The Nightingale Before Christmas

by Donna Andrews

I drove over to the campus and prowled around until I found a parking space reasonably close to the administration building. If classes had been in session, I might almost as well have walked from Clay’s house, but most of the students were gone now. And the administration building wasn’t all that close to any of the shops and restaurants being overrun by holiday tourists and locals alike.

  The student records office was festively decorated with tinsel and evergreens and a small tree in the corner, but I detected no signs of Christmas spirit in the single glum staffer sitting behind the information counter.

  “You must be the one here for the Jessicas.” She stood up and walked over to open a little gate and let me behind the counter that separated visitors from staff. “We’ve got all the student photos in a database. Should be online, really, but our IT guys are always too backed up to get to it. I’ve got you set up here at this computer.”

  She pointed to a desk toward the back of the room.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Please tell me you’re not here right now just to let me in.”

  “No,” she said. “My boss insists that we have someone here any day that’s not a federal holiday. I drew short straw this year. I’m Jen, by the way.”

  “Meg.”

  We shook hands. She showed me how to page through the photos. Then she drifted back to her desk, picked up her coffee mug, and came back to sit on the file cabinet beside me, where she could watch as I paged through the photos.

  “Why are you looking for this kid, anyway?” she asked after a while.

  “She pretended to be a reporter from the student newspaper,” I said. “But they don’t have a Jessica. And she might have information relevant to a case Chief Burke is working on.”

  “The murder,” she said, nodding. “Is she a suspect?”

  “No idea. Is this all the Jessicas you’ve got?”

  “Guess she was using a fake name. I can show you the rest of the women students. Hang on a sec.”

  She leaned over, punched a few keys. Large numbers of men and women students appeared on the screen. Another few keystrokes and the men disappeared.

  “Help yourself,” she said.

  It took an hour, during which I found out all about the family Christmas revels Jen’s boss was keeping her from enjoying, and her plans to look for a new job after the holidays.

  Michael’s mother called me once, right in the middle of my search.

  “What’s your family’s gluten situation?”

  I looked at the phone in dismay.

  “I had no idea we had a gluten situation,” I said finally. “What kind of situation?”

  “I meant, are a lot of your family going gluten free, or is it safe to have rolls and a bread-based stuffing?”

  “I think it’s safe to have rolls,” I said. “As long as you don’t force anyone to eat them at gunpoint. But I have no idea how many people are avoiding gluten. Maybe a gluten-free stuffing would be best.”

  “I’ll do both, then,” she said, and hung up.

  “Mother-in-law,” I said to Jen.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I persevered to the end, from the Abramses and Addisons all the way to the Zooks and Zuckers, but finally I had to admit defeat.

  “She’s not here,” I said.

  “Could be a townie,” Jen said. “A lot of townies pretend to be students at the college. Especially if they’re trying to get into bars.”

  “Yeah, but this one wasn’t trying to get into a bar. She was touring a half-completed decorator show house.”

  “Was there anything missing after she left?”

  “Good question,” I said. I wasn’t about to mention the gun that might have gone missing.

  “You should check carefully,” she said. “We’ve started seeing a lot of it. Crooks in their teens or early twenties. They come here and they just blend in. Everyone looks at them and sees students. If you don’t know them you just figure they’re transfer students, or students in a department whose building is on the other side of campus. It’s not like a neighborhood where people get to know each other and call the police if they see a stranger hanging around.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do in hindsight.”

  We wished each other a merry Christmas and I left. She seemed sorry to see me go. Clearly her boss’s desire to have someone in the office wasn’t motivated by a heavy workload. I suspected I had been the highlight of an otherwise boring day.

  I waited till I was outside again to call the police.

  “No dice,” I said. “Jessica was definitely not a student.”

  “Blast,” he said. That was usually as close to cursing as the chief went, so I knew he was seriously frustrated.

  “I’m heading back to the house,” I said. “Unless you need me to do anything else.”

  “Just be careful,” he said.

  As soon as I stepped in the door of the show house, Sarah and Violet came running to meet me.

  “Did you hear?” Sarah said. “The police found all our packages.”

  “Clay did have them after all,” Violet said. “What a horrible man!”

  “Martha was livid,” Sarah said. “If he wasn’t already dead, I think she’d probably strangle him over this.”

  “And I’d probably help her,” Mother said from the doorway of her room.

  I was still taking off my coat when Randall pulled up in a panel truck.

  “Got that new mattress for Clay’s room,” he said, as he came in the front door. “Can anyone help me haul it in?”

  Eustace said a few words in Spanish to Tomás and Mateo, and they raced out the door.

  “And I found some black sheets and a bedspread to replace the damaged ones,” Randall went on, handing me a bag from a well-known discount chain. “Had to send my cousin Mervyn down to Richmond for them.”

  “Excellent,” I said, pulling the package of sheets out of the bag.

  “These are cotton polyester blend,” Eustace said, in a tone of utter horror.

  “Yeah,” Randall said. “That’s what Mervyn could find down in Richmond. Not a hot item in the River City, black sheets.”

  “Clay’s were Egyptian cotton with a fifteen hundred thread count,” Eustace said.

  “And now they’re locked up in the Caerphilly Police Department’s evidence room,” Randall said. “And even if the chief let us have them back, between the bloodstains and damage from the ax the killer used to wreck the room, they don’t look so pretty.”

  “I seem to remember Clay saying he had to special order the sheets from somewhere,” I said. “And they took forever to get here. Even if we knew his source, it’s not as if we have the time to order them all over again.”

  “And it’s also not as if the people coming through the house are going to wallow on the sheets,” Randall said. “We’ll probably have a docent in here to make sure no one touches a thing.”

  “Well, go ahead,” Eustace said. “Who knows? If you actually put those sorry things on the bed in Clay’s room, he just might rise from the dead to smite you, and save Chief Burke the trouble of solving his murder.”

  With that he strode majestically back to his own room.

  “Do you really think anyone will notice?” I asked Mother. “Or care?”

  “If anyone does, we can tell them it was a deliberate design decision on Clay’s part,” Mother said.

  I suspected this was a subtle attempt to sabotage Clay’s posthumous reputation, but I didn’t really care.

  Tomás and Mateo appeared at the front door, carrying the mattress. I followed them upstairs and watched as they efficiently put it in place and left, taking the packaging materials with them.

  I opened the package of sheets—okay, they weren’t the softest I’d ever felt, but they looked fine. I made the bed, and topped it off with a matching black coverlet.

  And someone had responded to my pleas for design assistance and added a few token Christmas decorations. The dress
er now held a red bowl filled with gold-painted magnolia leaves, flanked by two red candles in black glass holders. Not my idea of a proper Christmas decoration—it was beautiful but cold and uninviting, and I couldn’t help comparing it to our house, where Mother had achieved beautifully decorated rooms that seemed to welcome friends, toys, dogs, carols, cups of hot chocolate, and Christmas cookies. But I had to admit that the bowl and candles looked like precisely what I’d have expected of Clay.

  Mother, Eustace, and Martha appeared in the doorway as I was surveying the room.

  “Very nice,” Mother said.

  “I suppose it will have to do,” Eustace said.

  “My thanks to whoever brought in the decorations,” I said.

  “Seemed like his kind of thing,” Martha said.

  “The room still needs something,” I said. I winced as soon as the words left my mouth. How many times had I heard the designers say that about a room that looked just fine to me. But in this case, I thought I was right. “The walls look pretty bare.”

  “He might have been planning to leave them that way,” Eustace said. “His rooms always looked a little bare to me.”

  “I think Clay would have used the words ‘uncluttered’ and ‘clean’ and ‘minimalist’ to describe his work,” Martha said.

  I glanced over in surprise. She sounded almost melancholy.

  “But I think Meg’s right about the room needing something,” she went on. “Not a lot—just a few well-chosen pieces of art on the walls. The problem is, without him here to do the choosing, I don’t see how we can possibly decide what.”

  “Didn’t Randall find his design sketches, dear?” Mother asked. “What do they show?”

  “They show art there, and there, and there.” I pointed to the three biggest bare spots. “But the art is indicated by a rough rectangle. Nothing in his almost nonexistent notes gives me any idea what he had in mind.”

  “You see?” Martha said. “Impossible. We shouldn’t even try.”

  “So while the room may need something,” Eustace said, “I think its needs will have to remain unfulfilled. You can’t always get what you want.”

  “Martha, dear, I think you’re in a lot better position to decide what that something is than we are,” Mother said. “You’re so good at that elegant simplicity he was clearly trying to emulate. Much better than Clay, actually.”

  Nicely flattered, I thought.

  “Yeah.” Martha did look pleased.

  “And you’ve known him longer than any of us,” Eustace added.

  Martha didn’t like that as much.

  “Don’t remind me,” she said. “Well, I’ll think about it. By the way, I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “Right about what?” I asked.

  “Clay was the one stealing the packages,” she said. “You didn’t believe me.”

  “I didn’t disbelieve you,” I said. “But without any kind of proof—”

  “Well, it’s water under the bridge now,” she said. “The bastard won’t be doing it again. I’ve got work to do.”

  She strode out.

  “Which means she’s going to ignore my request for help with the room,” I said. “Because if she did a really good job on Clay’s room, it would reduce her already small chance of winning the best room contest.”

  “Her rooms are very nice,” Mother said.

  “Yeah, but they’re two bathrooms and a laundry room,” I said. “You really think the judges are going to be that impressed?”

  Mother nodded as if conceding my point.

  “Look, you guys are busy,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You, dear?”

  “Is my taste that awful?”

  “No, dear, but Clay’s room isn’t very much to your taste, is it?” she said.

  “True,” I said. “I thought I’d ask Vermillion for some help. They’ve both got that black-and-red color thing going on.”

  Mother and Eustace both froze.

  “I think she’s kidding,” Mother said, after a few moments.

  “I certainly hope so,” Eustace muttered.

  “I was,” I said. “Actually, I know exactly what to hang there. Clay’s own paintings.”

  Mother and Eustace were silent, and obviously startled. But they didn’t ask, “What do you mean, his own paintings?” Interesting.

  “I suppose that would work,” Mother said.

  “Assuming you can find any of his paintings,” Eustace said. “It’s not something he’d ever have done, though. I think he was trying to forget his old life.”

  “If he was trying to forget it, then why did he have some of his paintings hanging in his living room?” I asked. “At least I’m pretty sure they’re his. I saw them when the chief called me over to look at the packages Clay stole—you heard about that, right?”

  They nodded.

  “I don’t think he was trying to forget his old life,” I went on. “Just trying to hide it from the rest of the world.”

  “Which means he’d definitely never have hung his own paintings in the show house,” Eustace said. “But now that he’s gone—why not? Can’t hurt him now. And it’s about the only thing I can think to put there that would be absolutely, undeniably his work.”

  “Yes,” Mother said. “A good idea.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” I went on. “Does everyone know about Clay’s checkered past?”

  They exchanged a look.

  “People will talk,” Mother said.

  “Martha will talk,” Eustace said. “And she’s not exactly an unbiased source. I assumed she was just spreading lies about Clay until I checked with a friend who runs a gallery in New York.”

  “And he confirmed her story?” I asked.

  “He told me the facts, which were a lot less damning than Martha made them out to be,” Eustace said. “To hear her talk, you’d think he was a serial killer who’d gotten off with a slap on the wrist.”

  “Well, she had considerable provocation,” Mother said.

  “To slander the guy?”

  “Slander is a little strong, don’t you think?” Mother murmured.

  They went back to their rooms, still amicably debating whether Martha’s dislike of Clay had motivated her to judge his past actions too harshly. I left them to it.

  I pulled out my cell phone and called the chief about getting back into the house to borrow Clay’s paintings.

  “I have no objection,” he said. “But I think you should get permission from the estate first.”

  “Do we even know who inherits?” I asked.

  “A brother in Richmond,” the chief said. “Runs a used-car dealership there. I can give you his number.”

  “Do you think it’s okay to call so soon after Clay’s death?” I asked.

  “I didn’t get the feeling he was too distraught,” the chief said. “They hadn’t seen each other in five years.”

  The brother was, at first, baffled by my request.

  “Sure I can sell you the paintings,” he said. “If we can agree on a price. But not till we finish probating the estate, and who knows how long that will take.”

  “I don’t want to buy the paintings,” I said. “I want to borrow them. To display in the show house, in the room Clay decorated.”

  “Show house?”

  “The last project he did before his untimely death,” I said. “As a memorial to his life and work.”

  I was laying it on a bit thick, but the brother didn’t seem to be grasping the concept.

  “I’m not sure we want to do that,” he said. “They could be worth something. Not my cup of tea, but for a while there he was getting a pretty high price for them.”

  “Yes, but he’s fallen off the radar in the last fifteen years,” I said. “An artist needs to keep producing new work to keep people interested, and I got the impression he hasn’t been painting these last few years.”

  “Not since he went off to prison,” the brother said. “He came and stayed with me when h
e got out. I thought maybe he’d start up painting again, but he never did. Just hung around moping until I told him he had to get a job or get out.”

  “What happened then?” I asked.

  “He managed to get a job working for a woman decorator,” he said. “Old girlfriend of his.”

  “What was her name?” I asked.

  “Martha something,” the brother said.

  Interesting. Clay wasn’t just Martha’s hated rival. He was also her hated ex.

  “He knew her from high school, I think. Moved out of my basement and into her fancy West End house. And the next thing I knew, he’s a decorator himself.”

  Heavy sarcasm on the word “decorator.” Was he implying that his brother wasn’t much of a decorator? Or indicating that he didn’t think much of decorating as a career choice?

  “You didn’t approve?” I asked aloud.

  “More like he didn’t approve of me. Didn’t want to have anything to do with a used-car salesman. We weren’t getting along when he left, and I haven’t heard much from him since. I’m just hoping he hasn’t left a whole bunch of debts for me to take care of.”

  I saw my opening.

  “Well, if he has left debts, selling the paintings could help out, couldn’t it?” I said. “Assuming you can get his name out there again to raise the price. Displaying the paintings in the show house will help make him visible again. Hundreds and hundreds of affluent people will be going through that house, seeing the paintings in the best possible setting. And if anyone asks if they’re for sale, we can steer them to you. When you combine that with the publicity that’s bound to follow when the media find out his real name—well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the price you can get for the paintings went up considerably.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, that might be something we could think about doing.”

  “And we’ll post a cash bond for the appraised value of the paintings, to ensure their safe return, and give you credit in the program as a major sponsor.”

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  Okay, we had a deal, but it took a little while to hash out the terms. Program credit turned into an ad for the brother’s car dealership, but he agreed to fax me permission to borrow as much of Clay’s artwork as I wanted.

  “Not just a former boss but a former girlfriend,” I muttered after I hung up. Should I tell the chief about this, or would he already know it? Of course, Martha had an alibi—unless the chief had found a problem with it. But what if one of Clay’s more recent flames found out about their shared history and thought they were rekindling their old romance? I’d have thought they were more likely to rekindle the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, but who knows what crazy ideas someone who hadn’t seen them together might get. Someone like Felicia Granger, for example.