Keeping Christmas

Kyle’s father? He wasn’t altogether certain he believed her statement that he was dead. The information had come too easily to her lips. After three and a half years he could barely speak the words aloud.

Was she fleeing a lover? That was more likely.

Or the law? Possible, but for some reason he didn’t think so.

“Jacob, I’m speaking to you.” Almeda’s voice cut into his thoughts. “Seeing you’re so worried about us having a stranger under our roof, do you wish to spend the night in the house?”

“Maybe I will,” he said too quickly.

Almeda narrowed shrewd dark eyes beneath white eyebrows. “The invitation is withdrawn if you plan to haunt the upper hall and spy on our guest all night long.”

“The thought never crossed my mind,” he lied.

“Yes, it did.” Almeda wrapped her gnarled hands around her mug of tea. “You think she’s going to murder us in our beds.”

Jacob laughed; it was rusty and almost devoid of humor, but it was a laugh, nevertheless.

Faye kicked Lois under the table but Jacob didn’t notice.

“No, but she might run off with all the money and silver in the house.”

“In her condition?”

“She’d never get out of the yard with Weezer on the porch,” Janet pointed out.

“Good point,” Jacob conceded.

“She’s nothing but a poor, frightened young woman who’s running away from someone or something that has her scared half to death,” Hazel said, echoing his own reluctant conclusions. “I’m certain of it.”

“Well, I’m not.” Jacob leaned his hips against the tiled countertop. He folded his arms across his chest. “But I promise not to harm a hair on her head.”

Almeda refused to be drawn into an argument. “Good. That’s settled. Remember, she’s our guest and she stays as long as she needs our hospitality.”

“It’s the Christian thing to do.”

“It is the season, after all,” Lois said quietly.

“It’s still November.”

“Close enough,” said Faye. “Christmas is my favorite time of year.”

Jacob set his coffee mug on the counter. “I give up. She stays as long as she wants. I’m going back up to my place to put some more wood in the stove. I’ll check on Weezer once more, then I’ll come back here and spend the night in my old room.”

“That sounds like an excellent idea.” Almeda seconded the suggestion. “We should all be in our beds.”

“Not me,” Janet said. “I’m going to watch Tales from the Crypt. Anyone care to join me?”

“No.” Hazel shuddered. “I hate that show. It gives me nightmares.”

“We’re going to bed,” the twins said, taking turns. “We’ve got a million things to do tomorrow.”

“I meant what I said about the lights on the roof,” Jacob reminded them. “Not till it thaws.”

“Of course.” They grinned. “If the sun comes out you can do it as soon as you get home from school.”

Jacob shook his head. He was defeated, and he knew it. “Good night.” He shrugged into his coat and headed out into the snow.

“He smiled,” Faye said in a stage whisper after he’d gone.

“And he laughed. Almost,” her twin sister added. “I can’t remember the last time I saw him laugh.”

It was many hours later when Jacob returned to the house. He’d forgotten the term papers that needed to be graded. But the back door was unlocked for him, as he knew it would be. His aunts were the most trusting souls on earth. And thank God, beyond ordinary common sense precautions, in Owenburg they still could be. He shook the snow off his coat and hung it on a hook by the door. He did the same with his hat, then took off his shoes. He walked through the house in his stocking feet, climbed the stairs and stopped before his father’s and his grandfather’s room.

He hadn’t slept here in months—he usually stayed only if the weather was very bad or his aunts were having problems with their temperamental old furnace—but he knew it would be ready for him. Probably with the bed already turned down and the radiator steaming.

He hesitated for a long minute, then walked silently down the hall to the room where Kate Smith and her son slept. He watched her from the open doorway. The soft glow of the wall lamps in the hall cast dim fingers of light all the way to the bed.

Kate Smith. He caught himself smiling again. If he had to pick a moment when he’d truly decided she wasn’t dangerous, it was then. She wasn’t much of a criminal if she couldn’t even pick an alias that didn’t make people think twice. But she’d told him to call her Katie. Katie. The name suited her much better than Kate.

She lay on her back, one arm outstretched toward her child, one lying across her chest, just beneath the gentle swell of her breasts. She had very nice breasts. He remembered the feel of them beneath her sweater as he’d carried her upstairs. Jacob looked quickly away. The baby slept beside her, on his stomach, his bottom high in the air.

Just the way his son used to sleep. His heart ached as he stood there staring at them.

And Katherine. How often had he teased her about putting the baby in bed with them. “We can’t make love,” he’d complain, “with a baby between us. It cramps my style and it will warp the boy for life.” Katherine would laugh. He would lean over, kiss the baby and she would put him in his own bed so that they could make love; long, slow, sweet love.

Jacob clenched his fists at his sides. He wouldn’t remember the soft, powdery baby smells, the giggles, the kisses exchanged with the woman he loved as she nursed his son, played pat-a-cake with him. The pain as they lowered them into the cold hard ground together. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. He would not give in to the pain.

Kate Smith bore a physical resemblance to Katherine, that was all. He could handle that. He didn’t have to exchange another half-dozen words with her. Tomorrow, or the day after that, she would be gone. Out of his life forever and he could go on, getting from one day to the next, making it through one more night, one more week, one more Christmas.

He gave the sleeping woman and her child a last look. Her short, dull gold hair gleamed faintly in the diffuse light. The little boy slept soundly, his thumb in his mouth. He looked like his mother, but his build was square and sturdy. Like his father? Kate, although tall, was slender as a child, skinny, really. Too skinny. Jacob liked his women with a little more meat on their bones.

The errant thought and his physical response to it surprised him, amazed him and scared him to death. Thinking about what Kate Smith would look like with an additional ten or twelve well-distributed pounds on her frame was too close to thinking about what it might be like to hold her, or kiss her, or make love to her. Doing that meant he would have to start feeling things again, letting his emotions stir to life, including the agony of remembering what he had lost. He wasn’t about to do that again for anyone. Not now. Not ever.

“Damn,” Greg Moran growled as he slammed down the receiver. “She won’t answer the phone.”

“Give her time to cool down,” his father counseled from his chair by the fire. He didn’t turn around. Neither did Greg. He remained by the inlaid wood desk that sat squarely in the middle of Andrew’s mahogany-paneled study. His hands balled into fists as he rested his elbows on either side of the phone. “She’ll come around. Patrice is a smart girl.”

“Maybe she’s already left town. Checked out of the hotel and went home to her family,” Greg said, following his own train of thought. He loved his wife. He hadn’t thought it was possible to miss her this much. He wanted her back, no matter what it took.

“We’d know. Someone follows her whenever she leaves the hotel,” his father reminded him.

“That’s another thing. I don’t want her finding out she’s being followed. I don’t want her hounded out of town.”

“Don’t worry,” Andrew said. “I’ve got my best guys on it. She’ll get tired of this game in a few days.”

“Sure, Dad.” But in his heart Greg wasn’t so certain. Maybe Patrice was right. Maybe they should let Katie go her own way.

“Patrice will come around,” Andrew repeated smugly. “In a few days you’ll have found my grandson and brought him home. Patrice won’t be able to stay away when she knows Kyle needs a woman to take care of him. She loves that boy like he was her own.”

“What if Katie won’t let us bring Kyle back here?” Greg asked.

“She won’t have any choice. Leave that all up to me. You just find her.” Andrew’s tone was hard as steel.

“She won’t give him up without a fight.” Greg hid a smile. Katie was a scrapper; even his father had to admit that.

“Remember. She’s got nothing to give the boy. We have everything, including the law, on our side.” Andrew chuckled. “Why do you think I make all those… campaign contributions…every election year?”

“Moran Enterprises makes campaign contributions for the same reasons every other company in this state does. To help elect the best man or woman for the job. Right, Dad,” Greg said, warningly.

“Sure, sure.” Andrew chuckled once more, then his voice hardened again. “Don’t try to con me. Are you trying to tell me you can’t find her?” He turned in his chair, his bald head shining softly in the mellow, recessed lighting. His stare was anything but mellow.

“I have a couple of leads,” Greg answered noncommittally. “It takes time to check them out. She’s only been gone three days. Right now I’m more interested in getting my wife to come home.”

“Three days is three damn days too long. You get the boy back here and your wife will come racing back so fast it’ll make your head spin.” Andrew brought his fist down on the arm of the chair. “The boy should be here with us. He’s our blood.”

For his father that was enough. For years it had been enough for Greg, too. Since the day he’d graduated from college he’d concentrated on turning Andrew’s ill-gotten gains into a legitimate business empire. For the most part he’d succeeded, although he wondered, sometimes, if his father didn’t stay in too close touch with his old pals from the syndicate. Were Katie’s glimpses of Andrew’s shady past one of the reasons she’d run away? He didn’t know. He couldn’t be sure.

But one thing he could be sure about. He’d spent all his life, forty-two years, trying his damnedest to please his old man, to make a success of Moran Enterprises and to rehabilitate the old sinner’s name. But it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough again. Not since Patrice had walked out on him and left an aching, empty chasm in the middle of his soul.

Outside the rain poured down from a leaden sky onto the lavishly landscaped grounds of the Key Biscayne hotel. Patrice smiled ruefully. If it wasn’t raining so hard, she could probably see Andrew’s mansion from here. She hadn’t run very far, but at least she had gone from her father-in-law’s house. The house she’d lived in with Gregory for twelve years, yet never thought of as her own, as theirs. Leaving Greg, taking a stand, that was the gesture she had to make. For Katie’s sake, and for her own.

She didn’t have her sister-in-law’s strength of purpose. Or her imagination. She’d never considered Andrew an evil person until the night Katie disappeared. Then she’d seen him for what he was: a ruthless, domineering man, skating the thin line between respectability and lawlessness. She didn’t care what Andrew had done in the past; that was all long ago and far away. Gregory said his father’s business dealings—his own business dealings—were legitimate now, and that’s all that mattered to her.

She missed Gregory. She wanted to be with her husband, to tell him about their child—the baby they’d wanted so desperately for so long. She was over four months pregnant. Her monthly cycles were so irregular she hadn’t realized, herself, she was pregnant until a few weeks ago. Now she was unable to share her joy with her husband until the situation between Katie and Andrew was resolved. That’s why she’d ignored the phone ringing behind her, was still ignoring its insistent summons. Because it was Gregory on the other end of the line, she knew in her heart, and because if he asked her, she would tell him what little she knew about where Katie had gone.

She couldn’t lie to Greg, even for Katie’s sake, but she couldn’t be a party to the scheme to take Kyle from his mother. That’s why she was here, in a hotel room, not two miles from her home, torn in mind and spirit, crying herself to sleep each night, instead of starting to plan for Christmas, her favorite time of the year. And this Christmas was to have been the most special of all, because her gift to Greg was their child.

Chapter 3

“The receipt for this fruitcake has been handed down in our family for six generations,” Hazel said, brandishing a sharp knife as she cut candied pineapple into tiny bits and added it to the bowl of batter, already stiff with crystallized fruits, on the table before her. She used the word receipt instead of recipe, just as Katie’s grandmother had done.

“I’ve never been fond of fruitcake,” Katie admitted as she broke off a small piece of sugar cookie for Kyle, who was sitting on her lap. “Every one I’ve ever had has been dry and tasteless as chalk.” Kyle opened his mouth wide for the bite of cookie, then made a grab for the rest of it. Katie laughed and so did Hazel.

“It’s good to hear you laugh. I know you must be feeling better.”

“Much better,” Katie agreed. “I don’t know how I can thank you for letting us stay here these past three days.”

“By praising my fruitcake to the sky, of course,” she said with another merry grin.

“That won’t be difficult, I’m sure.”

“If you’re not still with us when these are done—they have to ripen, you know—you must give me your address and I’ll send you one.”

“Yes,” Katie said, lying. “I’ll do that.”

She and Kyle were sitting in an antique rocking chair in the sun, in the window alcove of the Owens’ kitchen. The wide windowsills were crowded with blooming geraniums and potted ferns, the winter daylight filtered through lace curtains, but suddenly it seemed to Katie as if the sun had gone behind a dark cloud. It was Wednesday afternoon. She’d been here three days and soon she would have to be moving on.

The back door opened and the twins came into the kitchen from outside. Cold air streamed in with them, stirring currents of warmer air, heavy with the scent of growing plants, spices and wood smoke. Katie took a deep breath and held it, savoring the good smells and the good feelings in the room.

“The reason Hazel’s fruitcakes are in such demand,” Faye said, picking up the thread of the conversation as if she’d been in the room all along, “is because she soaks the things in rum before she stores them away.”

“That’s right,” Lois said, nodding in agreement. Now that she felt better, Katie had almost no trouble telling them apart. “Even the Methodist preacher thinks they’re great.”

“And he’s a teetotaler.”

Everyone laughed. Kyle loudest of all.

“Come on, fella,” Faye said, offering the baby another bite of cookie. “Want to come play with me so your mommy can rest for an hour?”

“You can take him to play if you like,” Katie said, lifting Kyle into Faye’s outstretched arms. “But I’m not a bit tired. I’ve spent the last three days resting. Are you sure there isn’t something helpful I can do?” She’d asked the question a dozen times already that day, and each time she’d been politely rebuffed.

“Thanks, but no,” Lois said. “I’ve already spent the afternoon straightening out the Christmas lights. It seems no matter how carefully I pack them away each year, whenever it comes time to put them up again they’re always a mess.”

“Gremlins,” Hazel said, shaking her head.

“Impatience.” Faye sniffed, cooing nonsense words at Kyle while tickling his belly with the tip of her finger. “You’re always in too big of a hurry.”

“I just don’t like Christmas to be over. And anyway, last year it was freezing cold when we took the lights down. Remember? I thought I’d freeze my…fingers…off before we were done.”

“Well, anyway, I’ve got about half of them ready to go for when Jacob gets home from school—he always stops in on his way up the hill. I got all the kinks out of the wires, and I replaced all the burned-out bulbs.”

“You’ll need someone to hold the ladder so Jacob doesn’t fall off the roof and break his neck,” Janet added, coming into the kitchen through the swinging door just in time to hear the last few remarks.

“Katie can do that,” Faye said without looking up from Kyle’s sugary, beaming face. “She’s dying to get outside, aren’t you, Katie?”

“Well, yes,” Katie said. “I would like some fresh air.” But she didn’t want another confrontation with Jacob Owens. She’d spent the better part of the past day and a half, since she had come downstairs, avoiding him. He didn’t want her in his aunts’ house. He didn’t want her near him. She wanted the same thing. Didn’t she?

“Good, that’s settled. If we aren’t the first house in town to start putting up Christmas decorations the twins pout for a week.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lois sniffed.

“Never mind Janet,” Faye said, ignoring her elder sister while concentrating on making Kyle laugh even harder. “She’s an old Scrooge.”

“I am not. I’m just practical. A virtue sadly lacking in several members of this family.”

“You’re a Scrooge,” Lois said firmly. “Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. I want to make it last.”

“Christmas should be in your heart, not on the front lawn,” Almeda said, coming into the kitchen from the short hallway that connected the big room with the bathroom and her bedroom.

“Christmas is in my heart,” Lois insisted. “That’s why I want everyone to enjoy the season as much as I do.”

“In the spirit of the season,” Katie heard herself say. Christmas had never been her favorite holiday. She knew enough about herself to know why. If you didn’t have a family, Christmas could be a very lonely time of the year. Michael and Kyle had helped keep away the loneliness she always felt at Christmastime. But now Michael was gone and she and Kyle were truly alone. “I’ll hold the ladder for Jacob while he puts up the lights.”

For some reason she didn’t want to think too closely about, she couldn’t stop herself from offering to do the chore. Besides, it was the least she could do for the quintet of wonderful old ladies who’d given her shelter from the storm. She was almost well; nothing was left of her illness but a lingering cough and runny nose. The Owens sisters had been as kind to her as if she was their own flesh and blood. They adored her son. They treated her like family; more like family than any of her own relatives, including her parents, had ever done. Just because she didn’t like their nephew was no reason not to repay their kindness in such a simple and relatively painless way. In the spirit of the season.

“You’ll need a pair of boots,” Hazel said, pouring the fruitcake batter into buttered pans. “What size shoes do you wear?”

“Eight and a half,” Katie said, trying not to blush. She resisted the urge to shove her feet under the rocker. “I doubt if any of you have feet that large.”

The twins snickered. “Janet does.”

“Wrong,” Janet said, not showing any sign of malice. “I wear an eight. You’re welcome to my boots even if they pinch,” she went on with a nod to Katie. “But I’ll be wearing them myself, since you’ll need my help untangling Lois’s thousand strings of lights if Jacob is going to get down off that ladder before midnight.”

“Quit exaggerating,” Faye scoffed, shaking her head. Kyle did the same. “There’s nowhere near a thousand strings. There’s twenty or twenty-five at the most.”

“I wear an eight and a half. She can borrow my boots,” Almeda decreed as she lowered herself heavily onto a chair at the table. “They’re on the back porch. Just like new, I might add. I don’t go out much anymore in this kind of weather.”

“If we wait until tomorrow the snow will be all gone and it will be forty-eight degrees,” Jacob said, coming through the back door, picking up the thread of the conversation just as quickly as his aunts had done earlier. Katie wondered if it was merely the result of living so closely together for so many years, or something in the Owens’ genes.

“Oh, Jacob, you’re not backing out on us, are you?” Lois asked, looking as disappointed as a child. “I penned Weezer up so she won’t try and eat the bulbs. I have all the boxes down from the attic. I’ve checked all the extension cords, and even un…packed a dozen strings.”

“Untangled, you mean,” Janet said under her breath.

“Unpacked,” Lois insisted. “I saw Mrs. Barnett, down at the crossroads, already has her Santa and reindeer set up out on the lawn. We can’t let her get the jump on us, Jacob. We just can’t.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” Jacob said, giving his aunt a salute. Katie almost thought she saw the glimmer of a smile cross his lips, but it never reached his eyes. They were blue, she noticed without wanting to—dark, dark blue. Navy blue, like the color of his coat and the knit cap on his dark head. Katie took a closer look at his clothes. It was a navy-issue coat, a pea coat, and a watch cap, both of which had seen better days. So Dr. Jacob Owens had been a sailor. One more tiny nugget of information to add to her private list of the things she knew about him.

“Give me a minute to get this tie off,” he said, suiting action to words as he pulled the knot from a gray knit tie and opened the collar of his long-sleeved gray-and-red-striped shirt. “I’ll call the Calhoun boys to come and give us a hand.”

“We don’t need the Calhoun boys, Jacob,” Lois said, smiling across the room at their reluctant guest. “Katie’s going to help.”

“Katie?” Jacob turned on her, tie still in hand, the indulgent half smile he’d been wearing wiped away in the space of a heartbeat, replaced by a frown.

“I’ll be glad to help,” she said hurriedly. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but Jacob made no effort to hide his antagonism for her and she couldn’t help wishing Lois had never asked for her assistance.

“I don’t need your help,” he said bluntly, tossing the discarded tie on the table and reaching for his coat.

“Yes, we do,” Lois piped up. “The Calhoun boys have basketball practice every night after school. They won’t be able to help until the weekend. I don’t want to wait that long to get the lights up. You promised,” she said, crossing her arms across her chest. “You promised.”

“I promised,” he said between clenched teeth as he rebuttoned his coat. “So let’s get going. This family spends entirely too much time and energy worrying about Christmas.” He walked out the door.

“Oh, dear,” Lois said, biting her lip. “Now I’ve made him mad.”

“It’s not you, Lo,” Faye said, offering her Kyle’s plump cheek to kiss. “It’s Christmas. You know how much Katherine loved the holidays. He doesn’t want to remember that she and the baby are gone forever. And Christmas is the hardest time of year for him....”

And the baby. So Jacob had lost a child, as well as his wife. She thought of her own loss. She had loved Michael, and she truly mourned his loss. Sometimes she wondered how she could have gotten through it without Kyle. To have lost the woman you loved and the child she bore you…together… The loss would be incalculable. Perhaps she’d judged Jacob Owens too harshly. Perhaps she should…

An imperious tapping came at the window beside her chair. Katie leaned over and lifted the lace curtain. Jacob’s dark, harsh features stared back at her, below eye level, framed by blooming pink geraniums and green leaves. “Let’s get going,” he called loudly through the old, green-tinged, wavy glass. “It’s colder than a witch’s—”

“Jacob!” Almeda called, holding up an imperious hand. “Watch your language.”

“Yes, Aunt,” he hollered back. The darkness didn’t leave his face, but Katie thought she saw just the slightest hint of softening in his deep blue eyes. He lowered his voice. “I’ll watch my p’s and q’s.”