"I'm ashamed of you," Doreen said severely. "The whole town's talking about it."
"It's not that big a deal! It was a setup! A mistake!" Quill sank her head in her hands. "I suppose Axminster's going to run a story in the Gazette."
"Huh," said Doreen. She scratched her nose vigorously.
"Isn't anyone glad to see me?" Quill asked somewhat plaintively.
The kitchen got very quiet, although, thought Quill, the kitchen was never really quiet. Even at two o'clock in the morning, the Zero King refrigerators filled the air with a gentle hum. And at one o'clock in the afternoon, four days before Christmas, with the rest of the McIntosh family due that evening and a wedding due at the end of the week, the Inn's kitchen was filled with the clank and clatter of sous-chefs at the Aga, the oceanlike hum of the lunch crowd in the dining room, and the slam-whack of doors opening and closing.
Quill thought about the sound of doors closing: store- room doors, cupboard doors, oven doors - all of it far preferable to the unique sound of a cell door being shut and locked. But at the moment, the kitchen was quiet only in relation to the usual people noise: Usually Meg alternately shrieked at and sang to the Cornell interns; Doreen recited the latest depredations of departed guests on the Inn towel supply; Frank, the assistant chef, called out food orders to the hapless Bjarne; the other workers whistled, gossiped, or hummed. At the moment, everyone in the kitchen was dead silent, out of sympathy, Quill had assumed, for her recent incarceration. Now she wasn't so sure.
"Oh, for Pete's sake." Meg, shaping meringues into swans, paused and waved the palette knife in an accusing fashion." Anyone would think you'd spent three days in solitary instead of three hours chitchatting with Davy Kiddermeister."
"I was not chitchatting with Davy Kiddermeister. I was in jail. A prisoner. And I was cold. I told you. They took away my boots."
Doreen made a surreptitious note on a pad she kept handy in her apron. Quill had seen the pad. It had a little logo of a mouse with a reporter's hat and five large capital W's running down one edge for Who, What, Where, When and Why. Doreen had ordered it from the Lillian Vernon catalog soon after she married Axminster and they bought the Gazette. Axminster had proved surprisingly good at publishing the weekly, although Quill suspected that Doreen's nose for gossip had a lot to do with it. That, and her savings from her wages as the Inn's housekeeper. Doreen was notoriously thrifty. Doreen caught Quill's eye and shoved the pad back in her pocket. Doreen's gray hair frizzed around her high forehead like a ruff on a grouse and her nose was beaky. Spurious attempts at innocence increased her resemblance to a startled rooster.
"Axminster' s going to run a story about this, isn't he?"
"It's publicity," Doreen offered placatingly. "Publicity's good for business."
Meg snorted, "Publicity! If you'd just told Howie Murchison about those priors, none of this would have happened. What I want to know is, how come when the Inn gets publicity, it's always bad publicity? At least this time it isn't a corpse. I hate it when the headlines involve a corpse."
"They better not, missy," Doreen said darkly.
"Better not what?" asked Quill.
"Involve no corpse."
Meg grinned to herself and added a wing to the swan's body with meticulous care.
"What are you talking about? I didn't kill anybody!"
"Passin' a school bus, you might of, is all," said Doreen.
The silence intensified.
"I didn't pass a school bus!" said Quill. "I mean I did, but it was a parked school bus."
"That's when you're supposed to stop," Doreen said tartly. "When the school bus is."
"It was a parked, empty school bus!"
"Empty?" said Frank, the assistant chef. "You mean you didn't almost run over a little kid?"
"No!"
"That's what we heard," Bjarne said apologetically.
"I told you guys," said Meg.
"Told them what?" said Quill.
"I told them you didn't almost run over a little kid. You would have confessed to me." She winked.
"There is," Quill said stiffly, "evidence that I didn't run over anybody."
"Evidence?" asked Doreen.
"A videotape. From that damn hidden camera that started this whole mess. They showed it in court. All it showed was my car passing that school bus!"
"They show the whole thing?" Doreen asked alertly. "Stuff like that can be faked, ya know."
"All right, all right." Meg gestured widely with the palette knife, spattering egg white. "Doreen, you know gossip in a town this size. Quill didn't run anybody over with anything." She shook her head at Quill. "You're right, I should have stayed with you this morning. Next time you get arrested, I will. Sisters forever!" She began to hum an Irving Berlin tune so old Quill didn't even know where she'd picked it up. "Sis - ters. Sis - ters. Dah-dah-dah-sisters..."
"Thing is," Frank said earnestly, "if you didn't almost run over a little kid, what else would bring someone like Senator Alphonse Santini all the way to Hemlock Falls to prosecute a little traffic case?"
Quill rose from her seat behind the counter. "He's here for the wedding! He is not a senator. He's an ex-senator. Clearly he's turning even his wedding into a media circus! And he's running so hard for reelection he's going to need oxygen infusions before New Year's. As to why he picked on Hemlock Falls first, beats the heck out of me. Maybe because he's getting married here. You heard what Nora Cahill said - this is part of a whole campaign to reform small-town America. And he's started here. If anyone's a hit-and-run driver, it's him. I mean it's he. Whatever. I'll bet you a week's pay that right now he's off to the next town and the next victim, trailing his pet little media person and her camcorders behind him. He'll be jailing innocent people over in Covert next. Or maybe Trumansburg. And he'll come back here to get married, and I'll kill him."
"The guy's a jerk," Meg said loyally. "If the McIntoshes weren't spending all this money on his wedding, I'd do more than shove a few handfuls of mud up his nose."
"Gee, thanks, Meg," said Quill. "Food first, sisters second." She paused, cleared her throat, and said huskily, "I can't believe you guys thought I did something as terrible as almost hitting a little kid."
"Somebody circulating that rumor again?" John came through the swinging doors from the dining room, a sheaf of lunch orders in his hand. At his seemingly casual comment, everyone busily resumed work. Quill had always thought his chief asset as business manager was his unflappability. She decided now that it was his easy air of authority. He smiled at her. "Glad to see Howie sprang you from the slam. I was about to callout the cavalry."
Quill gave him an unwilling smile.
"Mr. Raintree? This rumor that's been going around about Quill's jail time..." Frank began.