The Lawman Takes A Wife. Anne Avery
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 narrow 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