Murder at the Mistletoe Ball

by J. D. Griffo

  Alberta’s ears perked up, there it was again, the Flower. Carmichael had said, “She’s the Flower,” and now Janine claimed she’s going to be the Flower. They want to be a drug? Alberta thought. That didn’t make any sense. Not to her maybe, but to Lisa Marie it finally made perfect sense.

  “Oh my God! Bambi is the Flower!” she screamed.

  “No, Leese, the Flower is the name of the drug,” Alberta said.

  “It’s named after her,” Lisa Marie said. “Pedro said the drug stinks like holy heaven when it’s being manufactured.”

  “Bambi wears a lot of perfume, but she doesn’t stink,” Alberta said.

  “Not her, the skunk in the Bambi movie is named Flower!” Lisa Marie cried. “Bambi’s the drug king, or queen, or whatever the hell you call it, she’s the head of it all!”

  “Ah Madon!” Alberta cried. “Lisa, that’s brilliant.”

  “Thank you,” Bambi said. “I thought it was a fun play on words. Name the whole operation after me without anybody knowing it.”

  “Why?” Alberta asked. “Why would you do such a terrible thing? Bring drugs into this town and get people addicted? You led innocent people to their deaths.”

  “I did no such thing!” Bambi shouted. “After my idiot of a husband left me with mountains of debt, I tried to get help, but I found out a hard truth—if you want help you have to help yourself. That’s what I did. I saw an opportunity and I took it.”

  “And all the innocent people who died, they’re just collateral damage?” Jinx asked.

  “Nobody’s innocent!” Bambi replied. “Everybody has to take responsibility for their own lives and for every choice they make.”

  “Well the choice you made is about to blow up in your face,” Jinx said. “Now that everybody knows about what you’ve done you can kiss your drug empire good-bye.”

  “We might be interrupted for a while, but not for long,” Bambi said. “I need to get rid of Janine, which will be deemed self-defense of course, since she’s brandishing a gun at me. Kylie will never say a word because Kylie wants everyone to think she’s beyond reproach. Rudy and Natalie are long gone and Carmichael’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but Carmichael is going to live,” Alberta said. “He’s on his way to the emergency room right now.”

  “That’s impossible!” Janine shouted. “I shot him!”

  “Can’t you do anything right?” Bambi shrieked.

  “Maybe you should’ve snuck up behind him and plunged a knife in his heart like you did Natalie,” Alberta said.

  “You can’t prove Janine killed Natalie,” Kylie said.

  “Yes, I can,” Alberta replied. “She’s wearing the same red parka Sergio said the person who met Natalie at the back entrance of the Manor was wearing the night of the Mistletoe Ball. That wig she’s sporting will match the strands of synthetic hair they found on Natalie’s body. And the way she’s holding the gun proves she’s left handed. Add all of that evidence to Carmichael’s testimony that he will undoubtedly give and Janine will take my grandson’s place in jail.”

  “Why did you have to kill her, Janine?” Kylie asked.

  “Because she deserved to die,” Janine replied.

  “No, she didn’t!” Kylie screamed.

  “You’re wrong, Doctor, Natalie most definitely had to die. Isn’t that right, Janine?” Alberta asked. “After all, Natalie took everything away from you: your job, your standing in your drug cartel, you knew she could have Rudy any time she wanted, she even took your memories.”

  “Gram, I followed you up to that last point,” Jinx said. “What do you mean, she stole Janine’s memories?”

  “The sob story that Natalie told me the night before she died was all made up,” Alberta said. “It wasn’t Natalie’s past, it was Janine’s.”

  “How did you figure that out, Ma?” Lisa Marie asked.

  “‘If you can’t be perfect, it’s better to be nothing,’” Alberta said. “Isn’t that what Daddy Manzini used to say to his little girls?”

  “He was right!” Kylie screamed. “If Janine had just tried to do something with her life other than steal and sell drugs, none of this would’ve happened.”

  “If you would have done your job as a big sister and protected me, none of this would have happened!” Janine cried.

  “You can’t blame this on me,” Kylie said.

  “If you had only stood up to Daddy when he treated me like garbage or intervened on my behalf when Carmichael fired me and Bambi tried to run me out of town, I wouldn’t have had to kill Natalie!” Janine cried. “You left me no choice.”

  “But you had a choice, Kylie, and you chose to ignore it,” Alberta said. “You knew your sister had killed Natalie and yet you kept quiet while my grandson was carted off to jail. Were you going to let him go to prison for life simply to avoid a scandal?”

  “What would you have done, Mrs. Scaglione, had the tables been turned?” Kylie asked. “Would you turn in your own flesh and blood to save someone else’s life?”

  “Before tonight I might have given you a different answer, but after seeing my grandson being taken away in handcuffs, taken to jail possibly for the rest of his life, I would have told the truth,” Alberta said. “As difficult as it would be, I could not allow another human being to take the blame for something they didn’t do.”

  “Then you’re a better woman than I am,” Kylie said. “I’m sorry I kept quiet and didn’t tell the police that my sister killed Natalie, but you need to understand that for most of my sister’s life I had kept quiet. I let my father abuse her with his words, I let her spiral out of control and I didn’t say a word to prevent it. I know you won’t believe me, but even though I haven’t acted like it, I do love my sister.”

  “I believe you.”

  Lisa Marie stepped out from behind the candy cane to face Kylie.

  “I did the same thing to my mother,” Lisa Marie said. “I turned my back on her and stayed away for fourteen years.”

  “Lisa, don’t,” Alberta said.

  “It’s true, Ma, it’s what I did, but that doesn’t mean I ever stopped loving you, and I hope you know that.”

  “I do,” Alberta said. “Because I never stopped loving you, even though I didn’t lift a finger to call you or write you a letter. I don’t know why I never did, but I didn’t. I always made some kind of excuse, that you wouldn’t want to hear from me, or it would only make things worse. I let my ego and my fear get the better of me and I left it alone.”

  “That’s how it was for me,” Kylie said. “I had built a life for myself and there was no room in it for Janine. I convinced myself that we were both better off living separate lives, even when I knew she was going down a horrible path.”

  “And when I reached out to you, you told me to get lost!” Janine screamed.

  “Because by that time you were so deep into selling drugs that’s all you wanted to do,” Kylie said. “You didn’t want my help to save you, you wanted my help to get you more drugs.”

  “The one thing I don’t understand, Kylie,” Jinx said, “is why you kept quiet about Bambi?”

  “She had to,” Alberta said. “By the time she found out Bambi was in charge of the whole operation, it was too late.”

  “That’s right,” Kylie replied. “As much as what Bambi and Carmichael were doing disgusted me, I was forced to keep quiet.”

  “If you exposed Bambi, you’d expose your sister too, and you couldn’t handle the shame or the scandal because no one would believe you were innocent, you were too close to all the major players,” Alberta explained.

  “Sounds like you understand me quite well, Mrs. Scaglione?” Kylie asked. “Do you also understand that I can no longer handle the guilt?”

  Thankfully, Alberta did. She also knew what Kylie was going to do a second before Kylie did. She pushed the candy cane at Kylie just as the doctor yanked Bambi’s gun out of her hand. When she pulled the trigger, instead of shooting herself the bullet was lo
dged in the ceiling.

  Alberta ran for the gun at the same time Bambi did, and Jinx pushed her candy cane toward Janine at the same time Janine pointed her gun at Alberta. Jinx lunged at Janine, landing on top of her and preventing her from raising her hand to shoot. Jinx grabbed Janine’s wrist and slammed it onto the floor several times until the gun went free. Lisa Marie ran over and picked up the gun and, for good measure, stomped her foot onto Janine’s hand.

  Alberta wrapped her fingers around Bambi’s gun as Bambi’s fingers wrapped around Alberta’s throat. The women fell backward, Alberta on top of Bambi and Alberta unknowingly mimicked Jinx’s actions and slammed Bambi’s arm onto the ground until the gun was released from her grip and fell to the ground. Before Bambi could get up, Lisa Marie ran and picked up the second gun. She stood in the center of the four fallen women and held the guns out to her side.

  Lisa Marie looked around the room and smiled.

  “Here’s a piece of advice my father-in-law used to say,” she said. “Non scherzare con una pazza signora italiana.”

  Alberta started to laugh. “That’s right, don’t mess with the crazy Italian lady.”

  “Especially when there are three of them,” Jinx said.

  Lisa Marie stood in the middle and wrapped one arm around Alberta and the other around Jinx, the guns still in her hands. They were exhausted, they were exhilarated, they were excited. They had done what they set out to do: prove Sergio’s innocence and bring him home for Christmas. And they did it with a day to spare.

  All three women were thinking the same thing. It had been a long road to get to this point, to be able to stand side by side by side, three generations of Italian women working together and not against one another. It felt good because it felt like family.

  The only thing that made them feel better was when the rest of their family, those bound to them by blood and those attached to them by love and friendship, entered the gingerbread house. Vinny, Freddy, Sloan, Father Sal, Tambra, Helen, and Joyce. The looks of relief and gratitude on their faces told them everything they needed to know. They were loved.

  Alberta closed her eyes and thanked God for granting her wish. Her grandson’s innocence had been proven and he would be released from jail. God had added a bonus because this year her entire family would be together for Christmas.

  It was the best gift this old Italian lady could ever receive.

  EPILOGUE

  Avremo anche noi un piccolo e felice Natale.

  Christmas in an Italian family was always a day of major celebration. But this Christmas the holiday for the Ferraras was even more joyous, more meaningful, and more filled with family and friends than ever before. It would be a holiday to be remembered for decades to come.

  Once Janine confessed to killing Natalie and shooting Carmichael, who would make a full recovery, the DA had no choice but to set Sergio free on Christmas Eve. Vinny forced Roxanne to make a public apology to Sergio and his family for the undue stress they were put under due to the state’s rash rush to judgment. Sergio accepted her mea culpa with grace because how could he really fault her? Roxanne was as blind to Sergio’s innocence as he had been to Natalie’s guilt. He knew he needed to contemplate long and hard how he could have allowed one woman with such a questionable past lead him not only astray, but away from his family.

  In an attempt to lessen her sentence, Janine cooperated with the authorities and told them all about the drug dealing operation and how Bambi was the mastermind behind getting Flower onto the streets. Bambi wouldn’t spend as many years behind bars as Janine, but it would be a long time before she’d be able to buy designer clothes again. No criminal charges were brought against Kylie, but she also suffered. St. Clare’s Hospital immediately revoked her position as head of the new research lab and put her on unpaid administrative leave subject to further inquiry into her role in the drug scandal. She had always thought it would be her sister who would cause her public humiliation and, in the end, she took care of that all by herself.

  * * *

  Tommy arrived from Florida just in time to join the rest of his family as Bruno and Vinny ushered Sergio out of the correctional facility and into his family’s loving arms.

  Through tears, Tommy told his son, “Avremo anche noi un piccolo e felice Natale.” They were going to have a very Merry Christmas indeed.

  From the correctional facility they drove directly to St. Winifred’s Church to hear Father Sal say Christmas Eve mass and were not surprised when Sal led the entire congregation in a standing ovation to acknowledge Sergio’s freedom. The homily was filled with the importance of having faith not only during Christmas but all year long.

  That night everyone gathered at Joyce’s house for a catered spread of the seven fishes. Shrimp, clams casino, grilled octopus, stuffed calamari in tomato sauce, baccala—a fancy word for salted cod fish—marinated eel, and whole lobsters with drawn butter. Everyone agreed that Joyce served a delicious meal, because every item on the menu had been catered.

  Christmas Day was like watching a classic holiday movie.

  Snow was softly falling outside, not enough to make driving treacherous, but enough to make Memory Lake look as if it belonged in the Swiss Alps and not northern New Jersey. Inside Alberta’s house, family and friends gathered for a feast that started with cold and hot appetizers, antipasto, charcuterie, shrimp cocktail, and salad, then moved on to the pastas, which included lasagna, ravioli, and gluten-free macaroni to satisfy Jinx’s persnickety dietary needs, and finally the main course of roasted chicken, sausage and cranberry stuffing, roasted vegetables, lemon pepper brussels sprouts, and candied yams.

  In keeping with the Ferrara tradition, dessert was an assortment of Entenmann’s cakes and some pitchers of Red Herring with a little more prosecco than usual. It was a holiday after all.

  As the day ticked on, it was obvious that the family was more aware than ever how lucky they were. They realized they had so much to celebrate, big and small. Vinny couldn’t wait very long to tell them that a publisher had finally shown interest in his book and he would receive a contract in the new year. What’s Murder All About, Alfie? was finally going to be published. Helen’s Big Sister column was a roaring success, especially after it was revealed that the letters she had received from Noctor J and Mike DeDordo helped bring Natalie justice.

  The biggest surprise came during dessert, when Freddy got down on one knee in the middle of Alberta’s living room and proposed to Jinx. Through tears of joy, she accepted his hand in marriage and was delighted that the diamond and ruby engagement ring he bought for her fight perfectly on her finger. Freddy said that he was going to ask Jinx privately the night of the Mistletoe Ball, but realized he wasn’t just marrying Jinx, but her entire family. The proposal felt more appropriate with an audience.

  Having witnessed firsthand how deep Freddy’s feelings were for their daughter, Tommy and Lisa Marie gave their wholehearted support to the couple. After screaming, crying, and carrying on for a full ten minutes, Alberta, Joyce, and Helen informed the engaged couple that their wedding would take place in Alberta’s backyard in June. Jinx and Freddy didn’t even attempt to argue with them.

  Alberta looked at Sloan, sitting on the couch with Lola in his arms, and couldn’t believe how happy she was in her relationship with him. She smiled at him, and Lola, thinking the smile was for her, meowed back. Sloan wasn’t jealous since he knew the majority of Alberta’s smiles were only meant for him.

  After all the dishes were loaded into the dishwasher and the Tupperware was filled with food that everyone would take home with them, Alberta saw that Lisa Marie had gone outside and was standing in the backyard. Alberta took her mother’s quilt from the recliner in the living room and brought it outside.

  “You’ll catch cold out here,” Alberta said.

  “I forgot how much I missed this weather,” Lisa Marie said.

  Alberta threw the quilt around Lisa Marie’s shoulders, stretching it to make it long enough so the othe
r end wrapped around Alberta’s.

  Lisa Marie kept her eyes on Memory Lake when she spoke. “And I forgot how much I missed you, Ma.”

  Alberta held her daughter a little closer. “I can’t tell you how many nights I prayed this day would come. My mother was right, if you pray long enough your prayers really do get answered.”

  Lisa Marie turned her gaze from Memory Lake, and when she looked at her mother, Alberta saw that she had been crying. Lisa Marie was an adult, a grown woman, and yet she was still Alberta’s own, complicated little girl. She opened her mouth to speak, but Alberta stopped her.

  “Don’t say ‘I’m sorry.’”

  “But I am.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry about and neither do I.”

  “How can you say that? We’ve wasted so much time.”

  “No, we haven’t, we were just waiting for the right time to come back into each other’s lives.”

  Alberta looked at the snow falling on Memory Lake and felt Lisa Marie lean her head against her shoulder. She tightened the quilt around them and accepted the moment for what it was. A very merry Christmas.

  Recipes from the Ferrara Family Kitchen

  ALBERTA’S STUFFED CALAMARI

  It looks like it takes forever, but trust me, you can make it under an hour.

  Ingredients:

  12 calamari tubes—My mother cut her own calamari and it took forever!

  2 green onions, finely chopped

  8 cloves of garlic, minced and divided

  ½ pound chopped cooked shrimp

  ½ pound cooked crabmeat, diced

  1 tbs lemon juice

  ¾ cup butter

  12 oz. cream cheese, cut into cubes

  3 cups milk—Do not use non-dairy milk no matter what Jinx says!

  10 oz. grated Parmesan and 3/4 cup grated Romano—I think you know by now you should only use fresh grated cheese!

  1 pinch black pepper

  1 (8 oz.) package linguine—Only use gluten free pasta if you absolutely must!