Page 115 of The Holiday Gift

She rose quickly, ostensibly to check on the pizza, but he sensed she was also aware of it. As she slid the third pizza onto the peel and then out of the oven, he racked his brain to come up with a topic of polite conversation.

He could only come up with one. “What happened to your parents?”

The words came out more bluntly than he intended. Apparently, they startled her too. She nearly dropped the paddle, pizza and all, but recovered enough to carry it with both hands to the table, where she set it down between them.

“Wow. That was out of the blue.”

He was an idiot who had no business being let out around anything with less than four feet. Or three, in Tri’s case.

“It’s none of my business. You don’t have to tell me. I’ve been wondering, that’s all. Sorry.”

She sighed as she picked up the pizza slicer and jerked it across the pie. “What have you heard?”

“Nothing. Only what you’ve said, which isn’t much. I’ve gathered it was something tragic. A car accident?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, busy with slicing the pizza and lifting a piece to a plate for him and then for herself. He was very sorry he had said anything, especially when it obviously caused her so much sadness.

“It wasn’t a car accident,” she finally said. “Sometimes I wish it were something as straightforward as that. It might have been easier.”

He took a bite of his pizza. The robust flavors melted on his tongue but he hardly noticed them as he waited for her to continue.

She took a small bite of hers and then a sip of the root beer before she spoke again. “It wasn’t any kind of accident,” she said. “They were murdered.”

He hadn’t expected that one, not here in quiet Pine Gulch. He stared at the tightness of her mouth that could be so lush and delicious. “Murdered? Seriously?”

She nodded. “I know. It still doesn’t seem real to me either. It’s been eleven years now and I don’t know if any of us has ever really gotten over it.”

“You must have been just a girl.”

“Sixteen.” She spoke the word softly and he felt a pang of regret for a girl who had lost her father and mother at such a tender age.

“Was it someone they knew?”

“We don’t know who killed them. That’s one of the toughest aspects of the whole thing. It’s still unsolved. We do know it was two men. One dark-haired, one blond, in their late twenties.”

Her mouth tightened more and she sipped at her root beer. He wanted to kick himself for bringing up this obviously painful topic.

“They were both strangers to Pine Gulch,” she went on. “That much we know. But they didn’t leave any fingerprints or other clues. Only, uh, one shaky eyewitness identification.”

“What was the motive?”

“Oh, robbery. The whole thing was motivated by greed. My parents had an extensive art collection. I know you saw the painting in the dining room the other day and probably figured out our mother was a brilliant artist. She also had many close friends in the art community who gave her gifts of their work or sold them to her at a steep discount.”

A brazen art theft here in quiet Pine Gulch. Of all the things he might have guessed, that was just about last on the list.

“It was a few days before Christmas. Eleven years ago tomorrow, actually. None of the boys lived at home then, only me. Ridge was working up in Montana, Trace was in the military and Taft had an apartment in town. No one was supposed to be here that night. I had a Christmas concert that night at the high school but I... I was ill. Or said I was anyway.”

“You weren’t?”

She set her fork down next to her mostly uneaten pizza and he felt guilty again for interrupting her meal with this tragic topic. He wanted to tell her not to finish, that he didn’t need to know, but he was afraid that sounded even more stupid—and besides that, he sensed some part of her needed to tell him.

“It’s so stupid. I was a stupid, selfish, silly sixteen-year-old girl. My boyfriend, Cody Spencer—the asshole—had just broken up with me that morning in homeroom. He wanted to go out with my best friend, if you can believe that cliché. And Sarah Beth had wanted him ever since we started going out and decided dating the captain of the football team and president of the performance choir was more important than friendship. I was quite certain, as only a sixteen-year-old girl can be, that my heart had broken in a million little pieces.”

He tried to picture her at sixteen and couldn’t form a good picture. Was it because that pivotal event had changed her so drastically?

“The worst part was, Cody and I were supposed to sing a duet together at the choir concert—‘Merry Christmas, Darling.’ I couldn’t go through with it. I just...couldn’t. So I told my parents I thought I must have food poisoning. I don’t think they believed me for a minute, but what else could they do when I told them I would throw up if I had to go onstage that night? They agreed to stay home with me. None of us knew it would be a fatal mistake.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

---