Mistletoe Murder

by Leslie Meier

  “You don’t fool me,” said Lucy. “All you want is an early breakfast.”

  The cat flicked her tail impatiently and meowed.

  “Be quiet,” Lucy hissed as she filled the coffeepot. “You’ll wake everybody up.”

  For a moment Lucy considered waking Bill to tell him the news about Sam Miller, but she decided instead to let him sleep. She had been awakened so many times at night by hungry. babies that she appreciated the luxury of uninterrupted sleep—and Bill had had his share of sleepless nights with the kids. Besides, he’d be waking up soon, anyway. She switched on the coffeepot and sat down on the rocking chair to watch it drip, smelling its wonderful aroma. She sat and rocked, letting the familiar old-house sounds and scents surround and soothe her.

  Lucy loved her kitchen. She loved the old Glenwood woodstove that burned two and a half cords of wood every winter. She cherished the Hoosier cabinet she’d bought at a flea market and spent an entire summer refinishing. Bill had made the cupboards himself out of maple, and they had scraped and polished the wooden floor together. She’d sewn the blue-and-white-checked gingham curtains herself. This kitchen was really the heart of the house, with its wooden rack for wet mittens, its collection of bowls for the cat, and the big round oak table where the family gathered for meals, Monopoly, and checkers.

  If she didn’t do something soon, Lucy realized, she would fall asleep sitting up. She poured herself a cup of coffee and began mixing up some Santa’s thumbprint cookies for the cookie exchange. She was just taking the first sheet out of the oven when Bill, looking rumpled and sleepy, appeared in the doorway.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Baking cookies to stay awake,.” Lucy answered.

  “Oh,” he said, and headed straight for the bathroom. He returned, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the table.

  “You don’t usually bake cookies so early in the morning.”

  “I know. I didn’t get home until five and I decided it wasn’t worth going to bed.” She paused dramatically. “Oh, Bill! It was awful. Sam Miller committed suicide in the parking lot. I was the one who found him.”

  “Oh, my God. Was it really bad?” asked Bill, reaching for her hand.

  “No, not really. All I saw was the hose going from the exhaust to the window. I couldn’t get the door open, and I couldn’t see much because of the snow. The police came, and they realized it was Sam Miller. He was dead when they got there. Of course, we all had to stay and answer questions even though none of us really saw anything at all. We were all in the phone room.”

  “Gee, I never would’ve thought that he’d kill himself. He had so much going for him. Maybe it was all too much—too much responsibility, too much stress,” said Bill, drawing on his mug of hot coffee.

  “I don’t think so,” Lucy said. “You and I have stress; someone like Sam Miller goes to Barbados. I don’t believe it was suicide.”

  “Oh, Lucy. Just leave it alone. It’s none of your business. Promise me.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Lucy, lifting the cookies one by one onto a rack to cool.

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. You can’t just leave things alone. Well, for your information, there are people called police who investigate these things.”

  Bill paused to take a swallow of coffee and noticed Lucy’s jaw had become set in a certain way he’d come to recognize. “Lucy, don’t be like this. I’m just saying I don’t think you need to get us involved.”

  He got up from his chair and stood behind her, slipping his arms around her waist and nuzzling her neck with his bearded chin.

  “It’s Christmastime. Let’s just enjoy the holidays, and the kids. We don’t have to get involved with Sam Miller’s”—he turned her around and looked straight in her eyes—“unfortunate death.” As he put his hand on her chin and tilted her face up to meet his kiss, a high-pitched voice broke the morning stillness.

  “Mommy and Daddy alarm. Stop that kissing!”

  Seven-year-old Elizabeth squirmed her way between them, demanding, “Elizabeth sandwich! Elizabeth sandwich!”

  Bill caught her under her arms and lifted her up between them while Lucy covered her sleep-warmed pink cheeks with kisses. Elizabeth squealed and giggled in delight. Elizabeth’s happy cries attracted her little sister, Sara, who wrapped herself around Lucy’s legs, and her older brother, Toby, who leaned against the doorjamb with all the sophistication a ten-year-old could muster and asked, “Are we really having cookies for breakfast?”

  It seemed to Lucy as if years had passed before she finally drove Sara to nursery school and returned to the empty house, hoping to catch a few hours of sleep. She had the foresight to turn on the answering machine, but it seemed as if she had barely dropped off when she was awakened by a loud banging and rattling at the back door.

  Wrapping her log cabin quilt around her, Lucy staggered down the back stairs and across the kitchen to the door. Through the lace curtain she could see a massive blue shape: Officer Culpepper: Opening the door, she realized there was someone else with Culpepper, a slim, serious man wearing a Harris tweed sport coat under an unbuttoned London Fog raincoat.

  “Sorry to wake you up, Lucy. A few questions have come up that we need you to answer. This is State Police Detective Horowitz. May we come in?”

  Lucy stepped back, allowing the men to enter, and followed them into the kitchen. Officer Culpepper sat right down at the kitchen table as if he belonged there. Indeed, he had often sat at Lucy’s table planning Cub Scout and PTA activities. Detective Horowitz was more self-contained. He took off his coat and folded it carefully, then laid it across the back of one of the chairs. He placed his briefcase on the table just so, opened it, and took out a manila folder. Then he closed it and placed it on the floor next to the chair with his coat. Finally he sat down, drawing his chair up to the table and sitting stiffly with his hands on the folder. Lucy herself had collapsed on the corner chair, leaning her elbows on the table and trying to hold up her head.

  “Gee, Lucy, you look beat. Let me make some coffee for you.”

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “About eleven. Do you have to pick up the kids or something?”

  “Not till twelve. I slept longer than I thought.”

  “Not surprising. You had quite a night.” Culpepper slipped three mugs of water into the microwave and pushed the start button.

  “The instant coffee’s in the cabinet over the sink. Excuse me for a minute.”

  Looking in the bathroom mirror, Lucy decided she’d rarely looked worse. Quickly she washed her face, brushed her teeth, and ran a comb through her hair. She smoothed a dab of moisturizer under her eyes, straightened her sweat suit, gave herself a quick spritz of Charlie, and returned to the kitchen.

  A cup of hot coffee was waiting for her, and she sipped it carefully. Detective Horowitz, she noticed, had opened his folder and was clearly ready to begin.

  “Now, Mrs. Stone, about last night. What made you decide to go outside? Wasn’t that unusual?”

  “Not really. The calls had slowed down, I was feeling sluggish, and I didn’t want to drink coffee so close to quitting time. I thought a breath of fresh air might perk me up,”

  “I see. You weren’t drawn outside by any unusual noise or occurrence?”

  “Oh, no. In fact, the phone room has no windows. When you’re in there you have no idea what’s going on outside. Sometimes we’ll be completely surprised if a storm has blown up during our shift.”

  “So it was just a normal night for you. There was nothing out of the ordinary until you discovered the car.”

  “That’s right. When I looked out I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then I realized it was the car motor running.”

  “Was that unusual?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You didn’t think it might be someone arriving for the next shift or picking up one of the girls?”

  “It
was too early for that. Besides, when you get out of work at one A.M. nobody picks you up. If you’ve got car trouble, you just get a ride with one of the other girls.”

  “I see,” said the detective, pursing his lips and making a tiny notation on his yellow legal pad. He had a slight lisp, Lucy noticed, and his upper lip was elongated, rather like a rabbit’s. Lucy looked at him closely, thinking what a very serious man he must be. He was such a contrast to Officer Culpepper, who had rolled up his sleeves and was cheerfully washing the breakfast dishes she had left soaking in the sink. Perhaps it was his job that made him serious. A man couldn’t investigate sudden death all the time without being affected by it.

  Looking around her homey kitchen, Lucy thought how living in Tinker’s Cove had insulated her, until now, from the random violence and cruelty that was twentieth-century life. Of course, in the fifteen years she and Bill had lived in Tinker’s Cove, things had changed, sometimes drastically. When they’d first moved into the old farmhouse, they had heated entirely with wood, and Lucy, like many others, did all her cooking on the old Glenwood. In those days she often took down the long-handled popcorn popper from its hook on the wall and shook homegrown kernels over the wood fire until they popped. It took a little time, but she never felt rushed in those days. Nowadays she was more likely to put a package of preflavored popcorn in the microwave and zap it. Somehow the long, leisurely afternoons with children and friends had vanished; now Lucy was measuring her life in seconds.

  “You didn’t see any footprints in the snow, or any sign of disturbance?” insisted the detective.

  Lucy shook her head. “No. The snow was clean and unbroken. There were only my footprints.”

  “According to your account last night, the car was locked. Is that right?”

  “Absolutely. Once I saw the hose I tried to open the car door. I couldn’t, so I just pulled the hose out of the window and went in to call for help. I don’t know what else I could have done.”

  “Oh, you did the right thing, Lucy,” Culpepper interrupted. “It was too late to save him.”

  “Did you know the deceased personally?” asked the detective.

  “Well, everybody in Tinker’s Cove knew Sam Miller. I wasn’t a close friend, I was never invited to his house or anything. But I certainly knew him to say hello to in the street. Most people did. If you work for Country Cousins, he personally hands you your profit-sharing check, and Country Cousins is the biggest employer around.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Culpepper. “Everybody knew him.”

  “And envied him,” Lucy added. “That’s what I can’t understand. Why did he kill himself?”

  The detective and Culpepper exchanged a meaningful glance; finally Culpepper broke the silence.

  “There’s no harm in telling you, I suppose. It’ll be in the paper tomorrow, anyway. Sam Miller didn’t kill himself. He had quite a bump on his head. He was unconscious when somebody stuffed him in the car and rigged up the hose. Sam Miller was murdered.”

  CHAPTER THREE

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  Lucy leaned back in Sue Finch’s antique rocking chair and took a sip of mulled cider. She inhaled the spicy scent of the potpourri Sue had left simmering in a little copper pot on the woodstove and let out a long breath. After the last few hectic days it was wonderful to relax among friends in Sue’s beautifully decorated house.

  Christmas was Sue’s favorite time of year, and she loved using all the decorations she collected at flea markets and antique shops throughout the year. She had no fewer than three Christmas trees: one in the living room, bedecked with baby’s breath and ribbons, which were carefully coordinated to go with the Victorian color scheme; one in the family room, decorated with ornaments her daughter, Sidra, had made; and one in the kitchen, trimmed with cookie cutters and gingerbread men. A collection of teddy bears was gathered in a hutch, lamp tables held a large and valuable collection of St. Nicks, and a twelve-inch feather tree with tiny German glass ornaments stood on the coffee table. Crocheted and starched snowflakes hung in the windowpanes, and a single candle burned in each window.

  Looking around at the rosy-cheeked faces and eyes sparkling in the candlelight, Lucy realized she’d known most of these women for her entire adult life. A few were natives of Tinker’s Cove, but most were transplants or “wash ashores” like herself and Bill, idealistic young college graduates who had avoided the rat race and looked for an alternative life-style “back on the land.” With their Mother Earth News to guide them, they’d chopped wood, planted gardens, and recycled everything.

  Through the years she’d attended Lamaze and La Leche League classes with these women. In those days they wore hand-wrought silver earrings in their pierced ears, and they drove ancient pickup trucks or huge Chevy Impalas filled with apple-cheeked and overalled children. Conversations had centered around how to get a baby to sleep through the night or how to keep the cabbage moths away from the kohlrabi.

  Now they drove Jeep Cherokees or Dodge Caravans, and the dangling earrings had been replaced with discreet gold buttons or cultured pearls. Their faces were still scrubbed clean morning and night, but Oil of Olay was carefully smoothed under the eyes and just a hint of makeup applied. The long, flowing hair of the seventies had been cut, tinted, and permed. Now they didn’t look very different from their mothers.

  Their lives, however, were different from their mothers’. They all had jobs, some full-time, but most part-time like Lucy. They helped in their husbands’ businesses or answered the phone at Country Cousins, and some weren’t above waiting on tables during the summer. “How else can you make a hundred dollars in a few hours?” they’d ask each other as they sunned themselves on the beach. They were the mainstay of the Scouts and the PTA; they were the class mothers. The cookie exchange was an established part of their Christmas season.

  Sue Finch had been the hostess for five or six years. It gave her an opportunity to show off her decorations, and it gave her friends a chance to socialize during the busy holiday season. Sue held the number of participants to an even dozen, and each woman brought six dozen of her best Christmas cookies. All the cookies were arranged on a long pine trestle table, and the high point of the evening was a leisurely procession around the table, each woman taking six of each cookie. All went home with the same number of cookies they had brought, but each had a dozen different varieties.

  And what varieties! It was a point of honor to bring cookies rich in butter, chocolate, and nuts, cookies that required a bit of fussing. Of course, the cookies were to be taken home and saved for Christmas, so Sue always provided a dessert, too. This year it was an elaborate buche de Noel, a sponge cake filled with chocolate-flavored whipped cream and decorated with meringue mushrooms and drizzles of chocolate and caramelized sugar.

  “I just don’t know how you do it, Sue,” commented Lucy. “Everything is so lovely.”

  “Oh, well, I’m not working like you are.” Sue shrugged. “Lucy, you look exhausted. Are you doing too much?”

  “I don’t think so. But I haven’t been getting much sleep. The police kept us so late the night Sam Miller died.”

  “That’s right,” said Pam Stillings, whose husband, Ted, was editor of the Pennysaver. “You actually found Sam, didn’t you, Lucy?”

  “I did and I wish I hadn’t. I may have discovered the body, but I didn’t even see him. Everyone asks me about it, but I really don’t know anything.”

  “Were you scared?” asked Pam.

  “No, not really. Just kind of sick and let down the way you feel when the adrenaline stops flowing. Of course, I thought it was suicide. I didn’t realize he’d been murdered.”

  “Why would anyone think a man like Sam Miller would kill himself?” demanded Rachel Goodman. “He had everything, incl
uding Marcia.”

  “If you ask me,” Franny Small informed the group, “I think Marcia is the prime suspect.”

  “The wife usually is,” agreed Lucy. “But I can’t imagine her being mechanical enough to rig up a hose. She might have gotten her hands dirty.”

  “She really is a stuck-up little bitch. She thinks an awful lot of herself,” commented Rachel, running the side of her fork around her dessert plate and licking it clean with her little pink tongue. “When I invited her to join the Friends of the Tinker’s Cove Library, she just turned me down flat. Made me feel as if I were social climbing or something. I was just trying to be friendly,” Rachel defended herself.

  “They may live here in town, but the Millers have never really been part of the town,” Sue said. “I mean, there’s a certain distance. You wouldn’t just drop by for a cup of coffee and a chat.”

  Lucy chuckled. “Imagine dropping in on Marcia Miller!”

  “Oh, Sid got to know her pretty well,” announced Sue. “He’s spent quite a lot of time in her bedroom.”

  “Oh, really?” inquired Lucy. “How did that happen? Why aren’t you upset?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Sue admitted. “He installed a closet system for her.”

  “Tell us more, Sue,” said Lucy. “What did he say when he got home?”

  “He said she had a lot of clothes, and”—Sue stretched the words out, clearly saving the best for last—“they have separate bedrooms.”

  “Really?” Lucy was incredulous. “Lydia, you’re always the first to know about these things. Weren’t the Millers happy?”

  Lydia smiled. “It’s not my fault. Kindergartners tell their teacher everything. They just can’t keep secrets. But little Sam seems happy enough. He’s a quiet little fellow. Not abnormal. I thought, well, maybe he’s just a well-brought-up boy with good manners.”

  “That’s not much help,” complained Lucy. “What about your mom, Franny? She always knows everything that’s going on.”