A Carol for a Corpse (16 page)

Marge shrugged. “You don’t make those kind of bucks by playing Mr. Nice Guy. It’s a fact. I’ll tell you what burns my behind. If I’m right about this, and it’s a scam, he’s got that five hundred acres on the river for less than half a million bucks.”

“But if the residents aren’t paid the full amount, how can he?”

Marge patted her arm. “Slides the land into another company before he goes belly-up, that’s how. Now, just relax, Quill. There’s nothing more to do right now.”

“You saved those people, Marge,” Quill said. “That was a terrific thing to do.”

“Maybe.” She smiled. “But I sure put a spoke in the Kingster’s wheel, didn’t I?”

“I think, folks,” Harvey shouted, “that we’re finally ready to start. People? People? May I have your attention, please? Let’s not waste valuable rehearsal time here! We’re scheduled to give our first performance tomorrow. And I think,” he added with a twinkle, “that in view of the terrific news some of our friends at the Gorgeous Gorges trailer park received today, and in view of who will be the guest of honor at our debut tomorrow, we want to begin with ‘Good King Wenceslas.’ ”

A ripple of appreciative laughter swept the choir.

“Now, Marge? I want you to take the part of the Page. Elmer? You take the part of the King.” Adela, decked out in a red velvet pantsuit with a bunny fur collar, nodded approval. “Ready? And a one and a two and ah . . .”

Quill stood up. Melissa was at the Inn with Meg. She would have to know what Marge had just told her. She really ought to get back. And it wasn’t, she told herself, that she was afraid she would croak like a frog in front of everybody. “Harvey? I’m sorry. I just remembered that . . . I told Meg I’d give her a hand with the elf costumes.”

“The elf costumes?” Harvey looked both puzzled and curious.

“The bells, you know,” Quill said vaguely. “I’m sorry. I’ll be back as soon as I can. You guys go on without me.”

Quill was halfway down the aisle before she remembered that she hadn’t brought her car. She stood on the steps of the church and debated; she could call Meg, or she could walk all the way back to the Inn. The snow was still falling in lazy, halfhearted swirls. The heavy sky was breaking up and a handful of stars shone through the thinning clouds. It was just cold enough for the snow to pile up without melting, but not so cold that she was in danger of freezing to death. Not if she kept moving. The twinkling Christmas lights, the fresh stillness of the air, and the occasional glimpse of the moon decided her. She’d walk. The past week had been filled with too many people and too many events for her peace of mind. She had a penlight attached to the car keys in her purse in case the moon disappeared altogether. And she would be blissfully, totally alone for the twenty minutes or so it would take to walk home.

There was a shortcut to the Inn through Peterson Park. In the summer, when she had errands in the village, she almost always walked the half mile, and the terrain was totally familiar. She entered the park gates and crunched past the statue of General C. C. Hemlock on his horse, making up a mental list of things to do right now and things to do in the morning.

The very first thing was to sit down with Melissa Smith and talk to her about the supposed windfall from Zeke “the Hammer” Kingsfield. Marge had seemed pretty certain cash backed the ten-thousand-dollar checks he’d handed out like so much Halloween candy. If Melissa hadn’t deposited it in the bank, she needed to do it right now. And if Kingsfield continued the dramatic removal of the house trailers, the residents of Gorgeous Gorges could end up homeless. On the other hand, if he was the owner of the property, Marge seemed to think he could kick them out anyway. So the second thing she needed to do was talk to Howie Murchison to see if there was any way an injunction could stall things.

She reached the perimeter of the little park and the narrow trail that led up the side of the hill to the Inn. It was slippery here, and she paid attention to where she put her feet. Her boots slipped on the icy patches so she stopped and directed her penlight to the brush. It’d help if she could find a branch to use as a walking stick.

Something large moved in the brush beyond her.

Quill swept the light breast-high and shone it into the thickets. There were deer in Peterson Park—too many of them, as a matter of fact. She made a soft, chirruping sound.

The rustling movement stopped.

Quill shone the light into the depths of the trees. Nothing. And paradoxically, the light made it harder to see in the dark. She switched it off entirely and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim moonlight. A twig snapped. Uneasy now, she abandoned the search for the walking stick and began to hurry up the incline. She slipped and fell forward into complete and painful blackness.

Quill dreamed it was summer. She was washing her face in a warm pool of water in a forest glade. The washcloth kept moving out of her hands. It was rubbery and a little rough. She made a grab for it.

She woke up.

She was flat on her back and Max was licking her face. And her bedroom was dark. Max’s breath smelled like Alpo. And there was something wrong with the furnace because her feet were so cold they hurt. Her head hurt, too.

She put her hands up and pushed at the furry chest. “Stop,” she said.

Max whimpered and settled himself flat on her chest.

“Max, darn it. Get off. I can’t breathe!”

Quill struggled upright. Max weighed close to eighty pounds. And he was stubborn. She rolled the dog over and pushed him off into the snow.

And she realized, with a jolt of absolute panic, that she was lying in the middle of a woods in the dark and it was snowing hard.

Max jumped to his feet, shook his coat free of snow, and shoved his solid body against her shoulder. Quill steadied herself with one hand on his back and pulled herself to her feet. “Aren’t you a good boy,” she said breathlessly.

Her memory crept back to her in fits and starts, like floats bumping into her in a river. She’d left the church to walk home. She’d slipped on the ice on the path up the hill. She’d knocked the brains out of her skull when she’d fallen.

Except that she’d fallen forward; she was certain of it. And she’d wakened on her back.

She felt her forehead gingerly with one gloved hand. There was a terrific lump. And it was scraped raw. It stung in the frigid air. She must have hit a rock or a tree trunk the size of Alaska when she’d tripped. She was still clutching her key chain. She switched the flashlight on, and the beam pointed straight down. Shakily, she directed the beam to the ground in front of her.

The path was free of debris, except for a thin carpet of snow and a swirl of paw prints, footprints, and boot prints. The prints were filling up rapidly as the snow came down. But there was no boulder, no tree trunk the size of Alaska or otherwise.

She crouched down and nearly fell over from dizziness. She steadied herself with one hand and ran the flashlight over the roiled-up snow with the other. The paw prints were Max’s. The boot prints were hers. The footprints belonged to somebody with a pair of smooth-bottomed shoes.

“Somebody’s been here,” Quill said aloud.

Max pushed himself against her knees and she nearly fell over again.

“Max, who the heck would be out in the snow in shoes? Their feet would freeze off.” A sudden stab of pain in her skull made her gasp. She hadn’t fallen. She’d been hit over the head. “Which I hope they did, by God. Froze off, I mean.”

She took a deep breath. Her purse must be lying somewherearound here. There, at the side of the path, half its contents lying soggy in the snow. She picked her purse up and retrieved her cell phone, wallet, and sketchpad. The sketchpad was a total loss. All her money and credit cards were still in her wallet. And her cell phone was deader than a doornail, either because she’d forgotten to charge it or because its complicated little innards didn’t take to storage in snowbanks.

The ache in her head ebbed. The snow slowed and stopped. The clouds drifted on and the moon shone down, illuminating the path up the side of the hill to home. It was either back through the park or forward to a hot bath and a couple of aspirin.

Quill climbed up the slope to the top of the hill. Max charged over the top of the rise and plunged down to the lawn below. Quill followed him and stopped before she walked down the slight slope of law to the Inn. She rarely saw the structure from the top of the gorge at night, and she was struck by how beautiful it was. The Christmas lights made a fantastical jeweled web in the dining room windows. At Quill’s request, Mike had wound another web of lights around the trunk and branches of the oak tree just outside the front door. The effect was wonderful. The tree glowed with an otherworldly light.

Max dashed to the front door, looked at her, dashed back to her side, and then sat down, tongue lolling, as if to say, “Now what?”

“If I go in the front door, chances are good that someone will see me and shriek like a banshee. And I’m just not up for that, Max. If I go into the kitchen, it’s certain I’d run into Meg or worse yet, Lydia and the television shoot, and I’m not up for that, either. So it’s the burglar’s way for us. As it is, even if I get myself cleaned up so it doesn’t look as scary as I think it does, you know what’s going to happen as well as I do. Somebody will insist on calling the sheriff’s office, and Davy Kiddermeister took Dina to the movies tonight in Syracuse, and it would just wreck her date if he had to come back here and mooch around the dark in the snow. And Meg would drag me to the ER. Nope. I’m sneaking in.”

She felt quite noble about her decision. She looked at the fire escape on the east side of the building. Her rooms were on the third floor, directly across from Meg’s. And she had the keys to the fire door with her. At the moment, it looked like a long way up.

It took less effort to climb the fire escape stairs than she thought it would, perhaps because Max insisted on coming with her. Quill patted him frequently, grateful for his affection. These particular stairs scared him and it took him forever to decide to leave one landing and take the stairs to the next. She was feeling quite like her old self when she let herself into her rooms. She shrugged off her coat, kicked off her boots, and took a good long look at herself in the bathroom mirror. What had felt like a giant bump to her fingertips looked quite harmless. There was a slight swelling, and there was a faint bluish tint to her skin, but that was it. The scrape was barely visible. And there was hardly any blood.

Quill was conscious of a feeling of disappointment. “I mean,” she said to Max, who was listening with every evidence of intense curiosity, “you’d think that being knocked cold by a midnight attacker would be more, I don’t know, obvious.”

Her feet and toes were quite warm now, too. And although her skirt was soaked from the snow, and clung unpleasantly to her calves, she was actually feeling quite warm in her fisherman’s sweater.

She swallowed some aspirin, washed her face, combed her hair, and changed into dry trousers, a lighter-weight sweater, and a pair of knee socks and comfortable shoes. By the time she got downstairs, her headache was gone. To her surprise, the dining room was a quarter full of people still eating dinner. To her further surprise, when she flung the swinging doors into the kitchen open and announced, “I’m back,” Meg merely looked up her from her place at the stove and said, “How come you’re back so early? It’s a good thing that you are, though. I could use a hand here.”

Quill looked at the kitchen clock. It was barely eight. It seemed as if a lifetime had passed since she wakened in the woods. Clearly, she’d been unconscious for mere minutes.

Although the area around the new stove and prep sinks was clear, the rear part of the kitchen was filled with stage lights, video monitors, and a large video camera with a stand. Benny fussed with a wreath of spices that hung over the bread hearth. Five elves in costume lounged around in various poses; two were slumped comfortably in portable director’s chairs, one sat cross-legged on the floor, and two stood with their backs against the wall in the short hallway that led to the outside door. With the hats, clown white makeup, fake noses, and tights and jerkins, it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.

“Plate!” Meg shouted. Kathleen grabbed the entrée Meg had flung on the countertop and trotted out the door.

“Poached pears!” Mikhail grabbed a strainer, and began to take the pears simmering in wine out of the pot one by one.

“I need someone to prep Steak Quilliam,” Meg said, “and that’s you, Quill, since Mikhail’s busy with the pears.”

“But—” Quill gave up. If Meg hadn’t noticed she was bravely ignoring a significant head wound by now, she wasn’t going to until the food preparation was over.

Quill took a plate from the warming oven, arranged the Potatoes Duchess, sprigs of rosemary and cinnamon-spiced apple rings on it, and stepped back as Meg took a filet from her sauté pan and lifted it carefully into the center of the food. She handed the pan to Quill, who carefully drizzled the sauce over the beef.

“Meg!” Benny called out. “If that’s the last of the orders, can we try another run-through?”

“Yes. You can have my kitchen full time, now, Benny. That was the last entrée. If any dessert orders come in, Quill and I can handle them.”

Kathleen returned from delivering the final entrée and took her place in the lineup in front of the bread oven.

“Everyone line up!” Ajit stood behind the camera and put his eye to the lens. “Elf on the left move over three feet to your right. No, no, your other right.”

“Is Melissa there?” Quill said. “I can’t tell which one of you is which.”

“After rehearsal,” Ajit said firmly. “Come on now, dear. Ajit wants to get some dancing feet on tape.” He sent Quill a brief, comradely grin. “We only use one camera on the live shoot, but we want the production values to look pricier. So we do a lot of cutting with shots we’ve taken earlier.”