“Mrs. Graham?” Sammy appeared at the head of the stairway that led down to the garage. “The chief would like to see you now.”

Chapter 9

“I’m ready,” Alice said. “Dying to get it over with so I can pump Meg for all the details she won’t tell me!”

Bless her for that—it might reduce the chief’s annoyance, if he heard I’d been talking to a witness he hadn’t yet interviewed.

I decided it might be wiser for me to stick to talking to people who’d already been debriefed. So I followed them down the stairs and through the kitchen, intending to see what Mother and Eustace were up to.

They were standing together in the archway that separated Eustace’s breakfast nook from Mother’s great room. As I watched, they looked into the great room. Then the breakfast nook. Then the great room again.

“No,” he said. “You’re right.”

“Too abrupt,” Mother said.

“I could change the paint color?”

“No, it’s not that,” Mother said. “Maybe if we mass a few poinsettias on either side of the archway.”

They studied the archway some more.

“No,” they said simultaneously.

I’d seen this before. They could keep up these conferences for longer that I’d ever imagined possible. Sometimes the conference erupted into painting and furniture moving, and anyone foolish enough to be nearby would get drafted into the action and could kiss the rest of her day good-bye.

“Oh, hello, Meg,” Eustace said, spotting me. “What do you think of—”

“Hang on,” I said. “I’ve got to check on—on Linda.”

I’d almost called her Our Lady of Chintz in front of someone other than Mother. I needed to be careful. Linda. Linda. Linda.

I went back through the kitchen and into the dining room.

Linda was standing in her room, looking frazzled. She was batting uselessly at the branches of spruce that protruded into her room as if she’d caught them trying to sneak farther in and dump needles on her fabric. One of them had snagged her shapeless brown woolen tunic.

“This tree is impossible,” she said, turning to me. “The branches take up half the room.”

Half was an exaggeration, but the branches did stick out rather far.

“We need to move the tree,” she said.

I’d been afraid of that. Tomás and Mateo were nearly finished redecorating Mother’s side of the tree. We couldn’t ask them to move it again.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I think the tree adds just the right touch. We only need a little less of it in the room. I’ll have Randall get someone to prune it back.”

I stepped into the hall and called. Randall didn’t answer, so I left a voice mail—one that wouldn’t offend Linda, in case she was eavesdropping.

Then I stepped back into the dining room. Linda had turned her back on the invading vegetation and was sitting on one of her chintz-covered dining room chairs, threading red and gold beads and green holly leaves onto a string to make a garland.

“So,” I said. “Apart from the branches, how’s it going?”

“Fine.” She looked up and gave me a tight little smile. The kind of smile that’s supposed to say “Don’t worry, everything’s fine,” but makes you pretty sure everything isn’t. “Just need to add those few Christmassy touches,” she went on. “I’m essentially finished with the room itself.”

For my taste, she should have declared it finished a week ago. It was a big dining room, but now it felt small and claustrophobic. There were too many things here. Too much going on. Too many small bits of furniture. Too many precisely arranged groups of small prints or decorative plates on the wall. Too many whatnots containing too many delicate tchotchkes. And above all, too many different chintz prints. One for the wallpaper. A similar but not-quite-matching one for the curtains. A third print for the dining room chair seats. Yet another for the occasional chair in the corner, not to mention another for the skirt covering the side table. Even the rug had a busy pattern all too reminiscent of chintz. I knew the effect she was aiming for—she’d told me the first time I met her.

“I like that cluttered, homey, English country look,” she’d said. “Where it doesn’t look as if everything was bought as a set, all matchy-matchy. Where the family just accumulates objects it loves, over the centuries, and doesn’t care whether they’re supposed to go together.”

I had liked the sound of that. I’d expected something low-key and comfortable. Unfortunately, her room looked more as if she’d found a sale on chintz remnants and handed them over to a crew of blind seamstresses.

Of course, I made no pretense of understanding decorating trends, so for all I knew this could be the coming thing. Total sensory overload as a decorating strategy. Maybe I’d be seeing rooms like this in all of Mother’s decorating magazines, if I ever bothered reading them.

Then again, there was hope. Mother hated Linda’s room, I reminded myself, as I gazed at the offending spruce branches.

Linda herself didn’t match the room at all. She was an attractive woman of forty-five or fifty, and I could tell her skirt and sweater were not cheap, but the overall effect was drab and lugubrious.

But she was pleasant and undemanding and went about her decorating business without any of the angst and drama that seemed part of the process for so many of the other designers, so on the whole, I liked her.

A stack of cardboard boxes sat in one corner, all with the words “Christmas ornaments” scrawled on them in one place or another.

“Oh, dear,” I said. “Did you have to bring in your own personal Christmas decorations to cope with the tree?”

“Yes, but that’s not a problem,” she said. “I’m not going to do a tree this year anyway. There’s just me, and I won’t be home enough to really enjoy it. The tree here’s a godsend. I was worried that the room wasn’t turning out Christmassy enough.”

Not Christmassy enough? She’d already looped red, green, and gold garlands, like the one she was making, along the crown molding all around the room near the ceiling. Tucked sheaves of holly and ivy behind every picture. Covered the table with a red-and-green holly print table runner. Scattered china elves and angels along the runner. And placed both wreaths and battery-operated candles in the two windows. To me, the as-yet undecorated branches of the Christmas tree poking through the archway were the one soothing, peaceful, truly beautiful element in the room.

“Don’t work yourself into a frazzle,” I said. “We women are all too prone to do that around Christmas. Take care of yourself.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” she said. But I was startled to see that there were tears in her eyes. She bowed her head over her work, clearly not wanting me to see the tears.

Part of me wanted to stay and find out why a few kind words reduced her to tears. But another part of me—probably a better part—wanted to give her some privacy.

Maybe she was even crying over Clay’s death. I didn’t think they’d known each other that well. I couldn’t recall any run-ins between them.

Maybe not knowing him that well made it easier to feel sad over his death. She could be the one person in the house who had no negative feelings about Clay, and could react to it simply as the death of another human being.

“Got to run,” I said. “Call me if you need anything.”

She nodded but didn’t raise her head as I slipped out of the room.

I went back into the hall. It looked as if the chief was about to finish up with Alice. Sarah was sitting on the stairs with her chin in her hand, watching Ivy paint. Overnight the blue streak in Sarah’s hair had morphed into a rich purple that matched her sweater. I decided it was an improvement.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “The chief’s got your room.”

“He’s only got a couple of people left to interview,” she said. “And he did point out that this was faster for us than having to go down to the station. I’m good with it.”