Chapter Ten
By the time I arrived at the offices of Santaland Postal Express, the standoff with the alleged burglars had grown heated. Juniper, Smudge, and Filbert—SPEX’s manager armed with a snow shovel—had Jingles and Butterbean backed up against the wall of the building’s half-timbered exterior. I’d convinced Juniper not to call Constable Crinkles till I got there, but obviously she’d felt obliged to inform Filbert.
Jingles nearly went boneless with relief as I approached. “Mrs. Claus, tell them we’re innocent!”
“Totally innocent!” Butterbean echoed.
Smudge turned to me and explained, “We discovered Butterbean standing on Jingles’s shoulders, trying to break into a window.”
Butterbean’s hands fluttered frantically. “I was just peeking in because the door was locked.”
“Of course the door was locked,” Filbert said. “We were robbed last week. But you two would know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
Jingles drew up, bristling. “Certainly not. You think I would stoop to stealing candy?”
“That’s right,” Butterbean said. “We were only stealing what belonged to us.”
Jingles glared at him, then explained to Filbert, “I told you, we just came here to pick up a package.”
“That’s a logical explanation,” he said, “except that there’s no package here for either of you.”
“It’s in Salty’s name,” Jingles said. “He’s the groundskeeper at Castle Kringle and wasn’t at the castle this afternoon when you came by—so you left this notice.” He held up a yellow slip.
Filbert frowned at the paper. “Why didn’t Salty come pick up the package?”
“Because he’s in Tinkertown visiting his sick aunt,” Jingles explained. “But we know what’s in the package, and it’s very important that it be delivered to the castle.”
Filbert crossed his arms. “I can’t have people coming and taking packages that don’t belong to them.”
“Salty wouldn’t have minded,” Jingles said. “It was a joint purchase.”
“That’s right,” Butterbean said. “Salty hates computers, so I did the ordering. But we put it in his name because he’s going to be caring for it.”
Filbert crossed his arms. “All right, then. What was in the box?”
Jingles and Butterbean exchanged anxious glances, then darted a doubtful look at me. “It’s a surprise for Mrs. Claus,” Jingles said.
Maybe this would explain Jingles’s odd behavior this week.
“What is it?” I asked.
Jingles dug a foot in the packed snow and flicked a resentful look at Filbert. “Well, I suppose there’s no harm in saying, since the secret’s obviously ruined now. It’s a—”
“A turkey!” Butterbean blurted, stealing his thunder.
Jingles rounded on him. “I was going to tell her.”
“A turkey?” I was surprised, all right.
“We’re planning a Thanksgiving celebration at the castle for you next month,” Jingles said. “We’ve never done that before in Santaland—and after all your hard work for Halloween, we thought it would be a special treat for you.”
Tears welled in my eyes. “That’s so sweet,” I said. “But Thanksgiving’s still weeks away. The turkey could just stay frozen till then.”
Jingles and Butterbean blinked. “Frozen?”
Filbert clapped his gloved hands and turned to me. “I know the package they mean now. It’s a live bird, ma’am.”
“You shipped a live turkey to Santaland?” Turkey wasn’t a thing in Santaland. Chicken, yes. Goose and duck, too. Gobblers were practically unheard of here on dinner tables. “Where did you get it?”
Butterbean bobbed proudly. “WorldofTurkeys.com—‘The plumpest turkeys shipped directly from Farley’s Turkey Farm in Arkansas.’ ” He pronounced the state’s name phonetically.
Filbert finally lowered his snow shovel. “You didn’t have to break in, you know. The bird is fine—I saw to that before I went home.”
Jingles protested. “We didn’t break in.”
“Yet,” Smudge said.
The castle steward looked at me imploringly. “Can we please just collect our bird and go home?”
“It should be up to Filbert to say whether he wants to report this to Constable Crinkles or not,” Juniper pointed out.
Filbert sighed. “Well, okay. But if anything else goes missing from the SPEX office, I’m going to send Constable Crinkles straight to your door,” he warned Jingles.
“All we want is our turkey,” Jingles said.
As we all traipsed inside to look at the box, I asked Juniper how she and Smudge happened to see Jingles and Butterbean peeking through the window.
“We’ve been staking out the SPEX office,” she said.
“In case the thief came back to the scene of the crime,” Smudge explained. “We thought for sure we’d caught the right elves when Jingles and Butterbean were about to break in that window.”
“That’s okay—you couldn’t have known what they were really up to.” I didn’t quite understand it myself. In truth, I wasn’t sure which I felt more: gratitude, or anxiety. From Santaland’s experiments with Halloween, I’d discovered that introducing new holidays to a country was not without pitfalls.
A strange sound distracted me—a raspy hiss ending in what sounded like a sickly bark. Smudge, Juniper, and I circled around the crate, which had holes cut in the wood on three sides and LIVE ANIMAL stamped on it in several places.
“Um . . .” That noise did not sound right to me. “I think you better open that crate.”
Jingles tilted an anxious glance my way. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want him to get loose before we get him back to the castle.”
Not that I was an expert on turkeys, but... “You might have bigger problems than his running away.”
Carefully, they pried open the top of the carton. A hulking, hideous bird poked his head up.
“Golly doodle!” Juniper exclaimed.
What on earth? There was no fan of tail plumage, no comical wattle. This bird had dark, oily feathers, and atop his hunched shoulders, from a black-feathered neck, there poked a red head that looked as if it were fashioned from old, cracked vinyl.
Everyone backed up a step.
“Americans eat that?” Smudge asked incredulously.
I shook my head, pointing at the blinking bird, who looked just as startled by us as we were by him. “That is not a turkey. That’s a vulture.”
Jingles rounded on Butterbean. “You puffin-witted fool, you ordered the wrong fowl.”
Butterbean’s face fell. “Farley at World of Turkeys swore that they only shipped turkeys. Free range!”
Ever the librarian, Juniper had already looked up vultures on her phone and flashed a picture of this bird’s double at us. “He’s a vulture, all right. It says he’s native to the United States and Mexico.”
“Can you eat them?” Butterbean asked, a flicker of hope in his eyes. “It’s about the size of a turkey, isn’t it?”
“Nobody puts buzzard on their Thanksgiving menu,” I said.
Jingles scowled at his second-in-command. “You’ll have to return it. Luckily, we’ve got plenty of time before Thanksgiving.”
The bird hopped and flapped his black wings, causing us all to jump back another step.
“That’s one ugly bird,” Filbert said. “I’m not keeping that thing in here overnight—especially not now that his crate’s been opened.”
“That’s okay,” Butterbean said. “I’ll have to go back and fill out the forms to exchange him and print out the return label anyway.”
Filbert took pity on Butterbean and helped recrate the bird, who sounded none too happy to be shut back up again. It hissed and barked the whole time.
I pulled Jingles aside. “I’m so sorry,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s that Butterbean. He bungled the whole thing.” Never mind that until opening the crate, he’d been touting Butterbean as a genius.
“Forget the vulture,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about the candy corn peddler that came by the castle today.”
Overhearing us, Juniper and Smudged edged closer.
“Peddler?” Smudge asked.
Jingles nodded. “Mrs. Claus—the dowager Mrs. Claus—complained that the candy you bought from Dash wouldn’t work for her at all. So when this old crone came by, I went ahead and paid her for her candy corn, even though she was charging an arm and a leg. I figured if it wasn’t from the official stores that had sent the contaminated candy corn to the constabulary, we’d be safe.”
I grunted. “Whoever sent the glassy candy corn to the constabulary wanted to make sure elves stopped buying from the big stores so they could drive up the price of the black market.”
“And I fell for it. I was a patsy!” Jingles shook his head mournfully. “First the turkey buzzard, and now this.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You couldn’t have known.”
“Maybe that old crone was the one who pulled off the candy corn theft,” Juniper suggested, piecing it together. “Or else she might know who did.”
“I can think of someone else who might know,” Smudge said. “I should have thought of him before—Snuffy Greenbottle.”
Juniper sucked in a breath of recognition at the name, which meant nothing to me. “Snuffy Greenbottle’s Secondhand Store.”
“Snuffy sometimes handles items of dubious origin,” Smudge explained, noticing my confusion. “The crone might have approached him first to unload her goods—it’s a safe bet that Snuffy at least knows who she is.”
I bit my lip. “I think we need to talk to this Snuffy.”
Smudge looked at me doubtfully. “It might be best if I did the talking. You’re kind of . . . conspicuous.”
Unfortunately, this was true. One thing about being Mrs. Claus in Santaland: It was hard to blend into the woodwork. “All right, but I want to go with you.”
Smudge and I agreed on a time to meet up in Tinkertown the next morning. Then Jingles, Butterbean, and I loaded the vulture into the sleigh and headed back to Castle Kringle.
“I sure hope we can get our money back on this buzzard,” Jingles said.