Anne Stuart - Star Light, Star Bright Read online

  Star Light, Star Bright

  By Anne Stuart

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDONAMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURGSTOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRIDPRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter One

  First Week of Advent

  It was snowing again. Angela McKenna navigated the icy roads with her usual panic, driving her old Jeep at a snail’s pace. At least it had all-wheel drive. But even that wonderful invention wasn’t foolproof when it came to ice. This was her second winter spent on the shores of Lake Champlain, and she would have thought she’d have gotten used to the driving by now. After all, she could navigate the heart of Chicago, the insanity of New York, the freeways of L.A. without breaking a sweat. But let a few flakes of snow start drifting out of the Vermont skies and she was swamped with a tightly controlled terror. It was a good thing she didn’t have to go anywhere for work—she would have been hopeless. Except, maybe that would have forced her to learn how to drive in the snowy vicinity of Crescent Cove without courting a heart attack.

  She usually avoided going out entirely when the weather was bad, but right now she was driving home from Burlington Airport after spending Thanksgiving with her parents in Chicago, and the sooner she got back the better. It was only going to keep on snowing.

  They’d put the holiday decorations up in the middle of town while she’d been gone. Reindeer danced from every streetlight, and the big tree at the end of the main street was ablaze with lights. Wreaths were on every one of the white clapboard houses she passed. Just after four and already growing dark, the sidewalks of Crescent Cove were empty.

  She had to get home and off these snowy roads, she thought as she made her way through town with single-minded concentration, past the stores and restaurants, heading north, breathing deeply as she listened to the New Age holiday music on her car’s CD player, when for some reason she hit the right turn signal. She took the turn, half in a daze. In all the time she’d spent in Crescent Cove she’d never gone down this particular narrow road, never even noticed its existence, and why she’d do so in the middle of a raging blizzard made no sense at all. Nevertheless, that was exactly what she had done.

  Well, it wasn’t actually a raging blizzard—more a flurry or two. And maybe she’d just been daydreaming—forgetting where she was, and taken the wrong turn. It would be easy enough to stop and head back the way she’d come. She’d never been gifted geographically, and if she kept going in a strange direction, God knows where she’d end up. Her safest bet was to turn around.

  The street was packed with the early snow, and she pulled into a driveway beside a small store, then backed out again. Not into the street, but into a parking spot just outside the tiny shop.

  Crescent Cove was too small a place, especially in the winter, for Angie not to have known every single side street, every shop, every restaurant. Nevertheless, this tiny shop was entirely new to her, and the warm light spilled out onto the sidewalk.

  On impulse she turned off the car and climbed out. She never could resist a mystery, and the appearance of a new street, a new store, was unimaginable. Of course the street wasn’t new—that would be impossible. She just hadn’t seen it before—the snow made everything look different.

  And once she could read the faded gilt sign over the front door she breathed a sigh of relief. Christmas Candles by Mrs. Claus, it read. The very cuteness of it should have been cloying, but Angie was in a generous mood. No wonder she’d missed it—it was a seasonal business. No one would be buying Christmas candles in the busy summer.

  The snow was falling gently on her shoulders, and she realized she should return to the car and get her butt safely home, but something kept her rooted to the sidewalk. After all, she’d decided this would be the Christmas she would go all out, and it was important to support local businesses. Buy Vermont First, they said, and she opened the old oak door, listening to the silvery laughter of bells as she stepped inside.

  She was expecting to be assaulted by artificial perfumes, but instead the place smelled warm and delightful, like Christmas cookies. Candles of various shapes and sizes were arranged on a number of tables, decorated with festive tablecloths and sweet-smelling greenery, and Angie felt a surge of happiness that hadn’t been there in a long, long time. Christmas always did that to her.

  “Merry Christmas, dearie.” The woman seemed to materialize out of the shadows, and Angie would have laughed, except it seemed so right. The owner of the shop had dressed the part—rosy cheeks, wire-rimmed glasses, a red-velvet mob cap atop her soft white hair.

  “Merry Christmas,” Angie replied automatically. “I don’t really know why I’m here…”

  “You’re here for a Christmas candle,” the woman said in a comfortable voice.

  “Well, I suppose I am,” Angie admitted. “I just hadn’t realized…”

  “We seldom do,” the so-called Mrs. Claus said. “I’ve got just the one for you, Angie.”

  Angie was startled. “How did you know who I was?”

  “This is a very small town in the winter, dearie. Everyone knows everyone.”

  Angie was about to point out that Mrs. Claus was a complete stranger to her, but she was polite enough to keep quiet. Besides, it wasn’t strictly true. There was a familiarity about the old lady that was unmistakable.

  “I’m not sure what I’m looking for. Whether I want some kind of Christmas scent or—the candles are unscented,” she said suddenly, just realizing it.

  “No, they’re not. They only release their fragrance when they’re lit. And I promise you, there’s nothing artificial about the scent. If you smell cinnamon and apples, then that’s what’s in the candle.”

  “Well, maybe a nice big red pillar,” Angie said, always a sucker for cinnamon and apples.

  “No, dearie. I’ll get yours.” The woman disappeared into the back of the store with a swirl of her red velvet skirts, then reappeared holding a wide, slightly conical shaped candle. It was deep gold, with Florentine scrolling around the top and bottom, and a line of angels dancing. It was a work of art, undeniably beautiful, and not in Angie’s budget. If she had any money to spare it was earmarked for presents, not her own pleasure.

  “I don’t think I can afford it,” she said.

  “Oh, you don’t have to pay for it,” the woman said. “It’s already been taken care of. You notice there are three angels dancing on the side of the candle? One is for Christmas past, one for Christmas present and one for all the Christmases of the future. It will last just until Christmas morning, and when the candle burns down completely everything you need will be yours.”

  Angie would have objected, but the old woman put the pillar in her hand. It felt heavy, warm and oddly comforting. “But who…?”

  “Does it matter? Think of it as a gift from Santa Claus. Or are you going to tell me you don’t believe in him?”

  She had been about to say that very thing but something stopped her. Certain things were meant to be accepted, not scrutinized, and she accepted the gift as she accepted the existence of Santa Claus. Unlikely, but very nice anyway.

  “I guess I’ll have to find out on my own,” she said.

  The woman calling herself Mrs. Claus smiled sweetly. “I guess you will, dearie. In the end, we all have to find out on our own.”

  Not until Angie was halfway down the town road to Black’s Point did the oddness of the encounter hit her. The candle sat on the seat beside her, the rich colors glowing in t
he darkness. If all her wishes were going to come true when the candle burned down, then she’d better plan to burn it night and day. The old woman said it would last until Christmas Day, but Angie doubted it would make it halfway through Advent, the four weeks before Christmas. Still, it was a lovely thing, and its very presence in the car seemed almost a blessing, to ward off the danger of the snowy roads.

  At least they’d gotten around to plowing Black’s Point Road. Since she was the only inhabitant out there during the winter, and since the town road crew knew perfectly well that she didn’t have to get out to a job, her road was low priority. She’d spent four days last winter trapped there, about to run out of canned soup, when her best friend, Patsy, had raised holy hell and gotten them to plow her out.

  Had Patsy arranged for the candle? Unlikely—she and Ethan were saving every penny for their new baby, and besides, Patsy was a weaver. She made her own presents.

  Angie was in luck this time—the plows had been through recently, and she only slid a little as she took the sharp turn left onto the narrow road. The snow was tapering off—typical that once she was safely home the driving would suddenly become safe once more. Maybe fate was trying to tell her she shouldn’t have run away to Vermont when her marriage failed. Well, she had no intention of listening to such an arbitrary judgment. She’d had to rethink her entire life in the wake of Jeffrey’s behavior, and she wasn’t about to let a little thing like snow stop her from living the life she wanted. And there was no place in the world, not even the house she grew up in outside of Chicago, that felt like home the way Crescent Cove did. She was never sure why—it simply was.

  She pulled into her narrow driveway. They’d kept plowing past her house for some reason—usually they just turned around in her driveway and headed back into town. Must be someone new on the road crew who didn’t know the rules, she thought. There was no one else to plow.

  Still, it would make walking easier. She no longer played tennis or racquetball, and even though she now lived in Vermont, she’d decided that downhill skiing was vastly overrated. Particularly when you were skiing alone.

  But walking in the silent woods that surrounded Crescent Cove was good for the body and soothing for the soul. She’d worked out all sorts of problems while she walked, and when the snow got really deep she even resorted to high-tech snowshoes. The weather wasn’t that bad yet, though Vermont had had more than its share of snow already. And it wasn’t even winter yet. Technically.

  Weather-wise, winter in Vermont began around November 15. They’d already had two nights of below-zero temperatures, and caterpillars and the Farmer’s Almanac had predicted a long, cold season.

  The house was icy when she unlocked the door. She kept the heat down to sixty-two degrees most of the time, and augmented it with a cast-iron wood-fired stove. She shivered, closing the door behind her and flipping on the lights. Maybe she’d indulge in cranking the heat up, just until she had time to get changed and start a fire. Or maybe she wouldn’t, and then her money would last her just a bit longer.

  That was the problem with having married a lawyer, she thought, kicking off her soaked shoes and walking on the icy floors to the old farmhouse kitchen. Not only had she spent her marriage in a lifestyle well above what she was accustomed to, but her divorce settlement had been minuscule. It was her fault—she’d wanted to end her relationship with her philandering husband as quickly and neatly as possible, and land values in Crescent Cove had skyrocketed. The monetary value of the old farmhouse was impressive to any judge. The only problem was, she had no intention of selling the place, and it was the only thing she’d come away with from the failed marriage, while Jeffrey had kept the house, the car and most of their joint property.

  She could always try to get a real job, but assistant professors of English literature were not in high demand, even with a number of colleges and universities nearby. And somehow the very thought of academia sent chills down her spine, colder than the Vermont winters. She wasn’t in the mood for politics, students, or the Dead White Guys that made up most college curricula. The full professors got the fun stuff—the assistants were left with the same old crap. If she had to teach Charles Dickens one more time she would scream. Well, maybe not if she was teaching A Christmas Carol. But then, she’d always been a total sucker for Christmas.

  No, she liked what she was doing just fine. Even loved it. She’d always loved to bake, and providing pies and breads and other goods to the local businesses kept her busy and brought her some peace of mind. Sister Krissie’s Bar and Grill, Mort’s Diner, even BK’s Grocery provided enough standing orders that she stayed reasonably solvent.

  The smell of the farmhouse welcomed her like an old friend. The place had been empty for years—Jeffrey’s parents had acquired it as an investment and then forgotten all about it. Why they couldn’t have bought her own family’s house when finances had forced its sale was another question. Instead, the über-wealthy Jacksons had bought it and bulldozed it to make room for another tennis court, wiping out generations of love and memories. Typical of the new breed of summer people, she thought. Wipe out memories and traditions in favor of ostentation. The Jacksons had only been the first of the professional invaders. Their company, Worldcomp, made so much money that no one could figure out what they were doing in a quiet little seasonal community like Crescent Cove.

  Except to tear down her family’s home, she thought grumpily. And bring Brody Jackson into her life, someone she could have well done without.

  She put the candle down on the scrubbed kitchen table and set to work. It didn’t take her long to get a new fire going, and the heat began spreading through the kitchen. She lit the candle, and the scent was amazing. It smelled like cinnamon, and delicious enough to make her stomach rumble. She closed off most of the place in the winter—surviving nicely on the first floor with a bedroom, a bathroom and the parlor along with the huge old kitchen. In the summer she threw open the upstairs and invited everyone to visit, but the winters were hers, and she welcomed that season’s approach with a sense of relief.

  While the room was heating, she quickly put on some warmer clothes—jeans and a sweater and thick wool socks. She didn’t bother with her indulgent silk long johns—those she kept for subzero weather. Today was comfortably in the upper twenties, according to her outside thermometer. A nice, brisk afternoon.

  Five trips later, everything was in from the back of the car. One suitcase of her own, and four more that she’d borrowed from her mother. The first one was filled with Christmas presents from Marshall Fields. The other three were packed with family Christmas ornaments that her mother had finally decided to hand over.

  Angie could never understand why her mother had held on to them for so long. Her academic parents had downsized when Angie had married, moving into a small apartment that overlooked Lake Michigan, and from then on they’d only had a tabletop tree, with no room for many of Angie’s favorite ornaments or the Christmas tree house, an ornate tree stand made by her father’s great-uncle Otto early in the last century. For some reason her parents had preferred to keep things in storage rather than let her have them, which was unusual, because her parents tended to dote on their only child.

  Her marriage had ended Christmas Eve, and she’d spent the next few weeks huddled in a hotel room, not in the mood to celebrate a damn thing. By the next Christmas she’d been divorced for nine months and living in the farmhouse in Crescent Cove, and Jeffrey’s new wife had just given birth. To Angie’s surprise her mother had called, offering to ship the Christmas decorations east to her, but she’d politely declined, planning to spend the holiday alone in her farmhouse with nary a decoration or a Christmas carol to keep her company.

  Big mistake, she’d realized. Fortunately, her old friend Patsy and her husband were living in town, and they’d dragged her out of her morose isolation and into the warmth of their large family holiday that had included Patsy’s mother and her new husband, Patsy’s father and his new wife, Ethan
’s father and his new wife, and Ethan’s mother, newly widowed, plus five brothers and sisters and their spouses, countless children and even the ninety-year-old matriarch of the family, known to all as Aunt Ginny.

  It had been impossible to stay depressed in such chaos. Impossible not to feel the faint, tentative rebirth of the Christmas spirit. And now that another year had passed, she was once more ready to celebrate the holidays with a vengeance.

  She’d been half tempted to go right out and find the perfect tree the moment she’d come home from Chicago. A great many people in Crescent Cove put up their trees the day after Thanksgiving and took them down the day after Christmas. Since Angie had every intention of leaving her tree up until Twelfth Night, she decided it might not be smart to cut one so early, and besides, her mother was shipping the Christmas tree house stand to her. Time enough to find a tree when that arrived.

  But she wasn’t going to wait any longer to get the smell of pine in her house. She needed to make an outdoor wreath, an Advent wreath, a kissing ball and anything else she could think of, anything to start the season off properly.

  She grabbed the clippers from the jumbled junk drawer, put on her felt-lined Sorrels, her down jacket, her turtle fur hat and her leather work gloves and headed out into the gathering New England dusk.

  She knew just where she was going. The trees down by the edge of the lake were thick and cluttered—she could easily trim a boatload of branches off them and it would only help them flourish.

  Tucking the clippers in one pocket and her flashlight in another, she headed down the freshly plowed road, toward the lake, with the vast, comforting silence of the Vermont winter all around her.

  A little too silent. There were still the occasional bears around, and fisher cats were downright nasty, so she began humming, then started singing. Loudly. “Good King Wenceslas” was an excellent song for tromping through the snow, and she’d always had a good strong voice. Patsy had talked her into joining the church choir for the Christmas season, and Angie had rediscovered the joy of singing. And on this deserted spit of land she could sing as loud as she wanted and no one was around to hear.