She said nothing. Just studied me.
I went on blindly, “See, I’ve loved Rob since I was a little nothing-and-nobody girl, and I’ll love him today and every day after this for the rest of my life, even though I know he’ll never love me that way back.” I pressed a hand to my mouth and turned away from her shrewd maternal eyes. I fumbled with my tote bag of cosmetics and tissues, determined to hide the tears, the truth, the whole awful moment beneath a fresh coat of pink color. Otherwise, I’d be soggy when I got up to confess, and nobody liked a weepy coward. “I don’t mean I’d ever flirt with him or try to cause trouble in his marriage. He worships the ground Teresa walks on. I don’t mean I’d ever even think about trying to be a homewrecker. But I just . . . I just can’t stop loving him from afar.”
Miss Ida put her hands on my shoulders and gently forced me to turn around. She was tall; I was a munchkin. I looked up at her and nearly sobbed. But she only nodded. “I’ve always known you love Rob.”
I groaned. “It’s that obvious?”
“Only to me. I make it my business to observe the people who care about my loved ones.”
“Miss Ida, this whole town is your ‘loved one.’”
She nodded, again. “But some people in it are special. And you’re one of those people.”
“No, I’m not. But Rob is. I’ve tried to find someone to love besides him. Lor’, you know I like men. I’ve dated. I’ve gotten close to picking out Mr. Permanent a time or two, but in the end I always pull back and say No. Miss Ida, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life grieving over Rob. What am I going to do?”
“First of all, never stop believing that there’s someone special out that for you. Someone who is meant to be loved by you even more than you love Rob. Someone who will love you back the same way. Someone who will take the hurt away. Keep looking. And always believe. Then you’ll be open and ready when your own special person finds you—and you find him.”
“I’ll never tell Rob I love him. He’ll never hear it. I swear. I won’t embarrass him that way. But I just had to tell you. In case you ever need to remember how wonderful he is, how brave and noble and—if you ever need to hear somebody say how wonderful your son is, I’ll be right here to say it—oh, Lor’, I’m just babbling, and I know none of this makes any sense right now but it will pretty soon, and oh, I’m just trying . . . Miss Ida . . . whatever happens today, please don’t forget he’s a wonderful person.”
I clamped my lips together so tightly I tasted the raspberry flavor of my lipstick on the tip of my tongue. I’d said too much, or not enough. Miss Ida studied me the way a mother cat studies a wayward kitten—for a second, I didn’t know if she would nuzzle me or cuff my ear. Then she reached out one strong, graceful hand, stroked the side of my face with just her fingertips, and whispered, “Don’t worry. I know everything.”
I know everything?
I gaped at her and took a step back. She nodded, but didn’t say another word. She knew everything—everything. “Everything?” I asked sickly.
She nodded. “Everything.”
She knew what Rob had done, about what we planned to say, and maybe more than that. I was so addled my imagination took off. Maybe she knew everything that happened in Mossy Creek behind closed doors or outside them. Maybe she knew the past, present and future. Maybe even what people thought without saying it. What people did without doing anything.
Maybe she was the gypsy fortune-teller come to life.
And then, it hit me. She was. “You sent the old gypsy fortune telling machine to the party on New Year’s Eve.” My voice shook.
She nodded. “I found it in an Atlanta antique store last year. I sent it to the town in the hope it would scare the truth out of everyone. So far, it has.”
My mouth popped open. I stared at her. “But . . . but you acted so surprised. You made us all think—”
“If people suspected I was the one who sent the gypsy, it would have ruined the sinister effect.”
“But . . . what now?”
Her expression turned sly and proud. “Let’s just say the rest of the truth is in the gypsy’s cards.” She nodded to someone behind me. “Take it up on stage, boys. We’re ready to start.”
I whirled as several men carried the mechanical gypsy up on the speakers’ platform. The crowd saw it and went quiet. People stopped whatever they were doing and began to gather before the platform. They looked from the carnival machine to Mayor Ida and back to the fortune-teller.
On the sidelines, Ham Bigelow began to frown. He looked back over his shoulder at his blocked limo. Sandy waved at him merrily from beside the Mossy Creek patrol car.
Five thousand Creekites, past and present, waited for the future to be told.
I clutched my chest. My heart thudded against my hands. “Miss Ida, what’re you planning to do?”
“Nothing. Just watch.”
“But—”
“Good afternoon, friends and neighbors and family.” Rob’s voice. I whirled back toward the stage. Carrying a microphone, he walked up to the podium with Hank behind him, both of them as solemn as preachers. Rob beckoned me with a regretful but resigned look.
I hurried through the crowd.
“I’ve asked the mayor, my mother,” Rob went on, “to let me have the podium this afternoon. There’s something I need to tell you all about the night of the fire that burned down Mossy Creek High. I wish I were up here to tell this story alone and take full responsibility, but Dr. Blackshear and Rainey Ann Cecil won’t let me do that. So here they are, too.”
I bounded up the platform steps. Rob and Hank made a place for me between them. I stood there with as much dignity as I could muster, feeling an invisible noose go around my neck and theirs. The Ten Cent Gypsy sat next to us in her rusty metal booth, looking weird and stern. Down in the crowd, people traded bewildered glances.
Rob began, “Twenty years ago, with the best intentions but the worst common sense, my friends and I burned down Mossy Creek High School.”
Five thousand hearts stopped. The silence of that many people, all staring at us, seemed a wall of rejection, to me.
Then a strong male voice rang out. “No, you didn’t.”
John Bigelow stepped forward. You could have knocked me over with a feather. He looked up at the three of us sadly, then climbed the platform steps and stood beside us. Even Rob looked speechless. John took the microphone out of his hand. “You and Hank and Rainey couldn’t have burned down the high school.” He paused. “Because I did it.”
Shouts of dismay and cries of misery went up from the crowd. People were finally beginning to find their voices. A wave of whispers rose and fell.
Rob shook his head. “John, I put bolt cutters to the elephant’s chain. I can’t be sure, but I tried to cut it, and I must have. That’s the reason Rose was able to break her chain when the ram spooked her. Hank, Rainey, and I didn’t intend to set her loose to do any damage, and the last thing we expected was for her to head inside the front doors of the school—”
“She got loose because someone jimmied the padlock that held her chain around the bumper of her owner’s camper. I know.” He paused. “Because I’m the one who did that. Would you like to hear the whole story?”
Rob nodded.
John Bigelow took the podium and faced the crowd.
* * * *
Twenty years ago, when John Bigelow was a senior at Bigelow High School, he’d been elected president of the Fang and Claw Society. The society was only a dangerous, whispered legend by then—which made the boys at Bigelow High want to be part of it even more. Most of them never stood a chance.
The Fang and Claw members came from wealthy, namesake Bigelow clans. Hamilton Bigelow himself had been the last official president of the Fang and Claw before it was drummed out of sight, and every boy wanted to mimic Ham. He was rich, he was good-looking, he did whatever he wanted and always had. By 1981, he was running for his first term as a state senator—only 26-years old and already
planning his political dynasty. When he wasn’t getting his handsome Bigelowan face in the news, he was off skiing in the Rockies or snorkling in the Carribean or chasing various Southern beauty queens—Miss Lawson County Laurel Princess and Miss Greater Delmar Foxfire Queen before he married Miss Blue Ridge. Though nearly ten years out of high school, he was still the Big Man On Campus to wannabe Fang and Clawsters.
And he was John Bigelow’s first cousin.
“I was told that I had big shoes to fill, and it would take a big demonstration of courage and loyalty on my part to raise my name to the level of honor all the past presidents had achieved,” John told the reunion crowd. “A group of alumni blindfolded me in the middle of the night and took me into the woods to meet someone they called The Trouble Master. I never saw his face. He stood in the shadows. Wearing a Nixon mask. I didn’t recognize his voice, either. I think he disguised it.
“He told me I had to win back the honor Bigelow High had lost over the years to Mossy Creek. He said he wanted the Creekites to never forget their homecoming game with Bigelow that year. He told me it was my job to single-handedly kidnap the Mossy Creek mascot and bring that mascot to him before the game started. He said I’d get further instructions when I did.
“It wasn’t easy, but I managed to get Samson out of his pen at Mossy Creek High and hide him in a truck on a street near the school. During the first quarter of the homecoming game, The Trouble Master showed up at the truck. It was dark, and he was still wearing the Nixon mask, and he didn’t let me get too close. He said, ‘I’ll take over from here. You only have to perform two more duties: Go unchain the carnival elephant, wait in the bushes until halftime, and when you see Samson run out of the stadium, shoo him toward the elephant.’
“None of that sounded wise to me—someone could get hurt—and I nearly told The Trouble Master I wouldn’t do it, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the courage to tell him no. So I left Samson with him and slipped into the parking lot of Mossy Creek High, where the carnival was set up. I managed to break the lock on the elephant’s chain but left the chain looped so no one would notice. Then I hid in the bushes and waited for halftime.
“I never dreamed The Trouble Master would do what he did. Cover Samson in sparklers and set him on fire. When Samson came running through the darkness, I think I was more scared of him than he was of me. I stepped out of the bushes and just stood there, but it was enough to make Samson charge the other way—straight for the elephant. The elephant panicked, pulled its chain free, and ran for the nearest hiding place. Which happened to be right through the front doors of the high school.
“When I saw the first flames inside the windows I wanted to die. I was still just standing there in shock when the first people ran up from the stadium. I joined in. No one ever wondered why I was already there. No one asked what a student from Bigelow was doing lurking right outside Mossy Creek High when the fire started that night. Because I was a good guy who would never have risked hurting anyone or deliberately setting a fire. Because I was John Bigelow. Because I was crying as I helped fight the fire.
“And no one thought a Bigelow could cry if he was guilty. Only if he was caught.”
John cleared his throat then took a moment to swallow hard and wipe a hand over his eyes. He wasn’t the only one. Half the crowd was in tears, and the other half weren’t sure whether they were mad or just grateful to finally know the truth. “Last winter, when the Ten Cent Gypsy showed up in Mossy Creek, I knew someone was determined to find the truth, and I decided I had to help expose that truth—even if it included me. I’ve lived with a lot of guilt for the past two decades, but I’ve told myself I was only doing what I was instructed to do that night, and so I convinced myself it wasn’t my duty to take all the blame. So I . . . attempted to keep my cover but help the investigation.” He looked down at Sandy Crane. “I sent you the anonymous note about Rose’s burial place. I hired private investigators to check with small circuses all over the country for evidence that she’d been sold somewhere. I had a feeling that she’d been disguised. I was right.”
He stood silent for another long moment, clearing his throat, obviously struggling with emotion. Sue Ora and Will held hands and cried. He looked down at them with a heartbreaking return of their love. “I can’t be a father and a husband,” he said gruffly, “unless I’m willing to take responsibility for the fire like a man. So now I plan to walk over to the Mossy Creek jail and turn myself in,” he said. “Amos? I’m sorry your father didn’t get the honor of arresting me and booking me for arson, but—”
“Now just hold on, John.” Ham strode up on stage, red-faced and a little antsy but very much in command. He clapped a hand on his younger cousin’s shoulder the way a minister lays a healing palm on a sinner. In a way, he subtly sealed John’s guilt by focusing everyone’s blame on John as a pitiful sinner. “As head of the Bigelow family, and your elder cousin, I have to suggest that you’re under tremendous stress and not thinking clearly. I see no need—and I’m sure these kindly Creekites, my own mother’s beloved people—will agree—I see no need for a member of the Bigelow family to publicly throw himself into the arms of the law over a twenty-year-old mistake. Come down from here, Cousin John. I’ll escort you and your family to my mother’s house in Bigelow, and we’ll get you calmed down and decide whether you’ve condemned yourself unfairly, and from a legal standpoint, not in an appropriate—”
“Oh, no you don’t. Because we know who Nixon was.”
Ham froze. The crackly little lady voice came from the sidelines. Miss Millicent and Miss Eula Mae stood by their lawnchairs.
“I stole the mask from its owner that night,” Miss Millicent added.
“I saw her,” Miss Eula Mae put in. “And I saw him, too. Me and Millicent been sitting on what we know like hens on eggs. Now my butt hurts, and I’m tired of sitting. Tired of worrying about the trouble it’ll cause to tell the truth, too. Show everybody the mask, Sandy.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Grinning, Sandy bounded up on the platform with a paper bag. “Your Trouble Master wore this very one,” she said to John. With a flourish, she pulled out a dusty, bedraggled Nixon Halloween mask.
“Now, see here, this is a ridiculous bit of so-called evidence against some poor soul—” Ham began.
“Let’s see if the gypsy fortune-teller agrees with you, Ham,” Mayor Ida said. During the distraction she’d sidled up on the stage—prowled up, might be the better word. And so had Amos.
Silence. Five thousand people stared at the machine, at Mayor Ida, at John and Sandy and Amos and Millicent and Eula Mae and Rob and Hank and me. And at the governor, who stood there with an expression that said his eyes wouldn’t quite focus and he might need one of Eula Mae’s Depends at any second.
“Through the concerted efforts of this dedicated group of Creekites,” Mayor Ida said, “we now know who was behind the plot that caused the fire. One person, and one person only, deserves to be blamed. The Trouble Master. That person’s real name is on the next card in the fortune-teller’s hand. Governor, would you do the honors?”
Ham twitched like someone had just plugged a high-power electrical line to his tender parts. “Mayor . . . Aunt Ida . . . I certainly want to expose this criminal as much as any of you, but as a servant of the people and a servant of the laws of the people, I have to say we can’t risk vigilante justice. Americans—” he intoned loudly and dramatically—“are innocent until proven guilty.”
“Proving his guilt shouldn’t be a problem,” Mayor Ida said, smiling. “We have amassed considerable other evidence, Governor.” Ham’s eyes went even glassier. He stared at her. She kept smiling. “But why don’t you just take a look at the name on the card and then . . . well, we’ll abide by your decision whether to announce that name or not. Amos? Will you start the process?”
“My pleasure,” the chief said. Amos walked over, flipping a silver dime in his hand, his eyes never leaving the governor’s face. If a coin flip can demonstrate cold, calm menace,
Amos managed to do that. “I brought a dime from my father’s coin collection,” he said. “I think Battle would appreciate the symbolism of dropping his own dime on the person who burned down the high school.”
Amos smiled thinly as he deposited the coin in the fortune-teller.
The machine whirred, the machine clicked, and slowly, the plastic, painted hoochie raised her damaged plastic hand with its accusing fist. A crisp white card popped out of the slot in her palm.
“Governor?” Mayor Ida said and handed the card to Ham. “Your choice.”
He held the little card by his fingertips. I saw his Adam’s apple bob above the white collar of his expensive shirt and the knot of his silk tie. He slowly looked down at the card. A fine tremor shivered his hands. His face turned redder than it already was. Beads of sweat broke on his forehead.
We all waited with held breath.
“The name is . . . the name is. . . .” He swayed in place, then suddenly, as if some idea suddenly rooted him to solid earth, again, he went very still. His head snapped up. He looked out over the crowd with stately indignation.
“The name is too evil to speak!” He jabbed the card inside the breast pocket of his sleek gray suit and planted his hand over it for safe-keeping. “But I promise you all, my fellow Creekites, my fellow Georgians, my fellow Americans, that justice will be done!”
Mayor Ida leaned close, her smile so catty and so hungry he might as well have been a small, squeaking mouse. “But how will we stand it if you don’t share the name, Governor? What could you possibly say to us that will calm us down?”
“The name,” people called. “The name, Governor! Tell us whose name is on the card! Tell us who was behind the burning of our school!”
Ham gulped. “Now, now, that kind of impulsive announcement would not serve justice. No, I have a duty to see that this matter is handled fairly and properly—and I have a duty to see that these festivities are not ruined by a public . . . well, a public . . .”
“Ass whupping?” Mayor Ida inserted helpfully.
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