Gil and Emily exchanged surprised glances. News of Mary’s supposed “sins” hadn’t reached them yet evidently. “That silly Bippo Bear song? The one in the commercials? That’s Mary’s?” Emily asked, taking a mug for herself and sinking into a chair.
“It’s a dumb song and I’m sick of it, but how is it her fault?” Gil inquired.
“Her job,” Mac explained, “was to write a song kids could sing to their parents that would get stuck in their heads. To create that kind of ‘I want it’ fever so parents would do whatever it took to get their kids a Bippo Bear for Christmas.”
“It worked,” Gil replied. “I hate that song and I don’t even have kids.” He paused a moment before adding, “yet.”
Emily looked between Mac and Pastor Dave. “He knows. Actually, except for Dinah, we’re the only four who do. Oh, and Mary—I told her when she cast me as Mary.”
“Her boss basically charged her with writing a song that would incite parents to riot,” Pastor Dave described before taking a sip of his coffee. “She did her job. Actually, it’s part of why she left advertising altogether. Once she came to faith, that sort of thing stuck in her craw. I admire her—she took a big risk to act on her convictions.”
One I failed to take for years. Mac chided himself silently. “She’s miserable. She saw the way we’ve been trashing the Bippo Bear people—come on, everyone’s been harping on them, even me. I mean, I paid big bucks for one of those things for my nephew and I told folks I was steamed they were in such short supply. You couldn’t find one anywhere, and that made them easy scalping. And then when the fights were shown on television, what was she supposed to think? That we’d all compliment her on a job well done?”
“She’s supposed to think that we’re smart grown-ups who know the difference between an advertising campaign and a toddler tantrum.” Emily replied sharply. “I’m embarrassed. Do we come off that judgmental? Does she really think we’d hang her over Bippo Bears?”
“Maybe not hang her,” Pastor Dave clarified, “just fire her off the church staff. And, I’m afraid, she’s not too far off the mark. Howard ain’t exactly a bundle of mercy at the moment.”
“Why on earth did you tell Howard about Mary and the Bippo Bears?” Emily asked, making Mac feel even lower than he already did.
“I wasn’t supposed to. Howard just…was Howard.” Mac relayed the whole argument, how Howard called him a coward, a “poor reflection of the community’s fine character” that should “never be allowed to run for office,” which goaded Mac into a few choice remarks about Middleburg’s character, which led to how they’d made Mary afraid for her secret, and so on. “He pushed my buttons and I got stupid,” he said as he concluded his account of their argument and how Mary walked in at the worst possible moment. “I ought to know better than to let Howard get to me like that. I hurt her and I have no excuse for what I did.”
“Howard,” Pastor Dave said while he sighed, “feels the church had a right to know before we hired her. He feels betrayed, and worries all this bear ridiculousness will reflect badly on the church.”
“I’ll tell you what will reflect badly on MCC,” Emily replied. “If we treat her like some kind of criminal just because she used to do what she used to do—that’ll reflect badly on the church. I can’t believe people think like that!”
“I can,” Gil admitted sadly. “I overheard folks in Deacon’s Grill the other day. People are steamed about all the press these bears are getting. They keep running ads even though no one’s got any more to sell. Can’t say I haven’t thought the same thing, but I wouldn’t take it out on Mary personally.”
“She doesn’t know that,” Mac revealed. “She has no way of knowing that.”
“I think,” offered Pastor Dave gently, “that we’re getting off the topic of what to do about you, Mac. You’ve got a serious issue on your hands. If anything, you may be a blessing to Mary, taking the focus off her.” Mac hadn’t thought about it that way, but it didn’t help much.
“Stuffed animals aren’t exactly the same level of seriousness as deliberate vandalism to a church,” Pastor Dave continued. “And a car.”
“Howard’s car,” Gil reminded the room, although Mac surely didn’t need reminding. “He could press charges, I suppose, but I would think the statute of limitations has run out by now.”
“Are you ready, Mac, to stand up and deal with this?” Pastor Dave asked Mac with seriousness in his eyes. “To everyone? Tonight?”
“I have to. I don’t really see how this can wait until after Christmas.” This’ll go down as my worst Christmas ever, Mac thought to himself. “We need to deal with this now. Tonight’s a good as any, although I think it’ll blow any chance of rehearsal clear out the window.”
“Well, then,” Pastor Dave continued, standing up, “I think it’s time for God to show up in big and mighty ways.” He set down his mug with a nod of thanks to Emily and reached for his coat. “I think it’s high time I go check on Mary.”
“Tell her I’m sorry,” Mac relayed, catching the pastor’s elbow.
“I think you ought to do that yourself. You two have a fair amount to work out before either one of you come to rehearsal, I’d say.” Dave checked his watch. “It’s two now, so why don’t I tell Mary you’ll come by at around four?”
Mac nodded, just as his cell phone went off. “I have a feeling that’s Ma,” he guessed, reaching into his pocket. It was. These days, the only thing that could outpace his car was the speed of small-town gossip. “I’d better get over there.” He extended a grim hand to Gil. “Start praying. I think God’s about to take me down a peg—or six.” He leaned down and gave petite Emily a peck on the cheek. “Congratulations,” he spoke softly. “I haven’t had a chance to say that yet. I’ll try to straighten out my act by the time the little fella gets here. If you’ll still have me.” It stuck in his throat with an unexpected lump.
“Nonsense,” Gil objected, leveling a serious look right in Mac’s eyes. “God’s just gettin’ started on you—I expect big things on the other end of this mess.”
“See you tonight,” Emily vowed, squeezing Mac’s hand. “We’ll be there. Promise.”
“Mary, talk to me. We’ve got to talk about this.” Mac had been outside her door for ten minutes now. A more mature woman, someone with years of solid faith under her belt, might have been able to open up that door to the man who’d betrayed her worst secret, but Mary was not there yet. She looked at her dining room table, where the envelope from her parents’ house lay open. Thornton had sent hard copies of four different e-mails. Four different media outlets asking for interviews with “the creator of the Bippo Bear jingle.” He’d mailed them, along with a Christmas bonus and a personal note asking for her return to Maxwell Advertising, to her in care of her parents even though she knew he now had her Middleburg address. It was a masterful manipulation—wrapped in loyal employer language that would coddle her parents, but letting her know he could go public at any moment. Mary knew the only reason he hadn’t was that the mystery somehow served his purpose. The duplicity of it all made it worse than the outright blackmail she’d suspected from him.
Which made Mac just like Thornton. She’d allowed herself to believe she could expect loyalty from Mac, and instead he’d done the one thing he knew would hurt her most. No, she couldn’t open the door and face that man. He’d hurt her worse than anything Howard could have said, because she’d allowed herself to care about Mac. She looked at the paper with the circle diagram as it sat next to Thornton’s clever note, remembering the tenderness of Mac’s voice as he said, “Right underneath you, same as always,” and she wanted to crumple the thing and send it into the fireplace to burn. “Go away,” she said to the door with as much strength as she could muster, then she walked into her living room and turned up the stereo loud enough to drown out any persuasion he might try next.
Chapter Sixteen
Mac felt like the very air in the church sanctuary was on the verge of combus
tion. The whole building had a surreal dissonance to it—the joyful decorations at odds with his miserable spirit. The sanctuary looked amazing. Each of the stained glass windows were framed in fragrant pine boughs frosted with dozens of tiny white lights, and each window sill hosted a trio of hurricane candles circled in holly and red ribbon. The set, while nothing that would turn heads on Broadway, was brilliantly colored and made the church look, well, happy. Everything looked happy. The trouble was nothing felt happy.
After all that preparation, Mac felt as if he was standing on the brink of the worst Christmas ever. It was ten minutes past the hour, and no one had seen Mary all afternoon. Take care of her, Lord—I sure can’t. You know how much I wanted to go into this with things settled between me and her. Still, it wasn’t as if he had the right to have things the way he wanted. This mess—large or small—was his own doing.
Mac stood up. There was no chance he could feel worse, and it was time to take this mistake into his own hands anyway. Howard stood up seconds after Mac rose off his chair, and for a moment there was a silent challenge as to who would take command of the room. Mac cleared his throat loud enough to make everyone in the room turn to look at him. Everyone, that is, who wasn’t staring at him already. “I think,” he announced as steadily as he could, “that we might as well tackle this here and now. It looks like rehearsal isn’t going to happen, and I doubt anyone here is in the dark as to why.”
Howard made some sort of gruff sound, but said nothing as Mac walked to the front of the room.
“Just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few hours, I did, in fact, admit to Howard that I was behind the steeple falling down during its construction twelve years ago. I was an angry kid who did something stupid. I reckon it will go down as one of my life’s biggest mistakes—both then and now—but somehow I’d fooled myself into thinking it didn’t really matter.”
Howard coughed loudly, transmitting his disagreement.
“Well,” Mac went on while looking Howard straight in the eye, “it matters a whole lot. I get that now. And it’s up to me to put things right as much as I can. And I figure there are some parts of this that I can’t put right, and I’ll have to take that as it comes.” He took a deep breath and thrust his hands into his pockets to stop the urge to fidget that suddenly overtook him. He shifted his eyes to several people around the room, catching some supportive expressions and others that were condemning. The duality of it matched his current emotions; this was at once both easy and horrible. Easy in that he hadn’t even realized how the weight of this secret had pressed on him over the years and had now been released, and yet horrible in that it made him feel disliked and vulnerable and at the town’s collective mercy. “First off, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did it, I’m sorry I lied about it then and that I didn’t come clean before now. I damaged Howard’s car, the church and put people in danger. I didn’t handle my anger well and I allowed it to let me do something wrong. And dangerous.”
“Every one of us has done things we regret,” Sandy Burnside acknowledged, looking around the room.
“Every one of us,” repeated Matt Lockwood—father of the less-than-angelic Tommy Lee, “didn’t hide it and then run for mayor. What else we gonna find out about you?”
“Hopefully, that I set things right when I can. Howard, I looked up the value of your car that was hit by the falling steeple, and I’m prepared to write you a check to cover those damages. Even the ones covered by your auto insurance.” He’d planned to tell Howard this when he confessed to the deed earlier this afternoon, but the argument had spiraled out of control before he’d had the chance. “And I want to say I’m sorry, to you personally, here in front of everyone.”
He paused briefly, hoping Howard might say something along the lines of “apology accepted,” but Howard remained silently standing. Howard would probably accept the apology in the long run, but he wasn’t the kind of man to do something like that quickly.
“Now I’d apologize to our former Pastor Donalds if I could, but I don’t know where he moved to. I’m going to try to find him.” Mac scanned the back of the room until he found Pastor Anderson. “But in the meantime, I’ll apologize to Pastor Anderson for damaging the church the way I did, and I’m trying to work up some figures so I can pay MCC back in some way. You don’t need a new steeple anymore, but I’m sure he’ll find some use for the money.”
“I accept your offer of restitution,” Pastor Anderson responded with a formal tone. “On behalf of the congregation back then and the congregation now.”
A few folks in the room looked like they weren’t so ready to let it go at that, but no one actually said anything. The tension in the room changed to awkward mumbling that wasn’t a riot, but wasn’t quite silence, either.
“And then there’s the other thing,” Mac continued. Howard began moving toward the front of the room. “I think we need to get that out on the table now, too.”
“There’s more?” The alarm in town librarian Audrey Lupine’s voice wasn’t helping matters.
“It seems Mac was privy to some important information about Miss Thorpe,” Howard interjected. “Information we should have known before we hired her.”
“Information,” Pastor Anderson added, “Mary was under no legal obligation to provide us. She gave us her employment history in all the detail we asked for.”
“Matters of church staff go beyond legal obligations,” Howard declared. “She had a moral obligation to tell us.”
“Tell us what?” a woman who worked on the costumes asked.
“Haven’t you heard?” said another woman in a less than kind voice. “About the Bippo Bears.”
“Yes, Mary Thorpe is part of the Bippo Bear atrocity.” Howard’s tone was grave. “She worked to make those crazy blue bears into something every child wants. Into something that’s starting fights at stores and turning Christmas into nothing more than a profit machine for some soulless toy manufacturer. That’s the person we hired to run our Christmas drama. Someone who not only had that in her background, but purposely hid that from us because she knew the response we’d have to it.”
Atrocity? Howard made it sound like she was out knocking small children down with a baseball bat. “See? This is exactly why she chose not to mention it. The woman was just doing her job for the advertising agency where she used to work. The one she left when her faith called her to do something else. The same faith that called her here,” Mac informed.
“You’re defending her?” said the first woman. “You?” As if he were the last person in the world who should stand up for Mary.
“He knew about it. He’d discovered her deception and didn’t come forward. This is why I’m so angry. All of this shows an alarming lack of integrity. We’ve got to have people who look out for the public good running for office in Middleburg. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m not against someone running for mayor. I’m against the wrong person running for mayor. I’d say you’ve shown yourself to be the wrong person, MacCarthy.”
Mac felt his blood begin to rise. “Back off, Howard. We’re talking about Mary.”
“You’re both equally guilty.”
“Y’all hang on a minute, the two of you.” Sandy Burnside stretched out her hands between them like a referee. “Calm down. The way I see it, Mary wrote an advertising jingle. One she was paid to write. I can’t see the crime in that.”
“Have you heard that thing? I reckon it really could fix folks to riot,” Vern from the hardware store chimed into the discussion. “Gets stuck in your head like a bad cold. My daughter spent her whole Christmas budget getting one of those things for my grandson just ’cuz he whined so much to get one. Crazy if you ask me.”
Emily stood up. “But that’s not Mary’s fault. She’s embarrassed about what’s happened with the bears, and that’s why she didn’t tell us. She was afraid of what we’d think. And we’ve proved her right, haven’t we?”
Gina Deacon spoke up. “I’m sick
of hearing about it in the diner. Obviously, y’all find enough to fight about without adding some Christmas bear nonsense to the mix. I know for a fact she heard folks going on about how bad the ads were right in front of her face. I don’t know that I blame her for keeping it quiet.”
“We should have known. In advance,” Howard countered. “She should have known it would become an issue, especially over the holidays. She showed poor judgment. Poor character. A person of integrity would have come forward immediately, knowing the nature of the situation.” About one-third of the room nodded along with Howard. “It reflects poorly on the church and what it stands for this time of year.”
“And what does the church stand for, Howard?” demanded Dinah Rollings, standing up and squaring off at Howard. “Where’s the ‘peace on earth, goodwill to men’ in all of this?” She swept her hand around the room. “I doubt Jesus would be too pleased with what’s gone on today. Lost tempers. Fights. People not being able to forgive each other or not owning up to things they’ve done. Folks afraid of other folks for no good reason. Calling each other’s character into question and telling things that ought not to be told. This sure ain’t the kind of Christmas I hoped for when I moved to Middleburg.” Another third of the room nodded in agreement to Dinah. “How we’re gonna pull off tomorrow night now, Lord only knows. I sure don’t.” With a dramatic huff, Dinah moved to the back of the room where she paced with annoyance.
Things were about to spiral out of control. “Look,” said Mac determined to pull out whatever stops it took to keep this from dissolving into disaster, “let’s put everything on the table here. This play was a small bandage on a big wound and we all know it. I’m sorry I’ve upset you all, but if you want me to be sorry I ran—am running—for mayor, I won’t. Maybe I’m not perfect. Maybe I messed this up on a global scale and some of you can’t get past that. I can live with that. But what I can’t live with is what we’ve done to Mary. We hired her for all the wrong reasons, Howard. We thought we could all distract ourselves from the real stuff by putting on this ideal Christmas drama—as if Middleburg would heal itself like one of those old movie musicals where the kids put on a show in Grandpa’s barn and save the world. We put her in such an impossible situation that she was afraid to be part of our community. Afraid to let us know this tiny little detail—this ridiculous bear thing—that has her so frightened. She’s ashamed of something she has no reason to be ashamed of. You know why I found the spine to tell Howard after all these years? Because I wanted to show her that Middleburg wouldn’t hang her for a mistake. I figured if I “fessed up to my actual criminal act and survived, that she’d realize she could let people know about the jingle and be fine. I was trying to help her let her secret loose, but I let Howard get under my skin and I told her secret instead. And that’s low. Me, I deserve what I get. But Mary’s done nothing but try and pull this thing together under impossible circumstances and she’s deserved none of it. She’s an amazing, talented woman who deserves to be welcomed into Middleburg as part of our community. Which, if you ask me, is what she needed most and why God sent her here.” Suddenly realizing he’d made a very long speech, Mac shut up and sat down on the edge of the stage.
Bluegrass Christmas Page 15