Reunion at Mossy Creek Read online

  REUNION AT MOSSY CREEK

  A Collective Novel by

  Deborah Smith, Sandra Chastain, Debra Dixon, Virginia Ellis, Nancy Knight, Martha Shields, Carolyn McSparren, Dee Sterling, Carmen Green, and Sharon Sala

  Praise for Mossy Creek—

  “Delightful”

  —Georgia First Lady Marie Barnes

  “Marvelous”

  —New York Times Bestselling Author Betina Krahn

  “Hilarious”

  —USA Today Bestselling Author Pamela Morsi

  “Unique and Wonderful”

  —Romantic Times

  “Wraps the reader in a cozy quilt”

  —Southern Scribe Reviews

  “The kind of town where everyone

  wishes they could live”

  —New York Times Bestselling Author

  Debbie Macomber

  “Warmhearted”

  —Cleveland (TN) Daily Banner

  Copyright

  Disclaimer:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used ficticiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  BelleBooks

  PO Box 67

  Smyrna, GA 30081

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from our readers. You can contact us at [email protected] Please visit our website at www.BelleBooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-935661-02-3

  Copyright 2002 BelleBooks, Inc.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

  Cover art - Gypsy © Typogigo | istock.com, Cards © GOL | fotolia.com

  Back Cover Photo - © Jeff Kinsey | fotolia.com

  Cover Design - Martha Crockett

  Mossy Creek Map: Dino Fritz

  REUNION AT MOSSY CREEK

  About Mossy Creek and its Authors

  Welcome back to Mossy Creek!

  We’re so pleased to hear from readers who love our wise, warm, wonderful Southern village. This time, we invite you to enjoy the voices of some new writers who adore Mossy Creek as much as we do. They’re all enthusiastic members of the “Mossy Creek Storytelling Club,” with one goal in mind—to share a funny, thoughtful, and uplifting view of life in the little town we’d all like to call home.

  Joining us for Reunion At Mossy Creek are five acclaimed authors whose tales are sure to win your hearts. Martha Shields is both an award-winning novelist and a new partner in BelleBooks. Sharon Sala is a USA Today and New York Times best-selling author of 42 books. Carmen Green, Carolyn McSparren, and Dee Sterling are all well-known and respected authors with nearly two-dozen published novels between them. As an added treat we want you to meet Bubba Rice, the alter ego of down-home Tennessee chef, Wayne Dixon. Starting with Reunion At Mossy Creek, Wayne, aka Bubba Rice, will be sharing a few of his favorite recipes—and his own smile-inducing philosophy of life and food—with readers.

  We’re thrilled to introduce those new citizens of Mossy Creek, and we’re sure you’ll enjoy the love, laughter, and wisdom they have to offer along with those of the characters you’ve already come to know. Thank you all for your tremendous support and enthusiasm. The Mossy Creek series has been received with enthusiasm beyond our fondest hopes. We owe it all to you the readers, booksellers, and librarians who have taken our town into your lives and made it your own.

  A special thanks to Fred Rawlinson and Laura Austin for all their support, help and brushstrokes. We also want to thank our copyeditor, Maureen Hardegree, for keeping track of the many details of life in Mossy Creek, our friend and author Dee Sterling for her excellent editorial help, and our friend Anne Bishop for her wise, witty advice.

  Map of Mossy Creek

  The Mossy Creek Gazette

  215 Main Street • Mossy Creek, Georgia

  From the Desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager

  To: Lady Victoria Salter Stanhope Cornwall, England

  Dear Vick:

  “Katie Bell,” I ask myself as we start a year that will end with the biggest school reunion in Mossy Creek history, “do you need to write about the Ten Cent Gypsy the town got from an anonymous troublemaker on New Year’s Eve, or do you need to write about the reunion, or do you need to write about what people are really discussing: Are we finally going to learn who burned down Mossy Creek High School twenty years ago?”

  Well, all three. Because the return of the Ten Cent Gypsy, the reunion, and the fire are part of the same mystery.

  The fire has become as much a part of our town’s heritage as the pioneer feud between Mossy Creek and Bigelow nearly 150 years ago, when as you and I know, Vick, Isabella Salter disappeared after jilting her Bigelow fiancé and married Richard Stanhope, an Englishman who was here to work as a land surveyor. I figure it was my duty to help you solve the Salter/Stanhope mystery, and it’s my duty to solve this new mystery, too.

  Since nobody confessed to the fire twenty years ago, and it doesn’t look as if anyone’s going to step forward to confess sending the gypsy on New Year’s Eve, I’ve decided to send out some surveys and see if I can get Creekites to reveal what they know. Of course, I have to be sly about it so I won’t scare off the culprits, so I’m focusing on some innocent-sounding reunion questions.

  See, I just know Creekites will wander off on tangents and tell stories about other things going on in their lives to try and distract me, because Creekites love a good story over telling the painful truth. But I’m going to ask them, anyway. Even if they don’t answer, it’ll get them talking. To show what a good sport I am, I’ll tell them I intend to answer the survey, too. But I’m only sharing my real answers with you, Vick. Do you honestly think I’d let my whole town know all about me, the gossip queen? No way.

  The first survey question is, What do reunions mean to me?

  Do I answer that question honestly? Do I say that until I went to work for Sue Ora Salter Bigelow here at the newspaper I believed I was a nobody with nothing to make me special?

  The Bigelow High School annual called me the Perkiest Student in the Senior Class. But perky can also mean annoying, a pain in the neck. When Sue Ora Salter Bigelow hired me, she gave me permission to be really perky. So I’m perky and important. People come to me. They want the inside information on what’s going on in Mossy Creek. As for the reunion, do I want to go? You bet I do. I want all those out-of-towners who don’t know how important I’ve become to find out that I’m a local celebrity not that I’m in the least conceited about that.

  When I look at the vacant lot where Mossy Creek High stood until the mysterious fire twenty years ago, I think, What a waste. People get attached to a place and its past, but Creekites pay homage more than most. That isn’t a bad thing; it’s more of a promise. We don’t destroy you because you are no longer of use. We wrap you in memories and keep you here.

  Next question: Do I have a hurtful, public humiliation in my past?

  All right, I was jilted on the night of the senior prom at Bigelow High. Everyone knows us Creekite kids had a rough time attending Bigelow after Mossy Creek High burned down. I say it doesn’t matter any more. But it does.

  On to question three: What was the one thing that happened to you in high school that made you what you are today?

  Well, I’ve already confessed. Being stood up for that prom. I decided then that I’d find a way to make the world notice me. Being the business manager and gossip columnist for the paper may be a small thing in the scheme of things but it gives me prestige. And guess what I finally figured out that the power I have heals more than my own wounds. There
are a lot of people in the world like me, and I can slant the news any way I choose, to help them out.

  If I can just solve the fire, reunion, and New Year’s Eve mystery of the Ten Cent Gypsy, I can help the whole town and maybe win a Pulitzer Prize. Hey, stranger things happen all the time...in Mossy Creek.

  Read on, Vick, and you’ll see what I mean.

  RAINEY

  Maybe beauty is only skin deep, but our memories of childhood can’t always be made pretty and pink.

  RAINEY

  The Ten Cent Gypsy

  Reunions. Lor’. Nothing but trouble. Everyone in Mossy Creek was excited about the next fall’s big celebration except me. I knew the truth. The secret of who caused the fire. And that secret would tangle my town’s memories and sorrows worse than a cheap perm.

  The mysterious gift Mossy Creek got on New Year’s Eve haunted my dreams at night, driving out fond favorites where I’m doing Wynona Judd’s hair backstage at the Grammy awards and Hank Williams, Junior, walks into the dressing room to introduce me to Elvis. Young Elvis, not Las Vegas Elvis.

  No more good dreams like that, no. In the weeks since New Year’s, the `gift’ had been all people could talk about in Mossy Creek, and all my nightmares were filled with it. Mayor Ida ordered the thing set inside the lobby of city hall. “The gift,” Mayor Ida announced, “was sent to us as a taunt. It belongs to the town ,and the town has to deal with it.” Mayor Ida dares people to come forward and confess what they know about the night Mossy Creek High School burned to the ground twenty years ago. I agree with the mayor’s plan in principle. That night represented one of the darkest unsolved mysteries of our town’s history, and, some would say, the darkest secrets of our own hearts.

  Including mine.

  Early this morning, I bundled up in my favorite pink ski jacket and my pink jeans and set out to look the past square in its dark, plastic eyes. Thirty-four years old and scared of a fake fortuneteller. Lor’, the embarrassment. I put on pink blush and pink lipstick and even did my nails pink. Pink is a happy color, and though people often think I’m just a good ol’ girl with tacky taste, I considered myself a sophisticated pink good ol’ girl. With tacky pink taste.

  I trudged up Main Street on that cold January morning, blowing frosty breaths and keeping my head down. I even waved off Jayne Reynolds at The Naked Bean when she appeared in the coffee shop doorway and held out my favorite pink mug full of latte. I just shook my head. Jayne looked at me kind of funny. Everyone was looking at me kind of funny since I’d blurted out that “I only mixed the perm, I didn’t put it on her,” comment at the New Year’s Eve party, when we opened the crate and saw the Gypsy inside.

  For the past two weeks, I’d laughed off the moment and told everyone I was just drunk on Irish Ringers, a hot whiskey-and-cranberry drink Michael Conners invented at the pub. But no one has forgotten what I said.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Jayne called out, wrapping her pregnant self in one of Ingrid Beechum’s baby blankets. “You look pale, Rainey.”

  Pale? I whipped out my compact and added a dab more pink powder to each cheek. Lor’, even my pinkness was failing me.

  “I’m not pale,” I called. “I’m chilly.”

  I made myself keep walking. Mossy Creek Town Hall loomed ahead of me like a temple of doom, though it was the friendliest government building you can imagine, with a lot of natural stonework and warm oak timbers. The Mossy Creek Garden Club kept up the front terrace, so even in the cold dead of winter there was a neat bed of pinebark mulch around the big mountain laurels and a few dozen pansy seedlings poking their tough green leaves out from under dwarf azaleas that would bloom a soft watermelon color in springtime. I brushed a hand over one of those bare azaleas for courage just before I opened the lobby door. I thought of all the good intentions Mother Nature hides inside a plain wood stem. I tried to think of my innocence that way, too.

  No sooner had the glass door swung shut behind me than I saw the object of my misery. It sat in the middle of the lobby, which is ordinarily a sweet and inviting place. Creekites go into the lobby of town hall to read the community bulletin boards. Not to be confronted with the guilty mistakes of their pasts.

  I stopped like a squirrel trapped in front of an oncoming truck. Just stopped, my heart pounding in my throat the same way it did that night at the Hamilton House Inn, when Dan MacNeil opened the crate.

  The Ten Cent Gypsy looked back at me.

  She hadn’t had an easy life, wherever she’d been stored over the past twenty years. Her metal carnival booth was all dented up and a little rusted. The gypsy herself stared back at me through a windowless opening in the booth’s top half. I told myself she was still just a mannequin, hell, not even a full-length mannequin, because her waist disappeared in an apron of ratty, fake-red silk bunched up on a rusty metal shelf. Her paint was old, and her plastic face needed a good makeover. Fuzzy-curly black synthetic hair hung in tangles from beneath a dusty scarf tied around her forehead. Somebody had spilled something greasy on her puffy red blouse, and half the beads in her flashy arm bracelets were missing. She was missing a forefinger on her card hand, and she needed a manicure.

  “You don’t scare me,” I lied loudly. “Just you do your job and provoke somebody to tell the truth about that fire, so me and Hank Blackshear and Rob Walker can finally clear our consciences. We didn’t cause the fire.” I paused, feeling sick at my stomach with doubts that had gnawed at me for twenty years. “And even if we did, we didn’t mean to. You hear?”

  She stared back like the silent dead. My eyes went to the little slot below the window. The instructions were still simple:

  Put in 10 cents and pull the lever.

  If you dare.

  “You’re all brag and bad eye shadow. Haven’t got a single card left in your system, I bet.”

  I jabbed a dime into the slot, grabbed the rusty lever on the booth’s right side, and jerked it down. The mechanical innards whirred and clicked, and suddenly the gypsy’s dusty card hand began to rise. I took a step back. The gypsy’s stiff arm went up and up until the hand with its missing forefinger was pointing right at me, or sort of, anyway, considering the pointing finger was busted off. It was like she was shaking her fist at me, instead. I looked at the slot in the hand’s palm, and, Lor’! A little card popped out.

  I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to touch that card. Finally, I thrust out a hand and snatched the card by my fingertips.

  THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD.

  I jammed the card in my pocket then made myself walk out of the building with a calm face. My knees were weak. I trembled. When I got back to my salon, I locked the door and sat stiffly in one of my styling chairs. In the mirrors parading down one faux-pink-marble wall, I saw my scared and guilty and sad face from a dozen angles.

  It was going to be a long year in Mossy Creek, with a lot of nail-biting and second-guessing and gossiping and maneuvering for answers to a question that had haunted us for twenty years. Who had burned down Mossy Creek High School?

  I still didn’t have the courage to admit what I knew.

  KATIE BELL

  My Detective Work Begins To Pay Off

  Rainey came to me with her survey answers, but to tell you the truth, they weren’t worth reading—she’d just written a lot cute little pleasantries that weren’t the least bit revealing. So I said, casually, “I heard you went to see the Ten Cent Gypsy. Sandy Crane spotted you coming out of town hall with one of the cards in your hand. Anything interesting on it?”

  And Rainey jumped. Aha.

  Rainey’s the kind of woman who’s never quite gotten past things that happened to her as a kid, so she rushes back to her childhood friends when she’s upset. I could go into specifics, but I won’t, other than to mention that I’m one of the few people who know she’s been in love with Rob Walker, the mayor’s son, for over twenty years.

  “I didn’t get any card from the Gypsy,” she lied. “Sandy’s mistaken.”

  “Oh, well, I was
just curious.” I filed her little lie for future consideration. “It’ll be interesting to see how that gypsy provokes people’s attitudes around here. The effect’s already noticeable, you know.”

  “How do you mean?” she asked in a nervous voice.

  “The examination of personal secrets and truths has begun. You’ll see. Roots are coming to the surface.”

  Rainey touched her hair as if calculating her next dye job. “Not mine.”

  I smiled. Everyone has to take care of his or her roots, and sometimes that means burying them too deep for the world to touch.

  On that terrible night in Mossy Creek twenty years ago, I watched the fire destroy my alma mater and cried like everyone else in town.

  Did you know that the Miss Mossy Creek Pageant was discontinued the year after the school burned? The only contest left for our girls was the Miss Bigelow County Pageant. The last holder of the Miss Mossy Creek title was LuLynn Lipscomb, now married and known as LuLynn McClure. Her nineteen-year-old daughter, Josie, competed gallantly in last year’s Miss Bigelow pageant, trying to uphold her family’s honor and Mossy Creek’s, too. Poor Josie. I don’t think napkin arranging qualifies as a talent, even in Mossy Creek.

  But that’s an observation I’ll just keep to myself.

  It’s always the quiet girls who are up to something secret and shocking. But what do you do when you’ve fallen in love, and everybody needs to know it?

  JOSIE

  JOSIE

  The Eye of the Beholder

  I saw Katie Bell’s survey in the paper. I even wrote out some answers. I just never sent them in. Nobody would’ve expected me to, anyway, if they’d thought about it. I’m not expected to do anything well. Not anymore. But here are my answers.