At Home in Mossy Creek Read online

  Anyhow, it all started last weekend. I was planning a romantic pre-Valentine’s weekend dinner with Jess, to get him primed for Valentine’s Day this weekend, so I got a double takeout order. Then, just after I’d finished setting the table with my best wedding china, Jess called to say he was spending the weekend in the woods. Can you imagine? And he didn’t even ask me to go camping with him. He said he had to get off by himself.

  I found myself wondering if Julie Honeycutt was the outdoorsy type, but I slammed the door of my mind shut on that thought. I was not going to go there.

  So I ate those burritos all by my lonesome and read that Mars and Venus book. The most interesting thing I learned is that men, bless their sports-obsessed little hearts, are all about keeping score. That means that if they take out the garbage without being asked, they feel like they have scored a point, and you owe them. And if you fix their favorite meal, it means you just evened the score. In their warped minds, if they run up the score on you, they feel like they have a right to get all mopey and resentful.

  Now, my Jess is just a big sweet teddy bear. Thirty-something years old and dependable as grits. He’s never had a mopey and resentful day in his life. Me, on the other hand, now that’s another story. I’ve been out of sorts for a while now, not to mention hungry. I’ve been craving those new burritos like nobody’s business, and I don’t have the frame to carry around the extra pounds. I’m no bigger than a washing of soap, as my granny used to say. My khaki uniform pants are getting tight. I figure by giving my husband all the space he needs, I’m running up the score on him, at least. And he owes me, big time.

  My cell phone rang and I flipped it open. “Babe,” Jess began. I must say his voice still put a little thrill through me even though I had been peeved with him lately. “I got tomorrow off, so I’m going to go camping again tonight and tomorrow night, but I’ll be back for Valentine’s Day on Sunday. I haven’t forgotten our special date.” I took a deep breath. “Sandy, are you there?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Look, I gotta go.”

  “Duty calls, eh? I hope you’re not having to respond to a dangerous situation.”

  I thought about the volatile mixture of a bus breakdown in the middle of rush hour on a cold mountain night—not that we had much of a rush hour in Mossy Creek, where we can paint a clean white stripe down the center of a busy road and it’ll dry before the next car comes along—though this breakdown included not just circus people but foreign circus people, and a neurotic, peeing Chihuahua. Okay, no, it was not exactly big city crime fare. Amos, who had worked the mean streets of Atlanta as a detective before moving back home to be Mossy Creek’s police chief, was probably bored by the whole thing. “Not really dangerous, no,” I said shortly.

  “Okay then, you go get ’em, girl,” Jess said, ignoring my peevish tone. I flipped the phone closed. My Jess is a reporter at the Mossy Creek Gazette and writes scary novels on the side. He hasn’t sold one yet, but he’s got loads of talent, and he works hard. As soon as he gets home from work he sits down at the computer in the living room and writes until midnight. Lately I’ve started to get lonesome even though he’s sitting right there.

  It’s not like me to be needy, honest. I just don’t know what’s gotten into me lately. Besides five pounds of Bubba Rice burritos, that is.

  I WAS ON THE scene of the bus breakdown within minutes. Mutt had summed up the situation right well. Chaos. Various Creekites had parked their cars and pick-ups along the road and stood gawking. A big tractor-trailer was parked forlornly behind the busted bus. CIRQUE D’EUROPA was scrolled in large, florid lettering across the side of the trailer and the bus, too. There were more circus performers wandering around the wintry brown roadside than Carter had liver pills. A few of the acrobats were practicing their back flips to stay warm against the afternoon chill, I guess, and I’ll be a suck-egg mule if they weren’t locomoting exactly like chickens with their heads cut off.

  I should know, since the earliest chore of my recollection involved helping my grandma with the chicken dinner. She would wring the chicken’s neck, chop off its head and go back in the kitchen to get on with the rest of the cooking. My job was to stand by the chopping block to keep the barn cats off the chickens until the carcasses stopped flopping. A grisly chore for a five-year-old, I know, but you have to start earning your dumplings sooner or later. When you are raised up in the countryside around Mossy Creek, you are not coddled for long.

  I approached the circus bus from the back end of the broad side, and I saw a swarthy man draw back with a knife big enough to skin a mule. A woman screamed to my left and when I turned I saw a petite but buxom brunette standing in front of a six-foot-tall board with a huge bull’s-eye. Several knives protruded from the board in the vicinity of her head.

  Boy, Mutt wasn’t kidding; tempers were getting short. In an instant I drew my service revolver drawn and pointed at his head. “Put down the knife, sir. Now,” I hissed. He dropped the knife out to his side and raised his hands in the air.

  “Do not make shooting of my husband!” squealed the target in an accent that reminded me of Natasha Fatale on the Bullwinkle cartoons. “He ees but practicing throwing of knives!”

  “Oui, oui,” said another woman, clutching her heart. Her sweatshirt was embroidered with her name with a dagger through it. Monique. She must be a knife thrower, too. Oui? Even I know what that means in French. But it was also what Bob the Chihuahua did as I glanced over at the acrobats. Bob went oui-oui on an acrobat’s foot.

  “Sorry,” I said, lowering my weapon. “I didn’t see the target for the bus.” A little embarrassed, I pointed to the direction from where I had come. “But that’s kinda worrisome.” Laying on the frostbitten winter grass was a flat, open case jam-packed with wicked-sharp blades.

  The man put his hands down but didn’t seem much relieved. “Mariska, are you goink to stand in front of board or are you not?”

  “And wind up a kebab?” She gestured at the pattern of knives where her head had been. “No, tank you!”

  “You coward!”

  “You amateur!”

  “Whoa, whoa,” I yelled, waving my gun. “No name callin’!”

  Mutt appeared by my side. “I called you here to calm ’em down, not shoot ’em.”

  I ignored him and holstered my weapon. “What’s with these two?”

  “As near as I can figure, these here have a knife throwing act. He’s the throw-er and she’s the throw-ee.” He pointed at the other woman. “And she’s an assistant.”

  “I picked up on that much.” I muttered.

  “Only the main throw-ee don’t want to stand in front of the knives no more. I don’t know what the problem is, but the woman, Quinn James, who runs the circus said if they don’t straighten out their act by the time the bus gets fixed, he’s going to leave them on the side of the road.”

  I tried to imagine the two knife-wielding foreigners trying to hitch-hike out of town. My other brother Boo, who’s a paramedic, would have to save some poor old farmer from cardiac arrest. “We can’t have that,” I said.

  “Dang tootin’. Why don’t you see what you can do? And while you’re at it, find them a place to spend the night. The Hamilton Inn is full up ‘cause of a Valentine weekend promotion. So me and the chief are lining up volunteers with spare bedrooms.”

  Mutt walked away and Bob the Chihuahua skittered up to sniff at the swarthy knife-thrower’s feet.

  “Giant, urinating rat has returned!” the woman yelled. “Keel eet!”

  Her husband obediently went for his knife again, so I scooped up the trembling rat—I mean, uh, Bob—and scratched him between the ears. The look of revulsion on the faces of the two Europeans nearly made me laugh. “This is not a rat. This is an expensive Mexican house dog.”

  “You are keeding me,” the man said.

  “Nope,” I s
aid.

  “Thees rat-dog is most unpleasant,” the woman said.

  “Oui,” Monique added.

  “You’re telling that right,” I agreed. Bob wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for his nerves, but as it was, he could be the poster dog for doggie Prozac.

  “In my country, dogs are large and powerful beasts good for tracking and hunting.”

  “Well, this one here is good for nothing except yipping and peeing.”

  “Bob, there you are!” Mayor Ida’s Scottish housekeeper, June, ran up and grabbed the dog from me. “The mayor is babysitting him for Ingrid. I turned my back and he was out the veranda door. I don’t know how he got this far. Ock.”

  Me neither. Hamilton Farm, Mayor Ida’s place, was a good mile off the main road. I eyed the knife throwers darkly. “Bob must’ve smelled blood.”

  June cuddled Bob to her thick winter coat and scurried away.

  I turned back to the knife act. “I’m Officer Sandy Crane of the Mossy Creek Police Department. What’s the trouble here? Anything I can help with?”

  “My name is Sergei and this ees my wife, Mariska,” the man said. He handed me a business card with a picture of the two of them standing in front of the bull’s eye. Their last name was totally unpronounceable, made up as it was of all consonants. Vanna, buy me a vowel.

  “Our problems are not a matter for the constabulary,” he said.

  Mariska glared at him as she crossed her arms over her ample chest. “At least not unteel you pierce my flesh with one of those blades,” she said, inclining her head toward the knife collection. “When I am dead, you vill have no shortage of weemen lined up to take my place.”

  “Mais non,” Monique said urgently, pointing at herself and shaking her head. “Non!”

  French for, Not me, not in this lifetime, buddy.

  Sergei turned to me, looking pained. “I gave up career as lion tamer, just so we could start act together,” he said. He was a tall man, handsome in the way of old-time movie stars. His hair and mustache were inky black, his eyes dark and deep with emotion. Somebody needed to tell him to go easy on the hair product, though.

  “He got shut down by animal rights activeests,” Mariska said. “I was hees assistant in dat act as well. It was I who gave up stardom as aerialist to go with heem so we could make new act and new life together. He promised me moon and stars! But instead we wind up in tiny troupe traveling United of States in bus. And now we are stuck een middle of nowhere beset by giant peeing dog-rats!” Mariska let loose with a sob and hid her face with the backs of her hands. Monique patted her shoulder sympathetically.

  What a couple of drama queens. I thought about the prospect of letting two knife-fighting foreigners share my guest bedroom while Jess snoozed by a cozy campfire somewhere in the woods.

  “Get your things and come with me,” I told them. “I’m taking you to jail. Monique, I’ll find you someplace else to stay.”

  “What? But we haf done nutting!” Sergei cried.

  “Simmer down. I’m just taking you there so there’ll be a roof over your head tonight.”

  “Eet has come to dis,” Mariska grumbled. “I should have listened to my old babushka. She always said to me, Mariska, these one weel come to no good. And now he has gotten me into American chain gang run by American KGB!”

  I chewed my tongue. These two were more melodramatic than a Mexican soap opera. I waited while they scrambled around getting their stuff together, jabbering at each other in whatever their native language was. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, of course, but I was pretty sure they were accusing each other of everything but killing Cock Robin.

  I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have to keep score for them.

  Quinn James

  THE GROUND TILTED as I stepped down from the broken tour bus in the crisp February air, the lingering scent of leaking diesel making my nausea worse. I grabbed on to the folding door to steady the motion only I could see. It figured that the vertigo would return when I least needed it. I had to corral the stranded Cirque d’Europa performers into some semblance of order and give them their room assignments. The generous people of Mossy Creek and its outskirts were offering rooms in their mountain homes.

  Like Blanche Du Bois, I was grateful for the kindness of strangers, but that’s where the likeness between me and Blanche ended. Raised in the Virginia tidewater, I was Southern by birth, but had no belle-like qualities. A tomboy at heart, I’d excelled at gymnastics and disappointed my parents by joining the circus after college. They could at least brag it was a European circus. “Like Cirque du Soleil, only smaller,” Mom liked to say.

  I had been the only American acrobat in the troupe. Now, after being sidelined with recurring vertigo, I was the owner’s executive assistant and chief babysitter to thirty-five adults who were more demanding than a preschool full of whining three-year-olds. I might be sidelined by my illness, but I wasn’t giving up the big top. That disappointed my father, who’d hoped I’d return home to find a “decent job that utilized my degree.” For some reason, using my B.A. in Romance Languages in the circus didn’t count.

  “Miss James, you are all right?” Otto, the German bus driver, who was shaped like a tank, expanded my one-syllable last name into two. Jay-mess. It was bad enough that I had an odd first name for a woman—Quinn—without Otto turning my surname into, well, a mess. A Jay-mess.

  “Fine, thanks,” I said, tucking my clipboard under my arm. “I just need to get my bearings.”

  Only four steps separated me from the luggage bay, where Otto was unloading the performers’ suitcases and duffel bags. Like a ship with a broken rudder, I listed over to the bay and steadied myself on the lip of the door.

  The phone in my pocket buzzed. Even from halfway around the world, Mr. Polaski, owner of Cirque d’Europa, had the uncanny ability to call me at the worst possible moments. I knew it was him as certainly as I knew that it wasn’t a good idea to tell the Bulgarian jugglers that the town of Mossy Creek had a pub. Our worried owner had called once already, not fifteen minutes ago. Leaning against the bus for support, I let go of the door, quickly reaching up to turn on my cell phone’s earpiece.

  “Hello.” I spoke loudly to compensate for the conversations in at least three different languages going on within my earshot. I heard yelling and darted a gaze toward the sound. A local Chihuahua, shivering in the winter chill, lifted his tiny, shivering but determined tan leg on a mime’s make-up kit. Tartuffe, the mime, feigned a shriek. It takes a lot to get a mime to mime a noise like that.

  Mr. Polaski fired off his questions in a barrage not unlike gunfire. Why hadn’t I called him back with the estimate on the cost of the bus repair? Had I gotten all the performers accommodations in Mossy Creek? Had I canceled our reservations for the night at the Dollywood theme park, up in Tennessee? As enamored as he was of Dolly Parton’s assets and hometown, he didn’t want the Best Western where we’d planned on staying to charge us for rooms we weren’t using.

  He stopped to take a breath, so I seized the opportunity to reassure him before he could reload. “Relax. I’ve got everything under control. I called the hotel and cancelled. A young man from a place called ‘Peavey’s’ is waiting to tow the bus to his garage.”

  I didn’t tell him the young man, Jason Cecil, was still in high school and only worked part-time as a mechanic. “We’re unloading the luggage in the Mossy Creek Mount Gilead Methodist Church parking lot, thanks to Reverend Phillips. I was getting ready to read off the room assignments when you called.”

  Crossing my fingers would have been a good idea for luck that everything would go smoothly, but I was using them to keep the rest of me from falling to the hard blacktop shifting in front of me. Long shadows fingered the ground. It would be dark in an hour or so. I gazed upward at a horizon of darkening blue mountains. Were there wolves around here? Hillbill
ies? Albino banjo pickers with no teeth?

  “Okay. Okay,” Mr. Polaski said. “I call you back in a few minutes.”

  “I need more than a few minutes!” I shouted. The people standing around me grew quiet. The Chihuahua lowered its leg. “How about if I call you once I have everyone situated and the estimate for the bus repair?”

  “Okay. Okay,” Mr. Polaski said. “You know me, I worry so very much. You call as soon as you get estimate. Yes?”

  “Yes.” I glanced out at the performers who’d formed small countries on the sea of dark pavement. Spain, France, Germany, and Belgium clung together loosely, their breath vaporizing in the cold evening air. Luxembourg and Monaco hung off to the side of France. The Eastern Europeans puffed away on their unfiltered cigarettes and kept their distance almost as if we had our own cold war going on.

  My former partner, Erik Aelbrecht, was standing with the rest of the Belgian acrobats. The street lights gilded his short brown hair and the shoulders of his dark wool pea coat. He smiled at me, and I felt a different sort of dizziness. His gaze moved to my gloved hand gripping the door of the luggage bay for support, and he frowned.

  My ‘little problem,’ as I called it, bothered him. That fact made him less than perfect in my eyes. I couldn’t help that I’d gotten vertigo. I didn’t want it, the doctors said they couldn’t help me, and there wasn’t much I could do to relieve it other than some nearly useless exercises I’d found on the Internet.

  Erik took a step in my direction only to have his path blocked by his new partner, the dramatic Magdalene Schelde, who wore more make-up off stage than on and went exceptionally heavy on the eye and lip liner. She tossed her long red mane, pouted, and stomped her booted foot.

  Magdalene had been working with Erik for almost a year now, ever since my third bout of vertigo. The first bout we’d called a fluke. The second, a coincidence. By the third, I admitted my acrobatic days were over. I missed working with Erik, and I wondered if he missed working with me, too. Maybe that was why my vertigo upset him. We’d been closer friends than most non-romantically involved acrobatic partners.