How the Finch Stole Christmas! Read online

  “Seeing me doesn’t upset him,” she said. “He was just having a bad day. I shouldn’t have bothered him when he was trying to focus on his role.”

  “And he shouldn’t have yelled at you just for wishing him a good morning.”

  “You don’t know how hard life is for creative people.”

  “I’m married to an actor, remember,” I said. “I know a lot about how hard life is for creative people. But by and large, no matter how hard it gets, most of them manage to behave decently and civilly toward their fellow human beings. And when they don’t they have the good grace to apologize.”

  “You just don’t understand a truly great actor like Malcolm,” she said.

  Only not-so-great ones like my husband? Clearly she didn’t understand how to avoid insulting and ticking off the very people who had the power to grant her access to her beloved Malcolm. Not that I was going to override Haver’s oft-stated wish to be left to work undisturbed, particularly by overeager fans.

  Though come to think of it, to hear him talk, you could almost believe he had to fight his way through hysterical packs of fans after every rehearsal. I’d run into a few other fans in town—people like the trio I’d seen today, who oohed and ahhed over the poster. But so far at the stage door the Rabid Fan was also the Lone Fan.

  “I should go in,” I said. “And before you ask again if you can come in and sit in the back of the theater, I’m afraid the last I heard, Mr. Haver was still adamant about not having any observers at rehearsal.”

  “I understand.” She looked as if I’d gut-punched her, but she was also doing her best to smile bravely and keep her chin up.

  I felt so sorry for her that I couldn’t resist throwing her a bone.

  “And if he changes his mind, we know where to find you.”

  She beamed as if I’d offered her a front-row seat for opening night.

  “Thank you!”

  “Are you staying near here?” I asked. “Because in case you haven’t heard, it’s going to start snowing this afternoon. If you have any kind of distance to go, you might want to start out before the roads get treacherous.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m at a very nice bed-and-breakfast not two minutes’ drive from here. And in case the roads get bad, I can walk—I wore my boots, just in case.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Just stay safe.”

  I used my key to unlock the door—keeping a close eye on her, in case a sudden irresistible impulse to barge into the theater overcame her—and went in.

  I relaxed a little when I heard the lock click shut behind me, and stood for a quiet moment, letting my eyes adjust to the semi-darkness backstage. Somewhere not too far away a radio played softly. A piano, a drum, and a smoky contralto singer were turning “Away in a Manger” into something that sounded more like a torch song.

  I pulled out my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe, flipped it open to today’s schedule, and glanced at my phone to check the time. Not quite noon. Rehearsal was supposed to start up again at two. At the moment, the various backstage crews were hard at work.

  “A little to the left,” came a voice from onstage. “A little more. That’s it.”

  Our tech director, fine-tuning some of the light settings. Probably making yet another attempt to focus the spotlights so they’d illuminate Haver properly during his grand repentance scene in the final act. It would help if from one day to the next Haver could remember to repent in even approximately the same part of the stage.

  “Looks fine from here,” said another voice, this time from what I would once have called the audience—though I was getting pretty good at calling it “the house.” Backstage, onstage, house, and front of house—the latter being the lobby and box office—those were the cardinal directions of the theater world.

  Off on the other side of the stage I could hear some hammering, which I hoped meant that the set crew were rebuilding the bit of scenery Haver had fallen through during last night’s rehearsal.

  “Okay, let’s take that from the top.” Gemma, the stage manager. Was rehearsal starting already? I stepped forward and saw that near the other side of the stage, the actors playing Mrs. Cratchit and her two oldest children were sitting in folding chairs, arranged in a semicircle that approximated the positions they’d take around the fireplace in the third-act set. Gemma was holding a script, and Bob Cratchit was hovering nearby. Mrs. Cratchit and the daughter were holding dish towels and pretending to sew. The son was miming leaning against the invisible fireplace. Then Mrs. Cratchit sighed and dropped her dish towel into her lap.

  “The color hurts my eyes.”

  Her daughter wiped her own eyes with her dish towel, and her son took a few steps and put a comforting hand on his mother’s shoulder.

  “They’re better now again. It makes them weak by candle-light; and I wouldn’t show weak eyes to your father when he comes home, for the world. It must be near his time.”

  “Past it rather. But I think he has walked a little slower than he used, these last few evenings, Mother.”

  “I have known him walk with—I have known him walk with Tiny Tim upon his shoulder, very fast indeed.”

  “And so have I. Often.”

  “But he was very light to carry, and … and … Line!”

  The Cratchit son was wearing very anachronistic hipster glasses, Mrs. Cratchit was nursing a Diet Coke, and all three were wearing jeans and sweaters, and yet for a few moments, until Mrs. Cratchit had forgotten her line, I’d been totally caught up in the scene of the family mourning the departed Tiny Tim.

  “‘But he was very light to carry,’” Gemma prompted. “‘And his father loved him so, that it was no trouble,—no trouble. And there is your father at the door.’”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Cratchit said. “Why do I always muff that line?”

  “Maybe because it’s my entrance cue.” Bob Cratchit sounded slightly irritated. “If you do it during performance, I’ll just barge in and you can deal with that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Let’s take it from ‘the color hurts my eyes,’” Gemma prompted.

  I slipped away quietly, before I got caught up in the play again. No time for that—I had a million things to do. Sometime this afternoon I needed to drop by the prop shop to see if they’d figured out what was wrong with the Ghost of Christmas Past’s torch, and if they’d managed to construct a fake Christmas goose that didn’t look as if it had mange. And I should drop by the lobby to make sure the Twelve Days of Christmas hadn’t gotten out of hand. In fact, I should do that first.

  “Much better,” I exclaimed when I stepped out into the lobby. The red-and-gold drums that represented the twelve drummers drumming were now suspended from the ceiling on the left side of the lobby, nicely balanced by the eleven red plaid bagpipes dangling in midair on the left. The life-sized mannequins dressed as lords a-leaping, ladies dancing, and maids a-milking along with the papier-mâché geese, swans, and golden rings had all been fastened to the walls, freeing up much-needed floor space for incoming audience members.

  Perhaps I should declare a victory for common sense and learn to live with the four cages of live birds—although together with the many brightly decorated live Christmas trees scattered about the lobby in red and gold ceramic pots, the birds took up at least half the available floor space. The three glossy black Crèvecoeur hens were rather festive looking, and the two turtledoves were adorable. I waved to Rose Noire, who had come in to feed the poultry and appeared to be having a long conversation in his own language with the partridge, who was sitting rather morosely under a potted pear tree much too small to bear his weight. Then I counted the calling (or collie) birds—here represented by Gouldian finches.

  “Grandfather’s been at it again,” I said. “He thinks we won’t notice if he sneaks in a couple more finches.”

  “How can you tell?” Rose Noire said. “There are so many of them.”

  “I have resorted to counting them,” I said.
“Last night when I left the theater there were twenty-seven. Now there are thirty-three—which is twenty-nine more than we should have for accuracy. This has got to stop.”

  “If he’s going to sneak in extra birds, I wish he’d bring in another partridge.” Rose Noire sighed and shook her head. “I think poor Keith is lonely.”

  “How can he possibly be lonely with so many other birds around?” I said. “More likely he’s suffering from the stress of having too many neighbors.”

  I heard a door open behind me and turned to see Grandfather, carrying a small cage containing two more Gouldian finches. He stopped when he saw me, and turned as if planning to sneak away.

  “No,” I said. “You are not bringing another finch into this lobby. In fact, you need to take away some of the ones that are already here. The canonical number is four calling birds, and you have more than eight times that number already.”

  “But I need someplace to put them,” Grandfather said. “Laurencio’s counting on me.”

  “Laurencio?” Not one of Grandfather’s usual co-conspirators.

  “Ruiz. My friend in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He warned me last week that they were closing in on the mastermind behind this smuggling ring, and when they catch him they might be seizing a lot more finches.”

  “And you’re finding homes for finches before they’re seized,” I said. “Isn’t that rather like counting unhatched chickens? Just sit tight. Caroline’s due home from her cruise in a couple of days—with any luck Laurencio won’t show up with the next installment of finches before then. Or if he does, you can put out a call for volunteers to foster them. But the way you’re going, by the time you really need their help, people will be as sick of finches as they are of zucchinis by the end of August.”

  Grandfather heaved a heavy sigh, as if disappointed in my cruel indifference to animal welfare, and strode out, carrying his cage of finches.

  “Thank goodness,” Rose Noire murmured. “They’re very pretty birds, but too much of even a good thing … still, I hate to complain to your grandfather—he seems so fond of the finches.”

  “He’s not fond of the finches,” I said. “He prefers fierce animals, and there’s nothing fierce about a finch. And he’s very scornful about their brightly colored plumage. It makes them much easier for predators to catch, since the only place where they’d blend in with the scenery would be a crayon factory.”

  “Then why is he so obsessed with them? It’s very … unsettling.” Rose Noire had come as close as I’d ever heard her come to criticizing Grandfather. Or anyone else, for that matter.

  “He wants to impress the Fish and Wildlife Service,” I said. “And help his friend Laurencio. ‘You’ve got more finches than you can possibly handle? No problem! I’ll take care of it.’”

  “I suppose that’s it.” She gazed thoughtfully at the finches for a few moments. “I’ll tell you who is obsessed with the finches—Mr. Haver. He was in here again reciting poetry to them. And badgering your grandfather about letting him buy one. He doesn’t seem to understand that they’re not Dr. Blake’s to sell. Is that why you had Grandfather put the locks on all the birds’ cages?”

  “That’s one reason,” I said. “There’s also the fact that for some reason Gouldian finches are currently in such high demand that bad guys can earn a lot of money smuggling them into the country. I pointed out to Grandfather that if he wasn’t going to keep them safely out at the zoo, at least he could lock the cages and make any would-be finch thieves work for their loot.”

  “That makes sense.” She took a deep breath and threw back her shoulders. “Well, those cages aren’t going to clean themselves.”

  I’d already made a note to myself to talk to Grandfather. I expanded it to include suggesting that if he was going to foist finches off on people, he could at least pay some of his staff to feed them and clean up after them.

  I could tackle that this evening. Right now I planned to drop by the costume shop. Malcolm Haver was supposed to be trying on the latest new and improved costumes. If he was there, he was under Mother’s eye, and I could relax until she had to leave for her meeting.

  Surely if he wasn’t there Mother would have sent out an alert by now. Unless he’d pleaded the need for a bathroom break and snuck out of the building again, leaving her tapping her feet impatiently but too polite to stick her head in to ask what was taking him so long.

  I headed for the costume shop.

  My immediate anxiety was eased even before I reached the shop door when I heard Mother’s voice, in the imperious tone that I’d learned as a child meant that I was treading on thin ice.

  “Do try not to writhe quite so much while we’re fitting you, Mr. Haver. I have rather a lot of pins in my hand, and Nadja is holding a particularly sharp pair of scissors.”

  Mother was on the case.

  Chapter 4

  “How much longer is this nonsense going to take?” Haver’s crisp enunciation reassured me that he was, at least for the moment, reasonably sober. Though his grouchy tone warned that he was probably in the throes of a hangover and might at any minute go in search of the hair of the dog.

  “A lot longer if you keep squirming,” Mother said.

  “‘I will be the pattern of all patience,’” Haver proclaimed. “‘I will say nothing!’”

  Probably a quote from Shakespeare, and it irked me that I didn’t know which play. But I resisted the temptation to pull out my phone and look it up. I had no time to play one-upmanship with Haver. I retreated to the far end of the hall, ducked into a storage room, and called Ekaterina Vorobyaninova, my contact at the Caerphilly Inn, where Haver was staying. Actually, Ekaterina preferred calling herself my mole. Ekaterina’s childhood had been indelibly shaped by her father’s claim to have been one of the CIA’s most important contacts in Soviet Russia. She’d started at the Inn as a maid to help pay her way through graduate school, and had now risen to assistant manager of the ritzy five-star hotel. But she still had a sentimental fondness for anything that smacked of secrecy and subterfuge, which was why I’d been able to talk her into aiding and abetting my efforts to keep Haver sober.

  “I have completed my morning search of the subject’s room,” she reported. “No alcoholic beverages confiscated. Only an empty vodka bottle.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “Swedish vodka.” Her normally faint accent deepened slightly, so the words came out more like “Svedish wodka,” and her tone clearly indicated by rejecting classic Stolichnaya in favor of Scandinavian swill, Haver had sunk his reputation to new depths in her eyes.

  “However, we have an interesting new development,” she went on.

  I braced myself. Ekaterina’s idea of an interesting development often coincided with my definition of a hideous disaster.

  “He appears to have thrown the bottle away in the brown paper bag in which it was purchased,” she said. “There is a sales receipt.”

  “That’s great! Maybe we can figure out where he bought it, or who bought it for him.”

  “Where, certainly—the Clay County ABC store. But unfortunately, whoever bought it paid cash.”

  Okay, not as helpful as it might have been. There was no love lost between Caerphilly and neighboring Clay County. Caerphilly might be small, quaint, rural, strapped for cash, and off the beaten path, but by comparison, Clay County made us seem like a teeming metropolis at the crossroads of culture and commerce. And the denizens of Clay County seemed fond of blaming their woes on us.

  “Somehow I don’t think we’re going to have much luck talking whoever runs the Clay County ABC store into telling us who’s buying vodka for Haver,” I said. “And it might be well-nigh impossible for Stanley to stake out the place.”

  “They know him in Clay County?”

  “Even if they don’t, they all know each other. Any stranger who shows up will automatically be suspect, even before he starts asking nosy questions.”

  “I still think the best tactic is to take away
Haver’s rental car,” Ekaterina said. “I could arrange for a staff member to drive him to and from the theater. Or any other place you actually want to let him go.”

  “It could come to that,” I said. “I’ll keep you posted. Merry Christmas to you.”

  “And to you,” she said, following the words with a string of sibilant polysyllabic sounds that I deduced must be Russian for “Merry Christmas.”

  As I ended the call, I glanced at my phone and saw that Stanley Denton had tried to reach me while I’d been talking to Ekaterina. I was about to call him back when I heard Haver shouting.

  “What the hell is this? Are you trying to strangle me?”

  Probably a good thing to see what was going on. So I hurried down the hall to the costume shop.

  I found Haver striding up and down the middle of the room, half in and half out of a starched white Victorian shirt, uttering a stream of semi-coherent abuse liberally salted with unprintable words. Nadja, Mother’s chief costume acolyte, had flattened herself against one of the walls and was watching him wide-eyed. Mother was nowhere to be seen. Trust Haver to cause trouble the minute her back was turned.

  “Never seen a more ridiculous piece of garbage,” Haver was snarling. He tugged at the shirt again and managed to get it over his head and off both arms, but the cuffs were still buttoned tight, so both hands were trapped in the bundle of white cloth. He pulled again, and both Nadja and I winced at the resulting ripping sound.

  “Be careful, Mr. Haver.” Nadja took a timid step forward. “If you’d just let me unbutton the cuffs for you—”

  “Leave me alone!” Haver flailed at her with his fabric-bound hands, and she jumped back with a small shriek, tripped over something, and fell. Fortunately she landed in a box of fabric scraps. Haver didn’t even seem to notice what he’d done.

  “STOP THIS IMMEDIATELY!” I shouted.

  Haver and Nadja both froze. Actually, so did I, because it was astonishing how much like Mother I sounded. And for that matter, how well I’d absorbed Michael’s lessons on using my diaphragm for greater volume.