Wife Wanted in Dry Creek

by Janet Tronstad

  “Thanks. I think she’ll be fine.” Katrina looked around the church sanctuary. “Now, where would you like your picture taken?”

  “Probably just one of the walls around here.” Tracy looked at the two side walls. “I guess they all need painting. But then I probably do, too.”

  “Nonsense,” Katrina said as she searched for a place on the side wall that would be long enough to use as a backdrop. “You’re a beautiful woman.” She shot a look over at Conrad. “Some men just don’t appreciate strong women.”

  “Oh, Conrad’s okay,” Tracy said sheepishly. “He just got what I should have said to Pete.”

  Katrina didn’t agree, but she wasn’t going to inform Tracy of the man’s faults. Instead, she found what she was looking for and motioned the other woman over. “To your left between those two windows.”

  Tracy walked over and stood in the spot. She fluffed up her hair and brushed any lint off her shoulders. Then her lips pressed together for a moment. “Speaking of Pete, I wanted to apologize for yesterday. I should have just let him meet with you alone. We’re like oil and water.”

  Katrina nodded as she started to snap some photos of Tracy. “It’s not a problem. I don’t plan to use the few pictures I took of the two of you anyway. But—” she looked up from the camera “—for what it’s worth, I think he has considerable affection for you.”

  A wistful smile lit up Tracy’s face. Instinctively, Katrina lifted the camera to her eye and captured some haunting photos of Tracy’s face. Love and despair battled in her expression.

  After the last click, Tracy stood up and smoothed down her dress. Then she said, “It’s not really his fault, you know.”

  “How can you say that?” Katrina asked, putting down her camera. She kept her voice low so no one else would hear. “He clearly has feelings for you and he won’t do anything about it.”

  “He thinks I’m responsible for his younger brother’s death,” Tracy said softly as her face twisted. “And, some days, I’m not sure whether he’s right or wrong.”

  With that, Tracy walked down the aisle and out of the church. Speechless, Katrina watched her go.

  “I’m next,” one of the older men said as he walked down the aisle of the church. He was clutching some of the fruit Edith had brought over and a book. “Richard Compton.”

  “Well, Mr. Compton, you know the rule. No extras. Besides, that fruit’s artificial,” Katrina said as he got closer. She was tired of being caught up in everyone’s problems so she was glad to have one that was easy to solve.

  “I’m not going to eat it,” he protested. “I’m just using it to open up my negotiations. I’ll give up the fruit if you let me hold a picture instead.”

  “What picture?” Katrina asked suspiciously.

  Mr. Compton opened the book and took out a large old black-and-white photo of a young woman. She was wearing a black dress that was too big for her and had her hair scraped back in a bun. But her smile was soft with some deep affection for whoever stood next to that old camera. “This is my Ella. She’s been gone for ten years now, but I still miss her. This is what she looked like when I first met her almost sixty-five years ago.”

  He held the photo to his chest. “I’d like folks to remember Ella, too, when they see my picture in the directory.”

  Katrina looked through her lens and took the shot. The look on the old man’s face practically took her breath away. She took a few more shots and then lifted her eye from the lens so she could blink.

  She’d never seen anything so beautiful. Everyone in the church was silent as they looked at the man and his Ella.

  “I remember her,” Edith finally said softly from where she stood to the side. “She was a remarkable woman.”

  “She brought me chicken soup once when I was sick,” someone else said. “The best soup I ever ate.”

  “My mom still talks about her,” a young woman said.

  Katrina had to blink a couple of more times. And then, just when she needed a tissue, Conrad was there with a folded handkerchief.

  “Here,” he said as he held it out to her.

  “I don’t need—” Katrina started to say when a tear rolled down her cheeks. She reached over and took the handkerchief. “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  And then he just stood and looked at her like that old man had looked at his Ella. It all made Katrina want to cry even more. She needed to remind herself that he wasn’t going to do anything about his feelings. He was a disciplined man and he knew what he wanted and didn’t want in his life.

  “I’m ready for the next person,” Katrina said as she took one final swipe at her tears. She’d leave as soon as she got the pictures all taken. Maybe she could follow Leanne into Billings to visit Walker at the hospital. Then she could stay in a hotel for a night or two until her sister was ready to go home. She needed to leave Dry Creek.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Conrad sat on the church steps. The sun was beginning to set and the last photo had been taken. No one needed his clipboard anymore. Katrina had taken her final shot and walked back to his aunt’s house. He should feel good that he’d done all he could to get the church directory pictures taken in an orderly fashion. Instead, he felt like he’d been run over by a tractor with studded tires.

  He looked down the street to where his shop stood. It didn’t even bother him that he’d been closed for the day. He was a coward and it was killing him. He didn’t need Tracy to tell him that he’d failed at love in some major way. He’d expected the churn of emotions inside him to ease up when he knew he couldn’t go any further with Katrina, but they didn’t.

  For the first time in his life, he began to wonder if his father would have chosen to marry his mother even if he’d known she would die too soon. He wished he’d thought to ask him the question on one of his father’s more lucid days when he talked about the good times they’d had as a family before his mother passed away.

  Uncle Charley had been his father’s brother. He wondered if the two men had ever talked about Conrad’s mother’s death. He wasn’t quite sure why, but the question seemed to him suddenly to be very important to ask.

  He reached in his pocket to pull out his cell phone when he realized he didn’t have the phone with him. He must have left it in his shop when he came back over here the last time. Not that it mattered, he’d just stop in the hardware store on his way back to his shop and ask his uncle then. As he walked down the asphalt road, he noticed a tiny green blade of grass breaking through the ground. It wouldn’t be long now until spring was fully in bloom. He took the blade as a sign of hope as he quickened his steps. Maybe he could risk more than he thought.

  The town was quiet after all of the coming and going for the church directory. A pickup he didn’t recognize was parked across the street from his shop. If he wasn’t in such a hurry, he’d check it out. It probably just belonged to a new cowboy out at the Elkton Ranch, though. They were supposed to be hiring a few more hands.

  Conrad heard the lively discussion going on in the hardware store before he even stepped up to the porch. The door was open, probably because of the mild temperatures. He recognized his uncle Charley’s voice before he set foot inside the building.

  Shadows were beginning to gather in the corners of the store. The men were seated in wood chairs that circled the black potbelly stove even though there was no fire going today. It was the conversation and not the warmth the men came for anyway. Some of the store’s chairs were missing spokes and some of them had chipped paint or scratches. But they were all assigned for life to the regulars that came here. Usually, a man sent word if he was going to miss a day by the stove so that the others would know the chair was open for a visitor.

  “Uncle Charley,” Conrad said by way of announcing his presence. He hadn’t lived in Dry Creek long enough to be anything but a visitor here.

  All six of the men sitting looked up at him.

  “Hey, son,” his uncle greeted him and, t
o his relief, got up and walked toward the door. “Coming over for a game of checkers?”

  “Not today,” Conrad said, stepping a little closer to his uncle so no one else would hear their conversation. “I just wondered if you could tell me something about my father.”

  Uncle Charley brightened. “Sure. Anything.”

  Conrad took a deep breath. “Did he ever regret marrying my mother? After she died, I mean. Did he wish he’d married someone else?”

  “There was no one else for your father, not before or after. He loved your mother and that was it.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you there are no guarantees of any kind in life,” his uncle continued gently. “We need to be happy when we find love and not worry so much about whether it will last forever. God only gives us one day at a time. The rest is in His hands.”

  Just then Elmer shouted, “Hey, what are they doing?”

  The older man had been standing by the window of the hardware store, looking out over the street that went through Dry Creek. Now, he was pointing at something and sputtering. “Call the sheriff.”

  Conrad rushed over to the window. The sheriff was probably home by now and it would take him time to get back. “What’s wrong?”

  He only had to look down the street to see there were strange men in town. At that same moment, it occurred to him that the pickup he saw was too clean to have come from the Elkton Ranch. There was no dust on it. It had come in from the freeway. He should have followed his instinct and gone to check it out.

  He strained to see what was happening. The men—two of them—were down by his uncle’s house, standing on the street by the white fence. They were struggling with something that looked like his aunt’s fruity tablecloth only it had legs and black strappy high heels.

  “They’ve got Conrad’s bride!” Elmer shouted out at the same time that Conrad realized they had Katrina wrapped up in that old tablecloth and, what with all the flapping around, it looked like they were trying to get her to go inside her sister’s old gray car.

  Conrad raced for the door.

  “Wait,” his uncle called him back. “You can’t go out there with nothing in your hands.”

  And, with that, his uncle reached over to a shelf and threw him a brand-new shovel.

  “Thanks,” Conrad said as he opened the door and stepped onto the porch.

  Katrina was mad. She was also a little scared, but she’d had a hard day and she didn’t appreciate having a tablecloth thrown over her and scrawny arms trying to push her around. She’d been taking the tablecloth out to hang on the clothesline to freshen it up after using it all day for a backdrop for photos, when someone grabbed her.

  She elbowed one of the attackers in his stomach and got a grunt for her efforts. “Let me go!”

  “Shut up,” one of them muttered and she stomped on his foot with the heel of her shoes.

  “Witch,” he screamed. “You’re going to be sorry.”

  Katrina tried to duck out of their arms, but the other man had a firm grip on her waist.

  The man she had kicked started pressing her head down for some reason when she heard footsteps coming to her rescue.

  “Let her go,” Conrad shouted. She knew it was him by the sound of his voice.

  “Call the sheriff,” Katrina yelled.

  There, she thought, that was the way things were done in civilized places. The authorities came and rescued people from kidnappers. Although why these two were interested in kidnapping her she had no idea.

  “Nobody’s calling the law,” the man holding her waist said. She knew it was him because she’d been trying to twist free and he yelled in her ear. “Kyle, show them.”

  No sooner had the thought surfaced that having a name put her in a better negotiating position than she heard a blast.

  “That was a gun,” she said.

  “No kidding,” the other one, who must be Kyle, said with a sneer. She couldn’t see his face to know he was sneering, but she figured he was.

  “If you shot someone, you’ll be sorry.”

  The man at her waist just laughed.

  “No one’s hurt,” Conrad called out. Which relieved her until she realized he sounded closer. What was wrong with the man? He was supposed to be running off to get the sheriff. She knew Conrad did his duty, but he needed to use some sense.

  She heard one footstep coming closer and the click of the gun. That did it. She took a deep breath, put her elbow into the stomach of the man holding her and stomped her foot again on Kyle.

  She heard a howl and a grunt, but no gunshot so she felt good.

  “What—are you nuts?” Kyle demanded when he stopped jumping around. “That old car ain’t worth it.”

  She went still. “Which car?”

  She found a tear in the cloth. Edith had said the tablecloth was old, but it had been whole until these guys decided to use it as a net. Mentally giving an apology to Edith, she straightened and put her nose in the opening. She shook her head back and forth until she made the hole bigger and could get half her head through the opening.

  What she saw then made chills run down her back. Conrad was standing there with a shovel in his hands, daring those two degenerates to charge at him.

  “You can have the car,” she announced. Her sister had said it was only worth a couple of hundred dollars and she still had that in savings. She’d buy the thing if Leanne’s husband was so wild to sell it.

  “You don’t need to give them anything,” Conrad said.

  “We need the key,” Kyle said. He was a stocky, dark-haired man with a red bandanna tied around his forehead. At least he wasn’t waving the gun around anymore. He had it pointed to the ground as he turned to talk to her.

  The other man looked like a used car salesman. He had his hair slicked back with some kind of gel and a gold tooth in the front of his mouth. His brown T-shirt had a dirt bike pictured on it.

  Katrina decided that neither one of her attackers looked too bright. Not that she was probably looking her best after pushing her head through a hole, either. “I don’t have the key with me. What’s wrong with you? I was just going out to the clothesline. You could see I didn’t even have my purse.”

  She wanted to look around and see where everyone was standing, but she didn’t want to alert her would-be captors that people were no doubt looking out of every window in town now that they’d fired that gun. She’d keep talking so they didn’t think of that, either. She didn’t want them shooting any more bullets around. The sheriff would be here before she knew it.

  “Don’t you have a pocket?” Kyle asked. “What do you have in your pocket?”

  “Take the tablecloth away and I’ll empty my pockets for you,” she promised. “You’ll see there’s nothing in them but a tissue or two.”

  Conrad thought his heart was going to burst. Katrina kept talking to these thugs like she was at a garden party. If one of them would step away from her, he’d have a chance of bringing the man down with the side of the shovel. But he couldn’t risk hitting her, not when she was standing so close, and now she was letting that man search the pockets on her jeans.

  Please, God, help me, he thought. I’d rather die myself than see this exasperating woman hurt.

  “I’ll go get the key,” Conrad offered. Didn’t she know these men were dangerous?

  “How do you know where it is?” Kyle lifted his head and asked suspiciously. All he’d brought out of Katrina’s pocket was a soggy tissue and he didn’t look too happy about it.

  “Good point,” Conrad said. “Maybe you should take me as your hostage and let her go get the key. She’ll know where it is better than me. It’s where it was this morning.”

  “Why would you do something like that?” Kyle frowned like he was trying to figure out what the catch was. “We could hurt you something fierce if she doesn’t come back.”

  “He feels responsible for the whole world,” Katrina muttered.

  “Oh.” Kyle trie
d to figure that out.

  “Look,” Conrad said, spreading his hands and setting the shovel down at his feet. “I’ll cooperate. Let her go get the key.”

  The guy with the dirt bike on his shirt grunted. “Let her do it, Kyle. We can’t stand here all day if she doesn’t have it. Our orders were to get the stuff and get out of here.”

  “Well, Katrina is the one to get the key then,” Conrad said with as much cheerful force as he could manage. These men would run around in circles if no one took charge of them. “Kyle, you let go and Mr.—” Conrad looked at the man “—Mr. Dirt Bike here you take my arm at the same time and we’ll make the switch.”

  “I guess,” Kyle said.

  The Dirt Bike man was already reaching for him so Conrad cooperated by stepping closer. For a moment, he was near enough to Katrina to smell her perfume. If they got out of this alive, he was never going to let her go. Of course, now might not be the best time to tell her that. Not when she was looking at him like he was crazy.

  “These men aren’t playing around,” she hissed at him.

  “I know.” The grip Dirt Bike man had on him would have told him that if he didn’t already know it.

  “You could get killed just being responsible, you know. The world doesn’t need you to ride to its rescue all the time.” Her eyes flashed and her chin got that stubborn look he’d come to recognize with affection.

  He smiled at her. “Just go get the key,” and then, because he couldn’t help it, he added, “dear.”

  That apparently rendered her speechless, but at least she started walking back toward the kitchen.

  “And don’t get anything else. Just the key,” he called after her. He suddenly worried she’d come out with one of Aunt Edith’s butcher knives or that old ice pick his uncle kept. Conrad didn’t want to say anything to warn Katrina, though, not with the men here listening to every word he had to say. “Ask Aunt Edith about it if you need.”

  Maybe his aunt would have sense enough to make Katrina stay inside. The sheriff had surely been called and would be driving into town any minute now.