Trouble Under the Tree (A Nina Quinn Mystery)

  The screen was dark at first, then came to life when someone stepped into Santa’s Cottage.

  “Where is that?” Maria asked, leaning over the back of the couch to see the screen.

  I explained about Christmastowne.

  “It’s adorable!” she exclaimed.

  It really was—if one didn’t count the murder and all the strange things happening there.

  The shadowy figure came into the light and looked around. I gasped.

  It was Fairlane McCorkle.

  She peeked out the door, took a quick look in the back room, and then quickly walked over to Santa’s chest and scooped up the presents Kevin had put in there as bait. She opened her enormous handbag and dropped them in.

  My jaw dropped. “That sneak!”

  “Wait,” Kevin said darkly. “It gets better.”

  Maria came around the couch and scooched in next to me. Which pushed me firmly up against Kevin. The heat of his leg blistered against my thigh.

  I wiggled closer to Maria.

  “Stop fidgeting,” she demanded.

  I elbowed her.

  “Hey!” she cried.

  “Do I need to separate you two?” Kevin asked.

  I thought it might be better if he moved, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “Why does she keep looking at her watch?” Maria asked.

  “She’s waiting for someone,” Kevin said, a hint of laughter in his voice.

  A minute passed where Fairlane strolled around Santa’s Cottage, nicking ornaments and even a candy cane. She peeled that and started eating it.

  Another minute passed and we watched as Fairlane’s head snapped up. Someone had come into the cottage. The shadowy figure drew closer to her and took her into his arms. I squinted at the screen.

  “Wait for it...” Kevin said.

  The man spun her around and kissed her.

  My jaw dropped as I looked at Kevin, at Maria, then back at the screen. I was speechless.

  Finally, I said, “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

  “Who’s the hottie?” Maria asked.

  “Benny Christmas,” I said.

  “Benny Christmas,” she echoed. “I spit on his name. Pattoey!” she mocked spit.

  “How do you really feel about him?” Kevin asked.

  “He killed Carrie Hodges. Do you remember her, Nina? She was so sweet.”

  “Technically,” Kevin said, “he didn’t kill her.”

  “He was drunk,” Maria countered.

  “Not quite, and she was the one who crossed the line,” Kevin pointed out.

  Maria fisted her hands. “Well, if he had been sober, he could have swerved to avoid her.”

  “Maybe,” Kevin said. “Maybe not. It was an accident.”

  “I used to like you,” Maria said, huffing.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” I cried. “Back up, Maria. How do you know Carrie Hodges?” Because I certainly didn’t know her.

  “She was on my cheer squad in high school,” Maria said. “She was a freshman when I was a senior. I was cheer captain, you know,” she said to Kevin.

  “I know,” he said.

  Everyone knew.

  But that explained why I didn’t know Carrie. I would have long been out of high school when she was there.

  “Her funeral was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. She was an only child, and her mother looked like she wanted to crawl into the grave right along with her daughter.” She shuddered.

  I shuddered, too. What a horrible loss.

  I glanced at Kevin. Once upon a time, we’d talked about having kids, but first I’d wanted to get my business up and running. Then our marriage fell apart.

  Bobby and I had talked about kids, but now, with him gone, those discussions seemed a very long time ago.

  On the video, Benny and Fairlane groped each other for a few minutes, before they seemed to get into a heated discussion.

  “Is there no audio?” I asked.

  “No,” Kevin said. “But I assume this is the part where Fairlane asks for her job back.”

  “Actually,” Maria said, “she’s threatening him that if he doesn’t give her job back, she’s going to tell his wife about their affair.”

  Kevin and I stared at Maria.

  “What?” she said. “I can read lips.”

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “Since college. I took a course on it as part of learning how to do sign language.”

  “You know sign language?” I asked.

  She glared at me. “Yes, Nina. Jeez, don’t you know me at all?”

  I was beginning to think the answer to that was no.

  Kevin said, “You’ll want to see this next part.”

  “There’s more?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah.”

  The tape continued on, showing Benny giving in to Fairlane’s demand. She groped him some more, then left. As soon as she did, he sat in Santa’s chair, and dropped his head into his hand.

  “Scum,” Maria muttered.

  We ignored her. Benny sat there for a little bit before looking up at the doorway. He smiled as a woman came inside, hiked her skirt up to her waist, climbed atop his lap and straddled him. She tossed her hair, and I got a good look at her profile.

  It was Glory Vonderberg.

  “Is that his wife?” Maria asked.

  “Nope,” Kevin said.

  “He does like himself a cougar, doesn’t he?” Maria said.

  Apparently.

  Glory reached for Benny’s belt and started unbuckling.

  Benny unbuttoned her shirt, revealing a lacy red bra.

  “At least she has good taste in lingerie,” Maria said.

  I was thinking this tape was about to get very X-rated when suddenly both Benny and Glory froze. Benny said something.

  Kevin and I looked at Maria.

  She translated. “He said, ‘Did you hear that?’”

  On the tape, Glory nodded. Her lips moved but with the angle of the camera, it wasn’t clear what she said.

  They paused for a moment, then started with their unbuttoning and unbuckling again. There was much kissing going on, and I could only imagine the slurping and suckling noises.

  Suddenly, they froze again, and looked toward the back room of the cottage. Benny’s lips moved.

  “He said, ‘Is anyone back there?’” Maria looked at us. “As if someone would answer.”

  She had a point.

  Benny and Glory quickly resumed their exploration of each other. Just as Glory unzipped Benny’s pants, they jumped apart.

  Maria leaned in. “Benny cursed, then said something about a fire alarm?”

  “The fire alarm went off this morning at Christmastowne,” I said. “Complete with sprinklers.”

  “That explains the woman freaking out about everything getting wet,” Maria said.

  The pair on the screen waited near the doorway, then Benny patted Glory’s rear and they went out the door.

  But not before a shadow appeared in the doorway behind them—the one leading to the back room of the cottage.

  The tape went black.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “What?” Kevin went to take the disk out of the computer, and I slapped his hand.

  “Go back to the last shot.”

  Maria said, “I don’t think I can watch the two of them fondle each other again. I have a sensitive stomach.”

  “Not that far,” I said. “Just the very end.”

  Kevin scrolled through video.

  “There!” I cried. “See it?”

  Sure enough, there was someone in that doorway. Someone who had been in Santa’s Cottage the whole time?

  “Do you know who it is?” Maria asked.

  “Hard to tell,” Kevin said.

  I let out a breath. “I know who it is.”

  “Who?” Kevin asked.

  “It’s Jenny Christmas.”

  “How do you know?” Maria asked. “The tape isn’t very clear.”


  My stomach turned at the thought of what Jenny must have seen. I looked between Maria and Kevin, and said, “Because she told me.”

  Chapter Twelve

  I explained to them how Jenny told me she’d been in Santa’s Cottage when the sprinklers went off—firing Santa, aka Drunk Dave.

  “She obviously lied about the timeline,” Maria said.

  The lights on my Christmas tree cast a colorful glow on the walls. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and the scent of vanilla hung in the air, thanks to a few lit candles. It was all so cozy, yet I felt a chill. A chill that seeped into my soul.

  “Where do you stand in Lele’s murder case?” I asked Kevin.

  Kevin removed the disk from my computer. “I spent most of yesterday trying to get background on Lele. Unfortunately, Fairlane wasn’t talking, and I didn’t have much else to go on. I ran a simple background check on both of them, and I didn’t find anything.”

  “Nothing?” Maria asked. “Not even a parking ticket?”

  “Anything,” Kevin said. “Neither have a history. You know what that means, right?”

  My eyes widened. “Aliases?”

  He nodded. “I called over to the county coroner and asked him to take fingerprints from Lele and fax them to me.”

  Maria shuddered. “That’s gross.”

  Again, I agreed with her. What was the world coming to?

  “I ran the fingerprints through the system,” Kevin said. “I just got the results. Turns out Lele was Leigh Ann Walters, and Fairlane is Elaine Walters. The two sisters have rap sheets three pages long. Theft, fraud, forgery, embezzlement, bribery, blackmail. They’re con artists who specialize in going after rich men and taking them for all they’re worth.”

  “Both of them?” I could see Fairlane...but Lele? Sweet, shy Lele?

  “Apparently, Lele was the mastermind, while Fairlane did the dirty work,” Kevin said.

  Wow. I leaned back against the sofa cushions. Just wow. “So, they were at Christmastowne just to get their hands on Benny?”

  Kevin nodded. “Seems so. The toy donation thefts were probably secondary. Too good to pass up.”

  “Why Benny?” I asked.

  Kevin said, “They probably saw that documentary on him and heard about the huge settlement he won against Carrie Hodges’s insurance company. He got millions.”

  Millions of which he sank into Christmastowne. But maybe the McCorkle sisters didn’t know that.

  “Well,” Maria said, examining a fingernail, “we know that Fairlane blackmailed Benny to get her job back. Perhaps Lele blackmailed him, too, without her sister knowing? Looking for a big payout for herself? She had to have known Fairlane was sleeping with him.”

  It kind of made sense. “She had talked about sordid things going on at Christmastowne to Mr. Cabrera,” I said. “Why would she have done that? It implicated her sister.”

  “Does Mr. Cabrera have money?” Kevin asked.

  I nodded. “Not that he shows it.”

  Kevin lifted his brows. “She might have been targeting him, trying to get on his good side, playing with his sympathies.”

  “Playing with fire,” I said. “She had to have heard about the curse.”

  “Maybe she didn’t believe it.”

  “She’d dead, isn’t she?”

  Kevin smiled. “Hey, you don’t have to convince me. I’ve seen that curse firsthand.”

  Me, too. I shuddered.

  Maria leaned forward. “Maybe Benny didn’t want to pay Lele’s price and killed her because of it! He totally looks like a killer.”

  Maria wasn’t going to let this go. “A minute ago you called him a hottie,” I said.

  “I clearly lost my mind for a second there.”

  I could buy that. It happened a lot with Maria.

  “He deserves to be in prison,” she added.

  I ignored her. Seemed to me that Benny had paid the price for drinking that night. He’d almost died, too, and had also lost a career.

  Kevin said, “Blackmail is a strong motive. Benny wouldn’t want Jenny to know about his affairs.”

  Kevin would have firsthand knowledge about that. Since he’d cheated on me...

  Forgiveness, I told myself.

  But dammit, forgiveness was hard. Even after he’d almost paid the price for his indiscretion with his life. Thankfully, for Riley’s sake, the bullet Kevin had been hit with hadn’t been fatal.

  Okay, and for my sake, too.

  As mad as I had been at him, I didn’t want to see him dead.

  Maimed a little, but not dead.

  “Whether it was Fairlane or Lele, or both, who was blackmailing him,” Kevin said, “the question remains if this murder is a case of mistaken identity.”

  Aha! He had been listening to me, after all.

  Kevin went on. “Fairlane, whether she realized it or not, was a big risk for Benny, especially after she blackmailed him to get her job back. He might have realized she was a loose cannon and thought killing her would be the best way to shut her up. He could have thought he was killing Fairlane Saturday morning, but killed Lele by mistake.” He explained to Maria about how Fairlane had been fired and how Lele took her place as Mrs. Claus.

  I added to this theory. “When I saw Benny before the tree-lighting, he was shocked to hear that Jenny fired Fairlane. He had no idea. So he could have easily thought Lele was Fairlane—especially if he snuck up behind her.”

  We sat in silence for a minute, letting it all sink in. Finally, I said, “But it seems like Jenny has motive, too. She’s gung-ho on seeing Christmastowne thrive. If she knew Fairlane or Lele was blackmailing her husband, she might have killed to keep the news from leaking out. Part of Christmastowne’s appeal is Benny’s tie to it. It’s his name, his career, his accident, his recovery that will bring people in. The All-American Hero, remember? Would they still come if they knew he was a serial adulterer? I don’t think Jenny would want to take that risk.”

  And I knew right at that instant Jenny had probably known about Benny’s affairs all along. She turned a blind eye to get what she wanted—a successful business. It made me realize that I hardly knew her at all.

  Maria nodded. “I could see that.”

  Kevin leaned back on the cushions and rubbed his temples.

  I said, “I still don’t know how either would have been able to move the body, though, without anyone seeing.”

  Kevin said, “Many witnesses place Santa dragging a large, lumpy velvet sack around Christmastowne that morning, but no one can say for sure if it was Drunk Dave in the Santa costume. I’ve already sent the sack to the lab for testing. And,” he added, “those enormous presents were placed under the tree just before Lele’s body was discovered. It would have been simple enough for someone to put Lele under a box and wheel it to the tree. It wouldn’t have aroused suspicion.”

  “Has anyone admitted to putting the exact box Lele was found beneath under the tree?”

  “Several people unloaded boxes, but no one said they saw anything suspicious. I suspect that whoever put Lele under the box did so after the box was already under the tree.”

  I sighed, remembering the chaos of that morning. “I suppose we can’t rule out that Fairlane may have killed her sister, too. Maybe she got sick of splitting their proceeds? Or of sharing the Mrs. Claus limelight. Remember how she didn’t seem too happy that people always liked Lele never got fired? Have you questioned Fairlane formally yet?”

  Kevin said, “She lawyered up right away, probably figuring the truth of her identity would come out. I have an appointment to speak to her—and her lawyer—tomorrow at the station.”

  “At least Fairlane doesn’t seem eager to leave town,” Maria said, trying to lure Gracie out from under the table. The dog wasn’t budging. “Not if she wanted her job back at Christmastowne and is having Mr. Cabrera and Ry take her Christmas things down from the garage attic.”

  Kevin looked around. “What? Ry’s not upstairs?”

  “He’s helping
Mr. Cabrera over at Fairlane’s.”

  Kevin jumped up. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. She could be a killer.”

  My stomach sank.

  “Way to go, Nina,” Maria said, then yelped.

  I might have “accidentally” kicked her. “I didn’t know!”

  “I’ll go get him,” Kevin said. “Maybe ask Fairlane some questions while I’m there.”

  “Officially or unofficially?” I asked.

  “Officially unofficial.”

  I stood up, too. “Well, I’m coming along.”

  He looked about to argue, but gave a quick nod instead.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Maria said. “I’ll stay here, all alone. By myself.”

  “Oh, all right, you can come, too,” I said as I put on my coat.

  She jumped up with a squee. “Don’t forget to wear your new scarf!”

  Maria brought it to me, and wrapped it around my neck. And wrapped. And wrapped.

  Kevin grinned evilly. “Did you make that yourself, Maria?”

  She nodded. “Do you like it?”

  He adjusted the fabric so it covered my mouth. “It’s perfect for Nina. Ow!”

  I might have “accidentally” kicked him, too.

  As we trooped outside, I saw that Riley had uncovered the snow globe and plugged it in. Inflated, its top was covered in snow, but Snoopy and Woodstock were aglow.

  Maria wrinkled her nose. “Really, Nina?”

  “It was a gift, but I love it.”

  “A gift from whom?”

  “Mom.”

  Maria stumbled in the snow. Kevin grabbed her arm. “You’re kidding,” she said.

  “Nope.” As Kevin trudged ahead of us, I explained what was going on at our mother’s house.

  Maria, instead of finding it amusing like me, said, “That’s disturbing. Who would do such a thing?”

  Who, indeed?

  I’d ruled out Ana. And Maria, too—her outrage was genuine. Who else knew my mother’s eccentricities so well? Only someone close to her would understand how these pranks would get under her skin.