Season Of Wonder

He could tell the moment the little girl spotted him and his dogs coming into the area behind her mother. She went still and then slowly rose to her feet, features shifting from gleeful to nervous.

Why was she so afraid of him?

“You make a very good snowball,” he said, pitching his voice low and calm as his father had taught him to do with all skittish creatures. “I haven’t seen anybody somersault that well in a long time.”

She moved to her mother’s side and buried her face in Dani’s white coat—though he didn’t miss the way she reached down to pet Ollie on her way.

“Hey again, Silver.”

He knew the older girl from the middle school, where he served as the resource officer a few hours a week. He made it a point to learn all the students’ names and tried to talk to them individually when he had the chance, in hopes that if they had a problem at home or knew of something potentially troublesome for the school, they would feel comfortable coming to him.

He had the impression that Silver was like her mother in many ways. Reserved, wary, slow to trust. It made him wonder just who had hurt them.

“How are things?” he asked her now.

For just an instant, he thought he saw sadness flicker in her gaze before she turned back to her phone with a shrug. “Fine, I guess.”

“Are you guys ready for Christmas? It’s your first one here in Idaho. A little different from New York, isn’t it?”

“How should we know? We haven’t lived in the city for, like, four years.”

Dani sent her daughter a look at her tone, which seemed to border on disrespectful. “I’ve been in vet school in Boston the last four years,” she explained.

“Boston. Then you’re used to snow and cold. We’re known for our beautiful winters around here. The lake is simply stunning in wintertime.”

Mia tugged on her mother’s coat and when Dani bent down, she whispered something to her.

“You can ask him,” Dani said calmly, gesturing to Ruben.

Mia shook her head and buried her face again and after a moment, Dani sighed. “She wonders if it’s possible to ice-skate on Lake Haven. We watched the most recent Olympics and she became a little obsessed.”

“You could say that,” Silver said. “She skated around the house in her stocking feet all day long for weeks. A dorkupine on ice.”

“You can’t skate on the lake, I’m afraid,” Ruben answered. “Because of the underground hot springs that feed into it at various points, Lake Haven rarely freezes, except sometimes along the edges, when it’s really cold. It’s not really safe for ice skating. But the city creates a skating rink on the tennis courts at Lake View Park every year. The volunteer fire department sprays it down for a few weeks once temperatures get really cold. I saw them out there the other night so it shouldn’t be long before it’s open. Maybe a few more weeks.”

Mia seemed to lose a little of her shyness at that prospect. She gave him a sideways look from under her mother’s arm and aimed a fleeting smile full of such sweetness that he was instantly smitten.

“There’s also a great place for sledding up behind the high school. You can’t miss that, either. Oh, and in a few weeks we have the Lights on the Lake Festival. You’ve heard about that, right?”

They all gave him matching blank stares, making him wonder what was wrong with the Haven Point Helping Hands that they hadn’t immediately dragged Dani into their circle. He would have to talk to Andie Bailey or his sister Angela about it. They always seemed to know what was going on in town.

“I think some kids at school were talking about that at lunch the other day,” Silver said. “They were sitting at the next table so I didn’t hear the whole thing, though.”

“Haven Point hosts an annual celebration a week or so before Christmas where all the local boat owners deck out their watercraft from here to Shelter Springs to welcome in the holidays and float between the two towns. There’s music, food and crafts for sale. It’s kind of a big deal around here. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it.”

“I’m very busy, with the practice and the girls, Deputy Morales. I don’t have a lot of time for socializing.” Though Dani tried for a lofty look, he thought he caught a hint of vulnerability there.

She seemed...lonely. That didn’t make a lick of sense. The women in this town could be almost annoying in their efforts to include newcomers in community events. They didn’t give people much of an option, dragging them kicking and screaming into the social scene around town, like it or not.

“Well, now you know. You really can’t miss the festival. It’s great fun for the whole family.”

“Thank you for the information. It’s next week, you say?”

“That’s right. Not this weekend but the one after. The whole thing starts out with the boat parade on Saturday evening, around six.”

“We’ll put it on our social calendar.”

“What’s a social calendar?” Mia whispered to her sister, just loud enough for Ruben to hear.

“It’s a place where you keep track of all your invitations to parties and sleepovers and stuff.”

“Oh. Why do we need one of those?”

“Good question.”

Silver looked glum for just a moment but Dani hugged her, then faced Ruben with a polite, distant smile.

“Thank you for bringing in Ollie and Yukon. Have a good evening, Deputy Morales.”

It was a clear dismissal, one he couldn’t ignore. Ruben gathered his dogs’ leashes and headed for the door. “Thank you. See you around. And by around, I mean next door. We kind of can’t miss each other.”

As he hoped, this made Mia smile a little. Even Silver’s dour expression eased into what almost looked like a smile.

As he loaded the dogs into the king cab of his pickup truck, Ruben could see Dani turning off lights and straightening up the clinic.

What was her story? Why had she chosen to come straight from vet school in Boston to set up shop all the way across the country in a small Idaho town?

He loved his hometown, sure, and fully acknowledged it was a beautiful place to live. It still seemed a jarring cultural and geographic shift from living back east to this little town where the biggest news of the month was a rather corny light parade that people froze their asses off to watch.

And why did he get the impression the family wasn’t socializing much? One of the reasons most people he knew moved to small towns was a yearning for the kind of connectedness and community a place like Haven Point had in spades. What was the point in moving to a small town if you were going to keep yourself separate from everybody?

He thought he had seen them at a few things when they first came to Haven Point but since then, Dani seemed to be keeping her little family mostly to themselves. That must be by choice. It was the only explanation that made sense. He couldn’t imagine McKenzie Kilpatrick or Andie Bailey or any of the other Helping Hands excluding her on purpose.

What was she so nervous about?

He added another facet to the enigma of his next-door neighbor. He had hoped that he might be able to get a better perspective of her by bringing the dogs in to her for their routine exams. While he had confirmed his father’s belief that she appeared to be an excellent veterinarian, he now had more questions about the woman and her daughters to add to his growing list.

2 (#uf4d36971-2318-530c-acc9-9467340dac51)

After a long, difficult day, following a long, difficult week, all Dani wanted was to pop a batch of popcorn, sit on the sofa and watch something light and cheery with her girls for a few hours. As she stood at the kitchen sink of their three-bedroom cottage drying the last of the dishes Silver had washed after school, she thought that what she would really like was a long soak in the tub. By the time her daughters were in bed most nights, she didn’t have enough energy left to even run water in the tub.

The kitchen was small enough that cleaning it never took long. The house Frank Morales had provided as part of her internship compensation wasn’t big but it was comfortable, with three bedrooms, a living room and a lovely glass-enclosed family room facing the lake, which had become their favorite spot.

Someday she’d like to have a little bigger house, maybe with an actual dining room, but that would have to wait awhile. She had thousands of dollars in student loans to pay back first. Meantime, this house worked well for their needs.

Her life could have been easier. Occasionally, she tormented herself by playing the old what-if game, wondering how things might have been different for her and her daughters if she had been able to ignore her conscience and taken money from Tommy.

If she had accepted the ill-gotten gains her late ex-husband had tried to give for child support, she might have been able to start her professional life as a veterinarian with a clean slate, even with a little nest egg, instead of feeling swallowed by debt. But she would have had to sell her soul in return and she wasn’t willing to do that.