by Liz Ireland
Without thinking, I let out a banshee yell and charged down the steps two at a time.
Chapter 10
“Hey! Get away from him!”
Reindeer heads swung toward me. I flapped my arms, although I’m not sure what good that would have done if these delinquent reindeer had decided to stand their ground or stampede toward me. Instead, like the cowards they were, they caught one look at who was running at them and, with a few unintelligible grunts and snuffles took off, sprinting and fly-hopping away before I could identify any of them.
Not that I could have identified them, even if I’d had a longer look. But they didn’t know that. All of them had to be older juveniles, since they were skipping the yearling Reindeer Hop.
I still couldn’t see the sled, but Quasar’s head protruded out of the newly formed snowbank they’d kicked over him. I hurried over. “Are you okay?”
“Y-yes, ma’am.” His nose fizzled. One of his antlers lay in the snow while the other was still in place, giving him a strange, lopsided look.
“Who were those guys?”
“Reindeer,” he said.
“I know that, but what was wrong with them? Why would they do this to one of their own?”
I could have bitten my tongue. Because they don’t consider Quasar one of them. Because he was a misfit.
Reindeer were jerks. #notallreindeer.
“I’m rather c-cold, ma’am,” Quasar said, obviously hoping I would stop ranting and extract him from his predicament. I began digging with my gloved hands, but half a minute later I was back in the Wrapping Works asking the guard for a snow shovel. The foreman not only obliged me with a shovel but also sent several elves out to help me dig my reindeer and the sled out. At least these elves were a little friendlier than the group that had given me the evil eye. They even sang as they worked, and I heard my first “White Christmas” of the day. And it wasn’t an impromptu audition.
Once freed, Quasar thanked everyone, although he seemed rather subdued and depressed. Who could blame him? It was like a fraternity hazing, from a fraternity that had been rejecting him all of his life.
I couldn’t make him drag me all the way back after what he’d been through, so I tugged the sleigh and walked alongside him as he limped back to the castle. Keeping up a conversation was harder than keeping up with his crooked gait.
My thoughts returned to the marauding gang that had attacked him. “We should go to the constable and report those reindeer. What herd were they from?”
“A lot of different ones. There’s n-no point filing a complaint. That’s just the way they are.”
“Animals,” I muttered. “This is Santaland, not the Wild Kingdom. Not the jungle.” Quasar tripped in a dip in the snow and stumbled toward me. I just managed to avoid getting my foot stomped by a large hoof. “Of course I know the Rudolph story, but you’d think that would at least have taught them not to bully one of their own.”
“They don’t really see it that way. To them I’m just a . . .”
He didn’t say it, but I knew we were both thinking the dreaded m word.
I felt a little like a misfit myself. An April in a land of perpetual winter. More a budding Miss Marple than a Mrs. Claus.
“I’m at least going to tell Nick what happened to you. Lucia will be upset if we do nothing.”
His big eyes widened, showing the whites. “Lucia can’t hear about this. P-please don’t tell her!”
“If she’s your best friend, she’ll want to see those reindeer punished.”
“I-I’m not so sure she is my best friend now.” His head hung lower. “She’s not the same. She’s secretive, and spends time without me, and sometimes when she comes back she smells.”
Could she smell worse than a reindeer? “Smells how?”
His withers twitched. “Like danger.”
“Maybe you’re just imagining that.”
He tossed his one-antlered head and continued in his Eey-orish voice, “Anyway, she’s already brought enough trouble on herself for befriending me. I know the Claus family doesn’t always like me around.”
“That’s not true,” I lied.
He hung his head. “Pamela’s never liked me since I ate most of the Christmas tree one year. But I woke up in the night and I was so hungry. Times like that I can’t help nibbling.”
One of the downsides of being a ruminant.
“Well, never mind that. I know you don’t want to cause trouble, but something ought to be done. Otherwise those hooligans will start taunting more reindeer.”
It took longer than I expected to get back. Quasar wanted to stop to dig for fungi, which apparently is a delicacy reindeer with sensitive noses can smell through feet of snowpack. Far be it from me to stand between a reindeer and his nutritional mold, especially when he’s had a traumatic morning. I didn’t rush him. It was afternoon by the time we made our way up the long, winding drive to the castle.
As we neared, a figure at the portico loomed larger. It was Lucia, hands on hips, not pleased. Hadn’t Jingles said she’d be gone a long time? Of course he hadn’t known how long the trip to the Wrapping Works would end up taking me.
She lunged off the front steps to meet us. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick!”
“I had to go to the Wrapping Works.”
She rounded on me. “I wasn’t worried about you. I meant Quasar.”
“He went with me.” I sniffed, but I couldn’t smell anything on her but her usual leathery, reindeer-musky scent.
Her gaze took in Quasar’s lopsided antler situation and then the sled. “You made Quasar drag you out all that way?”
“He wanted to go.”
“Of course he said he wanted to—Quasar’s the sweetest reindeer in Santaland. That doesn’t mean you should exploit his kindness.”
Exploit? That’s not how it was, but on the way home Quasar had muttered a few times that he didn’t want to let Lucia know what had gone down outside the Wrapping Works, and I didn’t want to break that confidence. It was hard, though, with her flaring at me like an angry mama bear.
“Are you okay, Quasar?” She took in his sheepish expression. And that antler.
“Fine,” he blurted. “Th-there was no trouble with other reindeer.”
He was the world’s worst liar. Lucia groaned. “Did they kick rocks at you again?”
“Just snow,” he said. “It’s not like they b-buried me alive. My head was free.”
She rounded on me, apoplectic. “I’m going to give my friend here a thorough going-over, and if I find one thing wrong with him you will never be allowed within ten feet of another animal in this land again.”
I was too exhausted to tangle with her. And, to be honest, in retrospect my actions had not been well thought out. Why hadn’t I just taken the trolley, or at least asked if there was a stronger reindeer available?
I remembered Jingles suggesting Quasar, and a frisson of doubt traveled through me. I thought I could trust him. Had he done this on purpose?
No sooner did I enter the castle, tired and ragged, than Pamela swooped down on me as if she’d been lying in wait just behind the massive oak front door. Her jaw dropped. “Oh dear!”
I’d just hiked three miles in the snow with a lame reindeer. “Nothing that a long soak in a hot tub won’t fix,” I said.
“There’s no time for a long soak now. The big sleigh’s been ordered and will be here any minute. We’ll be leaving for the tea in a quarter hour.”
“The what?”
Her smile froze as if she were being forced to communicate with a half-wit. “The tea, the tea at Kringle Lodge. Don’t you remember? You booked the elf cloggers yourself.”
Cousin Amory’s tea. This morning it had seemed a far-off event.
“Nick looked for you, but he had to leave early. You’ll come with me in my sleigh.”
I was disappointed—both at having missed Nick and at the prospect of a frigid drive up the mountain with Pamela—but I tried not to show it. “Great! I’l
l change and be right back down.”
She wrapped a hand around my arm. “My dear, I realize this is all new to you, but you really must try harder to stay focused. It’s December. In January you can space out all you like, but December needs your attention.”
Her words reminded me of Nick’s the day before. In January I could swap gossip with my husband, zone out, or hibernate till spring. The trouble was, the Clauses didn’t know that their whole world could tumble down around them by then if Nick was fingered as the Santaland serial killer.
But try explaining that to a mother-in-law in full social panic.
I made my voice sound sober and soothing. “I will try,” I vowed. “I’ll be back down in a jiffy.” I turned and took the stairs two at a time. My legs were exhausted from the march through the snow, but escaping Pamela’s nattering put new life in my step.
The ride up the mountain to Kringle Lodge was blessedly short but just as frosty as expected. In front and behind us sleighs made their way up the mountain, which echoed with the cheery sounds of jangling harnesses and voices raised in wassailing songs. The temperature dropped as the sleigh climbed to the summit, and my mother-in-law’s demeanor didn’t warm things up any. I’d managed to do a fairly decent job freshening up and changing. My green crushed velvet with red piping wasn’t my favorite—the materials might have made a wonderful sofa sometime in 1972, but as formal wear it left something to be desired. Still, it was newly made by the order of seamstresses, and it was pressed and clean. Pamela looked satisfied with the dress; with me, not so much, especially as I pinned up my hair in some semblance of an updo. Sleigh primping wasn’t a done thing, I presumed. Together as ever in white gloves and an ice-blue wool suit with matching pillbox hat, she eyed my every movement as if I were flossing my teeth at a banquet table.
“I’ve finalized the plans for the croquembouche,” she said. “ ‘A Tribute to Castle Kringle.’ ”
I blinked. “We’re talking about a pastry, right?”
“Yes—a pastry in the shape of the castle. I’ve drawn up a blueprint. And on the morning we make it, we’ll use an overhead projector to outline the plans on a giant Plexiglas board that’s been dusted with powdered sugar. Then we’ll mark the outlines of the blueprint in food coloring.”
For a moment I thought she was pulling my leg, but her voice was dead serious. “Are you sure you want me to help you with this? It sounds . . . involved.”
“It will be a nice bonding experience for us. One year I made it with Tiffany, and last year Therese and I created a croquembouche swan—and I have to say, it was my most successful ever.”
The name Therese set my molars to grinding. Pamela had guessed the surest-fire way to keep me involved in her daffy project.
By the time the sleigh slowed in front of the lodge, we’d joined a procession of other arrivals. I looked around for Nick, but I didn’t see him among the other parties. Liveried elves stepped out to help us down.
“I’m going to hurry ahead and make sure the cloggers have arrived and have everything they need,” I told Pamela.
I hurried up the lodge’s wide steps, which had been newly cleared of snow. The lodge was a long, two-story building fashioned from old-growth cedars a century ago. Lights had been strung all along the front, and a wreath half as big as the door itself hung at the entrance. Candles and torches were lit everywhere to add warmth and light to the path leading to the door. From the lodge’s porch, I looked down the valley past the castle’s roof and turrets, and farther to the lights of Christmastown, and then even farther, across the forest line to the Frozen Reaches. I paused a moment to take it all in— though the sun was still fighting the good fight overhead, winter’s early twilight was falling fast, casting a reddish glow over the whole snowy landscape.
A dark presence, like the twilight itself, appeared next to me. Jake Frost’s gaze surveyed the scene I’d just been admiring. “Looks harmless from up here, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Very serene.”
“Christmastown, you mean?”
“I was thinking of the Reaches. You’d never guess there were snow monsters out there.”
“I wouldn’t guess from looking at Christmastown that there was a monster there, either. A murderer ranks worse than a snow monster in my book. One’s a monster by nature, the other a monster by choice.”
“Sometimes murderers are the way they are by nature, too.”
“I never understood the impulse to sympathize with a killer,” I said.
“Understanding and sympathizing are different animals.”
I raked my gaze over Jake’s dark hat, coat, and boots, which was what he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him. He wasn’t dressed for a party. “What are you doing here? Did Amory invite you?”
“I invited myself.” He came close to smiling. “The law has its privileges.”
One possible explanation for his presence here made my heart race. “You aren’t here to make an arrest, are you?”
He shook his head. “Just observing.”
I looked around at the gathering guests. To Jake Frost, we were probably all like bugs in a terrarium. Interesting beings to observe. Who would exhibit incriminating behavior?
“Are you here all alone?” he asked.
“No, I came with my mother-in-law.”
“Where’s your husband?”
Good question. Nick obviously hadn’t been watching out for my arrival. “He had business to attend to. He left the castle before I did.”
“Interesting.”
Never had that one word seemed to carry so many ominous undertones.
“No, it’s not,” I piped up, lest he extrapolate something incriminating from our separate arrivals. “It’s perfectly normal. Goodness, does everything strike you as suspicious?”
“I just think it’s strange that a newly married man wouldn’t want to escort his bride to a party.”
His dark gaze held mine, and heat mounted in my cheeks.
“I need to check on the entertainers,” I said. “These events always have an element of stress to them for the Clauses, you know.”
“What’s the entertainment?”
“Elf cloggers.”
He winced.
He wasn’t alone in his reaction. Elf cloggers were the morris dancers of the North Pole, it seemed. They got no respect. “They’re very talented,” I insisted.
“So are some kazoo players, but I don’t go out of my way to hear them.”
“I’ve never heard a talented kazoo virtuoso, and neither have you.”
“All right, April. You caught me in a lie.”
“Very suspicious.”
He laughed. The sound of it, though dry, made me smile.
“There you are!” Lucia appeared at my side.
Come to tell me I could no longer even look at a reindeer, no doubt. I would have liked to ask her a few questions—like what was in the package addressed to her and delivered to the castle. But I couldn’t forget Jake was there and would overhear everything.
I gestured to the detective. “Lucia, you know Detective Frost, don’t you?”
She glanced at him and darted out her hand. “Jack Frost? I’ve heard of you.”
“Jake, actually,” he corrected with strained patience. “Jack was a distant relation.”
Lucia didn’t seem to care what his name was. She was focused on something else. “Maybe you can help, Detective. Santaland’s juvenile delinquent reindeer problem is getting worse. You should catch them and take them with you back to the Reaches. Teach them a lesson.”
“Reindeer are a little out of my line,” Jake said.
“Even ones that attempt murder, like the pack of them did this morning?”
She had Frost’s attention now. “Murder? When?”
Lucia pointed to me. “Didn’t April tell you? They surrounded my friend Quasar and nearly buried him alive.”
He glanced sharply at me. “You were okay, though, I hope?”
“Of course April wa
s okay. Those fiends targeted Quasar. He shouldn’t have even been at the Wrapping Works.”
“What were you doing there?” Jake asked me.
I stammered, “I-I just had to talk to someone.”
Lucia frowned at me. “You’re even starting to sound like Quasar.”
“I had to speak to an elf who works there. Starla Winters.”
“The wolf lady?” Lucia asked. “What’d you want with her?”
Amused that Lucia was doing his job for him, Jake awaited my answer.
“Private matter,” I said, groping for a response to throw both of them off my scent. “I had a specific wrapping job I needed done.”
Lucia shook her head in disgust. “I’d heard you Southerners were useless, but I assumed you at least could wield your own wrapping paper and ribbon.”
I glanced around. “I really should go check on the elf cloggers.”
Before I could flee, a hand clamped on my arm. I expected the hand to belong to Jake, but it was Lucia gripping me. “I owe you an apology, April, for blowing my stack today.”
An apology from Lucia was so novel that under most circumstances I would have been agog with gratification, not to mention vindication. But Jake Frost was observing us closely.
“Quasar admitted that when you asked to take him to the Wrapping Works he really wanted to go. Whatever you were doing there, I know it wasn’t your fault that he was attacked. He said you rescued him, too, and I’m grateful to you for that.”
“It was nothing,” I said, and excused myself.
Should I have told Jake Frost that I’d been at the Wrapping Works to interview Starla Winters because she’d had a contentious history with Giblet? Maybe. But Punch had given me that information. If it became known that everyone I spoke to would be under official investigation soon after, who would want to talk to me? Besides, I hadn’t unearthed anything particularly incriminating against Starla.
It was a good thing I decided to check on the elves, because there was drama enough in the small room where they were getting ready and warming up to distract me from my worries. The cloggers wore bright red and green jumpsuits under boiled wool vests decorated with sequins, rhinestones, and bells. Their wooden-soled boots created a clop with every step, so everyone seemed to be in a frenetic state of sparkling, tinkling, and clomping. The vests differed in the size and number of tinkle bells according to each elf’s part in the production.
