The Forever Christmas Tree Read online

  With a heated face and wishing she could change the subject, Wendy inhaled deeply. Best to get it all out and over with. Well, not all. Some of it. “The Outer Banks is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina that separates the mainland from the Atlantic Ocean. It’s only about 200 miles long and three miles at most in width, but more often only a mile across. A ferry is needed to cross in several places, including to my town, near the southern edge of the OBX—that’s an acronym for the Outer Banks. While a lot of the Outer Banks is commercialized with open sea beaches and state parks and, yes, even shipwreck diving sites . . .” She addressed that last to Geek. “. . . Bell Cove has been waging the good fight to keep its character for a long, long time. They want visitors to spend their dollars there, but only if they’re passing through to Beaufort or the Crystal Coast. We’re like Mayberry at the Beach.”

  “My parents used to vacation on Nags Head and Hatteras,” Geek said. “They liked to sail.”

  “Tell us more about your house and your hometown,” Diane persisted.

  “Like I said before, Bell Cove isn’t like those others. Built around an inlet off Bell Sound, it’s never catered to the tourist crowd, not because it isn’t attractive, but the beaches are too wild, and its deep-water harbor hasn’t been maintained enough over the years to bring in the boaters.”

  “So, if there’s no tourist industry, how do the people there make a living? Do they travel to the other towns?” JAM asked.

  She shook her head, and realized suddenly that the reason everyone was so interested in her hometown is that it had given them a subject to discuss, rather than the looming one . . . the death of their friend. For that reason, Wendy elaborated, “Some do, but mainly the town was founded around Bell Forge, a small factory. The Conti brothers, Italian immigrants, settled there back in the early 1900s. They were craftsmen who made incredible bells, the kind that hang in cathedrals and city towers, but they also made bells as musical instruments. A dying industry, like all things today that can be made cheaper in mass production.”

  “Bells.” Diane sighed again. Diane had a tendency to romanticize everything.

  “Anyhow, it’s a lovely place, built around a town square, with a Catholic church at one end and a Presbyterian one at the other, their bells often appearing to be in competition. The streetlights are in the form of bells and are adorned with red bows at Christmastime. It’s the kind of place where Christmas carolers walk down its streets in period costumes. Everybody knows everybody.”

  “Does it snow there?” Diane asked, probably hoping for a warm climate with sunny beaches, a sharp contrast to her home state where snow lay on the ground throughout the winter, often neck-deep.

  “Rarely, usually only an inch or two a couple times a year, but there are exceptions. When I was about six years old, we got twenty inches.” Wendy’s throat closed up for a moment as she recalled her mother, who had been alive then, out by the dunes, making a snowman with her. Her mother had been wearing a red coat, and her auburn hair had been powdered with snowflakes, and she’d been laughing. But then, there were other memories. When Wendy was sixteen, her hair a darker shade of auburn than her father’s Scottish ginger, she’d been walking on the snowy beach, hand in hand with Ethan. She’d been the one laughing then, with joy, and wearing her mother’s red coat, which she’d refused to give away. Wendy’s heart hurt at that mental image.

  “Flip, you okay?” Diane asked under her breath as one of the guys called for another round.

  “What? Oh, yeah,” she said. “Just caught back in time for a moment. Anyhow, there’s nothing prettier than snow on sand dunes, I can tell you that.”

  “Tell us about your house,” Delphine encouraged.

  “Oh, really, you guys don’t want to know all this stuff.”

  “Yes, we do,” almost everyone at the table said, except F.U., who was eying a woman at a nearby table who was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Ask About My Tattoos.”

  “It’s a big house, with eight bedrooms, most of which we never used. My parents wanted a big family, but it never happened after my mother got sick. Dad was a doctor, the old-fashioned kind, who had his office and surgery on one side of the ground floor. There are nice views of the ocean and bay from the second- and third-floor windows. Anyhow, that’s it. Big house, small town, a trip I’m not looking forward to. End of story.” She exhaled with relief and seeing some of the guys’ eyes glazing over at what must be as boring to them as a Home and Garden TV show, she asked, “So, anyone interested in ordering dinner, or should we go somewhere else?”

  But not all of them were as bored as she’d thought or willing to let her go so easily.

  “Sorry to be so nosy, Flip, but why haven’t you been back in twelve years?” Diane inquired.

  Wendy’s face heated once again. “It’s not that I haven’t been back at all. I’ve made several short visits. Once when Aunt Millie was in the hospital. For my dad’s funeral. Anytime I was needed. Usually just overnight. The last time I went back was five years ago. My family visited me out here, though.”

  She could tell that they had lots more questions.

  “Sounds like a charming place,” Diane said then. “Can I come home with you for Christmas?”

  Huh? What? “Are you serious, Grizz?”

  “Yeah. Everyone’s going to my brother’s place in Spokane for the holidays, and my mother will be harping on me about why I don’t have a real job, and when am I going to get married and have kids, like my sister. And Dad pumps me for secret information about the SEALs. And my sister Marion wants me to introduce her to a SEAL.”

  “What’s she look like?” F.U. wanted to know.

  Diane ignored him and concluded, “The idea of a quiet Christmas in a small town with freakin’ bells, well, that’s heaven to me. Can I come?”

  “Sure.”

  “Me, too,” Geek said. “As long as there’s wi-fi, have computer, will travel.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.

  “I’m game.” This from K-4.

  “I could cut my time in Nawleans short, please God, and head out there for a week,” Delphine said.

  With each person self-inviting themselves, Wendy’s jaw dropped even lower. Oh . . . my . . . God!

  “Great, and Flip mentioned some shipwreck diving places on the Outer Banks. I could check them out, firsthand,” Geek said, then pointed to his iPhone on the table in front of him. “I just checked. Did you all know that section of water off the Outer Banks is known as the ‘Graveyard of the Atlantic’ because there are still so many shipwrecks still out there, undiscovered?”

  “Oh, hell! Count me in, too,” JAM said, then addressed Geek. “Maybe we can go to Jersey first and look over that Jinx operation.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Geek agreed.

  “You’re not going without me,” Hamr proclaimed.

  “What about your family?” JAM asked.

  Hamr shrugged. “I’ll think of something.”

  Wendy was stunned, but then she realized that this might be a good thing. She’d managed to avoid seeing Ethan all these years. If her friends were with her, it would provide a natural barrier.

  “You guys do realize it will be boring there,” Wendy cautioned. Really, there weren’t more than two bars open during the off season, if that.

  “I’m getting too old to be a Liberty Hound anymore,” Geek said.

  “Same here,” JAM agreed. “Party animal days are long gone for me, not that I don’t enjoy a party now and then.” He waggled his eyebrows at Wendy.

  “Will you have enough room for all of us?” Diane asked, a bit sheepishly, realizing she started all this.

  “Should be fine. You might have to share space with some senior citizen swingers until I get things straightened out, but it’s a big house.”

  “How senior?” F.U. inquired.

  They all laughed then.

  Geek glanced around the table. “So, road trip to the Outer Banks for Christmas?”

  “Hoo-yah!” a b
unch of them at the table said, raising their bottles of beer high, like toasts.

  Later that night, Wendy called Bell Cove. “Aunt Mil, it’s Wendy.”

  “Well, hello, sweetheart. You’re still coming next week, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but I want to bring some friends with me. It might be four or five. Is there enough room?”

  “Absolutely. Harry is going to his son’s home for the holidays, and Gloria is moving into one of those assisted-living places. Elmer and Claudette might still be here, and Raul sleeps with me,” her aunt said, as if thinking aloud. Then, she concluded, “Easy peasy, darling. Bring as many friends as you want. The more the merrier.”

  “Raw-ool?” Wendy choked out, repeating the name the way her aunt had pronounced it.

  “Yes, Raul. R. A. U. L. Our dance instructor. You’ll love him, honey.”

  “And he sleeps with you?”

  “Where else would he sleep?”

  There were a million questions she wanted to ask about this Raul but the one that popped out was, “How old is Raul?”

  “Oh, he’s a younger man. Once a woman reaches a certain age, she wants a man who can still tango, if you get my meaning.”

  Aunt Millie was seventy-two. Wendy didn’t want to picture her aunt doing the “tango” at all, and definitely not with some young stud looking to steal an old lady’s savings.

  “How young?”

  “Sixty last month.”

  “What’s that noise I hear in the background?” Wendy asked, noticing the music suddenly blaring and people laughing. “Are you having a party?”

  “No, it’s just the usual. Foxtrot Friday.”

  Before she hung up, Aunt Millie asked in a sly voice, “Should I get a Christmas tree, or do you want to pick it out yourself when you get here?”

  Over the years, Wendy had demanded that no one ever mention the name of Ethan Rutledge to her. Not her father before he died, or Aunt Millie, or her longtime friend Laura Atler, who was editor of the small weekly newspaper, The Bell. She didn’t want to know where he was or what he was doing. But there were three things she did know. He was married. He had a child, who must be going on twelve years old, in fact probably more than one child by now. And his family owned tree farms . . . Christmas trees, to be precise, at this time of the year.

  That had to be what Aunt Mildred was alluding to, although Ethan probably didn’t even live on the Outer Banks anymore. His dream had been to become a veterinarian and move off the barrier island.

  But then, my dream was to become a doctor, a general practitioner like my dad. And look where I ended up.

  Their compromise plan was that they would live off-island after marrying the summer following their sophomore year at UNC–Chapel Hill, where they’d been accepted for admission in the pre-med and pre-vet programs. It would probably take Wendy ten years to get through undergraduate and medical school. For Ethan, it would be a few years less. After that, they would move back to Bell Cove where she would join her father’s GP practice and Ethan would set up a veterinary clinic.

  What did they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men going awry? Boy, did they go awry for them!

  “Do they still sell those Rutledge Trees?” she asked, immediately regretting her first question related to Ethan in all those years.

  Aunt Mildred laughed. “Oh, sweetheart, you are so out of the loop. The Rutledge Tree has become famous, at least here in North Carolina. People travel hundreds of miles to get one. They place orders a year in advance.”

  “Huh?” Ethan’s father, and his father before him, had been trying to grow Christmas trees on the Outer Banks for decades, to no avail. The soil and climate weren’t ideal for evergreens. What resulted were stunted, sparse specimens . . . glorified Charlie Brown trees. And people bought them, first as a joke, then a conversation piece, even in upscale island homes. Ethan had been embarrassed by them, even when they had only a small, local following.

  But that was the past, and Wendy had dwelled on it enough. If just the mention of a Christmas tree prompted these kinds of memories, she could only imagine what she was in for going home. Could she cancel at this late date? No. There were things there that needed to be settled.

  With a shake of her head to clear it, she asked her aunt, “Do we have to have a Christmas tree?”

  “Bite your tongue, girl.”

  “Maybe it’s time to get an artificial tree.”

  “Wendy Ann Patterson! You’ve been living in California too long if you think a Bell Cove home would stoop to a fake tree, although I did see one in the window of the hardware store last week.”

  “Okay, but you buy the tree, Aunt Mil, and have it delivered, for heaven’s sake. Don’t think about hauling it home yourself. Wait a sec. The guys can pick up a tree when they get there. They’d probably get a kick out of doing that. Then we can all trim it. Do we still have Mom’s old decorations in the attic?”

  “Of course. Do you think I would get rid of those?”

  “I guess not.” Wendy felt a tightness in her chest just thinking about the raggedy angel tree topper that they’d pulled out every year, even after her mother died.

  “I’m so excited,” her aunt said. “This is going to be the best Christmas ever.”

  Wendy doubted that. Very much.

  Especially when she heard a voice in the background yell, “Hey, Mil, where’s the vodka?”

  Chapter 2

  Ding, dong, ding, dong, dang! . . .

  “I hate Christmas.” Ethan Rutledge hadn’t meant to say that aloud, but as he sat at the conference table in the Bell Cove municipal building on a Friday night, drumming his fingertips on the scarred surface, he had to have some way of expressing his exasperation. The emergency meeting of the town council was taking forever to commence.

  Everyone at the table turned to look at him as if he’d committed some sacrilege. He supposed it was, for a Christmas tree farmer.

  Like I care!

  Just then, the bells of Our Lady by the Sea Catholic Church out on the square tolled the hour. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That was immediately followed by the bells of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Not to be outdone, the clock in the tower above this building, which had been late for years, rang its own bells. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. It was like a freaking bell competition. Day in, and day out.

  “And I hate the bells, too,” Ethan declared, which was definitely a sacrilege in a town that was built on bells.

  His remark prompted some gasps and looks of horror from everyone, except Laura Atler, editor of the weekly newspaper, The Bell, who sat next to him. She chuckled and whispered, gleefully, “Way to go, Scrooge!” Laura, who had been best friends with she-whose-name-he-hadn’t-spoken-for-many-years, got pleasure in needling him every chance she got.

  Frank Baxter, owner of Hard Knocks, the hardware store, glared at him and said, “Don’t take your bad mood out on the rest of us.” Then, he inquired, not in a nice way, “Business bad, boy? I certainly hope the market isn’t dropping for those wonderful Charlie Brown trees.”

  Ethan was a successful businessman selling Christmas trees—well, all kinds of trees—around the country, but what Baxter referred to was the infamous Rutledge Tree inadvertently developed by his grandfather and further mucked up by his father, a self-taught botanist, which was sold only on the Outer Banks . . . IN HUGE NUMBERS! There was a time when Ethan had been embarrassed by the stunted, scrawny evergreens, but he’d learned to have a sense of humor, and now promoted the hell out of the funny Christmas trees. And people came from many miles away to buy the stupid things. Go figure!

  “Business is just fine,” asshole, Ethan said. “How are those aluminum foil trees moving?”

  “They’re not aluminum foil,” Baxter sputtered. “They’re genuine Williamsburg reproduction silver leaf fir trees.”

  Williamsburg, my ass! “Hmpfh!” Ethan snorted.

  He
and Baxter had been in a running battle ever since Ethan’s grandmother, Eliza Rutledge, opened a Holiday Shoppe (With two p’s and an e on the end! Don’t ask. Half the people in town called it the shoppie.) on the lot of their landscape business two years ago and made the mistake of offering some items that could also be purchased at the hardware store, such as removable wall hooks, of all things. Which had prompted Baxter to start carrying Christmas tree lights, which resulted in the shoppie, rather shop, selling electric drills to aerate the trunks of trees. Those drills had been like a gauntlet thrown down. This year, the window of Hard Knocks was stuffed with Christmas paraphernalia, everything from tree toppers to garlands, with the coup de grace being those artificial trees. Now, that was a sacrilege. North Carolina was one of the largest producers of Christmas trees in the United States, second only to Oregon. Dissing real trees was a Tar Heels sacrilege.

  While the other council members conversed softly with each other, trying to ignore the hostility, Ethan sank down lower in his chair and pretended to be reading text messages on his phone. How he’d gotten roped into serving on this body was beyond him. A moment of madness when Leonard Ferguson had died suddenly of a heart attack and they’d needed a temporary replacement. Temporary? Hah! That had been two years ago.

  Leonard Ferguson’s shoe store, named simply Shoes, had been a fixture on the town square for as long as Ethan could remember. He, his dad, his grandfather, all of the family, had gotten their shoes and boots there over the years. It was now renamed Happy Feet Emporium, whatever the hell an emporium was, by his widow Doreen Ferguson, who also happened to be the mayor. He hadn’t been in the store lately, but he’d heard some of the fancy gear there sold for a couple hundred bucks a pair.

  Ethan looked at his watch again and sighed. Before you knew it, the bells would be chiming again. Mid-December was the busiest time of the year for a Christmas tree farmer. His local lot and its shop were open until nine p.m. tonight, manned only by his grandmother, aided by two high school kids and Ethan’s daughter, Cassie, who was eleven going on eighteen. God only knew what kind of mess he’d find when he got back. Plus, he had three flatbed trucks of Fraser Firs, the Cadillac of Christmas trees, up at his mainland farm set to go to wholesalers early tomorrow morning. He had a seaplane that he kept over at the airport in Echo Harbor for commuting across the sound, which saved him hours getting back and forth to his headquarters, but still time was a-wasting here.