Page 6 of The Christmas Stroll

Neither of them seemed entirely sure whose job it was to hold what. A delivery truck idled a few feet off, hazard lights blinking orange against the brick, its back doors open on a stack of crates that no one had come to sign for.

As Maggie watched, the driver leaned out his window and called something, and one of the red scarves waved a distracted hand at him without letting go of the tree, and the truck went on idling and blinking, and the crates went on sitting there.

Nobody’s in charge, she realized. That was the problem. It wasn’t that the work wasn’t happening. Half the island was clearly out here in the cold doing it. It was that no one had told any of them where the work stopped, and so it stopped in a different place on every street, and the seams showed.

Maggie kept walking, tote bumping her hip, wheels rattling over the stones, and let the inventory keep running.

On Willow Street, The Flour Jar had its famous stollen sign up already, and a chalkboard easel out front promising gingerbread by the pound, and a paper flyer taped inside the door with two different Saturday parade times printed on it, one crossed out in ballpoint and then the crossing-out itself scribbled over, as though somebody had corrected the correction.

And then Maggie came up level with the top of the harbor walk and she looked, because even though she already knew what she was going to see, she wanted to be wrong.

The whole length of it, the oldest and most beloved stretch of the entire program, the Stroll route her father had loved best, ran down toward the water bare and dark.

No traditional warm white bulbs strung along the rail. No flashy new LED display either.

Just the old iron posts standing empty against the gray harbor, and the tide slapping the pilings, and a single herring gull picking its way down the boards where by now, every other year of Maggie’s life, the lights would already have been up and tested and glowing; a signal that the holidays were well and truly on the way.

Instead, just darkness, with the beloved event mere days away.

What on earth had happened?

Chapter 4

Maggie’s childhood home sat three streets up and one over on Union Street, a gray-shingled saltbox with black shutters and a candle glowing in every window; all battery-operated now for safety, but still arranged exactly as her dad used to arrange the real ones.

A balsam wreath hung on the front door with a red velvet bow gone slightly soft at the loops from a decade of storage, and someone - a neighbor probably - had swept the brick path clear of a recent light dusting of snow, and salted it.

Now that salt crunched under Maggie’s boots as she came up it, hauling her bag over the frost heaves the way she had hauled a hundred hockey bags, duffels and suitcases up this same path in her youth.

She let herself in with her own key. Warmth met her, and cinnamon and Bing Crosby of course, turned up a notch too loud.

Her mother stood at the kitchen table in pressed charcoal wool trousers and a cream cashmere turtleneck, arranging pine cones and fat white pillar candles in a shallow silver bowl with the total concentration of a woman defusing an explosive. She had a sprig of holly held delicately between two fingers, deciding where it wanted to go.

She did not immediately react when the door opened.

Helen Sullivan had witnessed practically the entire island come and go through that door for fifty-odd years, and had long ago stopped being startled by any of it.

Then she did look up, surprise softening at the corners despite herself, and she set the holly down and came around the table with her hands out. Her mother smelled of the same perfume she’d worn Maggie’s whole life and of coffee and candle wax, and Helen held her daughter’s face in both cool palms for a second and looked at her.

“You’re cold,” she declared. “Sit down, I’ll make you a hot chocolate, just how you like it.” She was already moving toward the stove, already busy, already narrating as she poured milk and took out a bag of marshmallows. “This is a lovely surprise sweetheart, but where’s the fire? I already told you all that Stroll business is being handled.”

Maggie raised an eyebrow. “Is it though?”

“Completely.” A mug came down from the cabinet, the good one, the one with the sailboat, which meant Maggie was still an unexpected guest at the moment and would be treated accordingly. “A minor disagreement, that’s all, like I said.” She stirred hot milk and the steam came up off the chocolate as Helen added marshmallows. Her mother smoothed an invisible wrinkle from her sleeve as she carried the mug over to the table. “Now, sit.”

Maggie sat. She wrapped both hands around the sailboat mug and let the heat go into her fingers, still cold from the walk and watched her mother go back to the centerpiece and pick the holly up again.

“So tell me more about this … disagreement,” she urged. “With the lights.”

“Oh, there’s more than that.” Helen turned the holly and refused to meet her gaze. “But I’m assuming Lucy already told you that.”

“You tell me.”

Helen turned back to the centerpiece. “Madam’s tried to reroute the carriage line, for starters. Off Centre Street, if you can believe, where it has run since before you were born! Onto Fair, which is far too narrow, the horses hate a narrow street.” Helen placed the holly, considered it, moved it half an inch. “And took it upon herself to change the caroler placement. And the lighting, I already told you about the lighting. Those tacky LEDs on the harbor walk business.”

“I saw the harbor walk,” Maggie said. “There aren’t any lights on it. At all.”

A pause. Helen adjusted a candle that did not need adjusting.