“Very imprezzive, Mrz. Clauz,” he said.
“Oh, why thank you,” Mrs. Claus replied with demure humility. “I’ve always been handy with decorations. Now tell me, what’s your name?”
“I em Geeftrep.”
It took a few seconds for the syllables to take shape in Mrs. Claus’s brain. “Giftwrap?” she asked.
“Yez. Bruther of Scotchtape.”
“Hmmm. I don’t believe I’ve heard you or your brother mentioned around here before, Giftwrap.”
The other elves shook their heads and squinted at Giftwrap with growing suspicion.
“Ve are new thiz year,” he said. “Before this ve are... how do you say? Ve cobble the shoez, yez?”
“I see. But this year you decided to become toy-making elves?”
“Yez. The shoemaker ve verk for, he moved hiz factory to Indonezia.”
“My, how terribly disappointing. Well, let me take this opportunity to welcome you to Santa’s workshop.”
Mrs. Claus held her hand out to Giftwrap. He hesitated just a fraction of a second, then grasped her hand and gave it a limp shake.
“Thank you, Mrz. Clauz.”
Mrs. Claus smiled, then glanced down as she let go of his hand.
“Goodness — is that ink on your sleeve?”
Giftwrap didn’t answer directly. Instead, he spat out a word no one had ever dared utter in the presence of Mrs. Claus.
“Oh, now surely that kind of language isn’t going to help matters any,” she began to say.
She didn’t get a chance to finish. The “Oh” was still on her lips when Giftwrap pulled a candy cane from his tunic and lunged at her with it. She barely managed to dodge away in time, and the razor-sharp candy sliced off a corner of her white lace apron.
“Oh, Giftwrap,” Mrs. Claus said. “My niece made that for me.”
But rather than apologize, Giftwrap lunged again.
“Mrs. C!” Jingle called out as he tossed her the ladle she’d handed him a minute before.
Mrs. Claus reached out and let the handle slap into her palm. Then she swung the ladle down just in time to parry Giftwrap’s thrust. Giftwrap tried again and again, but each time Mrs. Claus turned the sugary blade aside.
“Now really, Giftwrap — is this helpful?” Mrs. Claus asked, raising her voice just a bit to be heard above the clink-clank of their duel. “You can’t escape. Why not stop fighting and tell me what you’ve been up to? I bet you’ll feel a lot better if you do.”
“Bah!” Giftwrap snarled. With a dramatic flourish, he hurled his candy cane into the floorboards, where it stuck with a loud, vibrating spronnnng. Then he reached into his tunic and pulled out something brown and log-like.
“Look out!” Jingle yelped. “He’s got a fruitcake!”
“Yez! And I em not afraid to uze it!”
Giftwrap brought the fruitcake to his lips and took a savage bite.
“Daz vedanya, zuckerz!” he shouted, crumbs and bits of candied orange peel spraying from his furiously chewing mouth. He took a big, gulping swallow, and almost immediately his face turned blue. He collapsed, writhing and gurgling. After a few seconds, he stopped moving.
Jingle slowly approached the prone figure and gave it a cautious poke with the curled toe of his elf shoe. There was no response.
“I think he’s dead.”
“Dead? Deary deary dear,” Mrs. Claus said as she stepped over to Giftwrap’s side and stooped down to examine the body. “Oh, I thought so.”
She reached out and plucked the pointy ears right off his head.
There was more gasping and fainting from the elves gathered around.
“Don’t anyone fret now. They’re fake ears,” Mrs. Claus explained. “Giftwrap — or whatever his name truly is... is no elf.”
“A man?” Jingle asked.
Mrs. Claus nodded. “Yes. A midget.”
“Why would a midget come all the way to the North Pole just to kill Gumdrop?”
“Oh, I don’t think he would. Not just to kill poor Gumdrop, I mean.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either, Jingle. But I do know this: We haven’t seen the last of the naughtiness tonight.”
Mrs. Claus put a pair of elves named Mistletoe and Poinsettia in charge of guarding the bodies, then hustled out of the room, Jingle at her heels. Jangle started to follow too, but the glogg had turned his legs to rubber, and the only way to stiffen them up again was to curl up under a bench and take a nap.
Nice Management was deserted when Jingle and Mrs. Claus arrived. They found Gumdrop’s jacket at his desk, lying atop a pile of statistics, graphs, and pie charts analyzing the Naughty-to-Nice ratio of little boys who own albums by Kiss.
“Maybe Gumdrop never made it back to the office,” Jingle said. “He could have been murdered anywhere between here and Carol’s place.”
“No,” Mrs. Claus said. “I think it’s much more likely he was killed right here.”
She headed for the far end of the room, where Santa kept the tilted worktable he slaved over so many long hours each year. It was where he compiled The List — the massive scroll on which he kept the names of well-behaved children who’d earned a visit come Christmas Eve.
Mrs. Claus peered down at the worktable a moment. “Oh, goodness deary goodness,” she said. “It’s just as I feared.”
She moved to the nearest garbage can, shook her head, and pulled out two twisted, broken, ink-smeared feathers.
“What a shame. Santa loved these,” she said. “Griffin feathers. So hard to come by these days. Oh well. We have more to worry about now than Santa’s favorite pens.”
“That we do,” Jingle said, nodding. “Uhhh... and what is it that we need to be worrying about, exactly?”
“Why, the name Giftwrap added to Santa’s list, of course.”
Jingle looked from Mrs. Claus to the feathers to Santa’s worktable to Gumdrop’s desk, blinking blankly. Mrs. Claus took mercy on him and explained.
“There were ink stains on the box Gumdrop was in, and on Giftwrap’s sleeves, as well. And if you’ll look at the table there...”
Jingle followed Mrs. Claus’s gaze. A black smudge marred one corner of Santa’s worktable.
“Southerners aren’t accustomed to quill pens and ink bottles anymore,” Mrs. Claus said, using the term Santa’s elves favored for describing anyone who didn’t live at the North Pole. “So Giftwrap made a bit of a mess. And I can only think of one thing he might have been trying to do with a pen at Santa’s worktable. Poor, unfortunate Gumdrop saw what he was up to when he came back for his jacket. And... well, Giftwrap couldn’t have that.”
“Oh,” Jingle said. “I see. Then Giftwrap had to make sure Gumdrop’s body wasn’t found until after Santa took off.”
“That’s right. Yet he wanted the body to be found eventually. That message on the card — it must have some special significance.”
Jingle shook his head, bewildered and disgusted. “Sending a spy into the workshop, killing an elf, all just to get some kid on the Nice list. It’s beyond naughty. It’s nuts.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps this isn’t about a child.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, maybe someone wants to make sure Santa goes down a certain chimney tonight.”
Jingle gaped at her, amazed that a woman who’d devoted her life to making children happy and hanging out with elves would have such a natural affinity for the workings of devious minds.
“You think it could be a trap?” he said.
Mrs. Claus shrugged. “You know how those toy company people feel about Santa. And the religious fundamentalists. And the Elf Liberation Front. And the Ayatollah. He still hasn’t forgiven us for all those lumps of coal he received as a child. And—”
The longer the list grew, the wider Jingle’s eyes became. “I never realized Mr. C had made so many enemies.”