into a smile. “Rhenquist is an old boob.”
A young waitress appeared at their table to take their order, interrupting their conversation momentarily. “So, what’s up with you?” Savannah asked when the waitress had left their booth. “Are you off on another adventure?”
Meredith worked for the family business, Wild West Protective Services. Savannah had been intrigued when she’d learned her new friend worked as a bodyguard. “And when are you going to let me interview you for my column?”
“No, and never,” Meredith replied. “I’ve decided to take some time off.” She leaned forward, her green eyes sparkling. “My brother, Joshua is coming home. He should be here sometime today or tomorrow.”
“You have too many brothers. Which one is Joshua?”
“The baby. He’s been in New York for the past year and a half and we’ve all missed him desperately.” Her affection for her younger sibling was obvious in her voice.
“Is this a visit?”
“No, he’s decided to move back here. He says he’s had enough of the big city. He’d probably love for you to interview him. Joshua has never shied away from attention.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Savannah replied. “I’m interviewing Charlie Summit this afternoon.”
“Now that should be interesting. I can’t believe Cotter Creek’s epitome of crazy as a loon is going to talk to you.” Meredith shoved a strand of her long dark hair behind one ear.
“Actually, beneath his gruff exterior and eccentricities, Charlie is a very nice man. I sometimes go over to his place in the evenings and we play chess together. He’s lonely and he was thrilled when I told him I wanted to talk to him for one of my ‘People and Personality’ columns.”
“When we were kids he used to scare the hell out of us,” Meredith said after the waitress had returned to serve their orders. “He lived all alone out there in the middle of nowhere and looked like Grizzly Adams on a bad day. There was a rumor that his root cellar was filled with children who had disobeyed their parents.”
Savannah laughed. “I wonder who started that particular rumor?”
“Probably some parent with disobedient children.”
Meredith paused to take a sip of her iced tea, then continued. “Actually, Joshua became good friends with him when Joshua was about fifteen years old. You know that weather vane that Charlie has stuck in the ground next to his house?”
“You mean that copper monstrosity with the rooster?”
Meredith nodded. “One night a bunch of Joshua’s friends dared him to steal it. Joshua sneaked up and Charlie was waiting for him with a shotgun in hand.”
“So, what happened?”
“Charlie made Joshua go inside the house and call my father. As punishment Joshua had to go over to Charlie’s twice a week after school and work. I think he’s kept in touch with Charlie even while he’s been in New York.”
“If your brother is his friend, that makes two friends for Charlie. I’m hoping my article on him will humanize him and make people look beyond the scruffy beard and gruff exterior.”
“Oh, I almost forgot.” Meredith opened her purse and pulled out a cream-colored envelope and handed it across the table to Savannah.
“What’s this?”
“A wedding invitation. Clay and Libby are getting married a week from next Saturday.”
“Wow, that’s kind of fast, isn’t it?” Savannah knew a little about the romance between Meredith’s brother Clay and the beautiful blonde from Hollywood.
Clay had been sent to Hollywood to play bodyguard to Libby’s daughter, Gracie, who was a little movie star and had been receiving threatening notes in the mail. Clay and Libby had fallen in love, and Libby and her daughter had moved to Cotter Creek a couple of weeks ago.
Meredith smiled, a touch of wistfulness in her eyes. “Yes, it’s fast, but, according to Clay and Libby, when you know something is right you don’t waste any time.”
The two women continued to visit as they ate their lunch, then all too quickly it was time for Savannah to head to her interview with Charlie.
It was almost one o’clock as Savannah drove down Main Street, headed to the outskirts of town and the small ranch house where Charlie Summit lived.
Every morning for the past three months she had awakened and been vaguely surprised to discover herself for the most part content with her new life. And content was something she couldn’t ever remember feeling in her twenty-four years of life.
Savannah had awakened one morning in her beautiful bedroom in her parents’ beautiful house and had realized if she didn’t get away from the criticism and unrealistic expectations she’d never know who she was and what she was capable of being.
And so she’d headed for the biggest adventure of her life…finding her life.
It had been that faulty transmission that had brought her to Cotter Creek and a further stroke of luck that Raymond Buchannan, the owner of the local newspaper, was getting old and tired. When she’d approached him with her journalism degree in one hand and an idea for profiling the locals in a column each week in the other, he’d hired her.
In the time she’d been here, she’d grown to love Cotter Creek, but she’d begun to think something bad was happening here. There had been too many accidental deaths of local ranchers lately. On a whim she’d done some research and the results were troubling, to say the least.
She shoved away thoughts of those deaths and rolled down her window to allow in the crisp early-October air, so different from the desert heat in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she’d grown up.
She was looking forward to the interview with Charlie. All her teachers in her journalism classes had told her that she was particularly good at the art of interviewing.
She always managed to glean one little nugget of information that exposed the very center of a person. It was one of her strengths. Her mother had spent her lifetime cataloging Savannah’s weaknesses.
Charlie Summit lived, as most of the ranchers in the area did, in the middle of nowhere. But, unlike most of the flat pastures of his neighbors, Charlie’s little two-bedroom ranch house was surrounded by woods and a yard that hadn’t seen the blade of a lawnmower in the past twenty years.
A rusted-out pickup truck body sat on cinder blocks on the east side of the house, surrounded by old scraps of tin and the infamous, huge, elaborate copper weather vane.
The junkyard collection, coupled with his hermitlike tendencies, certainly helped add to Charlie’s reputation as an odd duck.
What was definitely odd was that, as Savannah pulled her car to a halt in front of the overgrown path that led to Charlie’s front door, his two dogs, Judd and Jessie, were pacing the porch, obviously agitated.
Charlie never let the dogs stay out on their own. He’d always told her the two mutts were too dumb to know to scratch an itch
