Mrs. Claus and the Halloween Homicide

Book 2: Mrs. Claus Mystery

by Liz Ireland

Genres: Mystery; Ghost; Holiday books

Synopsis

April Claus knows being married to the real Santa makes every day feel like Christmas. But when a different holiday arrives at the North Pole, so does murder . . .
 
For the first time ever, Christmastown is celebrating a strange new tradition—Halloween. But not everyone is willing to watch their dependable winter wonderland get overrun by carved pumpkins and costume parties. As a series of scary happenings hit Santaland, each one more intense than the last, April realizes having a role in the festivities could cost her family, friends—even her own life.
 
April isn’t the only unlucky target. Outspoken elf Tiny Sparkletoe is found dead in the snow outside his cottage, crushed in the middle of what appears to be a monstrous footprint. With mayhem descending like reindeer on rooftops, April must stop the Halloween killer before the fate of Mrs. Claus becomes another creepy tale to tell in the dark . . .
 
“An exceptional series launch . . . This fun, well-plotted mystery is the perfect holiday entertainment.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 

Release date: September 28, 2021

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

“It was a slaughter,” Salty said.

He’s not wrong, I thought as I surveyed the ruins inside the greenhouse. He’d warned me what to expect during his emergency phone call summoning me, but a slaughter of pumpkins proved more upsetting than I’d prepared myself for. And by “a slaughter of pumpkins” I don’t mean a vegetable term of venery like “a murder of crows” or a “flamboyance of flamingoes.” This was literal violence against a greenhouse full of gourds that had been carefully planted and tended by Salty, the elf who was Castle Kringle’s head gardener and groundskeeper.

I picked my way across broken glass at the threshold of Salty’s greenhouse, horrified by the carnage. Jagged chunks of pumpkin flesh and streams of seedy entrails were strewn across the thermally heated soil. Despite the blissful warmth inside the place, I shivered. I think I knew even then that this vandalism augured worse to come.

My husband, Nick—aka Santa Claus—put his gloved hand on my arm. The set of his bearded jaw told me the sight disturbed him, as well. He was dressed in his everyday red wool suit with black belt and accessories, but he’d taken off his hat inside the greenhouse. This was probably out of habit, but his solemn expression made it appear he’d doffed it out of respect for the pumpkins.

Pumpkins were a novelty in Santaland. Most of these had been earmarked for use during Christmastown’s upcoming first-ever Halloween festivities, but Salty had also been conducting tours. He’d installed a rustic Salty’s Pumpkin Patch sign above the entrance and rigged up a sleigh to resemble an old-timey hay wagon to bring young elves up Sugarplum Mountain to visit the greenhouse. Procuring enough hay bales in the North Pole for this display had been an accomplishment in itself.

“Look at that.” Salty pointed to a corner where a scarecrow with a pumpkin head had been decapitated. The top of its head had been crushed so that only the crooked rictus grin was left. The groundskeeper buried his fists in the oversized pockets of his quilted tunic overalls. “It was like this when I arrived this morning.”

I couldn’t help feeling a little responsible for the elf’s heartbreak, since I’d set him on this pumpkin path. Back in the spring, I’d mentioned to him that it would be fun to have a pumpkin patch at Halloween. It had been pie-in-the-sky musing more than an actual suggestion, but resourceful Salty had taken the idea and run with it, digging into the project with his small hands and big heart. Over the summer he’d repurposed a greenhouse previously devoted to the raising of turnips. “Nobody likes turnips anyhow,” he’d rationalized, and who could argue? By the time Nick and I returned from our four-month respite in Cloudberry Bay, Oregon, where I run the Coast Inn during the summer months, Salty’s pumpkin wonderland was already flourishing, the ground covered with extravagant vines and young pumpkins of all colors and sizes.

Now, a month later, someone had decimated his crop.

“Who would do such a thing?” Nick asked.

“I don’t know,” Salty said. “Hopefully Constable Crinkles’ll be able to get to the bottom of this.”

I wheeled toward him. “You’ve contacted the constable?”

“Sent for him before I sent for you.” He stubbed his pointy-toed boot against a broken orange shell. “A crime’s been committed. I want the evildoer to pay!”

I couldn’t argue with the sentiment, although I questioned Constable Crinkles’s ability to get to the bottom of anything besides a custard pie. Better not disparage local law enforcement out loud, however. I was still a relative newcomer to the North Pole, and while a year ago I’d solved a murder before Constable Crinkles had even managed to work up a decent list of suspects, I had to admit that finding criminals was not in my job description.

Then again, Mrs. Claus wasn’t supposed to concern herself with Halloween celebrations, either. Halloween had never been celebrated in Santaland. Last year, the first year after I’d married and moved here from Oregon, I put up a few decorations and handed out some treats to the young elves in Christmastown. I told them about the night when children in other parts of the world dressed up in scary costumes and took to the streets trick-or-treating.

No matter what corner of the universe you find yourself in, a holiday in which kids extort candy from adults will be popular with the grammar-school set. Elf children—abetted, I suspected, by my friend Juniper, one of Christmastown’s librarians—drew up a petition to bring the celebration to Christmastown and delivered it to the castle. After some wheedling on my part, Nick, who is acting as Santa until Christopher, his twelve-year-old nephew, comes of age, agreed that the night of October 31 could be given over to non-Christmas festivities.

I’d brought Halloween to Santaland, which evidently had caused someone to snap and vandalize Salty’s pumpkin patch.

“Thank goodness I culled some of the nicer Connecticut Field variety,” Salty said. “We’ll have enough big ones for jack-o’-lanterns, but look what they did to the rest of them.” As he walked among his battered plants, his voice grew more distressed. “They practically wiped out my Queensland Blues and the Long Island Cheeses.”

“Your what?”

“Long Island Cheese,” he repeated. “That’s what the paler ones are.” His brow pinched as he stared at me. “I thought you Southerners knew all about pumpkins.”

A Southerner to a Santalander was anyone who lived below the Arctic Circle. Apparently, everyone south of the sixty-fifth parallel is supposed to be a pumpkin expert.

“I mostly know how to carve them up as decorations,” I admitted. “And cook them once they’ve been canned. I never knew there were a lot of different varieties.”

“Golly doodle—there are dozens. Just looking through the seed catalog made my head spin.” His eyes filled with pleasure at the memory.

The sound of approaching motors interrupted our discussion—but only temporarily. The moment Constable Crinkles and his nephew-deputy, Ollie, pushed through the door of the greenhouse, they were agog at the sight of all the pumpkins.

Like a threatened puffer fish, Constable Crinkles inflated in surprise—and he was fairly round already. The brass buttons of his blue wool coat had a hard job of restraining his belly, and the chin strap of his old-fashioned policeman’s hat dug into his multiple chins. “I’d heard about these pumpkin doojabbers, but I haven’t had time to see for myself.” He bent over and squinted distrustfully at a large orange one as if it were an alien life-form.

Ollie, a pencil-thin shadow of his uncle, looked equally perplexed. “I only ever saw one in a can before.”

It was natural. Elves didn’t travel widely, and the North Pole wasn’t conducive to growing a wide variety of vegetables. Castle Kringle’s greenhouses provided much of the produce, as did little garden greenhouses around the country, but most were dedicated to foods that were staples at elf tables. Pumpkin pie filling had always been imported from the South.

Crinkles frowned as he peered around the glass-walled building. “Say . . . isn’t this the turnip house?”

Salty nodded. “Used to be.”

The lawman gulped in panic. “What’re we going to do for turnips? They’re my favorite vegetable.”

Salty and I exchanged looks.

“The problem here isn’t a potential turnip shortfall,” I told Crinkles. “It’s that someone vandalized Salty’s greenhouse.”

The lawman scratched his head. “But this place is right on the castle grounds. Who would do such a thing?”

“Somebody who doesn’t like pumpkins, maybe,” Ollie piped up. “Or somebody who likes turnips.” He laughed. “Hey, maybe it was you, Unc!”

Crinkles swatted his nephew and then turned to Salty. “Are you sure there wasn’t some animal that got in?”

Salty sputtered in disbelief. “What kind of animal can crush a pumpkin like that?”

“Neldor!” Ollie’s eyes went wide.

“Who?” I asked.

The young elf mirrored my own bafflement. “You’ve never heard of Neldor?”

Crinkles rolled his eyes. “Never mind. My nitwit nephew is spouting nonsense—some children’s story about a diabolical reindeer. It’s a myth.” He looked at the pumpkins again. “You really like these things better than turnips?”

Salty cleared his throat, impatient to find whoever had committed the depredations against his pumpkins. “Whoever broke in must’ve used some kind of club, or an ax.”

“Lots of elves have axes,” Crinkles said. “People, too. Seen anybody lurking about?”

Salty shook his head.

The constable puffed out his cheeks, clearly flummoxed as to what steps he should take next.

Ollie lifted a chunk of pumpkin off the ground and gave it a sniff. “Phew, these things have a weird smell. Not like a pumpkin pie.”

Salty’s irritation with the lawmen began to show. “Whoever did this needs to pay,” he insisted.

“Sure,” Crinkles agreed. “But how do we find them?”

“Footprints, maybe?” I suggested. With Crinkles, it never hurt to point out the obvious. It might be autumn in the rest of the world, but in this land of perpetual snowfall, no one could go anywhere without leaving footprints.

The constable snapped his fingers. “Good thinking.”

We all tramped back outside into the cold. I pulled my parka around me and rewound my long wool scarf around my neck, while the elves and Nick barely had to make any adjustments at all.

The trouble with Salty’s having conducted tours was that there were sleigh tracks and little boot prints all around. It had been a few days since the last snow.

“Here are some footprints all by themselves!” Ollie shouted.

“By gum, you’re right!” Crinkles was practically hopping in excitement.

Nick and I exchanged glances. Who’s going to tell them?

“I believe those are your and Ollie’s footprints, Constable,” I pointed out. “You’ll notice they lead to your snowmobiles.”

“Oh.” Crinkles deflated. “That’s right. They do.”

We finally spotted one set of prints that didn’t seem to have come from a tour sleigh. These prints were isolated from the others and appeared to have been made by narrow elf street booties, not the more solid kind worn by the groundskeepers around the castle. One print was in thick powdery snow and bore a clear maker’s mark.

I leaned close and read the letters of the brand aloud. “SB.”

“The mark of Sparkletoe’s Bootery,” Ollie told me. “There are only two places elves buy booties in town—Sparkletoe’s Bootery and Walnut’s Bootie World.”

“Craftsmanship’s better at Sparkletoe’s,” Crinkles said.

“Walnut’s Bootie World provides good value, though.” Ollie lifted his curly-toed black leather boot to show his uncle. “I got these there.”

“Leather looks cheap to me,” Crinkles said dismissively.

“Yeah, but they were half the price of a pair at Sparkletoe’s.”

Unbelievable. They were bickering over shoe stores when there was a criminal at large. “Could we leave the comparison shopping for later?” I said.

Crinkles looked abashed at having gotten so distracted. “The point is, the print at least narrows our suspects down to one of Tiny Sparkletoe’s customers.”

I tried not to show how the name Tiny Sparkletoe affected me.

“I can’t believe another elf would do this,” Salty said in disgust. “A grown elf, too, by the size of that print. Why would anyone want to ruin the pumpkin patch? They know it’s part of Halloween, and everybody’s looking forward to that.”

Not true. Not everyone was looking forward to this new holiday. Just days before, I’d had words with none other than the same Tiny Sparkletoe who owned Sparkletoe’s Bootery, and who was president of the Christmastown Community Guild. He’d made his displeasure with the upcoming festivities abundantly clear.

“It’s going to create all sorts of problems for Christmastown,” he’d told me. “There will be noise, and decorations that aren’t Christmassy, and trash to pick up.”

These seemed ridiculous objections to me, but this had been a one-holiday town for hundreds of years. Change was bound to rattle a few elves and people. Still, I wanted to talk to Tiny Sparkletoe myself before pointing fingers. The evidence so far was thin, and Tiny was a force to be reckoned with in Christmastown. Also, trashing a pumpkin patch didn’t seem like something an upstanding business elf would do.

Crinkles tilted his head. “Thought of something, Mrs. Claus?”

Nick was eyeing me intently, too.

“Only that I should probably get back to the castle,” I said.

Salty appeared wounded that I was abandoning the cause so quickly, but Nick stepped in to reassure him. “We’ll get to the bottom of this, Salty. In the meantime, I think you’ll find that the damage looks worse than it truly is. I counted hundreds of pumpkins unharmed.” He put a hand on the elf’s shoulder. “You did a magnificent job growing them. I’ll ask Jingles if he can spare a few castle elves to help you clean up.”

Jingles was the castle steward, who was in charge of most of the workers there.

Salty looked slightly less upset than he had when we arrived. “Thank you, Santa.”

The minute we were on his sleigh and heading back to the castle, out of view of the elves, Nick turned to me. “What are you planning?”

“Nothing.”

He laughed. “You can’t fool Santa Claus.”

“I think it’s Mother Nature you can’t fool.”

“Well, I can’t answer for her. But I do know that you’re Mrs. Claus, not Nancy Drew. You don’t have to solve the Mystery of the Pummeled Pumpkins.”

I trained my gaze away from him. It was hard to keep secrets from Nick, and not just because he was Santa Claus—that all-seeing business was a myth. But he had penetrating dark eyes to go with his dark hair and beard; it was the eyes that always did me in.

“I know I don’t have to solve anything.” Just because I didn’t have to didn’t mean I couldn’t, though.

He was giving me a suspicious side-eye and seemed on the verge of asking me more when sleigh bells sounded ahead. Coming at us from the opposite direction, my sister-in-law, Lucia, statuesque and blond, perched at the reins of her peculiar sleigh looking like a figurehead at the prow of a ship. Her sleigh had a special spot in the back for Quasar, her reindeer companion. It was the only sleigh in Santaland that was pulled by reindeer and also carried reindeer. I waved and Lucia slowed before we could pass. Nick asked his reindeer team to stop.

“Are you going into town?” I called to Lucia.

“I’m headed to Tinkertown,” she said.

Tinkertown was the village where the elves lived who worked in the many factories that kept Christmas going—the Wrapping Works, the Candy Cane Factory, Santa’s Workshop, to name a few. Getting there required driving several miles and crossing a strip of the Christmas Tree Forest—but from the castle that journey led through Christmastown, which was where I needed to go.

“Would you mind dropping me off at the library?”

Nick eyed me suspiciously. “Thought you needed to go back to the castle.”

“I just remembered I’m supposed to have coffee with Juniper. I said I’d meet her at the library.”

“Sure,” Lucia said. “Hop in.”

This was a bit of luck. A year into my life in Santaland and I still didn’t have a vehicle. Nick wanted to buy me something of my own to get around in, but I couldn’t decide what I wanted. Snowmobiles were fast and handy, but they lacked the style that old-fashioned sleighs had. Then again, those traditional sleighs were dependent on reindeer to pull them, and I had mixed feelings about that. It wasn’t like having a horse-drawn carriage. Reindeer could talk back to you, which could be unnerving if you weren’t used to it. And then there was the whole flying thing. One wrong command and it was bye-bye, biosphere; hello, stars.

“You don’t mind my abandoning you, do you?” I asked Nick.

“No, it’s all right. I have work to do.”

Nick was something of a workaholic, and in the months leading up to Christmas, a Santa’s work was never done. That’s why it had been so gratifying to have him with me when we visited Oregon this past summer. He’d had a real rest. The Coast Inn was near the beach, and Nick was able to sun and swim every day. I’d never seen him look so relaxed—no running Santaland to worry about, no elf disputes to mediate, no Dear Santa letters to answer. He’d gotten used to leisure and had even become addicted to a game he’d bought before the trip. A little too addicted, frankly.

I shot him a look. “Really? Not sneaking off to play Elfcraft?”

He laughed. “No, I reached the second glacier shield. I’m good for now.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“It means I’m up to my ears doing a last pre-holiday inventory before the final push in manufacturing begins next month. No more time for games.”

Starting in November, Santa’s workshops would be going full tilt.

I gave him a quick peck and hopped off, then reached into the back of the sleigh and took out a lap robe. I was always cold, but Lucia, born and bred at the North Pole, never bothered with niceties like blankets. Half the time, like today, she didn’t even bother with a hat or gloves. I’d never seen her so much as shiver. It was freakish.

I climbed up, wrapping the blanket around me serape-style, and thanked her for stopping. Quasar stood behind us in the sleigh, but his antlered head poked between us, his nose glowing in greeting. He had Rudolph blood in him, but his nose wasn’t always dependable. It tended to fizzle. He was a misfit, but he was my sister-in-law’s constant companion.

Lucia urged the reindeer team forward. “Jingles said you were called away on an emergency. What’s going on?”

Jingles made it his business to know the comings and goings of everyone, but Nick and I had dashed over to the greenhouse without telling anyone why. Salty hadn’t been too coherent over the phone.

“Someone broke into Salty’s greenhouse and trashed it.”

Lucia pivoted toward me in shock. “That’s terrible!”

“The one with the p-pumpkins?” Quasar asked.

“Unfortunately.”

“If you ask me, this Halloween business is a lot of nonsense,” Lucia said. “Now it’s encouraging people to vandalize property.”

“Halloween isn’t about property destruction.”

“We never had an incident like this before now,” she said.

For Pete’s sake. “Last year Christmastown had two murders. This was only pumpkins.” Thank goodness Salty couldn’t hear me say that.

Her brow pinched. “I hope the culprits weren’t Christopher and his friends. I know I encouraged his mom to get him that sled and dog team, but he and those friends of his are too rambunctious for their own good.”

Christopher, Nick and Lucia’s nephew, was twelve now but would become the rightful Santa when he reached twenty-one years of age. Nick was already looking forward to the day when he could pass on the suit and sleigh to his young relative and retire. Christopher might be high-spirited, but his heart was in the right place. He and his friends wouldn’t have destroyed Salty’s greenhouse. The scant evidence didn’t point to them, either.

“It was an adult elf, we think,” I said. “The footprints around the greenhouse were from elf booties, with a maker’s mark from Sparkletoe’s Bootery.”

She grunted. “That doesn’t narrow your search down much.”

“It’s not my search. I’m not investigating.”

“Sure you’re not,” she said.

We drove on down the mountain, which was pure Currier and Ives winter beauty, even though it was still October. Light snow flurries dotted the air. At the mountain’s base, we reached the outskirts of the village of Christmastown, where neat cottages lined the streets and cheery lights wound up the decorative lamps and were strung across the streets and boulevards. Darkness stretched ever longer, the closer toward winter we crept, but Christmastown was so well lit that the shortening daylight hours never felt oppressive.

The reindeer pulled up in front of the library, a solid two-story edifice built from gray stone that would have appeared solemn except for the fanciful details the designer had included: columns that had been chiseled to resemble candy canes, gargoyles reading books at the cornices, and an arch over the large door carved with elven legends. The facade was a masterpiece of architectural whimsy. The building was situated by itself in the center of a large flagstone plaza.

Lucia looked over at me, her face tense with worry. “The last time you started investigating, the whole town was turned upside down and inside out. I’d like to know if we should gird our loins for more chaos.”

“It was just pumpkins,” I assured her. “Nothing to get alarmed about.”

I climbed down and went inside the library. Like all elf buildings and houses, the scale was smaller than what I was used to. I stooped automatically, like Gandalf walking into a hobbit house. Juniper sat on a high stool behind the front checkout desk. She was an exceptionally pretty elf, if a little less plump than ideal. Her brown hair was half hidden by a jaunty green elf cap that matched both her eyes and her tunic.

Her normally smiling face collapsed in a mask of concern when she saw me. “Oh, April, I’m so sorry.”

“About what?” Alarm spiked through me. Before I’d left on vacation this summer, I’d forgotten to return a library book. It was amazing that my mere presence didn’t trip off some kind of bad-borrower alarm.

“I heard about the pumpkin patch,” she said.

I exhaled. At least she wasn’t going to shred my library card. “How?” News traveled fast.

“Salty’s cousin cuts hair at Four Gals A-Trimming down the street.”

Elves phoned, texted, and gossiped as never-endingly as people did, if not more so. Santaland might be cold enough to turn any normal warm-blooded creature into a popsicle, but it was a hotbed of gossip.

“It was just pumpkins.” If I repeated it enough, I might even convince myself.

“Maybe . . . or maybe not.” Juniper cast a furtive glance around the library and lowered her voice. “Someone sent us a message on the library’s Elfbook page.”

“What kind of message?”

Her gaze made another scan of the room. Whatever was in this message, she clearly didn’t want to talk about it here. I’d been lying to Lucia earlier about meeting Juniper for coffee, but maybe a chin wag at the coffee shop was called for. From Juniper’s expression, the pumpkin patch damage might be the tip of the crime iceberg.

“Do you have time for a break?” I asked.

Her head bobbed. “Meet you at We Three Beans in ten.”

We Three Beans coffee shop occupied the lower level of a half-timbered building that stood flush against the sidewalk of Christmastown’s main thoroughfare, Festival Boulevard. Even in a city ab. . .