A Touch of the Grape: A Hemlock Falls Mystery (Hemlock Falls Mystery series) (27 page)

"You wouldn't draw it that way today," Meg said.

"I didn't mean to wake you up. Did you go to the hospital with Andy last night?"

"They seemed happier, once they got there. It was
either Andrew's firm professional manner, the drugs, or
Marge's 'buck up' smacks on the shoulder that calmed them down. I'm putting my money on Marge."

"I'm going there for lunch to discuss whatever it was
the government types were discussing yesterday without
us. Do you want to come?"

"Do I want to know my future, Madame Lasagna? Of course. Just give me a minute." She rubbed her eyes hard.

Quill said automatically, "Don't do that."

Meg grinned at her. "How's business?"

"Business sucks. I called around this morning to all our usual contacts. Nothing doing for the summer."

"That fifty grand isn't going to last too long, is it?"

"No."

"How long have we got? Before we have to do some
thing dramatic, I mean."

"Dramatic like what? We can take out a second mort
gage "

"Sand against the tide, don't you think?"

"Let's see what Marge has to say. The cavalry may be coming over the hill at any moment."

"I don't like having to wait on the cavalry any more than you do," Meg complained.

"Maybe we don't have to wait? Maybe Marge has
some wonderful idea that's going to work fast, like Alka
Seltzer. Come on, get presentable, and let's go."

"I'm presentable!" Meg stared down at herself. She was wearing baggy sweat pants, a purple T-shirt, and had bare feet "Oh, all right. I'll put on chinos." She disappeared into her bathroom.

Quill walked around the living room, stepping over a
stack of magazines from
L'Aperitif,
a pile of kitchen equipment catalogues, a file filled with scrawled recipes
in Meg's spiky, hurried hand. There was nothing in this room to speak of a life outside a professional kitchen. Quill sighed. The Inn was her sister's life.

"There! Do I pass inspection?" The chinos were rumpled (Meg refused to iron) and the new T-shirt was clean
but emblazoned with a full color silk screen of the Indigo Girls.

"You do. We have about twenty minutes. Do you want to walk?"

Outside, they discovered that the day was cool and overcast. Main Street, where Marge's Diner was located,
was a fifteen-minute leisurely walk through the park. Max, bounding up to greet them, viewed the prospect of a walk through die park with an ebullience peculiar to dogs.

"You'd better get a license for him," Meg said. "That way, when he wrecks things, people will know to call you instead of Selena."

"He's going to be a good boy from now on," Quill said.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Main Street was quiet. Max bounded along the sidewalks, stopping to christen the white planters filled with
geraniums, and the black wrought iron streetlights with
obsessive attention. Most of the buildings in Hemlock Falls were cut stone; the few that weren't were white
clapboard with black trim. Marge's Diner was cut stone.
It had been a Laundromat in an earlier incarnation; goodness knows what before that. It was a very old
building and could have been beautiful. Quill always
suspected that the two large Laundromat windows in
front were a significant factor in Marge's success. Hemlockians loved to sit and watch the world go by on Main Street. The other factor, of course, was Marge's cooking,
which was excellent.

The diner was filled when Meg and Quill walked in,
a sorry contrast to their own empty—and far more luxurious—dining room. Marge sat behind the cash register up front and looked up with raised eyebrows when they
came in. "There you are," she said without preamble.
"You didn't walk, did you? With this damn loony walk
ing around burning women, the streets ain't safe."

"It's not a loony," Quill began, and then quit. Of course it was. "Never mind."

"C'mon back this way to my office. Betty'll bring us
lunch in there." They followed her as she stumped her
way through the tables to the back, shoving the customers aside with the assurance of a tank brigade come to
relieve a beleaguered front line. She disappeared into a
door marked PRIVATE! THIS MEANS YOU!, then reappeared
to beckon the two of them inside.

Quill followed her in. then stopped so abruptly Meg smacked into her shoulders.

"Doreen! What are you doing here?"

The housekeeper shrugged. "Marge gave me a call."

Marge's large metal desk had been shoved aside to make room for one of her Formica-covered tables. It was covered with a red-checked cloth, and a Mason jar of wildflowers sat in the middle. The table was set for four. Marge pulled out a chair. "Siddown."

Meg took a seat nearest the metal filing cabinet; Quill
seated herself directly across from her, her back to a grimy window set high in the wall. Doreen settled
grimly in the chair against the desk. Marge plunked her
self between them, folded her hands and said:
"Now, girls. How much do you want for the Inn?"

It was what she'd anticipated, of course. And now it was
out in the open. Quill stared straight ahead. She'd expected Meg to jump to her feet, shout, "No way, Marge!" (or something worse) and make a grand exit.
She wouldn't have been surprised if Doreen swept the
Mason jar off the table and dumped the contents on Marge's head. Marge had endured more vehement at
tacks than that without a blink of her beady little eyes.
She'd told them so last night, when they were trying to keep Freddie and Robin's spirits up.

What she hadn't foreseen was the overwhelming sense of relief.

"Sell the Inn?" she said—and images came to her, a series of paintings in the gallery of the past eight years.

Each corner of the massive building loved, labored over, wept over. The sound of the Falls in the evening. The way the moon looked over the koi pond. The kitchen with the massive fireplace, the wooden beams with Meg's dried herbs hanging from the rafters. Her own room, quiet, serene, with the French doors that led to her balcony—the late night conversations there with Myles, with Meg.

She wanted to sell the damn thing. Now.

It was the statistics. The bloody inexorable statistics.

Twenty-seven rooms, plus the bar and dining room
filled with paying customers a minimum of two hundred
days a year. Doreen had figured it out once: it meant
cleaning 290 toilets; the washing, bleaching, and drying
of 540 sheets, 1,080 pillowcases, 865 tablecloths; the scouring of 108 bathtubs and 172 showers stalls.

Not to mention the damn floors.

Then there were the customers: the yuppie couple that
sued Meg over the runny scrambled eggs, the little boy that bit Quill twice because she didn't have any peanut
butter, the numberless truly disgusting things people left
in their rooms and on the carpets. The people who muttered, "They can afford it," and stiffed them with bogus checks, stolen credit cards, and even counterfeit cash.

Not to mention the lawn maintenance. The damn grass just kept on growing. The building maintenance, the gar
dens, the insurance, the waitress that stole a week's re
ceipts and called three days later from Detroit for money
to get home.

The bills—the remorseless tide of bills. Mortgage, in
surance, workman's comp, wine, food, electric, gas. Taxes.

She never got any sleep.

She wanted out.

She took a deep breath. "Sorry, Marge. It's not for sale."

"You nuts? You really think you can make it in this economy?" Marge settled back in her chair with a grin, a warrior girding herself for a familiar and pleasurable battle.

"I'm not negotiating, Marge. I'm telling you a plain
fact. Do you know what that Inn represents? My creative
vision. Meg's creative vision."

Doreen cleared her throat in an ostentatious way.

"And Doreen's, too. The answer's no."

"Let me tell you what's gonna happen in Hemlock Falls the next coupla years. We got one of the prettiest parts of the U.S. of A., and nobody left to enjoy it. Taxes, no jobs, high prices—you name it, it's drove everybody out, down to the south. So what do we do? We fight it. This money from the government will give us a chance to drag people back up here for the good parts. The scenery. The lakes. The vineyards. We make it a good place to visit, but you don't have to live here to love it."

"It's our big chance," Meg said coolly, "finally. Why in the world does it make sense for us to sell just when we're on the verge of making a pile of money?"

"Here's Betty with the food. You wanna eat or talk?"

"Eat," Doreen said.

"Pot roast, crisped baked potatoes, new peas, and ap
plesauce," Betty said. "Lemon custard pie for dessert." She banged the plates down, wiped her hands on her apron, and went away.

Meg took a forkful of pot roast and tried it. "You are a darn good cook. Marge. But Betty's better. This is
terrific. And to answer your question, I'd rather eat, too,
than have you try to skinflint us. You heard Quill, no sale."

"Hey," Marge's voice was tolerant. "Lemme lay out
some facts. I eat at your place, I find out about the prices of the rooms, I do some rough figuring on payroll and maintenance, and here's what I figure. No way you can
make it on the size you are now. You either gotta get bigger, so you can sell more rooms, or you gotta get smaller, so you can cut staff."

"If we get bigger, we just have to hire more staff," Meg said patiently. "Don't be ridiculous."

"One thing you can't do is hire more staff. You build more rooms, you work harder is all. Right now, you're operating at a loss even when you're full up, unless my math's off." (The likelihood of that, her tone implied,
was that aliens lived underground in Roswell, New Mex
ico.) "You gotta get the profit from somewhere, and where you get it from is the same amount of people servicing more rooms. The other thing you can do, is get smaller. Cut costs by maintaining less overhead.
Point is, there is an equation where your business works,
but you ain't at it."

"We can get there," Meg said stubbornly.

"Hah! You two? And my gramma's from the moon.
Meg—" She leaned forward, her face intent. She tapped
her forefinger on the table. "You don't love money."

"Sure I do."

"Uh-uh. You like money, sure. Who doesn't? But you
don't love it. I love it. I like to make it. I like to take what I made and make more of it. You got other things
you love better. That Doc Bishop. Good food. Cooking.
Your sister." She shook her head joyfully. "No, you don't love money." She squinted at Quill. "You said that place's your creative vision? Bullshit. It's pretty. The food's good. That location next to the Falls—perfect. But I don't see how you got the
nerve
to say it's your creative vision when you can't make the mortgage payment. It's creative failure."

"This is weird," Meg said.

"What? Somethin' in the pot roast?"

"No. This conversation is weird."

"People like you," Marge said, instantly defensive, "you don't respect money either. You have names for people like me—and none of them very nice."

"That's not true," Quill said gently. She thought she'd never heard anything more pitiful in her life than Marge's speech about the love of her life. "I have a lot of respect for you, your skills, your expertise."

"This conversation is weird," Meg said, as though neither Quill nor Marge had responded to her initial comment, "because it makes so much sense."

"Thank the Lord!" Doreen said fervently.

Quill dropped her fork, tried to retrieve it, and ended
up with peas on the floor. Marge regarded the peas, then
said, "That damn dog still outside? Nah. We'll get it
later. You were saying as about how I made some sense,
huh?"

Meg took a deep breath and turned to her sister. "Quill? Do you know how many Rock Cornish game hen I've spitted and roasted in the last eight years? Six thousand, five hundred and fifty-seven. I counted."

"You're sick of it?"

"I'm sick of it."

"I'm seventy-two years old," Doreen said belligerently. "Ain't anyone gonna ast me if I'm sick of it? Well, I am. Stoke wants to retire and so do I."

"But what are we going to do?" Quill said.

"Have Marge give us this place." Meg twisted around and looked Marge in the eye. "It's a filthy mess and it will have to be gutted and then completely restored, and any deal we make will have to include enough money to do all that. But, Quill. Just look at it!" She swept her arm in the air. Cobwebs stirred on the window. "Can't you see how pretty this can be? I never told you this, but that boutique restaurant we opened—"