The Nightingale Before Christmas (18 page)

The little hidden wireless speakers were playing “O Holy Night,” and I hummed along as I followed Michael to the kitchen.

“Ham sandwich?” he offered.

“Not for me,” I said. “Maybe just a slice of ham. I'm not doing the show house next year.”

“Are we definitely having another show house next year?”

“If it makes a lot of money for the historical society and draws a lot of tourists, everyone will want to do another one,” I said. “But I'm not doing it.”

“We'll see,” he said.

“I've even figured out who to dump it on instead,” I said.

His mouth was full of ham sandwich, but he raised one eyebrow inquiringly.

“Martha.”

“The bossy one?”

“She's perfect.”

“I thought you found her really annoying and obnoxious.”

“I do,” I said. “But one reason she's so obnoxious is that she's really mad at the committee for not giving her a major room. She's taking it out on all the other designers. So if we put her in charge, she might be a lot less hard to live with.”

“You could be right,” Michael said.

“And if I'm wrong—at least she can get the job done, and I won't be there to be annoyed.”

“Good plan. So have you figured out which of the designers did in Clay?”

“It's starting to look as if none of them did.”

I filled him in on the rest of my day, including my success in figuring out alibis for all but one of the designers.

“Of course the chief's still checking them out, I suppose,” I added. “But I feel a lot better, being reasonably sure I'm not hobhobbing with a murderer all day.”

“Speaking of all day, the rehearsal for the boys' Christmas pageant is tomorrow at eleven. Are you going to be able to make it?”

“Is that tomorrow?”

“The pageant itself is on Christmas eve,” he said. “And I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but that's only two days off.”

“Don't remind me,” I said. “I will make a point of coming to the rehearsal. And maybe we can grab a quick bite afterward. Are they still happy with the costumes?”

“Jamie is,” he said. “And you know Josh.”

Yes, I knew Josh.

Unfortunately, I hadn't made it to the parents' organizational meeting, or the first recital for the pageant. Michael was at both, of course, but I felt guilty that I hadn't been there. And I realized, only a few days ago, that he hadn't told me the important bit of information.

“We need new costumes,” Josh had said one night.

“Can't you wear your costumes from last year?” I'd asked. “Or are they too small?”

Jamie had shrugged.

“Mo-om,” Josh had moaned. “We were animals last year.”

Actually, since they'd been dinosaurs last year, I'd have said they were reptiles. And extinct reptiles to boot. Although, as Grandfather was so fond of pointing out, technically, reptiles had just as much right to be called animals as any other living organism. Still, it was a long way from T. Rex to a sheep.

“Well, what do you want to be this year?” I'd asked. It wasn't as if there were a lot of choices in a nativity play.

Unless Robyn decided to spice things up and add scenes not found in the original text. Based on the boys' preferences, I suspected a scene with pirates would go down well with most of the participants. Perhaps instead of arriving in Bethlehem on a donkey, the Holy Family could come by boat, allowing Joseph to fend off pirates along the way. Or, better yet, what if the Wise Men could encounter a party of Imperial storm troopers—also bound for Bethlehem and clearly up to no good—and repel the them with their light sabers?

I'd abandoned that train of thought and dragged my mind back to the immediate crisis.

“So if you're not animals, what are you?” I'd asked. “Angels?”

“Mo-o-om!” I'd been hoping neither of them would learn to roll their eyes like that until they were teenagers. “
Girls
are angels. And little kids are animals.
Big
boys are
shepherds
!”

As it turned out, Jamie would have been just fine with being an animal. And he would have been quite satisfied with Michael's plan for a shepherd's costume, which was to cut a hole in a piece of burlap for the neck and tie the whole thing together with a length of rope. Josh, however, had demanded better, and his idea of proper shepherd garb would have taxed the expertise of a Savile Row tailor, to say nothing of my poor sewing skills.

It was December, so he'd wanted sleeves. Nicer sleeves. And his tunic wasn't white enough. Could I wash it? The hem was uneven. There was a loose thread. His belt was too tight. His crook was splintery, could I make it smooth? His sandals were too small.

And of course, I couldn't go to all that trouble for Josh and leave Jamie as a ragged lump of burlap. In the end, I'd managed to produce two passable tunics, with sleeves long enough to keep them warm, especially when combined with a blue-and-white striped overcoat. Their crooks were polished till they shone; their belts were made of gold-brocade cord left over when Mother had gotten new curtain ties for her dining room, and we'd delighted them with long, fussy brown beards. It was going to look as if two of the members of ZZ Top were moonlighting in the hills outside Bethlehem.

“What do you think?” I'd asked them, when they finally tried on the finished costumes.

“It's okay,” Josh had said. He still wasn't entirely happy with the sandals.

“This looks great, Mommy,” Jamie had said.

Sometimes, just for a few moments, you're allowed to love one twin more than his brother.

Michael's voice brought me back to the present.

“Always a chance he'll find some kind of problem with his costume and pitch a fit today,” he was saying. “But I think I can hold the threat of making Santa's naughty list over him.”

“Or tell him that if he behaves, Grandma will give him some special passementerie to add to his costume on the night of the pageant.”

“Will he know what passementerie is?” Michael asked. “Because I don't.”

“It can be a surprise,” I said. “And he'll be impressed with the five-syllable word.”

“Well, that was satisfying,” Michael said, as he finished off his sandwich. “Time we hit the hay.”

We both pitched in to tidy up the kitchen, and headed upstairs, yawning.

“Is there really that much left to do on the house?” he asked.

“For me, yes,” I said. “Tickets. Programs. Parking and shuttles. Schedules for the docents. Trying to get some more publicity so ticket sales will pick up. And keeping the designers from doing anything else to damage the house.”

“But what about the designers? Surely they must be getting close to finishing?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “I can look at a room and think it's perfect and if I say that, they look at me as if I'm an idiot. These are people who will repaint a room three or four times because the color doesn't work the way they thought it would. People who can spend five minutes plumping a pillow properly. If I hear the words, ‘it needs … something' one more time, I might lose it. I think they're all going to keep tweaking and improving their rooms right up until the last minute. Beyond the last minute. I'm afraid that when the first paying guests walk in, Mother will ask them if they mind helping her rearrange the furniture.”

“Well, it's only a couple more days,” he said.

“True,” I said. “I can survive anything for a few more days.”

 

Chapter 15

December 22

As I was driving to the show house the next morning, my phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number. Could it be Boomer, reporting back already? I pulled over to answer it. Fortunately, I only said “Hello” rather than “Well, that was quick” or “I guess Rob was joking about how late you slept.”

“Is this the Meg Langslow who's in charge of the Caerphilly Historical Society's Christmas Decorator Show House?” a male voice said.

“Yes,” I said. “May I help you?”

“I'm with the
Richmond Times-Dispatch,
” he said. “I'm supposed to come by to take some shots for a story in the paper. Would noon today be okay?”

I closed my eyes and contemplated how the designers would react if I arrived and told them a photographer would be arriving in four hours. Less than four hours.

“We don't actually open until ten a.m. on December twenty-fourth,” I said. “And as you can imagine, the designers are still busy putting the finishing touches on their rooms.”

“That doesn't matter to me,” he said.

“But it will to them,” I pointed out. “How about a sneak preview an hour before we let the public in on the twenty-fourth?”

“I'm tied up that day. Can we make it three today?”

We finally made it 10:00
A.M.
on the twenty-third. Which was tomorrow.

Now to break the news to the decorators.

I stopped by the Caerphilly Bakery and picked up two dozen assorted doughnuts, bearclaws, and other breakfast pastries, to sweeten the news. And a couple of carryout carafes of coffee, to jump start their efforts.

Most of the designers were already there when I arrived. Sarah was carrying in boxes from her car. As was Violet. What were they up to? Now was time to be putting on finishing touches, not dragging in vast quantities of new stuff.

Mother was showing Tomás and Mateo exactly how she wanted them to put a light touch of gilding on the edges of some of the woodwork.

“Pastries?” she exclaimed. “How nice, dear.”

She smiled indulgently as Mateo and Tomás abandoned their paintbrushes long enough to grab pastries. I carried the rest of the doughnuts and the coffee through to the kitchen. Eustace also had piles of boxes. Clearly it was a trend, and not one I was happy to see under the circumstances.

“Mind if I put these here?” I asked Eustace.

“Fine,” he said. “Just how awful does this cabinet look? Be brutal.”

I came around to where I could see the kitchen cabinets. He'd had all the cabinet fronts replaced with glass-paned doors in a sort of diamond-hatched pattern that looked vaguely Elizabethan. He'd even installed lighting inside the cabinets, the better to see the contents. And I noticed that he'd added—or, more likely, Tomás and Mateo had added—little flourishes of gold on the glass, curlicues and leaves and … well, squiggles. Evidently this was what had inspired Mother to commit retaliatory gilding.

And now he was arranging dishes in the cabinets. A really small number of dishes—especially when compared to the number of boxes he'd used to bring them in. One cabinet held nothing but a turquoise teapot and a matching teacup on the bottom shelf, two hand-painted goblets on the middle shelf, and a blue Fiestaware pitcher on the top one. At this rate, he'd need a lot more cabinets to hold just the dishes and glassware that were spread out along the counter, much less what lurked in the boxes.

“I'm not letting you anywhere near my kitchen,” I said. “But it's beautiful. They all are.”

“Then why don't you want me near your kitchen?” he asked.

“Because I think those glass-fronted cabinets are fabulous, and you'd talk me into having them, and they just wouldn't work,” I said. “We have too much kitchen stuff, and most of it's not decorative—at least not when you have to crowd it in to get all of it put away.”

“Well, you're right, it's not practical,” he said. “But it's beautiful, and people love to see it. Do you think I should switch the pitcher and the teapot?”

“I think you should ask Mother,” I said. “I have no eye for this kind of thing. Meanwhile, I have news.”

The assorted designers and worker bees gathered around the pastry looked up anxiously.

“They caught the killer?” Martha guessed.

“No, I haven't heard anything more about that,” I said. “But a photographer from the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
is coming tomorrow morning to take pictures of the house!”

You'd think I'd announced my intention to have them all shot at sunrise.

“That'll never do,” Martha said.

“We're not nearly ready!” Sarah wailed.

“Oh, great,” Eustace said. “My rooms will be a disaster.”

“Meg, dear, can't you possibly ask him to come a little later?” Mother said. “Christmas eve would be so much better. We could let him in before the general public.”

“I suggested that, and he can't do it,” I said. “He wanted to be here in about an hour. Just be glad I talked him into tomorrow morning at ten.”

They all scattered—though not, I noticed, without taking their share of the coffee and pastries.

Eustace had stopped fiddling with his dishes and was looking around his room as if he'd never seen it before.

“Where to begin?” he muttered.

Out in the great room, Mother was standing in the middle of her room, hands on her hips, slowing turning around to survey it, and frowning, as if everything she had done needed to be ripped out and redone.

“Looks fabulous,” I said as I passed.

She ignored me.

Throughout the house, all the other designers were performing their own variations on what Mother and Eustace were doing. Surveying their rooms as if they'd never seen them before—and evidently finding them wanting.

I stepped into the master bedroom. Which of all the rooms in the house was the one least ready for its close-up. Fat chance distracting one of the others from their pre-photo prepping, so getting it in shape would appear to be my job.

I texted Randall to remind him that we needed a new mattress for the room. And asked if I should buy sheets or if he was taking care of it.

Maybe I should talk to the designers, now that they'd had a few moments to absorb the news. Calm them down, if necessary. Find out if there was anything I could do to help them.