"I did NOT run over a little kid!"
"You heard it wrong, Elmer, you hopeless little shit." Marge put her hands on her considerable hips and surveyed the cell and the shoeless Quill with a suspicious touch of satisfaction. "Just look at this. Cold, hungry, and practically bare nekkid. I'm going to go down to the library and check out a couple of books for Quill, here. Esther, you find some slippers in that shop of yours, and then give Betty a call. She can run over here with some hamburg and a thermos of coffee." She fixed a malevolent eye on Davy. "And don't you touch a drop of my coffee, David Emerson Kiddermeister. I ain't subsidizing any damn fool that had a part in this. And speaking of damn fools, where's that useless son of bitch sheriff?"
"You talking to me?"
To her fierce annoyance, Quill jumped and her breath came short. Franklin Douglas Dorset, newly elected sheriff of Tompkins County, didn't look at all like Travis Bickle, he only sounded like him. He looked, as Meg had stigmatized him at the start of his election campaign, like a canned asparagus. He unzipped his quilted winter jacket and regarded the group crushed in front of the cell with speculation. Dorset was tall; his skin, hair, eyes, and clothes a uniformly nondescript pale brown. His hair was thick, standing almost upright, and his shoulders, chest, and hips were of similar circumference, so that if you had an imagination as food-oriented as Meg's it was possible to imagine Dorset as one of the more cylinderlike vegetables. Quill thought he looked more like a bleached-out Elvis Presley than an asparagus.
Meg also claimed Dorset had the brains of a boiled onion. Quill, after one look at his flat brown eyes, wasn't sure about that.
"Deputy?" said Dorset. "There some good reason why all these people are in here?"
Marge drew breath. Quill waited confidently for the explosion. Blessed with the psychic drive of a Patton tank, Marge could flatten sumo wrestlers with a single glance from her turretlike eye.
"Guess we better be getting along," Marge said meekly. "I'm bringing her coffee and a book, Sheriff," she added. "And somethin' to put on her feet. If you don't mind."
"What I mind," said Sheriff Dorset, lifting a comer of his lip, "is you taking that intersection at Route 15 and 96 at seventy miles an hour last Sunday at 4:32 p.m., Marge Schmidt. That's a three-hundred-dollar, three-point V&T violation."
"Route 15 and 96?" Elmer asked alertly.
"Maybe it's there," Dorset said with relish, "and maybe it isn't. I'll see you folks sometime, right?" He held an imaginary camera to one eye and pretended to click it.
Quill watched Marge leave, followed by a studiedly careless mayor and a nervous Esther. She said to Dorset, "You mean you can move the dam thing?"
"The hidden camera? Bet your cute little ass. No use in a town this size if you can't."
Dorset unclipped the keys to the cell from his belt with a flourish and opened the cell door. His gaze flicked over her carelessly, avoiding her eyes, and concentrating on her breasts. He stood slouched, one hip thrust out.
"Deputy here says you want to go home. Says you're a little scared. Can't say as I blame you."
Quill thought carefully about her response to this. She probably wouldn't get much more than seven years jail time If she punched Franklin Douglas Dorset right in the nose. On the other hand, her feet were cold and she was going to die if she didn't get a cup of coffee. "Ahem," she said, in a noncommittal way.
"Tell you what. Senator out there wants to have a little talk with you, then he figures you pay the fine, you've served a little time, it's all settled, you can go back up to the Inn." Dorset smiled ingratiatingly.
Quill didn't say anything. "Well, ma'am?"
"What kind of talk?" she asked suspiciously.
Dorset jiggled the keys. "Whyn't you come right out here and see?"
Dorset behind her like an ugly sheepdog, Quill marched into the sheriff's office and into a glare of lights, cables, and Nora Cahill's camera crew.
"Sarah Quilliam was released at 12:22, having spent all of two hours and forty-seven minutes of her seven-day sentence in jail," said Nora Cahill in her professional anchor voice. "Senator? Do you have a comment?"
Quill's stockinged toe caught on a piece of curling linoleum. She pitched forward. Al Santini grabbed her elbow and pulled her upright. Howie Murchison draped her down coat over her shoulders, grabbed Quill's other elbow, and pulled her toward the door.
"Sarah Quilliam is a wealthy businesswoman and Hemlock Falls' third largest employer," Santini said into the camcorder's little red light. "The level of this fine is a joke."
Ex-Senator Al Santini and Sheriff Dorset smiled for the camera. Howie looked pained. "Here're your boots, Ms. Quilliam," Davy whispered apologetically. Quill grabbed them and pulled the left one on, hopping around the linoleum on one leg. They were still soggy with snow and mud.
Nora Cahill shoved the microphone in Quill's face. "Do you have a comment, Ms. Quilliam? Do you think this criminal charge will affect business at your upper-crust Inn? And how do you feel about Senator Santini's efforts to reform small-town America?"
Quill, who thought of herself as a generally equable person, felt the last shreds of her temper fray and snap. She grabbed the right boot by its wet, muddy top and swung.
"And he's going to press charges?!" Meg said indignantly some twenty minutes later. "That lunatic! That creep! I would have whacked him right in the balls."
Quill, wanting nothing more than to sit quietly for two minutes and warm her feet, looked at the kitchen with the nostalgic affection common, she supposed, to the recently paroled. She never wanted to see Al Santini or Bernie Bristol or Frank Dorset again in this life. She wanted to stay in the kitchen forever. The cobblestone fireplace was hung with dried bay leaf, braids of pearly garlic, and sheaves of lemon thyme. A fire burned briskly in the grate. Meg's collection of copper pots gleamed reassuringly from one of the oak beams running overhead. The air was filled with the scents of baking bread, orange sauce for the game hens, and freshly ground coffee. Admittedly, the view from the mullioned windows at the kitchen's west end was not quite as picturesque as that from the county jail; the herb gardens out back were still producing parsley and brussels sprouts. Sometime yesterday Mike the grounds keeper must have cleared them of snow. The mulched beds were consequently muddy with well-manured straw, but they looked beautiful to Quill. "Free," mused Quill, feeling warmly toward the mulch, "I'm free."
"The son of a bitch," Meg continued.
"Do you kiss your mother with that mouth, Miss Margaret Quilliam?" demanded Doreen, who had insisted that Quill completely change her clothes. "Lice," she'd said. "And I ain't sayin' a word more."
She tapped Quill on the shoulder. "The senator got a powerful lot of mud up his nose, or so I hear. But that don't make it right for Meg here to cuss him out. Jail! The good Lord give me a stummick to hear this. Jail!"
"Actually, I was aiming at Nora Cahill. I didn't mean to get Al Santini, although I'm glad I did. And why are you mad at me, Doreen?"
Doreen darted a beady, somewhat proprietary eye around the kitchen. Six of the kitchen staff scrubbed vegetables, stirred sauces, and washed pots with unconcern for Doreen's cool reception of the fact that Quill had spent two hours and forty-seven minutes in the county jail. In her middle fifties, Doreen had been head housekeeper at the Inn for almost six years and regarded both Meg and Quill as sometimes satisfactory but frequently recalcitrant daughters, and everybody knew it.