Secret Santa Murder Page 2

  She pressed down on the accelerator and I strapped on my seatbelt, praying we’d make it in one piece.

  There was nothing to distinguish Phyllis’s white clapboard house from the other white clapboards on her street, but Irene found it one minute after speeding from Birdie’s home. “That’s her wreath on the door,” she said, heading up the drive. “She makes them herself. Magnificent beauties. She’s so talented.”

  It seemed Irene’s honesty led to generous compliments as well as biting criticism.

  We got out and Irene darted for the door. She began to bang loudly on it, thrusting her fist through the hole in the wreath. “Her doorbell is broken—do you think she can hear me knock?”

  “I think the street can hear you knock.”

  “I don’t have a key,” she said. “I just realized it. I can’t get in.”

  I walked to the side yard, spotted a green car, and called, “Does she have a green Honda Accord?”

  Irene raced around the house. “That’s hers.” Momentarily frozen, she stared at me, panic in her eyes, then stepped up to Phyllis’s side door, knocked, and turned the knob. “It’s open. She always locks her doors.”

  Close on Irene’s heels, I followed her through the kitchen and into the living room as she shouted for Phyllis again and again.

  “Could she be at a neighbor’s?” I asked.

  Irene halted and turned. “Why didn’t I think of that?” She began to grin, but as she continued to scan the living room, her face fell. “Brown slippers,” she said. “Feet. Behind the couch.”

  I spun back. Two slippered feet jutted out from behind a cream-colored couch. “Oh, no.”

  Irene strode bravely to the couch and, bracing herself on the arm, leaned forward and looked behind it. “Phyllis, no.”

  Minette stirred in my pocket. “What happened?” I asked.

  “It’s all right, Kate, you can come,” Irene said. “I don’t think there’s blood or anything like that.” She flicked on a lamp.

  I joined Irene and glanced down at Phyllis. She looked peaceful. Or as peaceful as one could look under the circumstances. She was in a robe and nightgown, and there was a half-consumed cup of tea on a side table. If she’d been sitting on the couch rather than laying on the floor behind it, I might have believed she’d fallen asleep and died while watching television.

  “Did this happen last night?” Irene wondered aloud. “After I called her?”

  My eyes rose to the drapes behind the couch. “The drapes are closed, so maybe. Did she open them during the day?”

  Irene nodded. “Always. Not first thing, necessarily, but soon. And she shut them at night. She didn’t like her nosy neighbors looking in.”

  The drapes, two dark green panels, were designed to meet neatly in the middle, but I noticed an inch or two of sheer white panel poking out from between them. Curiosity got the better of me, so I pulled one drape and the sheer panel behind it to the side. There, on the glass a foot above the windowsill, was the smeary remnant of a hand print. A print that slid from that spot of the glass down to the sill, as the hand that made it must have done.

  “I shouldn’t have touched anything,” I said, letting the drape fall free. “Let’s go back to the kitchen and call the police on your cell.”

  While Irene dialed, I stood in one place near the side door and surveyed the kitchen. Barring a few minor exceptions, it was spotless. On a small, square table under a window was a platter of Christmas cookies, with one half-eaten cookie and some crumbs next to it. On a counter next to the stove was an overturned, cup-sized mesh strainer, and next to that were used, dry tea leaves. And there were watery brown stains on top of and around the otherwise shining stainless trash can near the door. I stepped on the pedal to open the lid and saw more dried tea leaves, a wad of paper towels, and a red foil bag.

  “They want us to wait here, but outside,” Irene said. “We need to leave.”

  I let the trash can lid close.

  Tears glistening in her eyes, Irene pocketed her phone, left the house, and got into her car. I was right behind her.

  “I’m not one to jump to conclusions,” she said, “but Phyllis was strong and healthy as a horse. She didn’t have a heart attack, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have gone behind the couch to have one. Or run her smudgy hand down her window.”

  “It looks suspicious to me too, even without considering the ornaments and note. You said she found an egg ornament?”

  “In her mailbox.”

  “You found a typewriter, Norma found a pig, Phyllis found an egg.”

  “Yes, and Joan—she was about to show you her ornament—found a schoolhouse. Another plastic toy with a ribbon. You’d think whoever did this would’ve had the decency to spend a few dollars on real ornaments.”

  “They must mean something. You wrote that booklet on fairy lore. Have you written anything else?”

  “Other booklets for the gardening society.” She wiped the tears from her eyes. “A few magazine articles. And letters. I’m a prolific letter writer.”

  “So the typewriter does mean something.”

  Irene snapped her fingers. “And Joan was a schoolteacher. Hence the schoolhouse ornament. Yes!”

  Our brief crack at making sense of the ornaments was interrupted by the appearance of two vehicles from the Smithwell Police Department, one of them Detective Rancourt’s black SUV. He parked close behind Irene’s car, and when he got out, I did too.

  “Detective Rancourt, hello.”

  Rancourt’s steps faltered for an instant and he cocked his head. “Mrs. Brewer. I should have known.”

  He looked exhausted, like he hadn’t slept the night before, but then, he always looked like that. Puffy, tired, and in need of vitamins.

  “It’s not like I planned this,” I said.

  Irene was out of her car now, walking toward Rancourt and jabbing an accusatory finger at him. “I told you to pay attention to the ornaments and note, Detective. I said Norma’s so-called accident was no accident. And now look. Someone killed my friend Phyllis.”

  “We don’t know that yet, Mrs. Carrick,” Rancourt said. “Officer Bouchard will take your statements.” He sidestepped Irene.

  “Detective?” I said.

  He stopped and turned.

  “There are used tea leaves on the counter, tea stains around the trash can, and what might be a foil tea bag for loose tea in the trash can. I didn’t touch anything.”

  “I saw that mess on the counter,” Irene said. “It’s not normal. Phyllis mopped everything. Always. She was fanatical about the cleanliness of her home. There’s tea everywhere—and I’d have a look at her teacup in the living room, Detective.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “He took us seriously, don’t you think?” Irene said. “I think he finally did, after he left the house. I got that impression.” She parked on Birdie Thompson’s drive, and as she shut off her engine, a light snow began to fall.

  “He couldn’t deny something was wrong with that scene,” I replied.

  “Good catch on all that, by the way. I didn’t think to look in the trash.”

  “Rancourt would have seen it. I just saved him a couple minutes.”

  “Phyllis and Hazel were close. Hazel O’Brien, I mean. I haven’t introduced you to her yet.” Irene shifted in her seat, facing me while leaving her seatbelt fastened. Neither one of us were eager to head inside Birdie’s house, and not just because of the heat. Irene had phoned her knitting group to tell them we’d found Phyllis, and they hadn’t taken the news calmly. “She’ll be heartbroken. So will the others, too, but especially Hazel.”

  “What kind of ornament did Hazel get?”

  Irene brightened a little. “Are you still willing to help?”

  “Now more than ever.”

  “Hazel got a toy hen. Well, she calls it a hen. I think she’d be better off looking at it as a chicken. Has it struck you that these ornaments are pointed commentary?”

  “Yes, it has.”
>
  “Capital.” She undid her seatbelt and popped open her car door. “There’s no time like the present. Forward.”

  Bracing myself, I followed Irene into Birdie’s house. Just as I was beginning to worry about Minette, she stirred in my coat pocket, probably reacting to the blast of warm air. She liked it cool—her real home was in the woods across from my house on Birch Street—though she wasn’t impervious to the cold. She’d told me once that Ray had found her and took her in one bitter night, and that even fairies, tucked away in their maple and birch trees, had been known to die of the cold. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “It’s impossible, and I just can’t believe it,” Carla was saying. “What is going on? Irene, what’s going on?”

  “We’re trying to find out,” Irene answered. “And I think the police are too, at long last. Hazel, how are you, dear?”

  The skin beneath Hazel O’Brien’s brown eyes was streaked with mascara. She sniffed and rubbed a tissue under her nose. “I’m fine. I just want to know what happened to her.”

  “We all do,” Irene said. “Look, I don’t want to leave this to the police. How about you, ladies? What else might happen while they’re trying to catch up to where we already are?”

  “What do you mean?” Hazel asked.

  “That detective, Rancourt, said he wants to talk to all of you about your ornaments. We’re three steps ahead of him. We already know the ornaments are crucial to the case.”

  “We don’t know that,” Joan said, raking her fingers through her white streak.

  “I think we do,” I said.

  Joan’s head whipped around. I was an intruder, and worse, I was disagreeing with her.

  “For argument’s sake, let’s say the ornaments are connected to Phyllis’s murder and Norma’s accident,” I went on. “Let’s start with that assumption and find out where it goes.” Seeing Phyllis’s body like that, lying in her own living room, I couldn’t deny that Irene was also vulnerable. As brusque as the woman could be, I liked her and couldn’t stand the thought of her dying alone in her isolated house on Whitcomb Hill Road. Rancourt’s help or not, I intended to solve the case.

  “Agreed,” Irene said. “Joan, I’ve told Kate that you were a schoolteacher. Show her your schoolhouse ornament.”

  Joan pried open her red box and passed the ornament to me. A plastic toy like the others, it too was strung with cheap red ribbon.

  “Hazel, show Kate your hen,” Irene said. “Or chicken, rather.”

  “I prefer hen,” Hazel said, her thin, wrinkled fingers wresting the top from her red box.

  “My sense is our killer prefers chicken,” Irene countered.

  “What does that mean?” Hazel asked, passing the ornament down the couch.

  “Kate and I believe these ornaments are conveying a message. And before you go off half-cocked, Hazel, I was given a typewriter ornament, and it wasn’t a compliment to my writing. We’re all in the same boat. Would someone wake Birdie up?”

  I glanced from Hazel’s ornament to Birdie, who was fast asleep on the couch, her chin almost resting on her collarbone. “Let her sleep,” I said, turning the chicken over in my hands. Technically, it could have been called a hen, but it was a child’s barnyard toy, and any child would have called it a chicken. “Where’s Birdie’s ornament?” I asked.

  Carla fetched the box from Birdie’s lap and passed it down the line.

  “It’s a potato,” Irene said.

  Clearly it was. And it was the smallest of the ornaments. Still, someone had managed to drill a hole in one end and run a ribbon through it.

  “Oh, my goodness, of course,” Joan said. “We’ve talked about this before, haven’t we? Birdie’s grandfather was a potato farmer in Aroostook. For a moment there, I was mentally blocked. I couldn’t think what the devil a potato had to do with Christmas.”

  “Brava,” Irene said.

  I again glanced at Birdie. Her chin was still on her chest, and the bright light from the lamp at her elbow accentuated two inches of gray roots in her brassy, permed hair. She was a tiny woman, probably not physically capable of murder, though I wasn’t prepared just yet to cross her off my list.

  “You’ve been meeting for six years?” I asked, peering at the faces around me. “Has anyone else been in the group but left?”

  “Six years, yes, and it’s always been just the seven of us,” Carla said. “We meet monthly in the summer, sometimes with weeks off, then weekly starting in September as we gear up for Christmas and the charity sales.”

  Six years of chatting and gossiping over cups of coffee and cocoa and who knew what tongue-loosening beverage. Good heavens, the tales these women had heard. The secrets they knew.

  Irene spoke up. “I take it you’re saying we know quite a lot about each other, and in some instances things other people might not know. Hence the personalized ornaments.”

  “It’s no secret Birdie’s grandfather grew potatoes,” Joan said. “My father was a police officer, and almost everyone in Smithwell knows he was.”

  “But what about your grandfather?” I said. “That’s further back. I’ll bet most people don’t know what he did for a living. I haven’t got a clue what my best friend’s grandfather did.”

  “Then what has my ornament got to do with Sam Hill?” Carla said. She took the top off her box, seized the ribbon, and held aloft a pair of very red waxed lips. “My grandfather was not in the costume business, so what does this mean?”

  I had my suspicions. Wisely, I kept them to myself.

  “If only there was a cookie between those lips,” Irene said.

  “Quit it,” Carla said. “You eat as much as I do.”

  “Sorry,” Irene said. “It’s the tension. I say things I shouldn’t.”

  You say precisely what you mean to say, I thought. Sensing the two were about to go at it, I jumped in. “So what do we have? Birdie’s grandfather was a potato farmer, so she got a potato.”

  “He sure was,” Birdie said, her voice loud but raspy. Her chin was off her chest, her back had straightened, her eyes had cleared. “He had to give it up, and my father never took over the fields. We moved to Presque Isle, my grandfather died of a broken heart a few years later, and then my father left the county altogether.”

  “Why did your grandfather give up farming?” I asked.

  “Pesticide poisoning. One night, someone drove a truck through the fields and emptied drums of watered-down pesticides onto it. Gallons upon gallons of the stuff. Not on all the fields, but on enough to destroy the farm financially. It ruined the soil for years.”

  “Did they find out who did it?”

  For some reason, the question seemed to embarrass Birdie. She looked away, avoiding the others’ eyes, and said, “No one was ever charged.”

  I’d never seen so many sidelong glances from so many women. Their eyes were positively ricocheting around the room. There was much more to Birdie’s story, but she wasn’t going to tell it. Later, I’d ask Irene, but before I melted in my chair from the heat, I was determined to establish what all the ornaments meant to the women. “So, Joan, you were a teacher?”

  “Elementary school, yes,” she replied. “For twenty-five long years.”

  “You didn’t enjoy it?”

  “I taught fifth grade. Do you recall what fifth grade was like? But I retired at sixty—twelve years ago. Why would anyone bring it up now? For what purpose?”

  “We’re hoping you can tell us that,” Irene said.

  “I can’t. It beats me.”

  “And Hazel,” I continued, “was anyone in your family involved in chicken farming?”

  “No, and personally speaking, I much prefer beef.” She chuckled. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing funny about this.”

  “It’s the tension,” Irene said. “We’re all trying to cope.”

  “Phyllis got an egg,” I said. “Any idea, ladies?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think it is,” Irene said. “Just last week Hazel was sayi
ng thank goodness Phyllis wasn’t going to try making eggnog again.”

  Hazel bristled. “Just one second. That was an innocent comment, and we all know what I meant. One of us says the same thing every year. It’s almost a tradition.”

  “Four years ago,” Irene said, “Phyllis had us all at her house for a last knit before Christmas, and to our everlasting horror, she whipped up a bowl of homemade eggnog.”

  I waited.

  “Food poisoning, Kate. You’ve never seen such a mess. I won’t go into details. Use your imagination.”

  “She destroyed my finest knit caps just before the charity fair,” Hazel said. “To this day I think she was aiming at them.”

  “She wasn’t,” Joan said. “We all just . . . let go where we were standing when it . . . came over us.”

  “We were sick as dogs and had to clean it up ourselves,” Carla said. “I still think we should have hired a cleaning firm.”

  I felt Minette move in my pocket again, and this time I could have sworn she was kicking me.

  “Ladies, thank you for inviting me.” I stood. “Can you drive me home, Irene? I have some thinking to do. And I’d like to take photos of everyone’s ornaments before I leave.”

  Irene rose and said, “Very good idea. And I’ll join you. We’ll have tea and put our heads together.”

  Minette kicked me—or was it punched me?—again. “Actually, I have a dinner date with a friend in an hour. How about tomorrow morning? Sleep on it, cook up some theories, and come to my house for breakfast.”

  “No, I can’t. Tomorrow’s the charity fair, nine o’clock at the community center.”

  “Then I’ll meet you there.”

  “Excellent. Come along.” She tossed her head toward the door and I said my goodbyes, telling the ladies, rather needlessly, to be careful and thanking Birdie in particular for inviting me into her home. “I hope to see you soon, Mrs. Thompson,” I said.

  “My father had nothing to do with the pesticides,” she replied. “I don’t care what anyone says. He loved that farm as much as my grandfather and I did.”