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knew her very little, and then mostly as a decoration. It was true enough that she knew everything there was to know about the island. She had been born and raised there, which was incredibly rare, at least until recently. For most of the world, Margaret’s Harbor was a place to take a vacation or to own a second house. People came up from Boston and New York in the summer and sat in the hole-in-the-wall coffee places with copies of Forbes and the New York Review of Books , and even their waiters were from off-island. There were times when it was possible to think thatthere was no such thing as a native of Margaret’s Harbor. The whole place was just a repository for old New England money, new New York money, and the families of presidents too famous for their own good.
    Linda’s family had been fishermen, back when she’d had any family, and some of them had owned stores in the small towns in the island’s center, away from the ocean, where property was expensive. If she bothered to remember it—and she almost never did—she could feel the air on her face biking out to Oscartown to see the rich people when she was still in grade school. The girls had all looked to her like space aliens because they were nothing like the girls she knew, and nothing like the girls she saw on television. Back in those days, Margaret’s Harbor got exactly two television stations, both of them out of Boston. They showed the standard sitcoms and westerns and game shows and the Boston nightly news, which made even less sense to her than the rich people did. The only thing that did make sense to her was her plans for the future. None of those plans had included spending the rest of her life on Margaret’s Harbor.
    The reason that Linda Beecham couldn’t be the Spirit of Christmas anything was this: she never smiled, if she could help it, and she never acknowledged Christmas when she was away from the office. The office was always decorated to the hilt, including strings of lights around the entryway that faced Main Street, but home was blank and bare of even so much as a holly wreath. If people sent her Christmas cards, she threw them away. If people showed up with plates of cookies or fruit baskets full of navel oranges, she waited until they’d gone away and then put everything but the oranges down the garbage disposal. She was not an evil-tempered and embittered woman. She didn’t put a lot of venom in her systematic exclusion of all things sentimental. She just went about her life as methodically as possible without actually being transformed into a robot, and when people tried to get her to do more than that, she pretended she hadn’t heard them. Linda Beecham had learned a lot of things in the fifty-five years of her life, but the most importantone was this: it was very dangerous for some people to be happy.
    At the moment, since it wasn’t even New Year’s Day yet, the decorations were still up on the premises of the Harbor Home News , including a small tree in a wooden pot with bows and candy canes all over it. The tree sat in the window that looked out onto the street, and Linda tried her best to pretend it wasn’t there. In some ways it was too bad that she wasn’t evil-tempered or embittered. If she had been, she could have told the silly little intern who had brought her the tree to shove it up her gilded rich girl’s ass.
    On the other side of the office, her best reporter—her only full-time reporter—was setting up a presentation.on a tripod. The tripod had an easel on it and the easel was covered with photographs, most of them in color, even though the Harbor Home News never published anything in color. Linda had a big cup of coffee that she wanted to bury her face in. She sometimes thought that if she ever decided to become a legend in her own time, she’d start spiking the coffee with gin.
    â€œYou know,” she said, “there’s a major