A Rich Man For Dry Creek And A Hero For Dry Creek. Janet Tronstad
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He had just arrived at his mother’s house in Seattle from some trip that he wouldn’t explain. He looked tired and was limping. The housekeeper had his suite of rooms made up and ordered the customary orchids for his bedside table. Then the housekeeper put in the standing order for extra staff to handle the usual parties.
Robert Buckwalter hadn’t been home for twenty minutes before he canceled the orders. The housekeeper said he walked into his rooms and looked around as though he didn’t know where he was or why he was there.
Then he announced he was going to fly to Dry Creek to talk to his mother. He must have had something urgent to tell her—like maybe that he had a wife. Jenny wondered how the older woman would take the news of a strange daughter-in-law.
Mrs. Buckwalter was financing a winter camp for some teenagers from Seattle and the woman was staying in Dry Creek to be sure that all went well. It was a fine, giving gesture and Jenny respected the older woman for it.
But Jenny knew her sister wasn’t interested in Mrs. Buckwalter. There must be something useful about the man in question that she could share with her sister.
“Even if he’s not sick, I think he might have corns.”
“What?”
“You know—corns on his feet. And bad. I remember his mother commenting on some bill he’d run up for corn pads. Hundreds of dollars.”
Her sister grunted. “The man’s an Adonis. He can have a gazillion corns on his feet and who cares? No one’s looking at his feet. Have you even stopped your cooking long enough to look at the man?”
“Well, of course, I have.”
“And?”
“He’s neat, well dressed, clean—”
“Clean!”
“Well, he is—more than most.”
“I’ve got a news flash for you! He’s a whole lot more than clean. He’s hot. Drop-dead gorgeous. And if you haven’t noticed that I’m really worried about you. Might even talk to Mom about it. She always says you’re too picky—wait until she finds out you’re even picky with him. Robert Buckwalter—”
“I know.”
“—the Third.”
A timer went off in the kitchen.
“Look, I’ve got to go,” Jenny said in relief. “I’ve got egg puffs that need to come out of the oven.”
The café kitchen was noisy. A group of teenage girls, wearing prom dresses from the fifties, stood at a table in the corner laughing and folding pink paper napkins into the shape of swans. A dozen of the boys stood beside Robert Buckwalter, following his moves as they cut chunks of carrot into the closest thing they could get to a flower. The carrot nubs were more tulips than roses, but they had a charm all their own.
Jenny had forgotten the boys were from a Seattle street gang until she saw their ease with knives. Some of those boys could have done credible surgery on something larger and more alive than a hunk of carrot.
Jenny was thankful for people like Sylvia Bannister who ran a center for gang kids in Seattle, and for Garth Elkton who had welcomed the kids to his ranch for a winter camp program. Jenny had seen how peaceful the Big Sheep Mountains looked in the snow. Low mountains skirted by gentle foothills. This little ranching community was a perfect haven for gang kids.
Sylvia and Garth were giving those kids a second chance. Mrs. Buckwalter was funding the winter camp and providing the lobsters tonight, both as a thanks to the community of Dry Creek, especially to the minister who had recently gotten married, and as a reward to the teenagers from Seattle for putting down their knives and learning to dance.
Sylvia and Garth were the kind of people that deserved to be number one on some New York tabloid list, not some hotshot rich man like Robert Buckwalter who spent half his life in Europe attending art shows, Jenny told herself. He didn’t even organize the shows; he just sat there and gave away money.
Jenny felt a twinge of annoyance. An able-bodied man like Robert Buckwalter should be more useful in life. Giving away money hardly qualified as a job—not when he had so much of it. She doubted he even wrote the checks himself.
“I ruined one of the mushrooms,” a girl wailed from the sink. “Totally ruined it. The stem didn’t come out right and—”
“Not a problem. We just cut it up and put it with the stuffing.” Jenny walked to the refrigerator to get out the herbed bread mixture that went in the few mushroom caps they’d found in the café’s refrigerator bin. “Nothing goes to waste in a good kitchen. There’s always some other place for it. If nothing else, there’s soup. ‘Waste not, want not’ my mother always used to say. And remember, aprons everyone.”
The kids groaned.
Robert Buckwalter grunted. He wondered if he was crazy. He shouldn’t be annoyed with the ever-resourceful Jenny. He should be grateful to her. After all, he’d hired her because of her apparent good cheer and her complete indifference to him.
During her job interview, she’d asked no personal questions about him—no sly inquiries about how often he’d be present for dinner at his mother’s home in Seattle, or whether as the family chef, she’d be required to fly to the flat he must have in London or maybe the villa he had in Venice or the chalet he had in the Alps…and surely he must have at least one of those, didn’t he? Or maybe he just traveled around in the plane he had, the one especially designed with all the gadgets, the one she’d read about in the papers, the one they called the ultimate “rich man’s” toy?
The questions would come. They always did.
Except with Jenny.
But then, maybe she’d just been more clever than most.
“Finished with the phone?” Robert asked politely. He hadn’t been fooled for a minute by the woman who had called claiming she needed to speak to Jenny urgently about some pudding order. Pudding, my foot. The woman was no salesperson.
Why else would Jenny take the call and disappear into that hole of a pantry where no one could hear her conversation?
Not even bats would go into that pantry if they didn’t have to. Jenny had literally needed to pry the door open earlier with a crowbar. The wood was half-rotted and the wind blew in through the knotholes.
No, it wasn’t a place where anyone would go for a cozy phone conversation with a pudding salesperson.
Robert Buckwalter swore he could spot a reporter a mile off and he had a bad feeling about that call.
Maybe his time was up.
Robert knew how to keep a low profile with the press but he was off his game. He’d gone completely rustic. On the flight over here, he’d looked at all the extra knobs on his plane’s instrument panel and wondered what he’d ever need with all the unnecessary attachments he’d asked the manufacturer to add. He couldn’t even remember why he’d wanted a cup-size blender added on the passenger side.
He hardly knew himself anymore. It came from spending a whole five months as someone else.
Jenny carefully laid the phone back down on the counter where it had been when the last call arrived and then picked it up again to wipe off the dust that had followed her out of the pantry.
Robert watched her as he untied the apron strings from around himself and put the damp apron on the nearby counter. “Hope there was no problem.”
She looked up at him in alarm. “What?”
“About the pudding,” Robert elaborated grimly. She looked confused and guilty as sin. “I hope there was no problem with the order.”
“No, no, everything’s fine.” Jenny blushed.
Robert wondered what the tabloids were paying these days. “Good. I’m glad to hear that. Wouldn’t want anything