The Canal Boat Café Christmas: Port Out. Cressida McLaughlin

       Chapter One

      Summer Freeman placed an electric, flickering tea light in the pumpkin nearest the bow doors, and stood back to examine her handiwork. The café looked both celebratory and spooky which, she supposed, was the effect she was going for. The six tables inside Madeleine, her canal boat café, were adorned with black and orange streamers and the glint of metallic, pumpkin and skull-shaped confetti. The chair-backs were cloaked in white sheets, tied with glossy orange ribbons so it didn’t look like they were simply in the process of redecorating, and Halloween bunting – bats and cartoon ghosts and skeletons – hung in swathes along the length of the café. It certainly gave it a different feel to her usual, summery, bunting, but it still looked smart.

      As she turned towards the blackboard behind the counter, Summer thought about the couple who had decided on a Halloween-themed engagement party. Was it just that the timing was right, and they were piggy-backing on the existing Hallmark occasion, or did they have a shared interest in all things supernatural? Emma and Josh had seemed down-to-earth when she’d met them a few weeks ago to plan their event; both in their mid-twenties, Emma with auburn waves and a face as open as any she’d seen, and Josh, slightly more reserved but with a light in his blue eyes that conveyed easily to Summer how much he loved his fiancée. Josh had grown up in Market Harborough, the Grand Union Canal on his doorstep, and when a friend had told them about the canal boat café, and that it now ran private parties as well as serving daily bacon sandwiches and brownies, they’d known it was the perfect way to celebrate their engagement.

      Summer hadn’t questioned their theme, why would she? But as she took in the transformation her café had undergone, she wondered again if it was something she would consider: celebrating the start of a new life together, while simultaneously looking the afterlife in the face. She shook her head and smiled; she needed to stop being so serious. Halloween had a distinctly American feel about it these days – it was fun and frivolous rather than macabre.

      She remembered her dad refusing to answer the door to trick-or-treaters when she was small, despite her mum’s entreaties, and the idea that she and her brother Ben might dress up as a witch and a skeleton to knock on doors themselves was nothing short of scandalous. But now it was embraced, it demanded as much decoration as Christmas, and the streets were filled with laughter as children tried to out-sweet each other.

      The previous evening’s pumpkin carving hadn’t exactly been downbeat. Summer had corralled her best friend Harriet, fellow liveaboards Valerie and Norman, and of course Mason, into helping her.

      She ran her fingers over Mason’s pumpkin. He was her boyfriend of just over a year, and owned The Sandpiper, the beautiful narrowboat moored next to her. A nature photographer and journalist, he spent many cold, damp days crouching in bushes or hides, his lens trained on some rare visiting bird, hoping to capture their moment of take-off, or the vividness of their plumage as the sun emerged from behind clouds. Every time Summer thought about Mason, a flame of happiness lit up inside her, and even now, tracing her finger round the rather lopsided shape of the carved wolf’s face, she couldn’t help but grin.

      None of their designs came close to Norman’s. In his seventies, he spent the time when he wasn’t fishing