Hearts Evergreen: A Cloud Mountain Christmas\A Match Made for Christmas (14 page)

“You said you were with her when this was taken?”

Sarah's gaze moved to the photo. She chucked softly. “He surprised us more than we surprised him. Mom didn't usually photograph wildlife, that's why it didn't end up in a book. But she wore her camera like a necklace, so she never missed an opportunity to take a picture. She lived behind the lens.”

The undercurrent in Sarah's voice made him curious. “Did you travel with her a lot?”

“Up until two years ago.” Sarah pivoted and started to walk away. “Would you like to see more of her work? Mom was a perfectionist. I rescued dozens of photos from the wastebasket over the years.”

Strangely enough, Connor suddenly found himself more interested in Sarah's childhood than in the unpublished photos of legendary photographer Anne Elliott.

S
arah retrieved an album from behind the counter and her slim fingers smoothed the surface of the soft leather cover before she slid it over to him.

Connor lingered over each page, aware of Sarah's eyes on him. She was probably as shocked to find out he was a fan of her mother's work as he was to discover the daughter of an award-winning nature photographer living in sleepy little Jackson Lake. “I can't see anything wrong with these. The light. The composition. They're all perfect.”

“I think so, too, but if Mom were here, she'd be able to point out the flaws.”

Connor's emotions stirred as he stared at several images of the Rockies. Anne Elliott's signature style captured slices of changing landscapes around the country. She worked only in black and white—each photo as stark as a pen and ink drawing, and etched with a haunting loneliness. He'd always been amazed that a photographer could coax such emotion out of the landscape.

“She loved the mountains, didn't she?”

“She did. Mom liked to say the plains were God's living room, but the mountains were His library.”

Anne Elliott's career spanned thirty years—he had several rare prints of her early work—so Sarah must have grown up roaming the United States. The most isolated, desolate parts of it. The reality didn't fit with his first impressions of hearth-and-home Sarah.

“Did you enjoy traveling with—” He finally voiced the question that had been nagging him since he'd started paging through the album, but the bells over the door drowned out the rest of his words.

“Excuse me.” Sarah slipped past him to greet a customer.

Connor went behind the counter to put the album away and noticed another one on the shelf. This one covered in blue dime-store plastic. He pulled it out and flipped through it.

It wasn't Anne's work. No black and white. No fragile wildflowers or lacy ferns or jagged rocks. The photos were in color. And all the subjects were people. A tiny Native American boy, with fathomless chocolate-brown eyes, dressed in a ceremonial costume trimmed in scarlet and sapphire-blue. A cowboy hunched over a campfire, the steam from his first cup of coffee beading his leathery skin.

They took his breath away.

“What are you doing?” Sarah practically snatched the album out of his hands.

“Have you shown these?”

Sarah's face paled, darkening her eyes to the blue of a winter storm. “How do you know they're mine?”

Gut instinct? Connor pried her fingers off the album and opened it again, paging through it as Sarah stood next to him, taut as a bowstring. “Your mother never photographed people.”

“No. She didn't find people fascinating. Or worthy of her attention. She saw God in His creation—that's what she wanted to get across to people. I'm probably the only photographer's child who doesn't have any baby pictures.”

Connor listened for bitterness but heard only affection. “What did she think of your work?”

Sarah laughed. “It wasn't my
work
—it was a hobby. We'd be out on a shoot for months at a time. I picked up a camera one day just for fun and took pictures of some children on the Hopi reservation. It helped pass the time. Mom always told me I was better at scrapbooking pictures than taking them.”

Her mother was wrong.

Connor saw real talent in Sarah's photos. They differed from Anne's in style and technique, but not quality. For reasons he didn't want to analyze, he couldn't let Sarah think her photos were inferior.

“You just said your mother wanted people to see God through His creation?” Connor didn't wait for Sarah to answer. “Your photos express the same thing in a different way. God created man, didn't He?”

Sarah stared at him as if the idea had never occurred to her. And maybe it hadn't. “You believe in God?”

“Don't put words in my mouth.” It figured. She bypassed the compliment and zeroed in to search for a deeper meaning in his words. What she'd discover would disappoint her. Covering the news in the world's hot spots for the last decade had strip-mined his soul. “I'm not saying He doesn't exist, I just don't think He intervenes in people's lives here on little old earth.”

He waited, expecting Sarah to launch into one of the familiar, defensive arguments he'd heard from people like her in the past.

She didn't. Her silence didn't make sense. She was a believer. Wasn't she obligated to refute statements like the one he'd just made.

“Connor! Just the man I was hoping to see today.” Alice Owens' voice trilled above the bells. Chanel N
^o
5 surfed in on a gust of December wind. “When I was sorting through my photo boxes yesterday, I found this one of your mother. I thought you might like to have it. Such a beauty, our Natalie. With a voice like an angel. I think half the people who came to the Christmas Eve service at church came just to hear her sing ‘O Holy Night.'”

Connor's throat closed as Mrs. Owens tugged a photo out of her purse.

“I don't remember.” He tucked the photo in his coat pocket without looking at it.

But suddenly…he did.

The memory stirred inside him. He remembered wriggling around on the hard church pew, sneaking a bite of the candy cane the usher had given him. Hearing his dad mutter under his breath about the length of the service. And he remembered his mother, standing at the front of the church, wearing a green velvet dress. Singing.

The walls of Sarah's shop began to shrink around him.

“I have another appointment, but I'll see you at noon, Sarah. And Mrs. Owens, thank you for the photo. I'll give it to Dad.” Even though it would end up in the mysterious place all the other photos of Natalie had gone.

He took several steps toward the door but Sarah called him back. “Connor?”

Hearing his name stopped Connor in his tracks. It was the first time Sarah dropped the formal Mr. Lawe and called him by his first name.

“Here.” She lifted the Isle Royale photo off the wall and handed it to him. When he realized she was
giving
it to him, he tried to press it back into her hands. She wouldn't take it.

“I can't accept this.”

“You like it, it's yours. Consider it an early Christmas present.”

“Sarah…” He didn't know what to say. Was she trying to soften him up so he wouldn't accompany her and the girls? Or had she seen his reaction to the photo of Natalie and felt sorry for him? Neither reason set well. Overwhelmed by the generous gesture even as he rejected it, he let his inner cynic loose. “You know I don't believe in Christmas. Everyone acknowledges Jesus wasn't really born on December twenty-fifth.”

She didn't take offense. Nor did she snatch the photo from his unworthy hands.

“Maybe the
when
of Christmas isn't as important as the
why
.”

On the way to Mason Street, Sarah couldn't forget the expression on Connor's face when she'd given him the picture. Disbelief. Suspicion.

You'd think no one had ever given him a gift before, Lord.

She brought her complaint to God in prayer, knowing His gentle nudge against her soul had been what prompted her to give the photo to Connor in the first place.

Instead of being warmed by the spirit of giving, he'd looked at her as if she'd offered him a package with an audible tick!

He's as cold as one of those icicles hanging off the roof, God. It makes me wonder what kind of article he's writing about us….

“Sarah! You missed the turn.” Jennifer shouted from the backseat.

Sighing, Sarah aimed the van into the nearest driveway and turned it around. Bev, the waitress from Roscoe's Diner, had called her to set up their Saturday morning delivery. Bev couldn't share many details about Francine, the new dishwasher, other than she'd been forced to get a job after her husband had left her.

“Don't tell her I'm the one who sent you,” Bev had said. “I'm not one to get mixed up in other people's business, but I got to thinking one of those songs might cheer her up a little bit. She's got a tough row to hoe.”

Sarah switched off the ignition and glanced at her watch as a black SUV bore down on them. Right on time. Connor Lawe might be a Scrooge, but he was a punctual one. Armed and dangerous with a camera around his neck and a tape recorder in his pocket.

“Hi, Mr. Lawe.” The girls chimed his name together sweetly.

Sarah resisted the urge to roll her eyes as she lined the angels up for a quick inspection. She straightened Mandi's wings, re-pinned the back of Emma's robe and adjusted Alyssa's halo. She glanced down at the four pairs of gold boots and decided another coat of spray paint was in order.

“Trumpet?”

“Check.”

“CD player?”

“Check.”

“Jennifer, did you pick out a song?”

“Uh-huh. ‘Silent Night'.”

“I still think we should do the rap instead,” Mandi muttered.

Two inches of snow had fallen during the night, dusting the uneven concrete sidewalk leading to the front door. There were no signs of life and Sarah hoped the woman wasn't still asleep. According to Bev, Francine wasn't scheduled to work at the diner until later that afternoon.

Masking tape crisscrossed the rusty doorbell so she peeled off her glove and rapped on the door as the girls clustered behind her, using her as a windbreak.

When it opened, a young woman stood on the other side. Her arms cradled an infant while two older children wearing footed pajamas—with the feet cut out—clung to her legs.

“Is Francine Carmichael here?” Sarah asked, sure she'd somehow gotten the address wrong. For some reason, she'd assumed the woman would be older.

“I'm Francine.” The woman's eyes widened when the girls peeked around Sarah and then she frowned. “If you're selling something, you'll have to come back some other time. I'm flat broke right now.”

“We're here to deliver a Good News-gram.” Jennifer lifted the trumpet, eyed the sleeping baby and lowered it again with a grin. “Can we come in? It's cold out here.”

“I don't know…” Francine's gaze flicked to Sarah, who gave her a reassuring smile.

“We're here to deliver a message. From a friend. It'll only take a few minutes.”

“All right.” Francine shrugged one slim shoulder and let them pass. Connor was the last one in line and Sarah noticed the camera had disappeared. Before she had time to wonder about it, they were in Francine's tiny living room. And Sarah came face to face with a kind of poverty she'd naively assumed didn't exist in a town like Jackson Lake.

The couch, still layered with an assortment of pillows and blankets, obviously doubled as a bed for either Francine or the children. A colorful sheet had been creatively strung from light fixture to light fixture, bisecting the room into two separate living areas. One side, a mockup of a dining room, contained a card table, folding metal chairs and a high chair. The other side had been turned into a makeshift nursery with a crib and changing table.

Jennifer raised her arms. “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born; He is Christ, the Lord.”

During the recitation, Francine's daughter had sidled closer to Emma to inspect her wings while the boy tried to wrestle the trumpet away from Mandi, who finally gave in and let him take it.

Distracted by the charming antics, Sarah almost missed her cue to turn the CD player on.

As the last words of “Silent Night” echoed around the room, the baby in Francine's arms stirred and opened its eyes.

Silence. Mandi stepped on Jennifer's toe and Jennifer gave a tiny yelp.

“This Good News-gram is to tell you that God loves you and so does…” Jennifer paused and glanced at Sarah, her eyes wide with panic. Because Bev had asked to remain anonymous, Sarah hadn't given the girls a name. She ad-libbed. “So do we.”

Francine burst into tears.

The four girls looked at Sarah in horror. Connor, standing just inside the door, took a step forward.

Sarah didn't stop to think. She crossed the distance between them and gently took the baby from Francine and deposited her into Emma's waiting arms. She drew Francine to the couch and wrapped her arms around the young woman, hugging her until the worst of her inner storm subsided.

“I don't know why he…left,” Francine choked. “Everything is a mess. We're all alone…”

Sarah took a deep breath. “No, you're not.”