Up to Snow Good - Kelly Collins Page 0,36
and tell you to go against your heart. You can take this is as an omen and see it as the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that’s fine. If you feel that way, I’ll help you accomplish whatever you want to achieve, but you might also be overreacting.”
“Overreacting? If there’s even the slightest chance that it could happen again, I wouldn’t call that overreacting.”
“Then close the place now,” Max said. “Look around you, you live on a mountain in a changing world. Life changes here, as it does anywhere. There will be new challenges, new doubts, but our choice will be whether to rise to those challenges or to shrink from them. Whatever you choose, I’ll support you. I want you to make that decision with confidence and care. We’ve come so far, and we’re so close. I’m not sure how but look at what we’ve overcome already; all that history between our fathers, the changing weather, and now this. It may tempt you to stop, to give up, but if word gets out about that cat, and it will, and we shut down as a result, nobody will ever come here again.”
Lauren knew he was right, and the thought of letting go of her family home went too hard against the grain. She wanted to succeed, to survive, and she wanted Max to be right. It was getting harder to believe, but she mustered the strength and nodded, wiping a lone tear from her eye.
“What about an extra guard or something?”
Max nodded. “We’ll monitor the area. We can get a ranger out here, but my guess is that it won’t happen again.”
“Well, you’d better be right.” She let go of a hysterical laugh. “Maybe we should change it to a spa and weight loss center.” She attempted a weak smile. “Come visit Sunshine Lodge and lose weight, one bite at a time.”
Max shook his head and went back outside to deal with the disposal of the cat and see to the construction workers.
Getting them back on track was important if they wanted to meet their completion date. The petting zoo pen was going up, but the other booths were dragging behind schedule.
Lauren went to the lobby reception desk to take up her usual station. Swiping her tablet, she was once again looking over columns of numbers that assembled to tell a new and different story, to write a new chapter in the lodge’s history, maybe even a historical document showing its demise.
Ruthie walked by with her eyes fixed on Lauren, and her expression almost bursting with worry. Lauren followed her, knowing she’d hear about it, eventually.
“What, Ruthie?”
“You know what child. Dat man have you all turned around.”
“Did you see what he did? He saved my life, and you still don’t trust him?”
“You are not wrong. We can’t have children on the mountain. He only wants money.”
“Ruthie, he’s the one who signed the loan. If he was untrustworthy, he’d be encouraging me to shut down, use the loan against me. Is it so hard to believe that he’s a good and decent person? It’s Christmas time, so stop being a Grinch and become a Cindy Lou Who.”
She shook her head, obviously confused. “You’ll see, and let’s hope when you open your eyes, it’s not too late!”
Chapter Thirty
Max
Max made sure construction was back on track before taking some time out to hit the internet. Lauren had raised some good points, and he thought more research on the matter of big cat attacks would reassure, if not enlighten.
These kinds of attacks happened from time to time, in locations all over the United States. Bigger populations were pushing into otherwise natural areas, forcing the cats and the humans into contact. Cats were becoming more emboldened and desperate as their resources shrank.
Moss Creek hadn’t expanded in that way, and the lodge stood just where it had been. It seemed like a fluke, and there wasn’t much information to show the place wouldn’t be perfectly safe. At least as safe as any such place could be.
It brought his father to his mind and how things could be as they appeared. Random balances and imbalances in nature are resolved, old feuds are healed over. It was easy to believe the cat was a coincidence, and that his father’s anger had come and finally gone in the same way. Whatever had changed his mind, just as whatever had sent that big cat into their midst, made Max glad things had worked out as well as