Sinister Lang Syne: A Short Holiday Novel (Wicks Hollow)

by Colleen Gleason

  Ben finished hanging up his coat, and then because he didn’t know what to do next, and it was a structured, soothing task, he started stacking wood in the fireplace.

  The blaze was roaring happily by the time Callie came out, her face damp and shining and little red—probably from all the scrubbing. He remembered how difficult it had been to get that red stuff off his face and hands sixteen years ago. To his surprise, she was still wearing her hat.

  “Wow,” she said. “A real fire—not one of those gas ones.”

  “Yeah. I could have put in a gas insert, but I decided I didn’t mind the extra work of cleaning out the ashes and chopping and hauling in the wood. It’s good exercise, you know?”

  “So you chop all your own wood?” She lifted one brow and eyed him thoughtfully. “I bet that is good exercise. A really good workout for the biceps too, huh?”

  Ben nearly swallowed his tongue. Was she flirting with him?

  Of course not.

  She was getting married in two weeks.

  “Um, I hung up your coat—did you want to put your hat with it?”

  “Oh, no, that’s all right.” She reached up to touch the pom-pom hanging down the back of it, but didn’t remove the hat.

  He shrugged, but didn’t press. “So, what would you like to drink? And do you want something to eat? It’s about dinner time. For me at least.”

  “A glass of wine would be nice. Whatever you have open is fine. I could definitely eat, but please don’t go to any trouble—do you maybe have a frozen pizza or something?”

  She was wandering around looking at the books on his shelf in the living room, pausing at the photographs of his family—which included those from the fly fishing trips he took every year with his dad, grandfather, brothers, and nephews—as well as a few wedding pictures from his siblings.

  Ben realized he felt a little tense about what she might think of him having all sorts of boring family pictures everywhere, but no artwork or anything interesting on the walls or table…except old copies of American Angler and Sport Fishing.

  “I have some frozen beef stew,” he said. “And fresh sourdough bread from my buddy Jake DeRiccio. I can put the stew in the oven to warm, which will take a while, and then I think you’d better tell me about Brenda Tremaine.”

  “Ugh.” Callie heaved a great sigh and plumped down on the sofa in front of the fireplace. “This is really nice. Do we have to ruin it?” She gave him a wistful smile, then shook her head. “Of course we do. I’m really grateful you’re willing to listen.”

  He’d be happy to do a lot more than listen, but that ship had sailed. Dammit. When he brought her a glass of Cabernet (he’d opened a new bottle because the one he’d had a few nights ago was just about to turn and he didn’t want to ruin the evening with bad wine), she took it with pleasure.

  He hesitated for a minute, then ended up sitting at the other end of the sofa instead of the armchair. He told himself it was because that seat was closer to the kitchen and the fireplace, but he was lying. It was closer to Callie, and that was all that mattered.

  “So I’m in deep trouble, Ben,” she said right away.

  “All right,” he replied cautiously.

  She looked down into her glass, swirling the dark red wine into such an enthusiastic vortex that he half expected it to slosh out all over her and the sofa. He smiled deep inside—that was Callie. She rarely did anything halfway.

  “Brenda Tremaine has made it abundantly clear she is not going to allow a wedding,” Callie said. “I tried to talk to her today and she just freaked out. You saw me—I don’t know what that red stuff was all over me, but it wasn’t confetti. She’s mad and she’s not going to back down.” She grimaced and took another sip of wine, then tilted her head onto the back of the couch.

  This left her throat bare—a gentle, arc of pale skin above the modest vee-neck of the fuzzy sweater she was wearing. Perfect—just perfect—to drop a soft kiss on, right there in the hollow of her throat…and follow along that warm, sensitive line up to her chin and below her ear…

  Ben swallowed hard and looked away. “Well, can’t you just move your wedding to a different place?”

  Or cancel it all together?

  She huffed a sigh as she lifted her head back up. “I mean, of course I can. But I chose that venue because of the Clock Tower Curse—it’s a publicity-slash-marketing sort of thing, you know?” She shifted in her seat, moving back into the corner of the couch and bringing up one foot to tuck under her as she turned to face him. “And, dammit, it’s not right that Brenda Tremaine—who died ninety-some years ago—is holding your family’s tower hostage! I mean, I know she died, I know it was a tragedy, but she needs to get over it and let life for us mortals go on!”

  “Well, yes, I suppose you’re right. But Brenda wasn’t the only person to die there—how do you know it’s her that’s—uh—holding the place hostage, as you say? And I can’t even believe I’m saying this.” He gave a short laugh and shook his head. “It’s wild.”

  “It’s Wicks Hollow,” Callie told him.

  “I guess.”

  “And anyway, I know it’s her because I was talking to her portrait and I addressed her. I figured—well, I don’t know, I thought if I just acknowledged her as a ghost, she might…” She exhaled violently. “This is crazy talk. I know. And yet…”

  “It’s Wicks Hollow.” He lifted his glass in a mock toast and they both laughed.

  When his eyes lit up with humor and his mouth tipped up behind his beard and mustache, Callie really wanted to lunge down the sofa toward him and smack a kiss on his cheek. But she hadn’t gotten any sort of vibe from him that he would appreciate or reciprocate such a move, and so she kept her butt planted right there on the couch.

  “The way I look at it is, I’ve got three choices. One, cancel the wedding—or at least the venue, which I really really don’t want to do. Two, do it anyway, and just let the chips fall where they may—”

  “But someone might die,” Ben interjected.

  “I know. I know. I don’t want anyone to die, that’s for sure.” She huffed again. “Or, my third option is to try and figure out how to put Brenda Tremaine’s ghost to rest so we can have the wedding there.

  “It’s just going to be so beautiful, Ben! We’re going to do a forest of white painted trees on the balcony, sprayed with glitter paint. They’re not really trees, but big branches that just look like trees,” she added when he gave her a skeptical look. “And the balcony railing itself is going to be swagged with greenery and lights with a big wreath hanging from the center, right where the pictures will all be taken. It’ll be at midnight, of course, and so we’re actually going to do about three dozen hurricanes all over the balcony—”

  “Hurricanes?” He looked very confused.

  “Oh, you know, glass containers with candles in them to protect from the wind. All different sizes and shapes, and all the candles will be in cream or ecru or champagne colors. And some of them will hold three candles, some only two or one…it’s going to look so stunningly beautiful.” She sighed.

  She’d never done an outdoor winter wedding before—after all, who did something like that? Well, CQEvents did! She hoped anyway. And if she pulled it off, it was going to be so gorgeous.

  “And the bride will be wearing an elegant evening suit in ecru, trimmed with big white fur lapels and cuffs, and a lovely fur hat that looks a little like those big Russian things, but prettier.”

  “Right. Oh, let me check on the stew.” Ben popped up from the couch and was gone before Callie could say anything else.

  The fire was still raging merrily when, a few moments later, Ben came back in with a tray of bread and butter, along with two large bowls of stew.

  “Wow. This looks great,” she said, hardly able to wait to dig in. “Where’d you get the stew?”

  “I made it. On the weekend, I like to make big batches of stuff and freeze it so I have an easy dinner during the week.”

  “You
chop your own wood, keep a clean house, and you can cook too? How come no lucky girl’s ever snatched you up?” she said, half teasing, half being very nosy. And wistful.

  Was she imagining it or was he blushing? Good. Maybe that would loosen him up a little.

  “Oh, well, I—it just makes sense to plan ahead, you know. Anyway, I was doing some research about the last few weddings on the Tremaine Tower balcony, you know, after last week.” He was talking fast, as if trying to change the subject.

  So shy and awkward. She just loved that about him. He’d always been that way, and that was part of what had attracted her to him, even back in high school when most girls were ga-ga over football or soccer players. But Ben was quiet, steady, intelligent, and calm. And pretty nerdy. Some people might call him boring, but Callie figured she had enough excitement and energy in her personality for the both of them.

  “Did you really?” she asked, internally delighted that he’d spent some time worrying about what was really her problem. “Did you find out anything that might help the—uh—situation?”

  “I’m not sure. I just wanted to know more about all of the instances. The first one was Brenda and Barclay, of course. Everyone knows about that, and about how Lonna Donne supposedly cursed them and started this unpleasant trend. That was December 31, 1929. Here’s a picture of them right before she collapsed.” He tapped on the computer tablet he’d just retrieved and passed it to Callie.

  “And they had no idea what caused Brenda to die?” she asked as she looked at the photograph of the beautiful couple.

  The bride and groom were holding coupes filled with something that didn’t look like champagne—it was a darker color—and they beamed out over the crowd as the leaned over the railing and waved to their friends and family.

  Ben shook his head. “No—there wasn’t a mark on her, and she didn’t have any health problems. No poison or anything like that. I mean, it wasn’t like they had CSI in 1930, but they did do postmortems. So the timing of her death and the fact that they couldn’t attribute a cause added to the curse story.”

  Callie had been reading the article and she stopped suddenly. “Oh! That’s what it is.”

  “What?” He straightened up in his seat. “You figured it out?”

  “Well, I figured out what the red stuff is that was all over my face. I think.” She tapped the tablet screen and scrolled to the section in the article. “Brenda and Barclay had had a signature cocktail at their wedding—a cranberry champagne cocktail. She was holding a glass of it when she collapsed and died—and the way the newspaper article described her…let me read it to you. ‘Her horribly crumpled body lay in a heap of glittering silk, her cocktail glass shattered on the ground beside her. As if to punctuate the terrible moment, there were streaks of red on her face that had splashed up from the drink as Brenda Tremaine collapsed in sudden, inexplicable death.’ The journalists were a lot more dramatic in their descriptions back then,” she added with a wry smile.

  “So she—her ghost—is replicating the moment of her death with the red streaks,” Ben said, nodding thoughtfully. “All right, that’s logical.”

  “And cranberry juice really stains,” she said. “So what else did you find out about the other deaths?” She handed the tablet back to him.

  “All right, so three years later, Peggy Wilmington and Reginald Bowersox decided to have their wedding at Tremaine Tower, and they came out on the balcony to wave to all of their friends when the clock was striking midnight. At the twelfth and final toll of the bells, both of them fell to the floor of the balcony—suddenly dead.”

  “Both of them? How awful.” Callie was well into her stew and she was amazed at how good it was. She hoped there was enough for a second helping.

  “Right? And same thing—no obvious cause of death was found on either of them. Then no one tried anything until 1939…New Year’s Eve, same deal and Felicity Kelly and Patrick McMurtaugh tied the knot in front of a whole lot of their friends and family—some of whom were on the balcony with them. Felicity and Patrick were just about to pose for a picture for a reporter below, and when the clock finished striking midnight and the ball lit up, someone noticed that Felicity had collapsed on the balcony. She was dead as well. No obvious cause of death. So by that time, the idea of the curse had really taken hold, obviously.” He paused from scrolling through his tablet to sample the stew for a few bites. “The other two instances—in 1943 and 1947—were similar. And for all of them, there was no clear cause of death. It was like they just dropped dead for no reason. Here, take a look. I pulled up pictures of all of them.”

  Callie took the tablet again, still feeling moved that he’d spent all this time worrying about her problem. It was his family’s building, too, but he didn’t seem to have had any interest in the curse until she came along. She smiled to herself. Good old Ben.

  She flipped through the photographs he’d pulled into an album, noting the happy couples and their beautiful wedding attire. All were on the balcony, all were above everyone else and waving or looking down at them from the railing. The clock face was above them, and in each of the photos, it was just before midnight.

  “The other strange thing is,” he said, mopping a crust of bread through the rich brown broth, “there were other events that took place on the balcony over the years. Not many, but there were some…and no one died.”

  “Hmm. Any weddings?” Callie asked. “I mean, where no one died?”

  He shook his head. “No. So they all have that in common.”

  “And they all took place on New Year’s Eve, right around midnight—which is when the first incident took place. So it seems as if the so-called curse only applies to weddings that take place at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Great.”

  “Well, you could always do the wedding earlier than midnight,” he said with a sort of pained smile. “Then you might avoid whatever it is that is annoying Brenda Tremaine.”

  Callie laughed. “That’s an option. But, hey, you’re a relative of hers—maybe you could talk to her!”

  “That would assume I actually know how to talk to ghosts, much less female ghosts,” he said, and chuckled. “Which, unless they’re clients and talking about deductions and write-offs, I find myself at a loss talking to women. They’re just not very interested in fly fishing.”

  “You’ve never had trouble talking to me,” she said teasingly. “But then the topics of our discussion were all around Dungeons and Dragons and arguing about which Star Trek series is the best.” Callie sobered. “Seriously, Ben, why hasn’t some awesome gal snagged you? Or…is there someone?”

  He looked down at his bowl and shrugged. “Not really. There was someone I—uh—had a thing for for a while, but it never went anywhere. But I’m pretty happy with the way things are in my life right now. Though it would be nice to have someone to share this kind of an evening with once in a while.” He looked around the room: the fire blazing, the Christmas tree with its perfectly aligned rows of clear, sparkling lights, the comfort food, the overstuffed sofa.

  Callie nodded. “This is pretty cozy.”

  She sighed, tamping back her own twinge of emptiness. She, too, had a fulfilling life with her own exciting business that probably kept her too busy for a relationship anyway. Still, helping so many couples plan their weddings did sometimes make her feel lonely.

  She shook herself out of the melancholy and turned a bright—if somewhat forced—smile toward Ben. “Well, I’d better get to that printer if you don’t mind. I need to print off a schematic for the florist, and I was going to stick it in her mailbox on my way out of town so they’d have it first thing tomorrow. Margie’s not very good with opening email attachments,” she added ruefully.

  “Oh, yes, I know Margie,” Ben replied with a grin. “She gives me a box with her receipts in it every year and refuses to do anything with QuickBooks because it’s online.”

  Callie gave a weak laugh—she was really feeling down in the dumps—and said, “I bet that’s a
lot of fun! So, where’s the printer? I can connect via wifi, right?”

  Yes, of course she could connect wirelessly—she was at Ben’s house. Callie smiled to herself, but she still felt like crap. It was becoming clearer and clearer to her what she needed to do.

  And in doing so, she was going to be letting a lot of people down.

  But it was the right thing to do.

  Six

  While Callie was printing things off in his home office, Ben took the opportunity to stoke up the fire. He added several logs and by the time she came back into the living room, it was blazing merrily.

  He’d turned off the overhead light and the one that beamed in from the kitchen because it seemed so harsh when there was a Christmas tree and a dancing fire to give off a softer light, not because he was setting a seduction scene. After all, he’d left the side table lamp on.

  But when Callie came out of his office—her hat drooping even more off the back of her head—he took one look at her and knew something was wrong.

  “Callie? Is everything all right? Did you have a problem with the printer? It can be temperamental—”

  He didn’t even get to finish the sentence before she burst into tears. The next thing he knew, she was in his arms, sobbing into his shoulder—and he wasn’t sure whether she’d moved into him, or if he’d moved into her.

  But it didn’t matter in the least.

  He was holding Callie—a damp, soggy Callie, but Callie nonetheless.

  “Shhh…it’s all right,” he said, allowing himself to stroke the length of her back, forcing himself to stop just above her ass—and not at all sure what he was soothing her about…and whether it would be okay. “Shhhh…shhh…”

  She was warm and soft and curvy and smelled so sweet and delicious that he didn’t care that she was getting tears and snot all over his sweater—which didn’t happen to be one of his favorites, but it had been recently dry-cleaned.

  “I’ve decided I’m…going to have to…call off the…wedding.” She gulped when she pulled away a little bit, sobbed a little more. “I…it’s the only…right…thing to do…”