“ ‘He knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge,’ ” I quoted to myself. And I felt a sudden sadness that unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, Ralph Doleson never would have the chance of reforming his curmudgeonly ways.
The crowds that had lined the road were dispersing—a few to their cars, while most fell in step behind the children. Were they going to march all the way to Caerphilly?
Part of me wanted to jump in my car and follow the crowd. Or maybe race ahead on foot, hop on one of the last few floats, and enjoy the cheers and laughter of the crowds.
And part of me kept looking over toward the pig shed, where Chief Burke and his men were still doing . . . whatever they were doing. I hadn’t barged in for at least an hour and a half now—hadn’t even looked that way if I could help it—but I knew they were there. I also knew very well that Chief Burke wouldn’t welcome my dropping in to see how the investigation was progressing.
“Nothing I can do about that,” I muttered. After all the time I’d spent organizing the parade, I should at least try to enjoy it. Not to mention the fact that every single potential murder suspect I could think of had already gone to town with the parade. I headed for the house to fetch my purse from the safe room.
The kitchen looked as if a hurricane had come through. A hurricane with a bad coffee habit. I couldn’t stand to leave it that way, so I made a quick pass through with a trash bag and then loaded and started the dishwasher.
Before the previous owners had added a new, larger pantry much closer to the food preparation area, the safe room had been the pantry. It was a small room opening off the mudroom, four feet wide by six feet deep, with white-painted wooden shelves lining both sides and an old-fashioned Chubb lock on the door.
I was fishing in my pocket for my copy of the key when I realized there was already one in the lock. Not good. I flung the door open.
The inside was a disaster. Had someone ransacked it? Or had whoever took over from Horace simply done a remarkably slipshod job of keeping things organized? I grabbed a few purses at random and searched them, finding plenty of money and credit cards, along with small valuable items like iPods and PDAs. So the chaos wasn’t due to a thief hastily rummaging for loot. Just bad oversight. The items neatly arranged on shelves with numbered tags on them doubtless dated from the earlier part of the day, when Horace had been in charge. But the later additions had simply been thrown in. A small pile of numbered tags that should have been attached to items lay on a shelf just inside the door.
I waded through the clutter till I could reach my purse. The SPOOR placards made up quite a large portion of the debris on the floor, so I decided to take them with me and hand them over to whichever geese I could find in town. I began dragging them out of the heap.
I suddenly realized that there was something familiar about the placards. Not the signs themselves, although I’d seen them often enough by now. About two-thirds of them were, as usual, mounted on slats—rough strips of pine one-by-two that I knew would leave horrible splinters in your hands if, like me, you were stupid enough to try carrying one without gloves. They were sharpened to a rough point to make it easier to stick your placard in the ground when you needed to take a break for splinter removal.
The remaining third were nailed to rough wooden sticks, two to two-and-a-half feet long, about an inch in diameter, and sharpened to a rough point.
Just like the stake that had killed Ralph Doleson. And like the murder weapon, they appeared to be made out of holly wood.
I stopped to put on a pair of kitchen gloves before pulling the rest of the placards out into the kitchen and sorting them into two piles. Twenty-four slat placards, all of which looked as if they’d seen quite a bit of use. Eleven somewhat newer placards mounted on holly sticks.
And one placard by itself, with no stick of any kind—though it had a few staples still clinging to the top and bottom center, showing where it had once been attached to something.
I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the chief.
“I’m busy,” he said. “Is this important?”
“I think I found out where the killer got the murder weapon,” I said.
He didn’t say anything immediately.
“Well?” he said, finally. “I’m listening.”
Chapter 15
After hearing what I’d found, the chief showed up on the back porch in under five minutes and shook an impressive amount of snow off his coat and boots before stepping inside.
“Did you touch these before you put on those gloves?” the chief asked, nodding at the placard collection.
“Yes,” I said. “Not only just now, but earlier, when I confiscated them from the SPOORs. And then I gave them to Rob to lock up in the safe room, so his fingerprints will be on them, too. For that matter, since I found the key in the safe room lock when I got here, anyone could have been in there.”