A Puree of Poison

by Claudia Bishop

“But I don’t have time to paint! That’s the whole point!”

  “No. Not that kind of work. Cooking isn’t like painting. I can cook and have a life outside of cooking. The way you’ve been tackling painting, you can’t. Painting consumes you. There’s nothing left over for the outside. That’s part of your struggle with Myles and kids, and for a long time, Quill, me. Because you took time out of painting for me, to help me. You wouldn’t be here running the Inn if it weren’t for the fact that I needed you that year. You’d be back in SoHo, getting paint in your hair.”

  “You forget why I left and moved here. I had just as compelling reasons as you did. I didn’t have anything more to say on canvas. Not then. But now. Now it’s coming back. Slowly. And now I do have a decision to make.”

  Meg’s flush subsided. “The question’s whether there’s room for Myles and the art, then.”

  “Myles and children and the art. Myles and the art, yes. He surrounds it, Meg, he doesn’t share it, but he surrounds it with an odd kind of reassurance that I think I may be lost without. But babies? They take it out of you, all of it. Oh, my God. I don’t know what to do. Children are as consuming as art. They take that part of you. I know it. I know it.”

  She wept, standing in the middle of the kitchen.

  Meg put the recipe cards back in the file and made coffee. She ground the beans, then filled the kettle with spring water and set it to heat, then pushed Quill into the rocking chair and stroked her hair, saying nothing, but humming a wordless little tune with the cadence of a lullaby. The water rattled, just on the boil, and she poured it carefully into the filter. She brought the cup to Quill, who sipped it, with the sense that she was recovering from the flu. “Here’s what we do, chief. We go swimming. Forget about Myles and art and just let it work itself out in your subconscious. Listen, we’ll plan to get back by three, so I can pull the rest of tomorrow’s dinner together and you can set up for the Chamber meeting. And”—she smiled sunnily—”What you want is a rational, practical problem to solve, with no feelings swamping up your brain. While we’re swimming, we figure out a way to separate the Horrible Hedrick from that bloody little goods book. Whatever we figure out will take enough time to divert you to let the old subconscious do its decision-making stuff. And besides, that damn book’s important. We have to find out what’s inside. We can’t have the Bozo of the Year wrecking our new boutique restaurant, can we?”

  Quill wiped each eye with the back of her hand, sniffed, and went to get her bathing suit.

  “So seducing the little red book out of Hedrick is totally out of the question?” asked Meg, floating on her back and gently kicking her feet. The pond at the park had been filled with kids, and they’d swum over the submerged sluiceway gate leading to the river. Even the current was lazy in the heat, and they paddled with it like wood ducks bobbing on the surface of the clear green water. The granite cliffs rose on either side of them, hands cupping jade.

  “I’m not offering up this fair white body,” said Quill. Meg was right. Concentrating on this problem was better than Prozac. It was a neat little puzzle, free of emotion. “And Andy’d take violent exception to donating yours, even in the cause of justice.”

  “Undoubtedly,” said Meg, with a hint of complacence. “The two of us have arrived at the state where exclusivity in dating is a priority. What about good old breaking and entering? They’re all living in the apartment over the print shop, right? Piece of cake to sneak in and rifle the place.”

  Quill dived, considering this. She opened her eyes underwater. A brown trout gave her a startled glance out of one doll-black eye, and curved away like a question mark. She rose to the surface and exhaled. “When it’s not on his person, I’ll bet he sleeps with it under his pillow. We’ve got to figure out a way to get it out of the sports coat.”

  “Not bad. You stand next to him batting your eyes admiringly. I create a diversion. You slip your hand into that ratty sports coat and grab it.”

  Quill shook her head. “Too risky. And pickpocketing’s a misdemeanor or something. We’ve got to get him to take the jacket off, and drape it over a chair or whatever and while I’m hanging it up, I slip my hand in the coat and get it. If Myles finds out, we can always say it fell out of his pocket and we’re returning it to him.”

  “If we get him to strip, we’re back to seduction again.”

  “Meg! What is this bee in your bonnet about seduction? No. We invite him to the party tomorrow night, and if it’s as hot as this, of course he’ll take his coat off—”

  “What if it’s in his pants pocket?”

  “You haven’t seen it. It’s too big to fit into a back pocket. He’d have to curl it up. And even if he does that, it’ll be duck soup to get behind him and slip it out. You could create a diversion.”

  Meg addressed the sunny sky overhead. “The old diversion trick? What a new idea. There must be an echo in here.” She contemplated the shoreline. “What do you think’s in the book, anyway?”

  Quill attempted a shrug and took in a mouthful of water. “Who knows? Myles said he’d asked for the names of the bidders on the mini-mall project. Maybe he’s found out something about one of them.”

  “You want to swim downstream and see how it’s going?”

  “We’d have to walk back over the rocks. And we wanted to be back by three.”

  “Somebody will give us a lift.”

  “In our suits?”

  Meg rolled her eyes. “Jeez. Come on. First one there has to spend twenty minutes listening to Axminster Stoker after dinner.”

  Quill, disinclined to that much activity even in the river-coolness, breast-stroked pleasantly along, her mind empty of everything but the sensation of water and sky and sun. The gorge sloped abruptly to a riverbank a quarter mile ahead, an ideal place for a mini-mall with a view of the river. Ahead of her, Meg reached the small beach which fronted the mall property and treaded water, waiting for Quill to catch up.

  “We can ride back with the Kiplings,” said Meg. “Didn’t you say that they were touring the site with Mike and the van? Isn’t that one of them now? That Georgia what’s-her-name?”

  Quill waved. Georgia waved back, her arms describing a wide semaphore.

  “That’s odd,” said Quill.

  “I agree. People dedicated to furthering the works of R. Kipling, the last of the male chauvinist Victorian male poets, are very odd.”

  “No. The rescue truck’s there. See the lights?”

  “Rescuing the carpenters from another version of Gunga Din, I’ll bet. But we can go up and look.” Meg turned herself around and began to float toward the beach headfirst. She had a peculiar version of the backstroke, rather like an upside-down dog paddle that involved a minimum of breath. “Ooonnn the road to Mandalay,” she sang tunelessly, “where the flying fishes play, aaannnd the dawn comes up like thunder out of China across the bay ... tumpty um ... tee ... tumpty urn ...”

  “Elephants are piling teak in the sludgy squidgey creek,” Quill joined in. “Where the silence... oh, god! She bolted upright, sank, and her foot struck the thing again.

  Hair like seaweed, in the river.

  CHAPTER 5

  When Quill entered the kitchen the day after she’d discovered the body of Louisa Conway in the river, Meg was contemplating a pile of chicken liver, her slight figure cool in a thin T-shirt, cotton shorts, and a hideous pair of tennis shoes. Like the rest of the Inn, the kitchen hid technological efficiency beneath nineteenth-century charm. The cobblestone fireplace was fitted with the latest open-hearth grill, and birch wainscoting concealed the oversize Zero King refrigerator. A late-model Aga stove, flanked by hardwood and granite counters, dominated the large room. When the sisters had updated the three-century-old Inn, they’d decided the one concession to modern comfort they were unable to make was the flooring. The floor in the kitchen was the original brick, uncomfortable to stand on for long periods of time. Meg—who preferred to cook in ancient sportswear—solved the problem with battered pairs of
Nikes designed for heavy-duty basketball players.

  “Hey,” said Meg, plunging her hand into the pink-brown pile as Quill stamped into the kitchen. She hefted the liver with an absent air. “Equal parts butter and minced liver, with a heavy dash of Cointreau and a bit of tarragon. What do you think?”

  “Sounds like a heart attack waiting to happen.”

  “I’m sick of cuisine minceur. It’s boring. I want scope.” She swept both hands through the air, scattering bits of liver. “My experience tells me that the guests are sick of cuisine minceur. The world is turning its back on the rabbit-food menus of the eighties and forging toward cholesterol overdose. And high time, too. Geeve me butter!” she roared, with a sudden veer to the Teutonic. “Geeve me beef!”

  Quill glumly settled into the rocker by the fireplace and contemplated nothing in particular.

  “So you found another body,” said Doreen, stumping in the back door, the light of battle in her eye. “Maybe now you got this to think about, we can get rid of that-there Stoker.”

  “Mr. Stoker just needs a firm hand,” said Quill. “And I already told Meg last night, I don’t want to talk about the body. How are you this morning?”

  “J’a know right away it was Louisa Conway drownded in the river? You din’t step on her face did you?”

  “Doreen!” Meg complained. “It’s bad enough to find a corpse in the river, without you acting like somebody out of Salem’s Lot after the vampire shows up. Poor Quill.” Meg patted her shoulder sympathetically, then settled comfortably at the counter with her liver pate. “Did you feel her nose or anything? I mean, you knew it was a body right away, right?”

  “I knew right away.”

  “How?”

  “Never mind how.” Quill flexed her sandaled foot and resisted the temptation to scrub at it again with a soaped sponge. It’d been the teeth, and the sensation was going to be with her a long time. She shuddered.

  “Anyone get to that Mr. Conway to say they’re sorry his mother fell in the river?” asked Doreen. “And what about the funeral? They gonna bury her here? We could take a ham, I guess. I could go over since he don’t know too many people in town, yet.”

  “His mother knew one of them well enough,” muttered Meg.

  “What d’ya mean?” Doreen’s face was alight with interest. Quill knew that look. It wasn’t an avid or an unhealthy interest, since Doreen was far too nice a woman underneath the tough exterior to delight in a grisly death for the excitement. She’ d seen The Look before, the time when Doreen converted (briefly) to Christian evangelism. And again when Doreen had signed up to sell life insurance, and yet a third time when the housekeeper began attending Amway sales-training classes. Quill hadn’t been around for Doreen’s flirtation with Nu-Skin and the Tupperware business, but there was no doubt of Doreen’s entrepreneurial bent. “Doreen,” said Quill, suddenly suspicious. “We got a copy of Armchair Detective in the mail this week. I didn’t take out a subscription. Did you, Meg?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  Doreen put her thumbs in her dress belt and hitched her shoulders forward.

  “Bogart,” said Meg accusingly. “Oh, nuts.” The sisters exchanged a meaningful glance.

  “Some of them guys,” said Doreen, whose intuition was acute, “get twenny bucks an hour.”

  “You think Hedrick Conway’s going to pay you twenty dollars an hour to investigate his mother’s murder?” shrieked Meg. “Pooh!”

  “So it was murder,” said Doreen, thoughtfully rubbing her chin.

  “No, Doreen,” said Quill. “No and no and no. You are not going to go into business as Doreen Muxworthy, P.I.”

  Doreen pointed out that not only had Meg and Quill solved several murders, but they’d done it for free; she, Doreen, was merely turning an eye to the profit possibilities, which, if word-of-mouth were true about Hedrick and Carlyle’s millions, would be considerable.

  “And what if the kids did it?” Meg demanded. “Who’d pay you then?”

  “Huh,” Doreen said, considering.

  “And let’s not forget that we have a perfectly capable sheriff in town with an extensive background in investigations of this sort,” Quill added. “I mean, he was Chief of Detectives in Manhattan before he left the N. Y.P.D., and a man like that—”

  “My, my, my,” murmured Meg. “The post-discovery interview with Myles must have been interesting. He was pretty brief with me. ‘Did I see anything floating along the river?”Nope.’ That was about it.”

  “Was it murder or wasn’t it?” Doreen demanded.

  “Was,” said Quill briefly. “The classic blunt instrument. Louisa Conway was hit on the left temple with something like a hammer—”

  “Something like, indeed,” murmured Meg.

  “—and fell or was thrown into the gorge, sometime between one-fifteen, when she was last seen at the mini-mall, and two-fifteen, when I step—that is, when we found her in the river.”

  “There’s somethin’ not right about that place,” Doreen muttered. “Went out there myself to see how our investment’s goin’. Them workers give me the creeps.”

  “Really?” Quill pulled at her lower lip. “I’ve never been all that comfortable there myself. Why, do you suppose?”

  “Them guys don’t talk much. Never see ‘em in town. DeMarco brings ‘em in on buses and takes ‘em out again. There’s allus at least two of ‘em together. Thing folks in town is astin’, was she interfered with?”

  “You mean rape? I don’t have the least idea.” A troubled frown appeared between Meg’s eyebrows. “That’d be a heck of a note. A rapist in Hemlock Falls.”

  “She didn’t look interfered with,” said Quill cautiously. “I mean, she was fully dressed and all her clothing seemed to be in place. There was just this gash on her head.”

  Meg shook her head and went, “Brruh! It’s going to be a heck of a case to investigate. Quill and I counted; there must have been at least fifty people there. The construction crew, the electrical people, some of the Chamber members checking on the progress of the site, the entire membership of the Rudyard Kipling Condensation society, as well as Mr. Sakura and that weird little driver of his. For my money, Hedrick and his sister Carlyle could have done it. They all arrived together; Hedrick and Carlyle decided to leave a little after one-thirty and started to look for her.”

  “So how’d j’a know about the hammer?”

  “Oliver Doyle, with the rescue service. You remember him, Meg. He was here with the volunteer ambulance crew that time you made Keith Baumer so—”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes,” said Meg testily, who clearly recalled some aspects of their first case years ago with little enthusiasm. “I remember Oily Doyle. He’s a carpenter and volunteers on the ambulance. I hardly think he’s qualified in forensics.”

  “If you hadn’t been so busy being squeamish over the corpse, you would have heard him, too. One of the Kiplings found a hammer with blood on the claw at the lip of the gorge where they think Louisa went over.”

  “Oh,” said Meg.

  “What was Louisa nosin’ around the site for?” asked Doreen.

  “I don’t know. She had a camera with her.” Quill shuddered. “It was tied around her neck. Hedrick got everybody at the site—the plumbers, the electricians, the carpenters, and the sewage guy—to start looking for her, and called the rescue truck. The Kiplings volunteered to search the woods at the south end of the development, and that’s where they found the hammer.”

  “So what do you think, Doreen? You still want to take on this case?” Meg asked. “I think you’d be a terrific addition to our detective team. You could go out, poke around the site, figure out who saw Louisa last, and where the hammer came from. Of course, that’s on top of scheduling the household staff and seeing that the rooms are clean.”

  “That-there business about the pay ...”

  “No pay. Strictly in the interest of good citizenship.”

  “Seems to me a good citizen would do something about that-there Sto
ker.”

  “You are not to do a thing about poor Mr. Stoker.” Quill was firm.

  “Then I guess I’ll figger out somethin’ else.” Doreen brightened. “Think those Kiplings might be inn-erested in Tupperware? They do all this stuff in a group.”

  “No!” said Meg and Quill in unison.

  “Then tell me what’s on for today, and I’ll get to it.”

  Quill breathed in relief and looked at her watch. “There’s an emergency Chamber meeting this morning, to replace the one that was canceled yesterday. But the Kiplings’ party has been rescheduled for tomorrow, so we don’t have to worry about that. We don’t have any checkouts today, so the staff will have to work around the guests.”

  Doreen pursed her lips and stumped out the back door to get to work.

  “That,” said Quill, “was a close one.”

  “You mean you aren’t fascinated by this opportunity to solve yet another crime?”

  “I am not,” said Quill firmly. “The opening ceremonies for the mini-mall are scheduled for Tuesday. This is Saturday. We’ll be lucky to get through the next few days with our nerves intact, without adding amateur detective work to the list.”

  “You know who might be a good addition to the team?” asked Meg thoughtfully. “Georgia Hardwicke. I really like Georgia Hardwicke.”

  “There isn’t going to be a team, Meg.”

  “Right,” said Meg absently. “First thing is we can find out more about the scene of the crime. And then we need to find out if she died of the hammer blow or drowned. Maybe Georgia would be interested in a little legwork.”

  “Meg, we’re going to leave this one to Myles. And why would Georgia want to be a detective anyway?”

  “She was pretty efficient, yesterday. She was the one who organized the search for Louisa. And she was the one who prevented that engineer Eugene something from picking up the hammer and messing with the evidence. And Doreen told me that she’s got a lot of detective stories in her room. Besides, I like her.”

  “Then maybe the two of you can solve this one. Count me out.”