Chapter Four
I slept in the next morning, but eventually the sounds and smells coming from the restaurant downstairs wafted into the apartment and seduced me awake. I patted the bed next to me, hoping for Chris, but my hand hit a tangle of sheets and duvet. No doubt, he was long gone. I checked my phone. A text from him—CALL WHEN UNLOAD TRUCK. I snuggled in the warm sheets for an extra moment, appreciating my life and the helpful man in it, so unlike the odious Wade Cadwallader, who had bailed on Imogen in her hour of need.
I pulled on jeans, a Snowden Family Clambake T-shirt, and a flannel shirt over a top; then I put on thick socks and work boots. My landlord, Gus, spotted me as I came down the stairs and stopped cooking long enough to raise a hand. “Need a cup?”
“Rain check. Got to get to Mom’s.” I fast-walked over the hill to Mom’s house, screeching to a halt as I reached the top.
There was no big yellow truck in the driveway.
Darn. Mom obviously had to move it. She was supposed to have the day off, but since her promotion to assistant manager at Linens and Pantries over in Topsham, she often got called in for emergencies. The holiday season sometimes seemed like one long emergency.
I looked around the street. No truck parked on either side. I ran to the side of the house. No truck pulled farther down the driveway. By then, I was worried.
I burst through the back door. “Halloo!”
“In here!” Mom’s voice traveled from the living room. That was odd. The formal front rooms of our Victorian house were rarely used. I pushed through the swinging kitchen door into the front hall and stopped in my tracks. Christmas had exploded all over our house.
Mom turned from the mantelpiece where she was arranging a row of smiling snowmen. “Hello, dear. Imogen is helping me decorate.”
“Truck?” I croaked.
“What, dear?” Mom inclined her head, puzzled. I wondered if smoke was coming out of my ears.
“Where’s the truck?” I repeated. “The big yellow truck Imogen and I drove up in last night.”
“Is it missing?”
Oh, boy. “Believe me, if it was here, it would be visible.”
“Oh no.” Imogen came out from behind the Christmas tree, a string of colored lights in her hands. She was dressed in the green corduroy skirt, green tights, and the red Christmas sweater with the reindeer I’d spotted in her Bean’s haul from the night before. The whole outfit was much too young for her and looked like something a child would wear. A child with a sadistic mother.
I ran back into the kitchen. The truck keys weren’t on the table where I’d left them. My note to Mom was there, obviously opened and read, but no keys. My stomach clenched.
I pulled my phone out of my bag and found the non-emergency number for the police station. It was already in my contacts.
* * *
My childhood friend Jamie Dawes showed up five minutes later to take the report. He was the newest full-time member of Busman’s Harbor’s seven-person police force. He still lived in his parents’ house right next door.
“When’s the last time you saw the truck?” he asked. We sat at the kitchen table, while Jamie filled out a form on a clipboard he’d brought from his cruiser.
“Four-fifteen-ish.”
“In the morning?”
“Yeah.”
He raised a dark blond eyebrow at me.
“Long story,” I said.
“I think you’d better tell it.”
I gave him the fastest version I could of Imogen’s decision not to take my apartment and our late-night trip to the harbor.
“You locked the truck?”
“Of course,” I protested. I’m not an idiot.
“Where’re the keys?
“They’re gone. I left them here on the table in case Mom had to move the truck.”
“Was the house locked?” As he asked this, Jamie stood and took a long stride toward the back door to examine it, presumably for signs of forced entry.
“Uhmm . . .” Back in the spring and summer, when I’d been living with her, the door had been a matter of some contention between Mom and me. I was forever locking up, a New York habit not easily lost. She was forever coming home and finding herself locked out. Finally, I’d given in. Her house, her rules, even overnight.
Jamie gave me a form to list the contents of the truck. He told me to bring it to the station, where he’d give me all the paperwork I’d need for dealing with the rental company.
I walked him out to the front porch. As he started down the steps, I put a hand out to stop him. I didn’t want Mom and Imogen to hear what I was about to say.
“It’s probably nothing,” I began.
“Tell me anyway.” I’d been pulled by circumstances into working with the police on a few cases since I’d been home. Jamie was one of the officers who always gave credit when credit was due. Unlike some others.
“There was a car, a dirty white Toyota Camry with New York plates. It was parked on the street in the city when we loaded the truck, and then I thought I saw it again in Freeport when we stopped at Bean’s.”
“You’re sure it was the same car?”
“No.”
“Do you remember the license number? Did you write it down or take a photo with your phone?”
“No.” Though that probably would have been smart. On the other hand, I’d had no idea the truck would be stolen.
“Can you describe the person in the car?”
“It was a man. Thin face. Pale. Twenties, I think. Wearing a Yankees baseball cap.”
“Do you think he saw you loading the truck and followed you? You mentioned some antiques.”
The only things I could think of were my grandfather’s paintings. You could tell they were artwork from the shape of their boxes. But that was ridiculous. Compared to the kind of art you’d find in New York, the paintings were small potatoes. Not worth the effort of following us all the way to Maine. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Then what do you think happened?”
I hesitated. “Please, don’t take this for any more than it’s worth. It was my crazy imagination, trying to figure out why someone would follow us. It probably wasn’t even the same car.”
He looked at me directly, putting on his serious cop face. “Out with it.”
“Imogen just came out of a bad breakup. Her ex sounds like a jerk. I thought he might be following her.”
“Do you have a name for this guy?”
“Wade Cadwallader.”
“Phone number? Photo?”
“No, but I can get them.”
“I’ll do it.” He took a step back toward the house.
“Let me. If you ask her, it’ll just freak her out. I don’t want to upset her over some sleep-deprived idea I had in the L.L.Bean parking lot at three in the morning.”
He turned, considering what I’d said. “Okay. Call me as soon as she gives them to you.”
“Of course.”
I turned back inside to finish the paperwork and make a no doubt unpleasant phone call to the rental company. What a mess.
* * *
I was grumbling over the police inventory form when I heard the unmistakable clang and wheeze of my younger sister Livvie’s ancient minivan pulling into the drive. The kitchen door burst open and Livvie breezed in, a statuesque, auburn-haired beauty in her seventh month of pregnancy. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Good morning to you, too.”
“Sorry. You startled me. I thought you were in New York.”
“That was yesterday.” I brought her up to speed on the whole chain of events, starting with Imogen’s mishap with the eggnog and ending with the stolen truck.
“Geez.”
“I haven’t even told Mom that all Granddad’s furniture was in the truck. She seems to have forgotten about it.”
“Can you hold off telling her for a while? She has the day off work and I’m here to help her decorate the house for Christmas. I want it to be a fun day.”
“Um, sure, but she got a head start on you.”
“What?” Livvie strode through the swinging door and stopped dead in the front hall. I followed behind. “You started without me?”
Mom couldn’t have missed the hurt in Livvie’s voice. “There’s so much more to do this year! I thought I’d get going and Imogen was eager to help.” She introduced Imogen, who turned from decorating the Christmas tree, holding an ornament of a bird in a gilded cage that had belonged to Grandmother Snowden. I heard Livvie’s teeth grate. Imogen smiled at Livvie, but it didn’t look like a niceto-meet-you smile to me, more like the triumphant cat-who-swallowed-the-canary variety. Like the bratty younger sister we’d never had. And never wanted.
Mom was right about one thing, there certainly was “a lot more to do.” When we were growing up, my mother, so unaware of or indifferent to Christmas rituals, had not been one for decorations. When Livvie reached her early teens, she had orchestrated the tree trimming and stocking hanging. Later, decorating the house became a tradition that maintained our delicate family balance during the year of my father’s cancer and following his death. It helped enormously that Livvie and her husband, Sonny, had a daughter, Page, who, as a little one, had gaped wide-eyed at the tree with all the love and awe you could hope for. Livvie’s pregnancy at eighteen had been treated like a tragedy at first, but in many ways Page had saved us as a family. Page and Livvie.
Livvie stared into the living room, taking in the piles of stuffed Christmas penguins, poinsettia-covered linens, and ceramic houses with candlelight glowing from their windows. “What is all this?”
“I used my employee discount at Linens and Pantries to spruce things up,” Mom answered. “I thought we were due for a refreshing. I even got new stockings for all of us.”
“New stockings!” Livvie swiveled her pregnant self to look where my mother pointed. Laid out on the couch were six stockings printed on their tops with my mother’s name, JACQUELINE, and then JULIA, LIVVIE, SONNY, PAGE, and CHRIS.
“Chris!” I squeaked. When I’d asked if he planned to travel to Florida to spend the holidays with his family, Chris had replied simply, “I’d rather be with you,” neatly sidestepping the topic of his parents, as he always did. But we weren’t engaged, or even officially living together, and I wasn’t sure how he’d react to having a stocking with his name on it hanging from our hearth.
Livvie stared daggers at the new stockings. I didn’t blame her. We were both sentimentally attached to the old ones, which we’d bought with our allowances at a Christmas craft fair—misshapen cut felt personalized with drizzly glitter. They’d started as a mess and hadn’t worn well. Sonny’s and Page’s had been added later and were mismatched. And the one that said DAD had been put away.
“C’mon,” Mom urged. “We don’t have all day. Santa arrives in the harbor at five.”
Livvie hesitated, then smiled bravely. “Of course,” she said. “Let’s get going.”
“Imogen, can I borrow you for a minute?” I asked. “You need to list the items in your big suitcase on the form for the police inventory.” I’d been amazed at how lightly she’d lived in my apartment, and how quickly she’d cleaned her stuff out.
“Sure.” She followed me into the kitchen. I figured that would give Livvie some time to regain her equilibrium.
“Officer Dawes needs a photo of your ex-boyfriend and his phone number,” I told her after she’d sat down.
Her big brown eyes opened wide. “Why on earth would he need that?”
I kept my voice calm and even. “Think about it, Imogen. You just had a bad breakup. You said Wade didn’t take it well. Who else would have followed us here and stolen the truck?”
“Followed us!”
I immediately regretted mentioning “followed.” I wasn’t prepared to share my suspicions about the dirty white Toyota.
“Show me a photo of Wade,” I asked.
Imogen held her phone out in front of me, scrolling through the photos. There was Wade Christmas shopping in Union Square, skating at Rockefeller Center, drinking cappuccino at Eataly. Sometimes the two of them posed together, no doubt having asked some hapless tourist to snap the shot. Imogen glowed. Wade sometimes smiled and sometimes glowered. He had a thin face and fair features. And in several of the photos, especially the most recent ones, he wore a Yankees cap.