Murder on the First Day of Christmas (Chloe Carstairs Mysteries) (2 page)

    
When the police had finished with us, we had decorated the tree in the living room. Saul had thought it would make a nice backdrop for his interviews on today’s network morning shows.

    
I suppose I should mention that Saul’s a local celebrity - a true crime writer with fifteen titles to his name, the last of which had a quote on the cover from a nationally bestselling author, “A suspenseful read. Taylor knows his stuff!”

    
For some people, myself included, finding a severed hand at your back door would be an indescribable horror. Saul considered it an occupational hazard.

    
“A man like me makes enemies,” he had told the interview show’s producer during set up.  “Hell, I’d wear a Kevlar vest to court if they would let me through the metal detector.”

    
Not that we were any better. One thing Mom’s drilled into me about decorating: you have to develop a narrow focus to get the job done. Post-traumatic stress has to wait.

    
Right now we were more concerned with what these delays had done to our schedule. Mom had been on the phone non-stop since yesterday replacing the Baby Jesus (at this point, it would have been easier to hire a live stand-in), while I hung ornaments and tied bows. Today, we were in catch-up mode, starting with the pipers in the study.

    “Angela,” Mom addressed the research assistant and simultaneously patted her own chest to make sure her heart was still beating without even pausing as she cleared off Saul’s desk. After all, the clock was still ticking.

    
“What? He’s driving me crazy.” As usual, I was amazed to hear the petulant teenager tone Angela used with my mother. It was an uncharacteristic show of vulnerability that only my mother, it seemed, could elicit.

    
“Better not let the police hear you say that.” I continued unpacking supplies from our plastic bins. “They’re itching to hook someone up to a lie detector.”

    
“He’s so stupid.” Angela ignored me completely, a trick she had perfected in high school. “He’s turning this whole thing into a circus.”

    
“You can’t be surprised.” Mom passed me some ribbon to tie around sconces that flanked the exterior French doors. She looked meaningfully at the stepladder. I should have known.

    
“Nothing surprises me anymore.” Angela raked her fingers through red hair that would benefit from a leave-in conditioner. “Especially where Saul’s concerned.”

    
“The pipers are here.” Cassie Winthrop slipped past Angela into the study.

    
Immediately the mood of the room lightened. Cassie worked as an assistant for Flower Fantasy, Mom’s favorite vendor, and was here this morning to position flowers and greenery in the study and dining room. A total godsend, this girl, willing to work late into the night or show up at sunrise whenever Mom needed her. Right now, we needed her desperately.

    
Angela’s piercing eyes raked over Cassie, dismissing her as superficial and insignificant or, worse yet, cute.  Angela’s version of natural selection rivaled that of the Serengeti, and Cassie’s shining blue eyes and excited smile couldn’t make the cut.

    
“Your bow’s crooked,” Angela said to me and stomped off.

    
Mom sighed. “That child.”

    
Cassie made a face and turned to me. “I know she’s your friend and all, but she creeps me out.”

    
“I never said she was my friend.” I twisted my bow an inch to the right.

    
“Chloe,” Mom said. “She is, too. Y’all used to be good friends.”

    
“In eighth grade, when we had adjoining easels at art camp, but that was about it.” I climbed off the stepladder.

    
“I thought y’all went to high school together.” Cassie got on the stepladder and pushed the bow a quarter inch to the left.

    “Yeah, but we barely spoke to each other. She was always reading books like
The Bell Jar
or trying to uncover malfeasance among the lunchroom ladies for the school newspaper. So dreary.”

    
“Angela’s mother died when she was in high school,” Mom told Cassie.

    
Ok, there was that. And since Mom and Mrs. Jannings had been good friends, I didn’t point out that Angela had been little miss gloom and doom long before then.  My mother worked with guilt the way she worked with Venetian plaster, subtly and with a sure hand.

    
Even Cassie recognized that it was time to change the subject. “These guys are hot!” She snuggled up to one of the pipers, her blond head on his shoulder. “Do we make a cute couple?”

    
“Careful,” I warned. “Mom’ll set me up with one.”

    
Cassie lifted her new friend’s smock to check out his impressive backside.  “You could do worse.” She arched a brow.

    
“And has.” Mom smacked Cassie’s hand away from the front of the smock before she could check out the poor guy’s other attributes.

    
The pipers were incredibly lifelike with molded rubber faces, sharp brown eyes and real hair beneath their black caps, but they were, alas, not anatomically correct. Definitely not son-in-law material. Mom wanted grandchildren, and so far, only my sister had obliged.

    
“So the cops don’t have any clues about yesterday?” Cassie began unpacking her own supplies.

  
 
“Nothing. Dad said the medical examiner thinks the hand was removed postmortem and not that long ago,”I said. The ra
t
was fresh, too.” My father is a lawyer, semi-retired, so he had filled us in on the gossip downtown. The rest we had gotten from a local newscast.

    
Cassie shuddered. “Gross. Though I’ve never seen Mr. Taylor so happy.”

    
She was right about that one. During previous interviews, Saul had crowed about how dangerous his work was, how it took him to dangerous places, and how it attracted the attention of dangerous people. Then he had promised his next book would be his most explosive one yet, he said that about each one, and lurid threats wouldn’t stop him from writing it.

    
The man, the myth, the legend - even more importantly, the client. Despite the uproar, Saul was determined to go ahead with his holiday party this Saturday, just two days away, and we were determined to have everything ready in time.

    
To the trained eye, things were shaping up beautifully. Where others saw chaos - lights yet to be strung, ribbons to be tied, pine needles everywhere - I glimpsed an installation that was progressing nicely. While a severed hand was certainly the most gruesome of our delays, it wasn’t the most challenging. That came courtesy of Robin Woodall, Saul’s girlfriend, who was “supervising” the installation.

    
Thanks to her, the Twelve Days of Christmas theme was easier said than done. Turns out there is no hard and fast rule about whether it’s nine ladies dancing or nine pipers piping, whether the drummers drumming number ten or twelve, or whether you’ll get to see ten or twelve lords-a-leaping. In fact, once you get past eight maids-a-milking there are as many versions to the Twelve Days of Christmas as there are ladies dancing. Which is to say, nine or eleven, depending on whom you ask.

    
We were going by the version depicted on the hand-painted china plates Mom had painstakingly collected over the last years, scrounging up five full sets from antique dealers, eBay and other sources she wouldn’t reveal. This version, with nine ladies dancing, ten lords-a-leaping, eleven pipers piping and twelve drummers drumming, was by far the most common and widely accepted.

    
Robin, though, insisted we use the version of the song she had known all her life: nine pipers, ten drummers, eleven ladies and twelve lords.  We could still use the plates, she had assured us sweetly, not realizing how this inconsistency tortured Mom, but for the room installations, she preferred that we did it “the right way.”

    
We, of course, had agreed.

    
“Client appeasement,” Mom had pointed out, “no matter how capricious their whims or silly their concerns, is always job one.

    
We had scrambled to readjust our cast of characters. The two extra pipers, both a head taller than I and decked out in velvet smocks, tights and boots, were stashed in Saul’s garage. The two extra drummers were repainted, stripped of their uniforms, put into tights and leotards and made to perform painful scissor-kicks without so much as a stretch to warm-up. Two additional dancing ladies had been ordered.

    
Confusing enough? If Robin didn’t stay out of the way so we could deck the halls, Mom would deck her.

    
“Did you find a replacement for the Baby Jesus?” Cassie asked.

    
I nodded.  “Compared to the other pieces, he’s a little big, because he’s not really a newborn, but you would have to know what you were looking for to realize it.” I didn’t mention that his luminous sheen came from a thin glaze of Vaseline, rather than innate divinity.

    
“You never told us how your blind date went this past weekend,” Cassie said. “What was the guy’s name? Trevor?”

    
Mom had taken me at my word a couple of months ago when I halfheartedly mentioned getting back into the dating game, and she had wasted no time setting me up with sons of some of her friends.  Big mistake.

    “Well, let’s see.” I recounted.  “Trev was not as bad as Simon, who showed up for our date wearing pants so snug I could guess his religion, but not as promising as David who, despite being so short he probably had to stand on a box to reach a conclusion, at least made me laugh.” With David, I was all set to be won over by someone I didn’t necessarily find physically attractive, but alas, the creep never called back. Ted was OK, but his upper lip didn’t move when he talked and, after David, my standards were again high and my priorities shallow.

    
“So this Trevor won’t be fathering my grandchildren, is that what you’re saying?” Mom gestured for me to move Saul’s mahogany partner’s desk forward about six inches, so the pipers could stand in two rows between the desk and the doors.

    
“I wouldn’t count on it.” I accepted slack from the computer and phone cords as Cassie fed it to us. “He became a veterinarian because he prefers animals to people - actually came right out and said that. By the end of the salad course, the feeling was mutual.”

     “
Darling,” Mom paused in her work and addressed me. “I’ve always said a woman shouldn’t compromise her standards when it comes to choosing her men, but really, you have to give people a chance.”

     “
Tell that to Trevor. Besides, he’s a mouth breather.” I didn’t elaborate on how this trait was made particularly endearing by a meal that included garlic toast and ranch dressing.

    
Again annoyed by my lack of compassion for the socially challenged, Mom changed the subject, thanking Cassie for the arrangement she had sent to Judge Bernard Stone’s funeral for us.

    
“White lilies, white roses and green santini,” Cassie said. “Works every time. I would’ve done a poinsettia, we had just gotten some beautiful white ones, but he got two of those while he was in the hospital.”

    
“Judge Stone - the big death penalty guy?” I asked, recalling the judge was known for telling his law school classes that Yellow Mama, Alabama’s electric chair, was ‘the best seat in the house.’

    
“That’s the one,” Mom confirmed.

    
“He also had something of a nurse fetish,” I added, “if his reaction to Bridget at Dad’s 50th birthday party was any indication.”

    
“I’m sure your sister can take care of herself,” Mom pointed out. “Your father didn’t exactly share the judge’s politics, but he’s going to miss old Bernard, cantankerous devil that he was. Speaking of white poinsettias, Cassie, I need two dozen for Monica Dupree’s house. That’s two dozen in addition to the two dozen I’ve already ordered.” Mom grimaced, afraid she was asking too much of Flower Fantasy’s already overtaxed stock, as we were installing Christmas décor for four families in Arbor Farms: Saul Taylor, the Browleys, the Madisons and Monica Dupree. That’s a lot of poinsettias.

    
“I already put extras aside for you,” Cassie assured Mom. “Margie always says to give you first refusal.”

    
“Ms. Dupree does keep it simple, doesn’t she,” I commented dryly.

    
“Deceptively so,” Mom said, thinking, I was sure, how outrageously expensive Monica’s dramatic all-white décor really was. What she spent on Swarovski crystals alone was astounding.

    
Some may find such extravagance at Christmas sinful, silly or the worst kind of self-indulgence, and, well, I wouldn’t argue the point. I would, though, point out that Mom’s clients pay for the pleasures life affords them, and she, in turn, gladly shares their wealth with her vendors, artists and craftsmen who count on such crass commercialization to see them through the off-season. Saul Taylor’s seven swans-a-swimming punch bowl alone would put the son of our ice sculptor through a semester at Samford - books and lab fees included.