Secret Santa Murder Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Mailing List Signup

  Smithwell Fairies Cozy Mystery Series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Drop Dead Cold Cover

  From the Author

  More Books

  SECRET SANTA MURDER

  A SMITHWELL FAIRIES COZY MYSTERY

  KARIN KAUFMAN

  Copyright © 2018 Karin Kaufman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

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  SMITHWELL FAIRIES COZY MYSTERY SERIES

  Dying to Remember (Book 1) — Out Now

  Dead and Buried (Book 2) — Out Now

  Secret Santa Murder (Book 3) — Out Now

  Drop Dead Cold (Book 4) — Coming Soon

  CHAPTER 1

  I was about to dive into a rather good homemade grilled cheese sandwich—I always made mine with mustard and Gruyere—when Irene Carrick phoned me and said she needed to discuss a matter of great urgency. She was, in fact, already on her way and was a mere five minutes from my house. Could she stop by?

  Naturally, I said yes. Irene was the tough, unflappable type if ever there was one, but on the phone she sounded distinctly flappable. I’d met her two months earlier, while investigating the murder of a mutual friend, Ray Landry. Not a believer in fairies, Irene was nevertheless the author of a booklet on them titled Fairy Lore and Horticulture in Smithwell.

  She had thought Ray was bonkers to believe in fairies and, therefore, a foolish enough man to pick poison mushrooms and die eating them. And though the police soon proved her poison-mushroom theory wrong, I’d never tried to persuade her that Ray had been right about fairies. Doing so would have meant revealing the existence of Minette, the tiny fairy who lived first with Ray and now with me.

  But I liked Irene. She was about seventy-five, two inches shorter than my five foot seven, and possessed what I could only call spindly legs and arms, but she was no weakling, physically or otherwise. She was a force of nature.

  I polished off my sandwich and set the kettle on the stove, and the second the doorbell rang, I told Minette to hide. That she did—by diving straight into the pocket of my coat, which was slung over one of the table chairs.

  “Keep your head down and not a peep from you,” I warned her, heading for the front door. “You’ll give Irene a heart attack.”

  I took a last glance toward the kitchen and opened the door.

  “Kate Brewer, how good to see you again.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Irene.”

  She breezed through my door and wheeled back to me as I shut the door. “I have a task for you, if you’re game. How about we make a pot of tea?”

  “I already have the kettle on,” I said, leading her into my kitchen. “Have a seat at the table. I’ll get you a cup.”

  “So this is your famous teacup collection?” she said, admiring the contents of my hutch. “I’ll admit to liking Wedgwood. And that purple-flowered one is nice.”

  It wasn’t much of a collection. Just a few lovely teapots and twenty-five or so cups my husband, Michael, had bought for me over the course of our too-short marriage. But I’d mentioned my love of pretty cups and pots back in October, and though Irene by nature disapproved of even small collections as a waste of money, she had remembered our conversation.

  “That’s my purple vinca pattern,” I said, taking down two purple teacups before Irene could grasp the Wedgwood ones from the top shelf of the hutch. One of them, which I’d lined with soft cotton balls, was Minette’s favorite. It was where she sat, watching me as I worked in the kitchen, and where she slept at night, her four-inch frame and butterfly-like wings curled into a ball.

  “You keep your house nice and cool.” Irene plopped down on a chair, leaving on her brown waxed-canvas coat. “Good, good.”

  As a self-described “old Mainer,” she was pleased by the penny-pinching temperature of my house. I didn’t like to waste money, either, but on bitterly cold nights I’d been known to crank up the heat or put a few extra logs on the fire.

  “Birdie Thompson keeps her house so warm I could melt,” she went on. “But I’ll get to that in a moment. On second thought, never mind the tea. Have a seat, Kate.”

  I switched off the kettle and sat.

  “Have you ever heard of my Smithwell knitting group? We call ourselves the Merry Knitters. We’re all widows, so you see, merry widows became merry knitters. You and I both know there’s nothing merry about being a widow, but there you are. It’s not a clever name, but we knit for town charities, so it does the job.”

  “You knit?” This I had to see. Irene Carrick knitting. It was such a genteel thing to do, and it required one to sit still for, well, at least an hour. That just wasn’t Irene.

  “We all knit, and don’t look so surprised. Norma knits too. You remember Norma Howard?”

  “Of course I do. I met her at your house the day we talked about Ray Landry. Norma’s a widow too?”

  “Divorced, but that’s close enough for the rest of us. She paid a visit to the emergency room late last night.”

  “Oh no! What happened?”

  “An accident, so they say. I say baloney.” Irene dipped into her pocket, pulled out a red box, and slipped off the top, revealing a plastic blob of an ornament tied with a red ribbon. “This is what happened.”

  “Is that meant to be a Christmas ornament?”

  “Have you ever seen anything so ugly? It’s supposed to be a typewriter. It looks like a pickle.”

  “Did Norma slip on it?”

  Irene frowned. “Don’t make jokes. This ornament is mine. Norma received a plastic pig ornament, also in a red box and also tied with a red ribbon.”

  I lifted the typewriter ornament from its box and examined it. It was a plastic toy rather than an ornament, and someone had drilled a hole through it to string it with ribbon. “You’ll have to explain, Irene.”

  “I shall.” She leaned back and crossed her arms. “There are seven of us in the Merry Knitters, and we all exchange Secret Santa gifts about a week before Christmas. I think it’s a silly tradition, but tradition it is. However, we’ve already given and received our real Secret Santa gifts—four days ago. These ornaments, near as I can gather, arrived at all our homes yesterday morning, variously placed on our porches, in our mailboxes, or in our dooryards, though in my case it was in a brown bag taped to the gate across my driveway. You remember how insanely long my drive is. We all received one. Same thing—red box, plastic ornament, red ribbon.”

  “You have no idea who left them?”


  “Not a clue. However.” She dug into her pocket once more, and this time she produced a piece of paper that had been folded, it seemed, to fit the confines of the ornament box. “This same message came with each box. It was obviously printed on a computer.”

  I unfolded the paper and read the message aloud. “‘Secret Santa says it’s time for you to pay.’ What on earth does that mean? You all got this?”

  “All of us. Charming, isn’t it?”

  “Unnerving is more like it.” I looked up. “How does this relate to Norma going to the emergency room?”

  Irene pushed back a shock of her thick white hair. “She was lucky. It could have been serious. And even so, she only has the use of one wrist for the next ten weeks. She’s sixty-nine, and it takes longer to heal at that age. At any of our ages, frankly. We’re going to take turns checking in on her and helping out.”

  “What exactly happened?”

  “I haven’t said, have I? She fell and broke her wrist. Now, I know what you’re thinking. People fall, nothing unusual in that. But Norma isn’t a faller, and she fell in her kitchen because someone placed ball bearings in front of her refrigerator. Ball bearings, Kate. Where did they come from? And if for some peculiar reason Norma happened to have bearings around the house, why would she drop them in her own kitchen? She got up in the night, went to her refrigerator—like she does when she can’t sleep—and fell.”

  “That is strange. Did you talk to the police?”

  “Detective Rancourt wasn’t remotely interested. He said it was an accident. ‘It was an accident, ma’am, unless you know something I don’t.’ Kate, it was all I could do not to say, ‘I know a lot you don’t know, Detective.’”

  That didn’t sound like Martin Rancourt to me. I’d come to know him as an astute detective. Surely he considered ball bearings strewn across a senior citizen’s kitchen floor a bit weird. “Did you show him the note you all got?”

  “Yes, and he was mildly curious about that, but not motivated to do anything more than ask where the ball bearings might have come from.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  Irene tossed her hands in the air. “You tell me! They weren’t Norma’s or mine, that’s for sure. They looked like bicycle bearings. New ones, too. They weren’t oily or grungy.”

  “Does Norma have grandchildren or great-grandchildren?”

  “Both. They live in southern Maine and New Hampshire, and yes, they visit her, but none of them leak ball bearings. Besides, the last time she saw them was a full two days before she fell.”

  “And all the knitters received an ornament?”

  “Yesterday, as I said. We all telephoned each other, wondering if we’d missed a second round of Secret Santa. Norma found hers on her porch when she went to get the morning paper. This was before she fell, of course.”

  “Could it be a prank?”

  Irene scowled, appalled that I would ask such a naive question. “Let’s say it was a prank. I still want to know who’s behind it. Norma broke her wrist, and there’s no guarantee she’ll get her full motion back. Here we are, December twenty-second—Christmas is her favorite season—and she’s on pain meds. She won’t be able to participate in the Christmas Charity Fair tomorrow, and I can’t tell you how she looks forward to that every year.”

  “I was just grasping for straws. I hate to think someone deliberately tried to make her fall.”

  “But it looks like that.”

  “It does.”

  “Capital! We’re two peas in a pod, we are. Suspicious minds. I smell a rat among the knitters.”

  “How long have you known one another?”

  “We’ve been the Merry Knitters for six years, and I know those women better than I know anyone in Smithwell. And they know me.”

  “And you really think one of them did this?”

  “It can only be one of them. Seven knitters and seven nasty ornaments delivered to our homes.”

  “What about an outsider?”

  “No, it was positively one of us,” Irene said. “Joan Simm’s ornament was left hanging in a shrub at the end of her drive. She’s the only one of us who has a camera tucked up under her eaves—you know those security cameras you can buy online?”

  “I’ve seen them, yes.”

  “No one, and I mean no one, outside the group knows that camera exists.”

  “The shrub hid the perpetrator from the camera’s view?”

  “You bet it did. And who but us knitters would know that? Joan complained about it at one of our meetings. She called it the camera’s ‘blind spot.’ But she kept the camera secret from everyone else.”

  “But what do the ornaments have to do with Norma’s accident?”

  “We’re going to find out.” Irene examined the outside of her teacup, then set it down. “Lovely pattern. Next time I’ll have to put some tea in it. All right, then, let’s go. I’ll drive you and drop you back here when you’re done.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To Birdie Thompson’s house. It’s our final meeting before the charity fair, and they’re all there waiting for you. I told them I’d bring you. Come and meet your five suspects.”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t be humble, Kate. You helped solve Ray’s murder, and if the paper is correct, you were helpful in another murder case just last month. Well, if the police won’t help us, you will. That’s what I said.”

  “Okay. I guess.”

  Irene slapped the tabletop and stood. “Come along. Birdie Thompson will be eighty next week and she tends to fall asleep in the afternoon. It’s not surprising, considering she could grow hothouse tomatoes in her living room. The woman spends a small fortune on heating oil.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The instant I shut Birdie Thompson’s front door behind me, Irene’s drill-sergeant voice cut through the air. “Ladies, gather around and take a seat. Let’s get down to business. As promised, this is Kate Brewer. She doesn’t have all day, and we have no time to waste. Kate, grab that chair next to the bookcase.”

  I took hold of a small armchair and pulled it closer to Birdie’s other furniture—two threadbare blue couches on either side of a pink and blue oriental rug—and Irene laid her coat across the couch back.

  Though Birdie’s house was suffocatingly warm, I kept my coat on to make sure Minette was safe. I wasn’t sure how long I’d last in the stifling heat, though. Outside, it was December in central Maine. In Birdie’s house, it was August in southern Mississippi.

  “Bring out your ornaments,” Irene commanded.

  “We don’t know if the ornaments are connected,” one of the women said. She was on the short side, a little plump in the waist, and, like most of the women gathered in Birdie’s living room, she had gray hair. What set her apart in that realm was the streak of pure white at her left temple.

  “Kate, this is Joan Simms,” Irene said, dropping to the couch cushion nearest my chair. “Show her your ornament, Joan.”

  Joan’s middle became plumper as she sat on the couch and slouched like a teenager. “I have to start? Well, someone has to, I suppose.” Reluctantly, she passed her red box down the couch until it reached Irene.

  “Hold on a minute,” Irene said. “Where’s Phyllis?”

  “That’s what we were trying to tell you,” another woman said. “She isn’t here and we can’t reach her.”

  “I talked to her last night,” Irene said. “She found an egg ornament in her mailbox. An old plastic egg.”

  “Maybe she’s on her way,” the woman said. “She refuses to buy a cell phone for her car. If she breaks down one day, she’s out of luck.”

  “And this is Carla Moretti,” Irene said, turning to me. “If you get confused, she’s the one eating a Christmas cookie.”

  “Oh, quit it, Irene,” Carla said.

  I did like Irene, I really did, but she could be quite the sharp-tongued woman, and the funny thing was, I doubted she understood just how cutting she could be. I think
she saw herself as direct, practical, and honest, not unkind, and she didn’t possess the social filter most people had. What sprang to Irene’s mind came out her mouth.

  “I’m not saying you’re fat,” Irene explained. “You’re thinner than most of us. Eat away. I would.”

  Carla’s eyes were shooting daggers. “That was a compliment? I walk around with a cookie in my mouth but I’m not too fat, so it’s fine?”

  I cleared my throat. “So what’s this about Phyllis?”

  “Phyllis Bigelow, and I rang her this morning,” Carla replied, pointedly turning toward me and away from Irene. She had pale skin, an elegantly cleft chin, a heart-shaped face, and the kind of bone structure I’d envied in others for the past ten years, since turning forty. In short, she had the kind of face that aged very well. And she was aware of it.

  “Did you try again?” I asked.

  “Three times I called, and no answer.”

  “That’s worrisome,” I said.

  “You think so? I’ve wondered if I should worry.”

  “With all that’s going on?” Irene snapped. “Of course you should.” She retrieved her cell phone from her coat pocket and dialed. Ten seconds later she hung up. “Can you come with me, Kate? I have a bad feeling.”

  “Sure.” I rose, eager to leave. Though not so much to check on Phyllis as to get out of Birdie’s stifling house. There she was on the couch, happy as a clam in a navy turtleneck and brown cardigan. I hadn’t been introduced to her, but she was clearly the oldest of the knitters, and she was the only one wearing house slippers.

  “We’ll be right back,” Irene said as she moved for the door.

  “No, call the moment you get to her house,” Carla said. “Don’t make us wait.”

  I followed Irene to her car and had barely set rear to seat when she started to back out Birdie’s driveway.

  “It’s only a mile,” she said. “I don’t like this. Phyllis never goes anywhere, except to our knitting get-togethers.”