Chapter 3

three

STERLING

H arvey arrived at The Pear Tree Inn a little before five. In reception, the Christmas lights were blinking on and off, and carols played faintly. I found myself humming along. I might have even tapped my foot. Then the automatic door rolled open, and Harvey stepped inside on a wave of cold air. He smiled when he saw me waiting, and I was struck by how cute he was. He had tousled dark hair, eyes that were either gray or blue, and a smile that was both effortless and gorgeous. He didn’t give off even a hint of artifice, something I might have distrusted in any other setting, but here, in this ridiculous town, it seemed to fit perfectly. Either the Christmas spirit was contagious, or I was so mentally and emotionally wiped after my grandfather’s funeral and all the subsequent bullshit with my family that I couldn’t be bothered to look for an ulterior motive in Harvey Novak. Maybe he was just helping me out because he was that sort of person? I mean, it was unusual but not impossible, right? Or maybe it was just unusual in the circles I was used to.

“Hey.” His cheeks were flushed with cold.

I nodded at the to-go cup in his hand. “Is that another coffee?” I hadn’t meant to sound as judgmental as I did. Had only meant to tease him a bit. Even though I didn’t know him, not really.

“Oh.” He sounded sheepish. “That was a hot chocolate I had earlier. So is this one, and it’s—for you, actually.” He thrust it forward. “I figured we need to keep our energy up for sleuthing. I got myself another one too. It’s in the car.”

I stared for a few seconds before taking the cup from him. “Thanks.”

He gave a quick nod. “You ready?”

I followed him out into the cold, where he made a beeline for a bright red Yaris. “This is Grandma’s ride, huh?”

He glanced at me as he opened the driver’s side door. “Her pride and joy. She keeps a pair of quilting shears in the cupholder, so don’t spill any hot chocolate in the car, or I won’t be able to protect you from whatever she does to you with those shears.”

I climbed in, holding my hot chocolate very carefully. “Wouldn’t the blood make just as much of a mess?”

“Well, she’s not going to murder you in the car. She’d do it somewhere with easy cleanup.”

“I see.” I wasn’t sure where to set the hot chocolate, since my cupholder was, in fact, occupied by a menacing pair of scissors. “So I take it she’s also into true crime?”

“We listen to podcasts together.”

“Bonding time, huh? Does your whole family gather around the phone like people used to gather around the radio back in the day?”

He hesitated. “It’s just her and me.” He glanced over to make sure I was buckled and then pulled out of the parking lot.

Well, didn’t I feel like an idiot? “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make that awkward.”

He shot me a smile. “It’s okay. I’m not, like, traumatized or anything. My grandma raised me, and she’s amazing.”

“That’s good,” I replied awkwardly. The only thing I could say for my own grandmother was that interacting with her provided valuable insight into why my father was the way he was.

“My dad’s out of the picture. And my mom died when I was four.”

I winced internally. “I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago,” Harvey said. And then the corner of his mouth quirked up as he saw I was still holding my cup. “You can move the shears, you know.”

I gingerly moved them to the backseat. “Did you say she’s at quilting class? Doesn’t she need her shears there?”

“Quilting club,” he corrected. “She has club shears. These are just backup.”

“Ah, got it. Do you think we should keep them on us, though, in case it turns out Mary did Freddy in years ago and she doesn’t appreciate us snooping around?”

He glanced at me doubtfully—like I was the weird one, the one who listened to true crime podcasts with his scissors-wielding grandma. But then he grinned, and my stomach did that flip-flop again. “Sounds like you’re no stranger to the amateur sleuth genre.”

“I was Nancy Drew. Not Trixie Belden.”

“Nancy, huh? Not the Hardy Boys?”

“If you think The Haunted Fort has anything on The Secret of the Old Clock… ”

“I don’t. I promise you.”

A long pause.

“Or The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion .”

He laughed, and I realized just how much I was coming to enjoy making him laugh. “You know, there was a secret at a mansion in Trixie Belden too.”

“Of course there was. Mansions always have secrets.”

“Does your family’s mansion have secrets?”

I started. “What makes you think my family has a mansion?”

He only gave a snort and turned off the main street, heading away from downtown. I didn’t press the point. I probably oozed ‘smarmy rich asshole’ the same way this town oozed Christmas spirit.

“So did you tell Mary why we want to talk to her?” I asked.

“Tell Mary?” Harvey kept his hands perfectly at ten and two as he drove. “She doesn’t know we’re coming.”

“You didn’t ask if we could visit?”

“And give her time to get her story in order? No, no. We need the element of surprise.”

“Okaaay, but we don’t actually suspect her of foul play, right? We just want to talk to her about the hat.”

“We’ll see,” Harvey said, without looking away from the road. “We’ll see.”

Maybe I should have been concerned about just what Harvey’s formative Trixie Belden fetish and contemporary true crime obsession had made him into, but by the time we pulled up to Mary Kilmartin’s little farmhouse, I was getting into the spirit of the thing. I’d about thirty-percent convinced myself Mary knew where Freddy’s body was buried and would stop at nothing to keep her secrets.

Except that Mary was super nice and not at all fazed by us showing up unannounced, and within about thirty seconds I found myself wishing she was my mom. She even had sugar cookies fresh out of the oven, leading me to wonder if she constantly kept a tray of them cooling on the stove just in case visitors dropped in.

I quickly learned she would never have time for that level of domesticity: she was a county prosecutor, and this fact threw me a little, because up to that point I hadn’t envisioned Christmas Falls having any crime. Unless having too much holiday spirit was a crime, and I was inclined to believe it was.

We started out asking the questions, but at some point the tables turned and she was basically interrogating us. Nicely, of course. While she served us cookies. But still, it was clear she knew how to take and keep control of a conversation. “Oh, I remember that cotton candy machine!” she said with a laugh when we mentioned the photograph in the museum. “It was always getting gummed up. We pulled so much mangled sugar fluff out of that thing and ate it so it wouldn’t go to waste, I’m surprised none of us have diabetes. And those silly caps. Rachel was the only one who could pull it off; I looked like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Elf on the Shelf.”

After sharing that she’d started with Blitzen’s in 1990 but that Carol Drummer had been there in ’89 and might be more helpful to us, she asked, “How did you know the cap was Blitzen’s? You know Comfort & Joy’s Mattress Company had almost the same caps as part of their uniforms back then.”

“The…the mattress store had Christmas-themed uniforms?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” Harvey said. “I’ve seen the pictures.”

“Like, all year round, or just for the festival?”

“All year,” Mary supplied dryly.

This town really needed to pull its dick out of Christmas’s ass before someone got hurt.

“Well,” Harvey said, “I noticed the tilt of the brim on Blitzen’s caps was a little sharper. Plus, Blitzen’s caps were spruce green, and Comfort & Joy’s were more sage.”

Okay, Harvey wasn’t kidding about Trixie having prepared him well for sleuthing.

“What’s your interest in finding these boys?” Mary tapped the photograph of Freddy and his boyfriend.

Harvey glanced at me. My heart swooped, forcing me to ask myself some hard-hitting questions about why looking at him made me feel like I was about to start blushing and mumbling in a way I hadn’t since psyching myself up to ask Aimee Gockstetter to the Albrecht Preparatory Academy’s winter formal. Which I had done. And then, emboldened, had offered to sneak into her dorm room after the dance. She’d asked if I was sure I wanted to do that, and I’d mumbled something vaguely affirmative, and she’d looked me up and down and told me college would be good for me.

It had been, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was college had been so good for me that I now knew myself well enough to realize I wanted to sneak in through Harvey’s bedroom window at his grandmother’s house and do all the things I would never have been able to do for Aimee Gockstetter.

Mary stared at me oddly as I cleared my throat and said, “Uh, he’s…family. The one on the left. But the one on the right...well, we know he worked at the boat hire place because of the cap. We thought if we could find him, we might find my uncle.”

“So you’ve already tried Bob Hanks?”

“Bob…?” I was still thinking about Harvey’s eyes. Specifically how they were the color of snow in twilight. And if I was having thoughts like that, I needed help.

“Bob Hanks.” Mary took a sip from one of three mugs of cocoa that had somehow appeared during the course of our conversation. “He owned Blitzen’s. Seems like you’d have more luck talking to the man who owned the place than talking to former seasonal workers who may or may have been there when this guy was.”

It was a fair point. My ego smarted a bit.

“But does Bob Hanks have cookies?” Harvey lifted his brows as he shoved another one in his mouth.

Mary grinned. “I doubt it.”

“Well, there you go,” Harvey said around the mouthful.

“I’d try Bob. Like I said, Carol probably knew him if he stuck around for more than a season, but Bob’s more likely to know. And, if he wasn’t working there by the time I was, Bob ought to be able to tell you when and why he left. That might give you some idea where he went after. Maybe he told Bob he was moving or had received a job offer elsewhere or something.”

“You don’t think he stayed in Christmas Falls?” I asked.

“ You think he stayed in Christmas Falls?” she replied.

“No, not necessarily. I mean, I guess I sort of hoped…that would make it easy, if he was still here.”

She gave me a small smile and nodded at the mug of cocoa I still hadn’t touched. I was honestly afraid if I had any more cocoa today, I’d give myself a gastric disorder. “I know almost everyone in this town. But neither of these boys looks familiar.”

I drank some cocoa, not wanting to be impolite. I knew I should be doing more of the talking, since it was my mystery and I was the one who’d roped Harvey into it. But I knew so little about the town, and Harvey seemed so comfortable talking to his fellow Christmas Fallsians. Very much the opposite of where I came from. My father greeting people with a nod and a wave at the country club bore little resemblance to Harvey rolling up to Mary Kilmartin’s house unannounced, plopping himself down at her table and helping himself to cookies. My heart ached in a way I wasn’t expecting.

I refocused on the matter of Freddy. Had he really left Christmas Falls soon after the photo was taken? If Mary had joined the Blitzen’s crew the next year, and Freddy’s guy wasn’t there… Had Freddy just been passing through, or had they both been drifting? Taken a job doing boat tours for a few months to save enough money to head to the next town? It would help if I knew anything about Freddy himself. If he was the capricious sort, blowing wherever the wind took him. Or if he’d longed for a place to settle, a place to belong—the way I sometimes did. Or both? Had he wanted to blow in the wind a bit before he landed on home?

It was sort of a nice thought, I supposed, that I might share something in common with my uncle.

“We’ll definitely see what Bob knows,” Harvey said. “Is he still out by the mill?”

Mary nodded and proceeded to give directions to Bob’s house. “And Harvey? I assume you’ve already thought of this, but: old newspapers. Bob always used to buy a big front-page ad. It would say things like ‘Pop in and visit Tyler and Kelsey for some caramel corn’ or ‘Come and say hello-ho-ho to Rachel and Mary at the cotton candy stand.’” She twisted her mouth wryly. “I remember because my brother used to greet me with ‘Hello, ho’ for years after. Anyway, you might check those.”

Harvey snapped his fingers. “Right. I would have thought of that. Eventually. Probably. I think we have a bunch of old newspapers in storage at the museum.”

“Of course you would have,” Mary said smoothly. “Why don’t you take a few cookies for Bob? He could use them. What kind of person becomes a health nut in retirement? When I retire, it’s going to be my excuse to sit on my ass eating whatever I want, let me tell you.”

We took a few cookies for Bob, thanked Mary, and got back in the car. As we drove away, I said, “Think we should look at those newspapers first? I mean, even if it only has a first name, it’s a start.”

Harvey didn’t answer right away. I waited for him to tell me why that wasn’t our best move and to suggest we go call on Bob Hanks right now even though it was pitch dark and Bob was probably trying to enjoy a peaceful winter’s evening at home. Instead he said, “Hmm.”

“Hmm?” I pressed.

“That is probably what we should do.”

“But?”

“But Festival Hall is open.”

“Okay.”

“Because of the Arts and Crafts. The photographer will want to get pictures at night with the hall lit up with tree lights and candles.”

“Right.” I was clearly missing something.

Harvey let out a sigh. “The photographer is my ex.”

Ah. I couldn’t deny that my heart lifted a little at the knowledge there was an ex. It didn’t mean there couldn’t also be a current. But an ex sounded promising.

Which was a horrible thought.

Obviously I didn’t want Harvey to have endured a painful breakup, but I definitely enjoyed the idea he was single. “Not on good terms?” I asked. I shouldn’t be digging like this. But maybe he wanted to talk about it?

“We parted on okay terms, it’s just he doesn’t want us to have parted at all.”

Ah. “Maybe he’ll be so busy taking photos he won’t notice us slipping into the museum.”

“Maybe.” He was chewing his lower lip in a way that suggested he was genuinely anxious about the possible encounter.

I didn’t know if I was riding a sugar high from all the cookies and cocoa or what, but what came out of my mouth next was out of character, possibly very inappropriate, and yet…

And yet I said it.

“Or, if you want me to walk in there arm-in-arm with you so he realizes he’s got no chance, I volunteer my services.”

Whatever burst of self-confidence had allowed me to make the suggestion, I’d used all of it up in that moment and was left with a prickling heat in my cheeks and a tongue that could no longer form words. I looked out the window at the endless array of blow-up snowmen and wire reindeer in the yards we passed.

Harvey laughed—not quite his usual bright laugh, but a decent effort. “I think that would only give him more to hound me with.”

Of course. Of course that had been a stupid thing to even joke about. Even though I hadn’t actually been joking. Also, fuck this ex for thinking Harvey’s current or future love life was any of his business.

“But I wouldn’t say no,” Harvey added quietly.

I looked over at him, surprised. He was staring straight ahead, focused on the road. But he spared a quick grin for me.

“If you’re really offering.”

“Yeah.” I was too stunned to be more eloquent than that. “Yeah, absolutely.”

“We just can’t let Chloe see. Or Martha. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Part of being an amateur detective is being sneaky,” I said. “It’s what Trixie and Nancy would do.”

Harvey glanced over, smiling once again, and it occurred to me as we headed back into the sparkling lights of Christmas Falls that I liked Harvey’s smile a lot, and I hoped to see more of it.

Harvey was right. Festival Hall was busy when we got back. There were carolers on the front steps as we approached, greeting people with bursts of song. They were all dressed in old- fashioned clothes. The men wore top hats, and the ladies wore bonnets. I might have been taken aback at just how Christmassy it all was, except I’d seen a reindeer earlier today and, frankly, it’d take more than some carolers to top that.

Harvey jammed his hands into the pockets of his coat as we walked inside the building.

So much for making his ex jealous.

I told myself I wasn’t disappointed, but that was probably a lie. Christmas Falls just felt so unlike the real world that I’d already started to fall under its crazy spell. Why not get distracted by the cute guy from the museum? Why not pretend to be his boyfriend to make his ex jealous? Why not fall in love and live happily ever after? It was Christmas .

Huh.

Maybe I’d hit my head when I’d driven my hire car into the ditch, and this wasn’t a flight of fancy I was entertaining, but a symptom of concussion. That would certainly make more sense.

Light and music spilled out of the doorway across the hall from the museum, and I stopped for a look. The hall was full of tables where vendors sold handmade crafts: Christmas decorations seemed unsurprisingly popular.

“I like the crafts,” Harvey said. “But my favorite time of year is the Christmas Tree Festival. Once all this clears out, the trees will arrive. The businesses around town all sponsor a tree and decorate it.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That’s your favorite thing?”

He laughed. “You buy tokens to vote for your favorite tree. All the money raised goes to charity, and the business with the best tree gets bragging rights for the year. It gets super fun and competitive.”

“Is there a tree for the museum?” I asked curiously.

He laughed again. “No. We barely have a budget for toilet paper. That’s way out of our league.”

He knocked me with his shoulder, and we crossed the wide corridor to the place in question. Harvey had to use his key to let us in, and a glance at the opening hours on the door showed the museum was closed for the day. Harvey threw a look over his shoulder as he ushered me inside and closed the door behind us, then let out a long sigh of what sounded like relief.

That he’d dodged the ex, probably.

“Newspapers are this way,” he said, leading the way through the rooms of the museum, flicking on lights as we went. “We’ve got two hours until I need to pick Grandma up, so we might as well see what we can find out about Blitzen’s, right?”

His smile was bright again as he went into full Trixie Belden mode, and I couldn’t help but return it, because despite everything that had happened recently, or perhaps because of it—starting with my grandfather’s death and funeral and culminating with me driving a car into a ditch—this was the most fun I’d had in ages.