A Crime for Christmas

by Carolyn Keene

  “Revenge is a powerful motive,” I said. “And it is a pretty big coincidence that the hot-pepper incident and the greenhouse being tampered with both happened on the same night. And with someone sneaking around br—” I halted midsentence, catching Henry nervously shaking his head behind Archie’s back. Henry had trusted me with a secret, and I couldn’t mention the break-ins to Archie without throwing my new CI under the bus. “I mean if someone’s sneaking around behind Chef K’s back, then it could be bad for business.”

  Archie looked like he wanted to argue but didn’t have the energy. “Just keep your eyes open, that’s all. I don’t want you doing anything strenuous. And please don’t tell anyone. It wouldn’t do to have our guests or the staff asking questions and thinking something is wrong. Everyone’s on edge enough as it is.”

  “Ooh, my first case!” Henry exclaimed as Archie sulked away. “Or my first official case anyway,” he added with a wink when Archie was out of earshot.

  “If you see anything strange, let me know. I’m going to take a ride and get the lay of the land,” I told him as I wheeled myself off to explore the lodge and think.

  It sure sounded like sabotage, but were the two incidents from last night really connected to the wave of un-burgled burglaries? I had the go-ahead from Archie to investigate the greenhouse massacre, so I’d focus on that to start and see if anything relevant to the break-ins turned up.

  A couple of hours later and I still didn’t have any more information. I wheeled myself around, did a little surveillance, and casually chatted with the staff to see if I could pick up any clues. The walkie-talkie came in handy too, since I could listen in on some of the open channels the staff used to communicate.

  From what I could tell, most of Chef K’s employees didn’t particularly like her, but they did respect her. Sure, a lot of them were afraid of her too, but she was a great chef and she hired people who were serious about culinary art and the restaurant biz. Most of them seemed genuinely excited to learn from her and be a part of a high-profile new restaurant. They could definitely have had a nicer boss—and from everything I’d heard, she was on a real rampage after the greenhouse incident—but everything else about working at Mountain to Table sounded like a great gig, including the fact that the staff got to live on-site at a beautiful ski lodge. A harmless prank would have been one thing, but spiking guests with hot pepper and destroying important ingredients didn’t seem like something a staff member would risk. Those pranks might have really harmed the restaurant. If Mountain to Table tanked, it would affect everyone who worked there, and it didn’t seem to make sense for someone on the staff to sabotage their own job.

  What I did know was that I was exhausted, so when Archie told me he’d take me off the case if I wasn’t in bed resting by nine that night, I didn’t put up a fight.

  I woke up the next morning refreshed and ready to get to work. What I really wanted to do was check out the scene of the crime, but wheeling myself through the snow to the greenhouse wasn’t exactly an option. There was one place I realized I could go, though, not that I was looking forward to it. I didn’t think Henry would be either.

  “Good morning, Nancy!” he said when he answered the phone at the front desk. “Do you have a new investigative assignment for me?”

  “I actually do,” I said. “Where does the kitchen keep its garbage?”

  “Being a detective is less glamorous than I’d hoped,” he complained an hour later while helping me rummage through bags of kitchen trash. “I can’t believe this is how I’m spending my break.”

  “Detecting can be a dirty job,” I told him.

  I definitely wasn’t above digging through trash in search of clues. I wasn’t exactly sure what we were looking for, but if someone on the kitchen staff were to get rid of evidence, the kitchen trash might be the quickest place to ditch it without raising suspicion.

  The fact that the lodge did so much composting made the job a little less gross than it could have been, since all the compostable food waste was stored in separate bins. They even had special “bokashi bins,” where they used anaerobic fermentation to compost things like meat and dairy that couldn’t go in a normal garden compost pile. At least we weren’t elbow deep in mashed potatoes and chicken guts!

  “Be careful,” I said as Henry set down a bag with the telltale crash of broken dishes.

  “Detecting always seems so dangerous in mystery books, but cutting myself on a broken teacup wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Henry griped, tossing aside the offending teacup, along with a bundle of dirty paper towels that had snagged on the broken porcelain.

  The bundle came undone mid-toss, spilling out a pair of plastic goggles and crumpled rubber gloves.

  “That’s strange,” I said. Rubber gloves didn’t seem so weird for a kitchen; we’d excavated a few other pairs along the way and were even wearing our own. But I wondered, “Why would someone need plastic goggles?”

  Henry lifted one of the gloves by its rubber fingertip.

  “It looks like there’s some kind of red dust on this one,” he observed.

  I took the glove from him, held it a few inches from my nose, and took a cautious sniff.

  “ACHOO!” I sneezed.

  I turned to Henry and smiled. “Looks like we found the smoking glove. Our perp must have used these to keep from contaminating themselves when they mashed up the peppers and spiked the towels.”

  “So it was sabotage!” he exclaimed.

  “Looks like your theory about a disgruntled kitchen staffer who felt Chef K’s wrath may be right,” I told him.

  Henry beamed with pride. “But how do we tell which disgruntled kitchen staffer? Can we take DNA samples and do a forensic test?!”

  “We don’t exactly have a crime lab handy,” I said, but as I studied the gloves, I realized chili powder wasn’t the only red thing stuck to the goggles. “Wait a second! You may actually be onto something! Although I don’t think we’ll need a test for this DNA sample.”

  Henry leaned in closer to watch as I pulled a distinctive frizzy red hair from the band of the goggles.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Spy vs. Spy

  “CLARK!” HENRY CRIED.

  I nodded, dropping the incriminating goggles into an evidence bag. “Unless there’s another frizzy redhead on Chef K’s staff, I’d say it’s a good bet we’ve found our culprit. I saw her threaten to fire him last night at the banquet, and it probably wasn’t the first time.”

  “Oh, it’s not,” Henry confirmed. “He’s one of her favorite targets.”

  “If Clark stole the habaneros and spiked the towels, there’s a good chance he’s also responsible for killing Chef K’s plants,” I speculated. “Sabotaging the chef and trying to take the restaurant down with him makes more sense if he already thought he might lose his job.”

  “Speaking of jobs,” Henry said, scrunching his nose as he tried to wipe a blob of gravy from his shirt, “I need to get changed and back to the front desk.”

  “Thanks for your help, Henry,” I said. “I’ll deliver the news to Archie.”

  I was wheeling my evidence bag past the large ski lounge overlooking the slopes on my way to report back on our Dumpster dive when I spotted Grant talking to someone on his cell phone. And he looked STRESSED. All-caps STRESSED. He was sitting on the far side of the lounge, facing the big floor-to-ceiling windows, and hadn’t seen me, so I wheeled myself into the room as casually as I could and picked up a copy of the Prospect Piper daily newspaper to peek out from behind while I pretended I was lounging.

  It wasn’t surprising that the stories dominating the front page both involved the lodge. The headlines read GRAND SKY REOPENS TO MIXED REVIEWS and LODGE’S THREAT TO HALT PIPELINE FUELS TENSIONS, and there was a good chance that whatever conversation had Grant so flustered had to do with one of the two topics.

  Grant had a good reason not to want word of the break-in to his room to make the news and frighten guests even more. As shifty as he’d
been when I asked him about it, I didn’t think he’d welcome an investigation into it from me or anyone else. He might not want my help, but if I could figure out what was going on, it would help him, Archie, and the lodge.

  There was no way to eavesdrop on his conversation from across the room with holiday music on the speakers and five other conversations going on, but sometimes you can learn a lot from just watching a person.

  Only what I learned this time wasn’t about the guy I was watching—it was about the guys watching him!

  It didn’t take me long to notice that I wasn’t the only one peering over a periodical to spy on Grant. The blond teenager I’d seen at both the protest and Archie’s speech before my ill-fated ski run hid behind a glossy snowboarding magazine. I caught sight of the brown-haired teen a moment later a few seats away on Grant’s other side, lazily scrolling through his phone. At least that’s what it looked like he was doing. He was subtle enough you’d never notice that his line of sight was aimed at Grant and not his screen—unless you’d done as much clandestine surveillance as I had.

  Both guys were decked out for a day on the slopes and could easily pass as snowboarders hanging around the lounge between runs—and maybe that’s what they were; there’s no rule saying environmental activists can’t be snowboarders, too—but unless my sleuthing senses were broken along with my leg, they were doing the same thing I was: detecting.

  Now that was interesting. Why were a couple of protesters undercover, shadowing the lodge’s co-owner?

  I could tell Grant had no idea he was performing for an audience. The phone call appeared to get more urgent. Grant shook his head vehemently, saying no with enough emphasis that I could lip-read it before finally scrunching up his eyes like he’d just been forced to swallow some nasty medicine and then sagging in his seat. He pulled a fancy-looking gold pen from his shirt pocket and scribbled something on one of the Grand Sky Lodge courtesy notepads I’d seen lying around, then clicked off the call. He tore the note from the pad, jammed it into his pants pocket, and hurried out of the room, leaving his pen behind in his haste.

  If it weren’t for my broken leg, my instinct would have been to tail him, and it looked like the guys I’d seen spying on him had the same idea. I saw them exchange a quick glance, and then the blond left to follow Grant while the brown-haired one casually got up and slipped into the seat where Grant had just been. I ducked lower behind my newspaper as he gave a stealthy look around before picking up the gold pen and rubbed the tip rapidly back and forth over the center of the pad. The hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as he set the pen back down, tore the sheet from the pad, and tucked it into his pants pocket before following his friend out the door.

  I gave a begrudging smile of my own—I was starting to see myself as the Grand Sky Lodge’s house detective, and I didn’t like the idea of someone sneaking in to spy on one of the owners—but the brown-haired undercover protester had just done the exact same thing I would have if he hadn’t beaten me to it. He’d used the pen to take a rubbing of the indentation left on the pad from whatever Grant had written down. Judging from the guy’s smile, it had worked, and he’d left with a do-it-yourself carbon copy of Grant’s note.

  Clandestinely following the guy wasn’t an option, but hopefully that wasn’t the only way to get in on the secret of what Grant had written on the pad before getting off the phone. I moved over to Grant’s seat and picked up the gold pen (which was just as fancy up close as it looked from afar) to return it to him. After I took a rubbing of my own, of course. If I was lucky, Grant would have used enough force to leave an indentation a few pages deep.

  “Darn,” I muttered. With the page beneath it already ripped off, the indentation was now too faint to make out. It looked like it might be a number of some sort, but I had no way to know.

  I made a mental note to find out who the boys were, thinking how busy my self-appointed house detective job was getting as I headed off to let Archie know I’d found Chef K’s kitchen saboteur.

  I could tell from the gasping-fish face Clark made when Archie and I confronted him in the manager’s office that he was guilty. The goggles with the telltale frizzy red hair stared accusingly at him from the desk. I’d just presented him with proof that he’d spiked the hand towels with hot peppers, so I figured I’d hit him with the one-two punch. “Why did you kill Chef K’s plants, Clark?”

  He doubled down on his gasping-fish face and threw in a string of confused syllables to go with it. “Wha . . . I . . . uh . . . you . . . how . . . but . . . er . . . um . . . no!”

  “As I see it, there are two ways we can handle this, Clark. You can have an honest conversation about what you did with Nancy and me,” Archie offered. “Or I can get Chef K and leave you two alone to discuss it in private.”

  Clark’s eyes went wide with fear. I’d have to remember to compliment Archie on his interrogation skills.

  “Believe me, we’re definitely the good cops in this scenario,” I added.

  “No! She’ll kill me!” Clark blurted, images of the notoriously short-tempered chef and her ninja-like meat-cleaver skills surely dancing through his mind.

  “Well, then what do you have to say for yourself?” Archie asked.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled without meeting Archie’s eyes.

  “Sorry?!” Archie nearly shouted, struggling to keep his clam. “I don’t care how angry you are at Chef K. Your actions hurt every single person who works at this lodge.”

  Clark stared guiltily at his feet. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone else, or even Chef, really. I was just following instructions.”

  “Instructions? From whom?” Archie asked incredulously. “No one who works here would have told you to sabotage our own restaurant!”

  “It’s true,” Clark said. “I swear I never would have done it on my own.”

  “I demand to know who told you to do this,” Archie growled.

  Clark shrugged. “I dunno. I needed the money, so I didn’t ask.”

  “Wait a second, you’re saying someone paid you to sabotage the banquet?” I asked.

  “Um . . . kind of,” Clark said. He wasn’t the clearest communicator I’d ever interrogated, that was for sure.

  “But who would do such a thing?” Archie lamented.

  Clark shrugged again, but I had some ideas, given the beef between the lodge and the pipeline advocates. It didn’t sound like asking Clark about it would get us very far, though.

  “How much did they pay you?” I asked instead, hoping he might at least be able to give a direct answer to that.

  “Um, I’m not sure?” he half asked.

  Archie let out an exasperated sigh.

  “So someone paid you to sabotage the banquet and Chef K’s greenhouse, but you don’t know who or how much?” I asked with a raised eyebrow. “Something’s not adding up here, Clark.”

  “I think he’s making it up to deflect blame,” Archie concluded.

  “No, really!” Clark insisted. “They left me notes in my room in the staff cabins, telling me what to do. I was going to say no, but they said I’d be sorry if I refused, and it was pretty creepy how the notes just showed up inside my room, so I was scared, plus the money didn’t hurt, and it really wasn’t my fault when you think about it. . . .”

  “And you don’t have any idea who could have left those notes?’

  “No, I swear. They just signed them ‘The Grand Sky Christmas Elf,’ ” Clark protested.

  “And I suppose taking their money wasn’t your fault either?” I asked.

  “Well, I mean, I wasn’t going to do it for free,” he reasoned. I was getting the impression that Clark wasn’t the sharpest spoon in Chef K’s kitchen.

  Archie looked at him like he was from another planet. “Mysteriously appearing threatening notes from elves and magical money with no denomination? Do you really expect us to believe this?”

  “Uh-huh,” Clark affirmed earnestly as Archie buried his face in his palms.

/>   Clark’s answers did sound ridiculous, but this was definitely supporting my theory that the break-ins and kitchen sabotage were connected. If someone really had snuck into Clark’s room to leave the notes, it could be the same person who broke into Grant’s suite and the other rooms. I wanted to say all this to Archie, but that would mean admitting I knew about the break-ins, and I’d promised Henry I wouldn’t.

  “So you don’t even know how much this vanishing saboteur paid you? Did you not count it?” Archie rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, uh, yeah, that’s weird, isn’t it?” Clark chuckled nervously.

  He had been fidgeting obsessively with something in his jacket pocket. I’d initially passed it off as nerves, but every time the subject of money came up, the fidgeting got worse.

  “What’s in your pocket, Clark?” I asked.

  “Oh, uh, that’s nothing, just pocket stuff,” he murmured without removing his hand.

  “Pocket stuff?” I asked skeptically.

  He nodded his head vigorously, willing me to believe him. “You know, like, the normal stuff.”

  Archie stood up. “This is absurd. I’m going to get the chef and let her deal with this.”

  “Wait!” Clark shouted, pulling his hand from his pocket. “I don’t know how much it is because I haven’t had a chance to take it to the pawnshop yet.”

  He reluctantly opened his hand and placed an unpolished gold nugget on the table.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Showdown at High Noon

  “IS THAT WHAT I THINK it is?” I asked.

  I picked up the nugget. It was about the diameter of a penny and looked like a chewed-up piece of golden bubblegum but was much heavier than I expected. And it had a distinctly visible tooth mark in it.