Just Desserts : A Bed-and-breakfast Mystery

JUDITH GROVER MCMONIGLE thrust the phone away from her ear a good two feet, knocked her coffee mug off the kitchen counter, and booted her cat, Sweetums, into the open cupboard under the sink. At the other end of the line, Oriana Bustamanti Brodie was covering every note of the scale, be-seeching Judith to change her mind.

“We’re fumigating,” Oriana wailed. “Carpenter ants. It smells. It’s impossible. And Otto is counting on this weekend with the family!”

A disheveled Sweetums was eyeing Judith with open hostility. His orange fur bore traces of chili beans and apple peel. Any other cat would have ignored revenge for the sake of cleanliness. In Judith’s opinion, Sweetums was as unnatural as he was filthy.

“I’m sorry,” Judith said, for the third time, bringing the handset up to her mouth while she threw a dish towel onto the spilled coffee and began swirling it about with her foot.

“I’m booked, have been since November.”

2 / Mary Daheim

“But you told me January wasn’t a busy month!” Oriana had launched into her full-throated Act Four, Scene Three voice.

“It isn’t,” Judith agreed as Sweetums put a paw in the coffee, sniffed, and choked up a hairball. “Only two of the four rooms are taken, but you’d need all of them for your…family, right?” Somehow, “family” wasn’t a word she readily associated with Otto and Oriana Brodie; “horde” sprang more easily to mind.

The sigh that heaved over the phone line possessed seismic force. “Otto will be sooooo disappointed.” The mezzo-soprano voice that had mesmerized indiscriminating opera lovers in second-rate houses dropped several notches. “We would have paid extra for the short notice.”

“Another time, maybe,” Judith said pleasantly, if firmly, and replaced the handset as Sweetums slipped out through his cat’s door into the back yard. As much as she hated turning guests away, Judith was relieved. The Brodies might be considered by many on Heraldsgate Hill to be prominent personages, given his wealth as a carpet-sweeper mogul and her fleeting fame in the music world. But Oriana’s demands conveyed a hint of desperation which put Judith off.

Not that she had either the time or the inclination to indulge in speculation on neighborhood eccentricities. Widowed for almost three years, she had hurled herself into establishing the family home as a bed-and-breakfast known as Hillside Manor. At the moment, she barely had time to finish mopping up the mess left by the coffee and Sweetums before her mother came thumping into the kitchen on her walker.

“Where’s my Tums?” she demanded, giving the walker an extra whack for emphasis.

“Up your nose,” muttered Judith, grateful that Gertrude Grover was nearly deaf as a post. More loudly she said, “Try your housecoat pocket, left-hand side.” She checked the Caesar’s Palace coffee mug for cracks with one eye, while watching her mother with the other.

JUST DESSERTS / 3

“Damn,” breathed Gertrude, “how’d they get there?”

The telephone saved Judith from having to answer. It was Dorothy Dalgleish, calling from Pinetop Falls, a small logging community some fifty-five miles to the northeast.

“Oh, Mrs. McMonigle, I’m
so
sorry!” wailed Dorothy Dalgleish. “We’re going to have to cancel this weekend.

Homer is sick.”

“That’s a shame,” said Judith with feeling, though more for herself than the ailing Homer. “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“It’s always serious with Homer,” Dorothy responded with a touch of annoyance. “Bronchitis, this time. He
will
work out in the woods in the worst weather. But that’s the life of a gyppo logger. You’re on your own, with no big timber company behind you.”

Judith could sympathize, at least with Homer’s private initiative. “Tell him to take care. You, too. Mrs. Dalgleish.”

“He will.
We
will,” asserted Dorothy. “In fact, put us down for next weekend. If you can.”

Judith could and did, filling Hillside for the first weekend of February. A glance at her reservation book gave her mixed pangs of satisfaction and apprehension. Since opening the B&B in May, she was already discovering a pattern to bookings: Weekends up through October were generally full; so were most weekdays during the summer. Business revived in mid-November, but dropped off dramatically after New Year’s. St. Valentine’s had been taken since early December, but there were a lot of blank spaces until April. Maybe she should add catering to her repertoire. Or try to book more wedding receptions. Perched as it was on the steep hill on a dead-end street, the big old house was ideal for romantic getaways and for visiting shoppers who didn’t want the hassle or expense of a downtown hotel. Tourists, however, had yet to beat down Judith’s door. Perhaps that would change if she could get listed in one of the national guidebooks. She’d made various contacts, from AAA to specialty publishing compa-4 / Mary Daheim

nies, but so far without any payoff. Patience, she told herself; patience—and the cultivation of a tough hide—had gotten her through eighteen years of marriage.

“Where’s Mike?” Gertrude inquired, her pugnacious jaw thrust out above the gaudy green and red of her housecoat collar.

Judith was somewhat startled by the question. Her mother might be ornery, even absentminded, but she was hardly senile. “Away at school,” she replied in a much less certain voice than she usually employed.

“Of course he’s away at school,” growled Gertrude. “What do you think I am, daffy?” She rummaged in her other pocket and pulled out a package of cigarettes. “I meant, where is he at school? I thought he was off on some half-assed field trip.”

“Oh!” Judith ran a hand through her prematurely graying hair. “Idaho, some place. Priest Lake?” She knew, of course, but momentarily went blank. As a forestry major, her only son had already been on several field trips which seemed to focus on how much beer could be sneaked into one’s back-pack rather than how much knowledge could be crammed into one’s skull.

“What are those damned fools doing at that university, teaching kids how to camp? No wonder education costs so much—they waste it on all those frills!” Gertrude plunked herself down in a captain’s chair at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. “And what’s he going to do when he gets out?

Grow into Paul Bunyan?” The question emerged in a cloud of blue smoke.

“Well, he’s already dating Babe, the Blue Ox,” Judith replied, recalling the Viking-like Kristin of Christmas past.

A sports medicine major, Kristin had carried Judith’s eleven-foot unsheared Douglas fir into the house with one hand. It was no wonder Mike had described his girlfriend as awesome.

“I don’t know, Mother, I just hope he ends up doing something he likes. He’s got almost two more years, after all.”

“Seems like he’s been there for ten already,” rasped
JUST DESSERTS / 5

Gertrude as the phone rang again. “Face it, kiddo, he could turn out like his father. The closest Dan McMonigle ever got to work was when you put his ashes out in the toolshed.”

With a baleful glance for her mother, Judith answered the phone in her professionally charming manner. The voice at the other end went on nonstop for three minutes, signing off in a flood of tears. Judith sighed and put the phone down.

“The Hunicutts,” she said. “Their second honeymoon turned into a trial separation. Damn.”

“Wiped out, huh?” Gertrude stabbed her cigarette into an ashtray made out of a clamshell. Sweetums reentered the kitchen, growling menacingly at Judith as he made for his food dish just inside the pantry door.

“January is thin,” said Judith, slamming the reservation book shut. “I wish I were.” She gave her blue jogging-suited figure a disparaging glance, though in fact, she was a tall woman who could have easily carried another ten pounds without much detriment. Her hand strayed to a pile of bills in an English biscuit box. “Christmas seems like six months ago instead of barely one, except for paying for it.”

Gertrude was unwrapping a fresh batch of Tums. “I thought you were going to close up for two weeks this month anyway and wallpaper the living room. Why don’t you get off your butt and do it now that you’ve got the chance?”

Watching Sweetums lick his chops after polishing off his cat tuna, Judith eyed the packages of wallpaper that reposed in the back entryway. “I could. Or,” she went on grimly, feeling not unlike Marie Antoinette heading for the guillotine,

“I could call Oriana Brodie.”

“I could call that fathead a lot of things, but she wouldn’t much like most of ’em,” said Gertrude, chomping on her Tums.

Judith acknowledged her mother’s remark with a vague gesture, then opened the phone book. “I wonder why they moved back here from Palm Springs in the first place,”

6 / Mary Daheim

she murmured. “I would have thought Oriana would have preferred something more posh than Heraldsgate Hill.”

“Otto. The old fart always had a sentimental streak, according to your father, rest his soul.” She waved a hand in a haphazard sign of the cross on her forehead. “Otto used to cry like a baby in poetry class, especially when they read Rupert-What’s-His-Name.”

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