A Touch of the Grape: A Hemlock Falls Mystery (Hemlock Falls Mystery series) (8 page)

A failure.

For the benefit of the clearly suspicious Mr. Burke, Quill smiled at the spreadsheet with delight, then took the whole pile of papers and stuffed them in the top drawer. "There," she said brightly. "I'll have time to go over those later. You should have a seat, Mr. Burke, and I'll make that call."

She had to disabuse Signer Bellasario (who was
eighty-six, and going just a little deaf) of the notion that
she was selling house siding before he agreed to have his daughter-in-law drive him to the Inn. "Bad line," she said to Mr. Burke before he could question the entertainment value of a deaf pianist. "But he's delighted to help out. He'll be here within the hour." If his ar
thritis medicine kicks in, she thought. "Now. About this
binder."

"Right here." Burke spread his papers carefully on
the desktop and looked at them with possessive pride.
"Burke's is an insurance agency that can meet all your liability and casualty needs, Miss Quilliam. Like I said, our motto is Rocklike Security in Rocky Times. Now,
Mr. Raintree seemed to feel that the value of your buildings here was over eight hundred thousand. That fit with
your assessment?"

"Yes," Quill said recklessly.

"Good. 'Cause that agrees with your tax assessment.
And now Mr. Raintree gave me your revenue numbers from '95. Hell of a business you've got here, Miss Quilliam, if I do say so myself."

"Ninety-five," Quill recalled, "was a very good year."

"Part of this insurance plan provides for interruption of business due to fire, flood, famine, or other acts of God. Now, I'll need your numbers for the past year to verify the actual amount of business you'd lose if your
beautiful Inn here were to burn down, but based on Mr.
Raintree's word, I'm gonna go with the flow for '95. We'll reassess when you get me the 96-97 numbers, of course, so don't worry that you're underinsured. You get me? I mean, if you stand to lose more from an interruption of business than the '95 figures show, we'll take care of you."

"It'll be fine," Quill said.

"Mr. Raintree seemed to know what he was doing. You got his figures for this year around anywhere? 'Cause I'll be happy to write in the figures for those, even if the statement's unaudited."

"I'm not sure exactly what you mean, Mr. Burke." Which, Quill figured, wasn't as blatant a lie as it
sounded. She was picking up the nouns and verbs in Mr.
Burke's spiel, but the insurance jargon was beyond her.

"Well, we'll go with the '95 figures, then. Chances of anything happening in the next sixty days while the binder's in effect are slim to nonexistent. Not," he added hastily, and with an earnest expression, "that you can do without this, Miss Quilliam. Insurance is important."

He took a pen from his breast pocket, rose, and stood behind her. "You sign right here."

Quill signed,

"And here."

Quill signed again.

Mr. Burke sighed happily. "There you are. Miss. Quilliam. This binder's good for sixty days, as I said,
and your formal policy will come through the mail. You
just sign it and send it right back to me. And now …" He clapped her on the shoulder. "Now you can sleep easy."

Quill dreamed of rain. She stood at the tip of the Gorge
under a thunderous sky. Lightning flashed and flashed again. She smelled ozone. The rain felt at odds with the
bleak and cold landscape: it was soft, warm, and somewhat sticky.

"Woof," came a bark in her ear. "WOOF!"

Quill sat upright in bed. Red eyes glared into hers. She yelped, fumbled for the light next to the bed, and switched it on. The dog stood at her bedside, tail wag
ging frantically. He backed up, the woofs escalating into
short, high barks. He dashed to her bedroom door, then back to the bed again.

"How in the heck …"

The dog roared. Quill gasped, shrank back, and pulled
the covers up to her chin. She coughed. Smoke. The ozone smell in her dream was smoke.

Her head cleared. She reached for the phone at her bedside, hand steady. She dialed 911, spoke curtly, quickly to the volunteer fireman at the other end of the line, then leaped out of bed, headed out of her bedroom and through her small living room. Her set of master keys hung by the coffeepot in her little kitchen. She
grabbed them and raced into the hall. The dog followed,
frantic with impatience to be out and gone.

It was quiet. The night lighting along the edges of the ceiling shone into air just slightly tinged with smoke. Alarms were placed throughout the Inn; the age of the building and the sprawling layout made quick access to
them essential. There was an alarm and fire extinguisher
between her suite and Meg's. She grabbed the extinguisher with one hand, and pulled the alarm with the other, then ran to Meg's door.

The
whoop!whoop!whoop!
of the alarm struck the air
like a brass knuckled fist. Quill pounded on Meg's door
with the extinguisher, opened it, and almost tumbled into
her sister. Andy Bishop stood behind her, hastily knotting his bathrobe around his waist.

"Where?" Meg demanded tersely.

"I don't know. There's smoke. No burning. You take this floor. I'll go up."

"I'll take the up—"

Quill was already gone, the dog at her heels. The alarm was shrill, insistent, terrifying. She ran up the
stairs and rounded the landing to confront confusion and
shouts. The Crafty Ladies had five of the rooms on the third floor. The smoke was heavier here, and there was a smell of burning. Robin Robinson, hair in curlers,
dressed in a shabby chenille bathrobe, raced into the hall
from her room and slapped the door to 314. "Fran!" she cried. "Fran!" Mary Lennox emerged from the door to 316, hair wild, her bedspread clutched around her.

"Fire escape at the end!" Quill ordered. "Quick! Quick!"

"My purse!" Fran shrieked. "I've got to get my—"

Quill grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her forward. "Out! Out!"

Fran Grimsby opened her door and tumbled into Robin's arms. "Ellen?" Fran said. Her voice was thin and high. "Where's Ellen?"

"Three-ten!" Robin screamed. "She's in 310. I'll get Mary. She's at the other end."

"Get out!" Quill said. "All of you get out now!"
Three-ten was behind the landing and faced the Falls. It
had a balcony, thank God.

The smoke was thicker there. Quill found herself at the door, the dog leaping at her side. She tried the handle. It was hot. The door was locked. Smoke seeped in thick, ugly waves from beneath the door. Quill hoisted the fire extinguisher to her hip. She used the master key
in the lock. The door flew open, sucked inward by a hot
draft.

The room was blazing. Thick fingers of flames twisted
drapes, crawled up the walls, reached for the ceiling. It
was intensely, incredibly hot. Something grabbed Quill's nightgown and pulled her off balance."Not NOW, dam
mit," Quill said to the dog. "Beat it! Beat it!"

The dog ran halfway down the hall and back again, his barking colliding with the yell of the alarm. Quill
snapped the extinguisher nozzle free of the clamp. Thick
foam spurted out like evil-smelling Redi-Whip. She sprayed in a slow, smooth arc, the thick gush of foam smothering the flames. The nozzle sputtered; the foam
trickled to nothing. Quill threw the empty canister away
with a curse. The smoke cleared for moment. The bed in this suite faced the balcony. The balcony doors were open. Quill didn't know much about fire, but she knew that the fresh air coming in would fuel whatever smoldered in the room. When the fire reignited, it would come back with a blast. She could make out a huddled figure beneath the spread.

She didn't stop to think. If she had, she would have run away, down the stairs, out the door, to the safety of the lawn. She took a breath and held it. Ran into the room. Grabbed the figure in the bed by the hair and screamed. The hair came off in her hands like masking tape from a wall. She clutched the shoulders and was briefly aware of heated, crumbling, greasy flesh. She pulled. The weight was incredible, an anchor, a deadweight, immovable.

She pulled, hard. Near the open French doors, a white-
orange pillar sprang for the open air, a giant cat after
prey. Quill sobbed, pulled, and pulled again. The fire
resurrected with a roar and a bellow that set her hair
crackling. She heard the dog barking with sharp hysteria. Fear drove her like a blow. There was a moment of heat,
of huge strain. She heard herself scream.

And she was in the hall, the body of Ellen Dunbarton at her feet.

"Move! Move! Move!" John, beside her, lifted the blackened lump with no effort at all.

"So where …" Quill gasped, "were those muscles when I needed.

"MOVE!" Ellen's body over his shoulder, John propelled Quill forward with one hand.

"The dog!" Quill said. "Where's the …?" Sharp
teeth nipped at her hand. The dog bounced ahead to the landing, then scrambled first down the steps. Quill followed, John behind her, stumbling down the flight to the
second floor, then to the first, and to the blessed welcome sight of the open door, and beyond that, the lawn crowded with people.

The air was cool, too cool. Quill shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself, and discovered she couldn't stop. In the distance, she heard the wail of the fire trucks. "Meg?" she shouted. "Meggie!"

"Right here." Meg's hair was standing up around her head. She was wearing her purple nightshirt. "Andy grabbed the guest register. He's counting everyone off. I don't think there's anyone left in there. Here. You've singed your hair. And you're shivering. Quill. I'll get you a blanket."

"I don't think it's spreading," John said. He faced the Inn calmly. "See? The fire's confined to the upper
floor. I shut the door at the top of the stairs, so with any
luck—Quill, no."

Quill knelt in front of the bundle at his feet. "Oh, my God," she said. "Oh, my God."

"Don't look," he said quietly.

"Where's Andy?"

"Right here. Quill." He emerged from the crowd of exclaiming, excited guests. Like John, his voice was calm and unruffled. "Everyone's out, unless you had some unregistered guests? No? Just the rats?"

"There aren't any rats," Quill said indignantly.

"Always are in a building this old." He knelt beside her, quick fingers light and capable. "Well," he said. "Well."

"Is she dead, Andrew?"

"Poor woman. I don't think … where the hell's the ambulance?" He rocked back on his heels. The drive
way up the hill to the Inn was filled with the beams of
darting headlights, goldfish in the black night's bowl. The oncoming sirens were raucous. Meg reappeared
with a blanket, and Quill huddled gratefully into warmth.
She wished she could stop shivering. John's arm went around her and she leaned against him.

"What in the name of all that's holy," he asked, "happened to the sprinkler system?"

"Turned off?" Quill said, bewildered, fifteen hours
later. "How could the sprinkler system have been turned
off?"

"Little valve in each of the rooms," the fire chief said in a helpful way. "Easy enough to turn it on, turn it off. You got a good system, I'll give you that. Could have been a lot worse than just the one room."

Meg sat at Quill's left, Doreen was on her right. She felt a bit like the captain in the
Charge of the Light
Brigade
after the survivors left the valley. "I know
how,
Denny. I meant who. And why?" They were sitting at
table seven in the dining room. The afternoon sun made
burnished gold of the Falls. In the rose garden, the first buds of the
rosa pastura
were beginning to unfold in the soft spring air. The dog, who'd accepted a heavy meal of bacon, hamburger, and rice, lay outside next to the koi pound. He'd refused to come into the building
when the food was offered, and had waited patiently for
Quill to back away from the bowl before he'd plunged in. At this distance, it wasn't possible to see the singe marks or the matted coat, and he looked as if he belonged there. Quill watched this innocent and beautiful scene without really seeing it.

Denny the fire chief was a stocky man in his late forties, with grizzled hair and an amiable smile. He took a huge bite of chicken pâté and swallowed it with an appreciative grunt. "This here's the best liverwurst I ever tasted," he said. "The guys at the station want to thank Meg for the hamper. Me? I could eat it all day.
This'll be my third serving since last night." He waved
at the pile of fruit Meg had placed in the center of the table. "And them strawberries … delicious."

"You're welcome," Meg said.

Doreen sniffed. "But it ain't liverwurst, you toot. That there is liver pâté."

"Patties or spoonfuls, my stomach thanks you just the
same."

"You can have a fourth and fifth serving if you want," Quill said warmly. "You saved the Inn! I can never thank you enough."

"No, I didn't. I mean, the boys and me, yeah, we did a good job. But that fire was set in that room and it kept
itself to that room. Didn't even get the wiring or nothing.
Amazing."