'What do you think I should wear tonight? It's black tie.' Quill yawned, shook a long black jersey dress free of its hanger, and held it up to herself. 'I always feel like a cellist in this. Meg?' She stuck her head out into the hall. 'Meg!' She walked into the living room. It was just before lunch. Tiffany had called in great excitement. The electrical problems were fixed, the banquet was on, and the hurricane wasn't supposed to hit until tomorrow. Everybody was coming. And - although it might not be nice to say it - the interest in Verger's disappearance had heightened, if that were possible, and nothing at all had happened for the last twenty-four hours, so they could count on excellent media coverage. She, Tiffany, was going to wear black.
Quill looked at the sky dubiously. She'd rapidly become accustomed to Florida's insistently sunny weather. It was gloomy today. And those looked like genuine cumulonimbus thunderheads stacking up in the east. The living room was unaccustomedly shadowy.
Meg, curled up into a small ball in the corner of the couch, was wearing a T-shirt that said NO GUTS, NO GLORY.
'Hey.' Quill greeted her. 'You talked to Doreen and Andy? The airport in Syracuse is still snowed in, I take it.'
'Yep, I talked to Andy. Noreen had her baby. C-section. It was quite an operation, Andy said.'
'Myles is still out helping with the blizzard victims?'
'Yep. He sends his love, though.'
'I'm homesick,' Quill said.
'Me, too.'
'But thirty-six inches of snow in twelve hours with a wind chill factor of six below sounds positively gruesome.'
'That it does. What else have you got to wear besides the black?'
'Nothing.'
'Then I guess you'll look like a cellist.'
'You all right?'
'Yeah. Tired, though. Jeez, I thought he'd show up. I was sure he'd show up.' She rubbed her face with both hands.
Quill yawned again. 'Look, as I told you about sixty times, Ernst probably won't get the message until this morning. I'm convinced we're right, Meg. No one else had sufficient motive to take Verger's body anywhere.'
'Mr. X,' Meg said glumly. 'This may be the first case we fail to solve.'
'I doubt it. I'm taking the tape recorder, and we'll keep an eye out for Ernst. At the first opportunity, I think we should get him into a secluded corner...'
'We've been over this about a million times,' Meg grumbled.
'We'll go over it once more, just to be sure. I think the best place is the charcutiere kitchen. It's isolated, all your dishes will have been sent downstairs long before the banquet itself starts, and you'll be crawling the walls waiting for the L 'Aperitif people to fall over in delight over your dish - which they will, Meg. Guaranteed. Anyhow, we back him into a comer at the earliest opportunity and get him to admit the heist.'
'The heist?'
'Whatever. And bingo, we're free and clear to go home.'
'I've got to psych myself up for this thing tonight. All the challenge has gone out of the banquet, though.'
'That's because you don't have enough to do,' Quill said. 'Just supervising the main course presentation isn't nearly enough. Usually about this time, you're in the middle of the kitchen at home, flinging pots against the wall, singing and yelling. But that was the point, wasn't it? Didn't we say something about easy money and the time of our lives and fabulous weather?'
Meg stretched her legs out, wiggled her toes, and looked dreamily at the ceiling. 'If we were having a competition this size at home, and I was in charge, I'd be flying around the room right about now. But instead, I'm sitting here like a big fat lump.'
'You know what it is? It's the fact that the barometer's dropping. With any luck, we'll be out of here by tomorrow morning before Hurricane Helen comes roaring in, but there's this low pressure system in front of it, and that's why you feel so miserable. I'm a little depressed myself.'
'It isn't a low pressure system that's making you feel depressed. You're scared.'
'I'm not scared,' Quill said indignantly. 'How dangerous can a five-foot, three-inch body snatcher with a potbelly be? My gosh, Meg, the two of us outweigh him by thirty pounds.'
'You've got a point there, pal. So, I'm not scared of Ernst the body snatcher.' She brightened. 'I'm nervous. I'm nervous that the darn rabbit will taste like mung, I'm nervous that the editor from L 'Aperitif is going to hate Jugged Hare a la Quilliam and I'll get skunked and end up with no stars instead of three stars.'
She jumped to her feet. 'At home I'd be in my own kitchen with my own stuff and Andy to look forward to at night. Tell you what-pack up the dress and we'll go to the institute early. I need to cook something. Anything.'
'And what am I going to do?'
'Take your sketch pad. You can do a charcoal of Ernst and sell it to the publisher of Luis's book for the cover. You'll make a million bucks. Besides, it'll make a great place to conceal the tape recorder.'
The activity at the institute was both familiar and soothing to Meg and, by extension, Quill. Le Nozze had been closed for the day, and the students were busy setting up tables, decorating the ceiling with swags of white roses and eucalyptus, and polishing all the available woodwork.
Meg went up to the pastry kitchen to try a variation on crSme fra?che that had just occurred to her. Quill
