A Bride for Dry Creek. Janet Tronstad

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ have remembered your full name if I hadn’t seen that.”

      There it was. The man was pointing to a faded family Bible. One of those with the black leather cover stamped, Our Family With God.

      “I’m in there?” Francis moved outside the warmth of the foil blanket to stand up and walk to the bookcase. The Bible was closed, but she saw that a ribbon marker had been left through the center of the book. Curious, she opened it.

      The man was right. There was her name. Francis Elkton.

      The words read, “United in Holy Matrimony Flint L. Harris and Francis Elkton on the day of our Lord, April 17—”

      “Who wrote that there?” Even the temperature outside could not match the ice inside her. She’d never seen the words like that, so black and white.

      The man shrugged. “It was either Flint or his grandmother.”

      “His grandmother didn’t know we—” Francis gulped. She could hardly say they had gotten married when the most they had done was perform a mock ceremony.

      “Then it must have been Flint.”

      “He must have stopped here before he left that day.”

      The man nodded. “I expect so. A man like Flint takes his marriage vows serious. He’d want to at least write them down in a family Bible.”

      “There were no marriage vows,” Francis corrected the man bitterly. “We said them before a fake justice of the peace.”

      The man looked startled. “There was nothing fake about your vows.”

      Francis felt a headache start in the back of her neck. “I’m afraid there was. The justice of the peace was a phony.”

      “I checked him out. He was pure gold.”

      “You can’t have checked him out. He didn’t even exist. Phony name and everything.”

      Francis still remembered the smug look on her father’s face when he got off the phone with a city official in Las Vegas and informed her there was no such justice of the peace.

      The peaches were forgotten. The older man looked cautiously at Francis and said softly, “I did a thorough check on Flint myself before he came into the Bureau. I knew he had potential and would go far. I wanted to be sure we did a complete check. I talked to the justice of the peace personally. And the county sheriff who arrested Flint on that speeding ticket.”

      Francis felt her headache worsen. “What speeding ticket?”

      The old man looked at Francis silently for a moment. “The day after you were married, Flint was arrested on a speeding ticket just inside the Miles City limits. Thirty-eight in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone.”

      “No one gets a ticket for that.”

      “Flint did. And because he didn’t have the hundred thousand dollars cash to post bail, he did ninety days in jail.”

      Francis put her hand to her head. “That can’t be. No one does that kind of time on a traffic ticket—and they certainly don’t have that kind of bail.”

      The man kept looking at Francis like he was measuring her. Then he continued slowly. “I talked to the sheriff who made the arrest. He was doing a favor for someone. The arrest. The high bail. The ninety days. It was all a personal favor.”

      “Flint never hurt anyone. Who would do that?”

      The silence was longer this time. Finally, the man spoke. “The sheriff said it was you. Said you’d changed your mind about the marriage and didn’t have the nerve to tell Flint to his face.”

      “Me?” The squeak that came out of Francis’s throat was one she scarcely recognized as her own.

      The man looked away to give her privacy. “Not that it’s really any of my business.”

      Francis needed to breathe. Reason this out, she said to herself. Reason it out. Put the pieces in their places. It will make sense. There’s an order to it all. You just need to find it.

      “But I hadn’t changed my mind.” Francis grabbed hold of that one fact and hung on to it. The whole story revolved around that one piece, and that one piece was false. That must make the whole story false. “I wanted to be married to Flint.”

      The man lifted his eyes to look at her. With the soft light of the lantern on the table, Francis could see the pity in the man’s eyes. “I’m beginning to think that might possibly be true.”

      Francis was numb. She’d fallen into a gaping hole and she didn’t know how to get out of it. She couldn’t talk. She could barely think. “But who would do such a thing?”

      Francis knew it was her father. Knew it in her heart before she had reasoned it out with her head. He was the only one who could have done it.

      Her father had been upset when she and Flint had driven up and announced their marriage. She hadn’t expected her father to be glad about the marriage, but she thought he’d adjust in time. She’d been relieved when Flint had suggested he drive into Miles City to buy roses for her. If she had some time alone with her father, Francis had thought, she could change his mind.

      She and her father had talked for a while and then she went in to pack. There wasn’t much she needed to take. Some tea towels she’d made years ago when her mother was alive to help her. The clothes she’d been wearing to school. A few pieces of costume jewelry. The letters Garth had written her when he was overseas.

      She’d filled up two suitcases when her father came in to say he’d called Las Vegas and found out that the justice of the peace was a fake.

      At that moment, Francis had not worried about her father’s words. If the justice of the peace was a fake, she’d calmly reasoned, she and Flint would only find someone else to marry them again. Flint had made a mistake in locating the proper official, but they would take care of it. They’d marry again. That’s what people in love did. She started to fold the aprons her mother had given her.

      When she finished packing, Francis went down to the kitchen to prepare supper for her father. It was the last meal she’d make for him for awhile, and she was happy to do it. She decided to make beef stew because it could simmer for hours with little tending after she left.

      Four hours later her father invited her to sit down and eat the stew with him. She knew Flint could have driven into Miles City and back several times in the hours that had passed. Francis refused the stew and went to her room. He must have had car trouble, she thought. That was it. He’d call any minute. She stayed awake all night waiting for the phone to ring. It was a week before she even made any attempt to sleep at nights.

      “It was my father,” Francis said calmly as she looked Flint’s boss in the eyes. “He must have arranged it all.”

      “I’m sorry.” The man said his words quickly.

      The inside of the cold house was silent. Francis sat with the open Bible on her lap, staring at the page where her marriage vows had been recorded and a scripture reference from Solomon had been added. As she looked at it closely, she could see that the faded handwriting was Flint’s. СКАЧАТЬ