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“I still think your plans will destroy what makes this town worth saving.”
“And I still think your resistance to change will kill it faster than any renovation.”
We stared at each other across the dark asphalt. She’d wrapped her arms tighter, but she hadn’t gone to her car. She was going to stand in a freezing parking lot for as long as it took to say the last thing.
I understood that impulse better than I wanted to.
“Tomorrow at noon,” I said. “I’ll bring budget projections for the festival. Vendor analysis. Attendance data from the past five years.”
“I’ll bring the vendor relationships. The community connections. The human context your spreadsheets don’t capture.”
“Then between us, we might have a complete picture.”
A sharp laugh escaped her. “That’s the most optimistic thing you’ve said all night.”
“I’m a realist, Ms. Winters. And the reality is that we’re stuck together until opening night whether we like it or not.” I moved toward my car, then paused. “For what it’s worth, your presentation was effective. You outmaneuvered me.”
She blinked. Whatever response she’d prepared, it wasn’t for a compliment. “I’m not trying to outmaneuver you,” she said. “I’m trying to protect my home.”
“I know.” I opened my car door. “That’s what makes you dangerous.”
I pulled out before she answered. She stayed in my rearview mirror until I turned the corner.
Eighteen mandatory meetings stood between me and the Christmas Festival’s opening night. The first started tomorrow at noon.
On the way back to the furnished rental on Mill Street, I passed the elementary school. Someone had taped a chain of red and green paper rings across the gymnasium windows. It sagged in the middle because one strip of tape had peeled away from the glass. One weak point had pulled the whole thing out of line.
I understood weak points. Nora Winters wasn’t one.
CHAPTER 3
NORA
At eleven ten the next morning, Jenna Morales came through the back door and hung her coat in my office. She had worked for Adele before I bought the business, and during the holiday season she covered three lunch shifts a week and the occasional afternoon. Owen had scheduled our regular planning meetings at noon so Jenna could keep Winters Wonderland open.
I handed her the spare register key and hurried to the community center, arriving forty-five minutes early with vendor binders, color-coded folders, and enough defensiveness to fortify a small nation.
The festival office was as depressing as I remembered. The overhead lights made everyone look sick, so I’d carried a lamp down here in 2019 and never taken it home. The single window sat near the ceiling, level with the parking lot outside, and offered a view of tires. The folding table was scarred with the phone numbers of committee chairs past, and one of them was mine, written eight years ago in ballpoint by a woman who’d thought she was volunteering for one season. A strand of last year’s tinsel drooped from a nail above the filing cabinet with half its silver fringe missing.
I arranged the vendor binders around my seat. Food service went on the left, crafts and retail in the center, and entertainment and activities on the right. Each binder held contact information, participation records, and the notes nobody else kept about why these people chose Holly Creek over festivals that paid better.
The records covered Mrs. Morrison’s sleigh rides, the Hendersons’ hot cocoa cart, and the high school choir that had performed every year since 1987.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Owen’s warning. Every January since my second year I’d filed the festival on my downtown merchant grant renewal, in the box marked Annual Public Programming, in blue ink. The grant covered rent and utilities through the dead months of January and February, and until last night that box had been the least interesting line on the form.
My phone lit up against the folding table with a message from Pearl.
Pearl
You’re there early. I can see your car from the bakery window.
Me
Establishing position.
Pearl
You’re treating a planning meeting like a military campaign.
