Chapter Ten
“Hey!” Kevin suddenly looked up at us. “Nobody told me there were brownies.”
“You didn’t ask, you silly boy. Of course there are brownies,” Aunt Peg said. “But if you want one, you have to come and join us at the table.”
Kev’s gaze dropped. Both male puppies were asleep in his lap. The blue girl was chewing on the tip of his shoe. He was clearly undecided. She’d given him a tough choice. “But the puppies are down here.”
“It’s a dilemma, isn’t it?” she agreed. “Why don’t you stay there and I’ll pack a brownie for you to take with you when you leave?”
“Yes, please.”
I was marveling at my son’s polite answer when one of the black boys lifted his head and nipped at Kevin’s finger. He giggled and pulled his hand away. Then he reached back and scratched under the puppy’s chin. In the space of seconds, Kev had forgotten all about us.
“More for me,” Aunt Peg said happily. She slid another brownie onto her napkin. “Now go on. Surely that can’t be all you’ve accomplished since the last time we saw each other.”
“It isn’t. I also had a chat this morning with Lila’s supposed boyfriend.”
“Supposed?” She glanced up. “What does that mean?”
“It means that he didn’t think he was in a relationship with her. Linc Landry admitted to knowing Lila but said they’d just had a quick fling.”
“He would say that, wouldn’t he? The woman is dead. If he has something to hide, it only makes sense that he would want to disassociate himself from her.”
“Linc was already having trouble remembering who she was before I told him that she’d been killed,” I told her.
Aunt Peg looked surprised. “You mean he didn’t know?”
“Apparently not.”
“That’s ridiculous. New Canaan is a small town. A murder there would be big news. I think your Mr. Landry was lying to you. Maybe he killed Lila, and this was his way of deflecting attention away from himself.”
“He did say something else that was interesting.”
“It’s about time,” Aunt Peg muttered under her breath.
I ignored that and pressed on. “Sometimes when they were together, Lila would get phone calls that were important enough for her to immediately stop what she was doing and go in another room to talk.”
“Maybe she had a lover,” Aunt Peg mused.
“She did,” I pointed out. “Linc. And he was standing right there. Maybe she was talking to Josephine Mannerly. Do you think that’s a possibility?”
The idea made her smile. “All I know is that if Josie were to call me out of the blue, I would drop everything to talk to her too.”
“Josie was Lila’s landlady,” I said. “Maybe they had stuff to discuss.”
“Like overdue rent?” Aunt Peg was skeptical.
“I was thinking more like why that creepy Hank Peebles was always hanging around the gatehouse.” I grabbed a second brownie. Or possibly a third. It was hard to talk and keep count at the same time. “Or maybe the mystery caller was someone from Lila’s dubious past.”
“Ah, yes.” Aunt Peg nodded. “Claire finally got around to mentioning that to me. That was quite a tantalizing tidbit for her to keep tucked away, don’t you think?”
“I gather she felt we would think less of her if we knew she’d taken on a client with a questionable history.”
“Less than if she took on a client who got herself killed?” She lifted a brow. “That’s hard to credit.”
“I’m ready for my brownie now,” Kevin announced. The puppies had gone to sleep on the sheepskin bed. All three had cuddled together to form a small mound. “Is it time to go?”
“Just about,” I told him.
“Not so fast.” Aunt Peg pushed back her chair and stood. “You were going to guess the puppies’ names, remember?”
“I know their names.” Kev sounded very pleased with himself. “They’re Black, Blue, and Ditto.”
“Yes, but which is which? That’s the hard part.”
“Blue is the blue puppy,” Kev told her. “Black is whichever one of the others comes over first. Then the last one is Ditto.”
“That makes perfect sense to me,” I said with a laugh.
Aunt Peg couldn’t disagree. As she held out her hand, she looked like she wanted to laugh too. “Here, young man. You’ve earned yourself a brownie.”
* * *
Saturday morning arrived faster than I’d anticipated. That probably had something to do with the fact that Kevin was out of bed and dressed before I even had my eyes open. And once he was up, that meant all the creatures in the house would be stirring too. As well as my husband and our older son. Everybody couldn’t wait to go tramping around a forest on a cold winter day.
I was steaming in a hot shower when Sam opened the bathroom door. “Breakfast is on the table,” he said.
I took that as my cue to turn off the stream of water. “What are we having?”
“Cereal. Lots of cereal. More cereal that you can imagine.”
I peeked out from behind the shower curtain. Sam tossed me a towel. There was only one thing I could say next. “What did Kevin do now?”
“He decided to hurry us along by feeding the dogs himself. He also decided they must be tired of eating kibble. So he made them eight bowls of cereal. I got to the kitchen just in time to keep him from handing them out.”
“Eight?” I wrapped the towel around me and stepped out of the shower. “Kev knows we only have six dogs.”
Sam bit back a grin. “He thought Bud looked hungry, so he made him extra servings.”
That little mutt was already shaped like a football. He needed fewer helpings, not additional ones. But Bud was a master at manipulation.
“Bud always looks hungry,” I said.
“Kev and I had that conversation,” Sam told me. “And we gave the dogs their kibble. Now all we have to do is eat eight bowls of cereal.”
“And chop down a Christmas tree,” I mentioned.
“Right,” said Sam. “That’s the fun part. Hurry up.”
As he disappeared, I stared after him with a smile on my face. Was there a man in the world who didn’t flex his muscles, suck in his gut, and grin with glee when he was handed a chain saw? If so, I wasn’t married to him.
Haney’s Holiday Home was a Christmas tree farm in northwest Wilton. Situated on ten acres of wooded land, it had been a popular holiday destination for decades, until its elderly owner died and the place was allowed to fall into disrepair. My brother, Frank, and my ex-husband, Bob, who also co-owned a bistro in Stamford, had purchased the property the previous December.
Then it had been a scramble to get the business up and running in time for Christmas. All able-bodied family members had found themselves pressed into service—either to help make repairs or serve as salespeople. This year Frank had been able to plan ahead and he’d hired college students to fill in for the season. After that, all Frank and Bob had had to do was open their doors and customers had come flooding back.
Sam parked his SUV in front of the clapboard office building. I hadn’t been back to the tree farm in nearly a year. I could see that there had been additional improvements made in the meantime.
The outside of the structure was freshly painted and the parking lot had been resurfaced. A spruce wreath decorated with silver bells and sprigs of holly was hanging on the office door. Red and white ribbons were twined in a candy cane pattern around the banister that led to the porch. The place looked festive and inviting, and Kevin was already running on ahead to dash up the steps.
“I miss the snow.” Davey came over and stood next to me. “Last year when we were here, the snow was up to my knees.”
Last year we’d found a dead body half buried in the snow, I thought. I didn’t miss anything about that.
“Snow’s on the way,” said Sam. “It won’t be long now. We’ll have six inches on the ground before Christmas.”
Kev heard that. He’d been reaching for the doorknob, but now he spun around. “Promise?”
“Uh-oh,” I said under my breath.
“Promise,” Sam agreed.
I punched him in the arm. “What are you going to do if you’re wrong?”
“That’s easy.” He followed his son up the steps. “I’ll just blame the weather on you.”
It took us half the morning to find the perfect Christmas tree. The cultivated forest around us had plenty of good options. But Davey and Kevin both wanted to have the deciding vote on which tree we brought home, and the two boys couldn’t agree on which one to choose.
While they argued over the merits of height versus symmetry of branches, I just stood in the middle of the woods and inhaled deeply. All I wanted was a Christmas tree that smelled great. Fortunately, that part was easy.
It took another hour to cut the tall Douglas fir down, then get it back to the SUV. If the boys hadn’t been helping, Sam and I probably could have accomplished those tasks in half the time. Not that it mattered. We had the rest of the day to get the tree up and decorated. It felt great just to kick back and enjoy family time for a change.
When we arrived home, the dogs met us at the door. It wasn’t every day we brought a tree inside the house, and apparently, that was cause for canine mayhem.
“I know you remember this,” I told Faith. The oldest and the wisest of the Poodles, she was the first to calm down. Tar, Augie, and Bud were still leaping and yapping and otherwise making fools of themselves. “Tell them everything is all right. This is only temporary.”
Faith gave me a reproachful look. Just because she remembered didn’t mean she thought a tree belonged in her living room.
While Sam and the boys got the Christmas tree set up in its stand, I put on holiday music and poured eggnog for everybody. I added a little kick to Sam’s and mine.
That was a good thing, because when I returned to the living room the Poodles were adding to the party by zooming around the room. They bounced from couch to chairs, then back to the floor before racing circles around the tree. Kevin was giggling uncontrollably. He was also slipping Bud and Tar slivers of candy cane when he thought no one was looking.
I started unpacking the ornaments. Sam and Davey untangled the lights and strung them around the tree. Kevin was in charge of tinsel. The boys had chosen a towering Douglas fir, so it took us a while to decorate every inch. Finally everything was in place.
We all stood back to admire the effect.
“Wow,” said Kevin.
Davey reached over to ruffle his brother’s hair. “Now Santa Claus will know just where to find you. This tree is so big, I bet it’s already on his radar.”
Kev turned to him with wide eyes. “Do you think so?”
I didn’t hear Davey’s answer, because my cell phone began to ring. I’d left it in my bedroom earlier, so I had to make a mad dash for the stairs. Faith came racing behind me. She loved to talk on the phone, especially if Aunt Peg was calling.
I was slightly winded by the time I snatched the phone off the dresser and sank down on the bed. Faith jumped up beside me. I glanced at the screen, then held the device to my ear. Once again, it was Claire.
“You cost me a client,” she said without preamble.
“Hi, Claire. Wait . . . what?” Abruptly my good mood vanished. “What did you say?”
“You cost me a client,” she repeated slowly. “Karen Clauson. I just got off the phone with her. She’s furious.”
I reached over and pulled Faith into my lap. Dogs are a surefire stress reliever when things go wrong. And suddenly it sounded as though something had gone very wrong. I tangled my fingers in the Poodle’s long ear hair.
“Claire, start at the beginning, please. Tell me what happened.”
“I set it up so that you and Karen could meet.”
“Yes, you did,” I agreed. “And she and I had a perfectly pleasant conversation. She didn’t seem unhappy when I left.”
“Apparently, that was before she realized you were going to go running to the police with the information she gave you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
In the spirit of sharing—and to take the sting out of the fact that Claire and I had just been discovered somewhere we definitely didn’t belong—I’d related to Detective Hronis what Karen had said about the Mannerly estate caretaker. I’d given him Karen’s name. I’d even confirmed that she was George Clauson’s wife.
But wait a minute, I thought. What was wrong with that?
“That detective you talked to stopped by her house,” said Claire. “This morning, on a Saturday. George was there. And her kids. And apparently a couple of the kids’ friends. When a policeman parked right out front and marched into her house as if she’d done something wrong.”
“But she hadn’t done anything wrong,” I sputtered. “He just needed to talk to her. He probably wanted to confirm what I’d told him.”
“Yeah, well, I guess that wasn’t how it looked to the neighbors. Then George got upset because he hadn’t known Karen had previously talked to the police. . . and was she hiding things from him? And her kids got upset when they heard that someone their parents knew had been murdered.” Claire stopped and sighed. “You can probably imagine how things snowballed from there.”
“It was all a misunderstanding,” I said. “Lots of people talk to the police about stuff, and nobody gets upset about it.”
“No, Melanie, lots of people do not get involved with the police,” Claire said firmly. “You do. And the rest of us probably would get upset about it, except that by now you’ve done it so many times that we just figure, ‘What’s the point?’ ”
I bit my lip between my teeth. My eyes blinked rapidly. Suddenly it felt as though I’d been punched in the gut. That wasn’t fair. Claire was the one who’d called me when she found Lila. She had asked me to become involved.
Faith sensed my change in mood. She snuggled her warm body closer to mine and laid her head down across my legs. But right now, even she couldn’t make me feel better.
“So even though Karen was one of my oldest and best clients,” Claire continued, “she has now severed her relationship with me.”
“She can’t do that,” I said hotly.
“Of course she can. Karen is free to take her party planning business anywhere she wants to.”
“She’s the one who introduced you to Lila Moran. If it wasn’t for Karen, you and I wouldn’t even be mixed up in this.”
“Good point.” Claire sounded resigned. “And yet, I’m still fired.”
“You can’t be fired,” I said. “It’s not right. I’m going to fix this.”
“Don’t you dare call Karen. It will only make things worse.”
“How can they be worse? You already lost her business. I won’t call. I’ll go see Karen in person. We’ll have another friendly conversation. I’ll remind her about all the great parties you’ve thrown for her. I’ll tell her none of this is your fault. Don’t worry, I’ll get things smoothed over. You’ll see.”
She hung up without answering.