Manhunting in Mississippi Read online

  Ian conjured up a smile and hoped it wasn’t as shaky as his knees. At this moment, Mudville seemed like a haven, a slow little one-horse town where he could forget about the proposal for a few days. Fresh air, good-tasting water, maybe even a fishing trip or two…and no women bent on dragging him to the altar.

  “HI, GRAN.” Piper dropped a kiss on her grandmother’s silky cheek. “Sorry I’m late. Justine is obsessing over her wedding plans.”

  Dressed in gray sweats, Ellen Falkner radiated youth—seventy-five going on forty-five, she was much too young-looking for the title of “granny,” a name she insisted on nonetheless.

  Granny Falkner smiled wide, tucked a strand of convincing light brown hair beneath her blue bandanna, then planted her hands on her hips. “Don’t fret, Piper. There’s still plenty to do.” She frowned and glanced around the living room, shaking her head. “How does one accumulate so much junk?”

  At least two dozen brown boxes lined the perimeter of the weathered room, stacked atop jumbled furniture. The cabbage-rose wallpaper Piper had always loved suddenly appeared yellowed and dated next to the bright squares where pictures had once hung. Stripped of its window dressings, the tall-ceilinged parlor looked half-naked and lonely, as if already pining for its mistress.

  “Gran,” Piper said softly, “after forty years, you’re allowed to have accumulated a few knickknacks.”

  “I know,” her grandmother said, caressing the wooden mantel. “And I’m really going to miss this old house.” Then she turned a bright smile toward Piper. “But six years alone is plenty long enough. I hate to leave the house empty, but Nate would want me to move on, and Greenbay Ridge looks like my kind of place.” She winked. “I can learn to line dance and still be close to you.”

  “You’ll be the social butterfly of the entire retirement community, Gran. And the real-estate agent will find a buyer soon.”

  Her grandmother’s forehead wrinkled. “I wish you would take the house, Piper.”

  Piper shrugged, guilt riding through her. “I told you I’d be glad to move in with you. It would add only five minutes to my commute.”

  “Which would be wonderful for me, but not for you, dear. No, we both need to get on with our lives, but I was hoping you’d be looking for a home when I was ready to move.”

  Yearning bubbled within Piper, but she struggled to maintain a calm expression. Despite its dubious location in the outskirts of Mudville, she did want the big old house she so dearly loved, and for years she’d been putting aside every spare dime hoping she’d be able to buy it someday. Her finances still fell short of the mark, but if she received the bonus she was hoping for, she’d be within striking distance. But in case things didn’t work out, she had sworn the real-estate agent to secrecy. Piper chose her words carefully. “Gran, I can’t afford to buy this place, and I’m certainly not going to let you give it to me.”

  Her grandmother shook her head and frowned. “I know Mudville isn’t the most exciting place to spend the rest of your life, but I did so want you and your children to have this home.”

  “Gran,” Piper chided, “be practical. You have to have money to live on.” Then she grinned. “And in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not pregnant.”

  She was rewarded with a wry, wrinkled smile. “Not unless it was an immaculate conception, I’d wager.”

  “Gran!”

  Granny Falkner angled her head. “Really, dear, you conduct yourself like a nun.”

  Shock thickened her tongue. “I…I don’t want to talk about my, um—”

  “Chastity?”

  “Well, I’m not exactly a vir—” Piper stopped and swallowed. “A Virgo.” She laughed weakly and jammed her hands on her hips in a desperate attempt to look innocent. “I mean, I’m not exactly a Virgo,” she repeated in a squeaky voice. “B-because I’m a Pisces…as you know, Gran.” She cleared her throat noisily and scrutinized the toes of her leather clogs.

  Granny Falkner laughed. “You young people think you invented sex. Well, I’m here to tell you, your grandfather and I could have filed for a patent or two of our own.”

  Piper blinked and held up her hands. “Gran, I really don’t want to hear this.”

  “Relax, Piper, I’m not going to embarrass you. I’m simply trying to get you to open up.” She reached out and ran her thumb over Piper’s cheek. “You still don’t realize how lovely you are—with that face, you could have any man you wanted.”

  “Spoken like a true grandmother.”

  Sharp blue eyes, which she’d inherited, stared back at her. “Did someone break your heart, dear? Some young man in college?”

  The concern in her gran’s face sent a swell of love through Piper’s chest. The older woman knew all too well the grief Piper had suffered all her life. Her mother didn’t even know the name of the man who had fathered her. How could she tell her grandmother that she’d lived in fear of repeating her mother’s mistakes? That she’d been embarrassed to even introduce her outrageously flirtatious mother to the young men she dated? That she’d purposely ignored boys to whom she was attracted so she wouldn’t have to deal with the overpowering sexual rush that made people do crazy things with their lives?

  Her few intimate encounters had been with timid, fumbling boys who’d been even more inept than she’d imagined herself to be. She managed a comforting smile. “I met and dated some nice guys in college, but my heart is perfectly intact.”

  “And is there a current beau I don’t know about?”

  Piper pursed her lips, then replied in a singsongy voice. “Noooooo.”

  Her grandmother sighed and crossed her arms. “I know you’re independent, dear, but sharing your life with the right person can be an extraordinary experience.”

  A pang of longing pierced Piper, but she decided to make light of the comment. Her grandmother worried enough without Piper fueling the maternal fire. “Gran, I have other priorities right now, like establishing my professional reputation, paying off school loans, maybe even building a nest egg for myself.”

  “Is your job still going well?” She handed Piper a red bandanna for her hair.

  Piper immediately recognized the worn cloth as the handkerchief her grandfather had carried in the back pocket of his pants. She covered her hair and stretched her arms to tie the ends at the nape of her neck. “My job’s fine. I’m starting a new project this week to persuade our biggest client to extend their contract. Wish me luck!” If her grandmother only knew how much was riding on the creation of one little dessert.

  “Good luck, dear. But all work and no play…” Innuendo colored the older woman’s voice as it trailed off.

  A sly grin broke out on Piper’s face. “Gran, I’m letting my sorority sisters weed out the eager, needy men.”

  Her grandmother laughed, then wagged a finger. “Just don’t wait too long.”

  Piper narrowed her eyes. “Have you been talking to Justine, because this is starting to sound like a conspiracy.”

  Gran’s laugh echoed in the empty room and she raised her arms in defeat. “Okay, I’ll stop so we can get some work done.”

  Piper looked around the room, struck once again by the unfamiliar emptiness. She’d spent endless summers in this house, and as many weekends and holidays as possible, since her mother hadn’t exactly been a nurturing caregiver. Panic stirred in her stomach at the sight of the furniture she’d played on as a child pushed against the walls, queued up haphazardly as if awaiting deportation. Beneath the window stood the wooden coffee table. Her initials, which she’d carved with her grandfather’s Swiss army knife when she was seven, were still on the leg. And next to it, the armless padded rocking chair Gran had sat in when she sewed while Piper sprawled on the floor, stringing buttons with a dulled needle. She swallowed. “Where do I start, Gran?”

  “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.