The Gingerbread Bump-Off (4 page)

“Well, we’ll see.” She turned back to the yard. “Now, what else will we need? I want to pick up anything we have to buy before this weekend, so we’ll have all day Saturday and then Sunday afternoon to get ready.”

“They have one of those Christmas stores in the mall over in Fort Worth,” Sam suggested. “We can go over and just look to see what they have. Maybe get some ideas on how to approach this.”

“That’s a good idea. First, though, we have to make sure of what we already have. I know you think you can climb up on roofs like Santa himself. How are you at climbing into attics?”

“Pretty good, if I do say so myself.”

Unlike newer houses, which usually had a pull-down ladder built in for getting into the attic, this house was old enough that the only way into the attic was through an opening in the wall of the garage, above the door into the house. Phyllis moved her car out so it wouldn’t be in the way; then Sam got the ladder and propped it against the wall. He climbed up and disappeared into the attic. A moment later, the light from a bare bulb filled the space as he found the chain attached to the fixture and pulled it.

When Mike was a teenager, he and Kenny had carried sheets of plywood up there and nailed them over the ceiling joists to form a walkway and a good-sized storage area. Some of the Christmas decorations were in the house, in the closet of the room that had been Mattie Harris’s, but the things that hadn’t been used for several years were up here, packed away in cardboard boxes, each marked with a little Christmas tree that Phyllis had drawn on it with a marker so that she would know what was in it.

She listened to Sam rummaging around up there for a few minutes before her curiosity got the better of her. She was wearing jeans, so, grasping the sides of the metal extension ladder, she climbed until her head was level with the opening and she could look into the attic.

“What have you found?” she asked.

Sam was tall enough and the underside of the roof close enough that he had to stoop a little to keep from hitting his head. He gestured toward three boxes he had stacked between himself and the opening.

“Got those right there, and I’ve just barely started lookin’. That was a good idea, drawin’ a little Christmas tree on ’em. Keeps me from havin’ to open every box.” He frowned a little. “You better be careful up there on that ladder, though.”

“I’m not going to fall off any more than you are,” she told him. “If you’ll push those over here closer, I’ll start carrying them down.”

“That’ll speed things up, all right,” he agreed. He moved the boxes next to the opening where she could reach them.

She was able to prop each box on her hip and hold it that way while she used her other hand to help her climb down. She was careful because she knew there might be fragile items in all of the boxes. If she dropped one of them, something was bound to break.

Phyllis had the first two boxes stacked on the floor of the garage and was going up again for the third one when the door leading into the house opened. It swung outward, as most of them did in houses from that era, and that made it bump hard against the ladder just as Phyllis’s head reached the level of the opening again.

“What the—,” Carolyn said as the door hit the ladder and caused it to sway backward a little.

“Oh!” Phyllis cried.

Sam was close to the opening, about to set another box on the plywood floor of the attic. He dropped it instead and lunged forward, stretching out a long arm to grab the ladder while his other hand clamped around one of the bracing boards attached to the rafters. Phyllis clung to the ladder as it settled back into place with a little thump.

“Oh, my God!” Carolyn said as she looked up from the doorway. “Phyllis, I almost knocked you off of there! I didn’t mean to!”

“It’s all right,” Phyllis said as she tried to catch her breath. “Goodness, I know you didn’t mean to, Carolyn. It was just an accident.” She looked at Sam, who still wore a worried look as he held on to the ladder. “You can let go now. It’s stable enough.”

“And you were worried about me fallin’ off,” he said. He let go of the ladder and straightened up as much as he could.

“The door just bumped it a little. It wasn’t going to fall down.”

“You don’t know that,” Carolyn said. “I could have killed you. You might have broken a leg or a hip, at least.”

“It’s all right,” Phyllis said again. “I’m fine. But I’m not so sure about what’s in that box you dropped, Sam.”

“Whatever it is, if it’s broken it’ll be a whole heck of a lot easier to replace than you would be.” He took the top off the box, looked inside, and grunted. “Looks like a bunch of garland rolled up.” He tilted the box so Phyllis could see the plastic greenery. “It appears to be fine.”

“Stay where you are,” Carolyn said from down below. “I’ll go around and come in through the garage door so I can give you a hand. You can pass the boxes down to me, Phyllis, so you won’t have to clamber up and down that ladder.”

“That’s a good idea. We’ll make an assembly line of it.”

In another twenty minutes, they had all the boxes of Christmas decorations brought down from the attic. Phyllis and Carolyn began carrying them inside while Sam put away the ladder. When he joined them, bringing a couple of the boxes with him, he found them sitting in the living room floor going through the decorations scattered around them.

“Looks like one of those Christmas stores blew up in here,” he said with a grin. “You ladies stay where you are and keep doin’ what you’re doin’. I’ll bring the rest of the stuff in.”

“Thanks, Sam. For everything,” Phyllis added, hoping he knew she meant the way he had leaped to grab that ladder and save her from falling. It had been closer than she’d admitted to Carolyn.

When Carolyn had first heard about Phyllis agreeing to let the house be part of the Jingle Bell Tour, she had been dubious, but she was starting to come around. “I always wanted to go all out on decorating, just one year,” she said now.

“I always had to rein Kenny in a little,” Phyllis said. “When it came to Christmas, he was just like a big, overgrown kid.” A wistful smile crossed her face. “Of course, that always made it good for Mike. I don’t know which of them enjoyed Christmas more.”

“Those were good times,” Carolyn said, “when our children were small and most of our lives were still in front of us.”

“Yes . . . but these are good times, too, if we make them that way.” Phyllis lifted a beautiful, sparkling treetop angel from a box. “And this is going to be one of the best Christmases ever,” she said.

“If no one—” Carolyn stopped herself.

Phyllis looked up from the angel. “What were you going to say?”

“Oh, nothing. Forget about it.”

Phyllis knew, though. And given everything that had happened in the past few years, she couldn’t blame Carolyn for thinking it.

If no one gets murdered.
That was what Carolyn had been about to say.

 

 

 

Going through the decorations and figuring out what was going to go where took most of the day. It was necessary, though, because it was the only way they could determine what else they needed. Phyllis kept a list, and when they were finished she was able to make another list of what they might need.

“It’s too late in the day now to go to Fort Worth,” she decided. “We’ll drive over there to that Christmas store tomorrow, Sam, if that’s all right with you.”

He nodded. “Sure. I don’t have anywhere I have to be. That’s one of the perks of bein’ retired.”

But it wasn’t really much of a perk, he thought. After decades of having to get up and go to school nine months out of the year, he still felt the urge. A lot of those years he had worked a summer job, too, pay for schoolteachers being pretty bad in those days, so he’d had responsibilities all year round. It made a fella restless, not having anything to do when he’d always been busy.

Luckily for him, Phyllis was always mixed up in something or other, so he was glad to help her out. Because of that, he didn’t mind too much asking Roy Porter to come out to the garage with him when Roy and Eve got back from another fruitless day of looking for a house to buy.

“What for?” Roy asked. “I probably ought to get back to the motel—”

“Oh, no,” Eve cut in. “You’re going to stay and have supper with us tonight. That’s all right, isn’t it, Phyllis?”

They were all standing in the kitchen. Phyllis nodded and said, “Of course. You’re always welcome, Roy.”

“And there’s always plenty of food,” Sam put in. “Nobody ever goes hungry in this house, which is one reason I really like livin’ here.”

“And what’s the good of being semiretired if you have to check in at the office every day?” Eve asked Roy. “I know you still like to feel needed, dear, but they’ll get in touch with you if they have any problems that require your attention.”

Roy nodded. “I suppose you’re right. What is it you want me to look at, Sam?”

“Actually, I thought I’d put you to work,” Sam said as he smiled. “I’ve got a project goin’ that I could use a hand with.”

“What sort of project?” Roy asked as they left the kitchen and went into the garage. He looked at the long workbench, the tools, and the boards stacked and leaned here and there. “I’ve never been much good at woodworking.”

“You can handle this just fine. I’m makin’ the back for a set of bookshelves, and I need somebody to hold the board while I cut it.”

“Oh. Well, I guess I can do that.”

Sam had cleared an area and set up a couple of sawhorses, and had the four-by-eight sheet of quarter-inch plywood resting on them. He had already marked the three-by-seven section of the board he was going to cut out. He pointed to the end of the board where he wanted Roy to stand and said, “Once I’ve started the cut, you hold on to that corner right there. Just hold it up level so it’s not droopin’, because it’ll bind on the saw blade if it does.”

“Sure. I understand.”

Sam put on a pair of goggles and picked up the circular saw from the bench. He pressed in the safety release with his thumb and triggered the saw, causing it to make a brief high-pitched whine that confirmed he had power to it. Then he rested it on the board, lined up the edge of the blade with the pencil line he had made, and fired up the saw again. He edged it forward and the blade bit into the wood.

Being careful not to veer from the line, Sam moved the saw ahead. Sawdust flew in the air around him. The scent of freshly cut wood mingled with the smell of oil from the saw. To Sam it smelled almost as good as cookies fresh from the oven. Almost, but definitely not quite.

Roy moved in behind him and supported the cut portion of the board, just as Sam had instructed him. Sam made the cut all the way to the end, so that the one-foot-wide section came loose from the rest of the board. He released the saw’s trigger and turned to see that Roy had the piece of wood in his hands, holding it in front of him.

“Where do you want this part?” Roy asked.

“Just lean it against the wall over there,” Sam said, pointing with the hand that didn’t hold the saw. “I always save the leftover pieces. Never know when you might need ’em for something.”

“Now you have to cut off a foot from the top?”

“Yep.” Sam hefted the saw. “Unless you’d like to do it?”

Roy leaned the board against the wall and shook his head. He chuckled. “No, thanks. I’d probably manage to cut my arm off. I was never good with power tools. Back in my day, though, I was a demon with the slipstick. You probably don’t know what that is, do you?”

“The heck I don’t. You must’ve been an engineer. That’s what those fellas called a slide rule, wasn’t it?”

Roy nodded. “When I started out in the oil and gas business, we all carried them. I even had a holster for mine. Even more than a pocket protector, a slide-rule holster was a sure sign of an engineer.”

This was turning out to be easier than Sam thought it would be. “Math was never my strong suit, but I knew fellas who were real good at it. Haven’t seen a slide rule in a long time, though.”

“Oh, no, if any of them are still around now, they’d be antiques.” Roy laughed. “Sort of like the fellas who used them. Like me.”

“Don’t go remindin’ me how old we are. My knees remind me of it all the time.”

“We’ve been using computers for more than twenty years now,” Roy went on. “These little handheld calculators the kids have now probably have more capabilities than all of NASA’s computers did when we used them to send men to the Moon and back. It’s amazing.”

“I thought you said you were in the oil and gas business, not NASA.”

“Oh, I just meant ‘we’ in the general sense. I’m from Houston but never had anything to do with space. My company was more concerned with what’s under the ground than what’s above it.”

“Which company’s that?”

“You never would have heard of it. It’s just a little consulting firm. Nobody outside of the industry has heard of it.”

Sam nodded. Roy was being a little evasive now, but his answers weren’t really all that suspicious. If somebody not from around here had asked Sam where he used to teach, he might have said, “Oh, just some little town out in the country you never heard of,” rather than telling them Poolville. The name wouldn’t mean anything to them. This might just be a case of Roy feeling the same way.

“You own the business?” The question was a little blunt, but not out of line. It was something two men who didn’t know each other all that well might discuss over power tools.

“No, I was vice president in charge of R and D. Research and development.”

Sam nodded even though he knew perfectly well what R and D stood for.

“I spent most of my time in front of a computer for the past ten years. I’ve got to say, it’s good to be out and about more.”

“I imagine so. Computers have taken over teachin’, too. When I started out, my grade book was a real book, and I wrote the grades down with a fountain pen and added them up and figured averages on an addin’ machine. Now it’s all online, and you get a kid’s grade by clickin’ on something. In the classrooms they’ve got ‘smart boards’ instead of blackboards, and you can hook your computer up to ’em or plug a USB drive into ’em.”