Wreck the Halls (8 page)

More balls, too, from the way he was driving. “What's your hurry?” I groused, slamming both feet onto the imaginary brakes as he sped to a stop sign and tromped his own brake pedal at the very last instant.

“Sorry,” he said, and took off more sedately, spinning his wheels no more than we all did when snow had been recent.

“Now that you’ve got us out here, maybe you’d like to tell us a little more about what we’re doing,” Ellie suggested.

Peter was slim, dark-haired, personable, and equipped with the loveliest confidential smile you ever saw in your life: in its glow, one felt both adored and adorable. The trouble was, the smile had more miles on it than the Ford, and everyone in Eastport knew it.

“To get Faye Anne's diary,” he told us. “At her house.”

Oh, great. All he would tell us at my place was that it was “an emergency,” something to do with Faye Anne's “predicament.”

So I’d been against coming out with him, but Ellie had been bound and determined. And I couldn’t very well let her do it alone. If I needed help, Ellie might not quite walk on water, but she would try.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before, but I didn’t know who all was still at your house and I certainly didn’t want anyone else overhearing,” Peter said. “It’d be disastrous for her if anyone found out about it.”

“What makes you so sure it won’t be disastrous if we do?”

Now that he’d saved himself by throwing Faye Anne to the wolves, I didn’t have much faith in his opinion of what might help her. But at least he’d slowed down, so the holiday decorations on the elaborate old houses we passed were more than colored smears:

Eight plywood reindeer pulling a sleigh up the steeply pitched roof of a carpenter Gothic. Ribbons circling the pillars of an old Greek Revival. A Queen Anne mansion with stars on its far-flung gables, looking vast as an ocean liner in the darkness. In its heyday, Eastport's well-to-do citizens had built whatever sort of dwellings they might fancy, and bigger was better.

But he hadn’t answered my question. “What makes you so sure,” I persisted as he pulled into the alley behind the
Carmodys’ house and shut off the engine, “that we’ll keep it a secret?”

He turned the ignition key enough to put the dashboard lights back on. In their glow, his features were as classically modeled as the old architecture all around us. But his eyes were shadowy pools as he paused to compose his unhelpful reply and I thought again of what Joy Abrams had said of him: that he was a liar.

“Look, Faye Anne's in trouble. And I think I’ve helped put her there.”

Wow, as Sam would have said; brilliant deduction. But before I could reply aloud Peter picked up on my mental skewering of him.

“They were going to come and ask me, you know.” The state guys, he meant. “It's not like they were going to ignore me, or not find out about me. Hell, in this town you can’t even go for coffee with a woman without people talking.”

He frowned. “Especially a married one. Just because I was seeing her, it got so I couldn’t walk down the street without people looking at me. Going to the post office was an ordeal, even before this. And now it's going to be worse,” he complained.

Right. And it was all about him, wasn’t it? Inconvenience he had to suffer, embarrassment he might be required to endure. Never mind that he wasn’t in a jail cell, right before Christmas.

I controlled my impatience. “But there was more than coffee? The talk was accurate—you two were an item?”

He looked sulkily at his hands: long, tapering fingers and neatly clipped nails. “Yes. I’d never felt that way about anyone before.”

Mm-hmm. I glanced back at Ellie. Word was, Peter always had at least two women on the string, so when he got done with one there was another all lined up, ready for action. But he was speaking again:

“It wasn’t any of their business, people who talked about us.” He slammed his fists onto the steering wheel, in the sort of spoiled, ladies’-man frustration I recognized from living with Victor. “It wasn’t fair.”

Sam used to say that a lot, too. But I understood. When you first come to Eastport, it's easy to believe that its active gossip mill is an amusing but ultimately inconsequential feature of local life. After a while, though, some of the gossip inevitably starts being about you.

And that, as they say around here, is what separates the culls from the keepers. “So, what's in this diary?”

We were still sitting in the car because for one thing, this was a dumb idea; I’d come this far but I’d already decided that I wasn’t getting out. For another, I could see Kenty Dalrymple's windows from where the car was parked, which meant Faye Anne's neighbor could also look out one of them and see us. “Back the car up about fifteen feet,” I told Peter.

“What?” He frowned, but did as I asked.

“Good,” I said. “Now, you tell me what's in the diary that you’re so worried about, or I’m going to reach over there and lean on the horn until the cops come or your ears start bleeding, whichever happens first.”

He flinched, and I noticed with pleasure that my “do it” voice still worked. But he still didn’t answer directly.

“Anything seem funny to you about the method?” he mused. “I mean, cutting him up like that?”

“Poetic justice,” I snapped. Something about Peter Christie had really begun getting on my nerves. Maybe it was the “I’m such a sweet guy” crap he was exuding from every pore.

Or the way he kept evading my questions. Also the dash-lights were still on but the heater wasn’t.

“Hey, buddy. My feet are cold. Get on with your story and make it a concise one, please. Or take us home.”

Ellie still sat in the backseat: no comment. But I knew she was listening. This wasn’t the first time we’d found ourselves in, shall we say, unusual circumstances.

By which I mean murder. People do it, here, and try to get away with it, too, just like anywhere else. And in the snooping department, Ellie and I had our division-oflabor routine pretty well written up and initialed. Maybe Peter believed we wouldn’t be blabbermouths because, in all the strange stuff Ellie and I had been involved in, we were always so far on the side of the underdog that we practically had fleas.

Still, what Faye Anne really needed was a lawyer, not a pair of sympathetic but officially powerless Eastport women, teamed up with the dubiously motivated town Lothario, on a goofy mission. It all made me almost decide to insist on going home immediately.

Almost; instead, I glanced down at my ringless left hand, illuminated in the dashboard glow.

“I don’t want to say anything. I want you to look at it, and tell me what you think,” Peter said stubbornly. “I want your opinion.”

I want, I want. Now he sounded like Victor. “Well, isn’t that special?” I began sarcastically, but just then a blue-and-white Eastport squad car went by in the street behind us, tires squeaking on snow.

It gave no sign that its driver had seen us, though, not slowing. And with any luck, Kenty Dalrymple hadn’t noticed that we’d backed up, but hadn’t driven away.

That she might not have seen us at all was way too much to hope for; Kenty was famed as a combination surveillance-and-public-address system.

The squad car didn’t come back.

“And you have to see it here,” Peter went on, ignoring my remark. “We certainly can’t take it with us.”

But we could break into the house and rifle through the
diary's contents, maybe muck up evidence… “Yeah,” I retorted, “let's not do that. It would be wrong.” Oh, this guy was a hoot.

Still, I was curious about that diary. And Ellie was sitting there, waiting patiently for me to decide. But neither of those things were what really turned the trick for me in the end. It was Faye Anne, herself. Alone and in trouble she reminded me of someone I barely remembered, someone I hadn’t been able to help.

Because when that help had been needed, I’d been only three years old.

“And let's not get too comfortable with the first person plural, either,” I told Peter irritably, getting out. “We are not a team.”

He slammed his car door. In the snow-covered neighborhood it sounded like a bomb going off. “Oh, for criminy's sake,” I protested.

“Sorry, sorry. I forgot. I’m not used to this kind of thing.”

“Sure, everything else in your life is so well ordered,” I shot back.

“Ssh,” Ellie interjected quietly. A porch light had gone on two houses away. We stood rooted. The only sound was the breeze clickety-clicking in the frozen branches of the mountain ash tree in Faye Anne's yard.

When the light went out we hurried to the butcher shop door. The key was still under the mat where I’d replaced it; the state guys hadn’t found it. I let us in and closed the door hurriedly behind us. If the door to the kitchen was still hooked, this errand was over.

The door opened, the three of us tiptoeing in like cartoon burglars. “Okay, where is it?” Of course we couldn’t switch on any lights, but the streetlight shone in enough to show the shapes of the furniture, so we wouldn’t break our necks.

The stove fire had gone out and the central heating had
been left on only enough to keep the pipes from freezing; it was cold as a tomb in here, the air faintly metallic smelling.

Rank, actually; like meat that has begun spoiling, then gone into a cooler too late to keep it from being ruined. Suddenly I wished I were home where I could wash; my hands felt sticky again and my stomach did a slow, warning roll.

“I don’t know,” Peter confessed. “Somewhere in the house. She's showed it to me, I’ve even read parts, but I don’t know where she keeps it.”

“Oh, terrific. Anybody ever tell you you’re not one of the great minds of the century, Peter?” The sticky feeling faded. Right about then if I’d had a cleaver I’d have put him in that cooler.

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said huffily, “but I thought you could help find it. You two are supposed to be good at that kind of thing. And if you don’t want to, why did you agree to come?”

“Never mind,” I told him. My motives were none of his business. Simultaneously it occurred to me that Faye Anne hadn’t been the only one with a reason to kill Merle. If Peter really loved Faye Anne, or thought he did, he had one, too.

“I didn’t know it was going to be a goose chase,” I said. In the windows, the dark outlines of leaves on Faye Anne's houseplants stretched like small groping hands. White frost traceries unfurled on the panes behind them. Ellie had gone to the front of the house where the streetlight was brighter.

“Anyway, what were you saying about the method being funny?” I started opening cabinet drawers at random, looking for one that maybe Merle wouldn’t have gone into, so it would be safe for Faye Anne to tuck a diary in it.

The room hadn’t been cleaned, but the carnage had occurred at the other end, mostly. And as my eyes adjusted to the gloom the large shapes and smaller items around me began clarifying, like a black-and-white photo negative coming
up in developing solution. In the drawers: silverware, napkins, larger utensils. One held flashlights; I lingered over these but rejected the temptation. Someone going by outside would be bound to glimpse a light.

“Let's say your hobby was indoor gardening,” Peter said. “And one of your specialties was pharmaceutical herbs. You know, like Saint-John's-wort, or echinacea.”

I turned. Against the streetlit window he was a dark hulk, faceless. “Or digitalis,” I said. “Or wolfsbane. Or…”

“Right.” He’d been thinking along the same lines we were. “Now let's say you’d decided to kill someone—”

“Why use a knife?” I finished his question for him.

The dark shape nodded. “Ugly, messy, and hard work. Also, likely to leave inconvenient evidence. You can wipe up blood, but there's some kind of special spray the police can use so it shows again, isn’t there? Makes it glow? I saw it,” he added somewhat unconvincingly, “on a TV cop show.”

Not that I didn’t think he watched cop shows. It was just such an interestingly convenient piece of information for him to have retained, that's all.

And anyway, the blood hadn’t gotten wiped up. “Luminol,” I said. I’d already given up on the diary. To find it we’d have to make a detailed search, which we couldn’t do in the dark.

“Also benzidine, malachite green, and phenolphthalein, among others. Depends on the situation,” I added.

Back on Wall Street I’d gotten into the habit of doing my homework. And murder, whatever else it was, was a topic I could research.

Even in the half-dark I saw him start looking a little more respectful, as if he hadn’t really expected me to know anything at all. Another idea at the back of my mind was developing, too, like that photo negative.

“So tell me the rest of it,” I said, opening another drawer: sets of placemats, some tablecloths, linen towels.

“What rest of it?” Defensively.

“The rest of why Faye Anne didn’t do it.”

Thinking: if by some chance he had really loved her, he’d have wanted Merle gone. And one way to make that happen would be to kill Merle, get Faye Anne accused of it, and then show somehow that she could not have committed the crime, so the two of them could end up together.

And since getting falsely accused persons cleared is not a common habit of actual murderers, in doing that Peter would also be diverting suspicion from himself.

Complicated, dangerous. But it could work if both of them were in on it. If Faye Anne had been desperate enough to go along with such a risky plan, or if perhaps he’d never informed her of her part in it, at all.

At least, not in advance. And if my own suspicion was correct, Peter was starting to think I might be a tad too quick on the uptake for his comfort.

“Come on, Peter,” I coaxed mildly. “You can tell me.”

It also occurred to me that if by some chance I was right, I was standing in the middle of a darkened murder scene— with the murderer.

Peter began speaking again, nervously. “Let's just say you planned to use poison but then something happened. Maybe you’d been drinking a little. Or maybe you were under a lot of different pressures and you went crazy or whatever, and the next thing you knew you’d hit him with a hammer, cut him, something. Snapped and did it a different way.”