Sneak Peek: SLAY BELLS RING

Chapter One

Nothing says Christmas in Central Texas like cedar fever.

And deer season.

“Oh, man,” my friend Quinn said as she blew her nose for the tenth time that morning. She’d sneezed so many times, her red, curly hair was coming loose from the bandanna she’d tied around her head to keep it out of her eyes, and her eyes were watering. We were on the back porch of my farmhouse, getting ready for the Christmas Market. She’d come to help me make mistletoe bundles, which were a top seller, while I put together cedar swags. “I’m going to have to start allergy shots or something,” she said after another round of sneezes.

“Need an antihistamine?”

“I’ve taken three already,” she complained. “I hate being involved in the reproductive lives of trees.”

“It’s ragweed for me. And oak trees. But so far I’m immune to cedar,” I told her. As I spoke, Chuck, my apricot rescue poodle, came loping around the side of the house, followed by Pip, Quinn’s gangly rescue puppy, who had morphed into a large, extremely friendly black lab mix.

“Lucky dogs. It should be too cold for pollen!” she complained, and I couldn’t disagree with her. There was a decided nip in the air as I gathered a bunch of cedar boughs on a wood table and tied them together with wire, then added a bow of red ribbon. My evening plans involved lighting a fire in my fireplace and then settling down with mulled cider and popcorn, possibly with Christmas carols playing. It was a delightful change from the warm weather that had lingered well into December this year.

A Blue Norther had swept through Buttercup the day before, bringing enough cold air that I was able to light the first fire of the season and make a pot of hot cocoa. My boyfriend, Tobias Brandt, the local vet, had come by after a long day doing rounds, and as Christmas music played, together we had decorated the little cedar tree I’d cut down—female, so thankfully pollen-free—the week before.

It was my favorite time of year, and I was looking forward to some downtime with my friends, my family, and, of course, my loyal companion, Chuck. My dear friend Molly had stopped off earlier with a basket of goodies, including a pair of felt antlers she’d made for my chunky poodle. He was still trying to figure out how to get them off; cute as he was, I didn’t want him to suffer, so I put them on my own head instead.

“Did you hear there’s a new buried treasure story going around town?” Quinn asked.

“Another one?” Resuscitating buried treasure legends was a popular pastime in Buttercup. It probably didn’t help that, once in a while, someone actually found something. “What’s this one?”

“Oh, a bank heist that occurred in Houston about a hundred years ago. Word is they were ‘beset by Indians’ down on Dewberry Creek and had to bury the loot in a hurry.”

“Then what happened?”

“Two out of three of them got away, of course. But when they came back a year later…”

“They couldn’t find the loot,” I posited.

Quinn blinked in mock surprise. “What, are you psychic?”

I grinned. “There seems to be a common theme in these stories.”

“Well, whether it’s a story or not, there have been three charges of trespassing along the creek already this week. And Ed Zapp accidentally blew up Bubba Novak’s metal detector with a shotgun because he thought he was an alien.”

I almost dropped the cedar bough I was working with. “What?”

“It was dark. The metal detector was beeping. And Ed had just finished a Men in Black marathon, so he thought it was an alien.”

“Bubba is lucky Ed didn’t blow his head off,” I said.

“He ended up with a bit of buckshot in his left buttock, apparently, so he didn’t escape completely unscathed. Says he plans to sue.”

“If he was on Ed’s property, I don’t see that going anywhere,” I said. Texans took trespassing seriously. Unfortunately, “home defense” was considered a perfectly reasonable rationale for taking aim at people on your property.

“I think he’s just hoping Ed will pay his medical bills.”

“Never a dull moment in Buttercup, is there?” I asked, looking down at the creek. “Maybe we should go down there with a metal detector ourselves. Although with my luck, all I’d find would be an old hoe, or maybe a piece of rebar.”

She laughed as she tied another bundle of mistletoe. “You’ll be able to buy one in town soon if you’re serious. Edna at the Red and White got a special order of metal detectors in. She’s already sold out and has another one on the way.”

“People really are taking this seriously, aren’t they?”

She nodded. “Not much to do in a small town, I guess. Anyway, if you hear beeping down by the creek in the next week or two, it’s not aliens and you probably shouldn’t shoot.”

“I don’t own a gun, so the risk of that is pretty low.”

She grinned. “You city folks…”

I looked down at my dirt-stained fingernails and rolled my eyes. I’d spent half the morning cleaning out the chicken coop and the other half on my hands and knees weeding the veggies. “That’s us. Always afraid to get our hands dirty.”

Quinn laughed. “As always, my friend, you are an exception to the rule.”

* * *

Quinn had given up on the mistletoe and I was just about finished with the cedar swags I was taking to the Christmas Market on the Town Square the next morning when there was a loud popping sound at the corner of the pasture.

“I thought you posted ‘No Hunting’ signs,” she said.

“I did, and so did Dottie,” I told her. Dottie Kreische was my next-door neighbor, and she shared my thoughts on untrained people with longnecks in one hand and guns in the other traipsing through the countryside shooting at anything that moved. And a few things that didn’t. “Unfortunately, Cyrus Lemmon has hunting parties at his place all the time, and there’s really nothing we can do about it.” Lemmon, a wealthy Houston oil exec, had bought the hundred acres across the creek and liked to bring out his business contacts for weekend hunting extravaganzas. Despite the signs we’d posted, there was nothing keeping people from shooting on the other side of the water, so stray bullets were a hazard, particularly at this time of year. It made me nervous; packs of armed, Lone-Star-beer–fueled city folks weren’t necessarily the most responsible when it came to firearms. An unknown someone had accidentally shot two of the Fischers’ dairy cows the week before. The property abutted the Lemmons’ land, so it was pretty clear what had probably happened, but Cyrus had denied having anything to do with it.

Chuck growled, obviously uneasy. Pip stood next to him, ears perked up, in pointing position.

“Maybe it’s another trespasser being shot at,” Quinn speculated.

“Either way, I think we might need to go inside.”

“Like a bullet can’t make it through the house,” she said with a snort.

“At least it will slow it down,” I suggested as we hurried into the house, Chuck and Pip barreling through the door behind us. I’d barely closed the back door when another volley started.

“That sounded awfully close,” Quinn said, peering out the window.

“That’s because it is close,” I said, grabbing the binoculars I kept for bird-watching and training them on the line of trees down by the creek. What looked like a man in camo was aiming a rifle in the direction of my peach orchard. “Somebody’s shooting at something on my land,” I said.

“What? Take a picture so you can show the police,” she said. “That’s not okay.”

“My phone’s in the bedroom,” I said. “Do you have yours handy?”

“Right here,” she said. She held it up, zooming in on the camo-clad shooter. As she took the photo, we heard another volley of shots.

“Someone else is shooting,” she said. “That wasn’t him.”

“Where?” I asked. As I spoke, the man in camo crumpled to the ground.