A Lot Like Christmas: Stories

  She wrestled O.J. out the back door and then took down the rack and Iron Maiden ornaments, trying to gauge how long it would take Brian to get there and back if he floored the Incite.

  The answer was: over half an hour. “I had a terrible time getting away from her,” he said, coming in carrying a dusty plastic wise man, a bouquet of even dustier poinsettias, and a Styrofoam snowman.

  “She wanted to tell me all about what she wants for her new Christmas theme.”

  “Pandora can have whatever her little heart desires,” Linny said, putting the wise man where the guillotine had stood. She took the poinsettias from Brian.

  “Everything’s pretty grubby,” Brian said, wiping the snowman against his sleeve. “It’ll need to be washed off.”

  “We don’t have time,” Linny said, hurrying into the kitchen for a vase for the poinsettias. “They’ll be here—oh, gosh, in five minutes. We’ll call it An Attic Christmas. Go get the rest of the decorations.”

  He returned with a second wise man, two ceramic elves, and an armful of cobwebby bubble lights. “The good news is the Christmas spirit is alive and well in spite of professional Christmases,” he said, handing her the lights. “The bad news is, Pandora’s decided her new theme should be Godsends of History. People who’ve given aid and assistance through the centuries: the Good Samaritan, Florence Nightingale, the inventor of laserliposuction.”

  “What about the all-essential bust of Shakespeare?” Linny asked, draping the lights haphazardly around the tree.

  “He’s in the car,” Brian said. “Pandora could only find two of the wise men. She sent Shakespeare as a third. And a bathrobe to drape him in. Where do you want the elves?”

  “Coffee table,” she said, plugging in the lights. Two of them were burnt out. “Did she send any replacement bulbs?”

  “I’ll check,” he said, rummaging in an enormous box he’d brought in of ornaments, burned-down candles, plastic mistletoe, and bedraggled tinsel.

  Linny set him to decorating the tree while she finished placing the candles, five swans-a-swimming with several feathers missing, and a Victorian angel with a bent wing, looking anxiously at her watch. Dr. Darbingdon was already late.

  “Where do you want this?” Brian asked, and held up a chicken-wire sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.

  “Good Lord,” she said.

  “I know. I apologize for ever criticizing Christmas designers. It’s obvious you’re saving people from themselves. Bathroom?”

  Linny nodded. “Bathroom.” She began arranging the snow village houses on the sideboard.

  “Linny!” Brian called.

  “What?” she said, hurrying into the bathroom. A six-foot, solid-looking, toga’d statue stood over the sink, its marble hands extended. “Oh, I forgot all about Pilate.”

  “Pilate? What’s he doing in the bathroom?”

  “Washing his hands.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Don’t tell me he’s marble.”

  “No, plaster, I think,” she said.

  He took hold of Pilate’s waist and tried to lift him. “Definitely marble. Any chance of getting the robo-dolly back?”

  She shook her head. “He had six more deliveries.”

  “When’s my aunt due here?”

  She looked at her watch. “Fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Then we’ll just have to manhandle him out of here. Wait,” he said as she moved to take hold of one of Pilate’s hands, “let me get around behind him first. Then you pull and I’ll…what’s this?”

  “What’s what?” Linny asked, leaning around Pilate to see. Brian had untaped a sign from the statue’s back and was reading it.

  “What is it?” she asked, though it was obvious it was another of Norwall’s signs, and when he didn’t answer, “What does it say?”

  “It says, ‘This is what you get for trying to steal my concepts and my clients,’ ” Brian read. He looked up. “You thought that’s what we were trying to do—take over your clientele?”

  “Isn’t that what you were trying to do?”

  “Of course not. How could you even think that? No wonder you put up all this,” he said, gesturing to include Pilate and the rest of the house.

  “I told you, I didn’t put it up. But if you weren’t spying on me,” she said, bewildered, “what were you doing?”

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “Aunt Darby—”

  “She’s not your aunt,” Linny said coldly.

  “Not my…?” he said, and now he was the one who looked bewildered. “No, she’s not genetically related to me but…she’s my parents’ best friend. I lived with her while they were at Tombaugh Station when I was a kid, and again in high school when they were out in the Asteroid Belt.”

  And Norwall knew that, Linny thought. Inge had said she’d run complete personal histories. He knew it and didn’t tell me.

  “I wasn’t lying when I called her Aunt Darby,” he said. “I’ve always called her that.”

  “And I suppose her name really is Mrs. Shields and you really are an engineer and you build dams? What about her telling me she didn’t understand computers? And that she’d never had a professionally done Christmas before, that she’s always put up her decorations with her own two little hands?”

  “She was afraid if you knew who she was, you’d wonder why she wasn’t using Galatek’s decorators and would assume she had plenty of other options, so you’d refuse to take her on, especially at such a late date. Plus, she knew you did your interviews online and she needed to get you out to the house, so she came up with that whole ridiculous technophobic Mrs. Shields thing, and by the time I realized what she was up to, it was too late to stop her. She’d already told you so many lies about who and what we were—”

  “Stop her from what?”

  “You did a Christmas display for Howard Greenfeld in October.”

  “Hanukkah,” she said. “Hanukkah in Lapland. He needed the installation early because he was leaving for New Palestine.”

  “Hanukkah in Lapland?” Brian said. “Do they even have Hanukkah in Lapland? What did you do?”

  “Reindeer and menorahs. And a holo of the aurora borealis. What about Howard Greenfeld?”

  “He’s a friend of Aunt Darby’s. She was talking to him online when she apparently spotted you among the caribou and decided you were just what I needed.”

  “Needed?”

  “Aunt Darby’s one of the world’s great fixers. Galatek doesn’t take over businesses—it fixes them. Unfortunately, Aunt Darby doesn’t confine herself to fixing companies’ problems. She also fixes people’s problems. Or what she perceives to be their problems. When I was ten, she decided I needed work on coordination skills and insisted I take tuba lessons. And learn to bowl. Two years ago she decided my work wasn’t challenging enough and got me a job at Galatek. This year she decided my problem was that I was spending too much time at said job and not seeing anybody.”

  She was trying to fix us up, Linny thought. That was why he was so rude that first day. That was why she kept talking about “The Machine Stops” and how hard it is for young people to meet. “Your aunt was matchmaking?” she said.

  He nodded grimly. “She was matchmaking. Her first plan was to invite you to a party at Galatek, but after she ran a netcheck on you and found out how busy you are this time of year, she came up with the bright idea of hiring you to do her house.”

  “And of sending you to my apartment and the Manning installation.”

  “No,” Brian said. “After that first day, she didn’t have to send me. It was all my own idea. The contract was just an excuse.” He smiled crookedly at her. “I loved playing the tuba.”

  “What?” she said, bewildered again.

  “I even ended up loving bowling. Aunt Darby’s always right. My old job wasn’t challenging enough. I love working for Galatek. She always knows exactly what I need, even if I don’t. Only her way of going about it—”

  He reached up and smacked the back of P
ilate’s head with his open palm. “I told her you’d find out and feel betrayed and—I told her it would end up like this,” he said, gesturing to include the whole house, “with you—”

  “I told you, I didn’t do this.”

  He stopped in mid-gesture, his hand still out. “You thought I was spying on you,” he said slowly, “that we were trying to steal your business, but even though you thought that, you were still trying to take the decorations down before we arrived. Why?”

  “I told you, I didn’t want her to see them,” she said. “I knew she had the board of directors coming for dinner and…”

  “Even though you thought she had lied to you,” he said, coming around from behind Pilate toward her. “Even though you thought I’d romanced you to get information out of you…”

  “I…revenge didn’t seem to have anything to do with Christmas. I…it,” she stammered, trying not to be so aware of his scent, “it’s supposed to be about forgiveness and…and…good will…and…”

  “Love?”

  She backed into the sink. “Charity,” she said, and the doorbell rang.

  “Oh, my God, it’s Aunt Darby,” Brian said.

  It was the caterers. Brian recruited them and their robo-dolly to help lug Pilate out back behind the spruces, and Linny ran through the house, making sure they hadn’t missed anything else.

  They hadn’t, except for the chicken-wire sleigh and reindeer, which had gotten bent when Brian was removing Pilate. She unbent it, more or less.

  “The decorations look awful,” she told Brian, setting it on the sink. “This won’t fool anybody.”

  “I think there’s been enough fooling of people,” he said. “Aunt Darby will love it. This is just what she wanted. As you said, Christmas is the season of charity.”

  “I hope so.”

  “And forgiveness?” he said, backing her into the sink again.

  “Oh, I just love it,” a woman’s voice, not Aunt Darby’s, said. “How perfectly pre-retro!”

  “Even some of the lights are burnt out,” a man’s delighted voice said.

  “And look at the dust! You were right, Darby, this young woman is a genius!”

  “I wonder where she and Brian are,” Aunt Darby said.

  “Oh, my God, will you look at that!” a third voice exclaimed. “Our neighbors had light-up wise men just like that on their front lawn when I was a kid!”

  Linny clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no! I forgot all about the lawn decorations!”

  “I have just the thing,” Brian said, grabbing her by the hand and leading her through the living room, past the dinner guests and Aunt Darby, out the front door, onto the lawn.

  “Room,” he said, gesturing toward the window where Aunt Darby and the Galatek board of directors stood watching. “View.”

  “But this is supposed to be An Attic Christmas, not E. M. Forster,” she protested.

  “Aunt Darby will love it,” he said, walking back to the sidewalk. “Ready?”

  “No,” she said, but she didn’t move. “There’s no barley. Or poppies.”

  “Next Christmas,” he said, and strode purposefully toward her.

  “Come, Bridlings,” Touffét said impatiently as soon as I arrived. “Go home and pack your bags. We’re going to Suffolk for a jolly country Christmas.”

  “I thought you hated country Christmases,” I said. I had invited him only the week before down to my sister’s and gotten a violent rejection of the idea. “Country Christmases! Dreadful occasions!” he had said. “Holly and mistletoe and vile games—blindman’s bluff and that ridiculous game where people grab at burning raisins, and even viler food. Plum pudding!” he shuddered. “And wassail!”

  I protested that my sister was an excellent cook and that she never made wassail, she made eggnog. “I think you’d have an excellent time,” I said. “Everyone’s very pleasant.”

  “I can imagine,” he said. “No one drinks, everyone is faithful to his wife, the inheritance is equally and fairly divided, and none of your relatives would ever think of murdering anyone.”

  “Of course not!” I said, bristling.

  “Then I would rather spend Christmas here alone,” Touffét said. “At least then I shall not be subjected to roast goose and Dumb Crambo.”

  “We do not play Dumb Crambo,” I replied with dignity. “We play charades.”

  And now, scarcely a week later, Touffét was eagerly proposing going to the country.

  “I have just received a letter from Lady Charlotte Valladay,” he said, brandishing a sheet of pale pink notepaper, “asking me to come to Marwaite Manor. She wishes me to solve a mystery for her.” He examined the letter through his monocle. “What could be more delightful than murder in a country house at Christmas?”

  Actually, I could think of a number of things. I scanned the letter. “You must come,” she had written. “This is a mystery only you, the world’s greatest detective, can solve.” Lady Charlotte Valladay. And Marwaite Manor. Where had I heard those names before? Lady Charlotte.

  “It doesn’t say there’s been a murder,” I said. “It says a mystery.”

  Touffét was not listening. “We must hurry if we are to catch the 3:00 train from Euston. There won’t be time for you to go home and pack and come back here. You must meet me at the station. Come, don’t stand there looking foolish.”

  “The letter doesn’t say anything about my being invited,” I said. “It only mentions you. And I’ve already told my sister I’m spending Christmas with her.”

  “She does not mention you because it is of course assumed that I will bring my assistant.”

  “Hardly your assistant, Touffét. You never let me do anything.”

  “That is because you have not the mind of a detective. Always you see the facade. Never do you see what lies behind it.”

  “Then you obviously won’t need me,” I said.

  “But I do, Bridlings,” he said. “Who will record my exploits if you are not there? And who will point out the obvious and the incorrect, so that I may reject them and find the true solution?”

  “I would rather play charades,” I said, and picked up my hat. “I hope Lady Charlotte feeds you wassail and plum pudding. And makes you play Dumb Crambo.”

  In the end I went. I had been with Touffét on every one of his cases, and although I still could not place Lady Charlotte Valladay, it seemed to me her name had been connected to something interesting.

  And I had never experienced Christmas in a country manor, with the ancient hall decked in holly and Gainsboroughs, a huge Yule log on the fire, an old-fashioned Christmas feast—poached salmon, a roast joint, and a resplendent goose, with a different wine for every course. Perhaps they might even have a boar’s head.

  The bullet trains to Suffolk were all filled, and we could only get seats on an express. It was filled as well, and every passenger had not only luggage but huge shopping bags crammed with gifts, which completely filled all the overhead compartments. I had to hold my bag and Touffét’s umbrella on my lap.

  I thought longingly of the first-class compartment I had booked on the train to my sister’s and hoped Marwaite Manor was at the near end of Suffolk.

  Marwaite Manor. Where had I heard that name? And Lady Charlotte’s? Not in the tabloids, I decided, though I had a vague idea of something controversial. A protest of some sort. What? Cloning? The revival of fox hunting?

  Perhaps she was an actress—they were always getting involved in causes. Or a royal scandal. No, she was too old. I seemed to remember she was in her fifties.

  Touffét, across from me, was deep in a book. I leaned forward slightly, trying to read the title. Touffét only reads mystery novels, he says, to study the methods of fictional detectives, but actually to criticize them. And, I suspected, to study their mannerisms. And co-opt them. He had already affected Lord Peter Wimsey’s monocle and Hercule Poirot’s treatment of his “assistant,” and he had met me at the station wearing a Sherlock Holmesian Inverness cap
e. Thank God he had not adopted Holmes’s deerstalker. Or his violin. At least thus far.

  The title was in very tiny print. I leaned forward farther, and Touffét looked up irritably. “This Dorothy Sayers, she is ridiculous,” he said, “she makes her Lord Peter read timetables of trains, decipher codes, use stopwatches, and it is all, all unnecessary. If he would only ask himself, ‘Who had a motive to murder Paul Alexis?’ he would have no need of all these shirt collar receipts and diagrams.”

  He flung it down. “It is Sherlock Holmes who has caused this foolish preoccupation with evidence,” he said, “with all his tobacco ashes and chemical experiments.” He grabbed the carpetbag off my lap and began rummaging through it. “Where have you put my other book, Bridlings?”

  I hadn’t touched it. I sometimes think he takes me along with him for the same reason that he reads mystery novels—so he can feel superior.

  He pulled a book from the bag, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. No doubt he would find all sorts of things wrong with Inspector Dupin. He would probably think Dupin should have asked himself what motive an orangu—

  “Touffét!” I said. “I’ve remembered who Lady Charlotte Valladay is! She’s the ape woman!”

  “Ape woman?” Touffét said irritably. “You are saying Lady Charlotte is a carnival attraction? Covered in hair and scratching herself?”

  “No, no,” I said. “She’s a primate-rights activist, claims gorillas and orangutans should be allowed to vote, be given equal standing in the courts, and all that.”

  “Are you certain this is the same person?” Touffét said.

  “Completely. Her father’s Lord Alastair Biddle, made his fortune in artificial intelligence. That’s how she got interested in primates. They were AI research subjects. She founded the Primate Intelligence Institute. I saw her on television just the other day, soliciting funds for it.”

  Touffét had taken out Lady Charlotte’s pink letter and was peering at it. “She says nothing at all about apes.”

  “Perhaps one of her orangutans has got loose and committed a murder, just like in The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” I said. “Looks like she made a monkey out of you, Touffét.”