Mrs. Claus and the Santaland Slayings

by Liz Ireland

  “Judas Priest!” Lucia cried.

  “What happened?” Jingles asked.

  “I startled Quasar earlier and he lurched backward,” I said. “He must have fallen on the croquembouche.”

  “Sat on it, you mean,” Jingles said.

  This was a disaster. Come morning, someone was going to have to break the news to Pamela, and I did not want to be that someone.

  None of us did.

  “I’m going back to bed,” Martin and Lucia said in unison.

  “Cowards.” I rounded on them. “You can’t run out on us now. We have to try to fix this.”

  Martin’s laugh contained a hysterical edge. “Fix it how? The dessert has been crushed by a four-hundred-pound reindeer’s butt. There’s no coming back from that.”

  For once, Lucia agreed with her brother. “Especially if you’re a pastry.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Quasar said.

  “No one’s blaming you,” Lucia said.

  “I am,” Jingles said.

  I leveled a stern look on him. “It was an accident. No one did this maliciously.”

  “I don’t understand,” Quasar said. “Can’t we still eat it?”

  We gaped at him, and he understood. “Humans sure are f-finicky.”

  “So are elfmen—or at least this one is,” Jingles said. “What’s more, I value my life. I say we dispose of the whole mess, break a windowpane, and announce that there was a robbery.”

  A cowardly plan, but I couldn’t deny its appeal.

  “A croquembouche thief?” Lucia shook her head. “That’s a new one.”

  “So’s a serial killer in Christmastown,” I said, “but we have one of those.”

  Jingles snapped his fingers and looked at me. “You helped Pamela make the croquembouche. Maybe you can repair it.”

  I thought of the hours of labor that went into constructing that elaborate dessert and then looked at the heap on the floor. “The key word is help. I didn’t do it myself.”

  “You don’t have to do it all yourself now,” Jingles said. “At least, not from scratch. You just have to fix it.”

  How?

  “It wouldn’t look the same. Pamela would know right away.”

  Martin shook his head at me. “You’re selling yourself short. I bet you could fix this, April. Why not try? It’s better than the fictitious dessert thief idea.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but I was inclined to at least give it a shot. What could it hurt? If we announced to Pamela that her greatest creation had been sat on by Quasar, there was a chance Quasar would be diced into reindeer jerky. “All right,” I said, not without reluctance. “But I’ll need assistance.”

  Quasar offered. The poor animal wanted to make amends, but I told him he should get some rest. Mostly, I wanted him as far from the kitchen as possible. The last thing we needed was another accident. Jingles stayed with me. He at least seemed to know the rudiments of creating this dessert. The first order of business was to make more of the puffs. When we were opening up the pantry and checking that we had everything we needed, I found a covered bowl with a sticky note on it that read Leftover Custard.

  I could have cried with happiness. “It’s like yesterday’s sent me a gift.”

  “I wish yesterday could drag me back an hour and tell me not to try to find out what that scream was,” Jingles grumbled. “I’d still be in bed asleep right now.”

  I wouldn’t have minded being in bed, either. But I still wanted to know who had screamed. I’d heard it, as had Quasar. Jingles too. The reindeer had been in Lucia’s room at the end of the hall above, nearest the kitchen, where I was at the time. Jingles’ quarters were down the corridor past the kitchen. The scream had sounded loud—to me. But perhaps the reason for that was the location of the person making the noise. It had to be close to the kitchen.

  Jingles and I were making more pâte à choux for the cream puffs. To achieve a light, fluffy result required arm-tiring labor, especially beating egg yolks by hand into the thick dough. We were too chicken to turn on the industrial mixer, which made enough noise to raise the dead.

  While the puffs were baking, I prepared caramel for the “mortar.” I burned the first batch into crystallized sludge and had to start over. And then Jingles and I started making a new cage.

  When we finally had everything ready to start the renovation of the crushed castle, it was already getting quite late . . . or early, depending on your perspective. We had to rush to assemble everything before the kitchen elves came down. Jingles had done a fairly good job of cleaning and salvage: The Plexiglas had been wiped clean, the crushed puffs cleared away, and as many shards of the shattered sugar cage picked out as he could manage. It was a real Cinderella-with-the-lentils kind of task, but he’d managed to get almost all of them.

  Much of Pamela’s blueprint—the one she’d drawn in icing sugar on the Plexiglas—was now gone. We had to improvise, and while our results weren’t perfect, they weren’t terrible. Jingles did a good job remembering which details of the castle Pamela had tried to replicate in dough. When we were done, we both stood back, bleary-eyed, and tried to study our presentation objectively.

  “She’ll never notice,” Jingles predicted.

  “Let’s hope.”

  We hauled the croquembouche into the freezer and took ourselves off to our respective rooms. The still-empty bed gave my heart a jolt. All the frenzy over the croquembouche had driven worries about my wandering husband temporarily out of my head. At the sight of his unslept-on side, the worries came roaring back.

  I crawled into bed, looked at the time—4:36 a.m.—and wondered where Nick had gone. And what this meant. He’d gone to talk to Therese. And that took all night? My thoughts churned. I’d never be able to get to sleep. Which made me angst more. Tomorrow evening was the Peppermint Pond Skate-a-Palooza . . . not to mention the elf march. It was sure to be a long day, and even longer if I was exhausted.

  But somehow I managed to nod off.

  In my dreams, I was back home in Oregon, stringing lights everywhere. Brilliant electric streaks flew out of my fingertips, as if I were a sorceress. I strew lights all over my house and then proceeded to do up the whole town. When I finished, Cloudberry Bay was gorgeous. Everyone hailed me as a genius. Even Damaris had to concede to my decorative superiority. If Christmas spirit was a competition, I’d trounced her.

  “I’m no genius,” I said with elaborate modesty. “I’m just Mrs. Claus.”

  Someone was pushing me. Shoving my arm.

  “Stop!”

  “April!” Jingles’ voice was pure distress. “Get up. Please, you must wake up.”

  I forced one eye open, and it felt as if my eyelid were being raked across sandpaper. A blurry Jingles loomed right over me, his expression frantic.

  “Mrs. Claus—the dowager Mrs. Claus—is threatening to fire all my people. She thinks they messed up the croquembouche!”

  So much for fooling Pamela. I was dead tired and, come to find out, staying up to almost five had done us no good whatsoever. “She must have sniffed us out right away.”

  “Something . . . happened to it,” Jingles said, his expression twisting as though he was recalling a horror, “and now she’s blaming Waldo!”

  “You should tell her the truth.” But even as I said the words, I realized how weaselly they sounded. Jingles wouldn’t think it was his place to rat me or Quasar out to Pamela. The responsibility for preventing Waldo and the others from bearing the brunt of Pamela’s indignation was mine alone.

  I got up, put on my robe and slippers, and followed Jingles down to the kitchen.

  Poor Waldo. He was standing at attention, practically quivering yet trying to remain calm in the face of accusations of pastry demolition and counterfeiting. The rest of the kitchen elves were upset and showed various expressions of disbelief, dismay, and even resentment.

  As I arrived through one door, Nick appeared from the outside door. He was wearing his scarlet coat and matching hat
, but that was the brightest thing about him. His face looked drawn, tired, and strangely dark. “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  Everyone turned to him for justice, speaking at once.

  Pamela’s voice carried better than anyone’s: “This elf destroyed my croquembouche and tried to pass a sham off as mine!”

  “Santa, I swear I had nothing to do with this! I left Mrs. Claus’s—the dowager Mrs. Claus’s—croquembouche right there in the freezer. It was straight and beautiful!”

  I stepped forward and took a good gander at the rebuilt croquembouche. In the cold light of day it resembled Pamela’s fanciful creation about as much as a log cabin resembled Versailles. The walls—I could have sworn they’d been perfectly straight last night—now slanted at odd angles, and bits of the tower had plopped down into the icing sugar snow overnight. What had gone wrong? Had someone sabotaged my fix? Then I remembered the difficulty we’d had with the caramel burning. I’d been overly cautious with the second batch—it had been rather runny. Maybe too runny to cement my cream puffs into place. Also, la cage lacked the lacy delicacy of Pamela’s original, so it did little to mask the disaster happening below.

  I cleared my throat. “It wasn’t Waldo or any of the kitchen elves,” I said, projecting loud enough to be heard above the din. “It was me. I did it.”

  All eyes were on me now, including Pamela’s shocked, outraged gaze and Nick’s disappointed one.

  “You?” Betrayal mingled with indignation in my mother-in-law’s voice. “Why would you destroy what I tried so hard to teach you to make?”

  “I didn’t destroy it. That is, I didn’t mean to.” This was tricky, because I definitely didn’t want to get Quasar in trouble with Pamela. “There was an accident. Something must have fallen, because the croquembouche cage had collapsed in the middle of the night. So I attempted to fix it.”

  Pamela aimed a skeptical gaze at my efforts. “And you couldn’t do any better than this? After all I taught you?”

  “I guess I don’t have your talent,” I said. “So you see, it’s nothing to do with Waldo or anyone else.” I turned to the kitchen elves. “I’m so sorry. I went to bed last night after fixing the mess . . . or thinking I’d fixed it. I never dreamed anyone would be blamed for my shoddy pastry repair.”

  They all nodded—even Waldo—though I’m not sure they were entirely appeased. It’s a horrible thing to be falsely accused. And, looking at the situation from Pamela’s perspective, it was also terrible to have lovingly labored over the creation of something wonderful and then see your work destroyed, or at least diminished.

  “I can’t apologize enough, Pamela. I should have told you what had happened, but it was the middle of the night and I was just focused on trying to make things right. Instead, I just seem to have compounded the wrong.”

  She was somewhat mollified . . . but only somewhat.

  “I’d like to make this right,” I said. “I know the party is this afternoon. . . .”

  She gave her head a mournful shake. “I don’t see how you can make this right. There’s no time to make another croquembouche.”

  I grasped frantically for a solution, or at least a peace offering. Finally, I thought of something.

  “I can make a mean cloudberry blondie,” I said.

  Chapter 18

  “What happened last night?”

  Though he tried not to show it, I could tell Nick was irritated. We’d escaped the others and were closeted in his office. I sagged into an overstuffed chair, trying not to feel annoyed that he blamed me for something that wasn’t my fault. Not entirely, anyway.

  “Quasar sat on the croquembouche. It was an accident. I just couldn’t tell Pamela that or she’d be serving reindeer flambé to her guests this afternoon. We tried to repair it, but it didn’t quite work out—”

  “And you let the elves take the blame.”

  “No—I stepped in as soon as I heard what was happening. Unfortunately, I overslept. I didn’t get to sleep until almost five.” I crossed my arms. “Although I assume I got more sleep than you managed.”

  “You assume right.”

  I was glad to turn this conversation smack around where it belonged, focused on Nick’s actions, not mine. “I only went down to the kitchen because I was looking for you. I thought you were in here, so I was going to bring you some tea.”

  “That would’ve been nice. I could have used some hot tea last night.”

  “Why? Therese doesn’t do tea?”

  He blinked at me, confused.

  “The last time I saw you, Nick, you were off to give Therese a talking-to. Is telling your old girlfriend not to attempt to kill your wife an all-night activity?”

  His expression turned from confusion to astonishment. “You think I was with Therese all this time?”

  “I don’t know. You certainly weren’t in bed.”

  “Because I was at a fire. One of the cottages in Tinkertown burned down. A family of six.”

  “Oh.” Shame filled me, especially when I remembered how tired Nick had looked when he came in. “Do they need a place to stay? There’s plenty of room here.”

  He shrugged. “They’re living with relatives until they can rebuild.”

  “You were fighting the fire?”

  “I pitched in.”

  “I’m sorry.” I seemed to be apologizing to everyone this morning. “I didn’t know.”

  “I should have sent word to you,” he admitted. “But it was the middle of the night. I assumed you were asleep.”

  “It was hard to sleep last night. At least for some of us.” Most of his family seemed to have managed pretty well. “While I was downstairs, I heard a scream—it might’ve been a woman, I thought. Quasar thought so, too. That’s why he got so nervous. He worried it was Lucia.”

  Nick frowned. “Was it?”

  I shook my head. “She came sauntering in from outside, later, after we’d already checked every room in the castle.”

  “You mean you went around the castle doing a bed check?”

  “I had to. What if it was somehow connected to—”

  Too late, I noticed his face darken and I remembered I’d promised to leave off investigating. “Just because I’m not trying to solve Giblet’s murder doesn’t mean I shouldn’t look into suspicious things happening around me. Therese tried to kill me yesterday afternoon. What if that scream was actually the sound of someone else being attacked?”

  “It was probably just an owl or something.”

  “Maybe.” But I had my doubts.

  “At any rate, there’s nothing we can do about it now.” He leaned back, shaking his head. “Spiders, mysterious screams, people attacking each other. I swear to you, April, this was a peaceful place before you got here.”

  “You think I brought chaos with me?”

  He laughed. “No, but I don’t want you to think I was selling you a bill of goods when I told you what a wonderful place Santaland was.”

  “It is wonderful. Cold and slightly homicidally inclined at the moment, but wonderful.”

  “I think I’d go mad if all this was going on and you weren’t here with me.”

  I tilted my head. “Even if I am the croquembouche destroyer?”

  “I tried to tell Mother how good those blondies were.”

  Despite my offer of cloudberry blondies, Pamela and the elves had opted to make a sheet cake. Without my assistance. After all that had happened, I couldn’t really blame her. I wasn’t a great pastry chef’s assistant, and bars weren’t really fancy luncheon fare.

  But Nick had sampled the blondies in Cloudberry Bay, when he was a guest at the Coast Inn. The memory of those summer days washed over me like a balm. Our gazes met and held, and I felt my heart swell a few sizes. Would we ever get back to that intimate, carefree feeling we’d had last summer?

  “I wish I had time to catch a few Z’s now,” he said.

  I wouldn’t have objected to crawling back into bed, either, though I don’t know how muc
h sleep either of us would have gotten.

  “You should try to nap at some point,” I said. “Right now, I need to get to town to start preparations for Skate-a-Palooza.”

  He straightened stalwartly. “You’re right. Christmas week.”

  “How’s your Podgy Pooper problem coming along?”

  “Pudgy Puppers,” he corrected. “They upped production at the Workshop. I think we’ll be fine. But you know. No rest in December.”

  This was practically the winter mantra of the Clauses: no rest in December. I wondered if wives of guys with firework stands felt about July the way I was beginning to feel about December.

  “I need to go check to see how the decorations down at the pond are coming along.” I was halfway to the door before I turned and asked, “What did you say to Therese?”

  “I asked her not to attempt to murder you again.”

  I smiled. “I appreciate that.”

  “Figured you would. And then we discussed perhaps sending her to live somewhere else for a while. She said she wouldn’t mind going to Arizona.”

  Arizona! “That’s quite a change. Not that I’m complaining.” Anywhere far away would do.

  “She said she wants to live somewhere completely different.”

  “I suppose she expects the Clauses to bankroll her.”

  “She’s not asking for much. I’m inclined to give her what she needs to resettle.”

  Of course. Nick would give people the Santa suit off his back.

  We parted ways as if it were just another morning . . . instead of the start of what would be an extraordinarily awful day for the Claus family.

  * * *

  I changed clothes and went down to the park, intending to oversee things for about an hour or so. As soon as I got there, I was beset by problems. The temporary bandstand was still unfinished, so that the elves hammering and the elves in charge of decorations were clashing. I suggested the decorator elves let the construction people finish, then despaired as the construction elves took a long lunch. Musicians arrived early, adding to the pileup. I couldn’t speak for anyone else, but having a little girl warming up her “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” while hammers pounded wasn’t putting me in the Christmas spirit.