Scrooge and the Single Girl

The son in question nodded wearily. “Okay. You called Caitlin. She offered you this place.”

Jilly nodded. “Your mother was smart. She played it just right. She told me all about how primitive the setup would be, reminded me of all the old stories about your grandmother.” The house had once belonged to Caitlin’s mother, Mavis McCormack, known to everyone in Will and Jilly’s hometown as Mad Mavis. People whispered that Mad Mavis’s ghost still haunted the old house. “But somehow,” Jilly added, “your mother forgot to mention that you would be up here, too. Isn’t that surprising?”

“Not in the least.” Will stared at the woman across the table from him. She’d taken off her big coat and her funny hat, shoved up the sleeves of her red-and-green turtleneck and dug right into the food he’d offered her. She had wild brown hair with gold streaks in it and sparkly gray-blue eyes under thick, straight, almost-black eyebrows—eyebrows so heavy they should have bordered on ridiculous. Yet somehow, they didn’t. Somehow, they looked just right on her.

Attractive? All right, he’d admit it. She was a good-looking woman. If you liked them slightly manic and obsessively upbeat. She had her own business—Image by Jillian, it was called. She counseled fast-track execs and other professional types on how to dress for success—business casual, with flair. She also wrote an advice column, Ask Jillian. The column had started out as a weekly, but recently it had gone to Monday through Friday in the Sacramento Press-Telegram.

Yeah, he knew all about Jilly Diamond. His mother had made sure of that.

“I’m here every year,” he reiterated grimly. “And Caitlin knows it.” He was thinking that he wouldn’t mind strangling Caitlin as soon as he could get his hands on her. He was thinking that she deserved strangling. After all, he’d made it crystal clear to her that Jillian Diamond was not the woman for him.

The woman who wasn’t for him said, “Well, Caitlin didn’t tell me you’d be here, or I promise you, I wouldn’t have come.”

At first, he’d thought otherwise. The last time he’d seen her, at that party of Jane and Cade’s a couple of weeks ago, he could have sworn she was interested. It hadn’t been anything obvious. Just the feeling that if he looked twice, she would, too.

He didn’t have that feeling anymore. Now, she looked no happier to be stuck with him than he was to have found her at his door.

And that was absolutely fine with him.

He heard a strange, soft rumbling sound and saw something furry in his side vision. Her cat. It had emerged from the bathroom and was sitting beside his chair, looking up at him, eyelids lowered lazily, an expression of near-ecstasy on its spotted face, its orange, black and white tail wrapped around its front paws. The rumbling sound, he realized, was coming from the cat. The damned animal was purring so loudly, he could hear it over the howling of the wind outside.

Jillian said, “Okay, Will. Now you tell me. What are you doing up here all alone for the holidays?”

He turned from the scary look of adoration in the cat’s amber eyes and gave it to her straight. “I hate the holidays. I want nothing to do with them. I accept the fact that there’s no way I can avoid this damn jolly season altogether. But I give it my best shot. I decorate nothing. I don’t send a single Christmas card. I shop for no one. And I keep my calendar clear from the twenty-second on. I come up here to my eccentric dead grandmother’s isolated house. I remain here until January second, without television or an Internet connection, with only a transistor radio to keep up with the weather reports and my mobile phone in case of emergencies.” He indicated the Dostoevsky at his elbow. “I catch up on my reading. And I do my level best to tell myself that Christmas doesn’t even exist.”

She stared at him, one of those too-thick eyebrows lifting. He waited for her to ask the next logical question, which was “Why?” When she did, he would tell her to mind her own damn business.

But she didn’t ask. She only said, softly, “Hey. Whatever launches your dinghy.”

They did the dishes together, not speaking. She washed and he dried.

As he hooked the dishtowel on the nail above the sink, he said, “There’s a bedroom down here, off the living area. I’m in there. You get the upstairs all to yourself.” He gestured at the door beside the one that led to the bathroom.

Jilly got her suitcase and her purse and followed him up a narrow flight of steps to a long, dark, spooky attic room. He flicked a wall switch at the top of the stairs. A bare bulb overhead popped on. In the hard, unflattering glare it provided, Jilly took it all in, from the single small window at the head of the stairs to the dingy gray-blue curtain in a pineapple motif at the opposite end.

Someone had taken the time to Sheetrock the slanted ceiling and to paint it and the low walls bubble-gum pink. Too bad they hadn’t bothered to cover the nails or tape the seams. The floor was the same as downstairs—buckling speckled linoleum. Three single beds were arranged dormitory style, with their headboards tucked under the lowest line of the eaves.

Oh joy, Jilly thought.

“There’s a double bed in the other room.” Will gestured at the curtain. “You’d probably be more comfortable in there.”

She went through, set down her things and turned on the small lamp by the bed. This area was pretty much identical to the one she’d just left: Sheetrocked and painted pink, with a single dinky window at the end opposite the curtain. The head of the bed butted up under the windowsill.

Will was standing by the curtain. “Everything okay?” He didn’t look as if he cared much what her answer might be.

“Fine.”

He left her, ducking back through the curtain. She heard his steady tread as he crossed the first room and went down the creaking stairs.

The bed, which was made up already and covered in a threadbare chenille spread, consisted of a set of box springs and a mattress on a plain metal frame. Jilly dropped to the side of it. The springs complained and the mattress sagged beneath her weight. Lovely. She looked at the window and saw her own reflection, ghostly, in the glass. Up here, under the eaves, the eerie sighing of the wind was even louder than downstairs.

She glanced at her watch. It was just seven-thirty. It would be a long, long night.

However. She did have her phone. And she had a few pointed questions for Celia. For instance, did Celia know that Will would be at Mad Mavis’s old house? Was Celia in on the matchmaking scheme, along with the devious, domineering Caitlin?

Jilly had a hard time believing that. For one thing, Jilly had never so much as mentioned to either of her closest friends that maybe—just possibly—she might have considered dating Will Bravo. And she’d also been careful not to ask questions about him. She’d scrupulously avoided showing too much interest when his name came up in conversation.

She did know there was tragedy in Will’s past. A few years ago, he’d lost a woman he truly loved. Her name had been Nora. But Jilly had only heard about her in passing.

“Poor Will,” Jane had said a month or so ago. “He was so in love. Did you know? Her name was Nora. Cade told me he’s still not really over her, even after five years….”

And about a week later, Celia had mentioned that Will and Nora had planned to be married. And that Nora had died before the wedding.

But Jilly never got the details. She didn’t let herself ask for them. It had never been anything solid, anyway, those stirrings of attraction she’d felt for Will. And in the end, he’d squashed her feelings flat, leaving her exceedingly glad that she hadn’t said a word.

Jilly dug her phone out of her purse and pushed the Talk button—and got the same crackling static she’d gotten earlier, when she’d tried to call Caitlin.

“Wonderful.” She tossed the phone down on the bed and let out a groan of frustrated boredom.

She thought of the Cheez Doodles she’d left out in the car. A bag or two could really help to get her through the night. And while she was at it, she could also grab her boom box and CDs. Since Caitlin had warned her that the cabin had no television or stereo, Jilly had brought along the boom box and a thick black zippered folder full of tunes. And not only that. Now that she thought about it, she remembered she’d stuck a few intriguing novels in her overnighter. The evening didn’t have to be a total bust, after all.

On the negative side, getting the snacks and the music would mean another freezing excursion out to her car. But not to worry. There was good news here. This time she could handle it herself in a single trip. No need to get the scrooge downstairs involved.

Her coat and hat were waiting where she’d left them, on the pegs by the door. She was pulling on the coat when Will said, “What’s going on?”

She flipped her hair out from under her collar and reached for her hat. Only then did she bother to face him.

He was sitting in the easy chair in the living area, reading his big, fat Russian novel. He’d dug up an old radio from somewhere and had it tuned in to what sounded like it might be an NPR talk show, though he had it down so low, who could say for sure? Missy lay curled in a ball on the rag rug at his feet, looking as if she belonged there. The cat seemed to like him—a lot. While Jilly understood that cats were contrary by nature, the idea of her own sweet Missy developing a kitty crush on Will Bravo didn’t please her at all. To Jilly’s mind, it was carrying contrariness altogether too far, not to mention that it bordered on disloyalty, considering the way Jilly felt about the man.

“I’m going out to my car. I forgot a few things.”

He frowned. “It’s pretty wild out there. Are you sure you can’t get along without whatever it is?”

“Oh, yes. Absolutely. We’re talking utter necessities.” She smiled brightly and gave him an emphatic nod.

He was slanting her a doubtful look. “You need some help?” He didn’t sound terribly anxious to get up from that comfortable chair and trudge out into the freezing, windy darkness.

But at least he had offered. She said, more pleasantly than before, “No, thanks. I can manage.”

He shrugged and went back to his big, boring book.

She pulled open the door and went out into the icy night. A huge gust of wind came roaring down the porch just as she stepped over the threshold, so she had to struggle with the door in order to get it shut. Then she wrapped her coat close around her, hunched her shoulders against the cold and headed for her car.

The snow was thicker on the ground than it had been the last trip out. And the storm itself seemed worse, the wind crueler, the snow borne hard on it, not falling at all, but swooping in sideways, stinging when it hit her cheeks. The branches of the pines that rimmed the clearing whipped wildly, making those strange, ghostly crying noises as the wind rushed between them. Jilly forged on to her car, passing beneath that lone maple tree, hearing those creepy crackling sounds, like bones rubbing together, as the branches scraped against each other.

At the Toyota, she hauled up the hatch and crawled inside. She got the boom box from the back seat, then climbed over that set of seats and got the CD folder from where she’d left it on the front passenger side. Then she backed out, grabbing a bag of Cheez Doodles on her way. She almost reached for her laptop, too. But it would just be something else to drag back outside tomorrow morning when she loaded up to leave, so she vetoed that idea.

Easing her boots down to the snowy ground, she got the hatch shut. She had the CD folder tucked under an arm and the boom box and the bag of cheese snacks in either hand as she started for the house.