by Kacey Gene
She needs to see Jake’s photos to be sure, but Jennifer is convinced that this isn’t just a container that’s like the ones at Fred’s building. This container is from Fred’s building.
“So John has the A Christmas Carol books and a container full of cyanide,” Jennifer says, feeling the evidence stack up against him. “Now all we need is to find some pudding mix,” she says, but her gut tells her that they’ve found their murderer.
She picks up the container of NaCN, wanting to know how much is left, and when she does, she feels a piece of paper on the back of it.
Turning the container around, she sees a folded letter stuck to the back side. She pulls it free, opens it, and her eyes zoom across the words on the page. But, it’s the signature at the bottom that catches her eye.
“Fred Gailey,” she says, reading the signature out loud. The letter is a notification to John Diamont, informing him that the Gailey Press, while having loved and respected their decades of business with Robert Diamont, will not be continuing their services with John. “We regret that your intentions for the duplication of the A Christmas Carol novels made by your father, Robert Diamont, do not correspond with the mission Robert stood for, or what this press stands for.” Jennifer reads that last line of the letter out loud.
Then she looks at the top. The date in the right-hand corner is from one year ago.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The fist banging on the door downstairs echoes through the store and up the stairs, and it sends Jennifer’s heart pounding like the inside of a speaker.
“Jennifer,” she hears Jake’s strained voice yelling from outside. She keeps hold of the letter from Fred and sprints back down the stairs.
Jake is peering into the portrait window at the front of the store like a hungry animal in search of warmth and food. When he sees Jennifer come into view, he moves right in front of the main door, which she unlocks and opens.
“Where were you?” Jake asks, quickly moving into the store and rubbing his hands together to warm them up.
“I went up that staircase, and Jake, look at this.” She hands him the letter. As he reads it, she can’t stop herself from saying, “John has some sort of paper-making situation going on upstairs. And, he has a container of cyanide.”
She expects Jake to look at her with surprise when she says this, in a “Eureka” kind of moment, but when he finishes the letter, he folds it back up and says, “So it all fits together.”
“Wait, what all fits together?” Jennifer asks, feeling like she’s missing something.
“John never stopped yelling about those books. He screamed every second as we took him to Erin’s car about how those books are his new chance. Yelling about how they are the inheritance he deserves.”
“Do you think the rumors are true?” Jennifer asks. “Do you think the books hold a message to Robert’s will.”
“Yes,” Jake says.
Although he stands still, Jennifer immediately runs over to the copies of A Christmas Carol Erin dropped. She gathers all of them up, ready to follow the text trail Robert left.
“But I don’t think it’s Robert’s will that John is after.” When Jake says this, Jennifer looks up at him.
“What do you mean? What else would he be after?”
Jake furrows his eyebrows as he thinks this through out loud. “I don’t think John wants whatever is at the end of the message in those books. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion he wanted to stop anyone from ever piecing the message together. Hence the hiding of the books.” A glimmer of excitement covers Jake’s eyes as he says, “Which is why we should decode that message right now.”
He doesn’t have to tell Jennifer twice.
They both lug the A Christmas Carol books over to the front counter, but it’s already covered in books, so Jennifer sets down her stack, rolls up her sleeves, and then swipes her arms straight across the counter -- sending every single book that was piled up there flying off the counter and onto the floor.
Jake looks at her like she just grew a second head.
“What?” Jennifer says with a shrug. “We need a place to lay out all the books.” And without giving Jake’s look of wonder a second thought, they line up all fourteen copies of A Christmas Carol on top of the wooden counter. Each one is a different color -- from deep orange and eggplant purple to festive green and cherry red.
“What was our last number combination from book 14?” he asks.
“234713,” Jennifer says, having committed that number to memory. Both of them get to work, turning to page 23 in every copy of the books they have in front of them. Then, they go to paragraph four and to the seventh letter. If that seventh letter doesn’t have a combination ending in 13 above it, then they know they’re not in the 13th edition of the book. They go through book after book, each time hitting a dead end.
“I got it,” Jake says. “Look,” and he shows Jennifer how the 234713, leads to an “L” in the book he’s holding. And the “L” has the combination “994313” above it. “See how the 994313 also ends in 13?” Jake asks, quickly flipping to page 99, paragraph four, and letter three. It’s leads to an “e” and above that letter is the combination 4523413.
“So this is book 13,” Jennifer says.
“Now we keep following the numbers and letters,” Jake says. They flip, and read, and write down the letters that the numbers lead them to, each time organizing the books so they’re in order -- from edition 01 to edition 14. They go from page to page, paragraph to paragraph, and letter to letter, each combination directing them to a letter of the message. Until finally, they have the full message:
My Will and Testament Can Be Found On The Pudding Package I Left At Ebenezer’s Home.
“The pudding package?” Jake asks. “You mean those thousands and thousands of printed pudding packages in Fred’s building have Robert Diamont’s will and testament on them?”
Jennifer remembers how those stacks of printouts reached from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall in that back room of Fred’s building. “Do we seriously have to search through every one of those pudding printouts?” she asks.
A mischievous smile comes across Jake’s face. It’s a smile Jennifer doesn’t get to see often, and she understands the reason for it when Jake says, “Technically, Sharb barred us from that building, remember?” he says, his dimples getting bigger with his deepened smile. “And I don’t want to disobey direct orders, so I think Captain Sharb will have to lead this paper searching mission.” And with that, Jake pulls out his phone, calls his dad, and tells him all they’ve found, discovered, and what they need.
“It’s done,” Jake says, hanging up the phone. “My dad is sending a whole team of officers over to Fred’s building.”
“Including Sharb?” Jennifer asks, her eyes as slanted as her smile.
“Oh, Sharb is leading the team, did I forget to mention that?” Jake says with a smirk. But then his brows furrow as he looks back at the books.
“What is it?” Jennifer asks, wondering what he sees that she doesn’t see.
“John was so adamant about how these books were his new chance,” Jake says, remembering the repeated yelling from earlier. “It wasn’t about a will or anything. It was specifically about these books.”
“And we know he wanted to replicate them,” Jennifer says, referencing the letter Fred sent him denying his request to reprint these copies.
“But why?” Jake runs his hand across his scruff. “Show me this paper-making room of his,” Jake says. He grabs one of the editions of A Christmas Carol and tucks it under his arm.
Jennifer leads him up the stairs into the main room, which Jake observes and quickly says, “So John was obviously living here, which means his financial situation was not a great one.”
“I thought the exact same thing,” Jennifer says. And then she takes Jake into the closet-turned-paper-making room.
“Ugh, it stinks in here,” Jakes says, eyeing everything Jennifer looked over earlier. He hand
s her the copy of A Christmas Carol as he pokes around the piles of soppy paper on the table and examines the stacks of handmade paper John has in the back of the space.
“That’s where the cyanide is,” Jennifer says, pointing to the plastic container. “See how it’s the same as the ones in Fred’s building.”
Jake nods, and then -- still crouched down on the ground -- he looks under the table. Pulling up the fabric that’s draped over the sides, he sees a wooden box sitting nestled under the table.
“Did you open that?” he asks, pointing to the box.
Jennifer squats down next to Jake. “I didn’t even see that,” she says. Jake pulls it from under the table, peels off the top, and there -- in beautiful stacks of red, brown, green, purple, and orange leather -- are copies of A Christmas Carol.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jennifer says with a sigh. “I never thought I would say this, but I am so sick of this book,” she says, ready to toss the copy she’s holding out the window.
“Hand me that copy you’ve got,” Jake says, knowing exactly how she feels.
Jennifer hands it over, and Jake meticulously examines the copy from the safe and the green-leather copy he just pulled from the wooden box. They’re identical -- same green leather, same worn Pelznickel sticker inside the cover, same gold script for the title, and the same thick pages that are edged in gold.
“Were there more than 14 copies made? Was Alexa wrong?” Jennifer asks. “Does that mean there’s more to the message?” But then she sees what Jakes sees. With the books open and placed next to each other, something is off.
The print doesn’t match.
The book from the safe has print that is dark black and looks like it jumped off the keys of a typewriter. The book from the box has typing that’s crisp and more mechanical-looking. They compare book after book against the one from the safe, and all of them are the same -- identical on the outside but different when it comes to the print.
Except for one.
When Jake opens the red-leather bound book that was at the top of the pile in the box, the printing matches.
“Maybe there were more than 14 copies made,” Jake says, seeing that these books are the exact same, right down to the crooked tail on the letter “g.”
Jennifer shakes his head. “John had those books locked in the safe for a reason,” she says. “Those have to be the original 14. They’re the only ones with number combinations in them. Plus, the 14 originals are all different colors. If I had to guess,” Jennifer says, seeing a narrative becoming clear, “I’d say that Robert made a unique, individual version of A Christmas Carol for each man who played Santa. He wouldn’t have made two red-leather ones.”
“So John copied the design right down to the sticker on the inside and the print on the pages,” Jake summarizes. “But what I can’t understand is why in the world would John want to make copies of this book to look exactly like the editions Robert made?”
And then Jennifer remembers what Alexa said about John: That man is only interested in money.
Jennifer takes the replica version of A Christmas Carol in her hands and flips to the back page.
“I think I found our answer,” she says, turning the back page toward Jake. There in the top corner, written in pencil, is the price of the book: $2500.
Chapter Thirty
Let the Holiday Begin
As far as Jennifer is concerned, this case is closed. It’s a clear line that starts with greed and ends in murder.
John wanted to make replicas of the handmade editions of A Christmas Carol, that’s obvious. And he believed, maybe rightfully so, that he could sell them at an astronomical cost. But, there was something standing in the way of him creating the perfect replica -- a replica that no book scholar or trader could question in regard to legitimacy. The thing standing in his way was Fred Gailey and his printing presses.
Therefore, John got rid of Fred, by poisoning him with the cyanide that lives in John’s paper-making room. And it’s not like Fred didn’t know John; it’s obvious from the letter that their families had been doing business together for years. So if John offered to come over to Fred’s house and make him some pudding and talk business, Fred probably didn’t think anything of it. Until the cyanide slipped down his throat.
But, getting rid of Fred didn’t make the presses accessible to John, not if Earl -- Fred’s SOS partner -- was still in the picture.
Jake and Jennifer know that the printing press building Junior took them to was the headquarters for the SOS, so although they don’t have the solid proof yet, they’re positive that Fred would have left that building to Earl.
So John got rid of Earl to ensure that there was no clear owner of the building. John knows full well how a building can be left to sit -- unattended and ignored -- while legal debates around ownership go back and forth. So that was his chance. His chance to use the printing presses while no one was looking.
“That’s why the printing presses were warm when we felt them,” Jennifer says to Jake as they close the door to Pelznickels and walk to his car. “After John got rid of Earl, he must have gone to the building and printed the book. Remember when Wendy said she’d been running the store by herself for a few days?”
“A few days is all it took for John to kill those two men and use the presses,” Jake says.
“And that’s how he got his perfect copy of the book. The book he planned to sell for $2500,” Jennifer says, as Jake opens her car door.
“So maybe it wasn’t the million dollar department store he was hoping for when his dad died,” Jake says, as Jennifer slips in the car, “but John was planning to make money in another way.”
Jake closes her door and makes his way to the driver’s seat.
“I can’t believe anyone would spend $2500 on a book,” Jennifer says as Jake starts the car, but she knows it’s more than possible. With a little bit of research, she found that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales first edition sold for over 11 million dollars.
“Rich people,” Jennifer thinks, shaking her head.
“Speaking of which,” Jake says, looking over at her. “Are we going to this party?”
Jennifer tiredly throws her head against the seat of the car. “Have we done everything we can here?”
“Yes, and Erin said she’s sending officers over to tape off the place, get photos, and she’s going to have her PD office ship the A Christmas Carol books to the Middlebridge precinct.”
“And Sharb is checking on the pudding boxes,” Jennifer says, not able to stop the smile that comes to her lips when she says this.
“Yep.”
“And Junior?” Jennifer asks, tilting her head toward Jake as her eyes and heart soften. “Any word on him,” and she feels her heart splinter when she finishes with, “or any word on the dogs?”
“The dogs are all at the police station,” Jake says. “My dad said the dogs have actually made the station really calm.”
“And Junior?”
“Nothing on Junior. And he didn’t answer my calls or texts, but we’ll keep trying him.”
“He’s probably so scared,” Jennifer says, shaking her head. “I still can’t figure out why Sharb was so set on believing Junior was the murderer.”
“Well, his name is cleared now. And we’ll keep contacting him until he knows that.”
Jennifer feels a boulder lift from her shoulders. “Well then,” she says, with her tired eyes and an exhausted voice, “let the holiday begin.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Clinking Glasses of Crystal
They pull into the private parking lot that Jennifer’s mom specifically reserves for family and special guests. Jennifer half expects her designated spot to be filled, seeing that it’s now almost 9:00 PM, but after Jake punches in the code and turns into the lot, she sees her spot wide open.
She also sees her brother’s car, which means he and Julie came in from Wilmette for the party. Jennifer closes her eyes, praying that Julie doesn’t
ask about the tree skirt, which is still only half finished. But, now that Jennifer no longer has a crime to solve, she can get back to knotting together yarn rather than knotting together clues from murder scenes.
“You think Eleanor is going to be mad?” Jake asks, as he opens the trunk and starts filling their arms with bags of presents, boxes of jam, tins full of cookies, and Jennifer’s weekend bag full of clothes, yarn, and craft projects.
“Now what could she get mad about?” Jennifer asks, sarcastically. “I mean, sure we’re over two hours late. And, sure, you’ve got a giant goose egg on your forehead that she’ll find atrocious. And, sure, I’ll be walking into her fancy party with my hair a mess, my clothes disheveled and smelling like paper pulp, but, I think she’ll look on the bright side.”
“Which is?” Jake asks.
“At least I’m not taking the bus to Chicago,” Jennifer says with a shrug.
They both burst out laughing. And even though Jake’s arms are dangling with bags upon bags, he throws them around Jennifer. He loves the carefree attitude Jennifer gets after they solve a crime, and he doesn’t kid himself thinking that’s not one of the reasons he always comes to her for help with these cases. Yes, she can piece together clues and ideas better than anyone he knows. And he trusts her. Always has. But even beyond that, he knows that she loves to help, and when she does solve the crime, she’s blissfully happy.
Jake and Jennifer keep their jovial smiles and light-hearted feelings as they head through the circular door at the front of the building. Unlike Jennifer’s mere nine stories, this building has 32 stories, and her mom’s penthouse apartment is the entire top floor.
When they get into the lobby, which is covered from floor to ceiling in a cream and gold marble, Jennfer lets out a squeal when she sees Mrs. B, who has run the front desk since Jennifer was a young girl.
“There she is,” Mrs. B says, jumping up from behind the desk and running straight to Jennifer. She warms her in a thick hug, and Jennifer loves the way Mrs. B always smells like sunflowers, no matter what time of year it is. She also loves that Mrs. B’s hair is still short -- hitting just above her ears -- her arms are still thick, and her brown eyes still sparkle with life. “Your mom said you’d be here hours ago,” Mrs. B says.
