The Girl and the Black Christmas

by A J Rivers

  Chapter Sixteen

  The parking lot is nearly full when I pull in, giving me a hint that the grocery store is going to be just as chaotic as I thought it might. Cooking Thanksgiving dinner isn’t a completely new thing for me, but I don’t think I’ve quite reached the level of Jedi Gravy Master like some of the women around here.

  Up until a couple of years ago, I spent every Thanksgiving with Bellamy. Sometimes we would go to her parents’ house, but more often than not, we just stayed home. She would come to my house and we would cook and spend the day together watching the parade, and then binge cooking shows until after we ate. Then came digging out at least one Christmas decoration and watching a holiday movie to kick off the season.

  Since Sam and I have been together, Thanksgiving has taken on more meaning. And I put more effort into an actual feast. Bellamy and I usually settled for the fastest, mostly nostalgic food. Over the last few years, I’ve been gradually moving more toward the Thanksgiving meal of yore and attempting more dishes from scratch.

  This year, I’m taking the plunge. Everything possible will be from scratch and served in actual matching tableware. The only exception is the sacred cranberry sauce. Sam would never recover if I tried to give him anything but a tube of jellied red goo, complete with the ridges from the can.

  That’s the real reason I’m here more than a week ahead of time. I want the chance to be prepared and start cooking ahead of time, so I’m not totally overwhelmed on Thanksgiving itself. Maybe I’ll take a little inspiration from Xavier and lay out all the ingredients on the table so I can talk to them. Maybe if I’m one with the green beans this whole thing will go smoothly.

  Exhaustive list pulled up on my phone and the store’s weekly circular clutched in one hand, I grab a cart and head inside. My grandmother taught me the fine art of grocery shopping according to section of the store when I was much younger. Fortunately, the grocery store in Sherwood hasn’t undergone a whole lot of changes and modernization since then.

  I make my way to the main grocery aisles in the center of the store to grab non-perishables first. I’m halfway down the second aisle when my entire plan goes all to hell. Past the end of the shelves, I see the massive sign advertising the store’s blowout turkey sale.

  Now, I have never considered myself one of those women who goes all in with shopping. Coupon is not a verb in my vocabulary. I would not devote an entire day to doing a tour of all the stores in the area to get all the best prices. Three AM Black Friday finds me asleep with a belly full of midnight second-dinner turkey, usually on the couch with a movie playing in the background, rather than with a miner’s helmet glowing on my head trudging through the parking lot of the big-box store.

  But, I do enjoy a good bargain. I scan through ads if I think about it before going to the grocery store. And I won’t turn down a good marathon at the mall with Bellamy. But I remain sensible about the whole thing. The singular incident over sweet potatoes aside, I like to keep things simple and civil when it comes to acquiring groceries.

  For me, it takes on much the same sentiment as the large-scale Easter egg hunts my parents took me to when I was a little girl. All the other children started screaming and running around frantically trying to gather as many eggs as they possibly could. I might just scoop up an egg or two if I happened upon it, but it seemed to me the other kids were so desperate for those multicolored plastic jewels that I didn’t want to deny them any. I figured if they wanted them that much, they should have them.

  But something changes in me when I see that turkey sign. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s knowing I’ll have a house full of people for the holiday for the first time in a really long time. Maybe it’s knowing I’m staring down the barrel at being a wife and suddenly becoming very aware of all the responsibilities that holds.

  Whatever it is, I am overtaken by the need for a turkey at twenty-nine cents a pound.

  It’s like a seasonal roller derby over there, but instead of skates, everybody has shopping carts. Everybody is clamoring over the deep chest coolers filled with different sizes of birds. With absolutely no intention of doing the math to ensure I get an appropriate size for the number of servings I need, I head straight for the biggest ones I see.

  Any self-control and cool my training through the Bureau has given me goes straight out the window as I jockey for position and eventually snag my turkey. Popping out the other side of the crush of shoppers finds me at the back of the store. Only a few feet away is a hallway that leads to the restrooms, employee break room, and door to the stockroom.

  Still feeling a bit light-headed and with maybe even a slight buzz from the adrenaline, I move toward the hallway so I can recalibrate and check my list. But I am only a couple of steps in when the feeling fades. Any fun I was having disappears.

  Right in front of me is the employee bulletin board. Rather than being in the break room, it’s right there on the wall, available for anybody who comes down this way to see. Which means anyone visiting the restrooms or stopping for a sip from the water fountain will see him.

  Gabriel.

  A huge picture of him in his work uniform is pinned right to the middle of the bulletin board. Black edging surrounds the board and a sign posted beneath it memorializes his loss. Notecards, pieces of notebook paper, stationery, and even flipped-over receipts fill the rest of the board, all of them filled with notes and sentiments from his coworkers and customers of the store.

  Heat burns up the back of my neck and my stomach hardens. My hands grip the handle of my cart so tightly my knuckles ache.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been standing in the hallway staring at the board when the door to the break room opens and the manager walks out.

  “Gretchen,” I say.

  Her jaw stiffens. “Emma. I didn’t think you shopped here anymore.”

  “I know, it’s been a while. Sam has been coming for me. I’ve been working so much.”

  “I’m well aware of your work,” she says, cutting me short and biting off the last word as if she’s catching me in a lie. “But that’s not what I meant. I didn’t think you would have the guts to show your face around here again.”

  “Why not?” I ask, disturbed by her reaction to me.

  “Because of him,” she says, gesturing sharply toward the picture of Gabriel. “His life was just getting started. He was so young and had so much potential. Then you came along, and now he’s gone.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. What did you do to convince him to chase you to Harlan?”

  The initial surprise at her reaction turns back to anger, and I take another step toward the manager.

  “I don’t know what you think you know, but he didn’t chase me anywhere. I didn’t even know he was there,” I say. “It shocked the hell out of me when I looked into that car and saw it was him. Especially after watching him run a woman down just a few seconds before.”

  “Don’t you dare talk about him like that,” she says. “He was sad and vulnerable after his grandmother’s death, and you knew that. You led that poor boy on, and he died a horrible death because of it.”

  I open my mouth to correct her but stop myself. I’m not supposed to go into the details of his death while the case is still being reviewed.

  “How do you think he died?” I ask.

  “You want me to tell you the gory details? Was it not enough to actually see him smash his car like that?” she asks. “Is it fun for you to know you manipulated him like that?”

  “I don’t know where you get off blaming me for anything, but you need to educate yourself before you open your mouth again. He killed a woman. A woman I was at that park to talk to. Right in front of me. Right in front of a lot of other people. If we’re going to talk about people who shouldn’t be showing their faces around, maybe you should pay more attention to who you’re glorifying in front of the public,” I say.

  Yanking my cart out of the h
allway, I stalk back into the store and do my best to follow the rest of my list. I’m so angry I can’t even think straight, and by the time I decide I’m done and leave, I barely even know what I got off the shelves.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Hey, babe,” Sam says when I get home and carry my first couple of bags through the front door toward the kitchen. “Are there more groceries in the car?”

  “Yes,” I tell him.

  He heads out to get more while I start unloading the first bags.

  “Um, honey,” he says when he walks into the room a few moments later. I look up and he’s staring down into one of the bags in his arm. “Not that I would want to question your Thanksgiving cooking plans or anything, but could you warn me before I eat whatever has the Scotch Bonnet salsa in it?”

  “The what?” I ask.

  He sets the bag down on the table and reaches in to pull out a jar. I take it out of his hand and look at it. Rolling my eyes, I set it down.

  “I don’t remember picking this up. You would not believe what happened while I was shopping.”

  “Come on, let’s go get everything else and you can tell me all about it,” Sam says.

  It takes two more trips to get all the bags out of the car, but they’re finally strewn all around the kitchen. It’s weird seeing the full aftermath of my anger blindness.

  “Everything was going really well. I was even starting to get into the whole spirit of it all and picked out the turkey. Those women are crazy, so I needed a little bit of a break and I stepped off to the side. Which put me right face to face with a bulletin board honoring their poor fallen comrade,” I say.

  “Gabriel?” Sam asks.

  “That would be the one,” I sigh. “There’s this whole bulletin board lamenting his death and sending up messages and prayers to his dearly departed soul. I couldn’t even believe what I was seeing. Then Gretchen walked out of the break room and acted as if I was doing a voodoo ritual right in front of their sacred altar.”

  “Gretchen?” he asks. “The manager? She’s been perfectly pleasant to me every time I’ve seen her since.”

  I snatch up a canister of raisins I have no recollection of choosing and stuff it into the pantry.

  “That’s probably because she pities you,” I say. “Not only did she say she couldn’t believe I would show my face in the store, but she essentially accused me of being some sort of twisted seductress who led sweet innocent Gabriel astray and caused his death. She asked why he followed me to Harlan and suggested we were having an illicit liaison when he died. But she’s completely convinced he died in the crash.”

  “So, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Sam says. “The police aren’t releasing all the details about his death because it’s still technically under investigation. We don’t know who put him in that car or gave him the cyanide pill that killed him. Not releasing that information could help to pinpoint who it was if I slip up during an interview.”

  I scoff as I take the three loaves of day-old bakery bread I got from the discard rack and put them aside so I can cut them up and dry them for dressing.

  “In order to do an interview, they would actually have to find the members of The Order. Which brings us right back to not knowing what the hell is going on. The thing is, I’m just as confused as everybody else about why Gabriel was part of this at all. Why was he in Harlan? Obviously, he’s the one who broke into my house looking for the key, but what would he want with it? How would he even know I had it? At that point, I hadn’t seen Gabriel in weeks. After his grandmother died, he left the store and got compassionate leave so he could bring her back home. He was still gone by the time I went to Harlan to investigate Lakyn’s death.”

  “There’s no way he would have known about it,” Sam says. “You didn’t even find out about that key until you found Lydia. Someone had to tell him about it.”

  “Who? Who in Sherwood could possibly have known that I got a key out of evidence from a years-old case? And even if someone did find out and told him about it, why would anybody care? Nobody around here knew Greg. I still don’t know what that key goes to, or why he insisted I have it,” I say.

  “But somebody does,” Sam says. “There’s obviously someone who knows exactly what that key is for and why you have it. And they want to get their hands on it. Babe?”

  “What?” I ask.

  “Exactly how many people are coming to this thing?” he asks.

  I turn away from the refrigerator where I just put the huge containers of heavy cream I plan to whip up for banana pudding next week. Sam is holding up two ten pound bags of russet potatoes and another sits at his feet.

  “Well,” I say with a deep sigh. “We’ll have plenty left over for Hanukkah. And by the way, we’re celebrating Hanukkah this year.”

  I go over to the table to go through the remaining groceries and start folding up the empty bags.

  “Do you know anything about Gabriel that you didn’t think about? Anything about his family, where he comes from, where he went to college, anything?” Sam asks. “A reason he might be in Harlan?”

  “He was the cashier at the grocery store I go to when I’m not too busy to grocery shop,” I shrug. “We didn’t exactly create a deep bonded relationship. He was a sweet kid, but we didn’t know each other well. All I know about him is that he came here to take care of his grandmother when she was sick. He never said it, but it came across that he was the only one who was capable, or maybe the only one at all. He never mentioned a college. He didn’t even seem old enough to have graduated if he did go. He never mentioned Harlan. When he talked about coming to take care of her, it sounded as if he’d come from pretty far away.”

  “And you don’t know where his grandmother’s home was? Where he was taking her body?” Sam asks.

  I shake my head as I add another bag to the pile. “Nobody specified. And he didn’t have a heavy accent or anything that might help me pinpoint it. But I wouldn’t think that escorting his grandmother’s body to a town less than two hours away would justify the dramatic declaration of taking her home, or weeks of compassionate leave. He had to have brought her further than that.”

  “Maybe you can find out,” he says.

  “I would need his employment records to do that, and something tells me Gretchen isn’t looking forward to seeing me again any time soon. She’s definitely not just going to cooperate and hand over records because I ask her to. And the last thing I need right now is to get Creagan any more in my hair than he already is. The Order case has him crawling up walls, and I’m the one who gets to pick up all the work that isn’t getting done by the other members of the team.”

  “Crawling up the walls anxious and upset, or excited?” Sam asks.

  “You know, I think this is one of those situations when those mean the same thing,” I muse. “It’s pissing him off that he hasn’t figured it out and been the big hero solving this freaking spider web of murders, but it’s also always a thrill for him to be the face of something high profile.”

  “You should be the face of it,” Sam says. “And because you’re the one who actually uncovered it and solved some of the murders, not just because your face is so much prettier.”

  I smile. “Awww. That was sweet. But I think my days of playing poster girl for the FBI are over. Being out in the open hasn’t exactly worked out well for me. Maybe twenty or thirty years from now when I’m a little less recognizable, they can throw me up onto a billboard or something.”

  “Twenty or thirty years from now?” he asks. “Are you seriously thinking you’ll still be an agent then?”

  It’s the kind of conversation I never wanted to have with him. Moments like this are the reason I broke up with him all those years ago. My mind briefly flickers again to the very visible lack of a ring on my hand.

  “Does that matter right now?” I ask.

  Sam shakes his head and smiles. “No. As long as I’m there with you.”

  He comes over and gives m
e a kiss. It settles the trembling in my stomach a little, but that moment really threw me off. As he walks back over to his own little mountain of groceries he’s been organizing, I look over the last of the items on the kitchen table. It’s the small handful of canned foods I’m integrating into my menu for Thanksgiving, including the peas with mushrooms and pearl onions Dean apparently can’t live without.

  “Shit,” I mutter.

  “What?” Sam asks. “What’s wrong? Was that a realization moment about Gabriel and the key?”

  “No,” I say, grabbing up the last of the bags and folding it aggressively. “That’s a realization moment that I forgot the damn cranberry sauce.”

  “Oh.” He looks around. “Well, at least you have six pears and a persimmon.”

  My eyes swing over to him. “I have a what?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Seventeen years ago …

  “Are you really sure this is what you want to do?” her mother asked.

  There was a slant in her voice that said she wasn’t really asking. There might have been a question mark at the end of the words, but that wasn’t actually what she was trying to say. What she was saying was that she was having second thoughts about her daughter’s choice and wanted her to reconsider.

  But she couldn’t say that herself. If she did, she wouldn’t be the supportive mother she was trying to be. It would almost sound as if she was penalizing Julia for her success. That wasn’t something she ever wanted to do.

  She had big dreams for her little girl. From the time she was born, Julia was something different. She was special. Not just because she was an only daughter, or that she had always been beautiful. There was more in her. Something you don’t come across very often.

  Julia knew that about herself. She wasn’t conceited about it, and she didn’t look down at other people, even when she was soaring high above them. She kept herself focused and always accomplished what she set out to do.