“Fun event,” I said. “Nothing like it when we were kids.”
“Jewel Bay’s a lot livelier now than it was back then.” Her voice held a note of resentment.
“But you never had any doubts about coming back here.”
She grunted. “I had plenty of doubts.”
Whoa.
We stopped in front of what I guessed was meant to be a polar bear. It slumped heavily to one side, as if the maker hadn’t quite been able to hoist the midsection into its proper place. Some adult assistance was allowed in the children’s categories, but this one looked entirely the work of the ten-and-under set.
“Must be hard for your folks right now,” I said, “dealing with tragedy during the holidays.”
“They’re so wrapped up in each other, they barely notice anyone else,” Holly said. “My nine-year-old played in his first basketball tournament last weekend, and they skipped it.”
That surprised me. “Did they come Sunday?”
“No. The fourth graders played Saturday. I’m not sure who played Sunday.”
I thought back to the photographs I’d seen, with her in the same black coat, clapping her plaid gloves.
Not the black gloves she wore now. The black gloves she’d been wearing when she unloaded the groceries earlier this week.
“Which kids are yours?” I asked.
“There. The ones making the snow cat.” She pointed to a boy and girl thirty feet away, working on a giant, lopsided cat under Jack Muir’s watchful eye. “You can tell they’re vets’ kids.”
“Cute.” Another twenty feet past them, Landon smoothed a snow penguin’s belly while Adam shaped the beak. My guy looked up and smiled, and I waved. “I didn’t realize your father had been ill. The stresses with your sister must have aggravated the problem. That explains why your mother is so protective of him. And a teeny bit of why she was so hard on your sister.”
Holly’s laugh was bitter, and she shot me a harsh look before strolling on to inspect the next snow sculpture.
In a flash, the pixels in my brain rearranged themselves again. I’d been wrong about the lights. Walt and Taya decorated everything—their shop, their home, the schoolhouse—with tiny white lights. But the string around Merrily’s neck bore old-fashioned colored bulbs.
Walt had told me, down at the barn, that his purchase of leftover Christmas decorations included tubs full of lights, and that he’d donated them all to the village. I’d thought he’d had wrapped a stray string around his daughter’s neck, to divert attention from the tiny puncture wound in her skin. Her neck, I’d guessed, or maybe he’d stuck the old syringe full of insulin straight through her red coat.
“It was you,” I said, stepping into Holly’s path. “Not your dad. Detective Bello was right about the summons, but wrong about the person. He’s convinced Merrily got a call from someone who knew her secret. I’m sure he checked her phone records, but a call from you wouldn’t raise any suspicions.”
Holly clenched her fists, a muscle in her cheek twitching. “Even my darling sister wasn’t suspicious of me. She should have been.”
“It was the other way around, wasn’t it? She knew your secret. And you were afraid she’d tell your parents why she pled guilty all those years ago. To protect you, the child they thought so perfect.”
“I hate Christmas,” Holly Thornton Muir said.
“What you told her, I don’t know. Maybe you claimed your mother was having a change of heart. Or that she wanted to meet Ashley. You needed a powerful hook, to lure Merrily to the schoolhouse.”
“What if I don’t want to have a holly, jolly Christmas?” she said in a mocking tone, as if she hadn’t heard me.
“When I stopped at the clinic, to break the news about Merrily, I saw a box of decorations inside the front door. You hadn’t put anything up yet. You must have had the box in your car when you asked Merrily to meet you at the schoolhouse. Then, later in the week, your husband was decorating. I bet he was short a string of lights. The string you used on your sister, to make everyone think she’d been strangled. A sweet bit of revenge.”
“That’s plain silly, Erin.” She shot a look past me to her family and mine, busy with their snow sculptures, then her eyes darted toward the park entrance.
“What about the insulin? Is that silly, too? You told me you’d have to order insulin for my cat because you’d run out. You ran out because you used the clinic’s supply on your sister.”
Her eyes turned shiny-bright and her hands twitched, her face a picture of desperation. The last face Merrily Thornton had ever seen.
I pointed at Holly’s black-gloved hand. “The red-and-black plaid glove under her body was yours. You lost it at the scene. Merrily left hers in her kitchen.”
Maybe she had, maybe she hadn’t. All I’d seen on the kitchen chair was her bag. But why else had Holly Thornton Muir changed from the super-cute plaid gloves just like her sister’s to the basic black pair she’d worn the rest of the week, if she hadn’t lost one?
“I hate Christmas,” she repeated. “I hate my name, and I hated my sister. She was going to ruin everything. I stopped her, and I am not going to let you pick up where she left off.”
She shoved me and I staggered backward. She turned and sprinted toward the park entrance. I reached instinctively for my phone. My pocket was empty. I glanced over my shoulder, but in the time it would take me to reach Adam and get his phone, Holly would get away.
I pushed after her, ignoring the barking in my ankle and the voices in my head telling me to stop. Outside the park, Holly headed for the bridge, and I followed.
I couldn’t lose her. I had to catch her. For Merrily, and for Ashley. Even for Walt and Taya. For Jewel Bay.
For justice.
She stopped for breath by the cottages, and I caught up with her. She snatched the jaunty snowman’s heavy oak cane and raised it.
“Give yourself up, Holly. It’s for the best.”
She took a swing and I ducked. She swung again, but I wasn’t quick enough and the cane grazed my shoulder. I darted behind the gentleman snowman, pain shooting up my left leg.
Where had she gone? I peeked around, only to see Holly searching for me.
Surely someone would see what was happening and call the sheriff. But all the shoppers were up in the village, and the families were down in the park.
I bent and grabbed a handful of snow. Pressed it into a ball, stepped out from behind my guardian, and pelted Holly. Scooped up another handful and aimed. Backed away as she attempted to move in on me.
She swung once more and once more I ducked. She pivoted and ran up Front Street.
I couldn’t run anymore. I glanced around, desperately hoping for a passerby or a cottage guest who could catch her. But it was just me and the snow gent. I grabbed one of his rock eyes and packed it in a snowball. Fired. Hit Holly in the upper back and she stumbled. I grabbed the other eye. By the time she righted herself, I was closing in on her. I fired again.
Down she went, hard, arms and legs splayed. She didn’t get up.
And then I saw what I had not wanted to see: That it had been easier for me to imagine a husband loving his wife too much than a woman not loving her sister the way I loved mine. And I saw, too, that I wanted Adam’s relationship with his brothers to be like mine with my sibs, to be as close as I’d thought Holly and Merrily.
I stood in the icy street, panting, watching Holly Muir rant and writhe.
So that’s what they mean by a snow job.
Twenty-Nine
The dapper snowman had given his eyes and accessories in the service of a good cause. After Bello and Oakland arrived, I’d told them my story and hobbled to the Merc to warm up and smear a fresh dose of arnica gel on my swollen ankle. Then Adam, Landon, and I strolled back to the cottages to spruce him up. His cane had been taken into evidence, and one mitten was missing. But with his top hat back in place, a sprig of cedar tucked into the red-and-green plaid hatband, and two new eyes, he looked quite
the gentleman again.
Bello had confirmed my insulin theory. The string of lights had not distracted the pathologist. The tox screens, as Bello called them, had detected low blood sugar but elevated levels of sugar in Merrily’s heart. She wasn’t a diabetic, and they’d ruled out an insulin-producing tumor. That left an injection as the most likely cause of death. Deputies had begun executing search warrants that morning, and they’d found a used syringe in the trash at Holly’s home, along with Merrily’s phone.
Holly hadn’t been seriously hurt by my illicit snowball, thank goodness, and no one said I should have let her go and called for help, but I could tell that’s what they were thinking. That’s what I was thinking. Still, I had a talent for this investigating thing. Consider it a form of community service.
Cary Lenhardt had also been arrested. He admitted to running me off the road. Deputies had found a map in his truck showing Jason and Chiara’s house, confirming my suspicion that Lenhardt had intended to warn him off, too. They’d also found boxes full of unpaid bills and collection notices. The small amounts he’d stolen from the Building Supply had grown over the years, to the point where he considered himself entitled. He’d gotten in over his head with the expensive toys, like the RV he’d sold Ned, and a mortgage he couldn’t afford with a balloon he couldn’t meet. Cash had never been his principal means of theft, but as I’d guessed, he’d seen the opportunity to sneak the cash out of the deposit bag before Merrily took it last Saturday. Then he’d snuck it into the cigar box in her desk. I felt bad for his wife, but Bello dismissed that as “sympathetic drivel,” saying she should have realized they were living beyond their means ages ago.
As for Greg Taylor’s mysterious absence from the basketball tournament Sunday afternoon, when Merrily was killed, he’d been on a top-secret mission in his uncle’s barn, working with his French chef brother-in-law and other friends. He’d been about to tell me in the liquor store when we were interrupted.
They’d been carving the ice dragon and he hadn’t wanted his son to find out. The boy adored dragons, so the father had kept on working to finish the sculpture by the entry deadline, even though it had meant getting to the basketball game late.
I reported all this to Tracy and Lou Mary from the safety of the Merc, in between customers.
Then Oliver Bello returned. “I’ve just come from the Thorntons’ shop,” he said. “They want to see you and the Larsons. They are some seriously strange people.”
“Because they want to see me?”
He laughed and offered me a baby candy cane. I took it.
First, I stopped in Le Panier for a tray full of hot drinks. Wendy took me aside to say that Greg had told the family about Ashley, and though they were astonished, they would welcome her.
“Even Greg’s wife?” I asked.
She nodded. “I suggested he put diamonds in her Christmas stocking.”
I laughed out loud.
Then it was on to the antique store, where the shock of Holly’s actions and arrest had not yet set in. I’d asked Bello if the Thorntons had said anything about hiring a lawyer or putting up bail, and he said he’d made the suggestion but they hadn’t responded. Shock, he thought.
Shock, or lost in their obsession with Christmas. I couldn’t tell. Walt and Taya’s transformation into soft-hearted Mr. and Mrs. Claus was going to take time. Gaining a granddaughter did not make up for the loss of both daughters, or the realization that they had punished the wrong one. Learning that Merrily had gone to prison to protect Holly and spur her into turning her life around, because she’d adored her little sister and feared that the truth would devastate their parents, had them stunned. Holly, it seemed, had not actually been a force for reconciliation. Instead, she’d nursed her parents’ grudge, reveling in being the good daughter.
“One question, though, Taya,” I said, as I sat in the Thorntons’ back room, the shop closed for the day. “At the schoolhouse, when you heard that Merrily was dead, you slapped Greg Taylor. You didn’t know he was Ashley’s father, did you?”
“No.” Taya shook her head, her cap of silvery-blond hair moving furiously. “I thought—I thought that if he hadn’t given her a job, she’d have gone back to Billings. To safety.”
Walt spoke for the first time. “And she would still have been alive.”
No hot cocoa could have stopped the shiver that ran through me. “You knew. You knew it was Holly. Did you see her car drive in Sunday afternoon? Or recognize the glove she dropped?”
The puzzled look on Taya’s face cleared. “No. No, we weren’t home. We’d gotten a call about a collection of Putz houses up in Eureka. The owner’s daughter wanted to find out if they were valuable.”
“Putz houses?”
“Sometimes called Glitter Houses,” she said. “They’re cardboard, covered with glitter or white flocking. They originated in Germany in the 1800s, and whole villages were made from them, though cottages and chapels were the most popular. They were quite the rage in the 1940s and ’50s. Both our parents collected them, and we’ve always adored them.”
I felt like I’d dropped down the Christmas rabbit hole. What had Heidi said? There’s passion, and there’s obsession.
“Anyway,” Walt said, “we drove up for a look-see, and bought the lot.” He pointed at several cartons stacked along one wall. “Go ahead. The top box is open.”
I reached in and lifted out a small, light object wrapped in tissue. I peeled back the paper to reveal a white cottage that fit in the palm of my hand. Yellow cellophane windows peeked out from under a red roof, and flocking covered the bottle-brush trees in the yard. Charming and curious, I couldn’t help thinking they’d be delightful under the tree in the Merc’s front window. I put it back, reluctantly.
“So if you weren’t home, and you didn’t see Holly drive to the schoolhouse Sunday afternoon, how did you know she’d been there?”
“Because of the lights,” Taya said.
“You don’t see that style much anymore,” Walt said. “When we saw Merrily—when we saw her body, we knew right away that they came from a batch we’d given Holly and Jack years ago, when we upgraded. It’s the shape of the cup that holds the bulb, and the way it clips onto a tree or a garland.”
Only someone as obsessed with Christmas as these two would ever notice such detail. I understood now that they had responded to Merrily’s death so oddly because they’d spotted Holly’s involvement, but had been too tortured to say so.
Would they still relish the season, after all this was done?
When I’d found Taya on the schoolhouse porch, a place her daughters had loved as much as she did, she’d been crying for both of them. For the whole family.
I wanted to do the same, but I had a shop to run.
Brad and Ashley Larson arrived as I was leaving. “They’ve had quite a shock, but I think they will welcome you,” I said, smiling at Ashley. “As long as you love Christmas.”
Though her eyes still grieved her mother, she brightened. “It’s my favorite holiday.”
Out on the sidewalk, I rubbed my lucky stars. Brad would always be on Ashley’s side, I knew. As my mother had said, you can’t protect your children from life’s ups and downs, no matter how hard you try. But I thought Ashley would be okay.
The Thorntons were another story. If they couldn’t forgive themselves or Holly, as they hadn’t forgiven Merrily, they might be too mortified to stay in Jewel Bay.
I glanced up Front Street to the Jewel Inn, the chalet-style building across the tiny square from Dragonfly. Oh, heck, as long as you’re meddling. Just be quick.
Mimi George, co-owner of the Inn, stood at the reservation desk. “Ah, Erin. I think I know why you’re here.” She held up a finger, then beckoned to a short girl with light brown hair clearing a table.
“I’m Erin Murphy,” I told the girl. “I run the Merc. I want to thank you for your honesty.”
“Being honest about being a thief isn’t exactly gold-star stuff,” she said, her
hazel eyes flicking nervously between Mimi, the floor, and me. “But you’re welcome.”
“You’ve heard about the Treasure Chest project, to give hard-working kids a chance to pick out clothes and some basics their families can’t provide?”
She bit her lip. “I think it’s really great.”
“Maybe you can be an advisor,” I said. “Listen, I know you work here all weekend. Once or twice a week, after school, you could come to the Merc and help me pack orders for shipping. It’ll only be an hour or two, so it won’t interfere with your homework. We’ll have more hours for you in the summer.”
Her face lit up as if a switch had flicked on behind eyes too young to be so wary, and she glanced at Mimi, who nodded, then back at me. “Yes. Yes. Thank you.”
I wasn’t the only employer in town who believed in second chances.
I made my way back to the Merc slowly, admiring the window displays. Contest or no, the other merchants had taken the Thorntons’ window as a challenge to up their game. The sculptor had filled his front window with bronze animals decked out for the season. In a clothing shop, headless mannequins wore red and green scarves draped across their torsos and cedar bough skirts. And in Food for Thought, a stack of books in the shape of a Christmas tree glowed with tiny lights, a star on top.
The holiday surprises didn’t stop there. Inside the Merc, on the steps to my office, sat a basket filled with boxes of truffles. Each three-pack had been tied with ribbon—silver, dark red, and forest green. My wedding colors.
I carried one to the front of the shop where I found Tracy, tiny red chili peppers dangling from her ears.
“You needed wedding favors,” she said. “We’ve been packing them up whenever we had a chance.”
No matter that we had customers waiting, that I was a wet, soppy mess. I threw my arms around her and kissed her.
The front door chimed and Candy Divine waltzed in, holding a small cardboard box. “This got delivered to Puddle Jumpers by mistake. It’s for you, Erin.”
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