Coming Home for Christmas Read online

  Maizie watched her newest client for a long moment, studying him before she finally replied.

  “I’m afraid that all depends on the market, the price of the house, what you—”

  “You do it,” he said abruptly.

  “Do what, exactly?” Maizie asked. He looked to be on edge. Why? she wondered. Did it have to do with the house or something else? There were a lot of gaps she would have to fill. It didn’t necessarily help with the sale of the house, but the information would be useful in other ways.

  “You determine the going price for the house and sell it for just under that,” he explained.

  “Under the going rate?” Maizie questioned. Why would he want to sell it short? This was one of the more popular models in the development, and its orientation was ideal. The morning sun hit the kitchen and family room first. By the time the afternoon arrived with its heat, the sun was hitting the driveway, leaving the house enveloped in comfort.

  Maizie looked at her new client more closely. “What’s wrong with the house, Mr. O’Connell?”

  “Nothing.” He had to hold himself in check to keep from snapping. That wasn’t going to help. Besides, it wasn’t Mrs. Sommers’s fault that closure felt as if it was eluding him. “There’s nothing wrong with the house. I just want to get rid of it. I told you, I don’t live in this area anymore, and I just want to sell the house and get back to my work.”

  “What is it that you do, Mr. O’Connell?”

  “I’m a lawyer.” Usually he experienced a tinge of pride accompanying that sentence. But this time there was nothing, just this odd, hollow feeling, as if being a lawyer didn’t matter anymore.

  That was ridiculous. Of course it mattered. He was just fatigued, Keith insisted, silently scolding himself for the irrational thought.

  “A lawyer,” Maizie repeated with an approving nod of her head, surprising him. “The son and daughter of one of my best friends are both lawyers,” she told him conversationally. And then she sobered slightly and she asked in as kind a tone as she could, “Did your mother die at home, by any chance?”

  Because if the woman had, that put an impedance on the idea of a quick sale. Legally, at-home deaths had to be stated as such, and there were a great many people who wouldn’t dream of buying a home that supposedly came with its very own ghost to haunt its hallways.

  Keith blinked. “What? No. Why?” The single-word sentences were fired out at her like bullets, shot one at a time.

  Maizie’s tone continued to be kind as she answered him. “I thought that might explain why you seem so...tense,” she finally said for lack of a better word.

  She didn’t want to offend the young man, but she did want to get to the heart of what might be troubling him, because he was troubled. Anyone could see that.

  “Jet lag,” Keith told her dismissively, as if that explained everything.

  “San Francisco is in the same time zone,” she pointed out gently. There was no reason for him to be experiencing any sort of jet lag.

  “Of course it’s in the same time zone. I’m not an idiot,” Keith protested. “Sorry,” he murmured, doing his best to bank down his temper. Over the years, he’d schooled himself to be emotionally reserved. But what he’d learned was escaping him right now. “I was in New York on business when I got the call that—” Abruptly he changed the course of his response, correcting his last words. “My firm took a call from my mother’s neighbor saying that my mother had passed away. My assistant called me. So I caught the next plane back,” he told her.

  And then he stopped cold.

  Keith wasn’t accustomed to explaining himself. He hadn’t done that in a very long time. This had all caught him completely by surprise, and he was revealing more than he’d intended.

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” he informed her stiffly.

  “No,” she agreed, “it doesn’t. But I was just trying to get a feeling for the situation—and you. It helps me do a better job.” Maizie knew she had to sell this to the young man, who needed far more than the sale of this house to tie up loose ends.

  He needed peace, she thought.

  “I don’t care what you get for it. Just sell it,” Keith was saying. “I don’t want it hanging around my neck like the proverbial albatross.”

  “You might not care about the sale price now, but you will someday soon. Perhaps even very soon.” Maizie paused, her sharp eyes sweeping over everything in the living room. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you planning on doing with the furnishings?”

  “Furnishings?” Keith repeated uncomprehendingly.

  “The furniture, the clothing in the closets, the books—”

  He hadn’t even thought about that. He supposed he was still coming to grips with the idea that as far as his mother was concerned, there would be no more tomorrows and all that entailed.

  Replaying the agent’s words in his head, Keith waved his hand, dismissing the problem. “Get rid of it. All of it.” The things she’d enumerated represented a place in his life he had no intention of revisiting. “Throw it all away.”

  That would be a terrible waste, and Maizie wasn’t about to be wasteful if she could possibly help it. “I think if you do that, if you just throw all this away, you’ll live to regret it.”

  He was already regretting this conversation. However, he told himself that it cost him nothing to hear her out. “All right. What do you suggest?”

  Maizie thought of the conversation she’d just had yesterday with Theresa over a late lunch. It involved the daughter of a mutual friend.

  The single daughter of a mutual friend.

  A wide smile blossomed on Maizie’s lips. “I think I have an idea you just might like.”

  Chapter Two

  “You do realize you work too hard, right?”

  Marcy Crawford aimed the question at her younger sister, MacKenzie Bradshaw, as she followed her sister around a showroom that was nothing short of an obstacle course for anyone who wasn’t a size three. And in her current state of pregnancy, Marcy admittedly hadn’t been a petite size three for a little longer than eight months now.

  Her question was a rhetorical one, and it was meant to get Kenzie, the youngest of five and the one everyone in the family doted on, to reassess her present life. However, her supposedly impromptu visit to Kenzie’s place of work wound up getting the latter to fall back on her usual evasive maneuvers. Whether or not she actually meant to, Kenzie was weaving her way in and out of small pockets of space. Pockets that Marcy was frustratingly finding close to impossible to get into. Thus she was completely unable to follow.

  Kenzie glanced over her shoulder, pausing only long enough to blow her light blond bangs out of her eyes—she had to find time to get a haircut, she silently noted. With Christmas almost here, business had been good lately, really good. The turnaround at her shop, Hidden Treasures, both with items coming in and going out, had been more than a little gratifying.

  “Said the woman who’s more than eight months pregnant and carrying a fourteenth-month-old around in her arms,” Kenzie pointed out.

  She dearly loved her sister—loved all four of her siblings and her mother—but she instantly went into withdrawal mode the moment Marcy or the others felt compelled to change around the structure of her life. She liked it just the way it was—busy and profitable.

  “Exactly my point,” Marcy said, shuffling so that she was finally able to move in front of her sister by coming in from the other side. The less than fluid movement managed to trap Kenzie with an ornate carved turn-of-the-century credenza at her back while she, with her sheer girth, barred her sister’s escape from the front. “All this effort you keep putting out, it should be going toward your own family, not toward pawing through dead people’s junk.”

  “Hidden treasures,” Kenzie corr
ected her with just a touch of indignation, taking offense for both her clients and the one-of-a-kind items in her shop. “One woman’s junk is another woman’s prized possession.”

  “Call it whatever you like,” Marcy told her with a sigh. Alex, her sleeping fourteen-month-old son, was growing increasingly heavy and she shifted him from one side to the other in an effort to balance his weight. “Just say you’ll come to dinner tonight.”

  “I’d say it,” Kenzie replied willingly, “but you know I don’t believe in lying.” She fixed her sister with a penetrating look. “Look, Marce, I’d come over in a heartbeat if you weren’t setting me up.”

  “Setting you up?” Marcy echoed, torn between sounding utterly innocent and completely indignant at the suggestion that she would do something so underhanded—even though that’s exactly what she was doing. Her free hand was pressed against her offended breast. “Who’s setting you up?” she asked, her voice cracking as it went up just a little too high at the end of her question.

  “You are,” Kenzie replied without blinking. Turning, she found an opening next to a vintage Singer sewing machine console and wiggled through it, leaving Marcy to lumber over to a wider aisle.

  Marcy valiantly attempted to keep up the ruse. “I am not. Why would you say that?” she demanded. When Alex began to whimper in response to her elevated voice, Marcy was forced to lower it to a whisper. “Why would you say that?” she repeated in almost a hiss.

  Kenzie gave her a knowing look. “You told me not to wear my jeans and to remember to fix my hair.”

  Because of her hectic schedule and the fact that she had to dress well for work, in her off hours Kenzie enjoyed kicking back and being comfortable during her get-togethers with her family. Apparently, in her sister’s estimation, there was such a thing as being too comfortable.

  Marcy sniffed. “I just happen to think you look nice with your hair up.”

  Kenzie felt compelled to point out the flaw in that excuse. “Marcy, you spend your days running after a kid whose energy levels rival the Energizer Bunny and you’re about to give birth in a month or less. Why would you even care if I shaved my head before I came over for dinner?” she challenged. “Unless, of course,” she went on, “you’re inviting an extra guest to attend that dinner.”

  Marcy sighed, giving up the pretense. “Okay, you got me. I had Bob invite his friend George to dinner. But George is very nice—”

  Kenzie immediately cut her off. This line of conversation had no future. There was no point in letting Marcy just go on and on.

  “I’m sure he is,” she said, patronizing Marcy just the slightest bit, “but I’m never going to find out because I’m not coming over to dinner.”

  Marcy looked at her pleadingly. “C’mon, Kenzie, don’t be stubborn.”

  “You call it being stubborn. I call it surviving. Stop pulling a Mom on me,” Kenzie requested, then added a little more kindly, “I have no desire to be set up. My life is full enough as it is.” With that, she went on adjusting a new display of furnishings.

  Marcy cast a disparaging look around at her sister’s most recent acquisitions. “Yeah, full of dust and allergens,” she grumbled.

  Kenzie paused for a moment to pat her sister’s cheek. “C’mon, Marcy. Don’t pout. Your face might set that way,” she teased. It was something their grandmother used to threaten them with when they were little and scowled at being reprimanded.

  “What am I going to tell George?” Marcy asked. “I’ve already built you up to him as the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

  “Tell him I ran off to feed the masses,” Kenzie joked. And then she sighed, shaking her head. She would have thought Marcy would know better by now. “This can’t be coming as a surprise to you. You know how I feel about setups.”

  Marcy shifted Alex over to her other hip again, clearly physically uncomfortable. “But that’s when Mom does them.”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” Kenzie pointed out. “A setup by any other family member would be just as rotten.”

  Marcy played her ace card. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at her youngest sister. “You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

  “Nobody’s getting any younger, except for Brad Pitt when he played that weird guy in that movie a few years ago.” Kenzie congratulated herself on delivering the comeback with a straight face.

  Marcy’s hands were full as she held onto her son. Otherwise she would have used one to anchor her sister and get her to agree to dinner tonight. “I’m serious, Kenzie.”

  “And so am I, Marce. I’ve got a rocking chair with my name on it at the retirement home. The second I turn thirty, I’ll be sure to get my butt over there and start rocking in it.”

  “This isn’t a joke, Kenzie,” Marcy complained. She clearly wanted her sister to enjoy the sort of happiness she herself had a handle on: home, husband and an expanding family.

  “Neither is being set up.” Maybe if Kenzie issued a blanket warning, her siblings would cease and desist once and for all in attempting to manage her life. “Pass the word along to Marilyn. And while you’re at it, you can also tell Tom and Trevor in case they’re entertaining any ideas to jump in and pick up where you dropped off. I don’t want to be set up. Got that?”

  “I got it,” Marcy grumbled with a sigh. “But someday, you’ll regret this when you find yourself alone.”

  Kenzie suppressed a laugh. “Marcy, I have four married siblings with seven kids among them. I will never find myself alone. Besides, this way I get to be Fun Aunt Kenzie to the short tribe.

  “Now please, I’ve got work to do and I’m going to be here all night if you don’t let me finish it.” She paused for a second to kiss her sleeping nephew and brush her lips against her sister’s cheek. “I appreciate what you think you were doing for me, but trust me, setting me up will only lead to disaster. Now go before Pablo comes in with his duster. If you wind up staying here, you’ll be sneezing for a week,” she promised. “Go, Marcy.”

  Scowling her disapproval at the way things had turned out, Marcy murmured a few disenchanted-sounding words and then backed out of the space she was in. She was still scowling when she slowly made her way out the front door.

  Kenzie breathed a sigh of relief. Finally!

  She had exactly sixty seconds all to herself before the phone rang.

  She made it to the counter, where the store phone was located, by the second ring. Managing to collect herself to convey cheerfulness, Kenzie lifted the receiver from its cradle and declared, “This is Hidden Treasures. How may I assist you today?”

  The moment she heard the voice on the other end of the line, the smile she had deliberately forced to her lips widened of its own accord, generously spreading to the rest of her.

  “Hello, Theresa,” she said warmly to her mother’s close friend and the woman who had handled several catered affairs for her. “What’s up?”

  * * *

  It was a nice house.

  Kenzie recognized it instantly. It was nothing out of the ordinary, but still very nice. And well kept.

  The company her mother had founded and then passed on to her six years ago had her traveling up and down the California coast, visiting estates, regular homes and houses that fell somewhere in between. It was the middle group that tended to present her with the most surprises, yielding the occasional hidden treasure—which was why she had decided to change the shop’s name to that.

  Her work had taught her never to judge a book by its cover. She’d discovered that the most incredible things could be found in old cigar boxes—or their equivalent—left forgotten in the recesses of an attic, under a bed or in a seldom opened closest. Anything—from a vintage pack of playing cards once held in the hands of a famous gunman, to a great-grandmother’s precious missing cameo, to a deed to forgotten property—could turn up if some eff
ort was given to the hunt.

  What she liked most about her work was entering a different world while she assessed the belongings and, in some cases, prepared to undertake the sale of them. She always gave 110 percent of herself so her clients wound up receiving the maximum amount for their things while the items found homes with people who appreciated their worth.

  Kenzie liked to call her undertaking a win-win situation.

  Every place, be it a simple home or an estate, had its own kind of hidden treasure, no matter how unimpressive that item might appear to an outsider. With that in mind, Kenzie couldn’t help wondering what she would find in this pleasant residential home that Theresa Manetti had sent her to.

  She knew it was just serendipity that brought her here because she doubted Theresa had any idea she’d once known Amy, the girl who had lived here—or that she’d had a wild crush on Amy’s older brother.

  Parking her car next to the curb, Kenzie got out and slowly made her way up the front walk. She did a cursory evaluation of what she saw as she went.

  The property had been well maintained, although there was one hearty weed making its way up against the fence as if waiting to let loose with a growth spurt the moment no one was looking. The rest of the front yard, though, had been well tended.

  The house was at the end of a cul-de-sac in an upper-class residential neighborhood. All the houses in West Park appeared to be cared for. Holding a successful estate sale here with just a little bit of advertising would require next to no effort on her part, Kenzie decided just as she reached the front door.

  For a second, snatches of memories came scurrying her way, stirring questions.

  One thing at a time, Kenzie, she told herself.

  It seemed to her that the exact instant she touched the doorbell and pressed it, the front door flew open. She hoped she managed to hide her surprise from the tall, dark-haired man who answered the door.

  Oh, God, is that...?

  Yes, it is him. Keith. This is still his house, then.

  Kenzie struggled to subdue her erratic pulse. She forced herself to breathe normally.