Toast Mortem (12 page)

“The Secretary,” Officer Banks said, with an inflection that gave it a capital letter, just like Dina.

“The very same. You should be getting a memo about the changes in the regs any day now, as a matter of fact. My professor has worked with—you know—the Secretary—on other projects, and do you know what?” Dina stood on tiptoe and brought her face close to his. “I think this study may change the way we handle navigable riverfront projects
completely
.”

“Wow.” Officer Banks shook his head.

“So, sure, we can get a copy of the study to you. But they’ll have to black out quite a bit.”

“Pilot study, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

Officer Banks grinned. “Okay. Pilot study it is.” He put his hat back on his head and carefully adjusted the brim. “Mrs. McHale?”

“Yes, officer,” Quill said. Her voice sounded faint to her own ears, so she said “A-hum!” in a very authoritative way.

“This pilot study’s complete?”

“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

“Then what we recommend at the home office is that these pilot studies be dismantled sooner than quick.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be off now, ma’am.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He touched one finger to the brim of his hat and walked out the back door.

“Ten thousand dollars a day.” Quill sat down in the rocking chair by the fireplace and put her head between her knees.

“Dina, I am in
awe
,” Elizabeth Chou said. She raised her hand, palm up, and she and Dina exchanged a complicated series of slaps. “Was that smart, or what?”

“It was smart,” Quill said. “It was brilliant. But now we have to dismantle my beautiful beach.”

“I’ll get Mike on it,” Dina said. “Although we could go ahead and get the permits. If you want, I can get a couple of guys from the grad school in to do an engineering report for you. The whole thing will take a while, but I bet you anything by next year we can have the beach back again.”

“That would be wonderful. I mean, not only has it been a real draw for us, but it’s one in the eye for that fat little Frenchman.”

“You mean LeVasque?” Clare asked.

“Who else?” Quill jumped out of the chair and began to pace around the kitchen. “Spreading rumors about swine flu. Having Meg arrested. And now this! Turning us in to the DEC, for Pete’s sake! That little weasel thinks he can harass me out of business, does he? Well, he’s got another think coming.”

“This is all my fault,” Clare muttered. “I’m so sorry.”

“It isn’t your fault at all,” Quill said warmly. “He and Meg had locked horns long before you came to work for us. Well, a couple of hours, anyhow. What I can’t figure out is why? What did we ever do to him?”

“He doesn’t need a reason,” Elizabeth said. She adjusted her chef’s hat on her sleek black hair with a defiant hand. “He’s just a vindictive creep.”

“But why now?” Quill said. “The academy’s been up and operating successfully for several months. Goodness knows he could have come by long before this. We aren’t taking any business away from him. He’s taking business away from us.”

“Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men?” Dina said. “I’m going to go put all those names for the Welcome Dinner in a hat, now, Quill.”

“Good. And you’ll talk to Mike about our beach?”

“I’m right on it.” She pushed open the door to the dining room and then let it swing shut. “Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh?” Quill walked up behind her, opened the door a crack, and peered out. Then she let fly a word she almost never used and pulled Dina backward.

“What is it?” Clare asked, alarmed. “Is the DEC guy back?”

“I wish,” Dina said. “It’s Carol Ann. Quick! Everybody out the back!”

“Too late,” Quill said, as the doors swung wide.

“So here’s where you all are.” Carol Ann Spinoza marched in, chin thrust out and with a militant glitter in her eye. “You’ve been ducking me all morning.” As always, she was surrounded by the aroma of fabric softener and soap.

“Can’t imagine why,” Dina muttered.

Carol Ann swiveled slowly, like the turret guns on the top of a tank. “You talking to me, Dina?” she asked sweetly.

The office of Hemlock Falls Animal Control did not require its officers to wear a uniform, which hadn’t fazed Carol Ann a bit. She wore starched black jeans, thigh-high motorcycle boots, and a perfectly ironed black T-shirt with
Hemlock Falls Animal Control Officer
in large white letters on the front.

Despite the ominous outfit, Carol Ann at first glance looked like the winning candidate for the Strawberry Queen contest held every year in July. Her bouncy blond hair was drawn up into a billed hat lettered
HFACO
. Her bright white teeth flashed in a sticky-sweet smirk. Her peachy complexion was free of any sort of blemish (other than a deceptively kind expression). She chimed when she walked, primarily due to the equipment hanging from her narrow waist. A brown leather belt punched with grommets held a pair of handcuffs (for belligerent pet owners), a choke chain, a metal leash, the top half of a catch pole, a billy club, a can of Mace, and a hypodermic with acepromazine capsules in a plastic case. A .38 police special sat in a holster at the small of her back.

“Oh my God,” Clare Sparrow said. She darted a nervous glance at the storeroom, which was closed.

“Let me guess,” Quill said. “You have a report of a dangerous animal from a certain pointy-headed Frenchman up on the hill. Hard luck. The cat’s not here, Carol Ann.”

“What cat?”

“You aren’t looking for a cat?”

Her candid blue eyes narrowed speculatively. “Should I be?”

“No,” Quill said hastily.

“Are you talking about that big orange monster that attacked me down at your beach?”

“No,” Quill said, mentally cursing her impulsive comment.

“Because I got a report. That cat’s dead.”

Quill glanced sideways at Clare, who smiled and gazed guilelessly back.

“Smashed flat on the Route 15, is what I heard,” Carol Ann said with repellant satisfaction. “That cat came to a bad end. Some responsible citizen left a message for me on the animal control hotline. And that’s a good thing, because that cat was a menace, clear and simple. It was going right to the top of my ten most wanted list. It would have been number one. But,” she said bitterly, “it’s already dead.”

“That is
so
not fair,” Elizabeth Chou said mendaciously. “But I heard that, too. About the poor kitty gone to cat heaven. You’ve had so much on your plate this morning, Quill, that we didn’t get a chance to tell you.”

Nobody in the kitchen looked at the closed pantry door.

“Guess I was wrong,” Quill said cheerfully. “Max isn’t here, either, by the way.”

Carol Ann bit her lip thoughtfully. “You mean that dog of yours?”

“That’s the one. And before you ask, yes, his license is up-to-date, and no, he hasn’t hit any Dumpsters lately. So don’t even think about putting him on your list.”

“It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?” Carol Ann murmured. “Anyhow, I’m not here in any official capacity.”

“Oh. Then I can’t see how I can help you.”

“Well, now, I’m a liar. It is official business, for sure. I mean, it is a town function, and M. LeVasque feels as I do, that the animal control officer should not be overlooked in an event as important as the Welcome Dinner.”

“Oh!” Quill gave a sigh of relief. “As far as the dinner is concerned, we’re drawing names out of a hat. Best of luck, Carol Ann. We’ll let you know if you make it.”

“Out of a hat?” Carol laughed in a sinister way. “M. LeVasque warned me that you might try to trick me out of a seat. That hat business is just a barefaced lie. I have it on the best authority that the list was made up last week, by you, Sarah McHale, and I just stopped by to make darn sure I’m on it.”

“M. LeVasque is completely wrong,” Quill said with unexpected firmness. “The choice is completely random and we haven’t drawn the names yet.”

Carol Ann’s scary blue gaze swept the room. “Who’s in charge of it?”

Quill took one look at Dina’s terrified face and couldn’t do it. “I am,” she said. “And as I just told you, I’ll let you know as soon as the list is made up.”

“When?” Carol Ann locked her eyes on Quill like a laser seeking a target.

The doorknob to the pantry door rattled. Then a furious scratching sounded at the bottom. A large orange paw hooked itself under the door and began to pull. Clare dropped the kitchen towel she’d been holding, walked casually over to the door, and rested her back against it.

“When?” Carol Ann repeated.

The scratching stopped, abruptly. A furrow appeared between Carol Ann’s perfectly shaped eyebrows. “Do you hear something?”

“Bit of a mouse problem,” Elizabeth said.

“Mice!” Carol Ann paled. “You do know that rodent control is not part of my job description.”

“No?” Clare said. “Gosh. And we were just talking about what course of action to take before you came in. Maybe you could just take a look? There’s a pretty large nest in there, and Meg’s worried that they’ve infested the flour. I haven’t,” she said ruminatively, “seen mice as large as that since I lived in New York.”

“Yeah, well, tough luck on you. You have a problem? I suggest you call an exterminator.” She smoothed the sleeves of her T-shirt and edged toward the swinging doors. “I’ll be going now. You remember what I said about the dinner.”

“You bet,” Quill said.

“And you can drop my ticket off at the town offices. Or my house. Whatever.”

“Mm-hm.”

“I’ll give M. LeVasque your regards, shall I?”

“Please do.”

Clare waited a few minutes after the doors to the dining room closed behind Carol Ann. Then she opened the door to the pantry to reveal Bismarck sitting in the middle of the floor. He got up and, with an offended switch of his tail, walked over to Clare, wrapped both front paws around her ankle, and bared his teeth.

“Don’t even think about it.”

Bismarck yawned widely, padded to the prep table, and curled himself up beneath it. Then he went to sleep. Quill wanted to curl up beside him. But the house phone rang at the little desk where Meg sat to make up the menus. Quill looked at it but didn’t pick it up.

“Shall I get it?” Clare asked.

Quill’s hair was starting to fall down, and it wasn’t even noon. She pinned it back up in an absentminded way. “The odds are forty to one that it’s some Chamber member outside in the lobby looking for one of those darn dinner tickets.”

“Oh, I’ll get it!” Dina snatched up the phone and said, “Kitchen. Oh, hi, Mrs. Henry. You’re out front? Yes. I’ll check and see if Quill’s here.” She put her hand over the receiver and mouthed “mayor’s wife” at Quill, as if she didn’t know perfectly well who Mrs. Henry was.

“Sure,” Quill said, resignedly. Adela and Elmer already had dinner tickets so at least she wasn’t going to be harassed about that. “Ask her to have a seat in my office. And the Chamber members are all on an e-file, aren’t they? Could you print them out? We’re going to have to make up this darn list and post it somewhere, or we’re all going to be crazy in two seconds flat.”

She went back through the dining room. At least people were coming to eat lunch. It was scarcely noon and most of the tables were full. As a matter of fact, Kathleen had put up the velvet rope at the foyer, and there were a surprising number of people waiting for tables already. Kathleen, who rarely lost her aplomb, was looking harried.

“I put in a call for more waitstaff,” she said as Quill wound her way through the crowd and met her at the podium where they kept the reservation book. “There must be a couple of tour buses in town. I don’t understand it. We’ve been busy before—but never like this.”

Quill took a good look at the crowd. There were a fair number of middle-aged couples—very usual for this time of year in the Finger Lakes. But there were also a dozen or more teenagers, at least three mothers with little kids in their wake, and old Franklin Peterson, who was eighty-three and spent all of his days in the corner booth at the Croh Bar because he was scared of his wife, Arlene.

“Oh, no,” Quill said. “He couldn’t. He didn’t.” She stopped a heavyset woman in shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt that was having trouble covering both bosom and belly at the same time. “Ma’am? You are very welcome here at the Inn, but could I ask what brought you in today?”

“Free food,” she said. “There’s a sign right down to Main Street. Free three-course meal at the famous Inn at Hemlock Falls.”

—From
Brilliance in the Kitchen
, B. LeVasque

 

 

“So then what did you do?” Meg sat curled up at the end of her couch. It was after nine o’clock, and Quill hadn’t been this tired in her entire life. “How many people showed up for free food again?”

“One hundred and fifty-six.”

“She was absolutely brilliant,” Clare said.

Meg’s rooms reflected her personality in a way like nothing else could. Her sister was interested in good food, good wine, interesting men, and not much else. She favored jeans and baggy shirts in the winter, and shorts and baggy shirts in the summer. (She did have a wide variety of socks whose color tended to reflect her mood.) Her carpet and her furniture were beige, and almost completely covered with bright throw pillows (like the seasonings she favored in her entrees) and hundreds of cookbooks. Any space not covered by throw pillows or cookbooks had a plant on it.

Clare sat in the only comfortable chair in the room, her feet atop Julia Child’s two-volume set on French cooking. Quill sat opposite her sister on the couch.

Quill looked a little blearily at them. “I locked the front door. I sent Mike down to take the sign down and then take it to the sheriff’s department so Davy can have it checked for fingerprints. I walked into the dining room and told everyone that they were victims of a prank and to please bear with us while we prepared enough lunch for everyone. I called Peterson’s liquor store, and Clare went and got ten cases of the cheapest wines they had and we put a bottle on every table. And then . . .” Quill swung her feet up onto the coffee table and took a healthy sip of her glass of red wine. “I called Betty Hall.”