Marinade for Murder

by Claudia Bishop

  "Is Meg backing out?"

  "No." Quill tried to bring her knees up to her chest, but the cast wouldn't fit on the chair edge. Besides, it hurt. "But I have a guess about what will happen."

  "And?"

  "I think she'll put the wedding off. It didn't seem all that well planned anyway," she added plaintively. "Where were they planning to have it? The Tompkins County courthouse? With good old Bernie Bristol presiding?"

  "They were planning to have it here, on the terrace. With Dookie officiating."

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  "She hadn't invited any of her friends. She hadn't even invited me!"

  "They wanted an impromptu ceremony. They were going to call their friends a few days before and ask them to drop by. Both of them have been married before."

  "Andy has? I didn't know that."

  "An early marriage, in med school. He and his wife were both residents when they decided to call it quits." He laughed a little. "Now, where were you?"

  "Where? Oh! She'll put it off."

  "How will Andy—never mind. You're undoubtedly right, Quill. But it doesn't seem quite fair, does it?"

  "Fair to whom? It's marriage that isn't fair, John. Any sort of law that tries to control the relationships between people is screwy." She could feel his eyes on her in the dark. She cleared her throat. "Don't you think so?"

  "Maybe," he said.

  "You think that's an unsophisticated way to look at it. But let's take all the property-owning issues out of it. What's left?"

  She could feel him shrug in the dark. "I suppose it depends on your point of view."

  She tugged at her hair. He rose and went to the balcony's edge. The moon sailed high and white in the dark. "I'd better turn in." She could almost feel him smile. "You've started to pull your hair."

  She stopped tugging. "What will happen if we"— she hesitated, searching for the right words—"just remain friends?"

  "Is that all you want from a man? Friendship? It's

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  not all I want from a woman. What will happen will happen to both of us. You'll be lonely. You'll find someone to be with. And you'll stop being lonely. So will I."

  "Ha," Quill said in a meditative way. She felt vaguely insulted.

  "The lovelorn suitor is for Victorian romances, Quill." John's voice was matter-of-fact. "Adult love, good love, is all about exchanges. Communication. Being together every day. It's not about misunderstandings. The magic in love isn't the unspoken or the unknown. It's the dailiness of it." He dropped a kiss on the top of her head, as fraternal as Meg's had been sisterly.

  She sat for a long time on the balcony, picking at the knot of this most terrible of questions: whom do I love and why? The moon floated in the sky like a silver buoy. Something rustled in the bushes. She yawned, and went to bed.

  She dreamed she was back in the gym, and that the Gravitron landed on her foot and made it hurt like anything.

  She woke up and stared at the ceiling, collecting her scattered wits. She wiggled her toes. Her foot felt like a hot balloon spiked with needles. She'd been doing effortless chin-ups in her dream, the Gravitron pulling her lightly up, lightly down, and the Gravitron was somehow mixed up with John, and then the tread slammed upward, just missing her chin, and for some reason this all related to the pain in her broken toes.

  She sighed and got out of bed. Max gave a questioning whine and Quill bent and patted him. She

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  straightened up with a groan. Andy had suggested a painkiller, and she'd turned it down. He'd also suggested cold packs to keep the swelling down, and she'd forgotten all about it. But who could have imagined toes would hurt like the very devil? Quill hobbled to the bathroom and snapped on the light. She rummaged through the medicine cabinet. There was all that herbal stuff from Sherri Kerri's gym. Any full-blooded, worth-its-salt herbal fitness program ought to have an herbal remedy for pain; there were the usual muscle aches from exercise, not to mention all those people who fell off treadmills ...

  And the people who got smacked with the Gravitron.

  Quill sat down on the bathtub, heart pounding. She ran through a mental list.

  1. Neil Strickland was dressed for a workout

  when he left the Inn at quarter to four.

  2. Mort Carmody had followed Neil.

  3. Max had followed Mort; Mort's denim shirt

  was in his jaws on the day of the murder.

  4. Mort had died from an unknown agent that

  had precipitated a heart attack. Sherri had such an agent in her pharmacopoeia. Sherri could have made a good guess about Mort's physical status, too. That gray-faced, blue-lipped look was a notorious indicator of heart trouble.

  5. Twenty-four hours after Strickland's death,

  Mort was in business with Sherri Kerri—

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  and she'd claimed that she never wanted a partner the first time Quill met her.

  6. Mort had been blackmailing Sherri over

  Neil's death.

  7. Sherri was at the Inn when Mort died. She

  could have slipped the Vita Life into the orange juice.

  8. Sherri Kerri was the perp. There was the

  matter of Sherri's knowledge about the resort. She had known, why else would she make an offer for the Inn? Who'd told her? Mort? Quill decided this didn't matter, and tossed it aside.

  "Wow," Quill said to her image in the mirror. "Wow." But why attack Ed? And Benny? Well, no one had attacked Benny. Yet. Was Meg right? Was this truly a murder marinade? Could the attack on Ed—and Benny's fear—be due to something else? Someone else?

  Quill thought about Horvath. This deal was important to the Finns, that was clear. And with the resort going up, there was going to be a lot of money floating around Hemlock Falls. With Mort dead, was Horvath taking advantage of the aura of violence and dispatching Finn-insulting scriptwriters for God and country?

  Quill swallowed two ibuprofen tablets and hobbled into her living room. She sat down on the couch and switched on the lamp. Max pattered in from the bedroom and went to the front door. He whined and pawed it.

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  239

  "No, Max."

  He barked.

  "Stop it, Max!" The knock was faint, so faint that Quill couldn't believe she heard it. "John?" she asked. She went to the door and opened it.

  "Hello!" Sherri said cheerfully. "I saw your light. Glad you were up."

  Quill didn't really believe you could see madness. You could see the effects of madness—the drugs people took to stave off voices, the emotions stirred by manic surges of energy—but your average, everyday madwoman had a face no different from those of her saner sisters.

  And Sherri looked just fine.

  Quill backed toward the phone. Tompkins County didn't have 911. But John's extension was just three digits. If she could get to the phone. "It's two o'clock in the morning, Sherri."

  "I know it's two o'clock in the morning." She wore a sleeveless T-shirt. Quill could see the muscles under the tanned skin. "Two o'clock in the morning seems to be the only time you aren't surrounded by people. Hello, Max!"

  Max wagged his tail. Sherri scratched under his chin. So much for dog love. "You want to watch, Max?"

  Quill's skin crawled. She leaned against the wall, and fell into the umbrella stand. Sherri extended her arms and flexed her muscles.

  "What's going on here?" Quill said firmly. If she could get to the kitchen, she could get to a knife.

  "You-u-u sa-a-a-w meee!" Sherri sang. "Na-a-aughty!"

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  "Saw you what?" Ed's red ponytail, she thought. The same color as my hair. Sherri was trying to kill me, not Ed.

  "Kissing Mr. Bland."

  "Mr. Bland? The man you were kissing in the gym was Mr. Bland? I don't care if you want to kiss Mr. Bland," Quill expostulated. "You can kiss lawyers all you want."

  The red mi
nivan. Sherri was trying to kill me.

  "Kissing Daddy."

  The room turned icy.

  "Everett Bland? Everett Eland's your father?" Quill whispered. Her heart ached with pity.

  "Kissing Daddy."

  And then she came for her.

  CHAPTER 14

  "You had to hit Max with an umbrella to make him jump Sherri?" Meg said. "Thank God you had an umbrella! More coffee? Don't move! I'll pour it for you."

  Quill adjusted her foot so the sun didn't fall directly on the cast. They were sitting on the flagstone terrace. Everyone had fussed over her in an extremely embarrassing way. "If I hadn't hit him with the umbrella, he would have watched Sherri strangle me," Quill rasped. She rubbed her throat.

  "Have some more honey lemonade." Meg poured from the pitcher on the table and added ice. She frowned over the mint leaves in the chilled bowl and tossed them aside. "The leaves are wilting. They've been in the sun too long."

  "The taste is still okay, though."

  "Stop talking, Quill. It makes my eyes water. Andy

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  says there's damage to your larynx, but it shouldn't be permanent. He hopes."

  "What about Sherri? How permanent is her damage?"

  "God, Quill. They've got the death penalty in New York now."

  "It's Bland they should lock up."

  "Stop talking. I'll do the talking. Yes, they should lock Bland up. But they can't. Sherri won't bring charges."

  Quill gurgled.

  "Bland denies everything." Meg held her hand up. "I know. I know. Sherri kept trying to explain to Myles why she had to kill you. So we all know what you saw. God, Quillie." Meg's face was pale. She put her hands over her eyes for a moment. "She is crazy, you know. It must have driven her clean out of her mind. She says it started when she was eight. Sorry, kiddo. I shouldn't have told you."

  They sat for a moment in the sunshine.

  "The saddest thing is, Strickland's death was an accident. He came for the free workout, and wouldn't listen to her about how to use the Gravitron. So it smacked him in the chin and killed him. Mort walked in just in time to see it happen. Sherri was petrified that she'd lose her gym if someone died there, so Mort helped her dispose of the body in the gorge, and they both decided to pin it on Max."

  Max, stretched out in the cool of the flagstone, thumped his tail at the sound of his name.

  "You were right about how she killed Mort. If she killed Mort. There's no way to prove it, and the tests

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  are all coming back negative for all the stuff that was in the herbal supplement. There aren't any murders at all, Quill. Just improper body disposal and an assault on Ed Schwartz."

  "But she'll be tried, won't she?"

  "Don't talk! Yes. But Howie said this morning that if he were handling the defense, he'd plead diminished responsibility."

  Quill waved at the men staking out land on the other side of the Gorge. She could just make out the glint of Simon's gold beard.

  "Oh, yeah. You were right about that, too. The mega-resort. Bland told his daughter about it, of course, and she set her gym business up here because there's going to be a boom. JoyMax is the principal investor, and the only people with more money than they have are those Silicon Valley guys. The resort is going to be huge, Quill. They're talking about a sort of Disney World north. I thought Doreen was just being silly, but she was right. There's going to be a ton of money coming into Hemlock Falls. Maybe two tons."

  Quill smiled and nodded a question at her.

  "Andy and me? Well, there's this huge clinic going in, of course. A place as large as this one is going to need a lot of services. So Andy is going into partnership at the clinic with the new guys, and he's going to do research at Cornell. So he'll commute, for only twenty minutes!"

  Quill tapped her ice cubes.

  "Right. It's very cool. Let's see, what else? Oh. Benny Gilpin beat feet out of town and never came

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  . Who knows what happened to him? For that matter, who cares? Mort was blackmailing someone all right, but it was Sherri, not Neil Strickland."

  Quill made the sort of noises one makes in a dentist's chair during root-canal work.

  "Myles came back right away, as soon as he heard you were hurt. You might not remember, but he visited you in the hospital yesterday. Andy had you pretty drugged up." She tugged on her lower lip. "John spent the night outside your hospital room in a chair. And Doreen went and put potpourri in your room so it will smell great all day."

  Quill nodded and drank some lemonade. Meg had used honey instead of sugar. She wished she had some mint. It tasted better when it wasn't totally perfect.

  Meg was so upset by the marinade of events in her life that August that she substituted baking soda for baking powder in her recipe for carrot cake. She borrowed the recipe from Josephine DiChario, who was totally bummed out at the mistake.

  JOSEPHINE'S BAKING POWDER CARROT CAKE

  2 cups flour

  1.1/2 cups sugar

  2 teaspoons baking powder

  2 teaspoons cinnamon

  1 cup canola oil 4 large eggs

  2 cups shredded carrots

  1 eight-ounce can drained, crushed pineapple 1 cup of chopped pecans 1 cup flaked fresh coconut 1 cup plump raisins

  Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon together. Make a well in the center and put oil and eggs in well. Beat until completely blended. Add remaining ingredients and bake at 350 degrees in two floured cake pans for 35 to 40 minutes.

  Frosting: 1 eight-ounce package of cream cheese, 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, 1 '/2 teaspoons of freshly grated orange peel, and 3 cups of confectioners sugar.

  Visit Claudia Bishop's Web site address at www.mysteryhouse.com