A Holly, Jolly Murder

by JOAN HESSS

  “Or so you say,” Chunder muttered as he ignored the proffered teacup and went to the front door. “Tell Roy that as soon as he’s finished, he’s to go home and wait for me. We have something to discuss. It may have a profound effect on the grove, Malthea. Do not be surprised if there’s an upheaval in store for all of us.”

  “Whatever does that mean, Nicholas?” she asked as if she were a nanny humoring a recalcitrant child.

  “The grove has been tainted by depravity.” He thumped his walking stick on the floor, then bowed and left.

  Malthea waited until the door closed before permitting herself a fluttery little sigh. “It sounds as if there is unpleasantness in the ether. Roy’s a good boy at heart, but like so many of his peers, he has taken an unhealthy interest in certain aspects of the occult. I can tell Nicholas is upset with him, most likely with justification.”

  Curiosity got the better of me, as it’s been known to do. “You mentioned that Roy lives in his carriage house?”

  “Nicholas owns a large estate at the edge of Farberville. On the property is an old carriage house with an upstairs apartment. Roy’s father and stepmother are cultural anthropologists at Farber College, and they took a six-month sabbatical to Borneo or one of those peculiar places. They didn’t want Roy to miss school, so they arranged for him to stay with a family. When that didn’t work out, Nicholas offered the carriage house as lodging.” She peered into her cup as if deciphering the tea leaves. “If Roy’s done something to upset Nicholas, perhaps I in my capacity as Arch Druid should intervene. We must maintain harmony and positive energy fields in order…”

  The sound of the back door opening ended her musing. I hurried to my feet and said, “Just drop off the money at the bookstore after your car is fixed.”

  This time I succeeded, and I was at home pouring myself a drink when Caron came into the kitchen. “I thought you were supposed to work until eight,” I said.

  “I was.” She opened the refrigerator and glumly studied its contents. “There’s absolutely nothing to eat. Can we order a pizza?”

  “Then why are you home so early?”

  “I wasn’t fired, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said as she took out a pitcher of orange juice. “This smells funny. How long has it been in here?”

  “Not that long—and what happened at the mall?”

  She replaced the pitcher and sat down at the table. “Santa got sacked. Since nobody’s going to pay fifteen bucks for a photo of a kid sitting on a chair, Mrs. Claus sent Inez and me home. If she can’t find a replacement, I’m out of a job.”

  I took a gulp of scotch. “Let’s start at the beginning. Santa got sacked? What did he do—bash Mrs. Claus with a candy cane?”

  “I wish he had, but it was a lot worse than that. He’s this old geezer they probably found living under a bridge. If I were a kid, I wouldn’t get within fifty feet of him, but he was doing okay with the ‘ho-ho-ho’ bit and Mrs. Claus was keeping a real sharp eye on him. She couldn’t follow him into the men’s rest room, though. Inez and I both noticed he was weaving when he came back from a break, but we didn’t dare say anything. I’d just wrestled these three-year-old twins into his lap when he started bawling about his misspent boyhood or something ridiculous like that. Before anybody could figure out what was going on, half the kids in line were bawling, too. Both twins wet their pants, and so did Santa. Mrs. Claus hustled him off to the employee lounge, and when she came back, she told us she’d fired him.”

  “Poor old Santa,” I said.

  “At least he can go back to his bridge. What am I supposed to do about all the clothes on layaway?” She realized what she’d said and hastily stood up. “I’ll think of something. Maybe I can still get a job wrapping presents or pushing fries.”

  “Hold on,” I said, aiming a finger at her. “Didn’t I tell you that you weren’t going to spend—”

  “Mrs. Claus is going to the unemployment office first thing tomorrow morning to interview some guys. She’s going to call us if she finds a replacement.”

  I let my finger drop. “Let me ask you about a boy I met this afternoon. Do you know someone named Roy Tate?”

  “Where did you meet him?” she said in a horrified voice.

  “I delivered some books to a customer’s house. He came by to do some repair work.”

  Caron stared at me as if I’d described a casual social encounter with Hitler. “Roy Tate is a freak.”

  “A freak? He may not have been attractive, but he looked ordinary in the physical sense.”

  “Oh, Mother,” she said, “you are so far out of it. A freak is someone who’s all creepy and weird. Roy Tate has to be the freakiest guy who’s ever gone to Farberville High. He drives an old hearse and hangs out in the basement by the boiler room. He never speaks to anyone, including the teachers. They kept giving him detention, but finally resigned themselves to his occasional grunts. Emily had to sit behind him in European history at the beginning of the semester, and she just about threw up every time she looked at his hair. She was terrified she’d get cooties.”

  “He didn’t seem that bad,” I said, “and he explained why he was late.”

  “Selling drugs at the playground, I’ll bet,” Caron said with a sniff. At some point preceding adolescence, she may have had a speck of compassion, but hormones had flushed it out of her system. “I cannot believe you’re defending Mr. Mortician. Inez is going to absolutely howl when I tell her.”

  Her mood much improved, she went down the hall to call Inez. I accepted the futility of convincing her that nonconformity was not the worst of personal attributes; maturation rather than maternal enlightenment would be required. I did feel a bit sorry for Roy Tate, but there was nothing I could do short of inviting him for dinner. I wasn’t anywhere near that sorry for him.

  I was heading for bed when Peter finally called. Our greetings were chilly, but I decided to be magnanimous and forgive him for his previous childish behavior.

  “How’s your mother?” I asked.

  “Still jabbering away about Myron. She’s eager to elope, but I convinced her to think about it for a few days. She may very well forget her promise to me, though; she barely notices that I’m here. Maybe I ought to change my name to Myron.”

  “Oh, Peter,” I said with a flicker of irritation, “you’re behaving like a jealous toddler. Your mother is capable of making up her own mind. If she wants to get married, she should hop on the next flight to Las Vegas and haul Myron down the aisle of a wedding chapel. Maybe they can find an Elvis impersonator to do the honors.”

  “I don’t trust him. He’s probably after her money.”

  I did not point out that he’d ignored my astute psychological diagnosis. “There’s nothing wrong with her wanting some excitement in her life. You yourself were complaining that all she ever does is have her hair done, shop, play bridge, and have dinner at the country club. If Myron has swept her off her feet, more power to the both of them.”

  “You’re hardly in a position to encourage someone to climb out of a rut,” he said.

  “Would you care to expound on that remark?”

  “You get up in the morning and go to the bookstore. If we don’t go out, you spend your evenings at home with a book. I’ll admit you’ve stuck your elegant nose into some risky situations, but for the most part, you’re in a rut somewhat deeper than, say, the Grand Canyon.”

  I was not pleased to be characterized as a total bore, even though there was an iota of truth in what he’d said. I could have pointed out the situations had been more than risky, but this might have led to another of his tedious lectures about meddling in police investigations.

  I waited until I could trust myself not to bark at him, then said, “So I prefer as much order as possible in my life. What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s hypocritical of you to say my mother ought to elope when you won’t even go to a movie until you’ve read a dozen reviews. The only times you’ve done anything remotely spont
aneous were when you were hot on the trail of a murderer.”

  “That’s not true,” I said in such a cold tone that I hoped icicles were poking out of his receiver. “I happen to be a very spontaneous person when it suits me.”

  He snickered, fully aware it would infuriate me. “Do you have a block of time on your calendar marked off as ‘be spontaneous from one till three’?”

  “If you’re quite finished, I suggest you spontaneously stick a fork in a light socket.”

  This time I was the one who terminated the conversation by banging down the receiver. I gave him a moment to call back and apologize, then stalked down the hall to my bedroom. When I glanced in the mirror above the dresser, I was surprised at how composed I appeared to be. Unlike Caron, I prefer to internalize my anger—an unhealthy habit most likely picked up from Carlton, who’d preferred sarcasm to histrionics.

  I was still studying my reflection when Caron came into the room and collapsed across my bed.

  “What were you shrieking about a few minutes ago?” she asked as she inspected her fingernail polish for infinitesimal flaws.

  “Peter annoyed me,” I admitted as I sat down beside her and massaged her back. “Was I really shrieking?”

  “No, you were slightly strident, which is about all you ever are. When I tell my friends how you smacked somebody with a chair or barely escaped being blown up, they don’t believe me. They think you’re too stodgy for anything like that.”

  Great, I thought as I gave her neck a final (nonlethal) squeeze. According to popular consensus, I was in a rut, boring, stodgy, and incapable of raising my voice. Forty seemed too young for me to retreat to a rocking chair, but it sounded as though Peter, Caron, and her friends might beg to differ. They’d no doubt agree that knitting would be a suitable pastime—as long as the needles were too dull for me to hurt myself if I knitted when I should have purled.

  I poked Caron’s rump. “Call me in the morning if Mrs. Claus wants you back, dear. I’ll close the store and take you and Inez to lunch in the food court at the mall.”

  “You won’t close the store. Every time some emergency comes up and you have to go galloping off, you moan and groan about the sales you might be missing. I’ll call you if Santa gets kidnapped or Mrs. Claus is found dead on the toilet, okay?”

  I tried not to sigh. “Well, I do need every sale I can get. The post-Christmas season is bleak until the spring semester starts in the middle of January. Maybe I should close during that period. You and I can jump in the car and simply go wherever catches our fancy. The beach might be fun, don’t you think? Or how about New Orleans? You’ve never been there.”

  “Oh, Mother,” she said as she rolled over and gave me a piercing look, “you know perfectly well that we won’t go anywhere. Spare me the long-winded excuses about Christmas bills and the checking-account balance. Inez and I are already resigned to cleaning out her closet. If I find that blue sweater I loaned her last year, I may pass out from the excitement.”

  I sent her away, then climbed into bed and tried to read. The words failed to capture me. I finally closed the book and spent several hours in critical self-examination before falling into restive sleep.

  The following morning I felt somewhat proud of myself as I opened the Book Depot fifteen minutes later than usual, proving to one and all that I was not a slave to routine. Instead of automatically starting a pot of coffee, I sat down with the morning paper and turned to the entertainment page. There was a long column of movie offerings. I could go to any one of them I chose, I thought defiantly, even if I’d never heard of it. Or better yet, I could go to a country music bar, guzzle beer, and dance with bowlegged good ol’ boys. I could respond to a personal ad and meet a stranger in a secluded spot. I could pull an Ambrose Bierce or a Judge Crater.

  I was still entertaining myself with possibilities when the bell above the door tinkled. Entering the store was a petite woman with waist-length black hair and an exceedingly determined expression on what otherwise would have been a pretty face. Even in her wool coat and field boots she couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds; she would have made a perfect undercover agent in a junior high drug investigation. Trailing behind her were two small children of indeterminate gender, since they were swaddled in coats, mufflers, and knitted caps.

  All three of them examined me from just inside the doorway. The woman finally said, “Are you Claire Malloy?”

  “Yes,” I said cautiously.

  “Malthea Hendlerson told me you’d ordered some books for her. I’d like you to try to find one for me.”

  I felt a twinge of apprehension as the children disappeared behind the racks. Grubby little fingerprints do not enhance the value of books. “I’ll do my best,” I said. “Do you have the title and author?”

  She glanced in the direction of her offspring, shook her head, and then came to the counter. “I’m looking for Psycho-Sexual Transitions in Wiccan Initiation Rituals. I’m not sure of the author, but I doubt the title’s all that common.”

  An aroma of muskiness accompanied her. It brought back memories of my college days, when those of us who were adamantly antiwar staged demonstrations with temporary allies who wore flowers and beads in their hair and nothing at all on their feet. The woman across from me was much too young to have participated, and in fact was more likely to have found a bottle of patchouli oil in her mother’s belongings.

  “I’ll try the microfiche,” I said, glancing over her shoulder to check on her children, who were as silent as commandos on a covert mission. I slid the plastic sheet into place and scanned titles as quickly as I could. “No, I don’t see it. Do you know the publisher?”

  She shrugged. “A small press, I should think.”

  I took out Books in Print and started flipping pages, mindful of minute rustling from the far side of the store. “Yes, here it is. I can order it from the publisher, but it may take several weeks to arrive.”

  “Mother!” howled a high-pitched voice. “Cosmos tried to bite me.”

  “No, I didn’t, you pig-faced lump of dung!” said another. “But maybe I ought to.”

  The first speaker was not intimidated. “I’ll yank off your penis, chop it into pieces, and throw them in the composter!”

  The woman gave me a proud smile. “Children can be so forthright, can’t they? They’re blessed with a naive ignorance of societal conventionality.”

  I assumed this meant she approved of their nasty mouths and graphic threats. This further confirmed my hypothesis that she was the member of the grove who home-schooled her children. Since it was not a home I cared to visit, I said, “If you’ll leave your telephone number, I’ll call you when the book comes in and you can pick it up. As I said, it may be several weeks.”

  As the level of insults escalated from behind the rack, she unhurriedly wrote a name and telephone number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Do you have children?”

  I winced as the rack shuddered. “A sixteen-year-old daughter.” Who, in contrast to the present barbarians, was a veritable paragon of restraint and decorum.

  “Such a perfect age,” the woman murmured, looking into my eyes as though planting an idea in my mind.

  It was not going to germinate, I thought as I watched her collect her children and leave. The musky smell lingered, but now it seemed to imply malevolence rather than flower power. Psycho-Sexual Transitions in Wiccan Initiation Rituals was not likely to be a New Age version of the Girl Scout handbook. I picked up the piece of paper and read her name: Morning Rose Sawyer. One of the children had referred to his or her sibling as “Cosmos”; I couldn’t remember the other’s name.

  Not that I cared, I concluded as I wrote up an order to Peanut Brittle Press and stuck it in an envelope. For that matter, I didn’t care if the book ever came. My profit on a nine-dollar trade paperback would cover the cost of postage, but it would not impress my accountant.

  I was straightening the cookbooks when Caron came into the store. “The tyrant called,�
� she announced. “She found another Santa and wants us to report as soon as possible. Inez’s mother has a meeting, so she can’t take us to the mall. Can I have the car?”

  “There’s not much gas,” I said as I gave her the key. “You may have to spend a couple of your own dollars if you want to make it home tonight.”

  She politely overlooked my ludicrous suggestion. “What’s that awful smell?”

  “It’s from a customer who left a few minutes ago.”

  “Well, I didn’t think you were wearing some peculiar perfume. All you ever smell like is talcum powder.”

  After she was gone, I tried to reimmerse myself in fantasies, but it was futile. What was wrong with smelling like talcum powder? It was preferable to smelling like ripened roadkill or rotten eggs. Peter had never objected, much less commented on it. He’d never given me a bottle of perfume, for that matter.

  But he had, I remembered with a guilty start. I’d thanked him profusely, then tucked the bottle away in a dresser drawer. Maybe the time had come to shatter the aura of predictability that surrounded me like a scratchy wool blanket. In that I couldn’t afford to enroll in a flight school or book a trek to Nepal, I took Malthea’s card out of a drawer and dialed her number.

  Chapter 3

  What had seemed like a moderately eccentric thing to do the previous day seemed downright insane as I walked across the wet pasture. Frost crackled beneath my feet as though I was crushing glass. The diffused light from the eastern sky was adequate for me to avoid stepping in or on anything, although I was more concerned about snakes and mice than I was about livestock droppings. Minutes earlier I’d driven through a subdivision of treeless lots and prefabricated houses, but I was not at all convinced I wouldn’t encounter a dinosaur, or at least a woolly mammoth, before the sun rose.

  If the sun rose on places this desolate.

  As per Malthea’s instructions, I’d parked my car on a dirt lane in the company of a rusty van, an antiquated white subcompact, and a bicycle propped against a fence post. I would have dressed more warmly if I’d realized how far I had to walk. Okay, to be candid, I most likely would have stayed in my cozy bed until I heard Caron leave the bathroom after a ritual that was longer and more complex than anything Druids could ever dream up. I am not what is commonly called a morning person; the idea of hopping out of bed before dawn, jogging several miles, and arriving back home just as the newspaper is plopped into the front yard is inconceivable. I do not enjoy unnecessary physical exertion any more than I do bran muffins, and I prefer to stay in touch with my outer child, who does not care to sweat.