Sugarplum Dead

by Carolyn Hart

  Annie ignored Max.

  Laurel’s eyes widened. “What a wonderful idea. To talk, dear Annie.” She cupped her hands as if cradling a rainbow. “However, this evening there are so many wonderful friends I must greet.” She glanced happily around the ballroom.

  Laurel was undeniably one of the loveliest women in the room. But there was more to Laurel than sheer beauty. She exerted an attraction to the opposite sex that Annie compared to a tidal pull. As Laurel paused at their table, elegant in a cocktail-length ice-blue dress, men headed their way. Men of all ages and all stations. A retired admiral. The mayor. The captain of the high school men’s tennis team. A waiter. A visiting golf pro. Howard Cahill, an old friend and sometime beau. Fred Jeffries, intrepid sailor and current beau.

  Laurel knew, of course, and she showered hellos and lifted a graceful hand and the men eddied around her, each eyeing the other and awaiting an opportunity to break through. “So many friends to greet,” she murmured. “You and Max are such a dear couple. Do have a lovely—”

  “Laurel, please. Laurel, what were you doing at the cemetery?” As Annie leaned forward, the music stopped and the last word seemed to reverberate.

  Did faces turn toward them? Or was Annie simply imagining the feeling that hundreds of eyes covertly observed their table? Certainly the long list of messages taken by Barb at Confidential Commissions and by Ingrid at Death on Demand and the frenzied blinking of the red light on Annie and Max’s home answering machine were not figments of her imagination. Laurel may have been seen only by Pamela and Gertrude, but the eyes of two had done the work of hundreds. Call after call reported hearing about Laurel’s cemetery visit. The facts were garbled by some:

  “Max, I really hate to tell you, but Junie Merritt said Agnes Phillips told her sister that your mother put a model of a demolition derby car by the double-trunked live oak at the cemetery…”

  “Max, fun is fun, but pantomimes at the cemetery…”

  “Max, apparently Laurel is going to take vows! Now, I haven’t heard what kind of vows, but will the church let a woman who’s been married five times…”

  “Annie, I left word on Laurel’s machine, but she hasn’t called. Please tell her we’d like to have her speak at our luncheon next week and tell us about the Other Side. Everyone is so excited…”

  “Annie, I hope you can arrange things quietly for Max’s sake. Perhaps a nice rest home might be…”

  “Annie, Go-Dog is my very favorite driver. I haven’t been able to get in touch with your mother-in-law, but I’ll do anything…”

  In the pause after Annie’s plea, Laurel placed a hand over her heart. “The cemetery.” She could not have projected her husky voice more professionally from the apron of a New York theater. She waited a beat, her limpid eyes circling the room. “I’ve had no success yet, but in my heart I know Go-Dog will come through, just as he always did on Memorial Day.” Murmurs across the ballroom sounded like muted cheers. Laurel smiled with utter confidence. “I’ve asked Go-Dog to find Arturo. I know he will.”

  “Go-Dog, go!” a deep male voice shouted. Smiles flashed. Heads bent in eager conversation.

  Annie glimpsed a flash of utter satisfaction in Laurel’s eyes, a sharp, totally cognitive flash.

  Laurel lightly patted Annie’s arm. “Your aura is rather worrisome, dear. A rather mustardy color. However, Max”—she blew a kiss at her son—“is…oh, it’s coming to me…aquamarine, undoubtedly.” A throaty laugh. She turned toward her admiring coterie, “Oh, Howard, Fred, how utterly divine to see you both,” and swept away.

  Annie looked after her with amazement. A beau on either arm. Hot damn. But beneath Annie’s admiration, worry pulsed. That satisfied look of Laurel’s—what did it mean?

  Max bent down, kissed the top of Annie’s head. “Come on, sweetie, it’s vintage Laurel. She’s having a blast. Everybody in the room heard that exchange. She’s obviously decided to be the village eccentric.” He was half amused, half exasperated. “If there’s anyone in town who hasn’t heard about her performance in the cemetery, they will know after tonight.”

  Annie stared across the floor at Laurel, still circled by admirers. All male, of course. “Why does she want to talk to him?”

  Max blinked. “Annie, don’t ask questions that can’t be answered. Who knows? It can’t be anything too serious. They were only married for two years.”

  Annie had never sorted out the order of Laurel’s spouses. Max’s father, of course. And a sculptor. Arturo, the race car driver. A general. And a professor. Maybe Arturo was the most fun.

  Max grinned. “Actually, I liked Arturo. Laurel called him Buddy. Man, did he drive fast!”

  The band swung into “Tuxedo Junction.” Max grabbed her hand. “Come on, Annie, let’s dance.”

  Annie felt the old familiar thrill course through her. She loved to dance, but she wasn’t sure you could always dance your troubles away. As she and Max swung onto the floor, she couldn’t quite dismiss her memory of Laurel’s savvy, satisfied look.

  Or the face of the man who’d left her and her mother behind so long ago.

  A pale streak of silver speared into the dusky room, the crescent moon free for a moment from scudding clouds. Annie lay wide awake, Max’s body curved next to hers, his arm warm over her waist, his breath soft against her neck. The silvery beam briefly illuminated a white wicker divan and a table with photographs and a small china Christmas tree decorated with sugarplums. When she was little and awoke in the December night, she imagined sugarplums dancing along the moonbeam. The ever-present Great Plains wind rustling the sycamore trees became Santa’s husky laughter as he directed his sleigh over head. The pale moonlight wavered, was gone, prisoner again of the capricious clouds. How many years had it been since she’d pictured plump and luscious sugarplums on an avenue of silver?

  How many years…? She moved restlessly.

  Max’s arm tightened, pulling her nearer. “Penny for your thoughts?”

  Christmas memories fluttered like brightly patterned cards slapping into a pile…a heavy snow and the rush of icy air as her sled careened down a hill…her mother’s face flushed from the heat of the oven as she lifted out loaves of pumpkin bread meant for gifts, but there was always one for Annie…the procession at the Midnight Service, joyous and triumphant…opening presents on Christmas morning…

  “He was never there.” Her voice ached with unshed tears. “I used to think…oh, when I was really little…that someday he would come. I even wrote letters to Santa Claus. Oh well.” Now her voice was dry, removed, cool. “I grew up.”

  Max gently turned her to face him and their faces were inches apart on the pillow. “Annie, maybe—”

  “It’s too late, Max.” But she knew as she spoke that her father’s unexpected appearance, this confrontation with a past that she had never even known, had cast her adrift on a sea of memories, expectations, losses—and fears. Was her father’s instability a part of her? She’d always made plans, followed them. How much of that tenacity sprang from her early loss? Would she ever walk away from those who cared for her?

  “But he’s alive.” Max’s hand gripped hers. “My dad…well, I guess I always knew he wasn’t really there for any of us. I kept thinking some Christmas he would really see us, my sisters and me. But he could scarcely wait for the presents to be unwrapped to leave. He went to the office on Christmas Day.”

  At her involuntary movement, he rolled over on his elbow, stared down in the darkness. “I mean it. Christmas Day. There was always something he had to see to. Oh, he came home for dinner, but I don’t think he was ever aware of us. It’s like we were invisible and he lived in a world bounded by work. If he had lived…But I don’t think he would have changed. I swore that I would never be like him. Never.”

  Annie felt a rush of tenderness for the little boy whose father never saw him. Maybe that was worse than a father who was never there. At least she hadn’t had to deal with a quartet of stepfathers. She reached up, gently touc
hed Max’s face.

  He turned his mouth, kissed the palm of her hand.

  She felt his lips spread in a smile. She looked up and the moonlight flared again and she saw his familiar grin and the gleam in his blue eyes.

  “But you can’t say the girls and I didn’t have fun with Ma.” His voice was light and lively. “And I guess she made us feel good about Dad because she’s always had good taste in men—so he must have been fun sometimes.”

  Fun. Annie felt a pang. Max had devoted his life to fun. No one pursued pleasure and good times with more élan.

  Fun—wasn’t that why her father had left her mother? She and her mother had never talked about her father, about who he was or why he left or what he had done with his life, but she remembered standing outside the living room one afternoon when she was fourteen and listening to her mother and Uncle Ambrose and hearing her mother’s quiet, bitter comment, “All he wanted was to have a good time.” Annie had known they were talking about her father. That was all she heard, whirling around and hurrying down the hall to her own room, flinging her schoolbooks on the bed and thinking: So that’s why he left, so that’s why!

  “Hey, Annie, let it go.” Max’s arms slipped around her; his lips brushed her cheek, slipped softly toward her mouth. “It’s okay. We’re okay.”

  Were they? Her absent father, his distant father, his ditzy (surely it was no more than that!) mother, how much did they matter for Annie and Max? Just for an instant she lay still, and then her lips opened and fear was lost in passion.

  Three

  ANNIE GLANCED IN her rearview mirror. That blue Ford had been behind her red Volvo on Saturday when she went to the store. She’d spotted it on Sunday afternoon when she and Max went to the club for brunch. Now it was behind her this morning, obviously having waited for her to pass one of the side roads that opened onto Sand Dollar Road. It didn’t take the perspicacity of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown to guess the identity of the driver.

  Annie picked up speed. It didn’t matter. Her too-late father could trail her around the island from now until next summer and she wouldn’t change her mind. She had too much to do, including shopping for Max and thinking about the future—a future that did not include the driver of the blue Ford. She slammed out of her car, ignoring the Ford as it parked in the lane behind her. Whistling “Jingle Bells,” she hurried toward the boardwalk.

  Red and green Christmas garlands were wrapped around the light poles and strung along the seawall. The sun sparkled on jade-green water and boats ranging from sailfish to yachts. Annie took a deep breath and looked beyond the harbor to a pod of porpoises playfully diving. It was already in the fifties and would reach the low sixties, a December day that made winter seem far away. A happy day, and a day she was determined to keep that way, despite the blue Ford. And Laurel.

  Annie heard footsteps behind her.

  She walked faster, reached Death on Demand, unlocked the door and hurried inside. She moved purposefully down the center aisle, accompanied by Agatha, who nipped at her ankle in between emitting sharp yowls.

  “I am not late,” Annie protested. “And you have dry food; delicious, nutritious dry food.” Annie picked up speed and was glad for evasion skills perfected in long-ago soccer games. She reached the coffee bar unscathed, shook down fresh food, opened a can of dietary soft food.

  Agatha glared, then crouched over her bowl.

  Gradually, Annie relaxed. The front door hadn’t opened. Okay, should she string the Christmas lights around the mugs shelved behind the coffee bar? Or unpack some of the boxes of books that had arrived Saturday? She moved briskly to the storeroom and picked up the box marked COFFEE BAR CHRISTMAS LIGHTS.

  As Annie deposited the box on the coffee bar, the phone rang. She reached out.

  “Death on Demand, the finest mystery bookstore east of Atlanta.” She loved the phrase, which rolled over her tongue as easily as a Godiva chocolate.

  “And south of Pittsburgh,” came a cheerful voice.

  “Henny!” Henrietta Brawley was Death on Demand’s best customer, a club woman of enormous skill and dedication, a gifted actress, a former schoolteacher, a onetime Peace Corps volunteer and she was, most of all, one of Annie’s best friends. Annie felt only a small pang as she realized that Henny, vacationing in Pittsburgh, had probably done a lot of her book shopping at Mystery Lovers Bookshop in the Pittsburgh suburb of Oakmont. But this wasn’t the season to be piggy. “Say hello to Mary Alice for me.” Annie had met Mary Alice Gorman, the ebullient owner, at a mystery conference.

  “Will do. Annie, I’ve actually seen the hospital where Mary Roberts Rinehart went to nursing school!” Sheer delight lifted her voice. “I tried to figure out the wing where she and the others were quarantined with that smallpox outbreak over Christmas of 1895.”

  Annie lifted the lid of the box, pulled out a strand and began to untangle it. Why had she put the lights away snarled like a ball of yarn attacked by Agatha?

  A black nose poked over the edge of the box.

  Oh. Right. Agatha had no doubt helped with the dismantling last Christmas, which might have encouraged a dump-it-in-fast mentality. A black paw patted the end of the strand. Annie reached for another strand. Maybe she could work with this one while Agatha investigated the first.

  “Gosh, Henny, the actual building?” Mary Roberts Rinehart, once the grande dame of American mystery writers, had entered nursing school in late August of 1893 at the tender age of sixteen. It was there that she met a handsome young surgeon, Dr. Stanley Marshall Rinehart, who tutored her in German (an excuse to meet) and later would become her husband.

  “Yes. I even walked down the halls. But I don’t know where the smallpox ward was. In Christmas 1895 when she was quarantined with a rowdy group of patients, she and Stanley sang Christmas carols to quiet them down. You know, they both had excellent singing voices. Oh, Annie”—a sigh of pure happiness—“I am having so much fun. Except—”

  Annie pushed the stepstool behind the coffee bar, climbed, and carefully clipped the strand to the edge of the mug shelves.

  “—I’m snowed in. Eight inches and it’s still falling. So I decided to make a few calls.”

  Annie reached the end of one strand, leaned perilously sideways to snag another from the box. Agatha crouched to jump for the dangling end. Annie slipped loose a bracelet of bells and tossed it over Agatha’s head. The cat turned in midjump. Annie was applauding her own quick-wittedness and missed most of Henny’s sentence. “…wondered if you’d spoken with her.”

  “Henny, you’re the first person I’ve talked to this morning. Except for Max.” The second strand clipped into place nicely. Annie reached for the third strand.

  “I hope Max isn’t too worried,” Henny said quietly. “I’m afraid Laurel truly needs psychiatric help.”

  The strand slithered from Annie’s hands, caromed off the counter, clattered to the floor, one end landing in Agatha’s water bowl.

  “You talked to Laurel?” Annie sat down on the ladder.

  “Well, you know how it is to talk to Laurel.” Henny sighed. “Annie, she is trying to communicate with that race car driver. You know, her third husband. Or maybe he was her second. And he’s dead. When I asked why, she would only say, ‘I must. I must,’ and then she skittered off, oh, you know how she does, and she chattered about crystals and gamma rays and auras—”

  “Henny, you remember that woman—I don’t recall her name, Ophelia something or other, and she lived at Nightingale Courts—”

  “Of course I remember,” Henny interrupted crisply. “That’s when Ingrid disappeared. Right after your wedding.”

  That frightening disappearance had been solved with the help of Henny and Laurel. “You remember how Laurel wandered around murmuring about the boundaries of the mind and how we should open ourselves up to cosmic fields—”

  “This time it’s different.” Henny spoke with finality, and Henny was not an alarmist. She was smart, empathetic, clever, a world-class myster
y reader, and Laurel’s good friend. “I’m sorry, Annie. I’ll bet Max won’t admit there’s a problem”—Henny knew both of them very well indeed—“and I know it’s Christmas and you’re busy as you can be, but Laurel needs help.” There was a pause, then she added, her tone puzzled, “I tried Miss Dora first. She stays in touch with Laurel. But, Annie, it was the oddest thing. Miss Dora was evasive.”

  Annie stared at the phone. This pronouncement was almost more shocking than Henny’s concern for Laurel. Miss Dora Brevard, the doyenne of Chastain, South Carolina, was direct, to the point and never minced words.

  “Anyway, I could probably get to Nome before I could get home. The airports are closed, but I have a huge stack—Oh well, Annie, have a great Christmas—but see about Laurel.”

  Annie didn’t even try to retrieve the felled light strand from Agatha, who was pulling it toward the front of the store. Instead, she walked slowly up the central aisle. By the time she reached the cash desk, she had the beginnings of a plan. It took six calls to find Pamela Potts.

  “Oh hi, Annie.” Pamela took opportunities as they came. “You are so good to call. I’m sure we can count on you for two casseroles, can’t we? I’m at the church now and we need to restock the freezer.”

  Annie would have promised anything short of Max on a platter. “Listen Pamela, what time of day did you see Laurel at the cemetery?” Annie glanced toward the clock. A quarter to eleven.

  “The church bell was striking, Annie. It was straight-up noon.”

  “Thanks, Pamela.”

  Max kept his expression pleasant but noncommittal as he shook hands with his visitor. But he felt stunned. Annie’s dad. Max glanced at the picture on his desk, dear Annie with her steady gray eyes and sandy hair and grave smile, then looked at an older, masculine version of that treasured face.

  Pudge Laurance stared at Annie’s picture for a measurable moment, too, before he spoke. “You’re Annie’s husband?”