I Messed Up Christmas: A Ghost & Abby Mystery, #2

By Jo-Ann Carson

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?
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jo-Ann Carson
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780994955692

Jo-Ann Carson

Jo-Ann Carson ~ paranormal mystery and romance ~ Reports of Jo-Ann Carson’s death on a Gulf Island are greatly exaggerated or, at the very least, premature. An award-winning fiction and non-fiction author, blogger and podcaster Jo-Ann loves to tinker with words. Her latest two series the Ghost & Abby Mysteries and the Gambling Ghosts feature eccentric characters, such as a Viking ghost with existential issues, a broken-hearted Highlander and a Casanova-man-witch. At the center of each tale is a strong woman trying to make sense of life and love.  A firm believer in the magic of our everyday lives, Jo-Ann loves watching sunrises and walking the beaches near her home in the Pacific Northwest. You can find her at her author website: http://www.jo-anncarson.com/. Blog/ Twitter/ Author FB/ Pod FB/ Pinterest/ Instagram / BookBub Page

Book preview

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