Premeditated Marriage

“Starvation,” Leroy said. “I guess that or a quick heart attack is the way to go.”

“Beats putting a gun to your head,” Helen agreed.

An argument ensued over what caliber gun worked best. Augustus tried to steer the conversation back to the body in the lake. “Do they know what the drowned guy was doing here?”

The customers looked to Helen as if anyone in town would know, it would be her. She shrugged.

“Isn’t this lake off the beaten path?” Augustus asked.

“Yeah, but maybe he’d heard about those campers that were eaten by that grizzly and wanted to see the place,” Trudi said, all big-eyed.

Helen grimaced. “That’s pretty morbid and it was years ago. I can’t imagine he would have even heard about it.”

Augustus remembered from the national news stories when he was a senior in high school and working on the school newspaper. Mostly he remembered because there were only a few things that ate you. Sharks. Gators. Grizzlies. “Didn’t I read in the paper that he was seeing a local woman?” he lied, drawing the conversation back to Josh Whitaker.

“Wouldn’t know anything about that,” Helen said, going back to the kitchen to check on his chicken-fried steak. A few minutes later she handed Trudi a huge plate overflowing with meat, gravy and mashed potatoes and a side of canned peas through the pass-through.

“Charlie fixing your car, huh?” Helen asked him, returning to her spot at the counter across from Marcella.

“In the morning,” he said, taking the opening. “I heard she’s a pretty good mechanic.”

“Best in five counties,” Helen boasted as she lit another cigarette, definitely at home with the place, with herself.

Best in thirty miles, he could buy. Five counties though? That he seriously doubted.

“If anyone can get your car running, it’s Charlie,” Leroy agreed.

Anyone with even a little mechanical training could get his car running, if they wanted to. And if Charlie Larkin was as good as everyone in this town claimed, she would know that. The thought disturbed him.

“Yep, they don’t come any better than Charlie,” Helen agreed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was over there right now working on your car.”

He wouldn’t put money on that.

“Like that time she found that family broke down outside of town,” Marcella said, knitting as she talked. “Remember that bunch? Must have had a dozen kids in that old motor home. Charlie took them food and got the rig running, though heaven only knows how.”

Helen was nodding, obviously savoring the story. “They didn’t have two nickels to rub together, had spent all their money on gas trying to get to the coast—and a job the father said he had waiting for him. Sounded like a story to me, but you know Charlie.”

He didn’t. But he sure wanted 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.