towns along the Hi-Line were losing residents to more prosperous places.
Glen ran a hand over his buzz-cut blond hair and glanced out his office window past the park to the railroad tracks. A coal train was rumbling past. His phone rang. He let it ring a couple more times as he waited for the train to pass and the noise level to drop. “Hello.”
“One of the Bailey girls is missing.”
Glen groaned to himself as he recognized the voice of the worst gossip in the county. From the moment he took the job as reporter at the Milk River Examiner, Arlene Evans had been feeding him information as if she was Deep Throat.
“Missing?” Most of Arlene’s “leads” turned out to either be erroneous or the type of news he wasn’t allowed to print. He’d ended up at Whitehorse after working for several larger papers where he’d made the mistake of printing things he shouldn’t have.
He didn’t want to lose his job over some small-town gossip. But then again, he had printer’s ink in his veins. Working for a weekly newspaper, all he wrote about were church socials and town-council meetings.
Glen Whitaker was ready for a good story. “Which Bailey girl?”
“Eve Bailey. I just talked to Lila, her mother, and she said Eve rode out yesterday afternoon,” Arlene said with her usual relish. “Her horse came back this morning without her.”
Like the Baileys, Arlene lived south of Whitehorse.
The first settlement of Whitehorse had been nearer the Missouri River. But when the railroad came through, the town migrated five miles north, taking the name with it.
The original settlement of Whitehorse was now little more than a ghost town except for a handful of ranches and a few of the original remaining buildings. It was locally referred to as Old Town.
The people who lived there were a close-knit bunch to the point of being clannish. They did for their own, seldom needing any help and definitely not interested in any publicity when something bad happened.
But this could turn out to be just the story Glen had been waiting for—if Eve Bailey didn’t turn up alive and well.
Glen already had a headline in mind: Whitehorse Woman Lost In The Breaks, No Body Found.
“Her horse came back without her, so she’s stranded out there?”
Arlene clucked her tongue, her voice dropping conspiratorially. “Little chance of surviving that storm on foot. No shelter out there. And it got really cold last night.”
Whitehorse Woman’s Body Found Frozen.
Unfortunately, it was June and while it could snow in the Breaks any month of the year, the chances were good she hadn’t frozen to death. But hypothermia was a real possibility.
The problem was Glen knew about the Bailey girls, as they were called, although they were now young women. Attractive, but headstrong and capable. With his luck, Eve Bailey would survive. No heartrending story here.
He could picture Eve Bailey, so different from her sisters, who were blond with blue eyes. Eve had long dark hair and the blackest eyes he’d ever seen. But then he’d always been attracted to brunettes rather than blondes.
“Everyone is meeting over at the community center,” Arlene was saying in her excited high voice. “The women are putting together a potluck for the search party. It’s sewing day. We have to finish a quilt for Maddie Cavanaugh’s engagement to my son. With Pearl in the hospital with pneumonia we’re behind on the quilting. You know quilts are a tradition down here.”
He groaned inwardly. “I know.” Arlene had tried to get him to do a story on the Whitehorse Sewing Circle ever since he’d taken the reporter job. The group of women met most mornings at the community center and had for years. He suspected it was where Arlene picked up most of her gossip.
“I have to go. My pies are ready to come out of the oven,” Arlene said.
“Are you making one of your coconut-custard pies?” Glen asked hopefully. Arlene had taken a blue ribbon last year at the Phillips County Fair with her coconut-custard pie—and he’d been one of the judges.
“I always make the coconut-custard when there’s trouble,” Arlene said. “This could be your biggest story of the year.”
Arlene was forever hoping to be the source of his biggest story of the year. “My daughter Violet is helping me,” she said, shifting gears. “Did I tell you she’s quite the cook?”
Along with dispensing gossip, quilting and pie baking, Arlene Evans also worked at matchmaking, although she’d had little luck getting her thirty-something daughter, Violet, married off. From what Glen had heard Arlene had been trying to marry off Violet since she was a teenager.
The older Violet got, the more desperate Arlene had become. She considered it a flaw in her if her daughter was husbandless.
“Save me a piece of pie,” he said as he grabbed his camera and notebook, figuring it would probably be a waste of gas, time and energy. He was sure that by the time he reached Whitehorse, Eve Bailey would have been found and there would be nothing more than a brief story about her harrowing night out in the storm.
For a piece of Arlene’s coconut-custard pie he could even feign interest in her daughter.
BY THE TIME Sheriff Carter Jackson picked up his roping horse and trailer from his brother’s place and reached the Old Town Whitehorse Community Center, there were a dozen pickups and horse trailers parked in front.
He pulled into the lot, noticing that all of the trucks and horse trailers were covered in the gray gumbo mud that made unpaved roads in this part of the state impassable after a rainstorm.
Fortunately, the sun had come out this morning and had dried at least the top layer of soil because it appeared everyone had made it.
He’d always been proud that he was from Old Town and was sorry his family was no longer part of this isolated community. No matter how they were getting along at the time, the residents pulled together when there was trouble like a large extended family.
As he pushed open the door of the community center, he spotted Titus Cavanaugh at the center of a group of men. Titus had a topographical map stretched out on one of the women’s sewing tables and was going over it with the other male residents.
“Here’s the sheriff now,” resident Errol Wilson announced as Carter walked toward them.
“We’re putting together a search party,” said the elderly Cavanaugh, who was unmistakably in charge. If Old Town had been an incorporated town, Titus would have been mayor. He led the church services at the community center every Sunday, organized the Fourth of July picnic and somehow managed to be the most liked and respected man in the county, hell, most of the state.
His was one of the first families in the area. His grandmother had started the Whitehorse Sewing Circle and never missed a day until her death. Titus’s wife Pearl was just as dedicated to the group, although Carter didn’t see her. He’d heard Pearl was in the hospital with pneumonia. She’d always made sure that every newborn got a quilt, as well as every newlywed. It had been an Old Town tradition for as long as anyone could remember.
“Give
