Last Chance Beauty Queen

by Hope Ramsay

  Rocky leaned down and gave Haley a kiss. “Just like we practiced last night.”

  “I got it, Aunt Rocky. I won’t mess up. The angel is happy today. Did you know that? She likes your dress.”

  “I’m glad. I like my dress, too.”

  Daddy entered the room then, dressed in a rented suit and looking pretty dapper, despite his earring and long braid. Rocky took his arm and let him give her away. He’d been sentenced to some community service because Lillian refused to back down. He’d helped her rebuild her garden.

  Doc Cooper said all his tests came back negative, and as near as anyone could tell, Daddy was the same as he’d always been. But Caroline wondered. She’d had a strange, fuzzy moment, and so had Daddy.

  Maybe they’d been touched by an angel. Or maybe they both had lost their tempers beyond all reason.

  Either explanation worked.

  Daddy took her arm and led her down the aisle to her groom. She loved the moment when she took that first step, and everyone in the congregation stood up in shocked silence. They had all expected her to wear white. They had expected something like the pageantry of William and Kate’s wedding.

  But this was Last Chance, South Carolina, not merry old England.

  So she’d worn the dress that defined her. Pink and green with yards and yards of tulle. They said she had been the prettiest Watermelon Queen who had ever reigned. And it just seemed appropriate that she should wear it, along with her rhinestone tiara, especially since she was marrying an English lord.

  And by the look in everyone’s eyes that morning, especially Hugh’s, Rocky knew she’d made the right choice.

  She said her vows. Hugh spoke his.

  And they sealed the union of the Watermelon Queen and the English baron with a kiss that the old church ladies of Last Chance would probably gossip about for the next twenty years.

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  Discussion Questions for

  Last Chance Beauty Queen

  Rocky’s character has been shaped by the fact that Bubba Lockheart humiliated her when she was eighteen. What are some of the ways Rocky deals with that humiliation? Which ones are positive and help her to grow as a person? Which ones are destructive? Have you ever suffered a public humiliation? How did you handle it? How did it affect you?

  In the scene where Rocky and Hugh are sitting together in church, the minister is giving a sermon based on Mark 12: 38–41, the story where Jesus tells his disciples to beware of the scribes who go in long clothing and make a pretense of prayer. The minister’s message in this sermon is that God can see through the pretense that we sometimes hide behind. How does this sermon affect Rocky’s view of herself? How do you think Hugh was affected by this sermon? Talk about how this passage relates to the love story between Rocky and Hugh.

  Hugh worries that he can’t be a success because he’s too kindhearted. Do you think that kindhearted people are doomed to business failure? Can you think of a kindhearted person who has managed to be successful in his business dealings?

  Rocky loves her town, but she’s afraid to admit just how much. Discuss how Rocky’s assignment to assist Hugh with his factory helps her to more fully appreciate the town where she grew up.

  As a young woman, Rocky found a mentor in Sharon Rhodes, her sister-in-law. Discuss how Sharon’s advice was helpful to Rocky. Discuss how Sharon’s advice was potentially hurtful. Have you had a mentor? How did he or she change your life?

  The book discusses how small communities make up myths. Besides the myth of Stone and Sharon, what other myths have the people of Last Chance developed through the retelling of community stories? How do these myths and stories form a collective culture for Last Chance? Why do you think it’s so hard for people to live up to these expectations? Is this tendency for communities to make myths a good thing or a bad thing? Do you think this is limited to small towns?

  Haley faces a serious dilemma with her angel. The Sorrowful Angel is misbehaving, and Haley is being blamed for her actions. In Haley’s mind, she’s innocent. The rest of the world sees it a different way. Have you ever been out of step with the rest of the world? How does it feel? How did you cope? Did you feel crazy?

  Have you ever been blamed for something you didn’t do, as Haley is? Have you ever had to confess to something you didn’t do in order to avoid punishment or in order to protect someone from being punished? Do you think it’s okay to lie in a situation like that? Or should you always be honest, even if you’ll be blamed for something you didn’t do?

  How are Rocky’s shoes a metaphor for the things that hold her back from being the person she really is and the person that Hugh will come to love. Contrast Rocky’s lost, broken, and discarded shoes with Cinderella’s lost slipper. How are Cinderella and Rocky the same? How are they different? Hugh prefers Rocky barefoot. How does that make him different from Prince Charming, who goes on a quest to find someone to fit an impossibly small shoe?

  Teaser Opener TK

  Jesus looked like he’d been hit by a Mack Truck. The statue of the Son of God lay on its side, its fiberglass infrastructure torn and ragged. Scattered on the gravel beside the bleaching carcass were the remnants of a sign that read “Golfing for God.”

  Well, I guess that’s it. Lark Chaikin hugged her elbows and tried to keep warm against the December gust that blew her bangs into her eyes. Wasn’t it supposed to be warm this time of year in South Carolina?

  Apparently not.

  She looked up at the tops of the pine trees, swaying in the wind. She shivered.

  She had to be crazy to have driven all the way from New York on this fool’s errand. Roadside America was littered with the corpses of mini-golf courses, their windmills suspended in time, their giant Paul Bunyons toppled. It only stood to reason that Golfing for God would have gone the way of all the fiberglass dinosaurs.

  Pop should have checked before he made his last request. But of course, Pop had been sick for a long time, and in the last few days, it was almost as if he’d come back to this place in his mind.

  Lark turned back toward her late father’s SUV, a giant silver thing that drove like an ocean liner and guzzled gas like one, too. She opened the back door and stared down at the cardboard box containing Pop’s ashes. The box was eight inches square with the words “Chaikin, Leon” scrawled across its top.

  She pressed a couple of fingers against the ache in her forehead that had been growing all day. “Why’d you make a big megillah bout being buried here in the middle of nowhere on a closed-up mini-golf course?” She couldn’t go on. Her throat closed up, and tears threatened her eyes. She swallowed back the grief that was too new and too raw to be endured or expressed. Pop had left her alone only two days ago.

  Lark leaned on the tailgate, her gaze shifting from the box to the canvas camera bag sitting beside it. Her fingers itched to pick up the Nikon, maybe shoot a few photos of the broken statute. She might be able to capture the Picasso-like perspective of its smashed face. Maybe shooting a few photos would help her get her balance back.

  But she couldn’t find the courage to pick up the camera. She slammed the tailgate and turned toward a gravel path clearly posted with No Trespassing signs.

  Something violent had damaged the stand of pines growing on the right side of the path. The trees looked as if they had been blasted by napalm at some point. A wave of nausea gripped her. Oh boy, she was losing it. The last photo assignment in Somalia had done her in.

  Her feet crunched on the gravel, and the wind in the pines sounded like the rattling of dry bones. Lark searched the darkening sky. Clouds, heavy with rain, scudded across her view, and a lone hawk circled above, watching and waiting. Dizziness assailed her. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, or slept.

  She lowered her gaze. A medium-sized structure resembling Noah’s Ark loomed ahead of her. Scaffolding had been set up around it, and it looked as if someone was giving it a fresh coat of paint. Still, for all that, the place seemed sad and worn and
abandoned. A few dead leaves swirled across the path driven by the wind.

  She turned right and made a circuit of the place, hole to hole, past Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, and David and Goliath. Most of the holes seemed in semigood repair, except for the Plague of Frogs. The fiberglass frogs were missing, their guts exposed to the elements. She remembered Pop talking about how the frogs used to spit water over the fairway. Now only mangled plumbing was left.

  She turned and walked past the mostly undamaged Jonah and the Whale, then cut through the Wise Men with their bobbing camels and Jesus walking on water, until she reached the eighteenth hole.

  She halfway expected this hole to be the much-laughed-about Tomb of Jesus. It would be just like Pop to want to have his ashes buried in the ersatz tomb of a Savior he didn’t believe in. She could see him laughing his ass off as people putted golf balls across his grave. After all, Pop had a murderous short game.

  But the eighteenth hole wasn’t a tomb.

  It was a celebration of the resurrection.

  Stonewall Rhodes, the chief of police for the incorporated city of Last Chance, South Carolina, drove his cruiser south on Palmetto Avenue, taking his second-to-last circuit of the day. It was nearly five o’clock, and the light was fading quickly into dusk. It would be dark by the time he drove out to the edge of town and back.

  He got about halfway to the Allenberg County line before he saw the silver Cadillac Escalade parked in the lot at Golfing for God. The New York tags caught his attention.

  Cars with New York plates didn’t come through this neck of the woods very often—unless the folks in them were lost tourists searching for the road to Hilton Head, or on a pilgrimage seeking out Golfing for God.

  At one time, Golfing for God had attracted a fair number of pilgrims. The place was listed on roadsideamerica.com and had made it into a couple of tour guides. But the place had been closed up for more than a year—ever since its propane tank had been struck by lightning.

  Of course, Hettie Marshall and the Committee to Resurrect Golfing for God had just hired a contractor to begin fixing the place up. They were aiming for a big reopening in the spring. In the meantime, though, the No Trespassing signs were designed to keep the pilgrims away.

  Stone pulled his cruiser into the golf course’s parking lot, the gravel crunching under its wheels. He eyeballed the Cadillac. It appeared to be unoccupied, but appearances could be deceiving. Before leaving his cruiser, he keyed the plate information into his in-car computer. An instant later, the Cadillac’s history came back to him. There were no outstanding warrants involving the vehicle, which was registered to one Leon Chaikin of Kings Point, New York.

  Stone stared at the name for a long moment as the little hairs on the back of his neck stood up on end.

  The past had come back to haunt him.

  He snagged his Stetson from the passenger seat and dropped it down on his head as he left the cruiser. He pulled his heavy-duty flashlight from his utility belt as he cautiously approached the vehicle. He shone the light through the driver’s side window and confirmed that the car was unoccupied.

  The SUV was a late model—clean and fully loaded, with a GPS system and satellite radio in the dashboard. A well-worn duffle bag in army green occupied the cargo area, loaded with what looked like expensive camera equipment. The SUV was locked.

  He turned away from the car and walked up the charred remains of the main walkway. He saw the woman as soon as he turned the corner by the first hole. She sat on the wooden bench at the feet of the resurrected Jesus on hole eighteen, with her head bowed as if deep in prayer. For a brief moment, it appeared as if the Savior’s hand moved outward toward the praying woman, as if He were trying to comfort her.

  A shiver inched down Stone’s spine, and he blinked a couple of times. Only then did he realize the deepening dusk had played a trick on him. A little sparrow sat in the hand of Jesus. It turned its head this way and that and gave the appearance of the statue’s hand in motion.

  The woman was as tiny as the bird, with short-cropped dark hair that spiked around her head. She wore jeans and a pea coat. A stiff wind might blow her away.

  She looked up, turning a pair of dark, hollow eyes in his direction. All the breath left his lungs as he found himself caught up in her stare. For an instant, he felt as if he might be looking at a ghost from some forgotten past. Her face was oddly gray in the fading light, the skin beneath her eyes smudged with the purple of exhaustion.

  She wasn’t beautiful, but her looks stopped him in his tracks. She looked hopelessly lost, like a small waif or street urchin.

  A hot, tight feeling slammed into his chest. The unexpected intensity of that feeling was tempered by the immediate clanging of alarm bells in his head. She was trouble.

  She had arrived in a car registered to Leon Chaikin, a man who had upset the balance of things in Last Chance more than forty years ago.

  Stone couldn’t shake the feeling that the woman was here for the same purpose. This tiny woman was going to rend the daily fabric of life in his town, and he couldn’t let that happen.

  She looked up at him, and he recognized his doom right there in her hollow eyes, just as he recognized something about her that he couldn’t even put words to. He had this odd feeling that he had known her for a long, long time.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “What part of ‘No Trespassing’ do you not understand? Golfing for God is not in business, and I’d be obliged if you would move on.”

  Lark gripped the edge of the bench and willed herself to stand up. It was difficult. The nausea and dizziness she had felt earlier had grown steadily worse.

  She turned her attention to the policeman. He sure didn’t look like the stereotype of a small town cop. He was big, well armed, and wore a bulletproof vest.

  “Ma’am, are you all right?” he asked.

  Well, no, she wasn’t all right. Pop was dead. She was feeling like crap. She was scared of her camera. And her editor wanted her on a plane to Africa so she could take more photos of starving kids.

  She focused on the cop’s face. She recognized the green eyes, dimpled chin, and meandering nose. Crap. She was hallucinating.

  “Carmine?” she asked. Her throat hurt.

  “Excuse me?” The cop went on alert. His shoulders stiffened, and his body coiled in that ready-for-action pose she’d seen in the Marines patrolling the streets of Baghdad. “Ma’am?”

  She blinked a couple of times, trying to clear her vision. He wasn’t Carmine, of course. If she were seeing Carmine now, at the age of thirty-four, she really was losing it. Carmine wasn’t real. He was a figment of her childhood imagination. He was long dead and buried, and he needed to stay that way.

  “I’m all right, really,” Lark said, coming to a decision. If Pop wanted to scatter his ashes here, who the hell was she to say it couldn’t be done. She needed to finish this chore and then go someplace warm for a couple of days where she could tackle her sudden fear of cameras.

  She cleared her dry throat. “I was wondering if you could tell me where I might find Zeke Rhodes. I need to speak with him about something.”

  “Ma’am, Zeke Rhodes has been dead for more than forty years. I would have expected you to know that.”

  “Oh,” Lark said as she fought another wave of dizziness and disappointment. “More than forty years? Really?”

  “Yes, ma’am. He died the day Leon Chaikin left town. There are folks who say old Zeke died of a heart attack, but there are equally as many who think he was murdered.”

  Her head throbbed, and her face went hot and then cold. The world spun around her. “Murdered?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Zeke died right where you’re standing right now.”

  She took a reflexive step forward as if to avoid the long-dead body of Zeke Rhodes. “Murdered by whom?”

  “Well, not everyone thinks he was murdered. There’s a big debate on that topic.”

  “But you think he was, don’t you?”

  The cop�
��s shoulders moved a little. “Maybe. It happened before I was born. Are you related to him?”

  “Him? Who?”

  “Leon Chaikin.”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m his daughter.” The world started tilting sideways.

  “Well, ma’am, Lee Marshall has always believed that your daddy murdered Zeke. That’s not the official story, of course. If it was the official story, I’m pretty sure the old sheriff would have issued a warrant for Leon Chaikin’s arrest back in 1968.”

  Lark’s stomach clutched and darkness crowded her vision right before she passed out.

  Also by Hope Ramsay

  Welcome to Last Chance

  Home at Last Chance

  FRONT SALES

  TK

  THE DISH

  TK

  Contents

  Front Cover Image

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  A Preview of LAST CHANCE CHIRSTMAS

  The Dish

  Also by Hope Ramsay

  Front Sales

  Copyright

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.