for in the first place.
Jilly had told him no way. “Listen, Frank. I don’t care if half the time it seems to me that that’s my life, exactly. It’s not going in the Press-Telegram for everyone I know—not to mention two hundred and fifty thousand strangers—to read about.” She’d shot back a counter-proposal: the happy single girl’s Christmas. That is, Jillian and her cat and a Christmas tree, perfectly content all on their own, in some quiet, scenic, isolated place.
Frank had had the bad taste to stifle a yawn. “On second thought, never mind.”
So fine. Jilly decided she would do it on spec and sell it next year.
Which was why she and Missy were all packed up in her 4Runner, heading toward a certain secluded old house high in the Sierras, on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.
And the weather was cooperating nicely. Because, of course, for Christmas with the contented single girl, there should be snow, and it should be drifting attractively down outside a big picture window.
Too bad Jilly got going on this project a little late, thus necessitating settling for a setting a tad less than ideal. Most likely, there wouldn’t be any picture windows in this particular house. But Jilly was okay with that. She’d have mountains and pine trees and lovely, sparkly white snow. For the rest, she’d make do. She fed a Christmas CD into the stereo, pumped up the volume good and high and sang right along with Boyz II Men.
“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow….”
Which it did. The snow came down harder. Thicker. It was starting to stick, too. Jilly turned on the wipers and slid in another Christmas CD.
By the time she reached Echo Summit, she found herself driving through a true snowstorm. But the Chains Required signs weren’t up yet. Traffic was still moving right along. And she had four-wheel drive, so she was doing all right. Night was falling. Her headlights, set on auto, switched themselves on.
It was after she left the highway, not too far beyond Tahoe Village, that things started to get scary. But not too scary. She was handling it. At first.
Caitlin Bravo, a stunning and frequently overbearing woman on the far side of fifty, owned the house Jilly was looking for. Caitlin had provided detailed instructions for finding the place. There were a number of small, twisting mountain roads to navigate, but Jilly had it all mapped out. It should have been a piece of cake.
It would have been a piece of cake. In daylight, minus the blizzard.
Jilly turned off the Christmas music and tried the radio, but almost ran herself off the road in her effort to tune in the weather and drive at the same time. And really, she’d gone a little past the point where a weather report would do her much good. The view out her windshield told her more than she wanted to know. She should have checked the forecast a little earlier—like before she left Sacramento. It was a problem she had and she knew it. Sometimes she’d forget to look into important details in her enthusiasm to get going on a project that enticed her.
“So shoot me,” she muttered as she switched off the radio. She focused all her concentration on the snakelike, narrow road as it materialized before her in the glare of her low beams. She was deep in the forest now, pines and firs looming thick and shadowed on either side of the road.
She missed a turn and didn’t realize it until five or six miles later. Slowing to a crawl so she wouldn’t miss it again, she backtracked, searching. She found it. And then missed the next one, had to backtrack, found the turn at last, felt her flagging spirits lifting—only to realize she’d missed another one.
On the seat beside her, Missy was not pleased. Irritated whines had begun to issue from the cat carrier.
“Missy honey, I am doing the best I can, all right?”
The cat only meowed back at her, a petulant sort of sound.
“I’ll get us there, I promise you. And then it’s a nice, big bowl of Fancy Feast for my favorite girl.”
Missy said nothing. Just as well. Jilly needed all her attention focused on the next turn—which, for once, she actually found the first time around. She drove on, winding her way up and down the sides of mountains.
At last, at a few minutes after six, a good hour past the time she should have reached it, she found the rutted, snow-drifted dirt driveway that led to her destination. Her stomach growled. She thought of the bags of groceries in back. They contained ingredients for a number of gourmet meals. Gourmet, after all, had seemed the best way to go for this project.
Too bad what she longed for right now was some Dinty Moore chili, or maybe a big can of—
Jilly let out a startled cry and stomped on the brake as a doe leapt from the cover of the trees and directly into her path.
Luckily, she managed to stop before she hit it. And then it did what a deer always does. It froze directly in front of her vehicle and stared into the beams of her headlights, an expression of total surprise and dumb-animal disbelief in those big, sweet, bulging brown eyes.
Jilly rolled down her window, stuck her head out into the freezing storm and yelled, “Go on, you! Get out of here! Get lost before I make a jacket out of you!”
The doe blinked and took off, disappearing into the leafless bushes and pine trees at the other side of the driveway. Jilly pulled her head back inside, rolled up the window and brushed the snow out of her hair. Then she drove on, straining to see, the snow hitting the windshield so hard and thick, there was nothing but whiteness three feet beyond her front bumper.
The driveway was very long. Or at least, it seemed that way in the dark, with near-zero visibility. Jilly rolled along with great care, hunched over the steering wheel, peering into the wall of white in front of her, trying not to run into a pine tree or another startled deer.
Okay, truth. She was getting worried. She could end up snowed in up here in the middle of nowhere, with nobody but Missy to turn to. “Oh, not good,” she murmured under her breath. “Not good at all….”
But then she reminded herself that she did have her cell phone, that people knew where the old house was and knew she was headed there. She would be all right. She could call for help and get it eventually if it turned out she really needed it.
However, on the subject of the house, where was it? What if she’d somehow managed to miss it? What would happen if she—
And right then she saw it.
“Oh, thank you,” she cried. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, God!”
Not twenty feet ahead, the driveway opened out into a clearing. And in the middle of the clearing she could make out the looming shadow of the old house, with its high-pitched roof and long, deep porches. Smoke trailed up from the chimney-pipe and the golden light inside shone like a beacon through the swirling, blinding—
Wait a minute.
The golden light inside?
The house was supposed to be unoccupied.
Jilly reached the clearing. She pulled in beside the vehicle already parked there. Then she turned off the engine and sat for a moment, staring at the lighted house as snow gathered on the windshield, obscuring her view. Who could be in there? What in the world was going on?
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