3 Madness in Christmas River

by Meg Muldoon

  He cracked a half-smirk and stepped out into the wintry night.

  Chapter 14

  I woke up in a cold sweat, not knowing where I was.

  I reached for the other side of the bed, only to find that nobody was there.

  I sat up, trying to catch my breath as the walls of the bedroom came into focus.

  When I had a moment to put together where I was and who I was, and what I had been dreaming, I let out a frustrated sigh.

  “Every single night,” I said out loud.

  I was getting tired of this. Tired of running away from the wolf in the dream. Of feeling the pain in my legs as the creature ripped into my flesh.

  Tired of waking up in cold sweats.

  I glanced down at the foot of the bed. Huckleberry was lying curled up on his side, his paws twitching as he was in the middle of his own dreams.

  I glanced at the clock on the nightstand, the face showing 4:09.

  I just couldn’t get an uninterrupted night’s sleep these days.

  I grabbed my phone and checked for any messages.

  There were none.

  When I talked to Daniel before bed, he already knew about the vandalism of the tree. Deputy McHale had been keeping him apprised of the situation here.

  From the tone in Daniel’s voice, I could tell that he’d had a long day, and that there were probably other things on his mind.

  In the comparatively big city streets of Fresno, I was sure the vandalism of a Christmas tree sounded like a very small problem to have.

  I told him about the ornament left on the porch and about how Marie had just picked up and left, disappearing without a word.

  “But you say that she’s disappeared like this before?” he had asked.

  I told him that she had. When she was younger, she’d always just show up out of the blue, crash at our house, and then sometimes disappear without saying goodbye. That was just her way.

  But she used to leave things, letting us know she was all right. When I was a kid, she’d leave behind a stuffed animal and some high-end beef jerky for Warren. Or during my teenage years, she’d leave behind expensive make-up products for me. Products that usually went to waste on a tomboy such as myself, but that I enjoyed trying out in the bathroom mirror nonetheless.

  But this time, there’d been no little gifts left behind at the house.

  I didn’t tell Daniel about the bad feeling I had in the pit of my gut.

  “Well, if you don’t hear from her by tomorrow night, I’ll talk to Owen or Trumbow,” he had said. “They’ll track her down.”

  Then he paused for a moment.

  “There’s not anything else going on, is there?” he asked.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You sound strange,” he said.

  “I’m just tired,” I said. “And you just sound so far away.”

  “I feel far.”

  “Do you want to tell me about your day?”

  He had paused again.

  “It wouldn’t do any good. I’ll tell you everything when I get back home.”

  “Make that soon, cowboy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  After I hung up the phone, I had gone to bed. Falling into yet another fitful sleep.

  I threw my legs over the side of the bed and leaned forward.

  The darkness felt suffocating.

  I could handle being on my own. I’d had a lot of experience at it.

  But with the wedding so soon, all sorts of crazy thoughts were running through my head.

  And sometimes, when you wake up from a nightmare, all you want is for somebody to be there and tell you that it’s okay.

  I thought about picking up the phone and calling Daniel, but then reconsidered.

  He didn’t need a phone call at 4 in the morning to wake him up too.

  And sometimes in life, you just had to be strong enough to handle things on your own.

  I got out of bed and started getting ready for work, pushing the nightmare away as far as I could.

  Chapter 15

  Huckleberry bounded out of the passenger seat and into the soft snow piled high on the curb.

  He crash-landed, then scrambled up on the sidewalk to the front door, his little nub wagging happily as he waited for me to follow him.

  He knew that a visit to the shop always meant buttery, gooey treats galore.

  I pushed the door of the car open and stepped out carefully in case ice had formed over the snow, as it tended to do when the temperature dropped like this.

  The night was cold and empty. I disliked how often I was out and about at this hour lately. But I supposed that had something to do with my troubled sleep patterns.

  Even though I was tired, I was looking forward to getting into the shop’s kitchen.

  Baking always helped ease my mind. It was like meditation, or yoga, for me. I could just throw myself into the entire process. Into mixing, rolling, and shaping. Into combining ingredients and balancing flavors. Into popping it all into the oven and watching the magic happen.

  Baking was the best kind of distraction I knew.

  I opened the front door, letting Huckleberry in. Then I went through the dividing door, back to the kitchen, and got down to business.

  I put on a Townes Van Zandt album, tied an apron around my waist, and started mixing up a batch of pie dough.

  Even after several years of owning a pie shop, my own perspectives on what should go into the dough was ever-evolving. Pie dough was one of those culinary topics that polarized bakers, creating fierce, unbending opinions.

  Growing up, my mother had always taught me that the best pie dough had equal parts butter and vegetable shortening, mixed together with flour and salt until just combined. Those kinds of crusts were always good, but I was always striving for perfection. When I first started getting serious about baking, I rebelled, and went through an all-butter period. That, however, was difficult to reproduce at a large scale, and frankly, while the all-butter dough was rich and flavorful, the dough texture wasn’t as flaky as it was with vegetable shortening, leaving something to be desired. Plus, the all-butter version often folded in on itself during baking, losing its shape completely.

  So, after a few years, I went back to the shortening and butter combination.

  My mother had known her stuff.

  Lately, though, I was experimenting with other additions. I’d read in a baking magazine that adding a tablespoon of ice-cold vodka to the mixture right before gathering it all up into a ball would help make the dough more pliable, and help the pies keep their perfect, crimped shapes while baking.

  I grabbed the bottle of vodka from the freezer, measured out enough for five pie crusts, and added it to the flour, butter, and vegetable shortening mixture.

  Then, I grabbed a clean shot glass, poured myself a shot, and threw it back.

  To hell with calorie counting.

  As far as I was concerned, it was still night. And I was planning on being at the shop until the late afternoon, giving that shot plenty of time to work itself out of my system.

  Plus, maybe a shot of vodka was just what my nerves needed.

  I glanced over at Huckleberry, who was sitting on his dog bed, which was situated next to the back door.

  I swore he was eyeing me with a hint of disapproval.

  “Aw, c’mon,” I said. “Don’t give me that look.”

  He yawned, stretched out his legs, and rolled over on his side.

  I mixed the dough and split it up into several balls. I covered them in plastic wrap and threw them in the fridge. Then I took out a tray of already made pie crusts that I had rolled out the day before, and stuck them in the oven to pre-bake.

  “What do you say, Hucks?” I said out loud. “Do you think we should make up some Mountain Cherry or Santa’s Florida Vacation pies?”

  Huckleberry didn’t answer or acknowledge the question, as he’d fallen sound asleep in his doggy bed.

  He knew that tasty treats were
still a long way off.

  “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. Rememb
er? 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.