Rick turned back to the TV. One of the contestants had just thrown a gutter ball.
"Well, go on, then," he grumbled, pulling out his BIC and a pack of cigarettes. "Get outta here. I got business to take care of."
Karen and Ronnie hopped down from the couch and went to get their coats. They didn't complain this time.
"Karen?" Ronnie said as they roamed aimlessly around the parking lot. "What's gonna happen?"
Karen shrugged. "I don't know."
"You think he'll ever find out what we did?"
Probably. Yes. Sooner or later. That's what Karen assumed.
She looked up. It was a perfectly clear night, and the stars were bright and still. None of them shimmered or twinkled. They just hung there like holes in the big, black blanket smothering the sky.
Once upon a time, when she was a little kid like Ronnie, she used to wish on stars. She believed in Santa Claus, too. Same thing, really. Useless.
But it couldn't hurt, could it?
She picked a star.
"He won't notice," she said. "Everything's going to be O.K."
A door creaked open and slammed shut, and the kids turned to see Rick coming toward them with quick, purposeful strides.
He stopped beside his car.
"Finally got the call. The big one," he said, sounding nervous but excited, eager. "I'll be gone for a while. Tell your mom to wait up for me. She and I are gonna go out and celebrate when I get back."
As he ducked into the Dart, Karen noticed something tucked under his left arm.
The shoebox.
"Bye, Cousin Rick!" Karen called out. "Bye bye!"
She and Ronnie walked out to the sidewalk to watch him drive away, waving until the taillights shrank to pinpricks in the distance then faded to nothingness altogether.
Poor Mom had a terrible Christmas. Fretting. Pacing. Going downtown to fill out the missing person report. But Karen knew that she'd feel better soon. Be better soon. They all would be-Mom and Ronnie and her.
For the first time in a long time, Karen wasn't just hoping for that.
She believed.
RED CHRISTMAS
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AN ENCHANTED LAND FAR AWAY…
(OR, TO BE A BIT MORE PRECISE, ON DECEMBER 24, 1980, AT ELEVEN TWENTY SEVEN P.M., AT THE NORTH POLE…)
Jingle the elf noticed a peculiar package under the workshop's massive Christmas tree. There were dozens of boxes nestled around it: gifts to and from Santa, Mrs. Claus, the elves, the reindeer and Rumpity-Tump the Icicle Man, who worked for the Clauses chasing away National Geographic photographers and cleaning out the deer stables.
But this particular present stood out from the rest for a very special reason.
"Jeez," Jingle said. "That's gotta be the crappiest-looking thing I've ever seen under Santa's tree."
And indeed it was. The wrapping paper was crinkled and smudged, and the bow-work was shockingly shoddy, the beautiful red ribbon mangled and smeared with inky black fingerprints.
Jingle shook his head in disgust. "Looks like the guys down in Wrapping started pounding the glogg before the Old Man even took off."
"Dishgushting," said Jingle's brother Jangle, who'd had a few snorts of glogg himself. "We oughta shay shomething to the foreman. Ish there a name on the tag?"
Jingle moved closer to the package. It was big-almost as big as Jingle himself. He found the tag buried under a long loop of loosely tied ribbon.
"'To Santa,'" he read aloud. "'From R. with love.'"
"'R.,' huh? Maybe it'sh from Rudolph."
"Doesn't look like it's been in a deer stall," Jingle said, peering at the wrapping paper. "I mean, it's got stains on it, but not… you know…"
"Yeah, I shee what you mean," Jangle said.
(Despite Rumpity-Tump's best efforts, the deer stables were far from pristine.)
"Well, whoever 'R.' is, he's not one of the guys in Cards, Tags & Notes," Jingle said. "The handwriting's terrible."
He tried to pick up the box and give it a test shake, but it was so heavy he could only lift one corner. Something inside the box shifted with a muffled tinkle, and the edge along the floor turned dark and glistening.
"It's leaking."
"Oopsh," Jangle said. "You broke it. Shanta'sh gonna be pished."
"I didn't break it. Whatever it is, it was already…"
Jingle's words choked to a stop as a sour-sweet smell reached his nose. It was the scent of gingerbread and peppermint and magic, with an undertone of paint and glue and sweat.
Elf blood.
Since Jingle's reflexes hadn't been dulled by glogg, he was the one to start screaming first. Jangle quickly joined in, though. The two elves scrambled out from under the tree and dashed shrieking through the hallways of Santa's castle. Santa himself had been airborne nearly an hour, so there was only one person they could turn to.
"Mrs. Claus! Mrs. Claus!" they yelled in unison (though Jangle's cries sounded more like "Mishush Claush! Mishush Claush!").
They found Santa's wife in the kitchen stirring an enormous cauldron of borscht. It was the only thing her husband would eat for the next six or seven months, so gorged would he be on cookies and milk by night's end.
"Blood!" Jingle howled.
"Blllllloooooood!" Jangle added.
"Oh my, no," Mrs. Claus replied sweetly. "It's just borscht. Goodness, when you elves start nipping at the glogg there's no telling what you'll-"
Jingle grabbed one wrist, Jangle grabbed the other, and they pulled her away from the stove, out the door and through the halls until she was standing before the giant Christmas tree, a dripping ladle still clutched in her hand.
Jingle pointed at the mysterious package. "Blood!" he howled again.
"Blllloooood," Jangle added dutifully, though he was a too winded now to give it much oomph.
"Oh. I see," Mrs. Claus said. "Dear oh dear. Well, I suppose someone had best open it up."
A crowd had begun to gather, but no one made a move toward the box. Mrs. Claus sighed, whispered another "Dear oh dear," handed her ladle to Jingle and stooped down under the tree's lowest branches. The ribbon and paper slid off the package easily. When she lifted off the lid, a chorus of gasps shook the silver bells on the tree.
Inside the box was the crumpled form of an orange-haired, cherub-faced elf.
"Deary deary dear," muttered Mrs. Claus, employing the fiercest vulgarities in her vocabulary. "It's Gumdrop, Sugarplum's brother."
Another gasp echoed up into the rafters.
"Could he… could he have been… wrapped by mistake?" Jingle stammered.
Such things had been known to happen. Two years before, a pair of elves named Glitter and Sparkle had crawled into a box for a quick nap between shifts in Wrapping. Come Christmas morning, a horrified eight year old found their lifeless bodies crushed beneath her Charlie's Angels Beach House playset.
Mrs. Claus reached into the package and gingerly shifted little Gumdrop.
"Oh deary deary deary deary dear," she said, which told the elves that whatever she saw, it was bad indeed.
"Wh-what?" Jingle asked.
Mrs. Claus moved away from Gumdrop, giving the crowd a clear view of his blood-soaked back. Protruding from it was the red-and-white curl of a large candy cane. The deadly confection was smudged with sticky black fingerprints, just like the wrapping paper and ribbon on the box.
"I'm afraid this was no accident," Mrs. Claus announced. "Someone here has been very, very naughty."
The gasps turned to shrieks. A reindeer-handler named Holly fainted into the arms of her brother Jolly. Rumpity-Tump the Icicle Man became so frozen with fear he fell over and shattered, and his pieces had to be swept up and placed outside in the snow so he could pull himself together.
"A killer! A killer loose in the workshop!" Jingle wailed.
"And Shanta won't be back for hoursh!" cried Jangle, who'd been trying to steady his nerves with several long swigs from a flask he'd pulled from his vest pocket.