But I wasn’t waving any white flags yet. Nope. I still had plenty of grit in my gizzard. Raising my gloved hands, I aimed both middle fingers at the sky. “Kiss off, icehole!”
A strong gust of wind rammed me from behind, knocking me to my hands and knees in the snow. Cold wetness soaked through my jeans and gloves. Before I could catch my breath, another blast of air hit me, blowing snow into my face.
Son of a sugarplum!
I wiped at my eyes with my coat sleeve. Rolling onto my back, I stared up at the maelstrom whirling overhead. Somehow, I had to make it to my kids through this frozen wasteland.
Chapter Two
Six Hours Earlier …
The only way I could think to keep this Christmas from ending in disaster was to poison my sister.
As I killed the lights in Calamity Jane Realty’s office, my cell phone rang. A glance at the screen made me curse. Unfortunately, my mother was one step ahead of me, doing her damnedest to interfere with my sister’s untimely demise.
Buttoning my wool coat, I accepted the call. “What now, Mom?”
“Really, Violet Lynn?” my mother scolded. “You’re going to take that tone with me on Christmas Eve?”
“You’ve called me like five times in the last two hours.”
Something thumped overhead. I frowned at the ceiling. What was that? Other than me, myself, and I, the building was supposed to be empty. My coworkers and boss hadn’t even come into work today, and our upstairs neighbor was out of town.
“If you were down here already as we’d planned,” Mom’s voice interrupted my what-the-hell moment, “I wouldn’t have to keep calling you.”
As we’d planned? I gritted my molars. Was she smoking mistletoe leaves? Until yesterday morning, my plan was to enjoy Christmas Eve here in Deadwood with my kids, Aunt Zoe, and Doc, my boyfriend. Then, on Christmas afternoon, we’d drive down to my parents’ place for a family dinner. That was all. The end.
But yesterday morning, everything had changed when the TV weather guy started squawking about the sky falling and burying the hills up to their cockles in a shitload of snow. Of course, that made my mom freak out in true Chicken Little style, calling me in a panic to rant that she’d filled the refrigerator and deep freezer with hundreds of dollars’ worth of food and piled presents under her tree, all for us. In other words, if the kids, Doc, and I were stuck in Deadwood because of a blizzard, Christmas would surely end in a tragedy that rivaled Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Suddenly, my cozy Christmas Eve fantasy filled with visions of snuggling in front of the blinking tree lights with a plate of sugar cookies and a mug of hot buttered rum had disappeared in a puff of chimney smoke. The next thing I knew, Mom had beseeched and bribed Aunt Zoe to haul Addy and Layne down yesterday to spend the night with her and my dad, leaving Doc and me to follow when I finished with work today.
What was supposed to be a three-hour family Christmas dinner event had morphed. Now I was looking at a hellish two-night stay—maybe even three if the blizzard hung around to pester western South Dakota as long as the local meteorologists were forecasting.
It was because of this change in plans that I was wondering where I could buy a vial of poison on Christmas Eve for my sister, Susan, whom I’d lovingly nicknamed “The Bitch from Hell” many moons ago.
Susan had moved back home semi-recently, setting up her fiery lair in my parents’ basement. Susan’s modus operandi since childhood had been to seek and destroy anything special to me, including my relationships with various men over the years. It wasn’t enough for her that she’d popped out of our mother’s womb having everything I didn’t—long legs, a model-thin body, straight brunette hair, and a black soul overflowing with mischief. Okay, so maybe we shared that last trait along with matching heart-shaped lips.
My point, which I spelled out in loud enunciated words to my mom yesterday, was that it’d be impossible for my sister and me to endure each other’s company for forty-eight hours without something getting broken, such as Susan’s neck, followed of course by my mother’s heart. Breaking my mom’s heart would land me in a heap of trouble with my father, whom I adored to pieces. Therein lay the main setback to my poisoning plot.
Snapping back to the present task of making it out of Deadwood before the snow hit, I took a calming breath and returned to my conversation with my mom. “As I told you five phone calls ago, I couldn’t come down yesterday because I had to show a couple of houses this morning.” I opened the office’s back door, hunching into my coat at the blast of cold air that greeted me.
She scoffed through the phone. “Who goes house shopping on Christmas Eve?”
“Potential buyers who are in town visiting family for the holidays, that’s who.” I locked the door and scurried across the parking lot toward my Honda SUV. “This was the only day that worked for both of our schedules, so I had to stay in Deadwood.”
“Well, I think it’s selfish of them to make you work on Christmas Eve.”
“So you’ve said over and over and over and—”
“You know, if you manage not to screw up things with your boyfriend this time and actually snag a wedding ring in the deal, you could probably quit that job of yours and focus on being a good little homemaker.”
I pulled my phone away and scowled at it before holding it back to my ear. “There are so many things wrong with what you just said, Mother. You seem to be forgetting about the fact that Susan stole a couple of potential husbands away from me.”
She pshawed through the line. “Those boys weren’t marriage worthy and you know it. You really need to try to focus on the positive.”
“Positive,
