Hullabaloo and Holly Too ( A Cozy Cash Mystery Christmas Novella) (The Cozy Cash Mysteries)

by D. D. Scott

  As if he’d forgotten he had that saving grace, he whipped the list of recommended responses out of his coat pocket while I kept dad busy fussing over me being home for the holidays.

  Okay. Who was I kidding? Dad was making a bigger fuss over Vinnie than me, or at least just as much.

  “Gosh I’ve missed you, Zoey Bean,” my dad said, hugging me so tight to his huge white beard, I was concerned either Vinnie or I could very well suffocate.

  “I’ve missed you too, Dad.”

  And I had missed him.

  For all my parents’ craziness, I still love ‘em so very much.

  They, for sure, have a unique take on the world, but a take full of nothing but love for all mankind and all the world’s creatures too. That’s something I didn’t see much of in my fashion world.

  Despite the thugs in my new Princess Diaries lifestyle, being a Duchess did indeed allow me to spread the love my parents raised me on. I was enjoying the philanthropic duties of my new title. With every little bit of goodness I paid forward, I always thought of my mom and dad.

  “You say you do Christmas Eve fly-ins,” Roman said, evidently checking-off one of the approaches on his empathy model.

  “That I do. And oh, they’re such marvelous fun. You should join me this year, my son. I’d love the company.”

  Roman again looked to me, and I again motioned for him to just carry on with his behavior model methodology. The sooner he learned that thing was a huge farce, the better off we all would be.

  “I can’t see that and the tests don’t show any worms in your head,” Roman said.

  I damn near choked on the warm cocoa my dad always kept in a thermos in our sleigh.

  “What?” My dad asked. “I’m sorry, son, I can’t hear ya very well with all these damn bells jingling.”

  By this time I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, which delightfully made my prince’s cheeks turn an even brighter shade of crimson.

  Roman’s empathy model was based on subjects with a delusional disorder who thought worms were eating their brain. Not a particularly helpful model for dealing with the St. Nick Schizoid variety of this disorder.

  “Roman said he’d love to see that. As in, he’d love to ride with you this Christmas Eve,” I said, deciding I’d answer for my prince just this once, before I peed my pants and choked to death on hot cocoa at the same time.

  “I imagine I might feel overjoyed to share the adventure with you, Sir,” Roman said, beginning to recover, but still relying way too much on his behavioral model’s suggested wording.

  “No need to be so formal, son,” my dad said, patting Roman on the back with one hand while he took hold of the sleigh’s reins with the other. “Call me Santa. Or Nick. Or Dad. Why yes, of course…just call me Dad.”

  With that invitation, he lightly snapped the reins against Donner and Comet’s rumps.

  Oh boy, I thought. That wasn’t gonna sit well with these super-spoiled and ornery reindeer.

  Donner turned around and looked at my dad as if to say ‘you must be nuts, old man, we don’t answer to that trick anymore’.

  “These guys can be a bit stubborn,” my dad said, his round, cherry-red cheeks glowing just about as bright as Rudolph’s nose.

  And yes, The Witherspoons’ lead reindeer, aptly named Rudolph, also sports a glowing red nose.

  You see, my father doesn’t just think he’s St. Nick, he’s also a toymaker and inventor, plus he has a few rather spectacular side gigs as well.

  So yep, you guessed it. He designed and made a glowing red nose for our Rudolph. And it’s not just your basic, glowing red reindeer nose.

  Dad also outfitted our Rudolph’s nose with some sort of specialized GPS device. Our Rudy had grown old and developed Alzheimer’s. So my dad added this rather sophisticated GPS system to help Rudy make it around the globe on Christmas Eve. Otherwise, Dad and his sleigh-pulling entourage sometimes got lost between Bali and Belfast.

  After five minutes of no onward and upward progress, Dad got off of his captain’s bench to have a little heart-to-heart with Donner and Comet, who were always the cause of our reindeer stand-offs.

  My guess was that it probably had something to do with Vinnie. I doubt they appreciated that my pot-bellied pig was now riding high and mighty in their sleigh’s co-captain’s spot.

  Whatever Dad said to Donner must have really pissed him off ‘cause the next thing I knew, the jerk had bucked his head, snatched the empathy model right out of Roman’s fingers, and was chomping on it as if it were an organic carrot, his favorite snack.

  “I hope that paper wasn’t too important,” Dad said, holding his belly full of jelly as he laughed for a jolly bit.

  Dad then got back into the sleigh with us, took the reins, and without the slightest grunt or stomp, Rudolph and Company led us home.

  On our ride, we weren’t just accompanied by sleigh bells, we were also being serenaded by Vinnie’s wild ouffs. He was making all kinds of racket while shaking his head back-and-forth, full of melodrama. Obviously, he wasn’t all that impressed with the family reindeers’ bad attitudes.

  And no, we weren’t flying today. Dad and his reindeer had started saving that just for Christmas Eve. It was their way of “being green” by helping to save the ozone layer.

  How did that work?

  Well…let’s just say those reindeer eat a ton of cabbage to gear-up for their Christmas Eve flight. So their, ahem, emissions tend to be quite high.

  I settled back into the comfy confines of our sleigh with Roman and placed a beautiful blanket my mom had made over our laps.

  I love sleigh rides.

  We began to follow the lakefront and would continue along its curving shoreline all the way to my parent’s house. With the snow falling at a good clip, it was nothing less than a magical journey.

  Roman was no longer upset over Donner making a snack of his empathy model, and life just felt right.

  I don’t know how else to explain it.

  “I’m over the moon that you two are finally here, and with your terrific PI skills, I’m hoping you can help me out,” Dad hollered over his shoulder from his sleigh captain’s seat.

  “Sure thing, um, Dad. What can we help you with?” Roman asked, again looking at me as if I could help save the day.

  “I swear I’m being phone-hacked.”

  “What?! By who?!” I asked, glad to pitch-in on Dad’s latest crazy-trip theory.

  “Father Time, that’s who. The bastard has a beef with me and my Naughty List, and now I think he’s got me phone-hacked too.”

  And just like that, my belief in life feeling oh-so-right took a reindeer-sized cabbage crap on me and my prince.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The sleigh’s runners glided along the long lane then cut through the snow-covered forest leading to the dunes that eventually gave way to our main house.

  I couldn’t help but be taken in by the Winter Wonderland feel of my childhood home.

  There is the North Pole of storybook fame. And then there is the North Pole ala Witherspoon.

  Dad led the team around the half-circle drive that bordered the front door of our giant gingerbread house.

  I still couldn’t believe how much my parents had paid a local mural artist to paint all the cedar shingles on our home to look like pieces of icing-topped gingerbread.

  And the hundreds of thousands of multi-colored Christmas lights strung over the house’s eves and gutters really did look like the gazillion gumdrops on the most decorative of made-to-be-eaten gingerbread houses.

  Two giant evergreens, their boughs so weighed down with lake effect snow that the poor things looked as if they were about to snap, were decorated to the max and stayed that way, along with everything else on our property, the whole year round.

  “Wow,” Roman said, getting out of the sleigh and holding his chivalrous hand out for mine to help me exit the Witherspoon’s version of a family van, “this truly is magnificent.”

  “You
haven’t seen anything yet,” I said, hardly able to stand it till he saw the inside of our home, which would be very soon if my mother had her way.

  I hardly had Vinnie out of the sleigh, secured to his leash, and doing his business, before my mother was all over us.

  She wiped her flour-powdered hands on one of her gorgeous hand-sewn aprons. If my mom wasn’t baking, she was sewing. And if neither of those were on her agenda, she was covered in glitter from head-to-toe, making the next batch of Christmas ornaments she carefully attached to every package my dad delivered each Christmas Eve.

  “Oh, Roman, it’s such a thrill to finally meet you. We’ve heard so much about you. But to finally see you in the flesh just gets me all teary-eyed,” my mom said, crushing Roman into her bountiful bosom.

  The Witherspoon Women are definitely what you would very comfortably and correctly label well-endowed in the cleavage department, which could be considered a blessing or a curse, depending on your point of view.

  “Zoey talks about me? I had no idea,” Roman said, the ornery twinkle in his eyes was quite hard to ignore, although I gave it my best shot.

  So what if I may have talked about him a bit? These were my parents, after all. So that fact, on its own, didn’t mean much. Yeah. Not much at all.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, letting myself be the next squeezed-to-death victim. “It’s good to be home.”

  “You really mean that?” She asked.

  What was that supposed to mean?

  “Of ‘course I mean it. Why wouldn’t I?” And I really hadn’t a clue why she would think otherwise.

  She looked at the ground and played with her apron in the way she does when she’s wanting to say what she’s thinking but isn’t quite sure she should.

  “After the last couple…”

  Suddenly getting where she was going with this and chastising myself for not thinking of it on my own, I gasped. Evidently taking in too big of a lakeshore bitter-cold shot of air in one dose, I coughed a couple times before pulling myself together.

  Thank the powers that be, Roman was too busy listening to my dad explain the cedar gingerbread shingles to pay attention to me and my mom.

  “Not a word about that…little episode. Got it? And I mean it,” I said, and boy did I.

  “As you wish, but I don’t think…”

  “No thinkin’. Just please do as I ask this time.”

  The teeniest of icicle-sharp points of fear pierced my chest. But, on this one, I knew I was making the right call.

  Besides, my BFFs Roxy, Jules, and Audrey would be arriving soon, along with their significant others and The Mom Squad too. That would be enough to scare off anyone.

  “So what’s up with Dad and this phone hacking stuff?” I asked, purposely steering my mother toward my father’s problems and away from mine.

  But before she could fill me in, Santa and his elf-in-training were back.

  “Well, let’s not stand out here in this frigid wonderland any longer. Into the house. I’ve got coffee and cocoa, plus cookies about ready to come out of the oven,” my mom said, herding us all into a little group then hustling and bustling us towards the front door.

  Wanda Lu, my parents’ assistant and the best damn elf ever, had the door open and waiting for us, a huge beautiful grin across her beyond-wise face.

  God, I’d missed her, perhaps most of all. All four feet of her.

  Yes. My parents thought they lived at the North Pole, so they had an entire staff of little people. They could actually film one of those Reality TV dwarf shows right here in Witherspoon Whoville.

  I let Wanda Lu burrow into me, feeling the warmth of her wonderful soul wrap me in her unconditional kindness. On many occasions, I’d thought about having her come to work for Roman and I in the castle, but I couldn’t bear to leave my parents without her. She was my eyes, ears and moral compass where they were concerned. And with her here, I knew they were well cared for.

  “I’m so glad my princess is home. And look, you now have your very own prince, too.”

  Roman leaned down to shake Wanda Lu’s sweet hand and instead got her tiny hug filled with a giant-sized helping of love.

  After letting him out of her grasp, she giggled in her tiny, high-pitched, fairy-like laugh…a laugh I sometimes heard in my dreams.

  She pointed to the rounded archway of the top of the door’s frame.

  There it was…in all its glory.

  A sprig of mistletoe.

  The first of what was probably around 147 sprigs throughout our house. One hanging down from each door frame.

  My parents had a thing for mistletoe.

  “Well…what are you two newlyweds waiting for?” My Dad’s robust voice boomed through the grand entryway of his home.

  Roman looked at me as if to silently seek my permission.

  I nodded, then gulped.

  Little did he know how much more-than-fine it was with me to make good on mistletoe superstition.

  And then…my prince kissed me like mad.

  But being as we were now in Witherspoon Whoville, there’d be a ton more madness under the mistletoe.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Holiday-themed mugs full of Wanda Lu’s amazing hot cocoa with chocolate-tipped peppermint sticks poking out of the tops and a Christmas plate full of her superfab spritz cookies sat on the giant coffee table in the center of our family room.

  I grabbed another camel-shaped cookie, admiring the way the food coloring she’d added turned them the perfect shade of yellow. Of the green trees, reddish-pink poinsettias, and blue wreath-shaped cut-outs to choose from, the camels were my personal faves.

  I settled into the sofa opposite the fireplace, while my parents took their usual places in their his and her’s high-backed wing chairs on either side of the mantle.

  If the decorator-perfect holiday décor didn’t warm a visitor’s soul, the radiant heat from the crackling fire sure would.

  Forget the fire, for me, though. All I needed were the thirty-nine Christmas trees my mom had throughout our home. Yep, even the bathrooms had Christmas trees, a couple with miniature rolls of toilet paper for decoration.

  The thirty-nine trees, plus the grander-than-grand, twenty-five-footer sitting in front of the large, floor to ceiling picture window of our gingerbread house family room, warmed me up to nothing short of holiday magnificence.

  I’ve definitely gotten the love of the season gene from my parents.

  I loved the full balsam fir we all sat around now, but it was second in my heart to the tree in my old bedroom, which still held all my favorite ornaments, handmade by my mother each year since my birth.

  I took a moment before starting any conversation and simply gazed at our grand tree.

  It was filled with all my mother’s best work. Not a single store-bought ornament could be found anywhere in the Witherspoons’ Whoville.

  Every red bow, every sparkling candy cane, every mouth-blown glass ornament or Styrofoam-based fabric, beaded and glitter-soaked ball came straight from my mother’s workshop.

  It wasn’t just Santa who had a workshop in this Santa Claus Land. Mrs. Claus also had her own place to hang out, a special place that served as a playground for her muses.

  “Your tree is like none I’ve ever seen,” Roman said.

  “Why thank you,” my mom answered, the warm glow flushing her cheeks was not from the fire.

  She was always so humbly taken aback when anyone complimented her talents. I’d been at her for years to sell her creations, but she said doing so would stifle her muses. She said she could only create out of love. Making anything for money would be her muses’ undoing.

  “And Zoey tells me you’re not just Santa Claus, but an inventor as well,” Roman said, opening up who only knew what kind of invention tell-alls.

  “Indeed I am, Son. But that’s precisely what’s now gotten me into a wee bit of trouble.”

  Oh boy. My mom and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

  “Bette
r trade in our cocoa for egg nog. Spiced and well-spirited egg nog that is,” my mother said.

  As if perfectly on cue, Wanda Lu brought in a tray with four Irish Coffee-style mugs filled with perfectly frothy, cream-colored egg nog and ground cinnamon sprinkles.

  “I hope mine has plenty of spirit,” I said, winking at Wanda Lu.

  “I fixed y’all right up,” Wanda Lu said, never missing a beat with my family’s needs.

  Even if we didn’t quite know what we needed, she always did, especially when it came to our elixirs of choice.