Secret Santa (9 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

N
EIL
’
S
ARM
ACHED
. As he climbed out of the car and headed toward the doors of the community clinic, he wondered if maybe he should try something for the pain. A little ibuprofen in addition to the Tylenol wouldn’t hurt, would it?

It was barely eight in the morning, and cold as a polar bear’s toes. All Neil had really wanted to do was to roll over and go back to sleep until this wintry mix moved on and they had more palatable weather.

Still, Louredes had called in with some sort of crazy tale about an anonymous donation. A community newspaperman couldn’t turn down a story. Last week’s newsstand sales had been through the roof, what with the article about the little boy Charli had saved. Of course, the fair committee had bellyached about how he’d cut into ticket sales with his negative coverage.

Well, Neil had a business loan to pay off. He didn’t intend to sensationalize events for the sake of increasing his print run. But that didn’t mean he was averse to a genuine good story.

Including this one. The parking lot was empty except for what appeared to be the staff’s cars. And...was that Charli’s car?

No. It was the same make and model, but this little car had a spoiler on the back, and Charli’s didn’t.

Buddy, if you can already tell the difference between her car and every other one just like it, you might be in over your head.

Charli had called after last week’s paper and given him an effusive thank-you for the article. He could tell she wasn’t used to being on the front page of the paper. Neil had wanted to ask her out, but he figured maybe the reason she hadn’t called him earlier—or come around the hedge to his house—was that he’d been completely useless in an emergency. Or maybe he shouldn’t have kissed her so impulsively in the E.R. before he’d driven the Chathams to Savannah.

The whole thing had fueled a bunch of second-guessing but at least had inspired him to sign up for the next Red Cross CPR training session.

The door to the clinic was locked, though the lights were already on. Teeth chattering, he rapped on the glass. He wasn’t usually cold, but the frigid temperatures gnawed at him through his jacket and jeans.

Louredes bounded up, inserted the key and unlocked the door.

“Come in! Come in! A windbreaker? Neil! We’ll be treating you for double pneumonia if you don’t dress warmer than that.”

He stepped through the door to find the waiting room empty. The inside of the clinic felt blissfully warm after the bone-chilling cold outside. “Hey, Louredes. What’s this about a donation? Couldn’t it have waited until later today?”

The keys jangled as she locked the door behind him. She didn’t wait for Neil. She marched to the door to the exam rooms with a quick stride that made her short legs appear as though she were almost jogging. “No! And besides, the police are coming, so you can get a picture of them, too.”

“Police? For a donation? Why?” Louredes had him thoroughly confused as he followed her through the door marked Authorized Personnel Only.

“You’ll see.” Her words, delivered over her shoulder with a cryptic smile, mystified him.

He rounded the corner to find Wanda Headley, the clinic’s interim board chair, at Louredes’s workstation. She straightened up from inspecting several bundles of cash.
What the...?

“Look, Neil! A miracle!” Louredes swept her hand over the money as though she were a magician pulling a rabbit out of her hat.

“Wow—who donated this?” It didn’t take an expert in banking to see this was quite a haul.

“That’s just it. That’s the mystery. We don’t know. It just appeared. Poof!” Louredes shook her head and sent her eyes skyward. “A miracle.”

Neil tended to be a bit more cynical about miracles than Louredes apparently was, especially when the miracle turned out to be several thousand dollars. No—closer scrutiny revealed the heap of cash to be tens of thousands of dollars.

He worked his notepad out of his back pocket. Honestly, the one-handed note taking was the most irritating thing about his broken arm, that and the trouble he had to go to in order to shower. Maybe he should get one of those digital recorders.

But Neil hated the way a recorder made people anxious about what they said—plus, going through the recorded interviews was time-consuming and aggravating. No, it wouldn’t be much longer until he would have two good working arms again. He flipped the notebook to a clean page and jotted down the date and the time. Pen poised above the page, he fired off the first question: “How much is it?”

Louredes clasped her hands together and squealed. “Oh, Neil! It’s over one hundred thousand dollars! Do you know how much medicine that will buy? How many labs this money will pay for?”

Wanda spoke up in a subdued tone. “Don’t count on it yet, Louredes. It may be a joke...or counterfeit...or stolen.”

Louredes’s shoulders slumped, but only for a moment. “It can’t be, Wanda. We need it too much, and who would be so cruel as to do that to us?”

“So you don’t have a clue as to where it came from?” Neil asked. Louredes had been right. This was a good story.

“No! It was in a priority mail envelope. Somebody shoved it through the mail slot. We’ve got them on video!”

“Louredes, I’ve been thinking.” Wanda spoke up, her face pinched. “Maybe Neil shouldn’t write the story at all until we get the all-clear from the police.”

“But it’s news,” Neil insisted. “What would you gain from sitting on it for a week? It’s going to be common knowledge by day after tomorrow, anyway—you know Brevis. So wouldn’t it serve your purposes better if we went with the story and perhaps jogged a witness’s memory about seeing someone drop off the money?”

Now Louredes’s head bobbed in response to Neil’s question. “Wanda, we have to let Neil tell the story. That’s the only way we can thank this person.”

He surveyed the women’s faces. Louredes had her hands clasped in hope he would do the story. Wanda looked ready to collapse first and call her lawyer second.

Wanda ended the suspense. “I can see Louredes’s point, Neil. I guess it can’t hurt to go ahead and share it. And the public might have information. I guess if the police chief doesn’t want you to do the story, you two can work out any embargoed information.”

Neil let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. “Okay. So let’s hear what all your Secret Santa has been up to.”

Louredes giggled, her eyes crinkling. “I like that. He
is
a Secret Santa. He’s gonna make lots of our patients’ Christmas dreams come true.” Before Wanda could get out a word of warning, Louredes hurriedly raised a finger and added, “
If
we get to keep the money, that is.”

* * *

A
PERSON
WOULD
have to be under a rock to have escaped the buzz the donation had created in Brevis. And between her chatty patients and Marvela—who was plugged into all the gossip networks—Charli couldn’t claim to be under a pebble, much less a rock.

Who would have thought it’d make such a big splash? Charli had halfway expected that Louredes would have kept the donation under wraps. But no—everyone and his brother knew about it, with some really weird tales about how and why it had happened. It was a million dollars, it was from a migrant who’d hit the lottery jackpot, it was from a farmer, it was from the hospital to keep the migrants out of the E.R...and on and on the stories went.

As she left the office, Charli was exhausted from having to pretend surprise every time a patient brought up another version—always slightly wrong and even wilder than the one before—of where the money had come from. After that sort of day, the last thing she wanted to do was field more questions about it, but that’s exactly what the caller ID on her phone told her to expect.

“Charli!” her mother bubbled into the phone. “I’ve tried to get you all day! Did you hear about the clinic? Who on earth could have done that?”

No good deed.
Charli wanted to bang her head against the steering wheel. Instead, she snapped her seat belt in place and started the car. “Mom...” Her hands-free switched over, and now her mother’s excitement was in surround-sound stereo.

“It was a million dollars! A million—”

“Mom,” Charli started again. “I heard. But it’s not a million. It’s only a hundred thousand.”

Suddenly her mom’s voice sharpened. “Really? How do you know? What have you heard?”

Charli gave herself a mental kick. “That it was closer to a hundred thousand and that someone’s blowing smoke about the million. Besides, I don’t think a million dollars would have fit in a single envelope.” There. That sounded better. “Listen, Mom, I’m tired, I’m sleepy and I may have my facts all screwed up. You’re right. What do I know?”

“Oh, honey. Why don’t you come by the house and I’ll make you some of that tea you like so much? And some supper? I’ll bet you haven’t eaten a real meal all day. You’re a carbon copy of your father.”

Charli knew better than to risk being around her mom—who could spot her telling a fib in a nanosecond in person, especially if Charli were this tired. One slip was warning enough. “It’s all right, Mom. I’m too tired to even chew.”

“Soup, then. I can make you a nice hot cup of soup. You could slurp that down.”

For a moment, Charli was tempted. It would be nice to have someone waiting for her at home, with a steaming pot of soup on the stove. But if she went by her mother’s, she’d surely screw up. And the one thing she didn’t want to do was make her mother a knowing accomplice, even one after the fact, of her crazy, impulsive decision.

Time for distraction. “What did you hear about the donation, Mom? And why does it get you excited?”

The tactic worked like a charm. “Well, Clara Long was the first one who called me....”

And on it went, a convoluted tale of one gossip queen calling another to pass on the latest juicy news. Thankfully, nobody seemed to have a clue about who could have donated the money, and everybody referred to the donor as a man—for once Charli was glad to have gender bias work for her instead of against her.

“And Thelma was telling me that your Neil Bailey was planning on finding out exactly who this fellow is, and why he did it! Seems there’s a video and maybe Neil can identify the donor—”

Charli gripped the steering wheel. “What?”

“That is a fine young man, Charli. I think he’s a very good match for you. But you didn’t join the community cantata—that would have been an excellent way to get to know him better.”

“Mom!” Exasperated by the memory of her mother’s clumsy matchmaking efforts, Charli still tried to tamp down the irritation so it wouldn’t spill out in her voice. “I’m not some nineteenth-century girl who needs to be married off. Neil’s just...well...he’s—”

Her mother’s response was uncharacteristically pragmatic. “He’s one of the only single and eligible young men in town, Charli. You have to marry somebody. As to why I’m so excited about the donation...maybe because it was something that reminded me of your dad—something your father wanted to do, but he didn’t have the money. Because of me. Because of my mistakes.”

Charli turned onto her street. Even over the road noise, she could hear the sudden note of sadness in her mom’s voice.

“Mom?”

“I’m going crazy, Charli. What am I supposed to do all day? All night? I never realized how much of my life centered around your father. And now...” A muffled sob came through the car’s surround-sound speakers, twisting Charli’s heart. “I feel so useless. Nobody
needs
me anymore.”

“Mom—Mom...” Charli tried to interrupt her mother’s tears. She could hear her crying in earnest now and recalled those long tear-filled days leading up to the funeral. She should go stay with her. She could, maybe for an hour....

“Mom,” Charli tried again, this time more softly. “Forget about people needing you. How about the people who
want
you? Hmm? Your friends—the garden club ladies, the women in your Sunday school class. They adore you. They want to help you. They told me so.”

Her mom made a little “meh” sound that could have either been agreement or despair.

“Well?” Charli prodded. “They’ve been eager to help out, right?”

“Delores Sanders did invite me to go to Macon with her and another of our girlfriends,” her mom allowed in a near-whisper. “And Beattie Trilby suggested I help her teach a floral arranging class at the public library. Oh, and the Christmas bazaar... We have to get that started because that’s the main fundraiser for the senior center. And...well, there’s the Christmas tour of homes that I always do to help the Cancer Society. I don’t know, though, how I feel about decorating the house. I mean, it’s not like your father’s here to enjoy it.”

Charli still couldn’t imagine decorating for Christmas, either. Her mom had always obsessed about finding the perfect gift for her dad.... Charli didn’t even want to think about how tough this Christmas would be.

Instead, she fixed on the thing she could feel good about encouraging her mom to pursue. “See? You are one busy lady—Neil told me so. I’ll bet they’re waiting for you to help them organize that bazaar. Besides, you do a much better job at arranging flowers than Beattie does.”
Please don’t let Beattie Trilby find out I said that. But anything to get my mama out of the house.

“You don’t think they’re feeling sorry for me?”

“No, Mom. You’re always the life of the party. You know that. They tell me that all the time—there’s no fun until Violet gets here.”

“Oh, you.” Her mom’s smile came through loud and clear. “You’re just like your dad. You both always knew what to say to make me feel better.”

I’m not like him at all. I love her, but living with my mom all the time would drive me bonkers.
Instead, she settled on, “Well, I guess I’d better let you go so you can get started on the Christmas bazaar thing.”

“Okay. Bye, honey.”

Neil’s blazing vista of lights welcomed Charli home. It was after eight-thirty so the music had shut off, but the lights would stay on until midnight, then come back on promptly at 5:55 a.m. to greet the morning working stiffs. She sat in the car for a long moment and stared at his Christmas display.