Up to Snow Good - Kelly Collins
Chapter One
Lauren
Lauren Matthews stood behind the registration desk, wishing she could pound her head against the wall instead of smile into the phone. Her mother used to say a smile helped a voice sound chipper, but all it was doing now was making her jaw hurt.
“I understand, Mrs. Pitkin. No, there is no snow in the forecast, but the lodge is a lovely place to vacation, regardless.” She listened to all the reasons the family of five couldn’t come and deleted their reservation before she hung up.
The Robinson’s sat on the couch in front of the fire, where she had relaxed countless times. The smell of pine sat thick in the air. She could almost see her mother’s face in Arlene Robinson’s, the guest from Tampa, Florida, celebrating the fortieth wedding anniversary to her husband, Bill.
The chandelier attracted her attention. Six ten-point bucks’ antlers supported a ring of eighteen lights. The cords inconspicuously wrapped in black chain led up to the ceiling. She could hardly look at it and not think of the day her father hung it. He had stood on the top rung of the ladder, looking down at her from that dizzying height with a hopeful smile for their future in Moss Creek, Colorado. Now, as she surveyed the lobby of Sunshine Lodge, she could see that the echoes of her childhood lived in every corner.
It seemed like so long ago. Her tears were so ready to push forward as she imagined her mother, on that last day, looking at her from her bed, red hair faded, pale expression drained, and a sad smile that was the last she could offer her daughter.
Lauren wiped the tears away and tidied the registration counter where her mother, Judith, would have been beaming joyfully, and feeling blessed to be alive, in love, and living in Colorado.
Lauren shoved the memories aside. She wasn’t her mother, and she didn’t feel blessed. There were too many things on her mind to worry about. Love had no place in her life, and she had no time for pointless emotions.
The clogged gutters needed fixing, the buckling hardwood floor in the game room was a hazard to all who walked across it, and two of her employees snuck into the stables nightly, doing who knew what. On top of all that, two hundred dollars kept disappearing every month.
She shook her head as she swiped the screen of her tablet, one spreadsheet replacing the other with her family holdings at her fingertips. Everything they’d come to Colorado and created sat in columns of numbers on a digital screen, but those numbers were getting smaller, causing a cold feeling to stir in her belly.
She sighed and turned to look out the window at the Rocky Mountains, waiting for a miracle. It was once a snowcapped playground for locals and visitors from all over the country. Families, fitness buffs, and wealthy fashionistas enjoyed the powdered snow and the pines as their seasonal celebration.
Those things seemed lost to her in that odd and melancholy moment. The snow hadn’t come back to Moss Creek as it had the year before, and that had been the best year in a streak of five warmer ones. Those brown jagged cliffs in the mountainside had their own natural beauty, filled with pines and coyotes and deer, but they also seemed a terrible omen of the changes that were coming. For Sunshine Lodge, those changes meant a slow but sure death.
While the horses were still popular among the girls and children, nothing brought in visitors like the snow. It seemed like it would take a miracle to bring that back, at least enough to put the lodge on track.
She caught a glance of herself in the mirror as she walked by. Still in her late twenties, she could see her mother’s reflection more than her own. She was the spitting image of the brave woman who’d helped create the lodge, and whose spirit seemed to live in the walls, the floors, and the air, but whose presence seemed to fade with every passing day.
Pushing it out of her heart and mind, she walked out the French doors and into the backyard. She couldn’t escape the uneasiness—a strange nervousness she couldn’t name. There were plenty of reasons for it, but even the fate of Sunshine Lodge wasn’t the cause of her anxiety.
The Colorado winter spread out in front of her, a deep breath of cool air kissing her cheeks. A hawk circled overhead, as blue jays sang