Silent Knife (A Celebration Bay Mystery) (6 page)

Hank looked around at each one of them. “What? Am I missing something? Ms. Montgomery? You must be able to get stuff at the last minute.”

Liv swallowed.

Bill let her off the hook. “Hank, I’m afraid you’re going to have to come down to the station.”

“Why?”

“Just to answer some questions.”

“Because someone stole my suit? Is that what it is? Someone wore my suit to commit murder?” Hank’s ruddy cheeks drained of color.

Bill stepped toward him. “Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Right now, I just need a detailed account of your activities earlier this evening.”

“I was home all day. I brought the suit in yesterday, and when I came back tonight, it was gone. I found it in the Dumpster right out there in the alley.”

“So you don’t know when the suit was taken?”

“No. I told you. It was gone when I got here. You should ask Nancy. She keeps the back room locked. I have a key to let myself in.”

“Hank!” Ted said so sharply that the man jumped. “I think you shouldn’t say anything more without a lawyer.”

Hank frowned. He wasn’t catching on.

“I was getting to that,” Bill said. “Officer Meese will take Nancy’s statement with these others. I’m only taking you in for questioning, Hank, but I think you should have a lawyer present.”

“A lawyer? You mean—you don’t think I killed that man?”

“I’m not thinking anything except that your Santa suit has blood on it and it needs to be tested. But that’s gonna take a few days.”

“A few days? But what about tomorrow?”

Yeah, what about tomorrow?
Liv wanted to ask. One Santa dead, the other possibly suspected of murder, his Santa suit bagged as evidence. Where the hell were they going to get another Santa in full regalia by tomorrow?

She looked around the room. Ted had the hair and twinkling eyes, but she needed him in the office. Bill’s back would probably go out if he tried to lift a child on his knee. Besides, he had to investigate and keep the community safe. Ditto the other officers. Fred had the stomach, but he had to control traffic flow. She reluctantly looked at the only man left in the room.

Chaz Bristow looked back at her, not a care in his sleepy, unused little heart. Yet.

She smiled, grim though it was. “How soon can you get your butt into a Santa costume?”

His blank look became blanker. She was looking straight at him, but he turned to look over his shoulder at the row of boxes behind him. Slowly, he turned back to Liv. Even more slowly, he shook his head.

She nodded just as slowly.

Suddenly galvanized, Chaz sprang to his feet. “Sheriff, you can’t put Santa in jail. He has to be here to talk to the kiddies tomorrow morning.”

“How many times do I have to say this? I’m just taking him in for questioning.”

“Yeah,” Chaz said. “Great. And when it gets out that Santa is a suspected murderer, do you think anybody is going to bring their child to sit on his lap? They’ll go to some other town to do their shopping. The local businesses are going to love that.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Hank said.

“Remember what happened in
Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street
?”

Bill frowned at Chaz.

“They put Santa on trial. Parents were in an uproar. Children were brokenhearted. The judge was on the hot seat.”

“I didn’t do it,” Hank reiterated.

Bill looked toward heaven. “If you just let me take him to the station and don’t talk about what’s happened, he may be back in his sleigh before anyone knows he was gone.”

“Just like with Joss Waterbury?”

Low blow, Chaz
, thought Liv.

“I wasn’t the one who arrested Joss.”

“Do you think people are going to remember that it was those jerks from the state? No. They’ll just remember that you’re trigger-happy when it comes to arresting local citizens. And that you arrested Santa Claus.”

“That’s not fair, Chaz.” Fred hoisted himself out of the easy chair. “But he may be right, Bill. Hank has been the town Santa for over a decade. Do you think he would go off and kill someone right before the Santa Parade? He’d have to be nuts.”

Everybody looked at Hank.

“I’m not. I didn’t.”

Liv had seen him jolly and seen him angry, but now he just looked tired, resigned, defeated. His round cheeks had lost their roundness, his eyes were dull. His shoulders stooped like an old man’s. Even his beard seemed to droop.

“I’m not saying you did, but the sooner we get out to the station, the sooner you’ll be back looking for a new Santa suit.”

“I’ll get on it right away,” Liv said. There had to be a costume shop she could rouse at nine o’clock on a Friday night. Sure. And reindeer could fly.

“Come on Hank. Get your coat. We’ll call your lawyer once we get there.”

“I don’t have a lawyer.”

“I’ll call Silas Lark,” Ted said. “But don’t say anything until he gets there.” Ted was already scrolling through his cell phone for Silas’s number.

“Can’t afford no lawyer.”

Bill took Hank’s coat off the hanger and helped him into it.

“Officer Meese will stay and take your statements here and then you’ll be allowed to leave. I don’t have to ask that you not talk about this situation.”

He escorted Hank toward the door.

Chaz jumped up and grabbed his jacket. “I think I’ll make my statement at the station if that’s okay with you.” Without waiting for an answer, he headed for the door.

“I know where you live,” Liv said sotto voce as he passed by.

“Chaz was sure in a hurry to leave,” Fred said. “Do you suppose he knows something he didn’t want to share?”

Liv sighed. “No. I think he was afraid of me tagging him for the job of Santa tomorrow.”

She looked up to find Nancy Pyne standing in the doorway to the shop. Her face was as gray as her hair, her lips colorless.

“Where are they taking Hank? Did they just arrest him for murder? They can’t do that. You heard him. He didn’t do anything.”

They had heard him, Liv thought, and evidently so had Nancy Pyne. She must have been listening at the door.

“Someone stole his suit,” Nancy said. “He found it in the Dumpster behind A Stitch in Time. I helped him look.”

“Just a sec.” Officer Meese fumbled in his pocket. “I’ll just turn on this tape recorder. Would you mind repeating that and answering a few questions, ma’am?”

“I would. But in the spirit of the season, I will.” Nancy sat down on the stool, and the policeman turned on the mini-recorder.

“I’ll just move these pastries out of your way.” Ted caught Liv’s eye, and they moved to the far side of the room where Fred was sitting.

“Your name is?”

“Nancy Pyne.”

And you’re the owner of this store?”

“Yes.”

Nancy answered his questions in a calm, almost disinterested voice, and Liv only half listened. At the moment, she had bigger problems to deal with. Like where to find a Santa suit. And then find someone to wear it. Or get Hank Ousterhout out of jail. But first, she had to move this interview process along before it got any later.

“What now?” she whispered to Ted.

“As soon as we’re through here, I’m going to take a drive out to the station. See what the score is there and try to get Hank out of there tonight.”

“Why wouldn’t you be able to? Someone stole his suit. There were witnesses.”

Ted gave her a look. “Hanks
says
someone stole it. Hank
told
Nancy someone stole it. So far, no witness.”

Liv shivered. “I can’t believe this. Do you think he’ll be back in time for the pancake breakfast tomorrow?”

“Bill will make sure everything is done by the book. And they won’t charge him until he’s been fingerprinted—”

“He’s been fingerprinted along with the rest of us. It’s part of the our new policy. Bill knows that.”

“Sure he does. But they’ll want to do it again. Along with some other tests. It just depends on what they’ve got and what Silas can do to get him out.”

Fred leaned forward in his chair. “Even if they let Hank go, and if Liv can find a suit by tomorrow, can we allow Hank to be Santa? Would it be responsible to allow a suspect to be that close to children? What if the news gets out?”

“Oh Lord.” Liv slumped against the wall.

Ted shrugged. “Hank has been Santa for ten years. I don’t think he suddenly snapped tonight. If they don’t arrest him, we’ll be okay. If they do . . . that’s a problem we’ll have to take up with the town council.”

“Nonetheless, I think I’ll put a security person on the premises, just to be safe,” Liv said.

“Good idea,” Ted said. “Santa’s helper.”

Liv held up a finger. She’d been listening with one ear to Nancy’s interview. Now it had her full attention.

“When was the last time you saw the suit?”

Nancy shrugged. “I didn’t really pay attention. Hank uses my back room every year so he can have a place to relax between shifts. It was hanging over there.” She pointed to the now empty clothes rack.

“Did you see it today?”

“I don’t recall seeing it this morning, though I wasn’t back here much,” Nancy said. “The door is usually locked except when I’m accepting deliveries. Then we leave it open until everything is unloaded. There were several deliveries this afternoon.”

“So it’s possible someone could have sneaked in and taken the suit without being seen?”

Nancy deliberated, then slowly nodded. “There was a misunderstanding with one of the craftsmen. We had to recount the order before it off-loaded. Someone could have sneaked in then. I don’t know. I didn’t know someone was going to steal the suit. I didn’t notice. The order was from a craftsman over in Lake Placid. If you’d like to talk to
him
, too.”

“I think Nancy is getting a little impatient,” Ted whispered. “Let’s see if we can speed things up.”

The three of them moved back to the interview table.

Nancy saw them and stood up. “We’ve had nothing but trouble since that woman opened that tacky store. She’s the one you should be talking to. Where was she when all this was going on?”

“Yes,” Liv said. “That’s something we’d all like to know.”

Ted and Liv gave their statements and were released. As they left the Pyne Bough, they saw a crowd gathered on the far side of yellow tape that had been stretched across the end of the alley.

“Oh crud.” Liv looked over the faces and tried to act normal.

“Look nonchalant,” Ted said.

“Some kind of electrical problem?” Roscoe Jackson yelled from the crowd. Roscoe was the owner of the Celebration General Store and a member of the board of trustees who had hired Liv.

“That’s what we heard,” Ted said and motioned for the officer in charge to let them pass.

“Why’s there an ambulance and no power company truck?”

Ted shook his head, yawned. “Roscoe, don’t you have better sense than to stand out in the cold for no good reason? If anything of interest was happening, you’d hear it on the police band before you’d find out standing around getting frostbite.”

Several people eased out of the crowd and began to walk away. They were soon joined by everyone else.

Roscoe scrunched down in his anorak, craned his neck to see down the alley, then nodded to Liv and Ted and walked away at a brisk pace.

The officer opened the tape and let them pass.

“A veritable stampede to their CB radios,” Liv said. “Bill ordered police silence. You are good.”

“I am that,” Ted said with a grin. He took her elbow and maneuvered her around the line waiting for a table at the Corner Café. “Think you can come up with a Santa suit by nine a.m. tomorrow and find someone to go inside it?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Good. You call around for a suit. I’ll go out to the police station and try to get Santa back.”

They split up at the steps of town hall; Ted headed for the employees parking lot around back. Liv reached for her keys and climbed the steps. She unlocked the Events Office door; reached for the light switch; and pulled off her gloves, hat, and coat as she went through to her office. She tossed them on the chair; booted up her laptop; and scrolled through her contact lists for costume shops, party stores, and everything rental.

Twelve calls later, she’d left seven messages, gotten three no-can-do’s, and had found two suits. One size small in New Jersey, which would be totally useless. And a large one that could be overnighted from a theatrical costume shop in NYC . . . as soon as it was returned on Monday.

“This was not supposed to happen,” she said to the walls. She’d triple-and quadruple-checked every aspect of the night’s festivities. She was way ahead on the coming events.

She was a seasoned event planner. She knew that she had to be on top of everything. She also knew you didn’t last long if you didn’t learn to delegate. She would never try to make hors d’oeuvres or direct traffic. She hired professionals to do it. Of course, she only hired the best. Occasionally they screwed up, but not very often.

As soon as she heard they’d had the same Santa for a decade, and he had his own suit and was ready to ride into town, she’d relaxed. Dexter Kent drove his own wagon and he was in charge of the two reindeer, which they imported from a nearby breeder and which would be housed at Dexter’s nursery for the next three weekends.

Liv had even driven out to the nursery to check on the reindeer accommodations. The last thing they needed was to have PETA picketers stopping traffic before they even made it into town.

She’d made sure that the people who’d be serving the cider and donuts were licensed food handlers. She’d listened to reports of safety standards, porta potties, emergency medical services. She had ambulances standing by, inconspicuous but readily available.

She’d sent out memos and reminders with instructions for the Celebration of Lights. She’d made sure Chaz, the uninterested, would run the ads for each week’s festivities without them being bumped for fishing news.

But she hadn’t made sure there was a backup Santa suit.

She could kick herself. She stood, started to pace. There had to be a Santa suit out there. Even if she had to drive all night to get it.

She stopped at the window that overlooked the green. She hadn’t even taken the time to look at the town in all its twinkling magic. In the center of the park the town tree was lit with thousands of lights. It was encircled by a gleaming square of sparkling lights, like a giant diamond necklace. Every store, restaurant, house, business—even unoccupied ones—were all lit, joining in the spirit of the community, the excitement of the season . . . except for the one dark gap where Trim a Tree had been the scene of murder.

And where was Grace Thornsby? No one seemed to know. She’d called Penny to say she couldn’t make it in to work. Where was she? Did she sabotage her lights because they had insisted she get rid of Santa?

An icy tendril crept up Liv’s neck. Had she taken them seriously and gotten rid of him? Permanently? Liv shuddered. Absurd. She was getting off topic. The man was dead. An awful thing. She stopped.
The man was dead.

She grimaced at the idea that had suddenly sprung to mind. He wouldn’t be needing his Santa suit, not now or ever again. He wasn’t wearing it when he died, so the police wouldn’t need it as evidence.

Especially if Liv got to it before they did.

She grabbed her coat and keys. It wouldn’t hurt to just take a look. She wouldn’t remove anything without checking with Bill first. They could have it back as soon as the other one arrived.

It was a bizarre thing to do. She knew it. But if she didn’t tell anyone where it came from, no one would feel squeamish about it. It wouldn’t hurt just to check and see if it was still in the TAT store.

She locked the door to the outer office and hurried out to the street.

She wasn’t sure if they would let her back across the caution tape, so she headed for the bakery. First she wanted to see if Miss Ida and Miss Edna were still there with Whiskey and to ask them to take him home with them. Then she’d ask Dolly if she could use her back door to get back into TAT.

Neither Dolly nor the sisters were in the bakery, but the girls at the counter said they were in Dolly’s office and told her to go back.

Whiskey let out a bark and started dancing when she entered the room. The three women were sitting in the tiny room around Dolly’s old rolltop desk, listening to the police band.

Liv knelt down to scratch Whiskey’s ears. “Hey, buddy. Did you miss me?”

“They’ve taken someone into custody,” Dolly said. “Do you know who it is?”

“Custody?” Liv stopped scratching, and Whiskey wiggled under her hand. What had happened to “radio silence”?

Ida pursed her lips. “Please don’t tell me it’s that nice young Newland girl. Fred said they kept her behind when you went down to the Pyne Bough. That poor family has suffered enough.”

“They have,” Edna agreed.

“I really need to get going,” Liv said.

“Just because Penny made one little mistake, it doesn’t give people a right to be mean,” Ida added, looking stern.

“Nor accuse her of murder,” Edna added. “The whole idea is absurd.”

Liv wondered if Penny’s little mistake had resulted in her little boy. “Are you sure they said Penny is in custody?” Liv tried to quell the surge of relief that it wasn’t the town Santa. But time was passing and she needed to get to that suit before it was too late. She started inching toward the door.

“They said it was a ten-fifteen,” Edna said.

Ida nodded, looking worried.

Dolly shook her head. “I don’t think they meant Penny. Fred called to say they’d finished with him but he had to hurry over to a traffic jam on Delice Street. That he would talk to me later, and that Bill had sent Penny home.”

“So if it wasn’t Penny, who was it?” asked Edna, eying Liv speculatively.

Liv deliberated. She needed to get to TAT and collect that Santa suit before the police sealed the store. But her three friends would wheedle her for information until she told, and she didn’t have the time.

She needed that Santa suit now. And then she would have to beg Bill not to put crime scene tape across the front of the store.

“While we were at Nancy’s, Hank came in. There was blood on his Santa suit. They thought that maybe whoever stole it and left it in the Dumpster might have—well, they didn’t actually say that, but the fact that there was blood on the suit, they needed to take Hank in to give his statement. Dolly, can I—”

“Hank Ousterhout?” asked Edna.

“Yes,” Liv said. “Listen, there’s something I have to do. Could you please take Whiskey home with you? You can just put him in the carriage house. I shouldn’t be too long.”

“Of course, dear,” Miss Ida said. “But we’ll keep him with us. Just knock on the door when you get home.”

“I might be late.”

“Oh that’s all right. With all the excitement we won’t be able to sleep a wink.”

“What she means,” Edna said, “is we’ll want to know the whole story when you get home.”

Liv smiled tightly. This was the hard part of her new job. The public didn’t need to know a lot of stuff. And yet the line between the public and her friends was blurry. She decided to skirt the issue for the time being.

“Dolly, do you mind if I use your back door?”

“Of course not, but what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to try to get back into TAT—”

“You’re going to investigate,” Miss Ida declared.

“No-o-o,” Liv said. “I’m hoping the police are still there, and if it isn’t needed in the investigation, they’ll let me borrow the TAT Santa suit.”

“I didn’t think about that.” Miss Ida pressed her fingers to her lips. “What’s Hank going to wear if his suit is ruined?”

“Heck, what are we going to do for a Santa if Hank is in jail?” countered her sister.

“Come on.” Dolly pulled herself up from her chair and shooed Liv out the door.

Whiskey tried to follow.

“Stay,” Liv commanded.

Whiskey stopped but he whined piteously and gave her the nobody-loves-me look.

“I’m sorry,” Liv said guiltily. “Soon we’re going to have a treat day—all day long.”

Whiskey yipped.

Edna managed to clip on his leash before he tried to follow. “Go on. We’ll be fine.”

“Thanks.” Liv took off after Dolly, who was already halfway across the kitchen.

“Do you need help, dear?” Miss Ida called after her.

Edna let out a gruff laugh. “Yeah, we can distract the police, while you sneak in and steal the suit.”

“Edna, you are not helping with that attitude.”

“
Do
you need help?” Dolly asked seriously as she unlocked the back door of the bakery.

“Thanks, but I’m not going to do anything devious. I’ll just ask politely and hope for the best.”

“Well, just say the word.” Dolly opened the door. “We’ve got your back.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll just watch to make sure you get there okay.”

“I appreciate it.” And she did. Though TAT was only a few stores away, and the alley was mostly well lit, tonight Liv felt eerily alone, even with Dolly watching from the bakery door.

Her cell phone rang. She fished it out of her pocket. Looked at caller ID.

“Ted, what’s up? Are you at the station?”

“No, I’m in the car with Hank.”

“They let him go?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“Uh . . .”
In the alley about to remove something from an active crime scene.
“Well . . .”

“Liv?”

“I’ve called everywhere. I can’t get anything until Monday. Though I’ll start calling in the morning again. But it won’t be in time for Breakfast with Santa.”

The door to the Trim a Tree shop opened and a policeman stepped out. “Ms. Montgomery, is that you?”

She nodded, smiled, waved.

“You really can’t be back here, ma’am.”

“Liv, who was that? Where are you?”

The officer was headed her way.

“Ted, hang on for a minute.” She covered the phone with her hand. Just as the officer met her.

“Ma’am, you know better than to be out here alone, especially after—” He jerked his head toward TAT.

“I know,” Liv said. “I was hoping Bill was still there. I wanted to borrow the Santa suit. They confiscated Hank Ousterhout’s.”

“Yes ma’am, I heard. Darn shame. What’s he gonna wear for breakfast tomorrow?”

“That’s what I was hoping to see Bill about.”

“Liv, where are you? Who are you talking to?” Ted’s voiced squawked into her palm.

“I’ll call you back.” She hung up.

“I was hoping to borrow the one that Mr. uh, the TAT Santa wore. Just for a couple of days,” she added quickly. “I have one arriving on Monday.”

The officer bit his lip, looked back at the store. “I sure wish I could help you. But it’s a”—he lowered his voice—“crime scene.”

“Can you just tell me this? Is it still there?”

He shrugged. “I’m just stationed outside the door, making sure nobody tries to get in. I haven’t even been inside.”