Volunteers in thick Victorian greatcoats lurked on every third corner, ringing bells and collecting funds for Caerphilly Cares, a consortium of local charities. Parties of carolers roamed the streets in hoop skirts and frock coats, serenading the crowds with Victorian-era carols. Chief Burke had drawn the line at forcing his officers into old-fashioned London policemen’s outfits, so Randall had recruited a volunteer security force who strolled about the town wearing their distinctive custodian helmets and twirling realistic looking truncheons. And some of the more enterprising shopkeepers had begun showing up in costume and claiming it increased sales.
About the only holdout to the Victorianization of Caerphilly was Muriel’s Diner, whose owner was so firmly entrenched in her attempt to maintain its original 1950s décor that even Randall couldn’t sway her. But she’d decorated the building with so many garlands, bows, angels, holly branches, and “Merry Christmas” banners that you couldn’t see the chrome and vinyl booths until you actually stepped inside, so no one minded.
My route to Grace Episcopal took me past the town square, where the Christmas tree—“just a smidgen shorter than the National Christmas Tree,” according to Randall—was beautiful, even though a lot of the ornaments were presently obscured by snow.
The Methodists, who would be hosting the annual live nativity on their front lawn tomorrow night, were busy. They’d decided not just to build their usual manger but also to surround it with a cluster of houses to represent the rest of Bethlehem. And they’d set up a tent to represent one that the wise men might have slept in during their travels from the east across the desert. The original idea had been to exhibit the camels from Grandfather’s zoo there on warm days, but so far we hadn’t had any. So the camels stayed indoors, and there was just the tent, its intricate painted decoration—done as a Christmas project by the Methodist children’s Bible study classes—also, alas, obscured by the snow.
But the Methodists were getting busy for tomorrow’s big event, shoveling the area around Bethlehem and the wise men’s tent—and with luck, once they dug a path to it they’d clear off the tent as well.
I arrived at Grace Episcopal in plenty of time for the rehearsal. I waved at Robyn, the rector, but I’m not sure she saw me. She had her hands full. There were at least twice as many children appearing in the pageant as last year, which spoke well for Robyn’s efforts to recruit new members and get the existing ones more involved. But as any parent can testify, doubling the number of children in any given situation quadrupled the amount of noise and confusion.
I wondered briefly if any of the children came from the women’s shelter. I thought I recognized one small sheep as the child Vermillion had been carrying. What if—
And then I shoved Vermillion and the shelter and the show house and the murders out of my head and tried to concentrate on enjoying the pageant.
There were several mothers helping, and I needed a break from my own set of rambunctious and badly behaved charges—by which I meant the designers, not Josh and Jamie—so I just sat with Michael in a pew a few rows back from the temporary stage and braced myself to leap into the fray if either of our angels did anything particularly heinous.
The church was beautifully decorated, as usual, with spruce and fir garlands, clusters of holly, and banners along all the walls in red, green, gold, and purple—since we’d all figured out that purple was Robyn’s favorite color. The bracing evergreen smell that permeated the whole sanctuary lifted my spirits and cleared my sinuses, all at the same time.
And one of Robyn’s innovations for this year was an actual curtain, to make the altar end of the church, where the play would take place, even more like a real theater. The curtain was made of deep-blue plush material, representing the night sky, with sparkling stars all over it, and there were a few palm trees on the far right and left sides.
The pageant began, as always, with Mary and Joseph entering the back of the church to wend their way down the center aisle to Bethlehem. In another of Robyn’s innovations, Mary was going to be riding a real donkey, lent by a local farmer who certified him docile and highly reluctant to answer any calls of nature if he wasn’t in his favorite spot in his own back pasture. But Robyn had decided not to push our luck by having the donkey in rehearsals, so the boy playing Joseph appeared to be leading his wife down the aisle with a rope around her wrist, while Mary, with a sullen expression on her face, slouched along, chewing her gum and occasionally blowing a small bubble. The organist played “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” to mark what the choir would be singing at the real performance, and Mary and Joseph eventually climbed up the shallow steps onto the sanctuary/stage—was the donkey going to be able to do that?—and ducked behind the blue curtain.
Cut to the shepherds, who filed out from behind the curtain to abide in their fields by night—the fields being represented by the area in front of the curtain and a potted palm tree. Josh seemed to think that abiding meant walking up and down at the front of the stage with his crook over his shoulder like a sentry’s rifle, glowering at any sheep who even thought of leaving his or her assigned piece of turf. Jamie took a milder view of his duties, and was happily sitting in the midst of the sheep, his head barely visible over the sea of woolly forms.
It was at this point that I deduced that Jamie and Josh’s promotion to shepherd had occurred not because they were so much older and wiser but because, thanks to the new influx of families, the church had an overabundance of children even younger.
I caught a glimpse of Robyn, looking harried, peeking out from behind the curtain. It occurred to me that she was filling much the same cat-herding role for the pageant that I did at the show house. Though at least her charges had an excuse for behaving immaturely. And so far none of them had slaughtered each other, though if Josh kept waving his crook about wildly that, too, was a possibility.
I was about to hiss a cease-and-desist command at Josh when the angel of the Lord appeared stage left, causing Josh to leap to the defense of his flock. Some of the smaller sheep, startled by the angel’s sudden appearance, cried a little and huddled closer to Jamie for protection. But the angel ignored Josh’s dramatic flourishes of his crook and mimed speaking while Michael intoned the relevant verses from Luke.
And when Michael read out that a “great company of the heavenly host appeared,” a dozen assorted preteen angels shuffled out from the wings and put their hands together as if in prayer. Most of them weren’t in costume yet, but they were all wearing their wings, because not putting each other’s eyes out with the wings was the tricky part that they needed to rehearse. Along with not knocking each other down and not stepping on the sheep as they lined up between the sheep and the curtain. Robyn took them through their entrance half a dozen times, to the great displeasure of the sheep, who were impatient to get to their favorite part of their roles, singing “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” along with the choir.
But eventually the angels managed their entrance to Robyn’s satisfaction, and then we all sang the carol together, sounding almost as good as we would when the full choir joined in. After that, the curtain opened, and Josh and Jamie and a third shepherd herded the sheep past the stable and settled them on one side of the stage—except for one very small sheep who was discovered to be in dire need of a diaper change and was handed down to his waiting mother.
Then the wise men entered. In spite of Grandfather’s offer to lend her three of the camels from his zoo, Robyn had decided not to risk it. So the wise men entered stage right, afoot, while one of the older boys stood in the wings and played a recording of Grandfather’s camels making their characteristic moaning and groaning sounds. Perhaps by Christmas eve someone could help him edit out the part where an adult male voice yelped and then said, rather loudly, “let go of my hat, you smelly beast!”
Then we took another break in the action to sing “We Three Kings,” after which the three wise men presented their gifts—represented, at the moment, by a popcorn tin, a shoe box, and a coffee pot, since
the church’s traditional gold, frankincense, and myrrh props had been repainted at the last minute and were not quite dry yet.
A final rousing rendition of “Joy to the World” ended the pageant, and the players all scattered to join their parents and hurry back to the room where the buffet lunch had been set up.
“Mommy,” Josh asked me during lunch. “Do you like frankincense and myrrh?”
“Frankincense and myrrh are for babies,” Jamie said scornfully.
“No, they’re not,” Josh said.
“Then why did the wise men give them to Baby Jesus?”
“No one had invented Xboxes yet,” Michael said.
“Actually, I think I might be allergic to frankincense and myrrh,” I said.
Josh looked disappointed.
After lunch, Michael headed off to take the boys sledding, and I was walking out to my car, planning to head back to the show house, when I got a text from a vaguely familiar phone number. It said simply “Check e-mail for Smith info.”
I opened my e-mail and scrolled down till I found one from [email protected]. I opened it and found it consisted of page after page of links. E-mail worked on my phone, but for links, I’d need to be at my computer. I closed it and was getting into my car when my phone rang. Chief Burke.
“Meg, are you very busy right now?” he asked.
If anyone else had asked me that, I’d have given them chapter and verse of everything waiting for me back at the show house. Somehow I didn’t think it was a good idea to be so blunt with the chief.
But while I was struggling for a tactful answer, he figured this out.
“Of course you’re busy,” he said, with a sigh. “What I meant was, can you possibly break away for a few minutes to take a look at something here?”
“Where’s here?”
“Mr. Spottiswood’s house—1224 Pruitt Avenue.”
Suddenly leaving the show house to fend for itself for a while seemed like an awesome idea.
“I’ll be right there.”
Clay’s house surprised me. I’d expected something imposing, expensive, and decorated to the nines in taste that was utterly different from mine. But 1224 Pruitt Avenue turned out to be one of a nearly identical row of town houses, in a subdivision full of such rows. I suspected most of the town houses were rented by pairs, trios, or quartets of young singles. There were no toys in any of the yards, very little landscaping, and even though every house had a garage, both sides of the street were lined with parked cars, bumper to bumper. I had to park over a block away.
When I showed up at the doorway, Sammy Wendell came out to meet me. His deputy’s uniform looked disheveled, as if he’d been working several shifts without a break.
“This way.” He led me through a living room decorated with mismatched and slightly battered articles of furniture that looked as if they belonged in larger and more imposing rooms. The only things that didn’t look like castoffs from some of Clay’s decorating projects were the paintings—a dark, moody landscape over the mantel, an equally dark and moody bar scene over the sofa, and a huge cityscape filling all of one otherwise empty wall. Were they Clay’s own paintings? Probably. I could see a signature in the corner of each that looked rather like a stylized CS.
“It’s this way,” Sammy said, interrupting my study of the art.
I followed him through a kitchen decorated only with dirty dishes. And finally into the garage.
Chief Burke was standing in the garage, looking down at a collection of twenty or so boxes. I could see my cousin Horace squatting down beside the boxes, writing something down in a notebook. His uniform also looked a little the worse for wear.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You tell me,” the chief said. “Horace?”
Horace stood up and pointed to a stack of four boxes. I squatted down and looked at them. They were all addressed to Mother at the show house address.
“These are Mother’s,” I exclaimed. “What are they doing here?”
“A good question,” the chief said. “You can think of no legitimate reason for them to be in Mr. Spottiswood’s possession?”
“All four of these packages are ones Mother thought were lost in transit,” I said. “Three of them she had to have shipped again. She’s been bugging me for two days to find this one.”
I held up a small, flat parcel from The Braid Emporium.
The chief turned to Horace.
“And what did the UPS tell us about these packages?”
Horace looked down at his notebook.
“These two were drop shipped,” he said, touching two of Mother’s parcels. “No signature required. These two were signed for.”
“Who signed for them?” I demanded.
“This one was a W. Faulkner,” Horace said. “The Braid Emporium one went to a C. Dickens.”
“We also have signatures from T. Capote, F. S. Fitzgerald, and D. Hammett,” the chief added. “The manager of our local UPS facility will be having a word with the driver responsible.”
“That jerk,” I said. “Clay, I mean. Ever since the designers started working in the house, we’ve had problems with packages taking longer than expected, or getting lost entirely. I assumed someone had figured out that a lot of expensive stuff was being left at a house where no one lived, and was pilfering packages. So a week ago I told everyone that I’d rather they ship stuff to their own offices, but if they had to ship to the house they had to require a signature. We still had a few problems with packages, but not nearly as many.”
“That makes sense,” the chief said. “Most of these packages would have been delivered between ten days and three weeks ago.”
I glanced through the other packages. They came from fabric and trim companies, glass and china vendors, antique stores—all the kinds of vendors the decorators would have used.
“That jerk,” I said. “He’s been sabotaging everyone.”
“That makes you angry,” the chief observed.
“Damn right it does,” I said.
“I imagine the designers themselves would be even angrier,” he said.
“Angry enough to kill him? Is that what you’re asking?”
The chief raised one eyebrow and waited.
“How should I know?” I said. “Maybe. I can’t see killing someone over a bit of braid, or a few yards of fabric. But if one of them realized Clay was deliberately sabotaging them, and had been for weeks? Can I see someone losing it and lashing out in anger? Yes. Don’t ask me who, though.” I waved at the stack of packages. “He’s got at least one from everyone.”
“If Mr. Spottiswood had been stabbed or bludgeoned by something that could readily be found at the crime scene, I could more easily accept the theory that someone lashed out in anger.” The chief leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “But he was shot. Someone had to bring a gun to the scene. Which looks more like premeditation. Unless, of course, Mr. Spottiswood had the bad luck to enrage someone who happened to be carrying a firearm. Were you aware that any of the decorators were armed?”
“If any of them were, it’s news to me,” I said. “Apart from the gun Sarah’s partner Kate tried to get her to take. I assume you heard about that.”
The chief nodded.
“Given the amount of arguing, backbiting, and general nastiness going on in the house, if I’d known any of them were packing, I’d have ordered them to leave their guns at home, on pain of expulsion from the house. Remind me to suggest to Randall that we make that a rule for next year. No guns at the show house. New rule number two.”
“What’s new rule number one?” the chief asked. “No murders at the show house?”
“No packages sent to the show house,” I said. “The amount of bickering and backbiting those stolen packages have caused … Incidentally, I’d already planned to come and see you this morning to see if you could do anything about the thefts. I wasn’t sure any of the designers paid any attention when I told them to make a police report.”
“Two of them did,” he said. “Mrs. Martha Blaine and Mrs. Linda Dunn.”
The other Martha and Our Lady of Chintz.
“But I didn’t have enough officers to stake out the house, as Mrs. Blaine suggested,” the chief went on. “And as I pointed out, a stakeout wouldn’t do much good if, as they suggested, the thefts were an inside job.”
“Did they suspect Clay?” I asked.
“Mrs. Blaine, rather presciently, did,” the chief said. “Mrs. Dunn was more suspicious of the various workmen who frequented the house, particularly Mr. Cruz and Mr. Torres, who worked for Mr. Spottiswood.”
“Tomás and Mateo?” I said. “I don’t believe it. And do you really think two guys who speak little or no English would forge William Faulkner’s and Charles Dickens’s signatures on the UPS forms?”
“We were aware of that implausibility,” the chief said. “We thought it was neighborhood juvenile delinquents.”
“Very erudite delinquents,” I said.
“The same ones who had been vandalizing the house this fall,” Horace added.
“Vandalizing it how?”
“On several occasions, neighbors called us to report that there was activity in the house,” the chief said. “We found wallboard ripped away from the walls, floorboards pulled up. As if someone was trying to destroy the house from the inside out. We were keeping our eyes on several neighborhood juveniles with troubled histories. So you can imagine how pleased the bank was when Randall Shiffley approached them offering to fix up the house if it could be used for the show house. Apparently your mother thought she had a house lined up, but it fell through at the last minute.”
The Nightingale Before Christmas Page 16
