Scrooge and the Single Girl

by Christine Rimmer

  The voice of reason—in general, Will liked to think of himself as reasonable man—whispered in his ear that he was being every bit as foolish and pigheaded as she was. But there was something about having that woman underfoot round-the-clock that brought his worst qualities to the fore. He started reading again, concentrating fiercely, trying to keep all those Russian names straight, resolutely ignoring the icy wind that was blowing in the door.

  And then, out of nowhere, her cat landed on his lap, between his belt and his book.

  He reacted on instinct, shouting “No!” raising his book and giving the animal a firm shove off his lap.

  Maybe firmer than he should have. The cat went flying. But it landed on its feet. And it ran off into the kitchen, fast, using all four legs, not limping in the least. He was sure he hadn’t hurt it—that time, or earlier, when he’d caught its tail under his chair. From what he’d just seen, its tail looked fine.

  And where in hell, he wondered, had that woman gotten herself off to?

  Outside, he heard engine noises.

  What the hell? She shouldn’t be trying to drive off yet. Her cat was still in the house with him.

  It flew in the face of good sense to pay the slightest attention to what she was up to, but he did it anyway. There was a window about three feet from his chair. He got up and went over there and peeked around the edge of the blind.

  The snow was coming down pretty thick by then, but even through the veil of white, he could see the vehicles—and Jillian. She was putting on her chains. Surprisingly, she seemed to have a clear grasp of the process. She’d managed to flatten the snow in the crucial places and she’d laid out the chains. She was just getting ready to drive back onto them. He imagined she might even manage to actually get them hooked correctly in place.

  But there was no way even properly installed chains were going to get her down the driveway to the road. The snow was just too damn deep. She had to know that.

  But then again, she was Jillian. And who could ever really know what went on in that mind of hers? Also, who could say how long it was going to take her to face reality and come back inside?

  Muttering a few more choice expletives, he went over and shut the door. Then he stuck another log in the wood-burning half of the kitchen stove and stood in front of the heater in the living area until the place began to warm up again.

  He’d just settled back into his chair and picked up his book when Jillian blew in again. She went straight to the heater and stood in front of it for three or four minutes, shivering and rubbing her hands together.

  Eventually, when she was more or less thawed out, she went looking for the cat.

  “Missy,” she called softly. “Come on, sweetie….”

  She tried the old iron bed in the corner first, where the cat had run to hide after the tail-crushing incident. He could have told her that most likely it wasn’t under there, that the last time he’d seen it, it had been shooting off in the direction of the bathroom and the door to the stairs. But if he told her about the cat taking off into the kitchen, she might ask how he, who made a point of paying zero attention to the animal, had even noticed that dear little Missy was on the move. When he answered that one, she’d only start shouting at him again. He could do without more of her shouting.

  She got down on her hands and knees and peered under the couch. When she stood again, she made a big deal of clearing her throat.

  “What?”

  “Missy’s not under the couch.”

  “So?”

  “Last night, I saw her coming out of your room. Maybe she’s in there now. Do you mind if I…?” She let her voice trail off and gestured at the curtain that led to his bedroom.

  “Be my guest.” He was already looking down at his book again.

  Jilly stared at the top of his bent head, thinking that, really, his very existence annoyed her. She had a distinct and quite powerful urge to say something rude. Somehow, she quelled it. She stepped past him and went through the curtain.

  What she saw on the other side made her stomach turn over and the tiny hairs rise on the back of her neck.

  Chapter Six

  The room was the room of her dream. Everything—all of it—was just as she remembered it, from the ladder-back rocker under the window to the big dark dresser against the far wall, the one with the yellowed runner on top and the streaked mirror above. Jilly could see herself in that mirror. She looked as if she’d seen a ghost.

  And maybe she had.

  Her legs felt shaky. It would probably be a good idea if she sat down. The bed—honest-to-Pete, the same bed as in her dream, with the same dark head-board and faded patchwork quilt—was only a few feet away. She staggered over to it and dropped to the edge.

  She still had her coat and hat on. And it was a good thing, too, because suddenly she was freezing again. She wrapped her arms around herself and hunched her shoulders and waited for the shivering to pass.

  It did, fairly quickly, thank goodness. She took off her hat, wincing when she bumped the knot on her forehead.

  Wait a minute. Gingerly, she touched the injury again. She had been knocked out last night. Maybe she’d suffered a minor loss of memory. Didn’t people often lose short-term memory after a head injury bad enough to cause unconsciousness?

  Yes. Of course. It was all starting to make sense now.

  She’d come into this room last night, at some point—maybe doing just what she was doing now, looking for Missy. Then she’d been hit on the head and forgotten all about it. Then, last night, while she was sleeping, the memory had resurfaced and been incorporated into her dream.

  It made perfect sense.

  Jilly put her hat back on. “Missy?” she called.

  She got no response. She looked under the dresser, under the bed, in the crude closet that had been constructed of two-by-fours braced against a wall and hung with more curtains made of that palm-tree-patterned fabric.

  When she went back out to the living area, Will glanced up.

  “No luck,” she told him and then couldn’t stop herself from asking, “By any chance, was I in your bedroom last night?”

  Now he was looking at her as if she had several screws loose. Not, she reminded herself, that such a look from him was anything all that new or different. “Why the hell would you have been in my bedroom?”

  “You know, I was asking myself the same question.”

  “And what kind of answer did you have for yourself?”

  She wondered, Why am I talking to him? It always turns out badly when I do. “I have to tell you, I think this is a subject best not pursued.”

  “Then why did you bring it up?”

  “Now that’s a good question. Am I going to answer it? I think I’d rather not. I left my car running and I have to find my cat.”

  He grunted and went back to reading his book.

  She realized she needed a little help from him. How unpleasant. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me?”

  He let out a big gusty breath. “What is it, Jillian?”

  “I hate to put you out, but do you think you could keep an eye on the doorway to your bedroom? Make sure Missy doesn’t go darting in there while I’m looking for her in the rest of the house?”

  Will seriously considered telling her to forget the cat for now—forget the cat and go out and turn off her damn car, since they both knew she wasn’t going anywhere. But that would only inspire more argument. Let her figure it out for herself. She’d have to come to grips with reality as soon as she actually tried to drive off, anyway. “Sure. I’ll watch for the cat.”

  “Thank you,” she sneered.

  She wandered off, calling, “Missy, Missy, here sweetie, come on…” He heard her footsteps on the stairs. She called the cat as she went. She stayed up there for a while, poking around, calling intermittently, “Missy, baby…come on now, come on…”

  She came back down. “Missy? Where are you? Missy, here girl…” She went into the bathroom, still calling.
Then he heard her in the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets.

  She popped her head around the half-wall and caught his eye, lifting one of those thick eyebrows in an unspoken question.

  “Haven’t seen it,” he said.

  She went back upstairs, still calling. It seemed to him he could hear the worry creeping into her voice, becoming more pronounced every time she said the cat’s name.

  Her concern somehow turned out to be contagious. He was starting to wonder, too, where the damn cat might be, starting to think about how she’d left the door open, how he’d sent the cat flying, how he’d turned his back on the door for several minutes while he peeked out the window to see what she was up to.

  And how it was Christmas. And at Christmas, if you hung around Will Bravo, bad things seemed to always happen….

  She came back downstairs and went out the door, shutting it carefully behind her. He got up, went to the window and lifted the blind. She appeared from the side porch, hunched against the wind. She slogged out to her 4Runner, opened the driver’s door and leaned in. The windshield wipers stopped. She pulled her head out and shut the door again.

  When she got back inside, she went straight to the heater to warm herself. He was still standing by the window. She took off her hat and smoothed her hair. “I don’t know what to do next.” All the usual animosity was gone from her voice. “I can’t imagine where she might be.”

  Will didn’t like what he was feeling. Guilt. It tightened his gut and squeezed at his chest. He shouldn’t have shoved the cat off his lap like that—not with the door wide open, anyway.

  “Jillian…”

  She made a questioning sound and those dark brows drew together.

  “I, uh, probably should have said something earlier.”

  “About?”

  “The last time you went out, before you came back to get the cat, you left the door open.”

  She laid a cold-reddened hand against her throat. “How…long was it open?”

  He hated to see her look so damn stricken. And he could see it in those gorgeous gray eyes: She was blaming herself. He couldn’t stand that. He liked it better when she was sniping at him, or chattering away like Martha Stewart on speed. It was going to be a relief, he realized, to tell her the truth. Then she could get mad at him, maybe yell at him and call him a few rude names. He could take that. He could take just about anything, if she would only stop looking so worried and scared.

  “At least five minutes,” he said. “Probably more.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yeah. And I—” But she wasn’t sticking around for the worst part of his confession. She was already putting her hat back on, turning for the door. “Jillian, wait.”

  “I can’t. I have to go look for her. She was a stray when I found her, but she’s been an indoor cat since then. And she’s never been in the wild, that I know of.” She pulled open the door and a flurry of snow blew in, borne on a frozen gust of wind. “She won’t know how to cope.” She went out the door and pulled it shut behind her.

  Will just stood there for several seconds, thinking that an outdoor search was an exercise in futility. If the cat had wandered out the door, it was more than likely a frozen cat by now—and if not, it would be frozen very soon. And in the meantime, who the hell could say where it might be hiding? It could be anywhere. And he wouldn’t put it past Jilly to get herself lost in the woods looking for it.

  Will switched from his moccasins to his boots. Then he grabbed his coat off the peg and went after her.

  Luckily, she hadn’t gotten far. He found her in the woodshed, which was maybe ten feet from the house in the opposite direction from the clearing where they’d parked their cars.

  She turned when he came through the open door. “What are you doing out here?” Her breath plumed on the frozen air.

  “I want to help.”

  She didn’t argue, only wrapped her coat tighter around her and peered into the gloom. “I should have brought a flashlight.”

  The woodshed was the simplest sort of structure, a tin roof, a wooden frame and rough plank walls. The wind whistled through the cracks between the planks. For as long as Will could remember, there had always been a flashlight hanging on a big rusted nail to the left of the door. He’d put fresh batteries in it just the other day, as a matter of fact.

  “Right here.” He grabbed it and turned it on.

  They scoured the shed, shining the light in every nook and cranny. There were a lot of those. The wood was stacked three logs deep at the far end of the shed. With slow care, Will ran the flashlight over the rows of logs. They checked out the tool area, examined the big box of rags in the corner, looked over the shelves stacked with dusty jars. He shone the light behind more boxes full of nails and screws.

  No Missy.

  Will followed Jillian back out into the storm, stopping to pull the door shut and hook the latch. They circled the outside of the shed, to no avail. They checked the perimeter of the house, the two porches and then out behind, where the emergency generator and the propane tank were buried well above their bases in snow. They went on, hoping to find places that a cat might crawl into.

  But the snow covered everything, smooth and deep. Once they’d been around the house and the shed, Jillian trudged into the bushes that rimmed the clearing.

  Will knew it was pointless to keep at it—that it had probably been pointless from the first—but he didn’t have the heart to tell her, so he went with her. For a time, they wandered around in the brush, hunched against the cold, protected a little from the storm by the close-growing trees, as Jillian called the cat and got no answer but the howling of the wind.

  Finally, she turned to him, hands in her pockets, bright red nose poking out under the brim of her hat, “I want to check the cars before we go in.”

  They traipsed to the vehicles. She hauled open the driver’s door of her 4Runner and climbed in there to look around, he assumed in the faint hope that Missy might have jumped in while she had the door open. She checked underneath, where she’d had to dig out to get her chains on. No luck either place. His vehicle was buried to the base of the bumper. No way any animal was hiding under there.

  The storm had intensified as they searched. By the time they turned back toward the house, it was almost as bad as it had been the night before. Snow and wind buffeted them. The world was a swirling, freezing wall of whiteness.

  Back inside, she headed straight for the stairs. She went up and came back down, then she went into the bathroom, and all through the kitchen, the living area and his bedroom, checking every corner one more time, calling forlornly, “Here, Missy. Here, girl…”

  Will took off his coat and his boots and warmed up at the heater, waiting for her to stand in one place for a minute or two—at which time he would confess to her that her darling Missy’s disappearance was all his fault.

  His opportunity wasn’t that long in coming. Once she’d gone through the house a second time, she came back to the coat rack by the door. She took off her hat and her coat and hung them up, then unlaced her boots and set them next to his. He stepped aside so she could have the heater to herself for a minute or two.

  She took the spot he offered and informed him solemnly, “I’m sorry. I’m not leaving without her.”

  She wasn’t leaving in any case, since they were snowed in. But he decided there was no point in beating her over the head with the facts. If she didn’t want to face them, fine. She finally understood that she was stuck here, and that was what mattered.

  He shrugged and tried again to tell her what he had done. “Jilly, I—”

  She cut him off with a groan. “Oh, this is ridiculous.” And then she surprised him by admitting the truth, after all. “As if I ever was leaving in the first place. We both know I wasn’t. But I just had to make my big scene.” She shivered and stared miserably down at her thick red socks. “I’ll never forgive myself if I’ve ended up costing Missy her life.”

  “Jilly.”
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  She looked up. “Yeah?”

  “If the damn cat did run out, it’s not your fault.”

  She scrunched up her nose at him. “Oh, I don’t know what’s happened to you in the past half hour. All at once, you’re just a wonderful, wonderful guy.”

  He tried to look thunderous. “Don’t count on it lasting.”

  And she actually smiled—though her eyes didn’t. “I won’t, I promise—and if Missy got out, it was my fault.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “No.”

  “Will. I was the one who—”

  “No. You were not the one. When you left the door open, I should have gone right over and shut it. But I was angry and I figured you could close the damn door yourself.”

  “Makes sense to me. If our positions had been reversed, I probably would have done exactly the same thing. And if you’d been the one with a cat and your cat had run out—”

  “You would have been at fault.”

  “Oh, please, Will. You’re a lawyer. Get real. She’s my cat and I’m responsible for her safety.”

  This wasn’t going the way he had planned. The woman was giving him logic, something he’d never in a million years have expected from her. “There’s more. The cat didn’t run out. Not at first. It jumped on my lap. I gave it a whack.”

  Jillian flinched. “You whacked my cat?”

  Had he? Whacked it? “Well, it was a good, solid shove, anyway. The animal went flying.”

  “And she ran out the door?”

  “Not exactly. She ran into the kitchen.”

  “And?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I got up to look out the window and see what was taking you so damn long out there, and then it got so cold in here, I gave up and shut the door myself, after all.”

  “But you never saw Missy run out.”

  “It’s obvious she ran out while I had my back turned.”

  “No, it’s not. The only thing that’s obvious is that I left the door open.”

  “I could have closed it right away.”

  “We’ve been over that. You were mad and you weren’t about to shut the door that I had left open.”