by Donna Ball
“What’s up?” Mike asked.
“We’re looking for Santa Claus,” I answered, gasping a little as we reached him.
Mike chuckled. “Who isn’t? Cute dog,” he added.
“Thanks,” I said, and the puppy, who was grinning happily with the excitement of the chase, licked my face. “Big man, red suit.”
“No kidding, man,” Buck said, “have you seen him?”
“Yeah, he was here a minute ago.” Mike looked around. “There he is, headed toward Hanson’s.” He pointed across the street.
The Christmas lights started to come on all over town as we dashed across Main Street: the wreaths and candy canes that decorated the lamp posts, the swags that were draped over the shop doors, the miniature trees in the store windows. The Christmas village in front of the florist’s shop sprang to multicolored life as we ran past, and I slowed my step a little for one more appreciative look. The big tree in the town square lit up in a cascade of red and blue and green, and a dozen sparkling red and white wreaths blinked on along the front of Hanson’s Department store. On the roof of the store, the north pole came to life with snow men, elves, reindeer, and dancing nutcrackers. The whole world was bathed in color, and somewhere a choir was singing, “Hark, the Herald Angels”. The puppy twisted this way and that in my arms, his excited panting hot against my cheek, trying to take in everything.
“There he is!” I cried, and this time it was really him, just reaching the corner of the block that ended in a blind alley behind Hanson’s.
“Hey!” Buck called. “Hey, wait up a minute!”
Santa turned, saw us, and lifted his hand in a wave. “Merry Christmas!” he called back.
“Hold on! We need to talk to you!”
But Santa did not stop. In fact, he might have increased his pace a little as he turned the corner into the alley. And what was Buck supposed to do? Pull a gun on Santa Claus? With frustration tight on his face, he ran after him.
Santa couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty steps ahead of him, and as I’ve said, Buck was fast. I was not so fast, particularly when weighed down by a bouncy puppy, and I burst into the alleyway, gasping for breath, a second or two behind Buck.
The alley was-- except for Buck, the puppy-- and me, empty.
Long ago, perhaps in the days of wagons, the fifteen by fifteen area had been used as a loading dock. Now it was nothing but a concrete walled space with no practical purpose that contained nothing but a few rotting wood pallets and a crushed gallon paint bucket. The reflected Christmas lights from the roof illuminated the small area as brightly as daytime; nonetheless, Buck took out his flashlight and shone it on every square and empty inch.
I lowered the puppy to the ground, easing my aching arms, bending at the waist to catch my breath. “He was…right here,” I insisted, wheezing a little. “I saw him!”
Buck frowned. “Me, too.” His flashlight beam climbed the solid wall, at least a story and a half high. “Damned if I know how he got out of here.”
“Reindeer?”
Buck turned to me, about to make some equally sarcastic remark, and then stopped, listening. I heard it, too. For a moment we just stared at each other, and then, slowly, raised our eyes to the sky, looking for the source of the sound that simply couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. It was the crisp clear sound of jingling sleigh bells.
That was the last we ever heard of Santa Claus.
“Aw, come on,” said Melanie. Her eyes were big behind her black-rimmed glasses, and tinged with healthy skepticism. “You don’t really expect me to believe that.”
“It’s true,” said Buck, and shared a wink with me over Melanie’s head. “I was there.”
The room had begun to fill up while I talked, although we were still a few minutes away from the official opening of the doors. Maude had brought young Pepper in from the grooming room, freshly styled and shining like silk, with a red and white bow clipped behind each ear and nails that were painted, at Melanie’s insistence, bright red. My Aunt Mart arrived in a festive “Deck the Halls with Bows of Collies” Christmas sweater and Majesty the collie on a leash. Majesty looked equally festive in a gold-trimmed red velvet ruffled collar and was still every bit as imperious as she had been the day I’d first met her, sitting atop a dog house in a muddy lot. Buck had stopped by with a fifty-pound sack of dog food that the boys from the department had donated for the animal shelter, and had stayed to repair a malfunctioning strand of lights and to tack up the sagging garland over the doorway. My twin blue merle Aussies, Mischief and Magic, had come in from the play yard calm enough to allow Melanie to wrestle them into Santa Claus hats, and now wandered happily around the room, each with a hat under her chin, looking for trouble to get into.
Cisco had of course bounded from his mat the moment Buck opened the door, slinging himself into his hero’s arms. Buck and I had been more-or-less-amicably divorced for years now, but Buck was still Cisco’s favorite person in the world. I sometimes thought that he knew, somewhere deep in his doggie heart, that Buck was the one who’d brought us together and changed both our lives. Now he pranced around the room like the gracious host and more-or-less model citizen he was, plumed tail waving, reminding everyone with his ineffable grin that it was, indeed, the season to be jolly.
“Seriously,” Melanie said, “you caught him, right?”
“Wish I could say so,” Buck admitted. “The Sheriff’s Department over in Broward did pick up a fellow with the same M.O. a few weeks later, but something happened with the evidence and they had to let him go.”
“And no one was ever able to tie those crimes with the ones here,” said Maude. “If indeed you could call them crimes.”
“Of course they were crimes,” I said indignantly. “He stole three hundred twenty-six dollars from us!”
“But we received four hundred nine in return,” Maude pointed out. “No one ever claimed the envelope Cisco found, so all the money went to the Humane Society.”
“The worst part probably was that I never found Cisco’s registration papers,” I told Melanie. “My guess is that I dropped them in all the confusion, and the phony Santa picked up the envelope thinking it was the one that had the money in it. I wish I could have seen his face when he opened up the envelope.”
“All you have to do is write to the AKC for a copy,” said Melanie who, thanks to the Internet, knew a little bit about everything.
“Which I did,” I assured her.
“I never heard any more about the man, did you?” Aunt Mart came in with a bowl of ice cubes for the punch. “The most peculiar case I think Roe ever had.”
“There was no sleigh in that alley,” Melanie insisted determinedly. She straightened one of the bows behind Pepper’s ear, which had already been dislodged a half dozen times in puppy play.
“Then how did he get out?” Buck queried, straight-faced.
“And what about the sleigh bells?” I added.
“Aren’t you planning to be a detective when you grow up?” asked Maude.
“FBI,” I corrected.
“Well then,” said Buck, “this sounds to me like the kind of case a future FBI-agent in training should be able to figure out.”
Melanie said thoughtfully, “Yeah.” Then, more confidently, “Yeah, I will. Don’t you worry about that.” She turned to walk away, then looked back at me. “You know,” she said, “I’m glad the Forest Service downsized you. If they hadn’t, you never would have opened Dog Daze. And if you hadn’t opened Dog Daze, you never would have met my dad and...” She shrugged. “Funny how things work out, huh?”
I did not bother to point out that the way I had met her dad had been far, far more complicated than she made it sound. That was a story for another day. I agreed simply, “Right. Funny.”
“But there was no sleigh in that alley,” she repeated sternly. She walked away, pondering, while the rest of us shared a grin.
Aunt Mart slipped her arm through Buck’s. “Buck, honey, I know you’ve got to get b
ack to work but if I could steal you and that hammer of yours for just one more minute, I really don’t like the way that tree is tilting to the left…”
She led him off, and I wandered, drawn by the pull of exquisite party food aromas, toward my office for a quick taste of what was cooking before everyone else arrived. The best thing about Melanie’s dad, Miles—aside from the fact that he was inexplicably wild about me—was that he was a great cook and he didn’t mind who knew it. Thanks to him, this year the Dog Daze Christmas party would include garlic shrimp, non-alcoholic eggnog, and some kind of incredible melty cheese wrapped in bacon on toast points for the adults, along with the cookies and punch for the children.
I opened the door to my bright blue and yellow office, where the food prep stations had been staged, and he turned, a spatula in one hand, wearing a Santa hat and an apron decorated with dancing elves. He deadpanned, “Do you think this outfit is emasculating?”
The other great thing about Miles is that he makes me laugh way, way more than he makes me cry, which, all things considered, makes my relationship with him the best one I’ve ever had with anyone except Cisco. I went into his arms and kissed his lips, which tasted of garlic shrimp and white wine sauce. He leaned his forehead against mine, looked deep into my eyes, and said softly, “There was no sleigh in that alley.”
Someone put on the Bow-Wow Baritone’s version of “Jingle Bells” (easily recognizable, since the lyrics are “woof-woof- woof”), and Miles and I carried out platters of hors d’oeuvres to the buffet table. The jingle bells over the door rang repeatedly as one dog after another tugged his owner excitedly inside—terriers, hounds, toys and mutts, all dressed in their Christmas finery, accompanied by men, women and children of all ages. Someone gave Cisco a dog-bone shaped present wrapped in gold, with which he pranced around proudly, teasing the other dogs, until Pepper grabbed one end of it and a tug of war ensued. The stuffed toy inside was ignored for the gold ribbon that came on the package, and Maude snapped pictures of the two golden retrievers playing tug of war with the ribbon.
“All that glitters is usually golden,” I said, grinning as I watched them.
The jingle bells sounded again and a yellow lab bounded in. Melanie, who was untangling Pepper’s paws from the ribbon, looked up at the bells, then at me. She burst into laughter. “I’ve got it!” she cried. “It was Cisco’s jingle bell collar that you heard! He was wearing a jingle bell collar in the picture, and when you put him down he probably started scratching. It wasn’t sleigh bells at all—it was Cisco!”
Miles brought me a glass of eggnog, and I lifted it to Melanie in a salute. “Good for you. You’ll be taking your Detective First Class exam before you know it.”
She nodded smugly. “I told you there was no sleigh in that alley.” She picked up the stuffed toy Cisco had dropped and started to toss it to him, then hesitated, frowning at me a little. “Then how did Santa get out of the alley?”
I just smiled.
Melanie tossed the toy for Cisco, still looking thoughtful. Cisco leapt to catch it and took off at a dash, leading the charge toward the playroom. Dogs barked, children laughed, music played, lights twinkled. A mastiff stepped on my foot, and an Australian shepherd leapt onto the table and dunked a paw into the punch bowl. The Christmas tree swayed dangerously.
And in the background, the sound of sleigh bells still could be heard.
We hope you enjoyed the characters you met, canine and human, in this Christmas Cozy short from Raine and Cisco. The mystery continues in these full-length adventures:
Are you new to the Raine Stockton Dog Mystery series? See how it all began with SMOKY MOUNTAIN TRACKS
Read more about how Raine, Buck and Cisco became a team in RAPID FIRE
See how Raine first met Miles Young in GUN SHY
Is Majesty the collie your favorite character? Read how she takes matters into her own paws in the novella, BONE YARD
Enjoy Raine and Cisco’s first Christmas with Miles and Melanie in SILENT NIGHT
Things get serious in Raine and Cisco’s most intense adventure yet , THE DEAD SEASON.
And look for High in Trial, Book 7 of the Raine Stockton Dog Mystery series, coming in, 2013.
Other books you might enjoy:
Spine-chilling suspense by Donna Ball
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He was a reformed jewel thief now turned security expert and her job depended on his expertise. But could he be trusted not to steal the most valuable jewel of all-- her heart?
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She was a marine biologist on short deadline to find a very important dolphin, with no time to waste on romance. He was a sailor who knew there could only be one captain on his ship-- himself. But two weeks at sea together could change everything...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR….
Donna Ball is the author of over a hundred novels under several different pseudonyms in a variety of genres that include romance, mystery, suspense, paranormal, western advent
ure, historical and women’s fiction. Recent popular series include the Ladybug Farm series by Berkley Books and the Raine Stockton Dog Mystery series. Donna is an avid dog lover and her dogs have won numerous titles for agility, obedience and canine musical freestyle. She lives in a restored Victorian Barn in the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains with a variety of four-footed companions. You can contact her at http://www.donnaball.net
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR