The Nightingale Before Christmas (32 page)

“Wonderful!” I exclaimed.

“Maybe I shouldn't have told you,” she said. “But you looked so disappointed.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “I'm very good at pretending to be surprised.”

She headed back to her room. In fact, all the designers were returning to their rooms to do a few bits of last-minute primping. Most of them were spinning their wheels, though, having raced to get everything ready and now finding nothing to do with themselves.

“Probably a good idea to leave now,” Sarah said finally. “At this point, I'm more apt to mess things up than improve them. And they'll kick us out when the judges get here, right?”

One by one, the others made the same decision. Eventually, Mother and Ivy were the only designers left in the house. Ivy was upstairs, finishing her Snow Queen mural, and Mother was watching Tomás and Mateo doing something with strings of lights.

“Half an hour till the judges get here,” I called out.

“I'll be ready,” Ivy called back.

I strolled into the living room. Tomás and Mateo were dashing madly up and down their tall ladders. Whatever they were doing with the lights—more like a mesh of lights than a string—they had started on either side of the Christmas tree and were about to meet over the fireplace.

I could hear Randall's voice outside.

“Step this way, folks,” he was saying.

“I'm just going to slip out the back,” Ivy said. “I'm all paint-smeared and messy.”

She looked fine, as usual. I gave her a quick hug. She seemed surprised, but not upset.

“We couldn't have done it without you,” I said. “Any of it.”

She smiled and left.

“No, the designers won't be watching you while you're judging,” I heard Randall saying on the steps. “We'll just give them a minute or two to leave.”

“
¡
Fin!
” Tomás exclaimed.

Mateo scrambled down his ladder, raced over to the foot of the Christmas tree, and plugged something in.

The lights came on. Not just the conventional lights on the Christmas tree, but great swathes of tiny fairy lights, clustered thickly all along the ceiling and then thinning out to one or two lights halfway down the walls. And all the lights twinkled, and thanks to the metallic gold paint on all the curtains and furniture and the several tons of glitter the kids had used on all the canvas murals and the Christmas ornaments, the whole room twinkled along with it.

“It's beautiful.” I said. I stopped myself from saying anything else, like “I know it's not the room you'd planned.” The room
was
beautiful. Full stop. And it looked like exactly what it was—a room decorated by a bunch of different people, some of them with a flair for design, and the rest with just a whole lot of love and Christmas spirit.

In fact, while I would never say this to Mother, I liked this room better. I found myself thinking of it as the real nightingale to the beautiful but artificial clockwork bird that was her original room.

Mother took a long, slow look around.

“Yes,” she said. “It's beautiful. Let's go out through the garage.”

As we hurried through the breakfast room, the kitchen, and the laundry room, we heard Randall's key in the front door.

“Step right in, ladies and gentlemen.”

Mother and I stopped in the garage and took a deep breath.

“I need to get in here early tomorrow morning to tidy up,” I said, looking around.

“Will people be coming in here?” Mother asked.

“Well, given that every shop in Caerphilly has been selling the tickets for weeks, probably not a lot of people,” I said. “But we're going to have a ticket seller here, just in case.”

“Then let's clean up tonight,” Mother said. “It won't take long.”

Normally, Mother's only involvement in cleaning was supervisory. But tonight she seemed to have been inspired by the events of the day and pitched in with a will. We swept, tidied, filled black plastic bags with garbage, stacked construction supplies for Randall to haul off in the morning, and arranged everything else neatly on the workbench.

But she still seemed pensive.

“A penny for them,” I said.

“I was just wishing I had a picture of my room before that horrible girl attacked it,” she said. “I was so tired when I left yesterday afternoon that I didn't take any—I was planning to ask someone to do it this morning.”

“I have a few,” I said.

“Oh, I knew you were taking them all along,” she said. “And those will be lovely to have. But it finally came together yesterday afternoon, after you left.”

“And I took a lot of pictures last night,” I said. “When I first came in. Before Jessica arrived.”

Her face lit up. I turned on my phone, opened up the picture album, and handed it to her.

I finished up the last few bits of tidying as she studied the photos.

“Yes,” she said. “It was just the way I planned it.”

“I'm sorry that no one else will get to see it,” I said.

“I can show them the pictures,” she replied. “You are going to send me those pictures, aren't you?”

“Of course.”

“It doesn't bother me as much now,” she said. “It's always silly to fall in love with a room—especially a show house room that you know from the start will only last a few weeks. But now that we have pictures, I don't feel nearly as bad.”

“That's good,” I said.

“We should get back to your house,” she said. “Dahlia has a special dinner planned. She's cooking all the things she wanted to have on Christmas eve or Christmas day but didn't have room for.”

“Well, that should be original,” I said. “And after dinner—”

“And I have wonderful news,” she added. “This afternoon Rob went up to fetch your grandmother Cordelia. She's coming, too.”

“For tonight's dinner?”

“Yes, and for Christmas. Now that we've finally found her, it's about time we spent a lot more time with her.”

“Grandfather won't like that,” I said.

“Your grandfather will just have to cope,” she said. “She's as much family as he is. And Christmas is a time for family, isn't it?”

“Absolutely.” Suddenly I was eager to leave the show house and get home so I could really start enjoying Christmas. I glanced around to see how much more tidying we had to do. Not much. And with Mother pitching in, we'd be finished in no time.

“You were absolutely right, you know,” she said.

Not words I often heard from Mother. Was I witnessing a small Christmas miracle?

“About what?” I asked aloud.

“About not having the show house at your house. It would have been a much better house, of course, but think of the disruption it would have caused.”

“Yeah, murder does tend to be disrupting,” I said.

“Not just the murder,” she said. “Having peculiar things done to all your rooms, and then crowds of the people tramping through over the next few weeks. You were right to dig in your heels.”

“Thank you.”

“Next year, we'll just have to start looking for a house earlier,” she said.

I decided not to say anything about my resolution to not to get involved next year.

“In January, I should think,” Mother went on. “Perhaps not quite so large a house next time—after all, the design community's noticeably smaller than it was when we started this whole project.”

Instead of answering, I hit the button to raise the garage door.

“We can sneak out this way,” I said as the door slowly chugged up. “So we won't bother the judges.”

“Look!” Mother pointed as the landscape outside. “More snow. How lovely!”

Yes, it was lovely. All you could see in the light spilling out of the garage door was snowflakes. Not the kind of big, sloppy, wet snowflakes that tended to melt as soon as they hit the ground. These were the tiny snowflakes you get when the air is really cold—serious, businesslike snowflakes, clearly intent on making a major contribution to our already record December snowfall totals.

“How many more inches are we expecting, anyway?” I asked.

“I haven't had time to listen to the weather,” Mother said with a shrug. “But as long as we take off soon, we shouldn't have any trouble getting to your house.”

No telling if she and Dad would be able to get home again afterward. But if this proved to be the snow that finally defeated the county snowplows—well, one more benefit of not holding the show house in our house was that Michael and I had enough spare rooms for everyone to stay over. The boys would love being snowbound with all their available grandparents and great-grandparents to spoil them.

“Let's not waste any more time,” I said aloud. “And—”

“Mrs. Langslow.”

It was Randall. He stepped into the garage. The six other members of the County Board filed in after him. They all looked solemn.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

Instead of answering, Randall walked over to stand in front of Mother.

“Mrs. Langslow,” Randall said. “I'm delighted to inform you that your room has been chosen as the winner of the best room contest for this year's Caerphilly Historical Society Decorator Show House.”

The board members all broke into smiles, and a great deal of hugging and handshaking followed.

“The other rooms are all lovely, each and every one of them,” one of the women said.

“In their own ways,” chimed in one of the men.

“But your room is not only lovely, but it has a warmth and a sense of Christmas good cheer that we all loved.”

“Thank you,” Mother said. She was dabbing at her eyes. “I really couldn't have done it without so many people.”

“Let's go home and make a list,” I said. “So you can thank them all when you make your acceptance speech at the reception tomorrow. In the meantime, we have presents to wrap, and grandsons who are waiting for you to read them ‘'Twas the Night Before Christmas.'”

“Good advice, dear,” Mother said. “Good night,” she said, beaming one last time at the judges.

“Merry Christmas to all,” I said. “And to all a good night.”

 

 

ALSO BY DONNA ANDREWS

The Good, the Bad, and the Emus

Duck the Halls

The Hen of the Baskervilles

Some Like It Hawk

The Real Macaw

Stork Raving Mad

Swan for the Money

Six Geese A-Slaying

Cockatiels at Seven

The Penguin Who Knew Too Much

No Nest for the Wicket

Owls Well That Ends Well

We'll Always Have Parrots

Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon

Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos

Murder with Puffins

Murder with Peacocks

 

About the Author

D
ONNA
A
NDREWS
has won the Agatha, Anthony, and Barry Awards, an RT Book Reviews Award for best first novel, and three Lefty and two Toby Bromberg Awards for funniest mystery. She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Private Investigators and Security Association. Andrews lives in Reston, Virginia. Visit her Web site at
donnaandrews.com
.

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin's Publishing Group.

 

THE NIGHTINGALE BEFORE CHRISTMAS.
Copyright © 2014 by Donna Andrews. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

 

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.minotaurbooks.com

 

Cover illustration by Maggie Parr

 

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

 

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

 

Andrews, Donna.

    The nightingale before Christmas: a Meg Langslow mystery / Donna Andrews.—First edition

            p. cm. —

    “A Thomas Dunne book.”

    ISBN 978-1-250-04957-5 (hardcover)

    ISBN 978-1-4668-5055-2 (e-book)

  1.  Langslow, Meg (Fictitious character)—Fiction.  2.  Women detectives—Fiction.   3.  Murder—Investigation—Fiction.   I.  Title.