Reunion at Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  “Get out,” Robbie yelled. “I’ll try to shoo Rose and Samson back toward the front doors. But y’all go on outside! Now!”

  “No way!”

  Hank’s throat worked. Words finally spewed out. “I’ve got to save Fluffy and Booger!” he yelled. Then he took off down an opposite hall. His daddy, Dr. Blackshear, had loaned a pair of pet rabbits to Mrs. Almira Olsen, the biology teacher. Mrs. Olsen was hoping the bunnies would make bunny love in public so she could avoid teaching the new eighth-grade sex education class. She figured a little bunnie-show-and-tell would pretty much explain everything eighth-graders needed to know.

  We tore after Hank. By the time we found our way in the dark to Mrs. Olsen’s classroom, the smell of smoke was everywhere. Robbie popped the door on Fluffy and Booger’s cage. Hank took Fluffy, and I grabbed Booger.

  “We can’t go back that way,” Robbie said. He ran to one of the room’s tall windows, unlocked it, and shoved the bottom half up.

  Hank and I scrambled out, clutching the rabbits, and tumbled in the laurel shrubs. I looked back up at the window. “You come out right now too, Robbie Walker!”

  He hung over the sill for a minute, looking down at us somberly. “If my dad were here, he’d try to save the elephant and the sheep. That’s what I have to do.” He disappeared back into the smoky darkness.

  I yelled like a banshee. Hank and I ran to the front entrance. By then, Chief Royden was on the scene with a big crowd of people. Everyone was shouting and turning their car headlights on the front of the school. Smoke had begun seeping from the windows and the open doorway. In the distance, we heard the sirens of the Mossy Creek Volunteer Fire Department.

  Tears slid down my face. Hank was crying, too.

  “Come out, Robbie, come out,” I whispered.

  Rose’s owner wobbled around the entrance, drunk, yelling, “Rosie? Oh, Rosie, com’ere, Rosie, where ya hiding?”

  As if she heard him, Rose came thundering out the school’s front doors, followed by Samson. Who was still sparkling. Chief Royden dodged Rose and Samson with only an inch or two to spare.

  Rose charged down the steps, made a right turn, ran through the parking lot, and evaporated into the pitch-black forest. Samson halted on the school’s lawn, uttered one long, plaintive baaah, then hid behind the ram statue. He looked like a toasted cotton ball with legs.

  Everyone was so busy gaping at Rose and Samson they didn’t notice when Robbie staggered out of the doors and into the shadows. Hank and I snuck over to him. The three of us huddled in the woods—dirty, sweaty, smoky, and holding traumatized rabbits.

  Hank tearfully peered into the darkness where Rose had vanished. “Poor pack-a-perm,” he whispered. “Poor sheep.” That was one of the few good things that came out of that night. Shy Hank Blackshear took up talking.

  But fire leapt from the roof of Mossy Creek High.

  “I did it,” Rob groaned.

  “What?”

  “I cut Rose’s chain—part of the way, at least. That must be why she was able to break it so easy and escape. It’s my fault.”

  “No, we were all in on it,” I corrected, crying. Hank nodded and began crying, too. Robbie just sat there in dry silence, looking as if he wanted to tear his heart out.

  We watched Mossy Creek High burn to the ground.

  * * * *

  What followed was one of the darkest times in the history of the town. People mourned like the high school had been living kin to them. Rose was spotted once out in the hollows along Trailhead Road, still wearing the wig and duck. Chief Royden made it his business to find her—after all, what police chief wants people to snicker that he can’t even find an elephant? But the man hunt—well, the elephant hunt—went on for weeks, with no luck.

  Rose the elephant was never found. Nothing was ever proved one way or the other as to who kidnapped Samson and set him afire with dozens of sparklers. The school was never rebuilt, and from then on, Creekite kids were sent down to Bigelow High.

  All because we’d cut Rose’s chain. Or thought we had.

  We began to do penance in ways no one but the three of us would recognize. Hank devoted himself to animals. Robbie went to work at his family’s failing department store, Hamilton’s, as if saving one of the town’s landmarks would help make up for destroying another. And I hid myself under layers of makeup and hair dye.

  Twenty years later, I was still hiding.

  Until the reunion.

  SANDY

  SANDY

  The Mask

  “Miz Hart? Miz Whit?” I whispered loudly.

  Beside me, Katie Bell whispered just as loudly, “Ladies? Are you there?”

  A piping, crackly little voice snapped back, “You’re standing just around the corner of the statue, so you know we’re here.”

  “Tell Sandy to get a move on,” another old-lady voice intoned. “We’re not gettin’ any younger. Oughta be glad I decided to live.”

  “Just hold on, Eula Mae.”

  “Don’t you ‘hold on,’ me, Millicent. I got better things to do than play cops-and-robbers out here in the broad daylight with a crazy old woman like you.”

  “Who are you calling crazy, you dried-up piece of bacon? I’ll. . . .”

  “Ladies,” I interrupted.

  Millicent Hart was eighty-something years old going on a twinkle, and Eula Mae Whit was an even one century young. Both of them liked to give people headaches.

  Katie Bell and I peered around the weathered edge of the statue of General Hamilton in Mossy Creek’s square. Millicent, a shrewd-eyed little oldster wearing a Britney Spears’s t-shirt—probably stolen from Hamilton’s Department Store—peered back at us defiantly. Beside her, ancient Eula Mae scowled in a flowered housecoat. Old white lady and old black lady. Both of them glared like we were the dumb-gray color of dishwater.

  “Who are you callin’ Ladies?” Eula Mae demanded, as if I’d insulted them.

  I shook my head. “All I’m sayin’ is let’s hurry. What have y’all got for us?” I looked around furtive-like, since it was high noon, and we weren’t exactly the only people in the park. This meeting place sure wasn’t my choice.

  Millicent and Eula Mae had made it clear they wanted our rendezvous kept secret, but they were the ones who picked this spot and this time.

  “They like to live on the razor edge of public curiosity,” Katie Bell told me.

  Well, their idea of ‘secret’ made my back itch.

  “Here.” Millicent thrust a dusty, battered, twenty-years-out-of-date Hamilton Department Store shopping bag into my hand. “He was wearing this, that night. We saw him. He dropped it outside his car as he drove off.”

  “Tell us his name.”

  “You are two the stupidest white girls in the county.” Eula Mae said. “We didn’t see him. We saw him.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “We saw what’s in the bag, not what was behind it,” Millicent explained.

  “But I thought—”

  “I got to go,” Eula Mae said. “There’s my niece, Carmel, and she’s nosier than a squirrel in a bag of nuts.”

  “There’s Maggie and Tag,” Millicent yelped. “Why don’t they stay in bed and quit spying on me?”

  Millicent and Eula Mae left us standing there without another word.

  Holding the bag, so to speak.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Katie Bell dragged me across Main Street into the alley between Rainey’s salon and Dan McNeil’s Fixit Shop. Once in the shadows, I pulled the wrinkled paper sack open, and we looked inside.

  President Nixon looked up at us without any eyes. A plastic Halloween mask, that is.

  Regardless, I nearly wet on myself.

  Katie Bell said a couple of bad words and dug out the dusty, bent, Halloween mask. Turning it in her hands, she sighed with defeat. All our detective work, for this. We had a dead elephant and a Nixon mask.

  I moped around the police station for the next few days. All this work, but no good leads. Fo
r weeks I’d talked to shipping companies all over Georgia, begging them to search their files for any record of transporting an elephant away from Mossy Creek twenty years ago.

  One morning the phone rang on my dispatcher’s desk. The call was from the elderly, retired owner of a little trucking company in Atlanta.

  “Miz Crane,” he said, “I think I moved your pachyderm.”

  * * * *

  “Red Skelton,” I said to Amos. “That’s who shipped Rose the elephant out of Mossy Creek without anybody knowing.”

  The chief looked at me over his Gazette, as if afraid to lower the paper. “Red Skelton.”

  “Red Skelton.”

  “The old comedian? TV. Movies. The Red Skelton Show. That Red Skelton?”

  I nodded, then held up a fax of a twenty-year-old shipping invoice. “Magnolia States’ Shipping delivered one Rose the elephant to the Sumter Sweet Circus in Iowa. Right here is a copy of the invoice from Magnolia States’ files. The perpetrator who contracted with them to ship Rose from Georgia out west to Iowa signed his name Red Skelton.”

  Amos dropped the newspaper, took the fax from me, and scowled at it. “This is just a hunch, Sandy, but I’d say your perp used a fake name.”

  I grinned. “That’s why I’ve sent a copy of the signature to the state crime lab for handwriting analysis. I used to clean house for the sister-in-law of the mother of the head of the lab. I got us some premium attention from the state lab folks. It’s a longshot, but they say they’ll run this Red Skelton against every signature in their files. Chief, they’ve got a new computer database with samples of every criminal’s handwriting from here to forever and then some. They’ve got handwriting samples from all sorts of government officials and celebrities in the database, too—to check out cases where some so-and-so tries to fake a famous signature.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” the chief deadpanned. “Maybe it really was Red Skelton.”

  I huffed loudly and pursed my lips. “You know what, Chief? You’re not many years older than me, and you’re a good-looking man—not as good-looking as my Jess, but not hard on the ol’ eyeballs, either. I’m gonna find more clues in this Rose case just to startle you into putting your paper down. So I can enjoy the sight of you lookin’ impressed.”

  Amos arched a brow. “I am impressed. I’d love to see this case resolved. My father couldn’t crack it, and he worked on the mystery for years.”

  I waved the invoice. “But he didn’t have Red Skelton.”

  After a moment, Amos squinted one eye just a little. He was either having an allergy attack or fighting one of his little anti-hero smiles. The kind that put the iron in irony. “Do me one favor,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone else we’re going down to the state crime lab to investigate Red Skelton.”

  I gave him a thumbs up and whooped. “We’re on it, Chief.”

  * * * *

  Amos and I sat in a dark office cubicle peering at a big computer screen next to a preppy little black guy named Ronell Sommersby. Ronell put the gee in geek.

  “Gee, baby,” he said to his computer as he typed in codes and commands that split the screen in half. “Gee, baby. Gee. Come on.”

  The Red Skelton signature had been scanned into the system and suddenly appeared on one side of the screen.

  Ronell said, “Gee, baby,” then punched one last key and sat back. “Watch this. All likely handwriting matches will zip-zap-zing through the system. The closest matches should pop up within a few seconds. This baby has a ninety-eight-percent accuracy rate.”

  “Gee,” I said politely, and hunched forward with Ronell.

  Amos stood behind us, leaning over our heads and staring at the computer intently.

  On the screen, thousands of signatures flashed by in a blur as the computer sorted them. The speed made me a little dizzy. I looked away, sipped a Coke from a glass bottle—the only way to drink the best elixer ever made—and asked myself if I hadn’t dragged my chief and myself down to the crime lab for nothing.

  “Look at all those names going by,” I muttered. “How can I expect the computer to match up some stranger’s handwriting style with my one puny offering of loops and squiggles?” I sighed. “A longshot? Hah! An impossible shot.”

  “No,” Amos said, his eyes never leaving the screen. “There it is.”

  “Gee!” Ronell yelled, then shoved his chair back so hard its rolling feet squealed.

  I whipped toward the computer screen and stared. There, side by side with Red Skelton, was the signature of the real perp. The hider of fire-bug elephants. The face behind the Nixon mask. The villain who’d masterminded the burning down of Mossy Creek High School.

  Amos went stone-silent. Then, “Battle would have eaten his heart out over this.”

  Ronell, who looked as if he’d just discovered a good reason to polish up his resume for a new job, said something a lot worse than Gee.

  And I took a hard gulp of air. “It’s reunion time,” I whispered.

  Lady Victoria Salter Stanhope

  The Cliffs, Seaward Road

  St. Ives, Cornwall TR37PJ

  United Kingdom

  Dearest Katie:

  My dear mum used to say, ‘Be careful what you wish for, my darling, else you might receive it.’ Though you may have believed everyone in town would begin confessing as soon as your surveys provoked them into lowering their guards, have you considered the fact that the fire was a serious crime and the criminal mastermind behind your Nixon mask might be a dangerous person? I’m most certain you and Mrs. Crane enjoy playing sleuths, but please, my brave stateside Miss Marple, be careful. And do tell me everything that happens next.

  Vick, wishing she were on the case with you

  The Mossy Creek Gazette

  215 Main Street • Mossy Creek, Georgia

  From the Desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager

  Dear Vick:

  Not to worry. I think the lid’s about to blow on our twenty-year-old mystery. Just the other day, I looked at an old red brick flecked with gold specks on my fireplace mantel. The bricks of Mossy Creek High School were made at a kiln in a mining area of northern Georgia and bore bits of real gold ore inside them. After the fire, the gold-speckled bricks were sold to locals and raffled off to raise money for local groups. It was said the school was the foundation of Mossy Creek, and so it was only fitting that it support good causes.

  In my mind, a father and child ought to serve the same purpose. One builds the next, but they hold each other up. The same way a town can hold its heart together if its people build more than they tear down and keep that foundation in their hands.

  Speaking of which, I have some sad news to report about Ed Brady and his son. They’ve been estranged for a long time, but Ed, Junior, has come back home. The reason why is the sad part. Vick, remember me telling you last year about Mr. Brady and his beloved wife? I’m so sorry to report this to you, but Ellie Brady has died.

  Katie

  ED Jr.

  Sometimes the past and present come together like a sweet, old-fashioned puzzle, and pieces that seemed so hard to find begin to fit perfectly.

  ED, Jr.

  Coming Home

  I stood in the cemetery of Mossy Creek Presbyterian Church along with everyone else in town that fall, watching my father, Ed Brady, bury my mother, Ellie. Pop looked like what he was—an old, tired farmer, wearing an outdated sports coat and a tie knotted loosely beneath a white shirt too large for his neck. I remembered how big I once thought he was. He didn’t look that way any more. I felt out of place, standing there in my expensive pinstriped suit, a middle-aged businessman who’d left Mossy Creek almost thirty years ago and had only come back periodically since.

  After the graveside service, the minister and every oldtimer in the church congregation came up to me. I shook the men’s hands and hugged the women, while my father went through the motions. Every person who spoke to me said the same thing, Good to see you, Boy.

  I was still Ed Brady’s
boy, who’d come to say goodbye to his mother and give his father support, not that the old man seemed to need me. He’d never needed me—only my mother. Throughout the service, he stood stony faced and erect, holding all his emotions inside as he’d always done.

  Now, as I drove him home in a car I’d rented at the airport down in Atlanta, he grumbled softly. “Ought to be in the truck. It got me back and forth to see Ellie in the nursing home. Should have got her running for Ellie’s funeral.”

  I started to say something soothing, but my throat closed. As we headed out of town, I saw a banner over the door of the town hall: MOSSY CREEK SCHOOL REUNION, NOVEMBER 2.

  Pop spoke again. “Don’t reckon you’ll go.” It wasn’t a question.

  I hadn’t made up my mind until then. “I thought I would,” I answered. “I haven’t been to a reunion since I graduated from high school.”

  “No, you haven’t. Always figured it had something to do with what happened that night at Ida’s silo.”

  “No,” I said. I’d thought about that often. I didn’t have anything to do with burning the high school down in 1981. I was long gone by then. But ten years before, on the night he was referring to, I’d been part of something that people swore led straight to the fire, a decade later. I think Pop had never forgiven me. Ed Brady’s boy should have stopped the prank before it got out of hand. I hadn’t.

  People ought to have their own name. I was christened Edward Alton Brady, Junior, then shortened it to Eddie. I spent the first seventeen years of my life in the shadow of my father, as if he’d moved in a photograph and I was the blur behind him. If Mossy Creekites had been asked to describe me, all they would have come up with was something like, “Well, he’s Big Ed’s and Miss Ellie’s boy.”

  Growing up, I never quite felt at home in Mossy Creek. Everyone else was trying to keep the town just like it was, particularly Pop, who thought that his service during World War II gave him the right to expect the whole country, including Mossy Creek, to stay the same as when he’d defended it. My father didn’t enlist until late in the war. Before that he was exempted as a farmer. He said it was time he did his part and turned over the running of the farm to a veteran who’d already been wounded and sent home. Once Pop made up his mind, there was no changing it. When the war ended, he came back—wounded but proud—and married my mother, Ellie Whitaker, the old maid of the community. He said they were both surprised when I was born eight years later.