Page 9 of No Business Like Snow Business

He only gave a snort and turned off the main street, heading away from downtown. I didn’t press the point. I probably oozed ‘smarmy rich asshole’ the same way this town oozed Christmas spirit.

“So did you tell Mary why we want to talk to her?” I asked.

“Tell Mary?” Harvey kept his hands perfectly at ten and two as he drove. “She doesn’t know we’re coming.”

“You didn’t ask if we could visit?”

“And give her time to get her story in order? No, no. We need the element of surprise.”

“Okaaay, but we don’tactuallysuspect her of foul play, right? We just want to talk to her about the hat.”

“We’ll see,” Harvey said, without looking away from the road. “We’ll see.”

Maybe I should have been concerned about just what Harvey’s formative Trixie Belden fetish and contemporary true crime obsession had made him into, but by the time we pulled up to Mary Kilmartin’s little farmhouse, I was getting into the spirit of the thing. I’d about thirty-percent convinced myself Mary knew where Freddy’s body was buried and would stop at nothing to keep her secrets.

Except that Mary wassupernice and not at all fazed by us showing up unannounced, and within about thirty seconds I found myself wishing she was my mom. She even had sugar cookies fresh out of the oven, leading me to wonder if she constantly kept a tray of them cooling on the stove just in case visitors dropped in.

I quickly learned she would never have time for that level of domesticity: she was a county prosecutor, and this fact threw me a little, because up to that point I hadn’t envisioned Christmas Falls having any crime. Unless having too much holiday spirit was a crime, and I was inclined to believe it was.

We started out asking the questions, but at some point the tables turned and she was basically interrogating us. Nicely, of course. While she served us cookies. But still, it was clear she knew how to take and keep control of a conversation. “Oh, I remember that cotton candy machine!” she said with a laugh when we mentioned the photograph in the museum. “It was always getting gummed up. We pulled so much mangled sugar fluff out of that thing and ate it so it wouldn’t go to waste, I’m surprised none of us have diabetes. And those silly caps. Rachel was the only one who could pull it off; I looked like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Elf on the Shelf.”

After sharing that she’d started with Blitzen’s in 1990 but that Carol Drummer had been there in ’89 and might be more helpful to us, she asked, “How did you know the cap was Blitzen’s? You know Comfort & Joy’s Mattress Company had almost the same caps as part of their uniforms back then.”

“The…the mattress store had Christmas-themed uniforms?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” Harvey said. “I’ve seen the pictures.”

“Like, all year round, or just for the festival?”

“All year,” Mary supplied dryly.

This town really needed to pull its dick out of Christmas’s ass before someone got hurt.

“Well,” Harvey said, “I noticed the tilt of the brim on Blitzen’s caps was a little sharper. Plus, Blitzen’s caps were spruce green, and Comfort & Joy’s were more sage.”

Okay, Harvey wasn’t kidding about Trixie having prepared him well for sleuthing.

“What’s your interest in finding these boys?” Mary tapped the photograph of Freddy and his boyfriend.

Harvey glanced at me. My heart swooped, forcing me to ask myself some hard-hitting questions about why looking at him made me feel like I was about to start blushing and mumbling in a way I hadn’t since psyching myself up to ask Aimee Gockstetter to the Albrecht Preparatory Academy’s winter formal. Which I had done. And then, emboldened, had offered to sneak into her dorm room after the dance. She’d asked if I was sure I wanted to do that, and I’d mumbled something vaguely affirmative, and she’d looked me up and down and told me college would be good for me.

It had been, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was college had been so good for me that I now knew myself well enough to realize I wanted to sneak in through Harvey’s bedroom window at his grandmother’s house and do all the things I would never have been able to do for Aimee Gockstetter.

Mary stared at me oddly as I cleared my throat and said, “Uh, he’s…family. The one on the left. But the one on the right...well, we know he worked at the boat hire place because of the cap. We thought if we could find him, we might find my uncle.”

“So you’ve already tried Bob Hanks?”

“Bob…?” I was still thinking about Harvey’s eyes. Specifically how they were the color of snow in twilight. And if I was having thoughts like that, I needed help.

“Bob Hanks.” Mary took a sip from one of three mugs of cocoa that had somehow appeared during the course of our conversation. “He owned Blitzen’s. Seems like you’d have more luck talking to the man who owned the place than talking to former seasonal workers who may or may have been there when this guy was.”

It was a fair point. My ego smarted a bit.

“But does Bob Hanks have cookies?” Harvey lifted his brows as he shoved another one in his mouth.

Mary grinned. “I doubt it.”

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