A Taste for Murder

by Claudia Bishop

“Hell, we both were. I floated him a couple of private loans to tide him over first and second quarter. He expected business to pick up.”

  “Was that John’s recommendation? The private loans?”

  “John? He didn’t have much to say about it.”

  “Does he audit all your books, Tom? You know, for the transport company and your private affairs?”

  Tom’s face closed up. “I don’t know that that’s really any business of yours, Quill. No offense.”

  Quill flushed. Great detectives of fiction were never accused of rudeness; she’d have to brush up on her technique. “I was just thinking of having John do my personal taxes, that’s all. Wondered if you found him as good at that as he is at the commercial end.”

  Tom frowned. “Quill, you hired him. You know him better than I do.”

  “Just wanted your opinion,” she murmured. She cleared her throat. “Will you have a new partner now? Did Gil leave key-man insurance, or do you get the whole dealership?”

  “Quill, I don’t know what game you’re playing at. But you don’t play it with me. I’m warning you.” He held her eyes for a long minute. Quill gazed coolly back. He turned away from her. “Time for you to be going down to the Pavilion, isn’t it? Wouldn’t want to miss the play. Unless you’d rather continue to stick your oar into my personal business.”

  The sun was hot, but not hot enough to account for the heat in her face. Quill decided her chief irritation was with Myles, who had failed to clarify the embarrassing pitfalls awaiting inexperienced interrogators. She shoved the recollection of Myles’s prohibitions against any kind of detecting firmly out of her mind, waved cheerfully at Nadine, who raised a hand listlessly back, and walked the two blocks to the Pavilion, absorbed in thought.

  The open-air Pavilion was ideally situated for the presentation of The Trial of Goody Martin. Thirty wooden benches, seating three to four people each, formed a series of half-circles in front of a bandstand the size of a small theater stage. A forty-foot, three-sided shed had been built in back of the bandstand in 1943 to provide space for changing rooms, sets, small floats for parades, and band instruments. Between the shed and the municipal buildings that housed the town’s snowplows, fire engines, and ambulances was an eight-foot- wide gravel path. The path debouched onto the macadam parkway that circled the entire acreage of the park. The action in The Trial of Goody Martin required that the audience sweep along with the actors and props in a path from the duck pond to the bandstand to the bronze statue of General Frederick C.C. Hemlock.

  The statue of the man and his horse had been erected in 1868, two hundred years after the founding of the village. Something had gone awry in the casting process, and the General’s face had a wrinkled brow and half-open mouth, leaving him with a permanently pained expression as he sat in the saddle. On occasion, roving bands of Cornell students on spring break heaped boxes of hemorrhoid remedies at the statue’s base, which sent the mayor into fits. Most years the statue sat detritus-free, except for the six-foot heap of cobblestones piled at the foot and used to crush the witch each year.

  The crowd was enormous, the benches jammed. Quill stood at the periphery and scanned the mass of people for Meg and Edward Lancashire.

  Esther West jumped up on the lip of the bandstand, and shaded her eyes with her hands. She caught sight of Quill, pointed at her, and waved frantically.

  Elmer Henry appeared out of the crush of people and grasped her arm. His face was grim. “You memorize that Clarissa part?”

  Quill’s heart sank. “Why?”

  “That Mavis is drunker than a skunk. Esther don’t want her to go on.”

  “Elmer… I …”

  “You’re the understudy, aren’t you? You got to do this, Quill. For the town.”

  “Maybe we can do something,” said Quill weakly. “A lot of black coffee?” The mayor looked doubtful. “Come on. She may not be drunk, Elmer; she may just have stage fright. I mean, look at all these people.”

  “That’s what I’m looking at. All these people. We can’t have the Chamber look like a durn fool in front of these folks. Do you know that some have come all the way from Buffalo?”

  Quill plowed her way determinedly through the sightseers to the shed at the back of the bandstand, the mayor trailing behind. The shed was seething with a confused mass of costumed players and uniformed high-school band members. Harland Peterson’s two huge draft horses, Betsy and Ross, stamped balefully in the comer. The sledge, the barn door, and the band instruments squeezed the space still further.

  “Quill! Thank God! Do you see her, that slut?” Esther gestured frantically at Mavis, then clutched both Quill and a copy of the script in frantic hands. Sweat trickled down her neck. Mavis, blotto, swayed ominously in the arms of Keith Baumer. Her face was red, her smile beatific. Esther shrieked, “Can you believe it? Here’s the script. You’ve got ten minutes until we’re on.”

  Surrounded by Mrs. Hallenbeck, Betty Hall, Marge Schmidt, and Harvey Bozzel, Mavis caught sight of Quill and caroled, “Coo-ee!”

  “Coo-ee to you, too,” said Quill. “Esther, I can fix this. I need a bucket of ice, a couple of towels, and Meg and her picnic basket.”

  The ice arrived before Meg. Quill ruthlessly dropped it down Mavis’ dress, front and back. Someone handed her a towel. She made an ice pack and held it to the back of the wriggling Mavis’ neck.

  Meg and Edward Lancashire joined them a few moments later. “Oh, God,” said Meg. “Will you look at her?”

  “You’ve got your picnic basket?” Quill asked through clenched teeth.

  “Sure.”

  “You have those Scotch Bonnet peppers for that salsa?”

  A huge grin spread over Meg’s face. “Yep.”

  “You have your special killer-coffee?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then let’s get to work.”

  The Scotch Bonnet had the most dramatic effect. Mavis gulped the coffee, squealed girlishly at the reapplied ice pack, but howled like a banshee after Meg slipped a pepper slice into her mouth.

  “Language, language,” said Meg primly. The two sisters stepped back and surveyed their handiwork. Mavis glared at them, eyes glittering dangerously.

  “And Myles claims you can’t sober up a drunk,” said Quill. “Actually, he’s right,” said Edward Lancashire. “All black coffee does is give you a wide-awake drunk. I don’t know that Scotch Bonnet has ever been used as a remedy for drunks before. I’d say what you’ve got there is a wide-awake, very annoyed drunk.”

  “You can write about it in your column,” Meg said pertly. “Well, Esther? What d’ya think?”

  “I think we’ve got ourselves a Clarissa,” said Esther grimly. “Just in case, Quill, I want you to study that script. She’ll make the ducking stool, but I don’t know about the trial. C’mon, you.”

  In subsequent years, Chamber meetings would be dominated periodically by attempts to resurrect The Trial of Goody Martin, and it was Esther West, newly converted to feminism, who firmly refused to countenance it. “Anti-woman from the beginning,” she’d say. “It was a dumb idea in the first place, and a terrible period in American history, and we never should have celebrated it the way we did. Now, Hamlet - that play by William Shakespeare? I’ve always wanted a hand in that.”

  Mavis handled the ducking stool and the swim with a subdued hostility that augured well for the artistic quality of her impassioned speech at the trial to come. Marge Schmidt, Betty Hall, Nadine Gilmeister, Mrs. Hallenbeck, and others in The Crowd, may have yelled “Sink or swim” with undue emphasis on the “sink” part, but the audience failed to notice a diminution in the thrust of the whole performance, and joined in with a will.

  Elmer Henry, Tom Peterson, and Howie Murchison dragged Mavis the forty feet from the pond to the bandstand, and the trial itself began. Dookie Shuttleworth, surprisingly awe-inspiring in judge’s robe and wig, pronounced the age-old sentence:

  “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.”

  Ma
vis soggily surveyed the audience, smoothed her dripping gown over her hips, and addressed the judges. “My lords of the Court, I stand before you, accushed of the crime of witchcraft…”

  So far so good, thought Quill, perched on a bench in the front row. The s’s are mushy, but what the heck. Half the crowd’s mushy from the heat and the beer.

  “A crime of which I’m innoshent!” She burped, swayed, and said mildly, “I’m not a crimin’l. lush tryin’ to get along. Good ol’ Southern girl in the midst of all of you” - She paused and searched for the proper phrase. “Big swinging dicks?” she hazarded.

  “She’s off script!” screamed Esther. Apparently finding the response from the audience satisfactory, Mavis raised her middle finger, wagged it at a blond family of three in the front row, and took a triumphant bow.

  Quill pinched her knee hard, a defense against giggling she hadn’t needed since high school.

  Dookie thundered his scripted response, “Scarlet whore of the infernal city! Thou shalt die!” then called for the sledge. Harland Peterson drove Betsy and Ross to the side of the stage, the straw-filled sledge dragging behind them.

  Mavis spread her arms wide, in her second departure from the script, and leaped into Harland’s arms. He staggered, cussed, and dropped her into the straw. Responding to a harmless crack of his whip, Betsy and Ross phlegmatically drew the sledge down the path behind the shed.

  As the business of trading Mavis for the hooded dummy went on in the back, Howie, substituting for Gil, read the grisly details of the sentence aloud, straight from the pages of the sentencing at Salem three hundred years before… . planks of sufficient weight and height to be placed upon the body of the witch…”

  Harland Peterson appeared at the edge of the stage, scowling hideously. He waved at Howie, who ignored him.

  ” … and the good citizens of this town to carry out the justice of the Almighty…”

  Harland gestured again, furiously.

  ” … and the law of the Lord is as stones, and as mighty as stones… What, Harland?”

  “Barfed on my boots! I ain’t drivin’ that sledge! You git somebody else to drive that sledge.” He stomped off. Howie looked around helplessly. The crowd sniggered.

  Harvey Bozzel, teeth displayed in a wide shiny grin, jumped off the stage and reappeared some minutes later on the front seat of the sledge, reins in hand. There was a scattering of applause. “Gee!” he hollered firmly. Betsy and Ross turned obediently to the right. Meeting the wall of the municipal building, they stopped in their tracks.

  Ripples of laughter washed through the audience. Quill stole a look at Elmer and Esther out of the comer of her eye and pinched her knee. She was going to have an almighty bruise.

  “Haw! you durned fool. Tell ‘em to haw!” Harland yelled. “Haw!” said Harvey, in a more subdued manner.

  Betsy, or perhaps it was Ross - Quill couldn’t tell for certain - flicked an ear, gazed inquiringly at her partner in harness, then pulled to the left. This brought the forward edge of the sledge frame into view. Failing further direction, Betsy and Ross continued to pull left, and the sledge frame hit the shed side with a thud.

  “Giddyap!” roared Harland at his horses. “Ignore the durn fool up there.”

  Ross, or perhaps it was Betsy, snorted, shook his head in genuine disgust, and pulled straight in response to the man who fed him oats twice a day - not to mention the occasional sugar cube. The sledge with the dummy finally emerged intact from behind the shed.

  “You got that, Harvey, you idjit?” Harland shouted as he spelled out the commands to make them clear. “H-A-W means left. G-E-E-U-P means right. ‘Giddyap’ means straight.”

  Betsy and Ross broke into a rumbling jog. “Giddyap” was something they understood. The dummy bounced on the sledge, black hood flapping in the breeze.

  ” ‘Giddyap’ twice means faster,” Harland said in a normal tone of voice. “Never knowed you was such a durn fool, Harvey.”

  The band broke into the strains of Gounod’s Funeral March and the procession moved down the path to General Hemlock without further incident.

  Quill wondered if she should check on Mavis. If she’d gotten sick to her stomach, she was going to feel a lot better, and she might want to see the conclusion of the play. On the other hand, Mavis sober was probably meaner than Mavis drunk, and she had taken grave exception to the dose of fiery pepper. Quill decided guiltily to spare herself the experience.

  She strolled on down to the statue, behind the crowd. Howie demanded the laying on of the barn door, while Dookie and Elmer beat a slow and solemn rhythm on a large drum. The dummy, indefinably lifelike, sprawled in the straw. The sacklike hood had been drawn tightly around the high neck of the dress.

  She heard the thunk of stone on wood, and the final prayers of the “judges” condemning the witch’s soul to hell.

  The crowd usually entered into the spirit of the thing, and so it was with no surprise that Quill saw Keith Baumer heave a stone weighing a good hundred pounds onto the stones already piled high, to shouts of Go!Go!Go! from the crowd.

  She saw the stage blood seeping from under the wooden planks.

  It was the smell that alerted Quill: the coppery, unmistakable scent of blood-mixed with worse odors. The crowd quieted, then stirred uneasily, like water snakes in a still pond.

  The dummy’s hand stiffened, convulsed. The nails turned blue.

  For a few terrible moments, Quill saw nothing else at all.

  -9-

  “Squashed flatter than a bug on a windshield,” said Marge, awed.

  Myles had taken immediate control, separating those townspeople and Inn guests nearest the stage from the audience at large and sending them to the Village Library. Davey Kiddermeister escorted them to the ground floor, then set up a methodical interview system. One by one, each of the group was called and disappeared into the librarian’s office behind the checkout desk.

  Pale and sweaty, Keith Baumer paced to the front window and looked out at the Pavilion, where Myles was getting names and addresses from the out-of-towners. “Are we gonna put up with this? Who does that damn fool think he is?” He borrowed a cigarette from Harland Peterson and lit it with shaking hands. “He’s going to hear from me on this one. I know people.”

  Mrs. Hallenbeck coughed and waved her hand elaborately in front of her face.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” Esther West said. Baumer stubbed out the cigarette with an angry glare. “Murchison, you know about these things. What are our rights here?”

  “I practice family law, Baumer,” said Howie dryly. “Probate, real estate. I’m not much on problems like these.”

  “It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

  “That rock you heisted onto the shed door was a hundred pounds if it was twenty,” said Harland Peterson brutally. “I’d say it was your fault.”

  “But you have to have knowledge beforehand,” said Baumer. I had no Idea she was there. You people all piled the rocks along with me. If there’s criminal negligence here, we’re all in it together. I’d like to retain you as counsel, Murchison, until my own lawyer gets here from New York.”

  ” ‘Fraid I can’t help you,” said Howie. Quill wondered at the sudden drop in Baumer’s buffoonish façade; he was pretty quick to stand on his rights. Had he been in trouble before?

  Tom Peterson came out from the librarian’s office. “He wants to see you next, Quill:’ He looked at the assembly. “Don’t worry everybody, Deputy Davey’s keeping it short.”

  Elmer stopped Quill as she headed to the office. “Emergency meeting at the Lounge tonight, Quill? Chamber’s got to discuss this.”

  Quill nodded her agreement and went into the librarian’s office.

  Davey sat at Miriam Doncaster’s desk, his black notebook an incongruous official object among the china ducks, geese, and dogs that the librarian collected. “Will you sit down, please, Ms. Quilliam?”

  Quill sat in the straight chair in front of the desk and folded her h
ands in her lap.

  “Your name and home address, please, and don’t tell me I already know it like Tom Peterson just did, because I have to go through this exactly the same way with everybody, or Myles’ll have my head on a platter, like that poor fella that messed with the stripper.”

  Quill took a moment to sort this out. Davey was a faithful member of Dookie’s church. He must mean John the Baptist.

  “Sarah Quilliam, the Hemlock Falls Inn, Four Hemlock Road, Hemlock Falls,” she said. “My zip code…”

  “Don’t need no zip code.” Breathing through his mouth, Davey peered at the notebook. “May I see your driver’s license, please?” Quill fished in her purse and handed it over. Davey made a check mark in his notebook without looking at it, and handed it back. “Did you know the name of the deceased?” he read aloud.

  “Mavis Collinwood.”

  “Do you remember what she was wearing when she left the stage on the sledge? Before Harland pulled her around to the back?”

  “A long, black cotton gown. A white ruff around her neck. A black cloth cap tied with strings under her chin.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well - ” Quill blinked at him. “Shoes … stockings… and, um, underwear?”

  “Thank you. Please leave the library without speaking to anyone out there. Except to tell your sister that she’s next.”

  “That’s all?” Quill rose to her feet. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you think you could interview Mrs. Hallenbeck next, Davey? It’s been a long day for her, and she’s had quite a shock.”

  Davey’s eyebrows drew together; an obdurate state official following an inflexible routine. “Myles told me to do these interviews of the people who actually knew Ms. Collin wood in this exact order. Mrs. Hallenbeck’s at the bottom, right before the people who were next to the stage.”

  “Why isn’t he interviewing the people who piled rocks on the barn door?” asked Quill, exasperated.

  “I don’t know, ma’am. Just doing my job.”

  “You’ll be doing your job a lot better if you let me get that little old lady back up to the Inn so she can recover from the shock,” said Quill with asperity. “I’m sure Myles would want you to see to the needs of the elderly.”