A Rich Man for Dry Creek / a Hero for Dry Creek

by Janet Tronstad

  Jenny looked up. Someone had put another slow song on the record player. But no one was dancing. She could tell that the party was winding down. “I think with all these people here they would have spotted a stranger.”

  “They didn’t spot Santa Claus when he was the hit man and almost got that woman—the one they called Dry Creek’s angel,” he protested. “Besides, I’d prefer to come with you.”

  Jenny shrugged as she put on a jacket Mrs. Hargrove had lent her for the evening. “It’s just across the parking lot.”

  “You need someone to open the doors anyway.”

  Robert followed Jenny to the barn door. The sheriff and some of the other men were squatted down on the floor in one corner talking to the kidnappers.

  “Think they’re the last of the lot?” Robert asked the men as he stood by the door.

  The sheriff nodded. The man looked a lot more competent dealing with the kidnappers than when handling Laurel and her luggage. “I’m sure we’re safe for now anyway. He—” the sheriff jerked his head at the FBI agent “—thinks someone in Dry Creek is an inside informant on this rustling business, but even if that’s true we should be safe tonight.”

  Robert nodded his thanks as he opened the door for Jenny.

  The stars were no longer showing in the night sky and flakes of snow steadily blew in from the north. The men had stomped down much of the snow earlier but the boot prints were filling with the latest batch of snow.

  “I doubt half these cars will start,” Robert said as he looked at the twenty-some odd vehicles parked around the barn.

  Robert had never felt cold like this before. He’d given his coat to the old man earlier and had insisted the man keep it. Now he was glad one of the ranch hands had pressed a wool jacket into his hands as Robert was heading out. Even with the jacket, his heart pounded faster to keep warm. He’d swear his eyelids were freezing.

  “They’ve got jumper cables,” Jenny said through chattering teeth.

  A dim light was on in the café’s porch and Robert opened the porch door quickly. Even though the porch was boarded together and the wind blew in through some of the holes, it was several degrees warmer inside.

  “Let me get the door,” Robert said as he reached for the main door. “Do you have a key?”

  “It’s not locked. They left it open for us tonight.”

  “Then you better let me check it out first. Someone could have come inside.”

  In the yellow light of the porch, Jenny could see her breath come out in white puffs. Her lips were stiff from the cold and she felt snowflakes melting in her hair.

  “But what would you do anyway if someone was in there? You don’t have a weapon.”

  “Well, neither one of us has a weapon.”

  “I have this bowl.”

  “You wouldn’t dare break Mrs. Hargrove’s bowl over someone’s head. From what I hear, that bowl has served the punch for every wedding in this community for the past forty years. It’s practically a tradition all by itself.”

  “It is a nice bowl. Heavier than it looks, too. Real cut glass.”

  Robert had bent low and was looking in the glass panes of the café door. It looked like the only upright shadows inside were from chairs although it was hard to tell because the girls had used the café as a changing room and there were T-shirts and jeans everywhere. “I’m going in. Give it a minute and then follow.”

  The doorknob was as cold as any metal Robert had ever gripped. But it turned easily and he stepped into the café. The air inside still smelled of cooking. He thought it was the stuffed mushrooms he smelled.

  Robert flipped on the overhead light for the café and saw that the jumble looked undisturbed from the last time he had walked through. “Let me check out the kitchen first before you come in.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Robert walked toward the back of the room where the kitchen door was. The café was small so he reached the other side with a few strides. The light in the kitchen revealed all was safe there, as well.

  Robert heard the cell phone ring on the porch. It must still be in Jenny’s apron pocket. He’d bet a punch bowl full of pudding that it was Jenny’s sister calling. Which reminded him, he owed her a story. Assuming, of course, that she was able to get him off that cursed list.

  “For you,” Jenny called as she walked across the café and into the kitchen. “It’s my sister.”

  Jenny listened as Robert and her sister talked. Robert paced as he walked. Up and down the cold kitchen. His cheeks were red from the temperature and his dark hair was wet where snow had melted now that he was in the relative warmth of the kitchen. He looked excited though, wheeling and dealing with her sister. He said goodbye with laughter.

  “Your sister is something,” Robert reported as he hung up the phone. “Those editors will have their hands full with her.”

  “She is, isn’t she?”

  The outside door to the café opened and Jenny and Robert both stiffened until they heard Mrs. Hargrove. “I hope you’re not doing dishes at this time of night.”

  The kitchen door opened and the older woman stood there with a wool scarf wrapped around her head and a blanket thrown over her shoulders like a shawl. “We’ve had so much excitement tonight, the dishes need to wait. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Enough snow is predicted to close all the roads. We’ll have nothing better to do than dishes. I’ve already asked Mr. Gossett to help us. It’ll help settle him down. He’s been anxious lately.”

  “But if the roads are closed, we won’t be able to get to the café from Garth’s ranch,” Jenny said. “And I can’t leave the two of you with all these dishes.”

  “I’ve got extra rooms at my house. You’re both welcome to spend the night at my place.”

  “Robert doesn’t need to,” Jenny began in alarm. A man like him shouldn’t be helping with cleanup.

  “I’d be delighted.” Robert accepted the older woman’s invitation.

  Robert grinned. Things were working out better than he could have hoped. He’d have some talking time with Jenny tonight and tomorrow.

  “I already invited your friend—” Mrs. Hargrove smiled at Robert.

  Robert’s grin froze.

  “—or fiancée, I guess I should say. Considering that she brought a wedding dress with her to Dry Creek.”

  “She brought a what!”

  Chapter Seven

  “Now, Laurel, you take the room at the top of the stairs and to your left. That’s next to mine. Robert, you’ll have the couch in the living room. And Jenny, the room down that hall has a bed in it already made up. That room is closest to the furnace and should be toasty.” Mrs. Hargrove smiled at Jenny. “It’s my sewing room and the bed in there is my best. You’ll need a good night’s sleep after all you’ve done today, dear. Such a wonderful dinner party.”

  “Thank you,” Jenny whispered. She could have slept under a cardboard box in some old alley. A sewing room would be heaven. She was damp, cold and tired. She just wanted the day to end. She didn’t know whether or not she believed Robert’s vehement protests that he wasn’t engaged to be married to anyone, but she did know she was ready to be alone. She’d been right not to trust a rich man with any tiny bit of her heart.

  The walk across the snow to Mrs. Hargrove’s house hadn’t been long, but Jenny felt like it had taken an eternity. She didn’t have snow boots so she had to follow in the footsteps Mrs. Hargrove made. But it wasn’t just the snow that seeped into her shoes that made her cold and tired.

  It was all of this. She glared at Robert. She just wasn’t cut out for this—the kind of roller-coaster life that people like Robert and Laurel seemed to lead. Jenny was a simple person and liked to deal with people who were straightforward—people you could trust to be who they said they were. Not something like this.

  Who really knew who was engaged to who? It was like the dating game with extra doors for people to pop in and out of whenever they took a fancy to do so.

  The bottom line was that Laure
l said she had a wedding dress sitting in a box at the Billings airport. That was part of the special-occasion clothes she’d talked about earlier. The sheriff hadn’t had room to bring the box to Dry Creek in his patrol car. But there it was—waiting in Billings.

  No woman traveled around with a wedding dress unless she had a reason. And if Robert Buckwalter III was getting a visit from a woman who was so sure of herself that she brought a wedding dress along, why was he kissing another woman? Especially when the kiss was a whopper of a kiss like the one Jenny had gotten from him.

  Not that any kiss meant anything to a man like Robert, Jenny took a deep breath and reminded herself. She knew the rich kissed everyone, from their hairdressers to their dog trainers. A kiss from a rich man meant nothing. Absolutely nothing. A handshake was probably more sincere.

  Robert watched Jenny walk down the hall. Her back was military straight. He knew she hadn’t believed him about Laurel even though he’d said everything he could to convince her he wasn’t secretly engaged to Laurel or anyone else. He certainly didn’t know anything about a wedding dress!

  To make it worse, Jenny wouldn’t come right out and say she didn’t believe him. She just kept repeating that it was none of her business and it didn’t matter whom he married or what kind of a dress the woman wore.

  Robert knew there was a world of difference between “I believe you” and “it doesn’t matter.” Especially when Jenny had pulled that hairnet of hers back on like it was armor.

  “You run along, dear.” Mrs. Hargrove smiled at Laurel who had allowed herself to be coaxed into accepting Mrs. Hargrove’s invitation when it was apparent there was no hotel around. “I want Robert to help me bring in some wood before we all bed down. We won’t be long.”

  Laurel could have helped Robert out of his dilemma, but she wouldn’t. She kept a bored smile on her face that revealed little.

  Once Laurel made her bombshell announcement she apparently felt free to ignore him. Which would have been a dead giveaway about the true nature of their acquaintance if it wasn’t for the pouty face that Laurel put on for the show. She looked enough like a woman who’d been wronged to turn others to her defense.

  Robert sighed. His protests fell on skeptical ears. The truth was he hadn’t even been around Laurel for months. They had moved in the same social circle for years, but he had long ago made it a policy to spend as little time alone with her as possible.

  Even though the cold outside had iced every inch of tree and shrub, Robert was glad to be able to go out of the house and gather wood for the fire.

  Mrs. Hargrove had a stack of logs neatly arranged in a small shed on the south side of her house. Robert had offered to get the logs by himself, but Mrs. Hargrove had politely insisted on coming with him.

  He found out why when he had his arms half-full of frozen pine logs.

  “I run a godly household,” the older woman said. She had a plaid wool scarf wrapped around her chin, but her words still came out clear. “It’s late so I’ll come to the point—everyone sleeps in their own bed.”

  “Of course.”

  The woman nodded in satisfaction. “Just wanted to be sure we understood each other. I don’t know who you’re engaged to—”

  “I’m not engaged to anyone.”

  Mrs. Hargrove pinned him with her eyes. “You’ve got one woman who says you are. Why would she be saying that if it’s not true?”

  “I don’t know for sure.” Robert added another log to the stack in his arms. “But my guess would be that she’s trying to get her name in the paper.”

  Robert had been asking himself that same question for the past half hour and the only reason he could think of was that Laurel had somehow found out about the bachelor list.

  He’d suspected before that Laurel funneled information about him to the tabloids. That was one of the reasons he’d started avoiding her. But she could still get information about him from other people in their social set and pass it along. If that was what she was doing, it would appear that the communication flowed in both directions.

  Someone must have told Laurel he was a candidate for the big slot on the tabloid’s list. Laurel loved the spotlight. She’d see it as quite a triumph to announce her engagement to the number one bachelor in the U.S. at the same time, or shortly after he was named the most eligible bachelor around. The fact that Robert would deny the engagement the next day wouldn’t matter. Her picture would already be in every tabloid from here to Japan before Robert could get it all sorted out. Laurel would soak up the publicity. She might even get a book deal out of it.

  Mrs. Hargrove looked perplexed. “She’d get engaged just to get her name in the paper? They put the names of the bridal couples in the Billings Gazette, too, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting married just to see their name there.”

  “It wouldn’t be the Billings Gazette.” Robert wished that that’s all his marriage would ever mean to the media—just a nice paragraph in the Newly Married column of the local paper. “I’m trying to get out of it, but some New York paper has got me picked for number one in some one hundred best bachelor list they’re doing. When the list hits the newsstands, it will be all across the country. There’ll be pictures. My credit rating will rise. Companies will call me to be their spokesman. I’ll be offered free cruises—free everything.”

  “Free cruises! My goodness! Well, congratulations!” Mrs. Hargrove beamed briefly until she looked at his face. She continued more carefully. “That’s quite an honor to be number one. And a free cruise—I can’t imagine—I’ve never even been to Seattle. And a cruise! I think that’s exciting—to actually be on the ocean. But you don’t look very happy about it. I can’t imagine why you want out of the list if it has a free cruise with it.”

  “It’s not just any free cruise. It’s more like a free cruise on the Titanic.”

  “Well, still, being number one—that’s got to be some kind of an accomplishment to take pride in.”

  Robert snorted. “Being number one is like being tagged Public Property Number One. You’re nothing but an object for the curious. Men hate you. Women hunt you. Literally. They won’t let you go. They want to know everything from your shoe size to the kind of grades you got in junior high school. It’s like they want to be your best friend without even meeting you. And most of them don’t want to meet you. The kind of crowd we’re talking about here just wants to be seen with you.”

  Mrs. Hargrove was silent for a moment. “Let me make you a cup of tea and we’ll sit and talk if you’d like. Seems to me you’ve got yourself in quite a fix.”

  Robert looked up. “I’d like the tea, but I don’t mean to worry anyone. I’ve been listed before. Not this big, but if I can’t get out of it I’ll still survive.”

  “Oh, it’s not just the list. You can deal with that. It’s the rest of your life I’m worried about. You need to know what kind of a life that will be. You haven’t begun to understand the important questions in life.” The older woman picked up a couple of logs of her own. “Even with the cruises and everything, I’m sure being a rich man can’t be easy.”

  Robert snorted again. “Being rich is the least of my worries.”

  “That’s good, because I don’t know anything about being rich. I’m doing good just to understand the troubles of a poor person.” Mrs. Hargrove stepped up the snow-packed stairs to her front door. She looked down at Robert who stood on the walk below her. “But I do know this—and I know it because I’ve got the best instruction book for life ever put down on paper—being rich can be dangerous to the soul. The rich need to be pitied sometimes. They used to say a rich man had a harder time getting into heaven than a camel had going through the eye of a needle.”

  Robert was startled. No one had ever pitied him. Ever. Especially not for having money.

  Mrs. Hargrove turned the knob on her door and opened it. “Always did think it was strange to compare a rich man to a camel. I saw a camel on one of those nature shows on television once. It was an
ugly beast.”

  “And they spit,” Robert added as he stepped behind her into the house. He wasn’t sure how he felt about being pitied. For starters, it made him cranky. And being compared to a camel? “Smelly, stubborn animals with the personality of a cardboard box. The only reason anyone tolerates them is because they store all the water inside those humps of theirs and people need them to get around.”

  Just like me, Robert realized with a start. I store a great deal of money and people need me and my money to get around.

  Robert was back at the same place he had been earlier in the evening when he was talking to the minister. He knew people tolerated him—well, more than tolerated, they usually fawned all over him—because he could write big checks to support their favorite projects. Presto—be nice to Robert and he could make things happen. All kinds of things. Important things. Even silly things.

  Right now, if he wanted, he could fly in a team of real camels to meet Mrs. Hargrove. He could even pay the best Hollywood stylists to come and give them such glamorous makeovers that Mrs. Hargrove would change her mind about their camel looks.

  All it took was money.

  And he had money. A depressing amount of cold hard cash.

  But, Robert admitted finally, in the end it was only money, And money was a poor lover of the heart.

  The trouble with money was that it clouded the issue. Everyone loved him when he had money. But who would still love him if he were poor and ugly as a desert camel? There was his mother, of course. But his circle of friends dwindled dramatically at the thought of poverty. Robert had too many friends like Laurel. Lightweight friends at best.

  He had made more true friends in his five months as Bob than he had made in a lifetime as Robert.

  Maybe—the thought came in a whisper—maybe because Robert had always relied on his money to make him his friends.

  Robert, he was afraid, was a lazy friend.

  Oh, Robert was good at attracting women and he was good at writing checks to charity, but was he good at loving anyone?