A Touch of the Grape

by Claudia Bishop

  "You do. We have about twenty minutes. Do you want to walk?"

  Outside, they discovered that the day was cool and overcast. Main Street, where Marge's Diner was located, was a fifteen-minute leisurely walk through the park. Max, bounding up to greet them, viewed the prospect of a walk through die park with an ebullience peculiar to dogs.

  "You'd better get a license for him," Meg said. "That way, when he wrecks things, people will know to call you instead of Selena."

  "He's going to be a good boy from now on," Quill said.

  They walked the rest of the way in silence. Main Street was quiet. Max bounded along the sidewalks, stopping to christen the white planters filled with geraniums, and the black wrought iron streetlights with obsessive attention. Most of the buildings in Hemlock Falls were cut stone; the few that weren't were white clapboard with black trim. Marge's Diner was cut stone. It had been a Laundromat in an earlier incarnation; goodness knows what before that. It was a very old building and could have been beautiful. Quill always suspected that the two large Laundromat windows in front were a significant factor in Marge's success. Hemlockians loved to sit and watch the world go by on Main Street. The other factor, of course, was Marge's cooking, which was excellent.

  The diner was filled when Meg and Quill walked in, a sorry contrast to their own empty—and far more luxurious—dining room. Marge sat behind the cash register up front and looked up with raised eyebrows when they came in. "There you are," she said without preamble. "You didn't walk, did you? With this damn loony walking around burning women, the streets ain't safe."

  "It's not a loony," Quill began, and then quit. Of course it was. "Never mind."

  "C'mon back this way to my office. Betty'll bring us lunch in there." They followed her as she stumped her way through the tables to the back, shoving the customers aside with the assurance of a tank brigade come to relieve a beleaguered front line. She disappeared into a door marked PRIVATE! THIS MEANS YOU!, then reappeared to beckon the two of them inside.

  Quill followed her in. then stopped so abruptly Meg smacked into her shoulders.

  "Doreen! What are you doing here?"

  The housekeeper shrugged. "Marge gave me a call."

  Marge's large metal desk had been shoved aside to make room for one of her Formica-covered tables. It was covered with a red-checked cloth, and a Mason jar of wildflowers sat in the middle. The table was set for four. Marge pulled out a chair. "Siddown."

  Meg took a seat nearest the metal filing cabinet; Quill seated herself directly across from her, her back to a grimy window set high in the wall. Doreen settled grimly in the chair against the desk. Marge plunked herself between them, folded her hands and said: "Now, girls. How much do you want for the Inn?"

  9

  It was what she'd anticipated, of course. And now it was out in the open. Quill stared straight ahead. She'd expected Meg to jump to her feet, shout, "No way, Marge!" (or something worse) and make a grand exit. She wouldn't have been surprised if Doreen swept the Mason jar off the table and dumped the contents on Marge's head. Marge had endured more vehement attacks than that without a blink of her beady little eyes. She'd told them so last night, when they were trying to keep Freddie and Robin's spirits up.

  What she hadn't foreseen was the overwhelming sense of relief.

  "Sell the Inn?" she said—and images came to her, a series of paintings in the gallery of the past eight years.

  Each corner of the massive building loved, labored over, wept over. The sound of the Falls in the evening. The way the moon looked over the koi pond. The kitchen with the massive fireplace, the wooden beams with Meg's dried herbs hanging from the rafters. Her own room, quiet, serene, with the French doors that led to her balcony—the late night conversations there with Myles, with Meg.

  She wanted to sell the damn thing. Now.

  It was the statistics. The bloody inexorable statistics.

  Twenty-seven rooms, plus the bar and dining room filled with paying customers a minimum of two hundred days a year. Doreen had figured it out once: it meant cleaning 290 toilets; the washing, bleaching, and drying of 540 sheets, 1,080 pillowcases, 865 tablecloths; the scouring of 108 bathtubs and 172 showers stalls.

  Not to mention the damn floors.

  Then there were the customers: the yuppie couple that sued Meg over the runny scrambled eggs, the little boy that bit Quill twice because she didn't have any peanut butter, the numberless truly disgusting things people left in their rooms and on the carpets. The people who muttered, "They can afford it," and stiffed them with bogus checks, stolen credit cards, and even counterfeit cash.

  Not to mention the lawn maintenance. The damn grass just kept on growing. The building maintenance, the gardens, the insurance, the waitress that stole a week's receipts and called three days later from Detroit for money to get home.

  The bills—the remorseless tide of bills. Mortgage, insurance, workman's comp, wine, food, electric, gas. Taxes.

  She never got any sleep.

  She wanted out.

  She took a deep breath. "Sorry, Marge. It's not for sale."

  "You nuts? You really think you can make it in this economy?" Marge settled back in her chair with a grin, a warrior girding herself for a familiar and pleasurable battle.

  "I'm not negotiating, Marge. I'm telling you a plain fact. Do you know what that Inn represents? My creative vision. Meg's creative vision."

  Doreen cleared her throat in an ostentatious way.

  "And Doreen's, too. The answer's no."

  "Let me tell you what's gonna happen in Hemlock Falls the next coupla years. We got one of the prettiest parts of the U.S. of A., and nobody left to enjoy it. Taxes, no jobs, high prices—you name it, it's drove everybody out, down to the south. So what do we do? We fight it. This money from the government will give us a chance to drag people back up here for the good parts. The scenery. The lakes. The vineyards. We make it a good place to visit, but you don't have to live here to love it."

  "It's our big chance," Meg said coolly, "finally. Why in the world does it make sense for us to sell just when we're on the verge of making a pile of money?"

  "Here's Betty with the food. You wanna eat or talk?"

  "Eat," Doreen said.

  "Pot roast, crisped baked potatoes, new peas, and applesauce," Betty said. "Lemon custard pie for dessert." She banged the plates down, wiped her hands on her apron, and went away.

  Meg took a forkful of pot roast and tried it. "You are a darn good cook. Marge. But Betty's better. This is terrific. And to answer your question, I'd rather eat, too, than have you try to skinflint us. You heard Quill, no sale."

  "Hey," Marge's voice was tolerant. "Lemme lay out some facts. I eat at your place, I find out about the prices of the rooms, I do some rough figuring on payroll and maintenance, and here's what I figure. No way you can make it on the size you are now. You either gotta get bigger, so you can sell more rooms, or you gotta get smaller, so you can cut staff."

  "If we get bigger, we just have to hire more staff," Meg said patiently. "Don't be ridiculous."

  "One thing you can't do is hire more staff. You build more rooms, you work harder is all. Right now, you're operating at a loss even when you're full up, unless my math's off." (The likelihood of that, her tone implied, was that aliens lived underground in Roswell, New Mexico.) "You gotta get the profit from somewhere, and where you get it from is the same amount of people servicing more rooms. The other thing you can do, is get smaller. Cut costs by maintaining less overhead. Point is, there is an equation where your business works, but you ain't at it."

  "We can get there," Meg said stubbornly.

  "Hah! You two? And my gramma's from the moon. Meg—" She leaned forward, her face intent. She tapped her forefinger on the table. "You don't love money."

  "Sure I do."

  "Uh-uh. You like money, sure. Who doesn't? But you don't love it. I love it. I like to make it. I like to take what I made and make more of it. You got other things you love be
tter. That Doc Bishop. Good food. Cooking. Your sister." She shook her head joyfully. "No, you don't love money." She squinted at Quill. "You said that place's your creative vision? Bullshit. It's pretty. The food's good. That location next to the Falls—perfect. But I don't see how you got the nerve to say it's your creative vision when you can't make the mortgage payment. It's creative failure."

  "This is weird," Meg said.

  "What? Somethin' in the pot roast?"

  "No. This conversation is weird."

  "People like you," Marge said, instantly defensive, "you don't respect money either. You have names for people like me—and none of them very nice."

  "That's not true," Quill said gently. She thought she'd never heard anything more pitiful in her life than Marge's speech about the love of her life. "I have a lot of respect for you, your skills, your expertise."

  "This conversation is weird," Meg said, as though neither Quill nor Marge had responded to her initial comment, "because it makes so much sense."

  "Thank the Lord!" Doreen said fervently.

  Quill dropped her fork, tried to retrieve it, and ended up with peas on the floor. Marge regarded the peas, then said, "That damn dog still outside? Nah. We'll get it later. You were saying as about how I made some sense, huh?"

  Meg took a deep breath and turned to her sister. "Quill? Do you know how many Rock Cornish game hen I've spitted and roasted in the last eight years? Six thousand, five hundred and fifty-seven. I counted."

  "You're sick of it?"

  "I'm sick of it."

  "I'm seventy-two years old," Doreen said belligerently. "Ain't anyone gonna ast me if I'm sick of it? Well, I am. Stoke wants to retire and so do I."

  "But what are we going to do?" Quill said.

  "Have Marge give us this place." Meg twisted around and looked Marge in the eye. "It's a filthy mess and it will have to be gutted and then completely restored, and any deal we make will have to include enough money to do all that. But, Quill. Just look at it!" She swept her arm in the air. Cobwebs stirred on the window. "Can't you see how pretty this can be? I never told you this, but that boutique restaurant we opened—"

  "And closed," Marge said.

  "—was exactly the right size for a chef like me. I want to do dinners, only, six nights a week for no more than twenty people at a time. This place is perfect for that." She put both hands in Quill's. "You don't mind? Tell me you don't mind."

  "I don't mind," Quill said. Then, quietly, "Yikes."

  "So," Meg said, "now that we know where we are, we just need to establish a price."

  The ensuing discussion was lively, profane—and on one occasion, Doreen did rise and threaten Marge with the Mason jar. Meg led the haggling—backed by a satisfying truculent Doreen. Betty brought in the pad of paper Marge did all her businesses with, then a second one when Meg stood up, shrieked, and tore the first into confetti.

  The discussion lasted until four o'clock; Betty brought in coffee and shortbread cookies, reminded Marge that it was her bowling night, and Marge was on duty in the kitchen.

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll get on it. So, Meg. You get the Aga, the big refrigerator, and that's it."

  "Fine."

  Marge licked the end of her pencil and made a note. Then she ticked off the contingencies under her breath. "You got too much," she declared. "I want the stove."

  Meg rose to her feet for the fifth or sixth time and screamed, "Sapristi!" which disconcerted everyone except Marge. "That mean okay?"

  "Freely translated? It means, hell, no!"

  "Sapristi?" Quill asked. "What do you mean by yelling sapristi!"

  "You don't think," Meg said with relish, "that I studied for two years at LeCordon Bleu and the Sorbonne for desserts without learning how to yell sapristi, do you?"

  "Guess not," Doreen muttered.

  "Them Frogs can cuss a treat," Marge said appreciatively. "Okay. We got seventeen contingencies and a basic agreement on price. Flip you on who gets Howie Murchison to write it up."

  Quill, whose sole contribution had been to lay out the depressingly large list of their accounts payable, happily dug out a quarter. "Heads or tails?"

  "Heads."

  Quill flipped, slapped the quarter into her palm, and displayed it, tails up.

  "Damn," Marge muttered. "All right, I got some bozo I use in Syracuse who ain't worth the fart it takes to get his attention. You get Howie. Let's close the deal ASAP, all right?"

  "As soon as possible," Doreen said. "This agreement, you were talking, Meg, that I get maybe five thousand bucks?"

  "Depending on the due diligence," Marge warned. "You guys got any debts you ain't told me about, we're back to the bottom on price."

  "It's pretty close," Quill said. "The total haunts my dreams at night."

  "And John … you said he gets a little bit more than me, because he has a few more shares."

  "That's right," Meg said. "Do you want to call him and tell him?"

  Doreen glanced sideways at Quill. "She oughta. The news oughta come from Quill."

  "I'll call him tonight," Quill promised. "I think he'll be happy. He wrote off his shares in the company because of all the debt."

  "He wrote off his shares on account of you," Marge said brutally. "Don't do to mix love and business. You girls remember that when you run this place."

  "What are we going to call it?" Quill said. "I like Meg's Inn."

  "Too cutsey," Meg said promptly. "And it's a restaurant, not an inn."

  "Quill's Pen?" Marge suggested.

  "Yuck." Meg shook her head.

  "You got two artists here," Doreen said. "Call it the Palate."

  "Not bad," Quill said. "Not bad at all."

  Marge went into her kitchen, Doreen drove home, and Max got up from his post by the municipal garbage can with a "finally!" sort of bark. Meg and Quill stood outside the diner, looking over their acquisition. The overcast day had given way to a mauve-colored twilight. "The stonework's really beautiful," Quill said. "I wonder what the building was before some cretin turned it into a laundry?"

  Meg stooped in front of the main door. "The corner stone says 1828. It might have been a house."

  "Miriam Doncaster should know. I'll ask her."

  They turned to walk home to the Inn. Meg made a worried face. "There are so many 'pendings,' Quill. Pending inspection of the diner, pending due diligence. What if something goes wrong?"

  "It might," Quill agreed cautiously. "But I don't think it will. Marge is a woman of her word." They walked on for a moment in silence. Then Quill said, "Why didn't you tell me you were tired of the Inn?"

  "It seemed so important to you, Quill."

  "It seemed too important to you!"

  "I don't care where I cook," Meg said thoughtfully. "As long as I can cook. Are you going to tell Myles?"

  "Of course. Why wouldn't I?"

  "You never know with you two. Andy will be standing on his head for joy."

  "Myles will, too," Quill said, although she wasn't entirely sure what his reaction was going to be. "And what do you mean, you never know with us? Our relationship should be perfectly clear."

  "The only thing that's clear is that no one knows if you're going to get married or not." She eyed the engagement ring on Quill's finger. "It's been eight months since you put that on, and not one word about wedding plans."

  "This case is keeping us both pretty busy," Quill said evasively. They crossed Main and turned into the park. The lilacs were at their peak. The violet glow of the setting sun enhanced the purple flowers with an almost neon glow.

  "Stop a minute, Quill. Look at how the Inn sits up there."

  " 'Whatever walks in Hill House, walks alone,' " Quill quoted.

  "Oh, come on. Most of the years have been wonderful and not haunted at all."

  "That's true, they have." She narrowed her eyes. "Is that a Fed Ex truck? It is. Good. Myles said the Trenton P.D. was sending that correspondence. I hope it gets us a little further on the solution to the murder."
>
  "You don't want to let the police handle it?" Meg said. "I mean, now that we've sold the Inn, or practically, we can give Myles back his money, and let Marge wrestle Burke."

  "We can't quit now, Meg. We're just too close."

  By the time they reached the Inn, the Fed Ex truck was gone, and Dina was folding up her laptop to leave for the day. Her greeting was a subdued "Hi, Meg, hi, Quill," as they came in the front door.

  Meg put her hands over her head and danced a jig on the carpet. "Hey, Dina! We've got great news."

  "Well, it's no use telling me" she said rapidly, "because the answer is no. No bookings. And Mr. Smith checked out, so there's only Mr. Pfieffer as an overnight guest, and he didn't want to eat in a dining room all alone, so he went down to the Croh Bar."

  "Mr. Smith checked out?"

  "Back to the Marriott. And I'm sorry, but I'm in the middle of checking the pond data on the cocophods for my thesis, and I just didn't realize."

  "Realize what?"

  "That his name isn't Max."

  Max, hearing his name, went "woof."

  "That his name isn't Max?" Quill said, bewildered. "Why should his name be Max? The dog's name is Max. Mr. Smith's name is Thorne Smith or Henry T. Smith, depending on what job he has at the—oh, no! You didn't!"

  "What?" Meg hated it when people didn't let her in on the conversation. "Oh, no what?"

  "The boiled rice, eggs, and bouillon?" Quill asked Dina. "And you wouldn't let him eat anything else?"

  "Bjarne said he didn't know either. He said that Americans have very strange tastes and if that's what you said Max—I mean Mr. Smith—should have, that's what he'd make. Anyhow, I'm sorry. And he was our next-to-last customer, and I feel awful. You're going broke, and I'm shoving you right in the ditch!"

  Quill put her arms around her. Meg rolled her eyes and said crisply, "Kiddo. Lighten up. Come into the kitchen and I'll pour you a glass of wine. We've got some good news."

  "Like what?"

  "Like, really good. But I want you to keep it to yourself for a while, okay?"