3 Requiem at Christmas (4 page)

“You were late. We got worried,” Esteban said, stepping over
the room service tray and then setting it outside the door.

“Well, in this case you were justified. I’ve been having
adventures.
Homicidal ones.”

Raphael sighed.

“Tell me.”

“We’re waiting for Darby and Harrison. I think my little journey
into weirdness concerns Harrison, at least indirectly. If you don’t mind, I’d
rather only tell this once.
More.
The authorities were
having a little trouble with my story and I had to repeat it slowly and
thoroughly.”

“It concerns Harrison?”

She could see this surprised both men. Harrison was devoted
to his music and to Darby. Juliet wouldn’t stack up her knowledge of the human
heart against say Sigmund Freud, but she knew a bit about human avarice and the
capacity for violence. Harrison possessed neither flaw. Raphael knew this too.
Murder had no business coming to call in his neighborhood.

Esteban opened the door to Darby and Harrison. The composer
politely stood aside so that Darby could enter first. He had lovely manners.

“Please sit down. Or loll on the bed. I’m passing out
restoratives just in case,” Juliet said.

“Oh no,” Darby said, accepting the offered glass. “You do
look a little subpar. What happened to your hair?”

“It was styled by a blizzard,” she said and kept the last
glass for herself since Raphael declined to partake. “For starters, does anyone
know a member of Clan Buchanan with long silver hair and a reason to be
carrying a libretto of Harrison’s Requiem?”

“Yes,” Harrison said warily.
“At least,
maybe.
He’s Jeremiah Holtz, my soloist—a tenor. He missed rehearsal this
afternoon. No one has seen him since this morning. I was about to start calling
hospitals.”

Juliet wondered how someone named Holtz fit in with Clan Buchanan
but left it for the time being.

“He was driving a red Jag, maybe lived in Las Vegas?”
Harrison kept nodding. “Well, he’s not your soloist anymore,” Juliet said
bluntly. “If it’s the same guy I saw, he was murdered this afternoon, stabbed
with his own
sgian
dubh
. I hope
there is an understudy.”

*
 
*
 
*

Juliet closed the door on her last visitor and stared at the
generic flowers and kitten print on the wall. It was bland and inoffensive
mediocrity—except the cat’s back legs were jointed in the wrong direction. Had
any occupant ever noticed or complained?
Probably not.

She forgot, living among creative people who valued art,
that the world was overpopulated with persons who simply didn’t care what hung
on their walls, sat on their bookshelves, or assaulted their ears in elevators.

Juliet sighed and unzipped her bag so she could find her
nightgown. All she wanted was a hot shower and to go to bed. She had looked at
Raphael and then Esteban after she told her story and they had looked a bit
grim, but also—Esteban at least—had looked speculative. They said nothing
though while Darby and Harrison were there. Then, once Juliet had started
yawning, they had left en masse without any private conversation.

Juliet had been sure that after the large meal and Amaretto
she would drop off into oblivion, but after a year of living in the Woods, the
noise of elevators, parking lot arrivals, and outside floodlights that lit the
room through the crack in the blackout curtains were enough to keep her awake
in spite of her physical exhaustion. Quiet, like food and water, had become a
necessity and the normal city sounds smote her senses. Her biorhythms would
need time to adapt. And the longer she lay there, listening to strange voices
in the hall, the clearer the visual memory of the dead Jeremiah Holtz became.

He had not died as most people wish, either in their sleep
or in a comfortable bed surrounded by family and pumped full of morphine.
Poor man.
Had he deserved his death, courted it?

She exhaled loudly. They were in the mountains—for
Christmas. It was wrong that this thing from another, violent world had
intruded.

The wind howled, audible even above the other noises,
reminding her of the fact that she had nearly died. Juliet finally resorted to
meditation to clear out her unhappy mind and let in the restful sheep.

*
 
*
 
*

She came up out of slumber hours later, dragging her dream
with her. She was trapped in snow, buried to her chin, while people in kilts
stood singing Christmas carols beside a burning automobile.

It took her a moment to realize that her delayed rest had
let the morning advance past the continental breakfast and on to the Christmas
caroling by the grammar school children who were there to see the entries in
the annual gingerbread house competition. The night manager had explained this
all as she was checking in so she didn’t wonder about the phantom voices.

Juliet pushed the covers aside and toddled over to the
coffee machine they thoughtfully provided in every room. Clearly, though the dead
man’s body was long out of sight, it was nowhere near out of mind. She would
have to work on that.

Still, her worst feelings of oppression had lifted. She was
at a festival to hear a friend perform a musical masterpiece. There would be
good food, good company,
entertainment
. She had phoned
Officer Gibbons with the name of Harrison’s missing tenor the night before. She
would make her statement to whichever investigator came along that afternoon and
then, duty done, she would forget about the whole thing. In the light of day,
it was easy to dismiss the horrible details, to almost doubt that the murder
had even happened. And it wasn’t her problem anyway, damn it. The killing had
nothing to do with her.

She looked into the bathroom mirror, fortified by only a
half cup of coffee, and actually smiled at the messy-haired Bohemian. She
hadn’t cut her hair for a year and wasn’t sure when she would trim it again.
What a liar she had been! All those years wearing blue suits and sensible black
pumps—and boring pearls if the occasion was formal—and all for a job that had
required
she
crazy-glue her lips and legs together
lest they part in front of the wrong person.

“Bah, humbug,” she said and then laughed.

A second coffee and a hot shower later had her feeling
positively sybaritic. Only the occasional twinge of overtaxed muscles reminded
her that she had done anything unusual the day before.

Juliet promised herself that she would stop in to see the gingerbread
houses later in the day, but off-key children crooning “I Saw Mommy Kissing
Santa Claus” before breakfast were a bit much after her experience the day
before. She needed time to adjust to the concentrated Christmas spirit.

A glance in the inn’s coffee shop showed her that it was
crowded with parents waiting for the little singers, so she decided to cross
the street to a small but less busy café that advertised a dozen kinds of
scones, where hopefully there wouldn’t be choirs urging her to deck the halls
that couldn’t possibly be more decked with holly and lights.

On her way through the lobby she checked the newspaper
headlines on the collection of papers at the concierge’s desk. Nothing about a
murdered tenor, but apparently a small herd of desperate cattle had forced
themselves
into an abandoned cabin and frozen to death
inside the building. Because of freezing in certain positions, they were going
to have to be sawn into pieces before they could be removed from the building.

“Isn’t that the strangest thing you ever heard?” The lady
who asked that was leaning over her shoulder and had minty breath. Juliet
handed her the paper and fled.

Her first look at the inn in daylight had her impressed.
There were lots of tasteful greens
swagged
and tied
with red bows, and LED twinkle lights in stylish white. The parking lot was
flanked by two giant cedars, heavy with winter and more white than black, but
handsome all the same. Instead of Christmas ornaments, they were decked with
bird feeders and houses, which though charming, were probably not occupied at
the time.

Around them were the mountains—bleak and white. Juliet found
herself wishing that she had brought her paints and brushes. Painting was
excellent for clearing the thoughts and opened creative channels in her mind.
She wondered briefly if the budget would stand a trip to the art supply store,
but decided that since she planned on doing a little Christmas shopping perhaps
she should content herself with photographs from which she could paint later.

The coffee shop was an odd place, lots of bookshelves by the
small round tables, filled with eclectic selections of periodicals, some in
foreign languages and some clearly for precocious children.

There were foreign voices in the crowd. Juliet wondered what
they made of the festival. She had traveled abroad at the start of her career
but hadn’t enjoyed the language immersion as much as she had hoped. It had
certainly aided her in learning foreign tongues, but she found absolutely every
task, from calculating the cost of a cup of coffee in foreign currencies to
learning the bus routes, to be
headachingly
difficult. And memorizing cultural nuances was a pain. She couldn’t believe
there were people who actually sought out the experience voluntarily.

The air smelled of scones and coffee, but underneath there
was the sour odor of wine. A glance at the double-sided menu explained.
Apparently at night it morphed into a wine bar and the raw wood floor was bound
to have drunk from the Dionysian cup from time to time and the ghosts of
parties past lingered.

Apricot scones with orange tea sounded perfect, in spite of
being urged to try the peppermint hot chocolate with snowman droppings—marshmallows,
she assumed and shuddered. Marshmallows, unlike roses, were not appealing by
any name so she declined. Instead she ordered a more adult beverage and then
found a seat at one of the few oak tables. The chairs were a little bit too low
for the counters but at least had padded seats. A girl in a sort of modified
elf costume brought her the order only moments later, served on a selection of mixed
china whose clashing floral patterns were charming.

Juliet glanced out the coffee shop’s steamy window as a quartet
of Edwardian carolers strolled by singing “Ding Dong Merrily on High” and saw
Carrie Simmons mincing along a crowded walkway. She looked miserably cold
because she was dressed like a teen pop star in Los Angeles, imitating what she
currently envied (the popular) and not what she secretly admired (classic
skirts and jackets suited to a woman approaching fifty). That was because she
was insecure and wanted to be young and popular forever.

This determined immaturity was a new phenomenon for Juliet, who
had never been a worshipper at the shrine of youth or pop culture and saw
little of it in her line of work. It seemed to happen mainly to women who had
no brains and an endless ability to lie to
themselves
about what they saw in the mirror as decades passed. That was Carrie Simmons. Juliet
had told Raphael that she was pretty sure that Carrie’s head was empty because
there was a suspicious echo of blankly repeated words every time she addressed
a comment at Carrie’s multiply pierced ear.

Once out on the street where the light was stronger, Juliet
could see that the woman had dyed her hair a strange shade of pinkish-blonde
that defied friendly adjectives even if Juliet had been inclined to look for
them. Cotton candy was the best word that came to mind. Clearly the woman had
been brain damaged when Jake Holmes bashed her head in. Bad enough to dye your
hair any shade of candy, but pink didn’t suit her ruddy complexion,
nor
the red beaded cap she wore. And where was her coat?
Doubtless, she thought she was a woman above such things as overcoats. A few
more minutes out in the cold would cure her of that fantasy.

At least she had done away with the affectation of a walker.
Carrie had had to lie about having a disability to get a first-tier cottage at the
Woods, and until she had entered into an affair with a younger, married
psychopath, the walker had been a useful prop.

Juliet sneered at the leggings and lace blouse, but admitted
that Carrie did have on adorable Victorian lace-up boots. Juliet memorized the
name of the boutique bag she was carrying because she had decided that she
needed a new dress and shoes. Her classic black wool made her look like she was
going to a funeral.
Which was fine when she was still working
and most of her social events were less fun than funerals, but out west
everyone seemed to dress in lovely jewel tones and Juliet found herself
thinking about skirts in velvets in hues of emerald green and garnet red.

She had also promised to look in on her neighbors who had
rented booths at the Celtic fair, but first things first. She needed something cheery
and warm—besides her smelly goat sweater—to wear outdoors. It had stopped
snowing, but not freezing. She needed a couple warmer things or would have to
spend every day huddled in her shapeless parka.

Across the park she could see a gondola suspended from what
looked like dangerously thin wires, and knew from the guest book in her room that
it was headed to where most of the stores were located. She decided to walk across
the park rather than find a cab. Once there she would get someone to direct her
to Posh.

Juliet left a tip on the table and swallowed her last sips
of tea.

The cold was shocking but refreshing after the still, dry
heat of the coffee shop. Signs along the way pointed the direction to miniature
golf and ice-skating, but neither activity held any charm. The inn also offered
sleigh rides, but at twenty bucks each way Juliet decided to walk. The road was
faster and straighter than the pedestrian walkway which hadn’t yet been
shoveled, but she stuck to the meandering path anyway. She had had enough of out
of control cars on icy roads.