An Angel for Dry Creek

The bell over the door rang again, and this time a teenage girl slipped inside. She had a tiny gold ring in her nose and a streak of red dye going through her hair. Fashion, it appeared, hadn’t neglected southeastern Montana.

“Linda.” Matthew greeted the girl carefully. “What can we help you with?”

“What do you think, big guy?” Linda cooed softly. The girl lifted her eyes to Matthew. She was holding a five-dollar bill in her hand and she waved it around.

Glory winced. The girl was playing at something she obviously didn’t even understand. And she was looking at Matthew as if she was starving and he was a super-sized hamburger. Which was ridiculous, Glory thought. Sure, he was good-looking in a rugged kind of a way. And sure he smelled like the outdoors and sure he had biceps that would get second looks at the beach and—Glory stopped herself. Okay, so the girl wasn’t so far wrong. He was worth staring at. But that didn’t mean the girl had any right to do it.

“Hey, Linda,” called the little boy, Greg. “Come meet the angel. She’s gonna get us presents.”

Linda flicked an annoyed glance down that then softened at the enthusiasm on Greg’s face. “That’s nice. But I need to talk to the angel myself.”

“I’m not—” Glory began.

“I need some advice,” Linda interrupted impatiently. The teenager looked assessingly at Glory and held out the five-dollar bill. “Some love advice.”

“From me?” Glory squeaked.

“I need to know if I should marry the Jazz Man.”

“The Jazz Man?” Matthew asked as he leaned his crutches against a wall and sat down on a chair. “You don’t mean Arnold’s boy, Duane?”

“Yeah.” Linda looked at him and snapped her gum. “He’s forming a band. Calling himself the Jazz Man.” She stood a little straighter. “Wants me to be his lead singer.”

“And he’s proposed?” Glory asked in studied surprise. She might not know a lot about love, but she did know about business.

“Yeah, why?” Linda looked at her cautiously.

“Mixing business and pleasure.” Glory shook her head in what she hoped was a convincingly somber fashion. “He won’t have to pay you if he marries you.”

“Yeah, I never thought of that,” Linda said slowly, and put the five dollars on Glory’s easel. “Thanks.”

“What’s the money for—” Glory began, but was interrupted by the bell ringing over the door again.

This time the ringing was incessant and loud. A stocky man in a tan sheriff’s uniform stepped into the store and looked around quickly. His eyes fastened on Glory.

“There you are,” he said as he walked toward Glory and put his hand on the end of the gun that stuck out of his holster. “You’re under arrest for impersonating an angel. You have the right to—”

“You can’t arrest her.” The protest erupted from all across the store.

“Oh, yes, I can,” the deputy said as he clicked the handcuffs from behind his back and picked up the five dollars Linda had left on her easel. “I won’t have no con woman plucking my pigeons. Not in my town she won’t.”

Plucking his pigeons, Glory thought in dismay. Dear Lord, what have I done now?

The Bullet leaned against the cold glass of the phone booth. The credit card company records showed the woman had stopped at a gas station in Spokane and then at a bank for a cash advance. He’d followed the usual procedure to find her. He knew loners in a new town found a bar.

“You’ll never find her that way,” the voice on the other end of the phone snorted.

“Why not? She’s a cop.”

“A Christian cop,” the voice clarified. “Religious as they come. Doesn’t drink. Try looking in the churches.”

The Bullet swallowed hard. “Churches? Me?”

Chapter Four

“Easy now,” Deputy Sheriff Carl Wall warned Glory when she stood up. He’d forbidden the others to follow them when he escorted her up the church steps and into a small office off the church’s kitchen. She’d been sitting on the edge of the desk for ten minutes now while he argued on the phone. The cuffs he’d put on her hands hung open at her wrists. The key to unlock them was in his patrol car and so he did not lock them shut. They were more for show than because he thought the woman would bolt.

“Well, there’s got to be a law against it, Bert,” Carl was saying for the second time into the phone. He twisted the cord around his chubby ginger. “We just can’t have folks going around claiming to be angels and things.”

“I never claimed to be an angel,” Glory said, even though she doubted he heard her. He hadn’t paid any attention to her the past two times she’d said it. It wasn’t because he hadn’t heard her, she figured; it was because he wasn’t listening. In her experience, hearing and listening were two different things.

“But an angel’s different from Santa Claus,” Carl argued into the phone’s mouthpiece, ignoring Glory. He’d already twisted part of the cord around his finger, so now he looped another section around his hand. “Everyone knows Santa Claus isn’t real, but folks and angels, well, that’s a different story. She’s more like a fortune-teller. Gotta be laws against that.”

Glory looked around at the office. There was a boxy window at the end of the room. Everything else was long and skinny. The whole thing wasn’t much wider than the desk. She guessed the room had been a pantry at one time, running as it did side by side the whole width of the kitchen. A bookcase lined one long wall and a chair stood to the side of the desk. A filing cabinet was tucked behind the door.

“Of course she hasn’t got wings on,” Carl sputtered in exasperation as he eyed Glory suspiciously. He untwisted the cord around his hand and rubbed the red mark he’d created. Glory pulled a book off the shelf and tried to ignore him. “But a person doesn’t need a costume to con people. Crooks don’t wear signs, for Pete’s sake.”

Glory opened the book she held. She loved the smell of old books. They were like old friends. Just holding the book steadied her. If she had to, she could call the police station in Seattle and have them vouch for her honesty. She doubted there were any laws against claiming to be an angel anyway, not even if she sprouted wings and flew off the Empire State Building.

“Well, I can’t just let her go,” Carl Wall whined into the phone. Then he looked at Glory again and turned his back to her as though that would muffle his voice. “I’ve already taken her in. I’ll look bad saying there’s no law against it now. I’m going to write her up for impersonating even if the judge says no later.”

A movement through the window caught her eye. Something was happening in the street. Glory looked at the deputy sheriff’s back and slid closer to the window. She saw Matthew, standing in the middle of the dirt street and waving a crutch around. The people from the hardware store were gathered around him and Matthew wasn’t the only one waving something. Mrs. Hargrove had a broom. Elmer had a yardstick. It looked as if Matthew was giving a speech, but she couldn’t hear it through the closed window. She braced her fingers against the frame of the windowpanes and pushed up. A puff of cold air came inside, a puff of dirty cold air, Glory decided as the dust beneath the window blew onto her coat. But she could finally hear the voices outside.

“He’ll listen to voters. That’s all he wants,” Matthew was saying. A trail of white breath rose from Matthew’s mouth. It was cold. Matthew wore a wool jacket over his shirt. It wasn’t nearly enough to keep him warm, in Glory’s opinion. “There’s no need to threaten him with any more than that.”

“But he’s got our angel,” Elmer protested.

“We don’t know she’s an angel,” Matthew said. Glory noticed he had only a slipper on his injured foot. He needed to be inside. She was pretty sure the doctor had told him to stay inside.

“But we don’t know she’s not, either,” Elmer persisted as he dipped his yardstick for emphasis. “The Bible talks about angels. It could be. We don’t know. And who wants to take a chance! Do you?” Elmer took a breath. “Do you want to be responsible for turning an angel out of Dry Creek?”