by Liz Ireland
“Don’t look at me like that.” Her tone dripped contempt. “I’m not crazy, or suicidal.”
It was the possibility of homicidal tendencies that made me nervous. One good tug and that would be the end of me.
“I’ve got my son to think of,” she continued. “You can’t usurp him.”
As if I’d usurped anyone. “I have no intention to,” I assured her in a steady tone. “Christopher’s wonderful. He’s the nephew I never got to have—I don’t have brothers or sisters.”
She eyed me skeptically, and then slowly the blood pressure cuff of her grip let up. She dropped her hand.
Liberated, I slid off the wall and gave my butt a quick swipe to get the dusting of ice off. “Pamela asked me to tell you that tea was ready if you want it.”
She stared at me for a moment, the crazy draining from her gaze. She turned her attention back to those mountains, seeming as placid as if the whole previous conversation had never happened. “Thanks. I might come down later with Christopher.”
“Great!” I chirped. “I’ll let Pamela know.”
I walked away as calmly as I could, though once I hit the stairs, my feet moved considerably faster, wooly ice rats be damned. I couldn’t decide if I’d just escaped an untimely death or if I was just jittery from the strangest day I’d experienced since the afternoon the man I loved had revealed his true identity.
What was all that nonsense about Chris being murdered?
Of course, after her husband died in a horrifying way, Tiffany’s mind was bound to play all sorts of tricks on her. I’d had the experience of being the widow left behind trying to put all the pieces together. Sometimes it wasn’t possible. Sometimes you had to accept that there were things you would never know.
You’ve become one of them quickly, haven’t you?
If she was imagining Nick and me—or, even more laughably, Pamela and me—being part of a cabal plotting to undermine her, she was truly delusional.
“Did you locate the elusive Tiffany?” Martin asked when I entered the evening salon. He popped a sandwich triangle in his mouth.
“She was outside,” I explained. “She said . . . well, she might be down in a little while.” I didn’t want to go into the real subject of our conversation, at least not in front of Pamela. I was leery of talking about Chris’s death around his still-grieving mother.
Lucia, lounging with Quasar in front of the fireplace with a plate of currant scones, had no such qualms. “That woman needs psychiatric help. Chris’s death sent her over the edge.”
“Piffle.” Pamela, in an armchair, stared intently through her bifocals at her knitting. Next to her sat a half-finished cup of special Christmastown spiced tea. “Please don’t let Christopher hear you say such things.”
“You think he hasn’t noticed? She smothers him.”
“She’s just being a good mother.”
Lucia rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. Christopher hardly ever leaves the castle anymore. Tiffany doesn’t let him have any friends over, either. He wants a dogsled, but she won’t let him have one—she’s afraid of accidents, she says. But I think it has more to do with her not wanting him to be able to move around independently.”
“He’s only eleven,” Pamela pointed out.
“The perfect age for a kid to have a sled and a few dogs,” Lucia said. “I did at his age.”
Martin laughed. “And look how you turned out.”
Lucia stuck her tongue out at him.
“I confess I’m just as happy not to have any more animals wandering around the castle,” Pamela said, never stopping her knitting. We all pointedly avoided glancing Quasar’s way. “And dogs shed so.”
“What about a cat?” Lucia asked.
Martin and I exchanged confused looks. “Do cats pull sleds?” he asked.
“I’m talking about as a pet,” Lucia said.
“Especially not cats.” Pamela shuddered. “Unsanitary things.”
Again, there was a reindeer in the room drooling on the stone floor, but sure. Cats were unsanitary.
“Tiffany’s no-dogs rule isn’t about shedding,” Lucia said. “Or cleanliness. It’s about control. She’s a control freak and a little nuts, if you ask me.”
I didn’t feel as if I had anything to add to Lucia’s frank but spot-on assessment, so I started loading a plate with finger food. Tea was becoming my favorite meal. I’d already decided that when I opened the Coast Inn again in late spring tea would be a new tradition there. Although maybe not the overly sugared spiced tea popular in Christmastown.
“You’re very quiet, April,” Martin said. “Did Tiffany say something to disturb you?”
“No,” I lied. “I was just thinking how wonderful Pamela’s teas are.”
“Guess who wins the gold star in sucking up today,” Lucia muttered through a mouthful of scone.
“I mean it,” I said. “I’m going to start having tea at the inn.”
“We’ll all have to visit this place,” Martin said. “The Coast Inn. Sounds like a place you’d cruise up to in an old convertible.”
“You should plan a trip to Cloudberry Bay,” I told him. “I’ll give you a family discount.”
“I don’t see why any of us should go,” Pamela interrupted in that impatient tone she used when people weren’t behaving the way she wanted them to. Which was often. “For that matter, why should you and Nick go down there at all? You don’t need the money.”
Before we got married, Nick and I had struck a bargain that we would spend part of the year in Oregon, which would allow me to keep my hand in the innkeeping business and hold on to the property I’d come to love. If we didn’t continue operating the place at least part of the year, it would be nothing but a money drain—the most inconvenient beach house ever.
“It’s not just about the money.” Maintaining a toehold in my former life was as much for my sanity as anything else. “It’s a wonderful place. Nick liked it.”
“So much he went back twice.” Martin, who was lounging across the sofa, winked at me. “But I don’t think it was just the accommodations he returned for.”
I sat down in the chair next to Pamela. “The inn is my baby.”
“Hopefully it won’t be the only one!” she exclaimed.
It was natural that Pamela would want grandchildren, but she was barking up the wrong tree, not to mention reopening an old wound. Nick and I couldn’t have children. I couldn’t have children, which was what had made my first marriage hit the rocks. Infertility treatments didn’t work, and Keith, my late husband, had said he was against adoption as a solution to our troubles. But he was very much pro-cheating, I discovered after he was gone. I got to meet his pregnant girlfriend at his funeral.
Eyes trained on the floor, I gulped down a sip from my cup, waiting for the urge to pour hot sweet tea over my mother-in-law’s head to pass. Getting over Keith, and getting past the disappointment of not being a mom, had taken years. But talk like Pamela’s still needled me. What bothered me most was that I let it.
Happily, Martin saved the situation.
“Speaking of sperm,” he said, “where’s Nick?”
“Don’t be crude,” Pamela barked at him. “We don’t use words like that in Christmastown.”
Next to the fireplace, Lucia sniggered.
“What word?” Tentatively, Martin asked, “Sperm?”
Pamela jolted as if she’d been jabbed with a pointy stick. “Stop that!”
Lucia grinned at me. “No sexy talk in Castle Kringle.”
She and Martin guffawed. They were both punchy, and showing about as much maturity as Christopher.
“There’s no reason to talk about s-e-x at all,” Pamela said.
“But you were the one who brought it up, Mother,” Lucia pointed out, “telling April to get busy with the grandchildren.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“There just can’t be too many immaculate conceptions from Mom’s perspective,” Martin told me.
/> “Where is Nick?” Pamela asked impatiently. “If he’s in his study, we should let him know there’s tea—or, better yet, have Jingles or Waldo take some to him.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
But Pamela, exasperated with the present company, was out of her chair and halfway to the door before I could half rise. “You stay right there,” she said. “You have that overloaded plate of food to eat.”
When she was gone, Martin and Lucia collapsed into whoops of laughter.
Taking advantage of Pamela being out of the room, I decided to bring up what Tiffany had mentioned. “Was there ever an investigation into Chris’s death?”
I might just as well have fired a shotgun into the air. Their eyes went wide. Martin sat up straighter. “What makes you ask?”
“Tiffany raised the possibility that her husband’s death wasn’t an accident.”
For a moment they blinked at me as if I’d been speaking in tongues. Then Lucia stood, spilling scones on the rug. Quasar stretched his neck to reach the nearest one.
“You see?” she said to Martin and me. “She is crazy. Something needs to be done about that woman.”
“Like what?” Martin asked. “There aren’t any psychiatric hospitals here.”
“Then someone needs to go south and have her committed.”
“Lock the widow in the loony bin?” Martin mused.
“It’s not a joke. She needs help.”
I thought of Tiffany dangling her legs off the top of that tower as casually as if she’d just been sitting on a bench. Then I remembered her taking my arm, and the fear I’d felt in the face of all that wild vehemence. All I’d thought about was getting myself away from her. Now the words she’d hissed played back to me: This isn’t a safe place.
And here were two Clauses arguing over whether to lock her up.
Come to think of it, neither Martin nor Lucia had answered my question.
“What if she’s right about what happened to Chris? It sounds as if there wasn’t much of an investigation. Did Constable Crinkles even ask you where you were that day?”
Lucia frowned. “Why would he? Everybody knew I wasn’t on the mountain. I was tending to a sick reindeer that day.”
“And I was slaving away at the Candy Cane Factory, as usual,” Martin said. “I remember being in my office when word came back about what happened.”
“Nick told me it was an accident,” I said.
“Of course it was,” Martin said. “Everybody loved Chris.”
Lucia seconded his statement. “Nobody would’ve wanted to kill him.”
It was a rare moment of agreement between them. Even stranger was the fact that they both sounded so definite. The cult of Chris was strong in Santaland, and his mythic status seemed especially inviolate here in the castle . . . but what man alive was beloved by everyone?
“Anyway,” Martin said, “who would benefit from killing Chris?”
“Nick.”
I thought it, but Lucia had said it.
Martin laughed. “Oh, right. We all know how much he relishes being Santa.” He shook his head. “He wouldn’t consider it benefiting. Donning the suit was never his dream. He would’ve much rather kept beavering away in the Claus business office and the Christmastown Planning Commission.”
“You’re right about that,” I said.
“The point is,” Lucia said impatiently, “Chris’s death was declared an accident months ago and Tiffany can’t accept the truth. We can’t have a crazy woman running around the castle pointing fingers at Nick.”
“She didn’t point at Nick, exactly,” I said. “She implied that Chris’s death and the deaths of Giblet and Old Charlie were linked somehow.”
This stunned them into silence, at least for a moment.
“Aren’t the Hollyberrys adversarial enough? ” Lucia asked. “The last thing this family needs now is to have one of our own pointing fingers at us.”
“It’s especially bad for Nick after Charlie’s melting.” I told them about the button.
Lucia looked distressed. “What a mess!”
“It’s all nonsense,” Martin said.
“What’s nonsense?” Pamela asked, sweeping back into the room.
The three of us clammed up.
Luckily, Pamela was distracted by the sight of Quasar devouring the last of the scones on the floor. She clucked. “You shouldn’t let Quasar eat those currant scones, Lucia. You know what dried fruit does to his digestion.”
I looked to Lucia for an explanation. She mouthed the word gas at me.
Martin laughed.
“It won’t seem a laughing matter when the whole castle starts to smell like a methane factory,” Pamela declared primly.
I tried to look serious, as did Martin and Lucia, but Quasar chose that moment to let loose an impressive cloud of wind, accompanied by a sound that reverberated around the room like a moose call. The three of us dissolved into hysterics. But Pamela was right. That smell cleared the room.
Out in the hallway, Pamela stopped me. “You didn’t ask me about Nick.”
He hadn’t come back with her, so I assumed he was too busy for a tea break. “Is something the matter?”
“I never found him,” she said. “Jingles said he left right after dropping you off.”
As she spoke, she tilted her head, studying me as if she expected the words to have some specific effect on me. It was true that Nick normally spent afternoons in his study, but today had not been a normal day.
“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” I said. “He told me he had a hundred things to do.”
She stepped close to me and took both my arms as if she were going to give me a bone-rattling shake. Instead, she said ferociously, “Watch him, April. There should be nothing more important to you right now.”
When she released me, I stood reeling long after she’d bustled away. Watch him. I couldn’t tell if that was a simple directive, or a warning.
Chapter 6
Disturbing dreams kept me tossing and turning all night. One example: I was sitting on a ledge with Tiffany, who was insisting that someone murdered Chris. I fell backward, face to the sky, arms and legs flailing. Above me, peering over the stone wall to watch my plunge, was Nick.
A little later, another dream: I was getting married at the justice of the peace office where Nick and I were married, but after the ring was slipped on my finger I looked up and realized I hadn’t married Nick at all, but a horrible green-faced creature with a red nose and hair of orange and red flames. It was Heat Miser from The Year Without a Santa Claus.
I bolted up in bed. If it hadn’t been morning already, I would have been afraid to close my eyes again.
I turned to say good morning to Nick—and yes, to reassure myself that I wasn’t Mrs. Heat Miser—but his side of the bed was empty, the covers smoothed back, unslept in. I’d left him working in his study the night before. He’d returned for dinner, during which everyone had behaved as if nothing at all odd had happened that day. Which just made the horrors of the past twenty-four hours seem even more surreal to me. Despite his attempts to appear normal, Nick had clearly been preoccupied.
Or felt guilty?
Preoccupied, I repeated to myself. With a deadly crime wave underway, why wouldn’t he be? For all intents and purposes, he was Santaland’s head of state. Acting head of state. The Santa regent to Christopher’s claim.
Who benefited from Chris’s death?
I got up and dressed in my favorite Mrs. Claus dress—a green fitted velvet number with a skirt trimmed with white wool. I pulled on black boots with four-inch heels, did my hair, and put on makeup as if arming myself for battle. Mostly it was my own suspicions I was fighting. Fighting and winning. I was going to follow Pamela’s example. The events of yesterday had nothing to do with my family, and especially not with the generous, kind man I’d married.
Before I went downstairs, I unplugged my phone from its charger and looked at my email. One glance elicited a groan. A new messa
ge from Cloudberry Bay had landed in my inbox overnight:
FROM: DAMARIS SPROAT
SUBJECT: CHRISTMASTIME FINES
I didn’t want to open it, knowing I would be annoyed. And yet it was sitting there on my screen like a mosquito bite, an itch to be scratched.
Reader, I tapped:
Since you haven’t bothered to reply to my previous email, I can only assume that you are perfectly happy to let the issue of your lack of both town and holiday spirit be taken to the city council. It pains me to do this to you, April. I would be grieved if you think this complaint stems from any personal animus on my part. Far from it! Even though my great-uncle, Homer Sproat, was one of the town forefathers and practically built every inch of your beautiful home with his own two hands, and even though you basically snatched it out from under my nose right after Uncle Thornton died, I have never once uttered a peep against you, or your acquisitiveness, or your butting into city affairs that you know little of, being a relative newcomer. You’ll recall that I even stood up for you when you painted the house a non-town-approved color. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who came up to me and asked, “Damaris, how can you stomach looking at what a monstrosity that girl’s making of your uncle’s place?” But I mind my own business, and that house that was in my family for generations is no longer my affair.
Which is just my way of saying that I bear you no grudge, and would certainly never do anything so petty as fining someone out of spite. I hope we’re still good enough friends—Thursday Night Book Club notwithstanding—for you to believe me when I say that this is nothing personal.
Attached you will find the estimate of the fine to be levied against you, which amounts to $532.
Cheers,
Damaris
I’d completely forgotten demented Damaris. She’d even mentioned the Thursday book club we belonged to, which she quit in a huff when a majority of us had voted to read A Man Called Ove when she was dead set on Atlas Shrugged. In protest, she’d written a letter to the book club president as thoroughly argued and opinionated as a Supreme Court decision.
