Margot Early - A Spirit of Christmas p.01

Chapter 1
Keti Whitechapel never intended to end up in Bounty, Nevada. In fact, when she was a child, she wanted nothing more than to get out of Bounty at the earliest opportunity. And she did.

At fifty-five, she’s been just about everywhere but the moon, and now she’s back in town. She owns the Bounty Mountain Resort, whose world-class skiing rivals Switzerland’s St. Moritz, and the Empress Mine, whose rich deposits of gold give employment to three hundred miners. She owns an Idaho silver mine and Bounty’s largest casino. There are LLCs, too, and almost two percent of the NASDAQ. She used to own a couple of brothels, as well.

So she’s back in Bounty, no longer the poor bucktoothed daughter of a hard-drinking, hard-playing hard-rock miner, but the woman who owns it all. The woman who’s known locally as the Queen.

And it’s Christmas Eve, with a fog so dense it’s hard to see the porch from the sidewalk. A Mexican laborer is shoveling the long walk up to Keti’s house. Her motion lights pick out his shape and the curl of steam from his breath, and when he sees her step out of the Hummer at the curb he shifts onto the snowy lawn to allow her to pass. Somewhere north of town, out on the highway, sirens sound.

Keti swings her black leather tote over her shoulder, shuts her car door and locks it automatically. She prefers to drive herself. She prefers to be alone, period. If you live alone, it’s better to protect yourself. Keti owns several handguns and practices with them regularly. As far as she’s concerned, she needs no one.

The wrought-iron gate by the sidewalk stands open, and she hurries through.

“Merry Christmas,” says the worker, leaning on his shovel.

What reason do you have to be merry? she wonders as she nods. You’re poor. But at least he speaks English. She instructs him, “Make sure there’s no ice, and if that mangy animal across the street has been over here again, I don’t want to step in anything.” The mutt is, like many in Bounty, owned by people Keti thinks of as the Great Unwashed. Trust-fund kids with uncombed hair who look like runaways from a Grateful Dead show and talk about healing and auras and live on alfalfa sprouts and are only outnumbered by their dogs, which Keti hasn’t yet managed to ban from Bounty. The canine across the street is black and white and overweight and he thinks her lawn is his toilet. But all of Bounty’s dogs seem to fear Keti: when they see her approaching, they tug their owners into doorways. Away from her, which is how she likes it.

The man with the shovel asks Keti, in Spanish, if she speaks Spanish. She does, quite well—she grew up a miner’s daughter in Bounty, after all. But now she simply shrugs in exasperation. Once she was friendly with her workers, but eventually she saw how careful she would have to be. Everyone wants money—her money. They want to know her and befriend her so that she will subsidize them or, worse, so that they can blackmail or sue her. Once, she thought people who believed such things were paranoid or suffered from delusions of grandeur. But life has taught her. Oh, how she’s learned.

She stalks past the man, glad at least that her property manager, a fluffy little thing, Tiffany, who is Martin Collins’s niece, has made sure someone keeps the walk clear.

Martin, Martin, Martin.

Keti refuses to think about Martin. And yet she knows she will.

But later.

A tall cardboard box leans against the jamb of the front door, almost crushing the wreath that someone has hung for Keti, obscuring the knocker that used to hang on the home of Bounty’s first miner baron—the man who owned the Empress Mine when Keti’s father worked there. Keti is annoyed by the wreath. The porch light catches the brass knocker, which was actually brought from England by the miner baron. It is shaped like an eagle-bird-lion creature, a griffin, she supposes. But at the moment it doesn’t look like a griffin. Instead, it resembles Aunt Marlene’s face.

Keti blinks, and it’s a griffin once again.

She turns her attention to the huge box propped up beside her. The return address is Las Vegas and Keti knows what’s inside. A momentary disappointment, something she doesn’t want to analyze, gives way to satisfaction. Well, at least it’s finally here.

Her aunt’s mirror.

Keti doesn’t want to think about the fact that Marlene is dead, because Marlene was the one person Keti has loved who never turned her back on Keti; never chose others over Keti. And now she’s gone.

Marlene actually wasn’t her aunt but her great-aunt, which Keti thinks explains why the two of them got along so well. They had an understanding about certain things. When Keti first met her, Marlene was the madam of a brothel just outside Las Vegas. Keti herself would soon begin working underground in the Empress Mine, and prove herself in an environment profoundly hostile to women.

But then Marlene took her out of the mine and showed her how to make far more money at much less cost to herself. It was Marlene who taught her to be a successful businesswoman.

You loved me, Keti thinks again. You really loved me, Marlene, and you looked after me.

Yes, the mirror is part of her inheritance, and it isn’t a surprise. It’s not exactly a present, but it arrived on Christmas Eve, so it feels a bit like a posthumous Christmas gift from Marlene.

Her breath fogs before her as she inserts her key in the lock. Inside, she disarms the alarm system. Then she steps back to retrieve the mirror, but it’s heavy. Still, she wants it upstairs, and she wants it upstairs now. The miner baron’s house, Bonanza Victorian–style, has been completely renovated, but Keti had certainly never thought to install an elevator. How is she going to carry that mirror up the narrow staircase by herself?

“You want help?”

The Mexican. If he can speak English, why did he ask her if she could speak Spanish?

“Si.” It isn’t what she’d intended to say. She doesn’t let strangers into her house, and she doesn’t speak Spanish with the migrant laborers. Only occasionally, with their wives.

As he picks up the box, he remarks that it weighs a lot, and she asks him, in Spanish, where he is from.

“Chihuahua.” And more detail. His village. His brother and sister-in-law will join him in Nevada that summer. His wife works in one of Bounty’s hotels. They are expecting their third child. His wife has only a little English. He is going to classes. And he switches back to English, to practice.

Keti does not ask about his wife. She has seen the woman, whose baby has already dropped; who is undoubtedly due any day. It is not her concern. Probably, the woman is one of Martin’s patients, and Keti does not intend to think about Martin. She has trained herself not to think about him, and she’s gotten fairly good at it.

Reluctantly, she turns on a couple of lights so that the man can see to go upstairs. Darkness is economical, and Keti believes it’s a good thing to be used to. Especially for anyone in mining, even a mine owner.

She hears a low animal whine from somewhere toward the back of the house.

The Mexican tells her, “It’s a dog. He has…” He gestures to his face. “What do you say?”

She does not recognize the next word he uses.

He says, “Points. Animal.”

She shrugs, uncomprehending.

He touches his chest. “Thin. Bones.”

The dog, she presumes, and anyway, it has nothing to do with her. “I’ll call the marshal,” she says. Bounty’s answer to animal control.

A sad look crosses the man’s face.

He carries the heavy carton upstairs to the master bedroom, which faces the street, keeping a respectful distance from his employer. There is no reason for Keti to be distrustful, except that she knows inviting any stranger into her home is foolish. There are too many bad people in the world, and no one can tell the good from the bad. What is the use of having lived the kind of life she has, if she hasn’t learned that?

He asks if she wants the mirror taken out of the box, but she shakes her head. She wants to do that herself. Before she follows him downstairs, Keti turns off her bedroom light, again, and then the hall light. At the front door, she tells him, “I want to give you some money.”

“No.” He waves away the suggestion. “No. Thank you.”

“You can send it to your family.”

“No. No.”

She presses a bill into his hand, change from a latte she bought just after she’d arrived at the airport.

He says, “Thank you,” and takes the dollar, looking down and then nodding again. “Merry Christmas.”

He steps out the door with only the merest backward glance, but that glance is like a mirror in which Keti sees herself. Again.

Suddenly she is that bucktoothed miner’s daughter once more. And as she starts to close the door, she sees Marlene’s face. She slams it shut and turns out the last light in the foyer.

But there’s that damn animal, whining again and scratching.

She sets her alarms in total darkness, walks into the kitchen, with its restaurant-quality stove, refrigerator, espresso-maker and everything she might ever want. Something is on the table, a poinsettia, she thinks, no doubt also left by that ridiculous Tiffany, who hasn’t the money to spare on such nonsense. Keti reminds herself to take off her boots, and is annoyed when she remembers that she didn’t ask the Mexican to remove his footwear before carrying the mirror upstairs. Now she regrets giving him any money. Picking up her cordless phone, she dials 13, her speed-dialing code for the town marshal. Dispatch, not emergency.

“Bounty marshal’s office.”

“It’s Keti Whitechapel. There’s a stray over here, whining and scratching.”

“I’m sorry, but I really don’t have anyone to send. There’s a multiple-car accident over by Society Turn.”

“All right.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“Yes. Good night.”

She glances at the pointsettia and makes out a card beside it, colored by one of Tiffany’s fatherless brood. Though Tiffany did actually marry the last one, the father of the child with all the problems. The card reads, in Tiffany’s hand, “Dine with us tomorrow.”

Pretentious. The last time they’d talked, Keti had asked Tiffany, Why did you get married? After all, the man doesn’t make enough money for them to live on, and yet marrying him has reduced Tiffany’s government benefits.

Martin’s silly niece, her silly goddaughter, had said, Because I fell in love.

Because you fell in love! Keti snorts at the recollection.



She goes through to the back of the house. The damn animal is banging on her screen. For all she knows, it might even be rabid.

Deciding not to open the door after all, she heads upstairs. If she ignores it, maybe it will go away. There is a Leatherman tool in her vanity drawer, and she uses the sharpest, largest knife on it to cut open the box enclosing the mirror. Then she unpacks the paper that surrounds it, making a mess on her floor.

The ornate frame is cherry, carved with a pattern of roses—wild-looking roses. It stands over six feet tall, and the oval of the mirror itself tilts on its frame. She positions it from the back and so can’t miss the envelope that is taped there.

She recognizes the paper, because Marlene always wrote on the same pale peach linen paper and used dark rose linen envelopes. Her name, Ketura—an old family name—is written on it in Marlene’s hand.

A letter?

Keti wants to keep the envelope attached to the mirror, and she wonders if it is actually sealed and if she can open it without removing it. She slides her finger behind and finds it is taped in place with a loop of duct tape.

Oh, well.

She removes it, and there is Marlene’s wax seal on the back, the last seal of hers that Keti will ever open.

She has letter openers and she has the Leatherman, but she uses neither. Just her fingers, short-nailed and plain, because that is how she prefers them. No rings, either.

Photos.

Snapshots taken with a cheap camera, and now the color is faded, but Keti recognizes the people. Two children on swings, in the park in Bounty—a girl, probably five years old, with thick, tangled golden hair, and a dark-haired boy in a striped T-shirt and cheap blue jeans.

Martin.

Of course.

Martin, the boy, who became Martin, the only man she has ever loved. Martin, whom she will not see this Christmas because she’s done with him, done with his fluffy niece and done with the entire sentimental good-deed-doing Collins family.

She returns all the photos to the envelope and sets the envelope on her dresser, then walks around the mirror to stand before it.

She’s in good shape, she supposes, for fifty-five. She was always a solid woman. Five foot five, with enough bust and rather too much rear end. Her teeth are white and straight, though the road to having them straightened was complicated. She has never fixed her one chipped tooth, however, because she rather likes it. For years she’d smiled with a closed mouth. Then, for a brief while, she smiled fully.

She sees no reason to smile now.

She gets highlights—sometimes low lights—and she takes care of herself, works out. And still she looks old.

Would that animal go away?

She hears something banging about in her backyard.

I’ll throw water on it.

She pauses on the stairs to turn down the in-floor heating, then walks through the shadowy kitchen and grabs one of her copper pots, which she fills with cold water.

She goes to the back door, punches in the code to deactivate the alarm, and opens the door. The yard is so dark that even Keti, who knows every square inch of it, is reluctant to grope with her hands. She won’t touch the creature, whatever it is. She will throw water on it and it will leave.

But the animal is bumping against the screen, ruining the screen, and it’s whimpering. It appears to be stuck to the mesh.

With porcupine quills.

Good grief. That’s what the Mexican meant when he referred to “points.”

She has to get it unstuck from the door. It smells as if it’s had an encounter with a skunk at some point, too, and Keti’s not one hundred percent sure that it’s a domestic animal at all. The mutt has huge ears, one of which bends forward at the tip, and it looks a bit like a coyote—though with pale blue eyes—and a bit like one of those cow dogs she’s always seeing in the backs of pickup trucks. It has no tail, and it’s gray with black spots and some kind of cinnamon color on its nose and ears. No collar, of course.

She sets down the pot and tries to open her door, and the canine backs up, squealing, then wrenches itself free.

Keti wastes no time. She lifts the pot of water and hurls it at the dog.

It doesn’t yelp but backs away, then shakes itself, and lies down on the back porch, looking at her, its face full of quills.

Good God.

It is skeletally thin. Keti wonders if pound dogs die by lethal injection or if they’re gassed.

“It’s obvious,” she says, “why you got skunked and porcupined. You don’t understand when you’re not wanted.”

It’s not that she hates dogs. She hates particular dogs. And she particularly hates the owners of particular dogs, like that moron down the road who lets his border collie play tag with cars. That dog of his is going to cause an accident one day soon.

She steps onto the porch, deciding that it really is a dog and that it’s not rabid. Instinctively, she grabs a quill and pulls.

It comes out. The dog stands up.

Good. Maybe if she tries to pull out the remaining quills, it will leave.

She knows how to do this. She’s done it before—just not for decades.

She stands over the dog, pressing her knees against its neck, and it squirms. She grabs the quills and she pulls. She removes about eighteen this way, her hands growing cold as the dog tries to pull her off the porch. But he’s no match for her. She is strong and healthy and this dog has been starved. The quills on its chin present the greatest challenge. Then, all that’s left is its nose.

As it cries, wriggling hysterically, she says calmly, “Just cool it.”

There are no quills in its throat, so maybe it’s not a seasoned, obsessed, maniacal hunter of porcupines.

“You’re not getting loose until I get every one of these.”

The dog reeks.

“Dammit. Ow.”

Fifteen minutes later the animal is inside the master bathroom, standing in the tiled shower beside her. There is a bench, and Keti has a bottle of Bloody Mary mix at hand, which she dumps on the dog beneath the warm spray.

The dog doesn’t fight the shower or try to escape, but instead puts his feet on her knees.

Her eyes begin to water.

She calls him Marley, for the last person who loved her, then says to him, “I bet you’ve never slept on a memory-foam mattress.”

She sees, in her mind, the photograph she did not want to see, and pictures an older version of the boy on the swing beside hers. A much more recent, more present-time Martin. She blinks away the image and pets the dog.

Chapter 2
Keti awakens to the tolling of a bell. She hasn’t been asleep long. She can’t have been, for when she turns on her smallest Arts and Crafts stained-glass lamp, with its energy-saving bulb, the glass-domed clock on her dresser reads midnight, and the sound of the bell is from the church down the street. It must be. Announcing Christmas.

The first Christmas, for many years, that she won’t see Martin Collins.

She has chosen not to.

The dog lifts his head and looks at her. One huge ear stands straight up and the other falls over.

“Merry Christmas, Marley,” she says, gazing at the mirror.

Impulsively, she climbs out of bed to retrieve the envelope of photographs. Marley, who has quickly adjusted to memory foam, remains where he lies, watching her intently.

Why did you give me these pictures, Marlene? Keti wonders as she climbs back into bed. I don’t want to look back. Not to those times. Not to any of them.

She holds the small stack of photos, puts the one of Martin and her on the swings behind the others, and sees what is next.

Beside her, Marley whimpers, then gives a sharp bark, but Keti sees only the photo before her.

Martin, Martin again, sharing a milk shake with Keti, one glass, two straws, on the brick patio of what used to be the Bounty General Store and is now the extremely upscale Bounty Mercantile. In this old photo Keti’s teeth stick out so far it is no wonder she finally chipped one. I was a mess, she thinks, shuddering at the contrast between herself, so obviously impoverished, and Martin, handsome and well cared for.

She looks at another snapshot. Keti and Martin skating on the rink at Town Park, playing hockey with homemade sticks. Back when they were more like brother and sister than anything else.

She puts away the photos again and glances at the mirror as she sets them on the nightstand. Then she looks back, a double take. There is someone there, standing before the mirror, looking into it, someone not completely solid, but nearly so. A woman with white hair, pinned in elaborate braids atop her head. She wears a red Chanel suit and Italian pumps, and she is old, very old.

Marlene?

Keti touches her own skin, and then rests her hand on the warm dog, Marley. This can’t be a dream…But it is dreamlike.

Marlene turns.

“What do you want with me?” Keti is only half-surprised the words come from her. Aunt Marlene is dead—this can’t be her.

“Much!”

Marlene’s voice. This thing, this being, wants something.

Marley whimpers and barks again. Keti keeps a hand on him. “Who are you?” she asks.

“In life, I was Marlene Whitechapel, your father’s aunt.” She glances at the end of Keti’s bed.

Keti says, “You can sit there. If you can sit.”

The woman in red sits on the edge of the bed. She is shrunken by the passage of decades, withered and unwanted. She can’t be Marlene, though she does look like her. Her hands are cuffed together at the wrists. Keti thinks of the Nevada brothels. Marlene’s Nevada brothels. And those she herself owned for a time, giving Martin a gold-plated invitation to act holier-than-thou.

Marley bares his teeth.

“It’s okay,” Keti tells him, though she isn’t sure she means it.

“Do you believe in me?” asks the ghost.

“I think this is a dream. Why else would you have come to me?”

“It is required of every person,” her visitor answers, “that the spirit within him should walk among his fellow creatures and travel far and wide. If one doesn’t do this in life, one is condemned to do so after death. I am doomed to wander through the world and witness what I can’t share, but might have shared on earth and turned to happiness!”

“Why are you wearing handcuffs?”

“I wear the chains I forged in life,” Marlene’s shadow replies. “Do you know the fetters you bear, Keti?”

Fetters? “What do you mean? This is not comforting.”

“I have no comfort to give, Keti. No regret can make amends for missing the opportunity that life offers.”

“But you lived a full life, Marlene.” Keti wants to console the ghost of the older woman she loved. “You were a successful businesswoman at a time when women in business were resented even more than they are now. You achieved your goals.”

“Goals! Business! Mankind should have been my business, Keti. Charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence. But instead I made money my business. Don’t you see?”

Keti remembers the Mexican worker who shoveled her walk and the way he’d looked at her after she gave him that single dollar bill. As if he was sorry for her.

“Listen to me, Keti. My time with you is nearly gone.”

“I’m listening.” And quaking. Marley shivers at her side, ears back, head slunk low.

“I am here tonight to warn you,” says the ghost, “that you have yet a chance to escape my fate. I am giving you this chance, and it is only my love for you in life that allows me this opportunity to escape the torment I will otherwise endure.”

This is a dream. I’ll wake up, Keti thinks. The word torment makes her think of Martin. Martin doesn’t love her, won’t love her; and that is her torment.

“You will be visited by three spirits,” the ghost informs her.

“I’d rather not be.”

“Do you want to share my fate, Keti, condemned to wander the earth because you didn’t learn to love and to care in life?”

“I know how to love and care!” She touches Marley, reminding herself that she rescued him just that night.

And she has rescued people before. Oh, Martin might not see it that way. Or maybe he thinks she should spend all her time rescuing people.

He definitely thinks she should be someone other than the woman she is.

He has always wanted her to be different and he has never stopped trying to encourage her to improve. Or that’s how it seems to her.

But definitely she has loved. She has loved more deeply than anyone knows.

“You did know how to love and care,” Marlene tells her, as if reading her thoughts. “And you can learn again. You must learn again. What is a mirror but a way to see yourself? Expect your first guide, when the bell tolls one.”

“It won’t toll. This is Christmas, and there was probably midnight mass, so it tolled at midnight.”

“Go back to sleep, Keti.”

And Marlene is gone.

Keti extinguishes the light and vows to leave it off if she awakens again. She only turned it on to look at the clock, because of the church bell, and to look at Marley.

She closes her eyes, sinking into the comfort of her warm bed, seeing in her mind the ice rink at Town Park.



The bell tolls again in the darkness. Marley barks twice, sharply, and Keti wakens and remembers her dream and Marlene’s ghost, condemned to wander the world in Chanel and a pair of heels. She won’t turn on her bedside lamp, but she’s unable to resist glancing toward the mirror. It is glowing, glowing faintly but steadily, and Keti can see a figure there.

It looks like a child. But is it a child or someone extremely old and shrunken? It’s hard to tell.

Keti squints through the darkness.

Marley growls.

“Who are you?” Keti whispers.

“The Ghost of Christmas Past—your past. Don’t you know me, Keti?”

And Keti does. Right down to that face, with its odd features smoothed by Christmas or heaven or time. It’s Edith Kitchen, who had been Keti Whitechapel’s best friend, her only real friend back then. Edith who’d died in the third grade. Edith who went through the ice and drowned. “Edith?”

“Yes. It’s me. We’re going to visit the past together, Keti. Come on.”

It is a night of dreams, a night to dream. That’s all Keti can think.

She holds on to Marley, uncertain.

“Your dog can come, too. If he will. We’ll just be watching—come on.” And a small child’s arm extends from the mirror, the girl’s hand reaching toward Keti.

Slowly, accepting the rules of the dream she can’t stop, Keti climbs from the comfort of her bed. She wears silk pajamas in light blue, matching her eyes. “Come on, Marley. Edith’s nice.”

The dog jumps down from the bed and comes up to Keti’s feet, leaning against her calves.

Keti reaches down to clasp Edith’s hand.

It is warm and firm, and it casts Keti into the past.


Christmas Past

Chapter 3
Bounty, Nevada

The Christmas Keti was seven

Santa Claus did not come to Keti’s house. She never bothered explaining this to other people, and she wanted to smack Martin Collins just now for talking about the new skates Santa Claus had brought him. Keti’s father gave her presents, yes, but not on Christmas Day, because Christmas reminded him of losing Keti’s mother, and on Christmas he got drunk. He bought presents for Keti when he felt like it.

She loved nothing more than when her father took her somewhere and lifted her onto his shoulders. Like at the mine’s Fourth of July company picnic. Times like that. Though he always said, One of these days you’re going to be too big for this, Keti.

She was seven, and it worried her to be getting tall and too big to be lifted onto her father’s shoulders.

Martin sat beside her on the bench at Town Park, his black hair sticking out in different directions, the way it always did, eyeing her curiously. “What did you get?” he asked.

It was morning, and according to the Town Hall clock, which she’d read on the way to the park, it was about nine. There weren’t many people at the rink, just Keti and Martin, who was ten and the tallest person in his class, and Martin’s younger sister, Bridget, who had also gotten new skates.

“That’s rude,” Keti told him. Martin Collins never talked to her at school, and Bridget, who was in Keti’s class, was worse. Bridget looked like Snow White, with black hair and red lips. She was popular. She was friends with the girls who were meanest to Keti, the ones who made fun of her clothes.

“What’s rude?” Martin asked.

He was so stupid, Keti couldn’t believe it. Her skates—and by the way, no skates were going to make Martin a better skater than she was—were on. She stood up and stepped onto the ice, spinning before taking off to speed around the rink. Christmas didn’t matter. Why did people get so thrilled over it?

Edith probably wouldn’t come down to the rink for hours yet, she’d have so many presents to open. Her father was the mine manager, and they always had money. Keti’s father made more money than Mr. Kitchen, according to him, but he spent more, too. Edith always gave Keti a Christmas present, the only one she’d get, and Keti had a present for Edith, a pink scarf she’d knitted at school, which was wrapped up and in the pocket of her coat.



“You’re so stupid,” Bridget told her brother. “You’re the oldest, and you don’t know anything.”

“I’m a genius, handsome and charming,” he said.

“Keti doesn’t get Christmas presents. Her mother died on Christmas Day, and she doesn’t get presents.”

Martin sat on the bench, gazing at his new skates. There was so much information in what Bridget had just said. Her mother died… People did die. You didn’t grow up in a mining town, with a father who worked in the mines, and not know that people died and that it could happen to you. He’d known Keti had no mother. That’s why she was such a tomboy, everybody said. He’d never given her much thought.

But she didn’t get presents?

And he’d said, What did you get?

Score one for Bridget. He had been stupid.

The solution was simple for him. He was the oldest, and his job was to help his mom take care of his brothers and sisters. So Keti would be an extra little sister. He would tell his parents, and they’d want to help her and make sure she got Christmas presents and other normal things, because that’s how they were and that’s how they’d taught their children to be. Every Christmas, each of his parents kept a secret from the other one. Separately, they would pick out someone in Bounty who needed something—money or a new coat or new books for the school. And then they would secretly give that present to the person they’d chosen, passing along the sales slip to the other parent on Christmas. Always in a specially decorated envelope. They loved to give, which they said was the only cure for sorrow.

Martin wasn’t sure how they’d become this way, but he thought maybe it had to do with his brother dying years before. His brother Michael had died before Martin was born. He’d been six months old. Martin’s parents said that Michael was an angel watching over all of them now.

He was actually, Martin knew, an archangel, a superpowerful angel.

Keti probably wouldn’t want to be part of his family, though. That was the thing about her. She loved to act as if she was too good for everyone else because her father was the best “gyppo miner” at the Empress Mine. Gyp sheets were the forms that documented how much rock each miner moved. Gyppo miners got paid by how much they moved, and the sheets weren’t confidential. The competition, Martin’s father explained, keeps everyone working as hard as they can.

Sometimes so hard they made mistakes. His father had never said this to Martin, but Martin had overheard him saying it to other people.

Martin wondered if he would be able to enjoy skating on his new skates, now that he knew Keti never received Christmas presents. He decided he could live with it and skated out into the rink with Bridget. Homemade wooden hockey sticks leaned against the ticket shack—anyone could use them. Martin grabbed one, and Bridget grabbed another, but she was still learning to skate and she fell down. Martin set down his stick on the ice and helped his sister up, but then she said, “I’m fine!” and skated off.

Martin practiced with the stick, though they had no puck today. The pucks were kept inside, and the shack was closed because it was Christmas.

Keti yelled, “You’re still slower than me.”

“I’m not!”

They decided to race, from one end of the frozen pond to the other. Bridget said, “On your mark, ready, set, go!”

Martin stretched out his legs, which were longer than Keti’s, but she just seemed to fly over the ice.

He didn’t see exactly what happened, just caught her shape in her red pants and blue coat with the fur-fringed hood, as it went sailing, spinning, flat over the ice, skidding maybe twenty feet.

He slowed and circled back as Keti got up, her face a mess. It looked as if she had a bloody nose, and maybe she’d lost a tooth.

He skated toward her and asked, “Are you all right?”

But she just started skating away from him, and she reached the other end of the rink before she put her mittens up to her face, and he saw she was crying, too, although she tried not to show it.

He filled his mittened hands with snow and approached her. She’d chipped one of her front teeth, a permanent one just coming in—almost perpendicular to the way it should be—and her nose was bleeding.

“Sit down and put your head back,” he said.

“I’m not sitting on the ice.”

All thought of giving her a Christmas present disappeared. As soon as she stopped bleeding and crying, he was going to pull her hair and hit her with snowballs.

“You have to put your head back, to make your nose stop bleeding. And you chipped your tooth.”

She climbed up onto the snowy bank and stood there, tilting her head back. “I won,” she said. “New skates won’t make you faster than me.”

Martin felt bad that he was slower than a girl—and slower in his new skates. He was a good athlete; he was outdoors all the time, and he could hardly stand to be inside. He scooped up still more snow and hit her in the face with it.

Keti grabbed his coat and threw all her weight at him, knocking them both down in the snow.

“Martin Collins, I saw that!”

Keti sprang back from him, and Martin gaped at his aunt Bobbi, marching toward him.

Seeing Bobbi Kirk on her way over, Keti was sorry. She didn’t want Martin to get into trouble and Bobbi was so snotty. She’d been homecoming queen years before, and no one was ever supposed to forget it. And she worked at the company store and was mean to Keti and Edith whenever they went in.

Keti said, “He didn’t do anything! I fell down and got hurt. He’s helping me.”

Wobbling over on her new skates, Bridget chimed in, “That’s right!”

Bobbi Kirk stopped, an expression of disbelief crossing her face. Letting out a snort of disgust, she said, “Right.” Then, she came closer. “What happened, honey? Let me see.”



By the time Keti sat in the Collinses’ kitchen having hot chocolate, Martin had decided he didn’t really want Keti Whitechapel as an adopted member of his family. She wasn’t exactly an enemy, but he didn’t have to love her, either. He could just wait patiently until she went home.

Bridget said, “Keti beat Martin in a race.”

“I only tricked him,” Keti said.

Bridget was in her class, and they weren’t exactly friends, Martin knew. Still, Keti’s answer surprised him, especially when she explained.

“I didn’t really win. After I fell down I tricked him and kept skating. I had to trick him, because he’s faster.”

It was the second time she’d lied to help him out, Martin noticed, and this time he liked it less than he had the first time. “You are faster,” he said and stood up. “You’re the fastest skater in the whole school. It’s not like it matters.” And he left the noise in the kitchen and went into the living room where his dad was playing with his eighteen-month-old brother, George.

Martin sat on the floor and George wobbled toward him, saying, “Mar!” and Martin pulled him close and hugged him, and told himself that there were more important things than skating faster than a girl.

Chapter 4
Keti lets Edith lead her through the fog to the following year, when Keti is eight

Edith did not die on Christmas Day, but Keti remembered her death on the following Christmas Eve because she knew that among all the other things it meant there would be no gift from Edith. Edith, who was gone, Edith, who had been a misfit like Keti, and her only friend. Because Edith had had something wrong with her face. Keti had felt pretty beside Edith, and now she hated Christmas more than ever. Her father had gotten drunk the night before, and now he was asleep in his room in their cabin on Tomboy Road. No doubt he’d start drinking again as soon as he awoke.

Maybe she’d go sledding. She lived in the best place for sledding in all of Bounty. She could walk farther up Tomboy Hill, to the point that was the farthest from which anyone had ever sledded. But first of all someone needed to tamp down the snow to make it good for sleds, and she wasn’t about to ask her father to do that today, not even if he was already awake. He would yell and throw things.

Keti’s cat, Sam Cat, who was feral and would never let anyone hold her, jumped off the kitchen counter, where she’d been drinking milk out of Keti’s cereal bowl. Keti knew she’d have to wash the dishes soon. Her father didn’t wash dishes and he didn’t cook. Most nights, they ate out at the diner or at the Miners’ Boardinghouse. Keti made her own lunches for school.

Sam Cat yowled, and Keti heard someone out on the porch.

She went to the door.

Martin and Bridget Collins stood there. Martin was in the sixth grade now, and even taller than he used to be. All the girls in his class liked him, Bridget always said. His parents must have made him come to her house along with Bridget.

“What are you doing?” Keti said.

“You’re to come home with us,” Martin said.

“What do you mean?” She didn’t ask them in. The house was dirty, and she didn’t like people to visit. No one ever did anyway.

“We’re to be together all through Christmas,” Bridget said. “You’re sleeping over.”

“Why?” Keti demanded. The Collinses sometimes came across as do-gooders, and it was highly offensive to her to think that they might try to be doing good for the daughter of Luther Whitechapel.

“For fun. Our mom asked your dad yesterday. He said okay, but he probably forgot to tell you,” Martin said.

All three of them translated “probably forgot to tell you” into “got drunk and forgot to tell you.”

“I’m going sledding,” Keti said. “I don’t want to go to your house.” She’d try to tamp down the snow herself so that her sled would run smoothly.

Martin watched her. She’d cut her blond hair as short as a boy’s, and most of the time she dressed like a boy, too, the way she was today, in wool pants and a plain sweater. She still had the tooth she’d chipped the Christmas before. All her permanent teeth stuck out so far it was startling. If she were part of his family, Martin knew his parents would get her braces. He also knew that Luther Whitechapel would never bother to have Keti’s teeth straightened, any more than he’d buy her nice clothes. No matter how good at sports Keti was, she’d be picked last for teams and made fun of always. And she wasn’t about to accept the help of the Collins family. Martin looked at his sister and with his eyes conveyed what he could not say aloud: I knew she was going to do this. I told you so.

His mother had said, Martin, you go with Bridget, and make sure Keti comes.

But that was his job, given him by his mother, so somehow he had to accomplish it. It was that simple, even if he didn’t like Keti Whitechapel; even if he’d rather not have her around his family’s house on Christmas Day.

Keti’s family had no Christmas tree. Neither did his—yet. They would go cut the tree once they were back with Keti.

It occurred to Martin that he might have the best luck if he was straightforward. He said, “We’re supposed to go get our tree, and you’re supposed to come.”

“I’m not coming. You think I need to have Christmas, but I don’t. I don’t like Christmas.”

“We have presents for you,” he said, which was true.

She gave him a long-suffering look, then shrugged. “Okay.”

“And bring your pajamas and stuff,” Bridget said, “because you’re sleeping over.” As if she hadn’t looked at her mother with horror initially and said, I don’t want to have her over. People will think we’re friends!



“Keti, I’m so glad you’re here.” Mrs. Collins wrapped her arms around Keti and pulled her close.

Keti submitted to being hugged but said nothing. The Collinses were being charitable. She knew this and she didn’t like being the object of their charity. After all, her dad wasn’t poor. He just didn’t like Christmas. And the Collins family had five kids already. They weren’t rich.

“Would you like some pumpkin pie?” Mrs. Collins offered. “Everyone’s allowed a piece to tide them over while they go cut the tree.”

“Yes, please,” Keti answered.

“I do feel bad for the Kitchens,” Mrs. Collins said to her husband, Charles, as she sliced a piece of pie and served it to Keti on turquoise Fiesta Dinnerware. “I took them cookies, but it’s so sad over there. Edith was their only child.”

Keti sat at the Collinses’ big table. It was nicer than her father’s table. It was made of a light-colored wood and was big enough for their entire family. They had another table in their dining room, too. If Keti’s mother had lived, she and her family might have had tables like this. But it was just Keti and her father, so there was no need for anything fancy.

Martin said, “We could go sing Christmas carols to them.”

Keti wondered how Edith’s parents would feel about having someone sing carols to them. Probably all they wanted was to have Edith back. She felt that way, too. She told Martin, “They just want Edith. Don’t be stupid.”

She knew, the moment she said it, that at the Collins house people would think this was really impolite, calling one of the family stupid. “Sorry,” she muttered.

“That’s a nice idea, Martin,” said Mrs. Collins.

“Keti’s probably right,” he said, and he left the room.

“It wasn’t a bad idea,” Keti said belatedly, trying to make up for her mistake. She finished her pie quickly and took her plate to the sink and rinsed it. Mrs. Collins complimented her on her nice manners, and then Keti went to find Martin. He was sitting on the floor in the den near a space that had been cleared for the tree, helping George put rings over a rocking pillar. It was a PlaySkool toy like the one Keti had played with when she was little.

She said, “We could go caroling.”

“We have to get the tree,” he said, “and then I help Dad put the lights on it.”

Well, la-di-da, Keti almost said.

“Just offering,” she told him instead.

The phone rang. “Charles!” Mrs. Collins called, and Martin’s father hurried through the den to the kitchen.

A moment later, they heard Mr. Collins saying something about the mine. He was an engineer, and he was going to have to go to work to take care of a ventilation problem. “But the tree!” howled Martin’s sister Amy from the kitchen.

It was obvious, suddenly, that the Collins family wasn’t going to have a perfect Christmas after all.



Martin had the idea. He had it because he’d learned, in his family, that the only way to really make yourself feel good when you felt rotten was to help someone else. The Kitchens, Edith’s parents, probably felt more rotten than he did, than anyone else did this Christmas.

“What are you doing?” said his mother as he began looking up the number in the phone book.

“I’m going to ask Mr. Kitchen if he’ll help us get our Christmas tree.”

Keti, who had picked up George and followed Martin to the phone, watched his mother’s expression. She looked stunned. As if she didn’t know what to say.

“He’ll be at the mine, won’t he?” Mrs. Collins finally pointed out.

“Nope, he’s on the owl shift.”

She washed her hands at the sink.

Martin was aware of his mother and Keti listening as Mrs. Kitchen answered the phone, saying, “Hello?”

“Mrs. Kitchen, this is Martin Collins. Is Mr. Kitchen there?”

“Yes. Yes, he is. One moment.” At Edith’s burial almost a year ago, people had said, Mrs. Kitchen hadn’t wanted them to lower the coffin. She’d been on her hands and knees sobbing. Martin thought about this while he waited for Mr. Kitchen to come to the phone.

“Hello.” He had one of those warm, deep voices. Martin had always liked him.

“Mr. Kitchen, this is Martin Collins,” he began. “My dad had to go down in the mine, and we haven’t got our tree yet. I thought of you, because I know you already did your shift…”

Mr. Kitchen interrupted. “Kathleen and I will be glad to help you get that tree. As long as we have some assistance. You and some of your brothers and sisters, maybe.”



Keti was really glad to see Mr. and Mrs. Kitchen, who hugged her and told her how they’d missed her. Not all of the Collins kids came; not all of them had wanted to. Bridget had chosen to stay home with four-year-old Paul and two-and-a-half-year-old George. Keti thought Bridget was afraid to talk to the Kitchens because of Edith’s being dead.

It was nice of the Kitchens to take the Collins family to get their tree, Keti thought. Funny, the Kitchens seemed almost happy to be helping. They definitely seemed happy to see her.



Amy Collins, who was ten, appointed herself the expert and chose what she considered the perfect tree. It was in the Bridalveil area. Mr. Kitchen and Martin took turns with the saw, cutting it down. As he was sawing, Martin smelled the sap and the needles. He wanted to see the rings on the trunk and count them, because they would tell him how old the tree was.

Behind him, Keti and Amy stamped their feet to keep warm and Mrs. Kitchen warned her husband and Martin to be careful.

The tree toppled over in the snow.

Martin crouched by the trunk and counted rings. Keti said, “What are you doing?”

“Finding out how old it is. Twenty-one!” he concluded. “It’s twenty-one years old.”

“And now its life is over,” Keti said matter-of-factly. The others were already dragging the tree to the Kitchens’ station wagon, and Keti ran to help.

Martin thought about what she’d said, and he took off a glove to touch the stump of the tree, and then he picked up some snow and gazed at that. He couldn’t imagine anywhere he’d rather be than outside among all the trees.

Back in the fog with Edith

The fifty-five-year-old Keti wonders why Edith showed her that particular Christmas when she was eight. And Edith didn’t show her any presents. But Keti, being there, locked in the memory, remembered she had felt wanted. Wanted by the Collins family, and wanted by the Kitchens. People wanted her around.

Which proved what Keti had always believed, that she’d had a perfectly good childhood.

The dog, Marley, beside her, leans against her leg as Keti finds herself on a sidewalk, on Bounty’s Main Street. She sees groups of teenagers walking past, laughing.

She knows Martin by his shape. He’s tall, broad shouldered, handsome in an unusual way. She can see the bones in his face, the perfect bones. All the girls like him. He’s one of the brighter kids who’ll soon be graduating from Bounty High School.



Fifteen-year-old Keti saw Martin Collins ahead. It was Noel Night in Bounty. On Noel Night, the teenagers all met at the Town Hall to receive gifts from their Secret Santas. Keti was Secret Santa to a boy named Russell Logan, and she found it embarrassing. No other word for it.

It wasn’t just that he was poor. Everyone in Bounty was kind of poor.

It wasn’t even that he wore glasses.

It was things like the way he talked. He couldn’t use words with fewer than three syllables.

Tonight, he would find out that she, Keti Whitechapel, was his Secret Santa. She would be nice to him—kind of. She’d learned to get by in life with nice.

“Keti! Keti, my girl!”

It was her father, coming out of one of Bounty’s two bars. This one was The Underground. A man was with him. He looked vaguely familiar to Keti, and Keti had a bad feeling about him.

“Do you know Roy Knott, Keti?”

One of the miners.

“He’s signed on at the mine, and he’s going to be living with us. Someone else to wash the dishes, eh, Keti?”

Keti didn’t believe for a second that this other miner would wash a single plate at their house. He’d just get drunk with her father.

Roy Knott was tall, like her father, and thin and a bit hunched over. Keti supposed he was around thirty-five, but already he’d lost most of his hair. Her father had a full head of hair.

“You look pretty, Keti,” Roy said.

She was breathing steam in the cold air, but the breath of the two men was foul. Roy Knott had been drinking rum, and Keti detested that smell. She was sure that she didn’t look pretty. No one ever called her pretty, because of her teeth. She’d heard some of the guys at school talking, saying Keti Whitechapel would be okay if they could just stick someone else’s face on her body.

She didn’t even bother to say, “Thank you,” to Roy Knott’s patent insincerity.

Roy asked, “You got a boyfriend?”

“Keti’s got loads of boyfriends,” interjected her father.

This was demeaning. She didn’t need boyfriends, and she sure didn’t have any. Girls who looked like her never had boyfriends. Or friends of any kind, for that matter.

“Anything special you want for Christmas, Keti?” the man asked.

Her father said nothing, as if they had Christmas like other people.

Keti shrugged.

“How about a pretty sweater?” asked Roy. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He leered at her breasts.

Keti didn’t answer. The only thing she wanted was to have her teeth straightened. She didn’t mind the one chipped one, but she did mind all her teeth sticking out too far. There was an orthodontist in Bounty, now that it was no longer just a company town. People were talking about developing a ski area here.

All Keti could think about was money, wanting money to get her teeth fixed. She’d asked her dad about the orthodontist, and he’d told her she looked fine as she was. Which clearly meant he wasn’t going to spring for it.

She was glad to get away from her father and his friend, who was going to live with them so that she’d have two drunken miners at home instead of just one. She continued to Town Hall, dreading her encounter with Russell Logan. Of course, she’d put her name on his present. Although she didn’t like him, she’d given him something she thought he’d like. It was a special pencil case that was also a slide rule, because he was so brainy.

In the vast Town Hall, she looked around, thinking about Martin Collins and the reality that only the prettiest girls could get his attention. She would probably go to the Collins house again this Christmas Eve, as she always did. But she would mostly spend time with Amy, not with Martin—or Bridget, for that matter. Bridget acted as if she was too good for the rest of the world. In any case, Martin Collins would never notice Keti the way she wanted him to notice her. Because that was how things were. She looked the way she looked, and someday she might get to go on a date with some boy who had the sex appeal of Russell Logan—or someone who’d made a bet with his friends that she would let him touch her breasts. She’d heard that idea being whispered about, too.

She went over to the big tree to look for a package with her name on it. Her Secret Santa had been especially nice this year. There had been a poem by Robert Frost in her locker and new laces for her ice skates outside her front door one morning. There had been many more small surprises for her than she’d ever gotten before from a Secret Santa.

She finally found a box with her name on it under the tree. It was small, like a jewelry box, wrapped in green paper. Keti opened the paper carefully, then lifted the lid on the box. There was the card, and it said, “Sincerely, Martin Collins, your Secret Santa.” When she lifted the card, she found a necklace beneath. From a silver chain hung a crystal snowflake.

Keti peered around Town Hall, and she saw Martin by himself looking out the window at the Christmas lights on the street below. Two girls in Amy Collins’s class, two years below Martin’s, were looking at him and whispering and giggling.

Hoping.

Keti put on the necklace, and then she walked over to him. No need to be afraid, because he didn’t like her the way she wanted, would never like her that way. He’d been such a nice Secret Santa for reasons that had nothing to do with her. He was just nice to people, as if it was his profession.

Tonight, Keti was wearing the white sweater with the navy-blue Fair Isle pattern around the neck that Mrs. Collins had knitted for her the year before, and with it she wore her black stretch ski pants.

She tapped Martin’s back and he spun around.

She held out the snowflake, to show him she was wearing it. “Thanks! You were a really good Santa.” She smiled with her lips closed over her teeth, the way she always did.

His brown eyes saw the snowflake, and he reached out and gave her a hug. Then, he let go. “Merry Christmas, Keti.”

The same Christmas, on through the fog

The warmth fades in the chill of fog. Keti’s cheeks, which have been so warm, suddenly react to the frigid night and she is apprehensive. She remembers the rest of that Christmas season. Detestable Roy Knott moving in, and the two men being drunk all the time. Then her father throwing Roy out, finally, just after New Year’s, because Roy had tried to get fresh with Keti.

And the things Roy had shouted…“You may as well let me, Luther. Nobody’s going to want to look at her face.”

“The past isn’t always happy,” says Edith now. Edith, who—if she’d lived—could have written a book about the cruel things people say on the subject of imperfect faces. “But it doesn’t have to ruin us.”

The Christmas Eve when Keti was sixteen

Keti’s father was dead. He had died nine days earlier, when a slab broke loose overhead and fell on him and his partner, Hoss Skelling. Hoss’s legs had been crushed. Luther Whitechapel had died instantly.

At the Catholic church and also after the funeral, there had been discussions about what was to be done with Keti. Keti had overheard snatches of the talk. As far as she was concerned, she was old enough to live on her own and that was what she intended to do. But Mr. Collins had insisted, “She has to finish school!” as if anything other than that would be shocking.

Keti would get a job, she thought. She could work in the mine offices. She could even work below, as some other women in Bounty did, a few of them.

Now the Collinses were expecting her for Christmas Eve, but she didn’t want to go. They would want her to live with them. No, they would ask her to live with them, even though they didn’t really want her there. They would ask her because that was the kind of people they were.

So it was Christmas Eve, and for once no one was drunk in her father’s house, because now her father was gone forever. This was her house, or at least it would be, people had said, once everything was settled. Her father hadn’t ever made a will, and that bothered Keti—she’d heard rumors that it would all belong to the state. But no one was kicking her out just yet.

There were heavy feet on the porch outside, and faces peered in the window.

Keti wished she were invisible. The Collinses. The Collinses had come to the door—that had been Bridget and Martin peering in, and they had seen her. Martin, who was home from college. Martin was going to be a physician. He wanted to help people.

“Keti, come out!” called Bridget, who, this past year, had learned to at least act friendly, some of the time, if none of her friends—the popular crowd—were around. Bridget tried the front door, then knocked. “Keti, it’s Bridg. Let me in.”

Irritated, dressed in some baggy corduroys and a huge sweatshirt she’d rescued from the Bounty free box, where people left things they didn’t need anymore, Keti yanked the door open.

Bridget smiled, and her brother, behind her, did the same. “C’mon. Come over. Look…Martin’s home.”

“She can see that,” Martin pointed out.

Bridget ignored him. Keti looked at Bridget’s black curls, at her fresh complexion and white teeth, at her Snow White prettiness, which had only increased through the years. Everyone said Bridget would be queen of the junior prom this year.

Keti saw Bridget peering past her and was glad that she herself always kept the house clean, at least. My house, now. The thought didn’t make her happy, the way she would have wanted it to.

To stop Bridget from peering around her into the house, Keti said, “All right. I’m coming.”

Martin, who hadn’t looked inside or at her and still did not, said, “Good,” and turned away, swinging his car keys.



Keti was in the Collinses master bedroom, sitting on the huge bed, where Mrs. Collins had asked her to sit. “Keti, we want you to come and live with us. You’re like a part of our family, and we hate the idea of you living alone.”

Keti almost told Mrs. Collins that she absolutely was not part of the Collins family, but that would have been rude. And Mrs. Collins was nice. She wasn’t insincere, not exactly. Though Keti knew darned well that she wasn’t the same to Mr. or Mrs. Collins as their own kids were.

Keti said, “I’ll be fine.”

“It’s not good for you to be alone, and, honey, I don’t know what they’re going to do about the house.”

They didn’t have to be defined. Keti didn’t know who they were, only that her father might not have paid his taxes or might owe money to someone, or the “estate”—which sounded like wealth, but wasn’t, necessarily—could take years to “straighten out.”

“I’m going to work in the mine,” she announced. “Mr. Spencer said he’d hire me in the new year.”

Mrs. Collins looked at her in horror. “Not in the mine, surely. In the office, though…”

“In the mine,” Keti interrupted. “Some women do.” And the men didn’t like it and never would. But they’d accept Keti faster than many other women. Her dad had been the best miner in Bounty, and so they would be glad to give her a chance down below.

Well, not glad. But they wouldn’t be so hard on her. Most of them had known her for her whole life.

“Keti, Mr. Collins and I would like to see you finish school, and we know your dad would have wanted that, too.”

Well, that was an interesting thought, but Keti didn’t buy it. Her father hadn’t cared much what she did, short of something immoral. He’d had no ideas about her “finishing school.”

“Please come and live with us. We want you to be our girl, Keti,” Mrs. Collins said.

Keti did know something about the Collins family, though, and about Mr. and Mrs. Collins. If she, Keti Whitechapel, came to live with them, Mr. and Mrs. Collins would treat her exactly the same as they did their other children. It would be a matter of honor with them. They would buy her the same clothes they bought Bridget or Amy. They would make her do her homework the same way.

Keti wasn’t sure she wanted that. It had occurred to her that maybe, if somehow her father did have some money set by, she could have a few things she’d never had before. But it was more important to hang on to the house, if that was possible, and to live frugally. That was how she’d always lived.

“I’m fine,” Keti repeated. “I’ll be fine.”

“But, Keti, honey, I don’t think they’ll let you stay in the house.”

They. They. Keti didn’t even want to know who they were. “I think they will,” she insisted.



Just before noon, the front doorbell chimed. The Collinses’ bell played a song. Keti heard a voice outside speaking low, and then the muffled sound of an argument from the front entryway.

She followed the noises uneasily and saw a man and a woman standing near the door. They were elegantly dressed, and they were not from Bounty. Keti didn’t recognize them.

Mr. Collins showed them into the living room, closing the door behind. Keti sensed something in his eyes, something cool and decisive. Martin’s father seemed in charge of everything in the world just then.

He did not like these out-of-town people, Keti knew that.

But Mrs. Collins said, “Keti? Keti, these are relatives of yours.”

Keti liked the look of the woman, who wore an elegant red suit that fit so perfectly that it must have been made specifically for her. She was blond, perhaps Keti’s father’s age—definitely older than Mrs. Collins.

“Keti, I’m your aunt Marlene. Great-aunt, really, but I think we’ll let it go with aunt. I was your daddy’s mother’s youngest sister. And this is my husband, Edward.”

Keti decided that it was at least partly Edward that Mr. Collins didn’t like. Edward had a clipped mustache and his black hair was combed back, and he was extremely handsome—like a movie star. Not young, though, more like, well, Clark Gable or someone like that. His suit looked expensive, too. It was black with tiny pale grey stripes, and his shoes shone. No, these people were not from Bounty.

“We thought Keti could stay with us,” Mrs. Collins told their visitors. “That way she can finish school here in Bounty, where her friends are.”

Friends? Keti thought. That was a laugh.

Edward was giving her an appraising look through narrowed eyes, and Keti imagined she could read his thoughts—which were about her teeth and her corduroys and sweatshirt. She knew he was thinking that she wasn’t much to look at.

“Would you like to come home with us, Keti?” asked the pretty older blond woman, the woman who did seem too young to be a great-aunt.

Edward’s eyes slid sideways toward Marlene with a look that said they might as well leave Keti where she was.

Then Martin came into the front hall. He looked at Keti’s aunt Marlene and at her husband. His expression was almost rude. He seemed to have the gist of the conversation right away, and then his eyes swept over Aunt Marlene more carefully, and there was nothing friendly in his look. He didn’t look impressed by her clothes. “You’re from Las Vegas,” he said.

Las Vegas. Keti’s mind filled with the thought of it. The city. She could live in a real city.

Edward’s head lifted slightly, and he seemed to gain height, though he was shorter than Martin. Well, most people were. “I don’t think you have any part in this discussion, son,” he said, and there was something unkind in his tone, something mocking, that clearly implied Martin was not an adult.

Although Martin was.

Keti did not understand. But suddenly she wasn’t sure she wanted to go with Aunt Marlene and Edward. Edward, she could tell, was cruel.

“I don’t think anyone in Bounty is likely to let you take Keti,” Martin said matter-of-factly, sounding as if he knew Edward, which couldn’t be possible.

“Martin,” exclaimed his mother. “These are Keti’s relatives.”

“So?” Martin said.

Mr. Collins gave his eldest a look that unmistakably said, That’s enough from you.

Martin ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek.

Mystified, Keti allowed herself a look at Martin. She could still observe him, even if she tried to talk to him as little as possible. She never wanted him looking at her. He was beautiful, whereas she was ugly. Down in the Empress Tunnel was the place for her, where the grime, the dust of the hard rock would settle on her.

Martin did not like Edward. Seriously did not like Edward. And the thought of going with the man, even with nice Aunt Marlene, chilled Keti.

“Keti, why don’t you at least come out to brunch with us,” Aunt Marlene said. “We just wanted to start that way, because we know it’s scary to go live with people you’ve never met before. We can tell you all about our house in Las Vegas. We have a swimming pool, you know.”

“Would you like to go to brunch with them, Keti?” Mrs. Collins asked, though neither her husband nor Martin appeared to think much of the idea.

“Yes,” Keti said. “Let me just…get my parka.”

“Right,” Martin said, grabbing her hand and pulling her into the next room.

Martin Collins, holding her hand.

He dropped it in the living room. Keti gave him a perplexed look and picked up her parka, glancing at her pile of gifts, which was the same size as that of any other member of the family. There was the box that contained her new sweater from the Collinses and the blue stuffed dog, a present from Martin like the dogs he’d given his sisters, on top of it. Amy had gotten a white dog, and Bridget’s was pink.

He hissed, so as not to be overheard, “Keti, don’t go with them.”

“Why not?”

“I mean to Las Vegas. Go to breakfast, if you want, but don’t leave Bounty with them.”

Keti blinked at him once, then looked away. Why should any man look so good that it hurt her eyes to see him. He didn’t have a narrow face, yet its bones seemed impossibly fine where they could be seen beneath his skin. And that cleft in his chin. Amy Collins, Amy, who was Keti’s friend in a way Bridget never would be, always told Keti about her classmates making idiots of themselves over Martin. Amy could do a great impression of the homecoming queen tripping and making her breasts almost tumble out of her bra at the sight of Martin. Keti liked Amy.

“Why not?” Keti repeated. “What do you know about them?”

Martin gave her a pointed look and said, in an undertone that also conveyed his opinion regarding her naïveté, “Can you say pimp?”

Keti’s jaw dropped so that she forgot, for a second, about covering her teeth with her lips. She promptly caught herself, but still she had to ask, “How do you know?”

He wasn’t abashed. “I know. Let’s put it that way.”

He was looking at her the same way he looked at Amy or Bridget when they were being stupid. Just the same way. Like a sister.

I don’t want to be his sister.

“How do you know?” she repeated.

His eyes changed. Not much. But enough.

Enough so that she knew all at once, or maybe she simply hoped, or had the courage to dream suddenly, that Martin Collins also perceived that she had qualities that would be intriguing to a pimp.

That was news to Keti Whitechapel, but she wasn’t going to think too much about it. All she knew was that, if she lived with the Collins family, Martin would come home sometimes from college, and she would be here.

She felt faint.

Apparently deciding he’d gotten through to Keti, Martin smiled, and his smile was just a little chilly, indicating that he didn’t think the idea of her going to live with a pimp and his wife—were these two really married?—was a reason to smile.

“There aren’t pimps in Nevada,” Keti told him. “There are brothels, but there aren’t pimps.”

Martin’s unblinking expression conveyed his mesmerized disbelief that there could be a sixteen-year-old girl anywhere who didn’t know that, yes, there were pimps in the State of Nevada.

“Keti, darling?”

It was Mrs. Collins.

“Are you ready to go with your aunt and uncle, sweetheart? Now, you’re just going for brunch. They’re going to take you to the Grand Imperial.” The only place in Bounty that served Sunday brunch—or any meal at all on Christmas Day.

Keti nodded.

“And you’re to come back here afterward,” she said firmly, as if she was responsible for Keti. Mrs. Collins glowered at her oldest son, with a look that said she certainly hoped he hadn’t been speaking to Keti of things no son of hers should know about.

The car they drove was a Thunderbird, with whitewall tires. Edward didn’t open the door for Keti, even after Aunt Marlene gave him a look clearly encouraging him to do so.

Keti opened her door for herself, thinking of what she knew about Nevada’s legal brothels—there were two just outside the Bounty city limits—and of what on earth a pimp might do. Did pimps run brothels? In the backseat, she turned over the things everyone had said to her. The swimming pool and the money and Aunt Marlene’s friendly smile and her obvious desire to have Keti with her.

And then that interesting conversation with Martin Collins.

At the Grand Imperial, as the three of them waited to be seated, Edward twirled his car keys and looked at the hostess and at every other woman in the place. Not the way the boys Keti knew looked at girls—even, sometimes, at Keti, though only at her body, and never at her face. Edward didn’t look at women as if he wanted to, well, do things with them.

His expression reminded her more of the way her father’s face had looked when he’d been considering the purchase of a new drill at the hardware store. Thoughtful. Practical. Assessing.

The women were…merchandise. Keti realized this with a mixture of shock and, well, admiration. This Edward wasn’t one to get silly about anything. Clearly, he was sensible about money.

But he was a little scary, as well.

And Martin Collins had probably given her good advice when he’d urged her not to go with them. Not yet, anyhow.

At the table in the hotel dining room, where Keti had never eaten in her entire life, Aunt Marlene assured her she could order anything she wanted. Aunt Marlene treated Keti as if she were younger than sixteen, but Keti didn’t really mind. And surely Aunt Marlene wouldn’t let Edward the Pimp do anything to her or with her.

“You could have your own room,” Aunt Marlene told her. “I understand if you don’t want to decide yet, Keti. But you’re my only blood relative, now your father’s gone.”

“How come I’ve never met you till now?” Keti asked, finding it was possible to look straight at the other woman. When she did, she knew that she was looking into the face of a blood relation. Except that Marlene was so pretty. And Keti never had been and never would be.

Edward gave a twisted little smile that betrayed worldly cynicism and also amusement—the way Martin Collins had been smiling not too long before, Keti reflected. “Tell her, dear,” he urged Marlene, in a way that was definitely unpleasant.

He’s mean, Keti thought.