Randi signed herself out of her email for the Center and shut down the computer. She’d promised Emily she’d watch over the activities here while her friend was approaching Grady Sinclair to try and raise the funds they needed to save Christmas for Amesport and the surrounding villages. Unfortunately, Christmas wouldn’t be very merry if they couldn’t get the funds back for presents for needy children and the annual Christmas party. For some of the kids, whatever they got from the Center would be their only gift, and the food provided at the Christmas party their main Christmas dinner.
Randi pushed the dreary thought from her mind as she looked at all of the decorations around the old building. Emily had brought life into the aging structure, even though the tired Center desperately needed maintenance. Colorful wreaths and Christmas decorations were everywhere, hung with love for the season by its employees and volunteers.
Peeking into the area where the senior citizens held their bingo sessions, Randi’s stomach rumbled at the enticing smells coming from the room. She’d come to the Center, straight from her teaching job at the local school, to tutor a few students who were struggling with their studies, and she was starving.
Sneaking quietly into the room to snatch a few chicken wings and some cake without being detected by some of the sharp old ladies was never easy, but she was up for the challenge. Snatching food had become almost an art for her in her early teenage years.
After a nervous week of checking for an answer with no return message, Randi completely forgot about the email she had sent in desperation . . . until she finally got a reply . . .
Two Months Later . . .
Evan Sinclair might have laughed at the ridiculous email he’d just finished reading—if he was actually the type of man who found humor in anything . . . which he didn’t. Ever!
He stared at the email, frowning as he read it for the second time. What kind of person would have the gall to ask a charity raising big money for cancer research, abused women, and the several other urgent causes that the Sinclair Fund actually helped, for money? And it wasn’t even for a good cause, in his opinion. It was for a small coastal town that needed Christmas funds. Did the author of the missive really think he was some sort of friendly elf to grant her Christmas wish?
Hardly!
Evan didn’t believe in Christmas. If there was a modern-day version of Scrooge, it would be him, except he wouldn’t ever have the apparent epiphany that old Ebenezer experienced. In fact, the holiday did irritate him and always would. It meant a disruption of business, and scheduling meetings around the frivolous, commercialized season. It hadn’t been a pleasant holiday when he was a child, and he abhorred it almost as much as an adult.
Normally, none of his brothers or cousins looked at the mailbox for the Fund, and they certainly didn’t answer letters personally; they had employees for that. But the email had caught his eye when his assistant had written to him about a complaint a big donor had mentioned over the quality of assistance he was getting via email from the website. Evan had logged in to the mailbox from home to evaluate how some of the inquiries were being handled. They couldn’t afford to lose important donors, and especially not people who donated millions.
He could hardly miss the subject line “Help Us Save Our Town” as he scrolled through old emails.
Intrigued, he’d opened the missive.
Now, he was scowling at the correspondence in front of him. The email’s author was anonymous, the email address generic, simply signing the short explanation and plea for help with “A Concerned Resident of Amesport.”
He should have dismissed it, especially since he knew his brother Grady had already solved the problem well before Christmas. In fact, Grady was now a town hero in Amesport because he’d donated the needed funds. He had also gotten himself engaged and then married to the Center’s director, Emily.
Christmas is over. Leave it. Grady solved the ridiculous situation, getting himself injured in the process.
Evan wasn’t crazy about the outcome, especially the fact that his younger brother had thrown himself into the line of danger to resolve the whole debacle and rescue his new bride. But Grady seemed happy enough since his nuptials with Emily, even though, in Evan’s opinion, he’d married with far too little thought and way too much haste.
The entire holiday season had passed . . . thank God. Unfortunately, the audacity of the person who had sent the correspondence still annoyed him.
He frowned as he read the email again, still wondering about the author. It was a well-written account of the situation at the time it was composed, but it was still presumptuous. He hated the fact that the words were trying to play on his sense of guilt, duty, and family. If there was one thing that Evan did, it was watch out for his family. As the eldest in his broken family, he considered everything that happened to his siblings his business, his responsibility.
Uncharacteristically, he forgot about why he was in the mailbox for the Sinclair Fund in the first place. He switched gears and signed up for an anonymous email address on one of the numerous free sites that offered them, and decided to reply to the inquiry. The email had been appropriately ignored previously by employees, and probably should have just been deleted. For the sake of the charity, he didn’t want the sender to know exactly who was replying. He just wanted the author to understand that the Sinclair Fund wasn’t an appropriate place to seek a donation for a trivial problem. He could reprimand the person, discourage future emails of the same nature to the Sinclair Fund, and no one would ever know.
He copied and pasted the original email from the mystery author before replying.