Boo Who Read Free Page B

as she passed Missy, apparently not recognizing her as the center of the Thanksgiving Scandal. Missy offered a frightful frown back and kept moving. She just wanted to get home.
    Finally, five blocks later, she made it, her limbs tingling and shaky. She stopped to grumble about her neighbor’s lights. The blinking kind.
    Why must someone put blinking lights on their house if they must put them on at all? For two whole weeks she must endure the whole night’s sky blinking while she was trying to sleep.
    And to top off the annoyance, Mr. Turner had a Christmas tree in his front window whose lights also blinked, but out of unison with his house lights. For Missy Peeple it represented exactly what Christmas was … a mad, chaotic mess of electrically fed cheer.
    She turned to walk up her porch steps and into her house. Once inside, she threw her coat aside and found her favorite quilt, tucking it over her legs and underneath her as she sat down to rest in her rocking chair.
    So the town had not caught her vision for trapping tourists by way of cats. But they soon would. Already she had taken necessary steps to insure it would happen.
    She’s used her life savings to place a full-sized ad in two national newspapers that Skary, Indiana, was the most famous cat town in the world.
    She couldn’t wait to see the droves of people who would soon be crowding the streets.

    “Come in!” Ainsley beamed, embracing Wolfe before he could even get in her doorway. She kissed him and then pulled at his coat playfully.
    “My little elf,” he joked, looking around the house. “The decorations look terrific.”
    Ainsley grinned. She’d been working on them all day, putting the finishing touches on the house before Christmas arrived. She couldn’t believe she was going to get to spend Christmas as the soon-to-be wife of this extraordinary man. Every day she knew him she grew more and more in love, which she didn’t think was possible. “Let me take your coat,” she said, sliding it off his broad shoulders.
    He followed her into the kitchen where she was getting ready to putthree small legs of lamb into the oven for dinner. As he slid onto a bar stool at the kitchen counter, she asked, “So how was your first day of work?”
    He laughed. “Interesting.”
    Her mood shifted. “Wolfe, are you sure this is what you should be doing? Writing is in your blood. It’s all you’ve ever known. Do you think you can turn the switch off just like that? It’s not like you have to work, you know.”
    “True.” He sighed. “But for now I’m seeing what God has for me. I know there’s something if I can just find it, you know?”
    She squeezed his hand and smiled. “Well, did you learn how to sell a car today?”
    “Learned there’s a secret language. I have homework. And tomorrow I learn the secret handshake.”
    She giggled. “Well, leave it to Oliver to come up with a secret handshake. Oh, I talked to Melb today! She said she found the most amazing wedding dress.”
    “That’s good,” he said. “Have they set a date yet?”
    “Valentine’s Day.”
    “That’s a week before ours, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah, and she felt bad about that, but I told her not to worry. She’d always wanted to get married on Valentine’s Day. It’ll be fine. By the way, I finally composed a list of everything we still need to do before the wedding.” She reached under the counter and pulled out her notebook. Wolfe’s eyes grew large. She laughed and said, “Don’t worry. The list is only the back three pages of this thing. This is my wedding folder. I’ve been putting it together since I was ten years old. It has all my dreams in it. But you can’t look, because it also has the wedding dress I’m making.”
    “Oh …,” he said, though she knew he was secretly relieved he didn’t have to look through it. She patted him on the hand and started to prepare the salad. In her thoughts, she noted everything she was going to need to do tomorrow in