A Bride for Dry Creek. Janet Tronstad

a small hand-cranked lantern. He twisted the handle a few times and set the lantern on the table. A soft glow lit up the whole room. “Something must have gone wrong.”

      “Flint kidnapped me.”

      That fact seemed to amuse the older man. “Yes, I forgot. You mentioned that earlier. Sorry to spoil your plans.”

      “They were hardly my plans. You’re the boss. They were your plans.” Francis knew it wasn’t always wise to confront criminals. But the old man seemed fairly harmless, and she did like to keep things clear.

      “Sounded more like a lover’s tryst to me.” The man sat on one of the chairs.

      “Humph.” Francis didn’t want to go into that.

      “Not that it’s any of my business,” the man continued and looked around the room. “Although I can assure you that if Flint told you there was a bed, he lied.”

      “Humph.” Francis was feeling the warmth steel up her whole body. She could almost feel cozy. “We don’t really need a bed.”

      “Good.”

      The man sat for a few minutes in silence and then got up and went to his pack and drew out a can. “Peaches?”

      “I’d like that.”

      The man opened the peaches with the can-opening edge of a Swiss knife.

      “Handy thing,” he said as he flipped the blades into the knife and put it in his pocket. “Flint gave me this one almost fifteen years ago now.”

      “You’ve known him for that long?”

      The man nodded. “Almost as long as you have if you’re who I think you are.”

      Francis wondered if this were a trick to find out who she was. But then, she reasoned, it hardly mattered. Flint certainly knew who she was, and he would be back soon to tell his boss anyway.

      “I’m Francis Elkton.”

      The man nodded again. “Thought you must be. But I guess I’ll share my peaches with you anyway. Figure you must have had your reasons for what you did.”

      “Reasons for what?”

      The man shrugged. “It’s old history. Flint went on and so did you. I wouldn’t even 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