Chapter 9
“I’m ready,” Alice said. “Dying to get it over with so I can pump Meg for all the details she won’t tell me!”
Bless her for that—it might reduce the chief’s annoyance, if he heard I’d been talking to a witness he hadn’t yet interviewed.
I decided it might be wiser for me to stick to talking to people who’d already been debriefed. So I followed them down the stairs and through the kitchen, intending to see what Mother and Eustace were up to.
They were standing together in the archway that separated Eustace’s breakfast nook from Mother’s great room. As I watched, they looked into the great room. Then the breakfast nook. Then the great room again.
“No,” he said. “You’re right.”
“Too abrupt,” Mother said.
“I could change the paint color?”
“No, it’s not that,” Mother said. “Maybe if we mass a few poinsettias on either side of the archway.”
They studied the archway some more.
“No,” they said simultaneously.
I’d seen this before. They could keep up these conferences for longer that I’d ever imagined possible. Sometimes the conference erupted into painting and furniture moving, and anyone foolish enough to be nearby would get drafted into the action and could kiss the rest of her day good-bye.
“Oh, hello, Meg,” Eustace said, spotting me. “What do you think of—”
“Hang on,” I said. “I’ve got to check on—on Linda.”
I’d almost called her Our Lady of Chintz in front of someone other than Mother. I needed to be careful. Linda. Linda. Linda.
I went back through the kitchen and into the dining room.
Linda was standing in her room, looking frazzled. She was batting uselessly at the branches of spruce that protruded into her room as if she’d caught them trying to sneak farther in and dump needles on her fabric. One of them had snagged her shapeless brown woolen tunic.
“This tree is impossible,” she said, turning to me. “The branches take up half the room.”
Half was an exaggeration, but the branches did stick out rather far.
“We need to move the tree,” she said.
I’d been afraid of that. Tomás and Mateo were nearly finished redecorating Mother’s side of the tree. We couldn’t ask them to move it again.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I think the tree adds just the right touch. We only need a little less of it in the room. I’ll have Randall get someone to prune it back.”
I stepped into the hall and called. Randall didn’t answer, so I left a voice mail—one that wouldn’t offend Linda, in case she was eavesdropping.
Then I stepped back into the dining room. Linda had turned her back on the invading vegetation and was sitting on one of her chintz-covered dining room chairs, threading red and gold beads and green holly leaves onto a string to make a garland.
“So,” I said. “Apart from the branches, how’s it going?”
“Fine.” She looked up and gave me a tight little smile. The kind of smile that’s supposed to say “Don’t worry, everything’s fine,” but makes you pretty sure everything isn’t. “Just need to add those few Christmassy touches,” she went on. “I’m essentially finished with the room itself.”
For my taste, she should have declared it finished a week ago. It was a big dining room, but now it felt small and claustrophobic. There were too many things here. Too much going on. Too many small bits of furniture. Too many precisely arranged groups of small prints or decorative plates on the wall. Too many whatnots containing too many delicate tchotchkes. And above all, too many different chintz prints. One for the wallpaper. A similar but not-quite-matching one for the curtains. A third print for the dining room chair seats. Yet another for the occasional chair in the corner, not to mention another for the skirt covering the side table. Even the rug had a busy pattern all too reminiscent of chintz. I knew the effect she was aiming for—she’d told me the first time I met her.
“I like that cluttered, homey, English country look,” she’d said. “Where it doesn’t look as if everything was bought as a set, all matchy-matchy. Where the family just accumulates objects it loves, over the centuries, and doesn’t care whether they’re supposed to go together.”
I had liked the sound of that. I’d expected something low-key and comfortable. Unfortunately, her room looked more as if she’d found a sale on chintz remnants and handed them over to a crew of blind seamstresses.
Of course, I made no pretense of understanding decorating trends, so for all I knew this could be the coming thing. Total sensory overload as a decorating strategy. Maybe I’d be seeing rooms like this in all of Mother’s decorating magazines, if I ever bothered reading them.
Then again, there was hope. Mother hated Linda’s room, I reminded myself, as I gazed at the offending spruce branches.
Linda herself didn’t match the room at all. She was an attractive woman of forty-five or fifty, and I could tell her skirt and sweater were not cheap, but the overall effect was drab and lugubrious.
But she was pleasant and undemanding and went about her decorating business without any of the angst and drama that seemed part of the process for so many of the other designers, so on the whole, I liked her.
A stack of cardboard boxes sat in one corner, all with the words “Christmas ornaments” scrawled on them in one place or another.
“Oh, dear,” I said. “Did you have to bring in your own personal Christmas decorations to cope with the tree?”
“Yes, but that’s not a problem,” she said. “I’m not going to do a tree this year anyway. There’s just me, and I won’t be home enough to really enjoy it. The tree here’s a godsend. I was worried that the room wasn’t turning out Christmassy enough.”
Not Christmassy enough? She’d already looped red, green, and gold garlands, like the one she was making, along the crown molding all around the room near the ceiling. Tucked sheaves of holly and ivy behind every picture. Covered the table with a red-and-green holly print table runner. Scattered china elves and angels along the runner. And placed both wreaths and battery-operated candles in the two windows. To me, the as-yet undecorated branches of the Christmas tree poking through the archway were the one soothing, peaceful, truly beautiful element in the room.
“Don’t work yourself into a frazzle,” I said. “We women are all too prone to do that around Christmas. Take care of yourself.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” she said. But I was startled to see that there were tears in her eyes. She bowed her head over her work, clearly not wanting me to see the tears.
Part of me wanted to stay and find out why a few kind words reduced her to tears. But another part of me—probably a better part—wanted to give her some privacy.
Maybe she was even crying over Clay’s death. I didn’t think they’d known each other that well. I couldn’t recall any run-ins between them.
Maybe not knowing him that well made it easier to feel sad over his death. She could be the one person in the house who had no negative feelings about Clay, and could react to it simply as the death of another human being.
“Got to run,” I said. “Call me if you need anything.”
She nodded but didn’t raise her head as I slipped out of the room.
I went back into the hall. It looked as if the chief was about to finish up with Alice. Sarah was sitting on the stairs with her chin in her hand, watching Ivy paint. Overnight the blue streak in Sarah’s hair had morphed into a rich purple that matched her sweater. I decided it was an improvement.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “The chief’s got your room.”
“He’s only got a couple of people left to interview,” she said. “And he did point out that this was faster for us than having to go down to the station. I’m good with it.”
Ivy smiled over her shoulder at us, then got up and slipped down the hallway. In her brown skirt and brown sweater, she seemed to disappear into the shadows after a few steps.
But oddly enough, she didn’t seem drab like Linda. More elfin.
“If we’re bothering you, we can leave,” I called out.
“Just going to the basement to mix some more pigments,” she said.
I heard the basement door close.
“I don’t think we’re bothering her particularly,” Sarah said. “She just needs a lot of time alone. It’s not quite the same thing.”
I nodded.
“Hell of a night last night,” I said.
Sarah nodded but didn’t say anything.
“What I wouldn’t give to have been anywhere but here,” I said.
Sarah giggled.
“Meg, if you’re trying to find out whether or not I have an alibi for the time when Clay was killed, you could just ask me,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “I gather you do have an alibi.”
“Yes,” she replied. “I was neutering tomcats.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that.
“Actual feline tomcats,” she went on. “Not Clay’s kind. And spaying the females.”
“I didn’t know you moonlighted as a vet,” I said.
“I was helping Clarence Rutledge. He’s been doing a lot of pro bono work down at the animal shelter, spaying and neutering that whole feral cat colony that lives in the woods behind the New Life Baptist Church.”
That made sense. Clarence was Caerphilly’s most popular veterinarian. And although his appearance was intimidating—he was six feet, six inches tall and almost as wide, and usually wore leather and denim biker gear, even under his white lab coat at the clinic—he was a notorious softie when it came to any kind of animal.
“His clinic’s so busy during the day that the only time he can do the surgeries is after hours,” she said. “And we’d trapped a lot of feral cats. We were running out of cages. So every night this week I’ve been going over there at nine or ten o’clock, as soon as I can get away from here, and we work until he’s too tired. Usually one or two in the morning.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Best alibi I’ve heard all day, in fact.”
“There is one thing I’m worried about,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“My fingerprints might be on the murder weapon.”
Chapter 10
My jaw fell open, and I couldn’t think of anything to say for several moments.
“How did that happen?” I asked finally.
“I don’t know for sure,” she said. “But there’s a gun missing, and for all I know, it could be the murder weapon, and if it is, my fingerprints will be on it.”
“Missing where?”
“From the house,” she said. “From my room.”
“You were keeping a gun in your room?”
“Not on purpose,” she said. “It’s not even mine—it’s Kate’s.”
Kate—her business partner, the one Sarah had been having such an angry conversation with the day before—Kate saying “keep it” and Sarah saying “I don’t even want it around me.”
“Her husband got it for her when he started having to commute to Tappahannock for his job,” Sarah said. “She never really wanted it around. But then when I began working here at the show house, she kept telling me I should take it with me, for protection. Because of Clay.”
“She was afraid of Clay?”
“He’s got a temper,” Sarah said. “He had a booth near us at the Caerphilly Home and Garden Show last year, and he was just a pill the whole time. Flirting with us, and smirking at us, and then snaking people away from us the whole time, and then at the end of the show, during the teardown, someone ticked him off and he just went berserk. Wrecked part of his booth and the booth next door. He was like a crazy man. And Kate freaked. Ever since then, she’s wanted nothing to do with him. He works out of his house, which isn’t that far from our office, and for a while he kept trying to drop in and schmooze. Until Bailey tried to bite him.”
“Bailey?” I echoed. “The third partner in Byrne, Banks, and Bailey?”
“Bailey’s an Irish setter,” she said, with a giggle. “And he pretty much hates Clay, too.”
“Dogs can be good judges of character,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Sarah agreed. “Anyway, when Kate heard Clay was part of the show house, she wanted us to pull out. And I didn’t think that would be good for our rep. I said she could pull out, but I’d do it myself. We had a pretty big fight over it.”
“And then she brought her gun over here.”
“Yesterday morning,” she said. “I was off running an errand, and evidently, while I was out, she came in and put it in the drawer in one of my end tables. I found it there a little later, and told her to come and get it. And then the whole flood thing happened, and when I remembered the gun and looked in the end table drawers, it was gone. I was hoping she’d taken it after all, but I asked her this morning and she didn’t. It’s gone.”
“And you think someone took it while we were moving everything out from under the flood?”
Sarah nodded.
“Damn,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“What kind of gun was it?”
“I have no idea.”
“How big was it?”
She held her hands out about eight inches apart. Then moved them out to ten inches. And down to six. And then threw them up in frustration.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Gun-sized. Kind of small, I guess.”
Her inability to identify the gun very accurately might have been more frustrating if I knew more about guns myself. Or if we knew what kind of gun had killed Clay.
“Anyway—I figure I should probably tell the chief.”
“Absolutely.”
“Even though it will make Kate a suspect, and she’ll be mad at me, and maybe her husband will be mad at her for losing the gun?”
“Even though.”
“Damn,” she said.
We waited in silence for a while, and then the door opened. Alice came out, looking relieved to have gotten her interview over with.
“Ms. Byrne?” the chief said.
Sarah stood up and slowly walked toward the study.
My phone rang. I answered it, my eyes still on Sarah and the chief.
“Goose or turkey?”
“What’s that?”
“I said, goose or turkey?”
I looked at my phone. The number showing was Michael’s and my home phone. But the voice—
Wait—it was Michael’s mother. Who evidently had arrived, and was starting the preparations for Christmas dinner.
Last year, my mother and Michael’s had each decided to cook a Christmas dinner for the family. No amount of diplomacy could convince them to combine their events, and I heard that several people unlucky enough to attend both dinners developed a temporary aversion to eating and fasted for one or more days afterward.
One of the saving graces of Mother’s involvement in the show house was that it would prevent a recurrence. Even the mothers realized that last year’s excess had been over the top, and while we’d made progress on getting them to join forces, I’d been more than a little worried about the possibility of conflict in the kitchen. Not that Mother cooked, of course. She usually drafted one or two relatives whose culinary skills she admired and got them to cook for her. But while most of her family were quite willing to let Mother order them around in the kitchen, I didn’t think Dahlia Waterston would be as patient.
So I’d been very relieved when Mother announced that, alas, due to the show house, she would have to withdraw from Christmas dinner preparation. Would Dahlia ever forgive her?
Michael’s mother not only forgave her, she rejoiced in the opportunity to plan the dinner solo. And I’d been grateful to have at least one holiday chore completely off my plate.
Evidently I wasn’t going to be completely uninvolved.
“I tend to prefer turkey,” I said. “But goose is also nice.”
“And goose is traditiona
l,” she said.
I decided not to say “So’s turkey.”
“But many people find goose a little too greasy.”
“That’s true,” I said. “A lot of people have trouble digesting it.”
“But turkey’s so bland.”
I wanted to say “that’s why we put gravy on it,” but I held my tongue.
“Maybe I should have both.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” I said. “That should keep both parties happy.”
“Not the vegetarians,” she said. “But I’ll worry about them later. Oh, by the way—do you really want an Xbox for Christmas?”
“No,” I said. “I can’t say that I do, and Michael and I agreed that we don’t want the boys exposed to video games this young.”
“I thought as much,” she said. “So I told Jamie that I couldn’t help him buy you one for Christmas.”
With that she hung up.
Should I warn Michael that Jamie was trying to do an end run around him on the present-buying front?
No time. Mother and Eustace were waiting to ask me something. And one of Randall Shiffley’s cousins was standing behind them. And Vermillion was peeking through the railings from the upstairs landing as if waiting for a time to get my attention.
I took care of Randall’s cousin first, because he appeared to be in the middle of doing actual physical labor. Not that I didn’t think what the designers did was work, but as a blacksmith I suppose I was ever-so-slightly more sympathetic to work that produced sweat. Then I had to listen to Mother and Eustace explain something that they felt was essential to do to smooth the flow between their two areas. After twenty minutes I finally interrupted them.
“Let’s cut to the chase—does this involve knocking down any load-bearing walls or otherwise threatening the structural integrity of the house.”
“Of course not, dear.”
“Will what you’re doing intrude on or inconvenience any of the other decorators?”
“Of course not, dear. You see, all we really want to do is put a little bit of crown molding right here—”
“Do you need any supplies or workman other than what Randall has already provided?”
The Nightingale Before Christmas Page 9
