Valerie Malmont: Death, Snow, and Mistletoe

“Might be just as well,” I said. “After all the horrible things that happened to her, she's probably better off putting it all out of her mind.”

“I agree. Goodnight, Tori, and Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas to you-and thanks, for everything.”

I went back into the kitchen and put on water for tea. Thank goodness the stove was gas. While I waited for the kettle to whistle, something tickled my memory like a barely remembered tune, then faded away before I could grab hold. Something about adoption. Reverend Flack saying his wife's problems came from her having been adopted after her parents were killed in an accident.

When the kettle came to a boil, I prepared tea in one of Ethelind's Staffordshire teapots and covered it with a flowered tea cozy. I loaded up a silver tray with the teapot, a mug, artificial sweetener, a bowl of potato chips, and an unopened package of chocolate chip cookies. I always think better with food on hand, and I had a lot of thinking to do tonight.

Back in the parlor, wrapped up in a crocheted afghan, with the fire going, several candles lit, a cup of hot tea in one hand, a cookie in the other, and the cats on my lap, I settled down to do some serious brainstorming.

Something had come to me in a flash right after dinner at Greta's, and I was pretty sure I knew who could have committed the murders, but even though I was now sure that the intended victim had been Oretta, the “why” was still beyond my grasp.

I reached for another cookie when suddenly a rumbling noise seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth. The cats sat up, startled, as it built to a crescendo that ended with a crack and a burst of lightning that momentarily turned the room as bright as day. My mug flew into the air, and the cats shot off my lap and sought refuge under a marble-topped table in the corner.

After my heart stopped pounding, and I'd wiped up the tea I'd spilled, I laughed at them. “ 'Fraidy cats-scared of a little lightning.”

Another clap of thunder shook the house. “Maybe you guys know what you're doing,” I said. I'd never heard of thunder and lightning accompanying a snowstorm. I longed for a battery-operated radio to tell me what was going on, but that was the one thing I hadn't thought of earlier in the day.

Covered with another afghan, I tried to recapture my train of thought. During the past week, I'd spent a lot of time in the company of some very strange people: a TV psychic, a goddess-worshiping witch, a cat artist, a recovering alcoholic-drug addict restaurateur, an amorous arms collector, a bingo buff, a hymn-playing seamstress, a cavorting chiropractor, and a child serial-killer-in-training. But I hadn't come up with any evidence that pointed to any one of them as a murderer.

“Damn,” I muttered after a few minutes. “Nothing makes any sense.”

Noel, still under the table, consoled me with a comforting chirp.

How could I find Oretta's killer when I knew so little about the woman? If only I'd had the opportunity to get to know her better. What did she do in her spare time besides write bad plays and save animals?

That thought made me pause. Animals. Someone, presumably the murderer, had rescued all the animals in Oretta's house before setting fire to it. Had Oretta done something at the shelter to incense a fanatical animal lover?

Something else occurred to me. Oretta's passion had been writing. What if she hadn't limited her plagiarism to Shakespeare and the Bible? Perhaps the answer lay in Oretta's own, or stolen, words. What if someone had written a wonderful play and shown it to Oretta, only to discover later that Oretta had incorporated it into one of her own works?

Nothing in the Christmas pageant had struck me as unusual, except for the terrible writing, but there was the copy of the play she'd artfully left behind when she'd brought the lizard in. It was the only thing of Oretta's that had survived her death.

She'd claimed it was her “masterpiece,” a play even better than The Bad Seed . I'd purposely avoided reading it, dreading the woman's pretentious prose. But… everything else had been destroyed in the fire, and now I knew I had to look at the play. Maybe, just maybe, the answer I was looking for was there.

The manuscript was in the kitchen, half-buried under the Christmas catalogs. After refilling the potato chip bowl, I carried chips and script back to the living room.

I glanced at the title page and smiled at the title, Oretta Clopper's last attempt at plagiarism, Death in the Afternoon . With a sigh of resignation, I turned to Act I.

It was the worst writing I'd ever had the misfortune to read, but I couldn't put it down. Like the play Oretta had mentioned, it was about children. If I hadn't been directly involved so recently with Peter Poffenberger, the young wannabe serial killer, I would have thrown it down in disgust, but because I now knew without a doubt that children are capable of evil I kept reading, for Oretta's play was a thinly veiled account of Eddie Douglas's death.

In the first act, a little boy follows the older children to the quarry, where they have a secret clubhouse. The kids regard him as a pest, and when he falls in the water, they taunt him and throw rocks at him until he goes under and never comes up again. In the second act, the children, afraid of being punished, swear a blood oath not to tell anybody what happened.

I went back to read the cast of characters. The leader of that charming group of children was described as “a girl of great beauty and creative ability.” Not surprisingly, her name was Loretta. Loretta's cohort was Richard Shook, “a chubby but artistic child.”

As I read on, I was convinced that I was not reading fiction-Oretta hadn't even changed Eddie's name-that Oretta had written a play about the terrible thing she and Raymond Zook and possibly some other playmates had done. Why had she written it? Had it been an attempt to clear her conscience? In the past, this was the kind of thing I would have talked over with my best friend, Alice-Ann, but that was now out of the question. And I knew Maggie was out of town recreating the Civil War. I thought for a moment, then picked up the phone and called Ginnie Welburn's number. There was no answer, so I assumed she was still at Greta's house.

Before I had a chance to get resettled, a crash, far above, shook the house. What had happened? A tree? The roof? What? When the building stopped shaking, I took a candle and went upstairs to check on the damage. In a third-floor bedroom, a falling tree had smashed through a window. There was nothing I could do to fix it, not now with the storm at the height of its fury, so I moved everything I thought was valuable into the hall and shut the door against the howling wind.

Halfway down the stairs, with the candle flame casting eerie shadows on the wall, I suddenly thought I heard something in the front of the house. I stopped. Listened. Heard nothing but the wind. And yet, there had been a sound-I was sure of it. I wanted to run back to my room, lock the door, pull the covers up over my head. But that wasn't the adult way to face formless fears. Besides, my cats were down there. Near-panic set in. What if the door had blown open? They could be lost in the storm! What if they'd knocked over a candle? What if…? “Stop acting like an idiot, Tori,” I scolded myself. “Go downstairs and find out what's happened.”

In the front parlor, I found the cats were standing on their hind legs looking out one of the front windows.

I whistled with relief. What I'd heard had probably been them, moving around. “Is it still snowing?” I asked.

My answer was a crack of thunder followed by a bolt of lightning. Both cats screamed and scurried under their table.

I was transfixed by what I thought I'd just seen in the window before the drapes fell back in place. A face. I rushed to the window and looked out, but of course there was nothing there. My imagination, triggered by the storm, had gone into overdrive.