Maggie

The Hope Chest To my way of thinking there was no prettier month in the year than August in Mossy Creek. My dahlias, zinnias, and daisies turned their cheerful faces toward the golden summer sunlight and nodded sleepily with the soft mountain breezes. I smiled as I clipped a sunset rose from the bush at the corner of the veranda and dropped it into my basket. My lush gardens provide baskets full of herbs and fragrant blossoms for the soaps and toiletries and potpourri I make, perfuming the Victorian house I call home. I live just a block off Mossy Creek's town square, but my house-which is also my shop-could be a cottage in a fantasy painting.

I guess I'm still a flower child at heart. Nearly thirty years ago, I really was a flower child, but not for very long. Just my first couple of years at college down in Atlanta. I was going to be the first attorney in my family. But I was a Mossy Creekite girl, born and raised. Set me free in a big city, and I look for adventure.

My freshman year I met Bea, my college roommate. Beatrice Starling Williamson. Her parents had sent her to law school in hopes she'd follow in her father's legal footsteps, perhaps even to become a judge like him. Bea immediately discovered the hippies who hung out near the campus. Within days, she renamed herself Petunia, then swapped her Villager skirts, and sweaters, and Weejuns for a tie-dyed t-shirt, ragged bellbottom jeans, and sandals. A fashion rebellion looked like fun to me. I went right along with her.

Petunia made a perfect hippie, but I never did, not really. Oh, I perfected the look, the long straight hair, the granny boots and peasant skirts and incense sticks, but I didn't have the rule-breaking heart of a truly shocking social rebel. I mean, a person can never forget Sunday School lessons at Mossy Creek Mt. Gilead Methodist, where little girls had to wear white gloves and hard patent-leather shoes and were expected not to burp after drinking a Coca-Cola. Oh, I burned my bra and dated a guitarist in a rock band and changed my name from Maggie Hart to Moonheart, but that was about all.

Petunia and my guitarist ran off together, and I, brokenhearted, dropped out of college to find my way in the world of natural living. Maybe I wasn't a flower child, but I wasn't a lawyer either. Eventually, I wandered back to Mossy Creek, the way almost all ex-patriot Mossy Creekites do. I opened my shop and hung out a sign that named it Moonheart's Natural Living, though no one in Mossy Creek called me Moonheart. I started out selling natural products I purchased from suppliers in California, but gradually began to make my own candles, soaps, cosmetics, teas, and other organic, nontoxic items.

Becoming Mother Nature's business manager was the best thing that ever happened to me-unless you ask my mother.

My mother, Millicent Abigail Hart, is one of Mossy Creek's more outrageous characters. She considers herself an everyday, run-of-the-mill, meatloaf-and-marriage kind of woman, though Daddy disappeared on us when I was just a baby. Mother's been waiting all these years for me to give her a son-in-law and grandchildren to redeem the Hart female pride in Mossy Creek. Yet for obvious reasons, she's wary of men, and has never liked my taste in potential mates.

I can't help but agree with her. The men I chased when I was younger didn't want to play husband. The ones who chased me wanted to play caveman. I seem to be irresistible to the world's truck-driving, deer-hunting good old boys who wear white socks with their dress pants and love a woman who smells like a warm meadow full of does. It must be my flower scent.

Having never outgrown my rock-guitarist phase, I've dated one free spirit after another. Disillusionment has always followed love at first sightor first tw.a.n.g on the guitar, or stroke of the paintbrush, or quatrain of iambic pentameter-and the pickin's are getting slimmer.

Recently I looked in the mirror and saw a fifty-year-old woman. Pretty, sa.s.sy, still s.e.xy, but fifty. I decided to stop falling in love with grown men who haven't found themselves yet. No more hippies. No more musicians. No more poets. And no more artists.

So, I've devoted myself to running my shop and keeping track of my mother, which is no easy task. You could say her phone calls to reality are all long distance, now. Some people think I phone home on a loose-screw connection, too. Even my fellow Mossy Creekites-who are very open-minded in their own way-are whispering about me since I started expanding the shop. I've added a New Age book section, health foods, and a few swami-psychic-G.o.ddess trinkets. I still attend Mt. Gilead Methodist. But I admit the Mossy Creek Unitarians have been courting me.

Mother is convinced I'm a witch, but not beyond fixing. "You're not too old to renounce this nonsense, find a nice young man, get married, and have some children," she says. She neglects to remember that I just turned the half-century mark. Or maybe she can't remember. Her memory ebbs and flows just as rhythmically as the eddies that dapple the edge of Mossy Creek. In her lucid moments, she plots ways to make me marry Mossy Creek forest ranger Bradley "Smokey" Lincoln. "He's really dull," she says, "But you'll never run out of firewood." She doesn't even like him. Bradley was nicknamed Smokey as a rookie ranger after he set the forest on fire. He and I have been friends for years. I've occasionally considered the idea of a romance with Smokey, but it just didn't feel right. Like dating your brother. Not that Smokey would like to hear that.

As I pondered such circ.u.mstances in my life on that hot, beautiful August day in Mossy Creek, I cut my last rose and walked back up on my veranda to return to the cool sanctuary of my shop. I heard a car pull into my little gravel parking lot and turned around in time to see police chief Amos Royden getting out of his blue-and-white patrol car.

I froze. "Morning, Amos. Pretty day, isn't it?"

Amos nodded. I could see he was uncomfortable about something. "Come on in," I added.

He entered the shop behind me. "This place always smells good."

"Thanks. I think so." I floated my roses in a big cut gla.s.s punch bowl and turned back to him. I was procrastinating. A visit from the chief always meant one thing. "Smokey told me about the lost little boy and the skunk."

Amos nodded. "Smokey found him in the woods before I got there." Amos was procrastinating, too. "Followed a skunk too close. Got lost and got sprayed. Whew, what a smell!"

"Ah, the life of a forest ranger. Smokey brought him home in the park service Jeep, then had to fumigate it. I gave him some lemon-rosemary spray to use."

Amos smiled.

I sighed, and gave up. "So, what's Mother done this time?"

"She's been on a little shopping spree at the new shop by the theater."

"The sculptor?"

"I don't know what he is, exactly. She stole a tiara. You know." He gestured vaguely toward his head, and frowned. "A tiara."

"A tiara? In a sculptor's studio?"

"Yeah. The sculptor's ex-wife was an actress, and she left a crate full of her old costumes behind when they got divorced. When your mother s.n.a.t.c.hed the tiara, he followed her next door to the theater and cornered her in the director's office. He was nice to her. But you know your mother. She doesn't like to be caught. He didn't understand that he wasn't supposed to notice when she pilfered something."

"How much was the tiara worth?"

"Garner says about a hundred dollars."

"Garner?"

"Right. Last name is Garner. I'm on my way over to the theater now. I knew you'd want to go with me."

I didn't. Boy, how I didn't, but I couldn't see that I had any choice in the matter. Mother had promised to behave after the last incident. She was getting bolder in her old age. She'd swiped Julia Ledbetter's twin-seat stroller. I'd returned it laden with two of my finest hanging baskets of moss roses, as an apology.

"Let's go," I said wearily.

I placed my closed sign on the door. Weekday mornings in August didn't usually bring in brisk traffic, so I wouldn't lose much business. There weren't many tourists in town, and the locals would come back later.

"Oh, Mother," I said under my breath.

The Mossy Creek Theater was very small and anch.o.r.ed the southwest corner of the square with a small marquee that advertised the Mossy Creek Players' soon-to-premiere production of Oklahoma! Nestled right beside it, in a small, turn-of-the-century storefront that used to house a shoe shop, was Tag Garner's sculpting gallery and studio. His sign said, Figuratively Speaking. I hadn't met him yet and gaped at his work. His shop windows were full of rugged, manly looking sculptures, some of marble and some in bronze, mostly of athletes or wild animals b.u.t.ting each other and snarling.

That worried me.

Amos and I walked past the shop and into a side door at the theater, then down a narrow hallway to the office. A well-built man with a streak of iridescent blue hair that began at his temple and ended in his graying ponytail rose from a chair near the director's desk. He looked as if he'd been in a barroom brawl and lost. His shirt was ripped, his nose was bleeding, and his left eye was swollen nearly shut.

My mother was nowhere to be seen, which was more than a little worrisome. "Where's my mother?"

"Probably wrestling a bear," the stranger said dryly.

"My mother is a genteel little old lady-"

"Genteel?" He sat down again and pointed to his shiner. "I got hurt less playing football."

"I'm real sorry about the attack and the theft of your tiara, Mr.-"

"Garner," he confirmed. "Tag Garner. Victim." Without his newly acquired bruises, Tag Garner would have been a handsome, brawny man, even with the funky blue streak in his hair and the ponytail. The door opened behind me and our theater director, Anna Rose, walked in carrying a plastic baggie filled with ice. Anna grinned. "Your mother's performing her own brand of experimental theater these days, Maggie."

"She's been obsessed with tiaras since this spring's Miss Bigelow County Pageant. Pearl Quinlan loaned her a book about beauty pageants. It had pictures of tiaras in it."

"Somebody ought to give her a book on manners," Tag growled. He held up his right arm. I saw a perfect set of my mother's denture marks on his forearm. "She bit me."

I dropped into the chair opposite him and waited while he pressed the ice bag to his eye. "Did you see which way she went?"

He laughed darkly. "I thought I had her trapped in here, but she faked me out and ran like a linebacker."

"My mother is an elderly woman with health problems."

"Health problems? Has she had her shots? I could get rabies."

"Now, wait just a minute, Mr. Gardner-"

"Garner," he corrected. "Tyler Adams Garner-Tag, for short-b.l.o.o.d.y but unbowed, at your service." He held up his bitten arm, again. "I'll probably turn into a werewolf at the next full moon. When I do, you can still call me by my human name."

"Well, Tag, I am very sorry-very-for everything my mother's done, but if you don't quit making jokes about her I'll-"

"Punch me and bite me? Get in line."

"Settle down, both of you." Amos stepped to my side. "Let's start over. Let me introduce you. Maggie Hart, Tag Garner."

I tried to smile but failed miserably. "Pleased," I muttered.

"And, I'm just as pleased to meet you, Mrs. Hart, as you obviously are to meet me."

"I'm not married," I corrected absently.

"So the werewolf line stops with you?"

I glared at him, all the while wondering if my mother was admiring her looted tiara on a park bench beside one of Mossy Creek's pretty little bridges-only a short walk away, and her favorite spots after a crime spree. Mother had no sense of guilt, so she never ran for cover. I looked at Amos. "We've got to go and look for her. She may have hurt herself, this time."

"She seemed fine when she was sucker punching me," Tag Garner intoned. He stood up, becoming an even more imposing sight-over six-feet-tall and big-shouldered. "Look, she has a problem. I understand, I really do. But she needs to be corralled before she attacks somebody else. Wouldn't she be happy stealing bedpans in a nursing home?"

"My mother isn't ready for a home. She's just crazy." n.o.body can imagine how difficult those words were for me to say. Mother's condition was hopeless. "I'll be happy to pay damages-"

"No, save your money. Spend it on a doctor for your mother. Get her some help."

His patient tone infuriated me. "Listen, Mr. Garner, my mother is a Mossy Creek inst.i.tution. People around here don't mind her little quirks. She just needs to be left alone. If you don't like the way we do things here, then leave."

Tag, still holding the ice bag to his eye, squinted at our police chief for help.

Amos shook his head. I could tell he was observing the stalemate unhappily. He had one of his grim Thankyougladtobehere expressions.

Tag sighed. "Chief, I don't intend to press any charges. But I do want to go on record-I don't like being rolled by little old ladies."

Amos nodded and looked at me. "Maggie, I'll let her off the hook this time, but you've got to do something. We're getting more and more new people around town-and they don't know her. If this rumor about Ham Bigelow running for President is true, over the next few years we'll be swarmed with visitors. Someone will press charges, and then there'll be real trouble for her. You don't want her to end up in Judge Blakely's courtroom, do you?"

I sagged. "No. You're right." I faced Tag. "I apologize again, and I swear she won't steal anything else from you. I'll find the tiara and return it."

"Listen, she can keep the tiara. I was planning to donate it to the theater. My ex-wife wore it when she was in a touring company of Cinderella."

"Oh, your ex-wife played the starring role?"

"Nah, she was one of the evil stepsisters." He smiled. "Typecasting."

"I'm sorry."

"I must attract crabby women who like tiaras."

"Are you saying my mother is evil, too?"

He feigned fear and held up a hand to protect himself. "Please, Daughter of the She-Werewolf, don't twist my words. Let me live."

I walked out.

I spent some time wandering the town, looking for mother, but didn't find her. When I got back home, my beautiful yard roses didn't seem nearly so lovely. The hot sunshine felt cold. Entering the shop, I breathed deeply, inhaling the fragrance of vanilla, cinnamon, lavender, and roses. The scents in the shop usually had a calming effect, but they did little to help today.

I walked to the stairs. "Mother! Are you up there?"

No answer. I didn't really expect her to be back yet. When she went on one of her little shoplifting expeditions, she didn't usually come straight home. That was the strangest part of her hobby. I never found any of the items she took. Over the years, there had been a toaster, a fancy garter from the Mossy Creek Bridal Shoppe, a golden heart necklace, a pair of lace gloves, and even a small, decrepit trunk from the Up The Creek Flea Market. How could she steal something as big as a trunk and not be seen? Even Battle Royden, Amos's legendary father and police chief, had never been able to ferret out Mother's stolen treasures. And, believe me, for years I had searched the entire town myself.

I made a cup of tea and settled down to meditate for a few minutes. All right, I admitted it: My mother might be a Mossy Creek inst.i.tution, but now she needed to be put in a Mossy Creek inst.i.tution. I thought of Magnolia Manor, our nursing home. In her better days, Mother had done a lot of volunteer work there. She had known most of the staff and residents all her life. Unfortunately, they knew her, too. Just recently, she'd stolen a flower arrangement from the lobby.

I heard a sound outside and jumped up.

"Mother?" I called and swung the door open. It was Smokey. "Hi. Come on in."

He leaned down and gave me a peck on the cheek. "Howdy, Mags. What's up?"

I smiled at him. Tall and lanky with beautiful brown eyes, so comforting, so comfortable. There were times when even I didn't understand why he didn't make my heart race. "It's Mother. She went AWOL, again." I told him what had happened.

"Anything I can do? You want me to go look for her?" Smokey knew her habits almost as well as I did, maybe better. "I could radio the smoke tower and-"

"No, that's real nice of you, but unless Mother sets herself on fire, I don't think your idea will help."

Smokey looked crestfallen. I patted his arm distractedly. "But thanks."

"You okay, Mags? You want a hug, or something? You always get this faraway look in your eyes when we talk. Sometimes I think you need your hearing checked."

For some reason, I was thinking of Tag Garner, wondering why a man like him would set up a studio in a small town like Mossy Creek. He belonged down in Buckhead, Atlanta's ritzy art district, where rich socialites and country clubbers would quickly pay a small fortune for his work. And what had he said about playing pro football? I rubbed my forehead, trying to remember anything other than the color of his eyes. They were the softest gray.

"Mags?"

"Huh?"

Smokey sighed. "Deaf, again," he muttered.

"I'm sorry."

"Look, I know about this Garner guy. About twenty years ago, he played football for the Atlanta Falcons."

OmiG.o.d. Now I understood why Tag Garner was vaguely familiar. Despite my flower-child roots, I loved rock 'em, sock 'em sports in general and Falcons football in particular. Smokey watched my face closely. "You want me to go have a man-to-man talk with this smart-alecky Garner? I hear he has a streak of blue in his hair, now. He's an insult to American sports. He's some kind of Communist, I bet. I wouldn't mind punching him if I had to."

"Don't you dare. This problem is something I have to work out myself. I'm just trying to take care of Mother. At the moment, in fact, I'm just trying to find Mother."