Mrs. Claus and the Santaland Slayings. Liz Ireland

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СКАЧАТЬ be right there.” I turned back to Lucia. “Can you wait for me? I really want to go to Giblet’s cottage.”

      She gave my outfit a once-over. “Don’t worry, it’ll take me some time to get a sleigh ready. You obviously can’t ride in that getup.”

      I followed Jingles out, but once we were in the hall I practically had to sprint to keep up with him. “I’m sorry for the subterfuge.” He looked back at me and lowered his voice. “I don’t know what I’ll say to Mrs. Claus—the dowager Mrs. Claus—when the post really does arrive.”

      “There’s no letter?”

      “Of course not. I was just doing some straightening in your husband’s office when I found the strangest note on his desk. I thought I should show you before one of the servants saw it. I would have destroyed it, but it’s not my place.”

      Nick’s study had framed world maps on one wall and floor-to-ceiling bookcases on the two walls adjacent to the door. His mahogany desk took up the space before a large picture window that overlooked the grounds around the castle, which were dotted with snow-dusted evergreens and embellished with ice sculptures that had probably stood for years. Lights on the trees provided the only illumination outside. Dawn was still hours off.

      The room was scrupulously tidy except for two overstuffed sacks of mail piled in a corner. Santa letters—the tough ones. They kept Nick up at night till all hours sometimes and often preyed on his mind. Maybe that’s what he had been doing last night. Even a bulletin board full of lists was arranged neatly. Looking at them made me feel a rush of love for my Type A husband. Santa was supposed to make a list and check it twice, but Nick would make a hundred lists and check dozens of times.

      As I hovered over his desk, a piece of paper on the desk blotter caught my eye. I knew in an instant that this was what Jingles had brought me here to see. The note was printed in large capital letters in red ink:

      A VENOMOUS ELF. COAL IN HIS STOCKING?

      And that was all.

      I frowned. “I don’t understand.”

      “ ‘A venomous elf ’—Giblet,” Jingles interpreted for me. “ ‘Coal in his stocking.’ His stocking—Blitzen said they’d found something in Giblet’s stocking, remember?”

      “But that’s—”

      Lucia’s warnings of the gossip about Nick came back to me, and I understood why Jingles was worried. If Giblet’s death was ruled suspicious, this note might strike people as a damning clue.

      It looked like Nick’s printing, so I didn’t kid myself someone else had written it. But why had Nick put these words down? Out of irritation, anger? Neither of those emotions seemed like Nick. But how well did I know him? I’d only been married to the man three months, and had just met him three months prior to our wedding.

      Besides, who could say how anyone would react after being publicly accused of being a killer? Scribbling things on a notepad wasn’t a crime. It was no different than pouring your heart out in a diary.

      But diaries had been used to prove people’s guilt in court, hadn’t they?

      I hesitated, then crumpled the note in my hand.

      Jingles took it from me. “I’ll just put this bit of trash in the fire, then, shall I?”

      “Yes. Thank you, Jingles.”

      He tossed the paper into the flames and we watched it burn. After a minute, he jabbed at the embers with a poker. “And now you’d better go to the carriage house. Lucia hates to be kept waiting.”

      I nodded, stopping only for a last glance at a few charred flakes of paper lifting toward the chimney. If only I could have burned those red-inked words out of my memory as easily.

      Chapter 2

      “You picked a bad year to become a Claus.”

      A little impatience for my bad timing edged into Lucia’s matter-of-fact voice. She sat straight as a post in the seat of the sleigh and navigated the curved icy pathway down from the castle through Kringle Heights, holding the reins as casually as if she were born driving a team of reindeer. No surprise, given her genealogy. Of course, no other Claus had a sleigh custom-built both to be pulled by and to carry reindeer. Quasar stood in back, his head jutted forward between us like an impatient kid’s. I almost expected him to ask, Are we there yet?

      “Christmas season is always hectic and tense,” Lucia went on, “but it’s definitely worse this December because of poor Chris’s accident, and with Nick trying to fill his boots, and everyone trying to adjust to all the changes.”

      “Chris must have been a wonderful person.”

      I glanced at her through the maze of Quasar’s scruffy antlers. She bit her lip, her eyes filling with the emotion I’d seen on the face of everyone who’d known Chris.

      “He was bigger than life,” she said. “So much energy. Maybe it’s a cliché, but he really brought life to a room just by walking into it. He got along with almost everyone.”

      “Nick told me the same thing.”

      “I have to admit that I’ve had a hard time mentally adjusting over the years, being the oldest sibling and yet ineligible to inherit the prized family position just because I was born female. No female Santas, you know—especially not when there were three brothers behind me. An heir and two spares. I never stood a chance. It probably would have driven me mad if Chris hadn’t been so perfect. Objectively, he was worthier to be Santa than I was in every way.”

      I nodded, understanding, though her confession made me slightly uncomfortable. Somewhere beneath what she said lay the implication that Nick wasn’t perfect, or worthy.

      “Don’t get me wrong,” she added, as if following my train of thought. “Nick’s nice, too. In fact, he’s always been my favorite brother—but it’s a harder lift for him, isn’t it? Chris did things effortlessly, but with Nick, you can see it’s work. And he’s never satisfied with the status quo. Christmastown would have trundled along as it had for centuries if Chris had lived, but Nick wants to make things better. People don’t always appreciate that.”

      “Like the stipend rule.”

      “Exactly.”

      Members of the Claus family, both immediate and distantly related, had always been able to live in Santaland free of charge. Even if they did nothing to help with the Christmas season, they were given land and a stipend. The number of freeloading Clauses was beginning to cause disgruntlement among the hardworking elves, so over the summer Nick had decreed that every family had to contribute to the workload for their stipend, a dictate that had caused hard feelings. Some of the Clauses were having to work for the first time in their lives.

      “And there’s Tiffany, poor woman,” Lucia continued, “moping around all the time, hovering over Christopher. And now this business with Giblet. Some holly-jolly Christmas season this is going to be for Nick—or for any of us. I can only imagine how it must seem to you.”

      “It’s all new to me, so I don’t know the difference.”

      “No, СКАЧАТЬ