Текст книги "The Nightingale Before Christmas"

Автор книги: Donna Andrews

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

The little hidden wireless speakers were playing “O Holy Night,” and I hummed along as I followed Michael to the kitchen.

“Ham sandwich?” he offered.

“Not for me,” I said. “Maybe just a slice of ham. I’m not doing the show house next year.”

“Are we definitely having another show house next year?”

“If it makes a lot of money for the historical society and draws a lot of tourists, everyone will want to do another one,” I said. “But I’m not doing it.”

“We’ll see,” he said.

“I’ve even figured out who to dump it on instead,” I said.

His mouth was full of ham sandwich, but he raised one eyebrow inquiringly.

“Martha.”

“The bossy one?”

“She’s perfect.”

“I thought you found her really annoying and obnoxious.”

“I do,” I said. “But one reason she’s so obnoxious is that she’s really mad at the committee for not giving her a major room. She’s taking it out on all the other designers. So if we put her in charge, she might be a lot less hard to live with.”

“You could be right,” Michael said.

“And if I’m wrong—at least she can get the job done, and I won’t be there to be annoyed.”

“Good plan. So have you figured out which of the designers did in Clay?”

“It’s starting to look as if none of them did.”

I filled him in on the rest of my day, including my success in figuring out alibis for all but one of the designers.

“Of course the chief’s still checking them out, I suppose,” I added. “But I feel a lot better, being reasonably sure I’m not hobhobbing with a murderer all day.”

“Speaking of all day, the rehearsal for the boys’ Christmas pageant is tomorrow at eleven. Are you going to be able to make it?”

“Is that tomorrow?”

“The pageant itself is on Christmas eve,” he said. “And I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but that’s only two days off.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said. “I will make a point of coming to the rehearsal. And maybe we can grab a quick bite afterward. Are they still happy with the costumes?”

“Jamie is,” he said. “And you know Josh.”

Yes, I knew Josh.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t made it to the parents’ organizational meeting, or the first recital for the pageant. Michael was at both, of course, but I felt guilty that I hadn’t been there. And I realized, only a few days ago, that he hadn’t told me the important bit of information.

“We need new costumes,” Josh had said one night.

“Can’t you wear your costumes from last year?” I’d asked. “Or are they too small?”

Jamie had shrugged.

“Mo-om,” Josh had moaned. “We were animals last year.”

Actually, since they’d been dinosaurs last year, I’d have said they were reptiles. And extinct reptiles to boot. Although, as Grandfather was so fond of pointing out, technically, reptiles had just as much right to be called animals as any other living organism. Still, it was a long way from T. Rex to a sheep.

“Well, what do you want to be this year?” I’d asked. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of choices in a nativity play.

Unless Robyn decided to spice things up and add scenes not found in the original text. Based on the boys’ preferences, I suspected a scene with pirates would go down well with most of the participants. Perhaps instead of arriving in Bethlehem on a donkey, the Holy Family could come by boat, allowing Joseph to fend off pirates along the way. Or, better yet, what if the Wise Men could encounter a party of Imperial storm troopers—also bound for Bethlehem and clearly up to no good—and repel the them with their light sabers?

I’d abandoned that train of thought and dragged my mind back to the immediate crisis.

“So if you’re not animals, what are you?” I’d asked. “Angels?”

“Mo-o-om!” I’d been hoping neither of them would learn to roll their eyes like that until they were teenagers. “Girls are angels. And little kids are animals. Big boys are shepherds!”

As it turned out, Jamie would have been just fine with being an animal. And he would have been quite satisfied with Michael’s plan for a shepherd’s costume, which was to cut a hole in a piece of burlap for the neck and tie the whole thing together with a length of rope. Josh, however, had demanded better, and his idea of proper shepherd garb would have taxed the expertise of a Savile Row tailor, to say nothing of my poor sewing skills.

It was December, so he’d wanted sleeves. Nicer sleeves. And his tunic wasn’t white enough. Could I wash it? The hem was uneven. There was a loose thread. His belt was too tight. His crook was splintery, could I make it smooth? His sandals were too small.

And of course, I couldn’t go to all that trouble for Josh and leave Jamie as a ragged lump of burlap. In the end, I’d managed to produce two passable tunics, with sleeves long enough to keep them warm, especially when combined with a blue-and-white striped overcoat. Their crooks were polished till they shone; their belts were made of gold-brocade cord left over when Mother had gotten new curtain ties for her dining room, and we’d delighted them with long, fussy brown beards. It was going to look as if two of the members of ZZ Top were moonlighting in the hills outside Bethlehem.

“What do you think?” I’d asked them, when they finally tried on the finished costumes.

“It’s okay,” Josh had said. He still wasn’t entirely happy with the sandals.

“This looks great, Mommy,” Jamie had said.

Sometimes, just for a few moments, you’re allowed to love one twin more than his brother.

Michael’s voice brought me back to the present.

“Always a chance he’ll find some kind of problem with his costume and pitch a fit today,” he was saying. “But I think I can hold the threat of making Santa’s naughty list over him.”

“Or tell him that if he behaves, Grandma will give him some special passementerie to add to his costume on the night of the pageant.”

“Will he know what passementerie is?” Michael asked. “Because I don’t.”

“It can be a surprise,” I said. “And he’ll be impressed with the five-syllable word.”

“Well, that was satisfying,” Michael said, as he finished off his sandwich. “Time we hit the hay.”

We both pitched in to tidy up the kitchen, and headed upstairs, yawning.

“Is there really that much left to do on the house?” he asked.

“For me, yes,” I said. “Tickets. Programs. Parking and shuttles. Schedules for the docents. Trying to get some more publicity so ticket sales will pick up. And keeping the designers from doing anything else to damage the house.”

“But what about the designers? Surely they must be getting close to finishing?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “I can look at a room and think it’s perfect and if I say that, they look at me as if I’m an idiot. These are people who will repaint a room three or four times because the color doesn’t work the way they thought it would. People who can spend five minutes plumping a pillow properly. If I hear the words, ‘it needs … something’ one more time, I might lose it. I think they’re all going to keep tweaking and improving their rooms right up until the last minute. Beyond the last minute. I’m afraid that when the first paying guests walk in, Mother will ask them if they mind helping her rearrange the furniture.”

“Well, it’s only a couple more days,” he said.

“True,” I said. “I can survive anything for a few more days.”

Chapter 15

December 22

As I was driving to the show house the next morning, my phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number. Could it be Boomer, reporting back already? I pulled over to answer it. Fortunately, I only said “Hello” rather than “Well, that was quick” or “I guess Rob was joking about how late you slept.”

“Is this the Meg Langslow who’s in charge of the Caerphilly Historical Society’s Christmas Decorator Show House?” a male voice said.

“Yes,” I said. “May I help you?”

“I’m with the Richmond Times-Dispatch,” he said. “I’m supposed to come by to take some shots for a story in the paper. Would noon today be okay?”

I closed my eyes and contemplated how the designers would react if I arrived and told them a photographer would be arriving in four hours. Less than four hours.

“We don’t actually open until ten a.m. on December twenty-fourth,” I said. “And as you can imagine, the designers are still busy putting the finishing touches on their rooms.”

“That doesn’t matter to me,” he said.

“But it will to them,” I pointed out. “How about a sneak preview an hour before we let the public in on the twenty-fourth?”

“I’m tied up that day. Can we make it three today?”

We finally made it 10:00 A.M. on the twenty-third. Which was tomorrow.

Now to break the news to the decorators.

I stopped by the Caerphilly Bakery and picked up two dozen assorted doughnuts, bearclaws, and other breakfast pastries, to sweeten the news. And a couple of carryout carafes of coffee, to jump start their efforts.

Most of the designers were already there when I arrived. Sarah was carrying in boxes from her car. As was Violet. What were they up to? Now was time to be putting on finishing touches, not dragging in vast quantities of new stuff.

Mother was showing Tomás and Mateo exactly how she wanted them to put a light touch of gilding on the edges of some of the woodwork.

“Pastries?” she exclaimed. “How nice, dear.”

She smiled indulgently as Mateo and Tomás abandoned their paintbrushes long enough to grab pastries. I carried the rest of the doughnuts and the coffee through to the kitchen. Eustace also had piles of boxes. Clearly it was a trend, and not one I was happy to see under the circumstances.

“Mind if I put these here?” I asked Eustace.

“Fine,” he said. “Just how awful does this cabinet look? Be brutal.”

I came around to where I could see the kitchen cabinets. He’d had all the cabinet fronts replaced with glass-paned doors in a sort of diamond-hatched pattern that looked vaguely Elizabethan. He’d even installed lighting inside the cabinets, the better to see the contents. And I noticed that he’d added—or, more likely, Tomás and Mateo had added—little flourishes of gold on the glass, curlicues and leaves and … well, squiggles. Evidently this was what had inspired Mother to commit retaliatory gilding.

And now he was arranging dishes in the cabinets. A really small number of dishes—especially when compared to the number of boxes he’d used to bring them in. One cabinet held nothing but a turquoise teapot and a matching teacup on the bottom shelf, two hand-painted goblets on the middle shelf, and a blue Fiestaware pitcher on the top one. At this rate, he’d need a lot more cabinets to hold just the dishes and glassware that were spread out along the counter, much less what lurked in the boxes.

“I’m not letting you anywhere near my kitchen,” I said. “But it’s beautiful. They all are.”

“Then why don’t you want me near your kitchen?” he asked.

“Because I think those glass-fronted cabinets are fabulous, and you’d talk me into having them, and they just wouldn’t work,” I said. “We have too much kitchen stuff, and most of it’s not decorative—at least not when you have to crowd it in to get all of it put away.”

“Well, you’re right, it’s not practical,” he said. “But it’s beautiful, and people love to see it. Do you think I should switch the pitcher and the teapot?”

“I think you should ask Mother,” I said. “I have no eye for this kind of thing. Meanwhile, I have news.”

The assorted designers and worker bees gathered around the pastry looked up anxiously.

“They caught the killer?” Martha guessed.

“No, I haven’t heard anything more about that,” I said. “But a photographer from the Richmond Times-Dispatch is coming tomorrow morning to take pictures of the house!”

You’d think I’d announced my intention to have them all shot at sunrise.

“That’ll never do,” Martha said.

“We’re not nearly ready!” Sarah wailed.

“Oh, great,” Eustace said. “My rooms will be a disaster.”

“Meg, dear, can’t you possibly ask him to come a little later?” Mother said. “Christmas eve would be so much better. We could let him in before the general public.”

“I suggested that, and he can’t do it,” I said. “He wanted to be here in about an hour. Just be glad I talked him into tomorrow morning at ten.”

They all scattered—though not, I noticed, without taking their share of the coffee and pastries.

Eustace had stopped fiddling with his dishes and was looking around his room as if he’d never seen it before.

“Where to begin?” he muttered.

Out in the great room, Mother was standing in the middle of her room, hands on her hips, slowing turning around to survey it, and frowning, as if everything she had done needed to be ripped out and redone.

“Looks fabulous,” I said as I passed.

She ignored me.

Throughout the house, all the other designers were performing their own variations on what Mother and Eustace were doing. Surveying their rooms as if they’d never seen them before—and evidently finding them wanting.

I stepped into the master bedroom. Which of all the rooms in the house was the one least ready for its close-up. Fat chance distracting one of the others from their pre-photo prepping, so getting it in shape would appear to be my job.

I texted Randall to remind him that we needed a new mattress for the room. And asked if I should buy sheets or if he was taking care of it.

Maybe I should talk to the designers, now that they’d had a few moments to absorb the news. Calm them down, if necessary. Find out if there was anything I could do to help them.

I went downstairs and was just stepping into Sarah’s study when my phone rang.

“Hello,” I said, as I stepped into the hall to avoid bothering Sarah if I needed to have a conversation with whoever was calling.

“He doesn’t exist.”

I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at the screen, which said only BLOCKED.

“Who doesn’t exist?” I said into the phone.

“Spottiswood.”

It had to be Boomer calling.

“He has to exist,” I said. “I practically stumbled over his dead body two nights ago.”

“Whoever the stiff was, he wasn’t born Spottiswood,” Boomer said.

Okay, that made sense. I’d always thought Clay’s name was a little too good to be true.

“He showed up in Tappahannock five years ago,” Boomer went on. “Here in Caerphilly two years ago. That’s it.”

“You tried all the variant spellings for Claiborne and Spottiswood?”

“Couple dozen. No dice. And the guy’s not even filing income tax under any of those misspellings.”

“What did you do, hack the IRS’s databases?” I exclaimed.

Silence.

“Forget I asked,” I said. “Are you sure you checked every—never mind. Stupid question.”

“Sorry,” Boomer said. “If you get any other data—anything at all—I can keep trying.”

“If I had any more information, I’d have given it to you,” I said.

A soft voice from somewhere above my head spoke up.

“Clay Smith.”

I looked up. Ivy was peering down over the railing from the upper hall.

“Hang on a sec,” I said to Boomer. I took a few steps up toward Ivy.

“Clay Smith?” I said. “Claiborne Spottiswood is really Clay Smith.”

She nodded.

“I heard that,” Boomer said. “Clay Smith. What an unusual name. Won’t be easy.”

“Anything else you know about him?” I asked Ivy. Boomer was doing me a favor, so I decided to ignore his sarcastic tone.

“Tell your … investigator to look in New York City, fifteen to twenty years ago,” she said. “He’ll find the stories. It was in all the papers.”

I relayed this to Boomer.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

I hung up and put away my phone. Ivy’s head disappeared. I climbed the rest of the way up to the second-floor landing. She had gone back to painting one of her murals.

“It’s Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ you know,” she said, without looking up from her work. “He’s wearing the magic clothes the phony tailors have pretended to make for him—the clothes that are invisible to anyone unfit for his position.”

“Nice,” I said. Her mural showed a cobblestone street running along the length of the wall, lined on each side with townspeople in colorful medieval garb. Bits of snow flecked the cobblestones and covered the steep roofs of the buildings, so odds were the poor emperor would end his procession not only mortally embarrassed but probably also suffering from frostbite.

“So you knew Clay back then, in New York?” I asked, as I watched her carefully dabbing paint onto the cobblestones down which the emperor was strolling.

“Knew of him,” she said, without looking up. “I doubt if he would’ve remembered me. He was an up-and-coming painter on the New York scene, and I was … not.”

“Painter? As in fine art?”

“Oh, yes.” She nodded absently, and hitched herself a little to the left, to reach more cobblestones. “He really was very good. A brilliant painter, and it didn’t hurt that he was handsome and articulate and … larger than life.”

“What happened?”

“What happened.” She sighed. “Fame happened. He signed with a big gallery, and they started selling his paintings for a lot of money. But he was spending the money faster than he could paint. There might have been drugs involved. Or maybe he just went a little crazy. And unfortunately, he began to blame his financial problems on the owner of the gallery that represented him. Claimed the guy was a cheat.”

“Blaming the gallery owner for his own mistakes?” I suggested.

“Oh, no. He was definitely right,” she said, with a fleeting smile. “The gallery owner was cheating a lot of people. It came out at the trial.”

“Clay took him to court?”

“No, Clay shot him.”

“Shot him?”

“I don’t think Clay meant to kill him,” Ivy said. “Unfortunately, the fact that the man was cheating him only made Clay’s motive look that much stronger. He was drunk at the time, and the gun belonged to the gallery owner, so a lot of people thought he should have gotten off with self-defense or justifiable homicide. Of course, other people thought he was lucky to have gotten off with manslaughter.”

“So he went to prison?”

She nodded.

“For how long?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Not life. Though however long it was, young as we were, I’m sure it seemed like a lifetime to him when they sentenced him. I suppose it must have been ten or fifteen years, since he’s out now.”

I stood and watched her paint for a while, mulling over what she’d said. And watching her paint. She was working on the emperor now. Most of his body was hidden by the onlookers lining both sides of the cobblestone street, but you could tell he was wearing nothing. And, in a sly touch, while most of the onlookers were cheering happily, every so often you’d spot one who couldn’t quite keep up the pretense.

“Did you tell the chief about this?” I asked after a while.

“I expect he already knows by now,” she said. “Clay’s fingerprints would be on file, wouldn’t they?”

“Probably,” I said. “And if my investigator’s right and he’s not paying taxes under Spottiswood, he probably has paperwork at the house with his real name on it. The chief would have seen that by now.”

“Yes,” she said. “So I didn’t think I needed to tell the chief. But if you think he needs to know, you can tell him. I don’t mind.”

As I watched, she was putting the finishing touches on the emperor’s face. He looked a lot like Clay.

Chapter 16

I slipped away and left Ivy to work in peace. I stepped into Violet’s bedroom. She was sitting on the floor, working on something.

“How’s it coming?” I asked.

“Oh, just fine,” she said. “I decided the shelves needed a little something.”

I’d been thinking that for several days now, but then I knew better than to second-guess the designers. The twelve-foot back wall of Violet’s bedroom had two windows, each fitted with a pink-cushioned window seat, and the rest of the wall was given over to shelves. I’d have called them bookshelves, but up till now Violet had only decorated them with a small assortment of pastel ornaments. A white vase containing dried flowers. A pink-and-lavender child’s jewelry box. The overflow of pink, white, and lavender stuffed animals from the bed. A white ceramic lamb. A pink ceramic cat.

It all looked a little sparse to me, but I assumed it was the look she was aiming for. And at least she’d put up a few token holiday decorations. Nothing impressive—a few feet of silver tinsel garland, a few silver filigree balls. But at least she’d done something.

And I was delighted to see that she’d brought in books. Several tall stacks of books. From force of habit, I tilted my head to read the titles on the books.

A battered copy of The Wind in the Willows. A biography of Adlai Stevenson. A 1957 organic chemistry textbook. A lot of what I recognized as bestsellers from the forties and fifties.

“Oh, they’re not interesting books,” she said. “I just went down to the thrift store and bought a bunch that were the right size.”

I glanced over and saw what she was working on. She was taking the dust jackets off the books and cutting new dust jackets out of pink, lavender, or white paper.

She was piling the dust jackets carelessly in the corner of the room.

I wasn’t exactly a rabid bibliophile, but this bothered me.

“You’re not using the dust jackets?” I asked.

“Oh, no.” She wrinkled her nose slightly. “They’re just so … gaudy. The books themselves are better, but the colors are all wrong for my room. This will be so much nicer, don’t you think?”

Nicer as long as you had no particular desire to read any of the books. With her system, Robinson Crusoe and The Life Cycle of the Dermestid Beetle looked pretty much the same.

“Hey, could you save the covers for me?” I asked. “I have a project I could really use them for.”

“Happy to,” she said. “I was just going to throw them away.”

“Great! Just stack them neatly in this box, and let me know when you’ve got a stack big enough that you want me to haul it away.”

“No problem,” she said. “You can take those now.”

I set one of the boxes the books had come out of where it would be handy. Then I gathered up the twenty or so covers she’d already discarded, stacked them loosely, and carried them down via the back stairs, waving at the Quilt Ladies as I passed.

“You heard about the photographer at ten tomorrow?” I stopped to say.

“We’ll be ready!” Vicky sang out.

Nice to see someone was optimistic. They did seem to be working frantically on something. A quilt in Christmassy fabrics of red and green, with a lot of gold metallic tracery on them. But whether or not the room looked exactly as they wanted it to, it should look fine in the photographs.

Down in the garage I found a box for the discarded covers.

“I don’t know why I care,” I muttered. There probably weren’t any valuable books in there. Chances were, people who cared about dust jackets would turn up their noses at Violet’s book collection.

But it bothered me, so if possible, I’d try to reunite them at the end of the show house.

Of course, there was always the chance she’d sell the books back to the thrift shop without the covers at the end of the show. Maybe I should talk her into donating them to the library, for the tax break. She’d probably go for that. And I could give our head librarian a heads-up that the dust jackets would be arriving separately.

Back into the house. Eustace had now put one or two dishes, vases, or bits of glassware on every shelf in his ever-so-many cabinets. I paused to watch him for a minute or two. He was now standing and studying the effect, pausing every once in a while to switch a couple of items, or adjust one a few millimeters in one direction or another.

“It’s just not right,” he said. “It’s too much of a muchness. What else can I put in these wretched cabinets?”

“Well,” I said. “In my kitchen, a lot of that space would be given over to food. Teas, spices, canned goods. But I don’t suppose you want that gaudy modern supermarket look.”

Eustace’s face froze for a moment, then he beamed.

“You’re a genius! Yes! Decorative tea caddies! Elegant spice jars! And perhaps a few vintage grocery items! I must go shopping!”

He grabbed up his coat, hat, and scarf and dashed toward the garage, presumably heading for the back door there.

“A genius,” I murmured. “I like that.”

In the great room, Mother was rearranging the logs in the fireplace into a more pleasing configuration while Tomás and Mateo dabbed little bits of gold on things.

In the dining room, Linda had assembled several dozen pieces of wooden or plastic fruit and was painting them all gold. Another theme. I should probably refrain from pointing out what happened to King Midas.

I grabbed my coat and hat from the coat closet. I didn’t have to take off for the rehearsal for fifteen minutes or so, but with all the designers focused on something, now seemed a good time to make my escape.

“You heading out?” Randall appeared from the basement.

“Family stuff. Are you—”

My phone rang. It was Stanley Denton

“Remember that so-called charity you asked me to check out?” he said. “Designers of the Future?”

“So-called? What have you found out about it?”

“Not a whole lot, but enough to be very suspicious.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Let me put you on speaker so Randall Shiffley can hear.”

“Okay.”

“Hey, Stanley,” Randall said. “What’s up?”

“Meg had me look into the charity Clay Spottiswood designated to receive the proceeds if he won the contest,” Stanley said.

Randall looked puzzled and glanced at me.

“Because I’d never heard of it, and someone told me Clay had founded it, and it didn’t seem in character for him,” I explained.

“Good instincts,” Stanley said. “I can’t quite prove it yet, but I have reason to believe it was pretty much a sham. I haven’t been able to put my hands on any paperwork about the organization—”

“You think maybe there isn’t any?” I asked.

“Good possibility,” Stanley said.

“Didn’t I give you the form he gave me?” Randall asked.

“You did,” Stanley said. “But it’s a forgery. The tax-exempt number on it belongs to the Vietnam Veterans of America.”

“He’s scum,” Randall muttered.

“I talked to one of Clay’s clients,” Stanley went on. “A very wealthy man who doesn’t want his name attached to any of this, but I believe him. Clay hit him up for a donation to his charity but he never did produce any paperwork. Nothing like a business plan or a budget. Only thing he could remember was Clay bragging about what a low salary he was going to pay himself for running the show, but my source didn’t really think fifty thousand was such a bargain rate for an outfit that had no assets and no real hope of acquiring any.”

“So Clay was trying to con us into putting half the show house proceeds into his own pocket,” Randall said. “Meg, you’re allowed to say ‘I told you so’ now.”

“Did she predict Clay would try to pull something like that?”

“No,” Randall said. “But she did tell me we ought to get a lot more detailed contracts for these show house participants. Next year, I’ll make sure I listen to her.”

Probably not the best time to mention that next year I planned to make sure someone else was here doing the thankless job of riding herd on the designers.

“So does this have anything to do with Clay’s murder?” Randall asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“I’m going to fill Chief Burke in, just in case,” Stanley said. “Because you never know what little bit of information will crack his case. See you later.”

With that he hung up.

“And before you ask, I’m off to fetch the mattress for Clay’s room,” Randall said as he strode down the hallway. “And the sheets.”

As I was standing in the foyer, putting my coat on, Sarah appeared in the doorway of her study.

“You’re leaving?”

“Important family stuff,” I said. “Back in a couple of hours. How’s it going?”

“Getting close,” Sarah said. “I decided I needed a lot more books on the shelves. After all, it’s a study.”

I winced, and stepped farther into the room so I could see what she was doing to her books, and whether I needed to rescue another flock of unloved dust jackets.

But to my delight, Sarah was filling her shelves with real books in their natural state. Many of them had dust jackets, and I had to admit that some of the individual dust jackets were gaudy. But once she arranged them on the shelves, the individual jackets blended into a pleasing mosaic. And some of the books were jacketless, shabby, and obviously much read, but they also blended in and added to the patina.

I found myself remembering a period, from when I was nine or ten until I went off to college, when Mother and Dad would often take me with them to Virginia’s Garden Week or any other event that opened other people’s homes for tours by the paying public. Mother was interested in the décor, of course, and Dad went along because many of the houses had beautiful gardens. He was prone to complaining in the car afterward if not enough of the houses had landscaping worth looking at. I wasn’t that keen on any of it, though I did find it rather interesting to snoop into how other people lived. I only came along because I didn’t want to be left home with Rob and the babysitter—or later, as Rob’s babysitter. Mother always said that if she lost track of Dad and me in one of the houses, she’d think back over the rooms she’d seen. If one of them had books in it, she’d head back there, and would find the two of us standing side by side in front of the shelves, browsing the books—both of us with our hands clasped behind our backs, because you weren’t supposed to touch anything, and leaning forward to read the titles. And if there weren’t any books, we’d be outside, kicking our heels till she emerged.

Sarah’s books would have kept Dad and me happily occupied for however long Mother wanted to spend in a house.

“Nice selection,” I said, adopting the traditional posture with my hands clasped behind my back and my body leaning toward the shelves. “You must patronize a better class of thrift shop than Violet.”

“Actually, I brought in some of my own books,” she said with a laugh.

Better and better. I saw a lot of my own favorites, both childhood and adult, and Dad would have been gratified by the large selection of crime fiction. And she had interesting tastes in history and biography.

“I admit, I left my small collection of first editions at home,” she said. “And I’m sort of arranging these by color, which I wouldn’t do at home. I’m strictly alphabetical there.”

“Michael and I do alphabetical within subject,” I said. “Although we recently pulled together all the kids’ books that we want the boys to find and read over the next few years, and put them on shelves in their rooms. And we also decided to get a few locked bookcases for the stuff we didn’t want the boys to get their hands on for a couple of decades.”