Dashing Through the Snow

DASHING THROUGH THE SNOW

LISA G. RILEY

Copyright © January 2012 by Lisa G. Riley at
Smashwords

All rights reserved. No part of this e-book
may be reproduced scanned or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without prior written permission from Lisa G.
Riley.

Cover Artist: Whit Holcomb

This e-book is a work of fiction. While it
might refer to actual historical events and actual locales might be
mentioned, the names, characters, places and incidents are the
products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious
manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, or locales is completely coincidental.

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my family, which is
not near as crazy as Lily’s and Smith’s, but we’re colorful
enough.

In remembrance:

Mrs. Gloria Riley

Mrs. Helen Mitchell

Mrs. Geneva Cravens

I miss you three wonderful ladies every
day.

Chapter One

Christmas Season, 1981

“
See the pretty baby, darling? See the
pretty baby? Say ‘pretty baby’. Come on, say it. Pre-tty
bay-bie.”

Held suspended over the bassinet as he was,
two-year old Smith Cameron dutifully repeated the words his mother
encouraged him to say as he stared at what appeared to be a little
brown ball buried in a red blanket. Besides the silky pink bow
holding the fluffy black hair on top of its head, his toddler brain
could find nothing really interesting about the baby, but he
grinned because his doting mother and auntie had both rewarded his
compliance with kisses and snuggles.

“
That’s right, baby boy,” he listened to
his mother say as he continued to watch the ball to see if it would
do something interesting. “That’s the pretty baby Lily, and she’s
going to be yours to take care of forever and ever. She’s a very
special Christmas present. She’s an early Christmas
present!”

Smith perked up at the words Christmas and
present. He was eager to experience this phenomenon that he’d been
hearing so much about lately. The books his mother read to him made
him impatient for the presents and the mysterious man in the red
suit to get there. But then he was distracted by his auntie as she
appeared to chastise his mother. “Now, Darla, while we want Smith
to love her, let’s not go all medieval on them and betroth
them.”

“
Oh, I know,” his mother said. “But
wouldn’t it be wonderful if they did grow up and marry?”

Smith didn’t understand a word they were
saying and he was beginning to get tired of not having this
Christmas thing happen. He screwed his face up, prepared to wail,
but then the baby did something wholly familiar to him and he
grinned. Uncle Rowdy had told him all about this. “Pwetty baby
fawt,” he said as he wrinkled his nose at the odor before giggling
uncontrollably. He clapped his hands in delight. “Mewwy
Chwistmas!”

***

Thanksgiving 2011

Muscles tense with fear and nervousness; Lily
Carstairs tried to blend with the shadows as she stared across the
street at her target. The three-story house was a gorgeous beacon
in the dark night. She took a deep breath, and silently told
herself to calm down. She’d been trying to mentally prepare herself
for this task for days, but the risk in it was so high that she
hadn’t really succeeded. She pulled black leather gloves over
sweaty palms and then reached up to assure herself—for at least the
third time—that her black watch cap was pulled on tight. “So far
from home,” she murmured in a voice that shook with nerves as she
took one last look around the tony street, crowded with some of
Chicago’s priciest real estate. It was quite removed from her
middle class neighborhood back home in Sheffield-Chatham.

She swallowed hard before taking a deep
bracing breath. “It’s now or never, Lily girl.” And so saying, she
took off, her long legs eating up the distance between the streets
in seconds. She ran cross the expansive lawn, did double-time up
the stairs and finally took a flying leap to land on one of four
wide brick posts that bordered the portico of the house. Another
jump and she was grabbing onto two rungs of the limestone railing
that ringed the balcony of the master bedroom on the second
floor.

“Shit!” One hand slipped and she hung
suspended in the air for a moment as the triceps muscle of her
right arm shook with the effort of taking on the extra weight. “Oh
God, oh God, oh God.” Panic was all consuming when her body began
to swing a bit from the force. Grunting softly through gritted
teeth, Lily desperately flung her left hand up to catch hold again
and finally was able to pull herself up and over the rail to land
lightly on the balcony.

Unable to take even a few seconds to calm her
racing heart, in motions that appeared almost seamless, she pulled
a black baseball cap from her back pocket and pulled it on over the
watch cap. Just as quickly, she found a hidden button in the cap’s
bill and pressed it. A tiny row of small lights sewn into the edge
of the bill flicked on and she breathed a sigh of relief. She’d
ordered the cap online and had been a little concerned about its
effectiveness. She bent to study the lock on the French doors.
“Steady as she goes,” she murmured as she pulled out her burglar
tools and went at the lock.

The chintzy lock easily gave way. “Thank
God.”

She turned the hat off, pulled one of the
doors open, put her head in just enough to look around and then
crept inside when she saw that the room was empty. She could hear
muffled voices coming from downstairs and prayed that the fancy
Thanksgiving dinner wasn’t breaking up just yet. She turned her hat
back on and did a slow turn so the lights illuminated whatever her
gaze landed on.

She ran her gaze dismissively past the
connecting bath. “Bingo,” she whispered to the two doors of the
closet. “I know you hold all the secret goodies – enough for
someone like me to live the rest of her life on.”

Lily actually only wanted one thing: the
Watley diamond. Famous for its age, beauty and size, the seventy
carat gem had been set in platinum by order of Andre Watley more
than fifty years before. He’d given it to his wife on the occasion
of the birth of their only child.

Her goal in sight, Lily’s breathing
accelerated and she started towards the closet. Suddenly, light
exploded around her, blinding her for a few seconds and she
panicked again. Heart hammering, she turned back towards the French
doors. She heard the unmistakable click of a gun and stiffened,
stopping dead in her tracks.

“Hold it right there!” A gruff, husky voice
commanded. “Take another step and there’ll be a bullet in the back
of your head. You feel lucky?” Abrupt unnerving silence and then a
soft, satisfied, “Punk?”

Tired and miserable, Lily sat and willed
herself not to cry while her warden stared at her in severe
disapproval. She wanted to close her eyes, but made herself return
the stare.

“I think you actually might be a candidate
for Joliet. Seeing as how you were caught right at the scene, you’d
fit in with all the rest of the criminals.”

Lily said nothing, just stared back and
resisted the urge to say something snide in return. Her first
mission and she’d failed. She’d been so sure she could get away
with it.

“You’re lucky the homeowner didn’t panic and
blow your fool brains out –”

This time Lily couldn’t hold back and sighed
with impatience. She rolled her eyes at the tall, thin woman
standing over her. “Oh, come on, Gran. Given that it was a
fake
gun, you’re exaggerating a bit, aren’t you?” she said
in a stifled voice, her disappointment in herself almost choking
her.

“You’re lucky it wasn’t real!” Candace
Carstairs retorted, her nut brown eyes flaring while two spots of
red flagged her light brown cheeks, highlighting her anger.

Lily shook her head. “Of course it wasn’t
real! Aunt Amelia doesn’t actually
have
a real gun,” she
said, referring to Amelia Watley, the owner of the house, her
grandmother’s best friend since childhood and most recently,
Candace’s roommate. The two widows had decided to live together a
few months before, saying that they’d promised each other years ago
that if both of their husbands died before them they’d take a page
from the “Golden Girls” book and become roommates.

“That. Is not. The point!”

Candace continued to fuss and Lily did her
best not to take offense. She knew the older woman was simply
worried about her and her recent choice of career. Lily resorted to
a tactic from her childhood. She partially tuned out her
grandmother’s words, waited for a time when it seemed appropriate
to respond and then did so. “Yes, Gran.”

“Did it even occur to you that you might get
caught?”

“Yes, Gran.”

“And what was your plan in that highly likely
event? Bat those big brown eyes of yours and cry until someone took
pity on you?”

My plan was to come along quietly, just as I
did tonight, Lily thought, but what she said was, “No, Gran.”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“No, Gr – I mean, yes, Gran.”

Her grandmother snorted and Lily sighed
again. She reminded herself that Candace loved her and had helped
her a great deal in getting her detective’s license. It’s the only
thing that made Lily keep her mouth shut and let Candace get it all
out. Besides, all signs pointed to the rant winding down.

“And another thing, young lady,” Candace
began and Lily grimaced and looked over at the cherubic face of
Amelia Watley who smiled and winked at her. Lily suppressed a grin.
“By the way, Aunt Amelia,” she said quickly when Candace finally
paused for breath again, “You need a better lock on those French
doors upstairs. Any criminal –”

“Which brings us back to you,” Candace said
smugly, making Amelia chuckle appreciatively.

Lily whipped her head around to look at her
grandmother. “I’m not a criminal! I was just practicing in case I
ever have to break in somewhere for a client.”

Her grandmother rolled her eyes and sat down
next to her. Lily looked at her and knew she was still in store for
“a good talking-to,” as her grandmother called her little
scoldings, but Lily really just wanted to hug her. Candace was her
biggest supporter and always had been. It had, in fact, been her
idea that Lily attempt to break into Amelia’s house sometime during
Lily’s two-week visit just to see if she could get away with
it.

Lily didn’t bother to point that out. “What
gave me away?” she asked before her grandmother could speak, and
turning back to Amelia, Lily grasped her hand and gently pulled her
down to the sofa so that she had an eighty-year old widow sitting
on either side of her. “I mean, when I left after dinner earlier
you thought I was going to a movie. How did you know I was
upstairs? I know you didn’t hear me.”

Amelia opened her mouth to answer, but
Candace beat her to it. “Humph. We heard you all right. It sounded
like a herd of elephants was up there!”

Frowning, Lily looked at her grandmother
again -- this time with pure disbelief. “You couldn’t have! I was
as light as a feather! All of those years of ballet and gymnastics
couldn’t have been
that
--”

Amelia’s husky chuckles filled the room
again. “Your grandmother is joking, dear. We didn’t hear you.
Candace figured you’d be back to try to break in tonight. After
all, you haven’t much time left on your little vacation. You’ll be
going home to Sheffield-Chatham day after tomorrow.”

“Yes, that and the fact that you forget that
I know my granddaughter.”

Lily looked sheepishly at her grandmother.
“What do you mean? I really gave myself away that badly?”

Candace pursed her lips. “Noooo,” she
drawled, “I never suspected anything, even though you -- a
self-described fashion-connoisseur-on-a-tight-budget -- were
apparently willing to walk eight to ten blocks in two feet of snow
wearing a pair of two hundred dollar sneakers.”

“Now, now, Gran. No need for that disapproval
I hear in your voice. I told you I got them at a huge discount.
Huge,” Lily repeated distractedly as she looked down at the black
and silver sneakers on her feet. She curled her toes in delight.
She adored the shoes. She’d fallen in love with them the minute
she’d seen them. As she recalled that particular
love-at-first-sight moment, she felt that same familiar rush she
always felt when she got a bargain…the triumph…the joy…the -- “Ow!”
Lily rubbed her arm where she’d been pinched. “Gran!”