Mrs. Claus and the Nightmare Before New Year's

Book 5: Mrs. Claus Mystery

by Liz Ireland

Genres: Mystery; Female Sleuths; Amateur Sleuth; Animal Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

It’s beginning to look a lot like New Year’s in this creative and witty mystery featuring a unique heroine who’s married to the real-life Santa Claus and living in the North Pole. Santaland is scrambling to keep its secrets hidden from a trio of unexpected guests, but before the New Year’s Eve ball drops, the countdown is on for April Claus to catch a killer…

April Claus is looking forward to relaxing with her hubby, Nick (aka THE Santa Claus), in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. But just after Santa departs for his deliveries, an elf pulls into Santaland with three people he found lost in the frozen wilderness. The survivors of a scientific expedition are injured, but their presence endangers the future of Santaland. So, while the strangers recuperate at the infirmary, April convinces Christmastown to pull off its grandest, most impossible, most magical feat yet . . . pretend to be normal!

Posing as a touristy, albeit Christmas-centric, arctic town, the elves cover their ears, snowmen take a vow of silence, and the reindeer keep their hooves on the ground. But as New Year’s Eve draws closer, hiding their true selves becomes harder to do, especially when one of the uninvited guests dies under highly suspicious circumstances. With a murderer in their midst, April sets out to find the uncorked culprit before any auld acquaintances should be forgot . . . or worse.

Release date: September 24, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

You don’t know the meaning of “mixed emotions” till you’ve waved your beloved spouse off on a round-the-world trip in an overloaded antique sleigh powered by flying reindeer. I mean, who doesn’t love that iconic sight of Santa aloft, silhouetted against the night sky, giving a cheery wave and bringing joy to children around the world? The vision made even me half-woozy with nostalgia and happiness. Yet I also watched the takeoff with my heart lodged in my throat. That was my husband, Nick, ho-ho-hoing up there, and that sleigh didn’t even have seat belts.

Worse still, the weather this December had been completely unpredictable. Santaland had already dug itself out of two blizzards, and snow squalls had been whipping up periodically. What if one of those storms materialized while Nick was up in the sleigh?

As I stood on the steps of Municipal Hall in Christmastown in the minutes after watching Nick depart on his annual errand, all around me the elves were celebrating the big send-off with a jubilant frenzy of cheers, singing, and dancing. For them, the night marked the joyful culmination of a year of almost nonstop preparation. The fact that the holiday had brought a break in the unpredictable weather gave them even more reason to cut loose.

A series of zip lines had been set up in downtown Christmastown, including one strung from the roof of Municipal Hall to the old, sturdy cedar that marked the entrance to Peppermint Park. Now the street resounded with gleeful whoops of elves zipping overhead. Reindeer weren’t known for their sense of humor, but even they were kicking up their heels and laughing at some of the zip-lining elves wearing felt antler beanies.

The Santaland Symphony Orchestra played a full-throttle rendition of “Sleigh Ride” that had other elves dancing a crack-the-whip down the middle of Festival Boulevard where just moments before Nick had been making last-minute checks on his sleigh. Someone had passed out sparklers in the crowd, which, along with the twinkle lights everywhere, set our snow-and-tinsel world aglow.

Sparklers weren’t all that was lit, either. Vendors selling spiced cider, grog, and eggnog—spiked and plain—fueled the exuberant mayhem.

And there I stood, feeling like an astronaut wife seconds after liftoff. Nick, the elves accompanying him, and the nine reindeer drawing the sleigh were just a speck in the sky now; I could barely make out the dim flash of the lead Rudolph’s nose against the ribbon of vibrant northern lights.

The astronaut wife analogy ramped up my anxiety another notch. Would this trip be Santaland’s Apollo 13?

Stop it, I scolded myself. Nick would be back safe and sound in a day and a half, what with travel time and all the crossing of time zones. One of the first things you know when you marry Santa Claus is that you’ll spend part of every Christmas wearing out the carpet with anxiety on his behalf.

My friend Juniper tugged on the sleeve of my puffy winter coat, pulling my focus away from the sky. “Come on, April.” Her curly hair was covered by an elf cap decorated with big gold jingle bells. “Come join the fun.”

“I’m not sure I feel like dancing.”

She glanced up, tracking my gaze. “Your eye strain isn’t going to help Nick navigate. Worrying won’t help anything.”

It was the kind of thing Nick would say—in fact that he had said just this morning when I woke up shivering with fear for him and babbling again about seat belts.

“It’s too late now to retrofit the sleigh with seat belts,” he’d told me in his maddeningly sensible voice.

Frantic laughter had bleated out of me. “No, five decades ago was too late. Seat belts have been required in most places at least that long.”

“Santaland isn’t most places.”

As if I needed a reminder of that. After several years at the North Pole, I was still adjusting. During the first years after my marriage, the sleigh thing had seemed so novel. I put my trust in Santaland magic, like a child. Now I knew bad things could happen. Nick’s sister, Lucia, had been in a sleigh accident earlier this month when she’d been caught in a snow squall. She came out fine—Lucia was as tough as a boot—but just hearing about it had rattled me. I found it much harder to remain calm about my husband circumnavigating the globe in a contraption that had been built before the Wright brothers were even born . . . and hadn’t been altered since.

Nick had shaken his head at me when I worried something terrible could happen. “Haven’t you heard the saying we have here at the North Pole? ‘Santa always comes back.’ ”

“I don’t give a hoot about local sayings,” I’d shot back. “I’m worried about you.”

Having our last discussion be an argument, even one about my fears for his safety, made me feel even more upset now.

I gave myself a mental shake. I’m Mrs. Claus. That title came with many official duties—and being an elf joy buzz-killer wasn’t one of them.

I still wasn’t sure about dancing, though. “I’ll have some grog,” I told Juniper.

Her hat jangled in approval as Juniper bounced on her heels. “Oooh—good idea!”

She grabbed my double-mittened hand and we threaded our way through the throng of elves, reindeer, and snowmen. I was surprised at how few people mingled among elves in the crowd. Usually the humans in Santaland hung around after ceremonial occasions to make a point of being seen—Nick was keen to make the extended Claus family, who mostly lived in the old chateaus on Sugarplum Mountain, less aloof from the population at large. Where was everyone?

My mother-in-law, Pamela, was in bed with a head cold. But that left quite a few people unaccounted for. Other than Nick’s young nephew, Christopher, darting off with some of his friends, the only other person I spied was Nick’s cousin Amory Claus standing next to the Gert’s Pretzels cart, looking jolly and almost Santalike himself. We exchanged a wave.

Juniper and I finally made it to the front of the line at Sniffles’s Grog Wagon.

“Hello, Mrs. Claus.” The twinkle in Sniffles’s dark eyes told me he’d been sampling his own wares. “Small tankard or large?”

I almost said small, but then I remembered that endless sky Nick was traveling across. “Very large,” I said.

“That’s the spirit.” Juniper ordered the same for herself.

When Sniffles handed the large cups to us, Juniper and I raised them together. “To absent friends,” I said, not just thinking of Nick. Claire, my friend from my hometown in Oregon who’d moved to Santaland after I did, was spending Christmas in the north with her boyfriend, Jake Frost (distantly related to Jack). They wouldn’t return till after New Year’s.

The grog, which was bitter with a touch of sweetness, had a kick that took a little of the edge off my anxiety. As Juniper and I wove through the crowd, I thought about the good bottle of champagne I’d put by for this New Year’s. Maybe I would go ahead and pop it open when Nick got home. And then I’d apologize profusely for having been such a worrywart before he left.

My New Year’s resolution: Next year I would be a less naggy, more confident Mrs. Claus.

My arm hit something pointy and someone barked at me. “You there—watch your step!”

The voice belonged not to one of Santaland’s two police constables, but to a snowman named Pumblechook. The stick I’d bumped into was his arm. Last year Constable Crinkles gave Pumblechook one of his uniform hats, and ever since the snowman had acted as if law and order in Santaland rested solely on his frozen shoulders. Arguing with him was pointless. He was convinced he was Santaland’s answer to Joe Friday.

“Sorry, Mr. Pumblechook.” I saluted him. “Won’t happen again.”

“Really?” At such easy compliance, surprise registered in his charcoal eyes. His public reprimands rarely met with anything other than exasperation or laughter. “Well! See that it doesn’t.”

“Yes sir.”

When we were out of earshot, Juniper tsked at me. “You shouldn’t encourage him.”

“Why not? He’s about as good at police work as the actual policemen in this town.”

As if to prove my point, our local lawman, Constable Crinkles, skimmed overhead on the zip line, squealing like a toddler and waving lit sparklers in each hand. Our chief constable’s perfectly round body was squeezed inside the zip line body harness. His blue uniform with shiny brass buttons and tall hat made him resemble a miniature, manic Keystone Cop. Tonight he’d decorated the top of his hat with a gold pom-pom with tinsel streaming from it.

Juniper laughed at the spectacle. “He looks like a flying Christmas ball.”

“Or an over-decorated wrecking ball.”

We had to dive out of the way of oncoming line dancers. Were they doing the conga or the bunny hop? It didn’t seem to matter. The dance line absorbed anyone in its path like a joyous amoeba.

It wasn’t until the whooping dancers had passed that a strangled cry of distress overhead registered. Juniper and I looked up. Constable Crinkles dangled helplessly from the zip line, his arms and legs flapping uselessly.

“Help!” He waved his sparklers to get attention. The chin strap of his cap seemed to have his head trapped at an awkward tilt. “I’m stuck!”

The tinsel streaming from the pom-pom ball at the top of the constable’s uniform hat had managed to get jammed up in the pulley mechanism that was guiding him across the wire. As a result, the lawman was stalled out midway over Festival Boulevard.

His nephew, Deputy Ollie, appeared at my side, a younger, thinner shadow of his employer-relation. He gaped up at his uncle. “What should I do?”

“Get me unstuck!”

“Oh! Okay, I’ll be right there. Don’t move!”

“I can’t move.”

That last grumbling retort was lost on Ollie, who was already charging into Municipal Hall to rush to the rooftop and render emergency aid. Meanwhile, a crowd gathered below Crinkles. Everyone was calling advice up to the flailing constable.

“Try twisting, Constable!” one elf called out.

“No,” another said, “you need to swing your legs.”

“That won’t help,” someone behind me opined. “They’ll have to cut him out of the harness.”

Butterbean, the elf who had come up with the idea for the zip lines, waved his hands to nix that, his boyish blond cowlick quivering at the idea. “Those harnesses were expensive.”

“But we can’t just leave our chief constable dangling from a wire,” Juniper pointed out.

“Ollie’ll get him down,” Butterbean said, expressing more confidence in the abilities of the deputy constable than anyone ever had before.

The crowd’s collective gaze pivoted toward the top of the Municipal Hall, where a hurriedly harnessed Ollie slid onto the zip wire to make his way toward the constable. Immediately it became clear that he’d taken off too fast. The wire was designed to rush people along on a downward trajectory, and now Ollie whooshed headlong toward his uncle.

Cries of alarm and warning went up from the crowd. Too late. The deputy hit his uncle like one ball bearing crashing into another.

“Ouch!” the constable cried out. “You rammed right into my shoulder.”

“Sorry, Unc, I couldn’t figure out a way to make this crazy doojabber slow down.”

“Never mind—just get me out of this.”

“Okay.” The deputy reached up—but his hand came just short of the pulley holding the constable hostage. “Um, how?”

Butterbean cupped his hands like a megaphone and called up to Ollie. “Hoist yourself up to the wire, shimmy over, and twist his hat from the pulley.”

Following those instructions would have been difficult even if Ollie had possessed the build of a capuchin monkey. But lacking both long arms and a prehensile tail, and encased in his own harness, it was nigh on impossible. Now both our constables were dangling over the street.

“What next?” Juniper wondered aloud.

“We could call the Fire Brigade,” I said. “But they’d be coming from Tinkertown, so . . .”

Tinkertown was Christmastown’s sister city, a good twenty-minute sleigh drive away.

Juniper stood directly underneath the constables’ dangling booties, her mittened fists on her hips. Her brow crinkled in thought until an idea struck her and she whirled toward the gathered elves. “I know! Let’s make a pyramid.”

This idea was taken up immediately by the elves nearest us. It was a practical suggestion, since we didn’t have a ladder at hand. And elves love to make elf pyramids, the higher the better. Maybe it’s because their lower center of gravity makes them sturdier, or the fact that they’re usually performing these feats on snow-covered ground that softens any potential falls. But they really are quite adept at stacking themselves up in impossibly high elf piles.

At least, they’re usually adept. When they’re sober.

“I’ll join in,” I said, moving forward.

Smudge, a friend of Juniper’s and my fellow percussionist in the Santaland Concert Band, put an authoritative hand out to stop me. “Sorry, April. You’d throw off the symmetry.”

I tried not to take offense. I was taller and longer limbed than an elf, so my involvement would create a lopsided pyramid. It was hard to stand back and do nothing, though, as inebriated elves clambered on top of one another. Twice they collapsed and had to reorder themselves. And Juniper was going to be at the apex of the tottering mess. I decided that I could at least spot her, and stood at the bottom, arms stretched out ready to catch her if she tumbled off the precarious tower of elves.

When her time came, Juniper scrambled to the top without much problem and reached to unhook the constable’s pom-pom from the pulley. She was to the right of Constable Crinkles, on the downward wire side. As Juniper was wrenching the pom-pom from the mechanism, something in the distance caught her eye. “Look! There’s a big sleigh coming from the north!”

The moment she said the words, the pom-pom finally pulled free. Several things then happened in quick succession. First, half the elves in the pyramid twisted to see if they could spot the aforementioned sleigh. Then Crinkles and Ollie, set free, slipped down the zip line, acting like a giant bowling ball against the elf-sized pins that were Juniper and the two elves beneath her. The top several rungs of elves tilted off balance, causing the structure to sway, which rippled down to the elves at the base. Before I knew what was happening, an elf avalanche was cascading toward me.

If you’ve never been buried beneath a pile of twenty-plus elves, let me tell you, it’s a shock. Elves might be small, but twenty of them together flattened me into the snowy ground. For a moment I was stunned, suffocating beneath all those small but solid woolen-clad bodies. Finally those at the top started to squirm free, allowing a little air to penetrate to those of us at the bottom. When a hand finally reached down to help me to my feet, it was Juniper’s.

“Are you okay, April?” Her tumble to the ground hadn’t fazed her.

I tested my legs. “Everything seems to be functioning.” A Christmas miracle.

Her brow scrunched as her gaze aimed north again. “Whose sleigh do you think that was?”

The sleigh! I’d forgotten about it. What if Nick had crashed and was making his way back?

“Do you think it’s Nick?” I asked. What if he was hurt?

She blinked in surprise. “No—golly gumdrops, I’d recognize Santa’s sleigh. There were only two reindeer pulling this one. It was traveling fast from the north.”

North of Santaland was a vast snowy plain that stretched to our border with the Farthest Frozen Reaches, an icy mountainous wilderness populated with wild elves, snow monsters, Santaland’s criminal exiles, and other unsavory characters. It was also where Claire was vacationing with Jake’s family.

I brightened. “Maybe it’s Claire and Jake.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Smudge said, “Could be someone coming to Christmastown to join the celebration.”

“Why would anyone show up now, when Santa’s already taken off and the fun’s almost over?” Juniper asked.

It didn’t seem like the celebration was winding down to me. In fact, the stuck constables and the toppled pyramid had just been a hiccup in the proceedings, judging from the way the assembled crowd had resumed their revelry. The orchestra was playing “Here Comes Santa Claus” and elves were once again jigging down the street, singing along. Having made it to the end of the zip line, the constables were out of harness and queued up at Sniffles’s Grog Wagon.

The celebration had already grown so loud again that it took a moment to hear the arriving sleigh’s brassy blast, which was like a cross between a hunting horn and an emergency klaxon. The orchestra ceased playing and the crowd parted to allow the vehicle through.

The reindeer pulling the sleigh were rough, shaggy creatures, unlike the more manicured animals from the herds around Christmastown. I recognized the boxy, weathered wood sleigh behind them, although I hadn’t seen it in a while. The vehicle belonged to an elf named Boots Bayleaf, who rarely ventured far from his shack full of unfortunate taxidermy animals in the northern snowdrift, just south of the Farthest Frozen Reaches. The grizzled old elf’s eyes were frantic as he careened down the street thick with revelers. He was forced to stop where Gert’s pretzel cart blocked the road.

“I need to see Doc Honeytree right away,” he shouted.

Constable Crinkles and his deputy stepped out of the grog line to peer into the back of Boots’s sleigh. “What you got there, Boots?”

Ollie, who was taller than his uncle, rose on the pointed toes of his booties to see. His eyes bugged. “Those are people!”

Not elves, he meant. Since I knew all the people in Santaland, I was curious, too, and concerned.

But these people were strangers to me. Two men and a woman lay sprawled unconscious on the flatbed in back of Boots’s sleigh, covered with old woolen blankets. Yes, they were definitely humans—their size was a giveaway. Judging from their faces, which was all I could see of them, all three were adults. Maybe in their thirties? It was a bit hard to be sure of ages; the men had shaggy beards dotted with ice, and all three had a pallor that was mottled red over pale marble. A sure sign of prolonged exposure to extreme cold.

“You know them?” Boots asked me.

I shook my head. It was hard for elves who’d lived all their lives in the close-knit world of Santaland to grasp that I might not know every member of my species. “Their faces aren’t familiar to me.”

“Strangers!” Juniper said, aghast.

While friends or relations who were known to the residents of Santaland were welcome to visit—as long as they pledged to keep Santaland’s secrets—random outsiders were forbidden. Our country was a secluded, magical place. No one wanted to see Christmastown and the surrounding area exploited as a tourist destination.

The constable stood with his arms akimbo and glared at the backwoods elf. “Have you lost your hooting senses, Boots? We can’t have random visitors here.”

“I didn’t invite them, I found them just this side of our border—three lumps of nearly frozen humans in the snow. I need to get them to the Santaland Infirmary. One looks real bad.”

Boots yanked the striped blanket off one of the men. A collective gasp went up from the crowd.

A large antler was lodged in the man’s back.

“Go,” I told Boots. I was already dialing the doctor’s number. “I’ll alert Doc Honeytree that you’re on the way.”

But elves remained crowded around the sleigh, making it impossible for Boots to maneuver around them.

“Was he gored by a reindeer?” Ollie asked.

Constable Crinkles puffed out a breath. “Well, there is a big pointy antler sticking out of his back.”

One well-toned reindeer obviously from the Comet herd nosed his way forward. “Reindeer are not murderers.” The vehement pronouncement was accompanied by a loud sneeze that made elves dart out of his snout’s pathway.

“Hmph.” Crinkles’s lips pressed together. Next to him, Ollie shifted uncomfortably.

Was it my imagination, or were the elves gathered around avoiding looking at each other?

“It’s outrageous!” the reindeer snapped.

Was it? Even Constable Crinkles had a hard time ignoring the gruesome evidence before his eyes. His pallor made me worry that he might faint. I wasn’t feeling too good myself.

Boots bit his lower lip. “I, uh, asked the man who attacked him. He was almost unconscious at that point, and I had to lean close to hear his reply. He said, ‘An animal.’ And that was it.”

Everyone shifted, and pointedly did not look at the reindeer.

“We’re not the only animals in Santaland,” another reindeer called out, to murmured agreement among his fellow ruminants.

He wasn’t wrong. Technically, humans and elves were animals.

The other man lying in the wagon of the sleigh let out a groan.

“All right, everyone—break this up!”

It wasn’t Crinkles trying to scatter the crowd. Pumblechook the snowman had shuffled forward and was now trying to direct traffic and herd elves out of the sleigh’s path.

“Everyone make way for Boots’s sleigh!” he barked.

The elves dutifully followed instructions, moving back and pushing the Gert’s Pretzels cart out of the way. I was slower to react, still distracted by the people in the sleigh. Why were they here—and what were we going to do with them? The future of Santaland might hinge on the answer. What if one of these people was a travel writer or journalist who’d been blown off course?

Way off. Santaland was nestled in an unmapped arctic valley nearly impossible to find.

Yet these three had found it. Had they meant to, or were they lost?

It didn’t matter. What mattered now was helping them to the extent we could, and then getting them out and back to where they came from with Santaland’s secrets preserved.

“Egress!” Pumblechook shouted at the stragglers—including me. “Let the sleigh through.”

As the sleigh nosed forward, one of the men’s eyes opened. He blinked groggily at Pumblechook. “A talking snowman?”

He fell back again, delirious, but that question made my heart sink. Preserving Santaland’s secrets might prove an even trickier business than I’d feared.

Christmastown leaders gathered at the Midnight Clear diner for an emergency meeting. A retro eatery with a strong Christmas vibe was an unlikely venue to discuss weighty civic matters, but Municipal Hall was closed up for the holidays, while the diner was open late and toasty, and practically empty since the street celebration was still underway.

Besides myself, Constable Crinkles and Mayor Firlog of Christmastown were also present. And of course, where the mayor appeared, Mrs. Firlog was never far away. I’d asked Amory Claus to join us, too. Given that Pamela, Nick’s mother, was in bed with a cold, and . . .