Cowboy Crazy

chapter 26



Once Sarah had finished talking to Gloria, the drive into town was too short. Before she’d even had time to think about who might be at the diner, what they might say to her, and how she should respond, she found herself guiding her car into a parking space a half block from her destination.

Stepping out of the car, she rummaged for change. When had Two Shot put in parking meters? Back when she’d lived here, nobody had wanted to come to town bad enough to pay for parking.

She shoved in a dime and cranked the lever, then fed in another. Thirty minutes should be long enough to get breakfast, make some connections, and get out. If things went wrong, she could use the expiring meter as an excuse for leaving—as long as it really was expiring. Because she had no doubt that someone passing on the street would notice a new car in town and take note of how much time was on the meter. Two Shot had its share of champion busybodies, and they didn’t have much to do but gossip.

In fact, one of them was hustling toward her right now.

“Eddie.” She couldn’t help smiling at the white-clad figure. Eddie Johnston had been chief cook and bottle-washer at Suze’s when she’d worked there in high school, and apparently he still was. He wore the cowboy uniform of a boldly striped cotton shirt and jeans, but a grease-spattered apron decorated with handprints in various shades of egg, orange juice, and maple syrup took the shine off the outfit. An old-fashioned white cap that made her think of hot dog vendors at a ballpark was perched on his thinning hair.

The progress of Eddie’s hairline was a sign of how long she’d been gone. It had moved up his forehead and was obviously headed on an inexorable march up and over his crown, but his wide grin, bracketed by deep smile lines and punctuated by a dimpled chin, was still the same. So were his protuberant eyes, which bugged out even more at the sight of her.

“Hey, don’t you have some hotcakes to flip?” She’d thought long and hard about her approach, and come to two resolutions: Keep it light, and act as though she’d never left. As though she’d never scorned the town and all it represented. As if she hadn’t savored the long-sought experience of leaving Two Shot in a cloud of dust and moving on to bigger, better things.

“I gotta feed the meter before that danged marshal catches up to me and slaps a ticket on my truck.” He stepped toward her, then away, then toward her again, clearly divided between good citizenship and good manners.

“Well, don’t let me keep you.” She gave him a perky smile. “I’ll see you at Suze’s.”

There. That was easy. She walked away, leaving Eddie to hurry down the sidewalk toward his truck, which was propped half on, half off the curb a few cars down. Eddie had been notorious for his bad driving when she’d been in high school, to the point where the driver’s ed teacher issued a warning to steer clear of his red-and-white pickup.

Some things never changed.

But the encounter with Eddie was just the way she wanted things to go, and that made her feel a little better about her prospects. She could do this. She’d been away from Two Shot for years, and people had probably forgotten what a snob she’d been.

Not that snobbery had been the real reason behind her retreat from the friendships and connections of her childhood. The truth was, she’d felt ashamed after Roy died and they lost the ranch. She knew she’d failed her family, and she’d figured everyone else knew it too. But she couldn’t bring herself to hang her head in shame, so she’d tossed her hair and walked away whenever folks tried to throw her a pity party.

She resisted the urge to toss it now and set off down the street. She’d crossed about three sidewalk squares before Eddie caught up with her.

“I got it all taken care of now.” Eddie wasn’t the brightest dog in the kennel, but he was the good-natured one that never snapped back when the others chewed his ear. “I put another dime in yours too, just in case. Mel don’t have much to do but watch them meters, so you gotta be careful.”

“Mel’s still the sheriff?”

“He likes folks to call him the Marshall. He’s got the first five seasons of Gunsmoke on DVD, and he can make that squinty face good as James Arness. He says it gets criminals to confess just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“Two Shot has criminals?”

“Naw. Mel does all his squintin’ at folks who forget to feed the meters.”

Sarah paused to wait for the light at the corner of Main and Jewel Streets, but Eddie jaywalked without even looking right or left.

“How long have we had a traffic light?” Sarah asked.

“Two weeks. Nobody pays any attention to it ’cept Mel. Between that and the parking meters, he’s like a dog chasin’ his tail. He quit the poker group, you know. Says he got no time for games.”

“You’re kidding.” The poker group had been running as long as Sarah had been alive. It included the town barber and a couple of retired ranchers.

“Yep. And now he says it’s illegal to gamble in public places, so they can’t play in the diner anymore.”

He escorted her up the diner steps and held the door, causing the cowbell dangling there to clang out its usual announcement of a new arrival. Fortunately, everybody looked up and saw Eddie, then went back to whatever they were doing. It gave her a chance to step inside and take a deep breath, remembering all the resolutions she’d made. She wasn’t going to talk about Carrigan. Not this first day. She was going to reestablish herself as part of the town first.

Scanning the spinning stools and vinyl booths to the left of the door, she felt an acute sense of déjà vu. There was Mr. Jenson, who’d retired from teaching English at the high school a year before Sarah had graduated. There was the poker group, looking bored without their cards to distract them. There was Joe Reynolds, slouched at the counter all by his lonesome. Joe had never had a regular job that she knew of but had a talent for fixing stuff that kept him busy all around Two Shot. He didn’t talk much, which was a blessing because he’d seen under everybody’s sink and into their basements over the years. He probably knew more secrets than the CIA.

There were a few people she didn’t know at the counter and in the booths, probably truckers and tourists passing through. She let the door swing shut behind her and glanced to the right. There were only two tables over there, and one of them was reserved for the staff so they could drink Suze’s rotgut coffee on their breaks. The other one was occupied by…

Lane.

He was sitting by the window, chatting companionably with Trevor over scrambled eggs and toast. He hoisted a thick white mug of coffee to his lips, his eyes fixed on her over the rim. Telltale crinkles at the corners told her he was smiling as he sipped.

Dammit. She’d been glad he was gone, but now he’d never know it. He probably thought she’d tracked him like a bird dog running for a downed duck.

Reflexively, she backed away and slammed into the door, setting the bell to clanging. Everybody in the place looked up to see what the racket was about this time and she froze, plastered against the glass.

***

Lane watched Sarah bounce off the diner’s front door to the accompaniment of the clanging cowbell. Every head in the place turned toward her. He waited for the usual greetings, the inside jokes and backslapping comments that acknowledged every Two Shot native, but the diner was remarkably silent. Evidently Two Shot didn’t like her any better than she liked Two Shot.

She had her best smile on, the one she always wore to the office, but it was trembling at the edges as she glanced around the room. Finally her gaze settled on an older man who always perched at the counter. Lane knew he was a retired English teacher from the high school. Sarah had probably been teacher’s pet.

“Hi, Mr. Jenson,” she said.

He turned briefly and offered her a scowl that reminded Lane of some grim hero of literature—Captain Ahab, maybe. It was a look that would send most people skittering out the door, but Sarah stood firm.

“How are you?” she asked in a louder voice. She crossed the buffed linoleum and perched on a stool beside him, clasping her knees in her interlaced hands. “Remember me? Sarah Landon?”

A hushed murmur swept through the diners. Some of them obviously hadn’t known who she was, but judging from the way they all turned away, they’d heard of her. There were no hellos, not even a few casual nods. He could swear the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.

Mr. Jenson gave her a scowl and kept on eating. She kept on smiling, but her eyes brightened and he could tell she was holding back tears. He couldn’t really blame her. She might not like the town. She might have made escaping it her lifetime goal. But he’d always figured growing up in a place like Two Shot was like being part of a big, extended family. A troublesome, pain-in-the-neck family, but still a family. And didn’t families forgive each other?

People must have heard who she was working for. He’d been viewed with suspicion, even hostility, when he’d first moved to the ranch and started spending time in town. They didn’t welcome outsiders and they definitely weren’t embracing energy development with open arms. Maybe it was because there were so many older residents and they were resistant to change. Or maybe they’d seen the cautionary tale playing out in Midwest, and didn’t want to experience the same kind of boom-to-bust disaster. In any case, Sarah obviously had her work cut out for her.

She turned to the man on the next stool, who was downing a short stack like it was the last food on the planet and some alien might snatch it away.

“Joe,” she said.

Joe might not be the friendliest guy in the world, but he never seemed to care about folks one way or the other. He treated everyone with the same distant, laconic attitude.

But he wasn’t even speaking to Sarah.

She stood in the aisle, clasping and unclasping her hands.

“Hey, sweetheart,” said a gruff voice. “You can sit with me.”

It was a trucker, heavyset and unshaven, wearing a wrinkled denim shirt and oil-streaked jeans. His black leather motorcycle boots had chains across the instep. Sarah had evidently dealt with his kind before, and she wasn’t desperate enough to deal with one again. “No thank you.” She shot him a killing glare. “And I’m not your sweetheart.”

Great. She could have sassed him off, dismissed him with a laugh, but instead she’d confirmed everybody’s bad opinion by being rude and snooty. Somebody needed to save this woman from herself.

Lane hooked his boot around a rung of the empty chair beside him and pulled it away from the table. “Join us?”

Judging from her grateful smile, she’d never been so happy to see him. She crossed the diner in three long steps and dropped into the chair.

“Hey. Heard you two got together in the Love Nest last night.” Trevor’s tone was just a shade too loud for normal conversation. “I didn’t know you were, you know.” He waggled his eyebrows. Trevor had never been famous for tact. Lane was just grateful he didn’t demonstrate with a hand gesture.

A flush turned her face to a becoming pink. “Lane just needed a place to stay. I was at the cabin, so I… he slept on the sofa.”

“Oh.” Trevor grinned. “Well, excuse me. I saw the way he looked at you when you walked in, and I could’ve sworn he was picturing you naked.”

“He does that with all the girls.” There. The old Sarah was back, flippant and fun. He breathed a sigh of relief and was surprised to realize how much he’d tensed, suffering through her ostracism with her.

“I guess you noticed a lot of people know you’re here for Carrigan,” he said, nodding toward the crowd. Most of the diners had returned to their meals, but a few were still leveling hostile stares in her direction.

“You say that like you’re not a Carrigan yourself,” she said.

“I might be a Carrigan, but they know I’m not a part of this project.” He finished his last forkful of egg and sat back. “Nobody around here is too happy about the drilling, as you might have noticed.”

The diner’s owner Suze, a heavyset blonde who’d been whipping around the room removing plates and taking orders with her usual efficiency, paused by their table. “You want something?”

This should be interesting. Lane was sure Suze would be the toughest nut for Sarah to crack. The place was hung with dream catchers and cheap prints of wolf packs howling dramatically at the moon. Between the decor she’d chosen and the Birkenstocks on her feet, Lane was sure Suze wouldn’t take kindly to an invasion from the Carrigan Corporation.

“Oh, hi, Suze.” Sarah gave the woman a smile, but the waitress was all business.

“You want something or what?”

“No, thank you.” Sarah rose and laid a dollar on the table, despite the fact she hadn’t eaten anything. She was blinking fast, clearly hurt by Suze’s deliberate snub. “I need to get going.”

“You do that,” Suze said. “You just do that.”