A Day in Mossy Creek Page 7

  “Absolutely not. What would your parents say when you asked their permission to stay an entire Saturday night in a county building? I think the word ‘No’ would only be the beginning.” She smiled slightly. “Thank you, Linda, for the offer. But I’m sure I’ll be fine here.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Every ghostly tale I’d ever read from the Headless Horseman to the scary books of Peter Straub and Stephen King flashed through my mind. I knew in my bones that if we had a real ghost in the Mossy Creek library then Mrs. Longstreet shouldn’t be hunting it down alone. So I did what any confused teenager would do. I went home to tell my mother.

  The Mossy Creek Gazette

  215 Main Street • Mossy Creek, Georgia

  From the Desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager

  Lady Victoria Salter Stanhope

  The Cliffs, Seaward Road

  St. Ives, Cornwall TR37PJ

  United Kingdom

  To: Chip Brown, Spruce Street

  Chip—

  Thank you for writing to me at the Gazette. You know, the newspaper’s office is just a short walk from your house. You could have left your letter on my desk, instead of mailing it. However, I appreciate your formal manners. You have style. And you bought a postage stamp. I’m honored.

  In answer to your first question: No, you’re not too young to write an article for the paper. I wrote my first gossip column when I was your age. Only eleven!

  In answer to your second question: I’m not sure the subject you suggested is such a good idea. “How To Get Girls, Like My Cousin Rory Does,” might upset some of the Gazette’s readers. Especially the ones who are parents or grandparents of teenage girls. And I’m not sure Rory will appreciate the publicity, either.

  Why don’t you stop by the Gazette office sometime soon, and we’ll discuss ways to “spin” your angle. I’ll teach you how to get your point across without making readers mad. Or, at least, without getting caught.

  Your friend,

  Ms. Bell

  Chapter 5

  A bad combination—the coolest kid in town, on the coolest day of the year.

  The Day Rory Lost His Mind

  I’M CHIP BROWN, and I think I’m a pretty cool kid. But when it comes to being really cool, there’s no one in the world cooler than my cousin Rory. You can ask any kid in Mossy Creek, except maybe the MacGruder boys. The only reason they won’t admit he’s cool is because Rory stuck them both head-first in a snow drift last winter for picking on my little brother and his friends. The girls will definitely say he’s cool, but for silly reasons, like his blue eyes and blonde hair. When my mama said she’d like to take a pair of scissors to his “shaggy mop,” Ashley Winthrop nearly had a conniption fit, and she’d just met him.

  The girls talk about his muscles, too. He sure enough has some muscles, now. He’s only three years older than me, but shoot, you’d think he was sixteen or maybe even seventeen. He’s a big ol’ boy—almost as tall as my daddy—and strong as all get-out for just being fourteen. And man, can he fight. Some of the biggest, baddest boys from Bigelow County come looking for trouble when he’s around, just to see if they can whup him. Rory usually has ‘em hollering uncle in no time flat. He’s just naturally talented that way. He’s also the star wrestler at his school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He’s always sending us pictures of his trophies and articles from the newspaper about his victories.

  Daddy says it’s a crying shame that Rory’s own father didn’t live to see him wrestle. He died in a car wreck when Rory was four. It wasn’t your ordinary everyday car wreck, either. I heard mama telling her friend, Miss Francine, that he was running from the law. “Billy Tom is the skeleton in the Brown family closet,” Mama said.

  Scared me to death. I had nightmares about Rory’s daddy being a skeleton in our closet, until Mama told me she only meant Uncle Billy Tom did something we weren’t proud of. I heard Daddy say, “If that ain’t the pot calling the kettle black, Tammy Jo. Folks ‘round here still talk about you throwing that knife at an officer of the law.”

  Mama hushed up about Uncle Billy Tom. She’s real sensitive about the fuss she caused when we first moved to Mossy Creek, thinking the neighbors held a grudge against her for being a Bigelow by blood and that the Mossy Creek police were going to sic their dogs on us. Daddy would have calmed her down, but at the time, his jaw was wired shut from his fall off the roof. I never was so glad to hear my daddy’s voice than when those wires came off. Miss Francine told Mama not to give another thought to that knife incident—anyone with half a brain knows she gets a little crazy about dogs since that time a Rottweiler attacked her just before the county beauty pageant and scarred her face and all.

  As sensitive as Mama is about her run-in with the Mossy Creek police, Daddy’s even worse about Uncle Billy Tom’s breaking the law. The only time I ever heard him talk about it was when my little brother Toby walked off with a Pokemon card hid up under his shirt at the Up the Creek Flea Market. Daddy was madder than fire.

  “I wasn’t stealing it, Daddy!” Toby had cried. “I was only borrowing it. I was gonna bring it back next time.”

  “If you take something that doesn’t belong to you and you don’t have permission from the owner, that’s stealing, and I will not stand for it. I watched my brother take to thievin’, and I watched him die trying to run. I’d rather cut my heart out than go through that again. If you ever steal another dad-gone thing, you’d best pack your bags and hit the road, son. You won’t be welcome in my home.”

  Later I told Rory about what Daddy said. Rory didn’t say much. I guess it can’t be fun, knowing your daddy was a thief. Then again, it’s a whole lot better than thinking he’s a skeleton in your closet.

  FOR AS LONG AS I remember, Rory came from Chattanooga to spend vacations with me and my family. Mostly because his mama, Aunt Lou, is a career woman, as my mama puts it, and has to travel all over tarnation selling lumber to Latin American countries so as to keep food on her table, though why she’d keep food on her table when she’s never home is beyond me. Most of the time, Rory lives at a private school that costs a pretty penny. To hear him tell it, he’d rather she keep that penny and let him come live with us. She says he’ll be glad for all that fancy schooling when it comes time for him to go to college. Rory don’t give a flyin’ fig about that, though.

  “I don’t need college,” he says. “I want to work on motorcycles with Uncle Bunk.” That’s what he calls my daddy. Everyone else calls him Bunkin, except me and Toby, of course.

  Rory happens to share Daddy’s never-ending fascination with motorcycles. Daddy is the maintenance foreman at the retirement home, Magnolia Manor, but cycles are his full-time hobby. Heck, Rory spends more of his vacation working with Daddy in his garage than hanging out with me. Once the two of them get to talking about Harleys and taking apart engines, there’s no stopping them.

  That’s why I was surprised that Daddy wasn’t happy when Rory got suspended from his school for two weeks in January for throwing a stink bomb into the teachers’ lounge. Sounded like something Rory would do. I told you he was cool as all get-out, didn’t I? But when Daddy and I drove up to Chattanooga to pick him up, Daddy laid into him about how much trouble you’ll get into nowadays for having bombs of any kind, anywhere.

  “It wasn’t my bomb, Uncle Bunk,” Rory told him, “and I wasn’t the one who threw it.”

  Daddy didn’t look a bit glad to hear that. In fact, he glared at Rory as if he’d just tossed a grenade at a passing school bus. “The principal said you owned up to it.”

  “Only to keep my buddy, Joe, from being expelled. Shawn McElroy, the sorry jerk who happens to be our quarterback, blamed the stink bomb on Joe. Joe didn’t do it, but the principal wouldn’t believe him. So I said I did it. I knew they wouldn’t expel me. Coach needs me to win the wrestling championship. Joe doesn’t wrestle or play football or an
ything important. They’d have kicked him out, for sure. I had to help him.”

  Daddy studied Rory like he wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. I remembered Mama saying that Daddy couldn’t look at Rory without seeing his own brother. Maybe that’s why Daddy doubted him—because Uncle Billy Tom always lied to get out of trouble. He was a charming son of a gun, that Billy Tom, Mama told Miss Francine, but he’d climb a tree to tell a lie, if it would get him what he wanted.

  “You sure you weren’t after a two-week vacation from school?” Daddy asked.

  Rory’s eyebrows bunched together in the middle and his face turned red, like he was ready to fight, which he’d never do with my daddy. “I’m not lying about what happened. All the kids know Shawn McElroy has a mess of them stink bombs in his locker, and he ain’t above throwing ‘em in the teachers’ lounge. But a two-week vacation from that school is fine by me. A permanent vacation would be better. I hate living there.”

  “Why? Is someone giving you problems?”

  Rory hesitated, and I knew he wanted to say yes. I could see the word pushing to get out of his mouth. But then he fell back against the seat, looking annoyed with himself. “No, sir,” he mumbled. “Not really.”

  “Are the kids unfriendly?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is the coach unfair?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Is the school work too hard?”

  “Boring, but not hard.”

  “Then why don’t you like it there?”

  “Well, heck, Uncle Bunk…would you like living at school?”

  Daddy and Rory frowned at each other for awhile, then Daddy shook his head and lectured all the way back to Mossy Creek about how Rory better not throw away his opportunity to get educated, and how the best motorcycle designers are mechanical engineers with college degrees, blah, blah, blah.

  By the time we got home, Rory’s good mood at being off for two weeks was ruined. We’d been emailing each other about my new video game system since Christmas, and he’d been wanting to try it out, but now he barely looked interested.

  “Aw, c’mon, Rory. Don’t feel too bad. At least Daddy only talked. Heck, if I’d been kicked out of school, he’d have me ‘clocking it’ for days.”

  He scrunched his brows together again. “What do you mean?”

  “You remember what happens when Toby or me have to ‘clock it’, don’t you? That means we work our butts off, round the clock. Oh, they let us eat and sleep a little, but then every waking minute, we have to do chores. And when Mama and Daddy run out of chores, we have to stand in the corner and just stare at the gall-dern wall.” I shook my head at the memory. “There’s nothing worse than clocking it.”

  “Yeah, I do remember,” Rory said in a slow, pondering way. “You had to do that after you dropped the chain saw in the creek. And Toby had to clock it when he trampled all over Mrs. Lavender’s flower garden.”

  “That’s what happens to Toby and me when we mess up too bad.”

  Rory squinted at me, as if I’d said something extremely important. “Then why not me?”

  I barely heard his question, he asked it in such a low, hushed voice.

  “Daddy never punishes anyone but his own kids,” I explained, surprised he hadn’t known that. “Doesn’t matter how bad the neighbor kids are—they never have to clock it. He just sends them home.”

  I’ll never forget the look on Rory’s face then. He turned pale and still, almost like he was about to throw up. He didn’t, though. He just stood there.

  Looking back, I believe that was when the trouble really started.

  “GOOD GAME, CHIP.” Rory dropped the video game controller and pushed his chair back to stretch his muscles, as if he’d been playing for hours instead of minutes. “But I’m ready for a break.”

  “A break? We only beat one puny level. Heck, we haven’t even got to the good part yet. You know, where you turn the aliens into gobs of green goo then splatter ‘em with your turbo-laser.”

  “Let’s take a walk into town. Maybe to Poppy’s Ice Cream Parlor on the square.”

  “We’ve got ice cream in the freezer downstairs. Three kinds. Cookie dough, Moose Tracks, and—“

  “Ashley Winthrop still works at Poppy’s, don’t she?”

  I don’t believe he even heard what kind of ice cream we had. He was too busy looking in my dresser mirror and combing his hair. Guess I should’ve known what he had on his mind. Girls—the only thing Rory likes better than motorcycles, wrestling or pulling pranks. Last summer he even passed up a poster of Chipper Jones at bat for one of Paris Hilton in a bikini. Can you believe it?!

  “I guess Ashley still works there,” I mumbled, trying to think of something that might interest him more. “Hey, you want to see the deck we built by the creek in the backyard? It’s cool, man. Almost like a fort. And we can make a bonfire in the fire ring Daddy built.”

  “Ashley still going with that Charles Huckleby?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t pay much attention to that kind of thing, especially considering they were both older than me. “I s’pose so. I see ‘em together now and then.”

  “Does he spend a lot of time at the ice cream parlor while she’s working?”

  “How would I know? And so what if he does?”

  Rory laughed at that and ruffled my hair. I punched him in the chest, and he swung me into a headlock and rubbed his knuckles against my skull. Before we could get into a decent tussle, though, he pushed me away. “You go on downstairs and tell your mama we’re heading into town. I’ll meet you out front.”

  That seemed kind of odd, seeing as how he could have come downstairs with me then and there, but I figured he had to go to the bathroom. Little did I know he had an ulterior motive for sending me away . . . and for going into town.

  I also thought it a little strange when he met me on the front porch wearing his backpack. “Just in case I buy DVDs or posters, or something cool from Derbert Koomer’s I Probably Got It store,” he explained when I asked about the backpack. After we walked a good little ways, he added, “I also brought along something for excitement.”

  “What is it?” I asked, mystified.

  He slanted me a look that promised fun. “You’ll see.”

  My spirits perked up considerably. Rory had something up his sleeve . . . or in his backpack, to be more precise. I couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  When we strolled into Poppy’s, Ashley Winthrop stood behind the counter scooping up ice cream for a couple of ladies, and Charles Huckleby, the kid Rory had mentioned, was sure enough sitting at the counter, sipping a cola. Ashley’s big green eyes lit up when she spotted us. “Well, as I live and breathe . . . Rory Brown! I didn’t know you were visiting.”

  Three other teenage girls at a nearby table jumped up to greet Rory and fuss over him. Almost made me wish my hair was blonde instead of red-brown and that I had muscles instead of “skin and bones,” as some people put it. Not that I really liked girls all that much, but still . . . no one wants to be left out of the action.

  I reckon Charles Huckleby was feeling near the same, judging from how he swiveled around on the stool and gave Rory the evil eye. Rory just sauntered up beside him and leaned against the counter, smiling at the fluttering, giggling girls. “We might go bowling down in Bigelow tonight, Rory,” a short blonde named Chantal said. “You want to come along?”

  “Chip and I were thinking of starting a bonfire in our backyard,” he answered. “I’m sure we wouldn’t mind company.” He glanced at Ashley when he said it, and she grinned at him. The others all talked at one time, mostly about bringing a thermos of cocoa and bags of marshmallows to roast.

  Ashley finished with the customers she’d been helping, tossed her head in a way that made her long dark hair shimmer and slide, then sallied over to us. “What fl
avor can I interest you in, Rory?”

  He slid the backpack off his shoulder, set it on the counter and leaned in toward her. “What kind you got?”

  It was a simple question, but I noticed Charles Huckleby getting all tense and huffy on Rory’s other side. Charles was even bigger than Rory and at least two years older, but he never caused the stir Rory did with the girls. Last summer Charles threatened to whup Rory’s butt if he ever talked to Ashley again. Personally, I was hoping Charles had forgotten about that threat, but something told me neither he nor Rory had.

  “Let’s see now . . .” Ashley drawled with a flirty little smile, “I have Chocolate Mousse Surprise, Strawberry Banana Fantasy, Peaches-n-Cream Paradise—”

  “Why don’t you just read the sign?” Charles cut in, glaring at Rory,. “Or can’t you read yet?”

  I stiffened and glanced sideways at Rory. Guys couldn’t talk to him like that without expecting trouble in return.

  Surprisingly, Rory didn’t scowl at him or shove him or even tell him to take a flyin’ leap. In fact, he smiled at him. “Why, hello, Charles. I didn’t notice you sitting there.” He actually put an arm around his shoulder. “How you been, buddy?”

  “I ain’t your buddy, and I told you last summer that if you—”

  Charles’s words broke off, and he looked down at his lap. His eyes grew wide and with a mighty holler, he pushed himself clean off the stool. Next thing I knew, girls were screaming, Charles was flailing around on the floor and Rory was diving to grab something from under the counter.

  It took me a while, but I finally spotted the cause of the commotion. A snake. A big ol’ black rat snake. Just like the one that belonged to my brother Toby.

  “I think it’s a rattler!” someone yelled, which started more girls to shrieking.

  “No, it ain’t,” Ashley said, dropping to her knees behind the counter. “Aww, he looks scared slap to death, bless his little heart. Charles, you brute! You nearly rolled over him . . .”