Critters of Mossy Creek Page 4

  Could cats reason well enough to frame an innocent man?

  Actually, I wouldn’t put it past Dashiell. The others would follow his lead.

  The next morning, I asked Arturo if he’d replace the shelf under the bathroom sink—no mouse hole and plywood too thick for their little paws to dig through.

  Dashiell didn’t speak to me for three days.

  ooo

  Dashiell

  Our plan did work. We got caught and our hidey-hole was closed, but that noisy man left us alone only a few days after we stole the necklace. I’ve already found us a new hidey-hole. I refuse to tell anyone where it is. I hope we won’t need it in the future.

  But we may. This afternoon we were all snoozing in front of the fire when the doorbell rang.

  Peggy opened it. There on the stoop stood a very tall human with gray hair like Watson’s. I started to run to the bathroom, but something stopped me.

  He smelled fascinating. An animal odor. Not dog nor cat. Pungent. I liked it. So did Marple. She ran over and rubbed her body against his ankles. He bent down, courteously offered to allow her to sniff his fingers first, then scratched her ears.

  Humph. Watson was next. Then Sherlock. Finally, I meandered over. He smelled heavenly. And he liked cats.

  ooo

  Peggy

  I certainly didn’t expect an answer to my ad for the studio apartment the same day I put it in the paper. I assumed I’d get a few calls before someone actually wanted to see it.

  Instead, just after lunch the very Sunday I put it into the paper, I answered the door to find a tall, slim, gray-haired man with Paul Newman eyes and Clint Eastwood looks smiling down at me.

  “Sorry to just barge in like this,” he said, “But I was afraid to wait. I’ve just bought a farm outside of Mossy Creek. Has a great barn, but no house. I can’t keep staying in a motel in Bigelow, so I’m looking for a place to live. Could you show me the apartment?”

  “Let me get my coat and the keys.” I’m no fool. I shut the door. No stranger walks into my house uninvited.

  He waited for me on the porch in the misty cold.

  “We have to walk down the driveway. It’s a garden apartment—more like a studio. But everything’s new.”

  “I don’t need much. I spend my days and most of my nights out at the farm.”

  An enormous white crew-cab pickup truck sat in the driveway. It had North Carolina plates.

  There’s not much arable land around Mossy Creek. I asked him if he was a cattleman.

  “No, ma’am. I’m a horse trainer. I train and drive carriage horses and restore carriages.”

  That was a new one.

  He looked at the apartment and liked it. We discussed terms. He agreed to a one-year lease, wrote me a check for the first and last month’s rent and gave me the telephone numbers and addresses of people he’d worked for who could vouch for him.

  He was as old as I was, though in better physical shape. He was also sexy as the dickens. The widows of Mossy Creek would be all over him like a frog on a June Bug.

  “I’d like to move in as soon as you check my references and my check clears,” he said with a smile. “I’ve lived in too many motel rooms all over the world to like living in them for very long.”

  “That’s fine.” We shook hands. He climbed into his truck and backed out with a wave.

  And that’s the way Hiram Lackland became my tenant and my friend.

  Little did I suspect how that friendship would turn out.

  The Mice that Roared

  Part Two

  Jayne

  “Anudder one!” Matt cried happily as yet another mouse skittered along the wall in our living room two days later.

  Emma, my seven-year-old calico, lifted her head from a desultory job of licking her paws and watched the mouse disappear into a hole in the wall so small I’d never noticed it before. Then she calmly went back to her paw-licking.

  “How can you look at yourself in the morning?” I asked Emma, who sat on the coffee table in front of me.

  She regarded me with feline disdain, then turned her paw over and studied it as if she were Zsa Zsa Gabor admiring her rings. I could just hear her little kitty voice saying in a Hungarian accent, You get your paws dirty if you want to, but I’m not touching one of those things.

  “And you call yourself a self-respecting cat. This is your job,” I said in disgust. “Matt, please don’t play over there where the mice have been. They’re nasty.”

  A boy through-and-through, Matt was fascinated by the small gray creatures. He’d tried to catch them as they flew across the hardwood floors, but so far hadn’t managed to even get close to one.

  Thank goodness.

  “Come on, Matt. Let’s get out of this mice-infested place and go help Ingrid with the cookies for the game tomorrow.”

  He held my hand as we walked down the narrow steps leading below. At the landing, one set of steps led to the back door, but I turned down the steps to the shop.

  The work on the doorway connecting the bakery and The Naked Bean was just about done. Dan and his crew had finished framing the doorway and were painting it and the walls on either side. They’d cleaned up most of the mess they’d made, but I’d already hired Betty Halfacre, Ingrid’s full-blooded Cherokee Indian assistant, to scrub both shops from top to bottom on Sunday. Betty was stocky and sour-faced and I’d never see her blink, but she was a rare find—a hard and trustworthy worker. This job was big enough that she’d enlisted the aid of some of her family members, but I didn’t care. Neither I nor Ingrid were involved. I’d already made it clear to Ingrid that she wasn’t to set foot inside the shop until Monday morning.

  “Ingie not here!” Matt exclaimed after pulling away from me and bolting past a worker into the bakery side of the shop. My son was too accustomed to having the run of both shops. He was as certain of his welcome in the bakery as he was in my shop. He and Ingrid had bonded as close as any grandparent and grandchild, though Ingrid was not related to us.

  By blood, she would always correct me.

  Smiling at the warm fuzzies my relationship with Ingrid always gave me, I held out my hand to Matt. “Come here, please. We need to stay out of the way. Ingie is at her house. You know that. We’re going to see her over there.”

  “OhBoyOhBoyOhBoy!” He used my hand as a lever to aid his bouncing. “See Bob?”

  “Yes, of course, little darlin’.” But under my breath, I said. “As if Bob ever leaves Ingrid’s side.”

  Dan peeked around the molding of the new door. “Afternoon, y’all off for a walk?”

  I nodded. “I have to get away from the mice for awhile.”

  He shook his head and repeated what he’d already told me. “Sorry about that, but I’ve seen it happen more often than not, especially in these old buildings. When you don’t disturb the walls for years at a time, no telling what you’re going to get when they’re opened.”

  “I’m not blaming you, Dan. It’s just, well . . .”

  “Your cat still not chasing ’em down?”

  I snorted, “No. They bore her.”

  “Not a mouser,” Dan said with sympathy. “People think all cats will kill their mice, but some cats just won’t. Those mouse traps not working?”

  He’d brought her several of the snapping traps yesterday afternoon.

  “I don’t know. Emma tripped one trying to get the peanut butter, and Matt tripped the other one.”

  “Did he get hurt?” Dan asked.

  “No,” I admitted. “Neither did Emma. But it’s just a matter of time. Besides, I . . . “

  Dan smiled. “You’d have to take out the dead mice.”

  “Well, yes.” I sighed. “What can I say? I’m a girl.”

  “Yes, you certainly are.”

  Our eyes met and held. I was so surprised by his comment that it took a moment for me to comprehend that he was flirting with me.

  “I’ll figure something out,” I said, then glanced down at Matt. “You r
eady to go, little darlin’?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Are you going to the game tomorrow?” Dan asked quickly.

  It took me a second to realize he meant the soccer game. “Yes, we are. That’s right. You’re on the team, aren’t you? Yes, Ingrid and I are setting up a table with coffee and cookies. Proceeds going to the new football stadium, of course.”

  “Peanut butter cookies?” Dan asked hopefully.

  “I don’t know what Ingrid’s planning, but probably. Peanut butter is one of her staples.”

  “Be sure and save me a couple.”

  “Will do. See you there.”

  As I held open the door of The Naked Bean for Matt, I caught sight of Dan’s muscular back disappearing into the bakery side of the shop.

  Dan. Hmmm. Maybe Josie was right.

  Mossy Creek Gazette

  Volume VII, No. One • Mossy Creek, Georgia

  The Bell Ringer

  Mossy Creek Men Prepare to Play with Their Feet

  by Katie Bell

  The world is changing faster than your teenager’s iPhone uploads a Jonas Brothers’ video from YouTube, and so . . . get ready to watch a new kind of “football” as the Mossy Creek Men’s Community Soccer Team takes on the Bigelow Men in a pre-season opener at the site of the future Mossy Creek High School stadium.

  Rob Walker, Mossy Creek team captain and owner of Hamilton’s Department Store, says he’s lined up an exciting new mystery player for the Mossy Creek team.

  Word on the street tells me, your town gossip columnist, that we may have to call the “police” to keep Creekite females away from this mystery man, “chief” among them a certain public official of the “Mayor Ida Walker” variety. . . .

  “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged

  by the way its animals are treated.”

  —Mahatma Gandhi

  The Rabbit Stops Running

  We never forget the moments that wise us up about life’s disappointments. The men who done us wrong. The great job that went to someone less deserving. The strapless prom dress that proved why prom dresses need straps.

  Or, to use a more specific example, the bitter disappointment when Mother and Dad cut short my seventeenth birthday summer backpacking trip through Europe because my sister Ardaleen heard through informants that I’d gone wild in Paris and gotten a tiny peace symbol tattooed above my navel.

  I should have known she’d rat me out. This was back in the Jurassic era of hippies and flower power, when only sailors and Hell’s Angels had tattoos. Mother sobbed. Dad said I was scarred for life. My friends from Mossy Creek High started a prayer chain for me.

  Elderly Grandma Ida, my namesake and mentor, hooted and applauded. Cousin Ingrid thought it was “groovy.”

  But Gran Ida and Ingrid were in the minority. At the Mossy Creek town pool I was asked by the Mossy Creek Parks and Rec supervisor, Boneeta Truman (mother of Dwight Truman, which explains a lot), to “cover that Communist symbol.” I stuck a giant Band-aid over the tattoo and my navel. I refused to give up my flower-print bikini with the little red bows on the hips. So I looked like a red-headed Barbie with a missing belly button.

  A few years later, after coming home from college, I rescued Jeb Walker when his small plane crashed in our fields, and I fell in love with him instantly. In our first intimate encounter, he stripped off the Band-aid and kissed my tattoo. That’s one reason I loved him, and still do.

  Rest in peace, my tattoo-kissing man.

  Back to the story. The tattoo bust was hardly the first time Ardaleen betrayed me.

  In my clan, the Hamiltons, the sad truth we never forget the most is that even family can stick a knife in your back. Romeo and Juliet. Hatfields and McCoys. Godzilla versus Megatron. Appalachian Southerners feud with their kinfolk because that’s what we’ve always done, going back to the tribal Scots and Irish who battled each other for control of the mountains, the English, the French and the Cherokee Indians, before all of the above intermarried and began sharing bourbon recipes. Drinking together makes us forget our differences just long enough to load the shotgun for the next round.

  Which brings me again to my sister, Ardaleen Hamilton Bigelow, and a moment in my life I will always rank among the Top Five Truths I’ll Never Forget.

  Ardaleen, who was sixteen when I was five, wanted to kill me.

  “Pokey likes to be petted,” Ardaleen insisted, grinning her fiendish, Maybelline-over-freckles grin as she pointed through the slatted boards of the stall at Hamilton Farm. Inside, blowing hot air softly through his huge nostrils, stood Pokey, the farm’s giant champion Guernsey bull. He was not called Pokey because he was slow or because his main job in life was to inseminate cows, but because he had a pair of ten-inch horns, which he often swung like calcified joisting sticks.

  Ardaleen aimed her mood-ringed finger underneath Pokey’s thick, golden belly. “Pet him right there. On his . . . fire hose. Go in and give it a good hard slap, Ida. He really likes that.”

  I looked up at her earnestly. I was still trusting of my big sister—I hadn’t yet realized that Ardaleen was a sociopath. “But Grandma Ida says that’s his wee wee. And she says it’s not polite to pat boys on their . . .”

  “Bulls like being petted on their . . . I call it their tummy,” Ardaleen oozed. “You’re not a scaredy cat, are you? Little Miss Ida, the scaredy puss. Grandma Ida will be embarrassed. You’re a disgrace to her name if you don’t go in this stall and pet Pokey on his tummy. Baby. Chicken. Cluck cluck cluck. Why, oh why do I bother trying to teach you anything? Some days I am so ashamed to call you my baby sister.”

  My eyes welled with tears. Being unwanted by my big sister seemed like the end of the world to me. “Don’t be ashamed! I’ll do it! I’m not scared.”

  She smiled like a shark. “Good.”

  The universe of children is defined by their innocent devotion to cold-hearted idols. At that age we want to believe in angels, but we learn quickly that life is filled with nasty little devils, many of which share our family name.

  To make a long, turning-point story very short, I crept into Pokey’s stall, gave him a hearty smack on his euphemistic ‘tummy,’ and he horned me in the ass like a Spanish bull tossing a pint-sized matador. I hit the plank wall hard enough to stick splinters in my forehead.

  For two weeks I limped around the farm with a welt on my head and a deep purple bruise on my right buttock. I was smart enough to tell Grandma Ida, Mama and Daddy that I fell on a tree stob.

  Ardaleen threatened to smother me in my sleep if I confessed the truth to anyone. She even added insult to injury. “Baby Sister,” she drawled, “I was a honeymoon baby. Mama and Daddy wanted me. But you were just an accident of nature after Mama and Daddy got reckless in their old age. You aren’t supposed to be here.”

  Ahah. Ardaleen hated me for taking away her Only Child status, for being doted on by Grandma Ida, for being pampered as the Miracle Menopause Baby of the Hamilton princess line.

  No surprise, then, that Ardaleen felt disappointed by her reduced status in the Hamilton family. She grew up determined to reject and punish everything in our heritage, which included Mossy Creek. She moved to the fancy south-end of our mountain county, married a pompous, hated Bigelow and bore my nephew, Ham Bigelow, who at forty years of age is only ten years younger than me but is the governor of the great state of Georgia, God help the State.

  Ham has long been a sharp thorn in my paw, along with Ardaleen. I don’t trust him, I don’t trust her and I admit that poison ivy grows on the dark side of my family tree.

  Some truths are more painful than others.

  ooo

  As usual, I was trying to control my temper. If you take your oath of office a bit too personally, being mayor of a small town can turn you into a fat, stressed-out wino with anger management issues. Despite two rambunctious decades at the mayoral helm of Mossy Creek I’d managed to escape obesity and alcoholism, but my struggle with my red-headed tempe
r was known far and wide. So it surprised me that Ardaleen was brave enough to turn her back on me that morning in the chilly spring sunshine.

  “And so, speaking to you all as Governor Hamilton Bigelow’s proud mother . . .” Ardaleen said proudly and loudly, her cigarette-stained voice forming a crust in the cool air around the microphone. She bobbed her red-with-blonde-highlights-to-hide-the-gray head. “. . . I welcome you here today to be with me at this lovely event.”

  Be with me. Not be with ‘us.’ Not be with the town of Bigelow, the town of Mossy Creek, or Bigelow Countians in general. In Ardaleen’s world, Ardaleen was the only person worth being with. One heavily diamond-ringed hand with perfect French nails stroked the lapel of her blue Dior dress suit. At sixty-one my sister looks and sounds like a deep-fried Dixie version of Bea Arthur on The Golden Girls, only without the humor and charm. “I’m so pleased to lead these dedication ceremonies for yet another fine project built under my son’s leadership . . .”

  I coughed loudly into my hand. The cough sounded suspiciously like “Bull.”

  Ardaleen’s shoulders stiffened. Oh, yeah, she’d heard me. “. . . with contributions from the citizens of our fair city of Bigelow . . .”

  I coughed again. Louder. This time it sounded like Sheet.

  Sounded like being the operative words.

  Ardaleen and I stood on the bunting-draped stage in the freshly poured parking lot of the sleek new Bigelow County Humane Society facility, a state-of-the art adoption center that had been built with a big dollop of money donated by Mossy Creekites, not to mention that our vet, Dr. Hank Blackshear, was a driving force behind the project. Also, ninety-nine percent of Mossy Creek’s 397 registered voters voted in favor of the county-wide special tax that funded the center. The Creekite vote put the tax referendum over the top.

  So we had plenty to be proud of, even if no one in Bigelow, city of, or Bigelow, county of, wanted to admit it. Mossy Creek is the little sister Bigelow keeps trying to push off the swing set. Boy, howdy, I could relate to that metaphor.