A/N: Chapters have been renumbered to include Chapter 60 in Part One. Therefore, Part Two Chapter One now begins at Chapter 61 in the chapter listing.
Part Two - Chapter Two (62):
Hazzard, Georgia – November 1997
Rosco had since given up making the rounds to the stores in town that sold L.A. based gossip magazines, although there were only two, The Busy Bee and Rhubottom's Store.
On Day One of his 'assignment,' back on November 6th, Rosco nearly choked on his kolache when he saw the truck that delivers the morning papers drive past the bakery window. Scrambling to shove the rest of the roll into his mouth and say goodbye to Sarah Jane at the same time, he grabbed his jacket from the hat tree and sped out the door.
Miz Tisdale, still manning the Post Office on the high side of of eighty nine, had caught him purloining the gossip rags that very first day, the minute after Hershel Gibbins had put them on the shelf outside Rhubottom's, and had given him a horrendously stern talking-to about freedom of the press. Bashing him repeatedly with her motorcycle helmet, she made him drop the bundle of papers and chased him away from the front of the store.
When Rosco went back, after he knew the coast was clear of course, he found nothing on the shelves where they were usually displayed and that neither the general store nor the café had received their usual delivery. However, both had found an envelope full of change in their place, suspiciously amounting to exactly the retail price of their usual orders. Rosco had left Rhubottom's scratching his head and muttering to himself. 'Daisy Duke's gonna' kill me, but first she's gonna' chop me up like raw liver. There's a flaw in the slaw and I'm gonna' find it."
Twenty minutes later, he and Flash III were responding to a report of fire behind the Post Office. When he ran into the alley, Rosco found Emma Tisdale standing on a milk crate poking at something inside a 30-gallon oil drum, smoke billowing out of it, a 5-gallon bucket at her feet.
"Miz Tisdale, now you can't be burnin' nothin' back here. It's a fire hazard, ya' hear. Now, you just let me help you put this out," he said, and tried to reach for the bucket of water.
With Emma's short little arms fighting him off, Rosco held her carefully out of the way with one hand and peered down into the drum only to find all the papers he had been trying to commandeer turning to ash in the bottom. Before he could pull his head up out of the drum, she dumped the bucket of water on his head. Rosco would go to his grave wondering how the little pixie had been able to heave that bucket so fast.
Dripping wet, he stood up, wiping the water, and the consternation, off his face. He looked a little like Curly Joe.
"Miz Tisdale! Shame, shame! I'm an officer of the law..."
"Well, that's debatable. But for your information, Sheriff, I bought these papers and I can do whatever I want with em,'" she said and threatened him with the empty bucket. "Why'd you want with them papers anyway, Rosco?"
"Welllll...Hey, I don't have to explain nothin' ta' you. I'm the Sheriff and boss of this here county see, and you..."
She drew herself up to her maximum height of 4' 11" and planted her hands on her hips. "An' I'm a duly appointed official representative of the U.S. Gov'ment. So you better spill them beans b'fore I make 'em rattle around in your empty head." She raised the now empty bucket again, hardened her gaze, and gnarled her lips together menacingly.
Prior experience with Miz Tisdale had made Rosco as cautious as a snake doctor around a starving bullfrog. He recoiled and braced for another assault.
"Could it be," she asked, her eyes still narrowed to little tiny slits, "there's somethin' in them papers you don't want nobody in Hazzard ta' see? Somethin' about a certain former deputy?"
She held up a copy of one of the most popular, not to mention the most gossip mongering, scandal sheets with the headline THE DETECTIVE AND THE HOOKER in large red letters that blotted out the faces of a man with brown hair and a woman whose hair was auburn.
"Miz Tisdale! Why I'm surprised at you! You...You itty bitty little devil." Then he put on his serious face and went limp. "You know it ain't none of it true, don't ya'? Not none of it, not no how."
"Course I know that, you birdbrained nincompoop. But I got a Post Office to run, so I can't be runnin' around all the time b'fore I open the P.O. tryin' to squelch barefaced lies. So next time, you mind you pay for them papers, you hear me Rosco Purvis Coltrane. Just 'cause you're sheriff doesn't mean I can't take a switch to your scrawny bottom, just like I done to his once or twice when he was growin' up."
"Yes, Ma'am," Rosco said, and smiled. Still a little cautious of a possible counterattack, he leaned down, kissed her on the top of her head and whispered, "God bless ya,' Miz Emma. You're a real peach. And that's a fact."
Daisy's initial problem had been how to tell Aunt Judy and Uncle Frank what they needed to know without alarming them or giving away anything that would put Enos, his new family, Kate, or anyone in Hazzard in danger, including them. The Strate farm was the first visit she made after receiving the letter that Monday afternoon; before Rosco started spreading the news around town. Thanks to Alvin Dobbins, the HazzardNet had already been set to buzzing about the package from Enos that had arrived for Daisy the day before.
When she pulled up to the Strate house on her Harley, she prepared herself for the cold reception she was sure to get when she knocked on the door. Looking around, she realized how long it had been since she had stood on the porch of the house that had built Enos Strate.
Uncle Frank had taken good care of the farm. He hadn't squandered the money Enos had been sending them all those years that he was in Los Angeles. The fences were in good condition, the picket fence around the three-bedroom single story house was freshly painted and cured wood had been piled neatly in the wood rack, ready for winter.
When she turned around to knock on the screen door, Frank, looking so much like an older version of his brother, Otis, and of Enos for that matter, was already holding it open for her.
"Com'on in, Daisy. We been expectin' you."
Even though the welcome seemed to be less frigid than she had anticipated, she still felt out of place.
"Did Enos tell you I would be coming by?"
"No'um. I reckon we're the last two people in Hazzard he'd be callin' about you" Frank said, putting his hands in the pockets of his blue overalls.
Straight laced Aunt Judy had never approved of Enos's affections being settled on her. Judy had raised his ire once by, in the heat of an angry exchange, calling Daisy a trollop. Daisy had long ago forgiven her, but the incident had prompted Enos, then twenty six, to move out of the farm house and into a room at the boarding house in town. That he had asked them to attend the wedding (the one that never happened) was a testament for his capacity for forgiveness. But even though the property was still in his name and he never asked Frank and Judy to leave, he never went back there to live.
"Now, Uncle Frank," she dared address him, "that simply isn't true..."
"Miss Mary Bowling was by yesterday evenin' ta' pick up summa' my pickled scuppernongs," Judy said. Until now, she had been sitting quietly on the same neatly upholstered sofa with the little floral roses that had been in the house since before Enos's father died.
"We got to talkin' about how they're Nephew's favorite snack," Frank said, "and she said how she was talkin' to Elviry Rose over ta' the feed store when Alvin Dobbins come ta' daliver her a package from her sister Amy Louise. An' we just put two 'n two together when we saw you ridin' up the road. Said the Sheriff was there when the package 'rived."
"You got sometin' ta' tell us, child?" Judy asked.
"Yes, Ma'am," Daisy said, with an appreciation of the fact that Aunt Judy's worrisome half-smile seemed to be genuine, and maybe all she could hope for.
Daisy pulled a photo out of the envelope she'd had tucked in her leather Duke University jacket and sat down on the sofa.
"He wanted me to tell you before you found out from somebody else," she said, handing Aunt Judy a photo of Enos in a Sunday suit with his arm around the waist of the woman standing next to him in front of a church altar. The woman wore a tailored coral wedding outfit and held a small nosegay of flowers in her left hand. They were both wearing wide gold wedding rings.
"Her name is," she tried her best to pronounce it correctly, "Kyung-soon. But Enos calls her Soonie. She was born in Korea. South Korea that is, not North Korea. They were married last Thursday afternoon."
Daisy had tried her best to explain to Aunt Judy that marrying Soonie wasn't the most insane thing her nephew had ever done and that he had not been seduced by the wicked ways of a big city floozy. Even Uncle Frank had a hard time with the fact that this Soonie woman was someone they had never even heard of until today. Why should they just accept it? She hadn't been able to accept it either - at first.
"I think they are very much in love."
How could she tell them she knew that to be true because she had met Enos's wife without telling them that she had been to Los Angeles? It was when she told them he had quit the LAPD and would be living in South Korea for the foreseeable future that the peas started sliding off the plate.
A/N: The 'house that built Enos Strate' is a nod to Miranda Lambert's song, The House That Built Me.
