Page 32 of The Christmas Fix
Cat smiled and showed her teeth. “The handsome city manager opening his home to his neighbors and a stray cat? Oh, yeah. You’re participating. And you’re going to hold Felipe in your lap.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Six weeks to Christmas Eve
Well, it had happened. Just as he’d known it would. Noah slammed the phone down into the receiver. The first episode ofMerry’s Christmashad aired two days ago, and the calls hadn’t stopped. Volunteers offering their time, contractors who suddenly found openings in their schedule, businesses hoping to give Merry residents discounts on this and that.
Cat King was hell-bent on turning his life, his nice quiet town, into a circus.
And now he was the one fielding all the calls. Well that wasn’t going to fly. He had a job to do, a town to provide for. Noah didn’t need to be the network’s answering service.
He shoved his arms into his coat. “I’m going out,” he told his part-time secretary Carolanne.
It was cold, and the forecast was calling for snow this week. But his anger, his sense of inconvenience kept him warm.
The field producer had decided to carbon copy him on all shooting schedules so he knew where he could find Cat. Part of him recognized that he should be bringing the issue to the field producer or Paige. But he’d prefer to yell at Cat. It was more satisfying.
Noah decided to walk the four blocks to the park. He’d spent so many hours the past few days holed up in his office, the amount of cleanup progress surprised him. The buildings that had seen floodwaters licking at their foundations had all been power washed and a temporary week-long parking restriction on the last three blocks of Main Street had allowed a team of street sweepers to clean up the leftover mud clogging gutters and curbs.
Window cleaners had made quick work of the entire downtown. The town was still devoid of any actual holiday decorations. While the bulk of the decorating didn’t happen until Black Friday, there were still touches here and there that he missed. The storage shed that held most of the park’s decorations had yielded the disappointing news that nearly every item had been damaged if not destroyed.
Cat hadn’t seemed fazed by it, but Noah couldn’t help but mourn the decades of history wiped out by relentless inches of black water.
There was a crew stacking drywall and materials in front of Reggie’s diner. Cat and her ambitions. How was one woman and a tightly run crew or two going to turn a flooded park into a winter wonderland, return a destroyed diner into the breakfast mecca it had been, and redo half a dozen houses into livable homes all in time for Christmas?
She wasn’t. And that fact was plain as day. Cat King was getting people’s hopes up, and they were only going to get crushed. It didn’t matter how many volunteers showed up with cleaning supplies and tools. There was no way in hell that some pretty little actress could save his town.
And he’d be the one to pick up the pieces when she packed up and left town. He’d be the one sweating over budgets and bills, making the tough choices that needed to be faced. Through his fog of anger, Noah waved at the handful of people who greeted him. Frieda Fawkes poked her head out of the hair salon to holler a hello, and Ismail Byler called a greeting over his newspaper from the bench in front of the insurance agency he’d run since 1967. Their cheerfulness grated. Noah knew they were weeks away from disappointment, and he wished he could prepare them for it.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and pressed on.
The park was a hive of activity. Landscaping crews were blowing in mulch to beds revitalized with new evergreens. A crew of cleaners was pressure washing the salvaged benches and trash receptacles. A tree surgeon was in the process of examining the remaining pines and hemlocks for damage.
They’d lost enough trees, buried enough sidewalks in mud, that North Pole Park seemed a foreign landscape to him. The river, calm again, had returned to its banks beyond the park and sparkled icily in the morning light, giving no hint to the destruction it was capable of.
It made him think of Cat. Beautiful, fun to look at, but danger lurked beneath the surface.
Noah spotted the small village of production tents and pop-ups and headed in that direction. Picking his way over cables and boxes and leftover storm debris, Noah headed toward the voices. It sounded like a meeting was in progress.
He poked his head around the corner and spotted a handful of crew huddled together under a two-sided pop-up, clutching coffees and papers.
“Let’s talk ratings.” Paige’s voice cut through the murmurings around her. She was sitting on the ground, leaning against Cat, who looked as if she were asleep. Cat’s back rested on the skinny leg of the tent. Her long, denim clad legs were stretched out straight in front of her, a cup of something steamed between her knees. Her eyes were closed. Another woman in a powder blue beanie leaned against her opposite side.
Everyone was yawning.Must not be morning people, Noah decided. Cat seemed like the type who would lounge about in bed until noon every day if given the chance.
Cat cracked open one eye. “Must you with the numbers? I’m too tired to comprehend.”
Paige kicked her good-naturedly in the foot and rattled off a series of stats.
Cat’s eyes were closed again. “I told you,” she said smugly. “I told you this was going to strike a chord with a lot of people.”
“Yeah, a lot of people who wanted to get on camera next to Cat and Mr. I Make Preteen Girls Giggle,” Noah muttered under his breath.
“I’m very pleased with the numbers, and I have a feeling they’re only going to go up from here. We could be looking at a big finale.”
“Color me shocked.” Clearly Cat was gifted in sarcasm.
“I’m not the one who was arguing with you,” Paige pointed out.
