by Liz Ireland
“I’m not investigating anything.”
He leveled a doubtful stare on me.
“Okay, I’m investigating, but it’s not what you would call official. And Nick doesn’t approve, so not a word of this to him.”
“Newlyweds already keeping secrets?”
“Cut the arch tone or I won’t tell you anything.” I crossed my arms. My teeth chattered. Would I ever get used to bone-deep cold?
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Any suspects yet?”
“Not really. I just wanted to see what Punch had to say about Giblet.”
“Let me guess.... He told you he didn’t kill Giblet.”
I nodded. “They were friendly.”
“And you believe him?”
“I’m not sure. He talked a good game.”
“Most elves do after a few tankards.” He shook his head. “It’s freezing out here. Reach back and get the blanket behind the seat.”
I did, and spread it across both our laps.
“Do you know I’m probably the only Claus who hates winter?” he asked. “I can’t wait to retire to Florida.”
I laughed. “Heretic.”
His smile disappeared. “Given the crime wave up here, maybe I should retire sooner rather than later.”
I wished I could whisk Nick away. Maybe not to Florida, but at least to Oregon. We could decorate the Coast Inn and avoid Damaris’s fine. And not worry about who was committing all these murders up here . . . and who might be the next victim.
Chapter 9
The next morning, after checking with Jingles that my presence wasn’t necessary until late afternoon, I considered the best way to get myself over to the Wrapping Works. It was a long trip. I’d have to take the funicular down through Kringle Heights, then catch the Christmastown trolley out to Tinkertown, and I wasn’t sure of the way once I got off there. Asking the stables for sleigh transport might alert Nick or Pamela about what I was up to, and for now I wanted to keep my sleuthing stealthy.
I broached this dilemma with my castle confederate. “Is there a way to get there on the sly?”
Jingles opened his mouth to answer, then slammed it shut again.
“What?” I asked.
His head shook. “No—never mind.”
Quasar’s uneven gait clopped down the hallway behind us.
Jingles’ gaze caught sight of the reindeer over my shoulder, and he seized upon a new idea. “Why not take Quasar?”
I stared at him dumbly. I’d rarely seen Quasar leave the castle without Lucia.
“Lucia is judging the yearling Reindeer Hop this morning and Quasar doesn’t care much for competitions, so he’s at loose ends.” He called out, “Aren’t you, Quasar?”
Quasar, who was grazing on a garland, was startled to hear his name. “W-what?”
“Can he do that?” I whispered to Jingles. I’d seen Quasar riding in sleighs but never pulling one.
Jingles put his hands on his hips. “He’s a reindeer. Their whole raison d’être is eating and dragging things around.”
It was worth a shot. “But what will Lucia say?”
“If you leave now, you’ll be back long before she is—those games go on and on. And you don’t have to worry about Quasar spilling the beans. He’s not much of a talker.”
No argument there.
I turned and approached Quasar, whose nose blinked unevenly as I drew nearer. “I need to go to the Wrapping Works,” I said. “Could you take me? On a sled, I mean?”
His nose sustained a glow for a few seconds and then went out like a cigar ash. “M-me?”
“Why not?”
He seemed paralyzed.
“I’m in a bit of a bind. Jingles thought you could help me.”
He lifted his head. “You m-mean it’s an emergency?”
Not life-and-death, but . . . “I need to get there this morning.”
Something in my words brought out his inner Rudolph. His eyes brightened and momentarily his nose blazed to a blinding red. “I will t-take you! Meet me at the front in ten minutes.”
“Can we make it the side? I need to get there without too many others knowing.”
He nodded, sending a little flurry of antler velvet sloughing to the floor. “Of course.” He clopped away noisily, moving faster than I’d ever seen him go, until a corner of an antler hit the doorframe, sending him stumbling back. He twisted back to check if I’d seen.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I will get you to the Wrapping Works! N-never fear!” He charged successfully through the door and out of sight.
A quarter hour later, he came loping crookedly at the head of a small uncovered sled that looked like something a dog musher might drive with the help of a few huskies. But Quasar was in harness and hooked up to the contraption, raring to go.
“It’s s-steadier than it looks,” he said.
I climbed on, worried more about his steadiness than the sled’s.
“Hang on!” he called out.
I’d never driven a sled, but apparently that didn’t matter, because Quasar knew where he was going and he was ready to get there with all due speed. All I did was perch myself at the barrier at the front of the sled, like standing in front of a podium with reins in my hands. Though this sled was not technically flying, as the gangling Quasar loped unevenly over bumps and icy potholes it occasionally felt as if we were leaving the earth. The sled had no shocks, so every yard of packed snow we traveled over was tooth rattling.
Once, after an Arctic hare dashed in front of our path, a startled Quasar nearly dived into a ditch, but he righted himself, and the sled managed not to pitch over, and we were soon on our way again.
By the time we pulled up to the Wrapping Works, a warehouse-sized half-timbered building, my legs were noodles from the strain of holding my body rigid and steady. I dropped the reins and wobbled off, looking up at the lit Santaland logo at the top of the peaked roof. It reminded me of the little chocolate box Nick had once given me, which had so intrigued me.
“Thanks for getting me here,” I told Quasar. “I won’t be long. I just need to speak to someone.”
Was it my imagination, or was Quasar standing a little straighter? “I’ll be waiting right here, ma’am.”
Inside, the Wrapping Works was a noisy hive of activity. Though almost all the workers were elves, the rooms were bigger than the ones in the castle, especially the main room in which a series of conveyor belts carried toys to various stations along the building’s three floors. The motor driving the belts, though unseen, whirred heavily as background sound that echoed throughout the cavernous room.
A foreman elf carrying a clipboard and sporting a pencil behind one ear found me talking to a security guard by the front door. “Lady says she needs to talk to Winters,” the guard said.
“Winters can’t talk now—she’s busy.” The security guard gave him a nudge, and the foreman’s eyes widened as he noted who I was. “Oh! Mrs. Claus. How can we help you?”
“I need to speak to Starla Winters.”
“Of course! Right this way.” He waved me forward, tapping his clipboard. “We’re very busy here. And Starla was just promoted to leader of her section, so you can imagine . . .”
“I’ll only need to speak to her for a few minutes.”
We walked past an open workroom. A group of elves stopped what they were doing to stare at me. Far from smiling, they looked almost belligerent.
“Well?” the foreman asked them. “What are you gaping at?”
They said nothing, but the hostility in their eyes spoke for them. The wife of an elf killer. It was a reminder that all was not well in Santaland.
“Get back to work,” the foreman ordered.
“It’s okay,” I said under my breath, not wanting to fan the flames of resentment.
Happily, we started walking again.
I had to practically skip to keep up with him. “You said Starla was recently promoted.” Didn’t take her long to get Giblet’
s job, apparently. “Isn’t that an odd step to promote someone in December, when things are so busy?”
“It’s not as if we had much choice, shorthanded as we are. And you might say, ‘Well, Giblet Hollyberry was just middle management,’ but those are the employees who really keep the belts moving around here.”
“You must have felt his loss keenly.”
“Oh sure. We don’t have an elf to spare. Not in December. And Giblet, for all his faults, was a real artist. He knew what looked good and what didn’t.”
“Did everybody like Giblet?” I asked.
He nearly stopped in his tracks. “Everybody? Try almost nobody. But that doesn’t matter here. At the Wrapping Works, we don’t expect elves to be jolly all the time. No ma’am. Wrapping is serious business and an art, and we like to foster an atmosphere of what we call industrious expressiveness. If emotions and egos come into play, it’s bad for morale. Wrapping is the highest calling in Christmastown, and we need strong workers in all places.”
“I take it you didn’t like Giblet, either.”
“He was okay as long as you didn’t cross him. And as long as there were anise-flavored icebox cookies available to him. He loved his breaks.”
At the top of the stairs he led me into a long room with perhaps a seven-foot ceiling, where elves worked at long metal worktables lined with roll after roll of wrapping paper of all designs. A conveyor belt brought a series of boxes with various stuffed animals inside, some with heads poking up as they watched themselves being carried toward the elves who would tape up their boxes and wrap them.
The foreman noted my interest. “Boxing’s done on the first floor, wrapping second, and then ribbons and labels are added on third. Then the packages are moved back down by freight elevator and taken over to be labeled and sorted according to which part of the world the recipient lives in. Don’t want to waste your husband’s time making him backtrack on the big night.”
The wrapping elves worked at lightning speed.
“They must get a lot of paper cuts.”
From behind me, a deep voice rasped, “Just a hazard of the trade.”
The foreman peered around me. “Oh, Ms. Winters. Just who we were looking for. Mrs. Claus needs to speak to you.”
Stocky, with her black hair in a buzz cut as if she were a US Marine, Starla Winters was dressed in bizarre green overalls—drab olive green, not the perky kelly green that you saw most often in Christmastown—tucked into her ankle booties. Her eyes were assessing me, and not in a friendly manner. I’d never known a person a full foot shorter than I was could appear so intimidating.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Is there somewhere we could speak in private?”
The foreman nodded. “Take the break room. No one else is using it this time of day.”
Starla led me to the room he’d indicated and shut the door behind us. To be honest, I felt a little hesitant now that I was shut up in a room with her. If there was ever a match for Giblet Hollyberry, it had to be this drill sergeant of an elf in front of me. Her mouth flattened into an impatient line.
“What is it you want?” she asked. “Not to be disrespectful, but it is the week before Christmas. Maybe that doesn’t mean much to you Southerners.”
Southerners in arctic parlance meant anyone south of the Yukon. “We have our own Christmas rush down there, too.”
She sniffed derisively. “We hear all the stories of stampedes of people at big-box stores. And then we also hear stories of people who don’t even start thinking about Christmas until Christmas Eve. Procrastination’s a luxury elves don’t have.”
I’d always been a bit of a holiday shopping procrastinator myself, a trait I’d never felt shame about until I fell under Starla’s withering gaze. “I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about Giblet Hollyberry,” I said.
Her jaw worked, and she crossed her arms. “I can tell you he’s dead.”
“Yes.” I shifted, looking around. The break room had a long table, and across the back wall there was a counter that extended the whole length of the room, which was broken up by a two-burner stove. There was some kind of drink dispenser on the counter, alongside a long platter of iced Christmas cookies.
The kind Giblet was so fond of, I imagined.
We sat at the table, in what I realized at the last minute were elf-sized chairs. My knees poked up past the tabletop. Starla noted my position with a smirk.
“Okay, what do you want to know about Giblet?” she asked.
“I heard there was some controversy about his getting hired over you.”
She shrugged. “No controversy. He got the job and I didn’t. It was pure sexism, of course.”
“Sexism?” I repeated.
“Sure—don’t you have that where you come from? These male elves all stick together, especially the ones with artistic pretensions.”
“Giblet was very talented.”
Evidently, that was the wrong thing to say. She practically vibrated with irritation. “As a sculptor, maybe. As a wrapper, he didn’t know squat. Could he cut a straight edge? Did he know how to fold a curved end? Did he know the difference between grosgrain and curling ribbon? Heck no. Let me tell you, a package gift-wrapped by Giblet Hollyberry was a package you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. The tape would show from a mile away.”
I hadn’t realized wrapping was something a person could get so het up about, but every skill had its obsessives.
“Did you work your way up at the Wrapping Works?”
“I sure did—my first job was gathering scraps off the ribbon-cutting floor when I was knee high to a gumdrop. I’ve been in practically every job here, and I’m one of the better wrappers in Santaland, if I do say so myself.”
“And Giblet?”
She sniffed. “He came on a few years ago, after losing his job at the Candy Cane Factory.”
“That must have been irritating, having him jump ahead of you.”
“Try infuriating—but that’s the way things go around here. It’s not how hard you work; it’s who you know. I shouldn’t say that to a Claus, of course. . . .”
“Are Clauses all-powerful?”
“Boy, you really did just poke your head through the spring ice, didn’t you?”
“I’m new here, if that’s what you mean.”
“Well, you’ll learn. In this country, Clauses can get away with murder.”
“The murder of Giblet Hollyberry, for instance?”
She seemed taken aback that I would extrapolate something so concrete from her metaphor. “I didn’t accuse anybody of murdering Giblet.”
“No, but having a Claus under suspicion doesn’t hurt you any, does it?” I leaned forward. “It took me exactly one day of asking around about Giblet’s enemies before your name came up. Everyone knows you hated that Giblet was promoted over you. You don’t even try to hide your animosity toward him and he’s only been dead a few days.”
“Why should I try to hide anything? I didn’t kill him. Giblet was an egotistical, cranky jerk, and he shouldn’t have come anywhere near a management job in this place, but the abomination of his promotion took place almost two years ago. If I’d wanted to murder him, I’d have done it long before now.”
“Not if you were smart.”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“If you were smart, you would have bided your time, waiting for a moment when everyone had forgotten that you were stung over the promotion kerfuffle. Just hang back until a busy moment in the year, or after Giblet had just made a public show of temper toward someone else. Or after all three of those conditions had been met. Then even the police wouldn’t think to talk to you.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“The police haven’t talked to you, have they?”
“Why would they? I didn’t do anything.”
“And you have an alibi for the night Giblet died.”
“Of course.” She frowned. “That is, not exactly. I was home all that nig
ht, with Cletus.”
“And Cletus can vouch for your whereabouts?”
The question brought a chuckle. “Cletus is my dog. A wolf pup, actually. He’s five years old now, but he’ll always be a pup to me.”
“He lives in the house with you?”
“Where else?”
“Don’t you worry he’ll hurt someone?”
“He’d only do that to protect me.” She tilted her head. “Tell me—did that dimwit constable find any wolf tracks around Giblet’s cottage?”
“Not that I heard of.”
“There you go, then. I never walk anywhere at night without Cletus. He’d take on a snow monster to protect me.”
So the wolf was her alibi, in a way.
I stood. “Thank you for talking to me.”
She got to her feet, too. “Sorry I couldn’t have broken down and confessed for you. I suppose that’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it?”
“I just wanted to find out more about Giblet,” I lied.
“I’d give a lot to know who sent you here,” she said in a low rasp. “But I don’t suppose you’d tell anyway.”
I remained silent.
“That’s what I figured. I’m guessing it was someone like Tinkles.”
“Who’s that?” I asked, bird-dog alert.
Starla came close to laughing. “If you’re going to play at the detective game, you really ought to practice your poker face.” She shook her head. “I guess Tinkles is off the hook. He’s the manager that works under me now. I thought maybe he was thinking he could score a bloodless Wrapping Works coup by having me pegged for Giblet’s murder. But maybe I’ve got more enemies than I thought I did.”
“It wasn’t an enemy,” I assured her. “Though I had no idea the Wrapping Works was such a hotbed of competitiveness.”
“It’s an elf-eat-elf world, Mrs. Claus.”
I said good-bye and made my way down to the main doors, wondering what my next step would be. As I was walking out of the factory, my calculations evaporated when I saw a small herd of reindeer surrounding the place where I’d left the sled. Not just surrounding it—menacing it. Hooves were kicking up snow, and I couldn’t see either Quasar or the sled.
