Page 1 of The Christmas Stroll

Chapter 1

The Boston Copley Plaza ballroom smelled of cinnamon, cloves and Christmas. Maggie Sullivan stood just inside the double entry doors with a glass of untouched sparkling water in her hand and three hundred guests spread out before her like a film set she had personally co-ordinated.

Which in fact, she had.

Towering floral arrangements of white roses and eucalyptus threaded with pine and looped in white satin ribbon rose from every table - so tall that the shortest guests had to lean around them to find their dinner partners. Hundreds of warm bulbs strung through garlands along the balcony caught the crystal of the chandeliers, so that the whole room sparkled; gold pooling on marble, catching in the champagne flutes, sliding down the sweep of the grand staircase where a quartet of carolers in claret velvet sang about angels on high.

She had chosen that exact spot for them. Voices carry down a marble stair; Maggie had learned that at the first major gala she ran over twelve years ago, back when she was a terrified event management newbie and trying to hide it.

A tray of mulled wine drifted past, held aloft by a young waiter dressed in black, and the steam off it basically carried the holiday season with it; orange peel, star anise and the deep rich warmth of something on a stove all day.

Across the room, laughter went up around the mayor’s table, bright and unforced, which was the only kind of laughter that mattered at these things. It meant the room was happy. And a happy room ran itself.

Maggie set down her water glass on the tray of another passing waiter without breaking stride, and moved into the crowd.

She did not look like someone at work. That was the point of the dress, a column of deep green silk that let her disappear into the color scheme, and metallic block heels she could stand in for hours because she had trained herself to.

As always at her own events, she moved unhurried and everywhere; a hand grazing a shoulder here, a name delivered warmly there. Halfway across the floor she saw it before anyone else did, a centerpiece on table eleven listing a degree off true - a single waterlogged stem tipping the whole arrangement toward the brink of catastrophe. Maggie reached it, righted it, tucked the stem back into place and had moved on before the woman seated beneath it had even finished her sentence.

Near the kitchen doors, a catering captain was gesturing at a runner with a plate that should not have left the pass. Maggie caught his eye, gave the plate a glance and the captain a look that required no translation. The plate went back, the captain nodded and she smiled at him. The whole exchange had taken four seconds and made no sound.

This, she thought not for the first time, was the version of herself she liked best. Competent. Weightless. In command of something beautiful that did exactly as it was told.

Unlike most other things in her life.

As if on cue, her phone buzzed against her hip, tucked into the obligatory pocket in her dress. Maggie slipped the device out, expecting the florist, or valet, or even her trusty office assistant Eloise, who never rested.

But instead, the screen read Lucy, her old friend from home.

Maggie’s face curved into a smile. She stepped out of the current of the room and into the shelter of a nearby pillar wrapped in fresh garland; the pine cool and resinous against her bare arm as she lifted the phone to her ear.

“Tell me you’re not calling to say you’ve finally eloped with that lobsterman.”

“I have not,” Lucy replied, and Maggie could hear her friend smiling and behind that the eerie quiet of Nantucket in December - no traffic, no crowds, just the cosy sound of her childhood friend likely sipping something warm from a mug in her little cottage. “Though the year’s still young. How’s the holiday gala of the century?”

“Well, it’s Thursday, so I’d give it the holiday gala of the Thursday.” Maggie turned slightly so her shoulder was to the room, watching the carolers hit the high notes. “The flowers came in six inches too tall and the ice sculpture is technically a fire hazard, but everyone’s drunk and no one’s crying, so I’m calling it a triumph.”

“Of course it is. You could run a royal banquet with a stapler and a folding table.” A pause then, but comfortable; the kind that had thirty-odd years of friendship behind it. Then the sound of ice shifting in a glass on Lucy’s end, so maybe it was something colder she was sipping. “So … I didn’t mean to interrupt you at work, but …” Her tone was so unexpectedly sombre that Maggie’s whole attention snagged on it. “Have you talked to your mom lately?”

Inwardly, Maggie rolled her eyes. Her mother, Helen was seventy-two years old and entirely convinced she was the fixed point around which the turning world arranged itself.

Or the island, mostly.

What now? she wondered. Helen had a gift for producing the kind of situation that began with the words it’s completely under control, and ended with three grown adults on a ladder at midnight.

“I spoke to her last week. Why?”

Lucy made a sound then, not quite a laugh nor a sigh, more the sound of someone deciding how much or little to say. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she assured. “Really. And you know how Nantucket gets in December, everybody’s got an opinion and a casserole.” Another beat. “It’s just … there’s been a bit of a hubbub this year. About the Stroll.”

Maggie immediately felt goosebumps of the unsettling kind. “What kind of hubbub?”

Lucy’s voice stayed warm, but something underneath it had gone serious. “People have been getting conflicting instructions. Two separate emails from the committee about the same thing, but they don’t say the same thing. Setup times, load-in, who’s approving what. I had a pop-up vendor in my shop today saying she’d been told the market opened at eight and also that it opened at ten, and when she queried which, she got told to ask someone else.” A small dry pause. “It’s a bit of a muddle this year all round.”

Helen Sullivan had been at the center of Nantucket’s Christmas Stroll organizing committee for fifty years. Maggie’s mother did not send conflicting instructions. Her mother had a system, a timeline and a persona that functioned with the efficiency of a military operation.

If vendors were confused, something was up. Something significant.

“When did this start?” Maggie asked, frowning.