How It All Goes Down
The book opens in Tupelo Landing, a small town with less than two hundred residents. The main character, Mo, wakes up Dale, her best friend, and the two of them head on over to the café that Mo's guardians—Miss Lana and the Colonel—own.
Miss Lana and the Colonel are not Mo's real parents. The Colonel found Mo floating on a raft during a terrible hurricane when she was just a newborn, shortly after he'd crashed his car and lost his memory. Nowadays, Mo constantly writes letters and puts them into bottles to float down the creek in hopes of finding her "upstream mother," which is what she calls her real mother.
While Dale and Mo are running the café, a detective from out of town named Detective Starr stops by and says that he's investigating a murder. The Colonel returns and takes over the café because Miss Lana is still out of town visiting her cousin, giving Mo and Dale permission to go to the races with Dale's older brother Lavender that night.
Before they go to the races, though, Dale decides to return a boat he's stolen from their mean neighbor Mr. Jesse for a reward. He gets ten dollars and gives half of it to Mo when they get to the racetrack to watch Lavender, Dale's dreamy older brother, race.
Things go awry when Lavender crashes in the race and has to be rushed home since he might have a concussion. While Mo is at Miss Rose's house (she's Dale and Lavender's mom), the Colonel calls and says that he's coming to pick Mo up right away: Mr. Jesse has been murdered. Dun dun dun…
Mo goes home, but Dale sneaks into her house in the middle of the night. He's all freaked out because he stole Mr. Jesse's boat and he's afraid that he'll be a suspect. Things only get darker when they look outside the window and see a strange man looking back at them. Gulp. Both Mo and Dale start screaming until Miss Lana shows up and tells them that they need to calm down. It seems she has come home but the Colonel has now left.
Mo goes to check out the crime scene the next day, and when she does, she finds the murder weapon—a bloody boat oar. Dale comes clean to Detective Starr and says that he was the last person to see Mr. Jesse. The detective knows that he's not the killer, but he still cuffs Dale and drives him away in his patrol car, hoping that the real killer will get sloppy if he believes they already have a suspect.
Dale is later released and becomes a town celebrity. He goes to Mr. Jesse's funeral and tells Mo that this unfamiliar man has been following him around—he thinks that it's his undercover police bodyguard. At the funeral, Detective Starr learns that Mr. Jesse had been giving $100 to the church every week for the past eleven years.
Mo and Dale come up with the idea to raise money for Lavender after his car crash by selling ad space on his car at the Mimosa Festival. Good thinking, right? But the good times don't last long…
After the festival, Mo goes home to find her entire house ransacked and Miss Lana missing. There's a note on the table from the murderer stating that he has Miss Lana and won't give her back until he gets what he wants. Oh no… Detective Starr has them look through some mugshots to see if they recognize anyone, and Dale points out the man that he thought was his undercover bodyguard. Apparently he's actually a bank robber named Robert Slate. Miss Rose takes Mo back to their house to keep her safe while the police search for Miss Lana and the Colonel.
Robert Slate calls Miss Rose's house several times demanding a ransom of a half a million dollars for Miss Lana and the Colonel, but the police can never track the call in time. The Colonel calls at one point and says that he's escaped and that Mo shouldn't trust anyone, so she lies to Deputy Marla when she asks who called.
Mo and Dale go back to the house to find a packet of papers that the Colonel told her to look for. When they're there, Deputy Marla comes in and points a gun at them—turns out she's in cahoots with Robert Slate. Say it ain't so. The kids manage to knock her out and tie her up before running back to Miss Rose's house as a hurricane brews.
When they get there, Mr. Macon (Dale's abusive father whom Miss Rose is divorcing) breaks in and hits Miss Rose. He admits to helping Robert Slate with supplies, and Dale points a gun at him and threatens to shoot. The Colonel shows up just in time to help them tie Mr. Macon up. Phew.
The Colonel then goes with Mo and Dale to Mr. Jesse's house, where they find Robert Slate pulling up the floorboards to look for money. Dale, Mo, and the Colonel subdue him, and shortly thereafter Miss Lana shows up with Detective Starr. She escaped and went to get help. The Colonel remembers something about his life from before he lost his memory: He used to be Robert Slate's lawyer. No wonder the Colonel hates lawyers so much—he blames himself for getting someone as evil as Slate off easy.
At the end of the story, all of the bad guys are serving time and Miss Lana reopens the café to much fanfare. She explains to the townspeople that she and the Colonel fell in love twelve years ago when he was a lawyer, but that he lost his memory after getting Robert Slate a light sentence (which he always regretted). Mo finds one of her bottles floating in the creek with her note to her upstream mother, and realizes that she doesn't really care if she gets an answer—she has all the family she needs right here.