“But—” Marla protested. She wasn’t sure if she was protesting hiding her roots to find a husband or looking for a husband in the first place. She supposed she would have to marry if she wanted a new father for her children. But she wasn’t ready for that yet. What if a second marriage proved only how lacking she was as a woman? There was no reason to believe she’d do any better the second time around than she had the first.
“Trust me. No one wants to have a Hispanic gang member in their neighborhood, no matter where they live. If they don’t know you’re Hispanic, there’s no reason for them to make the 19th Street connection.”
“But Sammy’s not in the gang. Not really.”
Susan held up her hands. “I’m just saying these people will be nervous. There was an article in Time magazine last month—or was it Newsweek? Anyway, it was about gangs sending scouts out to small towns to see about setting up safe houses there. They want to have a place to send their guys so they can hide out from the police if things get bad. I wouldn’t blame a small town for being careful.”
“Well, of course they should be careful, but…”
Susan looked at the carving on the armchair again and then just shrugged. “I had a cousin drive through Montana a few years ago. If I remember right, he said the population is only about two percent Hispanic for the whole state. How big is this Dry Creek place you’re moving to?”
“Two hundred people.”
Susan nodded as she pulled the agreed-upon five-dollar bill from her pocket. “Then you and your kids will probably be the token two percent.”
Marla frowned as she stood up. She was ready for the woman to leave. “We’re probably not that far from a large city. Maybe Billings. There’ll be all kinds of people there.”
Susan snorted as she finished handing the bill to Marla. “All I can say is that you’ll want to take your chili peppers with you. I doubt you’ll find more than salt and pepper around there. It’s beef and potato country in more ways than one.”
Marla slipped the bill into her pocket. “We don’t have a choice about going.”
She didn’t want to tell her neighbor that the police had come to her door a little over a week ago and warned her that Sammy was on the verge of becoming a real member of that 19th Street gang. She figured they were exaggerating, but she couldn’t take a chance. She had given notice at her cashier job and started to make plans. She had to get Sammy out of here, even if it made every soul in Dry Creek nervous. At least she would own the house where they would live, so no one could force them to leave. Sammy and her four-year-old daughter, Becky, would be safe. That was all Marla cared about for now.
The neighbor took one more look at the scarred chair. “I guess we all do what we need to do in life. It’s too bad. It was a nice chair.”
Marla nodded.
“I wish you well,” Susan said as she started walking to the door. “And, who knows, it might not be so bad. My cousin said they have rodeos in the summer and snow for Christmas. He liked the state.”
Marla mumbled goodbye as the neighbor left her apartment. She’d been anxious about the move before talking to Susan. Now she could barely face the thought of going to Dry Creek. But looking down at the arm of that wooden chair, she knew she had to go. She’d lost her husband; she refused to lose her son, too.
She wouldn’t hide their ethnic roots from the people in Montana, but she saw no reason to advertise them, either. And, of course, she’d keep quiet about Sammy’s brush with gang life, especially because it would all be in the past once she got him out of Los Angeles. She was sure of that. She had to be. Dry Creek was her last hope.
Chapter Two
A few weeks later
Les Wilkerson knew something was wrong when his phone rang at six o’clock in the morning. He’d just come in from doing the chores in the barn and was starting to pull his boots off so he wouldn’t get the kitchen floor dirty while he cooked his breakfast. It was the timing of the call that had him worried. He’d given the people of Dry Creek permission to call him on sheriff business after six and it sounded as if someone had been waiting until that exact moment to make a call.
Les finished pulling off his boots and walked in his stocking feet to the phone. By that time, enough unanswered rings had gone by to discourage the most persistent telemarketers.
“I think we’ve had a theft,” Linda, the young woman who owned the Dry Creek café, said almost before Les got the phone to his ear. She was out of breath. “Or maybe it’s one of those ecology protests. You know, the green people.”
“Someone’s protesting in Dry Creek?”
Dry Creek had more than its share of independent-minded people. Still, Les had never known any of them to do something like climb an endangered tree and refuse to come down, especially not in the dead of winter when there was fresh snow on the ground.
“I don’t know. It’s either that or a theft. You know the Nativity set the church women’s group just got?”
“Of course.”
Everyone knew the Nativity set. The women had collected soup-can labels for months and traded them like green stamps to get a life-size plastic Nativity set that lit up at night. Les was sure he’d eaten more tomato soup recently than he had in his entire life.
“Well, the shepherd’s not there. We don’t know what happened to him, but we can’t see him. Charley says that Elmer has been upset about all of the electricity the church is using to light everything up. He says someone either took the shepherd or Elmer unplugged it to protest the whole thing.”
Les had known there would be problems with people eating all that soup. It made old ranchers like Elmer and Charley irritable. It was probably bad for their blood pressure, too.
“Unplugging something is not much of a protest. It could even be a mistake.” Now, that was a whole lot more likely than some high-minded protest, Les thought, and then he remembered promising the regular sheriff that he would be patient with everyone. “But I’ll talk to Elmer, anyway, and explain how important the Nativity set is and what a sacrifice everyone made so we could have it.”
Les was sure Elmer would agree about the sacrifice part. He’d said he was eating so much soup he might as well have false teeth.
There were some muffled voices in the background that Les couldn’t make out over the phone.
“That’s Elmer now. He just came in and he claims he didn’t unplug anything. He says if we can’t see the shepherd, it’s because it’s not there and Charley’s right that somebody stole it.”
“The light could be burned out.” Patience went only so far, Les thought. He wasn’t going to go chasing phantom criminals just because someone thought something was stolen. There hadn’t been an attempted theft in Dry Creek since that woman had broken into the café two years ago. And she had not even taken anything. After all that time, it wasn’t likely someone would suddenly decide to steal a plastic shepherd.
“Maybe it is a defective light,” Linda agreed. “But I’m going to tell Charley and Elmer not to go over and check. It’s still pitch-black outside. Charley’s been looking out the café window for a good fifteen minutes, and it’s still too dark to see if the shepherd is there. And if it’s not there, then it could be a crime scene and we’d need the professionals.” Linda’s voice dipped so low that only Les could hear it. “Besides, the two of them could fall and break half their bones going over there in the dark. You know how that patch of street in front of the church is always so slippery when we’ve had snow. So I’ll tell them you’re going to handle it. Okay?”
“Sounds good,” Les said. He’d rather safeguard old bones than chase after