The Nightingale Before Christmas(54)

“I suggested that, and he can’t do it,” I said. “He wanted to be here in about an hour. Just be glad I talked him into tomorrow morning at ten.”

They all scattered—though not, I noticed, without taking their share of the coffee and pastries.

Eustace had stopped fiddling with his dishes and was looking around his room as if he’d never seen it before.

“Where to begin?” he muttered.

Out in the great room, Mother was standing in the middle of her room, hands on her hips, slowing turning around to survey it, and frowning, as if everything she had done needed to be ripped out and redone.

“Looks fabulous,” I said as I passed.

She ignored me.

Throughout the house, all the other designers were performing their own variations on what Mother and Eustace were doing. Surveying their rooms as if they’d never seen them before—and evidently finding them wanting.

I stepped into the master bedroom. Which of all the rooms in the house was the one least ready for its close-up. Fat chance distracting one of the others from their pre-photo prepping, so getting it in shape would appear to be my job.

I texted Randall to remind him that we needed a new mattress for the room. And asked if I should buy sheets or if he was taking care of it.

Maybe I should talk to the designers, now that they’d had a few moments to absorb the news. Calm them down, if necessary. Find out if there was anything I could do to help them.

I went downstairs and was just stepping into Sarah’s study when my phone rang.

“Hello,” I said, as I stepped into the hall to avoid bothering Sarah if I needed to have a conversation with whoever was calling.

“He doesn’t exist.”

I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at the screen, which said only BLOCKED.

“Who doesn’t exist?” I said into the phone.

“Spottiswood.”

It had to be Boomer calling.

“He has to exist,” I said. “I practically stumbled over his dead body two nights ago.”

“Whoever the stiff was, he wasn’t born Spottiswood,” Boomer said.

Okay, that made sense. I’d always thought Clay’s name was a little too good to be true.

“He showed up in Tappahannock five years ago,” Boomer went on. “Here in Caerphilly two years ago. That’s it.”

“You tried all the variant spellings for Claiborne and Spottiswood?”

“Couple dozen. No dice. And the guy’s not even filing income tax under any of those misspellings.”

“What did you do, hack the IRS’s databases?” I exclaimed.

Silence.

“Forget I asked,” I said. “Are you sure you checked every—never mind. Stupid question.”

“Sorry,” Boomer said. “If you get any other data—anything at all—I can keep trying.”

“If I had any more information, I’d have given it to you,” I said.

A soft voice from somewhere above my head spoke up.

“Clay Smith.”

I looked up. Ivy was peering down over the railing from the upper hall.

“Hang on a sec,” I said to Boomer. I took a few steps up toward Ivy.

“Clay Smith?” I said. “Claiborne Spottiswood is really Clay Smith.”

She nodded.

“I heard that,” Boomer said. “Clay Smith. What an unusual name. Won’t be easy.”

“Anything else you know about him?” I asked Ivy. Boomer was doing me a favor, so I decided to ignore his sarcastic tone.

“Tell your … investigator to look in New York City, fifteen to twenty years ago,” she said. “He’ll find the stories. It was in all the papers.”

I relayed this to Boomer.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

I hung up and put away my phone. Ivy’s head disappeared. I climbed the rest of the way up to the second-floor landing. She had gone back to painting one of her murals.

“It’s Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ you know,” she said, without looking up from her work. “He’s wearing the magic clothes the phony tailors have pretended to make for him—the clothes that are invisible to anyone unfit for his position.”

“Nice,” I said. Her mural showed a cobblestone street running along the length of the wall, lined on each side with townspeople in colorful medieval garb. Bits of snow flecked the cobblestones and covered the steep roofs of the buildings, so odds were the poor emperor would end his procession not only mortally embarrassed but probably also suffering from frostbite.

“So you knew Clay back then, in New York?” I asked, as I watched her carefully dabbing paint onto the cobblestones down which the emperor was strolling.

“Knew of him,” she said, without looking up. “I doubt if he would’ve remembered me. He was an up-and-coming painter on the New York scene, and I was … not.”