by Lizzie Shane
“We’ll need to have Jeb look her over to make sure she’s healthy and up-to-date on her shots, and I’m not sure she’s been spayed yet, but after that she’ll be ready to go to a good home. Won’t you, sweet girl?”
“We don’t have a run for her.” These last few weeks they’d been taking in more dogs than were going out. In fact, none of the dogs had been adopted since Ally arrived.
“We’ll keep her in the office for now,” Gram said with a casual hand flap. “Though I don’t think she’ll be with us long. I have a feeling. Someone’s going to snap her right up.” She sent her beaming smile past Ally. “Are you looking for a dog, girls?”
The girls exchanged a look. “We’re just volunteering for now,” Astrid said.
“What a lovely idea! Aren’t you sweet? Do you want to help me introduce little Dolce to the office?”
Handing a strange dog who hadn’t even been checked for rabies yet over to a pair of children sounded like a recipe for a lawsuit. Ally stepped forward quickly before her grandmother could reach for the carrier crate. She didn’t even want to think about her grandmother trying to carry the bulky thing. “I’ll take care of Dolce. Why don’t you show the girls where the leashes are so they can take Fred and Ginger for a walk?”
“Good idea. You’ll love them,” Gram gushed, putting one arm around each girl’s shoulders and guiding them toward the kennels, leaving Ally alone with the timid little spaniel.
The dog watched her cautiously, and Ally bent down to make herself less intimidating.
“Hello, sweet girl.” She reached out her hand, letting the pup sniff her through the cage. “It’s okay. You’re okay now.” In her pocket, her phone chimed with an email alert, and the spaniel scrambled to the back of the crate at the sound, hiding her face.
“That’s okay,” Ally murmured soothingly, taking a step back to pull out her phone. “You take your time. Maybe this is someone putting in an application to adopt a sweet girl just like you.”
She’d only gotten the application form to go live on the website a few hours ago, so that might be overly optimistic, but a girl could hope. Maybe this was the first of many.
But when she opened the email, it wasn’t an application.
Regret to inform…budget shortfall…discontinuing funding…January first…She skimmed the words, trying to make sense of them, but they refused to compute. The town couldn’t actually be cutting the shelter funding. The shelter had been here for decades. Almost as long as she could remember.
“Ally girl?” Her grandmother’s voice penetrated the fog she’d fallen into as she stared at the email, as if she could change the meaning if she just read it enough times. “Are you all right? You’ve gone white as a sheet.”
Ally looked up from the phone, the words spilling out of her mouth and making it real.
“They’re shutting us down.”
Chapter Five
Who does that? Who cuts the funding for an animal shelter right before Christmas?”
Ally stalked back and forth in the tight confines of the shelter office while her grandmother sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to lure Dolce out of the crate beside her with a cheddar snack. They’d carried the new dog inside, and in the process Ally’s shock had melted away, leaving frustration and indignation in its wake.
“I’m sure it’s just a mistake,” her grandmother soothed, keeping her voice soft for Dolce’s sake. “The town would never cut our funding.”
“It says they expect us to find homes for all the dogs and cease operations by the first of the year.”
The shelter got some money from donations and adoption fees, but the town funding kept them afloat. Ally hadn’t realized how expensive the little shelter was until she’d gotten a look at the books. Food, vet bills, dog beds, and chew toys she’d expected, but she hadn’t considered propane to heat the barn and liability insurance and maintenance costs. Her grandparents had opened the shelter after they retired and made it look easy for twenty years—and they weren’t exactly business savvy—but three weeks after she showed up the whole house of cards was collapsing.
“I’m sure that’s not what they meant,” her grandmother insisted. “It’s all a misunderstanding. Who sent the email?”
Ally scrolled to the bottom of the email, the same one she’d been reading over and over again for the last fifteen minutes. Sincerely, Benjamin West, Pine Hollow Town Council. “Benjamin West.”
A flicker of a frown crossed Gram’s brow. “Hm.”
“What does that mean? Hm? Who is he?”
“He took over Paul Williams’s spot on the council two years ago and he…well…”
Ally groaned. “Don’t tell me. He would actually do this. Shut down a charitable organization right before Christmas.”
“Of course not. Though he can be a little prickly, I suppose, but some people are just a little more abrupt than others. There were all those rumors with his fiancée, but he’s a wonderful uncle and I’m sure he isn’t trying to run the shelter out of business—”
That was all the confirmation Ally needed. Her grandmother would bend over backward to say nice things about everyone she met, but Ally could read between the lines. This prickly councilman was probably rotten to his core. Evicting poor helpless dogs right before Christmas.
She shoved her cell phone into her pocket. “I’m going down there.”
Her grandmother looked up, frowning. “Down where?”
“Town hall.” She yanked her coat off the hook, flinging her scarf around her neck. “I’m dropping the car at the Estates for Gramps and then I’m fighting this.”
Her grandparents would dip into their retirement savings without a second thought to keep the shelter afloat, but they needed that money to support themselves. And she wasn’t going to let any power-mad bureaucrat take the shelter away from them.
“I can pick up your grandfather—”
“Gram.”
“All right, all right, fine. I’ll stay here and keep an eye on Dolce and Astrid and Kimber.” She tipped her head to the side speculatively. “Though maybe you should take Astrid with you. Ben West’s her uncle, and she might be able to persuade him where you can’t.”
Ally was pretty sure Astrid hadn’t told her parents she was volunteering here, and this Benjamin West sounded like the kind of guy who would absolutely rat her out.
Ally shook her head. “I don’t need a kid to fight my battles. I’m going to give this Benjamin West a piece of my mind. This shelter is staying open. That prickly…” She couldn’t think of a word insulting enough that she could say in front of her grandmother. “Whatever won’t know what hit him.”
* * *
“It just stopped.”
Ben silently counted to ten in an attempt to cling to his patience as Linda Hilson flapped her hands helplessly over the blank computer monitor. He’d been the one-man IT department for the town for the last six years now, and he never ceased to be amazed at the different ways people could screw up perfectly good electronics.
“Go grab yourself a cup of coffee and I’ll see what I can do,” he suggested.
“Thank you,” Linda gushed, before leaving him in peace so he could diagnose the problem.
Ben crouched on the floor, checking all the cables and connections. The desk had been buried under a mountain of Christmas cheer, and he found the power strip beneath a swath of garland…with the power switched off.
He flicked the switch, heard the familiar hum of electronics whirring to life, and climbed out from beneath the desk, borrowing Linda’s chair as the machine powered up so he could confirm that was the only issue—the wiring in the historic town hall building was notoriously finicky and could wreak havoc on electronics.
If only all of life’s problems were as simple as flipping a switch.
While he waited, he pulled up the to-do list on his phone, adding research gingerbread and figure out which time slot I blindly volunteered for at the freaking Christmas fair to the never-ending li
st. Along with fix Keurig.
Two years ago, he probably would have just ordered a new machine and not thought twice, but two years ago every dollar he spent on himself wasn’t a dollar he could be saving for Astrid’s college fund. Katie and Paul had tucked some money away for Astrid’s future, but the good schools were only getting more expensive, and Ben wasn’t bringing home Silicon Valley paychecks anymore. Working for the town had sounded relaxing compared to the eighty-hour weeks he’d been pulling in Palo Alto—but at the time he’d never expected to become a single parent or a town councilman. Relaxing felt like a distant memory.
He tucked away his phone, glancing around the town hall. Garland and twinkle lights draped every surface, and there was even a bough of mistletoe hanging over the door—which seemed like an odd choice in a work environment, but Ben wasn’t about to suggest taking it down and earn himself another Grinch strike.
New plan: Keep his head down and avoid pissing anyone else off between now and Christmas Day.
As the computer booted, he stared at the bough of Sexual-Harrassment-Lawsuit-Waiting-to-Happen—so he was perfectly positioned to see the tourist from this morning appear beneath the mistletoe, storming into the building.
And she was definitely storming.
Her purple wool coat flew open as she moved, and a white scarf flapped in the gust of wind as the door slammed shut behind her. Her expression only darkened when her gaze landed on him.
“You!”
Ben frowned. “Me?”
“You’re him, aren’t you?” The words cracked like a whip. “Of course you are. Benjamin West. As in the Wicked Witch of.”
He straightened from Linda’s chair. “No relation, actually.”
“I should have known it would be you,” she snapped—which didn’t help him figure out what she was doing here. “Did you do this because I spilled coffee on you? Are you really that petty?”
“Look, I’m sorry about this morning. My coffeemaker was broken, and I’d had a lousy start to the day. It was a whole thing, but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
“Apology not accepted. Lots of people have bad days. My day hasn’t exactly been peachy. And you know why? Because some jerk yelled at me this morning when I was trying to apologize to him, and now he’s shutting down my shelter. Who does that? Oh, that’s right, Ebenezer West. The Scrooge of Pine Hollow. Determined to destroy Christmas for all of us.”
Frustration flashed through him. “What is it with everyone thinking I’m anti-Christmas all of a sudden?”
“Maybe if you don’t want to be known that way, you shouldn’t go around shutting down animal shelters three weeks before the holiday. My grandparents put their lives into that shelter. They’ve been running it for over twenty years, and now, what? You’re just going to cut their funding because you had a bad day?”
The pieces clicked into place—though one still didn’t quite fit. “You’re Rita and Hal’s granddaughter?”
“You were expecting someone else?”
“I was expecting a city girl,” he admitted, before he thought through the words. He’d heard Hal and Rita’s granddaughter was some New York fashionista. He’d pictured a six-foot model-gorgeous woman with flat-ironed hair and fake eyelashes. And heels. Definitely heels. But this pint-sized tornado had clomped in here in snow boots without a lick of makeup to cover her freckles. They were kind of cute, those freckles. If you could ignore the glare coming over them.
“Yeah, well, I am a city girl. And city girls don’t take shit from anyone. So explain to me why my funding is being cut for no good reason three weeks before Christmas.”
Ben felt his eyebrows climbing at her assessment of the situation. No wonder she thought he was the second coming of Scrooge. “How long have you been in Pine Hollow, Ms. Gilmore?”
She tipped back her chin pugnaciously. She was kind of adorable when she was mad, but he had too many self-preservation instincts to tell her that. “A few weeks, but that shelter has been here for decades. My grandparents are pillars of the community.”
“So you were here two weeks ago when we had that big snow? And I’m sure you heard about how all that wet, heavy snow caved in the roof on the community center? The building that houses dozens of town events every month and is currently unsafe to enter?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with the shelter.”
“It’s a town building. Which means the town has to pay for the repairs. And that money has to come from somewhere,” he explained. “No one wanted to make the call to cut your funding, but it was one area we could cut. We couldn’t take the money away from schools or first responders without impacting the entire community. There just isn’t any extra to go around.”
She pressed her lips together, still glaring at him, though some of the heat had gone out of it. “Couldn’t you have…” She trailed off with a frustrated noise.
“The council didn’t do this to spite you. Or anyone else. If it’s any consolation, that money is going to do the community a lot of good.”
“The shelter does the community good, too,” she insisted, but there was the awareness of impending defeat in her eyes. “What are we supposed to do with the animals?”
“Find them homes?” he suggested. “Isn’t that what you do?”
“It’s not as easy as just waving a magic wand and the perfect home for every dog instantly appears. There’s always more supply than demand, and we haven’t had a single adoption since I got here. And now we have to find homes for all of them in less than a month? It’s like I’m cursed.” She looked up at him, a rosy flush rising to her cheeks. “I can’t believe I just told you that.”
“It’s okay. I’m really not Ebenezer Scrooge, you know.” Her dejection dug into his chest, but he pushed down the urge to help the damsel in distress. You don’t have time for one more thing, moron.
“I didn’t mean to call you—Okay, yes, I did, but I was just thinking about the dogs and my grandparents and only having four weeks and it being Christmas and a new dog just arrived today and I have no idea what to do with her and…You know, it really doesn’t help that you had a good reason to cut the funding. We need it.”
“The town budget doesn’t have any wiggle room. I wish it did.” Especially since his vote had been the tie-breaker, sealing the shelter’s fate. “Look, the town can’t extend the funding past the first of the year, but maybe we can help you find homes for some of the dogs. I can put the word out—I handle the town’s newsletter. And if I hear of anyone looking for a dog”—other than Astrid—“I’ll send them your way.”
“Great,” she mumbled. “Thanks. Sorry for calling you Scrooge.”
He grimaced. Right now he felt like one. “Merry Christmas.”
Her smile was humorless. “Bah humbug.”
Chapter Six
Ally stalked back toward the shelter, her head tucked down against the wind, as she tried to think of some way to fix this. She should have known the jerk who cut their funding was the same bearded guy from this morning. And it didn’t help that he had a good reason for doing it. It just made her feel that much more helpless to undo it.
Yes, she understood that the money had to come from somewhere, but they’d found it in the past, hadn’t they?
She couldn’t escape the feeling that she’d caused this mess for her grandparents somehow. She’d always believed in signs. In messages from the universe. Or maybe she just wanted to believe in them because she wanted to believe her parents were still out there, silent voices guiding her.
She’d come to Pine Hollow in part because it had felt like the universe was pointing her away from New York. Everything had lined up so perfectly—the end of her lease, a gap in her freelance work, her grandparents needing her. But now it was like Pine Hollow was kicking her out—and punishing her grandparents for taking her in at all.
A car rolled to a stop beside her, and Ally glanced over to see her grandparents’ Subaru. For a fraction of a second she thought Gram had gotte
n behind the wheel again—but then the passenger’s side window rolled down and her grandfather leaned across the gearshift. “You need a ride?”
“Hey.” Anger still hummed through her, but some of it unknotted as she reached for the door handle.
Her grandfather had a dry, raspy voice and an impenetrable calm. He’d always been the voice of reason and logic in their family—but he was also the one who would do things just to wind his wife up and then wink at Ally when he got a rise out of her. Ally had always thought she took after him—a planner, pragmatic rather than emotional. But throw one little obstacle in her path and she immediately became her grandmother, storming town hall and calling civil servants Ebenezer.
Copper—the mini mutt with a wizened little old man face that her grandfather insisted was Gram’s dog but was never more than two feet away from Gramps—stood on her grandfather’s lap with his paws on the driver’s side window. When Ally climbed into the warmth of the car, holding her frozen fingers up to the vents, Copper scampered across the stick shift to sniff at her before resuming his post, keeping watch for traffic threats.
“Did you win?” she asked.
Her grandfather’s shrug was nonchalant. “A few dollars. Figured I’d let ’em keep the rest until next time. Your gram called me.”
Ally hadn’t wanted to interrupt her grandfather’s card game when she dropped off the car, so she hadn’t gone inside. She’d also been impatient to get to the town hall—and hopeful she’d have the whole funding thing worked out before her grandfather even heard about it. “Did she tell you she drove to Franklin and back for a dog?”
“Sounds like something she’d do,” he said mildly. “But that wasn’t why she called.”
“She isn’t supposed to be driving.”
“Mm-hmm.” That was her grandfather. He almost never directly contradicted her. He just agreed with her in a way that made her feel foolish.