by J. R. Ripley
“Are you sure?”
“Have I ever give you any reason to doubt it?”
“No,” my mother admitted.
“Who knows,” I said, “maybe one day I’ll have a grown daughter and she’ll let me live with her.”
“Will that include Derek?” Mom teased.
My answer was to eat a couple more onion rings, after which I answered, “Let’s get through Christmas without any more problems before we worry about our futures. Deal?”
“Deal.” Mom picked up her burger with both hands and took a solid bite. “From now on, let’s focus on the holiday spirit.”
“I’ll eat to that,” I said, attacking my burger.
5
“I don’t know what everybody is complaining about,” complained Esther. “Things change. Life goes on. Deal with it.”
The subject, once again, was Kinley’s Christmas House Village. The place was Birds & Bees. Nearly two weeks had gone by and little had changed regarding the town’s latest resident and business owner, Franklin Finch. The demonstrations against him continued unabated. Some Ruby Lakers had long memories and held even longer grudges.
Esther was seated on the hardwood floor in the middle of the aisle, pulling new merchandise from a cardboard box beside her and placing item after item on the shelf. With Christmas around the corner, we had decided to stock up on packages of holiday- and bird-themed greeting cards.
Esther’s a small, narrow-shouldered, elflike septuagenarian with a hawkish nose, sagging eyelids, and silvery hair. Gray-blue eyes hide under a pair of wispy white eyebrows. The woman has absolutely no filter when it comes to speaking her mind. A bluebird-blue Birds & Bees apron was tied around her waist and neck. A peach-colored, floor-length dress billowed out around it.
“I only wish everybody felt like you do, Esther,” moaned Kim, who was busily stacking cellophane-wrapped packs of suet on the shelf above her.
“I don’t understand why everybody is still mad at you,” I said, moving to unlock the front door, though it was five minutes until the official opening time for the day. “You weren’t responsible for the sale of the business. That was your boss’s doing. Besides, Belzer Realty only handled the sale.”
I twisted the thumb lock and turned the Closed sign to Open. “If folks around town are going to be mad at anyone, it’s Kinley’s children they should have a beef with.” I crossed back to the register and checked to be sure there was enough cash in the till to make change. “Even then, the business is theirs to do with as they choose.”
“Was theirs,” Kim corrected. She straightened, went to the storeroom for a second box of suet cakes, and said as she passed me, “Everybody blames me and Mr. Belzer for not telling them about the potential sale before it happened.”
“So they could stop it?”
Kim dropped the new box on the floor between the aisles. “Something like that.”
Esther rose and scurried to the front door as two gray-haired women entered.
“You know,” I began, rubbing my finger over my ear, “Birds and Bees has a contract for a two-gross of birdseed ornaments. Mom and I have already begun making them.”
“I know,” Kim said. “There must be hundreds of them piling up back there already.”
She was talking about the storeroom. I had set up a long folding table I’d borrowed from a neighbor, on which we crafted our holiday ornaments. After some discussion, we had decided to use snowman and gingerbread-man molds.
The ornaments were easy to make. We combined safflower seed, two kinds of millet, and sunflower seed; the seeds combined with flour, water, agar, and corn syrup were pressed into molds. We cut plastic straws to create a hole through which we inserted red or green ribbon so the ornaments could be hung on Christmas trees. It was a slow, time-consuming but straightforward process. We had been crafting them in our spare time during store hours.
Christmas House Village had ordered nearly three hundred of the ornaments, a dozen dozen of each, and we were due to deliver the full order soon. We only had a few batches of snowmen left to go.
I untied my apron and fluffed my hair. “I think I’ll go introduce myself to Mr. Finch. You and Esther can handle things here, can’t you?”
Esther was hovering over her customers. She’d given them each a cookie and a cup of coffee and was now extolling the virtues of having a beehive of their own. “Nothing like honey that comes from your own yard,” I heard her say.
The two women nodded, clearly intrigued.
“Go.” Kim waved her hand at me.
I grabbed my coat and scarf from the storeroom. “Shall I say hello for you?”
Kim pulled a face. “Are you kidding? Mr. Finch is mad at me and Mr. Belzer because of the way the town is treating him, and the town is mad at me and Mr. Belzer because of Mr. Finch.” She pulled at her hair. “It’s enough to drive me crazy.” She tilted her head. “Maybe I should go away for the holidays,” she said with a sigh.
“Go away? Where would you go?”
“I could go to Florida,” she said with a shrug. “Visit my mother.”
“And miss your first Christmas with Dan?” Dan Sutton and Kim had recently begun dating, not long after Kim had broken up with her previous boyfriend.
Kim frowned. “Some Christmas this is turning out to be.” She wrung her hands. “But things could be worse. At least I’ve got my job. I really do feel sorry for all those people that Mr. Finch is putting out of work.”
“I know you do.” I pulled on my gloves. “Who knows? Maybe Mr. Finch will have a change of heart.”
“You mean change his mind?” Kim looked dubious. “I doubt it.”
“Leave it to me,” I said bravely. “I can be very persuasive.”
* * * *
I drove uptown, past the town square that was home to the city offices and the farmer’s market, and found a parking spot in the off-street public lot down the road from Christmas House Village. The parking situation at Christmas House Village had always been difficult. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas it was near impossible because they had no parking lot of their own.
I crossed the street to where a dozen or so people stood outside Christmas House Village, most of them elderly. They didn’t look happy. A squad car was parked at the curb.
I spotted Dan Sutton bundled up inside the squad car with his leather jacket zipped up to his ears. I waved and walked over.
He rolled down the window. Steam rose from the paper cup of tea in his hand. As indicated by the imprint on the cup, the beverage had come from the Coffee and Tea House on the square. “Morning, Amy.” Dan was a stocky fellow who knew his way around a weight room. He’s Hawaiian on his father’s side, with short brown hair and big brown eyes.
“Hi, Dan.” I turned to the small crowd. “What’s going on?”
He took a sip before answering. “Nothing. Chief Kennedy asked me to sit here for an hour. Then I can go.”
“What’s he afraid of? Does he really think there could be trouble? From these people?” They all looked like kindly old ladies and gentlemen.
“No, but that new guy, Mr. Finch, has been giving the chief all kinds of grief.”
“Such as?”
“Such as complaining that these good folks here are disrupting his business and that he has every right to do with Christmas House Village whatever he has a mind to, seeing as how it belongs to him now.”
“It’s hard to argue with that.” I draped my arms atop the squad car. “It’s too bad everybody can’t sit down and try to find a way to work things out though.”
“Don’t I wish. Kim is really upset.” He cursed under his breath. “Then again, it seems like everybody in town is upset. It’s awful. Townspeople are calling the chief telling him to arrest Finch—when the man’s done nothing wrong. The chief has talked himself sick trying to explain that there’s nothing he
can do. So now they are all mad at him, too.”
“That can’t be doing much for Jerry’s mood,” I noted.
“You’ve got that right,” Dan was quick to agree. “And Mr. Belzer is mad at the chief because he claims he’s been getting all kinds of harassing calls and death threats because he was the real estate agent handling the sale.” Dan let out a sigh that filled the squad car, then took another sip of his tea.
“Death threats?”
He shrugged. “So he claims.” He set his cup between his legs. “What are you doing here?”
“Business. Over the summer, I made a deal with Kinley’s Christmas House Village to supply them with several hundred birdseed ornaments for the holidays.”
“Good for you. You really seem to be making a go of things with that store of yours.”
The computer screen attached to his dashboard beeped. Dan glanced at it then turned to me. “A school bus has a flat tire and is partially blocking the road,” he explained.
Officer Reynolds’s voice erupted over the speaker, saying that he would handle the traffic situation. Dan turned down the volume of his radio. “Good,” he said to me with a grin, “I can finish my tea.” He sipped. “Yeah, when you first set up Birds and Bees, the chief was sure you wouldn’t last till Christmas.”
“Was he now?” Jerry and I—now Chief Jerry Kennedy—have a long history of mutual dislike. Our relationship hadn’t been helped by a murdered man being found in my home prior to opening the store, or that I had been found standing over the dead man with the murder weapon.
But the past was the past, and today I had other things to deal with.
I took a deep breath and looked over the fence at the half dozen houses that comprised Christmas House Village. The entire scene looked so idyllic on the outside, if one avoided glancing at the surly, stubborn crowd on the sidewalk. “I guess I should be getting inside.”
“Good luck.” Dan rolled up the window as I walked toward the crowd.
I got some ugly looks as I edged between them and started up the sidewalk. A big banner hung from two of the gas-burning streetlamps that lined the sidewalk, lighting the path from one Victorian house to the next for the evening shoppers. The ornate, cast-iron antique Corinthian column streetlights added to the small-town charm.
The banner’s giant red letters spelled out: Finch’s Christmas House Village.
“That’s not going to win our Mr. Finch any new friends,” I said under my breath as I passed beneath the banner.
A magnificent Fraser fir, taller than a small skyscraper and fatter than ten Santa Clauses, occupied most of the small circle of grass about ten steps from the entrance to the village. The Fraser fir was North Carolina’s most popularly grown Christmas tree. It grows best in the higher elevations. On more than one occasion, my father had driven my mom and me up to the Carolina mountains where we got one fresh and carried it home tied to the roof of our car.
The Christmas House Village fir was said to be nearly as old as the enclave itself. The tree with its beautiful blue-green needles rose nearly sixty feet overhead, casting a shadow over me as I passed. Legend had it that Owen Kinley himself had planted the tree when he’d opened the original Christmas House store.
Each year over Thanksgiving weekend, the tree gets decorated with big, bright, red and green ornaments. At night, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, it is illuminated with the light of a thousand bulbs. Carolers, a mix of adults and children, greet customers as they come into the village each evening.
The sidewalk split at the circle, going around the village on each side, then connected up again on the other side. Shaker-style wooden benches flanked the cobblestone walk. I went to the left.
I noticed a uniformed security guard leaning against one of the porch columns of the nearest house on the right, his eyes fixed on the crowd. Was he expecting trouble?
I stopped and waved to him. “Can you tell me where I might find Mr. Finch?”
He was a slim Japanese American, around fifty years old. He turned and pointed. “He’s in his office, I expect. Do you know how to get there, miss?”
This was not the man I had seen with Mr. Finch the other morning. The other guard had been younger, huskier, more dangerous looking than the mild-mannered man before me.
“Yes, I remember.” The office was in the last house on the left, up on the second floor. I had met there with Christmas House Village’s manager, Eve Dunnellon, in her office when we’d inked our deal over the past summer. She was a sweet woman in her midforties, and I looked forward to seeing her again.
Above the office had been Tyrone Kinley’s living quarters. I suspected it would be Franklin Finch’s living quarters now.
He’d probably feel safer living there than anyplace else in town. At least until the townspeople calmed down. As I walked up the sidewalk, I noticed there were many shoppers moving in and out of the Christmas houses despite the small demonstration going on outside.
Along the way, a heavily bundled man in a dark blue parka and red knit beanie came walking toward me with his head down. A wiry black moustache clung to the underside of his nose like some exotic caterpillar trying to keep warm. His head bobbed up and down like a pigeon’s with each step he took. It was Kim’s boss, Ellery Belzer.
“Good morning, Mr. Belzer.” I stopped in the center of the sidewalk.
He looked up and it was a moment before recognition crossed his face. “Hello, Amy. How are you?” Tufts of brown hair mixed with gray sprouted from the edges of his cap.
“Fine. You?”
Truth be told, the poor man didn’t look so good. Mr. Belzer’s face was drawn and there were puffy, deep brown circles under his dark blue eyes. “I’ve been better.”
Ellery Belzer sounded like a defeated man.
“Were you meeting with Mr. Finch?” I asked.
“Yes. We had some details to discuss.”
“He sure has a lot of ideas for Christmas House Village, doesn’t he?”
Mr. Belzer smiled sourly. “If by ideas you mean changes, then that’s exactly what he has.” The real estate agent shook his head. “I had no idea what a hornet’s nest of trouble the sale of Christmas House Village was going to be.”
“Still,” I said, “you must have made quite a commission.”
Mr. Belzer’s brow shot up. “Believe me, Amy, no commission is worth all this. Though, to tell you the truth . . .” He paused and looked over his shoulder toward the house containing Christmas House Village’s office.
“What?” I asked curiously.
“Talking to Mr. Finch . . .” Maddeningly, he stopped once again.
“Yes? What is it?”
He stepped closer. “Now this is just between you and me, you understand?”
I nodded readily. “Of course.”
“Well”—he looked over his shoulder once more, then looked at me—“talking to Finch, I get the idea that he’s rather unhappy that he’s bought Christmas House Village.”
I tilted my head. “You mean, like buyer’s remorse?”
“Big-time.” Belzer shrugged. “At least, that was the impression I got. In fact, the man seemed depressed.” He leaned in even farther and I felt his warm breath on my cheek. “The man has a history of depression, you know. That’s part of the reason he left New York. Forced out of his own business. His wife divorced him.” Mr. Belzer shook his head. “All in one year, mind you.”
“That is rough.”
“Mr. Finch wanted to make a new start. But now . . .”
Mr. Belzer had an annoying habit of letting his voice trail off. Kim might be used to it, but this particular trait of his personality was driving me crazy.
“He’s not thinking of selling already, is he?”
Mr. Belzer merely shrugged as he stepped back and thrust his hands deep into his coat. “I’m afraid that would be a c
onfidential matter.” Nonetheless, he winked at me. “Good morning, Ms. Simms.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Belzer.” I resumed my walk, quickening my pace for warmth—it was cold standing in one place too long outdoors this time of year.
I climbed the festively decorated porch of Elf House, which was painted green with white gingerbread trim. Green garlands with red ribbons wound in and out of the porch railings. Each of the six houses was a unique color on the outside and contained an exclusive assortment of Christmas-related gifts and decorations on the inside.
The architectural layout of the houses themselves had remained untouched, giving the stores a very homey feeling as one wandered through each room. The kitchens remained as they would have been when these houses were occupied by families going about their daily lives. The kitchen counters, open cabinets, and even the refrigerators and stovetops in each house had been decorated with Christmas merchandise.
Even the bathrooms held Christmas-themed bath towels and shower curtains and more. In one house, as I remembered, Santa Claus sat soaking in the tub, hidden under a blanket of fake, foamy, snowflake-shaped bubbles.
From front to back, the houses of Christmas House Village were named Santa’s House, Reindeer House, and Elf House on the left; Frosty’s House, Sugarplum House, and Nutcracker House were on the right side. Cobblestone paths connected houses on the same side of the walk to each other.
Elf House’s theme included an abundance of toys in the rooms, from Christmas trains whirring forever and ever around artfully decorated artificial Christmas trees, to giant, foam-filled candy canes. Mechanized elves stayed busily working and whistling while they did so.
A woman in a green dress and green elf hat with white trim greeted me. “Good morning,” she said with a cheery smile. “Happy holidays.”
“Thank you.” The living room smelled like it had been dipped overnight in pine oil and cinnamon-stick incense. Between the cacophony and the overpowering scent, one day in this house and I’d be batty.
“Are you looking for something special?” the middle-aged woman asked.
