Treacherous Toys (26 page)

“That could explain why Harry wasn’t very forthcoming about who stabbed him,” Chase suggested. “But I can’t imagine Livy shooting or stabbing anyone without fainting when it was over.”

“I’ve heard there’s some talk that her baby isn’t her husband’s,”
Miller added. “Is it possible the dead man is the father?”

Everyone looked at Christine, who sniffed and wiped her eyes. “I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Have a talk with her anyway, Manhattan,” Detective Almond said. “God knows I’m putting it off on you—I never want to discuss anything with that woman again.”

He told Christine to come up with a list of all the women she knew of who’d dated her husband. Christine agreed, but I could tell from her face that she was embarrassed and heartsick at the thought of doing it. It was one thing to know your husband was sleeping around, but quite another to have to parade that fact in front of everyone.

Chase didn’t mention anything about Jolly and Nick and their modest thirst for vengeance. I was glad he’d gone that route. The boys didn’t deserve to be punished. I hoped they could be kept out of it altogether.

“What about Christine?” I asked. “Now that you know that Nick found the gun after seeing his father killed, will you drop the charges against her?”

Detective Almond shrugged. “Who knows? For now, nothing changes. We’ll compare the boy’s fingerprints to the one’s we found on the murder weapon. But let’s face it—he could’ve come into contact with the gun here after she tried to hide it. Until we know better, nothing changes. Sorry.”

At least he looked apologetic, as if he wished there was something else he could do for Christine. He didn’t say anything else, just left with Miller and a pocketful of Christmas cookies.

Christine sat down hard on the sofa. “I wish we hadn’t told him about Nick. What if he tries to make it all his fault?”

“I don’t think that will happen,” Chase said. “Despite appearances, Detective Almond is a fair man. At least he was open to the idea that you aren’t guilty.”

“So what do we do now?” I asked him.

“You go and see Livy—I agree with Detective Almond right now. You seem like you can handle her.”

“Okay. I guess I’m working as her lady-in-waiting anyway. I can talk to her as easy as anyone else. But what else can we do?”

Chase’s two-way radio went off. A coolant line under the ice skating rink had ruptured, and they couldn’t get in touch with the repair person who’d installed it.

“I’m on my way,” he said, then turned to me and Christine. “Let’s try to come up with some real suspects for the police. Anyone you think might have wanted to hurt Chris. Let’s get the police talking to them, especially if they’re living within fifty miles or so of the Village.”

He kissed me and was gone. I comforted Christine as best I could. I knew Livy was waiting for my report from Chase—if she was up and around after Edgar’s sudden death in her parlor.

“There’s still hope,” I told Christine. “Christmas isn’t here yet. Maybe something wonderful will happen.”

“I hope so. Do you think Chase will be able to convince Merlin to let me stay in the Village?”

“I’m sure he will. I’m sorry, but I have to go. Don’t do any packing until we know something for sure. Take the kids out for supper.”

I was about to open the front door when it suddenly burst open, slamming against the wall behind it.

“Ho ho ho! I’m Father Christmas. I hope there is someone ready to make some toys for me. Well, really, I hope
someone here can tell me exactly what Father Christmas is supposed to do.”

Christine jumped to her feet, and all the kids came running out of their rooms, bearing out my theory that they were all listening anyway.

I laughed. “Bart, you make a great Father Christmas. The kids are going to love you.”

“I hope so, because Daisy isn’t in love with me doing this. The only reason she let me go was because Merlin promised her something. I don’t know what I’m supposed to get out of it.”

“A lot of enjoyment and satisfaction,” Christine said as she took his arm and smiled up at him. “My, you’re a big one. I thought my Chris was big. Children, let’s go and help Father Christmas.”

To my surprise, even Jolly agreed to go with them. I left as they were explaining everything to Bart. Maybe it wasn’t too late to get a new Father Christmas after all.

I walked to the castle with a borrowed umbrella. The worst storm clouds were moving quickly toward the ocean. There were still a few visitors left in the Village. They looked a little wet but seemed to be having a good time at the climbing wall and the hatchet-throw area. The well-dressed lords and ladies—and anyone else with expensive costumes—hadn’t emerged from their shelters yet. The heavy rain might have signaled the end of the day for them.

Gus was gone from his post at the castle gate. That was good news for me. I walked in and checked to see how Livy was doing. Lady Jane and Lady Barbara looked relieved when they told me that Wanda had given Livy an herbal sleeping tonic to relax. She was still sleeping off the trauma of Edgar’s death.

I certainly didn’t want to be the one to wake her much less ask questions about where she was when Chris was killed.

It was stupid anyway, thinking she had actually taken a gun and killed her former lover. Her affair with Chris had been a long time ago. I felt sure Harry either knew about it or no longer cared. It was water under a very wide bridge for both of them. Edgar was a different story, though, not only because he had been involved with Livy so recently but also because their affair had taken place very near the time Livy had gotten pregnant. If it turned out that Edgar had been murdered, well, I might have to rethink Livy’s innocence on that score. But as Chris’s killer? No way.

And I believed even Nick would’ve noticed if the killer’s stomach had stretched out two feet in front of her—no matter the wide base of the gown. Livy’s pregnancy was very obvious.

Of course, I might be biased. I just felt sure Alice was involved in some way. Maybe she hadn’t actually pulled the trigger, although it seemed to be established that it was a woman who’d done it. She could’ve hired someone. Nick’s story strengthened my theory. Who would hate Chris more than his first wife? Sure, the divorce happened a long time ago, but bitterly divorced couples had been known to feud for longer than twenty years, in my experience.

Alice was our best suspect. Maybe she was one of the group who’d been at the Village almost since its opening. Or maybe she was a recent hire. I hadn’t considered that idea. Maybe she came back because she knew Chris would be here. There had been plenty of advertising about the Father Christmas event. I’d even seen a commercial with him in it when I was in Columbia. Maybe his killer had seen the ads, too.

With that in mind, and since I was already at the castle
and the rain had started again, I decided to go back and take another look at the computer.

I might’ve been wasting my time trying to figure out what Alice had once looked like from pictures or paintings. Maybe she was right under my nose. The chances were good that I might not even recognize her from an old photo. It had been a long time. People changed. I needed to know what she looked like now.

Had Chris known who she was when she whispered to him before she shot him? Had he thought she was just fooling around, or had he felt that he deserved to die for what he’d done to her? It wasn’t normal for someone to sit still and let himself be shot. Maybe she’d whispered something romantic and he’d had no idea she meant to kill him. Maybe he’d thought she wanted to be with him despite all their years apart.

It was a good time to look through the computer files for another reason—Bart was busy trying to get his Father Christmas act together. It would be good not to have him looking over my shoulder and asking me questions I’d rather not answer. Not yet anyway.

I hurried down the empty hall and entered the small room near the castle gate. I was surprised to find that I wasn’t alone after all. Esmeralda was there, too.

“We keep running into each other,” she said. “You must be working at the castle again.”

“Livy’s new lady-in-waiting,” I explained. “My toy-making apprenticeship kind of went south and I had to find something else to do. Livy’s going through more ladies-in-waiting right now than usual.”

“Not surprising. She’s not easy to get along with when she’s not pregnant. You know how they say some women glow when they’re pregnant? Livy just screams louder.”

We both laughed at that. I’d known Esmeralda since my first summer here. She was tough about getting things done at the castle, but I’d always liked her.

She nodded at the computer. “They want me to start using this thing to order what I need for the laundry. Like I know how to do that. We live and work in the 1500s here. What’s wrong with paper? Even paper is a modern-day device for that age. I don’t think we should progress further than that right now.”

I agreed with her and sat in one of the other chairs facing a monitor and keyboard “I’m still trying to find out what happened to Queen Alice. I know if I keep looking, I’ll find out.”

“You’re still stuck on that? Jessie, that was twenty years ago. I don’t think they even had a computer here then. What difference does it make now?”

Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but I decided to lie to her. I thought I might be able to get her to help me if my reasoning sounded inoffensive. Not everyone wants to help with a murder investigation.

“I’m putting together a history project for the Village. I’m hoping they’ll hire me to keep up with it once they see it. There have to be some records from the beginning of the Village. I’d like to know what she looked like and what happened to her. The answers are here somewhere.”

She smiled and stood up. She was wearing street clothes, jeans and a sweater, so I knew she was on her way out. “Well, I wish you luck. I can’t get this thing to make a list of supplies. Every time I try, I get an error message. I think I may have to give my usual paper list to Bart and he can do the rest.”

“I know what you mean.”

Esmeralda left me there, closing the door behind her as
she went. I found the files I’d been looking through before pretty quickly and started searching through them again.

But this time, Alice’s employee records were gone, erased. There was no mention of the first queen. Only Chris was listed as the first king of Renaissance Faire Village.

I typed her name in the search box—nothing came back. It was as though she’d never worked here.

I knew it.
Not that it was hard to get in here and mess around with the computers—I’d just done it. If Alice was in the Village, she might’ve done the same thing.

Bart was going to be furious.

M
aybe, if Alice
was
here, she was a new hire. At least I thought I would test that assumption. Chase had already confirmed that there was no Alice currently working at the Village. But she could be working under a different name.

I wasn’t sure how I’d find her. My only option was to search through all of the new-hire records using certain parameters. She had to be at least forty. That narrowed the field. Chris and Christine were in their early fifties. Alice had to be somewhere between forty and fifty. How many women had been hired in that age group recently?

I restarted my search. I was amazed at all the women over the age of forty who’d been hired recently. There were even two over the age of seventy. Seventeen women fit the age bracket I’d specified. Their assignments ranged from castle help to carriage driver and goat herder.

That gave me seventeen women in the Village to check
on using absolutely no criteria other than height and body build—were they shorter than me, with a thicker waist? It seemed pretty hopeless. What were the chances that any of them
weren’t
shorter than me?

I went ahead and made a list of all the people in the Village who’d worked there since it first opened. That was twenty-five people, most of them men. I separated the men from women and ended up with six women.

Rita Martinez and Esmeralda had both been here that long, as had Ginny Stewart at the Lady of the Lake Tavern. Bawdy Betty of Bawdy Betty’s Bagels and Mrs. Potts at the Honey and Herb Shoppe were on the list, too.

I printed the list, wishing I had my flash drive with me instead. I had just taken the pages from the printer when King Harold joined me in the computer room.

“Jessie.” He looked surprised and unhappy to see me there. He shifted his arm, still in the sling, as though it pained him. I thought he might turn around and leave, so I said, “I’m leaving, Your Majesty. You can stay.”

“I, uh, wasn’t leaving. I have a few things to do. Adventure Land wants to computerize us, you know. I need a laptop in my chamber, but until then—” He looked embarrassed to have explained himself.

“I’m sorry we had that argument.” I needed to mend some fences if I was going to be at the castle full-time until Christmas. “I hope we can be friends again.”

To my surprise, he sat down in one of the chairs and put his head in his good hand. “I’m sorry, too. Everything is in a bad place right now. I know it shouldn’t be this way with the baby coming and all. This should be a joyous time for everyone in the Village.”