CRIMINAL CHRISTMAS: A Set of 8 Holiday Suspense Stories, page 22
Pops was the ultimate good sport.
Just then, the girls thundered down the stairs arguing about something and Jamey raised his eyebrows at Pops. “Here comes trouble.” They both smiled.
Jade kissed her father and grandfather on the cheek while Jasmine let Harry back in the house, both of them still arguing about a video game.
Distraction usually worked. “Girls,” Jamey said. “Gavin wants us to come to dinner tonight. Your cousins got the new Xbox.” Jamey knew he’d get enthusiasm from that idea. They loved both their cousins and playing Xbox.
Jade poured herself a mug of milk and added a few dribbles of coffee. “I call front seat.”
Jasmine shot her a look. “You always sit in the front seat.”
“Pops will sit in the front seat. Or me,” Jamey added.
Pops stopped dishing kibble into Harry’s bowl and looked over. “I have a dinner invitation from Amy and Max tonight. I told her tonight was good because you three were going out.”
“You not coming to Uncle Gav’s?” Jade sounded disappointed.
“I got another invitation. I’m very popular,” Pops winked at her.
“I guess we can do without Pops for one dinner, girls.” Jamey nodded to his daughters. There was no reason why Pops couldn’t go to his neighbors’ for dinner. No reason at all.
****
Tina woke from a dream in which she and Pops were wandering through an old house. It wasn’t a proph. She and Pops had been inside a decrepit mansion knowing there was a ghost somewhere. They desperately needed to find something but Tina wasn’t sure what it was. The rooms went on forever, all doors were closed, and as they went through them to search the rooms, Pops felt increasingly ill. They’d gone through at least ten doors, and were now looking for a way out, when her father-in-law doubled over in pain and told her to go on without him. And that’s when she woke.
Kai was babbling from his crib in his room down the hall, so she swung her legs out of bed. Obi was ahead of her, trotting towards his favorite new companion. “Hello, Little Man!” she said when she saw her son. Did this feeling of inloveness ever get old? She picked up Kai and kissed him in the chubby folds of his neck. He scrunched his neck and giggled. In one month he’d be one year old. It was hard to believe. Soon he’d say words. Already, he was walking. Wearing baby jeans. He looked so different in clothes meant for people, not babies, like when he and his Daddy wore matching jeans and Hawaiian shirts.
She changed Kai’s diaper and took him to the kitchen to make a bottle, thinking about her dream with Pops. Although it was not a proph, nor was it a remembrance, she now doubted it was a normal. Something told her to watch Pops--the same feeling she’d had when dreaming of Pepper’s car accident. Like a suggestion. Or a warning. There was always something new in this crazy life as a dreamer.
While she got ready for work, Kai hung on to the bed’s edge and tried to pull Obi’s tail. The dog had planted himself just far enough away in the center to stay out of reach. “Good idea, Obi,” Tina said pulling on her board shorts and a tank top. She thought about the dream and how Jamey had told her his intuition seemed diminished in Carnation and by the time Kai and Obi were loaded in her truck, she was sure of one thing. She had to book a flight today. Pops was in danger and she needed to get to Carnation just in case she was the only one who could really help Pops.
There was no hanging around Maui for four more days after that dream. For hours, Tina worked the shop worrying about her father-in-law. By noon, she’d bundled up Kai, thrown everything into a suitcase and had called Pepper to take care of Obi. “I have to leave early,” she’d said.
After the day of worrying, it was a great relief to touch down in Washington State just after the sky got dark.
Jamey picked them up curbside at the airport, and on the way to Carnation, explained the precautions he’d taken to catch whoever was bothering Pops. Tina listened with a sense of heaviness in her heart. Usually her husband would have relied on his psychic abilities to have this mystery solved by now. Why couldn’t Jamey figure out who was doing this? When they pulled in to Pops’ driveway, she detected something.
“See those motion detector lights there?” Jamey parked the truck by the Christmas tree in the yard. “And, I’ve got two video cameras set up, one on the front porch, and one on the back porch.”
It was disconcerting to have Jamey rely on conventional methods. Tina slipped out of Pops truck and as soon as her feet touched the snowy ground, a clear sense that Pops was being targeted invaded her sensibilities. Whoever was doing this, had motive. It wasn’t a joke. She turned to Jamey who was lifting Kai from the car seat.
“I just got a sense of what’s happening to Pops.” She shivered, not sure whether it was with the cold, or the knowledge that someone out there wanted to do harm to her father-in-law.
“What is it?”
“Someone is seriously trying to scare Pops.” Tina was now glad she’d come four days early if Jamey couldn’t feel this.
“Are you sure?” The look on his face was one she’d seen before, like when they’d gone after a child abductor.
“Very sure. Someone means Pops harm.”
“Who?” He waited.
“No idea.”
“Try the tree.” With Kai in his arms, he led her over to the propped up Christmas tree.
Tina put her hands on the branches and took a deep breath. “This is very strange. I feel like something is blocking me, keeping me from digging deeper.” She glanced at Jamey. “Someone is trying to scare Pops. That’s all I get.”
Inside the house, it was the same thing. Tina had a clear indication that someone was out for Pops. With evil intentions. “Here too,” she said to Jamey. Has anyone been at the front door recently?”
“Just the neighbors, Max and Amy. And, we had a letter taped to the door a few days ago.” Jamey looked down the hall and whispered. “Don’t talk about this in front of Pops. Not yet. I know my dad, and he’ll think we’re being over-protective. I don’t want to burden him with this right now. Not after all that’s happened this fall.”
It had been a rough time for Pops when a few months earlier he’d had the shock of his life and he’d been coping well, considering. Tina had been worried about her father-in-law’s health after that adjustment and agreed to not bother him with these details, not just yet.
Once hugs and kisses were exchanged and the kettle was boiling for tea, Tina set to making everyone lunch. She’d baked scones just for Pops and with those on the table, she went searching the fridge for lunch fixings. After slicing some Havarti and Gouda, she cut apples and pears and found ham on a plate covered in clear wrap.
“Jamey tells me that you had dinner at your neighbors’ house last night. Was that enjoyable?” Tina picked up the plate of ham and immediately released her grip, like she’d been burned. “Oh shoot, look what I’ve done?” The plate had broken into pieces, and chips of china and ham now lay scattered on the linoleum.
Pops looked crestfallen. “Don’t worry, Kiddo.” His words didn’t match the look on his face.
Jamey picked up Kai who was toddling around the kitchen, mostly chasing Harry. Jamey looked at her strangely. He knew something was up.
Tina gingerly picked up the chunk of meat, carried it to the counter and threw it into the sink. “I’m so sorry, Pops. Now I’ve gone and ruined the beautiful ham you cooked.”
“No. It was left over from my dinner at Max and Amy’s last night. They sent me home with some because I said it was so delicious. I’m not worried about the ham, but I’ll have to replace Amy’s plate.”
Tina shot a look to Jamey. “I’ll try to find a match for the plate.” She picked up shards of china and deposited them into the trash, then swept the floor around the fridge. “It looked like a good ham. Did you eat your fill and then some?” She looked at Pops, trying desperately to hide the fact that she sensed something strange about the ham. Maybe it had been left out too long on the counter and had gone bad.
But when she picked up the ham to throw it away, she felt more than a ham that had turned bad. There was something about the meat that seemed tainted. She had to tell her husband, see if he wanted to tell Pops the real reason she’d dropped the ham.
Chapter 4
Tina pulled Jamey aside and told him she suspected the ham had turned bad. “I got a feeling something wasn’t right.
“Maybe Pops should go to the doctor,” he said.
They found Pops upstairs in the hall and told him that Tina suspected the ham wasn’t fit to eat.
“Do you feel okay today Pops?” Jamey asked.
“I feel fine,” he said, looking at Tina. “It was just a hunch, right?”
She nodded. Her hunch was based on nothing scientific, only intuition, and even though that was good enough for her and Jamey, it didn’t look like Pops was convinced.
“I’m not sure ham can go bad that quickly, but throw the thing out. Maybe it was in room temperature too long.” Pops pushed past them, annoyed, like he’d been insulted. When they found him in the downstairs hall getting ready to take Harry outside for a walk, he seemed more concerned they get a replacement plate for Amy.
So, while his father was out in the snow, Jamey got on the phone and set to work locating another plate with tiny roses around the edge.
The ham was put in a plastic sealed bag in the garage. Tina wasn’t sure why she didn’t just throw it out. Jamey’s intuition had always been much stronger than hers, and if he didn’t get anything from the meat, she wondered if she was just acting paranoid right now. Unless, Jamey really didn’t have access to his intuition, at all. With the horrible dream of Pops’ house burning and Jamey not intuiting, she had to listen to the warning signals. Just in case.
Tina couldn’t think clearly, with exhaustion pulling her down. She and Kai had been up early, too early, to catch the flight from Maui, and even though she was concerned about Pops, she had to get some shut eye, then tackle this conundrum.
When Pops, Jamey and the twins left for Redmond Town Center to buy the located plate, Tina took Kai upstairs for a nap. Kai fell asleep immediately and Tina lay on Jamey’s bed looking around the room. Long ago, her husband had shared this bedroom with his brother Gavin, but since then had claimed the room for himself. He’d come and gone from Pops’ house many times in the last twenty years of adulthood, first after his marriage to Carrie, then, before and after his deployment to Afghanistan. Now he used the room when he came to visit his father and his daughters.
Tina got out of the bed, went to the front window and realized she couldn’t see across the snowy field to the old Clancy house. There were no windows on that side of the house. Max and Amy were the third owners since the days when the Clancy’s lived there in the seventies. On the way from the airport Jamey had told her that Mrs. Clancy jumped off the widow’s walk above the third floor when her baby died. Jamey was five-years-old at the time and the tragedy kept him from playing again at the house with the Clancy kids. The father and two children eventually moved away. Jamey hadn’t been inside since. “But I remember a hidden room on the third floor,” he’d said.
Tina went downstairs, put on her coat and continued outside to stare at the tall house in the distance. The two properties were separated by a field of grassy stalks poking through the snow. Pops had a fence on his side so she assumed the field wasn’t his.
She thought about going over there, pretending to be friendly, and trying to get a reading on the neighbors, but Jamey asked her to stay in the house, not try anything until he got back. She couldn’t leave Kai.
Back inside the warmth of Pops’ house, she returned to Jamey’s bedroom and lay down on the bed again. She had to get some sleep or the evening would be torturous trying to stay awake with Kai. The house was perfectly quiet. Jamey and Pops had taken Jade and Jasmine with the promise of doing some last minute Christmas shopping. Tina had waved them off, recommending they take the girls for dinner. Jamey had looked worried at the door and she reminded him that she was the one with the kick-ass psychic powers and could take care of herself.
“I like to worry about you, Wifey,” he’d said.
She eventually fell into a dreamless sleep and when she woke two hours later, Kai was still snoring in the crib Pops had borrowed from a friend of Carrie’s. Tina went downstairs and called her mother, who was only forty minutes away by car. Tomorrow, she and Kai would drive to Mercer Island, near downtown Seattle, and have lunch with her mother.
Since her dad’s death last year, Tina’s relationship with her mother had undergone a needed transformation. The only good thing that came from her father’s passing was that her feelings towards her stoic mother had softened, and Elizabeth Greene had become more like a real mother, not the impenetrable battle axe who’d raised her. When her mom asked how Pops was doing these days, Tina told her a smattering of what was going on. “He’s been sick. Did you know?”
“Yes, he told me last time we talked. He cancelled our dinner two weeks ago because he didn’t feel right.” Her mother sounded concerned. “This flu of his has been on and off for weeks. I told him he needed to go to the doctor, but he won’t. The old coot,” she added fondly.
“I sensed a ham he’d been eating was off. It was left over from Amy’s dinner last night.”
There was silence on Elizabeth’s end.
“She’s here a lot.”
“I noticed that too,” Elizabeth said.
“Really Mom? How often?”
“I don’t know, but Pops is quite enamored with her.”
If Tina didn’t know her mother better, she might think she was jealous. “Pops got letters supposedly written by the neighbors that told him to bring in his trash cans and turn off his Christmas lights. And he’s getting prank phone calls.”
“No one would intentionally want to harm Pops, would they?” Elizabeth sounded flustered.
“I wouldn’t think so, but I’d like to talk to you about this tomorrow when I come for lunch.”
It was a dark afternoon, the sky heavy with clouds almost bursting with snow. Tina sat in one of the old-style kitchen chairs at Pops’ table in the semi-darkness talking with her mother about Kai, and his recent milestones.
The motion detector light flicked on in the backyard and Tina got up to see if a fox or deer was roaming across the backyard. She loved the wildlife out here. But when she looked out the back window, what she saw instead was the shadow of a person in a big coat running around the side of the house. “Hang on, Mom.” She ran down the hall to the front door. Nothing. Who was out there in the late afternoon gloom? Tina opened the door and went out on the porch to peek around the corner. “Hello?” The chimney was large enough to hide someone. She went inside, locked both doors and cursed the fact there was no window on this side of the house.
Hopefully the trespasser was caught on Jamey’s newly installed video camera.
****
Jamey stood in the rain with the plate in bubble wrap and inside a bag that was tucked carefully under his arm. Pops was happy again. He’d seemed so troubled by the broken plate that Jamey wondered how neighborly he actually thought these people were. “It could have been an heirloom,” Pops had said on the way in. “Or a wedding present.”
“True.” Jamey was sympathetic, but it was almost like Pops thought Tina broke the plate on purpose. He’d barely spoken to his daughter-in-law since.
Jade and Jasmine had ducked into a girl shop to find presents for each other that Jamey guessed would either be earrings, purses with the latest boy band’s photo, or hair accessories. Any way you looked at it, he and Pops didn’t belong in the store and were much happier standing outside in Redmond’s cold rain listening to a school choir sing Little Drummer Boy on the shopping center’s stage.
The place was packed with Christmas shoppers. It was that last frantic week before the big day of present giving and last-minute shoppers were panicking. Jade and Jaz were excited to have cash and it had been hard to keep them on track to buy for others, not themselves. When they’d finally found gifts at the toy store for their siblings, Harley, Mango, and Wyatt, the girls figured they were done. But Pops pointed out that they had four parents to buy for, Grandma Liz, and one very important grandfather who’d be disappointed on Christmas morning if his granddaughters didn’t get him at least a stick of gum. Jamey thought his dad seemed back to normal, no longer sluggish or mad about Tina’s suggestion the ham had gone bad or worried about replacing the plate.
Once the girls came out of their favorite store, Jamey suggested they go to Macy’s where they could shop for the men in their lives. “Let’s go upstairs. You can hit the men’s department while Pops and I wander around the kitchen section.”
“How do you know we don’t want to buy you a toaster or something,” Jade asked.
“That’s true,” Pops said. “I’m a hell of a chef, and I might need a new garlic press. Hint, hint.”
At the top of the escalator Pops stopped at a display of products to make Christmas cookies. He picked up a box set, complete with recipes and cookie cutters. “Amy would like this,” he said. “Her last batch didn’t come out right and she worried she put too much almond extract in.” He picked up the gift and chuckled. “They did taste a little off but of course, I wouldn’t tell her that.”
Jamey tried to dissuade Pops from spending his money on the cookie set. “Christmas will be over in a week. I doubt she’ll need it between now and then.”
“Oh you don’t know Amy. She’ll probably make another five or six batches between now and Christmas.” He took the box and headed to the checkout desk. “I know that wife of yours is jealous, but that’s silly just because someone else is making me food. I have enough appetite for all of you,” he joked.
Jamey smiled even though he had a strange feeling when Pops said the cookies tasted off. While watching him pay for the gift with his retirement money, Jamey had to bite back the words that would burst his Dad’s bubble. It was a fact that his father had an inexplicable fondness for Amy. Maybe she was simply a bad cook.
