by Judy Baer
“They are hoping to find the grandmother—her father’s mother. Social Services say she used to live in the Twin Cities. Greta’s mother suggested that if they could find her, the little girl could stay with the grandmother until she and her husband got their feet back on the ground. Apparently after Greta’s father died, Greta’s mom went off the deep end for a while and cut off ties with everyone—including her husband’s family. She’s found her way back, but after she remarried they both lost their jobs. She tried to find Greta’s grandmother in Minneapolis but without any luck.”
“They completely lost track of her?”
“The woman moved to somewhere around here, according to old neighbors. That’s why the family came to Blue Earth. They thought they could get help if they found her former mother-in-law.”
Merry thought of Hildy next door—no, it couldn’t be; that would simply be too much of a coincidence. “What is this mystery woman’s name?” she ventured anyway.
“Bernice, I think.”
That counted Hildy out, Merry mused. Besides, there were tons of Olsons in Minnesota. It would be like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.
* * * * *
After school Merry saw many cars lined up in front of the shop. Since Abby had opened again today, she probably needed a break.
When she entered the shop, the scents of evergreen and cinnamon assaulted her nostrils. Some of the ladies were shopping, their arms full of stuffed toys or woven throws, and a few were seated in the living room having tea and dainty cookies. Merry had even decorated each and every sugar lump with a bit of red and green to amp up the spirit of the holiday.
Abby was at the till ringing up sales and looked frazzled.
“Welcome! Merry Christmas!” Merry recognized several of the ladies from past years.
“Could you make some of these for me?” One of the women pointed toward the sugar lumps. “They’d be darling on my table.” The others cooed in agreement.
“Ah . . . sure. How many?” She really didn’t need any more fussing, but special orders were her best moneymakers. She took the orders and headed for the till.
Abby caught Merry’s sleeve as she was ringing up the order. “Can I sit down for a couple minutes? My feet are killing me!”
“Absolutely. Has it been busy?”
“They were standing at the front door waiting to get in when I arrived.” Abby grinned. “Of course, everybody loves Christmas.”
Not quite, Merry thought. She was harboring Ebenezer Scrooge right here, right under her own roof.
Ebenezer . . . er . . . Jack arrived for dinner at seven. He looked tired, Merry noted, and worried. Something weighed heavily on him.
She served roasted chicken with mounds of vegetables, creamy white mashed potatoes, and hot rolls. Merry waited until he’d made his way through the first plate and was on to seconds before she asked, “Bad day?”
The weariness in his eyes made them look somber and intense.
She felt a pang of sympathy for him, Scrooge or not.
“For one thing, I’ve discovered that my great-grandfather was not the businessman we thought he was. In fact, he was careless and a terrible record keeper. I feel like I’m trying to unravel a skein of tangled yarn.”
“So it will take awhile, then?”
“Much longer than I’d planned. Fortunately, this is our slow time of year at my plant. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas we usually see business drop off.”
“What do you make?”
“Medical devices. Pacemakers, for example. I have a good staff, which means I can stay here until things are sorted out.”
“Things like titles and deeds and who owns what?”
“Exactly. Every single piece of land in town and the rural area has to be sorted through. Houses, cropland, pastures, you name it. I have two first cousins, both women who have small children. Although I inherited this from my father, I want to make sure my cousins and their children get what they need too.”
“What do you plan to do with the land—and Frost?” She spooned more mashed potatoes onto her plate and reached for the gravy.
“Sell it all, probably. There’s nothing for me here.”
“Your family founded this town. The entire town is named after your ancestors, and you don’t care in the least?”
“I’ve been dogged by my name all my life, Merry. I’ve kept it because someone I loved always called me Jack, but jokes about Jack Frost, references to freezing leaves off the trees, stupid movies that make fun of Jack Frost the buffoon . . . It’s all getting old. People enjoy ribbing a real, live Jack Frost. I have to admit I’ll be glad to be rid of the town with my name on it.”
“Sentimental soul,” Merry murmured under her breath. Then she looked up and saw his eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Apology accepted,” he said.
“By the way,” Jack said, gracefully changing the subject, “who is Greta? I noticed you prayed for her during grace.”
“Greta is a little girl in my class. She and her family are in financial trouble and currently homeless. Greta comes to school in worn-out clothing. She’s also a very cheerful, friendly child who doesn’t seem to have emotional problems as a result. They are trying to find her grandmother who is supposed to live in this area.”
Jack sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. He was silent for a long time before saying, “We so easily get caught up in our own issues that we forget we could have it so much worse.” He surprised her by adding, “Is there anything I can do?”
“Unless you can conjure up a grandmother out of thin air or a free house, I don’t think so.”
Jack didn’t say any more, but he looked thoughtful.
Chapter Five
• • • • • • • • • • • •
On her way home from school, Merry stopped at the bank to deposit the previous day’s checks.
Penny Barlow was at the teller’s window. When she saw Merry approach, she waved her over. Penny was what Merry called a professional gossip. Though she was a relatively new resident of Frost, by working where she did, Penny could keep her fingers on the pulses of several small communities in a rural radius of thirty or forty miles. If something happened anywhere in Penny’s realm, Merry knew she’d hear about it on her next visit to the bank. Sometimes downloading all her information took Penny a long time. That’s why Merry chose to use the drive-up window whenever she could.
“So you have a B-and-B guest at your house.” Penny’s nose twitched delightedly. “A tall, dark, and handsome stranger too.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I suppose you could say that.” The conversation made Merry uncomfortable.
“I think he’ll be there for a while,” Penny whispered. “Good luck, because I don’t think he’s happy about it.”
Merry thought back to Jack’s reference to the state of his family affairs. “Should you be telling me this?”
Penny waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, it’s not about bank business. My friend at the Register of Deeds office in Blue Earth said—”
“Don’t tell me. She’s not supposed to be talking about Mr. Frost’s business either.” It was the one thing about small-town life that Merry had never quite grown accustomed to. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Sometimes it seemed that others knew her business before she herself did. In Minneapolis people sometimes didn’t know their own neighbors. Here, only a hundred miles away, it was a completely different story. Still, she didn’t regret opening her Christmas store in a town so aptly named. It was as if it were meant to be. She’d been hired for her teaching job the same week she’d decided to make the move.
“And that’s another thing! Isn’t it crazy? Jack Frost! In Frost. Now, right before Christmas!” Penny’s brow furrowed. “He’s gorgeous, of course, but kind of grumpy according to my friend. He doesn’t seem to like his relatives very much. Or Christmas either. I thought a guy with a name like that would be c
razy about the season. He made some disparaging remark about Frost turning into a Christmas carnival. He’s like the Grinch!”
Merry managed to excuse herself before Penny could reveal more unwelcome gossip and escaped into the street.
A cloud of gloom descended upon her as she drove the nine and a half miles toward Frost. Jack and little Greta Olson were two complications she hadn’t planned on.
Greta was such a sweet, happy child despite her family’s current circumstances. Joy in the face of discouragement—that was Greta. And Jack . . . he was the picture of discouragement about what she would have thought of as a blessing. He didn’t seem to want what had fallen into his lap—the quaint little town she loved. Both people, for very different reasons, pulled at her heartstrings.
When she pulled into her driveway at one o’clock, she noticed Hildy Olson next door struggling to put up a Christmas wreath on her front door. Hildy was a tall woman with short, iron-gray hair and a determined expression. She’d been a few pounds overweight when Merry first met her, but those pounds had fallen off over the past few months, and now her jacket fell loose around her.
Hildy never asked for help. Ever. With steely resolve she tackled every project herself. Sighing, Merry walked across the yard to where Hildy was struggling with the wreath.
“Don’t say a word,” Merry warned her cheerfully. “Let me put that thing up.”
“I don’t need help,” Hildy muttered. “If I could just get the thingamabob in the gizmo . . .”
Merry took it out of Hildy’s hands, and with experience born of much practice, she hung and fastened the wreath, fluffed out the bow, and turned on the battery-operated twinkle lights woven into the greens. “There.”
“I could have gotten it . . . eventually,” Hildy admitted ruefully.
“But you did the right thing letting me, a self-proclaimed Christmas decorating expert, do it in a couple minutes.” Merry put her hand on Hildy’s arm. “Now you can come to my house and have a cup of tea instead of wasting your time out here. One day I’ll come over and help you string the lights on your porch.”
“I’m not doing it this year. This wreath is it. Now I’m done with Christmas.”
Shades of Jack Frost!
“Not you too!”
Hildy looked at her. “What?”
“Oh, never mind. Just come over.” Merry tugged encouragingly on the older woman’s sleeve. “I want to hear what turned you into Ebenezer Scrooge.”
Hildy snorted. “That’s a long story I won’t get into, but I will have some of your peppermint tea.”
“Good. Come with me.” This, at least, was a start.
Merry put on the teakettle and dished out a plate of her buttery spritz cookies while the water was heating. Then she sat down across from her neighbor at the kitchen table. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing I want to get into, Merry,” the older woman said gently. “It brings up sad memories. I just don’t feel like Christmas this year.”
“It’s the birth of Christ.”
“Well, there is that. I’ll go to church, of course, but none of this whiz-bang fancy stuff. Christ is all I need for Christmas.”
“He’s all any of us need,” Merry agreed, “but I like to think of this as His birthday party. I serve birthday cake every day in December, and when people ask me why, I can tell them about Him. It’s a gentle way to remind people what the season is really about.”
“Good for you. Just count me out this year.”
There was nothing more to get out of Hildy, Merry knew. She was a woman who kept her own counsel and would only tell Merry what was troubling her when she was good and ready. Merry had no doubt, however, that it would come out eventually.
* * * * *
The windows rattled and the house shook when Jack plowed through the front door and slammed it behind him. Bells on a string jingled and the Clap On, Clap Off light went dark. Several shoppers who were sniffing candles in order to decide which fragrance to buy looked up, startled.
Merry put her finger to her lips to indicate that he should be more circumspect, but she was met with a black glare that could have sliced metal.
“Come into the kitchen,” she said. “You look like an angry old bear. I’ve got beef stew cooking. Maybe a full stomach will help.”
Jack looked chagrined and followed her.
With swift hands, she dished up a bowl of stew from the Crock-Pot, thrust a spoon in the bowl, and broke off a hunk of French bread. “Eat. I’ll go ring up these last sales and be back. Don’t break anything while I’m gone.”
When she returned a few minutes later, Jack was serving himself a second bowl of stew and had taken the butter out of the refrigerator for his bread. He’d calmed down, but the look on his face bordered on bleak.
Quietly, she filled a bowl for herself and cut two huge slices of fresh chocolate cake and put them on the table. She sat down, bowed her head for a silent prayer, and began to eat.
“I’m sorry about how I came in,” Jack said contritely. His remarkable eyes looked genuinely repentant.
Merry hadn’t noticed before how long and dark his eyelashes were. Nor had she noticed that his profile was nearly flawless.
“It’s just that I’ve never had such an exasperating day in my life. I had no right to storm in here like that. I forgot you might have customers.”
Since you’d never buy any of the things I sell, you assume no one will? she thought but left unspoken.
“Frankly,” he said, half to himself, “I don’t know how my ancestors succeeded at anything with their lack of organization. My great-grandfather allowed buddies of his to farm his land when he was alive. It was all in a letter he wrote to someone at the courthouse. Although he never sold the land and no money ever changed hands, that left the next generations to assume the property belonged to them. Since none of the land has ever changed hands and the taxes have been paid annually out of an interest-bearing account set up years ago, now I’m in the uncomfortable position of telling families that they don’t own the land they live on and never have.
“No one ever questioned why the taxes were paid directly from that account. I think every party assumed it was their great-grandfather who’d set it up.”
“And if it’s not broken, don’t fix it?”
“Right. But the result is that I have no idea how much property was ‘loaned’ to people and forgotten about.”
“Oh dear,” Merry blurted. “How awful for you! You mean you’ll have to kick people out of their homes?”
Jack looked at her miserably.
“Can’t you just let them stay?” Even as she said it she knew it was a ridiculous idea. Jack’s family owned the property. He had every right to his own inheritance.
“I’m afraid I’ll be the most despised man in Frost before I’m done, but it can’t be any other way. These people have to buy me out, move, or start farming for me and paying rent. I can’t just turn the land over to them . . . there are my cousins to consider.”
They sat silently, both looking down at the table and the cooling stew. Merry wasn’t hungry anymore. This was an awful situation for Jack and for the yet unknowing people who had assumed for years his land was theirs.
“So this might take awhile to untangle?” she finally ventured. “And you’ll need a place to stay?”
He looked at her and gave a humorless smile—the only kind he seemed to have. “Two or three weeks, I’m afraid.”
“Won’t you have to go back to your company?”
“I’ve got good people, and I check in every day. Unless something unforeseen happens, it will be business as usual there. I just never expected anything like this or planned on spending so long in Frost. Especially now.”
He didn’t elaborate further, but Merry had a good idea what he’d meant—especially now during the holiday season, with this little place on Christmas steroids. It was going to be a very long few weeks.
She poured the coffee and suggested, “Mayb
e a distraction would be good. I own lots of Christmas movies. Want to watch one?”
“What are my choices?” His eyes narrowed suspiciously.
She ticked them off on her fingers. “The Christmas Carol, Polar Express, Home Alone, Miracle on 34th Street . . .” She saw his expression and added, “. . . movies that you would probably find annoying.”
“I’m sorry I don’t hold your view of Christmas superficiality. There are reasons, Merry, but I don’t want to go into that.” His features showed unspoken pain. “Let’s just say it’s simply too frivolous for my taste.”
Merry felt a rush of frustration churn through her. “Jack, I would never do anything that sullied this holiday! But it is a birthday, the birthday of the King of kings! No one leaves my business without knowing that’s what I believe. It’s an opportunity to share with others what Christmas is truly about. It’s my witness.”
His expression softened. “I realize that.”
“What do you believe about Christmas, Jack?”
He stared over her shoulder and out the window, where the winter darkness was total. A bright moon backlit the leafless trees that bordered her yard.
“It’s a long story, Merry. We should save it for another time.”
There was firmness in his voice that brooked no argument. There wouldn’t be another time, Merry realized. He didn’t want to talk about it, so he wouldn’t talk about it.
Pasting her best hostess smile on her face, she said, “Of course. It’s really none of my business anyway. More coffee?”
Chapter Six
• • • • • • • • • • • •
Jack watched her make her way around the kitchen in her fluffy slippers. The woman’s entire wardrobe seemed to consist of things that were soft, fuzzy, fluffy, red, or green. She was an unlikely looking businesswoman who was perfect for her job. He’d never run into anyone quite like her . . . fortunately. This much Christmas spirit was going to bring him to his knees.
