Chapter 1
“Believe it or not, I do know how to fish,” I said. “I’ve done this a time or two.”
“I do believe you, Isabelle, but why would you use a worm that isn’t real?” Jerome asked as he leaned back against the tree and folded his hands on his lap.
“Because I don’t like the feel of real worms. They’re slimy and alive and gross. These fake worms are wonderful inventions. And I believe we call them lures now. To lure the fish, you know.”
“Lures,” Jerome said with a disgusted sigh.
“Missing the good old days?” I said.
Jerome smiled his half smile. “Always. Not in the ways you might think, though.”
I was sure that Samuel Clemens himself would have been inspired to pen another great American novel if he saw Jerome and me in the woodsy setting.
I wore my oldest, most faded overalls and one of my mom’s straw hats. If the hat had seen better days, they were days before my time. My white T-shirt was new and clean, but surely Mr. Clemens would have forgiven that minor fault in my country look. I’d even had the urge to pick a long piece of grass and hold it between my teeth, but so far I’d resisted. Jerome was Jerome, dressed in his cowboy hat and cowboy-ish clothes—the clothes he was wearing when he was killed in 1918.
For the fishing excursion, I’d picked a spot in the woods that I was familiar with. It was close to town, very close, and still a secret to most of our visitors—the tourists who ventured to Broken Rope every summer, as well as the current group, who’d been more a surprise than a plan. The river was one of Missouri’s more narrow rivers and about a hundred feet back from the jail side of Broken Rope’s Main Street, the place where the buildings and businesses were set up to duplicate their original Old West incarnations. I’d fished this river a number of times, and I knew about the abundance of catfish it held. Well, it might not be so abundant at the moment, but it would replenish quickly, even after Broken Rope’s recent run on catfish fishing. It was only two days earlier that many of the town’s full-time residents, Gram and me included, had been standing side by side up and down the river with our lines in the water. We’d all had a successful outing.
As a town, we had—well, Jake had, and the rest of us had gone along—agreed that Broken Rope could feasibly host a cowboy poetry convention this year, since the cowboy poets’ normal campsite had been destroyed by fire the previous summer. For our contribution, Gram and I would be teaching a couple outdoor cooking classes—frying catfish over a campfire and Dutch oven techniques. Along with the frying, there’d also be large amounts of catfish eaten over the next four days. We’d had to stock coolers and freezers with enough fish to support a bunch of healthy, fueled-by-fresh-air appetites.
The convention was almost a day and a half old, and if Jerome and I listened hard, we could hear sounds from the skit currently being performed on Main Street—something about a pioneer wife’s disloyal ways that would, of course, result in a gun battle. We’d already heard a gunshot. I hadn’t been needed for this particular skit, so I’d decided to take a few hours of downtime just for me. Before Jerome arrived I was just going to go for a head-clearing drive. There were a couple reasons I felt I needed to get away from the activity. A little quiet time might help me refocus; the convention had conveniently been scheduled over the cooking school’s April spring break, and all the students had left town, so they didn’t need any immediate attention, but the timing also meant I’d gone from busy cooking school teacher to busy convention-planning assistant. My normal spring break day or two of recharging wasn’t going to happen this year. Fortunately, even though the cooking school year had started off rough, things had been sailing along smoothly, and busily, since January.
But with Jerome along, my biggest reason for ditching the long drive idea and escaping a hundred or so feet into the woods was that I wanted and needed a place other than my car or my house to talk to him without the possibility of being overheard or interrupted by something more than a fish tugging on the line.