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Well, that pretty much summed it up. “Yeah, probably. If someone’s mad, it’s usually at me.”
“Because Hale’s a saint?”
Van wouldn’t put it that way, but the sheriff had a point. “He doesn’t piss people off the way I do.”
“You know you can do therapy online now,” the sheriff offered. “Or there’s a therapist in Alamosa.”
The sheriff was kind of an asshole. “Is there anything I can get you, Sheriff?”
Nate sighed and straightened his Stetson. “Let me know if you think of anything. I’m going to send Cam out to the lodge to find out if anyone’s been asking about you. I suspect some people up there knew where you were staying.”
He’d made a couple of friends while working at the ski lodge as a bartender. “Yes, and I left that cabin as my forwarding address. I probably should have gotten a PO box, but I don’t get a lot of mail. I’ll let the lodge know to forward everything to my brother’s place in Dallas. I don’t know where we’ll be this time next year.”
Nate looked surprised. “I thought Hale was looking for a cabin. I saw him talking to Marie the other day and she had her realtor face on.”
Marie Warner was Bliss’s all around everything. She and her wife, Teeny, ran the all-purpose store called the Trading Post. It sold everything from groceries to sporting goods. They also ran a tea shop, a bookstore, and when property got sold in the area, Marie handled that, too. “Hale is looking for a project after he finishes with the ones he has lined up. That’s all. He wants to try his hand at potentially flipping a cabin. Hopefully one that’s not haunted.”
Nate grimaced. “He should be careful then. Lots of murder around here. Well, I hope you two stay for a while. And when you get tired of bartending, there’s a deputy spot open. A couple, really, since Cam wants to go part time.”
Nate turned.
There was no way he was going to be a deputy. “Did you forget about the whole rap sheet thing?”
Nate didn’t look back, simply held up a hand. “Nope. Just don’t care.”
He watched the sheriff walk away. He would not be a good deputy. Not in any way. But he had started thinking about what he could do here in Bliss if they stayed.
The idea of letting his brother down gnawed at him. He’d promised Jake he would come back.
All of his life he’d truly only had Hale and Jake to count on, and he felt like he was going to have to choose between them at some point.
“Hey,” a voice whispered from behind him.
He turned but no one was there. Shit. Could a booth that moved around be haunted? “Uh, hello?”
“Keep it quiet, son. You never know who’s listening.”
“Yeah, well, right now I don’t know who’s talking, and it’s kind of freaking me out.”
The door at the back of the booth slid open slightly, and he was facing an older man in a trucker hat. Mel Hughes was a slender man in his sixties. He’d recently adopted a big dog with floppy ears and the look of a hunting breed. He claimed the dog could detect alien beings, and Van had been glad when the dog merely accepted him because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what happened when an alien was detected.
“It’s only me and Ripley,” Mel said with a nod to his hound. “Something’s happening and I need you to back me up. Someone from the government is going to come and ask you about me.”
“They are?”
“They are.” Mel’s tone was low and grave. “Sent out a woman this time, but I can tell she’s military. Even looks a bit like someone I knew back in the day, so she could be an alien taking another form. You should tell her you don’t know me. Never heard of me.”
He barely knew the man, was the tiniest bit scared of him because while everyone told him Mel was a sweetheart, he also seemed like a dude who knew how to handle various weapons and maybe shouldn’t have any weapons at all. “Will do.”
Mel nodded and slipped back away, Ripley wagging her tail behind him.
He probably wouldn’t get this weirdness when he was working at the business offices of DMW…WDM…it was a lot of initials. His brother’s company was a whole bunch of initials, and he would never get that right and how could he work a nine to five and…
Oh. Well, that was a gorgeous woman. Damn. She was pretty and he’d never seen her before, so she was likely here for the festival.
She had a phone to her ear but she smiled as she slid it back into her pocket. She looked adorable in a puffy jacket, dark curls peeking out of the knit cap on her head. She looked around, pausing at the smaller tree that stood near the big Christmas tree the town put up each year. In addition to the tree, there was also a display of all the other holidays to be celebrated at this time of year. The lovely symbols for Hanukkah, Mawlid al-Nabi, Rohatsu, and the winter solstice weren’t what the pretty lady was staring at. Nope. It was the smallish tree decorated in carved beets she was examining.
