When Christmas Comes

by Andrew Klavan

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

After a confession of murder, a sleuthing English teacher will need a Christmas miracle to prove a condemned man innocent.



Colorful Christmas lights dapple the family homes in the idyllic lakeside town of Sweet Haven when Jennifer Dean, a young librarian at the local elementary school, is brutally murdered. There are witnesses and her boyfriend Travis Blake confesses to the crime . . . but something doesn't quite add up. Blake is a third generation Army Ranger, awarded the Silver Star for his heroism in Afghanistan—how could a beloved son of this tight-knit burgh commit such a grisly deed?



As a community of military families a few miles down the road from an Army base, no one in Sweet Haven wants to investigate a war hero like Blake, not even the top brass at the police department. In steps Cameron Winter, a rugged and lonesome English professor haunted by the ghosts of his own Christmas past, whose former lover asks him to prove Blake innocent. The Sweet Haven murder reverberates in his mind, echoing a horrific yuletide memory from his youth, and Winter knows there are darker powers at play here than a simple domestic dispute. If he can solve this small-town mystery, just maybe he can find peace from his inner demons as well.

Release date: November 2, 2021

Publisher:

Sample

Christmas never meant much to me after Charlotte went away. Charlotte brought the season into my life and I guess you could say she took it with her when she left. Still, whenever Christmas comes, I think of her.

We met when we were both children, me seven, she nine or so. I wasn’t a very happy boy. “A grim presence,” my father once called me. And I suppose I was. Serious. Silent. Watchful. Sad. Melancholy might be the word for it.

My father worked in the financial sector, whatever that means. I never quite knew what he did for a living. I never had to learn. He inherited a fortune and he turned it into a bigger fortune, that’s all I know. As for my mother, she dabbled in things, little arts and crafts projects that she would occasionally try to turn into a business. We had a town house in the city and a mansion out by the water. I had private tutors and flew on private jets and had private birthday parties in toy stores and theme parks rented out for the purpose.

A poor little rich boy, that’s what I was. Truly, what I remember most about it is the loneliness. Those birthday parties—children would come—“Your friends,” my mother would call them—but I never knew who any of them were. My parents had no time for me. Whenever they would come upon me in one of the rooms, they always looked startled, as if they’d completely forgotten I lived in the same house with them. If my mother came upon me by myself, a look of absolute panic would come into her eyes. She would ask, “Where’s Nanny?” in this strained, high-pitched, near-hysterical voice. And when Nanny would return from wherever she was, mother would breathe an enormous sigh of relief. “Oh! There she is!” Clearly, for a moment, she had been terrified she was going to have to figure out how to mother me on her own.

From the time I was five years old or so, Nanny was a homely little German woman named Mia Shaefer. She had only come to America a few months before we hired her. She and her family had gotten out of the eastern sector after the Soviet Union collapsed and the wall came down.

She was a small, slender, quiet, silver-haired spinster. Her Teutonic rigidity and precision were softened by a rich reserve of maternal tenderness and a sly sense of humor, teasing but gentle. I could never love her like she deserved because she was not my mother. I was holding my love back, you see, in the hopes my mother would come around and realize, on second thought, she really did want to tend to me, after all.

But Mia was all I had, and she was devoted to me, and whether I knew it or not, whether I appreciated it or not, her nurturing kindness, I would even say her love, was all the meat and drink on which my child’s heart was fed.

So anyway, I was talking about Christmas. It was a pretty miserable affair at my house. My parents were not at all religious, so there was nothing to it, to begin with, no underlying substance, I mean. It was mostly just elaborate decorations, all white on white, for some reason. And night after night there were fashionable parties to which I was never invited. There were plenty of presents on the day, of course, but what did I need presents for? I already had everything. In truth, my earliest memory of the holiday is me sitting in my room one year, watching some musical Christmas special on television and dreaming I was there, inside the TV, standing on the vaguely Victorian set, caroling under the fake snowfall. I wanted to be a member of the family of singers in their colorful sweaters and woolly hats.

Then, one Christmas, my parents received an invitation to spend the holidays with some friends in England. These were very lofty folk, as I understand it. True aristocrats with titles and everything. One of them was even a confidante of some member of the royal family.

Well, my mother was a very charming and elegant lady, but underneath all that, she was just a middle-class girl from the Midwest. And she was always a bit of a social climber, dazzled by high society. So this, for her, was like being invited to heaven. And the last thing she wanted was to have me along, getting in the way.

So off I was sent to spend the holidays with Mia and her family. “Won’t that be fun?” my mother said.

And you know what? It really was fun. More fun, I think, than I had ever had in my life.

Mia lived in a small suburb about half an hour out of the city. The houses were modest there but fiercely respectable. Lawns mown. Windows washed. This was a neighborhood of people who had got a fingerhold on the middle class and they weren’t going to let go of it come hell or high water.

Mia’s house was a small two-story gray-shingled dwelling on a patch of grass in a close row of houses much like it. She lived there with her family, all refugees from the old Communist world. There was her older sister, Klara, who worked as an aide at a local hospital: a cranky fussbudget but with a kind heart. There was their younger brother, Albert, a stalwart, down-to-earth, trustworthy sort of fellow, a security guard at an office building in town. Albert was a widower. As I understood it, his wife had died before they all came over to the US. But he had a daughter, and she was there too. That was Charlotte.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Charlotte was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen till then or have ever seen since. Blond and slim and prim with perfect features and bottomless blue eyes. She looked like one of those china figurines Mia and Klara collected and displayed everywhere about the house. I’m sure you’ve seen the sort of thing: angelic Bavarian children in lederhosen and dirndls. Charlotte looked like one of them.

But I don’t think that’s why I fell in love with her at first sight the way I did. It wasn’t just that anyway.

It was because she was so much like Mia—exactly like Mia really, only I didn’t have to withhold my heart from her because she wasn’t there to replace my mother like Mia was. Aside from that fact, she was a miniature of the original: a serious and precise little housewife, always busy with something, doing everything just so with the most serious perfectionism, yet with the same warm maternal tenderness in her eyes that Mia had and the same small teasing smile at the corner of her mouth too. I adored her almost from the moment I first saw her.

As soon as I arrived, I was put to work alongside Albert. We brought home a tree together, strung it with drugstore lights and crowded it with dime-store decorations. We assembled a train set on a card table in the front parlor, and set the locomotive going round and round a plastic German village that we arranged near the tracks then decked with Styrofoam snow. We hauled in wood and Albert taught me how to build a fire in the fireplace.

All the while, Mia and Klara and Charlotte were in the kitchen baking Christmas cookies and roasting lamb and potatoes. Charlotte was adorable in her pristine apron, and the smell was heavenly. The music was heavenly too. I loved the music. They had a portable compact disc player hooked up to a pair of third-rate speakers and it filled the place with a steady stream of cheesy, sentimental carols sung by crooners from the last generation. I thought every song was fabulously beautiful.

More than anything, though, I was swept away by the palpable family warmth in that place. With my parents, everything was all rush and importance. There was always this sort of sophisticated, dutiful politeness and restraint among us. We spoke pleasantly. We nodded to one another with thin, cold smiles. But here, at Mia’s house, there was teasing and nagging and squabbling and constant hilarity. The ladies treated us gentlemen like a cross between slaves and royalty. On the one hand, they were always ordering us about, sending us off on one chore after another, one more trip to the shops to pick up something they’d forgotten. On the other hand, they couldn’t do enough for us. They were forever bringing us snacks and drinks. We would sit like kings as they laid out meals for us, and when we were done eating, they would command us to sit still and relax while they cleared the table and washed the dishes.

Albert received both the ladies’ bossing and their ministrations with patient good humor. Judging by the gleam in his eye, he considered himself the luckiest man in the world. He was loved, that was for certain. Charlotte particularly idolized him. Whatever she accomplished, she wanted to show Papa. “Papa, look what I’ve done!” And whenever it was time to put a plate or a glass before him, she begged her aunts to let her be the one to do the job.

After dinner each night, Albert would ensconce himself in the plush armchair by the living room fire. He’d light a pipe and read the paper and sometimes drink a beer. And when it wasbedtime—Charlotte’s bedtime and mine—we would come in and sit cross-legged at his feet, and he would lay the paper aside and turn the ceaseless music low and tell us a story. They were good stories, I remember, though it was all I could do to pay attention when I was so distracted by Charlotte’s beauty—her perfect face turned up to her father with an expression of near-religious devotion. ...