Dry Creek Sweethearts. Janet Tronstad

had sent him to Dry Creek to get reformed under the stern guidance of his great-aunt, Cornelia Enger.

      To Linda back then, Duane had looked every bit the tough city boy people said he was. He wore ragged black sneakers when the rest of the boys in school were wearing leather cowboy boots. And he had that old Silvertone guitar strapped to his back all the time. It was whispered that he knew how to hot-wire a car, pass a fake twenty-dollar bill and French-kiss a girl. No one was quite sure if the latter knowledge came from experience or observation, but the adults didn’t like it no matter how he’d learned about it.

      Linda’s mother asked her not to talk to Duane in school and that had made Linda determined to be his friend. The adults in Dry Creek all eyed the boy cautiously, but Linda decided he just looked lonely. He scowled at everyone, but Linda just kept smiling at him until one day, when they were in the seventh grade, he smiled back.

      It wasn’t much of a smile, but the thaw had begun. Eventually, he would play a song on his guitar for her now and then. Over time, he seemed to fall in love with Linda as much as she was with him. She was thrilled when they were freshmen in high school and he said she was his girl, and then when they were sophomores and he called her his sweetheart. When they were eighteen, he secretly asked her to marry him…someday when everything was good…someday when he could support them…someday when his dreams had had a chance to come true.

      Of course, someday never came.

      “It’s just as well he left Dry Creek,” Linda finally said. “He would never have been happy here.”

      She didn’t know what would have made Duane happy. Back then, she had thought it was his music. He’d learned to play the guitar from some man in Chicago and Duane had been fierce about wanting to spark another major jazz revival. Linda believed he could bend the whole music world to his thinking by the sheer force of his wanting to make it happen. As it turned out, her belief lasted longer than his determination. He gave up on jazz and joined a rock band that promised a quicker route to fame. Duane was impatient with everything. He hated lines and contracts and waiting for people to respond to his music.

      So, he left jazz and went to where the music beat faster. The rock band he joined toured and recorded and, now and then, even had a song with a few jazz overtones in it. She knew those jazz moments came from Duane.

      Not that Linda really listened to the songs from Duane’s band anymore. If she heard something from them come on the radio, she turned it off. She didn’t want to be wondering what the words to these songs meant. Or, if Duane had written them and who he had in mind when he wrote them. Or if he ever sang the songs he had written for her. Or if he even thought about her anymore.

      Not that she wanted Duane to think about her now. It was much too late for that. And it was okay. God’s plan had been for her to be in Dry Creek. It was her place; hers and Lucy’s. When their mother died and left them alone, the people of Dry Creek had made a circle around them and became their family. She and her sister wouldn’t have been happy anyplace else. And she was happy here. Really, she was.

      Sometimes her memories of Duane seemed like nothing more than a long-ago dream, vaguely sweet but irrelevant to her life today.

      “I doubt he even signs those letters himself.” Linda brought herself back to Lucy and the problem at hand. So much had changed. “He probably has someone who does the whole thing for him. You could have been anybody writing to him and you would have gotten the same letter back.”

      She hoped she wasn’t being too hard on her sister. She hadn’t known Lucy had sent a letter telling Duane all about the outdoor concert she and the other high school students had given last spring, until Lucy got a letter in response. Linda would have protested if she’d known Lucy had written; her sister didn’t need to waste her time thinking about someone who wasn’t giving anyone in Dry Creek a moment’s thought.

      “He signed it ‘Love, Duane.’ That has to mean something.”

      Obviously, Linda thought, her skepticism wasn’t making a dent in Lucy’s adoration.

      “It means he hopes we buy his new CD.” Linda stepped over so she could take a closer look at the letter her sister held. “I don’t even know if that’s his real signature.”

      There was a time when Linda would have definitely recognized Duane’s handwriting, but eight years was a long time and she’d had better things to think about. She had a business to run and, after her mother had died, she had a younger sister to raise. Besides, Duane had probably changed the way he signed his name many times over the years anyway. Change seemed to be his pattern.

      “But you two used to be friends,” Lucy protested. “I remember all those times when he snuck out to the farm when Mom was at work. He was your boyfriend. I saw him kiss you dozens of times.”

      Linda felt her whole face stiffen. Duane had been more than her boyfriend; she’d said yes when he’d asked her to marry him someday. She’d been foolish enough to think that meant she was his fiancée and she’d waited for him like a woman of her word until she visited him and it became apparent things would never work out. Not that she was going to tell Lucy that. No one needed to know about her empty dreams. “Things change.”

      With Duane, things had really changed.

      Everything was gone. Duane’s great-aunt had died in her sleep just after he graduated from high school. She’d been ill for some time and the doctor said she’d just hung on until she could see Duane through school. Linda had stood with Duane as they buried his aunt and she’d felt him tremble.

      There were no Engers in Dry Creek now, except for Duane’s old dog, Boots. Duane had taken Boots with him when he first left Dry Creek and then, a year or so later, he’d asked Mrs. Hargrove if Boots could live with her for a while. He paid the older woman, of course, but still that didn’t make it right.

      A dog should be with its master, especially this dog. Boots would die for Duane.

      Every time Linda thought about it she was indignant on Boots’s behalf. Duane couldn’t help it when he lost his great-aunt, but he didn’t need to lose Boots, too. Besides, a man shouldn’t ignore the kind of loyalty Boots had. It should count for something more than just remembering to send a check to cover some dog biscuits. And, if the truth were told, Linda wasn’t even sure Duane sent the checks regularly. Maybe he’d completely forgotten about the dog.

      Mrs. Hargrove was too kind to evict Boots even if she never received a dime for his care. Now that she thought of it, Linda wondered if Duane had some purebred show dog in Hollywood that he used for publicity shots. Maybe he’d replaced Boots just the way he’d replaced everyone else.

      Linda almost said something, but Lucy clearly wasn’t thinking about the injustice befalling anyone left behind in Dry Creek. She was looking straight at Linda with a hopeful look on her face.

      “You went to Hollywood to visit him,” Lucy said softly. “Remember? I stayed with Mrs. Hargrove and you went to see him. That had to mean something.”

      “That was a long time ago.”

      It was shortly after their mother had died. Their father had been dead for years by then and their mother’s death left Linda broken. It was too much. She had gone to see Duane as instinctively as she’d wept at her mother’s graveside. He’d opened his arms to her, too. She’d been comforted until she realized he had no intention of returning to Dry Creek and she couldn’t go with him on the road chasing his dreams as he’d asked, not when she suddenly had a seven-year-old sister to think about. So she’d left him a note saying things just wouldn’t work out between them and she had come back to Dry Creek.

      Duane had brought Boots back shortly after that, but Linda had refused to see Duane then. She needed to get on with her life and she couldn’t do that if Duane kept stopping by. At the time, she hadn’t known it would be Duane’s last visit to the town. His great-aunt had left him her house, and Linda had thought Duane would need to stop by to tend it. It was his duty to take care of that house; she thought he’d be back often. But he wasn’t.

      “I