Moonlight and Mistletoe Page 2

  Scarlett studied the sheriff with narrowed, suspicious eyes. He didn’t talk about Devil Anse the way other people did. Like they’d do anything to stay out of his way.

  “I just can’t turn her loose, Susan. Listen, can’t you put her over in the Hardee County shelter with her little sister? That is, when we find her.”

  “Are you kidding?” The woman turned to him. “Buck, you’re not going to make me give up my Christmas vacation! Why, even if I could find somebody brave enough to take in a couple of Scraggses over the holidays—which is highly unlikely—there’s the prospect that Devil Anse would be coming to town to claim them. Ugh! Why do I keep thinking in terms of armed attack, siege, home invasion, ambush—”

  “Don’t be melodramatic, Susan,” the sheriff said coldly. “It’s not called for.”

  “Melodramatic?” The social worker put her hands on her hips and faced him. “Look, I didn’t volunteer for this. You called me, remember?”

  Scarlett was thinking the woman was right. At any minute now Devil Anse would find out that his granddaughters were missing. And so was his money.

  She took a deep breath. She was never going back, neither was Farrie. That’s what she’d promised.

  “I’m not going to miss my meeting in Atlanta,” the woman was saying firmly. “And this girl isn’t in my jurisdiction, anyway. Frankly, I was glad to get Scarlett O’Hara off my hands when she left high school. Buck, just do what your dad always did.”

  “Don’t drag my father into this,” the sheriff growled, “I know how you feel about him, Susan.”

  “I wasn’t dragging your father into anything! Besides, I know your mother wouldn’t object.”

  The sheriff’s jaw tightened. “You don’t have to criticize my mother, either.”

  She stared at him. “Look, Buck, I know the Scraggses are not the most rewarding project to get involved in here at Christmas. I’ve chased them from one end of the county to the other and they’re hopeless. The men won’t let the women and children have any contact with strangers, they’re too afraid the government will find their stolen-car chop shops and the rest of the rackets they’re into up there in the hills, and prosecute them.” A little pleadingly, she touched him on the sleeve. “I’ve paid good money to attend my meeting and have my holiday, Buck, don’t ask me to give it up. Anyway, the county doesn’t have the money to put the Scraggs girls up in a motel, much less pay a matron to supervise them. And you can’t leave them alone. I don’t see that you have any other choice.”

  The sheriff looked like a thundercloud. The last thing he wanted for Christmas was Devil Anse’s granddaughters. “Dammit, Susan, if it comes to that, I’d pay their motel bill myself!”

  She suddenly looked at her wristwatch. “Good heavens,” she exclaimed, “I haven’t got time for this! It’s a good thing I’m all packed and my bags are in my car outside.”

  She started toward Scarlett, the sheriff following. “Susan,” he was saying, “why don’t we leave her here in the cell block and see how things work out?”

  “You can’t do that. Scarlett’s not a criminal. And as a Scraggs, she’s got enough against her as it is. Scarlett,” she said, “do you understand what we’ve been talking about? When your sister is found the sheriff can’t keep her in jail. And we don’t want to send you back to your grandfather without a court hearing. Sheriff Grissom agrees with me that we need to move you out of here.”

  “Now just a minute,” the sheriff said, “I didn’t say—”

  “Scarlett O’Hara,” the woman went on, “Sheriff Grissom has very kindly offered to take you home with him.”

  Three

  A GUST OF WIND SWEPT INTO NANCYVILLE from the heights of Makim’s Mountain, making the tinsel garland on Main Street whirl in the winter light. The same blast swept across the windshield of the Blazer with enough sleet to blot out Sheriff Buck’s vision. Muttering under his breath, he switched on the wipers, then turned the heater to Defrost.

  Beside him the Scraggs girl was still clawing at the Blazer’s locked door. It had taken a good bit of Buck’s strength and all of Susan Huddleston’s guile to get her into the county police vehicle, and once inside Scarlett had been sure she’d been tricked, that she was under arrest and on her way to the state pen. Screaming, she’d attacked the inside of the Blazer in a fury. She was still at it.

  “You gotta let me out of here, I ain’t done anything!” She pounded the door handles and window glass with both fists. “I mean it, you gotta let me out! I gotta go look for my little sister!”

  “Stop that!” The screaming in the close confines of the Blazer was fraying Buck’s temper; he was used to more orderly prisoners. Except, he reminded himself, Scarlett Scraggs wasn’t exactly a prisoner. “Sit down,” he ordered. “And act decent!”

  As he said it, Buck realized that “decent” wasn’t a word that one could use to command the Scraggses. Unless he was mistaken, Scarlett’s mother was the Scraggs who’d left Devil Anse’s youngest son to run away with a country and western guitar player from Nashville. It was unlikely that Elvis Presley, Farrah Fawcett, or Scarlett herself had been exposed to any sort of stable home life.

  For the second time that afternoon Buck experienced an unsettling nervous cramp in his stomach. His mother—whatever her past experiences with his father’s Christmas strays and vagrants from the county jail—had never coped with a true Scraggs. Bringing this half-wild creature home, not to mention the other sister when she showed up, filled Buck with foreboding. And he was not used to feeling that way. Not since Susan Huddleston announced she was calling off their engagement.

  That, he told himself sourly, was another thing.

  He still couldn’t fathom how his ex-fiancée could make him feel so guilty, when the damned engagement was over and done with a long time ago. He should have put the Scraggses up in a motel. They could have found some way around regulations.

  The girl beside him had stopped banging on the door. Now she slumped in her seat, substituting the earsplitting howls for subdued, but just as nerve-racking moaning. Buck glanced at her. Her head was bent, her face hidden by a mop of hair that fell forward.

  “Farrie’s out there, in all that snow and cold.” A gulping sound that might have been a sob broke from her. “And you’re gonna take me someplace”—she turned, the gypsy eyes gleaming at him balefully—”to do whatever it is you think you’re gonna do to me!”

  “What I’m going to do to you?” Buck stepped on the brakes in surprise. The Blazer bucked in protest, then skidded sideways on the sleety road. Scarlett Scraggs clutched the dashboard and screamed.

  Buck snarled something under his breath.

  “There, you cussed,” she screeched. “I heard what you just said!”

  At that moment the county dispatcher called on the police radio. “Sheriff, your mother’s been trying to get you.”

  “Even I know a sheriff,” the Scraggs female was screaming, “ain’t supposed to cuss like that!”

  “Dammit,” he barked, “will you shut up?”

  “Sheriff, I’m only trying to do my job,” the voice of the dispatcher said.

  “Not you, George.” Buck had tried to get his mother on the telephone before he left the jail, but the line at home had been persistently busy. “Listen,” he said into the radio, “if my mother calls back—”

  “You got no right to talk to me like that!” Scarlett Scraggs maintained at the top of her lungs. “I want to know where you’re taking me!”

  “Sheriff?” The dispatcher’s tone was cautious. “You got a—ah, prisoner with you?”

  Buck was aware how all this sounded; so, he was sure, did Scarlett Scraggs. “No prisoner, George. I’m taking care of some of Susan Huddleston’s confounded problems. If my mother calls again, tell her to use the cellular phone.”

  Buck was well aware that it had been a long time since his mother had put up any strays from the jail. That was something his dad had made a tradition when he was alive. Sheriff Buck Grissom,
Sr., had been a law unto himself in the Georgia hills.

  One year, Buck remembered, his dad had brought home a whole poverty-stricken family of migrant workers stranded on the highway when their old truck broke down. They’d had all seven of them for a week, straight through the New Year’s holiday. His mother had nearly gone crazy.

  His passenger was wrestling with the door handle again. “You’re taking me someplace where my little sister’ll never find me!” she wailed. “I’ll never see Farrie again!”

  “This is a county police vehicle,” he warned her, “the doors lock automatically. You won’t get that open no matter how hard you pound on it.”

  The Blazer turned into Main Street. Traffic was light in the bad weather, and Nancyville was not a big enough town for a real rush hour. In spite of the aluminum holiday messages strung across the thoroughfare, the central area was bleak. Just beyond the R&R Variety Store, the Valley Bank, and Nancyville Hardware was the red brick pile that had formerly been the town’s textile mill, closed since the 1970’s.

  The old mill was a reminder of all the jobs lost, all the people born and bred in the mountains who’d gone from Nancyville south to Atlanta and Birmingham or north to Chicago. The blighting presence of the mill was the reason the Nancyville Downtown Merchants’ Association needed the living manger scene at the courthouse to bring folks in to shop, so they wouldn’t go over to the giant mall on the interstate.

  “Listen,” Buck said, relenting a little, “I’ve got practically my entire force out on the road looking for your little sister. When they find her I’m going to turn both of you over to my mother, and she’ll look after you until Sus—until Miss Huddleston gets back.”

  Even as he spoke Buck realized Susan’s holiday would not be over until well after New Year’s. The prospect of being stuck through a full week of Christmas with any part of the Scraggs clan was something that rendered him almost numb.

  Scraggses all through Christmas.

  Unseeing, Buck turned off the windshield wipers. The sleet had stopped but the sky looked as though a storm was brewing up north in the Smokies. Bad weather was all the county police needed these last days before Christmas.

  This infernal mess was all Susan Huddleston’s fault, Buck thought, leaving town and abandoning her job to take a Christmas holiday! Now that they no longer had any plans for marriage, Susan obviously felt she could do as she pleased. What remained between them wasn’t the friendly, cooperative relationship Buck thought they’d agreed upon. On the contrary, Susan could be downright hostile and treacherous. Like she was this afternoon.

  Buck supposed that like most couples they had broken up with their share of hard words. Certainly they’d always fought over the day-and-night demands of her social-work job, and Susan still didn’t know how to cook a decent meal. She didn’t seem to have enough interest in it to want to learn how. Buck had made it plain he was damned if he was going to settle for a life of microwave dinners.

  Susan’s reply, which in his opinion wasn’t really any sort of reply, was that if he felt that way he could learn to cook himself. “Rigid,” was the word she’d flung at him. And “pompous.” And “father-dominated.”

  That last really irritated him. How could “father-dominated” apply to somebody whose father was already dead?

  Buck reached out for the cellular phone on the dashboard. When he tried home he got the same busy signal. Scarlett Scraggs sat hunched in the corner, watching him as he turned the Blazer into Magnolia Street and the extension that climbed Makim’s Mountain. She sniffled from time to time, wiping her eyes sullenly with the back of her hand. Finally the Blazer bumped into the driveway and the house came into sight. The girl beside him promptly lunged forward in the seat, eyes wide. “Is that your house? All that?”

  Buck made an affirmative noise. The Grissom house sat on the side of the mountain overlooking Nancyville Valley. It had been a trapper’s log cabin when the first Blankenships migrated to Georgia from Virginia in the early eighteen hundreds and decided to build on the slope for the view.

  In the next generation, when most of the valley’s Cherokee landowners had been driven out and their land confiscated, the Blankenships had prospered. By the end of a decade Blankenships owned the whole valley and founded the town of Nancyville, naming it after the second Thomas Blankenship’s bride.

  By the time of the Civil War, wealthy Blankenships added an upper story and four white Greek Revival columns to their mansion. These were torn down a few years later to make way for a renovation in the grand Victorian Gothic style, with a turret tower, two ornamental balconies, jigsaw work all around, and a huge front porch. In the 1950’s the last remaining Blankenship sold the cotton mill to northern investors and moved to Los Angeles. When Buck’s father bought the place the farmland it once stood on was gone, the downstairs rooms were being used for hay storage, and the roof had fallen in. It had taken years to restore it.

  Buck’s mother, slim as a girl in a red suit and matching coat, was standing in the middle of the driveway, several suitcases around her. Buck felt another ominous pang in the bottom of his stomach.

  He cut the Blazer’s engine and got out. “Mother, what the devil?”

  “Oh, thank goodness, there you are. I’ve been trying to get you on the telephone for over an hour, but nobody seemed to be able to find you. Never mind.” Alicia Blankenship Grissom tugged at her shoulder-strap handbag to pull it around to her front. “I think I’m all together. Have I got my credit cards? Yes, I have, here they are. The airline said I could pick up my tickets in Gainesville. Good heavens, I had no idea how expensive it was, buying a ticket at the last minute!”

  She lifted her head to look past Buck to the Blazer. “Who’s that, darling? Have you got a prisoner?”

  “Yes. No. Mother,” Buck said hurriedly, “you’re not going anywhere. You can’t.”

  “When I couldn’t get you on the telephone,” his mother said, snapping shut her purse, “I called Camilla Farnsworth, and she’s going to drive me down to Gainesville. So it’s all right, dear. You won’t have to leave work to take me.”

  Buck had been listening impatiently. “Mother, look at me, will you? Remember how Dad used to bring people home from the jail at Christmastime?”

  “Willie, darling,” his mother interrupted, “don’t start on anything right now, I have a plane to catch.”

  He couldn’t believe his mother thought she was taking a plane. “Mother, I’ve brought this—” Buck turned to look at the Blazer and Scarlett O’Hara Scraggs making contorted faces behind the windshield. “I’ve brought you a gi—a young woman—home for Christmas.” Buck couldn’t bring himself to say “one of Devil Anse’s granddaughters.” “Actually, Susan Huddleston, the social worker—”

  “Yes, darling,” his mother said, lifting one of her suitcases, “I remember. You used to be engaged to her.”

  “Well, she’s going out of town on a holiday, of all the imbecilic ideas, and I have this Christmas vagrant I have to place. Susan—uh, regulations say I can’t keep her in jail.” He ran his fingers through his hair. His mother didn’t appear to be listening. “Actually, there are two of them. Sisters.”

  His mother had walked a few steps with her nylon suit bag and pressed it into his hand. “Sweetheart, I really haven’t got time to listen.” The wind ruffled her shoulder-length hair, making her look even younger and prettier. “Willie, your sister’s poor husband is in the hospital with a broken leg and possible skull fracture, and Sheila’s half out of her mind. Christmas is coming, the children are out of school, and goodness only knows how they’re going to manage with Sheila in the hospital looking after James. Camilla is coming—oh, there’s her car now.” His mother started down the driveway. “Get the other bag, too, will you, dear?”

  Buck trailed after his mother carrying her luggage. His mind wasn’t working. Apparently his sister had just had a terrible accident.

  “Mother, how did it happen?” Camilla Farnsworth’s Buick pulled up be
hind the Blazer. “Is Sheila all right?”

  “James has the skull fracture, dear,” his mother said gently. “At least it might be a skull fracture, they don’t know yet. Sheila’s the one who needs me. Just put my bags in the trunk, will you?”

  Camilla Farnsworth handed her trunk key to Buck. “Hi, Sheriff.” Her smile faded as her eyes found the Blazer. “Good grief! Is that one of your prisoners?”

  Buck stared at his mother’s friend. “Camilla, you can’t take my mother anywhere right now,” he said, desperate. “The county caseworker’s gone out of town and I have this possible vagrancy-and-assault I have to place, and her sister, too, if she shows up. I need Mother to take care of them.”

  Camilla took the travel bag out of his hand and put it in the trunk. “Just like your dad used to do, Junior? It figures.”

  He didn’t like the way that sounded. “Mother never minded doing it,” he said stiffly. “Besides, I can’t keep them in the jail, the younger sister is a juvenile.” He remembered Scarlett’s insinuations at the top of her lungs. “And it wouldn’t look right for me to be out here in the house all alone with them.”

  His mother came up behind them. “Oh Willie, you’ll manage, you always do. Don’t worry so much. If they’re sisters they can chaperone each other. Camilla’s invited you for Christmas dinner and you can take your prisoners with you.”

  Camilla grimaced. “Just promise me they haven’t done anything terrible. All the Farnsworths are coming, and serial killers would really shake them up.”

  “Very funny, Camilla.” Buck followed them to the front of the car. “They’re not prisoners. You haven’t given me a chance to explain.”

  His mother turned to kiss him good-bye. “Darling, don’t fuss. The freezer is full of microwave dinners and there’s plenty of beer in the refrigerator. I didn’t quite get the tree trimmed, I’m afraid there are boxes all over the living room, but I put your presents out where you can find them. Don’t forget to call me Christmas morning. Sheila’s number is—”