Ian Foster came in from the barn, went automatically to his
office, sat down at his desk and began to go through the mail.
A promotional offer for direct T V. Imbeciles—didn't
they know he already had it? He tossed the flyer into the
wastepaper basket. Next was a bill. He frowned, then put it
in the "bills" folder and picked up the last envelope.
It was addressed to Foster Brothers, Inc., and the return
address was Internal Revenue Service. He opened it with
interest. Maybe the corporation he and his brothers had
formed was getting a tax refund. They couldn't possibly owe
more money—Ian had calculated the numbers too
carefully, checking and double-checking.
He read it, and frustration rose from the pit of his stomach
and emerged as a shout loud enough to rattle the paper clips
on his desk. Man, why now? This was the last thing they
needed. He slumped in his chair, put his head on his desk
and held his breath.
"You dead? If you are, nod so I can start CPR."
Ian leaped up from his desk to confront his brother Daniel.
"Of course I'm not dead."
"Do you feel faint?"
"Do I look like I feel faint? What the hell's wrong with
you?"
Daniel's expression informed Ian that Daniel was thinking.
Maddening trait of Daniel's—thinking before he spoke.
"I'm on the way back from the barn where I've been
inspecting your sheep," he said in that reasonable tone
that drove Ian crazy, "and I hear a cry of pain from my
brother, so I run into the house, find him collapsed at his
desk, so I assume heart attack, and my first thought is to
save his life. It's a natural reaction, Ian." His
bedside manner also drove Ian crazy.
"For a cardiologist, maybe."
"Okay," Daniel said, "so what happened?"
Ian simply handed over the letter.
Daniel's smile faded. "Ah, the corporation's being
audited. So what? You haven't lied or cheated or…"
Ian glared at him. "Of course not." He motioned his
brother toward a leather-covered armchair. Why he bothered,
he didn't know. Daniel knew he could sit down. "Auditors
probe," he said. "Maybe they'll probe into why we
formed the corporation, into who we are. If they find out
who we are, and I'm sure the IRS has CIA-type information
systems, then we're done for."
"Why would the IRS care about our past as long as we're
paying our taxes?"
"Not the IRS, Serenity Valley," Ian moaned.
"You think the IRS would tell the neighbors?"
"You never know," Ian said, narrowing his eyes.
"The auditor might be a local. He tells his wife, she
tells her sister, who tells the preacher's wife, who tells
the preacher…You know what it's like around here."
"Whoa," Daniel said. "You're thinking way too
far ahead."
"I like being ready for the worst."
"Still," Daniel said, "if there's nothing wrong
with the return and the documentation is in order, nothing
will attract their attention. You have everything on disk,
right? The books? The return?"
Ian cleared his throat. "The return itself looks
professional."
"What are you telling me?"
"Well…" He had to confess. "I never quite
got the hang of that accounting software." He pulled a
clothbound volume out of his side drawer. "Here are our
books." Then he produced his spreadsheet. Handwritten.
Daniel paled. "Geez, Ian. Where's your abacus?"
Feeling hurt, Ian displayed a handheld calculator.
"How did you get through business school?"
"I don't know. By being charming?"
"No," Daniel said, sounding resigned, "by coming
up with the right answers in your own primitive way. But
hey, it doesn't matter. You're overreacting. If there's
nothing wrong with our numbers, why would they—"
"What if some little thing is wrong? If they get
interested in us…"
Ian's worry wasn't financial, but personal. Of course the
Foster Corporation, Inc. return was accurate—it would
have been accurate down to the last penny if the government
didn't insist on rounding off the numbers. He had a much
more important reason to want to panic, and Daniel knew
perfectly well what it was.
Putting it bluntly—he didn't know how to put things
any other way—the Fosters weren't Fosters, or even
brothers. They'd met in a juvenile correction facility, had
bonded because of their mutual goal—to leave their
pasts behind and get ahead in the world by working hard. And
most of all by supporting one another, understanding that
they each had a separate, very different career goal, and
sacrificing whatever it took to make sure that each of them
reached that goal.
They'd done it. Managed to get Daniel through veterinary
school, and now he was Serenity Valley's most respected
vet—its only vet, actually, but highly thought of.
Sent Mike to culinary school, and now Mike's Diner was
raking in the money—and the rave reviews for Mike's
culinary skills. Respect was what it took to make it in this
closed-in valley where everybody knew everybody else and
newcomers were subjected to intense scrutiny.
Ian's degree was in animal husbandry, and after deciding
that Daniel and Mike were hopeless with money, he got a
second degree in business and took on the responsibility for
their financial security. Now he could ruin them. It was a
lot to think about.
Daniel gazed at him thoughtfully. "You might want to
turn this audit over to someone else," he said.
"You think I can't handle it?" Ian's pride was
involved here. As the youngest of the brothers, he had to
prove that he could take care of them as well as they'd
taken care of him. They'd put him in charge of the family
financial affairs. If they ever decided they couldn't trust
him, he'd have to opt out of the family, change his name and
start all over.
Yes, he needed to be prepared for the worst-case scenario,
because he'd lived through a few of them already. He tuned
in to what Daniel was saying.
"You can't handle it tactfully," Daniel said, less
than tactfully. "For example, 'none of your business'
might not be the best thing to say to the auditor."
Daniel was right. That was exactly what Ian would have said
if the auditor had cornered him. Neither tact nor subtlety
was in his skill set. "Who should I turn it over
to?" he said.
Daniel thought for a moment. "Tansy Appletree's the only
tax accountant in the valley," he said. "Hire her."
"No way," Ian growled.
"Why not?"
Because she's too short to have any brains, and besides,
she's way too energetic. "Well,
because…" Daniel was waiting, with that
irritatingly patient look on his face.
"Because she's also the mayor of Holman, her father is
our state senator, her brother is planning to run for
governor, so I don't trust her, either," Ian blurted
out. "If she suspected anything, she'd spill it. And
she'll be looking for things, too." He got up and began
to pace. "Everybody in the valley is curious about us,
especially about me, because I haven't gotten 'involved,' as
they like to say, in the community."
"So get involved, Ian."
Ian didn't want to be involved with anybody but Daniel and
Mike and their ever-expanding families. "That's not what
we're talking about."
"In a way it is. You're saying you don't trust them.
Tansy's a great person, and she's been an excellent mayor.
She and Lilah and Allie are friends, and besides, unlike
others I could mention—" the look Daniel gave him
was so intense, Ian felt pinned down "—she uses
the most up-to-date software. In fact, Lilah and Allie call
her their 'redheaded geek.' So why not give her a chance?"
Lilah was Daniel's wife. Mike and Allie had set a wedding
date. Ian had learned to trust the women because his
brothers clearly did, but it hadn't been easy. Still, he'd
make a better impression if he presented the auditor with
professional-looking records to back up the return, so he
guessed he should listen up. He ground his teeth. "I'll
think about it."
"How long do you have to think?" Ian glanced at the
letter. "Not very long." Daniel got up. "Now
that we've solved that," he said cheerfully, "I'll
get back to your sheep."
And about time, Ian thought. Unless Daniel irritated the
sheep. If he did, their fleece would lose both quality and
quantity, and—He gave up that worst-case scenario. He
was clearly going over the edge.
Accompanied by her administrative assistant, the town clerk,
and the three Holman
selectmen—select-persons—Mayor Tansy
Appletree stood in front of Hol-man's historic Town Hall and
launched into her pitch. "We've finished the main room,
we have electricity and plumbing—and we're out of
money. We've bled the pockets of Holman down to the last
penny. But I have an idea that would raise at least enough
to paint the outside."
"A government grant?" one of the selectpersons said
hopefully.
"We have one in the works, but it will be months before
it comes through. And we need to paint. No, I'm
thinking of a Winter Holiday Festival. Doesn't that sound
like a lot of fun?"
She was greeted with blank stares. "Here's how I see
it," she said, trying not to sound as enthusiastic as
she had before, since she'd apparently scared them.
"Come inside with me."
They trailed silently after her, through the tall, creaky
front doors and into the main room of the Hall. Once upon a
time, it had echoed with the sounds of music and dancing as
well as the monotonous drone of town meetings. The mayor and
the town clerk had had their offices here. They held out
when the telephone service came to Holman—what did
they need with a telephone when people could just walk
in?—but when electricity came in the 1940s, they moved
into a room in the public library, the first building to be
wired. Since then, the hall had fallen into a state of
disrepair. Even when it was put on the National Register of
Historic Places, former city officials had looked the other
way, horrified at the expense of restoring it to its former
glory. But not Tansy. Town Hall had been her first priority
when she'd been elected mayor. It was coming along, but not
fast enough.
She waved her arms around to encompass the huge space.
"Look how big it is," she said. "We could invite
the best-known craftspeople in Vermont—not just
Serenity Valley—to set up their booths…"
She paused to make outlines of imaginary booths. "No
charge, but we'd ask for ten percent of their gross sales to
go to Town Hall."
That got a murmur out of them. She'd call it progress.
"We'll decorate for the holidays. A huge tree, garlands,
candles. The room will be festive, and if we hang enough
wreaths and lights outside, that will hide the fact that it
looks horrid and will continue to look horrid—"
she fixed a stern gaze on them "—until we
paint."
They still seemed dubious, which Tansy took to mean they
were thinking it over.
"We could sell food, too," her assistant, Amy
Win-free, said shyly. "Mulled cider would be good and it
would make the room smell lovely."
"What a wonderful idea," Tansy congratulated her.
"Cider, wedges of apple pie, ginger
cookies—gingerbread! All at reasonable prices, of
course. Maybe some of you know someone who'd like to donate
the cookies…"
One of the three selectpersons was a female, Martha Latham.
She stared daggers at her male colleagues until they cleared
their throats, coughed or scraped their boots on the ground,
and at last, one of them said, "Aggie's gingerbread is
sort of famous around here. I imagine she'd make a couple of
pans."
Martha breathed out an exasperated sigh and pinned him down
with one of her accusatory "chauvinist pig" glares.
"I'd help her, of course," the man said hastily.
"Turn on the oven, add something to something else."
"Ay-uh," the other one of them spoke up. "Polly
would get a kick out of contributing some apple pies."
He looked down his nose at both Aggie's husband and Martha.
"And I can't help, because Polly won't let anybody into
her kitchen."
"Thank you all," Tansy said earnestly, hoping to
avoid an argument among the selectmen—or
"persons," she reminded herself. "Now, besides
food, we have to have top-notch people exhibiting and
hopefully selling their work."
To her surprise, her captive audience warmed to this idea,
coming up with crafts and the names of the
craftspeople—including woodworkers, knitters,
crochet-ers, quilters, a group of rug-hookers who delighted
in calling themselves The Hookers, and makers of holiday
tree ornaments. Tansy was writing as fast as she could on a
legal pad she'd kept clutched under her arm in case the
selectpersons segued from shock and rejection to cooperation.
She'd gotten them on her side. That's what a politician was,
right? A persuader. But she'd made a vow to persuade only
toward the best results for all concerned, the same vow her
father had made, the same vow she knew her brother had made
when he threw his hat into the ring of candidates for the
governor of Vermont.
The Winter Holiday Festival would be good for the valley. It
would bring the careers of the many Vermont crafters into
the limelight. She paused in her reflection to think about
press coverage in the newspapers.
It was a good project. An honorable project. And she'd see
it through to its satisfying conclusion: Town Hall, freshly
painted.
Ian was outside with his sheep, feeling gloomy. The sheep
were fine—high-quality merinos, the first breed the
British settlers brought to Vermont, carefully chosen,
carefully bred, religiously taken care of by
Daniel—they didn't have a worry in the world. If only
he had it as good as his sheep.
He petted a hogget, a half-grown lamb, to make himself feel
better. Last thing in the world he wanted to do was hand
this audit over to a woman. Okay, so he sounded sexist, but
he wasn't. He just didn't trust women, not really, and he
felt that way for good reason. They were undependable. At
least some of the ones he had known had been. What if he
turned his books over to Tansy Appletree, and she found
something she could hold over him in those carefully penned
numbers? What if she just left town right in the middle of
shaping up his books?
The hogget, who'd ducked her head under Ian's hand to help
him pet her in just the right places, said, "Baaa."
"Baaa, humbug?" he asked her. "I'm stupid to
mistrust Tansy Appletree? You women. You all stick
together." He looked down at her. "Come on, little
girl, time to go inside and play with your cousins."
With a few deep breaths and some mental chest-pounding, he
pulled himself together. He had to do it. The audit would be
over and done with by the time he figured out how to load
the software, after he'd figured out which software he
needed, which he'd have to do before he loaded it and
figured out how to use it—it made him tired just
thinking about it.