by Joanne Fluke
I’d come home and was working off my breakfast with a strenuous nap on the sofa, when somebody rang my doorbell.
You’ll never guess who it was.
Angel Cavanaugh.
She stood on my doorstep in a Hello Kitty T-shirt and flip-flops, barely big enough to cast a shadow, a bouquet of flowers in her hand.
Her dad stood at her side, holding a shopping bag.
“Don’t you have something to say to Jaine?” he said, nudging her with his elbow.
“I’m really sorry,” Angel said, looking up at me with sheepish eyes. “For lying to you. And for getting you in trouble with Sister Mary Agnes.”
Alert the media. She actually seemed to mean it.
“These are for you.” She held out a bunch of supermarket daisies.
“Why, thank you!” I have to admit, my heart melted just a tad. “Won’t you come in?”
I ushered them inside and hurried to the kitchen to put the daisies in water.
When I came back out, they were sitting on the sofa. Prozac, the shameless flirt, had wandered in from the bedroom and was shimmying in ecstasy against Kevin’s ankles.
“Wow, you’ve got a cat!” Angel said. “I always wanted a cat.”
“I’m not sure you want this one.”
Prozac glared at me through slitted eyes. I swear, that cat understands English.
Don’t listen to her, kid. I’m adorable.
With that, she leapt into Angel’s lap and began purring like a buzzsaw.
“You have something else for Jaine, don’t you?” Kevin said, once again nudging Angel with his elbow.
Reluctantly she plucked Prozac from her lap, and walked over to me with the shopping bag her dad had been carrying.
“Here are the jeans,” she said, taking them out of the bag. “You shouldn’t have spent so much money.”
This time, I could tell her heart wasn’t in it.
“That’s okay,” I said. “You keep them.”
“Thanks!” She grabbed them back so fast, she almost got whiplash. “Can I go put them on?”
“Sure. You can change in my bedroom,” I said, pointing down the hall.
“I can’t tell you how much those jeans mean to her,” Kevin said when she’d dashed off. “Angel doesn’t get very many gifts. I’m all the family she’s got. And, as you can imagine, she doesn’t make friends very easily.”
I could imagine, all right. In Technicolor and Dolby stereo.
“We’ve tried other mentoring programs, and you’re the first person who ever stuck it out for more than an hour.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish. That’s why I’m so grateful to you. Anyhow, I called L.A. Girlfriends and explained how Angel lied to you about having asthma, and how she goaded you into the food fight. Which, incidentally, she loved. She said she hadn’t had so much fun since the time she fingerpainted on our living room walls.” He shuddered at the memory. “It took three coats of paint to cover that mess.
“Anyhow, Sister Agnes has agreed to take you back. That is, if you want to see Angel again.”
He looked at me like a puppy begging for a bone.
Acck. The thought of a date with Angel without intravenous Valium was daunting, to say the least.
But before I could fumpher an excuse, Angel came bouncing back into the room in her new jeans.
“They’re great!” she beamed, a radiant smile lighting up her pinched face. “Thank you so much.”
At the sight of that smile, my heart melted again.
“I was just telling Jaine the good news about L.A. Girlfriends.”
“Yeah,” Angel said. “They want you back. So how about it, Jaine?”
Angel smiled shyly. “Will you be my Girlfriend?”
By now my heart was the consistency of a pint of Chunky Monkey in the microwave.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll be your Girlfriend.”
“Great! They’re having a sale at The Limited. Wanna go?”
“Forget it, Angel.”
“Hey,” she shrugged. “It was worth a shot.”
Okay, so it wasn’t going to be easy.
But like the kid said, it was worth a shot.
Epilogue
You’ll be glad to know that Ethel Cox got her wish. She never has to cook another meal as long as she lives. The state is providing her with three meals a day at a prison for the criminally nutsy.
At first Willard visited her regularly, in spite of the fact that she refused to see him. After a while, though, he gave up. Last I heard, he was dating a woman he met in the Christmas decorations department of Home Depot.
Peter Roberts and Prudence Bascomb (aka Brandy Alexander) are still practicing law, and frankly I’m glad I never got around to telling the cops about what I’d discovered in Garth’s file. So what if they’ve got dark secrets in their pasts? What attorney doesn’t?
And remember Peter’s secretary, Sylvia Alvarez? I saw her wedding picture in the paper not long ago. She and Hector finally tied the knot. I only hope the priest managed to get a word in edgewise during the ceremony.
Even more good news: Seymour Fiedler and his merry band of Fiedlers are back in business, plying their trade on the roofs of Los Angeles. In fact, they just finished Libby Brecker’s place.
Speaking of Libby, I saw her the other day when I took a sentimental spin over to Hysteria Lane. She was out front, buffing her door knocker. She congratulated me for my work on bringing Ethel to justice (the police were kind enough to mention my name in their account of Ethel’s arrest) and told me that Cathy Janken had sold her house and was living in an apartment in Van Nuys. Contrary to Cathy’s expectations, Garth left her saddled with debt, which may have been the reason Jimmy the mailman dumped her for the UPS delivery gal he’d been seeing on the side.
Angel and I “dated” for a few months, until her dad got transferred to Sacramento. It was tough sledding at first (I wanted to throttle her when she threw her house keys into the La Brea Tar Pits to see if they’d sink), but gradually she stopped acting out, and I grew quite fond of her. We never bonded in the lovey-dovey way of my fantasies. But we definitely Scotch Taped.
Things were never the same between me and Tyler. Maybe because it’s hard to have romantic feelings for a woman once you’ve seen her with chocolate mousse up her nose. But mainly because Tyler and Sister Mary Agnes (who, as the authorities discovered, wasn’t really a nun) ran off to Acapulco with the proceeds from an L.A. Girlfriends fund-raiser. I should’ve known there was something fishy about a nun who’d go mano a mano for a pair of Hot Stuff jeans.
Finally, I’m happy to report I had a very merry Christmas that year.
Daddy and Uncle Ed got into a big fight over a Monopoly game, and when Daddy threw Uncle Ed’s hotels—along with his toupee—in the Tampa Vistas pool, Uncle Ed got so mad, he checked his whole family into a Ramada Inn.
So Prozac and I had the guest room—and my parents—all to ourselves. How lovely to eat all the Christmas cookies I wanted, free from invidious comparisons to Cousin Joanie and her string bikinis.
And the flight to Florida wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Prozac didn’t throw up on a single passenger.
Nope, this trip, she threw up on the captain.
But Homeland Security finally took her off their Most Wanted List, so we’re free to travel again.
Catch you next time.
PS. If you’re reading this during the holiday season, Prozac and I want to wish you a marvelous Christmas, a heavenly Hanukah and/or the coolest Kwanzaa ever.
Well, I do, anyway. Prozac just wants you to scratch her back.
CANDY CANES OF CHRISTMAS PAST
LESLIE MEIER
Prologue
A fire was crackling in the grate, Christmas carols were playing on the stereo and Lucy Stone was perched on a step ladder in the living room arranging strings of twinkling fairy lights on an eight-foot balsam fir her husband Bill had cut in the woods behind their old fa
rmhouse on Red Top Road in Tinker’s Cove, Maine.
“Watch out, Lucy,” warned Bill, coming into the room with several battered brown cardboard boxes of ornaments. “You don’t want to lose your balance and fall.”
“I’ve just finished,” said Lucy, slipping the last loop of wire over a branch and stepping down from the ladder.
Bill put the boxes on the coffee table and stood back, arms akimbo, admiring the tree. “It’s the best we’ve ever had, I think. I’ve had my eye on that tree for a couple of years now.”
“A special tree for a special Christmas,” said Lucy, wrapping her arms around his waist. “It’s Patrick’s first.”
“Not that he’ll remember it,” said Bill. “He’s only nine months old.”
“We’ll remember. After all, it’s our first Christmas as grandparents.”
As if on cue, the dog’s barking announced the arrival of Toby and Molly and the baby, who had come from their house on nearby Prudence Path. Feet could be heard clattering down the stairs as Zoe, at eleven the youngest of Lucy and Bill’s children, ran to greet them. Behind her, moving more sedately but unable to resist the allure of their nephew, came her older sisters, Sara, who was a high school sophomore, and Elizabeth, home from Chamberlain College in Boston, where she was a senior.
“Look at how big he’s gotten!” exclaimed Elizabeth, who hadn’t seen the baby since Thanksgiving.
“Can I hold him?” asked Sara.
“No, let me!” demanded Zoe. “Let me hold him!”
“Careful there,” cautioned Lucy, asserting her grandmotherly prerogative and scooping little Patrick up in a hug. Then she sat down on the couch with him in her lap and began unzipping his snowsuit, revealing a blond little tyke in a plaid shirt and blue jeans that matched his father’s, and his grandfather’s. She nuzzled his neck and Patrick crowed and bounced in her lap, delighted to be the center of attention.
“Elizabeth, you can get the cookies and eggnog, and everybody else can start trimming the tree. Patrick and I will watch. Right, Patrick?” But as soon as the boxes were opened and the first ornaments taken out, Patrick was no longer content to watch. He wanted to pull the paper out of the boxes and touch the ornaments, too. Deftly, Lucy distracted him with a cookie and took him over to the window, to look at the Christmas lights strung on the porch.
“It’s starting to snow,” she said. “It’s going to be a white Christmas.”
“Nothing unusual about that,” said Bill, who was attaching a hook to a round red ball.
“We’re only supposed to get a couple of inches,” said Toby, pulling a plastic trumpet out of the box. “Hey, I remember this,” he said, blowing on it and producing a little toot.
“Look at this one!” said Zoe. “It’s baby Jesus in his manger, and if you shake it the snow falls on him!”
“Poor baby Jesus,” said Molly, making herself shiver. “He must be cold.”
“It snowed on me in my crib, when I was a baby, right in this house,” said Toby. “Right, Mom?”
“He’s making that up,” declared Sara.
“And how could he remember, if he was a baby?” asked Elizabeth.
“That’s silly,” said Zoe. “It can’t snow in the house!”
Lucy looked around the room, at the strong walls and the tight windows, the carpeted floor, and the brick fireplace where the fire crackled merrily, and then her eyes met Bill’s. “We-e-ll,” she said, “this house was in pretty bad shape when we first moved here.”
“It was a nor’easter,” said Bill, exaggerating. “The wind blew the snow through a crack. It was easy to fix, the window just needed some caulking.”
“See, I was right,” declared Toby.
“It was Christmas Eve,” said Lucy. “Toby was two. I found him in his crib, with a little dusting of snow. But how did you remember?”
“I think you must’ve told me,” said Toby. “To tell the truth, it just popped in my head this morning when Patrick woke up and I went into his room to get him.”
Lucy smiled fondly at her grandson, who looked so much like his father at that age. Things had certainly changed since that awful winter of 1983….
Chapter One
December 1983
Only a week until Christmas. Not that it felt like Christmas. Lucy Stone was crouched awkwardly on the cracked linoleum kitchen floor in front of an elderly gas range, trying to reach all the way back inside the broiler despite her six-month pregnant belly to relight the oven pilot light that was always going out. No wonder, considering how drafty the old house was.
The flame finally caught and she sat back on her heels, gathering up the collection of wooden matches she’d used and groaning a bit as she hauled herself to her feet. She tossed the matches in the trash and washed her hands in cold water—it took a while for the balky hot water heater to produce anything remotely warm, much less hot—before returning to the cookie batter she was mixing. Spritz cookies, just like her mother always made. Except this year she had to make them because she wouldn’t be seeing her mother, or her father, this Christmas. They were staying in New York City because Dad was making a poor recovery from heart surgery and was lingering in the hospital, needing all Mom’s attention. That left Lucy, who could use some attention herself, out in the cold.
Literally out in the cold, she thought, switching on the mixer to cream the butter and sugar together. It didn’t get much colder than coastal Maine and that’s where she was, in the nowhere town of Tinker’s Cove. It was certainly a far cry from the Upper West Side of New York City, where she and Bill and Toby, who was almost two, had lived in a tight three-and-a-half rooms overlooking Central Park. But what did space matter when you had the entire park with playgrounds and a zoo and even a carousel, and the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art just steps away? When you could hop the subway to Battery Park for a breath of sea air and a walk along the water? Or a night out at a Broadway show? Or a quick trip to Bloomingdale’s where they sprayed you with the newest fragrances and you could find the cutest little outfits for Toby?
Lucy switched off the mixer and set it on the kitchen table, then began adding the flour by hand. It was hard work but she was glad to have something to occupy her, something that would make it seem more like Christmas. Which was weird, she thought, because Tinker’s Cove was one of those picture-perfect New England towns that looked as if it could be on a Christmas card. But even though the air smelled piney and the houses all had wreaths with red bows and the big fir tree in the center of town was decked with colored lights, it wasn’t nearly as festive as Rockefeller Center where they set up a proper Christmas tree above the skating rink and played Christmas carols on loudspeakers and Fifth Avenue was filled with shoppers carrying bags that bulged with presents.
Just the thought of presents made Lucy groan. There weren’t going to be presents this year, at least not the lavish presents of Christmases past. She and Bill had agreed to exchange one modest gift apiece, reserving the rest of their limited budget for toys for Toby. Limited being the operative word here, thought Lucy, who had a fifty-dollar bill folded in the back of her wallet and was keeping an eye on the assortment of trucks and stuffed animals at the IGA, anxiously hoping they held out until Christmas Eve when Dot, the friendly cashier, promised her prices would be cut by half.
Somehow she hadn’t expected it would come to this when she agreed to Bill’s plan to dramatically change direction, exchanging a well-paying job as a stockbroker and their comfortable life in the city to realize his longtime dream of living in the country and working with his hands. Back then he’d just gotten a fat bonus and it seemed that they could easily afford the fixer-upper farmhouse they’d found in Tinker’s Cove. He’d learn by doing, he said, gaining the skills of a restoration carpenter by refurbishing the big nineteenth-century house room by room. But everything was more expensive than they anticipated and the fat bonus shrank rapidly, going to the hardware store and the lumber yard and the electric company a
nd the grocery store and the oil company. Especially the oil company. When Bill tore out the old, rotted plaster and lath he discovered there was no insulation, and sometimes not even proper studs, in the walls. Which meant it was always cold even though the furnace ran constantly, burning oil at a ferocious rate.
Even worse, Bill’s career change had alienated him from his parents. Bill Sr. and Edna had seemed so jolly, so easygoing when Lucy first met them but that had all changed when Bill announced his plan to give up corporate life. Bill Sr. had listened stony faced as Bill explained his reasons for quitting the brokerage firm he bitterly referred to as “Dewey, Cheatham and Howe.”
“They don’t care about the clients, Dad, all they care about is making a big profit. There’s so much pressure to churn accounts to generate commissions, to sell limited partnerships and other products that aren’t going to produce a dime until most of my clients are long gone. And there’s the insider trading. I tell you, it’s just a matter of time before the SEC gets on to these guys.”
“You have a responsibility to your employer, son,” said his father, looking grim. “They’re paying you handsomely to make money for them. It’s not some sort of welfare scheme, you know.”
“You said it,” snapped Bill. “They’ve got me taking from the poor and giving to the rich and I’m not going to do it. We’re going to get out of this filthy town and go somewhere where the air is clean and people are honest.”
“I’m warning you, son,” said Bill Sr. “I can’t approve of you putting your family and your livelihood at risk like this. Don’t come whining to me looking for a handout when the wolf is at the door.”
Lucy smiled grimly to herself. Despite Bill’s high hopes they hadn’t found either clean air or honest people. The local weather forecast announced frequent bad air days, thanks to prevailing winds that carried pollution from the entire country. And the big story last week in the town’s little newspaper alleged that a sweet-faced church secretary, beloved by the entire congregation, had embezzled several thousand dollars for a trip to Las Vegas. Bill had succeeded, however, in bringing the wolf to the door, but there was no way he was going to give his father the satisfaction of asking for help. That would be admitting defeat and Bill wasn’t about to do that. So they wouldn’t be seeing the elder Stones this year, either.