A Carol for a Corpse (25 page)

Quill threw open the shed door. The coil of cable stood against the wall, just inside the door. As Dina had predicted, it was at least four feet high.

“There’s a light,” Quill said. She turned it on.

“Just step back, please,” Davy said a little testily. “Tony? You have that garbage bag?”

The two of them pulled on latex gloves, then carefully maneuvered the coil of cable into the garbage bag. They stowed it in the trunk of the squad car. “Okay,” Davy said, “that’s it. Tony will drop this off at the forensics lab in Syracuse. We’ll take it from here.”

“You’ll let us know if there’s anything unusual about it?” Quill said hopefully.

“I can’t make any promises.” Davy got back into the squad car and rolled the window partway up again. “Quill?” he said. “Even if nothing comes of this, I appreciate the fact that you called me in rather than taking things into your own hands.” He put the car into gear. “Ladies? We’ll be in touch.”

Quill waved farewell to them. She waited until the car disappeared around the bend before she stepped into the shed.

“It’ll be days before we hear anything,” Dina said fretfully, following her. “What if we’re wrong? What if it doesn’t have a thing to do with the murder?”

“It has to do with the murder,” Quill said. “Look at this.”

Meg crowded against her shoulder. Quill was on her knees at the spot where the coil had rested against the shed wall. “That’s glitter!” Meg exclaimed. “That’s the same kind of glitter Benny used in the elf costumes!”

“Yes,’ Quill said soberly. “It’s one of Zeke’s inner circle after all.” She got to her feet and brushed her skirt free of the dirt from the floor. She stood still for a long moment, trying to get her thoughts in order. “But which one?”

“But everyone of Zeke’s inner circle, as you call it, was in the kitchen on that shoot from five until well after the snow stopped falling,” Meg said. “I would have noticed if someone had slipped out.”

“Would you? With five people dressed exactly alike roaming around the kitchen with no particular place to go? It happened right under our noses. One of the elves slipped out during the shoot last night, passed me in the woods coming up the slope and socked me in the head, moved the six-by-six piece of lumber in place, and loosened the fence post. It couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes, at best. And they were all in costume, so pinning down who was where with eyewitness testimony is absolutely impossible. You were in the kitchen the whole time, Meg. Do you remember anyone going missing?”

“I was cooking!” Meg said indignantly.

“Pretty ingenious,” Marge said. “You had the murderer in plain sight all along.”

“There’s a slim chance that Ajit noticed the missing person. And the other three might have seen something and not put it together until Zeke was found dead. Melissa was the likeliest one to say something, but she’d run away from Hemlock Falls by then. She may not know that Zeke is dead.”

“Or if she does, she may be afraid to come back,” Dina said soberly.

“Perhaps,” Quill said. “And there’s no good reason for any one of the
Good Taste
crew to turn the murderer in. Each one of them had an excellent reason for wanting Zeke gone. He was about to destroy the quality of the show. Benny’s very ill, as you can see just by looking at him. His chances of getting a new job if the show folds are nonexistent. And Benny’s the bright light in that relationship. If the show is a disaster, and Benny unemployable, what sort of job will Bernie be qualified for?”

“What about LaToya? She was Zeke’s girlfriend,” Marge said. “Although she may have slept with him without liking him much. I’ve heard of stuff like that happening before.”

“Or maybe she’s just loyal to the others,” Dina said. “I think I might be.”

Quill shook her head. “We may never know for sure. LaToya’s been embarrassed on national television. She was promised a responsible job in one of Zeke’s companies, and here she is working as an assistant on a cable food show. I doubt there’s any love lost between her and Zeke. That’s a pretty tight group.”

“You’d think one of them might have told Lydia, though,” Marge said.

Quill looked at her. Marge was a pretty shrewd judge of human nature. “That’s more than possible. But Lydia stands to lose a pile of insurance money if Zeke’s death is ruled a murder and not an accident. If she does know anything, don’t you think she would have come forward by now? I don’t think we can count on anyone giving evidence. Unless we put on the right kind of pressure.”

“So what do we do now?” Dina asked.

Quill tugged at the curl over her left ear. “There has to be some proof. Some evidence of who was where.”

“The tape?” Dina guessed. “The tape of the dancing elves?”

“Fat chance,” Meg said. “It’s just feet. We’ve all peeked at Ajit’s monitor while the show’s being taped. I know I have. Quill has, too. I watched her watch it.”

“Feet!” Quill said. “Oh my. Oh my. Feet!”

So that was it.

“What?!” Meg said.

“She knows who did it!” Dina shrieked.

“You’re kidding me,” Marge said. “You know who did it because of feet?”

Quill took a deep breath. She looked at her watch. “It’s noon. Everybody’s at the Resort getting massages. There might be a way. But we need Doreen and the housemaids to do it. And it’s really, really risky. And I need to talk to Howie Murchison before I do anything at all.”

“Fabulous dinner, sweetie.” Benny drained the last of the cappuccino. “You’re a genius with lamb, Meg. A positive genius.”

“We should consider it for the spring show,” Lydia said. “I mean, lamb, asparagus, new peas, young lettuce. Classic. Simple. Brilliant.” She tapped a few notes into her BlackBerry. “The mint chutney in particular, Meg. It’s wonderful. I think it should be part of the product debut. And we certainly want to spotlight it on the spring show.”

Meg had prepared the first of ten menus she’d selected as candidates for the
Good Taste
program. It was for the debut program, in the spring, and she’d gone to a great deal of trouble to get fresh ingredients shipped in and taken her time over the meal itself.

Quill hadn’t said much during dinner—which had been spectacular. She was preoccupied with the very risky chance she was going to take.

Did she have a choice? There was no way to bring Davy and the sheriff’s department in on this, not legally. And Howie had been very clear about the scarcity of evidence. It was almost certain that the murderer would go free even if what Quill was about to do actually worked.

Doreen had grasped the problem immediately. She’d turned Caleb over to Quill for the afternoon and gone to work. Quill looked at her watch. Past nine o’clock, and the dining room was almost empty except for the
Good Taste
party. Caleb was asleep in his crib upstairs, under Dina’s watchful eye. And Doreen still hadn’t signaled her yet.

“We’ve been neglecting meringue,” Lydia said. She poked her spoon delicately into the remains of the dessert. “I have to admit, Meg. This is a work of near genius, just like the chutney. Do you have a name for it?”

“Christmas Angel,” Meg said a little doubtfully. “I’m not very good at that part of menu planning. Names, I mean. But it’s a meringue whipped with peppermint. I was afraid the peppermint chocolate mousse in the middle might overwhelm it.”

“The only thing it overwhelms is me,” Bernie said blissfully. “It’s perfect.”

“I have to agree,” LaToya said. “Although if you ditched the mousse, it’d be a terrific dessert for anybody with an eye on the scale. Like me.”

“Exactly,” Benny said enthusiastically. “Now, if you’d given me much more than a demitasse-full, it would have been too much, given the delicate nature of my digestive system. And think of the changes we can ring on this. I love the idea of flavored meringue. I can see a whole show designed around flavored meringues.

“Is there any reason why the meringues have to be sweet?” Ajit asked. “Eggs whites are neutral. Why not curry-flavored meringues? Or dill?”

Lydia’s eyes glowed. “Now
this
,” she said with excitement, “is exactly what I was hoping would happen with the show. Innovation. Creativity. Food used in ways it hasn’t been used before. Isn’t this wonderful, Meg?”

Meg glanced at Quill. “Yes,” she said dryly. “It is.”

“Are we boring you, Quill?” Lydia asked somewhat acidly. “You keep staring off in the distance.” She turned around and followed Quill’s gaze. “Your foyer is just as overdecorated as it was the day before yesterday. Oh. There’s your whosis. Your housekeeper. She’s waving at you like mad.”

Doreen gave Quill an abrupt nod.

Quill took a deep, shaky breath. It was now or never. “Everybody? I’ve arranged for liqueurs in the conference room. Would you all come along with me?” She rose from the table. Except for Lydia, the others got automatically to their feet. Quill waited. With a snort of exasperation, Lydia pushed herself away from the table and got up. “Lay on, Macduff.”

“The conference room?” LaToya said. “What about the Tavern Lounge? It’s so cozy there. So Christmassy with that big tree in the corner and the pine scent in the air and the fire burning cheerily away. I love it.”

“Have you noticed,” Benny whispered to Quill as they trooped down the hall, “how cheerful everyone is now that you-know-who is out of the picture?”

“Yes,” Quill said. As she passed Doreen, she gave her hand a brief squeeze. “I have.”

A few moments later, she opened the door to the conference room and stepped aside so that they all could file in.

“You have our monitor in here,” Ajit said with displeasure.

“Yes,” Quill said. “I have to apologize for taking it without telling you. But I discovered that your tape wouldn’t work in our machine. The commercial equipment is quite different.”

“I would really prefer that you not borrow my equipment,” he said testily. “And what tape are you talking about?”

Kathleen and Nate had set up an array of brandies and liqueurs on a trolley under the whiteboard and set out crystal and napkins at seven chairs. Quill waited until everyone was seated, then wheeled the trolley around to let everyone serve themselves.

She turned the video monitor on, and then faced them all. “Zeke Kingsfield was murdered this morning. This was a clever murder, committed by an organized person with a great deal of daring. But it was a murder.”

No one else noticed Davy and Nate slip into the back of the room.

“Sometime just before seven thirty last night, this person left the kitchen by the back door and went outside to set a trap on the ski trail. The Christmas lights illuminate the field that lies between the Inn and the drop over the gorge, so this person went over the rise and into the woods that lead down to the gorge; it was here that this person ran into me. I was stunned. The killer continued on to the drop. The six-by-six log was rolled into place. The fence post was rocked back and forth to loosen it still further, and Zeke’s killer returned to the Inn undetected.

“Except for one important clue.”

Quill looked into a sea of staring faces. At the door to the conference room, Nate and Davy stood with their arms folded.

Dina’s photographs lay on the trolley in a manila envelope. Quill took them out one by one and held them up. “The next morning, the killer returned to the drop, strung a cable between the loosened fence post and this tree, and waited for Zeke to come around the bend at a pretty good clip. He tripped on the tree trunk and fell into the wire. The impact was enough to tear the post out of the ground completely and he fell heavily into the chain-link fence.

“Did Zeke fall to his death as he spun out of control? Or did the killer push him over the edge as he lay stunned in the snow? We’ll never know for certain. I’d lay odds, however, that the killer provided the last bit of assistance needed to assure Zeke’s death. The killer returned to the Inn, leaving the wire in the same place it’d been found. It was a perfect crime.

“Except for another important clue.”

Quill flipped the video monitor on. “This is the tape of the dancing elves Ajit laid down yesterday morning. It’s hard to tell who is who, isn’t it? All we know is that the feet belong to LaToya, Bernie, and Melissa Smith.”

Quill fast-forwarded. “And this is the tape Ajit laid down after dinner. Look at the feet. See the shoes on the left? They don’t fit. This elf has unusually tiny feet. Now, Melissa Smith left the Inn late yesterday afternoon taking everything with her but her elf costume and her baby.”

Quill switched the tape recorder off. “Shall we check to see who among us has a size-five shoe? It’s you, Lydia. You didn’t go to Syracuse with Zeke last night. You stayed here.”

“That’s absurd,” Lydia said hoarsely.

“And here is the ski tag that was caught in the cable as the murderer detached it from the tree and wound it up. It’s from your jacket, Lydia.” Quill held it up. “It’s only half of the tag. The other half is on your silver jacket.” Quill looked at the other faces around the table. “It’s absurd to think that none of you suspected that it was Lydia under that clown makeup and belled hat and not Melissa Smith. It was a safe bet that no one in Meg’s kitchen would mark the difference. It was too chaotic. The costumes were exactly alike. The gentleman behind you,” Quill continued in a conversational way, “is Sheriff Kiddermeister. Sheriff, what’s the penalty for an accessory to premeditated murder in New York State?”

“Lethal injection,” Davy said tonelessly.

“No!” Ajit exploded. “That’s too much to ask of anyone, Lydia. I will not keep quiet anymore. Of course I knew that Lydia had taken Melissa’s place.”

Lydia leaped to her feet, her lips drawn back over her teeth. She hissed like a cat at bay. Ajit stood up slowly, both hands held out, palms up, as if in supplication. “It’s too much to ask of me,” he repeated quietly.

Quill looked from Ajit’s handsome, perfectly proportioned face to Lydia and back again. “The two of you aren’t having an affair,” she said. “It isn’t that. So what is it?”