Tears burned her eyes at his kindness and she had to look away not to cry. A young couple had just come in the door. The cowboy was good-looking in a cocky, got-it-all-going-on kind of way. But it was the woman who caught Dulcie’s eye. She was tall and pretty with a mane of chestnut hair. There was something familiar about her...

“There has to be a simple explanation that will clear this whole thing up.”

“Thank you,” Dulcie said to Russell as she turned back to him and pulled herself together. “I just needed to say all of that out loud. I feel better.”

He grinned at her. “I’m glad I could help.”

Their salads arrived just then and they lost themselves in the food and talking about other things. She asked about Texas and Whitehorse. He asked about Chicago and the Cubs games.

The evening passed in a pleasant blur of good food and equally good conversation. There was a lot more to Russell Corbett than met the eye—and in his case, that was saying a lot.

As they were leaving, she again noticed the young woman whom she’d seen with the cocky cowboy. As Dulcie passed their table on the way out of the restaurant, the woman looked up, a smile coming automatically to her lips, then a look of recognition and surprise.

That’s when it came to Dulcie why the woman had looked so familiar. She was the one Dulcie had run into coming out of the newspaper office—the one who’d dropped the copy of the article about the murder investigation.

What surprised Dulcie was the fear in the young woman’s face at seeing her again.

Chapter 7

Russell noticed the change in Dulcie as they were leaving the restaurant. “Anything wrong?”

“That young couple we passed as we were leaving, do you know them?”

He’d seen Dulcie hesitate at that last table. “That’s Tinker. You probably don’t follow rodeo. Thomas ‘Tinker’ Horton’s a pretty famous bull rider in these parts.”

“I was more interested in the woman with him,” Dulcie said, surprising him. Most women would have been more interested in Tinker.

“That’s the new schoolteacher in Old Town Whitehorse, Jolene Stevens.”

“Not that tiny school I saw next to the community center?”

He grinned at her obvious surprise as he opened his truck door for her. “It’s your old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse. I think I heard she has five students this year, grades three through eight.”

“I had no idea,” Dulcie said as he slid behind the wheel. “I thought one-room schools were a thing of the past. So she drives to and from Whitehorse every day?”

“The community provides her with a house in Old Town. It’s that cute little white one past the center and down the hill a ways. Why all the questions about the schoolteacher?”