The Nightingale Before Christmas (11 page)

“It didn't happen when we were over there caroling?” I asked. I was always deathly afraid that the boys would start running and knock over one of the frailer seniors.

“No, around midnight, while I was on duty. I'm the night shift receptionist, you know, five nights a week.”

Actually, I hadn't known, but I nodded as if I did.

“It's really the perfect job for us,” she said. “Until we can afford to do this full time. For me, actually—Vicky's retired, of course. But she comes over most nights when I'm on duty, and we sit together behind the desk and quilt all night. Or work on our room designs. Management doesn't mind—as long as I'm there to answer the phone and buzz people in, they don't care what I do. And sometimes, like last night, it's a real blessing to have the two of us there.”

“What happened last night,” I asked. “With Mrs. Stavropoulos?”

“Got up to go to the bathroom and fell,” Alice said. “Luckily, she could still reach the emergency cord. I called 9-1-1 and Vicky went up to sit with her and keep her spirits up until the ambulance got there. And a few of the residents heard the ambulance, and we had to reassure them and walk them back to their rooms. And old Mr. Jackson took it into his head again that General Sherman's army was coming to burn the town, and Vicky calmed him down by filling the water buckets and keeping watch out his window till he fell asleep. I had to stay at the desk all this time—I was trying to reach Dr. Stavropoulos to let him know—so having her there was a lifesaver.”

“When did all this happen?” I asked.

“Around eleven thirty,” she said. “And I don't think we got everyone calmed down and back in their rooms until well after one a.m. Not much progress on our quilting last night! But Mrs. Stavropoulos is going to be all right, so all's well that ends well.”

“Where is Vicky?” I asked. “Sleeping in after all that excitement?”

“I wish. That both of us could sleep in. No, she's downstairs, talking to the chief. My turn next. You poor thing! Here I'm rattling on about our night—and did I hear that you found poor Clay's body right here in the house?”

“I did,” I said. “And I'll be happy to tell you all about it after you talk to the chief. I just came over to see how you two were doing. Find out if this morning's delay has you in a panic.”

“Oh, we're fine,” she said. “We'd be fine if the house opened tomorrow. Mind you, there's a few more things we want to do if we have the time. And we might do a little fine tuning of what's here. For example, do you think we should swap the tumbling blocks with the Irish chain? Or leave them were they are?”

From her gestures, I deduced that we were talking about quilts, not actual blocks and chains.

“I'm not sure I know which one is which,” I said. “And if I had any design sense whatsoever, Mother would long ago have co-opted me to work in her room. But for my money, that quilt is the most awesome one you've got.” I pointed to a quilt that looked like a bunch of three-dimensional squares done in black, purple, and turquoise. “So if you put it where it was the first thing visitors saw when they walked into the room, they would be seriously impressed.”

“That's the tumbling blocks,” she said. “And yes, we were thinking we should make it more prominent. Don't tell me you have no design sense. Can you help me with this?”

We'd done this before, so I knew the drill. We each grabbed one end of the long pole from which my favorite quilt was hanging and lifted it down from the pegs that held it up. We laid it down carefully on the worktable while we picked up the other quilt—presumably the Irish chain—and moved it into the place where the tumbling blocks had been.

“Definitely an improvement,” Alice said, as we lifted the tumbling blocks quilt into place, right inside the door where the visitors would enter after touring Martha's bathroom. We stood back for a few moments and admired the effect.

There were a dozen large quilts hung around the room—some modern, some traditional, all different and all beautiful. Along one wall they'd put a shelf with dozens of bolts of fabric, arranged in order from blue on one end through green, yellow, orange, red, and purple at the far end, like a bright rainbow. And they hadn't forgotten to work in the Christmas theme. One of the quilts was a special Christmas quilt in reds and greens, using fabrics with patterns of holly and presents. Another was in blue and silver with stars and snowflakes—both beautiful, though neither outshone the tumbling blocks quilt I so admired. The small Christmas tree in the corner was decorated with a garland of metallic fabric and ornaments quilted from red and green satin.

“Even the late Mr. Spottiswood allowed as how that quilt wasn't too bad,” Alice said as she carefully tucked a few sprigs of evergreen at either end of the pole, being careful not to let them touch the fabric. “I confess, I feel sorry for the poor man, but I won't miss him.”

“Sorry for him?”

“You have to be pretty unhappy to be that mean, don't you?”

I nodded.

“Well, anyway,” she said. “Things will be a bit more pleasant around here with him gone, won't they?”

“Yes, we might actually see a bit of Christmas cheer around here.”

“True,” she said. “I think Clay's idea of Christmas decorating was to put a bit of mistletoe in the doorway so he could bother all the pretty ladies. But actually by around here I meant here in Caerphilly. The design world's a small town, you know. Having Clay barge in has shaken things up a bit. And not in a good way.”

“Who was the most hurt by his arrival?” I asked.

“Sarah and Martha,” Alice said, with surprising promptness. “Your mother and Eustace have a much more traditional sensibility. So do Linda and Violet, though they're not in the same league. Violet's barely making a living, and poor Linda's lucky her late husband left her comfortably off.”

Linda, I remembered, was Our Lady of Chintz's real name.

“And he didn't much hurt Vicky and me, either. If you want a quilting room, or a room designed with plenty of quilts, we're the best. But we don't do anything outside of our niche. And I suppose our vampire girl has her own niche. Not a big call for decorating with bats and coffins, is there? I understand she makes the better part of her income selling Goth crafts on Etsy.”

I nodded as if I'd already known this.

“But Sarah and Martha are both working in similar areas,” she said. “More modern styles. A clean, open minimalist look. Strong colors. I think when he arrived here a few years ago, he took quite a bite out of both their businesses,” she went on. “They've been bouncing back—people are starting to see Clay for the one-trick pony he is. Oh, it's quite a handsome pony, but it's always the same, and frankly, a little too much Clay and too little client. He's not a bad designer if you like what he likes, but if you don't, too bad—that's what you get anyway.”

“Mrs. Graham?” Sammy appeared at the head of the stairway that led down to the garage. “The chief would like to see you now.”

 

Chapter 9

“I'm ready,” Alice said. “Dying to get it over with so I can pump Meg for all the details she won't tell me!”

Bless her for that—it might reduce the chief's annoyance, if he heard I'd been talking to a witness he hadn't yet interviewed.

I decided it might be wiser for me to stick to talking to people who'd already been debriefed. So I followed them down the stairs and through the kitchen, intending to see what Mother and Eustace were up to.

They were standing together in the archway that separated Eustace's breakfast nook from Mother's great room. As I watched, they looked into the great room. Then the breakfast nook. Then the great room again.

“No,” he said. “You're right.”

“Too abrupt,” Mother said.

“I could change the paint color?”

“No, it's not that,” Mother said. “Maybe if we mass a few poinsettias on either side of the archway.”

They studied the archway some more.

“No,” they said simultaneously.

I'd seen this before. They could keep up these conferences for longer that I'd ever imagined possible. Sometimes the conference erupted into painting and furniture moving, and anyone foolish enough to be nearby would get drafted into the action and could kiss the rest of her day good-bye.

“Oh, hello, Meg,” Eustace said, spotting me. “What do you think of—”

“Hang on,” I said. “I've got to check on—on Linda.”

I'd almost called her Our Lady of Chintz in front of someone other than Mother. I needed to be careful. Linda. Linda. Linda.

I went back through the kitchen and into the dining room.

Linda was standing in her room, looking frazzled. She was batting uselessly at the branches of spruce that protruded into her room as if she'd caught them trying to sneak farther in and dump needles on her fabric. One of them had snagged her shapeless brown woolen tunic.

“This tree is impossible,” she said, turning to me. “The branches take up half the room.”

Half was an exaggeration, but the branches did stick out rather far.

“We need to move the tree,” she said.

I'd been afraid of that. Tomás and Mateo were nearly finished redecorating Mother's side of the tree. We couldn't ask them to move it again.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I think the tree adds just the right touch. We only need a little less of it in the room. I'll have Randall get someone to prune it back.”

I stepped into the hall and called. Randall didn't answer, so I left a voice mail—one that wouldn't offend Linda, in case she was eavesdropping.

Then I stepped back into the dining room. Linda had turned her back on the invading vegetation and was sitting on one of her chintz-covered dining room chairs, threading red and gold beads and green holly leaves onto a string to make a garland.

“So,” I said. “Apart from the branches, how's it going?”

“Fine.” She looked up and gave me a tight little smile. The kind of smile that's supposed to say “Don't worry, everything's fine,” but makes you pretty sure everything isn't. “Just need to add those few Christmassy touches,” she went on. “I'm essentially finished with the room itself.”

For my taste, she should have declared it finished a week ago. It was a big dining room, but now it felt small and claustrophobic. There were too many things here. Too much going on. Too many small bits of furniture. Too many precisely arranged groups of small prints or decorative plates on the wall. Too many whatnots containing too many delicate tchotchkes. And above all, too many different chintz prints. One for the wallpaper. A similar but not-quite-matching one for the curtains. A third print for the dining room chair seats. Yet another for the occasional chair in the corner, not to mention another for the skirt covering the side table. Even the rug had a busy pattern all too reminiscent of chintz. I knew the effect she was aiming for—she'd told me the first time I met her.

“I like that cluttered, homey, English country look,” she'd said. “Where it doesn't look as if everything was bought as a set, all matchy-matchy. Where the family just accumulates objects it loves, over the centuries, and doesn't care whether they're
supposed
to go together.”

I had liked the sound of that. I'd expected something low-key and comfortable. Unfortunately, her room looked more as if she'd found a sale on chintz remnants and handed them over to a crew of blind seamstresses.

Of course, I made no pretense of understanding decorating trends, so for all I knew this could be the coming thing. Total sensory overload as a decorating strategy. Maybe I'd be seeing rooms like this in all of Mother's decorating magazines, if I ever bothered reading them.

Then again, there was hope. Mother hated Linda's room, I reminded myself, as I gazed at the offending spruce branches.

Linda herself didn't match the room at all. She was an attractive woman of forty-five or fifty, and I could tell her skirt and sweater were not cheap, but the overall effect was drab and lugubrious.

But she was pleasant and undemanding and went about her decorating business without any of the angst and drama that seemed part of the process for so many of the other designers, so on the whole, I liked her.

A stack of cardboard boxes sat in one corner, all with the words “Christmas ornaments” scrawled on them in one place or another.

“Oh, dear,” I said. “Did you have to bring in your own personal Christmas decorations to cope with the tree?”

“Yes, but that's not a problem,” she said. “I'm not going to do a tree this year anyway. There's just me, and I won't be home enough to really enjoy it. The tree here's a godsend. I was worried that the room wasn't turning out Christmassy enough.”

Not Christmassy enough? She'd already looped red, green, and gold garlands, like the one she was making, along the crown molding all around the room near the ceiling. Tucked sheaves of holly and ivy behind every picture. Covered the table with a red-and-green holly print table runner. Scattered china elves and angels along the runner. And placed both wreaths and battery-operated candles in the two windows. To me, the as-yet undecorated branches of the Christmas tree poking through the archway were the one soothing, peaceful, truly beautiful element in the room.

“Don't work yourself into a frazzle,” I said. “We women are all too prone to do that around Christmas. Take care of yourself.”

“Oh, don't worry about me,” she said. But I was startled to see that there were tears in her eyes. She bowed her head over her work, clearly not wanting me to see the tears.

Part of me wanted to stay and find out why a few kind words reduced her to tears. But another part of me—probably a better part—wanted to give her some privacy.