My phone rings from the living room, and I finish taping down one flap before heading for it. It’s Dean.
“Hey,” I say, walking back to the table and pinning the phone between my shoulder and ear so I can keep wrapping.
“Hey,” he says. “Xavier wants to know if there will be snow.”
“Just in general?” I ask. “Like as a weather pattern, will it exist in the future?”
“For Christmas,” Dean says. “He wants to know the potential of a white Christmas in Sherwood. He says he consulted the Almanac, but that is just assumption and he would prefer the insight of someone who has experienced Christmases there. If you could provide data on all previous holiday seasons, he would appreciate it for comparison reasons.”
“Well, I don’t have that information right at the tip of my fingers at this moment. I didn’t spend every Christmas of my life here, and I don’t even remember most of my Christmases, to be honest. But I can tell him that there have been a few white Christmases here that I do distinctly remember. So, the potential is there. Obviously, I can’t guarantee it, but it has been a cold winter so far, so there is a chance. Does he want it to be snowy, or not?”
The question comes out faster than the rest of what I said because I realized part way through my reassurances that maybe he’s asking because he is nervous about the snow. Weather preferences aren’t something that Xavier and I have had any in-depth conversations about. Snack color preferences and the merits of continuing the textile tradition of adding tags to the back of t-shirts, yes. But snow versus no snow hasn’t come up.
“Yes,” Dean says. “He definitely is hoping for a white Christmas.”
“Dreaming of a white Christmas,” Xavier calls from the background.
“Dreaming,” Dean echoes him. “He was singing this morning and now he needs to know.”
“If he’s right there, why are you calling me? He could have asked,” I say.
“Well, now he’s singing. But he didn’t call because he is in the middle of perfecting a cookie recipe. With no references, from scratch. Like, he tried to put the entire bag of flour in for just one dozen cookies.”
“Why is he doing that?” I ask.
“It’s been a long time since he’s been able to celebrate Christmas, and I think he’s just trying to do as many of the traditions as possible. And since we got into the conversation about cookies over Thanksgiving, he’s been planning a Christmas cookie extravaganza.”
“His words?” I ask.
“Yes,” Dean says.
“Is he aware that there are cookie recipes on the internet? Like, a lot of them?”
“He is,” Dean says. “I even showed him how to download a recipe app onto his phone. He immediately made me remove it. But he said he doesn’t want to look up a recipe. He thinks our family needs its own Christmas cookie recipe.”
I melt a little bit. “I really hope he gets his white Christmas.”
“If I do, will you play in the snow?” Xavier calls from the background.
“Of course, I will,” I tell him. “We’ll make snowmen. And…” I stop. My hand falls away from the present in front of me and I almost drop the phone away from my shoulder. Catching it, I start toward the living room. “Dean, I’m going to have to call you back.”
“Is everything okay?” he asks.
“I think it’s about to be better than okay.”
Putting the phone beside me on the side table, I open my computer and pull up one of the pictures I saved from my research. I look at it closely, then move to the next picture. Reading through some of the articles and publicly accessible photos associated with it, I check another of the pictures. I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before.
Grabbing my computer and my notebook, I stuff my feet into the nearest pair of shoes and run out to my car. When I get to the police station, I wave off the woman at the front desk and walk straight into the back to Sam’s office. I know she hates when I do that, but I’m feeling particularly unwilling to wait in this moment.
The door is standing partially open and I give it a cursory knock to make sure he’s not interviewing somebody before opening it.
“Hey, babe,” he says when I walk in. “This is a nice surprise.” His face falls slightly. “It is a surprise, right? We didn’t have plans or anything?”
“No. You’re good. I figured it out. I know who the letter’s about,” I tell him.
“You did?” he asks. “Who? How did you figure it out?”
“Xavier was singing Christmas songs,” I say.
Sam stares back at me for a few seconds. “Is this a snake charmer situation?”
“Snake charmers use an instrument. I think you’re thinking about Xavier being a siren,” I say.
Sam shakes his head. “Nope. I was most definitely not thinking about that. But if Xavier wants to be a mermaid, then more power to him. I bet he could pull it off.”
I shake my head. We have fallen down the rabbit hole again. It seems now that Xavier has introduced us to the entrance, we are tumbling down that path far more often than we used to.
“No, Sam, Xavier does not want to be a mermaid. He was singing Christmas songs. White Christmas. He’s making cookies that inspired him to tell Dean, and he wants to know if it’s going to snow. Anyway, we were talking about the snow and Xavier asked if we would go out and play in it. And that got me to thinking.”
I walk around behind his desk and set up my computer, pulling up the series of images I was looking at. I minimize each one so they can all appear on the screen at the same time.
“This is the one near the Christmas tree farm?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Angeline Courtney. We talked about her name being too on the nose for there to be an
