“It’s beautiful.” I said. I stopped myself from saying anything else, like “I know it’s not the room you’d planned.” The room was beautiful. Full stop. And it looked like exactly what it was—a room decorated by a bunch of different people, some of them with a flair for design, and the rest with just a whole lot of love and Christmas spirit.
In fact, while I would never say this to Mother, I liked this room better. I found myself thinking of it as the real nightingale to the beautiful but artificial clockwork bird that was her original room.
Mother took a long, slow look around.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s beautiful. Let’s go out through the garage.”
As we hurried through the breakfast room, the kitchen, and the laundry room, we heard Randall’s key in the front door.
“Step right in, ladies and gentlemen.”
Mother and I stopped in the garage and took a deep breath.
“I need to get in here early tomorrow morning to tidy up,” I said, looking around.
“Will people be coming in here?” Mother asked.
“Well, given that every shop in Caerphilly has been selling the tickets for weeks, probably not a lot of people,” I said. “But we’re going to have a ticket seller here, just in case.”
“Then let’s clean up tonight,” Mother said. “It won’t take long.”
Normally, Mother’s only involvement in cleaning was supervisory. But tonight she seemed to have been inspired by the events of the day and pitched in with a will. We swept, tidied, filled black plastic bags with garbage, stacked construction supplies for Randall to haul off in the morning, and arranged everything else neatly on the workbench.
But she still seemed pensive.
“A penny for them,” I said.
“I was just wishing I had a picture of my room before that horrible girl attacked it,” she said. “I was so tired when I left yesterday afternoon that I didn’t take any—I was planning to ask someone to do it this morning.”
“I have a few,” I said.
“Oh, I knew you were taking them all along,” she said. “And those will be lovely to have. But it finally came together yesterday afternoon, after you left.”
“And I took a lot of pictures last night,” I said. “When I first came in. Before Jessica arrived.”
Her face lit up. I turned on my phone, opened up the picture album, and handed it to her.
I finished up the last few bits of tidying as she studied the photos.
“Yes,” she said. “It was just the way I planned it.”
“I’m sorry that no one else will get to see it,” I said.
“I can show them the pictures,” she replied. “You are going to send me those pictures, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“It doesn’t bother me as much now,” she said. “It’s always silly to fall in love with a room—especially a show house room that you know from the start will only last a few weeks. But now that we have pictures, I don’t feel nearly as bad.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“We should get back to your house,” she said. “Dahlia has a special dinner planned. She’s cooking all the things she wanted to have on Christmas eve or Christmas day but didn’t have room for.”
“Well, that should be original,” I said. “And after dinner—”
“And I have wonderful news,” she added. “This afternoon Rob went up to fetch your grandmother Cordelia. She’s coming, too.”
“For tonight’s dinner?”
“Yes, and for Christmas. Now that we’ve finally found her, it’s about time we spent a lot more time with her.”
“Grandfather won’t like that,” I said.
“Your grandfather will just have to cope,” she said. “She’s as much family as he is. And Christmas is a time for family, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely.” Suddenly I was eager to leave the show house and get home so I could really start enjoying Christmas. I glanced around to see how much more tidying we had to do. Not much. And with Mother pitching in, we’d be finished in no time.
“You were absolutely right, you know,” she said.
Not words I often heard from Mother. Was I witnessing a small Christmas miracle?
“About what?” I asked aloud.
“About not having the show house at your house. It would have been a much better house, of course, but think of the disruption it would have caused.”
“Yeah, murder does tend to be disrupting,” I said.
“Not just the murder,” she said. “Having peculiar things done to all your rooms, and then crowds of the people tramping through over the next few weeks. You were right to dig in your heels.”