Page 39 of The Christmas Stroll

Will pushed off the doorframe. He drank the last of his cocoa, dropped the cup into the bin by the café door, and came down off the step to stand beside her on the cobbles.

The morning had brightened while they’d been talking, the pewter gone thin and silver, a low sun finding the frost and setting the whole glazed length of the street glittering.

“Then we’d better finish that list,” he said jauntily. “Especially when the pharmacy’s still committing crimes against the pedestrian zone.”

“Three inches,” Maggie repeated.

“An outrage.”

They turned back up toward Main together, walking in synch again, boots crunching the fresh snow, the garland lights burning gold on either side and the smell of clove and orange and sea salt moving with them.

Maggie opened her notebook again and found the next unticked line and put her pen to it. She confirmed the caroler placement in her own hand. She confirmed the carriage route.

She was very good at this, at moving through a list fixing what could be fixed, at giving every line a time and a number and a tick, and she did it now with Will’s sleeve brushing hers at every third step and the harbor opening up bright and blue at the end of the street.

The only thing she did not write down, the only thing Maggie couldn’t give a time or a number, was the question that walked up Main Street a pace behind her the whole way, breathing at the back of her neck in the cold.

When all of this was over and the island ferry pulled away, whether this time, she truly wanted to leave.

Chapter 30

By ten o’clock the following day, Main Street had stopped belonging to the island and started belonging to the Stroll.

The ferry crowds had come up the cobbles in their thick coats and their good boots, and the whole town was full of them now, moving between the storefronts in a slow bright current, cocoa cups steaming in their mittens, children on shoulders, dogs in tartan coats being tugged along past the garland-wrapped lantern posts.

The Flour Jar’s window was fogged opaque from the gingerbread and stollen going in and out of the ovens inside, and every time the door opened it breathed out molasses and clove and warm yeasted bread into the cold, so that people slowed as they passed it without quite knowing why.

Down at the Pacific Club corner, a cocoa vendor worked a copper urn under a striped awning, ladling it into cups fast as she could pour, and near the top of the street a quartet in Victorian dress - top hats, a muff, a woman in a bonnet clutching a folder of sheet music - ran their scales into the frost, their breath going up in little clouds between the notes.

Maggie moved through it with her phone in one hand and the finalized printed schedule in the other, Will beside her carrying a coffee he had not, as far as she could tell, taken a single sip of yet.

“Carriage horses are staged behind the bank,” she confirmed, ticking the line. “Driver confirmed two-thirty.”

“Confirmed twice,” Will said. “Marianne radioed him earlier to check he still had a horse, I think.”

“Vendor tents?”

“All loaded. Pharmacy stand is now exactly where it’s meant to be, three inches and all.” He nodded toward it as they passed, where the offending table sat, for once, precisely inside its chalked line. “I stood over Carrie while she moved it. She called me the enforcer. Seems I’ve been promoted.”

“From peacekeeper to enforcer.”

“It’s a whole career path.”

They went down the list the way they had gone down a dozen lists over the past few days, in the shorthand they’d built without deciding to build it - she named something, he confirmed or flagged it, and neither of them wasted a word.

Santa’s boat was fueled and waiting off Straight Wharf for its arrival. The lantern star at the bottom of Main stood dark against the pale sky, wired and ready for seven.

The carolers had their bank-steps slot at four and their opening number settled, Joy to the World, no further discussion. Somebody handed Maggie a flyer for a nativity pageant and she took it, thanked them, and kept walking.

“You look tired today,” Will said.

“I look efficient you mean.”

“You look like a woman who’s been up since five running load-in for an island that doesn’t know it’s being run.”

“That’s the job.” Maggie drank from his coffee without asking, found it indeed cold, and handed it back with a look. “Will. This is Baltic.”

“Stone cold. I keep meaning to drink it.”