One Snowy Night Before Christmas (12 page)

The old man shot her a look of surprise.

“That little girl believed in you, and you…turned her into
me
.
I hope you’re happy with yourself.”

“I am innocent, young lady.”

“Spare me. You’re a con artist who
preys
on
innocents.”

“I haven’t preyed on anyone.”

“You jumped out in front of my truck, probably to get an
insurance settlement. Well, let me tell you, Tom is a lawyer and he’ll say you
did it on purpose. That equals insurance fraud. There’s probably a hefty
punishment to go along with that. You’re going up the river,
Santa
.”

Her fury rose, but she was most angry with herself. She had
let her guard down, and because of it she’d been poked in a sensitive spot.

“I didn’t rob the jewelry store.” He leaned back and shifted
on the bench as if he didn’t have a care in the world, other than the crick in
his back. “The truth will come out.”

What arrogance!

“What’s your real name?” she demanded. “Be honest with me,
for once.”

“My name is Christopher Kringle.” He leaned his head back
and closed his eyes. “There are fifty-six other people living in the United
States with that name, as well.”

She would wager he was right. The old grifter had probably
done his research.

“How are you enjoying your time with Tom?” he asked.

Her heart leapt. She hadn’t been prepared for that.

“I knew when I saw him he was just perfect for you. You want
the same things in life, after all.”

For a moment she simply stumbled over her own tongue, too
amazed for words. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she finally
managed.

“Don’t you like him?”

“None of your business!”

He smiled, his cheeks rosy even in the greenish light. “You
do
like him.”

She stepped closer to the bars, pointing her finger. “You
know, for a few minutes you actually had me fooled. I was starting to believe
this year might be different. But it isn’t. Christmas is a miserable time of
year when more people are sad than happy. The holiday is nothing but a capitalistic
scam that opportunists like you use to bilk trusting people.”

“Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ,”
he countered. The old man kept his voice calm and low, even slightly happy, as
if he were teaching a class of first graders.

“Tell that to the department stores who pressure consumers
to buy a bunch of expensive presents they can’t really afford, and the grocery
stores who tell people they have to cook a gigantic meal. Do you know how many
people go hungry in this country every day?”

“Far too many.” His voice remained placid, even though she
was shouting. “What have you ever done to help them, Jessie?”

She stopped and swallowed. He had a point, but damn if she
was going to let him turn this around to make her look like the bad guy. “More
than you,” she managed.

His brows shot up. “Really?”

“At least I’m not robbing and conning them,” she snapped. “I
can’t believe I’m having this conversation with you. I only came here to tell
you you’re the lowest of the low. You’ve ruined Christmas for a little girl.
She’ll never look at it the same way again.”

“Are we talking about you…or Amy?”

She caught her breath. “Amy, of course. I already hate
Christmas.”

He started to speak again but she interrupted. “You know
what the best part of this is? You’ve proved I’m right.” She whirled away and
stomped down the hall.

“Jessie.”

Something about the doleful tone of his call made her stop.
She slowly turned around.

“Faith isn’t something other people give you. It’s something
you find within yourself.”

She stood there, heart thundering in her chest, arms and
legs quivering. Like all Christmases, this one had turned wretched.

“You’ll believe, when you get your Christmas present.”

“What Christmas present?” she fairly growled.

“One you received the first time twenty years ago.”

He was nuts. A nutty Santa Claus imposter.

“Miss Jeffries?” A dewy faced deputy came toward her.
“Sergeant Adams had an emergency call. He’d like you to come back this
afternoon.”

“Fine.” She stalked past. “I’ll be happy to. I plan to press
charges against Santa.”

“For what?”

“I’ll think of something!”

* * *

With Amy in tow, Tom stopped at the precinct’s registration
desk. Before he had a chance to ask about Jessie, she came stomping toward him,
her expression dark.

She slowed her step when she saw them. “What are you doing
here?”

“I got my rental. I thought you could use some moral
support.”

“Where’s Santa?” Amy whined.

Jessie glanced at her, then back to him. “Let’s go outside.”

Good idea
, Tom thought. They were all still bundled
in their winter clothes. Tom was already sweating, and Jessie appeared to be
fuming.

She pulled Amy aside on what was probably a grassy area, now
covered with smooth snow, and knelt beside her. “He looks like Santa, and I
know he even told you he was, but Amy…”

She glanced up at him, and Tom nodded.

“He’s not Santa.”

“Yes, he is.”

“I’m sorry, Amy. He only wanted to make you feel happy.”

Considering what had happened, Jessie had just given that
man three hundred times the credit he deserved. Tom knew this was excruciating
for Jessie, yet she did her best to spare Amy’s feelings. Jessie was a trooper,
that was for sure.

For a moment Amy’s brow set in what he saw as a mixture of
defiance and clinging hope. Then her lower lip jutted.

“He’s just a nice old man who did something really bad. He
has to go to jail for it.”

“He didn’t do it.”

Jessie nodded. “Yes, Amy. The police caught him.”

“Naw-aww, you don’t know.” Amy wrenched away from her and hugged
Tom’s legs. He hefted her up and she threw her arms around his neck. She didn’t
sob, but she was crying, he could feel her wet tears against his cheek.
 He figured she had learned to cry quietly around her mother.

“I’m sorry, Amy,” he said, smoothing her hair. “Sometimes
good people do bad things.”

What a lesson for a kid to learn about on Christmas. He’d
wanted to protect her, to give her a good, safe life. To make her happy. At
this moment he was made painfully aware how impossible that was. You couldn’t
stop the people or things that were bound and determined to hurt you.

He gestured to Jessie and she followed him to the car. He
fastened Amy into the backseat and he and Jessie climbed in front.

“It isn’t fair,” Amy whined.

“Yeah, well…” Jessie muttered to herself. Tom could have
finished the sentence for her.
Life isn’t fair
.

“All the kids are going to miss Christmas.”

Jessie glanced at him with a strange sort of frown. The
crease in her brow deepened. “You know what the really weird thing is?” She shifted
in the deep leather seat of the Envoy to face him. “There is no record of his
fingerprints.”

“That’s hard to believe, in this day and age.”

“He said something that keeps coming back to me…”

“You saw him in there?”

Jessie nodded, but her gaze had drifted off somewhere into
the footwells of the SUV.

“What did he say about the robbery?”

“Huh? Um, that he didn’t do it.”

“He didn’t,” Amy chimed in with a huffy little voice.

“He said I’ll get… No, that’s ridiculous.”

He was about to ask her to elaborate when he pulled to a
stop at a yellow light. Up ahead, the road was crowded with traffic crawling
past a police car blocking one of the street’s two lanes. Yellow barrier tape
crisscrossed a broken window in the door of a shop and the sidewalk was taped
off off from pedestrian traffic.

“Is that the jewelry store?”

Jessie nodded. She glanced to the other side of the street
and her brows knit.

Tom pulled forward when the light turned and drove carefully
past the police car.

“Stop!” Jessie’s outburst nearly made him jump out the
window. She pointed, tapping her finger against the window. “Turn here.”

“In here?” It was a gas station with cyclone fencing around
the islands. It appeared the tanks had been dug up before the snows. He turned
the Envoy into the pristine snow coating the driveway.

“No, never mind.” She dragged in a sharp breath.

“You want me to turn around?”

“Yes. No.  I don’t know!” Jessie pressed the heels of
her hands against her eyes.

He braked to a stop. “I’ll let you think about it for a
minute.” Jessie was obviously conflicted about something.

“Can I use this?” She picked up his cell phone from the
center console.

“Of course, if you can get a signal. Jessie, what’s going
on?”

She dialed and brought the phone to her ear. “Hey, Elmer.
What’s up? I know, listen, do you still have the key to Walt’s Texaco? I need
to see something.”

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she whispered.

Tom only raised his eyebrows.
Doing what?

She glanced at him and a sheepish grin slid over her features.
It turned into a smile, and at that moment he would have gone along with
whatever she asked. She brought the phone back to her ear when a voice buzzed
through. “Yeah? Are you sure? All right, I’ll call you back if I can’t find
it.”

She snapped the flip-phone shut and lowered her hands to her
lap, staring at the back door to the station’s office.

“Jessie?”

Even Amy was quiet, staring at her from the backseat.

“I’ll probably live to regret this.”

His blood sped up. Jessie’s face was still masked with
indecision. She had an unusual gleam in her eye. This woman had proved to him
last night there was no end to her amazing sense of adventure. What did she
have in mind now? He’d expected she would be sinking into a crevasse of
darkness after this latest event, but instead, she seemed…energized.

“What is it?” he asked in a whisper.

“Probably nothing.” She sighed, staring at the building for
a long moment before she turned to him. “You might want to take Amy and go
somewhere else, considering I’m about to go into a place when I know the owner
is in Florida and there’s a police car right across the street.”

“I wanna come,” Amy said in an insistent voice, as though
she knew some adventure was in the wind.

He glanced in the back seat. “Now, wait a minute—we don’t
even know what she’s doing.”

“I wanna come anyway!”

As if he’d let Jessie out of his sight. He turned back to
the beautiful redhead beside him. Those full lips curled into the barest smile.
He thought back to her kisses last night, the wonderful things she’d done with
that lush mouth.

“I’ll park in the back.”

Tom was with her through thick or thin. He had to prove that
to her. He wouldn’t let himself be one of the many people who had let her down.

“Walt installed three motion sensitive cameras on the roof
last spring after a string of vandalism kept happening at night. They record to
a hard drive from ten to six when the station is closed.”

“How do you know all this?”

She pointed to the glass window at the side of the building
as he maneuvered the car around.
Elmer’s Tow and Cradle
was painted in
the same red and gold old fashioned letters that marked the side of the tow
truck. “Elmer works out of this station.”

“When did it close?”

“Two months ago, but the system would still be running.
Probably.”

“What happens when the hard drive gets filled up?”

“Usually it doesn’t, because he reviews the footage every
day and deletes it. But you’re right, there’s a very good chance it has because
Walt’s been gone almost a month.” She glanced out the window. “But the hard
drive is huge, and it only records when the motion sensor is activated. We
should be able to pinpoint the recordings from last night based on the time
stamp.”

His hope surged, now that he understood what she was getting
at. If “Santa” really was innocent, the surveillance footage might reveal
proof.

“What if the power’s gone out? Would the system
automatically reset itself when it came back on?”

She shrugged at the same time she grinned. “We’ll soon find
out.”

Jessie hopped out of the SUV and walked down the backside of
the building until she came to a snow covered lump. She grabbed it and rocked
it over. It was a planter. She swept her hands through the snow for a few
minutes.

“Viola!” She held up the key.

“Are we going inside?” Amy asked.

“Yes, but we have to be quiet,” Tom told her. “We’re not
supposed to be here.”

She dropped her voice to an excited whisper. “Oooh, this is
scary!”

Tom followed Jessie inside, clutching Amy’s hand. A small
console on the wall started beeping.

“Uh oh—phone.”

He handed it back and she dialed Elmer again. “I need the
alarm code.”

Seconds ticked by, and he started to sweat. It would not
look good for a lawyer to get arrested on a B&E charge.

“Elmer,” she said urgently, “I’ve got twenty seconds before
the alarm goes off!”

That was the last thing he needed, to end up in jail only
two days after picking up his daughter. He glanced out the window at the police
car across the street.

“Are you sure? No, his birthday is in March.”

She punched buttons on the keypad, visibly holding her
breath. Tom held his with her.

The beeping cut off. No sirens screamed.

The breath whooshed out of him. Thank God.

She looked at him and grinned. “Faith isn’t something other
people give you. It’s something you find within yourself.”

Tom was struck speechless. That wasn’t exactly what he
expected to hear from Jessie of all people, but he enjoyed hearing her say it.

They passed into the tiny office and Jessie opened an
out-of-place looking cupboard. Inside a hard drive whirred. “It’s on.”