CHAPTER ONE

      TWENTY-TWO gallons of hot chocolate.

      Ten of mulled wine.

      Four hundred and sixty-two painstakingly decorated Christmas cookies.

      And no one was coming.

      The storm battering the windows of the White Pond Inn—Emma White had rechristened it the White Christmas Inn just this morning—was being compared by the radio announcer to the Great Ice Storm of 1998 that had wreaked havoc on this region of Atlantic Canada, not to mention Quebec, Ontario, New York and New England.

      Christmas was clearly going to be ruined.

      “Just like always,” Emma murmured out loud to herself, her voice seeming to echo through the empty inn.

      Her optimism was not in the least bolstered by the fire crackling cheerfully in the hearth, by her exquisite up-country holiday decorations in the great room, or by her bright-red Santa hat and her lovely red wool sweater with the white angora snowflakes on its front.

      In fact, speaking the thought out loud—that Christmas was going to be ruined, just like always—invited a little girl, the ghost of herself, to join her in the room.

      The little girl had long, dark wavy hair and was staring at an opened package that held a doll with jaggedly cut hair and blue ink stains on its face, clearly not Clara, the doll she had whispered to Santa that she coveted, but rather a castoff of one of the children her mother cleaned houses for.

      “Shut up,” Emma ordered herself, but for some reason the little ghost girl wanted her to remember how she had pretended to be happy. For her mother.

      Her mother, Lynelle, who had finally agreed to come for Christmas. Emma could not wait to show her the refurbished house that Lynelle had grown up in but not returned to since she was sixteen, not even when Grandma had died.

      Emma tried not to think that her mother had sounded backed into a corner rather than enthused about spending Christmas here. And she had agreed to come only on Christmas Eve, taking a miss on the seasonal celebrations at the inn: the ten-day pre-Christmas celebration, Holiday Happenings. But still Lynelle would be here for the culmination of all Emma’s hard work and planning, Christmas Day Dream.

      Lynelle’s lack of enthusiasm probably meant she was distracted. In Emma’s experience that usually meant a new man.

      It was probably uncharitable—and unChristmas-like—but when Emma sent the bus ticket, she was sending fare for a single passenger.

      The radio cut into her thoughts, but only to add to her sense of unease and gloom. “This just in, the highway closed at Harvey all the way through to the U.S. border.”

      Emma got up and deliberately snapped off the radio, thoughts of her mother and her memories. She tried to focus on the facts, to be pragmatic, though the inn was plenty of evidence that pragmatism did not come naturally to her. The inn was the project of a dreamer, not a realist.

      Okay, she told herself, visitors would not be making the scenic drive up from Maine tonight. Maybe it was just as well. Her aging neighbor, Tim Fenshaw, had already called to say he couldn’t bring the horses out in this, so there would be no sleigh rides. The phone line had gone dead before he had said good-bye.

      And just before the last light had died in the evening sky, Emma had looked out her back window at her pond and seen that it was being covered with snow faster than she could hope to clear it. So, no skating, either.

      “Holiday Happenings is not happening,” Emma announced to herself. Or at least not happening tonight, which was to have been the opening night of ten days of skating and sleigh rides right up until Christmas Eve.

      It was all adding up to a big fat zero. No sledding, no sleigh rides, no skating, no admission fees, no hot dog sales, no craft sales, no cookie sales. All the things Emma had counted on finally to bring the inn firmly into the black.

      And