The White Christmas Inn

by Colleen Wright

  As the girls squealed with delight, Santa stepped aside to let them barrel past, and Molly finally got a glimpse of Marcus, standing a bit down the stairs. It was the first time she’d seen him since he’d kissed her in the kitchen the night before, and she got a deep thrill at the sight of him, along with an undertow of uncertainty. She wasn’t sure what the kiss had meant to her yet. And she had no idea what it had meant to him—if it had meant anything at all.

  When the girls got to him, they stopped, creating a perfect traffic jam on the stairs. Between their “Merry Christmases” and hugs, Addison also managed to press the pages of Molly’s manuscript into his hands and order, “Be very careful with this, Daddy! It’s important.”

  As Molly watched, Marcus smiled indulgently, then stepped aside to let the girls and Santa slip by him, heading for the presents waiting on the main floor. But when he glanced down at the pages in his hands, he froze, then looked up toward Molly’s room, where his eyes locked with hers.

  “Is this your book?” he asked.

  Molly nodded.

  “Did they misunderstand?” he said. “Were you reading it to them again?”

  Molly shook her head. “It’s for them,” she said.

  Marcus took a step up the stairs toward her, but then the girls’ voices floated up from the main floor. “Daddy! Daddy! Santa says we can’t open our presents until you come down.”

  “Um,” Marcus said. It was clear he had something to say, but totally unclear what. Did he want to let her know it had all been a terrible mistake? Did he want to kiss her again?

  “Go!” Molly said, waving him down the stairs. “It’s Christmas morning! They’re going to expire from anticipation if you don’t get down there soon! I’ll be down in just a minute,” she said in answer to his questioning glance.

  “Daddy!” the girls chorused from below.

  “I’m coming!” Marcus called. “We’ll talk after?” he asked Molly.

  And before she had even finished nodding, he dashed down the stairs.

  LUKE WANDERED AIMLESSLY DOWN the candy-and-chips aisle of the gas station convenience store, spent a good long time perusing the energy drinks in the coolers, and then came back up the aisle full of jumper cables and weird little dolls, before stopping at the cooler at the front of the store, which was stocked with frozen treats on Popsicle sticks, and frozen candy bars.

  “It’s Christmas. You’re buying breakfast in a gas station,” the woman behind the counter said. “I say, get whatever you want.”

  From the looks of the small pile in front of her, she had taken her own advice. She was sipping from both a large coffee and a blue slushie, and picking at a cinnamon roll from the warmer beside the counter.

  “Um . . .” Luke said, trying to come to some kind of a decision.

  He felt like something was missing, and he’d thought at first he must be hungry, but his brief tour of the convenience store had convinced him that he wasn’t—or at least he wasn’t hungry for anything in the convenience store.

  Still, he didn’t want to go on the long trip to Burlington on an empty stomach—especially because, with the storm and the holiday, there was no telling when he’d be able to find something decent to eat next.

  He had pulled a banana and an orange from the fruit basket beside the lottery tickets, and was trying to decide if anything else nearby looked remotely healthy, when the bell over the front door dinged as the door swung open.

  Luke recognized Trevor as soon as he walked in. But Trevor, who was wearing a bright blue parka coat with a ridiculous and mismatched brown wool deerstalker hat, didn’t seem to notice there was anyone else in the place but him. He didn’t even nod back to the woman behind the counter just inside the door when she nodded her greeting to him.

  Instead, he stalked down the first aisle he found, as Luke made a quick turn away from him, pretending to take a deep interest in the various kinds of bottled water in the nearby cooler, because the last thing he wanted to do was have any kind of further interaction with Trevor.

  So he was startled when Trevor blurted out, “What are you talking about?” in a loud, impatient voice.

  Both Luke and the woman behind the counter looked over at Trevor, thinking he must have been talking to one of them. But Trevor was oblivious to them, and after glancing at him for another moment, Luke saw the mobile earpiece hooked over Trevor’s ear, when Trevor leaned down to pick up a crinkly bag of cheese crackers.

  He was on the phone with someone, Luke guessed. He hoped it wasn’t some local minister Trevor was trying to talk into coming out for the wedding, who now had to deal with that kind of attitude on a Christmas morning. But in Luke’s brief experience with him, Trevor had never worried much about anyone else when he wanted something.

  Trevor threw the bag of crackers back down on the shelf as Luke turned away to make sure he still wasn’t recognized.

  “I don’t see why that should matter,” Trevor said. “Not when we’ve been together for six years.”

  It was all Luke could do not to shake his head in disgust. Who was Trevor browbeating now? Some poor local Vermont city clerk who he’d rousted out of bed and was now harassing about some local permit for the wedding? And did Trevor really think that whoever it was cared even the tiniest bit about how long Trevor and Hannah had been together?

  But at the thought of Hannah, Luke felt a twist in his stomach. The idea of her winding up with anyone else but him was bad enough. But the idea of her winding up with this guy was unbearable.

  He had several brief fantasies, all in a row, all of which involved running Trevor out of town somehow before he could get in his car and go back to Hannah. In one of them, he threw a bottle of water at Trevor’s head. In another, he forced Trevor’s pretentious little sports car, which was completely unsuited for the Vermont winter, back to the highway with his truck, then made sure that Trevor stayed in it, headed anywhere but back to Hannah.

  But when those crazy ideas played out to their end, Trevor was still there, braying into his cell phone.

  The only difference was that, having reached the back of the store, he’d now turned up the next aisle, and was coming up it.

  “I don’t know,” Trevor said. “I have no idea what she was thinking.”

  Luke could relate to that, he thought wryly. He didn’t blame Hannah for the decision she’d made. She’d been in a tough place, and he knew what it was like to be loyal to someone you’d cared about for years. But he did wonder what she was thinking, how she explained it to herself. And just the tiniest part of him also wondered something else—if she had thought about him at all before she made the decision to get back with Trevor.

  By now, Trevor was standing directly behind Luke, pawing at the display of beef jerky on one of the convenience store’s endcaps.

  The hairs on the back of Luke’s neck prickled, but he managed to hold steady, and hold his ground without shooting his mouth off, until Trevor let loose with his next volley.

  “She just said no, Mom,” Trevor said. “I tried to get her to change her mind.” He listened for a minute, then let out an exasperated sigh. “I tried telling her that,” he said. “She didn’t care.”

  Suddenly, a different kind of thrill went through Luke. Was it possible that Trevor was talking about Hannah?

  “You know what?” Trevor said. “I’m not sure Hannah ever really knew what she wanted.”

  This, coming from Trevor, who had called his wedding off and then showed up for it after all, all within the space of forty-eight hours, almost made Luke laugh out loud.

  But instead, he just turned on his heel.

  For the first time, Trevor realized he wasn’t alone in the convenience store. Startled, he lurched back a little bit as he recognized Luke, almost as if he was afraid Luke might throw a punch at him.

  Instead, Luke just grinned and started to stride out of the store.

  As he passed the woman at the counter, she called after him. “Hey,” she said, nodding at the frui
t he’d left on the counter. “You want this stuff?”

  “No thanks,” Luke said. “I’ve gotta go.”

  And he walked out the door, straight back to his truck.

  “LOOK, AS LONG AS you’re at it,” Jeanne said, looking down at Tim, who was busily patching the beautiful cobalt-blue tile below the mantel over the kitchen stove, “I think maybe it’d be best if you just tore out the whole stove and built me a fireplace this morning. I’ve been thinking it might be fun to cook over an open fire. Not many fine chefs in Vermont could claim to do that.”

  But instead of annoyance in her voice over Tim’s constant repairs, this morning there was amusement.

  “Hey,” Tim said, plunking one last tile into place, and wiping away any stray mortar. “At least if I’m wasting my time repairing stuff, I’m doing it in the kitchen, not the barn, right?”

  He stood up, wiped his hands on his work pants, and kissed her. “Togetherness,” he said.

  “Mmm,” Jeanne answered, linking her arms together at his back as she leaned against him.

  “Hey,” Tim said. “You okay?”

  Jeanne leaned back and surveyed the kitchen. “I think so,” she said. “I’m going to keep it simple this morning. I just cut a bunch of grapefruits to caramelize brown sugar on under the broiler. And then I’ve got the famous Evergreen Inn Christmas-morning cinnamon rolls in already.”

  “Couldn’t miss the smell of those,” Tim said.

  “Even when I had nothing in my pantry,” Jeanne said, “I still had Indonesian cinnamon. And, of course,” she said, “the remains of Hiram’s sausage and bacon.”

  She laid her head back on his chest. “So I think we’re good,” she said.

  Tim gave her a squeeze. “That’s good,” he said. “But actually I was asking about your feelings.”

  “My feelings?” Jeanne said, looking up at him with a mock-skeptical glance.

  Tim laughed. “I know, it doesn’t happen often,” he said. But his eyes stayed locked with hers. “But seriously,” he said. “How are you doing?”

  Jeanne sighed. “Okay,” she said. “A little sad.”

  “Me too,” Tim said.

  “It used to be when you did a fix-it project,” she said, “at least we were building something together. Now . . .” She looked up at him. “It feels so strange to think of leaving it all behind.”

  Tim nodded. “Well,” he said, “I can’t help it. As long as I see something I can fix, I’m still going to do my best. Including us,” he said, bending down to kiss her.

  Jeanne smiled at him. “I could get on board with us both spending some time on that,” she said.

  But just as Tim leaned in to kiss her again, Iris came through the kitchen door.

  “Jeanne,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. “Jeanne, there’s something wrong with the computer. I think I broke it.”

  “The computer,” Tim said, letting Jeanne go with a squeeze. “The one thing I can’t fix.”

  “How is it broken?” Jeanne asked, not at all alarmed. Iris’s previous incidents of a “broken computer” had involved both accidentally changing the font in a word-processing document and inadvertently dragging their finance documents into Jeanne’s recipes folder, both of which were relatively easily identified and remedied.

  But she’d never seen Iris look quite this worried before.

  “It’s our guest calendar,” Iris said.

  Jeanne gave an internal sigh of relief. Iris had always been fiercely resistant to the online scheduling system, because she highly preferred the handwritten ledger system she’d developed on her own. It had always been a little source of friction between her and Jeanne, but never a big one, because they simply didn’t get very many online reservations—or many reservations at all, these days. But the likelihood was that Iris had just forgotten how to use the system, because she’d never really wanted to learn it in the first place.

  “We got a reservation?” Tim asked. “On Christmas?”

  “It was Frank and Eileen,” Iris said. “Eileen wanted to make a reservation for them to come back this summer, on Frank’s birthday. So she asked me to put their name in secretly, so it would be a surprise for him, while he was helping the girls with their presents.”

  “And what’s wrong with the calendar?” Jeanne asked patiently, trying to bring Iris back to the problem at hand.

  “Well, it’s full,” Iris said.

  “Were you looking at last year, maybe?” Jeanne said. “I do that sometimes. It’s a little too easy to click the year-to-year view.”

  “No,” Iris said. “I’m quite careful about that. It’s next year. We were both looking at it, she and I. We could both see the date, for next year. And June of next year, when she wanted to book, is all full.”

  Jeanne’s mind began to race. She knew exactly how many reservations they had in the new year, because there were only a handful of them. She had gone over and over them, hoping against hope that if she left them alone, they might multiply, maybe even enough to keep the place open. And in the process, she had gotten to know them, which was why she had been dreading canceling every single one.

  “Maybe you accidentally blocked a whole month out,” Tim suggested, then glanced at Jeanne. “You can do that, right? Mark a week as not available in the calendar? Maybe Iris accidentally marked a whole month.”

  Iris shook her head decisively.

  “Or maybe you did,” Tim said to Jeanne, to mollify Iris.

  But Iris was not the least bit confused on this point. “It’s not just June,” she said. “They’re almost all full. And the ones that aren’t, while you sit there and look at them, suddenly the empty dates will fill up, without you even touching anything. It’s like the calendar’s haunted.”

  “I’ll come take a look,” Jeanne said, heading for the front desk, the two of them trailing behind her.

  When she sat down in Iris’s seat, Iris and Tim both looking over her shoulder, she clicked open the guest calendar.

  Sure enough, when she flipped to January, the following month, almost all the rooms were marked full.

  Frowning in confusion, Jeanne clicked on January, then February, then straight on through to the end of the year. It was just as Iris had described: some months, especially in the summer, were totally sold out, while others flickered with activity in any unclaimed space, which was liable to be reserved without warning, as Jeanne looked at it.

  “How are they breaking into our calendar?” Tim asked, alarmed. “Did someone hack the inn?”

  Jeanne suppressed a smile at his utter lack of tech savvy, then clicked for the first time on one of the reservations.

  “This came in over our website,” she said. “It’s always been enabled to take reservations online. But we’ve never had more than a handful get made that way. Usually, we’re booking repeat customers, and they’re liable to call instead.”

  She clicked on another reservation. “I don’t recognize any of these names,” she said. “I don’t think they’ve been here before.”

  “They’re real reservations?” Tim asked, realization dawning in his eyes. “It’s not some kind of glitch?”

  “Seems like it,” Jeanne said, opening another. “But why now? What are people doing, booking us on Christmas?”

  “Is that a note on that one?” Tim asked. “What does it say?”

  Jeanne clicked on the personal request that had been attached to the reservation Tim had pointed out, then peered down at the lines of text.

  “It’s a man booking a surprise weekend for his wife, for their anniversary,” Jeanne said. “He says he wants to make sure that she’s able to try our orange-lemon French toast, that they read about it in Geoffrey Peterson’s article on this year’s best country inns.”

  “Geoffrey Peterson?” Tim repeated.

  Jeanne turned to meet his eyes. Geoffrey Peterson was the country’s leading travel writer, by turns irascible and effusive, and the two of them had been devotees of his work for years. It was thro
ugh his writing that they’d first learned of some of the jewels of the hospitality industry all over the world, and all the different ways individual innkeepers had invented to welcome and pamper their guests. He’d been a major inspiration for their work at Evergreen Inn. It was after reading about quilts made from scraps of saris at an establishment in India that Jeanne had gone on a hunt for the velvet crazy quilts that now graced all of their guest beds, for instance.

  But it had never occurred to either of them that their inn would ever rise to the level of his attention.

  “Did you say Geoffrey Peterson?” Iris asked.

  Jeanne nodded. “He’s the best travel writer living,” she said by way of explanation. “And probably the most powerful. I just don’t know how in the world he would have heard of us. And he would never write about a place without visiting it himself. So how did he write about us?”

  “Well, he was just here,” Iris said.

  Now both Tim and Jeanne turned to her.

  “Geoffrey,” she said. “Our British gentleman.”

  “Geoffrey Godwin,” Jeanne said automatically, with her perfect memory for the names of every guest that had ever passed under her roof.

  Iris nodded and pulled a book out from under a sheaf of papers on the front desk. “When he left,” she said, “he gave me this.”

  “Travels Incognito,” Jeanne said. “This is the book that made his name.” She flipped it over to look at the picture on the back, which showed a clean-shaven man about thirty years younger than the bearded Geoffrey who had just spent the past few days with them.

  “No wonder we didn’t recognize him,” Tim commented.

  “There’s an article?” Iris said. “Did he write an article about us?”

  Jeanne set the book aside, brought up an Internet browser, and typed in “Evergreen Inn” alongside “Geoffrey Peterson.”