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  Leigh looked down at the pile of exterior lights at her feet. They looked older, dustier, and even more hopeless than the smaller interior ones that Lydie was fussing with. “Do we have to use vintage lights?”

  “Well, they’re made differently today, you know,” Lydie explained. “In the seventies, everyone used plain multi-colored lights, inside and outside. And the outside lights were simple strings with big bulbs, not like these fancy hanging icicle ones we have now.”

  Leigh watched with a wince as her aunt painstakingly began plugging a test bulb into every socket on the next string, having no guarantee it would light up even if all the bulbs were good. Leigh couldn’t stand it. She was sure she could drive to a drug store right now and buy a nearly identical string for two dollars.

  “Put those away, Aunt Lydie,” she announced. “I’m buying new lights. Retro is in — I’ll find ones that look close enough, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Lydie’s hands paused in mid air. Leigh expected an argument, but she didn’t get it. Lydie’s eyes darted into the living room. “Slip out the back then, and be quick about it,” she whispered conspiratorially. “We’ll need both exterior and interior strings. I’ll clean up that mess and hide these in the attic.”

  Leigh smiled. She dashed out to grab her coat under cover of another loud squabble from the living room.

  “You can’t tell me Hummel figurines weren’t popular in the seventies!”

  “Well, of course they were, but not that one!”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “That’s ‘Spring Cheer!’ We’re supposed to be decorating for Christmas, you moron!”

  “Well, maybe she’s ‘Christmas Cheer!’”

  “I used to have a dozen Hummels, but one night, Harry—”

  “Those are spring flowers! We’re not using it, I say!”

  “But her dress is green!”

  Leigh escaped again unnoticed, shaking her head. The Floribundas didn’t get along with each other any better than they got along with anyone else, but for whatever reason, they didn’t seem to mind each other, either. If you asked them tomorrow about today’s decorating party, they would tell you they’d had a fabulous time.

  She never had understood it. Perhaps they had their lighter moments when Leigh wasn’t around. Perhaps even Lucille had a kinder, gentler side.

  She shrugged on her coat. As she opened the back door she could hear the oldest Floribunda still ranting, as loud as her obviously impaired lungs could bluster.

  “That Hummel will go on the mantel over my stinking, maggot-ridden corpse!”

  Or maybe not.

  Chapter 6

  Leigh returned with two armfuls of Christmas lights just as her husband and kids arrived, bringing her nephew Mathias with them. Technically, Matt was her first cousin once removed, but she and her cousin Cara had grown up next door to each other and had always felt like sisters. Besides which, it was easier to have each other’s children call them “aunt,” an illusion which allowed the kids to share both grandmothers as well. “Awesome timing,” Leigh proclaimed, stopping them in the street and then walking them around to the kitchen door. She held out the shopping bags containing the exterior lights. “Take all these out of the boxes first, then collect all the trash and stash it in your trunk. We want everyone to think these lights are vintage.”

  “Done,” Warren said cheerfully. He took the bags from her arms and handed them off to the boys, who accepted them with simultaneous yawns. “How’s the decorating coming so far?”

  “Don’t ask,” Leigh replied.

  Warren smiled. “Floribundas showing their thorns this morning?”

  Leigh answered him with a grimace, then shot a questioning look at her daughter. The boys were headed for the back door, but Allison was moving toward the front. “Where are you going?” Leigh asked her.

  Allison stopped and turned around. “To find Grandma.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to help hang the lights?” Leigh questioned. With all the chaos of Ethan’s party, she had neglected to find out what Frances had asked of Allison on the phone last night. But now that she thought about it, her petite daughter was the last person in the family Frances would send up a ladder.

  “No,” Allison answered. She started walking again.

  Leigh looked at Warren, but he merely shrugged. “I’ll go get your dad’s ladders,” he said, moving off.

  Leigh caught up to her daughter at the bottom of the porch steps. She had the distinct feeling she was missing something a better mother would know about. “What did Grandma ask you to do?”

  Allison’s shrewd brown eyes studied her, even as the girl’s slight figure squirmed a bit. She cast a glance toward the house and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m on surveillance.”

  Leigh blinked, disbelieving. “Surveillance of whom?”

  Allison didn’t answer for a moment. “Do you think the Flying Maples are anything like the Floribundas, Mom?”

  “I have no idea,” Leigh answered. “Why are you asking? What exactly is Grandma worried about?”

  The creases in Allison’s already serious little forehead deepened. She lowered her voice another notch. “Sabotage.”

  “Sabo—”

  “Mom!” Allison shushed her with a gesture. “Grandma said she’s just being cautious. She doesn’t want to get any of the other Floribundas all worked up.”

  Leigh managed to stifle herself. That, at least, sounded like a great idea.

  “But Grandma does worry that maybe these other women are upset enough to try and get revenge somehow. And it can’t hurt for me to keep an eye out,” Allison argued. “Crazier things have happened, you know.”

  Leigh knew. “Fine,” she agreed. “But if you see anything, just tell somebody, okay? Don’t try to do anything about it yourself.”

  “Oh, there you are!” Frances said, popping open the door. She smiled indulgently at Allison, then looked out beyond them expectantly. “Where are Warren and the boys?”

  “They went around back,” Leigh explained.

  “And did you find the extension cords you needed?” Frances asked, eyeing the bags as they walked inside.

  “I did,” Leigh said honestly, happy that she had, incidentally, purchased an extension cord. She was also glad that her aunt had covered their tracks so smoothly, although Lydie’s skill as a liar was disturbing in other contexts.

  Leigh looked around her mother to see the same three Floribundas parked in the center of the living room. They were still sorting through decorations and still arguing, but the number of dilapidated boxes at their feet had multiplied.

  “Delores and Jennie Ruth came by,” Frances answered the unspoken question. “They dropped off all the decorations everyone else could find. They couldn’t stay, of course — they’re on baking detail.”

  “Ah,” Leigh acknowledged. Delores and Jennie Ruth were the odd couple of the Floribundas, the former being very small and the latter quite large. Delores, a multiple divorcee, owned a stately older home near the golf course in West View, and Jennie Ruth, who was widowed at a young age, had moved in decades ago to serve as her companion. Leigh had never heard that either of the women were particularly skilled at baking, but if their efforts lowered Frances’s stress level by relieving her of the duty, Leigh was all for it.

  “Lydie’s upstairs in the sewing room finishing up the lights,” Frances continued. “Why don’t you start setting up our old artificial tree? I pulled out the photo album to help you remember how we used to decorate it. Now, I’d best go outside and—”

  “Oh, no, Mom,” Leigh interrupted, thinking quickly. The boys couldn’t have all the evidence of her crime hidden away yet. “The women obviously need you in here!” She quickly handed her bags to Allison. “Could you take these upstairs to Grandma Lydie?”

  Allison nodded and dashed off, and Leigh turned back to Frances. “Don’t worry, I can put up the tree and supervise outside, too. I’ll have them string
the lights all around the porch roof just like Mr. Rudzinskas across the street always did. I remember exactly what it looked like.”

  Frances’s brown eyes looked ever so slightly watery. “Thank you, dear,” she replied. “That would be marvelous.”

  Leigh could barely hear her mother’s last words over the shouting.

  “The Muppets won’t do!” Lucille declared.

  “That show was on in the seventies, I’m telling you!” Virginia argued. “I think I know how old my own children are!”

  “But the Muppets aren’t Christmassy enough!’”

  “Miss Piggy’s dressed like Mrs. Claus!” Virginia screamed.

  A knock sounded on the door, and Olympia swept into the room. She was wearing a long, dated-looking fur coat and she towered over the rest of the women by at least a head. She looked flushed and excited as she greeted everyone, but as her eyes took in more of the bare walls and empty surfaces around the house, her good cheer fizzled. “But… where is everything?” she asked with alarm.

  “This is all that we can agree upon,” Frances reported, pointing to the coffee table. “And a few things we can’t. But there’s no hope for the rest of it.”

  Olympia cast a critical eye over the pile of acceptable decorations. There were three glass tumblers that showed Santa Claus enjoying a Coca-Cola, a Little Golden Book of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the plush Miss Piggy doll, a calendar tea towel from 1975 (decorated with fruit), some glass perfume bottles shaped like stockings, a poorly done hook rug of a snowflake, a plastic snowman wearing a Steelers’ jersey (number 75), a foot-tall angel made of burlap, and a “Great Songs of Christmas” album courtesy of Goodyear tires.

  “Oh, dear,” Olympia said dourly. “Oh, my.”

  “But what are we going to do?” Anna Marie cried from her chair. “The tour starts in hours!”

  Frances was looking pale again, and Leigh resisted a strong urge to pull her own hair out. This ridiculous house tour was certain to be one of the most wonderfully exciting, gloriously memorable days of her mother’s life.

  If it didn’t give her a stroke first.

  “I told you we’d be laughingstocks!” Lucille said snidely, banging her walker again. “I told you all!”

  “Mom! Grandma!” a high-pitched voice shrieked as footsteps pounded down the stairs two at a time. Allison skipped the last three steps altogether and sailed into the living room, then dashed across it to the door. “They came and left a— And now they’re driving off!”

  Leigh raced after her daughter onto the porch, but saw only the briefest glimpse of an SUV as it sped around the bend at the end of the block. “They who? Left what?” The second question was a dumb one. In stepping out to see the car, Leigh had practically tripped over a giant rectangular plastic bin set squarely in the center of her mother’s porch. Attached to its lid with clear tape was a sheet of notebook paper, folded in half.

  “I saw them through the window,” Allison explained as she gave up the chase and returned. “They just double parked and carried it up… I never thought they’d ding-dong-ditch! I figured Grandma was expecting them!”

  Warren and the boys came around the corner just as Frances and Olympia appeared on the porch.

  “What’s this?” Frances asked. She leaned over and pulled off the note.

  “It was two women in a silver SUV, Grandma,” Allison reported.

  “How old were these women?” Olympia asked brusquely. “What did they look like?”

  Allison looked at Leigh. “Around Grandma’s age, I guess,” she said uncertainly. “They were both medium height, medium build. One had blondish hair and the other gray. They were both wearing dark leather coats, and jeans with boots.”

  Virginia, who was now standing in the doorway, brought her hand to her heart and breathed in sharply. “Biker chicks!”

  No one had any response to that.

  “Read the note out loud, Frances,” Olympia ordered.

  Frances adjusted her glasses on her nose and complied.

  To our fellow gardening enthusiasts,

  We’ve collected a few things it appears we have no use for, and we thought you might like to borrow them. Please take good care of them and return them to this bin and we will send someone to pick them up early next week. Have a lovely day!

  Cheers,

  The Flying Maples

  The last words hadn’t left Frances’s lips before Olympia began to pop off the top of the red plastic bin.

  “Wait!” Virginia cried, slamming her hands down violently over the lid. “What if it’s a bomb?”

  “Then you would have just exploded it, you featherhead!” Lucille wheezed from the doorway. All of the Floribundas had now made it to the porch, although Lucille was breathing heavily from the effort and leaning on her assistant as well as her walker.

  “It isn’t a bomb,” Olympia said impatiently, throwing off Virginia’s hands and setting the lid aside. “It’s—”

  The women let out a collective gasp.

  “It’s exactly what we need!” Olympia finished in triumph. She reached in and lifted out a giant macramé wall hanging in the shape of a Christmas tree. “Oh, course! Macramé! Everyone had these!”

  “Ooh! And look at the Santa!” Anna Marie cooed, picking up the flat plastic decoration beneath it. Leigh recognized the cartoonish figure immediately. The chubby, smiling Santa holding a Christmas tree was one of a set of three “melted popcorn” decorations that had once hung on the wall of every elementary school classroom in America, as well as in many family rooms. “They have all of them!” Anna Marie cried with delight, pulling out a prancing Rudolph with yellow antlers and a Christmas tree decorated with a candy cane and a star on top.

  “Look at this garland with the little plastic pine cones!” Olympia exclaimed, digging deeper. “Oh, Frances, it’s perfect to run up the stair rail! And here’s molded wax candles, and a sleigh centerpiece, and plastic candle lights for outside, and a cardboard Advent calendar! Oh, this is precisely what we need! And so clean! It’s all just perfect!”

  “There’s even a red and green lava lamp!” Anna Marie effused. “And look at all the macramé! I always hated that nonsense, but I love it today!”

  Leigh looked around to see that Warren and the boys, as well as Allison, had disappeared. No doubt the boys had lost interest in the bin as soon as the bomb threat was dispelled, but Allison’s whereabouts were more concerning. The child’s natural curiosity was dangerous enough without her grandmother giving her delusions of employment as a private security officer.

  “Don’t you think this is all just a little too suspicious?” Virginia insisted.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Olympia chastised. “They’re just being thoughtful. They must have been collecting all these decorations for months! They clearly realized, even if we didn’t, that it would be impossible for us to collect the equivalent overnight.”

  Leigh watched as her mother stood still with her lips pursed, staring thoughtfully down into the box. Frances had yet to say a word.

  “It’s exactly what we need!” Anna Marie insisted, blinking awkwardly as one of her false eyelashes came loose.

  “But why would they want to help us?” Virginia asked. “We all know the Flying Maples only started up their chapter to shut ours down!”

  “Have none of you illiterates ever heard of a Trojan Horse?” Lucille spat.

  Leigh resisted the impulse to roll her eyes. An interesting shape in the bottom corner of the bin caught her eye, and she reached down and pulled out a giant bottle of cognac with a green and red plaid ribbon tied around its neck. The women fell silent again, gaping.

  “Here’s another note, Mom,” Leigh announced, holding open the cardboard tag so that Frances could read it.

  Frances’s face creased with concern. “It just says, ‘Celebrate!’”

  “Poisoned!” Lucille barked.

  Virginia’s hands flew to her mouth, muffling her own scream. Then her eyes widened and she turned
to Olympia. “You don’t think—”

  “No, I do not,” Olympia said firmly, taking the bottle from Leigh’s hands and replacing it in the bin.

  “I don’t either!” Anna Marie said petulantly, crossing her arms over the bulky layers of necklaces adorning her thin chest. The dangling eyelash had fallen off and now stuck to the front of her sweater. “And I’m not going to run all over this town looking for more decorations when we have everything we need right here!”

  “Ha!” Lucille snorted. “You wouldn’t run anywhere if the hounds of hell were chasing you!”

  Anna Marie turned to Lucille and stuck out her tongue.

  Leigh looked around for an escape route, but she was hemmed in.

  “Ladies!” Olympia said loftily. “I really must insist.”

  “I say we put it to a vote!” Lucille rasped. “Who trusts those drunken upstarts?”

  “Well, I don’t!” Virginia cried, her eyes beginning to tear. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t think they’re up to any good, and I don’t think we can take a chance on trusting them when we have so much riding on this!”

  Olympia made a growling sound. “Fine! Let’s put it to a vote then! You two say no, Anna Marie and Frances say yes, and as the president I break the tie, and I say yes, so there. We use the decorations!”

  “Now hold on a minute,” Virginia argued. “Frances didn’t vote!”

  All eyes turned toward Leigh’s mother, who stood pensively, studying them all in turn. She might be keeping the rest of them in suspense, but Leigh never had any doubt what her answer would be. Frances was a born worrier, and when it came to contriving drama from nothing, she could conspire with the best of them. But she was also unfailingly practical. And making a success of this house tour truly was the stuff of her dreams.

  Frances’s back straightened. She cleared her throat and broke into her fiercest voice of authority. “We will use the decorations,” she proclaimed. “All of them. This is my house, and I say so. Now, I want everybody to get back in the house, get over it, and get busy!”

  Leigh smiled to herself as every one of the Floribundas, even the sour Lucille, dropped their arguments and followed directions. Frances, Virginia, and Olympia all carried the bin inside the house while Leigh held open the door for them.