A Crossworder's Delight Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NERO BLANC

  “At last puzzle fans have their revenge … super sleuthing and solving for puzzle lovers and mystery fans.” —Charles Preston, puzzle editor, USA Today

  “Addicts of crossword puzzles will relish The Crossword Murder.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “A puzzle lover’s delight … A touch of suspense, a pinch of romance, and a whole lot of clever word clues … Blanc has concocted a story sure to appeal to crossword addicts and mystery lovers alike. What’s a three-letter word for this book? F-U-N.” —Earlene Fowler on The Crossword Murder

  “Snappy, well-plotted … an homage to Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh … The solid plot never strays from its course and features a surprising yet plausible ending.” —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel on Two Down

  “Another neat whodunit, along with some clever crosswords … Blanc builds the suspense slowly and surely, challenging the reader with a dandy puzzler.” —Publishers Weekly on The Crossword Connection

  “A great investigative team in the tradition of Nick and Nora … Nero Blanc is a master.” —BookBrowser

  A Crossworder’s Delight

  A Holiday Novel

  Nero Blanc

  GREETINGS FROM NERO BLANC

  Dear Friends,

  What would holidays and family gatherings be without special recipes passed along and shared? Our own memories of childhood are irrevocably connected to the wonderful smells of baking that filled relatives’ homes when we arrived for a visit: pies and angel-food cakes made proudly from scratch, the dough carefully kneaded and rolled, the egg whites beaten by hand.

  In the spirit of those happy and bygone days, we dedicate this book to the memory of Cordelia’s mother, Cordelia Frances Fenton Biddle, and to her mother, Mary Frances Higgins Fenton, who made the very best fudge in the world.

  And we also give many thanks to Midge Walter and her son, Tony, of Lore’s Chocolates in Philadelphia. As current residents of the city, we can promise you that holidays aren’t the same without numerous samplings of Lore’s wares. Tony provided technical information as well as a glimpse into the workings of a true confectionery shop. If you’re in Philadelphia, be sure to visit their store on Seventh Street. It’s a pure delight!

  Please remember that our website www.CrosswordMysteries.com has puzzles to download, and that we do love getting your letters.

  Cordelia and Steve

  One

  TRADITION and traditional were key words at the Paul Revere Inn. Historic, venerable, quaint, even revered might vie for the prize, but the notion of the hostelry and eatery as being paramount to the timeless traditions of Newcastle always won out. Especially on the day after Thanksgiving, when the annual Holiday Decoration Competition was in full swing, and this coastal Massachusetts city’s volunteer organizations descended en masse upon the rambling old building, dead-set on transforming it into exuberant holiday mode—a la the late eighteenth century.

  The rivalry between the competing groups was fierce, culminating at the inn’s Solstice Dinner, when the civic association whose members displayed the most wizardry with garlands of greenery, cranberries strung on thread, pomanders of orange and clove, hand-dipped candles, barley-sugar figures, and gingerbread creatures was awarded the coveted silver Revere bowl. It was a contest with a capital C, and a noted lack of reverence permeated the air.

  “Coming through, ladies and gentlemen. Coming though.” This regal voice belonged to Sara Crane Briephs, presiding “Queen mum” of Sisters-in-Stitches, a church sewing group that had lost the prize for four hard-luck years in a row. In Sara’s hands was a large hat box containing copper and tin ornaments in the shapes of stars and snowflakes. They were old and valuable and had resided in the attic of her ancestral home, White-caps, for as long as anyone could remember. “We’ll tie them with bows and hang them from the pewter chandelier. None of the other groups have anything to remotely equal them. If I’d only remembered these things last year.…”

  As she spoke, Sara jostled her way through the throng crowded outside the inn’s front parlor, the room being the one assigned to the Sisters. The parlor was notoriously difficult to decorate, its focal point being a much-beloved icon: a signed original printing of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.” It was Longfellow’s ode to Massachusetts’s hero of the Revolutionary War that had inspired the grandparents of the inn’s current owners to change the hostelry’s name when they’d purchased the place in the early 1920s. The treasured artifact had hung in the same spot for close to eighty years. Needless to say, its large gilt frame didn’t make for easy decorative magic.

  Martha Leonetti shook her head as she watched Sara enter; Martha was the only other Sister present in the parlor, and she observed the hat box and its owner with an habitually jaundiced eye. Head waitress at Lawson’s Coffee Shop in the city’s downtown commercial center, Martha prided herself on her worldly wisdom and sassy candor. She knew the life stories of all her regular customers, what they habitually ordered, and/or wanted to order but didn’t. And she wasn’t adverse to providing “much-needed advice” about diets and love lives and career choices and family squabbles, or dishing out the latest dirt right along with the home fries. She would have seemed the antithesis of the patrician Sara, but the two had formed such a bond of friendship that they often appeared to be each other’s alter ego. The noted exception was that Martha had sported the same aggressively blonde beehive hairdo for the past three decades while Sara, at eighty-plus, had a coiffure that was a natural snowy white.

  “I don’t know, Sara. Seems to me like guests will keep bashing their heads on your do-dads. And that could lose us points, big time. The ceilings are way too low in here; and with everyone gawking at the poem and all, crowding around to read it and what have you, well, someone could get hurt.… Better put your gee-gaws out of the way—maybe up on the mantle or hang them on velvet ribbons over the windows.”

  “But if we put them on the mantle, they’ll simply disappear within all those clusters of greens, Martha.”

  “Didn’t you tell us gals that we should keep things ‘subtle’ this year? Wasn’t that the new stratagem?”

  “Subtle doesn’t mean hidden,” Sara countered loftily.

  “Hmmmph,” Martha sniffed. She was standing in her stocking feet atop a step stool as she tried to drape a window with a loop of cedar garland. Reaching up to push the prickly pieces in place, her body looked dangerously unbalanced and unsteady. “If I want to know the meaning of a word, I’ll ask our resident linguistic expert.… Heya, Belle, get your tush in here, pronto,” Martha bellowed toward the door. “Will you please explain to Her Highness here that I’m not suggesting subterfuge when it comes to displaying her prize ornaments?”

  Belle Graham was carrying a coiled garland of white pine as she walked into the parlor; its sap had left dark, sticky marks on her hands that had then been transferred to her face as she’d pushed her corn-silk-colored hair aside. Despite the romantic given name of Annabella, she wasn’t adept at maintaining a ladylike pose. And she never, ever called herself Annabella or Anna. Being the crossword puzzle editor for one of Newcastle’s daily newspapers, The Evening Crier, had produced one too many gibes about being “Ms. Anna-Graham.” “What are you two quibbling about now?” Belle shook her head and smiled as she spoke.

  “Martha’s insisting my handsome family ornaments should be all but hidden like snakes in the grass.”

  “I am not, your ladyship! I’m only saying those pointy ends might prove dangerous when dangling down in the middle of the room. Poke some tall dude or dudess in the noggin, or scratch some follicly challenged baldy’s pate.”

  “And where does ‘subterfuge’ enter into this a
rgument?” Belle asked.

  “It’s Martha’s term, not mine,” was Sara quick retort. “As you know, I’ve been advocating subtilty, because last year we made the terrible mistake of—”

  “Ah yes, the subliminal approach to decorating.” Belle laughed. “A bit subversive, don’t you think, Sara? Sub rosa, surreptitious, sly—”

  “I prefer the word stealthy, dear.” Sara also laughed. As Belle’s self-styled surrogate grandmother, she enjoyed tinkering with language as much as Newcastle’s celebrated word game editor. “Creating artful interiors requires a certain craftiness. What else is trompe l’oeil but a means to trick the eye? A wave of the wand—or in this case, the glue gun—and then poof! Now you see it, now you don’t.”

  “You ladies aren’t planning on making things disappear, are you?” Stanley Hatch asked as he strode into the room. Stan was the owner of Hatch’s Hardware, and an “honorary” member of Sisters-in-Stitches. He supplied brawn (in his mid fifties, he was still slim, tall, and muscular), as well as the all-important tools of the craftsman’s trade. “Because, if any of the inn’s pricey antiques were to take a powder … well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be likely that we’d be invited back next year to compete.”

  “What a ridiculous notion, Stanley,” was Sara’s amused response. “We’re here to add to the Marz twins’ furnishings, not subtract from them.” Then Sara abruptly shifted her focus. “Give Martha a hand with those swags above the windows, will you, dear boy? I’m afraid if she tries to reach any higher, she’ll take a tumble. And crutches certainly won’t aid in her labors at Lawson’s.”

  But this request met with unexpected hesitation from both the principals. Wisecracking Martha grew suddenly shy and quiet. Stan made a move to help her from the stepladder, then awkwardly withdrew his hand as Martha clamored heavily down on her own, finally making a show of searching for her shoes. She never once glanced in Stanley’s direction. Their behavior was no different than that of a couple of smitten fourteen-year-olds. It did not go unnoticed.

  Sara and Belle shared a meaningful look. Stanley was a widower; Martha was also single. The two were destined for each other—at least, that was their friends’ opinion. Why it was taking the pair so long to act upon this obvious fact was beyond anyone’s comprehension, although it was Sara who felt the most frustrated at the duo’s lack of gumption. She was the one who’d originally conceived of the notion of forming a couple from two lonely people. “Your shoes are under the wing chair,” she told Martha with unaccustomed chilliness, “where you left them, dear.”

  Martha dutifully retrieved her pumps while Sara released a hearty sigh; and Stan, in order to cover his own embarrassment, walked over to the wall where the Longfellow hung.

  “A cry of defiance and not of fear,” Stanley read aloud from the final stanza,

  “A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,

  “And a word that shall echo forevermore!

  “For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,

  “Through all our history, to the last,

  “In the hour of darkness, and peril, and need,

  “The people will waken to listen and hear

  “The hurrying hoof beats of that steed,

  “And the midnight message of Paul Revere.”

  He stood, studying the words. “We still need stirring messages like that, don’t we?”

  “More than ever before,” Sara replied with feeling, then added a brisk, “You read it beautifully, Stanley,” as if she were afraid of revealing too much of her weaker nature.

  “Yes, you did, Stan,” Martha echoed in a hushed and unfamiliar murmur.

  “Well, you’re the one who gave me that Kipling at the Secret Santa exchange last year,” was his pleased response. “And without knowing how much I liked his poems. ‘If’ always reminds me of my granddad.… Funny how that is.”

  But Martha’s reply to this obvious invitation to further conversation was to avoid Stanley’s glance, duck her head, and mumble a businesslike “We’d better get back to work. The other Sisters will be arriving any sec, and this room’s going to get as crazy busy as Lawson’s on a Saturday morning snowfall.”

  “If you don’t need any further verbal explications, I’ll leave you at it, then,” Belle said, propping the coiled garland against the hearth. “You know me around glue guns and such.…”

  “Don’t want to fuse your house keys and car keys together like you did last year, huh?” Martha jibed.

  Belle chuckled. “If everyone hadn’t been forced to stop what they were doing and help me out of my mess, the Sisters would have made a better showing.”

  “That’s sweet of you, dear,” was Sara’s soothing reply. “However, I don’t believe your accident caused us to lose. I feel our design approach was lacking in sufficient vision.”

  “Which is exactly what’s gonna happen if we hang those pointed pretties of yours at eye-level, Sara. Lack of vision for some guest would definitely put us once again in last place.”

  Two

  LEAVING Martha, Stanley, and Sara, Belle continued her tour of the building, greeting other competition participants as they bustled around the low-beamed reception areas, the three intimate dining rooms, the formal staircase, and the rear parlor. Fires were lit in every hearth; the waitstaff, dressed in period costumes, lent an air of authenticity to the scene while the paying guests seemed caught up in the festive spirit. Many were aiding the Newcastle regulars. The instant camaraderie seemed to Belle the very quintessence of the holidays, and she was smiling happily as she climbed the stairs to the second-floor bedrooms, then to the third floor with its dormer windows and views of the now-frozen lawn and garden. There she walked down the hall, revelling in the sense of past and present joined together, before she came to the half-open door of a room converted to office use where she overheard a sotto voce spat between Morgan and Mitchell Marz, the twins who now owned the inn.

  In their sixties, the brothers were physically identical: two sturdy men with expanding waistlines, two full heads of salt-and-pepper hair, and a shared penchant for brightly hued turtleneck sweaters. Where business was concerned, however, they had a fundamental difference of opinion.

  “Mitch’s kitsch!” Morgan was grumbling. This was a common expression of his, just as it was standard practice for him to gripe about the valuable antique furnishings his brother insisted on keeping in situ, and that Morgan believed should be sold. “Have you looked at our insurance premiums recently, Mitch? Have you? We simply can’t afford to keep all this—”

  “It’s not kitsch, Morgan. If it were, insuring it wouldn’t be so expensive!”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!”

  But Mitchell’s gentle tone overrode his brother’s exacerbated interruption. “And for another thing, it’s our legacy. Our grandparents wanted the inn to have—”

  “You can’t keep wallowing with ghosts forever!”

  “I’m not wallowing, Morgan. It’s what they wished.”

  “And what about our mother, is it what she wanted, too?”

  “Morgan, we both know she worked very, very hard during the time when Dad was—”

  “My point exactly! Now, please don’t start with—”

  “When Dad was off during the war,” Mitchell continued as if his brother hadn’t spoken; although his desire to make his point, combined with a modesty that could verge on shyness, caused his words to stumble—a trait his more forceful twin didn’t share. “B-b-because she wanted the inn to continue to look the same as it had when—”

  “Oh, stop. You don’t know that, Mitch. In fact, I’ll bet the opposite was true, and she wanted to chuck all these historic references, and streamline the—”

  “That’s simply not true, Morgan! It’s … it’s—”

  “Okay. My mistake. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was perfectly happy with the status quo. That’s not the point. It’s the cost of protecting these pieces I’m objecting to. Besides, what if we had a fire, or a theft? What if one of
these antiques you love so much should—?”

  “B-b-but our guests come here because of these articles.” Mitchell’s tone was disbelieving. “History is the Revere Inn’s strong suit. Stepping inside our doors is like … it’s like walking into the past.”

  Morgan groaned in frustration. “I’m not disagreeing with the traditional approach, Mitch. You know I’m not. I realize that’s what attracts our clientele: Queen Anne and Shaker furniture, and so forth … but we could have the same design appeal without the price tag of maintaining genuine—”

  “Well, you can’t get more traditional than real antiques, Morgan. Besides …”

  Belle moved on and the Marz brothers’ argument eventually vanished into the half-light of the narrow corridor whose path wrapped around unexpected corners and climbed surprise single-step rises.

  At last, she came to a room that was far from the hubbub, a cubbyhole of a spot lined with shelves on which sat forgotten books and board games and wooden jigsaw puzzles that were undoubtedly missing crucial pieces. The room smelled pleasantly of age. She scanned the library, wondering if Mitchell—in one of his many antiquing forays—had added any unusual finds, but nothing exciting caught her eye. Not for a moment, anyway. Then she spotted a volume that was slimmer than the rest, an unprepossessing black book no thicker than a pamphlet. Belle carefully withdrew it from the shelf and opened it.

  To my dear daughter who so loves chocolate.

  These are for you from your loving Mama.

  The pages were crossword puzzles. The clues and solutions belonged to recipes, but none of the word games were completed. In fact, it looked as though the book hadn’t been opened since “Mama” had penned those old-fashioned and curlicued lines.

  Belle hurried back to the brothers and presented them with the little volume. But Mitchell looked blank when asked from whence the book had come.

  “I don’t have a clue, I’m afraid, Belle.… Maybe it was … maybe it was in a box of books I bought at a yard sale or a second-hand store.”