Free Wreck the Halls by Sarah Graves

on it than the Ford, and everyone in Eastport knew it.
    “To get Faye Anne's diary,” he told us. “At her house.”
    Oh, great. All he would tell us at my place was that it was “an emergency,” something to do with Faye Anne's “predicament.”
    So I’d been against coming out with him, but Ellie had been bound and determined. And I couldn’t very well let her do it alone. If I needed help, Ellie might not quite walk on water, but she would try.
    “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before, but I didn’t know who all was still at your house and I certainly didn’t want anyone else overhearing,” Peter said. “It’d be disastrous for her if anyone found out about it.”
    “What makes you so sure it won’t be disastrous if we do?”
    Now that he’d saved himself by throwing Faye Anne to the wolves, I didn’t have much faith in his opinion of what might help her. But at least he’d slowed down, so the holiday decorations on the elaborate old houses we passed were more than colored smears:
    Eight plywood reindeer pulling a sleigh up the steeply pitched roof of a carpenter Gothic. Ribbons circling the pillars of an old Greek Revival. A Queen Anne mansion with stars on its far-flung gables, looking vast as an ocean liner in the darkness. In its heyday, Eastport's well-to-do citizens had built whatever sort of dwellings they might fancy, and bigger was better.
    But he hadn’t answered my question. “What makes you so sure,” I persisted as he pulled into the alley behind theCarmodys’ house and shut off the engine, “that we’ll keep it a secret?”
    He turned the ignition key enough to put the dashboard lights back on. In their glow, his features were as classically modeled as the old architecture all around us. But his eyes were shadowy pools as he paused to compose his unhelpful reply and I thought again of what Joy Abrams had said of him: that he was a liar.
    “Look, Faye Anne's in trouble. And I think I’ve helped put her there.”
    Wow, as Sam would have said; brilliant deduction. But before I could reply aloud Peter picked up on my mental skewering of him.
    “They were going to come and ask me, you know.” The state guys, he meant. “It's not like they were going to ignore me, or not find out about me. Hell, in this town you can’t even go for coffee with a woman without people talking.”
    He frowned. “Especially a married one. Just because I was seeing her, it got so I couldn’t walk down the street without people looking at me. Going to the post office was an ordeal, even before this. And now it's going to be worse,” he complained.
    Right. And it was all about him, wasn’t it? Inconvenience he had to suffer, embarrassment he might be required to endure. Never mind that he wasn’t in a jail cell, right before Christmas.
    I controlled my impatience. “But there was more than coffee? The talk was accurate—you two were an item?”
    He looked sulkily at his hands: long, tapering fingers and neatly clipped nails. “Yes. I’d never felt that way about anyone before.”
    Mm-hmm. I glanced back at Ellie. Word was, Peter always had at least two women on the string, so when he got done with one there was another all lined up, ready for action. But he was speaking again:
    “It wasn’t any of their business, people who talked about us.” He slammed his fists onto the steering wheel, in the sort of spoiled, ladies’-man frustration I recognized from living with Victor. “It wasn’t fair.”
    Sam used to say that a lot, too. But I understood. When you first come to Eastport, it's easy to believe that its active gossip mill is an amusing but ultimately inconsequential feature of local life. After a while, though, some of the gossip inevitably starts being about you.
    And that, as they say around here, is what separates the culls from the keepers. “So, what's in this diary?”
    We were still sitting in the car because for one thing, this was a dumb idea; I’d come this far but I’d