A Carol for a Corpse

by Claudia Bishop

  A wide grin split his face as Marge hauled Quill to the conference table, and he hurried up to meet them. “Merry Christmas, Quill.” He took Quill’s hand in both of his own and shook it heartily. “And a Merry Christmas to you too, Marge. Well! Let’s sit down and have at it.”

  “Have at what?” Quill asked warily.

  Harvey patted his sculpted blond hair, cleared his throat, and took a deep, dramatic breath. “The First Annual Hemlock Falls Christmas Chorale!”

  “Oh,” Quill said in mild surprise. “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

  “Doesn’t sound too bad? Quill! Marge! It’s fantastic!”

  “Are you planning a concert, then?” Quill asked.

  “We’ve got that special meeting of the Chamber coming up day after tomorrow, and I thought we could have the chorale debut at it.”

  “Oh,” Quill said. She’d forgotten about that. Zeke Kingsfield was famous for his real estate seminars. To the delight of the mayor—and most of the businessmen in the village— he had agreed to present a shortened version of it at a special Chamber meeting.

  “And then the Reverend Shuttleworth wants us to sing at the midnight carol service, of course. And I thought maybe we could get up a caroling group to go around the village. Adela’s got the Ladies Auxiliary knitting hats.”

  “Hats?” Quill said. “We’re going to be wearing special hats?”

  “Oh there’s big stuff coming down in Hemlock Falls,” Harvey said importantly. “And we have to be prepared for any and all contingencies.”

  “What does that have to do with hats?” Marge demanded. “And what are you talking about, ‘big stuff coming down in Hemlock Falls’?”

  “Just a few of us are in the know, if you get my drift. The mayor made a couple of calls yesterday. Just to the movers and shakers, if you get my drift.”

  “You’re drifting all right, Harvey.” When Marge’s temper was roused, as it appeared to be now, she had the belligerence of a tank. “Nothing big goes down in Hemlock Falls without me hearing about it.”

  This, Quill knew, was not a boast, but a fact.

  Harvey smiled and put his fingers to his lips. “It’s big. Very big. I can tell you that. It’s going to put Hemlock Falls on the map. That’s what Elmer said.”

  “All that means is you don’t know a thing about it, either,” Marge said.

  Quill looked at her. “Charley Comstock did say something yesterday morning about some new business at the bank meeting, come to think of it. But he was very vague. You haven’t heard anything, Marge?” If anyone was a mover and shaker in Hemlock Falls, it was Marge.

  “Charley?” Marge looked thoughtful, but she let it drop. The members were filing in to the meeting. She marched forward to take her usual spot next to Harland Peterson at the head of the table. Quill herself retreated to the corner farthest from the mayor’s podium. The room was long and narrow, and the rear was ideal for those Chamber members (like Quill herself) who preferred to sit in meetings unnoticed. Back in the mid-1900s, the conference room had been a keeping room for food storage. Such a space offered few usable options. Quill had installed a beige Berber carpet, painted the walls a soft cream, put up some whiteboards at the far end, and added a credenza with a sink to accommodate coffee service.

  Chamber meetings were the only time that she was thankful for the proportions of the room. The space really wasn’t usable for anything other than meetings.

  But it was a good place for that. She’d scrounged a rectangular table long enough to seat all twenty-four members of the Chamber of Commerce from an auction of old public library furniture. The chief advantage of the table as far as Quill was concerned was that the farthest corner hid her from the active, highly vocal members clustered at the front, like Harvey.

  Harvey followed Quill back to the end of the table, an A-frame tucked under his arm. “I’ve made some preliminary sketches of the program, here.”

  “Oh,” Quill said again. “I see. You’d like me to design the cover?”

  “We sure would!” Harvey placed the A-frame on the table with a flourish. “The cover cries out for the Quilliam touch!”

  “For God’s sake, Harvey. Are you trying to cadge off Quill again? Tell him you won’t do it, Quill.” Miriam Doncaster swept into the room. She dropped into the chair next to Quill’s and shook her head in some disgust. Miriam had moved to Hemlock Falls more than twenty years before, with a husband in tow. The husband had picked up and moved on, leaving Miriam with a ten-year-old to support and a large mortgage to pay off. She’d taken a job as town librarian and paid off the bank. The ten-year-old was grown up and practicing as a lawyer in Cleveland. And Miriam had settled into the village with the ease of a Hemlockian born and bred. “You realize what he did with your sketches for the Texas Longhorn Cattlemen’s thingie, don’t you? Sold them. Sold them on eBay as original Quilliams. He got a pretty price for them, too.”

  “I personally donated the money to the high school,” Harvey said frostily.

  “That you did,” Miriam agreed. “For the Harvey Bozzel Career in the Arts Scholarship.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Quill said hastily. “I’d be glad to do it. What with all the money hassles, I haven’t been working at all lately. This will be a good project to limber up, so to speak.”

  “And if we do decide to put the sketches on eBay, the money will be put to a good cause,” Harvey said.

  “The library, perhaps?” Quill turned to Miriam with a twinkle. “I know the state’s been hacking away at your budget, Miriam.”

  “Bless you, my child,” Miriam said. “You heard that, Harvey. The money’s mine.”

  “So,” Quill said, “let’s see what you’re proposing here, Harvey.” She turned back to discover that Harvey had charged to the head of the table, where Mayor Henry stood rapping his gavel on the tabletop with an air of having to practice.

  “You’ve lost him, momentarily, at least.” Miriam put her hand on Quill’s arm and said with unaccustomed warmth, “By the way, I was so glad to hear that you and Meg are out of the woods. And with the Kingsfield Publishing consortium, no less. Quite a coup.”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I don’t have to tell you how worried I was. The light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train, thank goodness. I’m very grateful to them.”

  “And Meg?” Miriam asked with a shrewd glance. “How’s she going to feel about the temporary invasion of her kitchen?”

  “It’ll be fine,” Quill said with more confidence than she felt. “I hope. Lydia Kingsfield is checking in this afternoon, with, I think, some of the crew for the cable show. So I’ll know soon enough.”

  “And her infamous other half, Zeke, ‘the Hammer’?”

  Before Quill could answer, Elmer Henry rapped his gavel and called the meeting to order. Quill scanned the table and saw that most of the Chamber members had turned out for the meeting: Harland Peterson, the big, weather-beaten president of the local Agway, sat next to Marge. Howie Murchison, the town’s attorney (and Miriam’s occasional date), was present, as well as Dookie Shuttleworth, minister of the Hemlock Falls Church of the Word of God, Esther West (West’s Best Dress Shoppe), and Charley Comstock. Charley sat next to Carol Ann Spinoza, the village tax assessor and Quill’s least favorite person in the entire world.

  There were some new faces, too: Jinny Peterson from the recently formed GoodJobs! agency and Tom McHugh, who’d taken over Peterson’s Auto after poor George’s bankruptcy sale. Quill looked at them all with varying degrees of affection. “I feel quite sentimental about everybody today,” she said to Miriam. “It’d have been horrible to leave all this and have to move back to New York.” She looked around the table once more. “Oh, phooey,” she said under her breath.

  Miriam craned her neck in the direction of Quill’s gaze. “What? What’s wrong?”

  Albert McWhirter, immaculate in a gray pin-striped suit and crisp white shirt, had been hidden behind Harland Peterson’s broad back. He’d taken a cha
ir from around the table and set it against the wall. He sat with his feet together, his back straight, and a supercilious look on his face.

  “Who is that?” Miriam asked.

  “The bank thinks we need someone to take a fresh look at the way we’re running the Inn,” Quill said warily. “That’s the someone.”

  “Quill!” said Mayor Henry with all the decisiveness his portly five feet five inches could muster. “Didn’t you hear me call the meeting to order?”

  “I did. I did. Sorry, Elmer.”

  “No offense taken, Quill,” Adela Henry said graciously. The mayor’s wife—who dominated her husband both physically and politically—nodded in an amiable fashion. Adela, fond of bright colors, had added an orange chiffon blouse to her favorite purple pantsuit this morning.

  Elmer nodded agreement and tapped the gavel again. “Before we start, I’d like to introduce a guest to these proceedings. This here is Albert McWhirter, from Syracuse. He’s here for a few days on bid-ness, and as a member in good standing of the Syracuse Chamber of Commerce, we welcome him as a brother member.” Elmer clapped his hands to start the applause, which was polite and perfunctory. “Now, Quill. Perhaps you could have the minutes ready to read, after the reverend leads us in prayer.”

  Obediently, Quill fumbled in the pocket of her long wool skirt for her sketchpad. Dookie Shuttleworth thanked the Lord for the many blessings given to Hemlock Falls. Elmer rapped the gavel and asked for a motion to read the minutes. Esther West somewhat testily pointed out that they always opened the Chamber meeting by reading the minutes and why did they have to take a vote? The several minutes it took to settle this point of order gave Quill the chance to flip through her sketchbook to the November meeting. The relevant page was embellished with a sketch of Elmer dressed as a Pilgrim, a sketch of Adela Henry in the guise of a ferocious Apache wielding a tomahawk in Elmer’s direction, and an attractive series of swooping lines that looked like a Dada-esque version of a lemon pie with the figure $233.43 written underneath.

  “Minutes of the last meeting,” Elmer said, with a thwack of the gavel.

  Quill looked at the otherwise blank page and said in an authoritative voice: “The November eighth meeting of the Hemlock Falls Chamber of Commerce was called to order by Mayor Elmer Henry at ten o’clock.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Esther said fussily. “We started an hour late, Mayor, because you and Adela had that huge argument over the Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

  That accounted for Adela’s ax and the panicked expression on the Pilgrim mayor’s face. Quill made a little note next to Apache Adela.

  “Did you make that correction, Quill?” Esther asked.

  “I did. Thank you, Esther.” Quill cleared her throat. “Old business centered around a discussion of the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the success of the Veteran’s Day bake sale, which yielded a profit of two hundred and thirty-three dollars and forty-three cents.”

  “Actually, the bake sale profit was a hundred and ninety-eight dollars and sixty-six cents,” Esther said. “I paid myself back for the coffee cups and napkins I had to buy because we ran out right in the middle of the sale. And the reason we ran out is because nobody listened to a word I said about how many coffee cups and napkins we were going to need.”

  “You spent thirty-five dollars and change on coffee cups?” Carol Ann Spinoza demanded. “That is a total abuse of public funds.” Carol Ann had the blond, athletic good looks of a high school cheerleader. Her hair was drawn up in a neat ponytail. She always smelled of shampoo and soap. She was the cleanest person Quill had ever met in this life. She was also the scariest. As town tax assessor, Carol Ann gave new meaning to the term “abuse of power.”

  The meeting descended into familiar squabbles, with Carol Ann’s high, sticky-sweet voice dominating the uproar.

  Quill drew her charcoal pencil from her other pocket and turned to a clean page in her sketchbook. She drew a tropic island, a peaceful beach, and a little swimsuited Meg and Quill lying under a palm tree. By the time she’d sketched in a muscular beach boy carrying a pitcher with paper umbrellas sticking out of the top, the acrimony over the bake sale expenditures had died away.

  “And what about new business, Quill?” Elmer said.

  Quill paged back to her November notes. “Golly, Elmer. We didn’t have any new business.”

  “We didn’t?”

  “Nonsense,” Carol Ann said. “I have some new business.”

  Since Carol Ann’s interruption violated Robert’s Rules of Order, everyone felt safe ignoring her.

  “Nothing,” Quill said cheerfully. “And a good thing, too. It’s a perfect time to take a vacation. You’ve worked hard all year, Elmer. We all have. I think we should just kick back and maybe have a party. We have the one hundred and ninety-eight dollars from the bake sale, after all. That’ll buy a few rum toddies down at the Croh Bar.”

  “I find that a very frivolous suggestion,” Adela said reprovingly. “And you’ve been quite remiss in your taking of the minutes, Quill.” The words “as usual” hung in the air. “Harvey here brought up the formation of the Hemlock Falls Choir at the end of last month’s meeting.”

  Quill bit her lip guiltily. “Oh, dear. You’re quite right, Adela. I do apologize. Again.”

  “Well, you had quite a lot on your mind, what with running the Inn into bankruptcy and all,” Elmer said kindly. “We all know about that. Anyhow, as your mayor, we’ve got some great—”

  “I didn’t run the Inn into bankruptcy,” Quill interrupted. She darted a glance at McWhirter, who stared impassively back. “And,” she added in what she hoped was an impressive way, “I had quite a lot on my mind. Some of you may know I was in negotiations with the Kingsfield Publishing Group.”

  Elmer gave a knowing chuckle. “Otherwise known as Zeke ‘the Hammer’ Kingsfield. Now, about Zeke,” he added with confidant familiarity.

  “I’ve seen him on that show, The Assistant,” Esther broke in. “You know, the one where he makes big business executives out of taxi drivers and that. It’s sort of a talent show. We all have an inner executive, Zeke says.”

  Elmer gave Esther a skeptical glance.

  “Yes. Well,” Quill said. “Lydia Kingsfield, editor of L’Aperitif and her husband, um . . . Zeke, have made my sister, Meg, and me a simply terrific offer. They’re going to lease the Inn four times a year as a set for the new L’Aperitif TV show, Good Taste. Not to mention the line of special foods that will have the Inn at Hemlock Falls label. We are going to have tons of money around. We’ll be rolling in it.” She stuck her chin out at a defiant angle.

  There was an impressed silence. Swept up in the drama of the moment Quill realized she had risen to her feet. She sat down again. She met Miriam’s amazed glance with an apologetic air.

  “Always glad to welcome new millionaires to Hemlock Falls,” Elmer said. “As a matter of fact . . .”

  Quill felt her cheeks turn hot. “Well, we aren’t going to be millionaires, precisely.”

  “Everybody who works for Zeke Kingsfield is a millionaire,” Esther said in a hushed voice. “My glory, Quill. And to think it happened to you.”

  “We aren’t working for him,” Quill said hastily. She got up again and faced them. “And I didn’t mean to imply that we’re rolling in more than a . . . a sufficiency. I just meant . . .”

  Miriam gave Quill’s sleeve a sharp tug. She sat down again with a thud. Miriam winked one big blue eye at Quill and said loudly, “I make a motion that we get on with the choral society, Elmer.”

  “I make a motion that we pay attention to my new business issue,” Carol Ann said furiously. “I hope you realize that some vandal is going around assassinating Christmas lawn décor with a paintball gun and I move to start a volunteer police force to track these vandals down.”

  “No,” Howie Murchison said. “No vigilantes, Carol Ann. You’ve tried this on us before. I second the motion to discuss the choral group.”

  “Carried,” Elmer said wit
h considerable relief. “Harvey, you want to show us your plans? And then I’ve got an announcement about a special Chamber meeting day after tomorrow.” He beamed at them. “Always save the best for last, I say.”

  “I suppose I got a little carried away,” Quill said to Miriam in an undertone.

  “You certainly did.”

  “It’s because Mr. McWhirter is sitting there. I didn’t want to look like an idiot.”

  “The examiner that came recommended by the OCC?” Miriam said with interest. “Is that him? Hmph. Looks like he ate lemons for breakfast.”

  Quill tugged at her hair miserably. “Do you suppose everyone in Hemlock Falls is going to think we’re millionaires?”

  “You’d better hope Carol Ann doesn’t.” Miriam smiled. With her short, sun-streaked hair and large blue eyes, she was attractively middle-aged. The softening of her jawline and the wrinkles around her eyes made her appealingly warm. “Well, let’s say you’re probably going to be getting a lot of offers you wouldn’t have gotten before.”

  “Time-shares,” Quill agreed glumly. “Hot tips on surefire stocks. Yuck.”

  “Quill?” Elmer’s tone was unusually polite. “We were wondering what your thoughts were on the matter.”

  “I’m sorry.” Quill stopped herself and made a fierce internal vow to never say she was sorry again. At least not in the next twenty minutes. “What . . . ?”

  “My choral group,” Harvey said proudly. He set the A-frame upright. “I have to say, with all due modesty, that bringing a fresh approach to this product would be a challenge to Saatchi himself.”

  “You mean a fresh approach to Christmas?” Quill said.

  “Christmas,” Harvey agreed. “But I don’t think there’s anywhere in these great United States of ours that you’ll find an idea like this!” He flipped the A-frame open with a flourish.