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JAMIE

HERE'S THE IDEA, Christmas comes but once a year. In Gloria, New Jersey, it comes for five months. Red-nosed reindeer are running across the roofs as soon as the ghosts come off the porches. Christmas trees get dragged out to the curb, dumping a trail of tinsel and needles, after the Valentine candy goes on display at Solly's Drugs. In Gloria, the good parents hide Santa's loot in the crawl space by late September and they're still paying for it in July.

I'm Jamie Ferrara, Giovanna Lucia Ferrara. No kids, not married, less than a year to go before I'm thirty. People don't think that I'm Italian, both sides, because I have blue eyes and strawberry-blond hair. But my family's stayed 100 percent Italian since they first came to this harbor town. They were here when the mayor changed its name from Deep Port back in 1927. Gloria was the mayor's wife's name. The high school where we all went was named after her too, Gloria Hart High School. We figured the mayor must have really loved his wife, although from her picture in the hallway it was hard to tell why.

A lot of us who went to Hart still live in Gloria, even if we're always saying that someday we're going to leave. I'm one of that any-day-now set. For me, there're not many strangers here. So driving along River Street, I knew Pudge Salerno was headed back from the planning board meeting when I saw him park his new Lexus in front of his family restaurant. I knew the Virgin Mary and Joseph had gone to Dockside Tavern to warm up when I passed the gazebo on Etten Green. They'd left a sign hanging on the manger wall: BACK IN TEN MINUTES. There was no one left guarding the wooden Jesus in the crèche but two plywood shepherds, a plastic camel and a cow. No one was going to steal him either; he had a bicycle chain around his belly.

It was a Friday, early December, bone-cold, dirty snow frozen in lumps in the gutters. A nasty wind was flapping through that one crack, right at the back of my neck, in the canvas top of my Mustang. I admit it, a 1968 Ford Mustang Shelby GT-500 is not a practical car. But I like my convertible, and life is short. I was about to be reminded of that lousy fact.

I'd been in court all day, testifying for the state in an aggravated assault case, and now I was headed for a birthday dinner with Rod Wolenski, chief of detectives at Gloria Police Department (GPD). Rod moved to town five years ago from Philly. He's my boss. For three years, he's been my fiancé too. The same everybody who disapproves of my Mustang—and that's various relatives, including my older brother—thinks a three-year engagement is two years too long. In Gloria, girls from Italian families get married before they're thirty, even if the girls are detective sergeants who love their jobs. Especially if the girl could marry a good-looking man from a Catholic family who, while not Italian, was not out of a job, not an alcoholic and not already married to somebody else. Seven months till my deadline.

I was a little early for our reservation at the Ironworks Inn so I headed west, away from downtown and the river, and drove to a mid-nineties subdivision called Glen Valley (there was not much glen, and no valley in it). I wanted to take a look at what Ben Tymosz had done to his house this year. I'd been thinking about Ben today because of an odd phone call from him that afternoon. I'd known him since we were teenagers but we had never been close and I don't think I'd said ten words to him in the last couple of years. So his phoning and making a formal appointment to come see me in my office the following morning had felt odd, especially since he wouldn't tell me what he wanted to talk about.

In Gloria, Ben is famous for his Christmas show; it spreads from his roof down across his yard, covering the small lawn in plastic icicles, wreaths, reindeer, elves, nutcrackers, Victorian carolers, giant candles and peppermint sticks, all rigged to blink in waves of red, white, blue, green, orange, red, white, blue, green, orange. It's about as tasteful as an Atlantic City casino, and uses about as much electricity.

So when I first saw the sky, I didn't think fire; I thought, wow, Ben's really outdone himself this year. He was always a believer; we were already in fifth grade when he socked Garth McBride for saying there was no such thing as Santa Claus. Now Ben played Santa for the Rotarians in a plastic igloo in Appleton Mall. Shopping with my nephew, Clay, I'd seen Ben there in full costume a week ago, telling a long line of kids that if they were good, they'd get what they wanted. Clay, thirteen, had laughed. "Yeah, sure." In Ben's case, it was hard to argue with Clay's pessimism: Ben had wanted to go to college on a football scholarship and had never made it. He'd wanted to live in one of the big houses on the river and never got there. "Just not good enough," he used to tell us and nobody had argued with him.

Turning into Glen Valley, I could see the smoke, then smell it. As soon as I took the right onto Windsor Lane, I knew it was Ben's house on fire. When I saw how bad it was, my hands went hot on the wheel. Our big red ladder truck and the pumper had pulled up onto the lawn. Black and whites blocked off the street. Neighbors stood watching from the sidewalks. EMS was in the driveway and two paramedics were lifting a gurney with a body lumped on it into the back of the van. Half of the bright yellow, two-story clapboard Colonial was a charred shell. Firemen were still hauling out wet sooty furniture. Everything was steaming in the frozen air.

I drove past a brand-new black Mercedes sedan, still with its dealer plates, across the street. The guy who owned it was talking on his cell phone in the driver's seat. I recognized the aggressively handsome profile of Barclay Ober, who'd built Glen Valley. I wondered why he was there.

Nearby, my fiancé, Rod, was walking the chief of police to his car. Even in a New Jersey suburb, there was something about Rod's way of walking that made him look like he was headed through an open stretch of dusty sagebrush to rope a wild horse. Chief Warren Waige depended on Rod. But Rod gave everybody that feeling—that you could lean on him and he wouldn't fall over.

The chief drove away as I got close enough to shout out the window, "Rod! Is it bad?"

He nodded, hands hunched in his suede jacket pockets.

I called again: "Is it Ben?"

He nodded.

For our date at the Ironworks, I was wearing a short dress under my parka, and I was tripping in the hard snow in red Ferragamo knockoffs that spend most of their time in a box on my closet shelf. It was a rare enough sight for my fellow GPD detective Danny Ventura to grab the flattened fire hose, shake it at me from between his legs and whistle. "Hey, Giovanna Lucia, you're a girl!"

"Give it a rest, Danny." I threw him the finger. It didn't mean as much with my padded gloves on.

He made a kissing face. Danny Ventura and I had gone out once, years ago, when I first joined GPD. Once was enough. He was good-looking in a sleazy sort of way. He was a good detective too, though not a smart one, but dogged and observant. Everything else about him—well, let's leave it at that.

Rod told Danny to back off. Danny did. Rod is his boss too.

Copyright © 2005 Gads Hill LLC and Babcock Productions