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I turned to my younger brother, Ethan, who was pouring a round of shots for a rowdy table by the dartboard. “Remind me what day you’re leaving for New York, again?”
“I’m not,” Ethan said, before surging into the crowd with his drink-laden tray.
Helpful but unenlightening, which summed up my brother completely. Every year, Bethany Albright sent Ethan a front-row ticket for theNutcracker, and every year Ethan took a twelve-hour bus ride to New York to watch Bethany dance before making the twelve-hour bus ride home again a few days later. This had been the way of things for the past five years.
That Ethan would not be making the trip this year was only slightly less incomprehensible to me than the fact that he ever made the trip to begin with. The only rational explanation was unrequited love. Maybe this year he had come to his senses?
I looked to Jasmine for an explanation, but she just shrugged. “You know Ethan. He doesn’t say much.”
I did know Ethan. Better than anyone. But that didn’t mean I understood him. The boy was opaque.
“Well, at least that takes care of four of your double-shift days,” I told Jasmine.
She shook her head. “I don’t know how to break it to you, babe, but this changes exactly nothing. You had Ethan scheduled for all of those days, anyway. We need another person, it’s that simple. Things have changed around here, or haven’t you noticed?”
I grimaced. Oh, I’d noticed. Goat’s Tavern had always done good business in the summer, and I could generally count on a thru-hiker sticking around for a week to earn a quick wad of cash, or college students home from school. Winter had predictably slowed down every year, until my friend Emma took over as mayor. She’d made it her mission to bring tourism to Hart’s Ridge year-round, to breathe new life and, most importantly, jobs into a town that had long relied on cows and chickens. And she’d succeeded.
Mostly, I thought that was a good thing. But this year I was having trouble keeping up. A good problem to have, but still a problem.
“Hey, if you want to hire someone to help out around here, go for it,” I said. “And good luck with that.” Because it wasn’t like I hadn’t tried.
The door banged open and two late-thirties men all but fell inside, looking over their shoulders like the devil was chasing them. Which probably wasn’t far from the truth. The devil had horns, supposedly, and so did Goat.
“Dammit, Luke, do something about your pet!” one of them hollered, confirming my suspicions.
I raised my arms in awhatcha gonna dogesture. “He’s not my pet.”
Dogs and cats were pets, to my way of thinking. Farm animals couldn’t be pets, and since Goat was a farm animal, he couldn’t be a pet. I had found him as a baby, left behind by a wealthy city family who had tried homesteading for two months before throwing in the towel. Goat had stuck close to me ever since. Likely because I fed him regularly, sheltered him from bobcats, coyotes, and inclement weather, and gave him scratches between his shoulder blades, exactly where he liked it.
But Goat didn’t fetch or snuggle or anything else a pet would do. His favorite hobby was headbutting people behind the knee when they least expected it. More than a hobby, really. It was his life’s purpose, and he was very good at it.
So, no. Goat wasn’t a pet.
He was a psychopath.
But he wasmypsychopath.
Jasmine arched an eyebrow at me, waiting.
I eased away from the bar. “I’ll bed him down for the night.”
“Take the trash out while you’re at it.” Because even though she wasn’t the boss, that had never stopped Jasmine from bossing me.
I swung through the kitchen, grabbing a garbage bag with each hand without pausing, and exited through the back. Outside the snow was still falling softly, melting into the gravel parking lot but sticking to the grass. By tomorrow there would be an inch of accumulation here in the valley, at most. It would be much deeper in the mountains that surrounded the town like a halo.
After depositing the trash into the bear-proof dumpster, I looked around, careful to keep my back to the fence because Goat was not above headbutting the hand that fed him.
It would do no good to call his name, I knew. Goat never heeded. Instead, I cocked my head, listening. When I heard the sound of hooves on gravel, I dug into my pocket for the bag of dried corn and gave it a shake. That was usually enough to bring Goat running.
Not tonight, though.
Which meant Goat was stalking a new victim.
Cursing under my breath, I rounded the building to the front at a slow jog. And then I saw her. The woman looked like a Christmas present with her green winter coat and matching knit hat, her red hair streaming around her as she lifted her face to the sky, tongue out to catch snowflakes.
Completely unaware of the psychotic goat twenty yards behind her.
It happened too fast for me to think. Goat charged; so did I. I called a warning, and she looked up, puzzled, then let out a yelp when she realized the danger. There was no time to explain. I scooped her off her feet a millisecond before Goat could make contact, spinning us both out of the way.
