Christmas Card Murder

by Leslie Meier

  “He lied to you about going ice fishing with Sal. It’s because he was up in Ellsworth at the dealership picking it up for you,” Sergio said.

  “He asked us if he could store it here until Christmas morning. He was going to jog over really early before you got up and drive it back to your place, where it would be waiting for you in the driveway when you came down to open your presents in front of the tree,” Randy said with a big smile. Then he turned to Sergio and chided, “Isn’t that an incredible present? What did you get me, socks?”

  “You will love them. They have little reindeer embryoed on them,” Sergio cracked.

  “Embroidered!” Randy corrected his sometimes-English-challenged husband, whose first language was Portuguese. “Not embryoed. An embryo is something entirely different!”

  “Whatever,” Sergio snapped, waving him away with his hand before turning back to Hayley. “Of course, after you and Mona and Rosana Moretti found Carol’s body, I had to make sure. I drove up to Ellsworth and talked to everyone at the dealership, and they all confirmed Bruce was there signing papers at the time of the murder.”

  “Bruce didn’t want to spoil the surprise, so he had Sal cover for him and tell you he had been with him ice fishing on Eagle Lake,” Randy added.

  Hayley heaved a huge sigh of relief.

  Her fears were unfounded.

  Bruce was in the clear.

  Randy stepped forward and grabbed Hayley by the wrist and looked her squarely in the eyes. “But you have to promise us, you won’t say anything. You need to pretend to be totally surprised on Christmas morning when Bruce takes you out to the driveway and presents it to you.”

  Hayley nodded, crossing her heart with her free hand. “I promise.”

  She could be a good actress, too, if she needed to be.

  But at the moment, not even the acting talent of Meryl Streep could hide the enormous relief on her face, now that she had proof her husband wasn’t a lying cheat or a marauding killer.

  Chapter Twelve

  Hayley’s mind may have been put at ease regarding her own husband, and according to Rosana’s Sal and Mona’s Dennis, they, too, were in the clear. So the puzzling question remained: Why did Carol Waterman write that Christmas card, springing the news that she was planning to run off with one of their spouses? It just didn’t make any sense. If it was simply a joke, it wasn’t a very funny one. At Hayley’s suggestion, she and Rosana arrived at Mona’s house early the next morning for a cup of coffee and a little girl chat as to what might be going on.

  Mona had already been up at six, feeding her wild brood and getting them off to school, at least the few ones left that she hadn’t finally pushed out of the nest. So it was unusually quiet in her kitchen, with no rug rats chasing each other around, screaming at the top of their lungs, and smearing the stainless-steel appliances with their dirty, sticky hands.

  Mona grabbed the pot from the coffeemaker and filled both their cups before setting down a carton of milk and bowl of sugar on the table with a few teaspoons. She plopped herself down across from Hayley and Rosana and shook her head, baffled. “I have no idea what the hell is going on? What was Carol thinking? Maybe she really was just trying to mess with us, scare us into believing one of our husbands was secretly in love with her?”

  Rosana, eyes wide, carefully sipping her steaming coffee, mind racing, said, “I guess we’ll never know why she did it.”

  “Well, at least we can rest easy now, knowing Bruce, Dennis, and Sal are all in the clear for her murder. That’s something to be grateful for, right?” Hayley said, always in search of a silver lining.

  “What makes you say that?” Rosana squeaked, setting her coffee down because her hands were shaking.

  Hayley and Mona both noticed, but chose not to shine a light on her obvious unsteadiness.

  “They all have alibis. There were about a dozen employees at the car dealership who saw Bruce signing the papers for my new car, and Mona’s son Chet was with Dennis when he went up to Ellsworth for Christmas shopping, and Sal—”

  “Sal was ice fishing out on Eagle Lake. Alone. Unless we can question a nearby deer or a trout that may have gotten caught on his fishing line, there is no one to corroborate his story. He could be lying! It still could be him!” Rosana wailed, suddenly panicked again.

  “Rosana, calm down!” Mona bellowed. “It wasn’t Sal!”

  “Mona’s right,” Hayley said, nodding.

  “But how can we be sure?” Rosana asked, her hands still shaking.

  “Because he stank of fish when he showed up at the party!” Hayley exclaimed.

  “He could have just bought some fish at the Shop ’n Save and rubbed them all over himself as a way to make his story seem more believable!” Rosana cried.

  Hayley took Rosana’s hands and squeezed them, hoping to comfort her and to help her stop trembling. “You and Sal have been married how many years now?”

  “Twenty-six,” Rosana whispered.

  “Twenty-six years. Have you ever had any reason to believe Sal would be unfaithful, let alone harm anyone?”

  Rosana slowly shook her head.

  “I’ve worked for the man eight years, and I can tell you he is a good person. He may yell sometimes and try to act like the tough guy, but we all know that inside he’s a mushy sweetheart with not one violent bone in his body!” Hayley confidently declared.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Rosana said. “We had a mouse in the attic once and Sal refused to put one of those sticky traps up there for it to get caught on. You know the ones I’m talking about, where the poor mouse tries to chew his own leg off to escape—”

  “Yes, Rosana! We know what you’re talking about! There’s no need to get so graphic!” Mona barked.

  “Sal used a plastic 7UP bottle, a dab of peanut butter, and a few other things to set a humane trap so the mouse wouldn’t be hurt and he could set him free in the woods.”

  “See? That kind of man isn’t capable of murdering a woman in cold blood by strangling her with a Christmas garland!” Hayley assured her. “What we need to be asking ourselves is why did Carol send us that card?”

  “I’m sure it was to upset me,” Rosana said.

  Mona raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  Rosana took a deep breath and sighed. “Because we had an unpleasant altercation not too long ago.”

  “Rosana, why didn’t you tell us this before?” Hayley asked.

  “Because it wasn’t a big deal and I had completely forgotten about it until just now.”

  “What happened?” Mona asked, leaning in, slurping some coffee from her cup.

  “We were both at a potluck dinner back in March, and everybody was supposed to sign up online to let other people know what they were going to bring. Well, I plumb forgot and just brought my homemade turkey chili. Well, guess what? Carol brought turkey chili, too. And she had remembered to register it online. I thought it was just a funny coincidence, but Carol was furious. She accused me of trying to upstage her, since everyone knows I have the best turkey chili recipe in Bar Harbor. She gave me the evil eye all night, especially as people came up to tell me how much they enjoyed my chili. Carol’s chili was hardly touched. I felt awful. When I tried to apologize to her after the dinner, she refused to talk to me and just stalked off, furious. I’m sure the Christmas card was her way of getting revenge.”

  “Maybe,” Hayley said to herself. “But hearing your story reminds me of my own run-in with Carol Waterman.”

  “You too?” Mona barked, slamming her hands down on her kitchen table and knocking over the bowl of sugar. “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing!” Hayley cried. “But there was certainly no love lost between us. Remember that time about a year ago when Carol was complaining about the young couple who lived next door to her? You know, the ones who never mowed their lawn or took care of their house? Carol was apoplectic. She wrote a scathing op-ed about being a responsible neighbor, which they ignored. Then she tried to get the
city council to act, and although they promised to address her concerns, they got too distracted by the town budget negotiations and never followed up. Carol was at her wit’s end.”

  “Didn’t Carol spray paint something on their garage door late one night?” Rosana asked.

  Hayley nodded. “ ‘Mow Your Damn Lawn.’ Everyone who drove by saw it. It was in bright red paint on their white garage door.”

  “Sergio had to arrest her,” Mona remembered.

  “Yes, and she had to pay a hefty fine and reimburse the couple for the cost of repairs. About a week after that, Carol suddenly got worried about her reputation around town and didn’t want her arrest recorded in the Island Times police beat section. She called me at the office and asked me if I would do her a small favor and pull the arrest from the column. I had to tell her it was too late. The paper had already gone to press and it was probably already up on the website. She was livid. She blamed me! She thought I was purposely trying to humiliate her!”

  “That’s utterly ridiculous!” Rosana gasped.

  “There was nothing I could do!” Hayley said.

  “Okay, so Carol had reasons to hate the two of you,” Mona growled. “But she had no beef with me. Why did she include me in that stupid Christmas card? We’d never had a bad word between us!”

  Frustrated, Hayley’s shoulders sagged. She was totally stumped.

  Mona’s house phone rang and she hauled herself up to her feet and shuffled over to answer the call. “Yeah?”

  That was Mona’s typical phone greeting.

  No cheery “hello” or “good morning.” Just “yeah?”

  Mona listened to whoever was on the other end and then erupted and roared, “What?”

  More listening.

  Hayley and Rosana exchanged curious glances.

  Then another loud “What?”

  Rosana nearly dropped her coffee cup.

  Mona shouted a couple more questions. “He did what?” “What day was that?” She followed by shouting, “I’m going to kill that little hoodlum!”

  Mona finally slammed down the phone and marched back over to the kitchen table. “That was the principal out at the high school. Apparently, Chet’s been in detention the past two weeks and didn’t bother to tell me. The principal was just calling to let me know he didn’t bother showing up on Saturday.”

  “What did he do?” Rosana asked.

  “A few week ago, he and his delinquent buddy Abel got a bunch of dog carriers and stuffed them with chickens from Abel’s family’s farm. They let them loose in the school late one Sunday night, so the next morning the whole faculty was running around chasing frantic chickens.”

  Hayley snorted, unable to stop herself.

  “That’s not the worst part. On Mondays, the cafeteria always serves chicken chow mein for lunch!”

  Hayley and Rosana were now both howling.

  “Apparently, the school sent me an e-mail when the bugger got caught, but it mysteriously got deleted from my account before I saw it. The principal gave him two weeks of detention. The last day he bothered to show up was Friday. I swear I’m going to strangle that kid with my bare hands!”

  Hayley’s laughter subsided as something dawned on her. “Friday?”

  “Yeah, so?” Mona grunted.

  Hayley suddenly froze. “Mona . . .”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “If that’s true, if Chet was serving detention at the high school with a teacher supervising him on the day of our Christmas party . . .”

  Mona stumbled back like she had just been punched in the gut. “Then it would have been impossible for him to be up in Ellsworth with his father doing Christmas shopping.”

  Father and son.

  One of them was lying.

  Chapter Thirteen

  His mother’s icy stare chilled him to the bone. Almost to the point where Hayley could see his whole body shaking.

  “What?” Chet managed to squeak out, lacking any other more articulate response.

  “I asked you why you lied to me,” Mona growled.

  Chet, somewhere in the middle of her large brood age-wise, stood frozen in place like a squirrel in the middle of the road sensing the approach of an oncoming car.

  “I . . . I don’t know what you—”

  “You were in detention when you told me you had gone to Ellsworth with your father for Christmas shopping!” Mona bellowed.

  “Oh, right, that,” Chet mumbled, his mind racing, desperate to come up with some logical explanation that would appease his angry mother. “I can’t really—”

  “You can’t really what?” Mona snapped.

  “I can’t tell you,” Chet whispered, bowing his head, preparing himself for the inevitable onslaught.

  “You can’t tell me?” Mona shrieked.

  Chet, head still down, nodded slightly.

  Mona stepped forward menacingly. “Why not?”

  There was a long silence. Hayley and Rosana were both sitting at the kitchen table when an unsuspecting Chet had ambled in to get himself another soda from the fridge, only to be confronted by his furious mother. Both women now sat motionless at the table, watching the intense drama rapidly unfolding in front of them.

  The pressure was getting too much for the poor kid.

  He glanced over at Hayley and Rosana, hoping to get some support, but both women quickly averted their eyes.

  He was on his own.

  “Because . . . Dad asked me not to say anything,” he stammered, already aware he was inevitably going to lose this battle.

  “Oh, really?” Mona scoffed, one eyebrow raised. “Let me ask you something, Chet. Who are you more afraid of?”

  “Um . . . I don’t . . .”

  “It’s a simple question. Who makes the hair on your neck stand up more? Who do you fear the most, me or your father?”

  This was not a trick question.

  The answer was pretty straightforward.

  “You,” Chet acknowledged.

  “Exactly. So do you honestly think it’s a good idea to stand there and lie to me when we both know I can be your worst nightmare?” Mona challenged.

  “He promised me a motorcycle!” Chet blurted out.

  Mona’s cheeks were a deep, livid red. “Excuse me?”

  She had broken him. He was eager to confess everything in order to avoid corporal punishment. “He said if I lied and said I’d been with him in Ellsworth that day, he’d buy me a Harley-Davidson Street Rod for Christmas, the one I’ve been wanting all year!”

  Mona stared at him, perplexed. “But why?”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted that bike, like really bad.”

  Mona considered this startling revelation for a few more moments, then stared back at her son, eyes narrowing. “Go to your room. You’re grounded.”

  “For how long?” Chet whined.

  “I don’t know! A while! Until you’re thirty-seven!”

  “But—“

  “Go!”

  Chet realized arguing his sentence was futile, at least for now, so he spun around and hightailed it out of the kitchen.

  Without another word, Mona marched out the back door to the driveway. After another quick look between them, Hayley and Rosana jumped out of their chairs and chased after her.

  Outside, Mona was already rummaging through her husband Dennis’s pickup truck.

  Both Mona and Dennis owned matching Fords.

  “What are you doing?” Rosana asked Mona, who was yanking papers out of the glove box.

  “Searching for evidence!” Mona howled.

  Hayley gingerly took a step forward so she was directly behind Mona. “You don’t need to do that, Mona.”

  “I’m going to prove my deadbeat husband is a lying cheat!”

  “The evidence is right here,” Hayley said.

  Mona stopped and cranked her head around. “What are you talking about?”

  “Just take a whiff.”

  Mona sniffed the air, finally taking
in the same lingering smell Hayley had instantly noticed wafting out from inside Dennis’s truck.

  It was distinct and undeniable.

  It was the strong scent of Carol Waterman’s favorite perfume.

  White Diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor.

  The color drained from Mona’s face.

  “She was in this truck,” Mona gasped. Then she flung herself back toward the house, Hayley and Rosana struggling to keep up.

  Inside, Mona spotted Chet hovering near the top of the staircase, craning his neck to see what was going on.

  “I said go to your room!” Mona barked, startling the kid so he dashed into his bedroom to hide.

  Mona yanked open the door leading to the basement and barreled down the stairs, where Dennis was lounging in his man cave. He was sprawled out on the couch, tipping a bottle of beer and watching an old episode of Knight Rider, from his DVD boxed set, on the giant sixty-five-inch flat-screen TV hammered to the wall.

  “Oh, good, you’re home,” Dennis said casually, ignorant to his wife’s fiery mood. “Is there any of that crab dip left in the fridge?”

  Mona stared at the large image of David Hasselhoff on the screen, a stinging reminder of Carol Waterman’s thank-you gift to her husband. She snatched the remote off the wooden coffee table and shut off the TV.

  Dennis finally took notice of the seething rage on his wife’s face. “Something wrong?”

  “It was you! You killed Carol Waterman!” Mona cried.

  Dennis shot up from the couch.

  Frankly, it was the fastest Hayley had ever seen him move since she had met him way back in grade school.

  “Wh-what did you say?”

  “You heard me, Dennis! I know what you did! I have to admit, I have underestimated you all these years! I didn’t even know you had the energy to fill a gas tank, let alone strangle a poor, unsuspecting woman!”

  “I have no idea what you’re prattling on about! What do you mean, I strangled someone?”

  “Carol Waterman!”

  Dennis’s face slowly went pale. “You think I killed Carol?”

  “She’s obviously been in your truck! We nearly gagged on the smell of her perfume!” Mona wailed.