Buck dropped the paper towels. Before she could run from him he seized the littler Scraggs and lifted her in his arms. He was startled at how weightless she was, even with the soggy football jacket, which gave out a sour odor.

“Upstairs,” Buck said tersely. “Turn right.”

He argued with himself about calling a doctor. Not Dr. Henson who served the county jail, that was too complicated because other agencies were involved, like Susan Huddleston’s. Yet if he called his own family physician Buck had a good idea of the explaining he would have to do.

Under his breath he groaned.

As he mounted the stairs with Farrah Fawcett Scraggs in his arms, Scarlett trailing behind, Buck was struck with another thought. It was six o’clock. Dinnertime. No matter how soon or late the doctor got there, or even if he decided to wait to see what happened before calling one, there was one thing certain.

“Oh hell,” Buck muttered, “we’ve got to eat. Now it looks like I’m going to have to cook.”

Five

“Scarlett, tell me about when i was a baby.” Farrie moved the paper plates with the remains of the pizza and baked beans they’d had for dinner to the other side of the bed. “Oh, ain’t this the most beautiful room?” she breathed. “Did you hear the sheriff say it used to belong to his sister before she got married?” She suddenly jerked up in the bed, excited. “Just think about living here all the time in this old house, and sleeping in this bed with posts all around it and curtains hung over the top!”

“It’s called a tester.” Scarlett got up, collected their plates, and carried them to a safe place on the Victorian bowfront bureau. “You can buy them at K Mart.”

Farrie shook her head. “This didn’t come from K Mart. And the bathroom’s got a window where you can sit in the bathtub and look out and see trees like there wasn’t nobody else in the world to see you sitting there buck naked except for a whole tub full of good-smelling bubbles!”

“Anybody else,” Scarlett said, frowning. “We said when we left Catfish Holler we was – were – going to try to talk right, like people on television, remember? And not like a Scraggs.”

“Anybody, then.” Farrie closed her eyes, blissful. “Oh Scarlett, wouldn’t you like to be lucky enough to live in a house like this?”

Scarlett sat down on the side of the bed and studied her little sister. Farrie’s freshly shampooed hair stood out around her hair in a wiry bush. She was not a pretty girl, Scarlett always told herself, but Farrie had her own sort of looks. It was true her cheekbones stuck out and her jaw was a little crooked, but she had big, lively eyes that lit up her face. And that grin, Scarlett thought. When Farrie was happy, no one could resist that pixie grin.

Still, in the last few years Scarlett had begun to wonder if her sister would have a chance when she grew up to find someone who would see something special in her. And want to love her, and marry her. Scarlett worried a lot about it. The Scraggses didn’t have much luck that way. And Farrie had even less.

She could see Farrie’s cheeks were flushed as though she had a fever. It was due, probably, to what they’d been through, a lot for someone like Farrie, who’d been raised in a broken-down trailer on the side of a mountain in the wildest part of the Blue Ridge. From her look she was so wound up she probably wouldn’t go to sleep until after midnight.

“Yeah, it’s a nice house,” Scarlett agreed. She pulled the covers up to her sister’s neck and patted them in place. “I thought you wanted me to tell you the story about when you were a baby.”

The little girl nodded quickly, eyes shining. Scarlett had been telling this story ever since Farrie had been old enough to listen, but she never seemed to tire of it.

“Well,” Scarlett began, “I never had a doll of my own when I was your age.” She was thinking that she was so tired herself she could hardly hold her eyes open. In a minute she was going to crawl into that big, soft bed beside Farrie and get some sleep. “No, I forgot, I had a doll once.” She’d pretended not to remember; the story always went this way. And Farrie nodded as she always did. “I was about your age when the Baptists over at Toccoa sent a Sunday-school bus around the mountain hollers at Christmastime for kids who didn’t -”

She paused, waiting. Farrie said, “Didn’t have any Christmas. Like us.”

“That’s right. She was a real nice doll.” Scarlett’s voice grew wistful. “She had eyes that would open and close and real eyelashes. You never saw a doll like that one, it was so pretty. They gave me a scarf and mittens somebody had made, and a bag of candy, too. Only that year Bubba Scraggs, he was your daddy’s brother, he took my Baptist church doll almost as soon as I got home and broke it when he was stinking drunk. I hadn’t had it long at all. So when Mamma brought you back from the hospital I thought you looked like my doll. You was just about the same size.”

“I wasn’t pretty,” Farrie put in. “Not like your doll.”

Scarlett looked thoughtful, which was part of the game. “Well, no, not at first. You was just a little scrunched-up bundle in a blanket they left laying there on the bed because you were sickly. First thing you know Mamma said she couldn’t stand it no more, she was tired of the Scraggses, and she upped and went off with a guitar player from Nashville.”

“And I cried.” Farrie was smiling. “I was a puny baby.”

Scarlett patted her kneecap under the bedspread. “Yes, honey, you cried day and night, I just hated to hear it. But I didn’t give up on you.”

Never in all the years since then had Scarlett told Farrie the truth. That the reason their mother had run off was that she didn’t want the baby the doctors had said might not live. The little bundle that lay on the bed and cried for hours had skin a dark slate color and it aimlessly jerked its matchstick arms and legs in a way that even Scarlett could see wasn’t normal.

“After a while I just picked you up and washed you,” Scarlett went on, “and carried you around like a real dollbaby. Nobody said anything, I guess they were just glad you stopped crying. I cleaned out the baby bottles and fed you canned milk and corn syrup like they told Mamma to do in the hospital. And I thought you were the best little doll anybody ever had. You were my very own.”

No matter what happened Scarlett would never tell Farrie of that terrible night when Devil Anse and one of her uncles had come to take the baby, without even saying what they were going to do with it. “It won’t live much longer,” her grandpa had said. “You’re just wasting your time with it, girl.”

Farrie said, “You took care of me and you weren’t much older than me.”

“That’s right, I was about nine.” Scarlett had fought like a tiger when her grandpa and her uncle tried to take the baby away, and finally they’d let it be. “Going to die, anyway,” was what Devil Anse had said.

Thinking of it made Scarlett uneasy. “Look, it’s all well and good for the sheriff to put us up like this,” she said, “but don’t forget we gotta get out of here. Devil Anse is going to find us sooner or later.”

If her grandpa did what he said he would, Farrie would be left to fend for herself in Catfish Hollow. And Scarlett knew how long that would last. They would let Farrie get sick and die, as her grandpa had meant for her to do when she was a baby.

“He’s not going to catch us, Scarlett!” Farrie hauled herself up in bed, eyes blazing. “Listen, we don’t have to go anywheres. We just got the best Christmas present anybody ever had in the whole world, only we just didn’t see it!”

Scarlett made a warning cluck against her teeth. “Farrie, for goodness’ sake, you’re gonna be sick if you don’t slide down in that bed and close your eyes. Go to sleep – I don’t want to be up all night with you, I’m tired and need some rest myself.”

But Farrie seized the sleeve of her sweater in both hands. “Scarlett, we could live right here in this house. Right here in Nancyville. We wouldn’t have to go to a far-off place like Atlanta!”

Scarlett pried her hand away. She brushed the sticky pizza crumbs off her front and stood up. “Don’t talk like that, Farrie. We can’t stay here, this house belongs to the sheriff.”

Her sister got to her knees in the middle of the bed. “Don’t you see it, Scarlett?” she shrilled. “The sheriff’s house is the last place Devil Anse will come looking for us. And if he does – why you know that big tough sheriff won’t let him do anything. No sirree! Scarlett, this here place is safer than Atlanta!”

Scarlett leaned over and pushed her sister back down against the pillows. “Farrie, I swear, I’m getting worried. I don’t think you’ve got that much fever, but you’re talking out of your head.”

“No I’m not! We can have this house and the sheriff can live here, too. All you got to do is marry him!”

“What?”

Scarlett straightened up to stare at her.

“Yes!” Farrie jerked her head up and down violently. “Scarlett, he’s good-looking,” she pleaded, “it wouldn’t be so hard to do. Not like the ones that are always pestering you around Grandpa’s place. And he’s the sheriff, you can’t get no safer than that. Besides, I think he likes you – he’s always looking at you when he thinks you don’t know it.”

“Good Lord.” Scarlett sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed. “When did you start thinking like this?”

Farrie looked at her solemnly. “Didn’t you say if we ever wanted to live like other people we had to run away from Catfish Holler? That if we stayed up there with Devil Anse and the rest we’d end up no better than they was – were? Well, I guess it was while I was taking a bath in that bathroom where you can look out into the woods, and thinking about that big room downstairs with the Christmas tree in it that it came to me. And the way I feel now in this big beautiful bed, all warm with the curtains hanging over me, just like a princess. All of a sudden I had this idea that you’n me could live here if you was married to the sheriff, and nobody could put us out in the cold. And Devil Anse would be too scared to come here, too!”