Raising Hell - Shannon West Page 0,1

time visiting with her since moving to Atlanta for college. With my parents now gone, I felt guilty about leaving her all alone. She had a roommate—her sister, my Aunt Rose, who had moved in with her shortly after the two widows had retired from teaching at the local high school. But Rose was nearly the same age as my grandmother.

After my grandmother fell on some icy steps later that month, scaring the hell out of me and bruising, but thankfully not breaking her hip, and after a few failed attempts to get both my gran and my aunt to move to Atlanta, I finally made the decision to move back to Alabama. I quit my job, gave up my condo in the city, and moved to Indian Springs—a place I’d left years ago, vowing never to return. Not because of the town itself—I’d grown up there and it was familiar and still felt like home. It was because of the man who was now sheriff in Creek County, the youngest sheriff ever elected there.

The last time I’d talked to Sheriff Nick Moody had been just before I left to go to Atlanta, ten years earlier. We’d had a bitter argument—our first and last, as it turned out. He had joined the Army and had been about to leave for his basic training. I didn’t know when I’d see him again, and it had occurred to me that I might never see him again, because the war was still going on then in Iraq. I later heard that he did go there directly after basic training and thankfully only served there a couple of months before the troops pulled out in 2011. Still, even in that short amount of time, he’d brought home a Bronze Star for bravery under fire. Ironic, in a way, since he hadn’t had the courage to face what was between us. But then again, I had bitter, complicated feelings about Nick Moody, and I suspected I always would.

He spent four years in the Army and afterward, Nick went to work for the sheriff’s department. I guess he was a sucker for a uniform and a gun.

Just five years after that, he ran for sheriff and won. There hadn’t been much competition against the war hero and favorite son. As for me, I went to Atlanta, finished college there and got a job at a marketing firm in midtown. It was well-paying too, if a little boring. At least it paid well enough that I could afford a one bedroom, one bath condo just off Peachtree Street and still have enough money to go out clubbing with my friends on occasion. Life had been—well, not good, exactly, but not all that bad either.

After my parents’ funeral, I couldn’t get my grandmother off my mind. She needed help, and I decided I would return to Indian Springs after all, because a lot of water had passed under the bridge since I last lived there, and surely enough time had passed that being in the same town as Nick Moody again wouldn’t be a problem. I’d decided to take over my parents’ little bakery and try to turn it around, even though I knew absolutely nothing about baking and had little interest in it, despite having been around my parents all those years. What I did have was a degree in Business and Marketing and a lot of ambition, which I decided I could use to my advantage.

I’d started by changing the name of the shop from We Knead Dough—my father’s dumb idea—to The Donutery. Okay, so maybe equally as dumb, because the apple doesn’t fall from the tree, frankly, but I wanted to emphasize we just mostly did doughnuts and not much else. I started making doughnuts in the mornings.

It was the one pastry I really liked, and I felt I was something of a connoisseur of them, especially considering I was a secret devotee of Krispy Kreme. I tried to limit my enjoyment of them, so I wouldn’t weigh three hundred pounds—seriously, you may as well apply them directly to the hips—but to me they were the pinnacle of southern doughnut art. And I’d so far been lucky about being able to eat pretty much whatever I wanted and never gain weight. Every morning, since I was a teenager, when I weighed myself after my shower, I crossed my fingers and made a wish that I hadn’t gained any weight. And so far, against all odds,