Page 2 of The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year
“You know, it’s a miracle there aren’t more murders at Christmas.”
“Oh, here we go,” Deborah mumbled, but Maggie never took her eyes off Cardboard Ethan.
“Think about it. People who hate each other crammed together in hot rooms with too much alcohol. Scissors and strangulation devices lying around.”
“Strangulation devices?”
“You know... Lights. Tinsel. I bet you could do some real damage with garland.” In spite of everything, Maggie felt herself perk up at the possibilities. “Even mistletoe is poisonous.”
“To dogs,” Deborah said.
“In large enough quantities,everyone’sa dog,” Maggie pointed out as she slowly turned to face the woman beside her.
Deborah Klein was five-foot-one inches of power. Gray hair. Chanel suit. And eyes that had seen it all during her forty-nine-year rise from the mail room to the most feared woman in publishing.
“I say all this becauseIam going to murderyou.”
“Who? Me?” Deborah brought one tiny hand to her chest.
“Yes, you!It’s just lunch, Maggie.You need to get out of the house, Maggie.We need to talk marketing, Maggie.”
“One, I don’t sound like that.”
“You sound exactly like that.”
“And two—”
“This is a party, Deborah. There is a tree made out of paperbacks right over there. Half the marketing department is singing karaoke. And...” Maggie trailed off as she realized—“Lance VanZant is literally wearing a T-shirt that looks like a tuxedo.”
Deborah waved the words away. “Lance VanZant wrote one half-decent book nine years ago. No one cares about Lance VanZant.”
“What about him?” Maggie pointed to Cardboard Ethan and Deborah had the good taste to look guilty.
“I’m told it’s not exactly to scale.”
But then a thought occurredto Maggie. “Ooh. Can I have it when this is over? I’ve been wanting to learn how to throw knives.”
Deborah’s mouth was opening, slowly, like she couldn’t figure out what to say when a woman walked past, chiming, “Merry Christmas, Maggie!”
She was new and Maggie thought her name was Jen. It was probably Jen. Statistically speaking, one-third of the women who worked in publishing were named Jen, but Maggie wasn’t thinking very clearly because the room was too loud after a year of constant silence. It was too crowded. And Maggie, who had never loved crowds or parties to begin with, felt her hands start shaking.
“Let’s get you something to eat.” Deborah had a hand on Maggie’s elbow. She could feel it through her Joan Wilder coat, puffy and too hot in the crowded room. She’d always thought it was an excellent coat to disappear inside, but Deborah was still there, whispering near her ear. “I’m sorry. It’s been a year and I thought... Stay five minutes. For me. I’m sorry I tricked you into coming, but there really is something we need to talk about.”
Maggie was starting to waver. She’d already spent fifty bucks on train fare and taxis and lost a whole day of work, so it might not be that bad. After all, she didn’t have to gotothe party. She just had to walkthroughthe party, and she could do that. She’d been walking every day for a year—for almost thirty years. She could make it to Deborah’s corner office.
But then the elevator dinged. The doors slid open and a deep voice boomed, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” First, he spotted the cutout. “Well, who’s this handsome fella?” Then he spotted her. “Hey! It’s good to see you, Marcie!”
And Maggie started looking for some tinsel.
Chapter Two
Maggie hadn’t always hated Christmas. There had been a time when she’d loved the lights and the presents and the trees. She knew all the words to at least thirty different Christmas carols and used to sing them in July. She had a sweatshirt with a reindeer on it that she always wore to school on the Monday after Thanksgiving. (Did the nose light up? Yes, yes it did. Did she wear it that way? Absolutely.)
Twelve-year-old Maggie had baked sugar cookies and organized Secret Santas and terrorized her mother with multipart questions like (1)Why don’t we have a big family?and (2)Why don’t we spend Christmas with our big (fictional) family?and (3)Can this fictional gathering of this fictional family take place in a location that always has snow?
But Maggie was an only child born late in life to only children. Maggie didn’t even have grandparents, and it was almost always too warm for snow in Texas.
So the problem wasn’t that Maggie hated Christmas; the problem was that Christmas hated Maggie. Every terrible thing that had ever happened to her had occurred with a backdrop of carols and lights, and, eventually, Maggie had no choice but to start taking it personally.
