“Good heavens, no!” she exclaimed. “He’s as sober as a judge.”
Clearly she hadn’t met some of Caerphilly County’s justices.
“Then what’s his little problem?” I asked.
“He . . . tends to borrow things.”
“Oh, that little problem,” I said, nodding. “Another kleptomaniac.” We had a few of those in the family, too.
Caroline winced.
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not it,” she said. “He’s just curious—always picking things up to look at them. And so easily distracted. He . . . wanders off with things. I suppose the police would call it kleptomania.”
“The police would call it larceny,” Michael said. “Grand or petit, depending on what kind of things catch his eye.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “The bin was where Norris stashed the stuff he’d wandered off with while distracted.”
“Exactly, dear,” she said. “Every few months, we help him empty out the bin and return everything.”
“Every few months?” I echoed.
“We have to do it fairly often,” she said. “Before he forgets where he’s found everything. I suggested labeling everything, but he really isn’t very methodical about it. Sometimes, we have a fair number of things we can’t identify well enough to return.”
“So what do you do with that stuff?” I asked.
“Donate it to Purple Heart,” she said. “We used to do the Salvation Army, but Purple Heart picks up—so convenient.”
“I should go see if the rest of our guests have everything they need for the night,” Michael said.
I suspected what he really wanted to do was find a quiet corner to howl with laughter without hurting Caroline’s feelings. I wondered what Purple Heart and the Salvation Army would think when they learned they’d been obliviously receiving stolen goods.
“Ralph Doleson found out about Norris’s little problem,” Caroline went on. “And he changed the lock on Norris’s storage bin and has been forcing the poor man to pay him money not to tell the police.”
“He was blackmailing Norris.”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “That’s such a nasty word.”
“It’s a nasty crime,” I said. “So you decided to take advantage of Ralph Doleson’s death to steal back the incriminating evidence.”
“No, we planned to take advantage of Ralph Doleson’s absence during the parade to steal back the evidence,” she said. “Since I would be down here with the truck, and Doleson would be stuck for several hours in town, giving out presents. It seemed like the perfect opportunity.”
“Until Ralph Doleson was murdered.”
“Yes,” she said. “That came as a horrible shock to us, and we almost gave up our plan. But Norris was afraid the police would start combing through all the bins in the Spare Attic and become suspicious, so we went ahead, a little later in the day than we planned. I suppose that wasn’t such a good idea.”
I didn’t argue with her.
“Does Norris have an alibi for the murder?” I asked.
“He was helping me with the elephants.”
“Doing what?”
“Helping put on their trappings,” she said. “And fetching hay and—”
She fell silent.
“Running errands?” I suggested.
She nodded.
“And he was wearing the goose costume?”
Caroline nodded. She probably realized the goose costume was too multicolored to show blood spatter and heavy enough to protect the clothes beneath. She sipped the last bit of her martini and sighed.
“Would you like another?” I asked. “I’m sure Michael would be happy to bartend again.”
“No, thanks,” she said. “One’s my limit after midnight, or should be. Is that offer of a bed still open?”
I showed Caroline to our guest room and made sure she had more than enough blankets. When I came back down, Michael and one of the police officers were unrolling the Boy Scouts’ sleeping bags in the living room, as near the fireplace as possible. They’d doused the oil lanterns, but the fire reflected off all the tinsel and lit the room with a flickering golden glow. Someone’s battery radio was playing Christmas carols.
It would have been such a peaceful heartwarming scene if our uninvited guests had been relatives instead of cops, and if the back yard wasn’t still festooned, under the snow, with crime scene tape. And if we didn’t still have an unsolved murder in town.
At least I assumed it was still unsolved. I decided to risk seeing what I could learn from the chief.