The Nightingale Before Christmas(85)

“Stupid people,” she muttered. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Then did you see who did?” I twisted slightly so I could see her.

“Of course not,” she said. “He was dead when I came in.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Then let’s tell the police and everything will be okay.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. I heard a small clatter.

I wriggled a little more so I could see what she was doing. She had knocked the two middle stockings off the mantel, brass hooks and all, and was leaning into the fireplace and reaching up as if looking for something.

I decided to take a chance that some of my hypotheses were correct.

“Look,” I said. “I know you used to live in this house. And you’re looking for something you left behind. If I knew what it was, maybe I could help you.”

She stopped and turned to look at me.

“I’m looking for the money,” she said.

“You left money here?” I asked. “How much?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s a lot. It was my parents’ money.”

“Well, where did they leave it?”

“If I knew that I’d have it by now,” she said. “I thought it was in one of the secret compartments.”

She sounded younger than eighteen. Did Emily, the neighbor, overestimate her age? No, she didn’t just sound younger than eighteen. She sounded like a cranky child. I had a bad feeling about this.

“Have you looked in all of the secret compartments?” I asked.

“All I could find. My dad must have made some I didn’t know about. He liked to do that—make secret compartments, and then he’d hide candy in them for me to find.”

“Sounds nice,” I said.

“But maybe he made some extra secret compartments for the money.”

She was knocking on the mantelpiece, as if trying to find a hollow spot. I had managed to pull my arms far enough to the side that I could crane my head and look over my shoulder to see what she’d tied me up with.

It looked like a leftover bit of the black-and-red braided cord Mother had used to trim the couch and the chairs. I started picking at it with my nails, and casting my eyes around for something sharp I could rub it against. I vowed I was not going to die tied up with these little bits of string.

“Damned passementerie,” I muttered.

“What?” Jessica said.

“I said, did your parents leave behind a lot of money?”

“Yes,” she said. “We were rich. I had a pony, and I had ballet and piano lessons, and Daddy was building me a pool so I could practice a lot and make the swim team. And then the stupid bank took our house away.”

Probably not a good idea to point out that people who really had a lot of money didn’t usually have their houses foreclosed on.

Jessica had started knocking on the walls by the fireplace. She must have found something she liked the sound of. She walked out into the hall, putting the gun down on one of the end tables as she went.

I felt a little better now that she wasn’t holding the gun.

Until she walked back into the room holding a large ax.

I redoubled my efforts to unravel the passementerie.

“The stupid bank cheated us.” Jessica took a vicious hack at one of Mother’s freshly painted walls. “They took away my pony.” Another hack. “And then they took away our house. One day Mommy picked me up at school and told me we were leaving. And they wouldn’t let my parents come back in to get their money.”

“Are you sure they left it in the house?” I said. “And not somewhere else? Because you’ve done a really good job of searching the house over the last six months.”

“I know it’s in the house,” she said. “My mother must have said it a million times. ‘You can’t have a pony. You can’t have dance lessons. We don’t have any money. All our money’s in the house.’”

I winced, and not because she’d just reduced fifteen or twenty square feet of Mother’s “Red Obsession”–painted wall to wreckage. “All our money’s in the house.” I could remember saying those very words in those first few years after Michael and I had bought our house. The size of the mortgage payments had made us nervous in those early days, even before you factored in all the money we’d paid to the Shiffley Construction Company to make the house habitable. We’d had to economize a bit. All our money was in the house.

But not literally. We hadn’t had Randall Shiffley’s workmen build little hiding places in between the walls and under the floorboards to stash our meager post-down-payment savings in.