Страница 31 из 55
“What do you think?” I’d asked them, when they finally tried on the finished costumes.
“It’s okay,” Josh had said. He still wasn’t entirely happy with the sandals.
“This looks great, Mommy,” Jamie had said.
Sometimes, just for a few moments, you’re allowed to love one twin more than his brother.
Michael’s voice brought me back to the present.
“Always a chance he’ll find some kind of problem with his costume and pitch a fit today,” he was saying. “But I think I can hold the threat of making Santa’s naughty list over him.”
“Or tell him that if he behaves, Grandma will give him some special passementerie to add to his costume on the night of the pageant.”
“Will he know what passementerie is?” Michael asked. “Because I don’t.”
“It can be a surprise,” I said. “And he’ll be impressed with the five-syllable word.”
“Well, that was satisfying,” Michael said, as he finished off his sandwich. “Time we hit the hay.”
We both pitched in to tidy up the kitchen, and headed upstairs, yawning.
“Is there really that much left to do on the house?” he asked.
“For me, yes,” I said. “Tickets. Programs. Parking and shuttles. Schedules for the docents. Trying to get some more publicity so ticket sales will pick up. And keeping the designers from doing anything else to damage the house.”
“But what about the designers? Surely they must be getting close to finishing?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I can look at a room and think it’s perfect and if I say that, they look at me as if I’m an idiot. These are people who will repaint a room three or four times because the color doesn’t work the way they thought it would. People who can spend five minutes plumping a pillow properly. If I hear the words, ‘it needs … something’ one more time, I might lose it. I think they’re all going to keep tweaking and improving their rooms right up until the last minute. Beyond the last minute. I’m afraid that when the first paying guests walk in, Mother will ask them if they mind helping her rearrange the furniture.”
“Well, it’s only a couple more days,” he said.
“True,” I said. “I can survive anything for a few more days.”
Chapter 15
December 22
As I was driving to the show house the next morning, my phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number. Could it be Boomer, reporting back already? I pulled over to answer it. Fortunately, I only said “Hello” rather than “Well, that was quick” or “I guess Rob was joking about how late you slept.”
“Is this the Meg Langslow who’s in charge of the Caerphilly Historical Society’s Christmas Decorator Show House?” a male voice said.
“Yes,” I said. “May I help you?”
“I’m with the Richmond Times-Dispatch,” he said. “I’m supposed to come by to take some shots for a story in the paper. Would noon today be okay?”
I closed my eyes and contemplated how the designers would react if I arrived and told them a photographer would be arriving in four hours. Less than four hours.
“We don’t actually open until ten a.m. on December twenty-fourth,” I said. “And as you can imagine, the designers are still busy putting the finishing touches on their rooms.”
“That doesn’t matter to me,” he said.
“But it will to them,” I pointed out. “How about a sneak preview an hour before we let the public in on the twenty-fourth?”
“I’m tied up that day. Can we make it three today?”
We finally made it 10:00 A.M. on the twenty-third. Which was tomorrow.
Now to break the news to the decorators.
I stopped by the Caerphilly Bakery and picked up two dozen assorted doughnuts, bearclaws, and other breakfast pastries, to sweeten the news. And a couple of carryout carafes of coffee, to jump start their efforts.
Most of the designers were already there when I arrived. Sarah was carrying in boxes from her car. As was Violet. What were they up to? Now was time to be putting on finishing touches, not dragging in vast quantities of new stuff.
Mother was showing Tomás and Mateo exactly how she wanted them to put a light touch of gilding on the edges of some of the woodwork.
“Pastries?” she exclaimed. “How nice, dear.”
She smiled indulgently as Mateo and Tomás abandoned their paintbrushes long enough to grab pastries. I carried the rest of the doughnuts and the coffee through to the kitchen. Eustace also had piles of boxes. Clearly it was a trend, and not one I was happy to see under the circumstances.
“Mind if I put these here?” I asked Eustace.
“Fine,” he said. “Just how awful does this cabinet look? Be brutal.”
I came around to where I could see the kitchen cabinets. He’d had all the cabinet fronts replaced with glass-paned doors in a sort of diamond-hatched pattern that looked vaguely Elizabethan. He’d even installed lighting inside the cabinets, the better to see the contents. And I noticed that he’d added—or, more likely, Tomás and Mateo had added—little flourishes of gold on the glass, curlicues and leaves and … well, squiggles. Evidently this was what had inspired Mother to commit retaliatory gilding.
And now he was arranging dishes in the cabinets. A really small number of dishes—especially when compared to the number of boxes he’d used to bring them in. One cabinet held nothing but a turquoise teapot and a matching teacup on the bottom shelf, two hand-painted goblets on the middle shelf, and a blue Fiestaware pitcher on the top one. At this rate, he’d need a lot more cabinets to hold just the dishes and glassware that were spread out along the counter, much less what lurked in the boxes.
“I’m not letting you anywhere near my kitchen,” I said. “But it’s beautiful. They all are.”
“Then why don’t you want me near your kitchen?” he asked.
“Because I think those glass-fronted cabinets are fabulous, and you’d talk me into having them, and they just wouldn’t work,” I said. “We have too much kitchen stuff, and most of it’s not decorative—at least not when you have to crowd it in to get all of it put away.”
“Well, you’re right, it’s not practical,” he said. “But it’s beautiful, and people love to see it. Do you think I should switch the pitcher and the teapot?”
“I think you should ask Mother,” I said. “I have no eye for this kind of thing. Meanwhile, I have news.”
The assorted designers and worker bees gathered around the pastry looked up anxiously.
“They caught the killer?” Martha guessed.
“No, I haven’t heard anything more about that,” I said. “But a photographer from the Richmond Times-Dispatch is coming tomorrow morning to take pictures of the house!”
You’d think I’d a
“That’ll never do,” Martha said.
“We’re not nearly ready!” Sarah wailed.
“Oh, great,” Eustace said. “My rooms will be a disaster.”
“Meg, dear, can’t you possibly ask him to come a little later?” Mother said. “Christmas eve would be so much better. We could let him in before the general public.”
“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.