LITMIR.BIZ

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how a woman with her looks and spunk would be like honey to bears to most men.

      But he wasn’t most men. So what was it about Charlie Larkin that had him worried? Something about her reminded him of Natalie. The thought shook him to his core. He glanced out the window, feeling too isolated, too ill-prepared for the weather—and this dinky little town. How was he going to be able to accomplish anything without even rudimentary services? He’d tried to make a call from his motel room, which—big surprise—had no phone and he got no service on his cell phone.

      He’d seen two pay phones so far, one tacked on the wall a few feet inside the café door and a primitive-looking one outside Larkin’s. Neither exactly private. And the one was out in the weather and way too close to Charlie Larkin.

      The conversation at the all-male booth had changed to the price of lumber and those damn tree huggers who were ruining the logging industry.

      The woman in the waitress uniform put out her cigarette. “So, Leroy, did I hear you’re still trying to get that old tractor running?” she inquired of the suspender-wearing man in the booth. She had a face with a lot of miles on it and a voice gravelly from smoking.

      “Got to, Helen. Can’t afford a new one. Goin’ to have to plow snow with it pretty darned soon. Maybe Charlie’ll have a look at it when she gets the time,” he said, wagging his head.

      Helen, who no doubt was the café’s owner, looked over in Augustus’s direction. “Get settled in at Murphy’s, Gus?”

      Gus. It wasn’t bad enough that Charlie Larkin had told everyone in town about him, she hadn’t even gotten his name right. “It’s Augustus,” he said and gave Helen a smile to soften it. “Augustus T. Riley.”

      She chuckled as if he’d said something funny, obviously not recognizing the name. “Well, welcome to Utopia. You’re the big news of the day.”

      “Slow news day, huh,” he said, seeing an opening. “I would think that fellow who got pulled out of the lake would still be news.”

      “Shoot, that was over a week ago. Old news now and not the kind we like to be known for.” She stepped back into the kitchen and proceeded to finish up some cooking she had going on. “Trudi, your orders are up.”

      He wondered what kind of news Utopia liked being known for.

      “Here ya go, T.J.,” Trudi said cheerfully as she slid a plateful of food across the counter to the guy sitting alone. She wasted a big smile on him. He didn’t even bother to look up at her, just grunted something Augustus couldn’t hear.

      Trudi stood there for a moment, then went to deliver a couple of burgers to Leroy’s table and brought Augustus his salad. “Was creepy though, you know, if you think that his body was in the lake all this time,” she said, picking up the thread of the earlier conversation.

      “Since last fall,” he agreed, trying not to think about it. “So, did you know him?”

      She shook her head. “He wasn’t from around here.”

      Augustus knew that. Josh Whitaker had been an emergency-room doctor in Missoula at the hospital. He was thirty-four, two years younger than Augustus, single and lived with two other residents in a large house near the hospital. His death was being investigated as possible foul play after the coroner reported Josh had been hit in the back of the head with a blunt object, his car then pushed into the lake where it sank from view.

      No one knew what Josh Whitaker was doing in Utopia, thirty miles from the nearest real town. In this part of Montana, that thirty miles felt like three hundred. Augustus had never felt such isolation and couldn’t imagine why Josh had come up here all the way from Missoula. Josh had been missing for almost a year, his body finally discovered in late September by two local teenagers, just before the cold spell.

      But what Augustus knew that the press didn’t, according to phone company records, was that Josh had received two phones calls from Utopia just before he disappeared. Both from the pay phone outside Larkin & Sons Gas and Garage. He’d almost placed several phone calls to that pay phone, along with another to a C. Larkin that same day, the call to C. Larkin less than a minute in length, making Augustus wonder if Josh had reached Charlie. Her name had also showed up in an old date book of Josh’s with a notation beside it: help line.

      What Augustus needed was to find out what Charlotte “Charlie” Larkin’s relationship had been with Josh Whitaker, how they’d met no doubt through Josh’s statewide help line program, why Josh might have come to Utopia to see her and why she might want him dead. No small task.

      But hadn’t Emmett mentioned that Charlie Larkin had to quit college when her father had his heart attack? Was it possible she and Josh had met while she was attending the University of Montana in Missoula? That was where Josh had started his first help line.

      “What a terrible way to die,” Trudi was saying. “Drowning.” She shivered.

      “I heard it’s not that bad, like going to sleep,” the knitting woman said.

      “Marcella, I think you’re confusing drowning with hypothermia,” Helen said.

      “Starvation,” Leroy said. “I guess that or a quick heart attack is the way to go.”

      “Beats putting a gun to your head,” Helen agreed.

      An argument ensued over what caliber gun worked best. Augustus tried to steer the conversation back to the body in the lake. “Do they know what the drowned guy was doing here?”

      The customers looked to Helen as if anyone in town would know, it would be her. She shrugged.

      “Isn’t this lake off the beaten path?” Augustus asked.

      “Yeah, but maybe he’d heard about those campers that were eaten by that grizzly and wanted to see the place,” Trudi said, all big-eyed.

      Helen grimaced. “That’s pretty morbid and it was years ago. I can’t imagine he would have even heard about it.”

      Augustus remembered from the national news stories when he was a senior in high school and working on the school newspaper. Mostly he remembered because there were only a few things that ate you. Sharks. Gators. Grizzlies. “Didn’t I read in the paper that he was seeing a local woman?” he lied, drawing the conversation back to Josh Whitaker.

      “Wouldn’t know anything about that,” Helen said, going back to the kitchen to check on his chicken-fried steak. A few minutes later she handed Trudi a huge plate overflowing with meat, gravy and mashed potatoes and a side of canned peas through the pass-through.

      “Charlie fixing your car, huh?” Helen asked him, returning to her spot at the counter across from Marcella.

      “In the morning,” he said, taking the opening. “I heard she’s a pretty good mechanic.”

      “Best in five counties,” Helen boasted as she lit another cigarette, definitely at home with the place, with herself.

      Best in thirty miles, he could buy. Five counties though? That he seriously doubted.

      “If anyone can get your car running, it’s Charlie,” Leroy agreed.

      Anyone with even a little mechanical training could get his car running, if they wanted to. And if Charlie Larkin was as good as everyone in this town claimed, she would know that. The thought disturbed him.

      “Yep, they don’t come any better than Charlie,” Helen agreed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was over there right now working on your car.”

      He wouldn’t put money on that.

      “Like that time she found that family broke down outside of town,” Marcella said, knitting as she talked. “Remember that bunch? Must have had a dozen kids in that old motor home. Charlie took them food and got the rig running, though heaven only knows how.”

      Helen was nodding, obviously savoring the story. “They didn’t have two nickels to rub together,

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