Fete Worse Than Death (9781101595138)

by Bishop, Claudia

  Actually, Quill thought as she got into her car, except for the fact that she couldn’t con anybody else onto her committees, things looked pretty good right now. The full moon floated overhead, seeming to bob gently in the soft dark sky. The air was filled with the scent of late roses. Myles was off on another assignment, but they’d both known when they’d married that his job took him away from her and Jack. She accepted that because she loved him. Not only that, but their son was a joy, a miracle in a world too often short of miracles.

  She drove up the long circular driveway to the Inn.

  The gracious old building sat on five acres on the lip of Hemlock Gorge. Carriage lamps gleamed at the corners of each of the three stories, washing the mellow stone walls with yellow light. Beyond the circle of the main driveway, the rush of the falls was familiar and unutterably soothing. Her collection of Oriental lilies was just starting to add their perfume to the air, mingling with the smell of freshly cut grass.

  On impulse, she parked in front, rather than going around to her usual spot in the back, and used her key card to go in through the big oak door at the entrance.

  The night-lights were on in the foyer. The mahogany reception desk sat at the right. The please ring for assistance sign stood on the polished desktop. The two hip-high Oriental vases that flanked it were empty; Mike the groundskeeper would fill them with late-blooming dahlias in the morning. To the left, the beige leather couch faced the cobblestone fireplace. She paused on her way upstairs and ran her hands over the back. It was looking worn, and they had the money to replace it, but there was a comfort in old things, and she’d resisted that small change in her life.

  When she and Myles had married, she’d moved into Myles’s house, which sat on a tributary of the Hemlock River, some three miles away and out of the small suite she’d lived in on the third floor. After Jack was born, they had all decided—Myles, Quill, her sister Meg, and their much-loved housekeeper Doreen Muxworthy-Stoker—that when Myles was away, Quill and Jack would come back to the Inn and stay.

  Quill barely admitted to herself, much less to her family, how important her rooms upstairs were to her. She had to make some adjustments—her large walk-in closet, which had a window, was converted to a bedroom for Jack. Doreen moved into the connecting room next door to care for him. And, of course, her sister Meg had the suite opposite her own.

  She decided against using the elevator and walked upstairs.

  Quill had just re-carpeted the third floor in a navy-and-celery-green patterned plush that shouldn’t have worked but did. The new-carpet smell was faint but persistent as she walked down the hallway. Her sister’s door opened just as she put the key card into her lock.

  “Hey,” Meg said.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  Meg was small, a whole head shorter than Quill, and dark-haired where her own was perilously close to carrot-colored. Myles, in his tender moments, assured her it was red-gold. Meg was also the best gourmet chef in the northeastern United States, and the Inn had the satisfied diners to prove it.

  “How was the committee meeting?”

  Quill rolled her eyes. “Dire. Contentious. Awful. How was your date with Justin?”

  “Fine.”

  “Just fine?”

  “Nice. But then Justin’s nice.”

  “Yes, he is,” Quill said readily. Some part of her hoped her gypsy sister would decide to settle down with Justin; the more rational part of her brain knew this was unlikely to happen. Justin Alvarez was the junior partner in Howie Murchison’s law firm and a little too steady for her volatile sister. On the other hand, he was a younger, cuter version of the actor Benjamin Bratt, and for Meg, who was always attracted to lawlessness, his gorgeousness went a long way toward mitigating his excellent character.

  Quill glanced at her watch. It was well after one o’clock. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

  “Bjarne’s got the breakfast shift tomorrow. I’ve got a light day in the kitchen. Clare Sparrow’s coming over in the morning to finish up some work for the fete.”

  “The fete! Aha!” Quill clapped her hand over her mouth. If she woke Jack up, she’d never get to bed herself. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “How’s about if you give me a hand with the Furry Friends committee?”

  “How’s about if I smack myself silly with a sauté pan?” Meg said amiably.

  “Then maybe you wouldn’t mind helping out with the booth assignments.”

  Meg patted her sister on the back in a kindly way. “Everybody in town knows that Dolly Jean Attenborough is gunning for Esther West and the ladies at the Craft Guild. I’d just as soon not be witness to the start of a land war.”

  “I’ll make you a deal…”

  “Forget it. I’ve already exposed myself to unfriendly fire by agreeing to select the judges for the food competition. This is me saying good night, Quill.” She slipped back inside her room before Quill could think of a bribe big enough to get her sister to change her mind. She made a face at the closed door and let herself in to her suite.

  ~

  Moonlight flooded in from the French doors to the balcony, bathing her small living room in silvery light. She put her tote on the kitchen counter. The door to Jack’s bedroom was ajar. She edged it open and looked in on her sleeping son. Here, the moonlight touched his face and hair. He slept hard, the way that little boys do, his mouth slightly open. Max the dog stirred a bit at the foot of the bed. Quill rumpled his ears and hushed him.

  In the living room, the connecting door to Doreen’s room was also ajar, and the sounds of Doreen’s snores were a soft purr. She closed the door, drew the drapes in the living room, and prepared herself for bed.

  Fine, she thought as she drifted off to sleep. If she couldn’t get anyone to take over a couple of her committees, she could at least take a solemn oath not to get on any more. Marge thought she was a pushover, did she? Ha.

  2

  Esther West was sitting on the worn leather couch in front of the cobblestone fireplace in the foyer when Quill came downstairs at nine-thirty the next morning.

  It had been a wonderful day so far. The weather was warm and sunny. She’d eaten a leisurely breakfast with Jack. She’d checked in with the head of the housekeeping staff and Mike the groundskeeper. The only thing left to do as far as Inn management was concerned was to return yesterday’s phone calls left for her by the Inn’s excellent receptionist, Dina Muir. She now had an hour and a half to do that, before her first committee meeting. The Chamber of Commerce meeting was at eleven and the Furry Friends committee meeting was in the afternoon. Then the day would be hers and Jack’s. He would be starting preschool in a couple of weeks. Each day she could spend with him was a gift.

  Esther was an old acquaintance, and she greeted her happily.

  Esther ran the local crafts store, which she called, in her direct and unambiguous way, Esther West’s Kountry Krafts! For many years, it had been West’s Best Dress Shoppe! but the rise of the nearby Pyramid Mall in Syracuse and the new Walmart out on Route 15 near Ithaca had driven even her most loyal customers away. With practical good sense, she’d taken advantage of her former customers’ love of knitting, quilting, beading, and sketching and opened a craft store.

  Esther was a great believer in advertising her own wares. This morning she wore a patchwork quilt skirt, handmade beaded earrings, and a quantity of beaded bracelets. She clutched a large, thin package wrapped in brown paper.

  She got up as soon as she saw Quill coming downstairs. “I’m so glad I caught you. I just happened to be passing by and I thought I’d drop off those sketch pads you ordered. I brought a nice new package of charcoal pencils, too. Don’t worry about paying me for them, dear. I consider them a contribution to the arts.” She dropped the package onto the couch and clutched Quill’s arm companionably. “I know how busy you are with your dear little boy and your many, many duties at the Inn, but I was hoping you had a few minutes to spare to consid—”

  “Ha!” Dolly Jean Attenbo
rough rolled through the big front door with the determination of Sherman advancing on Atlanta. “I thought I’d find you here, Esther West. It’s just like you to go sneaking around behind my back.” She put her hands on her hips. “Sarah Quilliam, if you’ve gone over to the Craft Guild, all I have to say to you is shame, shame, shame!”

  Esther retained her grip on Quill’s arm and wagged her finger in Dolly Jean’s face. “I cannot believe that you are addressing one of the finest artists of our generation in that rude way, Dolly Jean!”

  The two women glared at each other. Esther, president of the Craft Guild, was tall and thin and reminded Quill of a great blue heron. Dolly Jean, chairwoman of the Association of Crafty Ladies, was short and round. With her fluffy white hair and hand-crocheted skirts, she looked a bit like a doily.

  Quill had been an innkeeper for more than fifteen years, and she had a highly developed sense of survival. She looked at her watch and exclaimed in dismay, “My goodness, is that the time?! How nice to see you, Dolly Jean. And, Esther, thank you so much for bringing the art supplies by. I’ll drop by the store later to pick up the invoice, shall I? Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I have a ton of…”

  Dolly Jean grabbed her other arm. “Just one minute. I have been sent here by the Crafty Ladies to offer you an honorary membership on our board of directors.” She shot Esther a triumphant glance. “The membership comes with a modest stipend, naturally.”

  “Quill was just about to agree to become the honorary chair of the Ladies Craft Guild Auxiliary,” Esther snapped. “Which also carries a stipend.” She thought a moment. “A stipend much less modest than yours.”

  Quill gently disengaged herself from both women. “Now, look,” she said kindly. “You both realize that as a judge on the arts committee, I’m forbidden to associate with any artists who’ve entered their work in the fete. As much as I would love to be on the boards, I just can’t. The rules simply won’t allow it.”

  “Damn,” Esther said.

  Dolly Jean bit her lower lip and said crossly, “That’s not it. It’s because you’re one of those big-city artists who sneers at the crafts of the common people.”

  “I am not!” Quill said, astonished.

  “Huh!” Esther said. “For once in your life, you’re making sense, Dolly Jean.”

  Quill clutched at her wildly springy hair. “That is absolutely not true!”

  ~

  Twenty minutes later, Quill stamped into the kitchen and sat down in the rocker by the fireplace in a huff.

  Nobody paid any attention to her.

  Meg’s two sous chefs, Bjarne Bjarnsen and Elizabeth Chou, were finishing up the breakfast service. Meg and Clare Sparrow were hunched over the birch-topped prep table in a sea of pens and yellow pads. Dina Muir, the Inn’s receptionist, perched on a stool in front of the twelve-burner stove. Mellow sunshine flooded the large, comfortable room. Bunches of fresh herbs hung from the wooden beams that crossed the high ceiling and the air was filled with the scent of drying lavender, basil, oregano, and thyme.

  Quill addressed the indifferent air. “I cannot believe I did this. I just joined another committee.”

  “This is good,” Bjarne said. “As long as I, myself, do not have to join any committees, I approve of others joining committees.”

  “I hate committees,” Quill said. “But it was the only way out. I am now director of the Associated Crafts Association of Hemlock Falls. I did not,” she continued darkly, “choose the title. But at least the Crafty Ladies and Craft Guild are in temporary alliance…nobody cares about this, do they?”

  “You’re a pushover, Sis. Always have been. Always will be.” Meg’s small, slender body was hunched over her notebook with the ferocity of a mamma bear defending her young. Clare, who was equally slender but much taller, leaned back against the counter, her arms folded defiantly. The tension between the two would make a marvelous line drawing. Quill decided to stop beating herself up for getting onto yet another committee and get the shapes onto paper before the two either subsided into amicable squabbling or erupted into open warfare.

  Dina Muir was at Clare and Meg’s meeting mostly because she didn’t have anything better to do before graduate school resumed in three weeks. She was texting somebody with indignant jabs of her forefinger, ignoring all three of them. Quill had allowed her to forward phone calls to reception to her cell phone, and it’d given her the freedom of the Inn.

  “I give!” Meg said. “I’ll judge the flipping Jell-O architecture contest. But I am not, not judging pies. No way, no how. No, ma’am.”

  “Why not?” Clare asked suspiciously.

  “For one thing,” Meg said, “you are a far, far better pastry chef than I will ever be.”

  Although this was true, everyone in the kitchen knew that Meg would rather dye her hair blue than admit it.

  Clare looked at her best friend and chief competitor with a skeptical eye. “There’s something going on here I don’t understand,” she said. “This is a simple job, assigning judges to the food competition. We’ve been at it an hour or more. And it’s turning out to be not so simple. What kind of baloney are you trying to pull on me now?”

  “You are the empress of pastry, Clare,” Meg added. “I’ve always said so, haven’t I, Quill?”

  Quill didn’t bother to answer. If nobody cared that she was hostage to yet another committee, she wasn’t going to jump into this. Clare and Meg could work it out themselves.

  Clare made a sound like “phooey.”

  Meg flung her hands apart. “I concede your preeminence in pastry. You should be flattered! You should judge the Homemade Pies division at the fete. Besides, there’s nothing sneaky or underhanded about my preference for judging the Jell-O architecture contest. Let’s face it. Buildings made out of food are cool.”

  Clare squeezed her arms closer to her chest. “First of all, neither one of us thinks Jell-O is food. Food is a perfectly balanced bouillabaisse. Or individually crafted tartes au chocolat. Jell-O’s processed by machines that kick out tons and tons and tons of the stuff every minute. Second, food is something you eat, not something you make bricks with. We’re both master chefs and the food part of this fete is an opportunity to get a little PR for the both of us. You’re telling me you’re happy to get publicity for judging the quality of a town hall made out of horse’s hooves flavored with lime?”

  Dina looked up uneasily. “You’re kidding me, right? Not horse’s hooves.” She flipped her phone shut and shoved it into her skirt pocket. “Ick.”

  “Cow hooves, anyway,” Meg said carelessly. “Whatever. Don’t be such a wimp, Dina.”

  Dina resettled her red-rimmed spectacles farther up her nose. “I’m not a wimp, Meg, thank you very much. I find it perfectly disgusting that people eat the boiled hooves of animals. Anyone would. And to answer your question, Clare, Meg doesn’t want to judge the fete pie contest because it’s a suicide mission. Think about it. Every home cook in Tompkins County—and we’re still very much a rural economy here no matter what the Chamber of Commerce thinks, so there’s a ton of farmwives—takes pride in her piecrust. You really want to be the one who picks Mrs. Kiddermeister’s pie over Marge Schmidt-Peterson’s? Or even worse, Carol Ann Spinoza over Adela Henry, the mayor’s wife?”

  Clare paled. “Carol Ann Spinoza enters the Homemade Pies competition?”

  “Every year,” Dina said.

  There was a moment of respectful silence. Carol Ann Spinoza was a persistent, annoying dermatitis on the village skin. When she’d been tax collector, she’d risen to the status of a lethal disease. As animal control officer, she’d posted a wanted poster in the Hemlock Falls post office that featured Quill’s dog Max as Public Enemy Number One. For a brief, horrible couple of weeks, she’d been a food inspector for the State of New York. There was a lot more that was horrible about Carol Ann, including her deceptively cheerful blond good looks, but Quill didn’t want to think about it.

  “She’s unemployed at the moment,” D
ina said darkly. “And you know Carol Ann. She’s power mad and competitive. She’s probably Googled prizewinning pie recipes from the entire planet and is going to enter every single one of them. It’s going to be one heck of a contest this year.”

  Clare tossed her pencil onto the prep table, folded her hands over her middle, and looked at the floor.

  A minute passed, then two.

  Meg couldn’t stand the silence. She leaped to her feet and yelled, “Gaah! What the heck are you doing?”

  Clare smiled serenely at her. “You just can’t stand a peaceful meditative silence, can you, Meg? I’ll tell you what I’m doing. I’m centering.”

  “Centering,” Meg said flatly.

  “Some sort of yoga thing, I expect. Or maybe Zen.” Dina swung her forefinger into the air for emphasis. “You’re going to need more than yoga to get you through the homemade pies. Vodka, maybe. Lots of it. That’ll help.”

  Clare settled back onto the stool. “How did you guys talk me into this, anyway? I get that the fete is an annual event…”

  “A tradition, really,” Quill said.

  “Right. So for the past umpty-ump years…”

  “Fifteen for the Inn,” Quill said. “Ever since Meg and I bought it. The fete itself—gosh, probably since the War of 1812. Adela Henry’s been running it for years. She’s been so successful that the last five years or so we’ve had thirty thousand people show up for fete week. It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it.”

  “Whatever. I’m from New York, remember? Crowds don’t bother me.” Clare, that rarest of birds, an unflappable chef, was showing signs of agitation. “I’m new here, right? I’ve only been director at the culinary academy for a year. So of course I want to do my bit. You’re Food Booth Liaison, Quill, right?”

  “Yes. I’m judging the art show, too. And I’m in charge of the Furry Friends booths.” Quill sighed and clutched her hair. “Which is another huge mistake. You think people get passionate about their homemade pies? You should see how they feel about their pets.”