A Very Merry Christmas: WITH Do You Hear What I Hear AND Bah Humbug, Ba

by Lori Foster

  “Were there identifying marks with which we could trace the thing, Socks? Scars? Distinctive tattoos? A wooden leg, perhaps?”

  Socks shook his head. “Okay, okay, I get the point, Alex. It was a rat. Just like every other rat in Manhattan, except that this one was dead.”

  “Then you could have safely disposed of the thing, and I apologize most profusely for not being more explicit. Now, before we open it, could you tell me what else is in the bag? And remind me, please, of the particulars of the delivery of the package. I was rather involved with other matters when last we spoke.”

  “You really want to do this now?” Socks asked, taking another step backward. “You just got home from the airport a couple of minutes ago. Some trip, too, from what Sterling told me before he headed upstairs to see Henry. Isn’t that something, Alex? Give one of them a white fur coat and he’s a pet, like Henry. Make another one ugly and he’s just another damn rat. Would that be discrimination, you think? Sterling said you solved more murders while you were in England, huh? You sure have all the luck.”

  “We will discuss all of that later, Socks, if you don’t mind, as I’m anxious to begin my investigation. According to you, there has been a threat on Maggie’s life. I don’t believe there is anything to be gained by delay, do you? Besides, Maggie is busy upstairs, undoubtedly cudgeling her brain for reasons to put off unpacking for at least a week, and won’t notice that I’m gone.”

  “Okay, but do I have to be here?”

  “To tell me what I’ve just asked you to tell me, yes, you do,” Saint Just said, manfully lowering the handkerchief, because he’d just remembered reading that allowing your olfactory senses to be inundated by the sickening smell of decomposing flesh was the best way to shut down those senses, rendering himself at least temporarily immune to the stench. Of course, the shutting down part took several minutes, and he only hoped the rather pitiful chicken salad sandwich he’d had on the plane had already been fully digested.

  “All right,” Socks said, still speaking through his cupped hands, “but I’m going to have to take my uniform to the cleaners again, and I just paid twenty bucks for the first time, when I opened the package. Mrs. Loomis said I smelled like a three-week-old gefilte fish, and threatened to report me to management.”

  “Remind me to give you forty dollars when we get back upstairs,” Saint Just said, breathing as slowly as possible through his nose. Socks might be happy with a newly cleaned uniform, but Saint Just had already mentally consigned every stitch he wore to the dustbin. Which was a pity, for the black cashmere sweater was one of his favorites. Ah, the sacrifices he made for his Maggie.

  Socks appeared slightly mollified by the offer to pay for cleaning his uniform. “Okay, Alex, thanks. So the mail came, and there was this package for Maggie, see? Came right through the mail, an overnight delivery package, so you tell me how careful Homeland Security is, huh? Run that sucker through an X-ray machine and, bam, little rat skeleton. Little rat head, little rat teeth. I’m asking you, who could miss that?”

  Saint Just continued to eye the garbage bag. “Another topic for some other time, fascinating though it is, Socks. Continue, please.”

  “I put the package under my desk, like I always do with packages, but when I got to work the next day I noticed the smell. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from at first—I always have five or six packages under there—but then Maggie’s package started to leak, you know? That’s when I opened it, and then I called you.”

  “So it was a standard overnight packaging?”

  “Oh, yeah. Damn. Either one- or two-day delivery—I forget which. Sorry, Alex. But you’ll see it—one of those red, white, and blue boxes with an eagle on it, you know? I do remember that it was postmarked here, in Manhattan. Anyway, I opened it and out came two more things—a clear plastic bag and another package. I think the bag had been filled with dry ice—to keep the rat cold, you know?—but that was pretty much gone. And the other bag was really leaking. And really reeking. I brought everything down here before I opened it, and out came the rat.” He moved his hands from his mouth and nose, to hold them on either side of his face and make up-and-down motions with his fingers. “Whiskers. Those long, pointy front teeth. Definitely a rat. And then the note.”

  “Ah, yes, and now it becomes interesting. But you didn’t keep the note separate, did you?” Saint Just asked, pulling on a pair of thin latex gloves he’d purchased at a drugstore some weeks earlier, when his own interest in television shows showcasing crime-scene investigation had been piqued. Preparedness was half the battle in crime solving, he believed. Brilliance was the other half, exemplary powers of deduction. His forte.

  “It was already all wet, Alex,” Socks protested, his hands over his nose and mouth once again. “You’re just lucky I didn’t just call the cops, or at least Steve Wendell. But then I figured you’d kill me if I did that, so I used my master key to get into Mr. O’Hara’s storage locker and used his grabber to pick up everything—you ever see one of those, Alex? They’re really cool. Old people use them to reach things on high shelves. When Mr. O’Hara broke his hip and couldn’t reach stuff he had me go buy one for him, so I knew where it was, since Mr. O’Hara’s been just fine this past year or more. Married again and everything, and by the looks of Mrs. O’Hara, if he didn’t know how to use his hips she’d find someone else who could, you know what I mean?”

  While Socks was giving his informational talk on grabbers and…well, grabbers, Saint Just had been undoing the twist tie on the bag. Once opened, the smell, which had been unpleasant, became nearly unbearable. Still, Saint Just persevered, using a small flashlight to peer inside at the contents.

  If there had been a return address on the box, the decomposing rat had made reading it impossible, and any address would most probably be bogus at any rate. Saint Just was luckier, however, with the note, as it had landed on top of the box and was relatively undamaged. Calling upon what he believed had to be awesome untouched powers he hadn’t known he possessed, Saint Just reached into the bag and snared the note, then quickly replaced the twist tie and retreated with more haste than decorum from the storage cage.

  “You’re not going to throw that away?” Socks asked, or perhaps pleaded. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “As having the rat bronzed or stuffed and mounted is probably out of the question, I suggest the Dumpster in the alley,” Saint Just said, holding onto the note by the edges as he stood beneath one of the bare lightbulbs that hung from the ceiling. “Computer generated, I would say, which narrows down the suspects to all but about three people in the entire country. I imagine that, even in its present sorry state, there exists some way to extract fingerprints if there are any, but we’ll leave that for now, shall we? More important, and more ominous, is the note itself.”

  Socks had commandeered Mr. O’Hara’s grabber yet again and was busy inserting the foul-smelling green garbage bag inside a second, larger green garbage bag. “So you can still read it?”

  “Yes, indeed. Roses are red, violets are blue. This rat is dead, and you could be yourself. How very charming. I believe we can rule out Will Shakespeare, Socks.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are we done here? We can turn over all this stuff to Lieutenant Wendell now that you’ve seen it, right?”

  “I think not, Socks,” Saint Just said, slipping the note into a clear food storage bag he’d brought down to the cellar for just that purpose. Detecting had become more sophisticated since the Regency, but Saint Just considered himself nothing if not adaptable. “I’d rather Maggie not know about this, at least for the moment.”

  “She’ll murder you,” Socks said, shaking his head as the two of them headed back through the maze that was the basement of any building of any age in Manhattan, heading for the stairs.

  “Yes. I’m shaking in my shoes at the prospect of her righteous anger, Socks. But let’s think about this, shall we? A dead rat and some execrable poetry. All the makings of a one-off prank, don�
��t you think? A disgruntled reader, most likely. As Maggie is wont to say, everyone’s a critic. This particular critic simply had access to a dead rat. Now that he’s vented his spleen, said what he had to say, that should be the end of it.”

  “And if it isn’t?”

  Saint Just stripped off the thin gloves and tossed them in a nearby empty bucket that didn’t seem to have a purpose, so he gave it one: waste can. “If it isn’t, we’ll know soon enough. In any event, we will all—you, Sterling, and myself—stay very close to Maggie for the next three weeks, until she and Sterling and myself adjourn to New Jersey to celebrate Christmas with her family. If there are no more rats, and nothing untoward occurs, we can then probably safely conclude that this particular rat had no siblings.”

  “She’s still going to murder you,” Socks said, grinning. “Maggie doesn’t like secrets. Hey, you didn’t say—did you see how the guy signed the note?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Saint Just stopped beneath yet another bare bulb and held up the note inside its plastic covering. “I don’t see…oh, there it is. N…e…Nevus? What in bloody blazes is that supposed to mean? Nevus? A nevus is a—”

  “A mole,” Socks said brightly. “I looked it up. A bit of skin pigmentation or birthmark.”

  Saint Just tucked the plastic bag back into his pants pocket. “And you still think we should take any of this seriously, Socks?”

  “No, I suppose not. Anyone who’d call himself a nevus has got to be a little crazy.”

  Saint Just stopped, turned around, looked at Socks. “Well, thank you, my friend. Now, for the first time, I do believe I’m a trifle worried. Yes, we’ll all stay very close to Maggie, won’t we?”

  “And you’ll talk to the lieutenant? You know, like without telling Maggie?”

  “Possibly. Although I doubt there would be much of anything he could do unless the threat becomes more specific. I’ll think on it, Socks.”

  “I saw him the other night,” Socks offered carefully as they continued their way through the rabbit warren, Saint Just pausing only to pick up his sword cane, which he’d retrieved from his condo and brought downstairs with him. He felt naked without his sword cane, which was Maggie’s fault, because that’s how she’d made him.

  “You saw the left-tenant? And why does that sound so ominous, Socks?”

  “Well, he wasn’t alone.”

  One corner of Saint Just’s mouth curved upward. “Really, Mr. Jackson. Feel free to expand on that most intriguing statement, if you please?”

  Socks looked to his left and right, as if expecting Maggie to be hiding behind one of the stacks of boxes. “I’m not one to gossip….”

  “No. Definitely not, Socks. You are the soul of discretion and I commend you for that. Indeed, I am in awe of your powers of circumspection. And now that we have that out of the way—please go on.”

  The doorman grinned. “A blonde, and hanging on his arm like she couldn’t navigate without him, you know? They were coming up out of the subway just as my friend and I were going down. We looked at each other, and then pretended we didn’t see each other—you know how it is. But, man, did he look guilty. Do you think Maggie will be upset?”

  “Only if she believes it wasn’t her idea that she and the left-tenant stop seeing each other as anything but friends.”

  “You want to run that one by me one more time, Dr. Phil?”

  Saint Just smiled. “Please, don’t attempt to compare me with a rank amateur. It’s simple enough, Socks. If Maggie stopped seeing Wendell as a beau, which I do believe she has already decided to do, that would be fine with her, as she’s already realized that she thinks of him as a good friend, but no more. But for him to stop seeking her attention in favor of some other female before she can make that clear to him, let him down gently, as I believe it’s called? No, then she’ll decide she’s just managed to allow what could have been the man of her maidenly dreams slip through her fingers. It’s all in the timing, my friend, so we will not mention that you saw Wendell with another woman.”

  Socks shook his head. “Women. It’s times like these that make me so glad I’m gay.”

  Saint Just chuckled, then frowned as he lifted a finger to his mouth, warning Socks to silence. “Someone’s approaching.”

  A few moments later Maggie popped her head around the corner of a pillar, holding a shovel in what some might consider a threatening manner. She sighed, and put down the shovel, the look in her green eyes daring him to mention the makeshift weapon against Things That Go Bump in the Cellars. “Alex? I thought I heard someone talking. What are you doing down here?”

  “Maggie, my dear,” Saint Just said smoothly, inclining his head in acknowledgment of her presence. “One could reasonably ask the same of you. I was assisting Socks here with something he had to carry downstairs for Mr. O’Hara. You?”

  “You carried something down here? Performed manual labor? Why can’t I get a mental picture of that?” Maggie said, turning back the way she’d come, Saint Just and Socks exchanging “whew!” glances before they followed her. “But I’m glad you’re here. I was upstairs, just sort of looking for something to do.”

  “Something such as unpacking your suitcases?”

  “Yeah, right. My favorite thing,” Maggie said, stopping in front of one of the many wire storage cages that lined the walls. “Anyway, I was looking around, and I suddenly realized that it’s December, and we’re not going to be here for Christmas unless we have a blizzard and they close the New Jersey Turnpike—which has never happened, even though I’ve prayed for it every year. I usually put up my Christmas decorations over the Thanksgiving weekend, so I can enjoy them longer, but we went straight to England from Jersey this year and now the condo looks naked, you know? So…who’s going to help me get all of these boxes upstairs?”

  Saint Just peered through the wire of the cage, at the stack of boxes that seemed to be three deep and reach to the rafters. “Your holiday decorations are in those boxes? All of those boxes?”

  “Yes, most of them anyway. And you love manual labor, right, Alex?”

  Socks shrugged. “I’ll go get the dolly, and we can use the freight elevator.”

  “Thank you, Socks,” Maggie said as she slipped a key into the lock that hung on the door, then stepped inside the storage area. “My mother hates Christmas, you know. The Grouch Who Stole Christmas, every damn year,” she told Saint Just, who was still mentally counting boxes.

  “So, naturally, you adore the holiday to the top of your bent, correct?”

  Maggie’s grin was deliciously wicked. “You know me so well. Oh, Alex, you’re going to love New York during the holidays. The tree at Rockefeller Center, the office party drunks ice skating nearby, the department store windows. Barneys is always so out there. Oh, that reminds me. I’ve got to get to Bloomie’s for a cinnamon broom. I get one there every year—it’s a tradition. I love the smell of cinnamon. And cookies. We’re going to make lots of cookies.”

  She lifted up two fairly flat cardboard boxes and handed them to Saint Just. “You see, I’ve just decided something. Bernie’s already got next year’s hardcover in-house, so I’m just not going to worry about writing again until after the new year. You’ve been here for months now, Alex, you and Sterling, and I’ve never really shown you New York. So that’s what we’re going to do.” She added a third cardboard box to the two Saint Just was holding. “Right after we decorate the living crap out of my condo. Come on, Alex, smile. It’s Christmas!”

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  Copyright © 2006 by Kensington Publishing Corp.

  “Do You Hear What I Hear” copyright © 2006 by LoriFoster

  “Bah Humbug, Baby” copyright © 2006 by Gemma Bruce

  “By Firelight” copyright © 2006 by Janice Maynard

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  ISBN: 0-7582-5232-3