Snowfall at Willow Lake: Lakeshore Chronicles Book 4 by Susan Wiggs

slippery, the guardrail too flimsy to stop the van from hurdling over the side of the bridge and plunging into the ink-black water.

Part Three
    St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands
    Three Kings Day
    Three Kings Day, or Epiphany, is the culmination of a month of celebration on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, a place famed for its sugar, molasses and rum. Wedding fruit cake is so dense and richly flavored that it must be served in small pieces as a memento of the event.
    Wedding Fruit Cake
    Place five pounds of mixed dried fruit (currants, raisins, dates, figs, prunes) in a very large bowl, and cover it with about three cups of Cruzan rum. Set this aside to macerate for two days or up to a week.
    To make the cake, you will need the macerated fruit, plus:
    2 1/2 cups flour
    1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
    1 pound brown sugar
    1 teaspoon cinnamon
    1 teaspoon vanilla
    1 cup molasses
    1/2 pound butter at room temperature
    6 eggs

    Beat the butter in a large bowl and add the sugar, cinnamon, vanilla and molasses. Add the eggs one at a time. Beat in flour and baking powder and then stir in the fruit mixture.
    Pour into two or three well-greased 13”x9” baking pans. Bake in a 350ºF oven for about one hour.

Six
    St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands
6 January–Epiphany
    M ax Bellamy couldn’t stand weddings. In his family, weddings seemed to crop up on a regular basis, like flu season. Since he was just a kid, he wasn’t allowed to check off “regrets” on the invitation reply card and stay home. But boy, did he regret having to sit through a wedding.
    Sometimes they even made him participate. Twice, when he was really little, he’d been a ring bearer. At age four, he’d thought it was cool until he realized they wanted him to dress up and stay clean and stand still through a ceremony that wouldn’t end.
    At twelve, he was way too old for such an indignity, but his family managed to find a new one. Last summer, he’d been upgraded to usher for his cousin Olivia, who married Connor Davis at Camp Kioga on Willow Lake. That was when he knew for sure all weddings were pretty much the same. Same level of discomfort, in starched clothes and shoes that pinched, same droning ceremony and sappy songs, different couple at the altar.
    His take on weddings—they were long and boring and everyone talked about love and promises, and it was pretty much all a load of crap, as far as he was concerned.
    Today the discomfort came from a different source. Since the ceremony was on the beach, everybody got to wear beach clothes. They looked like a reunion of Hawaiian punch guys, as far as Max was concerned. Which was a lot more comfortable than tuxedos and tight shoes, but that didn’t mean he was having a great time.
    How could he, when the groom was his dad?
    Okay, so Max liked Nina Romano. A lot. She was going to do fine as a stepmother. He wanted her to marry his dad. He wanted them to be married. But he didn’t want to have to sit through all the endless vows and recitations. He didn’t want to have to listen to his dad say stuff like “I offer you my heart” to anyone.
    That kind of stuff just skeezed him out. He wished they had sneaked off somewhere to do it instead of involving families. There were like a gazillion Romanos milling around. Nina had eight brothers and sisters, and most of them had kids, so between the Romanos and the Bellamys, this had turned into some huge deal.
    Cheerful, Italian-American strangers had been coming up to him all week, thumping him on the back and acting like his best friend. They weren’t all strangers. Two of them—who by the end of the day would be stepcousins—were in his grade at Avalon Middle School. Angelica Romano was in his prealgebra class and Ricky Pastorini was on his hockey team. Ricky’s mom was Nina’s sister, Maria. She was the team mother. Although he was Max’s age, Ricky was already shaving and his voice had