Fete Worse Than Death (9781101595138) (23 page)

Quill sat down on the couch and rested the tote with the laptop in it at her feet. The couch was positioned so that Sophie could look out onto the field, and beyond that, the trees of Peterson Park. Marge wandered around the apartment, stopping at the bookshelf. “Lot of books about cooking here.”

“That’s not surprising.”

“Lot of books about sailing ships, too. Oh, my Lord.”

“What?”

“The girl’s a lefty. She’s left of Attila the Hun. Look at these books on social justice.”

“You don’t mean Attila the Hun. You mean left of a
humanist’s humanist. I can’t think of a role model for humanism at the moment, but it’d be to the left of that.”

Sophie emerged from the bedroom, dressed in white shorts, sandals, and a baggy T-shirt that read
Port of Palm Beach
on the back and
There’s nothing better than messing about in boats
on the front. She grabbed a bottle of water from her refrigerator and sat down next to Quill. “Okay, guys. Shoot. You said something about a snake in my Eden? Now what does that mean?” She turned pale. “Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.” She pulled on her lower lip, sighed, and said in a very small voice, “Clare sent you here to fire me, didn’t she? I knew it was too good to last. I just knew it. I mean, I’m really sorry about the pasta.” Then, with an air of painful honesty, “I wasn’t at the time. I admit it. I was just so ticked off at the guy that I didn’t stop to think.”

“Of course Clare didn’t send us to fire you,” Quill said. “If Clare were going to fire you, she’d do it herself.”

“She would?”

“Of course she would.” Then, more kindly, she said, “We’re friends, but the businesses aren’t connected at all.”

“Of course they aren’t.” She bit furiously at her thumbnail. “It’s just that I still can’t believe I’m here. I wake up every morning thinking Clare’s going to knock on my door and say it was all a mistake. You know all the other chefs have these homogenously fabulous résumés. Jim Chen was a sous chef at Arnaud’s in New Orleans. Raleigh Brewster’s been written up in
Bon Appétit
like a billion times. I’m nobody compared to them. But I’m
not
getting fired.” Sophie beamed. “Well, yahoo and hooray! Then, carry on, ladies.”

“What is it about the pasta?” Marge said.

“It sort of ended up in a guy’s lap. It wasn’t anything, really.”

“About the pasta…” Marge said stubbornly.

She waved her hand airily. “Nothing. Nothing. The nice thing about Clare is that she doesn’t lose her temper like a lot of chefs. I mean she does, but there’s not a lot of yelling and screaming. More like, icy annoyance. What time is it?”

“Six o’clock,” Quill said. Jack would be eating his dinner now. Without her.

“Since I’m not fired, then I’m due back in the kitchen in thirty minutes. Is there something I can help you with?”

Quill picked up the laptop with a grimace. “Do you know Brady Beale?”

“Nope.”

“Did you buy a car at Peterson Automotive recently?”

“Nope. I don’t have a car. I don’t drive. I have a bicycle.”

“You didn’t go to any of the Citizens for Justice meetings at the auto dealership, did you?”

“You mean that protest group run by Carol Ann Spinoza? Heck, no.” With a certain amount of admiration, she added, “You don’t meet all that many sociopaths in the traveling chef business. More than a few filthy-rich capitalists that deserve to be keelhauled for greed, of course, but you have to be relatively sane to make big bucks these days. That Carol Ann’s a case study for somebody.”

“And what’s wrong with capitalism, young lady?” Marge asked in a dangerous way.

“That’s
exactly
what my parents want to know!”
Sophie said delightedly. “I’ve got a few books you might like to read, Marge. But.” She swiveled that very bright blue gaze back to Quill. “That’s not what you’ve come about.”

“No.” Reluctantly, she opened up the laptop, booted it up, and handed the laptop to Sophie. “These were apparently taken by Brady Beale.”

“Ick.” Sophie clicked rapidly through the photos. “Ick. Ick. Ick. Where the heck did the little bugger get these pictures of me in Miami?”

“Trade show?” Quill hazarded. “I know he was there for an international car show recently.”

Sophie shuddered. “Ugh.” She looked thoughtful. “The big question, of course, is why me?”

Marge and Quill glanced at each other. Sophie couldn’t be that oblivious to the way she looked in a bikini.

“I’m awfully sorry,” Quill said. “We came to you as soon as we came across them…what are you doing?”

Sophie tapped rapidly at the keyboard. “Seeing what else the little peckerwood has in here.” She paused and demanded sharply, “Who’s this?” She pivoted the laptop. The photo file was in slide-show format, and a series of pictures showed a small dark-haired woman walking briskly along the streets of a crowded city. She wore dark glasses, a gray hoodie, and cargo pants. The people around her were Asian. Chinese, Quill thought, rather than Korean or Japanese. There were a lot of palm trees, and the streets were broad.

“Linda Connelly,” Quill said. “Where is she, do you suppose?”

“Singapore,” Sophie said. She caught their looks of
surprise. “I was there earlier this year. A hedge-fund banker with twenty of his closest friends. Big boat, thank goodness, although I was a little urpy in the bay. You say this woman calls herself Linda Connelly?”

“The village hired her to manage the fete in Adela Henry’s, ummm…absence. But she was killed yesterday afternoon. Didn’t you hear about it?”

“Sure. Sure I heard about it. Who didn’t?” Sophie stared at the screen, and then began biting her other thumb.

“Do you know her?”

Sophie looked up, and for a moment, Quill saw what the girl would look like in twenty years. “No,” she said after a long moment. “I don’t know her. Not personally, thank goodness.” She clicked the photo file closed. “As far as this creep Brady Beale…” She shook her head. “All I can say is what I said before. Ick. Thanks for the heads-up. I guess I’d better keep my drapes drawn from here on in.”

“I think you should do more than that. I’d like to take this to Sheriff Kiddermeister. I was hoping that you’d swear out a complaint. We should be able to get Brady arrested. Or at least make him stop.”

“It’s not that big a deal.”

“It’s a very big deal.” Quill touched Sophie’s shoulder. “This is a total invasion of your privacy. And if he’s stalking you, he may be stalking other women.”

“Gosh. I doubt that.”

“If you’re afraid of reprisals,” Marge said, “all I can say is you don’t need to worry about a thing. One way or another, we got resources.”

Quill shook her head. “Really, Marge. We’ve got
enough on our plates as a village without jumping into vigilantism. The best possible thing is for us to take Sophie to Davy Kiddermeister and let the law take care of it the right way.”

“Did this Peterson let you use his laptop? I mean, how did you guys get hold of it?”

“It fell into our hands in a roundabout way,” Quill said vaguely. “The person that borrowed it from Brady’s office intended to put it back.”

“And you borrowed it from the original thief?” Sophie raised her eyebrows. “Sounds to me like there’d be a whole lot of hoopla falling on you guys if I went down and made a complaint.”

Quill shook her head. “We can handle that. Your safety’s more important.”

“Oh, I can take care of myself.” Sophie looked perfectly blank. “Let me think about this. Okay. I’ve got a great solution. You guys are gonna love it. We wipe this baby down so there’s no fingerprints, and we stick it in a ditch outside or somewhere, and one of us calls the sheriff’s office in a very anonymous way and tells him where it is. We maybe put a sticky note on it, to send the sheriff right to the place where my photos are.”

“An anonymous sticky note?”

“Sure.”

“The forensics,” Marge said heavily. “They can trace anything these days.”

“Phooey,” Sophie said. “No government office I ever heard of is going to waste department resources on anything more than a fingerprint check. Nope. I say sneak this into evidence.”

“We could do that, I suppose,” Quill said unwillingly. “I’m not big on being sneaky.”

“She would have jumped on this before she had her kid,” Marge said to Sophie. “She got a lot more law-abiding since she became a mother. Quill, I think young Sophie’s got the right idea. We drop this off to Davy, unobtrusive-like. We’ll let the law take its course.” She cracked her knuckles for the third time that day. “In the meantime, I’ll give Harland’s linebacker nephews a heads-up.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Sophie said cheerfully. “When the sheriff comes to interview me, I’ll swear whatever I need to swear and peckerwood can hire a defense lawyer.” She looked brightly from Marge to Quill. “So where shall we put it?”

“My diner,” Marge said. “I’ll let Betts find it and make the call. In the meantime, young lady, keep your curtains closed.”

“I’ve got a better idea.” Sophie’s slim fingers grasped the laptop. “Leave it with me. I’ll put it in the tasting room, and then ‘find’ it in front of a couple of the other chefs. I’ll suggest we call the cops and there you are. Keep you guys out of it altogether. Now, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to get back to work. And I still have to dry my hair! If Clare didn’t fire me over the pasta thing, she’ll sure as heck fire me if I miss my shift.”

Something about the way Sophie hung on to the laptop bothered Quill. That, and her comment about not knowing Linda Connelly personally.

Ever since Jack’s second birthday, (in self defense) Quill had gotten really good at being stern. She often
thought her life as an innkeeper would have been easier if she’d learned it a lot earlier. “Sophie,” she said. “What’s going on? What do you know about Linda Connelly?”

“I don’t know a thing about Linda Connelly.” She scowled. “What’s it to you, anyway?”

“We’re looking into her death,” Marge said breezily. “We do that.”

“You do what?”

“Quill here’s by way of being one of the best detectives in Hemlock Falls.”

“I didn’t know there were any detectives in Hemlock Falls.”

“There aren’t,” Quill said. “I mean, over the years we’ve had the occasional…”

“Corpse!” Marge said cheerfully.

“…At the Inn and once or twice I’ve stumbled over the solution to the murder…”

“And we’re going to solve this one, too.” Marge settled comfortably back against the couch. “Soon as we get this yahoo Brady Beale and his snoopy camera off the streets.”

Sophie carefully unwound the towel from around her head, shook out her wet hair, then folded the towel neatly and set it on the coffee table. “Wow.” Then, “You were trained in police work, is that it?” She glanced at Marge. “Or maybe you were in the military? I’ll bet you would have been a great Marine.”

“No formal training, no,” Quill said.

“Just nosy,” Marge added. “And I was never a Marine, thank you very much.”

Sophie got up and walked up and down the living room, as if sitting still were a penance. Quill was struck
again by her sheer vitality. Maybe a sketch would work, after all. She felt in her skirt pocket for her charcoal sticks, to reassure herself they were there. “From what we’ve discovered so far, we’re pretty sure Linda Connelly isn’t her real name.”

“That’s for sure,” Sophie muttered.

“And I don’t think…” She looked at Marge. “Well, we don’t think that she’s even a legitimate events co-coordinator.”

“You’d be right about that, too.”

“So after we settle Brady’s hash, we’re going to check out her so-called company in Syracuse,” Marge said.

“We are?” Quill said. “But the police have already done that.”

“Harker,” Marge said in derision.

“You’ve got a point.”

“Only logical to follow up and see if the Linda Connelly her clients knew is the same one that’s dead as a doornail in the Tompkins County Morgue. Right after we finish up here. Figured we’d tell people we’re doing background checks for an insurance claim.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Quill sighed. She wished she didn’t have so many sidekicks. First Althea, who was going to get them all in hot water over the purloined laptop, and now Marge, who was a little too enthusiastic about impersonating people. She looked at her watch again. Jack was in his bath now, looking adorable, and she was missing all of it.

“Look, you guys. You can’t do this.” Sophie stopped striding and put her hands behind her back, reminding Quill of a lecturer at a podium.

“Linda Connelly isn’t her real name. You’re right. And she’s not an events co-coordinator—at least, not the kind of events you want here in your beautiful little village.

“She’s Russian. And what she does for a living is kill people.”

Quill gaped at Sophie. “Linda Connelly’s an assassin?”

“Was,” Marge said. She looked delighted. “She’s gone toes, remember.”

“Yes,” Sophie said tightly. She pointed at the laptop. “If the woman we just saw on the streets of Singapore is the woman who ended up in the trunk of a rented Lexus at Peterson Automotive, then that’s Natalia Petroskova. A hired assassin. A good one. Although not good enough, since she seems to be dead.”