Homecoming in Mossy Creek Read online

  Reviews of the Mossy Creek Series

  “Delightful.”

  —Marie Barnes, former First Lady of Georgia

  “Mitford meets Mayberry in the first book of this innovative and warmhearted new series from BelleBooks.”

  —Cleveland Daily Banner, Cleveland, Tennessee

  “MOSSY CREEK is as much fun as a cousin reunion; like sipping ice cold lemonade on a hot summer’s afternoon. Hire me a moving van, it’s the kind of town where everyone wishes they could live.”

  —Debbie Macomber, NYT bestselling author

  “You won’t want to leave MOSSY CREEK! These pages offer readers a taste of country charm with characters that feel like family.”

  —Joyce Handzo, Library Reviews

  “If you have never entered the city limits of MOSSY CREEK, then you should go there immediately. The books of this series are among the most readable and enjoyable you will find anywhere.”

  —Jackie K. Cooper, WMAC-AM, Macon, GA

  “Mossy Creek combines the atmosphere of an Anne River Siddons’ novel with the magic of a Barbara Samuels’ character study. The latest trip is worth the journey.”

  —Harriet Klausner, Amazon.com’s top reviewer

  “The characters and kinships of MOSSY CREEK are quirky, hilarious and all too human. This story reads like a delicious, meringue- covered slice of home. I couldn’t get enough.”

  —Pamela Morsi, USA Today bestselling author

  “MOSSY CREEK is a book you will not lend for fear you won’t get it back.”

  —Chloe LeMay, The Herald, Rock Hill, SC

  “For those who like books with a strong sense of community and place, engaging characters, and stories that will take you from tears to laughter and back again. It’s very ‘Southern,’ and very small town.”

  —Renee Patterson, Alachua (FL) County Libraries

  The Complete Mossy Creek Hometown Series

  Mossy Creek

  Reunion in Mossy Creek

  Summer in Mossy Creek

  Blessings of Mossy Creek

  A Day in Mossy Creek

  At Home in Mossy Creek

  Critters of Mossy Creek

  Homecoming in Mossy Creek

  Homecoming in Mossy Creek

  by

  Debra Dixon, Sandra Chastain, Martha Crockett and Nancy Knight

  with

  Brenna Crowder, Darcy Crowder, Susan Goggins, Maureen Hardegree, Carolyn McSparren and Berta Platas

  BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyrights

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  BelleBooks

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  eISBN: 978-1-61194-069-5

  ISBN: 978-1-61194-040-4

  Copyright © 2011 by BelleBooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

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  Cover design: Martha Crockett

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Cover art credits:

  © Mark Herreid, © Jeff Kinsey | Fotolia.com

  Mossy Creek map: Dino Fritz

  :EMhc:01:

  Dedications

  For all the Creekites: Those who live in Mossy Creek and those who want to. If you don’t know the way, just close your eyes and click your heels.

  —With love, Sandra Chastain

  To my best friend, Davy Crockett.

  —Martha Crockett

  For the friendship in my mama’s arms, the wisdom in my daddy’s heart and the love of Jesus in Sylvia’s smile. You can always come home again.

  —Brenna Crowder

  To Brenna and Wil for always believing. How blessed I am to travel this road with you. And to John, for making me the lucky one.

  —Darcy Crowder

  This one is for all the readers who’ve loved Amos and Ida as much as I have.

  —Debra Dixon

  To the best mom and dad ever, Martha Kate and Howard Goggins, with love.

  —Susan Goggins

  For all the special people who make my life so rewarding: My ninety-one year old mother who is amazing; my son Mike and his family, Karol, Kristi and Michael; For Joyce, Ron and Trey; For Sandra who has been my best friend for thirty years; For Doug who’s always there for me, and for Mikey (and his wonderful family) who brought back laughter and love.

  —Nancy Knight

  To Martha Crockett who pushed me until I got published, and to Debi Dixon, the world greatest (and toughest) editor. Also to my wonderful critique group who puts up with me week after week.

  —Carolyn McSparren

  To all the great friends who let me play with them in Mossy Creek!

  —Berta Platas

  The Mossy Creek Gazette

  215 Main Street • Mossy Creek, Georgia

  From the Desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager

  Lady Victoria Salter Stanhope

  The Clifts

  Seaward Road

  St. Ives, Cornwall, TR3 7PJ

  United Kingdom

  Hey, Vick!

  I’ve been telling you that Homecoming was on its way to Mossy Creek, and it’s finally arrived. Festivities officially start on Thursday, with a Bake Sale and a play, but Creekites will spend all week getting ready.

  Excitement is wafting through the air. This is the first Homecoming at Mossy Creek High School in 20 years. Imagine the fun everyone is going to have, getting together for all the festivities. I’ve heard from over 40 expatriate Creekites who are wending their way home for the weekend. Hamilton House has been booked for months, as has the Best Western and Days Inn down in Bigelow.

  Town Square has been festooned with green and gold. Gold mums are planted in every flowerpot in town. Creekites are digging deep into their fall wardrobes for any and all green and/or gold sweaters.

  Tom Anglin bought a stuffed Ram online and it’s sitting outside the Mossy Creek Hardware store. Kids have been getting their pictures made riding on it, and the Booster Club has taken to a night vigil so it’s not heisted by some Bigelow vigilantes.

  Gotta go for now. Albert Bailey just came in saying he’s certain he’s been smelling moonshine brewing up around Bailey Mill. Since you might not know the term, moonshine is homemade liquor and it’s illegal as all get-out. Gotta go check it out!

  Talk at ya later—

  Katie

  PART ONE

  Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.

  —Seneca

  The Great Time Capsule Caper

  Louise & Peggy, Thursday afternoon

  “Just because Peggy and I are on the Homecoming committee does not mean we are capable of sorting out this mess.” I folded my arms across my chest and stared hard at the three Mossy Creek town leaders: Mayor Ida Walker, Chief of Police Amos Royden and Town Council President Win Allen.

  “Oh, come on, Louise,” Peggy Caldwell said. “Where’s your sense of mystery? The game’s afoot, Sherlock. It’s up to us to save the day.”


  “I always hated Sherlock Holmes,” I said, ignoring Peggy’s snort of disgust. “How hard is it for the so-called great detective to pick up on those clues when Conan Doyle is the one who set them up for him?” I dropped my voice a couple of octaves. “I perceive, Watson, that the criminal is a left-handed tax accountant with buck teeth, a lisp and six toes on his right foot.”

  “Bite your tongue, Louise Sawyer! Sherlock Holmes is a genius.” My friend Peggy is a retired college professor who is an omnivorous reader of detective stories. She named her four cats Dashiell (as in Hammett), Sherlock, Watson and Marple (after Agatha Christie’s busy-body detective Miss Marple). That does not mean she can detect her way out of a paper bag in the real world.

  Which this was.

  “If y’all would please consider—” Win Allen, newly elected President of the Town Council, began.

  But Mayor Ida Hamilton Walker gave an impatient snort. “Louise, Peggy, if you are through bickering, let’s sit down and hash this thing out.”

  “What do we do if—and it’s a big if—we locate the time capsule?” I asked.

  “Call me immediately,” Amos said. “Hold onto it until I can come get it. Don’t talk to Mutt or Sandy whatever you do.”

  “We absolutely must have our hands on that box by mid-afternoon Saturday,” Ida said at her most authoritarian. Believe me, Julius Caesar was a wimp compared to Ida.

  “We’ll have to open it secretly and debug the darned thing before the Homecoming Dance,” Win added in more placating tones. “Otherwise we could embarrass half of Mossy Creek,” He was much newer at politics than either Ida or Amos.

  But he was right. Small town secrets may seem trifling to big city folks, but here they can lead to feuds and hurt feelings that last generations.

  I’d stopped thinking of that stupid box as a time capsule and started considering it a time bomb all set to go off at the Homecoming dance to spatter half of Mossy Creek with mud.

  An innocent time capsule. How scary can that be? How many graduating classes and churches and school dedicators have buried cultural icons from their own day to be dug up at some specified time in the future? How can a bottle of New Coke or a Dacron blouse or an eight-track tape of The Beatles create guerilla warfare?

  I’ll tell you how. Leave the box unguarded on the table in the hall outside the gym beside the nametags at the Homecoming dance the night the school and the athletic field burn down, hide inside it a collection of secrets that nobody wants revealed, add a big dollop of spite, close, dig a hole, bury said box and promptly lose track of it in the ensuing chaos.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “The fire started before the dance. The last thing on anyone’s mind must have been that stupid box. Maybe it burned up?”

  “If only,” Amos said. “A couple of the football players tossed it into the back of somebody’s pickup truck, came back after the fire and buried it on the field.”

  “So they should know where to find it, right?” I asked.

  Amos shook his head. “We were exhausted, still half-drunk and mad as a bunch of alligators.”

  Win, who was not a native Creekite, raised a brow at Amos’s admission of youthful foibles. The Police Chief was so hard on teenage misbehavior, it was easy to forget he’d ever been one.

  Amos continued, “Except for what little leftover light there was from the flames, it was still dark. Somehow burying that capsule despite the fire became a symbol that Mossy Creek High School would come back. We just didn’t expect it to take twenty years.” He shrugged. “Now look at it. After twenty years of reverting to forest, it’s being razed again for the new stadium. There’s no way we could point to a spot and say, ‘Dig here.’”

  Without a high school or a football stadium, no one had given the capsule a thought until the high school reopened and the town fathers and mothers decided to rebuild the football field. In my opinion, it would have been better if everyone who remembered the capsule had been knocked over the head and given selective amnesia.

  The football stadium had over twenty years to revert to nature. Trees grow fast in the Appalachian Mountains. So do vines like poison ivy, oak and sumac. Instead of a rectangle of pristine grass and neat limestone lines, it became a haven for rabbits, possums, raccoons and, Heaven help us, copperheads and pygmy rattlesnakes. Before the fire, the stadium was a neat assemblage of bleachers and concrete block dressing rooms and restrooms. After the fire, the place sank into a jumble of split and charred concrete blocks, twisted metal rebar and rampant greenery. Even the goal posts resembled Henri Moore statuary run amok in an arboretum.

  I doubt if the crew who built the stadium in the first place would have been able to figure out what went where after all this time. The location of a buried time capsule would have been the least of their worries. Plus the footprint of the new stadium didn’t quite match that of the old stadium.

  So we couldn’t simply point to the place where the capsule was supposed to have been buried. Even if one single person who took part in burying it had a clue as to what they’d done with it, everything was now catawampus.

  Our current problem began with a letter sent to Amos by a lawyer in California. One would think a letter marked ‘private and confidential’ would stay that way. This, however, was Mossy Creek.

  Sandy, the police dispatcher, believed she had a right and duty to know everything about everything that happened in Mossy Creek, preferably before anyone else knows. She did not feel that ‘private and confidential’ refers to Amos alone, but to the entire police department. Therefore, she read the letter before it reached Amos’s desk.

  And, of course, she told Mutt, her brother and police cohort. She swore him to secrecy. As if.

  Next Amos read the letter over the phone to Ida Walker, Amos’s mayor and erstwhile light of love. Who knew who’d been listening in on the extensions?

  Ida insisted that Win, as head of the Town Council, be apprised of the situation.

  All that is the logical reason why the whole letter became ‘secret’ knowledge by suppertime. Mossy Creek, however, leapfrogs over logic. We don’t actually use jungle drums to communicate, but whether news is transmitted via the honeysuckle vines or the clematis, we do have our own bush telegraph. A breath of possible scandal turns it into our own wireless network.

  So why not simply leave the stupid box lost, you ask?

  Because everybody who had a hand in creating the thing expected it to be opened with great fanfare at the first Homecoming dance in the new school. The time capsule was supposed to anchor the entire theme of the Homecoming weekend. That had been the plan before the letter. Now...

  “As much as I’d like to, we can’t tell everyone we lost it,” Ida said. “You know what a furor that would create?”

  “Not nearly so much as actually opening it and discovering a boxful of nasty little secrets,” Peggy said. “If the box was going to be part of the Homecoming festivities, how come you’ve waited this long to look for it?”

  “Everybody thought they knew exactly where it was,” Amos said. “But until we decided to make a big deal of this year’s Homecoming, nobody figured we’d ever dig it up, so the actual location really didn’t matter.”

  “And until they actually started clearing the land to rebuild the football stadium, nobody wanted to hunt for it,” Win added. “We asked for volunteers at the last Town Council meeting. No takers.”

  “But you expect me and Louise to?” Peggy asked. “No way.”

  Ida gave an exasperated snort. “The field is being denuded as we speak, so the snakes are probably long gone. All you have to do is ask a few discreet questions. Somebody who was there must have been sober enough to remember where they put it. You don’t actually have to dig.”

  “Discreet? In Mossy Creek?” I asked. “How come you got this letter now? Out of the blue?”

  �
�Not precisely out of the blue,” Amos said. “It was supposed to be sent to me a week before the box was originally scheduled to be opened.”

  “With a dull thud,” Peggy said.

  “Remember,” Ida said, “This is a not simply a Homecoming for the last class before the arson, it’s scheduled as a Homecoming for everyone who ever went to Mossy Creek High, whether they ever attended a football game or not. It’s a huge deal.”

  For everybody, that is, except the unhappy girl who added all the personal nasties to the innocuous cultural icons before the box was buried.

  “So the secrets will be revealed not only to the graduating class who buried it, but to the entire town of Mossy Creek,” Amos said.

  “What on earth makes you think Peggy and I can find it in two days without tipping our hand any farther than it’s been tipped?” I asked.

  “If anyone can, you can. Who’d suspect you two?” Amos said with a broad smile.

  Win nodded his agreement.

  Ida believes in delegation. “And you can be trusted not to gossip. We need you.”

  Now all Peggy and I were supposed to do was to find the thing so Amos could remove anything incriminating.

  Why us? For that matter, why was either of us on the Homecoming Committee in the first place?

  First of all—like Win Allen—Peggy was not a born-and-bred Creekite. She retired here with her husband. As a retired college professor, she was capable of sidetracking any opposition from faculty or administration we might encounter. She says academic bureaucrats make the three hundred Spartans at that bridge look like newborn kittens.

  So Ida had appointed her to the Homecoming committee as our non-Creekite arbiter of disagreements. Of which there have been many.

  I am on the committee because I am a native Creekite, I went to the high school before it burned, and I am old enough not to have had a hand in creating the time capsule in the first place. I can also go upside the heads of those who do not play well with others even after arbitration.