Chapter One

Rose Wilson turned away from the wind that whistled across Loch Awe in a futile attempt to keep her hair from being blown into a tangled knot.

Something nipped at her ankle and she reached down to swat it away. Pesky midgies.

Ouch! Her hand scratched against the thorny stem of a thistle. One more thing. As if the sticky wicket she’d gotten herself into hadn’t already worked her into enough of a dither. She glanced up at the lofty spires of St. Conan’s Kirk. If she were at all religious, she might think God was trying to tell her something.

Where could he be? It had been nigh on three years since she’d stood waiting, and waiting, and waiting at Robert’s and her favorite restaurant. When he never showed up, she’d been angry – thought he’d gotten too busy at work, forgotten she was waiting, or, worse yet, remembered and blown her off.

How could she have known he was dead?

Here she was again. So it was a kirk and not a restaurant. A man she didn’t know all that well instead of her husband. The emotions felt the same. She was peeved. So peeved she could almost forget what it was like to feel abandoned, to hurt so badly she could barely keep her head about her.

She took a deep breath and tried to relax. Would she ever get over being scared that something horrible had happened every time someone was a wee bit tardy?

She peeked through the hedge and tried to see round the bend that led to the village. What were the odds that two men she was supposed to meet would die en route to their rendezvous point? She paced up and down the path that led to the kirk, squelching her nervous energy only long enough to look at a bee dipping into a rhody that was a lovely shade of lavender. And then, she was back at it, scanning the roadside for Digby’s car, checking the time on her mobile every few seconds, and imagining the worst.

She’d been waiting for an hour – plenty long enough for Digby to get there even if he’d been temporarily detained at work, gotten a speeding ticket, or stopped by the mini-mart to buy her flowers. Besides, the man had a mobile.

She clicked hers open and pressed the green button twice. Still no answer.

Where could he be? And why now? Was it because she’d been too intimate with him? Not intimate enough?

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

She blinked and looked in the direction of the voice, but the sun was in her eyes, and all she could see was a soft sheen of light backlighting the silhouette of a very tall man. Too tall to be Digby. She raised her hand to her eyes to shade the light but the sun was still blinding, clinging to his head like a halo.

“Forgive me,” the man said, just as she saw his collar, the white square gleaming brightly between the black, and thought, shouldn’t it be me saying that?

“Sorry to intrude,” he continued. “I couldn’t help noticing that you seem to be looking for someone.”

So much for her and Dig having the place to themselves. Of course, as of this moment, there wasn’t a “them” anyway, so it mattered little if they had privacy. Besides, she had been going to tell him that they couldn’t do it again, that it was too soon, that what had happened shouldn’t have. Not yet. That didn’t mean she didn’t want to be alone with him, to do something. She probably did, eventually. Just not so much, or quite so fast.

“I’m waiting for a friend,” she said.

“You’ve still plenty of time,” he said. “Worship doesn’t begin for another half hour.”

The sun wasn’t in his eyes, but behind him, illuminating her face. She knew, even without being able to see his eyes, that he could read hers perfectly.

“I didn’t realize…”

“We’ve a small but active congregation,” the man said, extending his hand. “Ian MacCraig. St. Conan’s pastor.” He nodded at a stone cottage with windows rimmed in tiny stones. It was mostly overgrown with creepers. She had assumed it was unoccupied.

She gave her hand, took his, and was surprised by his warmth. “Rose Wilson.” Her hands had been perpetually cold ever since Robert had died. The only reason she’d come to meet Digby in the first place was to get warm. But holding hands with Digby didn’t even compare to the heat this man radiated.

“I’m not from Lochawe. Just up for the day from Glasgow.”

She turned just enough to get the sun out of her eyes and looked up into his face. And started to melt. Warm times ten. Honest, intelligent eyes, longish hair the color of butterscotch. Wide shoulders perfect for shielding a companion. A genuine, concerned smile tinged with the slightest whisper of what? Guilt? Her mind flipped back a page. Forgive him for what? For startling her? For intruding on her reverie? For being concerned enough to acknowledge her presence? To see if she was in need of someone to talk to?

He had such a beautiful aura about him. So serene. So utterly masculine. She felt like she was in a dream, or starring in a film. She resisted the urge to pinch herself. The vicars she knew were old and gray – most, gone completely bald.  This one – Ian, wasn’t it? – didn’t fit any of the pastoral images she held in her mind.

Pastor Ian’s eyes blinked wide open a split second before she felt a movement to her left. A stream of men streaked towards them, guns drawn. She could see them out of the corner of her eye. What the devil was going on?

In the moment it took to comprehend that they were slowly being surrounded by armed constables, her mind, ever agile, jumped to the conclusion that Ian must be a convict, recently escaped. Oh – my – God. No doubt “Ian” had killed the real vicar while he slept. It would have been a simple matter from there to don the poor gent’s clothes. He was probably planning to take her as a hostage so he could escape across the border to England, make his exit on a ferry, and disappear on the mainland. It was the only explanation she could fathom.

That was when she realized he was still holding her hand, smiling at her with all the sincerity in the world. The man certainly didn’t look like a convict. Perhaps he’d come to St. Conan’s for sanctuary.

“Step away from the pastor.” A voice boomed through a megaphone.

She looked at Ian and dropped his hand, fully expecting the constables to rush him once she’d safely backed away.

Instead, two strong arms wrenched her from behind, pulled her hands behind her back and slapped on a set of cuffs.

“What on earth?” she said, nearly toppling over from the shock of her capture.

Ian looked even more apologetic that he had before, with a little relief mixed in. Forgive him for what? For this? Had he called the police on her?

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” she cried. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but there must be some mistake. I’m Rosalie Wilson from Glasgow,” she tried to explain when she wasn’t struggling to stay on her feet, bucking this way and that as they pulled her over the rough terrain.

“She had nothing to do with the actual theft,” the vicar was saying, following close at her side. “She was already gone when her man stole the artifacts.”

Her man? Digby? What were they talking about? Digby wouldn’t…

“You said she was on the tape,” the constable said.

“The earlier part, when they were…” the vicar stammered.

The man holding her cuffs snickered.

Oh, God. They couldn’t have a tape of her and Digby. Could they?

“Do you want us to call you a barrister?”

“No,” she said, sure of that at least. If Robert’s solicitors ever found out, or his sons, or the press…

Oh, God. How mortifying! How could she have? She’d risked Robert’s good name, his reputation, and his millions, and for what? To feel a man’s touch for a mere five minutes?

A man who appeared to be the ring leader of the hooligans who were herding her towards the car leaned against the vehicle with an amused expression on his face, and looked at her… her…  her breasts.

If she’d been blessed with the opportunity to get her hands on Digby at that moment, they’d have had reason to arrest her.

The little weasel! She certainly hadn’t meant to get intimate with him when she did, but not because she hadn’t trusted him. My God. She’d taken up with a common thief, a con man, a criminal.

And the tape. How humiliating! Never in a million years had she ever dreamed… to have had her lowest moment recorded…  and seen by who knew how many people.

The vicar rushed alongside her as the constable’s men whisked her to the car, with – oh, God – bars on the back windows. “Is there a family member, a friend you’d like me to call?”

She felt her cheeks burning just imagining what the vicar must think of her. “There’s no one.” Which was a shame. She could certainly have used a hug and a little moral support about then. But she could hardly ring up her mum, or Kelly and Kevin, and tell them she’d been arrested, or that her new boyfriend had turned out to be a criminal, or that she’d been caught on some sort of tape, probably half-naked, her legs spread wide like some common hussy.

“Will you come?” She turned to the vicar and watched as his cheeks flushed even redder.

“I’ll get my auto and follow you to the station.”

The constable shoved her shoulder into the car and nearly shut her foot in the door in his hurry to lock her in the cramped back seat.

“Good thinking, assuming you’re planning to make a confession,” he sneered.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” she said, knowing she had. But not what they thought. She hadn’t stolen a thing. What she had done was to throw her whole life down the crapper.

* * *

“I’ve only known Digby for a fortnight or two,” she said for the twentieth time. “We met on the internet. I was widowed almost three years ago, and I felt like I was… was…” She struggled to go on. “I felt like I was ready to start seeing someone again.” Someone who hadn’t known Robert. Someone who didn’t know Robert Junior and Rodney. Someone who didn’t know she sat on the board of directors of an endowment worth millions. Someone she could trust to love her for herself. She gulped another belly full of air, rank as it smelled in the constable’s office, and tried not to give in to the urge to sob.

The man who’d been interrogating her for the last two hours asked her again what Digby’s last name was.

“The emails I received from him were from Digby Bentworth. I had no reason to think it was an alias. I didn’t ask to see his driver’s license. I trusted him.”

More of the same odd questions, asked over and over again. They were trying to break her down. Couldn’t they see she was already broken?

“No. I never went to his home. No. I never shared a hotel room with him. No. I never entertained him at my home.” She set her jaw stubbornly. “As I’ve told you dozens of times already, we had only just met. What happened in the grassy spot under the flying buttresses was a fluke – the first time we’d ever, I’ve ever—”

“Hasn’t this gone on long enough?” Ian MacCraig came to her defense, as he had several times over the last two hours. “The woman is clearly telling the truth. If ye’ve got no evidence to the contrary, I kindly suggest you let her go.”

The interrogator ignored the vicar. “So you had no idea that your lover was stealing architectural relics from the church?”

“He was not my lover! And no! We’d met at the church twice before. The first time we visited, I admired the copper rabbit drain spout and the stained glass windows, and the interesting architectural detailing. The second and third times, I evidently didn’t look up, or I certainly would have noticed that they were gone.”

This brought another round of snickers.

She rose to her feet and planted her hands on her hips. What she wanted to do was to curl up into a ball and cry herself to oblivion. “Yes, I was on my back. But I’m sure if you review the tape, you’ll find that I had my eyes closed through most of the afore mentioned proceedings.”

“Too busy seeing fireworks,” one of the deputies commented.

“Seriously, gentlemen. Is this really necessary?” The vicar stood and squared off with the constable. “If I’d known what disrespect you were going to show Ms. Wilson, I’d have deleted the first half of the tape before I ever showed it to you.”

The catcalls and responses that followed were so gross that she forced herself to block them out.

“I must insist that you cease this vulgarity immediately,” the vicar demanded loudly. “If not for Ms. Wilson’s sake, then for mine.”

She thought their fact-finding mission was about to start all over again, but this time, when their hoots and laughter died down, she was told she was free to go, provided she didn’t leave Scotland, and with the stipulation that she would make herself available for further questioning as the need arose.

“I’ll drive her back to her car.” The vicar volunteered, securing her purse and ushering her to his vehicle.

“Thank you,” she said as they drove the few short miles to the kirk. The rhododendrons lining the road beside the parking spot she’d so innocently chosen were still in full bloom, but the colors had dulled, and several of the blossoms had wilted in the hot sunshine.

“He was never going to see me again, was he?” She’d opened the car door and was toying with the idea of getting out of the vicar’s car, but hadn’t acted on it. The horror of the day’s events was just sinking in, and she felt numb, deflated, humiliated and dazed.

“I think it’s reasonable to assume that not everything the man told you was true.”

“But some of it? I mean…” Her voice trailed off. “He didn’t need or ask for my help in committing the crime. He didn’t involve me in any way. Can I safely deduce that his feelings for me were true, that what he said about me was independent of the lies he obviously told about the rest of his life?”

The vicar said nothing, probably wisely, but sat quietly, allowing her to talk.

“He said he loved me. He said I was beautiful.”

“And truly, you are,” the vicar said.

“You think so?” she asked, as dully as the once bright rhodies.

“I haven’t a doubt.”

“Thank you,” she said in a voice that sounded absolutely piteous, even to her.

“I know the constable and his men were a bit unkind,” the vicar said, “but the truth is, much of what Digby told you may have been the truth. In the days to come, as the shock wears off, if you should remember anything pertinent – a comment spoken in an offhand moment when the chap’s guard was down – please contact the constable, or if you prefer, me.”

“No offense meant.” She looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time since the nightmare began. “But what I’d really like is to forget the whole thing ever happened.”

“I’m sorry you had to be subjected to an interrogation, Rose, sorrier yet that you had to learn these sort of unpleasant truths about someone you’d grown close to.”

“It’s me who should be sorry,” she said, looking deep into his eyes and seeing forgiveness, not censure. “I’m so ashamed – not only of what I did with Digby, but that you were put in such an awkward position because of my actions. And sorry that you missed your church service.”

“Don’t worry about me,” the vicar said. “I’m told the organist organized a hymn sing. All is well. Although I’ve no doubt everyone is upset by what happened.”

“Again, I am truly sorry for everything that’s transpired.”

“There’s no need,” he said once more, his blue green eyes sizzling with compassion.

“I suppose you have probably heard – and seen – worse.” She tried to move her legs, but they just didn’t seem to want to go.

“Much worse, as a matter of fact. So not to worry.”

“Are you – could you – if you could grant me forgiveness-”

“No.” He said it firmly, as though there would be no changing his mind. “That would not be my place. I’m not here as your pastor.”

His collar said otherwise, but she didn’t press the issue. She hadn’t been to confession since before she’d married Robert. If it came right down to it, it made little sense to worry about one innocent romp when there was a whole list of other infractions unaccounted for.

He had such an earnest face. “If you do remember anything at all, please ring me up immediately… If it weren’t important, I wouldn’t ask you to revisit the horror of what happened today, but the truth is, St. Conan’s has been struggling financially for some time now. There’s been talk of ceasing our worship services by summer’s end if donations continue to dwindle. The congregation is dear, but they do not have much money to pay me, or to do the maintenance and upkeep the church requires. Losing whatever cash was in the donation box – and the artifacts – has proven very disheartening to all of us.”

“I understand.” And she did. Rose swung one, unfeeling-as-wood leg out of the car.

The vicar pressed a card into her hand. Once again, she was startled by the warmth of his touch.

“Do you think Digby knows what happened here today? That he was watching from afar?”

“Anything is possible. The important thing is that if you should hear from Digby, you must contact the authorities immediately so they can sort things out.”

“I promise.” Rose nodded and mustered her strength. She could do this. The vicar squeezed her hand and a few moments later, she was driving toward home.

***Sherrie Hansen lives in a 116-year-old Victorian house in northern Iowa who, just like her, got a second chance when she rescued it from the bulldozers grips and turned it into a bed and breakfast and tea house, the Blue Belle Inn. Wild Rose is Sherrie’s sixth novel to be published by Second Wind Publishing, and the first of her Wildflowers of Scotland novels. (Blue Belle will be released later this year and Shy Violet sometime next year. “Thistle Down,” an eShort prequel, is currently free or 99 cents online.) She attended Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL and University of Maryland, European Division, in Augsburg, Germany. Her husband, Rev. Mark Decker, is a pastor and Sherrie’s real life hero. She enjoys playing the piano with their worship team, needlepointing, renovating and decorating historic houses, traveling, and going on adventures with her nieces and nephews.

Click here to buy: Wild Rose

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “After 60 years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.” While John Oxenham wrote: “For death begins with life’s first breath; and life begins at touch of death.”

A Retrospect in Death is a story about discovery. You think you know yourself? Perhaps you only think you do. Do those closest to us know us better than we know ourselves; or do they, as we often insist, know jack? Consider that only in death can you really know, and understand, who and why you are—or were. And then ask yourself: At that point, is it too late? Does it even matter?

Darker than any of J. Conrad Guest’s previous novels, while also more humorous, it portends not only a search for the meaning of life, but also seeks to determine why we are as we are: prewired at conception, or the product of our environment?

Prologue:

I exhaled, fought to draw yet another breath – one more in a lifetime of breaths – heard my own death rattle, and followed the light. Muted voices, although the words meant nothing to me, and the sound of someone sobbing thrummed softly in my ears. A hand on top of mine – warm, soft, delicate… connecting me. Feminine. A woman’s hand. Someone I knew. Who?

The light darkled to a black blacker than the blackest night, and the voices and sobbing faded. Disconnecting, I heard nothing, not even the ringing in my ears that had become familiar to me in my old age as my blood pressure inched ever upward. I might as well have been deaf.

I had conquered the Great Divide. A general feeling of indif­fer­ence, which I’d associated with the acedia others had come to asso­ciate with me while I lived, washed over me.

In living, I had feared death; yet in dying, despite the crushing weight of far too many regrets, which had become a sort of leitmotif in what had become my anything but Wagnerian life, I feared I hadn’t lived enough.

Fear of the unknown, or an instinct for survival?

In death, I was relieved to have left behind the hardship, to no longer hear the rhythm of my heart counting down its finite number of beats, to feel the burn of my blood pushed, seemingly against its will, through plaque-hardened veins.

I waited for what could’ve been a moment, a month or a millen­nium, suspended somewhere between belief and disbelief. No glim­mer of light illumined me or my surroundings – if it could be said that I was in fact somewhere, or anywhere – nor did a sound vibrate against whatever essence my being had become.

Death?

It occurred to me that, while alive, I had often questioned, espe­cially as I felt my time growing shorter, the definition of death; yet I had never truly alit upon a faith of what I might find on the other side. To me, the hereafter was what I’d left the comfort of my easy chair to seek in another room only to realize I’d forgotten – What am I here after?

No white-haired, bearded and robed divinity waited to judge me for the life I’d led, the choices I’d made, the sins I’d committed, my far too few successes, far too many failures, the little good I’d accomplished, the hurt I’d inflicted upon others or had inflicted upon me by others the result of my choices – “You choose the women in your life who hurt you,” a voice whispered to me in the void, from during the time I walked among the living. Always accountable so that others could deny their own answerability. Nor had any of my loved ones, family, friends, or enemies – those who’d preceded me to this dark place – greeted me upon my arrival.

I waited again for what could’ve been a moment, a month or a millennium.

In life, as I tired of living, tired of the aches and pains both physical and emotional associated with the aged, I became convinced that once I left the world of the living, I could not be coerced into making an encore appearance.

I wasn’t born a futilitarian. Is anyone? It just sort of grew on me, like that fungus that afflicted the toenail of the great toe on my right foot a few years after I broke it – the toe, not the foot. Shattered it actually, an injury that impressed the doctor who told me, after viewing the x-ray, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Yes, in life, I always did things in a big way.

At best difficult, life is born to end in death – the ultimate fail­ure. With few successes, still fewer moments of happiness here and there interspersed, no matter how hard one tries, failures are para­mount. Death is life’s only true reward – or so I concluded. A para­doxical thought I’d often, in life, punished myself for having. I didn’t want to believe it; yet it had become a sort of mantra to me. But at the end I was old, alone, lonely, frightened, dying, and unlike Oscar Wilde’s literary creation, I had no portrait in my attic to hide the shame of my transgressions. If I could see those sins mirrored before me during my morning shave, surely anyone could. But by then my universe had become miniscule, with me at its center, a second childhood as Shakespeare would say – sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. I was so preoccupied with self that I couldn’t see that the world around me had no time or concern for an old man dying: no country for old men. Directed by the Coen brothers, and starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and Woody Harrelson. A dark movie, yet it won four Oscars, including Best Picture. But not best hair for Bardem.

For that reason alone, I should have sought God.

But his seeming absence from the world and, particularly, from my life, that he never whispered in my ear at those times I needed most to hear words of acceptance, encouragement, assurance, left me doubting. Believers say he never turns his back on anyone, so maybe I just wasn’t listening. Still, those footprints in the sand Mary Stevenson wrote about? I was convinced they were mine alone. They surely weren’t deep enough to account for the burden God chose by carrying me.

Faith?

Do we believe, or simply want to believe, that something more must exist after death to give living, life’s suffering, meaning, or something to which to aspire or win, as the Bible teaches? Is it simply ego that prevents us from accepting that dust to dust means just that?

Faith, where God is concerned, is belief in a being whose exis­t­ence can neither be proved nor disproved. That his existence can’t be proved doesn’t prove he doesn’t any more than an inability to dis­prove his existence proves he does.

I believed, while alive, in intelligence behind creation. The real­ity to which I referred as the universe around me, while faithfully believing my next breath was promised, didn’t just will itself into existence.

So I’d lived my life largely on faith: that each morning I left for work, telling the woman who was born to be my first and only divor­cée I’d see her at the end of the day, is but one example of a faith in a limitless number of days. Why then was it such an insur­mountable step for me to accept the presence of a greater thinking thing, even if he had more important matters to tend to than res­ponding to my piti­ful pleas for guidance, leniency?

In the wake of Shirley MacLaine’s claim to previous lives, I briefly considered reincarnation. To return to the living to make res­titution? Come back as the opposite gender, born in another country to another culture, to bear a different set of hardships – forced to en­dure great oppression, to be tested by either poverty or great wealth, to be blessed with love, family and good fortune, or cursed with aridity? How could I hope to make amends for a previous life? How could I even hope to apply the lessons I’d learned if I had no recol­lection of my previous lives? How come, for that matter, anyone re­turning from a previous life claims to have been Cleopatra or Nero, or some other notable historical figure? Why does no one ever re­count a former life as a Christian have-not torn asunder by lions to the delight of the Roman haves?

At worst, too New Age; at best, inherited memories from gener­ations past, like facial features, addiction to substances – disease.

I grew sullen, choosing to disbelieve in a fifth season, rejecting the concept of transmutation instead of oblivion.

Still, a part of me yearned for a do over.

I waited for what could’ve been another moment, a month or a millennium.

I began to question the meaning of life, as I realized that death in and of itself is no reward for wrongful living, or living in general, only a release from a self-imposed purgatory the result of self-loath­ing, the product of self-judgment that we’ve failed to live up to stan­dards set by someone else – either another human being or an anthropomorphic deity with little understanding of the hardship of being human, who sets impossibly high standards and, in his perfec­tion, judges us against those standards while warning us against our judging each other; someone who blessed us with five senses, then filled the world with myriad wonders to pleasure those senses (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell – a dog’s sense of smell is four hundred times more sensitive than a man’s; but is a cur, limited cranial capacity and lack of opposable thumbs notwithstanding, judged un­fairly for losing itself in a world rife with smells that tempt?), but forbade us from indulging in the music that moves us to joy, the food and drink that sate our hunger and thirst (a voice from my past in­truded: “All things in moderation”… the voice might’ve belonged to my father, a man more intent on passing down the wisdom of others than nurturing a son); the touch of a lover’s tongue to our lips, on our neck, in our ear, elsewhere, that moves us to ecstasy; the sight of a beautiful woman who inspires us to greatness or the launch of a thousand ships (“best to gouge out one’s own eyes than to admire beauty, because such approbation leads to desire and sinful thoughts”… the words of a savior passed down during a Sunday morning sermon, a savior who advised that attachment to all things worldly is but a barrier to achieving eternal bliss), a deity who sent a son, his own embodiment in flesh, to prove that temptation can be overcome, and to teach that before one can aspire to doorhood, one must first be willing to be a doormat.

I cursed myself for my overt blasphemy. These were not the thoughts of the innocent boy who, while in grade school, wrote in shaky block letters with great affection Mother’s Day cards to his loving mother, who believed Jonah was indeed swallowed whole by a whale and lived to tell the tale, that Job never lost his faith, that Christ walked on water, performed miracles, was crucified for no real good reason, and rose from the dead to sit at the right hand of God.

Yet what if it is not God who deems us worthy of a seat in heaven, but instead those whom we wronged in life? If that were true, then I was doomed to spend eternity on the outside looking in, nose pressed to pane.

Still, death, as I’d borne it these past minutes, months or millen­nia, seemed only to imitate my loathing toward living. Death – mine at least – was punishment for the way I’d lived. I wasted so much of my life waiting.

As instauration went – the renewal, the restoration of my spirit – this, in three words, sucked big time.

Maybe the Bible was right: had I spent more time worrying about my eternal bliss, lived in a more godlike fashion, I’d now be in a better place. But living mostly in a reactive fashion, I’d won little reward; while in looking to death as reprieve, I’d found no respite.

At that moment, a vibration reverberated throughout my being; because all my senses had atrophied over my guessed at millennia during which I’d heard, felt, smelled, saw, tasted nothing, it seemed thunderous:

“I am…” it said not with words, and I waited patiently, as I’d done for so long, for it to finish telling me who it was.

***

J. Conrad Guest is the author of Backstop: A Baseball Love Story in Nine Innings, available from Second Wind Publishing. Backstop was nominated as a Michigan Notable Book in 2010, and was adopted by the Illinois Institute of Technology as required reading for their spring 2011 course, “Baseball: America’s Literary Pastime.” He is also the author of One Hot January and January’s Thaw, both available from Second Wind.

Click here to buy: A Retrospect in Death

One murdered woman.
A missing child.
The diabolic father who will do anything to get his son back.
The female cop who risks everything to keep the boy safe.

CRESCENDO– Redemption with a bullet

As the only female Native American officer on the Bryson City, North Carolina police force, Inola Walela, must always play her A game. All bets are off when during a routine traffic stop the passenger insists her son has been kidnapped but is struck by a car before Inola can glean any hard facts. An altercation ensues and Inola’s partner is felled by a bullet—possibly from her gun. On administrative leave, fraught with guilt for allegedly killing her partner, and obsessed with the possibility of a missing child out there somewhere, she defies the force and her fiancé, Sheriff Steven Hawk. Inola sets off on her own journey to find the missing boy.

Chapter One

Preston Durand tapped the black muzzle of a .32 caliber Beretta Tomcat against his thigh. He paced a tight circle. Glowered at Billy Carlton. An ominous creak and the steady drip from a leaking pipe in the boiler room beneath the Sylva, North Carolina cotton mill unnerved him. Dust so fine, the grit crunched between his clamped teeth. A rat scurried into a corner. Preston shuddered.

All he wanted was a little cooperation from his ex-wife’s boy-toy. Why wouldn’t the prick talk?

“Where is my son?” Preston asked Billy for the tenth time. Again, the bloodied young man shook his head, moaned, uttered no reply.

This was supposed to be so easy for Preston. Find his kid and take him back to Chicago so that his dying father would amend his will. Instead, he and Hondo Polk, the private investigator with a dubious past, had traveled across five state lines chasing his damned elusive woman. He was sick of staying in shitty motel rooms, missed his glass and chrome condo loft that overlooked the high-rise towers of downtown Chicago.

If he’d have known an heir would be so important to his father, he would have told him about the kid years ago. Now it was almost too late. He would have to prove the boy was his. Hondo would see to that—hell, he’d forge a paternity document if Preston needed him to.

Less than a week ago, in Chicago, the bitch had said she’d have the boy ready at nine o’clock the next morning. But she must have taken off with the kid the second they hung up. He should have gone right to her apartment instead of hitting the Blackhawks game, downing a few celebratory Stoli’s afterward, then partying with a long-legged blonde until dawn. By the time he kicked in his ex’s door, she and the boy were gone.

It took all of the following day for Preston to find the right man for the job he needed done “post haste” as his father often said. And a lot of money. Hondo had agreed to put his other cases aside and accompany Preston in his quest—for a ten thousand dollar fee. He immediately pulled out his checkbook and endorsed payment for half. The check wouldn’t clear, but he was willing to take the risk they would find the kid and mend the severed relationship with his father before Hondo caught on.

Preston glared at Billy, just out of his teens by the looks of him. He sat bound to a folding chair, his hands secured with ropes. Face bloody, left eye swollen shut, long hair dripping with sweat.

“Please, you gotta stop, man,” Billy pleaded, a slow Southern drawl. “I don’t know where your boy is.”

Preston looked at Hondo who sat on his haunches stroking his rust-red beard as he studied Billy. “Do you believe him?” Preston asked.

Hondo shrugged.

“Neither do I.” Preston swiped at a smudge on the lapel of his full-length, charcoal-colored twill coat. “All right then, let’s back up. Where is my wife?”

“Ex-wife,” Billy muttered.

“Ah, kid.” Hondo’s massive chest covered by a 3XL Hawaiian shirt jiggled as he chuckled. “Big mistake.”

Preston was accustomed to parking lot fights with anyone who disparaged his Hawks after a hockey game. The prick in front of him was half the size of most punks he’d taken down. He took a step closer and punched Billy in the gut. Billy’s legs jerked upward and he gasped with the impact.

“Where is she?” Preston roared.

Billy shook his head back and forth. Preston backhanded the younger man with the butt of his Beretta. A trail of blood coursed down the gash in his cheek, to his jaw, cascaded to the cement floor.

When Billy’s head collapsed to his chest, sumo-sized Hondo withdrew an ammonia inhalant from his breast pocket, broke the capsule in half and waved it under Billy’s nose. Billy’s head snapped up and he thrashed back and forth.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough, Billy Boy?” Preston asked, squatting down next to Hondo. He reached out and tipped up Billy’s chin. A ripple of excitement stirred in Preston when his captive’s uninjured eye grew wide with fear. “Tell me where they are and we’re gone from your life forever. You want that, right?”

“Yeah, but I swear, I don’t know. She said she was moving on tomorrow. We were just having a drink.” Billy glanced at Preston, then looked away. “And I never even seen your kid!”

Preston let out a burst of air. “What did she offer you to keep quiet? Money? Let me clue you in…she doesn’t have any. Or was screwing her payment enough?”

“Naw, man, it wasn’t like that—”

“Bullshit,” Preston said. “It’s always like that.” Billy shook his head again, then resorted to sobbing. Preston wound a lock of Billy’s hair along his finger. “I don’t think pretty-boy knows where my family is. What do you think, Hondo?”

Hondo shrugged.

Preston rose and took a few steps backward, the knot in his stomach tightening with each stride.

“Shoot him,” Hondo said without turning to Preston.

Preston froze. The gun felt heavier in his hand. He gaped at Hondo who seemed mesmerized by the mess of a man in the chair. “What?” he asked over the whimpers.

“You want your kid, you gotta make him understand.” Hondo looked over his shoulder and gave Preston the psychotic grin that always scared him a little bit. “Shoot him.”

Preston lowered his gaze to the Beretta, considering.

“Look, I could do it for you. But, hey buddy, you told me you’d do anything to get your boy back. Prove it.”

“Pleeease, cut me loose.”

“Sure, Billy Boy. I’ll cut you loose.” Preston raised his weapon and fired a round. A hole the size of a dime bloomed between Billy’s eyebrows. A fine mist of blood spattered onto Hondo’s face and clung to the hibiscus blossoms on his chest. The gunfire’s crack reverberated off hard surfaces in the cavernous room. Billy’s head tilted back, lolled to the side. His body slumped in the chair.

Hondo jumped up and swiped his face with his hand. “Goddammed-sonofabitch-ofabitch!” Why’d you go and do that?”

Preston popped his jaw, trying to clear the ringing in his ears. He flicked his fingers over his left ear, amazed they didn’t come back bloody from the eardrum he thought must surely be broken. “You said to.”

“I told you to shoot him—not kill him.”

“Why do you care? He’s a stupid backwoods hick.”

Hondo stroked his beard, red faced, a vein on his forehead pulsating. “He was a stupid backwoods hick.” He took out a knife and proceeded to hack the rope from Billy’s torso. “Now we still don’t know where your kid is. Stupid bonehead move, pal.” Hondo tapped his temple with the tip of the blade and whirled away from Preston. “Stupid.”

Preston took in the dank space, the still air, the lifeless body at his feet—everything so surreal. He’d never shot anyone before. Had no clue he would be able to squeeze the trigger. “She can’t be far from here, right?” Hondo didn’t answer or turn around. “Right?”

He remembered the sight of his ex disappearing in the crowded bar a few hours earlier. They would be forced to track her down again. And now he had the monstrous, clearly pissed off Hondo to deal with too.

He stuffed the Beretta’s warm barrel into his waistband, then crouched to reach into the pocket of Billy’s jeans and retrieved his wallet. Preston pocketed the twenty-seven dollars and a condom, then took out the dead man’s North Carolina driver’s license.

“Look at this, Hondo,” Preston said in a voice he thought would entice his partner. “Billy Boy really is a boy—nineteen years old. What was she thinking? Address is in Bryson City. Ever heard of it?”

“Shit, no,” Hondo said. “Gotta check the map.”

He and Hondo had followed a lot of maps the past five days, crumpling each one as they crossed to yet another state after Illinois: Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and now North Carolina. His ex-wife baffled him. He had no idea where she was headed. In Chicago, that auburn, doe-eyed bank manager he had lured to his bed before he and Hondo left the city had divulged every transaction on his ex’s credit card and savings account, but the banker had refused to return his calls for two days now.

Good thing Hondo was damned fine at his job. After a few clicks on his laptop, accessing a restricted Internet website, the PI had tracked the ex’s cell phone whenever she turned it on to make a call. Each time, he and Hondo would race to her location, only to find her gone.

Not knowing if Preston would locate his son in time plagued him. If his widower father died before getting the kid back, the entire Durand multi-million dollar fortune would be left to charity. Charity. Apparently Preston wasn’t good enough to receive what was rightfully his. He wasn’t successful, refused to work for the Durand International Fidelity Trust Corporation. Hadn’t made a name for himself. As if being the only child of an elusive blowhard didn’t qualify him as worthy. Preston could only assume that proving a suitable heir would be enough of a reason to change his father’s mind.

Tonight had been their first break, when they pulled up to a neighborhood bar and found his ex’s Camry parked out front. A quick search through the windows of her vehicle gleaned nothing. Not even an empty fast food container. Sure as hell, not his son.

When they’d entered the dive Preston caught a glimpse her long blonde hair glowing in the neon signs hanging over the bar. She fawned over Billy Carlton and stroked a bicep that rippled through his shirt. She must have sensed something because in a blink she vanished. Preston pushed his way through the throng of drunken patrons while Hondo stealthily pulled his own Beretta and snatched Billy. By the time Preston made it outside a different car had replaced her Camry in the parking space.

Preston looked down and scowled at the dead man, arms and legs splayed on the floor. He wondered again why the prick wouldn’t talk. Preston could only hope Billy Boy didn’t have any secrets to reveal. He took hold of Billy’s soaked armpits as Hondo grabbed the legs. Struggling with the cumbersome body, stinking of sweat and piss, they crossed the room and dumped him on the floor.

Hondo pushed a bulbous red button mounted shoulder-high on the wall and a rumble echoed in the bowels of the deserted mill. The incinerator lit and soon the area filled with heat and the stench of oil from the enormous furnace. Hondo took a steel bar from the floor and wrenched open the burner’s cast iron door, fed the ropes to the fire.

“I’ll be tastin’ this loser for days,” Hondo said, wincing. He swept his mitt of a hand over his mouth and spat on the ground. “Don’t pull any more shit like that, got it?”

“Sorry to take all the fun away from you,” Preston mumbled.

Hondo glared at Preston a moment. And then he laughed. The big man’s bellow resounded nearly as loud as the shot from Preston’s gun. “Got me there, Presto. I did wanna kill the little pisser.”

Preston let out a relieved breath, realizing Hondo had calmed down. He tossed Billy’s wallet into the furnace as he caressed the scar on his jaw, the only flaw on his GQ-worthy face. “I’m paying you a shitload of money, Hondo—”

The big man raised his hand. “Don’t worry. Like you said, Belinda can’t be far. We should check the punk’s house. I’ll take Billy’s car. Get yourself a room in Bryson City and keep your phone on.” He bent his imposing bulk and checked the licking flames. “What’ll you do when I find her?”

Preston thought about Hondo’s question as he scanned Billy’s lifeless form. He had been impulsive. But now he’d learned his lesson about reacting too quickly, without thinking about the full ramifications of his actions. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He would remind himself to consider what Hondo would do. Next time, he vowed, he would be more patient.

“She’ll tell me where my son is. And if she doesn’t, I’ll cut off her fingers and toes one by one until she does.”

Hondo removed one of Billy’s boots and threw it into the furnace. “You are one sick dude, Presto.” Flames engulfed the leather with a hiss. “I like that about you.”

Preston looked into Hondo’s wild eyes dancing with adrenaline. He wondered if his own expression mirrored the look of satisfaction.

***

Deborah J Ledford’s latest novel of suspense, CRESCENDO, is book three of the Steven Hawk/Inola Walela series. Other novels include SNARE, Finalist for The Hillerman Sky Award and the NM-AZ Book Awards, and the classical-music themed STACCATO. Deborah is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and her award-winning short stories appear in numerous print publications as well as literary and mystery anthologies. Part Eastern Band Cherokee, she spent her summers growing up in western North Carolina where her novels are set. 

Click here to buy: Crescendo by Deborah J Ledford

A local television station is the link between a murderer and his victims. But why is he killing seemingly random people? An insurance salesman, a police officer and a hitchhiker; the police cannot connect the victims to each other much less to the killer.

The questions haunt Vince Williams as he takes charge of the task force set up to stop the serial killer. When the team comes too close to answers, the killer makes a bold and very personal move against Vince. As Vince races to find the killer and rescue his fiancé, he is haunted by the killer’s calm promise to destroy the woman Vince loves. Vince will do anything to save her. Anything.

Chapter One

“KWBD Newsroom, Ralph Moore speaking.” He wasn’t happy about being assigned to answer the phone. He was a reporter, not a receptionist.

“Ah, Mr. Moore. I recognize your voice. I just want to say how much I appreciate your reporting. You are the best reporter KWBD has. By the way, Mr. Moore, what time does the Newsroom clock indicate?” the man spoke softly. His voice was low, melodious, cultured, and captivating. There was something about the voice and the fact the man had complimented him that made Ralph look at the clock and answer him.

“Nine twenty-three,” Ralph said, wondering why he was answering the man.

“Good! Our time pieces concur then, which means that in thirty-seven minutes, or at ten o’clock this morning, if everything goes as I have planned, there will be a sizable explosion in the downtown area resulting in considerable property damage and hopefully significant injury and loss of life. Because you are the station with the lowest ratings, I’m giving you the scoop on this,” the caller said and hung up.

Ralph sat there for just an instant debating whether or not the call was a hoax and then decided even if it was a prank, it was a terroristic threat and that was a crime. He dialed 911.

“This is Ralph Moore at KWBD. I just got a call about a bomb threat,” he said when the operator answered.

“One moment please and I’ll transfer your call to the police,” said the operator.

A police officer came on and identified himself. “A bomb threat to the station?”

“No,” said Ralph. “As best I can remember, the man said the bomb would go off somewhere downtown at exactly ten this morning. He said there would be lots of property damage and he hoped people would get hurt.”

“Was there anything else?” the officer asked.

“Well, he asked what time it was.”

“Did it at all sound as though the threat was against the station?”

“No. He said downtown and we’re not really downtown.”

“Okay. We’ll be right on it. Don’t go away, Mr. Moore. We may want to talk with you some more,” the officer said and the line went dead.

Two detectives showed up at the Newsroom within seven minutes to talk to Ralph about the call. Other officers rushed to position bomb squads and swat teams as inconspicuously as possible around the downtown area. Explosive sniffing dogs went through the most congested buildings and streets. The officers wanted to keep everything very low key.

The Mayor, the Police Chief, the Direct of Civil Defense, and the state Director of Homeland Security all agreed the threat seemed indefinite but would be taken seriously, but without warning the public. They could not possibly evacuate the whole downtown area in a safe and orderly fashion in twenty minutes. If they were to tell the public about the threat, there would probably be more loss of life due to the panic than if there really was a bomb.

When the detectives left, Ralph considered calling his wife. The authorities asked the station not to make any broadcasts about the threat or call friends and family. There were those who still called relatives who worked downtown, advising them to get out of the area. Ralph didn’t like his colleagues disobeying instructions. He was a law-abiding citizen who never exceeded the speed limit except accidentally.

Ralph’s wife worked on the nineteenth floor of the First National Bank Building and he was hoping the bomb would be placed on the eighteenth floor, directly under her office. He hoped she would be one of those killed in the explosion. He would be free from her and be able to collect on the $100,000 life insurance policy they had on each other with a double indemnity clause that would get him $200,000. He couldn’t be that lucky, but it was pleasant to think of her being killed.

* * *

At nine forty-five, Ferus Vitium pulled into a four-level parking ramp a block away from Delany’s Pub. He was a slim man with steely gray eyes. Despite a calm and controlled demeanor, his heart had that wonderfully warm increased tempo of excitement. In the pit of his stomach was that exciting flutter which he always felt when someone was about to get what they deserved.

At a nearby café he slipped into a seat by a window where he could see the corner where Delany’s Pub was located and ordered a cup of coffee and whole-wheat toast. Delany’s was the place where all the true Irish gathered on St. Patrick’s Day for green beer and Irish stew. It was a two-hundred-year-old, red stone building on the fringe of the skyscraper area and two blocks from the picturesque waterfront. Delany’s was on the list of historic buildings and was maintained in the original style and furnishings. In the restrooms, the partitions between the booths were New England marble. The toilets were the old-fashioned kind with a varnished oak box around the copper water tank attached high up on the wall with a chain and oak handle one pulled to flush the toilet.

At exactly one minute and thirty-two seconds past ten, there was an explosion in Delany’s Pub. When the fire was put out and the investigation completed, the bomb squad determined the device had been placed in the water tank of one of the toilets. It had been enclosed in a plastic container to protect it from the water. It did not affect the function of the toilet, except to reduce the flow of water when the toilet was flushed. It was a crude device of dynamite with a simple twelve-hour timer, which meant it had to have been put there after ten o’clock the night before.

The real damage occurred when the explosion broke through the wall to the kitchen on the other side, breaking the gas lines and igniting the gas. The dishwater was killed, and the cook and a helper each suffered second and third degree burns. Others suffered injury from flying debris, but most of the customers and employees got out safely.

The six o’clock news mentioned the death and the injuries, but not many people personally knew those people, whereas everyone knew Delaney’s. There was more genuine regret over the destruction of Delany’s Pub than about the people.

* * *

“Do you mean to tell me you knew it was going to happen and you didn’t call to warn me?” Jessica Moore sat leaning forward tensely in her chair. Her tone of voice and the arch of her back told Ralph exactly how angry she was.

Jessica was a beautiful woman. Many strangers would guess her to be a runway model rather than a CPA in the accounting firm of Banning, Banning and Devon. She had black hair, which she wore fairly long to frame her very white complexion and set off her blue eyes. Her unique coloring always attracted attention. But there were times when the blue eyes could be menacingly cold.

“I couldn’t call you, Jessie. The police wouldn’t let any of us at the studio call out.”

“If you really wanted to call you could have found a way to do it. You could have gone to the bathroom and used your cell phone or something.”

“And what would you have done, left work and come home?”

“Maybe. But that’s not the point. The point is you were not in the least bit concerned about my safety.”

“I was concerned about your safety which was exactly the reason I didn’t call you. I knew you were safer staying right where you were.”

“How could you know that? You didn’t know where the bomb was. It was downtown where I was. But that didn’t matter to you because you weren’t downtown. You were safe in your studio across from the shopping center. If the caller had said the bomb was in the shopping center I’ll bet you would have gotten your ass out of there.”

He didn’t like these arguments. He didn’t like arguments of any kind. They saw so little of each other their life together was acceptable most of the time, but there were times when they argued that he knew he would kill her if he thought he could get away with it. He was very glad when the phone started ringing, interrupting their argument.

She reached over and very deliberately pushed the speaker button. The way she pushed the button was like she was squishing a bug. ‟Hello,” she said, very sweetly.

‟Mrs. Moore, may I speak to Mr. Moore, please?” the voice asked.

‟He’s busy right now. If you leave your name and number I’ll have him call you back.”

‟I’m afraid that would be inadvisable. I talked to your husband this morning about a bomb I had set and I just wanted to follow up on our earlier conversation.”

She turned to look at her husband and the expression on her face was a combination of both fear and awe. She turned back to talk to the speaker phone and rather meekly said, ‟Just a minute, I’ll get him.”

‟This is Ralph Moore,” he said moving closer to the phone.

‟I hope I’m not interrupting anything important, such as dinner.”

‟No, my wife and I were just talking,” he said, looking toward Jessica.

‟That is very commendable. So few husbands and wives talk any more. Communication is very important, that’s why I’m calling you.” He spoke in that low, controlled, reassuring voice Ralph heard that morning. ‟You are going to be the means by which I communicate with the authorities. Through you I am going to tell them when I’m going to kill someone and from time to time I will give them clues as to who I am. Let me say this. No two crimes will be the same. I like variety, don’t you?” There was a slight laugh in his voice when he said that. ‟The other thing is there will be no pattern of crimes with which the authorities can work.”

‟Why?”

‟The why of it, of course. Everyone wants to know the motive. Well, let’s just say I bombed Delany’s because I like the English and I don’t like the Irish.”

‟No. I mean why me?”

‟Oh, that why. Because I like you, Mr. Moore. You and your station are going to know everything I do before anyone else. If you’re smart you will work it so people will be listening to your station just in case you have a special bulletin about something I’m about to do. Now I realize this is going to create some inconveniences. For example, the police are going to want to put a tap on your phone to record all the things I say to you. Please convey to Mrs. Moore my sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may cause her,” the voice said soothingly.

‟Oh, that’s all right,” Jessica blurted out afraid of angering the caller.

‟I see we are on a speaker phone. Well, that’s good. Saves you having to tell your wife what we talked about, doesn’t it, Ralph.”

He heard the click of the caller hanging up ‟I guess I’d better call the police and tell them about this,” he said.

‟Not now, Ralph. Call them in the morning. I don’t want some cops running around here asking questions until all hours of the night.”

‟Detective Sloan said I was to call him immediately if I got another call, even if it was the middle of the night. He gave me his home number.”

She had a resigned look on her beautiful face and said, ‟You’re such a wimp, Ralph. You think you have to do everything the cops tell you. Maybe you should ask Dr. Aspen why you’re such a wimp.” She was about to say something more, but was interrupted by the ringing of the phone.

He pushed the speaker button and said, ‟Hello.”

‟I forgot to mention, Mr. Moore, you don’t have to let the police into your house to listen in on your phone. They have all kinds of equipment now-days to do it from outside the house. The only reason for them wanting to be inside the house is so they can coach you as to what to say and what to ask each time I call. It doesn’t make any difference to me.

‟Now their psychiatrists will tell you the reason I am telling you all this, and through you them, is because I want to be stopped. That is not it at all. The reason I am telling someone is because I am smarter than all the police departments and their psychiatrists put together. I can tell them what I’m going to do before I do it and they still will never catch me. Be sure to tell them I told you that.” There was chuckling in the melodious voice at the end just before he hung up.

‟I have to call Sloan and tell him about these two calls,” Ralph said as he pressed the disconnect button and then got up to get the card Sloan had given him with the telephone numbers on it.

She turned her head looking at him and nodded. ‟If the police don’t catch him soon and he keeps calling us we could become famous, couldn’t we?”

‟Yes, I suppose so.”

‟We should have taped those two calls. From now on, we have to keep recordings of every call we get and keep notes of everything we do, Ralph. When it’s all over you could write a book or we could sell our story to some TV show,” she said, excitedly getting up to go to find the tape recorder. ‟Don’t call Sloan until we have the recorder set up, Ralph. Tomorrow I’m going to buy a good, voice-activated recorder.”

***

At age 13 Paul hunted big game in Africa with his father, not as a sport but to provide food for the station. He’s had a leopard’s face six inches from his own in the middle of the night where the only thing protecting him was the mosquito net. He has single handedly sailed a 38 foot ketch from Tahiti to Hawaii. Another time with only his wife and 13-year-old son on board, he sailed their 42 foot cutter through a hurricane.

Paul has been a construction worker (while going to college),a sailboat skipper, and university teacher and administrator before and after his sailing days. Paul is now retired and lives in Hawaii where he spends a lot of time on the potter’s wheel making bowls and mugs and at the computer writing.

Click here to buy: The Telephone Killer

Celia Whitfield’s Boy is a riveting, bittersweet, funny and historically accurate account of a talented young man coming of age in a changing, challenging time. Set in the lumber country of eastern North Carolina in the early days of the 20th century, the novel allows us to watch the growth and challenges faced by of young people against a backdrop racism, economic change and politics. Written with great insight and unfailing authenticity, Celia Whitfield’s Boy transports, beguiles and awakens readers.

Prologue

The wind blew steadily through the pine trees, across the empty fields and down the dirt road. A misty rain had been falling since before daybreak and the chilly January temperature added to the dismal mood of the North Carolina morning.  Celia Whitfield’s thoughts were just as gloomy as the weather as she walked down that road, her head bent against the wind and mist.

It was almost two miles across Brown’s Swamp from her house to Flynn’s Crossing.  Water was already standing in the wagon ruts and the dust that had been there just the day before was turning to sticky mud, causing her to step carefully to keep from slipping. The road she took that morning was the only way to get to Glover’s Store there in the little hamlet.  She had walked that road many times in rugged winter weather like that morning’s and in the muggy heat of the eastern Carolina summer. Regardless of the weather, it was two long miles.

It seemed even longer that morning.  Celia was on a solemn mission, one she had considered and postponed many times. Although she had reached her decision, she still had reservations about her ability to do what she knew had to be done. She let a tear slip onto her cheek knowing the misty rain would hide it.

It had been two years since her husband, Sam, had died in a logging accident.  She had struggled to raise the children: the boy, Jacob, and his sisters, Carrie and Rachel. It was an impossible task.  She was young, just barely twenty-five years old, but she wasn’t physically able to farm. The children were too small to help, although Jacob tried.  Mr. Glover, a generous and caring man, had been kind enough to carry her on his books so she could get some staple items at his store.  The rest of the food they ate she had raised. But it was not enough.

As she came around the curve in the road she could see Glover’s store just across the railroad tracks.  It was a small, unpainted building with a front porch that ran the length of the store.  There were sacks of feed stacked out front and a couple of wooden rocking chairs on the porch. A rusty tin roof, one corner flapping in the wind, kept the rain out.

The gloomy morning had caused Mr. Glover to light a lantern in the building.  She could see its glow through the dusty windows.

As she walked slowly up the wooden steps to the porch, Celia thought what a pitiful picture she made.  Her clothes were wet, the hem of her long black dress was heavy with mud accumulated during the journey and her high-buttoned shoes, which she had polished so carefully with hog fat, were covered with mud.  Her red hair was tied up in a tight bun that glistened with the mist of the morning rain.

But she didn’t want to look pitiful.  She was too proud to ask for pity no matter her circumstances. Although her Irish family was considered just a little higher on the social ladder than the black folks who worked on local farms, she considered herself the equal of anybody. And she wasn’t going to beg for anything— except maybe for her children. So she stood up straight and brushed the dampness from her face with her cotton handkerchief.

She pulled open the screen door then pushed on the right side of the narrow double doors that opened into the big room full of everything a farm family could want. It all came together with a unique smell of leather and coal oil, fresh meat and cloth.

Celia was glad there were no customers that morning.  Mr. Hugh Glover was standing alone with his back to the woodstove in the middle of the room.  He was dressed as always in wool pants and vest, a string tie around his stiff collar and garters on his shirt sleeves.

“Good mornin’, Celia,” he said.  “This is awful nasty weather to be traipsin’ about in.”

Celia closed her umbrella and shook the water off onto the worn wooden floor, stood as straight as she could and said, “The fact that I am out in this mess oughta tell you my purpose for doing so is important.”  She tried to speak as confidently as she could.  She didn’t want him to think of her as some emotional woman come to throw her troubles on him.  She rolled her umbrella then walked over and stood beside the warm stove with Mr. Glover.

She spoke without preamble. “Mr. Hugh, I have come to make you a bargain.  I know that you are a businessman and fair in your dealin’s.  I propose to make you a deal which will be beneficial to all concerned.”  Without even taking a breath she went on. “As you know, my boy, Jacob, is nigh ’bout seven year old and is in good health.  I know he may seem a mite small of stature but he is a willing worker and smart, too.  We do not have a school here and I can’t afford to send him off nowheres, but me and his daddy decided before Jacob was born that if it was a boy child he would get a education.

“You are an educated man, Mr. Hugh, and I know that you know how important education is if a body is to better themselves in this world.  Sam said he was goin’

to do whatever it took for Jacob to get him an education.”  Celia paused but kept looking past Mr. Glover out at the rain as it increased and a little sound of thunder could be heard above the flailing of the rain on the tin roof.  “And I aim to keep Sam’s commitment, Mr. Hugh.”

Celia paused again, this time she took a deep breath. The hesitation gave Mr. Glover a chance to speak.  “Celia, I have always admired your determination to properly care for your children in the wake of Sam’s death.  You have conducted yourself in a Christian manner and I know that you have struggled hard and long. But I also know that you knew I was aware of that before you came here this morning.  So why don’t you tell me what is on your mind?”

Celia turned abruptly to face Mr. Glover. She looked him straight in the eye and said, “Mr. Hugh, I want you to take Jacob in, to raise him like he was your own.  I cain’t care for him. I am a poor widow-woman, young though I may be, and I can not do what needs to be done for my boy. Askin’ you to do such a thing near ’bout tears my heart out.  I love that boy more than life itself, but I cain’t do what needs to be done to give him the kind of life he deserves.”

Mr. Glover could see the tears come to her eyes despite her efforts to suppress them. But she refused to acknowledge them.  She didn’t reach up to wipe them away with her handkerchief so they just streamed down her cheeks unimpeded. She continued to speak with as much control as she could muster, “I don’t aim to just turn him loose, neither.  I will pay you every month for his keep and whatever I can toward any expense you might have in sendin’ him to school. He is still my boy and nothin’ in the world can ever change that. You can work him here in the store to help as well.  And although I know you to be a Christian man, I tell you now that if you should agree to this bargain but should ever harm him, I will hunt you down and kill you.  That’s as plain as I can say it.  Do we have a bargain?”

The storekeeper didn’t answer.  He looked away from the young woman standing there with rainwater still dripping from her dress to the floor.  “What courage,” he thought, “must she possess to take such drastic action? How much desperation must she be facing?  And how much love must be bound up in that little body to make such a sacrifice?”

He also thought, “I can’t just do this without talking it over with Mary.  How will she feel about taking in a small boy especially at her age?”

But he knew Jacob, too. He had seen him in the store and at church.  He was a good boy and Celia had done a good job of raising him so far. How could he turn her down when she seemed so desperate?

“Let me talk to Mary,” he said. The next Sunday afternoon, Celia brought Jacob to live with Mary and Hugh Glover.

***

Bill Thompson has been a speaker and entertainer for hundreds of events celebrating The South. In the course of all that, he has written two books of essays, including the best-selling Sweet Tea, Fried Chicken and Lazy Dogs, as well as a collection of short stories and a play. He is author of numerous articles for newspapers and magazines, particularly Our State. Celia Whitfield’s Boy is his first novel.

Click here to buy: Celia Whitfield’s Boy

An enormous, enigmatic object appears suddenly in a limestone quarry in the flat lands of the midwest. A reporter, a security guard, and government operatives all seek the answer to what the object is, and why it has appeared. What they discover is not what any of them expect. This unpredictable thriller takes readers on a journey to the edges of quantum physics and also the inner reaches of the psyche. Each key character must come to terms with his or her past, as well as their common destiny.

Chapter One

Gregg Childress drove the giant gravel truck up the ramp toward the rim of the quarry. As he reached the top of the ramp he was blinded. The sun shining on the dusty windshield created so much glare he could not see. The truck rumbled to a stop. He ran the wipers and watched the washer fluid first streak and smear then clear the windshield. He realized the glare was not getting much better. It dawned on him that the filth on his own glasses was causing most of the problem. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and began to wipe the accumulated grime from the thick safety lenses.

As he wiped, the weather report came on the radio.

“…Today’s high a blistering 94, low tonight expected to only get down to 78 under clear skies. Tomorrow, there is a possibility of thunderstorms in the evening as a cooler front comes through. We certainly could use the rain. Stay tuned for…”

Gregg liked the warm nights of the summer. He often sat in his swimming trunks in the quick set pool he had bought a couple summers ago. He liked to sit out there at night looking at the stars and daydream about being an astronaut. He imagined the hum of the pool filter being the rocket engines propelling him to Mars or Pluto or the jump limit, beyond which he could flip a switch that would propel him to anywhere in the galaxy. That had been his dream as a boy. He had tried to get into the Air Force when he graduated from high school, but had been a little too heavy and had been told that, even if he had gotten in, he would never be a pilot because of his poor eyesight.

He finished wiping his glasses, and was delighted when he put them back on and could see clearly. The rock dust that was omnipresent in the quarry coated everything. The lack of rain lately had made it worse. Even walking with a light tread would raise a cloud of dust. He looked down to the gauges on the truck and noticed that the engine was running a bit hot; not close to the red, but hotter than usual. The radiator needed a good hosing off. He made a mental note to take care of that, and check the air filter at the end of the shift. He drove the truck to the big hopper at the end of the cement plant and dumped the load of limestone. He started the trip back down into the pit to pick up another load.

Slowly turning the switchbacks as he went, he drove the truck down the ramp. He had reached a level plateau, a shelf about fifty yards wide that skirted the perimeter of the active pit. Anywhere active quarrying was being done could be reached from here. He drove along the limestone wall parallel to the road in front of the plant that was about seventy feet above his head. Followed this path around an angled outcropping of stone that had been left in place because it wasn’t been considered useful, he turned the corner at the end of the outcropping and headed toward where the bulldozers were filling another truck.

Gregg was about twenty yards from where he would queue up to get his next load when there was a brilliant flash to his right. The truck rumbled for a moment then died. The radio cut out. He looked at the gauges. There were no readings. Even the battery gauge was zero. He turned the key to try and restart the massive diesel. Nothing happened. There was not even so much as a click, a cough or a single whir.

He looked up, and noticed that one of the bulldozers had stopped with its load of stone halfway dumped out into one of the other trucks. The operator was moving levers and nothing was happening.

Then the bulldozer operator looked up. To Greg it appeared the man was looking between two of the dump trucks. The operator’s face went pale. He stopped shifting the levers. Slowly, mechanically, he undid his seat belt. His eyes never left what he was staring at.

Gregg looked to his right as well. He could not see what the bulldozer operator was looking at, his view obscured by the back of the  cab. He got out of the truck, walked to the front of the truck and stopped dead in his tracks.

Gregg saw a giant object. It had the appearance of the monstrous metal horn of a giant robotic bull had had been thrust, wide end first, into the pit. His first thought was that it was a hallucination.  He had forgotten to take his medicine last night and had only taken his regular dose this morning. Then he looked around at the other people in the pit and realized he was not the only one seeing this thing. Despite the fear of what he was seeing, he was glad at least that it was not his mind playing tricks on him. He had learned he could deal with anything in the real world much easier than he could with the things that lurked in the shadowy corners of his mind.

He stood staring at the thing for nearly a full minute before it dawned on him that there might be some of the other employees much closer to that thing. From where he stood, it looked like one end of the object was near where the engineers were setting up for the next blast. He tried to remember the blast schedule, realizing the next scheduled blast was in 2 days. The final inspection of the bore holes would be happening today.

Gregg started to run toward where the next blast would be happening. He wanted to be sure everyone over there was safe. As he ran, he kept an eye the entire time on this thing that had just appeared. Scenes from every science fiction alien movie he had ever seen started to flash though his mind. He kept coming back to the scene in Alien when the alien’s ship is first seen. This thing vaguely reminded him of that. When he suddenly had to stop running and vomit, he had an image of one of the alien babies bursting out of his chest. His body gave the closest approximation it could muster, his breakfast bursting forth from his mouth. When he was finished, he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief.

He kept walking, out of breath, toward the blast area. As he got close he called the name of the two people he knew would be doing the inspection.

“Harry. Stephen?. Where are you? Harrrrry?… Steeeeve?” He called.

Gregg kept calling as he walked. He saw the pickup they had driven out to the blast zone. They had to be close. Then he saw two smoking piles on the ground. The blue of the Shawnee Quarry jumpsuits, blackened around the edges, was still visible. Without pausing to think, he pulled his cell phone out of one pocket and its battery from another. As a safety measure, they were not allowed to keep the battery in their cell phones inside the quarry. It was not really a problem except on blast days, but the quarry management made it an everyday rule so the employees would develop the habit of keeping them separate. Gregg slipped the battery onto the phone and turned it on. He started shooting pictures as he approached the lumps on the ground.

As he got closer, he could see the nametags on the jumpsuits. It was them—Harry and Stephen. He was overtaken with another wave of nausea. The first round of vomiting had emptied his stomach, which did nothing to stop the dry heaves. He took more pictures after he recovered. He made sure to get the name tags.

Fear shot through him as he realized whatever had done this to Harry and Stephen might do the same to him. He turned and began to run. Raw fear, panic overtook every bit of sanity he had so desperately cultivated and clung to since the accident. He ran back to the dump truck. He tried one more time, in vain, to start it.

Standing outside the cab was Jack, the bulldozer operator. Gregg climbed  out and called to him, “Harry and Stephen are dead! It looks like they just incinerated—completely. They’re over by the blast zone. I got some pictures. I gotta out of here. I…I…I…” Then he simply stopped speaking and turned to look at the object again. He took a couple pictures of it and turned off his phone. He began walking toward the ramp.

His mind had kicked over into “robot mode”. At least that was what Gregg called it. His psychiatrist called it a mild dissociative disorder. He would just turn off all emotion and become like a robot when he reached a point where he was no longer able to cope with what was happening around him. It had been a long time since it had happened to him. The part of Gregg that was still aware of what was occurring around him knew robot mode did not last forever. Had he been able to feel anything, he would have been glad. He would have to deal with all of what he had just seen, but he did not have to do it yet.

He walked out of the pit. There was a sheriff’s car pulling into the parking area. The car’s siren was on and gumball machine lights were flashing. Gregg understood it was here because of that thing in the pit. He recognized the short, round, blob of a man in the driver’s seat—Horace Jones, one of the deputies. Gregg heard other sirens approaching. He knew if he were to have a chance of getting to safety, he had to leave now. He walked quickly to his car, got in and hoped it would start. It did. Whatever had happened to the engines of the vehicles in the pit had not extended this far. He spun his wheels as he drove to the back of the office building. There he found the two tracks of gravel that formed a seldom used service road. It led to an exit that was almost on the opposite side of the plant from the main gate. He pulled onto the gravel path and began to drive home.

***

J. R. Hobeck is a writer, poet, scientist and pharmacist. A native of the flatlands of northwest Ohio, a smokestack very similar to the one in this story has always been on his radar. He currently lives in Clemmons, NC with his wife, Jenni, his two children, Jake and Juli and his dog, Charlie.

Click here to buy: Smokestack

Christian Lindgren has lost that which he holds most dear, his daughter. In a haunting dream she comes to him and shows him where she is. He can not rest until he can get help to find her. When a search is mounted on a foggy day she is found in a shallow grave just as his dream predicted. But what exactly occurred? Bergin Halverson takes up the task of searching for the truth of what happened the night Miss Lindgren disappeared putting himself and his family in peril until at last, nearly thirty-five years later he is able to reveal that truth and put to rest the many ghosts that have haunted him over the years.

Prologue

Bergin Halverson gazed at the diamond ring the sheriff had placed on the desk.  He did not reach to touch it or pick it up.  In the stillness, a flood of memories swept over him.  Memories he had tried so hard to leave behind in the hidden places of his past.

He sighed as he ran his hand across his forehead and down over his eyes, pausing at his mouth as if it could keep him silent a little longer.

“If you can tell us anything about the diamond ring, and who it belonged to, you could help us solve this case.”  The sheriff shifted uneasily in his chair as he waited for the older man to reply.  Silence settled uneasily about them as the dust motes drifted lazily through the bright shaft of sunlight that streamed in through the window.  “It’s not every day that someone unearths a skeleton on your property, Mr. Halverson.”

“No, not an everyday occurrence,” Bergin Halverson said in a hushed tone.  He wasn’t sure he wanted to bring all those memories back again.  He had lived with the fear and the pain for all these years now, and it had taken some time for there to be only a dull ache instead of a sharp pain when some memory would surface unbidden into his conscious mind.

Bergin sighed and shook his head.  He didn’t want to remember.  They had all been so young then, such fools, especially his brother; his selfish, irresponsible brother.  He winced as the pain of memory grabbed at him.

“Mr. Halverson, are you all right?  Can I get you something?”  The sheriff sat forward in his chair.

“No, no, I’m fine.”  He put out his hand and moved it like he was brushing the air away from his face on a hot day.  “Just an old ghost from the past—one that I would prefer to leave slumbering.”

“I do wish you would tell me at least some of what you know about this.  Because if I am any good at my job, and I believe that I am, I have a hunch that you not only know who this is, but how they ended up in that shallow grave.”

“I didn’t kill anyone, sheriff.”  He shut his eyes tightly as he shook his head.  Flashes of memory still came even with his eyes shut tightly against them.

“Okay, I will accept that for the moment.”  He pulled at his lower lip as he thought about what Mr. Halverson had said.  “I would bet that you know a hell of a lot about what all happened back then.  I want you to tell me what you know.”

“That’s not so easily done.”  A faint smile touched his lips and he looked into the sheriff’s eyes for a moment; his gaze was slowly drawn back to the ring, then he looked away again.  “It was so long ago when you count the days and years and yet . . . time is a funny thing, it plays with us . . .” his words drifted into silence as he reached out to pick up the diamond ring.

His hand trembled.

It was weighty in his hand.  The ring was a heavy gold band with three perfect blue-white diamonds set into it, four karats in total.  It had been designed by a man named Cartier.  He held it so the light flashed across the surface of the stones.

It was a ring he remembered well and hated the associations that went with it.  He closed his eyes, but scenes from his past flickered through the darkness like visages from an aged, silent film.

The ring had been unearthed with a skeleton discovered in a shallow grave in a stand of oak trees on an unused piece of his land near the ruins of an old house.  The skeletal remains were being analyzed by the coroner and the anthropology professor from the university.  There had been a few other things that had been found with the bones that placed the burial somewhere around 1925.

Mr. Halverson opened his eyes and looked at the sheriff for a moment, then looked down at the ring again before he began to speak.

“I guess I do know most of the story.  Over the years, bits and pieces have come to light, not because I was seeking them, but they came to me nonetheless.  So much that I would have liked to forget.”  He shook his head gently.

“Help me out here, Mr. Halverson,” the Sheriff stated it more as a command than a request.

“It is a story that has taken nearly thirty-five years to come to this point, and since that time there were so many secrets kept by those of us who went on living.  So many things that no one talked about, questions no one asked.  No one dared, maybe we didn’t really want to know the answers.  Maybe no one really wanted the truth back then,” Bergin said to the sheriff, meeting his gaze.

“I want the truth now.  I am asking for the answers and I will get them one way or another.”  The sheriff held Bergin Halverson’s gaze.

“Yes, I am sure you will.  Eventually the truth does make its way through, no matter how deeply we try to bury it or hide it from sight,” his words again drifted into silence.  The eight-day clock on the wall ticking away the minutes was the only sound until Halverson began to speak again.  “It has taken me all these years to lay to rest those memories of what happened, and now, you want me to remember it all again.”

“I don’t expect it will be easy for you, but as sheriff of the county, I have a job to do and I have to get some answers. I believe this person was murdered, and the body hidden in that grave.”  He raised his eyebrows, pressing the matter.  “Do you know who it is in that grave?”

Bergin fought back the tears that threatened to fill his eyes.

The sheriff waited.

Dust motes danced in the shaft of light, the clock on the wall ticked away the seconds, from the street the sound of an occasional car, and far off the plaintive sound of a train whistle as it came into town.

“The person in that grave was someone that I . . .” Bergin Halverson let his words drift off into silence, shrouded in painful memory.  Bergin looked again into the light playing in the facets of the ring casting a shower of little rainbows about the room.  He looked deeper into the stone.  On one of the polished surfaces, he saw a fragment of his own reflection.  He looked into his own eye as it looked back at him from the depths of the diamond’s clarity.

“Maybe if I finally let go of the secrets I have been holding all these years, maybe then I can at last be free of the ghosts that haunt me,” Mr. Halverson sighed from the depths of his being, speaking more to himself than to the sheriff.

The sheriff said nothing, allowing Bergin to compose himself.  He had seen the struggle on the man’s face as he battled with his inner demons.  He knew that this time the man would begin to relate to him the events of the past.

The radiator began to hiss as the steam rose in the lines, air hammers pounded and clanked in the iron pipes.  The room began to warm against the chill that had settled in about them.

Mr. Halverson placed the ring gently back on the desk.

The sheriff sat and bided his time.

At last, Bergin Halverson began to relate his tale; his voice had a soft, far away quality to it as someone sorting through a lifetime of recollections, brushing away the thick cobwebs that clung to old memories.

“I believe it all began with a wish whispered from the heart of a beautiful but lonely woman.  The old adage tells us to be careful what we wish for,” Bergin sighed again, closing his eyes, struggling with the shadows of his past.  He could see them all again coming to life in his mind’s eye.  “She got her wish, in a way.”   He opened his eyes and looked out the window at nothing in particular.

“Who was that Mr. Halverson?”

“Clara,” he smiled, seeing her again, a young and beautiful woman of twenty-three.  He, of course, was only nineteen back then.  “Clara Lindgren.” Bergin said her name almost as if it were a caress.

***

S. M. Senden was raised in Winnetka , a north shore suburb of Chicago . From an early age reading and writing were passions as was travel. Senden has studied, lived and worked in the USA , Europe, the Mid-East and Africa , spending a number of years as an archaeological illustrator for various expeditions. S. M. Senden earned a Masters Degree and has studied creative writing, play writing and screenwriting.

A short story, Christopher’s Egg  was accepted for the anthology Change is in the Wind published by Second Wind. Senden has published various other short stories and articles.

S. M. Senden currently resides in the greater Omaha metro area and is working on another historical mystery Under the Anheuser Bush, as well as a modern day series involving forensic artist, Dr. Kate Ashton.

Click here to buy: Clara’s Wish

Things don’t work out as intended for Elaine Randolph when her doctors send her, with her young family, to the sleepy Texas town of Veil to aid her recovery from a serious illness. Much as she tries to rest, Elaine just keeps stumbling onto old, unsolved kidnappings, disappearances and cover ups. Veil, she discovers, has concealed a lot. Quirky neighbors, doubting family and growing danger draw the readers to a thrilling, deadly conclusion that is anything but restful.

Chapter One

“What’s wrong with the gazebo where it is?”

Elaine shuddered. She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the stranger’s voice, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

“Oh, sorry. Did I startle you?” He was wearing a light brown police uniform, smiling casually, his hands in his pockets. “Guess I should have introduced myself first.”

He was already too close to her and drew even closer as he reached out. For an instant she only stared at him, still trying to gather herself. She felt his hand, firm and powerful, grasp hers.

“I’m Larry Daughtry, the Chief of Police.” He let go and stepped back. Lifting a thumb in the direction of the simple, one-story house next door, he grinned boyishly. “I’m also your neighbor.”

At last she was able to respond. “Hello. My name is Elaine—”

“Elaine Randolph.” The police chief completed her sentence. “And you and your family just moved here from Dallas.”

“Well, Richardson.”

“Same difference to me. All big city.” He put his hands back in his pockets. “Welcome to Veil, the best hometown in North Texas.”

“Th-thank you, Mr. . . .”

“Daughtry. Larry Daughtry. Most folks call me ‘Chief’. But since we’re neighbors, why don’t you call me ‘Larry’?”

Elaine struggled to recall the little ritual she had been taught by her physical therapist. When flustered, it was okay to close her eyes, take a deep breath and say something about what she felt right then.

“You just surprised me, Mr. Daughtry.” She opened her eyes. “I didn’t realize anyone else was here. I was talking with our contractor, Mr.—”

“Tim Starling!” The chief interrupted her again. He stepped around her and punched the smaller, quiet man on the shoulder playfully. “Oh, Tim and I know each other very well. We go way back. How long we been knowing each other, son?”

Starling shook his head, annoyed at the intrusion. “Don’t get me to lying.”

“Well, we graduated high school together over at Blue Ridge.”

Elaine had calmed enough to study the chief more carefully. He wore the tan of a person who spent hours outside every day. His thinning, yellow hair and mustache were pale against his weathered face. And he was strongly built. Not as tall as her husband Jim, but thicker. Muscled.

“Mr. Starling is going to move our gazebo.”

“Yeah, that’s what I overheard.” The chief grasped one of the thick timbers of the shelter. “I’m sort of attached to it, really. I guess Tim told you he was the builder who constructed it originally?”

“Yes.”

“Well did he tell you I helped him?” His voice had a conspiratorial tone. “I was glad to help the Blanchard’s. They were great neighbors.” He faced her and smiled. “’Course you and Jim will be too, I’m sure.”

“I’m sorry,” Elaine said. “You—you have the better of me. You seem to know all about us.”

He hung his head in mock humility. “Well, it’s only gossip, Miss Randolph. In a town no bigger than Veil, new people moving in makes everybody curious—especially when they’re going to be your new neighbors. When Janet, your realtor—”

“Mrs. Thomason?”

“Yeah. When she put the ‘sold’ sign in the yard, my wife Sheila and I came right out and started quizzing her about you all. I suspect she didn’t tell us anymore than is public record.”

“Well, we don’t have any big secrets, Sheriff.”

“’Chief,’ ma’am. I understand your husband is a big executive downtown.”

She nodded. “He’s the Vice-President of Sales for DCC, a wholesale supply company.”

“Yes, ma’am. And I understand he’s keeping his job in Dallas and commuting every day?”

Elaine sighed. “Yes.”

“Quite a drive. And you have two young kids, right?”

“Yes. Our son Jake is almost sixteen. He’ll be a junior when school starts. And Camille, our daughter, is—” She stopped, her mind suddenly completely blank. “—I’m sorry. Sometimes my memory plays tricks on me.”

“That’s quite all right, ma’am.” For an instant the chief seemed truly sincere. “I believe Janet said she’s going to be in the sixth grade.”

“That’s right. Eleven. She’s eleven.”

“Sheila and I have a daughter ourselves. Well, that’s the rumor. We don’t see her much anymore now that she’s twenty-four. Her name’s Susan. She has an apartment in Bedford and works at DFW. We only see her when she runs out of groceries before the end of the month.”

“I see.” Elaine smiled. He seemed a bit more human to her as he talked about his child.

“So.” He pounded his hand against the upright timber again. “How come you’re moving the old gazebo?”

“Puttin’ in a hot tub,” Starling said.

“Oh?”

“It’s a therapeutic spa for me,” Elaine said slowly. “I’m recovering from some surgery on my brain, which can take a long time. This spa is part of my treatment.”

“Well, while recognizing it ain’t my business,” the chief said, “do you mind me asking why you don’t just put the tub on the far side and leave the gazebo where it is?”

“I’d have to dig under it anyway to run the plumbing,” Starling explained, looking down. “There’s not much to digging under the footings, bringing it back fifteen feet, setting it in and bringing it to level. Then we’ll build a low deck around the new site for the tub. Having the hot tub closer to the house makes it easier for Mrs. Randolph to get into and out of the water. Plus it offers a little more privacy. When we get it in place, we’ll put a fortress fence around the backyard.”

“Fence? Oh!” Daughtry acquired a surprised, chastened expression. “Well, Miss Randolph, just speaking from a nosy policeman’s point of view, it sure does make it more difficult to spy on your neighbors when they have a fence.”

They all laughed.

“Speaking of policing, I got to get to work. It’s nice to meet you and you’re in good hands with my old buddy Tim here. He really is a good contractor, for a guy who played the trombone. If you ever have an emergency or you need anything—you or anyone in your family—I’m here to protect and serve.”

“Nice—nice to meet you, Chief Daughtry,” she stammered.

“Please do call me ‘Larry,’ ma’am.”

He turned and walked away, hands in his pockets. It seemed to her that he made no noise as he moved. She couldn’t hear him leaving any more than she heard him come up behind her.

Elaine glanced toward Starling. “Trombone player?”

He smiled, shaking his head. “You aren’t from Texas I take it, Mrs. Randolph?”

“California originally.”

“Well in Texas, all high school boys are divided into two groups: those who play football and those who don’t. Those footballers like Larry, who was a nose tackle on defense and a tight end on offense, are accorded a special distinction of ‘near sainthood’. I liked music and I played in the marching band.” He began making notes again on the pad that held a large diagram of the backyard. “Actually I was all-district band three years in a row. And—” He pulled out his tape measure. “—when I went out to Commerce, to East Texas State, to study drafting and construction, I played in the marching band there as well.”

Her gaze followed Daughtry, who had disappeared through the row of cedars shielding his house from theirs.

“What about the chief?”

“He went into the Marines. Became a military policeman or shore patrol—whatever they call ‘em. Did three or four hitches and came back to work in law enforcement around here. He started as a Cochran County deputy and, about five years ago when the chief’s spot came open in Veil, he was the natural choice. I guess.”

“He seemed happier to see you than you were to see him.”

Starling chuckled. “I always thought Larry was a kind of a thug. He bullied me. Not that he was the only one.” He began to stretch his tape measure along the yard. “It’s the divine right of football players to torment band guys.”

“He seemed a little concerned that we were going to move the gazebo.”

“Well.” Starling shook his head. “It’s your gazebo. You can do what you want with it.” He let the tape slide back with a snap and wrote a series of numbers on the paper. “I didn’t realize this hot tub was for health reasons, Mrs. Randolph.”

“Oh. My children think it’s going to be for them. But actually its main purpose is to help me get better. I haven’t always been this way, Mr. Starling.”

“What way?”

“You’re kind. I haven’t always stuttered and lost words and gotten flustered at little things.”

“You had a brain tumor, did you?” He pulled the tape out again, setting it perpendicular to the point of his previous set of measurements.

“Not a tumor. An aneurysm.”

“Oh, yes.” He began to write again. “I heard of those. A ballooning blood vessel.”

“Yes. I never—never knew I had it. Until the day it burst.”

“You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind?” He handed her the end of the tape. “Stand right there and hold this.” He backed away from the house and the tape made a little gurgling sound as he pulled it. “My Uncle Horace died with an aneurysm.”

“I was in the hospital. Already, I mean. I’m a nurse. I was a nurse, anyway. I was what they call a ‘med-surg’ nurse.”

“Uh huh. Ma’am, would you hold the end to the edge of that post?”

“Okay. And I was feeling so strange. . . . I said to my friend . . .”

He was in front of her suddenly, gently taking the tape from her hand. “Are you all right, Mrs. Randolph?”

She gazed at his face, seeing the genuine concern in his eyes. “How long?”

“Mmm. Five or ten seconds, I suppose.”

“Oh. That’s not so bad.” She straightened herself. “Did I tell you about Marci?”

“Who?”

“My friend. We were working together that day on my last shift. I turned to her and said, ‘The room is turning left and blue.’” She laughed. “Isn’t that funny? ‘The room is turning left and blue.’ That’s the last thing I remember. My next true memory was in the ICU and I had been there two weeks. I collapsed and they took me right away. If I had been anywhere else, I would’ve died. I had eight hours of surgery. They shaved my head.”

He had stopped taking measurements and closed his notepad. His expression sober, he stood listening to her.

“Well, at first they just shaved where they went in. Later they shaved it all to keep an EEG running on me.” She smiled. “They kept waving at my brain to see if it would wave back.”

“. . . You lived. You got well.”

“Mostly. I had to learn to walk and talk. And feed myself. I didn’t get home from rehabilitation for six weeks after the surgery. Most of my mental abilities have come back at least part way. The worst part is not knowing sometimes if I’m awake or dreaming.” She climbed into the gazebo. “Can we sit down here and rest for a minute, Mr. Starling?”

“Of course.” He stepped into the shelter and sat across from her. “I have pretty much what I need. I guess I didn’t realize this was part of your recovery process. We’ll get it finished just as quickly as we can.”

“You know,” she said, “this whole move is supposed to be therapy for me. My neurologist told my husband I needed to get away from the city. He said I needed a quiet, restful environment where things were stable and there wouldn’t be a lot of excitement. He said we should find the most boring place we could.”

“Well that’s Veil. You’ve succeeded in following your doctor’s orders.”

“Ha. Jim—my husband—has been so wonderful about this. So have my children. We haven’t sold our house in Richardson. We leased it out for a year. Furnished. My kids will go to Veil schools for a year. Jim will commute sixty miles each way five days a week for a year.” She shrugged. “I sure hope I get better.”

“If I don’t miss my guess,” the contractor said, “watching you continue to recover will be all it takes to make their sacrifice worthwhile.”

She smiled. “You’re very kind, Mr. Starling.”

He stood. “Well, this afternoon one of the guys on my crew, Antonio, will come over and dig around the footings of the gazebo. We need to see what shape they’re in and exactly how hard it will be to move them.”

“Okay. Antonio, right? I’ll be watching for him.”

“Is there anything you need help with before I leave? Anything you need carried or moved?”

“Oh, thank you. No. It’s actually time for my afternoon medication and nap. When I wake up from that, Jim will be here with my kids and we can start putting away all the boxes the movers brought in last night.”

He leaned against one of the gazebo posts. “You know, this will work out okay for you all. I know you’ve had to give up your life in Richardson for a year, but a lot of good things will happen for you. The economy is bound to keep getting better. These changes to your property—the new deck and built in hot tub, the fence—all these things will increase the value of this house for when you sell it.” He straightened. “Okay then. Tomorrow we’ll start by lifting up the gazebo and setting it yonder. It’ll all be over in a week.

***

“Did they have a daughter, Mom?”

Elaine sat on the unmade bed in Camille’s new room. “I don’t know much about the Blanchard’s, sweetie. This room is so feminine, though, it makes me think they must have a girl about your age.”

“I wonder if she had friends around here? If there are more girls my age?”

“Don’t know. Maybe we’ll find out in the next few days.”

Do you like this lavender okay? I know you prefer yellow. We can paint it.”

Camille walked away from the box of clothes she was unpacking and sat down beside her mother. “This is weird, Mom. I hope you don’t mind me saying this.”

“You can say anything you want, Cammie.”

Her face grew dark. “I had to leave all my friends. And tell them, ‘Well, I’ll be back. Maybe.’ And I’m coming here and I’d like to make new friends. Only, in a year or so I may have to give them up too.”

Elaine nodded. “It is unfair, isn’t it?” She toyed with her daughter’s long auburn hair. “I don’t know how to make it up to you.”

Camille set her jaw. “How about a pony?”

“Ha! That’s my girl. I think you have to run that one by your dad. He’s in charge of horses and all other livestock.”

“Like kittens?”

“All that. Have you noticed your brother is strangely quiet?”

“The Jakester?” He didn’t unpack much. Last I saw he set up his Xbox and was playing some disgusting game. He plugged in his ear buds so no one would hear him.”

“Ah, teenage boys. Maybe I should go encourage him to finish putting away his stuff.”

“What’s for supper, Mom?” she called as Elaine walked out of the corner bedroom.

“’Dad’s Surprise’.” She replied. “I have no idea. Are there any restaurants in this burg?”

She padded toward the other end of the “L” shaped house, through the kitchen and living room and down the hall toward the other two bedrooms. Elaine stood in front of her son’s closed door.

“Jake.” When he did not answer, as she had anticipated he would not, she tapped on the door. “Jacob James…. All right. You asked for it.”

She pushed the door open. He was listening to his iPod and stuffing clothes into his large, old chest of drawers. With his signature yank, he pulled the ear buds out with a single tug.

“Ola, Mammacita. Como esta?”

“Mammacita is okay. Are you making progress?”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking.”

“Every time you think, son, it costs me money.”

“Oh, Mom.” He flopped on his bed, putting his hands behind his head between the first and second bounce. “You want me to get acclimated here in Hicksville, right.”

She tipped her head warily to one side.

“Just saying. I’m going to need a whole new wardrobe. You know, bib overalls, tacky western shirts with pearl buttons. Probably some suede work boots. We’ll get those at the ‘Cowboy Consignment Shop.’ That way they’ll already have cow manure stains.”

“I can see now you’re gonna fit right in.”

“I’ll give it my best, Mom”

“People do not like smart aleck strangers making fun of them.”

“Ah, Mom!” He covered his ears in mock annoyance. “Dad already gave me this speech.”

“Do tell? And what did he say?”

“He said I couldn’t make fun of anybody either to their face or behind their back. He said I couldn’t ju-jitsu anybody no matter how much they asked for it. He said if you two get a call from the police or the principal, you’re automatically not on my side.”

“Well it sounds like he’s covered most of the bases.”

Jake sighed. “He said we’re going home this weekend for Gram Lou’s birthday.”

“It is her birthday, isn’t it? I don’t know what kind of present we can get her out here.”

“He said he might let me practice driving when we get to her house.”

Elaine pulled the chair away from his desk and sat on it. “I’m sorry, son. I should be letting you drive every day.”

“I know, Mom. The thing is, this is a much better place to learn to drive. It’s not like North Dallas or Central Expressway. There is no traffic. No crazy drivers. Well, except for all the tractors on the road.”

She smiled at him. “We’ll be back in Richardson before long. Maybe that’s where you should be practicing on the streets.”

“I’m adaptable. Just give me the key and I’m booking.” He caught her eyes, suddenly sincere. “I am a good driver, you know.”

From somewhere in the direction of the kitchen, Jim Randolph’s voice called out. “Dad is home! He’s got pizza.”

“All right!” Jake leaped off his bed and shot out the bedroom door.

Elaine followed him. “Wonderful teenager.”

Jim sat two large flat boxes and two two-liter soda bottles on the table. Packing paper flew around him as he dug inside the boxes stacked by the cupboards. Watching his form—tall, lean, still youthful—made Elaine feel a bit more like an invalid. And guilty that she had not unpacked the dishes, even though he had told her to leave them alone.

“Plates coming,” Jim said. “Glasses coming. . . . Get your own ice.”

“Thanks, Jim.”

“You’re welcome. Have the kids got all their stuff put away?”

She slid into a chair at the kitchen table. “They got started. They have good attitudes.”

“Well I guess that ought to be worth something. You want pepperoni and mushroom or supreme or both?”

“One of each, please.”

“Coming up.” He plopped a stoneware saucer in front of her with two slices of pizza on it.

“This is not bad,” Jake said.

“Is there a napkin?” Camille waved her fingers like they were on fire. “It’s a little greasy.”

“Here, kid,” her father said. “Explain to your brother what these are for.”

“That’s what jeans are for,” Jake mumbled around his pepperoni.

“I have a question,” Jim continued. “This little town has one pizza parlor, one hamburger joint, one greasy spoon diner and three Mexican restaurants. What’s up with that?”

“Dad, would you fill up my glass?” Camille asked. “I like burritos.”

“You remember, Jim, when we lived in California and you applied for that job up in Marin County ten or eleven years ago?”

“Sure.”

“Remember remarking about how that little town had one fast food place, one American bistro and four Thai restaurants?”

“Ah! You’re right I do. I guess every place has it’s own special weirdness.”

“That was California,” Jake said. “California is supposed to be weird. Texas is supposed to be old-school.”

Elaine took a drink and set her glass on the table. “I meant to tell you I met our next door neighbor.”

“You mean the cop? Sandy headed guy with a mustache. A couple inches shorter than me?”

It startled her. “You met him too?”

“Well, actually he pulled up alongside me when I was leaving the pizza place. I’m opening the door and this police car eases up beside me. The passenger window rolls down and the driver says, ‘Hi, Jim!’”

She nodded. “That’s Larry Daughtry all right.”

“My first thought was that something happened to you and they called an ambulance and they sent this guy to find me.”

“I’m fine, dear.”

“Yes, I know. Anyway, this guy parks, gets out and comes around. He tells me he’s our neighbor and if we need anything, we shouldn’t hesitate to ask.”

She gazed at him, waiting for him to continue. “So? What’d you think?”

“What’d I think? Seems like a nice enough guy. Why? Don’t you like him?”

“You know, I can’t say what it is exactly, but somehow the chief makes me feel a little uncomfortable.”

“Is that why you had a spell?” Camille asked.

“Oh,” Jim said, “was it a bad one?”

Elaine shrugged. “It was only five or ten seconds. I was talking to Mr. Starling, the contractor. He caught me and set me down in the gazebo.” She frowned at Camille. “What are you, the seizure police?”

“What did Larry Daughtry have to do with it?”

“Oh, nothing, hon. I mean, I had just been talking to him. I think it had to do with me being on my feet all morning and standing outside for half-an-hour talking to Tim. I just overdid it.”

Jim looked at her skeptically. “Well . . . why did you say that about Daughtry making you uncomfortable?”

“He was just real nosy, is all. Well, first he just seemed to appear out of nowhere. And he just inserted himself into my conversation with Tim Starling and took over. And he seemed to know everything about us: where you worked, how many kids we have, how old they are.”

“That’s cop skills for you,” Jake said, his mouth full.

“That’s our realtor,” Elaine replied. “When Janet put out the ‘sold’ sign, apparently Daughtry and his wife Sheila saw her and asked her about us.”

Jim shrugged. “Sounds like he has what it takes to make a good police officer.”

“Suppose he does that with all new Veil residents?” she asked. “You know, just to let us know that we’re being watched. Maybe it’s his way of telling us to mind our P’s and Q’s.”
“Or what?” Jim asked.

“Or they burn a pile of cow shit in your front yard.”

“Jake!”

“Daddy, Mom told me today I could have a kitten.”

“Cammie! What’s wrong with you two? I told you to ask your dad. I didn’t make you any promises.”

“Mom’s promises don’t count anyway,” Jake said casually. “She’s not right in the head.”

“I’m right enough to confiscate your Xbox, smart guy.”

The teenager grinned. “Oops! Did I say that out loud? I must have an aneurysm.”

“Cammie,” Jim said, “if I wouldn’t let you have a cat in Richardson, why would I let you have a cat in Veil?”

“Not a cat. A kitten.”

“Kittens have a way of becoming cats.”

“Not if you’re lucky.”

“This doesn’t concern you, Jake.”

“Come on, Daddy. We’re out in the country.”

“We’re in a subdivision, missy.”

“Cats are not pets are around anyway,” Jake persisted.

“Oh really.” His father’s voice was testy. “And what are they?”

“They serve a purpose out here on the frontier. You know. They’re meant for keeping down mice. And for target practice.”

“Oh, Jake!”

Jim shook his head. “He’s just saying that to get a rise out of you, missy.”

Elaine began to laugh aloud. The others stopped eating and talking and turned to her.

“Are you okay, E?”

“Yes, yes I am.” She sighed and smiled. “I spent most of the morning worrying about whether or not we would ever have a normal family day here in Veil. And I shouldn’t have. This is just like being back home.”

***

She sat on the edge of the bed listening to Jim’s peaceful snoring and trying to assure herself she was truly awake.

Nights like this one were the worst for her. The dreams could be so incredibly vivid, as well as macabre and full of anxiety. Waking up offered little relief to her because of the hallucinations that often attended her unfinished dreams, breaking into her consciousness, as a doctor had explained it. It was only when she was awake in broad daylight she was truly aware of what was happening around her.

The medicine helped. The act of simply getting out of bed and going to the kitchen for a glass of water and opening the pill bottle often helped her shake the dreams and illusions. It was the desire of that small comfort that caused her to stand, unsteady at first, and walk quietly out of the bedroom. The clock glowed “2:30” in pale crimson.

In anticipation of a night like this, she had strategically placed night lights throughout the little house, glowing breadcrumbs intended to lead her to the kitchen and back in this new, unfamiliar place without tripping over something and hurting herself or waking her family.

As she walked through the dining room with its large plate glass windows, she glanced out at the backyard. In the moonless night, the only thing obvious to her was the dark outline of the gazebo. Then, it seemed, something in the gazebo moved.

Elaine stopped inadvertently. She heard herself draw a surprised breath. Shaking her head, she closed her eyes. Hallucinations. She glanced back, expecting to see only the straight, rigid lines of the wooden structure. Instead she saw again the moving shadow.

The dark form was not in the gazebo, but rather behind it. Entranced, she watched the shadow moving rhythmically. This was a mind trick to end all tricks. The gazebo was morphing into a living thing, looking like some great insect emerging from a cocoon. She could make no sense of the repeated motions she saw, until the shadow splintered, a long, thin branch standing apart.

“A handle,” she whispered. “A broom—no a shovel handle.” She felt herself smile. “I’m dreaming that Antonio came back. He’s digging around the foundation again.”

The flowing shadow disappeared. Elaine stepped toward the plate glass.

“There. You see. All in my head.”

Just as suddenly, the shadow appeared again—only half as tall as before and not behind the gazebo, but to one side of it. Smoothly the shadow grew and remained still. It had assumed the shape of a man.

Elaine stared at it. She knew this shape. She recognized it from somewhere. Whose shadow was it? And then the thought dawned upon her that the dark form was either staring at her or standing with its back to her, looking in the opposite direction. And it occurred to her that she was not engulfed in darkness. If the figure in the backyard was actually a person, it could clearly see her watching it in the dull nightlights of the dining room.

She shivered, embarrassed and impatient at the illusion. Crossing her arms over her chest, she went on into the kitchen. The pill bottle cap made a satisfying pop as she thumbed it off. She dropped the pill onto her tongue and washed it down with lukewarm tap water and started back to her bed.

Passing through the dining room, she stopped to make sure the shadow was gone. There was a slight movement in the far corner of her vision. Something disappeared through the cedars that marked the edge of the Daughtry’s property.

That was the familiar outline. It was the police chief whose shadow had been by her gazebo.

***

Sally Jones, long an aficionado of murder mysteries, at last steps forward to try her own hand. In her first effort she has penned a cozy, engaging novel of suspense that readers will not want to put down. Though she has written for years, Jones finds the effort and concentration required to write a seamless mystery both exhausting and exhilarating. The professional administrator and paralegal is now developing a second thriller.

Lazarus Barnhill, a veteran novelist known for work that crosses genres and captivates readers, has melded his distinctive writing style with that of Jones in this, his first collaboration with another author. After a three year absence from the literary scene, Barnhill returned in 2012 with two new novels, as well as participating in the multi-author thriller Rubicon Ranch.

Click here to buy: Come Home to Me, Child

Amid swaying palm trees, lush gardens, and the blue ocean, Valeska Bernhart, a faded Hollywood film star; Glick Glickman, a has-been Broadway impresario; and Jon Sullivan, an out-of-work New York actor, meet at West Palm Acres, a retirement community in West Palm Beach, Florida, and reinvent themselves for a new chance at hilarious happiness.

Chapter One

“Mister Goldberg, it’s time to take your pill,” Jon shouted through the dark green steel door. 4-G. The brass nameplate readHarry Goldberg andOscar Shapiro. Getting no response, Jon knocked on the door. Not so much a “knock knock”, but rather a light rap. Still getting no response, he banged three times with a closed fist before shouting out the next directive: “Mister Shapiro, it’s time to take your pill.” Jon waited. Pressing the bell would have been easier, but it was an absolute last resort. Something to do with the shrill sound of the buzzer startling the folks with sensitive ears; maybe faulty hearing aids. A hand knock, then the brass knocker only if necessary. No bell. He didn’t question the direction. Per his training, he did as he was told.

So far, his first day on the job at the place was going satisfactorily. Actually, he didn’t know if it was going satisfactorily or not, never having been a medical clown before. No one in management knew if it was going well or not. The launch of a new experiment to remind residents to take their medications would take time to assess. It wasn’t so much the reminder, but the take on it. Medical clown was a good description.

New York based actor Jon Sullivan was standing in the fourth floor hallway or, as the residents labeled it, ‘the penthouse,’ of Building G at West Palm Acres in West Palm Beach, one of Florida’s premier retirement communities, and he was dressed in a costume knocking on doors reminding residents to take their pills. A clown costume. Jon Sullivan. Never say never in life because this was something he would have said would never happen to him.

The décor had a dizzying effect; repelling, yet, he had to admit, strangely attractive. It was the same on all the floors. The walls were papered in floral prints of bright shades of emerald green, orange, yellow and varying shades of purple to blend in, more or less, with the varied color of the doors. The floors were covered in a thin carpet of a pattern in corresponding colors. Only in Florida. Jon learned that the wallpaper would soon be replaced by a simpler pattern of swaying palm trees on a white background. Nice. He also learned this was a rumor started and spread around for many years by a longstanding resident.

It had taken nearly four hours to get around the seven buildings on the property all with the similar design: four floors, each with an elevator, thirty apartments. About eighty percent were two bedrooms; the other twenty percent were made up of studios and one bedroom. This information he learned from the brochure at his training session. He didn’t actually go around and count.

Jon welcomed the exercise. After a short break, he started the rounds again. That way everyone was reminded to take their pills at what had been deemed the general interval between prescribed medications. No one had worked through what happened if a resident was not in his apartment when the knock came from Sullivan. There were multiple activities going on all the time at West Palm Acres, from an arts and crafts class to the musical group called Flats and Sharps to the aquatics at the indoor and outdoor pools, card games, and much more. Anyway it was the early days of the project, so no one was worried about flaws yet. The general consensus was that the kinks would get worked out in the doing. That’s why it was called ‘an experiment.’

Jon’s voice projection was good as he reminded each resident on his list about their pills. Too bad his voice projection hadn’t helped him get an acting job in nearly eight months. And before that, there was a long interval between acting jobs. The theatrical term was resting. Between jobs, actors waited for the magic call from their agents about the next job. To make ends meet, lots of actors—and that included Jon—sometimes took odd jobs. Nothing could be odder than this one. He had hated leaving all the action in New York, but he’d hung around long enough with nothing happening. And when you need work, you go where the work is, whatever it is. He figured a job out of the acting business would be less of a stigma if he was out of town, away from the mainstream of the highly competitive acting community. And winter was rolling in up north, so he wasn’t going to mind being warm for a while. The job included bed and board and a small stipend, enough to cover his rent controlled studio apartment in a pretty good neighborhood in lower Manhattan.

A quick look at his reflection in a window told him he was ageless in the clown suit, not that that was the intention. As it happened he was thirty-four, had an acting range of four or five years either way, was tall, and he was single. That part made it simpler to come and go. Two years ago, he had taken a job on a cruise ship and was part of a troupe doing their thing on the high seas nightly. His specialty was a juggling act and telling a few jokes at the same time. Not a very good sailor, he had spent his off-stage hours mostly being sick in the head. He vowed no matter how bad things got, he was never going to do a cruise ship thing again. There was that word again. Never. A word never to be used.

Under the clown costume, that was a little warm on his body, but nothing unbearable, Jon’s appearance was generic. Except for his hair. His hair was red. In bright sunlight, it looked orange. In Florida, he looked like he had a tomato on his head. Not the bright red type. The yellow-red ones that were supposed to be better for your health. He had lovely soft brown eyes and—once people got over the hair—that’s what they focused on. Growing up, he was teased in the neighborhood because no one had hair like that. His mother didn’t have red-orange hair, his father didn’t have red-orange hair, his sister had a nice head of brown hair. His mother’s, “That’s how it happens sometimes,” was explanation enough and couldn’t be questioned. Jon grew up and outgrew hating being a redhead. By college, they were calling him ‘Red’ after Red Skeleton, who was his hero. And when his career was beginning to take off, he was easily identifiable in the acting game by producers and directors when he went to auditions. “Let’s get the redhead” or “Call back the redhead for a second reading” or “Who’s the redhead’s agent?” It was his calling card. And he wasn’t going to fight it. For movies the color could always be changed. It’s what actors did all the time.

He liked being single. Marriage might have prevented his gallivanting around so freely, taking jobs where they came up. It wasn’t that he was anti-women. Hardly. He dated lots of actresses, but nothing ever developed into a serious relationship; that is, he got out before it got to that next level, much to the disappointment of his parents and probably the female party. He never stayed around long enough to find out. He wasn’t a cad or anything like that. It’s just that he believed when a thing was over, it was over. No need to conduct a post-mortem.

His parents still lived in the same house where he was born just outside Chicago. They thought their son was in New York teaching a course called, “Creativity in Communication” at a college. It was easier to let them think so. The ultra conservative Sullivans never would have understood or approved of his lifestyle. Actually, he had taught an acting class one semester, so it was more of a fib than an out and out lie. The real lie was about his name change. His birth name was Duane Sullivan, Junior, but thinking it would be easier to say, spell and remember, he had changed it to Jon when he moved to the big Apple fourteen years ago. Jon told his family there were too many Duane Sullivans in New York, especially in communication. Trusting souls, they never doubted his choice.

He had had to reveal many of these details in an interview before West Palm Acres would hire him. He had also been subjected to a drug test. He didn’t even drink wine. Never had. And never had the desire to snort anything. In these two cases, the word “never” was totally appropriate. When his urine test came out a copper color, he was suspected of something, but the lab technicians couldn’t put their finger on it. A second test proved him to be safe. Further investigation revealed that the copper color was attributed to the fact that Jon had eaten about half a pound of red beets the night before the test. Auditioning for a Broadway show or a television role was less intensive than this one at West Palm Acres, but he needed money so he didn’t complain. In a way it was kind of an acting job. He was in costume. He was playing a character. He had received a script to memorize his one line. He had been given directions. Definitely an acting role.

Signs of life behind the door to 4-G finally could be heard, and Jon Sullivan had something to focus on other than Jon Sullivan; just one of the many idiosyncrasies of an actor, appropriately titled, Me, Me, Me.

Two men stood at the now opened door looking up at the stranger. The man on the right asked with curiosity, “Who are you?” Not waiting for a reply, he said emphatically, “If you’re from the travel people, we already told them we don’t want to do the day trip on the cruise ship.”

The man on the left explained to Jon—who didn’t know who was Goldberg and who was Shapiro, “Everyone goes so they can gamble for the day. I get seasick at the indoor pool we got here, never mind an ocean voyage.”

“Another country heard from,” the other one said. “Besides, it isn’t a voyage. The ship stands still for five hours.” Looking at the person standing in front of him, he asked, “Are you the one yelling about some cockamamie pills?” And looking him up and down, added, “In a clown get-up yet or maybe your everyday attire?”

Had Jon detected a slight note of disdain? After all, a stranger telling you to take your pill could create some mistrust. With the door open, Jon was surprised to see how dark it was in the apartment.

One of the gentlemen picked up on Jon’s look and volunteered an explanation. “The sun’s so bright we can’t see the TV. So we keep the drapes closed.”

So much for the hype about the benefits of vitamin D, Jon thought. It was necessary to get down to business. Looking down at the little man on the right, Jon said in a serious tone, “It’s time to take your pill, Mister Goldberg.” Little as in height-wise, not meaning a person of lesser value.

Without hesitation, the short man said with authority, “I’m Shapiro. The ugly one is Goldberg.” The arthritic finger first pointed to, then poked his roommate in the ribs.

Ignoring the ‘ugly’ reference, the pointed finger, and finally the shove, Goldberg restored himself. “We took the pill ten minutes ago. Since we have the same prescription, we split it in half. Saves on the medical expenses,” he said with superiority. “And health-wise, we feel the same with or without the pill; with or without the whole or the half. So there it is.” Nodding towards Shapiro, he said matter-of-factly, “If he dies, he dies.”

If Jon’s eyes were closed, he would think it was actor Walter Matthau with his deliberate enunciation on certain words. Oscar Shapiro’s voice was gentler in tone; more like Eli Wallach. Jon had trouble believing the explanation about their creative pill taking. Apart from not believing them, he wasn’t sure if what they said they did was even legal or medically correct; but, as he was only supposed to deliver the one line giving them the reminder to take the pill and not monitor the actual taking of it, he said nothing.

Harry Goldberg caught sight of the elevator door opening down the hall. Without moving, he called out to no one, “Somebody hold that damn door. I want to eat.” He continued, “Whoever heard of a dining room in a basement? I eat my meals facing a brick wall.”

Oscar Shapiro quickly added, no doubt to impress the clown, “There’s a palm tree out there, too, in a beautiful garden with a stone bench. Don’t listen to him.”

“Don’t listen to him. I’m paying monthly fees for an underground garden with a brick wall,” Harry Goldberg said with great annoyance.

“We’re thinking of getting a petition up to change the name West Palm Acres to Garden of the Moon,” Oscar Shapiro said. “It has a romantic touch.”

“Romance, shmomance. It’ll never happen.” Turning his attention to the clown, Harry Goldberg said, “There was a movie where that doctor character put on a clown face to make the patients feel better. Are you a medical person?”

“Doctor. You mean, doctor,” corrected Oscar Shapiro.

“What?” asked Goldberg. “I said that.”

“Doctor. Not medical person,” Shapiro corrected impatiently. That’s what you said.”

“What’s the matter with you? That’s what I said.”

Not wanting to get in the middle of their thing, whatever their thing was, Jon jumped in. “Look guys, I’m just a kind of aide in a clown suit. I’ve been hired to go floor to floor, door to door, up and down to all the apartments in all the buildings. That way, everyone gets a nice reminder every four to five hours to take the next pill. It’s a new experiment. Management thought the clown suit would add a bit of fun for the patients. I mean residents.” He quickly made the correction, but it was too late. The grave error had already slipped from his lips. To take their minds off his stupid fluff, in a stage voice from his lower register, he proudly announced, “In real life, I’m an actor. My name is Jon Sullivan. You may have seen me in some things.” Typical of many actors, he was always citing his credentials; if not actually citing them to anyone, he would rehearse them in his mind to reinforce his abilities. He held out his hand, not to be kissed, but perhaps to be shaken as a goodwill gesture.

Ignoring the extended white gloved hand of the clown, Goldberg and Shapiro looked at one another before looking back up at the clown. Actor? They’d been injected in the arm with a life-enhancing serum just by the word. They loved actors, acting, anything to do with performers, stars, television, movies, Hollywood. All of it.

“I saw you on the box last night,” Goldberg announced, shaking his head with approval. “You’re very good.”

“No, you didn’t, moron,” Shapiro reprimanded. To Jon, he said, “Don’t listen to him, Clown Solomon.”

At first, Jon wasn’t sure he should make the distinction, but in the end, he did. “Sullivan. Jon. You don’t have to say the clown part. Just Jon Sullivan.” It didn’t matter. No one was listening.

Shapiro explained, “Listen, last night, we attended a program on reversing arteries, so my friend here couldn’t have seen you.”

“Heart disease,” Goldberg corrected. “Not reversing. It was about arteries. How can you reverse arteries? And besides, it wasn’t reversing. It was the other re word.” He thought a second before coming up with, “Reconstructing.” The attempt to snap his finger didn’t quite work. He tried again. Still no luck. He gave up.

“What in blazes are you talking about?” Shapiro snapped. Turning away from Goldberg, he addressed the clown. “We see movies now and again, but they are nothing like they used to be. We used to see every movie that was ever made. In a real movie theater. Big screen. Lots of seats. Down and up. A balcony.” His eyes shone as he recalled the time. “Maybe we’ve seen you; maybe not.”

Caught up in the reverie of the bygone movie days, Goldberg said, “Back then, they had a movie, then a live orchestra came right up out of the floor, then a second movie. Remember, Oscar? Harry James. Benny Goodman. Tommy Dorsey. That was a real show.”

“Remember?” exclaimed Shapiro. “Remember? I was there, dumbo. Twenty-five cents every Saturday. It was a lot of money back then. We weren’t rich, but we always found the money to go to the movies.”

“Every Saturday, we were there.” Goldberg eyes misted as he remembered.

“So you guys knew one another a long time ago.” Jon meant it as a question, but it came out like a statement.

“Are you kidding? Over fifty years I know this ganef,” said Shapiro with affection.

“Once I stole a button from him, so I became a ganef, a crook, according to him,” Goldberg said with equal affection. “Ganef  he thinks sounds more classy so he uses it. We worked together in the garment district on Seventh Avenue in New York,” he explained. The images raced through his brain and just for that moment in time, you could see the switch on his face, and he wasn’t here but there.

“Manhattan,” Shapiro corrected.

Ignoring him, Goldberg went on. “It was a time when clothes had really good stitching. We were tailors,” he said with great pride. He reached out and touched the front of the loose jacket Jon had on. “Excuse me, do you mind?” Jon gave the go ahead nod. Harry handled a button. He lifted up the collar and ran his finger down a seam. “Oi. Look at this, Oscar. Machine. Today, they don’t know one stitch from another. He’ll be lucky if this outfit lasts through the week. Three days tops.”

“They did that because of the heat. Had to make it lightweight. It’s just a costume,” Jon mumbled, straightening his collar and heeding their words without tugging too heavily on the fabric. He said brightly, “I bet those were the days, huh? Anyone who was anyone wore hand-tailored.”

Shapiro was thinking movies, not shirts. “Do you know the actress Sharon Stone? Some beauty.”

“What about Rosalind Russell? Ever meet her?” Goldberg piped in, adding, “Jewish. A lot of people didn’t know that.” This type of conversation made him tingle with excitement.

“They didn’t know that because she wasn’t Jewish,” Shapiro snapped.

“What are you talking about, moron? She was Jewish. Real name was Goldberg.”

“That’s your name, dummy.”

“We were distant cousins.”

“I know you fifty-three years. How come I never knew that?”

“I don’t tell you everything.”

“Why not?”

Jon was enjoying the two, but he couldn’t allow himself to be drawn into their debate because with this pill job, time was of the essence. He excused himself and headed down the hallway to the next door, surprised but not sorry that the vaudeville team was following. At their own pace, of course.

4-H. The place where the name should be was blank. He checked the list on his clipboard notes. Hank Herman’s name was there. Jon put his ear to the door. Not hearing anything, he shouted, “Mister Herman, it’s time to take your pill.” Jon waited a couple of seconds. He knocked on the lime green steel door. “Mister Herman?”

When the duo of Goldberg and Shapiro caught up to him, in unison they announced in flat tones, “He’s dead.”

“Dropped right into the soup. Only eighty-four. A kid,” said the eighty-seven year old Harry Goldberg, further explaining, “Last week in the dining room in the middle of lunch. Just like that.” Another attempt to snap his fingers didn’t exactly work.

Out of respect, Shapiro lowered his head before speaking. “We don’t know who’s moving in. It’s a nice big unit. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, make-shift kitchen. Just like ours. We don’t cook. I’m eighty-seven.”

“Eighty-nine,” Goldberg corrected. “I’m eighty seven.”

“Are you sure?” Shapiro tired to do a mental calculation, but gave up. “Oh, well, it’s only a number.”

“Until you have to get out of bed in the morning.” Goldberg never talked about it to strangers, but his hips, knees, feet, eyelids, ears, elbows, and fingers ached constantly.

It was back to the movies with Harry and Oscar continuing their observations about who was and who was not Jewish in Hollywood while Jon crossed Hank Herman’s name off his list. He would have to report this to the office so they could update his report.

“Weren’t you guys going down to the dining room?” Jon asked concerned they might be missing their meal time.

“I’m not hungry,” Shapiro said.

“They want us to eat lunch at ten-thirty in the morning,” grumbled Goldberg.

“And dinner at four-thirty in the afternoon. Who ever heard of such a thing? The verkakte early bird special,” complained Shapiro. “I used to eat a big lunch when I was young around one o’clock. Then dinner—only then they called it supper—was at seven, eight; sometimes as late as eight-thirty.”

“You mean when you could chew,” said Goldberg.

Ignoring the person he shared his living accommodations with, he said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to eat when.”

“Or when to eat what,” added Goldberg. “Mind you, the mashed yams yesterday weren’t too bad. I liked them.”

“Too dry,” said Shapiro. “Now they call them sweet potatoes, I think.”

“Same thing.”

“Sunday was the day we had chicken with yam potatoes.”

“Yam is a potato. You don’t say yam potato,” corrected Goldberg.

Oscar Shapiro was strolling down memory lane and wasn’t listening to Harry. “My mother worked full time so the kitchen was my grandmother’s department.  Roast chicken for lunch, a chicken sandwich with lettuce and mayonnaise on toasted white bread for dinner while I listened to my favorite programs on the radio: Jack Benny; Fred Allen; Amos `n Andy. On Monday, my grandmother sent me to school with a thick sliced chicken sandwich on thick white bread, and Monday night we had chicken salad with chopped celery on a bed of lettuce. In those days, no one worried about allergies and arthritis and inflamed joints. Why would that matter when there was the wishbone ritual? The wishbone. The highlight. Every Sunday, my grandmother would pull it off the cooked chicken, dry it off with a paper towel, and hold it out to me. I grabbed one end in my small hand while she held the other end and we each made a wish. Then we pulled the thin bones apart. The one who got the fat end was the winner. That person’s wish would come true. I can’t remember what I wished for.”

“Probably a more varied menu,” chuckled Goldberg.

Jon wasn’t sure where this bantering was headed or if it had come to an end, so he excused himself and walked down the hall to the next door. The duo was right behind him.

4-J was a purple door and the brass plate was marked Valeska Bernhart. He was puzzled. He looked at his list. Had he missed a door?

Reading his mind, Shapiro volunteered, “The ‘I’ is eliminated at West Palm Acres. No one knows why.”

“No one cares,” added Goldberg.

Checking that the nameplate matched the name on his clipboard, Jon knocked on the door and then called out, “Missuz Bernhart, it’s time to take your pill.” Valeska Bernhart, Valeska Bernhart. It couldn’t be. Just a coincidence. Still…with such an unusual name, there couldn’t be two, could there? He’d soon find out.

Goldberg and Shapiro immediately shifted their focus. The sound of Missuz rang out a different tune to them. Stretching their five feet five and a half inch frames as tall as they could, they looked up at the brass nameplate on the door. Valeska Bernhart.

“I told you a new woman moved in, Shapiro. They made the floor co-ed.” Goldberg knew he had never told him, because he didn’t know any such thing, but in every group, there is always the one who liked everyone to think he was the one with the inside information. In this group, that person was Goldberg.

“What are you so excited for, Harry? Valeska could be a man’s name,” Oscar said.

Harry studied the name. His eyes narrowed. “You know who this is?  This is Valeska Bernhart.” He let his brain wrap around that thought. “But it can’t be. On the other hand, it isn’t a name like every Tom, Dick, and Harry. How many people could have the same name? And if it is, in which case as it happens, it would be Miss, not Mrs. You know, they go by their maiden names in show business.”

“What are you talking about?” And then as quickly as the words had come out of his mouth, the penny dropped. Shapiro recognized the name, too. “You think it could be? Sooner or later, we all end up in a home like this, so why not her? And why not here?” He had high hopes.

Harry Goldberg took great umbrage at the “home” reference. “Excuse me. West Palm Acres is a very upscale class retirement community; not, as you say, a home. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”

“This could be my lucky day.” The white skin on Oscar’s face turned a light pink.

“Your lucky day? You? Oscar Shapiro? Why would she look at you? She danced with Valentino.”

“You’re crazy. That would make her six years old; or is it the other way? Two hundred years old.”

“On screen, they do things to make them look younger.”

“How do you know that?”

“The Doctors. It’s a medical program on TV.”

As far as co-ed, there was no such differential at West Palm Acres. The apartments housed a mixed population with the widows outnumbering the widowers about four to one. There was also the smattering of elderly married couples and a few folks who had hooked up since arriving at the place; but permanent co-habitation of these unmarried couples was strictly forbidden. While they might eat together in the dining room and sit next to one another on bus trips and traipse down the hall when everyone else was asleep for nightly visits, living in a permanent situation together was frowned upon. The reason was obvious. It was strictly economical. Business is business. Why lease only one apartment, when you could get money on two apartments?

Harry Goldberg brushed a hand down the side of his nearly bald head; a reflex reaction, no doubt in reverence to his once thick dark brown hair that had turned to salt and pepper before losing the battle and finally revealing his bullet-shaped dome. He carefully adjusted his heavily framed bifocals. Only those closest to him knew that even with the thick glasses, he had to use a magnifying glass to read the newspaper. “How do I look?” he asked Oscar.

Looking him up and down, knowing what Harry was really thinking, Oscar was grateful that he still could boast nearly a full head of white hair. He replied with as much diplomacy as he could muster, not wanting to be mean, not wanting to lie, not wanting to tell the truth, “Like you always look.”

And this satisfied Harry.

Oscar was determined not to get his hopes up that this was really the Valeska Bernhart. Nevertheless, he carefully adjusted his recently acquired rimless progressive eyeglasses without the obvious bi-focal line that he was sure made him look younger. While Goldberg may have had the personality, he definitely had the looks.

“She must have moved in yesterday,” Harry said.  He pulled back his shoulders and puffed out his chest in an attempt to look vertical. It only made him more horizontal.

At last, the door to 4-J opened slowly. The occupant, a woman indeed, looked upat the trio of two old men and a clown. At just over five feet three inches tall, with hair dyed so black—or was it a wig—it looked like a crow was sitting on her head; with a face painted with black eyeliner, pink rouge, and bright red lipstick, Valeska Bernhart resembled an old-fashioned kewpie doll. Intentional or a slip of the make-up brush? Goldberg and Shapiro felt like giants. At five feet eleven, Jon, the actor/aide in the clown suit, looking down at the trio, wasn’t sure how he felt.

Oscar broke the silence following the stares. “May we accompany you to the dining room, Miz Bernhart?” He was sure his voice was self-assured and rather young sounding.

“We have a good table by the kitchen, Miss Bernhart. The food stays hot,” lied Harry Goldberg. He’d always hated “Ms.” A woman was either Miss or Mrs. An actress was always Miss, at least in public.

“By the kitchen, the food stays hot,” repeated Shapiro. No need to mention it was the worst seating arrangement in the dining room. If you had the seat with your back to the kitchen, every time someone came out with a tray, you risked getting bopped in the head with either the swinging door or the tray.

“I just said that. The food stays hot, Miss Bernhart,” said Goldberg.

For Oscar, there was no one here now but Oscar Shapiro and Valeska Bernhart. “Take my arm, Miz Bernhart. Please.” He extended his good arm out to her.

“Take your pill, Miss Bernhart,” Jon said. He knew actresses preferred ‘Miss’ even if they were married. This really was Valeska Bernhart. Everyone who was in the business knew who she was. She was hot for a long time, then nothing. A few years back, he was sure he’d seen a documentary about the film stars of yesteryear. Something like that. She did some things on Broadway, too. She was very good. Then he remembered his position and why he was here. It wasn’t to ogle old time film stars. It was about medication. He wasn’t sure whether she had taken her pill or not. Again, he reminded her.

A clown telling her to take her pill didn’t seem unusual to Valeska Bernhart who had just arrived from California at the insistence of her daughter who lived in Florida. To her alleged suitors she said, “I have to take the pill with food. Wait while I get my cane. I’ll go with you to the dining room.” The cane was new. It was all new.

To Goldberg and Shapiro, her distinctive Metro Goldwyn Mayer major studio accent and tone sounded like sweet butter melting in the center of a freshly baked, warm bran and raisin muffin—which regrettably was taboo on their respective diets.

Jon hadn’t seen anyone take their pills. His training had included knocking on the doors and shouting out the instructions. The rules hadn’t specified actually supervising them swallowing the pills. He didn’t think that would even be ethical. He wasn’t a doctor. He had never even played a doctor. He would just have to trust that they were following their regimen. Anxious to stick to his time-table, leaving the newly formed trio behind, he sauntered down the hall to the next door.

4-K. Arnold Sollowaywas the name on the brass plate. Jon rapped on the tangerine colored steel door and shouted, “Mister Solloway, it’s time to take your pill.” He waited. Again, he called out, “Mister Solloway, it’s time to take your pill.” He listened for movement inside. It was quiet. Too quiet. He didn’t like the feeling he was getting. He tried turning the knob. The door opened. First, he peered around the door and then went in slowly so as not to alarm the resident who may only be hard of hearing.

A man Jon assumed to be Arnold Solloway appeared to be asleep in the armchair in the living room. A distinct musty odor wafted up from the faded neutral wall-to-wall carpet that covered the floor throughout, except for the kitchenette against the wall where there was a small stretch of light tan linoleum. A bedroom was in plain sight. It looked like the bed had been slept in but not made up. A smattering of tables and chairs from a bygone era gave the whole space a rather depressing atmosphere. Jon gently nudged the shoulder of the man who was slumped over in his chair. “Mister Solloway, it’s time to take your pill.” He said it close to the man’s ear in just a bit above a whisper. But Jon knew his words were useless.

He had played a cop once on a TV show and his character was the one who discovered the dead man in his hotel room. And he had read enough crime novels to know dead when he saw dead. He lingered, unafraid, untouched by being in the same room with the body. As a trained actor, he couldn’t help try to figure out the back story. Who was Arnold Solloway? What was his life? Where was he from? Was there any family? He stood over the dead man in the threadbare chair and stared at him for a moment before reaching into his pocket for the pager that had been issued to him by the office in case of an emergency. This was definitely one of those. He punched in the code, explained the situation, was thanked by the staff member on the other end, and told it wasn’t necessary to wait in the apartment. It can happen that quickly. Arnold Solloway was fine early that morning when he was checked on, one of the features of West Palm Acres, not that they put that fact in the brochure. They preferred their residents alive, but did keep up a waiting list, so they never had to worry about filling a space.

Jon figured it would take them about three or four weeks to clean out the apartment, paint, clean the carpet and replace the name on the brass plate. He doubted he’d still be around to see who that was. He planned to be back in New York with an acting job. But you never knew in his business. At least this so-called role was giving him some income, and his agent could reach him easily enough. He’d be on a plane that same day if warranted.

Stepping from the apartment into the hallway, Jon was just in time to catch a glimpse of Harry Goldberg and Oscar Shapiro making their way towards the elevator with the petite Valeska Bernhart and her fancy dark mahogany cane with the silver handle between them. Her once famous legs were covered with a pair of black slacks, the fabric of which he couldn’t make out. And she was wearing a fancy type of tennis shoe, not the three-inch spike heels she had always been photographed in.

As the trio shuffled towards the elevator, the newcomer to West Palm Acres told her companions she was between thirty-one and death, had been married more times than she could remember, single now for thirteen or fifteen years. Warningly, in the event they had any ideas, she told them she didn’t want to get married ever again.  “Of course, I still have my mansion in Beverly Hills,” she lied with a perfectly straight face, with no intention of ever telling them the truth, “in case this place doesn’t work out for me. I never liked Florida. Too humid. Too blah. Servants are looking after the house. I didn’t want to sub-let. They ruin the place. You know how that can be.”

They didn’t know how that can be, but shook their heads, mumbling a “mmm” sound.

She had a captive audience and was milking it for all it was worth, adding or embellishing details and omitting certain others. Whatever made for a better story. Valeska Bernhart, the daughter of Minnie Rich and Herman Bernhart who came to the United States from Russia to start a new life and settled in Brooklyn. Valeska Bernhart from Brooklyn to Hollywood to Beverly Hills to Santa Monica to West Palm Beach. It was at 2251 North Gower Street, Hollywood 28, California, where it almost didn’t begin thanks to her eccentric neighbor, Pasha Elca (nee Elizabeth Cohen) from Boston, who claimed to be a scenario writer. Scenario writer? She couldn’t write a note for the milkman. Almost didn’t begin because the fool Pasha nearly burned down the place when she left some electrical device plugged in too long like an iron and, the next thing anyone knew, the fire department was there, saving the day, the apartment building and potentially a lot of lives and property. What else could be expected from a nut case like Pasha Elca who wrapped her money up in lettuce leaves in the icebox? As if a burglar wouldn’t look there first. Valeska moved to another place, still in Hollywood, and it wasn’t long before she was noticed and began working in films; not just working, starring. Then came the husbands, the houses, the daughter, the downfall. It’s a fact of life. What goes up eventually must come down. Rarely does it go back up again. Maybe if you’re very, very lucky or very, very smart.

The gentlemen were in awe, saying nothing.

“When I splashed onto the screen, you know what they wrote in Variety? Quote: Valeska Bernhart is Technicolor even when she’s in black and white. Unquote.”

So absorbed in her story, the gentlemen forgot why they were standing at the elevator. It was Valeska who finally pressed the elevator button down to the basement which only reinforced her theory that what goes up must come down.

***

Boston-born Susan Surman lived abroad for over twenty years in London and Sydney as an actress and playwright (Gracie Luck / Susan Kramer), performing on stage, radio, and TV. Author of Dancing at all the Weddings, Max and Friends, Sacha: The Dog Who Made it to the Palace, and numerous short stories, she lives in North Carolina where she is working on her new novel.

Click here to buy: West Palm Gig

Geophysicist Mark Cabot and his lover/fiancé Maura race against an impending, but unknowable, geological deadline to prevent a nuclear meltdown that threatens future generations with a nuclear winter, spelling the end of human-kind, and perhaps all life on earth. The action ranges between Washington DC; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Chincha Base, Peru; Cranston Labs, Snedens Landing, New York. It covers twelve days from discovery to the final climax. Mark faces death from a foreign covert group seeking nuclear power in their search for dominance over other nations. The resounding climax is a breathtaking, armed confrontation and geologic collapse in Peru, deep beneath the Andes Mountains.

Chapter One

17 JANUARY 1986

“What do you want me to do about it?” Amil said.

“Look at this.”  The man pulled a photo from his thin leather briefcase.

“This is him?”  He said, studying the eight by ten glossy.

 “Yeah, that’s him.  Find him and kill him.”

With dead eyes, Amil said, “As you say.”  He handed the file back. “You mind telling my why?”

“No I don’t mind,” the man said gruffly, “but we have more important things to do right now.” He got up.

“We’re leaving now?”

“Yeah.  We’ve have to get to the island and see what has gone wrong.  I’m beginning to wonder if I chose the right side.”

Amil scowled.  “It’s a bit late for that kind of talk, isn’t it?”

The man sighed. “I guess it is.”

The two men left the hotel and drove directly to Pisco’s dock area. Amil unlocked the trunk and handed the man a small blue automatic. He placed it in his belt under his coat.  Amil then slipped on a shoulder holster, adding a Beretta to it before closing the lid. They began walking toward a sleek launch tied up at the end of the long wide pier. Two men saw them coming and jumped into the boat, started the engine and began casting off lines. Amil was in the rear as they reached the boat. The other man had just stepped into the craft when Amil noticed another boat approaching the dock from the north side.  The third man in that boat caught his attention. Amil turned and ran, keeping pace with the slowing boat.  It was heading for the landing closer to shore. He found several wooden crates, stacked against some future shipping date, to hide behind.  Soon  the four men were coming up the wet steps and walking quickly toward land.

I am right, Amil thought.  The third man matches the picture.  It’s Cabot.  This is easier than I thought it would be.  Amil smiled and followed them at a distance.

“You get the car,” Mark said.  “I’ll find a phone and meet you back here in ten minutes.”

Hal, Joe and Ray walked away through a narrow cobbled street that shone from the mist like wet snakeskin.

The area was abandoned.  Mark saw telephone lines looping toward  a  gray  warehouse  thirty  yards  away.  The building was dark and seemed vacant.  He headed for it. Once inside he spent several minutes finding the phone.

He had just picked up the receiver when he thought he heard a noise. Shit, he thought, some night watchma……

He saw the blue flash but didn’t hear the compressed report of the shot.  The bullet hit and spun him around. Mark dropped unconscious onto the table, and slumped to the floor.                         

***

The first third of Rich Adams’ life was spent as a classical tenor. He began writing advertising copy in his early thirties. He has won several national awards for advertising and has also published magazine articles and a weekly newspaper column.

Look for Book One of his Detective Jerzey Swift series, KNIFE LINES, coming soon. He lives with his wife and Dachshund, Heidi, at Lake Norman, North Carolina.

Click here to buy: Fractured