Return to Christmas

by Anne Stuart

  But as usual, she was shit out of luck. “Are you all right, my dear? I’ve been watching you, and you seem quite upset.”

  “Please leave me alone,” She would have to get up and walk away, and if the man came after her, she’d dial 911, except that she left her cell phone at home, and damn, her wonky laptop at the café. She jumped to her feet. Sarah would presumably keep it safe, but she ought to get back there...

  “Are you certain, Mollie?”

  She jerked back to look at him, a chill running down her back. “Do I know you?” she demanded in a harsh voice. “You don’t look familiar. How do you know my name? You’re not some crazy stalker, are you?” This was all she needed. If he was a serial killer, she hoped he’d get it over with. She wasn’t even sure she’d call for help.

  “We’ve met,” he said, unruffled. “I saw you outside of Macy’s long ago, and then again on Christmas Eve. You were a bit distracted at the time.”

  Without thinking, her mind immediately flew to the last Christmas Eve, the party, the freezing run down Park Avenue, and Johnny, wrapping his arms around her. And then she realized she was being absurd—he must have been at one of the unremarkable round of Christmas parties she attended every holiday season, most of them work-related.

  “Sorry, I don’t remember.” He didn’t look like a stalker. He looked sweet, actually, and yes, familiar.

  “As I said, you were upset.”

  Mollie froze. She didn’t get upset, not in this lifetime. She had her emotions and reactions under tight control. And he hadn’t called her Madison, he’d called her Mollie.

  “You know, I told Johnny that sometimes you just have to believe. That’s all you have to do, Mollie. Believe. Let go of everything you’ve been told, everything that makes sense, let go and believe.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. “What...what do you mean?” she stammered. She glanced around her. No one seemed to notice anything odd about her conversation with the old man.

  “You know where to find him, Mollie. Just believe.”

  She half-expected him to disappear, to fade away from the bench like the Cheshire Cat, but he remained where he was, looking at her out of kindly eyes. She took a careful step toward him and poked him. He was real.

  “You’re a crazy old man,” she breathed.

  He shrugged. “Sometimes it’s the best way to be.” For a moment, she just continued to stare at him. “Well?” he said finally.

  She took off. She used to run, and even a week or so spent curled up in bed and weeping didn’t put a dent in her stamina—her temporary exhaustion had fled. She ran, down the broad sidewalks that lined Central Park, past the Plaza Hotel that was no longer a hotel. Twenty-six blocks, and she wasn’t going to risk a taxi. She was simply going to run to him, and he’d be there.

  Not all magic was real—Mollie got a stitch in her side around Forty-Ninth Street and had to walk for a bit, and her ballet flats weren’t ideal running shoes, but then she sped up again. People watched as she ran by, carefully avoiding the tourists getting in her way, and it made no sense that she could simply disappear, but she didn’t stop to question.

  Believe, the old man had said and she could do that. Faith had always been in short supply in her cynical life, but now it was endless, flowing through her as she moved down Broadway, past the greengrocers and the restaurants, through the garment district without even stopping to look. She could see Macy’s, five blocks away, modern and spiffy, the ancient art deco look mixed with bright awnings, the familiar logo that had been nowhere around in the 1940s, the windows with Ralph Lauren and iPads and...

  She didn’t care, she didn’t stop. It was early afternoon, and the store would be crowded with tourists and shoppers, and she didn’t hesitate, passing door after door until she found her door, the huge revolving bronze one on the corner. Some metrosexual businessman was coming through, followed by a woman in dreadlocks, and she didn’t stop. “Believe, Mollie,” she said out loud, and dove into the revolving doors.

  He caught her. He was there, waiting, and he pulled her into his arms, holding her so tight she thought her bones might break, and she didn’t care. It was Johnny, she was here, she was home, and she was here to stay.

  Epilogue

  2021

  * * *

  “So, what do you think really happened to the former owner?” Sam looked around the shoebox-sized apartment curiously.

  The ruthlessly thin, perfectly coiffed real estate broker eyed her customer. “Who knows?” She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Murder, suicide, alien abduction? She just disappeared more than a year ago, and there’s been no trace of her. But you can set your mind at ease—whatever happened to her didn’t happen in this condo. There are no blood stains on the rug.”

  “Hmmph.” He moved through the empty space—the alcove that served as a de facto bedroom, and the one separate room that was a professionally appointed closet. It was tiny, absurdly expensive, and a bargain in New York real estate.

  He glanced back at the broker. “What happened to all her stuff? In some police lock-up somewhere?”

  “Some of it. Some was sold to cover expenses. When she died, her assets were frozen and have been for the last year. They were only just released, which is why you’re lucky enough to be the first to see this amazing property.”

  Hardly amazing, Sam thought cynically. The price was ridiculous, the place a shoebox, but he ran his hand along the wall, fascinated.

  “And, of course the place will be painted, the rugs cleaned before you take possession,” she continued. “They’ve got an excellent maintenance staff, though the super left a while ago. Someone left him a lot of money and he took his family upstate, and they haven’t found anyone to replace him. I’m sure there’ll be someone in place by the time you move in.”

  Sam nodded absently, wandering over to the window, looking down at the street far below. This place was perfect for the right sort of person, someone driven and soulless. But it could come to life.

  The broker, who’d been wining and dining him assiduously since he first expressed interest, amped up her charm. “So tell me, Sam.” She always made an effort to use his name, to foster a false sense of friendliness. He just wished he could remember hers. “What made you decide to relocate from Vermont? You said you got a bequest from your grandparents?”

  He turned from the view and gave her a slight smile. “I decided it was time to check a few things out, and Manhattan has always fascinated me, ever since I was a little kid and watched Miracle on 34th Street.”

  The woman laughed. “I hate to tell you, Sam, but that’s not what New York is like anymore.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “It’s fuller, richer, wilder, Sam,” she continued. “There’s nothing you can’t find in New York. You never told me what you do for a living. Whatever it is, the best opportunities are here as well.”

  “I’m an architect.” Not for soulless places like this one, though.

  The woman—Sheila was her name, he remembered, amped up her ingratiating manner. “You know, I greatly admired your grandparents, Sam. Everyone did, of course. Your grandfather’s designs influenced the entire world of furniture design, and the pieces I’ve seen at MOMA were extraordinary. And of course, your grandmother’s children’s books are beloved by all my nieces and nephews. They were an extraordinary couple—the world is a much sadder place without them.”

  “Grandfather was over one hundred years old, and Nana was ninety-eight, and they died within hours of each other. Nana didn’t even know he was gone. I think they deserved their rest.”

  “Oh, of course,” Sheila said quickly. “They were the stuff of legends.”

  He had to grin at that. He missed them terribly, and this trip was nothing short of a pilgrimage, but he knew his grandparents would have snorted at the term.

  He looked around him, at the bleak space and the avid realtor, feeling oddly unsettled. And then he straightened, towering over the woman.

&nbs
p; “I’ll take it,” said Samuel Madison Larsen, and somewhere, a lifetime ago, he heard his grandparents laugh.

  Excerpt from Falling Angel

  Prologue

  “THIS ISN’T WORKING out, Mr. MacVey.”

  Emerson Wyatt MacVey III looked up and blinked. The light was blinding up there, endless bright white light set against a clear crystal blue. It gave him a headache. “Could you be more specific?” He managed to make his voice coolly polite.

  The woman standing in front of him was an impressive figure, and he didn’t like to be impressed. She was ageless, of course, with smooth, unlined skin, pure white hair, a long, slender body and large hands. She was possessed of the most frightening eyes he’d ever seen. Large, dark, powerful, they looked right through him, seeing everything he wanted to keep hidden.

  Not that he needed to keep anything hidden, he reminded himself. He’d lived his life as he’d seen fit, and he didn’t need to make excuses to anyone.

  “How long have you been here?” the woman asked in a voice even colder than his. Augusta, that was her name. It suited her.

  Emerson shook his head. “I don’t remember. Time moves differently.”

  “Then I’ll jog your memory. You’ve been here for seventeen months, Mr. MacVey. And you’ve shown very little improvement.”

  “Seventeen months?” he echoed, shocked out of his determined cool. “It was only three months yesterday.”

  “As you’ve said, time passes a little differently up here,” Augusta said sternly. “You’ve been dead for seventeen months, Mr. MacVey. And you’re still the same arrogant, argumentative asshole you were when you arrived.”

  He tipped back in his chair, staring up at her. Augusta had a thing for alliteration, and saltier language than he ever would have expected from someone he assumed was an angel. “Yeah? Well, maybe I wasn’t ready to die. You ever consider that? Maybe thirty-two years old was a little young to have a massive heart attack. Maybe someone made a mistake, pulled me out too early.”

  “You’ve seen too many movies. We don’t make mistakes.”

  “Then why am I here?” Frustration was building, ready to spill over. “Why aren’t I floating around with the angels, playing the harp and all that crap?”

  “You are an angel, Mr. MacVey.”

  That stopped him for a moment. He glanced down at himself. Same body, thin, patrician. Same English wool three-piece suit that he died in. It had been ripped off him when the medics had labored over him, trying to bring him back. Fortunately the damage had been repaired by the time he arrived here, wherever here was. “Really? Then why don’t I have pearly wings and a halo?”

  Augusta smiled sourly, and suddenly she reminded him of his maternal grandmother, a cold-blooded old tartar who’d managed to terrorize three presidents, a prime minister and her only grandson quite effectively. “Your status is in no way assured, Mr. MacVey. There are two choices. Heaven, or the other place. We’re not certain where you fit.”

  When he’d had his heart attack it had been a huge explosion of red-hot pain. This was cold, icy cold, and even more frightening. “What do you mean by that?” His voice stumbled slightly, and he cursed himself for showing weakness. Augusta wouldn’t respect weakness, any more than his grandmother would.

  “I mean that you need to earn your place up here. On earth you were petty, grasping, cold and heartless. All you cared about was making money and amassing possessions. Where are your possessions now, Mr. MacVey?”

  “It’s a little too late to do anything about that, isn’t it?” He managed to muster a trace of defiance.

  “On the contrary. It’s not too late at all. You’re going to be given a second chance. One month, to be exact. You’re going back to earth and try to right some of the wrongs you’ve done. If you prove yourself worthy of redemption then you’ll be allowed to move on. If you fail . . .” She made a desultory gesture.

  “The other place?” Emerson supplied.

  “Exactly.” Her voice was sepulchral.

  Emerson controlled his instinctive start of panic. He didn’t want to go to hell. It was just that simple. But not simple enough that he wasn’t ready to put up an argument. “Won’t people find it a little surprising to see me running around again? I imagine they had a full-blown funeral, people weeping and all that.”

  “No one wept.”

  Again that stinging sharpness where his damaged heart should be. “Don’t be ridiculous. People always cry at funerals.”

  “No one cried at yours. But then, not very many people showed up for it, either. Only one person cried for you, Mr. MacVey. And it was one of the people whose life your selfishness destroyed.”

  He racked his brain for people he might have injured, people he might have destroyed, but he came up with a comforting blank. “I didn’t destroy anyone.”

  “Oh, you didn’t set out to do so, I grant you that. In a way, that almost makes it worse. Does the name Caroline Alexander mean anything to you?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “She was your secretary for three months.”

  He shrugged. “I went through a lot of secretaries.”

  “You certainly went through Carrie. You fired her on a whim, Mr. MacVey, on Christmas Eve, and that started a chain of events that totally devastated her life. She’s one of your projects. You have to fix what you so callously destroyed.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that? I don’t imagine she’d want me anywhere near ha.”

  “You aren’t going back as Emerson Wyatt MacVey III. Things aren’t going to be quite so easy this time around. You’ll have your work cut out for you. You have three lives to save, MacVey. And you’ll have one month to do it. You go back on Thanksgiving. And you return on Christmas Eve. We’ll decide then whether you’ve earned your right to move on.”

  “But . . .”

  “Don’t fret, Mr. MacVey,” Augusta said. “You won’t be going alone. You’ll have a little help. An observer, so to speak. Someone to keep an eye on you, make sure you’re not making things even worse. I don’t have a great deal of faith in this particular experiment. I think you’re a lost cause, but I’ve been overruled in this matter.”

  Thank heaven for small favors, Emerson thought.

  “Not a small favor at all,” Augusta replied, reading his thoughts with an ease he could never get accustomed to. “You will go back to earth and repair some of the damage you have caused, or you will be doomed to the other place. And you won’t like it, MacVey. You won’t life it at all.”

  He had no doubt of that. “What exactly am I supposed to do?”

  Augusta smiled, exposing very large, slightly blue teeth. “You will fix Carrie Alexander’s life, which, I warn you, is no small task. And you must find two other people you’ve harmed, and somehow make amends.”

  “How am I supposed to find two people I’ve harmed?” he demanded indignantly.

  “The problem, MacVey, won’t be in finding people you’ve harmed. The problem will be in finding people you haven’t hurt during your tenure on earth. Good luck,” she said sourly. “You’ll need it.”

  “But what about my observer? You said I was going to have some help,” he said, no longer bothering to disguise the panic in his voice.

  “We don’t want to make it too easy on you, MacVey,” Augusta said with saccharine sweetness. “You’ll find out who your observer is in good time. As a matter of fact, no one’s offered to take on the task. They all think you’re a lost cause.”

  Emerson sat up a little straighten He was a man who was used to challenges, would do just about anything to triumph over impossible odds. “Want to bet?”

  “We don’t gamble up here, Mr. MacVey.”

  “You just pass judgment.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Great,” be muttered under his breath, despising the old woman almost as much as he’d despised his grandmother. “So you’re going to dump me back on earth and the rest is up to me?”

  “That about sums it u
p. Oh, and you’ll be given a slight edge. Miracles, Mr. MacVey. You’ll be given the opportunity to perform three miracles. How and when you choose to use that particular gift will be up to you. But you cannot use more than one per person.”

  “Great,” he said again. “Any other rules?”

  “You’re not to tell anyone who you are. But you needn’t worry about that—you won’t be able to.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’ll find out. Are you ready?”

  “Ready? Last time I looked it was August.”

  “It’s late November. Thanksgiving, to be exact. Time to go.”

  “But . . .”

  “No more questions, Mr. MacVey. You’re on your own.”

  The light grew sharper, clearer, brighter still, until it felt as if his head were about to explode. The cold stinging in his chest was like a stiletto-sharp knife, a column of ice that speared through his body until it began to dissolve into a thousand tiny crystals. And then he was gone, cast out, drifting through the black night like the flakes of snow surrounding him, no two ever the same. And all was black.

  Chapter 1

  HE SQUINTED AT the swirling white light in front of him, trying to orient himself. He was cold, his feet, his hands, even the tip of his nose was cold. It took him a moment to realize the bright, fuzzy light in front of him was the headlights of the vehicle he was driving. It was snowing, heavily, and the light barely penetrated the thick darkness.

  “Damn,” he said out loud, he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe he wanted to hear the sound of his own voice, to prove he was alive.

  Except that he wasn’t alive. He’d been dead from a massive heart attack for almost two years now. And it wasn’t the sound of his own voice coming from his throat.

  He dropped his gaze, from the storm beyond his windshield, to his hands clutching the steering wheel. They weren’t his hands. His hands were on the small side, neat, perfectly manicured, slightly soft. The hands in front of him were big hands, with long, slender fingers, short nails, calluses and scars marring the skin. They were the hands of a working man. Not the hands of a man who’d never done anything more strenuous than use the carefully padded equipment at his upscale health club.