Free Wreck the Halls by Sarah Graves Page B

We stood rooted. The only sound was the breeze clickety-clicking in the frozen branches of the mountain ash tree in Faye Anne's yard.
    When the light went out we hurried to the butcher shop door. The key was still under the mat where I’d replaced it; the state guys hadn’t found it. I let us in and closed the door hurriedly behind us. If the door to the kitchen was still hooked, this errand was over.
    The door opened, the three of us tiptoeing in like cartoon burglars. “Okay, where is it?” Of course we couldn’t switch on any lights, but the streetlight shone in enough to show the shapes of the furniture, so we wouldn’t break our necks.
    The stove fire had gone out and the central heating hadbeen left on only enough to keep the pipes from freezing; it was cold as a tomb in here, the air faintly metallic smelling.
    Rank, actually; like meat that has begun spoiling, then gone into a cooler too late to keep it from being ruined. Suddenly I wished I were home where I could wash; my hands felt sticky again and my stomach did a slow, warning roll.
    “I don’t know,” Peter confessed. “Somewhere in the house. She's showed it to me, I’ve even read parts, but I don’t know where she keeps it.”
    “Oh, terrific. Anybody ever tell you you’re not one of the great minds of the century, Peter?” The sticky feeling faded. Right about then if I’d had a cleaver I’d have put him in that cooler.
    “Well, I’m sorry,” he said huffily, “but I thought you could help find it. You two are supposed to be good at that kind of thing. And if you don’t want to, why did you agree to come?”
    “Never mind,” I told him. My motives were none of his business. Simultaneously it occurred to me that Faye Anne hadn’t been the only one with a reason to kill Merle. If Peter really loved Faye Anne, or thought he did, he had one, too.
    “I didn’t know it was going to be a goose chase,” I said. In the windows, the dark outlines of leaves on Faye Anne's houseplants stretched like small groping hands. White frost traceries unfurled on the panes behind them. Ellie had gone to the front of the house where the streetlight was brighter.
    “Anyway, what were you saying about the method being funny?” I started opening cabinet drawers at random, looking for one that maybe Merle wouldn’t have gone into, so it would be safe for Faye Anne to tuck a diary in it.
    The room hadn’t been cleaned, but the carnage had occurred at the other end, mostly. And as my eyes adjusted to the gloom the large shapes and smaller items around me began clarifying, like a black-and-white photo negative comingup in developing solution. In the drawers: silverware, napkins, larger utensils. One held flashlights; I lingered over these but rejected the temptation. Someone going by outside would be bound to glimpse a light.
    “Let's say your hobby was indoor gardening,” Peter said. “And one of your specialties was pharmaceutical herbs. You know, like Saint-John's-wort, or echinacea.”
    I turned. Against the streetlit window he was a dark hulk, faceless. “Or digitalis,” I said. “Or wolfsbane. Or…”
    “Right.” He’d been thinking along the same lines we were. “Now let's say you’d decided to kill someone—”
    “Why use a knife?” I finished his question for him.
    The dark shape nodded. “Ugly, messy, and hard work. Also, likely to leave inconvenient evidence. You can wipe up blood, but there's some kind of special spray the police can use so it shows again, isn’t there? Makes it glow? I saw it,” he added somewhat unconvincingly, “on a TV cop show.”
    Not that I didn’t think he watched cop shows. It was just such an interestingly convenient piece of information for him to have retained, that's all.
    And anyway, the blood hadn’t gotten wiped up. “Luminol,” I said. I’d already given up on the diary. To find it we’d have to make a detailed search, which we couldn’t do in the dark.
    “Also benzidine, malachite