the Nativity set. The women had collected soup-can labels for months and traded them like green stamps to get a life-size plastic Nativity set that lit up at night. Les was sure he’d eaten more tomato soup recently than he had in his entire life.
“Well, the shepherd’s not there. We don’t know what happened to him, but we can’t see him. Charley says that Elmer has been upset about all of the electricity the church is using to light everything up. He says someone either took the shepherd or Elmer unplugged it to protest the whole thing.”
Les had known there would be problems with people eating all that soup. It made old ranchers like Elmer and Charley irritable. It was probably bad for their blood pressure, too.
“Unplugging something is not much of a protest. It could even be a mistake.” Now, that was a whole lot more likely than some high-minded protest, Les thought, and then he remembered promising the regular sheriff that he would be patient with everyone. “But I’ll talk to Elmer, anyway, and explain how important the Nativity set is and what a sacrifice everyone made so we could have it.”
Les was sure Elmer would agree about the sacrifice part. He’d said he was eating so much soup he might as well have false teeth.
There were some muffled voices in the background that Les couldn’t make out over the phone.
“That’s Elmer now. He just came in and he claims he didn’t unplug anything. He says if we can’t see the shepherd, it’s because it’s not there and Charley’s right that somebody stole it.”
“The light could be burned out.” Patience went only so far, Les thought. He wasn’t going to go chasing phantom criminals just because someone thought something was stolen. There hadn’t been an attempted theft in Dry Creek since that woman had broken into the café two years ago. And she had not even taken anything. After all that time, it wasn’t likely someone would suddenly decide to steal a plastic shepherd.
“Maybe it is a defective light,” Linda agreed. “But I’m going to tell Charley and Elmer not to go over and check. It’s still pitch-black outside. Charley’s been looking out the café window for a good fifteen minutes, and it’s still too dark to see if the shepherd is there. And if it’s not there, then it could be a crime scene and we’d need the professionals.” Linda’s voice dipped so low that only Les could hear it. “Besides, the two of them could fall and break half their bones going over there in the dark. You know how that patch of street in front of the church is always so slippery when we’ve had snow. So I’ll tell them you’re going to handle it. Okay?”
“Sounds good,” Les said. He’d rather safeguard old bones than chase after imaginary thieves any day. “I’ll be right there.”
Les usually made a morning trip into town, anyway, before he drove a load of hay out to the cattle he was wintering in the far pasture. The little town of Dry Creek wasn’t much—a hardware store, a church, a café and a dozen or so houses—but the regular sheriff guarded the place as if it was Fort Knox, and Les, who was the town’s only volunteer reserve deputy, had promised he’d do the same in the sheriff’s absence.
Just thinking of the sheriff made Les shake his head. Who would figure that a man as shy as Sheriff Carl Wall would ever have a wedding, let alone a belated honeymoon to celebrate with a trip to Maui?
It was all Les could do not to be jealous. After all, he was as good-looking as Carl, or at least no worse looking. Les even owned his own ranch, as sweet a piece of earth as God ever created, and it was all paid for. Not every man could say that. He should be content. But for the past week every time he thought of Carl and that honeymoon trip of his, Les started to frown.
If Sheriff Carl Wall could get married, Les figured he should be married, too. He was almost forty years old and, although he enjoyed being single, a man could spend only so much time in his own company before, well, he got a little tired of it. Besides, it would be nice to have a woman’s touch around the place. Les knew he could hire someone to do most of the cooking and cleaning. But it wouldn’t be the same. A woman just naturally made a home around her, like a mother bird making her nest. A man’s house wasn’t a home without some nesting going on.
Of course, Les told himself as he pulled his pickup to a stop beside the café, the sheriff had gone a little overboard with it all. He had completely lost his dignity, the way he had moped around until Barbara Strong agreed to marry him. Les would never do that. He had already seen too many tortured love scenes in his life; he had no desire to play the lead in one himself.
His parents were the reason for his reluctance to marry. They had had many very public partings and equally dramatic reconciliations. Les never knew whether they were breaking up or getting back together. The two of them should have sold tickets to their lives. They certainly could have used some help with finances, given the salary his father earned in that shoe store in Miles City. Half their arguments were about money. The other half were about who didn’t love whom enough.
His parents were both dead now, but Les had never understood how they could be the way they were. They were so very public about how they felt about everything, from love to taxes. As a child Les had vowed to stay away from that kind of circus. It was embarrassing. Growing up, he never even made a fuss over his dog, because he didn’t want anyone to think he was becoming like his parents.
No, Les thought as he stepped up on the café porch, if he was going to get married there would be no emotional public scenes. It would all be a nice sensible arrangement with a nice quiet woman. There was no reason for two people to make fools of themselves just because they wanted to get married, anyway.
“Oh, good. You’re here.” Linda’s voice greeted Les as he opened the door.
The café floor was covered with alternating black and white squares of linoleum. Formica-topped tables sat in the middle of the large room, and a counter ran along one of its sides. The air smelled of freshly made coffee and fried bacon.
Elmer and Charley were sitting at the table closest to the door and they both looked up from their plates as Les stepped inside. They had flushed faces and excitement in their eyes.
“They already went over to the church,” Linda whispered as she closed the door behind Les. “They snuck out when I was in the kitchen making their pancakes.”
Les could tell the two men were primed to tell him something. It hadn’t stopped them from eating their pancakes and bacon, though. All that was left on their plates was syrup. Les walked closer to them. Fortunately, no one had ever suggested people should have soup for breakfast, so that meal had always been safe.
“It’s a crime,” Elmer announced from where he sat. He had his elbows on the table and his cap sitting on the straight-backed chair next to him.
“We thought maybe you were right about the light just burning out,” Charley explained as he pushed his chair back a little from the table. “We didn’t want to bother anyone if that was all that happened, so we went over to take a look.”
“Looks like a kidnapping to me,” Elmer declared confidently, then paused to glance up at Les. “Is it a kidnapping if the kidnapee in question is plastic?”
“No,” Les said. He didn’t need to call upon his reserve deputy sheriff training to answer that question. “It’s not even a theft if someone just moved the figure. That’s probably what happened. Maybe the pastor decided the Nativity had too many figures on the left side and put the shepherd inside the church until he could set it up on the other side.”
Les reminded himself to get these
