Never Mess with Mistletoe Read online

  “You’re so competitive.”

  “Winner gets a twenty-minute backrub.”

  Leigh smirked. “Deal.”

  Chapter 5

  The Koslow living room was already a hive of activity when Leigh walked through the front door at 7:16AM the next morning. Her father and her Aunt Lydie were busily carrying boxes both up and down the stairs while Frances and another Floribunda pulled items out of some boxes and packed them away in others.

  “Do come over here, Leigh, we need you!” Frances ordered. Leigh weaved through the boxes on the floor toward where her mother stood next to Virginia, a woman in her mid seventies whom Leigh had known forever and whom she had always unfortunately associated with the adjective “horse faced.” The term was somewhat less apt now that Virginia’s wild head of chestnut hair had thinned and turned to gray, but her jutting jaw, prominent brow, and bushy eyebrows still fit the image. Not that Virginia’s appearance was objectionable — her unusual face was actually quite appealing in a charismatic sort of way. What made Virginia objectionable, aside from the fact that she was a hopeless gossip, was the fact that she was forever pestering both friends and acquaintances with intrusive personal questions.

  “Look at these decorations,” Frances instructed Leigh, holding up a half dozen plastic toy figurines of Dalmatian puppies playing with ribbons and packages. “You think these are from the seventies?”

  Leigh shook her head. “No. Those came from McDonalds.” She looked deeper into the box. It was full of similar offerings. “All these things came from kids’ meals at fast-food places,” she explained. “That whole fad didn’t start until the eighties, at the earliest.”

  Virginia sighed. “Well, I’ll swear, Frances, I thought Angie played with them when she was a girl. I guess I’m remembering wrong. They must have been the grandchildren’s.” She dropped the toys back into the cardboard box, which judging by its markings had once held cases of whiskey. Having heard plenty about the escapades of Virginia’s husband, Leigh was not surprised.

  “That’s all right,” Frances declared as she sealed the box back up. She picked up a sharpie marker and squeaked out a series of precise letters across the lid. REJECTED.

  “Well, what about these, then?” Virginia asked, pulling over another box and opening its lid. “I know they’re from the seventies. Angie and I did all the cross-stitching before she left for— Oh, my. Oh, dear. This is terrible.”

  Leigh leaned over to take a look for herself. The mess of jumbled fabric inside had probably once been a very nice set of placemats and napkins. But judging from the jagged hole on the lower corner of the box, the pile of fluff that had replaced a good part of its contents, and the abundance of scattered brown pellets throughout, it had long since been repurposed as a mouse nest.

  “Well, that’s that, then,” Frances said decisively, reclosing the lid and taping it shut. She put an extra piece of tape over the hole on the lower corner, then called out to Leigh’s father. “Randall, could you take these two boxes back to Virginia’s car, please? And bring in the tree from her trunk? We’re ready for it, now.”

  “Oh, yes,” Virginia said happily. “At least we saved that!”

  Randall Koslow, VMD, walked over and picked up the boxes. He nodded a wordless greeting to Leigh, but the expression on his face spoke volumes. Thank God you’re here, because if I had to stay in the house with all these women the rest of the day I’d lose my ever-loving mind.

  No problem, Dad, Leigh’s own expression answered.

  “Leigh, darling,” Virginia began, her attention refocused as soon as the boxes were out of sight. “Have you been having any more of that gall bladder trouble your mother was telling us about?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Leigh replied as politely as she could fake. The gall bladder incident had been nine years ago, but Virginia never forgot a juicy bit of medical information. And you couldn’t avoid direct questions from her either — the woman simply repeated them, using more detail each time. The only way to handle Virginia was to give as short an answer as possible and move the hell on. “How are you and Harry doing these days?”

  “Oh, well Harry just did the radiation implant for his prostate, you know,” she said with enthusiasm. “We thought about the surgery, but we decided to go with the implant because…”

  The rest of Virginia’s answer flitted through Leigh’s brain without impact as she studied the room around her. Frances had been very busy indeed since yesterday afternoon. Apparently she had gone about the entire house removing any items or decorations from the walls that did not appear authentic to the seventies. Those must have been in the boxes that Randall and Lydie had been carrying up to the attic. Leigh recognized a few of the boxes coming down as being the Koslows’ own family Christmas decorations.

  She hoped there were more Christmas decorations in those boxes than she remembered, because with the family’s personal pictures gone from the walls, along with virtually every other knickknack that had been added to Frances’s collection since the early 1980s, the house currently looked rather bare. And most of the boxes on the floor looked like they had been opened and “rejected” already.

  Leigh moved to help Randall bring in the tree, and the two of them carried the long box between them and sat it down in the middle of the room. Frances eagerly popped open the lid.

  “See what I told you!” Virginia cried with delight. “It’s in perfect condition!”

  Leigh looked down to see the disassembled parts of a shiny aluminum Christmas tree. The center trunk was white metal, while each of the branches was a perfectly straight rod, covered like a bristle brush with shimmering “needles” of bright pink.

  “Doesn’t that take you back?” Virginia cooed.

  “It’s perfect!” Frances exclaimed. She turned to Leigh. “Here, dear. You and Virginia can start setting this up in the corner. We’ve no time to lose!”

  “I’m off to the clinic,” Leigh’s father said mildly, so mildly Leigh suspected he was hoping that no one would hear him.

  “So soon!” Frances said with a shriek, whirling around. “But the attic! We’ve got—”

  “It’s all taken care of,” Lydie interrupted, removing her work gloves as she walked down the last few steps. “Let him go, Frances. We’re good.”

  Frances hesitated.

  Randall disappeared.

  Lydie looked down into the box and immediately handed Leigh her gloves. “Here. You’ll need these.”

  “Lord, yes!” Virginia proclaimed. “The times I drew blood trying to put ornaments on this darned thing! It’s like giving your fingertips a biopsy!”

  Leigh put on the gloves. She couldn’t remember ever working with a tree quite like this one, although she’d seen pictures of them. The tree she’d grown up with had been artificial also, but it was green and lifelike. Hadn’t that been in the seventies?

  She propped up the center rod in its stand, and Virginia began to hand her the limbs — very carefully. “So you think you’re over the gall bladder issues, then?” Virginia inquired.

  “Definitely. Do you remember when you got this tree?”

  “No. And how is your little one? She’s had it so rough, poor thing. I thought they’d never let her out of the neonatal intensive care unit. Is she doing better?”

  Leigh jammed a branch in its hole on the trunk. The tip of it was indeed sharp. How did kids not poke their eyes out on these things? “Allison will turn twelve tomorrow,” she answered, wishing she could hurry up without hurting somebody.

  “Oh my,” Virginia said grimly. “What an age. Has she started her monthlies yet?”

  Leigh was saved by the doorbell. She looked up hopefully as Frances ushered in another Floribunda, but although almost any distraction would have been welcome at that moment, the arrival of Lucille Busby was an arguable exception. The arrival of Lucille Busby was unpleasant under any circumstances.

  “Lucille, dear, come on in,” Frances said gamely, holding open the door and gestur
ing for the older woman to move directly to the couch.

  “Well, I’m sure as hell not standing out on your porch all the damn day!” Lucille squawked, shuffling forward with her walker. Leigh watched the woman’s slow progress with surprise, then wondered at that reaction. She supposed that subconsciously, she had always viewed Lucille as eerily immortal. Lucille was the oldest of the Floribundas, and she had been complaining about some ailment or other — and predicting her own demise in increasingly macabre detail — for as long as Leigh had known her. And yet the woman had persisted in torturing and depressing those around her for decades without ever showing the slightest sign of age-related deterioration. Until now.

  Lucille stood a good foot shorter than Leigh remembered as she slouched over her walker and shuffled across the carpet. Her back was hunched, her hands were shaky, and a tube ran from her nose to a portable oxygen tank. She wheezed with every breath and her complexion was sickly pale.

  “Hurry up, idiot!” Lucille rasped to the space behind her. “What kind of lazy bones can’t keep up with the likes of me, I ask you?”

  A short, plumpish woman who looked like she was somewhere in her fifties hustled in the front door and rushed to Lucille’s side. She was dressed in scrubs like a medical assistant, but she didn’t wear a nametag or carry any medical gear. Her short, graying brown hair was bedraggled, she wore large out-of-style glasses, and she appeared extremely nervous.

  Lucille turned around to sit on the couch, and the assistant clumsily helped her maneuver into position with the walker.

  “Ouch!” Lucille squawked. “If you’re going to kill me, woman, the least you can do is suffocate me in my sleep. Not break my bones while I’m standing!”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Busby,” the assistant squeaked.

  “Leigh,” Frances said smoothly, pretending as she always had that Lucille spoke and acted like a normal person, “you remember Lucille. And this is her personal assistant, Bridget.”

  Leigh and Bridget exchanged nods, but Lucille merely glared at Leigh, as she did most people. Leigh could never fathom why Lucille chose to be a part of the garden club, given that she appeared to detest everyone in it. Then again, it was equally unfathomable why the other members put up with her. Lucille had loomed large as a specter of negativity even in Leigh’s childhood; her earliest memories of the woman were of conflating her with Dr. Seuss’s sour kangaroo. And that was before Lucille got really cranky.

  “I sent you a wedding present,” Lucille said fiercely, staring at Leigh through cold blue eyes. “Never got a thank-you note.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Lucille, not that again!” Frances rebuked. “We’ve been through this before. Leigh sent the note. It got lost in the mail. Now, this is serious, women! We have to focus!” She clapped her hands, and all the women, including Leigh, snapped to attention. Frances had always been irked by Lucille’s now nearly fourteen-year-old lament over the missing thank-you note, but Leigh had never heard her mother shut the old witch down so succinctly. Usually the standard, repeated accusations and denials went on for at least five minutes.

  Go, Mom!

  “Did you bring any decorations from your house?” Frances asked, looking from Lucille to Bridget.

  “I sent this brainless numbskull up to the attic for them,” Lucille replied, gesturing to Bridget. “But she said she couldn’t find any old stuff. I don’t know. Maybe she’s blind. But I’m sure as hell not going to go crawling around up there. I’ll die soon enough in my own bed without having to be dragged down feet first from the rafters with cobwebs in my hair!”

  The assistant lowered her voice and spoke to Frances. “There’s hardly anything left in that attic. Her son’s been going through it for a while now — I think he’s selling stuff online.”

  Frances’s perfect poise gave way a little. Her shoulders sagged. “Oh dear. But I thought…” She took a seat herself. “Well, I do hope the others have more luck.”

  Noticing that Lydie had wisely slipped out of the room at some point, Leigh turned back to the Christmas tree and stuck in another branch. Risking bloodshed on a mechanical task was one thing, but engaging socially with three Floribundas at once was beyond her call of duty.

  “You can’t use that!” Lucille sputtered.

  Leigh looked over to see Lucille’s reptile eyes staring at the growing Christmas tree.

  “Why ever not?” Virginia said resentfully. “It’s vintage!”

  Lucille sniffed. “Vintage sixties, maybe.”

  “We used it in the seventies!” Virginia argued.

  Lucille shook her head stubbornly. “You may have still had it in the seventies, but if you put it up, you were as out of fashion as a poodle skirt! Don’t you remember the cartoon? With the fat-headed little boy and the snarky dog?”

  The women looked at each blankly for a moment.

  “Oh,” Frances said finally. “You mean Peanuts? The Christmas show with Charlie Brown?”

  Lucille pointed a crooked finger. “That’s the one. Where the boy wraps a blanket around some pathetic little twig and everybody starts singing and what all. Don’t you remember how that show made fun of trees like this? Pretty much said flat out that they were part of everything that was wrong with Christmas!”

  “Oh, dear,” Virginia moaned, sinking into a chair. “That’s right. I’d forgotten that.”

  Lucille nodded smugly. “It got so you were embarrassed to have an aluminum tree in your house. Everybody wanted real trees.”

  Frances stood up again. “But when was that, exactly?”

  Leigh took off a glove, pulled out her phone, and looked it up. “A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired in 1965,” she reported.

  Frances sat back down. Her eyes were getting the glassy look that made Leigh’s heart skip.

  “Mom, it’s okay,” Leigh said quickly. “We still have the tree we had when I was a kid up in the attic. What’s wrong with that one? It’s definitely vintage seventies, even if it’s not so different from the ones you buy today.”

  “Well,” Frances said uncertainly, “I suppose if we used our old ornaments and you decorate it like you remember when you were little, it would be authentic.”

  “Oh, but green trees are so mundane!” Virginia opined. “Can’t we use the pretty pink one anyway?”

  “They were out of fashion I tell you!” Lucille huffed, beating her walker on the floor for emphasis. “I will not allow us to be the laughingstock of the regional organization!”

  Leigh tried to tune out the bickering as she quietly deconstructed and repacked the offending tree. She had no doubt who would win the argument. Anyone meeting Lucille for the first time might attribute her crustiness to dementia, assuming she’d lost her normal ability to self-edit. But Leigh knew better. Lucille might have declined physically since the last time Leigh saw her, but mentally she was as sharp — and ready to draw blood — as ever.

  The Floribundas were still arguing when Leigh finished the task and silently excused herself to the kitchen. Lydie was sitting at the table with a tiny light bulb in her hand, meticulously switching it out for every other bulb on a long string of multicolored tree lights. Leigh dropped into the chair next to her. She spied another string of lights on the floor that were tangled into a ball and pulled it into her lap. “Mom’s getting nervous.”

  Lydie nodded. “The house itself is in fine shape, and there won’t be any problem with the refreshments. But they’re definitely short on decorations.”

  Leigh glanced at her watch. “Has Mom been checking her blood pressure? Do you know?”

  “I checked it,” Lydie replied. “It’s not bad. But it’s early yet.”

  The sense of foreboding that had plagued her yesterday hit Leigh again with full force. “Aunt Lydie,” she asked in a hushed tone, “what happened at your sixteenth birthday party?”

  Lydie’s wrists dropped down on the table with a thud. “Shhh!” she ordered, throwing a glance over her shoulder towards the doorway. “You didn’t say
anything about that to your mother, did you?”

  Leigh was taken aback. She looked into the eyes of her ordinarily mild-mannered aunt and found them ablaze. “Um… no,” she answered. “Why?”

  “Don’t you breathe a word of it!” Lydie insisted sharply. Then she softened her tone and leaned closer. “I know that Mason put his foot in his mouth yesterday, but you’ll just have to forget he said anything. Believe me, now is not the time to bring up old ghosts. Later, after all this is over with, we’ll talk. But for the rest of the day, mum’s the word. All right?”

  Leigh didn’t have a chance to respond. Someone was tapping on the back door. She looked up to see another of the Floribundas, Anna Marie, balancing a limp-looking cardboard box over one hip. Leigh rose, opened the door, and removed the unwieldy box from the older woman’s arms just as one corner of it collapsed. A mass of jumbled exterior Christmas lights spilled onto the ceramic floor, along with a shower of dust, loose bulbs, and shards of previously broken ones. Anna Marie, a stick-thin, wig-wearing blonde whose face was always plastered heavily with makeup, looked at the mess and laughed lightly. “Oh, fiddle! Hello, Leigh. Hello, Lydie. It’s so nice to see you both again! Where is everyone?”

  Leigh set down the collapsed box. “Hello. They’re in the living room.”

  “Thanks, love!” Anna Marie replied. Then she sauntered out the doorway.

  Leigh and Lydie looked from the mess on the floor to each other. Then Leigh grabbed her mother’s broom. They both knew what would happen with Anna Marie. She would find the most comfortable chair in the house, repose in it as if she were Cleopatra, then not bestir herself the rest of the day. She had come to the back door instead of the front, no doubt, because the kitchen was fewer steps away from wherever she’d parked.

  “Finally!” Lydie said with triumph as the string of lights in her hands burst into color. “One down, fourteen to go!”

  Leigh stopped sweeping. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Don’t any of these lights work?”

  “Not yet,” Lydie replied stoically.