“Don’t drag my father into this,” the sheriff growled, “I know how you feel about him, Susan.”

“I wasn’t dragging your father into anything! Besides, I know your mother wouldn’t object.”

The sheriff’s jaw tightened. “You don’t have to criticize my mother, either.”

She stared at him. “Look, Buck, I know the Scraggses are not the most rewarding project to get involved in here at Christmas. I’ve chased them from one end of the county to the other and they’re hopeless. The men won’t let the women and children have any contact with strangers, they’re too afraid the government will find their stolen-car chop shops and the rest of the rackets they’re into up there in the hills, and prosecute them.” A little pleadingly, she touched him on the sleeve. “I’ve paid good money to attend my meeting and have my holiday, Buck, don’t ask me to give it up. Anyway, the county doesn’t have the money to put the Scraggs girls up in a motel, much less pay a matron to supervise them. And you can’t leave them alone. I don’t see that you have any other choice.”

The sheriff looked like a thundercloud. The last thing he wanted for Christmas was Devil Anse’s granddaughters. “Dammit, Susan, if it comes to that, I’d pay their motel bill myself!”

She suddenly looked at her wristwatch. “Good heavens,” she exclaimed, “I haven’t got time for this! It’s a good thing I’m all packed and my bags are in my car outside.”

She started toward Scarlett, the sheriff following. “Susan,” he was saying, “why don’t we leave her here in the cell block and see how things work out?”

“You can’t do that. Scarlett’s not a criminal. And as a Scraggs, she’s got enough against her as it is. Scarlett,” she said, “do you understand what we’ve been talking about? When your sister is found the sheriff can’t keep her in jail. And we don’t want to send you back to your grandfather without a court hearing. Sheriff Grissom agrees with me that we need to move you out of here.”

“Now just a minute,” the sheriff said, “I didn’t say -”

“Scarlett O’Hara,” the woman went on, “Sheriff Grissom has very kindly offered to take you home with him.”

Three

A gust of wind swept into Nancyville from the heights of Makim’s Mountain, making the tinsel garland on Main Street whirl in the winter light. The same blast swept across the windshield of the Blazer with enough sleet to blot out Sheriff Buck’s vision. Muttering under his breath, he switched on the wipers, then turned the heater to Defrost.

Beside him the Scraggs girl was still clawing at the Blazer’s locked door. It had taken a good bit of Buck’s strength and all of Susan Huddleston’s guile to get her into the county police vehicle, and once inside Scarlett had been sure she’d been tricked, that she was under arrest and on her way to the state pen. Screaming, she’d attacked the inside of the Blazer in a fury. She was still at it.

“You gotta let me out of here, I ain’t done anything!” She pounded the door handles and window glass with both fists. “I mean it, you gotta let me out! I gotta go look for my little sister!”

“Stop that!” The screaming in the close confines of the Blazer was fraying Buck’s temper; he was used to more orderly prisoners. Except, he reminded himself, Scarlett Scraggs wasn’t exactly a prisoner. “Sit down,” he ordered. “And act decent!”

As he said it, Buck realized that “decent” wasn’t a word that one could use to command the Scraggses. Unless he was mistaken, Scarlett’s mother was the Scraggs who’d left Devil Anse’s youngest son to run away with a country and western guitar player from Nashville. It was unlikely that Elvis Presley, Farrah Fawcett, or Scarlett herself had been exposed to any sort of stable home life.

For the second time that afternoon Buck experienced an unsettling nervous cramp in his stomach. His mother – whatever her past experiences with his father’s Christmas strays and vagrants from the county jail – had never coped with a true Scraggs. Bringing this half-wild creature home, not to mention the other sister when she showed up, filled Buck with foreboding. And he was not used to feeling that way. Not since Susan Huddleston announced she was calling off their engagement.

That, he told himself sourly, was another thing.

He still couldn’t fathom how his ex-fiancée could make him feel so guilty, when the damned engagement was over and done with a long time ago. He should have put the Scraggses up in a motel. They could have found some way around regulations.

The girl beside him had stopped banging on the door. Now she slumped in her seat, substituting the earsplitting howls for subdued, but just as nerve-racking moaning. Buck glanced at her. Her head was bent, her face hidden by a mop of hair that fell forward.

“Farrie’s out there, in all that snow and cold.” A gulping sound that might have been a sob broke from her. “And you’re gonna take me someplace” – she turned, the gypsy eyes gleaming at him balefully – “to do whatever it is you think you’re gonna do to me!”

“What I’m going to do to you?” Buck stepped on the brakes in surprise. The Blazer bucked in protest, then skidded sideways on the sleety road. Scarlett Scraggs clutched the dashboard and screamed.

Buck snarled something under his breath.

“There, you cussed,” she screeched. “I heard what you just said!”

At that moment the county dispatcher called on the police radio. “Sheriff, your mother’s been trying to get you.”

“Even I know a sheriff,” the Scraggs female was screaming, “ain’t supposed to cuss like that!”

“Dammit,” he barked, “will you shut up?”

“Sheriff, I’m only trying to do my job,” the voice of the dispatcher said.

“Not you, George.” Buck had tried to get his mother on the telephone before he left the jail, but the line at home had been persistently busy. “Listen,” he said into the radio, “if my mother calls back -”

“You got no right to talk to me like that!” Scarlett Scraggs maintained at the top of her lungs. “I want to know where you’re taking me!”

“Sheriff?” The dispatcher’s tone was cautious. “You got a – ah, prisoner with you?”

Buck was aware how all this sounded; so, he was sure, did Scarlett Scraggs. “No prisoner, George. I’m taking care of some of Susan Huddleston’s confounded problems. If my mother calls again, tell her to use the cellular phone.”

Buck was well aware that it had been a long time since his mother had put up any strays from the jail. That was something his dad had made a tradition when he was alive. Sheriff Buck Grissom, Sr., had been a law unto himself in the Georgia hills.

One year, Buck remembered, his dad had brought home a whole poverty-stricken family of migrant workers stranded on the highway when their old truck broke down. They’d had all seven of them for a week, straight through the New Year’s holiday. His mother had nearly gone crazy.

His passenger was wrestling with the door handle again. “You’re taking me someplace where my little sister’ll never find me!” she wailed. “I’ll never see Farrie again!”

“This is a county police vehicle,” he warned her, “the doors lock automatically. You won’t get that open no matter how hard you pound on it.”

The Blazer turned into Main Street. Traffic was light in the bad weather, and Nancyville was not a big enough town for a real rush hour. In spite of the aluminum holiday messages strung across the thoroughfare, the central area was bleak. Just beyond the R &R Variety Store, the Valley Bank, and Nancyville Hardware was the red brick pile that had formerly been the town’s textile mill, closed since the 1970’s.

The old mill was a reminder of all the jobs lost, all the people born and bred in the mountains who’d gone from Nancyville south to Atlanta and Birmingham or north to Chicago. The blighting presence of the mill was the reason the Nancyville Downtown Merchants’ Association needed the living manger scene at the courthouse to bring folks in to shop, so they wouldn’t go over to the giant mall on the interstate.

“Listen,” Buck said, relenting a little, “I’ve got practically my entire force out on the road looking for your little sister. When they find her I’m going to turn both of you over to my mother, and she’ll look after you until Sus – until Miss Huddleston gets back.”

Even as he spoke Buck realized Susan’s holiday would not be over until well after New Year’s. The prospect of being stuck through a full week of Christmas with any part of the Scraggs clan was something that rendered him almost numb.

Scraggses all through Christmas.

Unseeing, Buck turned off the windshield wipers. The sleet had stopped but the sky looked as though a storm was brewing up north in the Smokies. Bad weather was all the county police needed these last days before Christmas.

This infernal mess was all Susan Huddleston’s fault, Buck thought, leaving town and abandoning her job to take a Christmas holiday! Now that they no longer had any plans for marriage, Susan obviously felt she could do as she pleased. What remained between them wasn’t the friendly, cooperative relationship Buck thought they’d agreed upon. On the contrary, Susan could be downright hostile and treacherous. Like she was this afternoon.

Buck supposed that like most couples they had broken up with their share of hard words. Certainly they’d always fought over the day-and-night demands of her social-work job, and Susan still didn’t know how to cook a decent meal. She didn’t seem to have enough interest in it to want to learn how. Buck had made it plain he was damned if he was going to settle for a life of microwave dinners.