Rest Ye Murdered Gentlemen Page 3

  My mom would kill someone when she heard she’d missed this.

  At last Nigel had all the pictures he wanted. I told Jackie to get behind the counter as a line was forming, and I walked with the photographer to the door. I handed him my card. He put it in his pocket without a word.

  “Have you heard about the parade reception tonight? Six thirty at the community center. Santa will be there, some local musicians are playing, a children’s choir is singing, and there will be plenty of refreshments. Everyone is welcome.”

  “It’s all part of Christmas in America’s Christmas Town, right?”

  “Right.” I smiled, trying to look friendly. He glanced across the room at Jackie. She waved and called out, “Catch you at the party, Nigel!”

  He left.

  With the speed and agility of a lion catching sight of an unattended baby zebra, Betty Thatcher leapt out from the door of her shop.

  * * *

  “What an unfortunate thing to happen,” Vicky said to me after she’d modestly accepted the first place trophy at the post-parade party. “Tractor breakdown, and you went to so much trouble. Oh, well, better luck next time.” The trophy, a hefty two-foot-tall, gold-painted reindeer with a big red glass ball for a nose, was prominently displayed in the center of the room for all to admire. Plaques ran across the base, with the names of the first place winners and their years. Until next December, the trophy would once again sit in the place of pride on the top shelf of Vicky’s bakery. A smaller statue, of Rudolph in bathing trunks and sunglasses, was awarded for the summer parade, but it didn’t have the prestige of coming first in the main event. It, too, adorned the bakery.

  We were gathered in the main hall of the community center for the after-parade festivities. The prizes had been awarded, every group (except mine!) pretty much got something for showing up. Mom’s class sang Christmas songs. Their “Silent Night” was so beautiful that a few of the tourists were brought to tears. As was Mom, when she heard there had been a journalist from an internationally famous magazine in the shop that afternoon. She was mollified when Nigel sauntered in, laden with photography equipment, and I introduced them.

  Nigel then went on to take more photos of Jackie: in front of the buffet, admiring the trophies, sitting innocently on Santa’s knee. Kyle Lambert, Jackie’s current boyfriend, glowered all the while.

  But even Jackie had to give way to Mom and her school. I had no doubt that if—a big if—we were the cover story of the magazine, as Nigel had hinted, the photo of her, resplendent in her Broadway-worthy gown, surrounded by pink-cheeked, beribboned, turquoise and green elf–costumed kids, would be on it.

  The main room of the center was fully decorated for Christmas, with a real tree with all the trimmings, rows of red stockings pinned to one wall, and colorful baubles hanging throughout. Santa held court for the kids in a big, comfortable wingback chair, listening to their wishes and posing for pictures. Alan, dressed in his toymaker getup, was acting as Santa’s assistant, taking notes on a lengthy scroll of paper with a pen that had an elaborate feather stuck to one end. His Honor held court, or attempted to, with the adults, accepting praise for how well everything had gone.

  Victoria’s Bake Shoppe had catered the affair. Hot chocolate, with or without ginger tonic, huge slabs of gingerbread cake, and perfect gingerbread cookies cut in all sorts of interesting shapes. Fortunately, Vicky had forgone the anatomically correct boy and girl cookies that had been served at my last birthday party—to my considerable surprise.

  People came from far and wide to Rudolph for parade weekend. I’d talked to people today from California, Quebec, and Wyoming. With the feature in World Journey, we might start getting tourists from Europe and Asia. Dollar signs danced in my head.

  My skirt and tights had dried over the afternoon, but then I had to make another dash across the park to feed Mattie and let him out before coming to the party, and I was soaked once again. I was beginning to lose contact with my toes.

  I was thoroughly beat and wanted nothing more than to go home, put the fire on, pour a glass of wine, grab Holmes for the Holidays or More Holmes for the Holidays, which I read every year, and go to bed early. But I wouldn’t be able to do that until December twenty-sixth. The store was closed, of course, on Christmas Day, but somehow I’d managed to get myself talked into hosting Christmas dinner in my tiny apartment.

  I glanced around the crowded room. Russ had given me a wave when I came in, but had spent his time interviewing town dignitaries and taking pictures for the paper. Pretty much everyone who lived in the vicinity of Rudolph, New York, could be counted on to be here: business owners, the farmers and craftspeople who supplied our shops and kitchens, representatives of the service clubs, town employees. About the only people missing would be the restaurant staff. They’d be getting ready to serve dinner.

  The politicians had come out in force, including two state representatives. Speaking of which, I spotted Sue-Anne Morrow glad-handing the crowd. (Glad-handing the locals anyway. She ignored the obvious tourists.) Sue-Anne hadn’t declared her candidacy yet, but she made no secret of the fact that she would be challenging Fergus Cartwright for the mayoralty in the forthcoming elections. She was going to run on the slogan “Rudolph can do BETTER!” Our town was prospering, but the number of visitors had dropped off from the heights of a few years ago and sales were down. Nothing we could do about the recession that had stung the entire state, but Sue-Anne wanted everyone to know it was all Fergus’s fault.

  Fergus had been mayor for seven years, and a lot of people—including me—thought he was getting a bit too comfortable with the job. He hadn’t had a fresh idea in a long time. In fact, most of his ideas (when he had them) were handed to him by my dad, who’d decided not to run for another term. But I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted Sue-Anne as mayor. I suspected she had a nasty streak that she kept well hidden under her sprayed helmet of gray-blond hair and pastel power suits that always matched her shoes. Today she wore a boxy pink suit with three-quarter-length sleeves and a skirt cut sharply at the knee. I doubted that the suit, or the pink and black ankle boots, had been bought at Jayne’s Ladies Wear, Rudolph’s premier women’s fashion store. Sue-Anne’s only concession to the season was a tiny brooch representing a decorated Christmas tree pinned on her collar. Maybe that was one of the reasons I didn’t trust Sue-Anne. I didn’t think she truly loved Christmas.

  In Rudolph we lived and breathed Christmas all year long. You might think that would make us hard and cynical when the time arrived, but somehow it made me love the real thing all the more. And I knew the majority of my fellow townspeople felt the same.

  I glanced around the room. Most of the women, locals as well as tourists, not in some sort of costume had accented their outfits with the worst (meaning the best!) of Christmas jewelry. Gaudy flashing-light necklaces that the Nook sold for two dollars (five bucks for three), earrings of wreaths or trees, giant brooches. More than a few men were in the sort of homemade Christmas sweaters fashion magazines ridiculed. I spotted Betty Thatcher slithering along behind Nigel Pearce, trying to worm her way into every conversation he attempted to have or every picture he tried to take. I watched as Nigel snapped pictures of three attractive teenage singers when it was their turn on stage, and decided that Betty, fifty years old, totally without curves, and dressed in her usual frumpy style, didn’t have a chance. I almost felt sorry for her, and then she caught me watching and gave me a look of such disdain, my sympathy dissolved.

  “You’re a thousand miles away,” a voice said at my side; Alan Anderson with two glasses of steaming hot chocolate. He passed me one. A single giant marshmallow, homemade at Candy Cane Sweets, floated on the surface.

  “Thanks. I might have been at the North Pole. I was thinking that I love Christmas.”

  He laughed. It made a strange sound: the notes of a young man, the appearance of one about a hundred years old. No doubt I presented a sim
ilar paradox.

  All part of that Christmas magic. I grinned at him and took a sip of hot chocolate. Thick and rich. The toymaker gave me a warm smile. The young blue eyes sparked from beneath his spectacles and under bushy gray eyebrows. I took another sip as I wiggled my toes, trying to get some circulation back into them. My sodden skirt weighed about a ton and my lower appendages felt as though ice might be forming on them. The room was freezing, with the door constantly opening, and most people were dressed in heavy winter clothes and parade-suitable costumes.

  “Having a break?” I asked.

  “Yup. Even Santa has to answer the call of nature.”

  My dad had returned from the restroom and was in a little conclave with Nigel Pearce, Russ Durham, Ralph Dickerson, Fergus Cartwright, and my mom. Mom was drinking water, and the men were munching on gingerbread. Sue-Anne Morrow danced at the edges of the group, trying to squeeze herself in while Mom tried to block her. Betty had disappeared.

  Alan and I stood in comfortable silence, watching. Alan was a man of few words. His wooden toys—as much art as things for kids to play with—spoke for him.

  Soon Dad broke away from the group and went back to his duties. Mom turned to exchange a word with him, and Sue-Anne saw her chance. She darted forward and thrust her hand toward Nigel.

  “I’d better get back to it,” Alan said. “Do you . . . uh . . . think, Merry, when all this is over that . . .”

  “Nice party.” The couple who’d been first into my shop today came up to us. Alan nodded to them and slipped away. I gave them a smile, and not only because they’d dropped five hundred bucks on jewelry and Christmas ornaments.

  “We’ve already made a reservation at the inn for next year,” the woman said. “We’ve finally found a way to entertain my parents on their annual visit. They’ve retired to Hawaii and love it, but Mom still pines for the old-fashioned Christmases of her youth.”

  “That’s the spirit of Rudolph,” I said, feeling my smile widening. Old-fashioned Christmases were my bread and butter.

  Night had arrived before five o’clock and snow still drifted lazily out of the dark sky. The room was bathed in a soft blue and green light from the tree and decorations. Soon nothing was left of the food but a few armless and headless gingerpeople and a pile of crumbs. And not many of those. We deliberately didn’t provide too much food; we wanted our visitors to go to one of the town’s many restaurants after the party. People chatted and laughed in small groups, still enjoying their hot chocolate and the last of the cookies, reluctant to head out into the night. The youngest children were being folded into their snowsuits to be taken home and put to bed after an exciting day.

  Christmas. I might spend the entire month of December in an overworked panic, but I still love it as much as I did when I was a small kid. And in our house, Christmas had been pretty special. After all, my dad was Santa Claus.

  The nicest thing about the Christmas spirit, I always thought, was that it was infectious. Everyone was made happy simply by being near it.

  Well, almost everyone. Three people standing by the buffet table did not look as though they were about to burst into a spontaneous round of carols. I knew them all. Two were store owners from the next town, Muddle Harbor. The third was the mayor of that unfortunately named town, Randy Baumgartner.

  Over the years, as the reputation of Rudolph as the place for Christmas activities and shopping grew, the town of Muddle Harbor fell into decline. It wasn’t entirely our fault—the town’s main industry had closed and the shipyard along with it—but Muddle Harbor folks were convinced that Rudolph was stealing all the visitors that would otherwise be pouring into their town, loaded with cash to spend.

  In fact, they did pretty well out of our overflow. When the B&Bs and inns in Rudolph were full, we directed people to Muddle Harbor and that brought customers to their shops and restaurants. Five years ago they’d tried to set themselves up as “Easter Town” with a parade and festival in the spring. That had ended when the former mayor had run through town in an Easter Bunny outfit with a vital part of his costume missing, pursued by the three-hundred-pound trucker-father of the nineteen-year-old Queen of the Easter Parade, titled the “Chocolette.” Right now, Randy Baumgartner and his companions were glaring at the group around Nigel Pearce.

  George lumbered up to me, a slab of gingerbread clenched in his paw.

  “I hope you’re able to get the tractor fixed,” I said.

  “Already done.”

  “Not too expensive, then?”

  “Have to tell you, Merry. It wasn’t no mechanical problem.”

  “What then?” Not that I particularly wanted to hear. I am interested in a lot of things in this world, but the intricacies of a tractor’s innards are not among them.

  “Spark plug wires switched.”

  “Oh. How’d you get it into town, then?” I saw Vicky come out of the kitchen with a fresh platter of cookies. I’d been mad at her long enough. Time to go and help. Give her a chance to invite Nigel Pearce to her bakery.

  “Merry,” George said. The tone of his voice was so serious I turned back to him.

  “What?”

  “I drove the tractor into town last night, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Between then and this morning when the parade started, the wires got switched. The wires start in order. If they ain’t in the right order, the engine don’t start.”

  “Why would that happen?”

  “It didn’t do it by itself, Merry.”

  “But you fixed it, right?”

  “Easy enough once everyone and their dog weren’t yellin’ at me to start the blasted tractor, and I had a chance to check ’er over.”

  “George, are you saying . . . ?”

  “That the tractor everyone knew would be pullin’ your float was sabotaged. Yeah, Merry, I guess that’s what I’m sayin’. Hum, I better get another one o’ those cookies afore they’re all gone.” He touched the rim of his ball cap in his polite old-fashioned way and sauntered off.

  Chapter 3

  Gobsmacked, I stared at George’s departing figure. The way George had described it, it certainly sounded as though the inability of his tractor to start this morning hadn’t been an accident. The floats and the vehicles to pull them had been assembled yesterday evening and left in the community center parking lot all night. No one in Rudolph had ever even considered we should put a guard on the floats.

  Who would do something like that?

  And to me!

  I watched Vicky exchange a word with one of her helpers. Vicky was the only one who benefited from the disabling of my float.

  No, not Vicky.

  I hurried across the room to give her a hand. I was beat, but my best friend had also been on her feet all day, and she still had dishes to pack up, the kitchen to clean, and then needed to have the shelves in her bakery fully stocked and ready to open at seven tomorrow morning.

  I grabbed an empty tray out of her hands. “You better take a minute and talk to that guy over there. He’s a big-time travel reporter.”

  She pushed the single long lock of purple hair out of her eyes. The rest of her hair was cropped short. “I’ve been told. He was in the bakery at lunchtime. Had ham and Swiss on a baguette and potato soup. Even took a few pictures before he left. Don’t worry, I’m about to wow him with my special cookies.”

  “That’s good, then,” I said, meaning the sandwiches as well as the cookies. Vicky’s baguettes were exceptional, even better than ones I’d had in Paris: soft on the inside, crusty on the outside, served with thickly spread butter from a local farm. Yummy! More than a few pounds on my hips owed their existence to that bread. I pulled my head back from dreams of warm baking. “Still, you should take a break, freshen up. I can help with the dishes.”

  We walked together into the large industrial kitchen. Vicky’s helpers
were washing the serving dishes and tossing unfinished food and crumpled napkins—featuring Santa’s sleigh and his nine reindeer crossing a night sky thick with stars—into the trash.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to your float, Merry. Really I am. I was sure it was going to win. Although I can’t say I’m not entirely surprised that tractor of George’s finally went on strike.”

  I’d decided not to tell anyone about the suspected sabotage. For now anyway. George was mighty handy with an engine, but even he could make a mistake.

  I put the trays on the long table in the center of the room. One platter of untouched treats remained. “These look pretty special.”

  Vicky made plain cookies, just good gingerbread cut into fun shapes. The only decorations were on the reindeer, who were given tiny red candies for noses. She didn’t believe in elaborate icing on cookies. Too much work, she said, and it detracted from the pure flavor of the cookie.

  But these cookies were works of art. Edible art. The Santa suits had been painted in bright red icing, with a strip of licorice for the belt, chocolate ganache boots, and a white icing beard. The brightly costumed people had pink icing smiles and black licorice-piece eyes, and the sleigh was piled high with candy gifts. The cookies rested on a bed of coconut arranged to look like snow. The biggest and most beautiful cookie was painted with a thick layer of white icing, topped with colored icing to show a bespectacled man wearing a frock coat and a tall hat, carrying a book. I leaned over and peered closely in order to read the delicate writing painted onto the book. A Christmas Carol.

  “It’s Charles Dickens!”

  “I decided to do something over the top for our special guest,” Vicky said. “I hope he likes it. It was a heck of a lot of work. You’re just in time. I’m about to present it. I asked your mom to make sure Mr. Pearce stayed until the end.”

  She hefted the tray and handed it to me. “You take it.”