A Touch of the Grape

by Claudia Bishop

  "How in the heck …"

  The dog roared. Quill gasped, shrank back, and pulled the covers up to her chin. She coughed. Smoke. The ozone smell in her dream was smoke.

  Her head cleared. She reached for the phone at her bedside, hand steady. She dialed 911, spoke curtly, quickly to the volunteer fireman at the other end of the line, then leaped out of bed, headed out of her bedroom and through her small living room. Her set of master keys hung by the coffeepot in her little kitchen. She grabbed them and raced into the hall. The dog followed, frantic with impatience to be out and gone.

  It was quiet. The night lighting along the edges of the ceiling shone into air just slightly tinged with smoke. Alarms were placed throughout the Inn; the age of the building and the sprawling layout made quick access to them essential. There was an alarm and fire extinguisher between her suite and Meg's. She grabbed the extinguisher with one hand, and pulled the alarm with the other, then ran to Meg's door.

  The whoop!whoop!whoop! of the alarm struck the air like a brass knuckled fist. Quill pounded on Meg's door with the extinguisher, opened it, and almost tumbled into her sister. Andy Bishop stood behind her, hastily knotting his bathrobe around his waist.

  "Where?" Meg demanded tersely.

  "I don't know. There's smoke. No burning. You take this floor. I'll go up."

  "I'll take the up—"

  Quill was already gone, the dog at her heels. The alarm was shrill, insistent, terrifying. She ran up the stairs and rounded the landing to confront confusion and shouts. The Crafty Ladies had five of the rooms on the third floor. The smoke was heavier here, and there was a smell of burning. Robin Robinson, hair in curlers, dressed in a shabby chenille bathrobe, raced into the hall from her room and slapped the door to 314. "Fran!" she cried. "Fran!" Mary Lennox emerged from the door to 316, hair wild, her bedspread clutched around her.

  "Fire escape at the end!" Quill ordered. "Quick! Quick!"

  "My purse!" Fran shrieked. "I've got to get my—"

  Quill grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her forward. "Out! Out!"

  Fran Grimsby opened her door and tumbled into Robin's arms. "Ellen?" Fran said. Her voice was thin and high. "Where's Ellen?"

  "Three-ten!" Robin screamed. "She's in 310. I'll get Mary. She's at the other end."

  "Get out!" Quill said. "All of you get out now!" Three-ten was behind the landing and faced the Falls. It had a balcony, thank God.

  The smoke was thicker there. Quill found herself at the door, the dog leaping at her side. She tried the handle. It was hot. The door was locked. Smoke seeped in thick, ugly waves from beneath the door. Quill hoisted the fire extinguisher to her hip. She used the master key in the lock. The door flew open, sucked inward by a hot draft.

  The room was blazing. Thick fingers of flames twisted drapes, crawled up the walls, reached for the ceiling. It was intensely, incredibly hot. Something grabbed Quill's nightgown and pulled her off balance."Not NOW, dammit," Quill said to the dog. "Beat it! Beat it!"

  The dog ran halfway down the hall and back again, his barking colliding with the yell of the alarm. Quill snapped the extinguisher nozzle free of the clamp. Thick foam spurted out like evil-smelling Redi-Whip. She sprayed in a slow, smooth arc, the thick gush of foam smothering the flames. The nozzle sputtered; the foam trickled to nothing. Quill threw the empty canister away with a curse. The smoke cleared for moment. The bed in this suite faced the balcony. The balcony doors were open. Quill didn't know much about fire, but she knew that the fresh air coming in would fuel whatever smoldered in the room. When the fire reignited, it would come back with a blast. She could make out a huddled figure beneath the spread.

  She didn't stop to think. If she had, she would have run away, down the stairs, out the door, to the safety of the lawn. She took a breath and held it. Ran into the room. Grabbed the figure in the bed by the hair and screamed. The hair came off in her hands like masking tape from a wall. She clutched the shoulders and was briefly aware of heated, crumbling, greasy flesh. She pulled. The weight was incredible, an anchor, a deadweight, immovable.

  She pulled, hard. Near the open French doors, a white-orange pillar sprang for the open air, a giant cat after prey. Quill sobbed, pulled, and pulled again. The fire resurrected with a roar and a bellow that set her hair crackling. She heard the dog barking with sharp hysteria. Fear drove her like a blow. There was a moment of heat, of huge strain. She heard herself scream.

  And she was in the hall, the body of Ellen Dunbarton at her feet.

  "Move! Move! Move!" John, beside her, lifted the blackened lump with no effort at all.

  "So where …" Quill gasped, "were those muscles when I needed.

  "MOVE!" Ellen's body over his shoulder, John propelled Quill forward with one hand.

  "The dog!" Quill said. "Where's the …?" Sharp teeth nipped at her hand. The dog bounced ahead to the landing, then scrambled first down the steps. Quill followed, John behind her, stumbling down the flight to the second floor, then to the first, and to the blessed welcome sight of the open door, and beyond that, the lawn crowded with people.

  The air was cool, too cool. Quill shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself, and discovered she couldn't stop. In the distance, she heard the wail of the fire trucks. "Meg?" she shouted. "Meggie!"

  "Right here." Meg's hair was standing up around her head. She was wearing her purple nightshirt. "Andy grabbed the guest register. He's counting everyone off. I don't think there's anyone left in there. Here. You've singed your hair. And you're shivering. Quill. I'll get you a blanket."

  "I don't think it's spreading," John said. He faced the Inn calmly. "See? The fire's confined to the upper floor. I shut the door at the top of the stairs, so with any luck—Quill, no."

  Quill knelt in front of the bundle at his feet. "Oh, my God," she said. "Oh, my God."

  "Don't look," he said quietly.

  "Where's Andy?"

  "Right here. Quill." He emerged from the crowd of exclaiming, excited guests. Like John, his voice was calm and unruffled. "Everyone's out, unless you had some unregistered guests? No? Just the rats?"

  "There aren't any rats," Quill said indignantly.

  "Always are in a building this old." He knelt beside her, quick fingers light and capable. "Well," he said. "Well."

  "Is she dead, Andrew?"

  "Poor woman. I don't think … where the hell's the ambulance?" He rocked back on his heels. The driveway up the hill to the Inn was filled with the beams of darting headlights, goldfish in the black night's bowl. The oncoming sirens were raucous. Meg reappeared with a blanket, and Quill huddled gratefully into warmth. She wished she could stop shivering. John's arm went around her and she leaned against him.

  "What in the name of all that's holy," he asked, "happened to the sprinkler system?"

  "Turned off?" Quill said, bewildered, fifteen hours later. "How could the sprinkler system have been turned off?"

  "Little valve in each of the rooms," the fire chief said in a helpful way. "Easy enough to turn it on, turn it off. You got a good system, I'll give you that. Could have been a lot worse than just the one room."

  Meg sat at Quill's left, Doreen was on her right. She felt a bit like the captain in the Charge of the Light Brigade after the survivors left the valley. "I know how, Denny. I meant who. And why?" They were sitting at table seven in the dining room. The afternoon sun made burnished gold of the Falls. In the rose garden, the first buds of the rosa pastura were beginning to unfold in the soft spring air. The dog, who'd accepted a heavy meal of bacon, hamburger, and rice, lay outside next to the koi pound. He'd refused to come into the building when the food was offered, and had waited patiently for Quill to back away from the bowl before he'd plunged in. At this distance, it wasn't possible to see the singe marks or the matted coat, and he looked as if he belonged there. Quill watched this innocent and beautiful scene without really seeing it.

  Denny the fire chief was a stocky man in his late forties, with grizzled hair and an amiable
smile. He took a huge bite of chicken pâté and swallowed it with an appreciative grunt. "This here's the best liverwurst I ever tasted," he said. "The guys at the station want to thank Meg for the hamper. Me? I could eat it all day. This'll be my third serving since last night." He waved at the pile of fruit Meg had placed in the center of the table. "And them strawberries … delicious."

  "You're welcome," Meg said.

  Doreen sniffed. "But it ain't liverwurst, you toot. That there is liver pâté."

  "Patties or spoonfuls, my stomach thanks you just the same."

  "You can have a fourth and fifth serving if you want," Quill said warmly. "You saved the Inn! I can never thank you enough."

  "No, I didn't. I mean, the boys and me, yeah, we did a good job. But that fire was set in that room and it kept itself to that room. Didn't even get the wiring or nothing. Amazing."

  "And thank you for letting us keep the Inn open." Meg took two slices of sourdough bread from the basket in the center of the table and set them on Denny's plate with a smile. Quill kicked her in exasperation. "I—ow! What'd you do that for?!"

  Denny set his fork down with a stem expression, a man on a mission. "No, don't you thank me for that, Meg. You thank that interfering lawyer Howie Murchison. I told him and I'm a-telling you …"

  "That's why!" Quill hissed.

  "… s'not right to keep the premises open when the origin of a suspicious fire has not yet been determined."

  "That's why I kicked you," Quill said.

  "And it's going to take a whiles to determine what happened, too. You heard from Sher'f McHale yet. Quill?"

  "I called him about the fire this morning, Denny. And he's not sheriff anymore, you know."

  "I don't know that you could call Davy Kiddermeister a sheriff," Denny grunted. "Just a kid. Don't seem to know his ass from a hole in the ground, if you'll excuse the language, ladies. Thing is, Myles is good at this sort of stuff. I mean, it's the kind of thing he gets paid for now, right? Investigations. I was just wondering when he was headed back this way. Sher'f McHale, he wouldn't have let no lawyer bamboozle him into keeping the scene of a suspicious incident open. Nossir. He would have kep' this place closed up right and tight. Like it should be."

  Quill looked around the dining room. It was late, after three, but the lunch crowd had been substantial, and they had had to turn people away even after the third sitting. The remnants of the crowd, including the four remaining Crafty Ladies, were still eating. She'd had to call in all the help they'd laid off the month before, and more. None of her employees had turned down the opportunity to be included, however peripherally, at the scene of the tragedy. Quill doubted that their willing responses were due to the effectiveness of her Termination techniques. Quill's own reaction to disaster had always been to retreat to a discreet distance until the fuss was over; everyone else's seemed to be to crowd in and watch. Human beings—and their curiosity—never failed to amaze her.

  "Myles offered to come home, of course," Quill said. "But I told him I don't think it's really necessary."

  "You let me talk to him next time he calls," Denny said. "I'll let him know how necessary it is. We got ourselves a murderer here, plain and simple. That fire was set, sure as I'm the volunteer fire chief of the Hemlock Falls Volunteer Fire Department, and that poor lady murdered in her bed."

  "Why didn't she just get up and get out?" Quill asked. "That's what's been bothering me. Was she that heavy a sleeper?"

  "Andy said the autopsy wouldn't be finished until tomorrow." Meg ran both hands through her hair. "We won't know cause of death until then, and until we do— maybe it was just vandalism or something. Maybe the murder part was unintentional."

  "Ladies, Chief." Rocky Burke approached the table, unsmiling, rumpled, his briefcase clutched in his hand. "Rocky Burke, Burke's Insurance. Mind if I sit down for a bit?"

  "Siddown right here," Doreen said, pleased. She hitched her chair over to provide room for him. He sat down primly, holding his briefcase in his lap. "You got a check for us, mister?" Burke frowned. Doreen shook an admonitory finger in his face. "Now, you look and look smart—"

  "Doreen," Quill said.

  "—I got experience with you bozos, and I know how you all like to weasel outta your commitments."

  "Doreen!" Quill said.

  "You wrote us that fire policy last night, and it's as good as gold. I talked to Howie Murchison myself this morning and you owe what you owe. So pay up." She turned to Denny with a grim smile. "We can sure use that check for payroll this week, I can tell you. This is going to he'p cash flow quite a bit. Quite a bit."

  "DoREEN!" Quill shouted.

  "I've done a preliminary estimate," Mr. Burke said stiffly. "But I have to tell you, Mrs. Stoker, that I am advising my company to withhold payment until the investigation is completed. The circumstances surrounding the taking out of this very expensive policy, and the discovery I've since made that your Inn is in a great deal of financial trouble have created suspicions. Yes, I have grave suspicions."

  "You what?" Fortunately, Quill thought, Doreen's mop was safely stowed in the kitchen. By the time she went to retrieve it and came back, Quill could have the hapless Mr. Burke safely out of the way.

  Doreen bent her head and gave Mr. Burke the full benefit of the Glare. "You try any tricks. Rocky Burke of Burke's Insurance, and you're gonna see your puss spread all over the front page of the Hemlock Falls Gazette. And you ain't gonna like what you read."

  "What?!" Mr. Burke—who'd looked rumpled and exhausted after a sleepless night calculating his losses— now looked rumpled, exhausted, and pissed off.

  "My husband. Third husband. Axminster Stoker. Publisher and editor-in-chief of our newspaper. And I," Doreen said grandly, "have bin named special correspondent to the Inn. Just this morning. So you watch yourself, smart guy. When the media's on the trail, the buck stops here."

  "And other mixed metaphors," Meg said cheerfully.

  "Suspicions?" Denny said alertly. "Of the girls, here?"

  "Wimmin, you bozo," Doreen said. "Watch your tongue, or I'll get the Ax after you, too. For harassment."

  "That," said Quill, rising to her feet, "is bloody well enough. Doreen, I want you to supervise the cleaning on the third floor …"

  Denny pounded his fist on the table. "Oh, no, oh, no. Don't you touch that room."

  "… and stay out of the room in question."

  "Huh," Doreen said belligerently.

  Quill turned conciliatory. "Doreen, we've got the backup cleaning crew in, and you know what they're like."

  "Bozos," Doreen said darkly. "You're right. They don't know shit from shinola, those girls. I'll git my mop and git up there."

  "Good. And thanks. Oh, and Doreen?" she called after the housekeeper's retreating back. "Don't hit them, okay? They're doing the best that they can."

  "You should keep a better handle on your help, Cookie," Mr. Burke said sulkily. "That attitude of hers is going in the report, too."

  "Just what sort of information do you need for this report of yours, Mr. Burke?" Meg popped a strawberry in her mouth and regarded him with wide eyes.

  "That's for me to know, and you to find out." He reached for a strawberry. Meg slapped his hand away. "Hey!"

  "For guests of the Inn, only."

  "You gave the fire chief all he wanted. He's making a pig of himself. Just look at him." Denny grinned through a mouthful of strawberries. "And I'm a guest at the Inn."

  "You've extended your stay?"

  "You bet your"—he searched for a less belligerent word—"bippy I extended my stay. Until I know for sure this is a fraudulent claim. Preliminary estimates on this little caper of yours add up to a good fifty thousand." He scowled. "All those damn antiques. And labor. You know what even a half-assed carpenter costs these days? And we're required to pay the union rate even though"—he lowered his voice and hissed fiercely— "even though I know darn well your basic type of insured gets his uncle Al to do it for minimum wage."

  "
We don't have an uncle Al," Meg said. "But if we did, I can assure you we'd pay the going rate. Okay. If you're staying, have a strawberry. Have," Meg said generously, "two."

  "Is there any help we can give you, Mr. Burke?" Quill rubbed the back of her neck. She was tired. She was really tired. She wished that she'd given in to impulse and said to Myles: "Please, yes, come home NOW." "I know it looks suspicious. But honestly. We didn't set that fire. You can't believe my sister and I would do anything like that for any kind of money."

  "You'd be surprised at what people will do for money."

  Denny grunted agreement.

  Quill thought about this, then said, "No, I guess I wouldn't. I've seen a lot of people do a lot of horrible things for money. All I'm telling you is that this isn't that kind of town. And we're not that kind of people."

  Meg squeaked irrepressibly in a high falsetto, "Daddy! Clarence got his wings!"

  "What the hell?" Burke said in a tired voice.

  Quill made a face. "I guess I was sounding Pollyannaish. It's a line from Frank Capra's movie. It's a Wonderful Life. Meg hates that movie. Every time I start to sound a little, um …"

  "Jimmy-Stewart dorkish?" Meg asked. "Donna Reedish?"

  "… noble is a word I like. Anyhow, she likes to poke a pin in me. So she quotes. Worse yet, she sings."

  "That so?" Mr. Burke looked at Meg, and grinned suddenly. "You know what? I hate It's a Wonderful Life, too. It's not an especially wonderful life, if you ask me. Look at crime in the cities. Look at the people who think AIDS victims should be shunted away to a camp. Look at Arab terrorists. They are all people like you and me—which is to say, mean, rotten, and dirty as dogs."

  Meg grinned back and slid him the entire fruit bowl.

  Quill shook her head, covered her face with her hands, and muttered, "I get it, Mr. Burke. You don't know us from Arab terrorists. We could be bad guys in innocent young women suits, for all you know. So. Stick around. Poke your nose into anything you want We'll be right behind you. Because if the fire chief is right, and this was a deliberate murder, somebody set that fire to burn poor Ellen Dunbarton to a crisp. And somebody should find out who."