Murder Well-Done (20 page)

She could barely see the signposts now, between the dark and the snow and the wind. The tiny mile reflectors flashed white-white-white as she hurtled by, the front-wheel drive giving the heavy car purchase in the drifts, her speed preventing a skid. She'd be all right until she had to make that turn.
The pickup behind her straightened out, barreled forward, and nudged her bumper with a thud.
The mile marker for the exit flashed.
Quill bit her lip, pulled a hard right, spun, drove into the skid, and gunned the accelerator. The OIds fishtailed. Quill let it ride, keeping her hands off the wheel, her foot off the brake.
She broke through the barrier of snow at the ramp's edge.
The upward incline slowed the OIds, steadied it. She waited.
Behind her, the pickup roared and tried to turn to follow. The engine whined. The pickup bounced, the height and weight of the truck throwing it into a spin from which it couldn't recover - and she heard the squeal of the transmission. He'd thrown it into reverse. His engine screamed and died.
"Fool," Quill said, and slammed her foot on the accelerator again.
The tires bit into the powdered snow and held.
She drove up the ramp, the OIds' rear end slamming against the guardrail, now to the left, now to the right. She clenched her hands to keep them from the wheel and braked, gunned, braked, gunned, the car rocking back and forth until she broke through onto 96....
"And thank you, God!" she shouted. The road was plowed.
-9-
Quill had approached the Inn at Hemlock Falls at least two thousand different times over the past seven years, in every season, at practically every time of the day and most of the night.
It had never looked more welcoming. Warm golden lights shone through the mullioned windows as she drove carefully up the driveway. There was a pine wreath at each window - as they had every year at holiday time - wound round with small white lights. Mauve taffeta bows shot through with gold were wired to the wreaths. Hundreds of the small white lights sparkled in the bare branches of the trees clustered near the Gorge, casting jewel-like twinkles over the snow.
Mike the groundskeeper had been busy; white snow was piled in neat drifts on either side of the drive. The asphalt was powdered with at least a half an inch. He'd be out again with the plow later, when the snowstorm finally quit.
The Olds was lugging worse than ever. Quill took the left-hand path to the maintenance building out back in low gear, with a vague idea that this would save the engine. She hit the button for the overhead door opener, then pulled in and stopped. The engine died with a cough.
"Good girl," she said foolishly, patting the dash.
She was surprised to discover that her legs were weak. And she had trouble opening the driver's door. She got out, then turned back and opened the rear door to take the red down coat to Myles.
It was gone.
"Damn." She punched the light switch and the garage flooded with light. The coat hadn't fallen to the floor in that hairy ride down 81 and it wasn't under the seat. The box with the contents of Nora Cahill's desk at the office was gone, too.
"Damn and damn again." She slammed the rear door shut. Joseph Greenwald. She hoped he was up to his eyeteeth in snow. The computer disks from Nora's home office were still in her purse. Quill hoped her quota of luck for the week hadn't run out; she'd made quite a dent in it with Route 96 being plowed at just the right time. If her luck held, those disks would contain Nora's investigative files.
She marched to the Inn's back door, her adrenaline charged from annoyance, stripped off her winter clothing, and hung it on the coat pegs. She ditched her boots and walked into the kitchen in her socks. It was overly warm. There were six sous-chefs busy at the Aga, the grill, and the butcher block counters. To her surprise, Meg was seated in the rocking chair by the cobblestone fireplace, smoking a forbidden cigarette.
"Hey! I thought you'd be up to your ears in work. How come you're sitting down?"
Meg threw the cigarette into the open hearth with a guilty air and bounced out of the rocker. "Hey, yourself! I was just beginning to worry. You're more than an hour later than you said you'd be and that storm Bjarne predicted is a doozy."
"In Helsinki, this is spring," Bjarne said. He whacked at a huge tenderloin with the butcher's knife, and whacked again.
"I thought you'd be run off your feet, Meg." "You're kidding, right? Santini's closed the dining room so that he and his eleven pals can eat tenderloin in lofty seclusion. Ten pals actually. One of them got held up by the storm. Listen. I spent the day with Tutti McIntosh, and I've got something really interesting to tell you."
Quill interrupted, "Santini paid the table minimum? For all twenty tables?"
"Claire's doting dad did, I think. Anyhow, everyone's eating away and they're all taken care of. The mayor and his soapy friends ordered cold stuff, except for their roasted cow which they did somewhere in the woods themselves, and I made all that this afternoon. And the H. O. W. ladies each brought a dish to pass. That's where Tutti is now, surrounded by the entire protective brigade of - "
"John's not going to like that. Guests aren't supposed to bring their own stuff."
"I like it," Meg said firmly. "I've got enough to do with this rehearsal dinner for twenty tomorrow night. And then the wedding. Thank God the truck got here just before the snow. We got all that stuff unloaded. And then Tutti was with me in the kitchen all afternoon. I'll be glad when this is all over and we can put up our tree and close the place down for two days. By the way, Myles called and said he won't get here until midnight or after. The snow's caused the usual numbers of crises, including some damn fool wrecking his pickup truck at the 96 exit to 81 and you'll never guess what Tutti did - "
"At the moment," Quill said crossly. "I just don't give a hoot." She settled on a stool at the butcher block counter. Exhaustion overtook her like a dam bursting. She could just sit here and go to sleep. She yawned. "Can you tell me the fascinating news about Tutti later? I have to speak to Myles about that pickup." She glanced casually at Meg. "It sounds like the one that tried to run me off the road."
"Oh, yeah? Well, you can go pound on the driver personally tomorrow. The truck's been towed to Bernie's garage and the guy's at the hospital with a broken arm. Andy says he's not going anywhere soon. Let me tell you what happened here this afternoon."
"Oh, yeah? That's all you have to say when I tell you I was almost murdered right there on 81 by a crazed guy who very probably is involved in Nora Cahill's death, not to mention Frank Dorset's?"
"You're here all in one piece, aren't you?" Meg said callously. "Honestly Quill, sometimes you exaggerate as much as Dina does. It's either that or the other extreme - like failing to mention your absolutely awful driving record to Howie Murchison, which is when all this nutty stuff started. Try to be a little rational for once, will you?"
Pressure always upset Meg. In some remote part of her mind, Quill tried to remember this, and failed. "I am perfectly rational!" she shouted.
"Perfectly rational people don't shriek their heads off at a little mild criticism from a beloved relative. No, they don't. Wait until you hear about the s‚ance this afternoon."
Quill slid off the stool. "I'm numb with cold. I'm sweaty with the aftermath of fear - "
"The what?!"
"And I'm going up to my room and call Myles and tell him about the evidence I just uncovered in this murder case, because it's practically solved, Meg, and then I'm going to take a hot, hot, hot shower, wash my hair, nap, and be gorgeous for poor Myles when he finally gets off road duty."
"Practically solved the murders, huh?" Meg shouted after her as she shoved open the swinging doors to the dining room. "Quill! Don't go that way!"
Quill took two steps into the dining room and encountered the affronted glares of Alphonse Santini, a well-known Supreme Court Justice, an equally well-known Democratic senator, and Vittorio McIntosh, among others.
They were all in black tie.
Quill was jerked out of her fatigue into the present. Sweat streaked her face. Her knitted cap had made a tangled mess of her hair. She'd been wearing black long johns under her snow pants, and she was suddenly aware that rather than resembling leggings - which they were not - they looked like long underwear. Which they were. And there was a hole in her argyle socks.
She retreated to the kitchen.
Meg looked smug. This, Quill reflected later, was the straw that broke the camel's back, the monkey wrench in the machinery, the penultimate push. Actually it wasn't the smugness as much as the pious comment that accompanied it:
"You never listen to me. You'd never get into half the trouble you do if you'd just listen to me."
Quill washed her hair in the shower, drained the tub, filled it with water as hot as she could stand it, and threw in four capfuls of Neutrogena Rain Bath Shower and Bath Body Gel. She had, she realized, told Meg (and any interested person within forty feet of the kitchen) that in the past two days she'd a.) been thrown in jail for a bogus traffic ticket, b.) renounced her lover, c.) been humiliated on television, d.) been thrown in jail on a trumped-up murder charge, e.) been assaulted and sexually harassed by a human asparagus, f.) witnessed a murder, g.) spent the night with a corpse, and finally, been terrified almost to death by a high-speed chase in a snowstorm. Meg's tart rejoinder ("There's no need to get hysterical about it!") made her so mad that she'd upended an entire canister of whole wheat flour on the kitchen floor. The Finns thought this was hilarious. "Americans," Bjarne said with a pleased air, "how I love this country."
A knock on the bathroom door roused her from the gloomy contemplation of her soapy knees. "Yes?" Quill shouted.
There was a bout of furious yapping, a thump, and a muttered "Gol-durn it."
"Doreen?"
"Yap-yap-yap-yap," came Tatiana's voice, in a furious fusillade, "yap-yap-" Crash!
"YAP!!"
"You git, before I turn you into earmuffs!"
There was another crash, as of a mop hitting a hardwood floor, and a ferocious growl. Doreen wouldn't dare deep-six the dog. Would she? Quill waited for a canine gurgle. Maybe that growl had been Doreen. Maybe a short dog drowned in a tall mop bucket didn't have time to gurgle.
"Doreen?"
"It's me," came Doreen's familiar foghorn voice.
"You decent? - OW!"
Decent, she thought. How decent is a person who yells at her sister?
"I'll be right there." She sloshed out of the tub, pulled on her terry cloth robe, and opened the door.
"Doreen. You look really nice."
The housekeeper was dressed in a long velvet skirt, a metallic gold turtleneck with blouson sleeves, and sandals with rhinestones at the toes. This gave her a charmingly old-fashioned (if gaudy) appearance. She was carrying a mop. Quill smiled at her. "You ought to wear soft shapes more often. But why the mop?"
"You'll see," she said with a glower. "'Bout this outfit, Stoke bought it for me. I think it makes me look like I'm plugged inta a outlet. Say, Quill. The girls, I mean the organ'zation members, sent me up to see if you're comin' to the meeting."
"The H. O. W. meeting?" Quill stepped barefoot into the room, the sash to her bathrobe trailing. "Boy, Doreen, I'm just so - OW!" Tatiana, who'd been hiding under the couch, retreated as soon as her needle teeth got Quill's ankle.
Crash! Doreen wielded the broom with prompt efficiency. "Durn thing," Doreen said glumly. "She'll do that. Ain't hit her yet."
"It doesn't seem to me that you try very hard." Quill nursed her ankle with one hand and hobbled to the couch. "Why is she up here?"
"She follers me around. Why it is, durn'd if I know."
"Is Tutti here?"
"Yeah."
"She's not at the shower for Claire, is she?"
"Heck, no. She's in the H. O. W. meeting. Where you bin, anyways?"
"To Syracuse. Why?"
"Big hoo-ha here this afternoon, I can tell you."
She remembered suddenly: s‚ance. And Meg anxious to tell her about it just before Quill lobbed verbal fireballs at her over the tenderloin. "Did something happen at the s‚ance?"
"You bet it did. That Tutti's amazin'. She ought to be on TV. You know how many serial killers that one'd catch if she went public?"
"What?! What serial killer?"
Doreen gave a patient sigh. "This one that killed that Dorset and that poor Nora Cahill. He spoke to us. Right there in the Proven‡al suite next to the fireplace. We don't have to worry about him. He's dead. Deader than a doornail. Which is how come he come back from Beyond to speak through Tutti. You shoulda heard him. You know how Tutti has that nice sweet voice? Well, it was like somethin' from that movie where the devil was in that Linda Blair and turnt her head right around like a screw cap. Ol' Tutti's head turnt around - "
"All the way?" Quill asked sarcastically.
"No, ma'am. Just partways. Then this here voice comes out. Low. Ugly-like. A man, of course." Doreen's voice, although hoarse, was generally clearly feminine. She pitched it several octaves lower than usual and growled, "I DONE FOR 'EM. I DONE FOR 'EM BOTH."
"Yap!" went Tatiana, "yap, yap!!"
"See, the dog's a familiar, like. Tutti don't do her sayance without her. Good girl," Doreen cooed suddenly. "Good girl. She got two mice in the storeroom today, too."
Tatiana made a noise like a Norelco shaver. Quill shifted back nervously. "Did Tutti say anything else?"
"You mean he, the murderer. Oh, yeah. RABBIT! RABBIT!"
Quill opened her mouth, then closed it. Nobody knew about her rabbit hat. Except Dorset, and he was dead. Except herself, and she didn't do it. Except the murderer, who had worn it.
Tutti? Impossible. She was too short. Too round. And the murderer was a male - Quill wasn't entirely sure how she knew that, except that she'd been no more than three feet away from him while he slashed Frank Dorset's throat. The sound of his breath, the way that he walked on the videotape. And the arms, she thought suddenly. The arms extended way past the sleeves of her coat. So the murderer was a man. She trusted her painter's eye that far. And Tutti, for reasons known only to herself, was letting the murderer know she knew.
But why? To stop Santini from marrying Claire? If she knew about the rabbit hat, she knew enough to turn Santini in to Myles. It didn't make any sense for Tutti to warn a man who had killed twice already.
"Alphonse Santini was at the s‚ance, wasn't he, Doreen?"
"Yep. Shook him up some, I'll tell you that."
"I'll bet it did."