She nodded knowingly. “Then while you’re holding down the ratchet,” Farrie went on, “you slide the second piece of wire to push the tumblers out of the way. Then you rotate the first piece of wire with that L-shape and it will go click! Nice and easy. You got your number three Master lock open.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Buck stared at her. “Did some of your – ah, somebody teach you how to do all of this?”
“My uncle Lyndon Baines,” Farrie said proudly. “Only I’m better than he is, now.”
Scarlett had come up in a hurry to take what was left of the dinner away and tell Farrie to slide down in the bed and close her eyes. It was time to end that conversation right where it was.
“We don’t say no prayers,” she’d explained as she tucked Farrie in. “I’ve heard a lot of people always say their prayers at bedtime, but my great-aunt Lutie Scraggs used to say: ‘Don’t cry and you won’t be sorry. And don’t pray for nothing. That way you’re not disappointed.’”
He gave her an odd look. “That’s quite a philosophy.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know what you call it, but it’s what Scraggses do.”
Farrie told Buck she wanted him to kiss her goodnight. He had leaned down to let her wind her arms around him and give him a big smack on the cheek.
So it looked like Sheriff Buck didn’t hold a grudge, Scarlett thought as she watched them. And his deputies didn’t seem to mind, except the big Indian deputy, Kevin Black Badger, who had come in pretty mad after a long time in the cold on the mountain because nobody had thought to tell him.
Now, lying in bed, Scarlett could let herself sigh with relief at how well everything had turned out. Farrie was safe, and nobody seemed to blame her for acting the way she did.
If there was any trouble, she thought with a small frown, it had to do with the television newscast, and the people with cars and trucks in the driveway earlier.
Buck had said he was going to be in the den to see the newscast. Scarlett had been in the kitchen getting supper warmed up. What made her notice it at all was that she heard Buck cussing. Curious, she’d come to the door to see what was going on.
There on the television screen was the figure of Sheriff Buck Grissom saying there couldn’t be any living manger scene at the courthouse because of a court order.
Then, while Scarlett was still admiring how nice Buck looked, big and handsome in his uniform, the camera moved up close on his face as he said that he had armed deputies, if necessary, to keep any manger scene away.
You could tell right away that what Buck had said about armed deputies wasn’t right. You could see it right there on his face that he knew it, too, before the camera swung away and the man in the television news studio came back on.
A moment later the telephone had started ringing. Instead of eating his dinner that Scarlett had fixed, Buck had answered one call after another until he finally gave up and went upstairs to see how Farrie was getting along. He came down again later to check the news, and Scarlett went to clean up the kitchen. When the news came on again, the telephone started to ring. It hadn’t stopped ringing, even late as it was.
Scarlett went out on the upstairs landing where she could see the light from the den and hear the rumble of Buck’s voice, still answering calls. Whoever they were, people in Nancyville, they ought to leave him alone, she thought. Deputies were armed. He was only telling the truth.
She couldn’t help remembering how he had looked as he sat on the edge of the bed feeding Farrie hot chocolate from a cup. Or the look on his face as he’d carried her out of the tower room. Or when he’d searched for her pulse. You wouldn’t think those big hands could find a spot on a little girl’s skinny wrist to take her pulse, but they had.
It was just too bad that some people hadn’t liked what they saw on TV, because their sheriff was a brave man. A good man. She had never met a man like him before.
I’m in love with him, Scarlett thought, surprised.
It was such a strange, totally unexpected feeling that she sat straight up in bed, staring at the spot of moonlight falling on the carpet by the window.
Was she sure? She didn’t want to make a big mistake again like she had the other night, coming to his room. But Sheriff Buck Grissom made her heart stop just watching him. And the feeling that she just couldn’t wait for him to kiss her hung around her like a homeless cat practically all the time.
It was love, all right, because it felt just like she’d heard other people say – sort of warm and excited and feeling happy whenever she thought about Buck. It was, Scarlett realized, probably the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her. That’s why she hadn’t recognized it right away; she just wasn’t used to having wonderful things happen.
But now, how everything had changed! For one thing, she didn’t have to force herself to do anything, she didn’t have to please Farrie and trick him into marriage. And she didn’t have to please Devil Anse, who wanted to bribe Buck and make him do something crooked.
No, she thought, almost hugging herself, she was in love with Sheriff Buck Grissom. She could please herself!
It made her so happy she couldn’t wait to tell him. She slipped her bare feet over the edge of the bed and started for the door.
The darkened house smelled like Christmas, filled with the fragrance of the spruce tree in the parlor. The prisms in the hall’s ceiling fixture winked sparks of light as Scarlett hurried under them.
What should she say? Just tell Buck that she’d just found out she was in love with him?
Scarlett hesitated at the door to the den, hearing his voice on the telephone. He was talking, not to someone about what had happened on the television news, she realized, but to his mother. It was Mrs. Grissom’s nightly call from Chicago. She always called after eleven because they had a different time in Chicago, Buck had explained.
Scarlett stood by the half-open door to the den, not knowing now whether she wanted to go in. She hadn’t known about places in America having different times. “Zones,” Buck had called them. But then she was pretty ignorant; she’d never finished her last year of high school because Devil Anse had made her drop out.
If a person was in love with someone like Buck Grissom, Scarlett thought, they would have to give some thought to something like that. Her grandpa, Ancil Scraggs, and all the things he’d done. And how much school she had missed.
She’d already seen the woman they said Buck had once been engaged to: Susan Huddleston, the county social worker. You could see Susan Huddleston was pretty much what a sheriff would look for in a wife. Not, she told herself, slowly taking a step back from the doorway, some wild Scraggs from Catfish Holler.
The happy feeling faded away. Scarlett knew now that she didn’t want Buck to feel that he was being forced into anything. Hadn’t he already told her he didn’t intend to make a fool of himself?
She bit her lip. She supposed he could do that, make a fool of himself with Scarlett Scraggs, old Devil Anse Scraggs’s granddaughter. Especially if she came down after eleven o’clock at night in her bare feet and only a secondhand church nightgown and tried to tell him that she had some crazy idea that she loved him.
The happy feeling was gone now, replaced with a sad, hollow place in her middle.
There couldn’t be anything much better than to live in this house, and make a home for Farrie, and be Buck Grissom’s wife. But look at her! She didn’t even have bedroom slippers to put on her feet. When she got dressed in the morning she put on somebody else’s clothes. And she didn’t have a home. Neither did her little sister.
It had been all right to pretend that she could trick Buck Grissom into marrying her. Or even to know that Devil Anse had tried to use her to bribe him. But it was a different thing entirely when you’d just found out you were in love.