who only showed up for a week or two in the summer and a few weeks around Christmas and New Year’s for the ski season.
Outside, her breath expelled in cold white puffs. She hugged herself as she looked through the driving snow and saw Mia’s car. Mia was always so protective of her car. It seemed strange that she would leave it. But if she really had been drunk... Maybe she was planning to come back.
Who had she left with, though? Some cowboy, the Texan had said. That, too, didn’t sound like Mia, let alone that the cowboy had “poured her into the passenger seat.”
Everything about this felt wrong.
Unable to shake off the bad feeling that had settled over her, Lily headed for her SUV. The drive up to Mia’s condo didn’t take long in the wee hours of the morning after the bars had closed. There was no traffic and few tracks in the fresh snow that now blanketed the narrow paved road. Her windshield wipers clacked noisily trying to keep up with the falling snow, and yet visibility in her headlights was still only a matter of yards.
Lily was used to driving in winter conditions, having been born and raised in Montana, but just the thought of accidentally sliding off the road on such a night gave her a chill. Why hadn’t she told her brother where she was going?
She’d heard tomorrow was supposed to clear, the storm moving on. With a full moon tomorrow night, maybe she would go cross-country skiing. She loved skiing at night in the moonlight. It was so peaceful and quiet.
Through the falling snow, she got glimpses of Christmas lights twinkling on the houses she passed. She’d already done all her Christmas shopping, but she was sure her brother would be waiting until the last minute. They were so different. She was just thankful they were close in spite of their differences, even though Ace was always trying to get her to loosen up. He saw her orderly life as boring.
“You need to have some fun, sis,” he’d said recently when he’d given her a ski pass and the ultimatum that she was to use it on her day off. “It will do you good.”
She didn’t need Ace to tell her what else he thought would do her good. She’d forbidden him to even mention her former fiancé Gerald’s name. Not that it often stopped him.
Distracted with her thoughts, she saw that she’d reached her destination. But as she pulled up in front of Mia’s condo, her earlier bad feeling turned to dread.
Mia’s front door stood open. A drift of freshly fallen snow had formed just inside the door.
Chapter Two
The hair stood up on the back of Lily’s neck as she got out of her SUV and walked toward the gaping front door.
“Mia?” she called as she carefully peered in. She could hear music playing inside the condo. Mia’s unit was on the end, and it appeared that whoever was staying in the adjacent one wasn’t home.
Lily touched the door. It creaked the rest of the way open. From the doorway, she had a view of the stairs. One set went up, the other down.
“Mia?” she called over the music. No answer as she carefully stepped in.
She’d only gone a few steps up the stairs when she saw what appeared to be a fist-size ball of cotton roll across the floor on the breeze coming in the open door behind her.
One more step and she saw dozens of white balls of cotton. Her heart began to pound. Another step and she saw what was left of the living room sofa cushions.
The condo looked as if it had been hit by a storm that had wreaked havoc on the room. The sofa cushions had been shredded, the stuffing now moving haphazardly around the room. Lamps lay broken in pieces of jagged glass shards on the wooden floor. A chair had been turned over, the bottom ripped out. Nothing in the room looked as if it had weathered the storm that had blown through here.
Who would do such a thing? Why would they? Lily fumbled out her cell phone as she backed down the stairs, her heart hammering against her rib cage. What if whoever had done this was still in the condo?
“I need to report a break-in,” she said the moment she reached her SUV and was safely inside. She kept her eyes on the open doorway. When the dispatcher at the local marshal’s office answered, she hurriedly gave her name and the address.
“Is the intruder still there?”
“I don’t know. I only went just inside the door.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m outside. I don’t know where the owner of the condo is. I’m worried about her.”
“Can you wait in a warm place?”
“Yes. I’m in my vehicle and watching the condo.”
“Please stay there until law enforcement arrives.”
* * *
MARSHAL HUD SAVAGE was on duty when the call came in. He’d just been up on the mountain on a disturbance call. All day he’d felt as if he were moving in a fog. A cop friend of his from the academy had been killed two nights ago. He was still in shock.
Paul Brown’s death, on top of what had happened to Hud’s family last spring, had left him shaken. In April, he’d let a dangerous woman come into his home. Hud’s wife and children had almost been killed.
He was a marshal. He should have seen what was right in front of his eyes. He would never forgive himself. Worse, the incident really had him questioning if he had the instincts anymore for this job.
When he’d heard that his friend Paul had been murdered just forty miles away in Bozeman, he’d been ready to throw in the towel.
“I’m running scared,” he’d told his wife, Dana.
She’d hugged him and tried to persuade him that none of what had happened to their family was his fault. “I was the one who was so excited to have a cousin I’d never met come stay with us. You saw that I was happy and ignored things you wouldn’t have under any other circumstances.”
“I’m a marshal, Dana. There is no excuse for what happened last April. None.”
Now as he turned into the condo subdivision in the pines, he tried to push everything but this latest call out of his mind. More and more, though, he wasn’t sure he deserved to be wearing this star.
As he pulled up, a young brunette got out of her SUV and stood hugging herself against the cold snowy night. A break-in this time of year was unusual. Normally this sort of thing happened during off-season when there were fewer people around.
“Are you the one who made the call?” he asked as he got out of his patrol pickup.
She introduced herself as Lily McCabe.
“Ace’s sister,” he said with a nod.
“Sometimes I forget how small a community Big Sky is,” she said, not looking in the least bit happy about the prospect that everyone knew her business.
Gossip traveled fast in the canyon. Hud had heard something about Ace’s sister being left at the altar. He couldn’t imagine
