'Thank you, no,' she said. 'I called Gil Junior, of course, and he's driving up from Alfred. He'll be here sometime this afternoon.' The two women were silent for a moment. Abruptly, Nadine said, 'He was a bad husband, Quill. He ran around on me, and never came home, and caroused too much, and I spent like a drunken sailor to spite him. And now everyone in the town thinks I'm awful. And I was, Quill, I was.' Suddenly, she began to sob. The low murmuring in the room stopped. Quill put her arm around Nadine. Elmer Henry proffered a handkerchief. 'I'll take her,' said Betty Hall with rough kindness, and she led Nadine away.
Quill sighed, turned, and knocked over the table that held Gil's final effects. With an exclamation of chagrin, she bent to sort through the items that had fallen to the floor. Gil's wallet, still damp from the duck pond, had opened and its contents lay scattered. Quill picked up his driver's license (credit cards were conspicuously absent) and a few family pictures. She tucked several of Gil Junior back into the wallet, and flipped over a picture that had been folded in half. She smoothed it out.
A pretty Indian girl stared back at her. The girl in the picture on the night stand in John Raintree's room at the Inn.
-7-
Quill smoothed the photograph flat. The girl was dressed in a pink waitress's uniform, leaning across a diner counter. She smiled into the camera, black hair long and shining, dark eyes bright. Was this a girl John had loved? What would a picture of John's girlfriend be doing at the scene of Gil's drowning? Quill took a deep breath. There had to be another explanation. John couldn't be involved with this. Could she have been a waitress at Marge Schmidt's diner? Could John or Gil have met her there? If that were true, this picture might belong to Marge, and not to Gil at all. No. Marge was Hemlock Falls' most notorious employer, running through waitresses and busboys with the speed of a rural Mario Andretti. And anyone who'd tuck her aged mother into a nursing home on Christmas Eve, as Marge had done, was not someone you could accuse of sentimentality. Marge wouldn't carry a keepsake of a favorite waitress. If she carried photographs at all, they'd be of cream pies she had known and loved.
Mavis and Keith Baumer were from out of town and had never met John before. Could the picture have belonged to either of them? Was there any connection between John and Mavis? What possible connection could John have with the companion to an elderly and wealthy widow?
That left Gil himself. Gil and John were business acquaintances, hardly friends. But John, a loner, had few friends.
Quill carried the photograph into the kitchen. Nadine stood at the sink, staring out the back window.
'Nadine, I just wanted to say goodbye. If there's anything at all that you need, please call me.'
'Thanks for coming, Quill. I've been telling everyone I don't know when the funeral's going to be held. Myles said maybe a week or two.'
'That long?'
'He wants to complete the investigation. There'll have to be an autopsy. Howie Murchison says that's standard in an accidental death. He won't be able to probate the will until the inquest is done, so I hope Myles is quick about it.'
'Will you be... all right... until then?'
This was local code for money matters. Wealthy farmers were said to be doing 'all right.' Marge Schmidt was said to do 'all right' out of the diner. Betty Hall, a junior partner, was held to be doing not so well.
'Things weren't going so well,' Nadine said, confirming the commonly held belief that Gil's money troubles were real and not the grousing of a Hemlock businessman who felt it unlucky to look too successful. 'Mark Jefferson at the bank said there's a couple of outstanding loans that have to be paid off, but Gil had a lot of life insurance. That's the one thing he kept up. Now Marge Schmidt' - spite made Nadine ugly - 'had better have some damn good proof that Gil borrowed money from her. If she doesn't, she can whistle for it.'
'Meg and I could probably find something to tide you over,' said Quill.
'Thanks. But I can always call on Tom. He's been a good brother, by and large. Been supporting Gil for all these years.'
Quill shifted uncomfortably. 'By the way, Nadine, I found this dropped on the floor of the living room. Is it yours or Gil's?'
Nadine glanced at the photograph. Her expression froze. 'My sister-in-law,' she said shortly.
'Your sister-in-law?'
'John Raintree's sister, yes. She was married to my brother Jack. We don't talk about her or him, so just forget it, I okay?'
'Sorry,' said Quill. 'I didn't know.'
'You didn't?' Nadine lit a cigarette and slitted her eyes through the smoke. 'John never told you?'
'No!'
'Then I'm not about to.' Nadine crushed the cigarette into a used coffee filter in the sink.
Quill went back to the living room. She made idle conversation with the remaining townspeople, but the visitors were clearing out. She wondered if she'd ever know all the town's secrets, or if she'd always be treated like a flatland foreigner.
Quill looked at her watch. She needed to get back to the Inn and she still had Tom Peterson to tackle about the meat. Perhaps he might tell her about John's sister. She fingered the photograph. She should either leave the photograph here, or take it to Myles as evidence in the case. And if she did that, she'd have betrayed John, perhaps, to the inexorable machinery of the law. If she could just talk to John first, show him the picture.
Her bad angel, a handy scapegoat for childhood crimes and misdemeanors, and little-used until now, whispered, 'Swipe it!' She did.
After a hurried exit from the Gilmeister living room, she drove to Peterson's Transport, wondering if the penalty for theft increased relative to the viability of the victim. 'He's dead, he won't care,' sounded like a practical, if graceless, defense. On the other hand, phrases like 'impeding an official investigation' had an ominous ring to them. So did, 'concealing the evidence in a crime.'
