Toast Mortem (26 page)

“You look like Patricia Cornwell,” Dina said. “How cool is that?”

Miriam blinked her big blue eyes at them. “I feel
just
like Patricia Cornwell. And I don’t want to be late for Howie, so listen up. Bobby Ray Whosis . . .”

“Steinmetz,” Quill said.

“Right. He has an alibi. A good one. So they have to let him go.”

“What’s the alibi?”

Miriam cocked her head and looked at Dina. Everybody in Hemlock Falls knew Dina and the sheriff were dating, and knowing Miriam, odds were good she was the one who’d spread the word. “The police don’t seem to have released that, yet.”

“I’ll say. Davy didn’t even tell me.” Dina turned to Quill. “Davy only tells me stuff when it’s allowed by the department. But,” she added earnestly, “he always tells me first.”

“Yes, well.” Miriam coughed. “The word’s all around town that poor Mrs. Whosis, you know, the vic . . .”

“The vic?” Quill said.

“The dead woman,” Miriam hissed. She paused impressively. “She had a brand-new fifty-dollar bill clutched in her hand.”

“Wow!” Dina said.

“A fifty-dollar bill,” Quill repeated. She wasn’t as surprised as she thought she’d be. They could call this the Case of the Clutching Corpses. Because poor M. LeVasque had that recipe clutched in his hand, too. Except it had too many “s” sounds in it. The Case of the Corpse That Clutched?

“And that,” Miriam said with a grand gesture, “is the clue of the day. If you need me, Watson, you know where to find me.” She whirled grandly and made her exit.

“I’m Sherlock!” Quill shouted after her.

“Doesn’t sound like much of a clue,” Dina said, “unless there’s been a robbery somewhere of marked fifty-dollar bills and Mrs. Owens did it. What are you doing, Quill?”

“Booting up this computer. And I hope to heck the battery’s charged. Damn it. It’s at fifty percent power. Do you think you can find a power cord that’ll fit?”

Dina tipped the little pink case on its side. “I’ll try.”

Quill’s first fear, that the wireless at the Inn wouldn’t be compatible with Mrs. Owens’s service, proved to be groundless. Her second, that Mrs. Owens’s account was password protected proved to be groundless, too. Mrs. Owens had checked the “do not ask for this again” box on her Internet service to save herself the few keystrokes needed to log on.

“Not smart, Mrs. Owens. Not smart at all. But thank goodness, anyway.”

She moved the cursor up to the History option. She scrolled down, down, down. The last days of her life, Mrs. Owens had visited a custom shoe site, a holistic vitamin site, and twenty or more cruise ship tours.

Quill kept on scrolling. A red light came on at the corner of the keyboard; 5 percent power left.

Just before the power died Quill hit it.

The screen blacked out.

Quill pounded her hands on the desk in frustration. She wrote the website down, noticing that her hands were trembling, and turned to her own laptop. She logged on quickly, silently blessing the super-speedy service Dina had insisted they sign up for.

The Oxbury Grand Prize was nothing to sneeze at. The cereal company offered a million dollars, cash, to the person who submitted the tastiest recipe using at least four Oxbury products. And this year’s winning recipe was for Oxbury’s Excellent Krispies.

They had posted the winner’s face, of course.

Mrs. Barbarossa.

Quill paged down the website, a little dizzy with shock. Mrs. Barbarossa’s real name was Serena Owens Canfield. Under the picture of the triumphant little old lady was an interview with the Oxbury judges. She had a sister, Verena Owens, who was a professional chef, but the two hadn’t seen each other for years, and of course Mrs. Owens (the older by ten minutes) hadn’t a thing to do with the winning recipe.

But Quill bet Bernard LeVasque had.

“Quill?”

Absorbed in the screen, Quill didn’t register the fear in Dina’s voice at first. She looked up and for a long, horrifying moment, what she saw didn’t register at all.

“That damn website,” Mrs. Barbarossa said. She held Dina’s left arm high behind her back. Her other hand, shining with rings, held a long, thin boning knife against Dina’s neck. The front of Dina’s T-shirt was soaked with blood. “I demanded that they take it off, but they said they had the right to leave it up for a year. For the publicity.”

Quill got up, slowly.

“I asked in the dining room if anyone had a power cord to match your little pink computer cord.” Dina managed a ghastly smile. “She said she had one just like it.”

“Shut up.” Mrs. Barbarossa pressed the knife closer against Dina’s neck and a little stream of blood flowed over the old lady’s knuckles. It didn’t take much pressure. Boning knives were lethally sharp. “Vee and I bought matching computers at the same time,” she said chattily. “Right after I won the contest. She lost hers on a cruise ship and didn’t get herself another one until a couple of days ago. Funny how much these things get hold of you. Who’d have thought we’d cotton on to computers at our age?”

Quill moved carefully away from her desk.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Barbarossa said. “I want you to go out and go upstairs. I need that nice little boy of yours. I can’t drive through the countryside with this great gawk of a girl in the car.”

“Not Jack!” Dina said. “I’ll go with you!” Her face was so pale, Quill was afraid she was going to faint.

“I wouldn’t hurt a hair on his head! What kind of a person do you think I am?”

Quill moved away from the desk, step-by-step. “A very clever person, to be sure,” she said steadily.

“Well, I have been smarter than the average bear,” she said coyly. “You just go on up now and get little Jack. The two of us will wait right here.” She bared her teeth. “If you don’t go right this minute, I’ll pull this knife all the way across her throat and be out that window before you know it.”

“Of course you will,” Quill said. “But you’ll want to take your sister’s computer. It’s evidence. And you wouldn’t want the police to get their hands on it. Vee, is it? And the two of you are sisters?”

“Thank God I got the looks. We never got along all that well, to tell you the truth.”

“She didn’t seem like a very nice person.” By now, Quill was three feet from them. She held the computer out, like an offering. She held Dina’s eyes with hers and shook her head lightly.
No

“Well, she wasn’t,” Mrs. Barbarossa said fretfully. “Do you know, she wanted to take my money, too?”

“Just like Chef LeVasque.”

“That man! He thought the recipe was a joke! Vee tried to make the recipe herself, you know.” Mrs. Barbarossa sniffed contemptuously. “And the little jackass said he could win it in a snap. But the two of them are professionals. They aren’t eligible.”

“So it was really LeVasque’s recipe? And not yours, after all?”

Mrs. Barbarossa took an indignant breath. Quill raised the computer and swung hard. Dina, weak with fear, shoved herself sideways. Quill cracked the old lady on the head, driven by panic for Jack, for Dina, and filled with horror at herself.

Mrs. Barbarossa went down like a stone.

Quill grabbed the knife and threw it out the open window. Dina sat dazed on the floor. Quill grabbed her by the shoulders and cradled her against her breast. She pulled off her shirt and wrapped it around the wounds in Dina’s neck, then laid her carefully flat on the floor. She opened the door and shouted for Davy. Then she punched 911 frantically into the phone and shouted for the paramedics. She sat down again, Dina in her arms, half-naked, covered with blood, weeping.

—Headline from the
Hemlock Falls Gazette
,
August 14th

 

 

“She was as crazy as an outhouse rat,” Meg said wonderingly. “How in the world did she think she could get away with it?”

The sun was dropping behind the academy across the gorge. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since the paramedics had taken Dina and Mrs. Barbarossa to the emergency room. Meg and Quill sat in the gazebo. Doreen sat on the steps, silent.

Jack was asleep on Quill’s lap. She’d had to leave him with Doreen to give her official statement to the police, but she hadn’t let him out of her sight once she’d gotten back to the Inn.

“I don’t know how I’d have lived with myself if I’d killed her, Meg.”

“Well, you didn’t,” Meg said. “And nobody would have blamed you if you had. What else could you do?”

Quill smoothed Jack’s curls. “Maybe not hit her so hard.” She’d felt sick with dread all day.

“Don’t think about it.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it!”

“She killed two people, Quill. She would have killed poor Dina without a second thought. She threatened you.”

“She wouldn’t have gotten near Jack,” Quill said fiercely. “I don’t like knowing this about myself, Meg. That I can do what I did.”

“I like knowing it,” Meg said. “You were brave. And you were in a corner. And like the man said, you did what you had to do.”

“What man?”

“I don’t know.
The
Man. What, you were supposed to stand there and let her cut Dina’s throat? Just so you could avoid clocking a monster over the head with a computer?” She reached over and tucked a curl behind Quill’s ear. “Your hair’s falling down again.”

Jack stirred in her arms, woke, and sat up. Then he began to wriggle. “Let me down, Mommy.”

“Not just yet, Jack.”

“Yes, just yet! Let me down
now
!” He held out his arms to Doreen.
“Gram!”
he shouted. “Mommy’s squishing me!”

Doreen got to her feet with a grunt. “You’d best let me take him up for dinner.”

Quill put her cheek against Jack’s. He smelled of sunshine, soap, and little boy.

Doreen’s face softened. “Best to keep to his routine, dear. It’s all over now.”

“You’re right.”

Quill let him down. He scrambled off her lap and danced out of the gazebo and into the sunshine. “Chase me, Gram.”

“I’m too old and too cranky to go off a-chasing you,” Doreen said sternly. “You get up on to bed, now. As for you two,” she put her hands on her hips. “You’d best come on in and eat something. You haven’t had a thing all day, Quill. And as for you, missy, you’ve got some free time on your hands—you can spend it making something tasty for your sister.”

Quill clapped her hand to her head. “The Welcome Dinner! I forgot all about it! Shouldn’t you be at the academy?”

“Cancelled,” Doreen said. “So she’s free as a bird. I’m taking Jack up, now, and I’ll look in on Dina.”

“Don’t wake her up,” Quill warned. “Andy Bishop prescribed a sedative for her. I finally got her to take it. The more she rests, the faster she’ll heal.”

“She’s going to have a right good scar,” Doreen predicted gloomily. “But at least her head’s still attached to her neck. Wouldn’t have been if it hadn’t been for you, Quill.” She touched Quill’s cheek with a gnarled finger. “I’m proud to know you, missy. You did the right thing.”

The heaviness in Quill’s heart lightened, just a little.

“As for that Welcome Dinner, Meg will tell you all about that. Goat!” She turned and trudged across the lawn after Jack.

Quill raised her eyebrows. “Goat?”

“Nobody wanted goat.” Meg settled comfortably back into the lounge chair. “We had exactly three confirmed guests. Once the word got out about the entree, people stayed away in droves. Of course, the hoorah here had something to do with it, too.” There was a cynical twist to her mouth. “We’d be full up tonight if I hadn’t closed the kitchen.”

“It wouldn’t have been anyone from Hemlock Falls,” Quill said warmly.

“No,” Meg agreed. “But the media’s not prone to either tact or respect. I’ve got Mike posted at the end of the driveway in the pickup.”

“I didn’t think of that. That was smart.”

“Glad it meets with your approval. So.” Meg moved restlessly in her chair. “Did Davy let you in on the particulars?”

“Some. Mrs. Barbarossa—it’s Serena Canfield, actually, started paying blackmail money to LeVasque about a month after she got all that cash.”

“So it was his recipe.”

“Yes, it was. The contest has strict rules about professionals, of course. Only amateurs. And Serena claims that once the news about her win was publicized, all kinds of people came out of the woodwork demanding money from her.”

“I’ve heard that happens to people who win the lottery.”