as Tag watched the lights winking out, one by one, on Main Street, he thought this was probably the town least likely to ever be a Destination. In fact, he was aware of thinking it wasn’t the prettiest picture of small-town U.S.A. that he had ever seen. He was also aware of missing the garish display of lights and moving figurines in the park at the end of the street just the tiniest little bit.
Lila Grainger’s store, of course, was a shining jewel in the middle of that street, the one-hundred-year-old limestone recently sandblasted back to soft, buffed ivory, the new sign hanging above it, green, red and white, saying in tasteful letters, Miss. L. Toe, and in smaller letters underneath it, The Christmas Store At Snow Mountain.
Miss. L. Toe. Cute. Nauseatingly so. Welcome to her world. The opening of the store lent itself to motive, too. Lila Grainger had a vested interest in keeping the Christmas in Snow Mountain, now that she’d invested her whole book advance in opening a store here.
When she’d signed a contract to write a book about Christmas, the chief had practically sent out announcement cards he’d been so pleased and proud. Then, unexpectedly, she’d decided to move here from Florida and invest her windfall in this old building.
Tag had yet to meet her, but he had formed a picture of the kind of person who opened a year-round Christmas store on what seemed to be a whim: scrawny, wire-rim glasses, flowered dress, blue eyes spilling over moistly with that do-gooder glow.
The store windows, cleaned until they sparkled, were filled with fairy tale like displays that confirmed his worst suspicions. Mrs. Santa incarnate had arrived in Snow Mountain. One gigantic window display contained an entire town in miniature, completely decked out for Christmas. A train moved through it; he could hear the muffled choo-choo of the whistle right through the plate glass.
The other window contained a tree, at least seven feet tall, decorated entirely and in his mind, hideously, in various shades of purple.
It was a fantasy, not appealing at all to a man who spent the days of his life dealing with harsh reality.
“I’m getting a headache,” Tag admitted to the dog as he reached over to the seat beside him, put on his hat, pulled the shiny black brim low over his eyes.
The dog whined.
“You are not coming in.”
Boo, who usually obeyed instantly and without argument, ignored him, hurtled over the seat into the front of the car and was out the door as soon as Tag opened it.
The dog sat on the sidewalk, and waited, her tail thumping enthusiastically. Tag looked at her, the world’s ugliest dog, and felt the downward swoop of his heart.
Cancer. Who knew dogs got cancer?
Boo, the exact color of a mud puddle, had the head of a Great Dane, the body of a Chinese Shar-pei, and the legs of a dachshund. There was nothing the least bit “cute” about the combination of a wrinkled dog with a painfully oversize head waddling around on very crooked and too-short legs.
Tag knew darn well that the visit to the specialist’s office, the promise that his Christmases were about to get worse than ever, rather than better, was the real reason his mood was blacker than the silhouette of Snow Mountain. Since he could change nothing, especially not the mood, there was no sense letting it go to waste. The rawness of his own hurt was under control tonight, as it had not been last night.
He felt a moment’s sympathy for Miss L. Toe, having to face him when he was in this frame of mind, but then he quelled it.
He debated wrestling Boo back into the car, but the dog had an amazing instinct for people: Boo could tell good from bad with such telepathic accuracy it was spooky. Even before the dog saw a person, while Tag was still sitting in his cruiser running a license plate, Boo would be watching intently, sniffing the air, “sensing” things unseen.
The truth was people, even ones as cynical as Tag, could be fooled.
They could be fooled by a pretty face or an angelic air, by white hair and granny glasses, by adolescent awkwardness, by words, by body language.
Not Boo. The hackles on the dog’s neck rose when something—or someone—needed a second look, and she grinned the silliest grin when everything was all right. Tag did not substitute her judgment for his own, but the world’s ugliest dog had an uncanny knack for letting him know when he’d missed something.
She wasn’t officially a K-9, but she was unofficially the mascot of the Snow Mountain Police Department.
So, why not see how she would react to the chief’s niece? Just for interest’s sake, nothing more. Lila Grainger’s appearance and the opening of her store seemed mysterious and sudden, as if Tag needed to be any warier than he was of the woman he had never even laid eyes on. Still, the chief was usually a talker—you couldn’t shut him up when she’d signed the book deal—but he’d said nothing about his niece’s arrival in town until she had gotten here.
Tag ignored the big No Dogs Allowed sign posted on the door, since just about everyone in Snow Mountain knew Boo was more human than dog anyway, and pulled the brass handle on the heavy walnut and glass door. He stepped in. A sleigh bell jingled a greeting and he was enveloped by smells of Christmas: candy cane, mint, pumpkin pie, incense, spices, pine.
Scent, he had found, was the most powerful of triggers and the aromas swamped him in memories of what his life had once felt like and had once been. A longing for the sweet, uncomplicated days of the past enveloped him. For a moment he could almost see his brother, Ethan, at about age six, tearing into a train set not unlike that one that chugged around the window.
He shook off the feeling of melancholy, liking crankiness better. A carol played loudly, old school Bing Crosby, and everywhere he looked Tag saw the highly breakable paraphernalia of the season. He warned Boo, with a finger, not to move.
At the far end of the store, a slight figure sat behind a counter had her back to the door and was typing furiously. She had not heard him come in over the high-volume crooning of Bing and her own intensity, and he studied her, frowning. No flowered dress?
In fact, the woman seemed to be wearing low-rider jeans that were slipping to show quite a bit of naked and very slender lower back. Tendrils of blond hair, the color of fall grass streaked with liquid honey, had escaped a clasp and teased the top of a delicate neck.
Tag’s first thought was that it couldn’t be the chief’s niece. Hutch had a town full of relatives, not a niece or nephew under forty. This girl looked like she was about eighteen.
The wind picked that moment to send a vicious gust down Main Street, and it sucked the door out of his hand and slammed it so hard even the dog flinched.
The woman, who had just reached for her coffee mug, started, and the glass dropped from fingers that had not quite grasped it, and shattered on the newly refurbished hardwood floor.
She leaped from the chair, and whirled to face him, one hand over her heart, the other reaching frantically for the three-foot-high striped candy cane decoration in a box beside her.
She held it like a weapon, and he might have laughed at what a ridiculous defense a candy cane was, except that somehow the picture of his brother ripping into Christmas parcels was still with him, as was his agony over Boo, and his laughter felt as dried up as those fall leaves blowing down Main Street.
Miss Mary Christmas was not eighteen
