Read the book: «Her Montana Christmas»

For Valerie Hansen, Ruth Logan Herne,

Carolyne Aarsen, Brenda Minton and Jenna Mindel.

Best of the best,

and I’ve been around long enough to know!

Bless you all.

DAR

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

Bible Verse

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Dear Reader

Questions for Discussion

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

The first day of December in Jasper Gulch, Montana, sparkled like diamonds. Pastor Ethan Johnson stood in front of the small, weathered parsonage that had been his home these past five months and inhaled early-morning air sharp enough to cut his California-born lungs to shreds, but not even the cold could dim his joy in the day. The snow from November’s freakish storm had finally melted, power had been fully restored and the distinct aura of Christmas permeated the atmosphere.

Ethan was excited to celebrate his first real Christmas as the pastor of Mountainview Church of the Savior. He loved the Lord. He loved being a pastor. He loved the people here in Jasper Gulch. He loved the beauty of Montana. He even loved the church building itself.

The unorthodox log-plank structure had taken on the shape of a cross over the years. It wasn’t at all what one expected or usually pictured when thinking of a church, and yet it fit its purpose supremely well. The belfry contained two brass bells, sadly no longer in use, and four large speakers through which the recordings of bells were played daily. Ethan admired everything about the place, from its broad plank walkways, to its steep, wood-shingled roofs, perhaps because it was his first pastorate or perhaps because it truly was a special place.

The town, though small with just nine hundred or so residents, was certainly unique. Jasper Gulch had been engaged in a six-month-long celebration of its centennial, starting on the Fourth of July and ending on the last day of this year. It seemed to Ethan that the Christmas services should reflect that motif. The idea had come to him the previous night as he’d prayed over his preparations for the holidays, and he knew just where to get the information necessary to make his first Christmas in Jasper Gulch a success in keeping with the centennial theme.

Casting a last fond look at the church building, Ethan swung down into the seat of his dependable nine-year-old dark green Subaru Forester. He could walk over to the museum, but he didn’t know what he might be bringing back with him, books, papers or other media, so he drove. Already many Christmas decorations were out, thanks to Faith Shaw, the mayor’s eldest daughter.

Dale Massey, a fabulously wealthy scion of one of the town’s two founding families, had come out from New York City to participate in last month’s centennial Homecoming celebration, only to find himself stranded in Jasper Gulch by the unexpected storm. Faith, a daughter of the other founding family, the Shaws, had convinced the community’s residents to pitch together to give Dale a taste of a small-town Montana Christmas. As a result, Faith and Dale were now engaged to be married on Christmas night—and Ethan had started thinking in earnest about the true Christmas celebration to come.

Mayor Jackson Shaw seemed pleased to have his eldest daughter marry. For a time, he’d appeared determined to foster a romance between her and Ethan. Apparently, everyone in town wanted to make a match for the new pastor. Much to Ethan’s dismay, they’d thrown every eligible female within traveling distance at him. Thankfully, Shaw seemed less eager to marry off Ethan than he did his own children, for the man had gotten his way with three of the five. Ethan had found that the mayor usually did get his way, but his future son-in-law was bucking him on reopening the Beaver Creek Bridge.

From what Ethan could gather, the bridge had been closed since a Shaw relative had driven off it to her death in an automobile accident nearly ninety years earlier. Apparently, Jackson’s grandfather had promised his father that the bridge would never be reopened, and Jackson had renewed that pledge when he’d first assumed his place as mayor, an office that the Shaws had held for generations.

Other, more forward-thinking citizens pointed out that, with the bridge closed, Jasper Gulch could be accessed by only one road, but Jackson Shaw had repeatedly beaten back attempts to repair and reopen the bridge—until Dale Massey had magnanimously offered to underwrite the project on his own.

Personally, Ethan thought it a shame to let an eighty-eight-year-old tragedy dictate public policy, but he couldn’t help feeling some sympathy for Mayor Shaw. The man was trying to pull off six months of centennial celebration that had been missing its centerpiece from the beginning. On the very first weekend, the time capsule that the whole town had gathered to open had gone missing. Since then, the town had suffered several instances of vandalism and more than one cryptic note hinting that the capsule had contained a treasure and was connected with the initials L.S.

A local teenager by the name of Lilibeth Shoemaker had fallen under suspicion, but she insisted that she’d had nothing to do with the notes or the disappearance of the time capsule. Though she’d been officially exonerated, a few still harbored suspicions of her based on her initials alone, but Ethan certainly wasn’t about to judge her guilty on such flimsy evidence. Most believed that a local man named Pete Daniels was to blame because he’d suddenly left town without explanation.

The time capsule had finally turned up, opened. It contained some historical documents, photos and mementos, but nothing of any market value. Ethan doubted they’d ever know the truth about the time capsule’s contents or who had taken it, and he, for one, did not really care. He would be glad to see the centennial celebrations come to an end on New Year’s Eve with the burial of a new time capsule, the official opening of the museum and the reopening of the Beaver Creek Bridge—unless the mayor found some way to prevent the latter. Again.

After parking in front of the museum, Ethan took a moment to enjoy the new building. A few folks had complained that the structure was nothing more than a brown sheet-iron pole barn with an Old West–style front attached, complete with hitching rails, but Ethan figured that a town the size of Jasper Gulch was blessed to have a bona fide museum of any sort. He got out of the car and, finding the front door unlocked, went inside.

A wide reception area, with an unattended Y-shaped desk, branched off into two hallways. Hearing the unmistakable sound of a copy machine at work in the distance, Ethan dumped his down coat, wool muffler and gloves on the desk and walked along the left hallway toward the sound.

The slender feminine figure at the copy machine jolted him. She wasn’t Olivia Franklin McGuire, the curator, though the purple sweater and black slacks seemed vaguely familiar. The long, straight tail of wheat-colored hair, caught at her nape with a black barrette, swung between the curves of her shoulder blades as she caught the papers shooting from the end of the machine.

He put on his best pastor’s smile and said, “Excuse me.”

She whirled around, pale hair flying. Her peaked brows, several shades darker than her hair, arched high over rich blue eyes as round as marbles. He spotted a tiny flat dark mole just under the tip of her left brow, which she reached up to touch with one finger, calling attention to her perfect nose and lips the color of a dusky rose, the bottom fuller than the upper, with a little seam in the middle as if God had created it in two perfect halves and knit it together.

“Ah, yes. Robin Frazier.”

They’d met more than once. She’d been attending church semiregularly for months now, and they’d spoken on several occasions, but never more than a few passing words. She seemed a serious, studious sort, despite the youthfulness of her face. He’d first seen her at a distance and taken her for a teenager, then wondered why he didn’t see her with the other kids. Someone had finally told him that she was a graduate student visiting Jasper Gulch on some sort of project.

“Pastor Johnson,” she said, several seconds having ticked by. “Can I help you?”

He waved a hand at the papers she held. “Material for your...” He couldn’t remember exactly what her project was. “I’m sorry. Something to do with genealogy, isn’t it?”

She stared at the papers in her hand as if resigning herself to speaking to him. Then her deep blue eyes met his, and a funny thing happened inside his chest. At the same time, she spoke.

“This has to do with the centennial. I’ve been hired to help out here at the museum.”

Since he’d moved to Jasper Gulch, all the eligible females in town had cast lures of one sort or another in Ethan’s direction, but this one seemed reticent, almost wary of him. He should have felt relieved about that. Instead, he felt...disappointed, even a bit irritated, though God knew he wasn’t in the market for a wife.

“Really?” He put on a smile. “That’s great. I hope it means you’ll be joining the church.”

She just looked at him without answer for several heartbeats before asking again, “Can I help you with something?”

“It’s about Christmas,” he said, not at all put off. He was used to people stonewalling, hedging, even outright prevarication when it came to the subject of church attendance. He took his openings when, where and how he found them and left the results to the Lord. “I’m hoping to have a historical kind of Christmas this year. You know, sort of do my part for the centennial. The thing is, being from California and fairly new to the area, I have no real idea what Christmas might have been like around here a hundred years ago.”

“Well,” she said, “let’s see what information we can find for you then.”

Ethan grinned. It looked as if he had come to the right place. And maybe, when all was said and done, he’d find himself with a new congregant, as well.

* * *

Robin didn’t know why the young pastor set her on edge, but he had from the first moment that she’d met him almost five months ago now. He wasn’t just handsome; he was a nice man, almost too nice. Something about him made a person want to confide in him, even when he wasn’t wearing his clerical collar, like now, or maybe it was just that she wanted to confide in someone.

She hated being in Jasper Gulch under false pretenses, and the longer it went on, the worse she felt, but she dared not truthfully identify herself at this late date. Too much had happened. She couldn’t step forward now and tell the truth without raising everyone’s suspicions about her motives. After everything that had gone on—the theft of the time capsule, the vandalism and mysterious notes, the investigation and the disappearance of Pete Daniels, the sudden reappearance of the time capsule and all the mysteries that she and Olivia had uncovered about the past, not to mention the secrets that Robin alone knew—everyone would think that she was after something. It didn’t help that a member of the extremely wealthy Massey family had shown up on the scene, either. Connections to wealth, as Robin knew all too well, inspired a certain type of grasping, clinging hanger-on.

Sometimes Robin thought it would be best if she just left town as quietly as she’d arrived in July, but she couldn’t quite make herself go. Not yet. And go back to what? Her parents and grandparents had never disguised their disappointment in her. With her great-grandmother Lillian dead, she couldn’t find much reason to go back to New Mexico, and Great-Grandma Lillian had known it would be that way, too. Why else on her deathbed would she have urged Robin to come here and find what other family she might have left?

“So the church was here even before the town was officially founded,” the pastor said, laying aside the newspaper article she’d printed off for him. “Interesting. I wonder if any of the original building still stands.”

Pulled from her reverie, Robin shrugged. “Apparently there were several homes and a small log church in the area when Ezra Shaw and Silas Massey decided to formally incorporate the town and draw up a charter. I’m sure I can find something about the church building, given enough time.”

“I’d appreciate that, even though it’s mostly curiosity on my part,” Pastor Johnson told her, smiling warmly. “I’m most interested in the vestibule and the belfry.”

“The rock part at the front of the church?”

“Exactly. Did you know there are actual bells up there in the belfry?”

“You mean they’re not just for show?”

He shook his head. “I have to wonder why we never use perfectly good bells. I mean, recorded bells are fine for every day, but what a treat it would be to pull the ropes on real bells once in a while. I wonder why the church stopped using them.”

“That is a puzzle. I can look into it, if you like.”

“I’d love to know, but I hate to put you to any extra trouble.”

She shrugged. “I don’t mind. I like solving puzzles.”

He would understand that about her if he knew what mysteries had brought her here to Jasper Gulch, but then perhaps it was best that no one here knew.

Her plan had seemed so simple in the beginning. Come to town under the guise of a graduate student doing research for a thesis on genealogy. Find proof to support her claims. Show the proof. Be greeted warmly by family who previously hadn’t known she existed.

Five months into the project, she now realized that her proof wasn’t likely to be any more welcome than she would be, that her motives could easily be questioned and that she could well come off looking like a schemer and a liar. She bitterly regretted the route she’d taken to this point. She had feared being jeered at in the beginning, but at least she could have conducted her research in the open, then once the proof had been found, all would have been well. Now...now people trusted her, people to whom she must reveal herself as a liar. What a fool she had been.

“I appreciate any information you can give me,” Pastor Johnson told Robin forthrightly, again breaking into her troubled thoughts.

He had the kindest brown eyes and the most open, engaging smile she’d ever seen. Everything about him exuded warmth, even on this first day of December. His California origin showed in the burnished brown of his short, neat hair and bronzed skin. In fact, Robin could easily picture him walking barefoot in the surf with his sleeves and pant legs rolled up, the tail of his chambray shirt pulled free of the waistband of his jeans. He looked younger without his ministerial collar, almost boyish, despite the faint crinkles that fanned out from the corners of his deep-set eyes. Something about the way his long, straight nose flattened at the end intrigued her, as did the manner in which his squared chin added a certain strength to his face.

“What?” he asked, his lips widening to show a great many strong, white teeth.

She shook her head, embarrassed to have been caught staring. “I, um, I’ll see what I can find and get back to you.”

“Excellent. Can I give you my personal cell number, as well as the numbers at the church and the parsonage? That way you’re bound to reach me.”

“Oh, of course. That would be fine.” She pulled out her phone and tapped in the numbers as he gave them to her. When she looked up again, he had his own phone in his hand.

“Mind if I take your numbers, too? In case I have any questions?”

Robin was aware of her heart speeding up, which was ridiculous. He was a minister, a man of God. He wasn’t hitting on her. In fact, he probably intended to call and invite her to join the church again. She wouldn’t mind if he did. She just didn’t know if she could do that; she might not be staying in Jasper Gulch for much longer.

“Uh, sure.” She gave him her cell number, though mobile coverage was not the best here, as well as the numbers at the museum and her residence, such as it was. He saved them to his contacts list before pocketing the tiny phone again.

“There now,” he said. “I have a lead on the information I need to make this a grand centennial Christmas, I’ve found a kindred spirit to help me solve a puzzle and I’ve got the phone number of one of the prettiest ladies in town. That’s what I call an excellent morning’s work.” He turned a full circle, walking backward a step or two, as he headed for the door. “I look forward to hearing from you.”

He was out of sight and halfway down the hall before Robin’s own laughter caught up with her, and her heartbeat still hadn’t slowed one iota. It had, in fact, sped up! Perhaps that was why she called him later when she stumbled across information concerning the church bells.

A tidbit in the local newspaper from early 1925 had reported that the bells had been deemed unsafe due to problems with the crosspiece in the belfry and would “henceforth be silenced to prevent any startling and calamitous accidents.” The reporter had gone on to quote a deacon as insisting that rumors suggesting this decision had to do with the “decampment of Silas Massey and his wife” were “scurrilous and mean-spirited,” which led Robin to wonder aloud if the aforementioned rumors had anything to do with the bank failure.

“Bank failure?” Ethan echoed.

Robin mentally cringed. “Sorry. I wouldn’t want you to think I was gossiping. Speculation is part and parcel of historical research, I’m afraid. It’s just that we’ve uncovered evidence of some trouble at the bank founded by the Shaws and the Masseys here in Jasper Gulch. The timeline says everything’s connected. First, the Masseys pulled out. Then the rumors started flying about the bank being insolvent. Right after that, the bells were determined to be unsafe, with a deacon at the church insisting that the decision had nothing to do with the Masseys leaving town. It seems as if Ezra Shaw was quoted in every edition of the newspaper around that time saying that the bank was solvent and all was fine, but when the crash came in ’32, it failed spectacularly and was reported to be woefully undercapitalized. Shaw was quoted as saying that for him it was just a long nightmare come to an end but that he felt badly for his neighbors and depositors, whom he promised to help as much as he was able. It just seems logical that Massey had something to do with the whole situation.”

“So you’re saying that Silas Massey either forced Ezra Shaw to buy him out, which caused the bank to be undercapitalized, or he stole—”

“I’m just telling you what we’ve uncovered,” Robin interrupted smoothly.

“However it came about,” Ethan said, “there were bound to be some hard feelings. I think it’s worth looking into to see if the bells might have been a gift to the church from the Masseys.” He added that he was going to dig into some old file cabinets tucked into a closet in a back room. “I might find something of interest to the museum.”

Robin remembered that, and the next day when she found a website that showed details, as well as written instructions, for re-creating exactly the sort of decorations the pastor would need to provide a centennial-style Christmas for his congregation, she decided to print off photos and drive over to the church with them on her lunch hour. She and Olivia had their hands full getting the displays at the museum ready for viewing, but Olivia’s husband, Jack, had come into town from his ranch on an errand, so the two of them were having an early lunch together, and that gave Robin a bit of free time.

She parked right in front of the church, grabbed the file folder in which she’d stashed the printouts and hopped out of her metallic-blue hybrid coupe. Stepping up on the plank walkway, she hurried to the white-painted front door of the church. It swung open easily. She walked into the cool, strangely silent vestibule and let her eyes adjust from the bright sunlight.

The vestibule usually rang with noise and always seemed dark, despite the twin brass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Not today, however. Today, a shaft of light illuminated the very center of the wide space, along with the slender metal ladder that descended from the belfry. She looked up to find an open trapdoor in the vestibule ceiling.

“Pastor?” she called, amazed at the way her voice carried in the empty room.

“Put your hands over your ears,” he called down to her.

“What?”

“Put your hands over your ears!”

“O-okay.” She tucked the file folder under one arm and clapped her gloved hands over her ears. About two seconds later, a deep, melodious bong tolled through the rock vestibule. The force of the sound made her sway on her feet. She laughed, even as she warned, “You’ll shatter the vases in here if you keep that up!”

“I know. Isn’t it wonderful?”

It was, really, like standing inside a gigantic bell.

“Come up here and see,” he urged.

Glancing around, she laid the folder on the credenza that sat against one wall and tugged off her mittens, tucking them into the pockets of her heavy wool coat, but then she hesitated.

“Robin,” he said, just before his face appeared in the open trapdoor above, “come on up. It’s perfectly safe.” He wore a knit cap and scarf with his coat.

“How did you know it was me?” she asked, moving toward the ladder.

“I recognized your voice, of course.”

“Ah.”

He reached down a gloved hand as she put a foot on the bottom rung of the wrought iron ladder.

“How does this thing work?”

“It’s very simple. There’s a tall pole with a hook on one end. I used it to slide open the trap and then to pull down the ladder. When I’m done, I’ll use it to push the ladder back up and lift it over the locking mechanism then slide the trap closed.”

“I see.”

“Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet,” he told her, grasping her hand and all but lifting her up the last few rungs to stand next to him on a narrow metal platform fixed to one side of the tiny square open-sided belfry. In their bulky coats, they had to stand pressed shoulder to shoulder. “Take a look at this.” He swung his arm wide, encompassing the town, the valley beyond and the snowcapped mountains surrounding it all.

“Wow.”

“Exactly,” he said. “There’s a part of Psalm 98 that says, ‘Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy...’ Seeing the view like this, you can almost feel it, can’t you? The rivers and mountains praising their creator.”

“I never thought of rivers and mountains praising God,” she admitted.

“Scripture speaks many times of nature praising God and testifying to His wonders.”

“I can see why,” she said reverently.

“So can I,” he told her, smiling down at her with those warm brown eyes on her face.

Her breath caught in her throat. But she was reading too much into that look. Surely she was reading too much into it. That wasn’t appreciation she saw in his gaze. That was just her loneliness seeking connection. Wasn’t it? Though she had never felt this sudden, electrical link before, not like this, as if something vital and masculine in him reached out and touched something fundamental and feminine in her, she had to be mistaken.

He was a man of God after all.

Even if she couldn’t help thinking of him as just a man.

A shadow seemed to pass behind his brown eyes, as if he’d read her thoughts, and he turned his gaze back to the mountains, visually drinking in snowcapped peaks set against the bright blue sky and the sunshine.

After only a moment, he smiled at her, his genial self again.

Yet Robin felt a distinct chill that she hadn’t felt an instant before, a chill that even winter could not explain.