Christmas Recipe for Romance novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: December 23
On the morning of the twenty-third, thirty-one women walked down the back lane with hand trucks.
I counted them.
Mabry counted them too, and she had a clipboard, so hers is the official number.
The green parka led the column in her mud boots.
Behind her came the Methodists in their church coats.
The Lutherans followed in their snowman sweaters, and the retired schoolteacher came on the arm of the plow man.
Every one of them pushed a hand truck or carried a rolled-up tablecloth.
"Where are we going?" I whispered to the green parka.
"Cellar door."
"Barton changed the locks."
"On the front," she said, and smiled with all her teeth. "The Grange has owned the cellar door since 1981."
"It's in the bill of sale. Nobody's read page four since Reagan."
The cellar door sits at the foot of the Hall's back wall, under the very step where my grandmother once asked her question.
It is an iron-banded slab with a padlock the size of a fist, and the padlock is not Barton's.
It is the Grange's.
The green parka took a key on a shoelace from around her neck and turned it.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Christmas Recipe for Romance are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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