Текст книги "The Nightingale Before Christmas"

Автор книги: Donna Andrews

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“Psst! Meg!”

I was past the gate now. I turned and looked back.

The gate was open about a foot, and Reverend Robyn Smith from Grace Episcopal was peering out.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I followed Vermillion,” I said.

Robyn closed her eyes, sighed, and then opened them again.

“Come in for a minute,” she said.

She swung the gate open. I stepped into the yard and waited while she closed and latched it. Then she led me into the house.

“It’s okay,” she called as she stepped inside. “I know her.”

She moved aside so I could see. The room was filled with women and children and sparsely furnished with what looked like castoffs. Three children were playing Parcheesi on the floor. Another knot of children were playing with toy cars. A girl of perhaps eleven or twelve sat on one of the faded sofas, playing with a baby. At the far end of the room, three women were setting out plates and silverware on two card tables, and another woman peered out from the kitchen.

“Welcome to the Caerphilly Battered Women’s Shelter,” Robyn said.

Chapter 13

“I didn’t know Caerphilly even had a women’s shelter,” I said.

“We like it that way,” Robyn said. “If you tell anyone where it is, you could be putting these women’s and children’s lives in jeopardy. They’re all taking refuge from dangerously abusive men.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I haven’t the faintest idea where I am anyway.”

Robyn smiled at that, and a couple of the women giggled.

Vermillion, carrying a toddler, came over.

“Why were you following me?” she asked.

“I’m sorry—” I began.

“The safe house is supposed to be a secret,” she said. “I was supposed to pick up Eil—one of the residents—at her job and bring her back here without anyone following us, especially her horrible ex. And—”

“Then maybe you should take some lessons on how to lose a tail,” I said. “Starting with driving a less distinctive car.”

She blinked and took a step back as if I’d hit her.

“Now, now,” Robyn said.

“Vermillion, I’m sorry,” I said. “If I’d known where you were going, I wouldn’t have followed you. But remember, we’ve had a murder at the show house, and you’re one of the few people in the house whose whereabouts last night I know nothing about, and you were acting incredibly furtive.”

“Meg does have a point, Vermillion,” Robyn said.

Vermillion’s shoulders slumped.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I just get really nervous when I’m bringing someone to the house. And if it makes you feel any better, last night I was here at the shelter. All night.”

“Vermillion’s been staying here on night duty,” Robyn said. “And we had a new family move in last night. I arrived with them around ten thirty, and I didn’t leave until past one. She was helping, too. So I think she’s in the clear on the murder.”

“Excellent,” I said.

“If I knew anything, I’d tell you,” Vermillion said. “I loathed Clay and I wanted him out of the house, but still, it’s not right for someone to murder him.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and get dinner started?” Robyn said to the women at the table. “I just want to have a quiet word with Meg. Vermillion, can you help them?”

Vermillion lugged the child she was carrying into the kitchen. Robyn led me back out onto the porch.

“So how long has Caerphilly had a battered women’s shelter?” I asked.

“Only been operating six months,” she said.

“Keeping it secret for six months is a miracle in a small town like this.”

“And Vermillion is one of our best volunteers,” she said. “Although I’ve been worried about her lately.”

“Worried? Why?” I asked. Would it have something to do with Clay?

“She’s really good with the residents because she’s been through what they’re going through,” Robyn said. “Not here, but back home, wherever home was. She hasn’t told me much more than that. She was doing pretty well until the last few weeks. Lately she’s taken to sleeping here overnight most nights.”

“Did something happen to her here in Caerphilly?”

“No,” Robyn said. “I asked her. She said no—and I believe her—but she also said there was someone in the house she didn’t trust.”

“Clay Spottiswood,” I said.

“Yes.” Robyn nodded. “Not that she said as much, but it stands to reason.”

“Do you think he … threatened her in some way?”

“I think she’d have told me if he did,” Robyn said. “But I trust her judgment. Not her fashion sense, mind you. But her ability to spot someone capable of violence, absolutely.”

“Yesterday, when she arrived at the house, Rose Noire said she could feel the negative energy trying to keep her out,” I said. “And that there was something evil in the house.”

“Rose Noire is a good person,” Robyn said. “I trust her judgment, too. Do you think this man Clay was evil?”

The question surprised me.

“No,” I said, after thinking for a few moments. “Unpleasant, yes. Responsible for that negative energy, definitely. He was not a nice person. Maybe even a violent one. But evil? No. If there really was evil in the house, maybe it was that someone was already planning to kill him.”

“Yes.” Robyn nodded emphatically. “So be careful out there. There’s an evildoer still at large.”

Then her mood lightened.

“We’re having chili for dinner,” she said. “One of our current residents is a fabulous cook. Would you like to stay and share it?”

“I would love to,” I said. “But I’m going to miss the start of Michael’s show if I don’t rush over to the theater right now. Rain check?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And you do realize now that you’ve found your way here to the safe house, we’ll figure out a way to make use of you.”

“I’ll count on it.”

I tried to follow my own advice as I walked back to the car, matter-of-factly, no tiptoeing or looking furtively over my shoulder. But I still found myself breathing a sigh of relief that I saw only a few perfectly innocent-looking vehicles and pedestrians as I wound my way out of the quiet neighborhood.

And I realized, with a start, that the safe house was only about ten blocks from the show house. Vermillion could have walked here in ten minutes. We must have spent at least two or three times that driving around town. Of course, she hadn’t just been coming here, she’d been picking up the resident who needed a safe way of getting home. Still—if Vermillion had been alone for as little as half an hour …

I’d have to trust Robyn on that. Robyn, and the chief’s good instincts.

Of course, if Vermillion really had been afraid of Clay, knowing that he had been so close by could partly explain her growing uneasiness at the house.

I was getting close to the theater, and needed to focus all my attention on finding a parking space nearby. Or at least in the same time zone.

I raced in just in time to claim the seat my family had been saving for me on the far end of the front row. Not the best seat in the house, as Dad kept telling me apologetically, but I didn’t mind. I’d heard Michael do his one-man show more than a couple of times now—part of the entertainment, for me, was to watch how the audience reacted to him. And I could do that more easily from the side of the theater.

And, of course, I also wanted to watch Josh and Jamie’s reactions—they’d seen the show last year, of course, but now they were a year older, and considered themselves veteran theatergoers, thanks to our season tickets to the Caerphilly Children’s Theater.

At last the house lights dimmed. A single spotlight lit the podium, and the sound crew played a few bars of a group of carolers singing “Good King Wenceslas.” Then the music faded as if the carolers were strolling away, and Michael stepped onstage, to be greeted with thunderous applause.

He bowed, and waited till the applause had died down—and both twins had been induced to sit down instead of standing on their seats—before opening.

“A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens,” he read out. “Stave one: Marley’s Ghost.”

I sat back to enjoy the show. But after a few paragraphs, Dickens’s words suddenly drew me out of the story and back into thinking about the events of the last two days.

“Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, ‘My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?’” Michael proclaimed. “No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge.”

He could be talking of Clay. Clay wasn’t evil, any more than Scrooge was. Unpleasant, both of them, to be sure. Uncivil, rude, selfish, misguided—I could think of any number of uncomplimentary words that would apply to both.

But not evil. And Scrooge hadn’t started off bad. At some point, for some reason, he’d taken the wrong path. But he’d reformed. Been redeemed.

Clay never would be.

As Michael recounted Scrooge’s journey with the Ghost of Christmas Past, I tried to imagine what would happen if the same ghost had visited Clay.

And I drew a complete blank.

What if Clay’s murderer wasn’t anyone in the show house, but someone from his past?

The past I knew nothing about.

“None of my business,” I murmured, causing Mother, who was next to me, to turn and raise one eyebrow inquiringly.

I smiled and shook my head.

I needed to focus on Michael’s performance. But my mind continued to wander until my eyes, also wandering, lit on Rob, near the other end of our row of family members.

Of course. Rob. There had to be information online about Clay, and Rob was the one to help me with it. He might know next to nothing about computers himself, but as the CEO of Mutant Wizards, his highly successful computer game development company, he had access to all sorts of highly skilled techies. As soon as the show was over, I’d ask him to lend me one. Someone really good at online research, who could find me every detail of Clay Spottiswood’s past.

With that decided, I was able to turn my attention to the show.

And not a minute too soon. I realized that while Jamie was sitting completely still, attention riveted to his father’s every word and every gesture, Josh was displaying his devotion in a rather different way.

He was imitating Michael. When Michael rubbed his chin thoughtfully to indicate Scrooge’s puzzlement, Josh rubbed his chin. When Michael threw out his hands to express Scrooge’s delight at seeing his old master Fezziwig, Josh threw out his hands. And when Michael, describing the dancing at Fezziwig’s Christmas party, leaped into the air and clicked his heels together, Josh bobbed out of his seat.

People were starting to notice. In fact, they weren’t just starting to notice, they were staring and giggling. And Dad, on one side of him, and Michael’s mother, on the other, weren’t doing a thing.

“Josh!” I hissed. He was several seats down and didn’t hear me at first. “Josh!”

He turned in the middle of pretending to play the fiddle and looked at me.

“Not now,” I said.

He frowned.

“It’s Daddy’s turn to do the play,” I said. “You can do it when we get home.”

He slumped back into his seat.

“Okay,” he said, in a small voice.

A voice I shouldn’t have been able to hear.

I looked around. Everyone was staring. Even Michael, up on stage, was watching, and suppressing laughter. Then he bowed very deeply to Josh, who sat up a little straighter and smiled again.

Michael went on with the show. Josh, to my relief, remained silent, and mostly still. Though I could tell, from the way his mouth often moved, and the fact that his hands occasionally twitched in an almost imperceptible echo of Michael’s hands, that he was planning to hold me to the notion of doing a performance of his own at home.

And the rest of the show went just fine. Even though I could repeat large chunks of it by heart, I never tired of hearing Dickens’s words in Michael’s voice. And all of the English holiday traditions Dickens described—and I suspect helped create—were exactly what I had grown up with. When the Ghost of Christmas Past took Scrooge to Fezziwig’s party, with its mince pies and dancing, I felt nostalgic for the family parties of my childhood and eager to see the boys enjoy this year’s celebrations.

When the Ghost of Christmas Present arrived laden with “turkeys, geese, game, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and great bowls of punch” I began looking forward to the upcoming holiday meals and thanking my lucky stars that Michael’s mother was in charge of providing them. And when Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed Scrooge the sorrow the Cratchits were suffering from losing Tiny Tim, audible sniffles could be heard throughout the theater, and I looked down the aisle to make sure the boys remembered that thanks to Scrooge’s reformation Tiny Tim would not die. Jamie looked anxious and was holding tightly to Mother’s hand, but Josh was fine—he was practicing the look of grave sorrow with which Michael read Bob Cratchit’s words: “I promised him that I would walk there on a Sunday. My little, little child! My little child!”

The idea of being without one of the boys was bad enough—but at Christmas! I sniffled a little myself, and wanted to cheer when Scrooge woke from his ordeal and exclaimed “It’s Christmas day! I haven’t missed it.”

As everyone in the audience slowly filed out of the theater, exclaiming about the show and exchanging Christmas greetings as they went, I caught Rob’s sleeve.

“Rob,” I said. “I need to borrow one of your employees. Have you got an online Sherlock who can find out anything about anyone?”

“Sure thing.” He pulled out his phone and turned it on, scrolled through his contacts for a few moments, then nodded.

“Boomer’s your guy,” he said. “I’ll e-mail you his info.”

“Great,” I said. “How early can I call him tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” Rob sounded amused. “Call him now.”

“It’s past eleven,” I said. “It could be midnight before I find a quiet place to call him.”

“He’s up,” Rob said. “He keeps vampire hours. If you wait till tomorrow, I wouldn’t call him before three or four in the afternoon.”

“And he works for you?”

“Flextime,” Rob said with a shrug.

So while everyone else went backstage to congratulate Michael, I lagged behind, found a quiet corner, and called the number.

“Yeah?” said a voice on the other end.

“Hi, is this Boomer?”

Silence.

“This is Meg Langslow,” I went on.

“Rob’s sister,” Boomer said.

I waited for a few moments, but clearly he thought that was enough of a response.

“Rob told me you could help me find out about someone,” I said. “A guy named Claiborne Spottiswood.”

“Spelled?”

Well, at least Boomer’s terse style was efficient. I spelled the name and reminded him also to look under “Clay” and every possible misspelling of “Spottiswood” he could think of.

“Standard operating procedure,” he said. “I’ll call you when I find something.”

When, not if. I liked the way Boomer thought.

“Thanks,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

I pocketed my phone and headed for the dressing rooms. But along the way I stopped, almost by force of habit, by the rack that usually held copies of the student newspaper. It was empty. Not surprising this late in the evening. Well, I could check their Web site tomorrow to see if they’d run an article on the show house, or for that matter, on the murder.

Wait—the rack wasn’t empty because of the late hour. We were on winter break. The newspaper wouldn’t be putting out another issue until the students came back, in two weeks. There might be a few students still hanging around for the holidays—students from the area, grad students, students on tight budgets who couldn’t afford the fare to go home for the holiday, and students who had something to do in town, like the ones working backstage at Michael’s show. Presumably Jessica was one of the few still here. Maybe she was whiling away the long dark days on the near-deserted campus by pursuing stories from the wider community. But by the time the paper’s next issue went out, the show house would be over, so an article wouldn’t do us any good.

“Blast!” I muttered. I remembered all the time I’d spent talking to Jessica—time I could so easily have spent doing something more immediately useful. And who knew how much of the designers’ time she’d wasted?

Ah, well. At least if she did the article it might get the decorators some publicity. And there was always the chance that once the chief caught up with her he might find something useful in the photos she took.

I ran into Randall in the throng of family and friends crowding Michael’s dressing room.

“Everything go okay at the house after I left?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Ivy was the only one still there when I left to come here. I’m going to drop by on the way home and make sure everything’s locked up.”

“I’ll do it,” he said. “You go home and rest.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

Jamie was asleep on Michael’s shoulder by the time we got to the Twinmobile. Josh was busily discussing the costume he needed to have for his Dickens show, and was so wide awake that I was afraid I’d have to start assembling his miniature Victorian dress suit as soon as we got home. But a few seconds after I strapped him into his booster seat, he fell silent and his head lolled to one side in the sort of awkward position that never seems to bother children, though any adult who tried it would probably end up with a semipermanent sore neck.

Michael took off with the boys, and I headed up the street to where I’d parked my car. The streets that had been lined with cars belonging to shoppers and people going to the theater were nearly empty now that the stores were closed and the show over.

I was enjoying the peace and quiet and the crisp night air until I suddenly noticed the sound of footsteps behind me.

Chapter 14

Was I imagining the footsteps? I stopped and bent down as if to adjust my boot fastening. I stole a look behind me. There was no one in the street. And I heard no footsteps nearby.

Yet when I walked on, I heard it again. My footsteps made just a little more noise than they should. And the noise varied ever so slightly, as if someone was walking behind me, taking a step every time I did, and almost—but not quite—disguising the sound of his footsteps.

I walked along at a slow saunter until I came to a corner. Then, instead of crossing the street as I’d originally planned, I ducked around the corner. Once I had a building to keep me out of sight of anyone following me, I sprinted till I came to an alley in the middle of the block. I ducked down the alley and hid behind some trash cans.

I waited there, peering out from behind the trash cans to the mouth of the alley.

It wasn’t my imagination. I could hear footsteps in the street I’d left. Soft footsteps approaching the mouth of the alley.

“Meg? Are you all right?”

I started, and whirled to find Muriel, owner of the diner, standing there with a full black plastic garbage bag in one hand. Not surprising, since this was the alley that ran behind the diner.

“You startled me,” I said, a lot more softly than Muriel had spoken. “I thought someone was following me.”

We both fell silent and listened while peering toward the end of the alley, but we didn’t hear anything. At least I didn’t, and after a few moments Muriel shook her head.

“You sure you’re not just feeling spooked?” she asked. “What with finding a body last night and all?”

“Could be.” I stood up and dusted my pants off. “Sorry if I startled you.”

“No problem,” she said. “Hey, just in case someone really was following you, how about if you walk me to my car and then I’ll drive you to yours?”

“It’s a deal,” I said.

She deposited her garbage bag in the Dumpster and locked the back door of the diner behind her.

When we got to the mouth of the alley, I paused to look up and down the street. No one visible. Plenty of places to hide.

But was there a reason someone had left a brick lying on the snow just outside the mouth of the alley?

“From the construction site three blocks over,” Muriel said, seeing me studying the brick.

“But what’s it doing here?” I asked.

She looked at the brick for a few long moments.

“My car’s this way,” she said.

I was glad when we reached her car, and even gladder that she waited until she’d seen me start my car and drive off.

But I hadn’t gone more than a few blocks before I began to suspect that a car was following me. A car with oddly distinctive headlights. Two sets of headlights, one on top of the other, with the bottom set slightly farther apart. And there was something on the inside of each top headlight that made it seem as if the car was looking at me cross-eyed. And frowning.

Maybe I’d been listening to the boys too much. Lately they’d developed very strong automotive likes and dislikes, based mainly on their impressions of the cars’ faces, as they called the headlights and front-end decorations. Some cars looked as if they were smiling, others frowning. Some were sad, some happy. Josh was particularly fond of Corvettes, and Jamie thought most Audis looked mean. Once he’d burst into tears because a “mean car” was following us.

Was a mean car following me now? All I could see was those odd double headlights. Could be just a coincidence—there weren’t that many streets in Caerphilly.

I took a leisurely detour through a residential neighborhood. The distinctive headlights never turned off, and never got any closer, even when I idled for a couple of minutes in front of a house well known for having some of the most over-the-top holiday lights in town.

Before moving on, I pulled out my phone. And then hesitated. Should I call the police?

I called Randall instead.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Are you still at the show house?” I asked.

“For another minute or two. What do you need?”

“Could you stay there a few minutes longer? I think someone’s following me. I’d call the police, but maybe everything that’s happened lately has just got me jumpy. I don’t want to look like a nervous idiot.”

“What can I do?”

“Get in your truck, but don’t leave yet. I’ll drive by the house in a few minutes. If there’s someone following me—”

“I’ll get the license, call 9-1-1, and follow both of you till the police get there.”

I felt better already. I took off again, and the headlights that had been stationary the whole time I’d pretended to enjoy the light show continued to follow me.

I cruised slowly past the show house. It was completely dark, but I spotted Randall sitting in his truck.

I went up a couple of blocks, then went around a block. Just as I was about to make a left turn to go past the show house again, the car behind me suddenly speeded up. It passed me, then turned sharply so it blocked the whole street. The driver’s door popped open and a man jumped out and ran back toward my car.

I clicked the button to make sure all four doors were locked and then put the car in reverse and began slowly backing up as I picked up my cell phone to dial 9-1-1.

The man ran up to my window and banged on it, hard. Startled, I slammed on the brakes.

“Where is she?” he yelled. “I know you know.”

“Meg, help’s on the way,” Debbie Ann, the dispatcher, said. “Randall just called to tell us about the guy who’s following you.”

“He’s not following me anymore,” I said. “He’s banging on my car.”

“I’ll kill that bitch when I find her!” the man was shouting.

I turned my cell phone toward my window and took a picture of the angry red face pressed against it. But while I was still figuring out how to e-mail it to the police, the man suddenly flew backwards away from my window and landed in a snowdrift. Randall now stood just outside my window. I could hear sirens in the distance.

“Don’t move,” Randall shouted to the man. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

“Randall Shiffley’s here,” I said to Debbie Ann. “He’s … confronting the guy.”

The angry man was trying to struggle up.

Just then a police cruiser pulled up. Vern Shiffley, Randall’s cousin, jumped out just in time to see the man lurch to his feet and aim a punch at Randall. Randall dodged neatly. Vern wasn’t as lucky, but maybe it wasn’t entirely a bad thing that my stalker had just opened himself up to a charge of assaulting a police officer.

Another cruiser pulled up and Aida Butler hopped out. By the time Chief Burke pulled up, she and Vern had the stalker handcuffed in the back of Aida’s patrol car and Vern was holding a handful of snow on his injured eye.

“Are you all right?” the chief asked me.

“I’m fine,” I said.

The chief strode over to Aida’s patrol car and stood looking down at my stalker.

“Mr. Granger,” he said. “What’s the meaning of this?”

Someone known to the chief. I decided that was a good thing.

“She knows where my wife is,” Granger said.

I controlled my impulse to protest that I didn’t even know who his wife was, much less where she was.

“And what if she does?” the chief asked. “You do realize that you’d be violating the protective order if you followed her to find your wife, don’t you?”

Granger shut his mouth as if determined not to say anything else.

“Take him down to the station,” the chief said.

“I didn’t go near the bitch,” Granger protested. “I don’t even know where she is.”

“No, but you just assaulted a law enforcement officer while he was engaged in performing his duties,” the chief said.

He waved to Aida, who got in and started up her patrol car. As she drove off, the chief walked back over to me.

“You willing to press charges against this clown?” he asked.

“Gladly,” I said. “Though I’d really rather wait till tomorrow to do it, if it’s all the same.”

“Tomorrow will be soon enough,” he said. “You want an escort home?”

I shook my head. I had the feeling Mr. Granger, whoever he might be, was the only person after me tonight.

Not that I wasn’t glad when I got home and saw the house still brightly lit. And when Michael came out onto the porch to meet me.

“What took you so long?” he asked. “I was just about to call the police to have them check the ditches.”

“We had a little excitement.” I followed him and told him about Mr. Granger, while he went through the downstairs, performing his nightly ritual of shutting off lights and checking doors and windows.

“Quick thinking,” he said, when I’d finished my tale. “But who is this Granger character, and why would he think you know anything about his wife?”

“No idea,” I said. “I’ll ask the chief tomorrow.”

Though I had a feeling it would have something to do with the Caerphilly Women’s Shelter. A good thing Granger hadn’t been following me earlier in the day.

“Has the excitement given you an appetite?” Michael asked. “Want to join me in the kitchen?”

He never ate much before a show. He claimed it wasn’t due to nerves but part of a deliberate plan to keep himself sharp for the performance. Whatever the reason, he was always starving afterward and ready to pig out.

“I won’t eat much, but I’ll keep you company,” I said.

“Busy day tomorrow?”

“Two more days till we open,” I said. “So yes. Remind me again why I ever agreed to do this.”

“To protect this,” he said, waving a hand around in a gesture that took in not just the foyer where we were standing but the surrounding rooms. “It was the price we had to pay to keep your mother from insisting on having the show house here. Having all those crazy designers invading our space, redoing rooms we’ve finally got looking the way we like them, letting hordes of strangers tramp through our home—madness!”

“Not to mention the possibility that we might have had a murder in our own master bedroom instead of someone else’s,” I said.

“Exactly.”

Michael continued down the hall to the kitchen. I followed more slowly, looking around as I went, taking in the Christmas decorations in the foyer. I’d expected us to have to survive with minimal holiday decorations this year, since Mother, who normally insisted on decorating for us, would be totally immersed in the show house. But the day before she started work on her room, Mother showed up at seven in the morning with a dozen or so friends and relatives, and they’d transformed the whole house. The usual tall, narrow tree graced the foyer, this year completely decorated in red and gold with a musical theme—gold ornaments shaped like harps, trumpets, fiddles, drums, pianos, and French horns shared branches with chanting angels and singing choirboys. We had about the usual number of poinsettias, though this year most of them were plain red, which I preferred to the white or pink ones. Plain red dusted with a hint of gold glitter, anyway. This year Mother had put up red velvet ribbons crisscrossed on all the foyer walls, with little clips on them to hold Christmas cards. Every afternoon, providing they’d behaved themselves, the boys were allowed to take all the newly arrived Christmas cards and add them to the display. Mother had also festooned every corner of the room with so many tiny battery-powered LED candles in red-and-gold votive holders that the room sparkled like a convention of fireflies.

Just looking at it made me happier. When Michael and I had first moved into our house, I’d made an effort to trim it for the holidays with a wreath here and a garland there, but the sheer size of the space to be decorated overwhelmed me. Mother had taken over the chore of decorating the year I’d been pregnant with the boys—“You have so much else on your plate, dear”—and to my secret relief had never relinquished it. I might poke fun at some of her excesses, but I realized that I was okay with Mother doing the decorating. It brought back memories of Christmases when I was little. Not so much the way the house looked, but the fact that long before I’d have even begun seriously thinking about holiday plans, Mother and her helper bees would show up and transform the house from top to bottom in a single day. In fact, this was even better, because when I was living at home she’d enlist me as one of her minions, and now she preferred to finish the project when I wasn’t even around. Maybe she liked to surprise me. Or maybe she was afraid I’d veto some of her more extravagant notions if I found out about them in advance. Either way, I was content. Especially since I’d found out she had a growing list of clients who paid her hundreds of dollars every December to do to their houses what she did to ours for free. And now that Michael and I had the boys, I focused a lot less on being independent and getting my own way and a lot more on making sure the boys had a fabulous holiday. And they seemed to like their grandmother’s decorations.