The library was only open for a half day on Christmas Eve. Of course, in the years since Lindsey had been head librarian, it had become a sort of open house for the community, with everyone popping in to wish their friends and neighbors a happy holiday, snag a cookie from Nancy, do a calming yoga meditation with Milton, make a last-minute crafty gift with Paula or listen to Beth read “A Visit from St. Nicholas” during one of the many times she read it while dressed in her Mrs. Claus outfit.
It was one of Lindsey’s favorite days of the year because they didn’t even pretend to try and work other than to empty the book drop, check in the books that were returned and answer any pressing reference questions, which usually consisted of “What present can I buy my wife last minute?” or “Will Nancy give me the recipe for her gingersnaps?” That was a maybe, if she liked you.
The crafternooners were all there having an impromptu meeting. They had just agreed that the next book they were going to read would be Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Nancy and Violet had lobbied hard for the book, since Owens, the author, was a debut novelist at age seventy, and they felt they needed to support her.
Lindsey was walking to the break room to refill the punch bowl when Naomi and Nate came in with all five of their girls. The girls, especially the middles, were practically vibrating with excitement. The oldest gave her parents a put-upon look but took a cookie and dutifully walked her sisters to Beth’s reading.
Nate, who was wearing the baby in a sling, and Naomi saw Lindsey and walked toward her.
“Hi.” She greeted them with a smile. “The girls look excited.”
“Completely bonkers, more like,” Nate said, but he was smiling. “Lindsey, we wanted to thank you and Sully. Is he here?”
“He will be soon,” she said. “He’s my ride home.”
“I’ll make sure I thank him then, too,” Nate said. “What you did for us, well, we’ll never forget it.”
Lindsey glanced between them. Now that she was married, she felt a new understanding of what a lifetime commitment meant. She knew that she and Sully were still in the salad days and that there would be inevitable struggles ahead, but when she looked at Nate and Naomi, who were clearly going to give it another go, she felt a surge of optimism that no matter what life threw at a couple, they could try and make it.
“It was nothing,” Lindsey said. “Right place at the right time and all that.”
He gave her a look. Then he waved one of the baby’s chubby fists at her. “Librarian for the win, then.”
Lindsey laughed.
“I’ll go keep an eye on the girls,” he said to Naomi, and kissed her cheek.
“I’ll be right there,” she said. She watched him go with a look of love in her eyes that was so tender, it made Lindsey sigh.
“Things are good?” Lindsey asked tentatively.
“As good as they can be,” Naomi said. “Because of Steve’s will, we felt we had to have Matilda tested. She’s Nate’s.” She looked weak with relief when she said it, and Lindsey knew that it had been important to her that the baby be her husband’s.
“And you’re staying together?” Lindsey asked. She pushed open the door to the break room and put the punch bowl on the counter. Naomi joined her.
“We’re going to try,” Naomi said. She started to fill the bowl with ice from the freezer while Lindsey poured in a bottle of cranberry juice. “We’re in counseling, and I think we’ll be able to put the past behind us. The counselor says the fact that we both were willing to sacrifice ourselves for the other shows how much we love each other.”
Lindsey handed her a bottle of sparkling cider, while she poured in a bottle of ginger ale. The punch began to fizz.
“Of course, she also said that our ability to believe each other capable of murder meant we have some communication issues.” Naomi’s tone was wry, and Lindsey laughed.
“What about Maddie?” she asked. “Will she be able to have the surgery?”
Naomi looked up at her, and her eyes filled with tears. She nodded and said, “With Nate’s inheritance, we can afford it. It’s still terrifying, but there’s a surgeon at Phoenix Children’s Hospital in Arizona who is supposed to be the best in the country.”
Lindsey put down the bottle and hugged Naomi. She felt her own eyes get watery. “I’m so glad.”
“Me, too,” Naomi said. “It’s hard for Nate, though. He’s got a lot of conflicting feelings toward his brother, which my affair didn’t help. I know if he was given the choice, he’d give it all back to have his brother back, and I feel for him. I really do.”
“‘. . . the two most powerful warriors are patience and time,’ Leo Tolstoy from War and Peace,” Lindsey said.
“Oh, I like that,” Naomi said. “I think we’re going to need both.”
“From what I’ve seen, you have them,” Lindsey said. “You’re going to be all right.”
“Thanks,” Naomi said. “Like Nate said, we can never thank you enough. If you hadn’t left that note for Emma, and if Jamie hadn’t seen it—”
“We would have had a very boring wedding,” Lindsey said. She lifted up the punch bowl and followed Naomi, who led the way to the door. “It was purely selfish what we did.”
Naomi laughed, and it was wonderful to see her smile again. “Well, when you put it like that.”
They returned to the main room in the library, and Lindsey was delighted to see that her husband had arrived. It had been a week since they’d been married, but Lindsey still wasn’t used to saying my husband. They had postponed their honeymoon until after the holiday, knowing that Emma might need them as she put together the pieces of Steve Briggs’s murder and then Tony Mancusi’s.
According to Jamie’s full confession, she’d wanted out of the marriage so that she could be with Blaise, so she had hired Mancusi to take Steve out on his boat after the holiday party, saying that he wanted to talk. He was supposed to push Steve off the boat and leave him to drown or freeze, whichever killed him first. Jamie hadn’t known about the will leaving her nothing and had assumed that she would inherit everything as a widow, which was substantially more than she’d get as a divorcée.
The murder didn’t go as planned, and when Steve put up a fight, Tony grabbed the first thing he could find, Nate’s wrench, and clobbered Steve in the head, killing him instantly, or so he thought.
In a panic, Mancusi decided he needed to dump the body. He shoved Steve overboard, then he set Steve’s boat adrift, hoping people would think Steve had taken out his boat by himself and had an accident. He had no idea that when he pushed Steve overboard, he was still alive, and Steve somehow managed to swim to Bell Island, where the head injury and hypothermia finished him off.
According to plan, Mancusi went into hiding in one of the stored boats at the marina, but when he realized there would be no payout because Jamie had been disinherited, he confronted her, demanding his money, saying otherwise he’d go to the police and confess that she’d engineered the whole thing.
In a fit of rage, Jamie stabbed Tony with the dog-grooming shears she had in hand, as she was grooming Teddy at the time. Then she and Blaise tried to hide Mancusi in a boat, planning to dump him after either Nate or Naomi was arrested, giving Jamie an opportunity to contest the will.
Everything changed when Lindsey found the dog hair on Mancusi and left a note for Emma, which Jamie found when she stopped by the police station to see how the case was going. Of course, now that the truth was out, Jamie was denying that she’d hired Tony and was trying to change the narrative, saying that she killed Tony as revenge, out of love for her husband. Lindsey didn’t think anyone was going to buy that.
The doors to the library opened, and Emma and Robbie appeared, with Charlie right behind them. He was carrying Teddy, whom he now called Theodore, in a baby sling much like Nate’s. Lindsey elbowed Sully and pointed with her thumb. He glanced up from handing a cup of punch to Violet and grinned.
“I think they’re perfect for each other,” he said.
“Agreed,” she said.
They handed out more punch to the newcomers, and when everyone had a cup, Robbie stood up on a chair, because of course he did, and cleared his throat.
“I believe a holiday toast is in order,” he said. “And since I’ve been doing readings of A Christmas Carol for two weeks, let’s take it from the master.”
And then in his best Dickensian voice, Robbie said, “‘Then all the Cratchit family drew around the hearth in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers and a custard cup without a handle. These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and crackled noisily. Then Bob proposed, “A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!” Which the family re-echoed. “God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.’”
“Merry Christmas, wife,” Sully said as he clinked his plastic cup with Lindsey’s.
She smiled and said, “Merry Christmas, husband.” And she knew that it was going to be the first of many in what she hoped was a long life together.