The Mistletoe Secret

by Richard Paul Evans

  “It’s okay. I didn’t want you to have to come in.”

  I looked at her quizzically. “Why?”

  “I just didn’t.”

  I turned the heat all the way up and pointed the dash vents toward her. She rubbed her hands together in front of the closest vent. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She looked at me and remarked, “You got a new coat.”

  “A real coat,” I said. “A parka. Just like you told me to.”

  She smiled. “You’ll be glad. It gets so cold at night.”

  “Which is why you really should have waited inside. What if I’d been in a wreck and didn’t come?”

  She grinned. “Then the next morning I would be found frozen on the front porch like the Little Match Girl.”

  “Exactly.” I put the car into gear. “So, speaking of freezing, where do we find this ice castle?”

  “Just head east.” She pointed. “You’ll drive about a quarter mile until you see a sign that says Soldier Hollow. Then turn right again. You can’t miss it. There will be a lot of cars.”

  “Hopefully all leaving,” I said.

  “That’s the plan,” she said. “To have the castle to ourselves.”

  The ice castle was even more spectacular than I had expected. We arrived around ten o’clock to a throng of cars and people exiting the field. Following Aria’s instructions, I pulled my car up around the back of the exhibit. Someone in a yellow reflective vest came over to stop us, but Aria just waved to him and he smiled and let us through.

  As we made our way to the back entrance, Aria told me a little of the history behind the ice castle. The artist or, more aptly, the architect behind the castle was a Utah man named Brent Christensen. His ice creations began one cold winter eight years earlier, when he made them in his backyard for his daughter.

  What started out of amusement turned into an obsession that had him pushing the limits of ice creation, trying new things with the medium, and soon building larger and larger structures.

  Then he convinced a Midway resort to pay him to build a massive ice exhibit—not as big as the castle we were walking around but larger than anything that he, or anyone else, had built before. The public response was phenomenal and inspired Christensen to build full-size ice castles in different locations around the world. Since then, millions of people had toured his ice constructions in Utah as well as elsewhere, including New York and Edmonton, Canada.

  During the daylight hours the ice castle is a striking, glacial blue, but at night it is even more spectacular, lit up by thousands of LED lights embedded in the ice.

  It took Aria and me forty-five minutes to move through the structure. Still, as beautiful as our setting was, it wasn’t the castle that commanded my attention. Aria was far more beautiful than anything that could be created of crystal and light. Near the end of our tour the lights all went off, leaving us alone in the dark, the ice caverns and walls lit only by moonlight.

  “I don’t think they know we’re still in here,” Aria said.

  “Now I’m especially glad I got a ‘real’ coat,” I said. “Since we’ll probably end up spending the night.”

  To my surprise, she looked a little nervous. “Do you know how to get out?”

  “This way,” I said.

  “Wait.” She took my hand. Her fingers were slim and delicate and her hand felt soft and warm in mine. When we were finally out of the castle I was reluctant to give her hand up.

  As we walked back to my car she said, “It’s not Daytona Beach, but what did you think?”

  “I loved it,” I said. “And I guarantee that there will never be one in Daytona Beach.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “No one will ever go surfing in Midway. I’m glad you liked it.”

  It was late and I wasn’t sure what was to come next, only that I didn’t want the night to end. “Do you want to get a drink or something?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “I meant a hot chocolate.”

  “Oh.” She smiled. “I don’t think anything’s open.”

  “The inn is,” I said. “We could go there.”

  She looked a little hesitant.

  “If you don’t want to . . .”

  “I do, I just . . .”

  I suddenly understood her reticence. “We’ll stay in the dining room.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Sorry. I’m just a little old-fashioned that way.”

  “And I’m a gentleman that way.”

  She smiled. “A gentleman. I almost forgot what those look like.”

  As we turned onto the road before the inn, Aria said, “Do you know anything about that statue of the boar?”

  “No, but it seemed a little familiar.”

  “It’s a casting of a statue in Florence, Italy. There are replicas of it around the world, including the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia. But what’s really cool is that the statue can be seen in the movie Hannibal and two of the Harry Potter movies.”

  I looked at her in wonder. “How do you know all this?”

  “Ray,” she said. “He talks a lot. About the inn.”

  I grinned. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  I parked the car on the cobbled driveway and led her in. A woman I didn’t recognize was standing at the front desk. The dining room was empty, though the lights were still on.

  “Is anyone in the kitchen?” I asked.

  “No, sir. They’ve gone home for the night.”

  “I’d like to make some hot chocolate.”

  “There’s a coffeemaker with a tray of tea and cocoa on the counter in the back of the small dining room.”

  “Thank you.” I grabbed a napkin and a few butter cookies from the tray near the stairway, then Aria and I walked back to a table near a window in the smaller dining area.

  I held her chair for her, then walked over to the counter and made two cups of hot cocoa. I brought them over and set both cups on the table.

  “It’s nice to be on the other side of that,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “Being served.”

  I smiled. “Be careful, I think it’s too hot.”

  “It smells good.”

  “The package said it’s mint chocolate.” I sat down across from her.

  “What time do you have to be at work in the morning?” she asked.

  “I’m flexible. How about you?”

  “Early,” she said.

  “Do you work every day?”

  “Almost. I’m working a lot more lately because of the holidays.”

  “Extra Christmas money?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I can always use the money, but mostly because the other waitresses have a lot of family things. So I pick up their shifts just to help out.”

  “That’s noble of you.”

  “I don’t know about noble but it works out. It’s not like I have much going on. And, added bonus, people tip more during the holidays.” She took a sip of her cocoa, then quickly withdrew. “That is hot.”

  “Sorry.” I walked out into the hall and returned with a couple cubes of ice. “May I?”

  She nodded and I dropped one of the cubes into her cup, the other in mine. “That should help.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Remember that woman who sued McDonald’s for millions of dollars because her coffee burned her?” I said.

  “Yes. Could I sue you for millions because the cocoa’s too hot?”

  “Sorry, I don’t have millions.”

  “Me neither.”

  “So tell me about your name. There’s got to be a story behind it.”

  “It came from my father. He was a musician. He played the violin, second chair for the Minnesota Orchestra.”

  “So he was good.”r />
  “He was very good.” She looked at me. “He told me that he named me Aria because an aria is an expressive melody and that’s how he wanted me to live life, not as the background beat, not the repetitive harmony, but to create my own song.

  “The strange thing is that if you look the word up, it says the meaning has changed through time. Today, an aria is usually a self-contained piece for one voice. That pretty much describes my life.” She stirred her cocoa again, then took another small sip. “That’s better.” After a pause and another sip, she said, “Do you think that our name actually affects who we are in life?”

  “There’s a name for that theory, you know. It’s called nominative determinism.”

  “That’s a little scary that you know that.”

  “Then I’ll really scare you. The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung said that there’s a ‘grotesque coincidence between a man’s name and his peculiarities’ . . . or something like that.”

  “I’m not scared, I’m impressed,” she said.

  “I just read a business book about that very thing. It pointed out a study on names and concluded that because people tend to gravitate to things that are familiar, we are attracted to things that are similar to our names. One of the examples the study gave was the extraordinarily high number of dentists named Dennis.”

  “Is that true?”

  “It was in the book. The book actually had some funny examples. Such as a famous psychiatrist named Angst.”

  She laughed. “That’s not true.”

  “And there’s a meteorologist named Blizzard, a gynecologist named Dr. Ovary, and my personal favorite was a union leader named Raymond Strike.”

  She laughed again. “You’re making this up.”

  “I wish I was that clever,” I said. “Then, of course, you have the famous English poet William Wordsworth.”

  “You’ve made your point. We are what we are named. And I’m an Aria.”

  “What does that make me?”

  “Alex?” she said. “I’ve no idea.”

  I took a long drink of my cocoa. “You mentioned Minnesota. Is that where you’re from?”

  “Wayzata, Minnesota. It’s near Lake Minnetonka.”

  “Is there snow?”

  “Lots and lots of snow.”

  “That’s why it doesn’t bother you.”

  “Yes, I’m used to it. I suppose acclimated is the word. The snow and the cold. Minnesota is colder than Utah.” She shook her head. “In more ways than one.”

  I wasn’t sure how to read her last comment. “How did you end up in Midway?”

  She lightly groaned as if the question were painful. “I came here with my husband. My ex-husband.”

  “Ray told me that you had a coffee shop.”

  “Had is right. It was pretty short-lived.”

  “How did you end up in Midway?”

  “Shortly after we got married, my husband’s cousin called and said that he was starting a coffee shop in Utah and asked him to come and be a partner in it. He couldn’t afford to pay salaries, so we were going to earn sweat equity.” She shook her head. “How stupid is that, a coffee shop in Midway, Utah?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Almost three-quarters of the people in Midway are Mormons. They don’t drink coffee.”

  “Like selling bicycles to fish.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then why Utah?”

  “He overthought it. He read some book about how Starbucks was founded and decided that he was going to be the next big thing. He thought he was smarter than everyone else. He started looking for cities with the least competition. He never considered that there was a reason there were fewer coffee shops here. I have to admit that the name of the place was pretty good though. Brewed Awakening.”

  I laughed. “And it was.”

  “Literally.”

  “So what happened to the Brewed Awakening?”

  “After things started going bad, his cousin blamed it on my husband and said we owed him ten thousand dollars. They got in a big fight. They were punching, throwing coffee cups at each other. One of the customers called the police. They were both arrested. I had to post bail to get my husband out of jail.

  “After that, Wade—that’s my ex’s name—never went back to the coffee shop. For about six months he mostly just slept or watched television or played video games. I was already working full-time at the diner but I had to start taking extra shifts to pay bills.

  “Then, one day, Wade had this idea that was going to make us rich. He was going to rent snowmobiles to tourists. I should have been more wary, but the truth was I was just so happy that he was going to do something. He was so excited. I believed in him.

  “He needed a hundred thousand dollars to get his business going, something, of course, we didn’t have. He found this guy who raised capital. His name was Chad something. Maybe Brown. Wade had met him at the coffee shop.

  “Chad said he could get us the money, we just needed to come up with ten percent, up front. Chad looked the part. I mean, he was kind of weird-looking, like, his eyes were close together, like a spider, but he dressed in designer clothes, wore expensive sunglasses, drove a Mercedes, all the trappings, you know?”

  I nodded. “I know the type.”

  “So he took us to a nice restaurant. Actually, here. Chad told us, ‘If you want to live big, you have to dream big.’ Then he said that the reason most businesses fail wasn’t because they weren’t a good idea, but because of undercapitalization. So we should go for at least a quarter million. If we gave him just ten percent up front, he’d get us the money. I said, ‘We don’t have that kind of money.’ He said, ‘No problem—just take out a loan, and you can pay it back with the money I raise.’ The next day we took a loan out for twenty-five thousand dollars and gave it to Chad.”

  “You never saw Chad again.”

  “No. About a month later I never saw my husband again either. He just kind of faded away. Last I heard, he was in Minneapolis selling tires.” She took a deep breath. “Unfortunately, my signature was on the loan. I’m still paying on it. I will be for years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You live and learn, right?”

  “Sometimes we do,” I said softly.

  Aria said, “Tell me about you.”

  I took a deep breath. “Me. I’ve lived in Daytona Beach for most of my life, except for a year at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, where I mostly learned that college wasn’t really for me. It was, for better or worse, where I met my wife. We were married for six years but divorced about a year ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I thought I did. At first I thought it was because I traveled too much. And maybe that was it in the beginning, but in the end she had someone else.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me too. I wanted it to work.”

  “Do you have friends?”

  “A few. My best friend is Nate. He works with me. But he’s nothing like me.”

  “In what way?”

  “He’s tough. Like, Kevlar tough.”

  She asked, “Who’s Kevlar?”

  I smiled. “Sorry. Kevlar’s what they make bulletproof vests from.”

  “Oh.”

  “This story explains him perfectly. Before Nate joined the marines he was delivering pizza. One night a guy walks up to him, pulls out a gun, and says, ‘Give me all your money.’ Nate looked at the gun, then at the guy, and said, ‘Really? You brought a .38 to rob me? That’s just going to make me mad.’ And he turned and walked away. He said he kept waiting for the guy to shoot him in the back but he never did.”

  “He’s tough or crazy?”

  “Sometimes it’s a fine line,” I said.

  She laughed. Then she
yawned.

  “You’re tired,” I said. “It’s late.”

  “I’m sorry. I worked a double shift today. I was into work at five.”

  “Then I’d better get you home.”

  As we walked out the back of the diner we passed the Pino painting. Suddenly I stopped. “Wait a second.”

  “What?”

  “Stand right here, next to this painting.”

  She looked at me like I was crazy but did as I asked.

  “That’s why,” I said.

  “That’s why what?”

  “Ever since I met you, I’ve been wondering why you looked so familiar. Look”—I motioned to the picture—“it looks just like you.”

  She looked at the painting for a moment. “I can kind of see that. And she’s got the waitress thing going.”

  “Not kind of,” I said. “She looks exactly like you. You could have modeled for the picture.”

  “I’m not as pretty as she is.”

  “Prettier,” I said. “Even prettier.” I glanced at her and she was looking at me gratefully. “All right,” I said. “Let’s get you home before you pass out from exhaustion.”

  I drove her back to the diner, pulling up next to her car behind the restaurant, an older-model Jeep Wrangler, covered with about a foot of snow.

  She sighed when she saw it. “I’m buried.”

  “No worries,” I said. “I just got this.” I lifted my new snow brush-scraper. “I’m practically local. Just one minute.” I left my car running as I brushed the snow off her Jeep, leaving huge mounds of snow on the ground around her car. After I finished I came back to my car and got in.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “My pleasure.”

  She smiled sweetly. “Pleasure? Really? You hate the cold.” She took my wet, cold hands and looked at them. “Don’t you have gloves?”

  “I have cycling gloves,” I said. “In Florida.”

  She began rubbing my hands. Then she lifted them to her mouth and blew on them with her warm breath. After a few times she said, “I think I’ve saved them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you. I had a really nice evening.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Do you work tomorrow?”

  “Yes. Another double.”