The van rolled into the circular drive before the Grissom house and came to a stop. It waited a moment for the two automobiles behind it to come up, and then the van’s door opened. A tall figure, dressed in a saffron robe, cardigan sweater, and sandals wet from the steady rainfall, got out. He was followed by a woman also wearing saffron robes and carrying a drum, and another Hare Krishna, a short man who opened an umbrella. Both men had shaved, uncovered heads.
Buck was standing on the front porch waiting for them. He said, “Okay, let’s hold it right there.”
The television van from Channel 10 in Atlanta sped up the drive, swerved around the other vehicles and pulled up on the grass right in front of Buck, coming to a stop over the spot where he knew his mother had her bed of early daffodils. A man with a television camera on his shoulder jumped out and aimed it at Buck.
“Excuse me, Sheriff,” someone called, “but could we have a shot of you talking to the alternative-program people?”
Buck felt the back of his neck tighten. He had already discarded the sling on his arm, aware that “I fell over a dog” did not project the best image for a county sheriff. His arm throbbed painfully. In spite of it, he stuck both thumbs into his Sam Brown belt.
“If there’s an alternative program I don’t know anything about it,” he said sternly. “And if there is such a thing, it’s not in my jurisdiction.”
At the same time Buck was a little nervous about Scarlett Scraggs; it was almost as if he could feel her eyes on his back. He had asked her to stay out of sight until he could get rid of the delegation and the media, his excuse being that he wanted to get to work quickly afterward and organize a search for the little sister.
That, he told himself, was only the truth.
“But Sheriff, you’re going to be down there tomorrow night,” the TV cameraman said, his camera right in Buck’s face. “To make sure the local committee for the Real Meaning of Christmas doesn’t bring on their own manger scene, right?”
Surprise showed on Buck’s face for a brief second. “There’s no plan at this time,” he said even more sternly, “to bring on a manger scene.” He was beginning to feel that at any moment something was going to happen. Like Farrah Fawcett Scraggs coming up the driveway, deciding not to run away after all. “I haven’t got the authority to permit any alternative programs,” he told them. “Nancyville is still under a court order not to have any religious Christmas displays of any kind on the courthouse lawn tomorrow night.”
“Will you be there?” one of the TV crew called.
Buck peered into the rain, trying to locate the voice. “Yes, I’ll be there,” he answered.
“Are your deputies armed?” the same voice asked.
“Well yes,” Buck said, “they’re always armed.”
Too late, he saw what was happening. County sheriff will confront Joseph, Mary, and Baby Jesus at courthouse with armed deputies. He’d bet anything that was the way it was going to come out on the evening news. He could have kicked himself.
The TV news people were looking excited and happy at this element in their story, but the Hare Krishnas stopped their circling and came to stand at the steps, looking alarmed.
Buck’s face felt like granite, but he tried for a smile. “Well, no matter what’s planned for tomorrow night,” he began, “Nancyville welcomes all -”
“Okay, that’s a wrap,” the cameraman said to the TV sound man. “Thank you, Sheriff.” They turned their backs and abruptly walked off toward their van.
Seeing the TV news crew call it a day, the Hare Krishnas filed toward their vehicle, hopped inside, and pulled shut the doors.
At that moment Kevin Black Badger chose to arrive at the end of the driveway in a county patrol car, lights flashing. Buck leaped from the porch.
“Hey,” Black Badger said, sticking a long leg out of the patrol car. He watched interestedly as the Hare Krishnas’ van backed to turn out of the drive to the faint hum of bare ram chanting. “What goes on, Sheriff? I was told you need me to track a runaway child?”
Buck reached down and dragged his deputy out of the patrol car. The TV crew was still in the driveway, close enough to hear. “Open your mouth again,” Buck growled, “and I’ll put you on a month’s suspension.”
Kevin’s eyes widened. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Buck led him toward the house.
Scarlett met them at the door. She had on her denim jacket, jeans, and a red sweater, and looked beautiful and determined. “What was that all about?” she demanded. “Are those people going to look for Farrie?”
Kevin Black Badger stopped short, transfixed. His black eyes took in Scarlett Scraggses’ dark hair flowing becomingly over her shoulders, her trim, luscious figure, and he reacted with an appreciative quiver.
Buck pushed him out of the doorway. Now recognition dawned in the deputy’s eyes. Kevin Black Badger recoiled. “Sheriff, I swear, but isn’t she – this – she looks like -”
“Scraggs,” Buck said tersely. “She’s a Scraggs.” He put his hand in the middle of his deputy’s back and pushed him down the hall. As he opened the door to the parlor he explained in a few words who Scarlett was, and how she had come to be his Christmas houseguest. “There are two of them, Devil Anse’s granddaughters. They’re runaways, and Susan Huddleston is in Atlanta taking a long holiday.” Buck couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “I’ve got custody until she returns.”
“Well,” Kevin said, “that’s something.” He seemed to shake himself. “Who’s the missing child you want me to track?”
Before Buck could answer, Scarlett cried, “It’s my little sister, she’s run away, and I need to get out there!” Whirling, she made for the door. “I want to go in the patrol car so I can look for her.”
Kevin Black Badger rushed forward to open it. “That’s a good idea,” he said with considerable enthusiasm. “I’ll just drive you around, Miss Scr -”
“Never mind!” Buck reached over the deputy’s shoulder and slammed the door, forcefully. Somehow the idea of Black Badger riding around with Scarlett Scraggs all afternoon in the patrol car did not make him happy. Not with that look on Black Badger’s face.
“You’re going to track on foot,” Buck told him, taking a perverse pleasure in seeing the deputy’s face fall. “I want you to do this whole area and the woods in back of the house.”
The woods in back of the house covered virtually all of Makim’s Mountain. They were thick enough to keep Black Badger busy for a week.
“I’ve already called in an All Points Bulletin,” Buck went on, “so there’ll be cars patrolling the immediate vicinity. The missing child’s only ten years old or so, let’s hope she can’t get very far. And,” he added, remembering, “she doesn’t walk too good.”
At his words Scarlett gave a low cry and started for the door again. “You can’t keep me here! I’ve got to get out there and look for her myself!”
Buck caught her and motioned to Black Badger that he could leave.
“You’ve got to stay here, Scarlett,” he said, holding her in spite of her struggles. “When the patrols come back with your sister she’s going to be cold and tired and wet. She may even be running a fever.” He knew how she worried about her little sister getting sick. “You’ve got to be here in the house to look after her.”
He felt her go slack in his arms. “She’s out there, just walking around in the rain,” she whimpered. “Farrie’s worried because we’ve got no home, no place to go!”
She was tearing him apart. Buck tightened his arms around her and bent his head to kiss her lightly, on those rosy, tempting lips. More a gesture of comfort, he told himself, than anything else.
But that kiss was fated to be something more. A lot more. She seemed to shudder, then opened her mouth to respond to him. It was as though lightning struck them both. A sort of rainbow-hued, dazzling display of earthly delight that sent Buck’s head spinning and his knees to shaking. With a groan, he deepened the kiss and drew her closer.
But only for an instant.
With a howl, Scarlett Scraggs wrenched herself so violently away from him that Buck staggered back in stunned surprise. While his head was still reluctantly clearing she yelled: “Don’t touch me!”
“What the devil?” Buck exploded. He rubbed the stabbing pain in his bad arm.
“Yes, the devil!” Scarlett Scraggs’s beautiful breasts heaved furiously under the denim jacket. “Devil Anse! I know what my grandpa’s offered you, he told me!” Her lip curled, contemptuous. “Did you just make up your mind this minute?”
He’d told her?
Dumbfounded, Buck rubbed the back of his neck. Now it was getting a bit clearer. Blast the old villain! He’d told his own granddaughter he’d offered her as a bribe to the county sheriff! “Scarlett,” Buck began, “I -”
“He said if you agreed to it,” she spat at him, “I was to act nice to you or he’d come and see that I did!”
Buck stared at her. It had been a bad afternoon, but this finally made him lose his temper.
“Now listen.” He pointed his finger at her. “Don’t you get it in your head that your vile, low-minded relative can bribe me, even with anything as damned near irresistible as you are. I may lose my head over you, but it won’t be because your grandfather thinks he’s calling every shot, in or out of bed. No,” Buck shouted, “if I’m going to fall in love I’ll do it on my own damned time!”
Scarlett stood still for a long moment, her mouth open. “Fall in love?”
“Forget it,” Buck snarled. He turned away. “Just get what I said out of your head, because nothing’s going to happen. I may have made a fool of myself, but I won’t do it again.”
She followed him toward the parlor, biting her lip. Fall in love. That’s what he’d said. But not because Devil Anse had anything to do with it.
That meant he’d thought it over and decided not to take up the free trial offer! Scarlett gasped in amazement. It put a whole new light on things, considering the way that she was beginning to feel about him, too.
She didn’t know why she was so happy, except now she knew that Buck Grissom wasn’t the kind of man her grandpa could twist around his finger! Scarlett regarded him with new eyes as he paced up and down.
“The reason Farrie ran away,” she said softly, “was because I told her we couldn’t stay here. I told her that Devil Anse was going to make you do something you shouldn’t do, and it would mean trouble for all of us. So I guess Farrie couldn’t face up to it, having to go away in spite of everything. She’s just disappeared.”
He wasn’t listening. He strode across the room, massaging the back of his neck furiously. “Damn Susan Huddleston! If the kid gets pneumonia I’ll have a damned court case on my hands. ‘Illegal harboring of a minor.’” He groaned aloud. “Is that a charge? Damned if I know. What else could they sue me for?”
He turned, suddenly distracted by a thought. “I should have told Black Badger to take the damned dog. He says it could be good for tracking. He should have thought of that himself. I’ll call him on the Blazer radio -”
He suddenly stopped short. “The dog! Where’s the infernal dog?”
Scarlett gaped at him. “Demon?”
“It isn’t with your little sister, it came in with me! But where is it?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” he repeated, looking around the parlor. “The confounded thing’s never more than a foot from me, it never lets me alone. But since we came into the house it’s disappeared. That means,” Buck said, starting for the door, “it’s got to be somewhere in here.”
He slammed off toward the kitchen, calling the dog. A few seconds later he came back down the hall. Scarlett heard his steps on the stairs.
She probably should help, she thought. It wasn’t like Demon to go missing like that, and was too bad Demon wasn’t with Farrie. If Demon was there to look after her little sister it would help a lot. Especially if they didn’t find Farrie before it got dark.
With a sudden lump in her throat, Scarlett found she didn’t want to think about that. “Demon!” she yelled.
There was no sound from the dining room. Almost no sound at all where she was, in the parlor, except for a faint thumping from behind the big, flashing Christmas tree.
Buck came back. “The dog can’t be with her,” he was saying to himself, “Farrie was missing before I got home.”
He stood in the middle of the room, head cocked, listening. Then he seemed to detect something, for with a quick movement he made a lunge for the other side of the tree. Crouching, Buck dragged a big black animal out from the far corner behind it. “Gotcha,” he whooped.
At any other time the thing would have taken his arm off. Now the Scraggs dog lay unresisting, as big as some felled black bear, on its back with its feet and legs hanging limply.
“It’s been hiding,” Buck told Scarlett. “You’ve been hiding, you monster, haven’t you? Lying back there behind the tree hiding from everybody. But you just gave yourself away wagging that damned tail.”
She was puzzled. “Why would Demon do something like that?”
“Because,” Buck said, seizing a hind leg and spinning the cowering dog on its back until its head pointed toward him, “it knows something we don’t know. It knows where your sister is.”
Scarlett sucked in her breath. “Demon knows?”
He smiled grimly. “When I remembered Kevin Black Badger saying what a good tracker your dog would make, I knew that if your sister was really missing, the dog would be out in the rain looking for her. We wouldn’t be able to keep it in the house. Instead of that, the thing goes to hide behind the Christmas tree.”
“Demon,” Scarlett said, bending over the dog, “you stop this fooling around and go get Farrie if you know where she is.”
“Oh, it knows.” Buck reached under the huge dog and tried to roll it onto its feet. He got it halfway, and then Demon fell back, all four legs waving.
“I’ll bet I know what happened.” Scarlett looked thoughtful. “Wherever Farrie’s gone to, I’ll bet Farrie told Demon not to let on where it was.”
Buck cursed. As well as he could, he dragged the dog to a sitting position. It promptly slid back down again, tail wagging cravenly.
He stood over the Scraggs dog, feeling murderous. “Go get Farrah Fawcett Scraggs,” he told it, “or I’ll haul you down to the jail and lock you in a cold cell for the night without any food.”
At the word “jail” the animal stopped wagging its tail and rolled its eyes up at him. “I think Demon knows what that means,” Scarlett said.
It was a Scraggs dog. It would.
“Two nights in jail, then,” Buck snapped. “Go get Farrah Fawcett. Or do you want to try for three?”
The dog rolled over, groaning, and slowly got to its feet. “Oh, Demon!” Scarlett jumped up, excited. “Good dog! You’re gonna go find her!”
Buck couldn’t resist giving the dog a shove on its hindquarters with his booted foot. “It’s been lying around here hiding,” he growled, “when I’ve got every man I can spare out in this weather looking for her.”
“Demon loves Farrie,” Scarlett said, following them as the dog started for the hall. “She’ll do anything Farrie tells her to. If Farrie told Demon not to let on where she was, then Demon wouldn’t do it.”
“Are you going up?” They stood at the foot of the steps, which Demon regarded with indifferent interest. “She’s upstairs somewhere, isn’t she?”
He couldn’t believe he was carrying on a conversation with the Scraggses’ monstrous beast who, according to Scarlett, kept secrets. Like where the little sister was.
Slowly, tail wagging, the black dog started up the staircase. At the top it turned away from the bedrooms and padded toward the front of the house.
“I know where she’s going!” Scarlett darted past Buck. “Farrie’s in your mother’s little sewing room, I’ll bet you anything she is!”
Buck hurried down the corridor, trying not to get tangled in the dog. They went up the stairs and at the door to the tower room Demon flopped down heavily and buried its head between its paws. Scarlett tried the doorknob.
“The sewing room’s locked,” Buck told her.
“Farrie can pick locks, she’s real good at it.” She rattled the door handle. “She could get in there if she wanted to.”
“Why in hell would she want to do that?” Buck stepped over the dog and bent and put his eye to the keyhole. He couldn’t see anything, it was dark. “Farrie?” he called, experimentally.
There was no answer.
He turned to Scarlett. Her face was white. She held one fist to her mouth, trying not to cry out. “It’s dark in there,” she moaned. “Farrie went in there in the dark to hide.”
There was no heat in there, Buck knew, but he didn’t say it. He felt a slow coil of fear unwind in his belly. Why would a child go hide in a dark room as cold as this one, unless she didn’t expect to come out? Buck braced himself for something unpleasant. “Stand back,” he told Scarlett.
Scarlett drew a deep breath. “You going to shoot the lock off?”
“You’ve been watching too much television. No, I’m going to use a key.”
He took out his key ring, found the right one, and unlocked the door. There was no sound from inside while he was doing this, and no sound when he swung it open.
The outside shutters were drawn and it was so dark Buck stumbled over some boxes groping for the light switch.
Scarlett charged past him. “Oh, Farrie, Farrie, my poor baby,” she screamed.
The light didn’t come on, the bulb was burned out. Buck couldn’t see what Scarlett was doing, but he heard her sobs. “Move aside,” he told her, as he pushed the dog out of the way and swung his legs over a trunk and came down on the other side. He saw the old football jacket. That was all there seemed to be, the jacket, and a pair of scrawny legs, but he recognized the lime-colored tights and the stained high-top sneakers. Buck bent and slid both hands under the bundle that was the youngest Scraggs.
When he picked her up her head fell back and he saw the pale, wizened face, seemingly lifeless, the eyes closed tight.
A little too tight, Buck noted. In his experience, when someone was unconscious the eyelids came loosely together, relaxed. Miss Farrah Fawcett Scraggs was playing possum.
But that was not to say she wasn’t a pathetic little possum. In his arms, Buck found as he started for the door, she was as weightless as ever and even her clothes were cold to the touch. Up there in the dark tower room it must have felt like the tomb itself.
Poor little pixie, he thought, she’d probably got more than she’d bargained for. She was rigid with cold.
Still, he reminded himself, she could have come out at any time.
“Farrie,” Scarlett moaned, following them down the stairs and out into the hall. “Why did she go and do it? She near froze in there!”
Buck maneuvered around her, kicking the dog out of the way. “The bedroom,” he told her. “I’m going to put her in your bed. You go downstairs and fix her something hot to drink.” As Scarlett wavered, he snapped, “Go ahead, my mother’s got some cocoa mix somewhere.”
Scarlett ran down the stairs. Buck carried Farrie into his sister’s bedroom. When he leaned over her to put her on the bed, she opened her eyes. He hung over her, finding he couldn’t get her little hands unlocked from around his neck.
“You’ll be okay,” Buck said, trying to pry her fingers apart. “You can let go of me now.”
The sad little eyes looked up at him.
“Don’t make no use,” the child whispered. “If I let you go, we still can’t stay noplace. There’s no place at all for Scarlett and me.”
There was no need to deny it, she spoke the truth. There was no place for Scraggs children and other outcasts; day in and day out in the southern mountains he saw it, and his deputies did, too. Farrie wasn’t the only one.
“We’ll work on it,” Buck told her. “You just relax.”
He knew that wasn’t good enough to tell a wisp of a child who had wanted to crawl into a cold dark place and disappear, but it was the best he could do at the moment.
“Just lie back and shut your eyes for now,” Buck said. “And tomorrow you can show me how you get into locked rooms.”
Eyes closed, Farrie smiled.