by Jean Rabe
He’d seen the twins shortly after they were born. Six years old now? Wow, time had slipped by like lightning. Good thing Nicky had picked them up yesterday; he would’ve hated to strangle kids.
In the master bedroom he poked through the underwear drawer and found a little bank envelope with $120 in it. He’d read somewhere that people stashed cash in their underwear drawers—old woman Thornbridge certainly had, maybe had an issue with banks. He carefully replaced the socks, and shoved the money envelope in his back pocket. Not that he needed money anymore, but Sammy didn’t need it. There was a fine-looking watch on the dresser, and he needed a new watch, but he didn’t dare touch it. Didn’t want the deputies to think this was a robbery. It wasn’t. Well, not much of a robbery, and he certainly wasn’t about to take a piece of jewelry that might get recognized. He’d watched enough cop shows, CSI being his favorite, that he knew what not to do. But underwear drawer money…that was fine to take because no one would know it was there to begin with so it couldn’t be missed.
In the living room, he plugged in the tree and stood back to admire it. He liked Christmas trees, all the colored lights—didn’t care for the lights that were all white and artsy looking. After a few moments, enough to heat them up, they started blinking. He didn’t much care for blinkers, too distracting if you were trying to watch TV. But it wasn’t his tree. The ornaments were generic, glass balls mostly, but a couple of Hallmarks—an Elvis Presley singing into an old-style microphone, and a red Mustang convertible. He almost took the Mustang, but stopped himself; his willpower was strong. Next he turned on the train. It was an old one, probably worth something, maybe was given to Sammy when he was a kid, probably twice as old as Sammy. Well, one of the twins would get it now.
A small desk had a laptop on it. Everyone had a laptop, didn’t they? Except old woman Thornbridge. He unplugged it and pawed through the desk, not easy because of the gloves, found an address book and set it on top of the laptop—both were leaving with him. Might have his name in them. He’d forgot to take the address book at Thornbridge’s. That’s why he didn’t send Christmas cards this year, didn’t want his name floating around someone’s house. Didn’t want to get caught.
He went into the bathroom and picked an old ragged towel out of the cabinet. He used it to clean up the kitchen, never taking his gloves off, taking the beer can he’d drank out of, crushing it and sticking it in his coat pocket. Couldn’t leave that, DNA and all.
Now to set the scene. He took the Christmas card out, the one Sammy had sent two weeks prior to Christmas. It was folded and had been riding around in his shirt pocket. He smoothed it and set it on the table. Was going to take some effort to do this just right. Was going to be a long night.
But it would be worth it. Payback. Send a message. And money found in the underwear drawer was just icing; it was all good. And Sammy’s computer might have some games on it…that would be a bonus.
And good thing he’d remembered to put one of those red mugs in his truck so he could add his signature, so to speak, to the scene. Gotta leave a calling card. In the movies, on the TV, killers worth their salt left calling cards.
His truck.
“Damn it all to hell and back.” It had some front-end damage because of messing with the younger-than-Taylor-Swift sheriff, and he sure couldn’t have it fixed around here. Couldn’t have it fixed at all. He’d had the door fixed, replaced with a maroon one last month from the junkyard. Maybe it wasn’t bad that he’d have to dump it, leave it with his sweetie. He could get a ride all one color. She’d watch it for him and keep it safe. He’d buy another ride, the Thornbridge underwear drawer money would help. Maybe he’d get something more economical, a hybrid. Used. He liked used cars, more value for the money.
Money? He reached in Sammy’s pocket and pulled out a worn, brown wallet. Eighty bucks inside. He took fifty and replaced it. If he left the wallet empty, some deputy might call it a robbery. This wasn’t really a robbery. But he was walking away with one hundred and seventy dollars. A pittance next to what old woman Thornbridge had stashed under her bloomers. She probably gifted him enough to cover a whole car.
A glance out the window. Still snowing.
Good.
Perfect.
Time to get to work.
He smiled. “At least you had a Merry Christmas Sammy Sammy Sammy-my-pal, Sam You Made the Pants Too Long. Kids and snowmen. Bet you had hot cocoa, too. Ho. Ho. Ho.”
Thirteen
Piper flipped the card over that Conrad had sent Abigail. She read it once again, hoping to find…what was she hoping to find?
Abby T: I hope this winter finds you well and pleasantly busy. I really should drive over to your church and hear you play. Haven’t been to church in quite a while. Your congregation would think the Nile had flowed backwards if I walked in. Maybe I could sit in the back and no one would notice. Hey! Thanks for recommending that roofer. He did a great job on my house, I even had him use the same color of shingles. A real jack-of-all trades, and great prices, he also put in a new kitchen floor for me. Small world, he used to go to high school with my boy Anthony. I thought he’d looked familiar. I kept his business card….
Piper made a note to find the name of the roofer, something Abigail and Conrad had in common. Had Randy collected business cards from the Delaney place? And who took Conrad’s picture in the painted-black sleigh? The pic he intended to use on his next-year card? Did Conrad have a camera lying around the house? She hadn’t seen one when she explored, nor did she see one in the evidence boxes. Had Randy sent a camera to the lab? Piper scrawled: ask Randy about any cameras found at the Delaney’s. I want to see what’s on his camera. And business cards. The jack-of-all trades.
First day on the job: Mr. Delaney is found murdered. Second day: Miss Thornbridge turns up dead and Piper could have died too, her department vehicle totaled. Third day…what awful thing would tomorrow bring? She’d certainly have something to write to the Rakkasans about.
Piper usually sent out about a dozen Christmas cards each year. She got away with buying just one box, and she’d never bought extras like Miss Thornbridge had. Military life taught her to keep possessions to a minimum, no stockpiling of anything. This past December she’d broke with tradition and bought four boxes, sent out a bunch of cards, nearly all to the Rakkasans she’d left behind, some to folks who’d vocally supported her in the election. She’d even written one of those “Hi Y’all” newsletters that had a picture of her in front of an “Elect Blackwell for Sheriff” placard, and she’d added a personal note to each card. Stuffed the envelopes and sealed them during the halftime sessions of NFL games she watched with her dad. She’d figured if she was spending the money for postage and fancy Hallmark cards—a gold foil partridge in a green foil tree—She might as well go the distance and add a note. And stickers on the back, as she’d donated to the American Lung Association during its Christmas drive, and had been rewarded with a sheet of snowflakes.
She got a lot of cards in return, but not as many as she’d sent…some of the Rakkasans were awful about writing. Piper shared the cards with her father, who’d displayed his own on the fireplace mantel and bookshelves in his living room. Christmas—and Christmas cards—had always been a much bigger deal for Paul Blackwell. Had he stockpiled cards like Abigail? Did he have a stash of sale-priced wrapping paper and holiday whatnots? She seemed to remember seeing boxes of them in the hallway closet during her childhood. Again she thought about rides through the county to take in the lights, better times; back when she was a kid and Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was not in her vocabulary.
Gazing across to the other table, the one with Conrad’s cards, Piper saw some of the same designs as on Abigail’s. Didn’t surprise her. A county as small as Spencer, with a population of less than the city of Henderson, Kentucky, and well less than half the population of Owensboro…lots of people knew each other and would send each other cards. But Abigail was almost twenty years older than Conrad, had maybe been one of h
is teachers or the principal of the school he’d attended, or his kids had attended. Maybe Abigail had been a friend of Conrad’s wife, perhaps through a church group, and that was the connection.
“The connection’s important,” Piper mused.
She got up, went to the whiteboard, and added:
Used the same roofer/who is roofer?
Back in the chair, she tapped her notebook with the end of her pen. She’d start by jotting down the names of people who sent cards both to Conrad and Abigail. Would her suspect be one of those souls? Or had the killer not bothered to send Christmas cards this year?
“Who the hell would kill a couple of old people?” And try to kill her for that matter. During the holidays. And setting them up to look like the Christmas cards they’d sent. Macabre, and the fodder for a Stephen King knockoff.
“Sheriff Blackwell!” Teegan called from the other room. Her heels clicked against the polished tile, and she poked her head in. “Oh, there you are. My, look at all the Christmas cards. I’ve never gotten that many. Some of them look expensive, don’t they? I suppose geezers send each other a lot of cards.” She glanced at the whiteboard and shuddered. “You got a call, Sheriff. Long distance. Some guy from Thailand.”
Piper pushed herself to her feet and discovered a few new jabs of pain.
“Calls himself Bee-koo Delaney. Maybe a relation to Conrad, you think?”
“Put it through to my office, Teegan.” Piper suspected the dispatcher would listen in.
Bee-koo Delaney was Bhikkhu Anthony Delaney, an ordained monk.
“I’m sorry to deliver the bad news,” she began.
Fourteen
Wednesday, January 3rd
“I gave Oren a choice, you know.” Piper drove the rented Subaru Outback along 231, big farms on either side, gentle hills, not much flat ground in this area. It was all slopes and tilts with stands of birch trees rising up—a postcard vista, she thought, especially with the snow coating. “He said he’d take Evansville and the autopsy.” She passed a sign that read: SANTA CLAUS, Birthplace of Jay Cutler, NFL Quarterback. The small industrial park and the American Legion Post were ahead. Above it all stood a water tower that said “Holiday World.”
“Of course Oren took the autopsy—no matter how bad the body looked.” Piper’s father was in the passenger seat of the rented car. When he’d learned she was coming here to pursue the Merry Christmas mugs, he’d asked to go along.
She was reluctant for his company at first—not that she’d told him that. Almost told him no, that she had other places to go afterwards—which she did—and had mulled over more reasons, all valid ones. It wasn’t the lymphoma, or fearing he was too weak. Don’t baby him ever! It was a worry that if any of the deputies caught wind of it, they’d think she was relying on the longtime sheriff for his expertise, that she couldn’t handle this investigation on her own.
As if he’d sensed her apprehension, he’d said, “Our secret, my coming. I want to look at the ornament sales. Haven’t bought a new one in a while.”
That statement had buoyed Piper’s heart; her dad was planning on next Christmas, thinking he might beat this stinking cancer, put up a tree again, add a new ornament or two. It also made her think about Miss Thornbridge with her boxes and boxes of Christmas cards and dozens of rolls of unopened wrapping paper, napkins, and decorative paper plates. Mrs. Thornbridge probably would have been shopping the sales, likely would have gone out the day after Christmas before things started getting picked over.
“Because he’s Jewish, right? He took the autopsy because this Christmas store—”
“Seriously? It’s because he’s friends with Dr. Neufeld, Punkin. Because they can chatter like hens about you to their grizzly hearts’ content. Because he might gain some interesting tidbit about the body, some clue he can covet for just a little while. Your chief deputy is going to work this case hard. He’ll want to solve it on his own. Prove he should have been the one elected sheriff.” He laughed good-naturedly. “Oren’s a good man, Punkin. Really, he—”
She shrugged. “He lives in Santa Claus. This would have been easy for him.” Her hands tightened on the steering wheel.
“And why did you give him a choice anyway? You’re the boss and the sheriff’s department isn’t a democracy. If you wanted to attend the autopsy, you should have sent him here. Or sent Randy here. Randy’s a damn fine detective and—”
Piper grumbled.
“What? I didn’t hear you.”
“Randy said there were a couple of people at the Hagee party he wanted to chat with again, didn’t have a good feel for them. And he went out early to where I was rammed off the road, getting paint samples, seeing if anyone saw something…the pickup, the driver. But I know they didn’t see anything. Nobody was out. It was just me and—me and the pickup on that road.” And hopefully Randy could find her cell phone in the wreckage; she didn’t want to buy another one and deal with loading it up with apps and phone numbers. Dear God, she still ached all over. Maybe a doctor visit would have been a good idea.
Piper had spent the night at the station, looking through the Christmas cards, making a few notes, talking to Bhikkhu Anthony Delaney long-distance, falling asleep at the table, waking up and giving in and napping on a downstairs cot until Randy came back the next morning. He’d given her a ride to her apartment, where she’d changed into uniform, put the borrowed sweats in her clothes basket, stuck a bottle of aspirin in her back pocket, and checked on her father, who handed her a cup of coffee and made her a cheese omelet. Wrinkles was curled on a pillow in the kitchen. Sometime last night Oren apparently found a home for the aging pug.
“Oren’s a good man,” her dad had said then, too. Because he’d gifted her father with a scrunchy-faced, arthritic dog rather than dumping it at the shelter? Because he took in Mr. Delaney’s cats?
“Oren and Annie are probably chatting about you right now.” Paul tipped his head back and closed his eyes. “I miss the department gossip, going to work every day. It’s been a little lonely, I hate to say. In the house I mean. But I have a dog now. I shouldn’t have gone so long without one.”
She’d given Oren a choice between the store and the autopsy because she thought it might improve the itchy working conditions, give him a choice rather than orders. And she’d hoped he would take the autopsy.
“Actually, I didn’t want to attend the autopsy,” Piper confessed. “Miss Thornbridge looked…awful. I could have stomached it. I really could have. I’ve seen a whole lot worse. You don’t want to know just how much worse. I really just didn’t—not today, I didn’t want to deal with Dr. Neufeld and—”
“Two autopsies in two days? I wouldn’t have wanted that either. But I wouldn’t have given Oren the choice. I would have just sent him to Evansville and been done with it, had it be your idea.”
“I bet the coroner started on time for him.”
Paul raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing. Nothing.” She pulled into the parking lot of what looked like a small strip mall but was basically one long cheerful-looking store, turned off the engine, stuck her gloves in her jacket pocket, and got out. Softer: “Nothing.”
A banner read: Cheeriest Store in the World—Every Day is a Very Merry Christmas.
The air felt brittle, cold, and clean, the breeze nonexistent and the sky cloudless and bright baby blue. A big contrast to last night’s snow, which had kept plowing crews busy until the early-morning hours. The snow along the edges of the sidewalk and on the roof, coupled with the splashes of red on the exterior made the store seem too happy. Piper thought that most of Santa Claus looked too happy. It was one of Spencer County’s biggest towns, with a population chasing twenty-five hundred.
“Merry Christmas,” her dad said, his gaze sweeping across the long building. “Gotta love a town called Santa Claus. And gotta love a store devoted to Christmas.”
Piper didn’t have to love it.
“So much history here, Punk
in.”
She knew the history. He’d spooned it in her during her childhood. Santa Claus was founded about a hundred and sixty years ago, called Santa Fe then, and had sixty-some residents. The US Postal Service refused the first post office application because there was another Santa Fe. “Pick another name,” some official had told them. After a handful of town meetings, Santa Claus was etched in the record books. The town survived by attracting tourists—the bulk of them from the Midwest—from throughout the United States. Even international travelers stopped at the Santa Claus Holiday Store or at the post office to have mail hand cancelled with a special Christmas postmark—a different postmark each year—and to buy an ornament.
Piper had campaigned door-to-door in the town, but she hadn’t come to this store…hadn’t been to this store since high school—and that trip had been to buy her father an ornament, a moose in a sheriff’s uniform. She thought the whole Christmassy town cheesy then, and her opinion hadn’t changed much.
She opened the door and gestured for her dad to go first.
Christmas music still played inside.
Christmas music always played in the store, even at the height of summer.
It was crowded with bargain hunters.
And it was a feast for the senses.
Piper swallowed her sour mood and allowed herself to be overwhelmed for a few moments while her father grabbed up a shopping basket and ambled toward the closest row of sale ornaments.
Fifteen
Jolly old St. Nicholas, lean your ear this way!
Don’t you tell a single soul, what I’m going to say…