Page 38 of 15 Summers Later

“I’m not sure whether I can make it yet.” She sipped her coffee, avoiding her friend’s gaze.

“Why not? Do you have plans I don’t know about?”

She thought about making something up but that seemed cowardly. Besides, Nic had been her best friend for fifteen years. She always seemed to know when Madi was lying.

“No plans, other than doing my best to avoid my sister, whatever it takes. You know if Leona comes to dinner, she will drag Ava with her and I really don’t feel like sitting down at the table with a woman whom I suspect would be remarkably adept at jabbing a steak knife between my ribs.”

She frowned. “Ava loves you dearly. You know that.”

If her sister loved her, she would have respected her privacy. She never would have capitalized on their shared trauma.

She didn’t say any of this to her roommate. In truth, she was heartily sick of talking about Ava.

“Should I tell my mom you can’t make it, then? She will be so disappointed not to see you but I have no doubt at all she could find another hungry mouth to feed.”

While she knew Nicole didn’t mean the words literally, Madi knew they were true. Like many small towns in the West, Emerald Creek was an unfortunate dichotomy, with millionaires snatching up land all over town, especially along the river bottoms and the banks of the Emerald Creek reservoir. Their elaborate Western lodges, gleaming glass and hand-hewn logs, were sometimes planted next door to shell-shocked, long-time locals like Paul Lancaster, who were still trying to figure out what had happened to their cozy rural community.

The workers in these tourism-heavy areas who served in the fancy restaurants and worked at the hotel front desks often couldn’t afford to live in the same towns where they were employed because housing prices were completely out of reach.

Madi suspected that some of the animals they had already helped at the Emerald Creek Animal Rescue had been abandoned by owners who could no longer afford their care.

“I’ll come, since we’ll be celebrating Sierra’s birthday next week. If the cost of showing up for that is putting up with my sister for a few hours, I can handle it. Contrary to popular belief, I am capable of acting like an adult occasionally.”

“I never said you weren’t,” Nicki protested.

No one had said it, but Madi felt like a whiny child, anyway.

“I should head over to the barn. I think I need to go hang out with the animals for a few hours. They, at least, probably won’t want to talk about Ava’s book.”

Nicki laughed, then winced at the sound before returning to her toast.

The kitten mewed from her crate in the corner. Madi picked her up, grabbed the kitten milk substitute and headed out for the barn. She would feed her there, she decided.

When she pushed open the door, she was greeted by a cacophony of animals, as well as a wave by Ed Hyer, one of the dozen or so volunteers who helped out.

“Morning, boss.”

“Sorry it’s taken me so long to get here. I had to work unexpectedly. Thanks for filling in for me. Anything interesting been going on?”

“Everybody has been fed and watered. We had playtime with the senior dogs and I was about to let the young ones into the yard.”

“Okay. I can do that as soon as I feed this little girl.”

He looked with interest at the kitten. “She’s new, isn’t she?”

“Yes.” She told him the story of Charla Pope finding the kitten in her flower bed and of Luke giving her a preliminary exam.

“He’s such a great guy, isn’t he?” Ed said.

Madi tried not to remember Luke’s arms around her the night before at the tavern or that light in his eyes this morning. “Yes. He really is.”

“Oh, we got a phone call from some campers who claimed they saw a couple of stray dogs up in the Sawtooths on the road to Ghost Lake. They looked pretty rough, apparently. One had a collar but the other one didn’t. I was thinking about heading up there off-roading this afternoon to see if I can track them down.”

This wasn’t the first report of stray dogs living in the mountains that she had heard. Sometimes they wandered away from campers, sometimes they escaped their owners in town or sometimes people abandoned them in the mountains, thinking they could fend for themselves.

It usually didn’t end well for the dogs in any of those scenarios.

“Sounds good. Can you fit a crate in the back of your side-by-side in case you can find them?”

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