"You're too smart to believe that one, Frank. And even smarter enough to stop anyone who spreads it. Quill? You have a few minutes to spare? Mrs. McIntosh would like to go over some of the wedding plans."
"Sure." Quill latched on to the proffered diversion with relief. "Where is she?"
"Office. I'll meet you there in a second. Kathleen's busy with customers out there. The RV conventioneers from the Marriott snowmobiled over here in a huge group. I told her I'd turn these lunch orders over to Frank for her."
Quill hesitated, waiting for him. "You go on ahead, Quill. I just need a few minutes with these guys."
Quill pushed her way through the swinging doors slowly enough to hear John say, "Everyone in this kitchen is going to listen to this once, and only once..."
The doors whispered closed. Behind her, John's admonitions rose and fell. Phrases like "innocent until proven guilty" would be hurled next. Not to mention, "going through a tough time at the moment." Quill folded her arms and glowered, startling a guy in an unzipped snowmobile suit at table fourteen into spilling Meg's pumpkin souffl‚ onto his T-shirt. Mindful of a public television special on psychic well-being she'd seen recently, Quill took deep breaths, strove for inner calm, and exhaled noisily, further alarming the gentleman seated at fourteen.
Quill concentrated fiercely on the McIntosh wedding, clearing her thoughts of a persistent sense of injustice. Mrs. McIntosh would want to know if they could accommodate the extra eighty people who'd somehow I, sprung up at the last minute.
She still wasn't sure how they were going to handle the entire McIntosh reception without opening the terrace, and there was no way to open the terrace because it was December and too cold for anyone except the S. O. A. P. diehards. She mentally rearranged the mahogany sideboards, the breakfront, and the tables. She waved absentmindedly at Kathleen, who was moving gracefully among the tables like a skater on a pond, and thought about taking out just one more wall. The sturdy building was used to it, and she'd been convinced they needed the extra space for a long time anyway.
When they had purchased the Inn seven years before, Meg and Quill had decided on twenty-seven guest rooms, a Tavern Lounge to seat a hundred, and an equivalent number of seatings in the dining room. They'd remodeled with that in mind. John had added a conference center for possible corporate business when he'd signed on with them two years after they had opened, over Quill's protests, The past summer John had encouraged them to open a small, boutique style restaurant in the Sakura mall which almost ran itself.
Neither Meg nor Quill had anticipated the sudden spurt of success of the last year or so resulting from John's management, Not only had the number of business parties increased - but so had the private, The McIntosh wedding would be the largest Meg and Quill had ever planned, and it would be the first of many, if the current trends held.
She felt John come into the room behind her and said, "If we could just take out the wall between here and the foyer, I know we could seat those extra eighty people."
"I think we should stick with the buffet."
"I hate to stand up when I eat, And so does everyone else."
"Well, by all means. Let's call Mike and get that wall down, the place recarpeted, and the walls repainted by Friday."
"Oh, ha," She paused. "I don't know, you're probably right about the spacing," She scanned the room, Mauve carpeting covered the floor, The tables were covered with deep dusty rose cloths in winter, to make the room seem warmer. The east wall gave a view of the snow-filled gorge. Sunlight sparkled off the icicles formed on the granite by the waterfall, a welcome change from the gloom of the day before. The contrast between the blue-white iridescence of the winter outside and the warmth of the room had a lot to do with the animation of the people eating Meg's food, she thought. They're happy, they're full. This is a business that gives people a little peace of mind. And I like it. She pushed the thought of Myles, and a home and children a little further into her subconscious.
A plump blond woman at the foyer entrance waved agitatedly in Quill's direction. "I almost forgot about Mrs. McIntosh," she said suddenly. "Poor thing!" She tucked her hand into John's arm. "Let's go relieve her agitation."
"That," murmured John, "will be quite a trick without Prozac."
On the way through the foyer to the office, Elaine McIntosh circled them like a retriever asked to herd sheep - plucky but easily distracted. She was a pretty, plump, beautifully shaped woman who wore well-tailored trousers and plain blouses trimmed with a bit of lace on the collar or the cuffs, high-necked and long-sleeved.
Quill had discovered that Elaine's physical appearance, combined with a more or less permanent state of soft-spoken distress, brought out odd impulses in men. Even John, who was as reserved around women as the Pope, fussed over her. He settled her on the couch in Quill's office, buzzed the kitchen for tea, and pulled the McIntosh wedding file from the drawer in Quill's cabinet with a minimum of words and a maximum of composure. With a cup of hot Red Zinger in her hand and John's solid height next to her on the couch, Elaine exhibited all the aplomb of a woman who owned a large amount of property over the San Andreas Fault. This was an improvement over her usual state of mind, which was that of a periodontophobe waiting for a root canal.
"There's two things," she said breathlessly. "The first is, I just wanted to thank you again for the use of this lovely, lovely building. It's so antique! It's so historic! You know, Claire - I mean, her father - well, our money is plumbing fixture money and Alphonse is so..." She waved helplessly.
"Fatheaded?" Quill ventured under her breath.
Mrs. McIntosh twisted her rings in agitation. "Ritzy," she finally managed. "The Santinis are bigwigs. My husband Vittorio gets so mad when I say that. He says money made in plumbing fixtures is as good as anybody's, but you know, it's not!"
"Of course it is," Quill said indignantly. "My goodness."
A brass plaque set near the fireplace in the Inn's foyer read "Est. 1693," the implication being that the Inn building with its copper roof and weathered shakes had been there for three hundred years. And most people, Quill knew, thought that antiquity conferred prestige. Quill never passed the plaque without a mild sense of guilt over the aristocratic implications; three hundred years ago, the Inn overlooking the Falls of Hemlock Gorge had been a one-room log cabin owned and operated by a lady of dubious virtue called Turkey Lil. From the War of 1812 on, the Inn had been added to, until it reached a sprawling twenty thousand square feet mid-century. Subsequent owners had adapted the Inn to fit various purposes, and it had been a girls' school, a rest home, and even, briefly, the home of the deservedly unknown Civil War General C. C. Hemlock. The Inn was a lot of things, but it wasn't, in Mrs. McIntosh's parlance, ritzy, aristocratic or even prestigious. Merely old.
"And the second thing?" Quill prompted.
"It's Vittorio, my husband." Mrs. McIntosh apologized and Quill got the impression she was apologizing for the marital relationship as well as the existence of the man himself. "Actually it's Vittorio's mother, Tutti."
"Tutti?" asked Quill, leaning forward so she could hear better. Elaine McIntosh became almost inaudible when stressed, and since Elaine seemed to be stressed all the time, no one at the Inn had been entirely certain whether the McIntosh celebration was a wedding or an anniversary until Mrs. McIntosh confirmed the plans in writing last August. A secondary frustration was that no one knew why the Mclntoshes - who were clearly Italian - had a Scottish cognomen; Meg had given up altogether on being able to figure that one out. "Has she decided not to come after all?"