She nodded. “You’re doing the right thing. That’s all that matters.”
After a long, intense silence in which tearful looks were traded by all of us, Rob’s shoulders sagged. “I love you two as if you were my sister and brother,” he said quietly, looking at Hank and me. “You’re the most stubborn people I know.”
“That’s right,” Hank said and smiled sadly.
“I love you and Hank,” I told Rob with tears in my throat and sister settling hard in my stomach.
Rob Walker. How I loved him—and not as a brother. He was tall and dark-haired and handsome and noble. He dressed in gray suits only a banker or young businessman would wear. He looked like that actor, Dylan McDermott, on The Practice. Teresa even resembled Dylan’s wife on the show. Their daughter, Little Ida, was one of the prettiest, most level-headed girls in town. Rob had everything a Creekite could want. He was sophisticated, rich, kind, and perfect.
But I, Rainey Ann Cecil, of the “po’ but proud” Cecils, looked like Dolly Parton’s pink-jeaned, red-headed baby sister from a bad country-western song. Tacky Rainy Ann Cecil. And I had nothing I wanted.
Except my principles. I wouldn’t back down. Neither would Hank. Come November and reunion time, we’d spill the setting lotion of our permanent misery. Curl everyone’s hair with the facts about us, Rose the elephant, and the night that would live in blazing infamy, in Mossy Creek.
“We’re agreed, then,” I said. “November. All for one and one for all.”
Rob and Hank nodded.
A little while later Rob, Hank, Casey, Teresa and I walked out a dark lower door of the old department store, our footsteps muted and somber on the carefully tended bricks of a Mossy Creek sidewalk. I told everyone good night then wandered alone up an old alley toward my salon and the little apartment I lived in, above it. I felt like the only soul on the face of the earth.
Out of the summer darkness came a scratchy female drawl. “Hey, Rainey, were y’all just having a little social visit at Hamilton’s, tonight?”
I jumped. Sandy Crane loitered near the gas lamp on Main Street, looking little but official in her dispatcher’s shirt and A-line skirt. Her eyes narrowed shrewdly in the glowing light. She plucked at her curly blonde hair as if calculating how long before she could corner me in my own salon during her six-month body-wave job.
I puffed myself up. “Can’t a person visit with friends and take a walk without bein’ eyeballed? Especially by a woman who refuses my advice to use smoky smoke eye shadow color instead of that gunslinger silver. That silver washes out your whole inner lid crease.”
“My crease is just fine, thank you. I’m just here observin’. An officer of the law can’t let her guard down, not with such a big mystery in town this year and some folks acting secretive.”
My skin chilled. “Nothing secretive about a walk.” I breezed past her onto Main Street in a flash of pink jeans and knock-off Oscar de la Renta perfume. “Nighty nite, Sandy. Your hair’s looking real good with the new cut I gave you. See you soon for a trim?”
“Oh, yeah, I’ll be seein’ ya,” she said. “You know, I still do some house cleanin’ on the side from my duties as a law officer. You want me to spruce up your apartment for you? You know, it’s always good to come clean.” Soft, sly tone. Those shrewd Bambi eyes. She twirled a piece of her hair around one super-efficient little finger. It was like being stalked by a Cabbage Patch Doll with a badge.
“I like my dirt,” I said.
I hurried upstairs to my tiny apartment, locked my door, and sat in the dusty dark.
SANDY
SANDY
On The Trail
I knew something was going on with Rainey, Rob, and Hank—I just couldn’t put my finger on what, yet. Besides, I had bigger fish to fry in Mossy Creek. Somebody left a note on Jess’s and my doorstep the morning after I had my conversation with Rainey. “Hon,” my husband said as he carried the envelope inside, “either the raccoons have started writing thank-you’s for the seed they’re stealing from your bird feeder, or you have a secret pen pal.”
“Gimme that. It’s probably from my boyfriend,” I deadpanned, then gasped when I opened it. The envelope contained an anonymous computer print-out note. I read it five times, then rushed to the police station.
“I’ve been tipped off to a new clue, Chief,” I told Amos as I ran into his office. I bent over his desk and repeated that real loud. “I got some great clues about one part of the school mystery!”
He looked at me over a copy of the Gazette, like he usually did, trying to hide. “I operate on a need-to-know basis.”
“It’s about the elephant.”
He lowered the paper. There’s nothing like a twenty-year-old unsolved crime to get the attention of the son of the police chief who couldn’t solve it. Family pride and father-son competition would raise the hairs on the back of Amos’s neck every time.
“Tell me,” he ordered.
“I’ll tell you on the way. We’ve got to drive to Memphis, Tennessee. Right now, Chief. It’ll take all day.”
He studied me for a second, decided to risk not asking for more details, then stood. “Get my car.”
I grinned. “I’m on it, Chief.”
Then I was out the door.
* * * *
Memphis is a damp old city. Smells like rich dirt, barbecue, and the Mississippi River. Lots of fancy old buildings and fine old homes. Lots of good blues music. Lots of Elvis knicknacks.
And lots of elephant bones.
Lord have mercy, who’d have believed it? By late afternoon, Amos and I drove down a sandy lane through a pine thicket then stopped where the woods opened up into mowed pasture and the weirdest cemetery on the face of the Southern planet. I sat there beside him in the patrol car with my jaw hanging to my collar and just stared. So did Amos. We were only a mile inland from the river and only a few miles outside the Memphis suburbs, but we might as well have been in Strangeville, USA. If Elvis had stepped out of the woods, it wouldn’t have surprised me a bit. Stranger legends than the King’s had come to rest there.
“Big Top Memorial Garden,” I read from a circus billboard at an entrance which was just a pair of steel livestock gates. Kind of appropriate, I guess. Inside, in the “garden,” bizarre tombstones marked gravesites big enough to fit my truck. My jaw still hanging open, I wandered around with a throwaway camera in one hand and my eyeballs hanging out on stems of amazement.
Amos shoved his hands in the pockets of his khaki trousers and read the tombstones aloud in his driest ThankYouGladToBeHere tone of voice. “Bertha The Lioness, R.I.P. Hannibal The Camel, May He Hump It To The Pearly Gates. Twinkle The Tap-Prancing Pony, We Hope He’s Tap Prancing In A Three Ring Heaven.”
“Interesting poetry,” I said.
Amos looked at me as if I wasn’t serious. I shrugged.
We walked on, reading more tombstones. Chimpanzees and cheetahs. Ostriches, one water buffalo, and a boa constrictor. Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my. And every other kind of formerly performing, now decomposing, circus critter. We reached a white wooden archway and stood gaping up at the words Pachyderm Paradise, when an old man drove up in a rusty sedan and walked out to meet us.
“Chief Royden, Officer Crane?” he called.
Okay, I’d lied and told the caretaker I was a real law officer, not just a dispatcher. Amos eyed me for a second, and I puffed up like a little hen trying to look bigger to a snake.
He looked away and sighed. “Are you Mr. Thornton?”
“Yessir.”
“I’m a little stunned by what you have here.”
“Most people are, the first time they see this place.” He swept an arm at the grave makers. “We’ve got deceased performers from just about every circus and big carnival there ever was. It’s an honor to have an animal perfomer buried here at Big Top Memorial Garden. Why, just last week a theme park out on the west coast shipped the remains of Danny The Dolphin here.” He pointed to a backhoe sitting next to a big ope
n hole. “Services are next week.”
I just stood there praying Danny The Dolphin was on ice somewhere. A lot of ice. I held up my mysterious note. “Mr. Thornton, about this information I got . . .”
“She’s here.” He put a hand to his heart. “Follow me.”
Amos and I walked beside him into the elephant section. All of the tombstones were carved in the shape of rearing elephants with their trunks curled like S’s over their heads.
“Some granite company in Memphis has a monopoly on the rearing-elephant-headstone market,” Amos said.
Mr. Thronton pointed. “There’s your gal.”
We looked at a rearing elephant marker and frowned.
Lucy. A Perfect Lady.
Beloved by the Sumter Sweet Traveling Circus.
Sumter, Iowa
Died 1997
Amos shook his head. “We’re seeking an elephant named Rose, not Lucy.”
The old man nodded. “This is her. I checked with the Sumter Sweet people. They bought her from her first owner in 1982. Her name was Rose, then. Came from somewhere down south of here. No other notes on her.” He paused. “Except she was scared of fire. Nearly trampled the Sumter Sweet’s Tahitian Fire Twirler when he got too close, one time.”
I gasped. “Then it can only be Rose!”
So now we knew. Obviously, Rose had been sold under a new name only one year after Mossy Creek High School burned down. Somehow, someone had spirited her out of the mountains around Mossy Creek without a soul knowing.
“I smell a big cover-up,” I muttered under my breath.
“Usually is, where elephants are concerned,” the old man said.
The Mossy Creek Gazette
215 Main Street • Mossy Creek, Georgia
From the Desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager
Dear Vick:
I just happened to be at Mama’s All You Can Eat Café the other day along with Louise Sawyer. We were having iced tea and apple pie with some elderly ex-patriot Creekites who’d come back for a pre-reunion visit. Everyone was talking about the discovery of Rose’s grave up in Tennessee. Sandy Bottoms Crane wandered in. They say curiosity kills a cat—well, if Sandy was a cat she’d be on her ninth life—and I say that as a professional curiosity seeker, myself. She’s taken on the job of cracking the case of the high school fire as a way of proving herself to Amos. Her dearest dream is to be promoted from police department dispatcher to a full-fledged officer, like her brother, Mutt.
“Sandy, you look distracted,” Louise said. “Anything wrong?”
“Just pondering the case of our dead, disguised elephant. You know, Ms. Sawyer, I’ve never forgotten the pet rooster your Cousin Minn used to have. What was his name?”
“Henry.”
“Hmmm. There were a lot of animal lovers around here way back when. A lot of kindly people who would have fed an elephant and hidden her in their barn out of the fear that she might get blamed for causing the fire. But whoever shipped Rose out-of-state to the Iowa circus had the kind of money it takes to pay trucking costs for an elephant. That leaves out most Creekites and most Bigelowans, too.”
Louise nodded. “But it also means that somewhere, in the dusty files of some local trucking company, there may be a record of the shipment.”
Sandy stared at her like a frozen blonde squirrel while that idea sank in and took root. Then she yelped with glee. So did I. Before I could get a word in edgewise, Sandy paid for a bag of fried chicken and yeast rolls and rushed out.
I leapt up to follow. Louise gave me an odd look. “You and Sandy have spent too much time thinking up wild theories on this case,” she ventured.
“A wild theory is better than no theory at all, I say.”
Louise just laughed. “At least I’m glad she remembers Henry and Cousin Minn. Speaking of which, let me tell you all the story I told my guests the other day. . . ”
I thought you’d want to hear it too.
Katie
LOUISE
Often, the sweetest reunions are with our memories of childhood adventures we weren’t supposed to have.
LOUISE
Cousin Minn and the Banty Rooster
“Louise Sawyer, why in the world do you keep that old gun in your nice living room?” Marge McCracken asked. She’d graduated and moved away from Mossy Creek to Atlanta long before the fire. Although she’d only come home for the high school reunion, she had told several people she might move back now that she was retired.
I took the gun down carefully from the two iron pegs that held it. “It’s an old shotgun my granddaddy carried in France during the First World War and smuggled home in his kit afterwards. I inherited it from my Cousin Minn about thirty years ago.”
The noise of a reunion party eddied around Marge and me. I, too, had graduated from the old Mossy Creek High School before it burned. I felt duty-bound to ‘have a little something’ to honor the returning alums. I’d wanted to have champagne punch, but had been advised to stick to what my mama used to call rinso—lime sherbet and gingerale. The table looked lovely covered with Mama’s antique Irish linen cloth. I prayed it wouldn’t wind up pale green from spilled punch.
I patted the scratched wooden stock of the gun gently. “Can’t say I keep Cousin Minn’s gun on display for its artistic value, now can I?”
I sat down in a pale blue silk wing chair beside the ornate fireplace with the shotgun across my knees. All my old friends gathered around.
“No, I keep it for its moral value. It’s a constant reminder to me not to think I know all there is to know about anybody.”
Especially my Cousin Minn.
* * * *
“Louise!” The whisper came out of the darkness. “Wake up, Louise.”
“Ma’am?” I rolled over and opened my eyes. It was still dark. School was out for the summer. I was twelve years old, had no cares, and could sleep until noon. I groaned and turned over again only to have my shoulder roughly shaken.
“Louise, get up! I can’t find Henry.”
I blinked a couple of times and struggled to a sitting position. I could see Cousin Minn’s aging, pale face in the pale light of the false dawn that was beginning to show through the sheer lace curtains. Her hair, wavy and streaked with gray, was wildly ruffled. “He’s probably roosting in the fig tree.”
“No. I’ve called, I’ve looked, I’ve spread chicken feed all the way to the alley gate. He’s not in the yard. You’ve got to help me find him.”
I glanced at the old wind-up alarm clock on the bedside table. The big numbers still retained enough radium so that I could read them. “It’s five o’clock in the morning. If he’s not home by eight, we can look for him.”
She stood and clasped her small hands in front of her. “Now, Louise.” Without another word, she turned and walked out of the small bedroom I used when I stayed with Cousin Minn during the summer.
I flopped back on the sad old feather pillow that was damp from the sweat on my neck, but after a second I got up and tried to find the shorts I’d worn yesterday. I had heard something in her voice I had never heard before. There was fear, but there was also a firmness that surprised and kind of bothered me.
My Cousin Minn was only in her mid-fifties at that time, but to me she seemed ancient. She weighed maybe eighty-five pounds dripping wet and wore neat Liberty print dresses with hand-made Belgian lace collars, winter and summer. She was still slim and erect, and swore the scissors had never touched her hair. I could believe it. It was heavily streaked with gray, but the plait she did it up in every night was as thick as my wrist. She wore lisle stockings and sensible shoes whenever she went out. The only jewelry I ever saw her wear was an antique cameo brooch she said her mother had left her. I still wear it, although I’m hardly the cameo type.
I was more a not always benevolent despot to her than a child, and like most tyrants, I was sometimes bad-tempered about it. She never complained, not even when we stood in line two hours in the blazing sun outside the Mossy Creek pic
ture show on Saturday afternoon to buy ten pieces of bubble gum for a dime. Bubble gum had been rationed because of the war. Then she had to put up with my tantrums when I couldn’t blow a bubble.
I have no idea what actual kin we were—all that once-and-twice-removed stuff went over my head. The sister with whom she shared a house was called Aunt Bertie. If she was an aunt, then how could Cousin Minn be a cousin? An elderly female relative of mine, always called “Daughta”—not daughter—by every one in the family, including the children, attempted to explain the relationship to me one snowy afternoon, but I couldn’t grasp it, so I simply accepted it. Even my friends called her Cousin Minn.
I had heard that she and Aunt Bertie had a younger brother who died before I was born, but there weren’t any pictures of him in their house. My mother said that Cousin Minn had been engaged to a young man who had died in the First World War. I couldn’t picture her as a young woman going on dates, dancing, laughing, and dressing up. I saw her only as she was now, an indulgent and doting elderly relative. Whatever existence she’d had when she wasn’t spoiling me was irrelevant. Children are selfish monsters.
That morning, I thought she was crazy to go hunting for a darned old banty rooster before dawn in the middle of August, but I figured I owed her. I hated Henry and the feeling was mutual. He adored Cousin Minn but figured any other creature in her proximity was either an enemy or a rival. While Cousin Minn worked on her hands and knees in her garden, Henry strutted back and forth behind her like a member of the Praetorian Guard. Maybe he thought of her as his prize hen, although he had a harem of half a dozen Rhode Island Reds that Cousin Minn kept in a cage on the back porch.
He greeted each dawn raucously. Nobody in the neighborhood complained or seemed to mind, which shows you how much nastier people are than they used to be. Now some lawyer or stockbroker would probably sue her for noise violations and keeping poultry in a residential area.
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