The Lawman Meets His Bride by Meagan McKinney Page A

and bounced to a fluff piece about a hot-dog eating contest in Billings. Constance turned off the TV set. She admonished herself against drawing unwarranted conclusions about Quinn Loudon’s innocence.
    She tried to work in the office she’d set up in the spare bedroom. Most pressing was a sheaf of legal forms she needed to fill out for a sale she had closed last week on a nice little A-frame cottage in the south valley. But she simply couldn’t concentrate, right now, on the legal niceties of escrow accounts and variable mortgage rates.
    She decided to run some errands in town. She’d been so busy with this year’s surprise influx of home buyers—not to mention surprise abductions at gunpoint—that almost everything in her refrigerator was near or past the sell-by date. Since the pharmacy was open on Sunday, she decided she should also renew the prescription for her allergy medicine.
    She had parked the rental car on the concrete apron in front of her attached garage. As she eased down the serpentine driveway, she searched everywhere for any sign of the gray sedan that had followed her—or so she still believed—yesterday.

    However, the only vehicle she spotted on the road to town was Billy Bettinger’s old rattletrap pickup and drilling rig. Billy had dug water wells throughout the valley ever since she could remember. She waved as he flashed past her, and he honked back.
    Seeing Billy coaxed the day’s first smile onto her lips. The shameless but harmless old lech never saw her without letting loose a sharp wolf whistle.
    “Prettiest gal in the valley,” he always insisted. “All them curves, and me with no brakes.”
    “Big talk,” she had shot back once in a challenging tone, and Billy had blushed to the tips of his sunburned ears.
    Thanks in part to the unseasonably warm weather, Mystery was already fairly busy when she angle-parked in front of Omensetter’s Pharmacy on Main Street. Newcomers and longtime residents mingled on the sidewalks and frequented the various shops and the brand-new supermarket.
    She quickly realized, from Wallace Omensetter’s remarks as he filled her prescription, that the brief link to Mystery had gotten the Quinn Loudon story noised about all over the valley.
    “Saw your sign on the news, Connie,” he informed her. “Got yourself a free plug on TV, huh?”
    “My sign?” she repeated, confused at first.
    Wallace wore a longhorn mustache, the kind she saw only in cornball TV commercials featuring “Old West” characters.
    “Sure. Yesterday, or actually last night on the late news. They showed the cabin where that fellow Jim Loudon holed up. I recognized the Hupenbecker place right off.”

    “Quinn,” she corrected him automatically. She must have gone to bed before that broadcast.
    As Wallace handed her the medicine, he bent close to her over the counter, his lopsided mouth grimly self-important under the silly mustache.
    “Around here,” he said in a confidential hush, though the store was empty except for them, “rumors are always thicker ’n toads after a hard rain. But I heard this straight from Constable Lofton. This guy Loudon? He’s a notorious bank robber. You watch yourself. Lofton thinks he might even have infiltrated the town in disguise.”
    Her skeptical dimple appeared for a moment. But she gave him a solemn nod, trying to keep a straight face. She wasn’t sure exactly what “notorious bank robbers” looked like these days. But she suspected that one would stand out in this valley populated by ranchers, townies, and diva-shaded yuppies like a rhinestone yo-yo.
    “Thanks for the tip,” she replied from a poker face. “I’ll be careful.”
    But as she left the pharmacy, Constance felt a stab of guilt. There had been several messages on her answering machine that she hadn’t bothered answering yet. Now she realized that at least one of them might have been her mom, worried by that graphic of the cabin and her real-estate sign.
    She decided to