3. Joy
JOY
Joy had always heard that when you met your true mate, you would instantly know. She had never been entirely sure if she believed it.
But she had felt an electric spark as soon as she saw Barnaby, which had turned into a circuit the moment their hands met. Joy had a feeling that if her squirrel talked to her in words, it would be shouting Mate! Mate! in her ear.
Except Bar didn’t seem to feel it in return, and she had no idea what that meant at all.
With her mind replaying every detail of her encounter with Bar, she hadn’t said much since getting back in the car, but Leah was chattering enough for both of them.
“Did you see that truck he’s driving? Talk about a compensation-mobile. Maybe a midlife crisis-mobile. Is he old? I couldn’t see him very well. Is he ugly? Does he have a face like an inside-out shoe?”
“No, he’s not old or ugly,” Joy said absently. He had looked around her age, late twenties or early thirties, maybe a few years older at most.
He wasn’t stunningly handsome, although he seemed well-built under the improbable suit. He was good-looking in an ordinary person sort of way, like an actor who would play the kind best friend instead of the chiseled action hero. He had dark hair and nice eyes.
She desperately wanted to talk to him again.
For one thing, she wanted to find out why he didn’t seem to have the same reaction to her as she did to him. Or did he? Maybe he was hiding it for some reason.
“Was he hitting on you? Was he inappropriate? I’ll rearrange his shoe-face for him!” Leah made a fist.
Joy’s little sister loved her dearly, was fanatically loyal, and often seemed to have no sense of scale. Joy could not be entirely sure she was speaking figuratively.
“No one’s face needs to be rearranged. He was perfectly nice.” She glanced up to see the headlights her rear-view mirror, following them at a respectful distance so they weren’t blinded. “We’d still be in the ditch if he hadn’t come along.”
Leah probably would have kept arguing, based on past experience, but just then the snow-covered pines they had been driving through for the last half hour developed a new feature that distracted her.
The trees were covered with sparkling white and blue fairy lights.
“Ohhhh,” Leah breathed.
Joy was already driving almost as slow as humanly possible, but she slowed even more to gaze at the beauty around them. The lights weren’t overwhelming; instead a few of them peeped out of the trees here and there, giving the impression that a few scattered stars had come down from the sky and become caught in the branches. With the falling snow, the effect was absolutely magical.
“Blue and silver,” Leah said. “A little Hanukkah for double the holiday spirit.”
“I don’t think they’re meant to be Hanukkah lights.” Although it was possible, she supposed.
“Chrismanukkah lights, then.”
“Chrismanukkah is a thing you made up; you know that, right? Anyway, this must mean we’re almost at the lodge,” Joy said. “Nobody would put lights on trees in the middle of nowhere.”
As if summoned by her words, she came over a final rise in the road—the car slithered a bit, but made it—and they were confronted by a glittering winter retreat straight out of a brochure.
The lodge was framed by falling snow. Colorful fairy lights gleamed at them from trees and from the front of the lodge as Joy drove into a large plowed area in front of the main building. All the trees around them were wreathed in lights, and there was a family of reindeer on the lodge’s snow-covered front lawn.
It wasn’t until Joy had parked that she noticed parts of the lodge were swathed in plastic house wrap, and there was a scaffolding up against the right side. It looked as if the place was undergoing renovations. However, the lights provided a visible welcome and a sign that the owners were home. Some of the windows were lit up.
Joy had pulled up as close to the front steps as possible for Leah’s benefit. The headlights of Bar’s truck pulled in behind them, and he parked nearby.
The truck was, indeed, a lot. It was a huge white behemoth, with a detached front grille and a roof rack. It looked like it could drive right over Joy’s car. At the same time, it looked about two hundred percent more suitable than their beat-up old sedan for driving around on ice and snow.
Joy got out and went around to Leah’s side to see if she needed any help with her crutches.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Leah grumbled, although she accepted Joy’s hand to steady her while she got her forearm crutches on.
Bar joined them just then, in his unfairly flattering black coat with snowflakes sprinkling his shoulders and dotting his dark hair. He looked startled to see Leah leaning on Joy while fussing with the crutches. His gaze went to her legs, encased in stylish tights but visibly bent, so that one leg was nearly hooked behind the other.
“I thought you weren’t hurt in the crash,” Bar said, sounding alarmed. “Are you okay?”
“Oh wow, we’ve got a rocket scientist here,” Leah said. “I was born like this, Einstein.”
“She was born like that,” Joy said, a step too late. She always bristled defensively when anyone pointed out her sister’s disability, but Leah seemed to be doing enough bristling for both of them. It was clear that she had taken an inexplicable dislike to Bar. “And we don’t need help,” she added hastily, before she gave in to the urge to do something like swoon so that Bar could lend her an arm.
“Sorry,” Bar said. “Can I help you carry something?”
“She just said we don’t need help,” Leah said. “Did someone drop you on your head when you were a baby?”
Joy found herself in the uncomfortable position of switching from defending her sister to wanting to defend Bar from her sister. “It’s okay,” she said. “Actually, if you want to carry a box or two of cookies from the back, that would be a big help.”
While Bar collected things from the backseat, Joy got her bag and went up the front steps with Leah, who managed handily despite looking back frequently as if she suspected that Bar was going to transfer everything to his truck and speed away into the snowstorm. “I can’t believe you trust him with your cookies,” she said between her teeth.
Joy would love to trust him with her cookies. All of her cookies. Her muffins and her cupcakes, too. So to speak. Shaking herself back to reality, she protested, “He helped us out of the ditch! What’s gotten into you?”
“He’s just got an untrustworthy look about him.”
Joy sighed and held the door for her.
The lobby of the hotel swept her away with a wave of holiday feelings. As with the trees outside, the holiday aesthetic was understated yet magical; it was clear that someone with a good eye for design had set up the decorations. Snowflakes dangled from the ceiling and lights glittered around the windows. There was a huge Christmas tree with rustic-style decorations near the old fieldstone fireplace. Everywhere she looked, she saw something new. Was that an actual, old-fashioned sleigh near the wall?
Joy’s mixed Jewish-Protestant heritage had left her with mildly conflicted winter holiday feelings, but she did like Christmas and it was impossible not to get swept up in the cheerful mood of the lights and decorations. Also, Leah might be right; those were Hanukkah stars up there on the wall, and some Kwanzaa decorations too, in an earnest effort to make the lodge welcoming to everyone.
It was also ... cold. Joy could see her breath puffing out in clouds. She had expected to find it warmer inside than the blizzard outside, but at these temperatures, some of those snowflakes on the walls might be real.
A sudden clang echoing from somewhere overhead made both of them jump. Leah looked up and her mouth dropped open.
“Joy, there’s an airplane up there.”
In all of the decorations, Joy had somehow managed to miss a bright yellow vintage biplane suspended from the ceiling above the reception desk. It made her realize just how big the lobby actually was. The open space went up two and a half stories, with huge windows looking out into the storm, and part of that space was filled with airplane. The plane had lights draped on it.
“Hello, hello! Are you the Blanchard sisters? It’s so nice to meet you in person.”
The speaker hurried from the vicinity of the reception desk, where Joy had also failed to notice anyone, though she now realized the woman must have been working on the computer.
She was short, with a halo of curly brown hair, on top of which a pair of reindeer antlers perched crookedly. She was wearing two sweaters, the sleeves of the one beneath peeking out from the one on top, which had a cactus draped in Christmas lights and above it the words CUDDLY AS A....
“Hi, yes, I’m Joy Blanchard and this is my sister Leah.” Joy shook the woman’s hand, which was as cold as her own and encased in a fingerless knit glove. “The baked goods you ordered are out in the car.”
“That’s wonderful, thank you so much. I hope you didn’t have too much trouble on the drive, and I’m terribly sorry it’s so cold. We’re having heating issues.” As if to demonstrate, another clang reverberated through the walls around them. The woman glanced upwards and then resolutely returned her gaze to Joy. “But we have our best people on it! I’m Hester, the co-owner, and?—”
“Okay, I think I found your problem.” A woman in mechanic’s coveralls, her hair tied back under a scarf, was coming down the stairs, holding a wrench in one hand. “Outflow’s blocked with a bird nest. It must’ve been there all year, but it never mattered when we weren’t using the furnace. Must’a been some airflow getting through still, and then it got knocked down there by the wind in the last day or two, blocking it completely.”
“Good job! Can you get it out?” Hester asked.
“Mauro is working on it. We might need a fire in the meantime. Do you want me to have Wick bring in some more wood?”
“Already on it,” a gruff voice said. A man with snow on his hatless hair and an open coat that displayed a ripped bare chest pushed past Joy with a huge log resting on his shoulder. Joy and Leah both watched in astonishment as he carried it effortlessly to the fireplace.
“I’ll get you checked in,” Hester told them. “This is not how I would have wanted you to see the place. I’m sorry it’s in such a state.”
Joy looked up at the decorations. “It looks beautiful to me.”
“Where are all the guests?” Leah asked, rubbing her hands together.
“Yes, well, about that, I’m afraid—there’s been a change of plans.” Hester hit a few computer keys and blew on her fingers to warm them.
“You don’t want the cookies,” Joy said, her stomach sinking to her shoes. Somehow, the lodge backing out on the first big order for her fledgling home bakery business had not occurred to her. She had stretched her credit card to the limit buying the ingredients. The windfall from the lodge’s payment had covered all her costs and provided money for Christmas presents. She didn’t know how she was going to pay it back.
Speaking of which—where were the cookies? Surely Bar couldn’t have taken this much time to get a few Tupperware containers from the backseat. Maybe Leah was right and he really had run off with them, for what reason Joy couldn’t imagine.
“Oh, no, no!” Hester exclaimed. “No, we’re not backing out on that. Anything we don’t use now, I can freeze for later. It’s just that we were planning a big holiday party with guests and all the locals from the town down the mountain, and now ...” She shook her head. “Guests are cancelling left and right with all this snow, and I don’t blame them—in fact I’m amazed you made it. And the ... the other thing.”
“What other thing?” Leah asked. “Frozen plumbing, aliens, an outbreak of dysentery? Don’t keep us in suspense.”
“No, nothing like that.” Hester looked up from the computer. “I don’t want to cast a shadow over your stay. I hope you’ll have a wonderful time. We’re just having some, uh—some financial issues with the lodge right now, that’s all.”
“Financial issues, my striped tail!” the female mechanic with the wrench said loudly. She had come down the stairs and was now leaning on the decorated bannister. “Some big-city big-shot is trying to steal the lodge out from under her, and he’s found a loophole where it looks like he can do that. I’m telling you, if I had him in front of me right now, I’d?—”
“Doreen, you promised to be nice,” Hester protested.
“Oh, I’ll be nice.” Doreen smiled, showing teeth. “I’ll be very nice. No promises about Wick, though.”
Wick, presumably the guy setting up a fire in the fireplace, glanced up but said nothing, though he smiled a little.
“It’s going to be all right,” Hester said. “Somehow,” she murmured. “Anyway,” she went on brightly to Joy and Leah, “I know you booked one double room, but I’ll upgrade you for free to a suite with two separate rooms and an adjoining bathroom. It’s not like we don’t have plenty of space. I don’t have a cook right now, so I’ll be cooking for you myself, but I can definitely guarantee three meals a day—as long as you don’t mind if a few of them feature your own baked goods.”
“Her baked goods are great,” Leah said loyally. “I would eat them every day. I’d eat them six meals a day.”
She probably would, too. Joy wondered where exactly those baked goods were at the moment. “That’s fine, I don’t mind. Is there any way I can help with the, uh—with whatever’s happening with the lodge, the buyout or whatever it is? When I’m not baking, I work as a real estate agent, so I’m familiar with property law in this state. If someone is trying to take advantage of you, I could look into it and see if there’s anything I can do.”
“Would you?” Hester asked eagerly. “That would be wonderful. I’m afraid I can’t pay you.”
“That’s all right, I don’t expect it, and you already upgraded us to a nicer room. Let’s call it a pro bono gift for the holidays.” She glanced nervously toward the door. “If you don’t mind, I’d better go see?—”
“What’s the deal with this person who’s trying to take the lodge?” Leah asked, leaning on the desk. “Why do they want it so badly?”
“It’s not really—it’s complicated,” Hester said.
Doreen snorted loudly. “It’s not complicated at all. He claims he owns the land the lodge is built on.”
“He does own it,” Hester said. “The issue is that the land the lodge stands on was leased by the previous owners, not purchased. Unknown to me and Mauro, the lease expired. If we can’t work this out somehow, we’re all looking at eviction.”
“That’s terrible!” Joy exclaimed. “What kind of heartless person would do that at the holidays?”
Just then the door opened and Bar came in, awkwardly holding the door with his hip. It was immediately obvious why it had taken him so long, because he had gone and found a cart from somewhere else on the property so he could move all the trays and Tupperware containers at once.
“ Him ,” Hester said.