Christmas in Cold Creek

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “And if not?” she asked, her voice small and her tone no longer so truculent.

  He squeezed her gnarled fingers. “Then we will just have to figure out a way to get you around town to the grocery store and your doctor’s appointments, okay? Maybe you can let Violet have a turn driving.”

  “Hmph. We’ll see.”

  The mayor came into the diner before he could answer and greeted Agnes with his customary charm. Trace wasn’t sure how he did it, but in about thirty seconds of conversation, Mayor Montgomery had Agnes blushing and tittering like a teenage girl.

  He looked up and happened to catch Becca’s gaze. She was staring at him with a strange expression in her eyes, something glittery and bright. When they made eye contact, she wrenched her gaze away and headed for their table.

  “Mrs. Sheffield, I seated Violet at your favorite table. Mayor, what can I get you to drink?”

  The next forty-five minutes were miserable. He forced himself not to stare at Becca every time she came to their table to take their orders or deliver their food. He tried to avoid making eye contact but despite his best efforts, he was aware of her every movement in his peripheral vision Finally they finished the meeting and wrapped up their lunch at about the same time.

  “Thanks for meeting me over lunch,” Mayor Montgomery said, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “It was the only time I had free today.”

  “My treat this time,” Trace answered. “You paid last time.”

  “But I invited you.”

  They wrangled over the bill for a moment but Trace emerged victorious and the mayor excused himself for another meeting. Trace was waiting for the bill when the chimes on the door jangled. From his position facing the door, Trace saw the new customer was a smartly dressed woman in her mid- to late-forties but trying hard to look a couple decades younger. He didn’t think he recognized her but there was something vaguely familiar about the shape of her jawline, the angle of her neck.

  He was trying to place how he might know her when he suddenly heard a clatter. He turned at the sound and saw Becca staring at the door, broken plates and spilled food at her feet and shock in her eyes.

  “Look what you did!” Agnes Sheffield exclaimed.

  Becca looked as if somebody had just run her over with a delivery truck. Her features were pale, her eyes hollow and stunned. She stood frozen for a long moment, then seemed to collect herself enough to kneel down and begin cleaning up her mess.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll have Lou replace your food. Oh, did I spill on you?”

  She started to wipe off a splatter of sauce from Agnes’s sweater, all the while darting little panicky glances at the woman who had come in. Who was it? And why did her presence leave Becca so flustered?

  Not his business, he reminded himself, unless the woman was here to stir up trouble in his town. He did feel compelled to help Becca clean up the mess, however.

  “Need a hand?” He didn’t wait for an answer, simply crouched beside her and started picking up shards of broken plate.

  “I just … I need to tell Lou.”

  Donna approached them with a wet cloth and the mop. “I saw, darlin’. No worries. I’ve already had him throw another couple of chicken breasts on the grill.

  No charge for lunch today, you two,” she said to the Sheffield sisters. “And for your trouble, you can have a piece of pie on the house.”

  “What about one of your sweet rolls instead?” Agnes gave her a crafty look.

  “Sure. I can probably find one of those for you,” Donna answered.

  “A fresh one. It has to be fresh.”

  “Of course. A fresh sweet roll coming up, Mrs. Sheffield.”

  “They ought to fire that girl if she can’t handle a tray,” he heard Agnes grumble to her sister, and he saw that Becca’s leached-out color had been replaced by a pale pink as she cleaned up the mess.

  “I can do this,” she muttered to him.

  “And I can help,” he said simply. “Is everything all right?”

  She met his gaze and he watched as she seemed to become calm and composed right in front of his eyes. He found her skill at locking away all her emotions quite remarkable, though he could still see a shadow in her eyes and he didn’t miss the way she completely avoided looking at the newcomer, whom Donna was trying to seat at the counter.

  “Everything’s great,” Becca muttered. “Couldn’t be better. I don’t know why I’m so clumsy this afternoon. I guess it’s just already been a long day. I’ve been on my feet since six-thirty.”

  He might almost believe her if he hadn’t seen that moment of panic in her eyes and her determined efforts not to pay any attention to the woman who had come in.

  When they finished cleaning up the mess, she forced a smile. “Thank you. I forgot you were still waiting for your bill. Just give me a moment and we’ll get you on your way.”

  She rose in one fluid motion and headed to the kitchen, taking the soiled tray with her. Donna had seated the other woman at a table across the diner from him. He was tempted to go over and introduce himself but thought that might not be wise, under the circumstances.

  When Becca returned, she handed him his and the mayor’s bill with another distracted smile that didn’t come close to reaching her eyes, then she headed toward the woman.

  He expected her to hand the woman a menu. Instead, Becca slid into the booth across from her. He had the right cash to cover the bill and could have just left it on the table, but he was too curious to see how this drama would play out. As he watched, Becca and the other woman spent a few moments of intense conversation, but with the general hubbub of the diner, he couldn’t hear the conversation. Becca looked to him angry and frustrated but the other woman didn’t appear to care much.

  Who was she? Why did she seem so familiar to him, like a book he was almost certain he’d picked up once at the library? And why was Becca so upset to see her?

  After perhaps a five minutes’ conversation, he saw Becca’s hands flutter to her jeans pocket. She seemed indecisive, her features tight with frustration, but finally she pulled out a keychain and extracted a single key, which she slid across the table to the other woman almost defiantly.

  The woman gave a tiny, triumphant sort of self-satisfied smile that immediately set Trace’s teeth on edge as she palmed the key. She slid out of the booth, kissed Becca’s cheek and left the diner without ordering anything. Becca sat there for a moment, her features hollow and raw. He very much wanted to go to her, to ask her to tell him what was so terribly wrong, to promise her he would send the woman packing from his town if her presence bothered Becca so much.

  Not that he could do such a thing, but he would have liked the chance to try.

  As he watched, she smoothed her hands down her apron and stood almost defiantly, lifting her chin and returning to work.

  She stopped at two other tables to check on customers before she worked her way to his. “Did you need dessert or anything?”

  “I’m good. Thank you.” Despite years of training and practical experience questioning suspects and witnesses, he couldn’t come up with a clever way to ask her about what had just happened, so he ended up just blurting it out. “Who was your friend?”

  “My … friend?”

  “The woman you just gave your house key to.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Am I under police surveillance now?”

  He refused to let her bait him. “I tend to observe things around me. It’s part of being a police officer. She obviously upset you.”

  “She didn’t upset me. I was just … surprised to see her, that’s all. That was my dear mother, here to spend the holidays with Gabi and me. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Her cool tone of voice left him in no doubt the development was anything but wonderful to Becca. Her mother. That was why the woman seemed familiar, because he saw traces of her in the woman he was coming to lo— His mind jerked away from the word like a skittish horse at a rattlesnake pit. He saw pale
traces of her in Becca.

  “That will be nice for Gabi, to have her grandmother around.”

  “Won’t it?” she said mechanically, then turned to leave. Though he knew it was crazy, he reached out and touched her arm. She trembled a little but at least she didn’t jerk her hand away.

  “I know I’ve said this before but I just want to repeat that you can come to me for any reason. No strings, Becca.”

  Their eyes met and he thought he saw a glimmer of yearning there before she became composed once more.

  “Why would I need to do that?” she asked with that cool smile he was beginning to hate, then she headed away to attend to another customer.

  Chapter Eleven

  Monica. Here. In Pine Gulch.

  Becca couldn’t think straight, barely aware of what she was doing for the rest of her shift as she took orders, bused tables, poured drinks.

  How had her mother found them? Becca hadn’t discovered the inheritance from her grandfather until after Monica had left, and she had been very careful to cover their tracks. She had been vague and closemouthed with her former coworkers and neighbors about where they were going.

  She had feared this very thing. Monica couldn’t have anything good in mind to show up out of the blue like this. What could she possibly want? Would she dare try running one of her schemes here in Pine Gulch? Years of experience had taught her she couldn’t put anything past her mother. If there was any sort of illicit money to be made in Pine Gulch, Monica would find a way to get in on the action.

  She couldn’t let her. Becca fought down her panic attack. If Monica started bilking the people of Pine Gulch out of their hard-earned savings, she and Gabi would have nowhere else to go.

  She so wished she’d been able to send her mother packing when she showed up at the diner—which begged another question. Of all the places she might have shown up in town, how did she know Becca worked at the diner in town?

  Monica had shown up, though, and told her she needed a place to stay. Becca had wanted nothing more than to tell her mother to go to hell. The words had hovered there on her tongue. She had almost said them but then Monica had given her an arch look.

  “I saw a police car out there. Who does it belong to?” She had scanned the diner and her gaze had landed unerringly on Trace. Monica could spot a cop with a spooky kind of skill. “That handsome devil with the dark hair and those delicious green eyes, right? He’s not in uniform. What is he? A detective?”

  She hadn’t wanted to answer but she knew Monica would probe until she did. “The police chief,” she had muttered.

  “Ahhh. Perfect. What would that gorgeous police chief do if I walked over and told him you kidnapped my daughter? I can make it a very convincing story. You know that.”

  Even as cold fear gripped her stomach, she had let her mother goad her into losing her temper. In retrospect, that had been ridiculous but she seemed to have very little control when it came to Monica.

  “I didn’t kidnap anyone!” she had snapped. “You left her with me and took off without a word. What was I supposed to do?”

  “I never expected you to leave Arizona with her. I don’t believe I gave any such permission.”

  Though the rational part of her knew perfectly well her mother wouldn’t want to bring unnecessary attention to herself by reporting a completely nonexistent crime when she had plenty of real crimes that could be pinned on her, Becca had reacted.

  “What do you want?” she had hissed.

  Monica shrugged. “Nothing so terrible, darling, I promise. Just a place to stay for a few days. I want to spend Christmas with my daughters. Family, that’s what the holidays are all about, right?”

  The very idea nauseated her, but at the time she had been desperate to get Monica out of the diner. In the end, she had caved and given her mother the key to her grandfather’s house.

  She would be there now. Picking through her things, assessing their humble Christmas decorations. Probably looking for any weakness in Becca that she could use to her advantage somehow.

  Now what was she supposed to do?

  She had never been so relieved when her shift ended and Donna told her to go home. She hung up her apron and grabbed her coat off the hook, then drove home as quickly as she dared through the snowy streets of Pine Gulch. In her mind, she rehearsed a dozen ways she would send Monica packing.

  She found her mother in the kitchen wearing the frilly pink apron Becca had won at a bridal shower for a coworker in Arizona, what seemed another lifetime ago. She was stirring something in a bowl while Christmas music played on the kitchen radio.

  Becca narrowed her gaze. “What are you doing?”

  “I thought I would make some peanut butter cookies. They were always your favorite and my Gabi loves them, too.”

  She had absolutely no recollection of her mother ever making cookies. “How did you find us?” she demanded.

  As she might have expected, Monica ignored the question. “How can you stand all that snow? Oh, I’ll admit it’s lovely for a day or two but I can’t imagine putting up with it for months at a time.”

  Fitting, she supposed. Her mother didn’t like to be inconvenienced by anything. Weather, finances, pesky little things like, oh, morals, ethics and laws.

  “Tell me the truth, Monica. What are you doing here? I’m not buying the whole ‘holiday time with the family’ line. What else is going on?”

  “Why do I have to have an ulterior motive, darling? I missed my little Gabi. And you, of course.” She smiled as she added vanilla to the dough.

  “Gabi’s fine. She’s happy.” She doesn’t need you coming in and screwing everything up.

  “Is she?”

  Just those two words and suddenly everything became clear. She stared at her mother, those nerves clutching her stomach again. “She found a way to call you, didn’t she?”

  Monica opened her mouth as if to deny it and then must have decided she could work the truth to her advantage somehow. “Apparently, she borrowed the cell phone of a little friend from school.”

  Of course. The day Becca had found out about her claiming she had a heart condition, she’d had an iPod and phone and other electronic gadgetry. Gabi must have known Becca would have figured it out if she’d somehow sneaked her cell phone to use it, so she’d figured out a work-around.

  “Gabi knows that no matter where I am or what I might be doing, I’ve got one cell number she can always use to reach me in an emergency. She called me last week and told me where she was and of course I dropped everything to rush right here.”

  Her sister was nine years old, she reminded herself. She didn’t know any other life than the twisted one Monica had provided for those years. Still, Becca was aware of a sharp ache in her chest. “You left her with me, Monica. You used me and embroiled me in mortgage fraud and cleared out my savings and then you took off. I had no choice but to clean things up the best way I could. I might have been disbarred.”

  “You weren’t, were you?”

  “By a miracle. Because I agreed to liquidate every asset I had to cover what you stole!”

  Monica’s smile was conciliatory. “I’ll make it up to you. You know I’m good for it, right?”

  Oh, of course she would make it up. Like all the other money she had taken from her over the years in one form or another. Becca wasn’t going to hold her breath over that particular promise.

  “I don’t want you here. Neither does Gabi. She’s finally got a comfortable, stable home. Someone willing to think about her first.”

  Monica sniffed. “You call this place comfortable? It’s horrible!”

  Though she had thought the very same thing herself throughout the past month, decrying the layers of dark, unattractive wallpaper, the peeling linoleum, Becca suddenly wanted to defend her grandfather’s house. This house had provided a haven for them when they hadn’t had anywhere else to go and she didn’t want to hear Monica malign it.

  “There’s nothing wrong with this hou
se that a little tender loving can’t take care of. We’re working on it, little by little. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, Gabi is fine here. You showing up like this out of the blue will only confuse her.”

  “She called me,” Monica pointed out once more.

  “That doesn’t matter. Gabi—” Is here, she realized, her words cut off by the sound of the front door slamming. School was on an early schedule because Christmas vacation started the next day, she remembered.

  “Whose car is out there?” Gabi called from the entry. Becca didn’t have a chance to answer before her sister wandered into the kitchen. She stood in the doorway, her jaw sagging at the sight of their mother in an apron, spooning batter onto a cookie sheet.

  “Mom?”

  “Darling!” Monica took a moment to wipe her hands on a cloth, then rushed to Gabi and enfolded her in a huge hug. Gabi didn’t return the hug. She merely stood still, arms at her side.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked stiffly.

  “You called me, honey. You told me where you were. I thought that meant you wanted me here.”

  Gabi shot a quick look at Becca, her eyes stricken. “I only wanted to make sure you were okay and let you know we were fine here. I didn’t want you to worry. I never thought you would come out here.”

  “It’s Christmas. Where else would I be than with my beautiful girls?”

  Becca barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes. She hadn’t spent Christmas with her mother in a dozen years. Even when she lived with Monica, her mother had never made any sort of fuss about Christmas.

  “We’re going to have a wonderful time, darling. We can sing carols and, look, I’m making cookies, and I can be here when you open your presents from Santa. Aren’t you so happy that we can be together?”

  “Um. Sure,” Gabi said. She had that closed-up expression again that always worried Becca.

  The rest of the afternoon and evening passed in a stilted awkwardness, with Monica showing over-the-top enthusiasm for everything except the house. She loved the snowflakes Gabi had made. She adored their humble paper-chain garland. She couldn’t get enough of the stockings Becca and Gabi had made out of felt pieces clumsily stitched together.