He sputtered. “You think you’re very funny, don’t you, Mayor Walker?”
I fanned myself with the antique letter and batted my eyelashes. “Why, yes. How kind of you to notice.”
“I intended to build a wholesome theme park in your godforsaken part of the county. Whoopee Arcades, Incorporated is dedicated to promoting quality development, to helping the unfortunate underprivileged—”
“Dedicated to making a buck, you mean. Dedicated to bulldozing the foothills of a pristine mountain to build a crappy amusement park. Dedicated to replacing a historic tree with a parking lot.”
Ham held up both hands. “I have to insist that you not slander the reverend this way. He is my cousin’s husband, after all. And a faithful supporter of mine.”
“Yes, Ham, I know you hate it when one of your campaign donors steps in a big pile of Bigelow nepotism and cronyism. It continually amazes me that you and I came out of the same gene pool. Somebody should have added more chlorine to the Bigelow end.” I swiveled my attention back to the reverend. “It doesn’t help when Bigelow women marry despotic little scam artists like you. If they keep this up we’ll have to drain the whole gene pool and scrub its walls.”
The reverend turned more colors of red than a Russian May Day celebration. “You’re nothing but a . . . tree-hugging heathen! The Lord won’t fail to notice your attack on me! And He won’t fail to notice that you value the fate of an old tree over a family-friendly entertainment for our precious children, who are desperate for clean-spirited fun in this age of debauchery and Britney Spears! Jesus wants that amusement park built!”
“What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do?” I poked a fingertip at a pendant swinging from a gold chain on the reverend’s chest. W. W. J. D. was set in tiny diamonds. “Well, for one thing, I doubt He’d dress like a plus-sized L.L. Bean model and spend his time lying to little old ladies so he could buy more diamond trinkets.”
“I prayed with your cousin Amarosa! I helped her understand that God wanted her to sell that land to my amusement park company!”
“Prayed with her? Don’t you mean preyed on her?”
“Jezebel!” He shoved me.
You can call me a Jezebel all you like, but nobody shoves me.
So I punched him. Right in the mouth. Proof that Judge Blakely’s anger management course didn’t take.
After that, things got a little chaotic. Reverend James staggered around clutching his bloody lips and shrieking like a Girl Scout who’s just had her cookies crushed. Ham yelled at me in between trying to herd the wobbly reverend toward a chair and bellowing at his speaker phone for help. Several state troopers burst into the office.
“Reverend James tripped over his Jesus jewelry,” I deadpanned. “Jesus didn’t intend for obnoxious little men to wear a lot of diamond bling around their necks.”
“She talks like a rap singer on MTV!” the reverend squealed, flopping against a wall full of Ham’s glorious photos with other politicians. Ham and the President did a belly flop into a wicker trash can.
“Get the President out of the garbage!” Ham yelled at the state troopers.
They headed to the rescue, but that’s when Regal Von Doggin raced into the office, still being chased by Bob. Regal ran between the reverend’s feet, completing Whoopee Arcade’s new attraction, the Whirl-And-Crash Preacher Ride. The reverend fell on the trash can. Ham and the President parted ways with a crunch of tempered photo glass and polished teak frame.
“Not the President!” Ham moaned.
“Regal!” Gloria screamed, joining the fray.
“Bob!” Ingrid bellowed, right behind her.
I stood there smiling in amazement. In all the punking in all the world, this punking had to be the best, ever. I had outdone myself.
“Time to go, Mayor,” a deep, familiar male voice said behind me. My smile froze. I whirled around.
“Oh, no.” That was all I managed to say, unless you count, “Oooph,” which is the noise I made as a result of being bodily lifted and tossed over a broad male shoulder.
Amos Royden’s broad, male shoulder.
I hung upside down, cushioned by Amos’s brown leather jacket, with a bird’s eye view of Amos’s lean, handsome, khaki-clad, no-nonsense butt. He headed for the door. Like a good heroine fighting a kidnapper in your average 1930s Western, I fluttered my feet, then balled up a fist and began thumping Amos’s thoracic vertebrae. “I’m ordering you to put me down. I’m your boss. I’m the mayor, and you’re giving me vertigo . . .”
“It’s mutual,” he answered, and toted me out.
DISGUSTED AND GRIM, not to mention under arrest, I sat in the back of Amos’s patrol car with my arms crossed over my chest. Ingrid and Hope gaped at us from the sidewalk in front of the governor’s mansion. Amos shut my door and locked it, then leaned down and gazed calmly at me through the open window. “Comfortable?”
“I don’t need to be rescued.”
“This isn’t a rescue. I made a deal with the state troopers and the GBI. If I cart you away, they won’t charge you with trespassing and assault.”
“Fine. But look down at the front gate. That’s an Action News satellite van. I told them there’d probably be fireworks during my visit to Ham. You can’t haul me back to Mossy Creek without letting me fulfill my obligation to the media. All I’m asking for is five minutes in front of a camera. I’m going to show them the Sitting Tree letter. And my bloody knuckles.”
“Not today, Mayor.”
“I’m ordering you—”
“I’m all that’s standing between you and a night in the Atlanta jail. Trust me, you don’t want to go there. They don’t have curtains on the windows like we do.”
“Drop me off. I can take a night with no curtains.”
“Ida, the subject is closed.”
I gave him a stare that could flash-freeze a side of beef in July. He didn’t even break out in frost. He just smiled and headed around the car to the driver’s side. I cupped my hand around my mouth and called to Ingrid and Hope. “All right, Ingrid, you ride with Amos and me. Hope, you take my car.”
They looked from me to Amos, feigning uncertainty. Ingrid cradled Bob in her arms and murmured soothing sounds at him. Hope gazed at the blue winter sky. “Hey,” I called louder. “Are you women, or are you wussies?”
Amos slid into the driver’s seat and swiveled to look back at me. “You think we need a chaperone? I’m flattered.”
A lot of complex and disturbing thoughts ran through my mind. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Dammit. I just sat there, frowning at him. And he simply stared back, his cocky smile slowly fading to something more serious. Ingrid and Hope wandered closer and gaped at us. Then Ingrid gave up all subtlety and hooted. So did Hope.
“You take her straight home, Amos,” Ingrid said primly. “Put her under house arrest. Don’t leave until you’ve tucked her into bed. She’s dangerous.”
“Yep,” Hope added cheerfully. “You might want to handcuff her to her bedpost.”
Amos faced forward then, oh, yes. He scowled at my partners in crime then pretended to organize his car keys. I could almost picture his muscles contracting to suppress a blush. I’ve never seen him blush. But he does a lot of contracting and suppressing. So do I. He hit a button, and my window began to rise.
I glared at the still-giggling Hope and Ingrid. “Traitors,” I called over the edge of the window. I raised my bruised fist, knuckles forward. Slowly, wincing, I lifted a finger at them.
The middle one.
Mossy Creek Gazette
Volume V, No. 4 • Mossy Creek, Georgia
Public Notice
I Declare My House a Public Disaster Area
I, Louise Sawyer, do hereby officially announce that my aged house, until recently the historic hovel of my late aunt, Catherin
e, is a public (and private) menace. It confounds contractors. It eats decorators. It invites unwelcome visitors of the wild, four-legged variety. And now, as proof of its evil intentions, the house has personally attacked both me and my husband, Charlie.
I urge you, neighbors and fellow Creekites, to keep your distance! Stay safely on the sidewalk, no matter how sweetly the house whispers to you. Don’t be lured by nostalgic memories of its nicer days. Trust me, the house can’t be trusted. From its rotten floorboards to its crusty ceilings, it has turned bad.
Mossy Creek Gazette
Volume V, No. 5 • Mossy Creek, Georgia
The Bell Ringer
I Quilt, Therefore I Am
by Katie Bell
Yes, I’m obsessing about the estate sale and the quilt I lost to Patty Campbell. Nothing brings out the best, or the beast, in a Southern woman like a patchwork quilt. Heirloom “Wedding Rings” and “Log Cabins” and “Grandmother’s Flower Gardens” have been the cause of more Southern feuds than the Hatfields and McCoys combined. Long before Martha Stewart told us how to turn ordinary home decorating into an art, legions of Southern women—from all races, creeds, classes and places of Southern origin—have turned scraps, rags, and old flour sacks into quilted masterpieces.
It’s something about the tedious thrill of it all. You sit, and you cut out tiny pieces of fabric, and you piece those tiny pieces together, and you stitch. Tiny stitches. Perfection, thy name is stitchery. Quilters know that one hundred years from now some stranger will look at their work and go, “How did she ever make such tiny, perfect stitches by hand?” Now that, friends, is the secret to eternal life. Your stitches live on.
Quilters know that. And they know this, too: Quilts talk. Quilts remember.
They remind you that your mother once wore a gingham apron with a poodle embroidered on it. They bookmark the day you took your granddaughters to a fabric store for the first time. They whisper your memories back to you, held in bits of cloth.
My husband looked so young and handsome in this plaid shirt.
I wore this satin dress to my son’s graduation party.
My grandmother saved this handkerchief from her mother’s college trunk.
To quilters, and to women who aren’t quilters but love quilts just the same, an heirloom quilt isn’t a thing, it’s a being. A cotton soul full of history. Look at a quilt, and you see your great grandmother’s hands at work.
Touch the stitches and hear the voices of your ancestors as they sewed by lamplight. Pull the quilt around your shoulders, and you’ll stay safe inside your family’s heart. It has warmed your ancestors just as it warms you, now. Touch the quilt, and you touch them.
See how just talking about quilts makes me get poetic and philosophical? But let’s get back to grim reality, here.
Don’t mess with a Southern woman’s quilt. She’ll come after you with her pinking shears. She’ll hurt you. Bad.
Just ask Addie Lou Hamilton Womack and her sister, Inez.
Chapter 9
Solomon never had to decide who gets Mama’s heirloom quilt.
Sandy Is Caught Up In An Alteration
I’M JUST GOING TO have to get me one of those portable sirens for Jess’s old Ford pickup—the ones they used to use in Starsky & Hutch. Trying to get to a burglary in progress in a vehicle that will barely crack fifty miles per hour just won’t cut it. Maybe one day Amos’ll let me have my own cruiser.
Like I kept telling everyone, Amos was down in Atlanta for the afternoon. I wasn’t telling anybody why he’d gone to Atlanta, or who’d tipped him off about Ida’s scheme to confront the governor. Let’s just say I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday, and I have my sources.
It was a crazy Saturday all around, what with that escapade at Orville Gene’s place, Amos going after Ida, Miss Irene running amuck on her scooter, Pearl and Spiva at war over some brownies, the Sawyers at war with toilets and raccoons—I didn’t need any more calls to answer. Neither did Mutt. He’d taken this one not ten minutes ago, when I was on another line. He looked serious at first, but then he started squinching up his face, which started turning all shades of purple and red. Since he’d spent most of the past two hours laughing himself sick over Charlie Sawyer’s predicament, I thought I was fixing to have to do CPR on my own brother. (I trained for that with the paramedics and got the highest score in the state that month on the written part.)
Anyway, it turned out he was trying real hard not to laugh anymore. I finally figured that out when he started making little snorting sounds, like a pig at a trough. He covered the receiver and hissed, “Miss Addie Lou Womack says her big sister Inez has busted into her house to steal a quilt. She says she’s holding her until we get there—at cane point.” He did bust out laughing, then, and it sounded like a jackass braying. It is no wonder that Sugar Jean Milford keeps stalling every time he asks her to marry him.
Personally, I don’t think burglary is any laughing matter. Especially when somebody’s accusing their own flesh and blood of doing the burgling. I doubted that Miss Addie Lou would run Miss Inez through with the cane, but you can’t ever be too careful. Family feuds could be tricky. Goodness knows nobody understands that better than us Creekites. You know what I’m talking about.
Besides, not only was this a burglary, it was also a domestic matter, what with Miss Addie Lou and Miss Inez being sisters and all. Everybody knows that a domestic call can be one of the most dangerous an officer of the law has to make. I wondered if Miss Addie Lou was using her everyday adjustable aluminum cane or her Sunday-go-to-meeting polished wood cane.
Another complication was that Miss Inez’s granddaughter, Lucy Belle, (distant kin to Katie Bell,) was a friend of mine. She’s a few years older than me. In fact she used to babysit me and Mutt and Boo summers from the time we were ankle-biters until we graduated to yard apes. She used to pull us into town for ice cream in a Radio Flyer and tell us stories. I owed it to Lucy Belle to make sure Miss Inez and Miss Addie Lou (Lucy Belle’s great aunt, of course) didn’t assault and batter each other too awful bad before Lucy Belle could get there to referee.
Being a referee was something that Lucy Belle had gotten good at over the years. Why, she could be the zebra at the girls’ basketball games if she wanted to, I expect. That grandmother of hers—Miss Inez—is what we call a sight, a mess, a caution. Take your pick. She came from a long line of formidable women, which included her and Miss Addie Lou’s first cousin, Big Ida Hamilton, the grandma and namesake of our mayor, Ida Hamilton Walker. And she loved to fuss with people, just for the fun of it, I reckon. It kept Lucy Belle on her toes just trying to keep her out of trouble.
Sometimes she isn’t as successful at keeping her grandmother out of trouble as she’d like to be. And sometimes she mires up in it neck-deep, herself. There was that incident back in the summer at Ham Bigelow’s political fundraising event that like to have got the both of them arrested—or at least wrestled to the ground—by Ham’s state patrol bodyguards.
But as I understand it, Ham’s mother’s silk suit was saved and she never could prove who stole those rare chili peppers anyway. And the Shih Tzu recovered too, physically, at least, if not his pride, which was pretty much shot to hell to begin with on account of Ham’s mother naming him Pierre and having his toenails painted. But that’s a whole ‘nother story. And don’t even get me started on what happened to that Bigelow Mercedes with the trunk full of fireworks. Lord have mercy.
I CALLED LUCY BELLE on my cell phone as I was peeling out of the parking lot at the police station. “Lucy Belle,” I’d said, “You better get over to your Aunt Addie Lou’s. Her and Miss Inez are mixing it up.”
I can’t rightly tell you what Lucy Belle said. But I can tell you that if she’d said it on the street I’d have had to arrest her for public indecency, old friend or not. I’m sure there must be a law against such language
in public. If there’s not, there ought to be. She thanked me, told me she’d meet me there and hung up.
Lucy Belle and Inez’s chow-chow business had taken off so well that Lucy Belle had been able to quit her job as a computer programmer and help her grandmother run the business full time. In fact, she lived with Miss Inez a few blocks from Miss Addie Lou’s.
Lucy Belle never really liked her computer job that much anyway. Her manager—a man—had just passed her over for a promotion, giving the job instead to an individual—another man—who was very nice but had only a fraction of Lucy Belle’s experience. Lucy Belle knew this because she had trained him herself.
When Lucy Belle finished the business plan for the chow-chow operation and figured out that she could make a living working in her grandma’s kitchen, she walked into her manager’s office, told him that not only did he not know anything about computers, but she was quite sure he didn’t even suspect anything. She further told him that not only could he not “manage” computer programmers, but that he also could not “manage” to find his own behind with both hands, a road map, and a flashlight.
I must say I was right proud of her. And I will tell you straight out, if you do not want to hear the truth of a thing, do not ask Lucy Belle.
When I pulled up in front of Miss Addie Lou’s house, Lucy Belle was just crossing the yard toward the front door at a dead run. She was wearing a faded cotton apron spackled with what looked like chow-chow stains over jeans and a tee shirt. Even though it was cold, she hadn’t even taken time to grab a sweater on her way out. She paused right outside the door to get her breath and to let me catch up with her.
“I don’t know what’s got into her this time,” Lucy Belle said. “She told me she was going to take a nap and waddled off toward her bedroom. She must have snuck out the back door when I wasn’t looking. That old woman can walk as quiet as an Indian scout when she’s up to something. I should have known something wasn’t right because she always manages to stay awake for her stories.”
A Day in Mossy Creek Page 13
