Chapter Text
Trixie and Honey met Jim at Wimpy’s for dinner after work. “I have a conference in Baltimore the weekend before Thanksgiving. I was wondering if FWDA wanted to tag along,” Jim suggested.
Trixie laughed. “Are you expecting to need private detectives at your education conference?”
“I’m not,” Jim assured her. “I am, however, anticipating the conference utilizing event space on the Johns Hopkins University campus, which will put us closer to a certain medical student than our lives normally take us. I also expect to be able to carve out a dinner or lunch with said student, which would give us a chance to deliver our—are we still calling it a ‘care package’?—for Brian and the clinic in Whette in person, and explain the whole deal. I thought Honey might be better at explaining all of that than I am, and that Tanner might be more comfortable meeting a complete stranger – or three – if he’s joined by his wife and sister. Plus, if you both come, you can go out and do things together while I’m at the conference, instead of one of you being alone and at loose ends.”
“Got it all planned out, don’t you, brother dear?” Honey teased.
Jim shrugged.
“It is a good plan,” Trixie admitted. “We’ll check the calendar at the agency tomorrow and make sure there’s no reason why we can’t tag along.”
🔍
Trixie was woken on Christmas morning by a cold nose trying to worm a fuzzy head under her hand. “Good morning, Jenna,” Trixie mumbled, petting her dog’s head.
The young golden retriever’s tail thumped against the floor pleasantly. Looking at the dog as she sat up, Trixie figured Jenna and Jim must have already gone for their morning run and Jenna had already scarfed up her breakfast. Jim had laced a big red ribbon bow into Jenna’s collar for the day. “Look at you, pretty girl. All dressed up for Christmas, aren’t you?” Jenna’s tail wagged harder.
“I don’t hear the shower, so I’m guessing Daddy already had his and is downstairs making coffee and eating an orange?” Trixie asked the dog as she gathered her clothes for the day and headed into the bathroom for her own shower.
Usually, Jim would be making breakfast along with the coffee while Trixie got ready, but Moms had promised a Christmas spread for them on the way up to Manor House, so Jim just needed something to tide him over from his dawn run until actual breakfast. Trixie would probably skip the fruit and coffee entirely and wait for the meal.
Trixie glanced at the time as she dried her hair with a towel. There was still time before they were expected at the Farm, though not a lot since she and Jim had stockings to open. Early in their marriage, they’d decided not to give each other gifts at Christmas, aside from stockings and a date night, which this year was a date long weekend at Mead’s Mountain the weekend between Christmas and New Year (Trixie had been shocked when Mead’s Mountain was at capacity the first two weekends of December but had vacancies the final weekend of the month).
“Merry Christmas,” Jim greeted her when she bounced down the stairs with Jenna at her heels.
“Merry Christmas, Jim!” She sat next to him on the couch in the den, reaching eagerly for her stocking, which was laying on the coffee table next to Jim’s. It was filled with small gifts to amuse her, all her favorite chocolates and candies. Jim’s was filled similarly.
He smiled at the strip of hand warmers. “We’re going to use these at Mead’s Mountain this weekend,” he guessed. “It’s supposed to be snowing there all week.”
Trixie shrugged. “As a winter destination, I was counting on snow, so I’m not really worried, as long as they aren’t predicting a nor’easter while we’re trying to get there or back.”
“No, looks like just snow, not a storm.”
“Perfectly perfect, then,” Trixie said, her attention on her stocking. She’d set the empty stocking back on the table and heard a thunk that suggested there was something still in the toe. She scrunched up the “leg” of the stocking to get her hand as deep as she could and came up with the last item, a small cloth drawstring bag with two lumps in it.
She carefully undid the strings to open the bag and pulled out two small hand-carved animals. “Oxen? I need a pair of hand-carved wooden oxen?” She asked Jim.
Jim nodded. “You do. You might not know it yet, but you do.”
Trixie pursed her lips, unconvinced, but Jim hadn’t been any more forthcoming last year when he’d put a small flock of hand-carved sheep in her stocking. It was a mystery. “These aren’t a hint about the farm animals you’d like us to have someday, right? Because Mart’s getting the Farm, not us, and farm animals are a lot of work that doesn’t particularly appeal to me. Aside from maybe a couple of horses, if Regan ever retires and we have to keep our own.”
“No,” Jim assured her with a chuckle. “I don’t think we need oxen. Or sheep. I’m good with a dog, and, like you said, some horses, maybe.”
Trixie shook her head at her husband. He was a mystery, sometimes. She took the animals up to the library, setting them on the shelf where last year’s sheep had landed after the move. “You can all keep each other company until I get to the bottom of this mystery,” Trixie told them.
🔍
“It feels so different, coming here as a married couple, compared to coming here as a bunch of teens on a ski vacation,” Trixie admitted as she and Jim made their way up the grand staircase beside the main desk at the Mead’s Mountain resort.
Jim nodded, squeezing her hand. “That’s the idea of a resort, to an extent. To a couple looking for a romantic getaway, it’s charming hotel. To a dedicated alpinist, it’s a well-stocked base of operations. To a group of teens, it’s a modern castle.”
“Everything for everyone,” Trixie murmured as they skirted around the edge of the massive fireplace in the upstairs lounge on the way to their rooms.
When they’d put their bags down in their room, Jim pulled Trixie to him and kissed her softly. “Happy date night,” he murmured when they broke apart.
Trixie giggled. “Happy date night. I suppose we should text Moms and then do the phone thing.”
The “phone thing” was a part of their agreement to gift each other a “date night” each December in lieu of physical Christmas presents. The agreement was that for the duration of their date night, they would turn their phones off and swap phones so they couldn’t turn it back on and just check in quickly, no matter how tempted they were. Trixie had thought it ridiculous when Jim first suggested it, though, of course, she’d acquiesced. Since then, she’d come to see the value of it, but that didn’t mean she was going to stop teasing Jim about it. Usually, they’d have swapped phones by now, but Moms had insisted they send a message when they got to the mountain safely, even if they were going to unplug for the remainder of their weekend away.
Trixie accepted Jim’s phone when he handed it to her, but didn’t immediately slip it into her bag. “Are you sure about this?”
“We made a commitment to each other to give each other, and ourselves, this time every year.”
“I know,” Trixie admitted. “For an evening, just a couple hours.”
“So, this’ll be a couple more.”
“A couple more days,” Trixie argued. “We call it date night, but this is more than a night.”
Jim sat on the end of the bed, taking Trixie’s hands in his. “Hey, Trix, talk to me. Are you second-guessing the date night cellphone plan because we’ve all gotten so connected to our devices that the thought of days away from them is a little bit—or even a lot—unnerving for you? Or is there something else?”
“I know all the reasons you gave last year for why this is important and I agree with you about all of them. And I know that you are undeniably stubborn and honorable, which I love about you, but I also know means you wouldn’t break what you see as a promise you made me, even if the circumstances don’t fit anymore. Ten Acres Academy is your dream, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be supportive. Can you really be out of pocket for five days? Because it’s okay with me if we just enjoy the weekend and then turn your phone back on for the week, or the reverse, if the weekends are more problematic with less of the staff around.”
“I love you,” Jim told her. “Obviously I’m highly invested in Ten Acres and my students, and, like anyone, like to believe I’m indispensably valuable, but the truth is that Mart and Miss Trask are perfectly capable of handling anything administrative that comes up, and Kevin is more than capable of helping the boys through anything that comes up. They’ll be fine for a week without me. And it’s not like we’re unreachable. Everyone knows where we are, and you know as well as I do that Miss Trask wouldn’t need more than a deep breath to come up with the phone number for the resort’s front desk. If Sleepyside needs us, they’ll get hold of us. Job-wise, I’m more worried about you being out of touch for a week. You and Honey are building a business still.”
“The week between Christmas and New Year’s is dead, though. Everyone’s still doing the holiday thing at this point. Business will be brisk after the first of year, as all the people who have realized in the past six weeks that they never want to spend another holiday season with this person start to contemplate their divorce strategies and suspicions about credit card bills bear out because the gifts received and the gifts purchased don’t balance. But this week, we’d be working on reports and paperwork and official documents that keep our PI licenses, carry permits, and corporate taxes current, whether I was there or not, and, frankly, I think Honey prefers that I’m not because I don’t have the patience for it and I drive Honey crazy when I get bored with the paperwork.”
Jim chuckled. He’d heard Honey and Trixie discuss with some passion the days when they had to do that sort of paperwork and reporting. Trixie probably wasn’t wrong that Honey would just as soon take care of the formalities in an empty office, and would likely accomplish the tasks all the sooner for having Trixie out of the office.
🔍
“I was thinking we’d go cross-country skiing this morning,” Jim suggested over breakfast the next morning. “If that sounds fun to you.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Trixie agreed. “But what do you say we skip the avalanche this time?”
“You drive a hard bargain, Mrs. Frayne.”
“Is that a yes, Mr. Frayne?”
“It’s an ‘I’ll do my best,’” Jim hedged teasingly. Avalanches were common in mountainous regions in the winter, but they weren’t that common, especially in these mountains, that one could reasonably expect to experience more than one in a life without actively seeking them out or doing stupid things that one shouldn’t be doing on a snowy mountain.
Quietly, Trixie confessed, “For all the reckless things I’ve ever done, all the danger I’ve been in, or put any of you in as teens, I’ve honestly never been so scared that I would never see someone again.”
Jim nodded. “I had nightmares for weeks. Couldn’t believe Mart didn’t.”
“We were talking one night, after I got back from the National Investigative Bureau, and it came up; I forget how. Mart said the whole thing had a feeling of inevitability about it for him, from the moment he looked up and saw the wall of snow and realized there was no outrunning—outskiing—it. He was going to die, probably, and there was nothing he could do about it. And then he didn’t. Die, I mean. And there was nothing he could do about that, either. It just was what it was: he could have died, didn’t.”
Jim shook his head as he checked the bindings on his skis. “Yeah, I’ve never been able to get my brain to let go of the ‘could have died’ thoughts, whether it’s me, or you, or him, or anyone else in danger. I certainly wouldn’t wish nightmares like we’ve both had on anyone, so I’m glad for his sake that Mart was able to shake it off. I just don’t know how he was able to do it.”
🔍
The following afternoon, they were coming back toward the lodge at the end of an afternoon of snowshoeing. As they approached a fork in the trail, Trixie looked for a sign and didn’t see one. “We should remember to tell them this fork is missing a sign.”
“It’s not,” Jim said absently. “It’s about thirty feet back.” He gestured the way they’d come. “Both paths go back to the lodge, and they’re both about the same length. It’s just skirting the fishing pond. I can’t remember if you’ve ever been here in the summer?”
Trixie shook her head. “No, it was always a ‘family vacation’ when you all came here in the summer, and, much as I wanted to come, I knew Moms was right, that your family needed some time just the four of you, especially back then when being a family was new for all you, and Matt and Maddie were still learning how to do it.”
“I don’t know that any of us knew to appreciate it at the time, but I do appreciate it.”
“Any thought on which way you want to go back?”
“Left, but come here a second and just confirm I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing, because, if I am, it is something we need to tell the lodge staff.”
“Sure,” Trixie said, cautiously stepping over to where Jim was crouched at the left edge of the path.
Jim waited patiently, not saying anything, while Trixie looked over the area. She saw it quickly – four large paw prints in the snow. She wasn’t anywhere near as skilled as Jim at identifying animal tracks, but given the size there were basically two options. “Catamount?” She said, a little tentative.
Jim nodded. “And cleaner than the snowshoe tracks, so it’s recent. But the tracks just end,” Jim pointed out. “So, either the wind somehow got windier in under the trees than it was out here on the path, or—”
“It went up in the trees, which means it’s got a perch for napping up there somewhere.”
“Exactly. I don’t think snowshoeing under a catamount’s perch is how either of us want to end our day.”
Trixie shuddered. With winter in full force, the catamount would be hungry, even if it did have a kill stashed in the woods somewhere. The last thing they needed was to have it with the high ground, and them looking all plump and delicious in their winter gear.
“Left it is,” Trixie said. “And, yeah, we should probably tell the base lodge that there’s a catamount this close to things. It’s not normal for them to come this close to civilization.”
“Not at all,” Jim agreed, “and it’s bad news for all the vacationing folks at the resort who don’t have the woodscraft you and I do.”
“Hey, you’re the woodsman in this relationship. I’m just along for the ride.”
Jim shook his head, even as he pushed back to his full height and took her hand, turning for the path out of the fork that didn’t have catamount prints along the side. “Don’t sell yourself short,” he told her. “You at least recognize catamount tracks when you see them, and know why they’re concerning.”
🔍
Two days – and no further evidence that the catamount was around – later, Trixie and Jim, with some reluctance, started their drive back to Sleepyside. Once they were on the road, Trixie fished both cellphones out of their bags and turned them back on.
Both phones buzzed with notifications. Trixie didn’t even glance through Jim’s. If anything important was in those notifications, it’d probably be Ten Acres related and confidential. If it was important and she could or should know about, he’d let her know.
She was just about to toss his phone in the console cup holder when both phones buzzed simultaneously with a new notification.
Dan: Welcome back to the 21st century!
Trixie snickered, told Jim what she was laughing at, then put his phone down and focused on her own device. She started by texting Dan back. We never left it. We are in Vermont, not the Middle Ages.
Yes, but you willingly gave up your cell phones, which is the closest thing science has yet given us to backward time travel.
Says the man who lives in a cabin without central heat.
Chicks dig the muscles I earned the hard way chopping all the wood, Dan bantered right back.
Trixie laughed harder, reading the exchange for Jim, who just shook his head, laughing himself.
Well, I’ll leave you and Mr. Honorable to your last few hours of alone time. See you at the Country Club for New Year’s Eve?
We wouldn’t miss it, Trixie confirmed.
And even if you did, for a fleeting moment, entertain the idea of a more, shall we say, _intimate_ New Year’s Eve celebration alone, Honey would drag you both, kicking and screaming, to the club.
A fact we are well aware of, Trixie assured him, still grinning. See you then.