All I Want For Christmas Is a Reaper Read online

  It was the small town phone tree, no social media required.

  And while I could call the office and have them call Ellen while I waited for her, there was something nice about having the element of surprise. Walking into an office looking like the cheerful temp who’s going to be answering the phones all day is a good way of measuring people. Time and again I’d learned that everyone treated me differently once they realized what my job was. It was a basic self-preservation skill.

  City. Jungle. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

  I was the well-camouflaged hunter, like an orchid mantis or one of those deep-sea angler fish that looked like a friendly light in the darkness giving hope and joy to everyone right before the fangs closed around them. Nom nom nom.

  Grinning at my reflection, I gave my strawberry-pink lipstick one more touch up and headed out to find Ellen Berry and the Cozy studios.

  The building to the left of the parking lot looked grim, with darkly tinted solar windows[9] and no signage. To the right was a warehouse, the smell of second-rate catering, and the steady hum of machinery and noise. A narrow, dirt path led between a wooden fence and the warehouse; I followed it right into Winter Wonderland.

  Literally.

  There was a broken, wooden sign with distressed pink lettering and a beheaded elf.

  There was also a sticky puddle of red that smelled like corn syrup and was probably fake blood. Probably not a Cozy set.

  Carefully avoiding the puddle, I kept right, heading slowly toward the warehouse and the sound of voices muted by the scream of the dying ventilation unit.

  I don’t know what I actually expected to find. My ideas about Hollywood lots in general were all formed by repeated viewing of Backlot and Ultra, both shows set in pre-reform Hollywood, California, before the monopolies were broken up in the thirties.

  Both shows left me with the impression that movie making was a huge undertaking, with a crew of hundreds and sets that could cover whole counties. That wasn’t what I was seeing as I walked through Cozy’s backlot. It was more like walking through a series of pocket dimensions. Little universes contained by thick, sound-dampening curtains, three sides of thin walls and a ceiling of light reflectors.

  When I entered the sound stage in the warehouse, I saw huge overhead camera setups, lights, and larger sets that ranged from Mistletoe, Minnesota,[10] to a fake beach complete with a shallow pool of water in front of a green screen. Each set had a huddle of people, most wearing jeans or shorts paired with a jokeish holiday t-shirt, and then heavily made-up, heavily perspiring actors bundled in winter coats, despite the spring weather outside.

  “If you take another step, I’m going to have to kiss you.”

  “What?” I spun fast enough to make my skirt flare.

  A sandy-haired man with sparkling blue eyes and the biceps of a dedicated gym aficionado smiled back at me. His grimy, once-white t-shirt had a picture of a body building Santa and the words ‘Santa Stud’, so I figured he belonged to Cozy. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hello.” I put enough ice into the greeting to create a polar vortex.

  “You’ve got to watch out for the mistletoe.” He gestured above our heads.

  “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.” I took a deliberate step to the left without looking up.

  “I’m Noah, by the way.” Sexy Santa held out a strong, tanned, calloused hand. “I do set design.”

  I ignored it. “I’m just passing through.”

  “Right...” His eyes dragged down and back up. “Cute costume. Do you work for Slasher?”

  “Do I look like I work for Slasher?”

  Again, he looked me up and down, appreciation in his eyes. “You look like you could keep a man up at night.”

  I smiled. “Thank you for the compliment.”

  “Any time, beautiful.”

  “Lesbians!” someone screamed behind me.

  I turned in time to see a trim, bald man wearing pink sunglasses, a black sweater, black shorts and waving an actual clipboard with paper in the air.

  A woman with short, curled gray hair and purple t-shirt with a kitten in a Santa hat ran up to him. “Have you seen the mistletoe bouquet?”

  “Nope,” the man in pink glasses said, “no bouquets. I’m zombie wrangling.”

  “Noah?”

  “Sorry, Bee.” Santa Stud shook his head.

  She nodded and rushed off.

  The bald man took a deep breath and shouted, “Lesbians! Where are the lesbians?”

  Noah winked at me as he sauntered off.

  A pair of women in matching bridal gowns ran up, one with shaggy, blonde hair with the tips dyed an atrocious mildew green that clashed with her too-pale skin. The other looked like she was ready to play Okoye in the reboot of the Black Panther movies. She waved at the man. “We’re the lesbians!”

  He checked his clipboard. “Ghosts or zombies?”

  “Mistletoe Miss,” the blonde said.

  “Wrong lesbians!” He marched away, clearly enraged that the lovely ladies were not undead.

  They glanced at each other, shrugged, and then looked at me.

  “Are you looking for lesbians?” the blonde asked.

  “I’m looking for Ellen Berry,” I said, “but I have a sister who likes lesbians.” I reached for my purse where I kept a couple of Lucky’s business cards for just such occasions, but the second lesbian shook her head.

  “We’re already—” She waved a hand between herself and her co-star. “On set romance.”

  “Cozy Curse!” the blonde said cheerfully, shaking her silk flower bouquet at me and hugging her wife-to-be’s arm.

  I nodded. “Understood. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks!”

  The future general of Wakanda pointed down the row of lights. “Ellen is over in Paradise, I think.”

  “Thank you.”

  Off in the distance, someone called for the kissing misses and the brides rushed off to Montana waving and running much better than I ever could on matching high heels.

  Paradise... Hopefully that was a set and I wasn’t interrupting a private moment between Ellen and whoever she was with these days. She hadn’t dated in high school, and I couldn’t remember anyone mentioning her with a partner in college.

  I knew for a fact she wasn’t married because that kind of news would have reached me even if I were on the moon. But maybe it wasn’t news she was sharing yet.

  I walked through wintery scenes, gazebos and pine forests, and coffee shops, and remote cabins.[11] Snow really is prettier when it isn’t cold enough to freeze your nose off outside. Cozy’s brand managed to encapsulate my two least favorite things: winter holidays and small towns.

  No one truly understands how horrible Christmas can be until they have to have a mock cheese made of fish and almonds, or locally-sourced beaver tail, with a group of random grad students who showed up for a three-week intensive course on twelfth century English history.

  One time is fun. Getting a slightly moldy orange and two pence every Christmas for eighteen years while your parents spend their time with guests and your sister goes to winter training camp is significantly less fun.

  Sure, I’m fluent in Middle English, but I really prefer summer holidays. It’s hard to go wrong with fireworks and barbecue.

  “Merri?” The voice of my childhood friend had gotten richer over the years, like a fine wine, but I knew Ellen’s voice anywhere.

  I pivoted in a swirl of skirt. “Ellen!”

  “Aahh!” Ellen looked the same as she had at graduation: curly black hair cut to shoulder length, a galaxy of dark freckles across her permanently and perfectly tanned, cider-brown skin, bright gray eyes, and a wide smile. She wore a shell-pink blazer, champagne satin camisole, and a cute pencil skirt. “Merri! You made it!” She wrapped me in an enthusiastic hug.

  I had a height advantage only because I was wearing two-inch heels. Ellen had the muscle advantage of being the former state wrestling champion for her weight class—women�
�s and co-ed—from ninth grade through college graduation. “Can’t breathe! Can’t breathe! You are squishing me!”

  She gave me one more tight squeeze and released me back like a little kid releasing a goldfish they just tried to kiss. Her smile was even brighter than mine. “I didn’t think you’d come!”

  “For you? I’d drop anything,” I promised. Linking arms with her, I walked away from the movie sets smelling of pine wood and fake snow, back to the garish light of day.[12] “So, tell me every little thing. Why’d you need to see me at work and not for brunch?”

  “All I want from Kriesmas is for her to play grim reaper and kill some problems for me.”

  “Done,” I promised. “Tell me where to start.”

  “First, because I didn’t even realize we were in the same city,” Ellen said as she led me to a park bench under a small, fake maple tree with silk leaves glued to the branches and nailed to the ground. “Your digital footprint is nonexistent.”

  “That’s intentional,” I assured her. “I get stalkers. I get haters. I get death threats. I am the Grinchiest Woman In America according to a recent poll and—at last count—there were seventy-two public videos where my face has been imposed over Scrooge’s in various iterations of Dicken’s classic A Christmas Carol. Thankfully it’s the slightly blurred photo from the newspapers, but still, I’m not putting any of my social life out on the internet. Also,” I added, “I don’t have a social life. I have work.”

  “Sounds like me,” Ellen said sympathetically. She sat next to me on the bench. When she saw my dubious expression, she giggled. “This is the set for the save-the-date promo photos we’re doing for most our movies. Right now all the outside sets are for promo shots to share on social media. They’re mostly wedding invite-themed.”

  I nodded. “Even Winter Wonderland?”

  “Holiday of Horrors for Slasher.” Her mouth twisted at the name and her shoulders hunched forward.

  “Is Slasher really that bad?”

  “For a bunch of Goth Gremlins who get their wiggles and giggles out of watching serial killers?” she asked with a stretched tone. “No. They’re fine. I mean, they’re polite at least. I haven’t heard any of them actually making fun of Cozy.” She named the studio like it was her precious puppy or only child. “But they give us looks and....” She sighed heavily. “I mean, it’s obvious what they’re doing, right? There’s no way Seth Morana is going to keep Cozy going. The only reason we’re still kicking is because there are contracts Morana couldn’t get out of.”

  “Has he told you that?”

  Ellen shook her head, tight curls moving as a unit. “No, the amount of senior staff abandoning Cozy around the time of sale told me that. Merri, I was hired last year as a costumer. That’s it. Now I’m basically running the production of all the Cozy movies. I’m on the Slasher executive board, officially. That doesn’t happen in healthy companies.”

  “Transitions can be rough,” I said.

  There wasn’t much information to go on, but mass quittings after a change of ownership weren’t necessarily a red flag for me. “I’m sure you can handle this.”

  “I’m sure I can’t,” Ellen said glumly. She leaned against the back of the bench with a sigh as someone in the distance yelled for mistletoe. “We had a policy to pay up front for as much as possible. Everything from salaries to the marketing budget is set aside before filming starts and stays there. In January I was told it was all there, the full Cozy budget. I want to start paying and...” She shook her head as she stared out at the fake, brown grass. “I can’t.”

  “Was it stolen?”

  She shook her head again. “Each quarter’s budget is sectioned off, there’s some accounting magic the CFO does.” She waved her hand to scare off a passing dragonfly that had found its way into the set warehouse. “I accessed the second quarter budget this week, after I got my new computer, and it’s not enough. Morana said this was the same budget Cozy had used for the past three years. It was the projected budget for this year, including our big, new movie.”

  I looked at her with interest. “I thought all the movies were new?”

  “About forty percent,” Ellen said, easily falling into the stats because she’d always been good with them. “We show a mix of past favorites, ones we loved but that didn’t get enough public love, and then our new ones. But A Midwinter Wish is a totally different style than anything Cozy’s done before. It’s an interactive holiday romance. The heroine wishes for love on a shooting star on the night of the winter solstice, and when she wishes the star breaks into three pieces. It’s technically difficult because we have to set up all three romances. And it’s more expensive to film, and post-production tripled and so did marketing. It’s a great idea, but really ambitious and very expensive. Very, very expensive.” Ellen glanced up at me guiltily, then went back to studying the impaled leaf as if spending money was a sin.

  “And the budget doesn’t cover it?”

  She reached for the pocket of her shell-pink blazer and pulled out a folded, multi-creased piece of paper that had obviously been crumpled, tossed away, retrieved, smoothed, and refolded.

  I unfolded it and looked at the number. “Fifteen thousand? How much does it take to make most your movies?”

  “The cheap ones run fifty thousand, and that’s with no-name actors reusing sets. Bigger projects usually run close to a hundred thousand, and that’s after accounting for the product placement and ad revenue. Subscriptions help, but where we really make money is having the sales. Every piece of wardrobe is available on our website. You see a toy? You can buy it through Cozy. We team up with every major brand in thirty-four countries.”

  “But fifteen thousand—”

  “—doesn’t buy me anything.” She nodded. “It’ll cover a half a week of wages for a full crew or, maybe, a few cheap dinners for everyone.”

  “What did Morana say?”

  “That he checked the numbers and he thinks that the budget is enough. If I need more, we can talk about it at the next meeting. But, I have to pay people now. Patrick Miles is supposed to be flying in tonight to start filming his portion. If I don’t have the money for him, he’s going to be on the red-eye back to Portland. As for everyone else? I have less than two weeks to make this money magically appear.” She looked ready to cry.

  Patrick Miles was Ellen’s celebrity crush. Missing a chance to meet him because of a budget mishap would...

  Okay... it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But Ellen would be sad, and I could never let that happen.

  I refolded the paper as I thought. “Do you think this is the budget Cozy had before?”

  “Absolutely not.” Ellen was confident. “I started working budgets last summer. I know this isn’t what we spent.”

  “Have you talked to Morana face to face?”

  Ellen suddenly became very interested in one of the fake, orange leaves nailed to the fake, brown grass.

  “You didn’t,” I said flatly.

  “He’s hard to find!” Ellen protested. “And he’s scary. He creeps me out.”

  My eyes narrowed immediately. The chances that I would let Seth Morana scare my best friend were about as good as me retiring to North Pole, Alaska, or releasing an album of Christmas carols.

  “No!” She held up her hands to keep me from murdering her creepy boss. “Not, like, he’s done anything creepy. He’s just so quiet, and he just stares at you until you start to ramble. I don’t like dealing with him. I don’t like dealing with anyone from Slasher,” she admitted. “They all have awards and experience and I feel like an idiot. They’re polite, but, you know how it is when people just stare at you?”

  She wilted like a rose at the first touch of frost.

  Ellen had never been particularly good with confrontation. It’s part of the reason we were best friends: my sister and I were very good at confrontation of every kind. That, and after bumping heads on the playground Ellen had spent a week following me around apologizing. I’d finally
convinced her she wasn’t supposed to say sorry because bumping heads made us best friends. It’d sorta been a lie at the time, but it worked out and became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  She was overwhelmed, she felt unskilled, she felt like she was letting everyone down, so she’d reached out. That made perfect sense. To me.

  I patted her arm. “Do you have the account books?”

  “Yes.” Ellen sniffled a little. “But they’re old school.”

  “What? Like... Excel? OpenOffice?”

  “Pen and paper.”

  I stared at her in horror. “Ellen, that’s not funny.”

  “I know. I have an entire office full of brown boxes of pen and paper accountant ledgers and checkbooks with pre-signed checks.”

  My stomach turned and I felt faint. “That’s... that’s not even legal! To sell Cozy they had to have digital accounts.”

  “Morana might have those,” Ellen said. “I don’t.”

  “Right.” I stood up, brushing off sawdust from my skirt. “Then step one is to track down the serial killer CEO and get the digital records from him.”

  “Can you do that?”

  I thought about it. “Are you officially asking me to do an audit and performance review of Cozy Studios?”

  She looked up at me, gray eyes wide, waiting for a hint.

  I nodded.

  Ellen nodded.

  “Then, yes, legally you are allowed to ask for an audit and I am allowed to request the records for the audit, unless Morana did something very sketchy during the sale.”

  “I probably can’t pay you your regular rate.”

  “True. That’s why I’m charging you the friends and family rate: you owe me a meal.”

  Ellen jumped up and hugged me. “You’re the best!”

  “I know.” I managed to wiggle loose of her grasp again. Barely. “Where can I find tall, dark, and dangerous?”