Premeditated Marriage. B.J. Daniels
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to. He took a bite of the steak. It was delicious.
“Charlie told him he could pay his bill after he got settled.” Helen shook her head. “I would have sworn she’d never see a dime of that money, but a year later she gets a check—with interest. Don’t that beat all?”
“That’s one hell of a story,” Augustus agreed, wondering how much of it was now Utopia legend and how much of it was true.
“Oh, we could go on all night about Charlie,” Helen said.
“Like the way she’s helped Earlene with that baby,” Marcella said. She glanced back at Augustus. “Earlene’s a single mother. The baby’s father’s dead.”
Charlie Larkin sounded like a saint. He’d found out a long time ago, though, that the nicest, most charitable person in the world was still capable of committing murder. But it certainly made him all the more curious about Charlie. And all the more determined to get her.
The twenty-something man at the counter Trudi had called T.J. suddenly pushed his half-full plate back, slapped down some bills on the counter and stalked out, grabbing his coat before disappearing through the door without a word.
“Who was that?” Augustus asked Trudi quietly when she came over to his table to refill his coffee cup.
She glanced toward the closing door. “Oh, that’s just T. J. Blue.”
“He seemed upset.”
“He’s always upset when Charlie Larkin’s name comes up,” she whispered and then went off with the coffeepot to refill cups.
Upset when Charlie Larkin’s name came up, was he? Augustus made a point of reminding himself to have a talk with this T. J. Blue who hadn’t said a word when Helen and everyone else were going on about the virtues of Charlie Larkin. Interesting.
“Emmett told me that Charlie had to come home from college early and take over the garage after her father’s heart attack,” Augustus said to Helen who was clearing away T. J. Blue’s dishes after his abrupt departure.
Helen nodded, but said nothing, as if he was on the verge of asking too many questions.
“She worked in the garage alongside her father every summer,” Leroy said. “Burt insisted she get an education although everyone in town knew he hoped she’d come home and work with him after she graduated.”
“What was she majoring in at Missoula before she had to quit?” he asked casually, taking a bite of his steak. It could have been cardboard for all the attention he paid it as he waited for someone to confirm his theory that Charlie Larkin had gone to college in the same town Josh Whitaker was a doctor.
Helen frowned, looking suspicious.
“Business, wasn’t it, Helen?” Marcella asked, looking up from her knitting. “But she didn’t go to school in Missoula. She went to Bozeman.” Miles apart.
“I thought Emmett told me—never mind,” Augustus said. “I must have heard wrong.” So how had they met?
Charlie had to be the reason Josh Whitaker had come to Utopia and ended up in Freeze Out Lake last fall. Augustus would stake his reputation on it. But what was their connection? The obvious female-male one? Or something else?
A thought struck him like a brick. The use of the pay phone at the garage—rather than her home phone. “Charlie isn’t married, is she?”
Helen studied him for a long moment. “No.” Her gaze said he’d just asked too many questions.
“She sounds like someone I’d like to get to know better.” He shrugged and grinned his you-know-us-guys grin.
Helen seemed to relax a little. She obviously knew how men could be. She went around the counter to sit next to Marcella and proceeded to tell her about some yarn she’d found on sale in Missoula.
“Got all that firewood split and stacked yet for winter?” Leroy asked the man across from him.
“See ya, Helen,” the woman in the first booth said as she and her husband left, leaving money on the table.
“Take care, Kate. You, too, Bud.”
Augustus concentrated on his food, listening to the conversations move from one mundane topic to the next. No one paid him any attention. He must be old news.
But he saw Trudi watching him when she thought he wasn’t looking and he knew, the way he always knew, that here was someone who had something she was dying to tell him.
The chase always made him ravenous and this one was no exception. It wouldn’t be easy with most of the town trying to convince him Charlie Larkin was a saint. But at least one person in town wasn’t wild about Charlie: T. J. Blue. And Augustus had a feeling he’d find more. He smiled and dug into his dinner.
HE’D EATEN all he could and shoved his plate away when Trudi came over to his booth. She was all business, making a project out of writing up his bill, then taking his napkin to write something on it before sliding it and the bill under the edge of his saucer. She refilled his cup with coffee he’d just said he didn’t want. She seemed nervous.
He could feel Helen’s gaze on them, watching eagle-eyed, and Trudi must have felt it, too. She huriedly cleared up his dishes, everything but his coffee, and disappeared back into the kitchen again.
He stared after her for a moment, then plucked the bill and napkin from under the edge of the saucer. Along with the six dollars and fifty cents he owed for dinner, she’d written on his napkin: “I get off at ten.”
He glanced at his watch. That would give him time to get ready for her. He pulled out his pen and wrote, Murphy’s, No. 5 on the napkin, then dropped a ten on top of the bill. With luck Trudi had something good to offer him.
As he left the café, Helen called after him, “See ya, Gus.” He could feel her watching as he walked past the front window of the café. He wondered how long it would take her to call Charlie Larkin and tell her he’d been asking personal questions about her. The thought pleased him, since he’d only just begun.
I’m coming for you, Charlie.
Chapter Four
Charlie pushed through the kitchen door of the old farmhouse she shared with her mother and aunt, a huge box of produce in her arms.
“Let me guess. Wayne Dreyer’s old Chevy broke down again.” Aunt Selma shook her freshly-permed, gray head as she walked over to the table to peer inside the box Charlie set down. Her aunt looked small and frail next to the huge box, older somehow.
“I’ve got another one in the van,” Charlie said and went back out to get it through the falling snow, thick as cotton ticking, the old farmhouse and the surrounding trees a blur of white.
Her aunt was giving her that look when she came back in.
“Winter squash, apples and pumpkins,” Charlie said, sliding the second huge box onto the table next to the first.
“I can see that,” Selma said. “There’s enough squash alone to last three winters. And pumpkins—Land-sakes, what will we do with all of them? You’d better hope that boy’s car doesn’t break down again until berry season.”
“He got the idea that we eat a lot of pumpkin pie,” she said, shrugging out of her coat. This time last year the water pump had gone on Wayne’s Chevy and she’d taken pumpkins as payment, going on about her Aunt Selma’s need for fresh pumpkin for her pies.
Her aunt shook her head. “You remind me of your father.”
“Thank you,” Charlie said, going to hang her coat on the hook by the back door.
“That wasn’t a compliment.”
Charlie turned to smile at her.
Her aunt’s gaze softened. “Is anything wrong?”