Harland Peterson, however, looked at Pamela with
something more than mere approval.
Quill exchanged glances with Miriam. The librarian
leaned over and whispered. “He came into the Croh Bar
Monday for the fish fry.”
“With Pamela?” Quill said. “In Marge’s own place?
Right in front of her?”
“Betty does make the best fish fry in Tompkins
County.”
“Phew.” Quill shook her head. Well, that explained
the newly dyed hair and the blue eyeliner. She’d been
sure the tough old farmer and the (fairly recently) widowed Marge were going to make a thing of it. Well, it was too bad, that was all.
Pamela went to the white board that occupied the
wall at the head of the table and scribbled enthusiastically across the top: “Best Lap Dog/Best Children’s Pet/Best Happy Puppy/Cutest Puppy/Dog with the Best
Vocabulary.”
“These categories,” Pamela said, “are much, much
fairer than in those breed shows we all watch on TV.
What I’m looking for, what we all want to reward, are
the dogs that make our lives the happiest.”
It was hard to argue with that. Quill thought that her
own dog Max (who would win Best in Show if there were
ever a competition for Ugliest Dog) would score pretty
well in the Dog with the Best Vocabulary category.
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The gist of the committee’s ideas, Quill gathered,
was a dog and puppy show to be sponsored by the
Chamber, but with prizes to be offered by those business owners in Hemlock Falls willing to donate them.
“For example,” Pamela said, “the Pampered Puppy will
offer a whole month of pet food from that very, very
fine company, Pet Pro Protein.”
“That Maxwell Kittleburger’s company?” Marge demanded suddenly.
“Why, yes. Yes it is.” Pamela paused politely. Marge
didn’t say anything more. But the scowl on her face was
ferocious. “Well, um, so that’s our ideas. The show will
begin promptly at nine on the high school football
field.” Flustered, she sat down abruptly.
“Hooray,” Harland said, and clapped again.
“I think these classes are a fine idea,” Esther said
earnestly. She had, Quill recalled, quite a handsome
standard poodle. “And Pamela, I just think your shop is
so sweet. I just love going in there. Love it. It’s so nice
having you right next door.” She turned to the rest of the
group. “Pam bounced these ideas off us a few days ago
in our last committee meeting. The committee, as you
know, is me, Pammie, and Harvey, here.”
Harvey Bozzel, Hemlock Falls’ best (and only) advertising executive, smoothed his gelled blond hair and smiled modestly.
“Harvey,” Esther said breathlessly, “is going to tell
you all about our fabulous new idea.”
Harvey rose, smiled even more modestly, and said in
a well-modulated voice: “Well. We have some wonderful
news for you. You may all know that at the moment we
have a World-Famous Celebrity right here in Hemlock
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Falls. We have asked her to judge a very special category
in our wonderful dog show. And she has accepted!”
There was an encouraging silence.
Esther leaned forward. “We have created a class
where the dogs vote on each other!”
“Hah?” Elmer said.
“All Olivia Oberlie has to do is ask them! And she’s
agreed to do it! Right on her show on cable TV.” Esther
sat back, flushed with triumph.
“That certainly will put us in the headlines,” Miriam
said dryly.
“It sure will,” Elmer said in great excitement. “Why,
everybody watches that show Mind Doesn’t Matter. And
us dog owners are going to be on it, too!”
“I meant the headlines that read ‘Town Loses Collective Mind Entirely,’ ” Miriam snapped. She heaved a long sigh. “I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in
my life.”
“This is a great opportunity!” Harvey shouted.
“We are going to look like a bunch of idiots!”
Miriam shouted back.
Harvey sat down with a scowl. Pamela patted him on
earnestly in his ear. Harland, who was seated on the
other side of Pam, gave Harvey a glare that would have
curdled milk on a cold day in Alaska.
Quill tuned out the rest of the discussion, which rapidly turned acrimonious. She doodled a large Olivia Oberlie in a Roman toga with “We Who Are About
to Die Salute You” scribbled underneath because she
couldn’t remember the Latin. Then she lettered in “Suspects” at the top of the page, and rapidly sketched a
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71
weedy Millard Barnstaple cringing under the heel of
a cranky-looking Priscilla Barnstaple. She added the
downtrodden Robin Finnegan, and a portrait of Victoria
Finnegan in a general’s helmet with a pair of pearl-
handled pistols on her hips. She added Pamela in a Scarlett
O’Hara ball gown, and then a glowering Rudy Baranga.
Maxwell Kittleburger turned into Donald Trump with an
Uzi. Finally, she lettered in the chart that she’d relied on
for so many of her cases.
“Means,” she muttered to herself. “Motive. Opportunity . . . ”
Miriam nudged her. “Quill?”
Quill blinked. The conference room swam back into
focus.
“Is it true?” Miriam asked. “Olivia Oberlie’s predicted another murder?”
“Well, sort of,” Quill admitted.
“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?” Elmer demanded.
Quill closed her eyes in an effort to remember accurately. “She said ‘I see another murder.’ ” She opened them. Everyone was staring at her.
“So there’s no ‘sort of’ about it!” Elmer said.
“I don’t think we should even think about planning a
Chamber function with a murderer running around
loose!” Esther said nervously.
Carol Ann Spinoza demanded the reformation of
the (thankfully) defunct Hemlock Falls Volunteer Police Force. Marge told them all not to be a bunch of wusses, and anybody who believed in a middle-aged
fart who talked to animals was an idiot. Dookie
thumped the table gently and said that there was no
place for so-called psychics in the Hemlock Falls
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Church of God. The volume of the discussion rose.
From what Quill could tell, support for Olivia Oberlie’s
psychic abilities was running two to one, in favor.
Quill looked down at her sketchpad and created the
silhouette of a sinister profile with a fedora. Then she
penciled in an elaborate “X.”
“The point is,” Carol Ann Spinoza yelled, rising out
of her seat, “that someone is going to get killed. These
people are all at your Inn, Sarah Quilliam. And what are
you and that stuck-up little sister of yours going to do
about it?”
CHAPTER 5
“Stuck up?” Meg said. “Me?”
“Forget it.” Quill curled herself up in
the corner of
her couch and took another sip of the Syrah. Meg had
arrived at her house at eight that evening, as promised,
and with a basket full of food, also as promised. She’d
prepared a cassoulet; the evenings were getting cool as
true autumn approached, and the hearty stew was perfect with the muscular red wine. Quill was indulging herself with a second glass after dinner.
“And they want us to do something about a murder
that hasn’t happened yet?” Meg shrieked.
“If we do something about the murder that has happened, maybe there won’t be another one.”
“Now you’re doing it,” Meg said accusingly. “Don’t
tell me you’re buying this cosmic woo-woo stuff. If
Olivia’s accurately predicted another murder, it’s because she’s going to commit it.”
“Cognitive dissonance,” Quill mused. “No, I don’t
believe that Olivia’s any more psychic than Max, here.”
Max, stretched out in front of the fireplace, thumped his
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tail lazily at the sound of his name. “But even the most
reliable skeptics, like Marge, are convinced there will
be another victim. I’m worried about it, too. So here I
am, holding two opposing opinions at the same time.
Olivia’s a fraud, but someone’s going to get killed. Go
figure.”
“We don’t even know why there’s a first victim,” Quill
continued. “We don’t know what time she was killed,
how she was killed, or even if she was killed somewhere
else and moved to poor Bernie Hamm’s place afterward.
For that matter, why Bernie Hamm’s hog farm? Why not
the ravine, which is where a truly sensible murderer would
dump the body?”
“Actually, I found out a lot of that stuff this afternoon,” Meg said with just a touch of smugness.
“Good,” Quill said. “That means I can fill out my
chart.”
“Yep. But there’s something I want to talk to you
about first. This marriage of yours . . .” Meg rose from
the Eames chair that Quill had brought from her old
quarters at the Inn and walked around the living room,
tripping occasionally over an exposed nail in the flooring. “When are you getting around to fixing this floor?”
she interrupted herself irritably. “And for that matter, the
walls in here look like a disease. How can you stand it?”
“The remodeling is taking more time than I thought,”
Quill admitted.
Myles had bought the old cobblestone years ago. It’d
been owned by a Peterson—which one of that fertile
family Quill could never remember—but Petersons as a
group weren’t particularly interested in the interiors of
their houses. Myles wasn’t either. So when Quill had
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75
moved in, there’d been a lot to do. She’d stripped the
indoor-outdoor carpeting out of the living room, first
thing, and exposed wide-planked pine floors in need of
serious repair. But the wallpaper—magnolias mixed with
calla lilies—was too hideous to live with, and she had
started removing that, too. The wallpaper had been
pasted onto the walls with some fiendish variant of Superglue. It was far more unsettling to the eye than the splintery floor, so for the moment, Quill spent most of
her spare time chipping away at the wallpaper with a
steam iron and a caulk scraper. Meg was right. The
walls looked infected, if not downright terminal.
Meg halted next to the fireplace. “You know something? This room is ghastly.”
Quill followed her gaze, and said with amusement,
“It’s worse than ghastly. Remember the first year at the
Inn, though? And the year we remodeled the Palette?
Those jobs were just as awful to begin with. And look
what we ended up with.”
“You just love to remodel,” Meg accused her. “You
and Myles could have sold this place and built a nice
new house.”
Quill ignored this. “I’m thinking about a Frank
Lloyd Wright–ish feel to this room.” She gestured with
the wine glass. “Some nice glass doors in the south
wall, there, so we can walk out to a stone patio. And
from there, steps down to the little pond.”
Meg glanced at her, and then looked away. “So it’s
not the living conditions.”
Quill went very still. “What isn’t the living conditions?”
“Come on. I’m your sister. You think I don’t know
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Claudia Bishop
when you’re okay and when you aren’t? You aren’t
okay. So tell me about it. Unless . . .” Meg’s eyes brightened. “You aren’t, you know, pregnant?”
“As of this morning, nothing’s changed. I’m not
pregnant.”
“So?” Meg dropped to the floor and crossed her
legs. “Do you want to tell me about it? How come
you’re depressed?”
“I thought we were going to start solving the murder
of Lila Longstreet.”
“No detective does her best work when she’s depressed.”
“Nonsense. All the best detectives do their best work
when they’re depressed. Look at Harry Bosch. Peter
Wimsey. Phillip Marlowe. Sam Spade, Kinsey Milhone.
I’d run out of air before I ran out of successful depressed detectives.”
“So depression is good. Fine. The chances of solving
this case have increased mightily. But just for the
record, how come you’re depressed?” She bit her lip,
and then said diffidently, “Have you discovered you
don’t love Myles?”
Myles, who slept better if she was curled under his
left shoulder. Who called at unexpected moments so he
could hear her voice. Myles, who had been utterly transformed by marriage into a happy and contented man.
“Ha,” Meg said. “What a happy look you’ve got,
Quillie. So that’s not it, thank god. You love Myles.
Myles obviously loves you. You aren’t fazed a bit by the
truly gruesome condition of your current living arrangement. So what’s up?”
Quill shook her head. “I don’t know. I wish I did
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know. All I can tell you is that I feel too big for the
room.”
Meg drew her dark brows together. “Okay. You want
to run that by me one more time?”
“I feel squashed. Constricted. Compressed.” Quill
curled her knees up to her chin and stared into the fire.
“Like Alice, after she drank the stuff that made her
grow too big for the room.”
“There was that time a few years back when you took
off to that artists’ retreat? You came back from that feeling just fine. Maybe you should go there again?”
Quill shook her head. “That’s not it.” She sat up and
stuck her hands in her hair. “I’m not sure what it is.”
She looked up, “Just tell me I’m not making your life
miserable.”
“Nah. I’m fine.” She smiled impishly. “Finer than
fine.”
“And Jerry?”
Jerry Grimsby, master chef, rolling stone, and the
man who’d seduced h
er sister away from marriage to
the steady and reliable Andy Bishop.
“That jerk!” Meg flared. “You know we agreed to be
absolutely, utterly open about how we rated each other’s
recipes.”
“Hm.” Quill had been dubious about this pledge
from the start.
“And you remember how I agreed with him about my
Duck Quilliam.”
Quill suppressed a wince. Meg’s response to Jerry’s
disdain for her Duck Quilliam had wrecked more than
her usual quota of eight-inch sauté pans that month.
“I not only accepted his criticisms with grace . . . al
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Claudia Bishop
though he’s always had a bee in his bonnet about black
beans and mango salsa and absolutely utterly refuses to
acknowledge the prejudice, so what does he know about
duck anyway? Not much. But I knew that. So my duck
was doomed from the outset. A bean-and-salsa-loving
reviewer would have had a far different take on Duck
Quilliam, believe me.”
“Hm!” Quill repeated, with more cheerful emphasis.
“So, when he asked me to review his chevon glacé, I
did so with the confidence that I would be extended the
same courtesy that I extended him! Master chef to master chef. Each maintaining the highest level of professionalism in their critiques.”
“And did he? Maintain the highest level of professionalism when you gave him your opinion about the glazed goat?”
“Did he, HA!” Meg shouted.
Quill hoped that Jerry had used his own kitchen’s
sauté pans and not the ones belonging to the Inn.
“So?”
“So I’m not speaking to him, of course.”
“I thought the two of you had agreed to do the cooking demonstration for the Tompkins County Gourmet Society next week.”
“I don’t have to speak a word to that bonehead to do
that, do I?” Meg said cheerfully. “I’ll just cook like mad
and ignore him. I’ll cook better than he cooks and ignore him.”
And they would have made up by then, anyway,
Quill thought. Phew!
She had to admit that her relationship with her sister
was a lot more restful since Jerry had come into her life.
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The two of them had a fine time yelling bloody blue
blazes at one another, making up, and starting all over
again the next week. The Inn kitchen was a lot more
serene, too. So serene that under chef Bjarne Bjarnson