Let There Be Suspects (2 page)

We—the progeny of Junie Bluebird and her assortment of husbands—are definitely not notable. My sisters and I were raised at craft festivals and Renaissance fairs, wintering in campgrounds, ersatz artist colonies, and dumpy city apartments. Traveling back and forth from coast to coast we gained and discarded fathers, banded together to thwart our craftswoman mother, and developed the ironclad bond a more normal childhood would not have encouraged.

We know each other far too well. Vel and I have already predicted that Bix Minard will not be the last of the men Sid latches onto in her endless quest to feel settled and respectable. As if to prove our case, Bix went for a walk several hours ago and hasn’t been seen since.

Finished with her preparations, Vel backed away from the stove. “Okay, I’ve combined the spices and cranberry juice, and I’m putting it on to simmer. All we have to do when people arrive is add the burgundy and keep it away from anyone under twenty-one.”

“Shall we card everybody who walks through the door?” I thought this might be a new high mark in my approval rating with the church Women’s Society. For the most part the Women’s Society is made up of older women who meet during the day in what is mostly a historical reenactment of Women’s Society meetings of a century before. Most of those who attend are warmhearted and generous, able to overlook my failings and those of my children. A few thrive on the details. I hope the open house will convince them to find a new calling.

“I’m done.” Teddy slid back her chair, pale amber pig-tails flapping. “I only decorated the ones that are real.”

She abandoned the room before her aunts could question her. I walked over to peer down at the platter of cookies and saw that although the trees and stars were fully adorned, the cutouts of angels were as naked of frosting as the moment they’d emerged from my oven. I was left to explain this newest wrinkle in Teddy’s pursuit of a workable theology.

“Remember when I told you that somebody on the school playground told Teddy there’s no Santa Claus? Well, now she’s skeptical about
everything
. Over the holidays she’s supposed to write a story about angels, but last night she told me that since angels aren’t real, there’s no point. I guess she’s extended the angel ban to cookies.”

Sid slipped her arm through mine. “There’s not much of Junie in Teddy, is there?”

She was right. Our mother is a great champion of angels. Of course Junie is a great champion of a lot of things: leprechauns, unicorns, anything that goes bump in the night. She’s not a believer exactly; she’s just eternally optimistic.

Sid disappeared to find the stepladder so she could plunk pine boughs and clustered ornaments among the cobwebs. By the time Vel and I had cleaned up our messes, the ladder had come and gone, and the kitchen was transformed.

Technically Vel, Sid, and I are only half sisters because each of us has a different father, but a childhood shared is more important than genetic code. Having survived together, we are closer than identical triplets. Now I felt a wave of warmth as I realized how much they had helped me today.

Warmth wasn’t the first thing I felt when I realized this family reunion and open house were going to overlap. I very nearly panicked. But now that the shock is over, I’m beginning to think it might be a lucky accident. My sisters have an issue or two to settle in their personal lives, but they are lovely, talented, and approachable. Sid has decorated the parsonage until it looks like a Christmas fairyland. Vel has spent the last two days cooking her generous heart out.

So what if our mother is a little unorthodox? If Junie comes in the midst of the merriment wearing nothing but a reindeer skin, there’s still one chance in a thousand nobody will notice.

As she is prone to do, Vel took charge. “I think we ought to set out Sid’s fruitcake and everything that won’t spoil.”

Although Vel is our gourmet cook, Junie made sure Sid and I know our way around a kitchen, too. The moment Junie announced this reunion, Sid baked a fruitcake, and it’s a masterpiece. Her recipe is loaded with dried fruits, nuts, and butter, and for weeks the finished product has been aging in her Atlanta kitchen wrapped in a whiskey-soaked cloth. In the true spirit of Christmas, she agreed to donate it to the open house. This is one fruitcake guaranteed not to be recycled for years to come.

As Sid retrieved the cake I made my way to the dining room laden with dishes. Only a small portion of the food had been prepared by my hands, but as Vel and I heaped the table with spreads and dips, home-baked brownies and cookies, platters of tea sandwiches, and slices of fruit, I pictured my stock rising with the congregation.

I know it’s not my mission to make everybody at Tri-C love me, but at least one afternoon a year, I don’t mind making them blissfully happy.

The fruitcake arrived on a crystal platter I had borrowed from a locked closet in the parish house. Sid set the platter in the center of the dining room table and everyone in attendance applauded. Sid had studded the glazed top of the cake with fruit and nuts in the shape of holly boughs. If Junie got here in time to see the cake before it was demolished, she would be proud.

Sid stepped back to be sure the platter was in the center of the table. “Did Junie tell the rest of you she’s bringing a surprise with her?”

To appear as if I was involved in the preparations, I rearranged two of the dips so they were on opposite sides of a platter of vegetables. “She forgot to tell me there
was
a reunion, remember? What kind of surprise?”

“Vel? Did she say anything to you?” Sid asked.

“Nothing concrete.”

Sid stopped fooling with the fruitcake and moved on to a platter of brownies, building a perfect pyramid. I expected to see Aman-Ra poking his head between crumbs.

“If Junie’s bringing a surprise, it could be just about anything,” Sid said. “Maybe we have a new father.”

“Maybe she’s delivering a herd of alpacas. Junie’s version of a college fund for Deena and Teddy.” Vel brought in the last of the dips and set them near the middle before gesturing to an empty space at the edge. “Have I left enough room for the sacred punch bowl?”

The bowl that matches the crystal platter is still safely packed in a box in the hallway, because it, too, belongs to the Women’s Society. In the fall I destroyed its predecessor trying to thwart a murderer. The Women’s Society claims to have forgiven me, but the subject still comes up now and then. It
was
an unlikely choice for a weapon.

Since I wasn’t fooling anyone, I stopped playing with dips and vegetables and tried to sound prim. “The punch bowl is not sacred. Not in the same way a cow is sacred to Hindus or a tree is sacred to a Druid.” I paused. “Of course Ed will need a new church immediately if anything happens to this one and I’m remotely involved.”

Even a mere mention of the world’s religions will pull my husband from the unlikeliest places. Ed, looking scruffy and sleepy-eyed, wandered in from installing the Christmas lights on the porch and pondering—I’m sure—which version of the New Testament to use for his Christmas Eve readings. Last year he used the Cotton Patch Version, in which Jesus is born in Gainesville, Georgia. He still gets questions about this.

Ed was wearing his favorite green sweater, which is older than our firstborn Deena. The corduroy coat he’d thrown over it is an orphan from the church’s lost and found. His blond hair stuck out like the straw in the living manger scene at the local Catholic church.

He dropped a kiss on my cheek, tickling me with the beard I’d expected to disappear months ago, then stopped to peer over Vel’s shoulder and give his approval. “I might need a new church if we don’t get busy and finish the Christmas tree. We’ve just got an hour and a half before everybody arrives.”

Since we had done everything we could in the dining room, we let him lure us into the living room. The room was so different after Sid’s hard work that I hardly recognized it. All of Junie’s girls are talented at making something out of nothing. These days I do it professionally, renovating and flipping houses with my realtor friend Lucy Jacobs. But Sid is the one who really inherited our mother’s artistic talents. Professionally, she uses them as an event planner at an Atlanta-area country club.

Once again I admired glass bowls of polished fruit, willowware platters of pinecones and evergreen tips, red and green bows tucked in among books and family photos. Candles of every shape and size nestled in odd little spaces with rocks and shells, and discount store poinsettias communed in corners. Quilts and afghans Junie had made were folded over sofa backs, and plump bed pillows were wrapped in red and green calico and tied with ribbon like the gifts under the Christmas tree.

“It really is perfect,” I told Sid. “But you’ve set a standard I’ll never meet again.”

Sid is not particularly sentimental, but at the praise, she slipped her arm around my waist. “No prob. I’ll always be on call.”

Despite Ed’s fears, the tree was well on its way. Our garage sale bubble lights were in place, and Sid had tucked and wired tiny bouquets of red and green, silver and blue silk flowers deep inside the branches. Christmas trees were a big deal during our childhood. My sisters and I could never be sure where we’d spend Christmas, but we could always depend on a tree and a party to decorate it. I had passed on the tradition to my own children.

The moment the girls had waited for all day had arrived. I went to the stairs and called them to come down. Deena showed up first. My eleven-year-old daughter is poised on the brink of adolescence, although most of the time I’m in denial. Her skin is still clear, her figure is more American Girl than Barbie doll, but day by day, disdain for the adults in her life is growing. Luckily that disdain hasn’t yet extended to her aunts. In the past two days she has spent copious amounts of time with each, sharing thoughts and feelings, bonding, and pumping them for information she can use against me.

Today Deena was wearing flared jeans and a red and black T-shirt with a scooped neck and too much spandex. Sid had brought her the T-shirt as a pre-Christmas present, but Sid and I are destined to have a little talk. I don’t need reminders of what’s ahead. Deena, with her strawberry blonde hair and adventurous spirit, is going to need as lengthy a childhood as we can muster.

Teddy arrived with Moonpie, our silver tabby, under one arm, so that he could supervise. She dropped him on the couch, where he immediately took cover behind one of Sid’s gift-wrapped pillows. Pushing her glasses up the bridge of her freckled nose, Teddy came to rest in front of the tree. She’s a hard kid to excite, our Teddy, but the thought of decorating the tree had done it. Her blue eyes were sparkling.

For a moment I found it hard to breathe. I adored every single person in the room. And how often can anybody say that?

An hour later I still loved them, although possibly a tad less. The girls had squabbled over where to place every ornament. Vel and Sid had dug out every memory of childhood Christmases including the one when our motor home broke down on an isolated gravel road in Arizona, and Junie made us decorate the tallest cactus in the vicinity. As he installed his childhood train set under the tree, Ed had regaled us with tales of the ancient Romans, who decorated with evergreens during the pagan celebration of Saturnalia.

But the blue spruce was stunning nonetheless.

I looked at my watch and officially started the countdown. “Thirty minutes until they begin to arrive.”

“Haven’t we forgotten something?” Sid pointed to the bare top of the tree. “Don’t you have Junie’s angel?”

Every year of our childhood, each member of the family made one ornament to add to our Christmas tree. Since I’m the only daughter with children, I was given most of Junie’s ornaments along with my own. Add to these the ones my girls make each year, and our tree is one of a kind.

But each year the highlight of our tree is another Junie heirloom, a porcelain angel clad in ethereal lace, satin, and tulle, with gossamer wings laced with gold filigree. The year she crafted our tree topper Junie made hundreds and sold them at astronomical prices, though none of the others were as lovely. Every Christmas as a finale to the tree decorating party, the youngest child in attendance was lifted high to place the angel on the highest branch. My own family has continued the tradition.

“Teddy?” I turned to find Teddy squinting at the top branch where the angel should be. “You’re the youngest today. Are you ready?”

Teddy folded her arms over her red corduroy jumper. “There’s supposed to be a Christmas party.”

“This
is
a party. Everybody’s together to decorate the tree.”

“No, the party is later. You said the youngest child at the
party
. When you told the story.”

Last night I had reminded Teddy about our Christmas tradition as a bedtime story. I was sorry now I had been so precise.

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “This is close enough.”

“No. It has to be a party.”

“Then we’ll put the angel on the tree at the open house.” Ed lifted her into his arms for a hug. “But you might not be the youngest.”

“Hillary has a star on her tree. Stars are real.”

I thought it was too bad Teddy had chosen Christmas as a time for logic. Now that Santa Claus had gone permanently up the chimney, he’d taken an awful lot of childhood fun without leaving so much as a ho-ho-ho.

We were saved another go-round in the angel wars by someone hammering on the front door. Suspecting Bix had finally returned, I made it to the hallway just in time to see the door open with a bang and my mother appear in the doorway. Junie’s short body was smothered by a gorgeous gold caftan with a pair of jeweled Aladdin-style slippers curling out from under them. The caftan wasn’t from any rack at Dillard’s, but I was so relieved to see Junie merely looked exotic, I wanted to weep with gratitude.