Manhunting in Mississippi

“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?”