Moonlight and Mistletoe

talk them into singing on the Living Christmas Tree. It was not where Scraggses belonged.

Neither, Scarlett told herself as she turned to look back at the courthouse, was learning to cook out of cookbooks, or dressing up in other people’s clothes. Fish out of water. That’s all they’d been all along.

After the fussing over Farrie’s singing died down people would only make fun of her. It was time they gave up all this foolishness and left Nancyville.

In the parking lot Scarlett leaned against the Heamsteads’ car to wait. She didn’t see until the last moment the tall dark shape that suddenly loomed up at her.

Scarlett’s heart leaped. Maybe Buck was meeting her like this! Maybe they could get the misunderstanding between them straightened out.

Maybe he’d hold her in his arms and kiss her again, she thought hopefully.

“Well, Scarlett girl,” the tall shadow said, “looks like you’ve fixed yourself up real good.”

Scarlett whirled to run, but Devil Anse grabbed her. She looked beyond him to the crowd on the courthouse lawn, wanting to yell for help but knowing it wouldn’t do any good.

“Farrie and I don’t have anything to do with you anymore!” she burst out.

“Now listen here, Scarlett.” He gave her arm a shake. “I got something mighty important for you to do and I don’t want no messin’ up, y’hear me?”

When she didn’t speak, Devil Anse nodded. “That’s right, listen good, girl. Me’n Sheriff Buck Grissom’s got a agreement, the first time we managed to get such a thing for our Scraggs business. That’s something to brag on, seeing how his daddy wouldn’t never listen to no talk. Every time the old sheriff saw me he’d start shooting up everything for a mile and a half with that sawed-off shotgun he used to carry. I never could get one word in edgewise. But the boy’s different. I allus said young Grissom’s reasonable.”

Scarlett stared at him. “What did you do?” she cried.

Someone backed their car out down the parking lot. It started toward them. Devil Anse pulled her behind a car.

“Ain’t nothing permanent, yet,” he growled in Scarlett’s ear, “it’s in the nature of a free trial offer. But I figure the way things are going yore young sheriff won’t waste too much time.”

Scarlett pulled back to look up into his face. “Grandpa, you tell me what you done!”

He gave her arm a cruel twist.

“Ain’t what I done, girl, it’s what I want you to do. Now, when you’ve made young Buck happy, you just deliver a little message for me. Tell him in view of all I have done and am going to do for him, I want him to just stay at home, rest up, and not worry about any hijackings.”

Scarlett managed to wrench her arm away. “When I have made him happy?” The full meaning was just sinking in. “You mean -”

When he nodded, she yelled, “I won’t do it!”

“Won’t do it?” The shaggy white brows came together. “Scarlett, don’t talk to yore old grandpa like that. Didn’t I let you have that puny baby sister of yourn to play with, when she’s never going to be no good except taking up space and eating food what should go to the able-bodied? You got a durn sight better treatment, girl, than you deserve, all things considered.”

With a sob, Scarlett lunged away from him. “You leave us alone,” she cried. “You’ve never done anything for Farrie and me – except make us a part of the Scraggses!”

The car that was on its way out of the parking lot slowed, looking Scarlett over. When she didn’t seem to want any help, it went on.

Scarlett’s mind was racing. Devil Anse had made some sort of offer to Buck Grissom. She still didn’t believe it. Her heart was being torn out of her to realize that it was all just a free trial offer. To see if Sheriff Buck liked it.

Now, she thought, he was probably trying to make up his mind!

She circled away, blindly bumping into parked cars. Her grandfather followed. “Are you listening to me, young lady? I don’t want to have to put up with no foolishness from you. You please Sheriff Buck just as hard as you can or you’ll have to explain to me why you didn’t. Do y’hear me?”

Scarlett broke into a run. They were going to have to leave for sure now. Buck Grissom would never tell Scarlett the things she wanted to hear now. Devil Anse had made that plain.

They wouldn’t even stay for the Living Christmas Tree, she thought, fighting back tears. That was out of the question with Devil Anse lurking around every corner, telling her what he wanted her to do.

They had to leave Nancyville just as quick as they could. The only thing was, Scarlett dreaded telling her little sister the reason why.

Eleven

“This has got to be a case of the world’s meanest people,” Officer Kevin Black Badger said, “to hijack a truckload of Christmas turkeys. The birds were going up to the state school for the deaf for Christmas dinner. The place is mostly kids, too.”

Buck followed his deputy down the shoulder of U.S. Route 29 as passing traffic thundered by. “Watch the dog,” Black Badger reminded.

Buck gave him an irritable look, “Don’t worry, I’m not lucky enough to have the damned thing run over.”

They stopped at a place where the grass of the shoulder had been chewed into strips. “This was where,” Black Badger said, pointing to the tire tracks, “the Piedmont Poultry driver pulled his rig over to check his brakes. He hadn’t even put out his flares when this pickup truck comes roaring along, pulls up beside him, and two guys hop out and hit him over the head. When the driver came to last night he was lying here in the freezing rain, and his eighteen-wheeler was long gone.”

Buck bent, hands braced on knees, to look at the truck’s tire tracks where they reentered the highway. Somehow he had hoped he’d seen the last of the hijackers, that they’d moved on to greener territory up in North Carolina or Tennessee. But it looked like that wasn’t going to happen.

In any event, the theft of a truckload of Christmas turkeys meant they would shortly have a message from Byron Walker at the Georgia State criminal investigation department. And if the truck was headed north over the state line, as Buck suspected, that could even bring in the Feds.

He realized his holiday was looking even bleaker, when he hadn’t thought that was possible.

“It still had a full load when it left,” Kevin Black Badger was saying. The deputy was a Native American from the Cherokee reservation in the Smokies and prided himself on his tracking, both animal and vehicular. “You can see by the depth of the tire imprints that it was still loaded up.” He hesitated, frowning. “Turkeys are not something you can get rid of like cigarettes, or sides of beef, Buck. My guess is they must be going to sell them out of the back of the truck.”

Buck straightened up. “Good work, Kevin.” There was nothing else he could say. He only wished that the big Indian could do some tracking wizardry and follow the hijacked truck down miles of concrete to its final destination.

That, Buck told himself, only happened in movies.

“Write it up,” he told Kevin. “Have you got anything on the pickup truck the hijackers were riding in?”

Demon sat leaning against the deputy’s leg, making affectionate, whimpering noises. Black Badger bent to pat her head. “It’s pretty standard Sears Roebuck tread, but I’ve been checking it out for idiosyncrasies.”

“Good.” Buck started back toward the Blazer. “Keep at it and let me know.”