Текст книги "The Nightingale Before Christmas"

Автор книги: Donna Andrews

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No, better not. I’d figured out that the designers rarely appreciated what I thought were brilliant practical suggestions.

“We’ve pretty much cleaned up what the water leak did to the den,” Randall said. We both glanced over at the French doors. Mother was gesticulating dramatically. I suspected she was giving the chief chapter and verse of Clay’s sins.

I walked through all the rooms, starting with the upstairs, with Randall trailing me. We found a few small things to add to his list, but none of them appeared to be the result of the intruder. No sign that the intruder had damaged anything on his flight path through the Princess Room, the back bathroom, the quilt room, or the garage. No sign that he’d been in the Goth room, the kitchen, the dining room, or the great room.

“Tree looks nice in that new position,” Randall said when we’d finished our detailed inspection. “I just hope your mother doesn’t up and decide to move it again.”

“If she does, I’ll talk her out of it,” I said. “It looks glorious there. You’d hardly know the dining room existed.”

“Yeah, I gathered that was the whole point,” Randall said with a snicker. “But your mother made me cut a couple feet off the bottom to make sure folks could still see Ivy’s ‘Nightingale’ mural.”

The mural that at the moment was still only a few pencil marks on the wall of the upper hall, marks so faint that from down here it still looked like a blank wall. I felt a twinge of increasingly familiar stomach-churning anxiety. Would Ivy still have time to finish all the paintings she’d planned? And if she didn’t, would it be playing favorites to hint that maybe she should give priority to the one Mother had planned to showcase in her room?

Just then the front door opened.

“Meg, darlin’!” Eustace sailed in with a travel coffee cup in one hand and a large brown grocery bag in the other. He bent over to land an air kiss near my cheek. “I hear it was like the shootout at the O.K. Corral in here last night.”

“I was only here for two of the gunshots,” I said.

“I’m going to round up my workmen,” Randall said, and strode off, pulling out his cell phone.

“Only two! Good Lord!” Eustace exclaimed. He was heading through Mother’s room to his own domain, the breakfast room and kitchen. “But I heard someone knocked off Clay, and you found him. I want to hear every detail! Spill!”

“Not till after you’ve talked to the chief,” I said.

“You sure he wants to talk to me?” Eustace asked.

“He wants to talk to everyone.” I followed him into the breakfast room and sat down at the round glass-topped table while he continued into the kitchen.

“Well, I won’t grill you till after the chief has grilled me.” He had opened the refrigerator door and was putting things away: diet sodas, several brown paper-wrapped deli packages, and bottles of water. “But after that, I expect all the dirt.”

“Every bit,” I said. I was staring at something that seemed out of place in the otherwise impeccable breakfast nook. A dirty glass. No, a half-full glass, and unless my sense of smell was playing tricks on me, it was half-full of cheap scotch.

I found myself remembering a night shortly after we’d started working on the house, when Randall had sent over beer, sodas, and pizza for everyone. I’d held out a can of soda and a bottle of beer for Eustace to choose from.

“I’ll take the diet soda, darlin’,” he’d said.

“I’m not a big beer drinker myself,” I’d replied.

“Dear heart, I’m a dry drunk,” he’d said. “Ten years sober come New Year’s Day. If you ever see me popping the top of one of those beers, you tie me down and call my sponsor.”

So why was there a half-full glass of scotch in his room?

He saw what I was looking at.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

“If you think it’s a stale glass of cheap, smelly scotch, then yes,” I said.

“Another little offering from Clay,” he said. “The last, I assume, unless he comes back to needle me from beyond the grave. Do me a favor—pour it out and rinse that glass out real good so I won’t smell it.”

“Offering from Clay?” I echoed, as I got up to follow his instructions. “You mean he left this here deliberately. Did he know—”

“That I’m a recovering alcoholic? Hell, yes. He did it all the time, bless his evil little heart. That’s the kind of guy he is. Was.”

I dumped the scotch in the sink, rinsed out the glass twice, and ran enough water to make sure the alcohol smell was long gone from the sink. Then I carried the glass back to the breakfast table so I could take it with me when I left. It was a cheap, heavy tumbler, and clearly didn’t belong in Eustace’s elegant kitchen.

“Chief’s going to want to know my alibi.” Eustace looked somber. “And that’s going to be a problem.”

“If only we’d known someone was going to knock Clay off,” I said. “We could all have arranged to be with someone who could alibi us.”

“I was with someone, but I’m not sure it’s going to do me any good,” Eustace said. “I’m sponsoring someone. He’s almost made six months.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“But holidays are a bad time for him. For most of us. I was with him, helping him through a bad night, from about nine thirty till well past two in the morning. But I can’t give the chief his name unless he’s okay with it. And if he’s not…”

He shook his head.

“Maybe it won’t be a problem,” I said. “Even if he says no, you probably won’t be the only person in the house without an alibi.”

“No,” he said, looking slightly more cheerful. “Not even the only person without an alibi who hated Clay’s guts. I do hope your mother’s alibied.”

“Probably alibied ten times over,” I said. “Michael’s giving his one-man show of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol tonight, so we have tons of family and friends coming into town to see it. If I know Mother, she was up till midnight visiting.”

Deputy Sammy appeared in the doorway from the living room.

“Mr. Goodwin? The chief’s ready for you now.”

Eustace stood up and squared his shoulders.

“Wish me luck,” he said, and sailed out.

I followed him and Sammy out into the living room. Mother was standing in the center of the room, gazing at the tree. Apparently she’d recruited Tomás and Mateo to work on the redecoration. They’d placed two stepladders next to the tree and were scampering down to grab ornaments and then back up to put them on the tree with Mother directing them in sign language and scraps of broken Spanish.

I glanced over at the French doors. Eustace was talking, gesticulating dramatically. I had a feeling he’d be there for quite a while.

Randall and my cousin Horace were standing at the top of the stairs. I ran up to join them.

Chapter 8

“Hey, Meg,” Horace said. “The chief says it’s okay for you guys to have the room back.”

“Great,” I said. “How bad is it?”

Randall stepped aside so I could see.

The master bed frame stood, stripped of its hangings, its bed linens, and even its mattress.

“We took all the bedding down to the lab,” Horace said, following my look. “And there was almost no blood on the walls.”

I didn’t see any blood on them. But it looked as if someone had gone after the walls, the floors, and the furniture with an ax. And there was fingerprint powder all over everything—the furniture, the carpet, and the walls up to a height of six or seven feet.

“Soon as your mother’s finished with Tomás and Mateo, I’m to turn them loose in here,” Randall said. “First thing’s to scrub off all that powder. Then we can patch and repaint.”

“And clean or replace the carpet,” I suggested.

“Roger.” He was scribbling on his list. “Couple of my guys are headed down here with some new drywall, and the hardware store’s mixing up a big batch of that god-awful red paint. We’ll get it back as fast as we can to where it was when Clay left yesterday, so start talking to whoever you think you can get to finish it off.”

“We’ll also need a new mattress,” I said. “King-sized.”

“And I assume we should be replacing the black sheets.”

“Part of the design,” I said.

“See you later,” Horace said. “Got to get back to the lab.”

“Oh, my!”

I looked over to see Violet standing in the doorway. She was holding something—a rolled-up rug, by the look of it—and staring at the room.

“What’s left of the crime scene,” Randall said.

“Horrible,” Violet said. She turned and fled—presumably across the hall, to her room.

“I should go and see if she’s all right,” I said.

Randall nodded. He was holding a box of trash bags. As I was turning to leave, I saw him pull one out and stoop down to start picking up some of the debris on the floor.

I followed Violet. She was standing in her room, holding her head.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she replied.

Probably a monster headache, by the look of her. She was pale and hollow-eyed, and I noticed she was shading her eyes against the light.

“Want me to help you with that?” I asked, pointing to the rolled-up rug.

“Please.”

I tore the brown paper off the roll and set it down on the floor. I figured it would go where the damaged rug had gone, and Violet didn’t correct me. Then I unrolled it, revealing a very familiar-looking petit-point rug.

“Is this a new rug or the one Clay damaged?” I asked.

“The damaged one.”

“It looks great!” I exclaimed.

“It’s Daphne’s doing,” she said. Daphne, the proprietor of the Caerphilly Cleaners, was well known as a miracle worker when it came to removing stains. In a less enlightened era, her competitors would probably have tried to have her burned at the stake. “I can still sort of tell where the paint was,” she added.

“But it might be your imagination,” I hurried to say. “And no one else would ever guess. It looks great. The whole room looks great.”

I must have been able to say it with a straight face, because she beamed happily. Actually, I suppose if you liked pastel colors, glitter, ruffles, lace, and stuffed animals, it probably was great. It was certainly the most extreme example I’d ever seen of the whole uber-feminine girly girl style. If Mother had done up my room like this when I was ten or twelve, I’d have run screaming into the night and slept in the tool shed.

Martha stuck her head in the door.

“You okay?” she asked. “You want more of that Alka-Seltzer?”

“I’m fine,” Violet replied.

“You don’t look fine,” Martha said. “Here.” She handed Violet a bottle of water. “Keep hydrating. Best thing for you.”

Violet nodded, opened the bottle, and sipped.

Martha nodded and left. I was puzzled. I hadn’t noticed that the two of them were particularly close before.

“She’s a mother hen,” Violet said. “We sort of bonded over the whole horrible experience of having Clay ruin our rooms.”

“I can understand that,” I said.

“We went out to dinner last night,” she said. “To vent about the whole thing. Isn’t that lucky?”

“Lucky? How so?”

“Well, I had a couple of glasses of wine, which I shouldn’t have done, because even one glass puts me under the table.” She giggled girlishly. “Martha put me up in her guest room, and we stayed up past midnight gossiping.”

I suddenly realized where she was going with this.

“So you’re alibied,” I said. “Congratulations!”

It must have sounded as silly to her as it did to me, because we both burst out laughing. Or maybe it was the relief. She was happy to be in the clear. I was happy for her. She was one of the nice ones. Silly, but nice. And knowing that Martha had looked after her properly made me think better of her, too.

“What’s so funny?” Martha had appeared in the doorway again.

“We were just—” Violet began. And then she paused and held her hand to her mouth. “Oh, dear. Mind if I use your bathroom for a sec?”

“Don’t touch the walls,” Martha said. “Wet paint.”

Martha stepped into the room. Violet scurried into the bathroom and closed the door.

“Nice of you to look after her,” I said.

“Some people shouldn’t be allowed out on their own.”

“And your good deed is rewarded.”

“Rewarded?” Martha raised one eyebrow in a puzzled expression.

“At the very time when Clay was being murdered here in the house, the two of you were sharing girlish confidences over your wine.”

“Actually, I was probably holding her head while she worshiped the porcelain goddess,” Martha said. “No head for alcohol, that girl. And I feel a little guilty—we must have spent half the evening trading stories about nasty things Clay had done, and planning silly little pranks to play on him. If I’d known he was about to get killed…” She shook her head.

“But you didn’t,” I said. “And being dead doesn’t make him a saint.”

“I guess we’ll have to go to the funeral,” she said. “And look solemn. And make sure he’s really gone.”

Violet opened the door and scurried out into the room.

“Thanks, Martha,” she chirped.

“Let’s go see if Eustace has any coffee,” Martha said. “Might settle your stomach.”

As they went down the stairs, I could hear Violet chattering with determined cheerfulness about ruching, whatever that was. And Martha answering that proper thread tension was the key.

Not the most likely pair of new best friends, but perhaps working in adjacent rooms under the pressure of our deadline—and with the odious Clay nearby—had worked some kind of magic. And it would be interesting if their newfound alliance survived the end of the show house. But it was nice, for the time being, to see Violet opening up and Martha behaving kindly rather than waspishly.

I heard the toilet flush in Martha’s bathroom. The door to the first part of the bathroom, with the sink and tub in it was open, but the door to the toilet compartment was closed. I waited until after I heard water running in the second sink, in its own compartment on the far side of the toilet, to knock on the door.

“Out in a minute.”

It was Alice, one of the two Quilt Ladies.

“I was just coming to see how you two were doing this morning,” I said.

“Pretty well, considering,” she answered, as I followed her into the bonus room beyond. “Last night was a tough night.”

“You’re telling me,” I said.

“I don’t just mean here,” she said. “Mrs. Stavropoulos broke her hip. Dr. Stavropoulos’s mother,” she added, seeing my puzzled look. “She lives at Caerphilly Assisted Living.”

“It didn’t happen when we were over there caroling?” I asked. I was always deathly afraid that the boys would start running and knock over one of the frailer seniors.

“No, around midnight, while I was on duty. I’m the night shift receptionist, you know, five nights a week.”

Actually, I hadn’t known, but I nodded as if I did.

“It’s really the perfect job for us,” she said. “Until we can afford to do this full time. For me, actually—Vicky’s retired, of course. But she comes over most nights when I’m on duty, and we sit together behind the desk and quilt all night. Or work on our room designs. Management doesn’t mind—as long as I’m there to answer the phone and buzz people in, they don’t care what I do. And sometimes, like last night, it’s a real blessing to have the two of us there.”

“What happened last night,” I asked. “With Mrs. Stavropoulos?”

“Got up to go to the bathroom and fell,” Alice said. “Luckily, she could still reach the emergency cord. I called 9-1-1 and Vicky went up to sit with her and keep her spirits up until the ambulance got there. And a few of the residents heard the ambulance, and we had to reassure them and walk them back to their rooms. And old Mr. Jackson took it into his head again that General Sherman’s army was coming to burn the town, and Vicky calmed him down by filling the water buckets and keeping watch out his window till he fell asleep. I had to stay at the desk all this time—I was trying to reach Dr. Stavropoulos to let him know—so having her there was a lifesaver.”

“When did all this happen?” I asked.

“Around eleven thirty,” she said. “And I don’t think we got everyone calmed down and back in their rooms until well after one a.m. Not much progress on our quilting last night! But Mrs. Stavropoulos is going to be all right, so all’s well that ends well.”

“Where is Vicky?” I asked. “Sleeping in after all that excitement?”

“I wish. That both of us could sleep in. No, she’s downstairs, talking to the chief. My turn next. You poor thing! Here I’m rattling on about our night—and did I hear that you found poor Clay’s body right here in the house?”

“I did,” I said. “And I’ll be happy to tell you all about it after you talk to the chief. I just came over to see how you two were doing. Find out if this morning’s delay has you in a panic.”

“Oh, we’re fine,” she said. “We’d be fine if the house opened tomorrow. Mind you, there’s a few more things we want to do if we have the time. And we might do a little fine tuning of what’s here. For example, do you think we should swap the tumbling blocks with the Irish chain? Or leave them were they are?”

From her gestures, I deduced that we were talking about quilts, not actual blocks and chains.

“I’m not sure I know which one is which,” I said. “And if I had any design sense whatsoever, Mother would long ago have co-opted me to work in her room. But for my money, that quilt is the most awesome one you’ve got.” I pointed to a quilt that looked like a bunch of three-dimensional squares done in black, purple, and turquoise. “So if you put it where it was the first thing visitors saw when they walked into the room, they would be seriously impressed.”

“That’s the tumbling blocks,” she said. “And yes, we were thinking we should make it more prominent. Don’t tell me you have no design sense. Can you help me with this?”

We’d done this before, so I knew the drill. We each grabbed one end of the long pole from which my favorite quilt was hanging and lifted it down from the pegs that held it up. We laid it down carefully on the worktable while we picked up the other quilt—presumably the Irish chain—and moved it into the place where the tumbling blocks had been.

“Definitely an improvement,” Alice said, as we lifted the tumbling blocks quilt into place, right inside the door where the visitors would enter after touring Martha’s bathroom. We stood back for a few moments and admired the effect.

There were a dozen large quilts hung around the room—some modern, some traditional, all different and all beautiful. Along one wall they’d put a shelf with dozens of bolts of fabric, arranged in order from blue on one end through green, yellow, orange, red, and purple at the far end, like a bright rainbow. And they hadn’t forgotten to work in the Christmas theme. One of the quilts was a special Christmas quilt in reds and greens, using fabrics with patterns of holly and presents. Another was in blue and silver with stars and snowflakes—both beautiful, though neither outshone the tumbling blocks quilt I so admired. The small Christmas tree in the corner was decorated with a garland of metallic fabric and ornaments quilted from red and green satin.

“Even the late Mr. Spottiswood allowed as how that quilt wasn’t too bad,” Alice said as she carefully tucked a few sprigs of evergreen at either end of the pole, being careful not to let them touch the fabric. “I confess, I feel sorry for the poor man, but I won’t miss him.”

“Sorry for him?”

“You have to be pretty unhappy to be that mean, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“Well, anyway,” she said. “Things will be a bit more pleasant around here with him gone, won’t they?”

“Yes, we might actually see a bit of Christmas cheer around here.”

“True,” she said. “I think Clay’s idea of Christmas decorating was to put a bit of mistletoe in the doorway so he could bother all the pretty ladies. But actually by around here I meant here in Caerphilly. The design world’s a small town, you know. Having Clay barge in has shaken things up a bit. And not in a good way.”

“Who was the most hurt by his arrival?” I asked.

“Sarah and Martha,” Alice said, with surprising promptness. “Your mother and Eustace have a much more traditional sensibility. So do Linda and Violet, though they’re not in the same league. Violet’s barely making a living, and poor Linda’s lucky her late husband left her comfortably off.”

Linda, I remembered, was Our Lady of Chintz’s real name.

“And he didn’t much hurt Vicky and me, either. If you want a quilting room, or a room designed with plenty of quilts, we’re the best. But we don’t do anything outside of our niche. And I suppose our vampire girl has her own niche. Not a big call for decorating with bats and coffins, is there? I understand she makes the better part of her income selling Goth crafts on Etsy.”

I nodded as if I’d already known this.

“But Sarah and Martha are both working in similar areas,” she said. “More modern styles. A clean, open minimalist look. Strong colors. I think when he arrived here a few years ago, he took quite a bite out of both their businesses,” she went on. “They’ve been bouncing back—people are starting to see Clay for the one-trick pony he is. Oh, it’s quite a handsome pony, but it’s always the same, and frankly, a little too much Clay and too little client. He’s not a bad designer if you like what he likes, but if you don’t, too bad—that’s what you get anyway.”

“Mrs. Graham?” Sammy appeared at the head of the stairway that led down to the garage. “The chief would like to see you now.”