Christmas in Dogtown Read Online Free PDF

drowned out her ringtone, but Resa had it set to vibrate as well. The shaking danced the phone off the little White Castle dressing table and onto the floor. By the time Resa scrambled for it, the call had gone to voice mail.
    Jeanne’s voice was annoyingly chipper first thing in the morning. “Resa, where are you? I can see out the back window there are people already lined up at Madere’s and Emile isn’t answering his home phone or the store. He’s probably on his way, honey, but could you run over and open for him? Stop by tonight for dinner, why don’t you, and bring Chandler ?”
    Yeah, well, she had the impression Chan didn’t plan to go anywhere with her. The more she’d thought about his “I’m Dogtown” comment after she got home yesterday, the more ticked off she’d gotten. It felt a lot like an ultimatum: If you aren’t Dogtown, you aren’t in my life. If you don’t want Dogtown, you don’t want me and I don’t want you.
    Why did Dogtown have to be all or nothing? Resa stopped on her way out the door, surprised. She’d never thought about it, but that was the reason she’d tried so hard to get away. It wasn’t to escape her family or the meat business. It was Dogtown itself, or that mystical th ing in the air here.
    You couldn’t be from Dogtown and live somewhe re else. You had to be Dogtown.
    And why did it bother her so much that Chandler Caillou had written her off as not Dogtown?
    Jeanne was too chipper early in the morning, and Resa was too damned serious.
    She stuffed her phone in her jeans pocket, locked the trailer door behind her, and walked to Madere’s, using her key to let herself in the back.
    Everything was neat, just as they’d left it yesterday when she helped close up after the disturbing kiss in the truck . That niggling wrongness tickled the back of Resa’s mind again, and she shoved it aside. Uncle Aim was just running late. He’d come breezing in any minute with a joke or a snatch of a Cajun ballad.
    For the next three hours, she handled customers and in spare moments refilled the case from the big refrigerator in back. By noon, with no word from Uncle Aim, she gave herself permission to be officially concerned.
    When her phone rang at 12:30 and his name showed up on the screen, she realized exactly how worried she’d been. The relief drained through her, turning her muscles shaky. She held the phone to her ear. “Where are you? Are you all right? You scared me.”
    Uncle Aim’s voice echoed, tinny and distant. And serious. “Leave the store with your cousins, niece. Come to my house. Don’t tell anybody where you’re going, and do it now.”
    Huh? “Why—”
    “Come now, Theresa Ann Madere.”
    “Wait…why…?” The connection broke.
    Crap. Everybody in Dogtown was a freakin’ drama queen.
    Resa lured her cousins Janelle and Darcy into Madere duty with a feigned headache and the promise that they could take home whatever smoked gar was left at the end of the day. She turned right at the crossroads bear totem and drove a winding set of backroads to her grandfather’s small woodframe house, set back from the road under a cluster of live oaks dripping Spanish moss.
    Uncle Aim’s pickup sat in the drive, but he didn’t answer the door. Resa didn’t know whether to be pissed off or worried, so she settled for something in between.
    “Uncle Aim!” She walked around the side yard and spotted movement from the densely forested, swampy thicket beyond. “Uncle Aim, is that you?”
    If he thought she was wading into that muck, he was nuts. She had no desire to be Dogtown’s latest victim of Boars Gone Wild.
    A rustle of branches drew her farther into the thicket, and then she saw it. Except there were no bears in South Louisiana , were there?
    She froze in place as it ambled out of the trees, swiping at a bush with a huge, clawed paw. Had Uncle Aim been killed by the bear? Had his accident finally happened?
    Yet even as she asked the questions, she knew the