The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a package. He spread the contents on the shiny oilcloth which covered the kitchen table. And as he did so, the voices which never seemed to be far away, came back.

  “ … somewhere …”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “Where, Gran?”

  “Up north.”

  “Where up north?”

  “That would be telling, wouldn’t it now?”

  “Tell me, Gran. Tell me.” Because even then, a child, six, seven, ten years old, he had known it was important. If she would just pinpoint the place for him, just give it space, meaning, then he himself would finally be rooted.

  “What happened, Gran?”

  She would start again. “It was Christmas Eve.” Then stop, laughing at him, the heavy rolls of her flesh shaking up and down her body. She was all too aware of the depth of the desire to know that filled him. Only to know.

  “Christmas Day, Gran.” It was part of the cruel ritual that the beginning must never vary.

  “Oh yes. You’re a knowing little monkey, aren’t you?” A nod of the head, a stare over the tops of her glasses, a small not-quite-pleasant smile. “It was Christmas Day, and there was champagne in a silver bucket …”

  Ah, that champagne. For years he hadn’t really known what it was. “Wine, dear, with a sparkle,” she’d told him. “It made you feel good. Or bad, depending on your viewpoint.” And she had giggled, an old woman scratching at memories.

  When he was older, of course, he’d seen real, not imagined champagne, seen the big bottles, the shiny tops, the labels, special, rich, different from other labels on other bottles. Later still, drunk it, felt the bubbles at the top of his mouth. The sparkle of it was entwined in his earliest memories: that Christmas, that champagne.

  “Yes, Gran. The champagne.”

  “There was champagne in a silver bucket, and then your mother …”

  And she would stop. Always. Her fingers would float above the photographs, her hands small and delicate against the grossness of her bulk, and he would see the past in her eyes, the something terrible that she would never tell him. He knew it was terrible by her silence. And always, briefly, her face would register again the shock of whatever it was had happened that Christmas Day, before she turned off into a story of Santa Claus or mince pies or some other yuletide banality which he knew had nothing to do with the one which lurked behind her eyes.

  “Then what, Gran? What?” But there would be no force in his voice now. She wasn’t going to tell him. Not then. Not ever.

  Now, the woman came forward, stood beside him, stirred the photographs on the table with her finger.

  “Still got all the snaps, then?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose she’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “About time. How did she die?”

  Slowly, he wanted to say, but did not.

  “Because I hope it hurt her to let go of life,” the woman said. “I hope she fought against it, knowing she would lose.”

  That was exactly how it had been. He said nothing.

  “I hope it was … violent.” Her voice shook. “Like his.” She sifted through the photographs and picked one out. “Like his.”

  He was young. Dark. Hair falling over his forehead. A military cap held under one arm.

  The woman moved her head from side to side. “He was so beautiful,” she said, lifeless. “So … beautiful.”

  “My father.”

  “Yes. What did she tell you about him?”

  “She told me nothing. Except that he was dead.”

  “I don’t imagine she told you why.”

  “No. Not even that this was his picture. At least—not until very recently.” He’d managed to choke that from her, squeezing and relaxing the soft flesh of her throat, alternately giving her hope, then removing it. “And my mother,” he’d said. “Tell me where she is, where she is.” And almost left it too late. “Garthway,” she had managed. That was all.

  Outside the window, at the edge of the garden, he could see how the last of the sun caught the green hill through the iron gate which led out on to the moors. It shone like a transparency between the shadowed walls on either side.

  “And now you’ve come back to see for yourself where it all happened, have you?” The woman filled a kettle at the tap and set it on top of the red Aga.

  “She never told me what exactly …” He picked two photographs out of the pile on the table. “… but I knew something must have.”

  Somewhere in his mind he heard the echo of the hateful voice: “It was Christmas Day, somewhere up north …”

  Two photographs. Christmas dinner, every detail clear: the turkey, the sausages, the roast potatoes and steaming sprouts, a cut glass dish of cranberry sauce, a china gravy boat. Beside the table, a silver bucket. The people leaned towards each other, smiling, holding up glasses, about to celebrate. At the head of the table was a woman of maybe forty, big-boned, fair-haired, her dress cut low over prominent breasts. She was handsome, ripe. His workmates at the police station would have whistled if he’d shown them the photo, would have nudged each other, said she was pleading for it, they wouldn’t have minded a bit of that themselves. She was leaning towards the young girl sitting at her right, saying something.

  “That’s you, isn’t it?” he said, his finger brushing across the girl’s face.

  “It is. It was.”

  And the same scene, seconds later. Glasses still in the air, but the smiles gone as they stared towards something out of frame, their faces full of horror and shock. The girl was gone. The woman at the head of the table looked straight ahead at the camera, smiling a small not-quite-pleasant smile.

  “What happened?” he said. “I have to know.” Because the body down in Wandsworth would never tell now. The swollen protruding tongue was silent at last. Had been for weeks. The small white hands would never again turn and turn through the photographs, reliving a past that a cataclysm had destroyed.

  The woman lifted her shoulder and released a sighing breath. “You have a right, if anybody does,” she said. “I didn’t know Bobby was taking photographs then.”

  “Bobby?”

  “My youngest brother. He was camera mad. He took all of these, photographed everything. ‘It’ll be a record for posterity,’ he’d say.

  “It’s been that, all right.”

  Staring down at the photographs, the woman said softly: “She hated me, of course.”

  “Who did?”

  “My mother.” She indicated the woman at the head of the table. “It must have been some kind of madness, some pathological obsession. Or maybe she was just jealous because Dad loved me more than he loved her. They’d have a word for it today, I suppose. Perhaps they did then, but I never knew what it was, just that she was dangerous. My brothers tried to protect me, even little Bobby. So did Dad, while he was alive. I think she would have killed me, if she could.” A silence. “She did the next best thing.”

  “Tell me.”

  Again the shuddering sigh. “Edward. Your father. He lived further up the dale. His family was rich, owned a lot of land. Edward was ten years older than I was, but it never mattered. Right from the beginning there was never anyone else for either of us.” She turned her gaze on him. “We loved one another.” On the Aga the kettle began to fizz, water drops skittering like ants across the surface of the hot plate. The woman got up, found a teapot, cups, saucers. “Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” he said, though he knew nothing of love.

  “I was sent away to school, to keep me from my mother, but the first day of the holidays, Edward would be there, outside the garden gate, and then it was like summer, like fireworks, like roses shooting out of the ground and birds singing.” She smiled, looking back. Her voice was without emotion.

  “What happened?”

  “On my sixteenth birthday, in the middle of September, Edward wrote
to me at school—he was in the Army by then—and said he was being posted overseas after Christmas and wanted me to come with him. He said I was old enough, he’d ask my mother if we could get married, since Dad had died the year before.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That it was out of the question, that I was far too young. I wrote and said I didn’t need her consent, I was legally able to get married and I was going to, soon as I came home at Christmas, so I could go abroad with Edward. She was furious.”

  He nodded. He knew Gran’s furies. The violence, the hatred, flowing out of her like champagne from a shaken bottle.

  “Edward said he thought my brothers could persuade her. And in the end, she gave in. She invited Edward to have Christmas dinner with us.” She checked, touched her forehead, closed her eyes. “I really thought that she …”

  Softly, he said: “It was Christmas Day, somewhere up north.”

  Equally softly, she said: “It was snowing that day and Edward was so late that we were about to start without him. Then he suddenly appeared at the door of the dining-room. He stood there, looking at me. Just—looking. Not smiling. And then my mother leaned over to me and said … she said …”

  “What?” All these years, and he could feel the inner emptiness begin to fill at last with what should always have been there.

  “She must have planned it, decided exactly when she would tell me, right down to the second. Normally I would never have sat next to her at the table but that day she made me. So nobody but me heard her say that she and Edward … that they were lovers. That she’d seduced him, that it had been easy, that it was not me he loved but her.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “No. Not all of it. Not … everything.”

  “What then?”

  “Edward knew what she was doing. He called my name. He said he loved me, that in spite of everything, I was to remember he loved me. Then he—suddenly, he was gone, out through the front door. We heard a shot.”

  “My God.”

  “I ran and ran across the grass, in my new shoes. I could see him lying on the ground with his gun beside him, and I knelt in the snow and held him while he died. His blood was so red against the white. She put her arm round me for the first time in her life. She said they would have married. That Edward had no choice, not in the circumstances.”

  “Did you believe her?” he said again.

  “Not at first.” She sighed. “Later, I went into a … hospital for a while.”

  “Of course. If you were carrying … I suppose in those days … more of a stigma … unmarried …” His voice died away.

  “When I came out, Bobby had died in a car crash and my elder brothers had both gone out to Australia. She’d gone, too. She took you away with her, down south. You were all that was left of my Edward.”

  “You poor thing.”

  “Because of course, she and Edward had … not that I ever blamed him. It was all her fault.”

  “Poor darling Mother.” He covered her hand. They would be friends, she and he. They would make up for all the years that the evil old woman, Gran, had taken from them both. He thought swiftly about Gran’s dying, wished it had taken her longer, that she had suffered more, that he had been, perhaps, more brutal at the beginning. “Why didn’t you come looking for me?”

  She moved from under his hand. “Why would I? It would only have brought it back. The trauma. Besides, eventually I got over the shock of it all.”

  He wished she did not sound so indifferent. “I didn’t,” he said.

  “Jim and I started courting, we got married, had the children …” She shrugged. “You know how it is.”

  “But, Mother …” The word hung in his mouth, succulent, unaccustomed.

  She stared at him for a moment. “I’m not your mother,” she said, giving the word a hard emphasis.

  “What?” He did not take in what she was saying.

  She smiled a small, familiar, not-quite-pleasant smile. “Not me, Martin. Your father and I didn’t … hadn’t … I was a virgin when I wed Jim.”

  “Then … who?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Gran?” he said.

  “If that’s what you called her.”

  “She told me my parents were dead,” he said. Tears filled his eyes. Hatred, raw and red-edged, filled him. Was Gran, that blowsy, disgusting old woman, was she the mother, the flesh and blood, it had taken him so long to find?

  The woman looked at him. “In a way, she was right, wasn’t she?”

  “No! Don’t say that!” His hands were around her neck. He could feel the bone at the base of her skull and the convulsive movements of her throat. He shook his head. “She can’t be … not Gran,” he said.

  He squeezed harder, trying to force the right words from her mouth, while her white fingers tore at his hands and her face darkened. “Tell me it wasn’t Gran,” he screamed, but she did not answer.

  When he let her drop back in her chair her eyes, so like his own, had grown dull. In one of her small hands she still held the photograph of that long-past never-finished luncheon, and the champagne in a silver bucket, on Christmas Day.

  THE BUTLER’S CHRISTMAS EVE

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  THE FIRST MYSTERY NOVEL to appear on the bestseller list in America was The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart in 1909. She had written it as a serial for the first pulp magazine, Munsey’s Magazine, which also serialized her novel The Circular Staircase (1908), which was released in book form before The Man in Lower Ten, probably her most successful work. She and Avery Hopwood adapted it for the stage as The Bat in 1920, by which time she had become the highest-paid writer in America. As the creator of the now frequently parodied “Had-I-But-Known” school, Rinehart regularly had her plucky heroines put themselves in situations from which they needed to be rescued. “The Butler’s Christmas Eve” was first published in her short story collection Alibi for Isabel (New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).

  The Butler’s Christmas Eve

  MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

  WILLIAM STOOD IN THE RAIN WAITING for the bus. In the fading daylight he looked rather like a freshly washed eighty-year-old and beardless Santa Claus, and underneath his raincoat he clutched a parcel which contained a much-worn nightshirt, an extra pair of socks, a fresh shirt, and a brand-new celluloid collar. It also contained a pint flask of the best Scotch whisky.

  Not that William drank, or at least not to speak of. The whisky was a gift, and in more than one way it was definitely contraband. It was whisky which had caused his trouble.

  The Christmas Eve crowd around him was wet but amiable.

  “Look, mama, what have you done with the suitcase?”

  “What do you think you’re sitting on? A bird cage?”

  The crowd laughed. The rain poured down. The excited children were restless. They darted about, were lost and found again. Women scolded.

  “You stand right here, Johnny. Keep under this umbrella. That’s your new suit.”

  When the bus came along one of them knocked William’s package into the gutter, and he found himself shaking with anxiety. But the bottle was all right. He could feel it, still intact. The Old Man would have it, all right, Miss Sally or no Miss Sally; the Old Man, left sitting in a wheelchair with one side of his big body dead and nothing warm in his stomach to comfort him. Just a year ago tonight on Christmas Eve William had slipped him a small drink to help him sleep, and Miss Sally had caught him at it.

  She had not said anything. She had kissed her grandfather good-night and walked out of the room. But the next morning she had come into the pantry where William was fixing the Old Man’s breakfast tray and dismissed him, after fifty years.

  “I’m sorry, William. But you know he is forbidden liquor.”

  William put down the Old Man’s heated egg cup and looked at her.

  “It was only because it was Christmas Eve, Miss Sally. He was kind of low, with Mr. Tony gone and everything
.”

  She went white at that, but her voice was even.

  “I am trying to be fair,” she said. “But even without this—You have worked a long time, and grandfather is too heavy for you to handle. I need a younger man, now that—”

  She did not finish. She did not say that her young husband had enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, and that she had fought tooth and nail against it. Or that she suspected both her grandfather and William of supporting him.

  William gazed at her incredulously.

  “I’ve handled him, one way and another, for fifty years, Miss Sally.”

  “I know all that. But I’ve talked to the doctor. He agrees with me.”

  He stood very still. She couldn’t do this to him, this girl he had raised, and her father before her. She couldn’t send him out at his age to make a life for himself, after living a vicarious one in this house for half a century. But he saw helplessly that she could and that she meant to.

  “When am I to go?” he asked.

  “It would be kinder not to see him again, wouldn’t it?”

  “You can’t manage alone, Miss Sally,” he said stubbornly. But she merely made a little gesture with her hands.

  “I’m sorry, William. I’ve already arranged for someone else.”

  He took the breakfast tray to the Old Man’s door and gave it to the nurse. Then he went upstairs to his room and standing inside looked around him. This had been his room for most of his life. On the dresser was the faded snapshot of the Old Man as a Major in the Rough Riders during the Spanish War. There was a picture of Miss Sally’s father, his only son, who had not come home from France in 1918. There was a very new one of Mr. Tony, young and good-looking and slightly defiant, taken in his new Navy uniform. And of course there were pictures of Miss Sally herself, ranging from her baby days to the one of her, smiling and lovely, in her wedding dress.

  William had helped to rear her. Standing there he remembered the day when she was born. The Major—he was Major Bennett then, not the Old Man—had sent for him when he heard the baby’s mother was dead.

  “Well,” he said heavily, “it looks as though we’ve got a child to raise. A girl at that! Think we can do it?”