by Vicki Delany
Chapter 15
We’d been so busy I hadn’t had time for a lunch break, but by the time the shop closed, Cranberry Coffee Bar and Victoria’s Bake Shoppe were also closed. I considered going home for a quick bite, but decided to stay and work on some accounts and order a pizza when I got home.
I let out a long groan and mentally slapped my forehead. I’d forgotten to check on the water situation at my apartment. Mrs. D’Angelo said she’d call her nephew when she got off the phone. The problem was, Mrs. D’Angelo never got off the phone.
Mattie cocked one ear at me, and I rubbed the top of his head. I’m normally a highly organized person. I have to be with the job I had at Jennifer’s Lifestyle and then owning my own shop. But too much was happening: Mom’s visitors and all their drama, the death of Karla, the shoplifting, Wayne Fitzroy and the plot to unseat Dad, the upcoming Santa Claus parade, and the arrival of the holiday season.
Plus business accounts waiting for my attention. I sat down at my desk and got to it.
At five after seven, I closed the computer. Mattie leapt to attention as I got my coat and his leash from the hook at the back of the door.
We walked the short distance to Vicky’s house. Sandbanks met us at the door. Mattie wanted to play, but no amount of refusal could convince him that the old dog didn’t want to engage in an excited romp around the house.
I crouched down and gave Sandbanks a hearty rub. “How’s the old guy doing?” I asked Vicky.
“Getting older,” she said. “But he’s still hanging in there.”
Sandbanks rubbed his head into my chest. Mattie tried to push him away, as if saying, My human!
When Vicky’s aunt, who bred Saint Bernards, had one of her top dogs fall under the spell of a non-purebred with a wandering eye, and the resulting puppies-without-papers needed homes, Vicky had leapt into the task of placing them. But she couldn’t take one herself: having an enthusiastic puppy around the place wouldn’t be a good match for Sandbanks.
About the last thing I wanted or needed at the time was a puppy to care for and to train. But it turned out Vicky knew me better than I knew myself, and now I couldn’t imagine life without Matterhorn.
“Guard the house, Sandbanks,” Vicky said as she pulled on her coat. He curled into a ball and happily settled down on the floor for a nap to await our return.
Vicky shut and locked the door, and we stepped off the porch. “Now are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
“Mom and Dad’s house.”
“Why didn’t you just say so? You were being so secretive, I was expecting we were going to rob a bank or break into Diane Simmonds’s office or something similarly nefarious.”
“It’s sort of along those lines,” I said. “I’ll tell you the plan when we get there.”
We hurried through the busy streets of Rudolph. People walked dogs or drove home after work. Lights shone from most of the houses as parents helped their kids with homework and families ate dinner. At my parents’ house, the lights over the front porch and the garage were on.
I marched down the driveway, my steps firm. Mattie ran eagerly ahead of me. He knew where we were, and he was hoping something delicious waited in the kitchen.
I unlocked the kitchen door with my key and let us in. “Hello!” I called in a good loud voice. “It’s Merry, anyone here?”
I held my finger to my lips, asking Vicky to be quiet. A blanket of silence lay over everything, but more than that the house felt unoccupied. These grand old Victorians seem to almost change their aura when they’re empty.
“Sounds like no one’s home,” Vicky said.
“As arranged by yours truly,” I said. “They’ve all gone out for dinner.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Meaning there’s a shoplifter loose on Jingle Bell Lane. Something was taken from the accessories store on Saturday.”
“The day after you and I had items stolen.”
“Which we noticed after Mom’s friends paid us a visit. I suspect one of them is our thief, so I’m here to search their rooms.”
“I think they call that breaking and entering,” Vicky said. “Or something along those lines.”
I held up the key I’d used to enter the house. “It can’t be breaking and entering, as I haven’t broken anything, and I have my own key, which was given to me by the homeowners in case I need to come in when they’re not here.” More like the key had never been taken back when I moved out, but that was irrelevant right now.
“Okay,” Vicky said, “but I bet that doesn’t give you permission to rifle through guests’ things.”
“Probably not. You can guard the back door if you don’t want to go upstairs.”
“And miss the action? Are you kidding? Do you know who has which room?”
“No, but we should be able to tell which is which by their clothes and things.”
“You’re thinking the shoplifting has something to do with Karla’s death?”
“It might. If Karla knew about it . . . If she threatened to expose the thief . . . Mattie, stay.” I pointed to the spot in front of the stove, and he lay down.
To ensure he didn’t follow, I closed the kitchen door behind us. It would be hard to make the guest rooms look as though someone hadn’t been in them if Mattie got into the women’s things.
I went first. I found myself creeping up the staircase as Vicky tiptoed behind, and then gave my head a shake. This was the house I’d been raised in, in which I’d lived for the first eighteen years of my life, where I was welcome anytime I wanted to come. I’d slid down that wide oak banister more than a few times. On one memorable occasion I’d come off the end too fast and had to be taken to the hospital to have my head stitched up.
It’s a large house, built in the days when the affluent of Rudolph had big families and plenty of servants to care for them. The servants’ quarters on the third floor are closed up now and used for storage, but the six bedrooms on the second level are all still in use. Even with four children in the family, we’d each had our own room as well as a guest room for visitors.
Upstairs, all the doors were closed, and the big old house remained silent. My room, the one I’d had when I was a child, was first on the right. I knocked hard and called out once again, “It’s Merry here. Anyone home?”
No one answered, so I slowly pushed the door open. “You start at the far end of the hall,” I said to Vicky. “I’ll take this one. The room in the middle on the left is Mom and Dad’s. Don’t go in there. Mom uses the closet in the one to the right of theirs for her off-season clothes, so you don’t need to search them.”
“What if the thief decided to hide the things in Aline’s pockets or something?”
“I’m hoping she—whoever she is—won’t think anyone would search her room, so she didn’t bother to hide them. We don’t have time to check all Mom’s clothes or pry up the floorboards.”
“My uncle Doug lifted my floorboards when I had the new floor laid. He found a trapdoor. I was hoping for a skeleton, but the only bodies we found were from mice and spiders.”
“We don’t need to be finding any more bodies around here.” I went into the room, and Vicky slipped down the hallway.
I’m the oldest child, and I was the first to leave home, so most of my things were moved out of here to make another guest room. An open suitcase containing men’s items lay on the bed. Eric Vaughan must have arrived. This room had originally been given to Karla, and no one had yet packed up her things. I went through the closet and the drawers quickly. Simmonds and her officers had searched here, but they wouldn’t have been looking for the items I was after.
No men’s clothes hung in the closet. Either Eric didn’t mind living out of a suitcase, or he hadn’t had time to unpack. Or, more likely, Mom had strongly hinted he wasn’t entirely welcome here, and he’d gotten the hint. My m
other was very good at saying one thing while expressing something completely different. Karla’s clothes were plain, shades of brown and gray mostly. I slipped my hand into her single pair of shoes and felt nothing. Nothing of interest was in her pockets, either. Her purse, big enough to contain the stolen items, lay on the top of the dresser. I rifled through it, finding the usual debris, but nothing of interest.
A pair of earrings sat on the dresser, next to a phone charger, a pen, and a couple of sheets of paper. I flipped through the papers. Printouts of her flight details and a letter from Mom providing her visitors with her address and phone number. A photograph lay next to it, facedown. I flipped it over, expecting to see Karla and her family. Instead, Constance was posing at what was probably her house in California—swimming pool, palm trees—with a young man. The man was in his early thirties, a touch shorter than Constance but very handsome. They had their arms around each other and were smiling at the camera. Constance’s hair was different—longer and blonder, and she had fewer lines on her face. I guessed the photo was about five years old.
Wasn’t that just like Constance? I thought. Send all her friends pictures of herself, expecting them to display it as if they were close relatives or something. I went to the next room. My brother’s hockey team and heavy-metal band posters still hung on the wall. Mom had replaced the hockey-themed comforter with something with pink flowers. It clashed horribly with the dark red walls, chosen by Chris in his rebellious years, but I guess it was hard to find a pretty comforter that matched. The bed was unmade, a towel had been tossed onto the floor, and several dirty glasses and a half-empty coffee mug sat on the side table next to a small stack of threadbare paperbacks, almost certainly from a used bookstore. I read the spines of the books. All mysteries from the so-called Golden Age. This had to be Ruth’s room. Two pairs of jeans hung in the closet, and a couple of T-shirts and sweaters were in the dresser. I saw no shoes, meaning she’d brought only the one pair.
I found nothing interesting among her possessions.
I met Vicky in the hallway. “Wow, that Constance doesn’t pack light,” she said. “Why she thought she’d need a sequined cocktail gown and matching shoes in Rudolph in November, I have no idea.”
“Is that the only room you searched?”
“As I said, she has a lot of things. Her makeup bag alone must count as extra baggage on the plane.”
“Two left. You take that one, and I’ll take the other. We won’t bother with the bathrooms, as they’re shared.”
The next room I went in had been Eve’s. The year before she went to Hollywood to pursue an acting career, she’d done the decorating herself, proclaiming that she was no longer a child so she needed an adult room. Down came the movie posters and pictures of famous actresses and out went the stuffed bears and My Little Ponies. She replaced it all with so much pink you might have been standing inside a giant Pepto-Bismol bottle.
The room was neat, the bed made, the pink quilt smoothed, the pink cushions propped up against the headboard, the pink curtains pulled closed. I recognized the high-heeled shoes as ones Genevieve had been wearing the night of the potluck dinner.
I opened the closet and sucked in a breath. Bingo. A blue and turquoise ribbon scarf was draped over a blue sweater. I quickly went through the drawers. Tucked in among Genevieve’s underthings and T-shirts, I found my necklace and the jar of red-pepper jelly from Vicky’s bakery. I also found a small wooden decoration of a reindeer on skis that I hadn’t missed, and a couple of plastic tree ornaments with the price tag ($2.99) from Rudolph’s Gift Nook still on them. Genevieve might have bought the ornaments from the Nook, but I didn’t think so. Two small paper bags from Mrs. Claus’s, one containing the tree ornament purchased on Friday, and the other with the cocktail napkins she’d paid for this afternoon, had been tossed onto the armchair under the window. The other things were in the drawer because they hadn’t come home in bags. They were all small enough to slip into a coat pocket or a purse.
Margie probably hadn’t even realized she’d been robbed.
The door opened, and I yelped.
“Only me,” Vicky said. “Nothing in there, but a lot of reading that would put anyone to sleep. Legal stuff, so I guess it’s Barbara’s room. That, plus her hiking shoes. What about you?”
I held up the necklace. “Your jelly’s here, too, as are a few other things that I doubt came with shop receipts.”
“Whose room’s this?”
“Genevieve.”
“Which one’s that again?”
“The actress.”
“What are you going to do?” Vicky asked.
“I don’t know. To be honest, I didn’t expect to find anything. The shoplifting was a box I wanted to tick off because it was bothering me. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the death of Karla.”
“Stealing is a crime in itself,” Vicky said.
“So is searching someone’s possessions without a warrant. And, as we are not police officers, we obviously do not have a warrant and will never get one.”
“Are you going to tell Simmonds?”
I dropped onto the bed. “I don’t know.”
“What’s with all the pink?” It’s making me feel queasy. Your mom has better taste than this.”
“Eve was going through a stage. Something about helping an actor focus on their emotions when not interrupted by breaks in color.”
“Or breaks in taste,” Vicky said.
I pushed myself to my feet and smoothed the cover. I wasn’t sure if I should put the things back, so Genevieve wouldn’t know someone had been in here, or take them with me, so she’d know someone was onto her. “I’ll talk to Dad. See what he says I should do.”
“Do you think Karla might have been blackmailing Genevieve over this?”
“It’s entirely possible.” For now, I decided, I’d leave everything as I found it. If the petty thieving had some relation to the death of Karla, the stolen goods were evidence. “Maybe Karla threatened to expose Genevieve.”
Vicky nodded, making her lock of orange hair bounce, a sharp contrast to the seriousness of her expression. “And Genevieve decided she had to eliminate the threat.”
Chapter 16
I held out my begging bowl.
“Still no water?” Wendy said.
“Not a drop.”
“Come on in,” she said.
When I’d arrived home from my search of Mom’s guests’ rooms—after taking care to ensure no evidence of our presence remained and locking the door behind us—I’d turned on the kitchen tap to fill Mattie’s bowl. Nothing came out.
Lights were still on in Steve and Wendy’s apartment, so I gathered up a stockpot and a towel and toothbrush and went begging.
“If you need a shower in the morning,” Wendy said, “you’re welcome to use ours.”
“Thanks. I’ll have to venture back down and ask if Mrs. D’Angelo remembered to call the plumber. Which she probably didn’t. This time I’ll get his number myself.” I’d also stand well out of snatching range on the porch and not allow myself to be dragged inside.
I filled my stockpot, brushed my teeth and washed my face, stayed for a few minutes so Tina could show me her new dance moves, and staggered the four steps down the hallway under the weight of the water.
I then gathered my courage around me and ventured downstairs to face my landlady. I knew from past experience there was no point in phoning Mrs. D’Angelo. If I got her on the line, she’d not let me get a word in edgewise, and if I reached voice mail, she’d never reply.
To my considerable surprise, and relief, I was back in my apartment in a matter of minutes with a piece of paper containing the plumber’s phone number clenched in my fist. Apparently my parents and their guests had been spotted at the Yuletide Inn, and because I was not with them, I obviously had nothing to contribute to the gossip mill.
I rummaged in the fridge for ingredients to make a sandwich and then called Alan. “Are you busy?” I asked.
“Never too busy to talk to you, Merry. I’m in the workshop, about to paint the newest batch of train sets, but I can take a break.”
“I need some advice.”
“If I can help, I will.”
“What would you do,” I said, “if you knew someone had committed a crime, but the reason you know verged on the slightly illegal? I’m asking for a friend.”
He chuckled. “I won’t ask what you and Vicky have been up to this time. I guess it depends on how serious the crime is and how slightly illegal your activities have been.”
“Not serious and only slightly.”
“Does this have anything to do with the death of that woman at your parents’ house on Sunday?”
“I’m not sure.”
“If you’re not sure, Merry, but you think it might, then my advice is to tell Detective Simmonds anything you know.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. Not that I’m talking about me, you understand.”
“Right. Has your dad said anything about next Saturday?”
“What’s happening next Saturday?”
“The Santa Claus parade. Don’t tell me you forgot.”
I sighed. “So much is happening, I can’t work up any enthusiasm for it. I’m thinking of skipping the parade this year.”
“That’ll have you run out of town. How about I come around on Sunday and we put something together? It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it does have to be something. You have arranged for a flatbed and someone to pull it, haven’t you?”
“Must have slipped my mind.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“You don’t have to do that, Alan. You have your own role to play.”
“Which brings us back to my original question. Did Noel find anything out about the attempt to unseat him as Santa?”