"I am moving toward a profound Change," he announced, "an experience of a unique and perhaps Life Enhancing Kind. The Inn's My Destination."
"You Bester," said Quill, who occasionally read science fiction. She curbed her irreverence (but he would speak in capitals!) started the OIds, and backed carefully out of the garage. She pulled into the circular drive leading to the Inn's front door.
"Ah," said Mr. Blight. "They await."
"They sure do," said Quill, eyeing the crowd outside. "My gosh. It's all of S. O. A. P. and Alphonse Santini. And Vittorio McIntosh."
"They are waiting for Me. I am scheduled for an Address. Stop here, please."
Quill braked. "An address? You mean a speech?"
"On the link between the generosity of Nature and the generosity of the human spirit."
Quill thought this through. The crowd of men, seeing Mr. Blight in the passenger seat, began to murmur and shift, like crows in a cornfield. "Is this a fund-raiser for Alphonse Santini?"
Evan Blight's eyes were deep-set, gray, and, Quill realized, very, very sharp. "That is very acute of you, my dear. Not what one would expect of the softer sex. Not what one would expect at all." He maneuvered himself out of the down coat and opened the passenger door. "I leave you now for whatever may be your Destination."
"Syracuse," Quill said absently. "Channel Seven. My coat, Mr. Blight. Where did - um - nature present this to you?"
"At the base of the Root," said Blight. "Near the seed of the tree."
"Beg pardon?"
He clasped her wrist with strength. "Each Conclave of Men has a Center. A Totem. A Signal which - er -signifies the heart and thrust of male power. There is one such Totem here. Perhaps more. I will discover that in future."
There was only one even remotely totemic item in Hemlock Falls, which also happened to be five minutes swift walk from the sheriffs office. "The statue of General Hemlock? That's where you found my coat?"
He patted her cheek. Quill hated anybody patting her cheek. "Let no man gainsay the occasional wisdom of women." He pulled himself out of the car, slammed the door shut, shouting, "Farewell! And on to Syracuse." And turned to meet his fans.
"Aagh!" Quill muttered. "And aaagh again." Alphonse Santini must have heard Blight shouting out that she was headed to Syracuse. Most of the village must have heard Blight. She returned the wave and drove down the road to the turnoff for Route 96. She turned south instead of north, toward Buffalo, on the off chance that this would confuse Santini and discourage anyone from following her.
The only problem with this particular diversionary tactic was that it took her twenty minutes to get to an exit to turn around to head south, and she lost nearly an hour before she was on Interstate 81 to Syracuse.
She lost another half hour trying to find the proper exit to Genesee Street, where the television station was located. For some years in the late eighties Syracuse had been a dying city, its major employers having fled the punishing New York State taxation system for the better business climate in the South. But lately there'd been a resurgence, and a great many streets were undergoing repair. Quill passed work crews red-faced with cold, flagmen who seemed to have been recruited for the amount of ill temper they vented on drivers, and innumberable, irritating, annoying orange cones, which blocked each shortcut to Genesee with fiendish regularity.
By the time she reached the KSGY parking lot, the wind had risen and Bjarne's mashed potato clouds were thickening the blue sky. Quill parked in a space marked KSGY EMPLOEES ONLY. ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED!
She'd worked out a cover story. It was risky, but, as she'd told Meg, time was running short. What she hadn't told Meg - or John - or anyone - except Myles - was that Howie wasn't all that certain she was in the clear. They way in which she spent the next twenty years, he'd suggested, was dependent on how believable John's testimony would be to a jury. Nothing would be gained at the moment, Howie had added, by ruminating on the fact that the new governor had promised to reinstate the death penalty once in office.
Quill took a deep breath, got out of the Olds, and sloshed through the inadequately plowed lot to the lobby. A middle-aged security guard sat behind a glass-walled kiosk. Quill pulled off her knitted cap, smiled, and rapped on the sliding glass window.
The guard raised her eyebrows and slid the panel open. "Can I help you?"
"Hi. I'm Sarah Cahill. Nora's sister." She bit her lip and thought about twenty years in jail.
The guard looked at her face sympathetically.
"I'm not too certain about whom I should see regarding Nora's personal effects. Has - um - any of the family arrived yet to take them? I've been out of the country and haven't had a chance to talk to any of our relatives."
"I thought your folks had passed on," said the guard. Her name tag read: "Rite-Watch Security, Rita."
"You must be Rita," Quill said warmly. "Nora's told me so much about you."
"She did? I on'y met her the two times."
"She said that the one who'd been here before... "
"Paula?" The guard looked smug. `I guess so!' She shook her head briefly. "You know how many jobs Paula's gone through on account of that mouth? I told her. We all told her. But here you are. So Miss Cahill remembered me, huh? Well, I remember her. Poor thing. Poor, poor thing. And you're her sister, huh?"
"We were quite close," said Quill. "I'm sure she's told you all about me, too."
:Yeah. Yeah. Look. I doan want tot hurt your feelings or nuthin', but she never did say much about any of the family."
"Given her schedule," said Quill, "I can understand." She sighed, "All the same, it hurts."
"Poor thing," said Rita, "poor, poor thing. Well. I'll tell you. Mr. Ciscerone packed up all her stuff and said to wait sixty days and if nobody showed up, to ditch it."
Quill, who was beginning to feel genuinely sympathetic on Nora Cahill's behalf, said, "And no one's come yet? No one except me?"
"Nope. You hang on. I'll get her stuff for you." Rita reached through the open panel and patted Quill's hand, then disappeared through a door at the back of her kiosk. Quill shifted nervously from foot to foot. Nero Wolfe always told Archie Goodwin to conduct his investigation based on his intelligence guided by experience. There was never any indication that either detective felt terrible about pulling the wool over various people's eyes. Quill tried hard to feel she wasn't taking advantage of Rita's warm heart and didn't succeed.
Rita reemerged from the back with a large cardboard box and set it on the ledge of the kiosk. It was stuffed with papers, disk files, a Rolodex, a flower vase with four dead daisies, a photograph of Nora with two other women on a beach, and a stack of magazines. Quill made a cursory examination. The computer disks were parts of software packages; the papers mainly office memos, clippings from magazines, and letters from fans and critics of Nora's show.
"Nora was really proud of an investigation she was conducting just before she - you know..." said Quill. "Did Mr. Ciscerone mention that? Nora would have been so happy to know that it had been reassigned."