I left Sweetie Pie, Chablis, and Pluto with Tinkie—she needed someone to keep an eye on her—while I drove my car up to Odell’s and left it in the lot with thirty other vehicles. I found what I hoped was a secluded place where most people wouldn’t see the old Roadster. Tinkie and I needed less conspicuous vehicles when we were working.
As I left the car, I heard Garth Brooks on the jukebox inside. “Friends in Low Places” was the tune. I was fortunate in my friends, and that was the best Christmas miracle ever. The next song up was Burl Ives singing “Holly Jolly Christmas.” Whoever was feeding quarters into the jukebox needed to be physically restrained.
The gravel crunched beneath my sensible boots as I made my way back to the river and down the dirt road to the place where I’d left Tinkie. Which was completely empty. No Tinkie. No dogs. No cat. Just the flashing red and green lights on the house set back from the road.
“Tinkie!” I whisper-hissed her name. “Tinkie! Where are you?”
The night had no answers for me. Not even the dogs made a sound. I moved down the road, glad I’d been smart enough to bring a flashlight and my gun, though I was reluctant to turn the torch on for fear of alerting folks to my presence. Lights pricked the total darkness through the thick growth of trees. This was a river community, and many people would not welcome a stranger knocking at their door. So where was Tinkie? Had something happened to her?
“Tinkie!” I called a bit louder. “Sweetie Pie! Pluto!” Calling the pets was a long shot because they often ignored me in the best of circumstances. To my shock, Pluto came out of the trees and joined me on the road. He curled around my ankles and bit at my knees.
“Where the hell is Tinkie?”
He started into the woods. Trusting his ability to navigate the darkness better than I could, I followed. As we wound our way through the trees, I grew more and more concerned. Tinkie wasn’t the kind of woman to take off through the underbrush in the dead of a winter night. She was wearing dress boots, not real boots. She didn’t have a weapon or a light. And why would she willingly fumble into a place where tree limbs poked at my eyes and tore at my clothes and hair? Tinkie was not a fan of the windswept or twig-swept look.
I stopped to get my bearings. The trees were so thick I lost sight of the dim lights that had marked a few of the houses down the road. Even the sound of the river water gently lapping the bank was gone. It was as if I’d stepped under a glass bowl where I was disconnected from everything except my immediate surroundings.
Using my flashlight as little as possible, I eased forward. Where in the world were Tinkie and the pets? Now even Pluto was AWOL.
Far in the distance I heard the sound of music. I recognized the Christmas ballet I’d always loved. What was going on? Where was my friend? I felt the pressure of panic pushing at me. I stepped forward in the darkness and came to an abrupt stop. Someone was in my path. I clicked on the flashlight to reveal an older man, who I knew instantly as Uncle Drosselmeyer. The man with the magic in The Nutcracker ballet.
All around me, the beautiful melody of the ballet came from the trees and limbs and branches, and Uncle Drosselmeyer began to dance. The leaves of the trees reflected a soft, diffused light that illuminated the woodland clearing in a mystical glowing orb of light. From behind the tree trunks, animated toys came into view. They joined in the dance with the great magician of the ballet. I thought back over my day to be sure I hadn’t ingested any hallucinogens. What I saw right in front of me wasn’t possible, yet I was seeing it. The toys and snowflakes danced to the lovely music, and Drosselmeyer, who was a fine figure of a muscular and lithe man, danced and leaped and whirled with such grace I was breathless just watching.
Drosselmeyer danced toward me and unveiled the nutcracker toy. He jetéed around a large oak tree and then rested the nutcracker in a nook of roots. I was transfixed with the agility of the dancer. At last I thought to pull out my phone and record what was happening. Just as I did so, Uncle Drosselmeyer began to change. Slowly, the dancer turned into someone I was far more familiar with, even if it was almost as impossible. Jitty, disguised as a beloved member of the ballet troupe, had followed me into the woods of Tallahatchie County.
With one magnificent grand jeté, Jitty twirled and faced me. Unsurprisingly, my phone camera had captured only blank darkness.
“What are you doing here in the woods?” I whispered because, in my heart of hearts, I hoped Tinkie was close by.
“You have to believe, Sarah Booth.” Jitty unbuttoned the top of her suit coat. “That’s your problem. You really don’t believe. Christmas is all about believing.”
“I have to believe in Santa Claus to find my friend and my pets?” Annoyance was clear in my tone.
“You have to believe in yourself, and in the power of the season.”
“Bull crap.” I had a missing pregnant woman and another missing mother and child. I was in the middle of the bitter-cold woods, unable to find my partner or critters. This wasn’t a time to lecture me on believing in magic or Christmas characters. Next she’d be after me to find Rudolph to light my way home with his red nose.
“Do you believe the nutcracker came to life?” Jitty asked. Her costume had begun to disappear and she was no longer the dancer, but Jitty, the haint of Dahlia House wearing my favorite jeans and green Christmas sweater.
“It’s a ballet. It’s fantastic and wonderful, but it is a stage production.”
“Am I real?” Jitty asked.
I had the good sense to stop the first answer that bubbled to my lips. “You’re very real to me.” I’d almost said she wasn’t, and a deep vein of fear opened up at what might have happened if I’d said that. Would she have disappeared? Would I be left at Dahlia House without Jitty, my friend, protector, and connection to the Great Beyond, where most of my family resided?
“And if you tried to tell someone about me, would they believe you?”
That was a tougher question. “They would want to believe me.” But I knew Tinkie would think I’d fabricated a means of communicating with my dead parents. And Cece would think that I’d opened the door to a subconscious desire made manifest. Madame Tomeeka is the only one who might believe me. She was hooked into the spirit world in a way that was much stronger than I was. But could she believe that I lived with the ghost of my great-great-great-grandmother’s dead nanny who’d been a slave and best friend? I couldn’t answer that.
“But would they believe?” Jitty pressed.
“They would try. And each one might come to believe in his or her own way.”
“The ability to believe in the unbelievable is what makes life magical,” Jitty said. “Without belief, your Granny Alice and I would have opted for a suicide pact. We had to believe that the sweet potatoes would make, and the okra, and that somehow, the two of us could scratch out enough food to feed the chil’ren and ourselves through the winter.”
“She couldn’t have made it without you, Jitty.” I’d thought many times that I didn’t have the grit of my Grandmother Alice or Jitty, or even of my parents, who’d stood up to injustice in a very public way.
“She couldn’t have made it without believing that the future would be kinder than the present. That we could somehow figure it out and manage to keep body and soul together. We believed, Sarah Booth. Else we would have given up.”
“You believed in your own abilities to do whatever was necessary. That’s different than believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.”
“Is it?” Jitty did a quick and deft plié, letting me know that even in my jeans she could cut a fine figure on a stage.
I thought about her question. Really thought. Was it so different? Was self-sufficiency a more solid belief than in a mythical figure? “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “Believing in magic is very powerful.”
“And you just made my point, girlfriend!” Jitty held up a hand to high-five. She was done with classical ballet and rational thought. She’d one-upped me in the logic department and she wasn’t interested in further debate.
“Make-believe won’t keep Eve and her baby safe or help me find Tinkie.”
Jitty sighed. “Call her.”
“What?”
“Whip out that cell phone you love so much and call Tinkie. And, just so you know, twenty years ago few folks on the planet would have believed you could carry a phone in your pocket and dial a friend from almost anywhere in the U.S. of A. Now I have work to do.”
Leaps and twirls took her to the edge of the woods, where she turned. “You’ll come around, Sarah Booth. I know it.” There was a burst of giggling from the animated mice and toys, a flash of the soft lights from the fluttering tree leaves, and then Jitty was gone.
The cell phone in my pocket rang.
“Where the hell are you?” Tinkie asked, more than a little annoyed.
“I could ask you the same. I’ve been trudging through the woods looking for you.”
“I’m standing in the road right where I’ve been for the last half hour, waiting for you. Not a single car has passed and the tall man hasn’t left his home. Good thing one of us is doing our jobs!”
I noted her sarcasm and chose to ignore it. The sequence of events didn’t make any sense at all. Tinkie hadn’t been on the road. She’d disappeared into the woods first, which was why Pluto had followed her in, and I’d followed Pluto. “I’ll be right there.” I backtracked and found myself on the rutted road in front of the cabin where the tall man lived. The dim lights of houses scattered down the road were easily viewed. The woods were not as thick as the grove I’d just left. I walked fifty yards down the road and found Tinkie standing with the dogs and Pluto. “Did you ever leave the road?” I asked.
“Are you a fool? There could be alligators in those woods,” she said.
“Or worse. Ballet dancers.”
She looked at me like I’d lost my mind, which I likely had. “So are we going on down the road to interview people or have you decided to play Hansel and Gretel in the woods?”
Her question gave me pause. “I’m going to find Eve and her baby. I believe they’re okay.”
Tinkie put a hand on my forehead to check for a fever. “Are you okay?”
“I’m better than I’ve been in several days. We’re going to find her, Tinkie. I know we are. Christmas is the season of miracles, and we’re overdue.”
Tinkie knelt down by Sweetie Pie and Chablis. “I don’t know what’s going on with Sarah Booth, but let’s roll with it, okay? She’s so much pleasanter when she’s in a positive mood.”
Sweetie Pie barked twice, as if agreeing. My own hound dog was betraying me.
“Let’s head down the road.” I started walking fast, knowing the pace would prevent Tinkie from talking too much. “Here.” I handed her the gun. She was a better shot.
“You think I’ll need to plug someone?”
“You sound like you’d like that.” Sometimes Tinkie’s bloody streak surprised me.
“I would, if it’s the person who abducted Eve.”
“Just as long as we have a plan,” I said sarcastically.
“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” Tinkie said.
She was correct, but that was the date set for Eve’s delivery. “We need to find her.” I couldn’t help the feeling that time was running out for us. It was harder to believe in Christmas miracles when the stakes were so high.
We knocked on the doors of several more houses and ended up with no information to help us. Some of the homes were empty—the occupants out for the evening.
“Let’s head back to that roadhouse,” I said. “This is getting us nowhere fast.”
“I agree,” Tinkie said. “You need a drink.”
I pulled out the phone and called Cece to join us.
“I have news,” she said. “I’ll tell you when I see you.”
Before I could respond, she hung up. I relayed the information to Tinkie. “Is it good news or bad news?” Tinkie asked.
“We’ll know soon enough.”