Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

I vy Winters should have known the Ivy Effect would make an appearance sooner rather than later. It had chased her through elementary school when she received the award for outstanding penmanship, which ended with her hair catching fire on the ceremony candles and all the boys laughing at her. It struck again at graduation when her homemade gown fell apart like Cinderella’s at midnight. Not good when you opted for pasties and a thong.

Not the way you wanted to deliver your valedictorian speech.

And now.

Of course, there had been other incidents but to list them all out would take all Christmas.

Why couldn’t she catch a break? Just one. It’s all it would take for her to get her feet under her once and for all.

Silence settled around her, but it was next to impossible to gather solace from the quiet when she was always waiting for the other proverbial shoe to drop.

With a deep sigh, she folded back the edges of her oversized comforter and patted Max’s soft head—her gran’s aging golden retriever. He snuggled close to her with a tiny whine, offering what he could in the ways of consoling.

“Why can’t we just skip Christmas, Max?” It left a nasty taste in her mouth just saying the word. She looked down into soulful brown eyes and smiled. “No answer, huh? Yeah, me neither.”

Ivy rolled to her side and pulled the covers over her head. A burst of light filled the little pocket of space beneath the covers and she sighed heavily as she read the text message for a third time that morning. The millionth since receiving it twenty-seven days, six hours and some odd minutes ago. She wasn’t desperate enough to count them or the seconds that had ticked by since her now ex-fiancé bid her au revoir via text message, as she stood on the curb and watched her house burn to cinders, and on Thanksgiving night no less.

“Bastard.” She hoped karma had his name in big bold, black letters.

Ivy threw back the comforter and immediately shrank back from the cold. Low embers shimmered in the darkness from the fireplace opposite the bed. She reached over to flip the lamp on. Nothing. “Still out. Great.” The snowstorm that greeted her coming in from New York City the night before had arrived in Dixen with a big huff of wintry energy.

The angry winds seemed to have died down. Through the window to the right of her bed, she could see snow drift softly against the large picture window, but she couldn’t bring herself to appreciate the beauty of the fine feathery fluff. Early morning hues of gray and white gradually brightened the room. Just enough for her to see the craggy outlines of the bare trees beyond her window.

She sighed and flipped her phone off, unable to bear the words on an empty stomach.

“Coffee. Maybe a doughnut too. What do you say, Max?”

On one hand, maybe she should have returned to Seattle after her job interview in New York City instead of giving in to her family and coming to her grandmother’s.

While on the other, what else was she going to do over the holidays? Return to her parent’s house and wait by the phone praying she got the job like a teenager over summer break? Not even a possibility. Her mother baked from sun up till sun down starting the day after Thanksgiving and didn’t stop until New Year’s Day. All that cheer and merrymaking…

Ivy’s stomach gurgled.

No thank you. It was better she stayed away and did not pass on her Scrooge attitude to anyone. She would wait for the insurance claim to go through, rebuild her home, refocus on work and firmly shove her cheating ex-fiancé from her mind. He was already out of her life so that was half the battle. The job in New York City would take care of the latter two.

Her cheeks were growing numb and her fingers started to turn cold. Still, she lay there, staring into the dying embers in the fireplace.

Thwack.

Ivy bolted upright, the blankets around her neck pooling at her waist.

Her heart thudded and she gripped the covers.

There it came again. A solid thud as though someone pounded a sledgehammer against wood. The front door? No, it sounded like it came from the side.

Three more booming cracks whipped through the quiet morning and she dashed aside the thick comforters her gran had piled on when the power went in the middle of the night. Feeling around in the dark with her toes, she found something warm to slip on her feet.

Ivy clutched her phone as her stomach did a topsy-turvy nosedive. She slowly peeled back the edge of the lace curtain from the window enough to peer down into the side yard.

A man stood just beyond the eaves. Tall for sure with shoulders wider than a barn door. He raised his hands above his head and the pre-dawn light glinted off a sharp edge.

She pressed closer and swallowed when she realized a handle was attached to the shiny part.

Her eyes widened. Whoever it was had an ax.

White flakes obscured most of her view. She dodged around and tried for a better look but no luck. A thick blanket of snow spread over the entire property and the grounds beyond the extension of the three-story bed and breakfast. Between the inn and mountains on the far side nestled Dixen Lake. When the sun crested over those white peaks, the frozen surface would glisten in the light like a million fallen stars and would light up the entire side of the house.

She squinted into the fading darkness. Were those footprints? She pushed a little closer to the window.

“They are! Max, get ready.” Ivy looked over her shoulder to find the dog sound asleep. “Big help you are!” Wholly exasperated, she turned back to the window. From this angle, she spotted large boot prints that led from the side of the house and around in the direction of the back kitchen door. “Who would be out there at this time?”

Gran hadn’t mentioned anyone being at the inn already so it couldn’t be a guest. She leaned in. Close enough where she could outline the frosted fingers of winter along the edges of the glass and her nose pressed into the cold crystal. “Come on. Where did you go?”

Ivy shuffled her feet around the corner of the nightstand and craned her neck to the side for a better look. A thick thatch of brown hair poked out from the edge of the veranda right before a set of wide shoulders encased in red plaid and a muscular back came into view.

She pulled back and let the curtain fall into place when the stranger craned his neck around and looked in her direction.

“Crap!” After several seconds passed, she eased back to the window for another glance. “What kind of crazy man is out at this time of the morning?” He was gone. She didn’t know if that made her happy or more nervous.

With how her heart raced, the safer bet rested on the latter. Ivy fell to her hands and knees. Shuffling with a phone in one hand did not make for the stealth mode she aimed for. She scooted along the floor, nearly toppling over a ladder and stacked buckets of paints. Her gran’s crazy idea of waiting until almost a week before Christmas to spruce up the joint, as her gran put it, could be the death of her. The evidence of her claim stood outside right now, ax in hand.

Ivy stopped by her grandmother’s closed door. Not a sound and Max took her absence in bed as an invitation to spread out. Some guard dog.

Nothing kicked off the holiday season like a good jolt of horror and adrenaline. She should have snagged up her brother’s offer to get her a stun gun for her birthday. “Ivy, you’re a damn fool,” she reprimanded herself.

At the top of the stairs, she slowly shifted to her feet and made it down the hall to the kitchen without tripping over the wads of painter's plastic in ten steps when it normally took twenty. The distinct sound of wood splintering carried through the darkness above her head.

“What the hell? Chopping wood?” Who the heck went around chopping wood for people in the middle of the night? Maybe they needed the wood to burn the bodies. Hers and Gran’s. Poor Max.

She shook her head. The early hour coupled with her imagination fueled by too many hours watching cop shows played multiple murder scenarios over in her head. She didn’t want to be wrapped in painters’ plastic. That last few crime novels she’d read had scenes that came back to haunt her too.

Ivy popped her head up fast enough to grab the cordless phone off the kitchen counter. But nothing when she hit the power button. “Genius. No power means no phone.”

Knees pressed into her chest and her back against the glass window of the kitchen stove, she opted for her cell phone. If a wood-chopping loony was the way she had to go, someone needed to know what to look for in the mulch come springtime.

“Great.” The battery sign flashed on the screen. One bar left.

“Hello, Dixen Sheriff’s office.”

The female voice sounded way too chirpy for the crazy morning hour.

Holding her hand over the mouthpiece, Ivy whispered in a muffled voice, “Hello. I want to report a break-in.”

It grew quiet beyond the window. She rose to her knees and peeked over the kitchen sink for another look, but retreated to the safety of the shadows when a silhouette passed. Huddled by the front of the stove again, Ivy returned her attention to the phone. “I take that back. He’s not exactly inside. There’s a crazy man in red plaid cutting firewood outside my house. Who does that kind of thing?” She flared out the word crazy to make sure the lady on the other end understood the situation louder than she’d intended.

Half her attention on the window and the other on the phone call, Ivy cringed when the shadow paused by the window.

“Oh, shit.” She drew out in a shaky breath with her head in her hands.

“Ivy? Ivy Sunday Winters. Is that really you? I didn’t recognize the number on the ID. When did you get back into town? You were due two days ago. Thought maybe you weren’t coming, hon. Are you staying with your gran at the inn? Well, silly me. Of course you are.” The lady on the other end of the line answered herself before Ivy could. “She said to be on the lookout for you.”

“Mrs. December?”

“One and only. When did you get back into town, hon?”

“I..uh…last night,” she whispered, craning her neck for another look outside. Did she lock the back door last night after lugging her tired body in well after midnight?

“Oh, good. Listen when you come into town stop by and see Mr. December’s at the Slice of Heaven, eh? He’ll be thrilled to see you again. It’s been ages. Of course, it wouldn’t be Christmas without him and Hardt at it again. This year they didn’t even wait until after Thanksgiving to start up their antics.” Ivy felt the other lady settling in for a long talk. An audible tsk sounded through the phone’s speaker and Ivy fought a scream of frustration as the other woman filled her in on the town’s gossip.

Dixen, Alaska was a quirky town tucked in the hollow between two snow-capped mountains an hour north of Anchorage, and her people were known to take three things very seriously: tradition, Christmas, and baking. Well, hockey too.

“It’s good to see some things never change. Who do you think will win the bake-off this year?” Ivy crept up to her knees. All seemed quiet now.

“Last year we came within a snowball’s throw to knocking the stockings off that Hardt. If you’d been here, you’d have loved how those blubbery cheeks of his huffed out in surprise when it came down to the final vote last Christmas. But those two have yet to break their tying streak. At this rate, those two will be feuding well into the grave. But we have plenty of time to talk about them and the annual town party. I’m so happy you’ll be here for the annual Dixcemberfest!” There was a bit of rueful chagrin, one Ivy knew all too well from her past Ivy school teacher’s tone and she cringed. The fact was, Ivy wouldn’t be here now if she’d had better luck and fairer siblings.

Longer story short, if her Facebook updates were anything to go by, her family stood firmly by the belief their grandmother no longer operated with a full set of cards. Without a clue as to what the other seven Winters siblings were up to, her name landed at the top of the list as the most eligible to spend her holidays shoveling snow and painting walls before the mass of guests descended on the seasonal bed and breakfast for Christmas. She’d accepted her fate on one condition—her name be moved to the bottom of the list for the next seven years.

She failed to see any proof Gran needed her help, but they— meaning everyone but her—found Ivy to be the perfect spy as the favorite grandchild with her job description as a residential re-developer.

It didn’t help her case that her house went up in flames over Thanksgiving and she needed a place to live until she landed her job in New York City.

“Promise you’ll stop in and see us before all the commotion kicks up. I’ll be done with my shift before noon. Plus, I have a job for you. Thought of you the second your gran mentioned you were coming.”

Ivy flinched. The last thing she wanted was anything that would hold her here longer.

Ivy raised her eyes to see a big shadow looming over the opposite wall from the window and swallowed hard. “Um… Mrs. December. I might not make it. Is the sheriff there, or anyone with a badge, really?”

“Oh, why’s that, hon?”

“The ax-murdering woodchopper at my front door.”