by Clare Kauter
Santa’s Little Helper
A Charlie Davies Mystery
Santa’s Little Helper
Copyright © 2016 Clare Kauter
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
A letter to the reader (that’s you!)
Also by Clare Kauter
About Clare Kauter
‘Deadhead’ Preview
This book is dedicated to... man, I don’t even know anymore. I’ve written so many of these now. Who wants it? Great, it’s yours.
CHAPTER ONE
December 20.
I sat there at my desk staring at the computer screen for upwards of ten minutes – or at least that’s what the guy from the control room said when he came down to check on me. (He thought the security camera had frozen because I’d been sitting there motionless for so long.) How had this happened? When did it stop being November? In between working as a receptionist, taking on a bunch of low-profile PI cases and hanging out with my housemate Stacey, who insisted we go out every night to craft classes and meditation and other weird singles events, somehow the month had ticked by and I hadn’t done my usual trick of ordering presents online so I could avoid the shops at this time of year. I’d messed up. Immensely.
Now what?
Celia would know what to do. I picked up the phone and began to dial, but paused when I heard a small clearing of the throat coming from my right.
“I hope you’re not going to use the work phone for a personal call,” said John, who was just returning from lunch. He was the other – inferior – receptionist, and he was the kind of person I could see dressing up as a clown on weekends just for fun. I bet when he was at school he’d done extra homework just for fun.
I rolled my eyes as he walked around the desk and took his seat beside me.
“Shut up, John.”
He crossed his arms, pretending to be annoyed even though we both knew he was loving this situation. “I will report you.”
I gritted my teeth. “Go ahead.”
“I wouldn’t be so glib about this if I were you. You’ve already been written up a number of times,” he said. “I checked your file.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “I’ve never been written up.”
He scoffed. “You’ve even been fired before. I can’t believe you continue to push the boundaries when they could get rid of you at any moment. It’s only a matter of time before they figure out that you’re dead weight and prune you.”
I sighed. This was not even close to the first time we’d had this conversation. “John, I really don’t care what you have to say.”
Luckily I wouldn’t have to put up with him for too much longer. I was actually working undercover at the moment and I’d just nipped back into the office to report in to my boss, Adam. While I was waiting for him to finish his meeting with a client I’d decided to return to my seat in reception. I liked to come back here from time to time just to make sure John didn’t get too comfortable sitting at my desk. He was only here to help while I was out working on cases, after all. He wasn’t going to replace me. I was almost 60% sure of that fact.
Anyway, he could report me all he wanted. I wasn’t going to be fired – at least not for using the company phone for private calls. I’d done far worse things than that and somehow I was still employed, so I figured it was going to take something colossal to push my boss over the edge. The thing is, I was the youngest private investigator with the company and one of very few women, and thanks to that there were certain jobs that only I could do. Like going undercover as a high school student, for example, which I’d done a few months ago (much to my chagrin). Or my current undercover job.
I picked up the phone, stuck my tongue out at John and dialled Celia, poking the numbers hard to show John that I wasn’t afraid of him. He put his hand to his chest as though he was shocked by my behaviour, but I doubted he actually was.
The phone rang a few times before Celia answered. She was at work too, but she didn’t have any Johns in her office to dob her in for taking private calls.
“How the hell did you forget Christmas?” asked Celia when I’d explained my situation to her.
“I –”
“It’s not like it sneaks up on you.”
Rolling my eyes, I tried to explain. “It’s –”
“Like, you’ve literally had all year to figure out what presents to get.”
I sighed. “But –”
“It didn’t just stealth-attack you.”
“I –”
“It’s not like Easter where it changes dates every year.”
“I know!” I said exasperatedly, finally managing to get more than one word in. “I just, you know, got distracted.”
“By what?”
“Everything,” I said. “Stacey’s endless evening classes, for one.”
Celia groaned. She’d been dragged along to a fair few of those herself. It was getting to the point where I sort of wished I hadn’t sent Stacey’s last boyfriend to prison for being a psycho murderer just so she’d have someone else to spend time with.
“Plus I’ve been working weird hours because of that Santa Claus flasher.”
“Yeah, I heard about that,” C said. “Bit weird, isn’t it?”
“I reckon.” For the past few weeks, there had been a man running about town dressed up as Santa, but with one key difference – he didn’t wear pants. Because the flasher’s outfit had the Westgarden shopping centre logo on it, they’d managed to narrow down the suspects to a few men, all guys who worked at those ‘take a picture with Santa’ stalls. Because of the whole flasher-working-with-children thing, this case had become something of a priority, and our company had been hired to find the culprit. They needed someone to go undercover and ferret the flasher out, and because (to quote my boss, Adam) I ‘looked the most like an elf’, I got lumped with the case. “But the point is, I’ve been busy. I haven’t had a chance to buy presents for anyone.”
“Anyone?”
“I know, I’m a terrible person,” I said. “We can have this discussion later. For now can you just help me?”
She sighed. “Alright. Well, let’s narrow down the list. Who do you absolutely have to get presents for?”
I chewed my lip, thinking. “Um...”
“You’re useless,” said C with a sigh. “OK, fine. You need to get presents for Lea, Jo and Stacey. Lea and Stacey because you live with them, and Jo because she’s the only other person brave enough to gatecrash your family Christmas. Since you won’t see any of the other girls on the day you don’t need to get them anything.”
“OK,
right,” I said. “What do I get Stacey, Jo and Lea, though?”
“You’re on your own with that,” C replied. “Don’t bother getting me anything. I know you too well to be offended by how horrendously inconsiderate you are. Now –”
“Wait!” I said. “I have to get you something or else Gina will hate me even more.”
Gina was Celia’s girlfriend, and she was not my biggest fan. Like, I had a lot of people who were actively not fans of me, but along with the murderers I’d sent to prison she was at the top of the list. I kind of had a history of being a terrible friend, and Gina didn’t trust that I had changed my ways. (A theory that this whole Christmas present debacle totally proved correct, but never mind. She could never know that.)
Light-bulb moment. “Wait! I’ve got it!”
“Got what?” Celia asked, sounding wary.
“I know what to get!”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, grinning.
“You’re notoriously terrible at giving gifts.”
“How dare you?” I said. “I’m notoriously terrible at many things, but very few people know how truly awful my gift-giving skills are.”
“That’s true.” She paused. “Alright. Hit me with it. What horrors are you going to unleash upon me under the mistletoe this year?”
I didn’t think that meant quite what she thought it did.
“Actually, I happen to be a very good kisser.”
“Did James tell you that?”
I fought back a smile. “Maybe.”
“You’d get in a lot more practice if you stopped trying to keep your relationship a secret.”
I rolled my eyes. We’d had this conversation a number of times already. To be honest, I thought ‘relationship’ was too strong a word for the, um, thing between me and James, which so far had mostly consisted of us texting and making out in secret in the thirty second blocks in which we’d managed to actually see each other recently. We had kind of been dating for months, but we’d hardly spent time together at all. Even though we lived two blocks away from each other, it felt more like a long distance relationship.
James was forever away on business trips, and when he was in Gerongate he worked weird shifts as a police officer. I was meant to have a nine to five job, but since I was a fledgling PI (and hence got all the boring cases that no one else wanted) I spent half my evenings sitting in my car outside dodgy hotels taking pictures of cheating spouses. On the other evenings, my housemate Stacey dragged me along to every evening class under the sun (or under the moon, I guess, given that they were night time classes). Basically we just never had free time to hang out.
“Not going to happen,” I said. “I’m still not convinced that our friends won’t murder me if they find out.”
A few people knew that James and I were seeing each other – Celia, Tim, Adam and my former high school principal (long story) – but we weren’t making it public, and we couldn’t really hang out too much without people getting suspicious. There were a few reasons for us keeping it a secret (although seeing as we NEVER SAW EACH OTHER, there wasn’t all that much to tell). Firstly there was the fact that all my friends had weirdly intense crushes on James and I just wasn’t sure how they’d react to the news. Not to mention the fact that James had been best friends with my brother who’d disappeared six years previously, which made things a little weird. Also, the police chief kind of hated me and letting him know that we were together didn’t seem like a great career move for James given that the chief was his boss.
We’d had a couple of close calls with people nearly finding out, though. For example, the time my friend Jo – who was president of the James McKenzie Stalking Society (official name) during high school – had almost caught us.
While James and I were having a secret rendezvous in a spare room at my birthday party (clothes on – mind out of the gutter, you), Jo had walked in brandishing a knife, and James and I had both feared for our lives. Only momentarily, though, because it became clear pretty quickly that she hadn’t seen any actual kissing. The knife she was holding was for me to cut the birthday cake, and she was just annoyed because she realised we were talking about ditching the party. I’d mentioned that it was a ‘date’, but she’d apparently assumed that was a joke – maybe because she didn’t think the greatest fast food restaurant in the world, Lord of the Fries, was the kind of location a billionaire would take his girlfriend for a romantic evening. She was wrong, but I wasn’t going to correct her. That had been a close call, and we were lucky to have come out alive. Since then, we’d grown a little more cautious, and we’d been keeping our relationship hidden from most of our sane friends as well, just in case.
“Anyway, back to the presents,” I said, not wanting to have this conversation again.
She groaned. “Right, yeah. The terrible present. Hit me with it.”
“Spa day,” I said. “You, me, Jo, Lea and Stace.”
“That is the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I know.”
“They’ll love it.”
“I know. Plus I can do it all online, so I don’t have to try and get to a shop.” The perfect present.
“OK, cool. How about other people? Your parents?”
“Nah, they’ve known me too long to expect anything from me.”
She was silent for a moment before saying, “That’s really sad. You need to get them something.”
“But –”
“No arguments,” she snapped, cutting me off. “How about people at work?”
I thought. “Probably just Tim,” I said. I glared across at John, who was already filling out an incident form for the phone call I was currently conducting. “You’re certainly not getting a present,” I hissed at him.
“Maybe there’ll be a Christmas miracle and they’ll fire you. That would be a true gift,” he replied.
“Hot boss?” Celia said and I turned my attention back to the phone call.
“What? I didn’t catch that.”
“Should you get a present for your hot boss?”
“Adam?” I snorted. “Yeah, right. Like I’d get anything for him.”
Not too long ago, I’d considered Adam a friend. Alas, things had deteriorated very quickly when I’d nearly messed up a massive case a few months ago. Since then I’d been relegated to mostly investigating cheating spouses, which was boring but far better than sitting at the reception desk with John. Then while I was out with Tim and Adam one night (purely to avoid one of Stacey’s classes), I’d told a girl at a bar who had her eyes on Adam that he lived with his parents (a lie) and he’d sent me to work in a shopping centre in retaliation (retail-iation?) – an action for which I’d grown to loathe him more than I thought it was possible to hate a person. No present for him.
“OK, so that leaves Will.”
“Yes, I have to get something for Will. He’s the only one left, right?”
“Wrong.”
“What? Who else?” Even though she was silent on the other end, I could hear her disbelief radiating through the phone. Suddenly it clicked. “Oh god, do I have to get something for James, too?”
“Of course you do, you idiot.”
I groaned.
“Why is that a problem?” she asked. “You’ve always spent Christmas with his family. Don’t you give him a present every year?”
I sighed. “Yes, but I’ve never given him a real present.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I always buy him an insulting present.” Celia was silent again, so I decided I’d better explain what I meant. “Last year I got him penis enlargement pills. The year before I got him foot fungus spray.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. But to be fair, he bought me a book on how to make friends and a ticket to a Nickelback concert.”
“You really are going to be moving into new territory this year, having to get him a nice present and all.”
You’re telling me.
There
was a beeping noise, indicating I had a phone call on another line. I said goodbye to Celia and switched to the other line before John had the chance to pick up. I poked my tongue out at him and said, “Hello, Baxter & Co.”
“Hey, Charleston.” It was Will McKenzie, brother of James and best friend of me.
“Hey, Willy,” I said, using his least favourite nickname. “What’s up?”
“I’ve organised your Christmas presents for our parents – yours and mine – and for my sisters and their kids, but you’re on your own with James. Make it count,” he said. “Also, you better get me something amazing.”
“William, you’re a saint.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m not helping you pick out your present for James, though.”
“Did you get him anything?”
“Of course.”
This Christmas would be the first in five years that James and Will would spend together. Usually one came in the morning and the other came in the afternoon. (They’d had a bit of a falling out over some weed in high school, but James had finally decided to grow up and now they were friends again.)
“What did you get him?” I asked.
“Why?” Will asked suspiciously.
“Just curious.”
I could practically hear Will narrowing his eyes down the phone line. “You’re just asking so you can get the same thing and pretend you didn’t know.”
Sprung.
“No I wasn’t!”
“I know you too well,” he said. “No, I’m not telling you. You need to figure this out for yourself.”
“But –”
“Bye.”
Argh. OK, well, at least now I only had a couple of presents to come up with. Before I forgot, I decided to book the spa tickets on my work computer.
“Using the company computer for personal shopping,” John said, tutting. “Dear, dear.”
He took another incident report sheet from the desk drawer and got to work. I rolled my eyes and got back to brainstorming presents.
A thought occurred to me and I had a mild panic. Was I going to have to give James a sincere gift in front of my family? No, that could not be allowed to happen. They would definitely know something was up. I sent James a text.
