Dancing in Lake Mistletoe (Lake Mistletoe #4)

Chapter Two

Dutch

I t’s only six a.m., and I’m already in my truck with coffee steaming in the cupholder. The morning sky is a deep blue just before dawn as my seven-year-old daughter, Josie, and I head out for the day.

My first stop is to drop Josie off with my friend, Sela Prince. Sela works in the mayor’s office and lives in an apartment above the flower shop downtown. She recently got engaged to Isaac Ralston, a photographer she met when the travel magazine he freelanced for was doing a feature on holiday-themed destinations and sent him to our little town. She’ll soon be a stepmother to Isaac’s eight-year-old daughter, Cobie, who has become one of Josie’s close friends.

Sela is an angel who feeds Josie breakfast and takes her to school on the mornings I have to start my day before drop-off time. Today, I have a meeting at the nearby Sun Valley Resort Hotel before work.

I texted her before we left the house to let her know we were on our way, and when I make the turn onto Main Street, she’s waiting on the sidewalk.

I pull up to the curb and put the truck in park.

“Good morning,” Sela greets as she opens the passenger door.

“Hi, Sela,” Josie chimes.

“Morning. Thanks for taking her today,” I say as I reach into the backseat and grab her book bag.

“It’s no problem at all.”

“Is Cobie here?” Josie asks as Sela helps her down.

“Not yet, but Isaac is picking her up this evening, and she’ll be here through Halloween.”

“Yay!” Josie squeals.

Cobie lives in Texas with her mother and stepfather, but thanks to Isaac’s flexible schedule as a photographer and the fact that Cobie is homeschooled by her mother, she gets to spend a lot of time here with her dad and Sela.

“We can go trick-or-treating together,” Josie says as she hefts the backpack onto her shoulders.

“You sure can,” Sela affirms as she ruffles Josie’s dark curls.

“Hey, kiddo,” I call, and she turns back to me. “I’ll pick you up from school, and we’ll go get burgers for dinner after dance class, okay?”

She nods.

“I love you to Jupiter,” I say.

She grins.

“I love you to Pluto, Daddy.”

“I appreciate this, Dutch.”

I shake Mr. Zelinsky’s hand as we stand.

Irv Zelinsky is the general manager at the Sun Valley Resort Hotel. Which sits atop Bald Mountain, just a few miles north of Lake Mistletoe. I do contracted work for him around the resort from time to time.

I’m the only electrical engineer in Lake Mistletoe, which isn’t a job you’d typically expect to find in a town that feels like a Christmas postcard year-round. But you’d be surprised at how busy I am, fixing circuits, installing lights, and ensuring that the power remains on during the hectic holiday season.

I grew up here. My dad, Gene, is a retired electrician, and my mom, Lydia, owns a dress shop in town.

Both my sister, Farah, and I left to attend college. Farah, who is very bright, went to the sunny shores of Santa Ana to attend California Coast University while I headed east to endure the bitter cold of Boston at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. Farah stayed in California, but I landed back here just over five years ago.

Lake Mistletoe is tucked into a little valley, surrounded by snow-dusted pine trees. It’s quaint, real charming if you’re just passing through. But behind the charm, there’s a lot of work to keep things running smoothly. That’s where I come in. In a town where Christmas is the main attraction, you need someone who can keep all the electrical systems running without a hitch. My dad used to have that honor, but he passed the torch to me when he stepped down.

It’s not a fancy job, but it’s a demanding one. Take the light displays, for example. We have more lights than stars in the sky—or at least, it feels that way during the months of November and December. Every house, every shore window, every street is draped with them. We have a lighting ceremony every year—think Rockefeller Center, but on a much smaller scale—and those lights? They have to work. People come from all over the country to see Lake Mistletoe’s festive glow, and it’s my responsibility to make sure everything lights up as it should.

But it’s not just about plugging in a few strands of bulbs. No, it’s a lot more complicated than that. These are old buildings, some dating back to the 1800s, and the wiring inside them is ancient. If you try to hang a thousand feet of Christmas lights on a hundred-year-old system, you’re asking for trouble. Since my return, I’ve spent countless hours upgrading the electric panels in the town square alone. If I didn’t do that, there’d be power outages across the valley every time someone turned on their holiday display.

It keeps me fairly busy, but during the spring and summer, when things slow down around the lake, I often pick up jobs in the surrounding towns.

Two years ago, Sun Valley took on the massive task of adding a theater with two thousand one hundred seats, which features state-of-the-art equipment and capabilities and is poised to house any event from a grand opera to corporate meetings and lectures. I was contracted to assist their building contractors with the design and installation of the electric and sound systems, work which was completed this past July.

The theater is now slated to host its first major production this holiday season with a weeks-long run of The Nutcracker ballet. However, the theater lost its set designer last week, and they are now scrambling to find another before the curtains open.

Set designers are responsible for the visual appearance and function of the set, and while I’m no artist and I can offer them very little when it comes to visual design, I can ensure that everything electric and mechanical functions properly.

“Thank you, Dutch. I know you’re busy this time of year, and I appreciate you helping us out. We’ll work around your normal schedule, and in the meantime, I’ll be on the hunt for a full-time set designer. Luckily, Keller and Brannigan have most everything finished, and we just need to get all the moving parts working correctly,” Irv assures me.

Keller is a buddy I grew up with. He’s a master woodworker, and he owns Keller Harris Design Studio in downtown Lake Mistletoe. He and an artist, Brannigan Prince—another childhood friend and Sela’s older brother—create incredible custom furniture and decor that they sell all over the country. Irv hired them to craft the theater seats and the intricately carved balcony railings, as well as build all the sets needed for the ballet production.

“I’m glad I can help,” I tell him.

We finish with our breakfast as he goes over the timeline and his needs, and then I head back to town to old Mrs. Kline’s house on Holly Street. Her lights went out again last night, which isn’t surprising—her circuit breaker is as old as she is.

I knock on the door, and she appears, smiling through the frost on the door’s windowpane. She opens it, wearing a housecoat and rollers in her salt-and-pepper hair.

“Oh, Dutch, thank you for coming so early!” she says, ushering me in. “It’s the lights and outlets in the kitchen and laundry room. They went out sometime in the night. I just don’t know what’s wrong with them. Could it be the fuse again?” she asks as she follows me to the basement door in the hallway.

“I’ll have to check it out to see.”

It’s never just the fuse with Mrs. Kline. The wiring in her house is a rat’s nest of copper lines and bad decisions, made by whoever built it decades ago. Still, I don’t mind. With my toolbox in hand, I head down to her basement to start tracing the issue. It’s a small job, but it needs attention. If I left it, the whole house could go dark—or worse, catch fire from an overload.

And Mrs. Kline? She’s part of the heart of this town, a retired librarian who spends her time teaching Sunday school at the local church, making cookies for the kids, and knitting scarves for everyone in town. Keeping her lights on feels like a service to Lake Mistletoe itself.

She stands in the basement, talking my ear off and filling me in on all the goings-on in town while I work.

Once I have her all sorted out, I move on to the town square. This time of year, I’m constantly at town hall, where the big light displays are stored. They go up around mid-November, but I start checking them in October. Each display has to be tested, repaired, and reassembled. Imagine dozens of enormous snowflakes, ten-foot-tall candy canes, and a massive central tree, all covered in lights. If one bulb goes out on a strand, the whole thing might not work. I learned that the hard way a few years ago when half the display went dark the night before the lighting ceremony. Since then, I’ve been extra cautious.

Today, I’m climbing a ladder to check the wiring on the wreath that hangs over the entrance gate. It’s huge—probably ten feet across—and it’s rigged to the lampposts on either side of the street. I need to ensure the power connections are solid and that there’s no short circuit waiting to ruin our visitors’ Instagram-worthy holiday photos. As I’m tightening a loose connection, I hear a familiar voice boom across the street.

It’s just my dad’s friend Earl, calling from his old farm truck, loaded down with bales of hay to fill the trailers for the fall festival’s hayrides. He waves up at me, and I wave back.

By noon, I’ve got a dozen other calls lined up. One of the shops on Main Street is having trouble with its window display. It’s a winter wonderland scene, complete with animated reindeer and blinking lights. Animatronics require a different level of electrical engineering altogether. They’re powered by a series of motors and timed circuits, and if one of those malfunctions, the scene can look downright creepy. I spend an hour replacing the motor on Rudolph’s front leg so it doesn’t jerk like it’s possessed each time it moves.

Then, there’s the Christmas tree in the town square. That tree is the centerpiece of Lake Mistletoe. It’s a real tree, brought in every year from the woods outside town, standing about thirty feet tall. We wrap it in thousands of lights, all connected to a single switch inside town hall. If you think plugging in your tree at home is a hassle, try getting the wiring straight on one that size. One bad connection, and you’re in the dark. To top it off, the mayor wants the tree to rotate this year. I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to make that happen yet.

People don’t think about how much work goes into keeping a town like this running. I’m not just an electrician; I’m the guy who makes sure Christmas doesn’t disappear because the lights go out. Without me, Lake Mistletoe would still have the snow and the trees, but it wouldn’t have that ethereal glow that makes people feel like they’ve stepped into a holiday dream.

I finally get a moment to grab a bite at the coffee shop. It’s a small place with twinkling lights strung across the windows and the smell of cinnamon in the air. Ms. Beaty hands me a coffee and a slice of her famous apple streusel pie, and we chat about the pumpkin carving contest being held this weekend.

“Are you and Josie entering?” she asks.

“Yep, Dad already took her to the patch in Hailey, and they came back with a forty-pound pumpkin. It’s sitting in the back of my truck now.”

“My goodness, that’ll take a while to carve,” she says.

“Josie drew a scene from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown with silhouettes of Lucy and Linus and Snoopy in the moon.”

It’s ambitious, and it’ll probably end up a giant mess, but we’ll have a lot of fun attempting it.

“You’ll have my vote,” she says—something I’m sure she tells everyone.

I finish up my pie and head out to pick up my girl.