by Liz Ireland
Delighted to see his uncle, Christopher ran over and hopped on Martin’s back. Laughing, the two of them loped across the room. Martin’s good spirits were infectious, and I laughed along with Christopher’s whoops of glee. Martin could mimic anything, and his snorts sounded more authentic than an actual reindeer’s.
Christopher was never so happy around Nick, I couldn’t help thinking regretfully. But Nick and Martin were different people. Born to don the suit? That was Martin. It was just unfortunate that he’d been born the youngest of three brothers. Because of this accident of birth order, his destiny would probably be to run Santaland’s candy cane factory for the rest of his life.
Although he’d be the first to assure anyone it wasn’t a bad life at all.
“The important thing to remember when we visit the Hollyberrys,” Pamela continued, “is to be supportive and, most of all, cheerful.”
“That’s just what people want when someone’s died,” Martin said. “A good laugh.”
“I’m not suggesting we troop through their cottages like merry jokesters,” Pamela insisted. “But of course they will want cheer.”
Martin glanced at me with restrained mirth in his eyes. “What do you say, April? Got any good one-liners for the Hollyberrys?”
I smiled back. I needed coffee. I hoped Jingles or Waldo would remember to bring some. I was one of the few in the castle who drank it.
Martin dropped his nephew down on a chair with a plunk and then gave my dark outfit a closer examination. “Are we supposed to wear mourning for cranky elves now?” he asked. “Even the ones who slander Santa Claus?”
Christopher’s forehead pillowed. “What’s slander?”
“Something unpleasant,” Pamela said.
“Like when Giblet called Uncle Nick a murderer?”
“Christopher!” The call from the doorway turned all our heads, and at the sight of the woman in black standing there a pall fell over the room. Tiffany, petite, slender, and pale, greeted none of us but spoke directly to her son. “Plato’s waiting for you in the library. You shouldn’t be late for your lessons.”
Christopher dragged to his feet. “It’s not fair that I have to do math while there’s all this excitement going on.”
“Excitement?” My other sister-in-law, Lucia, appeared behind Tiffany. “What’s exciting about an elf dying?”
Next to Lucia stood Quasar, her favorite reindeer. Both were hard to ignore—Lucia because she was tall, blond, and muscular, a Viking queen of a woman, and Quasar because he had a bum foreleg that made him list to one side and a red nose that blinked like a bulb screwed into a wonky socket. The red nose suggested an ancestor from one of the noble Rudolph herd, but the rest of him . . .
Quasar’s antlers were shedding velvet today, which we all tried pointedly not to notice lest we face the wrath of Lucia for criticizing him. The shedding added to his ragged look. He had to be the last male reindeer at the North Pole to lose his antlers, which just made him seem even more of a misfit.
Both of them towered over Tiffany, although Tiffany still had the presence and poise that had riveted the attention of arenas full of people in her youth. I’d never seen her skate. But just the fact that she was so accomplished an athlete impressed me. I’d never done anything sportier than take a handball course at the Y. I was pretty good at it, but not the kind of good that a person could brag about.
“Giblet might’ve been a jerk,” Lucia said to Christopher, “but no one ever denied that he was talented and worked hard. You should do as your mom says and don’t keep your tutor waiting.”
If Lucia expected thanks for backing up Tiffany, she was doomed to be disappointed. Once Christopher was out the door, Tiffany swept a dismissive gaze over us all, turned on her heel, and followed her son.
Martin chuckled at Lucia. “What a hypocrite you are. I don’t remember you being Little Miss Studious when we were young.”
“I wasn’t, but I kept myself busy with other things. I didn’t waste my time listening to your nonsense.”
Pamela let out a peal of clucking laughter. “No bickering, you two. There’s a lot to do today.”
It was, I couldn’t help noting, as if Tiffany in her head-to-toe black hadn’t appeared at the door at all. As if they’d all decided her sadness was something unpleasant and therefore best ignored.
My mother-in-law presented a courteous yet forced smile to the reindeer limping toward the fireplace. “Good morning, Quasar.”
His head dipped, nose fizzling like a dying neon sign. “G’morning, ma’am.”
Martin leaned toward me. “Don’t forget rehearsal.”
It took a moment to recollect that the Santaland Concert Band was meeting this morning. I’d been given the job of chairperson of the Musical Events Committee, so it wasn’t good for me to miss practices, even though I had a lot on my plate this week. All the upcoming activities kept me up night, worrying. There would be Kinder Caroling here at the castle, a tea with entertainment at Kringle Lodge, the Reindeer Hop, and, most worrisome of all, the Skate-a-Palooza at Peppermint Pond. I still hadn’t set the schedule for the musical acts for that last event yet; there were far more people who wanted to play than slots to fit them into, and I hated to disappoint anyone. I felt like groaning just thinking about it. And now all this business about Giblet’s death, and calls to be paid to the Hollyberrys . . .
“Will we have time?” I asked Martin, who was in the concert band with me. He played a pretty good tenor sax.
“I’m sure the band will understand if you can’t make it,” Pamela said. “Anyway, you’re not really musical, are you, April?”
“I play percussion.”
“Exactly. They probably just felt they needed to include you in something, because of Nick.” Knitting needles flew as she spoke. Clack, jingle, clack, jingle.
“If she’s not there they might think she doesn’t want to show her face,” Lucia said. “Because of that scene yesterday. And now Giblet . . .”
“Well, I’m going to rehearsal,” Martin said. “I won’t waste my time lugging food baskets to Hollyberrys.”
Lucia crossed to the sofa, flopped down next to her mother, and propped her feet on the massive low table in front of the couch. I envied her unvarying wardrobe of long wool sweaters and fleece-lined pants. She always looked warm and comfy, even if she did exude a soupçon of reindeer musk. She was the official Claus liaison with the reindeer herds and presided over all sorts of animal activities, including the never-ending Reindeer Games. “There’s a big race today, too. I can’t miss that.”
Jingle, clack, jingle, clack. “Surely they can do without you this once,” Pamela said. “You’re not racing.”
Martin snorted. “Don’t disillusion her, Mother. She thinks she’s part reindeer.”
Lucia chucked a pillow at him. She had a special affinity for animals, especially reindeer, although her relationship to the honored beasts of Santaland could also be contentious. She’d founded the Santaland Reindeer Rescue, which got some reindeer’s antlers in a twist. No one was crueler to reindeer than other reindeer. Sorry to say, what happened to Rudolph the First wasn’t an anomaly. The animals weren’t forgiving of flaws in their own kind, and castoffs were often sent to the misfit herd in the Farthest Frozen Reaches to do their best among the snow monsters, polar bears, and hunters. The lucky ones, like Quasar, caught Lucia’s attention before they were exiled.
Lucia let out an irritated breath. “What a mess. I suppose there’ll be even more whispers about Nick now.”
“Whispers?” Pamela squinted in concentration at the jangling sweater beneath her fingers. “No one’s been whispering in my hearing. Giblet’s death was unfortunate, of course, but it was nothing to do with Nick.”
“Mom, Giblet as much as called Nick a murderer, and the next day he’s dead? ” Lucia’s lips twisted. “Not a good look for the Claus dynasty.”
“Nonsense!” Needles clacked more frantically. “It will all blow over. Little kerfuffles li
ke this usually do. Imagine throwing a hissy fit over losing an ice sculpture competition! It’s Christmas—who has time for all this nonsense?”
“Elves always have time for nonsense,” Martin pointed out.
“We’ll pay condolence calls this morning,” Pamela insisted. “All of us. Smooth things over. Everything will be fine. We must be helpful, sober, and cheerful.”
Martin smirked. “Solemn and jolly. Nothing weird about that.”
Clack, jingle, clack, jingle. “Keeping up appearances is always important, especially this time of year.”
“You’re putting a lot of faith in food baskets.” Lucia stood. “But I’m not. I intend to go see for myself what happened to Giblet.”
I was on my feet in an instant. “I’ll go with you.”
All gazes turned to me. I sensed they’d forgotten I was there, much the same way they didn’t see Quasar nibbling the pine boughs over the mantel.
Before anyone could speak again, however, Jingles moved silently into the room, stopping next to me. “I’ve left your letters and your coffee in Santa’s office,” he said in a low voice.
“The post has arrived?” Pamela asked. She had ears like a bat.
“Yes, ma’am.” Jingles acknowledged her with a bow. “There were just a few things for April. One letter in particular looked rather urgent”—he leveled a significant look on me—“so I thought she might want to tend to it right away.”
“I’ll be right there.” I turned back to Lucia. “Can you wait for me? I really want to go to Giblet’s cottage.”
She gave my outfit a once-over. “Don’t worry, it’ll take me some time to get a sleigh ready. You obviously can’t ride in that getup.”
I followed Jingles out, but once we were in the hall I practically had to sprint to keep up with him. “I’m sorry for the subterfuge.” He looked back at me and lowered his voice. “I don’t know what I’ll say to Mrs. Claus—the dowager Mrs. Claus—when the post really does arrive.”
“There’s no letter?”
“Of course not. I was just doing some straightening in your husband’s office when I found the strangest note on his desk. I thought I should show you before one of the servants saw it. I would have destroyed it, but it’s not my place.”
Nick’s study had framed world maps on one wall and floor-to-ceiling bookcases on the two walls adjacent to the door. His mahogany desk took up the space before a large picture window that overlooked the grounds around the castle, which were dotted with snow-dusted evergreens and embellished with ice sculptures that had probably stood for years. Lights on the trees provided the only illumination outside. Dawn was still hours off.
The room was scrupulously tidy except for two overstuffed sacks of mail piled in a corner. Santa letters—the tough ones. They kept Nick up at night till all hours sometimes and often preyed on his mind. Maybe that’s what he had been doing last night. Even a bulletin board full of lists was arranged neatly. Looking at them made me feel a rush of love for my Type A husband. Santa was supposed to make a list and check it twice, but Nick would make a hundred lists and check dozens of times.
As I hovered over his desk, a piece of paper on the desk blotter caught my eye. I knew in an instant that this was what Jingles had brought me here to see. The note was printed in large capital letters in red ink:
A VENOMOUS ELF. COAL IN HIS STOCKING?
And that was all.
I frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“ ‘A venomous elf ’—Giblet,” Jingles interpreted for me. “ ‘Coal in his stocking.’ His stocking—Blitzen said they’d found something in Giblet’s stocking, remember?”
“But that’s—”
Lucia’s warnings of the gossip about Nick came back to me, and I understood why Jingles was worried. If Giblet’s death was ruled suspicious, this note might strike people as a damning clue.
It looked like Nick’s printing, so I didn’t kid myself someone else had written it. But why had Nick put these words down? Out of irritation, anger? Neither of those emotions seemed like Nick. But how well did I know him? I’d only been married to the man three months, and had just met him three months prior to our wedding.
Besides, who could say how anyone would react after being publicly accused of being a killer? Scribbling things on a notepad wasn’t a crime. It was no different than pouring your heart out in a diary.
But diaries had been used to prove people’s guilt in court, hadn’t they?
I hesitated, then crumpled the note in my hand.
Jingles took it from me. “I’ll just put this bit of trash in the fire, then, shall I?”
“Yes. Thank you, Jingles.”
He tossed the paper into the flames and we watched it burn. After a minute, he jabbed at the embers with a poker. “And now you’d better go to the carriage house. Lucia hates to be kept waiting.”
I nodded, stopping only for a last glance at a few charred flakes of paper lifting toward the chimney. If only I could have burned those red-inked words out of my memory as easily.
Chapter 2
“You picked a bad year to become a Claus.”
A little impatience for my bad timing edged into Lucia’s matter-of-fact voice. She sat straight as a post in the seat of the sleigh and navigated the curved icy pathway down from the castle through Kringle Heights, holding the reins as casually as if she were born driving a team of reindeer. No surprise, given her genealogy. Of course, no other Claus had a sleigh custom-built both to be pulled by and to carry reindeer. Quasar stood in back, his head jutted forward between us like an impatient kid’s. I almost expected him to ask, Are we there yet?
“Christmas season is always hectic and tense,” Lucia went on, “but it’s definitely worse this December because of poor Chris’s accident, and with Nick trying to fill his boots, and everyone trying to adjust to all the changes.”
“Chris must have been a wonderful person.”
I glanced at her through the maze of Quasar’s scruffy antlers. She bit her lip, her eyes filling with the emotion I’d seen on the face of everyone who’d known Chris.
“He was bigger than life,” she said. “So much energy. Maybe it’s a cliché, but he really brought life to a room just by walking into it. He got along with almost everyone.”
“Nick told me the same thing.”
“I have to admit that I’ve had a hard time mentally adjusting over the years, being the oldest sibling and yet ineligible to inherit the prized family position just because I was born female. No female Santas, you know—especially not when there were three brothers behind me. An heir and two spares. I never stood a chance. It probably would have driven me mad if Chris hadn’t been so perfect. Objectively, he was worthier to be Santa than I was in every way.”
I nodded, understanding, though her confession made me slightly uncomfortable. Somewhere beneath what she said lay the implication that Nick wasn’t perfect, or worthy.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she added, as if following my train of thought. “Nick’s nice, too. In fact, he’s always been my favorite brother—but it’s a harder lift for him, isn’t it? Chris did things effortlessly, but with Nick, you can see it’s work. And he’s never satisfied with the status quo. Christmastown would have trundled along as it had for centuries if Chris had lived, but Nick wants to make things better. People don’t always appreciate that.”
“Like the stipend rule.”
“Exactly.”
Members of the Claus family, both immediate and distantly related, had always been able to live in Santaland free of charge. Even if they did nothing to help with the Christmas season, they were given land and a stipend. The number of freeloading Clauses was beginning to cause disgruntlement among the hardworking elves, so over the summer Nick had decreed that every family had to contribute to the workload for their stipend, a dictate that had caused hard feelings. Some of the Clauses were having to work for the first time in their lives.
“And there’s Tiffany, poor woman,” Luci
a continued, “moping around all the time, hovering over Christopher. And now this business with Giblet. Some holly-jolly Christmas season this is going to be for Nick—or for any of us. I can only imagine how it must seem to you.”
“It’s all new to me, so I don’t know the difference.”
“No, I guess not. That’s good. And don’t let Mom get you down. She’ll warm up to you.”
I frowned. “Pamela doesn’t like me?”
“Oh.” Lucia hitched her throat. “Well, you know. She worries you and Nick got married too fast, not to mention too soon after Chris’s death.”
These thoughts had crossed my mind, too. Having someone else voicing them wasn’t helping my insecurities.
“Anyway, never mind about Mother,” Lucia continued blithely. “She can’t disapprove of you more than she disapproves of me. She’s ferociously loyal to the Claus identity and is going to will herself to put on a cheerful front even if the castle comes down around her ears.”
I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
Lucia flicked a glance over at me. “Most everybody else thinks it’s a good thing Nick got married. Would’ve been strange to go through Christmas without a Mrs. Claus.”
She made it sound as if Nick could have plucked practically any woman off the street to marry, so long as there was a Mrs. Claus in Santaland for Christmas. But it often seemed to me that there were too many Mrs. Clauses around. Three in one castle: me, Tiffany, and Pamela.
I sank down in the seat, shivering. The sun was shining, but the cold still penetrated bone-deep. “Are we almost there? ”
Who sounds like a kid now?
Quasar’s nose sizzled. “C-close.”
The most populous area of Santaland was referred to as Christmastown, but Christmastown proper was the old village at the foot of Sugarplum Mountain, just below Kringle Heights, the area where most of the Claus family and their retinue lived, which of course included the castle. Kringle Lodge was farther up at the summit of the mountain. The village was small and picturesque, with a mix of Tudor-style and shingled cottages. The immaculately plowed streets were strung with white lights all year long, but during the holiday season, the town went nuts with twinkling colored lights, wreaths, bows, and other decorations.
