How the Finch Stole Christmas! Read online

  “So I’ll make a reasonable attempt and report back to you.” I stood and picked up my purse and tote. “And if she comes back—”

  “If she comes back, I will tell her I’ve tasked you with making the decision on whether her event will fit into our crowded schedule and give her your cell phone number.” Robyn beamed at me as if she’d come up with a brilliant idea. Of course, from her point of view, she had. “I’m sure you’ll have much more luck than I had getting information out of her.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” I headed for the door, and Robyn tossed her knitting onto her desk and fell into step beside me. “But for now, I have to head over to the theater and perform my official duties as Michael’s assistant director.”

  “Yes, I heard you were doing that,” she said, as she accompanied me down the hall. “I admit, I was surprised—I had no idea you had directing ambitions.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “At least for this show, the assistant director’s job is as a glorified gofer and organizer.”

  “You’re certainly good at that. The organizing part, at least.”

  “More to the point, I’m one of the few people other than Michael who can get Malcolm Haver to behave.” In fact, I was even better at it than Michael, but I wasn’t about to share that with anyone. “And Mother is the best of all. He practically cowers when she looks at him. We try never to leave him at the theater without at least one of us there to manage him.”

  “So in a sense he already has a keeper,” she observed.

  “Three keepers, all of whom have other equally if not more important jobs that they’d rather be doing. Not to mention the fact at all three of us are starting to feel homicidal thoughts whenever we spend any time with Haver. Especially Mother. The other night I heard her and Dad having the most alarming discussion about whether it was really possible to kill someone by impregnating one of their garments with a contact poison—and did I mention that she’s designing the costumes?”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “I’m sure she’s just blowing off steam, but clearly he stresses her. I want him off her hands.”

  “Definitely—so think about the idea of a keeper. Although, frankly, unless he’s really ready to make a change in his life—”

  “I know, believe me,” I said. “He’ll eventually elude even the sharpest keeper, and every time we take a bottle away from him he’ll start looking for another. I’m under no illusion that we can fix him. We’re just trying to get through the run.”

  “Does he have any family who could help? Any friends who might be a good influence?”

  “He’s divorced with no kids,” I said. “And any close friends he has would be back in L.A. We’re hoping his agent can be the good influence—they’ve worked together for forty years. He’s due in sometime today. Though if the agent can’t do anything, Mother thinks maybe it’s time to let Haver crash and burn.”

  “Sadly, she might be right. And speaking of your mother, she’s due here in an hour for a meeting of the Christmas Toy Drive, so I’d better let you go. Just one more thing.”

  I braced myself. Like Columbo, Robyn sometimes delivered her biggest bombshells under cover of those harmless words “one more thing.”

  “Why does your grandfather seem to think we should add finches to the church’s holiday decorations?”

  “Oh, blast,” I said. “So he’s hit you up, too? Just tell him no thanks.”

  “I did, but you know how persistent he is. Are finches really part of the traditional Australian holiday celebration?”

  “Not that I know of. The finches he’s trying to pawn off on you are Australian—they’re Gouldian finches. Very pretty birds—they have patches of red, turquoise, green, blue, and yellow—and they sing quite nicely. But they have nothing to do with Aussie Christmas celebrations. Grandfather just happens to have a surplus of Gouldian finches at the zoo and he’s expecting another batch any time now, so he’s trying to find places to put some of them.”

  “Expecting another batch?” Robyn looked puzzled. “If he already has too many, why is he getting another batch?”

  “He’s helping out the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—he’s a certified wildlife rehabilitator, you know. The finches he’s got were seized from an animal smuggling operation, and his contact there has dropped a hint that they could be seizing another big batch sometime soon, so he needs to find a place to put them. Normally he’d just send them down to the Willner Wildlife Sanctuary, but Caroline Willner is off on a cruise with her daughter, and the staff member she left in charge is digging in his heels. I’m sure as soon as Caroline’s back she’ll figure out a way to help out with the finches, but in the meantime Grandfather’s trying to bully everyone he knows into fostering a few.”

  “I will stand firm, then, and refuse to be bullied!”

  Robyn dashed off toward the parish hall, where “Silent Night” had given way to ominous silence—would she have to settle another quarrel over whether to sing “Adeste Fideles” or “O Come All Ye Faithful” to the traditional tune?

  I paused to take a few deep breaths, feeling my spirits lifted by the bracing spruce, pine, and fir scents that permeated the church, thanks to all the fresh evergreen wreaths and garlands decking the halls. I made a note in my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe to have another talk with Grandfather about his attempts to finchify the world. Then I peeked into the sanctuary to check on the progress of the Christmas pageant—and to make sure my sons were behaving.

  Josh, who had been cast as the assistant leader of the shepherds, was covertly studying the thirteen-year-old playing Joseph, no doubt with an eye to replacing him in future. I didn’t have the heart to explain that it would probably be a few years before he succeeded—as was her custom, Robyn had filled the role of Joseph with a middle-grade boy who’d recently shot up to a gangly six feet. The fact that this year’s Joseph couldn’t walk three steps without tripping over his newly elongated legs didn’t matter, since Joseph was mainly required to be tall and look pious. When the time approached, I would probably advise Josh to angle for a role as one of the wise men. They had better costumes and props, and their dramatic entrance actually allowed some scope for acting.

  Jamie, on the other hand, would probably snag the role of First Angel without difficulty. Although I knew I was biased, I couldn’t help thinking that he already stole the show as Third Angel. Unlike Josh, he wasn’t studying what the two senior angels did—he just threw himself heart and soul into every moment of the performance. When the angels gazed down tenderly at the Christ Child, his eyes brimmed with tears. When they pretended to blow on their trumpets to summon the shepherds, he gave the impression that he was blowing so hard that it was making him breathless. And in his favorite part, when the angels raised their wings and pointed them while the light crew shone a spotlight past them to give the impression that the Star of the East was somehow emanating from the tips of their wings, Jamie closed his eyes and looked so ethereal that for a moment you really could believe he was generating his share of the light. More than his share.

  “Yes, he’s a ham like me,” Michael had said after watching the last rehearsal. “They both are.” But he sounded proud, so I refrained from smacking him.

  I’d been a little worried about having the boys appear in not just one but two holiday plays, but so far it was working out okay. We’d made sure they knew that any decline in their school grades or the performance of their household chores could result in their understudies taking over the roles. And I was hearing a lot fewer “how many days till Christmas?” questions. Multiple renditions of “How many days till the Christmas pageant?” and “How many days till A Christmas Carol opens?” probably took up the slack, but somehow the variety made it all less annoying.

  Satisfied that the younger Waterstons were behaving at least as well as their castmates, I slipped out of the sanctuary, quickly donned my winter coat, and escaped from Trinity before anyone spotted me and tried to recruit me for any of the man
y volunteer projects I knew were going begging.

  The whirring of dozens of camera shutters greeted me when I stepped out of the church door, as if I were a celebrity being stalked by paparazzi. It wasn’t about me, of course. Trinity Episcopal, with its glossy bright-red door and elegant gray stone walls, was beautiful in any season. In its Christmas finery, with candles in all the windows, wreaths on all the doors, and fairy lights covering all the shrubbery, it was truly magical. And some of the tourists liked to have a human figure in their pictures for scale, so I paused for a couple of moments on the doorstep, buttoning my coat, before stepping aside for the convenience of the other tourists who preferred their church photos unsullied by random strangers.

  As I walked I glanced at the sky, which was both leaden gray and curiously luminous. What I’d learned from the old timers to call a snow sky. I checked the weather app on my phone—yes, we were still getting two to six inches of snow, starting sometime this afternoon and continuing through the night.

  “Two to six inches,” I muttered. “You’d think this close to the start they could be a little more precise.”

  Ah, well. It wasn’t happening yet, and with any luck I could be safe at home before it got bad. Or if the roads became impassable during rehearsal and I ended up snowbound at the theater, at least Michael and the boys would all be with me.

  I set out toward the drama building. My path didn’t lie through the town square, thank goodness, but tourists still filled the sidewalks and spilled over into Church Street, making the already congested traffic even worse. Tourists swarmed in and out of the nearby shops and restaurants—fewer shops, and thus fewer tourists than in the very heart of town, but still, it was a mob scene. This close to the town square, all the shops, houses, and—of course—churches had jumped onto the decorating bandwagon with a vengeance. Life-sized nativity scenes vied with life-sized Santa Clauses, with or without sleighs and the requisite quota of reindeer, and the occasional house sporting blue and silver candles and Stars of David. If there was a roof or a bit of shrubbery in this part of town not trimmed with some kind of lights I couldn’t spot it, and everyone seemed to have used the overcast sky as an excuse to turn them on early. I had to keep reminding myselef that these days nearly all the tree lights, fairy lights, and candles were LEDs, so my neighbors’ electrical bills weren’t going to send them into bankruptcy and they weren’t likely to burn their houses down. Whole forests had died to provide enough evergreen for the wreaths and garlands festooning almost every house, and there probably wasn’t a scrap of tinsel left within several hundred miles.

  And copies of the poster for A Christmas Carol were in windows everywhere, in all of the shops and a good many of the private houses. From a distance, the poster’s festive metallic red, green, and gold colors added nicely to the glittering, tinseled look the whole town had taken on. And when you looked more closely—as I did while waiting for the driver of a car laden with confused tourists to make up her mind which way to turn and clear the crosswalk—well, Haver did look the part of Scrooge, scowling and shaking his walking stick theatrically at the world. His top hat and high-collared black coat fit in nicely with the festival’s Victorian theme.

  I didn’t so much mind that “starring Malcolm Haver!” was in letters almost as big as the play’s title—the town and the college were paying him good money to headline the show, so we might as well get our money’s worth out of him. I’d have made “directed by Michael Waterston” a little larger, but maybe that was just me. I’d also have made the figure of Tiny Tim, in the background, a little less tiny, so someone other than his adoring mother could recognize him. Fortunately my son Jamie was charmed to be on the poster at all, and used it to lord over Josh—who was playing what Michael and I were careful to point out was an equally important role, that of Scrooge as a boy. For several weeks now, their lives had been wall-to-wall rehearsals.

  The only part of the poster I didn’t much like right now was the line that gave the show’s run dates. Opening night was only two days away. And Haver was still stumbling through his blocking and mangling his lines—when he showed up at all.

  I mentally wished Michael well in his mission to Finance.

  I noticed that a trio of female tourists had clustered around the poster in the window of the bakery.

  “Malcolm Haver!” one exclaimed. “Isn’t that fabulous?”

  Chapter 3

  Okay, I admit it. When I heard the tourist lady call Haver “fabulous,” I inched a little closer so I could eavesdrop.

  “Malcolm Haver!” the second lady in the group said. “Wonderful. Oh, Judy, let’s go!” she added, turning to the silent third member of their trio.

  “Malcolm Haver?” Judy repeated, with an air of slight bafflement.

  “Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know who he is,” the first one chided her.

  At first glance, the three women were almost indistinguishable. They were all three in their fifties or sixties, well-wrapped against the cold in coats, hats, gloves, and woolly mufflers, and they each carried several red, green, and gold CHRISTMAS IN CAERPHILLY shopping bags in each hand. But the first two wore the starry-eyed expression of true enthusiasts as they studied Haver’s picture. As I watched, Judy’s expression shifted from incomprehension to mild distaste.

  “Isn’t he one of those people who used to be on Hollywood Squares?” she asked.

  “He was Sir Tristan on Dauntless Crusader!” Fabulous explained.

  “And didn’t you see him in the remake of Now and Forever?” Wonderful asked.

  “What incredible memories both of you have,” Judy murmured.

  I was starting to like Judy. And to feel a little sorry for her, finding herself saddled with two overzealous Haver fans. Haver’s movie career had been unspectacular and mostly over by the time I was in grade school. His role as the roguish, cynical, yet ultimately goodhearted Sir Tristan was his main claim to fame, but although it lived on as late-night filler on some of the more obscure cable channels, Dauntless Crusader’s prime-time run had ended a good thirty-five years ago.

  Which made Fabulous and Wonderful—like Robyn’s mother—just the right age to be avid Haver fans, I realized.

  “The show doesn’t even open till the day after tomorrow,” Judy pointed out. “And we only have our rooms in the bed-and-breakfast for tonight.”

  “We could ask to stay on,” Fabulous suggested.

  “We could,” Judy said. “But if you remember, I had to make our reservations six months in advance.”

  Her two companions drooped with disappointment.

  “It’s okay,” Wonderful said, perking up again. “We could come back down sometime during the show’s run. It’s only a three-hour drive.”

  “A much more practical idea,” Judy said. And one, her face suggested, that they could carry out without her involvement. “Let’s go back to drop this latest batch of bags. We can check to see if there’s any possibility of keeping the rooms.”

  They hoisted the shopping bags they’d set down while studying the poster and headed down a side street. I turned the other way and continued toward the theater.

  I avoided the front entrance—although I noted in passing that two students were assiduously polishing the large brass letters that spelled out THE DR. J. MONTGOMERY BLAKE DRAMATIC ARTS BUILDING. Good; Grandfather was in town for the play, and nothing irked him more than seeing his name tarnished. Nearby were mounds of evergreen and reels of red ribbon, so I gathered that when they’d finished the polishing job they’d move on to decorating the façade. Doubtless Grandfather would like that, too, as long as they didn’t obscure any of the letters in his name.

  I continued around the side to the stage entrance—and then stopped. Damn. The Fan was there. Sometimes known as the Avid Fan or even the Rabid Fan. She’d been stalking Haver ever since he’d arrived in town. The one time someone had made the mistake of letting her in the building, she’d dogged Haver’s steps until he finally lost his temper and stormed
out of rehearsal for the rest of the day. Now we were under orders to keep her out.

  Maybe it would be easier to go in the front way.

  But no. I was Meg, the assistant director. Even Haver behaved in my presence, or at least misbehaved more furtively and on a smaller scale. I could cope with the Rabid Fan.

  I strode up to the stage door. She turned and brightened when she saw me.

  “Meg! How’s it going?” Her tone could easily have convinced any passerby that we were devoted friends.

  “Fine.” I paused outside the door and studied her smiling, eager face for a few moments.

  She was older than me—fifties? Maybe sixties—and slightly plump in face and form. I wasn’t sure whether her glasses were very old or whether they were some sort of retro fashion that didn’t appeal to me—they were blue with silver glitter, made in what I thought of as a cat’s-eye shape, with the outside of the frame sweeping up into points. Her features were regular, rather ordinary but pleasant. She was wearing a red-and-green sweater festooned with misshapen metallic gold reindeer that would be a strong contender in Caerphilly’s annual Ugly Christmas Sweater Contest, but I knew better than to suggest this, in case she’d knitted it herself. At first glance, she was largely indistinguishable from the hundreds of tourists flocking the streets with their shopping bags and steaming cups of coffee and hot chocolate.

  But I’d seen the glitter in her eye whenever Haver came into view.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Why do you keep hanging around here at the stage door? You know we’re not going to let you go inside, or even talk to Haver. You know seeing you upsets him. So why do it?”

  She was already shaking her head before I finished.