Trouble Under the Tree (A Nina Quinn Mystery) (8 page)

I fanned the pack out in pairs to tackle the
uprooting, and I kept checking the door—not only for Kit, but
because my parents had yet to show up. I thought they would have
been here by now.

“Where you go, trouble always follows,” a
voice said behind me.

“
You’re
not
always
trouble,” I
said as I turned. “Just most of the time.”

“Ha ha. I wasn’t talking about me,” Kevin
said.

“That’s strange, because it feels like
you’re
the one following me. First you’re at my party, then
you’re an elf, now this. What’s a girl to think?”

“Maybe I just can’t stay away from you,” he
said, blinking his eyelashes.

A weird, warm fizzy feeling slid down my
spine. I didn’t like
that
one bit. Kevin and I were
divorced. Done. That fizz was probably just a remnant of post
traumatic stress from the breakup. “Now you’re scaring me. Stop
that.”

He grinned a lopsided grin as if he could
sense that fizz.

Damn him.

He nodded to the plants. “What happened?”

Safe ground. Thank goodness. “Looks like
someone poured weed-killer over them.” I picked up a shriveled
plant. “Which had to take some time. Please tell me this place has
security cameras.”

“It does.”

“Have you checked the film yet?”

“There’s no film to check. Not from last
night, when these plants bit the dust, and not from the day of
Lele’s murder.”

“But you said...”

“Christmastowne has cameras, but they don’t
work. Someone tampered with the system on Saturday, and it’s still
not functioning.”

I read between the lines of what he was
saying. “Tampered with them before Lele’s murder?”

He nodded.

I put two and two together. “Lele’s murder
was premeditated?”

“Sure looks that way.”

I put the sad little poinsettia in a brown
bag. “Do you know yet if she was the intended victim?”

“No proof otherwise.” He plucked three plants
from their bed and dropped them into the bag. He wiped his hands on
his jeans.

I kind of missed his tights. Kevin had great
legs. “Have you talked to Mr. Cabrera? He might have some
information for you.”

Great legs? I grabbed another plant and
yanked. What was I even thinking about Kevin’s legs for? I had
Bobby now.
Bobby
.

Blond-haired, blue-eyed Bobby, who was the
complete opposite of Kevin. Which was one of the reasons I liked
him so much.

“Like what?” Kevin asked.

I told him what Brickhouse had said.

The lines around his eyes deepened as he
said, “Sordid?”

I nodded. “And I’ve been thinking...”

“Dangerous.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Do you know
anything about Lele and Fairlane’s backgrounds? Family? Where they
lived before they came to the Mill. That kind of thing.”

“I’m looking into it, Nina. It’s my case,
remember?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

He looked around. “Did I see Mr. Cabrera
around here with a trowel?”

“You did. He’s working in the food court
area, but you may want to stay away from Flash Leonard.”

“Why?”

“He’s not happy that his baseball disappeared
after Lele was discovered. He thinks someone stole it and is going
to try and sell it on online.”

“Was it signed?”

“I don’t think so. He said he’d only get it
autographed if there were old-timers here on Saturday—and there
weren’t.”

“Then why does he think someone would sell
the ball?”

“I think he puts a high price on sentimental
value.”

“Gotcha.” Kevin’s lips twitched. “I’ll look
into it. It’s probably in the evidence room.”

He looked up at the tree. “Did you know that
someone cut the wires on the lights the day of the
tree-lighting?”

“Really?”

“It’s why the tree wouldn’t light at first.
Some quick-thinking elves spliced the wires together, but the tree
will need to have all the lights replaced, sooner rather than
later.”

More sabotage. But why?

Over Kevin’s shoulder, I spotted my parents
coming in the front door. My mother was stomping like a pissed-off
soldier, and my father trailed behind her, wearing his “patience”
face.

Kevin turned to see what I was looking at and
said quickly, “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Chicken,” I called after him as he strode
off in the opposite direction.

My mother’s eyes were wild, bloodshot, and
wide open in a crazy-person-on-the-loose kind of way. “We’re here!”
she cried.

I glanced at my father.

He said, “Thanks to me.”

My mother just kept staring, wide-eyed.

“What’s wrong with Mom?” I asked.

Dad smiled. Mom jabbed him in the chest.
“This is not funny, Tonio. Not at all.”

“A little,” he said to me.

Mom let out a small cry.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We were backing out of the driveway to come
here,” he began.

“And it was on the roof,” Mom said. “On. The.
Roof.”

I looked between the two of them. “What
was?”

“A Santa Claus and nine reindeer. The Santa’s
arms move,” she said, waving wildly.

I took it to be a manic mimic of Santa’s
abilities.

“Rudolph’s nose blinks. Blinks like a
freaking blinking beacon.” She laughed a maniacal laugh.

“You can see it for miles,” Dad said. “At
least we don’t have to worry about planes hitting the roof.”

He might have himself a death wish, too.

“How long is this going to take?” Mom asked.
“Because we have to take that Santa down. As soon as possible.”

“I convinced your mother to come here first,”
Dad said.

“You owe me, Nina Colette Ceceri,” my mother
said, fisting my shirt and pulling me close. “You better have a
good Christmas gift planned for me.”

I, perhaps, needed to rethink the slippers
and robe I was going to get her.

Because, even as we stood here, I could see
snow starting to fall outside. Which meant that there was no way my
father was getting on the roof to take down Santa today.

“How,” I asked, “did someone put a Santa and
reindeer on your roof without you noticing?”

“In addition to her ear plugs, she took one
of her pills,” my father said.

“What pills?” I didn’t know she took any
pills.

“A mild tranquilizer. It helps me sleep,” Mom
huffed, finally releasing me. “Don’t judge me.”

She’d been hanging out with Ana, apparently.
There was a lot of non-judgment pleas going on these days.

I passed them both trowels and a brown lawn
refuse bag. “Well, thanks for coming. Just dig up as many dead
poinsettias as you can find.”

“They look so sad,” my mother said, glancing
around. Then her gaze hardened. “But not as sad as that Santa on my
roof after I get my hands on it.” She stomped off, cursing
loudly.

I looked at my dad. “Did you see the
snow?”

He nodded.

“You might want to give her one of those
pills now so she doesn’t have a stroke.”

He patted my cheek. “I’ve got it covered. She
has about twenty minutes before she’ll be down for the count. We’ll
keep this between us?”

I nodded.

“Good girl.”

As he followed my mother’s trail of curse
words, I turned my attention back to work.

I’d dug up four plants before the fire alarm
went off.

Followed by the sprinkler system.

Chapter Seven

“At least the new plants are well-watered,”
Kit said an hour later.

I was still damp from head to toe. “Har.
Har.” My sense of humor had been drowned out of me. I looked like
something washed ashore and just wanted to go home and crawl into a
hot bath.

Kit had arrived after the fire department.
The fire hadn’t been in Glory Vonderberg’s kitchen as I assumed,
but in a trash bin in the men’s room.

Apparently, someone had dropped a lit
cigarette into the trash and it had ignited crumpled paper towels.
The fire had been contained, thankfully, and the sprinklers had
only been on for a few minutes, but the damage had been done.

Christmastowne was a soggy mess.

“Chop, chop!” Jenny shouted from across the
atrium as she clapped her hands loudly. “Get to work. We have one
hour to get this place bone dry.”

Kit looked at me. “Is she serious?”

“Delusional is more like it.”

I didn’t know how Jenny planned on explaining
damp merchandise to her customers. Thankfully, the biggest draw,
pictures with Santa, wasn’t going to suffer. Santa’s Cottage didn’t
have sprinklers inside it, so it had escaped the deluge.

“Uh-oh, she’s headed this way,” I mumbled,
looking around for a place to hide.

“I’m out of here,” Kit said.

“Don’t leave me,” I pleaded.

“You don’t pay me enough to deal with that,
Nina.” He grabbed a pallet of poinsettias and trotted off.

I didn’t pay myself enough to deal with it,
either.

“Nina!” Jenny yelled as I turned to slink
away.

Slowly, I pivoted and plastered a phony smile
on my face. “Hi, Jenny.”

“Look,” she said, touching my arm, “I’m sorry
if I snapped at you this morning. You cannot imagine the stress.
And now the sprinklers?” She shook her head. “I feel like someone
is out to get me.”

And I felt like collateral damage. The sooner
I wrapped things up at Christmastowne the better, but what she said
resonated. It really did feel like someone was out to get her. “Do
you have any enemies? Besides the thirty workers currently giving
you dirty looks?”

She scowled. “They’ll get over it.”

I wasn’t so sure. She was turning into a
boss-from-hell.

“And no, I don’t have any enemies. That’s
ridiculous. I was only kidding about someone out to get me. Why?”
she eyed me. “Do you think someone’s out to get me?”

Totally. “It just seems a little
coincidental, all these things going wrong.”

She chewed on her lip. Little bits of pink
lipstick stuck to her teeth. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“Is there any chance the fire this morning
was set on purpose?”

Her brow crinkled. “I don’t think so. The
fire chief would have said so, right?”

I shoved another three, now soggy,
poinsettias into the bag. “Probably. Has anyone admitted to
dropping the cigarette?”

“Not yet.” She glared at her scurrying
employees. “Coward.”

Whoever it was probably feared for not only
his job but his life. There was a dazed, crazed look in Jenny’s
bloodshot eyes that left me suspecting she was, in fact, capable of
murder.

But I still doubted she had anything to do
with Lele’s death. It didn’t make sense, unless I was missing
something big.

I noticed that every hair on her head was
fluffed and perfect. “How come you’re not wet?”

Anger tightened her lips. “Because I was in
Santa’s Cottage when the sprinklers went off, firing Santa.”

“What? You fired Drunk Dave?”

“He was drinking on the job again. Never hire
family, Nina. I’m never going to hear the end of this at family
gatherings.” She shook her head, then looked at me slyly. “Speaking
of hiring, I poached one of your hired hands to take over Santa’s
job. I hope you don’t mind, but I was desperate to fill the
position, and when I walked out of Santa’s Cottage, there was the
perfect man standing there. I asked, and he accepted.”

I hoped she wasn’t talking about Kevin. He
couldn’t pull off the elf look, much less a respectable Santa.

“Who?” I wavered between admiring her
go-get-’em attitude and being really angry she hadn’t asked me
about it first.

“Donatelli Cabrera? He’s starting as Santa
this afternoon.”

Mr. Cabrera? As Santa? I tried not to laugh.
He wasn’t a little-kid kind of person, though he tolerated
teenagers fairly well.

“Good luck with that.” Across the atrium,
someone fired up a wet vac. “Are you sure opening today is a good
idea?”

Her gaze snapped to me. “Yes. Today. No more
delays.” Her eyes filled with tears. “If this place doesn’t turn a
profit over the next few weeks, it’s doomed, Nina. Then what will
Benny and I do?”

I didn’t have an answer for her, but seeing
those tears helped me forget that I was miserable and wet and just
wanted to go home. I would stay and help as long as she needed
me.

It was, after all, what friends were for.

***

I was thinking about sabotage as I hauled a
trash bag out to the Dumpsters behind Christmastowne.

It was a lot to think about.

Between the lengthy delays opening the
village, the power outages, the wires on the Christmas lights
having been cut, the fire in the men’s room...

But if it was sabotage, who was the saboteur?
And why? What was there to gain, other than to bring misfortune to
Jenny and Benny?

Did they have any enemies? With the way Jenny
snapped at her employees, I had a feeling any number of them might
want retaliation against her.

I propped open a fire door and sucked in a
breath as a cold wind crawled under my skin. Snow fell in light
flakes, dusting the back parking lot in a covering of white.

How did the toy donations factor into all
this? Was their disappearance part of the sabotage? In the midst of
what had happened with Lele, I’d almost forgotten about the thefts.
If Riley was certain some were missing, I believed him. Little
escaped that boy.

Then there was Lele. How did her murder
factor in? Had it been a case of mistaken identity? Or had she seen
the saboteur at work and was killed to keep her silent? Or did it
have something to do with the “sordid” goings on she mentioned to
Mr. Cabrera?

Snowflakes tickled my cheeks as I dragged the
bag down a path to the Dumpster. All these questions were giving me
a headache. For a second, I stopped, and just listened to the
silence—that eerie, beautiful quiet of snow falling.