The Nightingale Before Christmas(4)

“If I ever get filthy rich, I’ll buy one,” she said, wriggling a little deeper into the chair. “But what happens to the chairs when the show is over? The owner of the house doesn’t get to keep them, surely?”

“The owner of the house is the First Bank of Caerphilly,” I said, “which has been trying to sell it ever since they foreclosed on it six years ago. They very graciously agreed to let us use it for the Christmas show house. They’re putting it up for sale as soon as the show is over, so of course they’re hoping that someone will fall in love with it and want to buy it.”

“Weird that it wouldn’t sell before,” she said. “It’s a nice house. Or did it need a lot of fixing up after being empty for six years?”

“The Shiffley Construction Company did a little fixing up, as their donation to the project.”

“That’s the company Mayor Shiffley owns?”

“Yes. Randall Shiffley’s a big supporter of the historical society.” And luckily, not here to hear me call thousands of dollars in major repairs “a little fixing up.”

“So if all the decorators—” Jessica began.

“I am going to kill that man,” came a voice from the doorway.





Chapter 2

Jessica and I looked up to see a tall ash-blond woman standing in the doorway. Martha Blaine, another designer. The one Mother and I called “the other Martha”—though not, of course, to her face, because we’d figured out she wasn’t a big Martha Stewart fan. Like Mother, she was tall enough that her head brushed the trailing evergreens, and she whacked them aside with a vicious swipe.

A loud hammering began upstairs.

“I said—” Martha began, raising her voice to be heard over the hammering.

“You’re going to kill him,” I said. “I get it. You’ll have to take a number, though. What’s he done now?”

I didn’t have to ask who she wanted to kill. There were only two male decorators in the house, and everyone loved Eustace Goodwin.

“What hasn’t he done?” She paused as if briefly overcome by the weight of Clay Spottiswood’s transgressions. I heard the whir of Jessica’s camera as she took a few pictures of Martha in the doorway.

I wondered, not for the first time, if Martha had stage experience. Not only did she carry herself with a certain dramatic flair, she also had the trick of speaking from the diaphragm so her voice could easily be heard in the last row of the theater. Or, in this case, in the farthest corners of the house. Outside the study the hammering stopped, and everything suddenly seemed very still, as if all the other designers on the premises were pausing to eavesdrop.

“What’s he done today?” I asked.

“He’s been rinsing paintbrushes and rollers in my bathroom again,” Martha said. “And bloody carelessly. Oh, and he’s dripped paint all over Violet’s room on his way to mine.”

Inhaling the evergreen scent wouldn’t help with this. I closed my eyes to count to ten. Martha, who’d had several occasions to watch me perform this temper-calming ritual over the last few weeks, waited patiently. I hadn’t even made it to five before Jessica piped up.

“Who’s this you’re going to kill?” she asked.

I frowned at Martha and shook my head to suggest that perhaps we should not be having this conversation in front of a reporter. Either she didn’t get my signals or she ignored them.

“Claiborne Spottiswood,” she said. “If he doesn’t stop messing up other people’s rooms— I don’t know why Clay was allowed to participate in the show house to begin with.”

“He’s a local decorator, and he turned in his application before the deadline, and the committee approved him,” I responded.

Martha scowled at that, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to remind her that she had waited until two weeks after the deadline to apply, and wouldn’t have gotten in, despite her impressive reputation, if the committee hadn’t been short on applicants and eager not to offend her. I thought she should be happy with what the committee had given her—two bathrooms and the laundry room. Not the most glamorous rooms in the house, but still, rooms that could be fabulous when done by a designer with her talent. In the five years since she’d moved from Richmond to set up shop here in Caerphilly, she’d quickly become one of the town’s leading decorators.

But even though she was well on her way to making her rooms fabulous, I knew she was still angry that the committee had accepted Clay. Not just because they’d given him the master suite, which she thought should have been hers. There was bad blood between the two of them. I’d figured out that much. Maybe I should find someone who could tell me why.