Dread on Arrival

by Claudia Bishop

  “The Ladies’ Auxiliary is all excited about the Attic’s road show being taped here,” Meg said. “Somebody told them geraniums looked cheap.”

  That same somebody had convinced Esther West to put the “Cs” back in her sign, so it read country crafts and not kountry krafts. Esther had put topiary next to her front door, too.

  She slowed even more as she passed Rose Ellen’s shop … boutique business, Quill corrected herself. The place looked exceptionally attractive. An evergreen topiary in a bronze pot stood to the right of the mahogany front door. The window display this week was an oil—a trompe l’oeil depiction of a fountain with a bunch of grapes at the foot. Right next to Elegant Antiques was the Balzac Café, a coffee/specialty cupcake shop that had opened up the week before. The coffee shop occupied the space where Meg and Quill had briefly run a white linen restaurant, and Quill had always thought the space unlucky. But a line of tourists stretched out the door and onto the sidewalk, and it looked like a hit.

  The scent of fresh coffee floated through the air.

  Meg sniffed appreciatively. “Jamaican Blue Mountain blend.”

  Quill sighed aloud.

  “What?” Meg demanded.

  “We’re getting so … ‘sophisticated’ is the wrong word. So … tarted up. I miss the way it used to be. I like geraniums. I don’t care if they look cheap.” She stopped on the red at the one traffic light in town. “I was wondering why somebody like Rose Ellen thought Hemlock Falls would be a good place for stratospherically priced antiques—and I realized I haven’t been paying much attention to what’s been happening in town lately. The village has gone upscale, Meg.”

  “Change is good,” Meg said, with a depressing lack of sentiment. “And the tourist traffic is even better. We’re booked through New Year’s and Labor Day last weekend was the best we’ve ever had. Clare said she’s running eighty-percent full for her cooking classes until Thanksgiving. We’re not a backwater anymore, Quill, and that’s a good thing. Why would you want to go back to the old days, when we were starving to death?”

  The not being a backwater anymore part was true. The past three years in Hemlock Falls had been prosperous ones. The Finger Lakes district in upstate New York was one of the most beautiful spots in the world. The freshwater lakes formed the heart of the area. The glaciers that had moved through the land ten thousand years before had left waterfalls, gorges, and sparkling streams in their wake. The Hemlock River and the gorge that divided the village from Meg and Quill’s Inn was only one of many such beauties in the surrounding countryside.

  Surrounded by lush, fertile ground, the five counties of the Finger Lakes held a hundred or more boutique wineries, apple and peach orchards, cheese makers, dairies, and even a handful of upscale distilleries and breweries. The new, large resort hotel that fronted the Hemlock River just on the outskirts of town catered to the thousands of tourists. The tourists came through the village in spring, summer, and autumn looking for hikes through the gorges that ran through the drumlins and wine tastings at the family-held vineyards. The Inn at Hemlock Falls benefited from this surge of outlanders just like everyone else.

  Quill waited until she parked in the lot behind the Inn before she answered her sister. “We were never even close to starving to death.”

  “Well, no. That’s true.”

  “That’s not to say that we weren’t exactly successful for a bit, either. And I don’t miss the scary parts of almost being broke. I miss … I don’t know what I miss. Maybe it’s that I don’t like Rose Ellen Whitman and all she stands for. Conspicuous consumption. A sort of arrogant greediness. Phrases like ‘people who matter.’ I mean, most people love and appreciate good food, good company, and that’s how we make our living these days, but we aren’t snobs about it and that’s what’s hit the village.” Quill tugged at her hair, which was red and wildly springy. “Snobbism,” she repeated glumly.

  “Pooh.” Meg opened the car door and jumped out. “You sit there and wallow in nostalgia if you want. I’ve got to put in a food order.” She halted halfway across the lot and shouted, “What about Jack? I haven’t seen the kid today.”

  “Doreen took him to a playdate with Harland Peterson’s grandson.” Quill looked at her watch. “Although they should be back. She must have put him down for his nap, by now.”

  “Then don’t you have a Chamber meeting to go to? Get with it, Sis. Get a move on!”

  “Yikes,” Quill muttered. “So I should.” She tossed her keys in the ashtray. Nobody ever locked their cars in the village. She got out of the car, stretched, and took a moment to check out the vegetable gardens just off the back door to the kitchen. Mike the groundskeeper must have picked the last of the tomatoes and the last of the yellow squash. The nasturtiums were cheery spots of bright red, yellow, and orange among the last of the dill and the oregano. The roses that grew against the stone walls of the building were in full flower. Before long, the beds would be spaded up and the roses covered for the winter, but for now, the air was alive with the mingled odors of Quill’s favorites: Apricot Nectar, Peace, and Malmaison.

  The creamy pink blossoms of the Peace rose quivered, and Max the dog emerged with a yawn. Quill bent down and rubbed his ears, which were large, floppy, and a mixture of colors as odd as the rest of his coat: black, white, gray, and a sort of muddy ochre that made him look in perpetual need of a bath.

  “So where’s Jackson Quilliam-McHale, Max? Your young master. My best boy? How come you’re not with him? Is he still at his playdate? Is that how come you’re skulking in the bushes?”

  Max wagged his tail and cocked his head intelligently. The screen door to the kitchen banged open. “Jack’s back from his playdate,” Doreen said. “and takin’ his nap, just on schedule. Which is more than I can say for you. Bein’ on schedule that is.” Doreen stood with her hands on her hips. Quill looked at her with affection. Doreen had been the Inn’s first hire, and she had terrorized the staff for years. She was lean and wiry, and with bright beady black eyes. Jack loved her to distraction, and so did Quill.

  “I know, I know.” Quill dropped a quick kiss on her housekeeper’s mop of wiry gray hair, and moved lightly past her to the kitchen. A quick glance assured her all was well; Bjarne, the head chef, loomed over Meg, eyebrows raised, as they looked through the menu notes she’d brought from the meeting with Clare. Elizabeth Chou chopped tomatoes, humming happily.

  Quill sniffed; roast lamb for the special, it seemed, and it smelled absolutely delicious.

  She passed through the swinging doors to the dining room. There was always a nice, expectant air about the dining room just before they opened for dinner. The wineglasses gleamed in the sunshine streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows. The cutlery sparkled. The flowers in the vases on the table were the last of the dahlias. Outside, the rush of water over the falls reached her ears in a faint, reassuring susurration.

  Quill passed from the dining room into the front hall. It was small for a reception area, no more than twenty by thirty. A cobblestone fireplace occupied one wall. A soft cream leather sofa piled with needlepoint pillows sat in front of it. The curved staircase to the second and third floors was opposite the massive oak front door. The pine floors were covered with an Oriental rug in cream, celadon, peach, and sage green. The two giant Chinese vases that flanked the reception desk were filled with late lilies. Dina Muir, her receptionist, sat behind the mahogany front desk, her nose in a textbook. She looked up as Quill whizzed by on her way down the short hall to the Chamber meeting and shouted, “Whoa!”

  Quill skidded to a halt. “What is it? I don’t have time for my messages right now. I’m late for the Chamber meeting.”

  Dina’s expression said: so what else is new? But she pushed her red-rimmed glasses up on her nose with one slim forefinger and dropped her voice. “I’m thinking maybe you don’t want to go in there.”

  “I don’t?” Quill took a couple of steps forward and looked down the short hall to the conference room. It wasn�
��t really a conference room, just as the wine cellar at Bonne Goutè wasn’t a conference room, but there wasn’t any need for a keeping room, which had been a salient feature of the two-hundred-year-old Inn, so they had converted it.

  Quill lowered her voice, too. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s a lynching.”

  “A what!?”

  “Well, okay. Not a real, actual, physical lynching.” Dina marked her place in her textbook with a pink While You Were Out slip. She was a graduate student in freshwater pond ecology at nearby Cornell University. While rigorous in the pursuit of accuracy of the life cycle of her copepods, she tended to the imaginative in her approach to human beings. “But there’s been a ton of screaming and yelling going on down there, and Marge stomped out here twice, wanting to know where the heck you were.”

  Quill relaxed. “Chamber meetings are always a little volatile, Dina. It’s the Attic’s road show taping that’s got everyone in a flap, I expect.”

  Dina shook her head dubiously. “You think? How much hoorah can there be over a bunch of old furniture?”

  “A lot, I should think,” Quill said. “Antiques Roadshow sometimes features tons of valuable stuff. Paintings, porcelain, jewelry.”

  “Your Ancestor’s Attic doesn’t,” Dina said cynically. “If you ask me, they just follow along in the Roadshow’s wake, picking up all the junk the Roadshow didn’t want to feature. Did you see that episode where Edmund Tree announced he was coming to Hemlock Falls? Did you see that pissed off little old lady whack him over the …”

  A crash from the vicinity of the conference room made them both jump.

  “I don’t watch it.”

  “Even if it is a riot over old junk, you still don’t want to go in there. I mean, Mrs. Henry stomped right in after Marge Schmidt came out here the second time looking for you and called Marge an old boot.”

  “Adela called Marge an old boot?” Quill discovered most of her hair had fallen out of her topknot. She swept it up again and pinned it firmly in place. Adela, Elmer Henry’s imperious wife, was the real power behind the mayor’s throne and a stickler for what she called ladylike manners and grace under pressure. “No! You must have misheard her.”

  “She did. And you know Mrs. Henry. She’s about the most unflapped person in Hemlock Falls. But there she was, hollering away and red in the face.”

  “My goodness,” Quill said, equably.

  “If you ask me,” Dina said unhappily, “we’re on the verge of revolution, right here in the village. Who would have thought something like that could happen here, of all places?”

  Quill smiled at her. Years of happy attention to the pond life of upstate New York clearly hadn’t prepared Dina for the messiness of human behavior. “You remember the second rule of innkeeping.”

  “‘Keep your shirt on’?” Dina shook her head. “You go on in there. You’ll see.”

  2

  ∼Hemlock Falls Ladies’∼

  Auxiliary Coffee Cake

  2 large eggs

  1 cup salted butter

  1¼ cups sugar

  2 cups flour

  ½ teaspoon baking soda

  1½ teaspoons baking powder

  1 cup sour cream

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  ¾ cup ground pecans combined with 3 tablespoons brown sugar

  Combine eggs, butter, and sugar. Add flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Mix well. Fold in sour cream and vanilla. Put half of batter into a Bundt pan. Sprinkle one half of the pecan sugar mixture over it. Add second half of batter and sprinkle remainder of sugar over the top. Bake in a cold oven set to 350 degrees for about an hour.

  The conference room was at the end of a short flagstone hall. Quill paused before going in and put her ear to the door. It was ominously quiet.

  She rapped twice, out of habit, and turned the knob and went in.

  The room was long and narrow, with a low ceiling. Two hundred years before, it had been a keeping room, storing fruits, vegetables, cured hams, and barrels of flour and sugar. Quill had taken a utilitarian approach to the space. A credenza set up for coffee service was on the long wall facing the door. The floor was brick, impossible to keep warm in the winter, and it was with real reluctance that she’d installed Berber carpeting. She’d placed a series of whiteboards on the walls, and installed a conference table that seated twenty-four.

  Twenty of the twenty-four spaces were filled with members of the Hemlock Falls Chamber of Commerce. They were all silent, with the kind of uncomfortable body posture that nice, middle-class Americans adopt when embarrassed. Elmer Henry sat at the head of the table, a mulish expression on his face. His majestic wife Adela, sat next to him, dressed in a bright orange pant suit and a ruffled navy blouse. Her face was red. Howie Murchison, the town justice and senior partner in Hemlock Falls’s only law firm, sat next to Adela. Howie was in his early sixties, with a fringe of graying hair and a comfortable paunch. He raised both eyebrows in greeting as Quill walked in.

  “There you are, Quill. We’ve had a motion to form a new political party sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. We need your vote to break the tie.”

  This was so completely unexpected that Quill turned around to make sure she had come in the right door. Then, “A what?”

  “You heard Howie,” Marge Schmidt said. “Siddown and vote.”

  Twenty faces swiveled and looked at her. Quill knew all of them and liked most of them a lot. Harvey Bozzel, Hemlock Falls’s best (and only) advertising man. Nadine Peterson, owner-operator of the Hemlock Hall of Beauty. Dookie Shuttleworth, the mild-mannered pastor of the Church of the Word of God. Harland Peterson, president of the local Agway and Marge Schmidt’s husband.

  Marge herself, the richest woman in Tompkins County, sat right next to Harland, dressed in her usual chinos, a navy blue Peterson Dairy Farms windbreaker, and red-checked shirt. Her ginger hair capped her round skull in newly tight curls, which meant she had just made her biannual visit to Nadine’s beauty shop.

  Marge narrowed her machine-gun gaze and growled, “’Bout time you got here. All right, Mayor. We got twenty-one here now, and we gotta break this tie.” She smacked her meaty fist on the table. “I call for another vote. And this time, it’d better go my way. You vote yes, Quill. Got it?”

  “She’ll vote no,” Adela said. “Or else.”

  Everybody looked at Quill.

  She smiled cheerfully. The third rule of innkeeping was to retreat in the face of certain disaster. She looked at her watch. “Sorry. I just dropped in to tell you that I have a small emergency. I was going to ask Miriam if she’d mind taking the minutes for me. I have to be off right now.”

  Miriam Doncaster, the town librarian, was a particular friend of Quill’s. She admitted to being in her mid-fifties, and Quill had always admired the faint sensual air that clung to her. She wasn’t quite sure how Miriam created the effect: it had something to do with her gray blond hair, which was thick and tousled, and her wide blue eyes. She smiled sweetly and patted the empty chair next to her. “Not on your tintype, honey. Sit down and take it on the chin, like the rest of us.”

  Quill sank into the chair and said with an air of decisiveness everyone knew to be spurious. “What is the motion, exactly?”

  Marge sat back in her chair and folded her arms under her considerable bosom. “I’m not saying another word.”

  “Oh, sure,” Carol Ann Spinoza said. “Like you haven’t said way too many words already, Marge Schmidt.” Carol Ann had been the town’s tax assessor for an excruciating three years. She currently held the office of the Hemlock Falls animal control officer. Quill wasn’t quite sure why she had abandoned her personally designed animal control officer’s outfit, with its belt of lethal weapons, but she had, in favor of a tailored pantsuit.

  She drummed her perfectly manicured nails on the table. “And I don’t know why we have to stop in our tracks just because Quill’s waltzed in hours late like she always does. You don’t have to know what’s going on
, Quill. It’s your fault you’re late, so you’ll just have to go ahead and vote without us going over all this baloney again. All those opposed to sponsoring this party raise your hands.” She thrust her right arm up in the air and looked around the table.

  “What party?” Quill asked. And then, bewildered, “If I’m opposed to voting, do I vote yes or no?”

  “You. Were. Late,” Carol Ann said, as if speaking to a disagreeable deaf person. “Now, vote!” Carol Ann’s cheerleader good looks, perky smile, and gleaming white teeth concealed the soul of a piranha. She wasn’t the town’s meanest tax assessor any longer, so her power to intimidate was considerably lessened. But old habits die hard and a few hands went hesitantly in the air, Harvey Bozzel’s among them. Marge frowned at him and he hastily patted his hair, which was blond and gelled to perfection.

  “Hang on a bit,” Howie said easily. “Due process is due process, Carol Ann. We have to at least describe the motion before calling for a new vote.”

  “If the secretary had been here,” Carol Ann said viciously, “we could have had her read the motion back from the minutes. But she wasn’t and she can’t.”

  Esther West sat forward timidly. “I jotted a few notes. Pastor Shuttleworth asked me to, just in case.” She held up a scrapbook covered with glitter hearts and rainbow decals. “I ordered these for the shop and I can’t tell you how handy they are. It’s a three-ring binder, as you see, so I can just take these Chamber notes right out and ta-da! I have my scrapbook back again, ready for photos or anything. They’re only ten ninety-nine, while they last. Useful for anything, these scrapbooks are.”

  “Mayor,” Carol Ann said, her voice stickier and sweeter than usual. “I have a question. Are these Chamber meetings supposed to be places where some people think they can sell overpriced stuff from their shop or not? I say not. I move to have that blatant advertisement for Esther’s Country Crafts stricken from the record.”