“Why didn’t someone bring Sandeep Hawthorn of 2629 Billings Street, Dekatur to my attention?” he demanded, looking not at me but at the letter. “He is asking for the Bloozy-Blu Ultra Pony Squad figure this year.”
“And wowzers, we shall get it for him and make his Christmas won-dun-dunderful!” I said in my default spirited manner.
“But he asked for it last year as well…and, no, don’t bother checking, I remember, he got it. So he should’ve been asking for Tickeldy-Pink, or Mizz Scarlett, or any of the three mega-ponies. But instead, he asked for Bloozy-Blu, a baseball bat and glove, and a remote control truck, a year after asking for and getting the Bloozy-Blu, an art set, and a toy oven.”
“Perhaps the poor li’l feller broke his Bloozy-Blue?”
“Perhaps, my dear Wuzzin, but no. Dani Roland of 2622 Billings Street, Dekatur this year asked for Tickeldy-Pink and Mizz Scarlett and all three megas.”
I looked up Dani Roland in the ledger. “She’s certainly not going to get all of those things…perhaps not any of them, she’s been naughty-listed in the past, but I see your point. You think Dani stole Sandeep’s Bloozy-Blu.”
“Wuzzin, you have a wonderful ability to pinpoint the obvious. No, no, that’s a compliment,” he said, waving away the rejoinder that I was definitely thinking but might not have chosen to voice, “so many of your fellow elves skip gleefully past the obvious without a lick of attention. But while noticing what’s interesting about what Dani asked for this year, you missed the clue in the other things that Sandeep asked for.”
“Baseball items and a truck? That’s grand and great, but not particularly interesting, a large portion of boys that age will happily ask you for sports equipment or a truck.”
“Yes, but look the year before. His tastes weren’t so gender-specific. It’s like he’s trying hard to prove his boyness now. So what made him change?”
“Perhaps it’s just a phase, nothing to explain.”
Holmes look exasperated. He is, of course, an amazing man, but far from perfect. While he is quite aware that he is amazing, he has never accepted that the rest of us simply do not have the brainpower to work on his level. “Why look for a lack of explanation when one is staring you in the face? He’s going for the boys’ toys because he’s been made to feel there’s a problem if he doesn’t. The girl across the street didn’t steal Bloozy-Blu…she blackmailed him for it. Probably caught him playing with a toy oven or somesuch and threatened to tell the other boys at school.”
“That’s mean!” I said in a shocked tone, proving that I too had trouble adapting to the truth. I knew intellectually that humans had far more cruelty built in than elfin society did, but examples still always came as a surprise.
“Change Dani’s schedule for this year to three pair of pajamas, all gray. I want the point to be clear. You may want to put that down as her default delivery for the future. I would love to be wrong, but I suspect she’ll be earning fresh pajamas annually for years to come. Meanwhile, tag Sandeep’s account. If he asks for anything even a bit away from the norm in the future, make sure he gets it.”
I was entering those details into my ledger when the door flew open. I was ready to take whoever came through to task for such a gross violation of protocol, entering Mr. Holmes’s office without so much as a knock, when I saw Frazzen’s face and realized that whatever was happening, it was more important than protocol.
“Mr. Holmes, sir,” she said, out of breath and her usually musical voice strained. “Brizzen’s sent me to tell you—Dancer has been found out in Livingstone Field, dead.”
“Golly! That’s horrible,” I opined. “I knew she was getting on in years, but I thought she still had a couple decades…”
Holmes held up his hand to stop me. “No, that’s not what Frazzen is saying. Go on, please, Frazzen.”
“She was killed. Slaughtered. Smashed in the noggin.”
• • •
It took us half an hour to get out to Livingstone Field by snowmobile, which gave us time to get what little information Frazzen had, shouted over the whine of the engine. Brizzen had found the dead reindeer several hours earlier, while out on a hike. On snowshoes, it had taken him hours to get to the nearest shack, where he found Frazzen and sent her to talk to us, while he himself went to alert stablemaster Grizzian.
Livingstone Field is a vast, flat expanse, largely featureless unless you consider snow to be a feature. When we got within a quarter mile of where the reindeer carcass lay, Holmes stopped the snowmobile and he and I walked the rest of the way, leaving Frazzen with the vehicle not because it needed any guarding, but simply because she was too stressed and would not likely be useful in examining the scene. I was momentarily surprised he even took me along, but he needs someone to talk to when working things through. At times, I’m helpful because we have a rapport, although at other times, he’d do as well just talking to a Dancin’ Betty doll from the toy storage shack.
We walked the last quarter mile, he explained, to ensure that we weren’t damaging any potential evidence with the snowmobile nor overlooking anything in our haste. I was fine with that slow entry, being in no rush to see the remains of this once beautiful creature, a feeling that only increased as we grew closer and I could see a wide bloom of blood-stained snow surrounding the spot where she lay.
• • •
The scene when we finally reached Dancer was even more heartrending than I had anticipated. The body was drenched with blood, and there was more blood tainting the clean white snow for yards around. Dancer’s skull had been utterly pulped at the top, with chunks of brain, bone, and antlers scattered. While I instinctively drew away from the gruesome sight, Mr. Holmes leaned in closer. “This wasn’t just one or two blows, it was many. A dozen or more, probably. Had it been fewer, I could get a good outline of what struck her, but this? Each blow destroyed the marks of the previous ones, and by the end, it was like it was hitting soup.”
I could not respond to what I saw nearly so dispassionately. “Gosh, such a senseless tragedy!”
The boss shook his head. “We must not believe that. Tragic, yes, of course. But not senseless.”
“You see sense in smashing a reindeer’s head in?”
Sherlock Holmes let out a sigh that filled the chilly air in front of him with a fog, giving physical form to his disappointment. “It doesn’t matter whether I see sense in it, dear Wuzzin. What is important is that we remember that whoever perpetrated this saw sense in it. Things are not done without reason. Find the person for whom this killing made sense, and you have found your killer. Believing that it cannot make sense is, in practical form, giving up. The killer has a motive, even if we cannot yet suss what that motive is.”
“Obviously, the killer was trying to stop you from making your deliveries and bringing joy to all the wunnerful li’l kiddies of the world this year.”
Holmes cocked an eyebrow. “Obviously? Likely, perhaps, but obviously?”
“Well, shucks, the other reasons for killing that come to mind certainly don’t apply. I doubt anyone would kill a reindeer to rob them, or out of revenge for a love affair gone wrong.”
“If that’s all that you can come up with, you have a limited knowledge of killing. Which is, I suppose, a good thing. It’s not something that the typical man nor elf need be too well versed in. But you leave out such motives as protecting secrets—the dead tell no tales.”
“Nor do reindeer, even when alive.”
“Deceased reindeer make excellent stew meat, I am told. No, no, don’t bother telling me that this one hasn’t been eaten. I am merely demonstrating that there are many reasons for killing, and we can waste our time eliminating all those that do not apply, or focus on finding the one that does.”
“I still reckon it was to stop your oh-so-magnificent deliveries.”
Holmes did not respond. He just scanned the snow surrounding the corpse.
“Did it work? Will you be able to deliver the gifties without Dancer? Or do we
have to…” I trailed off, unable to bring the words “cancel Christmas” to my lips.
“What? Oh, yes. I’ve done it before with seven. Remember a few years back, when Vixen was pregnant? Couldn’t risk having her on the team.”
“Vixen’s daughter! Zephyr! Can she take Dancer’s place?”
“Not this year. Zephyr has started to fly, but she hasn’t the necessary range or control yet, last report I got from Grizzian. She’s got at least two years before she’s mission-ready.”
“Then gee whiz, it sure is good that you can make it with seven.” I said, for once having to force a smile onto my face.
“Yes, but it’s a tight fit with no room for error. The calculations show that it would all fail if I had to take even a few more pounds…if, for instance, I weighed as much as those ludicrous pictures that the publicity elves distribute. Egad, they make it look like I’ve never turned down a cookie in my life. I do wish they’d stop promoting that image of me.”
“No, you don’t sir, and you know quite well why they do that. You realize the success of your operation depends on you not seeming threatening, as safe as everyone’s jolly ol’ grandpa. If people knew what you really looked like…well, you might be okay to pass on the street, but if people started thinking of your bony self with that talon-like nose of yours, sneaking into their house through their chimney and tippy-toeing around, it’d give the kiddies nightmares! They would think you were there with the intent to murder, and your motive would be stew meat! And furthermore,” I emphasized, trying to find a tactic that would keep this conversation from recurring ever again (yet knowing I would fail), “you know all this to be true. You know that image to be necessary. And I can prove that, because I have heard you say a hundred times, a thousand times that you wish they would stop doing that, but you have never once gone to the publicity shack and told them ‘stop doing that.’ That’s all it would take. Three words from you and it stops, because by golly, you are loved, you are worshipped, you are respected, and you are obeyed. Yet you do not take that step, because you know they are right, sir.”
Holmes let what passes for a smile in his facial repertoire pass his lips (no, he could never even fake being the man you see on the posters). “You are,” he said, “very good at telling the truth. Not that any of you elves have any talent for lying. Few of you even seem to see it as an option. But you in particular, when you see the truth, you like to put it all out there, straight and bare, don’t you? Sometimes, I wish you’d stop that.”
“No, you don’t,” I responded, in my usual chipper tone.
“No, I don’t.”
• • •
Holmes examined the snowy plain surrounding the carcass from all angles, trying to find any trail of the attacker, but to no avail. The only tracks that he could see were Dancer’s and some faint outlines of the snowshoe tracks left by Brizzen, and, more recently, by ourselves (and even those were quickly being lost to the wind). “So the killer left no tracks?” I asked.
“Or the wind has long since brushed them away,” Holmes explained. “If the perpetrator approached the scene on snowshoes, the track would be gone. But snowshoes would make it impossible for the killer to have chased Dancer, yet by the spacing of her hoof prints, she was clearly running.”
“And a person couldn’t run that fast in snowshoes.”
“A person can’t run that fast through snow no matter how they are shod. Even an aging reindeer like Dancer should still be able to do bursts of more than twenty miles an hour. The attacker would need a vehicle of some sort, if he were chasing after her.”
“If? Surely, Dancer was fleeing from whatever nasty ol’ fiend killed her.”
“Again, Wuzzin, you fail to see all the options. What if Dancer was not running from something, but toward it? If the killer presented some sort of a lure or bait that drew her in, then there was no need to go fast at all. He could have come in on snowshoes and stood there for hours, for all we yet know.”
• • •
Our trip to the stables was, if not silent thanks to the engine, certainly devoid of conversation. Holmes was deep in concentration, and Frazzen clearly did not want to hear the details of what we had seen, and for that I could not blame her; if I could unsee it myself, I would. As we approached the stables, we could see many reindeer in the pen. I could not quickly count to see if they were all there, and even if I could, I was unsure how many there were supposed to be. (I dealt mainly with delivery planning, and leave things like toy production, reindeer care, site maintenance, and the various sundry aspects of our North Pole operation to the capable hands of other elves.) I could see there were at least some of the flyers, all female (because that’s where the flight ability lies), and some of the breeding studs (recognizable during this season by their lack of antlers). And I recognized Zephyr, more mature than when I’d last seen her but still slightly smaller than the flight team. There were clearly other reindeer who were somehow necessary to the operation in some way, but again, this was not my department.
Upon hearing our approach, stablemaster Grizzian stepped away from a bit of grooming she’d been doing and rushed toward us. She was old even for an elf, but showed no sign of having been slowed down by it. “Hello, sir. Have you been to see Dancer?” she asked. When Holmes nodded, she launched her next question. “Is it as bad as he says?” he said, gesturing toward Brizzen, who stood slumped against the open doorway of the stable.
“Yes, it is oh-so baddy-bad indeed. Are all the others accounted for?”
She nodded. “They’re all here.”
“What was Dancer doing so far away?” I asked.
“Golly, this time of year, they’re all usually out,” she said, gesturing with her hand. “This close to delivery time, they’re wandering or flying or doing whatever it takes to stay calm. They only come home when they need food or when I blow the horn to call them in. I blew the horn the moment Brizzen told me the news.”
Holmes shook his head. “They’re not calm, though.”
“Nope.”
“What does that mean, not calm?” I asked. “Are they frightened, are they angry, are they…”
A mitten-clad hand came down on my shoulder. “You’re looking for a more complex range of emotions than these reindeer exhibit,” Holmes explained. “They are fairly simple creatures, with two visible emotional states: calm, and agitated. Agitated can be happy or angry or frustrated or sick or ready to mate or any state other than calm.”
Grizzian concurred. “I’ve been tending this wonderful herd for over a century now, and even I still need to know the cause of agitation to have a good guess at what form of agitation it is. They aren’t at all stupidheads, and they have some form of communication among themselves but they aren’t expressive in any way an elf can read. Mister Holmes, if you ever come up with a reindeer decoder, put that on my Christmas wish list.”
• • •
We approached Brizzen, who was still morosely leaning on the stable door frame. He didn’t snap into alertness the way that most of us elves do when the boss looks our way. I tried to find cheery words for him, but all the usual greetings seemed so hollow in the moment, so I just said “Brizzen” to acknowledge his existence. His eyes turned toward me for a moment, then went back down to the ground.
“Don’t worry, I’ll calm things down with Huzzin,” Holmes said to him, in a tone more matter-of-fact than reassuring. “Things will be okay if you just clown around a little less. Now if you could…”
This grabbed Brizzen’s attention. “Is that what Huzzin called it? Clowning around?” he demanded, in a tone that I had never previously heard any elf use with the boss.
“No, not to me, anyway,” said Holmes with a shake of his head. “I’ve not spoken with Huzzin lately.”
Confusion crept across Brizzen’s face. “Then how in the widdly-wide world did you know that he was mad at me for fooling around?”
Holmes sighed. “Most elves don’t go out on a several mile hike for no reaso
n…and particularly not production elves so close to the Christmas deadline. For you to choose to go out—or for Huzzin to let you go—there must’ve been some conflict at hands. Now, looking down at your pants, I see a line of grease just above the cuff. That’s the familiar mark on loose pants. You’ve been riding bicycles, I presume.”
“Testing them out, yes, that’s part of the job,” the elf replied. “The kiddies would be sad sad sad if their new Christmas bikes’n’trikes didn’t work.”
“Of course,” said Holmes, “but the chain is on the right side of the bicycle. You have grease marks on both cuffs, albeit fainter on the left. You’ve been mounting bicycles backwards at times…that is to say, trick riding, showing off, fooling and/or clowning around. Now, I know Huzzin well, and he loves merriment as much as the next elf for ten, maybe eleven months of the year. But in the final weeks before deadline? You should know better than that, and I’m sure you will, next time.”
“Oh, it was obvious then,” said Brizzen, apologetically. “I should’ve known immediately. I’m just a bit too upset.”
“I understand. So, did you just happen to pass right by Dancer’s body?”
“I wasn’t going to go right by it. In fact, I was just about to turn around and head back to the toy production shack, but I saw it…her…in the snow from a while away. My peepers, they see pretty good. I wasn’t sure at first just what that thing in the snow was, but I thought I ought to check.”
“And when you got close, when you could tell it was a reindeer, how’d you recognize it was Dancer?” said Holmes, staring intently at the elf’s face.
“The fur pattern, I suppose mostly the amount of white on her rump. She has the most whiteness of any of them.”
“You’ve spent a lot of time with the team?”
“Not really. Which is good, they scare me, so big.” Brizzen gave a little shiver. “But a few seasons back, we were assembling stuffed reindeer, for the kiddies. Had to get them right. Kids can tell!”
Baker Street Irregulars Page 26