Catch As Cat Can

                "You might be right," Mrs. Murphy agreed."This will get Lottie Pearson s knickers in a twist. She's on the man hunt and BoomBoom ignored her in favor of Mom. She'll have her revenge. Just wait."

                "On whom? Mom or BoomBoom?" Tucker lifted her head.

                "Both, if I know Lottie. Her social ambitions seethe. Being escorted by a handsome man working on Washington's Embassy Row is her idea of perfect. She'd get to meet more important people and she'd look important. She cultivates people, I guess that's how you put it, before she asks them for hundreds of thousands of dollars for the university. She'd like to run this town someday, too. Never happen. Big Mim will live to be one hundred and fifty. Look how old Aunt Tally is. They never the, I swear. But you mark my words, Lottie Pearson is smart and devious. She'll get her revenge."

                "It's so petty!" Pewter exclaimed.

                "Precisely but that's the way people are. They re further and further removed from nature, and they get weird, major weird." Mrs. Murphy watched as Harry walked BoomBoom to the back door in the kitchen.

                "Spring fever." Pewter marched back into the kitchen for more crunchies.

                6

                The work week rolled along without incident. Harry and Miranda sorted mail, light this time of year. Big Mim made pronouncements about how to improve the Dogwood Festival before Saturday's parade. Everyone smiled, said, "You're right," and went about their business.

                Fair, Harry's ex-husband, was just wrapping up foaling and breeding season. Upon hearing that Harry would be accompanying Diego Aybar to the tea party and then the dance, he fumed; but Fair had committed the mistake of thinking he didn't need to ask Harry. He assumed she would be his date if he could shake free of work. Usually a low-key and reasonable man, he slammed the door to her kitchen, upsetting the cats and secretly delighting Harry.

                Miranda glowed for her high-school beau, who would be returning from Hawaii, where he had finally settled his estate, would be her escort for all festivities. She was to pick him up at the airport Friday morning and she figured he'd bounce back from his travails and travel by Saturday, the big day. Tracy Raz, former star athlete of Crozet High, class of 1950, was a tough guy and an interesting one, too.

                Reverend Herbert C. Jones, pastor of the Lutheran church and parade marshal this year, was the most jovial anyone had ever seen him, which was saying something as the good pastor was normally an upbeat fellow.

                Little Mim, as vice-mayor of Crozet, used this opportunity to insist more trash barrels be placed on the parade route. She enamored herself to the merchants in town by having flags made up at her own expense for them to hang over their doorways. The flags, "Crozet" emblazoned across a French-blue background, also had a Inroad track embroidered on the bottom right-hand side. As Crozet was named for Claudius Crozet, former engineering officer the Napoleon's army, she hoped out-of-towners would ask about the tracks. Crozet, after capture in Russia, again rejoined the emperor for Waterloo, managing to escape the Royalists and sail to America. He cut four tunnels into the Blue Ridge Mountains, an engineering feat considered one of the wonders of the nineteenth century. His work-sans dynamite, using only picks, shovels, and axes-stands to this day, as do the roads he built from the Tidewater :o the Shenandoah Valley.

                The town itself never became a glamorous depot but remained quiet stop before one plunged into the mountains themselves. 3rd residents worked hard for a living, but a few enjoyed inherited wealth, Little Mim being one, which is why she paid for the gas herself. She thought if merchants hung the flags out it would create further color for the day, showing pride in the community. Not that residents of the small, unpretentious town lacked pride t rather, in that quiet Virginia way, they didn't speak of it. The surrounding countryside, dotted with apple orchards, drew tourists m all over the world, as did Albemarle County itself, laboring under the ghosts of Jefferson and Monroe, to say nothing of all the movie stars, sports stars, and literary lights who had moved there, enticed by the natural beauty of the place and the University of Virginia. As it was only an hour by air from New York City, some of the richest residents commuted daily in their private jets.

                Crozetians, although part of Albemarle County, more or less ignored Charlottesville, the county seat.

                Little Mim, a Republican, and her father, a Democrat, now ran the town together. He was grooming her as well as pressuring her jump parties. So far, she had resisted.

                The merchants adored her, not just because of the flags. Like her father, she had a natural flair for politics.