Moonlight and Mistletoe Page 13

  “So I see.” Buck shoved the Scraggs dog out of his way and started toward his office. Unfortunately, the Committee for the Real Meaning of Christmas, with Junior Whitford in front, moved to block his way.

  “Sheriff, we hope we’re not going to have any trouble with you tonight,” Whitford said belligerently. “We come down here this morning to tell you that under the Constitution of the United States we’re entitled to our free speech. Ain’t that right?” he said, turning to the three men and two women behind him.

  They nodded vigorously.

  Buck stood with his hands in his Sam Browne belt. The leader of the Committee for the Real Meaning of Christmas was a small, paunchy, middle-aged electrician of undoubtedly sincere convictions. But the last time Buck had heard of Junior he’d been a member of a snake-handling church that his deputies tried to keep their eye on over in Folsom Ridge.

  “I’m going to give you trouble?” Buck said. “I’m not trying to break the law, Mr. Whitford, you are. We have a court order that says there are to be no displays of religious significance on the courthouse lawn. And it’s my job as sheriff of Jackson County to enforce that order.”

  “With armed deputies?” Junior shrilled. “That’s what you said on the television news last night, wasn’t it—armed deputies?”

  “Sheriff,” one of the ladies behind Whitford called. She held up her arm, waving several sheets of paper. “We have a petition—”

  “Wait!” This was Madelyne Smith, coming to Buck’s rescue. She jumped up from her desk and hurried to hand him a pink telephone-message slip. “Sheriff,” she said loudly, “I have Mr. Byron Turnipseed on the line from the Georgia State criminal investigation department. Folks”—She turned to the committee, smiling brightly—”I can make an appointment for all of you to meet with Sheriff Grissom if you’ll just tell me when you want to see him.”

  Buck took advantage of Madelyne’s strategy to hurry past Junior and his crowd, stumble over the Scraggs beast, enter his office and shut the door.

  He sat down behind his desk, feeling winded. He’d never expected to find the committee lying in wait for him when he got to work. It sure wasn’t a great way to start his day.

  When he looked at Madelyne’s pink telephone slip in his hand it said: “Byron Turnipseed is not on the line, Buck, but he did call last night after you left. Mose took the message. The Georgia criminal investigation department wants you to contact them ASAP.”

  Buck had just lifted the telephone to do that very thing when Deputy Rory Haines entered his office wearing an expression of disgust and pain.

  “What’s the matter?” Buck said, putting the telephone back down.

  Haines lifted a small, naked body by the legs and held it out to him. “You won’t believe this, Sheriff, but I found out where them turkeys have gone to.”

  “I believe it,” Buck said, staring at the inert form that the deputy now laid carefully on his desk. “Just tell me.”

  “A deputy from Union County came down last night with one of these, wanted to know if it was what we had a bulletin out on. Seems half of a little town up there called Deer Run’s been just saturated with turkeys. Somebody’s selling them out of the back of a truck at about five dollars apiece.”

  Buck got up, swearing under his breath. “Damn, I haven’t been here five minutes. I’m never going to get a chance to do my paperwork.” In front of his desk the Scraggs dog was sitting on its haunches, staring at the plump body on his blotter. “Better take back that turkey,” he reminded the deputy.

  “It’s the Piedmont Poultry hijacked truck, ain’t it?” Haines said, picking it up.

  “Sounds like it. I guess I’ll have to go up to Union County and see what they’ve got.”

  The deputy followed him to the door, bird in hand. “Sheriff, if you’re going up that way, Kevin Black Badger’s down with bronchial pneumonia, and wants somebody to bring him his camping stuff he left on his desk. He doesn’t want it lying around the office while he’s out sick.”

  Buck nodded.

  Moses Holt met them in the outer office with what appeared to be Kevin’s things: a stack of blankets and a sheepskin hide, a Coleman stove perched on top, and a sleeping bag. As they went out to the parking lot Buck looked around warily, but Junior and his committee seemed to have left.

  “I’ll be back around noon,” Buck told his deputies as they loaded Black Badger’s camping gear in the back of the Blazer. “I have to check out the Living Christmas Tree early and see we’ve got all our security in place.”

  The deputies looked at each other.

  “Sheriff,” Moses Holt said, “there’s no possibility we’re going to have to fire on anybody, is there? Junior Whitford’s a cousin of my wife’s sister’s brother-in-law and he says—”

  “The story all over town is,” Haines interrupted, “that the committee is going to try tonight to put a manger scene in place. A sort of Christmas sit-in.”

  “Yeah, I heard that,” Buck said, shoving the dog out of his seat and getting in behind the wheel. “Look, I don’t care what kind of rumors they’re spreading, if there’s a manger sit-in, we’ll deal with it the way my dad did in the seventies with the Vietnam War protesters. We will gently remove them from the area in dispute.”

  As he said it, Buck hoped that if the manger sit-in materialized, the parties involved would come peaceably. And that Jackson County deputies wouldn’t have to bodily carry out Joseph, Mary, and some local kid voted Best Baby Jesus. That would make a TV news item Jackson County would never forget.

  Both deputies stepped back as he gunned the engine and pulled the Blazer out of the parking lot.

  Kevin Black Badger lived out on Route 19, the highway that ran north to Union County and then into North Carolina. Buck was sorry to hear about Kevin’s bronchial pneumonia, but told himself it was not all that serious or Kevin would be in the hospital. On the other hand, he wasn’t at all sorry that he’d assigned Kevin to search Makim’s Mountain instead of driving the patrol car around all afternoon with Scarlett Scraggs.

  The sky was overcast and because of the cold there wasn’t much traffic. Buck was looking for connecting State Road 165 that would take him into 19 when he came around a curve, doing about sixty, and suddenly saw an old stake-sided truck broken down in the middle of the road.

  Buck swerved the Blazer. He had put his sling back on his right arm that morning, and the moment he yanked at the steering wheel he knew that had been a mistake. The Blazer hardly responded to one hand. As he struggled with it a weedy figure in a satin windbreaker and cowboy hat stepped out from behind the broken-down stakebody at the last minute, waving his arms.

  The Blazer missed the idiot dancing in front of it, roared off onto the shoulder of the road, then plunged into a stand of shortleaf pines.

  It took a moment for Buck to pry himself upright. The passenger’s side door hung open and the Scraggs dog was gone. He’d banged his head, but he wasn’t so groggy that he didn’t recognize the two faces that appeared at the Blazer’s window.

  “Well, boy,” Devil Anse said, “we been trackin’ you all week and we gotcha. This here’s Reese Potter, my granddaughter Scarlett’s betrothed, you might say. We’re both a mite anxious to ask you a few things. Like when you’re gonna make up yore mind.”

  Scarlett had locked all the doors and windows to the Grissoms’ house, but she still kept looking over her shoulder and listening for the sound of trucks or cars in the driveway that might be Devil Anse and the Potters coming for her. Thinking about it, she accidentally stabbed Farrie with the pin she was using to fasten her mistletoe headdress.

  “Ow!” Her sister’s scream was genuine. “What’s the matter with you, Scarlett? You been acting mean as a three-legged cat all day long, but I ain’t done nothing to you!”

  “No, you haven’t,” she admitted. She was afraid to tell Farrie of her feeling that something terrible was going to happen. They should have left Nancyville a long time ago. Now Buck Grissom was in trouble
with Devil Anse because he hadn’t let him bribe him, Reese Potter was hanging around again when she’d thought there’d been an end to all that, and, finally, she was in love with Buck and it was plain he didn’t love her.

  No, last but not least, Scarlett thought, studying her sister standing in front of her in Mr. Ravenwood’s Spirit of the Mistletoe costume, there was Farrie. She didn’t know how she was going to get Farrie out of Nancyville when her little sister thought all these things that were happening were wonderful. The new life they’d been looking for.

  But after Christmas, Scarlett knew, they would be plain old Scraggses again. The social worker, Miss Huddleston, would be back in town and Farrie most likely would be turned over to the court. She had heard enough about the Jackson County welfare department to guess it wasn’t likely they’d give Farrie back to their grandpa to raise. They’d put Farrie in a foster home, or a home for children who needed special care —

  And Scarlett would never see her again.

  “What’s the matter, Scarlett?” Farrie peered up into her face. “You look so sad. Aren’t you happy we’re going to have a Christmas this once?”

  Scarlett frowned. “We had Christmas before,” she said, jerking the pieces of plastic mistletoe into place. “I got a doll from the church over at Toccoa when I was little, and we had some kind of Christmas nearly every year since you were born. Maybe not so as you’d notice it much, but we had it.” She picked up a plastic mistletoe berry that had fallen out of Farrie’s headdress and tossed it on the table. “This stuff! Last Christmas I shot real mistletoe out of oak trees and we sold it.”

  “With Uncle Lyndon Baines’s twenty-two,” Farrie reminded her.

  Scarlett shrugged. “Anybody can shoot mistletoe out of a tree with a shotgun.”

  “We made fifty-seven dollars,” Farrie remembered, “but Grandpa took it away from us.”

  “Well,”—Scarlett leaned back on her heels to look at Farrie full-length—”that’s why we ran away.”

  Something was happening to her little sister. In her long white angel dress, topped now by the big, full wreath of plastic mistletoe resting on her wiry hair, Farrie glowed. For the first time it seemed to Scarlett that Farrie was looking more like other little girls. Her face wasn’t so pinched, she didn’t seem so thin, her funny little grin wasn’t so elvish. And tonight was Farrie’s night.

  Mr. Ravenwood had put Farrie on the top of the tree as the Spirit of Mistletoe for the final number. The closing song sung by the entire tree, plus Farrie’s solo, would be spectacularly joined by all the church bells in downtown Nancyville: the First Methodist, the Nancyville First Baptist, the Makim’s Mountain Presbyterian, and St. George’s Episcopal Church, which had a real carillon played by computer program.

  “I guess I’m happy we’re having Christmas here,” Scarlett said reluctantly. There was no need to let her little sister suffer just because she was out of sorts. “It could be a lot worse.”

  She looked up at the kitchen clock. It was almost noon and she had to fix lunch. That at least would make her feel better; planning something for Farrie and herself to eat from the cookbooks.

  Nevertheless, the doleful feeling wouldn’t go away. Scarlett wished it was five o’clock, and time for the Heamsteads to pick them up for the performance. But that was still hours away.

  A trickle of blood from the cut on his eyebrow where the cretin in the cowboy hat had hit him made its way down into the corner of Buck’s eye, partly fogging his vision. He wasn’t bothered so much by the cut, nor even the rabbit punch old Devil Anse had delivered to his abdomen in a fit of temper, as he was by the cold.

  Buck figured from the looks of the misty sun over the tops of the pines that he’d been tied to the tree for about an hour. After punching him up, the two Scraggses—one, he gathered, was the girls’ uncle Lyndon Baines—and the two Potters, father and son, had gone down to their pickup trucks to drink beer and talk things over. The more beer the louder the talk. He could hear them distinctly now, discussing profits in the hijack turkey market.

  Buck tried his legs experimentally. He could hardly stretch them out, they were so cramped. The Scraggses had him restrained with his own handcuffs, a prime humiliation for any law officer, and his right shoulder and where he was sitting on the half-frozen ground had gone numb.

  In a little while the Scraggses and what Devil Anse called the family of the “betrothed”—the Potters, father and son—would come back up to persuade him to adopt their current business agenda. Lay off investigating Jackson County truck hijackings, was the message. Especially turkeys. And lay off the entire spectrum of Scraggs enterprises.

  And oh yes. Make up his mind about Scarlett.

  They were actually stupid enough to think they’d make him cooperate by beating him up. The jerk in the cowboy hat had been particularly happy to slug him twice in the face while yelling about what he’d probably done to his girl. With, of course, Buck couldn’t help thinking, the permission of her grandpa. After they finished this round of beer they’d be back again.

  It could go on all afternoon, he thought, checking the slant of the cloud-covered sun. In the meantime, there was the Living Christmas Tree waiting down at the courthouse, and soon, Junior Whitford’s committee. And, Buck remembered with a groan, the Atlanta TV cameras. It was too much to hope for a miracle, that the news crews would stay away.

  Out of the corner of his eye he was aware of a persistent, slight movement in the trees. Now, as he squinted against the gray light he saw it was the Scraggs dog back there, hiding and watching him.

  Fat lot of good the animal had done him. Since it had fallen or been thrown from the truck, he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of it. Certainly not while the Scraggses and Potters were beating their current revised business demands into him.

  Now that the blood from his cut was no longer seeping into his eye, Buck could see the dog better. The thing knew it, too: it lifted that huge black tail and whacked it in the pine needles several times.

  Suddenly inspired, Buck lifted his handcuffed hands and wiggled one finger.

  Come closer.

  To his surprise the Scraggs dog obeyed, crawling on its belly until it was at the edge of the trees but still in the shade.

  Well, that was progress. Hope began to stir, unwillingly. “Go get Farrie,” Buck whispered hoarsely.

  The dog wagged its tail again.

  Damn, it was too much to hope the thing had any sense! He remembered the time when the little sister was hiding, and Scarlett’s remark that the dog knew where she was but wouldn’t tell. He’d half believed it, then.

  “Listen, I need help,” Buck rasped. He realized he was pleading with a dumb animal. “Go get help, understand?”

  The Scraggs dog wagged its tail again.

  Despairing, Buck suddenly had a bright vision of the one good thing he could think of in spite of the Scraggses and in spite of everything. A warm, lovely presence that put its slender arms around him and chased away his misery, his humiliation, the terrible cold.

  Scarlett.

  “Go,” Buck told it, “get Scarlett.”

  When next he looked, the dog was gone.

  Sixteen

  SCARLETT HAD NOT ONLY FIXED LUNCH, she’d peeled a bowl of apples and made two apple pies with fancy lattice crusts, but she still felt jittery. Farrie sat at the kitchen table and watched as she started on a package of Betty Crocker brownie mix she’d found in the Grissoms’ pantry.

  “If you’re going to sit around in that Spirit of Mistletoe dress, you’re going to have to be careful,” Scarlett said as Farrie took the brownie bowl to lick. “It’s too late to wash and dry it if you spill something.”

  Farrie nodded, busy with the chocolate batter. She’d kept her plastic mistletoe headdress on, so ready for her big night that she couldn’t bear to take any part of her costume off.

  Although they both jumped, it was something of a relief to hear Demon’s wild barking, followed by the scratching at the back door. The
next instant they knew what it meant.

  “Something’s happened to Buck,” Scarlett cried.

  They both raced to open the door. Demon came hurtling in, not stopping to be petted, circling the kitchen table and barking.

  “She don’t want to stay,” Farrie shouted.

  Scarlett bent to touch Demon’s coat. It was icy cold. “She’s been out somewhere with him. I know Demon would never leave Buck unless something’s happened!”

  Suddenly Scarlett knew what that look meant in Devil Anse’s eyes that morning when he’d gotten out of the pickup truck at the Living Christmas Tree. Those eyes that singled her out held a warning not to do anything, no matter what happened.

  The dog circled the table again restlessly, still barking her low, rasping woof, woof.

  Scarlett leaned over it. “Where’s Buck?” she cried.

  Demon barked again and raced for the door. The dog sat down in front of it, tail pounding furiously.

  Farrie threw up her hands, her face wrinkled in anguish. “Something’s happened for sure, Scarlett!” she screeched. “Is it Devil Anse? Is he going to hurt Sheriff Buck?”

  Scarlett’s legs gave way under her and she had to sit down. Something awful had happened to Buck. She could guess what that was, since Demon had come back without him.

  Oh, glory, she prayed fervently, don’t let Devil Anse do anything to Buck! There was no limit to what her grandpa could do, mean as he was!

  Scarlett looked slowly around the kitchen. It had all been a dream, she thought. A dream that someone like Farrie and herself could live in a real house, so solid and comfortable, and full of love, like real people. Without being discovered for what they were.

  Scraggses. Outlaws. People that no one in their right mind would want to have anything to do with.

  What had just happened—what had probably happened to Buck by now if Devil Anse had him—proved that, all right.

  She took a deep breath. “We’ve gotta stop Grandpa,” she said, looking across the kitchen table at Farrie. “Buck’s been good to us like nobody else has ever been.”