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Chapter 2

2

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“Good Heaven! I was bred in this place. I was a boy here! . . . There’s the Parrot! Green body and yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe, he called him, when he came home again after sailing round the island. There goes Friday, running for his life to the little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Halloo!”

—Ebenezer Scrooge

Little about her hometown of Testament had changed.

Well, maybe a few things, but not enough to truly note. The minute Charlie crossed the city limits—several miles from the actual heart of town—a strange mixture of yesteryear and today worked her like a tonic. And not necessarily in a good way.

She drove the familiar streets, her eyes darting, looking for a face she might recognize in the outskirts. Seeing none, Charlie frowned. She hadn’t been gone that long, had she? Nine years since high school graduation hardly resembled a lifetime. Not to mention that she visited periodically. All the major holidays. A week during the summer.

Okay, so even then she rarely fraternized with the locals. Only with Sis, who hauled her from pillar to post, showing her off like some prize pig. Naturally, on those outings—to places like the Testament Drug Company for lunch in the side café—she saw a few of her old friends now all grown up. She’d gone to school with them from fifth grade to senior year. A few had children of their own now.

Fifth grade . . .

Charlie gripped the steering wheel of her Hyundai Elantra at the thought of that first year at Testament Elementary. She’d been so afraid back then. What if the other children knew the truth about her? That her parents were convicted felons. That they were serving ten to fifteen in Georgia state prisons. That her father, the man she hoped never to lay eyes on again, was a drug dealer. A liar. Who’d chosen drugs over his own child.

Sis had told her not to worry. “You know and I know,” she’d whispered to her that first night, adding a peck to Charlie’s mop of dark hair. “And the good Lord knows. I can’t think of another soul who needs to know.”

Later, when asked by a neighbor, “Where’s her daddy and mama?” Sis rolled a version of the truth off her tongue as if she’d been practicing for days. “Their business,” she’d said with a nod, “has taken them away from little Charlie for a while. Her daddy and I agreed it best for her to come live with me for the time being.”

“A while” had turned into five years. By then her parents had managed to commute their sentences for good behavior. Exemplary, her father’s attorney’s letter explained, the one Charlie had sneaked into Sis’s desk drawer to read. Exemplary to the state, perhaps, but Sis was having nothing to do with it.

“You listen to me good,” she’d said to her son during a phone conversation one evening when Sis thought Charlie to be asleep in bed. “I don’t care if you were holding Bible study on Wednesdays and preaching church on Sundays. You come here and try to take this child from my home, and you’ll have me to deal with. I don’t care if you are her father. You’re my son, and you’re not too big for me to remind you of that every once in a while. No, John Dixon, your daughter—whose name is Charlie, by the way, and not ‘my kid’ as you keep referring to her—Charlie is a junior in high school. She’s a straight-A student. She’s popular with the others, a favorite among the teachers, and active in her church youth program.” Sis took a short breath. “Now if you love her as much as you say you do, you’ll do right by her and leave her be until she’s old enough to decide for herself.”

Sis had gotten through to him. Good thing, too. By the time Charlie graduated from high school, her mother had run off with another man, leaving no forwarding address, and her father had returned to his “three hots and a cot,” as Sis called it. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Forever, she hoped.

Still, no one in Testament was the wiser. To this day, Charlie hadn’t bothered to contact her father, and he’d not bothered to contact her. Just as well. She knew her bitterness wasn’t healthy, but it ran deep—and with good reason! “Keep the past where the past goes,” she said aloud as the Hyundai rolled past the elementary school to a stop sign. She glanced over, noting the new paint trimming the red brick structure. The wooden cutouts of the early Pilgrims. The ones with holes for faces, perfect for photo ops, obviously left over from the week’s preholiday festivities.

She’d spent only a year at this school, and still the memories thumped at her heart. The initial dread of anyone knowing the truth about her had soon been overshadowed by making new friends, going to slumber parties, participating in school sports—track, mainly—and having her first and only crush, Dusty Kennedy, the cutest boy in fifth grade. The cutest boy in the entire school all the way to high school graduation.

As her car rolled on toward town, Charlie wondered what he looked like now. She’d not seen him since senior year, and she imagined him balding or, at the very least, with a receding hairline. Perhaps even a rounding gut where once there’d dwelled a six-pack.

She laughed out loud. Maybe that was just wishful thinking on her part. After all, they hadn’t even hit thirty yet.

Charlie drove past the Decker Ranch, craning her neck to find the winding driveway. Old habits die hard, she supposed. She’d practically grown up hanging out there. A little farther up the road, the Matthews’ property stretched on the right side. She was almost home.

Home. Whatever that meant these days.

She turned the wheel, and the car bumped its way up the narrow stretch of weed-strewn road leading to Sis’s nautical-styled cottage nestled beneath a canopy of fall leaves a hundred yards or so from the old barn Sis had never used but declared she’d never tear down. “Gives this property character, don’t you think?” she’d say anytime someone suggested demolishing it.

Just like Sis, holding on to the past.

Charlie smiled as she stopped the car no more than a foot from the Nantucket star railing wrapped around the front porch. She looked at the dashboard clock before shutting off the engine. She’d made it before two.

When she exited the car, the screech of the weather vane pulled her gaze upward. Just as quickly, the slamming of the screen door—the one leading to the screened-in side porch—stole her attention.

“There you are,” Sis said, leaping over the two wooden steps bookended with clay pots filled with pink-petaled asters.

Charlie laughed as her grandmother wrapped her in a tight hug. The older Dixon drew back, her cornflower-blue eyes made all the more startling by the pure white of her bobbed hair. “Look at you,” Charlie said. “How do you do it, Sis? How do you manage to get younger instead of older?”

Sis pushed at Charlie’s shoulder. “Who taught you to say things like that, I wonder? Something you learned at that posh school where you’re working?”

Charlie’s stomach lurched, and she pressed her hand against the flat of it. “Come on, Sis. You look like a magazine ad, all dressed up in that boho skirt and sweater and . . . are those scrunch boots?”

Sis pointed a toe, turning her foot left to right and back again. “You like? They’re hip.”

“Hip?”

Sis splayed her hands at her waist. “Is that not the right word?”

Charlie answered with a giggle and a shake of her head. “Hip’s an okay word, I suppose.” She walked to the back of the car, popping the trunk open with her key fob. “You said you have to be at the school at three?” She pulled the larger of her two pieces of luggage from the recesses.

“I do. Want to come, or are you too tired?”

Charlie had to admit she wasn’t tired at all. Somehow, even with the stress of losing her job and having a nine-hour trip behind her, she felt reenergized. Probably the change in weather, which in Testament was crisp and scented with burning leaves. A sharp contrast to the humidity that hadn’t quite left Ocala, keeping the scent of hay and horses at a premium. “Actually, I’m feeling kinda good right now, Sis.”

Sis reached for the smaller piece of luggage now at Charlie’s feet. “Then let’s get you inside and freshened up a little.” She started toward the screen door. “Oh, I know. We’ll stop at The Spinning Bean on our way. They have this new pumpkin latte you have to try.”

Charlie brought up the rear, dragging her luggage over the still spongy grass. “So what play are y’all doing this year?” she asked, her focus on her sandaled feet. She’d need to pull out warmer shoes before they left.

Sis paused at the top step as she opened the screen door. “A Christmas Carol. And I need to talk to you about—”

Charlie stopped and looked up. “You’re kidding me, right?”

Sis feigned indignation. “What’s wrong with A Christmas Carol?”

“You mean other than the fact that it’s been done to death?” Heavens, but wouldn’t Sis give Clara Pressley a run for her money in the “let’s keep it old-fashioned” department? How one woman could look so modern and think so old . . .

“Ha. Ha.” Sis pulled at the burnished brass door handle and stepped onto the porch, holding the door for Charlie to enter.

“You know, Sis,” Charlie said, huffing as she pulled her luggage up. “There are some fantastic current musicals out there. In fact, I was working on one with the girls at Miss Fisher’s before I . . . uh . . . before we took our Thanksgiving break.” New hope sprang into Charlie. Perhaps all the work she’d done before being fired hadn’t been a loss.

“Mm-hmm.” Sis ambled down the length of the porch toward the side door. “You’ll have to take that up with the new drama teacher.” She turned and smiled at Charlie as though she were in on a classified top secret.

Charlie stopped. “New drama teacher? Someone I know, or did the county finally spring for someone outside its traditional circles?”

Sis grinned. “Well, I suppose that’s how you look at it. He is outside the traditional circles. He’s young and just full of ideas, and he is someone you know.”

Charlie tilted her head. “Who?”

Sis smiled again, then pushed the door open. “Dustin Kennedy,” she said as she strolled into the house.