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  Contents

  The Christmas Cake War

  Stella Quinn

  The Night Before Christmas

  Penelope Janu

  The Ghost of Christmas Past

  Pamela Cook

  A Rush Creek Christmas

  Renae Black

  The Christmas Cake War

  STELLA QUINN

  About the Author

  STELLA QUINN has had a love affair with books since she first discovered the alphabet. She lives in sunny Queensland now but has lived in England, Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea. Boarding school in a Queensland country town left her with a love of small towns and heritage buildings (and a fear of chenille bedspreads and meatloaf!) and that is why she loves writing rural romance. Stella is a keen Scrabble player, she’s very partial to her four kids and anything with four furry feet, and she is a mediocre grower of orchids. An active member of Romance Writers of Australia, Stella has won their Emerald, Sapphire and Valerie Parv awards and was a finalist in their Romantic Book of the Year award. You can find and follow Stella Quinn at stellaquinnauthor.com.

  For T.O.N. and that time in the front corridor with the flour crisis, for the fruitcake she’s made year in year out from her mother’s recipe, and for bakers everywhere who are custodians of family recipes.

  Author’s Note

  This is not a historical story, but it is inspired by one.

  On 11 August 1944, when the ongoing war meant tea, sugar, butter, meat and eggs were rationed, a recipe was printed in an Australian newspaper for a butterless and eggless fruit cake. Its postscript read: This mixture fits the soldier’s cake tin, and can be sent with safety to boys as far away as New Guinea.

  The tin to which the postscript refers is the Willow lidded cake tin, thousands of which were manufactured by a Melbourne company during World War Two. The ‘boys’ who received these cakes were sent to New Guinea with no promises of safety and seven thousand of them didn’t come home. Seven thousand.

  Chapter 1

  The last time Jodie was in Clarence, she met a boy and fell in love. You know, the usual stuff. She had her heart broken, too, in case you’re wondering.

  The whole process took about four minutes. A waterfall and rock pool had been involved, and a heroic rescue, and even though a decade and a half had passed since then, she’d never forgotten the breathless moment she was scooped—by a boy!—from deep, scary, ink-black water and brought back up to the sun.

  Had she been fifteen? Sixteen, maybe? She was young, is the point, and she was naïve and wide-eyed and all those sweet, vulnerable things that shy teenage girls are when they’re suddenly clasped, bosom to chest, to a handsome boy with laughing brown eyes, no shirt and soaking wet boardies.

  The heartbreak wasn’t his fault; she knew that now. He’d done nothing more than save her from drowning, set her on her feet and return to his friends. Hero Boy hadn’t even known her name, let alone understood she’d been daydreaming about having a summer holiday romance with a boy since forever, and he was the Clarence local she’d chosen for the role. The hurt and humiliation were all in her head.

  But at the time, watching him walk away like he’d not even noticed she was a girl? Yeah. It felt fatal. She gave her shoulders a roll and stretched her fingers where they’d been clamped on the steering wheel. Driving back into the small country town after all these years had made her mind wander back to a time when she’d thrown words like fatal around for the sheer drama of it. Teenager stuff.

  She knew better now.

  Jodie rubbed her chest and blinked rapidly and put a little pressure on her car brakes to pull over to the side of the short street that marked the centre of town. She was older now. She knew what heartbreak really felt like. What fatal really felt like. She knew, but she wished she didn’t know, because knowing had been brutal.

  She pulled away from the kerb, keeping her car at a snail’s pace as she began inspecting the passing houses of Lillypilly Street through the dusty windscreen. Not that there were many: a few brick, a few fibro, a few weatherboard. The trees and grass and shrubs of the front gardens were such a light green compared with the silvers and sages of the southern gardens back home. After all these years, would she even recognise the house where her great aunt lived?

  Oh. Of course. There: a blue-painted weatherboard cottage showing its age. A rickety fence of rounded yellow palings marked the front, reminding Jodie a little of horse teeth. The shrubs lining the front path were pruned and tidyish, but dandelions growing up through the grass in front of the house and out on the verge near the road made the place look like mowing was a few days overdue. Three wide-planked steps leading up to the bullnose verandah looked like they’d recently been replaced. A sturdy chrome handrail, not at all in keeping with the country charm of the home, shone in the morning sun.

  Old and new. She’d just been expecting old; she’d just been wanting old, in fact. She’d spent the long drive north making wishful bets with herself: If Carol’s house looks exactly like it did when I was a kid, then maybe I’ll feel like a kid again while I’m here. Maybe I’ll remember what that little word ‘happy’ feels like.

  But Carol’s house had some new amid the old, which was telling her that wishful bets had been false hope. No surprises there. Hope had flung itself over a guardrail on the Megalong Valley Road ten months ago.

  Not that her family understood. Her mother, her father, her brother … they were totally over what they called her ‘wallowing in heartbreak’. She wasn’t sure whether they’d been holding family meetings without her and workshopping Ways To Perk Jodie Up, but somehow or other, it had been decided (by them) that it was her job (despite any objection she might raise) to drive 802 kilometres from Katoomba to Clarence and help Great Aunt Carol move into an aged care facility.

  ‘You’re the health professional in the family,’ her mum had said. ‘Carol will feel comfortable having you around. You know, in case her hip is playing up. Also, we’re all busy and you’re …’

  Not busy? Untrue. Oh, sure, she wasn’t busy with anything meaningful, like earning a living or delivering meals on wheels, or even brushing her hair, but she was very busy with other stuff. Like ‘moping’, to use her mother’s pet phrase. She’d been busying the heck out of moping for months now.

  Also, Jodie could not see why her mother thought a physio who’d had to sell her practice for a great thunking loss, and who was currently in a rut of deep unhappiness, was in any position to be playing caretaker to a woman who’d run her own life, happily and well, for over eighty years.

  But, here she was, idling by the kerb outside Carol’s house.

  All she’d brought with her was the laundry basket on the back seat filled with spare clothes, her own personal cloud of doom and little to no expectation of being any comfort at all to Carol.

  Carol was, in her own way, as masterful as her mother. She—

  Well. No need to spell it out.

  ‘Jodie? My darling girl, what a surprise to find you on my doorstep,’ her great aunt said when she opened the front door a few minutes later.

  Carol’s amazement mingled with Jodie’s guilt. It had been a very long time since she’d seen her. Jodie’s other thought was: Why is Carol surprised? Has Mum not told her I’ve been ordered to Clarence?

  ‘That basket of clothing must mean you’ve come to stay for a bit, pet. Your old room has some boxes of old committee meeting notes stacked up in it, but we can have it ready in a trice.’

  ‘Um. Thanks. Yes.’ Her old room. Three little, very ordinary, words, but they made her feel something that she hadn’t felt for a very long time: they made her feel warm. For a while there, in that January-February-March fog after the accident, she had tried to stop feeling anything at all. Call it cowardice, call it survival, call it what you like—its name didn’t matter, because it didn’t work. The truth was, her emotional state for the last year could only be described as raw.

  ‘You’re a long way from Katoomba. I hope you haven’t been driving through the night to arrive at this hour of the morning.’

  She’d taken three days, actually, driving with her fingers gripped on the wheel so tight they ached, ten kilometres under the speed limit the whole time, pissing off every northbound truck driver on the Pacific Highway. But mentioning all of that would invite Carol to ask questions Jodie was in no state to answer, so she just smiled and said, ‘It’s good to see you, Auntie Carol.’

  And, Jodie realised, there was another little nugget of warm right where her heart used to beat before heartbreak crushed it. When her great aunt wrapped her arms around her and pressed her papery cheek to hers, it felt so good. At least, it did until it started to remind Jodie of all the other hugs and cheek-presses she’d had to endure at the funeral.

  She didn’t cry, but it was a close-run thing. She stepped back.

  Carol looked her over, head to toe. ‘Why the long face?’

  ‘Um …’ Jodie had no intention of deep-diving into her own woes, which left her with Carol’s. ‘I wish I was visiting for a different reason, that’s all,’ she said. Deflection, go me. ‘I hope you’re not sad,’ she added. ‘Change can be hard.’ There, she could still be comforting. ‘And don’t worry about the boxes you’ve already packed being in my way. I don’t care where I sleep.’ She didn’t care about anything, truth be told, besides being left alone.

 
Carol pursed her lips. Jodie waited for her to suggest a cup of tea and a biscuit—Iced VoVos were her great aunt’s favourite, if she was remembering correctly—because breakfast at the motel this morning had consisted of instant coffee in a polystyrene cup and a single shortbread biscuit from a plastic sleeve with a very overdue use-by date stamped on it, but Carol just stood there, a furrow between her eyebrows.

  The gathering in the small cottage hallway—which up until now had consisted of Jodie, Carol, Jodie’s basket of belongings and an aroma of furniture polish—suddenly expanded to include foreboding.

  ‘Tell me, pet, what is the reason you’re here?’ Carol said. ‘The thing I’m supposed to be sad about?’

  ‘Uh …’ Was Carol’s fall and subsequent hip replacement surgery not the only reason she was moving out of her home? Was she senile, as well? How could she not know why Jodie was in Clarence?

  ‘Your move,’ Jodie said gently, setting her basket onto the hall table and taking her great aunt’s hand. Maybe she hadn’t lost all of her ability to care, after all. The poor old duck. Infirm in body and mind.

  ‘Go on,’ Carol said. Not gently. Grimly.

  Jodie cleared her throat. ‘Into the home.’ Jodie reached into the basket, shoved aside a rolled ball of socks, a phone charger and a tatty bra, then pulled out the crumpled stash of paperwork to hand over as a memory prompt. ‘Here. This place. A single room with your own ensuite and everything. Weekly mahjong, vegetable gardens …’

  She’d reached the end of what she could recall about Clarence Gardens. Her mother had assured her it was to be Carol’s future home, but Carol was not, as Jodie had hoped, now skim reading the paperwork and nodding her head, saying, Oh yes, that place, silly me, et cetera et cetera.

  What Carol did do was take the paperwork from her hand, tear it in two, then drop it back into Jodie’s basket. ‘Your mother,’ she said, ‘has been a little too busy. I’m not moving anywhere.’

  ‘But—’ Jodie said to empty air. Carol was walking down the corridor in the direction of the kitchen. I’ve driven all this way.

  Where the front of the house had some old and new to it, the kitchen was just as Jodie remembered: straight out of a 1950s Women’s Weekly photo shoot. Sage green Laminex, a central table, also Laminex, but gussied up with a studded strip of aluminium around the rim. Steel-legged chairs with orange vinyl upholstery, one of those toasters where the sides flopped down to put your home-cut bread in, a standalone oven with floral tin covers adorning the four electric hobs.

  And on every available surface was a cake tin, browned-off parchment paper rising up above the sides and deep-coloured fruit cake within, with a page of handwritten notes beside each cake. The scent of booze hung as thickly in the air as Jodie’s heartbreak, despite it being barely past ten in the morning. Surely Carol hadn’t been drinking?

  Perhaps they could circle back to the aged care home later … after she’d rung her mother for the lowdown on just what was wrong with her great aunt. ‘Been doing a little baking, Carol?’ she said.

  Carol tapped Jodie’s hand away as she reached out to a crumbcrusted glacé cherry that was poking up from the surface of the closest cake. ‘This is not a little baking, Jodie. These are my entries for the Christmas cake competition. You helped me bake them one year when you were little, don’t you remember?’

  A glimmer of memory: tinsel and music and mango crates; kids running full pelt on a dark grassy lawn with sparklers in their hands. A canvas awning over a trestle table filled with cakes and a heavy glass trophy that she’d been allowed to carry home. ‘The Clarence Christmas Twilight Markets. Wow, I can’t believe they’re still going.’

  ‘Of course they’re still going. Why on earth wouldn’t they be?’

  Jodie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Public liability insurance, a dwindling population, lack of volunteers, fire hazards, cancel culture …’

  Carol frowned but didn’t say anything. Instead, she waited until Jodie’s negativity tapered off, then opened one of the green-painted kitchen drawers and removed a pastry brush. ‘Make yourself useful, pet, and pass me that bottle. I’d just unwrapped them when you knocked on the door and they’ve been exposed to the air long enough. Can you be trusted with a brush?’

  ‘Um … yes?’

  Carol measured a large silver spoon’s worth of whisky into a teacup and handed it to her. ‘Dip and swipe. Mind, I want the entire surface covered with the same amount so don’t slop it around on one side and be stingy on the other.’

  ‘Why so specific?’

  ‘Pet, we’ll be feeding these cakes until midnight if you’re going to question my every move. Let me catch you up. Six cakes, all the same recipe, baked two at a time over three consecutive days. One from each bake is the sampling cake, and the other is the competition cake. I will test each of the sample cakes on the day of the markets to decide which one is the best for my entry on the day. I wonder …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wonder if I should make you sign some sort of nondisclosure agreement for the duration of your stay, Jodie. There will be people out there—’ Carol waved a boozy teacup in the general direction of the front door ‘—who would very much like to know what goes on in this kitchen.’

  Hip replacement, senility, paranoia. The picture was painting itself.

  ‘I promise not to mention your cakes, Carol.’

  ‘Or my method.’

  ‘Or your method.’ Jodie grinned. Really … this was cake they were talking about, not GPS coordinates to buried treasure. Her cheeks felt stretched by the unaccustomed movement.

  ‘Let’s get a few things clear, Jodie. Firstly, I’m not moving out of my home. Secondly, don’t make the mistake of thinking that I’m joking. About where I live or cake. Clarence may look like a sleepy riverside country town to the outsider, but we have socio-political undercurrents going on here about which you know nothing.’

  Jodie blinked. ‘You make it sound like there’s a war on, Carol.’

  ‘That’s exactly what’s going on, dear. A Christmas cake war. One I very much intend to win.’

  Chapter 2

  Lying in the hammock strung up under the party tree in the large beer garden of the Clarence Pub was an excellent way to spend a quiet morning. Dappled sunlight fell across Will as he swung back and forth, the waft of ground coffee beans hanging in the air. Snoozing below the hammock was the stray ginger cat who’d turned up one rainy day last winter and never left. A little like Will had turned up here at the pub and never left.

  When he closed his eyes he could hear lorikeets in the mango trees that adorned the wide bank of the river, the chatter of women at one of the picnic tables and the rumble of the cat’s contented purr. He liked that. He liked contentment. He especially liked it because, a while back, he’d wondered if he would ever feel content again.

  Turns out, he would. All it had taken was everything he had.

  ‘Some mail for you, Will,’ said an Irish accent.

  He opened his eyes as a wad of envelopes plopped onto his chest. Fergus was a backpacker working at the pub to earn a few bucks before taking off out west. He was a good worker and Will would be sorry to see him go, but there was no shortage of backpackers turning up wanting work. He finally had the pub running as sure and steady as the Clarence River, and a change in staff would barely push a ripple through his contentment.

  Turns out, running pubs was a heck of a lot kinder on his coping skills than his last job had been.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said. ‘You finished pressure washing the paths?’

  ‘Yep. Couldn’t lift all the green though.’

  ‘It’s the rainfall we get around here. Mould, moss, mildew … the Northern Rivers area is like a greenhouse for that stuff.’

  ‘At least the rain’s warm, though. You should try Dublin rain—it’s cold and bleak enough to slice you into ribbons.’

  ‘I bet. You right to open up the bar at noon? Livvy’s on kitchen, Matt’s on serving and wash up, and I’m—’