Read Online Lakeshore Christmas by Susan Wiggs - Free Book Online Page A

collided—the past and the future—one snowy night, ten years ago.
    Tonight, the road was bare and dry. The iconic church was the picture of placid serenity, its windows aglow in the twilight, the landscape stark but beautiful, waiting for the snow. This, Eddie figured, was the sort of setting people imagined for weddings and holiday worship, community events—and of course, AA meetings.
    He pulled into the church parking lot. “I’m officially broke now. Thanks a lot.”
    “I heard you used to be a movie star,” Randy, the older brother, pointed out. “Everybody knows movie stars are rich.”
    “Yeah, that’s me,” Eddie said. “Rich.”
    “Betcha you’re rich from that movie,” the middle brother, Moby, pointed out. “I saw it on TV just the other night. ‘There’s magic in Christmas, if only you believe,’” he quoted. It was a famous line in The Christmas Caper, uttered by a wide-eyed and irresistible little Eddie. The damn thing aired endlessly like a digital virus every holiday season.
    “Now you’re officially on my nerves,” said Eddie. “And FYI, I’m not rich from the movie. Not even close.”
    “Huh,” Moby said with a snort of disbelief. Moby was his nickname, based not on his size, but on the fact that his given name was Richard. “Your movie’s huge. It’s on TV every Christmas.”
    “Maybe so, but that doesn’t do me a bit of good.”
    “You don’t, like, get a cut or anything?”
    “Geez, don’t look at me like that. I was a kid, okay? And my parents didn’t do so hot, being in charge of finances.” The Havens had been incredibly naive, in fact. Against all odds and conventional wisdom, they’d managed to fail to make money off one of the most successful films of the year.
    Maybe that was why he avoided his folks like poison ivy around the holidays. Oh, please let it not be so, Eddie thought. He didn’t want to be so shallow. But neither did he want to try figuring out the real reason he steered clear of family matters at Christmas.
    “Did they, like, take your money and spend it oncars and stuff?” Randy asked. “Or make stupid investments?”
    “It’s complicated,” Eddie said. “To make a long story short, they signed some contracts without quite knowing what they were agreeing to, and none of us saw any earnings. It was a long time ago,” he added. “Water under the bridge.”
    “Didn’t you, like, grow up in some kind of compound?” Moby asked. “That’s what I heard, anyway.”
    Eddie laughed. “Commune, not compound. There’s a difference.” His parents had caught the tail end of the radical sixties, and for a time, they’d dropped out of society. They’d spent the seventies on a commune in a remote, rural area of the Catskills, convinced that simple living and self-sufficiency would lead the way to Nirvana. Eddie had been born in a hand-built cabin without electricity or running water, his mother attended by a midwife and surrounded by chanting doulas. He wondered what the Veltry brothers would say if they knew the actual name on his birth certificate. It was a far cry from Eddie. “A commune is based on the idea that the community raises the kids, not just the parents,” he explained to them. “I was homeschooled, too. The group kind of fell apart after a while, but by then, my folks had created a traveling show. We were on the road a lot.”
    “Musta sucked for you,” Randy said.
    Eddie had thought so, but working with kids like the Veltrys had shown him everything was relative. Compared to the three brothers, Eddie’s problems had been nothing. At least both of his parents had been present. According to Eddie’s friend Ray Tolley, who was with the local PD, the Veltry boys were in foster care more than they were out. Eddie didn’t know the precise reason and he didn’t want to bug them by asking. They’d neverknown their father, and they had a mother who couldn’t manage to stay out of jail.
    When Eddie was their age, his biggest