Rebel Without a Claus: Little Tombstone Cozy Mysteries, #2

By Celia Kinsey

It's Christmas time at Little Tombstone, a rundown roadside tourist attraction in the tiny town of Amatista, New Mexico, and the annual visit from Santa Claus to the children of the village doesn't quite go as planned.

 

Edgar Martinez, who's played Santa every Christmas for the past twenty years, fails to make an appearance. He doesn't even call.

 

The show must go on, so a substitute Santa takes Edgar's place. But when Emma decides to investigate why Edgar, who is normally a rock of reliability, didn't show up for the twenty-first year running to put on his size XXXL crimson crushed velvet Santa suit, she discovers that Edgar seems to have disappeared altogether.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Cat Cozies
• Release date: Jun 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201245535

Book preview

Chapter One

Five days before Christmas , I was in the dining room of the Bird Cage Café helping my second cousin, Georgia, set up the oversized, throne-like homemade plywood armchair which would soon contain the considerable bulk of Edgar Martinez, otherwise known as Santa Claus or alternately, Santo Clós, to the children of the village of Amatista and the surrounding countryside.

Mr. Martinez had been playing Santa in the dining room of the Bird Cage Café for the past twenty years, back when both he and Juanita, the proprietress of the Bird Cage, were considerably younger and Edgar had been at least a hundred pounds lighter.

That was according to Juanita.

I don’t see how Edgar can go on like this, said Juanita, surveying the modifications that Oliver, our handyman, had made to the massive painted plywood chair. If that boy gets any bigger, he won’t be able to leave his house.

That boy was pushing sixty, but since Juanita was nearly on the wrong side of seventy, I supposed that to her, Edgar probably did seem youthful.

I had my own memories of Mr. Martinez playing Santa Claus. By the time the tradition had become established, I’d been a gangly teenager and far too dignified to think of sitting on Santa’s knee and revealing my Christmas wishes, but I did have memories of the dining room of the Bird Cage being filled with squealing tots and their parents.

I was pretty sure there was a picture of me and Georgia somewhere, standing stiffly on either side of Santa in front of the backdrop of the garish pink and green aluminum Christmas tree my Uncle Ricky had acquired back in the sixties.

The antique tree had been quietly retired not long after that picture of Georgia and me had been taken, but this year, while cleaning out one of the guest cottages behind the Bird Cage in hopes that it could be turned into a habitable abode for Georgia and her son Maxwell, we’d come across that prickly aluminum tree, and Maxwell had become enamored with the thing.

This would be my first Christmas back at Little Tombstone, my extended family’s rundown roadside tourist attraction, since my grandmother had passed away.

It was strange for it to be just Georgia and me. We were all that was left of the family unless you counted Georgia’s mother, Abigail, who wouldn’t set foot on the place.

It was going to fall to Georgia’s precocious six-year-old son, Maxwell, to carry on the family line.

It was just as I was trying to imagine Maxwell as a grown man with children of his own and failing entirely, that the boy of the hour appeared with Earp, my late Aunt Geraldine’s ancient and irritable pug, in tow.

My great Aunt Geraldine, Georgia’s grandmother, had never allowed Earp to go around in the nude, and she would have heartily approved of Maxwell’s enthusiasm for dressing the poor pug up each morning before breakfast in one of the many little doggie outfits she’d bequeathed to me along with the animal.

This morning, Earp was costumed as a tiny elf, complete with hat, jacket, and little felt elf booties that made him pause and flick his back feet—first the right, then the left—every third step as he plodded across the worn floorboards of the dining room.

Maxwell was dressed to match.

Where did you find that elf costume, Maxwell? I asked.

I found it in a box. We’re going to be Santa’s helpers.

Maxwell was always finding things in boxes. In a place like Little Tombstone, with its rambling buildings complete with basements and attics, there was a lot of scope for indulging one’s desire to collect things: which appeared to have been a major pastime of every inhabitant of Little Tombstone for the preceding sixty years.

Who knew what we might find before we got the place set to rights, assuming that ever happened.

"Does Santa need helpers?" I asked Maxwell.

He nodded his head so vigorously that his elf hat tilted to one side.

"Mr. Martinez is a very experienced