Mrs. Claus and the Santaland Slayings

by Liz Ireland

  Luther Partridge tapped his baton on his stand, bringing us to order. Martin scrambled over to his seat, and I scooted back to my position next to Smudge. “New love,” he muttered in disgust.

  I glanced over at him. “What are you talking about?”

  He nodded between Martin and Juniper. “Those two.”

  “They barely know each other,” I said.

  “I think that’s about to change.”

  Huh.

  I would’ve liked to mull over the pros and cons of having the only real friend I’d made in Christmastown getting involved with my brother-in-law, but the rehearsal required most of my concentration. What with my investigative activities lately, and finalizing the Skate-a-Palooza schedule at last and posting it on the community hall bulletin board, I hadn’t had time for practicing. And now in addition to all our Christmas songs we were going to play at the Peppermint Pond event, the band had decided to go forward with “Requiem for Giblet,” which required crash cymbals and timpani, neither of which I’d had experience with. Given the ill feeling among many of the elves, I didn’t want to be accused of not doing my best for the Giblet tribute.

  After rehearsal, I hurried to gather my things.

  “We Three Beans?” Juniper asked.

  “Can’t. I have to get back to the castle early today. It’s croquembouche day.”

  “Oh.” Juniper looked disappointed until Martin sauntered up with his sax case.

  “Did someone mention coffee?” he asked.

  “April can’t go,” Juniper said. “Your mother’s giving her a baking lesson.”

  “I’m the pastry chef’s helper,” I reminded him.

  “Just because April’s playing Julia Child doesn’t mean we can’t get coffee,” he told Juniper.

  “Really?” Juniper asked, then tried to compose herself into some semblance of cool disinterest. “I mean, I guess I have time for a cup.”

  “Good,” Martin said. “Let’s go.”

  Juniper sent me an ecstatic smile. “Sorry you can’t come with us—enjoy your baking lesson!”

  She was out the door like a shot.

  Martin winked at me.

  I didn’t know what was more astonishing—the fact that the two of them were actually pairing off or that Smudge had realized which way the wind was blowing before I had.

  Another blow to my self-confidence as an investigator.

  Speaking of blows to self-confidence, I had to hurry to go meet my mother-in-law.

  * * *

  “It’s not enough to be just a baker. You have to be an architect,” said my mother-in-law as she filled round pastry puffs with rum-infused cream from a pastry bag.

  We were wearing matching aprons proclaiming Baking Spirits Bright! across the front in glittery red and green letters. Matching, that is, except for the fact that hers was pristine and mine was spattered with egg yolk, batter, and cream. I wasn’t completely hopeless in a kitchen—I’d fed guests at the Coast Inn for years. In the inn’s guest book, someone had even written that my cloudberry blondies, my own recipe, were to die for. But the croquembouche was not just any normal dessert. It was a power tower of flour. We’d been baking cream puffs half the afternoon; the filled dough balls were the bricks that would create the castle Pamela was building.

  Most croquembouches were pyramids of cream puffs made to look like a Christmas tree—or, for normal occasions, simply a pyramid shape. But Pamela’s confectionary ambitions couldn’t be limited to simple trees. The plans for the pastry replica of Kringle Castle covered in a dome of spun sugar had been rendered on the Plexiglas board, where the dessert would be constructed, although a paper copy of the blueprint had also been pinned to the kitchen wall for reference.

  Turns out, it takes a lot of cream puffs to build a castle. Not to mention patience. We had plenty of the former, but my patience was in short supply. Especially when I realized the same Christmas music mix was cycling through for the third time. It was Pamela’s, so very heavy on Johnny Mathis and novelty songs, which she seemed to think were chuckle worthy every time. At the third repetition of that Chipmunks song my temples began to throb.

  “April, dear, you’re sagging,” Pamela said. “We still have puffs to stuff.”

  I got back with the program, though I couldn’t help noticing that the dough balls were taking up most of the counter space in the castle’s substantial kitchen. “This is going to be kind of big for a dessert, isn’t it?”

  Pamela, concentrating on her work, barely looked up. A stray lock of gray hair had escaped her bun, which was the most disheveled she’d ever allowed herself to appear in my presence. “It’s not just dessert—”

  “It’s architecture,” I finished for her. “I’m just curious how big a piece of real estate it’s going to take up.”

  She gestured to that large piece of double-stacked Plexiglas on the kitchen island, dusted with powdered sugar. “It’s going to be the centerpiece of the dining table for the All-Guild charity luncheon tomorrow. My dessert is always the highlight, and every year people look forward to what I’m going to come up with next.”

  I tried to concentrate on my work, but squirting cream into pastry puffs left too much of my brain free to think about other things. Like that chalkboard I’d seen in the basement. Something about it still niggled at me. The “Naughty” list, maybe. Chris, Nick, Martin, Amory.

  Amory. What had he been doing on that list?

  “Did Amory visit the castle much when Nick and the others were little?” I asked.

  Pamela, concentrating on constructing a wall using rose water–flavored syrup as mortar, didn’t look up. “He wasn’t a visitor. He lived here.”

  This was a news flash to me. “The whole family used to live in the castle, you mean?”

  “Not his family, just Amory. We don’t talk about it much—unpleasant subjects are so, so . . .”

  “Unpleasant?” I guessed.

  In Pamela’s lexicon, unpleasant was just about the worst thing you could say about something, or especially someone.

  She lowered her voice. “Amory’s parents died in an avalanche. They’d taken all the Claus children skiing up by the lodge. It was a miracle they weren’t all killed. Lucia, the oldest, was looking after them all on the bunny slope, or whatever you call it, when the avalanche began a little farther up the mountain. Somehow she managed to keep a cool head and made the boys run to the side, out of its path. Apparently when most people see an avalanche, they try to out-ski it by going down the mountain, but Lucia’s instincts kept all the children safe. Amory and Chris ended up under a little snow—just the fringes—but she dug them out. Unfortunately, no one could save Amory’s parents.”

  “Poor Amory.” To have seen what happened to his parents, and then to also have been there the day Chris met with his fatal accident. I believed Midge’s account of his PTSD now.

  “He coped very well, considering. For all his prickliness, he’s very resilient and always has been.”

  Was he really?

  I tried to imagine what that day must have been like for a group of children—watching a mass of snow coming down a mountain, crushing lives of adults they knew and loved, and almost killing them, too. Then the aftermath, trying to get help. And then discovering that Amory’s parents couldn’t be saved.

  “We were happy to have Amory here with us,” Pamela continued. “The house brimmed with life back then. You can imagine—three little boys.”

  “And Lucia.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Yes, and Lucia.” She sighed. “I always wanted a little girl.”

  But what I got was Lucia. . . .

  She didn’t say it, but her thoughts rang out loud and clear.

  “Lucia’s a singular person,” I said.

  “Oh yes, I’ll grant you that. And she was always her father’s favorite. When she was little he’d always take her riding on his sleigh with him.” She frowned. “I suppose that’s when she developed her mania for reindeer.”

  Or whe
n she decided she deserved to be Santa?

  “Your husband must have been happy when Chris came along, though,” I said.

  “Oh yes—you couldn’t ignore Chris. Everybody loved him.” She shook her head, and tears trembled in her eyes.

  Regret shot through me. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned him.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said quickly. “So much of the time everyone’s trying not to mention Chris, but I love to think about him. I crave it, in fact. Only . . . maybe not when I’m making the croquembouche.”

  She gave the pastry her undivided attention again.

  I began to fear the thing would never be finished. Slowly but surely, though, progress was made. When Pamela stepped back, looking done, I wouldn’t say the dessert resembled Kringle Castle in every detail, but it did look like a large building with a tower. Maybe that was the closest you could get by stacking cream puffs on top of each other.

  “Looks great.” I wasn’t lying. Even if it wasn’t photo perfect, it was impressive.

  She gaped at me, aghast. “It’s not finished! We’ve still got to do the most important part. Waldo, bring the dome!”

  Did I mention preparation? As it turned out, what we’d been doing was the least of it. Pamela and Waldo had been dreaming up this confectionary tower since the year before, and now a special glass dome was wheeled into the kitchen.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’ll fit over the castle perfectly.” My gaze narrowed on the glass. “Although maybe we should clean it first. Something’s smeared all over it.”

  “That’s butter,” Pamela said. “We’re going to make la cage.”

  I’d forgotten the spun-sugar cage—la cage—that was supposed to go over the final creation. Now I could barely suppress a groan. My feet were achy, and I longed to shower the flour coating off of me and scrub the sticky syrup off my hands.

  My lack of enthusiasm wasn’t lost on Pamela. “This is the best part—and it only takes a few minutes.”

  Right.

  Actually, she was only off by an hour. By 6:00 p.m. we had drizzled the hot golden sugar over the buttered glass, let it harden, and then carefully—very carefully—pulled it up in one delicate piece and placed it over the cream-puff castle.

  Now it looked impressive, like a shiny, lacy sugar web over the dessert. “I can’t imagine actually eating this,” I said. “It’s so beautiful.”

  Not to mention, it had been so much work.

  A sense of accomplishment filled me when I looked at that castle resting under its spun-sugar dome like a pastry snow globe. In spite of all the intense labor it required, I felt pretty proud of what we’d done today.

  Pamela, who’d been pacing around her creation and inspecting it critically, finally allowed herself to look pleased. “Eating it’s the best part, actually. You cut into the sugar cage, and it all crackles apart like shattering glass and the crunchy bits are caught by the sticky parts below.”

  Waldo and two of the castle’s kitchen elves wheeled the confection away.

  “They’ll keep it in the walk-in freezer till tomorrow morning,” Pamela explained. “Then it will be thawed out by luncheon.”

  “Smart.” The castle “freezer” was a large storage room off the kitchen whose windows were kept cracked up. Keeping things frozen in Santaland was a low-tech affair.

  “Now do you think you could make one next year on your own?” she asked me. At my horrified look, she laughed. “I was just ribbing you, April. Of course I know you couldn’t. It takes years to master the croquembouche.” She patted my arm. “But you’ve made a good start.”

  That was probably the most praise I was ever going to get from her. I decided to quit while I was ahead. “I need to clean up before dinner,” I said after we’d tidied up most of our mess in the kitchen.

  “Very well. Thank you for your help today,” she trilled out to me politely as we parted ways in the hall. As if I’d merely dropped off a package or something. To me, exhausted and drooping, it felt as if we’d been through a war together. A croquembouche war.

  I dragged back to Nick’s and my room, ready to slip my tired feet into my soft lamb’s wool slippers. It took my last ounce of effort to push open the heavy door and close it after me.

  A figure on the bed caused me to gasp.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

  Therese smiled at me. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t waiting for Nick. Just for you.”

  I rolled my eyes. As if I’d actually thought she and Nick would have a rendezvous in our bedroom. “How did you even get up here?”

  She laughed. “I know this place better than you. I also know all the people who live here better than you do.”

  I crossed to the bellpull to summon Jingles or one of his helpers. I was too tired for this nonsense. “I get it. The detectives dismissed the malarkey you tried to whisper in their ears about me, so now you’re trying to intimidate me this way. It’s not working.”

  Therese lifted her head. “You can have me tossed out now, but you know I’ll be back. Permanently, someday. Look at yourself.” Her eyes traveled up my flour- and batter-coated person, and my ridiculous apron. “You’re a mess.”

  “I just spent five hours in the kitchen with Pamela.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Her face reddened. “It’s croquembouche day. Do you know who’s been helping her with that for the past three years?” Her tone of betrayal gave me a good guess. “Not Lucia,” she said, “not Tiffany. Me. But did she even ask me this year?”

  There was something wrong with this woman. I kept tugging the sash. Hurry, Jingles. “Therese, there’s a whole world apart from this place. And there are millions of men besides Nick.”

  She jumped to her feet. “Then why didn’t you take one of them? Why did you have to come here and steal him from me? All this was supposed to be mine!”

  In a millisecond she was in front of me, her thin hands around my throat. I was so shocked I didn’t know how to respond—and then I realized I couldn’t respond even if I’d wanted to. My windpipe was squeezed shut by her long-nailed claws. Who knew she was so strong? My head grew woozy from both the pain and the increasing lack of oxygen.

  My god, I’m going to die right here in Kringle Castle. Another Santaland casualty. Would Jake Frost think Nick was responsible for this, too?

  Three deaths.... And believe me, there will be another. Maybe this was what Tiffany had meant.

  Seconds went by, maybe minutes. All I could see was Therese’s face, then a moment of darkness, and then I was dropping to the hard stone floor. My vision came back just in time to witness Lucia hauling back and decking Therese with an uppercut to her jaw. The woman went down in a heap—much as I had. Only I was still conscious and Therese was out for the count.

  Lucia towered over me. “Are you okay?”

  Just then, Jingles skidded into the room. “What was all that ringing abou—” The last word morphed into a sharp intake of breath as he gawped at Therese lying there, and then at me. “Did you kill her?”

  Lucia laughed. “Guess again. Therese almost killed April. Help me get April up. Then we need to call Constable Crinkles.”

  “No,” I croaked.

  Lucia looked at me as if Therese’s choke hold had strangled my wits. “You’d let her get away with attempted murder?”

  “I want to talk to Nick,” I said.

  “You think he’d be okay with someone trying to kill you?”

  Jingles took my side. “It’s to avoid a scandal,” he explained to Lucia. “Think how this would look—two women catfighting over Santa in his bedchambers. During Christmas week, no less. Heaven knows there’s enough talk already.”

  Lucia looked disgusted. “It looks bad because it is bad. Therese is a maniac.”

  “She’s definitely disturbed,” I said. “She needs help. She needs to get away from here.”

  “Yes,” Jingles said, ringing the bell. “And right now I need help. How do we explain Therese being out l
ike this?” Neither Lucia nor I had an answer. After a moment of thought, he answered his own question. “We could tell the rest of the staff that Therese ate something that didn’t agree with her.”

  Lucia was skeptical. “And how do we explain away the welts around April’s neck? ‘Therese ate a bad clam’ isn’t going to cut it.”

  We debated different lies we could tell, and then settled on saying nothing. I would wear turtlenecks until the red marks calmed down.

  I was in the en suite washroom while Jingles and his helpers finally hauled Therese away.

  Lucia knocked when they were gone. “Coast is clear.”

  I came out. I’d jumped in the shower and was wearing my robe and slippers. It would have been bliss except for the fact that it felt as if someone had stomped on my neck with a work boot.

  I sank onto the bed and looked up at my sister-in-law. “Thank you for saving my life.”

  She shrugged modestly. “It was nothing.”

  “I’m not the only one in Santaland who owes my life to you, I’ve heard.”

  Her expression grew wary.

  “The avalanche,” I prompted.

  “Oh, that.” She said it as if it were nothing. “People say I did something great back then, but I was just the oldest left in charge of the kids. When the avalanche happened, my instincts were to run.”

  “You ran in the correct direction.”

  “That was just luck. It wasn’t as if I’d devised a survival plan. Mostly, I was thinking about saving my own skin.”

  “You protected them all.”

  “Well, they were littler and cuter then—even Amory.”

  “So Amory lived here through most of his childhood?”

  “Yeah, he was a little twit sometimes—still is—but he was okay. All of them were.”

  “That’s not what you thought when you were a kid, though, was it?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw a little chalkboard on an easel downstairs in the doll cellar. You’d written two columns—‘Naughty’ and ‘Nice.’ Chris, Nick, Martin, and Amory were all listed as naughty.”

  Her breath caught. “I’d forgotten all about that chalkboard. I used to try to teach the dolls about hockey plays.”