Page 20 of The Christmas Stroll

The Callahan house stood four streets over, gray-shingled like every other, with a plain green wreath on the door and no bow, because Marianne considered bows too showy.

Will went up the salted path and knocked twice, and his mother opened the door already talking, a dish towel over one shoulder and reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

“If this is about the lantern star, I’ve already told the marshal - ”

“It’s not.” He handed her the note. “Bandstand wreath. Signed off. All it needs is your two volunteers with the ladder.”

Marianne took the note and read it at arm’s length, chin lifted, and Will watched her look for the trap in it and fail to find one, because there wasn’t one where she was looking.

Her mouth pressed thin. She read it again. “Madam signed off?” she repeated, still refusing to name Helen.

“Done deal.” Will replied evasively. “You just point the ladder.”

A long pause. Behind her a kettle was starting to sing, so Marianne handed the note back and gave a single downward nod, the closest thing to agreement she’d offered anyone at all in ten days.

“Fine,” she said. “Tomorrow morning.”

“Understood,” Will said to the closing door.

Back in Helen’s kitchen, Maggie’s phone lit face-up on the star-crumbled roster.

Confirmed, Will wrote. Tomorrow AM. Then, a second later: Yours?

Maggie set the phone down, went to the foot of the stairs and she pitched her voice up, easy and offhand. “Mom - the bandstand wreath’s set. Tomorrow morning.”

A pause upstairs. Then Helen’s voice came down, pleased and clipped and entirely satisfied. “Well. High time. You may tell Her Majesty I accept.”

“Why thank you,” Maggie muttered, smiling.

She went back to the table and picked up the phone.

Both confirmed, she typed to Will. Wreath goes up tomorrow.

I kinda feel like we’ve defused a bomb by cutting the wire while blindfolded, he wrote back.

Maggie grinned. That’s exactly what we’ve done.

She set the phone face-down on the roster, screen to the wood, and sat for a moment in the warm hum of the kitchen with the toast smell and the low carols and the snow going soft outside the window over the sink.

Then let out one long relieved breath, quiet and private, the kind professional-Maggie would never ever let anyone see her take at an event.

Chapter 15

The relief lasted about ninety minutes.

The front bell went, and before Maggie had even made it to the hallway, the door was already open, because the woman on the step had knocked and entered in a single unbroken motion, the way so many neighbors did on this island.

Cold air and the smell of anise came in together and there stood Evelyn Price, seventy-two and unhurried, a green linen scarf knotted over her collar and a canvas tote sagging off one shoulder, holding a foil-covered plate out in front of her like an offering to a temple.

“Pfeffernüsse,” Evelyn announced. “I made too many, which is the best quantity of course. Helen, are you decent? I’ve come to celebrate.”

Her mother had come down the stairs behind Maggie, and she paused three treads up. “Celebrate what?”

“The armistice.” Evelyn set the plate on the hall table without being asked, peeled back a corner of the foil, and the deep spiced smell of cookies filled the little hall, molasses and clove and black pepper and something like cardamom underneath. “I just met George Katsaros at the post office, who said the bandstand wreath’s been settled at last, both sides agreeing, and I thought, well thank heaven, the standoff’s finally over.” She helped herself to one of her own cookies and considered the room over the top of her sunglasses, which she had not taken off, even though it was a gray day in December and indoors. “Whoever brokered it deserves a medal. Or at the very least a cookie.”

Maggie felt the temperature of the hall change before she saw it happen. It was a thing she recognized from a hundred galas, the moment a room turned. And she watched it turn now in the set of her mother’s shoulders on the third stair.

“Both sides agreeing,” Helen repeated, in a voice gone perfectly flat.