The Nightingale Before Christmas (17 page)

“Blast!” I muttered. I remembered all the time I'd spent talking to Jessica—time I could so easily have spent doing something more immediately useful. And who knew how much of the designers' time she'd wasted?

Ah, well. At least if she did the article it might get the decorators some publicity. And there was always the chance that once the chief caught up with her he might find something useful in the photos she took.

I ran into Randall in the throng of family and friends crowding Michael's dressing room.

“Everything go okay at the house after I left?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Ivy was the only one still there when I left to come here. I'm going to drop by on the way home and make sure everything's locked up.”

“I'll do it,” he said. “You go home and rest.”

“I'll think about it,” I said.

Jamie was asleep on Michael's shoulder by the time we got to the Twinmobile. Josh was busily discussing the costume he needed to have for his Dickens show, and was so wide awake that I was afraid I'd have to start assembling his miniature Victorian dress suit as soon as we got home. But a few seconds after I strapped him into his booster seat, he fell silent and his head lolled to one side in the sort of awkward position that never seems to bother children, though any adult who tried it would probably end up with a semipermanent sore neck.

Michael took off with the boys, and I headed up the street to where I'd parked my car. The streets that had been lined with cars belonging to shoppers and people going to the theater were nearly empty now that the stores were closed and the show over.

I was enjoying the peace and quiet and the crisp night air until I suddenly noticed the sound of footsteps behind me.

 

Chapter 14

Was I imagining the footsteps? I stopped and bent down as if to adjust my boot fastening. I stole a look behind me. There was no one in the street. And I heard no footsteps nearby.

Yet when I walked on, I heard it again. My footsteps made just a little more noise than they should. And the noise varied ever so slightly, as if someone was walking behind me, taking a step every time I did, and almost—but not quite—disguising the sound of his footsteps.

I walked along at a slow saunter until I came to a corner. Then, instead of crossing the street as I'd originally planned, I ducked around the corner. Once I had a building to keep me out of sight of anyone following me, I sprinted till I came to an alley in the middle of the block. I ducked down the alley and hid behind some trash cans.

I waited there, peering out from behind the trash cans to the mouth of the alley.

It wasn't my imagination. I could hear footsteps in the street I'd left. Soft footsteps approaching the mouth of the alley.

“Meg? Are you all right?”

I started, and whirled to find Muriel, owner of the diner, standing there with a full black plastic garbage bag in one hand. Not surprising, since this was the alley that ran behind the diner.

“You startled me,” I said, a lot more softly than Muriel had spoken. “I thought someone was following me.”

We both fell silent and listened while peering toward the end of the alley, but we didn't hear anything. At least I didn't, and after a few moments Muriel shook her head.

“You sure you're not just feeling spooked?” she asked. “What with finding a body last night and all?”

“Could be.” I stood up and dusted my pants off. “Sorry if I startled you.”

“No problem,” she said. “Hey, just in case someone really was following you, how about if you walk me to my car and then I'll drive you to yours?”

“It's a deal,” I said.

She deposited her garbage bag in the Dumpster and locked the back door of the diner behind her.

When we got to the mouth of the alley, I paused to look up and down the street. No one visible. Plenty of places to hide.

But was there a reason someone had left a brick lying on the snow just outside the mouth of the alley?

“From the construction site three blocks over,” Muriel said, seeing me studying the brick.

“But what's it doing here?” I asked.

She looked at the brick for a few long moments.

“My car's this way,” she said.

I was glad when we reached her car, and even gladder that she waited until she'd seen me start my car and drive off.

But I hadn't gone more than a few blocks before I began to suspect that a car was following me. A car with oddly distinctive headlights. Two sets of headlights, one on top of the other, with the bottom set slightly farther apart. And there was something on the inside of each top headlight that made it seem as if the car was looking at me cross-eyed. And frowning.

Maybe I'd been listening to the boys too much. Lately they'd developed very strong automotive likes and dislikes, based mainly on their impressions of the cars' faces, as they called the headlights and front-end decorations. Some cars looked as if they were smiling, others frowning. Some were sad, some happy. Josh was particularly fond of Corvettes, and Jamie thought most Audis looked mean. Once he'd burst into tears because a “mean car” was following us.

Was a mean car following me now? All I could see was those odd double headlights. Could be just a coincidence—there weren't that many streets in Caerphilly.

I took a leisurely detour through a residential neighborhood. The distinctive headlights never turned off, and never got any closer, even when I idled for a couple of minutes in front of a house well known for having some of the most over-the-top holiday lights in town.

Before moving on, I pulled out my phone. And then hesitated. Should I call the police?

I called Randall instead.

“What's up?” he said.

“Are you still at the show house?” I asked.

“For another minute or two. What do you need?”

“Could you stay there a few minutes longer? I think someone's following me. I'd call the police, but maybe everything that's happened lately has just got me jumpy. I don't want to look like a nervous idiot.”

“What can I do?”

“Get in your truck, but don't leave yet. I'll drive by the house in a few minutes. If there's someone following me—”

“I'll get the license, call 9-1-1, and follow both of you till the police get there.”

I felt better already. I took off again, and the headlights that had been stationary the whole time I'd pretended to enjoy the light show continued to follow me.

I cruised slowly past the show house. It was completely dark, but I spotted Randall sitting in his truck.

I went up a couple of blocks, then went around a block. Just as I was about to make a left turn to go past the show house again, the car behind me suddenly speeded up. It passed me, then turned sharply so it blocked the whole street. The driver's door popped open and a man jumped out and ran back toward my car.

I clicked the button to make sure all four doors were locked and then put the car in reverse and began slowly backing up as I picked up my cell phone to dial 9-1-1.

The man ran up to my window and banged on it, hard. Startled, I slammed on the brakes.

“Where is she?” he yelled. “I know you know.”

“Meg, help's on the way,” Debbie Ann, the dispatcher, said. “Randall just called to tell us about the guy who's following you.”

“He's not following me anymore,” I said. “He's banging on my car.”

“I'll kill that bitch when I find her!” the man was shouting.

I turned my cell phone toward my window and took a picture of the angry red face pressed against it. But while I was still figuring out how to e-mail it to the police, the man suddenly flew backwards away from my window and landed in a snowdrift. Randall now stood just outside my window. I could hear sirens in the distance.

“Don't move,” Randall shouted to the man. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

“Randall Shiffley's here,” I said to Debbie Ann. “He's … confronting the guy.”

The angry man was trying to struggle up.

Just then a police cruiser pulled up. Vern Shiffley, Randall's cousin, jumped out just in time to see the man lurch to his feet and aim a punch at Randall. Randall dodged neatly. Vern wasn't as lucky, but maybe it wasn't entirely a bad thing that my stalker had just opened himself up to a charge of assaulting a police officer.

Another cruiser pulled up and Aida Butler hopped out. By the time Chief Burke pulled up, she and Vern had the stalker handcuffed in the back of Aida's patrol car and Vern was holding a handful of snow on his injured eye.

“Are you all right?” the chief asked me.

“I'm fine,” I said.

The chief strode over to Aida's patrol car and stood looking down at my stalker.

“Mr. Granger,” he said. “What's the meaning of this?”

Someone known to the chief. I decided that was a good thing.

“She knows where my wife is,” Granger said.

I controlled my impulse to protest that I didn't even know who his wife was, much less where she was.

“And what if she does?” the chief asked. “You do realize that you'd be violating the protective order if you followed her to find your wife, don't you?”

Granger shut his mouth as if determined not to say anything else.

“Take him down to the station,” the chief said.

“I didn't go near the bitch,” Granger protested. “I don't even know where she is.”

“No, but you just assaulted a law enforcement officer while he was engaged in performing his duties,” the chief said.

He waved to Aida, who got in and started up her patrol car. As she drove off, the chief walked back over to me.

“You willing to press charges against this clown?” he asked.

“Gladly,” I said. “Though I'd really rather wait till tomorrow to do it, if it's all the same.”

“Tomorrow will be soon enough,” he said. “You want an escort home?”

I shook my head. I had the feeling Mr. Granger, whoever he might be, was the only person after me tonight.

Not that I wasn't glad when I got home and saw the house still brightly lit. And when Michael came out onto the porch to meet me.

“What took you so long?” he asked. “I was just about to call the police to have them check the ditches.”

“We had a little excitement.” I followed him and told him about Mr. Granger, while he went through the downstairs, performing his nightly ritual of shutting off lights and checking doors and windows.

“Quick thinking,” he said, when I'd finished my tale. “But who is this Granger character, and why would he think you know anything about his wife?”

“No idea,” I said. “I'll ask the chief tomorrow.”

Though I had a feeling it would have something to do with the Caerphilly Women's Shelter. A good thing Granger hadn't been following me earlier in the day.

“Has the excitement given you an appetite?” Michael asked. “Want to join me in the kitchen?”

He never ate much before a show. He claimed it wasn't due to nerves but part of a deliberate plan to keep himself sharp for the performance. Whatever the reason, he was always starving afterward and ready to pig out.

“I won't eat much, but I'll keep you company,” I said.

“Busy day tomorrow?”

“Two more days till we open,” I said. “So yes. Remind me again why I ever agreed to do this.”

“To protect this,” he said, waving a hand around in a gesture that took in not just the foyer where we were standing but the surrounding rooms. “It was the price we had to pay to keep your mother from insisting on having the show house here. Having all those crazy designers invading our space, redoing rooms we've finally got looking the way we like them, letting hordes of strangers tramp through our home—madness!”

“Not to mention the possibility that we might have had a murder in our own master bedroom instead of someone else's,” I said.

“Exactly.”

Michael continued down the hall to the kitchen. I followed more slowly, looking around as I went, taking in the Christmas decorations in the foyer. I'd expected us to have to survive with minimal holiday decorations this year, since Mother, who normally insisted on decorating for us, would be totally immersed in the show house. But the day before she started work on her room, Mother showed up at seven in the morning with a dozen or so friends and relatives, and they'd transformed the whole house. The usual tall, narrow tree graced the foyer, this year completely decorated in red and gold with a musical theme—gold ornaments shaped like harps, trumpets, fiddles, drums, pianos, and French horns shared branches with chanting angels and singing choirboys. We had about the usual number of poinsettias, though this year most of them were plain red, which I preferred to the white or pink ones. Plain red dusted with a hint of gold glitter, anyway. This year Mother had put up red velvet ribbons crisscrossed on all the foyer walls, with little clips on them to hold Christmas cards. Every afternoon, providing they'd behaved themselves, the boys were allowed to take all the newly arrived Christmas cards and add them to the display. Mother had also festooned every corner of the room with so many tiny battery-powered LED candles in red-and-gold votive holders that the room sparkled like a convention of fireflies.

Just looking at it made me happier. When Michael and I had first moved into our house, I'd made an effort to trim it for the holidays with a wreath here and a garland there, but the sheer size of the space to be decorated overwhelmed me. Mother had taken over the chore of decorating the year I'd been pregnant with the boys—“You have so much else on your plate, dear”—and to my secret relief had never relinquished it. I might poke fun at some of her excesses, but I realized that I was okay with Mother doing the decorating. It brought back memories of Christmases when I was little. Not so much the way the house looked, but the fact that long before I'd have even begun seriously thinking about holiday plans, Mother and her helper bees would show up and transform the house from top to bottom in a single day. In fact, this was even better, because when I was living at home she'd enlist me as one of her minions, and now she preferred to finish the project when I wasn't even around. Maybe she liked to surprise me. Or maybe she was afraid I'd veto some of her more extravagant notions if I found out about them in advance. Either way, I was content. Especially since I'd found out she had a growing list of clients who paid her hundreds of dollars every December to do to their houses what she did to ours for free. And now that Michael and I had the boys, I focused a lot less on being independent and getting my own way and a lot more on making sure the boys had a fabulous holiday. And they seemed to like their grandmother's decorations.