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“But that’s your present!” Liz exclaimed. “You should take it home for your tree!”

“If it’s my present, I get to decide where it belongs. And I think your tree needs my stah,” he said in his winning Boston accent.

“You might just be right,” Liz said, smiling at him.

As Bing changed his tune to “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” Tom took Liz in his arms, kissed her tenderly on the lips, and led her in a slow dance on the popcorn-strewn tablecloth.

Chapter 13

The next morning, the thin winter sunlight that spilled through the window onto the Christmas tree could not hold a candle to the glow that had shone there the night before. Alone in her bed, regarding the tree from across the room, Liz saw this, and told herself it didn’t matter. It was enough to enjoy the memory of Tom’s surprise.

Nor was Liz disturbed by Tom’s 3:00 a.m. exit. Picking up the brass monkey key chain on her night table, she turned it over in her hands and recalled how relieved she had been to find it, rather than an expensive gift, in the box. It was pleasant to discover Tom’s evident affection, but she was also aware she had never before then considered him as a potential date. This line of thinking led her to wonder if her pleasure in remembering last evening stemmed from receiving unexpected attention and treats or if she would have been attracted to Tom without them.

Then, too, she mused, while regarding the large bouquet leaning at an angle in her spaghetti pot, how differently the evening might have progressed had the enigmatic Dr. Kinnaird arrived at Gravesend Street before Tom did.

Kicking off her covers at the thought of two men surprising her with Christmas attention she had not sought, Liz gave her body rather more attention than usual in the shower, and while her hair was drying, she set about arranging Cormac’s bouquet in a hammered metal ice bucket. Clearing her desk of the pie-plate scraps, ice pick, and scissors, she set the bouquet upon it and stood back to study the effect.

But there was little time to linger. Although it was Christmas Eve day, Liz was scheduled to show up in the Banner newsroom, so she put on a snow-white angora sweater and doe-colored slacks, grabbed a plastic bag full of chocolate Santas, and donned her coat and gloves. Then, with a look over her shoulder at the tin star on the top of her Christmas tree, she smiled and left her house. As Liz crossed the short distance to her car, she noticed that the sunlight had fought and lost a battle with a sky full of clouds. The weather was unexpectedly mild, too. It looked like it would rain.

The raindrops that soon followed, splattering onto her windshield and soaking into the snow cover, might have dampened her spirits. But Liz was too intent on business to think along those trite lines. Instead, she pulled into an ugly strip mall made even less attractive by a huge sign with the words “EXTENDED SHOPPING HOURS!!” spelled out in large plastic letters set in slits on a vinyl signboard. The eyesore was also eye-catching, since it was elevated on the back of a flatbed truck.

Fortunately, the cellular phone shop was less mobbed than the toy store next door to it. If cell phones were in demand this year, those who shopped for them evidently did so at a more reasonable hour than did the last- minute toy crowd. Liz was disappointed to learn that although she could purchase a cell phone on the spot, thanks to the holiday, it would take forty-eight hours to activate it. Still, she made the purchase, and drove on to the Banner newsroom.

“How would you like to cover some hard news for a change?” Dermott McCann asked Liz as she handed him a chocolate Santa. “Mind you, you’re not getting the assignment thanks to this big bribe,” he added, unwrapping the candy and swallowing it in two bites.

“Where’re you sending me?”

“Poultry place in East Cambridge. Seems some guy dressed in a Santa suit ripped off a ton of turkeys in the early hours of the morning.”

Liz wrote down the address and, tossing holiday greetings and chocolate Santas to her co-workers as she passed by their desks, crossed the newsroom to her own desk. She used the phone book there to look up the address of the Arabic-speaking book dealer who had been recommended to her by Molly at Widener Library. As she had recalled, his shop was located in the same multi-ethnic neighborhood as the poultry place.

The neighborhood was alive with activity as Liz pulled the Tracer into a parking spot. While two Cambridge police officers decked the building and nearby parking meters with bright yellow plastic ribbon reading POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS, a harried-looking Portuguese butcher complained to a policeman in plain clothes, “It’s criminal, no? To take-a my turkeys like that!” The butcher rubbed his hands on his bloodied apron and added, “I just-a killed them this morning for the Christmas dinners. My sign, it tells-a the truth. ‘Fresh Killed,’” he read, pointing proudly to the bright yellow, hen-shaped sign jutting out from the building over his head.

“Good morning, Officer, and good morning to you, too, sir,” Liz said, addressing the policeman and butcher in turn. “I’m Liz Higgins of the Beantown Banner. Do you mind telling me what happened here?”

“Mr. Torrentino here claims his shop assistant, Lucarno, gave some guy dressed in a Santa suit twenty-seven birds this morning.”

“Fresh-killed! Put that in the pay-puh. Four and twenty fresh-killed turkeys, two ducks, and one goose,” the butcher said.

“Where’s Lucarno now? Why would he give away the turkeys?

“It’s turkeys, two ducks, and one goose. All fresh-killed. Not only the turkeys,” Mr. Torrentino said. “He’s a- went with the other policeman to the station. He’s a-gonna look at the mugs shots, like-a they have on the television.”

“To see if he can I.D. the thief,” the police officer interjected. “Kid claimed the Santa told him he was there to pick up the birds for charity.”

“Lucarno didn’t check with you before he gave them away?” Liz asked the butcher.

“That’s a-right. The idiot, he’s a-never asked me.”

“More a scam than a straightforward theft, then? Is that how you see it, Officer?” Liz asked.

“That about sums it up. Kid did chicken shit to prevent it, though. In fact, he helped load the birds into the van they were taken away in. He actually helped the birds fly the coop,” the officer smiled, obviously proud of his own joke. “And here’s the kicker—after all that, he couldn’t describe the vehicle!”

“May I quote you? Sorry, Officer, I didn’t get your name.”

“Sure you can quote me. And it’s Hurley. Detective Matt Hurley.”

“What’s with all the crime scene tape, then, Detective Hurley?” Liz inquired.

The policeman whispered in Liz’s ear, “Makes Mr. Torrentino here feel like something’s being done. Don’t ever let anyone tell you the Cambridge Police don’t have a heart.”

“Thanks, Detective. Will you give me a call if anything else develops?” Liz asked, handing him her card. “And by the way, do you know where Turkoman Books is located?”

“That way, past the gravestone yard, cigar shop, and curtain place. It’s upstairs, over a shop called Rosalita’s Notions.”

“Thanks, and Merry Christmas.”

“Yeah. You, too.”

After getting a few more details for her story, Liz retrieved an umbrella from her car and set out on foot to find Turkoman Books. With the raw drizzle intensifying into a pounding rain and the sodden snow banks oozing slush puddles, it might not have been a pleasant walk, but there was something oddly heartwarming about the plethora of Christmas lights and cheap decorations that ornamented the area. Even Empire Monument Works—a yard filled with shaped blocks of granite awaiting the names of the dearly departed to come—was strung with colored lights. Looking at one block carved in the shape of linked hearts with a cross—instead of Cupid’s arrow—piercing the pair on an angle, Liz told herself even gravestone merchants deserve a little holiday cheer.

The cigar shop outdid the monument yard in ornamentation, with a pair of plastic candy canes, illuminated from within, on either side of the doorstep and bubbling Christmas lights strung around the door and in the shop