Mistletoe Mysteries

by Charlotte MacLeod

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  Mistletoe Mysteries

  Tales of Yuletide Murder

  Collected by Charlotte MacLeod

  Contents

  Charlotte MacLeod: A Cozy for Christmas

  Peter Lovesey: The Haunted Crescent

  Dorothy Salisbury Davis: Christopher and Maggie

  Eric Wright: Kaput

  John Lutz: The Live Tree

  Howard Engel: The Three Wise Guys

  Mary Higgins Clark: That’s the Ticket

  Bill Pronzini: Here Comes Santa Claus

  Sharyn McCrumb: A Wee Doch and Doris

  Henry Slesar: The Man Who Loved Christmas

  Edward D. Hoch: The Touch of Kolyada

  Aaron Elkins: Dutch Treat

  Susan Dunlap: Ott on a Limb

  Isaac Asimov: Ho! Ho! Ho!

  Marcia Muller: Silent Night

  CHARLOTTE MACLEOD

  A COZY FOR CHRISTMAS

  Sarah Kelling and her husband Max Bittersohn are old friends of mine. Back when they were first married, I wrote a book called The Convivial Codfish, which takes place at Christmastime. Some of Sarah’s loyal readers expressed displeasure because I let Max do most of the work in solving the mystery and slighted, as they thought, their heroine by sending her off to holiday shop for her newly augmented family. At the time, I believed that I was in fact assigning to Sarah the more difficult and important task. I welcome at last an opportunity to explain why I thought so then and I think so still.

  “So Max has gone off with another woman?” Cousin Brooks Kelling appeared to find the circumstance highly entertaining.

  “Wearing false whiskers and great-uncle Nathan’s Prince Albert coat.” Sarah Kelling Bittersohn didn’t think it was funny at all. “He looked so handsome it made me sick.”

  “Men are all brutes.” Cousin Theonia Kelling, wife to Brooks, gave her own particular brute a smile of total adoration. “Whatever possessed Max to do a thing like that?”

  “He alleges it’s in aid of that insane business about our somewhat beloved relative and the Great Chain of the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish,” Sarah told her. “I suppose it’s all my own fault for having helped Uncle Jem nag him into tracking it down, which doesn’t make me feel any better about being left to pine alone and desolate.” Sarah, like all the Kellings except Cousin Mabel, was a Gilbert and Sullivan aficionado. “You don’t mind my inviting myself over?”

  This time, Theonia’s smile was for Sarah. “My dear, how could we?”

  Aside from the fact that both Brooks and Theonia would have welcomed Sarah’s company under any circumstances, there was the added point in her favor that she owned the house. During the lean years after the death of her first husband, the Tulip Street brownstone on Boston’s historic Beacon Hill had been virtually Sarah’s only asset, and a heavily mortgaged one at that. To keep herself afloat, she’d turned it into an ever-so-elite boarding house.

  Now she was married to one of her former boarders, the handsome and affluent Max Bittersohn, a private detective who’d been a specialist in recovering vanished art objects when she met him but had lately developed a sideline in dragging beleaguered Kellings back from the brink. The newlyweds were living next door in a small apartment while their new house on the North Shore was being built. Brooks and Theonia had taken over the running of the boarding house, an arrangement that suited them all just fine.

  “You’ll stay to dinner?” Brooks was urging.

  “Of course she’ll stay,” said Theonia. “It’s quite all right, Sarah. Our top floor back has gone to Denver for the holidays.”

  Numbers were always a consideration at the boarding house, its lovely antique dining table could only seat eight in the elegant comfort the Kelling establishment demanded. Elegance had been Sarah’s watchword from the start. Right now they were getting an early start on the customary predinner ritual by being served elegant little glasses of rather inelegant sherry from an extremely elegant Waterford decanter by a white-gloved butler who was the absolute epitome of elegance now that he’d had his missing tooth bridged in.

  So as not to lower the tone, Sarah had come over in a full-skirted green velvet dinner gown and her second-best diamonds. Theonia was in deep crimson and pearls. The two were sitting together on the library sofa, against a backdrop of greens obtained at no expense from the North Shore property. Flickering lights from the open fire and soft gleams from the red candles on the mantelpiece fell benignly on Sarah’s soft brown hair and Theonia’s piled-high raven tresses, highlighting the one’s delicate youthful beauty and flattering the other’s middle-aged opulence.

  “Well, if you two ladies aren’t the very spirit of Christmas!”

  Mrs. Gates, their all-time favorite boarder, had emerged from her first-floor suite and was making her careful way into the library. She herself made a charming picture in a long black gown set off by a fleecy white woolen shawl and an old-fashioned parure of gold and garnets. Charles the butler hastened to pull the old lady’s favorite Queen Anne chair a little closer to the fire while Brooks gallantly escorted her to it.

  “Thank you, dear boy.”

  She smiled up at Brooks, the firelight doing wonderful things to her spun-silver hair. “Just hang my work bag on the arm of the chair here, where I can get at it easily. You’ll all forgive me if I go on with my sewing, won’t you? I promised last February to make some tea cozies for this year’s Holly Fair at St. Eusapia’s. Now here it is the night before the fair and I’m still trying to finish the last one.”

  “Oh, it’s exquisite!” Sarah exclaimed as Mrs. Gates drew out the cozy cover she was working on. This was a confection of blue moiré taffeta, embellished in the more-is-better Victorian mode with garlands of creamy satin ribbon, ruchings of lace, flirtings of fringe, plus a scattering of sewn-on pearls and an occasional sprig of embroidery to reassure the purchaser that no avenue had been left unexplored. “You must have spent ages. How many have you done?”

  “Six counting this one and I must say I’m glad it’s the last. If you’ll thread my needle for me, my dear, I’ll let you tidy my work bag. When my granddaughters were small, they used to think that was the greatest treat in the world.”

  “And so shall I.”

  As Theonia went to make sure everything was under control in the kitchen, Sarah perched on a footstool beside Mrs. Gates’s chair, taking a childlike pleasure in sorting out the bits and pieces. “There’s enough of the blue taffeta left to do another,” she remarked. “Do you think you will, sometime? They must be great fun.”

  Mrs. Gates sighed. “I thought so when I started last spring. By now I’m so sick of them that I recoil at the mere thought. Take the taffeta and trimmings if you’d like to try one yourself.”

  “Do you mean it? May I really?”

  Sarah had been wondering about a tea cozy for Max’s mother. Herself a Wasp of the Waspiest, she was having a hard time reconciling this year’s holiday observances between what she’d been brought up to and what might be acceptable to her recently acquired Jewish in-laws. Max thought they ought just to forget the whole thing, but Sarah was far too thoroughly schooled in how easy it was to start family feuds among the multitudinous Kellings to risk one with the Bittersohns. Family relations were desperately important, even if they did add to the agonies of holiday shopping.

  Only that afternoon, she’d bought her new sister-in-law a soufflé dish and been rather badly mauled in the process. It would be lovely if she could manage to concoct an acceptable tea cozy rather t
han having to shop for one, though Sarah knew she’d never in the world come up with anything that compared to Mrs. Gates’s. It would, of course, be possible to go over to St. Eusapia’s tomorrow and buy this lovely thing if somebody else didn’t beat her to it and if she could bring herself to pay the small fortune the church folk would undoubtedly be asking. And why shouldn’t they? It would be criminal to let workmanship like this go for a pittance. St. Eusapia’s was a wealthy parish, they’d find customers enough.

  Sarah folded the oddments of fringe and ribbon inside the remnant of taffeta and stowed the small packet in the capacious side pocket, which was one reason why she’d chosen this particular gown. The other boarders were beginning to trickle in now, it was time to sit up and be a credit to the establishment.

  Naturally the boarding house had seen some turnover in its clientele since Sarah had turned the keys over to Brooks and Theonia. The basement room that had for a while been Max Bittersohn’s was now occupied by a flautist who looked melancholy and Byronesque but was in fact a jolly soul when he didn’t have a concert to play. Since Mr. Snowfjord was performing tonight, he was saving his breath to swell his arpeggios. As far as the conversation was concerned, his silence wouldn’t matter a bit; Mr. Porter-Smith could always be counted on to talk enough for two. One of Sarah’s original six, Eugene Porter-Smith was a certified public accountant who worked for Cousin Percy Kelling. Tonight he’d given his familiar maroon dinner jacket a Christmassy touch with a bright green tie and a cummerbund to match.

  Miss Jennifer Lavalliere, another of Sarah’s holdovers, showed up wearing a brand-new two-carat diamond on her fourth finger left hand and little else worth mentioning. She was delighted to show off the ring to her former landlady and to tell her all about the young man who’d bestowed it, plus a few catty tidbits about the one who’d gone to Denver for the holidays.

  Ms. Carboy, who shared the third floor with Miss Lavalliere, was a relative newcomer to Tulip Street: a long-boned, long-faced woman of forty-odd who reminded Sarah of Virginia Woolf. She had some sort of extremely high-powered job over at Government Center about which she tended to be inscrutable, possibly because the job was not in truth all that high-powered. She admired Mrs. Gates’s handiwork at some length and made the gaffe of asking whether she might buy it then and there.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Gates replied a shade too sweetly. “I’ve committed myself to supplying six of these for my church fair, and that’s all I’ve managed to do, assuming I get this done tonight. If you really want one, I’m afraid you’ll have to buy it over at St. Eusapia’s between ten and four tomorrow.”

  Ms. Carboy sighed. “Then I’m afraid I’ll have to do without it. I’ll be tied to my desk all day and possibly far into the night. There’s always so much paperwork to get through at the end of the year.”

  The sherry-sipping wound to its stately close, the butler announced dinner, Mrs. Brooks Kelling seated her guests. The flautist finished his soup, took two mouthfuls of the main course, excused himself, and rushed out into the night. The rest of the party partook of the excellent meal at their leisure and went back to the library for coffee.

  Mrs. Gates picked up her work again and asked Sarah to rethread her needle. “I’ve just this last little bit to do. Then I’m finished, praise be!”

  “What are the others like?” Sarah asked her. “Did you make them all the same?”

  “Oh, no, each one is different, otherwise I’d surely have gone mad. I’d show you but they’re all wrapped up and stowed away in a shopping bag for Charles to take to the church tomorrow morning.”

  Sarah would have been quite willing to repack them, but she knew better than to ask. She drank her coffee, said her good nights, and went home to try her hand with the leftovers.

  She’d had no high hopes to start with; after a couple of hours she was quite ready to call a halt. The cozy cover she’d achieved looked only superficially like the one she’d tried to copy; it might do as a stage prop, but wouldn’t do much to cement her somewhat tenuous diplomatic relations with Mother Bittersohn. Sarah was wondering whether to go to bed or sit and have a good pout when Max telephoned. The party had ended in catastrophe, he was stranded in the hinterlands, and would she drive out to pick him up?

  They got to bed late, which meant a delayed start the next morning. Sarah got Max off on his detectival rounds, then set off herself in quest of Mother Bittersohn’s tea cozy. On a previous safari, she’d seen some attractive ones at reasonable prices in the shop she still thought of as the Women’s Educational. By the time she got there today, though, the only cozies left were striped red and green and appliqued with saucy elves. Sarah didn’t think Santa’s elves would achieve their purpose in this particular instance.

  The shop held lots of other delights, though. She wandered around for quite a while choosing trinkets for this one and that of her myriad relatives and buying herself a tote bag to carry them home in. After that, she popped into Bailey’s to recruit her flagging energies with a hot fudge sundae and sat longer than she’d meant to, scooping up driblets of fudge sauce and trying to remember which of the Back Bay’s many churches was St. Eusapia’s.

  Once reasonably sure of her goal, Sarah was faced with the problem of getting there. A taxi would be out of the question, traffic wasn’t budging an inch. Outside Berkeley Street subway entrance she heard dire talk of a tie-up down below. They’d had snow earlier in the week, the sidewalks had been imperfectly cleared, drifts which the plows had piled up at the curbs were trodden into a lumpy mess. The wind had come up since morning, the skies were by now as muddy a gray as the frozen slush through which Sarah had to pick her way, along with far too many other gift-laden strugglers.

  A Bostonian born and bred, Sarah accepted all this as a matter of course though she could hardly take it in stride, for striding under such conditions would have been dangerous if not impossible. Dressed for the weather in boots and a windproof storm coat with the hood pulled up, she didn’t particularly mind the walk, but she did feel relieved when at last she reached the right church and entered the gaily bedecked parish hall.

  What with one thing and another, she’d got here much later than she’d meant to. The fair must have been a great success, the merchandise was pretty well picked over and the volunteer clerks looked ready to drop. Sarah found a fancywork table without any trouble, but only one of Mrs. Gates’s tea cozies was left on display, and that one a bedizenment of red and green that featured a charming but hardly ecumenical Christmas tree worked in multicolored glass beads.

  “Oh, dear,” she moaned to the presiding angel, a Miss Waltham whom she remembered from one of her former late mother-in-law’s civic committees, “is this the only cozy you have left? I watched Mrs. Gates finish up a heavenly blue one last night and was praying it might still be here.”

  “As a matter of fact, it still is.”

  Miss Waltham was a majestic lady with a determined chin and at the moment an even more determined set to her mouth. “The blue taffeta came with a note pinned to it saying ‘Hold for W. J. Ronely’ so naturally we set it aside. Needless to say, W. J. Ronely has failed to appear. People will do that, you know, make a great to-do about having merchandise put on reserve, then not show up, so we’re stuck with a no sale and the church is out the money. I think we’ve been quite patient enough with W. J. Ronely, Mrs. Kelling. If you’re willing to part with eighty dollars for a tea cozy, I’m more than willing to take it.”

  Sarah forbore to remind Miss Waltham that she was no longer Mrs. Kelling. However, she paid with a check that had her new name printed at the top, partly as a hint that she was no longer as she once had been and partly because she’d somehow managed to get through most of the generous sum Max had given her before he’d left. Miss Waltham accepted the check, took obvious pleasure in removing the “Hold for W. J. Ronely” note, and wrapped the cozy in many swaddlings of tissue paper.

  “Thank you so much,” said Sarah. “Don’t bother about a bag, I have one.
”

  She stowed her hard-won treasure carefully down inside her tote bag and made a quick tour of the depleted tables. The White Elephants were by now a sick-looking herd, but she did find a charming little Staffordshire cat with a chipped but mendable tail that the bargain hunters had overlooked. The bakery table yielded a box of fudge and a bag of ginger cookies at closeout prices. At last Sarah wound up back at the fancywork table where Mrs. Gates’s Christmas tree cozy was still displayed in lonely splendor. What could she do except stifle her Yankee conscience and say, “I’ll take it.”

  By this time her tote bag was crammed. Miss Waltham wrapped the sumptuous gaud in all the tissue paper she had left, then slipped it into a crumpled brown grocery bag she fished out from under the counter.

  “There’s your cozy, Mrs. Bittersohn,” she said in a good loud voice to let Sarah know she’d seen the error of her ways, “if that doesn’t give somebody a Merry Christmas, I don’t know what will.”

  Sarah thanked her and tucked the bag under her arm. As she turned to go, she was almost bowled over by a tall man in a dark overcoat who looked a bit like Virginia Woolf’s brother.

  “My name is Ronely,” Sarah heard him bark at Miss Waltham. “You have a tea cozy put away for me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Miss Waltham replied, “but we don’t. You shouldn’t have left it so late. We gave you up and sold the cozy to somebody else.”

  “But I got stuck on the subway!”

  Sarah decided it would be rude to hang around and eavesdrop. She slipped out of the hall as fast as she could, buttoning her coat up to her chin and pulling her hood down over her forehead. The snow that had been threatening on her way over was coming down now: a mean, driving, sleety fall that obviously meant business. Sarah hoped Max didn’t get snowbound in the exurbs, she herself would prefer not to be out in this storm much longer. She hurried up toward Arlington Street and was standing in front of the Ritz Carlton waiting for a break in the traffic so she could cross over and walk home through the Public Garden when she was whopped from behind and fell sprawling in the gutter.