Last Blue Christmas by Rose Prendeville

Author:Rose Prendeville
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781955643023
Publisher: Eridani Press

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Maggie had planned to take the D’s exam at least three or four times over the years—enough times that she’d lost track of her excuses. Except for the last one. It was late and they’d come off a particularly tense shift. The department shrink would say calling it tense was sublimating or something. During takedown, the perp managed to knock Maggie to the ground and get his hands around her throat, choking her until Max knocked him out with the butt of his gun.

It rattled her. More than rattled her. But when Max asked her to go for a drink after, she turned him down. She couldn’t stand the way he was looking at her, all big piercing eyes and furrowed brow, like she was a fragile baby bird, in need of protection. She told him all she wanted was to get home—to take a bubble bath and drink Sauvignon Blanc in her PJs, and then prepare for the exam the next day.

But she was still on edge, even after the hot bath. Every sound, every silence made her imagination more wildly dramatic.

And then the sounds started coming from inside the walls like some kind of tell-tale heart, clawing and scratching and gnawing its way through the drywall. It was too much. She thought maybe she was having a breakdown. So at one thirty in the morning she had called Max, and he was there by one forty-five.

She wasn’t imagining it, though, he heard the sounds too. In fact, he had arrived moments before a massive black squirrel pushed its head through the wall causing Maggie to scream.

But Max was apparently a squirrel whisperer. Without considering rabies or god-knows-what-else, he corralled the rodent in her bathroom, coaxed it into a towel, and carried it outside to safety in the most impressive catch and release Maggie had ever witnessed. It would have made the Crocodile Hunter proud.

He stayed with her for hours, teasing her back into good spirits. And it occurred to her, somewhere in between rounds of Slapjack and peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, that while they might remain friends if she became a detective, they would no longer be partners. And maybe next time he wouldn’t be so quick to come when she called.

She never showed up for the exam.

Maybe it was an excuse, an easy way to ignore her test anxiety—convincing herself that she didn’t want to be a detective as much as she wanted to keep her partner. But being an excuse didn’t make it any less true.

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