by Clare Kauter
You see, Stacey had something of a record of dating terrible men. If she was into them, they were a creep, basically. (Not that I could talk, given that earlier this year one of my exes had gone to prison for punching me in the face, but whatever.) In order to break her losing streak when it came to partners, Stacey had decided to stop dating men for a while, a decision I whole-heartedly supported. In theory.
Trouble was, Stacey got bored easily. Really easily. And because I lived with her, and because (as Stacey put it) I had nothing else to do with my time, really, because it wasn’t like men were tripping over themselves to date me (“sorry, babe – you know I love you, but like, really”), I got roped into all of her fun evening activities. Since we were currently in the lead-up to Christmas, she’d created an Activity and Movie Advent Calendar, or AMAC for short. I had suggested changing the name to AMAD (as in ‘Stacey is AMAD woman’) but alas my suggestion had been ignored.
My one consolation was that at least I didn’t have to do all these classes alone with Stacey. Whenever she could, she dragged our other friends along. Unfortunately, I was the only one who was ‘single’ (even Lea, who’d been unattached since her husband had gone to prison for killing a bunch of people, was now seeing someone) so I ended up at every class because I didn’t have an excuse. Celia – the only friend who knew that I wasn’t single at all – found the situation hilarious and suggested that I just grow a pair (of ovaries) and tell everyone.
Which, as we’ve already established, was not going to happen.
James McKenzie had been the heartthrob of Gerongate High, and back in the day all of my friends had been in love with him. I had not been, and the only part of me he caused to throb was my neck because he was such a pain in it. While my friends had slowly started to recognise McKenzie as a human and not an actual god, I wasn’t confident that they’d react well to news of me dating him. Especially Joanna, who had spent the evenings of her youth watching James from a tree in his backyard. I wasn’t joking before – when she’d walked into the room holding that knife on my birthday, I genuinely thought she was about to end me. If she’d heard the rest of the conversation, that might well have been what happened.
Needless to say, I was not planning on taking Celia’s advice and coming clean. Instead I would suffer through every horrible crocheting lesson Stacey threw at me. My self-preservation instincts took precedence.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if, once the classes were done, I was free to go back to, like, living my life. But no – it was Christmas movie season. Which was fine for the first week, but since Stacey wouldn’t listen to my suggestions (Die Hard and Lethal Weapon are Christmas movies, damn it), we were down to the dregs now. As in, made for TV holiday movies we found on YouTube. They were physically painful to watch because of all the heavy cringing. And since we were booked up with these hugely important and enjoyable tasks every day, I had virtually no time to see James.
So anyway, I dragged myself through the front door and headed up to my room to get changed out of my elf outfit, passing many Christmas decorations on the way. Lea and Stacey had gone kind of Pinterest mad this year and everywhere you looked there were hand crafted decorations (in various levels of success). Some of the stuff we had created in night classes and the rest Lea and Stacey had been crafting at home since October. There were bundles of twigs in vases, spray painted white so they looked snowy and tied up with red ribbons, outlines of Christmas trees on the walls created with fairy lights, wreaths made from candy canes, Christmas stockings, tinsel – the works. It didn’t look particularly classy or well done, but it I’ll be damned if it didn’t look festive.
I had a shower and then pulled on denim shorts, a Grinch T-shirt and Havianas before heading back downstairs to meet Stacey. When we stepped out into the afternoon sun, I felt myself begin to sweat immediately despite all the deodorant I’d slathered on post-shower. Nothing could combat this kind of heat. We took my Mustang and rode with the top-down despite the fact that I was pretty sure I could hear my skin sizzling as we drove.
I parked down the street from the studio where the class was to be held and Stacey and I walked to the door. We waited in the shade until Joanna and Celia showed up. Tonight was a good night, because I wasn’t in it alone. Lucky, because when we got inside it became immediately apparent that I was going to have to sit out of the class. (I couldn’t be trusted with anything that required adult supervision – I was notoriously clumsy and frankly a danger to the public.)
“Candle making?” I whispered to Celia as we walked into the room. “Do these people not realise that you can just buy candles? And why would anyone want to play with hot wax and flame at this time of year?”
I fanned myself with my hand as a wave of heat washed over me. The classroom wasn’t air-conditioned, and one sad fan rotated listlessly in the centre of the ceiling, displacing a pathetic jet of warm air.
“You could get out of this pretty easily,” C whispered. “Just tell her.”
“No!” I hissed. “If any of our friends find out about me and James, I’m going to have to hire around the clock protection. It hardly seems worth it given that I haven’t even seen him so far this week. It’s not like I have any saucy details to give them. The last time we hung out I fell asleep at his kitchen table.”
Celia shook her head at me. “You guys must have a wild love life.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not telling them. They will actually murder me.”
“Oh, they will not,” she replied with an eye roll so exaggerated that it put mine to shame.
C and I buddied up to do the candle making – by which I mean that I sat back and watched. Seriously? Why did Stacey keep making me come to classes that she knew I wouldn’t be able to participate in?
While the teacher droned on at the front of the class about how to melt soy chips and how to set your wick or something, my phone buzzed in my pocket. When I saw who the message was from, I smiled. James.
Then I read what it said and the smile fell off my face instantly.
Harcourt wants to bring you in for questioning.
I took ten deep breaths just like everyone had always recommended I do rather than get annoyed about trivial things like a murderous police officer who I was pretty sure had once run me over now deigning to bring me in for questioning. Once I’d composed myself as best I could, I replied to the message.
What does he think I’ve done?
A thought occurred to me.
You didn’t dob me in for breaking into your house, did you? That was months ago and I was running away from a crazy man! Extenuating circumstances, come on.
I glared at the screen as though James would somehow be able to feel my disapproval on the other end.
No! Don’t be ridiculous. If I started reporting you for all the things you’ve done to me, you’d go to prison for life.
Fair call. Another message came through.
It’s about Topher.
I just couldn’t get away from this conversation today. My phone went again.
Can we meet up face to face to talk about it?
Sighing, I shot back:
I wish. Stuck at another one of Stacey’s classes.
Tomorrow?
I nearly said yes, but then my shoulders sank as I remembered how I was going to be spending my weekend.
I’m elfing tomorrow.
I’ll come and see you on your lunch break, then.
Wow. He was really desperate to talk to me.
What had Harcourt done now?
CHAPTER FIVE
By 8:45 the next morning, I was standing guard at the gate to Santa’s grotto. There were three elves here at any one time – one to man the merch counter and take parents’ money, one to do gift wrapping and one to wrangle the children. We took it in turn to perform these different roles, and today I was starting with the child herding. This was not ideal, seeing as first thing in the morning was our busiest time. The one and only thing making this better was that Bob h
ad brought me a soy chai. And he hadn’t cheaped out and bought it from Muffin Break, either – he’d gone to the proper coffee place and splurged on the biggest size. This was $7.50 worth of chai. I guess being a Santa paid well.
Sipping the latte as I pretended to be friendly to psychotic parents, I tried to remind myself that this would all be over soon. It was OK. This wasn’t my real job. At most I’d have four more days of it. At that thought a tear escaped my eye. No – I couldn’t handle four days. Alright, so I’d have to solve the case before then. Whatever. I could do that.
I shepherded another kid onto the set and he wiped his sticky hand on my arm. I glared at him and he grinned maliciously at me. He’d done it on purpose. I knelt down next to him, smiled and whispered, “Santa isn’t real.”
Then I stood and walked back to my desk while he tried not to cry.
By midday, I’d heard Mariah Carey’s Christmas album play over the shopping centre’s speaker system so many times that I’d developed a slight twitch and I’d started imagining myself bludgeoning pushy parents to death in time to ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’. Surely the shopping centre had another Christmas album to play. Surely. Where was Bob Dylan’s ‘Christmas in the Heart’ when you needed it?
I’d been trying to distract myself by going over the details of the case, but I hadn’t really come up with anything. I considered what I knew about the flasher. He’d struck three times so far: once at a local charity football game, once at a park and once at the university campus. Bob, Garry and Randy were the only three Westgarden Santas who hadn’t been working during any of those incidents. According to witnesses, the flasher had been a chubby dude wearing a beard and Santa’s coat – but no pants. There had been a couple of cops at the park the time the guy had decided to streak there, but they hadn’t caught him. Somehow he’d managed to avoid Gerongate’s finest. Part of me suspected that the cops just let him run away because they didn’t want to have to tackle a half naked man if they caught up to him.
I was sure Bob wasn’t responsible. That meant it was either Garry or Randy. I’d told Adam as much, but he’d insisted that I continue working with Bob anyway, just in case. In reality he just wanted to make me suffer through as many shifts here as possible. (He was really annoyed at me for ruining his chances with that girl.)
Finally it was time to rotate jobs. Next I ended up on the counter, taking money for the pictures and selling shitty Christmas decorations. At least when I was working on this counter I had a buddy, though – there was another elf there to gift-wrap. After what seemed like an eternity in hell, I called the next customer to the counter.
“How can I help you?” I asked flatly, rifling through the stack of pictures to my left.
“I was hoping you could help me with lunch?”
I glanced up. “James! Oh my goodness, thank you!” I grabbed my bag and slipped out from behind the counter.
He smiled. “I already put in an order at the dumpling place so it’ll be done by the time we get there.”
“Lucky, because I only get half an hour for lunch.”
“That seems illegal.”
“If it’s not, it should be,” I muttered. “No one can eat enough food in that amount of time.”
He smiled and put his arm around my shoulders, placing a quick kiss on my forehead. James McKenzie was tall and lean, but with a level of muscle you had to attend a gym to attain. (He was one of those people who went to the gym voluntarily. I know; I don’t understand it either.) He had brown hair, tanned skin and very shapely legs. Distractingly shapely, some would say. Today he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and somehow he still looked freshly pressed despite the fact that the weather outside today felt like there were actual flames licking down from the sky.
We collected our food and took a seat at the cleanest table we could find in the food court. (There was actually a nicer table, but James wouldn’t let me fight the lady with the pram for it.)
“So,” I said, dipping my steamed veggie dumpling in the sauce it had come with. “What did you want to tell me?”
James paused with his own dumpling (fried) halfway to his mouth. He took a deep breath and then exhaled before looking up from the dumpling and into my eyes. “Harcourt...”
“Yes?” I said around a mouthful of dumpling. (James was so used to me being gross that he barely flinched at the sight of my semi-masticated food.)
He sighed. “He wants to ask you about your brother.”
“Why is everyone so interested in Topher all of a sudden?”
James shrugged. “I don’t – wait, who else has been asking you about him?”
I briefly considered whether or not to tell him, but I decided that there was no point in keeping it secret. “Tim,” I said. “Adam’s been giving him crappy cases lately so he’s been looking into Topher’s disappearance in his downtime.”
James nodded slowly, taking a bite of his dumpling and chewing thoughtfully. He swallowed and said, “Topher’s going to have to work a bit harder to stay hidden if Tim’s on the case.”
I frowned at him. There was something about the way he’d phrased that sentence that seemed odd to me. “James, you don’t know anything about Topher that you haven’t told me, do you?”
I saw him clench his jaw a little before saying, “You have trust issues.”
I shrugged. “That’s what happens when your brother abandons you, I guess.”
“Harcourt wants to question you,” he said. “I don’t know what’s brought it on, but he’s reopening the case.”
“Which case?”
James narrowed his eyes. “Your brother’s disappearance,” he said slowly. “What other case would I be talking about?”
I shrugged. “The one where I got run over?” The one where a woman got burned alive in a building where my brother had been spending a lot of time shortly before his disappearance? But then again, Harcourt would probably want to keep that case firmly shut if he could at all help it. “Never mind. Go on.”
James swallowed another mouthful of dumpling and used his chopsticks to pick up a steamed dumpling this time. I went in for a fried one.
“Well, like I said, I don’t know why he’s reopening the case, but he wants to talk to you.”
“Do I have to talk to him?”
James hesitated. “Well, no, but I think... I think you should.”
I sat my chopsticks on the plate in front of me and leaned back in my chair, crossing my arms.
“I know you hate him, but it’s not going to look good if you refuse to answer his questions.”
“Not going to look good to who?”
James exhaled. “If you don’t come down to the station, he’s just going to show up at your house.”
“What’s going on, James?” I asked, frowning.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“It’s not good, though, is it? He must have a reason for suddenly looking for Topher. Missing persons cases don’t get reopened for no reason.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Has Harcourt questioned you?”
He nodded. “Yeah. But he just asked if I’d heard from Topher. Nothing much.”
“He trusts you.”
“He does.”
“Do you trust him?”
James met my gaze and held it silently for a beat before replying. “Do you trust me?”
I swallowed, although for once I didn’t have any food in my mouth. “Of course.”
“Then don’t ask me questions like that.”
We continued eating until my lunch break was over, but from then on we stuck to less incendiary topics. James walked me back to Santa’s grotto and gave me a kiss on the cheek to say goodbye. As I watched him walk away I chewed my bottom lip, unable to stop thinking about the fact that James hadn’t actually answered my question.
CHAPTER SIX
After a few hours of gift-wrapping at the kiosk – which was definitely not one of my strengths, just FYI – my shift was o
ver. I could finally head home and kick off my curly-toed shoes. Before that, though, I decided to swing by the office and fill Tim in on the latest development in my brother’s case. Why was Harcourt looking into it? Had he somehow found out that Tim was investigating and decided that he needed to act? But why? And how? I needed to talk this through with Tim. He was better with this sort of thing than I was.
After parking the Mustang in the underground parking lot, I headed upstairs to Tim’s office. I knocked on the door and heard Tim invite me in. When I entered, Adam was sitting in the chair across from Tim’s desk.
“Oh, hi,” I said. They both murmured greetings and I wondered whether I should tell Adam what I’d just found out. I didn’t want to get Tim in trouble for investigating something he wasn’t meant to. But then, if Adam found out some other way that Harcourt was reopening the case and I hadn’t told him, he would definitely be suspicious. No, I decided. I’d tell them both now, but I wouldn’t say anything about Tim looking into the case.
“I have some news,” I announced.
“Your brother’s case?” Adam guessed.
I raised my eyebrows. “How could you possibly know that?”
“I know everything,” he replied. “I also know that Tim has been quietly looking into that case for the past six months.”
Judging by the expression on Tim’s face, this was news to him.
“Uh...” Tim began.
“It’s fine,” said Adam. “I don’t want you doing anything dangerous until you’re one hundred per cent better, and I figure you’re better off working on this than going after the guys who attacked you.”
That seemed fair.
“Right,” I said. “But how did you know that the case had been reopened?”
“Harcourt called here earlier looking for you,” Adam said.
