River's Bend

by JoAnn Ross

  “How quaint.” Janet shook her head. “Sorry. I really don’t mean to sound so negative. I just don’t want to lose my BFF. I’ll fly out there next summer,” she confirmed.

  Rachel wished Janet wasn’t making it sound as if she were planning a trip on a Conestoga wagon to the wild and wooly western wilderness country.

  Her decision hadn’t been entirely impulsive. Using due diligence, she had, after all, searched out River’s Bend’s website and discovered that the town that billed itself as “Oregon’s Most Western Town—where spurs have a job to do and cowboy hats aren’t a fashion accessory,” had a year-round population of three thousand, eight-hundred and thirty-six citizens. The top two industries were ranching and tourism, the second due to its outdoor lifestyle, proliferation of dude ranches, and the number of western movies that had been filmed there.

  “It’s a date,” she said.

  Both women’s smiles were forced. As they walked back into the house, Rachel knew that in spite of all best intentions and promises, their lives, which had been entwined for so many years, were inexorably drifting apart.

  2

  The New Chance Café was a wreck. Which wasn’t all that surprising, Cooper Murphy considered as he stepped over the heavy fire hoses and sloshed through three inches of blackened water. Fire had a way of making things downright messy. Although the flames had been extinguished, a thick cloud of acrid smoke hung heavily over the interior of the restaurant, stinging his eyes and scorching his throat.

  He found three members of the volunteer fire department in what remained of the kitchen, drinking coffee. Amazingly, the enormous stainless-steel urn had escaped unharmed.

  “Hey, Coop.” Cal Potter greeted him with a grin that appeared broad and white in his blackened face. “You’re just in time for the cleanup.”

  Cooper waded through the grimy water to the urn, wishing he’d worn his weekend work boots. Wet soot had already darkened the silver lizard skin of his Tony Lamas to a muddy gray.

  “My timing’s always been terrific,” he said as he poured coffee into a chipped white mug.

  “Speaking of timing, what do you think Mitzi’s gonna do when she finds out about this?” Fred Wiley asked. The fireman’s face was as dark and streaked as his partner’s.

  “Mitzi?” Cooper tasted the coffee and understood why the urn had escaped destruction. If it could hold the battery acid that Johnny Mott called coffee, it had to be lined with whatever they’d used on the outside of the space shuttle.

  “Do you think she’s going to notify that woman?” Fred asked.

  “What woman?”

  “You know, the Easterner who bought this place.”

  “Name’s Rachel Hathaway,” Dan Murphy, former River County sheriff and Cooper’s father, said.

  “Oh, her.” Cooper shrugged. “I supposed it’d only be the right thing to do, considering.” His gaze swept the room, taking in the destruction.

  Water was everywhere—on the floor, the counters, and six-burner stove. The ancient wood countertop was already beginning to swell. By tomorrow it would be warped beyond repair.

  The commercial oven hood, designed to handle a reasonable amount of smoke, had been completely blackened, and the prison green paint on the walls was badly blistered.

  “Where’s Johnny?”

  “Al drove him to the hospital in Klamath Falls. We were worried all this smoke might bring on an attack of his emphysema,” Dan said.

  “Is he in bad shape?”

  Cooper’s father shrugged. “Didn’t seem much worse than usual. I suspect he’s mostly stressed out about the possibility of the sale falling through.”

  “Mitzi should call that buyer,” Cal Potter put in his two cents’ worth. “Especially her being a widow lady and all. Finding this mess waiting for her would be bad enough if she had a man to help her get the place put back together again.”

  “Yep, Mitzi’s gonna have to call her,” Wiley agreed with a nod of his grizzled gray head. “Even if it does mean losing her commission.”

  “She can’t,” Dan said.

  “She already spent the money?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with the money,” Dan said. “The reason Mitzi can’t call the Hathaway woman is that she’s on the road and apparently somewhere out of cell range. She should be arriving today.”

  For the past six months Dan Murphy had, in the local vernacular, been keeping company with Mitzi Patterson, River’s Bend’s sole real estate agent. Mitzi was also the River’s Bend Register’s social reporter, which put Cooper’s father in a position to know more than he wanted to about the town’s goings-on.

  Cal Potter and Fred Wiley whistled in unison. “Wouldn’t want to be the one who’s got to tell the little lady that she bought herself a pig in a poke,” Wiley muttered.

  “Me neither,” Potter agreed.

  Dan remained silent and looked grim.

  Cooper was looking out the front window as a green Volvo station wagon with Connecticut plates towing a small rental trailer pulled up in front of the café.

  “Looks as if somebody’s going to have to break the news,” he said.

  Three pairs of eyes followed his to the parking lot.

  Silence settled over the ravaged kitchen.

  “I think Coop should be the one,” Potter said finally.

  “Me, too,” Wiley seconded the motion.

  Cooper had served for eight years in the Marines; six of those years in the military police, deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. After returning to civilian life, he’d signed on with the Portland Police Bureau, working in high crime districts, which often hadn’t seemed all that different from the war zones he’d left behind. In all those years working in risky situations, he’d never—not once—considered himself a coward.

  Until now.

  “Why me?”

  “Seems reasonable,” Dan drawled. “Seein’ as how you’re the sheriff.”

  Damn. Keeping law and order in River County was one thing. Telling a widow who’d driven all the way across the country that her dream had just gone up in smoke was quite another.

  Cooper took another fortifying drink of coffee and wished to hell it were something stronger. Not that anything short of toxic waste was stronger than Johnny Mott’s sorry excuse for coffee.

  “I don’t suppose I have any choice.”

  “Don’t suppose you do,” Dan murmured. Although his tone remained noncommittal, a fleeting look of sympathy appeared in his eyes, reminding Cooper of the winter when he was seven and his father had been called away from dinner to tell Mrs. Vance that her husband wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas. Ed Vance’s logging truck had hit a patch of black ice and skidded out of control on one of the mountain switchbacks.

  Then there’d been the time Billy Duncan had drowned in Potter’s Pond. According to Ethel MacGregor—River’s Bend’s answer to Paul Revere when it came to spreading the news—Cooper’s father had held a hysterical Karen Duncan in his arms, rocking her like a child, murmuring words of comfort until the woman had run out of tears.

  There had been other such occasions during Daniel Patrick Murphy’s twenty-five year tenure as sheriff. None of which could have been easy. All of which had probably stayed with his father like some of the stuff Cooper had witnessed while deployed lingered in his mind.

  “Guess it comes with the territory,” he said unenthusiastically.

  “Yeah. It does,” Dan agreed.

  This time it was pride Cooper viewed in his father’s eyes. Pride and empathy.

  He drew in a deep breath and put the chipped mug down on the muddy counter. “Well, here goes nothing.”

  3

  Rachel clenched the steering wheel as she stared out the window at the New Chance Café. The scene that greeted her was not the least bit encouraging.

  “Well, you’d certainly never see anything like this in Connecticut,” she said with feigned cheer as she took in the log building sitting in the middle of a gravel parking lot whe
re a white pickup, a red fire truck, and a black Jeep Grand Cherokee painted with River County Sheriff’s Department on the side, were parked.

  “The cow’s neat,” her nine-year-old son offered.

  Despite her best intentions to remain positive, Rachel cringed as she raised her eyes to the life-size statue of a brown cow standing on top of the roof. A cow the photographs posted on Mitzi Patterson’s real estate website had failed to reveal.

  “It’s unique, at any rate.”

  “Wait ’til Jimmy finds out we own a log cabin restaurant with a cow on the roof,” Scotty said. “He’ll never believe it! Can I call him tonight, Mom? And tell him about the cow?”

  “I suppose so,” Rachel murmured, staring up at the cow. Could it be any larger?

  “Let’s check out the inside,” she suggested. “We’ll have a nice brunch and take a tour of the kitchen before going to Ms. Patterson’s real estate office to pick up the key to our house.”

  “Do you think the house will have a cow on the roof, too?”

  “I fervently hope not.”

  “Maybe it’ll have a horse,” Scotty suggested. “Wouldn’t that be sweet?”

  “Sweet,” Rachel agreed absently.

  She’d just left the car and was headed toward the café when a man came out the scarred wooden door, causing her to come to an abrupt halt.

  He was, in a word, perfect. Impossibly, magnificently perfect. His tanned complexion revealed a lot of time spent outdoors, his jaw was firm, his chin square and marked with a deep and delicious cleft. His nose was straight, and his eyes, beneath the brim of a fawn-colored cowboy hat, were a remarkable green so bright that were the rest of him not so flawless, she might have suspected he was wearing tinted contacts.

  He was wearing a blue chambray shirt with jeans, wedged-heeled boots and a pistol worn gunslinger style on his hip. It was as if that iconic Marlboro man had suddenly sprung to life and walked off a billboard.

  “Ms. Hathaway?” he asked.

  His voice was a lush, deep baritone that was as impossibly sexy as his rugged good looks. For a fleeting moment, Rachel imagined showing up with this man at the country club back home. The women would all go wild; it would be like throwing him into a bucket with a school of starving piranha.

  That image had her smiling for the first time in a very long while.

  “Are you a cowboy?” Scotty asked, staring up at the hat.

  “Not really,” he said.

  Disappointment moved across her son’s freckled face.

  “But I am sheriff of River County.” He reached into a shirt pocket and pulled out a metal badge.

  Scotty beamed. “A real live sheriff. Holy cow! Wait’ll Jimmy hears about this!”

  “Jimmy is Scotty’s best friend,” Rachel explained. “Back home in Connecticut.”

  Not that Connecticut was her home any longer, she reminded herself. This was home now. This restaurant with the enormous brown cow on the roof.

  Up close, the cow appeared even more gargantuan. Rachel blinked, hoping that when she looked again, the enormous animal would prove to be merely a mirage, brought on by exhaustion and too many hours staring at the seemingly endless miles of asphalt crossing the country.

  No such luck. When she opened her eyes again, the cow was still there in all its bovine glory.

  “I figured as much.” When he took off his hat, revealing thick sun-streaked chestnut hair, Rachel decided that it was unfair for a man to be gifted with such physical beauty. “I’m Cooper Murphy.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sheriff. This is my son, Scotty.”

  “Mom,” Scotty complained. “I keep telling you, you have to call me Scott. I’m the man of the house, now,” he explained to Cooper. “Scotty’s a little kid’s name.”

  The sheriff held out a broad dark hand to her son. “Hi, Scott. I never would’ve taken you for a little kid. Welcome to River’s Bend.”

  “Me and my mom came to Oregon to start a new life,” Scotty—Scott—revealed.

  “My mom and I,” Rachel corrected.

  Her son shrugged off the murmured grammatical correction. “Anyway, my mom and I bought this restaurant because she’s the best cook in the whole world. Everyone thinks so. Not just me. Wait ’til you taste her braised short ribs. They even got written about in the newspaper.”

  “It was a very small review,” Rachel said, remembering how excited she’d been to see Rachel’s Home Catering in print. Even if it had only been a weekly local paper.

  “I’m looking forward to trying them,” the sheriff said.

  “Dad always said they were even better than Grandma’s.”

  “If your dad said so, it must be true.”

  “It is. Grandma died. So did my Grandma and Grandpa Field who lived far away in Iowa. They were my mom’s mom and dad. But that was a long time ago, when I was just a baby. But I’ve seen them on the DVDs Mom kept in the old bookcase we had to sell after my dad died, too. So we’re all alone now, but we still have each other. Right, Mom?”

  “Right,” she said absently.

  Dragging her gaze from where it had drifted back up to the roof again, Rachel decided to call a halt to this conversation before Scott proceeded to reveal her entire life story.

  “Well, as nice as it’s been meeting you, I’d like to inspect my café.”

  “Sure. Come on in and I’ll show you around.”

  “I appreciate the offer, Sheriff Murphy, but you needn’t bother. Surely giving restaurant tours isn’t part of your job.”

  “The name’s Cooper,” he corrected, taking her elbow as he shepherded her toward the front door. “And as for this being part of the job, Ms. Hathaway, I’m afraid that it is.”

  4

  This was the widow lady? Cooper couldn’t quite believe that this woman in the sharply creased jeans and white silk shirt was the one the guys had been talking about only minutes earlier.

  An educated guess put her age somewhere in her early thirties. Her hair, tied at the nape of her long, slender neck, was smooth ebony that gleamed like polished obsidian. As he opened the heavy wooden door, Cooper hoped that the willowy Rachel Hathaway was a helluva lot tougher than she looked because the widow lady was going to need every bit of strength she possessed.

  And then some.

  “Oh, no!” Mist gray eyes widened in a cameo face as she stared in dismay at the wreckage that greeted her entry into the restaurant.

  “Geez,” Scott said, his eyes wide, dark saucers behind the lenses of his Harry Potter glasses. “It looks even worse than the time Peter Martin’s science project exploded inside the microwave.”

  “I’m afraid the kitchen is in even worse shape.” Since her already fair skin had paled to the color of newly driven snow, Cooper watched her carefully for signs that she might be about to faint.

  “I find that hard to believe,” she murmured. Her gaze swept the room, taking in the smoke-tinged log walls, the blackened ceiling, and the sodden green felt of the pool table in the corner.

  “Perhaps you should go back outside in the fresh air and sit down for a moment,” he suggested solicitously.

  As if shaking off her shock, she squared her slender shoulders. Then lifted her chin. “I’d rather see the kitchen,” she said, meeting his concerned look with a determined, level one of her own.

  Cooper tipped the brim of his hat back with his thumb, his admiration mixed with concern. “Now it’s not that I want to stand in your way, ma’am, but I’ve got to warn you that it’s an unholy mess back there.”

  Reminding herself that the reason she had come to Oregon, the reason she had dragged her child all the way across the country, was to escape just such solicitude, Rachel stiffened: shoulders, back, resolve.

  After what she’d been through, she refused to allow a bit—all right, a great deal more than a bit—of smoke and water to get the best of her.

  “I believe you, Sheriff,” she said. “But unholy or not, it just happens to be my mess.”

&n
bsp; With that, she brushed passed him, pushing open the swinging doors that led to the kitchen.

  Taking in the destruction that made the dining room look neat and tidy by comparison, Rachel reluctantly admitted, if only to herself, that Sheriff Cooper Murphy definitely couldn’t be accused of exaggeration.

  The brown linoleum floor was awash with soot and ashes while acrid smoke hung over the kitchen like a funeral pall. Which was appropriate, because the devastation represented the death of a dream that had been keeping her going for weeks. And across all those seemingly endless miles of asphalt.

  At the very center of the muck and mire were three men who were all looking at her with varying degrees of interest. One, seeming shocked, bit through his cigar.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” she greeted them, forcing a smile that she was a very long way from feeling.

  “Morning, ma’am.” One of the men yanked off his hat and actually gave her a stilted bow that he might have bestowed on Kate Middleton, were the Duchess of Cambridge ever to pay a royal visit to River’s Bend, Oregon.

  “Mornin’,” the man who’d bit his cigar in two mumbled. He stared down at his boots and plucked bits of tobacco out of his mouth.

  “Ms. Hathaway.” The third man extended a hand. “I’m Dan Murphy and these two gentlemen are Cal Potter and Fred Wiley, members of River’s Bend’s Volunteer Fire Department. Along with being fire chief, Cal’s also River County’s deputy sheriff and Fred—” he gestured toward the cigar biter—“runs Wiley’s Feed and Grain.

  “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, ma’am, although I wish it could have been under more pleasant circumstances.” Dan Murphy continued.

  “I certainly can’t argue with you there,” Rachel murmured as her hand disappeared into his much larger one. “Murphy,” she said. “Are you—”

  “My father,” Cooper filled in for her. “And former sheriff of River County.”

  Eyeing Dan Murphy with renewed interest, Rachel realized that had she not been so stunned by the devastation of the New Chance Café’s kitchen, she would have spotted the resemblance immediately.