Clara shrugged.
“What’s wrong?” Bailey asked.
“Nothing,” Clara muttered.
Now one of the other girls had drifted over, a pretty girl with strawberry-blond hair and freckles, Clara’s best friend, Aurora.
Make that former best friend, judging by the way Clara turned her back. “Go away. I’m not talking to you.”
Tears sprang to Aurora’s eyes. “Please don’t be mad, Clara. It’s not my fault Garth likes me now.”
“Yes, it is. You stole him. He liked me first.”
“And so now you’re not speaking to her,” Bailey deduced.
“She stole him,” Clara hissed, in case they’d missed that piece of vital information the first time.
“We’ve been down that road,” Cecily said, and put an arm around her sister. “It was a dumb road. Especially considering how well things worked out.”
“What do you mean?” Aurora asked, settling onto the couch next to Muriel.
“I mean Bailey and I both wanted the same man. But in the end, we each got the person we were meant to be with.”
“Well, I was meant to be with Garth,” Clara said, her scowl deepening.”
Pat smiled. “Yes, I understand those feelings. You know, I thought I was meant to be with someone once and my best friend got him.”
“Who was that?” asked Clara, forgetting that she was supposed to be sulking.
Bailey and Cecily exchanged smiles. They’d heard the story back when they were fighting over a man. It looked as though it was time for a new generation to learn the importance of love and loyalty.
Muriel had both of the younger girls’ attention now. “What happened?” Aurora asked.
Dot and Olivia had drifted into the living room area now along with two other young girls. “Tell ’em,” Dot said. “I always like a good story at Christmas, especially when it has a happy ending.”
“All right,” Muriel said. “It happened a long time ago, but sometimes it seems like only yesterday.”
One
Summer, 1969
“WE NEED MORE cute boys in this town,” Olivia Green complained as she and Muriel and Pat Pearson walked home from Icicle Falls High.
“We have more than we used to,” Muriel said.
By the late fifties, most of the cute boys and their families were all moving away. So were a lot of the girls, including her best friend, Doreen Smith. Muriel and Doreen wrote regularly for years, determined to stay best friends via the post office. But it wasn’t the same as having her in town.
The town hadn’t been much then. Icicle Falls had been dying for years, thanks to the railroad leaving and drying up the lumber business. After that there wasn’t much left—a ramshackle downtown with derelict buildings housing a general store, a bank and a post office. There was a run-down motel and a diner to cater to people going over the pass. Add to that a few houses, a church, a grade school and tiny high school, and that was about all there was.
When Muriel was eight, she’d eavesdropped on the conversation of various grown-ups gathered in her parents’ living room.
“We’ve got a mountain setting as nice as anything you’d find in the Alps,” her daddy had said. “We could turn this place into a Bavarian village, make it a real destination town. We’ve already got the mountains and the rivers to lure skiers and fishermen. Let’s give ’em a reason to stay and spend their money.”
“I don’t know, Joe. It’s a big gamble,” Mr. Johnson had said.
“If we don’t take this gamble it’s a sure thing Icicle Falls will be nothing but a ghost town in another ten years. We’ve got more people moving away all the time,” her daddy had pointed out.
Ghosts? Were there ghosts haunting the place?
She’d asked her mother about that later. Mother had kissed her and assured her there was no such thing as ghosts.
“What did Daddy mean, then?” she’d demanded.
“He meant that we need to find a way to make our town a place where people want to be.”
“I want to be here,” she’d said. She’d wanted her best friend there, too.
“So do I, darling,” her mother had said. “Don’t you worry. Your daddy’s going to fix everything.”
Daddy made chocolate. She had no doubt he’d be able to fix this problem, too. The one all the grown-ups were so concerned about.
And he had. In the summer of 1962, while her friend Doreen was enjoying the Seattle World’s Fair, Muriel was helping with town cleanup, collecting old cans in a field with Pat Pearson and Olivia Green. That had been a bonding experience.
And while they bonded over bits of garbage, other townspeople bonded hauling away old tires and abandoned cars from empty lots. Architects and builders were put to work, and the ramshackle buildings began to get a face-lift, changing Center Street from a Wild West ghost town to a quaint Bavarian village.
Muriel’s correspondence with Doreen finally dried up, but life in Icicle Falls moved on. The following year new faces began to show up in town. They came in a slow trickle at first, like the drip from icicles on their roof when the snow began to melt. These visitors sometimes brought along cute boys. Some of them even returned to stay, opening up shops. Like Dale Holdsworth, who opened Kringle Mart and imported snow globes and handblown ornaments from Germany to sell to people who came to check out the newly minted tourist village. And Andy Marks, who started a small wood-carving shop, and Gerhardt Geissel, who built Gerhardt’s Gasthaus. The Mountain Inn got a face-lift and a new name—the Bavarian Inn.
By the time Muriel was in high school, the student body had nearly doubled in size. Now it was up to a whopping hundred and forty-eight students. Thirty-two of them, including Muriel and her friends, were seniors that year.
“We may have more boys than we used to,” Olivia said, “but most of them are underclassmen. Who’s there in our class to choose from?”
For Muriel? No one matched the man of her dreams, the man she hoped
