"What am I going to do?" Standing in her cold living room long before dawn, there were no people to keep Grace Mallory company and very little furniture to deaden the echo of her own voice. The battered couch had come with the rental house, although the afghan draped over it was hers, one of her few prized possessions. Feeling a chill, Grace picked up the coverlet and wrapped it around herself. She needed a hug. She needed a lot more than just one hug, but the soft old coverlet's embrace was as close to that as she was going to get. "Aunt Jo, what am I going to do?" she mused to the woman who had raised her and crocheted the afghan. Grace had no idea where Jo was now, or where she had been for years. She might even be with the Lord she loved so much and had told Grace about so many times. Wherever she was, Jo would have known what to do. Grace didn't know. She'd been so worried about the children. This was their third Christmas in a row without their father. First he'd been in jail, then last year before the holidays he was killed in an inmates' brawl. Now, her memory of him had faded, but the legacy of pain and poverty he'd left behind was still here: She had nothing to give the children for Christmas. Her son Matthew had been concerned about that - not for himself, but for little Maria. At age ten, Matt was sure he was too old and tough for Christmas to matter. At bedtime last night he'd stood before her at the kitchen table. "Don't worry about Christmas. I took care of it," he'd told her. Grace had been too worried about other things at the time to give the matter much thought. But at three this morning when she couldn't sleep, something had drawn her downstairs. The wrapped presents under the tree, even if they were few, filled her with dismay. Nobody would hire a ten-year-old to work in town, would they? Could Matthew have stolen these things, and the bright paper to wrap them in? Grace felt so helpless. She'd done everything she could to try to raise the children right, to keep them from making any of the mistakes she and their father had made. Now her heart told her things were terribly, terribly wrong. "What do I do?" she whispered. "What do I do?" It had started out as a question for Jo, but by the time she voiced it out loud, it was a prayer. It had been a long time since Grace had prayed. She still believed in God, but wasn't He just up there someplace watching? Surely He didn't care about her. That was pretty obvious in the downward spiral her life had taken in the last few years. Wait. Watch. Pray. The words were as clear as if someone standing in the room with her had spoken them. Grace stepped back, stunned. Wait, watch and pray? She could do that. The wait-and-watch part, too. She looked out the window, where ancient drapes framed a frosty scene. Outside? Surely it was too cold to sit out on the porch and pray. And what if Maria called her? Grace was sure she was getting sick again. Still, the porch drew her like a magnet. She went to the kitchen and grabbed a chair. Then, with the afghan still wrapped around her shoulders, she opened the front door and set the chair firmly on the front porch. The chrome legs of the chair settled into a light dusting of snow. Grace smiled wryly. It really wasn't much colder on the porch than it had been in the living room. "All right, I'll wait. And watch. And pray," she said softly. Maybe God wasn't so far away after all. Grace couldn't help feeling that He was out there, someplace close by. For the first time in a very long while, hope poked into her heart, nudging aside the despair that was her constant companion. She settled in to wait the coming of the dawn, and whatever the day would bring. * * * Carl Brenner trudged through the snow, wondering why the house wasn't next door to the store. Not that it mattered most of the time. Most winters in Missouri didn't bring snow this deep before Christmas. Today it was cold enough that he would have driven the pickup the five blocks between the house and the store. But that would have meant giving up one of the precious parking spaces in front of the store on the Redwing town square, and this time of year they were at a premium. So he and the yellow dog with no real name except Four - for his position in a line of yellow dogs that stretched back twenty-five years - walked in the bitter cold. Right now, one of those moods had closed in on him again - of wanting something. Except he didn't know what he wanted. He just knew it was out there, intangible and just beyond reach. No amount of prayer and Scripture had brought it closer, either. He was still running a store he didn't care much about in a town that didn't amount to spit. Granted, he never went hungry and he always had a roof over his head. He wasn't in debt. But he wouldn't miss anything in his life if anyone stole it, either. Except Four, and perhaps a pile of papers that would be meaningless to any other human being and didn't amount to enough physically to start a good fire. The wind had died down once he turned the corner onto Main, where the buildings on the square gave some protection from the bitter breeze. Four perked up, and Carl looked ahead to see why. The reason was quickly apparent and as quickly unwelcome. A delegation waited on the sidewalk, and it wasn't customers waiting for him to open the store. This was not the way to start the day. Twenty minutes later the crowd had filed into the bank and Carl stood with them, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, dripping melted snow on the bank floor like everybody else. Like Four, mercifully curled up in a back corner so he wouldn't jump on people, Carl never felt comfortable during official town meetings such as this. He might have agreed to fill the empty seat on the town council, but he still didn't like these meetings. "You know why we're here," Mayor Larry Trent finally began, looking at Carl. "It happened again yesterday. And I know he came in your place, too. This time you have to do something." The other two merchants nodded, Naomi from the café most emphatically. Carl just couldn't stir up the same kind of righteous indignation as the rest of the group. "Now, look," Carl warned the shorter, portly man. "I have a store to run, and it's Christmas Eve. I don't see why I should be the one to go out to that farm and tell Grace Mallory she's raising a thief." Mayor Larry Trent smiled uneasily. A squiff of his mouse-brown hair stood straight up, probably part of that patch he usually combed carefully over the bald spot at the top of his head. It gave him a comic air that belied the empty bank's frigid, formal atmosphere. "We can get somebody to watch the store for you, Carl," he coaxed. "Besides, it just doesn't look right, my going. The bank is the one place the kid doesn't ever take anything from." "Wish I could say the same," huffed "Doc" Conrad, the town pharmacist. "I lose ten bucks every time that kid comes in the drugstore lately." Carl huffed. The bank wasn't getting any warmer, and he had plenty to do next door before opening up. "Why don't we get you to do this? Or Ed? I mean, what are we paying him for as police chief, if not for stuff like this?" "Because Doc would scare her to death. And if we let Ed in on this, it's going to get official," Naomi said, looking like the grandmother she was. "Then we're talking the county juvenile hall for a ten-year-old. He's a thief, but he's not even a good thief. Surely we can handle this ourselves and keep it quiet." (Continues...) Excerpted from The Three Gifts by Lynn Bulock Irene Hannon Lenora Worth Copyright © 2002 by Harlequin Enterprises Limited Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
