Island Christmas

by M. L. Buchman

  Island Christmas

  a Miranda Chase origin story

  M. L. Buchman

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  About This Title

  Home for the holidays, with friends, should be worry free…

  For the first time in years, Miranda has invited guests to her San Juan Islands cabin for Christmas—her NTSB air-crash investigation team. She’s not sure it was the best decision.

  When more of her past flies in on Christmas Eve, it proves to be an even greater challenge than she expected. But, with the help of her past and her team, perhaps she can find the feeling of that true Christmas spirit.

  1

  “Okay, I have a good story. On—”

  “We’ve already heard that one, mate,” Holly cut Jeremy off before he could even get out a second word.

  Everyone started laughing, even Jeremy after he recovered from Holly’s “friendly” wallop on the back. It had knocked most of the air out of him, and almost flattened him onto the wire racks of Christmas cookies waiting their turn.

  Miranda didn’t understand why all three of them were laughing.

  She liked Jeremy’s stories. Holly’s were always so wild. Mike’s often had strange plot twists she couldn’t follow. Of the members on her NTSB air-crash investigation team, Jeremy’s stories always worked the best for her.

  If he was retelling a story, how could that single, two-letter word a sufficient clue for everyone except her?

  Wait, this was one of those moments. The ones that she wrote down in her personal notebook for later study. She could picture the page heading: Appropriate Reactions. Always a problem for people on the autism spectrum. But she was trying to get better at it.

  When people laughed quickly, it meant…

  A joke. She’d missed a joke. If they weren’t amused by Jeremy’s untold and as-yet-unidentified story, it was because… Oh! Cutting off Jeremy before the storytelling actually began was the joke.

  By the time Miranda joined in the laugh, everyone else had stopped, leaving hers ringing alone in the cozy kitchen. She sighed, to herself. So, what else was new? She focused out the window on the storm clouds building to the west over Vancouver Island.

  Mike nudged her with an elbow before he dipped the end of another coconut macaroon into dark chocolate and then a swish through the dish of sprinkles. “You got a joke, Miranda. Well done you.”

  He understood. He even said it softly so that the others didn’t hear. Holly and Jeremy were busy threatening to face-paint each other with icing anyway.

  She greatly appreciated that he never became frustrated with her about any of her shortcomings.

  They’d been together as a team for a year, and Mike always understood. Of course, that was his job on the team: Human Factors—the one thing she understood least. Pilot error was a key factor of fully eighty percent of airplane incidents, yet remained a complete mystery to her. She could identify if it was human error or not, but the why was so elusive.

  Undertraining, overconfidence, impairment, poor judgement: she understood none of those—except in herself. She’d striven her entire life to be better trained, remained possessed of a contrarian “confidence” that those efforts were wholly insufficient, knew her autism was a significant impairment in this area, which also gave her very poor judgment of people.

  Mike’s role was to ferret all those factors out on a crash.

  She nodded her thanks to him for understanding her (also on her Appropriate Reactions page), and pulled the next sheet of gingerbread cookies out of the lower oven. She’d need three more sheets before she had all of the pieces to make this year’s gingerbread sculpture.

  Holly and Jeremy had apparently reached some sort of truce and were back to icing the cooled cookies spread on the maple-and-cherrywood counter rather than each other. Instead they had returned to mere verbal sparring. Mostly Holly sparring, and Jeremy trying to think of some kind of comeback. He was definitely the kid brother on the team, especially to Holly.

  Was it natural for an older sister to constantly harass a younger brother? As an only child, she didn’t know, but Holly certainly seemed to think so. Of course, she didn’t pick on Mike much less, even though they’d been sleeping together for at least half a year. And that wasn’t something Holly would do with a younger brother, so maybe it was just Holly. Perhaps she picked on everybody…except her.

  “Why don’t you ever pick on me?”

  Holly blinked at her, then widened her eyes for some reason. Oh…surprise. “Do you want me to?”

  Miranda thought about how often Jeremy ended up on the defense. “Um, no, that wouldn’t be my choice.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “But you pick on Jeremy and I would be surprised if that was his first choice.”

  “Righto, but our young padawan gets no say in the matter. You do.” Holly wrapped her arm around Jeremy’s neck, then scrubbed her knuckles across his scalp hard enough to make him squirm.

  Mike just kept dipping macaroons.

  Miranda decided she was better off focusing on her gingerbread.

  Once Holly let Jeremy go, they returned to decorating the sugar cookies.

  Miranda had provided them with piping bags of royal icing in several colors.

  Jeremy was decorating snowflakes, Christmas trees, and Santas in neatly geometric patterns. She was quickly able to identify the crystalline structures on the snowflakes, and the branching symmetry typical of a Douglas fir tree. But it took her longer to identify the angle, force, and mobility-range diagrams of Santa’s skeletal structure. She liked that, and wished she’d thought to do that in past years.

  Holly’s designs were messy enough that Miranda could barely recognize them. Her Santa cookies were all Mrs. Clauses, who appeared to be—Miranda looked away before she blushed too brightly—very undeniably naked.

  Holly reminded her a little of Tante Daniels. She had always pushed at Miranda’s limitations.

  At first Miranda had thought that Tanya Daniels was merely a family friend who just happened to live in their house, acting as babysitter during her parents’ frequent travels. After their deaths when Miranda was thirteen, she’d become Tante Daniels—German for auntie.

  The day Miranda turned eighteen, their relationship was almost destroyed by the revelation that Tante Daniels was none of those things; she’d been a professional autism therapist, hired to help Miranda become as high-functioning as possible. It must have worked, because Miranda had found her way through the shock and anger to friendship.

  And now, she had her team about her for a major holiday.

  It was the first time in decades that there would be more than a quiet Christmas dinner for two, or just one as happened on the years Tante Daniels didn’t make it to the island.

  The cookies were Mike’s idea. Let’s make cookie boxes for family and friends. Post-Christmas treats.

  However, who to send them to had become a problem.

  Holly had been disowned by her family at sixteen, and her Australian Special Operations Forces team lay dead in some “Southeast Asian shithole.”

  Mike’s one real friend had been a nun at his orphanage, who had long since passed away.

  Miranda’s two friends were Tante Daniels, and Terence, the head of the NTSB academy. He’d finally retired from field investigations completely. They’d both get boxes. That was two.

  Which only left one for Jeremy’s parents, and another for his married sister. Which made four.

  Mike had s
aid it would be nice to also make one big box for the Seattle NTSB office. She didn’t know them very well as she had her own remote office, but Miranda liked doing nice things.

  Holly, however…

  Miranda eyed Holly’s cookie decorations cautiously.

  “Okay. Okay. No more naked Mrs. Clauses.” Then she held up a pink piping bag, “How about some naked Mister Clauses? Think he’s hung like a bull reindeer?”

  Mike laughed, leaving only her and Jeremy to blush.

  Miranda was a little relieved when Holly merely put the next cookie in a pink tutu and ballet slippers.

  2

  “It’s miserable out there,” Jeremy was peering out the back door.

  “You can stay inside. I’m used to doing this on my own.”

  But Jeremy continued pulling on winter woolen layers. “You’ve always lived alone here on the island?”

  “No. My parents were here until they died. And then my therapist until I was fifteen and went to the University of Washington. I was only able to fly home on weekends but Tante Daniels was almost always with me. We even shared an apartment in Seattle.”

  “I meant since then. Since you were eighteen?”

  “I lived off the island during my two masters degrees, and then whenever there were crash investigations that took me away.”

  “But you always come home here, alone.”

  “Except for visits by Tante Daniels, yes—until this team. It has always been my sanctuary.”

  “Some sanctuary!” Jeremy shove the solid-fir wood back door open against the wind. She couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or sarcastic…or something else. There was no way to check his face against her notes because he had a scarf over most of it.

  It was one of those rare afternoons when the temperature in Washington State’s San Juan Islands actually reached down to freezing. The snow wasn’t sticking yet, but it had only just started. It would soon be shifting from cold kisses to sharp, icy poniards.

  Twenty knots of wind made it colder. Jeremy was nearly tossed aside when another gust over thirty curled around the side of the house and slapped the door. Only the door’s stout shock absorber, and his tight grip on the handle, saved him. According to the forecast, it wouldn’t turn into a gale for several more hours. Not even a very big one then; winds at forty with gusts of fifty-five. At those windspeeds she could still walk, if she had to. Though gusts of fifty knots, sixty-three miles an hour, tended to knock her down because she didn’t weight enough. Jeremy should be able to remain upright for ten knots higher.

  At gusts of thirty knots, the winds only made her stagger about a bit—the closest she’d ever felt to what she imagined being drunk felt like.

  Once the door was shut and latched behind them, she led the way to the garage. She stored her hay bales, made from mowing the grass runway, in the back. Opening one of the big bay doors, together they leveraged two rectangular bales into the Kubota tractor’s front bucket.

  As she was turning to climb aboard, Jeremy shouted and stumbled into her back, nearly knocking her into the bucket.

  “Hey!”

  Jeremy just flapped a panicked hand toward the garage door.

  Miranda looked over her shoulder, got the joke right away, and started laughing.

  Except Jeremy wasn’t, and once again she was on her own. She was fairly certain that was okay under the circumstances but wasn’t sure how to be certain, so she stopped.

  Cutting a string on the hay bale, she pulled off a fat flake, carried it out of the garage, and around to the side where the wind wouldn’t simply scatter it aside.

  The three deer in the doorway, who’d spooked Jeremy while staring longingly at the stacks of hay bales, followed her docilely outside. Jeremy brought up a distant rear.

  “Up close, they’re…big!” Jeremy whispered once the deer family had started eating the hay she’d spread out.

  “Well, this is Rudolph,” she rubbed the eight-point buck on the nose while he chewed a mouthful. “He is the biggest on the island, forty-two inches at the shoulder which is the upper end for sika deer. He’s the island’s alpha deer. This is Bambi. She’s almost three now, and this is her second fawn. I’m thinking of calling her Thumper.”

  “Why?”

  Miranda reached out to scratch the small fawn’s rump just a few inches ahead of the tail. In response, she stretched out her neck and twisted her head completely sideways, closed her eyes, and one of her legs spasmed against the ground, making a happy thumping sound.

  “Oh.”

  Jeremy reached out to pet Bambi, who startled and jumped away. Thumper raced to get behind her, and Rudolph glowered at him. Jeremy stumbled back against the side of the garage.

  “I don’t think he likes me.”

  “Bambi has always been a little skittish. Don’t worry, Rudolph rarely tries to ram people with his antlers. Besides, we have to get moving, it’s getting dark.” Indeed, between the heavy storm clouds and the late afternoon hour, they would have to move quickly.

  Once they were well away from the garage and the three deer were returned to the small pile of hay, she headed for the southernmost of the three feeders on the island.

  “I come here to Spieden Island so that I can be alone,” she returned to the earlier conversation. “People are very confusing, and this is my sanctuary.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Jeremy stood on the rear trailer bar and hung onto the roll bar close behind her. “Though I’m not particularly good at being alone. Did your family always own the island?”

  “No. You know its big game history. We’d never do that.” Though she was less certain about her parents now that she’d said it. They may have died when she was thirteen, but she’d been thirty-six before she’d found out they’d traveled so often and unpredictably because they were CIA agents.

  “Right, sorry. Craziest idea I ever heard. Turning a San Juan island into a hunting safari park.”

  Her parents had bought Spieden shortly after Miranda was born, but that was long after the park, set up on the island in the 1970s, had collapsed. Most of the larger wildlife had been removed, but she still worried about the Asian sika deer and Corsican Mouflon sheep during the big storms. They were so far from their homes in Japan and the Mediterranean. She’d considered trying to repatriate them, but then the island really would be lonely.

  The animals already knew what to expect, and the deer and sheep were milling around the dark green hay feeder together. She dropped two-thirds of a bale into the steel rack, minus one thin flake to compensate for the third of the thick flake she’d given to Rudolph. Everyone pushed in to rip out a mouthful.

  Then she saw the string between two of the feeder’s top supports.

  “Oh no!”

  “What’s wrong?” Jeremy squeaked as a Corsican ewe nudged him aside with its big curling horns; he’d been blocking her access to the hay.

  “I forgot to give Rudolph any dried apple.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She pulled out the bag of dried apple rings she’d hung on the tractor through force of habit. “I always hang them on the string for the deer. They need it for the storm. We have to go back.”

  “What about this string? Don’t these guys get any apples?”

  Miranda stared at it. They did. But doing things out of order was so hard sometimes.

  She took a deep breath.

  “Tante Daniels always said that they needed it like comfort candy before a storm. I spend a week every fall picking up all of the ground-drop from the apple trees and drying them for the deer.”

  “Well, we’ll save some for Rudolph. Let’s do this one while we’re here.”

  “Right. Okay. That’s logical.” She dumped the bag out on the seat, counted the rings, divided by three, then took four large slices from each third and set them aside.

  After they’d strung up the third for this feeder, having to fight their way through the eager deer who wanted their share of the rings, she drove
the mile and a half up to the far end of the island for another two-thirds—minus a flake of hay bale—and another third—minus four—of the apple rings.

  At the final mid-island feeder close beside the small aircraft hangar, there were fewer deer waiting but more sheep. They placed the last bale and had hung the dried apple slices, when she turned and saw Rudolph escorting his family up from the house.

  She was very relieved. Now she wouldn’t have to worry about them during the storm. Considering their relative sizes, Miranda reallocated the twelve rings, five for Rudolph, four for Bambi, and three for little Thumper. The ratio of apple slices to body mass weren’t perfect, but neither was she, so perhaps it was okay.

  She’d started the tractor engine, as Jeremy was circling wide around the animals at the feeder. Very wide, as if he was still afraid of them. On the farthest side, he tipped his head. After a moment, he looked aloft.

  Miranda killed the engine. Once it thudded to a stop, she listened as well. Up in the scudding clouds, an airplane was circling her airport. It was a private airport on a private island. So minor that it didn’t even show up on the FAA Sectional Chart.

  Only rarely did she have problems with people landing here. If they looked up this field specifically, they would see that landing was prohibited.

  Yet the plane circled once more, popping briefly out of the clouds, though it was now too dark to see the profile. And the sound…was odd. It was a jet, but she couldn’t identify it. Most jets needed more runway than she had on her island, so that could cause a major problem.

  A crash to investigate on her own island was not the kind of Christmas Eve she’d been hoping for.

  By the way Jeremy was tipping his head, he couldn’t identify it either.

  She yelped, spooking several of the deer, when the runway lights flashed on. They were on a radio-controlled frequency that only a very few people knew. And none of them flew jets.