LITMIR.BIZ

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vertical slats.

      There in the front window stood a spruce tree with a silver star affixed to the top. Zach was pretty sure the red sparks were all in his head, but the white lights twinkling by the hundreds throughout the huge tree, those were real. He wasn’t too sure about the woman hanging the shiny balls. Most of her hair was caught up on her head and fastened in a curly clump, but the light captured by the escaped bits crowned her with a golden halo. Her face was a soft shadow, her body a willowy silhouette beneath a long white gown. If this was where the mind ran off to when cold started shutting down the rest of the body, then Zach’s final worldly thought was, This ain’t such a bad way to go.

      He wanted to tell her, touch her, thank her. If she would just turn to the window, he could die looking into the eyes of a Christmas angel. She would find him, know him, forgive and love him, all in a look, and he would go to his Maker feeling good inside. Fighting to free his leg from a dried-out bush, he stumbled over a stone face with the bulging eyes, fangs and flaring nostrils of a hideous watchdog sitting on the porch beside the steps. It took all the strength he had left to throw the hellhound off him. Down the steps he went.

      But he went down fighting.

      “Sally?”

      Something—someone—had fallen. The glass ornament that had just slipped from Ann’s fingers crunched under her slippered foot.

      “Sally, what happened?”

      No answer. No movement in the foyer. She would have heard the door if her sister had tried to sneak outside. Ann flipped the porch light on and peered through the narrow window flanking the front door. One of her gargoyles lay in pieces at the edge of the porch. Ann’s heartbeat tripped into overdrive as she opened the door, expecting the worst. “Sally?”

      “What’s going on?” Sally called out from down the hall.

      She was safe inside, thank God. If Ann knew her older sister, Sally had had her fingers crossed when she’d promised not to leave the house anymore without telling somebody where she was going. Sally hated being treated like an invalid, and Ann tried not to do it. They seldom talked about Sally’s condition, especially when the symptoms were in remission. They knew the pain of multiple sclerosis, each in her own way. It had become a third sister. The cruel and unpredictable one.

      “I don’t know,” Ann said. “Probably just the wind.”

      Or the fourteen-year-old she’d presented with an ultimatum at school earlier in the week. If we can’t depend on you to show up when you’re supposed to, Kevin, we’ll have to reassess the terms of our agreement.

      “It sounded like a battering ram. Where’s that dog when you need him?”

      “Someplace warm.” And no doubt having a good laugh. The dog and the boy had become a team over the summer, which had been part of the plan. Kevin Thunder Shield needed a loyal and true friend, and Baby needed a boy of her own. Ann just never knew with Kevin. Maybe he’d gotten a ride and she’d go out to the barn and find clean stalls. Wouldn’t that be a nice surprise? “My gargoyle’s broken, but other than that…”

      There was something on the top step. A glove? Ann grabbed her parka off the hefty hook under the hat rack and plunged her arm into the sleeve.

      “Sounds like a trespasser with good taste,” Sally said. “Maybe a wandering gnome.”

      “He left a clue,” Ann reported as she opened the door. “Cover me. I’m going out there.” It was an old joke between them, but it used to be Sally stepping out in front. The idea of little Annie serving as a convincing backup for her once-mighty sister was almost laughable.

      But times and conditions had changed. Stepping out had become Ann’s job, and what she found was hand in glove. Hand attached to arm attached to the rest of a man’s body draped facedown over her front-porch steps.

      “Oh…dear God.”

      “What is it, Annie?”

      “Stay inside.” For what it was worth, Ann tossed the order over her shoulder as she stepped onto the porch. “It’s colder than…” Her nightclothes puddled around her thin slippers as she squatted close to the man’s head. She clutched the front of her parka together with one hand and gingerly lifted the brim of his black cowboy hat with the other. “Hey. Mister. Are you…” Oh. Dear. God. No. Way.

      “Who’s out there, Annie?”

      “Sally, please stay—”

      Too late. Sally was standing in the doorway, leaning heavily on her cane. “Is he drunk?”

      Ann leaned close to his face, took a sniff and shook her head. “He’d be better off if he were,” she decided. “I think he’s frozen.”

      “Totally?”

      He answered with a groan.

      “I know him.” Sally suddenly had her sister’s back. “That’s—”

      “Will you please get back in the house?” Ann knew him, too. Better than her sister did, she suspected, but it had been years. Eight and a half, to be about a month short of exact. “Hey.” She touched his shoulder. “Hey, mister, can you stand up? Or maybe just…”

      “That’s Zach Beaudry,” Sally said. “He’s a bull rider. Used to be really good. I remember—”

      The man groaned again and mumbled something about a pickup. Ann moved around to his side, down two steps, and tried to haul him up by his arm. Then by her two arms, an effort that nearly sent both of them down another two steps.

      “Did something happen? Are you hurt?” His pilelined denim jacket didn’t look very warm, but it was clean. “I don’t see any blood.”

      “He’s frozen,” Sally reminded her. “He must have walked from the road.”

      “I’ll get you in the house, but you have to help me,” Ann told the cowboy hat, and then she warned her sister, “Not you! I’ll do it. You hold the door.” She sat him up against the railing. “Can you grab on here, and I’ll…That’s it, that’s it.” He almost fell over on her before he got his legs underneath him—railing under one arm, Ann under the other. “Okay, two steps up.” He managed one. “Now the left.”

      “Left side…no good.”

      “How about the right?”

      “Solid.”

      “Okay, so…hang on.” She moved around to his left side. “We’ll figure out a way to get you to a doctor.”

      “Just thaw-awww…” He tried and failed to hold his own, took a moment to brace himself against his slimshouldered buttress, and tried again. Through her parka and his jacket, Ann could feel the violent quiver in his left hip. The cause was more than mere cold. “…thaw me out. Damn.”

      “I’m afraid you’ve broken something.”

      “Yeah.” He waved his free arm toward the pottery shards scattered across the porch. “Hadda…kill that…dog. S-sorry.”

      “I’ll put him in Grandma’s room,” Ann told her sister, the doorstop. “No way can we get him up the stairs.”

      Grandma had been dead for fifteen years, but the spare room in the back of the house was still Grandma’s. Sally had the master bedroom on the main floor, and the hired man had his own bunkhouse, so Ann had the second floor all to herself. If nothing else, there was no shortage of sleeping quarters at the Double D Ranch.

      “We should put him in some warm water first.” Sally closed the front door and ducked under Zach’s free arm, where she’d been once before. Briefly. “Or tepid water. Can you handle yourself in the bathtub, Zach?”

      “Handle my…self?”

      “Get your blood circulating again,” Sally chirped. She’d been hurting and tired an

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