Wife Wanted in Dry Creek (15 page)

C
onrad 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, to 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 tried 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.

“Dear, huh?” Dirt Bike man said with a smirk as he looked at Conrad. “So you’re not out to rescue the whole world. It was just her.”

“You got a problem with that?” Conrad twisted to look the man in the eye.

“No, no problem,” the other man said with a chuckle. “Just passing the time, that’s all.”

Conrad watched as Katrina stepped into the house. Then he took a look around the town he’d come to love. He couldn’t see all of it because Kyle had decided to help Dirt Bike man keep him in place. Conrad would have told them that they could ease up their muscles a little. Until he knew Katrina wasn’t going to come back out here, he wasn’t going anywhere.

He pondered a little on what it was that made a man love a woman.

“You ever have a girlfriend?” he asked Dirt Bike man because his face was the closest.

“Yeah,” the man looked over in surprise. “Once.”

Conrad could see in the man’s eyes that he’d be standing right where Conrad was now if the situation had been reversed and his girl was in danger. “What happened?”

Dirt Bike man shrugged. “You know.”