The Girl and the Black Christmas Read online

  Then she slipped.

  It was just one moment. At least, it was only supposed to be. She didn’t think anything of it. When it happened, she didn’t even realize what it was. She didn’t know her feet were sliding. She didn’t know she didn’t have the grip she thought she did, or that the force pulling on her was stronger than anything trying to hold her in place. Stronger than her.

  So, she fell.

  It wasn’t a hard, tumbling fall. The kind that would have left her battered and broken. She didn’t crash down to the bottom and lie there in a heap, not even able to see the peak where she once stood. She could always see it. It was right there, but she couldn’t get back to it.

  She never seemed to be able to get her feet back under her. She kept sliding, but the further she fell, the more she scrambled. She tried to claw her way back so she could look out and find her future again. If she could stand there, the ground solid under her feet, she could see what was in the distance and remind herself where she was going. She could see the way.

  After that day, the future she thought she would one day have seemed like a different existence to Julia. By now, she should have graduated. She should be working on her graduate degree and checking things off the list that would get her step by step to her goals.

  But she’d slipped.

  She had always been so careful. Everything had been simple and clear. She’d always known what was one step ahead of her. In that one, single moment, she’d detoured. She hadn’t known it was happening. She hadn’t realized how far it was going to take her. It was nothing more than a blink. A breath. But that was all it took.

  She let out a sigh, dropped her shoulders, and smiled. Maybe they wouldn’t notice she was late. It was only by a few minutes. And she desperately wished she wasn’t. Of everything packed tightly into her schedule, this was what Julia enjoyed the most. The thing she hated to be late to more than anything.

  This was a break, serenity in the chaos. It was fun and relaxing. Beyond that, it was a glimpse of a different life. It was a chance to see something else, to look past the slide to the top of a different hill. That helped her remember there could still be a future. Not the one she had once imagined, but a future, and that assurance was enough. She just had to keep clawing.

  Julia knocked on the door and it opened almost instantly. The woman on the other side looked flustered, but happy to see her.

  “You’re here,” she smiled.

  Julia nodded. “There was traffic. I got stuck behind an accident.”

  “Come on in,” Marissa said. “My husband has already left, so I need to hurry.”

  She took off her coat and brought it to the closet hidden off to the side of the foyer, down a tight, dark hallway. That hallway always looked as if the people who lived in the house were trying to stop anyone from noticing it was there. She knew how that felt.

  Julia followed Marissa through the house to the expansive room that curved along the back. Huge windows and glass doors let in the afternoon light. It would disappear soon. November shortened the days and lengthened the chill of the dark. She didn’t mind. But the little girl sitting in the middle of the floor did.

  Iris hated when it got dark. She didn’t want to be anywhere near the big doors and tall windows when the sun went down. That meant they only had a short time in the room surrounded by her toys before they had to move further toward the middle of the house for the evening.

  Julia didn’t mind that, either. She loved every second of being in that house with that little girl. When she was there, she didn’t have to think about anything else. None of it mattered. She could think just about playing with the tiny dolls and wooden blocks. Then eating dinner with Iris and putting her in her bath. Everything else could pause a little while.

  It all came rushing back too soon, though. Marissa was always the one to usher her back to the front door, tell her to have a good night, and send her off into the evening. On the days when she came in the morning, she got more time with Iris in the playroom, then eased her into a nap. Somehow it was harder when she finished up during the day. Stepping out into the daylight made Julia feel off-kilter, as if she wasn’t sure where to go or what to do next.

  She sat down on the floor next to Iris. Wide blue baby eyes turned to her. Just three years old, those eyes still had so much left to see. There was infinite possibility in them. Julia wondered about them. She wondered what they saw when they looked at her, and what they saw when they closed at night.

  They would look out over the peak of a hill one day. They would see a future far out in the distance. Julia could only wonder what it was they would see and if there was a chance she might get to know.

  Chapter Five

  Now

  “The first time I came here, I had no idea my family had anything to do with this town. I had never even heard of Feathered Nest. To be honest, I thought it might be a joke when Creagan first mentioned it. He was so angry after I almost blew my last undercover assignment. He had been trying to bust a drug dealer for a really long time and in one night, I managed to almost destroy the entire plan. Not to mention almost get myself and a good portion of the team killed in the process,” I explain.

  “Drug dealer?” Xavier asks. “Did that have anything to do with The Dragon?”

  “No,” I shake my head. “Separate incident. But it did have to do with Greg. He had recently gone missing, and I still wasn’t coping with it very well. I felt as if it was my fault, and I was regretting a lot of things that happened between us. It put me in a really difficult place.”

  “The cliffhanger credits montage,” he says.

  “The what?” I ask.

  “TV shows and movies that are part of a series always end with a relationship in a bleak moment. Everything is falling apart, and it seems as if the two people are never going to find each other again. Then the guy, for instance, goes through an emotional journey displayed with a montage. The audience sees him remember everything about the woman and their relationship, but it’s always the softened parts. The guy doesn’t remember how high-pitched and loud the woman laughed, just that she laughed. He doesn’t remember getting woken up by the woman’s snoring and glaring down at her, just how she looked while she was sleeping. He remembers eating takeout in bed together, not that they had to order it because the woman forgot to cook, or that it made them sick,” he says. “It causes all sorts of…”

  He pauses, as if he’s trying to snatch the right words out of the constant storm of them swirling around in his mind. When he can’t, he flails his arms up in the air above his head and gives a little wiggle. I point at him.

  “Exactly. But I was all like that for kind of the opposite reason. I wasn’t imagining all of the wonderful things about my relationship with Greg, exactly. It wasn’t as if I was sitting around coming up with terrible things about him, but I wasn’t longing for him. I was upset that nobody knew where he was, and he wasn’t in contact with any of us. And I was angry for not being more honest with him in the first place,” I say.

  “Didn’t anybody realize something terrible must have happened to him?” Xavier asks.

  “People thought about it, of course. But the thing is, he didn’t just vaporize. It wasn’t as if he was going about his normal life and there was a specific endpoint that people could pinpoint. We didn’t have bills that lapsed or rent that didn’t get paid. His bills continued to get paid through automatic withdrawals from his bank account. And everything that we looked into pointed to the fact that he prepared to leave.”

  “He slipped through your fingers,” Xavier comments.

  It’s the simplest, most concise way to describe it.

  “Yeah,” I nod. “And it infuriated me. And broke me. I ended up getting taken out of the field and spending six months pushing papers and answering phone calls. Then I was sent here. People were dying and disappearing, and the Bureau was called in to assist the local police in tracking down the person responsible. Creagan chose me because I hadn’t
gone undercover in a while and was assuming I could pass as a woman trying to start over in a new life. At least, that was how it was presented to me. He gave me another name, and I came here with a story that I was considering moving to Feathered Nest to start again.”

  “What was your name?” he asks.

  “He kept my first name, but gave me the last name Monroe,” I say.

  Saying it feels as if I’ve found a tear in time. The words coming out of my mouth are my own, but the voice is from four years ago. I’m hearing myself say the name Creagan gave me and knowing how ridiculous it sounds. Now I understand why he kept my first name, but I didn’t know then.

  “Like Lakyn,” Xavier says.

  My stomach twists. I look back at the book in my hands. I want to fall into the words.

  “You wouldn’t make a very big splash.”

  My eyes snap over to him. “What?”

  “You said you wanted to fall into the words. You wouldn’t make a very big splash. Not with that book, anyway.”

  “I said that out loud?” I ask, startled it managed to slip out without my even realizing it.

  There’s something about talking to Xavier that blurs the line between thought and speaking. Just as he looks as if he’s absorbing what he reads, he soaks things up from the people around him.

  He nods. “But you aren’t going to get very deep in that.”

  I hold the book up. “It’s classic literature.”

  “Nothing more than a painting with letters for pigment. Lovely, for sure. Impressive, perhaps. But no deeper than a brush stroke on canvas. If you really want to swim around in something, try this.”

  He hands me the book he was reading. I scoff at the title.

  “It’s a comedy,” I say.

  “It’s easy to make people cry. Basic human emotion can be tampered with without too much effort. It’s not so simple to make people laugh. Sadness, grief, anger, emptiness, loneliness. They’re all solitary experiences. They crush from the inside out. But humor is reciprocal. It’s an interaction, even if it’s just with the page or a recording. You must be willing to have your emotions manipulated and vulnerable enough to not be cynical or bitter, or too protective. And someone must be willing to reach out and offer that twist on reality, a personal perspective or thoughts, knowing there’s no control over how it will be internalized. You fall into those words, you can keep sinking as long as you want to.”

  I stare at him for a few seconds, trying to wrap my mind around him. It’s not the first time. It won’t be the last.

  “I didn’t want to think about that,” I finally tell him. “I don’t like thinking about what happened here, but I can’t not think about it. There are still too many questions, and no matter how many times I tell myself I won’t come back, I end up here. The first night I was here, I was right here in this living room. I was going over notes for the case and getting myself ready for the investigation. Creagan had told me someone was supposed to meet me here, but there wasn’t anybody. That’s why it didn’t seem so strange when I heard someone knocking on the door.”

  Xavier nods.

  “I thought it was the property caretaker. But when I opened the door, a man fell dead on the porch in front of me. At the time, I didn’t know who he was or why he was there. When I was checking him, I found a piece of paper with my name written on it in his hand. “

  “Your real name?” Xavier asks.

  “Yes. After that, everything happened so fast. No one knew who he was or where he came from. There was no car. No one heard a shot. That was what started my journey to find out who he was and how he knew me. It helped me finally answer the questions I had about my mother’s death, but also her life. Then I was lured back here and found out I was actually born right outside of Feathered Nest, and my parents had strong connections to the town. Creagan knew that all along. It was why he sent me to track the killer.”

  “The one whose mother knew yours,” he says.

  I nod. “I know I shouldn’t think about it, but there’ve been a few times when it’s hit me that if things had worked out differently, Jake and I might have been raised together. We could have been friends.”

  “Why?” Xavier asks.

  “Because our mothers were friends. His mother was my mother’s nurse. Then she rescued her from her husband and relocated her. My mother didn’t know Jake existed or she would have made sure he was safe, too.”

  “I meant why shouldn’t you think about it?” Xavier clarifies.

  “Oh. I just… what benefit is there in thinking about it? It’s over. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t change it. So, why spend my time thinking about something horrible?” I ask.

  “Because it isn’t all horrible. You are where you are right now because those things didn’t change. If all had fallen into place and you were raised right alongside Jake the way you said, what else would change?” he asks.

  “My mother would still be alive. I would probably be an artist right now, rather than going into the FBI. But if it all did work out that way, we wouldn’t have spent as much time in Sherwood with my grandparents, so I wouldn’t be with Sam,” I say.

  “And Dean may never have been born,” Xavier says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If your mother and Jake’s were close enough friends to have raised you and Jake alongside each other, it would mean they would have stayed here. She never would have rescued Dean’s mother. And your uncle wouldn’t have used her the way he did,” he says.

  “I don’t understand, Xavier.”

  “Thinking about it reminds you of the good that came from the pain. It hasn’t been in vain, Emma. Do you know why roses have thorns?”

  I cringe at the thought of the roses but draw in a breath and shake my head. “Why?”

  “To protect the bloom. Without them, it couldn’t exist. Remember the thorns, cherish the petals.”

  I’m about to answer him when his eyes snap over to the door. His head tilts to the side and he gets up.

  “Xavier?”

  Without answering, he crosses to the door. He gets there just as Dean comes into the room.

  “What’s he doing?” he frowns.

  “I don’t know,” I say. Xavier opens the door and heads out into the night. “But I think we better follow him.”

  Chapter Six

  By the time I get outside, I can’t see Xavier anymore. That’s particularly concerning to me, considering I know for a fact he can’t find his way out of a large walk-through maze, and now he’s out in unfamiliar woods in the dark.

  And when it’s dark in Feathered Nest, it’s dark. A suffocating kind of dark that surrounds you and seems to seep down into your skin. Unless the moon is bright and the sky is cloudless, there’s little chance of seeing ahead of you while walking through the trees.

  It’s better now because of the new lights added to the front of the cabin. The first couple of times I was here, the lights on the front and side did little to penetrate the thickest part of the woods beyond the cabin. I rushed down the steps from the porch and into the middle of the open dirt space to look around for him.

  “Xavier?” Dean calls out, rushing after me.

  The cold is biting, and I realize I didn’t bother to grab a coat. Dean isn’t even wearing shoes. His hair still wet from the shower, he must be freezing.

  “Where is he?” I ask.

  Dean shakes his head. “I don’t know. But we better find him before he gets too far. It’s too cold out here for him to be wandering around.”

  “What the hell?” Sam shouts from the back of the cabin. “What are you doing out there?”

  Dean and I look at each other.

  “I think we might have found him,” I say.

  Xavier comes scrambling around the side of the cabin just as the door flies open and Sam runs out.

  “There’s somebody creeping around the back of the cabin,” he says.

  He’s holding his service weapon and he has that look in his
eyes he gets when he feels as if I might be in danger. I step up closer to the porch and hold up my hands to make him pause.

  “It was Xavier,” I say. “Everything’s fine.”

  “That was Xavier I saw outside the bedroom window?” Sam demands.

  “Yes,” I say.

  He shakes his head and tilts it back as if he’s trying to seek out some sort of guidance. “I honestly don’t know if that makes me feel better or not.”

  Xavier raises his hand. “I vote yes.”

  “Why would it not?” I ask.

  “Because he doesn’t do anything for no reason, and if he was creeping around back there, he knows something,” he says. “But he scared the hell out of me and almost got himself shot.”

  Xavier’s hand goes up again. “I vote no.”

  “Why did you go back there?” Dean asks.

  “Go inside,” Xavier says.

  “What?”

  “Go inside.”

  “We’re not leaving you out here,” Dean says.

  “Then you stay. Emma, go inside.”

  I look at Dean and he shrugs. Going back up on the porch, I rise up on the balls of my feet to kiss Sam, then take his hand to bring him with me into the cabin. I turn around before closing the door.

  “Any specific room?” I ask.

  “The living room,” Xavier says. “Review your notes. Be her again. See with her eyes.”

  Sam’s looking at me strangely when I close the door and walk over to the couch.

  “Whose eyes are you borrowing?” he asks.

  “Emma Monroe’s,” I say.

  He nods and sits down on the couch beside me. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing, but I do what Xavier asked. Taking my computer from where I set it when we first arrived, I open it on the coffee table and scroll through some pages as if I’m going through research.

  For a few seconds, there’s nothing but silence. I get the uncomfortable, creepy feeling something is about to happen. I’m just about to lift my head to look when movement flashes across the corner of my vision. My head snaps up, and I look at the window to my left.