Prologue: Reindead

LAKE GENEVA

December 24, 1927

11:47 p.m.

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The snowstorm swept in with a flurry of flakes as fluffy and white as the feathers of a Robber Baron’s Christmas goose.  Within minutes, the storm had entombed the Tibbett Family Ice Sculpture Garden, stuffing the frozen hymns back down the angels’ throats, suffocating the skipping children in the Kris Kringle market, converting the nativity scene into a lumpy marshmallow.

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From her servants' quarters in the basement of the Tibbett Estate, Millie Fudderman glowered out her window and thought, ain’t this the bee’s knees.  Months of flimflamming had culminated beautifully in the sculpture garden, the masterful sting to her long con, only to be foiled by a white Christmas. 

 

On the phonograph, Jelly Roll Morton was crooning about five golden rings.  Phooey.  She had ten fingers, thank you very much.  Every last one deserved a golden ring after all the strings they’d pulled.  And let’s not forget her neck, either.  She’d stuck it out enough times to deserve a string of the Mediterranean’s finest oyster fruit.  Millie closed her eyes and imagined herself strolling through Geneva, bedecked in shiny jewels and a fluffy mink coat.  Swiss Geneva, that is.  The one surrounded by snow-capped Alps and cozy chocolatiers, not gassy cows and cornfields. 

 

Millie slugged from her jug of giggle juice without a wince.  The illicit barbed wire burn spiffied her spirits.  Ever since rail baron Earl Tibbetts Sr. had started hacking up a lung in the fall of his 83rd year, everything had gone as predicted.  As predicted, Earl Sr.’s three young adult children, Ethel, Earl Jr., and Edwin—dim, dimmer, and dimmest—had flocked back home from their floozy misadventures like vultures.  As predicted, Earl Sr., basking in his pathetic progeny’s sycophancy, had waffled over who would inherit the Lake Geneva mansion, the crown jewel of his will.  And as predicted, as Earl Sr.’s health deteriorated with still no decision, the three dim-bulbs sought shrewder and more elaborate ways to curry his favor. 

 

As the hidden ringmaster of this three-ring circus, Millie had not only let them do it—she’d fanned the flames.  The busier Ethel, Earl Jr., and Edwin were one-upping each other, the easier it would be for Millie to snatch the mansion from under their schnozzles.  And so, one evening in mid-December, while mixing Earl Sr.’s nightly sidecar, Millie tripled the cognac, waited until he was good and pliable, and put her plot into motion.  

 

“Three children, all wise heads and deserving,” Millie said, lingering at his bedside, beside the IV stands and bottles of penicillin.  “But only one house.  I sure don’t envy you.  That’s a pickle.”

 

“Whole jarful,” Earl Sr. grunted.  He slugged back the dregs of his sidecar, setting off a coughing fit. 

 

Whole jarful, Millie mulled, as Earl Sr. hacked and spasmed.  Although she had not read the will herself, she had her hinkies that the jarful under discussion was due to the lack of other goodies in it.  Earl Sr. had shipped in the Italian marble to build the gargoyle monstrosity just as Americans were turning their affections away from the railroad, towards the automobile.  “Don’t be a caboose!” a radio ad urged.  “Drive into the twentieth-century with your very own Model T.”  His entire fortune was tied up in the home.

 

“What if,” Millie said, index finger to her chin, as if an offhanded thought had just occurred, “there’s a way out of this jarful of pickles?”  She turned away, shaking her wavy bob just so, as if she’d realized she’d overstepped her station and gender.  “Oh, never mind this silly old tomato, nobody home upstairs, as usual.”

 

There’d never been any hanky-pank between Millie and Earl Sr., but then she’d also never dolled up her hair in a wavy bob and gotten him this spliffcated.  Earl Sr.’s beady eyes dilated, as if seeing her for the first time.  “Now now, Millie, I may not be a fly boy or a flaming youth, but I still enjoy chinning with dames.”

 

Not as much as you like bumping them off, Millie thought.  As the story went, Ethel, Earl Jr., and Edwin’s mother had perished in an automobile accident long ago.  Bereft, Earl Sr. had elected to raise the trio all by himself, while building America’s steel backbone, while teaching Sunday School, with just the scantest amount of help from unmarried women like Millie who, at her pennies-on-the-dollar wages that a man would receive, had made ends meet by working as a switchboard operator by day, a maid for Tibbetts and his trio of spoiled rotten brats by night.  Beyond that latter quality, there wasn’t much by way of similarity amongst the “siblings.”  Millie had her hinkies that more than one mother had gotten into more than one accident.  And that mystery might be solved by dredging the bottom of the lake.  But she hadn’t gotten this far by flapping her gums.

 

“That’s real swell of you,” Millie said, “but truly, Cap, forget I said a peep.”  Although the pneumonia had cleaved away much of the man’s joie de vivre girth, Millie watched his skeletal chest puff up at the moniker.  Cap, as in Captain, as in Captain of Industry.  A smidge inflated?  Sure.  Earl Sr. was no Rockefeller.  In the rankings of robber barons in the flagging rail industry, Earl Tibbets Sr. didn’t make the top ten.  But swiping the riches of even a minor rail baron in the struggle buggy was a ritzy enough rags-to-riches ticket for Millie. 

 

“Don’t be a flat tire, dame,” Earl Sr. said.  “Speak your mind.”

 

“Only if you insist.  See, I was just thinking about Earl Jr., Ethel, and Edwin are each such spitting-images of you, yet brilliant in their own way…”

 

He waved his hand dismissively.  “Just the science of selective breeding.”

 

“…And of the spectacular Christmas sculpture garden you put on for the fine town each year…”

 

Another dismissive wave.  “I’m a charitable man.”

 

“And I thought, why, what if Earl Jr., Ethel, and Edwin each bid for the mansion by creating a sculpture?  All the town will be there.  We can hold a vote.  Whoever’s sculpture the town likes best wins the house.  You’re off the hook, Cap.” 

 

Millie tensed as Earl Sr. knitted his bushy brows and narrowed his gaze at her.  Publicity, Legacy, and Christmas Charity: the three clasps to which she’d attached her strings.  Those three, she’d pulled just right.  It was the fourth string that concerned her.  The what’s-in-it-for-Millie string.  As in, what if Earl Sr. croaked before Christmas?  Who then would fill in that lucrative blank space in his will, the one following the words: “I do hereby decree that the deed to my Lake Geneva mansion, and all assets and privileges therein, shall go to...”?

 

Earl Sr. was still staring.  Maybe his mind hadn’t deteriorated with his body.  Maybe he’d seen the advantage she pressed.  Millie’s palms sweated.  Dying or not, she’d been around Earl Sr. long enough to know he could blow a gasket without the slightest provocation.  Did he keep a heater beneath his pillow?  She bet he did.  Double or nothing he was a crack shot.  Time to scram out.

 

Just as Millie was tensing to flee, Earl Sr.’s cheeks flushed and he threw out his skin-and-bone arms with enough enthusiasm to knock over his IV stand.  “What a plan.  The papers will have a field day.  I bet the Trib, nay, the Times, catches wind.  Why, Millie, that’ll be the cat’s meow!” 

 

--

 

The cat had indeed meowed for the past couple weeks while Millie orchestrated the construction of the sculpture garden.  So perfectly had her plans played out that Millie’d begun to consider herself a prodigy fakeloo artist, as skilled in her medium of deceit as Marcel Duchamp was with a bicycle wheel and a stool.  

 

Tonight, just minutes before the Christmas Eve storm, she’d pulled on that fourth and final string attached to Earl’s emaciated—yet still alive—body.  Yes, defying all expectations, Earl Sr. was still alive, though that was a generous term.  The minor rail baron was a rasping mess, coughing so raggedly Millie expected the next hack to rip a hole in his paper-thin skin.  But he still wanted his nightcap.  Millie regretted it’d come to this, but she was out of time.  While mixing the cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice into Earl Sr.’s sidecar, she’d added a secret ingredient: Nevada juice.  Purchasing the three-ounce eyedropper had been easier than procuring bootleg liquor.  It hadn’t taken long.  By the time Earl Sr. had breathed his final breath, the yegg she’d hired had cracked the safe and removed the will. 

 

Sitting at Earl Sr.’s mahogany desk, which was carved into the shape of a locomotive, Millie had found that lovely blank space in the will: “I do hereby decree that the deed to my Lake Geneva mansion, and all assets and privileges therein, shall go to _____________...”  

 

In an imitation of Earl’s looping scrawl she’d practiced 100 times each day since the 1st of December, she’d written “Mildred P. Fudderman.”

 

--

 

But now this storm!

 

No one in the whole rotten new egg of Fake Geneva would huff over to the sculpture garden with peeled peepers if there weren’t sculptures to see.  And so there’d be nothing to distract everyone as she scurried her stubby little getaway sticks to her secret little getaway jalopy.  Or as she lammed off to Union Station in Chicago for the 4:10 rattler to the Big Apple.  By the time the Earl Sr.’s dim-bulb progeny put two and two together, Millie needed to be lounging in her first-class suite aboard an ocean liner, bidding adieu to Lady Liberty, and wishing herself and her flush Swiss bank account a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Season’s Greetings. 

 

Millie swigged from her jug.

 

No, this Fake Geneva snowstorm wasn’t going to spoil Millie Fudderman’s spinach. 

 

Millie donned her flogger, grabbed a broom, and set out to salvage her riches.

 

--

 

The storm had passed, but not before burying the rolling acres of sculptures with a knee-high dumping of thick, sludgy snow.  Millie galumphed along, wincing as a wet chill wormed through her floppy boot soles.  Applesauce!, she cursed with each step.  New boots had been an unthinkable luxury on her maid’s salary.  No longer.  Soon, she’d buy all the swanky boots.  And feather boas.  And shimmery frocks.  Why, she’d put her fortune towards relegating an entire floor of her Swiss chateau to a collection of fashion and art so spectacular that Mary Williamson Averell herself marveled at it and F. Scott Fitzgerald (“Call me Scotty Fitz,” he’d tell Millie) redeemed himself from his recent flop—The Great Gussy, or Gutzy, was it?—by basing his next book on her. 

 

Dust off and dust out.  That was the name of the game.

 

Breath frosting, Millie at last trudged her way to Ethel’s sculpture.  “Ethel’s sculpture.”  Like the Dumb Dora had lifted a chisel.  Like any of the Tibbett kids had.  Ha.  Fortune without effort, that was inheritance for you.  The kids had done the heavy-lifting by coming up with their genius ideas.  It’d fallen on Millie to train in armies of artists and sculptors, oversee engineering operations to extract blocks of ice from the frozen lake, get everything ready by Christmas day.  What a breeze.

 

Ethel’s genius idea was called “My Best Friends Charlie.”  Charlie, as in Chaplain.  Whom she claimed she’d co-starred beside in “The Kid,” even though Millie had not been able to find her anywhere in the picture aside from two seconds of glorified extra work that could be any dame with a Castle bob.  Ethel had pluralized “Friends” since she’d demanded not one, not two, but six life-sized sculptures of Charlie Chaplain, one from each of Earl Sr.’s favorite Chaplain pictures.  Millie began brushing off the snow from Chaplain number one.  The broom was copacetic at first, but the snow had also stuck in Chaplain’s eyes, sunk deep in his ears.  For those nooks and crannies, Millie had to use her fingers, which soon numbed. 

 

Merry Christmas to my Alp-sized mountain of dough, Millie reminded herself. 

 

Next, she moved on to “Edwin’s sculpture.”  Edwin, the middle child, had demanded a life-sized train in the shape of a tommy-gun headed to the Chicago skyline.  The train was a blatant appeal to Earl Sr.’s ego.  But at least the tommy gun was an honest reflection of how Edwin made his living.  After spending hours cleaning up “Edwin’s sculpture,” Millie’s teeth were chattering, her feet felt like ice blocks, and her hands were prickling with needle-like pain.

 

Happy Holidays to my chateau’s natural hotspring sauna, Millie again reminded herself. 

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The first gray of dawn was leaking over Fake Geneva when, at last, Millie moved on to the reindeer.  Nine reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh.  Smack beneath the mansion’s main balcony.  That was Earl Jr. for you: foisting his characteristically unoriginal idea front and center.  Poor egg would never make it in the rail business, especially after the fresh capital infusion he was counting on went to Millie.  By redirecting the inheritance to herself, Millie was sparing him the embarrassment of running his father’s business into the ground. 

 

The snow had clumped thick in the antlers.  Like an archaeologist excavating the fragile bones of creatures long dead, Millie forced herself to dig slowly, flake by flake.  Rudolph was the star of the sculpture garden.  The last thing she needed was for a broken ice antler to spin Earl Jr. into one of his conniption fits.  If she played this final hand right, Earl Jr. would have no reason to call in the help until said help was helping herself to a steaming mug of Swiss hot cocoa, sipped decadently atop her chateau, fluffed high with whipped cream, maybe a splash of whiskey—

 

“Ow!”  Millie retracted her hand.  The sharp antler had torn open the palm of her glove, fluff innards spilling and pinking with her blood.  What mug of a sculptor had made these antlers so sharp?  She could’ve sworn she’d instructed no sharp anything.  Families were to attend.  The first thing sugar-addled and gift-spoiled kids would do is climb all over the sculptures, the budding anarchists.  When it came to Fake Geneva’s little royals, Millie’s heart was more coal than sugar-plum, but still, it was a point of pride that her scheme be relegated to false home deeds, forged wills, secretive wire transfers, and the such.  It was Christmas, for crying out loud.

 

The cut didn’t seem too deep.  She considered running back inside for a bandage, but nixed it.  All around the lake, lights were turning on in the dark mansions’ windows.  Little girls tearing shiny paper off their Big 23 Inch Beauty Flossy Flirt Dolls with those Marvelous Rolling Eyes.  Little boys building their Clock Work Trains only to crash them and demand Santa bring a new one.  By mid-morning, the Model Ts would be chuffing over to the sculpture garden.  For now, Millie’d make do with a swig of shine.  She picked up the pace.

 

Season’s Greetings to my eight maids-a-milking: shirtless chiseled Swiss Michelangelos who scrub the tiles, dangle plump grapes above my lips, and milk every ounce of joy from my days.

 

“…rrrrrrrreinnnn…” Rudolph said.

 

Millie recoiled.  Heart thudding, she stared at Rudolph. 

 

“Rudolph?” Millie said.  No reply.  Of course no reply.  The words “reindeer” and “said” did not belong in the same sentence.  It was a reindeer.  Made of ice.  Millie sloshed her jug, alarmed by its lightness.  Oh, the trials and tribulations of availing herself to too much and not enough.  In Switzerland, there’d be no more bathtub liquor for her.  Her glorious stupors would be fueled by Parisian wines in golden chalices.  German beers in cedar steins.  Filled and refilled by her eight chiseled Michelangelos.

 

“…neeeeeengs…” Rudolph said.

 

This time, Millie leapt back, heart in her throat.  She positively had not imagined that.  Rudolph had made a sound.

 

Hadn't he?

 

She stared at Rudolph.  Snowy, icy Rudolph.  Frozen and inanimate.  Silent.

​

Millie's conviction that a reindeer made of ice had made a sound—twice, now—melted into embarrassment.  A reindeer talking?  Banana oil!  How much blood did one have to lose before hallucinations set in?

 

“Don't go casting a kitten, Rudolph,” Millie muttered, getting to work liberating snow from another antler.  As she pawed away the outer layers of snow, the inner layers were pink, then red.  Earl Jr. had insisted that Rudolph's nose be coated three times over in ruby red paint, and at least two of the coats had come off in the snow.  Millie'd have to repaint it.  With yet another task competing for her dwindling time, she dug deeper, faster— 

 

Di Mi!  Millie recoiled, stumbling over her own feet and into a pack of snow. 

 

That appendage poking out… that was not an antler.

 

That red snow… that was not from Rudolph’s nose. 

 

And those antlers that were moving: that was not her losing a grip.  No two ways about it: the icy deer was moving.  Shaking his head, freeing the antlers of snow.  Millie tried to get to her feet and flee, but her legs twisted over themselves, and it was all she could do to scoot backwards on her tush, reciting:

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Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings…

 

“Reindeer Reckonings,” Rudolph called.  “Reindeer… reckonings… reindeer… reindeer… rein…”

 

Then the deer’s head went still. 

 

All was calm.  All was bright.

 

Until a large chunk of snow fell away, revealing to Millie Fudderman not an icy reindeer come to life, but a shirtless male torso impaled six ways to Sunday by Rudolph’s antlers.

 

And she screamed. 

 

--

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Less than a half-hour later, as the church bells rang in Christmas day, so too did the black rotary atop the desk of Lake Geneva homicide detective Holly Blackice, its harsh braying dancing like a busted-up sleighbell as it announced the arrival of a grim Christmas gift: a murder case.

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