Mistletoe Mysteries

by Charlotte MacLeod

  The Ritz doorman was with her in an instant. He’d recognized her, of course; Max’s clients were the sort of people who’d automatically put up at the Ritz.

  “Mrs. Bittersohn, are you okay? That guy shoved you on purpose, I saw him. Did he get your pocketbook? Let me take that shopping bag. Do you want to come in the lobby for a while? Shall I call you a cab?”

  “What did the man look like?” was all Sarah could think of to say.

  “Tall, skinny guy in a dark overcoat. No use trying to catch him, he ran down the subway. He sure didn’t look like a mugger. You just never can tell, can you? Here’s your fudge.”

  “Thank you.”

  Sarah ought to know the doorman’s name, but she was too flustered to recall it at the moment. At least the fudge was all right, the maker had packed it inside a plastic bag. Her handbag was safely hooked over her arm, its excellent clasp still closed. The only thing missing was the brown paper bag that held the tea cozy, the Christmas tree that had not been set aside for W. J. Ronely.

  Eighty dollars down the subway. While she rubbed her bruises and straightened her coat, the doorman hunted between the ruts and under the nearest parked cars but didn’t find her parcel. Sarah was not at all surprised. In a way she could even sympathize with W. J. Ronely. Christmas shopping was a desperate business; perhaps he, too, had a mother-in-law.

  She tipped the doorman lavishly over his halfhearted protest, told him not to bother about a cab because she could make it to Tulip Street faster on foot, a statement he could hardly gainsay since the snow was snarling the traffic even worse than before, though that had hardly seemed possible, and set off across the Gardens.

  She wasn’t worried about being pursued again by W. J. Ronely. He’d got what he wanted, or thought he had. Even if he found out he’d snatched the wrong bag, he wouldn’t know where to look for the right one. Unless he’d happened to overhear Miss Waltham or the doorman call her Mrs. Bittersohn. Bittersohn was not a common name. Max’s was the only one in the Boston phone book.

  Sarah tried not to look over her shoulder, but she did wish the walking weren’t so beastly treacherous. She was astonishingly relieved to reach Beacon Street and cross over to the Hill. Tulip Street was only a matter of minutes now, and she’d be in the lee of the storm most of the way.

  Still, when she reached the purple-paned townhouse where great-uncle Frederick’s old army buddy General Purslane and his wife still lived, she decided to pop in and say hello. She’d give them the fudge, they both loved sweets.

  The Purslanes were delighted to see her and the fudge. “Weren’t you a dear to think of us!” Mrs. Purslane exclaimed. “Leave your coat and boots right here by the door, you’re just in time for a cup of tea. What else did you buy at the fair?”

  “One of Mrs. Gates’s lovely tea cozies. Let me show you.”

  No use lamenting the cozy she’d loved and lost, Sarah was happy enough to show off the one she had. “Can you imagine how much work she put into this? You can barely see the stitches.”

  Mrs. Gates had constructed her cozies on the usual pillow-pillowcase principle: a decorated cover and a padded double semicircle of plain muslin underneath that did the actual work of retaining the heat in the teapot. Sarah slipped off the cover so that Mrs. Purslane could appreciate the perfection of the stitchery even on the underside. As she did so, she noticed a small incongruity.

  Mrs. Gates had formed the padded underpart the natural way, by stitching the four pieces that made up the double semicircle together on the wrong side, then turning them right side out so that the seams would be hidden after the stuffing was in. The bottom seams were then slipstitched together so meticulously that the joining could barely be discerned without a jeweler’s loupe. For some reason, however, about an inch and a half of the seam at the top had been ripped out, then sewn up from the outside with apparent care but little expertise.

  “Mrs. Gates never did that!” Sarah squeezed gently below the stitches. “I think I feel something. Mrs. Purslane, do you have a pair of manicure scissors?”

  “Here, use this.”

  Mrs. Purslane fished in her sewing box and handed Sarah a dainty but efficient seam ripper. Sarah picked gingerly at the clumsy stitches, then poked the slender tool through the opening she’d made.

  “It’s there, all right. I felt it. Can you find me some tweezers?”

  “Certainly, just a second.”

  Tweezers in hand, Sarah fished around a bit and drew out a tiny transparent envelope. The general took one look and sprang from his easy chair.

  “Microfilm, by gad! The woman must be a spy!”

  “Mrs. Gates is eighty-nine years old and a bishop’s widow,” said Sarah. “She’d have had no reason to rip out the seam, she could have put the film inside while she was making the cozy. If she did rip the seam, she’d have sewn it up so you’d never have known. I could have done a better job than that myself. What are they of? I wonder.”

  “We’ll soon find out,” said the general. “Come into my study, I have a microfilm viewer there. For my book, you know.”

  The general was, needless to say, engaged in writing his memoirs. He’d been at them for the past twenty-five years or so, to the best of Sarah’s knowledge. She and Mrs. Purslane watched with what patience they could muster while he tweezered the mysterious strip of blackness into place and switched on the light.

  “What is it, George?” his wife asked impatiently.

  “Wait till I adjust the—great Scott! Ladies, I shall have to ask you both to leave this room immediately. And please close the door behind you. I must get on the phone to the secretary of defense immediately. Sarah, you’ve done your country a service today. Now go straight home and forget all about it. That’s an order.”

  “Yes, General,” said Sarah. “But I’m taking my tea cozy with me.”

  She thanked Mrs. Purslane for the tea, wished her a Merry Christmas, was assured that she’d just given the general one, and faced what was by now a fairly convincing blizzard. Luckily she didn’t have far to go. She entered her apartment with somewhat exaggerated circumspection.

  Once inside, Sarah told herself not to be silly and started making a business of hanging up her wet storm coat and unpacking her tote bag. Her purchases might as well stay on the kitchen table, she could gift wrap them there once she’d decided which was for whom. As for the blue tea cozy, she got a needle and thread and mended the place she’d ripped out, exploring first with a thin-bladed knife to make sure nothing else was concealed in the stuffing and wondering who’d been at it before her.

  The microfilm couldn’t possibly have been inserted before Mrs. Gates finished her work. An expert like her couldn’t have missed seeing those clumsy stitches while she was putting the cover over the padding. The job must have been done after she’d gone to bed, leaving the packed bag outside her door for Charles to pick up in the morning.

  Brooks would have locked the house up tighter than Fort Knox as soon as Mr. Snowfjord got back from his concert and everybody else was safely inside. Nobody would have dared tamper with the bag while others were still about. Assuming that it would have been possible for an outsider to secrete himself anywhere in the house, it would have been impossible for the intruder to depart in the early hours without leaving some chain, bolt, or bar unfastened to give the fact away. Whoever did this thing had to be somebody who’d come in, stayed in, or gone out, if at all, in the accustomed way; confident that Charles would deliver the altered package to the place where it was supposed to go and that church folk would honor the message pinned to the doctored cozy.

  There was, Sarah realized, the outside chance that Charles himself had stopped somewhere on the way to St. Eusapia’s and waited while someone else did the dirty work. Charles was an actor when he got the chance; like some other actors, he might not always distinguish between what was good theater and what was bad business. If he’d entered knowingly into any such plot, though, Charles must have been involved in some advance planni
ng. Sarah couldn’t imagine his not spilling the secret to Mariposa, the housekeeper, with whom he was on what Cousin Theonia sedately described as close terms. And there was no way Mariposa would have let him go through with such a caper.

  Theonia could sew as well as Mrs. Gates. Brooks probably could, too, if he tried; he was incredibly deft with his hands. Assuming they could have stooped to treason, which was unthinkable, neither of them would have made so clumsy a faux pas.

  Sarah wished General Purslane hadn’t been so desperately hush-hush about those films. If they had something to do with figures, such as a proposal for a defense contract, Sarah supposed Eugene Porter-Smith might conceivably be the culprit, assuming Cousin Percy had the sort of client who could get into this kind of trouble. If he did, Percy would probably do their books himself, though, rather than expose an employee to temptation.

  If she’d had any idea what that important job at Government Center was, Sarah wouldn’t have minded suspecting Ms. Carboy. As she didn’t, the question would have to remain moot for now. That anybody would entrust a featherhead like Jennifer Lavalliere with a subversive microfilm seemed insane, but she did have that new fiancé and, as the doorman at the Ritz had so pertinently observed, you just never knew.

  Mr. Snowfjord seemed an unlikely prospect but again, you never knew. A musician much in demand must get to meet a great many diverse people; and flautists were of necessity nimble-fingered.

  Sarah nipped off her thread, slipped the enchanting blue cover back over the mended padding, and supposed she might as well get Mother Bittersohn’s present wrapped before it caused any more trouble. On second thought, she wrapped it in aluminum foil and stuck it in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator.

  The cover she’d tried to fashion out of Mrs. Gates’s leftovers was still lying where she’d left it last night. Sarah found the padding out of an old tea cozy that she’d been meaning to recover sometime, ripped a couple of inches along the top, and picked up a snapshot Cousin Mabel had sent in lieu of a Christmas card. It showed Mabel standing beside an alligator on a Florida key, Mabel always went away for Christmas so that she’d have an excuse not to buy anyone a present. The alligator had the pleasanter smile, Sarah thought as she stuffed the photo inside the padding. She sewed up where she’d ripped, slipped the padding inside her improvised cover, and dropped the finished cozy back on the table.

  These were the shortest days of the year. It should have been pitch-dark by now but the fast-piling snow and the old-fashioned streetlights were keeping the cityscape a ghostly, shimmering charcoal gray. As a rule, Sarah would have been happy to stand looking out at the street, enjoying the play of light and shadow, the eerie beauty of car headlights approaching at a crawl, small as blurry flashlight bulbs, then looming bigger and brighter and blurrier, changing to ruby aureoles as the cars passed by and the taillights came into view, shrinking and shrinking and fading away into the blur. Tonight she pulled down the window blinds and shivered a little as she went back to the kitchen.

  Brooks would be here in exactly fourteen minutes to put up the last of the curtain rods. Brooks was always punctual to the dot, but fourteen minutes seemed a long time to be waiting by herself. The upstairs neighbor was at home, Sarah had heard the dragging footsteps and the tap of the cane. Mrs. Levits would have been housebound all day, like the Purslanes. She put some of her bargain cookies on a little plate and ran upstairs, too impatient to wait for the antique elevator, which was the size of a phone booth and slow as molasses running uphill in January.

  Mrs. Levits was pleased with the cookies and avid for a long winter’s chat; Sarah had to explain that she couldn’t linger because she was expecting her cousin. Not being a fool, she used Mrs. Levits’s phone to make sure Brooks was on his way before she went back downstairs, and waited for him on the landing. When they went in together, she was not much surprised to feel the draft from a broken pane in the door that led to the fire escape, to discover melting snow on her clean kitchen floor, and to notice that her faked-up blue tea cozy was gone.

  “Good Lord, you’ve had a burglar,” Brooks exclaimed. “Check your valuables, Sarah, while I call the police.”

  “No, don’t call them,” said Sarah. “I know what he took.”

  She told Brooks her story. He wasted no time on questions, but whipped out his tape and measured the broken pane.

  “I have window glass at home. It will take me roughly eight minutes to nip over, cut a piece to size, and bring it back. Do you want to come with me?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I ought to be all right here for a little while, surely, now that Ronely thinks he’s got what he’s after. I’d better stay and report to General Purslane.”

  She stuck a folded newspaper over the broken pane to shut out some of the cold air and picked up the phone. She was still talking to the general when the doorbell rang. Assuming it was Brooks with the glass, she said good-bye and went to punch the button that released the downstairs catch. Somebody thumped up the stairs—certainly not Brooks, he walked like a cat—and pounded on the door.

  “United Parcel. Package for Bittersohn.”

  “Just leave it by the door,” Sarah called out.

  “You have to sign for it.”

  “Sign my name yourself. I’m in the bathtub.”

  If this was a bona fide UPS delivery, the driver would be in a mad rush to get back to his truck, which would be blocking however much of the narrow one-way street was still passable, and would do as she’d said rather than face Tulip Street again in this weather. If the messenger was bogus, Sarah preferred not to find out the hard way. Brooks could pick up the parcel when he came, if there was one.

  She wished the door had one of those modern peepholes so she could see what the man looked like. It did have an old-fashioned keyhole, though, not used any more since a modern chain and deadbolt had been installed. Sarah knelt, flipped aside the tiny metal flap that covered the hole, and squinted through.

  All she could see was a pair of hands in black leather gloves, carefully lowering a brown paper package to the floor. Since the package was about the size of the box of fudge she’d given the Purslanes, this seemed a remarkably delicate way to handle it. Maybe there was a “Fragile” label but even so—she jumped as the messenger turned and leaped for the stairs, taking them three at a time from the sound of the thumps. She caught one fleeting glimpse of a black boot and something brown, but that was all.

  Brooks had been gone a little over four minutes, she’d let the package sit there until he got back. Then Sarah remembered the absurdly cautious way those gloved hands had set the small thing down, and lame Mrs. Levits up above, and the pokey old elevator down below.

  It was crazy, it was impossible. No matter, it was a risk she must not take. Sarah opened the door, bent her knees, and very, very tenderly picked up the package.

  The box was neatly wrapped. Her name and address were clearly typed on what looked like a standard UPS label. The sender’s name was obscured, the paper was not stuck down with tape, and the fancy red-and-green Christmas string holding it together was tied in a simple bow knot. In God’s name, what did one do now?

  Standing there with the box in her hands and her heart in her throat, Sarah glared frantically around the living room. Next to the gas fire sat a market basket she’d stuffed with greens and red alder berries as an apology for the tree they weren’t going to have. As fast as she dared, she settled the box among the greens and carried it out to the fire escape.

  On Tulip Street, the townhouses were set in a solid row with tiny backyards opening on a service alley. Across the alley stood the backs of the houses that faced on the next street over. Some previous tenant had rigged an endless clothesline on pulleys between Sarah’s fire escape and the one opposite; surely not to hang out washing in this posh historic area, more probably to ferry small articles across to a friend.

  With a piece of wide red ribbon she’d snatched in passing from among her gift wraps, Sarah tied the basket to
the lower section of the filthy but still intact clothesline and pulled on the upper part to send it bobbing out into the empty space above the alley.

  She could see the basket well enough in the glow from the street lamp beneath and the light streaming out from her own kitchen. It looked incongruously festive with its freight of greens and the perky red bow she must have tied, though she didn’t remember doing so. An automatic reflex, everybody was tying bows this time of year. She stepped over to the telephone and rang the general again.

  “This is Sarah,” she told him. “Perhaps I’m overreacting, but somebody’s just left a package at my door. The messenger said UPS, but the box is so insecurely wrapped they’d never have accepted it. No, of course I didn’t open the door. I peeked through the keyhole. The messenger set the box down much too carefully and dashed off in a terrible hurry. No, I’ve hung it out on the clothesline. I just hope whoever lives across the way doesn’t think—oh, I must have waked a pigeon. Shoo! Shoo!”

  Boston pigeons do not shoo easily. This one settled on the edge of the basket, causing it to tilt a little, to Sarah’s horror, and began picking off alder berries in a methodical and businesslike fashion. Sarah kept an eye out while the general asked questions she couldn’t answer.

  Now the pigeon had tired of alder berries and gone to work on the package. It had the red-and-green string in its beak, tugging with all the weight and expertise a tough, street-wise bird might reasonably be expected to possess. The pigeon braced against the handle and jerked harder. The knot gave way. The basket exploded with only a muffled pop, but the huge ball of flame lit up the whole area. Just for a moment, then charred fragments began drifting down, vanishing into the enveloping grayness.

  She was supposed to be a fragment.

  “Never mind the bomb squad, General,” she said dully. “The pigeon set off the incendiary. I’m glad he got the alder berries.”