Baby It's Cold Outside (26 page)

“Arnie, you had me so frightened.” She put him down, crouched, looking him over. She was crying a little, and her eyes were cracked and red, but he didn’t smell whiskey. She pressed her hand over her mouth then, and her shoulders started to shake.

He put his arms around her. “I’m fine, Mama. I’m safe. See, I have my storm house.”

But she just wrapped her arms around him, held onto him.

“How did you know he was here?” Mrs. Morgan was talking, her voice sounding suddenly frail.

“Gordon Lindholm came into the clinic with Violet Hart. She told us where to find him. I brought your horse and sleigh home.”

Arnie looked up at the voice. The sheriff, in his oversized coat, his sculpted hat. Arnie shrank back from him, remembering the unfinished lines on the board. “I can unhitch him, stable him in the barn for you, if you’d like, Dottie.”

Dottie nodded as Arnie’s mother stood. “Thank you, thank you for taking care of my boy.”

Arnie looked up at her, and Mrs. Morgan smiled down at him. “He’s a very brave boy.”

“And foolish! He should have never left the school!” But his mother smiled down at him, and he let the tension in his chest uncoil. “I went there straight from the factory, but you were gone.” She looked at Mrs. Morgan. “We stayed there, in the school, all the girls from the mill and me. And another group holed up at the dance hall. Frank Duesy has his snowplow out and is clearing the roads. I followed the sheriff over in the farm truck. Do you need anything?”

Mrs. Morgan wrapped her arms around herself. Shook her head.

His mother took his hand. “Let’s go home, Arnie. Tomorrow is Christmas Day. You don’t want Santa to find you missing.”

But he would find me here.
The words nearly broached his lips. Instead, he nodded and scampered upstairs to change.

At long last our hero escapes the land of Frigia, riding the wily Snow Dragon, with its massive teeth. But he waves good-bye to Queen Fria, as she stands in the doorway of her enchanted castle, bidding him farewell on his journey.

Don’t be frightened, Queen Fria. The Flash won’t forget your great kindness to him and his companions.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sunday, December 25

Jake knew everything about Violet’s life.

At least everything she’d written to Alex. Violet tried to catalogue the stories, but they meshed together into a knot of disbelief.

Jake had been lying to her for over four years. Reading her mail, sending her postcards, nurturing the dream that Alex might be waiting on the other end.

Violet just wanted to flee back to her home, forget about Storm House and Jake Ramsey and the fact that he made her feel like a fool.

A pitiful fool. Because every word out of his mouth only confirmed it.

“You were just so lonely, Violet. And it broke my heart. I know it was wrong for me to read your letters. You have to know I didn’t set out to betray you. I received Alex’s packet and I was curious about this woman who wrote to him. I had to write back, and when you kept writing, I simply couldn’t stop.”

She didn’t strangle him in the hallway of the Frost Medical Clinic only because he had saved Gordy’s life. “No doubt about it,” said Dr. Flemming as Jake had muscled Gordy into the physician’s parlor, then to the medical clinic. Well on his way to a heart attack, Gordy received nitroglycerin, and she and Jake kept watch over him as the blizzard finally wore itself out.

Which meant Jake also had plenty of time to try to plead his case.

“It wasn’t about deceiving you. It’s about the fact that you were in Europe, alone, and I wanted you to know that someone cared.”

“But you wrote to me—you made me believe Alex was alive!”

She’d earned a dark glance from one of the ward nurses for her strident 2 a.m. voice and cut it to low.

“You made me feel—and look—like a fool. Writing all those things to Alex. I even invited him to our Christmas ball.”

“You did?”

She’d wanted to slap Jake then, for the look of anticipation on his face. “I invited
Alex,
not you, Jake. I didn’t know you existed.”

She’d hurt him, then, she knew it, the way his mouth closed, the cool set of his eyes. “Yes, of course. My mother received your letter and she’s the one who sent it back.”

Return to Sender.

She wanted to send Jake
Return to Sender
. She wound her arms around herself, shivering. “Why didn’t you just leave it, Jake? I would have figured it out. You didn’t have to come all the way to Frost.”

“You would have thought Alex rejected you. I didn’t want your heart to be broken.”

She’d given a laugh that earned another throat clearing from the nurse. She schooled her voice. “My heart isn’t broken. It’s
shattered.
Eviscerated. I didn’t just lose Alex. I lost the chance to start over, with you. To be a woman without grease on her face.”

“But I don’t want—”

She’d held up her hand. “I don’t want you in my life, Jake. Go home. You delivered your message.” And, as if to confirm that indeed, she wasn’t at Storm House anymore, that she’d reverted to the soldier she was, she managed to say it all without a hitch in her voice.

Then she’d gotten up and found herself a pew in the chapel and tucked the bundle of letters under her head. She slept there, curled in her coat, letting the creases of the pew pad draw into her face.

She woke in the silence of the hospital, the gray of dawn sifting in through the windows of the chapel. The thunder of her heart propelled her to rise, and she shuffled back to Gordy’s hospital room, her breath tight.

Please.

Gordy was still with them, sleeping hard, looking old and drawn in the dusky light.

Jake, however, had listened to her and left.

Have a very merry Christmas.

She flagged down Frank Duesy on his plow just as the sun cast gold over the waves of snow, turning it to gemstone.

“Can I get a ride home?”

He patted the bench seat next to him. “I gotta take another run out your direction anyway.”

Violet tucked herself inside the cab, shivering.

Jake hadn’t even said good-bye.

It didn’t matter. She didn’t want him in her life.

Really.

Absolutely.

She could probably sleep until the New Year. “Thanks, Frank,” she said as she stepped out of his cab. The sun had finally appeared, turning the sky a pale blue, cloudless. She stood for a moment, remembering the blue sky over the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles, after S.H.E.A.F had moved them there from London. A clear sky, without smoke or the debris of battle to mar it. A sky of hope.

“You sure you don’t want me to run you to Johnny’s place?”

“No. I’m sure my mother is worried.” She shut the door, waving to him. He saluted to her then continued down the highway out of town, snow rolling off the side of his shovel like waves.

She had to hike through the drifts to the front door. The porch had protected it, but as she opened the front door—she expected at the least heat, if not the smells of Christmas day—a gasp of cold met her. The house shuddered as she shut the door behind her, caught in a silent chill.

“Mother?”

Her voice echoed against the walls of the house, and she listened, nothing but her heartbeat in her ears.

Mother? I’m home.
She heard her voice echo back to her as if it might be two years ago, the moment she’d arrived home from her service in Europe. She’d wore her dress uniform, carried her army-issue duffel bag over her shoulder.

She hadn’t really expected anyone at the train station. Just a feeble hope put her mother, her brothers there.

She’d braced herself for the fact that her father would be absent.

Violet had stood in the foyer, letting the duffel fall from her shoulder to hit the wood floor. The daisy clock in the kitchen ticked out her heartbeat. Her home smelled the same—lemony cleanser, the fragrance of pot roast, the redolence of family life. She spotted new sofas, the cushions wrapped in plastic, and a fancy new television set in the family room where the Wurlitzer once sat. She walked into the kitchen and discovered it empty. No casserole in the oven, no fresh-baked molasses cookies in the jar.

Water plinked into the sink from the rag hanging over the faucet.

She watched it gather on the edge, drop into the porcelain, bleed down into the drain.

“Violet?”

The voice turned her, and she found a smile as her mother swept into the room. Frances hadn’t aged a day, it seemed, although as she drew closer, Violet could count more lines around her smile. “When did you get home?” She pulled her daughter close, and Violet closed her eyes, breathing in her mother’s smell, talc and rosewater.

“Just now.”

Frances held her at arm’s length. “I’m so sorry. I have it on my calendar for next week.” She pressed her hands against Violet’s face, her dark eyes softening. “You’re home. Finally.”

Violet wove her fingers into her mother’s. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come home for Daddy’s funeral.”

Frances’s eyes filled. “It happened so fast—Johnny didn’t make it home either. But I gave him your father’s watch, and that seemed to help. Johnny is so much like him, you know.”

Violet watched as her mother put her purse on the table, pulled off her gloves.

No, she didn’t know. Johnny wasn’t at all like Daddy save his dark hair, the mischief in his eyes. He didn’t have a mechanical bone in his body. She, however, was identical to her father.

Her voice shook. “Daddy promised me that watch, Mother.”

Frances opened the icebox, pulled out a casserole. “It’s a good thing Thomas and June are coming over for dinner. I made extra.”

“Mother, the watch. Why did you give it to Johnny?”

Frances glanced at her. “It’s a man’s watch, Violet. It doesn’t keep time, anyway.”

It has its own mind, Vi, just like you.

“Go change out of those clothes and put on something pretty.” Frances picked up a match to light the oven, smiled at her. “We’re going to have a celebration.”

A celebration because June was expecting.

And, oh yeah, that Violet had made it home from war.

Probably, it only felt that way.

“Mother?” Violet now called again as she dumped the package of letters onto the kitchen table and shucked off her coat. The electricity had probably stopped the coal stoker in their house too. She stopped at the foot of the stairs and called again.

Had her mother not made it home from the dance hall? Then again, Violet
had
taken the Plymouth.

The Plymouth. She’d have to ask Frank to pry the car out of the tree. Maybe after he’d gotten the roads cleared. She could park it in the garage, try to repair the radiator, the damage to the headlights.

It would probably never run the same again, however.

Mother had probably headed home with June and Thomas. Violet should probably get her boots on, find her snowshoes, and hike back into town, but first she needed to get the stove running, find something to eat, and…

And read those letters. She wanted to see what kind of things she wrote, decide just how embarrassed she should be.

How transparent had she been to Alex, really? She’d told him about her life here in Frost, but had she told him how the news of her father’s passing had turned her inside out? That she couldn’t dance but longed to?

Had she told him about the watch? And the fact that sometimes, when she lay in her bed, she wondered why she wasn’t like other women?

Oh, shoot. Of course she did. She closed her eyes, shaking her head against the brutal truth. Jake knew her life. He knew her secrets. He knew her dreams.

Yeah, now she felt naked.

Pulling on her jacket, she headed downstairs to the cellar, thankful for the stairway her father put in. The coalman poured the coal in through another opening in the house, but it allowed them to access the furnace through the kitchen.

She checked the clinker then added paper and fuel to the center and lit it.

The paper flamed, then the coal began to burn. She shut the door. The heat would rise through the grate in the parlor. Maybe she’d take a pillow and blanket and park herself on top of it, try to press some warmth back into her brittle bones.

Returning to the kitchen, she found cheese and mincemeat and made herself a sandwich. Then, pouring a glass of milk, she retrieved the letters.

A bath would come next, but not until she had some real heat in the house.

She poured the contents of the envelope on the table then started to fish through it. Her early letters were thinner, probably less of herself in them as she talked about life at Fort Meade, or in London. Her last letters, however, contained the challenges of seeing so many people without family, without homes, without hope. She’d hated the brutality of war, wondered if there might be anything good waiting for her.

She read her last letter, sent from Berlin, a month before she shipped home. She’d been transferred to working in the chow line at one of the refugee camps, alongside the Red Cross workers. Meal after meager meal she handed to sallow, starving mothers, their children even more saggy beside them.

She simply longed to return home, to be safe, and away from the suffering. And yes, she’d hated herself for her weakness.

Getting up, she left her lunch and went upstairs to her room. She’d kept Alex’s letters too, in a drawer in her desk. She fished them out then brought them back to the kitchen table and began to sort through them. Only a fool would not have noticed the change in handwriting, but then again, a gal not looking closely might not have noticed.

Thinking of you,
Jake had written on his first card, sent from Minneapolis.

Stay safe,
he’d written on another, featuring photos from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.

From New York City, he’d chosen a card of the Metropolitan Opera House.
This reminded me of Versailles
, he’d written.

Had he ever been there? She had written to him about it…. Oh, he was too clever.

More postcards—of flowers in Washington, DC and then more of Minneapolis, one from London.

What did he do that he traveled so much?