Six Geese A-Slaying (11 page)

Chapter 14

It took an hour and a half to get everyone on the road. Ainsley Werzel borrowed my camera and gave me a wide berth. I had
no great confidence that I’d ever see my camera again, but if that was the price of not having Werzel underfoot for the rest
of the parade, it was worth it. I could always bill the
Trib
.

About half an hour into the launch, word came back that Mary had definitely gone into labor, and one of the state troopers
rushed her and Aunt Penelope to the hospital, but that I was not to worry, because Rose Noire was doing a great job as understudy.

I lost sight of the various floats and marchers immediately after they passed my post in front of the house, but farther along,
the road went up a long, gentle slope. If I glanced over my shoulder, I could glimpse the floats and marchers before they
disappeared over the crest of the hill toward town.

From those stolen glances, I realized that the SPOOR members, instead of marching in civilian dress, had found their backup
costumes and infiltrated the parade in ones and twos, making it look as if we’d inserted white geese into the procession at
random intervals as a sort of running gag.

One goose climbed into the convertible carrying the mayor of Caerphilly, who was too polite to kick him out, so the two of
them sat side by side, waving to the crowd, all the way to town.

I saw several pairs of goose feet pattering along beneath the sinuous red silk Chinese dragon, and at least one pair beneath
a maroon robe in the New Life Baptist Choir.

By the time Seth Early’s shepherds reached the hill, they were watching a mixed flock of real sheep and faux geese.

Several geese grabbed pails and joined the Boy Scout cleanup squads marching behind the large animals.

There were geese throwing Chanukah gelt from the Jewish Community Center’s float, geese dancing along with the Clay County
Cloggers, and geese waving and throwing confetti from the platform of the boom lift.

The Dickens float was the last straw. Since Dr. Smoot was still at the crime scene, they’d turned to the surplus SPOOR members
to find a replacement. Unfortunately, they picked someone who was much taller than Dr. Smoot, so the phantom’s robe didn’t
come down far enough to conceal the feathered costume he was wearing underneath it.

“Oh, look,” Eric said, as the float rolled away. “It’s the Goose of Christmas Yet to Come.”

“I give up,” I said.

Clarence was as good as his word, and showed up just when I needed him, with Dad, in full costume, happily perched behind
him, beaming and waving at everyone.

“Wow!” I looked down to see Cal Burke standing nearby. “Santa came after all!”

“That’s Eric’s grandfather, playing Santa,” I said. “But he sure does look a lot more like Santa than poor Mr. Doleson, doesn’t
he?”

“Yeah,” Cal said. And then he ran off happily to join the crowd of children tagging along in Dad’s wake as devotedly as if
he were the Pied Piper. I felt a sudden surge of pride—Dad really was a great Santa. For the first time in years, the children
of Caerphilly would see a Santa Claus who loved his job and cared about Christmas as much as they did.

“ ‘He knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge,’ ” I quoted to myself. And I felt a sudden
sadness that unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, Ralph Doleson never would have the chance of reforming his curmudgeonly ways.

The crowds that had lined the road were dispersing—a few to their cars, while most fell in step behind the children. Were
they going to march all the way to Caerphilly?

Part of me wanted to jump in my car and follow the crowd. Or maybe race ahead on foot, hop on one of the last few floats,
and enjoy the cheers and laughter of the crowds.

And part of me kept looking over toward the pig shed, where Chief Burke and his men were still doing . . . whatever they were
doing. I hadn’t barged in for at least an hour and a half now—hadn’t even looked that way if I could help it—but I knew they
were there. I also knew very well that Chief Burke wouldn’t welcome my dropping in to see how the investigation was progressing.

“Nothing I can do about that,” I muttered. After all the time I’d spent organizing the parade, I should at least try to enjoy
it. Not to mention the fact that every single potential murder suspect I could think of had already gone to town with the
parade. I headed for the house to fetch my purse from the safe room.

The kitchen looked as if a hurricane had come through. A hurricane with a bad coffee habit. I couldn’t stand to leave it that
way, so I made a quick pass through with a trash bag and then loaded and started the dishwasher.

Before the previous owners had added a new, larger pantry much closer to the food preparation area, the safe room had been
the pantry. It was a small room opening off the mudroom, four feet wide by six feet deep, with white-painted wooden shelves
lining both sides and an old-fashioned Chubb lock on the door.

I was fishing in my pocket for my copy of the key when I realized there was already one in the lock. Not good. I flung the
door open.

The inside was a disaster. Had someone ransacked it? Or had whoever took over from Horace simply done a remarkably slipshod
job of keeping things organized? I grabbed a few purses at random and searched them, finding plenty of money and credit cards,
along with small valuable items like iPods and PDAs. So the chaos wasn’t due to a thief hastily rummaging for loot. Just bad
oversight. The items neatly arranged on shelves with numbered tags on them doubtless dated from the earlier part of the day,
when Horace had been in charge. But the later additions had simply been thrown in. A small pile of numbered tags that should
have been attached to items lay on a shelf just inside the door.

I waded through the clutter till I could reach my purse. The SPOOR placards made up quite a large portion of the debris on
the floor, so I decided to take them with me and hand them over to whichever geese I could find in town. I began dragging
them out of the heap.

I suddenly realized that there was something familiar about the placards. Not the signs themselves, although I’d seen them
often enough by now. About two-thirds of them were, as usual, mounted on slats—rough strips of pine one-by-two that I knew
would leave horrible splinters in your hands if, like me, you were stupid enough to try carrying one without gloves. They
were sharpened to a rough point to make it easier to stick your placard in the ground when you needed to take a break for
splinter removal.

The remaining third were nailed to rough wooden sticks, two to two-and-a-half feet long, about an inch in diameter, and sharpened
to a rough point.

Just like the stake that had killed Ralph Doleson. And like the murder weapon, they appeared to be made out of holly wood.

I stopped to put on a pair of kitchen gloves before pulling the rest of the placards out into the kitchen and sorting them
into two piles. Twenty-four slat placards, all of which looked as if they’d seen quite a bit of use. Eleven somewhat newer
placards mounted on holly sticks.

And one placard by itself, with no stick of any kind—though it had a few staples still clinging to the top and bottom center,
showing where it had once been attached to something.

I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the chief.

“I’m busy,” he said. “Is this important?”

“I think I found out where the killer got the murder weapon,” I said.

He didn’t say anything immediately.

“Well?” he said, finally. “I’m listening.”

Chapter 15

After hearing what I’d found, the chief showed up on the back porch in under five minutes and shook an impressive amount of
snow off his coat and boots before stepping inside.

“Did you touch these before you put on those gloves?” the chief asked, nodding at the placard collection.

“Yes,” I said. “Not only just now, but earlier, when I confiscated them from the SPOORs. And then I gave them to Rob to lock
up in the safe room, so his fingerprints will be on them, too. For that matter, since I found the key in the safe room lock
when I got here, anyone could have been in there.”

While waiting for the chief, I’d laid the placards out neatly on the kitchen floor. The ones on slats were in two rows where
our kitchen table would have been if we hadn’t taken it to the barn to serve as a prop table, while the placards on holly
sticks were lined up on the other side, in front of the sink and refrigerator. The stickless placard lay in the center of
the room in lonely splendor.

The chief pulled out his cell phone and punched a couple of buttons.

“Horace?” he said. “I’m in Meg’s kitchen. Can you come over here? Bring your kit.”

He flipped his phone closed and continued to stare at the orphaned cardboard.

“We’ll need your prints and Rob’s for elimination purposes,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “And Jorge Soto was helping Rob. And Horace might have touched them when he took them into the safe room.
And—”

“We’ll follow their history, thank you,” he said. “It didn’t occur to you to wonder why one of the signs was missing a stick?”

“I didn’t notice the missing stick till just now,” I said. “I didn’t take them away one by one. I picked up the whole pile
and carried them off.”

“And you put them in here?”

“I gave them to Rob to put in here. Which, wonder of wonders, he actually did. He and Jorge. But you’ll have to ask them whether
they did it immediately or whether they left them lying around somewhere in plain sight for a while. You know Rob.”

The chief nodded.

Horace came in with a blast of frigid air, shook himself like a dog to get rid of the snow, and looked questioningly from
me to the chief. Then he took a look at the placards and went pale.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Those look just like—”

“Check that one,” the chief said, pointing to the stickless placard.

Horace pulled on a pair of gloves and examined the cardboard.

“You think that thing used to be attached to our murder weapon?” the chief asked.

“I can’t tell for sure till I measure these staples against the holes in the stake,” Horace said.

“I know that,” the chief said. “But if you had to guess?”

“Yeah,” Horace said. “The sticks are exactly the same, and these staples should match the tiny holes on the murder weapon.”

The chief took out his notebook and began scribbling in it.

“And look!” Horace said, pointing to something on the cardboard. “A couple of these staples have bits broken off. It’s possible
that the broken off bits are still in the stake—which means I might be able to prove that the two were once part of the same
staple.”

He looked so triumphant and excited that I didn’t have the heart to ask what good that would do. Even if he could authoritatively
match the two sundered bits of staple, and even if that led us to figure out who had stapled the cardboard on the stake, I
didn’t see that his forensic staple analysis would get us one inch closer to figuring out who had used the stake to kill Ralph
Doleson.

“That’s nice,” the chief said, in a rather mechanical tone. Clearly he shared my skepticism.

“I know it’s a small bit of evidence, and there’s no guarantee it will be useful, but you never know,” Horace said. “Don’t
you remember that case in Canada where a few cat hairs proved to be the critical piece of evidence?”

“I do,” the chief said, forcing a more cheerful demeanor. “And I completely agree. For all we know, the staple could be the
key to the case, and I’m extraordinarily grateful that you’re available to analyze it. I’m sorry if I seem a little distracted.
It’s been a long, hard day.”

Horace seemed mollified.

“I should take all of these signs in for possible comparison analysis,” Horace said. “Meg, can I borrow some more big trash
bags?”

I saw the chief open his mouth to veto the mass sign confiscation—the police station didn’t have a very large evidence room,
and the overflow usually ended up in the chief’s office. Then he closed his mouth again, nodded, and looked back at his notebook.
I handed Horace our box of trash bags.

“If you don’t need me for anything, I’m going to catch up with the parade and see a little of the festival in town,” I said.

“Good idea,” the chief said.

Just then the power went out, as it nearly always did when we had heavy rain, high wind, or even a moderate amount of snow.
Horace groaned. The chief made an impatient noise.

“We’ve got flashlights in the pantry,” I said. I heard shuffling noises as Horace headed that way. “And there’s a spare house
key on the key rack. Horace, could you lock up when you leave?”

“Roger,” Horace said.

I left them to it.

Outside, the air was bitter and snow was falling down in earnest—little tiny flakes, but so dense that they seriously reduced
visibility. Maybe going to town wasn’t such a great idea after all.

Of course, if I didn’t go to town, Michael would have no way of getting home. And if I was going to be snowbound someplace—which
looked increasingly more probable—I wanted it to be with Michael.

I took the truck.

Chapter 16

Luckily the Shiffleys’ snowplows and the parade traffic had kept the road to town relatively clear—so far. But I wasn’t used
to driving on snow, and my heart raced every time I hit the slightest patch of ice. Not seeing more than a few feet beyond
the windshield was unnerving. I was relieved to think that Michael would insist on driving home.

I caught up with the parade just as Dad made his triumphant entry into the town square. They’d set up a massive throne on
the portico of the town hall, and the crowds cheered hysterically as Dad raced up the two flights of marble steps and then
jogged back and forth through the snow along the edge of the portico, fists upraised, looking like a Yuletide Rocky Balboa.

Then several volunteers dressed as elves emerged from the courthouse dragging fake sleds full of real presents, announcing
the next part of the festivities. More elves began marshalling the assembled children into orderly lines and marching them
up the courthouse steps for their moment with Dad.

I could see volunteers leading the last of the sheep off in the direction of the college barn. Everyone without children or
animals in tow headed for the food. I didn’t think any of the kids in line were likely suspects or witnesses, so I followed
the rest of the crowd.

Every church and civic group in Caerphilly and Clay counties was selling some kind of food or drink. The New Life Baptists
and the Clayville Congregationalists had rival barbecue pits. Caerphilly Presbyterian was roasting turkeys, Trinity Episcopal
had baked hams, and St. Byblig’s Catholic Church was dishing out its justly famous potato-leek soup. In the interests of ecu-menicism,
I abandoned my diet for the day.

I ended up in the Garden Club’s dessert tent, sampling half a dozen kinds of cakes and cookies, accompanied by a mug of hot
chocolate. Everywhere I went I’d been congratulated repeatedly on the success of the parade. The few people willing to talk
about the murder were more interested in picking my brain than giving me useful information. Most people seemed to think I
was weird, wanting to talk about murder this close to the holidays.

So once I’d filled my dessert plate, I found a place in a back corner of the tent where I could analyze the day’s events in
relative peace and quiet. And keep an eye on Dad—if I craned my neck just right, I could look past the trash barrels behind
the tent to the snow-filled town square beyond. I couldn’t quite see him, but from the length of the line leading up to his
throne—not to mention the happy faces of the children and parents as they left the square for the refreshment tents—I could
tell he was a success.

Just then a figure blocked my view—someone putting something in one of the trash cans. He lifted the lid, dislodging an inch
or two of snow. Then he stuffed a pale blue paper bag into the trash. He looked around anxiously to see if anyone had noticed
and I recognized him. Jorge Soto. Then he hurried off.

How odd. What was Jorge so eager to get rid of? If he’d just walked up and lobbed the bag into the trash in a matter-of-fact
way, I’d never have thought twice about it, but his conspicuously furtive manner caught my attention immediately.

So I’m nosy. I finished my hot chocolate and went out to raid the trash can.

I could ignore the cans whose lids had more than a slight layer of snow, but four of them had been recently opened. The first
two I inspected held only plastic bags full of discarded paper plates and cups, but in the third I found the blue bag. Inside
was a gray sweatshirt with “Blitzen” stenciled on it. I remembered seeing Jorge wearing it before the parade. It seemed in
perfectly good condition—almost brand new. Why had Jorge discarded it?

Could it have anything to do with the dark stains on the front, near the hem? Only a few small spots but still—

“What’s wrong, Meg?”

I jumped, even though I realized it was only Deputy Sammy. On impulse, I showed him the sweatshirt.

“Is that blood?” I asked, pointing to the spots.

He peered at it.

“I’m no expert,” he said, finally. “Could be. Or it could just be chocolate. Does this have anything to do with the murder?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Here, take it.” I stuffed the sweatshirt back into the blue bag and shoved it at him. “Have Horace
test those stains, will you?”

He took the bag, holding it as far from his body as possible, as if he thought it might explode.

“If the stains turn out to be blood, the chief will want to know where you got this,” he said.

“If the stains turn out to be blood, I’ll gladly tell him,” I said. “Thanks, Sammy.”

I went back to the town square. The snow was still falling, though not as heavily. Most of the kids had gotten through the
line by now and the crowds were thinning. I strolled around the perimeter, looking at the Christmas decorations. Here in the
heart of town, where the newest buildings dated from the 1920s, the town had gone in for Victorian, heavy on the evergreens
with a lot of gold-sprayed pine cones, velvet ribbons, and the occasional cluster of fruit, real or fake. Mother thoroughly
approved of the town square. And with the gently falling snow frosting everything, it looked particularly magical. I passed
a photographer with a Nikon in his hands and a press ID hanging from his neck—presumably Ainsley Werzel’s much-delayed photographer.
I was pleased to see him busily photographing one of the more picturesque stores—the toy store, whose window was filled with
a model train set running through a magical landscape of cotton snow, cellophane ice, and battery-lit porcelain buildings.

If I’d found Michael, I’d have suggested inspecting the decorations in other parts of town. The street where at least a dozen
homeowners were locked in a fierce annual competition to see who could mount the most impressive light display. The dorms,
with their funky, non-traditional Christmas displays. And the upscale glamour of the ritzy neighborhood where all the senior
faculty lived.

But I was tired and my feet were getting colder by the second, so I decided to climb the courthouse steps. I could watch Dad
at close range and scan the thinning crowds for Michael. Or, better yet, I could wait inside the courthouse. I found a bench
just inside the door, worn smooth by the derrieres of countless witnesses waiting outside the nearby courtroom. I could sit
there to think.

Come to think of it, it might be even easier to think lying down.

I was just closing my eyes when I heard a door open.

“I can’t keep covering this up indefinitely,” a woman’s voice said. “Either you come clean and go to the police or I will.”

Whoever she was talking to said something that I didn’t catch, though I could tell it was a man’s voice.

I lifted my head and peered down the hallway toward the voices. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard the door to the back
parking lot open and close.

“Idiot,” the woman’s voice muttered. I recognized it now. Caroline Willner.

I put my head back down and feigned sleep as she strode past me and out the front door, slamming it behind her.

Interesting. Who and what was Caroline threatening to go to the police about? And did it have anything to do with the murder?
And if it did, was threatening a very smart thing to do?

Before I could figure out who Caroline was protecting, pretending to be asleep gave way to the real thing.