High Country Christmas. Cynthia Thomason

       CHAPTER ONE

      THE NUMBERS WERE beginning to blur. Ava checked the clock on the wall and was shocked to see the hands indicating one o’clock in the morning. She’d been at this for three hours.

      The job would have been much easier if she’d had access to the computers of her deceased father’s paper mill company. But the current owner, her uncle Rudy, had denied her request. So Ava spent long hours trying to decipher the financial status of the business by slogging through ledgers the now-retired bookkeeper had painstakingly entered with a number two pencil. And all Ava had determined so far was that something wasn’t right. The numbers weren’t adding up, literally and figuratively.

      Elsie Vandergarten had been a crackerjack bookkeeper in the days when accountants were called by that job-specific name. Ava’s father, Raymond Cahill, had trusted her with accounting for every dollar the company took in. A software technician had begun transcribing the figures into the company’s computer more than five years ago to satisfy Raymond’s techie brother, Rudy. A newly hired comptroller had replaced Elsie when she retired over a year ago when Raymond died.

      And now, struggling to find out why her mother’s share of the profits had dwindled, Ava had taken it upon herself to examine the company books. Her brothers, Carter and Jace, trusted Ava because she’d always been known as the smartest of the three siblings. The boys figured she would unearth the truth about the creative bookkeeping, and she didn’t want to disappoint them, or herself.

      Ava leaned back in her desk chair, appreciating the comforting creak the chair’s gears made. For three hours her office at the Sawtooth Children’s Home had been reassuringly quiet. Nearly everyone else who lived on the sprawling campus was in bed or preparing for Monday’s classes. Ava dropped her glasses onto the desk blotter, closed the ledger and stuck it in a large bottom-tier drawer of her classic mahogany desk. She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands.

      “Whatever you’re doing, Uncle Rudy, you are covering your tracks very well,” she said aloud. “But nobody’s perfect and I’ll find it.”

      Time for bed, she thought to herself.

      She stood from her desk and headed for the office exit. In moments she would be in her personal living quarters, a small but cheerful one-bedroom apartment carved out of unused space for the home’s chief administrator until she could find a nice house of her own. Having only been in this new job since September, Ava hadn’t yet had time for real estate shopping. But after living independently for so long in Charlotte, she was determined not to move back into her old room at the family farm. She stopped in front of a decorative mirror in the office to check the damages of her three-hour vigil.

      “Oh no, not another one,” she said, lifting her hand to grasp the spiky, coarse white hair that stood out from the others in her dark wispy bangs. “That’s the third one this month.”

      Ava didn’t consider herself vain, but really—three gray hairs in a month! She was only thirty-six years old, in good health and completely satisfied with her decision to leave the corporate world of finance in Charlotte. Returning to her mountain home of Holly River to manage the children’s facility, which had become a North Carolina treasure, had been the right decision for many reasons. Ava brought her professional business training to keep the school on a steady keel, and she enjoyed her association with the children and staff.

      She yanked the offending hair from the others and raked her fingers through the bangs which reached just to her eyebrows. Another quick look convinced her that all the other hairs