“Is this the Meg Langslow who’s in charge of the Caerphilly Historical Society’s Christmas Decorator Show House?” a male voice said.
“Yes,” I said. “May I help you?”
“I’m with the Richmond Times-Dispatch,” he said. “I’m supposed to come by to take some shots for a story in the paper. Would noon today be okay?”
I closed my eyes and contemplated how the designers would react if I arrived and told them a photographer would be arriving in four hours. Less than four hours.
“We don’t actually open until ten a.m. on December twenty-fourth,” I said. “And as you can imagine, the designers are still busy putting the finishing touches on their rooms.”
“That doesn’t matter to me,” he said.
“But it will to them,” I pointed out. “How about a sneak preview an hour before we let the public in on the twenty-fourth?”
“I’m tied up that day. Can we make it three today?”
We finally made it 10:00 A.M. on the twenty-third. Which was tomorrow.
Now to break the news to the decorators.
I stopped by the Caerphilly Bakery and picked up two dozen assorted doughnuts, bearclaws, and other breakfast pastries, to sweeten the news. And a couple of carryout carafes of coffee, to jump start their efforts.
Most of the designers were already there when I arrived. Sarah was carrying in boxes from her car. As was Violet. What were they up to? Now was time to be putting on finishing touches, not dragging in vast quantities of new stuff.
Mother was showing Tomás and Mateo exactly how she wanted them to put a light touch of gilding on the edges of some of the woodwork.
“Pastries?” she exclaimed. “How nice, dear.”
She smiled indulgently as Mateo and Tomás abandoned their paintbrushes long enough to grab pastries. I carried the rest of the doughnuts and the coffee through to the kitchen. Eustace also had piles of boxes. Clearly it was a trend, and not one I was happy to see under the circumstances.
“Mind if I put these here?” I asked Eustace.
“Fine,” he said. “Just how awful does this cabinet look? Be brutal.”
I came around to where I could see the kitchen cabinets. He’d had all the cabinet fronts replaced with glass-paned doors in a sort of diamond-hatched pattern that looked vaguely Elizabethan. He’d even installed lighting inside the cabinets, the better to see the contents. And I noticed that he’d added—or, more likely, Tomás and Mateo had added—little flourishes of gold on the glass, curlicues and leaves and … well, squiggles. Evidently this was what had inspired Mother to commit retaliatory gilding.
And now he was arranging dishes in the cabinets. A really small number of dishes—especially when compared to the number of boxes he’d used to bring them in. One cabinet held nothing but a turquoise teapot and a matching teacup on the bottom shelf, two hand-painted goblets on the middle shelf, and a blue Fiestaware pitcher on the top one. At this rate, he’d need a lot more cabinets to hold just the dishes and glassware that were spread out along the counter, much less what lurked in the boxes.
“I’m not letting you anywhere near my kitchen,” I said. “But it’s beautiful. They all are.”
“Then why don’t you want me near your kitchen?” he asked.
“Because I think those glass-fronted cabinets are fabulous, and you’d talk me into having them, and they just wouldn’t work,” I said. “We have too much kitchen stuff, and most of it’s not decorative—at least not when you have to crowd it in to get all of it put away.”
“Well, you’re right, it’s not practical,” he said. “But it’s beautiful, and people love to see it. Do you think I should switch the pitcher and the teapot?”
“I think you should ask Mother,” I said. “I have no eye for this kind of thing. Meanwhile, I have news.”
The assorted designers and worker bees gathered around the pastry looked up anxiously.
“They caught the killer?” Martha guessed.
“No, I haven’t heard anything more about that,” I said. “But a photographer from the Richmond Times-Dispatch is coming tomorrow morning to take pictures of the house!”
You’d think I’d announced my intention to have them all shot at sunrise.
“That’ll never do,” Martha said.
“We’re not nearly ready!” Sarah wailed.
“Oh, great,” Eustace said. “My rooms will be a disaster.”
“Meg, dear, can’t you possibly ask him to come a little later?” Mother said. “Christmas eve would be so much better. We could let him in before the general public.”