“Excellent,” said the androgynous kid with the purple spiked hair.
“Radical,” agreed his/her counterpart, who had a skateboard tucked under his arm.
“How in the world?” I asked, when I was able to speak again. “How did you get in that truck?”
Jethro licked my face in answer. I noticed for the first time that a frayed piece of yellow nylon cord was tied to his collar. Tucking my squirming dog under my arm, I looked inside the truck. A large, damp bone rested on the driver’s seat, beside my black velvet shawl, which, judging by the amount of dog hair clinging to it, had been used as a bed during his stay there.
I grabbed the shawl and carried both it and the dog inside.
As soon as we were in the house, he jumped out of my arms and ran into the kitchen. I followed him there and watched with relief as he scarfed down an entire bowl of chow. When he was done, I sat down on the floor and gave him a thorough examination. But he was fine. No scratches, cuts, not a mark on him.
He rolled onto his back and allowed me to give him a welcome-home belly scratch.
“You had me worried sick,” I scolded. “How did you get in that truck? Who found you and brought you home?”
Instead of an explanation, he went to the back door and scratched, letting me know it was time for a bathroom break. But before I let him out, I went into the garden first, making sure the gate was securely locked.
Satisfied that Jethro was safely fenced in, I ran upstairs and got dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. I was dying to know where Jethro had spent the night, but my investigation would have to be put on hold. I had a full day ahead of me, finishing my redo of Maisie’s Daisy window and getting ready for the open house tonight.
I was hanging up the cocktail dress I’d left in a heap on the bedroom floor when it occurred to me that I’d need to take the velvet shawl to the cleaners. I love my dog, but not his scent. I picked it up to see if there were any visible stains, and to remove the blue Christmas tree pin.
There were no stains, but there was also no pin.
I turned the shawl inside out, to see if it had come unattached, but it was definitely not on the shawl.
I went outside to the truck and ran my hands under the seats. I searched the floorboards. I even looked in the bed of the truck, which was uncharacteristically empty. Still no pin. But I noticed that the driver’s-side window had been cranked down about an inch. I knew with a certainty that I’d had the windows rolled up last night and the heater on, because it had gotten downright chilly once the sun went down. Had I locked the truck?
Usually I did keep the truck locked. An unfortunate side effect of living downtown was that crime was a nagging constant. Over the years, I’d had batteries stolen out of my car, potted plants stolen from my porch, and once somebody had even stolen the gas lamps outside my front door. But I’d been in such a state last night, I couldn’t say with a certainty whether or not I had locked the truck.
What was unquestionable was that somebody, sometime during the night, had tethered my dog to that makeshift leash, placed him in the truck, given him a bone for solace, and cracked the window so that he wouldn’t suffocate. That same guardian angel had also, apparently, decided to reward himself with my Christmas tree pin.
Fine, I thought. I’d have paid a real, and handsome, cash reward to anybody who’d brought Jethro back home. And I’d have gladly thrown the pin in as a bonus.
Before going back to lock up the house, I walked across the street to take another look at the Christmas decorations on Maisie’s Daisy.
What the hell? My daisy had been plucked! The topiary trees were virtually denuded of fruit. Apples, oranges, lemons, limes, even the cunning little kumquats I’d paid an indecent price for, were all gone. The garland around the front door was similarly picked clean. Pieces of popcorn littered the sidewalk, and I felt cranberries squashing under my sneakers. The only fruit left was the pineapple I’d nailed to the plaque above the door, and a couple of random pomegranates.
Without the fruit, the storefront looked naked and pathetic. Had the same thief who’d taken my pin also made off with my fruit? Some crime spree.
“Son of a bitch!” I muttered. Now I’d have to start all over again. With the open house tonight, and the decoration contest judges due at six, there was no time to waste.
Still I wondered if other businesses had also been victimized during the night.
I took a quick hike across Troup Square. Babalu was even more resplendent than it had been yesterday. It was a winter wonderland on steroids. New to the scene was a pair of eight-foot-high snowmen. I had to touch them to make sure they weren’t real. Although they glittered like fresh snow, they were actually made of some kind of cotton batting sprayed with iridescent sparkles. The snowmen held aloft shiny black snow shovels crossed over the shop’s doorway. Standing outside the shop, I could hear Chrismas music being piped out onto the sidewalk. And yes, as I sniffed hungrily, I realized these men would stop at nothing in their quest for world domination. That was undeniably the scent of fresh-baked gingerbread wafting into the chilly morning air.
The bastards! Manny and Cookie’s decorations were breathtakingly intact.
The shop door opened with a merry tinkle, and a small black powder puff with legs emerged. It trotted over to the fire hydrant at the curb, and daintily took a morning pee.
“Good Ruthie!”
Cookie Parker poked his head out the door and looked at me quizzically. “Yes?”
He was wearing a black satin bathrobe, and his chunky white legs ended in a pair of black velvet monogrammed slippers. His dyed blond hair stood up in wisps, and a black satin sleep mask had been pushed up over his forehead.
“I’m Weezie Foley. I own Maisie’s Daisy, across the square,” I said.
“I’m aware of who you are and what you do,” he said coldly. “But what do you want here?”
“Somebody vandalized my decorations last night,” I said. “Most of the fruit is gone. And my truck was broken into. I was just checking…to see.”
“If we’d been hit?” Cookie smiled. “Your concern is touching. But as you can see, nothing here has been touched.”
He clapped his hands smartly. “Come, Ruthie.” The little dog trotted down the sidewalk a few yards and looked back at Cookie, as if taunting him.
“Naughty girl,” Cookie said, shaking his finger at the dog. “Come along now. It’s cold out here. You need your sweater if we’re going to take a walk. And I need some pants.”
“You didn’t happen to see anybody suspicious last night, did you?” I asked.
“No more so than usual. Just the usual avant-garde types who wander the streets at night,” he said. “Ruthie!” He clapped his hands again, rapidly. “Come right here, right this minute, miss.”
“Odd that my decorations were trashed, and yet yours weren’t touched,” I commented.
“Maybe it was the birds. Damned pigeons!” Cookie suggested.
“Pigeons that carry off oranges and apples? I doubt it.”
The dog trotted farther down the sidewalk, and I did the same.
“Pricks,” I muttered to myself. It was way too much of a coincidence that my decorations had been pilfered, while Babalu remained untouched.
But I had no proof that Cookie and Manny were the culprits, and no time to look for any other suspects.
Instead I went home, got Jethro, and went to work at Maisie’s Daisy.
First thing, I stripped off the grapevines and what was left of the popcorn strings. I took down the pineapple plaque too. Now that I had a clean slate, I could think again. But it was nearly ten o’clock. Where was I going to come up with natural, vernacular Christmas decorations—prizewinning decorations, this late in the game?”
I sat down in one of the plaid armchairs in the window and closed my eyes. A minute later, I jumped up and loaded the CD player with Christmas albums. I put on all the good stuff: the Phil Spector compilation, Elvis, another compilation I’d go
tten at Old Navy, and a couple of CDs from a Rhino Records promotion I’d ordered off the Internet. I hit shuffle and sat down and waited for inspiration.
As luck would have it, the first song was the Ronettes version of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”
For some reason, I thought instantly of Daniel’s mom, Paula Gambrell. Had Daniel ever, I wondered, crept downstairs like the kid in the song, and thought he’d seen his mother kissing Santa Claus? Did he have any good memories at all of his parents? I’d probably never know. Family just wasn’t something Daniel liked to discuss.
When the next song started, I laughed out loud. Eartha Kitt singing “Santa Baby.” In it, the sultry gold digger implores a Sugar Daddy Santa Baby to bring an impressive list of luxury gifts; a fur coat, a ‘54 convertible—light blue—a duplex, checks, decorations for her tree, bought at Tif-fa-ny—and especially, a ring, meaning bling.
Before I knew it, I was up and vamping around the shop, swishing an imaginary feather boa and humming along with Eartha.
But it wasn’t until Elvis came on that I had my brainstorm.
Blue Christmas!
Screw the fruits and nuts. Screw vernacular. Screw tasteful. Screw the judges and the rules! I was gonna have a blue Christmas this year. And I’d by God have fun doing it.
CHAPTER 7
Blue, blue, blue, I chanted as I drove around town in a last-minute shopping spree. And maybe some silver. Yes, definitely silver. I hit Target and in the seasonal aisle loaded up on plain silver and metallic-blue glass tree ornaments. I bought boxes and boxes of silver garland, aluminum tinsel, and ten strands of old-fashioned-looking big bulb lights, all in blue, of course, to supplement the white twinkle lights I already had at home. Thank God the big box stores had discovered retro!
At Hancock Fabrics, my mind was reeling with songs with blue in the title. I heard Bobby Vinton singing “Blue Velvet,” Diane Renay singing “Navy Blue,” Willie Nelson crooning “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” even Elvis doing “Blue Hawaii.”
My hands trailed across the racks of fabrics. I’d need a big effect for just a few bucks. Regretfully, I turned away from a bolt of midnight blue velveteen—at $14.99 a yard, it was way too pricey. Blue satin was out of the question, and blue denim, still too high at $7.99 a yard, was too modern for the look I was going for.
But at the back of the store, in the bridal department, I hit pay dirt. Tulle! At eighty-eight cents a yard the price was right. But the colors—white, green, and red, were all wrong.
Still, I thought, eighty-eight cents a yard! I grabbed four bolts of the white tulle, all they had, and headed for the cash register, grabbing a bottle of blue Rit dye on the way.
At home I loaded the washing machine with what seemed like miles of netting, and spun the regulator dial to the gentle cycle. As the tub filled with water, I carefully added half a cap of blue dye, then a capful, then throwing caution to the wind, I went for two capfuls.
Blue foam filled the tub. I let the wash cycle run for only five minutes before manually switching to the machine’s rinse and then spin cycle.
As soon as the machine slowed, I jerked open the lid of the washer. Blue! I had a gorgeous wet glop of bright blue tulle, which I unceremoniously dumped into the dryer, also set for the gentle cycle.
But I had no time to waste sitting by the dryer.
Back at Maisie’s Daisy, I stripped the shop’s window of everything but the aluminum Christmas trees, trimmed with my hoard of Shiny-Brite ornaments and the tiny white twinkle lights. I draped the big blue bulbs in swags across the front of the window.
Then I lugged the shop’s one display bed, a vintage white iron twin bed, and set it up in the window, draped with a white chenille bedspread with bright blue and green peacocks. I added a pile of pillows stuffed into old pillowcases trimmed in crocheted lace, and stepped back to study the effect. Not bad.
In the stockroom, I rummaged around until I found the big old “portable” record player I’d picked up at an estate sale, along with the funny round black record caddy I’d found at another sale, still full of some long-ago teenager’s collection of 45s. I had my own stash of albums, 78s, that I’d collected just for the album covers. I set the record player up on the floor at the foot of the bed and fanned the 45s and the albums around the record player.
I studied my vignette. It was cute, yes. But it wasn’t telling me anything. I needed story. I needed drama. I needed teen angst.
Back to the stockroom. I found a pile of old magazines that I had kept because I liked the graphics and the illustrations. There was a sixties issue of Look magazine with Jackie Kennedy on the cover. Too modern. Several old copies of The Saturday Evening Post with Norman Rockwell illustrations. Too corny. Half a dozen copies of Archie comics. Yes! I’d always identified with Betty, hated Veronica. I passed over some TV Guides and some great Field & Streams from the forties, till I came to the bottom of the stack, where my quest was rewarded with three like-new copies of Silver Screen magazine from 1958. The lurid headlines about Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, and Tab Hunter would be just the thing for my teen tableau.
As I was gathering up the magazines, I spied a pink princess telephone. Pink was a prized color for a princess phone, but I frowned. Wrong color for a blue Christmas.
I could spray-paint it blue, but that would ruin the resale value, which was around sixty dollars. I turned the phone over and found the scrap of masking tape with the price I’d paid for it. Fifty cents.
My honor was at stake here. I took the phone out into the alley behind the shop, set it on an old copy of the Savannah Morning News, and quickly created an adorable, if now worthless, powder blue princess phone.
It was time to check on my dye job. The blue netting was absolutely heavenly. I gathered it up in my arms and was on my way out the back door when I spotted one of the many silver-framed photos of family and friends I had scattered all over the town house. This particular picture was of me and Daniel at the beach. I scowled at Daniel. He hadn’t even called yet to find out if Jethro was all right.
Looking at the picture of my boyfriend took me right back to my own teenage angst. I turned the frame over and slipped the picture out of the frame, leaving it on the kitchen counter. I took the frame into the den, sat down at my computer, and did a Google image search. Five minutes later I was printing out a black-and-white photo of Elvis Presley in his army uniform. I inserted Elvis into the silver picture frame, gathered up the netting, and headed back to the shop.
For the next three hours I worked as fast and as hard as I’d ever worked before. I stapled and styled, draped and swagged and glue-gunned, until I was ready to drop. At four o’clock I forced myself to call it quits. The judges would be making their rounds at six, and I still had to assemble all the refreshments for the open house, and bathe and dress.
When I got out of the shower, I moaned at how little time I had left. My original plan had been to get myself up in some glam outfit from my collection of vintage clothes. Maybe a red chiffon cocktail dress from the sixties, with a gold lamé cinch belt. But there was no time now for primping and, anyway, glam wouldn’t go with my theme.
Instead, I slicked my wild mane of red hair into a perky ponytail and caught it up with a big blue tulle bow. I pegged the hems of my blue jeans, rolling them calf-high, and slipped on a kitten-soft pale blue beaded cashmere sweater from my vintage collection that had been my Meemaw’s. But Meemaw had never worn a push-up bra and left the top three pearl buttons undone like I did that night. Briefly I mourned again for the missing blue Christmas tree pin that had started this whole thing.
But I still had the old jewelry box the brooch had come from. I looped three different strands of the faux pearls around my neck and tripled another strand of pearls for a bracelet.
Bobby socks and saddle oxfords would have finished off my outfit, but I’d long ago tossed out the hated black-and-white shoes that had been a required part of our uniform at St. Vincent’s Academy, the all-girl Catholic high sch
ool I’d attended. Instead, I slipped on a pair of black ballet flats, and as a last-minute thought, grabbed my daddy’s old maroon Benedictine Catholic High School letter sweater.
I was heading back downstairs to start gathering up the trays of food to take over to the shop when I heard a noise coming from the kitchen. I stopped abruptly on the last stair.
Footsteps, light but audible, were coming from the kitchen. I heard the sound of the heavy door of my Sub-Zero refrigerator door open and then close.
For a second, a chill ran down my spine. Somebody was in my house! Then I relaxed. Daniel. My prodigal boyfriend had come over to apologize for his uncaring attitude the night before.
“Daniel?” I called. “Are you on a mercy mission? Did you bring over the dessert trays you promised for the party?”
No answer. Quick footsteps, and then I heard the sound of the back door closing.
“Daniel?” I peeked around the door into the kitchen. It was empty, except for Jethro, who was crouched under the kitchen table, his tail thumping softly on the wooden floor.
I darted over to the back door just in time to see the wrought-iron garden gate swinging shut. I stepped outside to look. The only truck parked in my two-car carport was my own. The lane was empty.
Another chill ran down my spine. I walked quickly back to the kitchen, stepped inside, and locked the door behind me, throwing the latch on the dead bolt for good measure.
My hands were shaking, I realized. Jethro scooched forward on his belly and licked my bare ankle.
“Jethro,” I scolded. “Why didn’t you bark at the bad man?”
Thump thump went the tail.
I checked the refrigerator. Damn! The silver tray on which I’d carefully arranged five pounds of concentric circles of bacon-wrapped shrimp now held only a limp leaf of lettuce and a hollowed-out lemon half holding the cocktail sauce.
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