Manhunting in Mississippi Read Free Page B

put her arm around Piper’s shoulders as they walked back to the house. “I live in eternal hope that your mother wil 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 rol er-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 Mudvil e, 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 Mudvil e. 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 pul ed to a stop at one of the town’s two stoplights. Mudvil e 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 rol down her window, and after a reluctant sigh, she obliged.
    “Hey, Piper, what’s shakin’?” he bawled above the glass-shattering decibels of Hank Wil iams, 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 dol ar theater.”
    She grimaced. “I rented it several years ago.”
    “Oh, real y?” He frowned, and bit his lower lip.
    Thankful y, the light turned green. “So long, Lenny,” she said, pul ing 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 pul ed the box toward her and placed it between her spread legs, curiosity coursing through her.
    The smel of mothbal s, dried paper and stale flowers fil ed her nostrils as she lifted the lid. The box held a hodgepodge of memorabilia: dusty photo albums, yel owed 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