Her Holiday Family. Ruth Logan Herne

you’re so good with him.” Max tipped his head back and looked at her, and there it was again, that glimmer of assessment, appraisal. “Like you’re born to love animals.”

      “I get my share of loving when I come over here,” she told him. She stood, gathered her purse and slung it over her shoulder crosswise. “That’s plenty. It’s tough to give an animal all the love and care it needs when you’re working all the time.”

      His nod said he understood.

      His eyes said something different altogether.

      But no matter what Max thought, Tina understood the motivations behind her singular actions. When everything you’ve ever loved...or thought you loved...went away, alone was just plain better.

      * * *

      Max’s cell phone buzzed him awake in the middle of the night. He answered it quietly, not wanting to disturb his parents, but knowing it must be important for his brother Seth to place a call at that hour. “What’s up? Do you need help? I can be there in five minutes.”

      “Only if you break all the speed limits, and yes, I need you here. Now.”

      Max was half-ready before his brother placed the request. “Are you okay? Is it the babies? What’s going on?”

      “My family’s fine,” Seth assured him.

      Max breathed a sigh of relief. Seth’s wife, Gianna, had given birth to fraternal twins in early summer. Mikey and Bella were the sweetest things God ever put on the planet, and he’d felt a fierce shot of protective love when he’d met them for the first time the week before.

      “Someone was snooping around the remains of Tina’s place on the water, then cut through the pass between the church and the hardware store. I’d just finished feeding Mikey and saw a flash of movement at the edge of the light. I don’t think he or she knows they’ve been spotted.”

      “I’m on my way.”

      Max bolted for the car once he’d quietly closed the kitchen door to the side entrance. He started the engine, backed out of his parents’ drive slowly, then picked up speed as he cruised toward the village at the northern point of Kirkwood Lake. In town, he drove past the hardware store as if it was perfectly normal for traffic to pass through Kirkwood in the middle of the night. He turned right onto Overlook Drive, passed Seth’s house deliberately, then let the car glide to a silent stop. He turned the engine off, slipped from the driver’s seat and leaned the door shut. If anyone was still around, he didn’t want to ruin the false sense of security he’d just created.

      His eyes adjusted to the darkness quickly. He spotted Seth’s unmoving frame at the far edge of his carriage-style garage. Max walked around the garage, hoping Seth recognized his maneuver. When Seth melded back into the shadows on the far side of the angled garage, Max knew he understood. They met up on the farthest, darkest edge of the building. “Have you seen him again?”

      Seth shook his head. “No. But I’ve been watching to see if he came back.”

      “Was he at the hardware store? Do you think someone’s trying to break in? Or set another fire?”

      Backlit by the outside house lights, Max couldn’t see Seth’s face, but he read the consternation in his tone. “I’m not sure. It seemed the original intent was to find something in the ashes of the café.”

      “This person was crawling through a roped-off crime scene?”

      “Yes.”

      Max could only think of one reason why anyone would grope their way through the ashes of Tina’s cafe in the middle of the night: to find something that might incriminate them. “Man? Woman? Child?”

      “No way to tell. Too far and too dark. But whoever it was moved quick and light.”

      “Probably a woman or a kid.”

      “I hate to think either,” Seth admitted, “but that was my gut reaction, too.”

      “I’ll go the long way around the store, circling the outside of the church and the cemetery behind,” Max said. He clicked his watch to mark time. “In four minutes you come around the front to the back entrance of Dad’s store. I’ll flash my pen from the edge of the cemetery woods. And we’ll go in together.”

      “You packing?” Seth wondered aloud.

      “Always.” Skill with handguns had become intrinsic to Max years ago. Going through life armed and ready was second nature now.

      “Just don’t shoot me, okay?”

      “It is dark,” Max whispered as he slipped along the back of the garage, then into the shadows of the tree-lined street. Strewn leaves would have marked his presence on a dry night, but the late-day rain silenced his movement. He slipped along the front edge of the graveyard, then through the forested southern border. If this person was targeting area businesses to burn, or searching to remove incriminating evidence, Max was going to make sure he or she didn’t get any farther than Dad’s hardware store parking lot. Unless they’d already made their way home, wherever that was, and in that case, they’d let the authorities figure it out. Right now, with Seth covering his back, Max knew he was in the driver’s seat.

      “Stop right there.”

      Max froze.

      “I’ve already called the police, and if you move, I’ll—”

      “Tina?” He turned, hands up, and peered into the trees. “Where are you?” he whispered. “What do you think you’re doing?”

      “Max?”

      If there’d been time or if he was sure she wasn’t pointing a gun at his back, he’d have banged his head against one of the nearby trees in frustration. As it was, he held perfectly still until he made out her shape—well, half her shape—behind one of the sprawling maples planted nearly eighty years before. For one split second he wondered if it had been Tina that Seth had spotted in the rubble...but it couldn’t have been.

      Could it?

      Why would Tina be snooping around the ruins of her burned-out café, the place she loved so much?

       She’s pretty anxious to leave this town behind. Anxiety can push people to do things they’d never do normally.

      “I saw someone,” she whispered as she crept through the trees.

      Tina lived in an upstairs apartment on Overlook Drive, kitty-corner from Seth’s house. Her front windows overlooked Kirkwood Lake and Main Street. At this point, Max was actually surprised they hadn’t been joined by a cast of thousands, which was just as likely as having four people roaming Main Street in Kirkwood in the dead of night. “What did you see?”

      “Someone moving around the timbers of the café.”

      “And do you make it a habit of being up in the middle of the night, checking out Main Street?”

      “I didn’t used to,” she retorted, and he didn’t have to listen hard to hear the sting in her voice. “I used to sleep soundly. And then someone burned down my business, and I’m lucky I sleep at all. And at this point, the three hours I got tonight will probably be it, because how can I crawl back into bed and fall asleep after all this?”

      Jenny’s words rushed back, how she’d lost sleep and her appetite in the aftermath of an accidental fire as a young mother. How much worse must it be to think you were targeted?

      Tina pointed west toward Seth’s house. “I woke up and saw Seth’s lights on. I worried that one of the babies might be sick. When he came creeping outside, I knew something was up. I looked further and saw something. Someone,” she corrected herself, “moving through the remains of the café.”

      “Doesn’t anyone sleep around here anymore?” Seth’s voice entered the conversation from the near side of the church parking lot.

      “It