LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter One

      Shelly stood on the corner of Main Street, waiting for the light midafternoon traffic to pass, and stared at the check in her hand. One million, one hundred thousand dollars! The group had chosen the option of getting their money all at once rather than the annuitized $84,000 a year, and that had dropped the full figure by half. Still a fortune, as far as she was concerned.

      She knew it was unsophisticated to revel in her good fortune, probably even reckless to hold the check in her hand for all the world to see, but she couldn’t help it. She studied the neat, stick-straight ones printed on the check, then counted the zeroes. Five. Five zeroes! Seven figures! She was a millionaire!

      “Hey, Shelly! You buying us lunch today?” Chet Brower waved from ten feet above her in the bucket of the city works department truck. He and his brother Chuck, who stood below in a hard hat, were changing the street signs in downtown Jester—a change insisted upon by Mayor Bobby Larson. Few of the merchants were in agreement—the old names went back to Jester history—but the whole town was terminal with lottery fever and the influx of new life it had brought to Jester, even before any of the Main Street Millionaires had deposited their checks.

      Main Street was still Main Street, but the names of three major cross streets were being changed today. Her corner was now Big Draw Drive, a block east was Megabucks Boulevard and Lottery Lane was a block west. She’d expected things to change, but she hadn’t been prepared for just how much.

      News vans stood on every corner and seemed to spew an enormous number of people into downtown. They represented Billings, Helena, Missoula, even television stations from neighboring states. Reporters were scattered all over town, interviewing shop owners and people on the street, determined to make what they were calling the Main Street Millionaires national news.

      Gawkers had arrived from Pine Run, from Baker, Billings, and even Helena. Everyone wanted a glimpse of the Lucky Dozen, another name their group had acquired.

      Chuck came to Shelly and swept off his hard hat. The Brower twins were tall and big, the backbone of the city works department. They looked like linebackers, but thanks to their minister mother, they had hearts of gold.

      “Marry me, Shelly,” Chuck said, getting down on one knee on the sidewalk. “Then, buy me a Harley.”

      Shelly laughed and swatted his shoulder. Half a block away, a photographer drew a bead on them.

      “Oh, let’s see,” she said, pretending to give it some thought. “That would make me the Bride of Chuckie, wouldn’t it? Thanks, but I don’t think so.”

      “No!” Still on his knee, he caught her hands. “Think of me as Charles! Prince Charles! You’d be a princess if you married me.”

      Shelly patted his thinning brown hair. “Then you’d have two princesses, Chuck. Because you’re already married. You have three little redheaded children who look just like their mother. They’d be definite cogs in the works of a permanent relationship.”

      He held his hat to his chest and said with sober sincerity, “I could put up with it if you’ll buy me a Harley.”

      “How about a burger?” Chet called from the bucket. “And you don’t have to marry me.”

      Shelly looked up to see that Chet had taken down the old Peterson Drive sign with the bullet hole in it and put up the shiny new Big Draw Drive—white lettering on a forest-green background.

      “Free lunch for all my regulars tomorrow,” she said, a little stab of trepidation settling in her chest beside the tremors of excitement. “See you both?”

      Chuck got to his feet. “You’re a woman of style, Shelly,” he said, sweeping his hat with a flourish as he bowed.

      “Yeah, yeah,” she teased, starting across the street. “See you tomorrow.” She blew Chet a kiss over her shoulder.

      Harvey Brinkman’s photographer shot her walking across the street while Harvey stood by, dressed as always in jeans and a flack jacket—a foreign correspondent wanna-be stuck at the Pine Run Plain Talker, circulation just over 6,000, because he had a reputation for erroneous reporting. And at just twenty-five, with a slight build, a pale complexion and curly blond hair, he talked like a gangster from the forties.

      “Hi, doll!” he said as Shelly stepped onto the sidewalk. “Want to share with your fans what you’re doing with the dough?”

      “Nothing exciting,” she replied politely. “Just taking it to the bank.” What she really wanted to do was push him into the old trough in front of the Heartbreaker to clear his head and remind him that he was in Jester, Montana, not Afghanistan, and that this was the twenty-first century.

      But the trough that once held water was now a planter, and if he hadn’t figured out what time he was living in, there was little she could do to help him.

      “There’s got to be something you can tell us, Shelly,” he pleaded, hurrying along with her as she passed the barbershop and headed for Jester Savings and Loan. “You selling the coffee shop and going to Europe? Staying home, but spending all your moola on new duds?” His cursory glance at her blue corduroy slacks and the wool-lined red parka that covered a blue turtleneck suggested that she really ought to consider that. “Nobody ever gets to see what you look like under that big apron you always wear.”

      She kept walking, determined to suggest at the next city council meeting that they put water back in the old trough.

      Cameras flashed and microphones were pushed in front of her face as she walked through the savings and loan’s leaded-glass double doors.

      “Shelly! Are you finally going to live your dreams?”

      “Can you tell us what they are?”

      “What does the man in your life think of all this money!”

      “Does it make up for not having children?”

      She imagined her mother looking down on her and saying, “Patience, Shelly. Courtesy at all times. When you run a restaurant, your business is hospitality.”

      This wasn’t her restaurant, but she’d been so conditioned to that creed that she tried to be kind to everyone and seldom lost her temper. Though this invasion of Jester was threatening to undermine her good humor. Still, she reminded herself, all these reporters, photographers and gawkers were eating regularly at The Brimming Cup.

      She knew them by name now. When they were eating with her, they were friendly and fun and never asked questions, though they did make her feel as though she was being watched all the time. And when they were doing their jobs, they were unrelenting.

      She answered their questions in order and smiled at each of them in turn. “I love Jester, but I might travel a little, the only man in my life is Sean Connery, and I doubt that anything would ever make up for not having children.”

      “Sean Connery!” Gloria Russo from the Helena Herald gasped. She was short and plump and around Harvey’s age.

      Harvey leaned toward her as Shelly walked past them toward a teller. “Relax,” he said. “It’s a cat.”

      “Oh.”

      “Ladies and gentlemen!” Sidney Brown, manager of the bank, was tall, slender and gray-haired in a three-piece gray suit. He pushed the reporters back as they tried to follow Shelly. “How many times do I have to remind you that the business transacted in a bank is private? Please! You’ve been harassing my depositors all day. I’d call the sheriff on you if he wasn’t already busy!”

      Only slightly chastened, the reporters moved back to a refreshment table set up across the room with cookies and punch.

      Shelly

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