"Hey! I thought you'd be up to your ears in work. How come you're sitting down?"
Meg threw the cigarette into the open hearth with a guilty air and bounced out of the rocker. "Hey, yourself! I was just beginning to worry. You're more than an hour later than you said you'd be and that storm Bjarne predicted is a doozy."
"In Helsinki, this is spring," Bjarne said. He whacked at a huge tenderloin with the butcher's knife, and whacked again.
"I thought you'd be run off your feet, Meg." "You're kidding, right? Santini's closed the dining room so that he and his eleven pals can eat tenderloin in lofty seclusion. Ten pals actually. One of them got held up by the storm. Listen. I spent the day with Tutti McIntosh, and I've got something really interesting to tell you."
Quill interrupted, "Santini paid the table minimum? For all twenty tables?"
"Claire's doting dad did, I think. Anyhow, everyone's eating away and they're all taken care of. The mayor and his soapy friends ordered cold stuff, except for their roasted cow which they did somewhere in the woods themselves, and I made all that this afternoon. And the H. O. W. ladies each brought a dish to pass. That's where Tutti is now, surrounded by the entire protective brigade of - "
"John's not going to like that. Guests aren't supposed to bring their own stuff."
"I like it," Meg said firmly. "I've got enough to do with this rehearsal dinner for twenty tomorrow night. And then the wedding. Thank God the truck got here just before the snow. We got all that stuff unloaded. And then Tutti was with me in the kitchen all afternoon. I'll be glad when this is all over and we can put up our tree and close the place down for two days. By the way, Myles called and said he won't get here until midnight or after. The snow's caused the usual numbers of crises, including some damn fool wrecking his pickup truck at the 96 exit to 81 and you'll never guess what Tutti did - "
"At the moment," Quill said crossly. "I just don't give a hoot." She settled on a stool at the butcher block counter. Exhaustion overtook her like a dam bursting. She could just sit here and go to sleep. She yawned. "Can you tell me the fascinating news about Tutti later? I have to speak to Myles about that pickup." She glanced casually at Meg. "It sounds like the one that tried to run me off the road."
"Oh, yeah? Well, you can go pound on the driver personally tomorrow. The truck's been towed to Bernie's garage and the guy's at the hospital with a broken arm. Andy says he's not going anywhere soon. Let me tell you what happened here this afternoon."
"Oh, yeah? That's all you have to say when I tell you I was almost murdered right there on 81 by a crazed guy who very probably is involved in Nora Cahill's death, not to mention Frank Dorset's?"
"You're here all in one piece, aren't you?" Meg said callously. "Honestly Quill, sometimes you exaggerate as much as Dina does. It's either that or the other extreme - like failing to mention your absolutely awful driving record to Howie Murchison, which is when all this nutty stuff started. Try to be a little rational for once, will you?"
Pressure always upset Meg. In some remote part of her mind, Quill tried to remember this, and failed. "I am perfectly rational!" she shouted.
"Perfectly rational people don't shriek their heads off at a little mild criticism from a beloved relative. No, they don't. Wait until you hear about the s‚ance this afternoon."
Quill slid off the stool. "I'm numb with cold. I'm sweaty with the aftermath of fear - "
"The what?!"
"And I'm going up to my room and call Myles and tell him about the evidence I just uncovered in this murder case, because it's practically solved, Meg, and then I'm going to take a hot, hot, hot shower, wash my hair, nap, and be gorgeous for poor Myles when he finally gets off road duty."
"Practically solved the murders, huh?" Meg shouted after her as she shoved open the swinging doors to the dining room. "Quill! Don't go that way!"
Quill took two steps into the dining room and encountered the affronted glares of Alphonse Santini, a well-known Supreme Court Justice, an equally well-known Democratic senator, and Vittorio McIntosh, among others.
They were all in black tie.
Quill was jerked out of her fatigue into the present. Sweat streaked her face. Her knitted cap had made a tangled mess of her hair. She'd been wearing black long johns under her snow pants, and she was suddenly aware that rather than resembling leggings - which they were not - they looked like long underwear. Which they were. And there was a hole in her argyle socks.
She retreated to the kitchen.
Meg looked smug. This, Quill reflected later, was the straw that broke the camel's back, the monkey wrench in the machinery, the penultimate push. Actually it wasn't the smugness as much as the pious comment that accompanied it:
"You never listen to me. You'd never get into half the trouble you do if you'd just listen to me."
Quill washed her hair in the shower, drained the tub, filled it with water as hot as she could stand it, and threw in four capfuls of Neutrogena Rain Bath Shower and Bath Body Gel. She had, she realized, told Meg (and any interested person within forty feet of the kitchen) that in the past two days she'd a.) been thrown in jail for a bogus traffic ticket, b.) renounced her lover, c.) been humiliated on television, d.) been thrown in jail on a trumped-up murder charge, e.) been assaulted and sexually harassed by a human asparagus, f.) witnessed a murder, g.) spent the night with a corpse, and finally, been terrified almost to death by a high-speed chase in a snowstorm. Meg's tart rejoinder ("There's no need to get hysterical about it!") made her so mad that she'd upended an entire canister of whole wheat flour on the kitchen floor. The Finns thought this was hilarious. "Americans," Bjarne said with a pleased air, "how I love this country."
A knock on the bathroom door roused her from the gloomy contemplation of her soapy knees. "Yes?" Quill shouted.
There was a bout of furious yapping, a thump, and a muttered "Gol-durn it."
"Doreen?"
"Yap-yap-yap-yap," came Tatiana's voice, in a furious fusillade, "yap-yap-" Crash!
"YAP!!"
"You git, before I turn you into earmuffs!"
There was another crash, as of a mop hitting a hardwood floor, and a ferocious growl. Doreen wouldn't dare deep-six the dog. Would she? Quill waited for a canine gurgle. Maybe that growl had been Doreen. Maybe a short dog drowned in a tall mop bucket didn't have time to gurgle.
"Doreen?"
"It's me," came Doreen's familiar foghorn voice.
"You decent? - OW!"
Decent, she thought. How decent is a person who yells at her sister?
"I'll be right there." She sloshed out of the tub, pulled on her terry cloth robe, and opened the door.
"Doreen. You look really nice."
The housekeeper was dressed in a long velvet skirt, a metallic gold turtleneck with blouson sleeves, and sandals with rhinestones at the toes. This gave her a charmingly old-fashioned (if gaudy) appearance. She was carrying a mop. Quill smiled at her. "You ought to wear soft shapes more often. But why the mop?"