The Nightingale Before Christmas (16 page)

“Vermillion, I'm sorry,” I said. “If I'd known where you were going, I wouldn't have followed you. But remember, we've had a murder at the show house, and you're one of the few people in the house whose whereabouts last night I know nothing about, and you were acting incredibly furtive.”

“Meg does have a point, Vermillion,” Robyn said.

Vermillion's shoulders slumped.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I just get really nervous when I'm bringing someone to the house. And if it makes you feel any better, last night I was here at the shelter. All night.”

“Vermillion's been staying here on night duty,” Robyn said. “And we had a new family move in last night. I arrived with them around ten thirty, and I didn't leave until past one. She was helping, too. So I think she's in the clear on the murder.”

“Excellent,” I said.

“If I knew anything, I'd tell you,” Vermillion said. “I loathed Clay and I wanted him out of the house, but still, it's not right for someone to murder him.”

“Why don't you go ahead and get dinner started?” Robyn said to the women at the table. “I just want to have a quiet word with Meg. Vermillion, can you help them?”

Vermillion lugged the child she was carrying into the kitchen. Robyn led me back out onto the porch.

“So how long has Caerphilly had a battered women's shelter?” I asked.

“Only been operating six months,” she said.

“Keeping it secret for six months is a miracle in a small town like this.”

“And Vermillion is one of our best volunteers,” she said. “Although I've been worried about her lately.”

“Worried? Why?” I asked. Would it have something to do with Clay?

“She's really good with the residents because she's been through what they're going through,” Robyn said. “Not here, but back home, wherever home was. She hasn't told me much more than that. She was doing pretty well until the last few weeks. Lately she's taken to sleeping here overnight most nights.”

“Did something happen to her here in Caerphilly?”

“No,” Robyn said. “I asked her. She said no—and I believe her—but she also said there was someone in the house she didn't trust.”

“Clay Spottiswood,” I said.

“Yes.” Robyn nodded. “Not that she said as much, but it stands to reason.”

“Do you think he … threatened her in some way?”

“I think she'd have told me if he did,” Robyn said. “But I trust her judgment. Not her fashion sense, mind you. But her ability to spot someone capable of violence, absolutely.”

“Yesterday, when she arrived at the house, Rose Noire said she could feel the negative energy trying to keep her out,” I said. “And that there was something evil in the house.”

“Rose Noire is a good person,” Robyn said. “I trust her judgment, too. Do you think this man Clay was evil?”

The question surprised me.

“No,” I said, after thinking for a few moments. “Unpleasant, yes. Responsible for that negative energy, definitely. He was not a nice person. Maybe even a violent one. But evil? No. If there really was evil in the house, maybe it was that someone was already planning to kill him.”

“Yes.” Robyn nodded emphatically. “So be careful out there. There's an evildoer still at large.”

Then her mood lightened.

“We're having chili for dinner,” she said. “One of our current residents is a fabulous cook. Would you like to stay and share it?”

“I would love to,” I said. “But I'm going to miss the start of Michael's show if I don't rush over to the theater right now. Rain check?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And you do realize now that you've found your way here to the safe house, we'll figure out a way to make use of you.”

“I'll count on it.”

I tried to follow my own advice as I walked back to the car, matter-of-factly, no tiptoeing or looking furtively over my shoulder. But I still found myself breathing a sigh of relief that I saw only a few perfectly innocent-looking vehicles and pedestrians as I wound my way out of the quiet neighborhood.

And I realized, with a start, that the safe house was only about ten blocks from the show house. Vermillion could have walked here in ten minutes. We must have spent at least two or three times that driving around town. Of course, she hadn't just been coming here, she'd been picking up the resident who needed a safe way of getting home. Still—if Vermillion had been alone for as little as half an hour …

I'd have to trust Robyn on that. Robyn, and the chief's good instincts.

Of course, if Vermillion really had been afraid of Clay, knowing that he had been so close by could partly explain her growing uneasiness at the house.

I was getting close to the theater, and needed to focus all my attention on finding a parking space nearby. Or at least in the same time zone.

I raced in just in time to claim the seat my family had been saving for me on the far end of the front row. Not the best seat in the house, as Dad kept telling me apologetically, but I didn't mind. I'd heard Michael do his one-man show more than a couple of times now—part of the entertainment, for me, was to watch how the audience reacted to him. And I could do that more easily from the side of the theater.

And, of course, I also wanted to watch Josh and Jamie's reactions—they'd seen the show last year, of course, but now they were a year older, and considered themselves veteran theatergoers, thanks to our season tickets to the Caerphilly Children's Theater.

At last the house lights dimmed. A single spotlight lit the podium, and the sound crew played a few bars of a group of carolers singing “Good King Wenceslas.” Then the music faded as if the carolers were strolling away, and Michael stepped onstage, to be greeted with thunderous applause.

He bowed, and waited till the applause had died down—and both twins had been induced to sit down instead of standing on their seats—before opening.

“
A Christmas Carol,
by Charles Dickens,” he read out. “Stave one: Marley's Ghost.”

I sat back to enjoy the show. But after a few paragraphs, Dickens's words suddenly drew me out of the story and back into thinking about the events of the last two days.

“Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, ‘My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?'” Michael proclaimed. “No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge.”

He could be talking of Clay. Clay wasn't evil, any more than Scrooge was. Unpleasant, both of them, to be sure. Uncivil, rude, selfish, misguided—I could think of any number of uncomplimentary words that would apply to both.

But not evil. And Scrooge hadn't started off bad. At some point, for some reason, he'd taken the wrong path. But he'd reformed. Been redeemed.

Clay never would be.

As Michael recounted Scrooge's journey with the Ghost of Christmas Past, I tried to imagine what would happen if the same ghost had visited Clay.

And I drew a complete blank.

What if Clay's murderer wasn't anyone in the show house, but someone from his past?

The past I knew nothing about.

“None of my business,” I murmured, causing Mother, who was next to me, to turn and raise one eyebrow inquiringly.

I smiled and shook my head.

I needed to focus on Michael's performance. But my mind continued to wander until my eyes, also wandering, lit on Rob, near the other end of our row of family members.

Of course. Rob. There had to be information online about Clay, and Rob was the one to help me with it. He might know next to nothing about computers himself, but as the CEO of Mutant Wizards, his highly successful computer game development company, he had access to all sorts of highly skilled techies. As soon as the show was over, I'd ask him to lend me one. Someone really good at online research, who could find me every detail of Clay Spottiswood's past.

With that decided, I was able to turn my attention to the show.

And not a minute too soon. I realized that while Jamie was sitting completely still, attention riveted to his father's every word and every gesture, Josh was displaying his devotion in a rather different way.

He was imitating Michael. When Michael rubbed his chin thoughtfully to indicate Scrooge's puzzlement, Josh rubbed his chin. When Michael threw out his hands to express Scrooge's delight at seeing his old master Fezziwig, Josh threw out his hands. And when Michael, describing the dancing at Fezziwig's Christmas party, leaped into the air and clicked his heels together, Josh bobbed out of his seat.

People were starting to notice. In fact, they weren't just starting to notice, they were staring and giggling. And Dad, on one side of him, and Michael's mother, on the other, weren't doing a thing.

“Josh!” I hissed. He was several seats down and didn't hear me at first. “Josh!”

He turned in the middle of pretending to play the fiddle and looked at me.

“Not now,” I said.

He frowned.

“It's Daddy's turn to do the play,” I said. “You can do it when we get home.”

He slumped back into his seat.

“Okay,” he said, in a small voice.

A voice I shouldn't have been able to hear.

I looked around. Everyone was staring. Even Michael, up on stage, was watching, and suppressing laughter. Then he bowed very deeply to Josh, who sat up a little straighter and smiled again.

Michael went on with the show. Josh, to my relief, remained silent, and mostly still. Though I could tell, from the way his mouth often moved, and the fact that his hands occasionally twitched in an almost imperceptible echo of Michael's hands, that he was planning to hold me to the notion of doing a performance of his own at home.

And the rest of the show went just fine. Even though I could repeat large chunks of it by heart, I never tired of hearing Dickens's words in Michael's voice. And all of the English holiday traditions Dickens described—and I suspect helped create—were exactly what I had grown up with. When the Ghost of Christmas Past took Scrooge to Fezziwig's party, with its mince pies and dancing, I felt nostalgic for the family parties of my childhood and eager to see the boys enjoy this year's celebrations.

When the Ghost of Christmas Present arrived laden with “turkeys, geese, game, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and great bowls of punch” I began looking forward to the upcoming holiday meals and thanking my lucky stars that Michael's mother was in charge of providing them. And when Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed Scrooge the sorrow the Cratchits were suffering from losing Tiny Tim, audible sniffles could be heard throughout the theater, and I looked down the aisle to make sure the boys remembered that thanks to Scrooge's reformation Tiny Tim would not die. Jamie looked anxious and was holding tightly to Mother's hand, but Josh was fine—he was practicing the look of grave sorrow with which Michael read Bob Cratchit's words: “I promised him that I would walk there on a Sunday. My little, little child! My little child!”

The idea of being without one of the boys was bad enough—but at Christmas! I sniffled a little myself, and wanted to cheer when Scrooge woke from his ordeal and exclaimed “It's Christmas day! I haven't missed it.”

As everyone in the audience slowly filed out of the theater, exclaiming about the show and exchanging Christmas greetings as they went, I caught Rob's sleeve.

“Rob,” I said. “I need to borrow one of your employees. Have you got an online Sherlock who can find out anything about anyone?”

“Sure thing.” He pulled out his phone and turned it on, scrolled through his contacts for a few moments, then nodded.

“Boomer's your guy,” he said. “I'll e-mail you his info.”

“Great,” I said. “How early can I call him tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” Rob sounded amused. “Call him now.”

“It's past eleven,” I said. “It could be midnight before I find a quiet place to call him.”

“He's up,” Rob said. “He keeps vampire hours. If you wait till tomorrow, I wouldn't call him before three or four in the afternoon.”

“And he works for you?”

“Flextime,” Rob said with a shrug.

So while everyone else went backstage to congratulate Michael, I lagged behind, found a quiet corner, and called the number.

“Yeah?” said a voice on the other end.

“Hi, is this Boomer?”

Silence.

“This is Meg Langslow,” I went on.

“Rob's sister,” Boomer said.

I waited for a few moments, but clearly he thought that was enough of a response.

“Rob told me you could help me find out about someone,” I said. “A guy named Claiborne Spottiswood.”

“Spelled?”

Well, at least Boomer's terse style was efficient. I spelled the name and reminded him also to look under “Clay” and every possible misspelling of “Spottiswood” he could think of.

“Standard operating procedure,” he said. “I'll call you when I find something.”

When, not if. I liked the way Boomer thought.

“Thanks,” I said, but he'd already hung up.

I pocketed my phone and headed for the dressing rooms. But along the way I stopped, almost by force of habit, by the rack that usually held copies of the student newspaper. It was empty. Not surprising this late in the evening. Well, I could check their Web site tomorrow to see if they'd run an article on the show house, or for that matter, on the murder.

Wait—the rack wasn't empty because of the late hour. We were on winter break. The newspaper wouldn't be putting out another issue until the students came back, in two weeks. There might be a few students still hanging around for the holidays—students from the area, grad students, students on tight budgets who couldn't afford the fare to go home for the holiday, and students who had something to do in town, like the ones working backstage at Michael's show. Presumably Jessica was one of the few still here. Maybe she was whiling away the long dark days on the near-deserted campus by pursuing stories from the wider community. But by the time the paper's next issue went out, the show house would be over, so an article wouldn't do us any good.