I ran into the dining room and pulled the drawer of my mahogany sideboard open. My grandmother’s wedding silver, all eleven place settings of the Savannah pattern, were intact. My collection of sterling candlesticks on the dining room table was undisturbed.
In the living room, I picked up my purse from where I’d dropped it in the chair by the front door. My wallet was still stuffed with cash and credit cards. My checkbook was untouched.
I went back to the kitchen and picked up the phone and called Daniel’s cell phone. I almost never disturb him when he’s at the restaurant, especially this time of year, but this, I decided, was an emergency. I needed to be reassured by the sound of his voice.
“Weezie?” he said, answering after the second ring. “What’s up?”
“Hi,” I said, willing myself to stay calm. “Were you here just now?”
“No. Where? At your place? No. I’m asshole-deep in shrimp bisque here. Why?”
“Funny you should mention shrimp. Because mine are missing,” I said, sinking down onto a kitchen chair. “Somebody was here,” I said slowly. “In my kitchen. I’d just gotten dressed and I was coming downstairs when I heard somebody in the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door being opened and closed. I just assumed it was you. But when I called your name, whoever it was left. I think I spooked him. They slipped out the back gate. With all my bacon-wrapped shrimp.”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I said. “They left. That’s all I care about.”
“Was anything else taken? Did you call the cops?”
“No, I called you first,” I said. “All my silver is still here. My purse was out in plain view. Nothing in it was touched, and I had the day’s cash from the shop in my billfold, around five hundred bucks.”
“Jesus!” he said. “How did they get in?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, walking to the front of the house as I talked. “The front door still has the security latch on. Nobody got in that way.” I walked back to the kitchen. “When I came in from the shop, I came in the back door. I’ve been running back and forth from the house to the shop all afternoon—”
“Well, did you lock the door the last time you came in?” he demanded.
“I can’t remember,” I wailed.
“Weezie!”
“I was in a big hurry,” I said, near tears. “The judges are doing the historic district decorating contest at six, and I still needed to shower and dress, and get the food out for the open house—”
For the first time, I looked at the other silver trays of food I’d laid out on the kitchen counter, all neatly covered with plastic wrap. The platter of spinach-and-feta-stuffed mushrooms had been decimated. Likewise, the sausage cheese balls had been pillaged, and the mini crab quiches.
“Damn!” I cried. “They got the sausage balls. Not to mention the shrimp. Do you know how much I had to pay for jumbo shrimp?”
“Christ!” Daniel bellowed. “Forget the sausage balls and the judges. This is serious, Weezie. Somebody broke into your house while you were in the shower. You scared them off, otherwise…. Look, hang up and call the cops. Right now. I’m coming over there.”
“No!” I shouted. “I’m fine. Nothing else was taken. Nobody was hurt. If you want to help me, send over something for me to feed this crowd of people I’m expecting. A cookie tray or something.”
“I’m coming,” Daniel insisted.
“No way,” I said stubbornly. “You need to work. I need to work. Just…chill. Please? Okay? Maybe it was BeBe. In fact, I’m sure it was BeBe. She’s supposed to come over and help me set up the food and bring her silver punch bowl for the Chatham Artillery Punch. It was BeBe, I’m positive. Which is probably why Jethro didn’t bark.”
“Jethro didn’t bark? Somebody came in your house and he didn’t bark?”
“Not a yip,” I said, leaning down to scratch Jethro’s ears.
“He still barks his head off when I come in the door,” Daniel said darkly.
“That’s different. You’re a man. He thinks he’s defending my honor.”
“Well…lock the door.”
“I did. I will.”
“Promise me you won’t forget again,” he said. “There’s bad guys running around downtown, Weezie. I had a customer robbed at gunpoint yesterday just after he left the restaurant at midnight.”
“I’ll be careful,” I promised.
“Good,” he said, his voice softening. “So, Jethro came home last night?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s another strange story. In fact, a lot of strange stuff has been happening around here the last couple days.”
“You can tell me tonight,” he said. “I’m staying over. And I’ll send one of the busboys over with some appetizers and a cookie tray for your party. Okay?”
“That would be great,” I said.
“Good luck with the decorating contest,” Daniel said. “Knock ‘em dead, kid.”
CHAPTER 8
After I hung up the phone I got down on all fours and went eyeball to eyeball with my little furry buddy. “Did you eat up all my expensive appetizers, Jethro? Did you, Ro-Ro?”
Thump thump went the tail. He was the sweetest, most loyal dog God had ever created, but he was also, alas, one of the dumbest. Anyway, he was in the clear, since his breath smelled like Kibbles ‘n Bits, not garlic and shrimp.
“Yoo-hoo!” BeBe was banging on the back door. I went over and unlocked it, and she struggled in under the weight of a heavy silver punch bowl, on top of which rested a huge white cardboard box.
“I’ve brought pecan tassies and chocolate chewies from Gottlieb’s Bakery,” she said, setting the boxes on the counter. “I figure if you can’t win the decorating contest fair and square, we’ll just bribe the judges with these little goodies.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I told her. “Were you just here a few minutes ago?”
“No,” she said, looking puzzled. “I stopped at Gottlieb’s first, and I just now drove up around back. Why?”
“Somebody was here,” I said grimly. “Right here in this kitchen, while I was upstairs getting showered and dressed. I heard footsteps, and the refrigerator door opening and closing. I called down, thinking it was Daniel, and whoever it was took off out the back door.”
“Good Lord,” BeBe said, clutching her purse. “Burglars! Did you check your jewelry?”
“I’m wearing the only good jewelry I own,” I said, gesturing at the diamond stud earrings that had been a birthday gift from Daniel. “Relax. All they got was the sausage balls.” I gestured toward the half-empty party platters. “And the stuffed mushrooms and the bacon-wrapped shrimp.”
“Not the shrimp,” BeBe moaned. “They’re my absolute favorites. I’ve been thinking of those shrimp all afternoon.”
“You’ll get over it,” I said. I transferred the contents of one half-empty platter to another and rearranged the garnish and the plastic wrap. “Come on. We’ve got to start getting set up at the shop. The judges will be here in half an hour.”
BeBe picked up the punch bowl and the cookie box and followed me out the door, giving a backward glance at Jethro. “You’re sure your burglar wasn’t the four-footed kind?”
“Positive,” I said, locking the door behind us. “Jethro can’t open the refrigerator. Or the back door. And I distinctly heard somebody do both.”
“Oh,” she said, following me over to the shop’s back door. “Did you call the cops?”
“To report a case of purloined sausage balls? I somehow think the Savannah police have higher-priority cases than that these days.”
“Spooky,” BeBe said, stepping aside to let me unlock the door, which, I noted with satisfaction, was securely locked.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said, stepping inside. “All kinds of creepy stuff has been happening around here.”
But BeBe hadn’t stopped to hear my story. She’d put her contribution to the party down on the big pine table at the
back of Maisie’s Daisy, and gone straight outside. I could see her, standing outside on the sidewalk, staring rapturously in at the window.
I smiled and switched on all the shop lights. The forest of aluminum trees lit up, and the thousands of tiny white lights I’d wrapped the shop’s walls and ceilings with, hidden behind the mists of blue tulle, shone like little stars in a darkened sky. On the shelf above the cash register, I punched a button, and the shop’s sound system started playing the special Christmas compilation CD I’d burned earlier in the day, after downloading my favorite oldies off the Internet. Brenda Lee’s “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” wafted through the store and out to the sidewalk, courtesy of the mini speakers Daniel had mounted on brackets over the shop’s front door.
“It’s perfect,” BeBe said, when I joined her outside on the sidewalk. “Oh, Weezie, it’s like a little movie set.”
She glanced over at me and laughed. “Now I get why you’re dressed like Rizzo from Grease.”
“Not Rizzo,” I corrected her, adjusting my pearls. “More like Sandra Dee.”
“Whatever,” she said, turning back to the window. “If those judges don’t give you first place, I’ll have ‘em impeached. I’ll demand a recount.”
All modesty aside, the window was divine.
I’d set two of the aluminum trees on either side of the front door of the shop, decked out in the cheap blue and silver glass balls and big blue lights. I’d spray-painted the previously rejected grapevines with flat white paint, draped them with more of the blue tulle, and wrapped them with white twinkle lights. And the color wheel I’d hidden at the base of each tree bathed the front of the shop in a deep blue light.
From inside the window, the halo effect of all that gauzy blue tulle artfully bunched in soft drifts gave the whole scene a dreamlike quality.
“It reminds me of one of those little dioramas we used to make in shoe boxes for school book reports,” BeBe said. “But this one’s called Blue Christmas, right?”
“So you get it?” I asked, delighted.
“How could I not?”
Inside the window, the blue lights on the aluminum trees had an almost eerie effect. On the other side of the window, I’d styled a fantasy fifties teenage girl’s bedroom, complete with the silver-framed picture of Elvis on the nightstand. Beside Elvis, I’d placed an old-timey glass Coke bottle with a straw sticking out the top, and beside that was a paper plate with a slice of pizza, all of it illuminated by a kitschy formerly pink poodle lamp I’d mercilessly given the blue paint treatment to.
The blue princess phone was in the middle of the bed, waiting for that call from that special boy. Beside the phone I’d propped up my own much-loved childhood teddy bear. His little black shoe-button eyes gleamed with some sort of secret amusement. And beside Teddy, I’d placed an open diary with a feather-tipped pen.
“Perfect,” BeBe said, nudging me. “You should go in and lie on the bed and pretend to be a mannequin.”
“That reminds me,” I said, darting back inside the shop. I tiptoed into the vignette and took off the heavy gold Savannah High class ring that had been a gift from a long-forgotten boyfriend, and set the ring on the page of the open diary. Then I lovingly draped my daddy’s letter sweater across the foot of the bed.
I heard a pair of hands clapping and, looking up, saw BeBe outside, where she’d been joined by a small knot of bystanders. One by one, they started clapping too, until I realized I was being given a standing ovation.
Modestly, I bowed low, and when I straightened up, I saw Judy McConnell, the president of the downtown business association, pinning a First Place ribbon to the wreath on the door. Appropriately enough, it was blue.
CHAPTER 9
The punch,” I cried, suddenly jolted back into my role as shopkeeper and hostess. “We can’t have a Christmas open house without the punch!”
I first tasted Chatham Artillery Punch as a fourteen-yearold kid, when I snuck a cup of it at a family wedding and spent the rest of the evening passed out under the piano at the Knights of Columbus hall. My mother, certain that I’d been abducted and sold into white slavery, was on the verge of calling the cops, when my cousin Butch found me curled up underneath the Steinway.
Chatham Artillery Punch isn’t something you pour out of a couple of cans of fruit juice and call it a day. No, sir. The recipe I’ve always used, which is my adaptation of the one in the Savannah Junior League cookbook, the one with the great Ogden Nash limerick in the front, suggests that the hostess start the base of the punch at least two months ahead of time, preferably making it in a forty-gallon drum.
I hadn’t started two months ahead of time, nor did I have any empty forty-gallon drums at my disposal.
Instead I’d mixed up my batch the previous week in a brand-new galvanized tin trash can, bought especially for this purpose.
My recipe calls for the following:
2 liters of rum
1 liter of gin
1 liter of bourbon
1 liter of brandy
3 bottles of rosé wine
¼ pound of green tea steeped in two quarts of boiling water
2½ cups of light brown sugar, dissolved in the hot tea
2 cups of maraschino cherries
2 large cans of chunked pineapple in their juice
Juice of 9 lemons
The original, classic recipe also calls for a pinch of gunpowder for that final, explosive charge, but I’d decided my version was explosive enough without the gunpowder.
I’d made the base, covered it with the lid, which I’d tightened with a bungee cord, and stashed it out on my patio all week, where the cool weather kept it nicely. After five days, I’d siphoned the punch off into washed and emptied plastic gallon milk jugs.
“Jeez,” BeBe said, holding the punch bowl steady while I poured in my brew, “This stuff smells like a whole distillery. What’s the alcohol content, do you think?”
“Lethal,” I assured her. I went back into the stockroom, to the freezer compartment of the shop’s refrigerator, and retrieved the cherry-and-lemon-encrusted ice ring I’d stashed there the day before.
Once the ice ring was floating in the bowl, I added the finishing touch, a bottle of champagne.
I filled two cups with the punch, handed one to BeBe, and kept the other for myself. BeBe clicked her cup against the side of mine. “To the victors go the spoils,” she declared.
“Yowza!” she said after her initial sip. “I haven’t really drunk any of this stuff since my debutante ball.”
“What happened that night?” I asked.
“No idea.” She grinned. “I shotgunned a couple snorts of the stuff, and when I woke up the next day, I’d taken a road trip to Jacksonville with the bass player from the rock band Mama’d hired for the party. She made me have the tattoo removed too.”
“Take it slow,” I advised, blinking at the depth charge from my own sip. “I’m counting on you staying sober back here at the refreshments, while I mind the store.”
As soon as I unlocked the front door and announced the open house was officially open, people began to stream inside.
Judy McConnell was the first one in the door. “You know you broke all the contest rules, right?”
“Silly little rules,” I said. “And yet you gave me first prize anyway.”
“I want that aluminum tree in the window,” she said, taking out her checkbook. “How much?”
I shook my head. “Sorry. It’s not for sale. All the stuff in the window is from my personal collection.”
She cocked her head and gave me a winning smile. “And yet we gave you first prize.”
“Ninety bucks,” I said quickly. “But you can’t pick it up until Saturday. And if you tell anybody about this, I’ll have to kill you.”
“Deal,” she said. “We would have given you first prize anyway. Your window rocks. Way more original than anything else we’ve seen in years.”
I couldn’t resist. “What about Babalu? The
snow queens didn’t grab you this year?”
“Having the children’s choir from Turner A.M.E. Church dressed up in white robes singing ‘Walkin’ in a Winter Wonderland’ was too over the top. Even for me,” Judy said, wrinkling her nose. “And we lost a judge who slipped on that awful artificial snow they’re blowing and wrenched her ankle.”
Within a matter of minutes, Maisy’s Daisy was full to capacity. The music played, and the punch got drunk, and people seemed to be in a very merry, non-blue mood. I saw lots of our regular customers, like Steve the banker, who stops by the shop every Wednesday afternoon. He’s bought every old oscillating fan and Bakelite radio I’ve ever had. Tacky Jacky, my upholsterer client, came in too, and left with an armload of the vintage barkcloth drapes and cutter quilts she buys to make the designer throw pillows we sell in the shop.
But lots of the other customers were tourists, drawn in by the irresistible music that spilled out onto the sidewalk, and of course, by our prizewinning decorations.
While BeBe doled out the punch and kept the appetizer platters refilled, I manned the cash register, which jingled merrily with all the purchases people were making. Our customers seemed to be grabbing up and buying everything that wasn’t nailed down. And so many people kept trying to dismantle the display window to buy stuff, I finally had to scrawl a big sign on the back of a paper sack that said “Sorry! Window Display Is from Owner’s Personal Collection—Not for Sale!”
By ten o’clock, an hour past our posted nine o’clock closing time, I finally had to physically escort Steve the banker out the front door. He had two huge shopping bags full of merchandise in each hand, but he wasn’t done yet.
“But, I’ve really got to have the blue princess phone from the window,” Steve was saying. “It’s the perfect thing for the beach house at Tybee. It’ll be a Christmas present for Polly.”
“Not for sale, Steve,” I said firmly.
He pressed his face to the glass. “Not even for Polly?”
His wife, Polly, was an old friend from high school days.
Blue Christmas Page 5