by Liz Ireland
I scanned the message again and laughed at the absurdity of it. A perfect study in passive aggression. At times like this I missed my friend Claire, who enjoyed Damaris’s ridiculous shenanigans as much as I did. Claire owned Cloudberry Creamery, the local ice-cream shop, and we’d dubbed a popular bitter lemon slushee she sold “The Damaris Freeze” after the lip puckering its first jolt of bitterness caused. An added splash of vodka made a Drunken Damaris, which we enjoyed during those winter months when there weren’t too many tourists around. In other words, right about now.
I forwarded Damaris’s emails to Claire with a brief note telling her I thought she might like to know that I might have escaped the winter off-season, but I was still getting an icy blast of Damaris. I hadn’t confessed the truth about Nick to Claire yet—I’d just told her his family were big landowners in the far north. Her curiosity about my whirlwind marriage was intense, but she wasn’t naturally nosy. Perversely, this made me more inclined to confide in her. I just didn’t know how to start.
By the way, I married Santa Claus. . . . She’d suspect I was actually living in a rubber room somewhere.
After sending off the email, I decided to tell Nick about Damaris’s note. He could probably use a laugh today.
I met Jingles in the corridor. “Is Nick in the breakfast room?”
The question seemed to surprise him. “No, he’s in his study. It’s already been quite a morning. Constable Crinkles was here.”
I gulped. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
He gave me a dubious look. “They probably didn’t want to bother you.”
“They?”
“Santa and Mrs. Claus—I mean, the dowager Mrs. Claus. They were shut up in the study for half an hour after the constable left.” He lowered his voice. “Not that I was listening at the door, but as I was standing in the hallway I might have heard them mention something about the investigation, and bringing in someone.”
Bringing in someone . . . like a lawyer? Did they even have those in Santaland?
My jaw tightened. “Thank you, Jingles.”
I stood in the hallway, reminding myself of pertinent facts, trying to tether myself to sanity: Hiring legal counsel is no indication of guilt.
A morning meeting with one’s mother is not a personal cabal against me.
I did not marry an elficidal Santa.
This whole double-murder situation was making me paranoid. Especially with crazy Tiffany’s ravings about Chris being murdered thrown into the mix. Or was she crazy? If she wasn’t . . . well, she’d come as close as possible to implicating Nick as she could have without physically pointing a finger at him.
That’s what was making me second-guess everything. The only person anyone was pointing to as a suspect was Nick. As far as I knew, there were no other suspects. So far, the evidence was scant but it all pointed to Nick.
Someone needed to do some digging to find out who really was behind this crime spree. And given the head-scratching ineffectiveness of Constable Crinkles, I was pretty sure that someone was going to have to be me.
Filled with newfound investigative fervor, I grabbed a quick bite in the breakfast room—miraculously empty— tapped into my inner Poirot, and revved up my little gray cells. Who would have killed both Giblet and Charlie? The trouble was I’d barely known Giblet. And as for Charlie . . . did snowmen have enemies?
I needed to start at square one. The clues. First up: the spider. If what they said was true and poisonous spiders weren’t native to the North Pole, then how did one get to Giblet’s cottage and into his stocking? It had to have come from somewhere.
That decided my course of action. I put on my coat and gloves, and before anyone—especially Pamela—could waylay me I slipped out the side door of the castle and took the funicular down the hill into Santaland. Several cars went up and down the long incline toward the castle all the time, so I wasn’t completely dependent on the castle’s chauffeured fleet of sleighs and snowmobiles. Stealth was the goal. Unfortunately, as I settled into a corner seat for the ride I felt as if I was being examined. I was used to standing out; I was taller than an elf, had reddish-blond hair, and I was Mrs. Claus. But this was something different. A hair-standing-on-edge sensation.
I looked around the car and found my gaze locked with Therese’s.
Great. All I needed now was another public confrontation. I braced myself for a demented harangue like I’d been treated to in We Three Beans. To my surprise, however, she didn’t come forward to make a scene, and when I rose to leave the car at the first Santaland stop she merely smirked at me. I would’ve at least expected her to stick out her leg at the last minute and send me sprawling to the ground. Subtlety wasn’t her style, so her holding back left me almost as unsteady as a blizzard of angry words would have. I stepped off the funicular and very pointedly did not look back. Mistake number one.
My destination was the main branch of the North Pole post office. Think your post office is crowded during the holidays? You should see mine. The strange thing about the Christmastown P.O. is that the pileup isn’t caused by people sending packages, it’s caused by the sacks of mail—all addressed to Santa—and tables and tables of elves sit sifting through the letters and directing them to the correct department at Tinkertown, or, for those really tough letters, to the castle itself, where Nick and his assistants deal with the children who want things like a new brother, or a house, or an end to war. I’d already seen those stacks of letters and how they affected Nick. Santa Claus wasn’t just about tossing toys down chimneys. It was about giving hope.
Employees everywhere, and no one to talk to. On speakers from above, 101 Strings sawed happily away at “Sleigh Ride.” I waited through it and Bing’s “White Christmas” before a harassed elf clerk came to the window. “Can I help you?” When he looked up at me, he gulped and straightened his cap.
“I want to inquire about a package,” I said.
“Do you have the tracking number?”
“No . . . in fact, I’m not even sure it was sent at all. I was just wondering if there were any deliveries made recently to Giblet Hollyberry’s cottage?”
At the name, the elf frowned. “Giblet. Oh. Well, I wouldn’t know. Unless it was a tracked package. Any other deliveries would just go out with the normal mail and we wouldn’t have a record.”
I didn’t have a number, of course. I’d made the mistake of thinking that everything in Christmastown would be magically simpler, even the postal service.
So much for my little gray cells.
“We’ll be sending a sack of mail up to the castle later today,” the clerk said.
“Thank you.”
I was about to leave when the elf lowered his voice. “I’m not supposed to plug the competition, but what the heck—it’s the holidays, right?”
I leaned in.
“SPEX,” he said.
I frowned, uncomprehending.
“Santaland Parcel Express,” he said. “They might be able to help you. Lots of folks around here use them, especially this time of year. They don’t have to handle letters to Santa.”
“Thank you.”
The elf ’s eyes widened again. “Not that there’s anything wrong with Santa letters. It’s our bread and butter.”
“You do an amazing job sorting them all out,” I assured him.
He stood a little taller. “We try.”
He gave me the address for SPEX and I left, heading for the parcel office. As I walked, I felt a frisson of awareness, as if I was being watched. Or followed. Remembering my encounter with Therese earlier, I slowed down at a corner and looked around surreptitiously. She was nowhere in sight. The sidewalks teemed with the usual December traffic, elves and people bundled up and going about their business. A dogsled-der mushed past, the dogs wearing jingle bells on their harnesses like reindeer. The wonderful aroma of hot chocolate from the Hoppie’s Hot Drinks cart lured me over for a quick drink. As I downed a cup, I took in the twinkle lights winking against t
he snow-covered streets and rooftops. It was hard to believe that anything sinister could have happened in this cheery, festive world.
Maybe it hadn’t, I told myself. Maybe the spider bite was just happenstance and the melting of Charlie was . . .
Well, it was hard to say what that could have been besides deliberate malice.
The difference between this SPEX office and the post office was stark. A lone employee, middle-aged and tall for an elf, slouched behind the counter, bored out of his mind. Seeing me—recognizing who I was—he straightened and lit up like a Broadway marquee. “Mrs. Claus! How may I help you?”
“I came for some information. I need to know if any packages were delivered to Giblet Hollyberry’s recently.”
The enthusiastic smile on his face froze into a pained rictus. “I can’t give out information like that. Confidentiality, you know.”
I glanced at the name tag on the elf ’s tunic. Filbert. “The clerk at the post office said you might be able to help.”
“I’d like to. . . .” Filbert practically writhed.
Guilt shot through me at the position I was putting him in. I wasn’t an arm-twisting kind of person. I took a step back. “It’s all right. I understand.”
His head tilted. “Are you working with the police? I didn’t tell them anything, either.”
That caught my attention. “They’ve been here?”
“Yes—asking me all sorts of questions, probably about the same things you want to know. Suspicious packages at the castle, that sort of thing.”
“What did you tell them?”
His mouth tightened, as if he was physically barring any information from passing to me.
I’d underestimated Constable Crinkles. He hadn’t seemed inclined to do much in the way of real investigating, yet he’d worn out a little shoe leather coming down here to try to figure out who had sent that package to Giblet.
Maybe he wasn’t as hopeless a detective as I’d thought.
“Was the constable satisfied with what he found out?” I asked.
“The constable?” the clerk repeated.
Did he think I was so ignorant of Christmastown that I didn’t even know who the law was? “You don’t have to tell me what you said to him. I understand.”
“Wait!”
I stopped, and Filbert came around the counter. “I didn’t like the way the questions were being asked by that detective. Everything was about the new Santa, and did he ever come here to pick anything up, or was there a suspicious package delivered to the castle.”
My mouth felt dry. So it was as I thought. They suspected Nick. “What did you say?”
Anxiety crossed his face, and then he stepped back around the corner. “I’d love to tell you, but first, I’d like to show you a video I made of my youngest daughter, Willa. She’s a tap-dancing, singing dynamo!”
Before I could protest, he’d flipped his monitor around and had hit Play on a video of a little elf girl tapping and singing “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” She was cute as a bug’s ear, although her mastery of pitch left something to be desired. I tried to keep smiling as she warbled and tapped her way through the song.
When it was over, he grinned at me. “Wouldn’t she be great for opening the Skate-a-Palooza?”
My mouth dropped. First, the Skate-a-Palooza was a huge outdoor event featuring big acts, like our local rock band Figgie and the Nutcrackers. Open with this kid and I might have a riot on my hands. “I’m not sure . . .”
He hit the button and the monitor went black. “Of course, if you don’t want to know what suspicious package was delivered to the castle . . .”
So this was it. A shakedown. And now I had to weigh which was stronger: my integrity, or my curiosity.
“Willa will be a dynamite opener,” I said.
He beamed. “I hoped you’d think so. That wasn’t even her best outfit. Her mama just made her a new one, with sequins.”
I cleared my throat. “What about this package? What did you tell the police?”
“That I never took anything like a suspicious package to the castle, which is the truth.”
I frowned. Was this a joke?
He smiled slyly. “What I didn’t say is that my coworker, Frank, said he’d taken a special delivery over just last week. He said the package was marked Live Animals and had directions to be delivered immediately.”
Live animals. My heart rate sped. “What was in it?”
“Frank said he didn’t know. It was a big box, though. Came from Alaska, I think—at least, that’s where it went through before it got here. He said it was kind of heavy.”
I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed. “Too big to be spiders, then.”
He frowned. “Well . . . they could have put the spiders in one of those glass things.”
A terrarium. I hadn’t thought of that. “Who was it addressed to?”
“Lucia Claus. But she wasn’t the one who took the package. A man did.”
“Nick—I mean, Santa?”
His brow furrowed. “Frank didn’t think so. Neither of us had ever really seen Nick Claus up close. He’s not like Chris was, or even Martin. Those two were always the friendly ones.” My expression must have changed, because he suddenly looked stricken. “Meaning no disrespect.”
“None taken.”
“I hope you won’t hold what I said against little Willa. She’s got a mighty talent.”
I bit my lip. “No, I wouldn’t do that.”
“The Hollyberrys were always hotheads, Giblet most of all. None of us sane elves think the Claus family would kill anybody. Especially not Nick Claus. Gosh, everyone knows he’s a private sort of person. Keeps to himself.”
He sounded like a guy on the news replying to a reporter’s questions about the serial killer next door. “Thank you for the information,” I said.
Filbert leaned forward, lowering his voice. “You know you’re being followed, don’t you?”
The uneasiness I’d felt on the street came roaring back. “I thought so. Thanks for telling me.”
I left the store, feeling frustrated and paranoid again. If someone was following me . . .
As I reached the corner of the building, a hand darted out and caught my arm, whirling me back. A man in a black trench coat and hat looked at me with eyes as gray as flint. “Are you April Claus?”
I tried to shrug his hand off my arm, but his grip remained firm. Firm and cold. Iciness seeped through the wool of my coat. “I am.”
“You’d better come with me, then. I have questions.”
“I have one, too,” I protested. “Who are you?”
“Name’s Frost, ma’am. Jake Frost. I’m a detective.”
“Jack Frost? Are you serious?”
“Jake,” he said with the studied patience of a man who’d made the same correction a hundred times. “Jack was a distant relation.”
“Have you been following me?”
“As it happens, yes.”
“Why?”
“Someone tipped us off that you were acting suspiciously.”
“Who—?”
All at once, I remembered that smirk I’d seen on the funicular on the face of my would-be rival, Therese.
Chapter 7
“Why were you asking the postal and delivery clerks about Giblet Hollyberry?” the detective asked me.
“Why do you think? He was murdered.”
We were sitting in the main room of the Christmastown Constabulary, which was a cottage repurposed as a police station. My glimpse of the “jail” revealed it to be a bedroom with a button lock on the hallway side, although I was assured that the windows had been painted shut. Clearly, Christmastown didn’t expect any criminal masterminds to be passing through in the near future. Understandable, I supposed, for a city that had never seen a murder until yesterday.
Detective Jake Frost perched on a chair all the way across the room from me, while I was as close to the hearth as I could manage witho
ut going up in flames. The mantel was festooned with evergreen, holly, and mistletoe. No one would confuse this place with Alcatraz.
The gaze Frost leveled at me brought the temperature down a few degrees, though.
I jumped in before he could ask his next question. “I’m glad they’ve brought you in, Detective Frost. Maybe now we’ll find out who killed Giblet and Charlie.”
“That’s the intention.”
My attempt to ingratiate myself didn’t impress him. “Well . . . anything you want to know,” I said, continuing my effort to seem biddable. “I’m only too happy to help.”
Except I had no intention of helping to convict my husband or anyone else at the castle if Frost was going to rush to judgment. I especially wasn’t going to tell him about that package delivered to the castle until I discovered more about it.
Frost’s lips quirked. It was hard not to stare at him. I’d become so used to the doughy folk of Christmastown, Jake Frost had seemed to swoop in a like a bird of prey among a warren of plump bunnies. Everything about him was angular and dark, except his eyes, which were a disarming slate gray.
“Where were you the night Giblet Hollyberry was killed?” he asked.
Of course I’d known I was a suspect—the Hollyberrys thought so, and Jake Frost was here at their insistence. But I hadn’t yet heard that question. Suddenly I felt like a bug pinned on a board. I began to sweat like a suspect. I scooted my chair a little farther from the fire and cleared my throat. “I was in bed asleep, of course.”
“All night?”
I shifted, remembering how strange that night had been. How restless I was—almost as restless as Nick, who’d disappeared.
“Mrs. Claus?”
He may have said it twice. To be honest, I still had difficulty associating that name with me. “April, please,” I said. “I might have gotten up for a drink of water . . . or something like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
His eyes narrowed as if they could laser right through to my soul. For all I knew, they could. An air of unreality hung about him; his possessing supernatural powers wouldn’t surprise me. Once you find yourself in Santaland, the bar for something to seem fantastical is set high.