The Trouble With Valentine's Day Read Online Free

to her. There was a certain peace in knowing your neighbors. And even though those neighbors were all locked and loaded, there was comfort in knowing they weren’t likely to go on some wild killing spree.
    At least not until spring. Like the black bears that roamed the wilderness area, the town pretty much hibernated during the winter months. Once the regular hunting season was over in the late fall, there wasn’t a lot to do until the snow melted.
    As far as Kate could tell, the townspeople had a love/hate relationship with tourists and were suspicious of anyone without an Idaho “famous potatoes” license plate bolted to their bumper. They had a distrust of California and felt a superiority over anyone not born and raised in Idaho.
    After all these years, Gospel still had only two diners. At the Cozy Corner Café, the specials of the day were still fried chicken and chicken fried steak. The town had two grocery stores. The M&S was the smaller of the two, with only one checkout. On the outskirts of town, two different churches lined the same street. One nondenominational, the other Mormon. Gospel had five bars and four gun and tackle shops.
    The only new business in town was a sporting goods store located in what had once been the pharmacy right across the parking lot from the M&S. The old log building had been refurbished and restored, and big gold letters spelled out SUTTER SPORTS just above the stained-glass fish in the huge front window. It had a green tin roof and awnings, and a Closed Until April sign hung on the double glass-and-brass doors.
    According to Stanley, Sutter’s didn’t sell guns. No one knew why. This was Gospel after all, gun-nut capital of the world. A place where kids got their NRA membership cards before their driver’s license. A place where all pickup trucks had gun racks and THEY CAN HAVE MY GUN WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS bumper stickers. People slept with handguns stuck in the headboards of their beds and stashed in panty drawers. And they took it as a matter of pride that no citizen of Gospel had been killed with a gun since the turn of the century, when two of the Hansen boys had shot it out over a whore named Frenchy.
    Well, there had been that incident in ’95 when the old sheriff of the town had taken his own life. But that didn’t count since taking your own life really wasn’t a punishable crime. And no one really liked to talk about that particular chapter of the town’s history anyway.
    Most everything inside the M&S Market was the same as Kate recalled from her childhood. The antlers of the twelve-point buck her grandfather had blown away in ’79 were still on display above the old battered cash register. Around the commercial coffeemaker, conversation ranged from the mysterious owner of Sutter Sports, to Iona Osborn’s hip replacement surgery.
    â€œYou can’t weigh that much and not have hip problems,” Ada Dover said as Kate punched the keys of the cash register, then hit Add with the side of her hand.
    â€œUh-huh,” she responded as she set a can of cling peaches in a plastic grocery bag. Even the sounds inside the store were the same. From the back room, she could hear the whine of the meat slicer, and from the speakers overhead, Tom Jones sang about touching the green grass of home. Melba’s presence was still everywhere in the M&S, from the horrible music to the velvet Tom painting hung in the back office. About the only thing that had really changed inside Melba Caldwell’s store since her death was the stream of widows trolling for her husband, Stanley.
    â€œIona should have gone on Weight Watchers years ago. Have you ever tried Weight Watchers?”
    Kate shook her head, and the end of her pony-tail brushed the shoulders of her black shirt. Last week she’d substituted Tom Jones with Matchbox Twenty . But halfway into the second verse of “Disease,” her grandfather had