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had quit, claiming that he needed more stimulation than
the job was currently providing to cook at his best.
“You and Myles never seem to get upset with each
other,” Meg said. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or
a bad thing.”
“It’s a good thing,” Quill said. “A marriage should be
like an ideal day at the Inn. Absolutely no crises.”
“Well, I prefer days like we had today,” Meg said innocently. (Her sister was a charter member of the school of the blindingly obvious.) “I mean—it’s an awful thing to start the day with a murder, and of course I don’t mean I’d prefer that all our days started with murder. By the way, Doreen said to tell you that she’s going to have a cost overrun this week because she had to pay
overtime to get the conference room and the Tavern
Lounge cleaned up after all the hoo-rah, but Quill, hoorah is stimulating! And best of all,” she clapped her hands together. “We have a case!”
“We don’t have a case yet,” Quill said. “We have a
body and a list of questions.” She’d deposited her sketch-
pad and pencil on the coffee table with her purse and a
sheaf of bills she’d brought home to pay. “Here. I wrote
some of them down. And I spent some time on the computer while I was waiting for you. There’s a fair bit of information about IAPFP and its members. They’ve got a web page and it links to all the members’ businesses. So.
We have a lot of background information. Not that background information is going to do us much good.”
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Meg was scanning the list of questions. “ ‘Was the
victim killed elsewhere and the body moved to Heavenly Hogg’s?’Yes.”
“Yes?”
“You betcha.”
“And you know this, because?”
“Because while you were in the Chamber meeting, I
spent the afternoon at the Croh Bar, just as you suggested I should.”
“I didn’t suggest that you spend the afternoon at the
Croh Bar!” Quill said indignantly. “I suggested you
spend the afternoon in the kitchen!”
Meg, her eyes on the list, waved her hand in
“don’t-worry-about-it” fashion. “Jerry covered for me.”
She lowered the sketchbook and grinned at Quill over
the top edge. “He lost a bet.”
“What bet . . . never mind. This is something I truly
don’t want to know.”
“ ‘Estimated time of death?’ ” Meg read aloud. “About
twelve hours before you and young Quincy discovered
the body. Which would make it . . .” Meg counted
silently, “about eight o’clock the previous evening.”
“Monday night,” Quill said. “Well. We can cross
Pamela Durbin off our list of suspects right now.”
“Yeah?”
“At the relevant time,” Quill said, in mock prosecutorial style, “the suspect was eating fish fry with Harland Peterson in that very same Croh Bar.”
Meg dropped the sketchbook in her lap. “Get out. He
took another woman to Marge’s own restaurant?”
Quill nodded. “Not only that, he thinks that the dog
and puppy show is a great idea.”
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“What dog and puppy show?”
Quill explained, briefly. “And when Esther said that
she and Pamela had come up with the dogs voting for
the top dog idea, Harland clapped right along with the
rest of them.”
Meg shook her head as if to clear it.
“They want Olivia Oberlie to do the canvassing,”
Quill explained.
Meg’s mouth formed a soundless O. “So the village
is going to look as if it’s populated by a bunch of crazies
on national TV.” Then she said, “What! Harland Peterson thought that was a good idea? The toughest dairy farmer in Tompkins County? The same guy that ran the
PETA protestors off his property with a shotgun because he raises veal calves?”
“Yep.”
“Poor Marge.”
“Poor Marge. But lucky Pamela. She’s out of the
frame. So erase Pamela from the suspects list, Meg.”
Meg flipped to the pages with the caricatures and
shook her head. “I’m not about to erase a Quilliam. Do
you know how valuable this sort of thing will be? Especially after you die. Think of Picasso and all those cocktail napkins.”
Quill slid off the couch, grabbed the pad, and erased
Pamela’s image. “We’ve still got too many suspects.”
“What were the rest of your questions? Maybe we
can eliminate some more.”
“ ‘What was the cause of death?’ ”
“This will turn your stomach.” Meg said soberly.
“But it seems she was unconscious when it happened.
She was run over.”
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“You mean, somebody . . . ugh.” Quill swallowed
hard. “But Meg, this may not be a murder, as such. It
could be an accident. That’s manslaughter.”
“Not when she was run over twice, it isn’t,” Meg said
dryly. “And it wasn’t as if the truck backed up in a
panic, either. There were two separate sets of treads
moving forward on her skull.”
“Yikes.”
“You said it.” Meg got to her feet rather stiffly.
“Oof. Are you planning on putting carpets on this floor,
eventually?”
“Eventually,” Quill said. “Where are you going?”
“I’ve been experimenting with pumpkin desserts.
Pumpkin sorbet, pumpkin mousse, and pumpkin crème.
I stuck them in your refrigerator. If you can call that
thing in your kitchen a refrigerator. If you can call
that room it’s in a kit . . .”
“Just shut up,” Quill said amiably.
The kitchen was directly through a doorway in the
north wall of the living room. A hundred and fifty years
ago, it had been a keeping room. Quill found the basic
proportions very pleasing. Two large mullioned windows faced the backyard on the north side, and a large, long, brick fireplace took up the east wall. Either the Peterson Myles had bought the house from, or the Peterson before him, had walled off the fireplace with plasterboard. Unlike Sheetrock (of which Quill was very fond), plasterboard was thick, crumbly stuff that created an unholy mess going up and an even worse mess coming down. Quill and Myles had gotten about half of the fireplace uncovered before he’d left on his current trip.
The floor was Armstrong tile dating from the early
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sixties, if Quill was any judge. And the appliances dated
from the sixties, too. There was a harvest-gold Tappan
gas range (which actually worked fairly well, as long as
you adjusted the oven temperature down 35 degrees
when you baked) and an avocado-green Westinghouse
refrigerator. A cheap oak table provided counter space,
as did two squares of stainless steel mounted on cabinets on either side of the sink.
There was also a brand-new Meile dishwasher standing in glorious isolation against the west wall.
Meg put her hands over her eyes and said, “Bleah,
bleah, bleah!” as she made her way to the refrigerator.
She pulled out three large Tupperware bowls. Quill removed two clean plates and six spoons from the dishwasher, and sat down at the table.
“I’ve got a saut
erne in here somewhere,” Meg muttered from the depths of the Westinghouse. “Ah. Here.
You must know that I completely abandoned any responsibility for the temperature of the wine when I stuck it in there.”
She set the armful of food and wine on the table and
settled down opposite Quill. “Next question.”
“The murder weapon’s a truck?”
“Yes.” Meg squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m trying to
think. I don’t know anything about trucks. I don’t even
like trucks. It seems to me that the tires were Michelins.
The kind that fit on a Dooley? Like in Tom Dooley?”
“A dually,” Quill said briskly. “A double axle.”
Meg stared at her. “You have absolutely no idea what
that means.”
“You are absolutely right. Except that it’s a big truck.
A domestic truck.”
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“What in heaven’s name is a domestic truck?”
“You know, not a semi or anything. Like a big old
pickup.”
“The kind owned by half the guys at the Croh Bar.
Terrific.”
“True,” Quill said. “But where would the IAPFP find
a dually? None of them checked in with cars. No, wait.
That’s not true. Olivia has that whacking big Cadillac.
And Rudy has a Cadillac, too. What is it with wealthy
people and Cadillacs? Are you sure that the murder
weapon was a truck?”
“That’s what the police said.”
“Then we should check with Henry Peterson. He
does most of the car rentals around here now that
George is gone.”
“You know what, Quill? That was our first case.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” They were both silent, remembering.
“Well,” Quill shook herself. “We have to be on the
lookout for this truck.”
“Along with half the state troopers in Tompkins
County,” Meg said. “Maybe we should concentrate on
leads with a little less scope. Next question.”
“Okay. Who identified the body?”
Meg tugged at her lower lip. “I don’t have the slightest idea. Why do you think that’d be important?”
“It probably isn’t. Except that there may be someone
close to Lila who isn’t a member of the IAPFP.”
“I’ll go to my source tomorrow,” Meg said. “First
thing.”
“As a matter of fact, who is this source?” Quill stuck
her spoon into the pumpkin sherbet. “It’s not Esther West,
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or Betty Hall, or the mayor? I mean, I hope it’s someone
more reliable.” She took a bite of the pumpkin ice cream.
“What do you think?” Meg asked anxiously.
Quill, her mouth full, held up six fingers.
“Six!” Meg scowled. “Jerry gave it a seven. But then,
he knows all too well how tricky iced squash can be. Oh,
well.” She got up and dumped the remainder of the ice
cream into the sink. Quill quietly spit the stuff still in her
mouth into her bowl and congratulated herself once
again on the new rating system. It had been Jerry’s idea
actually. The old rating system was a simple “thumbs
up/thumbs down” arrangement, and it sent Meg into really interesting temper tantrums. “If you go zero to ten, you avoid all of that rejection reaction,” Jerry had said
knowledgably. “Meg won’t settle for less than a ten, but
she figures your average master chef settles for six and
above.” If her sister had just swallowed a nice sedative,
Quill thought, she would have given the pumpkin ice
cream a screaming negative one hundred and forty-two.
“Here, I’ll rinse this off, too.” Meg picked up her
bowl, looked at it, and gave Quill a suspicious glare.
“Did you spit the rest of this out? Is it that bad? Never
mind, I don’t want to know.”
“This information you have about Lila’s death,”
Quill resumed. “It seems pretty specific.”
“Straight from the horse’s mouth. Davy was in the
bar nursing the one beer he always allows himself and
was he peeved about Harker.”
“You mean Davy didn’t call Harker in on the case?”
Quill said. “That’s odd. Who did?”
“You’ll never guess.”
“I don’t want to guess,” Quill said impatiently.
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“I’ll tell you in a minute. Here.” She spooned the
pumpkin mousse onto a clean plate.
Quill took a tentative swallow. “Wow. And I mean
‘wow.’ This stuff is fabulous.”
Meg blushed.
Quill took another, larger bite. “It’s like the best
pumpkin pie I’ve ever eaten.”
Meg frowned.
“I mean, it’s the essence of pumpkin,” Quill said
hastily. “It’s diaphanous.”
“Diaphanous?”
“It’s wonderful,” Quill said sincerely. “It’s a triumph.”
“Jerry thinks I ought to take it to the competition in
Vegas.”
“Jerry’s absolutely right.” Quill set her spoon down
so she wouldn’t gulp the rest of it. “Now. Who called in
the Staties?”
“Maxwell Kittleburger.”
“Really?” Quill took another bite of the mousse.
“You have to call this mousse something unique and
amazing. Quilliam Celeste. You know, I didn’t see anything at all of him this afternoon, Kittleburger, I mean, after the Chamber meeting. He’s such a,” she stopped
and searched for the right word, “violent man, Meg. I
wonder where he was?”
“More important is where he was around eight
o’clock Monday night.”
Quill reached out to scoop more mousse onto her
plate. “We’re just going to have to find out. We’re going
to find out where all of them were. And after that—
we’re going to look for a motive. And I’m going to start
with Maxwell Kittleburger himself.”
CHAPTER 6
Quill woke at five o’clock in the morning to a silent
house. Living with Myles had changed a lot of things.
Before her marriage, in her rooms at the Inn, even in the
dead of night the Inn was alive with purpose. The
kitchens waited for the dawn arrival of the prep crew.
The guest rooms were filled with somnolent bodies.
And the sound of the falls outside was a constant music.
She lay in her comfortable bed, aware of Max asleep
at her feet, the empty space beside her—which wasn’t
truly empty, since she carried Myles in her heart—and
the quiet rustle of the trees outside. The world of her
home with Myles was totally different. Her attention
was directed inward, the demands of the Inn and all its
residents eight miles and a universe away.
The outward demands seemed too heavy, at the moment. That was why she felt squashed, pressed down, constricted.
The phone rang at six. Myles? His daily call earlier
than usual?
“Hey,” she said into the receiver.
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“It’s just me,” Marge Schmidt said. “You up?”
“Sure.”
“You want to stop by the Cr
oh Bar for coffee in a
while?”
Quill rubbed her eyes and yawned. “That would be
nice.” She sat up in bed. “Is anything wrong?”
“Maybe.” Marge dropped the handset into the receiver.
Quill rose, let Max out, made coffee, let Max back
in, then showered, wound her hair in a knot on the top of
her head, and stared at the contents of her closet. The
weatherman had called for a hard frost last night and the
days were getting cooler, too.
“What should I wear today, Max?”
Max cocked his ridiculous ears. He’d wandered into
her life six years ago, the year, Quill remembered now,
of what she thought of as the Case of the Crafty Ladies.
His coat was a chaotic mixture of brown, ochre, gray,
and white. His vet, a crusty septuagenarian named
Austin McKenzie, had recorded Max’s breed as Lab/collie/giant schnauzer/? With the dominant breed being?
Quill pulled on a cream fisherman’s knit sweater, a
beige wool skirt, and a pair of soft boots. Long ago,
she’d simplified her life considerably by investing in
minimalist dressing: five wool skirts and ten heavy cotton sweaters for fall and winter; five silk skirts and ten silk shirts in spring and summer. All her clothes were in
the colors that warmed her fair skin and hazel eyes, and
that treated her carrot red hair with some consideration:
sage, cream, bronze, and the whole palette of browns.
“What d’ya think, Max? Do I need a little blusher?
Some mascara?”
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Max cocked his head. There was no doubt in Quill’s
mind that if she entered her dog in the “Best Vocabulary” class of Pamela’s dog and puppy show, that Max would win hands down. “You do realize I’m investigating the meanest man in Karnack Corners, Iowa, this morning. I have to look terrific.” Max shook his head
violently—either, Quill guessed, because he didn’t
like her particular color of lip gloss, or he had picked
up another case of ear mites in his peregrinations
around the village Dumpster. “I’ve come up with an
extremely clever way to interview him. Want to guess
what it is?”
Max scratched himself vigorously. Quill shook her
head. More had changed about her mornings than a new
kind of peace and quiet. She was talking to her dog instead of to another human being. And she was doing it a lot. “You don’t give a hoot, do you? But you’ll do as
someone to talk to until Myles comes home. Come on.