Home Fires (A Butterscotch Jones Mystery Book 4)

by Jackson, Melanie

  Home Fires

  by

  Melanie Jackson

  Version 1.1 – November, 2011

  Published by Brian Jackson at KDP

  Copyright © 2011 by Melanie Jackson

  Discover other titles by Melanie Jackson at www.melaniejackson.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Author Note

  Season’s greetings and many thanks to all of you who have taken Butterscotch into your hearts. I hope your holidays are bright and let us all wish for peace on Earth and goodwill to all men. Merry Christmas.

  Chapter 1

  December 23rd

  Good Lord, watch over me! Chuck’s father was coming for Christmas! Horace Goodhead—who should have been at some veterans’ Christmas party like he was every year—had decided it was time to meet the woman in Chuck’s life and he was coming for Christmas! He would stay at the pub at night, but during the day he would be at the cabin with me and Chuck.

  Poor Chuck. He sounded more resigned than excited by the prospect. I understood. Kind of. My fatherly relations hadn’t been happy, but we had never put ourselves through the agony of getting together for seasonal torture after my mother died. And now the old reprobate was dead, too, so I was golden.

  Chuck wasn’t that lucky. And he loved his father. Most of the time. That meant they had to see each other at Christmas. It’s a rule. And since Chuck was in my life I guess that meant, ready or not, that I had to do this too.

  Had I baked enough cookies? Surely I had. And if I hadn’t they weren’t going to let me use the oven at the Lonesome Moose anymore so it didn’t matter. The Flowers needed the oven for baking pies and cakes and doing as much of the town Christmas dinner as she could prepare ahead. I eyed my kitchen shelf which functioned as a pantry. There were tins of fudge, a fruitcake, and canisters of cookies—even pfeffernuesse, which Chuck said were his father’s favorites. Those hadn’t been easy to make. I had thrown out two batches before the Flowers explained that the pepper-nut cookies were supposed to taste that way and would improve after aging a bit.

  Okay, probably we were okay for sweets. But what about decorations? Had I hung enough mistletoe? Brought in enough holly and pine boughs? Strung enough lights? Given that it was necessary to keep the drying evergreens away from the fire, I guess I pretty much had decked the halls as much as safety and batteries would allow.

  Max sighed heavily, reminding me that, though I was a wimp about snow and utterly lost in panic about meeting my boyfriend’s father, he had needs—like running through snowdrifts in the manner of his ancestors—and could I please put on my coat and take him out where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play?

  “Okay. Good idea,” I admitted. “I could use the exercise. No point staying in here and chewing on myself.”

  It was also a sound idea because, though I was in total denial of the possibility, a storm probably was coming. The air just smelled that certain way it did before we got snow. Then walking anywhere would be harder. In fact, if it was a bad storm it would be impossible to get out of town.

  “It wouldn’t dare snow. We have bingo tonight. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve!” But it would dare. The combined prayers of McIntyre’s Gulch and our itinerant minister, Father White, would not hold it back. After all, it was December, the time of Yule and the darkest days of the year. We had been a whole week with clear skies. Without Divine assistance, we weren’t going to beat the odds forever.

  “Let me check the fire and then we’ll go.” Max knows that we must do this before we leave the cabin. Either the fire must be out and new kindling laid so a fresh one can be lit with the stroke of a match, or the existing fire had to be banked down to safe embers that would come alive with stirring. Fire is both our dearest friend and most deadly enemy during the winter months.

  “Brrrr,” I said, opening my door and feeling the blast of cold air that rushed rudely inside. I added a scarf to my coat, hat, and gloves. “The temperature’s dropping and it’s later than I thought. Short walk, Max. Then I need to help decorate the hall.”

  Our community building was plain, but could be made quite pretty if we draped it in greenery and battery-operated twinkle lights. Those lights were a blessing and the Braids couldn’t get enough of them at the store. Most of the cabins outside the Gulch—and even inside of town—had no electricity and this was the only way to enjoy Christmas lights.

  Then, if there was time, I needed to lend the Flowers a hand over at the pub. Sasha and Big John were very little help when it came to the cooking. The men made great venison burgers and in a pinch could roast a goose, but had no aptitude for plum pudding or Bûche de Noël. None of the men in the Gulch are bakers. I think it is a matter of pride. They go out and kill the dinner. The women are expected to make it pretty and dress it up with fancy sides. That is the way of things.

  As you can see, the twenty-first century—even the twentieth—has not made a lot of headway here.

  The Braids is a good cook, but having the only store in town, she was probably too busy to get away much. Madge Brightwater would offer to help with the dinner—she always did—but Madge was not the best hand at pastry. In fact, as a pastry chef, she made a great sled-dog trainer. Not that I was much better, but at least I could follow directions and keep stirring or basting when the Flowers said to.

  “Woowoowooooo.” Max was undaunted by the wind and cold. His wolf ancestors were calling to him on the approaching gale and so he ran on ahead, singing joyously and only sometimes loping back to check on me. I decided that I preferred to avoid Potter’s Ridge and whistled Max away when he got to the fork. The memory of the downed plane I’d found last winter was still too fresh for comfort. Instead we started in the direction of Seven Forks and Wendell Thunder’s cabin. Wendell had been Max’s human father for the first eight weeks of his life. He was also a former boyfriend and Max and I sometimes stopped in for a visit and dog cookies for auld lang syne. Wendell and I had parted amiably so there is no awkwardness. You have to be friendly in the Gulch. We are small and cannot afford feuds.

  Fiddling Thomas was out working on his truck. We waved but didn’t try to shout through our mufflers. Thomas would be making music tonight after bingo. We’d talk then.

  Max let out a particularly piercing ululation as we crested the ridge and it was answered in kind.

  I don’t know if Max actually recalls that Kyra, Wendell’s dominant bitch, was his mother, but the two of them were always happy to see each other. Snohomish, Max’s father, was less delighted to see his offspring, but that is the way it is sometimes between fathers and sons.

  Chapter 2

  Christmas Eve—8:45 a.m.

  Officer Chuck Goodhead of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police pulled his Range Rover to the curb amidst what was rapidly growing from an active snow flurry into a full out blizzard. Not for the first time he bemoaned his bad luck. Why today of all days, he asked himself—why couldn’t the heavy snowfall have held off just another twenty-four more hours?

  Looking out the side window of his vehicle he gazed upon the house he’d grown up in and couldn’t help but smile. Of course, his mother’s prize roses were long dead and gone. He noticed that the gutter still hung down off the roof on one side of the structure—his father had yet to have someone out to fix it. He supposed that it would fall upon him to nail the gutte
r back into place, yet another quick patch; but not before a lengthy argument with his father. His dad would again insist that he’d take care of it, as he had the last several times Chuck had visited. Another option was to sneak over and fix the gutter in the night. His father would neither know nor care that the work had gotten done and at least one argument would be averted.

  Chuck sighed when he considered Christmas, which was only a day away. He looked forward to spending it with Butterscotch in McIntyre’s Gulch, but dreaded having to take his father along. His father and he had never gotten along, but things had grown worse since his mother had passed away. Now his father lived alone and Chuck couldn’t abide the thought of him having to spend Christmas on his own.

  His father and mother had been inseparable, the latter truly representing the former’s better half. With his mother’s passing, his father had rapidly declined into the position of being an inactive and grumpy old man. His father’s ability to find fault with everything that Chuck did was no longer tempered by his mother’s more balanced perspective. The result was one petty argument after another. It seemed the two of them couldn’t say “good day” without arguing about the weather.

  Perhaps their disagreements stemmed from the fact that Chuck was an only child and his father had piled all of his lofty expectations upon his only son’s too narrow shoulders. Whatever the case, Chuck knew that he should delay an encounter with his father no longer if they were to be on their way as soon as possible. He opened the door and stepped into snow that had already gathered close to half a meter high.

  Having trudged across the yard to the front door, Chuck knocked loudly after remembering that the doorbell had stopped working last month. He waited impatiently in the chill outside and finally had to knock a second and then a third time before eliciting a response.

  “Hold your horses. I’m coming,” a voice barked from the far side of the door.

  The door opened to reveal Mr. Horace Charles Goodhead I standing in the foyer in his robe and wool socks. He was withered by age which seemed to be advancing faster than the years. It was obvious that he hadn’t shaved in days.

  “You’re late!” Horace declared.

  “You’re not ready!” Chuck answered.

  “Who made you my nursemaid?”

  “There’s a blizzard blowing outside,” Chuck announced.

  “Doesn’t look so bad to me,” Horace opined after taking a peek around his front yard. “Anyway, come on inside before you let all the heat out.”

  Chuck stomped his feet on the porch to get the worst of the snow off his boots. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him while his father shuffled away deeper into the dark house. It was actually hot inside. Chuck unzipped his coat. He heard the TV playing in the den.

  “Why didn’t you answer the door, Pop?”

  “It was unlocked. I thought you’d let yourself in.”

  “I’d never enter someone’s house without knocking to be let in.”

  “Suit yourself. Besides, I thought you Mounties did that sort of thing all the time.”

  Chuck didn’t take the bait. Instead, he trekked after his father in the hope that he could get him to hurry up. He took a look in the kitchen as he passed and wasn’t surprised to see a tall stack of dirty dishes in the sink. The hallway was cluttered with stacks of old newspapers and magazines. Hoarding was a new habit that his father had picked up after his mother’s passing, or maybe it was a propensity his father always possessed that was only apparent now that his wife wasn’t around to clean up after him. Chuck heard the sound of some motorized device running in the bathroom.

  “Pop, what are you doing now?”

  “I’m shaving. Do you mind?”

  “You couldn’t have taken care of that before I arrived.”

  “No, I couldn’t. Besides, before you showed up on my doorstep trying to beat my door down, I wasn’t sure you were actually going to arrive.”

  Chuck wasn’t sure whether his father meant that he didn’t trust his son to drive in inclement weather or that he thought his son might change his mind and abandon him for the holidays. He felt somewhat guilty since the second thought had crossed his mind a time or two during the drive to his father’s home.

  Just then these idle thoughts were broken by the reappearance of his father, who stepped out of the bathroom running a hand over his freshly shaven cheek.

  “Have you packed your things?” Chuck asked hopefully.

  “That I did do. If you didn’t show up, I was going to fly off to Vegas for the holidays.”

  His father was always threatening to fly to Vegas for one last wild fling. Of course, he never did so and Chuck no longer became concerned at these idle threats. It had become the one thing his father could say that would actually make him smile.

  “Why don’t you point me to your things and I’ll load them into the car while you get dressed,” Chuck suggested.

  “They’re in here in the bedroom,” Horace said, leading the way.

  Chuck stepped into his parent’s bedroom, something he had rarely done in his life, to find a huge pile of luggage stacked in the corner. In fact, his father had packed so many things that he’d had to use black plastic garbage bags to hold some of his belongings.

  “Pop, we’re only going away for a few days,” Chuck complained.

  “It never hurts to be prepared,” his father observed. “Besides, maybe I’ll end up liking this McIntyre’s Gulch of yours and decide not to come back.”

  Chuck shivered at the mere mention of the possibility.

  “We’ll never fit all of this stuff on the plane. You’ll have to pick two or three bags of the most important stuff.”

  “Why not leave it all behind and I’ll meet your new girl in my birthday suit,” his father quipped.

  “Pop, help me out here,” Chuck pleaded.

  “Alright. I suspected you might say as much. The things I can’t do without are packed in the three Samsonite bags.”

  Chuck recognized the ancient battered luggage from previous vacations he’d spent with his parents in his youth. He felt a wave of nostalgia wash over him at the sight of the bags. As his father pulled on a pair of red long johns, Chuck bent to pick up the first suitcase and almost gave himself a hernia when he tried to lift it.

  “Pop, what did you pack in this bag? Cinder blocks?”

  “Just some of my more essential equipment.”

  “Not your old cameras,” Chuck moaned.

  Chuck’s father was a devout shutterbug. Unfortunately, he had no eye for the art and refused to spend any time trying to improve his craft. What he was good at was accumulating ancient cast-off pieces of photographic equipment which he lugged around with him everywhere he went. Once at his destination, he would unpack his many cameras and use them to take awful pictures of the scenery, often out of focus, and of people with their heads cut off. When Chuck gave it some thought, he realized that he shouldn’t have expected this trip to be any different. He also realized that the majority of the bags and cases must contain major portions of his father’s darkroom, which he used to either under or overexpose his prints.

  In his entire life, Horace Goodhead had only produced one good photograph. It was a picture of Chuck when he was a child, squatting in a huge field of golden poppies, looking cute as a button, taken in the Antelope Valley during one of their many trips to California. People marveled at the framing of the shot, the beautiful setting, the charming child, and the brilliant colors. Horace complained that he should have taken the photo without his son cluttering the landscape.

  Chuck stepped outside with the heavy bag he had to carry with two hands while shuffling through the ever accumulating snow. It was snowing harder now. He rushed back inside after the other two bags and was grateful to find that they were lighter. Apparently they contained only clothing. When Chuck returned for the final time, he was relieved to find that his father was fully dressed.

  He looked like the Michelin Man, only in red. Chuck was s
urprised when he saw that his father could actually bend his arms in the heavy snow gear. He had to work hard to keep from bursting out in laughter.

  “You’re going to cook in that outfit,” Chuck commented.

  “It’s easier to take things off than it is to put them on.”

  Chuck didn’t want another argument; he didn’t have time for one. Instead of commenting further, he tried with limited success to hustle his father out the door to the car.

  “And don’t forget to turn the heater down or you’ll be broke by the time we get back,” were Chucks final words of advice as he left the house to go start the car.

  Horace took his time ambling down the driveway and along the street to the waiting Range Rover. His son got out and ran around the vehicle to open the door for his father, not wanting the man to slip and hurt himself before their holiday junket even began.

  Their hour-long journey to the airport was punctuated with complaints that Chuck was driving either too fast or too slow, apparently without managing to drive just the right speed in between, and a less than helpful insistence that Chuck steer into the skid. Chuck was ready to throttle his father by the time they pulled to a halt beside a hanger on the airport tarmac. He was relieved to at least see that the Wings had not left without them. As usual, the Wings was tinkering with one of the engines in his Beech 18 aircraft even as the snow continued to fall on him unabated.

  “Ayah, there you are. I was going to take off without you, only the damn fuel line burst again before I could get her into the air,” the Wings announced as Chuck approached.

  “Sounds like good luck for both of us,” Chuck replied.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right there.”

  Chuck’s father eventually ambled along to join them. He didn’t want to do it to him, but saw no other choice but to introduce his dad to the Wings.