Love In a Small Town
Love in a Small Town
Joyce Zeller
Published by Rogue Phoenix Press
Copyright © 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62420-200-1
Electronic rights reserved by Rogue Phoenix Press, all other rights reserved by the author. The reproduction or other use of any part of this publication without the prior written consent of the rights holder is an infringement of the copyright law. This is a work of fiction. People and locations, even those with real names, have been fictionalized for the purposes of this story.
Dedication
Dedicated, with affection, to the people of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, America’s only remaining middle-class Victorian town.
You welcomed me and became my home.
In the afternoon of this late September day, business was slow at Scentual Encounters, Eureka Springs's only bath, body and fragrance shop, allowing time for Lindsay Keith to study her lone customer.
She hadn't been able to take her eyes off the oddly dressed teenager since she'd wandered into the shop, at least twenty minutes ago.
"Can I help you find something?"
She wasn't from around here. Possibly another tourist. In this remote area of northwest Arkansas, most of her customers were tourists. Lynn made friends easily. She was a young woman, approaching her thirties, with a wealth of shoulder length, brown hair, and warm, friendly brown eyes that promised interest in anything someone had to say.
Ordinarily, the visitor wouldn't attract much attention in a town that prided itself with being a little off-center in most things, but this girl looked so lost and forlorn—a lonely, lost soul with nowhere to go. Her defeated expression tugged at Lynn's heart, and the real beauty of the youngster intrigued her, barely visible, as it was, under that god-awful, Emo-wannabe makeup she wore.
Reacting to the query, the girl shrank into herself and kept her head down. "No, I'm just looking."
I should know her, if she's a local. In a town of only twenty-two hundred people, you know everybody. She started to turn away when the girl looked up and said, anxiously, "No, wait. Uh, do you have any patchouli?"
Lynn eyed her. In spite of her dress, an obvious attempt to appear outside the normally accepted, no way was she a patchouli person. It required confidence to wear the woodsy, mossy odor once popular in the sixties. Its detractors thought it smelled like old varnish.
"Sure, we have patchouli." She led the girl to a rack of half-ounce, brown bottles, reached for the tester, removed the top and held the bottle out to her.
"Oh, yuck. It smells like wet dirt. It's not like that on Tiffany."
"It changes on some people when it blends with their natural skin oils."
"Well, maybe you have something else the kids at school wear." At the note of longing in her voice Lynn got the picture immediately. This girl was having trouble fitting in. She thought wearing a popular fragrance would help. It might also explain her weird appearance.
The makeup was a pretty good attempt at the old Goth look, now mainly out of favor with the local teens, replaced by something called Emo. She had the white face and black eye makeup, the black lipstick and nail polish. Still, her clothes didn't make it. The t-shirt was the required black, but it cinched at the waist with a red striped necktie. A pink and orange print challis skirt skimmed the top of hiking boots, and an oversize, man's, green cardigan hung from her thin shoulders, like a shroud.
"Where do you go to school? If it's around here I'll know what scent the kids are wearing."
"I live here. I go to Eureka Springs High School."
Confident now, Lynn chose a small bottle of perfume oil and handed it to the girl. "Well then, here we go. A lot of the local girls wear this. It's called 'Rain.'"
She watched as the girl removed the top and smelled it, tentatively placing a bit on the inside of her wrist, massaging it gently, and then sniffing lightly.
Curious. The girl was no stranger to big city perfume counters.
"This is nice. I'll take this."
The hope evident in the girl's expression tugged at Lynn's heartstrings. She couldn't help it. Her nurturing soul drew her irresistibly to lost animals, sick birds, and needy people. Pregnant cats found their way unerringly to her door.
"Uh. Is this your store?"
Smiling, she gave Sarah her change and put the oil in a bag. "Yes. I started Scentual Encounters about ten years ago, after my mother died. There was some money from her insurance and I'd always wanted to own my own business, so I decided to give this a try."
The girl eyed her solemnly and apparently settled on some sort of decision. "We came here last month from Chicago—my stepfather and I. My mom, uh, got sick and died, so he said we had to come here." The anguish in her voice conveyed disapproval hard to miss.
"Oh, I'm sorry. It's hard losing a mom. It gets better with time, but I still miss mine." She said it with a smile, trying to lighten the mood.
The girl held out her hand, cautiously. "I'm Sarah Graham."
Smiling to reassure her, Lynn took her hand. "I'm Lindsay Keith. From now on, call me Lynn. Only my closest friends call me that, and I know we're going to be friends."
Sarah smiled with obvious pleasure. "I have to be going, Lynn, but I'll come back and visit."
Sarah moved to the door, took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, as though preparing for possible hostile encounters, opened the door and left.
Well, that was interesting. She'd ask Caro about her. The high school principal would know. Sometimes small town living, where you knew everyone, was a good thing. The downside was everyone knew you and your every move. She shook her head, remembering a story, committed to local lore, of the guy who stayed overnight at the house of a new female acquaintance and found his mail in her mailbox the next morning. The postman had recognized his truck. Lynn headed for the phone, too curious about her visitor to wait on finding out more.
The phone rang. Caro's voice said, "Hey, Lynn."
She laughed. "I was just going to call you, and here you are."
"Eureka Springs' serendipity is at it again," Caro replied. "I'm on a mission, getting a couple of us together to have dinner at the Kensington Hotel. Everybody in town is talking about the new waiter in the dining room. A couple of us are going tonight to check him out. I hear he is drop-dead gorgeous, a real 'hottie' and available. Lord knows we have few enough of those around here. How about it? You're invited."
"Who's all going?"
"Janine, Mary, me, and now you."
"You know I'm not into that. I hate watching Janine drool over the latest male body in town. Her constant prowling gets old fast."
"Oh, come on. You're just not into it. Your avoidance of anything more than a superficial relationship with the male gender is well known. This one might change your mind. I hear that on a scale of one to ten, he's a twenty-five."
"That good, huh?" Why did her friends persist in trying to find her a man? "It's nobody's business that I choose not to have a man in my life. I'm twenty-nine years old and able to find my own man, if I want one." Fears that should have died long ago started to surface. No, she wasn't going to go there. Men were not worth the heartache and the inevitable disappointment.
"Look, some other time, okay?" She should have known a simple refusal wasn't going to be enough.
"Hey, girlfriend. I'm only trying to talk you into dinner, not marriage. In the interest of peace, I concede that there are certain advantages to living alone, without a man in the house."
"At least that's something," Lynn laughed, her humor restored. "Consider this: I always get to drive, I have absolute control of the remote, and the toilet seat is always down."
Caro's boisterous laughter assaulted her ear. "Well, yeah, there is that. Come on, you need a night out and you like the food at the Kensington. You can make snide remarks and poke fun at us as we drool over this guy."
"I promise to be restrained, and the grilled salmon in lemon sauce is always primo. What time?"
"We're meeting at six."
"Okay, I'll be there." She paused, remembering the strange girl. "Oh, something else. Do you know of a student named Sarah Graham? She just left the store and she looked lost, like she's having a hard time fitting in."
"Yeah, I know her. She moved here a couple of weeks ago, with her stepfather, whom I haven't met. Her mother died, recently. She'd only been married to the man a short while, so he and the girl are still getting to know each other."
"No wonder she looks lost. I wondered about her because she was dressed oddly, in clothes that looked like they came from a resale shop, but she was wearing boots that retail for upwards of four hundred dollars."
"Yeah, she's having a rocky time of it, fitting in, especially if you consider she used to attend the Chicago Country Day Academy, a very expensive, private, big city school where uniforms were required.
"Unfortunately she's hanging with three girls who have invented their own look that borrows from Emo and the old Goth stuff. They're trying to set themselves apart from the rest of the crowd, mainly because they're not particularly liked. She's got to be suffering from cultural shock, but she'll find her center and be okay, especially if she has 'Mother Lindsay' on her side. Tell me later. I've got to go. Don't forget. The Kensington by six."
David Martin settled into the cushioned chaise on his front porch, waiting. His blonde good looks and lithe body, usually relaxed with the confidence of a successful man enjoying his domain, was taut with tension, ready for battle. Eyes narrowed, he searched for the quarry he knew was out there. Rampantly overgrown shrubbery provided a wealth of hiding places among the Victorian gingerbread cottages lining the narrow neighborhood street. Overhead, an unbroken canopy of massive shade trees kept the street dark.
Someone is stalking Sarah.
A shadow moved behind an oleander across the street. There he was, at it again, a strange boy lurking in the bushes, waiting for David's teenage stepdaughter to come walking home from school.
Damn.
David thought he'd left behind the sick predators, the violence, and the dangers associated with big city living when he decided on the move to Eureka Springs, a Southern town only a day's drive from Chicago. Here they'd have all the peace and security of a small town. He should've known better. He should've listened to Sarah, but he had been in a panic at his sudden role of a widowed, single-parent dad to a daughter he hardly knew, and the responsibility it entailed.
Fortunately, making a living was no problem. As an investment specialist, a Certified Financial Analyst, he managed a small, but select client list of portfolios, which provided a very satisfactory income. He could do business anywhere the Internet was available.
He
'd chosen this area of the Arkansas Ozarks after learning of it from some of his clients who retired here. The added benefit of two major airports close-by for easy access to any major financial center made moving here a no brainer.
Sarah objected bitterly to leaving all her friends, but he ignored all her protests. Never mind. He knew best; had it all figured out. Well, he was wrong. Moving her away from a sheltered, privileged lifestyle in a private school to a rural environment where she had nothing in common with the people around her was a mistake. God, what a complacent ass he'd become. All he'd gained for his trouble was Sarah's misery.
Reaching for his glass of iced tea, ever-present in the southern, late September heat, he considered the situation as the liquid cooled his throat.