How the Witch Stole Christmas (Witchless In Seattle Book 5) Read online

  The nativity I’d thrown all my love into? Trashed. The eyeball-rolling joy I’d derived from making those iconic figures out of papier mâché after watching videos on YouTube? History.

  No!

  Who, in good conscience, would steal my realistic baby Jesus and replace him instead with a zombie garden gnome, its gnashing teeth dripping blood? And the Virgin Mary with the light-up shawl? Someone had actually had the nerve to abscond with her and replace her with a cardboard cutout of Frankenstein positioned just right, so he loomed over the baby Jesus imposter. And where in all of Sweet Pete was Joseph?

  Was this some kind of joke Belfry was playing? Was he taking his revenge on me for being so picayune and difficult about this contest since I’d begun planning to coup a win from my entire neighborhood?

  No. Never. Bel knew how much I wanted to win. Sure, he’d called me silly, he’d mocked me all while I’d learned to use a blowtorch and played in endless amounts of water and glue to get the right consistency for my papier mâché.

  But he’d helped me every step of the way, too, indulged my every whim—even when I’d considered taking on the enormous task of personally acting out “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with partridges and everything.

  No, someone had sabotaged me, and that someone was going to pay!

  As I began to consider suspects, I heard a familiar tune—one I was sure I’d heard in some club back in the day. My whirling dervish of a mind stopped dead in its tracks and I groaned.

  Why of all the why’s in the wide-wide world were my twelve handpicked carolers tossing a multicolored beach ball around, dressed in corsets, bikinis, fishnet stockings, stilettos and Speedos, singing not “The Christmas Song,” but “Pour Some Sugar On Me”—with handheld bells?

  Just as I began to catch my breath, I saw something else that made me gasp and widen my eyes until they near fell out of my head.

  “Is that…?” I began, but couldn’t finish the sentence as I pointed to the front porch, where red and purple lights flashed out an angry, erratic beat.

  “A stripper pole? I believe that’s an affirmative, Dove,” Win replied after a long silence, his voice much too calm for me.

  Yes, indeed. It certainly was a stripper pole, right in the middle of our front porch, complete with an admirably athletic woman in a red, sparkly thong bikini and the highest heels I’ve ever seen. She slid along the pole with such elongated grace, you’d think it didn’t take the entirety of her estimated six hundred and thirty-nine muscles to do so.

  Slamming the door of the car, I lifted the hem of my Madam Zoltar caftan and stomp-picked my way through a display of maudlin headstones (ten of them, if anyone was keeping track) with each of the Christmas Lights Display Contest judges’ names on them.

  “Belfry!” I bellowed into the darkening night. “What the heck’s going on?”

  Like he always did whenever they were separated, Whiskey bounded out ahead of me and up the steps to find his buddy Belfry, only to become caught up in a fake spider web attached on either side of each of the porch’s pillars. He growled and struggled, twisting his large body as Win called out to him.

  “Settle down, boy! Wait there for Stevie to untangle you, good man!” Win chastised.

  I’m not the only one who can hear Win and Arkady. Ironically enough, Whiskey can, too, making life so much easier on me when he takes off on one of his tangents to hunt tennis balls.

  “Arkady will get dog untangled—you get the girls some clothes,” he directed. “Their lips, they are blue like in Siberia when we do totally naked Russian Spy-A-Thon.” Then he laughed, and just as quickly muffled it when I growled my discontent.

  “You do that naked?” Win asked, surprise and awe in his tone. “Kudos to you, bloke.”

  “You do not do this naked in your country, Zero?” Arkady still occasionally slipped and called Win by his old spy name, Zero Below.

  “And stick our pasty-white toes into snow? Not on your bloody life, friend.”

  “Boys!” I warned, my temper flaring. My dream was falling down around me, months of hard work crumbling, and they were reliving Naked Spy Ironman.

  Okay, okay, okay. I needed to take a deep breath before I went all Fight Club. However this had happened, these people weren’t responsible for this assault on my Christmas-loving soul. But they likely had answers as to who did.

  Under my breath, I whispered to Win from a clenched jaw, “Would you go find Belfry for me, please? Be sure he’s okay. I’ll try and get to the bottom of this.”

  “Of course, Dove. I’ll be right here if you need me. Just call.”

  An inhale in and an exhale out and I shook off my utter horror as a swirl of light-projector ghosts—with their middle fingers in the upright position—whizzed across the front of the house. Deciding the carolers were the closest to me, and least likely to run far, or even very fast in such skimpy outfits, once they saw my rage, I headed straight for them.

  Keeping my eyes on their faces, I approached the group, catching the first pair of eyes willing to gaze into mine—which happened to belong to a very thin young man wearing a Superman Speedo.

  His Adam’s apple bobbed as his singing warbled and faded off into the night. He gave me a sheepish look when I snatched the ball from the two beach bunnies next to him and lobbed it over their heads. Stilling his brass bell, he gaped at me, waiting.

  “You,” I said, pointing at him, attempting to keep my voice steady and non-confrontational. “Why are you dressed,” I waved my hand up and down along his body, “like this?”

  His lanky body shivered in violent protest, making the bell clang a tinny cry. “Not because I don’t need the money, that’s for sure.”

  Rolling my eyes, I planted my hands on my hips. “Listen, I hired you guys to dress like carolers from the eighteen hundreds and sing Christmas carols, not sing the playlist from Chubby Buddies Steak and Gentleman’s Lounge in your skivvies! Why did you all show up in bathing suits and—and whatever theme this is?” I pointed to another young woman’s fishnet stockings. “Where’s my ‘Joy To The World’ and ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas’?”

  A young woman with lustrous copper hair, also shivering so hard her teeth were chattering, gripped the ties of her bikini top and sighed an exasperated sigh. “Because that’s what our boss told us to do. We thought we were dressing as carolers, too. But our boss said there’d been a last-minute change in the work order and we should wear beach party/burlesque attire—as skimpy as possible. We thought it was a crazy combo. I mean, who mixes bikinis and burlesque? But we’ve done worse in less—it just wasn’t this cold. Seriously, do you really think I’d be here in a bikini when it’s forty-five degrees out if I knew we were actually going to be doing this outside? Not enough money in the world, lady.”

  I blinked at her, my shock clear. Someone had changed the work order? “Who changed the work order?”

  A young girl, maybe no more than college age, pushed her way from behind the others and frowned at me, her raven eyebrows swooshing together as she shook her bell in my face in an angry gesture, her pale fingers trembling with the effort.

  “Listen, lady. We’re not customer service, okay? We show up and shut up and that’s that. Everyone’s gotta make a living. Now do you want us to sing another round of Def Leppard or should we move on to ‘Walk This Way’?”

  I fought a good stomp of my feet and began to pull out my phone, fully prepared to call the Christmas Twenty-Four-Seven people, the place I’d hired the carolers from, when a handful of beads landed on top of my head.

  My blood pressure soared upward with a sharp spike. “Hey! Get down from there!” I bellowed up at them, but they couldn’t hear me due to the whir of the wind machine, blowing glitter and bubbles.

  Without thinking, I ran for the ladder I’d left on the side of the porch for any last-minute technical emergencies and climbed up the rungs to the second floor.

  Sticking my pinky and my index finger in my mouth, I tried to get their attentio
n with a sharp whistle. “Ladies! Get down from there now!”

  One of them actually smiled coquettishly and winked a flirty false eyelash at me, continuing to gyrate to the sounds of the carolers, who had indeed struck up “Walk This Way.”

  “I said, get down!” I hissed, grabbing for the banister as I hiked up my caftan and swung my leg over the wood.

  Hopping onto the balcony—there was very little room to move about and even less clothing on the women—I grabbed a handful of beads from one woman in a tight pink leather bustier with a gold zipper and shook my finger at her. “Give me those beads and get down from here!”

  “Hey! Knock it off, lady! Didn’t anyone ever tell you it pays to be nice to the staff?” A buxom brunette huffed the admonishment from crimson lips.

  My head began to beat out a dreadful pound, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

  The worst of it, Stevie, you ask? But how can it get any worse?

  How much worse does it get than an Easter bunny on your roof, spitting Easter eggs from his butt, while ghosts from some hidden projector fly through the air and give you the finger? How much worse does it get than plastic pink flamingos and baby Jesus zombies?

  I’ll tell you how. It gets worse when the headlights from the Eb Falls van pulls into your driveway and blinds you with the harsh glare of a reminder your judgment day has arrived.

  The very van bringing a car full of ten persnickety, matching-blazer-wearing, rule-abiding, seventy-year-old judges who were sure to have the vapors when they laid their judgey eyes on this fiasco.

  That’s how.

  I felt almost as naked as the women surrounding me. In my panic, I wanted to lunge at the side of the house, spread my arms and legs wide in an attempt to cover this debacle and hide my horror.

  Whoever had thrown up all over my house with every decoration for every holiday on the calendar had covered every nook and cranny, ensuring there was no hiding this.

  One of the women dropped a string of beads over my head with a grin and a tweak of my nose. “Don’t look so glum, chum. You’re having a party! Let’s celebrate!”

  Swatting the beads away, I let my head hang between my shoulders in order to gather my wits and a reasonable explanation for the judges, but there was no time to gather anything before a loud screech of dismay sounded when the judges piled out of the van and spilled onto my front lawn.

  “What is this abomination?”

  I closed my eyes and gulped. Mrs. Vanderhelm and her highfalutin’ had arrived and I was officially doomed.

  So I did the only thing I could do. I hissed one more terse order at the ladies to “put those beads away!” (as if that was going to make everything better. It was like putting a Band-Aid on an open-heart surgical incision) before I swung my leg over the railing and climbed back down the ladder to face my execution squad and take my licks like a man.

  As the judges gathered in a semi-circle, their eyes reflecting the residual vomit of the varied holidays displayed across my lawn and all over my house, I waved on a wince. “Evening, esteemed judges! Welcome to…um, my home.”

  As their eyes swiveled toward me in unison, some shocked, some disgusted, and one or two pair amused, I smoothed my clammy hands over my rumpled caftan, forcing a smile in the very moment another rainstorm of beads showered down from the balcony.

  Several of the colorfully-hued plastic necklaces nailed Mrs. Vanderhelm’s head and shoulders. “Oooh! What in the world?” she squealed and sputtered, stumbling over one of the Styrofoam tombstones, her ankles twisting in an attempt to keep her balance.

  “Mrs. Vanderhelm!” I made a valiant short leap forward, almost successfully catching her. Alas, I slipped in a patch of mud and steamrolled into her instead, sliding into an almost split.

  Which, of course, knocked Mrs. Vanderhelm to her knees—you know, where there was plenty of mud to sully her pantyhose.

  Bending my knee, I twisted the upper half of my body and planted my palms on the ground so I could dig my heel into the soft earth in order to rise—and slipped again. As in, total face-plant in more mud.

  As the male judges hauled a sputtering Mrs. Vanderhelm upward, I spit the grass and dirt from my mouth and wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my caftan, only to be assaulted again with another batch of necklaces.

  Looking upward amidst the onslaught of hard plastic falling down around me, I yelled to the women on the balcony, “Hey, you up there in the pink spandex and kitten mules! Did you bring all the beads in New Orleans? How many of those stupid necklaces do you have? Enough with the stinkin’ beads!”

  “I see you’re entertaining our guests, Stevie. I can always count on you,” Win teased with a husky chuckle. “Still looking for our man Bel. Will pop back in momentarily. Oh, and do tell the lovely lass in the red string bikini, clinging to the banister for dear life, she mustn’t wear that color. It clashes with her skin tone.” And then he laughed and his aura disappeared.

  On a grunt, I somehow managed to regain my footing, only to find the judges gaping at their tombstones while they muttered angry words and Madge Bledsoe dabbed at Mrs. Vanderhelm’s skirt with a tissue.

  On a ragged breath, I wiped my filthy paw across my hip and stuck my hand out in the group’s general direction. “I’m Stevie Cartwright. Remember me? You know, from all those meetings you had before the big day today? The pleasure’s all mine.”

  But no one took it. In fact, I think Ralph Acres wrinkled his bulbous nose in distaste before driving his hands into the pockets of his trousers and looking down at his feet.

  That’s when I saw the big multicolored beach ball the carolers had been tossing about catch the wind and clunk Mrs. Abernathy square in her surly face.

  She sputtered, flapping her hands and crying out as I ran for the ball and kicked it as hard as my leg would let me, while two of the judges soothed her.

  Licking my dry lips, I stuttered, “I can explain, Mrs. Abernathy. Okay, wait. I can’t explain. I mean, I have no explanation for how this happened. I—”

  “Are those women in their—their underwear?” Madge Bledsoe screeched, pointing up to my balcony with a knobby finger.

  “Yep, they sure are,” Frank Morrison said on a lewd cackle, before Hank Winkowsky nudged him in the shoulder, effectively shushing him.

  Blowing a breath from my lips, one that whistled on its way out, I attempted to make a joke. “So I guess the avant-garde approach wasn’t the way to go?”

  And cue the crickets.

  Well, except for Mrs. Vanderhelm. Her lips went thin in her pudgy face even as her eyes, fringed so thick with mascara her lashes looked like spiders’ legs, narrowed at me. Her angry gaze made a louder impact than any sonic boom.

  Thus, I quickly decided this wasn’t the crowd for my improv. So I put on my apologetic face. “If you’ll all just let me explain. Here’s the thing. I just got home from work and I don’t know what happened—”

  “And these tombstones? Can you explain why our names are on them? Are you mocking our committee and the contest? A contest that has been a tradition for fifty years in Ebenezer Falls, Miss Cartwright. Or need I remind you?”

  I cocked my head at Mrs. Vanderhelm and her question, peering at her in the glow of the red light in an attempt to read her facial expression. “What? No! I would never—”

  “Wouldn’t you, then?” she asked, lifting a penciled-in eyebrow as she tapped her clipboard with her red pen of death. “Wasn’t it you, in all your sarcasm, who asked all those questions about whether the stringent rules we take quite seriously for this contest allowed for one to breathe?”

  Oh. Okay. Yeah, I had asked that. But they only had a million and two rules, and as Mrs. Vanderhelm had set about the tedious task of reading them aloud, I’d tried to lighten the boredom. Obviously, I needed to learn to read my audience better or shut up, the latter probably being my best bet.

  I shot her a guilty look as another stiff breeze ruffled my thin caftan, slicing through the fabric and making my knees quiv
er.

  “I did, but I swear to you, Mrs. Vanderhelm, despite my crass jokes, I took this contest very seriously and I adhered to all the rules. I adhered so hard, I was like Gorilla Glue. Swear it on my secondhand Kenneth Coles. I don’t know what or how this happened, and I know this surely means I’m disqualified, but won’t you all please let me at least offer you some nourishment for your trouble? Maybe I can find a way to explain this to you. If you’d all just come inside, I have a delicious—”

  “What’re you gonna feed us in there, arsenic and frog testicles?” Ralph asked, rubbing his round belly on a snort.

  Frannie Lincoln’s eyes nearly rolled to the back of her head when Ralph said the word “testicles,” making Madge and Frank reach for her to keep her from collapsing. Her teased, marshmallow-colored hair flopped in the wind as she backed away from Ralph, swatting at his hands with a pinched expression on her face.

  “This is a disgrace, Stevie Cartwright! How could you bring us all the way out here only to laugh in our faces?”

  I nodded in her direction, tucking my hair back from my face as the rain began. “Yep. It’s a big disgrace, Ms. Lincoln. But if you’ll only let me explain, I’ll try and make it up to you. I hired Pascal Le June to make you some tasty treats for my open house. You remember him, right? He’s the chef who came all the way from France to work for Petula? The one who makes ze pastries lighter than air?” I asked in my sadly lacking French accent.

  Pascal had been all the buzz in town when he’d arrived. Everyone wanted to meet him, rub elbows with him, sample his amazing delicacies. My hope was that he and his tempting treats would at the very least keep me from getting kicked out of future contests.

  Ah, and then I noticed it looked like I’d caught someone’s attention, because Ralph perked up and winked at me. “We can’t let the little gal go to all that trouble without at least takin’ a peek, can we, folks?” He looked at his fellow judges for confirmation.

  “Everyone follow me inside!” I encouraged before they took the opportunity to refuse Ralph. I said a prayer that at the very least, the snacks I’d so carefully picked out were just waiting for the judges to gobble them up.