A Bride for Dry Creek Read online

  “Mrs. B called it in.” The older man gestured to his cell phone. “Said to hurry. Some kids are chasing the truck in a bus as we speak. You can use my Jeep. Parked it behind the trees over there.” The older man jerked his head in the opposite direction they had ridden in from. “It’ll get you there faster.”

  “Not faster than Honey,” Flint said with a smile as he walked toward the door. “She can beat a Jeep any day. She makes her own roads.”

  Flint opened the door and was gone in a little less than five seconds. Francis knew it was five seconds because she was counting to ten and had only reached five when the door creaked shut. Her teeth were chattering and she didn’t know if it was because she was near frozen or because she was scared to death. She hoped counting would force her to focus and make it all better. It didn’t.

  “I’ve got one of those emergency blankets in here someplace,” the older man said as he turned to a backpack of his own leaning in the corner of the room. “Prevents heat loss, that sort of thing.”

  “I’m okay.” Francis shivered through the words. She felt helpless to be sitting here when someone had kidnapped Sylvia and Garth.

  “Not much to that dress,” the older man said as he walked over to her and wrapped what looked like a huge foil paper around her. “Especially in ten below weather.”

  The paper crinkled when she moved, but Francis noticed a pocket of warmth was forming around her legs. It would spread. “I didn’t plan to be out in it for so long without my coat.”

  “I expect you didn’t.” The man went back to his pack and pulled out a small hand-cranked lantern. He twisted the handle a few times and set the lantern on the table. A soft glow lit up the whole room. “Something must have gone wrong.”

  “Flint kidnapped me.”

  That fact seemed to amuse the older man. “Yes, I forgot. You mentioned that earlier. Sorry to spoil your plans.”

  “They were hardly my plans. You’re the boss. They were your plans.” Francis knew it wasn’t always wise to confront criminals. But the old man seemed fairly harmless, and she did like to keep things clear.

  “Sounded more like a lover’s tryst to me.” The man sat on one of the chairs.

  “Humph.” Francis didn’t want to go into that.

  “Not that it’s any of my business,” the man continued and looked around the room. “Although I can assure you that if Flint told you there was a bed, he lied.”

  “Humph.” Francis was feeling the warmth steel up her whole body. She could almost feel cozy. “We don’t really need a bed.”

  “Good.”

  The man sat for a few minutes in silence and then got up and went to his pack and drew out a can. “Peaches?”

  “I’d like that.”

  The man opened the peaches with the can-opening edge of a Swiss knife.

  “Handy thing,” he said as he flipped the blades into the knife and put it in his pocket. “Flint gave me this one almost fifteen years ago now.”

  “You’ve known him for that long?”

  The man nodded. “Almost as long as you have if you’re who I think you are.”

  Francis wondered if this were a trick to find out who she was. But then, she reasoned, it hardly mattered. Flint certainly knew who she was, and he would be back soon to tell his boss anyway.

  “I’m Francis Elkton.”

  The man nodded again. “Thought you must be. But I guess I’ll share my peaches with you anyway. Figure you must have had your reasons for what you did.”

  “Reasons for what?”

  The man shrugged. “It’s old history. Flint went on and so did you. I wouldn’t even have remembered your full name if I hadn’t seen that.”

  There it was. The man was pointing to a faded family Bible. One of those with the black leather cover stamped, Our Family With God.

  “I’m in there?” Francis moved outside the warmth of the foil blanket to stand up and walk to the bookcase. The Bible was closed, but she saw that a ribbon marker had been left through the center of the book. Curious, she opened it.

  The man was right. There was her name. Francis Elkton.

  The words read, “United in Holy Matrimony Flint L. Harris and Francis Elkton on the day of our Lord, April 17—”

  “Who wrote that there?” Even the temperature outside could not match the ice inside her. She’d never seen the words like that, so black and white.

  The man shrugged. “It was either Flint or his grandmother.”

  “His grandmother didn’t know we—” Francis gulped. She could hardly say they had gotten married when the most they had done was perform a mock ceremony.

  “Then it must have been Flint.”

  “He must have stopped here before he left that day.”

  The man nodded. “I expect so. A man like Flint takes his marriage vows serious. He’d want to at least write them down in a family Bible.”

  “There were no marriage vows,” Francis corrected the man bitterly. “We said them before a fake justice of the peace.”

  The man looked startled. “There was nothing fake about your vows.”

  Francis felt a headache start in the back of her neck. “I’m afraid there was. The justice of the peace was a phony.”

  “I checked him out. He was pure gold.”

  “You can’t have checked him out. He didn’t even exist. Phony name and everything.”

  Francis still remembered the smug look on her father’s face when he got off the phone with a city official in Las Vegas and informed her there was no such justice of the peace.

  The peaches were forgotten. The older man looked cautiously at Francis and said softly, “I did a thorough check on Flint myself before he came into the Bureau. I knew he had potential and would go far. I wanted to be sure we did a complete check. I talked to the justice of the peace personally. And the county sheriff who arrested Flint on that speeding ticket.”

  Francis felt her headache worsen. “What speeding ticket?”

  The old man looked at Francis silently for a moment. “The day after you were married, Flint was arrested on a speeding ticket just inside the Miles City limits. Thirty-eight in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone.”

  “No one gets a ticket for that.”

  “Flint did. And because he didn’t have the hundred thousand dollars cash to post bail, he did ninety days in jail.”

  Francis put her hand to her head. “That can’t be. No one does that kind of time on a traffic ticket—and they certainly don’t have that kind of bail.”

  The man kept looking at Francis like he was measuring her. Then he continued slowly. “I talked to the sheriff who made the arrest. He was doing a favor for someone. The arrest. The high bail. The ninety days. It was all a personal favor.”

  “Flint never hurt anyone. Who would do that?”

  The silence was longer this time. Finally, the man spoke. “The sheriff said it was you. Said you’d changed your mind about the marriage and didn’t have the nerve to tell Flint to his face.”

  “Me?” The squeak that came out of Francis’s throat was one she scarcely recognized as her own.

  The man looked away to give her privacy. “Not that it’s really any of my business.”

  Francis needed to breathe. Reason this out, she said to herself. Reason it out. Put the pieces in their places. It will make sense. There’s an order to it all. You just need to find it.

  “But I hadn’t changed my mind.” Francis grabbed hold of that one fact and hung on to it. The whole story revolved around that one piece, and that one piece was false. That must make the whole story false. “I wanted to be married to Flint.”

  The man lifted his eyes to look at her. With the soft light of the lantern on the table, Francis could see the pity in the man’s eyes. “I’m beginning to think that might possibly be true.”

  Francis was numb. She’d fallen into a gaping hole and she didn’t know how to get out of it. She couldn’t talk. She could barely think. “But who would do such a thing?”

/>   Francis knew it was her father. Knew it in her heart before she had reasoned it out with her head. He was the only one who could have done it.

  Her father had been upset when she and Flint had driven up and announced their marriage. She hadn’t expected her father to be glad about the marriage, but she thought he’d adjust in time. She’d been relieved when Flint had suggested he drive into Miles City to buy roses for her. If she had some time alone with her father, Francis had thought, she could change his mind.

  She and her father had talked for a while and then she went in to pack. There wasn’t much she needed to take. Some tea towels she’d made years ago when her mother was alive to help her. The clothes she’d been wearing to school. A few pieces of costume jewelry. The letters Garth had written her when he was overseas.

  She’d filled up two suitcases when her father came in to say he’d called Las Vegas and found out that the justice of the peace was a fake.

  At that moment, Francis had not worried about her father’s words. If the justice of the peace was a fake, she’d calmly reasoned, she and Flint would only find someone else to marry them again. Flint had made a mistake in locating the proper official, but they would take care of it. They’d marry again. That’s what people in love did. She started to fold the aprons her mother had given her.

  When she finished packing, Francis went down to the kitchen to prepare supper for her father. It was the last meal she’d make for him for awhile, and she was happy to do it. She decided to make beef stew because it could simmer for hours with little tending after she left.

  Four hours later her father invited her to sit down and eat the stew with him. She knew Flint could have driven into Miles City and back several times in the hours that had passed. Francis refused the stew and went to her room. He must have had car trouble, she thought. That was it. He’d call any minute. She stayed awake all night waiting for the phone to ring. It was a week before she even made any attempt to sleep at nights.

  “It was my father,” Francis said calmly as she looked Flint’s boss in the eyes. “He must have arranged it all.”

  “I’m sorry.” The man said his words quickly.

  The inside of the cold house was silent. Francis sat with the open Bible on her lap, staring at the page where her marriage vows had been recorded and a scripture reference from Solomon had been added. As she looked at it closely, she could see that the faded handwriting was Flint’s. She wished she could have stood with him when he recorded the date in this Bible. It must have had meaning for him or he wouldn’t have stopped on his way into Miles City to write it down.

  “Surely Flint—” she looked at the man.

  He was twisting the handle that gave energy to the emergency lantern on the table. He didn’t look up from the lantern. “He didn’t want to tell me about you. Didn’t even mention your name. But he had to tell me the basics. I was only checking out his story. Part of the job. We needed to find out about the arrest. It was on his record.”

  “So he thinks it was me who got him arrested.”

  The temperature of the night seemed to go even lower.

  The man nodded.

  Francis felt numb. She had never imagined anything like this. She had assumed Flint had been the one to have second thoughts. Or that he had never intended to really marry her anyway. He wasn’t from around here. She never should have trusted him as much as she did. She repeated all the words she had said to herself over the years. None of them gave her any comfort.

  “He should have come back to talk to me.”

  “Maybe he tried,” the man said. He’d stopped cranking the lantern and sat at the table.

  The silence stretched between them.

  “Mind if I smoke?” the man finally asked.

  “Go ahead,” Francis said automatically. She felt like her whole life was shifting gears and the gears were rusty. She’d spent too much of the past twenty years resenting Flint. Letting her anger burn toward him in the hopes that someday her memories would be light, airy ashes that could be blown away. But instead of producing ashes that were light, her anger had produced a heavy, molten chunk of resentment that wouldn’t budge in a whirlwind.

  There had been no blowing away of old, forgotten memories. These past weeks in Dry Creek had already proven that to her. She was beginning to believe she would be forever shackled by her memories. But now it turned out that the whole basis for her anger was untrue. Flint had not left her. She had, apparently, somehow left him.

  A rumbling growl came from the man’s coat pocket.

  “Excuse me,” he said as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “That’ll be Mrs. B.”

  The conversation was short, and all Francis heard were several satisfied grunts.

  “Flint’s got them in custody,” the man said when he put his phone back in his pocket. “He’s holding them in something he called the dance barn in Dry Creek. Said you’d know where it was. Told me to bring you with me and come over.”

  “So I’m free to go?” Francis asked blankly as she looked up. She’d been so distressed about everything the man had told her she hadn’t realized her first impressions of him must not be true.

  “Of course,” the man said as he stood and put his backpack on his shoulders.

  “But who are you?”

  “Inspector Kahn—FBI,” the man said as he fumbled through another pocket in his coat and pulled out an identification badge.

  “But—”

  “The cattle business,” the man explained as he showed the badge to Francis. “It’s interstate. Makes it a federal crime.”

  “So the FBI sent someone in.” Francis took a moment to look at the badge so she could scramble to get on track. She had heard the FBI was working on the case. They had asked Garth to help. “So you really didn’t need Garth, after all.”

  Inspector Kahn grunted. “Not when I have a hot-head like Flint working for me.”

  “Flint works for you?”

  Inspector Kahn grunted again and started walking toward the door. “Sometimes I think it’s me working for him. I’d place money that the reason he’s so keen for me to get there is because he wants me to do the paperwork. Flint always hated the paper side of things.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “You coming?”

  “Yes.” Francis certainly didn’t want to stay in this cold house any longer than she needed to. She pulled the jacket Flint had given her earlier over her shoulders and picked up the Bible.

  The inspector looked at the Bible. “I expect you’ll need to talk to Flint about this marriage business.”

  “I intend to try.”

  The inspector smiled at that. “Flint isn’t always an easy man to reason with. Stubborn as he is brave. But you know that—you’re married to him.”

  “I guess I am, at that.” The ashes inside of Francis might not be blowing away, but she could feel them shifting all over the place. It appeared she, Francis K. Elkton, had actually been married to Flint L. Harris some twenty years ago.

  For the umpteenth time that night, Flint wondered at the value of being a hero. He had saved Garth Elkton’s hide—not to mention the even more tender hide of the attractive woman with him, Sylvia Bannister—and they were both giving him a shoulder colder than the storm front that was fast moving into town.

  In his jeans and wool jacket, Flint was out of place inside the barn. Not that any of the men there hadn’t quickly helped him hog-tie the three men who had kidnapped Garth and Sylvia and attempted to take them away in the back of an old cattle truck.

  But the music was still playing a slow tune and the pink crepe paper still hung from the rafters of that old barn. And Flint felt about as welcome as a stray wet dog at a fancy church picnic.

  “There, that should do it.” Flint checked the knots in the rope for the third time. He’d asked someone to call the local sheriff and was told the man was picking up something in Billings but would be back at the dance soon. He hoped the sheriff would get there before the inspec
tor. Maybe then some of the paperwork would be local.

  “Who’d you say you were again?” Garth Elkton asked the question, quiet-like, as he squatted to check the ropes with Flint.

  “Flint Harris.”

  “The guy who called me the other night about the kidnapping?” Garth sounded suspicious.

  “Yes.”

  “Still don’t know how you knew about it.”

  “Because I’ve been freezing my toes off the past few nights following these guys around.” Flint jerked his head at the men on the floor. Flint could see the direction Garth was going with his questions and he didn’t appreciate it. “If I was one of them, don’t you think they’d at least recognize me?”

  Flint looked at the three men on the floor. They looked quarrelsome and pathetic. He didn’t appreciate being lumped in with them. But at least it was clear that none of them claimed to have ever seen him before now.

  “They didn’t seem too clear about who their boss was,” Garth continued mildly. “Could be they wouldn’t recognize the man.”

  “I can’t tell you who their boss is, but he’s using a local informant,” Flint said in exasperation. “We’ve got that much figured out. And I’m not local.”

  “You were local enough for my sister.”

  Ah, so it’s come to that, Flint thought. It seemed he’d never get a square break from an Elkton. “Let’s leave your sister out of it.”

  The mention of his sister made Garth scan the room. “Where is she, anyway? Thought she’d be back inside by now. I heard Jess was looking for her.”

  “She was with me.” Flint resigned himself to his fate.

  “With you? What was she doing with you?”

  “Don’t worry. She’ll be back here any minute now.”

  “She better be or—” Garth seemed unaware that his voice was rising.

  “Now, now, boys.”

  Flint looked up. He’d recognize that voice anywhere. He grinned as he looked at the woman who had been his grandmother’s staunch friend in her final days. “Mrs. Hargrove! How are you?”

  Mrs. Hargrove had aged a little in the years since he’d seen her last. And she was wearing a long velvet maroon dress tonight instead of her usual cotton gingham housedress. But she held herself with the same innate dignity he always expected from her. “Doing just fine, thank you.”