“Is that the one?” I’ll never forget that question and how it messed up one of the best getaways ever.
This past Sunday, my husband, a three-term Magnolia alderman, left to attend the annual Mississippi Municipal League convention on the Gulf Coast. My recent shoulder surgery nixed all coastal fun for his spouse.
The board stayed at the Beau Rivage, the same high-end Biloxi resort where we stayed 10 years ago when Joe was first elected to office. Two weeks after the election and both just out of school for summer, we found ourselves on one of the nicest working vacations ever.
Adding to the excitement, our friend Lonnie Cox had also been elected, so his wife Brenda and I could hang out while our husbands attended classes.
On Sunday night, the engineering firm Neel-Schaffer hosted an elegant event for its patrons at the spanking new, glassy ultra-modern Maritime Museum, the perfect venue for an upscale meet-and-greet. With a gentle Gulf breeze and thousands of twinkly lights, Pike County seemed a thousand miles away.
While Joe piled boiled shrimp as big as lobster tails onto his plate, my friend Keith Lott, an employee of Neel-Schaffer, introduced me to Hibbett Neel, the firm’s president, CEO and co-founder.
When Mr. Neel, dressed like a corporate attorney on “Suits,” discovered I taught English literature, he ushered me to a deck table and relayed how in the mid-1920s, his aunt Frances Neel Cheney, a professor of library science at Vanderbilt, often hosted a group of budding university poets in her home down the street from his.
Full of youth and a spirit of rebellious adventure, they called themselves The Fugitives, led by now-famous poet John Crowe Ransom and including Robert Penn Warren, America’s first poet laureate.
Sensing my unbridled enthusiasm, Mr. Neel grabbed a cocktail napkin, pressed his company ink pen down and wrote “The Fugitives,” listing four.
When Joe finally found me, he asked in jest, “So, who’s your new boyfriend?” Flushed with excitement, I waved that napkin in Joe’s face, that he was THE Mr. Neel of Neel-Schaffer, but that wasn’t the impressive part.
When Joe found out “The Fugitives” were a bunch of poets, he quickly lost interest. But he admitted he got a tad jealous as I clung to that napkin like Tom Jones’ rabid female fans cherished those sweaty handkerchiefs he tossed into the audience.
I awakened the next morning pumped with a sense of adventure, trekking halfway across the Ocean Springs bridge and then returning to meander around the massive air-conditioned fresh-flower bedecked resort. The Beau Rivage was Oz. Pike County now seemed 2,000 miles away.
I reached the top of the second floor stairs when a man about my age in a baseball cap pointed to me and quietly asked another man, shoulder-to-shoulder, “Is that the one?”
I am now jolted into some horror movie.
At first I seek some logical explanation, but I’m the only one around. Both keep glancing, talking in hushed tones, heads up and down. I hurry to an elevator, making sure I lose myself in a crowded one.
Panicking over my weird encounter, I dash to my room and phone Brenda. We both recall the frequent signs on Interstate 10 as we approached the Coast: “Warning. Human Trafficking Is Real.” Under them, hotline phone numbers.
I try to dismiss the bizarre as coincidence, but my inner radar tells me otherwise. Brenda’s radar blows sirens.
I’m still antsy as we meet for lunch in the Beau Rivage’s buffet line. Out of nowhere, he appears.
“Brenda, that’s him. That’s the man.”
There he is, in line, three people behind us. Looking out into the lobby, I spot the other man, loitering. Within two minutes, he has made his way next to us: “So. what brings you ladies here? Vacation?”
Brenda, always bold of speech, pops back, “We’re here with our husbands for the MML convention and will be joining them shortly.” I don’t remember talking. It’s what happens next that cements my fear.
Pulling a cell phone out his pocket, he holds it up in the air and nudges close to me, asking Brenda, “Will you please take a picture of us, her and me?”
I almost faint as Brenda puts away all pretense of civility: “No, that’s crazy. Why would you want a picture of her? You need to leave, or I’m calling security.” He disappears as we try to make sense of what just happened.
We couldn’t. My room at the Beau Rivage became my prison cell until Joe got back. Even Joe, with nerves of steel, was stunned.
I have seen enough “Taken” movies and “Law and Order: SVU” episodes to imagine my fate. Why would anyone want to kidnap a 50-year-old woman? When was I targeted? On my solo walk? How was it supposed to go down? Where would I have been sent? And no one would ever know what happened to me.
Thankfully, I was only shaken, not taken. That night, Pike County seemed a million miles away, and all I wanted was to be there.
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JANELLYN B. CORNACCHIONE, a lifetime resident of Pike County, recently concluded a 40-year career in three Pike County schools. For information about The Fugitives, search online for Brainard Bartwell Cheney, Frances Neel Cheney Papers and The Fugitives (poets).
