Dread on Arrival

by Claudia Bishop

  “The Bryants are taking his place,” Quill said dryly. “You’ll have to talk to them.”

  “That Skipper?” Melanie made a face. “Yuck. Well. Whatever. Are they still around?”

  “Everyone’s still around. They will be until the police are finished with the interrogations. You’ll be able to leave after Sheriff Kiddermeister has talked to you.”

  Her eyes flashed white with alarm. “I had nothing to do with the murder. I swear to God!”

  Quill got up, went into the bathroom, and tossed the washcloth into the sink. When she came out again, Melanie clutched her hand. “I’d better get myself a lawyer. I’ve gotta call my parents. God! This is like, so ironic. I mean, the man was basically my meal ticket. Why would I want to kill him?”

  Quill wanted to say what she thought: that Melanie had nothing to do with it. Instead, she slipped the rings into her skirt pocket and pointed toward the phone on the nightstand. “Give your mom and dad a call.”

  Melanie stared at her, unseeing. “Okay, so, like, my mom’s off with her boyfriend for that Hawaii thing. Dad’s … where? The Hamptons maybe. You know what? I’ll call the lawyer myself.”

  “You do that,” Quill said and left.

  17

  ∼Madeleines∼

  Makes 24 cookies

  2 large eggs

  2⁄3 cup sugar

  1 cup flour

  5 ounces salted butter, chopped

  Grated rind of lemon

  ½ teaspoon vanilla

  ¼ cup powdered sugar, for topping

  Madeleine pan, or any cookie pan with 3-inch molds

  Beat eggs, sugar, and flour together. Melt butter. Blend all ingredients. Grease the molds. Put one tablespoon batter in each mold. Bake at 375 degrees in a preheated oven for about fifteen minutes.

  Quill went down the one flight to the first floor in the elevator, mainly because Edmund Tree hadn’t propped it open for his own personal use, and it took longer than walking down the stairs. She resisted the impulse to punch the up button, which would take her to her own rooms and a much needed break with her beloved, innocent son. She could use some of Doreen’s decent, straightforward view of life, too.

  Instead, she found herself on the main floor, facing Davy Kiddermeister, Dina, and Jukka Angstrom. She stepped off the elevator.

  “You didn’t call,” Dina said. “And the more I thought about it, the more freaked out I got, so I called Davy and I found Mr. Angstrom in the Tavern Bar. Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. Well, she’s not fine, exactly, since she thinks she’s going to be arrested at any moment for murdering her meal ticket, but she’s okay.” She met Angstrom’s eyes. The corners of his lips lifted in a cynical smile. “I apologize for that remark,” she said. “She’s only what, twenty-two, twenty-three?” She took a deep breath. “A confused kid, basically.”

  “Twenty-three going on forty-three,” Jukka said. “So? There is nothing I can do at the moment?”

  “I don’t know. You could tap on her door and see if she needs a familiar face.”

  “Hmm. An hysterical young woman who has just lost the source of a fine car, expensive clothes, and the entree into various top-shelf city clubs? I think not. She is well able to take care of herself, that one. If she does need me, she can find me in the lounge. A pleasant place to pass the time, Quill. You have done well.” He nodded to Davy and Dina and walked down the hall to the bar.

  Quill sighed. “Okay. That crisis is over. Anything else I should be aware of, Dina? No dead bodies on the lawn or mobs picketing the Inn?”

  “Just me,” Davy said. “Could we go in the office and talk?”

  “Sure. Absolutely. Dina, if you could ask the kitchen to send in some coffee and cookies, I would love you forever. As a matter of fact …” She looked at her receptionist, with her oversized, red-rimmed spectacles, her shiny brown hair in its usual neat ponytail, and her unflagging commitment to the life cycle of small pond creatures. “I’d love you anyway.”

  “But coffee and cookies would help. Got it.”

  “Thank you. All right, Davy. You know the way.”

  She followed him into her office and closed the door. “Let’s sit at the conference table. Marge gave me some information I should turn over to you.”

  He pulled out a chair and she sat down across from him.

  “The ME’s got a cause of death.”

  “That’s pretty quick. Was it strychnine?”

  Davy rubbed the back of his neck, in an evasive gesture. “County doesn’t have a lot of murder cases to begin with, and this here is what they call high profile, which is why I got the results so fast. But I’ve decided not to make the cause of death public for a while yet, so I guess I can’t confirm it to you. The thing is …”

  “Myles called you,” Quill guessed.

  “He did. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have involved you in this. The sheriff is right. Not just about bringing civilians in, but about getting you mixed up in it, in particular.”

  “Fine. Just to clear the air, I’m not investigating. As a concerned private citizen, I have collected some information that might be useful to the police. So I’m going to turn that over to you.” Quill fiddled with the curl over her ear. “Which will be okay with Myles. Just so you know. And even if it weren’t, I would do it if I thought I should. You see?”

  “No,” Davy said. “But I’m up the creek without a paddle with this thing, and I’m going to take what I can get.”

  “So I’ll tell you what I know, if you tell me what the ME’s report said.”

  Davy hesitated, clearly torn between the thought of an angry Myles—several thousand miles away—and an importunate Quill with information to share. “Strychnine, like we thought.”

  “Any idea where it came from?”

  “He sent the compounds off for analysis. But it’s not like it is on TV. We’re not going to get a chemical breakdown for weeks. Maybe months.”

  “Did the medical examiner know how Edmund ingested it?”

  “The wine, he thinks. Something to do with the residual sugar.”

  “The Marsala? Good grief, Davy. Everybody had access to the Marsala. It stood open on the prep table for hours.” Quill bit her lower lip. “Wow.”

  “Yeah, well, the good news is, as soon as they confirm the strychnine in the wine, they can dump all that pudding.”

  “Cream,” Quill said automatically.

  “Whatever. I’m still up that creek. You have anything else that might help?”

  “First off, there are these.” Quill dropped the rings into his hands. “The cufflinks are up there, too, I think, but I didn’t feel like spending one more minute with that dreadful girl than I had to.”

  “Where’d these come from?”

  “Melanie. She took them. She thought Edward had really bought them for her. She’s all mixed up. But there they are. You can close the burglary case.”

  “She did the basement burglaries, too?”

  “No, no, no. I know who did the basement burglaries. You can forget about them.”

  “I can’t forget about them. It’s an open case.”

  “You can close it without solving it, can’t you?”

  “Sure, I guess. There’s a procedure for that. It’s not going to look real good on my record.”

  “Fair enough. How’s about if I tell you who burgled what and you decide if you want to keep it open. I mean, it’ll be up to you. But I am hoping like anything that you will give this person a break. For one thing, there’s no evidence to speak of, and for another … never mind the other. This is what happened.”

  He listened intently. By the time she was finished, his face was bright pink. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Quill held her hand up, palm out. “I swear.”

  “And she shredded the evidence?”

  “The last of the paper was disappearing into the shredder as I walked out the door.”

  Davy muttered a word he didn’t usually use. “And Ms. S
chmidt, of all people.”

  Quill waited, filled with hope. Davy rubbed his chin hard. Finally, he shook his head. “Well. Shoot. Okay.” His jaw stuck out in a way that was becoming increasingly familiar. “I’ll tell you one thing though. Neither one of those ladies is going to be running for mayor. So. We close out the burglaries. What about the murder?”

  Quill let out a long, pent-up sigh. “Marge looked into the finances of some of the people you’re interested in. I’ve talked with a few more.” She got up, the better to pace around the room. She felt a little bit like Poirot, except the suspects weren’t gathered in her office. “Here’s the deal. I couldn’t find anybody with a credible enough motive to kill Edmund Tree.”

  By the time she finished going over the results of her interviews, Dina had brought the coffee and the cookies and Davy had filled up his small incident book and switched to a yellow pad. He flipped back through the pages of his notebook to the beginning. “Let me see if I got this right. Rose Ellen Whitman lost out on big money when Edmund died.”

  “If she was going to murder him, she should have waited until after the wedding,” Dina said. “I would have.”

  Davy looked at her a little uneasily. “Right. And this Melanie Myers lost out on a car and some clothes … do you have the make of the car?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Just curious. Not to mention all the fancy clubs this guy took her to. So she lost out on that. Barcini lost out on …”

  “… A potentially lucrative feud.”

  “Right,” Davy repeated. “So all these folks lost something.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Now the people who gained were the Bryants …”

  “In a way. I couldn’t take it to court, but Andrea seemed to feel that they’d be under a lot more scrutiny as hosts of the show. They’ve been making some money on the side. That’s going to stop.”

  “So they have a weak motive.”

  “If it’s a motive at all.”

  Davy tossed his pencil on the table. “Which leaves Angstrom.”

  “If Marge is correct, his motive is weak, too. Yes, he does get to wind his way back to Sotheby’s, but he wasn’t desperate.” She hesitated. “I know what I’m about to say isn’t good police work. Jukka’s a tough guy. No question about that. But he’s too …” Quill bit her lip while she searched for the right word. “Sane and balanced to kill for gain. It’s certainly possible. But I don’t think it’s probable. It bears looking into, though.”

  Davy tried to look optimistic and failed. “That’s something, anyway.”

  “How long do you plan on keeping them here?”

  “The suspects? Not much longer. We’ve collected all the evidence, done all the interviews. Unless I come up with something in the next twenty-four hours, I’ll have to let them all go home. That Rose Ellen has a lawyer on my case already. She wants to get out of Dodge and she wants out fast.”

  “She sure does,” Dina said. “You know that Delores Peterson brought that painting you liked up to the Inn, don’t you, Quill? Yep. Told me she couldn’t go back to the store without two hundred bucks in cash.”

  Quill raised her eyebrows. “You’re kidding.”

  “I am not kidding. So I looked in petty cash and we had one hundred and forty-two dollars.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “Gave it to Delores.” Dina fidgeted. “I kind of like the painting and poor Delores was in a state. I asked Mike to put it in the Provencal suite. You aren’t mad, are you?”

  “No. I’m not mad. And it will look really nice above the fireplace. Besides,” Quill added wryly, “trompe l’oeil is the coming thing.”

  Davy tapped his pencil impatiently on his notebook. “Does this have anything to do with Edmund Tree’s murder?”

  “Not a thing,” Quill said. “It sounds to me like forensics will be the only thing that’s going to help us solve that. You think there’ll be anything back from the crime lab before all these people leave town?”

  “No flippin’ way. It’ll be weeks. Months. No clues, no evidence. No motive. Just one dead guy. If you ask me … this is one case that we’re never going to solve.”

  Davy Kiddermeister moved the Edmund Tree murder case to cold-case status two months later.

  18

  ∼Heaven and Earth∼

  5 large potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces

  1 teaspoon salted butter

  ¼ cup cream

  1 tablespoon chopped parsley

  3 apples, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces

  ¾ cup sugar

  2 slices bacon, diced

  2 sweet onions, peeled and sliced into rings

  Salt and pepper to taste

  Boil potatoes in salted water for fifteen minutes. Mash the potatoes with the butter, cream, and parsley. Cook apples and sugar until soft. Add the potatoes to the apple mixture. Puree the mixture by hand. Fry the bacon to a crisp. Add onions to bacon and sauté the onion for a few minutes. Combine bacon/onion mixture with potato mixture. Serves six, as a side dish to a meat entree.

  “I’m not closing the case, exactly,” Davy Kiddermeister said to Myles McHale. “Just moving it to the back burner.”

  “Might be the best thing to do.”

  Davy looked as depressed as Quill had ever seen him. “I don’t know what else to do. What kind of leads do I have? Where can I go from here? I’ll be darned if I know who killed Edmund. I asked you to stop by the department for advice. Maybe you could look over the file again, see if there’s anything I’ve missed.”

  Myles was a tall, big-shouldered man in his late fifties. His skin was weathered. His eyes were gray and turned to silver in certain slants of light. He’d been home in Hemlock Falls for a month. He was about to leave again.

  “You, too, Quill,” Davy added with a self-conscious blush. “If you have any ideas at all I sure could use the help …”

  Myles leaned against the filing cabinets. He wore jeans, a denim shirt, and a baseball hat with a John Deere logo on it. Quill sat in the visitor’s chair across from Davy.

  It was mild, for November in upstate New York, and she wore a heavy sweater, a long wool skirt and boots. Jack careened around the peeling linoleum floor. Quill had made him wear his Sesame Street parka and he kept pulling it off and giving it to her. Davy kept the sheriff’s office in the low sixties, so she kept putting it back on again.

  “It’s a miserable case,” she offered, by way of comfort. “The forensics weren’t any help at all.”

  The strychnine had come from a common rat poison that could be purchased at Nickerson’s Hardware and the CountryMax feed store. Both stores had reported petty thefts of the poison. Both stores had computerized inventories, and Davy had patiently traced down each logged purchase to buyers with no connections at all to Edmund Tree and the Ancestor’s Attic TV show. The light bulb she’d carried so carefully around in her pocket had two sets of fingerprints: hers and Mike the groundskeeper’s.

  Myles and Davy had watched and rewatched the available footage of the Slap Down event. During the course of the evening, everybody had passed by the bottle of Marsala. The only person to come near Edmund Tree and his zabaglione was Belter Barcini.

  Davy confiscated all of the Barcinis’ luggage, searched the Pawn-o-Rama bus with a team of forensic scientists from Syracuse, and came up with nothing. The Barcinis complained loudly and delightedly to the swarms of media that descended on the village. Belter took advantage of their enforced stay to ask Nadine Peterson out on three different dates. Nadine restyled Josephine Barcini’s hair into a startling mass of curls with a couple of maroon streaks at the sides. Mrs. Barcini bought a knitting kit from Esther West’s Country Crafts and made two pairs of booties, one pink, one blue, and looked hopeful. Nadine started spending weekends in New Jersey.

  The bottle of Marsala itself had come from a cardboard box of twelve that had remained unopened until Clare set the bottles out at ten o’clock in the morning the da
y of the Slap Down shoot.

  Davy got a search warrant for Clare’s apartment at the academy and brought the forensics team back to go through every personal item she owned. Clare was so mad she spent the day of the search in Meg’s rooms at the Inn. They each downed a bottle of Keuka red and swore eternal sisterhood, a détente Quill hoped would last until the year-end holidays were over, but she didn’t think so.

  Davy had compiled thick background files on Edmund Tree, which turned up no useful information, but verified Rose Ellen’s reading of his character. He was miserly, arrogant, and rich. Rose Ellen had made an abortive attempt to sue Edmond’s estate for the two million dollars—the suit squashed and tossed out of court by an impatient circuit court judge—and was rumored to be living in a studio apartment on West Twenty-fourth in New York in impoverished circumstances.

  The lawyers handling the Tree estate had finally turned up his half sister—the only offspring of Edmund’s mother’s second marriage. Her name was Devora Watson. She lived in California.

  “Once in a while one gets away,” Myles said. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot more that you can do.”

  “I still like Angstrom for it,” Davy said.

  Myles raised his hands slightly, in a “maybe” gesture.

  “Every time I look over those videotapes, I feel him sneering at me. Cocky, like.”

  Quill had seen all the interview videotapes, too. Jukka Angstrom had been amused, unhelpful, and finally, contemptuous. She suspected that Davy was influenced by what she herself felt; Jukka was the only suspect who had the toughness to kill.