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I’ve written a love story

Dark and violent, but a love story nonetheless. “What Love Is” appears in Volume 2 of the anthology What We Talk About When We Talk About It, published last October by Darkhouse Books.

The inspiration for my love story grew from my early childhood in Soldiers Summit, Utah. The town was mostly ruins, the wooden husks and concrete foundations of railroad housing and a few commercial buildings, decaying in the dust and sagebrush. My father, like Dee’s, worked as a dispatcher at the railroad depot there. My brother and I played with two brothers who lived next door. Mickey and his brother are based on them. Our mothers became friends and stayed in touch after they left Soldiers Summit. Both women ended up divorcing their husbands. Although I saw the boys every so often, there was no puppy love between me and either one of them. Their mother died of cancer when the younger boy was seventeen, and he shot himself soon afterward. I can only guess why. Grief for his mother, feelings of abandonment and despair.

Soldiers Summit has kept a lasting hold on my imagination. For years I dreamed of the place regularly—lonely, haunting dreams.

Another inspiration for the love story was my strong emotional response to smells. Even after decades, certain smells evoke the circumstances around them—the catsup and eggs my father was eating when he quarreled with my mother at breakfast, the diesel fumes in the bus station when my brother and I traveled between one parent and the other, the alcoholic breath of a boy whose kiss I did not welcome.

I wonder whether love begins—or dies—with a response to the way someone smells and to other cues that register unconsciously. I wonder whether Evening in Paris, or any other perfume, can disguise the truth for long.

For those who want a sample, here are the opening paragraphs:

What Love Is

“I’m gonna marry you when we grow up.”

Even then Dee felt unsettled by Mickey’s eyes. They were blue, smudged with an emotion she couldn’t name. They demanded yes from her.

“Okay,” she said.

Yes was easy at age four, when every day went on forever and growing up was unimaginable. Their fathers worked as dispatchers at the railroad station in Soldiers Summit, Utah. A few years later, the station would close and the town would dwindle to a café and gas station on a secondary highway. It was already in ruins. She and Mickey explored the cellars of houses long ago demolished, rows of square cement holes ranked along a hillside fuzzed with sagebrush. They found dangerous things: two-by-fours with rusty nails hammered through them, shards of blue and green glass, barbed wire. And mysteries: a silver box without a lid, a book with its pages rotted away.

Dee would never forget the smell of those abandoned cellars, the open graves of homes. Spring after spring they collected snowmelt that soaked the remains and slowly dried in the summer sun and wind, seasons of decay like growth rings in a tree trunk.

Just outside town was the ruin of a restaurant, a long single-story building caved in at one end. The walls at the other end stood precariously beneath the weight of the sagging roof. Sections of the floor had been pried up, and the moldering breath of the cellar enfolded Dee and Mickey as they wound between the damage to the restaurant’s counter. Drilled holes with blackened edges showed where stools had been bolted onto the floor. But behind the counter was solid floor and an interior wall with shelves. This would be their house, Mickey said. On the shelves they arranged the silver box, the rotted book, and the shards of colored glass. Under the counter was their bedroom. They snuggled there, his breath warm and damp against her neck.

They were forbidden to play in the ruins, but it was easy to sneak away. Dee’s mom was usually busy with housework or laundry and chasing after her two-year-old brother. Mickey’s mom stayed inside their house, especially after lunch. When Mom asked where they’d been, Dee said the viaduct or the slope by the train station.

“Don’t go near the edge,” Mom would say, frowning. “Keep off the tracks.”

Dee shook her head in a solemn promise.

One day she announced that Mickey wanted to get married when they were grownups.

“There’s no way on Earth,” Mom said.

She was shocked by her mother’s vehemence. “How come? You like Mickey, don’t you? You like his mom.”

“You’re too young to think about marriage, little girl.”

The two families lived next door in the one row of houses still standing. At night she heard Mickey’s parents bumping into walls and screaming, and the next morning his mother came over to drink coffee and show Mom her bruises. Mom wheedled Dad to talk to Mickey’s father.

“It’s none of our business,” Dad said. “Stay the hell out of it.”

Read the rest of  my love story “What Love Is”—along with a diverse selection of other stories and poems on the theme of love—in What We Talk About When We Talk About It.

fiction anthology, stories about love

 

 

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Wrongly Accused

Imagine being wrongly accused, arrested and jailed for a crime you didn’t commit. Everyone—your colleagues, your friends, maybe even your life partner—assumes you must be guilty. After all, the police wouldn’t arrest you without solid evidence. Recently I read two thrillers based on this nightmarish scenario. The protagonists of both Rachel Caine’s Stillhouse Lake and Candice Fox’s Crimson Lake find themselves wrongly accused of heinous crimes.

Readers identify with a wrongly accused protagonist because the injustice appalls them—usually. They may lose their sympathy for a stupid or morally compromised character. Most of us harbor a deep fear of finding ourselves in a similar situation. It only takes bad luck—being in the wrong place at the wrong time or being targeted by a vindictive enemy—to place us in the crosshairs of the justice system. But when a character acts foolishly or has an unsavory side, we’re liable to back away. Not me, we think. I’d never be like that or do such an idiotic thing.

A naive woman wrongly accused of her husband’s crimes

wrongly accusedIn Stillhouse Lake, Gina Royal begins as a “normal” if overly docile housewife married to a man who’s oddly territorial about the garage, which he has converted into his personal workshop and keeps locked at all times. The reason for his secretive behavior becomes obvious when a driver loses control of her car and plows into the garage. The accident uncovers the hanging corpse of a woman, naked and showing obvious signs of torture.

Poor Gina stayed married for years to a serial killer without suspecting the truth. The police don’t buy her protestations of innocence. Her husband tortured women in the garage next to her kitchen. How can she be innocent? Either she participated, or at least helped cover up the crimes, or she’s hopelessly stupid—all reasons for withholding sympathy. Yet the author persuades me that Gina is wrongly accused. She became her husband’s doormat because she wanted to believe she had a storybook marriage. Many of us practice this sort of denial to the keep unbearable truths about our lives at bay.

Although a jury finds Gina not guilty, the families of her husband’s victims gin up an online mob to hound her. They find and dox her no matter where she goes or how many times she changes her name. They seem unbothered that her two children also suffer from the harassment. By the time she moves into a comfortable old house near Stillhouse Lake, she has changed her name to Gwen Proctor and is nobody’s shrinking violet anymore. She can never prove her innocence or clear her name, but she fights to protect her children and reclaim her life. She goes on fighting in subsequent books of the Stillhouse Lake series. In the end her grit earns my sympathy and admiration.

A cop ensnared by circumstance and wrongly accused of rape

wrongly accusedIn Crimson Lake, Ted Conkaffey has a respectable life as a police officer in Sydney, Australia until he faces trial for raping a little girl. His colleagues and friends abandon him and his wife soon follows. His prosecution gets put on hold for lack of evidence, leaving the terrible accusation hanging over him. Thanks to publicity about the case, the entire nation despises Ted. He flees to the remote area of Crimson Lake, seeking anonymity, but the locals discover who he is and begin a campaign of harassment against him.

Ted tells his own story, but some first-person narrators are unreliable. Could Ted be lying? His alibi makes sense even though he can’t prove it, but one detail persuades me that he’s innocent. Near the beginning of the story he rescues a family of geese and pays a ridiculously high vet bill to save the wounded mother. Okay, I’m sentimental about animals, but it seems unlikely that a character who rescues and adopts a family of geese would rape a child. Or anyone for that matter.

To prove his innocence and regain his reputation, Ted must track down the man who raped the little girl. He’s still searching when Crimson Lake ends. His story continues in Redemption Point, the next book of the series.

A woman wrongly accused of provoking her boyfriend to murder

It intrigues me the way innocent people get blamed for things they never did. They make bad choices like Gina Royal or they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time like Ted Conkaffey.

Kelly Durrell, the protagonist of my novel Hometown Boys, takes the blame after her long-ago ex-boyfriend murders her aunt and uncle. She might not be a criminal, but she’s held morally responsible. Gossip against her spreads through her hometown, fueled by some townspeople’s dislike of her and the expedience of a few others. Like Gina, she made a mistake. She dated the killer in high school.  The gossipers don’t care that she’s changed in the two decade since then. Like Ted Conkaffey, she must find out the truth to clear her name—to the extent it can be cleared.

Someone wrongly accused of a crime or even a peccadillo can never be altogether innocent again.

Thriller fans will enjoy Crimson Lake and Stillhouse Lake. And since both are the first book of a series, readers can keep the thrill ride going.

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Born Victim

Look for  Daemon Blood, the third volume of the Daemon World series, on March 8, 2022. 

The first novel in the series, Talion, recounts how the serial killer Rad Sanders stalks and kidnaps fifteen-year-olds Lu Jakes and Lisa Duncan. Lu must turn to the daemon Talion for help. But he has a price. Ten years later, in Daemon Seer, he comes to collect payment. Lu must undergo a harrowing ceremony and bear a child who will eventually replace her as his servant. Helpless against the daemon’s power and determined to save Lisa from a new sadist’s grip, Lu surrenders to Talion. She submits to the ceremony and with his help rescues Lisa. Daemon Blood picks up their story five years later. 

In the first chapter, “Born Victim,” Lisa finds herself unwillingly drawn back into the daemons’ world.

1: Born Victim

Panic wells up in Lisa as the drugstore’s automatic door slides open and winter air balloons against her face. The idea of stepping outside suddenly terrifies her. Post-traumatic stress, says her therapist, Sandi—as if naming a thing steals its power. A bearded guy in a camo jacket is close behind her. She has to move. Clutching her plastic bag of antidepressants and tampons like a talisman, she hurries through the door.

A semi rumbles past on the two-lane highway beyond the drugstore’s narrow parking lot. Its diesel fumes trigger the usual nausea. The clouds unveil the sun. She imagines getting in her beat-up Honda Civic, driving until it runs out of gas, and then walking until her legs buckle. Wherever she ends up will be fine with her.

“Hey Lisa!” A gaunt man pops out of his SUV and trots across the parking lot. His glossy parka, unzipped despite the subfreezing day, bounces against his fashionably threadbare jeans.

He’s no one she knows or wants to know. She plunges her hand into her purse as she runs for her car. Where are the stupid keys? She’s still groping for them when she reaches the Civic.

A hand seizes her shoulder and spins her around. The man in the parka presses her against the car, his groin against hers, and pokes her in the ribs with something hard. She looks down at a pistol with a short barrel, almost toylike. His open parka conceals the gun from anyone watching. Not that anyone is. Halfway across the lot, the bearded guy is climbing into a truck jacked up on monster tires. She doubts he noticed her at all. “Sorry, Lisa,” the gunman says. “I know what you’ve been through and I hate—really hate—doing this. But we need to talk.”

Panic muffles everything but her thumping heart. She wrenches her gaze from the gun to his face and opens her mouth to scream, but his eyes silence her. Colorless irises encircle the bottomless wells of his pupils. Her scream drowns in their depths, but she manages to whisper. “Who are you?”

“Willard Steeples.” His grin displays a mouthful of capped teeth edged with black along the gum line. “Author of Professor of Death.”

Evil parasite, feeding on people’s suffering. On her suffering. When she was fifteen, a psychopath tortured and disfigured her, and Steeples’ book made her into a freak show.

“You’re angry,” he says. “I get that. But your story doesn’t end with the Professor. There’s Grifford Riley, the bent cop from Chicago.”

She finally manages to speak. “What do you want?”

“This isn’t about what I want. My readers cry out for the truth.”

In the five years since fleeing to Utah to escape Riley, Lisa has managed to recover a fraction of her life. She overcame an opioid addiction. She fought the posttraumatic stress of having been raped and tortured, and she began to dream of a life not defined by the violence done to her. Now this ghoul wants to suck her back into the nightmare.

“Please. Leave me alone.”

“Sorry. No can do. My publisher’s gonna cut me loose if I don’t deliver another book on you by the end of the month. She said it’s my last chance.”

His publisher. Like she cares.

He prods her with the gun, a reminder. Even years after the surgeries, her face still aches in the icy wind. A frozen mask of pain, worse when she’s afraid. Steeples can have the story—some of it, anyway—but the dread lurking in her gut tells her that he wants more. A lot more.

“Okay, I’ll talk to you. There’s a coffee house on the Square.”

“No. Not after this.” He glances apologetically at the pistol. “I knew you wouldn’t talk to me unless I forced you to.”

Another semi crawls past, picking up speed after the stoplight. If the driver looks their way, he won’t see any gun—only a man and woman beside a car, close enough to be lovers. Despair chokes her. “My mother—expects me home.”

“I’ll have you back in an hour.” He grabs Lisa by the elbow, jabs the gun in her back, and hustles her to his SUV, a gray Ford Edge. Scream, she thinks as he yanks open the passenger door. Last chance. But no one is close enough to hear, or to stop him if he shoots her and drives away. He shoves her onto the seat. The label of a car rental company decorates the dash. It reassures her a tiny bit. Someone at the rental office will be able to identify him, assuming he cares about getting caught.

The other times she was kidnapped, she fought hard. This time, as Steeples gets into the Edge, she wonders if her life is still worth the trouble. Then she hears her therapist’s voice reminding her how much she’s endured. She’s lived through experiences that would’ve broken a lot of people. She clasps her hands to stop them from shaking. She can survive Willard Steeples.

As he peels out of the parking lot, she glimpses a ponderous figure near the pharmacy entrance. Mrs. Arlow, overweight and asthmatic, squints at the departing Edge. She lives down the street from Lisa’s parents. She might notice Lisa driving away with a stranger and call her mother. But Mrs. Arlow wouldn’t have a reason to remember any important details—the nondescript gray of the SUV, the make or license number—that could help the cops find Steeples.

He drives west, steering lefthanded so he can keep the gun pointed at Lisa. They pass the Seville Veterinary Clinic, Charlie’s Soft Serve Ice Cream, Morris Chiropractic, the Chevy dealership with its lineup of gleaming pickups beneath colorful plastic pennants, and the First Christian Church with its sign asking, will your eternal home be smoking or nonsmoking. It’s late November, and Christmas wreaths decorate the telephone poles along the highway. Cardboard signs nailed to the poles honor the military service of local young people. Lisa recognizes a few names from junior high. She missed high school because of the surgeries. She got her GED six years ago, back when she dreamed of studying at the Art Institute in Chicago.

“Where are we going?”

Steeples’ eyes flick toward her then back to the highway. “There’s a few cabins on the lake. No one uses them this time of year.”

“You’re from around here?”

“Nope. I just do my research.”

A mile or so after they leave Seville behind, Steeples turns onto a county road that cuts a straight line through fields stubbled with the remains of corn stalks. The tires bump over rough spots in the pavement, but the SUV’s suspension softens the ride. At least she’s riding to possible death in relative comfort.

A mile or so after they leave Seville behind, Steeples turns onto a county road that cuts a straight line through fields stubbled with the remains of corn stalks. The tires bump over rough spots in the pavement, but the SUV’s suspension softens the ride. At least she’s riding in relative comfort toward her possible death.

Regardless of what Steeples says about wanting her story, the vacancy in his eyes scares her. And an interview conducted at gunpoint? The whole situation radiates the weirdness of the daemon world. Lisa is wired into that world because of Lu, her closest friend. A friend she cut out of her life. Lu is a daemon seer. She possesses the talent to anchor daemons to the physical world, and five years ago she swore an oath to serve the daemon Talion. Lisa watched in numb horror as her friend knelt. She owes Lu and Talion for saving her life, and she’s grateful. But she just wants to forget about daemons.

For the past two years, she’s ignored Lu’s telepathic calls. Several months ago, Lu stopped trying and Lisa was relieved. Until now.
Lu! I need help!

No answer. Maybe the connection between them has withered, thanks to her.

Lu! I’m with Steeples, he kidnapped me.

Steeples turns onto a narrower road. The flat fields give way to rolling meadows and stands of leafless trees, their branches clawing at the iron-gray sky, bird nests bulging from them like tumors. The SUV rolls across a rusted bridge that looks a hundred years old.

“You do keep getting kidnapped. This is—what—the third time?” Steeples flashes a wolfish grin, showing off those corroded capped teeth. “Only this time Lu isn’t here to save you.”

She tells herself it’s a coincidence, that he isn’t tuning in on her thoughts. “What do you really want?”

“I told you. Your story. Your whole story. And you’ll give it to me before we’re done.”

The road widens into a clearing and ends at a low metal gate with a sign: closed until spring. Steeples stops the Edge. “Don’t move.” He slides out and circles to the passenger side, keeping the gun trained on Lisa. “Now get out.”

She gets out.

“Give me your phone.”

“I didn’t bring it.”

He uses his left hand to pat down her pockets and then pluck the canvas purse from her shoulder. He dumps the contents on the ground.
Lisa squats and picks up her wallet and a ballpoint pen. She leaves an almost empty pack of Kleenex, a couple of receipts, a shopping list, and a cough drop covered with fuzz. Steeples returns the purse. She drops the wallet and pen into it and stands. “I told you.”

“Pick up those receipts and the paper with your writing on it.”

She gathers the muddy slips of paper and stuffs them in her pocket. “Now you can shoot me or whatever.”

Willard Steeples giggles. “Leave your purse in the car. I’m not going to kill you, scout’s honor.”

She imagines him as a scrawny Boy Scout that the others picked on. She doubts he has any honor.

“Go around the gate post,” he says.

She squeezes between the post and the thorny branches of a bush. Steeples follows. She hopes the thorns will catch on his parka, but he carefully avoids them. They make a turn and Lake Seville spreads in front of them, lapping the pebbly shoreline and reflecting the gloomy sky. The wind blows harder and colder over the water. Ahead of them, a green prefab cabin sits on a slope overlooking a boat ramp.

“Is that where we’re going?”

He waves her forward. “Stay in front of me.”

As they walk along the shoreline, she concentrates on bridging the thousand miles between her and Lu with a strong and simple message. Help me help me help me. She half-heartedly thinks of running for the trees. Who knows, he might be a crappy shot. She keeps plodding toward the cabin.

Every nerve in her body screams for Vicodin. She stopped using almost three years ago and—with the exception of one slip—she’s stayed clean. She feels okay most of the time. But now, with the gun nudging her spine, time falls away and she’s raw again.

“I have codeine,” Steeples says. “You can have some when we get to the cabin.”

From behind her he can’t see whatever pain her face might be betraying. She reaches out to him with her thoughts. What’s the deal? Can you read my mind? Nothing comes back, but she senses an empty tunnel like the one where she and Lu used to communicate.

Beyond the lake the distant treeline clings like gray lint to the water’s edge. No sign of human life. “What are you on?” she says. “Not just codeine.”

“What do you think I’m on?”

“You look like a tweaker. Or maybe coke.”

“Would you like some?”

“No. And I don’t want your fucking pills either.”

He chuckles. “You might change your mind.”

Her stomach drops.

They climb a dirt path to the cabin. The window beside the door is broken, the glass removed from its frame. Steeples must have scouted the location and busted in. He opens the unlocked door. “After you, Sugar Pie.”

She enters the dim, musty space. Freezing wind from the lake howls through the broken window. The cabin is one room. A bed sags beneath a ratty quilt. A couch and two chairs huddle around a blackened fireplace. Steeples prods her toward the couch with the gun barrel.

“I’m cold,” she says. “Can I get that quilt?”

“Have a seat. I’ll bring it to you.”

The odor of mold wafts up from the cushion where she sits. He wedges the gun into the waistband of his jeans, raising Lisa’s hopes. With luck he’ll shoot his dick off. He fetches the quilt and covers her from the neck down, tucking its edges beneath her thighs, pinning her arms.

“There. Nice and toasty.” The damp quilt leaches the warmth from her. She pulls it loose.

Steeples plops into a wooden rocking chair. He scoops his phone from his pocket and stabs his finger several times at the screen. The chair creaks as he leans forward and places the phone on the low table between them. “Okay, let’s start with Grifford Riley. Tell me about him.”
Lisa will never forget the psychopathic cop who almost killed her, but she keeps her face blank.

“You know, I wanted an ‘after’ picture of you for Professor of Death,” he says. “Your bitch mother wouldn’t give me one, but now I can take one for this book. The main focus is Riley, but I’ll revisit your ordeal at the hands of Rad Sanders, too. People love that shit. I mean the parallels are dramatic. Twice you’re kidnapped and horribly assaulted. Twice you’re rescued by Lu, a mousy little girl in glasses. We’re talking best-seller, guaranteed.”

When Rad was finished with Lisa, her face had resembled raw meat. Steeples, the piece of shit, wanted to display that ugliness to the world. Anything to make money.

“So, what’s the title gonna be?”

“I was thinking Born Victim: The Unfortunate Life of Lisa Duncan. But my editor isn’t crazy about it.”
“Me neither.”

“Back to Riley. I need the whole truth, the untold story. He followed you to Park City and then grabbed you and drove to a motel outside Laramie. That’s where things get mysterious. Lu rescued you. How’d she manage that?”

“He went for cigarettes.”

“Bullshit. Only one place near the motel was open. A gas station. The clerk doesn’t remember Riley, but he remembers Lu buying snacks and bottled water.”

“That was later, after she got me out of there.”

“It doesn’t make sense, her stopping a couple miles from the motel when she knew Riley would be coming after you both.”

“Ask her.”

“She won’t talk to me.” He shoots her a reproachful look as though Lu’s silence is her fault. “Let’s talk about the stolen Ferrari you abandoned in Park City. At least that’s your story. How come no one saw it there and the cops never found it? Doesn’t sound like the kind of car you overlook.” Steeples grins as if he hears her nerves shrieking. “Sure you don’t want a Vicodin?”

She has no name for the wrongness in him, a hunger that brushes past her on its hunt for the food it really wants. “I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know. Please. Take me back into town.”

Lu ambushed Riley while he was on top of Lisa, shoved him into the narrow space between bed and wall, and stabbed him over and over with a sharp piece of metal. The hulking police detective broke Lu’s arm, but she blinded him and pulverized his testicles. Lisa’s breath snags as she remembers the viciousness of the attack. Lu was possessed by Black Claw, a daemon. But still.

All at once he leers. “What’s she up to?”

“Lu? I don’t know, we don’t talk.”

“You’re telling me they broke the connection?”

“Who’s they?” Her heartbeat speeds, pumping up her panic, and her head feels large and insubstantial, a membrane about to disintegrate. “What connection?”

He stares at Lisa as though deciphering her secrets. “Don’t tell me the bitch let Talion cut you loose.” He breaks into a stuttering laugh—heh-heh-heh-heh-heh—a crowing voice that no longer belongs to him. A daemonic voice. “You’re dead,” the daemon says in a childish singsong. It stands and draws the pistol.

Her heart trips ahead of the frozen moment. She springs from the couch and darts sideways, holding up the moldy quilt like a shield. The daemon fires the gun and the world goes silent. The quilt is burning. She drops it and runs blindly. A bullet splinters the doorframe as she yanks the door open. On the porch a woman knocks her aside with the shotgun she’s gripping in both hands. Lisa stumbles a few steps before falling. Her arm and shoulder hit the frozen dirt with a jolt that snaps her teeth together. More gunfire erupts inside the cabin. The muffled pops seem miles away to Lisa’s stunned ears. She crawls down the path until shock overtakes her and she lies still on the lakeshore, tasting blood from her bitten tongue. The world blurs.

Someone grabs her arm and pulls her over and up onto her butt. Stand, the woman with the shotgun orders her. Lisa struggles to her feet. The woman wears maroon yoga pants and an orange hunting jacket. Her face, puffy and creased, reddened by the cold, looks vaguely familiar—someone glimpsed in the supermarket or the thrift store on the Square. Her eyes gleam like dark ice, inhuman. Why did you go with the journalist? Even the Flame is not reckless enough to kill you in a public place. Half-deaf from the gun blasts, Lisa realizes the woman is speaking in her mind. Not the woman but the daemon inside her.

Who’s the Flame?

The daemon heads back toward the cabin, its stride hampered by the woman’s stubby legs. It wears her body like ill-fitting clothes. Lisa hurries to catch up. What’s happening? Is Lu in trouble?

The seer makes her own trouble.

Inside the cabin, Steeples’ body sprawls behind the overturned rocking chair, the face and chest like raw chuck. The stink hits her and sourness floods her mouth.

“Do not vomit.” Speaking aloud now, the daemon stoops and picks up Steeples’ gun. “Tell me what you touched.”

“Just that quilt.”

“Bring it. And the phone.”
Lisa grabs the phone from the table and checks the screen. “It’s recording us.”

“I will destroy it.”

“The recording could’ve been uploaded to the Cloud.”

The daemon gives her a razor-thin smile. “Perhaps you’re not altogether useless.”

“Thanks. I guess.” She hands over the phone. “Why did you save me?”

“Talion commanded it. I would have preferred the Flame destroy you.”

Careful not to look again at Steeples’ body, Lisa follows the daemon out of the cabin and down the dirt path. She clutches the phone in one hand and drags the singed quilt with the other. The daemon points to the boat ramp. “Go to the end and toss the quilt and phone in the lake.”

“The lake’s too shallow there,” Lisa says. “The cops will find the phone. And the quilt’s probably gonna wash ashore.”

“It makes no difference.” The daemon stands on the path, hands on hips and elbows spread wide. “The water will destroy any trace of you.”

The cops might still find a hair or fingerprint in the cabin or rental car. “Why don’t you just burn down the cabin?”

“A fire draws too much attention. Do as I say.”

Lisa tosses the evidence in the water and returns to the path. “Now what?”

“I will drive you to your car.”

They hike along the lake, backtracking to the road where Steeples left his rented SUV. Water laps at the shore and their shoes crunch against the pebbles. Icy wind whistles in Lisa’s ears and makes them ache. At least her hearing has come back. She wonders if Lu received her telepathic call for help and asked Talion to send this daemon, or if Talion was watching from the start. “Why was the daemon inside Steeples after me?”

“The reasons do not concern you.” Her rescuer’s harsh speech sounds strange coming from the rural Midwestern woman cradling a shotgun. She looks like a nice lady who probably goes to church on Sunday and spoils her grandchildren with cookies.

“What’s gonna happen to the woman you’re possessing? Will she remember any of this?”

The daemon fixes its empty eyes on Lisa. “You are a parasite. Were it not for the seer’s pleas on your behalf, you would have been destroyed.”

Lisa feels herself contract like a turtle withdrawing into its shell. Only she has no shell. She’s at the mercy of this monster. She wipes her nose with her sleeve and trembles as they trudge along the lakeshore.

The daemon opens the door of a battered blue Toyota pickup parked beside the Ford Edge.

“My stuff,” Lisa says. “It’s in Steeple’s car.”

“Get in the truck.” The daemon batters the Edge’s window with the shotgun stock until it punches through the safety glass. It reaches through the hole to unlock the door and then retrieves Lisa’s purse and the bag holding her drugstore purchases.

According to the clock on the dash, Lisa has been gone three hours. Way too long for a run to the pharmacy. She needs an excuse—a flat tire, an old friend who asked her for coffee, a spur-of-the-moment drive along country roads. The drive, she decides. Mom will yell at her for making them worry, but the other bogus excuses could be too easily checked.

When they enter Seville, she crouches out of sight and digs for her keys. Of course she finds them with no problem now that she’s not in desperate peril. The daemon stops in the drugstore parking lot and waits, silent.

“Goodbye,” Lisa says. “And thanks.”

“Get out.”

By the time she reaches her old Civic, the daemon is pulling onto the highway, headed back toward the lake. The possessed woman probably lives somewhere out that way. Lisa hopes she’ll be okay.

She clutches the wheel for several minutes, drawing slow, deliberate breaths the way the biofeedback guy in rehab taught her. The odor of mold clings to her like guilt.

Other books in the Daemon World series are Talion and Daemon Seer.

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Excerpt from Hometown Boys, a Kelly Durrell thriller

The following is an excerpt from Hometown Boys, a work in progress featuring Kelly Durrell. Kelly returns to the Midwestern town where she grew up to attend the funeral of her aunt and uncle. They’ve been murdered by her ex-boyfriend from high school, Troy Ingram, a meth addict destroyed by chronic drug abuse. Kelly is unwillingly drawn into the case when Troy’s lawyer asks her for help. The lawyer has evidence that Troy was coerced into committing the murders, but Troy refuses to talk about it. The lawyer hopes Kelly can persuade him to open up and reveal who wanted her aunt and uncle dead—and why.

In this flashback she remembers meeting Gene Countryman, one of Troy’s friends from their high school days. Now a successful businessman, Gene may not be as respectable as he appears.

In the dark he became a stranger

Certain moments stayed frozen in her memory. Like photographs, she thought with a pang. She warded off thoughts of Day Randall, her murdered friend and a talented photographer, whose body was still missing. Memories decayed faster than photographs. A lot faster. But the vital details, the ones whose emotional charge held the memory in place—those never changed.

It was her second date with Troy. Or maybe third. That unimportant detail had decayed. He picked her up down the block from Steph’s house, where she was supposed to be sleeping over. He pulled to the curb in a pumpkin colored Buick, a carriage waved into existence by a fairy godmother with a twisted sense of humor. The bucket seat sagged beneath her weight. Smells haunted the interior—marijuana and cigarette smoke and something like vomit. The engine made odd choking noises, and when they headed out of town, Kelly worried that the car might break down and leave them stranded in the country.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You look uptight.”

“No, I’m fine.” She peered beyond the reach of the headlights and ignored the uneasiness that hollowed her out. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.” In the dark he became a stranger. He could pull the car to the side of the road, strangle her, and roll her body into a cornfield. For a moment she wanted to go back to Steph’s house, pop some popcorn, and watch TV. Then she summoned the image of his lucid blue eyes and knowing smile, a smile that intimated life was a joke and nobody got it but the two if them. He was dangerous, but not to her.

Somewhere along the highway leading to Uncle George’s place, Troy turned onto a side road. Gravel crunched under the Buick’s tires, and the headlights played over milkweed and a drainage ditch. Treetops emerged from the darkness of the sky, then windows illuminated with bluish light winked into view. She couldn’t see much else of the house, only the silhouette of high eaves and a front porch, its roof slumped with age. The Buick jolted over a rutted driveway and arrived in a small clearing where several other vehicles were parked. Smothered music drifted from the house.

“What is this?” Kelly asked.

“What’s it look like?”

A party in the country. Obviously. Yet, for reasons she couldn’t pin down, the place seemed furtive and sinister.

Troy got out of the Buick, slammed the door, and strode toward the porch. Kelly scrambled to catch up, so young and smitten that she accepted his rudeness. And he set the pattern. The boyfriends who followed him differed only in degree—until she met Cash, whose old-fashioned father taught him to open doors for women, not because they were weak or helpless but out of respect. Kelly wondered now why she’d valued herself so little, why she’d taken so long to move beyond her teenage insecurity.

I am the passenger

Inside the house Iggy Pop crooned, “I am the passenger, I ride and I ride . . . ,” the song’s bass notes booming like distant thunder. The raw smell of mud drifted from a field. They stood for at least a couple of minutes. She was fretting that no one had heard Troy knock when the door swung wide. A skinny man stood in the threshold. His hair ebbed from his domed forehead and hung in greasy dishwater strands to his shoulders. Later she found out he was twenty-eight, but lines scored his face from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. His irises, almost colorless, were ground zero in a bloodshot explosion so intense that he seemed about to weep blood.

Troy leaned forward and said something. The skinny man’s gaze jumped frenetically between her and Troy before he finally nodded.

Troy grabbed her upper arm and pulled her toward the door. “Say hi to Gene.”

She mumbled a hello.

Gene raked his fingers through the stringy hair. “Troy says you’re cool. Is that right? He’s not full of shit, is he?” He sounded like a clarinet with a bad cold.

“No. I mean, I am. Cool.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.” She fudged her age by fifteen months. Lying made her nervous, but he wouldn’t ask unless he needed to hear the magic number.

Gene’s mouth twitched. “Yeah, right.” But he let them in.

As Troy shepherded her through the entryway, she noticed a mahogany hall tree, the varnish on the bench top cracked and bubbled where liquid—someone’s drink, maybe—had been spilled and left. To Kelly, who loved old furniture, it seemed like desecration.

They went into a front room where a dozen or so partiers lounged on a couch and chairs and huge pillows scattered over the floor. Everyone there was older than her. Some were way older—not quite her parents’ age, but almost. Troy dropped into a chair and patted on its wide upholstered arm, indicating that Kelly should sit there. Pretending not to notice, she sat cross-legged on a Persian rug. Several burns pocked its glossy pile. She stroked the rug with her fingertips as if to comfort it.

Most people don’t feel much of anything

A nearby table was also scarred with burns and littered with an overflowing ashtray, a couple of metal pipes, and the leftover butts of smoked joints. “Look at them fat roaches,” Troy said. “Can’t let ‘em go to waste.” He picked out the longest roach and held it to his lips. He removed a book of matches from his T-shirt pocket, opened it, and struck a match—all with one hand in a single fluid motion. The feat of dexterity had impressed her at sixteen. Remembering it at forty, she wondered how many hours he’d wasted perfecting the trick.

He sucked on the stub and blew out acrid smoke, then offered the smoldering butt to Kelly. She shook her head. He gave her the knowing smile. “Come on, don’t be a narc.”

She pinched the roach gingerly, its heat a millimeter from burning her fingertips, and brought it to her lips. Maybe if she pretended . . . She barely inhaled, but she sucked in the smoke anyway. Her throat closed like a fist, and pressure backed up in her chest. She hacked and coughed loud enough to be heard over the music. An overweight woman guffawed. A man with a wispy goatee snickered. Kelly felt trapped in a cartoon where it was her fate to do one stupid thing after another.

She  braced for anger or disgust from Troy, but he asked, “Are you okay? Want something to drink?” She might have started loving him at that moment. It was a slight kindness. Basic courtesy. Yet . . .

He left the room and quickly returned with a can of soda. It was already open and not cold enough to have come straight from the fridge. She guessed someone—Troy, she hoped—had already drunk from the can. She didn’t care. Its fizz soothed her parched mouth and throat.

When he passed her a lighted joint, she took a drag to make him happy and gave it back. A minute later, he offered the joint again. She shook her head. “I’m new at this. In case you haven’t guessed.”

Troy smiled and stroked her cheek. “You’ll be okay. Most people don’t feel much of anything their first time smoking.”

She took another drag. And a few more.

She leaned against the chair where he sat. She listened to Iggy Pop snarl the lyrics of “Lust for Life.” The music had a depth and shape she’d never experienced before. She pictured the drummer twirling his drumsticks like batons and pounding drums the size of trampolines. The silver pinwheels of the drumsticks spun before her eyes. She bounced on a giant trampoline, soaring high—higher with each bounce, more weightless. Time froze. She became the silvery sticks between the drummer’s fingers. Spinning and spinning. Her stomach pitched and her mind reeled. Vomit soured her throat. She needed a toilet before—

The darkness in their faces

Hand clamped to her mouth, she staggered down a dim hallway into the harsh fluorescence of the kitchen. Several men leaned against an old-fashioned oak dining table and a counter cluttered with beer cans and gallon jugs of wine. The men turned and stared at her. Something about their faces. A darkness.

Gene Countryman held a small metal pipe between his thumb and fingers. A pistol was jammed into the waistband of his jeans, snug against the small of his back. Had it been there when he let them in? Kelly struggled to think. Many of the grownup men she knew, her father included, owned guns and hunted deer and birds. None of them stuck pistols down their pants like a movie gangster. Show off, Kelly thought, but she couldn’t let go of the darkness in their faces.

Gene noticed her, and his mouth curled in a sarcastic hook. He nodded toward a door. “Over there. And try not to miss.” Scattered laughter chased her into the tiny windowless bathroom.

She raised the toilet seat and lowered her head over the bowl. Someone had peed and forgotten to flush, and shit smeared the porcelain just above the water line. Her stomach contracted. She’d thrown up her half-digested dinner, and the sour reek had triggered more vomiting.

All these years later, she carried an image of Gene Countryman’s gun in her memory—the black textured plastic of its handle and the way it wiggled when he straightened his back, as if trying to escape from his too-tight waistband.

Later, driving back into town, Troy had reassured her. Lots of people barfed the first time they smoked and—who knows?—the weed could have been cut with something.

“Like what?”

“Who knows? Meth or angel dust.”

Kelly never wanted to smoke weed again, and he would keep insisting. She hoped she could say no to his impish smile, his blue eyes shaded by dark lashes. It didn’t matter. After the way she acted, he wouldn’t ask her out again.

Only he did. And Kelly said yes for the stupidest of reasons. He was giving her another chance after she embarrassed him. How could she do any less for him?

 

 

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A shiny new object changes everything – and nothing

Last year I got an awesome deal on a camera. I “saved” over $500 off the purchase price. (And no, I didn’t buy it off the back of a truck. It was last year’s model, on sale, and I had credit card points.) Of course I could have saved more by passing on the camera and continuing to take photos and videos with my phone like most people.

FlowerI justified the purchase in various ways. I was writing a novel, Darkroom, in which a photographer and her photographs play a central role. Hands-on experience with an actual camera was research. (The photographer in the novel is old school. She uses shoots with film and develops her prints in a darkroom. I wasn’t ready to go there, especially since darkroom equipment is hard to find.)

Instead of shelling out money on stock photos, I could use my own high-quality photos on my blog and in the process learn more about working in Photoshop. And I could make videos!

I could ask an onlooker to videotape some of my riding lessons so I could study and improve my form.

As webmaster of the local Scrabble club, I take pictures at the meetings. This particular camera has a setting called “Beauty Shot” (I’m not kidding) that processes images of faces and eliminates flaws. I could get better shots of the people who hate having their picture taken. They might stop threatening to kill me if I posted photos of them online.

PlaygroundAnd the shiny new camera would give me a reason to detach my brain from my iPad and get my butt out of the house once in a while.

Once I started snapping pictures, I came to some unhappy realizations. All the fancy features were pointless until I knew how to use them, so I studied the manual enough to be minimally competent. More than that would take practice. A lot of practice.

SAMSUNG CSCAnd I soon realized were things that my camera couldn’t do. A few outdoor sessions showed me that even with the correct settings I couldn’t capture birds in flight. My husband, Joe, a sometimes photographer who gave me invaluable help in researching Darkroom, explained that I needed a lens with a longer focal length, which would cost almost as much as I’d spent for the camera.

HydrantMaybe someday . . .

It wasn’t only the camera that had limitations. I lacked the eye for photography. My gaze slipped past the unlikely objects that make good photos. I didn’t think in terms of frame or perspective or angle. Joe helped me. When I walked around town taking pictures, he came along and pointed out what I overlooked. He set tasks for me. One was to photograph the fire hydrants in our neighborhood. I came to think of the project as a travel guide for the dogs who might journey to Charleston, Illinois.

His tutoring helped. I learned to see more possibilities in places so familiar that I’d stopped  seeing them.

Locked

And I made a heartening discovery. Photography helps my writing. Not only do I see the world in a new way, but my photographs have become a kind of memory, capturing mundane images in more detail than I could ever remember.Shadow Box

But there are limitations here as well.

Memory is more than an visual image. It’s the smell of mud, the bark of a dog and the rumble of distant thunder, the flutter of the wind and the damp touch of the air. Above all it’s the convergence of thoughts and moods with the input from the senses—that complex thing called experience.

Broken Dishes

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Join the Dangerous Darkroom Blog Tour

The moment finally comes. The first copy of Darkroom arrives from the printer. Excited and anxious, I tear away the cardboard shell and behold the cover. It’s even more striking and sinister on the paperback than on the computer screen.The colors are deeper . The man lurking at the cover’s edge looks more compelling and mysterious. The designer has done a terrific job. I run my fingers over the glossy surface. Oh, it feels good.

Darkroom

I feel a bit shaky as I open the book. The interior is entirely my work, and although the PDF has been proofed by a professional and I’ve been over it  a dozen times, I fret that I’ve overlooked something so blatant and stupid that I’ll want to crawl into bed and hide beneath the covers. I thumb through the pages. The margins are right. The chapter headings look exactly as I’d envisioned, and none of them is out of place. The headings haven’t mysteriously vanished from any of the spreads.

Finally, my anxiety dies down. There’s probably an error lurking in there somewhere, but not a major error. I can relax and celebrate the launch of my newest novel.

Be sure to join me for the Dangerous Darkroom Blog Tour May 2-6, organized by the lovely people at Novel Publicity. You’ll get sneak peaks of the novel, interviews with me, and exclusive insights to the story and characters that make Darkroom a novel you won’t soon forget.

Enter the blog tour drawing for a shot at winning these special prizes:

  • A paperback of Larry Clark’s famous photo essay Tulsa. Darkroom features a talented photographer whose photos, like Clark’s,”uncover the secret of a face, its elusive life, so it becomes the portrait of an intimate you have yet to meet.”
  • A set of 10 custom note cards with envelopes, featuring a photograph of Boulder’s iconic Flatirons by moonlight. Photograph by Charles Pfiel.
  • Autographed copies of my dark fantasy horror novels Talion and Daemon Seer.
  • A $25 Amazon gift card.

Darkroom is a suspense thriller with a noirish atmosphere and unexpected twists. Art curator Kelly Durrell goes looking for her missing roommate, talented photographer Day Randall, and becomes entangled in a demimonde of powerful people who will stop at nothing to protect their secrets. Here’s what advance readers and reviewers have to say about Darkroom:

“. . . tight, compelling, and convincing writing.”  — Jon A. Jackson, author of Hit on the House and No Man’s Dog

“A thriller with unexpected plot twists and suspenseful action.”  — RT Source

“Kelly Durrell is a deftly-drawn, intelligent, and likable heroine.”  — Daiva Markelis, author of White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life

“A solid mystery that involves a satisfyingly diverse range of characters.”  — D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

“[Maddox’s] prose flows with beauty and clarity.”  — Tahlia Newland, author of The Locksmith’s Secret

The paperback is now available through Amazon and will soon become available through other online sellers. The Kindle edition is coming May 3, and you can preorder a copy right now at the special launch price of just $0.99. The price is going up at the beginning of next week, so don’t wait too long!

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I was a teenage changeling

It would happen as I walked to school alone, or sat in the cafeteria with schoolmates chattering around me, or came home to find my mother had left work early and stopped at the liquor store for a fifth of vodka, now half empty. I suddenly knew this wasn’t my life. I belonged somewhere else, to different parents. Why they’d abandoned me I had no idea. They must have had a good reason, I thought, and someday they would return for me. I imagined my real parents as powerful, unearthly beings who could transport me in an instant to the unknown and hardly imaginable world where I belonged. They might come anytime, I told myself. One more minute and I could be out of there.

The reasons for my make-believe were plain to see. I was an introverted kid with not many friends. My mother was depressed and numbed her misery with alcohol. “I wish I was dead,” she said often. “If I had any courage, I’d find a gun and shoot myself.” My brother, Steve, the only one who shared my experience, had gone to live with our father in another town. But his absence hardly mattered. Something had changed between us since we became adolescents. The onset of adolescence probably had something to do with my feelings of strangeness as well. I hardly recognized my body anymore. Hardly recognized myself. I felt alone and insignificant, and my fantasy allowed me to feel special.

A changeling is a child left by fairies in exchange for a child stolen. An inferior, sickly thing left in place of what is precious, like the fake diamonds a jewel thief might leave to conceal his theft. I wanted to believe I was worth the trade. I wanted to become, like David Copperfield, the hero of my own life. But first I had to accept my life as it was. Once I did, things got better.

I worked harder in school and won encouragement from some of my teachers. I joined high school organizations and made more friends. After losing ten pounds and getting fitted with contact lenses, I found a boyfriend. And if I wanted to enter unknown and hardly imaginable worlds, I picked up a book or wrote a story. Eventually my stories and plays won national contests sponsored by Literary Cavalcade magazine, which led to a scholarship at Knox College, a school famous for its program in creative writing.

Looking back, I know my unhappiness wasn’t that unusual. I’ve met people whose childhoods were far worse than mine and who had the same sense of not belonging, of being an outsider. Now I value the experience. Though it caused me plenty of suffering then — and later — it made me a writer. It helped me imagine Lu, the hero of Talion and Daemon Seer, a teenager trapped in hopeless circumstances until the daemon Talion tells her who she truly is.

I wonder how many others have imagined themselves as changelings of one kind or another. I would like to know their stories.

I wrote another version of this post almost five years ago. Now that I understand my life better, the story has a happier ending.

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CATALYST – Free eBook by Mary Maddox

What would you do to stay young and beautiful?

Melissa will do whatever it takes.

She has the wealth to buy eternal youth and destroy anyone who challenges her. Then she meets a young artist with a secret . . .

I’m offering my new short story Catalyst free to all subscribers of my newsletter. Here’s a short excerpt:

The young man in Melissa’s parlor stank of mildew and tobacco. The stench kept her from inviting him to sit, but she couldn’t stop looking at him. He was beautiful. His black hair fell in loose curls around his face. Wide blue eyes, sculpted cheekbones, full lips — an angelic face. “Do you smoke?” she asked.

“My girlfriend did.

“She quit?”

“We’re not together anymore, but the smell gets everywhere.” He studied the painting on the wall above the sofa. “That’s a Rothko. An original?”

“My husband acquired it not long before he died.” Melissa smiled. “You know something about art.”

“I’m a painter.”

Which explained why he needed money. The artists and writers were the saddest of all those Gerard brought to her. Doomed to awaken from their dream in a dark place, youth and hope gone. Nobody cared about their creations except family and a few friends. She felt a stab of sorrow for him. “What’s your name?”

“Chad. What’s yours?”

“You’re twenty-two, is that correct?”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat with a phlegmy rattling that alarmed her.

“Are you ill?”

“No, it’s just sinus. Allergies.” He spoke too fast.

“You’re sure?”

“That and the pollution. The air feels good in here. Pure.”

Something in his voice, a mix of bitterness and yearning, twisted her heart. She stopped the pity. It was one luxury she couldn’t afford. “I want you to take a hot shower. Would you like that?”

“Yeah, why not.” His nonchalance amused her, touched her a little. He couldn’t possibly afford a place in the city, not on his own. No doubt he lived in a cramped apartment with several others, and they all shared a slimy little bathroom half the size of her shower stall.

“Then Gerard will —”

“First I want to know what I’m getting.”

“Twenty thousand. Cash. Didn’t he tell you?”

“Not the money. The blood.”

Melissa studied her hands. Emerald polish gleamed on her shapely fingernails. No freckled spots yet, but the skin was starting to crepe. The hands of a middle-aged woman. The treatment would plump and smooth them. “Standard, from a blood bank. The donors were screened for disease.”

“How old were they?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “All ages, I suppose.”

Both of them knew better. The young sold to a more lucrative market than blood banks. Only the old and desperate traded a measure of their precious lives for a few dollars.

“So I should bounce back pretty fast?”

To read the rest of Catalyst, just subscribe to my newsletter using the button below or the form on the sidebar. Within 24 hours you’ll receive a message with a link to the download, available for Nook or Kindle.

I hope you enjoy the story!

Subscribe Button

 

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Excerpt from the noir mystery DARKROOM

My new novel Darkroom follows museum curator Kelly Durrell as she tracks her missing friend, Day, into a demimonde of drug traffickers and sexual predators. In this flashback, Day’s lover remembers his older brother.

When Gee was sixteen, Renny showed him how to do business.

He remembered the kids skateboarding in the darkening street, their raucous shouts joined to the chorus of starlings settling to roost. The scent of lilacs wafted from somewhere, too sweet. Gee hung back on the porch steps. Renny swaggered to the door, his thumb hooked in the front pocket of his jeans. No one answered the bell. He stepped to the window, cut the screen with his jackknife, and sent Gee inside to unlock the door.

Dougie was taking a shower. Light from the bathroom shined on Renny’s rapt smile. Gee heard the shower curtain rip, hooks popping off the rod, and a croaked “What —?” Thumps and scuffling. Then a louder thump and a scream.

They dragged Dougie into a bedroom and hogtied him with twine. He was a small dude with a hairless chest and not much pubic hair. He curled on the dirty carpet, wet hair pasted to his face, bleeding from his mouth and panting like a dog.

“The shit I tasted was rock,” Renny said. “The shit you delivered was stepped on.”

“The suppliers —”

Renny slammed his fist into Dougie’s face. “I bought from you, not them. Ain’t my fault you trusted a bunch of fucking spics.”

“Basement,” Dougie jabbered. “Third shelf up. Cinder block.”

“Check it out, Gee.”

Gee found the basement door where he expected it to be. Same with the light switch. As if the floor plan of Dougie’s house was burned into his brain at birth. As if he never had a choice. The shelves held the usual clutter — a busted toaster oven, a couple of bowling trophies, a glass jar of pennies. The money was stashed in the cavity of a cinder block. Not enough. Gee brought the pennies too.

The bedroom stank of urine. “Nine hundred seventy.” Gee tossed the roll of bill to Renny. “Plus change.” He shook the jar of pennies and placed it on the floor. Doing things like that — provocative things — made him less afraid of his brother.

Renny grabbed a sock from the floor and stuffed it in Dougie’s mouth. Shadows warped his smile into something monstrous. “You owe me seven large. I want my money, bitch. You gonna give me my money?” When he struck the first match, Gee looked away. A scream gargled in Dougie’s throat. The bedroom carpet was green and littered with tiny pebbles and burnt-out matches. The useless details stuck to Gee’s memory like lint. He wanted to bolt. But Renny would be waiting at home and their parents wouldn’t protect him. Dad thought weaklings deserved what they got, and Mom was just a slave.

“Where should I burn the cocksucker now? I’m thinking his balls.”

Gee tasted vomit. “He’d probably like it, the faggot.”

The hogtied body thumped like a landed fish. Dougie made an urgent whimpering noise. He had more to say. Renny yanked the sock from his mouth.

“Cl-cl-closet.” Dougie’s gaze jerked upward. “Sh-sh-shoe box.”

Gee pulled shoe boxes from the top shelf of the closet. In two of them he found Dougie’s real stash. Hundred-dollar bills and fifties and twenties, sorted into piles and rubber-banded. He showed his brother the money and began counting out loud. “Two hundred, three, four, five, six . . .” The diversion worked. Renny came and stood over him while he counted the money. Nine thousand, two hundred and thirty dollars.

“Asshole could’ve just paid me.”

Gee hoped it would end there, that his brother would be satisfied with a 3000-dollar profit and let Dougie keep his life. But Renny strangled Dougie with a belt from the closet and then tossed Gee the car keys. “There’s a can of gas in the trunk. Bring it.”

The firefighters showed up fast. Their station, it turned out, was two blocks away. Dougie’s body was mostly unburned, and the cops lifted a partial fingerprint from the belt. It wasn’t a certain match, but a neighbor IDed their car and Dougie’s friends testified to Renny’s psycho reputation.

Gee never rolled over. He was handcuffed to a table for hours. He begged for the toilet, but the two ugly cops just laughed. They laughed more after he pissed himself. They claimed a witness saw his face and showed him a drawing that looked like him. But Gee wasn’t stupid. It had been too dark for anyone to make him. The cops yammered on and on about their solid case and how he would be so popular in the slammer his asshole would be looser than his mama’s pussy. Now and then they changed tactics and called him a good boy, straight-A student, and promised him Renny was going down so he’d best cut a deal while he could. Through it all Gee kept the guilt and horror locked inside. And finally they had to let him go. They had nothing.

Renny was confident he would walk free, too. Gee had been in the courtroom when the jury came back. Had seen his brother’s face when the foreman spoke the word guilty — the rapt smile, like the moment he sailed into the bathroom to take Dougie down.

Darkroom will be available early next year.

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Ambiguity

You could write a book on why readers dislike ambiguity in fiction. Someone probably has. It might seem arrogant (or at least reductive) to address the question in 500 words or less, but I’m going to try.

The answer comes down to what a reader wants — challenge or comfort.

Ambiguity is a lack of clarity or certainty in a situation. In fiction, it’s found in open endings, unsolved disappearances, characters whose nature remains mysterious, events that may or may not be real. For me, ambiguity enriches a story and keeps me thinking long after I put the book aside. It makes the story more real. More like life.

We live with ambiguity every day. Someone texts a friend several times and gets no reply. An insecure person thinks, “I did something to make her hate me.” A fearful person thinks, “Maybe she’s in trouble.” An optimistic person thinks, “She’s having too much fun to check her messages.” The point is, people feel the need to come up with an explanation.

Oftentimes more is at stake. You interview for a job. The interviewer promises to get back to you, but doesn’t. Maybe you should call and ask whether you’re still in the running. But what if your call annoys the interviewer?

You meet someone and want to start dating. But maybe he’s a con artist with a string of ex-wives. You run an online search and hope it uncovers the truth. Some of the truth anyway.

The uncertainty of life can be exhausting and anxiety provoking. What a comfort to escape into a story where the mystery is solved, the lovers are united, and both characters and reader stand on solid fictional ground.

The trouble is, the real complexity of experience is missing from those stories.

Margaret Atwood’s “Death By Landscape” is a short story built on ambiguity. The protagonist, Lois, goes to summer camp and meets Lucy. The two girls become friends over several summers together at camp. One day while they’re alone on a hike, Lucy goes off to pee and never comes back. A search of the surrounding countryside turns up nothing. The owner of the summer camp blames Lois.

For the rest of her life, Lois carries the guilt and perplexity of not knowing what happened to her friend. She collects paintings of wilderness landscapes but otherwise pushes the experience to the back of her mind — until she gets old. With her husband dead and her children gone, the mystery of Lucy’s disappearance reemerges. Lois spends her days gazing at the landscape paintings in search of Lucy.

“Death By Landscape” illustrates how devastating lack of closure can be. Lois seeks closure in her collection of landscapes. They are attempts to recapture Lucy by placing borders around the uncharted territory that swallowed her up.

Many readers seek closure in fiction and abhor the holes where certainty and clarity disappear. I can’t really blame them.

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Finding another way

In her novel The Wife, Meg Wolitzer tells the story of a talented writer who sacrifices her own career to marry a man who becomes a famous novelist. Or rather, Wolitzer lets Joan tell her own story, beginning with her decision to leave her husband, a narcissistic philanderer, as the two of them are flying to Helsinki, where Joe will accept a prestigious award. The couple are in their sixties, their children long gone from the nest. Their comfortable golden years await.

After one or two pages I was already wondering why Joan stayed so long. The novel provides a complicated answer, a tangle of circumstances and character.

In a series of flashbacks, Joan relates how she and Joe meet and fall in love back in the 1950s while she’s a student at Smith. He’s her creative writing instructor (what a surprise), married with a newborn daughter (even less of a surprise). Their affair discovered, they flee the college in disgrace and begin their life together in a shabby Greenwich Village apartment. Joan goes to work to support Joe’s ambition to become a successful novelist. Although she has considerable talent as a writer, she sees little point in trying to pursue a career of her own.

In the 1950s the literary establishment was dominated by men and the stereotypical male novelist — a lusty, macho guy who wrote sprawling novels. Think Normal Mailer and James Jones. With a few exceptions, women’s writing was undervalued.

While at Smith, Joan attends the reading of Elaine Mozell, a writer whose first novel had good reviews but dismal sales. At the party afterward, Elaine warns Joan she cannot hope to win the attention of the male reviewers and editors “who decide who gets to be taken seriously, who gets put up on a pedestal for the rest of their lives.” These gatekeepers make sure “women’s voices [will remain] hushed and tiny and the men’s voices loud.”

Elaine Mozell’s warning echoes in Joan’s head for years afterward, a reminder that she would have failed anyway.

In the 1970s the literary landscape begins to change, but by then Joan has settled into the marriage. She has three children. She thinks it’s too late. So she stays in the marriage and puts up with Joe’s preening and fooling around with other women. By the end of The Wife, the extent of her sacrifice becomes clear. It’s heartbreaking.

Despite the sad story, The Wife is often savagely funny. Wolitzer gives her protagonist acute vision, cutting wit, and rage all the fiercer for having been suppressed. Of her once sexy husband Joan says:

Now he was old, with a humbling bio-prosthetic heterograft porcine valve (however you slice it, it’s just pig meat) stuck like a clove into his heart, and pig memories somehow looped into his brain: happy images of rooting around among old nectarines and tennis shoes.

Wow. Joe is sleeping beside a razor and doesn’t even know it.

Days after finishing The Wife, I’m still pondering Elaine Mozell and the role she plays in Joan’s choice. Elaine speaks the truth without regard for the damage it will do. I guess that’s a good thing. Better than lying, anyway. But it’s truth shaded by bitterness. Come to think of it, Elaine never tells Joan to stop writing, only to forget about impressing the men. She says, “Find some other way.” Advice so buried in negativity that Joan doesn’t understand it for decades.

I want to believe there’s another way — always — and failure won’t happen unless I give up. But I know too much about the intractability of life to think it’s that simple. Sometimes there are no good choices, only bad and worse ones. I’ve gone the wrong way more than once. And probably will again. I value Joan’s story, with its less than happy ending, for showing how even a terrible choice may be redeemable if one can face the truth.

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Word Play

I love finding new words. As a Scrabble player I see each one as another way to score. But as a reader and writer I value a word for its sound and texture and nuances of meaning. Certain words amaze and delight me when I first come upon them. This happened more often when I was young, less after I grew up and became a teacher. Task-oriented reading has a way of squashing delight before it is born. One is less likely to pause and savor a word when one has five dozen papers to read (which right now, thank the moon and stars, I do not). Anyhow, here are three words that amazed and delighted me as an adolescent reader.

Apoplectic Chestnuts

Apoplexy is stroke – a blood vessel starts leaking into the brain, causing all kinds of dire symptoms up to and including death. But the adjective apoplectic may be used in a figurative sense to describe someone who seems on the verge of having a stroke, or something that causes a stroke or resembles a stroke. Charles Dickens uses the word a lot. In Nickolas Nickleby there is “an ancient butler of apoplectic appearance” and in A Christmas Carol he describes “great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence.” I love the way the word sounds, the plosives one after another, popping off like a chain of fireworks. I imagine an apoplectic person as red-faced, bad-tempered and chronically frustrated – like a huge pimple on the verge of bursting.

Anger by Thomas Perkins

Apoplectic Man

Never Drop a Mercury Thermometer

Mercurial means volatile, unpredictable, fast-thinking, imaginative. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “Originally such qualities were associated with the god or the planet; the sense is now usually understood to allude to the properties of mercury the metal.” As a teenager I loved Greek and Roman mythology, so I associated mercurial with the wing-footed god. Then there came the incident in chemistry class. Mr. Hawks, our teacher, warned us to be careful with the thermometers. A hopeless klutz, I usually let my lab partner handle the equipment while I wrote the report. I was good at the writing reports. But one day I somehow ended up holding the thermometer. And of course I dropped it. The mercury hit the floor and scattered, then drew itself into tense little beads that seemed alive, as though any moment they would slither together and form a pulsating blob that would devour us one by one until it filled the entire classroom. Mr. Hawks confirmed this impression by ordering us to stand back as he vacuumed up the perilous beads.

A Colder Kind of Snotty

A phlegmatic character is the opposite of mercurial. He’s the guy at the party who sits like a lump watching TV and never cracks a joke or laughs at anyone else’s joke. She’s the gal who never dances and falls asleep after one glass of wine. As the OED puts it, being phlegmatic means “having, showing, or characteristic of the temperament formerly believed to result from a predominance of phlegm among the bodily humours; not easily excited to feeling or action; stolidly calm, self-possessed, imperturbable; (with pejorative connotation) sluggish, apathetic, lacking enthusiasm.” There are four bodily humours, or fluids, thought by the ancient Greeks to influence health. One of course is phlegm. The others – blood, yellow bile, and black bile – have words associated with them as well. Sanguine for blood, bilious for bile. But phlegmatic is the most fun of the humourous words. It sounds as though somebody spliced phlegm to automatic to create Phlegm-o-Matic, the amazing new snot-producing machine. I guess that would be just about anybody with a bad cold.

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