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  Books by Barbara Ross

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  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

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  Barbara Ross

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Kensington Publishing Corp.

  “Logged On” copyright © 2018 by Barbara Ross

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

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  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-4149-3 (eBook)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-4149-8 (eBook)

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

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  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

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  Barbara Ross

  Chapter One

  “It looks like a mousse,” my sister, Livvie, said. Charitably.

  “It looks like something a moose left in the woods,” her husband, Sonny, corrected. “An unhealthy one.”

  Page, my ten-year-old niece, leaned in toward the disaster sitting on a board on the countertop. “At least it must taste good.” She dipped a finger in the mess and popped it in her mouth. “Yuck.”

  “There’s the final verdict.” I used a big kitchen knife to sweep it into the garbage bin. “Tomorrow I try again.”

  The crease between Livvie’s big amber eyes deepened. “Maybe you should try something a little less challenging.” It was a gentle suggestion, well-intentioned.

  I shook my head. “Nope. Bûche de Noël, it is.”

  “Okay, then.” She turned to her family. “Let’s go. It’s a school night. Sonny, can you get Jack?” Their ten-month-old was asleep in a portable crib in my old bedroom upstairs. I’d made the Yule log cake, or, rather, I’d attempted to make the Yule log cake, at my mother’s house. The tiny kitchen in the studio apartment over Gus’s restaurant, which I shared with my boyfriend, Chris, couldn’t have handled the complicated dessert. Of course, as it turned out, neither could I.

  “Sure,” Sonny said. “Then we’ll light this baby up.”

  While I’d measured, mixed, and baked, Sonny, Livvie, and Page had strung lights outside the house. My mom had grown up motherless, in an apartment in New York City, and never had been one to go over the top at Christmas. All my life a simple Maine-made evergreen wreath had graced our door, nothing else.

  But the year before, the Maine Coast Botanical Gardens, up the peninsula, had started a new holiday tradition. Called the Illuminations, they adorned a huge swath of their 128 acres with five hundred thousand colored bulbs. It had been successful beyond their wildest imaginings. The first year, sixty thousand people showed up. But when those people had driven down to our little town of Busman’s Harbor, looking for dinner and perhaps a place to stay overnight, they’d found the sidewalks rolled up and the town in darkness. The only place to eat in the off-season was the dinner restaurant Chris and I ran in Gus’s space. But we catered to locals and Gus was anti-signage, so most people missed us.

  This year the Tourist Bureau had persuaded two of the larger restaurants to stay open every night until New Year’s. The town had strung lights along the stretch of two-lane highway from the gardens into the harbor, and they’d attempted to persuade all the year-rounders to decorate their homes. My mother was suddenly into it, consulting with Sonny about what kind of lights to buy and where to put them on the house.

  While Sonny was gathering Jack, Livvie again tried to talk me out of attempting the Bûche de Noël.

  “Julia and Jacques assured me that this flour-less chocolate roulade would make a perfect cake layer for my Yule log,” I told her.

  “Julia Child and Jacques Pépin were both considerably more experienced bakers than you are,” Livvie pointed out.

  I shook my head, unmoved. “You have cookie day.” Livvie was the field general of the family Christmas cookie-making efforts. “And Mom gives out her strawberry-rhubarb jam.” Made when the fruits were fresh in the spring, the jars were festooned with bright green ribbons and delivered to neighbors, friends, and relatives when the holidays arrived. “I need my own thing.” I’d been back in Busman’s Harbor for almost two years and had decided to make it my home. I needed my own contribution to our Christmas traditions. Livvie was the family baker. I was not. I admit the Yule log cake was an odd choice, but I had my reasons.

  “Julia Child said she never changed the recipe for her Bûche de Noël—only for the cake, the filling, and the frosting,” Livvie said. I squinted at her, my best daggers stare. She shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

  “Let’s go! Outside.” Sonny charged down the stairs, ten-month-old Jack in warm footie pajamas held to his shoulder. My mother hurried after them.

  “So exciting,” she said as we slipped into our coats, stepped into our boots, and went out the big mahogany front door.

  “Ready?” Sonny handed Jack to Livvie and disappeared around the side of the house. We stood in the road, shivering. “One, two, three!” Sonny shouted.

  Merrily-colored miniature bulbs outlined the front of the house, showing off its distinctive Victorian features, including the deep front porch, the mansard roof, and the cupola at the top. We gasped appreciatively, then clapped.

  “Bravo! You’ve outdone yourselves.” Mom ran to Sonny and gave him a hug as he returned to the front yard.

  “The lights are on a timer,” Sonny instructed. “They’ll come on at four every day, and go off at midnight.”

  I turned in the road, taking it all in. While many of the houses of seasonal residents around town were completely dark, Main Street had always been home to year-rounders. Up and down the road, every house twinkled against the night sky. Across the street, the Snugg sisters’ B&B had white lights outlining the gingerbread on their porch. One block down the hill all the town stores, including Gordon’s Jewelry, Walker’s Art Supplies, and Gleason’s Hardware, were decorated to the nines. Our days were short in coastal Maine. Dark came early. The lights made me feel so happy. They were everywhere.

  Except one house. Mrs. St. Onge’s. It was at the top of the harbor hill, next to my mom’s. Set back from the street, the overgrown house was always dark and foreboding, and now, the only o
ne on our block not lit up. It was like a black hole sucking up all the happiness on the street. I shivered and turned away. Back toward my family, smiling and laughing. Back toward the light.

  * * *

  “You don’t have to do this.” My boyfriend, Chris Durand, stared over my shoulder at the mess I’d made on Gus’s countertop. Rather than humiliating myself yet again by attempting the Yule log cake at Mom’s house, I’d waited until Gus finished lunch service so I could make the cake in the quiet of the restaurant kitchen. This time I’d tried a traditional sponge cake, but once again I’d foundered while trying to roll the base and filling into a log.

  “I want to do it,” I insisted through clenched teeth. “Your family is coming for the holiday. It’s my tribute to your French Canadian heritage.”

  Chris’s green eyes looked straight into my blue ones. “Honey, it’s lovely what you’re trying to do. But I guarantee you, the only rolled cake in our house while I was growing up was wrapped in cellophane and baked by Drake’s.”

  “I want to make a good impression.”

  Chris wrapped his arms around me, kissing the top of my head. “I’m more worried about the impression they’re going to make on you.” He stepped back and brushed flour off his flannel shirt. “I need to get to work.”

  Our restaurant, Gus’s Too, served dinner to guests Wednesday through Monday. Gus had talked us into opening the winter before as a place for locals to gather in the evening. Chris was a gifted home cook. I’d grown up in the food business and had come home to run my family’s company, the Snowden Family Clambake. Gus’s Too was intended for casual dining, but also as a place where a couple could have a date night, or a family could celebrate a special occasion.

  I’d worried about our lack of experience, and about how working and living together 24/7 would affect our relationship, but we’d done more than survive, we’d thrived. So this fall, once the clambake was done for the season, and Chris had finished closing all the summer homes and cleaning their yards for his landscaping business, we’d opened Gus’s Too again. This year we had more competition, with Crowley’s and the dining room at the Bellevue Inn open until New Year’s, but they were mostly aimed at the tourists who’d come to the Illuminations. We still had our niche with the locals.

  I looked at the cake, which resembled a log that had fallen into the sea in a storm and broken up on the rocks, and swept it into the garbage. This was getting expensive.

  Chapter Two

  “That smells promising.” Mom drifted into the kitchen as I lifted the large, flat pan with the sponge cake on it out of the oven. I was back, trying again at her house. It did, indeed, smell delicious, and the dent I made when I pressed it with my thumb sprang back, giving me hope that its texture was right. It would have to cool before we found out if it had worked. I put the cake to the side to cool and began work on the filling.

  Mom put the teakettle on and sat at the kitchen table. “You’re not used to failing,” she said.

  “What are you talking about? I’ve failed at plenty of things.”

  “Not many things you’ve set your sights on.”

  “Are you calling me a sore loser?”

  “I’m calling you a person who never showed the slightest interest in baking, who has spent an inordinate amount of time and money making a cake.” The teakettle whistled and she rose, mug and tea bag in her delicate hands.

  “Or not making a cake, as the case may be,” I said.

  I turned on her standing mixer to make the filling, drowning out any additional comments. To my surprise, she didn’t leave with her tea, but settled again at the table. When the filling was done, I poured a cup and sat across from her.

  “If you really want to learn to make this cake, why not ask for help from someone who knows what they’re doing?” she asked.

  “If you mean Livvie,” I answered, “I want this to be my thing.”

  “Not Livvie.” My mother shook her head. “She’s never made a Bûche de Noël. I’m talking about Mrs. St. Onge, next door.”

  Involuntarily, my gaze drifted out the kitchen window, through the trunks of the pines that divided the properties. The St. Onge house was set much farther back on its lot than Mom’s house. I could only see a corner of the ugly mustard-colored stucco. “No, thank you.”

  “Don’t be stubborn, Julia. When you were little, Mrs. St. Onge used to contribute a Yule log cake to the Festival of Trees opening party every year. It was something to see, with icing bark, and meringue mushrooms, and surrounded by spun-sugar moss. People in the gym would jostle to get close and ooh and aah over it. It looked like a limb cut from an enchanted forest. And then they’d serve it and the taste . . .” Mom closed her eyes and swallowed. “I remember it still. Now that was a Bûche de Noël.”

  “I don’t remember any of this.”

  “You and Livvie were too busy playing tag with the other kids around the decorated trees.”

  “That was years ago. We don’t even know if she can make one anymore.”

  We were silent for a moment. Then Mom said, “I wonder how she’s doing.”

  We’d lived next door for almost thirty years, but relations between us and our neighbor had never been warm. Mrs. St. Onge wasn’t friendly. She didn’t mix. Scrubby pines grew against her house, blocking the first-floor windows. She was the kind of neighbor who turned off her lights on Halloween, pretending not to be home. When we were children, Livvie and I and our friend Jamie, whose parents’ property backed onto our own, had dared each other to go onto the St. Onge property. We’d take a running start, touch one of the pine trees that lined the drive, and yell, “I did it!” and then fly back to the safety of our yard as fast as our feet could carry us. As we got older, we’d extended the game to touching a pillar on the front porch. I had been terrified, but there was nothing more motivating to a ten-year-old than a double dare.

  “She’s had someone coming since the early summer,” I said. From the clambake office on the second floor of Mom’s house, I’d seen the odd-shaped sea-foam-green car arrive three mornings a week. A woman about my age, with light brown hair, had stepped out determinedly and marched to the house. Often she and Mrs. St. Onge would leave and then return with groceries or other shopping.

  “So I’ve seen,” Mom replied. “And there’s a relative who visits regularly. A young man. At least I’ve assumed he’s a relative.”

  We were trying to feel better, assuring ourselves that our elderly neighbor wasn’t alone over the holidays.

  “I haven’t seen the caregiver in a while,” I said. “Not since Thanksgiving at least. But then, I haven’t been in the clambake office as often, since we shut down at Columbus Day and reopened Gus’s Too.”

  “I haven’t seen the young man lately, either. Of course, I’ve been busy at the store.” Mom was in her second winter working at Linens and Pantries, the big-box store in Topsham. After a rocky start she’d found her footing and been promoted to assistant manager. The holidays were the busiest time and she worked a lot of extra shifts.

  My mother went to the window. “I hope she’s okay over there.” She turned to me. “Julia, why don’t you take her a jar of my Christmas jam and make sure she’s all right? If she is, you can ask her to help you with the Bûche.”

  “We’ll see,” I answered. “I think this one is going to work.”

  Later, I discovered my sponge cake was, indeed, spongier, and I did manage to roll the thing. But instead of a tight log, it sat on the board looking vaguely egg-shaped.

  “Perhaps you could frost it in a pastel color and save it for Easter,” Mom suggested.

  “Okay.” I admitted defeat. “I’ll get the jam. I’m going.”

  * * *

  I didn’t cut across the lawn. I walked down our front walk, out to the sidewalk, and then down Mrs. St. Onge’s long driveway, cradling the jam jar with its bright green bow in my gloved hands. The strawberry-rhubarb jam was my mother’s tradition. She made it every year in the spring with rhubarb
from our garden and strawberries purchased at the farmers’ market. The truth was, my mother was a terrible cook, and throughout our childhoods, Livvie and I had crept around the neighborhood, dying of embarrassment, passing out jars of grayish sludge. In recent years, Livvie had subtly taken charge of the jam-making, while somehow letting Mom keep the illusion that the project was hers. The jam I held was lovely, deep red, and Christmasy with its green bow.

  An uneven flagstone path led from the drive to Mrs. St. Onge’s front porch. The pines that surrounded the steps left just enough of a gap to get to the door. I rang the doorbell and waited, fighting an impulse that went back to my childhood to turn and run.

  There was a scrabbling inside, barely audible through the heavy door, which shuddered open, revealing Mrs. St. Onge, blinking at me through her glasses. The lenses were thick and convex and made her light blue eyes look like a bug’s. “What’s this about?” she asked, those eyes tracking from my face to the jar and back again. She’d been tiny when I was a child and had been getting tinier ever since.

  “I’ve brought you my mother’s Christmas jam, Mrs. St. Onge. I’m Julia Snowden, from next door. I’m not sure if you remember.”

  “Well, you’d better come in, then.” She shuffled back from the doorway, leaning on a wooden cane. “Put it in the pantry. Top shelf on the left. You’ll see where. Through there.”

  I did as I was told, passing from the living room, with its beige wallpaper with pink roses, through a small passage into the old-fashioned kitchen. I found the pantry without difficulty and, glancing up and to the left, spotted about twenty years of my mother’s Christmas jams, some with fading bows still attached. I left the new one with its brethren and turned to find Mrs. St. Onge standing directly in front of me just beyond the pantry entrance.

  I smiled my bravest smile. “Mom and I haven’t seen your regular visitors in a while. She wanted me to check to make sure you’re okay.”

  Her sour expression didn’t change. “Visitors? I never have visitors.”