Duck the Halls

by Donna Andrews

  It was going a lot slower than usual, thanks to my still wonky shoulder—in fact, half the time it was Michael doing the wrapping with me providing sage advice and an occasional finger to hold a ribbon in place.

  As we wrapped, I told Michael about what I’d overheard after the concert.

  “So we know who the pranksters are,” he said.

  “One set of pranksters,” I said. “They didn’t do the duck prank.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe they just didn’t both do it.”

  “Michael, they both denied it. Strenuously. And they had no idea anyone was listening.”

  “Except each other. What if one of them did it, thinking the other would approve, only to find out the other was furious. Would he admit to pulling the prank? Or would he pretend to be baffled?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember their voices.

  “They sounded so sincere,” I said.

  “So would I have at their age,” he said. “At least we have a better idea why they did it. Some kind of retribution against Lightfoot—I assume that’s who they meant by ‘Bigfoot.’”

  “‘Mad at Bigfoot about the April thing,’” I repeated, as I collected a stack of presents Michael had already wrapped and moved them out of his way. A small stack, that I could carry one-handed. “I’m sure that’s what they said. What happened in April?”

  “Easter? The New Life choir gave that big sunrise concert down at the lake. Did Lightfoot dislocate anyone else’s shoulder for the occasion?”

  “Easter was in March,” I said.

  “Would they remember that? Most people think of Easter as being in April.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But if Lightfoot did something to upset them back then, why not call it the Easter thing? And why wait nine months?”

  Michael shrugged and shook his head.

  “Well, I’ll tell the chief,” I said. “Assuming he ever calls me back. He’s in the New Life congregation—maybe he’ll have some idea just what happened in April.”

  “Or maybe he’ll convince the boys to spill all,” Michael said. “Anyway—you know, we could do this tomorrow.”

  He’d caught me yawning prodigiously.

  “Tomorrow is cutting it awfully close, isn’t it?” I asked. “Especially since we’ve got your Christmas Carol performance tomorrow night. And I want to get everything possible wrapped beforehand, so we can save Christmas Eve for assembling things.”

  “Do we have any more gift tags?” Michael said, holding up a present. “I need to tag this one before I forget who it’s for.”

  “Hand it to me—I’ll make some more tags.” I grabbed the scissors and a scrap of foil paper and began carefully cutting little rectangles that I could fold into tags.

  “And don’t forget,” I went on. “We’ll be helping both mothers with their dinners.”

  “Right,” he said. “So we persevere. It would help if our respective mothers-in-law could work together and throw one big Christmas dinner instead of two.”

  “It was a major feat of diplomacy to get them to schedule their meals at different times,” I said.

  “Understood,” he said. “And believe me, your diplomatic skills are much appreciated. So is it lunch with your parents and then supper back here with whatever Mom comes up with? Or vice versa?”

  “Please!” I said. “They would both be mortally insulted at hearing their banquets described as lunch or supper. Early dinner and late dinner, noon sharp and six p.m.”

  “And Pepto-Bismol at midnight,” he said. “Please tell me they’re going for something easy to digest.”

  “Mother’s doing turkey,” I said.

  “Fabulous! I like a traditional holiday meal.”

  “Which she is cooking in some odd way she read about on one of those food blogs,” I said. “Stuffed with crab, oysters, and lobster.”

  “Sounds delicious!” And then his face fell. “For those who can eat it. Is she having a seafood-free option, or has she forgotten your allergies again?”

  “Mother doesn’t approve of my being allergic to anything as elegant and expensive as crab, oysters, and lobster,” I said.

  “Well, there should be plenty of side dishes.”

  “And with any luck she won’t gussy up all of them with seafood.”

  “Or if she does, you’ll have all the more room for Mom’s feast,” he said.

  “Yes.” I tried to sound enthusiastic, but Michael knew me too well.

  “So, what’s Mom serving?” he asked.

  “She’s going pan-Asian,” I said. “Cantonese-style lobster is the main course.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Accompanied by Peking duck, squid pancakes, spicy pig’s blood soup, thousand-year-old eggs, and charcoal-grilled eel.”

  “She’s clearly trying to impress everyone,” Michael said. “She always goes to Asian dishes with … unusual ingredients when she wants to impress.”

  “She said she knew people would be tired of ordinary holiday fare by the time they came to her dinner,” I said.

  We wrapped in silence for a few minutes.

  “You know,” I said finally. “I just don’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “The whole idea of getting tired of the usual holiday fare,” I said. “I like holiday fare. Turkey. Gravy. Mashed potatoes. Pumpkin pie. I like them.”

  “I assume everyone does. Or almost everyone.”

  “And I never understand all the fuss about how to use up leftover turkey. What’s wrong with just eating it the way it comes, at least while the gravy lasts? I’m always a little sad when the turkey runs out.”

  “I agree,” he said.

  “But unfortunately neither of our mothers does,” I said. “And please don’t repeat this to them—”

  “Of course not.”

  “Because I feel horribly ungrateful complaining about this. They’re going to a world of trouble, and fixing us fabulous, gourmet fare.”

  “That you can’t eat.”

  “Some of which I can’t eat, but that’s beside the point. Even if they fixed something I could eat—something I liked, like steak—I’d still kind of miss the traditional fare. Turkey, cooked in a normal way, not stuffed with crustaceans. And with good old artery-clogging southern gravy. Mashed potatoes. Cranberry sauce. Pumpkin pie. Tomato aspic. Don’t make a face—Mother’s tomato aspic is more like Bloody Mary–flavored Jell-O.”

  “Still—aspic?” Michael still sounded dubious. “Did you like it that much?”

  “I didn’t hate it,” I said. “And it was traditional. What I’m trying to say is that I miss all the things I used to have at Thanksgiving and Christmas when I was growing up. Back when Mother drafted Mrs. Fenniman to do her cooking. Mrs. Fenniman was an excellent plain cook. Forget losing weight on her cooking, and if you valued your life, you didn’t make a suggestion about how to do something differently, but if you liked good, plain southern cooking, Mrs. Fenniman was the queen.”

  “I remember,” Michael said. “Who’s helping your mother this holiday?”

  “Some poor cousin from Matthews County whose husband is spending Christmas on the USS Harry S Truman,” I said. “She’s a wonderful cook, and willing to put up with Mother’s strangest suggestions, and I’m sure it will all be delicious. But it’s—it’s not the tradition I grew up with. And I feel terrible complaining to you, because I know having strange and unusual food is your Christmas tradition.”

  “Some tradition,” he said. “Every year something different, from some other part of the world. The first time I had a holiday dinner with your family, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

  “Really?” I put down the scissors and stared. “You never told me. Or if you did, I assumed you were just being polite.”

  “Your family had the kind of holiday dinners I always longed for,” he said. “The kind every other kid on base—or later, in the neighborhood—got to eat. Real old-fashioned meals, like the Pilgrims ate. I wish we coul
d go back to that.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We fell silent again. I wasn’t sure what Michael was thinking, but I was pondering the fact that I already felt better about our mothers’ strange and over-the-top holiday menus, knowing Michael didn’t like them any more than I did.

  “I have a plan,” he said finally. “To satisfy the longing we both have for an old-fashioned Christmas dinner.”

  “We run away and eat with Mrs. Fenniman?”

  “Better,” he said. “We cook our own.”

  “And have three Christmas dinners?” I shuddered slightly. “I’m not sure that’s much of an improvement.”

  “We could do ours on Christmas Eve,” he said. “Remember that little basement apartment we lived in before we found the house?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s vacant at the moment. And the owner of the house is a friend. He’s trying to decide whether to rent it out again or remodel it as part of his house. I’m sure I could arrange for us to borrow the apartment.”

  “And do what?”

  “Cook our own Christmas dinner,” he said. “Just you and me and the boys. Not a big dinner—the kitchen’s pretty tiny. But I can drop by the turkey farm and get a small bird.”

  “It takes a while to cook even a small turkey,” I pointed out.

  “And you’ll probably be swamped with more church-swapping chores,” he said. “So I’ll pick up the ingredients, and the boys can help me get it started, and then you can join us in the basement apartment for our own little Christmas dinner. The four of us. And then when the tryptophan in the turkey starts working on the boys, we bring them home, put them to bed, and assemble the train tracks and whatever else in a fabulous mood.”

  “It’s a crazy idea,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  We took time off from our wrapping to run to the kitchen for a few cookbooks and make a list of utensils and ingredients we’d need. And by the time we’d finished that, it was well past bedtime, but we lay awake for quite a while, inventing ever more fantastic tales to tell our families about our absence on Christmas Eve, and giggling until I was afraid we’d wake the boys. It was nearly one by the time we fell asleep.

  And half past three when Michael’s pager went off again.

  Chapter 21

  “Where is that, I wonder?” Michael asked, after Debbie Anne had rattled off the address. “Someone really should explain to Chief Featherstone that a lot of people in town barely know their own street addresses, and at least half of his firefighters don’t own a GPS.”

  “Temple Beth-El,” I said. “I have now memorized the addresses of every church and synagogue in town, and I’ve practically memorized the phone numbers of all the priests, ministers, and rabbis.”

  “The prankster again?” He looked grim.

  I went up to make sure Rob was stirring. I found Rose Noire knocking on his door, which popped open just as I reached her side.

  “All right, all right,” he muttered. “Why didn’t someone tell me so many of these fires would be in the middle of the night?”

  He popped back into his room and from the thumping and scuffling noises, he appeared to be hauling out and donning his gear.

  “I’ll fix coffee again,” Rose Noire said.

  “And after that, could you watch the boys again while I trail after the firefighters?” I asked. “I have at least a dozen events scheduled in one or another of the temple’s meeting rooms today, and if I’m going to have to rework the schedule again, I’d like to know sooner rather than later.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “So it’s the prankster again? Of course.”

  She flitted downstairs and into the kitchen. I went to throw on my clothes. Warm clothes, in case we were in for another long stretch of standing about in the cold.

  Temple Beth-El was also on the Clay County Road, a little farther out of town than the New Life Baptist Church. It was fairly new, and very modern, with a lot of floor-to-ceiling glass windows looking out over the surrounding woods. In any other season, the view from those windows was magical, since members of the congregation had subtly improved the natural beauty of the woods by planting dogwoods and redbuds at its edge for spring blossoms and Japanese maples for fall color.

  But as I pulled into the temple parking lot and picked my way through the mounds of snow to find a good stopping place, I glanced up at the glass windows and shuddered. Even if they’d gone in for the kind of thick, energy-efficient glass that would make the inside toasty warm in this weather, just having a view of the snow and ice outside would chill me on a night like this. And knowing that every time I walked in front of one of those windows some lurking prankster might be watching me—

  “Stop spooking yourself,” I muttered as I parked the car.

  And my stomach tightened when I realized that this time the fire engines weren’t standing idly by. Michael and Rob and their colleagues were unrolling hoses and hauling equipment out of various compartments and then dashing off into the woods to the right of the temple.

  Most of the deputies who had arrived on the scene were following them, although I could see a pair of deputies slowly working their way around the left side of the building, checking behind every twig. And my friend Aida Butler was talking to an excitable man in a fur-trimmed down jacket. I strolled over to eavesdrop.

  “—and Chief Burke told us all to be on the lookout for the prankster,” the man was saying. “So when I saw the flames out in the woods, I called.”

  “Did you go out to investigate?” Aida asked.

  “I didn’t dare leave the temple,” he said.

  Flames in the woods. I watched until the last fireman had disappeared into the woods, then followed the path of the hoses, keeping a good ten feet away from the nearest one. A half-moon shone down from the cloudless sky and reflected on the snow, making it easy to see where I was going.

  Pretty soon I spotted the firefighters in a clearing. No flames, but a lot of steam rising from what had probably been a campfire before the hoses had gotten to it. Three hoses were still pouring water into the clearing—Rob was wielding the nozzle on one of them—and a couple of other firefighters were hacking at logs and turning over piles of leaves, presumably to uncover any lingering sparks.

  Chief Burke and Chief Featherstone, the fire chief, were standing at the edge of the clearing, watching the excitement.

  “You think maybe you could call them off now?” Chief Burke said. “I hate to dampen their enthusiasm, seeing as how for most of them it’s their first real fire—”

  “But the fire’s long gone, and all they’re doing now is washing away any evidence that you might like to find,” Chief Featherstone said. “I hear you.”

  He lifted a bullhorn to his mouth and barked out an order. “Stand down! Turn off your hoses and stand by to assist the deputies if needed.”

  It took a few seconds, but the hoses cut off, and all the firefighters gathered around the clearing, except for a few who were running through the woods shouting “All clear here!” at intervals, and were probably too far away to hear their chief.

  Two of the deputies sprang into action, searching the sodden leaves and ashes in the clearing.

  “Found something,” one called. “Beer bottles. And the contents are still a little fizzy.”

  He held up a bottle of Gwent Pale, a local microbrew.

  “Never heard of that brand,” Chief Featherstone said.

  “It’s not really sold anywhere but Caerphilly,” Michael told him. “Two retired agriculture professors from the college started a microbrewery as a hobby. The quality varies wildly, but since they’re not trying to make a profit, they keep the cost dirt cheap—making it the beer of choice for a lot of the college students who are old enough to drink.”

  “And a lot who aren’t,” the chief added. “But most of the college students have gone home. This looks like teenagers.”

  I had to agree. I tried to think of a reason why someone old enough to drink legally would ta
ke to the woods with a six-pack of Gwent Pale on a night like this, and failed miserably. I saw several other firefighters or deputies nodding as if having the same thought.

  “Let’s finish up here before all that water freezes over again,” the chief said. “And—”

  A harsh buzzing broke out, as if a tribe of giant, angry, mutant bees had suddenly descended on the clearing. All the firefighters began digging in their pockets. Chief Featherstone pulled his pager out first and pressed a button.

  “Box fourteen oh four for the structure fire. Seventy-two Church Street. Engine companies fourteen and two, truck twelve, rescue squad two, ambulance fourteen respond. Oh three twenty-three.”

  “Church Street,” the Chief Featherstone said. “Let’s go.”

  “Which one is it?” one fireman asked.

  “Trinity Episcopal Church,” I called over my shoulder. I was already making tracks for the parking lot.

  Chapter 22

  Since I wasn’t hauling heavy equipment, I beat all the firefighters and most of the deputies back to the parking lot. But since I was only a civilian, I made sure not to get in the way of any of the emergency vehicles as they roared and squealed out of the parking lot. So I was, of course, the last to arrive at Trinity.

  When I pulled into the parking lot, not that far behind the last of the fire engines, I saw five people standing around, stamping their feet and blowing out plumes of vapor as they breathed. None of them was wearing coats, so I suspected they were the night watch, and had evacuated the church in a hurry. And yes, I could see smoke coming out of the church. Out of the basement stairwell, in fact. Not a whole lot, but still. A real fire.

  I pulled up to the group of onlookers—I recognized several of them as frequent church volunteers—and rolled down my window.

  “Anyone need to warm up?”

  They all took me up on it. Four of them, three men and one woman, climbed into the back. It was a tight squeeze, even after we stowed the boys’ car seats in the trunk. The fifth, a plump elderly woman, joined me in the front seat.