Hers for the Holidays by Samantha Hunter

said.
    The older boy snorted in disbelief, crossing his arms over his middle.
    “But if I had to guess,” Ely continued. “I’d say you were caught—during school hours—smoking something down behind someone’s barn, yeah?” They reeked of pot, whether they realized it or not.
    “We weren’t behind a barn, we were—”
    Another elbow to the ribs got the two boys into a small scuffle, and Ely had to hide a smile. They thought they were so tough.
    The door to Sheriff Granger’s office opened, and he emerged, walking over to the boys. They didn’t quite meet his eyes as he towered over them, a big man, not too much older than Ely.
    “I just got off the phone with each of your parents. They’ll be down to get you soon, and in exchange for not charging you and locking you up for the weekend, they agreed that you all should spend the next week cleaning out Mr. Mason’s barn.”
    All four heads snapped up. “Are you kidding?” the older one said. “That place is a dump. It’ll take forever.”
    “That’s right. Added to that, you’ll be in school, and I’ll be making spot phone calls to make sure you are. If any of you do this again, you won’t get a second chance, got it? I’ll put you in the tank, and if we don’t have room for you here, since it can get a little crowded over Christmas, we’ll send you over to Powell, you got it?”
    “You can’t do that,” the belligerent older boy asserted, standing. “We’re minors, and it was just some weed,” he said, and then frowned as he realized what he’d just confessed aloud.
    “Good going, Rog,” the kid next to him taunted.
    The sheriff leaned in close. “You want to make a bet on what I can do, Roger? Push your luck, and you’ll see how far I’m willing to go to make sure you aren’t bringing that kind of trouble into this town, to these kids,” the sheriff said in his best Dirty Harry–type voice, which Ely thought he pulled off pretty well.
    The boy sneered, but backed down, sitting back on the bench.
    “Yeah, shut up, Rog, before you get us into more trouble,” the younger one said, earning a punch in the arm.
    “Cut it out,” Sheriff Granger barked, and the boys went quiet and still. “You’ll report to Mr. Mason directly after school. I’ll have a deputy stop by and make sure you’re there. Your parents will pick you up when you’re done and bring you home. Got it? You won’t be finished with the job until I go to inspect that barn and say you’re done.”
    The boys nodded glumly.
    “Think about it the next time you decide to skip school to do something illegal,” the sheriff said. He proceeded to tell the receptionist something and then turned to Ely.
    “Can I help you? Stella says you’ve been waiting to see me?”
    Ely stood, put his hand out. “I’d appreciate a few minutes, if you have the time.”
    “Sure. Now that I’ve got the Wild Bunch here all settled,” he said, sliding a look at the boys again as he led Ely into his office.
    “My brothers and I got into trouble quite a bit at about that age, too. Never drugs, but other stuff we were too stupid to avoid. Compared to what our father made us do, those guys got off easy.”
    Sheriff Granger laughed. “I don’t know about that. Hank Mason is kind of the town eccentric—one of those TV shows might call him a hoarder of sorts. That barn is a fire hazard. Hank finally agreed to have it cleaned out, so this works out well on all sides. I don’t even want to think about the crap those kids are going to have to dig through,” the sheriff said with a grin. “I should probably get them hazmat suits.”
    Ely laughed. “I bet they’ll learn their lesson, then.”
    “The young ones, yeah. The older one, Roger, he’s had some problems since his parents split up. He’s heading down a bad path, and we’re just trying to keep him from taking his younger friends down with him.”
    Ely nodded. “Nice thing about a town like this is that you can give them that