Just desserts, p.1
Just Desserts, page 1
part #1 of Bed and Breakfast Series
MARY DAHEIM
Just Desserts
A BED-AND-BREAKFAST MYSTERY
To JMC:
If you haven’t got a nickel,
then I haven't got a dine
CONTENTS
ONE
JUDITH GROVER MCMONIGLE thrust the phone away from her ear…
TWO
JUDITH HAD TO give the Brodie family their due: They…
THREE
AN EXTRA CHAIR had been brought in from the living…
FOUR
“DEAD? THAT’S RIDICULOUS!” screeched Oriana. “I paid her two thousand…
FIVE
NO GREATER FUROR could have been caused by Medic Kinsella’s…
SIX
JOE WAS GOING over the sequence of events with Judith…
SEVEN
THE PROCESSION OF guests pounded up and down the main…
EIGHT
FOR THE FIRST time since Medic Kinsella had stated that…
NINE
JUDITH WASN’T SURPRISED that Gwen arrived almost immediately after Lance…
TEN
JUDITH’S DARK EYES had grown very wide. Under the red…
ELEVEN
TEN MINUTES LATER, a much-chagrined Otto returned to the house.
TWELVE
THE DOORS TO the front parlor were closed, with Officer…
THIRTEEN
“DR. CARVER!” CRIED Judith, “are you all right?”
FOURTEEN
THE SNOW HAD grown finer and the wind had come…
FIFTEEN
“WHERE ARE THE hors d’oeuvres?” asked Joe. He was sitting…
SIXTEEN
“HOLD IT!” YELLED Renie, almost dropping the beans as she…
SEVENTEEN
“WHERE’S JOE?” JUDITH asked as she all but flew into…
EIGHTEEN
GERTRUDE REFUSED TO come home until Joe Flynn was gone.
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ONE
JUDITH GROVER MCMONIGLE thrust the phone away from her ear a good two feet, knocked her coffee mug off the kitchen counter, and booted her cat, Sweetums, into the open cupboard under the sink. At the other end of the line, Oriana Bustamanti Brodie was covering every note of the scale, beseeching Judith to change her mind.
“We’re fumigating,” Oriana wailed. “Carpenter ants. It smells. It’s impossible. And Otto is counting on this weekend with the family!”
A disheveled Sweetums was eyeing Judith with open hostility. His orange fur bore traces of chili beans and apple peel. Any other cat would have ignored revenge for the sake of cleanliness. In Judith’s opinion, Sweetums was as unnatural as he was filthy.
“I’m sorry,” Judith said, for the third time, bringing the handset up to her mouth while she threw a dish towel onto the spilled coffee and began swirling it about with her foot. “I’m booked, have been since November.”
“But you told me January wasn’t a busy month!” Oriana had launched into her full-throated Act Four, Scene Three voice.
“It isn’t,” Judith agreed as Sweetums put a paw in the coffee, sniffed, and choked up a hairball. “Only two of the four rooms are taken, but you’d need all of them for your…family, right?” Somehow, “family” wasn’t a word she readily associated with Otto and Oriana Brodie; “horde” sprang more easily to mind.
The sigh that heaved over the phone line possessed seismic force. “Otto will be sooooo disappointed.” The mezzo-soprano voice that had mesmerized indiscriminating opera lovers in second-rate houses dropped several notches. “We would have paid extra for the short notice.”
“Another time, maybe,” Judith said pleasantly, if firmly, and replaced the handset as Sweetums slipped out through his cat’s door into the back yard. As much as she hated turning guests away, Judith was relieved. The Brodies might be considered by many on Heraldsgate Hill to be prominent personages, given his wealth as a carpet-sweeper mogul and her fleeting fame in the music world. But Oriana’s demands conveyed a hint of desperation which put Judith off.
Not that she had either the time or the inclination to indulge in speculation on neighborhood eccentricities. Widowed for almost three years, she had hurled herself into establishing the family home as a bed-and-breakfast known as Hillside Manor. At the moment, she barely had time to finish mopping up the mess left by the coffee and Sweetums before her mother came thumping into the kitchen on her walker.
“Where’s my Tums?” she demanded, giving the walker an extra whack for emphasis.
“Up your nose,” muttered Judith, grateful that Gertrude Grover was nearly deaf as a post. More loudly she said, “Try your housecoat pocket, left-hand side.” She checked the Caesar’s Palace coffee mug for cracks with one eye, while watching her mother with the other.
“Damn,” breathed Gertrude, “how’d they get there?”
The telephone saved Judith from having to answer. It was Dorothy Dalgleish, calling from Pinetop Falls, a small logging community some fifty-five miles to the northeast.
“Oh, Mrs. McMonigle, I’m so sorry!” wailed Dorothy Dalgleish. “We’re going to have to cancel this weekend. Homer is sick.”
“That’s a shame,” said Judith with feeling, though more for herself than the ailing Homer. “I hope it’s nothing serious.”
“It’s always serious with Homer,” Dorothy responded with a touch of annoyance. “Bronchitis, this time. He will work out in the woods in the worst weather. But that’s the life of a gyppo logger. You’re on your own, with no big timber company behind you.”
Judith could sympathize, at least with Homer’s private initiative. “Tell him to take care. You, too. Mrs. Dalgleish.”
“He will. We will,” asserted Dorothy. “In fact, put us down for next weekend. If you can.”
Judith could and did, filling Hillside for the first weekend of February. A glance at her reservation book gave her mixed pangs of satisfaction and apprehension. Since opening the B&B in May, she was already discovering a pattern to bookings: Weekends up through October were generally full; so were most weekdays during the summer. Business revived in mid-November, but dropped off dramatically after New Year’s. St. Valentine’s had been taken since early December, but there were a lot of blank spaces until April. Maybe she should add catering to her repertoire. Or try to book more wedding receptions. Perched as it was on the steep hill on a dead-end street, the big old house was ideal for romantic getaways and for visiting shoppers who didn’t want the hassle or expense of a downtown hotel. Tourists, however, had yet to beat down Judith’s door. Perhaps that would change if she could get listed in one of the national guidebooks. She’d made various contacts, from AAA to specialty publishing companies, but so far without any payoff. Patience, she told herself; patience—and the cultivation of a tough hide—had gotten her through eighteen years of marriage.
“Where’s Mike?” Gertrude inquired, her pugnacious jaw thrust out above the gaudy green and red of her housecoat collar.
Judith was somewhat startled by the question. Her mother might be ornery, even absentminded, but she was hardly senile. “Away at school,” she replied in a much less certain voice than she usually employed.
“Of course he’s away at school,” growled Gertrude. “What do you think I am, daffy?” She rummaged in her other pocket and pulled out a package of cigarettes. “I meant, where is he at school? I thought he was off on some half-assed field trip.”
“Oh!” Judith ran a hand through her prematurely graying hair. “Idaho, some place. Priest Lake?” She knew, of course, but momentarily went blank. As a forestry major, her only son had already been on several field trips which seemed to focus on how much beer could be sneaked into one’s backpack rather than how much knowledge could be crammed into one’s skull.
“What are those damned fools doing at that university, teaching kids how to camp? No wonder education costs so much—they waste it on all those frills!” Gertrude plunked herself down in a captain’s chair at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. “And what’s he going to do when he gets out? Grow into Paul Bunyan?” The question emerged in a cloud of blue smoke.
“Well, he’s already dating Babe, the Blue Ox,” Judith replied, recalling the Viking-like Kristin of Christmas past. A sports medicine major, Kristin had carried Judith’s eleven-foot unsheared Douglas fir into the house with one hand. It was no wonder Mike had described his girlfriend as awesome. “I don’t know, Mother, I just hope he ends up doing something he likes. He’s got almost two more years, after all.”
“Seems like he’s been there for ten already,” rasped Gertrude as the phone rang again. “Face it, kiddo, he could turn out like his father. The closest Dan McMonigle ever got to work was when you put his ashes out in the toolshed.”
With a baleful glance for her mother, Judith answered the phone in her professionally charming manner. The voice at the other end went on nonstop for three minutes, signing off in a flood of tears. Judith sighed and put the phone down. “The Hunicutts,” she said. “Their second honeymoon turned into a trial separation. Damn.”
“Wiped out, huh?” Gertrude stabbed her cigarette into an ashtray made out of a clamshell. Sweetums reentered the kitchen, growling menacingly at Judith as he made for his food dish just inside the pantry door.
“January is thin,” said Judith, slamming the reservation book shut. “I wish I were.” She gave her blue jogging-suited figure a disparaging glance, though in fact, she was a tall wo man who could have easily carried another ten pounds without much detriment. Her hand strayed to a pile of bills in an English biscuit box. “Christmas seems like six months ago instead of barely one, except for paying for it.”
Gertrude was unwrapping a fresh batch of Tums. “I thought you were going to close up for two weeks this month anyway and wallpaper the living room. Why don’t you get off your butt and do it now that you’ve got the chance?”
Watching Sweetums lick his chops after polishing off his cat tuna, Judith eyed the packages of wallpaper that reposed in the back entryway. “I could. Or,” she went on grimly, feeling not unlike Marie Antoinette heading for the guillotine, “I could call Oriana Brodie.”
“I could call that fathead a lot of things, but she wouldn’t much like most of ’em,” said Gertrude, chomping on her Tums.
Judith acknowledged her mother’s remark with a vague gesture, then opened the phone book. “I wonder why they moved back here from Palm Springs in the first place,” she murmured. “I would have thought Oriana would have preferred something more posh than Heraldsgate Hill.”
“Otto. The old fart always had a sentimental streak, according to your father, rest his soul.” She waved a hand in a haphazard sign of the cross on her forehead. “Otto used to cry like a baby in poetry class, especially when they read Rupert-What’s-His-Name.”
“Brooke,” supplied Judith, waiting for the phone to be answered at the Brodie residence four blocks away in distance, but a world apart in hard cash.
A breathless Oriana gulped her hello, explaining that she had been on her way between the main body of the house and the guest quarters over the triple garage. “It’s the only part not being fumigated,” she said. “Oh, my lungs! I shall have to give up practice this afternoon.”
Judith was tempted to suggest that Oriana simply give up, period, but instead conveyed her message with forced enthusiasm.
“But how fortunate!” cried Oriana. “Otto will be ecstatic!”
Ecstasy as embodied by the porcine Otto Brodie struck Judith as a vision of Porky Pig hoofing madly away on his stout little trotters. To Oriana, she merely expressed pleasure and asked if any members of the party suffered from allergies. During the first month of her tenure as mistress of Hillside Manor, a superior court judge had been hauled away in an ambulance after eating crab dip. Judith had suspected that her son had substituted Sweetums’s cat tuna, but discovered later that the judge had a violent seafood allergy and that his wife was furious with him for not inquiring as to the ingredients in Hillside’s hors d’oeuvres. Since then, Judith had been careful about her guests’ dietary eccentricities, feeling that the screeching arrival of aid cars and emergency vehicles might give Hillside a bad name.
“Allergies,” mused Oriana, sounding not unlike Tosca mulling over the choice between surrendering to Baron Scarpia and jumping out the window of the Farnese Palace. “Otto has sinus, but mostly from dust and pollen. As for the others, I think not…but you must remember I haven’t been stepmother to Otto’s brood for all that long. Of course, Harvey is a doctor. As for the fortune-teller, she won’t be dining with us except perhaps for dessert.”
“Fortune-teller? Dessert?” Judith grimaced into the phone. “Actually, I do breakfast, not dinner…”
“…promptly at seven-thirty, or Otto gets…unruly. And Harvey sulks, while Lance tends to wander off. Mentally, that is, and Guinevere is never on time unless you absolutely insist on punctuality for meals.” Oriana had interrupted like an orchestra conductor giving instructions to a slightly dim-witted lead singer. Judith’s protests died aborning.
Facing a hopeless task, she decided to take advantage of what appeared to be a good thing. “Roast beef is ten dollars a plate, salmon eight dollars, and chicken, ah, seven-fifty. I only do one entree per party. Which will it be?” she asked cheerfully. If Oriana expected dinner as well as breakfast, she’d damn well pay for it.
There was a pause at the other end. “We pay for the roast beef or salmon or chicken? I didn’t realize…” A deep masculine voice rumbled in the background. “Roast beef,” Oriana said quickly. “Cream puffs for dessert, if you will, and do make one for the fortune-teller.” The phone clicked in Judith’s ear.
“Cream puffs?” Judith shrieked into the handset. “I should have told her they’d cost another two-fifty each!”
“Cream puff, my foot,” muttered Gertrude, lighting up another cigarette while Sweetums preened against her baggy stockings. “Otto’s no cream puff, he’s one tough customer. When he isn’t bawling, that is. Hey!” She grabbed the walker and swung it at Sweetums. “Beat it, you mangy little fleabag!” Sweetums pounced; Gertrude retaliated with the rubber-tipped leg of the walker. Cat and contraption became an orange and silver blur.
Judith ignored the encounter; she was busy counting china. “My service for twelve has dwindled to eight,” she said, more to herself than to her mother, who was still wrestling with Sweetums and the walker. “I wonder if the fortune-teller knows where to find odd lots of Wedgwood’s Pembroke pattern?”
“Odd lots is right,” her mother snorted as the war with Sweetums wound down to its inevitable conclusion. After Gertrude whacked the walker against the wall, an ear-shattering screech ensued. Sweetums abandoned the field and fled into the dining room, leaving behind a trail of fur. “Lots of odd ones in that Brodie family,” remarked Gertrude, panting a little. “I’d search ’em before they left come Saturday noon.”
Disinclined to argue, Judith looked at the art deco calendar on the refrigerator. It was Thursday; Saturday suddenly seemed far away. The house would be empty tonight, tomorrow would be taken up with grocery shopping and fixing the impromptu dinner. Judith’s logical mind toted up the price tag to feed the brood of Brodies, plus a fortune-teller for dessert: A rib roast for eight would probably cost over fifty dollars, plus potatoes, vegetables, bread, and condiments. Maybe they’d expect liquor, too. It was possible that the impulsive figure she’d given Oriana was going to backfire. Especially with the cream puffs.
“What’s the matter?” demanded Gertrude, seeing her daughter’s worried expression. “Screw yourself again?”
Judith uttered a truncated laugh. “Well, nobody else has offered.”
“Watch your mouth,” snapped Gertrude, leaning on the walker and getting to her feet. “What kind of a girl have I raised?” With a show of indignation, she clumped out of the kitchen toward the back stairs. “Besides, if you’re talking about romance,” she rasped over her shoulder, “there’s always that damned cat.”
TWO
JUDITH HAD TO give the Brodie family their due: They arrived promptly though almost simultaneously at six-thirty p.m. Friday night, sporting luggage with various designer labels, the rain blowing in behind them. Judith’s regular cleaning woman-cum-laundress, Phyliss Rackley, had called in sick. But a last-minute crisis had been averted when, as if in answer to a prayer, good old Cousin Renie had phoned not two minutes later, announcing that she had made the deadline for her annual report design, her husband had gone to a creative dream seminar for the weekend, the kids were away, and she was going to put her feet up and watch Brides-head Revisited on video, eat microwave popcorn, and drink six gallons of Pepsi. Judith demolished her cousin’s own creative dream in ten seconds by asking her to fill in for Phyliss.
“Who are all these goofy people?” Renie demanded when she peeked out through the swinging kitchen door into the dining room between tosses of romaine lettuce.
Judith explained even as she tested the rib roast and started the gravy. “Otto Brodie lives over on the Bluff, in that big old stone house with the topiary animal shrubs. He made his fortune in bombs during World War II, and then cleaned up—so to speak—with carpet sweepers. He’s retired now, and that’s his second wife, Oriana, who”—she paused long enough to grab the peppermill, grind it too fast, and sneeze—“was once an opera singer of some renown if little talent. Otto’s two kids—if that’s how to describe the Hulk and the Bulk—are Lancelot and Guinevere, his first wife, Minnie, being into King Arthur.”
