Christmas Carol Murder (A Lucy Stone Mystery)

by Meier, Leslie

  “Can we help some other way?” Florence asked. “I could help with the scenery, for example. I hate to ask people for money.”

  Rachel sighed. “I know things are tight for everyone right now, and I don’t want anyone to leave the show because they can’t sell a few ads. Let’s just leave it that I expect everyone to do their best to come up with the suggested amount.” Receiving nods from the cast members, she moved on. “Okay, let’s do a read-through and take it from the top.”

  Friday morning Lucy was crowing about getting the part of Mrs. Cratchit, despite her reservations. She had loved rehearsing, especially enjoying the lively company of the other amateur actors. The evening had been full of laughter and a growing sense of shared purpose.

  “Way to go, Mom,” Zoe said, giving her a high five as she ran out the door to catch her ride.

  “Break a leg,” Sara muttered, offering the traditional advice as she poured herself a cup of coffee and carried it back up to her room where she was working on a paper.

  “I guess I won’t be seeing much of you,” Bill said, poking his egg with a fork and making the yolk run out. “What with rehearsals and all.”

  “I’ve put the schedule on the fridge,” Lucy said, spreading some marmalade on an English muffin. “Rehearsals are seven to nine most evenings.” She took a bite and chewed. “It’s not like we even talk to each other much after dinner, anyway. You usually do fantasy football on the computer and I watch TV. It will be good to shake things up a bit.”

  “I suppose,” he said mournfully.

  Lucy chuckled. “I think you’re the actor in the family.”

  Bill had the good grace to blush. “I will miss you,” he said.

  “Come to the rehearsals, then. You could help backstage.”

  He was quick to come up with a reason to stay home. “Someone should keep an eye on the girls,” he said, wiping his plate with his toast.

  As Lucy tidied the kitchen she set her mind to considering who might be willing to buy an ad. Most of her friends were watching their pennies with Christmas taking up any spare change. Her old friend Miss Tilley was a possibility, until Lucy remembered that Rachel had probably already asked her. Who, she wondered, as she wiped the counters, was likely to support local theater?

  She was rinsing out the sponge when she remembered a series of articles she wrote in September profiling local people with surprising hobbies. The fire chief, Buzz Bresnahan, was a theater buff who traveled to New York City a couple of times a year to see Broadway shows. And his daughter, Alison, was studying theater at Ohio University. Deciding he would be her first target, she dried her hands and reached for her jacket, intending to make her first stop of the day at the fire station.

  But when she arrived at the station the ambulance was pulling out of its bay, lights flashing and siren wailing.

  She ran inside and caught the dispatcher’s eye. “What’s up?”

  “Medical assistance at Downeast Mortgage,” Krissy Kirwan replied, one of Dot’s numerous offspring who worked in public safety. “Sounds like a heart attack.”

  Maybe it was news, maybe it wasn’t, Lucy mused. There was only one way to find out, so she got in her car and followed the ambulance down Main Street to the Downeast Mortgage office. The office was in a neat little brick building that had once housed a bank. Stone steps with black wrought iron railings led to a plate glass door, with a window on either side. The ambulance took up most of the small parking lot, so Lucy parked on the street. She hurried to the door, hoping she could slip inside without being noticed, because she knew from previous experience that the rescue team didn’t appreciate an audience.

  She was just reaching the stone steps when the door flew open and Ben Scribner flew out. From his wailing you would have thought the hounds of hell were pursuing him instead of his faithful secretary Elsie Morehouse.

  “You’ll freeze out here, Mr. Scribner,” she begged him. “Come back inside.”

  Scribner was standing in the inch or so of snow that was on the ground, shivering in the light sweater he wore over his oxford cloth shirt and khaki pants. His thinning white hair was standing straight up on his head, his eyes were wide with fear, and a line of saliva was dribbling down his chin. “No! No! Get away!”

  A couple of EMTs had appeared in the doorway behind Elsie, and a police cruiser was just arriving. “It’s just me, Mr. Scribner. Elsie.”

  Scribner shook his head; he was trembling violently. “Jake Marlowe was here,” he said. “I saw him. In the flesh.”

  Barney Culpepper was getting out of his cruiser and assessing the situation, unobserved by Scribner.

  “Now, now.” Elsie’s voice was soothing. “You know perfectly well that Mr. Marlowe is dead. He died in the fire.”

  “He did!” Scribner’s head was jerking up and down like a bobble-head doll’s.

  “I know he did. He’s dead as a doornail. But he was here! He’s come back from the dead.”

  “That’s impossible, Mr. Scribner. You must have imagined it.”

  “He told me . . .”

  “What did he tell you?” Elsie asked, keeping eye contact with Scribner and ignoring Barney’s approach, even though she was aware of it.

  “He was w-w-warning me.”

  A female EMT unfolded a red blanket, which she offered to Scribner. “Let me put this around you, warm you up,” she said.

  “Fire! Fire!” Scribner pointed to the blanket and stepped backward, shivering violently.

  The EMT advanced with the blanket and Scribner scuttled backward, right into the officer’s waiting arms. Barney had him cuffed and confined to the back of his cruiser in a smooth, practiced sequence of moves. Then they were off, headed to the emergency room. The other rescuers began leaving and Lucy approached Elsie Morehouse.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. “That was pretty intense.”

  “Mr. Scribner’s very upset about losing his partner.” Elsie had a sweater over her shoulders and her arms were folded defensively across her chest.

  “Let’s go inside and get you warm,” Lucy urged. She fully expected Elsie to tell her to scram, and was surprised when the secretary allowed herself to be led inside. A full coffeepot was sitting on a credenza and Lucy poured a cup, adding a couple of sugars and some milk. “Drink this,” she said, and Elsie sat right down like a good little girl and took the mug.

  “Did anything in particular set him off?” Lucy asked.

  “Mr. Scribner thought he saw Mr. Marlowe’s ghost. At first he wasn’t afraid, but it seems he didn’t like what Mr. Marlowe told him. That’s when he got so upset.”

  “Did he say what Mr. Marlowe told him?” Lucy asked.

  Elsie was holding the mug with both hands, and though she was obviously distressed, her makeup and pixie cut hair were perfect. “He was babbling, but I think the gist of it was that if he didn’t change his ways the same thing would happen to him. I guess he meant the explosion.” She gulped some coffee. “It was all in Mr. Scribner’s head, of course. He had some sort of fantasy or hallucination. That’s it.” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re from the paper, aren’t you?”

  “Uh, yes,” Lucy admitted.

  “Well, thank you very much for fixing the coffee, but I think you better leave now. And anything you saw here is off the record.” She glared at Lucy. “Understood?”

  “What you told me is off the record,” Lucy said. “But everything that happened outside took place in public and involved town employees. I can and will report it.”

  “Well, I never,” Elsie sniffed, her lips pursed in disapproval. “That’s a disgusting way to behave.”

  “Oh,” Lucy responded, her ire rising. “I suppose you think it’s perfectly fine to foreclose and make families homeless. That’s a nice thing to do?”

  Elsie was holding the door for her, indicating she should leave, now. But first she wanted to get in the last word. “You can’t let people walk away from their obligations,” she said, bristling with righteous indigna
tion. “Think of the moral hazard.”

  “Moral hazard,” Lucy repeated, stepping outside into the frosty morning air. “That’s a new one on me.”

  Chapter Four

  “Moral hazard,” Lucy repeated, muttering to herself. She’d been hearing that term a lot lately. What on earth did it mean? Could it possibly mean that, if for some reason a borrower couldn’t meet his obligations, he would somehow be morally at risk if the creditor adjusted the terms of the loan? That a borrower’s morality would be preserved if his family became homeless, rather than if he received a month or two of forbearance?

  She thought of Lexie and Zach Cunningham, who were struggling to keep their home and provide medical care for their daughter, and wondered how the theory of moral hazard could possibly apply to them. Their debt would be satisfied if Downeast repossessed their home, but what about their parental obligation to provide shelter for their children? It wasn’t Lexie’s fault that her hours were cut because of the recession—that was completely out of her control. What were they to do? They had increased expenses because she’d lost her employer-subsidized health care at the same time their income was reduced. That was a simple enough equation to Lucy, but apparently the Ben Scribners and Elsie Morehouses of this world saw it differently. To them the inability to pay all one’s bills, a situation commonly known as poverty, was not simply an economic crisis but was a moral one, too.

  But what about the lessons she’d learned in Sunday School? She remembered contributing a quarter each week to “help the poor” and had never forgotten that most important Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” She was in her car now, driving down the street past several Downeast FOR SALE signs, trying to understand how all these foreclosures could possibly benefit anyone. Families were dislocated, forced to leave their homes and find shelter where they could. The town was losing citizens, sometimes people whose families had made their homes in Tinker’s Cove for centuries. And even Ben Scribner must have realized that accumulating a number of properties that nobody could afford to buy was hardly a good business policy.

  She found herself wondering about Scribner and Marlowe, and their relationship. It seemed it might have been somewhat strained, considering Scribner’s reaction to his dead partner’s reappearance. According to Elsie, Marlowe had warned Scribner that he was going to meet a fiery end, just as he did. But from what she’d seen, it seemed that Scribner was actually terrified of his deceased partner. Why should that be? she wondered, turning into the parking area behind the Pennysaver office. They’d been partners for decades, the company was a fixture in town, and the two men had always seemed to be of similar minds. Why should Scribner suddenly be afraid of his longtime partner? Lucy could think of only one reason: guilt. If Scribner had a guilty conscience he might well fear the return of a revenge-seeking Jake Marlowe.

  Ted and Phyllis were already at work when Lucy arrived. “You’re late,” Ted said, glancing at the clock. It wasn’t a criticism, merely an observation.

  “There was an emergency at Downeast Mortgage and I went to see what it was all about,” she explained, hanging up her coat.

  “Another explosion?” Phyllis asked.

  “No, nothing like that. Ben Scribner had a panic attack, that’s all.”

  “Understandable, I guess,” Ted said. “He must be feeling kind of paranoid. After all, the fire that killed Marlowe was started by a bomb, disguised as a Christmas package.”

  Lucy sat down with a thud in her desk chair. “I think that is so mean,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Phyllis agreed, with a nod that shook her double chin. “Sending a bomb is bad enough, but wrapping it up in Christmas paper is . . . Well, I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s not nice.”

  “Really not nice,” Lucy said. “It kind of makes you feel bad for poor old Marlowe. He was such a miser, he was probably really excited about getting a present.”

  “For a minute or two he must have thought somebody actually liked him,” Phyllis said.

  “Which really wasn’t the case,” Lucy mused. “He wasn’t very popular.”

  “Truth is, he worked pretty hard to make himself unpopular,” Phyllis added.

  “Ahem.” Ted cleared his throat. “If you ladies don’t mind, we have work to do.”

  They both fell silent and folded their hands in their laps, waiting for instructions.

  “Phyllis, this is a list of advertisers who haven’t renewed their contracts. I want you to call them, offer them these new reduced rates for our holiday issues.” He handed her a couple of sheets of paper, then turned to Lucy. “As for you, Lucy, I want you to check the legal ads for the last year or so and find out how many people have actually lost their homes to Downeast Mortgage. Once you get the properties you’ll have to follow up at the Registry of Deeds.”

  “Sounds like you’re planning a big story,” Lucy said.

  “We’ll see,” Ted said. “Let’s find out the facts first.”

  This was the sort of assignment Lucy loved. There was nothing better than digging through old papers for nuggets of truth. She loved the big, oversized volumes of bound papers that went back over a hundred years to the days of the old Courier and Advertiser. It was unfortunate, in her opinion, that Ted had switched to digitized versions of the more recent papers. She loved leafing through the brown and brittle pages that revealed past times: ads for corsets and transistor radios and cans of Campbell’s tomato soup for ten cents. Not that the computer versions didn’t have advantages. The computer wasn’t dusty, for one thing, and it was a lot easier and faster to find what you were looking for.

  By lunchtime, Lucy had made an interesting discovery. Not only had Downeast Mortgage foreclosed on dozens of homes in the county, at least one of those properties was owned by a town employee.

  Harbormaster Harry Crawford stood to lose the remaining hundred and twenty acres of his family’s waterfront farm, a property that the Crawfords had held for at least two hundred years. Lucy was willing to bet the amount owed on the mortgage was a mere fraction of what that property was worth. It was prime waterfront, perfect for a resort.

  As the afternoon wore on Lucy discovered Crawford wasn’t the only town employee to lose a unique piece of property. It seemed that Downeast Mortgage stood to profit handsomely from Marlowe’s FinCom vote to reduce town employees’ hours. Assistant building inspector Phil Watkins had lost his LEED-certified green home. Lucy remembered writing a story about the house, which had special shingles equipped with solar cells that provided electricity. Watkins had boasted that the house produced so much electricity, in fact, that his meter ran backward and the electric company was paying him. He’d been terribly proud of that fact and Lucy knew he must be heartbroken about losing his energy-efficient home.

  Health department secretary Annie Kraus’s loss wasn’t so remarkable; her home was a simple two-bedroom ranch. Nothing fancy or special about it, except that it was her home. Natural resources officer Nelson Macmillan also lost his property, but it was only a building lot, probably bought as an investment. Or maybe he’d dreamed of building himself the perfect house there one day.

  Lucy stared at the list she’d made and sighed. It seemed a sad record of shattered hopes and diminished dreams. She remembered when she and Bill had first moved to Tinker’s Cove and settled into the ramshackle handyman’s special they’d bought on Red Top Road. The place had a failing furnace, cracked walls and ceilings, peeling wallpaper, and no insulation in the walls except for seaweed and newspaper. She remembered going into baby Toby’s nursery one morning and finding him cozy and warm in his footed sleeper, sound asleep in his crib, the covers dusted with snow that had blown through a gap in the wall. They’d worked hard, scraping and painting and repairing, and turned the old house into a cozy, attractive, comfortable home that was now worth many times what they originally paid for it. But it wasn’t the thought of profit that had motivated them, it was the desire to make a home for their growing family.
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  When Lucy finally emerged from the morgue the office was empty and it was dark outside; as often happened when she did research, she’d lost track of the time. It was nearly five according to the regulator clock that hung on the wall above Ted’s desk. She had to get a move on if she wasn’t going to be late for rehearsal. When she got home she discovered Bill had dinner well in hand and was frying up hamburgers. Even so, the rehearsal was in full swing when she arrived at the Community Church, where some twenty or so cast members were sitting around a table.

  “ ‘Are there no workhouses?’ ” Bob was reading from the script. “ ‘Has the treadmill stopped its useful work?’ ”

  “Ah, Lucy, you’re here,” Rachel interjected. “Before I forget, I need to measure you for your costume.... What did I do with that tape measure? Let’s take ten.”

  While Rachel searched for the tape measure, Lucy got settled, removing her coat and taking the seat at the table indicated by a copy of the script with her name in big block letters. There was also a bottle of water so she took a few sips while she flipped through the pages, looking for the scene they were reading. When she found the line Bob had been reading, she smiled. “Bob, I had no idea you’d be such a terrific Scrooge,” she said.

  “Isn’t he wonderful?” Florence asked, leaning forward in such a way that her blouse fell open, revealing a good bit of lacy black bra. “I had no idea he could be so downright mean!”

  There was something in the way she was batting her eyelashes, something in the almost Southern accent that had crept into her voice, that made Lucy wonder if this was Gone with the Wind rather than A Christmas Carol.

  “Bob has hidden talents,” Rachel said in a rather snappish voice. “Stand up, Lucy,” she ordered, leading her away from the group for a modicum of privacy and slipping the tape around her bust. “I’m beginning to have second thoughts about Florence,” she whispered, making a notation of the measurement.