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“Exactly so. Anyway, I’m meeting Mavis for lunch, so I won’t keep you. Remember, go by the church after two o’clock.”
“Probably closer to three,” I told her. “I have some housework to do after this.”
“Even better. Have a wonderful day!”
She headed out, still beaming, and I could see why. For her, the mystery had been solved.
In my private opinion, though, it was just beginning.
* * *
The inventory took me until a little past one o’clock. Since I’d put food in Archie’s bowl before I headed downstairs, he couldn’t grumble too much about me eating my own lunch almost an hour later than usual, although he was none too thrilled about the dusting and vacuuming that ensued afterward…or the reason for it.
“Why on earth are you celebrating on a Tuesday night?” he groused from the safety of the middle sofa cushion. His voice was pitched louder than usual so it could carry over the sound of the vacuum cleaner. And yes, it was a fancy red Miele unit that had a much lower decibel level than the old Shark I’d left behind in Los Angeles, but still.
“Because that’s when Yule falls this year,” I said, refusing to get annoyed by his complaining. After nearly ten months of sharing my apartment with the cursed cat, I was pretty much used to the way he could find fault with almost anything. “For the millionth time, I don’t celebrate Christmas.”
“And yet you have a Christmas tree,” he pointed out.
“Christmas trees are universal,” I replied. “I had Jewish friends in L.A. who had them every year.”
Archie let out a small hiss at my comment, his usual signal that he was irritated with me but couldn’t come up with a satisfactory rejoinder.
“Anyway,” I went on, “it’s not like I’m throwing a big party. It’ll just be Calvin and Hazel and Chuck and me.”
“That’s enough for a small apartment,” he said, which was true enough. I’d briefly contemplated throwing some kind of bash at the store to thank everyone for a successful first year in Globe, but then had decided I was probably getting over-ambitious. With as busy as the store had been these past few weeks, the last thing I needed on my plate was a big event that required a lot of planning.
“It’ll be very quiet,” I assured him. “And I’ll be making roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, so you know you’ll be getting all kinds of fun table scraps.”
This promise seemed to mollify him, because his whiskers twitched and he stretched out all his limbs before curling up into a small ball, a signal to me that he wasn’t going to bother arguing any further.
Thank the Goddess.
With the apartment properly cleaned, I threw on my coat and headed downstairs. St. Ignatius was located only a few blocks away, so I didn’t see the point in driving. The day was cold, however, with lowering gray clouds and a chill wind from the east, and so I got my gloves out of the pocket of my coat and pulled them on. I’d started checking the forecasts, hoping for snow, but so far, all we had was the kind of cold I’d never experienced in Southern California, which sort of irritated me. If it was going to be this chilly, then we might as well have a snowstorm so it would really feel like Christmas.
When I got to the church, I could tell that Brett had already come and gone, because a couple of cameras that hadn’t been there before were now mounted discreetly under the eaves. The parking lot was completely empty. Father Estevez lived a couple of blocks up the hill, and I knew he always walked down to the church no matter what the weather was like, so I supposed he could have still been hanging around somewhere.
However, while I couldn’t say he exactly approved of me, I also knew he wasn’t openly hostile. If he happened to be in his office in the rectory and somehow spied what I was doing, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
The street itself was also quiet and empty. St. Ignatius sat on a corner lot that straddled the end of Globe’s commercial district — such as it was — and a modest residential neighborhood, and it looked to me as though everyone in the area had something else to occupy themselves on this gloomy Sunday afternoon.
I approached the crèche. It had been set up on the lawn that bordered the walkway which led up to the church steps, under the shelter of a bare oak tree and a couple of flanking pines. Just as Josie had said, the little figure of baby Jesus now lay safely in its cradle.
Up close, I could see the rich grain of the wood from which it had been carved, something warm and dark, still smooth even after decades of being displayed here throughout the month of December.
But not completely smooth, according to Josie.
I pulled off my gloves and reached out so I could lift the figure from its cradle. For some reason, I’d thought it would be heavier than this, but it felt curiously lightweight in my hands, with about the same heft as a bag of apples or something similar.
Although I’d been hoping I would be blessed with a mental image of who had taken the figure as soon as I lifted it, that didn’t seem to be the case. I didn’t see anything.
Well, sometimes these things didn’t come to me at once.
I turned the figure over in my hands and noted the scratches Josie had mentioned — almost like deep gouges, as if someone had been trying to pry the thing open.
Which didn’t make any sense, except….
I ran my hands over the back of the carved baby, hoping with all my might that no one would come driving by and see the town’s resident witch caressing the wooden figure of baby Jesus. The Goddess only knows what some looky-loo would have made of that spectacle.
