Holiday Murder

by Leslie Meier

  “Woomph,” said Sara, her mouth full of cookie.

  “Would you mind repeating that?” Lucy measured cocoa and sugar and dumped them into the pot, then added a quart of milk.

  “Lance.”

  Lance and Elizabeth had been close friends, but this fall Lance had gone away to a private boarding school.

  “What about Lance?”

  “Susie Macintyre told Elizabeth that he’s home for Christmas, but he hasn’t called her yet.”

  “Oh.”

  Lucy set the pot on the stove and turned the burner on. She got a spoon out of a drawer and began stirring the mixture, so it wouldn’t stick to the bottom. When it was ready she poured the hot chocolate into mugs, set them on a tray and carried it into the family room.

  Zoe, she saw as she entered, hadn’t been able to resist opening the boxes of ornaments. She’d already unwrapped some of her favorites and had lined them up on the coffee table.

  Lucy set the tray down beside them and picked one up. It was a little baby, sleeping in a crescent moon.

  “That’s Elizabeth’s,” she told Zoe. “From her first Christmas.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yes, it is.” Lucy sat down on the couch and took a bite of cookie. She wanted Elizabeth to hang the ornament on the tree, just as she had every year until now. “Why don’t you see if she’ll come down and hang her ornament?” she suggested.

  Happy to have an important errand, Zoe ran off.

  “Cookies and cocoa,” announced Lucy, noticing that Sara was making quite a dent in the cookies. “Better come and get some before it’s all gone!”

  “I think I’ll get a beer,” said Bill, heading for the kitchen.

  “In a minute,” said Toby, reaching for the last string of lights.

  Sara had already polished off her mug of cocoa when Zoe returned.

  “She said to save it for her. She’ll be down in a while.”

  “Where’s Elizabeth?” asked Bill, sitting beside her and tilting back his bottle of beer.

  “Sulking in her room.”

  Lucy watched as Zoe carefully lifted the mug of hot liquid to her lips and took a swallow. “Mmmm,” she said, and licked her upper lip with her tongue.

  Just then a blast of organ music came from the stereo and a famous choir began singing “Venite Adoramus.” Tears sprang to Lucy’s eyes as she was overwhelmed with a flood of jumbled emotions from all the Christmases past and for a brief moment she wanted to be a little girl once again, standing in the candlelit, pine-scented church, holding tight to her father’s hand.

  “Well, let’s get started,” she said, opening one of the boxes of ornaments and lifting out a bright red ball. She carried it over to the tree and placed it on a branch.

  Soon the floor was covered with tissue and newspaper wrappings, and the tree was filling up with decorations. Ordinary glass balls, special ornaments collected on family vacations, pinecones and seashells the children had gathered and coated with glitter when they were little, and a small but precious collection of antique German glass ornaments that had somehow survived scores of clumsy fingers and hundreds of Christmases.

  Lucy was watching as Zoe hung one of the very oldest, a glass fish so old that the paint had become translucent, when the phone rang. Zoe immediately lost interest in the ornament and turned toward the phone, ready to race Sara and Toby to answer it. Lucy quickly snatched the ornament from her, letting out a sigh of relief as she twisted the bit of wire that served as a hook securely onto a high branch.

  This time, Sara won the dash for the phone. “Elizabeth!” she shrieked. “It’s Lance!”

  Disappointed the call wasn’t for them, the other children turned back to trimming the tree. In a few minutes, Elizabeth joined them. Ignoring everyone’s curious glances, she picked her ornament off the coffee table and hung it on a branch.

  “Is it OK if I go out for a while?” she asked, casually.

  “Lance asked her out!” Zoe was fascinated by the whole idea of romance and dating.

  “Is that true?” asked Lucy. “What are your plans?”

  “Just to hang out,” Elizabeth murmured, nervously twisting a strand of hair.

  “That’s unacceptable,” said Bill, decisively placing a candy cane on the end of a branch.

  “What do you mean?” demanded Elizabeth.

  “Well, this is a family night,” began Lucy.

  “You mean I can’t go?”

  Lucy looked to Bill for support.

  “I don’t mind if you go out,” he said. “You haven’t exactly added a lot to the occasion so far. But I don’t want you hanging out in some car at the end of a dark lane. And you certainly can’t go looking like that. Put some slacks on.”

  “Dad!” Elizabeth was indignant.

  “Well, I don’t think you should go out at all,” insisted Lucy. “Why not invite Lance to join us here, decorating the tree?”

  “Oh, Mom,” groaned Elizabeth, then ran out of the room. They could all hear her thumping up the stairs in her platform shoes.

  “That went well,” said Bill, facetiously, as he reached up and set the star on the top of the tree.

  “She’ll sulk in her room all night,” said Lucy.

  “Not a problem for me,” said Bill, pleased to have thwarted one of his daughter’s suitors. “How about I call for some pizza?”

  “Great idea.” Lucy wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged him.

  Elizabeth declined to join the rest of the family for their pizza supper, but that didn’t stop the other kids from enjoying theit treat. When every scrap of pizza was gone, and the room had been cleared of papers and ornament boxes, Bill switched on the tree and turned off the lamps. They all stood for a moment, admiring the lighted, decorated tree.

  “It’s magic,” sighed Zoe.

  “It’s the best one ever,” said Sara.

  “Neat,” said Toby.

  * * *

  Later, while everyone was watching Christmas videos on TV, Lucy slipped upstairs to talk to Elizabeth. She found her sprawled on her bed amidst most of her clothes, talking on the phone. On the bookcase, her little pink TV was playing.

  Lucy stood, not knowing where to start. Why couldn’t she take better care of her clothes, instead of leaving them draped all over? Why was she always, always on the phone? And why was the TV on, when she obviously wasn’t watching it?

  Lucy reached out to switch it off, but was caught momentarily by the drama. It was an old black-and-white gangster movie, with actors she didn’t recognize.

  “He’s gettin’ to be a problem,” growled one gangster, talking around a huge cigar.

  “What do you want?” Elizabeth was glaring at her from the bed.

  Lucy wanted to sit beside her, to hug her, but there was no place to sit. “I just wanted you to know that Daddy and I only want what’s best for you.”

  “Yeah? Well, why won’t you trust me? All I wanted to do was spend some time with my friends,” demanded Elizabeth.

  “He’s not goin’ along with the program,” commented another gangster, a small fellow with a wizened face.

  “That’s why,” said Lucy, pointing to the TV. “I trust you to do what’s right, but I don’t trust all your friends.”

  “I can take care of myself,” insisted Elizabeth.

  “He knows too much. We gotta rub him out.” It was the gangster with the cigar.

  Stunned, Lucy sat down on the bed, staring at the TV.

  Elizabeth reached out and turned it off, and the picture shrank to a little, bright dot.

  Suddenly, Lucy knew why Tucker had been killed. She had been a good girl, a girl her parents trusted not to get into trouble. And she hadn’t done anything wrong herself, but she had seen something she shouldn’t have, probably during that forty-five minutes she was supposedly lost before the hike. She had known too much. And that made her dangerous to somebody. Her innocence hadn’t protected her, it had made her vulnerable.

  “Mom, are y
ou OK?”

  Lucy nodded, and pulled Elizabeth close to her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  1 day ’til Xmas

  Lucy had just slipped the chocolate cheesecake into the oven and was starting to make lunch for herself and the girls, Toby having been recruited to act as Bill’s gofer, when she realized she was ready for Christmas. The long month’s preparations were done. The cards and packages had been sent, the presents had been bought and wrapped, the house decorated and the tree trimmed, the refrigerator and pantry were stocked with holiday treats.

  “Do you girls have any plans for this afternoon?” she asked, as they gathered around the kitchen table to eat tuna fish sandwiches and tomato soup. “Zoe, you’ve been invited to go to Sadie’s house to make gingerbread men.”

  “Cool,” said Zoe, prompting Lucy to raise an eyebrow. They sure grew up fast these days.

  “I’m supposed to go ice-skating with Jenn,” said Sara. “Mrs. Baker said she’d pick me up at one.”

  “That sounds like fun, what about you, Elizabeth?”

  “Lance wants me to go over to his house to go swimming.”

  “Isn’t it kind of cold for swimming?” Lucy took a bite of sandwich.

  “They got an indoor pool.”

  Lucy choked on a bit of tuna fish that went down the wrong way. “An indoor pool?”

  She knew Lance’s mother, Norah Hemmings, better known as the “queen of daytime TV,” was a wealthy woman, but this was definitely a first for Tinker’s Cove.

  “Yeah, he’s invited a bunch of us to come over and hang out. I can go, can’t I, Mom?”

  “Only if you bring back a complete report,” specified Lucy. “Sue will want to know all the details.”

  “Deal.”

  * * *

  It was one-thirty when Lucy pulled into Norah Hemmings’s driveway, after dropping Zoe at the Orensteins’. True enough, she saw that a large addition with huge French windows had been added to the back of the big mansion on Smith Heights Road. Norah’s house now dwarfed the neighboring houses, including Corney and Chuck Canaday’s, which stood next door.

  “Dad’s going to pick you up on his way home, around four.”

  “Why don’t I just call, instead,” suggested Elizabeth.

  “No way, Jose,” said Lucy, firmly nipping that idea in the bud. “And listen. If I hear the slightest rumor that anything went on here that shouldn’t have, you can count on being grounded for the rest of vacation. Understand?”

  “Oh, Mom,” groaned Elizabeth, as she climbed out of the car. “You can trust me.”

  “Right,” muttered Lucy to herself, as she turned the car around in the spacious driveway.

  As Lucy drove past one impressive house after another, all with spectacular ocean views, she couldn’t help wondering why anybody would want to live here year-round. A bone-chilling wind came right off the ocean, she could feel it pushing against the Subaru. And the ocean wasn’t much to look at on a gray day when you couldn’t tell where water ended and sky began. In the distant sky she could see two herring gulls. One, an immature brown one had a fish, she could see silvery flashes as it struggled to break free. The other, a mature white-and-gray bird, was darting at the younger bird, trying to make him drop his prize. The brownish gull held on stubbornly, but the fish finally wriggled free and fell through the air, only to be scooped up by the more experienced bird, who flapped off in triumph. The yearling gull complained against this injustice. His harsh, hollow call echoed in Lucy’s ears as she passed a mailbox marked WHITNEY.

  Acting on impulse, Lucy braked and stopped the car. She looked at the house, a big old wooden box ringed by a generous porch, no doubt filled with chintz-cushioned wicker chairs in the summer but now bare and empty. Long window boxes had been filled with geraniums, now black stumps shriveled by frost. Lucy shuddered, thinking of Tucker all alone in that big, hollow house.

  She drove on down the road, surprised to come upon the conservation area only a quarter mile or so from the Whitney house. Once again, Lucy thought it unlikely that Tucker had lost her way, as she had told her fellow hikers. She had summered in that house for her whole life; she must have known about the conservation area.

  Saying she was lost must have been an excuse. Something must have delayed her, and it must have been something she didn’t want to talk about. Something she felt she had to cover up. What could it be?

  Lucy looked up at the Whitney house, and realized it was built on an outcropping of rock that set it up higher than the neighboring houses. In fact, it was so high that someone standing in one of the upstairs windows would have a clear view out to sea, looking right over the roofs of the houses on the other side of the road. From there, Lucy realized, Tucker could see the boats coming and going from Tinker’s Cove, and with a pair of binoculars she could probably see the big freighters farther out at sea on their way to Halifax.

  What if Tucker had seen something out of the ordinary, as she looked out of those big windows, thought Lucy. What if whatever it was she saw made her so curious that she went to investigate? Reaching to the end of Smith Heights Road, Lucy was about to turn out onto the main road when she noticed a well-worn dirt road branching down toward the water. Impulsively, she decided to see where it led. After all, she had no other responsibilities this afternoon. It was hers to spend as she liked.

  The Subaru bounced along, rocking from side to side and crunching through icy patches, for a few hundred feet. Then the road opened out and Lucy found herself looking at a cluster of metal buildings. A small sign read ROUSSEAU’S LOBSTERS.

  Nobody seemed to be around, there were no cars or trucks, so Lucy turned off the ignition and got out of the car. A blast of cold wind blowing off the water hit her, and she shivered, pulling up the hood of her parka and stuffing her hands in the pockets as she began walking across the yard to the dock. This wasn’t at all what she expected a lobster pound to be; she had somehow imagined the lobsters would be kept in some sort of pen or corral in the water. But there was nothing like that, only a dock with a hoist at the end, for unloading the boats. The holding pens must be in the metal buildings, she decided, so the workers could stay relatively warm and dry. Reaching the end of the dock she stood a minute, scanning the empty cove. The wind rattled the line on the hoist; it creaked as it swung back and forth. Realizing her teeth were chattering, she turned to go back to the car and saw she had company. A pickup truck was now parked next to her car, and two men were coming towards her.

  Recognizing Rusty and J.J., Lucy gave a wave and a big smile, but they didn’t smile back.

  “What are you doing here?” demanded J.J., when they were within earshot.

  “I was looking for lobsters,” improvised Lucy. “For Christmas dinner.”

  Rusty and J.J. exchanged uneasy glances.

  “Isn’t that what the sign says? Lobsters?” asked Lucy, cocking her head.

  The two men were standing opposite her, blocking her path to the car, a situation Lucy wasn’t entirely comfortable with. In fact, she would have been a lot happier in her car, speeding back home. Snooping around suddenly didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  J.J. shook his head, and a lock of curly dark hair fell across his forehead. “We only do wholesale,” he said.

  “Yeah,” agreed Rusty, scratching the orange stubble on his chin. “And with the quota and all, we don’t have any extras.”

  Lucy shrugged her shoulders. “Well, that’s too bad. I guess I’ll have to try someplace else.”

  Much to her relief the two men courteously stepped aside, clearing the path to her car.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said, reaching for the door handle, when she heard the sound of a boat motor. They all looked up as a boat approached the dock, then turned abruptly as a red pickup truck sped into the yard and stopped suddenly, brakes squealing. The driver-side door flew open and Claw jumped down and ran toward them.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded, pointing a stubby finger at Lucy. “What’s she
doing here?”

  “She wants lobsters,” J.J. explained. “I told her we only sell wholesale.”

  “Don’t you know who she is?” Claw was looking past them, out to the dock. “She’s that newspaper reporter. From the meeting the other night.”

  Rusty looked over his shoulder to the dock, where a man was tying up the boat. “Is that true?”

  “I write for the paper,” began Lucy, as Claw began running to the boat, waving his arms. “Mostly features, you know, soft stuff. In fact,” she extemporized, checking her watch. “I’m supposed to interview Mrs. Santa Claus—to get the behind-the-scenes story—and I’m a little late. So, Merry Christmas to you and your families.”

  Determined not to look back no matter what happened she grabbed the handle and pulled the car door open. Stepping next to her, Rusty slammed it shut.

  “I think the old man wants to talk to you,” he said, roughly grabbing her arm. Before she could protest, J.J. had her other arm and they were dragging her toward one of the buildings. A door was opened, and she was roughly thrust inside. “You wait here,” he said, and the door slammed shut.

  “You can’t do this to me,” she screamed. Nobody answered. The door remained shut. Lucy looked around. She was in a dim, chilly room with a concrete floor. Light came through translucent plastic panels on the roof, and she could make out big vats lined up in rows. She peered in the nearest one and saw a few dozen lobsters resting on the bottom.

  She stood there, looking at them, wondering how she could have been so stupid. She had retraced Tucker’s steps all too well; only to be trapped herself. Whatever Tucker had found had gotten her killed. Lucy was determined that wasn’t going to happen to her. She began exploring the room, looking for a way to escape.

  It only took minutes to discover that there were no windows and only the one door. She turned the knob, but it was locked. She looked up at the roof, wondering how solid the light panels were, when she heard voices approaching. When a few minutes had passed, and the door didn’t open, she pressed her ear against the crack, hoping to hear what they were saying.