Holiday in Stone Creek by Linda Lael Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

them to let the proverbial sleeping dogs lie, he probably had a good reason. Not that the decision was only his to make.
    "I miss having a mother, Ash," Olivia said gently. "That's different from missing Mom specifically. She left us, remember?"
    Remember? How could Ashley remember? She'd been a toddler when their mother boarded an afternoon bus out of Stone Creek and vanished into a world of strangers. She was clinging to memories she'd merely imagined, most likely. To a fantasy mother, the woman who should have been, but probably never was.
    "Well, I want to know why," Ashley insisted, her eyes full of pain. "Maybe she regretted it. Did you everthink of that? Maybe she misses us, and wants a second chance. Maybe she expects us to reject her, so she's afraid to get in touch."
    "Oh, Ash," Olivia murmured, slouching against the back of her chair. "You haven't actually made contact, have you?"
    "No," Ashley said, tucking a wisp of blond hair behind her right ear when it escaped from her otherwise categorically perfect French braid, "but if I find her, I'm going to invite her to Stone Creek for Christmas. If you and Brad and Melissa want to keep your distance, that's your business."
    Olivia's hand shook a little as she set her cup down, causing it to rattle in its delicate saucer. "Ashley, you have a right to see Mom if you want to," she said carefully. "But Christmas--"
    "What do you care about Christmas?" Ashley asked abruptly. "You don't even put up a tree most years."
    "I care about you and Melissa and Brad. If you do manage to find Mom, great. But don't you think bringing her here at Christmas, the most emotional day of the year, before anybody has a chance to get used to the idea, would be like planting a live hand grenade in the turkey?"
    Ashley didn't reply, and after that the conversation was stilted, to say the least. They talked about what to contribute to the Thanksgiving shindig at Brad and Meg's place, decided on freshly baked dinner rolls for Ashley and a selection of salads from the deli for Olivia, and then Olivia left to make rounds.
    Why was she so worried? she wondered, biting down hard on her lower lip as she fired up the Suburban and headed for the first farm on her list. If she was alive,Delia had done a good job of staying under the radar all these years. She'd never written, never called, never visited. Never sent a single birthday card. And if she was dead, they'd all have to drop everything and mourn, in their various ways.
    Olivia didn't feel ready to take that on.
    Before, the thought of Delia usually filled her with grief and a plaintive, little-girl kind of longing. The very cadence of her heartbeat said, Come home. Come home.
    Now, today, it just made her very, very angry. How could a woman just leave four children and a husband behind and forget the way back?
    Olivia knotted one hand into a fist and bonked the side of the steering wheel once. Tears stung her eyes, and her throat felt as though someone had run a line of stitches around it with a sharp needle and then pulled them tight.
    Ashley was expecting some kind of fairy-tale reunion, an Oprah sort of deal, full of tearful confessions and apologies and cartoon birds trailing ribbons from their chirpy beaks.
    For Olivia's money, it would be more like an apocalypse.

    T ANNER HEARD THE RIG roll in around sunset. Smiling, he closed his newspaper, stood up from the kitchen table and wandered to the window. Watched as Olivia O'Ballivan climbed out of her Suburban, flung one defiant glance toward the house and started for the barn, the golden retriever trotting along behind her.
    She'd come, he knew, to have another confab with Butterpie. The idea at once amused him and jabbedthrough his conscience like a spike. Sophie was on the other side of the country, homesick as hell and probably sticking pins in a daddy doll. She missed the pony, and the pony missed her, and he was the hard-ass who was keeping them apart.
    Taking his coat and hat down from