Buck lurched to his feet. As he did so, Demon got up from the floor and with its huge tail wagging swept a stack of medical magazines from the doctor’s desk.

“You see what I mean?” Buck reached for his wide-brimmed sheriff’s hat with his left hand. “It eats my lunch, I can’t get a sandwich halfway to my mouth before it gulps it down, Saran Wrap and all. Then it leans all over me when I’m trying to drive, and if I try to shove it out of the Blazer it acts like it’s going to take my hand off.” He twisted his elbow unhappily, looking down at the sling. “I don’t know if I can take this for ten days,” he said, turning to go. “I’ve got to take it off sometime. This is my gun arm.”

“Suit yourself, boy,” Dr. Halliwell called after him. “But that shoulder’s not going to get better unless you give it a rest.”

Giving it a rest, Buck found as he made his way out to the clinic parking lot, was easier said than done. And getting into the Blazer with only one hand was a challenge. Once inside the dog hunkered up next to him and rested her big head on his right shoulder, making Buck yelp in sudden pain. The fact that he was backing out as this happened, the steering wheel held only by his usable hand, made the Blazer veer in the same direction. With the result that the vehicle narrowly missed scraping the length of Dr. Halliwell’s Fleetwood Cadillac parked next to it.

Buck sat muttering under his breath, not only from the sharp twinge in his shoulder, but from the disaster that had almost overtaken him. Dr. Jerry Halliwell loved his brand-new 1994 Fleetwood Caddie almost as much as he loved his Yorkies.

Buck slipped his arm out of the blue and white canvas, gritting his teeth against the pain. He had thought to experiment with driving without the sling, but he’d promptly put it back on when he saw his hand, his fingers the color of smoked sausages.

It was going to be some holiday.

“Sit down over there,” Buck snarled at the dog. For once it obeyed, moving to its side of the front seat, looking at him reproachfully.

It was beginning to rain as they took the highway back to town, another sleety assault from the mountains to the north that made the road treacherous, especially driving with one hand. Buck had to hook his right elbow against the steering wheel to help turn it.

Both sides of the road were lined with the brightly colored local product: handmade chenille bedspreads now flapping in the wind. Making chenille bedcoverings had been a cottage industry for decades in the Georgia mountains. Most of the families along State Road 12 made money in the summer and fall when the tourists were around. Now it looked as though they were trying for some Christmas money.

In spite of bad weather, the clotheslines were hung with spreads with designs of peacocks, Florida flamingos and palm trees, and in honor of the season, outsized chenille Santa Clauses.

The Last Supper bedspread, Buck was relieved to see, was not as popular as it once had been. The local God-fearing mountain people had never seen anything objectionable in rendering Jesus and his disciples for sale in cotton tufts in primary colors. But the thought of actually sleeping under one of the Last Supper bedspreads, Buck had always felt, was more than a little daunting.

The radio suddenly came on. “Sheriff,” the county police dispatcher said, “can you pick up?”

Buck propped his elbow on the steering wheel to hold it and lifted the receiver. “Yeah, George.”

“Do you,” the dispatcher wanted to know, “care to answer a call from the Committee for the Real Meaning of Christmas? The chairman, Junior Whitford, has been calling you again about the music. He says the committee ain’t approving ‘Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town’ for the Living Christmas Tree to sing as it celebrates a pagan ritual.”

At that moment the Blazer entered Nancyville’s downtown. There were only a few shoppers on Main Street and they hurried along under umbrellas. Overhead, the whirling aluminum garlands said Joyous Noel, and Happy New Year.

Buck was suddenly reminded that he didn’t have a date for New Year’s Eve. Didn’t, actually, have any place to go. In years past he had always dated Susan Huddleston, and Susan had made the arrangements. Now he found the prospect of an unplanned New Year’s Eve surprisingly depressing.

He clicked on the Blazer’s radio. “I must have been celebrating pagan rituals all my life,” he told the dispatcher, “because I’ve been singing ‘Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town’ since I was in kindergarten. The head Druid, Mrs. Brown, taught it to all of us.”

Buck, too busy maneuvering the Blazer to get more than a glimpse of the wooden structure in front of the courthouse, was reminded that Cyrus Ravenwood, the high school band teacher, had guaranteed the Living Christmas Tree was the answer to their problems: a totally secular entertainment that had been successful in other places faced with similar court orders.

Buck hoped Ravenwood knew what he was doing. But he had his doubts. Right now even “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” was under fire.

“George, have we heard from any truckers?” He didn’t want to forget about their major problem. The department was averaging one call a day from local truckers asking what they were doing about the hijackings.

“All quiet so far,” the radio told him. “You got a call from Inspector Byron Turnipseed at the Georgia CID, that’s all.”

Buck signed off. The state’s criminal investigation department could wait until tomorrow; any help Byron Turnipseed offered with their hijackings was limited by a skimpy state budget. Small north Georgia counties’ law-enforcement departments usually had to shift for themselves.

Following that line of thought, he remembered the Scraggs sisters. For the first time he felt what could only be a rush of reluctant sympathy for Devil Anse’s offspring. The old outlaw came rightly by his name. Who else but a devil would think of selling off – there was no other word for it – his own flesh and blood? “Free trial offer” be damned!

Then there was the strange little elvish child. There was no telling what was wrong with her, a variety of birth defects, probably, from the look of it. The kid needed medical attention. Probably for the first time in her life.

And the other one. Scarlett.

Instead of coherent thoughts a series of fleeting images raced through Buck’s head. The screaming hoyden in the dirty pink underwear panties Moses Holt had dragged across the floor of the jail, yelling her defiance. Scarlett standing with her arms wrapped tightly around her in his mother’s driveway, black hair streaming in the wind. A few minutes later holding her sister in her arms and stroking the child’s hair, her face transformed with tenderness.

Buck stopped in the middle of his thoughts, astonished that he was even thinking about Scarlett O’Hara Scraggs. As an antidote he quickly tried to picture Susan Huddleston.

He couldn’t.

Buck pulled into the driveway and cut the Blazer’s engine, having to cross over the steering wheel with the wrong hand to reach the key. He sat there regarding his home for a long moment, a faint frown between his eyes.

He had no idea why he had been fantasizing about Devil Anse’s long-legged brat; the old man had put the idea into his head with his free trial offer, damn him. And for all her rough upbringing, Miss Scarlett O. Scraggs was fantastically tempting.

Buck got out of the Blazer. The cold wind almost blew him onto the front porch. Once inside, the warmth of the house enveloped him, along with strong tantalizing odors. He remembered he hadn’t made any arrangements about what they were going to have for dinner. His stomach rebelled at the thought of another pizza.

He started down the long hallway, stopping abruptly at the light coming from the parlor.

He stepped inside. There stood the big blue spruce Christmas tree, fully decorated. The strings of Christmas tree lights that embraced it sparkled and blinked.

It was the first time in years that Buck had seen a Christmas tree with seemingly every last one of his mother’s collection of ornaments on it, including the paper garlands he and his sister had made in the first and second grade.

With all the stuff on it the tree should have been a mess. Instead, every branch, almost every needle, was so covered with decoration that the great blue spruce tree radiated a remarkably homey, jumbled sort of – well, beauty.

If you were familiar with the Grissom family ornaments you could just stand and look at the tree for hours, he thought, remembering the story behind each item fashioned by children’s hands, each faintly crazed old glass ball, the grandparents’ German imported Father Christmases holding their blown-glass miniature trees, the now less-than-sparkling gold and silver tinsel ropes that came from the long-closed Nancyville McCrory’s.

Someone had done a good job. With the strings of lights, the tree blazed happily.

At that moment the damnedest, most bizarre apparition appeared from around the other side of the tree. Startled, Buck could only blink.

It seemed to be some sort of lumpy pink satin specter, drooping around the bottom, wearing a flappy straw hat with satin flowers.

When it saw him standing there the banshee recoiled in horror. Then it whirled, scuttling for the dining room with faint, ratlike squeaks of alarm.

Buck stared after it. The little sister? Then what the hell was she doing dressed up like Halloween? He started after her.

The odors in the far end of the hall were even more tantalizing. Before Buck could throw open the kitchen door, though, it swung out and some strange girl – woman – stood in the door with the kitchen light behind her. A ravishing female in a dark shirt, tight jeans, her dark hair pulled back with a ribbon.

“Hel-lo,” Buck said. He stepped back in appreciative surprise.

It was undoubtedly somebody who’d come with Judy Heamstead to bring the church clothes. But new in town; Buck had never seen her before.

“Don’t be down on Farrie,” the willowy figure cried. “She didn’t mean any harm to the tree, she just wanted to fix it up. She’s never seen anything like it before!”

For a moment he stood staring. “Farrie? Farrie?”

Even in the glaring kitchen light he couldn’t believe it. It was, he realized with a sinking feeling, Scarlett O’Hara Scraggs.

“It will be all right,” she was telling him rapidly. “You’ll feel better about it when I feed you dinner!”

Dinner? In a daze Buck gazed past her. If the Christmas tree wasn’t, by some miracle, a mess, the kitchen certainly was. Everything seemed to have been pulled out from where it belonged and then emptied, dropped, or spilled in a different place. Still, when he sniffed the air it smelled wonderful.

Buck’s moment of hope vanished with Scarlett’s next words.

She touched him on the arm, gazing up at him somewhat anxiously. “Don’t look like that,” she murmured in her husky voice. “You’re gonna like it. I cooked every bit myself.”

Nine

“The girl from the church showed me how to get the meat out of the freezer and thaw it,” Scarlett said. “That was the biggest part of the job.”

They were seated, Scarlett and Farrie and Buck, at the big mahogany table in the dining room. Through the sliding doors the Victorian parlor looked better without the clutter of cardboard boxes. The bright glitter of the huge Christmas tree reached almost to the ceiling.

“I was supposed to put the meat in the microwave thing, but she’d left by that time and I couldn’t get it to work. Anyway,” Scarlett added, looking down at the assortment of food on the table, “ten pounds of hamburger is a lot. When I got it thawed out I knew I was just going to have to keep cooking.”

“No problem.” Sheriff Buck tried awkwardly for a piece of meatloaf with the fork in his left hand. “I can’t get over it. Everything’s so delicious.”

The meatloaf slipped and landed on the table-cloth beside his plate. Scarlett tactfully picked it up and put it on her own. She’d been watching the sheriff closely from the moment they’d sat down, but he seemed sincere. Of course he’d been a little surprised that she’d cooked dinner, even after Scarlett had explained that she’d learned it all from the cookbooks they’d taken from the clothes boxes that afternoon. He’d looked tired when he came in and Scarlett saw at once he was out of sorts: Demon had left her marks all over his uniform, and he’d had some sort of accident as his arm was in a sling. Sheriff Buck went right into the dining room, pulled up a chair, and sat down.