The Trouble with Christmas by Kyle Katrina

Author:Kyle, Katrina [Kyle, Katrina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 2432610822
Publisher: St. Somewhere Books
Published: 2022-12-06T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

After sneaking Cujo out the back for a quick bathroom break, I gave him a handful of treats and let him into the hallway down from the kitchen. I could hear my mother on the phone with Dilly, and I understood why Dilly thought something was wrong with her. She sounded weird, talking in a high-pitched, sing-songy tone that was so far from her normal no-nonsense clip it sounded alien to me. My mother was all business, all the time. With eight active kids she’d had to be. Who was this woman talking about décor and the latest happenings on a reality show?

I hesitated, wondering if I should stay and humor her, eat her pancakes and pretend I liked them. But I couldn’t. Even at thirty-three, I was far from immune to her superpower—guilt. If I stayed, she’d have me spilling the beans about Antoine and Tamara and there was zero chance she wouldn’t overreact about it all.

Norma tugged at my arm and I quietly backed down the stairs. We exited through the valet station. I tensed when I started the engine, hoping my mom couldn’t hear the sound from inside. It was like sneaking out as a teenager all over again. The difference was this time I wasn’t technically doing anything wrong. But when guilt was riding shotgun, that rarely mattered.

We made it down the mountain without passing a single vehicle. When we reached highway 550, I hung a right and headed south toward Durango. Norma had texted Deputy Fuentes on the way down and he’d responded that he couldn’t talk right then but would call her later. In the meantime, I suggested we hunt down Tamara’s crew and talk to them. Norma was able to find all their addresses and some of their cell phone numbers and we decided to try Karen first, since it was likely her car that had been crashed.

The GPS-lady told me to take a right in five-hundred feet. I slowed and flipped on the blinker. When instructed, I turned and drove onto a gravel drive and into a trailer park that had seen better days. The trailers were single-wides with rusted skirting, snow accumulating on their almost flat tops and icicles dripping from the eaves. Older model cars sat out front in the elements. A few trailers had attached carports, but most residents parked in a scraped patch of yard abutting the structures. Most of the trailers were decorated with Christmas lights, and a group of kids ranging from toddler to teenager played underneath a bare cottonwood tree near the river.

The GPS directed me toward the back of the park to a tan trailer with a tiny wooden porch and a basket of dead flowers hanging from a hook. The parking spot was empty, so I pulled the Escalade into it, snow crunching under the tires, and we hopped out. We climbed the four steps to the side-door and knocked.

Karen’s trailer was one of the few without Christmas decorations, but through the small window on the door I saw a Christmas tree lit with colored lights against the wall.

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