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Just thinking of the sheriff made Les shake his head. Who would figure that a man as shy as Sheriff Carl Wall would ever have a wedding, let alone a belated honeymoon to celebrate with a trip to Maui?
It was all Les could do not to be jealous. After all, he was as good-looking as Carl, or at least no worse looking. Les even owned his own ranch, as sweet a piece of earth as God ever created, and it was all paid for. Not every man could say that. He should be content. But for the past week every time he thought of Carl and that honeymoon trip of his, Les started to frown.
If Sheriff Carl Wall could get married, Les figured he should be married, too. He was almost forty years old and, although he enjoyed being single, a man could spend only so much time in his own company before, well, he got a little tired of it. Besides, it would be nice to have a woman’s touch around the place. Les knew he could hire someone to do most of the cooking and cleaning. But it wouldn’t be the same. A woman just naturally made a home around her, like a mother bird making her nest. A man’s house wasn’t a home without some nesting going on.
Of course, Les told himself as he pulled his pickup to a stop beside the café, the sheriff had gone a little overboard with it all. He had completely lost his dignity, the way he had moped around until Barbara Strong agreed to marry him. Les would never do that. He had already seen too many tortured love scenes in his life; he had no desire to play the lead in one himself.
His parents were the reason for his reluctance to marry. They had had many very public partings and equally dramatic reconciliations. Les never knew whether they were breaking up or getting back together. The two of them should have sold tickets to their lives. They certainly could have used some help with finances, given the salary his father earned in that shoe store in Miles City. Half their arguments were about money. The other half were about who didn’t love whom enough.
His parents were both dead now, but Les had never understood how they could be the way they were. They were so very public about how they felt about everything, from love to taxes. As a child Les had vowed to stay away from that kind of circus. It was embarrassing. Growing up, he never even made a fuss over his dog, because he didn’t want anyone to think he was becoming like his parents.
No, Les thought as he stepped up on the café porch, if he was going to get married there would be no emotional public scenes. It would all be a nice sensible arrangement with a nice quiet woman. There was no reason for two people to make fools of themselves just because they wanted to get married, anyway.
“Oh, good. You’re here.” Linda’s voice greeted Les as he opened the door.
The café floor was covered with alternating black and white squares of linoleum. Formica-topped tables sat in the middle of the large room, and a counter ran along one of its sides. The air smelled of freshly made coffee and fried bacon.
Elmer and Charley were sitting at the table closest to the door and they both looked up from their plates as Les stepped inside. They had flushed faces and excitement in their eyes.
“They already went over to the church,” Linda whispered as she closed the door behind Les. “They snuck out when I was in the kitchen making their pancakes.”
Les could tell the two men were primed to tell him something. It hadn’t stopped them from eating their pancakes and bacon, though. All that was left on their plates was syrup. Les walked closer to them. Fortunately, no one had ever suggested people should have soup for breakfast, so that meal had always been safe.
“It’s a crime,” Elmer announced from where he sat. He had his elbows on the table and his cap sitting on the straight-backed chair next to him.
“We thought maybe you were right about the light just burning out,” Charley explained as he pushed his chair back a little from the table. “We didn’t want to bother anyone if that was all that happened, so we went over to take a look.”
“Looks like a kidnapping to me,” Elmer declared confidently, then paused to glance up at Les. “Is it a kidnapping if the kidnapee in question is plastic?”
“No,” Les said. He didn’t need to call upon his reserve deputy sheriff training to answer that question. “It’s not even a theft if someone just moved the figure. That’s probably what happened. Maybe the pastor decided the Nativity had too many figures on the left side and put the shepherd inside the church until he could set it up on the other side.”
Les reminded himself to get these two men a new checkerboard for Christmas. A dog had chewed up their old cardboard one a month ago, and now, instead of sitting in the hardware store playing checkers, they just sat, either in the hardware store or in the café, and talked. Too much talking was giving them some pretty wild ideas. He couldn’t think of one good reason anyone would steal a plastic shepherd, not even one that lit up like a big neon sign at night.
Charley shook his head. “Naw, that can’t be it. All of the wise men are on the other side. The pastor wouldn’t think there are too many figures on the left. Not even with the angel on the left—and she’s a good-sized angel.”
“Besides, we know it’s not the pastor moving things around, because we found this,” Elmer said as he thrust a piece of paper toward Les. “Wait until you see this.”
Les’s heart sank when he saw the sheet of paper. He had a feeling he knew what kind of note it was. It had a ragged edge where it had been torn from what was probably a school tablet. There must be a dozen school tablets in Dry Creek. The note was written in pencil, and he didn’t even want to think about how many pencils there were around. Anyone could have written a note like this.
Les bent to read it.
Dear Church People,
I took your dumb shepherd.
If you want to see him again, leave a Suzy bake set on the back steps of your church. It needs to be the deluxe kind—the one with the cupcakes on the box.
P.S. Don’t call the cops.
P.P.S. The angel wire is loose. She’s going to fall if somebody doesn’t do something.
XIX
Well, there was one good thing, Les told himself as he looked up from the paper. There weren’t that many people in Dry Creek who would want a Suzy bake set. That narrowed down the field of suspects considerably. He assumed the XIX at the bottom was some reference to a biblical text on charity. Or maybe a promise to heap burning coals on someone who didn’t do what they were told.
“So it looks like the shepherd is really gone,” Les said, more to give himself time to think than because there seemed to be any question about that fact, at least.
Elmer nodded. “The angel is just standing there with her wings unfurled looking a little lost now that she’s proclaiming all that good news to a couple of sheep. You don’t see anything standing where that shepherd should be.”
The door to the café opened briskly and an older woman stepped inside. She had a wool jacket wrapped around her shoulders and boots on her feet. Les thought she still had to be cold, though, in that gingham dress she was wearing. Cotton didn’t do much to protect a person from a Montana winter chill.
“Mrs. Hargrove, you shouldn’t be walking around these streets. They’re slippery,” Les said to the woman. The older people in Dry Creek just didn’t seem to realize how hazardous it was outside after it snowed. And they’d lived here their whole lives, so if anyone should know, they should.
“Charley told me some little girl was in trouble.” Mrs. Hargrove glared at Les as she unwound the scarf from around her neck and set down the bag she was carrying. “Something about kidnapping and theft. I hope you’re not planning to arrest a little girl.”
Les stepped over to help Mrs. Hargrove out of her jacket. “Someone stole the shepherd from the Nativity set. I don’t even know who did it yet. But if it is a little girl, she’ll have to be dealt with just like anyone else.”
Les turned to hang Mrs. Hargrove’s jacket on the coatrack by the door.
“Well, a little girl wouldn’t have done that,” Mrs. Hargrove said as she smoothed down the long sleeves on her dress. “Mark my words.”
“Little girls can get into just as much mischief as boys.”
One thing Les had learned in his reserve deputy sheriff training was that a lawman shouldn’t make assumptions based on stereotypes about people. There were all kinds of stories about mob men who loved their cats and sweet-looking grandmothers who robbed banks in their spare time.
“Still, I say no little girl took that shepherd,” Mrs. Hargrove said as she walked over to a chair next to Charley and sat down. “If she couldn’t get the angel unhooked, she’d take the baby Jesus. What would she want with a smelly old shepherd?”
Les frowned. “Just because a man works with animals and lives alone, it doesn’t mean he smells bad.”
Les had a few sheep on his ranch, but the only full-time shepherd he knew was Mr. Morales, who lived in the foothills of the Big Sheep Mountains north of Dry Creek. Les figured bachelor ranchers needed to stick together. Once in a while he invited Mr. Morales down for breakfast. Les decided he needed to do that again soon. Smelly, indeed!
“Well, no, of course not,” Mrs. Hargrove agreed and had the grace to blush slightly. “But still, I can’t see that a little girl would—”
“Whoever took the shepherd wants to trade him for a Suzy bake set—the deluxe edition.” Les walked over and gave the note to Mrs. Hargrove. “That sounds like a little girl to me. You recognize the writing?”
Mrs. Hargrove taught Sunday school and she knew all the kids in and around Dry Creek. When she finished reading the note, she looked up and shook her head. “I don’t recognize it, but whoever wrote the note probably tried to disguise their writing, anyway.”
Everyone was quiet for a minute.
“Are any of the classes in Sunday school memorizing the nineteenth verse of some book?”
Mrs. Hargrove shook her head. “Not that I know of. They wouldn’t write it that way, anyway, would they? XIX? That’s roman numerals.”
“I wonder about the Curtis twins,” Elmer said as he reached for his cup of coffee. “I don’t think they’d mess around with numbers, but they like cupcakes.”
“They like to eat cupcakes. Those boys don’t want to bake cupcakes,” Linda said. “Besides, they’re too busy with their new sleds to think up a scheme like this.”
Les shrugged. “I don’t know. Those boys live close to the church. I can’t see any of the ranch kids coming into Dry Creek on a night like last night. For one thing, we would have seen tire tracks over by the church.”
Les lifted his eyebrow in a question to Elmer and the man shook his head.
“Since there were no tracks, it means it had to be someone who was already in town last night.” Les let his words sink in for everyone. Somebody in the center of Dry Creek had taken that shepherd. If there were no tracks, they couldn’t blame it on a stranger passing through.
“Pastor Matthew won’t like it if his sons stole the shepherd,” Charley finally said, and then glanced over at Mrs. Hargrove. He must have seen the frown on her face. “Of course, I don’t believe it was the Curtis twins. Not for a minute. They don’t even know about Roman numerals. They can barely add up regular numbers.”
“Nobody added the numbers,” Les muttered before Charley could get himself in a spin. “They just put them out there.”
“Well, the only other kids in town are those two new kids.” Elmer stared down at his cup. “And what would they want with a shepherd? They’ve never even been to church.”
There was another moment’s silence.
“They’ve never been anywhere,” Charley finally said. “We’ve heard there are two new kids, but has anyone ever seen either of them?”
Everyone just looked at each other.
“Just because no one’s seen them doesn’t mean they’re thieves,” Mrs. Hargrove protested. “We need to have open minds here.”
“Still, you have to admit it’s peculiar,” Elmer said after a moment’s thought. “We’ve all seen the mother, but she must keep those kids inside. The only reason we know about the kids is because there are three names on their mailbox and we know the woman is a widow, so it has to be a woman and her two kids.”
The mailbox had sprung up next to the driveway of the old house when the woman and her children moved into town. Les figured they had not realized that everyone in Dry Creek collected their mail at the counter in the hardware store, so no one had any need for an individual mailbox by their house. The mailman made just one stop for the whole town, even though he’d started going out to some of the ranches this past year.
Les frowned. Now that he thought about it, he would have expected the woman to have taken her mailbox down by now. Surely she must know how useless it was. And another thing was coming to his mind. The woman hadn’t seemed all that familiar with the hardware store the day he’d seen her there, either. Which all added up to only one possibility. “Somebody must be taking the woman’s mail to her.”
Les looked around. He’d bet it was one of the people sitting right in front of him.
“Well, I don’t see what’s wrong with that,” Elmer finally said defiantly. “I figure it’s only neighborly. Besides, it’s no trouble to drop their letters in that box. They don’t get many of them, anyway. The boy got a letter from Los Angeles, but it wasn’t heavy. No two-stamper. And they don’t get catalogs to speak of, either. Just the J. C. Penney Christmas catalog.”
“The mail is protected by federal law. You shouldn’t be touching anyone’s mail without their permission.” Les wondered if the sheriff’s department should put out a book of rules for people. He wondered if anyone in Dry Creek would read it if they did issue one.
Elmer jutted his chin out. “All I’m saying is that there are the two kids, and if we haven’t seen them, maybe it’s because neither of them needs to go farther than their driveway for the mail. That’s all.”
“They could even be sick,” Linda added softly. “It’s flu season. They’d stay inside for sure if they were sick. Maybe they have colds.”
“And I can’t see sick kids stealing a shepherd,” Mrs. Hargrove said. “Especially not in this weather. Their mother probably wouldn’t let them go outside if they were sick, and they wouldn’t be able to see the Nativity set from the windows in their house, so they wouldn’t even know the shepherd was there. They can’t steal what they don’t even know about, now, can they?”
Les wondered how long the people of Dry Creek would protect a real criminal if one showed up. He hoped he never had to find out. “Forget the shepherd. Nobody said anybody wanted that shepherd. It’s the bake set that seems to be the goal. If I remember right, one of those names on the mailbox is Becky. Sounds like a little girl to me. Especially since we know the mother’s name is Marla Something-or-the-other.”
“It’s Marla Gossett. Remember, I told you about her? Said it would be a good idea for you to get acquainted with that new woman,” Elmer said as he looked up at Les. “Didn’t I say that just the other day?”
Les grunted. “You didn’t say anything. What you did was break the law by calling in a false fire alarm. That was a crazy stunt. And just to get me over to the hardware store while Mrs. Gossett was there.”
“Well, it would have worked if you’d stayed around to talk. She’s a nice lady. Charley and I both knew you wouldn’t come over if we just said there was an eligible woman we wanted you to meet. When have you ever agreed to do something like that?”
“I have a ranch to run. I can’t be running around meeting people all the time.”
“Wouldn’t hurt you to stop work for a night or two and actually go out on a date,” Elmer muttered. “It’s not like you’re busy with harvest season.”
Les had never known the two old men could be so manipulative. They definitely needed a new checkerboard. And a steak or two to get their blood going.
Les looked directly at Charley and Elmer. “The two of you didn’t take that shepherd, did you? Just to give me a reason to talk some more with this Mrs. Gossett?”
The stunned expressions on the faces of the two men were almost comical.
“What would give you that idea?” Elmer demanded.
Les just grunted. He wondered if XIX was part of the telephone number for a dating service.
Charley grinned a little. “Well, this isn’t like that. We don’t have anything to do with the shepherd being gone.”
Les felt a headache coming on. “Maybe it is the new people, then. I’ll have to go and talk to them.”
“Oh, no, you don’t. You can’t go over there and accuse the Gossetts of taking something,” Mrs. Hargrove protested with an indrawn breath. “They’re new here. We’re supposed to make newcomers feel welcome.”
“They’re not welcome if they’re going to break the law.”
“But it’s only a plastic shepherd,” Linda said as she looked up from the chair she was sitting in. “You said yourself, it’s not like it’s a kidnapping.”
“It’s only a small crime,” Charley added with a glance at Mrs. Hargrove. “The women’s group didn’t even pay real money for it. Just all those soup labels. Hardly counts as a crime, now that I think on it.”
That was easily the third time Charley had looked to Mrs. Hargrove for approval in the past ten minutes, and Les knew what that meant. Not only was the sheriff married and off to Maui, but it looked as if Charley was sweet on Mrs. Hargrove. What else would make a man stop speaking his mind until he made sure a particular woman held the same opinion? No, Charley had either turned in his independence or he owed Mrs. Hargrove more money than he could repay.
Les sighed. He didn’t know which would be worse. A debt beyond a man’s means or one-sided love. Both of them turned a man’s spine to mush. It had certainly done that to Charley. One look from Mrs. Hargrove and Charley would probably vote to send that plastic shepherd to the moon on taxpayer money. And Charley was a Republican who didn’t believe in spending a dime on anything. Nothing should change a man like that. It just wasn’t right. Besides, Mrs. Hargrove looked as if she didn’t even know Charley was twisting himself in knots trying to win her approval.
Elmer was the only one who looked as if he was holding on to his common sense.
That was another thing Sheriff Carl Wall had warned Les about. The people of Dry Creek couldn’t always be relied upon to see things in an objective manner. For one thing, many of them couldn’t bear to see anyone punished. That’s why it was so important that the law stood firm. It was for everyone’s protection.
“Today it’s a plastic shepherd. Tomorrow who knows what it will be,” Les said. “We have to stop crime where it starts.”
Elmer nodded. “That’s right. The law needs to have teeth to it. If the women’s group hadn’t collected all those soup labels, that Nativity set would have cost five hundred dollars. Who around here has five hundred dollars to throw away?”
There was a moment’s silence. Five hundred dollars went a long way in a place like Dry Creek.
“Well, at least take some doughnuts with you if you’re going to go over to that house this early in the morning,” Linda said as she stepped over to the counter and took the lid off the glass-domed tray that held the doughnuts.
“And be sure and invite the children to Sunday school,” Mrs. Hargrove added. She seemed resigned to the fact that someone needed to ask the hard questions. “I’ve been meaning to go over there with an invitation myself. It just always seems to be snowing every time I think of it, and you know how slippery the streets are when that happens.”
“This is a criminal investigation. I’m not going to invite anyone to Sunday school.”
Mrs. Hargrove looked at him. “It’s the best place for someone to be if they’ve been stealing. I noticed you weren’t in church yourself last Sunday.”
“One of my horses threw a shoe and I needed to fix it. You know I’m always there if I can be.” Les had come to faith when he was a boy and he lived his commitment. Quietly, of course, but he figured God knew how he felt about public displays of emotion. And even if he didn’t dance around and shout hallelujah from the rooftops, he was steady in his faith.
“We miss you in the choir.”
“I haven’t sung in the choir since I was sixteen.”
Mrs. Hargrove nodded. “You still have that voice, though. It’s deeper now, but it’s just as good. It’s a sin to waste a voice like that.”
