'Tell you what. Senator out there wants to have a little talk with you, then he figures you pay the fine, you've served a little time, it's all settled, you can go back up to the Inn.' Dorset smiled ingratiatingly.
Quill didn't say anything. 'Well, ma'am?'
'What kind of talk?' she asked suspiciously.
Dorset jiggled the keys. 'Whyn't you come right out here and see?'
Dorset behind her like an ugly sheepdog, Quill marched into the sheriff's office and into a glare of lights, cables, and Nora Cahill's camera crew.
'Sarah Quilliam was released at 12:22, having spent all of two hours and forty-seven minutes of her seven- day sentence in jail,' said Nora Cahill in her professional anchor voice. 'Senator? Do you have a comment?'
Quill's stockinged toe caught on a piece of curling linoleum. She pitched forward. Al Santini grabbed her elbow and pulled her upright. Howie Murchison draped her down coat over her shoulders, grabbed Quill's other elbow, and pulled her toward the door.
'Sarah Quilliam is a wealthy businesswoman and Hemlock Falls' third largest employer,' Santini said into the camcorder's little red light. 'The level of this fine is a joke.'
Ex-Senator Al Santini and Sheriff Dorset smiled for the camera. Howie looked pained. 'Here're your boots, Ms. Quilliam,' Davy whispered apologetically. Quill grabbed them and pulled the left one on, hopping around the linoleum on one leg. They were still soggy with snow and mud.
Nora Cahill shoved the microphone in Quill's face. 'Do you have a comment, Ms. Quilliam? Do you think this criminal charge will affect business at your upper-crust Inn? And how do you feel about Senator Santini's efforts to reform small-town America?'
Quill, who thought of herself as a generally equable person, felt the last shreds of her temper fray and snap. She grabbed the right boot by its wet, muddy top and swung.
'And he's going to press charges?!' Meg said indignantly some twenty minutes later. 'That lunatic! That creep! I would have whacked him right in the balls.'
Quill, wanting nothing more than to sit quietly for two minutes and warm her feet, looked at the kitchen with the nostalgic affection common, she supposed, to the recently paroled. She never wanted to see Al Santini or Bernie Bristol or Frank Dorset again in this life. She wanted to stay in the kitchen forever. The cobblestone fireplace was hung with dried bay leaf, braids of pearly garlic, and sheaves of lemon thyme. A fire burned briskly in the grate. Meg's collection of copper pots gleamed reassuringly from one of the oak beams running overhead. The air was filled with the scents of baking bread, orange sauce for the game hens, and freshly ground coffee. Admittedly, the view from the mullioned windows at the kitchen's west end was not quite as picturesque as that from the county jail; the herb gardens out back were still producing parsley and brussels sprouts. Sometime yesterday Mike the grounds keeper must have cleared them of snow. The mulched beds were consequently muddy with well-manured straw, but they looked beautiful to Quill. 'Free,' mused Quill, feeling warmly toward the mulch, 'I'm free.'
'The son of a bitch,' Meg continued.
'Do you kiss your mother with that mouth, Miss Margaret Quilliam?' demanded Doreen, who had insisted that Quill completely change her clothes. 'Lice,' she'd said. 'And I ain't sayin' a word more.'
She tapped Quill on the shoulder. 'The senator got a powerful lot of mud up his nose, or so I hear. But that don't make it right for Meg here to cuss him out. Jail! The good Lord give me a stummick to hear this. Jail!'
'Actually, I was aiming at Nora Cahill. I didn't mean to get Al Santini, although I'm glad I did. And why are you mad at me, Doreen?'
Doreen darted a beady, somewhat proprietary eye around the kitchen. Six of the kitchen staff scrubbed vegetables, stirred sauces, and washed pots with unconcern for Doreen's cool reception of the fact that Quill had spent two hours and forty-seven minutes in the county jail. In her middle fifties, Doreen had been head housekeeper at the Inn for almost six years and regarded both Meg and Quill as sometimes satisfactory but frequently recalcitrant daughters, and everybody knew it.
'I'm ashamed of you,' Doreen said severely. 'The whole town's talking about it.'
'It's not that big a deal! It was a setup! A mistake!' Quill sank her head in her hands. 'I suppose Axminster's going to run a story in the Gazette.'
'Huh,' said Doreen. She scratched her nose vigorously.
'Isn't anyone glad to see me?' Quill asked somewhat plaintively.
The kitchen got very quiet, although, thought Quill, the kitchen was never really quiet. Even at two o'clock in the morning, the Zero King refrigerators filled the air with a gentle hum. And at one o'clock in the afternoon, four days before Christmas, with the rest of the McIntosh family due that evening and a wedding due at the end of the week, the Inn's kitchen was filled with the clank and clatter of sous-chefs at the Aga, the oceanlike hum of the lunch crowd in the dining room, and the slam-whack of doors opening and closing.
Quill thought about the sound of doors closing: store- room doors, cupboard doors, oven doors - all of it far preferable to the unique sound of a cell door being shut and locked. But at the moment, the kitchen was quiet only in relation to the usual people noise: Usually Meg alternately shrieked at and sang to the Cornell interns; Doreen recited the latest depredations of departed guests on the Inn towel supply; Frank, the assistant chef, called out food orders to the hapless Bjarne; the other workers whistled, gossiped, or hummed. At the moment, everyone in the kitchen was dead silent, out of sympathy, Quill had assumed, for her recent incarceration. Now she wasn't so sure.
'Oh, for Pete's sake.' Meg, shaping meringues into swans, paused and waved the palette knife in an accusing fashion.' Anyone would think you'd spent three days in solitary instead of three hours chitchatting with Davy Kiddermeister.'
'I was not chitchatting with Davy Kiddermeister. I was in jail. A prisoner. And I was cold. I told you. They took away my boots.'
Doreen made a surreptitious note on a pad she kept handy in her apron. Quill had seen the pad. It had a little logo of a mouse with a reporter's hat and five large capital W's running down one edge for Who, What, Where, When and Why. Doreen had ordered it from the Lillian Vernon catalog soon after she married Axminster and they bought the Gazette. Axminster had proved surprisingly good at publishing the weekly, although Quill suspected that Doreen's nose for gossip had a lot to do with it. That, and her savings from her wages as the Inn's housekeeper.
