Manhunting in Mississippi

“I’m taking the couch, love seat, end tables and lamps, plus the bedroom suite and the kitchen table and chairs.” Her grandmother shrugged and grinned. “Everything else is yours.”

Mouth open, Piper turned. “Mine? But Gran, I don’t have space for all this.” Unless I buy this house.

Undaunted, Granny Falkner continued, “You can leave it here until the house sells, then put the whole kit and caboodle in storage.”

Piper took a deep breath and nodded obediently. “Okay, I’ll think of something.”

“Those boxes are personal things I gathered for you—let’s load them into your van so we’ll have more room to move around in here.”

Staggering under the weight of the first box, Piper laughed. “What is all this stuff?”

Granny Falkner waved her hand in the air, then picked up another carton that appeared just as heavy. “Just books and such, a lot of old nonsense I saved for far too long. Go through it and keep what strikes your fancy and throw away the rest.”

Piper walked back through the kitchen and held open the screen door with her elbow. “Mom called last night. She said to say hello.”

“Why didn’t she call and tell me herself?” her grandmother asked airily.

Sighing, Piper said, “I suggested the same thing.”

“She’s mad because I said something about that lazy bum she’s shacking up with.”

“She says they’re going to get married.”

Granny Falkner’s laugh crackled dryly. “After four trips to the altar, you’d think her judgment would improve.”

Nodding in mute agreement, Piper tingled with shame. Despite her grandmother’s wish to see her settled down, she wondered what Gran would think of the manhunt on which she had decided to embark. Probably not much, she decided with a sideways glance at the woman whose wisdom and advice she treasured.

Her grandmother lowered her box onto the floor of the van. “In fifty-five years, the only thing Maggie managed to do right is have you. And how you turned out so well, I’ll never know.” She put her arm around Piper’s shoulders as they walked back to the house. “I live in eternal hope that your mother will be just like you when she grows up.”

Her grandmother’s words reverberated in Piper’s head during the next few hours of packing and dusting and cleaning. Her mother’s track record was frightening—would her own burgeoning desire for male companionship color her judgment, too? Wouldn’t she be better off without a man than launching into a series of roller-coaster relationships? She didn’t know the first thing about finding a husband—her mother certainly wasn’t much of an example, and at the time, she hadn’t cared enough to study her sorority sisters in action. Worse, by deciding to buy her grandmother’s house and stay in Mudville, she’d narrowed the field of eligible men tremendously. Piper sighed. In the unlikely event that she did find a suitable dating prospect in town, she’d just have to wing it.

But on the late drive back to her town house, peering out the window at the forlorn little town she had made home a year ago, Piper had serious doubts about finding her dream man in the immediate vicinity. A decidedly garish neon sign read Welcome to Mudville. To make matters worse, the four center letters had expired, reducing the town greeting to Welcome to Mule.

The trip down Main Street took her past three used car lots festooned in multicolored plastic flags, nine beauty shops, six video-rental stores, two tanning parlors, “And a partridge in a pear tree,” she murmured as she pulled to a stop at one of the town’s two stoplights. Mudville consisted of two square blocks of dilapidated buildings and a few side streets, plus one fast-food restaurant where the town’s teenagers and desperate adults hung out. Then she chastised herself. People in glass houses…

The blare of a horn caused her to jerk her head toward the vehicle on her right. Too late, she recognized the smoke-belching, rattletrap sports car of Lenny Kern, her neighbor’s son, who seemed determined to live at home until he could pool his social security check with his mother’s. With a thick paw, he motioned for her to roll down her window, and after a reluctant sigh, she obliged.

“Hey, Piper, what’s shakin’?” he bawled above the glass-shattering decibels of Hank Williams, Sr.

“Hey, Lenny,” she said with a tight smile.

“Wanna go for a ride?” he asked, grinning wide.

“No, thanks.”

“Aw, come on, Piper, Top Gun is playing at the dollar theater.”

She grimaced. “I rented it several years ago.”

“Oh, really?” He frowned, and bit his lower lip.

Thankfully, the light turned green. “So long, Lenny,” she said, pulling away from the intersection. Her neighbor had been trying to wear her down into going out with him since she moved in. And she wasn’t that lonely…yet.

When she arrived at her town house, Piper parked, took out one of the boxes her grandmother had given her and went inside. She sprawled on the living-room floor in front of the television. With the remote, she tuned into a rerun of a comedy that hadn’t been funny the first time, then pulled the box toward her and placed it between her spread legs, curiosity coursing through her.

The smell of mothballs, dried paper and stale flowers filled her nostrils as she lifted the lid. The box held a hodgepodge of memorabilia: dusty photo albums, yellowed songbooks, thick seventy-eight-size phonograph records and curling postcards. She thumbed through old issues of Look magazine, and smiled at hokey rhymes on ancient greeting cards. There were several paper-thin embroidered handkerchiefs, an invitation to her grandmother’s high-school graduation and a brittle newspaper article picturing a teenage Granny Falkner and her two sisters in gowns and upswept hairdos, grinning. The headline read Dance Marathons a Family Event for Sexton Sisters. Piper smiled in delight as she read about her dancing grandmother and two great-aunts, both of whom now lived in Florida. Only a year separated the three sisters and they were all still full of vinegar. Piper shook her head and bit her lower lip. The Sexton sisters had probably been the most sought-after women in the then-thriving town of Mudville, Mississippi. They had all married well and enjoyed enduring marriages.

Near the bottom of the box, beneath pressed corsages, a string of buttons and a small ring box of costume jewelry, Piper’s fingers curled around a hardback book the size of a videotape. She withdrew it slowly, thinking the faded pink journal was possibly a diary or even a recipe book. But hand-written on the front in neat slanted script were the words The Sexton Sisters’ Secret Guide to Marrying a Good Man.

Piper’s eyebrows lifted in amazement, and she laughed softly. Gran and her sisters had conducted their own manhunt? An ancestral account to guide her on her mission…. Maybe there was hope after all.

CHAPTER TWO

Always wear clean gloves, since a marriageable man might reveal himself in the most unlikely of places.

“’MORNIN’, Piper. What’s shakin’?” Lenny Kern bellowed from the porch of his mother’s town house. He stood leaning against a post, picking his teeth, half-dressed and shiny, as if he’d been loitering long enough for the dew to have settled on him.

Piper, hoping to slink to her car unnoticed, acknowledged her neighbor without slowing. “Hey, Lenny.”

“Whew-we! You look gooooooooood.”

His gaze swept her figure, pausing at her yellow silk blouse, and again at her knees extending from the snug, short black skirt. He grunted in appreciation and Piper briefly considered removing a too-tight high-heeled pump and bouncing it off his leering head.

“Did somebody die?” he asked, utterly serious.

“No,” she said slowly, as if speaking to a child, “I’m going to work.”

He shifted and scratched his hairy stomach, which protruded slightly over the waistband of his slept-in cutoff jean shorts. “You gotta work again today?”

She quirked an eyebrow and unlocked the door of her aged white minivan. “Yeah, Len, it’s called gainful employment.”

“But you must put in—” he looked heavenward and counted on his fingers for what seemed like an eternity, then turned wide eyes her way “—close to forty hours a week!”

“At least,” she agreed wryly, opening the creaky door.

Lenny looked mournful. “I’m sorry for you, Piper. A woman like you shouldn’t have to do nothin’ but stay home and take care of her man.”

As she swung into her seat, with one hand tugging on her hem, she swore under her breath. “Some girls have all the luck, I guess.”

“Say, Piper, if you have an extra cake just layin’ around the food lab for the flies to eat, bring it home this evening, would ya? It’s Mom’s birthday.”

Striving to remain civil, Piper gripped the inside door handle and said, “You probably shouldn’t count on it, Len. Why don’t you order her something special?”

He snapped his fingers. “Good idea. I’ll call the day-old bakery and see if they’ve got something that ain’t too hard.”

She smiled tightly, feeling a pang of sympathy for sweet old Mrs. Kern. “Good luck, Len.” She closed the door and rammed the key into the ignition, her motions further hurried by the sight of Lenny loping off the porch and toward the van. He stopped and banged on the window, leaving large greasy fingerprints.

Reluctantly, Piper rolled down the window two inches. “I’m running late, Len.”

He smoothed a hand over his uncombed raggedy mane of dark hair and grinned. He really wasn’t a bad-looking man, he was just so…base. “Since I’m havin’ Mom a party, why don’t you come over for a piece of cake, say, oh, about seven? We’ll watch ‘Wheel of Fortune’ together.”

“I’ll try to stop by and wish Margaret a happy birthday,” she said pleasantly, nodding and rolling up the window at the same time she eased down the driveway.

“I’ll get out my baby pictures!” Len yelled, trotting alongside the van until she cut the wheels, prompting him to jump back into the wet grass to prevent a crushed bare foot.

Piper heaved a sigh of relief as she pulled away, but guilt struck her when she saw Lenny’s shoulders sag in her rearview mirror. After staying up late to read The Sexton Sisters’ Secret Guide to Marrying a Good Man, she’d gone to sleep with a smile on her lips and determination in her heart to keep an open mind where Mudville men were concerned. But at the first sight of her persistent neighbor this morning, her mind had banged shut like a newly oiled door. And although she was a little more than positive that Lenny Kern did not hold the key to her destiny, she renewed her pledge to give every eligible man that crossed her path a fair assessment.

Low-hanging black clouds crowded the sky as she pulled into the nearly deserted parking lot of a video rental store to return three movies. It looked like rain for sure. Rain wasn’t all that unusual for a summer day in Mississippi, but this one day, Piper had forgotten her umbrella. Still, perhaps a shower would alleviate some of the ever-present humidity, she thought hopefully.

Piper reached around to loosen her blouse from her sticky back and glanced at the movies in her hand with a faint pang of embarrassment. Was there a flick she hadn’t seen? Black-and-white, Technicolor or colorized, romance, action or science fiction—she loved them all. For ninety minutes she could escape, finding a new life infinitely more interesting and fulfilling than hers.

It wasn’t as though she didn’t love her job as a food scientist—she did. And despite her good-natured complaints about living in a small town, she enjoyed the sense of community in Mudville. But she realized last night while reading the manhunting guide that although she’d spent years convincing herself she didn’t want a man, she’d been fooling herself. She wanted her own happy ending, and as much as she hated to admit it, she wanted a loving companion by her side when the credits on her life rolled by.

She had just slid the tapes into a night drop box when a sound from the front of the store drew her attention. Henry Walden, owner of Videoville and town playboy, stuck his head out the door. “Piper Shepherd, is that you?”

Piper stared at the man who’d barely looked her way the five hundred or so times she’d been in his store. He had pale hair and tanned skin and seemingly row upon row of brilliantly white teeth. Henry wore his usual uniform of tight jeans, black pointed-toe boots and sleeveless shirt that showed off the tiger’s-head tattoo on his left biceps. Although he looked to be in his mid-to late-thirties, he typically kept company with girls half his age. And twice her bra size.

Still, Henry was eligible, and handsome in a flashy kind of way. She remembered her pledge and smiled up at him. “Who does it look like, Henry?”

He seemed mesmerized by her legs. “I’m not sure—you look so…so…I’ve never seen you wear a dress.”

Satisfaction and surprise warmed her. Were men so superficial that a simple change of clothes could elicit such a response? She was the same person she’d been yesterday, wearing drawstring khakis and an oversize T-shirt. Her scuffed clogs were substantially more comfortable than these toe-pinching pumps, so she was relatively sure she looked happier in her old clothes.

“Funeral?” he asked, utterly serious.

“No,” she retorted. “Can’t a girl dress up once in a while?”

He crossed his muscular arms and pursed his lips, surveying her as if he’d just made a discovery. “Absolutely,” he said. “Listen, Piper, I’ve been meaning to call you and see if you’d like to go out sometime. What do you say?”

Not quite sure if he was asking her out or asking her if he could ask her out, Piper nodded. “That would be nice…I think.”

He nodded confidently, as if he expected no less than her acquiescence, and chewed on the inside of his cheek. A smile curved his fetching mouth as he studied her legs. The silence stretched between them until Piper felt as if she stood on two juicy drumsticks.

She gestured toward her van, which was still running. “Well, I guess I’d better be going.”

Henry, nodding and chewing, watched her while she climbed inside awkwardly, aware of the expanse of thigh she revealed in the process. Embarrassment mixed with doubt and anticipation made her queasy as she drove away, and she suddenly remembered why she’d stopped dating in the first place—it hadn’t been worth the strain. She’d barely begun her day, and she was already exhausted. Still, she was making progress. She had the threat of a date anyway.

More out of habit than necessity, Piper slowed at the caution light before proceeding onto Patty Richards Kegley Boulevard, the main thoroughfare of town. Twenty-two years ago Patty Richards Kegley had made the mistake of stepping out onto what had then been called Main Street in front of the single Mudville fire truck as it rushed to a grease fire at the drive-in on the far end of town. For her misfortune, she’d been immortalized in street signs, and the drive-in had created a sandwich in her name. Piper hoped if she herself incurred a mortal wound within city limits, she would at least warrant an entrée.

The Mudville morning rush hour typically dragged on for a full fifteen minutes when nearly one hundred workers leaving the midnight to 7:00 a.m. shift at Blythe Industries food plant clogged Kegley Boulevard in a semimad dash for a window seat at either Tucker’s Good Food Place or Alma’s Eats. Piper avoided the tangle by timing her commute for seven-thirty, which gave her ample time for the ten-minute drive and a cup of coffee before she donned her lab apron at eight.

The rain started falling in sheets just as the company’s familiar blue and gray concrete sign came into view. Blythe Industries lay long and wide in a carved-out section of woods about a mile outside of town, past Trim’s Food Market, the new high school and the old car wash. Pure coincidence had landed her the job of chief food scientist when the plant opened a year ago. She’d been visiting her grandmother and they’d run into Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Blythe over apple oatmeal at Alma’s. The businessman had been ecstatic to learn of Piper’s educational and professional background and offered her a job on the spot. Not entirely thrilled with her position as a label-ingredient tester at a Biloxi packager, and eager to be near her aging grandmother, Piper had accepted. The money was better than average and she’d made quite a dent in her college loans, but she found it amusing that she, who was allergic to chocolate and averse to sweets in general, was in charge of creating many of the desserts ordered at fast-food restaurants all over the country.

She was glad to be starting a new project today, she decided as she circled the full parking lot searching for a vacant space, despite the fact that someone from the Bentley Group was arriving this afternoon to offer tips on the kind of dessert they were looking for. Working with a suit looking over her shoulder didn’t rank high on her list, but if Bentley signed for a new dessert, Edmund Blythe had promised her a very handsome bonus, so she aimed to please. Plus, a new face would take her mind off her after-hours manhunting mission. Her nerve was dwindling rapidly.

Through thrashing windshield wipers, she spotted one wide parking space on the end of a row and headed toward it. Cursing the van’s absence of power steering, Piper started turning well before the spot to leverage a good angle. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a small black sports car dart around the corner and wheel deftly into the spot. Piper slammed on the brake, bouncing her forehead against the unforgiving steering wheel and biting her tongue. Pain exploded in her sinuses while stars floated behind her eyes. And she had the vaguest thought that the cut in her mouth would affect her tasting abilities for the day. Damn pushy salesmen! They bombarded the plant daily, trying to coax Edmund Blythe into using their branded ingredients in the desserts produced on the line.

She pressed her hands against her forehead, blinking back involuntary tears. A low thumping noise invaded her senses and she realized someone was knocking on her window. Loath to move her pounding head, Piper glanced up slowly to see a man standing outside beneath an umbrella, peering in at her. He wiped away the rain on the glass, then yelled, “Are you all right?”

Her first instinct was to fling open the door and send the stranger sprawling, but her head hurt so much, she could only nod. He knocked again and motioned for her to lower the window. She cranked down the glass gingerly, giving him the same two inches she’d allowed Lenny this morning.

However, if she hadn’t been so angry, she would have appreciated the fact that the stranger was a measurable improvement over Lenny. His dark hair was cleanly shorn and he was wearing a shirt—a dress shirt, no less—and a tie, which was reason enough for pause in these parts. His clear eyes were the color of the rain dripping from his umbrella and topped with dark eyebrows, which were drawn into a vee. “Are you all right?” he demanded again.

Furious at her physical response to the nitwit, she swallowed a mouthful of blood and narrowed her eyes at him. “You,” she said thickly, “are a menace.”

The man’s eyebrows shot up and he pulled back a few inches. “Me?” he sputtered. “What about you? Don’t you know you’re supposed to have your lights on when it’s raining?”

Piper licked her lips, testing her tongue. “I didn’t expect,” she said, her voice escalating with each word, “anyone to be driving like a maniac in the parking lot!” She winced at the pain and exhaled.

“It’s a good thing you had your seat belt on,” he snapped.

“It’s a good thing I’m not carrying a gun,” Piper returned.

He scowled, gesturing. “Are you all right or aren’t you?”

“I’ll live,” she muttered, fingering the goose egg fast forming on her forehead.

“Look, give me a minute to move my car,” he said. “You can have the parking space.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” she said dryly.

“I didn’t see you,” he said tersely, “or I would have gladly let you have the spot.” He strode toward his car, shielded by the umbrella. His movements were jerky as he unlocked the door and lowered himself inside. Within a few seconds, he had backed out of the spot and disappeared around the corner.

Piper eased into the space, her heart still racing from the encounter. After she turned off the engine, she leaned forward and rolled her eyes up at the sky, hoping for a few minutes’ reprieve to make the dash into the building. When none seemed forthcoming, she fished a plastic grocery bag out of the glove box. After tying the handles under her chin, she took a deep breath, then shot out of the door into the unrelenting cloudburst.

She didn’t make it far. Her pumps didn’t have the same grip as her trusty clogs. One second she was jumping puddles, the next she was flat on her back on the pavement, completely winded and half-submerged, her head held out of the water, she suspected, by the knot rising swiftly on her crown. She squeezed her eyes shut against the pain. Mercifully the rain suddenly stopped.

“You’re accident prone,” a male voice said above her.

Piper opened her eyes slowly to see the salesman kneeling over her, his umbrella providing the imagined lapse in the downpour. She considered the depth of the puddle—surely drowning would be less painful than dying of humiliation.

“Are you all right?” He grasped her arm and pulled her to her soggy feet, but she felt off balance and leaned heavily on his arm.

“I should have let you keep the parking spot,” she murmured, still a little fuzzy, and very, very wet. Water streamed off her clothes, which were seemingly vacuum-packed to her backside.

“Do you feel well enough to walk?” he asked, his breath fanning her face as they huddled under the umbrella.

Piper conjured up a smirk. “What are my options?”

“I could carry you,” he said simply, one side of his mouth drawing up into a lopsided smile.

Her heart lodged near her throat at the prospect and time stood still for an instant. His gaze locked with hers and Piper swallowed painfully. They might have been captured in their own little snow globe, separated from the rest of the world by some transparent barrier. Rain drummed on the umbrella and water ran around their feet. Piper’s tongue felt thick, but she wasn’t sure if it was swollen from biting herself or if she’d suffered brain damage from the combined knocks to her head.

“N-no,” she stammered. She would already be the laughingstock when she walked into her office—she’d never live it down if she arrived high in the arms of a stranger. “I’ll walk.”

“That might be difficult.” He shifted and fighting a smile, he held up the heel to one of her pumps.

Her heart sank. “I’ll crawl,” she amended.

“Come on,” he urged, turning her toward the building. “I owe you one.”

“You certainly do,” Piper said briskly, but his throaty chuckle relaxed her slightly. He bore more of her weight than she did as they made their way across the short walkway and up a sweeping set of limestone steps. Piper’s vital signs went haywire and she fluctuated between wanting the encounter to end and wishing for another lap around the grounds on the arm of this man.

His driving skills aside, this was a man worth hunting. Tall, solidly built from what she could see, nice dresser. Piper frowned. He obviously was not from Mudville—hmm, that could be a problem. Still, she was thrilled that she’d managed to stumble over such a prize specimen so early in her hunt. Phrases from her grandmother’s guide popped into her head and she searched for something brilliant to say that would erase the impression she’d given him.

But her romantic musings came to a screeching halt when she glanced down at his left hand. Winking back at her, mocking her from his third finger was a very gold, very sparkly, very substantial-looking wedding band.

Her quarry had been bagged by someone else.

Piper suddenly felt cold, wet and miserable. Even if she did need the practice, she wasn’t inclined to waste her fledgling feminine wiles on a married man. She set down her foot wearing the good shoe on the top step, then felt the rain-soaked heel snap off. The pain in her ankle surpassed any of the injuries she’d received in the last fifteen minutes. She howled, her dignity long gone.