Christmas Spirit

by Amy Garvey

  The place wasn’t big enough so that being heard was a problem, although every inch was packed with shelves, each of them crammed with books. Every few feet, the ones that didn’t fit were piled on the floor.

  “You noticed,” Lillian said amiably. “How do you like your coffee? And do you want French roast, Blue Mountain, or house blend?”

  “Blue Mountain,” Sam said approvingly, and ran his fingers over a fresh stack of the new Chuck Palahniuk novel. “And I’ll fix it if you don’t mind.”

  “Did you eat breakfast? I have scones and pumpkin muffins. Mind if I mom you?”

  “Not really. Thanks. I’ll take a muffin,” Sam said, and found his way back to the counter, stepping over Gloria twice and setting his laptop bag down in an ancient leather easy chair the color of faded tobacco. “This is a great place.”

  “It works for me,” Lillian said easily, sliding a large paper cup across the counter at him and taking his empty, tossing it neatly at the trash can. She took a muffin from the pastry case with a pair of tongs and set it on a plate. “I’ve had it since ... wow, let me think, 1979.”

  “Had it?” Sam asked, spooning sugar into his coffee and adding a healthy splash of cream. “Did you buy it?”

  “I did.” Lillian came around the counter with her own cup and dropped into the chair beside Sam’s. The store was empty except for the two of them and Gloria, worrying a stray napkin across the floor with her nose. “I’d been working at the private school over in Falmouth, in the library, and when I heard the bookstore was for sale, I jumped.”

  “That’s a big jump,” Sam said, settling back in the chair. He took a deep, appreciative sniff of his coffee and smiled. “Librarian to small business owner.”

  “Well, I wasn’t married, and I was tired of snotty kids who didn’t know the difference between Jane Eyre and Dick and Jane, not that anyone’s learned to read from those two little robots for a thousand years. Anyway, I’ve always liked books better than people.” She sipped her coffee and looked up when the bell over the door jingled. “Morning, Tony.”

  A tall guy with a shaved head and three safety pins in each ear ambled up to the counter, black leather jacket crackling comfortably as he went. “Morning.” He stopped and looked at Sam dubiously, mouth twisting into a frown. “Coffee?”

  “Help yourself,” Lillian said with a fond smile. “I’m too comfortable to get up.”

  Tony shrugged and walked behind the counter, as if self-service wasn’t a surprise.

  “A regular?” Sam said quietly, turning to Lillian.

  She nodded. “One of a few. It’s a little rough in the off season, but they help.” She put her cup down on the table between their chairs, and propped her chin in one hand. “So what brings you to the Vineyard, Sam Landry?”

  He heard the unspoken question: What are you doing with Charlie Prescott?

  Lillian didn’t strike him as the maternal type necessarily, but he didn’t blame her. He wasn’t from the island, he’d shown up at Charlie’s with a bottle of wine, if not flowers, and if Lillian had happened to be watching out her window last night, she’d seen him practically staggering out of Charlie’s place.

  “I’m with ...” He trailed off, hating to say the name of the magazine and stared at a point across the room instead of looking at Lillian. “Scoop. I’m writing a piece on haunted houses of the New England coast.”

  Lillian barely swallowed a snort of laughter, but he gave her credit for not laughing out loud. “That’s ... interesting,” she said carefully, and picked up her cup to hide her smile behind its lip. “But what do haunted houses have to do with Charlie?”

  He had opened his mouth to make a smart remark to reply to her that’s ... interesting, and closed it just as quickly. “Uh, what?”

  She blinked at him, and he felt a little bit like a slow five-year-old facing a mean teacher. “What do haunted houses have to do with Charlie?” she repeated, carefully enunciating, and he scowled at her.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?” she said with a huff of exasperation, setting her cup down again. Understanding dawned in those sharp gray eyes all at once. “Are you telling me Charlie thinks that house is haunted?”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, tightening his fingers around his cup. Charlie had seemed so adamant—as she apparently had every right to—and he had never imagined she wouldn’t have mentioned her suspicions to anyone. Especially not Lillian, who seemed to be Charlie’s closest new friend here on the island.

  “Sam.” Lillian’s tone wasn’t the kind anyone could ignore, and he swallowed back a protest.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell you,” he said finally, and turned to her. Her eyebrows were lifted in disbelief—or was that anticipation?

  Lillian dismissed him with a wave of her hand, ignoring Tony as he swore behind the counter when something crashed to the floor. “Don’t be an idiot. If you’re interviewing her about this, and you include her story in your article, the whole world’s going to read about it when it’s in print. Spill the beans, buddy.”

  “Hey, I’m not actually five, you know,” Sam said irritably. He shook his head when Lillian made a face, and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “She thinks the house is haunted, yes. And that the ghost or whatever it is has been glugging up her eggnog and whiskey. And apparently its presence is playing hell with the thermostat.” He hadn’t planned the next words out of his mouth, but once they hung there in the air between them, there was no taking them back. “And I think I believe her.”

  At eleven o’clock that morning Charlie groaned and pushed away from her desk, the chair’s wheels squealing against the bare wood. She’d been up and at her desk since eight-thirty, despite only three hours and twenty-seven minutes of sleep, and in two-and-a-half hours she’d written only—she looked back at the computer screen—fourteen words.

  Fourteen. Fourteen nonsensical, poorly strung together words that didn’t even amount to a decent paragraph. In fact—she squinted at the screen again—one of the sentences was just a fragment.

  It didn’t make any sense. She’d been writing this book off and on, sometimes only in her head, for seven years. She knew the twins so well by now they might have been her own siblings. For years she’d been plotting the story and imagining settings, descriptions, the dangers the young hero and heroine would face when they explored the magical world she’d built for them. She knew this book inside and out, from the very beginning through every adventure to the end. Years of writing bits and pieces of it at the end of the day and on weekends and vacations had only gotten her so far, and she had been dreaming for a chance to sit down and finish the thing in one go.

  But now she was stuck. And it was because all morning a whole new story had been crowding its way into her head, insinuating itself over every plot point and twist of the Darkbriar book.

  She got up, twisting her hair into a loose knot on the back of her head and shoving a pencil through it to anchor it in place. Sometimes she could think more clearly when the loose length of it was up off her neck, but it didn’t seem to be working this morning. She’d already twisted it up and taken it down a dozen times as she paced the length of the small room, running her fingers over her bookcases, stopping to change the angle of the framed photos on her desk, plumping the pillows in the easy chair in the corner.

  It was procrastination, pure and simple, but she couldn’t help it. Not today, anyway. Usually the simple action of moving around, getting the blood flowing, helped her figure out a problematic scene or the best way to describe a setting, but this morning she couldn’t even concentrate on her characters.

  Because two completely new ones were shouting at her, waving frantically like shipwreck survivors, demanding that she write about them instead. They were adults, for one thing, nothing like her adorably gawky protagonists, and what was more, they were adults who had no interest in magic or the enchanted countryside or anything aside from each other.

&nb
sp; In fact, they never got out of their fictional bedroom. The scene between them echoed in her head, as if it was being written word by word in her imagination then and there.

  “You are shamefully bold.” With his back pressed against the wall, Daniel growled rough in his throat when Temperance slid her pale hands over his hips and pressed a kiss to his collarbone. Even through the worn white muslin of his shirt, her lips were warm, firm, a sinful promise.

  “I believe you approve,” she murmured. Her skirt whispered against the floor as she moved, pressing the slender length of her body against him, stretching up on her toes to wind her arms around his neck. “You’re a shy one, Daniel. If I don’t ask for what I want, I’m not at all certain to receive it.”

  “No question of that anymore, love.” He slid a hand into her hair, knocking the pins loose, shaking the dark, silky length of it out over her shoulders. She smiled at him, satisfied as a cat, and turned her face up to him for a true kiss.

  The first was always the sweetest, he thought as he licked into her mouth. It wasn’t the way she tasted, though he loved that, oh he did, yes indeed. It was her eagerness, the way she opened to him so easily, going boneless against him, letting him take what he wanted. She always tasted faintly of tea, but of need, too. He’d come to believe the bittersweet flavor there on her tongue was the soul of urgency.

  It always surprised him when she remembered herself, pressing harder against him, and began to make her own demands. Temperance had been sadly named, he would swear that on the Bible itself, even if his mother would have boxed his ears for the blasphemy. His Tempe knew nothing of moderation, not when they were alone together this way, nothing but hands and mouths and the hot pulse of desire thrumming in their blood.

  “We have all afternoon,” Temperance whispered now, her breath hot against his throat and her fingers tight on his hips, ten distinct points of pressure. “I sent Agnes into town on a dozen fool’s errands, and my father will be tied up for hours with his solicitor. The house is ours.”

  He pulled her closer, tighter, pressing the hard length of his erection into her belly. She sighed in response, as if nothing mattered but the two of them here like this, aching for each other until there was nothing for it but to be naked and slick in the tangled sheets of her bed.

  She sighed when he turned her around and fumbled with the buttons marching up the back of her bodice in neat order. His hands trembled, always did—this moment, right here, when she was pliant, offering herself to him, always undid him. That she trusted him with her body, that she wanted him, his hands on her, his tongue, his mouth, him, was always a revelation in this moment, when he was stripping away her dress. She never hesitated, never played coy, not even the first time, when he had braced for a slap after every rough, demanding kiss he’d stolen in the shed down behind the house.

  When the dress slid away from her shoulders, she stepped out of the puddle of sheer white lawn and let him untie her lacy corset cover and drawers. They fluttered to the carpet, white on blue, and she curled her hands around the bed’s foot rail, bending forward. Her bare bottom was creamy, smooth, and he let himself brush against it as he reached for her corset. It took careful fingers to unfasten the row of tiny hooks, and to stop himself from kissing every inch of skin he exposed. When he had tossed the corset into a chair and she was naked, she turned back to him, pale and soft everywhere, except for her hair, tumbling in a dark, glossy spill over her shoulders and brushing the white curves of her breasts.

  “Danny,” she whispered, as if it were the only word she knew, and opened her arms to him, bare and perfect against the busy background of the room’s wallpaper, the grand canopy that arched over her bed like a crown. He let her undress him, until he was as naked as she was, achingly hard, his erection proud and flushed as it strained toward her, and then there was nothing but the heat, flickering higher with each touch, each kiss, until it blazed bright enough to consume them.

  Hoo hah. Maybe she should just turn the thermostat back up to 72 and stop trying to be green. Her body and her ecological conscience were clearly at war.

  She blushed just thinking about those lovers, who’d pushed their way into her imagination sometime last night. The things she’d imagined them doing were, to put it mildly, definitely not rated for general audiences.

  Grabbing up her coffee mug, she headed downstairs, scowling. It was Sam’s fault, obviously. The man had scrambled her brain so thoroughly he’d flipped some internal switch in her imagination from “children’s book” to “hot romance.”

  She walked into the kitchen and opened a canister on the counter to spoon up fresh coffee for a new pot. Between the lack of sleep and the love scenes playing in her head all morning, she was starting to feel a little strung out. She either needed much more caffeine or about two days’ worth of sleep.

  Or to finish what you started with Sam last night, right there on the kitchen table, a voice in her head whispered, low and seductive. She was so startled at the clarity of the image she dropped the used filter on the floor, the sodden grounds landing with a disgusting wet plop on the polished wood.

  She closed her eyes in frustration for a moment, and realized she could practically feel his big, strong hands on her, right here, right now. The slow, sensuous sweep of his tongue in her mouth, the hungry groan he breathed into her ear when he pulled her onto his lap.

  Opening her eyes, she backed into the counter, flushed and breathing heavily. This was crazy. Okay, she thought he was gorgeous, she’d thought that the moment he walked through her door the first time yesterday morning, but she’d been attracted to men before, plenty of times. She’d never felt this, though. This urgent, inescapable desire to kiss him, touch him, taste him, everywhere.

  Something had happened last night, something much more complicated than a couple glasses of wine and two people who didn’t want to admit they were lonely, not in so many words. Maybe they had taken that what-say-we-chase-away-the-holiday-blues thing a little too far.

  And it had started in that upstairs room, she thought, glancing at the ceiling as she knelt down to attack the mess on the floor with a paper towel. The soggy filter ripped, spilling more of the damp grounds across the wood when she tried to pick it up, and she groaned again.

  The weird thing wasn’t that she had heard the noises and felt the heat before without anything so intense happening. Charlie got up and went to the pantry for the whisk broom and the dust pan. The weird thing was that she had never experienced anything like it in all the years she had come here before moving in.

  Her father had grown up here, after all, and they’d come every summer when she was a kid. She’d loved packing her suitcase at home in Boston, carefully choosing which shorts and bathing suits to bring, laying out her sandals and flip-flops, whatever books she’d taken out of the library and either Emily, her well-loved, sadly shabby doll and the wardrobe her mother added to every Christmas, or her best colored pencils and a new drawing pad, depending on her age.

  Most of her time had been spent on the beach, of course, running up and down the hot sand in her bare feet, splashing in the waves that lapped at the shore, digging for hermit crabs and building elaborate tunneled holes for the water to fill, since she’d never been any good at sandcastles. They always spent a week at the house, and sometimes she and her mother had stayed longer while her father went back to Boston, leaving them to putter around with Aunt May, making iced tea on lazy afternoons, watching the old TV in the living room in the evenings with bowls of popcorn or popsicles, depending on the heat.

  They’d come to the house for Thanksgiving some years, too, and once for Christmas, when Aunt May wasn’t up to traveling. And in all those years, Charlie had never once heard a ghostly whisper or felt anything other than the humid, salty heat of a summer afternoon on the island, or the drafty chill of a winter morning in a rambling old house with ancient windows.

  She brushed the grounds and the torn filter into the dust pan and stood up to carry the whole m
ess to the garbage can, thinking back. She’d slept in the room that was now her office, but her parents had slept in the spare room. Of course, they never would have mentioned something as disturbing as feeling the presence of a ghost to a child, but once she was older?

  Well, she knew what she would have said if she’d never seen or heard anything herself. She would have raised her eyebrows and wondered if they were getting prematurely senile.

  Which wasn’t fair at all, but at least it was honest. She had an active imagination—always had, according to both her mother and the yellowed notebooks packed away that contained pages of her first attempts at stories, more like extended daydreams—but it had taken feeling the ghost, hearing that papery whisper, to believe that such a thing as a spirit could actually exist.

  It made her wonder about Aunt May, Aunt Margaret, the generations who had lived in this house before them. What had happened here, and to whom? Cyrus Prescott had built this crazy old place back in the last century, with its Victorian excess and gingerbread moldings and endless nooks and crannies, and it had been in the family ever since. Whatever had occurred here that might have caused a ghost to stick around, it had happened to someone in the Prescott family, or at least someone closely associated with them, which was a little disturbing, to say the least.

  She filled a new filter with coffee, and set up the machine to brew, pondering everything she knew about the Prescotts, which suddenly seemed like not very much at all. She was so deep in thought as she put her few clean breakfast dishes away and waited for the fresh pot of coffee that the noise she heard a moment later caught her off guard.

  It was just the wind, she thought, glancing over her shoulder at the empty room. Buttery sunshine slanted across the floor and the back window was a grid of bright squares, the morning sky captured in the glass. There was nothing off here, nothing scary or weird or unnatural at all.

  And then there was. She froze, clutching a clean mug, as a sound rippled through the room, a crackling like crumpled paper, brittle with age. And just below it, the single, echoing word, barely audible: Mine.