Mistletoe, Merriment, And Murder

by Sara Rosett

  I wanted to sob in frustration. I couldn’t have made it this far only to have him drag me back.

  The umbrella was at my feet where I’d dropped it when I hit the lattice. I picked it up, prepared to turn toward Simon, but I saw a corner where the lattice was bowed slightly. A foundation planting had worked its way between the sturdy support post and the lattice.

  I sprinted for the corner. I stuck the umbrella into the opening and cranked it back toward me.

  There was a satisfying pop as the industrial-size staple that held the lattice in place gave way. I raised the umbrella point and popped the next staple. I had the hang of it now and was moving upwards, separating the lattice from the post like I was unsnapping one of Nathan’s shirts. Out the corner of my eye, I saw Simon move into a crouch. The lattice wasn’t completely disconnected, but I wiggled a leg through the opening. I was backing through, the heavy coat protecting me from the staples and splinters, when Simon stood and raced toward me. He was coated in dust. Good, I thought fleetingly. So much for his neat little scenario.

  Almost out, I worked one shoulder through the opening.

  His eyes were wild and angry as his latex-gloved hand reached for me. I grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it at his face. He fumbled to a stop, swiping at his eyes. I wiggled my other shoulder out of the opening and ran.

  I didn’t have a clear plan except to put as much distance between me and Simon as I could, so I circled the deck and sprinted into Marie’s side yard. I saw the lights and heard the music of the holiday display in the neighbor’s yard, which, up until this point, I’d completely blocked out. It was like someone had turned up the volume on the radio. People. There had been a steady parade of cars in front of the house and now that it was fully dark, I bet there were even more lookers. I had to get into that yard.

  I looked back over my shoulder. Simon was emerging from the panel of lattice. The opening must have been too small for him and he’d had to make it bigger. I aimed for the center of the brightly lit yard next door and ran like there was a gold medal on the line.

  I crossed into the illuminated yard, skipping over extension cords, the bright lights making me squint. It was like stepping to center stage with floodlights focused on me as I zigzagged through snowmen, reindeer, angels, and the life-size Nativity scene near the porch.

  There were cars, plenty of them. Yes! I aimed for the one closest to me, a cream-colored oversized SUV. I leapt onto the running board. “Call the police,” I said. The woman in the passenger seat looked horrified. I could hear the solid click as she hit the automatic lock button. “No, wait.” I glanced over my shoulder at Simon. With his layer of dirt, blue latex gloves, and furious face, he was scary. He was trying to run and work something out of his pocket. His gun, I was sure. “Please help me. He’s got a gun.”

  The man in the driver’s seat shouted and waved me off. I was holding onto the side-view mirror. He reached for a switch and the mirror moved, causing me to lose my balance. I dropped back to the ground and he accelerated away. I looked to the next car in line, but they swerved away, too, looks of dismay on their faces. One little kid who’d had his face pressed against the window was crying. I realized I must look as weird and frightening as Simon.

  Suddenly the music cut off in mid-song and I heard a heavy thud behind me as something solid hit the ground. The lights continued to flicker as Simon writhed on the ground, trying to untangle his feet from several extension cords. I changed course and dashed for the house.

  “That’s enough. I don’t want any trouble. Now y’all best calm down or I’ll call the police.” I swiveled toward the porch where garlands were lighting up, then falling dark, at a frantic pace. Wreaths flashed on and off across the façade of the house. I finally spotted the source of the voice. It was Marie’s neighbor. I’d spotted him on my mad dash through the yard, but, bundled in a plain blue coat, and with his beard, I’d mistaken him for one of the Nativity figures placed near the porch. I saw now that he’d been sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, not actually in the Nativity scene.

  “Please do,” I shouted, trying to sound as rational and calm as I could to counteract my appearance. “He’s got a gun and he’s trying to kill me.”

  “Is that so? Good thing I have one of my own,” he said, and reached down to pick up a shotgun from near his feet. “Y’all stay just as you are, until we get this sorted out.”

  Simon stopped thrashing about. He’d finally managed to pull the gun from his pocket, but the neighbor saw it and barked, “Drop it.” Simon slowly put the gun on the ground and I collapsed into a sleigh beside an enthusiastically waving Santa.

  I’d forgotten about the cars on the street until I heard a shout behind me. A teenager leaned out of his window as he called, “Best light show ever. What time is the next show?”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  My breathing was still ragged from my sprint when I stood up abruptly. “Marie! Where’s Marie?” I said, advancing on Simon.

  The neighbor moved quickly down the steps, gun poised in his arm and aimed mostly at Simon, whose feet were still hopelessly tangled in extension cords. The neighbor kept a wary eye on Simon as he asked me, “Are you talking about Marie? Next door?”

  “Yes. Where is she? What did you do with her?” I said, addressing Simon.

  Simon shook his head. “I’m not saying another word.”

  A short woman in a sweater and jeans opened the front door and stepped outside. She held a phone in her hand. “They’re on the way . . . the police,” she said, taking in the scene before her and the long line of cars at a standstill on the street. “I knew this would come to no good, Ed,” she said, crossing her arms.

  “I’ve got to find Marie,” I said to Ed. He wife moved down the steps as I explained. “His name is Simon Williams. He killed his wife. You may have heard about her death in the news—struck on the head in her garage. He came here today to kill me, then frame Marie so that the police would think she killed his wife and me . . . Marie is probably still in the house.” Ed and his wife exchanged a glance, but didn’t move. “He separated us. He locked me in a closet and I don’t know what happened to Marie. Please. She might be hurt.”

  His wife threw up her hands. “Fine. I’ll check on her,” she said, and stomped off, still carrying the phone. She crossed the lawn, giving Simon a wide berth, and climbed the steps to ring the doorbell at Marie’s house.

  “She’s not going to answer the door,” I called, yearning to run over to the house and explore myself. “She’s probably unconscious somewhere inside.”

  She pressed the bell again. In the distance, I heard sirens. I couldn’t stand it any longer. Once the police arrived it would take even longer to explain what had happened.

  “I’ll check the back door,” I said as I broke into a run. “Please don’t shoot me,” I called back over my shoulder.

  Ed’s wife came back down the steps and was retracing her path back toward us when I skidded to a stop in front of the garage. “Do you hear that?” I asked. She took a step backward. “That low hum?”

  “What is it, Vicki?” Ed called.

  “Sounds almost like . . . a car running,” his wife said slowly.

  “We’ve got to get in there. Simon said he was going to make it look like Marie committed suicide.” The garage door didn’t have a handle, so I dropped to the ground and tried to work my fingers under it.

  Out the corner of my eye, I saw that the woman—Vicki—wasn’t moving. She was standing beside the remote entry keypad mounted outside the garage. I stood up and moved to her side. “Do you know the code?”

  The sirens blared from the end of the street and cars were inching to the side of the road to let the police through.

  She ran her hand over her forehead. “I did . . . Before Marie moved in, I watered the neighbor’s plants when they were out of town . . . what was it? Not their address number . . . oh! The last four digits of their phone number.” She quickly tapped through her contact lis
t in her phone, then punched numbers on the keypad. “If Marie’s changed it . . . ,” her voice trailed off as the door clanked upward, releasing the pungent smell of exhaust.

  With our hands over our mouths, we ran inside. Vicki opened the driver’s side door and there was Marie, limply slumped on the seat. Somehow we pulled her out and carried her to the front lawn.

  Vicki leaned over her, gripped her wrist, then said, “She’s got a pulse.”

  A few hours later, I tapped on the door of the hospital room before gently pushing it open. If Marie was asleep, I wasn’t going to wake her, but I had to stop by and check on her before I went home. She was sitting up in bed, clicking through the television channels with the remote control. “Ellie!” she said when she saw me, and turned the television off.

  “Feel like a visitor?” I asked, still standing in the doorway.

  “Yes, come in,” she said, pointing to a chair as I handed her a bouquet of hydrangeas and a magazine that I’d picked up at the hospital gift shop. She thanked me for the flowers, then said, “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Oh, yes I did. I mean, considering what happened to you simply because I was at your house . . . well, let’s just say that flowers don’t really cover it.”

  She waved me into a chair. “Don’t be silly. It’s not your fault. If anything, Simon is the one who’s responsible for everything.”

  “But if I hadn’t been at your house . . .” I still felt guilty for suspecting Marie. What had I been thinking?

  “He would have attacked you somewhere else. Somewhere you didn’t have me to throw a lamp at him,” she said lightly. “Besides, I’m fine. The doctors are keeping me here overnight for observation, but I should be able to go home tomorrow.”

  “I’m so glad to hear that. You look good. Better than me, probably,” I said, brushing at my dusty coat. I didn’t want to look in a mirror. Layered in dirt, with my scraped and broken fingernails, and a growing lump on the side of my head, I knew I probably looked like a cross between a crazed, dust-encrusted Medusa and a bag lady. I’d gotten some weird looks in the gift shop and I was thankful that there were no small kids in the hospital lobby when I’d arrived. “They don’t think there will be any problems later because of the carbon monoxide?”

  “No,” she said definitively. “Simon thought he was being very clever, setting up my ‘suicide,’ ” she said, using air quotes to emphasize the word, “but he forgot to check what kind of car I drive.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She smiled. “It’s a hybrid—very low emissions,” Marie said. “Serves him right, for being so . . . evil. Anyway, the doctors told me that all cars now have very low carbon monoxide emissions and it’s much more difficult to commit suicide that way than it was years ago before the cars had—what did he call it?—catalytic converters, that was it.”

  “But it smelled awful in the garage and you were out cold when we found you.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s still dangerous—otherwise I wouldn’t be spending the night here. Simon used chloroform to knock me out. That’s why I was unconscious. It had nothing to do with fumes from the car.”

  “He had chloroform with him, too?” I said, amazed. “What a twisted person he was, remembering to bring the blood-soaked scarf with him and chloroform.”

  “And a gun, don’t forget that one,” Marie added.

  “What did he do, pull out a bottle after I blacked out and douse a handkerchief?”

  “No, he had another one of those sealed plastic bags with some wet fabric in it. As soon as you went down and he saw you were out . . . he came at me. I was scrambling away, but he caught me near the door to the garage. He pressed the fabric over my face as I tried to break away, but it was over my nose. It only took a few seconds and I was out, too.” Her voice got quieter and she focused on running her fingers along the edge of the magazine, which she held in her lap. “I remember very distinctly thinking, I don’t want to die. I don’t know what happened after that.”

  “He must have dragged you to the car in the garage,” I said.

  “I should have tried to get out the front door. Running through the house made it easy for him. He only had to move me a few feet to get me to the garage.”

  I described how Simon must have put me in the closet and secured it with some furniture in front of the door before dealing with Marie. “The time he was gone and I was alone in the closet, he must have been putting you in the car.”

  “Yes, and I’m sure it took him longer than he thought it would. My car was outside. He had to bring it in, then drag me out there and get me into the car. I’m not exactly petite, so it wouldn’t have been easy.”

  And he also needed to pick up the puzzle pieces from the front lawn, too, I thought, which brought up something that was nagging at me. “How did you know I’d seen the puzzle?” Her eyebrows wrinkled together. “Before Simon showed up. I said I had to go and you said you wanted to explain, then gave me the puzzle. How did you know I knew about it?”

  She smiled faintly. “When I came back from the garage, you were staring at that picture frame with the strangest look on your face, like you’d never seen a picture frame before. I’d never seen you look at something like that, especially something we were organizing. You were usually so calm and competent. I knew something was wrong and then I saw the closet door wasn’t completely closed and I just knew you’d figured out that I had the puzzle. I still can’t believe he barricaded you in there.” She strummed the edge of the magazine pages as she said, “It’s probably a good thing I don’t remember anything. I can’t imagine what it was like for you in the closet.”

  “I did eventually find the crawlspace and got out that way.” Marie had been through enough and I didn’t want to detail how scared I’d been. I didn’t really want to relive it myself, either. “Thank goodness you woke up and were able to answer Waraday’s questions in the ambulance. He didn’t believe anything I told him until you backed me up.”

  She tilted her head. “I only vaguely remember that conversation. That young guy was your detective? The one you wanted me to talk to?”

  “Yes. And he’s not my detective. I’m sure he’ll be along either later tonight or tomorrow to ask you more questions.”

  “Oh, wait. It’s coming back. It’s all very hazy, but I do remember he kept asking me about whether or not you’d hit me . . . or hurt me. I told him Simon was the one who’d caused all the problems already. I got mad and told him to stop asking stupid questions. I think the paramedics kicked him out of the ambulance after that.”

  “I’m so glad you were there to vouch for me,” I said with a smile. “Waraday did not want to believe that I was innocent. Simon worked the whole ‘I am an upstanding citizen’ angle, refusing to admit anything, and acting outraged. It was a mess, but Waraday finally worked out that I was telling the truth, especially when they found the bloody scarf.”

  “Those blue latex gloves and the gun didn’t tip them off?”

  “Amazingly, by the time the police arrived, they couldn’t find the gun. I think he ditched it somewhere in your neighbor Ed’s Christmas display while everyone was distracted getting you out of the garage. When I left, the police were doing a grid search of his yard.”

  “That could take awhile.”

  “I know. Thank goodness Ed was on the porch and that he had a gun. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t been there.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me that he was out there. Neighbors have been complaining for weeks and threatening lawsuits. He got egged yesterday and one night last week someone cut a couple of his power cords. He was livid. I’m sure he was trying to keep an eye on the light display. He’s kind of obsessive about it.”

  There was a knock and Hannah inched open the door. “Marie? Are you up for a visitor?”

  As Marie called for her to come in, Hannah caught sight of me. “Good grief, Ellie. You look like you need a hospital room of your own.” From someone else, the wor
ds would have sounded harsh, but coming from Hannah with her gentle tone and rolling southern accent, they only conveyed her concern.

  “I’m fine. Nothing a shower won’t cure,” I said, standing up. Now that Hannah was here I knew Marie was in good hands. I was sure there would be many more flower arrangements and phone calls for Marie as the word spread through the spouse club that she was in the hospital—the upside of the squadron grapevine.

  I rode the elevator down to the lobby and dropped into a seat beside Mitch. He closed a sports magazine and tossed it on the side table. “How is she?”

  “Great. She looks better than me, that’s for sure,” I said, going for a light tone. Mitch threaded his fingers through mine. “You always look good to me.”

  “Liar,” I said, but smiled.

  “You do,” he insisted. “In fact, you never looked better than when I saw you in the middle of all those Christmas lights.”

  I squeezed his hand. “So why did you show up? I know you told me, but in all the confusion . . .”

  “It was the text. You spelled everything out—no abbreviations. Not like you at all. And you don’t usually text me. You almost always call. I called you back, but it went straight to voice mail. It didn’t feel right. Then when you didn’t call back after a while . . . well, I thought it was odd, but I figured you were busy and would call later. It was only after we got home from the mall and I looked over the spreadsheets again that I was afraid something was wrong. You hadn’t called back, so I called Dorthea and asked her to stay with the kids while I checked on you.”

  “I don’t see the connection with the spreadsheets at all—you’d been looking at those for days and wouldn’t talk about them.”

  “I was asked not to talk about them. They were the books for Helping Hands. I didn’t know that when I first got them. Everything was blanked out—no names, no indication what kind of business it was, just the numbers.”

  “So who asked you to go over the books?”