“I wish we could let her bring Caleb to work, instead of just for little visits. Her whole life’s a struggle, Meg.” Quill shook her head. “And here we are complaining that we have to cede a little space to a perfectly pleasant and probably very interesting person.”
“Yeah.” Meg rubbed her nose. “Makes you think. And I’m glad you said what you did about keeping an eye out for something a little more challenging. In the meantime, I’ve got work to do.” She ducked out of Quill’s sight and clanked around the pots and pans stored under the prep table. “Sheesh! It’s a mess in here.”
Max, attracted by the metallic rattle—undoubtedly, Quill was sure, because it was a pleasant reminder of his forays into village Dumpsters—joined Meg under the prep table. Max had wandered into their lives several years ago. He was a stray, with courage and a loyal heart. He’d been an abused and neglected mess when Quill had taken him to the vet. Not the best dog food available or the most dedicated grooming could make Max other than a sorry example of the canine gene pool. His coat was a mixture of muddy browns, dismal gray, and streaks of black. It looked as if someone had thrown a can of motor oil over him. Quill scratched what she could see of his haunches. He wagged his tail furiously and wriggled further under the prep table.
Meg shrieked in protest. “Quill, this dog is not only the homeliest dog in Hemlock Falls, he’s the pushiest. Max, get off of me.”
Quill slipped off the stool and crouched down. “Come on, Max. Do you want to go for a walk? Walk, Max?”
“Um, Quill?” said a familiar voice from behind her.
Quill, having gotten on all fours in order to pull Max out from the pans, swiveled around to see two pairs of feet.
The first, size-seven clogs with a pair of knee socks embroidered with frogs, she recognized as Dina’s.
The second, highly polished wingtips and topped by dark blue wool trousers, she didn’t recognize at all. Nobody in Hemlock Falls wore wingtips. Not even Elmer Henry, who took his position as mayor seriously enough so that he never was without a tie, or Howie Murchison, the town’s most trusted lawyer and justice of the peace.
Quill backed away from the prep table and straightened to her full height. A tall, thin gentleman in a dark blue suit, striped tie, crisp white shirt, and the sourest expression Quill had seen looked her directly in the eye. He held Dina firmly by the shoulder. Dina looked nervous. The suited gentleman looked stern. Quill frowned at him and said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d take your hands off our receptionist.”
He gave a supercilious sniff.
Meg gave Max a final shove and emerged from beneath the prep table, her dark hair ruffled around her pink face. She smiled politely at Dina’s escort. “Nobody’s allowed back here but staff, sir. I don’t mean to be rude but we really need to get you back into the dining room. And while you’re at it, perhaps you could unhand our receptionist? If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Sorry, Meg,” Dina said. “But I couldn’t really help it. Mr. McWhirter wouldn’t let me come and bring you out to him.”
“McWhirter?” Quill said.
“Albert McWhirter,” he said. His voice was as acidulous as his expression.
“Mr. McWhirter,” Dina continued, “says he’s been sent here from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. And he says he’s not leaving until he sees every book in the place.”
CHAPTER 3
There was a prolonged and uncomfortable silence. Dina took the opportunity to sidle next to Max.
“Yikes,” Quill said. “Well. Um. How do you do?”
“Not at all well, at the moment,” McWhirter said sourly. He directed a fulminating glace at Dina. “This young lady appears to be laboring under a misapprehension about my credentials.”
“He’s not a cemetery salesman,” Dina said meekly.
“No,” Quill said. “I can see that.”
“Miss Quilliam? We need to talk.”
“It’s Mrs. McHale, actually,” Quill said a little frostily.
“And I think it would be a good idea to have our discussion in my office,” she added firmly.
“This is the guy Mark sent?” Meg said. “Yikes, indeed. Tell you what, Quill. You go right ahead and take Mr. McWhirter back to your office. I’ll send Melissa in with some coffee.”
“I’d prefer tea,” McWhirter said.
“Tea it is.” Meg grinned at her sister and waved. “Ta-ta.”
McWhirter was dourly silent as he followed Quill back to her office. It was a nervous-making silence, and despite an heroic attempt to shut herself up, Quill began to prattle.
“This,” she said as they passed through the dining room, “is our dining room.”
McWhirter looked at the tables, seating from four to six people, most of them filled with guests reading the menu of the special of the day. “It seems an appropriate use of the space.”
“We can seat one hundred and forty-six people at a time. We aim for two turns in an evening if we can. But we usually just have one. A turn is one sitting.”
“I know what a turn is.” He gave her a thin smile. “I specialize in restaurant turnarounds.”
“Yes, well. And we go through the archway here to our reception area.” She stopped short and gestured toward the east wall. “And there’s the wine racks, of course. And here, as I say, is our reception area. We have a very good receptionist. Well, of course, you met her. Dina. Dina Muir. A very smart, very polite, very valuable employee.”
McWhirter raised one eyebrow in a saturnine way.
She patted the waist-high sign-in desk. “This nice old piece dates from the late-nineteenth century.” She edged her way past the desk to her office door and flung it open with a flourish. “And this is my office.” She craned her neck and stared straight up. “The ceiling’s made of tin. I fell in love with those wonderful decorated squares. Well . . .” At last, thankfully, she faltered to a stop.
He stopped in the doorway and looked around. There was a faint expression of distaste on his face. With his thin legs, beaky nose, and wattled chin, he reminded Quill of a turkey buzzard. She gestured grandly toward her little Queen Anne conference table. “Please sit down, and let me know how I can help you.”
“Do I know him, Quill? Sure. They call him Scrooge McWhirter,” Marge Schmidt had a gleam of humor in her basilisk eye. She hefted a large slice of icing-topped cinnamon bread from the napkin-covered basket between them and slathered butter over the whole.
“Scrooge, huh?” Quill swallowed and looked past the bread to a poster of the Grecian Isles on the diner wall. She was overdue for a vacation. “Any particular reason? For calling him Scrooge, I mean.”
Marge laughed unfeelingly. “Well, it ain’t because he’s filled with the old Christmas spirit, that’s for sure.” Quill’s stomach lurched. She wasn’t getting the flu. She was getting an ulcer.
“Scrooge McWhirter,” Quill said, as if this third repetition would invoke a kindly Christmas spirit.
He’d requested all her accounts and her appointment diary. He intended to interview each one of the staff in the coming week. And he had been quite nosy about training programs for staff—particularly staff that answered the phone.
Nonetheless—with a feeling that it was all in the lap of the gods, and they’d been treating her pretty well, lately, considering everything—she’d gone about her business the rest of the day in a mostly optimistic frame of mind. Until her breakfast date with Marge Schmidt the following morning.
“Tough, is he?” she asked Marge.
“Tough enough.”
She’d wakened that morning determined to get a grip on anything that needed gripping. And the day was shaping up to be a pleasant one. The Kingsfield contingent was due to arrive. They wanted to start shooting background for Good Taste right away. She talked to Meg, and they decided to offer a reduced menu in the dining room until after Christmas, since the guests were few and the walk-ins even fewer. She called the bank to make sure that the very large check, which sealed th
e contract to lease the name and premises of the Inn, was still residing in the company bank account. Everybody would get a Christmas bonus. The mortgage was paid up. New York State Electric and Gas would put the Inn back on its Christmas card list. The terrible anxiety—the sense of failure—that had dogged her for the past few months was gone. She was in charge, and things were going well. And then Marge had called and asked her to come to breakfast.
“Well, he’s certainly living up to his name,” she said.
All but one of the twenty-seven guest rooms at the Inn could compete with luxury hotels anywhere in the world. There was one cramped single, in the northwest corner of the Inn with a view of the now-defunct paint factory on the outskirts of the village. Quill put McWhirter in it because he’d asked for it.
Quill nibbled at a bit of cinnamon roll. “He ordered consommé and toast for dinner, and oatmeal with skim milk for breakfast. He knows he has the pick of the menu, too. Can you imagine anyone passing up Meg’s food? Especially when he doesn’t have to pay for it? And he asked for the cheapest room we had, which I almost never use for guests, unless it’s an emergency, and he seemed perfectly happy with it.”
“He’s not real big on the comforts of life,” Marge said briefly, “or so I hear. Did he have any first impressions? I’ll say this for him: he doesn’t waste any time.”
Quill unfolded the napkin covering the bread basket. “Well, it was a bit like going to the dentist, to tell you the truth. More wincing than actual pain, at least on my part.” There was freshly baked cranberry-orange bread, right next to the cinnamon bread. It looked terrific. Quill didn’t think her ulcer would object to Betty Hall’s cranberry-orange bread. It had a statewide reputation.
They were sitting in Marge’s diner—the Hemlock Falls All-American Diner! Fine Food! And Fast!—that the businesswoman owned with Betty. Quill put a piece of cranberry-orange bread on her plate. Then she added a slice of the cinnamon bread. She was sure she’d read somewhere that cinnamon was an aid to digestion.
“He didn’t seem too impressed by the Kingsfield deal, though. I thought that was a little odd.” Quill pulled a frowning face in imitation of McWhirter. “Anyhow, after he got settled in his room, he spent the entire afternoon and half the night prowling around my inn.”
“Prowling, huh?” Marge burped discreetly and took a long drink out of her coffee cup. People meeting Marge for the first time refused to believe she was the richest person in Tompkins County. She was dressed, as usual, in chinos, a bowling jacket, and a checked shirt. As a concession to the weather, she’d added a bright red sweater with black reindeer galloping across the front. She had short, ginger-colored hair and the expression of a tank commander. Quill was extremely fond of her. “He’s pretty thorough. We put the word out that we were looking for someone to come in and take a look at your operation a few weeks ago. He jumped at the chance.”
“Which reminds me.” Quill put the cinnamon bread down. “Why didn’t you tell me the board voted to do this to me?”
“For one thing,” Marge said tartly, “bank business is confidential, or darn well ought to be. For another, I thought your day-to-day operations might benefit from an objective eye and I didn’t think you’d agree to the expense unless I put a little pressure on. And McWhirter knows what he’s doing. That chain of steak houses—Muriel’s, you know it? He practically turned that chain around single-handed.”
“I know of it,” Quill said scrupulously. “I’ve never actually eaten there. But that’s not much of a recommendation as far as I’m concerned. There’s no way that a chain pulls in the same kind of customers that we do, Marge. I mean, two-pound steaks? Whole fried onions? And all of it frozen and trucked in once a week, if I’m to believe the trade magazines. That isn’t us at all.”
“Has he said anything about the operation yet?”
“Nope. He’s just been stalking around. And making notes in a little handheld tape recorder.” Quill put her thumb in the middle of the cinnamon bread and squashed it flat. “In this horrible droning cackle,” she added crossly. “Like a raven of doom.”
“Raven of doom, huh?” Marge reached across the salt and pepper shakers and moved Quill’s bread plate out of reach. “You gonna eat that or play with it?”
Quill made an apologetic face. “Sorry.” She dabbed butter on the bread and ate it. “We got off to a bad start. I apologized and I made him as welcome as I could. But he’s so cranky, Marge. And sour as a Key lime.”
“You’d be smart to make the best impression on him you can. Show him you got a real grip on the business.”
“Well. Of course.” Quill had never been sure she had a real grip on the business. If she’d had a real grip on the business, crabby old McWhirter would be driving some other poor innkeeper crazy. “And I told everyone not to worry, that he’d be gone in a few days, and to treat him like a guest instead of a food inspector. Poor Melissa runs off every time she even thinks she hears him coming. I just hope he doesn’t put everybody’s back up. This is Tuesday, which is the day we do the linen count, and you can just bet he’s going to be driving Doreen absolutely crazy.”
“You’d better keep her away from the mops,” Marge advised unsympathetically. Doreen, the Inn’s head housekeeper, had a notoriously short fuse.
“Well, what can he do to us, after all?” Quill said with a renewed surge of optimism. “Mark Jefferson said he’ll give the bank a list of recommendations, and how bad can that be?”
“Is that a question?” Marge demanded.
“I guess so.”
Marge raised one chubby finger after the other as she counted off: “First, let’s say he thinks you’re overstaffed. He’ll want you to fire a bunch of people. Second, let’s say he finds that the kitchen budget is too high. He’ll want Meg to make less expensive food. You want me to go on?”
“Nope,” Quill said decisively.
“This guy will look at where you’re spending money, and how you’re spending money, and make a big fat list of what needs to be done to cut your costs. Worst case, he can tell us the business isn’t viable and that we should call your loan.”
“We?” Quill said.
“The board of the bank,” Marge said impatiently. “Jeez, Quill. D’ya think we sent this guy on over to you because there’s nothing to watch on cable TV? You want to keep on doing business in Hemlock Falls, this is the guy you got to listen to.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I never kid about business.”
Quill ate her piece of cranberry bread and said philosophically, “Marge, I’ve been getting your advice about running the Inn, and John’s, too, ever since I realized the Inn was in trouble. I don’t know anyone as smart as you about business, except John, of course, and to think that some crabby coot recommended by the . . . what is it?”
“Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.”
“Right. Anyway, do you really think that he’s going to find any major problems? I don’t believe it for a minute. The way Mark presented this, it’s a necessary step to getting the mortgage continued. Like getting an engineering inspection when you sell your house.”
“You think so, huh?” Marge might have been Hector skeptical about the contents of the wooden horse outside his city’s gates. “Well, what’s gonna come will come. You planning on finishing that cinnamon bread? We’ve got that Chamber of Commerce meeting and for once, it’d be nice if you were on time.”
Quill swallowed the rest of the bread and edged out of the booth.
“Tell you what,” Marge continued, “you drive. I want to walk back downtown after.” She patted her substantial stomach. “Doc Bishop thinks I need to get a little more exercise.”
Quill followed Marge out of the diner. She’d parked the Honda close by—it was rare to have a parking problem in the village—and they drove the short distance back to the Inn in silence. Marge was lost in thought. Quill herself—her optimistic mood temporarily dashed by Marge’s grim reading of the McWhirter powers
—grew progressively more cheerful as they proceeded down Main Street and past the Christmas decorations.
The residents of Hemlock Falls loved the holiday season. They decorated with the enthusiasm of little kids. Each year, the explosion of holiday decorations gave the whole village the look of a print by Currier and Ives. Most of the buildings in the village were of cobblestone. And while the founding of Hemlock Falls itself dated back to the late seventeenth century, most of the town’s expansion had occurred just after the Civil War, at a time when Carpenter Gothic was the favored architectural style in upstate New York. So icicles dropped dramatically from the elaborately carved eaves. Snow topped the slate roofs like frosting on particularly elegant gingerbread houses. The December sunlight bounced dazzling prisms of light from the ice-wrapped trees.
Pine garlands twisted down the lengths of the lampposts lining Main Street. An illuminated plastic Santa, sleigh, and reindeer marched across the top of Nickerson’s Hardware store. Large wreaths decorated with colorful ornaments and red velvet bows hung over the doors to the shops. Two-foot-high Christmas trees sat in the middle of the black-iron planters. At the end of Main Street, a life-sized crèche complete with bejeweled Magi sat in front of the Hemlock Falls Church of the Word of God, next to a ten-foot-high menorah that lighted up at night and a twelve-foot minaret. All of this goodwill, Quill thought, puts Scrooge McWhirter in his proper perspective. “And besides,” she said aloud as she parked the Honda in her regular spot near the Inn’s front door, “it wouldn’t hurt to sit down and give him a little bit of advice about how the business is really run. Maybe I’ll take him to lunch.”
“It’s you he’s going to have for lunch,” Marge said bluntly, “and I’m not talking about his picking up the tab. Best to leave him alone. Come on. Let’s get the lead out.”
The Hemlock Falls Chamber of Commerce meeting was held in the conference room at the Inn. Marge and Quill arrived at quarter to ten, which, Quill reminded Marge, was earlier than necessary and they could have had a second slice of Betty’s cinnamon bread. Quill looked into the room. “And the only person in there is Harvey. So I’ve got time to go check on things.”
Prime Crime Holiday Bundle Page 108
