Authors: Mariah Stewart
The door opened just as she turned to step off the porch.
“Hey. This is a surprise.” His smile welcomed her.
“I hope you’re not busy. I should have called, but I just dropped Gabi off at Wylers’—”
“She decided to go to the party? Good. I’m glad. The kid needs to be a kid.”
Ellie nodded her agreement.
“Oh. Hey, come in. Sorry. I was so surprised to see you that I forgot my manners.” He stepped back and she came inside. The house was warm and smelled of pine.
“I was just working on a table downstairs. Give me a minute to turn things off.…”
“What are you doing to the table?”
“Making it. Out of old barn boards.”
“May I see it?”
“Not much to see just yet, but sure …”
He led her down the basement steps and into a workshop he had set up. The top of the table he was making was held in some sort of vise.
“I don’t have a piece wide enough for the top, so I’ve had to glue several boards together to get the size I wanted,” he explained.
“Will the glue hold?” She ran her hand across the smoothly polished boards.
“It’ll hold pretty well, but I’ll reinforce the bottom with brackets just to make sure.” He looked up and grinned. “You don’t want your soup to land in your lap because your table fell apart.”
“Who’s the table for?”
“It’s for me, actually. I made it to fit that space near the windows in Lilly’s kitchen.” He looked mildly chagrined. “Yeah, I know, a little premature …”
“Good to plan ahead,” she said. “I guess it takes awhile to make something like this.”
“A couple of months, less if I’m not working.”
“It’s beautiful.” And it was. He’d sanded and refinished the old oak boards in a way that restored the grain to its original beauty. “You could probably sell these if the remodeling business got slow.”
“We were slow for a while last year, but this year, it’s been tough to keep up. I have a waiting list of at least a month. Not a complaint, by any means. Just a fact.”
He turned off the light over his worktable. “It’ll have a better finish on it when it’s done. I just couldn’t wait to see what the grain was going to look like once it was sanded.
“Let’s go upstairs and make a fire. We should
take advantage of the fact that you have the night off.…”
Ellie woke up in a strange bed, where a strange light played against shadows across the wall. She sat up with a start, then realized where she was. In Cam’s bed, in his house, and the light was from the fireplace in his room. She settled back down next to him, and sighed.
“You okay?” he murmured.
“I just got disoriented for a moment.” She rested her head on his chest. “I love that you have a fireplace in your bedroom.”
“I love that you’re getting to enjoy it.” His fingers trailed lazily up and down her back. “You know, it’s almost Christmas.”
“It’s the beginning of December,” she corrected him. “That’s hardly ‘almost Christmas.’ ”
“Not if you’re in St. Dennis. The holiday season begins early here. We’ll be lighting the tree in Old St. Mary’s Church Square next weekend. Weekend after that is the house tour.…”
“Houses all dressed up for Christmas, open to the public?”
Cam nodded. “I think there are eight houses on the tour this year.”
“I’d like that.”
“The shops up on Charles Street all have special sales from the first right on through till the big day. Brings in a lot of tourist dollars.”
“I noticed there was a lot of traffic and a lot of people milling around the shops when I drove Gabi over to Wylers’ earlier.”
“Some people in town complain about the weekenders and the day-trippers, but St. Dennis would have died years ago without them. A few forward-thinking folks on the town council had a plan to attract people to come here to vacation. It took awhile, but slowly the economy has turned around. St. Dennis has become a real destination on the Bay. Everyone’s profited from it. I sure have. Every time another old house changes hands, there’s going to be work for me and my crew.”
“Sounds like win/win. You keep working, someone gets a spiffed-up house.”
He nodded. “You all set to go to work on Monday morning?”
“Looking forward to it. I’m going to need to earn a few bucks for Christmas shopping for Gabi.” She wrapped the sheet around her torso and sat up. “She needs a cell phone.”
“What thirteen-year-old kid doesn’t have a cell?”
“She did have one. It was in her mother’s car when it crashed. I let her use mine today to call one of her friends from her old school. It seemed to cheer her up a little.” She pushed a pillow behind her head. “Christmas is going to be tough for her this year.”
“It will be,” Cam agreed. “So let’s keep her busy. Take her to the old church tomorrow for their service and plan on the other stuff as we get closer to the holiday. It won’t make it not hurt, but maybe you can help her to focus on other things.”
“Is there somewhere I can go to get a list of what’s going on each weekend?”
“You’re looking at it.” Cam grinned. “We’ll do it
all together. It’s been a long time since I went caroling. It’ll be fun.…”
Over the next few weeks, it
was
fun. Ellie and Cam took Gabi to the living Nativity where the manger would lie empty until Christmas Eve and they went caroling three times, each time ending up at Cuppachino for what Cam had promised would be the best hot chocolate they’d ever tasted. There was a house tour that had left Ellie breathless. She’d seen a lot of professionally decorated houses, but nothing compared to the homes of St. Dennis, where each stop on the tour had been decked out by the owner and their family and friends.
Garlands of hand-tied pine boughs wound up stairwells and draped around polished newel posts where bunches of holly and ivy trailed. Vases filled with tall branches of winterberry holly graced mantels and sideboards, and silver bowls were piled high with colored satin Christmas balls. Mantels were festooned with arms of blue spruce holding pinecones and silver bells tied with red ribbon.
“I love St. Dennis at Christmas,” Gabi declared one night when she arrived home from the middle school holiday musical.
“So do I,” Ellie had agreed.
“I wish …” Gabi glanced at Ellie, then stopped in midsentence.
“You wish what?”
“Nothing.” Gabi’s eyes were downcast. “I guess I’ll go up and look over my homework.” She fled up the steps, two at a time.
Ellie’s gaze followed her, knowing that Gabi must
be wishing for so much this year, none of which were presents.
They picked out a tree at a lot on Charles Street, and with the help of Cam and his pickup, got it home and set up in the front corner of the living room. Gabi and Paige searched the attic and found boxes of old ornaments, some of which looked as if they dated from the early 1900s. The china cupboard in the dining room was still empty, so Gabi and her friends set up displays of the oldest ornaments on the shelves, safely behind the glass doors. It was a Christmas unlike any Ellie had ever had, but it left her with a glow in her heart. She knew it would be an especially tough day for Gabi, but they managed to get through it.
And Gabi did seem to love her new iPhone on Christmas morning.
“It’s exactly the phone I wanted!” she squealed. “How did you know …?”
“I asked Paige what to buy.”
“I can’t wait to use it. Can I call someone right now?”
“Sure.” Ellie glanced at the clock. “I’m guessing that most of your friends are awake by now.”
“Are you kidding?” Gabi laughed. “It’s Christmas. Everyone gets up early on Christmas.”
As Ellie made her morning coffee, she could hear Gabi chattering away in the other room, and it pleased her enormously to have been able to buy the phone. It was the first time in her life—the only time in her life—that she had to work and save money to buy a gift for anyone. She’d put in a lot of hours with Cameron over the past four weeks, and had been
pleased with the money she’d made. The compliments she’d gotten on her work had pleased her as well. The men on Cam’s crew, while picking up right away on the relationship between Cameron and Ellie, may have been skeptical at first, but over the weeks they came to admire the quality of her work and her no-nonsense approach to the job. She came prepared to scrape paper every day, and she attacked every wall with skill and energy.
“You are really good,” Cam told her when she’d called him in to look at a room she’d finished in a Colonial home in the center of town. “Want to learn how to hang paper?”
“Sure.” She’d nodded. “That might be fun. When do we start?”
“No. It’s not fun. But I appreciate your enthusiasm. And we start in your dining room. We’ll do a trial run as soon as the holidays are over.”
Later on Christmas morning, Cam had arrived with a stack of wallpaper books for Ellie to look through and a neatly wrapped present for Gabi.
“Your gift isn’t finished yet,” he told Ellie. “But it’s coming.”
Ellie had three duck decoys in one big box, wrapped in red paper and tied with white ribbon, sitting under the tree for Cameron. He’d not been expecting such a gift, and Ellie could tell he was truly moved.
“Thank you.” He’d leaned over and kissed her, would have kissed her more if Gabi hadn’t come into the room.
“I love my journal, Cam.” She wrapped her arms around his neck for a hug. “Thank you so much.”
“You’re very welcome, Gabi.” He glanced at Ellie. “I had to resort to asking Paige for a suggestion, too.”
“She’s my best friend here in St. Dennis. She knows what I like,” Gabi said before scampering off to finish making breakfast—bacon and French toast, her gift to Ellie and Cam.
“I was dreading today.” Ellie leaned back against Cam on the sofa. “I was afraid it would be terrible for her.”
“It still may be.”
“She’s been pretty good. Only had one or two melt-downs over the past week. We went to the midnight service at church last night, though, and she did cry most of the time we were there. But for some reason, I expected that. I have to admit, I cried a little myself.”
“For her?”
“Partly.” She turned in his arms. “But selfishly, for me, too.”
“Well, this past year hasn’t been easy for you, either.”
“True, but it’s funny, when you’re focused so much on easing someone else’s pain, you forget about your own. What made me sad in church was thinking about all the time my mother spent here in St. Dennis, here in this house, that I didn’t get to spend with her. All the times I spent in places like Paris and London with people my dad thought were important but who I mostly didn’t care about, I could have been here, in this house, with my mother. I’d have known Lilly, and …” She sat up straight. “I keep forgetting to ask you. Have you ever seen Lilly here, in this house?”
“Sure. I used to live here, remember?”
“No, no. I mean after. After she died.”
“You mean, did I ever see her spirit?”
Ellie’s eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you say ‘ghost’? Most people would say ‘ghost,’ not ‘spirit.’ ”
He twirled a strand of her hair between two fingers, a gesture she’d learned was something he did while he was thinking of something to say.
“Because I never think of her as a ghost. It’s her spirit that’s still here.”
“So you have seen her.”
Cam nodded. “I take it you have, too?”
“No. But Gabi has. She says there’s a white-haired lady who sits on the chair in her room and who watches over her while she sleeps and comforts her when she cries.”
“That sounds like Lilly, all right.”
“I’m her descendant. I don’t understand why Gabi sees her and I don’t.”
“Maybe she thinks you don’t need her.” He dropped the strand of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. “Which room is Gabi in?”
“Back room on the left side,” she told him. “The Bay side.”
“That used to be Lynley’s room,” he told her. “After that, it was Wendy’s when we stayed here.”
“Little girls who needed to be comforted,” Ellie murmured. “Little girls who missed their parents.”
“That would be my guess.”
Ellie got up, walked to the tree, and pretended to straighten an ornament.
“What?” Cam asked.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said. “I never have. I’m surprised that you do.”
“What can I tell you? It’s not like I look out the window and say, ‘Hey, look. I’ll bet that’s the ghost of one of André Bonfille’s men.’ I know that Lilly is still here. I’ve seen her, but more, I’ve sensed her. Felt her.”
“When was the first time?”
“Right after she died. I couldn’t believe she was gone. She’d been our rock, mine and Wendy’s, and I couldn’t imagine what life was going to be without her.”
“You really loved her.”
“She was more of a mother to us than our mother had been. And I still love her. She’s here for me when I need her, El. I can’t explain it any other way.”
“Is she here now?”
He shook his head. “Maybe for Gabi, but Lilly knows I’m good now. I have you.”
“You think she knows?”
“She knows. It makes her happy.”
“Stop it. You’re making that up.”
“Maybe.”
“Can’t leave you two kids alone for ten minutes.” Gabi stood in the doorway, one of Lilly’s old aprons tied around her waist, trying to look stern, but she couldn’t hold the pose. She giggled. “Come quick. The French toast is awesome!”
The French toast
was
awesome, made even better by Gabi’s sheer joy in having prepared it for them. Sitting in her warm kitchen, the morning sun shining through the windows and spilling onto the table, with Gabi chattering away and Cameron’s leg resting
against hers, Ellie couldn’t help but compare this Christmas with last year’s, when she’d been engaged to a man who was so disastrously wrong for her. She and Henry had exchanged expensive presents—his to her had been an exorbitantly pricey watch that he’d probably sent his secretary to pick out, and that, in the end, had been confiscated to pay off those unfortunate people he had helped to defraud. This year the only presents under the tree had been the ones she’d bought for Gabi, Cam, and Carly, whose next visit wouldn’t be for another two weeks. And yet she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so contented, so happy in her heart, and she realized that for all the angst and all the shame and the emotional trauma of the past year, she had, as Carly had once pointed out, landed in a very good place. It was becoming harder and harder to think about leaving.