5 Mischief in Christmas River (16 page)

I wondered if the news station didn’t need to find itself a replacement meteorologist.

This storm was going to create a mess. Come tomorrow morning, the roads would be impassable. It’d take days before anybody would be able to walk from their front door to the sidewalk. It was going to be a real pain in the behind, this storm. A real bad—

“Awhoooooo…”

I nearly dropped my mug of tea as a ghostly noise sounded over the screaming wind.

“Yiiiippppp…”

Louder this time.

My skin broke out in goose bumps. 

That sound…

It was…

I placed my mug on the counter, opened the back door, and stepped out into the storm. A torrent of icy flakes blew into my face as I walked toward the sound, growing louder with each passing moment.  

“Yiiippppp…”

My legs fought through the thick snow, which seemed to be deeper with each step. The vicious wind cut through my sweater, and my body started to shake violently with chills. The entire world was a snow globe, walls of white flakes in every direction I looked.

“Huckleberry!?” I shouted. “I’m here Hucks!”

The noise sounded again. I was getting closer. Then there was a second yip.

They were together: Huckleberry and Chadwick. They were alive, and they were out here together.

“Come here, pooches!” I cried, my voice hoarse and cracking. “Come here!”

They were close by. I could feel them out there, just beyond the white. I could sense them.

“I’m here!” I cried out, desperation squeezing hard around my throat. “I’m right here, pooches!”

There was another yip.

The dogs were alive. It was going to be okay. Soon enough, they’d be back at home, curled up by the fireplace in the living room. Warm and safe and sound. Like they’d never been stolen in the first place.

“Huckleberry, I’m right—”

Suddenly, something changed.

The yipping stopped. There was a low guttural noise. A growl.  

And then I saw them, their coats glistening against the white.

It wasn’t Huckleberry. It wasn’t Chadwick out here, howling in the storm.

They weren’t dogs at all.

But by the time I realized that, it was too late.

Three black wolves stared back at me with soulless, beady eyes. Eyes with a hunger that could have devoured the whole world.

One of them began licking its chops. The others smiled.

“No,” I said, backing away. “No!”

But the dinner bell had already rung.

One of them pounced on me, its forceful strength knocking me into the cold, snowy ground. I tried to fight back, but one of them had grabbed a hold of my leg, thrashing me like I was a chew toy.

“Help!” I cried, my pleads vanishing into the wind.

The wolves started dragging me through the blizzard to their den, my blood staining the pure white snow behind me. And just before I lost consciousness, I heard a woman’s voice, wailing from somewhere in those dark woods.

“You deserve it!” the voice cried. “All of you deserve it!”

Then the world turned red.

Chapter 45

“Cin.Cin!”

My eyes flipped open. I looked up through a blurry film, not knowing who I was, where I was, or what was going on.

I was in a room. Soft light flickered around the walls. A stranger was looking down at me, his eyebrows knit together in an expression of deep concern. He had his hands on my shoulders. He’d been shaking me. 

Then my memory came back to me.

I was at home, in my bed. The light on the walls was from the fireplace.

“Daniel? What’s happening?” I said, my voice cracking.

“You were shouting in your sleep,” he rasped, concern still on his face. “You were having a nightmare.”

I closed my eyes for a second, the vividness of the dream coming back to me with the force of an avalanche. I could almost taste the snowflakes; almost hear the sound of the trees snapping in the wind.

Almost see those hungry black wolf eyes, leering at me.

And the red on the snow.

“I thought I heard Huckleberry,” I said, gripping his arm. “Both dogs. They were out there in the storm. But it wasn’t them, Daniel. It wasn’t them.”

I started trembling. A chill worthy of the blizzard in the dream caught hold of me and started shaking.

“They were wolves,” I said. “They were…”

The trembling got worse. So bad that I couldn’t speak because my teeth were chattering so much.

I wasn’t sure if I was still in the dream. If I was fully awake. I could still hear those wolves howling.

“Oh, Cin,” Daniel said.

He sat up, pulling a wool throw from the bottom of the bed. He led me over to the fireplace, wrapping me up in the blanket.

He rubbed my shoulders until the shaking started to subside.

“It was just a nightmare, Cin,” he said. “Everything’s okay. We’re okay.”

I sank into his arms, the warmth from his body enveloping me. My eyes drifted over to the bedroom window.

Dark clouds had rolled in and light flakes were coming down from the sky.

“She said we deserved it,” I muttered.

He peered down into my face.

“Who?” he finally said.

“The woman,” I said. “The woman in the dream.”

“I thought you said there were wolves,” he said.

“There was a woman too,” I said. “Somewhere, out there.”

I looked back over at the window.  

“It was just a dream,” he said again, pulling me close to him. “Just a dream.”

It was a long time before I believed that.

Chapter 46

I lay on the sofa flipping channels, holding the wool blanket close to my body.  

Though I had stopped shaking, the chill of the nightmare was still there, deep in my bones. As if I’d somehow absorbed the cold into my very cells. 

After the wolf dream, it’d taken me hours to get back to sleep. And when I did, I fell into a restless, half-awake kind of sleep that left me feeling more exhausted than if I had stayed up all night.

There were corpses that were more alive than me right now.

Maybe somebody else in my shoes would have been able to carry on, and have shown up to the Gingerbread Junction this morning.

But that person wasn’t me.

Not today. Not in the weak emotional and mental state I found myself in.

For the second year in a row, Cinnamon Peters would be a no-show at the annual Gingerbread Junction.

I just couldn’t stand there, surrounded by meaningless cookie houses, smiling at the judges and pretending that everything was okay. That my dog hadn’t been stolen. That business at the shop wasn’t tanking. That Pepper wasn’t a better gingerbread artist than me.

I couldn’t pretend anymore.

I wasn’t going to win the Junction this year anyway. Pepper had me beat. I knew it. She knew it. And the entire town knew it. Everyone already understood how today’s competition would end. There was no use in going through the motions.

I had better things to do today than to fall to Pepper in front of the whole of Christmas River. Like lie on the sofa and watch an old movie marathon on Turner Classic. 

“So you’re not going?”

I craned my neck over the back of the sofa. Daniel was standing by the door, dressed in his Sheriff’s uniform, a thermos of coffee in his hand. 

“There isn’t any point.”

Daniel walked over to the sofa, staring for a moment at the television, and then back down at me.

“Hmm,” he grunted. “You sure you want to spend the day with Robert Osborne here? Not that there’s anything wrong with Robert. It’s just that he might be a little old for you.”

I shrugged.

“He’s the best option I’ve got right now,” I said. “She’s going to win anyway. That house of hers is a work of art. The judges are going to lose their minds over it.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” he said. “Last I saw, that
Dr. Zhivago
house of yours was a work of art too.”  

“Not like hers,” I said. “You should see it, Daniel. If you did, you’d understand.”

He shrugged.

“If you want to be that way, then,” he said, leaning down and kissing the top of my head.

I had expected him to fight me more on it, but instead, he just grabbed his Sheriff’s duffel bag from off the counter and then headed for the door.

“I’ve gotta run, Cin,” he said. “I’m going to go talk to Deirdre Hamilton like you asked. Call me if you need anything, all right? I’ll be around.”

“Okay,” I said, numbly.

I listened to the creak of the front door. Then I heard the sliding of the lock behind him.

Then there was nothing but an achingly hollow silence in the house.

I closed my eyes, trying to push it all out of my mind.

But it was like pushing a boulder uphill.

It just all came rolling back at me, even stronger than before.

Chapter 47

It was movies-from-the-1960s marathon day on Turner Classic Movies.

Robert Osborne was wrapping up a movie and talking about the era of revisionist Westerns, and I had just closed my eyes, starting to slip away into dreamland, when the jingle of my phone jarred me awake.

I reached over without opening my eyes, grabbing it off the coffee table. I squinted at the caller ID.

What was he doing calling me from his phone?

He never called from his cell. If he did use a phone, he usually called from a landline over there. But most of the time, we talked on Skype as a way to save money and avoid hefty international call charges.

Had something happened? Was there an emergency?  

I quickly answered, tightening my grip on the plastic and pressing the phone hard against my ear.

“Grandpa?” I said.

“Cinny Bee?” he said.  

“Is everything okay over there?”

“No,” he said. “Something terrible has happened.”

I felt my stomach drop the length of the Space Needle.

This was it. This was the call that I’d been dreading since the old man boarded a plane to Scotland a year ago. The one telling me that he’d fallen down a narrow flight of Scottish stairs or been beaten up by hooligans in a Scottish pub or had a medical emergency and was now laid up in a Scottish hospital, clinging to his very life.  

“What… what happened?” I squeaked out, the strength draining from my voice.

He didn’t answer right away.

“Grandpa? What happened?” I asked again.

“Well, I tell you what happened,” he said. “The queen of the Gingerbread Junction has gone and quit on herself. Now in my book, that’s about as terrible as it gets.”

Chapter 48

After I found my voice again, I let Warren have it.

“You almost gave me a heart attack over here,
old man
,” I said, having trouble keeping the anger out of my tone. “I thought it was something serious.”

“This is serious,” he said. “My granddaughter is letting some silly croissant maker get the best of her. And you know what the worst part of it is? My granddaughter’s not even going to give it a shot. She’s just holding up her hands saying ‘You win. I give up.”

I bit my lower lip.

“You don’t understand, Grandpa,” I said. “I just can’t do it. Not today…”

I trailed off.

“It’s all meaningless anyway.”

“Cin,” he said, taking in a deep breath. “I know you’re hurting. I know that you think this fancy croissant maker has got the better of you. And I know what that little pooch means to you, too. But if you let them take away your dog
and
your passion for the things you love doing, then they’ve won. Don’t you see that?”

I sighed.

This was Daniel’s doing. Instead of talking to me, he’d gone behind my back and told Warren that I wasn’t going to compete, knowing that the old man would try to rally my spirits.

Daniel was playing dirty.

“I know,” I said. “But—”

“Now you being my granddaughter, I know that you’ve already done one of them cookie houses up right,” Warren said, interrupting me. “It’s probably just sitting there at your shop now, all ready to go. Alls you have to do is go over there, pick it up, and go to the competition. As easy as one, two, three.”

“Grandpa, it’s not that—”

“Oh yes it is,” he said. “You’ve got rivers of that strength deep inside of you, Cinny Bee. I know because I raised you. Now’s the time to find ‘em and fish some of that strength out.”

I shook my head.

“I can’t do it.”

“Cin,” he said. “You’ll regret it if you don’t. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someday soon, you’ll regret…”

I suddenly found that I was no longer listening to Warren’s pep talk.  

Something had caught my attention on TV, and my eyes drifted over toward the flat screen.  

A familiar scene played out. A still life painting of aspen trees with the word “Overture” appeared on the screen.

A moment later, the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up, as if a lightning storm was passing overhead.

A beautiful, haunting song played over the speakers. That sweeping, passion-filled melody that spoke of love and poetry and all the things that made life worth living.

I almost gasped.

What were the odds?

“Cin, you still there?” Warren said.

I swallowed hard, struggling to find the words.

“So are you gonna go or what?”

I watched as the overture faded and the opening scene of
Dr. Zhivago
danced across the screen.

I wasn’t sure if it was a sign, or divine intervention, or some cosmic coincidence.

But whatever it was, I knew that if I didn’t listen to what it was telling me, I’d regret it.

Warren was right.

I would regret letting them have that kind of power over me.

I’d regret letting them take my passion away from me.

I took in a deep breath.

“Yes,” I finally said, my voice growing strong. “You’re right, Grandpa. I don’t have a choice anymore. I’m going.”

I couldn’t see him, but I was almost certain that his old weathered face stretched into a bright smile just then.