A Puree of Poison

by Claudia Bishop

  “Nope,” said Meg. “Both Quill and I have kitchenettes in our rooms. Why don’t we meet in mine, about eight o’clock tomorrow morning? What would you like for breakfast? You can have anything you want.”

  Georgia grinned. “Just as long as it’s tuna. Pancakes. Casserole. Soufflé. Whatever. Solidarity forever!”

  “So here’s the plan,” said Quill after she and Meg had escorted Georgia to the door. “We quit. We buy a little house on the beach. You, Georgia, and I retire. And there will be no men allowed except twice a week for, you know—”

  “Sex,” said Meg with a small grin.

  “That. And conversation. There is something about the masculine point of view that adds to life, when you keep it on impersonal topics, like the lack of a national healthcare plan. It’s just when emotion gets in the way that you have to watch the backs of their heads receding into the distance. I mean, can you imagine Myles, or Andy, offering Georgia’s kind of support?”

  “Andy’s just doing his job,” said Meg. “Did he think I’d be angry with him? Did he say anything at all?”

  “Call him when you get to your room and ask him yourself.”

  “Why shouldn’t he call me?”

  “Because he’s a man.”

  “Aristotle wouldn’t like this train of logic.”

  “It is somewhat circular,” Quill agreed. “I’m going to call Myles.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I just learned something.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure. Something about women having hearts, and men having souls, with no voice to express them. I haven’t worked it out yet.”

  “When you do?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t tell me. I know I’m not going to understand a word of it.” She stopped on her way out the door, her gray eyes direct and clear. “Tell Myles hello for me, when you see him.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Quill went out on the balcony to clear the wrought-iron table of glasses and retrieve the brandy bottle. The moon was a silver thumbnail in a quiet sky. A small animal rustled in the herb garden. The scent of crushed thyme curled though the breeze from the river nearby. She lit the citronella candles, left the French doors open, then rinsed the glasses in the sink and put them in the dishwasher. She went back outside and leaned over the railing. The kitchen was dark. A car door slammed in the parking lot. The car motor started up and drove away. Footsteps sounded in the gravel path near the kitchen. Quill leaned out and called, “Hello?”

  “I saw your light.” Myles’s voice was tentative. “You’re still up?”

  “It’s hard to sleep,” Quill admitted. “Will you come up?”

  Myles was quiet, his body a large shadow in the thin moonlight. “Are you sure?” The uncertainty in his voice warmed her (although a part of her admitted it could have been the brandy). “Yes. Very sure.”

  “Any other man,” said Quill drowsily, several hours later, “would have thrown a rock at my window and said something inspired.” She adjusted her head against his chest; she could hear his heart beating.

  “I can’t remember all of it.”

  “All of what?”

  “ ‘What light through yonder window breaks? T’is the east and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun and kill the envious moon ...’ and that’s it.”

  “But it occurred to you. Love and homicide, even in Shakespeare.”

  “Particularly in Shakespeare. The man was a great psychologist.”

  Quill was silent a moment, working this out. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I’m never sure what you mean, Quill.” He grasped her by the shoulders and pulled her upright. He was very dark against the unbleached muslin of her headboard.

  “Can’t you say it?” she asked gently.

  “Can’t I say it? Can’t you say it?”

  “This conversation is ridiculous. If it is a conversation.” She pulled away and got out of bed.

  He rubbed both hands over his face. “All right. Here goes. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Myles.” And she did.

  “And this is where we were three months ago.” There was an unfamiliar note of impatience in his voice. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and looked at the floor. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Until I asked you to get married and start a family.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you said, as nearly as I can understand it, that you already had a family.”

  “I did?” said Quill, startled. “I guess I did.”

  His face was dark. A vein pulsed in his forehead. “I still don’t understand what you meant. Have you changed your mind?”

  He knows, thought Quill. He knows I haven’t changed my mind. She cleared her throat. “No. I haven’t changed my mind.”

  “Then what is this? What is this?”

  “I haven’t seen you like this before, Myles, what—”

  “What was the last hour about, Sarah?” He was impassive, except for the vein in his forehead.

  Quill watched it, fascinated. “I just missed you.”

  He picked up the lamp sitting on the night stand and threw it at the wall. It hit base first, and shattered. ‘ Then what the hell are you doing?”

  “What I was going to say”—Quill’s voice was tight with anger—”was that, yes, I have a family, and my work, Myles, my work. I’m a painter, Myles, or I was, and no, I don’t know if there’s room in it for you. I don’t know where you would fit, Myles. And now you’ve started smashing my furniture. And now I don’t know a damn thing. And we’re back where we started. Or where we ended. So just leave, please, but before you do”—she marched toward the bathroom, the only place in her small suite where she didn’t have to look at him—”pick up that lamp.”

  She sat in the bathtub and cried a little, into a towel, and when he didn’t knock at the door, and she heard him leave, she went back to bed and cried into the pillowcase that still smelled like the back of his head.

  “So that was the crash I heard last night.” Meg swirled the hollandaise in her copper sauté pan and plied the whisk with energy.

  “He picked it up, though. Did you talk to Andy?”

  “He called, yeah. Last night.”

  “Everything okay there?”

  “Seems to be. We’re going to Syracuse for a couple of days, as soon as this is over.”

  “What did he say about the case?”

  “Not a lot. We agreed not to talk about it.”

  “Everyone else in town is going to be talking about it.” Quill moved restlessly around the room. The essential differences between the two of them was nowhere more in evidence than in their rooms. From childhood, Meg had been a collector, and she liked chaos. Cookbooks, magazines, and kitchen equipment catalogs spilled out her bookcases and lay stacked on her windowsills. She’d chosen bright, sunny colors for her drapes and furniture: pinks and oranges with touches of a vivid spring green. Quill could never imagine Meg in anything but sunlight.

  “You heard about the emergency Chamber meeting this morning?” Meg pulled the crumpets from the toaster oven and set them on three plates, slipped the poached eggs on top, and poured out hollandaise in a thin stream.

  “Yes. This town has more emergency meetings. Did you hear that it’s going to be held in Marge’s diner?”

  “No! Nobody wants to eat here?! That does it! Let’s sell the damn place. Maybe Mr. Sakura will buy it.”

  “As a matter of fact, the mayor was very disappointed it couldn’t be held here. But Myles thought that the less activity around the area where the death occurred the better. But I don’t think we have to worry about people checking out, or refusing to come to the Inn to eat. You remember our first murder? And how we thought it would empty the Inn? And instead, everybody stayed out of some perverse interest?”

  “That’s a lot different from people thinking I’m poisoning them in my kitchen.”

  “Nobody thinks
that.”

  “Did you ask Myles how the investigation’s going? How soon we can reopen? Whether or not he thinks it was murder by persons unknown—or murder by me”

  “I didn’t have an opportunity to bring it up.”

  “Hmm.” Meg glanced her sidelong. “Could you drain that spinach for me, please?”

  Quill ran the spinach through the colander.

  “So, what was the argument about?”

  “What are you going to do with the spinach? I thought you were making eggs Hollandaise.”

  “It’s eggs Florentine. There’s no ham. And stop ducking the issue, Quill.”

  “It wasn’t about anything.” Frustrated, Quill slammed the spinach on the counter, leaving a green trail of water on the floor. Meg bent and wiped it up without comment. “I caught him just as he was leaving the kitchen last night. And he came up, as I told you....”

  “And you had a lovely reunion, and then what?”

  “He wanted to know if I’d changed my mind.”

  “And you said what?”

  “I started to explain that I hadn’t really, and then he threw the lamp against the wall!”

  “Quill. Let’s get this straight. Three months ago you tell the poor man you don’t want to marry him, or bear his children, or have anything to do with him as a human being, but he’s fine as a sex partner.”

  “Now, wait just a minute!”

  “No. You wait. And last night you’d had a glass of brandy to settle your nerves after that awful business and it was a warm summer’s night, and we had some good female bonding going and there’s Myles crunching his way powerfully across the gravel and you holler the equivalent of ‘hey, sailor’ and after you’ve had your wicked way with him, you say, sorry, I didn’t really mean what you thought I meant, and you’re surprised when he throws a mere lamp against the wall?”

  “When you put it like that, it sounds sort of mean.”

  “Sounds mean? It stinks! If a guy had done that to you, you would have thrown him against the wall.”

  “A sailor, maybe,” Quill said between giggles. “Not the sheriff.”

  “Well, I think you owe the poor man an apology. Honestly, Quill. You kicked him right in the ego.”

  “Coo-ee!” said Georgia, knocking as she opened the front door and came in. “Looks like you’ve recovered from the little setback last night, ladies. Sorry I’m late, but!” She paused dramatically. She was wearing yet another bright caftan, this one red, white, and blue with silver stars embroidered at the V. “I have discovered a Vital Clue!”

  “Before eight-thirty in the morning?” said Meg. “Good work. What is it?”

  “You’d both better sit down. This is big. This is really big. This is bigger than I am.”

  “Well, let’s sit at the breakfast table,” Meg suggested. “We can eat while you tell us.” She pulled out one of the bentwood chairs at her kitchen table and waved Georgia to sit. “So, what have you got?”

  Georgia settled herself, her expression sober. “This.” With a curiously restrained gesture after her exuberant entrance, she withdrew a small notebook from her sleeve.

  “The goods book!” Quill picked it up. “My goodness! Where did you get it?”

  “This morning. I got up early. That brandy hadn’t set too well on my stomach. As a matter of fact, I’d been a little queasy all day yesterday, nothing to do with your cooking, Meg, just a spastic colon that hits now and men. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up this morning at a simply ungodly hour—six, for Pete’s sake—and went down to sit in the gazebo. By the way, you’ll be delighted to know that I called Adela Henry, the mayor’s wife, and offered to help carry Jell-O buildings to the tent tomorrow, so that’s set. I figured I could catch any town gossip that they might not let you in on. Quill. Anyhow, back to the gazebo—that guest—the skinny one that looks like he’s been ironed?”

  “Axminster Stoker,” said Quill, paging through the book.

  “He was out jogging. Well, he jogged right past me and yelled over his shoulder that I’d dropped something over the edge of the railing. So I found it in the sweet peas.”

  “Myles and his men didn’t search down there, did they?” said Meg. “Here. Let me see.”

  Quill handed it over and asked Georgia, “Did you read it?”

  “Are you kidding? Of course I read it. Hedrick Con-way’s that slobby blond man, isn’t he? I saw him last night talking to you. Well, he may be a sloppy dresser, but he’s a very organized note taker. There’s a lot of garbage in there, Quill. Your manager, John Raintree? I didn’t know he’d been involved in a murder case a few years back....”

  “Yes,” said Quill, tight-lipped.

  “And did you know that somebody named Miriam Doncaster. ..”

  “Our town librarian,” Quill said.

  “... is having an affair with a fellow named Howie M.?”

  “Howie Murchison?!” shrieked Meg. “No!”

  “He’s town attorney,” said Quill. “What else did you find?”

  “Well, there’s a lot of background stuff on you, Quill. I had no idea you were so famous. And Meg... there was a little about your husband’s accident. My dear, I’m so sorry—but none of that’s important—at least, not to our investigation. Look here.” She took the book out of Meg’s hands and flipped to the back. The three of them bent their heads over the table.

  “It’s a lot of stuff about a chemical called neurobenzine,” said Meg after a moment.

  “Used in printing ... guess what?” said Georgia.

  “Newspapers?” hazarded Quill.

  “And guess what it is?”

  Meg and Quill looked at her.

  “A neurotoxin. A deadly neurotoxin.”

  “No!” they chorused.

  “See? There’s a lot of stuff here about the EPA regulations on disposing of it. And see this here?”

  Quill read aloud: “ ‘Hi. Haz.’ that must mean highly hazardous. ‘Contact with skin, soft tissues. Symp: anoxia.’ That’s oxygen deprivation, right? ‘Convulsions. Death within minutes. Anecdotes.’ Anecdotes? He must mean antidotes. ‘None.’ “

  “Oh, my God,” said Meg. “He killed his own mother and sister. Oh, good grief. How awful. I’d better give Andy a call. And Quill, Myles should know about this. No, you won’t want to call him. I will.”

  “Wait a minute.” Quill, paging through the ‘goods’ book, found a few sentences which cast her relationship with Myles in a highly unflattering light. The reference was listed under ‘Poss. Stories.’ and a putative headline noted: ‘Innkeep Trades Sex For Freedom! Sheriffs Girlfriend Avoids Plumbing Prosecution!”

  “Those damn toilets,” Quill muttered.

  “You found that, huh?” said Georgia.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s more, of course. The guy’s a creep. With a mind like a sewer. But that’s not the only thing. There’s a list of New Jersey phone numbers written under DeMarco’s name, and in several pages following that—look for yourselves.”

  “You’re kidding!” Meg ran her hands excitedly through her hair. Georgia paged through the book and displayed the page triumphantly.

  “That settles it. We have to turn this over to Myles.”

  “No,” Meg said. “If Hedrick knows the book’s been turned over to the police, he’s going to take steps to destroy evidence.”

  “We can’t suppress this, Meg,” Quill protested. “What if he kills somebody else?”

  “I want my kitchen open, Quill. Soon. We can solve these murders ourselves. And we don’t have to go through official channels like Myles and Andy do. We can be a lot quicker.”

  “And a lot more illegal,” Quill muttered. “It’d be quicker if we gave the police this book, wouldn’t it? I’m just afraid Hedrick will kill someone else.”

  “What if we suppress it just for a little while? And as for more murders, it looks to me like Hedrick’s run out of relatives.”

  Georgia shouted with laughter. “Sorry. I don’t know why
I think that’s so funny. Let’s work backward from what we know.” She held up one finger. “First, it’s pretty clear that Hedrick’s none-too-subtle threats to disclose something nefarious about the mini-mall operation have everyone in town upset. So upset that they’re looking to Mr. Sakura to buy them out. Yes?”

  “That’s right,” said Quill. “But there’s a slight discrepancy in what we know, here. When Sakura Toshiro checked in, he showed me a letter from Elmer Henry, inviting him to tour the mini-mall site when he arrived here in Hemlock Falls, with an eye toward purchase. Ken Sakura claims that his father discovered the investment opportunity the day before yesterday, when the group of men arrived at the sheriffs office to talk to him directly about it. So which is it? Second, if Elmer had been in contact with an investor, why didn’t any of the other investors know about it? And if it was supposed to be a secret, why did Mr. Sakura show me the letter?”

  “So we need an explanation of what that’s all about,” said Georgia. “Let’s make a list, and we can assign activities to the best investigator.” She dug a spiral notebook out of her capacious purse. “Okay, that’s question number one. What’s next?”

  “Who is Marco DeMarco, and why is Myles investigating him? John claims that it’s very odd that there are no local people employed at the construction site. Hedrick”— she tapped the goods book—”clearly has been following the same trail. So someone needs to call these numbers in New Jersey and do a little digging. Is DeMarco involved in something crooked? What kind of reputation does his construction company have? He’s got to be a prime suspect in the murders. Maybe he’s knocking off the Conways one by one to keep a story from being written.”

  “Investigate DeMarco,” Georgia wrote, speaking aloud. “Let me tackle that one, will you? Sitting and making phone calls is my idea of how to do legwork. And while I’m at it, I can do a little background digging on Hedrick, as well.”

  “Our restaurant’s nearly ready, but DeMarco would expect me to want to take a look myself,” said Quill. “It’d be really easy for me to drift on down to the mall site and ask him a few questions myself.”