Mrs. Claus and the Santaland Slayings. Liz Ireland
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a little, so I appreciate your being a good hostess.” He produced a small box of chocolates and presented them to me. “I brought these from home.”
“Where is that?” I opened the box, picked one, and bit into the most heavenly confection of chocolate and peppermint I’d ever tasted. I may have even let out a moan, because his face cracked in a smile and he pointed to a different one in the box.
“You should try that one. It’s my favorite.”
As I looked at him and remembered his ripped body in that surf, it was hard to believe he was a chocolate aficionado. “I’ll try it next. I want to savor this one. Where did you say you were from?”
“A little place up north—it’s sort of hidden.”
In the days of Google, was there any place that was still hidden? “Canada, you mean?” He had the faintest of accents, so I was fairly certain he wasn’t an American.
“It’s actually north of the Northwest Territories.”
That cagey answer assumed I had no knowledge of the geography of the Northwest Territories (I didn’t) and that I wouldn’t want to own up to my ignorance of anything north of Vancouver (I wouldn’t). A handsome, enigmatic stranger was leaning over me, taking me in with his dark brown eyes, and feeding me chocolates. I’d had dreams like this, and I wasn’t about to bust up a living dream by volunteering the fact that arctic geography was a huge hole in my knowledge.
The next day we met again on the beach, which wasn’t an accident on either of our parts. It was the start of the most romantic week of my life. We went for drives; we held hands under towering pines, listening to the music of the wind whistling through millions of needles. After two days we were having our dinners together, and every other meal, too.
No romance with guests had been my motto during the few years I’d been an innkeeper. Circumstances had made it easy for me to eschew romance. I’d been newly widowed when I’d taken my money from a legal settlement and sunk most of it into the house. My husband, Keith, had died in a car accident—hit by an eighteen-wheeler belonging to a megacorporation. That was traumatic enough, but we’d been having troubles for a long time caused by infertility problems and then infidelity problems. Before the accident we’d been on the verge of separation. After the police contacted me about the crash, I realized it had occurred minutes after a phone argument we’d had.
Feeling like an utter failure in family and relationships, I’d retreated across the country, to the Oregon coast near where my grandparents had lived. It was a place that held happy memories for me. When I purchased the inn, I vowed to focus on business and to turn the Coast Inn into a place that would create happy memories for others. For three years, the friendships I formed in Cloudberry Bay and the fleeting acquaintances of paying guests fulfilled me. My no-romance policy had never been difficult to adhere to.
Yet there I was, head over heels for a guy with a weeklong reservation. With Nick, I found myself spilling out more of the history of my marriage than I ever had to my best friend, Claire. More than I had to a psychologist I’d seen after Keith’s accident, even. Nick listened with real understanding and sympathy that seemed deep, almost raw. On the last night, I learned why. He told me about his brother.
“Chris died two months ago. Hunting accident.” The hurt rasp in his voice broke my heart—his grief was so fresh, and his face clouded with an anguished expression I hadn’t seen since the day he’d arrived.
“Your older brother?” I knew Nick had other siblings. He’d mentioned Martin and Lucia several times, but I hadn’t gotten the birth order down yet.
“Yes, he was older than me, younger than Lucia. Now I’m the head of the family.”
It seemed an antiquated way of looking at sibling relationships, almost as if he was the heir of some principality. I couldn’t help asking, “Why wouldn’t Lucia, the eldest, be considered the head of the family?”
He weighed his response longer than necessary. “It’s not our way.”
I laughed. “Even the House of Windsor’s fixed the females-last thing, you know.”
“There are strong women in my family. My mother’s wonderful, a force of nature. She’s the glue that keeps us all together. It’s been a terrible time for us.”
I knew all too well what he was going through, and felt a little ashamed of my glib sparring about Lucia. Also of my thoughts about that force-of-nature mother. (But honestly, how great could a parent be if they saddled their kid with the name Chris Kringle?) I focused on helping Nick. “It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Time is the only thing that helps. Grief never goes away, but it recedes.”
His dark gaze locked on mine. “This week with you has been the balm I needed. Spending time with you here has made me feel as if there’s some hope.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant. Did he really like me, or was I the human equivalent of a Xanax?
“I wish you could stay longer.” I’d blurted out the words before I could think about how needy they sounded.
“And I wish—”
He broke off, taking in the old sprawling house behind us, with its five gables of graying shingle, standing tall as it had for almost a hundred years against the whims of the Pacific. He shook his head. “You have a beautiful place here. You belong here, don’t you?”
“I’m happy here,” I said. “But I don’t belong. I came here to get away from . . . well, I told you about all that. I’ve made this my home, but it’s not the only place I can survive. No one should feel stuck where they are.”
It was the wrong thing to say. That cloud descended over his expression again. “It doesn’t always work that way, April. Maybe if it were ten years from now . . .”
Ten years? It seemed an odd thing to say.
“Are you going to take early retirement?” He was my age—thirty-six. “You must have started socking away money early.”
He laughed a little at that. “If all goes well. We’ll see. In the meantime, though, I shouldn’t sit around daydreaming like a child.”
Frustration filled me. If I was part of them, I wanted him to hold on to his daydreams. Why did he insist on talking like a slumming prince in a fairy tale, duty bound to return to his kingdom? Even as we stood face-to-face, hand in hand, the past week seemed to recede into something unreal.
He left the next day, saying good-bye quickly but brushing his lips against my cheek and then holding them there, as if to remember the moment better. Five minutes later I was helping my housekeeper, Dakota, strip beds. Back on the hamster wheel.
Where exactly was Nick off to? He’d given me an email address but never had told me the name of the town he lived in. I began to pinpoint other basic things he hadn’t revealed, such as what he did for a living and what nationality he was. By the end of the day, when I was greeting new guests, I wondered if anything I thought I knew about him was true. Cinematic possibilities filled my head: He was a CIA agent. A gangster on the run. It was all a dream and he’d been a figment of my imagination....
That night, I remembered Nick’s chocolates, the ones he said were from where he lived. A clue! The box was right where I’d left it. Not a figment, then. I took the chocolate he said was his favorite and bit into it slowly. The strange flavor filling took me a moment to place, and even then I wasn’t certain. Eggnog? The shiny red box had no writing on it, no stamp from the country of manufacture. No ingredients list, even. It must have been a pretty small outfit that had made them. And then I turned the box over and noticed one distinctive mark: a gold stamp in the silhouette of a Santa Claus waving a mittened hand in greeting.
* * *
I skidded into rehearsal just in the nick of time. In taking on the job of Christmastown Musical Events chairperson, I’d drawn the attention of a few of the music group directors, who were all interested in filling gaps in their orchestras, bands, or