Scarlett lay beside farrie in the big tester bed, listening to the wind roar around the corners of the Grissoms’ house. The rain had stopped. Through the ruffled curtains dark clouds scudded before a full moon. The wind and weather had changed; it would be much colder in the morning.
It was cold now, Scarlett thought with a small, comfortable shiver. In the night, in the dark, the deep, soft bed was a wonderful place, a warm nest with fancy ruffles of the canopy covering them overhead, where she could still hear the comforting sound of the furnace cutting on and off.
She reached out and gently rolled Farrie’s curled, bony little body up against her. When she held her fingers against her sister’s cheek she found her still cool to the touch. It was nothing short of a miracle that she hadn’t run a fever – Farrie, who could run a fever over practically nothing when she wasn’t happy. But her little sister had bounced back from her adventure, if you could call it that, and had even eaten a good dinner from the tray Buck had brought to her room.
They’d argued over whether Farrie should have had hot soup, even after the hot chocolate, but Scarlett didn’t have time to make soup. And Farrie had gobbled up what she’d fixed, anyway: a whole baked stuffed potato with bacon and creamed spinach, then the grilled tomatoes with cheese, the green peas, garbanzo beans, candied yams, and even half a box of Oreo cookies she’d found in the pantry.
“My God,” Buck had said, watching her. “How can she eat like that and still stay that size?”
Scarlett said thoughtfully, “I think she’s gaining weight.”
“And growing, too.” Farrie looked up at them with her bright eyes. “I think I growed some, too, while I was here.”
Buck had groaned.
Nevertheless, Scarlett thought, watching the cold moonlight dance across the ceiling, he had told her he wasn’t going to give in to Devil Anse and take a bribe, even if the bribe was Scarlett. He’d even called Devil Anse “vile,” and “low-minded.” Scarlett supposed you could call her grandpa that; she’d heard all her life there wasn’t anything a lowdown Scraggs wouldn’t do. And Devil Anse sure set the example.
Sheriff Buck Grissom was a brave man, Scarlett thought, and he had a kind heart. He’d fed Farrie hot chocolate from a spoon, taken her pulse, then sat on the bed beside her while Farrie ate and talked to him about opening locks.
“You know that Master lock number three?” Farrie loved being important; she hiked up in the bed next to Buck so she could look right in his face. “Like the one that you got in your gun case downstairs in the den with the twelve-gauge shotguns, and the automatic weapons like the AK-47? Well, they say in those ads in gun magazines that they can’t be picked. But they can!”
He’d looked skeptical. “That lock has a guarantee. That’s why it’s on my gun case. Those are confiscated illegal weapons.”
“I know that. But what you do is” – Farrie gestured in the air with her thin little fingers – “you get you two pieces of wire like from a coat hanger. The first piece you bend into a L-shape and slide right in at the opening where you put the teeth of the key, and you hold down the ratchet with it.”
Buck raised his eyebrows.
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.
And that maybe he wouldn’t care.
Shoulders drooping, Scarlett turned and padded back to the stairs.
Buck was glad to know from his mother’s call that his sister and the kids were fine, and that her husband was diagnosed, now, with a concussion and not the skull fracture they’d all feared. As soon as he hung up, though, the telephone rang again.
Buck snatched it up. He was dog-tired and wanted to go to bed but it seemed like half the town of Nancyville had to talk to him. It had been that way since six o’clock. This time his caller was the mayor. “Yeah, Harry,” Buck said wearily.
“Buck, listen,” the mayor said. The evening’s constant talking had reduced his voice to a rasp. “As you know, most of the city council are still here at my house, with the exception of Steve Morrisey and Britta Jergensen – Britta had to go home and let her babysitter go. But we’ve been looking over some of the counteractive measures that have been suggested, and we’ve decided to – ah, commit to a few.”
“We don’t need any of that, Harry,” Buck said. “In spite of what you think you heard on television, the sheriff’s department of Jackson County is not going to be down at the courthouse tomorrow night with a cadre of deputies to use force on any living manger scene. Because there isn’t going to be any manger scene.”
“Now, you don’t know that, Buck,” the mayor said quickly. “There were a lot of people looking at Channel Ten tonight, and they heard what you said.”
“That was just something dreamed up by those Atlanta news people,” Buck maintained. “Nobody had said anything about a manger scene or using deputies until the TV people showed up. Harry, that team would have been happy as hell if they’d gotten me to say that I was going to run Joseph and Mary and the kid that won the Best Baby Jesus contest off the courthouse lawn at gunpoint!”
“That’s just the problem,” the mayor said hoarsely. “Junior Whitford came over here a little while ago with most of his Committee for the Real Meaning of Christmas, and they’d been watching Channel Ten, too. I’ll say it to you, Buck, although I won’t say it to them – that damned committee’s got their heads turned by all the publicity. They’ve decided they’re going to have a manger scene after all!”
Buck surveyed the wall before him bleakly. “They can’t. There’s a court order.”
“Court order, fiddle-faddle!” the mayor burst out. “They think they’re going to storm the courthouse! They’ve already called Channel Ten, Junior tells me, to tell them what they’re going to do.”
And Channel Ten loved it, Buck thought.
“We had to put on our thinking caps,” the mayor went on. “There we were, except for Britta and Steve Morrisey, trying to come up with a new approach.”
Buck said cautiously, “You’re not thinking of those damned fireworks, are you?”
The council had learned that in a pinch they could use the leftover supplies of fireworks from the last municipal Fourth of July celebration, which was not as strange as it sounded: fireworks were a part of southern Christmases, even though the custom was dying out somewhat.
“Well, I think we ought to go with the fireworks,” the mayor was saying, “although I know you don’t like them, Buck. But the idea is to provide so much entertainment tomorrow night that – uh, people won’t look kindly on any interruptions from Junior and folks I won’t mention. We’ve just had an offer from Ronnie Dance, who runs an outfit that specializes in dropping Santa Clauses during the holiday season.”
“Dropping Santa Clauses?” Buck straightened up, surprised in spite of himself. “What the hell’s that?”
“The big operators bring their Santa Clauses in by helicopter, Buck,” the voice on the telephone explained a little apologetically. “You know, Santa just steps right out of the chopper in the parking lot and into the nearest J.C. Penney’s or what have you. Ronnie doesn’t have a helicopter, he runs a skydiving service in the summertime out of a Cessna 206. Santa Claus-dropping is just his off-season business. But he can drop a skydiver in a Santa uniform onto a circle that’s been already drawn on the asphalt at the shopping mall. Most of Ronnie’s Santas used to be paratroopers; they kind of look for that target.”
“Harry,” Buck said, keeping his voice even with an effort, “we don’t need a skydiving Santa at the Living Christmas Tree tomorrow night. There’s going to be enough going on.”
“Buck, I can’t refuse it!” the mayor rasped. “Ronnie’s offered it free, after Santa does his jump up at the K Mart in Toccoa. It’s a good thing the Living Christmas Tree’s at sundown. Ronnie says he can just squeeze Santa in as the last jump of the day, and it won’t cost us a dime.”
“Harry,” Buck said, his temper beginning to slip, “you and the city council just consider that I’m responsible for maintaining law and order in this county, and I don’t know about being able to do that if you’re going to encourage anybody to stage their own demonstrations tomorrow night -”
“Nobody encouraged Junior and that damned committee,” the mayor shouted, “that was his own idea!”
“- and pile a fireworks display and a Santa jump from a Cessna on top of it, while the people who worked hard on all this are trying to give the Living Christmas Tree their concert.”
The mayor made choking noises, trying to interrupt, but Buck went on. “Harry, it’s going to be pure hell if the council does even half this stuff, and then you want to throw the whole enchilada right in my lap! Now, you just tell those people you got in your house thinking up these bright ideas to go home and get some sleep.”
“Dammit, I’m not going to do that!” the mayor fired back. “Those people, as you call them, know there’s a need to show we got some civilizing influence up here, and that we’re not a bunch of jerks and hillbillies like they tried to show tonight on TV. As for you, Sheriff Grissom,” he said sarcastically, “you’re the one what shot off your mouth about armed deputies that are going to see to it we don’t have any unofficial manger scenes!”
“Now just a damned minute,” Buck said.
But the mayor had hung up.
Buck put the telephone back in its cradle with a groan of pent-up exasperation. The city council and the mayor had panicked, egged on by all those Nancyville citizens who had kept the telephone lines hot that night. The town had gotten upset enough about the original injunction over not having the living manger scene downtown. Now he knew his remark on TV, which seemed to say he would have deputies holding off any illegal Mary and Infant Jesus at the courthouse, had struck a nerve.
Damn, Buck thought, massaging the back of his neck furiously, he was beginning to hate Christmas!
He turned off the television in the den. The Scraggs dog got out from behind the couch and followed him as he went down the hall to the parlor to put out the lights on the Christmas tree. “I see you’re with me once more,” he told it.
The dog trotted along beside him, wagging its tail.
Buck stood gazing at the huge winking, glittering spruce for a long moment, suddenly realizing that since the Scraggs sisters were going to be with him for Christmas, somebody had to buy them presents.
What could you buy for the lock-picking little sister? he wondered. The contents of the Nancyville Hardware Store’s security department, so she could practice? A Rubik’s cube?
That didn’t sound like such a bad idea. Buck bent to finger a crayoned, cotton-bearded paper Santa Claus he remembered from the second grade.
And clothes. Farrie seemed to like clothes, the stranger the better. At least he could get both of them more than one pair of shoes.
And Scarlett?
Ah, Scarlett, Buck thought, still fingering the forgotten paper Santa Claus in his hand. What would he like to buy for her?
She wasn’t like Susan, he thought, bemused. She was a different person in her own right, soft and sparkling behind that tough Scraggs façade and, when you came down to it, an enchanting mystery. Both she and her sister were fascinated with the old Grissom house and what it represented, the kind of home they’d never had. The littlest one couldn’t keep her hands off the Christmas tree. And Scarlett was a natural-born chef.
Something for cooking, Buck thought, maybe one of those hand mixers. A set of chef’s knives. A frilly apron.
Black silk underwear, he thought suddenly. The idea of Scarlett in a frilly apron with nothing but black bikini panties and a black lace bra on under it made Buck’s fingers contract convulsively.
Looking down, he saw what he had done. He mashed the paper Santa Claus back into shape and nicked away the loosened parts of its beard.
You had to have a taste for trouble, he told himself as he turned out the Christmas tree lights, shoved the dog out of the way, and went out into the downstairs hall, to even think about Scarlett O’Hara Scraggs. Any professional lawman who gave a passing thought to the granddaughter of one of the state’s biggest criminals was out of his damned mind.
At the top of the stairs, he paused at their bedroom door and listened. Asleep, both of them.
Buck felt oddly disappointed. He’d almost wanted to find Scarlett awake, so he could talk to her. Maybe she had some ideas about this infernal mess with the council’s skydiving Santa Claus and fireworks. She seemed to have a pretty sharp mind.
He stood there, shifting from one foot to the other, not wanting to do anything as boring as go to bed, even though he was dog-tired.
At that moment the door opened.
The hall was dark and there was no light in his sister’s bedroom, but he knew at once it was Scarlett.
“What?” she said in a husky, sleepy voice.
Buck could just make out that cloud of dark hair, the pale oval of her face, the shadowy pools of her eyes. She was wearing the Atlanta Braves nightshirt that clung to her beautiful breasts and came only to the middle of her long legs. Buck tried not to look at it.
“I see you’re up after all,” he said, promptly cursing himself for the year’s stupidest observation.
“I heard you come up the stairs,” she murmured.
Buck knew he should say good night and turn to go to his room, but he didn’t. Instead, he stood drinking in the sight of Scarlett Scraggs, her lissom form in the nightshirt, her lovely face, her curving mouth that was sweetly, seductively, parted.
As if to ask, Buck thought suddenly, the question he’d never answered that night in his room. Aren’t you going tokissme again?
“Scarlett,” Buck said hoarsely. Those luminous eyes regarded him cautiously. “Are you – ah, comfortable in – in there?”
She considered that. “Well, it’s nice. Farrie especially likes the bed.”
Bed, Buck thought. It would have to be that word. He resolutely put thoughts of aprons and black lingerie out of his mind. Instead, he studied her hand resting against the doorjamb: the long, graceful fingers, the delicate wrist, amazed all over again that something so beautiful, so exquisitely fashioned, could be produced by that cesspool of criminal genes, the Scraggses. She hasn’t had a chance, Buck told himself.
He cleared his throat. “Don’t need a window open, or anything?”
“No.” That sad, slightly quizzical look was still there.
She’s wondering what I’m doing, standing here, Buck thought desperately. What I want from her.
He felt a slight sheen of sweat break out on the back of his neck, under his collar. They were so close now they were almost touching. With a little effort he could put his good arm around her, hold her warm, slender body in the Atlanta Braves nightshirt up against him, as he had before.
He couldn’t leave, yet he sensed something was different. If she was unhappy about something he wanted to comfort her. With a groan, Buck reached out with his left arm and scooped Scarlett Scraggs to him. He heard her gasp before he covered her mouth with his own.
Kissing Scarlett Scraggs was dangerous; it got better each time. She flowed into his arms, soft and tantalizing, sweetly giving – Buck drowned in that kiss. He could barely tear himself away.
When he looked down into Scarlett’s face, he saw her eyes were still closed. “Oh,” she was murmuring softly. “Oh!”
The astonishing part of this whole thing was not that kissing Scarlett O’Hara Scraggs was a sweet seventh wonder of the world, a dazzling trip through outer space and back again, but that they didn’t need to talk, say anything at all. The kiss said it all for them, a tender, fragile bubble of feeling that was wonderful.
Buck, still locked in the magic, didn’t want to let her go. It was Scarlett who pulled away. “I gotta go,” she said.
He supposed she was right. But he couldn’t help thinking she didn’t seem very enthusiastic about what had just happened. Not the way she’d been before.
Buck thought he’d detected an odd sadness. There was certainly no mistaking the faint, teary wobble in her voice.
“Scarlett, wait,” Buck said.
But the door closed softly. He stared at it, still not able to figure out what this was all about. She’d acted like he’d broken her heart instead of kissing her.
He was damned if it made any sense, he thought grumpily as he opened the door to his bedroom and the Scraggs dog rushed past him to leap on his bed. But that’s what you got being involved with the Scraggs tribe. What was it Susan had said? They were hardly rewarding.
But for a moment, Buck knew, he’d held a soft armful of heaven in his arms. It was a long time before he got to sleep.