Christmas Chiller Read online

  “I guess we’re not needed yet,” Mallory said. “So why don’t we go up to my room, okay? I still have some gift wrapping to do.”

  “Are you my Secret Santa?” asked Claire, momentarily distracted.

  “No,” said Mallory. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I was.”

  “Oh,” said Claire. She thought this over, ate two chocolate chips, then said to Mary, “Do you have a Secret Santa?”

  “I …” Mary began.

  “Yes,” said Mallory quickly.

  Mrs. Pike, who had bent over to peer into the oven, straightened up to smile at Mary. “It’s a tradition in our family,” she explained. “Since you’re staying with us, you’ll have to have your own Secret Santa.”

  Mary said, “I … but I can’t be a Secret Santa to anyone. I mean …”

  Mallory said, “Don’t worry, Mary, we have it covered.”

  Mary’s lips trembled a little, but she managed a smile. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Ho, ho, ho,” Mal said with a big wink and led me out of the kitchen.

  As we walked down the hall I asked in a low voice, “Did anyone call about the picture of Mary? The one you sent to the maternity shop?”

  “No.” Mallory sighed. “It looks as if we’ve hit a dead end on that one.”

  I sighed, too. Mary had been laughing and smiling with Claire, but there was a sad air about her, a sort of lost look. I shivered. I wondered if I could be as brave as she was being in the same circumstances.

  In her room, Mallory pulled wrapping paper, tape, and scissors out from under her bed. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I need to wrap Mary’s Christmas ornament, the one I made for her.” She held it up: a perfect snowflake, coated in glitter, with tiny rhinestones taken from an old earring suspended from the points.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Claudia couldn’t have done better. It could be one of her jewelry designs,” I added, then stopped, thinking hard. “Mallory, what about Mary’s jewelry? I mean, what about her ring?”

  “What about it? There wasn’t any inscription inside.”

  “I know. But it’s not just a plain old ring. I mean, it’s a work of art, like something Claudia would make. Maybe it’s even a one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry.”

  Mallory pushed her glasses into place and said, “Go on.”

  “So maybe it came from a jewelry store near BabyBaby. And maybe the jeweler would remember who bought it. I mean, you don’t pay cash for jewelry usually, do you? It’s expensive. So they might have a record of who bought it — even of a charge card with a name and address.”

  I had barely finished speaking before Mallory was on her feet. “Mary Anne. That’s a brilliant idea. Kristy-caliber.”

  Mallory found the phone number of the boutique and dialed it. “I hope it’s still open,” she said anxiously. “It’s pretty late, even in California. But maybe they’re staying open late for the holidays, and … Hello? Hello, is this BabyBaby? Oh, good. This is Mallory Pike. I’m the one who sent you that information about Mary Doe…. Yes…. No, no one knows. But we had another idea.”

  I wrote down the information about the local jewelry stores as Mallory repeated it aloud. The saleswoman even looked up the phone numbers for Mallory. Fortunately, Del Flores is a small town and there were only three jewelers in it.

  The first jeweler didn’t know what we were talking about. The second one had closed for the evening and we spoke to an answering machine. The third one was curious. She told Mary Anne to fax her a sketch of the ring.

  So we drew one. Fortunately, Mallory is almost as good at drawing as she is at writing, so it was a pretty good sketch. We went to the study and faxed it to the jeweler. From the kitchen, I could hear the sound of Claire’s laughter and the low murmur of Mary’s and Mrs. Pike’s voices.

  My heart was pounding. Were we about to solve the mystery of Mary’s identity?

  “Let’s go upstairs to call the jeweler back,” said Mallory. “It’s more private there. We don’t want Mary to overhear and get her hopes up until we’re sure.”

  We walked quickly back into the hall. And then Mrs. Pike called, “Mallory! Mary Anne! Is that you?”

  “Mom? What is it?” Mallory called back. Even I had heard the note of urgency in Mrs. Pike’s voice. I followed Mallory down the hall to the kitchen.

  When we reached the doorway we saw Claire, standing on a chair holding a spoon, cookie dough on her face. Mary was sitting on another chair, one hand on her stomach, looking scared and excited and surprised.

  “Mom?” said Mallory again. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” said Mrs. Pike. She was untying her apron as she spoke. “But Mary is about to have her baby. Call 911 and ask them to send an ambulance.”

  Mallory picked up the phone. She punched in the number. She punched it in again. Then she put the receiver down.

  “Mallory?” I said.

  She met my eyes. “The phone lines are dead,” she replied.

  “What time is it?” asked Jessi.

  “The same time it was ten minutes ago, only ten minutes later,” I told her.

  Jessi sighed. “I know, I know, but time is going so slowly. What if the thief doesn’t come? What if this doesn’t work? Or what if he does and then he gets away?” Then she said, “Boy, is Mallory going to be annoyed that she missed this.”

  “Mary Anne, too,” I said. “But they had a job to do.”

  “We won’t let him get away,” said Abby. “I may not be able to outrun him, but I definitely have the stamina to outlast him.”

  Dawn said, “It’s still early. There’s plenty of time for the trap to work.”

  “I’m going to make some hot tea. Does anybody want some?” Anna asked after a long silence during which nothing at all happened except that more snow fell.

  Mrs. Stevenson nodded. So did Mom. Watson didn’t say anything because he was in the Stevensons’ rec room with David Michael and Karen trying to calm them down enough to go to bed in the spare bedroom upstairs, where Nannie had long ago taken Emily Michelle.

  We were not, as you may have guessed, in my house. We were in Abby’s house. A few hours earlier, the Brewer-Thomas family had made a big show of leaving. We’d taken Shannon the puppy to the Papadakises’ for safekeeping and locked cranky Boo-Boo (Watson’s cat) in the laundry room with plenty of food, water, and cat litter. We’d carried empty suitcases and put them in the trunk.

  “See you tomorrow, Shannon!” David Michael had shrieked as we backed out of the Papadakises’ driveway.

  We’d driven downtown and back, and parked on a side street. Then we’d walked quickly to Abby’s house, slipping through her backyard and then her back door. Now we were sitting by the window of the living room, our eyes fastened on our dark, apparently deserted house.

  We had turned the lights off so we couldn’t be seen peering through the window, although if the vision of anyone outside was as bad as ours, we weren’t in any danger of being discovered. The snow fell heavily, a thick veil that hid half the world and blurred the other half. I couldn’t see the plain, unmarked police van parked in the Papadakises’ driveway, where Sergeant Johnson and another officer waited. But I knew he was there, just as I knew that Sergeant Tang and two more officers were waiting in the center hall of the house. We were all in place, except the burglar.

  Mrs. Stevenson and Anna returned with mugs of tea and passed them around. “We brought extra,” Anna announced. “We figured you might need it.”

  I took a mug and wrapped my hands around the warmth.

  Watson and Nannie came in and took seats at the back of the room. Mrs. Stevenson passed Watson a pair of binoculars, one of several pairs.

  I wondered if you could call what we were on a stakeout. It was more like a stakeout party, I thought wryly.

  But what it really was, was a trap, with our house as the bait. Dawn had put the pieces together: The rake had fallen out of the pickup truck Mrs. Korman had seen; the soil-laden foo
tprints belonged to someone who spent a lot of time walking in the dirt; the care taken not to break greenery could well be habitual, the sort of habit that a gardener would form. We also deduced that because lots of people had recently hired a new gardening service, their old gardener or gardening service would have been let go.

  When we spread out to question people in the neighborhood, we quickly learned that both the Hsus and the Papadakises had hired the new service — and had fired Mr. Nixon, who still worked for Watson and Mrs. Stevenson.

  There was the motive, and the reason for labeling some of the victims “naughty” and others, who suffered no damage or theft, “nice.” (We couldn’t quite fit Abby’s house into this scheme — but since only a window had been broken, what happened there didn’t really compare to the “naughty” houses. Maybe Mr. Nixon had wanted to badger them into staying “nice.”)

  Sergeant Johnson was impressed. He said so when we called him to present the information. He called us back a short time later to tell us that he had run Mr. Nixon’s name through the computer and had found a match for previous criminal activity. Burglary, to be exact.

  Most conclusive of all, however, were Watson’s and Nannie’s gardening magazines. The red letters cut from magazines and used in the notes were exactly the same as the red letters used in the title of the “Super Gardening Corner” column by Ty Harper that ran every month in the magazine, right down to the leafy green background of the capital letters G, C, T, and H (which were the first letters of the words Gardening, Corner, Ty, and Harper).

  I figured that one out. When I told Watson, he was amazed. And when we told Sergeant Johnson our plan to catch the thief, he was stunned. Then he said slowly, “It just might work. Let me talk to Mr. Brewer.”

  Watson and Sergeant Johnson conferred on the phone for what seemed like ages while Abby, Anna, Jessi, Dawn, and I listened impatiently. Then Watson hung up the phone, cleared his throat, punched in another number, and asked to speak to Mr. Nixon.

  When Mr. Nixon answered, Watson fired him, just like that. It was amazing how mean Watson made himself sound, quite unlike the mild-mannered man we know and love. Not only was he cold, but he insisted that Mr. Nixon come over to pick up his final paycheck immediately. “We’re going out of town this afternoon,” Watson said brusquely. “I don’t have time to waste.” Hanging up, he shook his head. “I didn’t enjoy that,” he said.

  “It’s for a good cause,” I pointed out. “We’re going to catch a thief.”

  Watson smiled slightly and patted my shoulder. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  I glanced at Watson now. He was sipping tea, a solemn expression on his face.

  Then Dawn, who was peering through the binoculars, said, “A truck. A truck just went by.”

  We all practically hurled ourselves against the window. Sure enough, we could see the dark shape of a truck inching down the street. It backed into our driveway and stopped. It was Mr. Nixon’s truck. I had taken a good look at it earlier, when he’d come for his final paycheck.

  For a long time, no one emerged from the truck. I almost stopped breathing. Did he suspect a trap? Could he see anyone in the van across the street? Had something tipped him off?

  Finally the door opened and a bulky figure climbed out. His face was completely covered, but then, that wasn’t so unusual in the middle of a blizzard.

  We watched as the figure moved toward my house. It was so late now that only the streetlights illuminated the blowing snow. And yet I knew that others in the neighborhood watch were probably sitting behind darkened windows too, watching Mr. Nixon. He might as well have been on a stage.

  He walked casually around the side of the house. I saw the flicker of a flashlight. Then he disappeared into the shrubbery by our back kitchen window.

  “This is it,” Dawn breathed. “This is it.”

  Agonizing seconds passed, and then lights blazed in the windows of our house. At almost the same moment, the doors of the police van flew open and Sergeant Johnson and his colleagues leaped out and charged across the street. The front door banged open and Mr. Nixon barreled out with Sergeant Tang one step behind him. She leaped at him and grabbed him around the legs, and they fell into the snow.

  Did we wait? We did not. In spite of Watson, Mom, and Mrs. Stevenson, who were all saying, “Stop, wait,” we made our own mad dash toward the scene of the crime.

  We arrived just as Sergeant Tang rolled Mr. Nixon over, pulled his arms back, and clapped handcuffs on him. “You have the right to remain silent,” she intoned.

  There he was, our gardener — or I should say, our ex-gardener — Mr. Nixon. He was wearing a one-piece hunting suit, a stocking hat, and black gloves. His bushy eyebrows were drawn together in a scowl as Sergeant Johnson and Sergeant Tang hauled him to his feet.

  “You can’t do this to me! I was set up! It was a trap!”

  Sergeant Tang kept reading Mr. Nixon his rights. Mr. Nixon saw us and his face turned red with rage. “You! You did this to me!” he shouted at Watson.

  “No,” said Watson firmly, “you did this to yourself.”

  “If you hadn’t fired me, it never would have happened,” Mr. Nixon said.

  Watson didn’t answer this time. He just shook his head sadly. I could almost read his thoughts. Mr. Nixon had been a good and careful gardener, but not an honest man.

  We watched, oblivious to the cold, as they led Mr. Nixon to the van. I realized that in many houses up and down the street, lights had come on and the figures of people could be seen peering outside.

  Sergeant Johnson realized it, too. He surveyed the street and then turned to us with a smile. “I think your neighborhood watch has been very successful,” he said. “Thanks to it and especially to your efforts, the Stoneybrook crime wave is over.”

  “Hey,” I said. I had just realized, with a sick feeling, that we had done a majorly dumb thing. We had forgotten to bring a flashlight.

  “The blizzard must have interrupted the power service,” said Ethan. His voice was reassuringly calm.

  So was Stacey’s, as she said, “Don’t worry, we’ll be able to find our way out of here. It just may take some time.”

  “Right,” I said, trying to make my voice match theirs.

  “Wall,” said Ethan. I realized that he meant he’d bumped into a wall.

  Stacey said, “Good. We’ll just follow the wall and it will lead us to the door, sooner or later. Ethan, I’m going to grab your shirt, and Claudia, you hold on to me so we can stay together.”

  I shuffled toward them in the darkness and put out my hand. I grabbed a fold of material. It pulled against my grip and I followed.

  We stopped.

  “What is it?” I said.

  From a completely different direction, Stacey’s voice said, “Claud? Where are you?”

  I froze. I was not holding on to Stacey.

  But I was holding on to somebody. And if that person weren’t Stacey or Ethan, then who was he (or she)?

  A hand shot out and clamped my wrist.

  “AAAAUUUUGGGGGH!” I screamed, jumping back. The person didn’t let go. I stopped and he or she slammed into me.

  I stumbled sideways and kicked out hard.

  “Ugh,” a voice grunted. The grip loosened fractionally and I tore loose. “Someone’s in here with us,” I choked out. “Run!”

  I matched my actions to my words — and fell over something with a crash. I slammed onto the floor and knocked the breath out of me.

  “Claudia!” cried Stacey’s voice. “Claudia!”

  I heard running footsteps and a thud. “Oww!” cried Stacey, and then a beam of light pinned her against the far wall.

  “Don’t move,” said a soft voice. “Or you’ll be sorry.”

  I couldn’t breathe. Gasping painfully, I squinted up. But the light nearly blinded me. All I could see was Stacey’s pale face and a dark figure holding an enormous metal flashlight, and — a stick? A bat?

  Then Ethan stepped into the beam of light ne
xt to Stacey and said, “Cybil. Stop it.”

  “Stop what?” said Cybil. “I’m not doing anything.” And then she laughed.

  It was the creepiest sound I had ever heard.

  I saw Stacey flinch. Ethan said, “Why don’t you use your flashlight to show us the way out of here, Cybil?”

  She laughed again. “You’re not scared, are you, Ethan?”

  “No,” said Ethan. “Is there any reason to be?”

  It was the wrong question. “Yesss!” she hissed. “After what you did to me, you should be scared. You and your dumb new girlfriend.” She swung the beam of the flashlight directly into Stacey’s eyes. “If it weren’t for you …”

  “I hadn’t even met Stacey when you and I broke up,” said Ethan flatly.

  Cybil didn’t answer. I could hear how heavily she was breathing. Suddenly she gave a shriek and hurled something through the air at Ethan and Stacey. They ducked sideways and an umbrella hit the wall, bouncing off like a giant black bat.

  “DON’T MOVE!” Cybil screamed, and they froze.

  I began to creep forward.

  Ethan said, “So it was you, Cybil, who put the red paint in the elevator?”

  “Yes. And I jammed the buttons and put up the OUT OF ORDER sign on the stairs. I talked Carl into going along with my pranks. I said that you and I liked to play jokes on each other. And it’s true, isn’t it, Ethan? You made a joke out of me, didn’t you?” Her voice was rising.

  Ethan said, “And the jack-in-the-box. Interesting idea.”

  It sidetracked her. “You think so? I had to follow you for hours to get a picture. She kept looking around, like she was afraid. Ha.”

  “It was pretty spooky,” said Ethan.

  “But not as scary as when you tried to push me under the train,” Stacey added.

  Cybil jerked, as if Stacey’s voice was an unwelcome intrusion.

  “I wasn’t going to hurt you. Just give you a little thrill, like the one Ethan gave me when he pushed me out of his life.” Something else flew through the air and I saw a clay flowerpot shatter against the wall.

  Under the cover of the noise, I pulled myself closer. Closer.