Just Desserts : A Bed-and-breakfast Mystery (3 page)

“Absolutely,” replied Judith, deftly stepping out of Otto’s reach, but bestowing a dazzling smile on the lecherous carpet-sweeper king. Experience had taught her that fast feet were as important in her business as a quick mind. “The mostest being dinner, most of which is still in the kitchen.” She glanced at Oriana, whose full lips were pursed with practiced disdain. It was Guinevere, however, who hurtled to the rescue.

14 / Mary Daheim

“Come on, Daddy,” she said in a soothing voice, wrenching the bottle away and steering him into his chair. Guinevere was a big woman, taller than Judith and built along more Amazonian lines. In her early forties, she still exuded girlish-ness despite her size, and would have been pretty except for the garish makeup and overdone wool jersey jumpsuit trimmed with mink. “You mustn’t keep us in suspense! We’re all so excited to hear what the fortune-teller is going to say about our futures!”

“About your inheritances, you mean,” growled Otto, finally sitting down with a large plop. Completely bald, he looked considerably younger than his seventy years, and though he was only average height, he gave the impression of being a big man in more ways than just girth. “I suppose you’d all be tickled pink if I fell in the salad with a heart attack right now.”

“Daddy!” exclaimed Gwen, her china-blue eyes wide.

“Don’t say such things!”

“Harvey could always revive you,” Oriana said with a touch of asperity, carefully arranging the gleaming rope of pearls which fell from her jutting bosom like a waterfall going over a cliff.

“Hunh!” snorted Otto, digging into his salad as Judith poured a California cabernet from a cut-glass decanter Gertrude had bought at a garage sale. “He’s a surgeon, not a heart specialist.”

“They’re both doctors, aren’t they?” Lance’s mystification was genuine. Shifting in his chair, he tried to get his long legs into a more comfortable position. He was a handsome man in his forties, with wavy brown hair and hazel eyes very like Otto’s, except not nearly so keen. His athlete’s build had not yet started to crumble, despite the fact that Judith was sure he’d been out of football for some years. Given the height of both Brodie children, it occurred to Judith that the first Mrs. Otto must have been a tall woman. Harvey, the nephew, was of average height, slender of build and sallow of complexion. He had, however, surgeon’s hands—long, deft, mobile. He was using

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them at the moment to tear up his romaine. Judith turned back into the kitchen. “The rolls,” she said, vaguely panicked.

“Where did I put them?”

Renie opened the oven and pulled out a bun warmer.

“Here, we’ll use this basket. Hand me a napkin. What’s with Happy Families out there? Do I detect dissension?”

“You detect greed. I gather they’re all here for Otto’s pronouncement about his estate.” Judith counted the rolls, then covered them with a monogrammed linen napkin. “Maybe the fortune-teller is really an attorney.”

Back in the dining room, Judith observed that the conversation had taken a different turn, not necessarily for the better. Mavis, her fine features crimped into an expression of disgust usually reserved for reporting the most heinous of crimes, was lecturing Gwen. “I have never understood how you can refer to what you write as a novel. There is only one plot, only two kinds of characters, and the only verbs you ever use are ‘throb,’ ‘moan,’ and ‘explode.’ The covers all look alike, and the titles are exactly the same. In fact,” she went on, oblivious to her sister-in-law’s crimson cheeks and shaking hands, “there are only twenty-eight usable words for romances, and all those dreadful two-word titles are merely a variation on ‘Love,’ ‘Lust,’ ‘Desire,’ ‘Passion,’ and the remaining twenty-four.”

“That’s not true!” shrieked Gwen in her jarring voice. “I used three words in mine, and one of them was ‘beast’!” She appealed to Lance for confirmation. “My first book, remember?
Beast’s Beautiful Bounty
.”

Lance, as ever, looked blank, but Mavis was not put off.

“That’s because the drooling vegetables who read that sort of thing thought ‘beast’ was really ‘breast.’” She tossed her short, smart blond coiffure in triumph.

Judith, nimbly avoiding Otto, handed the roll basket to Oriana. Dr. Carver’s wife, whose first name Judith had finally remembered was Eleanor, looked up shyly from under pale lashes. Her gray eyes seemed to stray to Dash Subarosa, then wandered across the centerpiece to Gwen.

16 / Mary Daheim

“I’ve read two of your books,” she said in her breathless little voice. “I thought they were very nice.”

“Oh, Ellie,” exclaimed Gwen with a grateful sigh, “they
are
nice. Some people,” she added with a malevolent glance at Mavis, “who haven’t read them say they’re just full of smut.

But that’s not true…”

“Smut?” Otto’s ears twitched. “You kidding, Gwen? You’ve been writing smut all this time and haven’t told your poor daddy? What have I been missing?”

“I gave you autographed copies of them,” Gwen said in a vaguely offended tone. “I thought if you didn’t read them, Oriana might.”

Oriana’s usually mobile face was wooden, her fork poised near her mouth. “I don’t read much. I haven’t the time, except for scores and libretti, of course.”

“And all those damned beauty treatments at sixty dollars a crack. You get worked over more than my Rolls Royce, and the car’s in better shape than you are, even if it is a 1950

model.” He gave Oriana glare for glare, then turned back to his daughter. “Well, by God,” he asserted, pounding on the table and making the china rattle so hard that Judith winced,

“I’m going to read one when I get home! I like that part about ‘thrust’ and ‘explode.’ Hey, sweetie pie,” he coaxed, reaching around a cringing Ellie to grip Gwen by the scruff of her neck, “which one’s the hottest?”

“Now Daddy…” Gwen began in reproach, but stopped as Otto let go of her and put a finger to his nose.

“Damn!” he bellowed after a thunderous sneeze. “You got a cat around here?” His porcine face glowered at Judith.

“No cat in this house,” Judith said truthfully. Sweetums had been expelled for the night, presumably to prowl the neighborhood for errant mice.

“Hunh,” muttered Otto, searching his pockets. “Something set me off. Where’s my inhaler?”

“Upstairs,” replied Oriana, starting to rise from her chair.

“I’ll get it for you, I know where I put it.”

JUST DESSERTS / 17

But Gwen had somehow miraculously extricated her considerable bulk from between her brother and Ellie. “I’ll take care of Daddy,” she insisted. “Besides,” she added with a seemingly innocent glance at Oriana, “my legs are younger.”

“Sturdier, at any rate,” murmured Oriana, her trained voice carrying at least as far as the entry hall. Although voluptuous, the present Mrs. Brodie was not a big woman, barely average in height, with a neatly tucked-in waist under her form-fitting black wool crepe. Coils of auburn hair were swept back from a clear brow, and a huge pearl dangled from each perfect ear. Her features were too irregular for classic beauty, but she possessed an undeniable amount of sex appeal even into middle age. Otto hadn’t been quite fair to his wife. Given her alleged beauty treatments and perhaps the skill of a plastic surgeon, Judith had to extend the latitude of Oriana’s age between thirty-nine and fifty-five, compromising on an arbit-rary forty-eight.

Returning to the kitchen, Judith was about to comment on Oriana’s state of preservation when the phone rang. The caller asked not for a reservation as she had hoped, but for Dash Subarosa. Opening the swinging door, Judith signaled to Gwen’s alleged fiancé.

“Telephone, Mr. Subarosa. You can take it in the living room.”

Dash evinced mild surprise, and excused himself while Ellie Carver giggled nervously and Mavis watched his depar-ture with keen gray eyes. Dash moved with a feline grace that would have done credit to Sweetums, but somehow Judith half expected to see him leave an oil slick in his wake.

Yet despite his faintly sleazy manner and the absence of socks, Judith had to admit that he was not unattractive. His curly black hair, the soulful black eyes, and that vaguely dissipated hollow under his cheekbones would no doubt in-trigue a romantic soul such as Guinevere Brodie Tweeks.

Hearing the extension picked up, Judith put the kitchen handset down. She headed back to collect
18 / Mary Daheim

the now-empty salad plates, but halted precariously in mid-step as Dash called out from the living room:

“Where’s the phone? I don’t see it.”

“Maybe he stole it,” Mavis said under her breath as she gave the butter a vicious stab.

Lance turned quizzical eyes on his wife. “If he stole it, he’d know where it was, wouldn’t he, Mavis?”

Judith pretended she hadn’t heard the exchange. Instead, she gestured at Dash: “The extension’s on that little round table by the bookshelves.” Still hesitating, she saw Dash pick up the phone and speak into it in a low voice. A glance at the table told her that not only was Gwen still gone, but Oriana’s place was empty, too.

“Add snoopy to greedy,” noted Judith, salad plates piled high in her arms as she reentered the kitchen. “Either Oriana or Gwen is listening in to Dash on the phone in the upstairs hall.”

“Are you sure your mother didn’t sneak in through the cat’s hole?” Renie asked, slicing the roast and letting the juices run into the gravy pan. But of course she knew better; Aunt Gertrude’s walker would have made a lively clatter coming into the house. Her room, along with the rest of the family’s private quarters, was on the third floor, an old ballroom partitioned into three bedrooms, a bath, and what had originally been intended as Judith’s office but had actually evolved into Gertrude’s parlor-cum-TV sanctuary. The staircase to the upper floor led from behind a door that was marked Private and always kept locked when guests were staying at the B&B.

“Oh, hell,” said Judith with a shrug as she drained the broccoli. “It’s none of my business. I just hope they don’t kill each other while they’re here. I get the feeling they aren’t exactly a close-knit crew. It’s a pity their house was of commission just at a time when—”

She stopped abruptly, startled by the black-clad figure emerging from the pantry area. Oriana, perched on suede Bruno Magli sling pumps, made a self-deprecating gesture, the sort which the Countess Almaviva might have
JUST DESSERTS / 19

offered to her wayward husband in
The Marriage of Figaro
.

“Forgive me for using your back stairs, Mrs. McMonigle, but I wished to speak to you privately and I hadn’t yet had the chance.” She gave Judith a brilliant smile, spared some of it for Renie, and turned confidential. “I felt it would be more thrilling if Madame Gushenka came in through the back door. She’s due here at nine.” A glance at the clock informed all three women that it was now five minutes to eight.

“You have a dimmer switch on your chandelier, I see. Could you turn it way down after you usher her in?”

“Of course.” Judith’s attitude was equally confidential.

“Easier to see the crystal ball in the dark?”

Oriana was unruffled. “She uses cards, actually. You have heard of her? She’s quite the rage on the Hill these days.”

Judith had not kept up with current fads and fashions among Heraldsgate’s social set. A searching look at Renie elicited no help. Her cousin merely lifted one shoulder and stuck a serving spoon in the baby carrots.

Oriana was only too pleased to enlighten them both.

“Madame Gushenka moved to the Hill just before the holidays. She’s been sought out by all sorts of people, with amazing results.” She put a beringed hand on Judith’s arm.

“Do you know that she told Rick Nordquist that his profits would skyrocket before the year was out?”

“No kidding?” Judith struggled to keep a straight face.

Somehow, telling the owner of the region’s largest department store that his sales would be up at Christmas was a little like telling an Eskimo to wear warm mittens.

“Oh, yes!” Oriana was nodding solemnly. “She told Coach Hackett at the university to beware of teams from the sun, and that Jenny Doakes-Brenner should take a vacation from her talk show in the next six months or get quite ill, and that the mayor should be on guard against vested interests! What do you think of that?”

“I’m astounded,” Judith answered, still with a straight
20 / Mary Daheim

face, though it wasn’t easy, with Renie practically rolling with soundless laughter against the wall, behind Oriana.

“Gee, I wonder what she’ll have to say tonight?”

Oriana’s face suddenly hardened. “She’ll say some things some people won’t want to hear, I can tell you that. I’m not paying her two thousand dollars just to predict a rosy future.”

Apparently aware that her hostess was about to serve dinner, Oriana again shifted gears, from the haughty Turandot to the compliant Violetta. “Oh, the roast looks superb! Let me get out of your way…I’ve been interfering with progress!”

She essayed an about-face on her high heels, heading back toward the pantry. “I’ll return the way I left,” she called over her shoulder. “By the way,” she added, pointing at Sweetums’s various culinary accoutrements, “I see you have a cat. I should have mentioned that Otto is allergic to them.”

Oriana made her exit with clicking heels and swaying hips.

Judith exchanged baffled looks with Renie. “I did ask.”

“That’s all you could do,” replied Renie, presenting the platter of roast to Judith. The meat was layered a bit haphazardly, but done to perfection: just enough rare, medium, and well-done to satisfy the choosiest of eaters. In triumph, Judith entered the dining room at almost exactly the same instant Oriana came in from the entry hall. Dash and Gwen were both back at the table. Mavis was practically leaning back out of her chair, trying to draw Harvey into conversation about a recent news story she’d done on unne-cessary surgical procedures. Meanwhile, Ellie was breathlessly recounting her latest successful fund raiser to a reasonably interested Otto. The mood was definitely more mellow, though Judith would not have called the gathering jolly.