Moonlight and Mistletoe Page 11

  She was puzzled. “Why would Demon do something like that?”

  “Because,” Buck said, seizing a hind leg and spinning the cowering dog on its back until its head pointed toward him, “it knows something we don’t know. It knows where your sister is.”

  Scarlett sucked in her breath. “Demon knows?”

  He smiled grimly. “When I remembered Kevin Black Badger saying what a good tracker your dog would make, I knew that if your sister was really missing, the dog would be out in the rain looking for her. We wouldn’t be able to keep it in the house. Instead of that, the thing goes to hide behind the Christmas tree.”

  “Demon,” Scarlett said, bending over the dog, “you stop this fooling around and go get Farrie if you know where she is.”

  “Oh, it knows.” Buck reached under the huge dog and tried to roll it onto its feet. He got it halfway, and then Demon fell back, all four legs waving.

  “I’ll bet I know what happened.” Scarlett looked thoughtful. “Wherever Farrie’s gone to, I’ll bet Farrie told Demon not to let on where it was.”

  Buck cursed. As well as he could, he dragged the dog to a sitting position. It promptly slid back down again, tail wagging cravenly.

  He stood over the Scraggs dog, feeling murderous. “Go get Farrah Fawcett Scraggs,” he told it, “or I’ll haul you down to the jail and lock you in a cold cell for the night without any food.”

  At the word “jail” the animal stopped wagging its tail and rolled its eyes up at him. “I think Demon knows what that means,” Scarlett said.

  It was a Scraggs dog. It would.

  “Two nights in jail, then,” Buck snapped. “Go get Farrah Fawcett. Or do you want to try for three?”

  The dog rolled over, groaning, and slowly got to its feet. “Oh, Demon!” Scarlett jumped up, excited. “Good dog! You’re gonna go find her!”

  Buck couldn’t resist giving the dog a shove on its hindquarters with his booted foot. “It’s been lying around here hiding,” he growled, “when I’ve got every man I can spare out in this weather looking for her.”

  “Demon loves Farrie,” Scarlett said, following them as the dog started for the hall. “She’ll do anything Farrie tells her to. If Farrie told Demon not to let on where she was, then Demon wouldn’t do it.”

  “Are you going up?” They stood at the foot of the steps, which Demon regarded with indifferent interest. “She’s upstairs somewhere, isn’t she?”

  He couldn’t believe he was carrying on a conversation with the Scraggses’ monstrous beast who, according to Scarlett, kept secrets. Like where the little sister was.

  Slowly, tail wagging, the black dog started up the staircase. At the top it turned away from the bedrooms and padded toward the front of the house.

  “I know where she’s going!” Scarlett darted past Buck. “Farrie’s in your mother’s little sewing room, I’ll bet you anything she is!”

  Buck hurried down the corridor, trying not to get tangled in the dog. They went up the stairs and at the door to the tower room Demon flopped down heavily and buried its head between its paws. Scarlett tried the doorknob.

  “The sewing room’s locked,” Buck told her.

  “Farrie can pick locks, she’s real good at it.” She rattled the door handle. “She could get in there if she wanted to.”

  “Why in hell would she want to do that?” Buck stepped over the dog and bent and put his eye to the keyhole. He couldn’t see anything, it was dark. “Farrie?” he called, experimentally.

  There was no answer.

  He turned to Scarlett. Her face was white. She held one fist to her mouth, trying not to cry out. “It’s dark in there,” she moaned. “Farrie went in there in the dark to hide.”

  There was no heat in there, Buck knew, but he didn’t say it. He felt a slow coil of fear unwind in his belly. Why would a child go hide in a dark room as cold as this one, unless she didn’t expect to come out? Buck braced himself for something unpleasant. “Stand back,” he told Scarlett.

  Scarlett drew a deep breath. “You going to shoot the lock off?”

  “You’ve been watching too much television. No, I’m going to use a key.”

  He took out his key ring, found the right one, and unlocked the door. There was no sound from inside while he was doing this, and no sound when he swung it open.

  The outside shutters were drawn and it was so dark Buck stumbled over some boxes groping for the light switch.

  Scarlett charged past him. “Oh, Farrie, Farrie, my poor baby,” she screamed.

  The light didn’t come on, the bulb was burned out. Buck couldn’t see what Scarlett was doing, but he heard her sobs. “Move aside,” he told her, as he pushed the dog out of the way and swung his legs over a trunk and came down on the other side. He saw the old football jacket. That was all there seemed to be, the jacket, and a pair of scrawny legs, but he recognized the lime-colored tights and the stained high-top sneakers. Buck bent and slid both hands under the bundle that was the youngest Scraggs.

  When he picked her up her head fell back and he saw the pale, wizened face, seemingly lifeless, the eyes closed tight.

  A little too tight, Buck noted. In his experience, when someone was unconscious the eyelids came loosely together, relaxed. Miss Farrah Fawcett Scraggs was playing possum.

  But that was not to say she wasn’t a pathetic little possum. In his arms, Buck found as he started for the door, she was as weightless as ever and even her clothes were cold to the touch. Up there in the dark tower room it must have felt like the tomb itself.

  Poor little pixie, he thought, she’d probably got more than she’d bargained for. She was rigid with cold.

  Still, he reminded himself, she could have come out at any time.

  “Farrie,” Scarlett moaned, following them down the stairs and out into the hall. “Why did she go and do it? She near froze in there!”

  Buck maneuvered around her, kicking the dog out of the way. “The bedroom,” he told her. “I’m going to put her in your bed. You go downstairs and fix her something hot to drink.” As Scarlett wavered, he snapped, “Go ahead, my mother’s got some cocoa mix somewhere.”

  Scarlett ran down the stairs. Buck carried Farrie into his sister’s bedroom. When he leaned over her to put her on the bed, she opened her eyes. He hung over her, finding he couldn’t get her little hands unlocked from around his neck.

  “You’ll be okay,” Buck said, trying to pry her fingers apart. “You can let go of me now.”

  The sad little eyes looked up at him.

  “Don’t make no use,” the child whispered. “If I let you go, we still can’t stay noplace. There’s no place at all for Scarlett and me.”

  There was no need to deny it, she spoke the truth. There was no place for Scraggs children and other outcasts; day in and day out in the southern mountains he saw it, and his deputies did, too. Farrie wasn’t the only one.

  “We’ll work on it,” Buck told her. “You just relax.”

  He knew that wasn’t good enough to tell a wisp of a child who had wanted to crawl into a cold dark place and disappear, but it was the best he could do at the moment.

  “Just lie back and shut your eyes for now,” Buck said. “And tomorrow you can show me how you get into locked rooms.”

  Eyes closed, Farrie smiled.

  Fourteen

  SCARLETT LAY BESIDE FARRIE IN THE BIG tester bed, listening to the wind roar around the corners of the Grissoms’ house. The rain had stopped. Through the ruffled curtains dark clouds scudded before a full moon. The wind and weather had changed; it would be much colder in the morning.

  It was cold now, Scarlett thought with a small, comfortable shiver. In the night, in the dark, the deep, soft bed was a wonderful place, a warm nest with fancy ruffles of the canopy covering them overhead, where she could still hear the comforting sound of the furnace cutting on and off.

  She reached out and gently rolled Farrie’s curled, bony little body up against her. When she held her fingers against h
er sister’s cheek she found her still cool to the touch. It was nothing short of a miracle that she hadn’t run a fever—Farrie, who could run a fever over practically nothing when she wasn’t happy. But her little sister had bounced back from her adventure, if you could call it that, and had even eaten a good dinner from the tray Buck had brought to her room.

  They’d argued over whether Farrie should have had hot soup, even after the hot chocolate, but Scarlett didn’t have time to make soup. And Farrie had gobbled up what she’d fixed, anyway: a whole baked stuffed potato with bacon and creamed spinach, then the grilled tomatoes with cheese, the green peas, garbanzo beans, candied yams, and even half a box of Oreo cookies she’d found in the pantry.

  “My God,” Buck had said, watching her. “How can she eat like that and still stay that size?”

  Scarlett said thoughtfully, “I think she’s gaining weight.”

  “And growing, too.” Farrie looked up at them with her bright eyes. “I think I growed some, too, while I was here.”

  Buck had groaned.

  Nevertheless, Scarlett thought, watching the cold moonlight dance across the ceiling, he had told her he wasn’t going to give in to Devil Anse and take a bribe, even if the bribe was Scarlett. He’d even called Devil Anse “vile,” and “low-minded.” Scarlett supposed you could call her grandpa that; she’d heard all her life there wasn’t anything a lowdown Scraggs wouldn’t do. And Devil Anse sure set the example.

  Sheriff Buck Grissom was a brave man, Scarlett thought, and he had a kind heart. He’d fed Farrie hot chocolate from a spoon, taken her pulse, then sat on the bed beside her while Farrie ate and talked to him about opening locks.

  “You know that Master lock number three?” Farrie loved being important; she hiked up in the bed next to Buck so she could look right in his face. “Like the one that you got in your gun case downstairs in the den with the twelve-gauge shotguns, and the automatic weapons like the AK-47? Well, they say in those ads in gun magazines that they can’t be picked. But they can!”

  He’d looked skeptical. “That lock has a guarantee. That’s why it’s on my gun case. Those are confiscated illegal weapons.”

  “I know that. But what you do is”—Farrie gestured in the air with her thin little fingers—”you get you two pieces of wire like from a coat hanger. The first piece you bend into a L-shape and slide right in at the opening where you put the teeth of the key, and you hold down the ratchet with it.”

  Buck raised his eyebrows.

  She nodded knowingly. “Then while you’re holding down the ratchet,” Farrie went on, “you slide the second piece of wire to push the tumblers out of the way. Then you rotate the first piece of wire with that L-shape and it will go click! Nice and easy. You got your number three Master lock open.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Buck stared at her. “Did some of your—ah, somebody teach you how to do all of this?”

  “My uncle Lyndon Baines,” Farrie said proudly. “Only I’m better than he is, now.”

  Scarlett had come up in a hurry to take what was left of the dinner away and tell Farrie to slide down in the bed and close her eyes. It was time to end that conversation right where it was.

  “We don’t say no prayers,” she’d explained as she tucked Farrie in. “I’ve heard a lot of people always say their prayers at bedtime, but my great-aunt Lutie Scraggs used to say: ‘Don’t cry and you won’t be sorry. And don’t pray for nothing. That way you’re not disappointed.’”

  He gave her an odd look. “That’s quite a philosophy.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know what you call it, but it’s what Scraggses do.”

  Farrie told Buck she wanted him to kiss her goodnight. He had leaned down to let her wind her arms around him and give him a big smack on the cheek.

  So it looked like Sheriff Buck didn’t hold a grudge, Scarlett thought as she watched them. And his deputies didn’t seem to mind, except the big Indian deputy, Kevin Black Badger, who had come in pretty mad after a long time in the cold on the mountain because nobody had thought to tell him.

  Now, lying in bed, Scarlett could let herself sigh with relief at how well everything had turned out. Farrie was safe, and nobody seemed to blame her for acting the way she did.

  If there was any trouble, she thought with a small frown, it had to do with the television newscast, and the people with cars and trucks in the driveway earlier.

  Buck had said he was going to be in the den to see the newscast. Scarlett had been in the kitchen getting supper warmed up. What made her notice it at all was that she heard Buck cussing. Curious, she’d come to the door to see what was going on.

  There on the television screen was the figure of Sheriff Buck Grissom saying there couldn’t be any living manger scene at the courthouse because of a court order.

  Then, while Scarlett was still admiring how nice Buck looked, big and handsome in his uniform, the camera moved up close on his face as he said that he had armed deputies, if necessary, to keep any manger scene away.

  You could tell right away that what Buck had said about armed deputies wasn’t right. You could see it right there on his face that he knew it, too, before the camera swung away and the man in the television news studio came back on.

  A moment later the telephone had started ringing. Instead of eating his dinner that Scarlett had fixed, Buck had answered one call after another until he finally gave up and went upstairs to see how Farrie was getting along. He came down again later to check the news, and Scarlett went to clean up the kitchen. When the news came on again, the telephone started to ring. It hadn’t stopped ringing, even late as it was.

  Scarlett went out on the upstairs landing where she could see the light from the den and hear the rumble of Buck’s voice, still answering calls. Whoever they were, people in Nancyville, they ought to leave him alone, she thought. Deputies were armed. He was only telling the truth.

  She couldn’t help remembering how he had looked as he sat on the edge of the bed feeding Farrie hot chocolate from a cup. Or the look on his face as he’d carried her out of the tower room. Or when he’d searched for her pulse. You wouldn’t think those big hands could find a spot on a little girl’s skinny wrist to take her pulse, but they had.

  It was just too bad that some people hadn’t liked what they saw on TV, because their sheriff was a brave man. A good man. She had never met a man like him before.

  I’m in love with him, Scarlett thought, surprised.

  It was such a strange, totally unexpected feeling that she sat straight up in bed, staring at the spot of moonlight falling on the carpet by the window.

  Was she sure? She didn’t want to make a big mistake again like she had the other night, coming to his room. But Sheriff Buck Grissom made her heart stop just watching him. And the feeling that she just couldn’t wait for him to kiss her hung around her like a homeless cat practically all the time.

  It was love, all right, because it felt just like she’d heard other people say—sort of warm and excited and feeling happy whenever she thought about Buck. It was, Scarlett realized, probably the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her. That’s why she hadn’t recognized it right away; she just wasn’t used to having wonderful things happen.

  But now, how everything had changed! For one thing, she didn’t have to force herself to do anything, she didn’t have to please Farrie and trick him into marriage. And she didn’t have to please Devil Anse, who wanted to bribe Buck and make him do something crooked.

  No, she thought, almost hugging herself, she was in love with Sheriff Buck Grissom. She could please herself!

  It made her so happy she couldn’t wait to tell him. She slipped her bare feet over the edge of the bed and started for the door.

  The darkened house smelled like Christmas, filled with the fragrance of the spruce tree in the parlor. The prisms in the hall’s ceiling fixture winked sparks of light as Scarlett hurried under them.

  What should she say? Just tell Buck that she’d
just found out she was in love with him?

  Scarlett hesitated at the door to the den, hearing his voice on the telephone. He was talking, not to someone about what had happened on the television news, she realized, but to his mother. It was Mrs. Grissom’s nightly call from Chicago. She always called after eleven because they had a different time in Chicago, Buck had explained.

  Scarlett stood by the half-open door to the den, not knowing now whether she wanted to go in. She hadn’t known about places in America having different times. “Zones,” Buck had called them. But then she was pretty ignorant; she’d never finished her last year of high school because Devil Anse had made her drop out.

  If a person was in love with someone like Buck Grissom, Scarlett thought, they would have to give some thought to something like that. Her grandpa, Ancil Scraggs, and all the things he’d done. And how much school she had missed.

  She’d already seen the woman they said Buck had once been engaged to: Susan Huddleston, the county social worker. You could see Susan Huddleston was pretty much what a sheriff would look for in a wife. Not, she told herself, slowly taking a step back from the doorway, some wild Scraggs from Catfish Holler.

  The happy feeling faded away. Scarlett knew now that she didn’t want Buck to feel that he was being forced into anything. Hadn’t he already told her he didn’t intend to make a fool of himself?

  She bit her lip. She supposed he could do that, make a fool of himself with Scarlett Scraggs, old Devil Anse Scraggs’s granddaughter. Especially if she came down after eleven o’clock at night in her bare feet and only a secondhand church nightgown and tried to tell him that she had some crazy idea that she loved him.

  The happy feeling was gone now, replaced with a sad, hollow place in her middle.

  There couldn’t be anything much better than to live in this house, and make a home for Farrie, and be Buck Grissom’s wife. But look at her! She didn’t even have bedroom slippers to put on her feet. When she got dressed in the morning she put on somebody else’s clothes. And she didn’t have a home. Neither did her little sister.