Mistletoe Mysteries

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Simon and I followed her through the back door. Trevitz’s kitchen was identical to the one next door, except for its disarray. There were cartons of melting ice cream in the sink and a pile of metal racks on the counter next to Kolyada’s basket. We could see her through the doorway into the living room, standing on the scuff-marked carpet as she bent over the hunched-up figure of Professor Trevitz in his chair.

  Her outstretched fingers were touching the skin of his cheek when Simon Ark spoke her name. “Kolyada.”

  She stiffened and turned toward us, revealing a rosy-cheeked face with slightly Oriental features. Then she hurried toward the front door. I was after her in an instant, but she was too fast for me. She was out the door and down the steps before I could catch hold of her flowing white robe. In the front yard I caught a glimpse of firm white legs as the robe came open and she broke into a run. At my age I knew there was no chance of catching her.

  I went back inside and was surprised to find Simon crouched over Professor Trevitz. “She got away. Is the professor still asleep?”

  “He’s dead,” Simon informed me quietly.

  “Dead! A heart attack?”

  “Feel his skin.”

  I did so and immediately pulled my fingers away. “It’s ice-cold, Simon!”

  He nodded. “It almost appears that Professor Trevitz has frozen to death.”

  We called the police, of course, and told them what little we knew. The man from the Medical Examiner’s office agreed that rigor mortis could not have set in that quickly under normal circumstances, but he declined further comment until the autopsy.

  The detective in charge of the investigation, a big Irishman named O’Connor, wanted to know if this Kolyada person could have killed him. Simon Ark thought about it and replied, “Not unless she froze him with a touch of her fingers.”

  O’Conner wasn’t too satisfied with that response, but promised to put out an alarm for the mysterious Kolyada. “You say she’s been bringing gifts to the children? I feel like I’m ordering the arrest of Santa Claus.”

  “In a sense that’s exactly what you’re doing,” Simon agreed.

  I left for home, promising to phone Simon in the morning. The version of the night’s events that I presented to Shelly was laundered a bit, but she still saw through it to the core of the matter. “You’re involved in another one of those bizarre murders Simon Ark loves so much, aren’t you?”

  “I’d hardly say that. The autopsy may show he died a completely natural death.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it!”

  Christmas Eve morning dawned with a few flurries in the air as predicted. The office was closed and I wasn’t surprised when Simon urged me to come up to the university once again. An hour later, after my subway ride, I found him in his room with a middle-aged Russian whom he introduced as Ivan Tolstoy.

  I shook hands and made the obvious comment. “Any relation to Leo?”

  He chuckled as if he’d never heard it before. “No, although when we read War and Peace at school I used to tell my classmates he was my great-uncle. They never believed me.”

  “Professor Tolstoy and his family reside in the fourth house along the street,” Simon pointed out. He’d drawn six squares on a sheet of paper and labeled the fourth one with the Tolstoy name. “His children were visited three nights ago by Kolyada.”

  “I came here when I heard the news of Professor Trevitz’s death,” Tolstoy explained. “I couldn’t believe it—especially the part about Simon seeing Kolyada touch the body. It’s as if—” He hesitated.

  “As if she killed him with a touch,” Simon completed the sentence for him. “That’s like something out of a Russian folktale, isn’t it, Professor?”

  Tolstoy was a handsome, dark-haired man in his mid-forties, who obviously kept in shape. I imagined the women students were especially pleased with his classes. “Well,” he began in answer to Simon’s question, “it’s true that our legends of Frost—or King Frost as he’s sometimes called—do contain instances of people frozen to death by the touch of his fingers, but there’s no connection between the vengeful Frost and the kindly gift-giving Kolyada.”

  “There may not be any connection between Professor Trevitz’s death and our Kolyada either, but we don’t know that yet.”

  “I must be getting on. We’ll keep you advised of any developments, Simon.”

  “Will you be attending the party at the Rodgers home tonight?”

  “I expect so, if they don’t cancel it because of this unfortunate event.”

  When he’d gone I asked Simon about the party. “Apparently it’s an annual custom,” he told me. “The faculty of the Russian Studies program all dress up in their fancy clothes and attend a Christmas Eve party at one of their homes. This year it will be Jeff and Lenore Rodgers’s turn. Last year I believe the Navogards had it at their old house, some distance away.” He moved to the telephone. “I want to call Detective O’Connor about the autopsy report while I’m thinking of it.”

  He waited for several minutes before O’Connor came on the phone. “No reason for not telling you,” the detective said. “The papers’ll have it for their noon editions. There was a blow to the head, but not enough to kill him. Death was due to suffocation.”

  “Suffocation!”

  “It’s impossible to place the time of death accurately because of the temperature of the body. He hadn’t eaten dinner, so the blow on the head probably occurred during the afternoon.”

  “I know he had a class just after lunch.”

  “I’ll want to speak with you again, Mr. Ark. Perhaps as soon as this afternoon. I’ll see how the investigation goes.”

  I’d been listening with my ear close to the phone, and when Simon hung up I asked, “How could he have been suffocated?”

  “There are numerous ways, my friend. A pillow, a plastic bag over his head, even a soft towel around the neck that wouldn’t leave marks. The important thing is that it’s murder, and Kolyada’s touch of ice didn’t kill him.”

  “Did you think it had?”

  “One never knows. Let us go and speak with some of the others. There are no classes today and everyone should be at home.”

  On the way across campus he explained that the brief Christmas break helped undergraduates prepare for examinations at the end of the semester in early January. Then there was a two-week recess before the beginning of the second semester.

  We went to the first house on the campus street, where the Navogard family was preparing for Christmas. Here the wife was the scholar, and I was pleasantly surprised to find Professor Lara Navogard to be a charming woman with a quick wit and ready smile. The man drinking coffee with her was not her husband, who worked downtown, but Jeff Rodgers from the house we’d visited the previous day.

  “Kolyada, Kolyada,” Lara Navogard marveled. “That’s all my son has talked about since the first night.”

  “It’s the same with my girls,” Rodgers confirmed.

  But Lara’s son was older, around eight, and this immediately interested Simon. He called the boy over and placed a friendly hand on his shoulder. “You’re Mark? You look like a fine growing lad. You’ll be playing football in a few years.”

  “Yeah,” the boy agreed. “I guess so.” He seemed to be completely Americanized, and I guessed he’d been born in this country.

  “Did you talk to the nice lady with the gifts?”

  “Sure, but I don’t believe in that stuff anymore. Kolyada is like Santa Claus. She’s not for real.”

  “But she seemed real when she spoke to you, didn’t she?”

  “Naw. Her lips didn’t even move.”

  “What’s that?” Simon asked. “If she spoke her lips must have moved.”

  “She was wearing a mask,” the boy said, “like on Halloween.”

  I tried to remember the face I’d seen so briefly, shrouded by that white hood. Yes, it could have been a mask of rubber or plastic. “I can’t understand you, Mark,” his mother said. “Why
have you been talking about her all week if you didn’t even believe in her?”

  “Because she came to see me first,” he announced with some sort of childish pride. “Before all the others.”

  Simon Ark had one more question. “Did she touch you, lad?”

  “Yeah, just once.”

  “And was her touch cold or warm?”

  “I don’t know. It was like Mom’s.”

  Simon nodded. “We’ll be going on, Lara. Thank you for your help.”

  Jeff Rodgers left with us, turning up his jacket collar against the thickening snow flurries. “We might be in for a white Christmas,” he decided.

  “That’s what they say.” Simon turned his face skyward, the fat flakes turning his lashes white almost immediately.

  “I’ll see you at our party tonight, Simon?”

  “I’d be please to attend.”

  “Your friend is welcome too.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I really should be at home.”

  Simon Ark peered through the snowfall. “Who’s that entering the Trevitz house?” A woman had emerged from a car at the curb.

  “It could be his daughter,” Rodgers speculated. “She’s come for the funeral, and to start clearing out the house.”

  “Come from where?”

  “North of the city. White Plains, I think.”

  We hurried along and intercepted the young woman. She had a plain appearance, with pulled-back hair and no makeup, of average height though she wore boots with quite high heels. Her married name was Marta Frazier, and Rodgers made the introductions. “Let me express my deep regrets,” Simon told her. “I knew your father well.”

  She picked up on the name. “You’re the one who found the body, aren’t you?”

  “That is correct.”

  “The police think he was murdered.”

  “That seems to be the case,” Simon agreed.

  The snow was coming harder now, and we sought shelter on the front porch of the Trevitz house. “Tell me about finding him. That Detective O’Connor says there was a woman with him.”

  “It may have been a woman,” Simon told her. “The person was wearing a mask and we can’t be certain.”

  For the first time I realized the truth of his words. Although Kolyada had spoken to the children, she’d uttered not a sound when we came upon her with the body of Professor Trevitz. If the face was a mask, the person behind it could have been male or female. I stared out at our footprints in the snow, and Marta Frazier must have been looking at them too. “There wasn’t enough snow for footprints, but couldn’t this Kolyada have left finger-prints on the knob of the back door?”

  “She was wearing mittens,” I said.

  “Did she flee in a car or on foot?”

  “On foot, but there might have been a car waiting in the next block,” I told her. “There might have been a sleigh, for all I know.”

  “The Christmas Eve party’s at our house this year,” Jeff Rodgers volunteered. “We decided your father would have wanted it to go on as planned.”

  “You can be sure of that,” Marta answered.

  “Naturally you’re invited. And your husband too, if he can make it.”

  “My husband’s moved out.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “How soon does the university want Dad’s things out of here?”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Will we see you tonight?”

  “I doubt it. I still have arrangements to make with the funeral director. The holiday tomorrow makes everything so difficult.”

  We left her on the porch and Rodgers headed for his own house. “Remember—anytime after eight. We’ve got a sitter coming then to take care of all the kids over at Tolstoy’s house.”

  Simon and I walked back through the snow to his room. I looked back at that row of six nearly identical old houses and I said, “You know something, Simon? After thirty years of associating with you, sometimes I can figure these things out too. There’s a very important point that you’ve completely overlooked.”

  “What would that be, my friend?”

  “I think these people are all lying about Kolyada, every last one of them! Kolyada comes with gifts for Russian children just before Christmas, right?”

  “That is correct.”

  “But don’t Russians exchange gifts on the Epiphany, January sixth, rather than Christmas Day? Isn’t that when Kolyada would come?”

  “Very good, my friend, and quite true of some Russians. But you’ll remember I told you earlier the university has a brief recess at Christmas because the semester’s final examinations are given in early January. So the Russian community here has adapted to Western ways and celebrates on December twenty-fifth. Obviously our Kolyada does, too.”

  “All right, you’ve got me again. Do you have any better theories?”

  “Only the beginning of one, my friend. But I think it’s important that we attend the Christmas Eve party at the Rodgers house tonight.”

  When we arrived that evening the other guests were already there. It was a smaller gathering than usual, because the Vladimers were spending Christmas with their married son in Philadelphia and the Batovrins were laid low with the flu. But Lara Navogard and her husband were there, along with Ivan Tolstoy and his wife and our hosts Jeff and Lenore Rodgers.

  “I think we all miss Professor Trevitz,” Ivan Tolstoy said, balancing a cup of eggnog with one hand while he helped himself to some of the food. “He really knew how to celebrate at parties. Were you here for last year’s party, Simon?”

  “I was doing some research at the university but I hadn’t gotten to know all of you quite so well at that point. This is my first holiday gathering.”

  Tolstoy turned to their host and began a discussion of the latest developments in Russia, where new leadership was already bringing changes none of them could have imagined a short time ago. “It’s certainly given a whole new lift to Russian Studies,” Jeff Rodgers agreed.

  I made my way over to Lara Navogard, who seemed the most interesting of those present. “You look a bit bored,” I observed.

  She laughed and nodded impishly. “I have to come because it’s the Department Christmas party, but I’d much rather be spending Christmas Eve at home.” Her husband was a hearty Russian who spoke English with a thick accent and seemed to ignore her.

  I tried not to think of Shelly at home alone as I chatted with her, keeping an eye on Simon across the room, deep in conversation now with Ivan Tolstoy and his wife. That was the position we were in when the doorbell rang and Lenore Rodgers went off to answer it. All conversation ceased as we turned to greet the newest arrival.

  “Perhaps the Batovrins are feeling better and came after all,” Lara speculated.

  But it was not the Batovrins. It was the short, white-caped figure of the elf maiden Kolyada.

  In that instant she was not a figure of Christmas joy or giving, even though she carried a basket full of gifts. In my mind, and perhaps others as well, she was a figure of dread, bending over the body of Professor Trevitz to touch his cheek.

  For an instant no one spoke. Then Jeff Rodgers took a step forward, staring into the mask that hid her true features. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice tense.

  But it was Simon Ark who answered the question. “It’s Marta Frazier, Professor Trevitz’s daughter, of course. Take off your mask, Marta, and join the festivities.”

  It was indeed Marta Frazier, though how Simon had known it was beyond me at that moment. She slipped off the rosy-cheeked, slightly Oriental face and became the woman we’d met earlier that day. “I owe you all an explanation,” she said with a smile.

  Ivan Tolstoy snorted. “I guess you do!”

  Lenore hurried forward with a mug of eggnog. “Have a little Christmas cheer first, Marta. I can tell you my children certainly loved your visit the other evening.”

  “It was all my father’s idea,”
Marta Frazier told them. “I was going to be with him here tonight, but now he’s gone. I decided I should come anyway, so you wouldn’t have to keep on wondering.”

  “How did you know, Simon?” Lara Navogard asked.

  “She was the right height, for one thing. When we saw Kolyada fleeing yesterday she was short—shorter than Marta, it seemed, until I noticed the high-heeled boots Marta was wearing. Marta mentioned knowing there wasn’t enough snow for footprints to show, and she even mentioned Kolyada entering her father’s house by the back door. These were all things she wasn’t likely to know unless she was playing the part of Kolyada.”

  “But why did you flee when you found your father dead?” Jeff Rodgers asked.

  “I panicked, I guess. It was such a shock. I hadn’t been on the best of terms with my father and I suppose I was afraid someone might think I really did kill him with a touch.”

  “You knew he was dead immediately?”

  A little shudder went through her. “His cheek was so cold—”

  Jeff helped her out of her white cape and she joined them in reminiscing about her father. I listened for a time, as did Simon, but I noticed that his eyes kept returning to Kolyada’s white cape, hanging from a clothes tree in the front hall.

  “I was a great friend of your father’s,” Lara was saying. “We even knew each other in Moscow, years ago. He was much older than me, of course, but we formed a friendship that rekindled when we met each other again on this campus.”

  Through all of this Ivan Tolstoy merely shook his head sadly. “Trevitz was in the prime of his life. Whatever happened to him in his home last night, it was not deserved.”

  I glanced at my watch and finally decided I had to head for home. “Simon—”

  “I know, my friend. Thank you for coming and staying this long.”

  “Well, the mystery of Kolyada is cleared up, at least.”

  “But not the mystery of what happened to her father. Perhaps it was the touch of her fingers that killed him.”

  “Do you really believe that, Simon? Like King Frost in the Russian folktales?”

  He’d slipped into his coat and walked out with me to the car, after we’d said good-bye to the others. “I must be going, too,” he said. But then, as we stood by the car, I saw his body suddenly tense. Someone else was leaving the Rodgers house.