The Nightingale Before Christmas (29 page)

“Downstairs,” she said. She inched into the room, backed away from the door, and then jerked the gun slightly toward it. “Move.”

She was motioning me toward the door. Well, that was a good thing, wasn't it? Here in the master suite there was only one way out, past her and the gun. Once I was out in the hall, there were the two stairways, which meant two escape routes. And downstairs would be even better.

“I said move,” she snapped.

“I'm moving,” I said. I made my way carefully to the door, not turning my back on her as I slid across the room and then backed out into the hall.

“Turn around,” she said. “And walk downstairs. Slowly.”

She was so wild-eyed and twitchy that I didn't like turning my back on her, but I figured it was more dangerous to disobey.

She followed me downstairs, far enough behind that there was no chance of turning around and jumping her.

“Into the living room,” she said. “Far enough. Now kneel down.”

I didn't like it.

“Look,” I said. “There's no need to do this.”

“Fat lot you know,” she muttered from behind me. “Kneel down.”

I turned slightly so I could see what she was doing, and crouched a little bit, as if to suggest I was about to obey her.

“Everyone knows Clay was a total jerk,” I said. “I figure he must have tried to attack you or something. You'd get off on self-defense. Every designer in the house would—”

“I didn't kill him!”

She accompanied her shout with a hard punch to my stomach. I was frozen—only for a few seconds, but long enough for her to grab my arms and wrap something around them. By the time I could struggle again, my arms were tied behind me, and I was lying on my face on the living room rug.

“Stupid people,” she muttered. “I didn't kill him.”

“Then did you see who did?” I twisted slightly so I could see her.

“Of course not,” she said. “He was dead when I came in.”

“That's great,” I said. “Then let's tell the police and everything will be okay.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. I heard a small clatter.

I wriggled a little more so I could see what she was doing. She had knocked the two middle stockings off the mantel, brass hooks and all, and was leaning into the fireplace and reaching up as if looking for something.

I decided to take a chance that some of my hypotheses were correct.

“Look,” I said. “I know you used to live in this house. And you're looking for something you left behind. If I knew what it was, maybe I could help you.”

She stopped and turned to look at me.

“I'm looking for the money,” she said.

“You left money here?” I asked. “How much?”

“I don't know,” she said. “But it's a lot. It was my parents' money.”

“Well, where did they leave it?”

“If I knew that I'd have it by now,” she said. “I thought it was in one of the secret compartments.”

She sounded younger than eighteen. Did Emily, the neighbor, overestimate her age? No, she didn't just sound younger than eighteen. She sounded like a cranky child. I had a bad feeling about this.

“Have you looked in all of the secret compartments?” I asked.

“All I could find. My dad must have made some I didn't know about. He liked to do that—make secret compartments, and then he'd hide candy in them for me to find.”

“Sounds nice,” I said.

“But maybe he made some extra secret compartments for the money.”

She was knocking on the mantelpiece, as if trying to find a hollow spot. I had managed to pull my arms far enough to the side that I could crane my head and look over my shoulder to see what she'd tied me up with.

It looked like a leftover bit of the black-and-red braided cord Mother had used to trim the couch and the chairs. I started picking at it with my nails, and casting my eyes around for something sharp I could rub it against. I vowed I was not going to die tied up with these little bits of string.

“Damned passementerie,” I muttered.

“What?” Jessica said.

“I said, did your parents leave behind a lot of money?”

“Yes,” she said. “We were rich. I had a pony, and I had ballet and piano lessons, and Daddy was building me a pool so I could practice a lot and make the swim team. And then the stupid bank took our house away.”

Probably not a good idea to point out that people who really had a lot of money didn't usually have their houses foreclosed on.

Jessica had started knocking on the walls by the fireplace. She must have found something she liked the sound of. She walked out into the hall, putting the gun down on one of the end tables as she went.

I felt a little better now that she wasn't holding the gun.

Until she walked back into the room holding a large ax.

I redoubled my efforts to unravel the passementerie.

“The stupid bank
cheat
ed us.” Jessica took a vicious hack at one of Mother's freshly painted walls. “They took away my
pony
.” Another hack. “And then they took away our
house
. One day Mommy picked me up at school and told me we were leaving. And they wouldn't let my parents come back in to get their money.”

“Are you sure they left it in the house?” I said. “And not somewhere else? Because you've done a really good job of searching the house over the last six months.”

“I know it's in the house,” she said. “My mother must have said it a million times. ‘You can't have a
pony
. You can't have
dance
lessons. We don't have any
money
. All our
money's
in the
house
.'”

I winced, and not because she'd just reduced fifteen or twenty square feet of Mother's “Red Obsession”–painted wall to wreckage. “All our money's in the house.” I could remember saying those very words in those first few years after Michael and I had bought our house. The size of the mortgage payments had made us nervous in those early days, even before you factored in all the money we'd paid to the Shiffley Construction Company to make the house habitable. We'd had to economize a bit. All our money was in the house.

But not literally. We hadn't had Randall Shiffley's workmen build little hiding places in between the walls and under the floorboards to stash our meager post-down-payment savings in.

Maybe Jessica's parents had. But even if they had, what were the odds they'd left behind tons of cash when they moved away? However abrupt their departure might have seemed to eleven- or twelve-year-old Jessica, her parents would have had time to clean our their hiding places.

And did she really think the left-behind treasure would still be there after the house had been empty for six years, despoiled by vandals and squatters, and completely rebuilt by Randall and his workmen?

Yes, apparently she did. She was working on another wall now, alternately hacking out chunks and stopping to sift through the rubble she'd created. And she was getting more and more jittery and agitated. Was she on something? Or suffering from some kind of mental illness? Either way, I needed to get untied and away from her, because she seemed to be spiraling down into some kind of frenzy.

She'd started muttering to herself. I caught a few words.

“… be a lot easier if these damned creeps hadn't come in and messed up everything…”

She seemed to have forgotten I was there. Which was a good thing. But what if she glanced over, saw me, and remembered that I was one of the creeps who'd messed up everything?

Just then I spotted movement in the archway separating the living room from the breakfast room. Someone was standing there in the shadows.

I glanced over at Jessica, and then back at the figure. I shook my head, and then jerked it toward Jessica.

The figure took a step forward. It was Martha.

I couldn't remember when I'd been so glad to see a friendly face.

 

Chapter 24

I could see Martha peering out of the archway at Jessica. I tried to shake my head, ever-so-slightly, to suggest that stepping into the room was a really bad idea.

After watching Jessica for a moment or so, she glanced down at me, nodded, and withdrew back into the kitchen.

Make sure you're far enough away so she doesn't hear you when you call 9-1-1, I wanted to tell her. And get some kind of a weapon! But she's dangerous, so stay back and don't try anything—unless, of course, you see her about to shoot me or dismember me, in which case you should do something quick!

Martha was a cool customer, I reminded myself. She could handle this.

At least I hoped she could.

“Where is it?” Jessica again. “It's got to be here. It's
got
to!”

She seemed to be losing it. More of it than she'd already lost. She began flailing out wildly with the ax, shrieking inarticulately. She shattered the mirror above the fireplace. Knocked the legs out from under a delicate secretary desk. Chopped a couple of nasty holes in the carpet. Bounced around between the sofas and armchairs, shredding up the brocade cushions. I flinched when she came near me, but she sailed past and began trying to dismember the Christmas tree. Between her shrieks, the hatchet blows, and the smashing sounds as hundreds of ornaments fell to the floor and shattered to bits I could barely hear myself think.

Martha, bless her heart, began stealing into the room under cover of the tree surgery. She was heading for the table with the gun.

She had it.

I breathed a sigh of relief and gave my poor bruised fingers a rest—I'd made progress on unraveling the passementerie, but not enough. Not a problem, though—Martha could hold Jessica at bay until the police arrived. Or, if Jessica was so hysterical that she tried to attack her in spite of the gun—well, I suspected Martha had enough nerve to use it.

She lifted the gun in her right hand and steadied it with her left. She'd either used a gun before or had paid attention when watching TV and movie cops use them. Go Martha!

Then she fired, twice.

Jessica collapsed on the floor and fell silent.

I was stunned into silence myself for a few moments.

Martha walked over to take a closer look at Jessica.

“Did you have to shoot her?” I asked.

“She's not dead,” Martha said.

“That's a relief,” I said. “Can you come over and untie me?”

“Which means I'll just have to shoot her again,” Martha said. “After bashing your head in with her ax, of course. It'll look as if you shot her just as she was hitting you with the ax. I'll let the chief of police decide who he wants to blame Clay's murder on.”

I started working again on unraveling the passementerie.

“You killed Clay,” I said. “Why?”

Not that I didn't have a pretty good idea why, between their professional rivalry and their shattered romantic relationship. But it seemed a good idea to keep her talking.

“Oh, for heaven's sake, you know why,” she snapped. “You've heard how he took me in. Let me set him up in the design business and then turned on me and took all my clients. I lost my business and had to go to work as a furniture store design consultant. Took me two years to save enough to start up again here in Caerphilly—it would have taken a lot longer to get started again in Richmond. And a year later, he moves here and thinks he can do it all again. No way. I told him—back off, leave my clients alone. But did he listen?”

“So it was all professional?” I asked. “Or am I imagining that the two of you also had a relationship?”

“The bastard,” she muttered. “Turns out I imagined the relationship. He was just using me.”

“So you killed him,” I said.

“That wasn't actually the plan,” she said. “I was just going to frame him.”

“For what?”

“Possession of a firearm,” she said. “In Virginia, a convicted felon who's caught with a gun can go to prison. I knew that from serving on a jury once. And when we were all trying to rescue Sarah's furniture, I dragged out this little end table, and suddenly the drawer pops open and a gun falls out. I kicked it under the sofa, and then picked it up later, with my cleaning gloves on. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but I figured it would be good for something. And then I came up with the idea of leaving it in Clay's room and calling the cops to report it.”

“So you took Violet out and got her plastered, so she'd tell everyone how sweet you were to take away her keys and let her stay in your guest room,” I said.

“Yeah.” She seemed to be enjoying the chance to brag about her cleverness. “I slipped her a Mickey to make sure she stayed out. I'm only six blocks from here, so I figured it would be a cinch to slip over here, plant the gun, and get back in before she noticed I was gone.”

“All that trouble for an alibi for planting the gun?” I asked.

“I figured he'd blame me for planting it,” she said. “He knew I had it in for him. So I wanted to make sure I could prove I hadn't done it. Lucky for me, isn't it? And bad luck for Clay, barging in when he did.”

“And you struggled, and the gun went off,” I said. “I'm sure you were devastated, but you were there to play a prank on him, not kill him. It was self-defense.” I tried to put a sympathetic, concerned expression on my face, as if I really did believe she was innocent. “Completely understandable. Anyone who knew Clay would call it justifiable homicide.”

“Nice try,” she said. “But I'm not buying it. Wish your little nut job had wrecked a few other rooms. Wonder if I have the time to—no, probably better not.”

“You won't get away with it,” I said.

“I can sure try,” she said. “And you know what? I may not have time to wreck everyone else's rooms, but I can hack Clay's stupid paintings to shreds.”