Dread on Arrival Read Online Free PDF Page B

faces swiveled and looked at her. Quill knew all of them and liked most of them a lot. Harvey Bozzel, Hemlock Falls’s best (and only) advertising man. Nadine Peterson, owner-operator of the Hemlock Hall of Beauty. Dookie Shuttleworth, the mild-mannered pastor of the Church of the Word of God. Harland Peterson, president of the local Agway and Marge Schmidt’s husband.
    Marge herself, the richest woman in Tompkins County, sat right next to Harland, dressed in her usual chinos, a navy blue Peterson Dairy Farms windbreaker, and red-checked shirt. Her ginger hair capped her round skull in newly tight curls, which meant she had just made her biannual visit to Nadine’s beauty shop.
    Marge narrowed her machine-gun gaze and growled, “’Bout time you got here. All right, Mayor. We got twenty-one here now, and we gotta break this tie.” She smacked her meaty fist on the table. “I call for another vote. And this time, it’d better go my way. You vote yes, Quill. Got it?”
    “She’ll vote no,” Adela said. “Or else.”
    Everybody looked at Quill.
    She smiled cheerfully. The third rule of innkeeping was to retreat in the face of certain disaster. She looked at her watch. “Sorry. I just dropped in to tell you that I have a small emergency. I was going to ask Miriam if she’d mind taking the minutes for me. I have to be off right now.”
    Miriam Doncaster, the town librarian, was a particular friend of Quill’s. She admitted to being in her mid-fifties, and Quill had always admired the faint sensual air that clung to her. She wasn’t quite sure how Miriam created the effect: it had something to do with her gray blond hair, which was thick and tousled, and her wide blue eyes. She smiled sweetly and patted the empty chair next to her. “Not on your tintype, honey. Sit down and take it on the chin, like the rest of us.”
    Quill sank into the chair and said with an air of decisiveness everyone knew to be spurious. “What is the motion, exactly?”
    Marge sat back in her chair and folded her arms under her considerable bosom. “I’m not saying another word.”
    “Oh, sure,” Carol Ann Spinoza said. “Like you haven’t said way too many words already, Marge Schmidt.” Carol Ann had been the town’s tax assessor for an excruciating three years. She currently held the office of the Hemlock Falls animal control officer. Quill wasn’t quite sure why she had abandoned her personally designed animal control officer’s outfit, with its belt of lethal weapons, but she had, in favor of a tailored pantsuit.
    She drummed her perfectly manicured nails on the table. “And I don’t know why we have to stop in our tracks just because Quill’s waltzed in hours late like she always does. You don’t have to know what’s going on, Quill. It’s your fault you’re late, so you’ll just have to go ahead and vote without us going over all this baloney again. All those opposed to sponsoring this party raise your hands.” She thrust her right arm up in the air and looked around the table.
    “What party?” Quill asked. And then, bewildered, “If I’m opposed to voting, do I vote yes or no?”
    “You. Were. Late,” Carol Ann said, as if speaking to a disagreeable deaf person. “Now, vote!” Carol Ann’s cheerleader good looks, perky smile, and gleaming white teeth concealed the soul of a piranha. She wasn’t the town’s meanest tax assessor any longer, so her power to intimidate was considerably lessened. But old habits die hard and a few hands went hesitantly in the air, Harvey Bozzel’s among them. Marge frowned at him and he hastily patted his hair, which was blond and gelled to perfection.
    “Hang on a bit,” Howie said easily. “Due process is due process, Carol Ann. We have to at least describe the motion before calling for a new vote.”
    “If the secretary had been here,” Carol Ann said viciously, “we could have had her read the motion back from the minutes. But she wasn’t and she can’t.”
    Esther