Chapter 17
Seventeen
Jewel
AUNTY KENDRA stabbed a bite of her eggs. “Why isn’t Colin here?”
“He never eats breakfast,” Jewel told her and sipped her tea.
“But this is a family occasion.” Aunty Cait looked to Mama. “Don’t you think that’s ill-mannered?”
“He’s not quite himself these days, and he truly doesn’t eat breakfast. He just takes a cup of coffee to his study.” Mama shrugged. “He told me he wanted a bath, and I decided not to argue.”
“He told me that, too,” Jewel said.
Privately, she wondered if he were actually avoiding her mother. Mama certainly didn’t seem to mind. She wished the two of them would settle the issue with Aidan one way or another, so her life could get back to normal.
Or at least as normal as life could be, considering she was contemplating an immense, life-altering decision.
“Colin won’t skip breakfast tomorrow,” Violet predicted. “Not when we’ll be serving my family’s traditional Christmas breakfast.”
“What will we be having?” Cas asked at the same time Pol asked, “What is your family’s Christmas breakfast?”
“Your sons are such typical Chase males,” Mama told Aunty Kendra. “Asking about the next meal while eating this one.”
Violet laughed. “My mother has always served panperdy, buttered eggs with bacon, hot pan cakes with butter and sugar—”
“And warmed chocolate!” the twins’ sister Diana interrupted. “How is it that neither of you remember?”
“Your brothers were but nine the last time we had Christmas here,” Aunty Kendra reminded her. “Four years is a long time when you’re thirteen.”
“Indeed,” Uncle Ford put in, “that’s nearly thirty-one percent of their lives to date.”
Trust Uncle Ford to calculate everything, Jewel thought while the rest of the family ignored his comment. She swallowed her last bite. “May I be excused? I need to finish wrapping my gifts.”
“But we’re going to skate!” her cousin Adam protested. “With our new skates! Remember?”
“That’s right.” She’d been so distracted by Henry’s proposal that she’d completely forgotten. “I suppose I’ll wrap them later.”
Aunty Kendra cleared her throat. “We need to wrap our gifts too, and I’d rather do that now and skate later.”
“Your gifts are already wrapped,” Diana declared with a frown. “I saw them.”
“You cannot have seen all of them,” her father said firmly. “Because we still have some to wrap. In our chamber.”
Jewel looked between Aunty Kendra and Uncle Trick. They both seemed much too determined to wrap gifts.
In their chamber.
What was going on?
“I’m nearly done implementing a new idea in my laboratory,” Uncle Ford said, “and I’ve a hankering to finish. How about if we each attend to our own tasks until dinner, then we’ll all skate afterwards?”
“Sounds good,” Uncle Trick said at the same time his four children shouted, “No!”
“I want to skate now!”
“We just ate!”
“Dinner won’t be for hours!”
“I don’t want to wait!”
Twelve cousins registered twelve different protests, all at once.
“The weather will be warmer after dinner,” Aunty Violet proclaimed as though that decided everything. Which Jewel supposed was the case, since Violet was in charge. “We’ll eat at noon, and then we’ll skate afterwards.”
“Noon isn’t even two hours from now,” her eldest, Nicolas, pointed out. “Our breakfast was too late. We ought to skip dinner.”
“We are not skipping anything,” Violet said, looking no less determined. “Not after Hilda went to so much trouble procuring supplies and making plans. So we’ll eat light, which is best before skating anyway.”
“And also because we need to save room for our big Christmas Eve supper tonight,” Aunty Cait put in. “With plum pudding.” She rubbed her hands together. “Kendra, you must be looking forward to plum pudding.”
Jewel looked to see what Aunty Kendra had to say to that, but she and Uncle Trick had apparently slipped from the room when she wasn’t watching.
To go wrap gifts?
Somehow, she thought not.
First Papa skipped out on breakfast, and now Aunty Kendra and Uncle Trick had vanished as well. Were the two disappearances connected?
A very interesting puzzle.