Christmas Stalkings by Charlotte MacLeod Page A

the Run in 1986. Since then, she’s published three more mysteries with Scribner’s and has recently completed a term as president of the Crime Writers of Canada. When not engaged in criminous literary pursuits, Medora Sale lives quite angelically with her husband Harry Roe, a professor at the University of Toronto, and their daughter, Anne.

    Annabel Cousins looked at her watch. “We’re on in five minutes. Where is that wretched girl?” Her eyes fell on the last set of angel wings spread over the huge table in the vestry. Angels. She hated angels. They went on at the very beginning, and they had to be dressed at the very last minute or the stupid creatures would smash their wings—magnificent structures made from a clever mix of real and fake feathers, at least six feet wide and over three feet high.
    “Ashley?” said a muffled voice. “She might be in the washroom.”
    “For the last twenty minutes, Heather?” said Annabel, trying very hard not to reveal her panic to her already highly nervous charges. “She hasn’t even picked up her costume yet. Are you two sure you saw her downstairs? Stand still, Jennifer!” she snapped in exasperation. “And don’t sit down. Or lie down, or lean against that wall or do any of the other things* you were thinking of.”
    “I thought I saw her,” said Jennifer. Her voice was also muffled behind her gold-and-white angel mask.
    Annabel’s heart sank. “Thought? You said you had seen her.”
    “Do you want me to go down and look?”
    “No, I don’t want you to move. Where’s Mrs. Toomey? She’s supposed to—damn it all. Erica,” she said, grabbing a short, thin girl preposterously garbed as a shepherd, “run down to the washroom and get Ashley. Tell her she’s dead meat if she isn’t up here in thirty seconds.”
    Erica, current holder of the Independent Schools Track and Field Association record for the 1500 meters (sixteen and over), disappeared without a word in a blur of brown wool and greasepaint.
    Two painful minutes ticked by. “I can’t find her, Miss Cousins,” said Erica, whose arrival was as silent and as swift as her departure. “She isn’t in the washroom, the furnace room, or the other dressing room, and she isn’t up in the choir loft either.”
    Annabel Cousins allowed herself half a second to appreciate Erica’s speed and thoroughness before panicking. She sat down on the only available chair. “My God, what do we do now?”
    “We get someone else.” The speaker was a tall, dark-haired woman engaged in sewing up a ripped hem for another shepherd. This one was standing on the vicar’s desk, barefooted, on top of a page from tonight’s sermon. “No one will know the difference. As long as she’s taller than Jennifer and Heather, relatively reliable, and has long hair. There certainly aren’t any more tall redheads around, so blond, don’t you think?” She turned to the already garbed angels. “You two—out into the corridor and stand where I put you on Friday. Sideways, remember!” She whipped the thread around a couple of times and broke it off. “You’re done, Laura. Keep your feet out of your hem, please. Off you go.”
    The two teachers looked at each other. “I should have known those wretched girls were covering for Ashley,” said Annabel gloomily. “Where do we find another angel? The entire senior school is in there singing.”
    “Who’s closest?” The two teachers slipped out of the room and up the stone passage to peer in at the students crowded into the chancel. They were in the middle of a long, difficult carol in the modern mode, hanging desperately on the conductor’s every movement, including those of his lips, as he mouthed the words for those who had not, in spite of threats and pleadings, managed to memorize them. Every girl within discreet grabbing range appeared to be short and dark. Or hopelessly unreliable.
    Helen Armstrong, who had learned during fifteen years of working on the pageant just what