Page 17 of Colorado Christmas Carol
“That was a strange conversation,” Mellie told Essa, moving closer to her.
“It was,” Essa said, spooked by it. The man was saying a lot without saying anything.
They were still discussing it in whispers when Mellie’s dad came down the stairs. He was wearing his usual indifferent expression, except that it changed to a tight-lipped one when he spotted Essa.
She glared at him and didn’t say a word. He glared back.
“Essa is my friend. You don’t really mind that I asked her to come with us?” Mellie asked in a plaintive tone.
He took a deep breath. “Of course not.” He glanced at Essa. “I thought you were going to another dig with your friend Dean?”
“He invited Mellie,” she said, “and then he invited me. But Mellie said you had someplace special for her to go that was secret. And she wanted me to come.”
He scowled as he pulled out his car keys. “Why were the two of you whispering?”
“It was something Dean said,” Essa told him. “He said you must have some sort of sixth sense. We didn’t understand what he meant.”
“And he said he was happy and sad that we couldn’t go with him,” Mellie added.
Duke knew something, Essa could tell. But she didn’t question aloud the sudden change of expression that he hid very quickly. Obviously he wasn’t sharing any information with the enemy, she thought wickedly.
He looked down at her with a strange expression. “Your hair,” he said. “It’s very long.”
“Too long for my profession,” she said, tongue-in-cheek. “It caught on fire once, before I learned to put it up before I went into a kitchen.”
He actually laughed, but he covered it up at once by coughing. “Well, you won’t be near any fires today.”
She and Mellie followed him out to his car. Mellie quickly claimed the back seat. An amused Duke insisted she move to the front seat. He climbed in and glanced at both of them to make sure their seat belts were on before he put on his.
“I always wear a seat belt,” Essa remarked. “It saved the life of one of my friends. He was in the passenger seat in a wreck. It was the only thing that kept him from going through the windshield. His mother said he had bruises where the seat belt dug into him.”
“Better bruises than dead,” Duke replied as he drove out onto the highway.
“Where are we going, Daddy?” Mellie asked excitedly.
He glanced at his daughter and smiled secretively. “Wait and see.”
“Oh, Daddy!” she wailed. And then she grinned.
* * *
They drove to a neighboring town, about halfway between Benton and Denver, to, of all things, an ice-skating rink.
“Oh, Daddy, you remembered!” Mellie exclaimed, and hugged him tight. “I thought you said you hated ice-skating now and would never do it these days!”
“I didn’t say that.” He noticed her glowering at him. “Well, I didn’t mean it, when I said that,” he corrected. He handed her a bill. “Go rent some skates.”
“Aren’t you going, too?” she asked Essa.
“I don’t imagine the would-be novelist here could stand up on them,” Duke said with a bland expression.
Essa just looked at him with an expression that could have stopped a charging bull. She went with Mellie to get skates.
“Can you really skate?” Mellie asked. “’ Cause Daddy gets real snarky with people who don’t do it well. He has his own skates, too.”
“I get by,” Essa replied, not adding that she’d won a regional championship while she was still in high school. She also had skates, but she’d had no idea they were going to an ice rink on this surprise trip for Mellie.
“Okay then.”
