A Crime for Christmas

by Carolyn Keene

  “Save your do-gooder act for those hippie protesters,” Dino snarled.

  “Gentlemen, let’s talk about all this at the town hall meeting on Monday,” said a mortified-looking Grant as he stepped in to play peacemaker. Only it didn’t look like Dino was in a peaceful mood.

  “Afraid I’m making you look bad in front of your precious guests, is that it, Mr. Conflict of Interest?” he shot back at Grant. “You’re supposed to be representing the voters, and everyone I know wants this to happen.”

  “This is a complex issue, Dino, and there are a lot of people with legitimate concerns on both sides,” Grant said diplomatically. “I’m confident that if we all work together, we can find a middle ground that everyone can—”

  “Oh, middle ground, huh? You mean like going behind the town council’s back and trying to turn the land we need for the pipeline into a nature preserve?” Dino shouted.

  “That’s Archie’s idea; I haven’t agreed to it,” Grant protested.

  I could see the wounded look on Archie’s face.

  “You may have some people fooled, Alexander, but you’re as full of hot air as all the other politicians,” Dino said, as his friends nodded and egged him on. “Me and my boys aren’t leaving here until, um, until . . .”

  Dino trailed off, his gaze shifting to something behind me. I turned around to see a short woman in a white chef’s jacket marching down the center of the hall with an intense scowl on her face and a large, bloodstained meat cleaver in her hand. I immediately recognized her from TV.

  “That’s Chef Kim Crockett!” I whispered to the table.

  “You. Are. Interrupting. My. Dinner,” she growled in Dino’s direction as she passed our table and raised the cleaver over her head.

  Kim “Chef K” Crockett’s triumphant run on Top Chop Challenge had earned her a reputation for two things in particular: a hot temper and superb knife skills.

  “She’s not going to . . . ,” Carol started to say as Chef K pulled the cleaver back and flung it at Dino Bosley’s head.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Meal to Remember

  THERE WAS A COLLECTIVE GASP as the cleaver twisted gracefully through the air and sailed within inches of Dino’s stunned head, sticking in the log beam behind him with a loud THWACK.

  That THWACK got the last word. Dino and his posse instantly ran the other way without another word. Archie’s and Grant’s embarrassed attempts at diplomacy might not have persuaded him to leave, but Chef K’s more direct approach certainly did.

  “You’ll all regret this!” Dino yelled from a safe distance down the hall once he was out of cleaver range.

  Kim marched over to the beam, pulled out the meat cleaver, and turned back the way she’d come, throwing Archie and Grant a withering look on the way.

  “I apologize for the interruption,” Chef K announced to the entire hall, pausing briefly in the center of the room and glaring again at the stunned co-owners. “I promise the food is better than the security.”

  “Well, that was quite the appetizer,” Carol remarked. “Local controversy and a knife-wielding celebrity chef. This is going to be the article of my career.”

  I bit my lip, worrying about the bad press the scene we’d just witnessed might generate for Archie and pondering what the confrontation with Dino Bosley might mean. Three things were clear: the Grand Sky Lodge’s grand reopening was off to a rocky start; Dino had made my death threat suspect list; and Chef K was not to be messed with.

  All of it vanished from my head as waiters began coming around to the tables with hot towels for the guests to clean their hands, signaling the start of the meal. Chef K’s signature style was beautifully arranged small plates full of interesting, super-fresh local ingredients that everyone at the table could share. So instead of just one appetizer and a main course, we’d all get to try, like, ten different awesome things! I couldn’t wait to see what kind of mountain-to-table delicacies she had crafted for the big opening meal.

  “I can’t believe I’m going to eat a meal prepared by a chef I watched on TV,” I said as a waiter in a burgundy tuxedo lifted matching plush burgundy hand towels with tongs from a steaming dish and placed one on each of our plates.

  “Do you think that was animal blood on the cleaver she threw at that guy, or did she chop up her sous-chef for burning the soufflé?” Carol asked, arching her eyebrows and picking up her steaming towel.

  “She’s got mad knife-throwing skills, that’s for sure,” said Brady, picking up the towel and looking at it like he wasn’t sure what to do with it.

  “Fancy!” Liz exclaimed, picking up her towel and then flicking it at Brady. “You wash your hands with it, doofus.”

  “It’s like a classy moist towelette!” he replied, rubbing the towel over his hands. “Ooh, that feels good.”

  “You should be at the kids’ banquet with Things One through Three,” Liz told him.

  Brady laughed. “Chicken nuggets with Santa?” I wish I were allowed in there. Brady finished washing his hands with the towel and placed it down with a shrug. “Still not totally sure why we needed those,” he told us.

  The towel was superhot, kind of like a sauna for your hands. Then the hot sensation lingered even after I put it down and picked up one of the appetizers the waiter had served from a separate covered dish on the same tray. I wondered if the towels had been coated in some sort of fancy essential oil.

  “Bon appétit,” the waiter said, collecting the used towels with his tongs.

  The little piece of toast with goat cheese and fresh bruschetta practically melted in my mouth.

  “Oh, that’s good!” I said with my mouth full. “Really good.”

  I could hear our housekeeper Hannah Gruen’s voice in my head telling me not to talk with my mouth full, but I just couldn’t help it. It was weird, though—my hands were still oddly hot from the towel more than a minute later. Actually, they were hotter!

  “Mmmmm,” Brady moaned in appetizer ecstasy, gobbling down a piece of bruschetta in one bite and then licking his fingers.

  “Hey, not bad!” Carol said, taking a bite.

  Brady started coughing and chugged his entire glass of water in one gulp. “Oh, man, that toast thingy has some kick. My tongue is on fire.”

  “Mine wasn’t spicy, but are anyone else’s hands still hot?” Liz asked, rubbing one hand with the other. “Mine are, and I think they’re turning red!”

  Carol had just absently rubbed the corner of her eye. “Uh-oh,” she said, squinting and quickly pulling her hand away.

  Not only were my hands red, but a little cut I’d gotten on my afternoon wipeout had turned bright red and was practically throbbing. “Yeah, that kind of hurts. I wonder if—”

  “Ahhhhhhh!” Carol screamed. “My eye! It really burns!”

  Next thing I knew, half the banquet hall was huffing, coughing, or outright screaming! Everywhere around us people were either guzzling their water or running for the bathroom to wash their hands.

  “We’ve been poisoned!” shrieked a woman at the table behind me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tropical Heat Wave

  AND THEN CHAOS REALLY BROKE out. All it took was the word “poison” to set off a chain reaction of screams. But as I looked around the room, I noticed that it was only the front part of the hall that was panicking. Everyone else was staring at us in confusion, trying to figure out what was going on, including the waitstaff as they made their way toward the back of the hall with the trays of yet-to-be-delivered hot towels.

  I looked down at my own throbbing red hands and it hit me: there was some kind of chemical substance on the towels!

  I went to jump up to stop the waiters, only to rediscover that I was trapped in a wheelchair with a huge cast on my leg!

  “Can you tell the waiters to stop delivering the hot towels and then get Doc Sherman?” I said as calmly and quietly as I could to Liz and Brady to keep anyone else from panicking even more. “I think there’s some kind of chemical o
n the towels that’s making anything they touch burn.”

  Liz gave me a concerned look, then nodded. “You got it, detective.”

  “On it,” Brady agreed, his voice hoarse from whatever chemical he’d licked from his fingers after using the towel.

  They both took off for the back of the hall.

  Using my napkin, I carefully picked up a discarded towel the waiter had missed when he’d collected them and brought it slowly toward my nose. I got about as close as a couple of inches when the vapors shot up my nostrils in a peppery blast.

  “ACHOO! ACHOO! ACHOO!” I sneezed uncontrollably, a familiar hot tingle spreading through my sinuses.

  It wasn’t a chemical.

  “Hot pepper!” I wheezed.

  “Give me that,” Chef K’s voice demanded from behind me.

  She grabbed the towel from my hand without bothering to use a napkin and inhaled deeply. I don’t know how she kept from sneezing, but she barely flinched. And then she licked the towel!

  “My Caribbean habaneros!” she cried.

  “You can tell what . . . ACHOO! . . . kind of . . . ACHOO! . . . pepper it is?” I asked between sneezes.

  “Of course I can,” she shot back, as if I’d just asked Einstein if he could count to ten. “I keep twelve varieties of homegrown hot peppers hanging in the root cellar, and my Caribbean habs are the hottest, but with a complex nose combining subtle notes of tropical passion fruit and smoked cherrywood that give way to a ferocious delayed kick at the back of the palate. Some cretin walked off with an entire strand of them last week, along with a crock full of my house-fermented kraut. But how the hell did they end up on my hot towels?”

  She stared at me like I might have been the one to do it, but her laser glare quickly shifted to a scrawny waiter with frizzy red hair whose name tag read CLARK.

  “You!” she yelled, grabbing poor Clark by the collar like he was a bad puppy dog, nearly yanking him off his feet as he rushed past. “Tell the other waiters to stop serving the towels now and get as much milk and yogurt as you can from the kitchen to give anyone who got a hot towel.”

  “Milk?” Clark hesitated. “What do we need to get milk for?”

  “Because if you don’t, you’ll be out of a job before the second course, you buffoon. Now stop asking asinine questions and do what you’re told,” she growled.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Clark squeaked, rushing off to do her bidding.

  I admit her ordering milk and yogurt sounded a little weird at first, but it triggered a random lesson my high school chemistry teacher had taught us one year.

  “Dairy has a compound that binds with the capsaicin oil that gives chili peppers their heat and neutralizes it, right?” I asked, the sneeze attack finally abating. “Like a hot-pepper antidote!”

  She stared at me for a few moments before giving me a curt nod and stomping off. I think she was actually impressed!

  Luckily, only about a quarter of the banquet hall had been “poisoned” by the habanero-spiked towels, and Chef K’s milk and yogurt antidote—drunk or applied topically, depending on the victim—helped resolve the crisis so the meal could continue. I felt a little silly pouring milk over my burning hands, but it really worked! Poor Carol and her bright red, bloodshot eyes needed an eyewash from Doc Sherman, but just about everybody was back at their seats soon.

  Archie and Grant were walking around personally apologizing to everyone, explaining that some harmless hot pepper had accidentally gotten sprinkled on the towels, when Chef K stomped back to the center of the room.

  “We’ll be sending a bottle of the lodge’s finest champagne to each table to make up for the inconvenience,” she announced.

  I could tell by the stricken looks on both Archie’s and Grant’s faces that it was news to them.

  “But we can’t . . . ,” Grant started to protest, but Chef K silenced him with one of her trademark glares.

  “And,” she continued, “dinner is on the house for anyone who was affected.”

  “That’s going to cost us thousands. We can’t afford this,” Grant griped at Archie under his breath as they walked past.

  Poor Archie. His big opening day sure wasn’t going as planned. Was this latest hot pepper mishap just bad luck? Had the chili powder gotten on the towels by accident—or was it sabotage? Chef K’s habaneros going missing a few days before they wound up dusted on the towels sounded like too much of a coincidence to be an accident. And the burgundy towels were perfectly colored to conceal the red pepper powder. That wasn’t proof that someone planned it, but it was definitely suspicious. And if it was suspicious, it meant there might very well be a suspect. Could it have anything to do with Dino Bosley and his crew crashing the party earlier?

  The questions came fast and furious, and I knew only one thing for sure: I’d just found a new mystery!

  “Talk about hot towels!” George exclaimed as I eagerly filled her and Bess in over FaceTime later that evening. I was a lot less mopey than I had been when I’d called them earlier to tell them about my accident.

  “I’m just glad you’re okay, Nancy,” Bess said sympathetically. “First you break your leg, then you’re poisoned!”

  “It was just hot pepper, Bess. It’s not like someone put plutonium in the polenta,” George said, rolling her eyes.

  Georgia “George” Fayne and Bess Marvin aren’t just my best friends, they’re also each other’s first cousins, although you wouldn’t know it from listening to them.

  “What I want to know is who had a motive to sabotage that meal,” I pondered, slipping easily back into detective mode. “The old owners’ son, Dino Bosley, is one, but how would he manage it? Does he have still have moles on the inside?”

  “Sorry, Nance, sounds like a stretch to me,” George said. “You want the new owners to lease a piece of land to a pipeline company, so you sprinkle hot peppers on the chef’s hand towels?”

  “Okay, well, speaking of the pipeline, the incident could be tied to the death threats the owners have received,” I speculated. “It sounds like there are a lot of people in town who could be behind that, but it’s going to be hard for me to do much investigating in town in this thing.”

  I flicked one of the wheels of my chair in frustration.

  “My money’s on one of the chef’s kitchen staff,” Bess said confidently. “It sounds like they have plenty of reason to gripe, with the way Chef K treats them.”

  “Meh, I’d forget about the hot-pepper angle and focus on the death threats. That sounds like the real mystery,” George said. “The hand towels thing sounds like a random prank. Hey, maybe it was Bess! She’s always threatening people with that pepper spray she carries around in her purse.”

  “Don’t let her discourage you, Nancy,” Bess interjected. “I think it’s great you have an inside case to occupy you at the lodge while you heal.”

  “Seriously, I’m already going crazy from cabin fever and it’s only been a few hours!” I agreed.

  “And for the record, I only threaten bad people,” Bess added.

  “Well, I know one thing either way,” George said. “A sleuth’s gonna snoop, and I don’t know anyone sleuthier or snoopier than our Nancy.”

  I’m not that snoopy, I thought after the call as I tried to resist the urge to peek into people’s rooms with my binoculars. There were still lights on in many of the rooms, and a number of them taunted me with open curtains. I compromised with myself by agreeing to watch only public spaces.

  On the mountain, the headlights from the groomers’ big snowcat machines lit up the slopes as they smoothed out the snow to get the trails ready for the morning’s skiing. Out front, the lodge’s grounds sparkled with Christmas lights. Even the tops of the hedges in the maze were aglow, illuminating all its geometric twists and turns as I looked down on it from the second story. A couple walked past holding hands. It was all picturesque and beautiful, but there were no clues to be found.

  I nodded off in my chair, and when I woke up a couple of hours
later, there were only a few rooms with lights still on. And one of them was Grant’s suite—at least I assumed it was Grant’s, since it was Archie who’d stormed out after their argument earlier. I didn’t need my binoculars to see his silhouette walk past the window toward the door. The lights went out a moment later. I figured he’d decided to go to sleep, but a few seconds later a light went on in a room down the hall. I recognized it as a cozy little reading room I’d passed earlier. And Grant’s silhouette was visible inside. So I’d learned that Grant was a night owl, but there wasn’t much suspicious about late-night reading.

  I yawned loudly. Grant might be a night owl, but I usually wasn’t, and it had been a long day, full of a short but disastrous ski run, controversial pipelines, death threats, cleaver-wielding chefs, hot pepper hijinks. . . . I tried to replay it all in my mind but soon caught my chin nodding toward my chest and had to blink my eyes awake. I was so tired I’d started to fall asleep in the chair again mid-thought. It was time to retire my binoculars for the night and get some actual bed rest. I was going to wheel myself over to the bed when a dim circular light appeared at the far end of Grant’s suite. His presumably empty suite.

  I raised the binoculars to my eyes without a second thought. Suspicion confirmed! I’d used enough flashlights in my time to recognize one when I saw one. A jolt of excitement shot down my spine as I tracked the light around the suite. The beam was too dim for me to make out the person holding it, but it sure looked like they were searching for something. Only one explanation came to mind for why someone would be snooping around Grant’s empty suite with a flashlight.

  I was witnessing a break-in!

  CHAPTER SEVEN