Christmas Stalkings (29 page)

“Do you celebrate Christmas Eve or Christmas Day in Norway?” I asked Margret he.

“Christmas Eve,” she said promptly. “That is when the Christmas gnome brings all the presents.”

I smiled at her more benevolently than usual and suppressed any comment about the Christmas gnome. Really, was it a Christian country or a European Disneyland?

“You know, I think we’ll do that this year,” I said to Annabelle later than evening. “Celebrate
our
Christmas on Christmas Eve, after the babies have gone to bed. Then we can give all our time and attention to them on Christmas Day itself. Their day, entirely and completely.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Annabelle, smiling her melting-fudge smile. “When you come to think about it, Christmas Day should be just for the little ones, shouldn’t it?”

Soon the packages began to pile up under the tree. Presents from grandparents, aunties, presents from constituents, especially from businessmen and property developers anxious to keep on the right side of me. Most of them were for Gavin and Janet, of course, but Annabelle and I soon had a respectable number. I began to separate the piles—the children’s on one side of the tree, ours on the other.

On December the twenty-first I put the suspect package into the pile—a brown padded envelope, with a stamp and a fake postmark. It nestled shyly under bigger and gaudier packages.

Christmas is a very uninteresting time in politics. Nothing important gets announced (unless it is something dodgy we are hoping to slip past the public with little publicity), and so many of the MPs slope off home early that there is very little of the cut and thrust of political infighting which is what I excel at. Even in the department things slackened off. I was able to get home on two or three afternoons in the lead-up period. I found Annabelle out shopping and the kids in the charge of Margret he. Margret he proved very unresponsive to my suggestions of how we should spend the afternoon. Really, Norwegians are not all they’re cracked up to be.

Once she had got the idea of a special dinner for us on Christmas Eve, Annabelle chattered on about what it should be. The damned kids insisted on turkey on

The Day, of course, though I can think of about twenty meats I would find more interesting. We finally decided on a cold meal—light, but with a few touches of luxury. Margret he was flying back to Bergen on the twenty-third, but she did some of the preparations before she went. We really get quite a lot of work out of Margret he. I made one or two suggestions—not that I expected to eat anything much, but in order that it should look right to the investigating officers. I would have been a superb stage director. Annabelle said she could get some of the things at the delicatessen around the corner, and she would get the rest at Harrods. She also said it was going to be an absolutely smashing evening.

The day dawned. The children (“the babies,” as Annabelle calls them, though they are no longer that, thank God) were of course wild with pre-Christmas excitement, so I escaped to the office for most of the day. There was, after all, nothing left to do. Soon after I got home I suggested it was time for the kids to go to bed, and as they were confidently expecting a visit from Santa Claus, they didn’t make too many objections. Then I began setting the scene. I put the drinks on the phone table at the far end by the door. I intended to be over there when Annabelle opened the package. I toyed with the idea of being rather closer, to get the odd cut and scar from the debris, but I rejected the idea. Annabelle began bringing on the cold collation with a series of appreciative shrieks— “Doesn’t this look
scrumptious?”
and the like. The room was beautifully warm from the central heating, and I rejected Annabelle’s suggestion that I light the fire. In fact, I was feeling distinctly sweaty, and I would have taken off” my jacket and tie, except that I hate that sort of slovenliness. Round about seven-thirty, I said,

“I think it’s about time for a drink.”

“Oh, goody!” said Annabelle. Getting God had not quenched her taste for dry martinis. I got her a large one with plenty of ice. Then I got for myself a gin and tonic that was mostly tonic and ice. Keep cool, George, keep cool!

“Now!” I said, and we looked at each other and smiled. We had agreed to open presents when we had our first drinks.

First of all we opened our own to each other. Annabelle
oohed
over the Carrier pendant (“You
shouldn’t
have,
Georgie
boy! What must it have cost?”) I tried to look pleased with a very expensive shaving kit.

“I really thought you should start shaving
properly,
Georgie
. Electric razors are frightfully
infra,
and people are starting to comment on your midnight shadow. Look what harm that did to Richard Nixon.”

I regarded my midnight shadow as part of my saturnine and macho image. Nobody ever found Richard Nixon macho.

“I promise, my darling,” I said.

Then she opened her
Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature.

“Oh, wonderful! How
thoughtful
you are,
Georgie
-Porgy. People say that reading this is an entirely new experience!” She opened it and read: “‘There were shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night.’“

I suppose I was lucky she didn’t sing it. She sometimes takes part in those come-along-and-sing Messiahs which are so very
matey
and democratic—practically the
Labour
Party at song. I opened a little square box and found a three-disc set of
Luciano
Pavarotti’s greatest hits. Talk about things being
infra!

“Perfect!” I said.

So we worked through our presents, eating chocolates and trying things on till at last she laid her hand on the brown padded envelope and took it up.

“What
is
this one?” she said.

My heart stood still. I tried with all the nonchalance my sweaty state would allow to take up one of my presents and open it.

“Haven’t the faintest idea.”

“I noticed it the other day. Did it really come by post?”

“How would I know?”

“Because neither Margret he nor I took it in, so you must have done.”

“Can’t remember. I may have done, I suppose.”

“If so, it must have been Sunday. It’s the only day when you were on your own here. I didn’t think they delivered parcels on Sunday. What did the postman look like?”

Normally this would have been a cue for a spurt of sarcasm on my part. I hoped Annabelle would attribute it to the Christmas spirit that it was not forthcoming.

“Good heavens, one doesn’t notice what postmen look like,” I said mildly. “If you’re wondering who sent it, you’d better open it and find out.”

She was looking at it closely.

“The postmark is all smudged. In fact it doesn’t look like a real postmark at all.” She got up. “
Georgie
, I think we ought to phone the police.”

She walked over toward the phone. I felt my face
going red; our positions in my plan were exactly reversed. I forced myself to take up the package.

“Of course I see what you’re getting at, darling, but I really do think that you’re panicking needlessly. I don’t see any of the things the inspector said should put us on our guard. It’s not from Ireland, the name is spelled right—there are none of the signs. A smudged postmark is hardly unusual.”

Her finger was poised over the press-button dial.

“Better safe than sorry.”

“No!”

My voice had come out very loud. The police would almost certainly be able to trace the package back to me if they got it intact Annabelle paused.

“No?”

“I mean . . . we’d look awful fools . . . disturbing them on Christmas Eve, for nothing.”

“How unusually considerate of you,
Georgie
. But you’ve been unusual for quite a while now. I’m beginning to think that Paul is right”

“Paul?”

“A chap I’ve been seeing.”

“Seeing?”

“He said that if I drove you too mad with my Pollyanna act, it wouldn’t be divorce I drove you to, but murder. He’s seen you on television from the House. He thinks you’re mad.”

“Annabelle, look, this really has gone too far. There’s no need at all to call the police. I was told all about suspect packages. This one hasn’t got the look of one at all.”

She stood there, twenty feet away from me, her hand poised over the dial, very, very cool.

“All right, buster: open it”

It’s no wonder Margaret
Maron
chose to write mysteries; her own mother is one of the world’s great mystery fans. And it’s not surprising that Margaret agreed to do a short story for Christmas Stalkings. She has always thought of herself primarily as a short-story writer, even though she’s better known for her superbly crafted novels. Nor is it any accident that this one takes place in rural North Carolina. Her own roots go more than seven generations deep into its sandy soil, where she still lives on her family’s farm south of Raleigh.

The only person who’s privileged to read and critique Margaret’s work in progress is her artist husband, Joseph
Maron
. She says they fight a lot, but her system appears to be working, judging from critics’ acclaim and the number of times she’s been nominated for awards in the mystery field. So far, only one of her novels,
Bloody Kin,
has been set in fictional but very real Colleton County, N.C., but we understand more will be coming. In the meantime, here’s your chance to spend New Year’s Eve in that enigmatic land of the black-eyed pea.

Vlarnolla’s
first question after I bailed her out of jail was, “What’s a revisionist?” Her second was, “
Ain’t
you getting too old for a
squinchy
little shoe box like this?”

“You wanted a Cadillac ride home, you should’ve called James Rufus Sanders,” I told her, referring to the most successful black lawyer in Colleton County, North Carolina. I switched on the heater of my admittedly small sports car against the chill December air and helped pull the seat belt across her broad hips, an expanse further broadened by her bulky winter coat “You mean recidivist?”

“I reckon. Something like that
Miz
Utley said I was one and I won’t going to give her the satisfaction of asking what it was.
Ain’t
something ugly, is it?”

“
Miz
Utley never talks ugly and you know it,” I said as I pulled out of the courthouse parking lot and headed toward
Darkside
, the nearest thing Dobbs has to a purely black section. “Magistrates have to be polite to everybody, but under the habitual-offender statutes—”

“Don’t give me no lawyer talk,
Deb’rah
,” she snapped. “I wanted that, I
would’ve
called Mr. Sanders.

“It means this isn’t the first time Billy Tyson’s caught you shoplifting in his store, and this time he wants to put you
under
the jail, not in it,” I snapped back.

She leaned back and loosened the buttons of her dark-blue coat “
Naw
, you won’t let him do that.”

It was three days past Christmas, but she still wore a sprig of artificial holly topped by two tiny yellow plastic bells that had been dipped in gold glitter and sparkled gaily in the low winter sun.

Marnolla Faison was barely ten years older than me, yet her short black hair was almost half gray and her callused hands had worked about twenty years harder than mine. In truth our families had worked for each other more years than either of us could count and it looks like it’s going to go on another generation, even though Marnolla left the farm before she was full grown.

“What in God’s name made you think you could walk out with all that baby stuff?” I asked.
“Two
boxes of diapers? Who’s had a baby now?”

“Nobody,” she said.

I stopped for the light and we waved to Miss Sallie Anderson, waiting to cross at the corner.

Miss Sallie motioned for Marnolla to roll down her window and she leaned in to greet us. Her white curls were covered by a fuzzy blue scarf that exuded a delicate fragrance of rose sachet and talcum. “Did y’all have a nice Christmas?”

“Yes, ma’am,” we chorused. “How ‘bout you?”