Ellen was still getting usedto living in the faded single wide trailer which was her new home. It was mostly quiet there, because Eagle Rock was a small place and there wasn’t a lot of traffic. But after a couple of restless nights and a bad dream she couldn’t shake, Ellen changed her mind about buying a handgun, deciding that she did need to buy a handgun to keep beside her bed.
In case Rigby Mortimer ever found out where she lived.
Odds were, the gun would just live in the little drawer and never need to come out, but if she needed a gun and didn’t have one, she’d be in big trouble.
She had no idea how to go about buying one out in the middle of nowhere in Montana and her gun classes were over now. Eagle Rock wasn’t like a big city, where she could go to the local gun store. Heck, the grocery was a thirty-minute drive, and for any serious shopping, she had to go all the way into Bozeman.
There were pluses and minuses to living away from a big city. It was a universal law that Ellen had learned, and learned to hate: the more people around, the higher the potential for conflict, and the more conflict there was, the more violence was possible. Thus, it stood to reason that the higher populated areas like cities had higher crime rates, which meant better business opportunities for teachers of self-defense, both armed and unarmed and the stores that supplied them.
Out here in the country, though, people were far less concerned about defending themselves. It was hard to convince people of things like “stranger danger” when everyone knew everyone else.
She’d taught a whole week of “stranger danger” in her last kindergarten job. It was very important for the children to learn not to talk to strangers. But here, they didn’t even have one book in the school on the subject, or any other training materials for her to use to teach them.
Likely with the townsfolk looking out for everyone’s children, and the adults knowing everyone else in town, a stranger would stand out real clear, if one came to town. Children disappeared in big cities every year, but here in Eagle Rock, their record was zero children taken. That was something to be proud of.
The attack on Chyna had happened thirty miles away in the next largest town in the grocery store parking lot. Witnesses had seen the attack and described her attacker fully.
It would be harder to get away with that kind of thing in a smaller town, if anyone saw it.
Ellen hadn’t quite gotten used to the town busybodies, which she’d learned could be male or female. A man could be as big of a gossip as a woman. She also wasn’t used to everywhere she went having someone who’d already heard about her.
This was country living. They might live far apart from each other, but they could tell you who all their neighbors were and quite a lot about them. Far more than city people usually knew about their next-door neighbors.
But she also knew the nosiness of her neighbors could be protection of a sort. If everyone knew the new teacher in town, and they all wanted to know her, she was now one of their own, and they would look out for her. Though none would expect anything violent to happen to her. Even if she told them about her stalker.
“That kind of thing doesn’t happen here.” It was a phrase she’d heard more than once from the citizens of Eagle Rock.
Sadly, Ellen noted that the way most people preferred to think about violence (if it ever crossed their mind at all) was that it was just one of those things that would always happen to someone else.
But we’re all “someone else” to someone else, she thought, making her way through the hunting store.
Though she’d thought about asking Travis to help her, more than once, at the end of the day, she decided not to contact him. After their kiss, she needed to stay away from him, not ask him for help.
I’ll do this on my own. I’ll find someone here in the gun store to help me.
She’d located Jim’s Sporting Goods just past the edge of town, behind an old, faded diner which had closed many years ago. As faded as her mobile home, she guessed both buildings to be about the same age. Next to Jim’s was Bob’s Taxidermy. Down the road toward Bozeman was an older motel she could see in the distance.
The sporting goods store was the only place in town where she might be able to buy a handgun. Past the aisles and display stands of camouflage clothing, scent masking soaps, tree stands, and skinning knives was a wall stocked entirely with long guns.
Ellen’s eyes nearly bugged out as she walked past them, catching snippets of conversation between customers and the men behind the glass counters.
“Have you got Springfield’s new bolt action in yet?”
“What caliber is that lever gun there?”
“The last scope I bought here had some great glass! Have they come out with anything new?”
“Nah, my daughter says she wants something that’ll reach out like a three-oh-eight, but with less kick on it. Got anything in six-five Creedmoor?”
The conversations blurred together, threatening to overwhelm her, and Ellen found herself walking faster to get past the loose crowd of people.
As if by magic, as she turned the corner to her right, the people ended. The conversations were quieter than she’d thought now that she was a little apart from them. The only person she could see was a young man behind the counter, leaning on the glass with his head in one hand, looking bored.
Here were the handguns. So many of them.
At first, Ellen thought there were a lot, but as she thought about it, compared to the volume of long guns she’d just passed, there weren’t very many handguns at all.
She was just about to address the young man when an older gentleman approached her from one side. “Hi there, miss. Can I help you find something?”
