Toast Mortem

by Claudia Bishop

  In the old days, before she’d married Myles, her rooms at the Inn had consisted of a bedroom, a small kitchen, and a living room, and she’d loved them. It was quiet, up on the third floor, and she’d used low-keyed neutral colors throughout. It’d been her refuge against the long days handling the usual furors at the Inn. And she’d had plenty of closets.

  When she’d married Myles, she’d moved to his cobblestone house and her old rooms became a suite, much in demand by those guests who stayed for more than a long weekend. And she still had plenty of closets.

  Jack’s arrival, and her return to the Inn while Myles was away on assignment, had demanded yet another set of changes. Mike had installed a window in her large walk-in closet and turned it into a bedroom for Jack. When Doreen was widowed, Mike had built a connecting door to the adjacent room, and Doreen rented out her house in town and moved herself in. The only real problem with this arrangement was that there weren’t any closets.

  So Quill kept her clothes stashed in a variety of places. Underwear, nightgowns, and other lingerie went into the oak chest she used as a coffee table. Shoes, jeans, T-shirts, and shorts went into the cupboards over the tiny stove. And her skirts and silk tees hung in the broom closet.

  Quill didn’t have time to decide what to wear every morning, so she kept it simple. Three calf-length cotton skirts and six silk tees in the summer, and three fine wool skirts and six silk sweaters for the winter. All of her clothes were in shades of bronze, amber, peach, and celadon. (Dressing in black made her feel like Mrs. Danvers in the old Gothic horror story Rebecca. Dressing in white was a stain waiting to happen.) So she kept to colors that suited her red hair and hazel eyes and only occasionally yearned for more choices.

  She took a fast shower, dressed, and came down the big staircase to the foyer to find Dina pink-faced and exasperated behind the mahogany reception desk.

  “There you are,” Dina said fiercely. “Quill, I know what you’ve said about not beating up the guests but I am like, up to here with that Fredericks person!”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “That woman,” Dina said darkly, “is allergic to everything. Plants, animals, carpets . . .”

  “Some people are very allergic, Dina. We have to be sympathetic.”

  “. . . Cloth, fur, wood, smells . . . Let me just ask you one tiny thing, Quill. Just one tiny thing.”

  Quill waited a bit, then when nothing more was forthcoming said, “And the one tiny thing is what?”

  Dina leaned forward and dropped her voice to a fierce whisper. “Have you ever seen her actually sneeze!?”

  Quill thought back. “No. Come to think of it, I haven’t.”

  Dina leaned back in her chair and tossed her pencil onto the desktop with a satisfied expression. “There you are. Just a BFW.”

  This was Inn-speak for Big Flipping Whiner.

  “Hmm. Where is she?”

  “She’s in the Tavern Lounge, with the rest of them,” Dina said glumly. “A big FedEx package came for one of them this morning, and they all lit out together with it. Wait a minute. You have a couple of messages.” She picked up the pink stack of While You Were Out slips and handed them over.

  Quill paged through them one by one: the Golden Pillars Travel Agency wanted to book a party of fourteen at Christmastime. That was good. The rest of the calls were from villagers: Harvey Bozzel, Hemlock Falls’s best (and only) advertising executive; Nadine Peterson, owner and chief hairdresser at Hemlock Hall of Beauty; the Reverend Mr. Shuttleworth. Quill looked up in bewilderment. “Most of these are from the Chamber of Commerce members.”

  “They sure are,” Dina said fervently.

  Quill waited a moment, and then said, “Do you know what it’s about?”

  “Is it gossiping to tell you that everyone’s in a huge flap over the Welcome Dinner?” Dina adjusted her red-rimmed spectacles with her forefinger. “I know how you feel about gossiping. It’s number whatever on your Innkeeper’s Rules List.”

  “I’m looking at my watch,” Quill said, doing just that. “And the reason I’m looking at my watch is that it’s 9:45 in the morning and you hadn’t started to drive me bananas yet. I was starting to get worried.”

  “So it’s not gossiping.” Quill’s expression must have r eflected her feelings—well beyond exasperation at the moment and verging into annoyance—because Dina flung both her hands up and said, “It’s because I’m so contrite over blowing Meg in to the cops. I’m trying to do everything exactly by the book.”

  “Why is there a flap over the Welcome Dinner?” Quill smacked herself in the forehead with the palm of her hand. “Oh my gosh. Everyone wants an invitation.”

  “It would seem so.”

  “And there’s only what . . . thirty spaces?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “And twenty-four Chamber members, which doesn’t account for the spouses and significant others.”

  “Bingo.”

  “And the mayor’s using town funds to pay for it, so everybody . . .” Quill stopped herself. “Why is everyone calling me?”

  Dina took the pink slips out of her hand, flipped through to the bottom one, and gave it back to Quill.

  Congratulations! I have asked the mayor to appoint you host for the Welcome Dinner! You are now in charge of the guest list. Warm regards, B. LeVasque.

  “He told me to write it down exactly as he said,” Dina said. “And I stuck faithfully to rule number three, which is never insult a member of the public.”

  Quill crumpled the paper in her fist. “That little twerp!”

  “Harassment,” Dina said. “Clarissa said the man’s a master at it. And you know what else he said, just before he hung up on me? ‘Tell her that’s just the beginning.’”

  “He did, did he?”

  The Inn phone sounded its gentle chimes. Dina picked it up and said, “Good morning. This is the Inn at Hemlock Falls. How may I . . . oh, hi, Mrs. Doncaster. Quill? The Welcome Dinner?”

  Quill shook her head vehemently, like Jack: No! No!

  Dina rolled her eyes and shrugged. “She’s not available at the moment, but I’ll get her the message as soon as I can. Yes. No. No, ma’am, I have no idea what her cell phone number is. I’ll tell her, you bet. Good-bye.” She replaced the phone in the cradle.

  Quill leaned over the desk. “If you give out my cell phone number to anyone from the Chamber, I will be really, really mad.”

  “Right.”

  “And you have no idea where I am today. Got it?”

  “Got it. What are you going to do?”

  Quill sighed. “After I murder Bernard LeVasque or before? Before I murder Mr. LeVasque, I want you to put every single Chamber member’s name in a hat—and anyone else who calls about tickets, for that matter—and then I want you to pull thirty names out at random and make a list. That’s who’ll be on the list for the Welcome Dinner. And when people call about it, you tell them we made the list up by random selection and that the list will be up in the post office this afternoon.”

  “Wow,” Dina said. “I thought maybe you’d be, like, lost without those management courses at Cornell, but this is really good. Very executive.”

  “Thank you,” Quill said. “It comes from being a mother, I think. And now I am going to run and hide in the Tavern Lounge.”

  Quill walked down the short hallway to the Tavern Lounge.

  The Inn had started as a trapper’s rest stop back in the late seventeenth century. The trapper’s shack, owned by a lady of dubious reputation, was no more than twenty feet by twenty feet, and Quill had some compunction about the stone on the foundation engraved: EST 1668. But the original stone footers were, in fact, directly under the reception desk. In the two hundred and fifty years since the demise of the fur trade, the building had sprawled, becoming in turn, a farmhouse, a gentleman’s residence, an academy for wayward girls, and just after the Civil War, an actual way-side Inn with fourteen rooms and an outhouse.

  The Tavern Lounge had been a
dded on sometime in the late 1920s, when village burghers had set it up as a speak-easy. The floors were flagstone, and the long, splendidly polished mahogany bar was the pride of Quill’s modest brochure. French doors led out to the stone terrace, and the view of the falls was framed by Mike’s meticulous landscaping.

  The room was comfortably furnished with round tables and deeply cushioned chairs. The cobblestone fireplace at the north end was filled with late August roses and sprays of lavender well past its prime. The lounge didn’t officially open until noon, when it was legal to serve liquor, but the members of WARP found it a convenient place to gather, when they weren’t off touring the countryside in their rented stretch limos.

  The members of WARP had pushed two of the round tables together and sat in satisfied proximity to one another, wearing identical T-shirts. William Knight Collier glanced at his watch and said cheerfully, “Right on time.”

  William Knight Collier was always cheerful. Quill thought he must have been one of the few mortgage bankers to survive the notorious crash of 2008. Or maybe he hadn’t, and the resulting financial catastrophe had driven him mad.

  “Like ’em?” Big Buck Vanderhausen swept his meaty hand over his torso. “Got ’em delivered this morning.”

  The T-shirts weren’t exactly matching, Quill realized. They were all made of the same material, a navy blue knit that looked quite expensive. But the slogans across the chests were all different. Big Buck’s read: A Penny Saved Is a Penny Earned. Valerie Barbarossa’s said: Don’t Spend It All at Once. Anson Fredericks’s skinny chest trumpeted, Look After Your Pennies and the Pounds Will Take Care of Themselves. The only shirt at odds with all this clichéd advice was Collier’s, which was emblazoned, Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish.

  “Mr. Collier is our contrarian,” Valerie said. “And Mrs. Fredericks just stepped outside to make a phone call, so you can’t see her T-shirt, but it says, Save for a Rainy Day.” Her eyes twinkled. “You just look as if you might be interested. Please, sit down. We’re really anxious to hear what you can tell us about running a bed-and-breakfast.” She glanced over at Anson. “I don’t think we need to wait for Muriel, do you, Anson? Mrs. McHale has been good enough to start on time, and I think we should be just as courteous.”

  “No problem,” Anson said. “Go ahead, Quill.”

  Quill glanced at the clock over the bar. It was just on ten. “I’ll be happy to tell you what I know.” She drew a chair out and sat down facing them. “I know that you all value your privacy, and I don’t want to intrude. But what’s your interest in a bed-and-breakfast? As a place to visit, as a group? Or,” she hazarded, “as part of your investment club?”

  “Investment club,” Valerie mused. She tapped her lips reflectively. She was the type of grandmotherly lady Quill didn’t see much of anymore. Most of the older women who came to the Inn paid a lot of attention to their hair, and their jawlines, and dressed in trendy jeans and chunky jewelry. They usually started the day with a jog. (Meg called them Mrs. Fletchers.) Mrs. Barbarossa was happily round, with snow-white hair and small, wire-rimmed glasses over her bright blue eyes. She was very fond of rhinestone brooches, which she pinned on the lapels of her print dresses. This morning’s was especially awash with color, glittering blue stones surrounded by large fake pearls. She’d placed it just above the Don’t on her T-shirt. “I suppose we are, in a way.”

  “The reason I’m asking is that I’d like to tell you what you want to know about running a small inn, rather than what you don’t. Because,” Quill said, happily settling into the topic, “that’s really what a bed-and-breakfast is all about. Running a small, exquisite inn.”

  “Any money in it?” Big Buck asked. He was the only one of the group that looked really at home in a T-shirt. It stretched tightly over his considerable belly, and he wore a leather vest.

  “Not a fortune, by any means. But it can be a lot of fun for active retirees, for example. It helps a lot if you have another source of income.”

  For some reason, a wave of merriment swept the table.

  “I’d like to know how much it would cost to hire somebody like Bernard LeVasque to run the kitchen,” Collier said. He brushed at invisible lint on his sleeve with a finicky flick of his fingers.

  “Really?” Quill raised her eyebrows. “Good heavens. Well, I can’t think of a B and B operation that would cover the costs of a chef of his reputation.”

  “We asked him to create a brunch for us this morning,” Mrs. Barbarossa confided. “And it was absolutely splendid.”

  “You did?” Quill said. “That’s amaz—well, I mean . . .” She floundered for a second. “If you look at the costs involved with that, I’m sure you can see that having him around full time would involve . . . considerable expense.”

  “Hmmm,” Collier said. “I see your point.”

  Quill bit her lip. She would not, she absolutely would not stoop to asking how much the obnoxious little toad had charged these poor people. “Umm . . .” she began diffidently. “If you don’t mind my asking . . .”

  “Anson!” Muriel flung open the French doors from the terrace with a crash and covered the distance to the table in three huge leaps. She caught sight of Quill, shrieked in a polite way, and covered her mouth with her palm. “Swine flu!” she shouted through her palm. “This place is infested with swine flu!”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Mrs. Barbarossa snapped. “What in the world are you talking about?”

  Muriel’s washed-out blue eyes fixed on Quill with surprise. “You don’t look sick.”

  “I’m not sick,” Quill said tartly. “I’m perfectly fine.”

  Muriel pinched her nose shut, but she sat down (at some distance from Quill). “We went to Bonne Goutè this morning for a perfectly lovely breakfast and M. LeVasque was kind enough to let me know that there was . . . some kind of illness here.”

  “He did, did he?” Quill said grimly.

  “He was a perfect gentleman about it, I must say. But it worked on me, you know? And when the driver was bringing us back here, I was thinking about it and thinking about it, so I called M. LeVasque back.”

  “And he told you we had swine flu?” Quill realized she was on her feet with her fists clenched. Muriel scooted her chair back a few feet.

  “Not exactly. I called the cooking academy on my cell and left a message. I begged him, begged him to tell me what he knew, and I just now got the call back.”

  “What did he say?” Quill’s voice was deceptively mild. Her eyes rolled dramatically in her husband’s direction. “We have to all check out of here right now!”

  “Which is what M. LeVasque wants,” Quill said calmly. “Everyone in this inn is perfectly well, perfectly healthy, and absolutely fine. M. LeVasque is annoyed with me because one of his best chefs has decided to work in our kitchens instead of for that . . . that . . .” Quill bit her lip, aware that she was about to growl. “Anyway. This is a dirty business tactic, and I’m not going to stand for it.” She nodded to them. “Do you mind if we have our talk at another time? Perhaps this afternoon? We can give you a wonderful cream tea here in the lounge about four o’clock.”

  “Why, thank you!” Mrs. Barbarossa said. “May I ask where you’re going now?”

  “I’m going to find LeVasque and knock his block off.”

  8

  In the best kitchens, a calm temperament is all to the good.

  —From Brilliance in the Kitchen, B. LeVasque

  Quill was so mad she swept through the dining room without checking to see how the diners were getting on. She straight-armed the swinging doors and stamped into the kitchen, only vaguely aware that Dina was trotting along behind her, trying to get her attention.

  “Not now, Dina.” She nodded briefly to Clare, who was staring past her with a bemused expression, and raised her hand in greeting at Elizabeth Chou, whose mouth was open in alarm.

  Elizabeth was an exceptionally taciturn person. Quill came to a halt and demanded, “What!?”

  Clare poin
ted. Quill turned around. Dina was hanging on to a guy in a brown uniform who was courteously trying to shake her off. He had a pleasant face, thinning brown hair, and was probably in his early forties. Quill had never seen him before in her life. She didn’t recognize the uniform, either.

  Dina let go of his arm, and he raised his hand in a sort of salute. “Officer Dooley Banks, ma’am. Department of Environmental Conservation. Are you Sarah Q. McHale?”

  Officer Banks delivered this inquiry in the same tone of voice that state troopers ask for a driver’s license. For one cowardly moment, Quill thought about denying that she was, in fact, Sarah Q. McHale, but she said, “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m investigating a report of an illegal beach.”

  “An illegal beach,” Quill said, as if repeating the phrase would make it more comprehensible. “Yes. I see.”

  “I’ve been down to inspect the area in question, ma’am, and I have to ask you for the permits.”

  Quill nodded. “The permits.” Then, “Wait! Are you talking about our beach?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The one Mike and I put in by the river?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “A permit?” Quill said, with a sinking feeling. “We need a permit?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He hitched his belt up. “There is a substantial fine attached to interference with a navigable waterway.” He paused. “Ten thousand dollars a day, I’m afraid.”

  “Ten thous . . .” Quill swallowed hard.

  “We take our environmental concerns seriously in New York state, ma’am.”

  “Well, of course you do,” Quill said.

  “The only way you can navigate the Hemlock River is in an inner tube,” Clare said tartly. “This is ridiculous, officer.”

  “I went down it in a kayak, once,” Elizabeth offered.

  “And it’ll handle a canoe,” Dina said.

  “There you are,” Officer Banks said. “Navigable.” Quill put her hands on her hips. “Everybody please be quiet. Right now.”