Another place, another time, I could have fallen hard for Ms. Jayne Reynolds. This wasn’t the time for her or the place for me. At least not yet, not in the fish bowl that was Mossy Creek. Trying to sort through the pieces of the twenty-year-old high school fire was enough of a challenge for me at the moment. I was on the trail of a mystery that included a lost elephant, not a temptress. Of course I was about the only one in town who listened when I said I didn’t have time for romance.
I know the words came out of my mouth; I heard myself say them. More than once. But I might as well have been speaking Latin. I’ve never seen a town more convinced that its chief should find a nice girl and settle down. Pronto.
Only Ida Walker and Jayne Reynolds had refrained from introducing me to someone ‘special.’ More’s the pity, because those were the only two women of my acquaintance who had a clue about what might interest me.
The bell over the door jangled. Mac Campbell walked in, head down and making a beeline for the counter. Must’ve been a bad morning at the courthouse. Mac hated to lose. Rarely did. If figuring out how to cut the corner off a circle could make the difference in winning or losing a case, Mac would figure out how to do the impossible.
I waved him over as soon as he’d collected his order from Jayne. Even without a kilt and bagpipes, he looks the role of big, brawny Scotsman. Until he opens his mouth and proclaims himself a Southern Son with his accent. We’re both Southern Sons of Mossy Creek legends. His dad was the judge; mine the chief. I think we were five years old when Mac beat me to a pulp the first time. I wasn’t stupid. I figured if you couldn’t beat ‘em, you’d better join ‘em. He’s been a friend ever since.
Neither of us ended up where we thought we’d be or what we thought we’d be. Neither of us could wait to leave Mossy Creek behind. He was going to be a rock star, and I was going to be anything but a cop. Fate had a good laugh at those plans and jerked us back in line.
Mac had long ago come to grips with his rebellious demons, graduated law school, snagged a wonderful woman, and found some sort of balance in his life. To my knowledge, he never regretted the road not taken. Or the guitar solos not written. But then his father was still alive; they spoke. Mine was dead, and I had his job.
The espresso claimed Mac’s complete attention for a gulp or two. When he looked up, the bad morning in court was washed away with the caffeine. “You’re just the man I need. Patty said to drag you to dinner if I found you. Consider yourself found. Now, what’s got you looking so thoughtful?”
“Sewing circles.”
His brows drew together as he banged the heel of his hand against one ear the way you’d whack a television to improve bad reception. “Patty’s right. I can’t hear anymore. Did you just say sewing circles?”
“Patty’s wrong. You can hear, but you don’t listen. Sewing circles.” I warmed to my topic. I don’t know why I hadn’t asked him before. He’d know. “Sewing circles. What is it about a single man that sets sewing circles to twittering and planning his future? Why is everyone trying to fix me up?”
Mac snorted and turned a sly look on me. I remembered why I didn’t like my best friend very much and why I hadn’t mentioned this before. He wiggled his eyebrows and enlightened me. “Sewing circles are twittering because—and I’m quoting Patty here—Amos Royden is one long tall collection of mysterious he-man parts.”
I stared at him, horrified. Or gratified. Or both. But he hadn’t answered the question. Not really. “I am not the only single, employed, reasonable looking, thirty-something man in town. So, why me? Why all the attention and women stopping by with food? I understood why they were on my doorstep with bribes before the pageant, but the attention didn’t stop afterward. The players just changed. Why is everyone so interested?”
“You sure you want to know?”
His question intimated that I ought not to pursue the answer. Of course his question also guaranteed I wouldn’t let the subject drop.
“Enlighten me.” I leaned back, braced by the wall.
“Three reasons.” Holding up a finger, he said, “One. You’re tall, dark, and brooding. You’ve got baggage. Women can’t resist a man with baggage or mystery. There’s all that time in Atlanta that no one knows anything about. That’s like a red flag to a lot of women. It’s the dark secret. Love of a good woman and all that.”
A second finger joined the first. “Two. Your preoccupation with the job might as well be a sign you carry around that says, ‘Betcha can’t catch me.’ They think you’re playing hard-to-get, and that’s turned it into a competition with you as the prize. They all want in the game because they all think they have a shot. I mean you like women whether you mean to or not. It’s the damnedest thing. Tall, short, skinny, fat, older. You appreciate women and forget to hide it.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing except that it tends to make the rest of us look bad and makes you look like you’re looking.” He paused as if asking for permission to continue.
I shut up, and he lifted a third finger. “Three. They’re afraid you’ll fall into the wrong hands.”
I started laughing, but sobered quickly enough when I realized Mac hadn’t cracked a smile. He was serious. “Mac, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I’m not some top secret report on Area 51’s UFO encounter. How on earth am I going to fall into the wrong hands. And whose hands would the wrong hands be?”
He gave me one of those pitying looks that friends give you when you’re being naive, but as he opened his mouth, the doorbell jingled again.
Loralee Atwater bounced in. She took only two fluid bounces toward Jayne before swiveling in our direction like a bird dog on point. Loralee’s a recently divorced tennis mom who lives in one of the new developments on Lookover Mountain. Her ex-husband was a Bigelow banker. Big friends with John Bigelow, Sue Ora Salter’s husband and a former lawyer, now president of the Bank of Bigelow County. Loralee’s husband got the safe; Loralee got the money. Most of which she spends in Bigelow, not Mossy Creek. Her interior decorator is Swee Purla. Swee bought a Porche with the commission from Loralee’s post-divorce, house-redecorating mania.
Loralee wouldn’t be caught dead in something less trendy than The Naked Bean. She takes a tennis lesson down at the Bigelow Country Club every Friday and has two pre-teen hellions in private school. Today was Friday, and she had one of those swirly tennis skirts on. Perky and physically adorable do not begin to describe her. The woman does actually bounce, but anyone who has spent any quality time with Loralee knows that appearances are deceiving. She’s Tigger-with-teeth. As soon as she smiles, you know it’s time to check your ammo. It’s a self-preservation instinct.
“Well, hello, Amos.” She smiled. I was glad I had reinforcements with me already. She didn’t take her eyes off me as she added, “Mac.”
Mac had handled her divorce. He doesn’t discuss clients. Doesn’t have to. You can see it in his eyes. He didn’t like Loralee. Mac’s a little touchy about folks who use kids as weapons in divorce proceedings. Especially in Loralee’s case. Everyone—Sandy was my actual source—knew she wouldn’t take the kids unless they came with plenty of money. Parenting interferes with an active social life.
“You boys takin’ a break?” She’d have pulled over a chair and joined us if Mac hadn’t gotten up.
“Not anymore. I’ve got appointments.”
I followed his lead and checked my watch. “I’ve got a committee meeting for the big grammar school reunion this fall, and I should probably get in a couple more hours of catching criminals and stopping crime before I go home for the day.”
She affected a little pout of disappointment. “Oh, darn. I did want to talk to you about the boys. We aren’t actually Mossy Creek citizens, but I thought you might help me figure out how to keep them out of trouble this summer.” Then she brightened as if an idea just occurred to her. “But, you know, dinner would be better. Why not tonight, if you’re just going home after work? You can come by my p
lace, and you won’t have to cook.”
I bought myself a few extra seconds by pulling some bills from my wallet to toss on the table. Loralee had managed to smother her invitation under a blanket of fake parental concern. Fortunately, I knew she didn’t give a flip how much trouble those boys caused this summer. As I turned back to her, inspiration struck.
“Can’t.” I managed not to sound relieved. “Patty’d kill me.”
“Patty?”
“Mac’s wife.”
He chimed in. “Tiny woman. Mean as a snake if he doesn’t show up at least once a month for inspection. Tonight’s the night. She’s gone to a lot of trouble for tonight.”
When he finally shut up, he looked mightly pleased about something. Warning sirens should have sounded then, but I was too focused on escaping any future Loralee invitations.
“Tell you what,” I offered. “Come down to the station anytime. Bring the boys with you. We’ll talk. I’ll see what I can do.”
My walkie-talkie crackled and beeped. I pulled it off the belt and keyed the switch. “Go ahead.”
Good ol’ Sandy. She’s an employee you can count on in a tight spot. “Chief, I need to talk to you about a dead moose. Over.”
“On my way. Out.” I slipped the walkie-talkie back on the belt, shrugged as if it were an emergency, and headed for the door in one motion. I’m sure Sandy was staring at the equipment back at the office wondering why I hadn’t at least asked her where she’d gotten a dead moose. We don’t have moose in Georgia. But I didn’t really care at the moment.
Mac followed, and once outside he fell into step with me. His office was on the way to the station. He didn’t wait long before commenting. “Moose?”
“I haven’t a clue, and I don’t care.”
“Coward.”
“That would be correct. Would it also be correct if I assumed that Loralee is who or what they mean by the ‘wrong hands.’”
“Yep.”
“They actually think I’m that stupid?”
“Sometimes Battle was.”
“I’m not Battle.”
“They’re beginning to figure it out. Give ‘em time.” He split off toward his office door. “Six-thirty. Don’t be late.”
“I never am.”
* * * *
Sandy always has my messages ready as soon as I walk in. That doesn’t mean I’m allowed to actually read them. She held them up and then impaled them neatly on the message spindle.
“Nothing important, Chief. Just complaints about the St. Paddy’s parade tonight. Some folks are afraid that it’ll be too rowdy.”
“Parade?” That got my attention. “I hesitate to ask, but when in hell did we get a parade? Did I miss a meeting?”
She grinned. “This morning. Bigelow’s having one. So we have to, too.”
Of course. I should have known that it was Bigelow’s fault. Creekites tended to over-react since that damned mechanical gypsy arrived and stirred up talk about the mystery of the high school fire. Just seeing it had fanned the flames —pardon the pun— of the old rivalries. Besting Bigelow was no longer a charming town hobby; it was becoming a town mission.
Leaning closer, Sandy got that gleeful look she wore sometimes when she was about to divulge good information. “Dwight Truman wasn’t real happy about the parade. Told Michael he couldn’t have a parade without a permit, which it was too late to get from you. Mostly because Dwight’s mad at ‘Father Mike’ for getting new insurance quotes. Dwight had to drop his rates or lose the business. Anyway, Miss Ida got wind of it—the permit power play—and waltzed into the insurance agency pronto. She walked right into Dwight’s office, right past the secretary, and gave him that look. You know the one?”
I nodded, chewing on my cheek to suppress a grin. I did, indeed, know that look. Ida was far more dangerous than some bouncy little Tigger-with-teeth. When she smiled, you didn’t bother to check your ammo. It was too late. I definitely enjoyed that smile. As long as it wasn’t directed at me. “I’m guessing a permit was produced?”
“Yep. Most of the people calling us calmed down when we told them that Bigelow was making a big deal out of their parade. And I reminded them that the force would be on hand to manage the rabble rousers.”
“How many of those are we expecting?”
“Michael said he thinks maybe about forty. Unless they cancel bingo. That’d be another ten or so. It’s just from General Hamilton’s statue to the pub. No drinking in the park and only green, non-alcoholic punch on the sidewalk outside the pub. Mutt says he doesn’t figure most of the crowd will stay for the charity costume karaoke party in the pub.”
Costume karaoke party at the pub? For charity? I didn’t ask. I figured the answer would just make my head hurt, so I concentrated on the original problem. The parade.
A couple of officers could handle forty plus the bingo crowd. I wouldn’t have to disappoint Patty. What Mac said about presenting myself for inspection was mostly true. Patty doesn’t have siblings either, so she’d appointed herself to the role of big sister.
I looked at Sandy for a minute. “Think you’re ready for crowd control and traffic?”
“Absolutely, Chief!” She snapped to attention without actually saluting. “I’m ready. Folks think of me as part of the force. I know they’ll listen to me if I ask them to quiet down or pick up their litter. The parade’s only a couple of blocks long. From General Hamilton’s statue to the pub and—”
“Whoa! You got the job. You don’t have to convince me. Mutt’s on duty tonight. He’ll show you the ropes. But take off now so I don’t have to pay you overtime.”
“Right!” She pulled her purse out of the file cabinet. “That’ll give me some time to work on Rose the elephant.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, as she raised the counter section that served as the entry to the clerical area of our little station. “No one’s leaving here until you explain about the dead moose and update me on the elephant investigation. I’m not going back out in the woods to retrace twenty-year-old elephant trails.”
She stopped, counter top not quite settled back into place. “Oh, yeah.” She let go; the counter clunked as it fell the rest of the way. Facing me, she strangled her purse straps with both hands. “I’ll do it all on my own time, Chief. I swear.”
“The moose or the elephant?”
“Both. They’re the same thing.”
“Not really.”
Grinning, she admitted, “Well, no. Of course not. What I mean is that the dead moose is what made me think of the elephant.”
“The elephant I understand. I’m drawing a blank on the moose.” I slung my hands on my hips and did my best impression of a chief-waiting-for-a-coherent-answer.
“No one ever found the elephant because I think they were afraid to ask questions. Because they didn’t want to deal with what would happen if they found out who cut her chain. She didn’t just pull free and bolt inside the school, Chief. Somebody cut her chain and shooed her. Maybe that somebody didn’t count on her causing a fire. So that somebody had a vested interest in getting her out of town.” Sandy made her pronouncement with a sage nod and a knowing wink. “See, me and Jess were having dinner with Sue Ora last night, and she and Jess started talking about writing. She’s a big role model for him, you know, and he’s not just saying that because she’s his boss at the newspaper. Anyway, they were talking. Metaphors or similes or allegory or something. I just kind of smile and nod when they get into the technical stuff about writing. I don’t want to interrupt them.”
“Sort of like me not wanting to interrupt you, so you’ll get straight to the point of what a dead moose has to do with any of this?”
“Exactly.”
Sometimes hints don’t work with Sandy.
“Sue Ora was talking about some issue the council didn’t want to address being a dead moose and just laying there on the table. Only nobody wants to be the one to point out that they’ve got a dead moose. They’d all just rather pretend that it i
sn’t there. That way, nobody has to be the bad guy. If anything is going to get done, Sue Ora says someone is going to have be brave enough to call that dead moose a dead moose and get it off the table. See, they’ve got to deal with it before it stinks up the place.”
“You weren’t, by any chance, paying any attention to the specific political issue Sue Ora was talking about?”
“Not really. My brain just kept buzzing me, telling me I was supposed to see a connection somehow.” She looked up at me, clearly expecting me to have grasped the obvious.
I hadn’t. She gave me a hint.
“Pink. . . . ”
“Elephant in the corner,” I finished. “The dead moose is just like the pink elephant in the corner everyone is too polite to mention. That made you think of the carnival elephant and wonder if the reason it was never found was because Battle and everyone else in town ignored it as the least of their worries at the time. Or because sometimes it’s best to let sleeping elephants lie rather than stir up a nest of pachyderms.”
“Doesn’t that make sense? How could the town honestly lose an elephant? Even up here in the mountains where there’re lots of places to hide one? Whether it was for pity or profit or to get rid of evidence, somebody helped that elephant escape from Mossy Creek. No offense to your daddy, but if he’d canvassed the mountains around here with an eye out for the elephant’s accomplice, the elephant might have been found. I’m going to get the truth. Somebody knows something. Whoever sent that mechanical gypsy wants us to figure it out.”
If anyone could find a twenty-year-old elephant in a haystack, with an accomplice, my money was on Sandy.
* * * *
Mac and Patty have a modest house on Elm. You’d expect something a little more upscale of a successful lawyer, but Mac never cared much for status and Patty cares even less. I suspect they both know they’ll eventually inherit the old homeplace from the judge, and they’re bright enough to realize they’ll need every penny they can lay their hands on to maintain it. Hundred-year-old houses that haven’t had more than a new coat of paint in fifty years are trouble waiting to bankrupt you.
Reunion at Mossy Creek Page 7