Holly and Homicide (6 page)

“Could we do a big promotion with this, over the Net?” Mikara suggested. “Allow customers to stay twelve days for the price of ten, for example?”

“I don’t see why not,” Wendell said cautiously, turning toward Henry, who truly was supposedly in charge of this type of decision.

“You were already telling me about the housewarming party for the neighborhood,” Chiffon said to Henry. “We could make a party game out of identifying the Christmas day in each room … like, we’d list them on our invitations, the twelve days, and we’d put an A, B, C, or so on in each doorway, and make people match the right letters to the right twelve days. Get it?”

“Hey, I like that, Chiffon,” Henry said with a big smile. “But getting back to Mikara’s suggestion, most of our guests have already booked rooms based on our previous weeklong price breaks. But we’ll contact our registered guests and offer them a special rate—pay for ten days and
stay for twelve, from December twenty-fourth to January fourth.”

“No! That’s going to make us sound desperate,” Mikara said, shaking her head. “You’ll make people think something’s up. And what about all our reservations for the week
after
Christmas? We’ll be double-booking ourselves.”

“But
you
were the one who suggested it in the first place!” Henry cried, throwing up his hands in exasperation.

“Don’t yell, Henry,” she retorted. “I reconsidered, and recognized a flaw in my idea. It’s not like
you
never change your mind and take back things
you
said!” She glared at him till he averted his eyes.

“This is no big deal,” I said, “but just so you know, the Twelve Days of Christmas actually begin on Christmas day and end on January fifth.”

“Please,” Wendell said, with a dismissive wave in my general direction, “nobody but a church nerd would actually know that. We can assign the dates however we want.”

“I’m hardly a ‘church nerd,’ Mr. Barton, but I’ll grant that it’s your right to time the promotion however you want.”

“Which is
not
going to involve a twelve-day rate at this late juncture,” Mikara stated emphatically.

The noise level increased exponentially as everyone except Sullivan and me began to bicker. He gave me a loving smile, which I returned. With all parties feuding about something, I reminded myself that, no matter what happened, my relationship with Steve couldn’t be
stronger. If not invincible, the two of us could at least prove to be unflappable tonight.

Wendell cleared his throat and grinned at someone in the doorway behind me. “Ah. Here’s my director of operations. No need to worry about a thing from now on.”

I turned. My heart started hammering in my chest as I stared in shock at the tall, handsome man, recognizing him at once.

“Everybody, this is Cameron Baker,” Wendell was saying.

Our eyes met, and we both froze with our gazes locked for several seconds. He was my former boyfriend—my first love, and the first man I’d been intimate with—and we hadn’t seen each other in ten years. When I was at Parsons School of Design, he’d been a grad student at Columbia.

“Erin?!”

“Cam! You …came back from London.” He was wearing an exquisite black cashmere coat. Other than his upgraded wardrobe, he looked exactly the same.

“Six years ago. I told you I would. You left New York.” He grabbed both my hands and helped me to my feet. “My God. Erin Gilbert, as beautiful as ever, standing two feet away from me.” He kissed me passionately.

I
n our bedroom later that night, Steve was deliberately keeping his distance from me. “I’m sorry about the kiss, Steve. It was just such a shock, suddenly seeing him again.”

“So you said. More than once.” His voice was cold.

Although I was trying my best to explain, I was failing miserably. Kissing a former boyfriend in front of Steve was something I’d have sworn I would never do in a million years. “His suddenly appearing after all these years just felt so surreal. There we were with our clients and everything, and the—”

“Which
we
are you referring to?” Sullivan glowered at me. “You and Cammy Boy? Because you can’t possibly mean you and me. I obviously faded into the woodwork for you the instant he walked into the room.”

“I only expected it to be a little ‘hello’ kiss. Didn’t you notice that I pushed him away?”

“Eventually you did, yeah.”

“Almost immediately!”

He snorted. “You forgot I existed. Your eyes and your head were all full of Mr. Fix-it Man. Then you
eventually
broke off the kiss and introduced me. As your
partner.”

“Cameron got my meaning immediately.”

“Yeah, he did. I could tell by the way he glared at me. He seems to be a smart guy. But you could have slipped in that little phrase about our being partners right away. Maybe
then
he’d have settled for a handshake.”

“I’m sorry, Steve. Deeply sorry. Letting him kiss me was thoughtless and inappropriate, I know. But, believe me, there’s nothing going on, other than my surprise at seeing a long-lost old friend.”

“Friend?”

“Yes. Cam’s and my romance ended nearly ten years ago. I feel nothing for him now except friendship.”

“You’d better tell
him
that. That was no friendly peck on the cheek he was giving you.”

“I
will
tell him that. And I’ll also tell him that I’m in love with you, just in case he’s slow on the uptake. He’s probably happily married, for all we know.”

“Erin. Don’t be naive. No happily married man takes his old girlfriend into his arms like that. At least, not if he expects to
remain
happily married.”

“Maybe he’s happily divorced, then. In any case, I’m flattered that you’re jealous, but you have nothing to worry about.”

He looked at me with far more venom than Cameron could possibly have generated when he “glared” at Steve. “Is that supposed to make
me
feel better, or just you?”

“You don’t need to be so harsh, Sullivan. I said I was sorry, and I am. I swear to you that I’ll never kiss an old boyfriend again, and anyway, there isn’t anyone else in my past remotely like him.”

“Great. So in other words, you’re still holding a torch for him alone.”

“No! I just meant that, out of all the guys I ever dated, he was the only one …This isn’t coming out right. The point is, I’m not holding a torch for him or for anyone except
you.”

“How lucky for me.” Steve stripped down to his boxers and undershirt, then clicked out the light. “I’m tired and I’m going to sleep now.”

“Fine. Good night.”

“Night.”

Although I turned out my own light and laid my head on my pillow, I silently cursed repeatedly while replaying the lowlights of the evening. I
had
honestly believed Cameron was going to give me a quick kiss hello. Sullivan was truly overreacting. Yes, I’d been wrong to let myself get so enthralled by seeing Cam so unexpectedly. But that’s the challenge of major surprises—you don’t get the chance to prepare for them; it’s impossible to react with intelligent forethought. My reaction had been the result of my happiness at seeing the long-lost man who’d once
meant the world to me; it had absolutely nothing to do with my relationship to Sullivan—the man who now meant even more to me. Nothing on this earth could make me drop Steve and go back to Cameron. I weighed telling Sullivan that, but he was already either feigning sleep or actually asleep. Besides, considering his current mood and my ineffective babblings tonight, he might take yet more offense. Surely this was all going to turn out fine. If we were going to be in this relationship for the long haul, we needed to know that we could get past bad times. This evening’s events definitely qualified as a bad time.

In the morning, Sullivan was fully dressed when I
awoke. We traded “good mornings.”

“I have to head down to Crestview to meet with some reps at the office, but I’ll be back by five,” he explained. His voice was as consciously bland as his face.

“Are you still angry with me about Cameron?”

“No. Let’s just forget it ever happened.”

“Okay. Well … bye.”

I reached for him, and he gave me a reasonably nice kiss, muttered, “Bye,” then left.

A knot formed in my stomach. I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to activate amnesia at will and that, in any case, unresolved small problems have a way of reemerging as bigger problems later. I rehashed my resolve before falling asleep last night. What if we weren’t
capable
of making it through bad times?

When I entered the kitchen, Mikara was sitting at the
table, cradling a cup of coffee. She offered me a semi-cheerful, “Morning,” but followed it up with: “I assume you can serve yourself breakfast. I’m not a morning person.”

“Isn’t that going to be problematic for running a bed-and-
breakfast?”

She arched an eyebrow and said, “I’ll rise to the occasion once our guests arrive.” Then she indeed rose—and marched out of the kitchen. It was not even half past eight, and I was two for two on driving people from the room. I was on a roll!

Even though Crestview residents’ fondness for granola was a cliché, that’s what I chose to eat. My crunchy meal was augmented by the racket of a jackhammer and a bulldozer outside as Ben and his temporary crew demolished the stoop.

The vibrations in the floorboards were so strong that I had visions of a bulldozer accident weakening the entire foundation. After breakfast, I went out through the back door and rounded the house. Ben Orlin was behind the controls of the small dozer as two Hispanic workmen were loading chunks of concrete into a sturdy truck bed by hand. It looked like horrid, backbreaking labor to me, and I immediately asked Ben if I could bring out a thermos of coffee or anything.

“Nah, we’re fine,” Ben said affably, shutting off the engine. “We took a coffee break an hour ago.”

“You’ve made a lot of progress, in just a couple of hours.”

“Yeah, well, we got started on it last night. On Wendell’s henchman’s orders.”

“Henchman?
You mean Cameron Baker?”

“Yeah. He made some phone calls and got them to deliver the dozer at eleven-thirty last night. Then he made the deliverymen wait and watch me operate it, ’cuz he was worried this dozer wasn’t big enough. I didn’t want to wake up everyone in the house by breaking up the concrete steps, but I finally moved enough dirt out here to convince him.”

“That was thoughtful of you.” That
did
sound like something Cameron would do. He had been a workaholic in college and had scoffed at anyone who chose a less stressful lifestyle.

He shrugged. “The noise still woke Mikara up. She was fit to be tied.”

“I’m … really sorry that you had to lose
your
sleep last night to do this. Did Henry have anything to say about your having to work that late at night?”

“Nah. He wasn’t even here. Out on a date.”

Knowing Henry, he probably took out Chiffon Walters, to counterbalance Audrey and Wendell’s dating. The Snowcap Inn was turning into a regular Peyton Place. Of course,
I
was no one to talk. I shuddered to think how quickly Cameron’s kiss must be spreading through the village’s rumor mill.

“Hey, Ben?” one of the workers said. “You better come take a look at this.” He was brushing off a bone that he held in one hand.

“Where’d you find that?” Ben asked.

My mind instantly filled with apprehension. I cursed
and approached along with Ben, hoping that this was just a dog’s old bone. But there were no telltale teeth marks, and its shape and size looked all too human. Someone’s upper arm. R. Garcia’s?

“It was in the pile of rubble,” the man explained, gesturing with his chin.

Just then I heard someone approach, turned, and saw a grouchy-looking Wendell Barton striding toward us. “What’s everyone standing around for?” he demanded. “Ben! Did you fail to understand Mr. Baker’s directive last night that this was to be done on double time?! Why do you have a crew of just two men?”

“There’s a problem, Wendell,” I interjected. “They found a bone in the debris from the steps. It looks like part of a human skeleton.”

Ben showed him the bone. “Nah. That’s nothing,” Wendell said with a dismissive wave. “Probably a dog’s treasure trove. That’s hardly an excuse to stop working.”

“Maybe not, but
this
is,” the second worker said, removing his gloves. He pointed at a spot in the top of the pile that the bulldozer had created, and even from where I stood—some ten feet away—I could make out the shape of a human skull. “I’m out of here. I don’t need the work this bad.” He started walking toward the driveway.

“Wait. You can’t leave,” I told him. “We have to call the police. They’re going to want to know precisely where you found the first bone.”

“I gotta go, too,” the second man said as he trotted down the walkway. “I’m not waiting for no police….” They both hopped into their respective pickup trucks and drove off.

“Ben!” Wendell scolded. “Are you some kind of an idiot? Those men are obviously illegal immigrants! Didn’t you ask to see their drivers’ licenses or their papers before you hired them?”