Jackpot Baby. Muriel Jensen

      Prologue

      Shelly Dupree leaned her elbows on the old oak bar that ran the length of the Heartbreaker Saloon and wished she could consume enough alcohol to achieve the rosy glow some of the regular patrons were already sporting at five minutes to seven. But as a chef, she found taste too important to ignore when eating or drinking. And the bite and burn of Scotch or bourbon just didn’t do it for her. She’d been toying with the same glass of gewuürztraminer wine for an hour. Dev Devlin, owner of the saloon, stocked it just for her and served it with a flourish despite the teasing hoots and hollers of their friends.

      She stared moodily at her reflection in the mirror hung behind the bar between two paintings of nudes, one reclining on lace, the other playing cards with a gentleman on her bed. Well, Shelly presumed he was a gentleman.

      She refocused on her own face and thought she didn’t look like a loser. Serious hazel eyes peered back at her, taking in short dark brown hair parted on the side, and an unexceptional but nicely symmetrical heart-shaped face. A pink turtleneck sweater, all that was visible above the bar, covered breasts that would never earn her a job at Hooters, but didn’t require a push-up bra, either. She looked like an upwardly mobile young woman having a drink with her friends after a successful day at the office.

      The truth, however, was that nothing in Jester, Montana, was upwardly mobile, particularly the merchants trying to make a living there. She was almost three months behind on her coffee-shop rent and was now on a cash basis with her suppliers of meat, produce and paper goods.

      Several years of drought had decimated Jester, population 1,502, located on the eastern edge of the state near its border with North Dakota. To anyone passing through, the area was just a long expanse of rolling hills and dusty bluffs, and downtown Jester was but a two-block-long collection of charmingly antiquated buildings reminiscent of its pioneer history.

      But to Shelly, Jester and its people were everything. She’d spent two years at the Culinary Institute of America in Chicago, and one year working as a sous-chef in the dining room of a Los Angeles hotel. But the other twenty-five years of her life had been spent in or around The Brimming Cup, a coffee shop her parents had owned and operated on Main Street since before she was born. It had become hers four years ago when her mother died of cancer, and her father followed six months later with a broken heart.

      The people of Jester, who’d always been her friends, became her family. They continued to eat breakfast and lunch in the coffee shop, brought her the latest news, discussed world events with an enthusiasm unfettered by consideration for politics or political correctness, and simply made her want to stay.

      She’d once had dreams of opening a fine-dining establishment in a big city, of imagining that the man of her dreams would walk in one day, fall madly in love with her and provide her with the sense of security and belonging that had died with her parents. She had work and her friends, but they went home to their families at night. She went home to Sean Connery, an old tabby tomcat who’d walked out of a snowbank last winter. When she’d opened the back door to offer him a saucer of milk, he had taken it as an invitation to move in.

      Her parents had been loving but practical people, and they’d taught her that pipe dreams amounted to nothing and only hard work yielded positive results. So she stayed in Jester, knowing she’d miss home too much if she left. And there was no man out there for her, anyway. They were all married or looking for supermodels.

      Unwilling to completely compromise her artistic approach to cooking, she’d added fine dining to The Brimming Cup’s menu. But that had meant eliminating a few of the menu’s standards and she’d gotten too many good-natured but serious complaints.

      So she continued with the same fare her parents had served for decades—burgers and fries, chili, stew, meat loaf, mac and cheese, sirloin steak, fried chicken, pie. Her life would go on as it always had.

      But even pie hadn’t been moving much lately. Skipping dessert had become an economy measure for many of her patrons. And while her lunch trade held steady, most of her regulars were eating breakfast at home to save money.

      Still, business, though hardly brisk, had sustained the coffee shop until this winter. The snow had started in October and had hardly let up since. Now at the end of January, it had been a long four months without visitors, the Christmas trade had been disappointing thanks to the cautious national economy, and the town that had just gotten by was now in danger of slipping away altogether.

      The Town Hall and the school were in disrepair, the church that all denominations shared needed a new roof, and the bronze statue of Catherine Peterson and her horse, Jester, for whom the town was named, was turning green. Everyone was mortified, but no one, particularly the town government, had the financial wherewithal to have it cleaned.

      Now, in one hand, Shelly held the letter from the Billings attorney who managed her building, threatening her with eviction if she didn’t pay the full two months she was behind in rent along with the current amount owing. She didn’t have it, of course, and she was out of ideas on where to get it.

      In her other hand was her list of lottery numbers. Once a week she and eleven friends and members of the Jester Merchants’ Association contributed a dollar and a list of numbers to a collective pot, and Dean Kenning, Jester’s one and only barber and himself a contributor, drove to Pine Run to buy their ticket.

      They’d done this every year for three years, and once they’d won forty-two dollars. They’d bought pizza, had a party and laughed about their big win.

      She came to the Heartbreaker every Tuesday to watch the drawing on television. Her set at home was diseased and the picture unreliable.

      She told herself philosophically as the time neared for the drawing, that no one could have everything in life. One was greedy to expect financial wealth when they were already rich in friends. But the fantasy of winning