For the second time that afternoon Buck experienced an unsettling nervous cramp in his stomach. His mother – whatever her past experiences with his father’s Christmas strays and vagrants from the county jail – had never coped with a true Scraggs. Bringing this half-wild creature home, not to mention the other sister when she showed up, filled Buck with foreboding. And he was not used to feeling that way. Not since Susan Huddleston announced she was calling off their engagement.
That, he told himself sourly, was another thing.
He still couldn’t fathom how his ex-fiancée could make him feel so guilty, when the damned engagement was over and done with a long time ago. He should have put the Scraggses up in a motel. They could have found some way around regulations.
The girl beside him had stopped banging on the door. Now she slumped in her seat, substituting the earsplitting howls for subdued, but just as nerve-racking moaning. Buck glanced at her. Her head was bent, her face hidden by a mop of hair that fell forward.
“Farrie’s out there, in all that snow and cold.” A gulping sound that might have been a sob broke from her. “And you’re gonna take me someplace” – she turned, the gypsy eyes gleaming at him balefully – “to do whatever it is you think you’re gonna do to me!”
“What I’m going to do to you?” Buck stepped on the brakes in surprise. The Blazer bucked in protest, then skidded sideways on the sleety road. Scarlett Scraggs clutched the dashboard and screamed.
Buck snarled something under his breath.
“There, you cussed,” she screeched. “I heard what you just said!”
At that moment the county dispatcher called on the police radio. “Sheriff, your mother’s been trying to get you.”
“Even I know a sheriff,” the Scraggs female was screaming, “ain’t supposed to cuss like that!”
“Dammit,” he barked, “will you shut up?”
“Sheriff, I’m only trying to do my job,” the voice of the dispatcher said.
“Not you, George.” Buck had tried to get his mother on the telephone before he left the jail, but the line at home had been persistently busy. “Listen,” he said into the radio, “if my mother calls back -”
“You got no right to talk to me like that!” Scarlett Scraggs maintained at the top of her lungs. “I want to know where you’re taking me!”
“Sheriff?” The dispatcher’s tone was cautious. “You got a – ah, prisoner with you?”
Buck was aware how all this sounded; so, he was sure, did Scarlett Scraggs. “No prisoner, George. I’m taking care of some of Susan Huddleston’s confounded problems. If my mother calls again, tell her to use the cellular phone.”
Buck was well aware that it had been a long time since his mother had put up any strays from the jail. That was something his dad had made a tradition when he was alive. Sheriff Buck Grissom, Sr., had been a law unto himself in the Georgia hills.
One year, Buck remembered, his dad had brought home a whole poverty-stricken family of migrant workers stranded on the highway when their old truck broke down. They’d had all seven of them for a week, straight through the New Year’s holiday. His mother had nearly gone crazy.
His passenger was wrestling with the door handle again. “You’re taking me someplace where my little sister’ll never find me!” she wailed. “I’ll never see Farrie again!”
“This is a county police vehicle,” he warned her, “the doors lock automatically. You won’t get that open no matter how hard you pound on it.”
The Blazer turned into Main Street. Traffic was light in the bad weather, and Nancyville was not a big enough town for a real rush hour. In spite of the aluminum holiday messages strung across the thoroughfare, the central area was bleak. Just beyond the R &R Variety Store, the Valley Bank, and Nancyville Hardware was the red brick pile that had formerly been the town’s textile mill, closed since the 1970’s.
The old mill was a reminder of all the jobs lost, all the people born and bred in the mountains who’d gone from Nancyville south to Atlanta and Birmingham or north to Chicago. The blighting presence of the mill was the reason the Nancyville Downtown Merchants’ Association needed the living manger scene at the courthouse to bring folks in to shop, so they wouldn’t go over to the giant mall on the interstate.
“Listen,” Buck said, relenting a little, “I’ve got practically my entire force out on the road looking for your little sister. When they find her I’m going to turn both of you over to my mother, and she’ll look after you until Sus – until Miss Huddleston gets back.”
Even as he spoke Buck realized Susan’s holiday would not be over until well after New Year’s. The prospect of being stuck through a full week of Christmas with any part of the Scraggs clan was something that rendered him almost numb.
Scraggses all through Christmas.
Unseeing, Buck turned off the windshield wipers. The sleet had stopped but the sky looked as though a storm was brewing up north in the Smokies. Bad weather was all the county police needed these last days before Christmas.
This infernal mess was all Susan Huddleston’s fault, Buck thought, leaving town and abandoning her job to take a Christmas holiday! Now that they no longer had any plans for marriage, Susan obviously felt she could do as she pleased. What remained between them wasn’t the friendly, cooperative relationship Buck thought they’d agreed upon. On the contrary, Susan could be downright hostile and treacherous. Like she was this afternoon.
Buck supposed that like most couples they had broken up with their share of hard words. Certainly they’d always fought over the day-and-night demands of her social-work job, and Susan still didn’t know how to cook a decent meal. She didn’t seem to have enough interest in it to want to learn how. Buck had made it plain he was damned if he was going to settle for a life of microwave dinners.
Susan’s reply, which in his opinion wasn’t really any sort of reply, was that if he felt that way he could learn to cook himself. “Rigid,” was the word she’d flung at him. And “pompous.” And “father-dominated.”
That last really irritated him. How could “father-dominated” apply to somebody whose father was already dead?
Buck reached out for the cellular phone on the dashboard. When he tried home he got the same busy signal. Scarlett Scraggs sat hunched in the corner, watching him as he turned the Blazer into Magnolia Street and the extension that climbed Makim’s Mountain. She sniffled from time to time, wiping her eyes sullenly with the back of her hand. Finally the Blazer bumped into the driveway and the house came into sight. The girl beside him promptly lunged forward in the seat, eyes wide. “Is that your house? All that?”
Buck made an affirmative noise. The Grissom house sat on the side of the mountain overlooking Nancyville Valley. It had been a trapper’s log cabin when the first Blankenships migrated to Georgia from Virginia in the early eighteen hundreds and decided to build on the slope for the view.
In the next generation, when most of the valley’s Cherokee landowners had been driven out and their land confiscated, the Blankenships had prospered. By the end of a decade Blankenships owned the whole valley and founded the town of Nancyville, naming it after the second Thomas Blankenship’s bride.
By the time of the Civil War, wealthy Blankenships added an upper story and four white Greek Revival columns to their mansion. These were torn down a few years later to make way for a renovation in the grand Victorian Gothic style, with a turret tower, two ornamental balconies, jigsaw work all around, and a huge front porch. In the 1950’s the last remaining Blankenship sold the cotton mill to northern investors and moved to Los Angeles. When Buck’s father bought the place the farmland it once stood on was gone, the downstairs rooms were being used for hay storage, and the roof had fallen in. It had taken years to restore it.