Just then a police cruiser pulled up. Vern Shiffley, Randall’s cousin, jumped out just in time to see the man lurch to his feet and aim a punch at Randall. Randall dodged neatly. Vern wasn’t as lucky, but maybe it wasn’t entirely a bad thing that my stalker had just opened himself up to a charge of assaulting a police officer.
Another cruiser pulled up and Aida Butler hopped out. By the time Chief Burke pulled up, she and Vern had the stalker handcuffed in the back of Aida’s patrol car and Vern was holding a handful of snow on his injured eye.
“Are you all right?” the chief asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said.
The chief strode over to Aida’s patrol car and stood looking down at my stalker.
“Mr. Granger,” he said. “What’s the meaning of this?”
Someone known to the chief. I decided that was a good thing.
“She knows where my wife is,” Granger said.
I controlled my impulse to protest that I didn’t even know who his wife was, much less where she was.
“And what if she does?” the chief asked. “You do realize that you’d be violating the protective order if you followed her to find your wife, don’t you?”
Granger shut his mouth as if determined not to say anything else.
“Take him down to the station,” the chief said.
“I didn’t go near the bitch,” Granger protested. “I don’t even know where she is.”
“No, but you just assaulted a law enforcement officer while he was engaged in performing his duties,” the chief said.
He waved to Aida, who got in and started up her patrol car. As she drove off, the chief walked back over to me.
“You willing to press charges against this clown?” he asked.
“Gladly,” I said. “Though I’d really rather wait till tomorrow to do it, if it’s all the same.”
“Tomorrow will be soon enough,” he said. “You want an escort home?”
I shook my head. I had the feeling Mr. Granger, whoever he might be, was the only person after me tonight.
Not that I wasn’t glad when I got home and saw the house still brightly lit. And when Michael came out onto the porch to meet me.
“What took you so long?” he asked. “I was just about to call the police to have them check the ditches.”
“We had a little excitement.” I followed him and told him about Mr. Granger, while he went through the downstairs, performing his nightly ritual of shutting off lights and checking doors and windows.
“Quick thinking,” he said, when I’d finished my tale. “But who is this Granger character, and why would he think you know anything about his wife?”
“No idea,” I said. “I’ll ask the chief tomorrow.”
Though I had a feeling it would have something to do with the Caerphilly Women’s Shelter. A good thing Granger hadn’t been following me earlier in the day.
“Has the excitement given you an appetite?” Michael asked. “Want to join me in the kitchen?”
He never ate much before a show. He claimed it wasn’t due to nerves but part of a deliberate plan to keep himself sharp for the performance. Whatever the reason, he was always starving afterward and ready to pig out.
“I won’t eat much, but I’ll keep you company,” I said.
“Busy day tomorrow?”
“Two more days till we open,” I said. “So yes. Remind me again why I ever agreed to do this.”
“To protect this,” he said, waving a hand around in a gesture that took in not just the foyer where we were standing but the surrounding rooms. “It was the price we had to pay to keep your mother from insisting on having the show house here. Having all those crazy designers invading our space, redoing rooms we’ve finally got looking the way we like them, letting hordes of strangers tramp through our home—madness!”
“Not to mention the possibility that we might have had a murder in our own master bedroom instead of someone else’s,” I said.
“Exactly.”
Michael continued down the hall to the kitchen. I followed more slowly, looking around as I went, taking in the Christmas decorations in the foyer. I’d expected us to have to survive with minimal holiday decorations this year, since Mother, who normally insisted on decorating for us, would be totally immersed in the show house. But the day before she started work on her room, Mother showed up at seven in the morning with a dozen or so friends and relatives, and they’d transformed the whole house. The usual tall, narrow tree graced the foyer, this year completely decorated in red and gold with a musical theme—gold ornaments shaped like harps, trumpets, fiddles, drums, pianos, and French horns shared branches with chanting angels and singing choirboys. We had about the usual number of poinsettias, though this year most of them were plain red, which I preferred to the white or pink ones. Plain red dusted with a hint of gold glitter, anyway. This year Mother had put up red velvet ribbons crisscrossed on all the foyer walls, with little clips on them to hold Christmas cards. Every afternoon, providing they’d behaved themselves, the boys were allowed to take all the newly arrived Christmas cards and add them to the display. Mother had also festooned every corner of the room with so many tiny battery-powered LED candles in red-and-gold votive holders that the room sparkled like a convention of fireflies.