A Carol for a Corpse

by Claudia Bishop

  “Max, who the heck would be out in the snow in shoes? Their feet would freeze off.” A sudden stab of pain in her skull made her gasp. She hadn’t fallen. She’d been hit over the head. “Which I hope they did, by God. Froze off, I mean.”

  She took a deep breath. Her purse must be lying somewherearound here. There, at the side of the path, half its contents lying soggy in the snow. She picked her purse up and retrieved her cell phone, wallet, and sketchpad. The sketchpad was a total loss. All her money and credit cards were still in her wallet. And her cell phone was deader than a doornail, either because she’d forgotten to charge it or because its complicated little innards didn’t take to storage in snowbanks.

  The ache in her head ebbed. The snow slowed and stopped. The clouds drifted on and the moon shone down, illuminating the path up the side of the hill to home. It was either back through the park or forward to a hot bath and a couple of aspirin.

  Quill climbed up the slope to the top of the hill. Max charged over the top of the rise and plunged down to the lawn below. Quill followed him and stopped before she walked down the slight slope of law to the Inn. She rarely saw the structure from the top of the gorge at night, and she was struck by how beautiful it was. The Christmas lights made a fantastical jeweled web in the dining room windows. At Quill’s request, Mike had wound another web of lights around the trunk and branches of the oak tree just outside the front door. The effect was wonderful. The tree glowed with an otherworldly light.

  Max dashed to the front door, looked at her, dashed back to her side, and then sat down, tongue lolling, as if to say, “Now what?”

  “If I go in the front door, chances are good that someone will see me and shriek like a banshee. And I’m just not up for that, Max. If I go into the kitchen, it’s certain I’d run into Meg or worse yet, Lydia and the television shoot, and I’m not up for that, either. So it’s the burglar’s way for us. As it is, even if I get myself cleaned up so it doesn’t look as scary as I think it does, you know what’s going to happen as well as I do. Somebody will insist on calling the sheriff’s office, and Davy Kiddermeister took Dina to the movies tonight in Syracuse, and it would just wreck her date if he had to come back here and mooch around the dark in the snow. And Meg would drag me to the ER. Nope. I’m sneaking in.”

  She felt quite noble about her decision. She looked at the fire escape on the east side of the building. Her rooms were on the third floor, directly across from Meg’s. And she had the keys to the fire door with her. At the moment, it looked like a long way up.

  It took less effort to climb the fire escape stairs than she thought it would, perhaps because Max insisted on coming with her. Quill patted him frequently, grateful for his affection. These particular stairs scared him and it took him forever to decide to leave one landing and take the stairs to the next. She was feeling quite like her old self when she let herself into her rooms. She shrugged off her coat, kicked off her boots, and took a good long look at herself in the bathroom mirror. What had felt like a giant bump to her fingertips looked quite harmless. There was a slight swelling, and there was a faint bluish tint to her skin, but that was it. The scrape was barely visible. And there was hardly any blood.

  Quill was conscious of a feeling of disappointment. “I mean,” she said to Max, who was listening with every evidence of intense curiosity, “you’d think that being knocked cold by a midnight attacker would be more, I don’t know, obvious.”

  Her feet and toes were quite warm now, too. And although her skirt was soaked from the snow, and clung unpleasantly to her calves, she was actually feeling quite warm in her fisherman’s sweater.

  She swallowed some aspirin, washed her face, combed her hair, and changed into dry trousers, a lighter-weight sweater, and a pair of knee socks and comfortable shoes. By the time she got downstairs, her headache was gone. To her surprise, the dining room was a quarter full of people still eating dinner. To her further surprise, when she flung the swinging doors into the kitchen open and announced, “I’m back,” Meg merely looked up her from her place at the stove and said, “How come you’re back so early? It’s a good thing that you are, though. I could use a hand here.”

  Quill looked at the kitchen clock. It was barely eight. It seemed as if a lifetime had passed since she wakened in the woods. Clearly, she’d been unconscious for mere minutes.

  Although the area around the new stove and prep sinks was clear, the rear part of the kitchen was filled with stage lights, video monitors, and a large video camera with a stand. Benny fussed with a wreath of spices that hung over the bread hearth. Five elves in costume lounged around in various poses; two were slumped comfortably in portable director’s chairs, one sat cross-legged on the floor, and two stood with their backs against the wall in the short hallway that led to the outside door. With the hats, clown white makeup, fake noses, and tights and jerkins, it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.

  “Plate!” Meg shouted. Kathleen grabbed the entrée Meg had flung on the countertop and trotted out the door.

  “Poached pears!” Mikhail grabbed a strainer, and began to take the pears simmering in wine out of the pot one by one.

  “I need someone to prep Steak Quilliam,” Meg said, “and that’s you, Quill, since Mikhail’s busy with the pears.”

  “But—” Quill gave up. If Meg hadn’t noticed she was bravely ignoring a significant head wound by now, she wasn’t going to until the food preparation was over.

  Quill took a plate from the warming oven, arranged the Potatoes Duchess, sprigs of rosemary and cinnamon-spiced apple rings on it, and stepped back as Meg took a filet from her sauté pan and lifted it carefully into the center of the food. She handed the pan to Quill, who carefully drizzled the sauce over the beef.

  “Meg!” Benny called out. “If that’s the last of the orders, can we try another run-through?”

  “Yes. You can have my kitchen full time, now, Benny. That was the last entrée. If any dessert orders come in, Quill and I can handle them.”

  Kathleen returned from delivering the final entrée and took her place in the lineup in front of the bread oven.

  “Everyone line up!” Ajit stood behind the camera and put his eye to the lens. “Elf on the left move over three feet to your right. No, no, your other right.”

  “Is Melissa there?” Quill said. “I can’t tell which one of you is which.”

  “After rehearsal,” Ajit said firmly. “Come on now, dear. Ajit wants to get some dancing feet on tape.” He sent Quill a brief, comradely grin. “We only use one camera on the live shoot, but we want the production values to look pricier. So we do a lot of cutting with shots we’ve taken earlier.”

  Quill nodded as if this made sense to her and sat down in her rocking chair. She sighed rather loudly, put her hand to her forehead, and gently rubbed her bump.

  “So how was choir practice?” Meg asked as she briskly swabbed down the stove.

  “I didn’t stay.”

  Meg laughed. “The hip-hop version of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ get to you?”

  “Harvey seems to have changed his mind about that.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  Quill sighed more loudly. “Do you have something I could use as a bandage around here?”

  “Of course we do. The first aid kit’s under—oh, no, it isn’t, we moved it.” Meg reached under the sink and brought out the white plastic box. “Did you cut yourself?”

  “I got whacked on the head.”

  Meg looked up, startled. “You what?”

  “I walked back through the park and someone hit me on the head. I was out cold,” Quill added rather pitifully, “for quite some time.”

  Meg was at her side in seconds. “Where did you get hit?” she asked anxiously. “There, on your forehead?” She touched the bump lightly with two fingers. The tension ran out of her shoulders and she straightened up. “Well, for heaven’s sake. It doesn’t seem like too much of a bump. And what happened?” She stiffened. “Were you mugg
ed?”

  “Of course not,” Quill said, “this is Hemlock Falls.”

  “What happened?

  Quill explained. Meg rubbed her nose and said skeptically, “Are you sure you just didn’t slip and fall? I mean, it must have been quite a smack, and that’s a shame, but why would anyone hit you on the head?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you’re just a little disoriented,” Meg said kindly. “I’ll get you some hot tea. You get a good night’s sleep, and you’ll have forgotten all about it in the morning.”

  “I was sure I saw a third set of footprints there.” Quill closed her eyes trying to remember. “Well, maybe I did. And maybe I just knocked myself out. Do you think?”

  Meg patted her shoulder. “One way or another, sister dear. You always do.”

  Myles didn’t call.

  Quill refused to worry. There could be all kinds of reasons why. But when she slept, she dreamed of footprints and moonlight and kept waking in the night, reaching across the mattress to him.

  She fell into a heavy, restless sleep just as the dark began to lighten into day.

  A loud, imperative banging on her door jerked her awake. Max was curled at the foot of the bed. The knocking jerked him awake, too. He jumped off the bed and began to bark. Quill rolled out of bed. Her head was fuzzy, her unsettled stomach was back, and her muscles ached from the fall she’d taken in the woods. She pulled on a bathrobe and stamped to the door. “This,” she snarled as she pulled it open, “had better be good.”

  “It’s not good at all,” Meg said. She stepped into the room. Her short dark hair was tangled, as if she’d been trying to pull it off her head altogether. “Mike found Zeke Kingsfield’s body at the bottom of the gorge.” She stepped inside the door and pulled it shut behind her. “I can’t believe it, Quill. He’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Quill stared at her sister in horror. “Zeke Kingsfield’s dead? How? Why? Do we know what happened?”

  Meg shouldered past her and went into the Quill’s little kitchen. “Have you had coffee yet?”

  “I haven’t even been to the bathroom yet,” Quill said indignantly. “Just tell me what’s happened, okay?”

  “He went out for his cross-country ski run about seven this morning, just as it was getting light. He’s usually back by eight thirty to have breakfast with Lydia . . .”

  “She didn’t go with him this morning?”

  “She said they got back too late from Syracuse last night. At any rate, she sent Mike out to look for him in the snowmobile. It looks like he went over the edge of the gorge where we put in that little fence. Dammit! We put that fence there to prevent stuff like this from happening.”

  “Good grief.” Quill sat down on the stool at her kitchen counter. “Poor guy.”

  Meg dumped coffee beans into the grinder, pushed the button, and waited until the beans had been reduced to a fine powder. She filled the electric teakettle with water and plugged it in. “Mike jumped off the snowmobile and climbed down the slope to the river. He said it looked as if Kingsfield’s neck was broken, but, of course, we won’t know for sure until the autopsy’s done.”

  “I hope it was quick,” Quill said with a shudder. “It’s awful. Just awful. How is Lydia taking it?”

  Meg didn’t answer. She put the filter in the Melitta cone, added the coffee, then the hot water.

  “She knows, doesn’t she?” Quill said. “Don’t tell me no one’s told the poor woman.”

  “Of course she knows. Mike came back and went straight to her after he told me. He wanted to wake you up, but I said I’d take care of it, which is why I’m here.” She poured out a cup of coffee and handed it over. “I haven’t seen her, so I don’t know how she’s taking it. Mike called the sheriff’s office and the EMTs and then he took Lydia back to the site on his snowmobile.”

  “So she’s down there with the body?”

  “Yep.”

  “One of us should be there.”

  “Yep.”>

  “And you’ve got to get breakfast out.”

  “I should be there right now.”

  “Okay. Go back to the kitchen. I’ll go down myself. It’ll take me a few minutes to get dressed.” She paused on her way back to her bedroom. “Mike put those fence posts in with concrete, Meg. And the fence was made of chain link. I don’t understand how he could have gone through it.”

  “Kingsfield apparently hit a boulder under the snow and veered into the fence. Mike says he was probably clipping along at a pretty good rate at that point. Anyhow, the freeze-and-thaw cycle we had a few weeks ago must have loosened the posts. One was pulled right out of the hole.” Meg spread her hands in a “that’s it” gesture. “I’m off. Call me if you need me.”

  Meg let the door bang closed behind her. Quill showered, then pinned her hair back with a clip. She pulled on a silk turtleneck, a heavy sweater, and wool pants. Her boots were still wet from the night before, and she rummaged in the back of her closet for an old pair of acrylic-lined pull-ons.

  She sat on the edge of her bed, put on a heavy pair of socks, and paused with one boot in her hand. She had been hit over the head. She was sure of it. Which meant that someone had been in the woods surrounding the gorge the night before Zeke Kingsfield fell to his death in an accident that shouldn’t have happened. Somebody who didn’t want her to see . . . what?

  Quill frowned, visualizing the spot where Zeke had gone off the cliff into the gorge, and its relationship to where she had been last night. The ski path Mike had created fell away from the west side of the Inn, curved around the edge of the gorge, and then circled back to the east side of the Inn. She’d been struck—she was positive she’d been struck—at a point about an eighth of a mile from the curve. If someone had come up to that point from the park, they would have been concealed all the way. If they’d come down from the Inn, they would have been visible the length of a football field before reaching the seclusion of the trees.

  And they reach the curve and do what?

  Quill shook her head, remembering the advice Nero Wolfe always gave Archie Goodwin: Never theorize ahead of the facts.

  Quill left the Inn by the front door several minutes later. A helicopter hovered over the gorge. A cluster of police cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck were parked every which way in the parking lot. Beyond that, at the spot where the ski trail curved around the gorge, she could see yellow-coated firemen, police in dark blue anoraks, and a small crowd of lookers-on.

  Quill followed the short trail left by snowmobiles and booted feet across the field to the far lip of the gorge. She looked first for Lydia. The widow stood next to an empty collapsible gurney, about forty feet away from the remains of the chain-link fence. LaToya and Ajit stood a few strides away huddled together as in the middle of a storm.

  “Lydia?” Quill asked quietly.

  She turned at the sound of Quill’s voice. Quill’s first reaction was one of slight shock. Lydia’s hair was a mess. She wore no makeup. She’d thrown on somebody else’s parka, which was too big for her. Her small feet wallowed in a pair of boots at least three sizes too big. Quill recognized those boots; it was an old pair she kept by the back of the kitchen door. “Quill,” she said blankly. She turned away again, to stare down the cliff. Quill walked up and stood next to her.

  Down below, a group of men had placed the body on a portable stretcher. It had been placed in a black body bag. Artie Guttenwald, the head of the Hemlock Falls Volunteer Ambulance Corps, was carefully zipping the body bag closed. Then Davy Kiddermeister, who had been promoted to sheriff when Myles resigned the position, picked up the front end of the stretcher. Artie and another EMT picked up the rear. They began the slow struggle up the shale rock to the top. Two other figures in jackets marked TOMPKINS COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPT. crouched at the wrecked remains of the skis.

  The helicopter swooped lower and continued circling. Quill looked up; a cameraman leaned out of the passenger-side door, his camera aimed at the action below. Lydia fo
llowed her glance. “I can see that offends you, Quill. But Zeke would have loved it.” She gave Quill a faint smile. “He wasn’t afraid of going broke. Or of any of his businesses going bust. He was mortally afraid that he wouldn’t be remembered. He wanted to be able to walk into a McDonald’s anywhere in the world and have somebody point and say, ‘It’s the Hammer!’ ”

  “McDonald’s?”

  Lydia shrugged. “You get the idea. He always saw himself as the quintessential American entrepreneur. And he believed that this is the age of the businessman, that four hundred years from now, even a thousand years from now, people would remember him the way we remember Julius Caesar.”

  Or Boss Tweed or Jack Abramoff, Quill wanted to say, but didn’t. What she did say was, “I’m sorry.”

  Lydia sighed. “I’m sorry, too. And I’m afraid you’re going to be even sorrier, Quill. This whole area belongs to the Inn, doesn’t it? And you directed Mike Santelli to set up this very dangerous ski trail. My lawyers will be in touch with your insurance company.”

  Davy and the others reached the top of the cliff, struggled up and over, and set their burden down. Lydia walked up to the stretcher, crouched down, and pulled the body bag open.

  Quill looked away. When she looked back, the bag was zipped shut again. Lydia had risen to her feet and was headed toward the ambulance. Davy and the others picked the stretcher up and followed her. Davy looked over his shoulder and nodded. Everyone watched in silence as the awkward parade proceeded the hundred yards across the field to the parking lot. The helicopter increased the circumference of its circle. With an unwelcome intrusion of her imagination, Quill could almost hear the hushed, smarmy excitement of the TV reporter’s narration. “And now the widow, head bowed, hands clutching the borrowed coat across her chest, follows the body of her dead husband across the wild expanse of this remote upstate village.”

  Or something like that. Quill said, “Ugh,” to the surprised disapproval of those within earshot. She debated a long moment, then walked over to LaToya and Ajit, who were dry-eyed, but somber. “Is there anything I can do for you two right now?”