Dread on Arrival Read Online Free PDF Page A

Is that how come you’re skulking in the bushes?”
    Max wagged his tail and cocked his head intelligently. The screen door to the kitchen banged open. “Jack’s back from his playdate,” Doreen said. “and takin’ his nap, just on schedule. Which is more than I can say for you. Bein’ on schedule that is.” Doreen stood with her hands on her hips. Quill looked at her with affection. Doreen had been the Inn’s first hire, and she had terrorized the staff for years. She was lean and wiry, and with bright beady black eyes. Jack loved her to distraction, and so did Quill.
    “I know, I know.” Quill dropped a quick kiss on her housekeeper’s mop of wiry gray hair, and moved lightly past her to the kitchen. A quick glance assured her all was well; Bjarne, the head chef, loomed over Meg, eyebrows raised, as they looked through the menu notes she’d brought from the meeting with Clare. Elizabeth Chou chopped tomatoes, humming happily.
    Quill sniffed; roast lamb for the special, it seemed, and it smelled absolutely delicious.
    She passed through the swinging doors to the dining room. There was always a nice, expectant air about the dining room just before they opened for dinner. The wineglasses gleamed in the sunshine streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows. The cutlery sparkled. The flowers in the vases on the table were the last of the dahlias. Outside, the rush of water over the falls reached her ears in a faint, reassuring susurration.
    Quill passed from the dining room into the front hall. It was small for a reception area, no more than twenty by thirty. A cobblestone fireplace occupied one wall. A soft cream leather sofa piled with needlepoint pillows sat in front of it. The curved staircase to the second and third floors was opposite the massive oak front door. The pine floors were covered with an Oriental rug in cream, celadon, peach, and sage green. The two giant Chinese vases that flanked the reception desk were filled with late lilies. Dina Muir, her receptionist, sat behind the mahogany front desk, her nose in a textbook. She looked up as Quill whizzed by on her way down the short hall to the Chamber meeting and shouted, “Whoa!”
    Quill skidded to a halt. “What is it? I don’t have time for my messages right now. I’m late for the Chamber meeting.”
    Dina’s expression said: so what else is new? But she pushed her red-rimmed glasses up on her nose with one slim forefinger and dropped her voice. “I’m thinking maybe you don’t want to go in there.”
    “I don’t?” Quill took a couple of steps forward and looked down the short hall to the conference room. It wasn’t really a conference room, just as the wine cellar at Bonne Goutè wasn’t a conference room, but there wasn’t any need for a keeping room, which had been a salient feature of the two-hundred-year-old Inn, so they had converted it.
    Quill lowered her voice, too. “What’s going on?”
    “It’s a lynching.”
    “A what!?”
    “Well, okay. Not a real, actual, physical lynching.” Dina marked her place in her textbook with a pink While You Were Out slip. She was a graduate student in freshwater pond ecology at nearby Cornell University. While rigorous in the pursuit of accuracy of the life cycle of her copepods, she tended to the imaginative in her approach to human beings. “But there’s been a ton of screaming and yelling going on down there, and Marge stomped out here twice, wanting to know where the heck you were.”
    Quill relaxed. “Chamber meetings are always a little volatile, Dina. It’s the Attic’ s road show taping that’s got everyone in a flap, I expect.”
    Dina shook her head dubiously. “You think? How much hoorah can there be over a bunch of old furniture?”
    “A lot, I should think,” Quill said. “ Antiques Roadshow sometimes features tons of valuable stuff. Paintings, porcelain, jewelry.”
    “ Your Ancestor’s Attic doesn’t,” Dina said cynically. “If you ask me, they just follow