Chapter 15
Jingles examined his snowmobile as closely as possible without the aid of a magnifying glass. Even though I’d taken it through Walnut’s Sleigh Wash by the fuel depot and had even sprung for the hand wax, I held my breath as Jingles pored over every square inch. If anything, his inspection became more meticulous once he’d twigged to the fact that I’d gotten it professionally cleaned.
When he finally nodded his approval, I let out a breath.
“Walnut’s did a good job.” He placed a hand lovingly on a handlebar. “Almost as good as I would have done myself.”
“I wanted to save you the trouble. Not that there was anything wrong with it,” I added quickly. “But Boots’ place was a long drive. I hit a little muddy slush.”
He winced at the thought of anything but pristine snow touching his beloved Snow Devil. “Did you learn anything?”
“Not much.” After Lucia’s warning not to trust Jingles, I hesitated to reveal more to him.
He scrunched his lips. “I’m surprised old Boots didn’t try to extract some kind of quid pro quo to get something from you in exchange for information. It’s about that crazy coot’s speed.”
I kept my gaze off the snowmobile that the crazy coot had been popping wheelies on. “He’s a character, all right.”
I left Jingles putting his vehicle to rest under plastic sheeting in his storage shed.
One person I could think of who would benefit from learning what I’d heard today was Tiffany. Familial relations in the castle could only improve when she found out her brother-in-law wasn’t responsible for her being a widow. The testimony from both Boots and Amory about the snow monster hunt confirmed Nick could not have been responsible for Chris falling into that crevasse. Learning that she wasn’t living under the same roof as her husband’s murderer was bound to ease her mental distress.
I entered the castle through the side entrance to the lower west wing where Tiffany and Christopher had their quarters.
It was late afternoon and the hallway lights hadn’t been turned on yet. One of the contradictory facts of life at the castle was that during winter afternoons, when there actually was a little natural light, the interior of the castle could seem darker than at night when all the chandeliers, lamps, decorated trees, and strings of lights chased out the winter gloom.
This part of the castle, the newest, had plaster walls, but Tiffany had had them all painted a gray shade called Stately Granite, which pretty much replicated the Frankenstein’s castle dreariness of the Old Keep, only with a glossier finish.
Down the hall, Christopher was having a cello lesson. He complained about practicing, but listening to him and his professor playing a Bach Contrapunctus, I was impressed. Maybe he should be playing at the skate night.
I knocked at Tiffany’s door but didn’t hear an answer, so I rapped my knuckles a little louder. A few moments passed before the knob turned and the door swung open.
Tiffany was standing in a floor-length black velvet dressing robe, fitted to her torso like a corseted Victorian lady’s dress. She wore four-inch mule slippers that brought her up to my height and she gripped a silver hairbrush in one hand like a weapon.
“I said come in,” she huffed.
“Sorry—I didn’t hear you.”
Her steady gaze held mine. “What did you want?”
“To talk . . . if you have time?”
“I’m brushing my hair, but sure, come in.”
She turned and crossed the cavernous bedroom to her dressing table, an ornate three-mirrored rosewood affair that was as wide as a classic Cadillac. The taste for modern decor—even modern vintage—hadn’t reached Santaland. The castle was still packed with all the too-heavy, too-tall furnishings that had gone out of favor everywhere else: towering wardrobes that could crush a reindeer like a bug, dressers that required four elves to budge a few feet, and cabinets and tables so ornately carved that it took the better part of an hour to dust all the nooks and crannies.
One change had been made fairly recently in this room: The doors of a tall wardrobe had been replaced with glass, which created an oversized trophy case dedicated to Tiffany’s figure-skating career. One of her costumes, dripping with blue and white sequins, hung in the center, surrounded by programs, skates, trophies, and clippings. Discreet yet focused lighting made everything visible—unmissable—in the dark room.
Of course I wandered over to look at the artifacts of Tiffany’s former life. No one else I knew created shrines to themselves, but I hadn’t met many people who’d been competitive on a world stage, as Tiffany had been.
Through the mirror, she saw me perusing the relics of her glorious past. “That’s the dress I wore when I won bronze at Junior World.”
“It’s gorgeous—and so elaborate. I can just see you shimmering across the ice.”
“I skated to a medley from Beauty and the Beast.”
Looking at her seated on her cushioned, low-back chair in front of her vanity, petite but regal, I understood for the first time how she must have felt she’d found a perfect place for herself here. A princess of the ice became an ice princess for real—the center of attention, next to her handsome, charismatic prince. All the ceremonial duties that chafed at me probably seemed just right for her. And then, this year, her happiness had turned to sorrow.
Maybe I could take a scrap of that sorrow away.
I sat on the corner of the bed and watched her through the mirror. I’d never considered brushing one’s hair to be an activity requiring much concentration, but Tiffany ran the fine-haired brush over her long dark locks as if it were an Olympian skill requiring as much dedication as perfecting a triple axel.
“I didn’t dismiss what you were telling me that day we were on the roof,” I said.
Her reflection showed no change of expression. “Why would you? You should know the man you married.”
“I do. That’s why I couldn’t account for the disconnect between the good man I know and the terrible things you were insinuating.”
Her hand dropped to her side and she twisted to face me. “Something happened on that mountain.”
“Yes. Chris fell into a crevasse.”
“He was an expert climber. A sportsman.”
A reckless daredevil. I didn’t say it, though—she was still holding that lethal hairbrush. “Anyone can have an accident, Tiffany. Chris did that day. I’ve talked to two men who were on the mountain, and they both confirmed that Nick was nowhere near the place where the tragedy occurred.”
“Who did you talk to?” she asked sharply, as if this person had betrayed her.
“Does it matter? They were there and we weren’t.”
“Exactly.”
I frowned. “Exactly what?”
“Those people can concoct any old story and according to you we’d just have to take their word for it.”
“Because they were eyewitnesses to what happened that day. That’s only logical.”
Her eyes narrowed to withering slits. “Thank you, Mrs. Spock. It’s also logical that you would coerce people to say anything to exonerate Nick.”
“I didn’t coerce anyone. And both people told me this independently of each other.”
“Who were they?” she asked again.
I thought of Amory holed up in his office with the windows closed on the mountain that had borne witness to his lapse of either courage or stamina, which had resulted in his not being there to help Chris. If Chris could have been helped.
I decided to leave him out of it.
“One of them was Boots Bayleaf,” I said.
She stared at me for a moment, then laughed. “That drunken geezer?”
“According to someone I spoke to, he’s the best elf to have on a snow monster hunt.”
“He didn’t do my husband much good, did he?”
Unfortunately, I was unable to contradict her.
“Who was this other so-called witness?” Tiffany asked. “Nick, maybe?”
“I haven’t said a word about this to Nick.”
“Why not?” She studied me before a sly smile came over her. “Is the bride a little suspicious?”
“No,” I bit out. “I was just trying to find out the truth, but you apparently don’t want to know it.”
“Three deaths.” She held up three fingers. “Chris, Giblet, and Old Charlie. And believe me, there will be another. And if you keep poking around, it might be yours.”
Was that a prediction or a threat? I got off the bed. “I don’t know why I bothered,” I said in disgust. “I felt sorry for you.”
“Save your pity for yourself. I married a man who was killed. You married a man I wouldn’t trust for all the gumdrops in Sugarplum Mountain.”
As if she put any value on gumdrops. I doubted one had ever passed her lips.
“If you’re determined to be wrong and miserable, I can’t stop you,” I said. “But at least let Christopher be free of your delusions. He’s a happy kid, except his worries about you. He loves his family, but he wants more freedom, a life outside the castle. Don’t you remember what that was like?”
She rose now, too, like a panther ready to pounce. “Don’t I? You have no idea what my life was like—oh, sure, it was hard, but have you ever skated across the ice, twirling, leaping, with the eyes of an entire arena on you?”
“No, of course not.”
“That’s real freedom, but it only comes after laying the groundwork. After dedicating your life to an avocation and putting in the effort. That’s the kind of freedom I want for my son, in whatever he chooses to do.” She gave me a dismissive head-to-toe scowl. “You wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“All I’m saying is that Christopher deserves to cut loose a little, like a normal kid. And he wants to see you happy again, too.”
She bit her lip, seeming to consider my words, but then her gaze hardened again. “Don’t worry about Christopher and me. The happiest day of my life will be when he turns twenty-one and Nick has to step aside. If Nick makes it that long.”
What was she implying? “Is that some sort of threat? Nick is looking forward to that day, too.” We’d talked about moving back to Oregon most of the year once his responsibilities here were over. It was still ten—now more like nine—years away.
“Nick can’t get away with things forever.”
Lucia was right. Crazy as a bedbug.
I left Tiffany in her Ice Capades museum of a room. In the hallway, my phone let out a “Fa-la-la-la-la” jangle in my pocket. I flipped it open and glanced at the screen. The preview of a new text message flashed:
D. SPROAT: I WON’T FORGET THIS.
I sank against the shiny gray wall and heaved a breath, letting the warm cello sounds floating down the corridor soothe my taut nerves. Forget what? What was Damaris fuming about now?
I’d just been thinking about retiring to Oregon as a light at the end of the snow tunnel. A text from Damaris Sproat was a timely reminder that there were crazy people everywhere.
I was punching in the first number of my PIN to phone my friend Claire when someone called out.
“Hey there!”
I looked down the long, dark hall. “Hello?”
No answer, although I thought I could hear the sounds of someone running. An elf, probably, hurrying about his or her business.
I glanced back down at my phone screen, which had gone black again. I pressed the start button and began keying in my PIN again.
“Hey there!”
The voice, enthusiastic and beckoning, drew me down the hallway, past the room where Christopher’s music lesson was taking place. An irregular corner led to the front section of the castle on the right, and on the left it joined up with the Old Keep.
“Hey there!”
Of course the person shouting was in the Old Keep. I took a breath, walked cautiously to the old winding staircase foyer, and peered down.
Was someone trapped in the cellar? I couldn’t see anyone. “Hello?”
I cautiously descended a few steps.
“Hey—!”
This time the shout was cut off, almost as if the person calling out had had a door slammed on them.
I hurried down and paused in the dank corridor to look around. I hadn’t forgotten about the wooly rats. I whipped out my cell phone and turned on its flashlight, studying the narrow passage. There was a wine cellar down here, part of Jingles’ bailiwick. All the rooms were locked, as far as I knew. But today one of the oak-and-iron doors stood slightly ajar. I eyed it anxiously.
“Hello?” I called out again.
No answer.
A cold knot formed in my chest, as if some unknown terror lurked on the other side of that door. Don’t be silly. This wasn’t Transylvania; it was Santa’s castle at the North Pole. A few rodents were about all there was to be afraid of.
I straightened and walked toward the open door. If someone was in distress, I was doubly foolish for being afraid of my shadow. The door opened with a push—albeit also with an ominous creak—and I stepped inside.
The stone floor was so cold I could feel the chill through the soles of my shoes. My breath puffed in front of me in the illumination of the phone’s light. And then I started to see the eyes.
Glassy eyes. Dead-looking stares. I turned in a circle; I was surrounded by faces. Bodies too, but it was the faces that leapt out at me—porcelain, plastic, wood, cloth—doll faces. Scary old dolls in tattered dresses with outstretched arms and dead stares. Clown dolls that had probably launched a million nightmares and a couple of Stephen King books. A baby doll with a face painted as a Pierrot. Marionettes with rictus grins hanging from the ceiling. A Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist dummy lay in a box as if it were a coffin.
I forced myself to breathe. Dolls. Just dolls. Old, creepy dolls, but—
Click, click, click—
I barely had time to register the noise behind me, like a winch being turned. I pivoted just in time to see a man leaping out at me, holding a knife.
“Hey there!”
Shrieking, I dropped my phone and ran. Without a flashlight, I stumbled into a pile of what looked like knock-off Raggedy Anns with messy yarn hair. Scrambling, I got to my feet and shot toward the sliver of dim light coming through the door. I hurtled up the stairs, not even realizing I was still yelling until I plowed right into someone’s chest.
It was Nick.
“Oh, thank goodness!” I threw my arms around him. “Someone tried to kill me.”
His arms around me loosened and he drew back, studying my face. “Who?”
“That demon down there!”
His expression screwed up in disbelief. “Was it a person or an elf?”
“I don’t know, but he had a knife!”
Nick let me go, turned, and took a step down. I gripped his shoulder to stop him. “Don’t—he’s deranged. Send Jingles.”
Nick laughed. “I won’t tell Jingles you volunteered him for demon slaying.”
“I mean, send anybody else.”
Christopher appeared at the top of the stairs next to his music tutor, Mr. Merriman. Merriman was a basketball-shaped elf in a dark green velvet suit and black booties with Pilgrim buckles. Thick spectacles perched over beady eyes.
“What’s going on, Uncle Nick?” Christopher asked.
“April saw something down here.”
“Can I go with you?” Christopher hopped down several stairs.
I stopped him with my outstretched arm. “Don’t. There’s a maniac down there. With a knife or something. He attacked me.”
“Right here in the castle?” Mr. Merriman exclaimed. “Good heavens!”
Christopher ducked under my arm and ran down to join Nick. Groaning, I followed at a safe distance. Even more reluctantly, Mr. Merriman fell into line behind me, holding his cello bow in front of him like a sword. Much good it would do him against the knife-wielding fiend.
When we reached the door, there was more light coming from inside. Nick had found the bare bulb hanging from a ceiling timber and pulled the chain.
All the dolls were still staring at me. So was my would-be assassin.
Nick pivoted toward me. “Is this who jumped out at you?”
My attacker was a jack-in-the-box. A large one, but still . . . a toy. The papier-mâché head was attached to a narrow spring-loaded body. The toy wore a shiny jester’s cap, and in his hand was a stick bearing a miniature copy of his head, also in motley. The knife that had terrified me.
My fear ebbed, quickly overwhelmed by a tide of embarrassment.
Christopher howled with laughter. “You were screaming bloody murder because of a jack-in-the-box?”
“It looked different in the dark,” I said weakly. The light had been bad.
Even the cowardly cello instructor eyed me with equal parts pity and mirth.
“Hey, April,” Christopher taunted. “Boo!”
He tossed an old troll doll at me and I caught it one-handed. Handball had given me good reflexes. If only it could have had lasting beneficial effects on my eyesight, or my courage.
Nick leveled a shaming stare at his nephew.
“What is this place?” I asked, before Nick could scold the kid for teasing me, which I richly deserved.
“It’s rather creepy,” Mr. Merriman said, shoving his glasses up his nose as he inspected the Pierrot baby doll I’d noticed before.
Super creepy. I was finally beginning to breathe easier and look around the room objectively. There were boxes piled up to the ceiling against one wall and other stacks of various heights elsewhere. Some boxes had been opened, some overturned. I saw a few dolls that looked as if they’d been shredded by an animal. Could rats do that?
“Why are all these dolls down here?” I asked.
“It’s the doll cellar,” Nick said. “Where the outdated ones are stored.”
There were an awful lot of them. I wondered if selling them online would be permissible, although the postage cost from the North Pole alone might discourage buyers. Unless Nick could just toss them off his sleigh Christmas night, like Santa does in—
“Wait a second.” I frowned. “So these toys are misfits?”
“I guess you could call them that,” Nick said.
“So why not send them . . .?”
Nick’s eyes went wide—the facial equivalent of flapping his hands in warning that I was about to say something very stupid.
Mr. Merriman, unfortunately, picked up on my unspoken blunder. “Good heavens, you aren’t one of those people who think there’s actually an Island of Misfit Toys!”
“It’s like when I wanted to go to school at Hogwarts.” Christopher bleated out a laugh. “Only I was eight.”
My face burned. “Is it really so outlandish?”
The three of them exchanged anxious looks on my behalf, which was rich. I was living in a land so fantastical I couldn’t even tell my best friend about it for fear she’d think I’d gone off my rocker, yet I was the crazy one for believing one little part of the Christmastown myth. Right.
“Toys are inanimate, April,” Nick said.
And reindeer are wild animals, and elves are tree-dwelling cookie bakers on TV commercials.
Mr. Merriman nodded. “Nothing animated here except a jack-in-the-box.”
As I leaned down to pick up my phone where I’d dropped it, I took another look at the creature who’d scared me so. He was silent now, as if to make my mistake seem all the more foolish. What, or who, had wound him up? “When I was upstairs, I heard the thing calling, ‘Hey there!’ at—well, not at me, obviously. I didn’t know that at the time, though.”
“That’s what he’s programmed to say,” Nick said, not understanding.
“But why was he working five minutes ago but not now?”
“Maybe he has a wonky battery,” Christopher said. “Sometimes I think one of my electronics has run down, but then I turn it on and it’ll work for a minute.”
Nick nodded, then raised a brow at me. See? his expression seemed to say. Even an eleven-year-old has a more rational brain than yours.
Would I sound paranoid if I mentioned the footsteps I’d heard from the hallway? Probably—I couldn’t even say for sure where they’d come from. Even without jibbering about mysterious footsteps, I sensed that I’d already sunk a little in the estimation of the three people in the room.
“I don’t really believe toys are alive,” I insisted.
Christopher snorted. I so wanted to beg him not to tell Lucia about this. Martin, either. But of course he was going to tell both of them. He’d probably be spreading this tale all over the castle. What kid could resist?
Something in the corner caught my eye. One of those chalkboards on an easel had been set up—a long time ago, probably. Someone had drawn up two columns: “Naughty” and “Nice.” I squinted, unable to make out everything in the shadowy light.
Bored now, the others headed for the door.
“You coming, April?” Nick asked.
“In a minute,” I said. “I’ll lock up when I’m done.”
He looked perplexed. “I thought you’d want to get out of here.”
“Yeah,” Christopher said. “You were screaming so loud we thought somebody was killing you.”
So did I.
“I’ll just tidy up a bit,” I said. “Hate to leave a room in disorder.”
Christopher piped up with the enthusiasm of a kid who’d just figured out a legit way to skip out on schoolwork. “I can help.”
“You’ve got another few bars of Bach to master, young man,” Mr. Merriman said, pointing toward the door with his cello bow.
Dragging his feet, Christopher moaned, “Back to Bach.” He laughed at his wordplay and followed his teacher.
Nick lingered with me. “What’s caught your eye now?”
I turned on my phone light, aimed it at the blackboard, and then began to pick my way over to it. “Look at this.”
Naughty: Nice:
Chris
Nick Lucia
Amory
Martin
Though all the lettering had faded over time, I could still tell that Lucia’s name, under “Nice,” had been gone over several times to make it stand out.
“Not hard to guess who was playing Santa that day,” Nick said.
I imagined a diminutive Lucia stuck inside on a blizzard day, coming down to this room to hide or just play by herself. Instead of reindeer, she would have been able to herd old dolls and boss them to her heart’s content. Her captive audience.
“What’s all this stuff being saved for?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It’s just where overflow got shoved at one point, generations ago, and no one bothered to clear it out. Most families have a jumble closet or an overstuffed attic, don’t they?”
“Not with creepy dolls and demonic jack-in-the-boxes.”
Nick’s reply was cut off by the ringing of his phone. “Nick Claus,” he answered. As he listened, letting out a series of increasingly distressed grunts, I studied my nemesis, Mr. Jack-in-the-Box, with his frozen smile and his shiny cheeks. He was silent now, and still as stone. What had set him off?
Or who.
Nick hung up the phone, a worried look on his face.
“Trouble?” I asked.
“Someone at the Workshop warehouse misplaced a carton of Candyland.”
“An emergency, then.” Five-year-old me would have thought so, at least.
As we shut the door on the storage room, an ice rat skittered past and dived into a pile of boxes. I swallowed a shriek. Lucia’s poison obviously hadn’t worked.
I remembered the last time I’d run through this door screaming in terror. Nick had been right at the top of the stairwell.
“What were you doing here?” I asked as we climbed the stairs. “It seems a strange coincidence that we both happened to be in the Old Keep.”
He smiled distractedly. “I was looking for you, actually. I thought I had an hour free, and hoped we might be able to have a little time together to grab a coffee or something.”
“I was hoping that, too,” I said. “I have something I want to talk to you about. It might not be something you want to go into, though.” In fact, I knew it wasn’t. Especially right now. Hard to discuss the details of a fateful snow monster hunt and his brother’s death when his mind was occupied with Candyland.
“I’ll see you at dinner,” he said.
We went our separate ways. I was still mulling over all that had happened in the doll cellar. First the jack-in-the-box had frightened me, and I’d run out of the room and up the stairs and collided with Nick. Then Christopher and Mr. Merriman had appeared. They were just down an adjacent hall, so it made sense that they’d heard me yell.
Another person had been down that same hallway, too, and was bound to have heard me. Tiffany. But she hadn’t come running, or even walking. Strange that she would be so incurious about shrieks of terror happening so close to her own bedroom, and so close to where her son was.
Unless she’d understood exactly what was going on down there.