Santa Goes Bananas: A Cozy Christmas Mystery Page 6

  Like any marriage of thirty some years, theirs had known its ups and downs, high points and low points, although they’d always had the presence of mind as a couple to ride their troubles out. Love doing what it does best, in the most trying of circumstances, by having the very last word.

  Over the years, Santa had irritated his wife innumerable times, infuriated her on several occasions, and wounded her deeply twice. Even then, he’d understood that she wanted to move past the hurt as soon as she was able, intent on forgiving her husband the first moment she could. But then never before had he gone to such great lengths to harm their family, and it was for this self-same reason that Santa greatly feared Jissika’s response.

  His heart was in his mouth already as the sleigh dropped through the clouds to reveal those forests bordering their property. Then, before he knew it, they were coming into land and he could see a figure away below him, stood over by the empty shed. It was Jissika, of course, waiting out there in the cold, despite the late hour, as Santa somehow knew she would be. Needing to discover, without delay, what exactly was going on.

  As the reindeer touched down on earth, their hooves turned up a fresh layer of snow, sending a tall spray skittering in either direction. Then, not without glee, they skidded to a halt a stone’s throw from the stables, another stone’s throw from Jissika’s feet.

  Santa got down from the sleigh wearily, letting out another drawn-out sigh. Then he trudged forwards, the sorry look on his face offering a taste of what it was he had to share.

  Jissika, for her part, said nothing as Santa advanced on her. Wrapped up in a hooded Parka, she was wearing a woolen balaclava underneath it. Her eyes all the more expressive and ominous with most of her face hidden away. Finally, with Santa stopped inside arm’s length of her, she offered a single word.

  “Well?”

  Santa opened his mouth and then shut it. Opened his mouth and then shut it again. “I’ve done something very, very stupid,” he confessed at the third attempt.

  “Just how stupid?” Again it was spoken with an eerie calm that unsettled her husband all the more.

  “I’ve had a falling out with Amka,” Santa said.

  “Go on . . .”

  For a fleeting moment, he felt the great temptation to justify himself again, but then recognized the terrible folly of it. “Well she’s been dating Jon Moran’s son as it turns out and I took that news very badly.”

  “How badly?” Jissika asked him.

  For a few moments, Santa tried framing that answer honestly – how he had moved the needle with his fury and gone beyond a scale of one to ten.

  “Badly enough that she’s not coming home for Christmas this year,” he confessed.

  There was no movement from Jissika. No sound either. The only visible response being the way in which her eyes widened to absorb the terrible blow. Now Santa had no option but to watch the pain flood into them and feel enormous sorrow at having been the one to have turned on the tap.

  Instinctively, Santa made to comfort his wife, but he’d barely moved off the spot before her left hand shot up, stopping him dead in his tracks. At the same time, she shook her head slowly.

  “I think you’d better bed down in the workshop tonight,” she told him.

  “Jissika . . .” The way he spoke her name, it was not to argue the point or query the punishment, so much as a lament for his own immense stupidity. For it was only then that it truly hit Santa Claus, like never before, that he had nobody to blame but himself.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Two days later, Amka, Kyle, Jon Moran, and his wife Bianca, were gathered around a sumptuous dinner table in Northern Vermont on Christmas Eve. Their three course meal at an end, it was Jon Moran himself who sat back in his chair, spread his hands over his stomach, and made a noise as if he’d been winded by the selection of fine foods.

  “Oof! That hit the spot. I’m absolutely stuffed,” he said happily. Then, no less satisfied, he grinned at the rest of the dining group.

  Amka, sat away to his left, forced herself to smile back, but it was wooden and pained looking. An exact replica of those other smiles she’d formed thus far this evening. In fact, it was all she could do not to burst into tears from one moment to the next one, and it was taking an almighty effort just to hold her tears back.

  On the night of the Bzaah store opening, she’d cried herself a river of them after returning to the room at The Watson they’d booked for the night. There, Kyle had done his very best to staunch them – taking her in his arms and holding her there long into the morning. Moreover, he’d told her that they could go to Hawaii for Christmas, just the two of them. To Mexico, or to Europe, or to China for that matter. Whatever it was she wanted to do.

  But Amka had shook her head fiercely at the generous offer. “No way. I’m not going to widen the blast radius here and ruin Christmas for anybody else.”

  “It’s only what my Dad deserves,” Kyle had told her. “I know you’re pops is far from innocent in this whole mess, but my old man’s every bit as culpable.”

  “And your Mom?’” Amka had asked.

  This had sobered him up and Kyle had started to turn pale at the thought of letting his mother down and destroying her cherished tradition – seeing to it that the whole family broke bread together and gave themselves over to the hallowed day.

  And so it was, thirty-six hours later, that Kyle and Amka travelled up from New York by hire car and arrived at the Moran family’s hilltop estate. Both had brought their troubles with them, however, and there was little disguising the worries and sorrows that haunted the young pair.

  Jon Moran, to look at him, couldn’t have been any less haunted this evening. Examining his half-full glass of burgundy, he swilled the liquid about and launched into a reminiscence of the time he’d outbid the drummer from Metallica at a Sotheby’s wine auction.

  For the first half minute, Amka tried following the story, but soon enough zoned out from it. What she heard in its place was her mother’s voice as it had sounded over the phone yesterday morning. Telling Amka it was OK, whatever she decided to do.

  “All you need to know is that you’re blameless in all of this.”

  “I’m not feeling blameless, right now,” Amka had confessed to her.

  “Well that’s what you are, and don’t you forget it,” her mother had said.

  Jissika’s love shining through as it always had, and always would, come hell or high water. Her mother once again leading with her heart, however much she was hurting right now.

  As Amka relived the conversation, she felt a hand close over her own ever so lightly. Startled for a moment, she stared down at it and then up at its owner and saw Bianca Moran staring back. Kyle’s mother wearing an expression of enormous kindness and sympathy. As if, with that look, she knew exactly what Amka was going through at present. Totally undone by the show of compassion, the younger woman’s bottom lip wobbled for several seconds before the floodgates duly broke. Tears streaming down Amka’s face, she rose from her chair, mumbled her excuses, and fled from the dining room.

  The Morans’, as a family unit, watched their guest go.

  “Seems a bit highly strung, your new lady friend,” observed Jon, breaking off from his anecdote. “She’s been fighting back those tears all day.”

  Kyle, to whom the comment was addressed, gritted his teeth and glowered at his father; holding to that sullen silence he’d maintained throughout the meal.

  It was his mother who answered for him, trying to head off the confrontation that was all but inevitable by now.

  “Jon. Please. It must be incredibly difficult for Amka to be parted from her family at this time of year. For a man who prides himself on being a student of human nature, you can be fantastically ignorant when you want to be.”

  “I’m just saying – between her teary-eyed outburst, and Kyle’s childish sulking, Christmas is starting look like a bit of a dud.”

  This was the final straw as far as Kyle Moran was con
cerned. Unable to hold his tongue any longer, the young man poured his feelings out.

  “Says you, the great upholder of all things festive! Tell me, could anyone have done more this year to rubbish the holiday and make a total mockery of its values? Peace on earth, goodwill to men and women – all so much flowery crap according to you!”

  Jon Moran had been expecting such an outburst all day, but was still taken aback by the vehemence of it. As such, it felt as if his son was in league with that insane Santa impersonator from the flagship opening: reading from the same script, repeating the same ridiculous charges.

  Roused by his son’s disloyalty, Jon Moran fought back: “Forgive me if I don’t put much stock in goodwill to all men, peace on earth, or any other of those fluffy metrics and powder-puff sentiments. Maybe quarterly profits and shareholder value aren’t quite as romantic or high-minded as propositions go, but you might want to spend a little time considering how they’ve paid for the food on this table, the roof over your head, your Harvard education, and just about anything else you might care to mention.”

  “So what you’re saying, in effect, is that you own me as well?”

  “What I’m saying is that you should be grateful. Very, very grateful. But instead all I’m hearing from you is the exact opposite. I don’t knew where this ingratitude has come from, although I’m prepared to hazard a guess . . .”

  As Jon Moran made this last comment, he looked to the open doorway, alluding to the young woman who’d just run through it, as good as suggesting that she was the one who’d brought on this change and ruined his son’s good character; casting a dark spell upon him somehow.

  Stung to the quick, Kyle shot up out of his chair. “You know what?” he shouted. “Santa was right – yours is a sad, pathetic, and meaningless way of looking at the world, whatever your net worth is.” Then, with this parting shot, he set the seal on it by storming out of the room.

  Jon Moran watched him go. Then he turned to his wife in search of support or sympathy, but neither thing was evident in her expressionless face. Wary of that neutral look, and what it promised, Jon tried making light of the situation as best he could.

  “Great, so now our son believes in Santa Claus on top of everything else . . .”

  Still, Bianca Moran showed no inclination to humour her husband. Instead she picked up a blue linen napkin from the side of her plate and used it to dab at the corners of her mouth. Then, as Jon had feared, she took the opportunity to share a few home truths.

  “Yes” she answered him, “just as our son believes in goodwill to all men, and peace on earth, and the power of love, I think we can safely say. In fact, he seems to be a big fan of all those “powder-puff sentiments” and “flowery metrics” that you think so little of. And that is why I am enormously proud of him right now.”

  Then, having said her piece, Bianca stood up slowly and completed the exodus from the dinner table in her own calm and graceful way.

  Chapter Seventeen

  With Christmas Eve upon him, Santa Claus had never felt less prepared in his life. For the last four hours he’d been sat inside The Gift Box, out in the woods, part of a last ditch attempt to get his Mojo working and ignite his self-belief. But despite the burning logs away at his feet, and the searing heat rising from them, he’d sweated out nothing of his worries or regrets.

  Normally, by this stage, Santa was totally in the zone. His final visit to The Gift Box serving to reassure him that all was right with the world. Falling into a trance, he was traditionally greeted by a vision of all the Santas ever to come before him, stretching back through time. The whole illustrious line forming a circle around the current title-holder in order to send him off in style – belting out Christmas carol after Christmas carol; creating an incredible wall of sound by putting their very souls into the festive medley. The sound rising in volume and swelling to a powerful vibrato that reached for Santa’s heart, relaying its message of unbound joy.

  The perfect preparation for what it was he was about to do.

  But this afternoon, despite long hours in front of the fire pit, his ancestors had failed to materialise. Worse still, it was hard not to think of their absence as anything other than justified – on account of the fact that nobody had ever fallen so far short of their high standards before.

  Downcast as Santa was, all he could see when he closed his eyes were repeats of his bust-ups with Amka and Jissika. Both of the women in his life turning their back on him, equally justified in walking away.

  In the last couple of days, he’d tried making amends, but Amka had not returned any of his phone calls, and Jissika had given him an equally wide berth despite their living on the same property. In either case, as Santa understood, the hurt ran too deep. He had said things and done things that couldn’t be taken back, however much he wanted to retrieve them. The stony silence was what his actions merited and there was no getting away from that fact.

  Jon Moran had called it right. He was a phony and a hypocrite. Instead of upholding the spirit of Christmas, all Santa had done was lay waste to it these last few weeks. Love was supposed to lie at the very heart of his operation – a great, surging, selfless emotion that had the whole of humanity in its sights. But he’d failed to extend it as far as his own daughter, even, never mind the world at large. And instead of delighting in her new-found happiness, he’d only seized on it like a rabid dog.

  .Now a burst of light penetrated Santa’s closed eyelids. Opening them, he saw rainbow-colored rays flickering through The Gift Box’s wooden slats. It was, he knew, a signal from Vettir. The elf turning on the full-beams of the quantum delivery van to claim his attention and let Santa know it was time.

  Standing up and walking over to the bucket of fresh water by the door, he took the ladle from it and washed himself down from head to toe. Then, after drying off with a towel, Santa turned to the clean change of clothes hanging from the back of the door. Socks, underwear, shirt, tie, beloved Houndstooth suit. The moment having arrived for him to spring from the sweat lodge feeling like a million dollars, ready to spread that feeling near and far.

  Fully dressed, he stepped out into the bitter cold and walked down the steps towards the centre of the snowy clearing. Around its edges, five blazing wooden torches had been pitched against the early evening darkness. In the middle of it, the quantum delivery van was hovering a few inches off the ground, its luminous shimmer very much in evidence.

  Stood off to one side of the van were Vettir, Taniwha, and Lambi, all of whom watched the seasonal figurehead come forward and stop in front of them. Examining Santa carefully, Vettir reached up and undid two buttons on his tailored jacket that were in the wrong buttonholes. As the elf corrected this glaring imbalance, Santa looked down at his suit front and then across at his long time collaborator.

  “I’m not in a good place right now, to be honest,” he said.

  At this, Vettir nodded repeatedly, in no doubt at all about the statement. “Then you’d better get in one,” he said.

  It was an uncharacteristically sharp remark from the laid-back old elf. And although Vettir’s expression hadn’t hardened in the process – nor had his voice risen – it was definitely the equivalent of being slapped around the face.

  For a few moments, Santa smarted at the reply and felt the first stirrings of his temper. But then he recognised that feeling for what it was, and where that feeling always led him, and just how ruinous it could be.

  Deeply humbled, he nodded back at Vettir’s instruction, knowing it to be of the utmost importance. After all, it was the only way he was going to make it through this year’s delivery round – by getting into character and thinking about everybody else except himself.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The first two hours of the Christmas delivery round passed without a hitch. If Santa didn’t hit the heights of former years – that was never going to happen under the circumstances – then he dug deep, and clung to his sense of duty, and the job started to get easier as
time passed.

  The delivery van, despite last year’s wobble, performed admirably to begin with. By dint of its quantum-based magic, it zipped above the earth’s surface, travelling along at speeds that beggared belief. And even while it flashed from here to there, bending all known physical laws, Santa kept on disappearing for an instant – teleporting down into the households below. Popping up for less than a second in bedrooms from Fiji to Tuvalu, leaving behind a precious gift for those children who continued to live in hope, even when their lives hardly seemed to merit it. Counting on Santa to come through for them with a Christmas miracle to make tomorrow a fabulous day.

  It would take a cold heart indeed not to warm to such a task, and Santa, for all his faults, was not cold-hearted. Stood there at the foot of each bed, there was time enough to register the sleeping girl or boy and experience tremendous pleasure at being the one to reward them so handsomely. This was how it was supposed to go – and usually did go – with Santa becoming increasingly jubilant with every present safely tucked away inside a stocking. Able to carry that feeling forwards until he was on an absolute high.

  But on reaching the suburbs of Melbourne, and materialising inside the third floor apartment of an old condominium, Santa suddenly came unstuck. There, in the far corner of the child’s bedroom, a television had been left on and its flickering images claimed his attention immediately – failing to fill Santa’s heart with joy. Once again, he was confronted by that punishing advertisement that would not let him be. Glued to the spot, transfixed by the insult, he stuck around until the infamous tag-line had splashed itself across the bottom half of the screen.

  Bzaah – Beating Santa to the Punch since 2013!

  Although it was true that the advert didn’t infuriate him as before, it certainly spoiled Santa’s momentum and knocked him fully out of his stride. This coming at the worst possible juncture – when, by all rights, he should have been the happiest man in the whole wide world.