The Nightingale Before Christmas

by Donna Andrews

  “It’s Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ you know,” she said, without looking up from her work. “He’s wearing the magic clothes the phony tailors have pretended to make for him—the clothes that are invisible to anyone unfit for his position.”

  “Nice,” I said. Her mural showed a cobblestone street running along the length of the wall, lined on each side with townspeople in colorful medieval garb. Bits of snow flecked the cobblestones and covered the steep roofs of the buildings, so odds were the poor emperor would end his procession not only mortally embarrassed but probably also suffering from frostbite.

  “So you knew Clay back then, in New York?” I asked, as I watched her carefully dabbing paint onto the cobblestones down which the emperor was strolling.

  “Knew of him,” she said, without looking up. “I doubt if he would’ve remembered me. He was an up-and-coming painter on the New York scene, and I was … not.”

  “Painter? As in fine art?”

  “Oh, yes.” She nodded absently, and hitched herself a little to the left, to reach more cobblestones. “He really was very good. A brilliant painter, and it didn’t hurt that he was handsome and articulate and … larger than life.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened.” She sighed. “Fame happened. He signed with a big gallery, and they started selling his paintings for a lot of money. But he was spending the money faster than he could paint. There might have been drugs involved. Or maybe he just went a little crazy. And unfortunately, he began to blame his financial problems on the owner of the gallery that represented him. Claimed the guy was a cheat.”

  “Blaming the gallery owner for his own mistakes?” I suggested.

  “Oh, no. He was definitely right,” she said, with a fleeting smile. “The gallery owner was cheating a lot of people. It came out at the trial.”

  “Clay took him to court?”

  “No, Clay shot him.”

  “Shot him?”

  “I don’t think Clay meant to kill him,” Ivy said. “Unfortunately, the fact that the man was cheating him only made Clay’s motive look that much stronger. He was drunk at the time, and the gun belonged to the gallery owner, so a lot of people thought he should have gotten off with self-defense or justifiable homicide. Of course, other people thought he was lucky to have gotten off with manslaughter.”

  “So he went to prison?”

  She nodded.

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Not life. Though however long it was, young as we were, I’m sure it seemed like a lifetime to him when they sentenced him. I suppose it must have been ten or fifteen years, since he’s out now.”

  I stood and watched her paint for a while, mulling over what she’d said. And watching her paint. She was working on the emperor now. Most of his body was hidden by the onlookers lining both sides of the cobblestone street, but you could tell he was wearing nothing. And, in a sly touch, while most of the onlookers were cheering happily, every so often you’d spot one who couldn’t quite keep up the pretense.

  “Did you tell the chief about this?” I asked after a while.

  “I expect he already knows by now,” she said. “Clay’s fingerprints would be on file, wouldn’t they?”

  “Probably,” I said. “And if my investigator’s right and he’s not paying taxes under Spottiswood, he probably has paperwork at the house with his real name on it. The chief would have seen that by now.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So I didn’t think I needed to tell the chief. But if you think he needs to know, you can tell him. I don’t mind.”

  As I watched, she was putting the finishing touches on the emperor’s face. He looked a lot like Clay.

  Chapter 16

  I slipped away and left Ivy to work in peace. I stepped into Violet’s bedroom. She was sitting on the floor, working on something.

  “How’s it coming?” I asked.

  “Oh, just fine,” she said. “I decided the shelves needed a little something.”

  I’d been thinking that for several days now, but then I knew better than to second-guess the designers. The twelve-foot back wall of Violet’s bedroom had two windows, each fitted with a pink-cushioned window seat, and the rest of the wall was given over to shelves. I’d have called them bookshelves, but up till now Violet had only decorated them with a small assortment of pastel ornaments. A white vase containing dried flowers. A pink-and-lavender child’s jewelry box. The overflow of pink, white, and lavender stuffed animals from the bed. A white ceramic lamb. A pink ceramic cat.

  It all looked a little sparse to me, but I assumed it was the look she was aiming for. And at least she’d put up a few token holiday decorations. Nothing impressive—a few feet of silver tinsel garland, a few silver filigree balls. But at least she’d done something.

  And I was delighted to see that she’d brought in books. Several tall stacks of books. From force of habit, I tilted my head to read the titles on the books.

  A battered copy of The Wind in the Willows. A biography of Adlai Stevenson. A 1957 organic chemistry textbook. A lot of what I recognized as bestsellers from the forties and fifties.

  “Oh, they’re not interesting books,” she said. “I just went down to the thrift store and bought a bunch that were the right size.”

  I glanced over and saw what she was working on. She was taking the dust jackets off the books and cutting new dust jackets out of pink, lavender, or white paper.

  She was piling the dust jackets carelessly in the corner of the room.

  I wasn’t exactly a rabid bibliophile, but this bothered me.

  “You’re not using the dust jackets?” I asked.

  “Oh, no.” She wrinkled her nose slightly. “They’re just so … gaudy. The books themselves are better, but the colors are all wrong for my room. This will be so much nicer, don’t you think?”

  Nicer as long as you had no particular desire to read any of the books. With her system, Robinson Crusoe and The Life Cycle of the Dermestid Beetle looked pretty much the same.

  “Hey, could you save the covers for me?” I asked. “I have a project I could really use them for.”

  “Happy to,” she said. “I was just going to throw them away.”

  “Great! Just stack them neatly in this box, and let me know when you’ve got a stack big enough that you want me to haul it away.”

  “No problem,” she said. “You can take those now.”

  I set one of the boxes the books had come out of where it would be handy. Then I gathered up the twenty or so covers she’d already discarded, stacked them loosely, and carried them down via the back stairs, waving at the Quilt Ladies as I passed.

  “You heard about the photographer at ten tomorrow?” I stopped to say.

  “We’ll be ready!” Vicky sang out.

  Nice to see someone was optimistic. They did seem to be working frantically on something. A quilt in Christmassy fabrics of red and green, with a lot of gold metallic tracery on them. But whether or not the room looked exactly as they wanted it to, it should look fine in the photographs.

  Down in the garage I found a box for the discarded covers.

  “I don’t know why I care,” I muttered. There probably weren’t any valuable books in there. Chances were, people who cared about dust jackets would turn up their noses at Violet’s book collection.

  But it bothered me, so if possible, I’d try to reunite them at the end of the show house.

  Of course, there was always the chance she’d sell the books back to the thrift shop without the covers at the end of the show. Maybe I should talk her into donating them to the library, for the tax break. She’d probably go for that. And I could give our head librarian a heads-up that the dust jackets would be arriving separately.

  Back into the house. Eustace had now put one or two dishes, vases, or bits of glassware on every shelf in his ever-so-many cabinets. I paused to watch him for a minute or two. He was now standing and studying the effect, pausin
g every once in a while to switch a couple of items, or adjust one a few millimeters in one direction or another.

  “It’s just not right,” he said. “It’s too much of a muchness. What else can I put in these wretched cabinets?”

  “Well,” I said. “In my kitchen, a lot of that space would be given over to food. Teas, spices, canned goods. But I don’t suppose you want that gaudy modern supermarket look.”

  Eustace’s face froze for a moment, then he beamed.

  “You’re a genius! Yes! Decorative tea caddies! Elegant spice jars! And perhaps a few vintage grocery items! I must go shopping!”

  He grabbed up his coat, hat, and scarf and dashed toward the garage, presumably heading for the back door there.

  “A genius,” I murmured. “I like that.”

  In the great room, Mother was rearranging the logs in the fireplace into a more pleasing configuration while Tomás and Mateo dabbed little bits of gold on things.

  In the dining room, Linda had assembled several dozen pieces of wooden or plastic fruit and was painting them all gold. Another theme. I should probably refrain from pointing out what happened to King Midas.

  I grabbed my coat and hat from the coat closet. I didn’t have to take off for the rehearsal for fifteen minutes or so, but with all the designers focused on something, now seemed a good time to make my escape.

  “You heading out?” Randall appeared from the basement.

  “Family stuff. Are you—”

  My phone rang. It was Stanley Denton

  “Remember that so-called charity you asked me to check out?” he said. “Designers of the Future?”

  “So-called? What have you found out about it?”

  “Not a whole lot, but enough to be very suspicious.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Let me put you on speaker so Randall Shiffley can hear.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hey, Stanley,” Randall said. “What’s up?”

  “Meg had me look into the charity Clay Spottiswood designated to receive the proceeds if he won the contest,” Stanley said.

  Randall looked puzzled and glanced at me.

  “Because I’d never heard of it, and someone told me Clay had founded it, and it didn’t seem in character for him,” I explained.

  “Good instincts,” Stanley said. “I can’t quite prove it yet, but I have reason to believe it was pretty much a sham. I haven’t been able to put my hands on any paperwork about the organization—”

  “You think maybe there isn’t any?” I asked.

  “Good possibility,” Stanley said.

  “Didn’t I give you the form he gave me?” Randall asked.

  “You did,” Stanley said. “But it’s a forgery. The tax-exempt number on it belongs to the Vietnam Veterans of America.”

  “He’s scum,” Randall muttered.

  “I talked to one of Clay’s clients,” Stanley went on. “A very wealthy man who doesn’t want his name attached to any of this, but I believe him. Clay hit him up for a donation to his charity but he never did produce any paperwork. Nothing like a business plan or a budget. Only thing he could remember was Clay bragging about what a low salary he was going to pay himself for running the show, but my source didn’t really think fifty thousand was such a bargain rate for an outfit that had no assets and no real hope of acquiring any.”

  “So Clay was trying to con us into putting half the show house proceeds into his own pocket,” Randall said. “Meg, you’re allowed to say ‘I told you so’ now.”

  “Did she predict Clay would try to pull something like that?”

  “No,” Randall said. “But she did tell me we ought to get a lot more detailed contracts for these show house participants. Next year, I’ll make sure I listen to her.”

  Probably not the best time to mention that next year I planned to make sure someone else was here doing the thankless job of riding herd on the designers.

  “So does this have anything to do with Clay’s murder?” Randall asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “I’m going to fill Chief Burke in, just in case,” Stanley said. “Because you never know what little bit of information will crack his case. See you later.”

  With that he hung up.

  “And before you ask, I’m off to fetch the mattress for Clay’s room,” Randall said as he strode down the hallway. “And the sheets.”

  As I was standing in the foyer, putting my coat on, Sarah appeared in the doorway of her study.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Important family stuff,” I said. “Back in a couple of hours. How’s it going?”

  “Getting close,” Sarah said. “I decided I needed a lot more books on the shelves. After all, it’s a study.”

  I winced, and stepped farther into the room so I could see what she was doing to her books, and whether I needed to rescue another flock of unloved dust jackets.

  But to my delight, Sarah was filling her shelves with real books in their natural state. Many of them had dust jackets, and I had to admit that some of the individual dust jackets were gaudy. But once she arranged them on the shelves, the individual jackets blended into a pleasing mosaic. And some of the books were jacketless, shabby, and obviously much read, but they also blended in and added to the patina.

  I found myself remembering a period, from when I was nine or ten until I went off to college, when Mother and Dad would often take me with them to Virginia’s Garden Week or any other event that opened other people’s homes for tours by the paying public. Mother was interested in the décor, of course, and Dad went along because many of the houses had beautiful gardens. He was prone to complaining in the car afterward if not enough of the houses had landscaping worth looking at. I wasn’t that keen on any of it, though I did find it rather interesting to snoop into how other people lived. I only came along because I didn’t want to be left home with Rob and the babysitter—or later, as Rob’s babysitter. Mother always said that if she lost track of Dad and me in one of the houses, she’d think back over the rooms she’d seen. If one of them had books in it, she’d head back there, and would find the two of us standing side by side in front of the shelves, browsing the books—both of us with our hands clasped behind our backs, because you weren’t supposed to touch anything, and leaning forward to read the titles. And if there weren’t any books, we’d be outside, kicking our heels till she emerged.

  Sarah’s books would have kept Dad and me happily occupied for however long Mother wanted to spend in a house.

  “Nice selection,” I said, adopting the traditional posture with my hands clasped behind my back and my body leaning toward the shelves. “You must patronize a better class of thrift shop than Violet.”

  “Actually, I brought in some of my own books,” she said with a laugh.

  Better and better. I saw a lot of my own favorites, both childhood and adult, and Dad would have been gratified by the large selection of crime fiction. And she had interesting tastes in history and biography.

  “I admit, I left my small collection of first editions at home,” she said. “And I’m sort of arranging these by color, which I wouldn’t do at home. I’m strictly alphabetical there.”

  “Michael and I do alphabetical within subject,” I said. “Although we recently pulled together all the kids’ books that we want the boys to find and read over the next few years, and put them on shelves in their rooms. And we also decided to get a few locked bookcases for the stuff we didn’t want the boys to get their hands on for a couple of decades.”

  “Good idea.” She took a few steps back, tilted her head, and squinted to see what effect she’d created. “So is my library more interesting than Violet’s?”

  “No idea,” I said. “She’s covering all her books with pretty pastel paper.”

  Sarah winced. She was a reader. She got it.

  I made a mental note to come back later and peruse Sarah’s shelves.

  “So is this photographer really coming to see the house?”
Sarah asked. “Or is he coming to see the place where a murder took place?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “But who cares, as long as it gets the show house some publicity?”

  “And if he shows up and only wants to take pictures of the crime scene?”

  “Then I’ll tell him that I have to get permission from the police to let him do that, and in the meantime, would he like to take some pictures of the other rooms.”

  “I like the way you think,” Sarah said. “And if he doesn’t bother with our rooms—”

  “Then the chief won’t give his permission.” My phone had started ringing, so I nodded to Sarah and stepped out into the hall to answer it.

  “Do you put marshmallows on your sweet potatoes?”

  Michael’s mother again.

  “I don’t, because I never make sweet potatoes,” I said. “And I have no idea what Mother does, because I dislike sweet potatoes and never eat them. You could make some with and some without.”

  “But what’s your family tradition?”

  “I’ll ask Mother,” I said.

  I stuck my head into the great room.

  “Mother! Sweet potatoes! With or without marshmallows?”

  “Well, I prefer them without,” she said. “But your father and your brother love marshmallows. And while I don’t know about—”

  “Some of each,” I said to Michael’s mother. “Gotta run.”

  The relief I felt at getting out of the show house for an hour or two was a little preview of how happy I was going to feel when it had opened. Better yet, when it was all over but counting up how much we’d raised for the historical society.

  Chapter 17

  Downtown, the sidewalks were full of shoppers—the sidewalks, and in a few places, the streets, where residents and business owners hadn’t yet done a good job of snowplowing. A lot of unfamiliar faces, so it looked as if Randall’s annual Christmas in Caerphilly tourism campaign was working.

  Last year, Randall had had to scale back his plans when the county council had balked at any major expenditure. But after seeing the dramatic increase in revenue from local shops, restaurants, and lodgings generated by Randall’s relatively modest efforts, the council had authorized a much more ambitious plan this year. Nearly every building in town had been decorated to the hilt and the street swarmed with low-paid or volunteer reenactors in Victorian costume. The clothing shops featured bustles and top hats in their front windows. The toy store displayed wooden toys and elaborately painted nutcrackers. The candy store featured rock candy, candy canes, and old-fashioned taffy.