Mrs. Claus and the Santaland Slayings Page 24

  “But you said you didn’t see anyone.”

  “Not that I recall, no.”

  So neither she nor Quasar witnessed any of the luncheon guests sneaking around in a way that would have allowed the person to slip into Nick’s office and replace the gumdrops with poisoned ones. I tried to hide my disappointment.

  “Whoever did this to Christopher is a real fiend,” she said. “Who could hate Christopher? He’s the nicest kid in Christmastown.”

  “Maybe they just hate what he represents—the Santa torch being passed to the younger generation. The killer might think Christopher’s unworthy.”

  “Why? Christopher’s a good kid, and conscientious. He’ll make a great Santa—but that’s ten years away yet.” Lucia frowned. “Why try to do away with him now?”

  “Jake Frost has a theory about that. He thinks Nick is power hungry and will stop at nothing to retain the position of Santa.”

  “Well, that’s a load of bull spit,” Lucia declared. “He obviously doesn’t know Nick.”

  “That’s what I said.” I asked tentatively, “But what if someone else is ambitious?”

  “Like who?”

  “How about Amory?”

  She looked as if she was going to argue, but then her mouth snapped closed. She tilted her head, considering. “You mean he was jealous of Christopher?”

  “All Clauses.” Bitterness ate at him, I could tell. Bitterness and guilt, and . . . I wasn’t sure what else was going on in that man’s head.

  Lucia looked grave. “Does the detective really think a Claus did this?”

  “He thinks Nick did it.”

  “And you think . . .”

  “I think it was a Claus,” I said. “But not Nick.”

  She scowled at me. “So it wasn’t Quasar you came up here to interrogate, was it? It was me.”

  I wanted to say that I couldn’t cross anyone off my suspect list at the moment, but that would have sounded ridiculous. As Nick had pointed out to me time and again, I wasn’t a detective. Mrs. Claus wasn’t supposed to have a suspects list.

  Well, I wasn’t a typical Mrs. Claus.

  “What makes you suspect me?” she asked. “I love Chris.”

  “One of my very first conversations with Nick was about you. I asked him why, if you were the oldest, you were never in line to become Santa.”

  “I’ve asked that my whole life,” she said, “but so what? Them’s the breaks. If I hadn’t accepted that by now, I’d be mad or living out in the wilds like Boots Bayleaf. I wouldn’t be sitting here in the castle eating my heart out for what I couldn’t have.”

  “You’re the one with the poison, though.”

  Her face screwed into a frown. “You mean that stuff for killing rats? It’s strychnine powder. Any kid who’d eat a gumdrop of that stuff without spitting it out would have to be nuts. You can’t stick strychnine powder into a gumdrop without someone noticing.”

  I nodded, taking her point. What I knew of poisons came mostly from streaming Poirot, where Agatha Christie’s poison victims always died in a quick and telegenic fashion.

  “Have you seen Amory today?” I asked.

  “It’s a workday. He’s probably down at the plant.”

  I stood.

  “You’re going there now?” she asked, as if my leaving the castle would be unseemly. Lucia, of all people, was suddenly concerned about appearances. “With Christopher still as sick as he is?”

  “That’s why I’m going—who knows where all this will end?” It was the same thing Tiffany had said to me days ago. I’d thought she was unhinged; instead, she’d been prescient. I owed her an apology; not that she’d care at this point. Her suspicions about Nick were wrong, but she’d been right to suspect foul play. And right to warn that there would be further violence touching our family.

  The least I could do for Tiffany now was to try to find who was culpable for all this tragedy.

  Lucia gave me an assessing look. “I’d call Amory first. The Plumbing Works would be a long way to go for no reason.”

  I took her advice and called ahead. Amory’s secretary informed me that he hadn’t been at work all day. “He’s out sick today,” she said.

  * * *

  I should have called Kringle Lodge first, too, but I wanted to check for myself whether or not Amory was there.

  When Mistletoe announced my arrival, Midge fluttered out to greet me. “What a surprise! It’s so nice of the castle to send someone to ask about Amory,” she said. “But you shouldn’t have bothered, April. It’s just a cold.”

  He hadn’t been malingering, then.

  But even if he actually was sick, “just a cold” wouldn’t necessarily preclude Amory’s nipping out to poison Christopher. True, in my quick survey of the elves at the castle I’d conducted before I’d left to come here, no one remembered seeing Amory that day. Yet the luncheon had taken up part of the afternoon. Amory could have snuck in at the height of that event without anyone noticing.

  “Would it be possible to say hello to him?” I asked.

  “The personal touch—how kind,” Midge gushed. “He’s been cranky all day, poor thing. Seeing a friendly face might cheer him up.”

  I wasn’t sure how friendly he’d consider my face to be. If I’d been thinking more clearly, I would have brought some flowers or fruit or something appropriate for giving a sick person. Either Midge didn’t notice my lack of an offering or else she was too polite, too obsequious, to let on.

  We went upstairs and she knocked timidly on the door. “Amory, dear, are you up?”

  “Yes, blast it,” came the testy reply.

  Midge shot an anxious sidewise smile at me. “Mrs. Claus is here—April, I mean.”

  “Good grief, what does that nosy idiot want?”

  She cleared her throat. “April is right here.”

  A short, awkward silence ensued.

  “Oh! Well, better have her come in then.”

  I turned the knob, fully prepared to let some accusations fly, but a loud, juicy sneeze stopped me in my tracks. Some colds are trifles, but a single look was enough to see that Amory was in the grips of one of those full-blown, red-nosed, sneezy, stuffy affairs that make the moniker cold seem insultingly insignificant. The poor man was adrift in a sea of used tissues, his eyes bagged and droopy, the rest of him bundled against chills, even though the room was stifling from the fire blazing in the hearth.

  “Hi, Amory,” I said, standing well back. Whatever he had, I didn’t want to catch it.

  “Whaddya doing here?” Now that I was in the same room, I could hear that his stopped-up nose was making his consonants indistinct.

  “I just wanted to see how you were. Your secretary told me you’d called in sick today.”

  “Oh yes,” Midge said. “Amorykins has been in bed all day. He’s the worst patient you can imagine. He pestered the servants all afternoon long, especially while I was down at the castle for wonderful Pamela’s fabulous party.”

  If he’d been pestering servants all day, then that would be plenty of elves who could attest that Amory—Amorykins!—hadn’t left his sickroom.

  A perverse disappointment shot through me. I started to feel like a ghoul. As if I wanted to believe that Amory would plan such an evil attack against his own relative.

  And yet . . . someone had done it.

  “April?” Midge prompted.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Wool-gathering.”

  “It was a perfectly splendid party your mother-in-law hosted today. Of course the sheet cake wasn’t as magnificent as her croquembouche, but she said there had been some kind of calamity. . . .”

  Right. Quasar and I were the calamity. “It’s a shame it didn’t work out this year,” I said.

  Midge nodded sympathetically. “Well, this has been the year for calamities, hasn’t it? What’s next? I often wonder.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. In my hurry to find out Amory’s true state of health, I’d forgotten that the news about Christopher pro
bably hadn’t reached the lodge yet. Midge had left the castle before he’d fallen ill, and Pamela said no one had called.

  “Actually, a terrible thing happened just today.” Their eyes widened in disbelief as I explained about the poisoning.

  “Someone’s tried to kill Christopher?” Amory asked, aghast and outraged. “Why?”

  “No one knows yet.”

  He and Midge exchanged looks, and then Amory sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was wearing solid blue flannel pajamas, but there was something about his big bare feet that made me turn away. “I’d better get down to the castle,” he said.

  “No,” I answered quickly. “You’re not well, Amory. I doubt Tiffany would thank you for spreading germs around her son.”

  I could tell from his woozy expression as he contemplated standing up that he would rather not make the journey down the mountain at night in the snow. “You’re probably right,” he said, collapsing back against his pillows. “Tell everyone at the castle that Midge and I are really concerned for the boy, though.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Yes—send our love,” Midge said. “And you’ll keep us updated on Christopher’s condition, won’t you?”

  “Yes, you must tell us if—” Amory’s words cut off. “Well, let us know if he gets better.”

  Or doesn’t get better, he didn’t need to add.

  “I will.”

  Midge showed me the door quickly after that, although she pumped me for more information all the way down the stairs. I had precious little to give. In parting, I promised again to keep them up-to-date on Christopher’s condition.

  Then, after she’d let me out the front door, I circled back around to the side, to the lodge’s kitchen entrance. I wanted to double-check with the staff to see if Amory was telling the truth about being in bed all day. After speaking to a few people, I realized he must have been. His cold was not a put-on. He really was sick, and as terrible a patient as Midge had said. He’d tossed orange juice at one of the elves and yelled at two of the others. There was mutiny in the air in that kitchen.

  I thanked them all for speaking to me and went back to the sleigh. My phone fa-la-la-la-la’ed with a text:

  JUNIPER: Have time for a coffee?

  Did I? Probably not.

  ME: We3B in twenty minutes.

  I might have gotten there a little later than that, but Juniper wasn’t on time, either, probably because of the difficult-to-navigate streets due to revelers from the Skate-a-Palooza. My event, and it had practically gone off without me. So much for making a meaningful contribution. I’d missed most of the acts. I’d even missed playing with my own band.

  We Three Beans was in its last hour of service, and the pickings at the counter were woefully slim. I grabbed a red-and-green Rice Crispies Treat in cellophane and a drip decaf and went to a table in the corner. Juniper arrived soon after, wearing her band uniform. She didn’t have it in her to look truly miserable, I suspected, but neither did she seem her usual happy self. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was blaring on an overhead speaker and she didn’t even sing along as most of the other elves were doing.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, suddenly worried about what I’d missed. “Was there any problem with the acts tonight?”

  “It all went like clockwork, right down to the fireworks.”

  I’d forgotten about those. “I missed those, too.”

  “You left in such a hurry,” Juniper said.

  “I got a phone call from Nick. It was an emergency.”

  Her eyes went saucer wide. “It wasn’t Martin, was it?”

  I started to say no, but she cut me off. She looked stricken. “Here I was wishing all sorts of terrible things on him all night for standing me up. But what if he was really sick all that time?”

  “He wasn’t sick,” I said. “Christopher was.”

  “Oh no.” She looked as pained for Christopher as she was relieved for Martin. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He was poisoned by a gumdrop. Now he’s in bed, unconscious. That’s why Martin didn’t show up for your date.”

  “It wasn’t a real date,” she said, as if she didn’t care. “Gosh, of course he stayed home for Christopher.” Her eyes registered surprise. “Why aren’t you there now?”

  “I had some things to check out.”

  “You mean the festival?” she asked. “I could have done anything you needed me to—shut things down, tidy up . . . anything.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “There’s a cleanup crew.”

  “I feel just awful. You must think me so selfish for asking you to come all the way down here just so I could whine at you.”

  “You haven’t whined. Did you have fun tonight?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I skated around a little with Smudge.”

  “Smudge skates?” It was like imagining an alley cat on skates.

  “Everyone who grew up here does.”

  All of the sudden, it felt as if there was another stampede down the street. Weren’t the Reindeer Games over? Out the snow-frosted windows, I could see lights flashing and people running. Then sirens sounded as a police vehicle, a motorized wagon on skis, tried to get through the crowd. The hum that went through the crowd penetrated even the walls of the coffee shop, and I stood on tiptoe to see over the heads on the sidewalk. In the back of the police wagon, which was driven by Deputy Ollie, I could just make out the forms of Constable Crinkles and Nick.

  An elf dashed into the cafe, out of breath and holding his cap. The bell over the door tinkled with a cheeriness that was completely out of sync with the dread pounding in my heart. Everyone in the coffee shop was watching him.

  “They’re taking Nick Claus to jail,” he announced. “Santa’s been arrested for murder!”

  Chapter 21

  Now that the worst had happened I felt strangely calm.

  Except it wasn’t actually the worst, since, thank heavens, Christopher was still alive. I knew Nick wasn’t a killer, and now all I had to do was convince these thickheaded elves in the constabulary of his innocence.

  As I waited on a bench by the fireplace while Crinkles and Frost interrogated Nick, my phone received a text. My heart froze, but the message wasn’t from the castle. It was from Cloudberry Bay.

  To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t given Cloudberry Bay a thought since my last text from Damaris. What had she said? I WON’T FORGET THIS. Oh dear. I opened Claire’s message with a feeling of trepidation. What had I done, or failed to do, now?

  Claire didn’t mention that. She’d simply taken a photo of the Coast Inn.

  Only it didn’t resemble the Coast Inn I’d left at the end of summer. Every angle of the house was lined with white lights. In front, someone had twined strings of colored lights through the tree branches and decorated my young cedar as if it were a Christmas tree. A few feet away from the Christmas tree was an inflated snowman, bigger than life. On the inn’s roof, a tableau of Santa’s sleigh, Santa, and his nine-reindeer team pranced across the shingles. Each of the three windows across the front had Ho spelled out in blinking lights. And, most amazing of all, in the front yard a train manned by stuffed elves and filled with gifts drove around a circular track.

  Of course the elves didn’t look exactly like real elves, but whoever had created the display had come surprisingly close.

  CLAIRE: Merry Christmas! You now have the most Christmassy house in town!

  It was hard to shift gears, back to concerns about my old life. I had to remind myself that Claire knew nothing about the world I was living in, or all the terrible events taking place here.

  ME: Has Damaris seen this?

  Of course she had. Cloudberry Bay wasn’t exactly Los Angeles. In Cloudberry Bay, if you’ve seen two streets you’ve seen them all. Literally. That was what Damaris had been texting me about—she’d seen people decorating my house and realized her fit about my lack of Christmas spirit would come to nothing.

  CLAIRE: Seen it? She�
��s already filed three complaints with the town council. Something about decoration by proxy not counting . . .

  ME: Excellent!

  A smiley face winked at me.

  CLAIRE: You see? All your troubles are over.

  If only.

  “All right, Mrs. Claus,” Crinkles said, interrupting my texting. “You can talk to your husband now.”

  I snapped my phone shut and hurried over to the room where Nick was being held. It was a tidy little bedroom with an en suite washroom. Hardly Alcatraz. But I still didn’t like the idea of him being cooped up here. Two nights before Christmas, no less.

  As soon as the policemen left us alone, Nick and I embraced. He was wearing a black fisherman’s sweater over his red Santa pants tucked into black boots.

  “Is there any word about Christopher? The detective wouldn’t say, and he seemed to be telling Crinkles that they should keep me in the dark.”

  “He’s the same, as far as I know.”

  Nick sighed. “He’s got to get better. If anything happens to him, it would destroy poor Tiffany. Mother, too.” He shook his head. “All of us.”

  “The doctor said he needed rest. In the meantime, we need to get you out of here.”

  He sent me a clear-eyed look. “From what Crinkles told me, that’s not going to happen. I just hope they find the real culprit before he or she harms anyone else.”

  I didn’t hold out a lot of hope that Constable Crinkles would flush out the guilty party. But I felt growing confidence that I could.

  “Nick, where did you go the night of Giblet’s murder?” I asked. “You weren’t in bed.”

  His eyes looked as if he was casting back months ago instead of just one week. “I thought I’d heard a noise, so I got up and just walked. I couldn’t sleep.”

  I wondered if the noise had been Lynxie. I hadn’t even seen him yet and that cat had already caused a lot of problems. “You were gone a long time.”

  “So were you,” he said. “When I returned to our room to go back to sleep, you weren’t there. I looked for you but gave up and finally went back to bed.”