The Nightingale Before Christmas

I stepped into the master bedroom. Which of all the rooms in the house was the one least ready for its close-up. Fat chance distracting one of the others from their pre-photo prepping, so getting it in shape would appear to be my job.

I texted Randall to remind him that we needed a new mattress for the room. And asked if I should buy sheets or if he was taking care of it.

Maybe I should talk to the designers, now that they’d had a few moments to absorb the news. Calm them down, if necessary. Find out if there was anything I could do to help them.

I went downstairs and was just stepping into Sarah’s study when my phone rang.

“Hello,” I said, as I stepped into the hall to avoid bothering Sarah if I needed to have a conversation with whoever was calling.

“He doesn’t exist.”

I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at the screen, which said only BLOCKED.

“Who doesn’t exist?” I said into the phone.

“Spottiswood.”

It had to be Boomer calling.

“He has to exist,” I said. “I practically stumbled over his dead body two nights ago.”

“Whoever the stiff was, he wasn’t born Spottiswood,” Boomer said.

Okay, that made sense. I’d always thought Clay’s name was a little too good to be true.

“He showed up in Tappaha

“You tried all the variant spellings for Claiborne and Spottiswood?”

“Couple dozen. No dice. And the guy’s not even filing income tax under any of those misspellings.”

“What did you do, hack the IRS’s databases?” I exclaimed.

Silence.

“Forget I asked,” I said. “Are you sure you checked every—never mind. Stupid question.”

“Sorry,” Boomer said. “If you get any other data—anything at all—I can keep trying.”

“If I had any more information, I’d have given it to you,” I said.

A soft voice from somewhere above my head spoke up.

“Clay Smith.”

I looked up. Ivy was peering down over the railing from the upper hall.

“Hang on a sec,” I said to Boomer. I took a few steps up toward Ivy.

“Clay Smith?” I said. “Claiborne Spottiswood is really Clay Smith.”

She nodded.

“I heard that,” Boomer said. “Clay Smith. What an unusual name. Won’t be easy.”

“Anything else you know about him?” I asked Ivy. Boomer was doing me a favor, so I decided to ignore his sarcastic tone.

“Tell your … investigator to look in New York City, fifteen to twenty years ago,” she said. “He’ll find the stories. It was in all the papers.”

I relayed this to Boomer.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

I hung up and put away my phone. Ivy’s head disappeared. I climbed the rest of the way up to the second-floor landing. She had gone back to painting one of her murals.

“It’s Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ you know,” she said, without looking up from her work. “He’s wearing the magic clothes the phony tailors have pretended to make for him—the clothes that are invisible to anyone unfit for his position.”

“Nice,” I said. Her mural showed a cobblestone street ru

“So you knew Clay back then, in New York?” I asked, as I watched her carefully dabbing paint onto the cobblestones down which the emperor was strolling.

“Knew of him,” she said, without looking up. “I doubt if he would’ve remembered me. He was an up-and-coming painter on the New York scene, and I was … not.”

“Painter? As in fine art?”

“Oh, yes.” She nodded absently, and hitched herself a little to the left, to reach more cobblestones. “He really was very good. A brilliant painter, and it didn’t hurt that he was handsome and articulate and … larger than life.”

“What happened?”

“What happened.” She sighed. “Fame happened. He signed with a big gallery, and they started selling his paintings for a lot of money. But he was spending the money faster than he could paint. There might have been drugs involved. Or maybe he just went a little crazy. And unfortunately, he began to blame his financial problems on the owner of the gallery that represented him. Claimed the guy was a cheat.”

“Blaming the gallery owner for his own mistakes?” I suggested.

“Oh, no. He was definitely right,” she said, with a fleeting smile. “The gallery owner was cheating a lot of people. It came out at the trial.”

“Clay took him to court?”

“No, Clay shot him.”

“Shot him?”

“I don’t think Clay meant to kill him,” Ivy said. “Unfortunately, the fact that the man was cheating him only made Clay’s motive look that much stronger. He was drunk at the time, and the gun belonged to the gallery owner, so a lot of people thought he should have gotten off with self-defense or justifiable homicide. Of course, other people thought he was lucky to have gotten off with manslaughter.”

“So he went to prison?”

She nodded.

“For how long?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Not life. Though however long it was, young as we were, I’m sure it seemed like a lifetime to him when they sentenced him. I suppose it must have been ten or fifteen years, since he’s out now.”

I stood and watched her paint for a while, mulling over what she’d said. And watching her paint. She was working on the emperor now. Most of his body was hidden by the onlookers lining both sides of the cobblestone street, but you could tell he was wearing nothing. And, in a sly touch, while most of the onlookers were cheering happily, every so often you’d spot one who couldn’t quite keep up the pretense.

“Did you tell the chief about this?” I asked after a while.

“I expect he already knows by now,” she said. “Clay’s fingerprints would be on file, wouldn’t they?”

“Probably,” I said. “And if my investigator’s right and he’s not paying taxes under Spottiswood, he probably has paperwork at the house with his real name on it. The chief would have seen that by now.”

“Yes,” she said. “So I didn’t think I needed to tell the chief. But if you think he needs to know, you can tell him. I don’t mind.”

As I watched, she was putting the finishing touches on the emperor’s face. He looked a lot like Clay.

Chapter 16

I slipped away and left Ivy to work in peace. I stepped into Violet’s bedroom. She was sitting on the floor, working on something.

“How’s it coming?” I asked.

“Oh, just fine,” she said. “I decided the shelves needed a little something.”

I’d been thinking that for several days now, but then I knew better than to second-guess the designers. The twelve-foot back wall of Violet’s bedroom had two windows, each fitted with a pink-cushioned window seat, and the rest of the wall was given over to shelves. I’d have called them bookshelves, but up till now Violet had only decorated them with a small assortment of pastel ornaments. A white vase containing dried flowers. A pink-and-lavender child’s jewelry box. The overflow of pink, white, and lavender stuffed animals from the bed. A white ceramic lamb. A pink ceramic cat.

It all looked a little sparse to me, but I assumed it was the look she was aiming for. And at least she’d put up a few token holiday decorations. Nothing impressive—a few feet of silver tinsel garland, a few silver filigree balls. But at least she’d done something.

And I was delighted to see that she’d brought in books. Several tall stacks of books. From force of habit, I tilted my head to read the titles on the books.

A battered copy of The Wind in the Willows. A biography of Adlai Stevenson. A 1957 organic chemistry textbook. A lot of what I recognized as bestsellers from the forties and fifties.