Murder Well-Done (3 page)
Authors: Claudia Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Detectives, #New York (N.Y.), #Women Sleuths, #Sisters, #Unknown, #Taverns (Inns)
Quill surveyed the dining room. It had emptied with dismaying rapidity. Even the nosy Nora had gone - before, Quill hoped, she'd heard any intimations of a political protest to be staged by H. O. W. "Of course, Claire. Let's sit down here."
"The tables haven't been cleared," Claire said. "I hate it when the tables haven't been cleared. You're sure that your staff is up to this? I mean, I've had my doubts about this little backwater even though Mummy said your sister is absolutely famous. But, I mean, my Go-od, there's nothing here. It's all very well for you. Mummy said everybody who's anybody knows about your painting, although I never heard of you in my art appreciation classes, and I guess you can paint on the moon or anyplace like that if you want to."
"Claire," said Quill. "Follow me over here. To the window."
Claire trailed Quill like a quarrelsome duckling. Quill pushed her gently into a chair at table seven, sat down opposite her, and fixed her with a firm - yet friendly - glare. "Now. How can I help you?"
Somebody, Kathleen the head waitress, most likely, who had been taking evening courses at the nearby Cornell Hotel school, had folded the crisp white napkins into elaborate tulip shapes. Claire picked one up, unfolded it, tried to refold it, and blew her nose in it. "Sorry. Allergies. Look. You've got to think of some way to keep my grandmother out of this wedding."
"Excuse me?"
Claire frowned. She was a natural blonde, in her late twenties, with the dry papery skin that affects thin women who spend too much time in the sun. In a few years, she was going to need the services of Nora Cahill's plastic surgeon. "Tutti," she said impatiently, "Daddy's mother. My grandmother."
Quill tugged at her hair, examined a curl, then said, "You don't want your grandmother at the wedding?"
"Of course not. She'll spoil everything!"
"This is just a little case of nerves, Claire. You'll be fine. I can't imagine how your grandmother could spoil your wedding. Is she ill? Are you afraid it might be too much for her? We have an excellent internist here, and a very fine small clinic. If she needs medical help, we'll be happy to make arrangements for a nurse."
"She doesn't need a nurse. She's crazy," Claire said resentfully.
"Oh, dear. Is it Alzheimer's? I'm so sorry, Claire."
"Good grief, no. She's not certifiable. At least a judge wouldn't think so. Stupid jerk."
Quill wasn't sure if this last referred to her, to the unknown judge, or to Tutti, and she wasn't about to inquire. Her own grandmother had been an elegant, forceful lady whom she had loved very much. "Gosh, Claire. I don't think I can do too much about your guest list. That's really the province of, um... the family. What does your mother say?"
"You know Mummy. She doesn't inhale without Daddy's okay."
"And this is your father's mother."
"My grand - "
"Yes," said Quill. Her temper - not at its equable best in the past few weeks - suddenly snapped. "I can't imagine how in the world I would prevent her from coming. Even if I wanted to. Which I don't."
"You could tell her the Inn is full. You could give her room to somebody."
"No," Quill said flatly. "As I said, we can suggest a good nursing service, if you really find it necessary..."
Claire sniffed scornfully. "A nurse for Tutti? Tutti can flatten a nurse in two seconds. Maybe less." She blew her nose once more in the napkin and dropped it disdainfully on the table. "All I have to say, if this wedding's wrecked..." She stood up, leaned over Quill, and hissed, "It'll be all your fault!"
-2-
Margaret Quilliam tucked a sprig of holly under the pig's ear and stepped back to regard her work.
"Guy I knew in the old neighborhood looked a lot like that after he welshed on a bet," said Alphonse Santini. He flung both hands up and cowered behind them in mock self-defense. Quill, who'd fled into the kitchen in search of respite, hadn't been pleased to find him there. "Hands out" was a gesture she was becoming all too familiar with, since Al had spent a large portion of the last three days harassing Quill and her sister Meg, when he wasn't aggravating the citizens of Hemlock Falls. The gesture always accompanied his notions of what was funny. Al considered himself quite a humorist.
"I'm sorry," she said, "about the fund-raiser. You've arrived at Hemlock Falls at sort of a peculiar time in the town's political history."
"That bitch Cahill," he said without rancor. "The press. Go figure."
"I don't think..." Quill paused. For all she knew, Nora may have prompted the H. O. W. revolt at breakfast, although to be fair, she couldn't see how.
"So. This roast pig's for a special occasion? Or what? Kinda early for Christmas."
The pig contemplated the ceiling. Meg contemplated the pig. Quill, whose testiness was increasing as the time for her lunch with Myles drew nearer, drummed her fingers on the butcher block counter. She stopped, not wanting to be rude. Ex-Senator Santini hacked into a well-used handkerchief, wiped his nose, and repeated his question about the roast pig. One of Meg's sneaker-shod feet began to beat an irritable tattoo on the flagstone kitchen floor. Quill held on to her own temper firmly and said in as diplomatic a tone as she could manage, "It's a special order for a men's organization in the village. Now, to get back to your wedding reception, Mr. Santini."
His eyes slid sideways at Quill. "I keep the title Senator, you get my drift? Even though I lost this time around. Most of my compadres call me Senator AI."
Quill, who'd been refusing Mr. Santini the honorific out of nothing more than perversity, decided to relent. For one thing, Senator Santini did have a miserable sloppy cold - or allergies - and he wasn't complaining about it. In Quill's opinion, far too many people with colds made their misery yours. For another, he was short for a man, about her own height, which made his frequent demands for attention more understandable, at least to Quill.
Quill had never gotten used to the fact that celebrities in person looked smaller than they did on television. This shrinkage made her sympathetic. Or maybe, she thought, they weren't smaller than they appeared. Maybe she'd only met celebrities who were smaller than the average person. The alternative was that her subconscious enlarged public figures based on the size of their reputations, which still didn't explain why she'd expected Senator Al to be bigger than he actually was, since his politics were so awful.
He certainly wasn't conventionally good-looking. He was balding, with lank brown hair that flopped over his ears. He had small, rather watery blue eyes and a pot-belly. None of this explained his undoubted appeal. Despite his height and rather flabby appearance, ex-Senator Al Santini definitely had charisma. The charisma might have been due to his voice, which was deep and resonant. Since he had a heavy Long Island accent, Quill didn't think so. It'd be a challenge to paint his portrait. She'd have to capture the charm and still get across the greed, vulgarity, and boys-in-the-back-room politics that had - finally, after three terms - lost him the race for the Senate.
"Quill?" Santini rapped his knuckles on the butcher block counter. "I got snot on my face or what?"
"Sorry, Senator," Quill said. "You were saying?"
"We got a few more people coming than we'd planned on."
Meg clutched her forehead, groaned, and said mildly, "Your mother-in-law-prospective mother-in-law, I should say - has been taking care of everything just fine. Senator. Did you check this new number with her?"
Senator Al waved largely. "She's busy with the other stuff. My guys've been on the horn. I'm telling you, we've gotta be prepared for a crush." Meg and Quill carefully avoided looking at one another. Senator Al had been unseated in a rash of very bad publicity six weeks ago; Newsweek's editorial on the demise - of his career had been scathingly final. Earlier in the week, they'd wondered if anyone would show up at all.
Meg said patiently, "Your fianc‚e Claire booked our Inn in April for a December wedding. In May you gave us the count for the reception - small, you said, since you didn't want a media circus. Forty, you said. Twenty of the immediate family, and twenty of your nearest and dearest friends. In the last few days you've gone from twenty to forty to seventy. Now, four days before the wedding, you want to bounce it to two hundred!?"
Meg's face got pink, which made her gray eyes almost blue. Her voice, however, remained soft, although emphatic. "Our dining room won't take two hundred. I can't cook for two hundred. Not in four days."
Al Santini waved expansively. "Hire all the help you need. Money's no object."
This blithe disregard for the fiscal gave Quill a clue as to a possible reason why the senator's campaign finances had occasioned such investigative furor from the national media.
Meg stared at him expressionlessly. "If I could hire somebody else to do what I do, do you think I'd be doing it?"
"Say what?"
Quill, grateful for Meg's unusual equanimity, and not too sure how long it would last, interrupted, "My sister's a great chef, Mr. Santini. A three-star chef. There aren't a lot of people who can cook with her style. I know that's one of the reasons your fianc‚e and her family wanted to have the wedding here. And, honestly, this last-minute change just isn't possible. You can't expect Meg to do a five-course dinner for two hundred. Not with this kind of notice. And not in our dining room. We don't have the space." Especially, she added to herself, for a guest list that was unlikely to materialize.
Senator Al put a large hand on Meg's shoulder and bent down to look her earnestly in the eye. "Five-course dinner? Am I asking you for a five-course dinner? Absolutely not. No question. But I got a problem here, you understand that? I got a hundred, maybe two hundred people that are going to be coming to my wedding."
"Which is it?" Meg asked patiently.
Santini shrugged. "Who knows? All I'm saying is we gotta prepare for the contingency."
"Contingency," Meg said. "Right."
"I got a couple of Supreme Court justices, a couple a guys from the Senate, ambassadors, and what all coming to this shindig. Important people, you know?"
Meg rubbed her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut. "Which is how come I can't give you an exact count.
If there's a war, or something, or like Bosnia heats up again? You gonna tell General Schwarzkopf he can't hightail it to the action on account of he's supposed to be at my reception?"
"General Schwarzkopf's coming?" said Quill. Senator Al shrugged. "He got an invitation. I expect him. Look, I don't want to say too much, okay? But there's something of national significance coming down pretty soon. And the eye of the nation is gonna be on Hemlock Falls."
Meg rolled her eyes at Quill.
The double swinging doors to the dining room banged open. One of the blue-suited men from the Santini entourage stuck his head inside the kitchen, a portable phone in one hand. Quill couldn't remember which of the men it was; they all looked and sounded alike. "Senator? We finally got Nora Cahill to agree to the interview. We have her in the conference room."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll be right there. You see? It's starting already. Now we got the media. So we bag the five-course dinner for seventy. We do heavy hors d'oeuvres. Stand-up. A buffet, like. The dining room can handle that if you take out the tables. So, Meg, dolly. No dinner."
"Dolly?" Meg said blankly. "Dolly?"
"We're looking at serving two hundred, right? If we can't seat 'em, let 'em stand. That pig, there?" He flicked his finger at the holly under its ear. "You roast a couple of those, we're all set."
"Heavy hors d'oeuvres for two hundred," Meg said stonily, "means a steamship round, pasta and shells, and baked BEANS!" She planted both hands on either side of the pig and drew breath. If one didn't know her very well, the expression on her face might pass for a smile. It put Quill herself, who knew her sister better than anybody, in mind of the wrong side of an outraged baboon. To Quill's amazement, Meg swallowed twice, and said merely, "Why don't we take the change in the menu up with Mrs. McIntosh?"
Santini, clearly unaware he'd escaped a verbal tsunami, continued, "So, no roast pig. I can live with it. If the food's a little less fancy than we planned - don't sweat it." His pat on Meg's shoulder was dismissive. "I gotta take this interview. So, look. You got more questions about the menu? Talk to the ball and chain."
"The what?" Meg demanded.
"Claire. My fianc‚e. Or her ma. Either one. Same-same." He waved at Quill, gave Meg the high sign, pointed a pistol-like forefinger at them, and went pow! "Catch you all later."
The double doors swung shut behind him.
"I don't believe it," said Meg. "Ball and chain? Dolly? Oh, God. I can't stand it!" She ran her hands through her short dark hair.
"Steamship round?" said Quill. "And pasta and shells?"
Meg grinned. "It's tempting, isn't it? That idiot."
"That's all you've got to say? That idiot?"
Meg shrugged. "Why should I waste my breath? It's kind of pathetic, thinking that all these people are showing up for this party. Mrs. McIntosh told me herself that one of the reasons they picked our Inn is because it's so hard to get to in the winter. He's got a guaranteed excuse for nobody accepting the invitations. I have no idea where all this last-minute agita is coming from."
"Maybe he's nervous about getting married," said Quill.
"Whatever. Anyway, Claire and her mother have had seventy acceptances. Almost all relatives. Five-course dinner with no expenses spared. That's what the Mclntoshes are paying for and that's what they'll get. General Schwarzkopf, my eye."
Quill twisted a strand of hair around one finger and tugged at it. "You don't think..."
"That two hundred politicians, ambassadors, and the President's cabinet are going to show up for this wedding? On Christmas Eve? In central New York?" Meg gestured toward the window. The kitchen faced the vegetable gardens at the back of the Inn. Quill could barely see the tops of the brussels sprouts for the snow. "They're predicting four inches more by this afternoon. If the rest of the wedding party doesn't get here by tomorrow, we'll have to cancel the reception and eat each other like the Donner party since we'll undoubtedly get snowed in. Which reminds me. I thought you were going to have lunch with Myles in Syracuse. You better give yourself plenty of time to get there."
"I'll be fine," Quill said. "I told him two o'clock."
"You're sure about it," Meg said, after a pause. "I mean, this business about it being the last lunch."
Quill nodded. "This relationship is just - not going anywhere."
"The tables haven't been cleared," Claire said. "I hate it when the tables haven't been cleared. You're sure that your staff is up to this? I mean, I've had my doubts about this little backwater even though Mummy said your sister is absolutely famous. But, I mean, my Go-od, there's nothing here. It's all very well for you. Mummy said everybody who's anybody knows about your painting, although I never heard of you in my art appreciation classes, and I guess you can paint on the moon or anyplace like that if you want to."
"Claire," said Quill. "Follow me over here. To the window."
Claire trailed Quill like a quarrelsome duckling. Quill pushed her gently into a chair at table seven, sat down opposite her, and fixed her with a firm - yet friendly - glare. "Now. How can I help you?"
Somebody, Kathleen the head waitress, most likely, who had been taking evening courses at the nearby Cornell Hotel school, had folded the crisp white napkins into elaborate tulip shapes. Claire picked one up, unfolded it, tried to refold it, and blew her nose in it. "Sorry. Allergies. Look. You've got to think of some way to keep my grandmother out of this wedding."
"Excuse me?"
Claire frowned. She was a natural blonde, in her late twenties, with the dry papery skin that affects thin women who spend too much time in the sun. In a few years, she was going to need the services of Nora Cahill's plastic surgeon. "Tutti," she said impatiently, "Daddy's mother. My grandmother."
Quill tugged at her hair, examined a curl, then said, "You don't want your grandmother at the wedding?"
"Of course not. She'll spoil everything!"
"This is just a little case of nerves, Claire. You'll be fine. I can't imagine how your grandmother could spoil your wedding. Is she ill? Are you afraid it might be too much for her? We have an excellent internist here, and a very fine small clinic. If she needs medical help, we'll be happy to make arrangements for a nurse."
"She doesn't need a nurse. She's crazy," Claire said resentfully.
"Oh, dear. Is it Alzheimer's? I'm so sorry, Claire."
"Good grief, no. She's not certifiable. At least a judge wouldn't think so. Stupid jerk."
Quill wasn't sure if this last referred to her, to the unknown judge, or to Tutti, and she wasn't about to inquire. Her own grandmother had been an elegant, forceful lady whom she had loved very much. "Gosh, Claire. I don't think I can do too much about your guest list. That's really the province of, um... the family. What does your mother say?"
"You know Mummy. She doesn't inhale without Daddy's okay."
"And this is your father's mother."
"My grand - "
"Yes," said Quill. Her temper - not at its equable best in the past few weeks - suddenly snapped. "I can't imagine how in the world I would prevent her from coming. Even if I wanted to. Which I don't."
"You could tell her the Inn is full. You could give her room to somebody."
"No," Quill said flatly. "As I said, we can suggest a good nursing service, if you really find it necessary..."
Claire sniffed scornfully. "A nurse for Tutti? Tutti can flatten a nurse in two seconds. Maybe less." She blew her nose once more in the napkin and dropped it disdainfully on the table. "All I have to say, if this wedding's wrecked..." She stood up, leaned over Quill, and hissed, "It'll be all your fault!"
-2-
Margaret Quilliam tucked a sprig of holly under the pig's ear and stepped back to regard her work.
"Guy I knew in the old neighborhood looked a lot like that after he welshed on a bet," said Alphonse Santini. He flung both hands up and cowered behind them in mock self-defense. Quill, who'd fled into the kitchen in search of respite, hadn't been pleased to find him there. "Hands out" was a gesture she was becoming all too familiar with, since Al had spent a large portion of the last three days harassing Quill and her sister Meg, when he wasn't aggravating the citizens of Hemlock Falls. The gesture always accompanied his notions of what was funny. Al considered himself quite a humorist.
"I'm sorry," she said, "about the fund-raiser. You've arrived at Hemlock Falls at sort of a peculiar time in the town's political history."
"That bitch Cahill," he said without rancor. "The press. Go figure."
"I don't think..." Quill paused. For all she knew, Nora may have prompted the H. O. W. revolt at breakfast, although to be fair, she couldn't see how.
"So. This roast pig's for a special occasion? Or what? Kinda early for Christmas."
The pig contemplated the ceiling. Meg contemplated the pig. Quill, whose testiness was increasing as the time for her lunch with Myles drew nearer, drummed her fingers on the butcher block counter. She stopped, not wanting to be rude. Ex-Senator Santini hacked into a well-used handkerchief, wiped his nose, and repeated his question about the roast pig. One of Meg's sneaker-shod feet began to beat an irritable tattoo on the flagstone kitchen floor. Quill held on to her own temper firmly and said in as diplomatic a tone as she could manage, "It's a special order for a men's organization in the village. Now, to get back to your wedding reception, Mr. Santini."
His eyes slid sideways at Quill. "I keep the title Senator, you get my drift? Even though I lost this time around. Most of my compadres call me Senator AI."
Quill, who'd been refusing Mr. Santini the honorific out of nothing more than perversity, decided to relent. For one thing, Senator Santini did have a miserable sloppy cold - or allergies - and he wasn't complaining about it. In Quill's opinion, far too many people with colds made their misery yours. For another, he was short for a man, about her own height, which made his frequent demands for attention more understandable, at least to Quill.
Quill had never gotten used to the fact that celebrities in person looked smaller than they did on television. This shrinkage made her sympathetic. Or maybe, she thought, they weren't smaller than they appeared. Maybe she'd only met celebrities who were smaller than the average person. The alternative was that her subconscious enlarged public figures based on the size of their reputations, which still didn't explain why she'd expected Senator Al to be bigger than he actually was, since his politics were so awful.
He certainly wasn't conventionally good-looking. He was balding, with lank brown hair that flopped over his ears. He had small, rather watery blue eyes and a pot-belly. None of this explained his undoubted appeal. Despite his height and rather flabby appearance, ex-Senator Al Santini definitely had charisma. The charisma might have been due to his voice, which was deep and resonant. Since he had a heavy Long Island accent, Quill didn't think so. It'd be a challenge to paint his portrait. She'd have to capture the charm and still get across the greed, vulgarity, and boys-in-the-back-room politics that had - finally, after three terms - lost him the race for the Senate.
"Quill?" Santini rapped his knuckles on the butcher block counter. "I got snot on my face or what?"
"Sorry, Senator," Quill said. "You were saying?"
"We got a few more people coming than we'd planned on."
Meg clutched her forehead, groaned, and said mildly, "Your mother-in-law-prospective mother-in-law, I should say - has been taking care of everything just fine. Senator. Did you check this new number with her?"
Senator Al waved largely. "She's busy with the other stuff. My guys've been on the horn. I'm telling you, we've gotta be prepared for a crush." Meg and Quill carefully avoided looking at one another. Senator Al had been unseated in a rash of very bad publicity six weeks ago; Newsweek's editorial on the demise - of his career had been scathingly final. Earlier in the week, they'd wondered if anyone would show up at all.
Meg said patiently, "Your fianc‚e Claire booked our Inn in April for a December wedding. In May you gave us the count for the reception - small, you said, since you didn't want a media circus. Forty, you said. Twenty of the immediate family, and twenty of your nearest and dearest friends. In the last few days you've gone from twenty to forty to seventy. Now, four days before the wedding, you want to bounce it to two hundred!?"
Meg's face got pink, which made her gray eyes almost blue. Her voice, however, remained soft, although emphatic. "Our dining room won't take two hundred. I can't cook for two hundred. Not in four days."
Al Santini waved expansively. "Hire all the help you need. Money's no object."
This blithe disregard for the fiscal gave Quill a clue as to a possible reason why the senator's campaign finances had occasioned such investigative furor from the national media.
Meg stared at him expressionlessly. "If I could hire somebody else to do what I do, do you think I'd be doing it?"
"Say what?"
Quill, grateful for Meg's unusual equanimity, and not too sure how long it would last, interrupted, "My sister's a great chef, Mr. Santini. A three-star chef. There aren't a lot of people who can cook with her style. I know that's one of the reasons your fianc‚e and her family wanted to have the wedding here. And, honestly, this last-minute change just isn't possible. You can't expect Meg to do a five-course dinner for two hundred. Not with this kind of notice. And not in our dining room. We don't have the space." Especially, she added to herself, for a guest list that was unlikely to materialize.
Senator Al put a large hand on Meg's shoulder and bent down to look her earnestly in the eye. "Five-course dinner? Am I asking you for a five-course dinner? Absolutely not. No question. But I got a problem here, you understand that? I got a hundred, maybe two hundred people that are going to be coming to my wedding."
"Which is it?" Meg asked patiently.
Santini shrugged. "Who knows? All I'm saying is we gotta prepare for the contingency."
"Contingency," Meg said. "Right."
"I got a couple of Supreme Court justices, a couple a guys from the Senate, ambassadors, and what all coming to this shindig. Important people, you know?"
Meg rubbed her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut. "Which is how come I can't give you an exact count.
If there's a war, or something, or like Bosnia heats up again? You gonna tell General Schwarzkopf he can't hightail it to the action on account of he's supposed to be at my reception?"
"General Schwarzkopf's coming?" said Quill. Senator Al shrugged. "He got an invitation. I expect him. Look, I don't want to say too much, okay? But there's something of national significance coming down pretty soon. And the eye of the nation is gonna be on Hemlock Falls."
Meg rolled her eyes at Quill.
The double swinging doors to the dining room banged open. One of the blue-suited men from the Santini entourage stuck his head inside the kitchen, a portable phone in one hand. Quill couldn't remember which of the men it was; they all looked and sounded alike. "Senator? We finally got Nora Cahill to agree to the interview. We have her in the conference room."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll be right there. You see? It's starting already. Now we got the media. So we bag the five-course dinner for seventy. We do heavy hors d'oeuvres. Stand-up. A buffet, like. The dining room can handle that if you take out the tables. So, Meg, dolly. No dinner."
"Dolly?" Meg said blankly. "Dolly?"
"We're looking at serving two hundred, right? If we can't seat 'em, let 'em stand. That pig, there?" He flicked his finger at the holly under its ear. "You roast a couple of those, we're all set."
"Heavy hors d'oeuvres for two hundred," Meg said stonily, "means a steamship round, pasta and shells, and baked BEANS!" She planted both hands on either side of the pig and drew breath. If one didn't know her very well, the expression on her face might pass for a smile. It put Quill herself, who knew her sister better than anybody, in mind of the wrong side of an outraged baboon. To Quill's amazement, Meg swallowed twice, and said merely, "Why don't we take the change in the menu up with Mrs. McIntosh?"
Santini, clearly unaware he'd escaped a verbal tsunami, continued, "So, no roast pig. I can live with it. If the food's a little less fancy than we planned - don't sweat it." His pat on Meg's shoulder was dismissive. "I gotta take this interview. So, look. You got more questions about the menu? Talk to the ball and chain."
"The what?" Meg demanded.
"Claire. My fianc‚e. Or her ma. Either one. Same-same." He waved at Quill, gave Meg the high sign, pointed a pistol-like forefinger at them, and went pow! "Catch you all later."
The double doors swung shut behind him.
"I don't believe it," said Meg. "Ball and chain? Dolly? Oh, God. I can't stand it!" She ran her hands through her short dark hair.
"Steamship round?" said Quill. "And pasta and shells?"
Meg grinned. "It's tempting, isn't it? That idiot."
"That's all you've got to say? That idiot?"
Meg shrugged. "Why should I waste my breath? It's kind of pathetic, thinking that all these people are showing up for this party. Mrs. McIntosh told me herself that one of the reasons they picked our Inn is because it's so hard to get to in the winter. He's got a guaranteed excuse for nobody accepting the invitations. I have no idea where all this last-minute agita is coming from."
"Maybe he's nervous about getting married," said Quill.
"Whatever. Anyway, Claire and her mother have had seventy acceptances. Almost all relatives. Five-course dinner with no expenses spared. That's what the Mclntoshes are paying for and that's what they'll get. General Schwarzkopf, my eye."
Quill twisted a strand of hair around one finger and tugged at it. "You don't think..."
"That two hundred politicians, ambassadors, and the President's cabinet are going to show up for this wedding? On Christmas Eve? In central New York?" Meg gestured toward the window. The kitchen faced the vegetable gardens at the back of the Inn. Quill could barely see the tops of the brussels sprouts for the snow. "They're predicting four inches more by this afternoon. If the rest of the wedding party doesn't get here by tomorrow, we'll have to cancel the reception and eat each other like the Donner party since we'll undoubtedly get snowed in. Which reminds me. I thought you were going to have lunch with Myles in Syracuse. You better give yourself plenty of time to get there."
"I'll be fine," Quill said. "I told him two o'clock."
"You're sure about it," Meg said, after a pause. "I mean, this business about it being the last lunch."
Quill nodded. "This relationship is just - not going anywhere."
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