Ex-Senator Al Santini and Sheriff Dorset smiled for the camera. Howie looked pained. "Here're your boots, Ms. Quilliam," Davy whispered apologetically. Quill grabbed them and pulled the left one on, hopping around the linoleum on one leg. They were still soggy with snow and mud.
Nora Cahill shoved the microphone in Quill's face. "Do you have a comment, Ms. Quilliam? Do you think this criminal charge will affect business at your upper-crust Inn? And how do you feel about Senator Santini's efforts to reform small-town America?"
Quill, who thought of herself as a generally equable person, felt the last shreds of her temper fray and snap. She grabbed the right boot by its wet, muddy top and swung.
"And he's going to press charges?!" Meg said indignantly some twenty minutes later. "That lunatic! That creep! I would have whacked him right in the balls."
Quill, wanting nothing more than to sit quietly for two minutes and warm her feet, looked at the kitchen with the nostalgic affection common, she supposed, to the recently paroled. She never wanted to see Al Santini or Bernie Bristol or Frank Dorset again in this life. She wanted to stay in the kitchen forever. The cobblestone fireplace was hung with dried bay leaf, braids of pearly garlic, and sheaves of lemon thyme. A fire burned briskly in the grate. Meg's collection of copper pots gleamed reassuringly from one of the oak beams running overhead. The air was filled with the scents of baking bread, orange sauce for the game hens, and freshly ground coffee. Admittedly, the view from the mullioned windows at the kitchen's west end was not quite as picturesque as that from the county jail; the herb gardens out back were still producing parsley and brussels sprouts. Sometime yesterday Mike the grounds keeper must have cleared them of snow. The mulched beds were consequently muddy with well-manured straw, but they looked beautiful to Quill. "Free," mused Quill, feeling warmly toward the mulch, "I'm free."
"The son of a bitch," Meg continued.
"Do you kiss your mother with that mouth, Miss Margaret Quilliam?" demanded Doreen, who had insisted that Quill completely change her clothes. "Lice," she'd said. "And I ain't sayin' a word more."
She tapped Quill on the shoulder. "The senator got a powerful lot of mud up his nose, or so I hear. But that don't make it right for Meg here to cuss him out. Jail! The good Lord give me a stummick to hear this. Jail!"
"Actually, I was aiming at Nora Cahill. I didn't mean to get Al Santini, although I'm glad I did. And why are you mad at me, Doreen?"
Doreen darted a beady, somewhat proprietary eye around the kitchen. Six of the kitchen staff scrubbed vegetables, stirred sauces, and washed pots with unconcern for Doreen's cool reception of the fact that Quill had spent two hours and forty-seven minutes in the county jail. In her middle fifties, Doreen had been head housekeeper at the Inn for almost six years and regarded both Meg and Quill as sometimes satisfactory but frequently recalcitrant daughters, and everybody knew it.
"I'm ashamed of you," Doreen said severely. "The whole town's talking about it."
"It's not that big a deal! It was a setup! A mistake!" Quill sank her head in her hands. "I suppose Axminster's going to run a story in the Gazette."
"Huh," said Doreen. She scratched her nose vigorously.
"Isn't anyone glad to see me?" Quill asked somewhat plaintively.
The kitchen got very quiet, although, thought Quill, the kitchen was never really quiet. Even at two o'clock in the morning, the Zero King refrigerators filled the air with a gentle hum. And at one o'clock in the afternoon, four days before Christmas, with the rest of the McIntosh family due that evening and a wedding due at the end of the week, the Inn's kitchen was filled with the clank and clatter of sous-chefs at the Aga, the oceanlike hum of the lunch crowd in the dining room, and the slam-whack of doors opening and closing.
Quill thought about the sound of doors closing: store- room doors, cupboard doors, oven doors - all of it far preferable to the unique sound of a cell door being shut and locked. But at the moment, the kitchen was quiet only in relation to the usual people noise: Usually Meg alternately shrieked at and sang to the Cornell interns; Doreen recited the latest depredations of departed guests on the Inn towel supply; Frank, the assistant chef, called out food orders to the hapless Bjarne; the other workers whistled, gossiped, or hummed. At the moment, everyone in the kitchen was dead silent, out of sympathy, Quill had assumed, for her recent incarceration. Now she wasn't so sure.
"Oh, for Pete's sake." Meg, shaping meringues into swans, paused and waved the palette knife in an accusing fashion." Anyone would think you'd spent three days in solitary instead of three hours chitchatting with Davy Kiddermeister."
"I was not chitchatting with Davy Kiddermeister. I was in jail. A prisoner. And I was cold. I told you. They took away my boots."
Doreen made a surreptitious note on a pad she kept handy in her apron. Quill had seen the pad. It had a little logo of a mouse with a reporter's hat and five large capital W's running down one edge for Who, What, Where, When and Why. Doreen had ordered it from the Lillian Vernon catalog soon after she married Axminster and they bought the Gazette. Axminster had proved surprisingly good at publishing the weekly, although Quill suspected that Doreen's nose for gossip had a lot to do with it. That, and her savings from her wages as the Inn's housekeeper. Doreen was notoriously thrifty. Doreen caught Quill's eye and shoved the pad back in her pocket. Doreen's gray hair frizzed around her high forehead like a ruff on a grouse and her nose was beaky. Spurious attempts at innocence increased her resemblance to a startled rooster.
"Axminster' s going to run a story about this, isn't he?"
"It's publicity," Doreen offered placatingly. "Publicity's good for business."
Meg snorted, "Publicity! If you'd just told Howie Murchison about those priors, none of this would have happened. What I want to know is, how come when the Inn gets publicity, it's always bad publicity? At least this time it isn't a corpse. I hate it when the headlines involve a corpse."
"They better not, missy," Doreen said darkly.
"Better not what?" asked Quill.
"Involve no corpse."
Meg grinned to herself and added a wing to the swan's body with meticulous care.
"What are you talking about? I didn't kill anybody!"
"Passin' a school bus, you might of, is all," said Doreen.
The silence intensified.
"I didn't pass a school bus!" said Quill. "I mean I did, but it was a parked school bus."
"That's when you're supposed to stop," Doreen said tartly. "When the school bus is."
"It was a parked, empty school bus!"
"Empty?" said Frank, the assistant chef. "You mean you didn't almost run over a little kid?"
"No!"
"That's what we heard," Bjarne said apologetically.
"I told you guys," said Meg.
"Told them what?" said Quill.
"I told them you didn't almost run over a little kid. You would have confessed to me." She winked.
"There is," Quill said stiffly, "evidence that I didn't run over anybody."
"Evidence?" asked Doreen.
"A videotape. From that damn hidden camera that started this whole mess. They showed it in court. All it showed was my car passing that school bus!"
"They show the whole thing?" Doreen asked alertly. "Stuff like that can be faked, ya know."
"All right, all right." Meg gestured widely with the palette knife, spattering egg white. "Doreen, you know gossip in a town this size. Quill didn't run anybody over with anything." She shook her head at Quill. "You're right, I should have stayed with you this morning. Next time you get arrested, I will. Sisters forever!" She began to hum an Irving Berlin tune so old Quill didn't even know where she'd picked it up. "Sis - ters. Sis - ters. Dah-dah-dah-sisters..."
"Thing is," Frank said earnestly, "if you didn't almost run over a little kid, what else would bring someone like Senator Alphonse Santini all the way to Hemlock Falls to prosecute a little traffic case?"
Quill rose from her seat behind the counter. "He's here for the wedding! He is not a senator. He's an ex-senator. Clearly he's turning even his wedding into a media circus! And he's running so hard for reelection he's going to need oxygen infusions before New Year's. As to why he picked on Hemlock Falls first, beats the heck out of me. Maybe because he's getting married here. You heard what Nora Cahill said - this is part of a whole campaign to reform small-town America. And he's started here. If anyone's a hit-and-run driver, it's him. I mean it's he. Whatever. I'll bet you a week's pay that right now he's off to the next town and the next victim, trailing his pet little media person and her camcorders behind him. He'll be jailing innocent people over in Covert next. Or maybe Trumansburg. And he'll come back here to get married, and I'll kill him."
"The guy's a jerk," Meg said loyally. "If the McIntoshes weren't spending all this money on his wedding, I'd do more than shove a few handfuls of mud up his nose."
"Gee, thanks, Meg," said Quill. "Food first, sisters second." She paused, cleared her throat, and said huskily, "I can't believe you guys thought I did something as terrible as almost hitting a little kid."
"Somebody circulating that rumor again?" John came through the swinging doors from the dining room, a sheaf of lunch orders in his hand. At his seemingly casual comment, everyone busily resumed work. Quill had always thought his chief asset as business manager was his unflappability. She decided now that it was his easy air of authority. He smiled at her. "Glad to see Howie sprang you from the slam. I was about to callout the cavalry."
Quill gave him an unwilling smile.
"Mr. Raintree? This rumor that's been going around about Quill's jail time..." Frank began.
"You're too smart to believe that one, Frank. And even smarter enough to stop anyone who spreads it. Quill? You have a few minutes to spare? Mrs. McIntosh would like to go over some of the wedding plans."
"Sure." Quill latched on to the proffered diversion with relief. "Where is she?"
"Office. I'll meet you there in a second. Kathleen's busy with customers out there. The RV conventioneers from the Marriott snowmobiled over here in a huge group. I told her I'd turn these lunch orders over to Frank for her."
Quill hesitated, waiting for him. "You go on ahead, Quill. I just need a few minutes with these guys."
Quill pushed her way through the swinging doors slowly enough to hear John say, "Everyone in this kitchen is going to listen to this once, and only once..."
The doors whispered closed. Behind her, John's admonitions rose and fell. Phrases like "innocent until proven guilty" would be hurled next. Not to mention, "going through a tough time at the moment." Quill folded her arms and glowered, startling a guy in an unzipped snowmobile suit at table fourteen into spilling Meg's pumpkin souffl‚ onto his T-shirt. Mindful of a public television special on psychic well-being she'd seen recently, Quill took deep breaths, strove for inner calm, and exhaled noisily, further alarming the gentleman seated at fourteen.
Quill concentrated fiercely on the McIntosh wedding, clearing her thoughts of a persistent sense of injustice. Mrs. McIntosh would want to know if they could accommodate the extra eighty people who'd somehow I, sprung up at the last minute.
She still wasn't sure how they were going to handle the entire McIntosh reception without opening the terrace, and there was no way to open the terrace because it was December and too cold for anyone except the S. O. A. P. diehards. She mentally rearranged the mahogany sideboards, the breakfront, and the tables. She waved absentmindedly at Kathleen, who was moving gracefully among the tables like a skater on a pond, and thought about taking out just one more wall. The sturdy building was used to it, and she'd been convinced they needed the extra space for a long time anyway.
When they had purchased the Inn seven years before, Meg and Quill had decided on twenty-seven guest rooms, a Tavern Lounge to seat a hundred, and an equivalent number of seatings in the dining room. They'd remodeled with that in mind. John had added a conference center for possible corporate business when he'd signed on with them two years after they had opened, over Quill's protests, The past summer John had encouraged them to open a small, boutique style restaurant in the Sakura mall which almost ran itself.
Neither Meg nor Quill had anticipated the sudden spurt of success of the last year or so resulting from John's management, Not only had the number of business parties increased - but so had the private, The McIntosh wedding would be the largest Meg and Quill had ever planned, and it would be the first of many, if the current trends held.
She felt John come into the room behind her and said, "If we could just take out the wall between here and the foyer, I know we could seat those extra eighty people."
"I think we should stick with the buffet."
"I hate to stand up when I eat, And so does everyone else."
"Well, by all means. Let's call Mike and get that wall down, the place recarpeted, and the walls repainted by Friday."
"Oh, ha," She paused. "I don't know, you're probably right about the spacing," She scanned the room, Mauve carpeting covered the floor, The tables were covered with deep dusty rose cloths in winter, to make the room seem warmer. The east wall gave a view of the snow-filled gorge. Sunlight sparkled off the icicles formed on the granite by the waterfall, a welcome change from the gloom of the day before. The contrast between the blue-white iridescence of the winter outside and the warmth of the room had a lot to do with the animation of the people eating Meg's food, she thought. They're happy, they're full. This is a business that gives people a little peace of mind. And I like it. She pushed the thought of Myles, and a home and children a little further into her subconscious.
A plump blond woman at the foyer entrance waved agitatedly in Quill's direction. "I almost forgot about Mrs. McIntosh," she said suddenly. "Poor thing!" She tucked her hand into John's arm. "Let's go relieve her agitation."
"That," murmured John, "will be quite a trick without Prozac."
On the way through the foyer to the office, Elaine McIntosh circled them like a retriever asked to herd sheep - plucky but easily distracted. She was a pretty, plump, beautifully shaped woman who wore well-tailored trousers and plain blouses trimmed with a bit of lace on the collar or the cuffs, high-necked and long-sleeved.
Quill had discovered that Elaine's physical appearance, combined with a more or less permanent state of soft-spoken distress, brought out odd impulses in men. Even John, who was as reserved around women as the Pope, fussed over her. He settled her on the couch in Quill's office, buzzed the kitchen for tea, and pulled the McIntosh wedding file from the drawer in Quill's cabinet with a minimum of words and a maximum of composure. With a cup of hot Red Zinger in her hand and John's solid height next to her on the couch, Elaine exhibited all the aplomb of a woman who owned a large amount of property over the San Andreas Fault. This was an improvement over her usual state of mind, which was that of a periodontophobe waiting for a root canal.