Mr. Murder

babbled excitedly: “Wow, you’d need a forklift and a dump truck to carry it all away, once it was popped, ’cause it’d be like snowdrifts only popcorn, mountains of popcorn. We’d need a vat of caramel and maybe a zillion pounds of pecans just to make it all into popcorn balls. We’d be up to our asses in it.”

“What did you say?” Paige asked.

“I said you’d need a forklift—”

“No, that word you used.”

“What word?”

“Asses,” Paige said patiently.

Charlotte said, “That’s not a bad word.”

“Oh?”

“They say it on TV all the time.”

“Not everything on TV is intelligent and tasteful,” Paige said.

Marty lowered the story notebook. “Hardly anything, in fact.”

To Charlotte, Paige said, “On TV, I’ve seen people driving cars off cliffs, poisoning their fathers to get the family inheritance, fighting with swords, robbing banks—all sorts of things I better not catch either of you doing.”

“Especially the father-poisoning thing,” Marty said.

Charlotte said, “Okay, I won’t say ‘ass.’ ”

“Good.”

“What should I say instead? Is ‘butt’ okay?”

“How does ‘bottom’ strike you?” Paige asked.

“I guess I can live with that.”

Trying not to burst out laughing, not daring to glance at Marty, Paige said: “You say ‘bottom’ for a while, and then as you get older you can slowly work your way up to ‘butt,’ and when you’re really mature you can say ‘ass.’ ”

“Fair enough,” Charlotte agreed, settling back on her pillows.

Emily, who had been thoughtful and silent through all of this, changed the subject. “Ten pounds of unpopped corn wouldn’t fit in the microwave.”

“Of course it would,” Marty assured her.

“I don’t think so.”

“I researched this before I started writing,” he said firmly.

Emily’s face was puckered with skepticism.

“You know how I research everything,” he insisted.

“Maybe not this time,” she said doubtfully.

Marty said, “Ten pounds.”

“That’s a lot of corn.”

Turning to Charlotte, Marty said, “We have another critic in the house.”

“Okay,” Emily said, “go on, read some more.”

Marty raised one eyebrow. “You really want to hear more of this poorly researched, unconvincing claptrap?”

“A little more, anyway,” Emily acknowledged.

With an exaggerated, long-suffering sigh, Marty glanced slyly at Paige, raised the notebook again, and continued to read:

“He prowls the downstairs—wicked, mean— looking to cause yet one more bad scene. When he spies the presents under the tree, he says, ‘I’ll go on a gift-swapping spree! I’ll take out all of the really good stuff, then box up dead fish, cat poop, and fluff. In the morning, the Stillwaters will find coffee grounds, peach pits, orange rinds. Instead of nice sweaters, games, and toys, they’ll get slimy, stinky stuff that annoys.’ ”

“He won’t get away with this,” Charlotte said.

Emily said, “He might.”

“He won’t.”

“Who’s gonna stop him?”

“Charlotte and Emmy are up in their beds, dreams of Christmas filling their heads. Suddenly a sound startles these sleepers. They sit up in bed and open their peepers. Nothing should be stirring, not one mouse, but the girls sense a villain in the house. You can call it psychic, a hunch, osmosis— or maybe they smell the troll’s halitosis. They leap out of bed, forgetting slippers, two brave and foolhardy little nippers. ‘Something’s amiss,’ young Emily whispers. But they can handle it—they’re sisters!”

This development—Charlotte and Emily as the heroines of the story—delighted the girls. They turned their heads to face each other across the gap between beds, and grinned.

Charlotte repeated Emily’s question: “Who’s gonna stop him?”

“We are!” Emily said.

Marty said, “Well . . . maybe.”

“Uh-oh,” Charlotte said.

Emily was hip. “Don’t worry. Daddy’s just trying to keep us in suspense. We’ll stop the old troll, all right.”

“Down in the living room, under the tree Santa’s evil twin is chortling with glee. He’s got a collection of gift replacements taken from dumps, sewers, and basements. He replaces a nice watch meant for Lottie with a nasty gift for a girl who’s naughty, which is one thing Lottie has never been. Forgetting her vitamins is her biggest sin. In place of the watch, he wraps up a clot of horrid, glistening, greenish toad snot. From a package for Emily, he steals a doll and gives her a new gift sure to appall. It’s oozing, rancid, and starting to fizz. Not even the villain knows what it is.”

“What do you think it is, Mom?” Charlotte asked.

“Probably those dirty kneesocks you misplaced six months ago.”

Emily giggled, and Charlotte said, “I’ll find those socks sooner or later.”

“If that’s what’s in the box, then for sure I ain’t opening it,” Emily said.

“I’m not opening it,” Paige corrected.

“Nobody’s opening it,” Emily agreed, missing the point. “Phew!”

“In jammies, slipperless, now on the prowl, the girls go looking for whatever’s foul. Right to the top of the stairs they zoom, making less noise than moths in a tomb. They’re both so delicate, slim, and petite, and both of them have such tiny pink feet. How can these small girls hope to fight a Santa who’s liable to kick and to bite? Are they trained in karate or Tae Kwon Do? No, no, I’m afraid that the answer is no. Grenades tucked in their jammie pockets? Lasers implanted inside their eye sockets? No, no, I’m afraid that the answer is no. Yet down, down the shadowy stairs they go. The danger below, they can’t comprehend. This Santa has gone far ’round the bend. He’s meaner than flu, toothaches, blisters. But they’re tough too—they’re sisters!”

Charlotte defiantly thrust one small fist into the air and said, “Sisters!”

“Sisters!” Emily said, thrusting her fist into the air as well.

When they discovered that they had reached the stopping point for the night, they insisted Marty read the new verses again, and Paige found that she, too, wanted to hear the lines a second time.

Though he pretended to be tired and needed some coaxing to oblige them, Marty would have been disappointed if he hadn’t been importuned to do another reading.

By the time her father reached the end of the last verse, Emily was only able to murmur sleepily, “Sisters.” Charlotte was already snoring softly.

Marty quietly returned the reading chair to the corner from which he had gotten it. He checked the locks on the door and the windows, then made sure there were no gaps in the drapes through which someone could look into the room from outside.

As Paige tucked the blankets around Emily’s shoulders, then around Charlotte’s, she kissed each of them goodnight. The love she felt for them was so intense, like a weight on her chest, that she could not draw a deep breath.

When she and Marty retired to the adjoining room, taking the guns with them, they didn’t turn off the nightstand lamp, and they left the connecting door wide open. Nevertheless, her daughters seemed dangerously far