How the Finch Stole Christmas!

by Donna Andrews

  “I gather he’s not hiding in the house or the barn,” I said.

  “We checked pretty thoroughly before we gave the all clear,” the chief said. “And no fresh tracks leading to the woods in any direction. If he left here on foot, it was well before the storm let up.”

  “We saw one place on the far side of the barn where someone made a path while it was still snowing,” Aida said. “Right along one of the fences. From what you told the chief, we figured it was probably where you came in to make your inspection.”

  I nodded.

  “Vern’s doing another close search of the barn,” the chief said. “He’s heard tell of a case where a moonshiner set up one of those prefabricated underground tornado shelters under his shed, so he’d have a place to hide himself and his contraband when the Feds came raiding.”

  “Be sure and have him look under where the tiger is after they’ve hauled him away,” I said. “If I were a smuggler, that’s where I’d put my secret hideaway.”

  The chief looked at me for few moments, then nodded. He headed toward the barn.

  “I never cease to marvel at the deviousness of your mind,” Aida said. “How soon do you think you and the social worker can have Mrs. Willimer out of there?”

  “Soon, I hope, and actually she’s Mrs. Frost.”

  “Understandable,” Aida said. “Wouldn’t you trade Willimer for Frost if you had a chance?”

  “Or if I started out Frost, I’d refuse to take on Willimer to begin with.”

  “Yeah—look how fast I dumped my married name when I got rid of the jerk who owned it.”

  “Anyway, Meredith’s helping the old lady pack.”

  “Good. The chief thinks it could upset her to see her cats being chased down and hauled away, so he wants her gone before we start in the house.”

  I nodded. We both gazed at the truck for a few more minutes.

  “Haver’s missing too,” I said. “Him and his rental car.”

  “Maybe he came back and picked up Willimer,” Aida said. “Anyway, someone must have. Want to bet he was over getting wasted at the Clay Pigeon and got stranded there by the snow?”

  The Clay Pigeon was a disreputable bar in our neighboring county, and hands down the largest single source of 911 calls in either jurisdiction.

  “Are we talking Willimer or Haver carousing at the Clay Pigeon?” I asked.

  “Either.” Aida laughed. “Both.”

  “The Clay Pigeon’s about their style,” I said. “I’ll check on how Meredith and Mrs. Frost are doing.”

  I went back to the front door, braced myself, and let myself in.

  “Noooooooo!” Mrs. Wi—Mrs. Frost wailed.

  “Now, now,” Meredith was saying. “Calm yourself. The cats are becoming unsettled.”

  Becoming unsettled? The cats were already in full-bore panic mode, howling and caterwauling and leaping wildly around the room. And most unnerving, a dozen or so were gathered in a circle around Meredith’s feet, heads lowered, ears laid back, hissing and spitting and giving the impression they were waiting for the strategic moment to pounce on her en masse.

  “The packing doesn’t seem to be going very smoothly,” I observed.

  “We have a problem,” Meredith said through gritted teeth.

  “Noooo,” Mrs. Frost whined. She was blinking fast to keep her pale-blue eyes from overflowing with tears. “I can’t possibly go without all my kitties.”

  “You can’t possibly go with all your kitties.” Meredith was starting to sound a lot less like an unnaturally patient kindergarten teacher and a lot more like a woman who’d already spent far too long breathing in toxic cat pee fumes. I could sympathize.

  “Just a few kitties, then,” Mrs. Frost said. “Just my special favorites.”

  Meredith looked at me. I stifled a sigh.

  “Let me talk to the Inn,” I said.

  I went outside, both for privacy and to get a few breaths of fresh air.

  “Are you making any progress?” Clarence asked. He and one of the Shiffleys were loading several dog crates into a Shiffley Moving Company panel truck. “It will be a lot easier to round up all those cats without her present.”

  I liked that he didn’t say “underfoot,” even though that was probably what he meant.

  “Working on it,” I said, as I strolled to the far end of the farmyard.

  I pulled out my cell phone and called Ekaterina again.

  “The room awaits,” she said. “Do we have an ETA for the handoff?”

  “Not yet. Any chance I can talk you into making another exception to your no pets policy?”

  “Is Mr. Haver acquiring another finch?”

  “No, Mrs. Frost, the little old lady I’m bringing over, is refusing to go without her favorite cat. She’s in a wheelchair, so technically we could just haul her out still pleading for her darlings, but—”

  “But what’s one little pussycat?” Ekaterina said. “Of course.”

  “I can’t promise it will be a particularly well-behaved little pussycat,” I warned as I watched a fat gray and white cat who was sitting just inside one of the front windows, sharpening his claws on the sill.

  “We will cope,” she said. “I always assume the possibility of higher-than-usual maintenance costs when we receive a guest who is perhaps not accustomed to staying in an establishment of the caliber of the Caerphilly Inn.”

  Well, she couldn’t say I hadn’t warned her.

  “Thanks,” I said aloud.

  I hung up and strolled back to the door, relishing the fresh air while I could. Then I braced myself and plunged back into the cat-infested chaos.

  “One cat.” I held up my forefinger by way of emphasis. “And try to make it a reasonably sedate and well-behaved one.”

  “Ronnie, then.” Mrs. Frost said. “He’s a perfect lamb. Now where has he gotten to?” She craned her head and began scanning the room. “There he is!” she exclaimed, pointing to something behind me. “That’s Ronnie—the big yellow tomcat sitting on top of my sewing machine.”

  Ronnie only stayed on the sewing machine for a few seconds before leaping via a bookcase to the mantel. Her favorite would have to be one of the livelier ones. And definitely not fond of strange humans. I went outside and drafted a couple of Brigade members to bring in a cat carrier and help me catch Ronnie the lamb. It took a good twenty minutes before we finally cornered him. And then the three of us had to fight a pitched battle to stuff the brute into the carrier.

  When we finally had him safely latched in, I brought the carrier over to Mrs. Frost.

  “Are you sure we have the right one?” I asked. At least 20 percent of the cats swarming through the house were yellow striped cats of various sizes. I had visions of arriving at the Inn only to have her declare we’d brought the wrong kitty and had to go back to find the right one.

  “Oh, yes. That’s Ronnie. Such a handsome, high-spirited boy.”

  I took a closer look at Ronnie. High-spirited maybe, but handsome? He was missing most of one ear, and rather a lot of clumps of fur. Perhaps I should suggest to Meredith that she take Mrs. Frost to have her eyes examined while she was in town.

  Still, he did have a fine, powerful voice, which he was using vigorously to protest his imprisonment. My fellow cat nabbers, who had been standing by to make sure we had the right suspect, breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Let’s get patched up,” one of them said. “I have a first aid kit in my car.”

  “I have plenty of Band-Aids in the bathroom,” Mrs. Frost said. “Just help yourself.”

  From the look that passed over my helpers’ faces, I suspected they were having the same thought I was: no way was I going to put anything from this house on my bare skin, much less an open wound.

  “Oh, we couldn’t think of imposing,” one of them said.

  “Brigade rules,” the other added.

  With that they fled.

  “My dad would have my head if I didn’t let him take care of my little scratches.”
I tucked my hand behind my back so she wouldn’t see quite how many not-so-little scratches I had. “You know how parents are.”

  “Of course,” she said. “If you’re going outside, then, you can take Ronnie’s litter box out to the car. It’s under the sewing machine—the bright blue one,” she added, as if suddenly noticing that there were four mismatched litter boxes there. “You know how territorial cats can get about their litter boxes.”

  I grimaced, but obediently picked up the litter box in question, held it up for Mrs. Frost’s nod of approval, and carried it out to the Twinmobile. Luckily for me, the litter box showed few signs of use. Although most of the several dozen litter boxes tucked into nooks and crannies didn’t appear to have been very recently used. Which made sense to me—cats are realists. Why bother with litter boxes when clearly there was no penalty for ignoring them and no effort on the part of the humans to keep them tidy.

  Outside, I took deep breaths. My fellow cat wranglers were clustered around the rear of one of the SUVs, fishing things out of an open first aid kit and wincing as they dabbed their scratches with alcohol wipes.

  “And to think we’ve got to go in and do it all over again a hundred more times,” one of them muttered.

  “It’ll be easier,” the other said. “Catching one particular cat in a swarm like that’s hard. When we go in again, all we have to do is grab the first cat we can reach, stuff it in a carrier, and repeat until the place is empty.”

  “When we go in again, we use the masks,” the first one said. “And gloves, the padded ones. I don’t care how insulting the old lady finds it.”

  “With luck, the little old lady will be gone by the time you have to go in again,” I said as I joined them at the SUV and helped myself to the alcohol wipes and bandages.

  Just then Clarence and another of the Brigade emerged from the barn, carrying a large plastic dog crate. From the amount of yipping and squealing emerging from the crate, I deduced it had more than one occupant.

  “Meg!” Clarence called out. “Just the person I was looking for. I wanted to ask you something.”

  “The answer is no,” I said.

  Chapter 17

  Clarence blinked with surprise.

  “I haven’t even asked my question yet,” he said.

  “I know what your question is. You want to know if you can keep all these animals in our barn. And the answer is no. Michael and I are both incredibly busy with the play and the festival and all the other seasonal events, on top of which we have a houseful of two-legged guests arriving today and tomorrow. We don’t have time to babysit dozens of four-legged ones.”

  “I can get volunteers to do that. But there are so many more animals than I was expecting—we just don’t have the sheer physical space to put them in.”

  “Other people have barns.”

  “How about if we just use your barn as a staging area?” he said. “Since everybody does already know where it is. We can do all the vaccinating and chipping there, and it will give us a closer-in place where people can come to pick up the animals.”

  Actually, that didn’t sound too unreasonable.

  “And I promise we’ll have them out within, say, three days.”

  “No,” I said. “If you can have them out by nightfall, you can stage them in our barn. But not for three days. Twelve hours.”

  After a bit more haggling as we hauled another crate full of puppies from the barn to Clarence’s van, we settled on twenty-four hours.

  “And don’t worry,” he said. “When people see how cute these golden retriever puppies are, we won’t have enough to go around. I expect a record number of foster fails on this mission.”

  “Foster fails?” I echoed. “How is that a good thing?”

  “A foster fail is when the foster family falls in love with the animal and doesn’t want to give it back,” he said. “And since they’ve already been screened and approved as foster families, the adoption’s a breeze.”

  “Let’s hope we have a lot of them, then,” I said. “I’ll go and see how Meredith’s coming with Mrs. Frost.”

  “Look out,” Clarence called to a pair of volunteers who were lifting up a very large dog crate. “That latch on that one doesn’t look too secure. It could—”

  Suddenly the door of the crate flew open and a small river of golden fur poured out onto the snow. Then the puppies, undeterred by their fall—which was only about a foot anyway—took off in all directions yipping with excitement.

  “Catch them!” Clarence shouted.

  The volunteers and I all took off after puppies while Clarence ran to the barn to call for more help. People poured out of the barn and joined in the chase. The puppies seemed to think this was the best game they’d ever played. And they might have been small, but they were fast, energetic, and agile. They could turn on a dime and dart between the legs of a human who thought he had them cornered. They could duck under parked cars and trucks and tease their pursuers with mock fierce barks and growls

  In addition to the puppies, an adult dog had also landed on the snow. She didn’t take off—just sat there on the snow for a few moments, glancing around before putting her head on her front paws with a sigh. Maybe she was wiser than we were, and knew her puppies would come back eventually. Maybe she was just too tired and dispirited to care. I remembered days when I’d felt like that, especially the first year of the twins’ life.

  “You take it easy,” I told her. “We’ll round them up.”

  And then I took off after a puppy who ran in an ever widening circle, yipping with delight, until he caught sight of something in the direction of the woods and made a beeline for it. He was heading for roughly the same patch of woods I’d hidden in the day before—to my left, I could see a faint indented line where the snow had covered over the path I’d made.

  I redoubled my speed—if he got into the woods, we might never find him again. And he might think himself very fierce, but he’d be easy prey for foxes. Hawks. Owls.

  To my relief, he stopped just short of the woods and began barking furiously at something. Whatever he was barking at was right along the path I’d taken to the barn from my hiding place. Was someone there now? I could worry about that later. I managed to get near him, and though he dodged my first several pounces, I finally managed to grab him and clutch him to me.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” I told him.

  He responded by wriggling in an effort to get down again, and finally gave up and began licking my face.

  I stood there for a few moments to get my breath back, and watched the end of the puppy roundup. When Clarence, looking like a mother hen, began shouting “We’re still missing one! There should be nine!” I held up my wayward ball of fur and everyone cheered with relief.

  The puppy settled down in my arms and appeared to be going to sleep.

  “Let’s get you back with the rest of your litter before I start getting the crazy idea that Spike and Tinkerbell need a little brother.”

  I glanced back at the woods the puppy had come so close to disappearing in and spotted something. Possibly the something the puppy had been barking at.

  A boot.

  No, not just a boot. A boot-clad human foot, sticking out from under the snow.

  Chapter 18

  I took a few steps backward, staring at the foot. Then I turned and hurried back toward the house and barn.

  “Where’s the chief?” I called out as I drew near. “I think we have a problem here.”

  I handed my puppy to a volunteer. Chief Burke appeared from behind one of the trucks.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Let me show you,” I said. I led the way to the much-trampled area by the woods where I’d finally caught the puppy and pointed to the foot.

  “Oh, dear.” He pushed up his glasses and studied the foot. “Do you recognize it?”

  “A snow boot,” I said. “From this angle, it looks a lot like the North Face boots Michael and I are giving Rob for Ch
ristmas.”

  He glanced at me with a look of mild exasperation on his face.

  “I know, I know,” I said. “No, I have no idea who’s wearing the boot.”

  “We should get your father over here to see if— Let me check.” He inched close enough to the body to reach out and touch the leg, just above the boot. He shook his head. “Freezing cold. Pretty sure he’s dead. But if you’d be so kind, go send your father and Horace over here. And tell Vern and Aida to have everyone stop where they are till further notice. This farmyard may just have become a crime scene.”

  I nodded. I noticed that he’d told me to send Horace and Dad, not bring them. I might pretend not to have grasped that subtlety.

  “And have them bring some snow shovels,” the chief called after me.

  Dad and Horace were among the crowd waiting by the vehicles. Horace, together with Vern and Aida, were discouraging people from going any closer to where the chief was standing.

  “The chief says for everyone to keep back and stay where you are,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” One of the volunteers.

  “I found a body in the snow,” I explained. A murmur ran through the group.

  “Dead?” Dad asked.

  “The chief wants you to make sure,” I said.

  Dad grabbed his old-fashioned black doctor’s bag, which had been sitting near his feet, and trotted out to the body. He’d probably customized his bag today with a few extras that might prove useful in dealing with any ailments the rescued creatures might be afflicted with—along with any injuries they might inflict. But it would always hold the basics—both for saving lives, as he’d done for decades, and for fulfilling the duties of his recently acquired role as the local medical examiner.

  “He wants you, too,” I said to Horace. “He’s probably hoping you brought your crime scene kit.”

  “He knows I’m never without it.” Horace ran toward his car.

  “Can I have a pair of those?” I asked, pointing to the snow shovels several of the Shiffleys carried.

  “Who is it?” one of the Shiffleys asked, as he handed me his shovel.