Toast Mortem (25 page)

Quill thought:
It’s a matter of your principles, lady. Because you would have taken anything of value out of the poor woman’s apartment before the police got there.
But she didn’t say it. She didn’t say anything at all.

Without a word, Madame got up and went to the massive cherry desk. She unlocked the bottom drawer and took out a little pink PC. Quill had seen that type of computer before. Meg had sent money to an organization that sent them to little kids overseas.

Dorothy set it on the conference table and walked out of the room.

—“The Prioress’s Tale,” Chaucer

 

 

Quill sat in the gazebo, watching Jack and Bismarck commune in the velvet grass. She’d made it back to the Inn just in time for their four o’clock time together. Mrs. Owens’s computer was stuffed in the academy tote at her feet. Bernard LeVasque’s face grinned at her, the cheeks bulging out some from the size of the computer behind it. The sun was low across the gorge and touched the copper flashings of the big cream-colored building where the chef had met his death. She’d never been this tired in her life.

“It’s not nap time, Mommy!”

“Not yet.” She looked at her watch. “Not for another few minutes, yet.” Well, there was his supper, but Jack’s routines were inviolable.

“So why are you yawning, Mommy!”

“Sorry, darling. Mommy’s had a long day. And I swore,” she said to Max, who sat beside her with his floppy head on her knees, “that I would never ever be the kind of mother that engaged in Mommy talk. What do you think of that?”

Max cast a nervous eye in the direction of the cat. He went “rrr” low in his throat. It wasn’t a growl. In a few minutes, he’d start to talk to her—a series of “rrrs” and modest yowly noises that had the cadence of speech. She’d asked their vet, Dr. McKenzie about it once. “Imitative of your own speech patterns, my dear,” the old man had said briskly. “There’s nothing to it. Dogs are pack animals, after all, and if that’s what the pack leader does, they’re bound to try it, too. Which is not to say”—he’d twinkled at her—“that you can’t try to respond in kind.”

Quill was prepared to descend to Mommy talk, but she drew the line at “rrr-ing” at her dog. She did say, however, “It’s no use being jealous of the cat, Max. If you want to join them, try it. Be nice, though.”

Max looked doubtful.

“Maxie!” Jack shouted. “Come and play, Max!”

The doubt in Max’s face changed to hope.

“Go on,” Quill said. “Nothing ventured and all that good heroic stuff.”

Bismarck was on his back, fluffy stomach exposed to the blue sky, his paws draped carelessly over his chest. Max descended the short flight of steps to the grass and stood at the bottom, tail wagging furiously. Bismarck closed his eyes, meditated a long moment, then got up and strolled away.

“The field is yours,” Quill said.

Doreen came out of the Tavern Lounge and stamped across the grass. She settled herself beside Quill and joined her in watching Jack throw sticks for the dog. “’Bout time you got home,” she grumbled. “Hear there was a ruckus across there.” She jerked her chin at the academy, which was now rosy as the sun sank behind it.

“There was.”

“That old coot really leave the place to Meg?”

“Yep.”

“And she turned it down?”

“Yep.”

“Not without a bit of a struggle, I’ll bet.”

“Some,” Quill admitted.

“Mrs. Peterson wants to see you.”

“Mrs. Peterson . . .” Quill broke out of her half-doze. “You mean Marge Schmidt?”

“I mean Marge Schmidt-Peterson,” Doreen said firmly. “Says she’s found something out real important.”

“Well, gosh.” Quill got up and looked around. Marge stood at the edge of the flagstone terrace, in uncharacteristic hesitation. “Marge, is anything wrong? Come on over.”

“She knows this is your time with Jack,” Doreen said in a confidential way. “Didn’t want to interfere.”

Marge had an air of suppressed excitement. She greeted Quill, accepted the seat Doreen offered her, and looked quite grateful at the idea of a drink. “Vodka, if you don’t mind. Tell Nate. He knows how I like it, Doreen. You ought to have one, too, Quill. You’re going to need it. Unless . . . ahum.” Her eyes darted nervously to Quill’s bosom and then to Jack.

“Oh, gosh, no,” Quill said. “You stop breast-feeding around six months or so.”

“Don’t know much about them. Kids, I mean.”

“Well, you’ve certainly met Jack before. Jack, come and say hello to Mrs. Sch . . . I mean Mrs. Peterson, please.”

“No,” Jack said. “No, no, no.”

Quill smacked her head lightly with her palm. “Silly me. Of course. Jack, don’t you dare come and say hello to Mrs. Peterson. Don’t even try.”

Jack smiled, looking so much like a small, perfect sun in her universe that Quill’s heart contracted. He pulled himself up the steps to the gazebo and held out his hand with a cocky air. “Good-bye, Mrs. Peterson. Good-bye. Good-bye.”

“I just got here, young man.”

“He’s the Backward Boy,” Quill said. “It’s part of being two, which he will be next week. I took a course about it. It’s very normal.”

“Would you like to meet my lion?” Jack asked.

“A lion?” Marge said with a faint note of alarm. “I don’t think I would.”

“Then would you like to meet my . . .”

“Here, you,” Doreen said. She’d made it to the Tavern Lounge and back in record time. She handed Marge a tall glass of what looked like pure vodka and then hefted Jack onto her hip. “Time for dinner, and then a nap.”

“No,” Jack said, “no, no, no.” He waved over Doreen’s shoulder as she carted him back to the Inn. “Hello, Mrs. Peterson. Hello!”

“Bye!” Marge bawled. She creased her brows in bewilderment. “Or do I mean ‘hello’? How long does this backward stuff last?”

“Too long. Not long enough. It’s terrifying, Marge. He’s a different boy every week. But he’s always Jack.”

“I’ll tell you what’s terrifying,” Marge said with an air of being on familiar ground. “Your near miss with that academy, that’s what’s terrifying.”

“Near miss? I don’t get it.”

“That LeVasque? Swaggering around like he’s the next Warren Buffet? Stone broke.”

“Ston . . . you’re kidding!”

“I am not.” Marge took a healthy swig of her vodka. “Did some checking. Made some calls.”

The exact size of Marge’s fortune was a cause of considerable speculation in Hemlock Falls. All Quill knew was that any time Marge needed financial background on some poor soul, she got it with a snap of her fingers. And even Quill knew that there were subtly different rules for the hugely wealthy.

“Owes everybody.”

“The bank?”

“And then some. It was about to go bust three months ago—and then, all of a sudden, he starts paying things off.”

“How?”

“My question exactly. Enterprise like that.” Marge narrowed her eyes against the sun and appraised the beautiful building half a mile away. “You’re looking at a couple of thousand in revenues a day in season, tops, and next to nothing in the winter. And then you’ve got overhead . . .”

Quill knew all about overhead. It frequently kept her up at night.

“Anyhow, he starts slinging a hundred K here, a hundred K there at what he owes, and the debt starts to go down.”

“An investor, maybe?” Quill hazarded.

Marge pulled at her lower lip. “Possible. Some private deal that doesn’t have a paper trail, though.”

“Something illegal? Like drugs?”

“Doesn’t seem likely. But you never know.”

“I had a conversation with Mrs. LeVasque this afternoon.”

“Yeah? She have any clue?”

“She didn’t give much away.” Quill thought back. “She did say her husband seemed to have access to a lot of cash. But she claimed it came from the business.”

“We all know about that,” Marge said. “Easy to skim when you’ve got cash coming in like they do. Doesn’t make it right. Anyway.” She slapped her knees with both hands and got to her feet. “Thought you’d like to know you two aren’t as crazy as I thought giving up what looked to be a gold mine.”

Quill let this pass. “Are they very close to being bankrupt? It should be working, you know. They’re very popular.”

“Depends. Not as near as bad off as they were three months ago, that’s for sure.”

“Thank you, Marge.” She stood up to follow her friend inside. “I don’t know what this means, exactly, but I’ll let you know if I find anything out.” She crossed the lawn and stood aside to let Marge precede her into the lounge. “If I can just get some time this evening, we might have a little more information to add to this case.”

“Good. That Clare’s a decent-enough cook. Shouldn’t be spending any more time in the hoosegow than she needs to.” She clapped Quill on the shoulder. “I’m off to see to Harland’s dinner. Call me if you come up with something.”

Quill promised. The tote was an annoying weight on her shoulder, but she was afraid to let the computer out of sight. She hoisted it from her right side to her left and went to check on the evening’s activities in the kitchen.

“Hey, Quill.” Elizabeth Chou stood in Meg’s spot at the prep table, her hands deep in a bowl of floury dough.

“Hey yourself. Just dropped in to see if you need any help.”

“Nope. It’s pretty quiet. I’ve got gnocchi for the pasta special.” She held up her floury hands. “And Bjarne’s poaching salmon in something weird.”

“Dill coulis is not weird,” Bjarne said, mildly. “It is a reduction.”

“Right. Anyhow, Dina just brought in the evening’s reservations. Six parties of two confirmed.”

“And those warped persons,” Bjarne said. He filleted a salmon with a neat flick of his wrist. “They love us, I think. And they do not love the Marriott so much.”

“Oh, dear,” Quill said. “I’m not too happy about that. You know what?” She stood for a long moment, lost in thought.

“What?” Bjarne asked. Then, more loudly,
“What!?”

Quill jumped. “Nothing. Look. I’ve got to go to my office and check something out.”

She hurried back through the dining room, the tote bumping against her hip. The dining room was beginning to fill up, even though it was fairly early. Quill automatically noticed that the hydrangea in the table vases had been replaced with late roses from the rose garden, and that there was a spot on the blue carpeting that hadn’t been there before. “Red wine,” Kathleen said as she passed by with a tray of starters. “Might be time to pull it up. I’m telling you, we need to go oak.”

Quill agreed in an abstracted way. She crossed into the foyer. Dina sat absorbed in a textbook, one hand on her cheek.

“Hey, Dina.”

“Quill!” She closed the text with a snap and followed Quill into her office. “Miriam Doncaster needs to get hold of you. And you know what?”

“What.” Quill placed her tote carefully on her desk and just as carefully extracted the computer.

“Cute,” Dina said automatically. “I’ve always liked those things. They’re nice and dinky. But the battery sucks. You’ve got like, forty-five minutes or something, but only if it’s fully charged. You have the power cord?”

Quill opened the tote and looked futilely around the contents.

“Bummer,” Dina said. “Maybe I can scrounge something. Anyhow, Miriam wants you to call her back right away. And is it true? About the Grouchy Gourmet leaving everything to Meg?”

“He tried to, at any rate. I talked to Howie. Meg has to go through something called Renunciation. That’s with a capital ‘R’ by the way. Anyhow, we do that, and then it’s over.”

“Hm. Maybe she’ll give up flinging sauce pans around, too. Although I’d hate to see it go. It’s one of my favorite traditions around here.”

“Ha-ha.” Quill sat down at her desk and put her palms over her eyes.

“Boy, you look beat,” Dina said sympathetically. “Anything I can do? Coffee, maybe? Want me to rub your neck?”

“Yes. No. Maybe. About the coffee, I mean. Are you seeing Davy tonight?”

“Sort of.”

“What does that mean? He’s going to wave to you as he drives by in his cruiser?”

“It means as soon as the WARPers booked dinner for five tonight, I called him and told him they made you worried sick. So he’s coming here. He’s going to eat in the dining room at seven thirty, which is when they booked their table, and then I’m going to come and sit with him until they leave or go berserk and try something awful, whichever comes first. I’m off,” she said unnecessarily, “at eight.”

Quill took her palm from her eyes and stared at her. “I love you, Dina.”

“I love you, too, Quill. Now, do you want to call Miriam back? She was so frantic to talk with you I thought she was going to spazz out right over the phone.”

Quill looked at her watch. “She’ll be at the Croh Bar with Howie.”

“Am I that predictable?” Miriam swept into the office. She wore black leather jeans, a man’s white cotton shirt (which couldn’t have been Howie’s; it was too slim-cut), and she had her hair pulled back in a tight French knot at the back of her head.