Claus for Celebration

by Laura Durham

  The branches looked fine, although the hydrangea looked dangerously wilted. I hoped Buster and Mack could work their magic on them.

  Leatrice handed up another bundle, followed by a tightly wrapped cluster of hydrangea. I handed them down to Kate, who proceeded to put them in the trunk. After a few minutes, Leatrice was passing up the last of the flowers, and then Fern and I were hauling her out.

  We both stepped back once we'd deposited her onto the hood of her car and let the heavy, metal lid slam shut. The scent of the dumpster seemed to linger even though she was outside, and I suspected it had permeated her clothes. None of us probably smelled great at this point.

  "Are you sure it was Santa you saw?" I asked Leatrice. "Not just someone in red and white. The lighting isn't great back here."

  Leatrice looked askance at me. "I know my Santas, dear. He was in the full suit--shiny belt, white beard, and all."

  Kate shrugged at me. "Looks like we're the only people not wearing a Santa suit around here. I mean, it is December."

  "Did my lock-picking kit work upstairs?" Leatrice asked once we'd all gotten off her hood and into the car. A few bundles of flowers that hadn't fit in the trunk were stacked up between Kate and Fern in the back seat, and Fern had his window open and his head out.

  "We didn't need to use it," I said. "The window was open."

  "That was lucky. So you didn't leave any trace that you'd been there?" Leatrice reached over and patted my hand. "I knew you'd be a natural."

  Although Leatrice thought she was paying me a compliment, I really didn't want to be a natural at breaking and entering. "I'm just grateful we have the flowers back."

  "I'm texting Buster and Mack to tell them we're on the way," Kate said, tapping away on her phone in the back seat. "They're going to need to make room in their cooler."

  "They have a cooler in their floral shop?" Leatrice asked, twisting around as she started the car and put it in reverse.

  "A big one," Kate said. "I've had smaller apartments than their floral cooler."

  Leatrice accelerated backward, slamming on the brakes when we reached the street. "Anyone coming?"

  Fern poked his head out farther, swinging it from side to side. "Nope. You're all clear."

  Leatrice pulled the car out backward, barely missing a car parked too close to the alleyway entrance before turning back onto the steep street leading toward the river. "In and out and no one saw us."

  "Rock on wood," Kate said.

  Leatrice cocked her head, mouthing the phrase to herself.

  "She means 'knock on wood,'" I whispered.

  "Can we please talk about the fact that one of our wedding planning colleagues stole a flower order and dumped it in the garbage?" Kate said. "I know we've had friendly competitors before, but this is getting out of hand."

  I agreed with Kate, but from watching Reese put together his cases, I knew proving our accusations would be difficult. "I don't know what we can actually do."

  "I have some ideas," Kate said.

  "That we can do legally," I clarified.

  Kate leaned forward. "Now you want to keep things legal?"

  I pointed to an intersection ahead. "We're going to make a right up there, Leatrice."

  "Obviously, the rumors about Brianna being a call girl weren't upsetting enough," Fern said. "What if we tell people she's a Russian spy?"

  "Getting her shipped off to Moscow would be good," Kate said.

  I sighed as I turned to face the back seat. "We're not going to accuse someone of being a traitor, even if she deserves it."

  "Wrong street, Leatrice," Kate said, looking over my shoulder and out the front windshield.

  "Oops." Leatrice giggled. "I'll just swing in here and then back us up."

  "Besides," I said, “we don't know anyone who could ship Brianna off to Russia."

  Kate gave me a sinister smile. "Speak for yourself. I'm pretty sure one of the guys I dated last year was CIA. You know when they say they're State Department, but are vague about specifics, that they're actually CIA."

  Leatrice pumped the brakes and twisted her head around. "Is that true?"

  I shook my head as Kate bobbed hers up and down vigorously.

  "What's that all about?" Fern asked, lifting his cat mask and leaning forward to peer past me.

  I spun back around and saw that we'd turned down another narrow alley, this one filled with a pair of box trucks and a bunch of thick-necked guys unloading them into a building. When they saw our car, one of the men started taking long steps toward us.

  "Uh oh," Leatrice said, as the man's jacket flapped open revealing a gun in a holster.

  "Get us out of here," I told her, sliding down in the passenger's seat. "Fast."

  Chapter 26

  “Is he still chasing us?" I asked, craning my neck to peek into the back seat.

  Fern popped his head out his window, then ducked back inside. "No sign of him."

  "Keep driving," I told Leatrice, waving one hand at the street. "We should go the back way to Lush."

  Leatrice nodded, her hands clutched tightly around the steering wheel that seemed to dwarf her. "Goodness me. Wasn't that exciting?"

  "Which part?" Kate asked, sinking into the beige, velour upholstery. "It's been a busy night."

  The air coming into the car from the open windows was cool, and I hoped that meant the heat wave was breaking. I also hoped the air could help dissipate some of the lingering aroma of garbage. It was bad enough that the back seat was piled high with wilting flowers. As delicately perfumed as flowers were when they were fresh, they smelled awful once they started to wilt.

  Leatrice flicked her eyes to the rearview mirror. "Why do you think that gentleman was chasing our car? You don't think he knew what we were up to, do you?"

  "Doubtful," I said, putting a hand to my heart and feeling it hammer away. "I think he was afraid we'd see what he and his pals were up to."

  Kate pulled her black cap off and ran a hand through her hair. "You think something criminal was going on?"

  "Why else unload stuff in the middle of the night and have a bunch of neckless guys with guns doing it?" I asked.

  "Maybe because it's impossible to park in Georgetown during the day?" Fern said. "I know I despise delivery trucks blocking the road during rush hour. I wouldn't mind a few more making deliveries in the evening."

  "I'd say it's later than 'evening.'" I glanced down at the simulated wood dashboard of Leatrice's car before realizing there was no clock, just knobs to tune the radio and small levers to adjust the air conditioning. There wasn't a single digital thing in the car. Not shocking considering she'd probably purchased it during the Reagan administration.

  "Who makes deliveries at midnight?" Kate said, clearing up my question of what time it was.

  "Spies," Leatrice said in a hushed voice, tipping her slightly stained fedora back on her head. "I always knew Georgetown was a hotbed of spy activity, but who knew how much crime went on around here at night?"

  "Makes you glad you live with a cop, right?" Kate asked.

  "Yes," Leatrice answered, bobbing her head up and down.

  I pointed to a street ahead of us. "Turn here."

  "Scary guys aside, does anyone think the Santa who tipped us off about the flowers might have been Kris?" Kate asked, as Leatrice made the turn, and she and Fern slid to one side of the car.

  "Possibly," I said. "There's no way to know for sure since Leatrice didn't get a good look at his face."

  "And he wasn't singing," Leatrice said. "I would have recognized the singing."

  "We could ask Kris," Fern said.

  I spun around to face him. "Are you telling me you know he's alive and you know where to find him, because if you've been keeping this from me and from Reese then--"

  "Unclench, sweetie," Fern said with a loud exhale. "I'm not saying any of that. I did, however, leave the key to my storage room over the sill in case Kris needed a place to sleep. I also left out some Christmas cookies."
r />   "He's not actually Santa," Kate said.

  "I know that." Fern straightened his cat mask. "It's not like I left out reindeer food, too."

  "Reindeer food?" Leatrice shook her head. "What will you kids think of next?"

  "I could always leave a note in case it's really him," Fern continued. "Maybe he'd be willing to talk to us."

  “What if it’s not him?” I asked. “What if it’s Stanley?”

  Fern ran his fingers down his long whiskers. “Then he won’t answer. Can’t hurt to try.”

  As much as I hated to admit it, leaving a note out for fake Santa Claus was the best option we had at the moment. Even thought I'd promised not to get sucked into the case--and meant it--I also wanted to see Kris Kringle back singing. If it couldn't feel like Christmas yet, at least it could sound like it.

  I pointed to a barely visible driveway. "We'll go into this alley behind the shop to unload."

  "Another alley?" Fern asked. "I'm starting to have post traumatic stress at the mention of alleys."

  "This one should be safe," I said, holding the door handle again as Leatrice swung the car wide to make the tight turn. "Besides, Buster and Mack will be waiting for us."

  Fern let out a dramatic sigh. "Good. We should really bring our biker gang muscle with us more often."

  Not a bad plan, until people realized our friends were with a Christian biker gang and their answer to most problems was a prayer chain.

  "Nothing happened," I reminded everyone. "We didn't damage Brianna's office; we found the flowers, and we hightailed it away from the scary guys in the alley. I'd call tonight a success."

  "We might have seen something illegal going down." Leatrice slowed as we drove down the narrow alleyway. "Are you sure we shouldn't call your fiancé and tell him?"

  "No," I said a little too forcefully. "He pulled a double shift, so I don't want to wake him."

  The real reason was that I didn't want to explain why we were dressed in black from head to foot, and in Fern's case, mask. As sympathetic as I knew he'd be to our flower crisis, those feelings wouldn't extend to breaking and entering, although technically we'd only done one of those things. Telling him we might have happened upon a connection to the Kris Kringle Jingle case might make him think we'd been looking for it, which we hadn't, but he seemed to be skeptical of coincidence.

  "Suit yourself," Kate said, "but you know he'll find out sooner or later. The man's like a human polygraph machine."

  Leatrice pulled to a stop, and I spotted Buster and Mack standing at the back entrance to their shop. I knew they often burned the midnight oil, so I didn't feel bad about having them meet us so late.

  "I can't believe it," Mack said, rushing over as we got out of the car. "You found our flowers."

  "In a dumpster?" Buster asked, shaking his head as if he couldn't quite believe it. "How did you know to search dumpsters?"

  "We didn't actually search dumpsters," I said. "Someone dressed as Santa tipped off Leatrice."

  "Then I fell in," she said with a giggle. "I'm glad these three finished breaking into that wedding planner's office and found me. It was getting awfully stuffy in there."

  Mack's mouth fell open. "A Santa? Was it Kris?"

  "Leatrice couldn't tell," I said. "We didn't break in, by the way. We merely had a look around. Her office happened to be open."

  Fern held up a finger. "Office window."

  I shot him a look. "Cat burglars never tell their secrets."

  Buster peered into the back seat, inhaling sharply when he saw the bundles of wilted flowers wrapped in brown paper. "We'd better get these hydrangea in water."

  Kate opened the trunk and waved a hand at the birch branches. "Voila. Your winter wonderland."

  Mack lumbered around to stand next to her. "I can't believe it. We were about to start gathering fallen branches and paint them with streaks of white."

  Kate wrinkled her nose. "We would have had to turn the lights very low to make that work."

  Buster filled his arms with flowers. "I'm glad you're all safe. Mack and I activated our emergency prayer chain this evening. You've had dozens of Road Riders for Jesus sending up messages for you."

  "We weren't specific, of course," Mack added.

  "Well whatever you did worked," I said. "Not only did we find the flowers, Leatrice might have spotted Kris, and we possibly witnessed some criminal activity."

  "In addition to our own," Kate said, stacking the branches high in Mack's outstretched arms.

  "I don't suppose you feel like sharing that with the police?" Mack asked, peering over the branches at an unmarked car driving down the alley toward us, the portable light on its roof flashing.

  I swallowed hard as I looked at my crew--Leatrice dressed like a vintage spy, Fern in a Catwoman costume, and Kate and I in black from head to toe. This was going to be a tough one to explain.

  "What a relief," Leatrice said as the officer stepped out of the car. "It's Reese."

  I almost groaned out loud.

  Chapter 27

  “I know you're mad at me," I said, as Reese and I trudged up the last few steps to our apartment. "You've barely spoken to me since we left Buster and Mack’s, and you won't hold my hand."

  He flicked a glance at me as he opened the front door and held it open for me. "Babe, you smell like a garbage truck, and your hands are filthy."

  I raised an arm to smell my shirt and cringed from the pungent smell as I walked inside ahead of him. "That may be true, but that doesn't mean you're not upset at me."

  "Upset?" He tossed his keys on top of the bookshelf by the door. "Why would I be upset? I only came home from a really crappy day to find you gone and your phone on the coffee table. Then that phone starts blowing up with concerned texts from Mack about your covert mission, and when I come to find you, I see you and your cohorts dressed like you stepped out of a bad spy movie mixed with a really bad superhero movie."

  I was glad Fern wasn't there to hear that. He took great offense when someone implied his outfits weren't authentic.

  "How did you find me, anyway?" I picked up my phone from the glass coffee table and saw the series of increasingly hysterical messages from Mack scrolling down the locked screen. "You couldn't use the 'Find My Friends' app since my phone wasn't on me."

  He cocked an eyebrow at me. "You think your phone is the only one I track?"

  I wasn't sure if I should be disturbed or relieved that my fiancé kept tabs on my friends, too.

  "I'm sorry I didn't leave a note," I said. Not that I knew what that note would have said. Off to break into someone's office and rescue our stolen flowers didn't seem like it would have made the situation any better. I was sorrier that I'd left my phone behind.

  He went into the kitchen, and I could hear him opening the refrigerator. When he returned, he handed me one of his beers with the cap already twisted off. "I know you're not a beer drinker, but you probably need this."

  "Thanks." I took a tentative swig of the microbrew, trying not to make a face as I swallowed. Nope. Still not a beer person.

  "You want to tell me why you all smelled like you'd been rooting around in a landfill?"

  I'd managed to avoid telling Reese the entire story when he'd arrived to find us behind Lush, partly because I knew having Leatrice and Fern around during the retelling would not help my case, and partly because I'd been so relieved to see him after the stressful evening that I'd wanted to do nothing more than go home.

  "The long and short of it is that one of our unfriendly competitors stole the floral order for this weekend's wedding, and we found it in a dumpster behind her office building. Actually, someone dressed as Santa tipped off Leatrice, and then she found it by falling into a dumpster. It took all of us to get the flowers--and Leatrice--out and loaded into her car, and they smelled pretty bad after sitting in a big, metal container all day." I took another drink of the beer, wishing it was one of the crisp sauvignon blancs Richard preferred and often stocked in my refrigerator. "So, if yo
u think about it, we were merely righting a wrong."

  "Did you say Santa tipped her off?"

  "I know," I said. "More Santas. There must be a sale on Santa suits somewhere. We don't know if it was Kris or not. Leatrice couldn't tell, but if it was, he got his hands on a new suit."

  "Speaking of that, I heard back from the lab about Kris's bloody costume." He paused to tip back his beer. "It wasn't human blood."

  "Not human?" I ran a hand through my hair and got another unpleasant whiff of garbage. I needed a shower.

  "It was bovine."

  "Cow's blood." I made a face. "How do you get that?"

  "Butcher's shop? Grocery store meat department? Restaurant kitchen?" Reese suggested. "I'm sure someone living on the streets would know where to source it."

  "That doesn't happen by accident," I said. "So it was staged to look like he was hurt or killed?"

  "Looks like it."

  "That explains Fern's storage room and Jeannie being so confident her friend wasn't dead. He's not," I said.

  "But he wanted someone to think he was." Reese took another long pull from his beer. "It feels like someone's trying to make a point with all the Santas, and maybe that someone is Kris."

  "You think Kris Kringle Jingle staged his own murder and is now running around framing criminals and dressing them up as Santa?" I asked, thinking it didn't sound like such a crazy idea once I'd said it out loud. “That means Stanley isn’t a killer on the run. Then why is he still missing?”

  "Maybe he knew about Kris staging his death.”

  I snapped my fingers. “Because he planted the suit. But why disappear?”

  “Everyone who seems to know something about Kris’s disappearance has gone underground. They must think that knowing about it puts them at risk.”

  “At risk from whom?” I started pacing a small circle. “If Stanley isn’t a killer and the other Santas didn’t knock him off, then we’re back to whatever it was he saw. And what’s up with all the Santa-related crimes?”

  “Richard was right when he said the holidays make people crazy." He folded his arms over his broad chest. "Speaking of crazy, do you want to explain what you and your motley crew were wearing tonight?"