The mental picture of a sleeping drunk in a Santa Claus suit stuck in a barbecue grill was funny in a grotesque sort of way, but I still was worried about his safety. What if he didn't “come to” in time? What if he was stuck there all night? The situation was potentially dangerous.
“I'm sorry, Mrs. Poffenberger, but I'll have to call the police to get him out of there.”
Her face sagged. “Can you give me an hour's head start? Please, miss. You don't know what he'll do to me if he catches us.”
The abused woman and her children deserved a chance for a better life. I wanted to help, but all I could do was give them the gift of an hour's head start. I was sure Mr. Poffenberger could survive for one hour, even in the snow. “You've got it,” I said. “I hope everything works out for you.”
She shifted the baby onto her left shoulder and extended her hand. “Thanks, miss. You always done spoke nice to me. Like a schoolteacher. And you found Kevin. I couldn't go without saying good-bye.”
I took her hand, feeling extremely touched. Yes, I'd found Kevin, but my involvement with Mrs. Poffenberger had been minimal. Apparently, even that was more kindness than she'd experienced in a long time.
“Call me if you need anything,” I offered.
She nodded. Her eyes were misty, and I realized mine were, too.
“God bless you,” she said and was gone in a flurry of wind and snow.
“Merry Christmas,” I whispered into the empty darkness. The only answer was an ominous creaking from the porch roof above me, and I pushed the door shut.
It was nearly time to leave for Greta's. I retrieved the pumpkin pies from the refrigerator, looked around the kitchen for something to carry them in, and spotted my bingo pie basket prize. Perfect! I could put the pies in it and give the basket to Greta as a Christmas gift.
I lifted Fred out of the basket, blew out the cat hair, and put the pies in. It was cleverly designed with a footed stand inside, so the pies could be stacked without being squished. With the addition of a red bow I took from the Christmas tree, the basket looked quite festive. I hoped Greta would like it.
Before I left, I gave the cats their early Christmas presents: two catnip mice. Fred was ecstatic. Noel pretended indifference, but after I said good-bye, I peeked through the kitchen window and saw her rolling happily on her back with her mouse clutched between two white paws.
The roads were a lot worse than “slippy,” they were downright dangerous. I passed several cars abandoned in snowdrifts, but Garnet's truck had both four-wheel drive and snow tires, and I drove safely, if slowly, to the outskirts of town where Greta's Fine Swine Farm was located.
The long driveway was already full of pickups and SUVs, so I had to park at the end near the road and hike through the ankle-deep snow. Halfway to the house, I was glad to spot a familiar car, Ginnie's Subaru. It was typical of Greta to invite someone whom she suspected would be lonely at Christmas. Greta was as genuinely concerned about people as she was about whales, dolphins, baby seals, rain forests, spotted owls, bald eagles, and brown trout.
At long last, I reached the large farmhouse. I paused for a moment in the snow to admire the Currier and Ives scene before me. The two-story farmhouse was like hundreds of others in Caven County: redbrick with tall, narrow windows trimmed with white wood, and second-floor balconies flanking the center section of the home. Each window held an electric candle topped with a small white flame, and the side-by-side front doors were decorated with large wreaths of real greens and pinecones.
When Greta and her late husband, Lucky Carbaugh, had purchased the farm from an Amish family, it hadn't even had electricity or running water. They'd spent years remodeling it into the comfortable home it was now.
I entered without knocking, as was the custom at Greta's house, and began to shed my coat and sloppy boots. The double living room was packed with people, and I didn't have the faintest idea who most of them were.
Nearly six feet tall, Greta towered over her short, stocky Gochenauer relatives. From her vantage point, she saw me and swept across the room to greet me. As she moved I heard bells, which meant she was wearing her favorite silver ankle bracelets from India. Tonight she wore a brilliant yellow caftan decorated with a blue, red, and green Indonesian batik print. Brass earrings from Pakistan dangled nearly to her shoulders. Several strands of multicolored agate beggar's beads from Taiwan hung around her neck. Her gray hair was twisted into a coil on top of her head with several lacquer chopsticks protruding from it. Good thing she's tall, I thought, or those things could put out someone's eye.
Comparing her to the rest of Garnet's solid, conservative Pennsylvania-Dutch family, I often wondered if she'd been adopted. She was probably the only person in Lickin Creek who could get away with dressing like that.
She seized me with an embrace that painfully mashed my face into her beggar's beads. “I'm so glad you're here at last,” she said, welcoming me and chastising me for being late in the same sentence. “Come on in. Everybody's dying to meet you.”
She suddenly spotted the pie basket and gasped. “For me? You are absolutely amazing, Tori. How did you know I collect Longaberger baskets?”
I smiled knowingly. Good for me—apparently I'd made the right gift choice, whatever a Longaberger basket was.
Greta propelled me through the room, introducing me right and left, and interrupting conversations that dealt with farm crops from alfalfa to zucchini. If I heard it once, I heard it a zillion times: “What do you hear from Garnet?”
Nothing, I wanted to scream. He doesn't write, he doesn't call. I have been dumped. You want to make something of it? But I smiled, murmured my nice-to-meet-yous, and somehow made it around the room without crying.
The walnut grandfather's clock in the corner chimed the hour. “May I borrow a phone?” I asked. “I have to make a call.”
Greta led me into the kitchen, where food covered every available inch of space. There was nothing like a Lickin Creek potluck supper to bring out the cooks’ best recipes. The good smells made my stomach growl as I dialed Hoop's Garage.
A breathless female voice answered, “Yeah?”
“Is this Hoop's?” I asked.
“Yeah. Look, Tori, I'm just getting ready to close down, so if you'uns need a tow, you'll have to wait.”
I silently cursed the New York accent that made my voice so instantly identifiable in Lickin Creek. “I need to talk to Luscious, please.”
“Is it an emergency?”
“Of course.”
“He's gone home. Wait a sec. I'll get his number.”
I heard her rummaging through a desk drawer. In a few moments she was back. I thanked her and dialed the number she'd given me.
Luscious's mother answered and said they were just getting ready to leave for church.
“I really have to speak to him, Mrs. Miller.”
She sighed, and soon Luscious was on the line.
I told him about Mr. Poffenberger trying to play Santa Claus in the barbecue grill.
“He's stuck … where?”
“You heard me. You'll have to get him out of there soon, Luscious, or he's liable to die from exposure.”
“Aw, Tori. My mom'll kill me if I miss church.”
I felt like a slimeball, but I said what I knew would get him moving. “Garnet would do it.”
“I'm leaving now.”
“Thanks, Luscious … and Merry Christmas.”
“You, too.”
I returned to the living room, where tables borrowed from the local fire hall were being brought in from the back porch. This required participation by everybody there. The men to carry them in, the women to wipe them off, and the children to cover them with tablecloths. When they were finished, we all admired the patchwork-quilt effect—every woman there, but me, had brought her favorite tablecloth from home and none of them matched.
Greta organized us into a line, and we filed into the kitchen through one door. There, we filled our Styro-foam plates from the mo
untains of food that covered the counters, then exited through the other door, where Great-aunt Gladys handed each of us silverware rolled up in a red paper napkin.
I was glad when Ginnie brought her plate over and took the chair next to me. “Thought it would be nice for both of us to sit with someone we know,” she whispered.
“Bless you,” I said. “I've met so many people I am totally confused. Am I wrong, or is everyone here named Zeke?”
“Only the ones who aren't named Gladys,” Ginnie said with a sly smile.
I unwrapped my plastic silverware and tasted the oyster stuffing. It was wonderful. Ginnie nudged me with her elbow, and I noticed that nobody else was eating.
“Grace,” Ginnie warned. “They're going to say grace.”
“Oops!” I put the fork down and hoped nobody had noticed my faux pas. I was too used to eating alone in front of a TV.
Great-uncle Zeke came by filling our jelly glasses with nonalcoholic sparkling grape juice. “Sorry about this,” he whispered to each person confidentially. “It's because of Greta and A.A.”
“No need to apologize,” I told him when he stopped at my place. I was glad that Greta was taking her involvement in A.A. seriously.
At last everyone was seated, and another Uncle Zeke said grace.
The food was turning cold, and I was aching to eat, but it was not yet time. Buchanan McCleary stood up and tapped on his water glass with a spoon to attract everyone's attention.
Several dozen Gochenauer and Carbaugh heads turned to stare at him.
Buchanan raised his jelly glass. “I propose a toast,” he said. “A toast to our hostess, my lovely bride-to-be, Greta Carbaugh.”
Greta blushed and looked up at him adoringly with dewy teenage eyes. The family members gasped, coughed, and even managed a few choked words of congratulations.
“It's going to be a June wedding,” Greta said, cheerfully ignoring the minor furor Buchanan's announcement had caused. “And you're all invited.” She reached for her glass, which wasn't there. “Uncle Zeke, you're drinking my juice,” she said with a smile.
“Oh! Sorry,” the old man on her left said. “I never remember, is mine the one on the right or the one on the left?”
“It doesn't matter,” Greta said, planting a kiss on his wrinkled cheek. “At my wedding dinner, I'll see that you have two glasses of your very own.”
“Nothing like young love,” Ginnie said with an exaggerated sigh.
“They're young at heart.” With that gentle chastisement, I took another bite of my stuffing and found it no longer tasted as good as I first thought. While I didn't resent Greta's happiness, I was ashamed that my first thought had been, It should have been Garnet and I.
Ginnie innocently rubbed salt into my wounds by saying, “Maybe you and Garnet can make it a double wedding.”
I tried the turkey and found it tasteless. How could she be expected to know? The problem with always keeping your feelings to yourself is that nobody is there to help out when you really need it.
I fooled around with the food on my plate and listened to several of the uncles discuss the pros and cons of round hay bales as opposed to the old-fashioned square ones. “They can be dangerous,” one said, referring to the round ones. “Just last year, Farmer Stone got crushed by one. Ruined his tractor, too.”
“How much do they weigh?” I asked, thinking of the little square bales associated with hayrides.
“Fifteen hundred pounds, at least,” he told me.
“Sure, you gotta handle them with a little care, but they save money,” another uncle argued. “I can do it all myself—used to be I needed a crew to make square bales.”
“Ain't no big deal,” chimed in another. “Just keep the bales close to the ground, and you don't tip over.”
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned to see one of the aunts smiling at me. “I'll bet those men are boring you to death,” she said.
“Well …” I began.
“You just turn around and join us gals, Tori. We're talking about the Quilt Guild.”
The scintillating dinner conversation ended when the pies were brought in. The choices were endless: mincemeat, cheesecake, cherry, apple, and pumpkin. Greta put several small pieces of several different flavors on a plate and passed it down to me. I ate it all. Funny how I can lose my appetite for nutritional foods, but hand me dessert and there's no stopping me.
After several servings of pie, a few of the men began to groan and undo their belts. That seemed to be the signal for some of the children to clear the tables. Within fifteen or twenty minutes, the room was back to its predinner look, with the tables stacked up once more on the back porch.
“Everybody gather round the piano,” Greta ordered. “We're going to sing Christmas carols.” She passed among us, handing out mimeographed song sheets that looked like they'd been used for at least forty years.
An aunt whose hair bun was covered by a starched white net bonnet sat down at the piano and began to play “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” A few of the women began to sing, and soon the men joined in.
Something had been nagging at me since the start of dinner. I tried to focus on the song sheet before me, but somehow I couldn't concentrate. What was bothering me? I closed my eyes and tried to shut out everything that was causing sensory overload. And I remembered.
CHAPTER 23
That night revealed and told
“TORI, ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?”
I opened my eyes and saw Ginnie staring at me with a concerned frown on her face.
“You looked so odd,” she said. “I thought you might be feeling sick—from all that pie.”
I hadn't eaten that much. “I don't know, Ginnie … something just came to me … let's go somewhere quiet … where I can think.”
We went into the small parlor that served Greta as a TV room. Hundreds of Santa Clauses—plastic, ceramic, papier-mache, and even celluloid—dominated the room, occupying every flat surface. There they would stay, I knew, until spring when they'd be replaced by Greta's collection of Easter bunnies.
“Can I get you a glass of water?” Ginnie asked, still concerned that I might be getting ready to throw up.
“No, thanks. I'm not sick. Really.” I sat on the plaid sofa and patted the cushion beside me. “Sit down. Maybe if I can talk this out, it'll make some sense to me.”
Ginnie moved aside a needlepointed Santa Claus pillow and joined me on the couch. “What is it? You look terribly serious.”
“I think it is something serious. Remember at dinner, when Uncle Zeke drank from Greta's glass by mistake?”
She nodded. “Sure. So?”
“So, it's been nagging at my subconscious ever since. Then, while we were singing, it came to me.”
“What came to you? For Pete's sake, Tori. You're not making any sense.”
“Give me a minute, Ginnie.” My voice sounded curt, even to me. “I'm sorry. What I'm trying to say is it made me think about Bernice drinking poison from the Goblet of Life.”
“And …”
“And I suddenly thought maybe her death was really a mistake.”
“You mean you think the poison got into the cup by accident?”
I shook my head. “No. I mean I think someone put the poison in the cup intentionally, but then the wrong person drank it.”
“That hardly seems possible, Tori.”
“That's what I thought, too, but when Uncle Zeke and Greta talked about him drinking Greta's juice, it made me recall the first rehearsal I attended. And I remembered it wasn't Bernice who drank from the Goblet of Life—it was Oretta.”
Ginnie's eyes widened. “You're right. I remember that now.”
“At the break, Bernice went up to Oretta and started to argue with her. I didn't stick around to listen, but I'll bet Bernice was reminding Oretta that according to the script she was the one who was supposed to drink from the goblet.”
“But the killer didn't know that,” Ginnie said.
�
��Right. Oretta got carried away by the moment at rehearsal and drank the stuff by mistake. The killer must have decided right then that he could kill Oretta by putting poison in the cup.”
“Only at the dress rehearsal, Bernice drank from the cup as she was supposed to and got the poison meant for Oretta.”
“Right.” My mind was in high gear now. “When the killer realized he'd murdered the wrong woman, he had to revise his plan—he paid a late-night visit to Oretta, shot her, and started the fire to hide the crime.”
Ginnie picked up a Santa Claus snow globe from the coffee table, shook it, and watched the miniature snow fall for a minute. “You could be on to something,” she said. “But there's something wrong with your scenario. Two things, actually.”
“What?”
She put the snow globe down. “The killer must have known that an autopsy would reveal that Oretta had been shot.”
“Of course. There had to be another reason he set the fire.” I realized Ginnie had said there were two things wrong with my interpretation. “Help me, Ginnie. What else have I come up with that's offtrack?”
“It's just that you keep referring to the killer as he. It could be a woman!”
“Excuse me,” I said with a hint of sarcasm in my voice, “if I wasn't politically correct. I referred to the killer by the masculine gender out of convenience. Actually, I have given some thought to him—or her—being a woman.”
“Really? Who?”
“Weezie Clopper for one. But don't you breathe a word to anyone, or I'll deny I ever said it.”
“Weezie? Why?”
“She had a grudge against Bernice and even sent her one of her poison-pen letters. But if I'm right about the intended victim being Oretta, then that rules Weezie out.”
“Weezie and her husband had a feud going with Matavious and Oretta about the Clopper land,” Ginnie pointed out. “I've always heard that to find a murderer you should look at the money angle.”
“True. But Oretta really wasn't involved. The land was inherited by Matavious, and he held the title in his name. Killing Oretta wouldn't stop the sale.” I stood up. “I'm going to go home, fix myself a cup of tea, and think about this some more. I'm sure something will come to me.”
Death, Snow, and Mistletoe Page 24