The ground tilted as I stepped down from the broken tour bus in the crisp February air, the lingering scent of leaking diesel making my nausea worse. I grabbed on to the folding door to steady the motion only I could see. It figured that the vertigo would return when I least needed it. I had to corral the stranded Cirque d'Europa performers into some semblance of order and give them their room assignments. The generous people of Mossy Creek and its outskirts were offering rooms in their mountain homes.

Like Blanche Du Bois, I was grateful for the kindness of strangers, but that's where the likeness between me and Blanche ended. Raised in the Virginia tidewater, I was Southern by birth, but had no belle-like qualities. A tomboy at heart, I'd excelled at gymnastics and disappointed my parents by joining the circus after college. They could at least brag it was a European circus. “Like Cirque du Soleil , only smaller,” Mom liked to say.

I had been the only American acrobat in the troupe. Now, after being sidelined with recurring vertigo, I was the owner's executive assistant and chief babysitter to thirty-five adults who were more demanding than a preschool full of whining three-year-olds. I might be sidelined by my illness, but I wasn't giving up the big top. That disappointed my father, who'd hoped I'd return home to find a “decent job that utilized my degree.” For some reason, using my B.A. in Romance Languages in the circus didn't count.

“Miss James, you are all right?” Otto, the German bus driver, who was shaped like a tank, expanded my one-syllable last name into two. Jay-mess . It was bad enough that I had an odd first name for a woman – Quinn – without Otto turning my surname into, well, a mess. A Jay-mess.

“Fine, thanks,” I said, tucking my clipboard under my arm. “I just need to get my bearings.”

Only four steps separated me from the luggage bay, where Otto was unloading the performers' suitcases and duffel bags. Like a ship with a broken rudder, I listed over to the bay and steadied myself on the lip of the door.

The phone in my pocket buzzed. Even from halfway around the world, Mr. Polaski, owner of Cirque d'Europa , had the uncanny ability to call me at the worst possible moments. I knew it was him as certainly as I knew that it wasn't a good idea to tell the Bulgarian jugglers that the town of Mossy Creek had a pub. Our worried owner had called once already, not fifteen minutes ago. Leaning against the bus for support, I let go of the door, quickly reaching up to turn on my cellphone's earpiece.

“Hello.” I spoke loudly to compensate for the conversations in at least three different languages going on within my earshot. I heard yelling and darted a gaze toward the sound. A local Chihuahua , shivering in the winter chill, lifted his tiny, shivering but determined tan leg on a mime's make-up kit. The mime feigned a shriek. It takes a lot to get a mime to mime a noise like that.

Mr. Polaski fired off his questions in a barrage not unlike gunfire. Why hadn't I called him back with the estimate on the cost of the bus repair? Had I gotten all the performers accommodations in Mossy Creek? Had I canceled our reservations for the night at the Dollywood theme park, up in Tennessee ? As enamored as he was of Dolly Parton's assets and hometown, he didn't want the Best Western where we'd planned on staying to charge us for rooms we weren't using.

He stopped to take a breath, so I seized the opportunity to reassure him before he could reload. “Relax. I've got everything under control. I called the hotel and cancelled. A young man from a place called ‘Peavey's' is waiting to tow the bus to his garage.”

I didn't tell him the young man, Jason Cecil, was still in high school and only worked part-time as a mechanic. “We're unloading the luggage in the Mossy Creek Mount Gilead Methodist Church parking lot, thanks to Reverend Phillips. I was getting ready to read off the room assignments when you called.”

Crossing my fingers would have been a good idea for luck that everything would go smoothly, but I was using them to keep the rest of me from falling to the hard blacktop shifting in front of me. Long shadows fingered the ground. It would be dark in an hour or so. I gazed upward at a horizon of darkening blue mountains. Were there wolves around here? Hillbillies? Albino banjo pickers with no teeth?

The dead, pretty much have to take whatever we want to do to them “lying down,” so to speak. But can you use the dead, I wondered, to make the living happy?

I hadn’t ever contemplated that question until recently, and why would I? Why would anyone other than a physician, mortician, or anatomy instructor?

Guess I’d better begin at the beginning.

# # #

It was the first cold, crisp day of fall when I walked through the back door of my house and encountered my mother sitting at the kitchen table. She raised her gray head, dabbed her teary eyes with some tissue, and sighed.

I glanced out the window at the yellow leaves, which earlier in the week my wife had informed me were actually a burnished gold. The sky was pretty blue. It was the kind of day that made most people happy—but not my mother.

“Hi, Mom,” I said with forced joviality and tossed my keys onto the desk.

Rather than answer in kind, she blinked at me, then her small face crumpled like the tissue in her plump hand and she started boo-hooing in earnest.

From the hunger-inducing smell of mozzarella, beef, and garlic, I suspected my wife Hannah was baking lasagna, which didn’t usually make my mother cry. It often did, however, prompt Mom to tell my wife how our family had never eaten Italian food for supper.

Maybe Hannah had borrowed one of Mom’s dishes again. All hell broke loose several months ago when Hannah pulled out the electric frying pan with the intent of using it to make pork chops. You’d have thought my wife had committed murder the way my mother had carried on.

Food cooking in the oven was only adding to my confusion. School was in session. Why was my wife home before sundown and preparing a hot meal? Had someone died?

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

“Why did you let me leave your father in Augusta?”

Mom’s genteel Piedmont accent often lulled people into thinking she hadn’t truly meant whatever hurtful thing she’d said, but I wasn’t most people. I heard the veiled accusation—his being in Augusta was somehow my fault.

“Maybe because he’s been dead for six years,” I said. “I don’t think he minds.”

“Well, I don’t want him there anymore. I can’t drive down to see him without taking the whole day. Besides, I don’t want to be in Augusta when I die. I want to be in Rutledge.”

“Your plot happens to be in Augusta, Mother. In fact, you’ve got seven of them.”

“Can’t we move him?”

If I wasn’t dreaming, Mom wanted me to move my father, a man who never wanted to be buried, to their homeplace, Rutledge, a town he hated.

I can guarantee losing a hairdresser is one of the worst things that can happen to a woman, worse even than hot flashes. I know this for a fact. I've lost several to retirement, one to a divorce, and two to arthritis. But I hadn't ever lost one to the cemetery until last week.

And if you don't think that's bad, then maybe you can tell me how the H—E—double—L a town full of old women is supposed to get their hair done for a funeral when the only hairdresser in town who knows how to fix hair right is the one they're going to see buried.

That's what I was trying to figure out last week at breakfast right after Geneva called to inform me of the blow fate had dealt to the old women of Mayburn.

The smell of sausage and biscuits hung in the air as I took my first bite. I nearly choked when my phone rang. I checked the clock on the wall, then my wristwatch with the big numbers my grandson gave me because my eyesight's so poor these days. It wasn't but ten after eight.

“I'm coming, I'm coming,” I said to the phone, annoyed because everyone knows there's nothing worse than a cold biscuit. I went to the bedroom off my kitchen. That was where my cordless phone was sleeping in its cradle.

“Hello?” I said, hoping it wasn't one of those salespeople. My grandson put me on the national “don't call me” list, so it should be someone I knew.

“Lucille, it's Geneva . I've got terrible news.” My across-the-street neighbor's voice crackled over the phone. For Geneva, terrible news could be weevils in her cold cereal, so I didn't get all excited.

I walked over to the front room and peeked out my dusty Venetian blinds. Geneva was standing by her picture window and looking at my house. She had every light in that building lit, wasting money. Now me, I like to keep my light bill low.

“What kind of terrible news?” I shouted.

“Have you read the obituaries yet?”

“No.”

“Then go do it, right now.”

My head got a little swimmy, so I walked back to the kitchen table and sat down. One thing I don't do is go all to pieces, but I had a head cold today and got a little teary-eyed. I flipped to the page of the Mayburn Times listing all the deaths.

My eyes scanned down, and I saw what had her so upset. Pearl Malcolm was dead.

“I'd like to know who's gonna do our hair for the viewin' and the funeral,” Geneva said. “I ain't going to that hoity-toity place. I hear there's a man there. Calls hisself a stylist.”

I didn't know who was going to fix my hair, either. Then I felt badly for thinking it.

“I don't mean to be ugly, but you shouldn't be worrying about your hair at a time like this, Geneva.” Good thing she didn't have the gift of reading minds.

My name is Pearl Quinlan and I'm a carbo-holic. A fat-aholic, too.

As testament to my addiction, I'd just spent the last five minutes determining how I could sneak a pack of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls out of my sister Spiva's stash at home without her noticing.

“They were on sale at the Sam's Club in Bigelow,” was Spiva's excuse for purchasing a jumbo crate of my all-time favorite snack cake. If caught, lying and blaming my pet ferret, Twinkie, would be my best line of defense. I wondered if Spiva knew ferrets didn't like sweets.

I glanced up at the clock on the wall behind my register at Mossy Creek Books and Whatnots, then checked my wristwatch. Fourteen minutes to closing. I'd best stop thinking about cream filling and start adding my register.

My store had done a pretty brisk business today, despite the cold, since a lot of people visited the town square for the Mt. Gilead Methodist Church January fundraiser. I realize most churches don't conduct fundraisers in the heart of winter. They prefer spring. Creekites, however, like to be different. After all, we are the town with a motto that says, “ain't going nowhere, and don't want to.”

Ever since Doc Champion had me on strict orders to lower my cholesterol, visions of fried pies and brownies danced in my head. For the past three weeks, I'd been making an honest attempt at following Doc's advice. All short-nosed Quinlans end up with high cholesterol, and I was going to be the one who won the battle the hard way—through diet and exercise.

I had announced my resolution to one and all on New Year's Eve. Of course the town gossip columnist, Katie Bell, took note, which has, I hate to admit, kept me on the straight and narrow and off the butter and bacon. I did not want to gain notoriety as one of the resolution failures mentioned in the Bell Ringer column.

I foolishly had believed Katie Bell would be my biggest worry, but my minor announcement caused my cholesterol problem to become the town's crusade and my sister Spiva to turn into a supreme saboteur.

The bell attached to the front door chimed. Relieved that I finally had someone to divert my carb obsession, I looked up from where I stood at the register to find Spiva bearing toward me like a member of the Benevolent Society looking for a donation. She was carrying a Styrofoam plate full of brownies and homemade peanut butter cookies with crosshatches scored across the top. And I had thought the Little Debbie cakes were a diabolical temptation.

I could almost see little red horns sprouting from her ultra-short hairdo. She set the treats on the counter right in front of me.

“Want one?” she asked, her mountain twang lost in breathlessness from her jaunt across the square.