Текст книги "The Nightingale Before Christmas"

Автор книги: Donna Andrews

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Chapter 9

“I’m ready,” Alice said. “Dying to get it over with so I can pump Meg for all the details she won’t tell me!”

Bless her for that—it might reduce the chief’s annoyance, if he heard I’d been talking to a witness he hadn’t yet interviewed.

I decided it might be wiser for me to stick to talking to people who’d already been debriefed. So I followed them down the stairs and through the kitchen, intending to see what Mother and Eustace were up to.

They were standing together in the archway that separated Eustace’s breakfast nook from Mother’s great room. As I watched, they looked into the great room. Then the breakfast nook. Then the great room again.

“No,” he said. “You’re right.”

“Too abrupt,” Mother said.

“I could change the paint color?”

“No, it’s not that,” Mother said. “Maybe if we mass a few poinsettias on either side of the archway.”

They studied the archway some more.

“No,” they said simultaneously.

I’d seen this before. They could keep up these conferences for longer that I’d ever imagined possible. Sometimes the conference erupted into painting and furniture moving, and anyone foolish enough to be nearby would get drafted into the action and could kiss the rest of her day good-bye.

“Oh, hello, Meg,” Eustace said, spotting me. “What do you think of—”

“Hang on,” I said. “I’ve got to check on—on Linda.”

I’d almost called her Our Lady of Chintz in front of someone other than Mother. I needed to be careful. Linda. Linda. Linda.

I went back through the kitchen and into the dining room.

Linda was standing in her room, looking frazzled. She was batting uselessly at the branches of spruce that protruded into her room as if she’d caught them trying to sneak farther in and dump needles on her fabric. One of them had snagged her shapeless brown woolen tunic.

“This tree is impossible,” she said, turning to me. “The branches take up half the room.”

Half was an exaggeration, but the branches did stick out rather far.

“We need to move the tree,” she said.

I’d been afraid of that. Tomás and Mateo were nearly finished redecorating Mother’s side of the tree. We couldn’t ask them to move it again.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I think the tree adds just the right touch. We only need a little less of it in the room. I’ll have Randall get someone to prune it back.”

I stepped into the hall and called. Randall didn’t answer, so I left a voice mail—one that wouldn’t offend Linda, in case she was eavesdropping.

Then I stepped back into the dining room. Linda had turned her back on the invading vegetation and was sitting on one of her chintz-covered dining room chairs, threading red and gold beads and green holly leaves onto a string to make a garland.

“So,” I said. “Apart from the branches, how’s it going?”

“Fine.” She looked up and gave me a tight little smile. The kind of smile that’s supposed to say “Don’t worry, everything’s fine,” but makes you pretty sure everything isn’t. “Just need to add those few Christmassy touches,” she went on. “I’m essentially finished with the room itself.”

For my taste, she should have declared it finished a week ago. It was a big dining room, but now it felt small and claustrophobic. There were too many things here. Too much going on. Too many small bits of furniture. Too many precisely arranged groups of small prints or decorative plates on the wall. Too many whatnots containing too many delicate tchotchkes. And above all, too many different chintz prints. One for the wallpaper. A similar but not-quite-matching one for the curtains. A third print for the dining room chair seats. Yet another for the occasional chair in the corner, not to mention another for the skirt covering the side table. Even the rug had a busy pattern all too reminiscent of chintz. I knew the effect she was aiming for—she’d told me the first time I met her.

“I like that cluttered, homey, English country look,” she’d said. “Where it doesn’t look as if everything was bought as a set, all matchy-matchy. Where the family just accumulates objects it loves, over the centuries, and doesn’t care whether they’re supposed to go together.”

I had liked the sound of that. I’d expected something low-key and comfortable. Unfortunately, her room looked more as if she’d found a sale on chintz remnants and handed them over to a crew of blind seamstresses.

Of course, I made no pretense of understanding decorating trends, so for all I knew this could be the coming thing. Total sensory overload as a decorating strategy. Maybe I’d be seeing rooms like this in all of Mother’s decorating magazines, if I ever bothered reading them.

Then again, there was hope. Mother hated Linda’s room, I reminded myself, as I gazed at the offending spruce branches.

Linda herself didn’t match the room at all. She was an attractive woman of forty-five or fifty, and I could tell her skirt and sweater were not cheap, but the overall effect was drab and lugubrious.

But she was pleasant and undemanding and went about her decorating business without any of the angst and drama that seemed part of the process for so many of the other designers, so on the whole, I liked her.

A stack of cardboard boxes sat in one corner, all with the words “Christmas ornaments” scrawled on them in one place or another.

“Oh, dear,” I said. “Did you have to bring in your own personal Christmas decorations to cope with the tree?”

“Yes, but that’s not a problem,” she said. “I’m not going to do a tree this year anyway. There’s just me, and I won’t be home enough to really enjoy it. The tree here’s a godsend. I was worried that the room wasn’t turning out Christmassy enough.”

Not Christmassy enough? She’d already looped red, green, and gold garlands, like the one she was making, along the crown molding all around the room near the ceiling. Tucked sheaves of holly and ivy behind every picture. Covered the table with a red-and-green holly print table runner. Scattered china elves and angels along the runner. And placed both wreaths and battery-operated candles in the two windows. To me, the as-yet undecorated branches of the Christmas tree poking through the archway were the one soothing, peaceful, truly beautiful element in the room.

“Don’t work yourself into a frazzle,” I said. “We women are all too prone to do that around Christmas. Take care of yourself.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” she said. But I was startled to see that there were tears in her eyes. She bowed her head over her work, clearly not wanting me to see the tears.

Part of me wanted to stay and find out why a few kind words reduced her to tears. But another part of me—probably a better part—wanted to give her some privacy.

Maybe she was even crying over Clay’s death. I didn’t think they’d known each other that well. I couldn’t recall any run-ins between them.

Maybe not knowing him that well made it easier to feel sad over his death. She could be the one person in the house who had no negative feelings about Clay, and could react to it simply as the death of another human being.

“Got to run,” I said. “Call me if you need anything.”

She nodded but didn’t raise her head as I slipped out of the room.

I went back into the hall. It looked as if the chief was about to finish up with Alice. Sarah was sitting on the stairs with her chin in her hand, watching Ivy paint. Overnight the blue streak in Sarah’s hair had morphed into a rich purple that matched her sweater. I decided it was an improvement.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “The chief’s got your room.”

“He’s only got a couple of people left to interview,” she said. “And he did point out that this was faster for us than having to go down to the station. I’m good with it.”

Ivy smiled over her shoulder at us, then got up and slipped down the hallway. In her brown skirt and brown sweater, she seemed to disappear into the shadows after a few steps. But oddly enough, she didn’t seem drab like Linda. More elfin.

“If we’re bothering you, we can leave,” I called out.

“Just going to the basement to mix some more pigments,” she said.

I heard the basement door close.

“I don’t think we’re bothering her particularly,” Sarah said. “She just needs a lot of time alone. It’s not quite the same thing.”

I nodded.

“Hell of a night last night,” I said.

Sarah nodded but didn’t say anything.

“What I wouldn’t give to have been anywhere but here,” I said.

Sarah giggled.

“Meg, if you’re trying to find out whether or not I have an alibi for the time when Clay was killed, you could just ask me,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “I gather you do have an alibi.”

“Yes,” she replied. “I was neutering tomcats.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that.

“Actual feline tomcats,” she went on. “Not Clay’s kind. And spaying the females.”

“I didn’t know you moonlighted as a vet,” I said.

“I was helping Clarence Rutledge. He’s been doing a lot of pro bono work down at the animal shelter, spaying and neutering that whole feral cat colony that lives in the woods behind the New Life Baptist Church.”

That made sense. Clarence was Caerphilly’s most popular veterinarian. And although his appearance was intimidating—he was six feet, six inches tall and almost as wide, and usually wore leather and denim biker gear, even under his white lab coat at the clinic—he was a notorious softie when it came to any kind of animal.

“His clinic’s so busy during the day that the only time he can do the surgeries is after hours,” she said. “And we’d trapped a lot of feral cats. We were running out of cages. So every night this week I’ve been going over there at nine or ten o’clock, as soon as I can get away from here, and we work until he’s too tired. Usually one or two in the morning.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Best alibi I’ve heard all day, in fact.”

“There is one thing I’m worried about,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“My fingerprints might be on the murder weapon.”

Chapter 10

My jaw fell open, and I couldn’t think of anything to say for several moments.

“How did that happen?” I asked finally.

“I don’t know for sure,” she said. “But there’s a gun missing, and for all I know, it could be the murder weapon, and if it is, my fingerprints will be on it.”

“Missing where?”

“From the house,” she said. “From my room.”

“You were keeping a gun in your room?”

“Not on purpose,” she said. “It’s not even mine—it’s Kate’s.”

Kate—her business partner, the one Sarah had been having such an angry conversation with the day before—Kate saying “keep it” and Sarah saying “I don’t even want it around me.”

“Her husband got it for her when he started having to commute to Tappahannock for his job,” Sarah said. “She never really wanted it around. But then when I began working here at the show house, she kept telling me I should take it with me, for protection. Because of Clay.”

“She was afraid of Clay?”

“He’s got a temper,” Sarah said. “He had a booth near us at the Caerphilly Home and Garden Show last year, and he was just a pill the whole time. Flirting with us, and smirking at us, and then snaking people away from us the whole time, and then at the end of the show, during the teardown, someone ticked him off and he just went berserk. Wrecked part of his booth and the booth next door. He was like a crazy man. And Kate freaked. Ever since then, she’s wanted nothing to do with him. He works out of his house, which isn’t that far from our office, and for a while he kept trying to drop in and schmooze. Until Bailey tried to bite him.”

“Bailey?” I echoed. “The third partner in Byrne, Banks, and Bailey?”

“Bailey’s an Irish setter,” she said, with a giggle. “And he pretty much hates Clay, too.”

“Dogs can be good judges of character,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” Sarah agreed. “Anyway, when Kate heard Clay was part of the show house, she wanted us to pull out. And I didn’t think that would be good for our rep. I said she could pull out, but I’d do it myself. We had a pretty big fight over it.”

“And then she brought her gun over here.”

“Yesterday morning,” she said. “I was off running an errand, and evidently, while I was out, she came in and put it in the drawer in one of my end tables. I found it there a little later, and told her to come and get it. And then the whole flood thing happened, and when I remembered the gun and looked in the end table drawers, it was gone. I was hoping she’d taken it after all, but I asked her this morning and she didn’t. It’s gone.”

“And you think someone took it while we were moving everything out from under the flood?”

Sarah nodded.

“Damn,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What kind of gun was it?”

“I have no idea.”

“How big was it?”

She held her hands out about eight inches apart. Then moved them out to ten inches. And down to six. And then threw them up in frustration.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Gun-sized. Kind of small, I guess.”

Her inability to identify the gun very accurately might have been more frustrating if I knew more about guns myself. Or if we knew what kind of gun had killed Clay.

“Anyway—I figure I should probably tell the chief.”

“Absolutely.”

“Even though it will make Kate a suspect, and she’ll be mad at me, and maybe her husband will be mad at her for losing the gun?”

“Even though.”

“Damn,” she said.

We waited in silence for a while, and then the door opened. Alice came out, looking relieved to have gotten her interview over with.

“Ms. Byrne?” the chief said.

Sarah stood up and slowly walked toward the study.

My phone rang. I answered it, my eyes still on Sarah and the chief.

“Goose or turkey?”

“What’s that?”

“I said, goose or turkey?”

I looked at my phone. The number showing was Michael’s and my home phone. But the voice—

Wait—it was Michael’s mother. Who evidently had arrived, and was starting the preparations for Christmas dinner.

Last year, my mother and Michael’s had each decided to cook a Christmas dinner for the family. No amount of diplomacy could convince them to combine their events, and I heard that several people unlucky enough to attend both dinners developed a temporary aversion to eating and fasted for one or more days afterward.

One of the saving graces of Mother’s involvement in the show house was that it would prevent a recurrence. Even the mothers realized that last year’s excess had been over the top, and while we’d made progress on getting them to join forces, I’d been more than a little worried about the possibility of conflict in the kitchen. Not that Mother cooked, of course. She usually drafted one or two relatives whose culinary skills she admired and got them to cook for her. But while most of her family were quite willing to let Mother order them around in the kitchen, I didn’t think Dahlia Waterston would be as patient.

So I’d been very relieved when Mother announced that, alas, due to the show house, she would have to withdraw from Christmas dinner preparation. Would Dahlia ever forgive her?

Michael’s mother not only forgave her, she rejoiced in the opportunity to plan the dinner solo. And I’d been grateful to have at least one holiday chore completely off my plate.

Evidently I wasn’t going to be completely uninvolved.

“I tend to prefer turkey,” I said. “But goose is also nice.”

“And goose is traditional,” she said.

I decided not to say “So’s turkey.”

“But many people find goose a little too greasy.”

“That’s true,” I said. “A lot of people have trouble digesting it.”

“But turkey’s so bland.”

I wanted to say “that’s why we put gravy on it,” but I held my tongue.

“Maybe I should have both.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” I said. “That should keep both parties happy.”

“Not the vegetarians,” she said. “But I’ll worry about them later. Oh, by the way—do you really want an Xbox for Christmas?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t say that I do, and Michael and I agreed that we don’t want the boys exposed to video games this young.”

“I thought as much,” she said. “So I told Jamie that I couldn’t help him buy you one for Christmas.”

With that she hung up.

Should I warn Michael that Jamie was trying to do an end run around him on the present-buying front?

No time. Mother and Eustace were waiting to ask me something. And one of Randall Shiffley’s cousins was standing behind them. And Vermillion was peeking through the railings from the upstairs landing as if waiting for a time to get my attention.

I took care of Randall’s cousin first, because he appeared to be in the middle of doing actual physical labor. Not that I didn’t think what the designers did was work, but as a blacksmith I suppose I was ever-so-slightly more sympathetic to work that produced sweat. Then I had to listen to Mother and Eustace explain something that they felt was essential to do to smooth the flow between their two areas. After twenty minutes I finally interrupted them.

“Let’s cut to the chase—does this involve knocking down any load-bearing walls or otherwise threatening the structural integrity of the house.”

“Of course not, dear.”

“Will what you’re doing intrude on or inconvenience any of the other decorators?”

“Of course not, dear. You see, all we really want to do is put a little bit of crown molding right here—”

“Do you need any supplies or workman other than what Randall has already provided?”

“No, dear.” Mother was starting to look a little provoked.

“Then make it so,” I said. “I approve with all my heart.”

As I strode back toward the hall, I heard Mother murmur softly to Eustace. “Clearly not quite herself again.”

I climbed upstairs—noting, to my satisfaction, that the chief had finished with Sarah and was interviewing Ivy. Her tiny, brown-clad body looked oddly out of place against the rich red velvet of Sarah’s armchair.

Upstairs, I found Vermillion wanted me to solve a dispute over what color to paint the door between her room and Martha’s bathroom. Vermillion had painted her side glossy black, to match everything else in her room. But when the door opened, it looked like a blob of ink against the white tile, white walls, white shower curtain, and white towels of Martha’s spa décor. Martha, of course, wanted to paint it white.

“The door will be open most of the time, which means it will be in my room,” Martha said, tapping her paintbrush against the lid of the can of Benjamin Moore “White Dove” that she was holding.

“But when it’s closed, it will look as if a polar bear has landed in my room,” Vermillion wailed.

We went back and forth about that for half an hour or so. Neither of them would budge an inch.

Suddenly inspiration came.

I pulled out my phone.

“Randall,” I said. “Can you come up to the back bathroom?”

“On my way.”

When Randall arrived, I let him watch Martha and Vermillion going at it for a couple of minutes, just so he could see what we were dealing with. He glanced at me uneasily. Settling catfights between the designers was supposed to be my job.

“Ladies!” I shouted.

They both subsided reluctantly and glowered at me.

“Randall, you see the problem.”

He nodded, and looked a little wild-eyed, as if trying to beg me to leave him out of it.

“Can you build us a door that will solve this problem?”

“A door that looks white when it’s in one room and black in the other?”

“One of those doors that disappears into the wall when it’s open instead of swinging one way or the other.”

“A pocket door.” Randall and Martha said it in unison.

“Yes,” Vermillion said. “That would work.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Randall said. “You ladies hold on to your paint cans for a little while. Help is on the way.”

I fled the room, and he followed.

“Ingenious,” he said. “Of course, it’ll cost money.”

“I will gladly pay for it myself if it shuts them up,” I said.

“On the contrary, it will be my treat, on account of you took this job and kept me from having to deal with all of them.”

“Of course, even once the pocket door is in, they won’t get along,” I said. “They’ll each complain that every time the door opens, the other one’s room will spoil the look of their own.”

“Then I’ll nail the damned door shut if that’s what it takes,” Randall said. We had reached the top of the stairway, right outside the door to Clay’s room. Both of us couldn’t help staring at the door for a few minutes.

“Puts it all in perspective, doesn’t it?” Randall said.

I nodded.

He went downstairs, and I pulled out my notebook to see what other tasks awaited me.

Sammy came up to fetch Vermillion for her interview. As they went downstairs together, Martha came out into the hallway and started after Vermillion.

I decided that if she made another complaint about Vermillion, I’d tell Randall to forget the pocket door and paint the whole damned door black.

But she stopped beside me.

“Why’s he spending so much time interviewing us?” Martha said.

I suspected this was a rhetorical question rather than a real one.

“Because all of us had access to the crime scene,” I said. “And some of us could have a motive to kill Clay, and any of us could have seen something that would give him a clue to who did it.”

“And they took all our fingerprints,” she said. “Took me forever to wash that nasty stuff off. Even those of us with alibis.”

“For exclusionary purposes,” I said. “I expect all of us have been in Clay’s room at one time or another, touching stuff. They need to identify our fingerprints so they’ll know if there are any outsiders’ fingerprints in there.”

“Well, that makes sense,” she said. Her tone implied that few other things the police were doing did. “And I suppose the police will have a better idea who might have done it once they trace the gun.”

“First they’ll have to find the gun,” I said.

“What do you mean, find the gun?” she asked. “Haven’t they searched Clay’s room?”

“Yes, but apparently the killer took the gun with him.”

“Took it with him? Are you sure?”

“Reasonably sure,” I said. “I was there, remember?”

“Sorry,” she said. “Yes, you should know. Well, that stinks.”

“Why?”

“Means the gun is still out there somewhere,” she said. “On the loose.”

“Yes,” I said. “Just like the killer.” Was it just me or was it weird for her to be more focused on the missing gun than the missing killer?

“I felt a lot better thinking the police had the damned gun.”

Did she think it was the only gun in the state of Virginia?

“Great,” she went on. “We’re stuck here in this house, sitting ducks, with an armed killer on the loose—maybe even among us.”

“Well, that’s why the chief is checking out everyone in the house pretty carefully,” I said. “And what makes you think the killer was after anyone other than Clay?”

“Till we know why he killed Clay, we don’t know that he isn’t. Maybe we should ask for police protection.”

I reminded myself, not for the first time, that Martha was a bit of a drama queen.

“I’ll let you take that up with the chief,” I said. “I just plan to be careful until the police catch the killer.”

“With any luck, that will be soon,” she said. “He must be a pretty stupid killer, taking the gun with him like that. If the police catch him with it, that will pretty much prove he’s the one, won’t it?”

“If he—or she—is stupid enough to hang on to it,” I said. “If I were planning to shoot someone, I’d make sure to do it with a gun that couldn’t possibly be traced to me, and then I’d dispose of it afterward someplace where there was almost no chance anyone would ever find it. Like dumping it in the middle of a river. Or down a mineshaft.”

“How do you come up with stuff like that?” She looked at me as if she thought I might be speaking from vast criminal experience.

“My cousin’s a crime scene specialist,” I said. “And my father’s the medical examiner. Sometimes they talk shop.”

“Goodness.” She shuddered slightly. “Well, I’m going to get back to working on my rooms. Got to take my shot at winning the prize for the garden club.”

As she strolled downstairs, I reminded myself that at least, if Martha won, the garden club would benefit. Although come to think of it, so would Martha, since she’d recently staged a coup and taken over the presidency of the club, and was reputed to be running it like a personal fiefdom.

But that reminded me of something. I flipped to the page of my notebook where I’d listed which charities each designer had designated to benefit if they won the judging. And then I pulled out my phone and called Stanley Denton, Caerphilly’s resident private investigator.

“Can you check out a charity?” I said. “I mean, is that something you’ve got contacts or access to do?”

“I can try,” he said. “What’s the charity?”

“Designers of the Future,” I said. “Supposedly it gives out scholarships to needy but deserving art students.”

“Supposedly?” he asked. “You think it might not be on the up-and-up?”

“It’s the charity Clay Spottiswood designated to get the money if he won the best room contest,” I said. “And I suppose it could still get the money if his room wins—always possible he could get the sympathy vote.”

“I hope not,” Stanley said. “You got an address on that?”

“Seems to be local,” I said. “The address is 1224 Pruitt Avenue in Caerphilly.”

“That’s familiar address,” Stanley said. “Hang on a minute. Yeah, very familiar. That’s Clay Spottiswood’s home address. Home and business. I remember it from serving papers on him a couple of times.”

“That jerk,” I muttered.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he said. “It could be a small but legitimate charity that he’s running in his spare time.”

“Or it could be he was trying to pull a fast one. Randall has the paperwork Clay provided. That might give you a starting point.”

“I’m on it.”

I made a note in my notebook to bug Stanley if I didn’t hear from him for a few days. And then I glanced over the other items on my list. Calling the graphic designer to see when we’d get the program proofs. Writing another press release to go to the Richmond, D.C., Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads, and other regional papers. Finding out if we had enough shuttle buses to take people to and from the satellite parking. And a dozen other tasks. All the practical minutiae necessary to make the show house actually happen.

Just then, my phone rang. It was Michael.

“Meg? Are you ready?”

“For anything you have in mind, always,” I said. “But was there anything in particular I’m supposed to be ready for right now?”

“Santa Claus,” he said. “Remember, Mom asked if we would wait to see Santa until she could be there?”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I forgot that was today. Are you still sure you want to do it? This late? They’ve already written their letters to Santa, remember? What if they come up with some enormous, important last-minute must-have thing that Santa can’t get by Christmas?”

“Then we’ll ask Santa to write them a letter explaining why their big present will be a little late,” he said. “We’ll manage. I’m more worried about a repeat of last year’s disaster. Was it Josh or Jamie who bit Santa?”

“Josh,” I said. “Jamie just ran away screaming and hid in the fake igloo.”

“I warned Mom about that,” Michael said. “But they are a year older. And Mom will be so disappointed if we cancel, so let’s do it. Your dad and I are about to load the boys in the car. We’ll be by for you and your mother in ten minutes.”

“I’ll tell Mother.”

I found her staring at a white board on which someone had painted a dozen stripes in various shades of red.

“What do you think, dear?” she asked. “I’m leaning toward the ‘Red Obsession.’ But ‘Ablaze’ is also nice. And ‘Positive Red’ is rather more Christmassy—but maybe too Christmassy? Or should we consider ‘Rave Red,’ or possibly ‘Habanero Chile’?”

“Time for Santa,” I said.

“I don’t think we have that one, dear,” Mother said. She frowned slightly at Mateo, who was holding the board, and presumably had been under orders to bring back samples of every possible red.

“It’s not a color, it’s a family event,” I said. “Michael and his mother and Dad are taking the boys to see Santa Claus. If you want to come and take cute pictures of your grandsons on Santa’s lap, be on the steps in five minutes.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so, dear? Mas tarde,” she added to Mateo. He smiled and whisked the board away. “I do hope we can avoid bloodshed this year,” she added as she followed me to the front door.