She knew she loved the old building. It cupped the ground beneath it like a comforting hand. It held her.
She'd made a mess of the finances the first time around. Mostly because she hadn't listened to John. He'd tried to warn her.
She'd almost lost it. Now she'd made a mess of her relationship with her sister. She poked her toe moodily at a clump of day lilies. She'd ignored the signs these past few weeks. To be absolutely, ruthlessly fair, Meg had made three attempts to sit down and have a serious talk. Three that Quill could recall; there had certainly been more that she'd overlooked.
And as for Myles ... Quill's mind sheered away from Myles.
Max bounded out of the French doors leading to the
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Tavern Bar. His fur was wet from a hasty but thorough scrubbing. He raced into the gazebo, ears flying. Then he skidded to a halt and shook himself hard. Quill bent out of the way of the lemon-scented spray. Waving his tail in an invitation to go for a walk, Max barked twice.
"Not today, Max. No time." She looked at her watch. "Three-o'clock, Max. I have responsibilities, you know."
His ears flattened. He looked longingly at the woods beyond the Gorge. With a heavy sigh, he picked his way to the grass and rolled vigorously. Then he curled himself into a ball and put his nose on his paws, watching her.
Quill sat down beside him and stretched her legs out in the grass. "My personal relationships are all screwed up, Max."
He sat up in alarm. Quill scratched his ears. "There's a common element to each and every one of these messes, Max. The mess with Meg, with John, with My-les. Want to know what it is?"
Max panted. His breath was awful. He'd probably eaten a bit of whatever he'd rolled in.
"Me." She bit her lower lip hard, but it didn't help. She moved into the shelter of the gazebo and curled up into the rocking chair. She cried, drying her nose on the hem of her favorite challis skirt. And then she fell asleep.
She woke when a shadow fell across her face. She blinked. John stood over her, her face blotting out the sun. Max was a heavy weight on her lap. She had that fuzzy-headed thick feeling that meant she'd been hard asleep for a long time. She sat up a little dizzily and
66 Claudia Bishop
pushed Max to the floor. She looked at her watch. "Five-thirty!"
"So this is where you got to. Are you all right?" John sat in the chair opposite her, drawing it close enough so that Max, whose chest and belly lay across her ankles, could put his head on John's feet.
"Yes. Sure. I must have fallen asleep! How's Mr. Strickland?"
"I haven't seen him for an hour or so. But he was fine. Physically, at least. He seems to have a phobia about dogs. God knows why he tried to corral Max."
Quill twiddled her thumbs.
"Myles had a talk with him. I don't know how much good it did. Pointed out that Strickland couldn't have chosen a better way to get out of a ticket."
"Maybe we should let them stay at the Inn for free."
John raised his eyebrows slightly. "I thought one of our new operating principles was that I'd handle billing decisions. And this wouldn't be a good billing decision."
"Okay. We charge them, same as everyone else."
"They're already getting a reduced rate since we're not officially open."
His shoulder was just touching hers. Quill bent down and shoved Max off her feet. When she sat back, she'd moved just enough to avoid the physical contact. "I had a fight with Meg," she said presently. "Are things in as big a mess as I think? I mean, good old Marge, with the best of intentions, went ahead and convinced Horvath that he'd be making a mistake to invest without Meg here as chef."
"We'll have to see."
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"We can't sign the contract without telling Horvath she's leaving."
John made an impatient movement. "Of course not. I don't think she's actually leaving, Quill. As I understand it, she's going to live in New York during the week and commute here for the weekends."
"That's not what she said today."
"She was angry today. She'll come home, Quill."
"How long do you think it will last? She's making a home there, John. It'll be impossible not to."
"I think we should cross that bridge at the proper time. And you're avoiding the real issue, Quill."
The final phrase of his comment hung unspoken: "as usual." "So is that why I've screwed up everything? Because I keep avoiding the real issue?" Tears threatened again. Quill pinched her nose, hard.
"You haven't screwed up everything."
"Oh, no," Quill said bitterly. "My sister can't, won't, didn't tell me she was getting married and moving to New York. And as for Myles—" She stopped herself. John had left his job as business manager for a lot of reasons, but the most important one had been Quill herself. She wasn't about to talk about her screwed-up relationships with someone with whom she had a screwed-up relationship. "Never mind."
"What do you want, Quill?"
"What do you mean?"
"Exactly what I asked. What do you want? You want the Inn back? We're working that out. You want your sister's love and respect? Do you want me in your life? Or Myles? Do you want to have the time to paint? You need to work all those things out. But you can't if you
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don't know what you want. Quill, look at me." He put gentle hands on her shoulders. Whatever he saw in her face made him take his hands away.
"Okay," he said after a long moment.
Quill rose to her feet and brushed her skirt off. "I'm going to wash my face." Then, politely: "Are you going to be around for dinner?"
"Possibly. I came out to find Max. I need the ID number off his collar to pick up his rabies certificate from the vet. And Strickland wants a blood sample to see if Max has any kind of infectious diseases."
Max knew the word vet. He stood up and wandered casually to the edge of the Gorge.
Quill made a sound like "phuut!" "Max doesn't have any diseases. He's as healthy as a horse. Aren't you, Maxie?"
Max barked at the sound of his name. He was, Quill admitted, possibly the world's ugliest dog. His bath had removed the stinky goo, but nothing could improve his coat, predominantly a mixture of ocher and dull gray. He was disheveled and ungainly, with floppy ears. He almost always smelled of something awful. Quill regarded him affectionately. Theirs was one relationship she hadn't screwed up. There was nothing like the love between a woman and her dog. "Bite 'em like you sees 'em, Max," she muttered. "Yay for you."
"If you're going to encourage him, you'd better keep multiple copies of the rabies certificate handy. Strickland insisted on filing a dog-bite report. Most people would. And he's got a point, Quill. He wants to be sure the inoculation's current."
"He could take my word for it," Quill muttered.
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"Don't you dare laugh. I didn't have any idea Max would go for him like that, John. Strickland was just so... so..."
"Offensive? Obnoxious? Oleaginous?"
"Orful. As in"—she tried on a Cockney accent— " 'Ain't it orful, judge?' Okay, we'll get his ID number. I'll try and hold him while you read the tag. Come here, Max." She patted her thigh.
Max grinned and danced backward.
"Uh-oh," Quill muttered. "It was the V-E-T word. That right on top of the B-A-T-H is going to make him impossible to catch."
As if on cue, Max dashed over the edge of the Gorge and was gone.
John swore. Quill groaned. She called "Max" a couple of times, then "walk?" in a sprightly way and "kibbles" before she gave in to the inevitable and plunged after John to bring the damn dog home.
It was not an afternoon for tramping through the woods. For one thing, she had her sandals on. For another, it was getting hot. They'd been lucky, this August. Late summer in upstate New York was almost always a stinker, hot and humid. But the unusual rains had kept things cool.
Until today, of course. John moved lithely a
head of her, somehow avoiding the brambles, the sticker burrs, and the roots, which reached for her big toe one too many times.
"I curse your Indian ancestors," she shouted after him. "Slow up a little, John!"
She caught a flash of his smile. She hollered "Max!"
70 Claudia Bishop
more to relieve her annoyance than any expectation of having the dog bounce home.
Max answered with a series of sharp, excited yips. Quill grumbled to herself. She knew that bark. He'd found something wonderful to roll in' again. And, dammit, that meant another bath.
She slipped down the gravelly slope to the shore of the Hemlock River. The Inn loomed above, casting a shadow on the ground. She saw her dog, dancing in excited circles at the water's edge. And John.
She knew something was very wrong by the set of John's shoulders. Even before she saw the body.
CHAPTER 4
"Max didn't roll on the corpse," Andy assured Quill.
"Do you know for certain? How stupid. Of course you do. You saw the body." Quill ran her hands through her hair. "He checked in three hours ago, Andy! How could someone have killed him in three hours! No one knew he was here!"
"We don't know that anyone did kill him, Quill."
They were standing at the river's edge, waiting for Myles and the forensic team from Syracuse. After Quill had raced back to the Inn to call the police and the ambulance, she and Meg had roped off the area around the corpse. Max, in highly vocal dismay, was locked in the garden shed. Doreen and Dina were up on the lip of the Gorge, preventing curiosity-seekers from scrambling down the slope to the scene.
They were all used to the routine after—how many
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cases was it now? Seven. That was it. Seven cases of murder. And this was the eighth. Quill didn't need Andy to hedge about whether this was murder. Someone had killed Neil Strickland. Someone had laid the back of his head open with either an ax or a machete. Quill wasn't sure where the murderer had found a machete in upstate New York. Which might be a clue, if it was a machete and not something else with a brutally sharp edge.
"Quill?" Andy looked at her, his brow furrowed. "Are you all right? You look a little green around the gills."
"She's going to be sick," Meg said briskly. "She always looks like that just before she's going to york."
"You don't look so hot yourself," Quill retorted.
"You're shivering," Andy said.
"It's cold down here!"
"It's eighty-five in the shade," Andy said kindly. "Sit down, Quill. Put your head down."
"I know, I know." Quill sat down and put her head between her knees. She felt a little better. That was the trouble with Andy Bishop. If Meg was going to run off and marry a doctor, why couldn't it be a nice rude orthopedic surgeon or an icy pathologist? Those guys she could hate. Nobody could hate a short, compact blond internist with a specialty in pediatrics, a heck of a tennis serve, and a kindly, if distant, manner.
Meg sat down next to her and put her arm around her shoulders. "How's your stomach?"
"Okay."
"And what are you mentally rambling on about?"
"Rambling on about?"
"Yes, Quill. It's how you handle stress. You go all
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vague and spend a whole lot of time thinking about irrelevancies."
Quill was too tired to squabble. And she was tired of quarreling with Meg. "I was thinking about how nice Andy is."
"Yep. He is. A genuine sweet patootie."
"Sexy, too," Quill observed.
"Hands off my man," Meg said lightly. "Oops! Here's Myles."
Myles listened quietly to both John's and Quill's account of finding the body, then sent them back up the hill to the Inn to his deputy, Davey Kiddermeister. "He's set up in the bar. Give him as complete a statement as possible," he said. "You know the drill by now." He bent over and looked into Quill's face. "Are you all right?"
"Fine."
"Get something from Andy to calm your stomach. How long has it been since you've eaten?"
"Really, Myles, I'm perfectly fine."
"I'll want to speak to you before I leave."
Quill nodded, feeling as she always did around Myles: a little helpless; hemmed in; fixed in place. "I'll wait," she said. Which was the biggest problem. She was always waiting for Myles, putting the rest of her life on hold. And there was always something else, urgent, compelling, necessary, that he'd been called away to do.
"But you don't need to wait!" he'd exploded, when she'd explained, weeks ago, that she couldn't spend her life on hold. "Get on with your work, Quill. Just let me be there when I can."
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Quill sighed shakily, and followed John up the hill to the Inn.
The short, arduous climb was enough to clear her head. By the time she entered the Inn through the Tavern Bar, she'd shoved the shock and confusion aside. Benny, Mort, and Ed were slumped at the long mahogany sweep of the counter, in close conversation with Nate the bartender.
Davey Kiddermeister sat stiffly at one of the larger tables, his ears pink with excitement. Davey was twenty-eight. His law enforcement career was hampered by the fact that he had a smooth, cherubic face, hair so blond it was almost albino white, and a blush that deepened in direct proportion to the emotional intensity the job demanded. Davey blushed pink when he stopped speeders and crimson when he had to arrest somebody. Right now he looked like he'd spent three days in the Arizona desert without a hat.
Quill sat down at Davey's table. John stood at her back.
"Sorry, Mr. Raintree. Have to interview the eyewitnesses separately. Could you sit somewhere else?"
John went to the bar and sat down with the three scriptwriters. Judging from the ashtray in front of Mort, they'd been sitting there since they tried to check in at three o'clock.
Quill gave a succinct summary of discovering Mort's body, then added, "We weren't eyewitnesses, Davey. We just found the body. Actually, we found Max. Max was the one who found the body."
"That dog's getting pretty good at it," Davey said, referring to a case Quill and Meg had investigated sev-
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75
eral months ago. "I was just sitting here, thinking that Max would be a big plus at the sheriff's department. I could, like, take him out and he could find more of 'em for me. Save you the trouble."
"It'd work if we were in Bosnia," Quill said gravely. "But you might end up wasting a lot of time around here."
"Thing is, I like Max," Davey said simply. "And if you get Howie Murchison to represent Max, I'll bet old Howie could cut a deal. Max wouldn't have to be put down."
Quill stared at him, openmouthed. "Stop," she said.
Davey stopped.
"What in the world are you talking about?"
"Well, the guys from L.A. think that Max did it. Killed Strickland, I mean. They called Flick Peterson down to the dogcatcher's offices and he came and took Max to the pound. They're going to get a court order to have Max put down, which is why," Davey concluded, with an air of long-suffering patience, "I told you that Max would be better off with me."
"David!" Quill's shout quieted the bar. She clapped her hand over her mouth and muttered, "Idiot-idiot-idiot."
"Pardon?" Davey said.
Quill took a deep breath. "Look, Deputy. A sharp-edged instrument killed Neil Strickland. An ax or a machete. There isn't a single dog bite on that body. I looked. At all of it"
"Strickland was terrified of dogs. They figure Max went for his throat when he went out for a walk and
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that he was so scared he fell and sliced his head on a rock."
"Strickland went for a walk?"
"After Max attacked him the first time." Davey licked his thumb and paged through his notebook. "Says right here. Statement by Benny Carmody, taken by me, David Kiddermeister, deputy, village of Hemlock Falls, Tompki
ns County, this date. Benny says: 'Neil was really shaken up. You could tell he had a real problem with dogs. We had a couple of pops in the bar. Didn't help Neil's jitters at all. Then he made a couple calls on his cell phone, but he just couldn't settle down to work. He went upstairs and changed into workout clothes, then he came back and said he was going out for a run. Said only thing worth seeing other than the damn redhead that ran the damn place'—that's you, Quill, sorry, but it's written right here, just like that—'was the damn waterfall. The last I saw Neil, it was about a quarter to four. He headed out the French doors to the terrace.' That's the full statement, Quill."
"Where were the others?'
"The other what? You mean Mort, Ben, and Ed?"
The Three Stooges, Quill thought, but she held her tongue.
"Drinking in the bar. Well, Mort went up to his room, but came back after about an hour. Said his stomach wasn't too good." The deputy leaned forward. "Nate says the guy put away three gin martinis in less than ten minutes. My stomach wouldn't be too good either."
Well, Deputy," Quill said icily, "I was out by the Falls in the gazebo until five-thirty, and I didn't see a
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thing. I would have heard a terrorized scream for sure. Not to mention the sound of a hundred-and-sixty-pound man falling down the slope to the river."
Davey paged through the notebook. He found his place and moved his lips, reading. He looked up and said, "You were asleep."
"I would have heard Max attack Strickland," Quill said with asperity.
"According to the eyewitnesses of the first attack ..." Davey started to flip through his book.
Quill grabbed his hand. "Just tell me," she said tightly.
"Max just jumped the guy. Didn't bark or growl or nothing. Mort said the dog actually went after him in the foyer."
"Are you sure that Mort can tell the difference between a dog and a pink elephant? I was there in the foyer, David. Max didn't go near Mort. As a matter of fact, Mort and his pal Ed beat feet the minute their boss started screaming."
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