Christmas Stalkings (2 page)

From some of the gingerbread houses, bonny lasses in frilly mobcaps and brave lads in stovepipe hats and home-grown chin whiskers purveyed artifacts ranging from apple-head dolls to woolens woven from fleece donated by the college sheep. Others hawked mulled cider, hot coffee, hot chocolate, and hot peppermint tea. Cold
switchel
had been tried one year but hadn’t caught on. Homemade doughnuts kept warm in imitation stoneware Crockpots whose electric cords were cunningly hidden from the customers’ view were a big item, though. So were hot dogs with festive garnishes of red-and-green piccalilli from the college ‘ kitchens.

Popcorn balls and taffy apples never failed to sell, as did more exotic comestibles. Foremost among these latter was a sort of antic sweetmeat made of shredded coconut, molasses, melted chocolate, and a number of other things that Professor Peter Shandy, the Crescent’s least Yule-minded resident, preferred not to think about Years ago, some coarse-minded wag had noticed the resemblance between these biggish, flattish, brownish,
whiskerish
confections and a certain bovine by-product familiar to every animal-husbandry student. Coconut cowpats he’d dubbed them, and coconut cowpats they’d remained. They sold even faster than hotcakes, and Peter Shandy thought them obscene.

But then, Peter thought most things about the
Illumination obscene. For the first eighteen years of his residence on the Crescent, he’d been the self-appointed faculty Scrooge. Despite endless nagging by the Illumination Committee, he’d allowed not so much as a Styrofoam candy cane or a wreath of lollipops to sully the simple dignity of his small old rosy brick house. Then one year, goaded to fury by the Illumination chairperson’s attempt to foist off on him a poinsettia fashioned from pieces of red detergent bottles, he’d gone hog-wild.

In a burst of uncontrollable fury, Peter had hired decorators to transform his premises into a veritable
Walpurgisnacht
scene of garish blinking light bulbs, life-size plastic reindeer, and hideous Santa Claus masks that lit up and leered. Then, fleeing the ire of his neighbors, he’d gone off on a cruise, got shipwrecked as he well deserved to be, and slunk home to find the Illumination chairperson’s body stiff and stark behind his living-room sofa.

Oddly enough, Peter had emerged from this deplorable incident not only with a whole skin but with a wife. Under the benign influence of his delightful Helen, the renegade bachelor had been transformed into a relatively civilized husband. Even his next-door neighbor said so in her mellower moments, of which it must also be admitted she didn’t have many. By now, Peter had gentled down to the point where he didn’t even put up much of a squawk when Helen gently but firmly insisted on doing in Balaclava as the
Balaclavans
did.

Fortunately, Helen’s instincts were for the tastefully simple as opposed to the more-is-better. There had been one unfortunate experiment with topiary trees made from fresh-cut boxwood that stunk the place up like a houseful of tomcats, but on the whole she’d done fine. This year, Helen’s decorations were particularly charming.

Eschewing the excesses of her neighbors, she’d made low arrangements of evergreen twigs for all the front windows upstairs and down, and trimmed them with a few small rose-colored baubles and velvet bows to complement the aged brick walls. In the middle of each arrangement she’d set a real candle, protected by a glass hurricane-lamp chimney so that it could be lighted after dark without setting fire to the house. On the front door she’d hung a fat balsam wreath tied with a larger bow of the same rosy velvet. To the wreath was fastened an old brass cornet that Peter had tooted in his high school marching band, salvaged from the attic and shined up till it dazzled the eyeballs. Peter had pretended to scoff but been secretly tickled. He’d even taken pains to wire the cornet to the door, lest it be pinched by some souvenir hunter among the multitudes.

For multitudes there were. Balaclava’s Grand Illumination had been going on ever since the bleak Depression years of the early 1930s. Photographed and written up in newspapers and magazines, talked about on the radio and even shown now and then on television, the event had become a New England tradition, attracting visitors from far and wide to this rural Massachusetts community.

Fairly far, anyway, and reasonably wide. Wide enough to keep Police Chief Fred
Ottermole
and his force, which consisted mostly of Officer Budge Dorkin, oftentimes hard-put to keep the traffic unsnarled.

Fortunately the college had its own larger and better-equipped security force, so there was seldom any trouble about maintaining law and order.

The college, of course, was squarely behind the Illumination, and with good reason. Its student body was not rich; most of the kids were working their way, and here was a welcome source of tuition money. A fair number of students willingly forwent part or all of their Christmas holidays for the greater good of hustling the tourists. Peter could admire their self-sacrifice and respect their motives; he just didn’t see why in Sam Hill they couldn’t maintain their blasted tradition someplace else.

Out beyond the pigpens, for instance. At this very moment, a disgusting youth in a just-purchased Viking helmet with plush moose horns on it was unwrapping a coconut cowpat and throwing the paper on the trodden snow. Peter was glaring balefully down at him through the upstairs front window and wishing it were the second week of January when he heard a thump at the door.

Some keen-eyed visitor must have managed to sort out the knocker from the balsam, or else a miscreant tourist was trying to swipe his cornet Normally Peter would have flung open the window and stuck out his head to settle the matter with a lusty bellow, but he was loath to disarrange Helen’s artistically disposed greenery and even loather to smash the hurricane lamp. There was no use even trying to bellow, he’d never be able to make himself heard over the general hullabaloo. He bowed to the inevitable and went downstairs. It might be his old friend and neighbor Professor Ames, at loose ends between semesters, looking for a game of cribbage.

No, by George, it was about the third from the last person he’d have expected. Moira Haskins, the college comptroller, was a pleasant woman and a neighbor on the Crescent, but not one with whom he and Helen were on dropping-in terms. Peter had an ominous foreboding that Moira was after something.

As so often happened, Peter was right. When he indicated a readiness to divest her of her storm coat and call Helen down from the den where she was wrapping presents, the comptroller shook her head.

“Thanks, Peter, but I can’t stay. I just wanted to show you this and see what you make of it.”

Moira’s “this” was a twenty-dollar bill. It looked to Peter like all the other twenty-dollar bills he’d been shelling out with unaccustomed abandon during this expensive season, until he put on his reading glasses and studied it closely. Then he began to chuckle. Where he’d have expected the grim and lowering portrait of President Andrew Jackson, he saw instead the even grimmer and far more lowering visage of President Thorkjeld Svenson.

“My God! Where the flaming perdition did this come from?”‘

“One of the gingerbread houses, I assume. It was in with the rest when Sylvester Lomax brought me last night’s cash pickup. I was sitting at my desk just now, counting the money for this morning’s deposit, when I did a double take and almost freaked out. What do you think, Peter? You don’t suppose somebody got to doodling around on the bill with a drawing pen or something and—”

“Not on your life. Jackson’s head is long and skinny. It might have been managed with Ulysses S. Grant, I suppose, if they could have got the beard off. Just a second, I think I’ve—” He fished in his wallet and pulled out a fifty, marveling that he did in fact still have one. “See, Grant had a heavy,
squarish
face like the president’s. Rather as if he’d been hacked out of Mount Rushmore.”

“Yes, I see,” said Moira. “Then why didn’t they use a fifty instead of a twenty?”

“Probably because fifties are less common and therefore more apt to be given close scrutiny. Is this the only such bill you’ve found?”

“So far. The only one that’s been caught, anyway. We’re into the fifth day of the Illumination, you know, and we’ve taken in an awful lot of money. There’s no telling how many may have slipped through.”

“Not all that many, I shouldn’t think. This is a remarkably good likeness.”

“Frighteningly good.” Moira shuddered slightly despite the storm coat she hadn’t taken off. “But President
Svenson’s
so much more presidential than most presidents. If those kids in the booths did happen to notice, they’d take it for granted he belonged there. Most of them have probably never heard of Andrew Jackson anyway. I wonder what Dr.
Svenson’s
going to think of this.”

“He’ll think it’s funny, provided we don’t get stuck with a whole flock of them. As for this one—” Peter kept hold of the startling counterfeit and handed Moira a genuine twenty taken from his wallet. “Fair swap?”

“No, really, Peter. Why should you stand the loss?”

“What loss? This bill’s a collector’s item, it’s worth far more than the alleged face value. I’m probably gypping the college worse than the counterfeiter did.

Drat it, Moira, this is a fantastically expert job. Look at the workmanship. Can you tell me why anybody with the talent to pull off such a magnificent fake would waste his time on a practical joke that could send him to jail?”

“Well, no, I hadn’t thought of that. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“It might, I suppose, though I can’t think how. Look, Moira, let’s keep this between ourselves for the time being. There could be something more than meets the eye here. I’d like to check around a bit before we spread the word. Let me know if you get any others, will you?”

“All right, Peter. I certainly don’t want to involve the college in anything shady, especially at Illumination time. You know how stories get blown up and stretched out of proportion. You’re quite sure I shouldn’t go to the president?”

“You can’t right now, he’s gone off skiing. I tell you what, Moira: I’ll have the security guards pass on to the students a general warning about being on the alert for funny money. A big event like this, run by young amateurs, creates an ideal situation for the passing of counterfeit bills. I’m surprised the Illumination’s never been hit sooner, now that I think of it. Anyway, we’ll cope. Thank you for coming, Moira.”

“Thank you for listening, Peter. I’m sorry to be dumping on you, but then everybody does, don’t they?”

That was true enough. Peter had been Balaclava’s unofficial private detective ever since that great debacle at the earlier Illumination, when President Svenson had confronted him with the dire consequences of his ill-judged prank and saddled him with the job of catching the murderer.

Peter knew he’d get stuck again anyhow, so he might as well get to work right away, not that he had the remotest idea where to start. He let the comptroller out and went back upstairs with the aberrant twenty-dollar bill in his hand.

“Helen, what do you make of this?”

“Of what?” his wife replied somewhat testily. “Stick your finger on this knot, will you? I don’t see why it’s always the woman who gets landed with wrapping the parcels. I’ll bet Margaret Thatcher doesn’t wrap presents.”

“Couldn’t you have had them gift-wrapped at the stores?”

“Of course not. You have to stand in line till your feet kill you, then they charge you an extra dollar for a piece of fancy paper and a stupid little bow. You can take your finger out now.”

“No, I can’t, you’ve lashed it down.”

“Oh, Peter!” Sighing, Helen freed the captive digit and yanked tight the knot. “All right, now what am I supposed to look at?”

“Behold.”

Peter handed her the note. She stared blankly for about a quarter of a second, then burst out laughing.

“Where in heaven’s name did you get that?”

“From Moira Haskins. She was here just now.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I offered to, but she said she couldn’t stay.”

“Then why did she come? It’s not like Moira to be showing silly jokes around.”

“She wasn’t joking. This thing turned up in last night’s Illumination takings.”

“Are you saying somebody actually succeeded in passing
Thorkjeld’s
picture off as legal tender?”

“That appears to have been the case. Unless some student worker stuck it in as a joke. Which, I must say, seems a bit subtle for purveyors of coconut cowpats.”

“I see what you mean.” Helen picked up the magnifying glass she used for studying ancient documents from the college’s historic
Buggins
Collection, of which she was curator. “You know, Peter, this likeness to Thorkjeld is quite a piece of work. I think it’s actually a pen-and-ink drawing, but it reproduces the steel-engraving technique so expertly that I can’t tell for sure. As a guess I’d say the artist, and I’m not using the word loosely, may have photocopied a real twenty, cut out the medallion on the front, inserted his drawing of Thorkjeld Svenson in place of Andrew Jackson, and run it off again. You could do that easily enough if you had access to a copier that does color work.”