Reading from My Latest Book Death In the Gallatin Valley

Clay was just bringing the New Holland stacker to a stop at the old Chevy flatbed truck where Dustin was drinking coffee and munching a strawberry Pop tart, when a sleek, red, late-model Audi with camel colored convertible top, pulled up alongside the truck and braked hard creating a large swirl of dust.

Luckily, what breeze there was quickly swept most of the dust away from the two men, and away from Dustin’s Pop tart, which was a good thing because he didn’t take kindly to a stranger just driving onto his property like she owned it. He certainly would not have felt too hospitable if the woman had covered his Pop tart with dirt. 

The top of the Audi was folded down. The woman behind the wheel of the red menace was blonde-haired and blue-eyed like many of the Dutch women who lived in the area, and she appeared to be as sleek and well built as her vehicle. 

Her long hair was clasped back in a pony tail by a turquoise barrette of Native American design. She was wearing a white sleeveless blouse and she had soft, tanned arms. When she swung her blue jean-clad legs and hand-tooled cowboy boots out of the luxurious leather interior of her car it became apparent that she also was fairly tall.

She was wearing a small, tasteful turquoise ring on her right hand and a handcrafted silver bracelet on her left wrist but no other jewelry of any kind, not even a watch. If she was wearing any makeup other than a nice red lipstick, Dustin couldn’t tell. 

 “Are you Dusty Rhodes?” the woman asked.

Dustin thought he saw shrewdness in her eyes that made him wary of being less than honest with her, but did he also detect a hint of a buried sadness?

“I might be Rhodes,” Dustin said. “My Pop tart would be dusty too if you had braked much harder in all this dirt.”

“I’m sorry. I’m Hilary Van Woorden,”

“Shoot. For a minute there I hoped you might be Jane Fonda with a big bag of money coming to tell me Ted Turner wanted to buy my farm so he could run buffalo in this valley.”

“Me not Jane, sorry Tarzan.”

Hilary Van Woorden approached Dustin’s perch on the flatbed, laughing at her own joke. Shading her eyes from the sun with her left hand she stuck her right hand out to shake.