Front Page Teaser

by Rosemary Herbert

As the structure came into sight, Liz was taken by surprise. The ad-free side of the billboard was strung with lights forming the letters, MERRY XMAS LIZ.

  The message in Christmas lights was not the only thing Tom Horton had arranged to brighten Liz’s holiday. Walking up to her house, Liz noticed a fresh-cut Christmas tree leaning against her front door. And beside her stoop, she found a cardboard box wrapped in a garbage bag. A note was taped to this package: “Tom Horton, at your service.” A Christmas tree with a star on top was sketched beside the message.

  Laughing with pleasure, Liz moved the tree aside and leaned it against her house. She and Tom had never celebrated any occasion before this one. Not only had they never been on a date, they’d not even shared coffee together anywhere but at Liz’s house. Overcome with surprise at Tom’s attention now, Liz picked up the box, unlocked her door, and entered her small abode. Even before taking off her coat, Liz tore open the box. It was packed with five strings of lights, a multisocket adapter to plug them into, and four more gift-wrapped items of varying shapes and sizes. Intrigued, Prudence climbed into the large box and purred contentedly while Liz looked up Tom’s phone number. The address listed was Tip Top St., Brighton. Now Liz realized why that street name had seemed familiar to her. Tom must have mentioned it at some point. Smiling, she dialed his number.

  “I’m on my way,” he said, with unguarded warmth, when she invited him over.

  “Wait!” she said, and heard herself giggling. “You have to wait an hour before setting out. There’s something I need to do.”

  “Please, don’t feel like you have to give me a present!” Tom said. “I know I surprised you with mine.”

  “Well, I want to surprise you, too,” Liz said.

  Hanging up the phone, she found a foil pie plate, some scissors, and an ice pick. Then she cut the plate into a star shape, used the ice pick to poke holes parallel with the star’s edges, and, after a moment’s hesitation, poked more holes in the shape of a heart at the center of the star. Then, she took out a bottle of champagne and set it in the snow pile beside her doorstep, tucked her travel bag under her bed, and changed into a bright green, tunic-length sweater and some black velvet leggings. Finally, she took out red tissue paper and used some to wrap the homemade gift.

  Liz was rummaging in her freezer for something to cook when Tom rang her doorbell. Before opening the door to him, Liz turned on her fireplace switch and ran her fingers through her hair. Tom stood on the doorstep grinning, but even as he picked up the tree to carry it indoors, he remembered to wipe his feet on the mat.

  As Tom carried the tree into the room, trunk end first, so as not to snap any of its branches against the doorjamb, Liz said, “Oh, but I don’t have a tree stand.”

  “Maybe you do,” Tom winked. “I think it’s time to open the present wrapped in the reindeer paper.”

  Sure enough, the package contained a tree stand. While Tom cut off the bottom of the trunk with a saw he’d thought to bring, Liz went back to her freezer and examined it with disappointing results. But she did have the makings of crêpes, so she made up a batch of crêpe batter and set it in the refrigerator to settle. Then she steadied the tree while Tom locked it into the stand.

  Crawling out from under the tree, Tom said, “I’ll bet you’re wondering what you’ll use to decorate it, aren’t you? Don’t worry. If you put enough lights on the tree, you almost don’t need any ornaments. But if you’ve got a needle and thread, I’ve got the makings of a garland. You’d better open present number two, in the snowman paper.”

  Liz opened the cylindrical package and found it was a jar of popcorn kernels.

  “I’ll be right back,” Tom said, pulling on his jacket and running out to his truck.

  By the time Tom returned with a perforated metal popping box on a long handle, Liz had set about peeling four apples, which she sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and set to simmer in a pot on the stove.

  “I could have brought microwaveable popcorn but I knew you had the fireplace and I thought this would be more fun,” Tom said, pouring kernels into the boxy popper.

  “Where did you get that thing?”

  “Scouts. I bet I never told you I’m a Boy Scout leader. I got this to take on our Camporees. Here,” Tom said, “you hold it over the heat while I get the lights on the tree.”

  “What’s a ‘Camporee’?”

  “It’s when a bunch of troops get together and camp in one place. We always have a big campfire with all the boys together.”

  While the aroma of apples mixed with the fragrance of fresh popcorn in the little house by the turnpike, Tom attached lights to the tree in a slapdash manner.

  “Doesn’t matter how evenly you place them if you’ve got enough of them,” he explained.

  Any doubts Liz might have had about the wisdom of his words were erased when he turned out the table lamps and the two stood together gazing at the illuminated tree.

  “It’s beautiful,” Liz said, “and even more lovely for the surprise of it all,” she said, placing her gift for him under the tree. “Maybe you’d better open the gift I made for you.”

  “Let’s wait,” Tom said. “If you don’t mind, that is. I don’t want this all to be over too soon.”

  “Neither do I,” Liz agreed. Feeling slightly overwhelmed by Tom’s smile, she returned to the stove to stir the apples and make the crêpes. Meanwhile, Tom arranged his two remaining gifts under the tree and then, opening the sewing box Liz pointed out to him, he set about stringing popcorn on thread.

  When the crêpes were ready, Liz spread a tablecloth on the floor in front of the tree, set a votive candle in a glass globe between herself and her friend, and asked Tom to bring in the champagne. After he’d popped the cork and filled two glasses, Liz produced the plates of apple-filled crêpes. Sitting cross-legged on the old tablecloth, facing one another, the reporter and the billboard hanger raised their glasses in a toast.

  “God bless us every one!” Tom said, smiling broadly. “The two of us in particular.”

  “If you haven’t got a penny a ha’penny will do. When I haven’t got a Christmas tree, I’ll call on you!” Liz sang, laughing.

  It was such a delicious experience, sitting in the glow of the Christmas tree, that Liz was loath to go to the door in answer to an unexpected knock. But she did get up and looked through the small windowpane to see who was on her doorstep. Partially hidden behind a lavish bouquet of white chrysanthemums, deep red roses, and holly, she saw Cormac Kinnaird.

  Staggered, she nonetheless gathered together some vestige of poise and opened the door to him.

  “I know I behaved appallingly the other night,” the doctor said. “I’m like that sometimes. But I wanted you to have these.”

  “They’re lovely,” Liz said, taking the flowers. “Would you like to step in and meet my friend Tom?” she added, stepping back from the doorway.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea you had a—a guest. I would never have barged in, had I known.”

  “Please, join us in some champagne,” Tom said in a friendly tone that contrasted with the expression of sad perplexity on his face.

  “I wouldn’t think of it. I’m interrupting,” the doctor said. “But thank you—both.”

  After Cormac Kinnaird left, Liz carried the bouquet to her kitchen counter, pulled out a large spaghetti pot, filled it with water and set the stems in it.

  “Aren’t you going to get a vase?” Tom asked. “It’s a nice bouquet.”

  “I don’t have a big enough vase for it. And, even if I did, I don’t want to take the time away from our celebration to arrange them now. They’re in water. They can wait.”

  Liz returned to her position across from Tom on the tablecloth.

  “You’re probably wondering who that was.”

  “That’s your business.”

>   “You’re right in more ways than you think. He’s someone I’ve met through my job—a forensics guy who’s helping me on the missing mom case.”

  Tom made no reply.

  “To return to more important things,” Liz said, “it’s time for you to open a present.”

  This time, Tom was ready for his gift. Opening it with care, he smiled widely when he saw the heart at the center of the homemade star. And when he reached out for Liz’s hand and clasped it tightly she needed no words from him to realize how much it meant to him.

  “Merry Xmas, Tom,” Liz said, pronouncing the “X” in honor of the billboard display.

  “Merry Xmas to you, too,” he replied, handing her a small present in a jewelry box.

  Liz was concerned. An expensive gift on top of providing an instant Christmas would be too much, she thought.

  But Tom must have known that would be the case.

  Slowly lifting the lid of the jewelry box, Liz looked inside and burst into gleeful laughter. The box contained a key ring and chain, on the end of which dangled a brass monkey.

  If Tom had any concerns that his gift would be underwhelming after the arrival of Cormac Kinnaird’s magnificent bouquet, those worries were wiped out when Liz stood up, pulled Tom to a standing position, too, and threw her arms around him in an enthusiastic hug.

  “Something’s missing! We need some music,” she said, removing the Erik Satie CD from the CD player and replacing it with a Bing Crosby Christmas album. As Bing crooned “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” Liz sat down and began to string popcorn for the tree.

  “Wouldn’t you like to string some more, too?” she asked Tom, who remained standing.

  “Not yet. There’s something else missing, too, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll see,” Tom said. And picking up the ice pick, scissors, and strips of pie plate Liz had forgotten to clear off her desk, he set about fashioning a ring of foil with holes punched in it. Borrowing an extra needle and thread from Liz, he sewed the ring to the back of the star, making use of the holes Liz had punched on one of the star’s points. Then, he took Liz’s hands and pulled her to a standing position. Standing on a chair, he slipped the tin ring over the topmost point of the tree.

  “But that’s your present!” Liz exclaimed. “You should take it home for your tree!”

  “If it’s my present, I get to decide where it belongs. And I think your tree needs my stah,” he said in his winning Boston accent.

  “You might just be right,” Liz said, smiling at him.

  As Bing changed his tune to “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” Tom took Liz in his arms, kissed her tenderly on the lips, and led her in a slow dance on the popcorn-strewn tablecloth.

  Chapter 13

  The next morning, the thin winter sunlight that spilled through the window onto the Christmas tree could not hold a candle to the glow that had shone there the night before. Alone in her bed, regarding the tree from across the room, Liz saw this, and told herself it didn’t matter. It was enough to enjoy the memory of Tom’s surprise.

  Nor was Liz disturbed by Tom’s 3:00 a.m. exit. Picking up the brass monkey key chain on her night table, she turned it over in her hands and recalled how relieved she had been to find it, rather than an expensive gift, in the box. It was pleasant to discover Tom’s evident affection, but she was also aware she had never before then considered him as a potential date. This line of thinking led her to wonder if her pleasure in remembering last evening stemmed from receiving unexpected attention and treats or if she would have been attracted to Tom without them.

  Then, too, she mused, while regarding the large bouquet leaning at an angle in her spaghetti pot, how differently the evening might have progressed had the enigmatic Dr. Kinnaird arrived at Gravesend Street before Tom did.

  Kicking off her covers at the thought of two men surprising her with Christmas attention she had not sought, Liz gave her body rather more attention than usual in the shower, and while her hair was drying, she set about arranging Cormac’s bouquet in a hammered metal ice bucket. Clearing her desk of the pie-plate scraps, ice pick, and scissors, she set the bouquet upon it and stood back to study the effect.

  But there was little time to linger. Although it was Christmas Eve day, Liz was scheduled to show up in the Banner newsroom, so she put on a snow-white angora sweater and doe-colored slacks, grabbed a plastic bag full of chocolate Santas, and donned her coat and gloves. Then, with a look over her shoulder at the tin star on the top of her Christmas tree, she smiled and left her house. As Liz crossed the short distance to her car, she noticed that the sunlight had fought and lost a battle with a sky full of clouds. The weather was unexpectedly mild, too. It looked like it would rain.

  The raindrops that soon followed, splattering onto her windshield and soaking into the snow cover, might have dampened her spirits. But Liz was too intent on business to think along those trite lines. Instead, she pulled into an ugly strip mall made even less attractive by a huge sign with the words “EXTENDED SHOPPING HOURS!!” spelled out in large plastic letters set in slits on a vinyl signboard. The eyesore was also eye-catching, since it was elevated on the back of a flatbed truck.

  Fortunately, the cellular phone shop was less mobbed than the toy store next door to it. If cell phones were in demand this year, those who shopped for them evidently did so at a more reasonable hour than did the last-minute toy crowd. Liz was disappointed to learn that although she could purchase a cell phone on the spot, thanks to the holiday, it would take forty-eight hours to activate it. Still, she made the purchase, and drove on to the Banner newsroom.

  “How would you like to cover some hard news for a change?” Dermott McCann asked Liz as she handed him a chocolate Santa. “Mind you, you’re not getting the assignment thanks to this big bribe,” he added, unwrapping the candy and swallowing it in two bites.

  “Where’re you sending me?”

  “Poultry place in East Cambridge. Seems some guy dressed in a Santa suit ripped off a ton of turkeys in the early hours of the morning.”

  Liz wrote down the address and, tossing holiday greetings and chocolate Santas to her co-workers as she passed by their desks, crossed the newsroom to her own desk. She used the phone book there to look up the address of the Arabic-speaking book dealer who had been recommended to her by Molly at Widener Library. As she had recalled, his shop was located in the same multi-ethnic neighborhood as the poultry place.

  The neighborhood was alive with activity as Liz pulled the Tracer into a parking spot. While two Cambridge police officers decked the building and nearby parking meters with bright yellow plastic ribbon reading POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS, a harried-looking Portuguese butcher complained to a policeman in plain clothes, “It’s criminal, no? To take-a my turkeys like that!” The butcher rubbed his hands on his bloodied apron and added, “I just-a killed them this morning for the Christmas dinners. My sign, it tells-a the truth. ‘Fresh Killed,’” he read, pointing proudly to the bright yellow, hen-shaped sign jutting out from the building over his head.

  “Good morning, Officer, and good morning to you, too, sir,” Liz said, addressing the policeman and butcher in turn. “I’m Liz Higgins of the Beantown Banner. Do you mind telling me what happened here?”

  “Mr. Torrentino here claims his shop assistant, Lucarno, gave some guy dressed in a Santa suit twenty-seven birds this morning.”

  “Fresh-killed! Put that in the pay-puh. Four and twenty fresh-killed turkeys, two ducks, and one goose,” the butcher said.

  “Where’s Lucarno now? Why would he give away the turkeys?

  “It’s turkeys, two ducks, and one goose. All fresh-killed. Not only the turkeys,” Mr. Torrentino said. “He’s a-went with the other policeman to the station. He’s a-gonna look at the mugs shots, like-a they have on the televisio
n.”

  “To see if he can I.D. the thief,” the police officer interjected. “Kid claimed the Santa told him he was there to pick up the birds for charity.”

  “Lucarno didn’t check with you before he gave them away?” Liz asked the butcher.

  “That’s a-right. The idiot, he’s a-never asked me.”

  “More a scam than a straightforward theft, then? Is that how you see it, Officer?” Liz asked.

  “That about sums it up. Kid did chicken shit to prevent it, though. In fact, he helped load the birds into the van they were taken away in. He actually helped the birds fly the coop,” the officer smiled, obviously proud of his own joke. “And here’s the kicker—after all that, he couldn’t describe the vehicle!”

  “May I quote you? Sorry, Officer, I didn’t get your name.”

  “Sure you can quote me. And it’s Hurley. Detective Matt Hurley.”

  “What’s with all the crime scene tape, then, Detective Hurley?” Liz inquired.

  The policeman whispered in Liz’s ear, “Makes Mr. Torrentino here feel like something’s being done. Don’t ever let anyone tell you the Cambridge Police don’t have a heart.”

  “Thanks, Detective. Will you give me a call if anything else develops?” Liz asked, handing him her card. “And by the way, do you know where Turkoman Books is located?”

  “That way, past the gravestone yard, cigar shop, and curtain place. It’s upstairs, over a shop called Rosalita’s Notions.”

  “Thanks, and Merry Christmas.”

  “Yeah. You, too.”

  After getting a few more details for her story, Liz retrieved an umbrella from her car and set out on foot to find Turkoman Books. With the raw drizzle intensifying into a pounding rain and the sodden snow banks oozing slush puddles, it might not have been a pleasant walk, but there was something oddly heartwarming about the plethora of Christmas lights and cheap decorations that ornamented the area. Even Empire Monument Works—a yard filled with shaped blocks of granite awaiting the names of the dearly departed to come—was strung with colored lights. Looking at one block carved in the shape of linked hearts with a cross—instead of Cupid’s arrow—piercing the pair on an angle, Liz told herself even gravestone merchants deserve a little holiday cheer.