Page 25 of Always Murder (The Last Picks #9)

“I thought it was a family Christmas pageant,” I said as we shuffled into the crowded sanctuary of the Hastings Rock Community Church.

I’d never been to the church before. (I know, I know: big surprise.) The aesthetic seemed to land somewhere between Blood of the Lamb and laserdisc: crimson carpet and white wood and these intense purple floodlights that made me think I’d suddenly become able to see ultraviolet light. There was also a dash of Grandmother’s Living Room—I was ninety percent sure my grandma had owned the same candlesticks, and I’d definitely seen those golden tassels before. It smelled like overheated children and winter woolens and musty upholstery, and the hub of voices made me wish I’d brought along the kind of hearing protection that airport ground staff have to wear.

It looked like the whole town had turned out. Tessa and her daughter waved to us from one of the front pews. Bliss and Althea Wilson were defiantly saving seats with their coats. Oscar Ratcliff was there, and he immediately locked eyes on us, obviously sniffing around for fresh gossip after the earlier excitement that day. And up at the front—I wasn’t sure if it was called a stage or an altar or, um, a narthex?—a few pieces of setting suggested an inn, a stable, and the little town of Bethlehem. Christine was scurrying around in her Christmas Eve best, making final adjustments to the grand production.

“It’s not,” Fox said. The theme of their outfit seemed to be Mrs. Claus, Zeppelin Pilot , and that’s all I’ll say—except that it involved a gratuitous amount of synthetic fur trim. A bit unnecessarily, they added, “Obviously.”

“I thought it was going to be in their living room,” I said.

“Well, it’s not,” Fox said. “Obviously.”

“I know it’s not—” I began.

“There are some seats over there,” Bobby said.

Which was Bobby’s way of telling both of us to knock it off.

We squeezed onto the end of a pew near the front. They seemed like prime seats, and I wondered why they’d been left open until I noticed who was sitting in front of us. And next to us. And behind us.

The Archer clan.

Here’s the thing: as individuals, every member of the Archer clan was lovely. (Except Cosmo, who was literally an ankle-biter—he was three years old, he was entirely made of teeth, and once he’d latched on to me in the Keel Haul, it had taken the jaws of life to pry him free.) But as a horde—er, quiver?—which was the collective noun for a group of Archers, they were…a lot. Sybil, who was six, had come to the Nativity pageant in a plastic astronaut’s helmet, and she was currently screaming as loud as she could inside it. Rhodes, who was ten, had taken Zaya’s firetruck and was smashing it repeatedly against the back of the pew. Zaya was wailing. Imogen was climbing on Mr. Archer, who looked like he’d fallen asleep, and Mrs. Archer was unscrewing the top off a flask.

“I changed my mind,” Fox said, and then they flinched as Rhodes smashed the firetruck down about five inches from their head. “I’m just going to nip out into the lobby.”

“Don’t be such a baby—” I began.

The rest of it was lost in a shout as Cosmo chomped down.

Bobby gave Fox—and me —identically disapproving looks. He plucked Cosmo off me and handed him over the seat to Grandma Archer. He took the firetruck from Rhodes, returned it to Zaya, and said, “Don’t make me get Miss Julie.”

I had no idea who Miss Julie was, but the blood whooshed out of Rhodes’s face.

Without missing a beat, Bobby flipped open the visor on Sybil’s astronaut mask and said, “There’s no air in space.”

Sybil stopped screaming.

I was busy checking for blood loss and pinched nerves and pulverized ankle bones, but I couldn’t help it. I stopped what I was doing and stared.

Bobby was looking at something on his phone, but eventually he noticed. “What?”

“Are you a mage?”

“What?”

“Did you cast a spell?”

Apparently, Bobby knew by now to wait me out.

“Charm Person is only first level,” I said, “but it’s super effective.”

For someone wearing a fur aviator’s cap, Fox had zero compunctions about coughing, “Nerd.”

“I’m serious, Bobby. You can tell me. I won’t breathe a word.”

“Lies,” Fox said. “He’d tell everyone as soon as he could. Just like how he told everyone about the time you kissed him and there was a full moon and he felt a tingle .”

“I never said tingle! I’m a grown man. I don’t tingle!”

“That sounds like a medical problem.”

At that point, Bobby went back to his phone.

A bit out of breath, Indira slid into the seat we’d saved for her.

“Everything all right?” Fox asked.

“Last-minute costume emergency,” Indira said. “All set.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You knew about this too?”

“Knew about what?”

“He thought this was the family pageant they did in their living room,” Fox explained.

“What about last year?” I asked. “Why didn’t I hear about this last year?”

“Millie wasn’t in the pageant last year,” Indira said.

“And you were busy ‘solving’ a murder,” Fox said. And they even made the air quotes with their fingers.

“I was busy solving a murder today!” I protested.

And, of course, that was when the entire audience—uh, congregation?—went silent.

I mean it: all of them, all at once. Even the Archer clan.

My words rang out in the stillness.

And then Mr. Cheek, who was very much a Bobby Mai fan and very much not a Dashiell Dawson Dane fan, leaned over to Mr. Ratcliff and stage-whispered, “I told you he’d find a way to bring it up.”

“That’s not—” I tried. “I didn’t—I was—”

“Everyone knows what you were doing,” Christine snapped into the microphone. She was standing on the stage now, hand on her hip, staring at me like she was having fond memories of the time she’d spanked Ryan and Paul in public. “If it’s not too much to ask, maybe you could let someone else have the spotlight for five seconds.”

“But—”

With the clipped pronunciation of someone at the end of her rope, she said, “We are trying to have an uplifting holiday experience.”

I sank down into my seat.

Christine waited a few seconds to make her point. I got the impression that I might have helped Millie and saved Paul and uncovered a murderer, but none of it was going to make up for ruining Angeline’s chance to marry a lawyer.

Then Christine broke into a cheery smile. “Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Hastings Rock Community Church’s annual nativity pageant. I’m Christine Naught, and I want to thank you all for coming. I have one announcement, and then we’ll begin: due to a family emergency, we’ve had a slight change in tonight’s cast.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“What?” Bobby asked.

I was surprised to find myself grinning so fiercely my cheeks hurt. “She did it. Millie did it.”

“Did what?”

I shook my head and patted his arm.

Christine made a few more welcome remarks. There was a prayer. And then music began—a flute, soft and plaintive. A mellow, NPR-quality voice came over the speakers, saying, “In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken…”

I tuned it out. I wasn’t here for the story.

I was here for Millie.

“—so Joseph went to Bethlehem with Mary—”

Millie stepped onto the stage a moment later, and she looked radiant: a blue dress, her blond hair miraculously tamed for once, a smile glowing on her face. My eyes stung. It was such a silly thing; I knew that. It was a church Christmas pageant. And it wasn’t going to change anything with Millie’s mom.

But maybe it already had, at least a little. And it meant so much to Millie. And she looked so happy that I had to blink rapidly to keep tears from falling. Bobby rubbed my back, and then his arm settled across my shoulders.

Millie’s victory hadn’t been complete, though; instead of Keme, her Joseph was a young man with an improbably long neck and ill-fitting brown robes. My brain had just long enough to wonder if this was the costume emergency Indira had been sorting out when Keme stepped onto the stage.

He was the donkey. Floppy ears. A shapeless gray sack of a costume. Black shoes that were supposed to be hooves. His face was set to murderous, and he stared out at the audience with an unmistakable challenge in his eyes.

Indira whispered in my ear, “His tail kept falling off.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Oh my God . I will love you for the rest of my life.”

And then I started to cry.

“What’s wrong?” Bobby whispered.

I shook my head and wiped my cheeks.

“Dash, he’s fine. He’ll be grumpy about it, but he’s okay.”

“I know,” I said through the tears. “I know.”

Because I couldn’t explain why I was crying, not completely. Sure, a lot of it was because of the emotional and physical exhaustion of the last few days, culminating in that life-or-death shootout only a few hours before. But it was also because of what tonight meant, for Keme to do this for her in front of the whole town. And what it meant for Keme to do it even after everything that had passed between him and Christine. And how much he and Millie loved each other, and how hard they were trying to make it work, and the fact that I loved them, and I wanted everything to be perfect for them, and it made me so happy to see them being happy. I wanted to laugh, of course—I mean, a part of me wished I could laugh—but when I thought about Keme’s long-suffering glower as Indira kept trying to fix his tail, a confusingly happy sob tore its way out of me.

“Dash—” Bobby whispered.

“He’s fine.” Fox patted my arm. “He’s all right.” And they kept patting my arm, and I realized their eyes were wet too.

It helped, a little, that when Mary and Joseph and the donkey crossed the stage toward Bethlehem, Christine whispered furiously from the wings, “Donkeys don’t stomp!”

My God, if you could have seen Keme’s face.

The pageant was an absolute train wreck, if you hadn’t guessed that already. Christine’s approach to casting clearly favored friends and family over acting talent. Joseph was a mumbler. One of the shepherds tripped over his own crook. A camel kicked a Wise Man. Angeline wasn’t in evidence, but Kassandra and David played the innkeeper and his wife, and I have to be honest: I had no idea someone could turn the role of innkeeper’s wife into something that required parental guidance for children under the age of thirteen. Bobby even flipped Sybil’s astronaut visor down again.

“Is David supposed to be wearing headphones?” I asked.

Fox rolled their eyes.

Indira ignored me.

Bobby took out a pen (my Deputy Bobby was always prepared) and wrote on the back of the program DAVITT.

“Oh my God!” I said. “Who names their child Davitt?”

Christine’s sharp—and lethal—“Be! Quiet!” echoed up from the stage.

Not that anybody was paying attention to me. Or, for that matter, to her. At that moment, Ryan and Paul, who had been cast as sheep, had apparently gotten into some kind of squabble and were now headbutting each other.

The star, of course, was Millie, who delivered her lines with an enormous smile and ear-shattering enthusiasm and almost immediately went off script and got into a tiff with one of the angels.

It was glorious. Christine looked like she was about to have a stroke.

At some point—right around when Millie told the angel she wasn’t going to flee to Egypt because she wasn’t going to let King Herod kill all those babies—I decided maybe I did have a religious side after all. And also that I wanted some popcorn. And would a soft drink be too much to ask?

That’s when I heard the voices behind me.

Three Barbara Bush types in sequined pants, sitting just past the Archer clan, were clucking their complaints to each other.

“Not very demure.”

“Too modern.”

“Who is she?”

I thought of how Millie had described her dream character: She’s tough and brave, and she doesn’t take crap from anybody. It made me smile because we all did it to some extent. We all wanted to read about the people we wished we could be. The people just a little better than who we really were. The people we were trying to become.

I couldn’t help myself. As Millie got a hold of the angel’s wing to give him a shake, I leaned back and pitched my voice to carry. “That,” I said, “is Jinx St. James.”