3 Madness in Christmas River (8 page)

“What’s that you say?” I said, carrying on a conversation with a sleeping dog. “Santa’s Florida Vacation? Bold choice, Hucks. Bold choice.”

Santa’s Florida Vacation was a new flavor I was offering for the Christmas season. It was a sweet and sour combination of cranberries, key lime and white chocolate cream. It wasn’t for everyone—but I did have a few die-hard customers who couldn’t get enough of it.  

I grabbed a few bags of cranberries from the cupboard along with some sugar, a few bars of white chocolate and the bottle of key lime juice. I placed them on the kitchen island, grabbed a saucepan and added the cranberries and sugar. I turned on the stove’s burner, and waited a few minutes for the sugar and berries to start reacting.

Personally, I was crazy about this combination of sweet and sour in a flaky crust. And if I wasn’t on such a strict diet, I was certain that this pie flavor alone would have caused me to gain five pounds this Christmas season. Something about the sour cranberries mixing together with the creamy white chocolate and tangy lime juice made my taste buds salivate. I knew that if I had so much as a taste of it, I’d be powerless to stop myself from squirreling away a huge piece later in the day.

I was going to have to exercise extreme restraint when it came to these pies.

I tried to envision myself in my wedding dress, the seams busting as I struggled for air.

The image just about did the trick.

I stirred the cranberries with a wooden spoon, watching as they began to pop and release some of their juices. The juice bled into the sugar, creating a bright pink sauce. The kitchen started to smell just like Christmas.

Just as the sauce started to bubble, I heard Huckleberry’s paws against the floor.

I glanced over and noticed that he’d jumped to his feet. With pricked ears, he gazed at the dining room door. A fierce expression on his face.   

I quickly turned the burner off and stopped stirring, knowing immediately that something was wrong.  

I held my breath and listened hard, trying to hear what he did. But there was only the sound of the bubbling mixture on the stove and Townes singing about his Colorado girl.

Huckleberry lifted his lips into a snarl and let out a low growl.

A loud noise sounded from the front.

Breaking glass. 

Then, a car alarm, howling in the still night. 

Huckleberry ran across the room, his claws scrambling hard against the tile.

He disappeared beneath the dividing door, running hell-bent toward the sound.

Chapter 16

I don’t know what got into me.

But when I saw the man in black breaking my car windshield, I wasn’t afraid, the way a woman all by herself in the darkness of early morning should have been.

I was angry.

I didn’t lock up the door and call the police. Or do anything sensible of the sort.

Instead, I opened the door.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?!” I yelled.

Huckleberry barked and squeezed past my legs, shooting out onto the sidewalk.

The man lowered the crowbar and turned around. His face was covered with a ski mask. All I could see were his eyes, dark and menacing.  

Huckleberry pounced on him like he was a steak cutlet.

The man screamed, dropped the crowbar, and fell to the ground behind the car.

Huckleberry growled for a few seconds, struggling with the perpetrator, before letting out a blood-curdling yelp.

My heart turned to ice in my chest.

The man stood up, and gave me a look that made me feel like I’d just fallen into a freezing lake.

“You better listen if you don’t want to end up like your dog,” he said, rummaging around in his pocket and placing something underneath the twisted windshield wiper of the car.

Huckleberry hadn’t gotten up yet. Panic stabbed at my heart.

What had this bastard just done to my dog?

“You son of a bitch,” I screamed, coming toward him. “You—”

But he had already taken off running down the street before I could finish the thought.

I ran around the car, shaking with fear, afraid of what I would see.

I knelt down over Huckleberry and started crying.

Chapter 17

“You really shouldn’t have opened that door, Miss Peters.”

I sat in the waiting room of the emergency pet clinic, wiping my runny nose with a Kleenex I’d pulled from the box sitting on the coffee table.

Deputy Owen McHale sat next to me. Judging.

He wasn’t wearing his usual uniform. His sandy-colored hair was as disheveled as I’d ever seen it. He still had sleep in his eyelashes.

It was clear that he’d been at home asleep when the sheriff’s station had called him about the car break-in. Normally, I would have felt bad that he’d been so rudely awakened, if he wasn’t making me feel like I was in court.

“Did you think you were going to take on a man in a ski mask?” he said, rudely.   

I dabbed at my nose again, thinking that being scolded by a 25-year-old was the last thing I needed right now.

I shook my head, those horrible moments replaying again in my mind.

I had found Huckleberry lying motionless on his right side after the man ran away. Huckleberry started whimpering when he saw me and tried to get up, but something was wrong with one of his front legs.  

Later, at the emergency vet clinic, they told me that poor little Hucks had two broken ribs and a broken front leg that needed surgery to fix. He was being operated on right now.

Knowing the pain he must have been in was tearing me up inside.

I already felt horribly guilty. And I didn’t need it rubbed in my face by a young police deputy who clearly didn’t have enough sense than to antagonize a woman when she was feeling at her worst.

But maybe what upset me the most was the fact that despite the rude manner in which Deputy McHale delivered his judgments, he was right.

I shouldn’t have opened that door. I should have stayed inside where it was safe and called the police.

I hadn’t been thinking about Huckleberry, or what that bastard dressed in black could do to him.  

“You got off lucky, Miss Peters,” he said. “Your dog’s not the only one who could have been hurt.”

I shook my head and wiped my nose.

Even though Trumbow and I weren’t exactly friends, I wished it were him questioning me instead of Deputy McHale.

“I don’t understand what you—” he started again.   

“I can’t do this right now,” I said, interrupting him. “You can ask me as many questions as you like later, all right? But I can’t do it now. Do you understand? I can’t think straight.”

“The more information I can get now, the better chance we have of catching the guy that—”

The door to the clinic opened.

I let out a sigh of relief when I saw who it was.

Warren walked in, a deep crease of worry between his white eyebrows. Kara was following close behind.

She’d been nice enough to go pick him up.

“Are you okay, Cin?” Warren asked, the wrinkles on his forehead making him look older than he already was.   

I got up and hugged him.

“I’m okay,” I said, trying to reassure him. “I’m okay.”

“Kara told me what happened,” he said. “How’s Huckleberry?”

“He’s…”

I had been giving it my all, trying to keep it together.

But I’d reached my breaking point.  

I buried my head in my grandfather’s shoulder and sobbed uncontrollably.  

He held me, patting my back gently.

“Shhh… It’s okay, Cinny Bee. It’s okay.”

“He’s got a few broken ribs,” I said. “And one of his legs is broken, too.”

“Is that all?” Warren said. “Well, that’s one little tough dog you have. Remember? He survived all sorts of snow storms when he didn’t have a home. A few broken bones shouldn’t shake him up too badly.”

“It’s just… It’s all my fault,” I said, pulling away. “I shouldn’t have let him out there. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Well, that’s what he’s there for,” Warren said. “He was just protecting my Cinnamon.”

“But look what happened,” I muttered. “Look what happened to him.”

“He did his job,” Warren said. “I’m sure he’s happy to have done it. And I’m happy he was there to take care of you.”

“It’s true, Cin,” Kara said, rubbing my arm. “And he’s going to be okay.”

“I just shouldn’t have opened that door,” I said, shaking my head again.

I sat back down in the uncomfortable plastic chair.

“Look, Miss Peters, we really need to talk about what happened. It’s important that we—”

I shot Deputy McHale an angry glare that said more than words could. He stopped mid-sentence, and then leaned back and sighed, like it was all such a big disappointment to him.

“Look, fella,” Warren said in a stern tone. “It seems to me that this can wait a little while. Give the lady some room for the time being.”  

When Warren spoke in that tone, you didn’t want to mess with him. The few times I’d been on the other end of it, I could have sworn that even the lights flickered out of fear.

Deputy McHale got the message. He stood up, and put his wool beanie back on over his disheveled hair.

“Fine,” he said. “But I’m only trying to help.”

He headed for the door. Kara’s eyes took a little walk over him before she shot up.

“Hey, let me walk you out,” she said, stepping around me and Warren and following him out of the waiting room.

I guess that was one thing she got out of this mess. She got a chance to see and talk to the guy she’d been drooling over since Thanksgiving dinner.

I wiped at my nose, and Warren placed an arm around me. The waiting room was empty now, save for the two of us.

“Huckleberry is going to be okay,” Warren said. “He’s a tough pup.”

I tried to stop crying, but the tears just kept on flowing.

Chapter 18

The blue sky was beginning to fall into shades of purple as I walked toward downtown. An icy wind rocked the trees back and forth. The temperature began to plummet as the light faded.

I picked up the pace.

I hadn’t gone into work that day.

Later that morning, we were able to take Huckleberry home from the vet. When they carried him out of the backroom, I swear that I felt my heart cracking.

His body was wrapped up in bandages, along with his left front leg. He was woozy and out of it after the sedatives they’d given him, and his tongue lolled out the side of his mouth unnaturally.  

Kara drove us home, and I spent the afternoon watching him sleep in his doggy bed.

I felt sad and guilty, but as the hours dragged on and I had more time to think, another feeling was starting to take hold.

Anger.

I flashed back on those harsh, dangerous eyes behind the ski mask.

I shivered thinking about the man kicking my dog. About Huckleberry’s chilling whimpers.

The thought that the man might get away with it filled me with rage.

I wanted to see him pay for what he did. I wanted to see him suffer the way my poor little Hucks was suffering right now.

Deputy McHale had been pushy and insensitive. But I knew that underneath that smug, judgmental exterior, he was only trying to do his job. And I’d just been in such a state of hysteria that I hadn’t been able to appreciate that.

I came to the conclusion that I didn’t much care for Deputy McHale. But Daniel had said he was good at what he did. In fact, of all the deputies at the department, Daniel seemed to think Deputy McHale was the most capable, trumping Trumbow by a longshot.

Maybe there was something I wasn’t seeing in him.

Chunky flakes of snow began to cascade down as the dusky purple sky faded into hollow greys.

I pulled my hood over my red knit hat and tried to walk faster, my snow boots crunching loudly against the sidewalk.

My car was in the shop getting fixed up and wouldn’t be ready until sometime the next day. Hence, the reason I was walking instead of driving.

I thought back to the man in the ski mask. His words echoed in my head. 

You better listen if you don’t want to end up like your dog.

Try as I might to understand, I didn’t know what that meant.

Listen to what?

I didn’t know why someone would want to hurt me. 

I couldn’t think of any enemies I’d made. For the most part, I was just a lady who loved baking pies. My life was simple. I hadn’t done anybody great wrong, and I tried to live my life as a decent citizen.

Save for my fierce Gingerbread Junction streak and the fact that I was marrying the sheriff of Pohly County, I couldn’t think of any reason anybody would hold a grudge against me.

The snow picked up its intensity.

I turned the corner. The faded brown sign for the sheriff’s station squeaked loudly in the wind.

Regardless of what I thought about Deputy McHale, he would have to do his job and help me.

Chapter 19

It was 15 minutes to 5, and the Christmas River police station was a ghost town.

The lights were all off, like I was coming in at 3 in the morning instead of a few minutes before the end of the work day.  

A lone deputy, Billy Jasper, sat at the front desk staring at the computer intensely and clicking his mouse.

I would have bet $10 he was playing solitaire.

“Hey Billy, is Deputy McHale around?”

Billy jumped up in his chair, dropping the mouse on the pad. He looked up from behind his glasses with a jarred expression.

“Uh, no, Mrs. Bright—I mean, Ms. Peters,” he said, acting like he’d just been caught at school doodling in his notebook instead of doing his algebra. “He, uh, he went home half an hour ago.”

I bit my lower lip in frustration.

“Is there something I can help you with?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Thanks,” I said, turning around and heading for the door.

“Any time!” he yelled after me, a little too eagerly.