by Leslie Meier
Arriving home, Lucy installed her mother on a corner of the couch, switched on the TV for her, and sent Bill in to keep her company.
“How’s the knee?” she asked as he hobbled past her.
“The ice helped, but it still hurts. If it’s not better tomorrow, I’ll go and see the doctor.”
Lucy sighed and went upstairs to get the kids ready for bed. Toby and Elizabeth could change into pajamas themselves, but Sara needed help. It was way past her bedtime, and she burst into tears when Lucy told her it was too late for a story. Bending down to kiss her good night, Lucy noticed that her forehead was awfully warm. A quick check with the thermometer revealed a temperature of a hundred and one. As Lucy counted out the cherry-flavored tablets, she wondered idly what else could go wrong this week.
That night she ran her bath as hot as she could stand and in a fit of self-indulgence poured in the last of her treasured Vitabath. As she leaned back in the delicious suds, she sighed and felt tears prick her eyes.
This was going to be an awful Christmas. It had been terrible to lose her father just a few months earlier. He had died suddenly of a heart attack. He had left for work as usual one morning, and by dinnertime he was lying in the intensive care unit of the hospital.
Lucy had rushed to her mother’s side and supported her through the hurried hallway conversations with doctors, who held out no hope, through long visits during which her father gave no sign he knew them, and she helped her make the difficult decision to forgo heroic measures and let nature take its course. Then there were the funeral and cemetery to arrange, accommodations to find for out-of-town relatives, and food to prepare for all of them.
After two weeks in the city Lucy was exhausted. She needed to go home. She helped her mother find an accountant to help put her affairs in order and then she left, feeling tremendously guilty but knowing that her place was in Maine. She called once or twice a week and made the occasional brief visit, but even though her mother had seemed awfully depressed over the phone, it had still been a shock to find her so passive and out of touch at the airport.
She had to face the fact that the mother who had been a friend and confidante was gone. Lucy promised herself that she was not going to worry about taking her shopping. If the weather was too bad, or if there was no time, she could just tie a twenty-dollar bill to a candy cane for each of the kids. Feeling somewhat relieved, Lucy was again flooded with depression when she remembered that Bill’s parents would be arriving on Friday. Christmas seemed like a huge snowball increasing in size as it rolled downhill. She was a small figure in its path, toiling up a mountain of baking, shopping, and wrapping.
She was reluctantly pulling herself out of the water when Bill appeared in the bathroom.
“Now, there’s a sight for any man,” he said, grinning and handing her a towel.
“Oh,” she groaned, “I’m getting so fat.”
“No, you’re not,” he said, drying her back. “You’re just right. There’s something the matter with your mom, though. She keeps talking about things that happened years ago. She’s mad at Aunt Beverly for borrowing a pair of stockings sometime during World War Two. Beverly just took them without permission and got a run in them.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. Just the sort of thing Aunt Beverly would do.” Lucy nodded.
“Aunt Beverly? She’s a sweet old thing who weighs about ninety pounds!” exclaimed Bill.
Lucy laughed. “You didn’t know her in her prime. I think she borrowed a boyfriend along with the stockings. I know what you mean about her state of mind. It’s not good. Maybe after she’s been here for a few days she’ll get better. I hope so. I don’t know what I’m going to do if she doesn’t.”
Chapter Nine
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At a few minutes before five the next afternoon, Lucy pulled into the employees’ parking lot at Country Cousins. She sat for a few minutes, waiting for a song on the radio to finish, and smiled wryly to herself. For the next few hours all she had to do was answer the customers’ calls and press a few buttons on her computer keyboard.
“You need a pair of waterproof boots? We have just the thing. What size do you need? Where shall I ship it? What is your credit card number?” The next day the boots would be on their way. If the boots went out of stock, Lucy would know immediately, thanks to the computerized inventory system that Sam Miller had pioneered. The computer would suggest an alternative style and indicate when the next shipment of boots would arrive.
Out-of-stocks were unusual at Country Cousins because Sam Miller had also developed a computer program that tracked the ebb and flow of customer preferences in the past and projected future sales. Lucy had come to develop a real respect for the computer, which always greeted her personally when she logged on. The screen would blink a friendly “Good evening, Lucy!” after she logged on with her password, Patches.
“You look beat,” Beverly said sympathetically. “Christmas getting to you?”
“Sort of,” agreed Lucy, taking a call for a decorative maple sap bucket. Calls came in pretty steadily for about an hour, and the time flew by as she placed orders for a chopping block, a fishing rod, a camp stove, and lots of deerskin slippers. There was a lull around six, dinner hour, and the evening was slow.
“Except for a few last-minute orders for slippers, it seems as if everybody’s got their shopping done,” Beverly observed.
“I’ve sold quite a few slippers, too.” Lucy laughed. “You’ll never guess who I saw at the airport,” she said, pausing for emphasis. “Marcia Miller and little Sam and a big pile of suitcases. It looked as if she were planning to be away for a while.”
“I guess the police don’t think she’s a suspect, then.”
“Do they really say that?” came Ruthie’s voice from the computer station on Lucy’s other side. “Don’t leave town, ma’am,” she said, mimicking Jack Webb on Dragnet. “I don’t think they can. Unless they indict you, I think you can go wherever you want.”
“It kind of makes her look guilty, leaving like that so soon after the murder,” Beverly commented.
“How could a woman kill a man after she’d had his child?” asked Karen Hall, pausing on one of her frequent trips to the restroom. She rubbed her huge tummy absentmindedly. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I know,” agreed Lucy. “But they say that the spouse is always the first suspect. She didn’t have to do it herself. She might have had a boyfriend, or even hired somebody. She certainly could have afforded to.”
“But why? Why would she kill him?” questioned Ruthie. “He seemed nice enough. And she had everything she could want. That nice little Mercedes, that big house, all those clothes.”
“Money’s not everything,” said Beverly, shaking her head.
“They had separate bedrooms. For all we know, she could have hated him.” Lucy broke off the conversation, nodding her head toward the end of the row of workstations, where George Higham had suddenly appeared.
Karen scuttled off and the rest of the women bent their heads over their desks in an effort to look busy. Lucy hoped he would pass by, or that someone would call with an order, but the indicator on her phone refused to light up. She hunched over her desk and began making a tally of the items she had sold that night.
“Lucy, how are things going?” As George stopped behind her he blocked the overhead light and a shadow fell over her tally sheet.
“Just fine, George. I’ve been selling a lot of slippers.”
“Keep up the good work,” he said, letting his fingers linger as he patted her on the shoulder. Then he moved along down the row.
Lucy stood right up and marched off to the restroom. She resented George touching her, and even though she washed her face with cold water, her cheeks remained flushed with anger.
Back at her station she muttered to
Bev, “I think somebody ought to check up on George’s whereabouts last Wednesday night.”
“Just because he’s obnoxious doesn’t make him a murderer,” Bev cautioned her.
“Everyone knows how ambitious he is. And Sam Miller never gave him the time of day. Maybe he figures his chances are a lot better with Tom Miller,” Lucy said darkly.
“Speak of the devil,” whispered Bev. Lucy looked up and saw George and Tom Miller standing together by the door to the phone room. Tom cleared his throat rather loudly, and George rapped on a file cabinet to get the women’s attention.
“I just want to let you know that we’re having a problem here,” said Tom in his high-pitched voice. He paused and the women shifted on their seats, waiting nervously.
“We have a mouse in the house.” He smiled apologetically. “A few field mice have apparently moved into the building.” A few of the women giggled.
“This is a serious problem for us,” he continued. “They could damage the computer. We’ve discussed the options, and I’ve decided the most humane course of action is to trap them.”
He held up a small wire-mesh box.
“This is a Havahart trap. We don’t want to hurt them, we just want to catch them and release them out in the woods where they belong. I just wanted you to know how we’re dealing with this. Any questions?” He waited, glancing around the room.
“We want to make one thing very clear,” added George. “It is company policy to allow eating only in the break room. If any of you are discovered with food in your desks, I can assure you that you will be dealt with severely.” He turned and ushered the senior executive out of the room.
“Better clean out your desk, Karen.” Lucy giggled, watching as Karen pulled out wads of crumpled candy wrappers.
“It’s just that I get so hungry,” Karen confessed. “I’m hungry all the time.”
“I know. Being pregnant is the one time you can eat without feeling guilty,” Lucy reassured her. She continued thoughtfully, “I guess we can eliminate Tom Miller as a suspect.”
“I didn’t know he was,” observed Bev.
“I heard he was,” Ruthie agreed, giggling. “Who knows what evil lurks behind that mild-mannered exterior?”
“I don’t think a man who uses a Havahart trap to catch mice is going to murder his brother,” said Lucy. “Dave Davidson is probably right. Sam Miller must have been involved in something outside Tinker’s Cove, something illegal like drugs.”
“Smuggling cocaine in the Peruvian ski hats?” asked Ruthie.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lucy admitted. “It’s hard to believe Sam would be involved in anything like that.”
“That’s it!” exclaimed Karen. “They wanted him to smuggle in dope and when he refused they killed him.”
“I think you better answer your phone,” observed Bev.
“Oops! Country Cousins. May I help you?” Karen babbled automatically. When she finished taking the customer’s order, Lucy heard her muttering.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m out of order forms.”
“I’ll get ’em for you,” offered Lucy. “They’re kind of heavy.”
“Thanks,” said Karen. “I’ll cover on your computer.”
Lucy went over to the corner of the big phone room where the boxes of computer order forms were kept, but she discovered that the usual supply of boxes was gone. She would have to go to the storeroom.
She hesitated. The storeroom was down a long, dimly lit hallway. The furnace room was along there, and the maintenance department. But no one would be there now; the offices would be dark and empty.
Before Sam Miller’s death she’d never given her safety a thought at Country Cousins. But now she was reluctant to leave the brightly lit phone room and the safety of the group of chattering women.
Straightening her shoulders, she pushed open the door and marched down the hallway, away from the phone room. She turned right where the hallway branched into the executive suite and the maintenance offices. The door to the storeroom was unlocked, and she pushed it open, reaching for the switch.
She was relieved to see several pallets of paper neatly stacked near the door and hurried in to pull a box from the top. Juggling the heavy cardboard box, she turned to leave when she saw George’s figure in the doorway.
“What are you doing in here, Lucy? You’re not supposed to leave the phone room.”
“I just came to get order forms,” explained Lucy. “There were none in the corner where they usually are.”
“You should have notified your supervisor,” George admonished her.
“I didn’t want to waste the time, George. Now, can I get by? I want to get back to work.”
“Let me carry that, Lucy. It must be heavy.”
As George took the box of paper, his fingers brushed against her breasts. “You know in many ways you’re a model employee. And you’re very pretty, too.” George’s voice had become hoarse.
“Thank you.” Lucy smiled at him sweetly. “You know, George, my husband is six feet tall, and he pounds nails all day long. If I told him that you touched me, he’d beat you to a pulp. He would.” She nodded. “Shall we go back to the phone room?”
“I guess you can manage this box after all,” said George, thrusting it at her. His face was very red, and there were beads of perspiration on his brow. Lucy hurried off. But inwardly she shuddered, unable to forget the sickening feeling of George Higham’s clammy hands on her sweater.
Back at the safety of her desk, Lucy was suddenly exhausted. She answered the phone mechanically and couldn’t help keeping an eye on the clock. The calls dribbled in, and the clock seemed stuck at twelve-thirty. Finally, at one, it was time to go home.
As they were putting on their hats and coats, Ruthie looked over her shoulder uneasily. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “I hope they catch whoever killed Sam Miller real soon. It feels creepy around here.”
“Ladies, don’t forget your paychecks.” George stood by the door with a handful of envelopes. Country Cousins had always followed the old Maine custom of paying on Monday. That way, the paternalistic mill owners had reasoned, the workers wouldn’t drink away their earnings over the weekend.
Lucy snatched her check from George, refusing to look at him. Before she left the building, she made sure that her car keys were ready in her hand. She went straight to her car, scanning the parking lot to make sure no attacker was lurking. She unlocked her car door quickly, made sure no one was hiding in the backseat, and climbed in, locking the door immediately. It was only after she was safely in her car that she noticed the other women clustered together by the door. She started the car and circled around the lot to the group, rolling down her window.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I’ve been laid off,” announced Bev, her voice flat with shock.
“Me too,” Karen said with a moan.
Lucy ripped open her envelope immediately, but only her check was inside. She still had a job, but she wasn’t sure she wanted it.
Chapter Ten
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“It’s a crime, I’m telling you, a crime.” Officer Culpepper’s voice boomed over the din in Jake’s Donut Shop. Jake’s was everybody’s favorite coffee shop, and today, four days before Christmas, it was packed. Lucy didn’t go to Jake’s very often; somehow her days didn’t include time to dawdle over coffee, and even if she had the time, she didn’t want to be tempted by the doughnuts.
But at noon Bill had come home early and announced that his knee was bothering him and he was going to take the afternoon off. Sara was feeling much better, so Lucy decided to seize the opportunity and take her mother shopping. They had gone through most of the stores in town, and everywhere they went her mother had the same comment.
“I just don’t see anything here that I want to
buy,” she would say, shaking her head and clutching her purse with two hands.
Lucy couldn’t decide if she really found all the shops uninspiring or if she just couldn’t bring herself to part with any money. Lucy knew her mother had been well provided for, but she suspected that the loss of her father’s weekly paycheck had made her nervous about spending anything at all. Passing Jake’s, Lucy had seen an empty table and suggested they stop for coffee. She needed a break, and her mother could certainly use the calories.
“I’ve heard those Bavarian cream doughnuts are delicious. Wouldn’t you like to try one?” she urged her mother.
“Oh, I never snack.”
“You’ve been losing weight. You should have a snack now and then,” said Lucy, forcing herself to make eye contact with her mother. She hated to see her dull eyes, sagging cheeks, and lank hair.
“Oh, I eat very well. I eat three meals every day.”
“Well, it’s obviously not enough. You must have lost twenty pounds since Daddy died.”
“It isn’t because I don’t eat enough,” she insisted. “I do.”
“That can’t be true. You’re using up more calories than you’re taking in. If you want to stop losing, you’re going to have to eat more. Have a doughnut.”
“Just coffee, please,” her mother told the waitress.
“Me too,” said Lucy, resigned to losing another round. Looking around the shop, she saw her friend Lydia Volpe, the kindergarten teacher, just coming through the door.
“Hi!” She waved, and Lydia headed over, cheeks cherry-red from the cold.
“What a day! Those kids have got too much Christmas spirit!”
“I can imagine. Lydia, this is my mother, Helen Hayes.”