Further proof that her luck had changed for the better, she also caught room service right before the kitchen shut down and they promised her the cheeseburger she had been craving for the last fifty miles. She ate it and most of the fries too.
Though physically exhausted, she found that sleep was far away, and knowing that Darby had nocturnal habits she decided to give her a call before retiring to count sheep.
“Hello.” There were party noises and Juliet could hear Carrie Simmons’ emotion-encumbered voice in the background. She always liked to emote, but it was worse when she’d been drinking.
“Darby, it’s Juliet.”
“You made it. We were getting worried.”
“Me too. I had a little adventure on the way up.”
“Are you okay? The weather has been awful.”
“Yes, I’m fine—now that I’ve eaten. Listen, is Harrison there with you?”
“Yeah, he’s beginning to look sleepy though.” More liked bored with Carrie doing Mae West. Her voice changed. “Is it something important? Do you want me to put him on the phone?”
“No. But do you think you could slip away from the party and come to my room for a few minutes?”
“Sure. What room are you in?”
“Um.…” Juliet had to think. The rooms were named as well as numbered. “I’m in Cedars ten. That’s second floor.”
“Okay. We’ll be there shortly.”
Juliet pulled the bottle of Amaretto out of her suitcase and fetched three tumblers from the bathroom. Darby and Harrison weren’t big drinkers but she figured that they might need something after she talked to them.
A tap on her door came a moment later. She opened, expecting Darby and Harrison, but instead it was Esteban and Raphael crowding her doorway.
“Are you psychic?” she asked, stepping back, and going to the bathroom for the last glass. If pushed she would drink from the bottle. It had been that kind of day.
“You were late. We got worried,” Esteban said, stepping over the room service tray and then setting it outside the door.
“Well, in this case you were justified. I’ve been having adventures. Homicidal ones.”
Raphael sighed.
“Tell me.”
“We’re waiting for Darby and Harrison. I think my little journey into weirdness concerns Harrison, at least indirectly. If you don’t mind, I’d rather only tell this once. More. The authorities were having a little trouble with my story and I had to repeat it slowly and thoroughly.”
“It concerns Harrison?”
She could see this surprised both men. Harrison was devoted to his music and to Darby. Juliet wouldn’t stack up her knowledge of the human heart against say Sigmund Freud, but she knew a bit about human avarice and the capacity for violence. Harrison possessed neither flaw. Raphael knew this too. Murder had no business coming to call in his neighborhood.
Esteban opened the door to Darby and Harrison. The composer politely stood aside so that Darby could enter first. He had lovely manners.
“Please sit down. Or loll on the bed. I’m passing out restoratives just in case,” Juliet said.
“Oh no,” Darby said, accepting the offered glass. “You do look a little subpar. What happened to your hair?”
“It was styled by a blizzard,” she said and kept the last glass for herself since Raphael declined to partake. “For starters, does anyone know a member of Clan Buchanan with long silver hair and a reason to be carrying a libretto of Harrison’s Requiem?”
“Yes,” Harrison said warily. “At least, maybe. He’s Jeremiah Holtz, my soloist—a tenor. He missed rehearsal this afternoon. No one has seen him since this morning. I was about to start calling hospitals.”
Juliet wondered how someone named Holtz fit in with Clan Buchanan but left it for the time being.
“He was driving a red Jag, maybe lived in Las Vegas?” Harrison kept nodding. “Well, he’s not your soloist anymore,” Juliet said bluntly. “If it’s the same guy I saw, he was murdered this afternoon, stabbed with his own sgian dubh. I hope there is an understudy.”
* * *
Juliet closed the door on her last visitor and stared at the generic flowers and kitten print on the wall. It was bland and inoffensive mediocrity—except the cat’s back legs were jointed in the wrong direction. Had any occupant ever noticed or complained? Probably not.
She forgot, living among creative people who valued art, that the world was overpopulated with persons who simply didn’t care what hung on their walls, sat on their bookshelves, or assaulted their ears in elevators.
Juliet sighed and unzipped her bag so she could find her nightgown. All she wanted was a hot shower and to go to bed. She had looked at Raphael and then Esteban after she told her story and they had looked a bit grim, but also—Esteban at least—had looked speculative. They said nothing though while Darby and Harrison were there. Then, once Juliet had started yawning, they had left en masse without any private conversation.
Juliet had been sure that after the large meal and Amaretto she would drop off into oblivion, but after a year of living in the Woods, the noise of elevators, parking lot arrivals, and outside floodlights that lit the room through the crack in the blackout curtains were enough to keep her awake in spite of her physical exhaustion. Quiet, like food and water, had become a necessity and the normal city sounds smote her senses. Her biorhythms would need time to adapt. And the longer she lay there, listening to strange voices in the hall, the clearer the visual memory of the dead Jeremiah Holtz became.
He had not died as most people wish, either in their sleep or in a comfortable bed surrounded by family and pumped full of morphine. Poor man. Had he deserved his death, courted it?
She exhaled loudly. They were in the mountains—for Christmas. It was wrong that this thing from another, violent world had intruded.
The wind howled, audible even above the other noises, reminding her of the fact that she had nearly died. Juliet finally resorted to meditation to clear out her unhappy mind and let in the restful sheep.
* * *
She came up out of slumber hours later, dragging her dream with her. She was trapped in snow, buried to her chin, while people in kilts stood singing Christmas carols beside a burning automobile.
It took her a moment to realize that her delayed rest had let the morning advance past the continental breakfast and on to the Christmas caroling by the grammar school children who were there to see the entries in the annual gingerbread house competition. The night manager had explained this all as she was checking in so she didn’t wonder about the phantom voices.
Juliet pushed the covers aside and toddled over to the coffee machine they thoughtfully provided in every room. Clearly, though the dead man’s body was long out of sight, it was nowhere near out of mind. She would have to work on that.
Still, her worst feelings of oppression had lifted. She was at a festival to hear a friend perform a musical masterpiece. There would be good food, good company, entertainment. She had phoned Officer Gibbons with the name of Harrison’s missing tenor the night before. She would make her statement to whichever investigator came along that afternoon and then, duty done, she would forget about the whole thing. In the light of day, it was easy to dismiss the horrible details, to almost doubt that the murder had even happened. And it wasn’t her problem anyway, damn it. The killing had nothing to do with her.
She looked into the bathroom mirror, fortified by only a half cup of coffee, and actually smiled at the messy-haired Bohemian. She hadn’t cut her hair for a year and wasn’t sure when she would trim it again. What a liar she had been! All those years wearing blue suits and sensible black pumps—and boring pearls if the occasion was formal—and all for a job that had required she crazy-glue her lips and legs together lest they part in front of the wrong person.
“Bah, humbug,” she said and then laughed.
A second coffee and a hot shower later had her feeling positively sybaritic. Only the occasional twinge of ov
ertaxed muscles reminded her that she had done anything unusual the day before.
Juliet promised herself that she would stop in to see the gingerbread houses later in the day, but off-key children crooning “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” before breakfast were a bit much after her experience the day before. She needed time to adjust to the concentrated Christmas spirit.
A glance in the inn’s coffee shop showed her that it was crowded with parents waiting for the little singers, so she decided to cross the street to a small but less busy café that advertised a dozen kinds of scones, where hopefully there wouldn’t be choirs urging her to deck the halls that couldn’t possibly be more decked with holly and lights.
On her way through the lobby she checked the newspaper headlines on the collection of papers at the concierge’s desk. Nothing about a murdered tenor, but apparently a small herd of desperate cattle had forced themselves into an abandoned cabin and frozen to death inside the building. Because of freezing in certain positions, they were going to have to be sawn into pieces before they could be removed from the building.
“Isn’t that the strangest thing you ever heard?” The lady who asked that was leaning over her shoulder and had minty breath. Juliet handed her the paper and fled.
Her first look at the inn in daylight had her impressed. There were lots of tasteful greens swagged and tied with red bows, and LED twinkle lights in stylish white. The parking lot was flanked by two giant cedars, heavy with winter and more white than black, but handsome all the same. Instead of Christmas ornaments, they were decked with bird feeders and houses, which though charming, were probably not occupied at the time.
Around them were the mountains—bleak and white. Juliet found herself wishing that she had brought her paints and brushes. Painting was excellent for clearing the thoughts and opened creative channels in her mind. She wondered briefly if the budget would stand a trip to the art supply store, but decided that since she planned on doing a little Christmas shopping perhaps she should content herself with photographs from which she could paint later.
The coffee shop was an odd place, lots of bookshelves by the small round tables, filled with eclectic selections of periodicals, some in foreign languages and some clearly for precocious children.
There were foreign voices in the crowd. Juliet wondered what they made of the festival. She had traveled abroad at the start of her career but hadn’t enjoyed the language immersion as much as she had hoped. It had certainly aided her in learning foreign tongues, but she found absolutely every task, from calculating the cost of a cup of coffee in foreign currencies to learning the bus routes, to be headachingly difficult. And memorizing cultural nuances was a pain. She couldn’t believe there were people who actually sought out the experience voluntarily.
The air smelled of scones and coffee, but underneath there was the sour odor of wine. A glance at the double-sided menu explained. Apparently at night it morphed into a wine bar and the raw wood floor was bound to have drunk from the Dionysian cup from time to time and the ghosts of parties past lingered.
Apricot scones with orange tea sounded perfect, in spite of being urged to try the peppermint hot chocolate with snowman droppings—marshmallows, she assumed and shuddered. Marshmallows, unlike roses, were not appealing by any name so she declined. Instead she ordered a more adult beverage and then found a seat at one of the few oak tables. The chairs were a little bit too low for the counters but at least had padded seats. A girl in a sort of modified elf costume brought her the order only moments later, served on a selection of mixed china whose clashing floral patterns were charming.
Juliet glanced out the coffee shop’s steamy window as a quartet of Edwardian carolers strolled by singing “Ding Dong Merrily on High” and saw Carrie Simmons mincing along a crowded walkway. She looked miserably cold because she was dressed like a teen pop star in Los Angeles, imitating what she currently envied (the popular) and not what she secretly admired (classic skirts and jackets suited to a woman approaching fifty). That was because she was insecure and wanted to be young and popular forever.
This determined immaturity was a new phenomenon for Juliet, who had never been a worshipper at the shrine of youth or pop culture and saw little of it in her line of work. It seemed to happen mainly to women who had no brains and an endless ability to lie to themselves about what they saw in the mirror as decades passed. That was Carrie Simmons. Juliet had told Raphael that she was pretty sure that Carrie’s head was empty because there was a suspicious echo of blankly repeated words every time she addressed a comment at Carrie’s multiply pierced ear.
Once out on the street where the light was stronger, Juliet could see that the woman had dyed her hair a strange shade of pinkish-blonde that defied friendly adjectives even if Juliet had been inclined to look for them. Cotton candy was the best word that came to mind. Clearly the woman had been brain damaged when Jake Holmes bashed her head in. Bad enough to dye your hair any shade of candy, but pink didn’t suit her ruddy complexion, nor the red beaded cap she wore. And where was her coat? Doubtless, she thought she was a woman above such things as overcoats. A few more minutes out in the cold would cure her of that fantasy.
At least she had done away with the affectation of a walker. Carrie had had to lie about having a disability to get a first-tier cottage at the Woods, and until she had entered into an affair with a younger, married psychopath, the walker had been a useful prop.
Juliet sneered at the leggings and lace blouse, but admitted that Carrie did have on adorable Victorian lace-up boots. Juliet memorized the name of the boutique bag she was carrying because she had decided that she needed a new dress and shoes. Her classic black wool made her look like she was going to a funeral. Which was fine when she was still working and most of her social events were less fun than funerals, but out west everyone seemed to dress in lovely jewel tones and Juliet found herself thinking about skirts in velvets in hues of emerald green and garnet red.
She had also promised to look in on her neighbors who had rented booths at the Celtic fair, but first things first. She needed something cheery and warm—besides her smelly goat sweater—to wear outdoors. It had stopped snowing, but not freezing. She needed a couple warmer things or would have to spend every day huddled in her shapeless parka.
Across the park she could see a gondola suspended from what looked like dangerously thin wires, and knew from the guest book in her room that it was headed to where most of the stores were located. She decided to walk across the park rather than find a cab. Once there she would get someone to direct her to Posh.
Juliet left a tip on the table and swallowed her last sips of tea.
The cold was shocking but refreshing after the still, dry heat of the coffee shop. Signs along the way pointed the direction to miniature golf and ice-skating, but neither activity held any charm. The inn also offered sleigh rides, but at twenty bucks each way Juliet decided to walk. The road was faster and straighter than the pedestrian walkway which hadn’t yet been shoveled, but she stuck to the meandering path anyway. She had had enough of out of control cars on icy roads.
The walk had been effort enough. Juliet lived on the side of a mountain. Once a week she did a hundred-yard dash to beat the high school football team to the bakery for lunch-hour cupcakes. Occasionally she did yoga with Mickey Shaw on days when he wasn’t sun-worshipping in the nude. She considered this to be sufficient exercise for a woman of her age. Unfortunately it had not prepared her for hiking through snow at six thousand feet in an increasingly chill wind, especially not with sore muscles.
Posh was soon discovered, it being the only formal clothing store among the various sporting goods and athletic clothing shops whose window displays absolutely bulged with seasonal gifts, framed in garland and tinsel and twinkle lights blinking in fake snow.
Though the streets and stores were awash with Santa hats and reindeer antlers made of felt and candy canes that could double as walking sticks, none of this had encroached on Posh. The boutique
was not meant to appeal to the hoi polloi. They specialized in vaguely medieval-looking dresses made of stretch velvet in jeweled colors. By the door was a small sign in gold scrollwork: Shop Here For Beautiful Things.
It lacked delicacy, but as a practical admonition, Juliet thought it sound advice. Defiance of convention was for the young. No matter that it would probably be ten below and snowing, one should wear a dress and stockings rather than ski pants and a parka to a Requiem Mass. That the dress was beautiful was an added benefit.
Their stock had been depleted by fairgoers, but Juliet’s “handmaiden” found two gowns in her size, one black and one a sort of fiery topaz which she tried on in front of a mirror grand enough to grace Versailles. It was no contest. The black was elegant but so boring and expected. She opted for the topaz dress, never having owned anything in that color—except Marley—and, after due reflection, she admitted that she didn’t really own Marley. He was, after all, a cat.
The store had a small stock of lingerie, so abandoning herself to the feminine pleasure of wallowing in the silken fleshpots of womanly commerce, she bought lacy gold underthings and some thigh-high stockings, which she hoped would stay in place without garters.
Silly and useless sandals in gold completed her purchases, though she had hesitated before buying them. Her mother had been fond of the story of the magic shoes and had told it to her when she was very young. As a child she had found the idea of shoes that wouldn’t stop dancing to be amusing; as an adult, what stuck in her mind was the part about you shall dance until you are a ghost, until your skin hangs from your bones, and even when the skin is gone and only your entrails remain, they too shall dance.
“Rot and nonsense,” she scolded under her breath. “Anyway, I’m not dancing.”
She had added the shoes to her pile of loot and then fled before being talked into buying anything else frivolous. Her savings account couldn’t withstand the damage. The shoes and underthings cost more than her monthly rent.
3 Requiem at Christmas Page 3
