by Anne Avery
Worries about her husband’s drinking and the excitement of a new sheriff couldn’t compete with the attractions of new yard goods, however.
“Could I take a look at that pink silk, there, Molly?” Coreyanne said. “It looks like it’d be just the thing to go with my old gray suit. Sort of spruce it up, if you know what I mean.”
“But what did he look like?” Louisa had a one-track mind when it came to men. “Is he handsome?”
“I’ll give you thirteen,” said Thelma grudgingly.
“Now, Thelma.” Molly passed the pink silk down the counter to Coreyanne. No one paid any attention to Louisa.
“Thirteen cents a yard,” said the widow, pulling the plaid out of Ida Walker’s reach. “That’s my final offer.”
Molly repressed a sigh. “Let me think about it, Thelma.”
She’d give in eventually. Both of them knew it. None of the other women would touch that plaid until they were sure Thelma had either gotten what she wanted or given up the hunt—and Thelma never gave up. The woman could wear down rock with her nagging if she set her mind to it.
“What’s his name? Is it true he’s not married?” Louisa asked of nobody in particular. “I heard he was at least thirty. If not older!” Her face went white at the thought of still being single at the advanced age of thirty.
“His name’s DeWitt Gavin, and he’s thirty-three, Sam says,” Coreyanne informed them with satisfaction. She started to say something else, then bit back the words.
“What else have you heard?” demanded Emmy Lou, leaning closer. “Is he married? I’d heard he was going to be living in that room at the back of the sheriff’s office. There’s not enough space there for a cat to turn around in, let alone a family.”
“Nooo,” said Coreyanne, still uncertain. “He’s not married.”
“Well, then?” said Emmy Lou. All the other ladies stopped breathing so they wouldn’t miss a word of whatever came next.
Coreyanne glanced at them nervously, but it was clear to everyone present that her information was simply too good not to be shared.
“I told Sam I wouldn’t say anything, but I know he didn’t really mean I couldn’t tell you ladies. After all, you’re my friends.”
“That’s right,” said Emmy Lou. “We are. You know you can trust us!”
“Well…”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Coreyanne,” Molly said sharply, yanking on a piece of wool felt that had gotten tangled around a bolt of flannel. She tugged the fabric to straighten it and started to roll it back up. “If you promised not to tell—”
“You can tell us!” Thelma interrupted. Even talking Molly down on the price of the plaid took back seat to the pleasurable possibility of scandal.
Coreyanne caved in.
“He’s divorced!” she said in a theatrical whisper loud enough for all to hear.
A collective gasp shook her audience.
“Can you imagine?”
No one said a word. The news was just too thrillingly awful to treat so lightly.
Molly knew the silence wouldn’t last long. “I can imagine, but it’s none of my business to try.” She flipped the bolt over another turn, giving a snap to the fabric as she did so it lay straight and taut.
“No, but—”
“No buts, Coreyanne!” she snapped. She kept her gaze fixed on the bolt. She’d never liked confrontation or conflict, but sometimes it couldn’t be avoided, no matter how much she wished it could. “I won’t listen to gossip of that sort! You know that.”
“Well, I will,” Emmy Lou said. Nothing fazed Emmy Lou, especially not Molly’s straitlaced notions of propriety and good manners. Especially not when it came to dirt about the man who’d taken the job that rightfully belonged to her husband.
“What did she do that he’d divorce her? It must have been something pretty bad.”
“Mmm,” said Coreyanne doubtfully. She cast a nervous glance at Molly, then at her friends. There wasn’t a chance she’d get out of the store without sharing whatever juicy tidbit her Sam had shared with her. “Well, according to what my Sam heard, he didn’t divorce his wife. She divorced him!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Well, I never! In all my born days, I never!”
Molly glanced at the avid faces in front of her, every one of them focused on Coreyanne. There was only one way to get the ladies’ attention off the sheriff and his disreputable past and back on the business at hand.
“Tell you what, Thelma,” she said to the widow. “I’ll let you have that plaid for fourteen cents a yard. I can’t do better than that, and neither can you. And Coreyanne, did you want the silk? If you don’t, Sally, here, was interested.”
A discount and competition for a coveted fabric! As one, the ladies abandoned the sheriff and plunged back into the fray. The distraction wouldn’t hold for long, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances.
Distraction or no, as she measured lengths of fabric and rang up sales, Molly couldn’t help wondering—what could the new sheriff possibly have done to make his wife take the scandalous step of divorcing him?
Witt Gavin had no trouble finding the store little Dickie Calhan had mentioned. It was a good-sized clapboard building with a one-and-a-half story false front facing the town’s main street. From the busy cross street running alongside the store, Witt had a clear view of the sign painted in big red letters on the whitewashed siding: Calhan’s General Store. Guaranteed Best Store in Town! If We Don’t Have It, We’ll Get It, No Extra Charge!
At least the boy had gotten that part right.
As for his wild tale about strangers who skulked down alleys and loitered around the town’s main bank whenever the mine payrolls were delivered…
Witt propped his shoulder against the building opposite Calhan’s, crossed his arms across his chest, and studied the scene before him. From where he stood, Main Street stretched north through town, headed straight toward the Elk Mountains that gave the town its name. The street’s unpaved expanse was lined on either side by false-fronted wood buildings and a dozen impressive brick ones. Saddle horses and teams hitched to a variety of buggies and wagons were tied at rails on either side of the thoroughfare. Several blocks up, a covered public well occupied the middle of an intersection, readily accessible to any citizen who lacked the convenience of a private one.
Nearer at hand, catercorner to Calhan’s General Store, stood a substantial brick building with an aura of sober respectability that immediately identified it as Elk City’s main financial institution. The sign over the door said Elk City State Bank in bold gold letters. It was more a concession to convention than an absolute necessity—the place was impossible to miss.
If there’d been any suspicious goings-on, a sharp-eyed, intelligent boy on the boardwalk in front of Calhan’s would have spotted them right off.
And if there weren’t any suspicious strangers, Calhan’s boardwalk was the ideal place for a boy with an overactive imagination and a taste for the lurid tales in dime novels to dream some up.
Elk City was a decent, workaday place that boasted good railroad connections, coal, lumber, water and some of the finest grazing range in the state of Colorado. It was also well off the more traveled roads and rail lines that laced the state. Payroll or no, the town wasn’t the sort of place he’d expect to find a bunch of desperadoes intent on a shoot-’em-up bank heist.
Witt watched as an old woman with a shopping basket over her arm made her way along the opposite side of Main. Every man she passed doffed his hat. Several exchanged a few pleasant words, as well. There was something comfortable about the scene, as if the folks he saw were glad to be right where they were. That wasn’t something you could say about every town he’d ever been through. Not by a long shot.
With hard work and a little luck, Elk City just might be the spot where he could finally put down roots, buy some land, some cattle. Maybe even get married. He was almighty tired of boarding house meals and na
rrow beds for one.
At the thought, the old, familiar hollowness came back. Witt shoved away from the building, disgusted with himself and his mush-headed daydreams. There wasn’t a woman in her right mind would want him, even if he’d had more than a dream to offer her, which he didn’t. Besides, if Clara hadn’t been able to abide him, it stood to rights nobody else would want to try.
He’d might as well not waste time reminding himself. The mistakes he’d made were well-plowed ground, yet for all the time he’d spent working that field, thinking it over, worrying about it, he’d never yet gotten a crop of anything but weeds out of it.
He’d do better to tend to his work, and right now that meant introducing himself to Mrs. Calhan and finding out if she’d noticed anything to indicate her son really had seen something, no matter how improbable the boy’s tale sounded.
As he crossed the street, Witt was conscious of a number of curious glances directed his way. Word had obviously gotten around that Elk City’s new sheriff was somewhat oversize. He ignored them. Over the years, he’d gotten used to the attention even if he’d never learned to like it.
He’d even gotten used to checking an unfamiliar boardwalk before he stepped on it to make sure it would hold his weight. Calhan’s boardwalk was sturdy enough and neatly swept, which was promising. The broad front windows were so clean they gleamed, which was even better.
Witt glanced at the display behind that glass and stopped dead in his tracks.
The proprietors of dry good stores generally had two ways of filling their front windows—either they stacked their excess supplies higglety pigglety on the broad display shelves built under the windows, heedless of appearance, or they crammed in as many unrelated items as they could until it was next to impossible to sort out anything from the heaps and piles and mounds of merchandise.
Mrs. Calhan had done neither. Instead, she’d constructed an intriguing arrangement of boxes of various sizes, then draped a length of shiny, bright-red cloth on top. The fabric spilled over the boxes and gathered in glistening folds in the spaces between them, for all the world as if it had been carelessly flung there, then forgotten. Yet there was something about the arrangement, something about the way the cloth caught the light, that drew the eye from one displayed item to another and then another, so that Witt felt as if he were being irresistibly drawn into the store.
Of course, it was possible the secret to the display’s attraction was that it offered nothing but candy—and Witt had a sweet tooth whose roots went all the way down to his toes.
He moved closer, studying the riches laid out before him. There were peppermint sticks in a tall glass jar, and chocolate creams in a box lined with shiny gold paper. There were licorice jawbreakers, and bright-yellow lemon drops, and candied nuts, and cream balls, and lady kisses, and an assortment of chocolate biscuits and bars arranged on a silver tray. There was a bowl of candied peanuts and another of mouthwatering pecan pralines. There was a little metal pirate’s chest stuffed with French bonbons that were as tempting to Witt as pieces of eight would be to a pirate. And there, right in the middle of it all, was an enormous glass jar tied with a bright-red ribbon and filled to overflowing with gumdrops in every color of the rainbow.
Witt let out the breath he’d been holding, and licked his lips. And then he pulled open the broad screen door and walked into paradise.
Chapter Two
A shadow claimed half the light in the store.
Molly looked up from straightening the disaster the ladies had left in their wake and found a mountain standing in her doorway. The mountain held out a hand to make sure the screen door didn’t slam shut behind him, then took a cautious step forward, squinting against the change from the bright sunlight outside.
Slowly, she set down the drawer of buttons she’d been about to put away. Coreyanne Campbell had said the new sheriff was big, but Molly hadn’t pictured anyone quite this big. Who would have? The man stood six three in his oversized stocking feet, maybe more. He’d have to have his clothes special made for him—those broad shoulders wouldn’t fit into any ready-mades she knew of, and she’d done her best to scout out all the options for her customers.
And his face…
Molly’s fingers closed around the edges of the drawer.
If the man himself was a mountain, the core of him had been made out of granite. His face was all hewn slabs and hard lines, like the stark, gray rock that jutted out of the nearby Elk Mountains. Life had slashed grooves at the side of his mouth and the corners of his eyes, but it hadn’t softened one angle of the sharp-edged nose or that uncompromising jaw.
There was an awful lot of jaw.
Slowly, deliberately, Molly raised her gaze to meet his.
Gray eyes gleamed from beneath heavy lids. Even with the light behind him, shadowing his face, they seemed alive and bright and warm. Wary, almost. She had the odd sense that he took in more in one glance than most people saw in an hour of looking.
“Good afternoon, Sheriff,” she said, “What can I do for you?”
He snatched his hat off and, squinting, lowered his head to look for her in the shadows at the rear of the store. “Ma’am?”
When he came forward, his movements were quiet, controlled, but that didn’t stop the floor joists from creaking in protest at the weight. She could feel the jouncing with each step he took.
The glass in her display cases rattled softly.
“You’re Mrs. Calhan, the proprietor of this store?” His voice rumbled up from somewhere deep in that big chest like distant thunder over the Elk Mountains. Just like the thunder, it sent a shiver of charged awareness down her spine.
“I am. And you must be Sheriff Gavin.” She smiled. “The ladies were talking about you just this morning.”
Too late she remembered what they’d been saying.
His expression didn’t change, yet she sensed a tension in him that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. To cover her gaffe, she extended her hand over the counter. After a moment’s hesitation, he gingerly took it in his own large, callused paw.
The warmth and the hard, masculine strength of that hand wrapped around hers made something inside her squeeze tight. It had been four years since Richard had died. Four long, hard and often lonely years.
“Welcome to Elk City, Sheriff.” She slid her hand free, palm tingling from the contact. “We’re glad to have you here at last.”
“You’ve had trouble?” The question came too quickly, as if he’d had it prepared beforehand.
“Oh, no,” she hastily assured him. “No trouble. Not really. Not that sort of trouble. Only, if there were trouble, we’d rather have a sheriff around than not.”
He nodded, glanced at the disordered counter, then let his gaze slide along the shelves of goods that lined the walls behind her.
Nervous, she nudged a couple of the button boxes in the drawer on the counter in front of her. The faint clack of the buttons shifting was comfortingly normal.
“I take it you’re introducing yourself to the shopkeepers?” she said. “That’s very commendable, such dedication to duty. And on your very first day, too.”
That came out a little more stiffly than she’d intended. She was used to men who weren’t much on conversation—a couple of her customers shopped mostly by grunting and pointing—but she wasn’t used to being quite so aware of the male on the other side of the counter. It was…unsettling. And strangely intriguing.
“We—the shopkeepers here in town, I mean—we’re very glad to have you. Things were getting to be so…difficult. Arguments, you know, about who was going to be sheriff and—” She smiled. “Well, let’s just say there was a good deal of discussion before the town council agreed we’d be better off getting a man with your…er, your experience.”
Heaven help her, she’d been about to say “your reputation.” Surely it was her imagination that his shoulders stiffened as if he were expecting a blow.
“I’m not sworn in yet,” he said, deliberatel
y not looking at her.
“I’m sure Mayor Andersen will take care of that little matter just as quickly as he can.”
“Mmm.” His gaze slid from the table in the center of the store with its eye-catching stacks of tinned fruits, to the glass-fronted case where she kept the sweets, to the rack made of antlers that displayed a range of ropes and twine, then over to the artful arrangement of tin washtubs and willow baskets that she’d hung on the wall at the back.
At the sight of a man mannequin with a rolled theatre bill in its waxen hands and sporting a ready-made suit, stiff-collared white shirt and bowler hat tipped at a rakish angle, he blinked and glanced back at her, clearly surprised.
“Never seen a store quite like this.”
His eyes were blue, Molly realized, not gray, as she’d thought. She wrenched her gaze from his face before it became obvious she’d been staring.
“It’s proven very handy, putting things on display like this.” There was an odd little catch in her throat. She cleared it, tried again. If she hadn’t known it was mere foolishness, she’d have sworn she could feel the heat of him clear across the counter. “This way, folks can find what they’re looking for without me having to fetch it off some shelf or dig it out of some drawer first. Saves a lot of time for everyone.”
She didn’t tell him it also increased her profits significantly. With so much right out in the open where customers could get their hands on it, more often than not they walked out of the store with at least one or two things they hadn’t intended to buy but hadn’t been able to resist. Sometimes they bought so much they forgot what they’d originally come for and had to come back to buy that, too.
Molly smiled at the mannequin. Since she’d installed it in the store, she’d doubled her sale of men’s hats and fancy dress clothes. Sales on cravats and ties had more than tripled and showed no sign of slacking. She’d already started to look for a child-size mannequin to go with it.