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      Charlotte Morgan shouldn’t have checked her bag for the flight from New York to Wyoming. Her layover in Denver had already been far longer than planned because of a storm that was coming in from the West Coast, and now she was—finally—waiting by a luggage carousel at the Cheyenne airport. And waiting... As her friend Karin always said, there were two kinds of luggage—carry-on and lost. And hers appeared to be of the lost variety.

      December 21 meant it was almost the festive season, but her spirits were definitely on the low side.

      This airport mess was typical of the dismal way her luck had been running lately.

      Let’s see. She’d had to arrange for her aunt Geneva to move into assisted living. Dealing with that, mostly by email and over the phone, hadn’t been easy. Then there was the fact that a stranger was staying at Geneva’s house, the house Charlotte had grown up in. Of course, she’d questioned her aunt about Mrs. Klozz, asking how she and the mysterious visitor had met, but Geneva’s answers had been consistently vague, even evasive.

      Worried, Charlotte had called Spencer Hogan, an old friend and Mustang Creek’s chief of police, to request a background check. He’d chuckled and said that wouldn’t be necessary; Mrs. Klozz was, as he’d put it, “all right.”

      Finally, Charlotte had decided to drop the subject. She’d meet the woman soon enough and form her own opinion.

      Despite all this, she felt uneasy.

      Then—just when she’d thought things couldn’t get any worse—she’d been laid off.

      Merry, merry Christmas.

      Oh, the company, an advertising firm, had given her a generous enough severance package. Her boss had explained that budget cuts were taking a toll on everyone.