I Messed Up Christmas Read online

  I Messed Up Christmas (A Ghost & Abby Mystery)

  Jo-Ann Carson

  JRT Publications

  Nanaimo

  © 2017 Jo-Ann Carson Terpstra

  JRT Publications

  ISBN: 978-1-989031-00-1

  Cover Art by Authors on a Dime

  Midnight Magic (A Ghost & Abby Mystery) is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are the products of my imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  I dedicate this tale to the mothers, aunts, daughters and grannies who selflessly give their hearts and souls to make Christmas special for their families. They are the true heroes of the world, the glue that holds us all together.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. My First Christmas Caper

  2. Ding Dong Merrily on High

  3. Angels We Have Heard on High

  4. Hark the Herald Angels Sing

  5. Do You Hear What I Hear

  6. Blue Christmas

  7. I Wonder as I Wander

  8. Oh Christmas Tree

  9. Jingle Bell Rock

  10. Rock'n Round the Christmas Tree

  11. O Holy Night

  12. Mistletoe

  13. Frosty the Snowman

  14. Silent Night

  15. Joy to the World

  16. Do You Hear What I Hear

  17. All I Want for Christmas

  A Note From Jo-Ann

  Other Books by Jo-Ann Carson

  About Jo-Ann Carson

  Introduction

  I Messed up Christmas

  A Ghost & Abby Mystery Novella

  ~magical mayhem for the holidays~

  Single mom Abby Jenkins runs a detective agency out of a haunted teahouse in the Pacific Northwest town of Sunset Cove, and while she finds tackling the usual supernatural suspects easy, she can’t face Christmas. She wants this one to be perfect for her kids. With a yuletide to-do list longer than Main Street, a jealous Viking-ghost boyfriend with existential issues, and unreliable witch powers, she’s in a twisted-tinsel, holiday funk, when the mayor asks her to find a missing angel. The statue, which sat on top of the Christmas tree in the town square for the last hundred years, symbolizes all that’s good about the holidays: love, peace and joy. Abby drops everything to look for the stolen angel.

  Will she find Christmas along the way?

  1

  I’m the night janitor in a haunted teahouse, in the small Pacific Northwest town of Sunset Cove, where things happen no one talks about. Ever. You’d think that would be enough weirdness for one person in a lifetime, but not for me. I’ve started a business on the side, to sort and sanitize supernatural drama. That is to say, I’m the community’s first private detective. My name is Abby Jenkins.

  I’ve studied sleuthing for years, reading every Nancy Drew, Agatha Christie and Charlaine Harris book in the public library. I rock at jigsaw puzzles. I’m naturally nosy. And my whopper credential is that I know all the usual suspects in town, both of the human and supernatural kind. Of course we get visitors, but that’s beside the point. I figure I can solve a local whodunit with the best of them, especially if there’s a butler involved. What could possibly go wrong?

  Although my jobs may sound unusual, I’m not a freak. I look like a regular thirty-two-year-old mom, the kind you see at the grocery store herding her three young children through the shopping aisles. My blond hair lives in a creative ponytail and my thrift-store clothes are stained with life. I can’t remember the last time I put on makeup. I avoid mirrors, not because I’m a vampire, but because they make me cranky. You could easily pass me by, and profile me as a normal, single-mom-next-door—a minion in the landscape of America. But I’m not. Unusual things happen to me.

  It’s as if I have a sticker on my forehead, reading: “Send me your ghosts, poltergeists and living dead, and see what happens.” Some people call me, “that widow,” others, “the janitor in that place,” and now some call me, “the private dick without a dick,” but I refuse to be defined. I am simply Abby.

  Let me tell you about my first Christmas Caper. Trust me: I’ll never forget it.

  2

  Ding Dong Merrily on High

  The view outside my kitchen window could have been used for the front of a Christmas card. Yuletide-picture-perfect. Snow fell in large, fluffy flakes, blanketing the ground with inches of fresh whiteness, trimming the limbs of the giant conifers with a layer of pure white and creating a winter silence that I craved. A half-formed snowman stood sentinel on my back deck with a carrot sticking out of its misshapen head and my old sunhat propped above its one remaining cucumber eye. The cold, crisp air smelled of evergreens, the ocean and snow. As the pre-dawn light rose over the horizon, revealing the landscape in its ethereal glow, I momentarily forgot my problems.

  The view inside my window was a whole different matter. Chaos ruled supreme. Three kids, two jobs and a weird love-life made my life complicated. Never dull, but complicated. And messy. Very, very mess. But looking out my window at the dawning of the gorgeous winter morning, I had hope. In my hand I held the mother of all to-do lists.

  On my favorite blog, The Worst Mom Ever, I had found the answer to all my Christmas worries, a way to create the best Christmas for my family. I know. I know. Every year a kazillion articles are written for moms to help them organize the picture-perfect Christmas. I’ve read them all. But this one really looked good. It felt authentic. It made having a meaningful, loving event for the family look doable, without having to create hand-made bows out of strips of tie-dyed silk or use a glue gun on egg cartons to create the perfect manger for the baby Jesus. The blog post was called “Christmas Simplified,” and I could see myself mastering it.

  “You’ve had too many candy canes,” said Spark inside my head, which was her way of saying she thought I was crazy. Spark is a wee bit of magic that slipped inside me when I used a magic potion to execute a vampiric beast called a draugr. She likes to comment on everything I do, which at times can be helpful, but mostly not. She has a decidedly sarcastic, cynical and bawdy view of the universe.

  “Get real,” she said. “Christmas is not something you simplify.”

  Ignoring her, I savored the smell of finely-roasted instant coffee as I poured myself my first cup. I reread the blog post for the third time. The first step to the simple Christmas was to get a tree, a really good tree. I sighed. The plastic tree we had used for the last ten years had been put out in the trash the day before after Jonathan, my seven-year-old son, levelled it doing a trick on his skateboard, which, of course, he’s not supposed to use indoors. Considering the lights no longer worked, it wasn’t a big loss. I planned to find myself the perfect tree, and since I now lived in the Pacific Northwest, the land of Christmas trees, I’d get a real one.

  Sparky tugged my ear. “Right. Let me get this straight. Your plan is take a chainsaw to a tree, drag it home in the snow and feed it water until all of its needles fall off, so that we can stand around its dead wood and sing ‘Merry Simple Christmas on High.’”

  “Be quiet. You don’t understand Christmas.”

  I grabbed the pad of paper sitting near me on the kitchen table and started a list. This was the third one for the season. The first died when spaghetti sauce drowned it. The second took a hike to parts unknown. But that didn’t matter. This would be the Christmas list to end all lists. It had five easy steps.

  Number one: find a tree. An evergreen tree, the writer asserted, would make Christmas great. The green tree at winter solstice has for centuries represented undying life. It’s an ancient custom to have one in the house,
or so the blogger said. In the Christian tradition the conifer represents the tree of life, an image of Christ, the supreme gift from God to humanity. Besides, she wrote, they hold decorations well.

  Two: decorate the tree. I had a box of old ornaments, and while some of them may have been on the tawdry side, they each told a sentimental family story.

  “You know your magic could do all of this quickly and easily,” said Spark.

  “Nope. I want to do it the old-fashioned way with my own hands.”

  “Bor-rrrring.”

  Shush. Where was I? Three: get presents. Now that’s where I got stuck. While I could envision myself chopping down the tree, dragging it home and putting ornaments on it, the perfect gift list had me really stumped. Jane, my three-year-old, had fallen in love with a stuffed Siamese cat in the window of a store downtown, so she would be easy to shop for. Jinx, my five-year-old, told Santa she wanted princess Barbies, and, as much as I loathed the dolls, I might get one for her. It would give me the opportunity to lecture her on what real women look like. She also wanted a bike, so I might get her that instead. Finding a good present for Jonathan, my skateboarder, worried me most. He told Santa that he only wanted one thing, a puppy.

  I did not want a puppy in the house. Not that I don’t like puppies. Other people’s puppies are cute, cuddly and generally wonderful, but they poop all over the place, shed and generally need a lot of attention. I didn’t want the responsibility of a puppy. I had way too much on my plate to be house-training a tail-wagging fur ball: two jobs, three kids, a big old house to tame and a stubborn boyfriend. I say stubborn because he had stopped talking to me and would not let me explain why he had found me in the arms of another man. Anyways, the point was that I did not want a puppy in the house, but if Jonathan woke up Christmas morning and didn’t see one under the tree, he would stop believing in the magic of Christmas, and I couldn’t have that.

  Someone knocked on my front door.

  3

  Angels We Have Heard on High

  I live on the outskirts of a small seaside town and hadn’t been expecting anyone, so I opened the door slowly, not knowing what to expect. One can never be too careful anywhere, and especially in Sunset Cove where odd things happen, but instead of finding a scary stranger on my doorstep I found the town mayor, James Madison, a quiet, Caucasian man of average height and average looks, the sort of individual who could blend in anywhere. “Ms. Jenkins, I must speak with you,” he said.

  I led him to my living room where I pushed all the toys off the sofa so that he would have somewhere to sit. I could hear his labored breath and figured he either had asthma or was upset. Nah. Push that thought out of my mind. Grown men don’t cry. I sat opposite him on my favorite comfy chair.

  “The town needs you,” he said.

  “I’m always willing to help the town,” I said, wondering if he was raising money for a new city hall.

  “No, you don’t understand. We need your help.”

  That could mean only one thing. “You mean you have a supernatural problem?”

  “Maybe. I’m not absolutely sure, but I want to cover all possibilities. I’m not a naïve man. I know that things happen in the cove that cannot be easily explained.”

  I opened my mouth to give him one of my pat stories for all the supernatural going-ons that happened around us, but he held up his hand to stop me.

  “No, don’t patronize me. You work at the haunted teahouse. I know you know things that would make my hair stand on end, and that might be helpful for my problem.”

  “And what exactly is your problem?”

  “Someone took our angel.”

  Angel? Sheesh. Since coming to Sunset Cove I had dealt with ghosts, poltergeists, ghouls, draugrs, psychics and mediums, but I had never dealt with divine beings. “I’m sorry, that’s out of my league.” As in, way out.

  “You have to listen to my story. I don’t know who else to go to. You’re the only detective in town and you understand strange things.”

  Strange things? Now there was an interesting way to sum up my life. I nodded.

  He leaned forward. “We put the angel on the twenty-foot Christmas tree in the town square on Friday morning and by Friday night it had disappeared. That angel has been on every Christmas tree in the square for the last hundred years. It’s a tradition, and you know how important tradition is when it comes to Christmas.”

  “Who would steal an angel?”

  “The council and I have discussed this at length and we don’t think any of the normal citizens would do such a thing. We think it may be one of them.”

  “Them?” I tried not to laugh.

  “All right I’ll say it. We think it’s one of the supernatural creatures who lurk around.” His eyes bulged as he made his point.

  “Why would they want an angel?”

  “I have no idea what kind of heathen rituals they perform at Christmas and I don’t want to know.”

  “I see.” His prejudice disgusted me. “You know I charge money for my services.”

  He took out his wallet, pulled out two hundred dollars and handed it to me. “I understand this is your retaining fee.”

  Cold cash in my hand felt mighty fine. I would have done the job for free, on account of Sunset Cove being my home, but after he insulted some of my best friends I decided I could use the money for a good turkey dinner. I nodded. “I’ll get on it.”

  “Good.”

  I stood. He stared at me.

  “Is there something else?” I asked.

  His face paled and his hand trembled as he handed me a folded piece of paper. “I received an anonymous email the night the angel disappeared.”

  4

  Hark the Herald Angels Sing

  I can’t afford Christmas. That’s my reality. Mine and most of the rest of the world. I know I shouldn’t waste time feeling sorry for myself, but the holiday season puts me in a funk. I can’t afford Christmas, at least not the kind pushed down my throat by the media; that of the perfect family with a mommy and a daddy and 2.5 kids, showered with the latest, most expensive gifts. I know the images are created to sell product, but they creep into my head and mess with my expectations of the season. Even though I recognize what is happening to me, it happens every year, and I wake up on Christmas morning with a fake smile on my face feeling like the worst mom on the planet. So the extra two hundred dollars sitting in my hands felt mighty fine. It felt like a chance for a good Christmas. Mayor Madison may be a bigoted dick-head, but he wasn’t asking for my hand in marriage or for my approval, just my help. And the town needed its angel.

  Who would steal an angel?

  I called Joy, the receptionist at the teahouse, as she is my official researcher and a good friend. I pay for her services with bottles of local wine for which I barter my janitorial services. That’s how the town works, mostly. Rather than use money the tax man can follow we barter services with one another. Joy knows everyone in town and is a whiz at computers, but when I asked her about the missing angel she went quiet for a moment.

  “Joy, you still there?”

  “The angel’s missing?” she gasped.

  “That’s what Mayor Madison says.”

  “Sounds like a bad omen to me. It’s really bad ju-ju to mess with angels. I’ll let Azalea know.”

  Before I could say more, she clicked off. Joy wasn’t a gabby person, but that was abrupt even for her.

  Okay, so no suspects yet. I needed to talk to Eric, my partner in crime and all things that matter. He might have some ideas about where to start. But Eric, my boyfriend for the last two and a half years, was MIA. Missing in action.

  Eric and I have an unusual bond. When we look into each other’s eyes the world around us dissolves. There is only him and me. We are a hot item.

  While we’d had our spats over minor issues like cursing in front of the kids, this was our first big fight. He had walked in as Dante, a man-witch who considers himself my mentor, was teaching me to levitate. What Er
ic saw was another man holding me in his arms, and he vanished faster than lightning and hadn’t returned. That was a week ago.

  While I’m not immune to Dante’s hot, Italian good looks or his Casanova charm, I’m not in the market. Eric is my guy.

  I’ve called his name. I’ve left messages with his friends. I’ve stalked him in every possible way, but I haven’t been able to reach him. I wish he used a cell phone, but ghosts aren’t fond of electronic devices.

  Yes, Eric is a ghost, a six-foot-seven revenant with a bad-boy smile that wobbles my heart, a wicked sense of humor and the solid character of a Viking warrior. He never failed to make me laugh at the ridiculousness of life and focus on what really matters.

  I paced my kitchen floor as if the answers would rise in the flour I kicked up from my last batch of burned shortbread. It looked like I would have to solve this one on my own. Back to the question: Who would steal an angel?

  5

  Do You Hear What I Hear

  An hour later I sat in my office in the attic of the teahouse. My kids were busy playing at my cousin Jill’s place. My incomplete Christmas to-do list sat simmering on my kitchen table, and I was free to concentrate on my new assignment.

  I looked at the mayor’s crumpled piece of paper. It read: “The angel is gone.” And it was signed “concerned citizen.” No clue there. At least none I could see.

  When I Googled the Sunset Cove angel I found lots of interesting details. She stood sixteen and a half inches tall and wore a white-and-silver dress with a lace design. Her wings were made of white feathers, and in her hands she held a silver heart. Carved from yellow cedar a century ago, she was the original angel for the town. The angel. No store bought glossy job could replace her.