A Small Town Christmas Read online

  “I used to love those old reruns when I was a kid,” said Emma.

  Jamie rolled her eyes. “Why am I not surprised?”

  Sarah was still thinking. “Why couldn’t we do one good deed a day?” she asked suddenly. “It might be fun to try. You know, paying it forward.”

  “Like in the movie,” Emma said with a smile.

  “That worked real well at the stop sign,” said Jamie. She downed the last of her chocolate mint tea. “Well, here’s my something. Your chocolate therapy is on the house,” she said to Sarah and Emma. It always was, but she cocked an eyebrow and grinned at Emma. “So, top that.”

  “Maybe I will,” Emma said. “If I see a hot-looking homeless guy, I’ll take him in for the night.”

  Okay, they weren’t taking her seriously. Sarah could see that. But somewhere in there was a good idea, if she could just find it.

  THREE

  At five-thirty Sarah looked at the clock and announced, “I’d better get home and start dinner.”

  She only had Sam and herself to feed now, and half the time Sam was at the station. But that didn’t matter. Sarah cooked dinner for him no matter where he was. In fact, she usually wound up cooking for all the guys at Firehouse Number Nine. If you asked Jamie, her aunt was already the queen of good deeds.

  “You know, she might have a point,” Emma said after Jamie had given Sarah a kiss and sent her on her way with a truffle for her uncle (which would, of course, never make it home).

  “About the ‘pay it forward’ thing?”

  “I mean, why not? People are basically good.”

  Jamie made a snort of disgust. “I don’t know who told you that, but he lied.”

  “Most people are basically good,” Emma amended. “And my grandma told me. I think, deep down, people want to be good.”

  “Not all people,” Jamie said under her breath. Emma’s pitying look made her suddenly antsy. She got up and went to the kitchen at the back of the shop to put their mugs in the dishwasher.

  Emma followed her. Jamie could feel her friend watching her with those big, blue naïve eyes. “Hey, it’s not like I don’t love this town,” Jamie said, “and I’d hate to see it grow into an anthill of strangers. But I don’t know how you stop a place from changing.”

  “Too bad we can’t take a picture of Heart Lake, stick it in a frame, and then just jump in,” said Emma with a sigh.

  Jamie picked up her keys to lock up. “With all the new people the picture would probably fall right off the wall anyway.”

  “Want to come over for dinner?” Emma asked as they walked out the door. “I made chicken curry soup last night and I recorded Bell, Book, and Candle with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak.”

  Emma and her old movies. “What’s it about?” Jamie asked suspiciously.

  “Witches. Perfect for Halloween.”

  “Just witches?” No sappy love story?

  “It’s really cute,” said Emma. “And don’t forget, you get a free meal, too,” she added.

  What the heck? Jamie wasn’t exactly booked solid. Since coming to Heart Lake her social life had consisted of weekend bike rides around the lake, trips to the gym, and visits to Sarah for cake-decorating lessons, followed by more trips to the gym to counteract the damage done by the visits to Sarah.

  Other than that, all she had was movie nights at Emma’s little duplex. When they first started hanging out, Emma and Jamie had done crafty things like making candles and dried-flower arrangements. That had evolved into crafts followed by a flick. It hadn’t taken more than a couple of times for Jamie to realize that Emma was an old-movie addict. She especially loved tearjerkers such as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and An Affair to Remember. Movies like Kill Bill were more to Jamie’s taste, so they had negotiated a compromise. Jamie would wander around in old-movieland with Emma as long as no woman was verbally abused or got a grapefruit pushed in her face by James Cagney. And no cop movies. No sappy romances, either. That last one was hard for Emma. Still, witches sounded safe enough. Bubble, bubble, and all that.

  But they weren’t. Jamie knew it right from the scene where Jimmy Stewart stumbled into Kim Novak’s creepy little shop. She sat on Emma’s old sofa, curled under a fan quilt, grinding popcorn between her teeth while Emma tried to look clueless as she finished the binding on a quilted wall hanging destined for her display window.

  When Jimmy and Kim finally got together and Kim declared with tears in her eyes that she was only human, Jamie frowned at Emma, sitting red-faced in her overstuffed chair, then grabbed the remote and put an end to the ending credits. “Just witches, huh?”

  Emma’s face turned redder—a bad color combination with her pink top. “I forgot about the romance part. I really did. I just remembered the funny scene with Jack Lemmon turning off all the streetlights.”

  “It wasn’t that funny,” Jamie informed her.

  Emma hung her head. “Sorry.”

  “Never mind. It’s all good,” Jamie said with a shrug, trying to be a sport. Anyway, it served her right. She should have bailed and gone to the gym when Jimmy and Kim started getting sloppy. She threw off the quilt, saying, “I’d better go. I have to get up early tomorrow and replenish my caramel truffles and do some more apples.”

  Emma nodded, obviously relieved to be off the hook. “What are you going to give out for the Goblin Walk? Have you decided?”

  “Suckers for the kids. And I’m going to sample out fudge for the grown-ups.”

  “Good advertising,” Emma approved. “You’ll probably even get some new customers out of it. Everyone likes chocolate.”

  “You know, I’m kind of looking forward to it,” Jamie said. “I remember doing the Goblin Walk when I was a little kid. I never thought I’d be doing it now as a shop owner.”

  “All those little witches and princesses and fairies—they’re so cute,” said Emma. “Kind of makes you want to have some of your own, doesn’t it?” she added in an attempt to be sly. And of course, to go along with those children, Jamie should have a man. When she wasn’t busy at her shop, Emma Swanson moonlighted as Cupid.

  “Uh. No.”

  “You are so lying.”

  Jamie shrugged. “Okay, so I’m lying. Maybe I’ll adopt someday.”

  “Someday? You’re not getting any younger, you know,” Emma reminded her.

  “Thanks.”

  “Neither of us are,” Emma said with a sigh. She pointed a finger at Jamie. “What you need is a Jack Colton.”

  “A who?”

  “You know, from Romancing the Stone.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s what I need.” Emma lived in la-la land. Jamie put on her denim jacket and scooped up her purse. “The soup was great. Next time’s at my place. We can start making those pinecone candle wreaths I told you about.”

  Emma reluctantly set aside her Cupid wings and nodded.

  Emma watched her friend climb into her old Toyota and drive off into the night. Alone. What a waste of blonde. With her thick, long hair and hazel eyes Jamie always made Emma think of Viking princesses. She had the perfect face—not too long, not too fat (like Emma’s), and no freckles—just perfect, creamy princess skin. She also had a little dab of a nose and a little dab of a chin that made her look helpless and delicate. Oh, and a perfect little body that also helped with the delicate look. Jamie was a princess in need of a prince.

  Aren’t we all? Emma thought. But she was more like Drew Barrymore’s pudgy stepsister in Ever After—not exactly the kind of girl a guy went looking for, glass slipper in hand.

  Even if one went looking, he’d have a hard time finding her. Princes tended not to wander into quilt shops. “You’ve got to get out there where the men are,” her mom had urged her. So she’d tried Internet dating. That netted her a nineteen-year-old nerd, a fat Trekkie, and a middle-aged bald guy. Baldie was strike three and she was out of there.

  Single wasn’t so bad. She didn’t have to fight anyone for the remote and she could watch her fill of real men on her classic m
ovie channels.

  Jamie was different, though. She was simply too pretty to be alone. Anyway, Emma was thirty-three. She still had time. Sort of. Okay, not really. But Jamie was older. In five more years her thirties would be history. Couldn’t she hear her biological clock ticking?

  Of course she heard it. She was probably trying her best to drown it out. A waste, a total waste. Emma would have to find a way to help her friend; that was all there was to it. She’d think of something.

  Meanwhile, she had things to do. She got into her pajamas, and then plunked in front of her computer to take care of the business of life. Online life.

  She clicked in her password and entered My World, a Web site rather like a giant Internet model of the old Milton Bradley game of Life. Only more expensive. People who lived online paid for the privilege, buying land and businesses, doing social networking. Emma’s avatar owned a fancy restaurant, and her name was Tess L’amour. Tess didn’t run the restaurant, though. She was a movie star, the size eight variety, and she had flowing black hair. She juggled six boyfriends, each of whom thought she was dazzlingly funny and brilliant. She drove a black Mercedes convertible and she was hot. Today she had to organize for a big soiree with a guest list of fifty movers and shakers. Three of the guests were her boyfriends. That could prove interesting, a lot more interesting than Emma’s offline life.

  It was easy to believe in happy endings when you’d never experienced a sad one, Jamie thought as she tooled home on balding tires. But once you’d seen the ugly underside of the storybook love story you couldn’t be a believer.

  Grant had seemed like the perfect man, but he’d been acting, just like the men in those movies Emma loved so much.

  A flash of red lights behind her brought Jamie out of her painful musings. Oh, not again. She pulled over and watched in her rearview mirror. Out came the giant.

  Hic.

  This was just sick and wrong. She suddenly thought of the movie Groundhog Day, probably another favorite of Emma’s. Just what she wanted to relive, getting stopped by a cop.

  She took a deep breath to quell the stupid nervous hiccups and held it while he approached the car. Then she let down her window and started talking the second his face came into view. “I haven’t had a chance to get the taillight fixed, but I’ve got an appointment.” Total lie. She was lying to a cop. This was no way to make a deposit in the old karmic bank.

  “Do you know how fast you were going?”

  Speeding? Hic. She never sped. Hic, hic. Well, when she was paying attention to what she was doing, she never sped. She crossed her arms over the steering wheel and laid her head down. “I’m in hell.”

  “You were going thirty-five in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone,” he informed her.

  She stared at him. “I was?”

  He was looking at her suspiciously. If only she’d gotten something useful out of that dumb movie, like a spell for making a cop disappear. If only she was Samantha the Witch. She’d wiggle her nose and have this guy gone in an instant. On impulse, like in some crazy dream, she wiggled.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  “As all right as I can be under the circumstances,” she replied. “I have allergies.” To cops.

  He frowned like he could read her thoughts.

  Another hiccup escaped her. Great. Just great. Stopped by a cop and hiccupping.

  He checked out the back of the car, looking for a half-consumed bottle of booze, probably. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? “May I see your license and registration?” he asked, politely neutral.

  She frowned and took her license from her wallet. “I haven’t been drinking if that’s what you’re thinking. I just get the hiccups sometimes.” Like when I’m nervous. She got her registration from the glove compartment and handed it over. “Go ahead, make my day,” she said grumpily.

  “Like I haven’t heard that one before,” he said, and went back to his squad car.

  She watched his retreating backside. It was a thick, well-muscled backside that made her think of football players—a great backside. For Emma or someone else. Not for her.

  “So, did you find anything on my record?” she greeted him when he returned. “Drugs? Grand theft auto?”

  Dumb. That smart mouth of hers was what got her in trouble so much when she was married. Big, testosterone-laden men were like bumblebees. They were slow mental movers. But they packed a wallop when they hit.

  A corner of his mouth slipped up. “Nope. Maybe I should look again.”

  Cute. A cop who moonlighted as a comic.

  “I’m letting you go with a warning.”

  She stared at him. “That’s unheard of.”

  “What’s unheard of?”

  “Stopping someone twice and not giving her a ticket. In most places you don’t even do that once.”

  He shrugged. “This isn’t most places. It’s Heart Lake.”

  “Mayberry,” she murmured.

  “Just call me Barney Fife,” he said. “And get that taillight fixed. Third time you get a ticket, even in Mayberry.”

  “Yes, Officer,” she managed. And swallowed a hiccup. Ouch.

  “Hold your breath,” he advised. “Best cure for hiccups.”

  “We both know scaring me doesn’t work,” she muttered as he returned to his car.

  He may have scared her, but not on purpose, or so he would have said. He was just doing his job. She still couldn’t believe the man hadn’t given her a ticket. Her conversation with Sarah and Emma about good deeds came to mind. Maybe she was this cop’s for the day.

  Or maybe the nose-wiggling had really helped. Who knew?

  Who cared? He was gone and that was all that mattered.

  FOUR

  Emma’s Quilt Corner was the place to be if you were a quilter. Sadly, there didn’t seem to be many quilters in Heart Lake, and that was a mystery to Emma since quilting was getting more and more popular. All a woman had to do was look on the Web.

  Maybe all a woman had to do was shop on the Web, too, she thought glumly as she worked on her new window display. Everybody lived on the Internet these days, she understood that. But the Internet couldn’t look at a quilter’s project and show her how to fix her wavy borders. The Internet couldn’t demonstrate how to put on binding. Never mind, she told herself. You can beat the odds.

  The quilt-draped rocking chair she had placed in the display window two weeks ago was too old-fashioned, she’d decided, so she’d replaced it with several wall hangings, all dangling at different levels—gigantic lures to catch passersby. The first week of November she’d be adding a machine-quilted rectangle that reminded Heart Lake residents “Christmas Is Coming.” She’d scripted a sign announcing her next quilting class (free when you buy your materials at Emma’s), which was now propped on an easel. She moved the easel six inches and stepped back to check out the overall effect. Perfect. People would see it and the lovely hangings on display and rush through the door to sign up.

  Hopefully.

  Emma looked out the window and surveyed the street. It was a rainy (big surprise) Monday and the only ray of sunshine came from the gold mums showering in their heart-shaped hanging baskets along the street. Soon those mums would be replaced by swags and candy canes. Then, after a short break, the hearts would be back, filled with plastic red roses for Valentine’s Day. The roses would stay until spring, when real flowers could make their appearance.

  It was little touches like this that made people want to live here. Emma sure didn’t want to live anywhere else. Not that she’d been many places. She’d gone to Mexico once when the church youth group went to some remote part of the country to build houses for the poor, and she had made several trips to eastern Washington to visit her cousins. She’d been to Victoria once, too. It had been fun to ride the Clipper.

  It wasn’t much compared to Heart Lake kids like Kelsey Bleecker, who had moved to New York to become a star on Broadway, or Jamal King, who Emma heard w
as now in L.A., working on films. So many kids had fled after graduation, vowing never to come back. But what had leaving town really gotten them? So far she hadn’t seen Kelsey on TV, accepting a Tony, and from what Jamie had told Emma about L.A., Jamal could have it.

  The shop door opened and in came Kerrie Neil, with her two-year-old, Nesta, crying in her arms. “Just one more stop,” she told the toddler, then greeted Emma with, “Hi. I need some white thread.”

  Good old Kerrie. She wasn’t into quilting, but she and Emma had been in student council together. They had fought to keep the Heart Lake High Good Citizen Award going, even though most of the student body preferred to play mailbox baseball, climb the water tower, and sneak pot rather than look for ways to be good citizens. Now, even though Kerrie didn’t quilt, she was still earning her good citizen award by helping to support Emma’s business.

  She grabbed the spool of thread and looked around the shop as if searching for something more to buy. So far she’d purchased embroidery thread and dish towels for her great-aunt’s birthday, a book on quilting—which she claimed she would be using as soon as Nesta was in school and she had more time—and Emma’s quilted Noah’s Ark wall hanging for Nesta’s bedroom. “I guess that’s it for today,” she said at last, setting her purchase on the counter.

  The little spool of white thread looked pitifully small squatting on that big, long counter, but a sale was a sale, and Emma appreciated the business. “How’s Miss Nesta doing?” she asked, smiling at the toddler as she rang up the purchase.

  Kerrie frowned. “We’re going home after this. She needs a nap. I need a nap.” She heaved a sigh. “You know, when you get pregnant everyone says, ‘Oh, awesome, you’re going to have a baby.’ But nobody tells you what that really means. It means you’re going to end up with a figure like a kangaroo, get no sleep, and be too tired for sex.”

  “Which is what got you in this mess in the first place,” teased Emma. “You’ve done such a great sales job I think I’ll have to grab a man on my way home tonight and have wild, crazy sex so I can get knocked up.”