Chapter One
Yule Lads
In Icelandic folklore, thirteen troll brothers known as ‘Yule Lads’ visit for the thirteen nights leading up to Christmas Eve. Children leave their shoes on the windowsills, and the designated Yule Lad for that evening places a gift inside for good behavior. If the child is naughty, he or she gets a rotten potato instead.
If you’ve ever smelled a rotten potato in your pantry, you know the Yule Lads aren’t messing around. At least they don’t eat your flesh like the worst version of Krampus, Santa’s hairy, fanged buddy.
Krampus has issues.
Luckily for Icelandic children, the Yule Lads are just weird.
Really weird.
There’s Sheep-Cote Clod (Stekkjastaur), who harasses sheep, and Gully Gawk (Giljagaur), who hides in gullies to bother livestock.
Then there’s the kitchen contingent—Stubby (Stúfur), who steals food from pots, Spoon-Licker (Þvörusleikir), who licks unwashed spoons, Skyr-Gobbler (Skyrgámur), who eats all the yogurt, Pot-Scraper (Pottaskefill), who scrapes pots for leftovers, and Bowl-Licker (Askasleikir), who—you guessed it—licks bowls.
Believe it or not, the last six brothers are even stranger. There’s the Door twins (Hurðaskellir)—one who slams doors to wake people like an angry poltergeist, and his brother, who sniffs at entryways, looking for food. Then there is Candle-Beggar (Kertasníkir), who steals candles, Sausage-Swiper (Bjúgnakrækir), who is pretty self-explanatory if not rife with phallic innuendo, and Meat Hook (Kjötkrókur), who sounds terrifying, but who only uses his hook to steal smoked lamb from the rafters.
This delightful group is rounded out by Peeper (Gluggagægir), who peeps into your house, looking for things to steal. He sounds a little creepy, but after hearing about the rest of his dysfunctional family, he doesn’t come as a surprise.
Their mother, Grýla, must be so proud.
Actually, the Yule Lads’ mother probably is proud, because she’s a troll, too, and this sort of behavior is cool by troll standards—especially a couple of pranksters like Grýla and her lazy husband Leppalúði.
It’s safe to say most of the residents of Pineapple Port have never heard about the Yule Lads.
But they will.
Chapter Two
Charlotte
Christmas was Charlotte’s favorite holiday. She didn’t love it in a goes-shopping-at-Christmas-stores-in-June sort of way, but Christmas at Christmastime made her happy. She couldn’t imagine how anyone couldn’t love Christmas—lights, presents, a feeling of camaraderie and family—all good stuff.
Every year, the Pineapple Port neighborhood where she grew up went bonkers stringing lights and setting up giant inflatable snowmen in their yards. Because the retirement community consisted of nothing but ranch-style modular homes, it was even relatively easy to get on a roof to put decorations there—a whole sled and eight not-so-tiny reindeer—nine if you count Rudolph.
The only thing that made Charlotte a little sad this year was that she wasn’t living in Pineapple Port anymore. She’d gotten married and moved in with her husband, Declan, who had a much better house not in a retirement community.
The irony of growing up in a fifty-five-plus community only to move out shortly before turning thirty wasn’t lost on her, but it wasn’t horrible to live a life without the watchful eye of the local retirees on her. Some of them had a lot of time on their hands. Too much, even.
Charlotte hadn’t gone far. Declan lived close to her old home, and they rented the little building at the entrance of Pineapple Port as an office for their Charlock Holmes detective agency. The money she got from renting out her old home paid for the little office and then some, so it all came out in the wash, as they say.
And by “they,” she meant the retirees who’d taught her to use all those old-timey catch phrases like, “it’ll all come out in the wash.”
Poor Declan. She knew living with her was sometimes like living with a crazy old lady.
Today was a sunny day in Pineapple Port, a little less than two weeks from Christmas. While the rest of the country shoveled snow or wrapped their jackets tightly around their bodies, Charity, Florida, remained toasty. It was sunny almost every day in Florida—except when it was raining like cats and dogs—yet another old-timey phrase that didn’t make a lot of sense.
This warm December morning, Charlotte opened her door to take her soft-coated Wheaten terrier, Abby, for their morning walk and nearly stepped on a small, red, square package sitting on the sisal doormat. Her foot hung in the air as the dog trotted out, but she placed it down hard to the left of the package when Abby jerked her through the doorway. Abby was only about forty pounds, but she had a thick neck and a solid chest capable of pulling anyone anywhere she wanted to go.
“Hold on,” Charlotte said, bracing herself to stop the dog’s momentum.
Abby looked at her, scowling with her dog eyebrows, and Charlotte relented—no sense wrestling when the whole point was to let the dog do her thing. When Abby finished, Charlotte scooped up the red-wrapped package on her way back inside. Declan’s open-plan home allowed her to see him sitting at the kitchen table as she reentered, and she held up the little red box with the green bow for him to see.
“What’s that?” Declan asked from his seat at their kitchen table.
“I was hoping you knew,” she said, unclipping the dog. “I found it on our doorstep.”
“Not a clue,” he said, sipping his coffee, his thick head of dark hair still poking in all directions from sleeping.
No amount of uncombed hair could make him any less handsome in her eyes. Tall, broad-shouldered, a swimmer’s body—she’d take his crazy sleepy hair anytime. Hopefully, he’d always feel the same way about her hastily ponytailed locks because she’d never be the sort of girl who smoothed down every hair or threw on half an inch of makeup before, or after, coffee.
Charlotte sat across from Declan and turned her attention to the package. It wasn’t large, maybe four inches square—a good size for holding a single tennis ball, though she couldn’t imagine who’d gift them a single tennis ball. She undid the loosely tied bow—the only thing securing the lid—and was about to pop off the top when Declan reached out to put his hand on top of it.
“Should we open that here?” he asked, his lips pursing with what looked like concern.
Charlotte chuckled. “You think it’s a bomb? A teeny-tiny bomb?”
His cheeks colored. “Who knows? We catch bad guys. We’ve made enemies.”
She squinted back at him. His anxiety was adorable, but she didn’t share it.
“I think we’ll be okay,” she said.
He shrugged and removed his hand.
“Okay, but if you kill us, I’m going to kill you,” he said.
She rolled her eyes. She didn’t think for a second someone had booby-trapped the present—but she grimaced and turned her head as she eased the lid off just in case.
Nothing exploded.
She peeked at the box and set the lid aside. Inside sat a folded piece of paper.
“That’s anticlimactic,” Declan said.
She nodded as she plucked the standard-sized sheet of white typing paper from inside and unfolded it. At the top of the printed message was the logo of a colorful bird. The rest of the sheet had a hand-drawn map—a cluster of squares and lines with what looked like a red tree near the center. The map's general layout reminded her of Pineapple Port, with the largest square representing the community center clubhouse. The rectangle beside could be the pool.
She turned it to show Declan.
“What the heck is that?” he asked, taking the paper to study it.
“Again, I was really hoping you knew,” she said.
He motioned to the map. “This has to be Pineapple Port, right?”
“Sure looks like it,” she agreed.
He handed her back the paper.
“Feels like a treasure map, doesn’t it?” she asked. “Maybe this is some goofy game Mariska and Darla are playing?”
Her husband snorted. “Probably.”
The two ladies who’d served as Charlotte’s adoptive mothers after her grandmother died—Darla and Mariska—also loved Christmas. Every year, they drove her around the neighborhood after dark on one of their golf carts, dogs on their laps, admiring the holiday lights.
“Do you know what’s there? The spot marked with the red tree-looking thing?” Declan asked, poking at the map.
Charlotte shook her head. “The lake is there, so...I think there is a little clump of trees in that general area. That’s where the photographers take their Great Blue Heron shots.”
“So that red tree might be the little nature area—not so much a single tree?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“What about that logo at the top?” he asked.
“I don’t know it,” she admitted.
Declan picked up his phone. “You found it out front? I’ll check the doorbell camera.”
“Yes. It was on the doorstep.”
She watched as Declan scrolled through the clips, thinking she could do it faster, but she didn’t have her phone with her and had been training herself not to make everything some little competition in her head. Even thinking that she’d be able to find the clip faster was a step backward.
Maybe I should put a coin in a jar every time I—
“Got it,” he said.
His expression darkened as he watched the clip.
“What is it?” she asked.
He turned the phone to her, and she watched as someone jogged to their door, left the package, and jogged away. She’d imagined that’s more or less what the clip would look like, but she hadn’t expected the head of the gifter to be so misshapen. This definitely wasn’t Mariska or Darla. They moved like a much younger, thinner person than either of those ladies.
“Why are they wearing a mask?” she asked, taking the phone from him and restarting the clip.
“You can only see it for a second, but it looks like some kind of old man mask, doesn’t it? Big nose? Beard?”
She nodded and paused it during the one moment their front light fell most perfectly on the mask.
“Hat too. Kind of looks like a garden gnome,” she said.
“I could see that,” he agreed. “The problem is it’s Christmas, not Halloween.”
“And the body type doesn’t look like anyone we know. Darla, Mariska, Seamus...” she murmured, mostly to herself. “This is definitely weird...”
“The fact that a garden gnome left us a gift or the fact that we don’t know any other young people?” Declan asked.
She giggled. “Both, I guess.”
He nodded and finished his coffee with one long gulp.
“I assume we’ll be stopping off at this tree area on the map before we go to the office?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Um, yes.”
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