A Killer Christmas Party

by Nicole Ellis

  “We should probably stop them,” I said half-heartedly.

  “Yeah, probably. But I don’t think they’re hurting anything and they’re having fun. They had to be quiet for so long in the retirement home that they need a little playtime outside.”

  “I’m glad we were able to have coffee with Delilah though,” I said. “I really liked her.”

  “Me too. Like I said, I’ve known her my whole life.” She frowned. “I didn’t realize how lonely she was though.”

  “If you’d like, I wouldn’t mind visiting her again. Maybe we could even pick her up and bring her to the café for coffee.”

  Desi smiled. “I like that idea. Remind me about it after Christmas, ok? Things should be calmer by then.”

  As we stood on the front walkway, she pointed at the brightly lit Christmas tree. “They outdid themselves with the tree.”

  She was right. It was decorated in a mix of multi-colored lights, with delicate metal stars twisted in between them.

  “I wonder why the building isn’t lit up too?” I stared up at the eaves. Small colorful bulbs hung off of the gutters, but they weren’t on. “It must look pretty at night.” With its multiple stories and fanciful architecture lit up against the darkness of Puget Sound behind it, the retirement home would be magnificently beautiful.

  Before she could answer, we both noticed that it was quiet—too quiet.

  “Where are the boys?” My eyes roved over the hedges and the rest of the grounds in front of the building, but I didn’t spot them.

  “I don’t know. I told Anthony not to run off.” Desi stalked over to the hedges and looked over the top of them to the other side. “They’re not here.”

  I put my hand on my hip and sighed. “Mikey’s getting bad about it too. He thinks he knows everything and is getting way too independent. He even left a store one day without me and I found him waiting outside after I spent a few frantic minutes searching for him.”

  I put my hand over my eyes to block the sun’s glare and surveyed the yard again. I didn’t see them in the street or the parking lot, but that left only one place—the back of the building.

  The sound of little boys’ high-pitched laughter rang out from the backyard.

  “There’s a fence along the bluff, right?” I asked. Fear replaced annoyance, and my words cracked. I wouldn’t put it past Mikey to go right up to the edge of the cliff, much like he had when we were at a lake resort back in August.

  “I don’t know,” Desi said grimly. “We’d better find out.”

  I ran over to the side of the building closest to the hedges, but a fence without a gate blocked the way.

  I pointed to the far side of the yard. “We have to go around the other way.”

  We jetted around the other side to the back of the building. I sighed with relief when I spotted the boys playing around a statue in the middle of a garden that must have been beautiful when it bloomed in the spring and summer. In the winter, it was still pleasant, but in a frozen tundra kind of way.

  I started to call out to the boys, but tripped over a shoe before I could say anything. What was a ladies red patent leather pump with a two-inch heel doing out here in the middle of the grass? My eyes caught on another flash of red about five feet away. What was going on? Something swayed above me, casting a gray shadow on the building. I looked up to see what it was and gasped, covering my mouth with my hand before I could scream.

  4

  Above us, in between some dormer windows, a woman hung by her neck from a thick mess of tangled Christmas lights. Her lifeless eyes stared downward at us.

  I froze in disbelief. What a horrible way to die.

  “Desi,” I hissed.

  “I know,” she said without turning to look at me. “I’ll get them down from there.” The boys were now playing on the statue.

  “Leave them.”

  Now she turned. “What? They could damage it.”

  I pointed upward and her eyes followed, widening when she saw what was hanging from the roof.

  “Oh, my goodness. That’s horrible.” She was quiet for a moment. “Do you think she was hanging the lights?”

  “I don’t know. But we’ve got to tell someone.” I shivered. That was why I never liked to put the Christmas lights on our house. I was terrified of falling.

  We both looked at the boys, who were completely oblivious to what was going on thirty feet away from them.

  “I don’t think she’s going anywhere. Let’s go inside with the boys and we can let the front desk know.” I moved closer to the boys so they weren’t likely to see the body and called out, “Boys! Time to go.” They must have sensed the urgency in my voice, because they trotted over to us without protest.

  We walked back into the building. The receptionist’s cheery smile fell when she saw our troubled faces.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  The boys had already started chatting with an elderly man about his cane, so we both moved closer to the reception desk.

  “There’s a woman’s body hanging from the roof in the back of the building,” I said in a hushed voice.

  Her mouth gaped open. “Excuse me?”

  “You need to call the police,” Desi said, her words slow and patient enough for a small child to comprehend. “There’s been an accident. It looks like she fell off of the building while hanging Christmas lights.”

  “Oh my. Are you sure? Is she ok? The maintenance crew installed the lights yesterday morning. I can’t imagine why anyone would be up there today.”

  I shook my head. “No. She’s dead, I’m afraid.”

  She picked up her phone and dialed, then spoke to the 911 operator. After she hung up, her face was white as a sheet. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. I can’t believe this. I mean, I’m used to calling 911 when a resident has a medical emergency, but this is horrible.” Her eyes filled with concern. “Wait, did the woman have dark hair?”

  I thought back to the woman’s hair that the wind had twisted into the lights. “Yes.” I peered at her. “Why? Do you know who it is?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not,” she said in a low voice. “But our recreation director is a bit of a perfectionist and I heard her complaining yesterday about how sloppy the maintenance crew had been when they hung the lights on the building. She has long, dark brown hair.”

  I looked over at Desi. Realization dawned in her eyes at the same time as mine.

  “That would explain why she wasn’t here today for the Christmas carols,” she said.

  The receptionist’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, poor Mila.”

  From the street, the sound of sirens filtered in through the walls. Half of the residents in the lobby turned toward the sound, probably worried that something had happened to one of their own.

  A few minutes later, a policeman entered the lobby and approached the front desk. “Could I please speak to whoever found the body?”

  “That would be us.” Desi gestured to me as she came forward.

  “We need to talk with you outside.” He eyed the residents, who were on full alert.

  “We have our kids with us,” I said. “They got away from us earlier and that’s why we were in the backyard, but we managed to keep them away from where she … is. I don’t want them to see her.”

  He looked at the kids. “I’ll call someone in to look after them.” He said something into his radio and a young policeman entered the room.

  “I’ll watch them while you go outside. Is that all right with you?” he asked us politely. With his curly blond hair and cherubic face, I wondered how long he’d been with the police force—and how much experience he had with kids. I gauged his expression and he didn’t appear to be terrified of children, so I figured he’d be ok with them for a few minutes.

  We nodded. “Thank you,” I said.

  The three of us went outside and around to the back of the building, where emergency personnel had gathered.

  A photographer was already takin
g pictures of the scene.

  “I’m going to need your information,” the policeman said gruffly.

  We provided him with our names and contact information and then I looked more closely at what was going on in front of us.

  “Is all this necessary?” I pointed at the photographer.

  “It is. Any time we have a suspicious death, we treat the scene with care,” he said. “And this death is definitely suspicious.”

  Desi tipped her head to the side. “Why do you say that? It looked like she’d fallen while hanging the lights.”

  He sighed. “Did either of you see a ladder earlier?”

  Ice ran through my veins. We’d checked the front of the building for the boys before heading around to the back and there hadn’t been a ladder in front or on either of the sides.

  “No. I didn’t see one out front.”

  I saw Desi running her eyes along the base of the rear of the retirement home.

  “Or back here,” Desi said grimly. “But she must have climbed up a ladder to get up there. There’s no other way to the roof.”

  Desi was right. None of the windows afforded much of a perch for climbing onto the roof. The ladder the woman had climbed was missing, and ladders didn’t just walk off on their own. This hadn’t been an accident.

  “Somebody took the ladder,” Desi said out loud.

  The policeman didn’t respond to her comment. “Did you notice anything suspicious when you were back here? You said that your children came around back first. Could they have played with the ladder?”

  I would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so grim. Our four-year-olds wouldn’t have been capable of carrying a heavy ladder long enough to reach the roof of a three-story building. “No. They couldn’t have moved it very far away.”

  “And they weren’t back here for very long,” Desi added quickly. “Only a few minutes.”

  He jotted something down in his notebook. “Thank you for your time. Please stay nearby for a little longer in case we have any questions.”

  We nodded in unison.

  He walked away from us, toward a few police officers standing in a group. They’d erected a yellow caution tape barrier, and behind it stood a dozen senior citizens who were watching the scene intently.

  “That’s Mila,” one man said. “I knew something was wrong when she didn’t show up today. She’s always so dependable.”

  “But didn’t maintenance hang the lights yesterday? Why would she be up there?” a woman asked.

  Another said, “It must have happened last night. That’s the Christmas sweater with the penguins on it that she wore yesterday.”

  Delilah came over to us. “I didn’t know you girls were still here. It’s awful, isn’t it? She was so young and full of life.”

  “It is,” Desi agreed.

  After documenting the scene, the police carefully cut the woman’s body down and lowered it to the ground. Mila’s red and green Christmas sweater sagged into the frosty grass, the black penguins gazing forlornly up into the air. A tear slipped down Delilah’s cheek and she wiped it away with a Kleenex that she removed from the sleeve of her sweater.

  “They’re saying she was murdered,” she said in wonder. “Who would have wanted to kill Mila? She had no enemies.”

  “I don’t know.” I felt helpless watching her cry and wasn’t sure how to comfort her.

  Desi wrapped her arm around Delilah’s hunched shoulders. “I’m sure the police will figure it out.”

  “I hope so. They haven’t been much help with everything else going on around here.” She blew her nose loudly.

  My ears perked up, but before I could ask her what she meant, Mikey ran up to me and tugged on my arm.

  “Can we go now?” he whined. “I want to go play at school.”

  The young policeman jogged out to us, his face contrite. “Sorry, ma’am. They escaped.”

  “Yeah, they’re good at that,” Desi said while gripping Anthony’s hand. “Do you know if we’re allowed to leave? The officer we spoke to had asked us to wait, but we need to get the boys off to preschool. I’m sure you don’t want to watch them for much longer.”

  Terror filled his eyes at the mention of minding the boys again. “I’ll go ask.” He hurried over to the older police officer and spoke with him, then came back to us. “He said it’s fine to go.”

  Desi patted Delilah on the shoulder. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Mila sounds like she was a good friend to everyone here.”

  “She was,” Delilah said softly.

  “We need to go now, but I’ll come check on you later, ok?” Desi looked into Delilah’s eyes.

  Delilah nodded. “Thank you.”

  We said goodbye to her and walked toward the front of the building. I glanced back at Mila’s body, which was still on the ground, but now covered with a special plastic tarp. We’d come to the retirement home for a preschool field trip and were now involved with yet another murder investigation. How was this happening?

  After I dropped Mikey off at school, I returned to the Boathouse and worked through the afternoon finishing up details on the Pearson Company Christmas party. At five, I picked up Mikey and then stopped at Beth’s house to get Ella.

  When she opened the door, she looked better than she had that morning, but still tired. I made a mental note to increase our babysitter’s schedule so I wouldn’t have to depend on Beth so much.

  “Hey, Jill,” she said. “Come in, don’t let the heat escape. Ella’s in baby jail in the living room.”

  I followed her inside the house to where my daughter and Lina were sitting inside of a series of interlocked plastic fence pieces, playing with a plastic elephant that lit up when they pressed its buttons.

  She pulled herself up on the fence when she saw me and babbled happily. Beth lifted her to freedom and set her down on the floor, where she promptly toddled over to me.

  “Ella, Lina, and I had a good time once the older girls left with Will.”

  I looked around the living room. Everything looked ok, so Will’s kids hadn’t managed to break anything of Beth’s. Lucky her.

  I picked up Ella. “Did they end up going to the zoo? It seems cold to go there.”

  Beth nodded. “They went to the zoo and the Space Needle. Will is playing tourist, I think in hopes of convincing the girls of the benefits of living in Washington.”

  “Did Tania come back?” I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing to ask, considering Beth’s feelings about my sister-in-law, but curiosity got the best of me.

  “She came back and got her stuff, then left promptly.”

  “She left?”

  “Yep. She’s decided to stay at a friend’s house in Seattle for a few days.”

  “Is she coming back?”

  Beth shrugged. “I don’t know. I figured it wasn’t my place to pry into things between her and Will.”

  “Yeah, that was probably best. I wonder what they’ll tell the girls.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure that the younger girls have noticed anything is wrong, but I think Bella has. She’s barely poked her nose out of a book the whole time she’s been here. She’s changed a lot since I last saw her.” She peered at me. “How did everything go at work today?”

  I sighed. “Fine. The Pearson Company keeps coming up with more things to add to their Christmas party. Now they want to have reindeer munching on hay outside for the guests to see.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Reindeer?”

  “Yep. I told them I’d look into it, but I don’t think I can pull it off for them.”

  “Well, good luck with all of that.” She smothered a smile, then looked behind her into the kitchen. “I’d better get the kitchen cleaned up before everyone gets home. I’ll see you at work tomorrow, ok?”

  “Yes. Thanks again for watching Ella. I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem. I’m sure the residents at the retirement home appreciated the preschool’s visit.”

  “I think
they did.” I didn’t tell her about finding Mila’s body. She had enough on her plate with Will and his family’s drama. “See you tomorrow.” I helped Ella wave goodbye to her grandma, and we let ourselves out of the house.

  5

  The next day, Adam had the morning free from client meetings, so he took Ella to the grocery store and Mikey to preschool. Overnight, I’d thought of a dozen more things I needed to do at work. The human resources manager from the Pearson Company had e-mailed me to increase their head count, so I needed to up their food order and check to make sure the seating plan would allow for the extra people. I also needed to call the company we’d used before for a horse and carriage rental to see if they had any reindeer in their stable.

  When I arrived at the Boathouse, I ducked my head into the catering kitchen. They were hard at work preparing food for an event that afternoon and with the radio going, the noise was deafening. I beckoned to our catering manager, Lizzie, to meet me at the door.

  She walked over to me briskly. “What’s up, Jill?”

  I smiled at her. “Remember how the Pearson Company wanted to increase the head count for their party a few weeks ago?”

  “Yeah, why? We’ve already upped the order with our supplier. Do they want to cut that now?”

  “No, they want to add even more people. Apparently more families have RSVP’d than they’d expected. Can we accommodate them?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “We should be fine. I’ll check our order and see what will need to change.”

  I beamed. Having such an organized catering manager made my life easier. “Thanks, Lizzie.”

  “No problem.” She jutted her thumb toward the people scurrying around the kitchen behind her. “I’d better get back to supervising. Let me know if anything else changes with their party.”

  “I will, thanks.”

  She turned around and hurried back to the others. Thinking about the tasks that lay ahead in my workday, I walked down the hall to my office. If only the reindeer thing would be as easy as that had been.

  I worked through the morning, then left to take my lunch break at the BeansTalk Café. I’d struck out with every place I’d considered for procuring reindeer and I was in need of a pick-me-up before calling the Pearson Company to let them know I wouldn’t be able to provide reindeer for their party.