“Hannah DIED?” he yelled into the phone.
“What?!” she yelled back. “No!”
“Oh my heck, Clove. You scared the living daylights out of me.” He then spoke to someone nearby. “False alarm. It’s okay. Hannah’s okay. Sorry.”
Clove dropped her chin to her chest. “Sheriff. Listen. I came home and there was a note from Grandma that she was going on a road trip with some guy.” She went with the story that was in the note, because what else did she have to go on and because saying someone stole my flying reindeer sounded crazy.
“Oh?”
She pulled the phone away to make sure they were still connected. “Why aren’t you freaking out?”
“Because I think it’s kind of sweet that she found a fella.”
Clove grit her teeth. “I’ve never met the man.”
He chuckled in that way guys do when they’re proud of another man’s romantic prowess. “Sneaking off, eh?”
She tightened her grip on the phone. “Can you go get her and bring her home, please?” she added the please at the last second.
“Gee, Clove. If she went willingly with this guy, there isn’t much I can do about it. She’s a grown woman. Last I checked, she was mentally sharp and capable of beating half the town at Trivia Pursuit.”
“Even if I report her missing–officially?” She grasped for straws. Grandma would be mortally embarrassed and mortified to the extreme to have a police officer bring her home. She probably wouldn’t speak to Clove for a week. The silence was a small price to pay to get her family back, though, and she’d press charges against the perpetrator in a heartbeat.
“She’s not really missing though, right? You just don’t want her with this guy?”
“Ugh!” she growled because he was right and that was extremely annoying. “Grandma would not leave like this. Her note was vague.”
“She left you a note. Clove, I’m sorry, but this isn’t a missing person’s case.”
Clove strangled her phone and silently screamed to the ceiling before putting it back to her ear. “Thanks, Allen. I have to go.”
“Okay. Merry Christmas.”
She hung up. “I should have said she wandered off and didn’t come home.” A wave of guilt immediately followed that thought. A report like that would have brought out the entire search and rescue crew, putting them all at risk as they looked for Grandma. Not to mention, the drain on their county resources.
What did Grandma expect Clove to do, go to bed as if nothing was out of the ordinary?
Yeah, right.
“Forget it.” Grabbing her gear, she marched back out to the snowmobile and fired it up. “No one takes my family.”
She drove down the lane at a speed she wouldn’t have dared on a clear day, let alone after nightfall. With the roar of the machine, she couldn’t hear the owls hoot nor the call of the wolves, if there were any. She hoped there weren't.
At the bottom of the lane, she used a headlamp to check the tire marks in the snow. There was a set from a pickup truck and trailer. “That explains how they’re hauling Felix.” She stood there with her hands on her hips, wondering how they got him to walk into the trailer in the first place. As far as she knew, he’d never trailered before and, other than sticking his head in their cabin in hopes of a treat or a chance to curl up by the fire to sleep, he didn’t go inside anything except the root cellar. The trees were his bed and the sky his playground. She’d always assumed he was claustrophobic.
“They better not have drugged him,” she ground out as she parked her sled. Her four-wheel-drive SUV was in the garage. She unlocked the building and lifted the manual door. Snow had piled up two feet high, but she didn’t have time to shovel her way out. She let the vehicle warm up, shifted into four-wheel drive, and then barrelled out like some hot rod looking for a mud puddle to splash through. With a steel grip on the wheel, she managed to make it out all right. Then she had to jump out and shut the garage door again so she didn’t come back to a garage full of snow.
There was no quick escape from off-grid living.
For a moment, her brain went to all the things she should have done–like feed the fire so it didn’t die out and the pipes didn’t freeze. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll be back before the hearth grows cold.”
Following the truck’s tracks, she plowed ahead. The roads weren’t that busy tonight and if she pressed her luck–and her speed–she’d catch up with them before they hit the interstate.
She hoped.
A truck hauling a 400 pound reindeer couldn’t go that fast on slick roads. Once she got over 35 mph, she took off the four-wheel-drive and prayed for safety.
The radio croonedBlue Christmas,and she sang along, changing the words, a note of sarcasm in her voice. “I will not have a blue Christmas without you because you’re coming home.”
