The Nightingale Before Christmas (10 page)

“If she does, I'll talk her out of it,” I said. “It looks glorious there. You'd hardly know the dining room existed.”

“Yeah, I gathered that was the whole point,” Randall said with a snicker. “But your mother made me cut a couple feet off the bottom to make sure folks could still see Ivy's ‘Nightingale' mural.”

The mural that at the moment was still only a few pencil marks on the wall of the upper hall, marks so faint that from down here it still looked like a blank wall. I felt a twinge of increasingly familiar stomach-churning anxiety. Would Ivy still have time to finish all the paintings she'd planned? And if she didn't, would it be playing favorites to hint that maybe she should give priority to the one Mother had planned to showcase in her room?

Just then the front door opened.

“Meg, darlin'!” Eustace sailed in with a travel coffee cup in one hand and a large brown grocery bag in the other. He bent over to land an air kiss near my cheek. “I hear it was like the shootout at the O.K. Corral in here last night.”

“I was only here for two of the gunshots,” I said.

“I'm going to round up my workmen,” Randall said, and strode off, pulling out his cell phone.

“
Only
two! Good Lord!” Eustace exclaimed. He was heading through Mother's room to his own domain, the breakfast room and kitchen. “But I heard someone knocked off Clay, and you found him. I want to hear every detail! Spill!”

“Not till after you've talked to the chief,” I said.

“You sure he wants to talk to me?” Eustace asked.

“He wants to talk to everyone.” I followed him into the breakfast room and sat down at the round glass-topped table while he continued into the kitchen.

“Well, I won't grill you till after the chief has grilled me.” He had opened the refrigerator door and was putting things away: diet sodas, several brown paper-wrapped deli packages, and bottles of water. “But after that, I expect all the dirt.”

“Every bit,” I said. I was staring at something that seemed out of place in the otherwise impeccable breakfast nook. A dirty glass. No, a half-full glass, and unless my sense of smell was playing tricks on me, it was half-full of cheap scotch.

I found myself remembering a night shortly after we'd started working on the house, when Randall had sent over beer, sodas, and pizza for everyone. I'd held out a can of soda and a bottle of beer for Eustace to choose from.

“I'll take the diet soda, darlin',” he'd said.

“I'm not a big beer drinker myself,” I'd replied.

“Dear heart, I'm a dry drunk,” he'd said. “Ten years sober come New Year's Day. If you ever see me popping the top of one of those beers, you tie me down and call my sponsor.”

So why was there a half-full glass of scotch in his room?

He saw what I was looking at.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

“If you think it's a stale glass of cheap, smelly scotch, then yes,” I said.

“Another little offering from Clay,” he said. “The last, I assume, unless he comes back to needle me from beyond the grave. Do me a favor—pour it out and rinse that glass out real good so I won't smell it.”

“Offering from Clay?” I echoed, as I got up to follow his instructions. “You mean he left this here deliberately. Did he know—”

“That I'm a recovering alcoholic? Hell, yes. He did it all the time, bless his evil little heart. That's the kind of guy he is. Was.”

I dumped the scotch in the sink, rinsed out the glass twice, and ran enough water to make sure the alcohol smell was long gone from the sink. Then I carried the glass back to the breakfast table so I could take it with me when I left. It was a cheap, heavy tumbler, and clearly didn't belong in Eustace's elegant kitchen.

“Chief's going to want to know my alibi.” Eustace looked somber. “And that's going to be a problem.”

“If only we'd known someone was going to knock Clay off,” I said. “We could all have arranged to be with someone who could alibi us.”

“I was with someone, but I'm not sure it's going to do me any good,” Eustace said. “I'm sponsoring someone. He's almost made six months.”

“That's great,” I said.

“But holidays are a bad time for him. For most of us. I was with him, helping him through a bad night, from about nine thirty till well past two in the morning. But I can't give the chief his name unless he's okay with it. And if he's not…”

He shook his head.

“Maybe it won't be a problem,” I said. “Even if he says no, you probably won't be the only person in the house without an alibi.”

“No,” he said, looking slightly more cheerful. “Not even the only person without an alibi who hated Clay's guts. I do hope your mother's alibied.”

“Probably alibied ten times over,” I said. “Michael's giving his one-man show of Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
tonight, so we have tons of family and friends coming into town to see it. If I know Mother, she was up till midnight visiting.”

Deputy Sammy appeared in the doorway from the living room.

“Mr. Goodwin? The chief's ready for you now.”

Eustace stood up and squared his shoulders.

“Wish me luck,” he said, and sailed out.

I followed him and Sammy out into the living room. Mother was standing in the center of the room, gazing at the tree. Apparently she'd recruited Tomás and Mateo to work on the redecoration. They'd placed two stepladders next to the tree and were scampering down to grab ornaments and then back up to put them on the tree with Mother directing them in sign language and scraps of broken Spanish.

I glanced over at the French doors. Eustace was talking, gesticulating dramatically. I had a feeling he'd be there for quite a while.

Randall and my cousin Horace were standing at the top of the stairs. I ran up to join them.

 

Chapter 8

“Hey, Meg,” Horace said. “The chief says it's okay for you guys to have the room back.”

“Great,” I said. “How bad is it?”

Randall stepped aside so I could see.

The master bed frame stood, stripped of its hangings, its bed linens, and even its mattress.

“We took all the bedding down to the lab,” Horace said, following my look. “And there was almost no blood on the walls.”

I didn't see any blood on them. But it looked as if someone had gone after the walls, the floors, and the furniture with an ax. And there was fingerprint powder all over everything—the furniture, the carpet, and the walls up to a height of six or seven feet.

“Soon as your mother's finished with Tomás and Mateo, I'm to turn them loose in here,” Randall said. “First thing's to scrub off all that powder. Then we can patch and repaint.”

“And clean or replace the carpet,” I suggested.

“Roger.” He was scribbling on his list. “Couple of my guys are headed down here with some new drywall, and the hardware store's mixing up a big batch of that god-awful red paint. We'll get it back as fast as we can to where it was when Clay left yesterday, so start talking to whoever you think you can get to finish it off.”

“We'll also need a new mattress,” I said. “King-sized.”

“And I assume we should be replacing the black sheets.”

“Part of the design,” I said.

“See you later,” Horace said. “Got to get back to the lab.”

“Oh, my!”

I looked over to see Violet standing in the doorway. She was holding something—a rolled-up rug, by the look of it—and staring at the room.

“What's left of the crime scene,” Randall said.

“Horrible,” Violet said. She turned and fled—presumably across the hall, to her room.

“I should go and see if she's all right,” I said.

Randall nodded. He was holding a box of trash bags. As I was turning to leave, I saw him pull one out and stoop down to start picking up some of the debris on the floor.

I followed Violet. She was standing in her room, holding her head.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I've got a bit of a headache,” she replied.

Probably a monster headache, by the look of her. She was pale and hollow-eyed, and I noticed she was shading her eyes against the light.

“Want me to help you with that?” I asked, pointing to the rolled-up rug.

“Please.”

I tore the brown paper off the roll and set it down on the floor. I figured it would go where the damaged rug had gone, and Violet didn't correct me. Then I unrolled it, revealing a very familiar-looking petit-point rug.

“Is this a new rug or the one Clay damaged?” I asked.

“The damaged one.”

“It looks great!” I exclaimed.

“It's Daphne's doing,” she said. Daphne, the proprietor of the Caerphilly Cleaners, was well known as a miracle worker when it came to removing stains. In a less enlightened era, her competitors would probably have tried to have her burned at the stake. “I can still sort of tell where the paint was,” she added.

“But it might be your imagination,” I hurried to say. “And no one else would ever guess. It looks great. The whole room looks great.”

I must have been able to say it with a straight face, because she beamed happily. Actually, I suppose if you liked pastel colors, glitter, ruffles, lace, and stuffed animals, it probably was great. It was certainly the most extreme example I'd ever seen of the whole uber-feminine girly girl style. If Mother had done up my room like this when I was ten or twelve, I'd have run screaming into the night and slept in the tool shed.

Martha stuck her head in the door.

“You okay?” she asked. “You want more of that Alka-Seltzer?”

“I'm fine,” Violet replied.

“You don't look fine,” Martha said. “Here.” She handed Violet a bottle of water. “Keep hydrating. Best thing for you.”

Violet nodded, opened the bottle, and sipped.

Martha nodded and left. I was puzzled. I hadn't noticed that the two of them were particularly close before.

“She's a mother hen,” Violet said. “We sort of bonded over the whole horrible experience of having Clay ruin our rooms.”

“I can understand that,” I said.

“We went out to dinner last night,” she said. “To vent about the whole thing. Isn't that lucky?”

“Lucky? How so?”

“Well, I had a couple of glasses of wine, which I shouldn't have done, because even one glass puts me under the table.” She giggled girlishly. “Martha put me up in her guest room, and we stayed up past midnight gossiping.”

I suddenly realized where she was going with this.

“So you're alibied,” I said. “Congratulations!”

It must have sounded as silly to her as it did to me, because we both burst out laughing. Or maybe it was the relief. She was happy to be in the clear. I was happy for her. She was one of the nice ones. Silly, but nice. And knowing that Martha had looked after her properly made me think better of her, too.

“What's so funny?” Martha had appeared in the doorway again.

“We were just—” Violet began. And then she paused and held her hand to her mouth. “Oh, dear. Mind if I use your bathroom for a sec?”

“Don't touch the walls,” Martha said. “Wet paint.”

Martha stepped into the room. Violet scurried into the bathroom and closed the door.

“Nice of you to look after her,” I said.

“Some people shouldn't be allowed out on their own.”

“And your good deed is rewarded.”

“Rewarded?” Martha raised one eyebrow in a puzzled expression.

“At the very time when Clay was being murdered here in the house, the two of you were sharing girlish confidences over your wine.”

“Actually, I was probably holding her head while she worshiped the porcelain goddess,” Martha said. “No head for alcohol, that girl. And I feel a little guilty—we must have spent half the evening trading stories about nasty things Clay had done, and planning silly little pranks to play on him. If I'd known he was about to get killed…” She shook her head.

“But you didn't,” I said. “And being dead doesn't make him a saint.”

“I guess we'll have to go to the funeral,” she said. “And look solemn. And make sure he's really gone.”

Violet opened the door and scurried out into the room.

“Thanks, Martha,” she chirped.

“Let's go see if Eustace has any coffee,” Martha said. “Might settle your stomach.”

As they went down the stairs, I could hear Violet chattering with determined cheerfulness about ruching, whatever that was. And Martha answering that proper thread tension was the key.

Not the most likely pair of new best friends, but perhaps working in adjacent rooms under the pressure of our deadline—and with the odious Clay nearby—had worked some kind of magic. And it would be interesting if their newfound alliance survived the end of the show house. But it was nice, for the time being, to see Violet opening up and Martha behaving kindly rather than waspishly.

I heard the toilet flush in Martha's bathroom. The door to the first part of the bathroom, with the sink and tub in it was open, but the door to the toilet compartment was closed. I waited until after I heard water running in the second sink, in its own compartment on the far side of the toilet, to knock on the door.

“Out in a minute.”

It was Alice, one of the two Quilt Ladies.

“I was just coming to see how you two were doing this morning,” I said.

“Pretty well, considering,” she answered, as I followed her into the bonus room beyond. “Last night was a tough night.”

“You're telling me,” I said.

“I don't just mean here,” she said. “Mrs. Stavropoulos broke her hip. Dr. Stavropoulos's mother,” she added, seeing my puzzled look. “She lives at Caerphilly Assisted Living.”