Six Geese A-Slaying

by Donna Andrews

  Every single stretch of roofline, including all the dormers and gables, was trimmed with a three-inch fringe of icicle lights. Every shutter, window-frame, and doorway was outlined with evergreen garlands trimmed with red bows. Every window had been painted to look like stained glass and behind each set of brightly colored panes glowed not only a flickering electric candle but a small constellation of prisms to reflect and scatter the light. Fortunately, Mother’s taste didn’t run to reindeer on the roof, but she had sent a team up to drape it with a giant banner that read “Peace on Earth.” A pair of Christmas doves the size of turkeys hovered over each end of the banner, pretending they were holding it up, though in reality that function was performed by a sturdy cable around the chimneys on either end of the main house. A wreath the size of a truck tire obscured most of the front door, and more evergreen garlands made a festive path down to the mailbox. As we watched, the cousins were arranging the cartload of poinsettias into a bank of red and green on the front porch.

  It wasn’t exactly my taste, but considering that I hadn’t lifted a finger to bring it about, I wasn’t going to complain. I just had to remember not to fetch the paper in my bathrobe for the rest of the holiday season—in the three days since Mother’s crew had finished it, the house had become a minor local tourist destination.

  Even as we spoke, another family group flagged down a passerby to take their picture on our front steps. All in all, the decorations were a smashing success, and boded well for the interior design business Mother had announced she’d be opening in the spring.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said. “I just stopped by to ask where the Dickens are.”

  “Where the dickens are what?” I asked.

  Mother allowed a small note of exasperation to creep into her sigh.

  “The Dickens characters, dear,” she said. “For the Christmas Carol float. You know—Scrooge, Tiny Tim—”

  “Oh, right.” I checked my clipboard. “Front yard, to the left of the walkway. Who are you, anyway?”

  “You can tell she’s having a bad day when she can’t recognize her own mother,” Clarence said, almost managing to keep a straight face.

  “I’m playing Mrs. Cratchit,” Mother said. She floated off toward the front yard, pausing briefly to straighten the evergreen garland decking one of the trash barrels. As Mother was fond of saying, it’s those little details that really make a design.

  “I thought the Cratchits were paupers,” Clarence said.

  “They were. Poor as churchmice. Mrs. Cratchit is described as ‘dressed out but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons, which are cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence.’ ”

  “Have you memorized the whole book?” he asked. “I’m impressed.”

  “Only parts of it,” I said. “The abridged version. Michael’s rehearsing for his one-man Christmas Carol show, so by the time he’s ready, I’ll have the whole thing down pat.”

  “Oh, wonderful! When?”

  “Six P.M. tomorrow night at the college auditorium; tickets ten dollars at the door; proceeds to benefit the Caerphilly Children’s Fund,” I rattled off.

  “What a lovely way to spend Christmas Eve,” he said. “I’ll be there. Meanwhile, don’t worry about Larry. He’s fine.”

  “Larry?” I repeated. My glance strayed down to my clipboard. Was I missing a Larry?

  “Larry the camel.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Trust Dr. Blake to name his zoo’s camels after the Three Stooges.”

  “A wonderful sense of humor, your grandfather.”

  I made a noncommittal noise. Less than a year ago we’d learned that Dr. Montgomery Blake, the world-famous conservationist and animal welfare activist, was Dad’s long-lost father. I was still working on thinking of him as “Grandfather” instead of “Dr. Blake.” I hadn’t yet begun learning to appreciate his odd, curmudgeonly sense of humor.

  “Anyway,” Clarence was saying. “Larry always fakes a limp when he wants attention. I’ve got them feeding him some camel treats, and he’ll be fine by parade time. By the way, you do realize that you sent the elephants to unload in the pasture where the drummers and fifers are rehearsing, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “If you’re heading there anyway, see if you can convince the drummers and fifers that all that racket they’re making could spook the elephants.”

  “It would if they kept it up,” he said, frowning. “Where do you want them to go instead? The musicians, that is.”

  “In the cow pasture behind the house. It’s farther away—and downwind.”

  “You don’t really intend to inflict a dozen bagpipers on a herd of defenseless cows?” Clarence said, with mock fierceness.

  “There are no cows in the cow pasture at the moment,” I said. “It’s too full of Boy Scouts—they had their annual pre-parade campout there. And good luck spooking them—Rob was out last night helping ride herd on them, and he reports that they laughed at all his scariest ghost stories.”

  “This modern generation,” he said, shaking his head. “Well, I’m off to cope with the camels and elephants.”

  Of course the moment he left, I wondered what he meant by camel treats. Did one of the leading pet food companies manufacture such a thing? And if not, what did you use to bribe a sulking camel back into good humor?

  I could ask him later. I looked back at my check-in sheet. I was using a tiny self-inking stamp of a holly leaf to mark everyone present and accounted for. I smiled with satisfaction at the almost unbroken garland of leaves marching down the right-hand side of the page.

  I accepted a piece of peanut brittle from a small angel with red pigtails and a cup of eggnog from a passing cousin. I waved at a local farmer who strolled by herding a small flock of white turkeys with red bows around their necks. Evidently they were marching in the parade—which meant, I hoped, that they wouldn’t be anyone’s dinner this holiday season. Someone in the front end of a reindeer costume, complete with a battery-powered flashing red nose, wandered by scanning the crowd as if he’d lost something. Probably whoever was playing the hind legs.

  “Aunt Meg? We’re here.”

  My twelve-year-old nephew, Eric McReady, appeared at my elbow, at the head of a swarm of brown-clad shepherds around his own age. The Boy Scouts. Eric had recruited the local troop, who would be earning credits toward the next rank by performing public service. They’d be acting as mobile cleanup crews, with groups marching in the parade behind the camels, the elephants, the horses, and all the other large animals. Had the bagpipers evicted the Boy Scouts from their campground already? Or had Eric succeeded in getting his volunteers to show up on time? Either way it was good news. I smiled as I stamped them as present.

  “Are we really going to have a white Christmas?” one of them asked.

  I glanced up at the sky again. I’d been doing it so often all morning that I was getting a crick in my neck. The latest forecast I’d heard called for a small storm to dump two to six inches of snow on us sometime today. Normally two to six inches would have constituted a fairly large storm by central Virginia’s standards, but the meteorologists were almost ignoring it to focus on the massive storm system currently pummeling the Midwest and scheduled to unload another six to twelve inches on Christmas Eve.

  “Yes,” I said. “I just hope it waits until the parade is over.” Or at least until the tail end of the parade was closer to town than our house. I had no desire to be snowbound with half the population of Caerphilly. Or with the dozens of animals we’d recruited for the parade—for this evening, I’d arranged quarters for the animals in town, in the barns belonging to the Caerphilly College Agricultural Sciences Department. I only hoped the snow would hold off long enough for them to get there.

  “Snow! Snow! No school tomorrow! No school tomorrow!” chanted a dozen voices, as the Scouts capered around me in what I assumed was a snow dance.

  Yes, two to six inches were more than enough to cancel classes. In their enthusiasm, they seemed to have forg
otten that the schools were already closed tomorrow for the Christmas Eve holiday. In my school days, we’d have called this a wasted snow. But that didn’t seem to bother the exuberant flock of miniature shepherds.

  “Ten-hut!” Eric called.

  Behind him the rest of the shepherds fell into formation, saluted in unison and then clanged their shovels against their buckets.

  “Cleanup patrol reporting for duty, ma’am,” Eric said.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” I said. And thank goodness they’d stopped calling themselves the Dung Fu Fighters and other worse names. “We just had a camel incident over there,” I added, pointing to the offending spot.

  Most of the troop scurried over toward the small pile of camel dung and began squabbling to see who got to shovel it up.

  “It’s okay if Cal helps us, isn’t it?” Eric asked.

  I glanced down at the small form at his side—much smaller than any of the other shepherds. A round brown face peered out of his hood, and I recognized six-year-old Calvin Ripken Burke, the youngest grandson of our Baltimore-born chief of police.

  “As long as it’s okay with his grandfather,” I said.

  Cal grinned, and ran over to join the rest of the crew.

  “His brother is home sick with a cold,” Eric explained. “So Chief Burke asked me if I’d look after him. Otherwise he’d have to stay with his grandmother and march with the choir. Cal would much rather shovel . . . um . . . dung.”

  “You’re a good egg,” I said. “Here—I made a list of the animals that are marching today. It would be great if you could assign a squad to follow each group.”

  “Roger,” he said. “I’m going to do the elephants myself!” With that he ran off to organize his troops.

  All by himself? Well, he’d learn. Then again, as the youngest of my sister Pam’s six children, Eric was always running as fast as he could to keep up with his siblings, and was doomed to become a teenage overachiever. The parade cleanup was in good hands.

  And it sounded as if Clarence, reinforced by the threat of stampeding elephants, had finally resolved the piper and drummer problem. Now I could return to checking in the remaining participants and keeping them from causing too much trouble before the parade started. Which would be in . . . a little over three hours.

  I glanced up at the sky. No snow yet, thank goodness. Cold as it was, any snow that fell would undoubtedly stick around.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I turned to see my husband, Michael, tall and resplendent in his wise man’s costume.

  “Just fretting over the weather again,” I said, giving him a quick kiss. “You look very dashing. Have you got your myrrh?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, giving a deep, elegant salaam that went well with the vaguely Middle Eastern costume. “Not with me, of course; it’s on the prop table in the barn with the frankincense and fake gold. Your grandfather’s giving a lot of the kids camel rides, so I thought I’d see if you needed any help. So nothing’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Well, except for the fact that they keep changing their minds about when the snow will start, but there’s nothing you can do about that. Most of the participants are already here, and it’s not even nine.”

  “Which means we have to put up with them for the next three hours,” Michael said, frowning.

  “Cheer up,” I said. “That gives us plenty of time to send out a posse for anyone who doesn’t show.”

  “Or better yet, plenty of time to round up a replacement,” Michael said. He waved at a brace of tuba players in Caerphilly High School band uniforms. “No one is irreplaceable.”

  “Except possibly the camels,” I said, as I pointed dramatically to the left to steer the tuba players toward the rest of their band. “There are just two people left that I’m at all worried about.”

  “Who?”

  “The Virgin Mary,” I said. “For the nativity scene float.”

  “The one who’s nine months pregnant.”

  “Only eight,” I said. “Maybe eight and a half. The costume’s bulky. No one will notice.”

  “Tell me again why we cast her as Mary?”

  “Her father-in-law owns a flatbed truck,” I said. “The only one we could find large enough to hold the nativity scene.”

  “She’s perfect for the role, then.”

  “It’s really the truck I’m worried about,” I said. I glanced down the road again, hoping to spot it. “We can replace her, but if the truck doesn’t show up, the Holy Family will have to walk all the way to Caerphilly. And then there’s Santa. He’s only a couple of miles away, and what do you bet he’ll be the last to show up. Of course, on the bright side, at least we won’t have to put up with him for too long. Frankly, if there’s anyone I’ll be happy to see the last of when the parade’s over, it’s him.”

  Chapter 3

  “Oh, Mr. Doleson’s not so bad,” Michael said.

  “Compared to whom?” I asked. “Scrooge? The Grinch? W.C. Fields with a hangover? Attila the Hun?”

  “I admit he’s a total grouch and can make ‘Good morning’ sound like a mortal insult,” Michael began.

  “Not that I’ve ever heard him say anything as polite as ‘good morning,’ ” I muttered.

  “But at least he’s a reclusive grouch, so we don’t have to see him more than once or twice a month.”

  “Wish we could say the same for some of my family,” I grumbled. “I can’t remember the last time we had dinner for two. But Ralph Doleson’s not my idea of a proper Santa.”

  “I don’t think he’s anyone’s idea of a proper Santa,” Michael said. “But he’s practically the only guy in town with the requisite white beard and round belly who’s also short enough to fit into the existing costume. You know how cheap the town council is—they would never pay to replace a perfectly good costume that’s only used once a year.”

  “Well, at least it’s only once a year,” I said. “And—speak of the devil.”

  The short, round, rather toadlike figure of Ralph Doleson was slouching our way. He was lugging a garment bag and a battered canvas duffel that I assumed contained his costume. He’d obviously made an effort for the occasion. He had on a clean pair of overalls. And in an unprecedented fit of vanity, he appeared to have shampooed his beard. Though not his long, stringy hair—a good thing he’d be wearing the Santa hat. His face wore its usual surly expression.

  I glanced casually at my watch. Nine o’clock on the dot. He might be lacking in social graces, our Santa, but at least he was punctual. Anyone who arrived from now on was officially late, and would receive the faint frown, the stern scowl, or an actual lecture, depending on how late they were and how penitent they seemed.

  “Morning, Mr. Doleson,” Michael said.

  Doleson looked up, scowling as if Michael had hurled a string of insults at him.

  “Do you expect me to get dressed in that barn of yours?” he snapped. “It’s full of children and animals.”

  A Santa who hated children and animals? I was about to snap back that the barn was the only men’s dressing room we had and he could change in plain sight if he liked, but fortunately Michael stepped in.

  “Of course not,” Michael said. “We’ve cleaned out one of the more private outbuildings for you. Wouldn’t do for the kids to spot Santa changing into uniform, now would it? Here, let me help you with your luggage.”

  Doleson snorted, but surrendered the garment bag and the duffel and shambled off in Michael’s wake.

  “One of the more private outbuildings?” I repeated. Maybe elegant estates had outbuildings. We had sheds, in various states of disrepair. Though they looked better than usual at the moment. Mother’s decorating crew had gift-wrapped the more disreputable-looking ones for the season, with green plaid paper and perky red bows, and decorated the rest with wreaths, evergreen garlands, and fake snow that would soon become superfluous.

  I managed not to break out laughing when Michael bowed and gestured grandly tow
ard the door of the pig shed. Michael must have done a good job of charming the old reprobate. Mr. Doleson peered through the door, nodded brusquely, and stepped in. Trust Michael to save the day and restore my good mood.

  The pig shed was the perfect place for Santa. We didn’t have any pigs, so the shed was rarely used. We’d stashed Santa’s sleigh there overnight in case the snow started slightly earlier than the weatherman predicted. The sleigh was an old horse-drawn wagon with boards nailed along both sides to hide the wheels. The boards were painted to look like runners, and I’d spent several hours the night before scraping off peeling paint, touching up the design, and then literally watching the paint dry—I’d had to run several space heaters to get the air warm enough for it to dry, and I didn’t think it was safe to leave them untended.

  Most years having a fake sleigh on wheels worked better than a real one, given how rarely we got a white Christmas in central Virginia. But how well would our ersatz sleigh work if the snow got very deep before the end of the parade? I shoved the thought out of my mind. The Shiffley Construction Company was on call for snow removal duty, standing by with snowplow attachments on all their trucks and tractors. If that wasn’t enough—well, there was nothing more I could do now.

  With the sleigh crammed into it, the shed wasn’t exactly palatial quarters but it was extremely clean—I’d made sure of that before we shoved the freshly painted sleigh inside. Mr. Doleson would have enough room to change in privacy, and he could spend the rest of the time until the parade began in the relative comfort of the sleigh’s padded back seat. Since Michael reappeared without him, I assumed Mr. Doleson was satisfied, and I stamped a particularly heavy-handed holly leaf beside his name on the participants’ list.