The Virgin And The Vagabond. Elizabeth Bevarly

but Stewart Hogan just moved here,” Angie said with a shrug, bringing Kirby’s attention back to the conversation at hand. “He doesn’t realize what a nice girl you are. Give him a few weeks of seeing you in action. Then he’ll leave you alone. Just like all the other guys in Endicott do.”

      Rosemary chuckled. “Yeah, one look at you in your Cadet Scout uniform or your candy-striper outfit ought to cool any ideas he might have about taking liberties with you. And when he finds out you’re president of Future Homemakers of America, he’ll run screaming in the other direction.”

      “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a homemaker,” Kirby stated crisply.

      “I never said there was,” Rosemary pointed out. “But what guy wants to think about starting a family when he’s only seventeen years old?”

      “Don’t worry, Kirby,” Angie interjected. “You’ll find the right guy for husband and father someday. I think it’s great that you’re planning to wait for him.”

      “Yeah, you’re a braver man than me,” Rosemary agreed.

      Kirby smiled, but something deep inside her felt shut up tight. She was confident that the man of her dreams was out there in the world somewhere. She just wondered what it was going to take to bring him to a little nothing-ever-happens-here town like Endicott, Indiana.

      The three girls, like everyone else who called the small town home, had turned out for the traditional Parsec Picnic in the Park, an official event that was part of the Welcome Back, Bob Comet Festival. Comet Bob actually had a much more formal, much more comet-appropriate name, but because everyone outside the scientific community was pretty much incapable of pronouncing the word Bobrzynyckolonycki unless they were three sheets to the wind, the name had been shortened some time ago to simply Bob.

      And because Bob was such a habitual visitor to the skies directly above Endicott, the small southern Indiana town had come to claim him as their own. Despite the fact that it was unheard of for a comet to be so down-to-the-minute regular—speaking both in terms of time and of longitude and latitude—Comet Bob was exactly and unscientifically that. Every fifteen years, like clockwork, the comet returned to the earth during the month of September. And when it did, it always made its closest pass to the planet right above Endicott.

      Hence the Comet Festival, which had been occurring in town every fifteenth September since the end of the nineteenth century. For whatever reason, Bob behaved with a regularity and predictability that had puzzled the scientific community since the comet’s discovery nearly two hundred years ago. Furthermore, because of Bob’s mysterious behavior, the comet had become something of a mythical being, in and of itself.

      And as was the case with mythical beings, much folklore had grown up around Bob as a result. A lot of people in town said the comet’s return to the planet made for a host of strange behaviors in Endicott. Put simply, people acted funny whenever Bob came around. Otherwise normal, functional folks would suddenly become...well, abnormal and dysfunctional. Elderly matrons donned leather miniskirts. Grunge teenagers became big fans of Wayne Newton. Husbands offered to do the cooking. Very odd behavior all around. And, too often for it to be ignored, people who would normally dismiss each other without a glance, fell utterly and irrevocably in love.

      And then, of course, for those who liked their folklore to be magical, there was the myth of the wishes.

      It was widely believed by the Endicotians that people who were born in town during the year of the comet had a distinct advantage over those who were not. It was said that if a native Endicotian’s birth occurred in a year of Bob’s appearance, and if that person made a wish during Bob’s next visit, while the comet was passing directly overhead, then that person’s wish would come true when Bob came around again.

      Kirby, Rosemary and Angie had all been born the year Bob had made his last visit. And two nights before, as the girls had lain in the soft, green grass of Angie’s backyard, each had sent a wish skyward while the comet was making its closest pass to the planet.

      Angie, Kirby recalled with a smile, had wished for something exciting to happen in the small town. It was a fitting wish for someone who exaggerated everything and saw spectacles where there were none, simply to spice up an otherwise mundane, mediocre, midwestern life. Kirby, however, would be satisfied if Endicott never changed. She liked the slow pace and predictability. It was the perfect place to settle down and raise a family.

      Rosemary, she recalled further, her smile broadening, had wished that, someday, her thirteen-year-old lab partner, a pizza-faced little twerp named Willis Random, would get what was coming to him. Another appropriate wish, Kirby thought, seeing as how Willis and Rosemary were generally at each other’s throats. But Kirby kind of liked Willis, even if he did have an IQ the size of the Milky Way and didn’t let anyone ever forget it. There was something decent and lovable about him, something that would make him a good husband and father someday.

      Kirby had made a wish that night, too, she reminisced as her smile grew dreamy. A wish she had made often for years. She’d asked Bob for true love, the kind that outlasted eternity. She wanted someday to find a man who would love her forever, a man she would love in return with all her heart. A man who would build a home with her, start a family with her, share her dreams and desires for all time. A forever-after kind of love. That was what Kirby had wished for.

      And because she knew Bob had granted wishes before, and because hers was so very noble, Kirby was certain the comet would see fit to answer her prayers. Bob was constant, after all. Predictable. Dependable. Just like the man she hoped to find for herself someday.

      Bob would grant her wish by the time he made his next approach to the planet—she was sure of it. By her thirtieth birthday, Kirby would be settled down, married with children and happier than she had ever imagined she could be. Of that she was completely confident. Because Bob, she knew, had never proved himself wrong.

      Bob always made wishes come true.

      One

      Ah, September.

      The blue skies and languid days. The stretches of sunny summer weather that made a person feel as if he were cheating the universe somehow by enjoying them. The subtle fusing of one season to another, as days shortened and nights grew longer almost seamlessly. The soft splashes of early-autumn color dashing the leaves of green. The quiet shift of the wind from warm to cool and back again as it whispered over one’s face.

      The golden, burnished glow on the skin of naked sunbathers.

      James Nash trained lus telescope not on a heavenly body up in the sky, but on one that was nestled on a chaise longue. A chaise longue in a backyard he estimated was a bttle over a mile away from the twelfth-story hotel suite where he’d set up his makeshift observatory. Providence had surprised him with the magnificent view as he’d been surveying his temporary surroundings, and now he was making the best of it.

      He’d been scoping out the area, so to speak, trying to get a feel—from a safe distance, naturally—for Endicott, Indiana, the small town that would be his home for the next few weeks. But now he found himself wanting to get a feel of something else entirely. And from considerably more close up.

      Originally, the only reason he had come to this dinky little backwater town was to observe a comet, an opportunity he’d been awaiting since he was a little boy. Simply put, James loved comets. He was fascinated by their travels, by their legends, by their mystique. Comets never stopped moving. Never slowed down. Vagabonds, that’s what they were. And he could really relate to that.

      In fact, there was only one thing that James loved more than comets, and that was the feminine form. So he smiled as he shamelessly studied the naked woman who was enjoying the sunny afternoon the way God had intended. And he thanked his lucky stars that he had come by his massive fortune the old-fashioned way—by inheriting it—and not because he had a lot of money invested in useless things like privacy fences such as the one surrounding this particular feminine form’s backyard.

      She was a sight beyond celestial beauty, with a body whose perfection