Bootlegger’s Daughter

I edged away from her as she jingled indecisively and was immediately claimed by an elderly poet and a would-be playwright who wanted to debate the Mapplethorpe photos and the First Amendment.

Wondering who else might not have realized that we’d closed early yesterday, I put in a call to the office and punched in the code that would cause our answering machine to play back. Sure enough, amid some non-urgent routine messages was De

Like what, De

There was no answer. After five rings, their answering machine switched on. I left a message that I was returning De

Dwight probably laid the fear of God and the law on De

I suddenly remembered the luscious dark red velvet cloak he’d created for The Further Adventures of Red Riding Hood. The young woman who played Red was awful, but the costumes were great. In fact, I wanted De

Now wouldn’t that make a nice apology, I thought, turning my car south on Forty-Eight toward Makely. Too bad I’d missed him.

I was scheduled to speak at a Parents Without Partners di

It wasn’t that I expected De

It was odd about couples, the dynamics of staying together or growing apart. Mi

“At least they’re all still honoring whatever vows they made,” said the preacher starchily.

The pragmatist held his tongue.

The Possum Creek Players Theatre began life as a one-room schoolhouse in the center of town a hundred years ago. The one room grew to three before it was abandoned for a new brick school in the twenties. A pentecostal congregation immediately bought the building and moved it to the banks of Possum Creek about five miles north of Cotton Grove. In the fifties, shortly after the church elders had taken out a new mortgage to remodel the structure, long-simmering animosities over scriptural interpretations suddenly came to a boil and emotions ran so high that the church split right down the middle. The wealthier members pulled out and built a new church at a crossroads south of Cotton Grove. The rest of the flock, unable to meet the mortgage payments, soon drifted off to other churches, and the bank foreclosed.

After that, the building sat empty for several years. The property kept changing hands. Different enterprises tried and failed out there, but nothing seemed to work until the Possum Creek Players organized and eventually raised enough money to take it over on a fairly sound financial footing. Raleigh was near enough to furnish better-than-average amateur actors; and Raleigh provided a dependable paying audience as well, once the theater had built a reputation for campy musical comedy, farce, and melodrama.

A gravel road wound in from the highway, through a stand of pine trees and azaleas out to the old white clapboard building on the banks of the creek. With the sun at my back, I drove into the sprawling dirt parking lot where a neat square sign a

To my surprise, De

I tapped my horn.

Nothing.

I switched off my motor and stepped out of air-conditioned coolness onto sun-parched grass. Warm air flowed around my bare arms almost like the red velvet cloak itself.

The sun was down below the pines now, and silence wrapped the shadowed creek bank. I walked across the concrete pad and pushed the door wider.

“De

All at once it struck me what a dumb thing it was to be walking into an isolated building out here in the middle of nowhere. Probably deserted, but maybe not. Not with De

“And let us not forget who’s shown himself to be just a little too damn free in the way he handles a rifle,” said the pragmatist.

“She who fears and runs away lives to fear another day,” the preacher agreed nervously.

I backed away from the door, feeling slightly foolish. On the other hand, I do keep a loaded.38 locked in the truck of my car and this seemed like as good a time as any to get it out.

The concrete loading zone was only eight or nine inches off ground level, but when I turned, I found myself looking straight down into the front seat of De

Like the blast that’d taken out the driver’s side of the Volvo windshield and blown away De