Needless to say, I slept little that night and finally dozed around dawn. A banging on the door woke me. "What now?" I asked myself as I dragged on a bathrobe and rushed to see who could be dumb enough to knock on a Mossy Creek door before the breakfast biscuits were in the oven.

Through the ornamental gla.s.s, I saw Smokey. Though the gla.s.s distorted his image, I realized he wasn't his usual cheerful self. I twisted the key in the lock and pulled the door open. "Smokey, what a surprise."

"I heard you went out with Garner. And I'm mad."

"Listen, I'm sorry I didn't tell you. Tag and I-"

"I can smell like roses if I want to. I can grow my hair long and put a blue skunk streak in it. I'd get fired from the forestry service, but still-"

"Smokey, it's not that. It's just-"

"You don't have to explain. I saw him on this veranda just a minute ago."

"What?" I glanced around. There was a package on the swing. Holding my bathrobe tightly around me, I retrieved the package. "He only came here to deliver this."

"I can smell like roses and deliver packages."

"Smokey, please-"

"We're finished, you and me."

"We never started."

"Well, uh, oh, never mind." He scowled, stomped down the veranda steps, got into his Jeep, and roared away.

I went back into the house and settled onto the sofa in my office. Morning sunshine poured through a window as I opened the box. Inside was the rhinestone Cinderella tiara and the big gla.s.s slippers, sparkling in the light. I read Tag's note. Your mother, aka "Swifty," left these on my doorstep during the night. I want you to give them back to her, or wear them yourself. I never thought of myself as anybody's Prince Charming, before, but for you, I'll try.

I smiled. Not a cultured, pretty smile, but a big old dumb uncontrollable smile, the kind that just bubbles up when you least expect it. It was going to be a great day.

I was wrong. A few minutes later, Anna Rose showed up at my front door. "Maggie! G.o.d, I'm glad you're up."

"Great show last night."

"I thought so, too. Until this morning."

"What happened? I know it can't be a bad review. The paper isn't out until Wednesday."

"I wish. The wedding gown is missing."

"What? How is that possible?"

"I don't know. I just don't know. n.o.body remember seeing it after the show last night. I need that dress back right away, Maggie. There's no way I can get another one before tonight's show."

"Let me put on some clothes." I raced upstairs to change. I looked into Mother's room but found the bed made and the room empty.

Anna and I went over to the theater and searched everywhere. The dress was definitely gone. I wanted to cry. "Anna, did you see Mother last night?"

"No."

"Could she have gotten backstage after the show without anyone noticing?"

"Sure."

"Where would the dress have ended up after the actress took it off?"

Anna took me to the wardrobe storage room, which was right beside the theater's back exit. I opened the door and walked outside in a small parking lot behind the building. "Ah, hah." I bent and picked up a tiny white seed pearl. A few feet farther I found another. The trail led around the corner of the building, up the side, and onto the sidewalk fronting Main Street. Anna and I stood there, looking across at the square. "Let's go."

We picked up seed pearls all the way to General Hamilton's statue. I stood there looking at the base. I began to run my hands over the large, square granite stones and the bronze plaques that listed Mossy Creekites who had served not only on both sides of the Civil War, but in every war since. "What are you doing?" Anna asked.

"Trying to see whether an old story in my family is true or not." Feeling around the edge of one of the bronze plaques, I gasped. My fingers found a hidden groove behind the plaque. I slid two fingers inside and touched what felt like a metal lever. I pushed down on it. The bronze plaque opened like a door. "Look!"

"What?" Anna asked, peering over my shoulder.

There was the wedding dress, folded neatly across the stolen flea market trunk and a pile of other pilfered items from years past. I stuck my head inside the opening and looked around. The hidden s.p.a.ce was large enough to hold much more. Was Mother only getting started?

"I see you found my stash."

I banged my head as I spun around to face my mother. "I always thought the stories about Great-Great Grandpa building a secret compartment into the statue's base were a joke."

"No, your daddy knew about it. When we were dating, he used to leave flowers and notes and little boxes of candy for me in there. It was our secret. We called it our hope chest." Tears filled her eyes. "After he deserted you and me, I couldn't bear to leave it empty."

I sagged. "But why did you steal the wedding dress, Mother?"

"It's for you." She cried and touched the statue's base with trembling fingers. "I had to make a hope chest for you, too."

Now, we were both crying.

Mother and I sat on a park bench looking across Main Street toward Tag's studio and shop. She placed the box containing the tiara and the slippers between us. Mother ran one hand over my hair, a gesture I'd loved many times as a little girl. "I was so afraid you were going to start dating Smokey," she said. "I couldn't let that happen."

"So you deliberately provoked Tag, just so I'd meet him?"

"Look at it this way, dear. I got you two past all the preliminaries right up front. I saved you months or maybe even years of beating around the bush."

"Okay, Mother, but he and I have just started getting to know each other. Don't get your hopes up."

The choice of words made her smile wistfully. "At least you know where I store them, now. In our hope chest. And we do have hope."

I smiled, but she was right. There was something different about the way I saw Tag, about the way I felt, already. Too many times, I'd fallen for the wrong kind of man. Now, maybe, thanks to Mother, I would fall for the right one.

"There he is," Mother whispered.

Tag walked out of his shop, a broom in hand. He started to sweep the sidewalk, then spotted us and halted. The expression on his face settled somewhere between a c.o.c.ky smile and a worried frown.

"Go for it," Mother urged. "I may be crazy, but I know a good man when I steal from one."

I took a deep breath and stood. I put the tiara on my head and slipped my bare feet into the oversized Cinderella slippers. A huge smile burst across Tag's face. The summer sun warmed my face, and the sunshine of Tag's smile warmed the rest of me. Today was a brand new day. The air was scented with flowers and possibilities.

Hope blooms forever, with a little help from a thief of hearts.

The Mossy Creek Gazette 215 Main Street * Mossy Creek, Georgia From the desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager Lady Victoria Salter Stanhope Cornwall, England Dear Lady Victoria, Let me tell you, you English folk haven't got us Mossy Creekites beat when it comes to neighborhood watering holes. We've got O'Day's, the only true Irish bar in this whole part of the state. The people down in Bigelow say the pub is just more evidence that Mossy Creekites can't bear to be completely respectable. We say we're just honoring a fine tradition of social libations.

Let me explain. The farmers around here used to earn their spring seed money by selling illegal corn liquor. We called it "moonshine" because most of it was made in backwoods stills by the light of the moon. When Lionel Bigelow declared war on Mossy Creek, the first thing he did was bust up all our liquor stills.

I don't think we've ever forgiven him for that!

Me? I'm a soda fountain kind of gal. I like my drinks with a scoop of ice cream floating on top and an extra splash of vanilla flavoring. By the way, (don't tell my husband Leo) but Michael is a good-looking, unmarried Irishman with dark blue eyes and a sense of humor that'll warm a woman's body without a toddy. But the first annual Mossy Creek dart contest at his pub was serious business, and yet another battlefield where Mossy Creekites and Bigelowans duked it out for the greater glory of town pride.

I hope you get the point.

Yours in pun, Katie O'Bell

Michael

Your Cheatin' Dart As they say on TV: There are a thousand stories in the naked city. And then we have Mossy Creek, where there're at least a thousand and one.

My name is Michael Conners. When I moved to Mossy Creek five years ago, after working and tending bar in the big city suburbs of Chicago, I thought I'd seen everything: from gang bangers, to mob wannabes, to crooked politicians (are there any other kind?). I'd had enough of the crooks and criminals in the world. Mossy Creek seemed like a green oasis, settled between the st.u.r.dy arms of the mountains, protected from the ever more daft world outside.

But there's daft, and then there's daft.

I'm a native Irishman, you see, with all that entails. We recognize daft in its many forms.

There's an old joke that goes, "G.o.d created whiskey so the Irish couldn't rule the world." Whiskey runs in our family, you might say. Not as a vice, although I've been known to down a dram or two, but as a living. My father owned a pub in Chicago like his father, who owned one in County Cork. Now I was the proud owner of O'Day's in Mossy Creek-named after my sainted mother's family for good luck, since they were all legendary drinkers, too.

Not difficult to find, O'Day's is right next door to the town's tiny city hall. Coming into a small, protestant Southern town in a dry county five years ago had been a challenge to political correctness, but to my surprise the Mossy Creekites welcomed me with open arms. "We're always amenable to the right new ideas," the mayor said-after I poured her a drink of the best whiskey I owned.

The fine citizenry voted a liquor ordinance into law as quick as you please, and my business became the first and only Irish pub in Bigelow County. I rented myself a handsome brick shop that had once been the Mossy Creek General Store. It's a place of fond memories, the locals tell me-games of checkers and cards up front, a little homemade liquor in the back room. And best of all, it's located, like I said, right beside city hall. I figure the best place to sell liquor is to those who need it most in order to sleep at night-lawyers and, without a doubt, politicians.

We Irish have an uncanny knack for finding our place in the world. Unfortunately, that place is rarely situated in Ireland herself, although we love her dearly. And in Georgia, from the earliest times on, the Irish have moved in and set up shop giving upstanding Bible Belt cities like Savannah and Atlanta an excuse to have a drunken parade on St. Paddy's Day. Faith, we even named one city in the southern part of the state Dublin in honor of our blessed homeland. We Irish have our moments. But on the whole, if we're not too busy drinking whiskey, then we're busier selling it.

There had yet to be a St. Paddy's Day parade in Mossy Creek, though I was working on it. I had learned quickly that Mossy Creek had its own traditions, and a bunch of drunken pseudo-Irishmen had nothing on Mossy Creekites in a lather. Did I mention. . .daft?

"We'll give you Labor Day," the mayor told me. "See what kind of happy trouble you can make out of that."

Now, an Irishman can make trouble out of nothing, so I founded the All-County Mossy Creek Labor Day Dart Compet.i.tion.

For quite some years, there's been a dart contest held in the back room of the Steak and Mug restaurant down in Bigelow. Always in November, a time when the weather, rainy and cold, forced folks inside for their amus.e.m.e.nts. Always held on Sat.u.r.day night-which gave year-round residents an excuse to turn off the TV, come out and have dinner, then settle down to some serious compet.i.tion before the official start of the holiday season.

Did I mention the word, serious?

I've been around serious contenders. Men who might have a potbelly and a bald head but who can whip you at golf with one club tied behind their back. Or women who don't hesitate to slide tins of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies into the hands of a priest to make sure their sons serve as altar boys for Christmas Midnight Ma.s.s. But I've never seen anything like the rivalry between these two towns-Mossy Creek and Bigelow.

It amounts to civil war on a different level, and there's nothing 'civil' about it. I don't really know all the whys and the wherefores. . . Suffice it to say, when I moved to Mossy Creek I was informed that anyone from Bigelow was suspect and most downright untrustworthy. I stepped right in the middle of the feud with my Labor Day dart contest, pre-empting the annual Bigelow event's thunder and upping the ante in the bad feelings compet.i.tion.

Who am I to argue? A transplanted Irishman whose own family holds its share of brotherly grudges? Oh yeah, did I forget to mention the other thing we Irish are famous for? Fighting.

But as I told Police Chief Royden, it wasn't me who started the fight which broke up the first All-County Mossy Creek Labor Day Dart Compet.i.tion. And I tried my d.a.m.ndest to make Buddy Daily put his clothes back on.

But I guess I ought to start from the beginning.

It was a dark and stormy night. . . Oh, sorry, that's more of my Irish blarney showing. All the nights in Ireland seem to be dark and stormy.

Now where were we? Oh yes, in my pub, O'Day's, on a Monday in the first week of September. Just a hint of fall in the air, the days still hot but the nights cool, the dogwood leaves starting to blush red. I'd been setting up all day for the holiday crowd, had to rent extra chairs and hire one of the local men, the aforesaid Buddy Daily, to help pumping beer.

In order to put the perfect head on Irish stout, a certain amount of time is involved. With the added customers the event would bring, I knew I wouldn't have time to finesse each gla.s.s to the perfect ratio of one-third head, two-thirds brew. Buddy, who in the past had more experience downing drinks than serving them, proved adequate with a little training. And as he said, he needed the work. He'd been staying in a cheap monthly hotel in Bigelow but wanted to get a good job and live in Mossy Creek. I can't fault the man for wanting to improve himself.

Did I also mention that we Irishmen are good listeners? I'd been nicknamed "Father Michael" for the mult.i.tude of drunken confessions I'd heard over the years.

But let me get back to this particular story. The first round of championship darts was to begin promptly at eight o'clock. The six finalists had already been culled the week before at the Bigelow VFW hall. Two teams for doubles and two for the individual t.i.tle, divided equally between Bigelow and Mossy Creek. Around seven, the crowd began to trickle in, filling the seats closest to where the action would take place. The tables immediately behind the dart line had reserved signs on them for players.

By seven-thirty, I had begun to notice a pattern. The spectators had divided into two distinct groups-Bigelow on one side, Mossy Creek on the other, and I could see some wagering going on. Such gambling should have worried me, but at the time they were ordering pints as fast as I could serve them, so I ignored the observation in lieu of counting my profit in my head.

The more the merrier.

But they didn't get merrier. By the time the first team stepped up to the line, every seat was filled and the room had grown smoky and watchful. Someone had even unplugged the jukebox in the corner.

"Gentlemen, and ladies. . ." John D. Hayslett, a fine auto parts salesman if there ever was one, who was acting as the MC for the night, nodded toward the scant females scattered throughout the crowd. "Welcome! Our first compet.i.tors are from our own hometown, Mossy Creek-"

A chorus of cheers rose from the left side of the room, combined with a smattering of boos coming from the right. John D. patiently waited for order before continuing. After all, the contest was being held in Mossy Creek, and being a hometown son, John D. must have come to the conclusion he could handle the crowd any way he saw fit. And, if the blessed Bigelowans-"Big-e-loads," as we call them around the bar-didn't like it, they could always forfeit.

A man with an Irish heart, I thought proudly.

"Jimmy Partain and Will Stewart placed in the top five All-County down in Bigelow for the last two years and won the coveted Golden Dart for team play two years before that." Another round of applause halted John D., but only momentarily. People seemed anxious for the action to begin.

I took myself to the end of the bar in order to have a better view, leaving Buddy to handle the slowed requests from our one c.o.c.ktail waitress, Regina Regina. Earlier, Buddy had painstakingly written down the numbers of each table in order to be more helpful. I didn't see any need for him to know which table got what drink-that was up to Regina-but I've always admired individual initiative.

"The second team is Dan Graham and his wife Laura. From Bigelow."

It could have been my imagination, but I thought I heard a slight hesitation in John D.'s voice, like even saying the name Bigelow out loud put a strain on his sensibilities. I learned later that John D. had visited the Grahams recently with the sole purpose of talking them into moving to Mossy Creek. They were too nice and too good at darts to be trapped in a sorry town like Bigelow. I never heard the exact offer, but whatever it was, Laura's mother lived in Bigelow, and Laura intended to see her children through the county high school down there before pulling up stakes.

The crowd reacted to this introduction in reverse-applause from the right, silence from the left. The dearth of boos demonstrated how badly the Mossy Creekites wanted the Grahams in their town and on their team.

"The rules for this evening are as follows: The game is 20-20, round robin, first out wins. Start when you're ready."

The players went through the rituals of checking the height of the new board on the paneled wall, pacing off the eight feet regulation distance, and discussing rotation of the horsehair. (Dartboards are made of horsehair.) I wasn't worried. I'd gone to great trouble to make sure the dart 'field' was regulation, even going so far as to install a chalkboard for scoring. If my adopted hometown was unhappy with the outcome of the tournament, I, at least, was determined it wouldn't be because of the facilities. My dad always said, "Don't do anythin' to get betwixt a man an' his drink, or between a man an' his darts."

The coin toss went against Mossy Creek, so Jimmy and Will had their work cut out for them. That along with the fact that Laura Graham seemed to be able to throw double twenties all night long. It was sad, really. I felt for the men, but the draw and follow through of Laura's throwing arm was something to behold.