High Country Christmas. Cynthia Thomason

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ