“The FBI has better things to worry about than who sees your seed catalogs,” Elmer said as he finished walking over to Jacob and looked down at the letter the other man still held. “Besides, no one in California would care how we sort through our mail. Would they?”
“Well, open it up and read it to us,” Mrs. Hargrove finally said. She had a raisin bread pudding baking in her oven and she didn’t want the crust to get too brown. “We haven’t got all morning.”
Jacob took out his pocketknife and used it as a letter opener. Then he cleared his throat and carefully read the entire letter aloud word by word. Jacob had always been proud of his speaking abilities, and he hadn’t had many chances in his life for public performances. If there hadn’t been so many people gathered in the hardware store, he probably would have listened to what he was saying instead of just focusing on getting all the words spoken correctly and loudly the way Mrs. Baker, his first-grade teacher, would have expected.
,!
Joseph K. Price, Attorney-at-Law
918 Green Street, Suite 200
Pasadena, California 91104
Dear Dry Creek Postmaster,
I’m writing to request your help in locating a man who lives in your community. Unfortunately, I do not know the man’s full name, so I cannot write to him directly. The nature of my business is this man’s relationship with a young woman, Chrissy Hamilton, and her new baby. It is the paternity of the infant that I wish to establish.
Miss Hamilton was in your community last fall. I am hopeful you will know the young man who spent the night with Miss Hamilton in her cousin’s truck. The man’s first name is Reno. If you can supply me with the man’s full name, I assure you that my client, Mrs. Bard, will be happy to reward you (you have no doubt heard of the family—they own the national chain of dry cleaners by the same name). I realize this is an unusual request, and I want to assure you that no one is asking the man to assume financial responsibility for the baby. Quite the opposite, in fact. Mrs. Bard is anxious to adopt the baby should it be proven to her satisfaction that her son, Jared, is the baby’s father. I apologize for the unorthodox nature of this request. It would not be necessary if Miss Hamilton were more cooperative. But she is young (eighteen, I believe) and does not yet see the full advantage to herself in this arrangement. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours truly,
Joseph K. Price, Esq.
The whole store listened and then stood still in stunned silence for a moment.
Finally Elmer spoke. “Our Reno?”
“Nothing says Reno’s the baby’s father,” Mrs. Hargrove cautioned, and then her voice softened. “Imagine, a baby.”
“Where is Reno, anyway?” Elmer looked around. “He’s usually here to get his mail by now.”
Chapter One
Reno Redfern stopped his pickup in front of the hardware store in Dry Creek. He was late and splattered with thick gray mud. Hopefully someone would have sorted the mail by now, and he could quietly pick up his few bills and get back to the ranch and shower. If he had been paying more attention to the road, he wouldn’t have slipped into the ditch and ended up with the wheels of his pickup stuck in the mud.
Reno shook his head. He’d made it a point to thank God repeatedly for the rain—what rancher wouldn’t?—but he was working on being honest in his dealings with God, and so far he hadn’t been able to say anything polite about the mud. The mud just lay everywhere, making the ground look forlorn and generally being a nuisance.
Reno had liked the first part of spring well enough. The cold of winter had eased up a little and he could walk from the house to the barn without pulling his cap down over his ears. But later, for some reason, everything had turned to mud. The mountains were no longer covered in snow, but the grass hadn’t taken hold yet either. Gray clouds hung in most of the skies, and the air was wet even when it wasn’t raining. The worst part was the deep clay that trapped everyone’s wheels.
Reno frowned as he opened the door to his pickup. The one good thing he could say for the mud was that it matched his mood these days. If it had been a normal Montana spring with endless blue sky and those tiny purple wildflowers blooming beside the gravel roads, he wouldn’t have been able to take all the love and sunshine flowing around the Redfern Ranch now that his sister, Nicki, had settled into married life.
At first Reno had wondered in alarm if he were jealous of Nicki’s wedded bliss. But that wasn’t it. He just missed the way things used to be.
There was such a thing as too much happiness, Reno finally decided, and his sister proved it. Nicki was so sweet these days it made his teeth ache. If she weren’t so sweet, he probably wouldn’t miss the old Nicki so much.
But as much as he tried to bring Nicki back to her senses, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even get her going on a good argument about cattle prices and fertilizer, and those used to be her favorite topics for heated discussion. But now all she wanted to talk about was curtain fabric and love. She had a perfectly good rancher’s brain that was turning to sentimental mush, and he was powerless to stop it.
And she wasn’t content to limit her new sentimental thoughts of love to herself and her new husband. Oh, no—she had started to speak of marriage with a missionary zeal that made Reno nervous. He had seen the speculation in her eyes several days before she came right out and asked him if he’d like her to set him up.
Set him up! Reno still couldn’t believe it. He and Nicki had had a pact. Neither one of them was going to get married, at least not for love. Of course, they’d made that vow when they were ten and twelve, a good four years after their mother had left their father and they’d heard every day since about the damage love could do from their father’s own bitter lips.
Besides, even if Reno decided to take leave of his senses and look for a wife, he didn’t need his sister doing the looking for him. There were plenty of women who wanted to date him. Granted, he wasn’t exactly in touch with any of them at the moment, but that was only because he was busy feeding the new calves and, well—things.
“I’m getting around to it.” Reno had set his glass of water down on the kitchen counter when Nicki asked her question. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m doing fine.”
“Really, you’ve met someone you want to date?”
Reno scowled. She didn’t need to sound so surprised. “Well, no, but I will—”
“When you have time,” Nicki finished for him, and shook her head. “I know as well as you do that there’s never any extra time when you’re ranching—you have to make time for what’s important.”
“Getting the alfalfa planted is important.”
“With mud like this, you can’t even plow. That’s why Garrett and I decided to go to Denver. There’s nothing to do right now.”
“I can change the plugs on the tractor.”
“Or you could do something fun for a change, like maybe go down to Los Angeles and pay a visit to Chrissy Hamilton.”
Reno was struck dumb. Chrissy was the cousin of Nicki’s new husband, Garrett Hamilton. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you’ve been, well, morose since Chrissy visited here last fall. That’s not like you.”
Morose? Ever since Nicki had married her trucker husband, she’d started learning a new word every day. Reno didn’t like to discourage anyone who wanted to learn. Still…“That’s not because of Chrissy.”
Well, Reno admitted to himself, it might be a little bit because of Chrissy, but it wasn’t in the way his sister thought.
Chrissy had come to Dry