by Liz Ireland
Nick barely glanced in that direction. “Could be.”
“Looks as if he’s on the move. Is that safe for him?”
“A snowman as old as he is knows what he’s doing.”
He certainly looked old. He wore a stovepipe hat, like Abe Lincoln, and a red vest that had faded to a salmon pink. He wasn’t just missing an eye; he’d also lost a stick arm somewhere.
“Shouldn’t we stop to help him?” I asked. The snowman seemed to be going our way—headed toward town—but Nick didn’t even slow down.
“You can’t move snowmen in a sleigh, April. You’d just end up with a heap of snow. They have to move on their own volition.”
“Okay, but maybe we should go back to see if he needs anything.” Or if he saw anything.
“I have to get back to the castle. There are scads of Santa letters to get through in the next few days and a few problems in production. The Workshop’s been texting me all morning.”
“I guess I can come back later,” I said.
“I don’t want you driving into the Christmas tree forest by yourself. I’ll send someone to take care of Charlie.”
We continued in silence. Nick wasn’t usually this rigid. But I’d never seen him juggling so many responsibilities at the busiest time of the year. And now there was Giblet’s suspicious death....
“Strange how coal in a stocking means something negative,” I mused, watching Nick closely. “But a lump of coal can be vital to snowmen.”
Nick’s forehead wrinkled in puzzlement. “What are you talking about?”
“Coal in a stocking.”
He shot me a sidewise glance, smiling a little as if he worried about my soundness of mind. “I’m not sure I get your drift.”
The bells on the reindeer harnesses were loud enough that I wasn’t too worried about being overheard, but I lowered my voice anyway. “Giblet’s death was an accident, wasn’t it?”
His face swung toward me, startled. “Why ask me?”
Because of words you wrote on a sheet of paper in your office. Had they been a prophecy, or a plan? Worried it was evidence, I’d burned the paper so no one would ever be able to use it against him. But I hesitated to explain what I’d done. It was hard to confess to your husband of just a few months that you worried he’d murdered an elf.
“How would you have described Giblet?” I asked.
He thought for a moment. “Irritating?”
“Are there other people in town who might have wanted to kill him?”
His eyes narrowed. “Other than who?”
Oops. “Well, his family think you did it.”
“They’re upset, naturally. Constable Crinkles doesn’t suspect me.”
“No.” In fact, he’d almost seemed to be on Nick’s side, just as Noggin Hollyberry had claimed. Of course, having Constable Crinkles as an ally probably wasn’t much better than having Constable Crinkles as your lead investigator.
“You can’t let all this get to you, April. We’re supposed to be cheerful and jolly.”
I laughed, but not exactly in a jolly way.
He glanced at me. “Well, you know what I mean. Until we hear more we should just go on as normal. It’s not as if there’s any lack of things to do this time of year.”
“No.” I looked at my watch; then I did a double take. Almost eleven already. “Just drop me off at the community center,” I said.
Murder or no murder, Luther Partridge, the conductor of the Christmastown Concert Band, frowned on us showing up late for rehearsals.
Chapter 3
My first clear memory of Nick was on a warm day in June in Cloudberry Bay. The sun was shining on the Oregon coast, giving tourists and even natives the illusion that we were a real surfing-and-suntan oil kind of place. He was standing at the edge of the beach, contemplating the expanse of gray-blue surf and flexing as if preparing to dive in.
“I wouldn’t do that.”
During warm summer days, lots of visitors were one plunge away from being disabused of the notion that Cloudberry Bay was Miami Beach. This man showed all the earmarks of being our next casualty. Something about the body pointed bird dog–like toward all that beautiful water. That beautiful, frigid water.
He’d registered at the Coast Inn the day before as Nick Kringle, saying as little as possible as he’d swiped his card and taken his key. He hadn’t come down to breakfast. It all gave him a mysterious air, and nothing taunts me like a mystery. Youngish men on their own didn’t wander into my cozy establishment often. Nick had brown hair, brown eyes, and a rather pale complexion that didn’t seem to go with his muscular build, but the parts all added up to a dreamy whole. Like Laurence Olivier in Rebecca, only without the fake gray streaks and with a neatly trimmed beard instead of Olivier’s pencil mustache.
His only response to my warning was to turn his gaze turned toward me. I’d been on an early afternoon walk and was togged out in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. I usually took advantage of the post-breakfast/checkout, pre-check-in break to get a little exercise. Otherwise it was easy to become chained to the inn round the clock, a mistake I’d made when I’d first bought the Coast Inn after my husband died. Owning a small hotel can be a hamster wheel existence if you don’t fence off time for yourself.
“The water’s cold,” I warned my guest.
“I’m used to cold.”
Those were the first words I remember him saying to me. I’m used to cold. Understatement of the century, but how was I to know? I assumed he meant he was from Wisconsin or something. Part polar bear was more like it. I watched in amazement as he took a few steps into the fifty-something-degree water and dived in. Most tourists who did that popped right back up shrieking and streaking back to shore and the nearest towel. When Nick surfaced, he sliced through the surf in an Australian crawl without missing a beat.
There was another reason I’d been a little anxious that Mr. Kringle stay out of the water. One I couldn’t exactly voice to a stranger. Until that moment on the beach, the few times our paths had crossed he’d exhibited a brooding, preoccupied air. The quiet ones worried me. I’d had a guest check in and take an overdose of sleeping pills once. I didn’t want another visitor to my inn to end their stay with an ambulance ride.
That evening, the mysterious Mr. Kringle sought me out after dinner.
“Thanks for the warning today,” he said.
“You didn’t need it. You must be part ice cube.”
“Where I’m from, most people are. But I’m here to thaw out a little, so I appreciate your being a good hostess.” He produced a small box of chocolates and presented them to me. “I brought these from home.”
“Where is that?” I opened the box, picked one, and bit into the most heavenly confection of chocolate and peppermint I’d ever tasted. I may have even let out a moan, because his face cracked in a smile and he pointed to a different one in the box.
“You should try that one. It’s my favorite.”
As I looked at him and remembered his ripped body in that surf, it was hard to believe he was a chocolate aficionado. “I’ll try it next. I want to savor this one. Where did you say you were from?”
“A little place up north—it’s sort of hidden.”
In the days of Google, was there any place that was still hidden? “Canada, you mean?” He had the faintest of accents, so I was fairly certain he wasn’t an American.
“It’s actually north of the Northwest Territories.”
That cagey answer assumed I had no knowledge of the geography of the Northwest Territories (I didn’t) and that I wouldn’t want to own up to my ignorance of anything north of Vancouver (I wouldn’t). A handsome, enigmatic stranger was leaning over me, taking me in with his dark brown eyes, and feeding me chocolates. I’d had dreams like this, and I wasn’t about to bust up a living dream by volunteering the fact that arctic geography was a huge hole in my knowledge.
The next day we met again on the beach, which wasn’t an accident on either of our parts. It wa
s the start of the most romantic week of my life. We went for drives; we held hands under towering pines, listening to the music of the wind whistling through millions of needles. After two days we were having our dinners together, and every other meal, too.
No romance with guests had been my motto during the few years I’d been an innkeeper. Circumstances had made it easy for me to eschew romance. I’d been newly widowed when I’d taken my money from a legal settlement and sunk most of it into the house. My husband, Keith, had died in a car accident—hit by an eighteen-wheeler belonging to a megacorporation. That was traumatic enough, but we’d been having troubles for a long time caused by infertility problems and then infidelity problems. Before the accident we’d been on the verge of separation. After the police contacted me about the crash, I realized it had occurred minutes after a phone argument we’d had.
Feeling like an utter failure in family and relationships, I’d retreated across the country, to the Oregon coast near where my grandparents had lived. It was a place that held happy memories for me. When I purchased the inn, I vowed to focus on business and to turn the Coast Inn into a place that would create happy memories for others. For three years, the friendships I formed in Cloudberry Bay and the fleeting acquaintances of paying guests fulfilled me. My no-romance policy had never been difficult to adhere to.
Yet there I was, head over heels for a guy with a weeklong reservation. With Nick, I found myself spilling out more of the history of my marriage than I ever had to my best friend, Claire. More than I had to a psychologist I’d seen after Keith’s accident, even. Nick listened with real understanding and sympathy that seemed deep, almost raw. On the last night, I learned why. He told me about his brother.
“Chris died two months ago. Hunting accident.” The hurt rasp in his voice broke my heart—his grief was so fresh, and his face clouded with an anguished expression I hadn’t seen since the day he’d arrived.
“Your older brother?” I knew Nick had other siblings. He’d mentioned Martin and Lucia several times, but I hadn’t gotten the birth order down yet.
“Yes, he was older than me, younger than Lucia. Now I’m the head of the family.”
It seemed an antiquated way of looking at sibling relationships, almost as if he was the heir of some principality. I couldn’t help asking, “Why wouldn’t Lucia, the eldest, be considered the head of the family?”
He weighed his response longer than necessary. “It’s not our way.”
I laughed. “Even the House of Windsor’s fixed the females-last thing, you know.”
“There are strong women in my family. My mother’s wonderful, a force of nature. She’s the glue that keeps us all together. It’s been a terrible time for us.”
I knew all too well what he was going through, and felt a little ashamed of my glib sparring about Lucia. Also of my thoughts about that force-of-nature mother. (But honestly, how great could a parent be if they saddled their kid with the name Chris Kringle?) I focused on helping Nick. “It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Time is the only thing that helps. Grief never goes away, but it recedes.”
His dark gaze locked on mine. “This week with you has been the balm I needed. Spending time with you here has made me feel as if there’s some hope.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant. Did he really like me, or was I the human equivalent of a Xanax?
“I wish you could stay longer.” I’d blurted out the words before I could think about how needy they sounded.
“And I wish—”
He broke off, taking in the old sprawling house behind us, with its five gables of graying shingle, standing tall as it had for almost a hundred years against the whims of the Pacific. He shook his head. “You have a beautiful place here. You belong here, don’t you?”
“I’m happy here,” I said. “But I don’t belong. I came here to get away from . . . well, I told you about all that. I’ve made this my home, but it’s not the only place I can survive. No one should feel stuck where they are.”
It was the wrong thing to say. That cloud descended over his expression again. “It doesn’t always work that way, April. Maybe if it were ten years from now . . .”
Ten years? It seemed an odd thing to say.
“Are you going to take early retirement?” He was my age—thirty-six. “You must have started socking away money early.”
He laughed a little at that. “If all goes well. We’ll see. In the meantime, though, I shouldn’t sit around daydreaming like a child.”
Frustration filled me. If I was part of them, I wanted him to hold on to his daydreams. Why did he insist on talking like a slumming prince in a fairy tale, duty bound to return to his kingdom? Even as we stood face-to-face, hand in hand, the past week seemed to recede into something unreal.
He left the next day, saying good-bye quickly but brushing his lips against my cheek and then holding them there, as if to remember the moment better. Five minutes later I was helping my housekeeper, Dakota, strip beds. Back on the hamster wheel.
Where exactly was Nick off to? He’d given me an email address but never had told me the name of the town he lived in. I began to pinpoint other basic things he hadn’t revealed, such as what he did for a living and what nationality he was. By the end of the day, when I was greeting new guests, I wondered if anything I thought I knew about him was true. Cinematic possibilities filled my head: He was a CIA agent. A gangster on the run. It was all a dream and he’d been a figment of my imagination....
That night, I remembered Nick’s chocolates, the ones he said were from where he lived. A clue! The box was right where I’d left it. Not a figment, then. I took the chocolate he said was his favorite and bit into it slowly. The strange flavor filling took me a moment to place, and even then I wasn’t certain. Eggnog? The shiny red box had no writing on it, no stamp from the country of manufacture. No ingredients list, even. It must have been a pretty small outfit that had made them. And then I turned the box over and noticed one distinctive mark: a gold stamp in the silhouette of a Santa Claus waving a mittened hand in greeting.
* * *
I skidded into rehearsal just in the nick of time. In taking on the job of Christmastown Musical Events chairperson, I’d drawn the attention of a few of the music group directors, who were all interested in filling gaps in their orchestras, bands, or choirs. I’d been an easy mark. The first meeting of the Musical Events Committee, I was on the receiving end of a firing line of musical wishes:
You aren’t by any chance a coloratura soprano?
I laughed. My warbly voice could barely carry a tune. I didn’t even like to sing in the shower.
Have you ever played oboe?
Um, no.
We need percussion players. Anybody can play percussion.
Three months later, I was well on my way to proving that last statement wrong. Taking my place at the back of the band hall of the Christmastown Community Center, I picked up a triangle and fumbled through my music folder to find the first piece on our playlist.
Smudge, the principal percussionist of the Santaland Concert Band, noted the triangle and shot me an exasperated look. “The first song is ‘Sleigh Ride,’ April.”
“Right!” I fumbled through my sheet music. The pages never seemed to be in order. I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to be on triangle or the glockenspiel for that “Sleigh Ride.” “What am I playing on that?”
His gaze turned withering. “Sleigh bells.”
“Oh. Right.” I scooted past where he was seated at his drum kit and picked up the sleigh bells. Harder to play than you’d think, by the way. At least for someone who was as rhythm challenged as I was. Smudge, an elf who styled himself as a hipster—or as much as anyone could who had Spock ears and tucked his faded denim pants into curly-toed booties—barely tolerated my intrusion into his world. Only the dearth of volunteers and the desperate need for sound effects in Christmas music had reconciled him to my presence on the back row.
The Santaland Concert Band was compr
ised mostly of elves, but there were a couple of us Claus family members mixed in. A few other members were elfmen, like Luther, the conductor.
My friend Juniper, one of the Christmastown librarians, played euphonium. She turned to me as she settled into her chair in the row in front of the percussion section. “Hi, April.”
“No greeting for me?” Smudge asked, in mock hurt.
“Smudge.” Juniper’s eyes widened as if she were surprised to see him. Smudge and Juniper had dated once. Now they just snarked at each other. “I heard something the other day that made me think of you. What do you call a drummer in a three-piece suit?”
He frowned warily. “I don’t know. What?”
“The defendant.”
Luther rapped on his music stand to bring us all to attention.
Several song sheets had slipped out of my folder, and I was scrambling to gather them all up. Juniper scooped up my second page of “Silver Bells” that had landed by her chair and handed it to me. “Everything okay?”
Was she asking me because I was late arriving, or because she’d heard rumors about Giblet?
“You seem nervous,” she whispered.
The morning had unsettled me, no doubt about that. One day you’re going along, married to Santa Claus, and the next you’re worried he’s murdered an elf. It wasn’t something I could just blurt out to my friend, but apparently carrying around a strip of bells that jangled with every movement didn’t do much to mask my anxiety.
“Is something wrong back there?” Luther asked.
I jangled back to standing. “Nope! All good!”
Juniper mouthed something at me. We Three Beans later?
I nodded vigorously. I could definitely use a sanity break and some caffeine before going back to the castle. Juniper was the best friend I’d made in Christmastown, and We Three Beans was our preferred hangout.
Luther raised his baton. “Let’s begin.”
Before he could count out the intro to “Sleigh Ride,” though, Woody, our sousaphone, rose from his chair, tuba and all. “JoJo Hollyberry’s not here today,” he said. “On account of what happened to Giblet.”
