by Diana Palmer
The thought made Meadow sad, but she concealed it. She went to her own desk. “Well, I’ve got work to do. Best I get to it before I’m out the door looking for a new job.” She laughed.
“Jeff won’t fire you. He’s too grateful for the help.” She shook her head. “It’s been hard on him since our investigator left.”
“I’m not making much headway on the antique lamp.”
“You will,” Mrs. Pitts told her. “You’ve got a good head on those shoulders. All you need is a little self-esteem.”
Meadow’s eyebrows arched in a question.
“Don’t you let Dal Blake run you down,” came the unexpected comment. “He’ll walk all over you if you let him.”
“He’d better be wearing thick boots, then,” she returned.
Mrs. Pitts just laughed.
* * *
Meadow went to the town’s one convenience store to investigate the theft of a jacket and a pair of boots that belonged to the owner. Nobody locked doors around here. Somebody had just walked in the back door while the proprietor was waiting on a customer and took off with the items.
The odd thing was that the thief had put on the boots. The owner recognized the tread pattern as they walked out back where fresh snow was falling.
“Now doesn’t that beat all?” the man said, exasperated. “He steals my best snow boots and just walks off in them! Doesn’t he know about tracks?”
“I think he may be a couple of beers short of a six-pack.” Meadow chuckled. “I’ll see if I can run him down.”
“You be careful. Easy to get lost in them woods when snow’s coming down like this.”
“I will. Thanks.”
She started out the back and followed the tracks. It was like bread crumbs, she laughed to herself. What a strange thief.
The trail led down the hill, across a frozen stream, and up to the back of the local barbecue joint. In fact, it led right to the back door.
She knocked, and a surprised young man opened it and gaped at her.
She looked down. He was wearing boots. Snow boots. With snow still clinging to them.
“Well, damn!” the boy burst out.
“Would you like to explain?” Meadow invited.
He let out an angry sigh. “Billy Joe stole my girl,” he blurted out. “I was mad as hell. I saw her drive off from the convenience store and I threw a limb, I was so mad . . . I rolled down the hill and into the creek. Soaked my sneakers and my coat. So I went in the back door and took Billy Joe’s,” he added belligerently.
She noted the pile of soaked sneakers and jacket on the floor beside him.
“Go ahead, cuff me, lock me up,” he muttered. “I got nothing to live for anyway, since Billy Joe stole my girl!”
Meadow grimaced. “I’m really sorry,” she said, “but regardless of the reason you took them, the fact is that you did take them. I have to arrest you.”
“I understand. It’s okay.” He drew in a breath. “What a lousy day!”
Meadow called one of the deputies to pick him up and take him to the detention center while she carried the boots and jacket down to the convenience store and had the owner identify them.
He did, but he said he wouldn’t press charges. “I didn’t mean to take his girl, but she liked me better and she wouldn’t go away,” he said simply. He laughed. “I guess some girls are hard to hold on to. Anyway, he shouldn’t have to lose his job and his freedom because he pitched a temper tantrum.”
She smiled. “You’re a good sport.”
He laughed. “She’s a sweet girl.”
* * *
Jeff chuckled when she told him about her morning’s work. “You can’t say this job is ever dull,” he pointed out.
“No. You certainly can’t.”
She and Jeff stopped by the local restaurant to have lunch. It was buffet style. The food was good and inexpensive. A lot of people had lunch there every day.
As she and Jeff took their trays to a booth, Meadow noticed Dal Blake and Dana Conyers sharing a table nearby. She averted her eyes from them and smiled at Jeff as they unloaded their trays.
“I like the way they do fish,” Jeff commented. “The cook came here from LA. He said the traffic was driving him nuts.”
She laughed. “The slower pace is pretty nice,” she said. “St. Louis has its share of traffic as well.”
“Dana’s from LA,” Jeff commented, glancing irritably at the table she was sharing with Dal. “Her aunt loved it here, but Dana has champagne tastes. She’d better not be banking on Dal putting a ring on her finger. No woman’s ever been able to get him to an altar.”
“I’m not surprised,” Meadow said nonchalantly. “He likes to play the field.”
“If I had his money, I might . . . no, that’s not true,” he added on a sigh. “I’d like to find a nice woman and settle down. Raise a family. I’m thirty-five this year. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life alone.”
“There are worse things,” she pointed out.
His eyes slid over her face. “Do you want to get married?”
She shrugged. “It’s not high on my list of priorities,” she confessed. She didn’t add that nobody yet had wanted to marry her. She was everybody’s kid sister at work, usually. Her dates were infrequent and usually miserable. She had no illusions about herself. But she didn’t say that to Jeff.
“It’s hard for people in law enforcement to settle down with someone who doesn’t share the job,” he commented. “I’ve seen plenty of divorces since I started out. You don’t want to take the job home. There are so many horrible things you have to see, things you can’t tell outsiders about.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “Civilians have a hard time understanding the demands of the job, much less the stress it puts on us or the sense of family it creates.”
“We share things outsiders can’t understand,” he agreed. He made a face. “I could never talk to Dana about any of it. She said it wasn’t something she wanted to hear about. She thought it was stupid to carry a gun, and she didn’t like having me called out all hours on cases. She said I should hang the badge at the door and forget it until the next morning.”
“That would work well when a man’s beating his wife and child to death and you get called to save them.”
“I know, right?” He sipped coffee. “I guess I knew it wouldn’t work out. But I was crazy about her.”
“You can’t force yourself to love the right people.” She laughed.
“Have you ever been in love?” he asked.
“No,” she lied. “And I hope that I never am. My parents seemed to love each other, but they couldn’t live together. I don’t want to end up like they did.”
“My parents were happily married for fifty years,” he recalled fondly. “They died together in a wreck—went over the guardrail up in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming during a rain storm. Neither one of them could have lived long without the other,” he added. “They were like two halves of a whole.”
“Do you have siblings?” she wondered.
He shook his head. “I was an only child. I’d just started as a deputy with the sheriff’s department when they died. Hard, losing both of them at once, though.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Your mother died some time back, didn’t she?”
She nodded. “It was just the two of us. We had disagreements, but we loved each other. It was hard. But losing Dad . . .” She stopped and sipped coffee, to keep from crying. “It gets easier, as time passes.”
“It does.”
Mike Markson came in the door a minute later and stopped by their table to say hello.
“How are you coming on the stolen lamp case?” he asked Meadow.
“Slowly,” she said with a smile. “But it’s early days yet.”
“Gil tracked the pipe organ back east,” Jeff told him. “It was sold through an antique dealer in Kansas City.”
“Really?” Mike asked. “Who was it? I k
now some dealers there . . .”
“You wouldn’t know this one, Mike,” Jeff said as he put down his coffee cup. “He’s buried up in Billings.”
“Excuse me?”
“A dead guy sold the pipe organ to the dealer in Kansas City,” Jeff said with twinkling eyes. “Amazing, how he managed that.”
Mike whistled. “Good heavens!”
“Anyway, the lead went cold after that.”
Mike shook his head. “Old man Halstead was from Billings, you know,” he mentioned. “He had people up there. In fact, his aunt died just recently.”
“Old man Halstead?” Meadow wondered.
“Owned the pipe organ that was stolen,” Mike told her. “In fact, I had Gary drive him up there for the funeral so he could talk to the antique dealer he bought the organ from. He hoped the man might remember someone asking about it, you know, about who bought it. Someone with an unusual interest in it.”
“Was there such a person?” Meadow asked.
“In fact, there was,” Mike told her. “The dealer had to turn down a man who offered him a small fortune, because he’d promised it to Halstead.”
“I’d love to talk to that dealer,” Jeff said. “I’ll send Gil up to see him, if you can provide us with a name and telephone number.”
“I’ll get the information when I go back to my shop and email it to you, how’s that?” Mike asked, smiling.
“It would be a great help,” Jeff said. “Gary not with you today?”
“He’s still asleep,” Mike said heavily. “He sits up all night in chat rooms, talking to people he doesn’t know. If he’s not playing video games online,” he added. “I keep hoping he’ll take a bigger interest in the business. I’m not getting any younger. But Gary’s just not that into small-time antiques.”
“Shame,” Jeff said.
“It really is. I should have had more kids,” Mike said on a sigh. “Well, I’ll get lunch and then I’ll send you over the information. Good to see you both.”
They nodded.
“That might give us a break,” Jeff commented with a grin. “I’d love to be able to return that organ to Mr. Halstead. It belonged to his great-grandmother. He loved her dearly. It’s not so much the monetary value as it’s the sentimental value.”
“Isn’t it that way with most things?” she wondered aloud. “I have my mother’s sewing kit. It’s old and nothing fancy, but it’s priceless, because it belonged to her.”
“Why aren’t you two working?” Dal Blake asked sarcastically, holding Dana’s hand tight as he paused by their table. “Goofing off on county time, are you?”
Meadow bristled, but Jeff just laughed. “Get out of here. We’re on our lunch hour. Even law enforcement gets to eat.”
“Hi, Jeff,” Dana purred. “Are you coming to the Christmas dance?”
“Yes. I’m bringing Meadow.”
Dal’s eyebrow lifted. “For God’s sake, spare us all and don’t wear a red dress, will you?”
Meadow glared at him.
“What’s this about a red dress?” Dana probed.
“The first time she wore one, she ended up in the coal bin in her father’s house,” Dal drawled, enjoying himself. “The second time, she fell into the punch bowl and wore the contents home.”
Dana was laughing uproariously. “My, you are clumsy, aren’t you?” she asked Meadow.
Jeff glared at her. “Not everyone is perfect,” he said shortly.
Dana flushed. “I never insinuated . . .” she began.
Jeff threw down his napkin and stood up. “Ready to go?” he asked Meadow with a warm smile.
“Yes, I am,” she said, and smiled back.
Dal glared at both of them. Beside him, Dana was furious at the way Jeff snubbed her.
They walked out without another word to either of the couple still standing at their table.
“She’s insufferable,” Jeff said curtly, turning to Meadow at the squad car. “Don’t let her get under your skin. She loves to needle people.”
“I’m impervious,” she lied with a laugh.
“I try to be. She loves to rub Dal Blake in my face,” he added curtly. “She even told me that if I’d been a little richer, she’d never have thrown me over for him.”
“What a sweetheart,” she muttered.
“He wasn’t much kinder, with that remark about your dress. You ought to wear a red one just to spite him,” he added.
She grinned. “In fact, I bought a new red one,” she replied. “And I don’t plan to end up in the punch bowl this time.”
“I’ll make sure you don’t.” He glanced toward the other side of the parking lot, where Dal was putting Dana into his big Lincoln. “We’d better get back to work.”
“Ready when you are, boss,” she said easily. She put on a good act, but her heart was breaking. Dal was heartless. She should be grateful that he didn’t like her. A man like that would rip her pride into shreds. But part of her was still seventeen, hanging on his every word, so much in love that it hurt to even look at him. She hoped she could keep those impulses under control. The last complication she needed in her life was to give Dal Blake the idea she couldn’t live without him.
* * *
The snow came suddenly, in such a blizzard that Meadow couldn’t even see how to get to her SUV. She put on sunglasses, which helped a little. Finding her car was hard. Once she found it, under about five feet of snow, she realized that she’d have to dig it out to even get it started toward what used to be her driveway.
Shoveling that much snow would take hours, and she didn’t even own a snow shovel. She stood beside her entombed SUV, with the hood of her parka pulled up over her blond hair, and tried to decide what to do next.
She heard jingling bells. She turned, and there was Jeff in a sleigh, with two horses pulling it.
He stopped the team just beside her SUV and grinned at her from under the brim of his hat. “Going my way?” he teased.
She laughed wholeheartedly. “Am I ever! Thanks so much! I think I’d be here until after Christmas if I had to dig my poor SUV out of there.”
He helped her into the sleigh and got the horses moving. “What about your cattle?” he asked.
“I talked to my foreman. He said the men would get to them even if they had to go out on snowshoes with shovels.” She shook her head. “It’s been a long time since I saw snow this deep.”
“It’s Colorado. We have a lot of snow.”
She smiled at him. “This is a nice way to get to work.”
“Well,” he replied, “it will be until the snow melts.”
She laughed. “What would you do then?”
“Leave the sleigh out back of the office and have Gil help me ride the horses home, bareback, I reckon.”
She liked his resourcefulness. “They’re a good team,” she remarked. “I’ve heard that some horses can’t be trained to pull sleds or any sort of loads.”
“That’s true. There are horses you ride and horses you use to pull wagons or sleds. Some people learn that the hard way.” He chuckled. “Like old man Beasley, who hooked up a skittish mare to a little wagon and thought she’d calm down once she got used to it.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“She heard a car backfire in the distance, reared up, turned over the wagon, Beasley and all, and fell in the creek. He traded me the mare for a nice draft horse.”
“What did you do with her?”
“She made one of the nicest saddle horses I’ve ever had. There are methods to get a skittish horse used to noise, to desensitize them. I worked with her for a few weeks, and she got over her nervous episodes.”
“That’s nice,” she commented.
He smiled at her. “I like animals.”
“Yes. Me too.”
She leaned back on the seat and watched the snowy landscape slide by as the horses made a path through the snow. “Should we be singing something like ‘Winter Wonderland’?” she asked with a laugh.
“How about ‘Jingle Bells’ instead?”
“You’re on!”
They sang the popular song all the way into town, laughing in between the choruses.
* * *
The night of the Christmas dance, Meadow slid into her sexy red dress, carefully put her hair into an elegant high coiffure with synthetic ruby combs, and applied her makeup perfectly.
The result made her feel good inside. She wasn’t beautiful, but if she worked at it, she could look fairly attractive, she decided as she studied her reflection in the mirror.
She thought about Dal Blake’s poisonous comments about her last two red dresses and she flushed with anger. He was always insulting these days, no matter what she said or did, or wore. She wondered why he was so antagonistic. She hadn’t done anything to deserve such treatment. God knew, she hid her feelings for him so well that nobody around her suspected that she even liked him. But he went out of his way to insult her.
She tried not to think back to the last Christmas dance she’d attended, when her father was alive. That dance, when Dal had kissed her so hungrily under the mistletoe, had colored her whole life ever since. She couldn’t forget it. She’d had some crazy idea that he felt something for her as well, those few endless, poignant seconds when she felt his hard mouth on hers.
Of course, he’d been drinking. And he’d made sarcastic remarks afterward. When the drunk man had tried to come onto her and spilled the contents of the punch bowl over her, Dal had thrown back his head and roared with laughter. He hadn’t even been sympathetic as she stood there with punch dripping off her beautiful dress, humiliated beyond belief.
Her father, bless him, had taken her home. He’d had some harsh words to say about, and to, Dal Blake afterward. He told Meadow that the man was never going to be welcome in his home again, not after that.
Meadow had said that it didn’t matter. She lived far away and Dal was kind to her father, even if he wasn’t kind to her. Sometimes, she said philosophically, people just developed dislikes for other people. It wasn’t logical, but there it was. The plain fact was that Dal Blake didn’t like Meadow Dawson. Period.
Yes, he’d kissed her under the mistletoe, but he’d been drinking. Men under the influence often did strange things. A veteran law enforcement officer, Meadow knew that better than many people.
