Calista looked a little skeptical as she asked him, “When you washed your shirts, you didn’t have the setting on hot, did you?”
Damned if he knew. “The machine has settings?” he asked.
“Why don’t you pile them up for me and I’ll take a look at your shirts the next time you have me over to watch Marlie?” she suggested.
Initially he had balked at asking for help or letting anyone know that he wasn’t up to handling this situation he found himself in. But after closer scrutiny, maybe this wasn’t going to be such a bad deal after all, Jake thought. If this cheerful woman with the sparkling brown eyes and endless brown hair could save his shirts as well as help him save his sanity, she was clearly worth her weight in gold.
“Sounds good to me,” he responded to the suggestion with feeling.
Yes, Calista thought, unable to contain her smile any longer, it certainly did.
Chapter Three
“You’re late.”
Jasper Fowler bit off the words as he glared at Calista from beneath shaggy gray-and-white eyebrows.
Just coming in, Calista eased the door to the Tattered Saddle antique shop closed behind her. If Fowler expected her to flinch at his obvious displeasure, he was going to be sorely disappointed, she thought. Growing up amid seven brothers and sisters had long since taught her how to hold her ground and stand up for herself. It was either that or suddenly find herself getting plowed under and lost in the shuffle.
So far, she’d never once gotten lost in the shuffle.
“I’m on time,” Calista corrected pleasantly, deliberately pointing to the closest clock to her on the wall.
Currently, there were several clocks on display, all hanging on the shop walls, all antiques, all fashioned with a decidedly Western flavor. And each and every one of them testified to the fact that she, and not the crotchety, cantankerous elderly owner of the store, was right. She was right on time.
With a frame that resembled nothing if not an animated question mark, his shoulders hunched in so far that they appeared to be almost touching one another, Fowler moved past her and grumbled, “Well, you would have been late in another minute.”
As was his habit, he refused to give in or concede the point. If asked, no one in town could recollect ever hearing the old man admit that he was wrong—about anything.
“But I didn’t take another minute,” Calista countered cheerfully. “So I’m here on time.”
In her own way, she was just as stubborn as the old man she was working for this summer. Beneath it all, she wanted to think that the man rather enjoyed sparring with her, enjoyed the challenge of having someone who didn’t cave in to him. Everyone else, she’d noted, always backed away, considering a verbal bout with the man just a waste of time and energy.
Maybe she was wrong, she thought, picking up the ancient feather duster he required she use every day to dust the eclectic collection of memorabilia he housed within the old shop’s four walls. But in complying with his specific instructions and using the duster, Calista couldn’t help but feel that all she was accomplishing was pushing the dust around, ineffectively moving it from one spot to another and then back again the next day.
But the pay was the same whether she eliminated the dust or just gave it another place to stay, so she had given up trying to introduce a few basic improvements into the daily routine. Fowler, she’d quickly discovered, was a stickler for adhering to routines, to all but worshipping the status quo.
She’d learned her first week here that it was pointless to try to point out the benefits of doing anything new or different.
But then, she reasoned, if Fowler had been opened to new things, he probably wouldn’t be dealing with items that were older than he was.
“When I finish dusting out here, if there aren’t any customers, maybe I’ll just go dust the storeroom,” she volunteered.
Although she’d brought along a couple of books to review, books that promised to help her get a better handle on her internship at the mayor’s office, she really didn’t like being idle for any stretch of time and because Fowler was paying her—minimum wage to be sure, but it was still her salary—her first efforts should be to do something worthwhile in the antique store.
About to shuffle off into the very same storeroom she was proposing to clean, Fowler stopped short and turned around to glare at her.
“No,” he all but shouted, then struggled to regain his monotone composure. “I already told you to stay out of there.”
He’d told her that the very first day she’d worked here. At the time she’d thought the edict was just fueled by his myriad of idiosyncrasies.
“I know, but I thought maybe you’d like to have me straighten things up in there, maybe do an inventory for you,” she proposed.
“Don’t need no inventory,” Fowler retorted. “I know everything that’s in there and where it is if I need to get at it. I don’t need some eager beaver messing things up with her own damn system that makes no sense to nobody on God’s green earth but her.”
He was really getting heated about it and she couldn’t help wondering why. She’d glanced into the storeroom once in passing and it was just a dark storage space as far as she could see.
“Okay, I won’t go in there,” she surrendered, at the same time trying to figure out just what it was that the old man was trying to protect. Most likely, it was nothing, but he certainly was behaving peculiarly—even more so than usual. Every time she mentioned the storeroom, he acted, in her opinion, as if she was trying to break into the U.S. Mint and he was its only defender.
But then, she reasoned, she’d known what the old man was like when she’d initially answered his want ad and interviewed for the job. Everyone in town—her family included—had warned her about going to work for “crazy ol’ Jasper Fowler.” And everyone from around the area knew about the legend.
Knew how, according to the legend, Fowler had once driven cross-country with a coffin rattling around in the back of his pickup truck. Moreover, the same legend claimed that there’d been a rotting corpse in that coffin, supposedly the remains of a woman who had once jilted him.
Over time other identities had been assigned to the so-called decaying cross-country traveler. Some said it was a business partner who had tried to cheat him out of the profits of their business. Others said that there were two bodies in there, his late wife and the infant son she’d given birth to minutes before both she and the baby had died.
That, at least, would explain his winning personality.
As for her, Calista figured that because the old man was so eccentric, Fowler invited these kinds of stories to be made up about him, maybe even reveled in them and that, ultimately, none of it was true.
Although, if it was true she supposed that might be a good reason why Fowler wouldn’t allow anyone but him to enter the storeroom. That might be where he was keeping the legendary coffin.
Stop it, she told herself. You’re smarter than that. There’s no coffin. It’s all just a bunch of fabrication about an odd old man.
She heard the front door open. The next second she heard the bell attached to it ring, announcing the entrance of another person into the store.
Having already walked into the storeroom, Fowler poked his head out to see who had come in. The etched-in frown on his stubble-laden face seemed to deepen as his small eyes focused on the woman who had just come into his shop.
Recognizing her, he challenged Erin Traub. “You here to buy anything today?”
Erin knew how to play