Mrs. Claus and the Evil Elves

Book 3: Mrs. Claus Mystery

by Liz Ireland

Genres: Female Sleuths; Amateur Sleuth

Synopsis

Jessica Fletcher meets Tim Burton in this creative and witty cozy mystery series from Liz Ireland, filled with unconventional characters, year-round Christmas cheer, and a unique heroine who’s married to the real-life Santa Claus!

April Claus has grown to love her new North Pole home almost as much as she loves her husband, Nick—Santa himself. But even in Christmastown, the holidays can be murder . . .
 
April Claus is getting an early gift for her second Christmas in Santaland. Her dear friend, Claire, is visiting from Oregon, and April hopes to show off her adoptive country at its cozy, glittering best. But when the annual ice sculpture contest is derailed by a kamikaze drone-deer, it’s just the first in a series of un-festive events . . .
 
Drone-deer, created by inventor elf Blinky Brightlow, are none too popular with the genuine, flesh-and-hoof kind, who are currently on strike. With no reindeer games to keep them in shape, Nick worries they may get too chunky to pull his sleigh come Christmas. Now Blinky is missing, his girlfriend, Juniper, is under suspicion, and between rogue reindeer and conniving elves, all of Santaland seems to have gone sugarplum-crazy. Add a dash of murder to the mix, and suddenly April is battling not just to clear Juniper’s name, but to save herself from being put on ice—permanently . . .
 
Praise for Mrs. Claus and the Halloween Homicide

“Fans of offbeat, humorous cozies will clamor for more.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Multiple plot twists, quirky, characters, plenty of humor, and the lovingly described, magical Santaland distinguish this entertaining cozy.”
—Booklist

 

Release date: September 27, 2022

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Note to self: Elf clogging should never be the main event.

As the person who’d scheduled the Christmastown Cloggers as part of the entertainment for Santaland’s annual ice sculpture contest, I was hardly in a position to complain. Yet it was one thing to have the head of the clogging troupe breathlessly inform me that his group would perform a dramatic “a cappella” dance accompanied only by jingle bells attached to their clogs, quite another to live through ten clomping, jangling minutes of it on a frosty late morning in December.

My friend Juniper Greenleaf craned her neck over her music stand to gaze at the crowd gathered around Peppermint Pond. “I don’t see Blinky.”

“How would you be able to?”

Half of Santaland had turned out for the ice sculpture competition. Spotting one elf in a crowd of hundreds of elves and people was impossible, unless they happened to be on the dais set up next to the pond for the local dignitaries. Even from a distance I could clearly make out my husband, Nick, aka Santa Claus, on the platform, decked out for the occasion in full Santa regalia. Next to him were Mayor Firlog and his wife, and other town bigwigs. Bella Sparkletoe, whose mercantile was sponsoring this year’s sculpture contest, was in her finest purple tunic and elf cap. Most notably, my best friend from Oregon, Claire Emerson, was among the Christmastown elite, standing next to Nick. Claire was visiting me here for the first time, and I could see her pop-eyed expression even from thirty yards away.

Claire, usually a fairly cool person, had been in freak-out mode since Nick and I met her in Fairbanks, Alaska, which was the closest airport to the North Pole. Obviously, it had been a long day of travel for her from Cloudberry Bay, Oregon, and then she’d been greeted with the news that we still had a flying sleigh journey to get to Santaland. Belatedly, I’d realized “flying sleigh journey” was a phrase that probably called for smelling salts.

“Aren’t you taking this Mr. and Mrs. Claus schtick too far?” she asked as Nick heaved her suitcase into the back of our elaborately carved sleigh, to which eight reindeer were harnessed.

I’d told her that Nick was Santa Claus, but the reality evidently hadn’t penetrated. I could relate. When Nick had first come to stay at the Coast Inn, the small hotel I ran in Cloudberry Bay, I’d had no idea he was Santa Claus. It wasn’t until we’d fallen in love that he’d confessed his real identity to me. To say that the news had knocked me for a loop was the understatement of the century. I’d been Mrs. Claus for a year and a half now, but I still experienced moments of amazement.

“How far are we going in this thing?” Claire had asked, hesitating to step in the sleigh. She was looking at us both now as if we were slightly crackbrained.

“Santaland’s a two-hour flight away.” The reindeer, I could tell, were getting restive. I leaned closer to her and lowered my voice. “We really need to get going. Nick had to call in some favors to get these reindeer to bring us here—most of them are doing it in secret. They didn’t tell the rest of their herds what they’re up to.”

She tilted her head, her wry smile indicating that she was humoring me. “Because . . . ?”

“There’s a reindeer strike.”

“A Santaland reindeer strike?” She laughed. “You mean these are scabs?”

Nick came around to help her inside. He hadn’t dressed in his Santa Suit—outside of Santaland, he only donned the suit on Christmas Eve. I was trying to think of some way to convince my friend that this was serious business. As it turned out, Donner, who was in the point position on the team, accomplished that for me by swinging his head around, ears twitching impatiently. “Are you ready, Santa?”

Claire pivoted toward me, eyes wide. “That reindeer just spoke.”

“I think the team wants to leave now,” I said.

She gaped at me. “This behemoth can fly?” Her gloved hand lifted toward the reindeer. “They can fly?”

“Yes, but it’s a long way, and—”

Claire wasn’t listening. She was digging around in her fat purse.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“If you think I’m getting on a flying sleigh without Dramamine, you’ve got another think coming.”

She downed a Dramamine with a swig of something she’d bought at the duty free. By the time the sleigh reached a deserted side road where the team would have enough room to take off, Claire was out like a dead Christmas bulb and didn’t awaken until we’d landed on Sugarplum Mountain. Which was probably fortunate. Even at Castle Kringle, the fantastic ancestral home of the Claus family, surrounded by my Claus in-laws and castle elves, she seemed to find the truth hard to accept. I think part of her still believed my married life was an elaborate Santaland cosplay hoax.

Today was Day Two of her Santaland visit, and she was still looking shell-shocked. I hoped by the end of her two-week visit that she’d get into the swing of things. I’d planned for Claire’s visit to be full of music, food, and fun—a dessert potluck, a skate show, the big Kringle Heights Ladies’ Guild craft bazaar, elf ballet, and, to top it all off, a fireworks show up at Kringle Lodge.

Elf cloggers aside, this was a day that would make anyone fall in love with Santaland. Christmastown had pulled out all the holiday stops for the ice sculpture event, and nature was doing her best to cooperate. The North Pole in December can dish out weather challenging for even the hardiest elf, but today the sky was clear, the air was still, and the world around us was a Technicolor wonderland. If faeries in sequins had skated across Peppermint Pond, I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. Judging by her already gobsmacked expression, Claire wouldn’t have, either.

From my spot standing in the percussion section at the back of the band shell along with the rest of the Santaland Concert Band, I had the best view not only of Peppermint Pond, but of Christmastown, aglow with more than the usual number of lights strung across its streets and in every window. Looking up, I could view where the town gave way to the majestic rise of Sugarplum Mountain and the trees of the Christmas Tree Forest. On the mountain, the cottages and châteaus of Kringle Heights, strung with lights and shiny garlands, twinkled intermittently like distant stars. At a slightly higher elevation stood the elegant spires and towers of Castle Kringle. Against the background of fresh-fallen snow, the whole world shimmered and sparkled.

There was only one fly in the eggnog facing Santaland at the moment: the aforementioned reindeer strike. My new sleigh, a hybrid model that worked on both electricity and hoof power, had been getting quite a workout ever since Santaland’s reindeer had declared a walkout a week ago. I seriously doubted their grievance would last till Christmas Eve, but the strain was beginning to show in Nick’s face. Christmas week was a bad time for Santa Claus to be uncertain of his reindeer.

“I wonder what’s happened to Blinky,” Juniper said, still craning. “He told me he wanted to be here to hear us play.”

Blinky was Juniper’s latest love interest. Though I hadn’t been introduced to him yet, everyone in the Arctic Circle knew about him and his brother, Dabbs. Blinky was a brilliant inventor, and he and Dabbs ran Brightlow Brothers Enterprises, an electronics business that boasted of “Bringing Santaland into the 21st Century.”

Smudge, crouched behind the drum kit, couldn’t help sniping, “Blinky Brightlow won’t show up for an event like this. Everyone knows he’s a weirdo.”

I took a deep breath. Smudge, Juniper’s ex-boyfriend from years ago, always seemed interested in winning her back, but he didn’t know the first thing about going about it. For one thing, criticizing Blinky for being eccentric when he himself had cultivated an outsider elf hipster persona was the height of hypocrisy. Of course, he looked anything but cool right now in our band uniform tunic of red and sparkly green, with a billed red hat festooned with a plume of dyed snow goose feathers.

Sure enough, Juniper rounded on him—forgetting we were onstage. “Pot. Kettle. Black.” Her vehement tone turned the heads of several band members. Not that anyone in the audience was paying attention to us with twenty elves in spangled harlequin tunics clogging on a makeshift platform downstage. “Blinky isn’t weird, he’s brilliant. Just because he hasn’t spent his whole life making candy canes . . .”

Smudge bristled at this slur on his profession. “Candy canes are the lifeblood of Santaland. I’ve never seen you turn one down.”

Her cheeks flamed.

Oh God. There was going to be carnage on the bandstand.

Soupy, the tuba player, poked his head around his sousaphone and pinned an annoyed glance on us. “Will you three shush? They’re about to announce the ice sculpture competition winner. I’ve got a box of Twinkle’s Fried Pies riding on the Blitzen statue.”

That shut us up. Twinkle’s Fried Pies were the best. Having a box of their sweet, flaky goodness on the line was no small thing.

The elf cloggers finished to relieved applause and a stir of anticipation. The big moment was here. On the dais, Bella Sparkletoe passed a blue ribbon the size of a door wreath to Nick for him to bestow on the grand-prize winner for best ice sculpture.

In my opinion, Soupy’s fried pies were as good as won. The statue of Blitzen the First—a three-times life-size rendering in ice of the legendary reindeer, with very intricate work on the antlers—was a shoo-in to take first place. When Claire, Juniper, and I toured all the sculptures around the pond this morning, we’d marveled at the detail the artist had used to render Blitzen, while at the same time conveying impressive majesty.

“How did they do this?” Claire almost shouted as she’d reached out to touch the ice with her mitten. “It looks like fur!”

The exquisite artistry had amazed Juniper and me, too. Considering how long ice statues lasted here in the frozen north, Blitzen the First would be gazing across Peppermint Pond for decades to come. And from a coldly calculating standpoint, given the situation with the reindeer strike, it was just good politics to award the grand prize to a statue honoring one of the most famous of Santa’s original team. It was probably no coincidence that the dais had been set up right next to the Blitzen sculpture.

The entire audience leaned forward eagerly. Luther Partridge, our bandleader, raised his baton, and the band members scooted forward on their chairs and lifted their instruments. After Nick’s speech, Smudge was going to do a drum roll. Then, when the ribbon was awarded, we were supposed to break into a rousing rendition of “Deck the Halls,” which would turn into a sing-along. No elf gathering was complete without a sing-along.

Nick cleared his throat and thanked everyone again for attending. Public speaking didn’t come easily to my husband—he was more at home being a manager than a front man for Santaland—but since taking up the mantle of Santa last year after his older brother died, he was getting better all the time.

I was annoyed, then, at a whining sound in the distance. Nick heard it, too, and kept flicking his gaze up from his prepared remarks like a picnicker being pestered by a mosquito. Each time he looked down again, his words came out a little faster and the whining grew louder.

Just as he walked across the dais with the wreath-sized blue ribbon to where the sculptor-contestants waited, a large mechanical drone buzzed into view overhead, too low for anyone’s comfort. The drone resembled a stingray, except it had strange antler-like protuberances coming off both wings. Behind it trailed a long, red-and-white streaming banner, fluttering violently. Elves in the crowd pointed and exclaimed as the drone swooped over the dais. Nick, Claire, Mayor Firlog, and all the other dignitaries hit the deck. Next, the thing banked toward the audience, which emitted a collective shout. Everyone ducked as the machine passed over their heads, creating a ripple effect. It was like watching a stadium wave, only terrifying.

As soon as the drone had cleared the seats, mayhem erupted. Elves and people darted for safety—but when a drone was still buzzing overhead, where was safety to be found? Audience members pushed over chairs in their hurry to escape from the open. Many stumbled on the overturned chairs, and then one another. Elf pileups created even more mayhem.

We on the covered bandstand watched it all in horror.

“What’s going on?” Bobbin, the piccolo player, cried out. “What is that contraption?”

“A drone-deer,” Smudge said in disgust.

Juniper pivoted toward me, scarlet in her cheeks. The drone-deer was one of Blinky’s inventions, and the cause of all the strife between the people and the reindeer—the nonmechanical kind. The reindeer had gotten it into their heads that they might be replaced by these mechanized creatures.

I’d seen smaller models of Blinky’s invention. Children had been playing with them for months. Nick’s nephew, Christopher, owned one. But I’d never seen a drone-deer so large.

This one certainly wasn’t a good advertisement for Blinky’s product; it was going berserk. With a tortured whine, it climbed high, and then began to dive in a kind of death spiral—right toward the dais, toward Nick and Claire. Heart in throat, I lurched forward. Shouts of warning went up, and dignitaries dove under chairs. To my relief, the drone seemed to be on track to miss the dais itself. Instead, it crashed right into the magnificent statue of Blitzen the First. A long, sickening crackle like that of an icy branch as it falls sounded, and then the sculpture’s elaborate ice antlers shattered into a thousand shards.

After the crash, a hiatus of eerie silence descended across the pond. The crowd straightened, blinking in disbelief at the damage. Then a collective groan went up. The weight and speed of the drone had sheared off Blitzen the First’s majestic head.

Elves and people swarmed toward the crash site. Juniper and I leapt off the bandstand and threaded our way to the front, where Nick and the other local grandees from the dais were inspecting the wreckage. I found Claire and put my arm around her. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“That was surreal!” she exclaimed. “Does stuff like this always happen around here?”

I shook my head. “Objects don’t come crashing out of the sky.” I thought for a moment, then added, “Except for the occasional drunken reindeer.”

The silent shock of the crash passed, followed by a hubbub of outrage on behalf of the beautiful creation of Stew, the ice sculptor who’d created Blitzen the First. Stew pushed forward to view the decapitated head of his ice reindeer. Stew was tall for an elf, and whippet thin. When he fell to his knees beside his fallen creation, it created a sad tableau.

“How could this have happened?” he asked, as much from shock as anger. “Who allows these things to fly around Santaland?”

“Drone-deer aren’t usually dangerous,” Juniper said, a hint of desperation in her voice as she stood up for Blinky Brightlow’s creation. “Something must have gone wrong with this one.”

Understatement of the week.

Someone shouted, “It was a targeted attack!”

“Now, we don’t know that,” Nick said, trying to maintain calm.

“It had to be!” another elf called out. “Those drones go where you program them to.”

“If they can’t be controlled, they shouldn’t be flying around Christmastown,” Bella Sparkletoe declared. “It’s bad for commerce.”

“What if it had hit a child?” someone else shouted.

“Or me?” said the mayor.

The shouts were drowned out by a siren blare at the back of the crowd. Everyone turned and then parted for Constable Crinkles, who bustled toward the crash site brandishing a bullhorn. Santaland’s answer to law enforcement usually resembled a basketball-shaped Keystone Cop, but today instead of his uniform coat he was wearing what looked like a collegiate letterman jacket with CT embroidered on one side. He was also coach of the Twinklers, Christmastown’s iceball team, whose season started in January. Clearly he’d expected this event to provide a recruiting opportunity.

“Let us pass,” he commanded piercingly through the bullhorn. Also unnecessarily, since everyone had already cleared a path for him and his skinny deputy and nephew, Ollie.

The constable stopped next to the wreckage. “What’s the problem here?” He was still yelling into the bullhorn.

“You have to arrest whoever killed my statue,” Stew announced. “Blitzen the First was going to win first place.”

“You don’t know that,” said Punch, another sculptor. The crusty old elf had been last year’s winner. Though his entry this year, a replica of Castle Kringle’s old tower, was impressive, he had to be the only one who believed his work stood a snowball’s chance in Arizona against the Blitzen statue.

“Santa will tell us,” Mayor Firlog declared. “Was Stew about to win first place?”

“Well, yes,” Nick admitted, walking over to the headless reindeer. “But now . . .”

Punch whooped joyfully, hopping up and down in his curly-toed boots. “I win!”

“You do not.” Stew jumped to his feet and planted mittened fists on his hips. “What’s more, if you ruined my statue, you’re going to jail.”

Punch gaped at him. “What did I do?”

“You murdered my statue. Admit it!”

“Wait a second!” Crinkles shouted into the bullhorn, causing us all to wince. “I can’t arrest anyone till I have all the facts.” The sentence was barely out before the bullhorn let out another eardrum-piercing shriek that sent a wave of groans through the crowd.

“Shut that thing off,” Mayor Firlog said, bustling forward. He turned to Nick. “Santa, what should we do?”

“Arrest Punch.” Stew gestured his wiry arm out to his sculpting rival. “He obviously wanted this to happen. Look at him gloating!”

“Wanting to win’s not a crime,” Punch declared. “Besides, if anybody should be arrested, it’s Blinky Brightlow. He’s the one who created this infernal contraption.”

“He sold it to someone who programmed it,” Juniper pointed out. “That’s who did this, not Blinky. Blinky’s not even here.”

“Then find him and make him tell us who’s responsible!” Punch said. “He must know who bought the bloomin’ thing.”

“But why?” Stew’s voice was practically a wail. “Why would anyone but another sculptor want to ruin Blitzen the First?”

“If you’d made it better, it wouldn’t have been so easy to ruin,” Punch sniped.

Just when it looked as if the day’s event would devolve into an elf sculptor knock-down, drag-out, Nick stepped forward, holding the banner that had been trailing from the drone. Our gazes met for the briefest of moments. The dread I saw in my husband’s eyes sent a spike of foreboding through me. Last year, an incident at the ice sculpture contest had set off a week of murder and mayhem in Santaland. Was history repeating itself?

“This crash was meant to deliver a message,” Nick announced. “This banner has words written on it.” He’d accordioned the banner so that no one could read all the words, though.

“What does it say?” the mayor asked impatiently.

To Mayor Firlog’s annoyance, Nick turned to Constable Crinkles before unfurling the banner. Nick believed in going through the proper channels, and discretion.

The same couldn’t be said of Constable Crinkles. He scanned the banner, and as he read he yelled the words into his bullhorn loud enough for all of Santaland to hear. But when I finally glimpsed the message, I could see why. The letters were in all caps, angry red against a white background.

THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING!!!

The beginning of what?

A hubbub of speculation followed Crinkles’s broadcast of the banner’s cryptic message. Were more drone attacks on the way? Glances flicked anxiously skyward as the crowd filtered away from Peppermint Pond. Many of us headed toward the Christmastown Constabulary to discuss the morning’s events.

Claire and I walked on each side of Juniper, who was checking her phone for messages. “I don’t know where Blinky could be,” Juniper said. “He should have been here.”

“If his company built that sculpture-beheading drone,” Claire said, “maybe it’s better that he stayed away.”

Juniper opened her mouth to argue, but then stopped herself. Claire was right. Since Blinky’s creation was at the center of the trouble, maybe it was just as well that he’d missed the event. That crowd had been itching for a scapegoat.

Claire’s eyes widened as we approached the constabulary. “This is a police station?”

The constabulary was housed in an old cottage on the edge of Christmastown. It was an elf cottage, of course, and Claire wasn’t yet used to the slightly smaller scale. As we entered, the low, coved ceilings made her hunch instinctively, even though she was only a little over five feet tall. It had taken me months to assure my inner spatial barometer that I wasn’t going to bang my skull on every doorway.

The interior looked more like something out of an old-fashioned Good Housekeeping magazine than a police station. Few signs of law enforcement were on view here in the cottage’s old dining room, which was still dominated by a long, lace cloth–covered table and chairs. The sideboard served as a file cabinet, with decorative plates on stands used as paperweights. Cheery mistletoe-patterned paper covered the walls, on which several winter scenes hung in gilt frames. A fireplace almost as long as the table took up one side of the room. A metal grate with reindeer prancing across the top protected the hearth, and from the greenery-and-candle-festooned mantel hung two stockings bearing the names Crinkles and Ollie in neatly embroidered letters.

At that moment, Deputy Ollie, now sporting a smock apron over his uniform, emerged from the kitchen with a tray of cookies to pass around. The whole point of coming here was to discuss this morning’s incident away from the crowd, but a large part of the crowd had followed and were all squeezed inside the constabulary. The sculptors were still arguing, Mayor Firlog was blustering away that something needed to be done, and Juniper broke away from Claire and me to buttonhole Crinkles.

“I’ve called and texted Blinky,” she informed him. “He’s not responding.”

From Crinkles’s flummoxed expression, he didn’t see anything odd in the inventor’s absence. I wasn’t sure I did, either.

Ollie stopped in front of Claire and me. “Cookie?”

“No thanks,” I said.

He nudged the platter closer to tempt me. “They’re cranberry cashew.”

“Oh.” There went my willpower. I took one, and Ollie reached into his apron pocket and handed me a dainty paper napkin edged in poinsettias. “They’re really good,” I told Claire.

She took one, too.

Ollie was gaping at Claire now. “Say,” he said, “you’re pretty tall! Ever think about joining the iceball team? You should talk to my uncle about—”

“Ollie,” I interrupted, “this is my friend Claire, from Oregon. She’s not an elf.”

He drew back. “Oh! That’. . .