Mrs. Claus and the Halloween Homicide

“It was a slaughter,” Salty the elf said.

He’s not wrong, I thought as I surveyed the ruins inside the greenhouse. He’d warned me what to expect during his emergency phone call summoning me, but a slaughter of pumpkins proved more upsetting than I’d prepared myself for. And by “a slaughter of pumpkins” I don’t mean a vegetable term of venery like “a murder of crows” or a “flamboyance of flamingoes.” This was literal violence against a greenhouse full of gourds that had been carefully planted and tended by Salty, the elf who was Castle Kringle’s head gardener and groundskeeper.

I picked my way across broken glass at the threshold of Salty’s greenhouse, horrified by the carnage. Jagged chunks of pumpkin flesh and streams of seedy entrails were strewn across the thermally heated soil. Despite the blissful warmth inside the place, I shivered. I think I knew even then that this vandalism augured worse to come.