A Very Special Delivery

Chapter One
    A wintry mix of freezing rain, sleet and snow peppered the roof and rattled the windows of the old farmhouse. Icy tentacles of cold snaked beneath the door to rush across the hardwood floors and over the gray cat sleeping on the colorful oval rug. Molly McCreight shivered, laid aside her book, and rose from her cozy spot in front of the blazing fireplace. The cat stirred, too, gazing up with curious green eyes.
    “Ah, be still, Samson. I’m just going to poke something against that door. If Bart Crimshaw had fixed it last summer like he was supposed to…” She let the words and thoughts drift away. Bart, the beast, hadn’t ever done anything he was supposed to do. He’d disappeared like all the others as soon as he realized she wasn’t kidding when she said she would never be interested in having children.
    “But we don’t care, do we, Samson? We’re doing fine, just fine, without any of them.”
    The cat’s ears flicked, though he stayed beside the glowing fire. She wasn’t doing just fine and even Samson knew it. She mourned for the loss of her once-close relationships with her mother and her sister, Chloe, and most of all, she mourned for baby Zack.
    Since she’d taken the job at the Winding Stair Senior Citizen Center things had been a little better, but the estrangement from her family still lay like a rock in the pit of her stomach.
    As she mumbled to the bored-looking cat, Molly took a towel from the bathroom, rolled the thick terrycloth like a jelly roll and stuffed it under the front door.
    “Listen to that wind.” Hunching her shoulders, she rubbed her upper arms as if to ward off the outside chill. “It’s a miracle we still have electricity.”
    Above the incessant howl of winter came a low hum.
    “What in the world?” Molly pulled the heavy antique-rose drape away from the window and peered out. Though the time was not yet six o’clock, outside was as dark as sin. “Surely, that’s not a vehicle way out here in this storm?”
    Thick layers of ice already coated the windows, the porch and the front of the house. More of the icy pellets and rain fell in such abundance she was hard-pressed to make out the faint glow of lights in the distance. The hum of a motor increased, coming closer. Since her farmhouse sat a ways off the main gravel road, Molly knew the visitor was headed in her direction.
    When the freezing rain had begun early that morning, she had done the sensible thing and prepared for the certain storm ahead. She’d filled the wood box and piled enough extra wood on the porch to keep her going for days even though the propane tank was full. She’d run water into buckets though the water had never frozen in the two years she’d lived on the remote farm in Oklahoma’s Kiamichi Mountains. And she’d made a pot of vegetable beef stew to die for just because the rich aroma of stewed tomatoes and beef filtering through the house made her feel warmer.
    “Looks like a truck of some sort,” she muttered, frowning through the narrow window in the front door. She flipped on the porch light and strained her eyes against the darkness camped beyond the yard.
    “It is a truck, Samson. A delivery truck.” Her frown deepened. “Now, what kind of idiot…?”
    The headlights disappeared as if they’d been sucked inside the dying motor. A smaller light signaled the opening of the van door. With a muffled thud, that light was extinguished also.
    Molly made out the hurrying form of a man, not overly tall, but not short either, picking his way over the crusty ice toward her front porch. Bundled against the frigid weather, he looked thick and heavy but moved with speed and agility, his arms crossed in front of him in a posture Molly found odd for running.
    He was carrying something. At times, she ordered a lot of things, but come on.
    “No package could be that important.”
    When the man’s feet thudded against the wooden porch, Molly yanked the door open, gasping at the sudden blast of frigid air. Shadowed beneath the glowing yellow light with sleet and bits of snow swirling around him, the man peered down at her from under a brown bill cap. He was a uniformed delivery man, all right. She recognized the familiar dark brown truck that sailed up and down the country roads delivering packages. The man himself looked vaguely familiar, but he wasn’t her usual delivery man.
    “Ma’am, I was wondering if you could—”
    She didn’t give him a chance to finish. The cold