and the most wanted man in America is about to destroy the entire nation…or save it.In this thrilling continuation of his popular TimeSplash series, Graham Storrs delivers “a fantastic speculative thriller” about what it would mean to actually change history…in a fast-paced action-packed novel filled with great characters, a sprinkling of romance, and a new and intriguing take on time travel.
The most wanted man in America is about to destroy the entire nation… or save it.
It’s 2066 and Sandra has kept a low profile for 16 years, working as a tech in a quiet British university, hoping her past would never catch up with her. But it has.
When Jay hears Sandra has been kidnapped, he drops everything and goes to the U.S. to find her. But Sandra’s kidnapper is not an ordinary criminal. He’s America’s most-wanted terrorist – a man driven to to free his country from religious oppression at any cost. Sandra, still suffering from the fallout of earlier timesplashes, refuses to help create the biggest timesplash ever, which would unleash a wave of destruction that the rebels hope will kickstart a new American revolution.
When Cara, Sandra’s teenage daughter, is taken by one of the many factions on the ground in Washington D.C., Sandra’s resolve is shaken, and Jay is forced into a race against time to stop the deaths of millions or save Sandra and her daughter.
Sandra and Jay must ultimately decide between what is right for them and what is right for all in this thrilling continuation of the Timesplash series.
Praise for True Path:
Playing with history
“…a fantastic speculative thriller that continues a great story. The author asks big questions about what it would actually mean to change history, and not just from the perspective of physics, but from the perspective of the rights and wrongs. His take on how time travel works…is really quite unique.”
Sci fi thriller
…”Loved the idea of a fundamentalist takeover. Very scary. …An excellent exploration of intolerance.”
an excerpt from
True Path
by Graham Storrs
Chapter 1: Splashfail
“Three, two, one …”
The big capacitor banks discharged with a bang, pouring their pent up energy into the coils. Within femtoseconds, the temporal displacement field bloomed around the three men on the platform, flinging them out of the spacetime we know and into the void beyond. To Isaac Callendro, team leader of this makeshift bunch of heroes, all he knew was that the lights went out.
The ruins of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center disappeared in a blink. He was in total darkness and silence, weightless and disoriented. In the void, he knew, there was no up or down, no light at the end of the tunnel. There was nothing but himself, the whole of Creation shrunk to the space within his own skull. Yet he also knew that, out there, beyond the stiff, inflated skin of his renovated shuttle-era space suit, his two companions were also with him, traveling in lonely isolation into the past. They had all been lobbed from the present, through the void, to splash down in the timestream forty-one years earlier, a time before dreams of space and exploration had died forever, before the certainties of religion had ripped apart the fragile network of science and reason upon which the greatest superpower the world had ever known had been built.
Just a single minute. That’s all the lob would take. Callendro just needed to hold on to his sanity for one minute and not let the awful blackness suck it out of him. He worried about the others, though. Jacob was so young and brash. Callendro would need the young man’s aggression and callousness at the other end of the lob, but he feared the boy was too unstable. Even if they pulled off the timesplash, it could unhinge a mind like Jacob’s. If that happened, what kind of person would be returning with them to 2066? And Rebekka, with her poise and her old money manners, how would she respond when the madness began?
And yet, after six failed attempts—three crews fried at the lob site, two spat out of the field generator dead on their return, and another that had simply disappeared into the void—the project was running out of suitable volunteers. Callendro knew this would be their last attempt. They must succeed. Everything depended on it.
He tensed his body as they burst into light and weight and noise. Into a room full of shouting, frightened people. Callendro stumbled to his feet and quickly observed his surroundings. They had interrupted some kind of briefing. There was a big image projected on one wall, where a terrified-looking man was huddling, his features blurring as his face vibrated. Other people in the room were cowering in fear, backing up against the walls of the room. Callendro saw Jacob and Rebekka among the upended chairs and dropped tablets. Jacob wasn’t moving. Not moving at all. He had somehow died in the void. Perhaps a leak had sprung in his ancient space suit. Rebekka climbed to her knees and pushed up her visor. She was clumsy in the fat white gauntlets and seemed stunned but OK. Beside her, a chair was bouncing against the floor, hitting the ground and springing back onto its legs, over and over, like a film repeatedly running forwards then backwards. Tiles fell from the ceiling as a crack ripped through the building. The men and women in the room cried out in fear. Callendro winced as the wailing sound shifted up into painfully high registers before grinding down into a deep bass growl.
He had hoped that the room would be empty, that the splash would not begin until they were well clear of the origin. Now they would never make it. The splash would grow around them and they’d have to fight it for every inch of ground. It would be a miracle if they made it out of the building alive.
Callendro lurched toward Rebekka. He noticed everything in the room with a bitter detachment. He had landed badly. His helmet had hit a table corner and now his visor was a web of cracks around a tiny hole. If the whole crew had matching spacesuits, he might have been able to use Jacob’s for the return trip. But their suits didn’t match. Only the first few crews had had that luxury. Since then they’d had to make do and mend, refurbishing any suit from any era that they could get their hands on. He thought about trying to squeeze into Jacob’s suit but the suit was defective. Jacob’s frozen corpse was proof of that. With a sigh, Callendro pulled off his helmet. It would be two hours before the yankback pulled them all back to their own time. He had only two hours to find another suit, or he would die. The primary mission was shot. The operation had failed.
“Rebekka,” he said. The woman looked at him with wild, half-panicked eyes. Whatever she had expected, Callendro could see that this was not it. “Becky!” he shouted. He felt the ground ripple beneath him. They needed to get out of that building at once. “Get to the exit. Get out of here.”
Despite her fear, she understood and began stumbling towards the door, panicking the fleeing people jammed in the room even more.
A timesplash was so unpredictable, Callendro thought as he hurried after Rebekka. Every person in this room might be affected by the sudden appearance of three astronauts. Witnessing the lob could change the rest of their lives. They might make a future decision in one way rather than another. They might fail to do something they should have done. They might drop dead of a heart attack. All of which could cause a temporal anomaly, creating an inconsistency between the future that might unfold and the present that Callendro came from. And if there was one thing the Universe hated, it was a temporal anomaly. As soon as an anomaly arose, massive forces began coercing the timeline back into shape. The bigger the anomaly, the bigger the forces involved. That was a splash: the unraveling of spacetime, the mangling of causality required to put the Universe right, to heal the wound, to return everything to how it was.
Callendro stomped along after Rebekka. The big windows on one wall of the room burst into a million fragments as the building warped. The fragments showered to the ground but stopped in mid-air, trembling. Callendro knew what it meant. Someone among the scattered occupants of this room had been a person who affected the future in important ways. Or perhaps it was the meeting itself. The bigger the effect, the bigger the splash would be. Maybe a space program employing thousands of people would not happen now. Maybe another program just as large would be started. It was impossible to know. But Callendro was sure of one thing: he had to find a suit or he was a dead man.
He saw Rebekka make it out through the door. There were still other people in the room, cowering away from him. Some seemed almost normal, no vibration, no jerky twitching.
“You.” Callendro picked on a woman clutching at a table as if it were a life raft. “I need a spacesuit. Where should I look?”
She stared at him in terror. “Please don’t kill me.”
“I’m not going to kill anyone. I need to replace my suit. Where do you keep them?”
“I—I don’t know. I work in IT. I’ve never …”
“Who are you?” The question came from behind him, from a balding man in a white collared shirt.
“I’m from the future. Look, I don’t mean to scare you, but I really do need to get into a new suit.”
But the man became incoherent, repeating the same syllable over and over, stammering out the beginning of a sentence he would never finish.
“Training,” the woman said. “You should look in the training areas. Try Building 9.”
Callendro nodded his appreciation and left the room. He was keen to get away before he did her and the others any more harm. He knew that everything would soon go back to how it was. After a while, the building would mend, the people would return, and the meeting would resume from the instant Callendro’s crew had arrived. He knew all that, but the sight of the horrified people in that crumbling building still affected him at a level below rationality.
-oOo-
Out in the corridor, Callendro reeled to a stop, unable to understand what he was seeing. Radiating lines seemed to stretch away for miles to a white dot at the center. It was only when the corridor snapped back into shape that he finally realized it had been stretched away from him to a vast distance. The white dot was now Rebekka, standing just a few metres away with her back to him, staring into a gaping crack that ran right across the floor. He hurried over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She turned towards him, her face white with shock.
“They fell in,” she said, turning back to the crevasse.
“It doesn’t matter, Bec. Nothing that happens here matters—except to us. It’s the past. We’ve stirred it up a bit but it will settle back into place. No harm has been done.”
Her expression was ragged. “I … I know. It’s just …”
“Rebekka, I’m canceling the primary mission.” They were supposed to steal a car and drive ten miles to where Jacob’s grandfather had once lived, but now Callendro had other priorities. “We’ll never make it.” He considered asking her to pursue the secondary mission—to reach the Director’s office and shoot the man—while he went off on his quest for a new space suit. But the idea was ridiculous. Rebekka was barely functioning now. She wouldn’t last five minutes on her own. “Come with me.” He took her hand, leading her away from the hole in the floor.
“Jacob’s dead,” she said.
“I think he had a leak. We’ll be fine.” She looked quickly at his face, where his helmet should have been. He could almost hear her thinking that he wouldn’t be fine, but she didn’t say anything.
He saw an exit sign and followed it. He had studied maps of the building, walked around the future remains of it until he knew it well. Yet now he was disoriented and did not recognize that particular corridor. He tried not to panic. He kept reassuring himself that he was in a space center at the dawn of the Orion Mars Mission—the ill-fated manned mission to Mars. If there was anywhere on Earth he could find a spacesuit, it was here.
They crashed through a fire exit and into the bright light of a Houston morning, frantically scanning the surrounding buildings for any that they recognized.
“There,” Rebekka said, pointing. “That’s Building 31. Building 9 is just beyond it on Avenue C.”
Callendro wasn’t sure. What if they made a mistake, wasted time going all that way? “We need to ask someone.” There were people about but nobody close. The building they’d just left was shaking itself apart, yet no-one else seemed to notice. They would start to notice, eventually, if the splash spread to the adjacent buildings but, until then, the effect was localized, contained.
Callendro saw a van parked just a dozen meters ahead of them and he made for it. There was no way he or Rebekka could fit in the driver’s seat wearing their space suits—the bulky environment packs they each wore made that impossible. But Callendro’s suit was useless anyway and he could bundle Rebekka into the back.
“Help me out of this thing,” he said when they reached the vehicle. He disconnected his gauntlets and Rebekka pulled them off. Tearing at the seal at his waist, he tried to remember what he could about internal combustion engines. He’s seen them in old vids, and knew there would be a key somewhere to start the engine.
It took an age to get out of the bulky, cumbersome suit. He knew it would take even longer to get into a new one, but if they could get the car working, they could cover so much more ground in the time that remained. Helping with the suit had seemed to calm Rebekka, restoring some of her usual poise. Yet, when a scream came from the building behind her, she flinched. He tried to comfort her but felt ridiculous trying to hug her in his underwear while she was in the bulky suit.
He went to the back of the van and pulled the door open. Inside there was painting equipment—cans, rollers, dust sheets. He pulled everything out and dumped it on the road before helping Rebekka climb inside. He slammed the doors after her and ran for the driver’s seat.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Callendro turned toward the shouting. Two men in overalls were approaching from across the road. Callendro quickly opened the driver’s side door and looked inside. He could jump in now, but the chances of starting the vehicle in a hurry were zero. In frustration, he stepped away to face the men.
“I need to borrow your van,” he said. “Just for a short while.”
“Beat it, creep. And get some pants on.”
The other man was staring at the road behind the van. “Hey! He pulled all our gear out. Look.”
Callendro clenched his jaw hard in frustration. Couldn’t anything go right? “I’ll put it all back,” he lied, edging around the front of the van towards his discarded suit. “I just need it for an hour. It’s a matter of life and death.”
But the two men were watching him with a mixture of aggression and wariness. “Call the cops, Al,” the first one said to his friend. “This guy’s a freakin’ whack job.”
Callendro ran to his spacesuit. It’s all right, he told himself. Everything will put itself back the way it was. He fumbled with the stiff white fabric, turning one legpiece until he found the pocket.
“What the hell is he doing?” Al asked.
“Just call the cops, OK?” The man hurried around the van to get a good look at Callendro and stopped dead. “Oh Jesus.”
Callendro pointed the gun at his chest and squeezed the trigger. He missed. He fired again and missed again. The man turned and ran. Callendro fired again and this time blood splashed from the man’s back and a red bloom colored his white painter’s overalls. The man stumbled one last pace, fell to his knees and then toppled forward to lie still. His companion, Al, didn’t move. He just gaped at his friend with wide eyes. Then he looked at Callendro. The sight of a strange man in his underwear turning to face him, gun raised, seemed to snap him out of the trance he’d fallen into. He threw up his arms and said, “Take the van, all right? Take it. It’s yours.”
Callendro fired again, hitting Al in the shoulder. Then again. A miss. Then again and again until the clip was empty and Al was dead. The man’s body did not lie still but twitched and shook on the ground, reliving its last few moments, over and over. From the body, small ripples fanned outward across the concrete.
Bile rose in Callendro’s throat. He threw away the gun and climbed into the van. In the back, Rebekka was sobbing. He wanted to shout at her to shut her up, but he didn’t have the energy. Even without the suit, every movement he made was a struggle against the weight of his limbs. He looked for where the ignition should be but could find nothing. There were displays set into the dashboard but nothing that looked like a key or even a starter button. He looked around in desperation. Maybe there was an instruction manual.
“Isaac!”
He pulled his head up from under the dash at Rebekka’s frightened call. She was staring through the back windows at a police cruiser that was pulling up behind them.
Callendro took a deep breath. “Stay quiet and keep out of sight,” he told her. “You’ve still got your gun?” She looked horrified but pulled the weapon out of her suit and showed it to him.
He climbed out of the van and walked back towards the police car, acutely aware that he had no clothes on. The two policemen threw open their car doors and jumped out, crouching behind them with guns drawn. Callendro raised his arms and stopped walking. The bodies of the two painters were clearly visible on the ground.
“Get down on the floor and put your hands behind your head.”
“Officer, I can explain everything.”
“Get down on the floor and put your hands behind your head.”
Emboldened by his obvious lack of any weapons, one of the cops came round the door and edged towards him.
Frustration welled up inside Callendro. He didn’t have time for this. The minutes were ticking away on his life and these two fat cops were going to get him killed. With a jolt, he realized that everyone he had seen since arriving in 2025 was fat. Everybody. Living high on the hog, spending the energy from all that oil on making food to stuff their faces with, while just forty years into the future . . . And then he noticed that the police car’s engine was still running. They had not turned it off. The incredible profligacy of burning petrol like that, without a thought, just because it might be a tiny bit inconvenient to stop the engine, hit him like a blow to the chest. This greedy world had destroyed his own, stolen his future, taken a world of peace and plenty and squandered it on fast food and air conditioning, cars and shrink wrap.
“Down on the floor. Now!”
He looked into the man’s eyes. “All I want is to get a spacesuit and go away.”
The cop blinked and, apparently reassessing the situation, frowned. “Chuck, it looks like we’ve got ourselves some kind of crazy guy.”
“No kidding?” said the other cop. “From the way he’s dressed I thought he might be one of those NASA eggheads.”
“Says he wants a spacesuit.”
The other cop came out from behind the door and joined his partner. “We got great spacesuits back at the station, buddy. They got arms that tie up at the back and everything. Now get down on the floor like the man told you.”
“I‘m going to die if I don’t get a spacesuit,” he said, kneeling on the hard concrete, still managing to keep his anger under control. “I‘m here from the future.”
“Yeah? And there’s me thinking you was an extraterrestrial.” The cop stepped forward to cuff him but looked up sharply at the van.
The rear doors burst open and Rebekka began firing from inside. Callendro threw himself to the ground while the cops ducked and ran, returning fire as they went. The one called Chuck fell, dead or wounded, Callendro didn’t care because the man had dropped his weapon.
Callendro got his legs under him and ran towards the gun, with Rebekka and the other cop still exchanging shots. He scooped up the gun and dropped behind Chuck’s body. Taking careful aim, he fired maybe a dozen shots before the other cop fell down dead.
But the body didn’t stay down. It bounced back up, sucking sprays of blood out of the air back into itself and then spurted them out again as it fell. Then it did it again, and again.
Callendro cursed and ran. Another splash had begun. A crack tore through the pavement and tripped him, sending him rolling across the ground towards the van, so close he could smell the oil and metal of its underside. The twitching body of the painter was nearby, the ground still rippling in concentric circles all around him. As Callendro scrabbled to get up, he saw one of the rear wheels. It had sunk to its axle in the concrete. He reached out a hand and touched the ground around the wheel. For all that it was rippling, the concrete felt completely solid. There was no way they could drive away the van now.
He got up and looked into the back of the van. “Come on. We need to get you into the police car, somehow.” Maybe she could take off the suit while they drove around looking for Building 9. On the other hand, maybe he should just leave her here. “Rebekka.” She was leaning against the wall, staring at the ceiling of the van. God damn the woman! This was not a good time to be having a breakdown. “Rebekka, we need to get moving.” He reached in and shook her. She toppled over and lay still on the floor of the van.
His heart thumped. Thumped again. Then he climbed into the van and lifted her head. She was big and awkward in the spacesuit, almost impossible to manoeuvre. He pushed her back up against the van wall and felt her neck for a pulse. Her skin was clammy and cold but she was still alive.
His relief lasted only a second or two before the realization struck him. Frantically, he felt around on her suit until he found it. The bullet hole. It had gone through the front at about waist height. He heaved her forward. The life support pack was positioned near where the bullet might have come out. The chances of it working properly with a bullet lodged in it were slim. And, even if he could mend the hole at the front somehow, the suit was almost certainly compromised at the back too.
Now both of them were without a suit. Not that Rebekka would need one if he didn’t find her medical care very soon. He could still use the police car. Its engine was running and it looked OK, even though mayhem was breaking out around the cop who was still flipping up and down. If Callendro was quick, he might get the cop car away from there before it too sank into the pavement, or a street light fell on it or whatever.
He lay Rebekka down as gently as he could and then sprinted for the cruiser. The ground was shaking as if gigantic animals were burrowing just below the surface. He leaped into the driver’s seat and looked at the displays, all lit up to display an array of dials and buttons. There should have been pedals on the floor. He was pretty sure he’d heard about that. A gas pedal and a brake. But there were none. He scanned the displays again. He had never seen technology like this. It was far more advanced than what he was used to in 2066. The cop car might as well have been an alien spaceship for all the sense its controls made.
He pushed some buttons at random and the car spoke to him.
“Only authorized drivers may operate this vehicle. Please identify yourself and speak your security code.”
He almost screamed in anger and frustration. “This is a medical emergency. A matter of life and death. Just give me control of the car.”
“Only authorized drivers may operate this vehicle,” the car repeated, without rancor. “Please identify yourself and speak your security code. Failure to comply will mean all systems will be locked down in twenty seconds and the authorities informed. You are advised that attempting to operate a police vehicle without permission is a crime punishable by up to three years imprisonment.”
Callendro jumped out of the car. He was scared that a lock down might involve closing the doors too. After a few seconds the engine stopped. He walked back to the van over ground that was cracked and distorted, past the flapping cop and the twitching painter. He didn’t go inside to sit with his dying companion but went to find his discarded spacesuit. In one of the document pockets was a small notebook and pencil. He moved away from the van, away from the shifting ground and the spreading splash. He found a shaded spot in a doorway at the other side of the street. Then he took the pencil and paper and wrote:
Tell him the mission was not a complete failure. We got back to 2025 and we started a splash. Just not the one we planned for. Tell him not to waste any more lives on trying to get this right. Tell him to go to Plan B. I don’t know if he has a Plan B, or what it might be. All I know is that anything has to be better than this.
Tell him goodbye from someone who never even met him but who would do it all again if he thought there was the slightest chance of it helping him get the job done.
Isaac Callendro
In the strange calm he now felt, an astonishing thought occurred to him. Even if he’d found a new space suit, it wouldn’t have done him any good at all. He’d have left it behind like the rest of 2025 when the yankback pulled him home. He’d felt so rational and purposeful and yet he’d been in the grip of some kind of mind-numbing panic all along. For a while, he sat there laughing at his own stupidity. He laughed so much he ended up crying.
It was just fifteen minutes now until the yankback. No time to do much at all except wait. There was only one thing he needed to do, though. He got up and walked back towards the cop called Chuck. He didn’t want to find himself in the void, almost naked, with no air and no heat. He picked up the gun he’d dropped earlier and checked the clip. There were three bullets left.
One would be enough.
Chapter 2: Embarkation
Leaving Boston in the summer of 2067 without the proper papers was no easy matter, but Zadrach Polanski had many friends who would give their lives to help him. One of his friends had introduced him to Captain Lee Xiangpo. Captain Lee—“Wayne” to his friends half a world away in Sydney—was Master of the handymax bulk carrier Lucky Country. And the Lucky Country was due to depart soon. With a Filipino crew and a cargo of fifty thousand tons of Montana corn bound for Liverpool, England, the Lucky Country was sailing with the morning tide. Meanwhile, she waited heavy and low in the Port of Boston’s Black Falcon Terminal while the Massachusetts rain scrabbled against her superstructure and along her decks.
From an old customs shed, Polanski and his companions watched the docks through infrared binoculars. It was two in the morning and the wharf was quiet. Much farther away, floodlights lit up the container docks where ships were still being loaded and unloaded despite the late hour.
“I make it two on patrol at this end and two more in the hut.” The speaker behind Polanski was a large and strong young man of eighteen, with fair hair and clear skin. He looked every inch the Kansas farm-boy he was, but his voice had the hard-bitten self-assurance of a man who had been fighting a guerrilla war since the age of twelve.
“Why so few?” Polanski asked, thinking out loud the way he often did. He turned to address a bulky, middle-aged man, crouched beside him in the cold, dark shed. “You did most of the recon work, David. Did you ever see just two SOBs patrolling this wharf?”
The big man shook his head, looking concerned.
Polanski turned back to the glistening wharf and peered again through his binoculars. “Could just be the rain, I suppose.”
They waited in silence as the two Sons of Joshua trudged along the quayside. They hunched against the rain in their brown uniforms, their long cloaks slick and wet. They passed within a hundred meters of the abandoned customs shed, then turned and trudged back the way they had come.
“So it’s a trap then?” the farm-boy asked.
“Looks like,” said Polanski.
“Do we call it off?”
“Nope. We just tread careful, that’s all.” He turned to the young man with a grin. “I promised you the flesh-pots of Europe, Peter, and I aim to make sure they’re yours.”
The young man grinned back. It was a private joke between them. No-one on this mission expected to have any time for pleasure.
“It’s time for that distraction now, David,” Polanski said.
His taciturn companion nodded.
David was part of a local chapter of the sprawling, loose alliance of resistance groups of which Zadrach Polanski was the nominal leader. The reality was that that the local chapters pretty much led themselves. But Polanski was changing that. In the past couple of years, he had coordinated several brilliant attacks on State and Federal Government facilities. He was making their presence felt. People were talking. For the first time in thirty-five years, the idea of taking America back from the Lord’s True Path Party seemed like something more than a crazy pipe dream.
Polanski’s new plan was as daring and original as his others—and every bit as risky. He listened with half an ear as David murmured through a compad to his team, keeping his eyes on the docks. Somewhere out there, Federal agents were in hiding, waiting for Polanski to make his move. He knew with the certainty that only a lifetime of evading the Feds could give a man. Someone had tipped them off. Someone had betrayed him. It had happened so often in his life, it didn’t even hurt anymore. He hoped it hadn’t been David. He liked the big guy. Chances were it was someone in David’s chapter—or maybe a spouse or sibling, even a child. There would be an investigation, and David would have to do whatever needed doing to protect the rest of his team.
“Sixty seconds,” David said.
Polanski and the young man, Peter, put away their binoculars and adjusted their backpacks. They moved to the door. Polanski looked back at David. At the same time, David looked across at him. Even if things went well, Polanski might never see the Bostonian again. They exchanged a small nod, each acknowledging the other.
Then the sky brightened, lighting the side of David’s face. Peering through the door, Polanski saw the patrolling militiamen stop and turn to look just as the thump of a large explosion shook the air. Pulling snub-nosed machine guns from under their cloaks, they began running away from Black Falcon Terminal. They were heading towards the Conley Terminal container facility, where a fireball was rising among the cranes. The two guards in the hut burst out onto the quayside and joined their companions in a dash towards the containers. The rattle of machine-gun fire could be heard in the distance.
Polanski waited, a steadying hand on Peter’s shoulder. Perhaps a full minute passed before David, still at the window with his infrared binoculars, said, “There.”
Following the direction of David’s gaze, Polanski saw a half-dozen black-coated men. They emerged from whatever shadows had held them, cautious as cats on the hunt. They looked all around, but mostly at the container docks. Some of them held handguns in two-handed grips, pointing the muzzles at the ground. FBI for sure. Polanski watched as one of them spoke urgently into his compad. After a moment, he shouted at the others and they all ran off towards the fighting.
“Time to get your people out,” Polanski said over his shoulder. Without looking back, he and Peter slipped out of the shed and ran at a crouch through the cold rain towards the Lucky Country.
-oOo-
“That’s far enough, mate.”
Captain Lee was not a big man but the way he blocked the top of the gangplank left no doubt that the only way to get past him would be the hard way. Behind him, two men with machine guns stood ready to back him up.
“Can we come aboard and discuss this?” said Polanski, glancing pointedly at the commotion farther up the wharf.
“Not till I’m happy with your credentials.”
Polanski reached into his jacket, causing the armed sailors beside Captain Lee to stiffen. He pulled out a small black bag, weighed it in his hand for a moment, then handed it to Lee. The captain took a look inside. Polanski watched in silence. The bag held twenty carats of cut diamonds, the price of his and Peter’s passage to Liverpool. Each stone had been donated by a supporter of the resistance, each taken from an engagement ring or brooch, each torn from the heart of someone who had clung to such mementos despite all the privations and necessities of life in modern America. Polanski had written each and every donor a personal IOU. He doubted that Captain Lee had the slightest notion what that bag of gems was really worth.
“Happy now?” he asked.
With a smile, the captain stood back and said, “Welcome aboard, Mr. Smith. These men will show you and your mate to your cabin. I’ll be along in a while to explain the ground rules. Until we’re under way, don’t leave your cabin for any reason. Understood?”
Polanski nodded. “Sure.”
“Not exactly friendly, is he?” Peter said as the Filipino sailors—one in front and one behind—led them into the bowels of the great ship.
“It’s a business transaction, that’s all. He’s taking a big risk,” Polanski said. “So is his crew. I don’t expect any of them to be happy about it.”
They were taken to a small cabin with bunk beds and very little else. They stowed their gear and lay on the hard mattresses. Neither of them were speaking nor sleeping, instead listening to the sound of water slopping against the steel hull, breathing air that smelled of oil.
After a long time, Polanski heard the boy’s breathing deepen into a steady, regular rhythm. He gave it another half hour and then climbed out of his bed and crept out of the room. The ship was large and lightly crewed. Its five massive holds were forward. The bridge, engines, crew quarters, galley, and everything else, were crammed into a relatively small space aft. Polanski made his way up to the deck without challenge and climbed up into the superstructure. There he found a quiet place to hide, a place where he could keep an eye on the docks and the gangplank. He settled down to keep watch. The rain had stopped but the wind was chilly and the painted steel he sat on was wet and cold.
At about four AM, a military vehicle drove down the quayside from the direction of the container docks and pulled up alongside the Lucky Country. A couple of Feds with a squad of Sons of Joshua militiamen at their heels got out of the armored vehicle and marched purposefully to the gangplank. Polanski eased himself into a crouch, ready to do whatever needed doing. Floodlights from the ship snapped on and caught the Feds in the glare about halfway up the gangplank, where their troops were forced into single file with nowhere to run. On the deck, Polanski could just make out the captain and several of his crewmen. He relaxed a little.
For a while, no-one spoke and no-one moved.
“God be with you,” the Fed at the front said. He waited for the reply but none came. He pulled a badge out of his coat pocket and held it up for Captain Lee to see. “I’m Special Agent Cartwell. This is Special Agent Drake.” Drake also held up a badge. In the bright lights, Polanski could see the silver crucifixes on the two agents’ coat lapels. The very sight made his jaw clench.
“And you are?” Cartwell asked and began walking up the gangplank again.
“Stop where you are!” The captain’s command was loud and sharp and was accompanied by the sound of bolts being slid on several firearms. Cartwell obeyed immediately. “No-one comes aboard this ship without my permission, Agent Cartwell. What do you want?”
Polanski couldn’t help but smile. The FBI was used to being met with fear and submission, not open hostility. It was good to see how angry it made them. Let the bastards fume, he thought. Boarding an Australian ship against the captain’s wishes was the kind of thing that sparked international incidents. And, now that Australia was a member of the Chinese Pacific Alliance—effectively a vassal state of the ever-expanding Chinese hegemony—the excrement would come pouring from a great height onto any FBI agent stupid enough to stir up that kind of trouble.
“We believe there are terrorist traitors in the area,” Cartwell said. “We would like your permission to search your ship in case any of them have stowed away with the intention of leaving the country. It’s in your own interest that these dangerous men are captured as quickly as possible.”
“There are no terrorists on my ship, Agent Cartwell.”
“Nevertheless—”
Lee raised his voice. “I said …” But, seeing the Fed wasn’t speaking any more, he let the point go. “I saw the fighting over there.” The captain looked off towards the fires that were still smoldering. “My men and I have been armed and on alert since it started. No-one got aboard who shouldn’t have. You can take my word for it.”
Cartwell’s sneer showed what he thought of the captain’s word. “If you would just permit a quick search, I can assure my superiors that there is no need to hold your ship in dock until a more thorough investigation can be made.”
It was an empty threat and the captain knew it. “Good luck with that, mate. Here’s what I reckon you should do. Take your pack of God-botherers and stick them back in that antiquated APC of yours, then drive into town and have a good night of burning gays and torturing old women and all the other fun things you get off on in the name of your fucking god, because I’d sooner send the lot of you to Hell this night than let any one of you set foot on my ship.”
Cartwell was practically foaming at the mouth. Even Polanski was shocked at the Australian’s blasphemous outburst.
“Atheist!” one of the militiamen said and spat into the black waters below him.
“Foreigner,” grumbled another.
Polanski heard a quiet scrape beside him and turned to find Peter crossing the roof to join him. The young man scowled an accusation at him as he settled into the shadows. In the lad’s hand, the blade of a hunting knife glistened.
Polanski looked back towards the drama unfolding on the gangplank. There was no way the Feds could storm the ship without being cut down by the captain and his men. All that Cartwell could do was to retreat and call for backup. Despite Cartwell’s fury, he was unlikely to do anything of the kind. He’d tried bullying his way onto the ship. Beyond that there was nothing he could do apart from escalate the matter to levels so high he would need absolute certainty that Polanski was aboard even to contemplate it. Even so, there was always the possibility that Cartwell was a fool, or that Captain Lee would goad him into starting a firefight.
The silence dragged out until Cartwell turned abruptly and shouted at his men to get back to the transport. With muttered complaints, they obeyed him. Before Cartwell joined them, he turned again to Lee and said, “I’ll be praying that we meet again, Captain.” He stalked down the gangplank and then posted the militiamen to guard the dock before driving away with the other Fed.
Polanski watched in silence for a while to make sure the SOBs were going to obey their orders, then tapped Peter on the shoulder and led him off the roof and back to their cabin.
“You won’t need that,” he told the young man, nodding towards the hunting knife still in his hand. “The Feds are more scared of disturbing their bosses than they are of letting us get past them. We’re safe now.”
Peter nodded and sheathed the knife. He looked into Polanski’s eyes and said, “I’d die before I let them take you, Zak.”
Polanski brushed his declaration aside with a laugh. “Save your passion for the girls in Liverpool.” And pray to God I never put you to the test.
Later, he left the cabin again and found the captain on the bridge.
“That was a brave thing you did,” he told the Aussie.
“I hate those bastards,” Lee said.
“All the same …”
“My mother always told me the only way to stop a bully is to stand up to him. Reckon she was right. Anyway, I know who you are. Anything I can do to help, you just name it.”
Polanski said, “You could give me my diamonds back.”
“Fuck off, mate!” The captain laughed loudly. “Now get back below decks like I told you, or I’ll fucking shoot you myself.”
The drone delivery vehicle sat on its four spindly legs on a raised platform about three meters square. Black and yellow stripes marked the edges of the platform. The words, “Danger. Authorized persons only beyond this line,” were stenciled on its sides. Thick cables snaked away to banks of capacitors, humming softly in gray steel cabinets. Behind a Perspex wall, two women watched the readouts projected in their virtual displays. Their hands moved confidently within the sensor fields. Their focus on the task was absolute.
“DDV power-up,” one of them said. The rotors on the little quadcopter drone began to whine.
“Counting down,” said the other, and a clock, projected so that they both could see it, began running backward in hundredths of a second. “Power at ten percent. All nominal.”
“DDV to operating height.” The little quadcopter rose into the air and climbed to one meter where it hovered, rock steady.
“Thirty seconds.”
“DDV to automatic.” The quadcopter went through a rapid series of maneuvers, ending up exactly where it started. “Test cycle complete. All nominal.”
“Twenty seconds. Field at fifty percent.”
The two women exchanged glances. It was all going exactly as planned. They had worked for six months on the DDV and its precious cargo and in a few seconds, their baby would be on its way.
Sandra allowed herself a moment of triumph. Her friend and colleague, Dr. Olivia Bradley, turned back to the displays and said, “Field at eighty-five percent. Ten seconds.”
Sandra checked her readouts. Everything had a green light. “All systems nominal.”
“Five seconds.”
“DDV main engines online.”
They both shifted their gaze to the quadcopter. Rocket engines mounted in its stubby wings would eventually explode into life, but not for a few minutes yet.
The clock’s digits raced down to a row of zeros and the DDV popped out of existence. The clock immediately reset for a one hour and twenty-seven minute countdown.
With a whoop, Sandra leapt into the air, skipped over to Olivia and high-fived her. For a while they danced and hugged among the desks and cables, Sandra did most of the leading while Olivia, looking bemused but happy, let herself be pulled about.
“Time to grab lunch before The Little Pig comes home,” Sandra said, dragging Olivia to the door.
Olivia laughed at Sandra’s pet name for the DDV.
“How can you think of eating while the DDV is out there on its first mission?”
“Oh, Piggy’s OK, and there’s not a thing we can do about it if it isn’t.”
“All the same,” Olivia said, insisting, causing Sandra to halt. “There’s a lot to do.”
“All the more reason to grab lunch while we can. Once all that data gets back, neither of us is going to get a break for the next few weeks.” Sandra let go of Olivia’s arm and stepped back. She could see her friend would only fret the whole time they were away from the lab if she made her leave. “OK. I’ll go and get lunch. I’m going to have something really nice to celebrate, and I’ll bring you back a cheese sandwich, or something else horrible, because you’re such a miserable old bugger.” She headed for the door again.
“Don’t be too long,” Olivia called after her. Sandra grinned and gave her friend the finger over her shoulder on the way out.
Outside it was a bright autumn day. Sandra was almost skipping, so pleased that the DDV had launched successfully. She checked the time on her commplant. Right now The Little Pig would be hurtling back through time through the pseudospatial void. She had done the trip twice herself—the last time, sixteen years ago in London—so she could visualize the DDV tumbling through the icy blackness with nothing but its accelerometers to tell it that it wasn’t perfectly still. Her own trips had been short, a couple of minutes each time, but the DDV was going much farther back in time than she ever had. Its flight-time was thirty-six minutes each way. Thirty-six minutes in that awful nothingness. It made Sandra shudder every time she thought about it. It made her remember that first time—with her boyfriend, Sniper—sucking on an empty air tank on the return trip, so scared she could barely think, and Sniper tearing off her helmet, pushing his snarling face against hers.
Sandra stopped, looking around at the bright sunshine, the brick buildings and the little groups of students on the lawns. Her breathing was labored and her heart was thumping. Even after all those years, the memory of that timesplash could still do that to her. She closed her eyes, then opened them again after a moment and continued walking.
Sniper is dead, she told herself. He died sixteen years ago in a backwash in Deptford, his body torn to pieces by machine-gun bullets, his creepy little teknik also dead. The police had no idea who had killed them, but Sandra always supposed it had been Sniper’s colleague, Camilla Vergara. She seemed the sort who would get her revenge.
It was all another world, another life. Sandra had been just fifteen when it started and only seventeen when Sniper died. She’d called herself “Patty” back then. All timesplashers had tags. It had all seemed so cool. Now it just seemed silly. Even Olivia had once had a tag. She’d been “Nahrees.” When Sandra met her she was working as a teknik for MI5, helping them create their own timesplashing capability so they could fight Sniper and his kind.
Thinking of Olivia made Sandra smile. Olivia had never been cool by any stretch of the imagination. She was pure geek to the very core. Being Dr. Olivia Bradley, a lecturer in the Temporal Sciences Department of the University of East Anglia was much more her style.
A young man caught Sandra’s eye. He was tall, well-built, fresh-faced. The right age to be a student—a freshman, anyway—but he didn’t look right. His clothes were wrong. Was that all? She studied him. He stood outside the cafeteria building, now intently reading the menu, but when she first spotted him, he’d been staring straight at her.
Which wasn’t so unusual. Sandra knew she was a beautiful woman. The kind of beautiful that made her stand out like a swan in a flock of geese. Tall, athletic, with a natural grace and elegance that made Siamese cats look gauche, she could easily have made a living as a model, except that she had not wanted her picture flashed around. As a teenager she had caught the eye of Sniper, the most famous brick in the world, and had been photographed on his arm at every fashionable party in Europe. At thirty-three, her beauty had deepened and matured and supposedly half the boys—and faculty—on campus were secretly in love with her. Some not so secretly. But everyone knew to keep their distance. She would let no-one near her and had a well-honed repertoire of stinging rejections. Besides, she had a black belt in karate—she was on the university team—and there were rumors that she secretly worked for the security services and that she had killed people. The rumors weren’t quite true. She did not work for the security services. She wanted nothing to do with that life at all. She had once killed a man, though.
The young man was still reading the menu. Sandra suspected he was watching her reflection in the cafeteria windows. Just a lust-struck teenager? Or something more sinister?
She went inside and bought the first two sandwiches she could grab, snatched a couple of random drinks from the cabinet, and a couple of chocolate bars from the display next to the checkout, bundled them all into a bag, the cafeteria automatically deducting the cost from her commplant. She hurried back to the lab. She walked fast, waiting until she’d traveled fifty meters on a straight stretch of footpath before stopping suddenly and turning round.
The path behind her was clear. No-one took a sharp turn into the shrubbery. The young man was nowhere to be seen.
Stupid, she told herself. Paranoid. She carried on to the lab. It was all this reminiscing about the past. She thought she was over all that. She’d spent weeks in a loony bin—the Porringer Institute for Mental Well-Being, to give it its proper title—and ten years in therapy after the events of 2050. She bloody well should be over it.
But, of course, hunting down Sniper—with a little help from MI5 and Europol—and facing him in London in 1902, were not what her problems had been about. The real issues had been to do with why she’d become involved with a bastard like Sniper in the first place. Getting to the root of that had been why her therapy had been such a long and painful road.
Yet she’d made it. Sorted herself out. Made up for all the school she’d missed, gone to university, discovered an aptitude for engineering and maths, and been one of the first graduates of Exeter University’s brand new Master of Science degrees in Temporal Engineering. Her therapist had worried about her attraction to the mechanics of time travel, but Sandra thought it only natural that she’d be fascinated by something that had so dramatically affected her life. And, when she started applying for teknik jobs, she found Nahrees, running her own Direct History team there at UEA.
“You were quick,” Olivia said, looking up from her work.
“Was I? I suppose I just wanted to get back to stop you messing up all my calibrations.”
Olivia pulled a tight smile. “Once. Once I turned the wrong knob.” She sighed. “What did you get me?”
Sandra glanced at the flight time display and saw the DDV had been falling through the pseudospatial medium for over twenty-five minutes. She hoped it would come out the other end still functioning. They had tested The Little Pig in zero pressure at almost zero Kelvin for much longer periods. It would be OK.
She tipped the contents of her bag onto the desktop. “Er, ham and cheese, or …” Her heart sank. “Beef and horseradish.” Olivia was a vegetarian.
“What happened out there?” Olivia asked, suddenly serious.
“I, em …”
“A brick?”
Sandra knew what Olivia was thinking. It was the same thing that had sprung to mind when she saw the young man watching her: old enemies. There were people from the old timesplashing scene who knew Sandra had played a part in taking down Sniper and his team. Most of the old timesplashers—the “bricks” as they were known back then—had moved out of the time travel business and into petty crime. Sometimes, not so petty. A couple of timesplashers were big names in organized crime now. It was always a possibility that one of them would decide it was time to settle an old score.
“I’m probably just being paranoid,” Sandra said, trying to convince herself.
“Shit.” Olivia sounded scared.
“It’s nothing. Probably. Just some kid, ogling me.”
“Did he follow you?” It struck Sandra that her friend had been employed by MI5, and would have undergone at least basic training, even though she had been on the technical staff. So many years ago. The idea of her slightly plump, rather matronly friend on a firing range, or practicing tradecraft, seemed ludicrous.
“I don’t think so. Look, it was probably nothing.”
“Do you want to …? You know.”
They’d spoken about it just once, on a boozy night out three years ago. Sandra had told Olivia about the bag she kept packed, the secret bank account with her emergency fund, the passports in false names. Yet Olivia had remembered.
“Are you kidding? With The Little Pig out there on its first mission? No way.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
Shocked that this was escalating into the realms of panic so quickly, Sandra decided to quash it, firmly. “I am not disappearing into the night to leave you to take the credit for all my hard work. For all I know, you planted that kid to spook me just so you could get all the glory.”
Olivia’s worried expression twitched into a smile. “It’s no wonder there are people out there who want to kill you. I feel the urge myself, sometimes.”
“Come on, let’s get the nets up.”
Olivia seemed reluctant to let go of her concern, but allowed herself be drawn into the work. They needed to fit fine, strong netting around the platform from which the DDV had been launched.
“I can’t believe it’s gone back two thousand years,” Sandra said, although that wasn’t strictly true. These days she fully understood the energy fields that would lob an object out of the present and into the past, through the nothingness in between. Even so, the sense of wonder at the achievement hadn’t left her.
“You and Jay did pretty well,” Olivia said, referring to the lob they’d made in London, sixteen years ago.
“We agreed not to mention that.”
“Sorry, your stalker friend just stirred it all up again.”
Sandra felt her stomach flip as she remembered what had happened. It had all started with Sniper. He and two other bricks had gone back 150 years to the British Museum Library to assassinate Pyotr Illyich Lenin, who had been visiting there on the fourth of April, 1902. The idea of a timesplash was to create a paradox, to change as much as possible so that the past became incompatible with the present. That was the essence; lob a brick back into the timestream and make as big a disturbance as possible. For the brick it’s the ride of a lifetime—if you’re of a disposition that likes wild, deadly mayhem. And that was all that Sniper and his kind lived for. And the best part is that whatever damage you do to history sets itself straight. The past reassembles itself. The anomaly is removed. Even the bricks are yanked back to their own time, as if the Universe just spits them out. Yet the splash ripples forward through time, and when those ripples hit the present, the acausal chaos is felt again. Only this time, any destruction is not corrected. Make a big enough splash, far enough back in time, and the backwash hits the present with the force of a nuclear bomb.
Sandra shuddered. The willingness of crazy psychopaths like Sniper to go back and risk their lives for the thrill of making a bigger, messier splash had soon been exploited by every terrorist group and organized crime gang who could find a splashteam willing to hit the targets of their choice. Beijing had been all but wiped off the map. So had Mexico City. London had been saved from utter destruction only because Sandra Malone and her friend, Jay Kennedy, had persuaded Europol and MI5 to help them go after Sniper.
It was all like a dream to Sandra now. In fact, between her first timesplash in 2047 and her last one in 2050, she had been declared certifiably insane and had spent most of that time locked up by the courts in an institution. In Sandra’s opinion, she had been insane all her life until she got to know Jay. Just a sweet boy of nineteen at the time, he had sparked a tiny flame of self-respect in her that had grown steadily over the years.
My God, Jay. Where are you now?
She thought about him every day. Literally, every day. When they parted, with half of London in ruins, Jay heading to a new job in Brussels, and she on her way to the Porringer Institute—voluntarily, this time—she had known they might never meet again. When she decided she needed to keep away from him, to stay out of his world, she had been overcome with guilt. It was only survivable because someone else had come into her life. Someone who needed her more than he did.
“You’re sure this stuff’s strong enough?” Olivia asked, picking at the netting.
Sandra snapped out of her reverie. “The Air Force came and fired shotguns at it, remember? Then they blew up a grenade inside a tent made of it. It’ll be fine.”
“Those drones might be moving at fifty kilometers a second when they get back. That’s a lot of momentum, even for little things.”
“So you want to worry about this right now, when there’s nothing you can do about it? I did the maths. I did the experiments. It’ll hold.”
“Yeah, I know. I just never touched the stuff before. It’s so light.”
“You think I’d let my Little Piglets come to harm?”
Olivia smiled. “Stupid of me.”
The DDV was The Little Pig. In its belly were a hundred tiny drones—The Little Piglets. Once the DDV reached its destination time, two thousand years in the past, it would emerge into the empty fields of Iron Age East Anglia and orient itself in mid air with its four rotors. Then it would climb to a hundred meters and fire its rocket engines. Like a bat out of Hell, it would fly at full thrust for twelve seconds on a high, ballistic arc. Its trajectory would bring it down over the coastal town of Camelodenum, previously a Celtic town, then occupied by the invading Romans and renamed as Colchester. As the DDV plummeted to earth, it would open its belly and let the piglets out. A hundred little self-steering ornithopter drones, no bigger than dragonflies and bristling with sensors, would spread wide and start recording, storing away petabytes of data in their pinhead brains.
And, if the archaeologists and historians were right, they would return with detailed high-quality recordings of the Celtic Queen Boudica leading her Iceni horde to defeat and massacre the Roman occupiers. It would be a triumph for the Direct History group and a record that would set the academic world buzzing for years to come. The DDV would land harmlessly in the sea. The drones would be almost indistinguishable from real insects. The chances of causing an anomaly—even a small splash—were infinitesimal.
Yet the chance was always there, a fact reflected in the oversight and scrutiny the project had endured over the long years of its inception and development. Olivia had steered it through all of that, spending endless days in committees and hearings. Everyone needed to be convinced that the DDV would not land right on Boudica’s head and create a timesplash big enough to wipe out half of southern England. The only reason they had been allowed to proceed, Olivia had told Sandra in private, was that the military had seen so many interesting applications and wanted the technology.
Sandra had been shielded from most of the bureaucracy and allowed to work in peace on building the rig—one of the most powerful time displacement field generators in the world—and getting The Little Pig and her piglets ready. Of course, she had agreed to letting RAF flight engineers critique her designs and CERN tekniks check her rig, but that had turned out t
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The Solitude of Passion
by Addison Moore
Prologue
It’s hard to know what’s real and what isn’t when you’re trying to pick the pieces of your heart off the ground. But the order of the universe reversed itself—it took my heartbreak and exchanged it for something far more palatable. I swallowed the delusion whole and traded agony for this strange new reality. Now, there was a choice to be made—a decision that would prove impossible.
I was walking barefoot on the edge of a very sharp knife, the blade already slicing me to ribbons, but I was oblivious to its infliction. The pain was sublime. I was the lucky one, even when the torment shaved me to the bone.
It was a season in my life, born of confusion, all consuming lust, passion that could fuel jet planes—intoxicating, rich and heated as lava.
A fire brewed in my heart, too magnificent to ignore, I could never deny it, never insist it disappear. I want to drink it down, let it erode me from the inside like a white-hot flame—intoxicating myself with ecstasy—ignoring the misery. A dream had materialized from the darkest part of my being. I had pulled everyone into my fantasy, and it was only fair that no one suffer but me.
Mitch gazes at me with those hungry eyes, his body glowing like burnished bronze.
“Lee,” my name streams from his lips like a poem. Mitch meets me with his mouth, diving over me with a kiss that tastes like eternity branding itself from his soul to mine. “I’m going to love you,” he whispers, gliding down my body and burying a string of kisses over my stomach, trailing lower until he presses my knees apart.
Mitch peels off his jeans and rises above me like a phoenix. He crashes his lips over mine and kisses me through a lust-driven smile. I open up for him like a flower—Mitch is the sun I’ve craved for so long. He pushes into me with a pronounced thrust, and a small cry escapes me that’s been building for the last five years. Mitch pushes in, deeper still and fills me with all of his carnal affection—a hard-won groan wrenches from his gut.
“God, I love you,” he pants hot into my ear.
“I love you, too, Mitch.”
There’s not another person in the universe who exists right now.
It’s just Mitch and me, lost in our love as his body moves in rhythm to mine.
But Max hovers over us like a ghost.
And, now, nothing will ever be the same.
1
The Departure
Lee
It’s a dangerous game when nobody knows how to surrender. If only it were a simple game.
The ground quakes beneath them. You could hear their primal grunting, feel the wind of their bodies cutting across the court. This was no ordinary match, no friendly round of balls—it was a battering. They want to beat each other, cross the net, and shove the optic yellow sphere down one another’s throats. This is years’ worth of pent-up aggression—the I’ll-see-you-in-hell kind of drama played out in fields of war, gang infested alleyways—prison.
Katrice and I huddle on a bench under the eaves and watch Mitch and Max play tennis in a warlike fashion. The California sun scorches across the sky, searing down over the four of us as if there could be casualties. My eyes wander to a bone-dry acacia that threatens to ignite like a birthday candle under the oppressive heat.
A night from long ago hedges in my mind, and I can’t fight it. I can still feel Max’s strong body pressing into mine, still see the flexing of his chest—hear his steady groans.
“You ever think of that party back in high school?” Kat asks. She doesn’t even know she’s chiding me, that it feels more like a taunt than something genuinely inquisitive.
I slept with Max—just once, that night at the party.
Katrice bows her lashes, trying to hide a smile. She’s the only living soul that knows what happened that night. Not even Mitch knows about that explosive night I shared with his self-proclaimed enemy. Of course, back then they were anything but—they were the best of friends.
“You ever tell Mitch?” she whispers.
“I’d die before I told him.”
Those two were closer than brothers until Mitch’s father and Max’s mother flaunted their infidelity for the world to see. It was treason in both the bedroom and boardroom. It split two families in half and reduced their friendship to cinders.
“Lee,” Max shouts, waving his racket. His black hair gleams in the light. He’s so cuttingly handsome, but it’s Mitch who’s my golden Adonis. “You see that? Your husband cheats!”
I wasn’t paying attention, so I just shake my head and round my hand over the curve of my swollen belly. I’m hardly five months, and already I’ve lost my toned stomach, exchanged it for a beautiful bump, oval and hard as stone.
“Leave him.” Max grins before serving the ball with bionic force. “I’ll help you raise the baby.”
“Leave him?” Kat whispers. Her face pricks with mockery. “I’ll help you raise the baby? He is so still in love with you.”
“Shut up. He’s not in love with me. He’s in love with making Mitch miserable.”
“Heard his divorce is final,” Kat practically sings the words. I can tell she’s enjoying this.
He was married less than six months to Vivienne—Viv. A girl he’s dated on and off forever.
“Well, I’m never getting divorced, so he’s out of luck.” I hold out my wedding ring and examine the stones as they shimmer under the harsh supervision of the sun. One of the diamonds pierces me with a glare—its brilliance lingers in my mind long after I put my hand down. It’s been a year for Mitch and me. Our baby is due in October.
A biplane gets my attention as it whirs in the sky. It heads off toward the beach, hauling a tattered sign with a picture of a faded beer can. Living on the coast you see a lot of these. You lose interest in what they’re trying to sell and just enjoy it for the spectacle it is. Mono Bay magic—that’s what the tourists call it. Mono Bay, where the vineyards reach the shore. Not quite, but what do tourists know? Mono is famous for its vineyards with two of the most prominent belonging to the gladiators on the tennis court.
My stomach sours as the biplane purrs toward the horizon.
God—Mitch is going on an impromptu trip overseas, and I hate the thought of it. I hate the thought of him being away from me for one second, especially now with the baby. He wouldn’t be going anywhere if it wasn’t for Colton and his hidden talent of rolling off rooftops.
“So, Colt broke his leg,” I whisper. Kat already knows this, but I’ll say anything to change the subject from my one-night stand with Max, so I go with it. “They really need a general contractor, someone who knows what they’re doing.” A tight knot builds in my throat, choking off the rest of the words.
Colton. I’m so pissed he broke his leg. I’d like to break the other one, too—hell, all four limbs.
“Don’t tell me Mitch is going in his place?” Kat’s features harden. “So it’s official? It’s his job to keep bailing out his loser brother?” Her hair whips around her face and conforms to her sarcastic smile like parentheses.
“Bailing out Colt is Mitch’s third job.” Right after the vineyard and his new side business of construction.
I push into Kat playfully with my shoulder. Our matching long hair is straight as bones and pale as paper. You can tell we’re sisters in so many other ways, but it’s the hair that confuses people, makes us look more like twins even though Kat likes to remind me I’m older—twenty-four to her twenty-three. My mother called us her Irish twins until the day she died.
“Besides, he’ll be in and out,” I say, trying to believe it myself. The truth is, it’s going to be two long weeks in China. They had a team of six people, and three have already bailed. If it wasn’t a community outreach, he’d probably reconsider. It should be great PR for Townsend Construction, the company Mitch and Colt started once the vineyard tanked, but I’m not sure it’ll do anything to drum up business. “Colton volunteered to cover material expenses and promised to heft the bulk of the responsibility.” I make a face at my sister because we both know damn well that Colt is allergic to responsibility.
“And the real story?” Kat is the last to buy Colt’s special brand of bullshit.
“Apparently, a hot brunette committed to go, and Colt’s dick wanted to salute the effort.” A small groan escapes me because now it’s my handsome husband who’s stuck traveling abroad with a hot brunette. “Anyway, so much for altruism. Mitch is going to supervise construction, so he’s pretty crucial to the team. They’d have to cancel the trip without him.”
“And the vineyard?” Kat lends her gaze to the battlefield as two gorgeous men swelter in the citrine sun—even though I’d never admit it, I could watch this twenty-four seven. The truth is, I miss Max in our lives. We grew up together. I knew what each of his smiles meant. I miss those infectious dimples that would greet me, those cobalt eyes that washed the day anew with their glory. But, once the divorce bombs went off between their parents, lines were drawn, and I was already with Mitch at that point. Although, unlike Mitch, I never considered Max an enemy, not by a long shot.
“The vineyard?” I consider Kat’s question. “Colt has two weeks to run it into the ground.” I give a wry smile. “Considering he doesn’t have far to go, I’d say he can do it in one.” It’s the truth. Kat and I both know it.
Unfortunately the Townsend label doesn’t have great distribution, so the construction business helps keep the financial cogs spinning. Max, on the other hand, has turned his father’s vineyard into a global conglomerate. You’d think they were selling the fountain of youth the way bottles of Shepherd wine fly off the shelves. It’s been served to royalty. And, poor Mitch—nine out of ten derelicts prefer Townsend wine across the country.
“Weird they’re playing together,” Kat muses, never taking her eyes off the sultans of soon-to-be third degree sunburns.
“So strange,” I whisper. Max wasn’t even invited to our wedding.
It was me who was playing with Mitch before I started to sway in the heat. Kat works at the club, so she brought me lemonade. Max came out with her and challenged Mitch to a quick match. “Wouldn’t it be great if they could be friends again?”
“Mitch-the-Bitch and Maxi-Pad?” She balks at the insanity of it all.
Clearly I’ve stunned her.
Those were the monikers of choice they used for one another in school after the “incident.”
Maxi-Pad. That’s what Mitch called him for years, still does sometimes. It’s hard to let go of all that misplaced anger. It was his dad he really wanted to strangle for having the affair with Max’s town-harlot of a mother. But, both of their fathers are long since dead. You’d think it would have brought them closer together, but under the circumstances it created a division as wide as the sea and made them captains of industry far too soon. It set them up at the helm their fathers abandoned and led them to turn their livelihoods into a bitter rivalry.
“Mitch feels like he’s always on the losing end of the stick.” It’s an unmitigated truth never before spoken, but it hangs in the air like a ghost every time we read of another Shepherd victory.
“He said that?” Kat’s mouth rounds out as if I’ve just dispensed a juicy bit of Mono gossip.
“Not those exact words, but it comes out in other ways.”
“Oh, come on.” Kat’s eyes roll back a moment. “He’s got you, Lee. He won the war. Who cares about battles fought with toothpicks when he’s already holding the gilded trophy?”
I look over at Kat. Her play on words amuse me. Ironic if you think about it. Mitch and Max, those hardwired rackets nothing more than glorified toothpicks. What are they fighting for so ferociously, anyway?
A dull laugh settles in my chest.
Mitch really wants the win, and Max doesn’t know how to lose.
Max catches the ball with his bare hand and howls out a laugh. He belts the ball into the sky as if it were Mitch himself.
“You suck, Townsend,” he shouts, rounding out the gate and blowing me a kiss.
Mitch tosses his racket across the empty court like a machete, and it fractures into a thousand splintered shards.
So many pieces to pick up after those two.
I don’t know why this always surprises me.
Mitch drives us past the vineyard on the way home, and I roll down the window, inhaling the sharp bite of soil. Up ahead, a tall wooden arch rises into the pristine sky with a crooked sign reading, Townsend Fields.
“I’ve been meaning to fix that.” Mitch presses his lips together and eyes the sign as if it might crash over the roof of the car as we drive beneath it.
I gaze out at the fields with the earth plowed in rows of deep russet-colored soil. The flat leaves of the vines are as wide as my hand, and the grapes gleam, hidden in the branches like tiny black gemstones.
Mitch and I get out of the car and walk over to the ridge, an overlook where you can see the entire vineyard, acre after luscious acre, nothing but rolling rows of verdant beauty.
“I’m going to turn this ship around.” Mitch wraps his arm around my waist and presses a kiss into my neck as he leads us down into the field.
“I know you will.” I give a peck to his cheek and rub my lips over the sandpaper like stubble. “I’m proud of how you handled yourself out there today, you know, with Max.” Strange, his name hasn’t passed through my lips in so long that it actually sounds foreign, downright illegal.
Mitch pulls back a dull smile. He’s so unreasonably handsome with his chiseled features, his glowing jade eyes. He still makes my stomach squeeze tight with nothing more than a stolen glance.
“Shepherd has balls to talk to you the way he did.”
“What?” I pull him in by the arm and hug him. “You’re hysterical, Townsend. He was kidding. Only in his wildest dreams would I ever leave you and let him raise the baby.” I brand a kiss over his lips and linger. “Besides, it’s too late.” I stop him from moving ahead and wrap my arms secure over his waist. “I love you. You’re my husband. The only one I’d ever want.” I push another kiss off his lips. “You’re my everything. You’re perfect.”
Mitch presses out a gentle smile, never taking those lawn-green eyes off me. He reaches over and plucks a grape off the vine and sets it in his teeth before feeding it to me by way of his mouth. He cups my face as we share the sharp bite of fruit with his sweet tongue dancing over mine. Mitch is a master of achingly soft kisses—kisses that wrench a cry from the deepest part of me, kisses that give birth to moans that have the ability to stretch out for weeks. My hands ride into the lip of his jeans, and I pull him in until his body is pressed against mine. The baby protrudes just enough to create a barrier.
He trails his mouth up to my neck and bites down gently over my earlobe.
“You’re my perfect wife, Lee. And nobody, not even Max Shepherd, can take you away from me. I’d move heaven and earth to make sure that didn’t happen. In fact, I already did.” He gives my ribs a quick tickle, and my elbows swoop to my sides as I give a violent laugh.
“Oh”—I reach down and scoop a handful of clay—“tickling, huh? So you want to play dirty?”
“Is that where this is going?” He tilts his head with that wicked gleam in his eye, looking hotter than hell in the process. “Because it looks like you’re the one who wants to play dirty.” Mitch takes a slow step in, and I jump back, laughing. “Come here and nobody gets hurt,” he gravels it out sultry and demanding.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” I try to make a break for it, but Mitch scoops me up in his arms and lands us both in a soft pile of Townsend soil, laying my head to rest in an orange cloud. “Thanks a lot,” I tease. “I’ll be washing dirt out of my hair for weeks.”
His brows twitch. Then, quick as it came, his playful demeanor dissipates. His eyes grow serious as death as he takes me in.
“God, you’re so beautiful, Lee.” He swallows hard as he runs his gaze over my features. “I always want to remember you like this.”
“Hey”—I reach up and touch his face, pulling him down by the chin—“I’m not going anywhere. You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”
He gives a quick glance around at the vineyard with its dilapidated sign, its dwindling crops, and gives a wry smile.
“Sometimes I think that’s the only thing I’ve done right”—his eyes squint out a smile born of pain—“having you in my life.”
“It’s you and me ‘til the end, Mitch.” I pull him in until he’s just a breath away.
“You and me ‘til the end.” He crashes his lips over mine and we detonate in a vat of passion, nothing but limbs and sublime kisses right here over a warm bed of Townsend soil.
Mitch said he would move heaven and earth for me.
I believe him.
Mitch
A seam of early morning light streams into the room from the slit in the curtains.
The clock reads 5:54—a full minute before the alarm is set to go off. I seem to do that on a regular basis—beat the buzzer, and I’m not sure why. It’s a gift, I guess, but as far as gifts go, I’d like to put in for something different. Something a little more useful that actually has the potential to produce a paper-like substance traded as currency.
I dot the back of Lee’s head with a kiss and take in her scent as she lies folded in my arms, still and quiet—so beautiful, and I fight back tears. Of all the times for my brother to maim himself, and he chooses now while Lee houses the evidence of our love deep in her belly. The thought of leaving Lee makes me sick to my stomach, but I would never tell her that. I don’t want her to worry. I’ve been making it sound like no big deal, but Colt would have caused less pain in my life if he skinned my balls and used them for batting practice.
Lee relaxes into me, still lost in a silent slumber, and I memorize the way her skin sears up against mine, her silken hair soft against my cheek.
I close my eyes and beg God to take care of Lee, our baby, the business. Protect all three from my idiot brother—and deliver us from Max. I throw in that last part about Max just for fun. Can’t get him out of my head since last week. I don’t like the way it happened—the way it felt too coincidental. My father’s self-prescribed doctrine comes back to me—that there are no coincidences in life. It’s never bugged me before, but now, with Max showing up out of the blue and saying the things he did, I hate the concept.
The plane ride floats through my mind, and I can’t help but envision an aerial cartwheel, followed by a ball of flames and nothing but the blue Pacific as we nosedive into the sea.
Wish I could shake this feeling of outright foreboding. Then again, I don’t travel much. Maybe this is how you’re supposed to feel seven hours before an international flight—maybe it’s just self-preservation kicking in—a little something called “fight the flight.”
I slip out of bed and head downstairs to make breakfast while trying to blow off the negativity.
It’s probably just Lee’s hormones rubbing off on me, and any minute now I’ll be bawling like a schoolgirl, craving pickles and ice cream.
I hit the bottom step and my foot lands on the bare plywood that spans the downstairs. I meant to take Lee into town to pick out flooring. We never should have moved in without installing a proper floor of all things. Now there’s furniture to move—heavy, cumbersome furniture that I’m pretty damn sure is lined with lead. Originally we had travertine planned, but at the last minute Lee changed her mind, and we moved in anyway. So plywood it is. The truth is, I’d love our home no matter what the floor was—because it’s just that, our home—the one Lee and I designed ourselves. The one I built with Colt as a starter project for our new side business—Townsend Construction.
It hasn’t fallen over yet, so we must have done something right.
“Morning.” Lee comes up from behind and wraps her arms around me. I turn and bury my face in her neck, taking in her scent—not showered and perfumed, just natural Lee. This is how I want to remember her. The sweet scent of her skin is going to get me through the next two weeks. I dig my face into her hair and inhale sharply—saving it all for later.
“Morning beautiful.” My stomach pinches with grief at thought of boarding that plane without her. I wish she could go, but with the baby I don’t want to take any chances.
The more I think about this situation, the more I want to smack my idiot brother. I’ve never been away from my wife for more than a day, and I sure as hell didn’t plan to go on some foreign relations excursion while Lee is pregnant with our first child.
“Don’t go,” her voice dips into its lower register when she says it, sounding sexy as hell in the process.
I give her a minute to see if she’s going to back it up with some nightmare she had of a plane crash, then for sure I wouldn’t go. When Lee was six, she dreamed her parents were in a horrible crash the night before they were killed in a car accident. It’s never happened again, the dream thing, but if she said it, I wouldn’t go.
“I’ll be back before you know it. Besides, hundreds of disabled orphans are counting on me.” I throw in that last part with a lopsided smile—amused she might actually believe this.
“I know.” Lee sags as she sweeps the floor with her gaze.
“Come here.” I pull her in tight. “Stupid Colt,” I whisper into her hair.
“Stupid Colt.” Her chest rumbles over mine.
“I may have to kill him before leaving the country,” I tease, rubbing her back, and she lets out a moan of approval. “Of course, I’ll have to make it look like an accident. Maybe I can run his head over with my back tire at the airport. People are always in such a damn hurry in those kinds of places.” A soft laugh rumbles from my chest.
Lee pulls back and makes a face. “No killing, Colt.”
“You’re right. Screw it. I’m sure he’ll have some new mutation of the clap before Christmas—and I won’t have to worry about doing the dirty work—flesh-eating clap.”
Lee belts out a laugh. “Rumor has it, there’s going to be a beautiful brunette on call in the event you get lonely.” She bites down on her lip, her teeth white as milk. “I think I’d better give you something to remember me by.” She hops up on the barstool and rocks back with the curve of a naughty smile, crossing her legs, slow and seductive. Her skin glows from underneath her nightshirt, revealing the fact she’s not wearing any underwear.
I give a slow spreading grin. “I can eat on the plane.”
“Eat on the plane?” She runs her tongue over the rim of her lips. “Whatever will you do with all this time on your hands?” She slides her foot over her knee exposing a dark triangle tucked between her thighs, and my hard-on ticks to life.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I lean in and wrap my arms around her waist. “Maybe you can help find something to keep me busy.” I trace the pattern of her brows, her high cheekbone before dipping down and feathering my finger over her lips.
Lee runs her hands along the elastic of my boxers before expanding their girth and sailing them to a puddle at my feet.
“Really?” I hold back a smile while my fingers work the buttons on her nightshirt. Technically it’s my dress shirt, but it’s been a longstanding habit of hers to utilize my wardrobe as her nighttime accouterments. “I’m naked in the kitchen. You’re limiting my options of what I can do.”
She bubbles with laughter as I fumble with the buttons just over her belly.
“Why don’t you make us some eggs?” She teases. “You could be the naked chef.”
“You’re funny.” I peel the shirt off her shoulders, and my insides pinch seeing her like this. Lee has perfect breasts, round as melons, but her stomach stops me cold. I hadn’t seen her in the light in a while. I’ve felt her stomach firming, seen her rounding out in her T-shirts, but seeing her stomach mound like a half moon scares the hell out of me. Lee has transformed into a full-fledged goddess, a creature of beauty too magnificent to comprehend.
“Lee,” I whisper, touching my hand over our growing child. “What the hell am I doing leaving you?”
“Hey.” She pulls me down to her mouth and tucks her legs over my hips. “It’ll be over before we know it. I promise you, this baby and I will both be waiting, right here, naked on this stool until you get back.”
A dry laugh rolls through me. “I like the imagery.” My hand slips between her thighs, and her chest expands with a breath. “I’d think I’d better leave you with something to remember me by—something that might hold you over for the next two weeks.” God knows I’m not going to be able to breathe without her.
She reaches down and guides me in. Lee lets out a groan that sears me straight to the bone. I push in and watch as her head slips back, her eyes close just enough while she bites down on her cherry-stained lip. I push in deeper before gliding out, and I’m already about to lose it. I don’t close my eyes once. I savor every moment with Lee, lost in ecstasy, and wonder if I’ll ever get to see this again.
I run my fingers over her slick and bring her right there with me until the world, the universe, feels like a bomb ready to detonate.
“Oh shit.” I pull her in and tremble over her as she pants wild in my ear.
“God, I love you, Mitch.” She grazes her teeth over my ear as she says it. “Come back to me.”
“I will. I promise.”
That heavy feeling takes over again.
Please God, let me keep my promise.
Lee and Mom sob all the way to the airport as if it were my funeral.
I cut a hard look to Colt. He almost had surgery. They wanted to pin his stupid leg then decided he wasn’t worth the effort. I’m going to tear into him as soon as Lee and Mom are out of earshot—pin him to a wall with a hunting knife if I get the chance.
LAX roars with the hustle and bustle of bodies readying themselves to drift to the four corners of the earth—with China being the most distal point.
We park and the three of them come to the ticket counter with me to give a “proper farewell” as Mom put it. Hate to break it to her but this proper farewell has all of the charm of an Irish wake.
Colt leans against the wall, sizing up a blonde in an airline uniform as she whizzes by.
“Dude, come here,” it huffs from me, annoyed as hell. I nod him over to the counter while Lee and Mom huddle in misery.
“What’s up?” His hair is neatly combed back. He’s showered, but his eyes look as if someone poured in vinegar. I’m afraid to ask whether or not a couple of blunts played a role in the breakdown of his blood vessels, but I’d most likely say, yes. We’d look identical if I spent more time at the gym and he spent less time everywhere but the vineyard.
“You don’t take your eyes off Lee, got it?” I meant for it to come out harsher than it did. I’m so close to tears I force myself to take a deep breath and down the rest of my water before continuing. I’ll let it all out on the plane—emasculate myself in front of dozens of strangers minus the people on the outreach team I don’t know anyway.
“Okay.” He salutes me. “She might not like it when she’s taking a shower, but I’ll follow orders.”
“Right.” I grip him by the arm and dig in. “Listen to me, you little shit. My wife is having our baby. If she feels the need for ice cream at midnight, she’s going to call you. Pretend you’re an adult for five minutes. I left the vineyard on autopilot. Just show up. It might actually give people the impression someone’s in charge.”
“So you’re just using me for my pretty face. Can I push all the shiny buttons?”
“The only buttons you ever push are mine.” I blink a smile and offer a half-hug. “If anything happens, man, take care of Lee for me, ‘kay?”
He pulls back, slaps me on the shoulder. “Dude, nothing’s gonna happen. But if it does”—he mock shoots me—“I’ll continue with family tradition and procreate with the girl in question.”
Lee swoops in and shoos Colt away. Her face is blotched and her eyes stained with large, dark rings from crying. It’s a haunting image that sears itself into my mind before I can stop it.
“Love you.” I press a kiss into her, deep and lingering, as if we were alone. I don’t usually make it a practice to kiss Lee so passionately in front of my mother, but this is an exception. I fight the urge to start breaking all sorts of carnal rules like taking off her clothes—having her right here at the baggage check in. “I love you deeper than the ocean, Lee Townsend.” The first time I told her I loved her was at the beach, and those were the exact words I used.
She tries to smile but it fails to initiate. “I can’t do this without you.” It strangles out of her, broken in pieces, as she glides her hand over her stomach.
My heart breaks witnessing all of the misery I’m causing, and I haven’t even stepped on the plane. I sweep my thumb over her cheek and press a kiss into her forehead.
“I’ll be right back.” Made it sound like I was going to the refrigerator.
“What if you’re not?” Her eyes are on fire with grief, her lips quiver with fear; although, I’d like to think it was the kiss I just delivered that was making her tremble.
We hadn’t entertained the theory of anything tragic happening until now. Something tells me it’s too late to explore the concept, so I nip it.
“But I will be,” I whisper. “I promise you. I’ll be okay. Don’t fall in love with Colt while I’m gone.”
She shakes her head like a frightened schoolgirl. I want to add, if I don’t come back, it’s okay to fall in love with Colt. Something tells me to say it, but I don’t.
I crash my lips into hers instead.
Max
Oversized X’s, the size of cereal boxes, are keyed into all four doors of my truck—a bittersweet memento from Viv. Hell, it’s all bitter. There’s not one sweet bone in that woman’s body. I’m over her, though. Although, I can’t say I’m not freshly offended each time I’m forced to admire her artwork. It’s more of a performance piece I guess you could say. Just like Viv—all performance. And cutting that drama out of my life was like excising cancer. The best thing we ever did in our relationship was sign the divorce papers. I assumed the position and took it up the ass while she got the house, two cars, and the condo in Tahoe. Thank God for the prenup, or everything my father worked for would be boxed and buried right alongside him. Talk about a watertight lesson. Might just leave those X’s to remind me of what lies ahead the next time I entertain the idea of unholy matrimony.
I pull into Hudson’s expansive, massively expensive, yet somehow doggedly showy, crap-filled yard and hop on out.
Hudson. Leave it to my ex-con slash wannabe biker of a brother to turn the best real estate in Mono into an automobile carcass warehouse. You name it, rusted out Chevys, skeleton Fords by the mile, burnt out crap, too. Anything and everything that once held the promise of a roadside maneuver litters the landscape as far as the eye can see. He lifts a beer in my honor as he makes his way over.
“What the hell?” Hudson stumbles forward, looking far more horrified at Viv’s extension of her vagina than I did when I first saw it. I slam the door and survey the damage right alongside him.
“Love letter. If you’re lucky, you’ll get one someday.” I push him in the arm, and nearly knock the beer out of his hand.
“Sooner than you think.” The lines around his eyes harden. “Jackie’s leaving me.”
“Serious?” A quick pulse of alarm tracks through me. Hudson and Jackie have been married for over three years. They happen to own my favorite nephew, Josh—my only nephew.
“Serious.” He yanks at his baseball cap and downs the rest of his beer before discarding the bottle into the bushes. “Moved out a week ago.”
Hudson glances up at me. His watery eyes shine like green stones. He’d be a good-looking guy if he hadn’t let himself fall to shit. Long scraggly hair—a Fu Manchu that scares the hell out of little children including his own—not that Jackie’s a prize with that razor blade she calls a tongue. I’ve seen her greet her own mother with a blunt fuck off on at least a dozen occasions, and half of those were holidays.
Hudson heads toward his massive enclave of garages, and I follow suit hoping to escape the harsh sting of the sun. An entire herd of his lackeys are busy twisting over the open hood of a bright yellow kit car. In addition to pilfering the vineyard, Hudson runs a sweatshop on the side. Although, I believe the term he prefers is “automotive restoration lab.”
“That’s too bad about you and Jackie,” I say before we head into the protective shelter of his overgrown man-cave. Can’t say the breakup was entirely unexpected the way my brother likes to keep track of the local strippers—the way he earns frequent flyer miles by purchasing drinks at the bar.
“Don’t feel too bad.” He offers a conciliatory slap to the back of my neck. “I don’t miss her. Besides, now I get to hang with the boys.” He pats a burly looking linebacker on the shoulder.
“That’s the problem,” I’m quick to assess. “You never stopped hanging with the boys.”
“You come to lecture me on what it takes to keep a woman around?” He bucks out a laugh and plucks another beer from the cooler. “Or are you just playing show-and-tell with the new masterpiece scribbled on your truck?”
“That’s what I’m doing.” I shake my head. Viv made sure I became a road show for her new career as an emasculation artist. I’m sure she calls this piece the ex-husband ode to Blue Balls. “I came by to see Josh and to tell you there’s a shareholders meeting next Tuesday. Play dress up in a monkey suit, will you? Brush your teeth, and I’ll throw in a six pack.”
“Got it.” Hudson looks impressed with the promise of malt liquor.
A white truck pulls up with a cheap metal sign slapped on the door that reads Townsend Construction.
“Here’s my man, Colt.” Hudson raises the bottle in his honor. “He’s gonna give me a bid for the new garage.” Hudson plucks his jeans up by the belt-loops before meeting him halfway. They exchange high fives and bark out a laugh over something. Probably how they’ve got their brothers snowed into doing the lion’s share of work while they sit around titty bars and collect checks like Halloween candy.
Colt’s sporting a thigh-high cast with a dozen different signatures scrawled over the front. There’s a drawing of a naked woman upside down that he probably penned himself with his dick.
“What happened to your leg?” I don’t bother with hello.
“Fell off a roof two weeks ago.” He presses out a dull grin, and I see Mitch hiding behind his face like a ghost. “Glad it wasn’t my neck.”
“Yeah, well, better luck next time.” I yank on my baseball cap. “Aim head down. You’ll get it right eventually. Where’s your brother? Rolling around with a broken back somewhere?”
“China. Building homes for orphans.” He runs his fingers through his hair. Girls used to fall over themselves trying to get Colt into bed. They thought he was some god who was going to rule their world with his pearly smile and cut abs. Now look at him. Tumbling off roofs, barely able to keep the family business afloat. They can’t save Townsend. Hell, not even I could save Townsend. There’s not enough alcohol in the world to pull off that miraculous feat.
“Sounds like Mitch is a real hero,” I say.
Colt and Hudson somehow managed to stay friends after my mother devoured their father like an anaconda. The blame should probably be the other way around. Young widow, fragile mindset, vulnerable, but it was my mother in question, and the word vulnerable is nowhere near her lexicon, let alone her person—not after my father died—not a moment before. Everything she does is calculated, and if she wanted to bag a very married Townsend, then, by God, that’s just what was going to happen. And it did, for a good long while until he died of a heart attack right there tucked between her legs.
Hudson and Colt could let it go, but not Mitch. He acted like I personally plunged a knife in his back when he wasn’t looking. He was already with Lee at that point. First she dated Colton. That’s when I hooked up with her at a party. She was mad as hell at Colt. Best night of my life, even if I was drunk out of my mind. So was she, which isn’t like her, and that probably explains the sleeping with me part. Soon after, she broke up with Colt, and it’s not too hard to understand why. I spent the summer with relatives on the East Coast, and when I came back she was with Mitch—missed my chance. I always wondered what would have been different if I had stayed. I don’t believe Mitch Townsend was ever Lee’s destiny, mostly because I don’t believe in that destiny crap unless it concerns Lee and me. Nope. Mitch Townsend wasn’t Mr. Right, just Mr. Right Place at The Right Time. Lee got comfortable that’s all. She’s loyal—doesn’t know when to quit. I know this because every now and then I’ll look at her, and sparks fly. You can’t deny chemistry like that. Lee might, but I never said she wasn’t above lying.
“Say a prayer for him.” Colton’s lips keep flapping like anybody cares. “He’s gonna need it.”
“Will do.” Dear God, please let Mitch drop dead in China, preferably between the legs of another. Either gender will do. Ah heck, make it a big hairy woman.
I blink a smile over at Colt. “Just sent one up.”
2
Missing You
Lee
My limbs swim over the bed in search of a tactile response—for arms or legs. There’s a mental hiccup just after I wake and instinctually I reach for him. For a brief moment I believe he’s still here, close enough to touch, then it all comes back to me, Colt and his broken leg—Mitch on the other side of the planet. Not even the tiny being that flutters in my belly can comfort me. The void he left eats through the darkness. It drills into my soul with a weight as heavy as the sea.
Eleven days without my husband and I’m starting to forget how to breathe. I can’t see past the permanent lens of tears anymore. Eleven days without contact. No phone, no email. He said, worst case, there’ll be no phone coverage and you won’t hear from me. It’s been eleven days, and it’s worst case. Nothing—not one damn word.
The alarm on the nightstand blinks in a panic—two o’ eight. There’s no point in trying to pretend to sleep, so I call Colton and coerce him into coming over.
I scuttle downstairs in the dark, waiting for the trail of headlights to illuminate the night as I nestle on the couch. It’s soupy out as a dense fog pushes over the landscape thick as batting unfurling in bolts. I glance up at the three-quarter moon spraying its beams over the haze. It ignites the neighborhood with its glittering magic. A part of me is convinced I can walk through that precipitous bloom and land on the other side of the world—touch Mitch.
I’ve never been afraid of the dark. Contrary to popular opinion I rather enjoy it. I like to sit and bask in its stillness, take in the world robed in its midnight splendor. There’s something relaxing about a room void of any ocular energy. I like the way the air shifts and takes on a strange heft—the way its weight presses against you like a body. The dark can comfort you far more than the light can if you let it. The light magnifies all the flaws in the universe, but the darkness lends a certain magic to the world. That’s the reality I’d much rather live in.
Katrice and her husband, Steve, live a half block away. They’ve only been married a couple months, but I don’t have the balls to ask her to come over this late. Colton is another story. Him I’d ask to dig in the sand until he found diamonds at this late hour. He owes me. He owes Mitch.
Twin lamps light up the street like a flare before landing harsh in the driveway.
When I called, he didn’t sound the least bit tired. He sounded irritated more than he did roused from a hard-earned slumber. The only thing he likely abandoned for me tonight was his hard-on.
I watch as he jogs up the walkway. Same broad shoulders, same flame of golden hair as his brother and for a second I let myself believe it’s Mitch—that he’s come home early to surprise me. Then Colt comes in clear with his schoolboy swagger, that get-in-my-bed grin—nope, definitely not Mitch.
I push out a tiny smile and hold the door open. A crisp breeze whistles in and inflates my nightgown like a flower before I tighten Mitch’s cashmere robe over me.
“You’ve got timing, you know that?” He gives a mild look of irritation as he steps inside.
Truth is, my eyes were ready to close off the world, heavy as anchors just before he pulled in. I could have gone to bed, but I promised Mitch I’d make Colt lose sleep at least once, and tonight seemed as good as any. I’m sure Mitch will dream up some supreme punishment later that involves manual labor and long hours, both of which Colt is spectacularly allergic to.
I lock my arms around him tight and take in his scent—musk and beer, a woman’s perfume lingers on his neck like a poltergeist. The girth of his body against mine, feeds me on some level. For years people thought Colt and Mitch were twins, and tonight they could be. I pull back and inspect him for signs of my husband. I see him there in the cheeks, the perpetual smile in his eyes, those perfect bowtie lips.
“Were you closing a deal?” I ask.
“Negotiating.” His brows dip as he frowns.
Colton is in the business of using women, not to be misconstrued as a player. These women demand to be utilized in the most sexually degrading manner possible. They line up for his dominance, desire him—worship at his feet until he points his unholy crutch in their direction.
“Shall we?” I tease, leading him up the twisted stairwell that leads through the attic until we emerge in a bath of dense salt-air. It was Mitch’s idea to add a rooftop patio—that way we could see the moon dance over the water, he explained. He said we wouldn’t want to miss it. And tonight the moon shimmers its spell over the Pacific like a song. It spells out I love you over the ocean like a poem written in the waves. Mitch was right—we wouldn’t want to miss this.
Colton takes a seat next to me on the glider. He hikes his cast up on the small rattan table and groans.
It’s so beautiful here. The beach house was Mitch’s gift to me, to us. And it’s times like this when I take in the grand scope of the sea—glittering and black—that I realize it’s one gift that will never stop giving.
“I miss him,” I whisper, pulling Colt’s arms over my shoulders to keep from shivering. The ocean shouts as it detonates over the shore. It demands our attention at this late hour, filling our ears with its rushing fervor. There’s something magical about hearing the consistency of the waves as they crash, listening to them whisper an apology to the shore after the harsh beating.
Colt leans in and singes a hot breath in my ear. “He misses you, too,” he says it muffled through a yawn.
“I bet you never planned on going. Bet you broke your stupid leg on purpose.” God knows he’s done more creative things to escape an honest day’s work.
“Stupid, huh? I get it,” he moans with his lids half-shut. “You dragged me out here to tell me how much you hate me.” He rubs the sleep from his eye with his palm. “You want to push me off the balcony?”
“Only if you let me.” I let out a little laugh and expire it in a sigh. “I’m sorry.” I nuzzle into him and trace the pocket on his T-shirt. “Calling you was a mistake.” I strum my fingers just under his neck as if I were plucking the strings on a guitar. I thought Colt and I could make music once. But it was Mitch who made me sing. “I should have gone to bed—washed my hair in tears.” It comes out low, morose. After my parents died, tears were the only constant in my life. Not even Kat could cure the pain. But this is an altogether different kind of misery. The pain of missing Mitch has multiplied, blossomed into a thing—a monster—I can’t see past the heartache anymore.
“I don’t want to feel like this.” I let the tears burn hot tracks down my cheeks. They roll into the seam of my lips, and I taste the salt and the pain—nothing but a hot wash of agony I could drink by the gallon.
“Hang in there kid. Just three more days.” Colt shakes my knee trying to snap me out of my hormone-inspired stupor. “We’ll head to the airport, bright and early. We can hold up a big fat sign that says, Don’t even think of pulling this shit again, Mitch.”
I stifle a laugh. “You miss him?”
“Of course, I miss him.” Colt sinks down and wraps an arm around my waist. “He’s my little bro. Annoying as hell, but I need him. He’s pretty good at keeping the funds fresh in my bank account—keeps me out of trouble, mostly—and he took you off my hands didn’t he?”
It was Colton I dated first, then Mitch. Really I was using Colt to get to Mitch, but he grew on me, and we dated three solid months.
“This could have been our baby,” I tease, placing his hand high over my stomach.
Colton is a far cry from his brother. He couldn’t sustain a wife or child on his best day, at least not one set of each. That would be like a tiger living under water, it couldn’t happen.
“Believe me, Lee. You’ll have my baby someday. I’m just having Mitch train you.” He digs a smile in his cheek. “When you’re good and ready, I’ll come around and take back what’s mine.”
“And Mitch?” I’m completely amused.
“He can be our cabana boy. He’ll run around—cook our meals, do the laundry.”
“You know what would be fun?” I reach up and pinch his ear. “If you were the cabana boy. Of course, you’ll have to change diapers and give baths.”
“Mitch can change diapers.” He dips down and plants a warm kiss over the top of my head. “I’ll give you a bath—you can sit on my lap while I do it.”
“Stop.” Typical Colt—all innuendo and nowhere to go.
He tightens his grip around my shoulder. “What do you think Mitch would do if he knew we were sitting in the dark entertaining the idea of bathing together?”
“Nobody is entertaining that idea but you.” The sky brightens with a sliver of lightning. It cuts through the navy sky like a sword in some intergalactic declaration of war.
A storm rolls in on the crest of ominous clouds. I’ve never been one to romanticize the notion of a summer storm. My parents died on a night like tonight, leaving my uncle to raise Kat and me. He passed away my last semester in college.
Clouds gather thick and full in strange hues of pinks and grey while the moon cleverly amplifies itself from behind. The night lights up like a broken chandelier, followed by a primal growl. I pull Colton’s arms tight around me and pretend he’s Mitch. “Thank you for coming home,” I whisper in secret.
He brushes a quick kiss over my ear. “You know I love you.”
Mitch
A crowded room filled with the pungent scent of body odor, distracts me from the fact I damn near broke my back digging in soil that could double as concrete.
Bodies swarm around the tiny room, hot and sticky. The humidity in the air bites through my nostrils like a toxic stew. They talk in whispers while I sit against the wall, trying to keep my eyelids from closing permanently. I can’t remember the last time my muscles ached like this. Swear to God, I’ll never complain about losing a day in the vineyard again. Townsend field has nothing on China.
I steal a quick glance around the room for a sign of the clowns I’m here with. It only took four days for each of them to crawl under my skin, and now two weeks have drifted by and I’m ready to start breaking more than a few legs. It was my idea to head back to the place we’re staying at and crash, but I was outvoted by the group and forced to attend a “house meeting”—a glorified Bible study that has all the appeal, and legality of a mafia meeting. It’s not quite a house we’re in, either. It feels more like a bunker, a dimly lit canal with no beginning and no end. We’ve crammed ourselves in a hideaway out in the country to hold this meet and greet after a blistering day slaving over parched earth. If I knew the soil would be so damn hard to penetrate, I would never have agreed to the job in the first place. On second thought, if Colt had come like he should have, I would have applauded the soil for being so damn stubborn.
A man, draped in a shawl that loosely resembles a potato sack, stands with his hands spread wide. He dispenses all things truth and light with minimal animation to a spellbound community of what feels like hundreds, sardined in this tiny space. He flexes in and out of broken English before diving into Chinese. I manage to catch a word or two before growing sleepy from the Ping Pong effect of it all. You would think we smuggled in illegal contraband and distributed it to unsuspecting villagers the way we dug in like moles. Nevertheless, a healthy number has joined the militia-type group. It all feels so rogue—sneaking around, covering the windows with blankets. Turns out, the good book is covert ops in this part of the country. It’s surreal to me. Lee and I must have half a dozen Bibles lying around. At least one of those is swimming around on the floor of my truck with discarded fast food wrappers. We walk into church like heading to the mall, no worse for wear. Not a fear in the world that we’ll find ourselves staring down the barrel of a machine gun or a prison term.
I force myself to keep my eyes open and take in the scenery. When I replay the scene for Colt, I want him to realize this wasn’t the romantic getaway he sold himself on. It’s panning out to be a tinderbox of heartache with too much suffering I don’t have the cure for and not enough Lee.
The women look beat and tired. Everyone’s so hungry to hear what the man with the plan has to offer. As much as their muscles crave protein, their hearts crave hope. It’s a miracle they believe in anything—that they even care to after the desolate living conditions I’ve witnessed. It’s heartbreaking on a whole new level.
Lee. God I miss her. She wafts over me like a cool breeze.
Three more days until I see her. Everything here is in Lee time. Hours until Lee, sunsets until Lee, dreams until Lee. I see her everywhere, her beautiful face in the hills, the clouds take her shape—I watch her in the sky as she laughs and holds her hands over our unborn child. Even the stars converge to spell out her name. Lee is her own consolation, her own divine universe.
I’m so sick without her, I think I could actually die if I wanted. There’s not another good deed in the world that would make me leave her again. I’d break my own damn leg if it came down to it.
I glance around at the room full of somber expressions. You could hear the wind blow, the crickets layered beneath the silence. Not even the sound of human breathing exists within these four cloistered walls, just some underground cleric reciting red-letter promises. He strings them out like a lullaby until the world vanishes, and Lee meets me in my dreams with a smile.
A hard thump jolts me out of my slumber.
“Shit,” I hiss, waking with a start.
A loud crash detonates to my left, and my eardrums vibrate from the assault.
I give several hard blinks and startle to a jumble of confusion—legs snake their way around the vicinity in a panic, a blur of bodies switch back and forth until the room begins to drain. Total disorientation sets in, and for a second I forget where the hell I am and what the fuck I’m doing here.
A gunshot goes off.
I hit the floor in time to see a pair of brown leather shoes stomp in this direction and one of them crushes my knuckles.
I snatch back my hand as I try to digest what the hell is happening.
A voice shouts something loud and aggressive in a dialect I’ve never heard, sounds like a rubber band warbling in and out of tune.
It all comes back, China, God—the man in the potato sack.
Shit.
The brief training we received in the “event things went south” jags through my mind. And here I thought the team captain of this junior expedition was offering comic relief as we disembarked from a twelve-hour flight.
Bodies fly over chairs and dart out every exit at once, nothing but limbs scrambling, women screaming.
A small army of men suited up in black fatigues fill the room, each armed with his own personal assault rifle. They kick and shout at the elderly that were unable to make a quick escape and herd them toward the exit, pushing and yelling as if they were lining them up for the firing squad.
I glance around for a weapon, but the place is so damn bare there’s nothing shy of a rug on the floor. I pat my jeans for my hunting knife before remembering it’s in my backpack which I stupidly left it in the trunk of the car. It houses my passport and a picture of Lee, and suddenly I want nothing more than to get to that picture because clearly logic isn’t invited into the equation.
“Please God, let me see Lee again,” I whisper below a breath. “Just let me hold her one more time.”
I bolt up and run out the back as a barrage of gunfire explodes from behind.
Outside, clouds lay in strips over a sodden sky. The sun melts over the horizon, still affording enough light to amplify the landscape. I dart up through the bushes until I hit the main road, and my heart lurches when I spot the car I arrived in sputtering down the street without me. It’s teeming with bodies, struggling in low gear as it tries to barrel up the hillside.
“Shit,” I grunt as I try to flag it down.
A barrage of uniformed officers pour into the street, corroding the landscape like wolves on the prowl. They fire an errant round of shots, inspiring me to take cover in an overgrown bush.
It all happens so fast. An entire band of men come in, clad in black, shouting and screaming like human megaphones. I peer out at them as they collect themselves in a group. The one with the thick neck and short arms appears to be in charge. He carries the appeal of a death ninja as he barks out commands, and the men break out into groups of two and three in an attempt to fulfill their mission.
The guy in charge levels his weapon to his eye and manages to blow out the windows of the tiny car as it hits the crest of the road.
Oh God, no. The faces of the outreach team flash through my mind. They’re good people. They don’t deserve this.
All hellfire opens up on the car as the small sedan slows to a crawl, curving until it gently butts into a tree.
Three of his apostles take off for the wreckage. Not a window survived the ambush, a shower of red sprays what remains of the shattered glass.
One of the officers tosses in a softball-sized flame through the windshield, and the entire cab ignites like a bonfire.
Not one body moves inside, just slumped figures igniting like torches.
“Shit,” I stare out in disbelief.
The bastard in charge gives a victorious shout as the unmistakable sound of glee swims from his voice. He fires a celebratory round into the air. This was his party, his deadly rules in play. The innocent beings that lost their lives were simply his prey.
The fire in the car dulls down to embers. Those people had families, wives, children waiting for them at home, and now they were gone in the most horrific way possible.
I get up and stagger backward as the
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PRIVILEGED WITNESS (legal thriller, thriller) (The Witness Series, #3)
by Rebecca Forster
Grace McCreary swears she tried to stop her sister-in-law from jumping from her penthouse balcony but the police have a different take on the situation. They arrest Grace for murder which puts her brother, Senatorial candidate Matthew McCreary, in an undesirable spotlight. Nor is he thrilled when Grace seeks out his former lover, Josie Baylor-Bates, to act as her defense attorney. Josie, who has sworn off rich clients, agrees to defend Grace but even she isn’t sure why. She swears she believes in the woman’s innocence but in her heart she wants to prove that Matthew made a mistake letting her go.
Stepping back into the world of privilege and power, forced to face her feelings for a man she once loved, Josie is determined to win this case – even if she loses everything she holds dear.
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Oh what a tangled web her clients do weave
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an excerpt from
Privileged Witness
by Rebecca Forster
Chapter 1
The half-naked woman had come from the penthouse— she just hadn’t bothered to use the elevator. Instead, she stepped off the balcony eleven stories up. Her theatrics kept Detective Babcock from a quiet evening with a good book, a glass of wine and some very fine music. Detective Babcock didn’t hold a grudge long, though. One look at the jumper made him regret that he hadn’t arrived in time to stop her.
Beautiful even in death, the woman lay on the hot concrete as if it were her bed. One arm was crooked at an angle so that the delicate fingers of her right hand curled toward her head; the other lay straight, the hand open-palmed at her hip. On her right wrist was a diamond and sapphire bracelet. A matching earring had come off at impact and was caught in her dark hair. Her slim legs were curved together. Her feet were small and bare. Her head was turned in profile. Her eyes were closed. The wedding ring she wore made Horace Babcock feel just a little guilty for admiring her. She carried her age well so that it was difficult to tell exactly how—
“Crap. I think I felt a raindrop.”
Babcock inclined his head. His eyes flickered toward Kurt Rippy, who was hunkered at the side of a pool of blood that haloed the jumper’s head. It was the only sign that something traumatic had occurred here. It would be different when the coroner’s people turned the body to take her away. When they cut off the yellow silk and lace teddy at the morgue and laid her face up, naked on a metal table, they would find half her head caved in, her ribs pulverized, her pelvis shattered. Her brain might fall out and that would be a sad sight, indeed. How glad Babcock was to see her this way.
Elegant.
Asleep.
An illusion.
Raising a hand toward the sky, he checked the weather. Even though the day was done it was still hot. He could see the thunderheads that had hovered over the San Bernardino Mountains for the last few days were now rolling toward Long Beach. Pity tonight would be wet when the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year had been bone dry.
“Are you almost done?” Babcock asked, knowing the rain would wash away the blood and a thousand little pieces of grit and dust and things that Kurt needed to collect as a matter of course.
“Yeah. Not much to get here. I bagged her hands just in case, but she looks clean.”
Detective Babcock bridled at the adjective. It was too pedestrian for her. Hardly poetic.
She was pristine.
She was beautiful.
She was privileged.
She was a lady who was either going to or coming from something important. She was going or coming alone because no one had run screaming from the penthouse distraught that she had checked out of this world in such a manner. The traffic on Ocean Boulevard had slowed but not stopped as the paramedics converged on the site, sirens frantically wailing until they determined they were too late to help. With a huge grunt, Kurt stood up and rolled his latex gloves off with a delicate snap.
“That’s it for me. I’m going to let them bundle her before we all get wet. I hate when it’s this hot and it rains. Reminds me of Chicago. I hate Chicago . . .”
He took a deep breath and stood over the woman for a minute as his train of thought jumped the tracks. His hands were crossed at his crotch, his head was bent, and his eyes were on the victim. He seemed to be praying and his reverence surprised and impressed Detective Babcock. Finally, Kurt drew another huge breath into his equally big body, flipped at the tie that lay on top of his stomach instead of over it and angled his head toward Babcock.
“How much you think a thing like that costs?”
“What thing?”
“That thing she’s wearing?” Kurt wiggled a finger toward the body and Babcock closed his eyes. Lord, the indignity the dead suffered at the hands of the police.
“I believe that type of lingerie is quite expensive.”
“Figures. Guess her old man could afford it. Now me? I think Kim would look real good in something like that, but with what I take home . . .”
A sigh was the only sign of Babcock’s irritation as he moved away and left Kurt Rippy to lament the limitations of a cop’s salary. Then it began to rain. Just as the last vestiges of blood were being diluted and drained into the cracks of the sizzling sidewalk, Detective Babcock walked across the circular drive, past the exquisitely lit fountain of the jumper’s exclusive building, and went inside. There was still so much to do, not the least of which was to talk to one Mr. Jorgensen, the poor soul who had been making his way home just as the lady leapt. Old Mr. Jorgensen, surprised to find a scantily clad dead woman at his feet, made haste to leave the scene as soon as the emergency vehicles arrived. He probably couldn’t offer much, but a formal statement was necessary and Babcock would take it.
He rode the elevator, breathing in the scent of new: new construction, new rugs, new fittings and fastenings. Babcock preferred the Villa Riviera a few buildings down. The scrolled facade, the peaked copper roof, the age of it intrigued him in a way new never could. He got out on the third floor and knocked on the second door on the left. He waited. And waited. Eventually, the door opened and Babcock looked down at the wizened man with the walker.
“Mr. Jorgensen? I’m Detective Horace Babcock.” He held out his card. The old man snatched it.
“It’s about time you got here,” he complained and turned his back. The carpet swallowed the thumping of the walker but the acoustics of the spacious apartment were impeccable. Babcock heard the old man’s every mumble and word. “I should be in bed by now but I can’t sleep. Something like this is damn upsetting at my age. Have you told her husband? Bet you can’t even find him to tell him. Goddamn pictures of him everywhere. Can’t turn on the television without seeing him but is he ever home? No. Never home. Well, in and out. But not good enough for a woman like her. Nice. Quiet. Real pretty, that woman. So, have you told him yet?”
“Yes, sir. We have located her husband. He’ll be here soon.”
Deferentially slow, Babcock followed the old man but something in his voice seemed to amuse Mr. Jorgensen. The old man stopped just long enough to flash an impish smile over his shoulder.
“Bet he’s got a load in his pants now, huh?” Mr. Jorgensen wiggled his eyebrows, chuckled and walked on, telling Babcock something he already knew. “Yep, it’s a big, big mess for a man in his position.
Chapter 2
The last time Josie Baylor-Bates had seen Kevin O’Connel he was wearing prison issue that marked him as the criminal she knew him to be. Unfortunately, a jury of his peers hadn’t been convinced that he had beaten his wife Susan to within an inch of her life.
Though she swore it was Kevin, an expert defense witness testified that Susan’s head injuries had resulted in an odd type of amnesia. Her husband was the last person she saw on the day of the incident, ergo Susan O’Connel transferred guilt to him. When the DA failed to get a conviction Josie suggested another way to make Kevin O’Connel pay for what he’d done: a civil trial where the burden of proof was not as strict and the damages would be monetary.
Susan O’Connel had been partially paralyzed because of the attack. She was in hiding, in fear of her life since her husband hadn’t been put in jail. Josie had argued that Susan deserved every last dime Kevin O’Connel had ever—or would ever—make.
Now the civil trial was over and Kevin O’Connel was squirming as solemn-faced jurors filled the box. He shot Josie a nervous, hateful look that she didn’t bother to acknowledge. Instead, she watched the foreman hand the decision to the clerk, who read the settlement with all the passion of a potato growing:
“The jury finds Kevin O’Connel guilty of assault with intent to kill and awards Susan O’Connel special damages in the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and general damages in the amount of one and a half million dollars. We further find that the assault was committed with malice and award Susan O’Connel—”
“That’s crap! What the fuc—” Kevin O’Connel shot out of his seat. While his attorney grappled with him the spectators gasped and the judge gave warning.
“Go no further, Mr. O’Connel!”
Josie heard the scuffle, heard Kevin O’Connel curse his attorney and, finally, heard him fall silent as the judge threatened contempt and imprisonment. It was a scene that didn’t seem to interest Josie. She pushed her fountain pen through her fingers, and then did it again, concentrating on that so the court wouldn’t see an unseemly grin of satisfaction. Josie was pleased that she had come close to ruining Kevin O’Connel. He deserved worse. He got it a second later. Another five hundred thousand in punitive damages was awarded.
Finally, Josie smiled at the jury as they were dismissed with the court’s thanks. It was over. Susan O’Connel was a rich woman on paper and Josie would do everything she could to collect for her client. Wages would be garnisheed, the retirement account cleaned out and the house they had shared sold. Josie would make sure Kevin O’Connel surrendered his car, his boat—she’d take his toothbrush if she could. Every time Kevin got a little ahead. Josie would be there with her hand out on behalf of her client.
It had been a very good day and it was just past noon.
Picking up her briefcase, Josie reached for the little swinging gate, but Kevin O’Connel put his hand on it first. He looked Josie in the eye, then pushed it back with a cool loathing that was meant to intimidate. It didn’t. Josie walked past him, down the center aisle and toward the door. His hatred trailed after her and stuck like sweat.
From her height to her confidence to her power, Kevin O’Connel despised everything about Josie Baylor-Bates. He hated that she won. He hated that she stood taller than he did. Kevin O’Connel hated her intelligence. He hated that she dismissed him when she put her fancy little phone to her ear. He knew who she was calling and that pissed him off royally—enough that he just couldn’t stand watching it happen.
When Josie walked into the hall Kevin O’Connel was right behind her. It appeared he was trying to maneuver around her but stumbled instead and knocked her off balance. Her phone clattered to the floor, her arm went out and she steadied herself against the wall. Before she could pick it up, the phone was snatched away.
“Sorry. Guess I better look where I’m going,” O’Connel teased, seemingly pleased that he had hit her hard and disappointed that he hadn’t hurt her.
Josie reached for what was hers but he held it back like an evil little boy who had pinched a hair ribbon. Slowly he put the phone to his ear.
“Good news, Suzy. You got it all, babe. Everything and then some. Enjoy it while you can.” Kevin O’Connel must have liked what he was hearing. There was a glint in his eye that turned to a self-satisfied sparkle before fading to mock disappointment. “She hung up.”
“Are you stupid or just a glutton for punishment?” Josie asked, not bothering to try to wrestle the phone away from him.
“That’s funny, you calling me stupid. I got to her first, didn’t I?” Kevin twirled the little phone. It disappeared into his big hand and he looked at that fist as if he admired it. He looked at Josie as if he didn’t hold her in the same esteem.
“If the shoe fits,” Josie answered dryly and then gave warning. “Push me again and I’ll have you arrested for assault. Hand over the phone or I’ll have you arrested for robbery. Say one more word to your wife and you won’t believe the charges I’ll file. If you really are smart, you’ll quit while you’re ahead.”
“And you better think twice before you let me see your bitch face again,” he hissed. Josie could feel the warmth of his breath before she retreated a step, but he was still on her. “I don’t go down that easy. Tell Suzy she’s got one more chance. She can come home and everything will be fine. If she doesn’t, she won’t get a penny and I’ll take you both out. I swear I will.”
“The only way Susan will ever even look at you again is over my dead body, Mr. O’Connel.”
Josie had had enough. She put out her hand for her phone. Taken aback by her self-assuredness, Kevin O’Connel almost gave it to her. Then he thought again, held his fist high and, with a laugh, dropped it at her feet.
“Oops.” The mischievousness melted from his eyes.
Josie looked down, then up again. Kevin O’Connel was waiting for her to get it. The man could wait until hell froze over because Josie Bates wouldn’t spend one second at his feet.
“Think about what you said,” Kevin O’Connel warned. “That dead body thing—”
“Excuse me?”
Surprised to find that they weren’t the only two people in the universe, O’Connel stepped away and Josie looked at the lady who was retrieving the phone. There was a good two grand on the woman’s back, another couple hundred on her feet. Not the type you’d figure for a good deed, not exactly the kind of woman who usually prowled the San Pedro courthouse. When she righted herself Josie had the impression that she smiled.
“I think this belongs to you.”
She held Josie’s phone out on her palm like a peace offering. Josie took it with a barely audible “Thanks” as she kept an eye on Kevin O’Connel. With a cock of a finger he shot Josie an imaginary bullet filled with hatred, arrogance and warning. Then he dismissed her with a grunt, turned on his heel and sauntered away, leaving Josie and the lady to watch.
“He doesn’t seem very pleasant,” the woman noted.
“He isn’t,” Josie answered and walked on. She got Susan on the phone again, calming her as she opened the door and absentmindedly held it for the man directly behind her. Josie paused on the sidewalk and made her second call. Eleven rings and Hannah answered. Home from school on a half day, homework done, she was readying her last painting for her exhibit at Hermosa Beach’s Gallery C. The girl had come a long way since Josie had taken her in. A casualty of adult folly, Hannah was now legally under Josie’s guardianship and she was anxious that Josie would not only be home, but be home in time for the exhibit. Josie assured Hannah that only the end of the world could keep her away, then said goodbye. Dropping the phone in her purse Josie was giving a cursory thought to where she might grab a bite to eat, when she felt a hand on her arm.
“Josie Bates?”
“Yep.” She looked first at the obscenely large emerald ring that adorned that hand, then at the rich lady who had followed her from the courthouse.
“I wonder if I could take a few minutes of your time.” She offered a smile and followed up with an invitation. “Perhaps lunch? It’s already past noon.”
Josie inclined her head, peeved at the interruption, perplexed by the invitation and dismayed by the woman issuing it. Josie had sworn off this kind of client long ago: the kind with more money than good sense, the kind usually found in Beverly Hills or Hollywood, the kind who had a different take on justice than the rank and file. This one looked to be bad news. Like a high-priced car she was sleek, high maintenance and tuned to a powerful, itchy idle. If Josie let her, she would press the gas and Josie would have no choice but to go along for the ride. The trick was to get out of the way before the flag dropped.
“I have an office in Hermosa Beach.”
Josie reached for a card. When the woman put out her hand again Josie moved to avoid the contact and tried to shake off the sudden chill that crackled up the back of her neck. Something was amiss, but the sense of it was vague and Josie didn’t want to waste her time getting a handle on it. Still, the woman persisted.
“I’d like to talk to you today. It’s very important. There’s a place not too far from here where we could talk privately.” Her voice was deep, almost sultry.
“I’m sorry, I don’t work that way. Call my office. If you’ve got something I can help you with I’ll let you know; if I can’t, I’ll refer you.”
Josie started to leave but the woman’s fingers dug in hard on her arm. It took less than a second for Josie to note the change in the lady’s demeanor, to see the flash of anger behind her dark eyes. It took even less time for Josie to break the hold and make herself clear.
“You better find someone else to help you.”
“No. I need to talk to you,” she whispered, refusing to be dismissed. “It’s about Matthew. Matthew McCreary.”
The woman smiled sweetly, triumphantly as Josie’s outrage turned to surprise. The lady’s abracadabra had conjured up a past that left Josie Baylor-Bates mesmerized, almost hypnotized. She came close again. This time both hands reached out and took Josie by the shoulders as if relieved a long search was over.
“I’m Grace McCreary. Matthew’s sister.”
Josie shook her head hard. She stumbled as she tried to free herself and that made the woman in blue hold tighter still. That was enough to bring Josie around. She pulled back, narrowed her eyes and said:
“You’re dead.
Chapter 3
Josie threw cold water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror. Then she did it all over again but this time she skipped the mirror. She knew what she looked like: pale under her tan, the blue of her eyes almost black, her cheekbones too prominent because shock had drained her. She was shaken by Grace McCreary’s appearance, unsure how she felt about it, and she resented having to figure it out standing in the bathroom of Fistonich’s Piano Bar and Restaurant two blocks down from the courthouse.
From the third stall there was a flush. Josie yanked at the paper towels stuck in the dispenser. When the door opened, a waitress came out adjusting a frilly white apron over her full black skirt. She looked like an aged showgirl: great legs and a face that had long ago lost its allure. She rinsed her hands and watched Josie pull harder until she was rewarded with a handful of coarse white paper. The waitress plucked two sheets from the pile in Josie’s hands.
“You okay, honey?” She sounded like a carnival barker.
“Yeah. Sure. I’m great.” Josie put the towels on top of the dispenser. There was nothing better than finding out that your soul mate didn’t have a soul at all.
Josie had lived with Matthew McCreary for three years, knew him a full year before that, had an intimate-as-hell relationship only to find out that he’d forgotten to mention one little thing: his sister was alive and well somewhere in the world. Family, the one thing Josie longed for, Matthew had treated cavalierly. She’d believed his sister died in the same accident that took his parents. How cruel to the memory of his parents, how unfair to Grace McCreary, how malicious to play on Josie’s emotional weakness.
Jesus.
She had skinny-dipped with Matthew McCreary in the ocean and made love on the floor of their house. She had told him about her mother’s abandonment, her father’s death. Josie had respected his pain, recognizing that he lived with tragedy the same way she did. Josie had taken Matthew McCreary’s shirts to the laundry because she wanted to, not because he expected it. He had allowed her to believe a lie; to live with a liar.
Christ.
Matthew had told her he was alone in the world. He said he felt complete with her and that made Josie feel whole. He was the first man she had loved. Josie admired Matthew. She believed in him. They parted like adults for all the adult reasons, but that didn’t keep the parting from hurting or the memory of him from lingering.
Damn him.
Josie had been happy when she heard Matthew was married. She was so proud when he threw his hat in the ring in a bid for the Senate nomination. Josie thought he was close to perfect, just that she wasn’t perfect for him. She didn’t want to find her identity subservient to his political ambition or his money. Josie believed that was her failure and she had lived with that regret all these years. But what really made her angry was that the mere idea that Matthew McCreary was in her world again made her heart race.
Damn it all, Matthew, and your sister, too.
Crumpling the paper towel, Josie tossed it in the trash, left the ladies’ room and paused in the small dark hall by the pay phone. Fistonich’s was a restaurant without windows; a throwback to the fifties. At night the piano bar filled with ancient people decked out in cocktail finery any vintage collector would kill for. The women shaded their eyes in blue and tinted their silver hair pink. The men wore toupees that had seen better days and polyester pants in shades the rainbow had never heard of. The place served a decent steak and management watched out for the old folks who got drunk and wept as they sang the old songs and danced cheek to cheek. But that was night and this was noon. The place looked shabby, smelled like smoke and was nearly deserted except for Grace McCreary, who waited patiently at a corner table for Josie to return. When Josie slid onto the black leather banquette, she put her purse by her side and gave Grace McCreary the once-over.
She had seen a picture of Grace as a gawky youngster, so it was no surprise that she didn’t recognize the woman upon whom God had played a cosmic joke. He had given Grace everything Matthew had: a high-bridged straight nose; quick, dark eyes protected by lush lashes; high cheekbones and artistically shaped lips. Unfortunately, where the sum of the parts made Matthew look intellectual and intensely handsome, his sister appeared untrustworthy and tough. In short, Grace McCreary looked like Matthew in drag—except Matthew would have been prettier.
To make matters worse, Grace made no attempt to soften her features, choosing instead to accentuate them with a short slash of dark hair that she swept behind ears decorated with moons of mabe pearls. Grace was pulled together with frightening precision and spoke with an East Coast accent so slight Josie might have missed it if she hadn’t been hanging on every curious word that came out of Grace McCreary’s mouth.
“I ordered you a beer. Matthew said you liked beer.” Grace tipped her head back and a plume of smoke seeped from between her rose-colored lips.
“That’s illegal in California. You can’t smoke in restaurants.” Josie gave a nod to the cigarette.
“The waitress smokes. She brought me her ashtray from the back room. You won’t turn us in to the police, will you?”
Grace cut her eyes slyly toward Josie, inviting her to share a giggle at this bit of naughtiness. It would have seemed a little girl trick if the glint in her eye wasn’t so sharp, if a dare to bend the rules didn’t lurk in her tone. When Josie didn’t react, the smile faded, the cigarette was extinguished. Ground out. Pushed down until the accordioned filter was half buried in a bed of shredded tobacco. Josie stayed silent. Grace’s brow furrowed as she rubbed the bits of the brown stuff from her fingers.
“Then again maybe you would tell on me. Matthew said you were a letter-of-the-law woman. He said you could be counted on to always do the right thing.”
“Do you believe everything Matthew says?”
Josie pushed the beer away, insulted by everything about this woman: her odd small talk, her ladies-who-lunch suit, her giant emerald ring and huge pearl earrings, her assumption that Josie would drink beer for lunch while she sipped ice tea. But her contempt went unnoticed.
“If someone is right, why not? He said you put yourself through college on a volleyball scholarship. He said you were smart and trustworthy. I’m not athletic myself and I know how much Matthew admires that. He told me you were as tall as he was, but I didn’t expect you to be so beautiful.”
“I’m not beautiful,” Josie said.
“Handsome, then.” Grace amended her comment seamlessly. Her gaze caught Josie’s as if she had studied the technique of eye contact but lost the art. “I saw you in the newspaper when you defended that man—the one they said killed the poor boy at the amusement park. The picture didn’t do you justice but it was the only one I’d seen. Matthew doesn’t have a picture of you.”
“I’m sure his wife wouldn’t have appreciated him keeping one around.”
“He wasn’t always married,” Grace reminded her and with the mention of Matthew’s dead wife the emerald ring turned ’round and ’round. Only the thumb of Grace’s left hand moved and she seemed oddly unaware of the motion. It was accompanied by a tic that made her well coiffed head pull up as if someone had bridled her and the bit was painful.
“But he always had a sister,” Josie reminded her, eager to shift the spotlight where it belonged. “Listen, Grace, is it just me or don’t you find it a little disturbing that Matthew led me to believe you were dead?”
“Matthew told me you always wanted to live at the beach. He told me you were a bleeding heart. . .” Grace talked over Josie as if she hadn’t spoken and that was the last straw.
“Okay. I don’t know why you’re here but this conversation is going nowhere. If Matthew wants to see me he can give me a call.” Josie reached for her purse. She was sliding out of the booth when Grace leaned over the table and stopped her as easily as if she’d erected a wall.
“Matthew didn’t stop thinking about you when he married Michelle,” she said quietly. “He would see you on the television or see a picture in the paper. I could tell what you meant to him. You should know that.”
Josie paused, confused by this piece of information. Grace’s own hands slipped beneath the table and Josie had no doubt the emerald was still whirly gigging. Wary of this woman’s liberties as the past was insinuating itself into the present, Josie pulled her lips together. Grace’s mere presence was rewriting Matthew’s history and Josie’s right along with it and that could threaten everything and everyone Josie loved.
“Matthew and me, that was a long time ago.” Josie looked away so that Grace McCreary wouldn’t see the flush in her cheeks. “Our history is private. Now, if there’s something you want, tell me. If you were just curious, you’ve seen me. And when you see Matthew, tell him to take care of his own business instead of sending a sister he was ashamed of to do it for him.”
Josie was about to leave, to forget she had ever met Grace McCreary, when she saw a fascinating play of expressions ripple across the woman’s beautifully made-up face. Grace’s shoulders broadened as if she were steeling herself for an assault; she tensed as if trying to absorb a possibly fatal blow and Josie was mesmerized.
“Oh, I see. Well, I suppose I never looked at it that way. I didn’t think he was asham—” Grace couldn’t bring herself to finish that sentence, so she shook back her hair and started another one. “I’ve made a terrible mistake. I thought he had told you something—enough that you would understand our relationship.”
“Christ.”
Josie shifted and pulled her purse close, uncomfortable with the turning of this particular tide. It seemed the truth was that a living sister was less important to Matthew than the memory of Josie and for Grace that was a devastating realization.
“Christ,” Josie muttered again, sympathetic to Grace’s plight. People erased other people from their lives all the time. Josie’s mother had done it, why not Matthew? That connection bought Grace some time.
“No, it’s all right.” Grace put up a hand to ward off sympathy. The emerald slipped to the wrong side of her finger, flashing like some alien sign of peace. “You mattered to him, I didn’t. That’s why I know so much about you and you know nothing about me. Please, don’t be angry with Matthew. He had his reasons. It isn’t important now.”
“Then what is important?” Josie asked. “Because it’s pretty clear you don’t just want to have a drink.”
“Matthew is in trouble. You have to help him.”
Grace leaned close. Her eyelids were dusted with silver and gray, black liner swept out at the corners. Grace McCreary’s skin was beautiful and her hair was luxuriously thick. Josie should have been able to admire her but the scrutiny of those dark, narrow eyes, too close together to be beautiful, made her uneasy. She was left with the feeling that she was being drawn into a conspiracy.
“Maybe you haven’t been listening to the news,” Josie said. “According to the pundits, if Matthew gets the nomination he’s favored in the general election. Why would he need anyone’s help?”
Grace’s face lit up like that of a lonely child thrilled to find someone who would play with her. She pulled a manila envelope from her purse and pushed it across the table.
“It’s not about his campaign,” Grace breathed. “It’s about the police. They don’t think Michelle committed suicide. They think Matthew killed his wife.”
by Rebecca Forster
4.5 stars – 165 reviews!!
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KND Freebies: Award-winning THE LAST LETTER by the bestselling Kathleen Shoop is featured in today’s Free Kindle Nation Shorts excerpt
GOLD MEDALUSA “Best Books 2011” Awards WINNER, Fiction—Western
For every child who struggles to forgive…
And for every daughter who thinks she knows her mother’s story …
award-winning and bestselling author
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Katherine wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t found the letter…
Katherine Arthur’s mother arrives on her doorstep, dying, forcing her to relive a past she wanted to forget. When Katherine was young, the Arthur family had been affluent city dwellers until shame sent them running for the prairie, into the unknown. Taking her family, including young Katherine, to live off the land was the last thing Jeanie Arthur had wanted, but she would do her best to make a go of it. For Jeanie’s husband Frank, it had been a world of opportunity. Dreaming, lazy Frank. But, it was a society of uncertainty—a domain of natural disasters, temptation, hatred, even death.
Ten-year-old Katherine had loved her mother fiercely, put her trust in her completely, but when there was no other choice, and Jeanie resorted to extreme measures to save her family, she tore Katherine’s world apart. Now, seventeen years later, and far from the homestead, Katherine has found the truth—she has discovered the last letter. After years of anger, can Katherine find it in her heart to understand why her mother made the decisions that changed them all? Can she forgive and finally begin to heal before it’s too late?
Praise from reviewers and Amazon readers:
“Shoop’s characters breathe. I am blown away by the authenticity of the dialogue and setting… a gifted writer with a bang-on sense of atmosphere, time, place, and social class.” –Bev Katz RosenBaum, author of I Was a Teenage Popsicle and Beyond Cool
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an excerpt from
The Last Letter
by Kathleen Shoop
Katherine rubbed the second knuckle of her pinky finger–the spot where it had been amputated nearly two decades before. The scarred wound pulsed with each heartbeat as her mind flashed through the events that led to its removal. Was it possible for an infection to form inside an old sore?
Don’t think about it. Just do your work.
She snatched the clump of metal from the stone saucer and scrubbed the iron pot as though issuing it punishment. She caught her forefinger on blackened beans. Damn. She sucked on the nail. With her free hand she yanked the plug from the soapstone sink then opened the back door. Hot, thick wind brushed her cheeks and forced her eyes closed as she yanked the rope that made the dinner bell clang.
With a jerk of her hip she booted the door closed and wiped her hands on the gravy-splattered apron that draped her body. A crash came from the front of the house. A ball through the window? Another wrestling match over the last “up” at bat? She dashed toward the foyer to see what her children were up to.
She tripped over the edge of the carpet and caught her balance, gaping at the sight. There on the floor was her husband, Aleksey, kneeling over her sister Yale. A shattered flow-blue vase lay scattered around them.
Yale burped sending a burst of gin-scented breath upward.
Katherine recoiled as the odor hit her nose.
“She’s drunk? Take her to my mother’s!”
Aleksey looked up, his face strained.
“Just help…”
She couldn’t handle Yale. Not right then. She turned and headed back toward the kitchen. Their mother would have to rescue Yale this time. As though being scolded from afar, her missing finger throbbed again, like a knife scraping at the marrow deep inside her bones the pain forced her to stop. Her mother hadn’t been there when she lost the finger. Her mother was never where she was supposed to be.
Katherine looked over her shoulder at the pair on the floor and clutched her hand against her chest. Yale gurgled, growing pale grey. Aleksey hoisted her and carried her to the couch.
She looked down at her smarting hand, against her heart, and clarity took over. It wasn’t Yale’s fault she was fragile. She’d been born that way. She’s your sister. Do something. She puffed out her cheeks with air and then released it. Her anger receded taking the throbbing pulse in her hand with it.
She grabbed a pot of hydrangeas from a side-table and ran out the front door, shook the billowy, blue flowers out of the pot sending coal-black dirt splashing over the wood planks.
Back in the house she slid onto the couch, Yale’s head in her lap, pot perched on the floor to catch the vomit. Aleksey paced in front of the women.
“She was at Sweeny’s. Alone. Men, tossing her back and forth like a billiard ball. I barely…”
Katherine covered her mouth. She had enough of her mother’s failures.
“I knew this kind of thing would happen. And, now-”
“She’s your sister and I know you love them even if you say you don’t care. Your mother’s dying. We have to help them.” Aleksey’s jaw tensed.
Katherine bit the inside of her cheek, struck by his rare disapproval of her.
“You can’t ignore this one more minute,” Aleksey said, “seventeen years is long enough to forgive.”
Without warning, Yale bucked forward and vomited, spackling Katherine with booze-scented chunks before passing out again. Tears gathered in her eyes. Hand quivering, she swiped a chunk from her chin with the back of her hand then smoothed Yale’s black hair off her pale, clammy forehead.
She gulped and gritted her teeth.
“If Mother can’t take care of Yale, then it’s time for the institution.” The words were sour in Katherine’s mouth, yet she couldn’t stop them from forming, from hanging in the air, the spitefulness making Aleksey break her gaze.
Aleksey pulled the pot from between Katherine’s feet and held it near Yale as she started to gag again.
“Yale can stay here. They both can.”
Katherine rocked Yale, not wanting to let her go, but knowing she had to hold her mother accountable. She was the mother after all. She shook her head and slid Yale off her lap, patting her head as she stood.
Aleksey rolled Yale to her side as she heaved into the pot.
“I’ll call Mother,” she said heading toward the stairs.
“I recall a time,” Aleksey said as he held Yale like she was one of his own, “when you called your mother, Mama, and the word swelled with adoration.”
Katherine turned from the bottom step, her posture straight and sure, like she was headed to dinner and a play rather than to scrape someone’s vomit from her skin. She gripped the banister trying to channel the mish-mash of emotion into the wood rather than feel it.
“I don’t recall that. Calling her Mama, feeling warmth in the word. I don’t recall it a bit.” And with that she trudged upstairs to peel off the rancid clothes and to stifle the rotten feelings that always materialized upon the sight of her family, drunk or not.
Chapter 2
1887
Dakota Territory
“Mama?”
Jeanie jumped at her daughter’s thin voice. Katherine lay below her in tall sinuous grasses that bent with the wind, covering and uncovering her with each shifting gust.
“I’m hot and tired and when will Father be back?” Katherine rose up on her elbows. “I understand complaining is like an ice-pick in your ear, but I’m plum hot and plum parched and tired of waiting.” She jerked a blade of grass from the ground and bit on it.
Jeanie nodded and rubbed her belly. She was pregnant but hadn’t told anyone. Cramps pulled inside her pelvis. Would she lose this one? Nervous, she grabbed for the fat pearls that used to decorate her neck and smacked her tongue off the roof of her arid mouth.
She hacked up a clump of phlegm, turned her back to Katherine and spit it into the air. A sudden blast of air blew the green mucus back, landing on her skirt. Hands spread up to the sky, she stared at the ugly splotch marveling at how quickly her life had transformed. She would never have believed it possible before the scandal hit her own family.
With clenched teeth she wrenched a corner of her petticoat from under the skirt to wipe away the lumpy secretion. Her thoughts tripped over each other. Jeanie would not let doubt linger, mix with fear and paralyze her. She would be sure the family re-grew their fortune, that they reclaimed their contentment, their name, their everything. If only Frank were more reliable. Damn Frank was never where he was supposed to be.
Arms wrapped across her body, Jeanie tapped her silk-shoed foot. They should head for water, but she didn’t think that was prudent. She’d heard people could lose direction quickly in such expansive land. That frightened her, not being in control, but she also thought perhaps the people who ended up wandering the prairie lost were simply not that smart or were careless. Slowly, as she ran her fingers down the front of her swelling throat, each scratchy swallow symbolized the wagonload of errors Jeanie had made and she started to understand that intelligence and survival did not always walk together.
Damn him. Five hours. They’d waited long enough for Frank. She pushed away the rising tears that grew from thinking of the mess her father and darling husband had made for them. Be brave.
They needed to take action or they’d prune from the inside out.
“Let’s head for water.” Jeanie clasped Katherine’s hand and pulled her to standing. We can do this, Jeanie thought. Frank had tied red sashes around taller bushes that were scattered in the direction of the well. Katherine wiggled free of her mother’s grasp and raced-as much as a girl could dart through grasses that whapped at her chest-over the land.
“Stay close!” Jeanie stopped and pulled her foot off the ground. She sucked back her breath as her slim-heeled shoes dug into her ankles. Katherine looked up from ahead, waving a bunch of purple prairie crocus over her head at Jeanie.
Jeanie turned to see how far they’d moved from the wagon. She could only see the tip of the white canvas that arched over it. She looked back in the direction of the well, of Katherine. The wind stilled. The sudden hush was heavy. The absence of Katherine’s lavender bonnet sent blood flashing through her veins.
“Katherine?” She must be pulling more flowers, Jeanie thought and rose to her tiptoes. “Katherine?”
Jeanie looked back at the wagon.
“Katherine!” Jeanie stomped some of the grass hoping the depressed sections would somehow stick out amidst the chunky high grass when they needed to return.
“Katherine!” Jeanie’s voice cracked. She cleared her throat and shouted again. No answer. She shivered then clenched her skirt and hiked it up, thundering in the direction of Katherine.
KatherineKatherineKatherineKatherine! Bolting through the grasses, the wind swelled, it pushed Jeanie back as she pressed forward, turning her shouts back at her, filling her ears with her own words as she strained to hear a reply.
Jeanie stopped as though slamming into a wall, swallowing loud breaths hoping the silence would allow Katherine’s voice to hit her ears. Nothing. She ran again, right out of her luxurious, city-shoes, while cursing the mass of skirts and crinoline that swallowed her legs. Her feet slammed over the dirt.
The grasses tangled around her ankles, tripping her. Jeanie scrambled back to her feet and took three steps before taking one right off the edge of the earth. She plummeted into water. A pond. Jeanie stood and spit out foamy, beer-colored water. At least she could touch bottom.
“Katthhh-errrrrr-ine!” She slogged through the waist deep water, her attention nowhere and everywhere at once. The sounds of splashing and choking finally made Jeanie focus on one area of the pond. She shot around a bend in the bank to see Katherine’s face go under the water taking what little wind Jeanie had left in her lungs away.
Katherine shot back up. “Mama, Mama!” She dropped back under.
Jeanie lunged and groped for Katherine as the bottom of the pond fell away. Jeanie treaded water, the skirts strangling her efforts to be efficient. A bit further! The bottom must be shallow or Katherine couldn’t have bounced up as she had.
But the bottom didn’t rise up and Jeanie choked on grainy water. She burst forward on her stomach, taking an arm-stroke, her feet scrounging for the bottom. Her face sunk under the surface.
We’re going to die, Jeanie thought. Frank would never find them. Her boys!
Bubbles appeared in front of Jeanie and she reached through the murky water for Katherine. Finally, hands grabbed back, gripping Jeanie’s. She could feel every precious finger threaded through hers. Jeanie jerked Katherine into her body, lumbered toward the bank then shoved the floppy girl up onto it. Katherine lay on the grass, hacking and inhaling so deep that she folded over, gagging. Jeanie squirmed out and pulled Katherine across her lap, thumping her back until there was nothing left but empty heaves.
Silent tears camouflaged by stale, pond water warmed Jeanie’s cheeks. Her hand shook as she pushed Katherine’s matted hair away from her eyes, rocking her.
“We’ll be fine, Katherine. We’ll build a life and start over and be happy. We will. Believe it deep inside your very young bones.”
Katherine snuffled then blew her nose in her filthy, sodden skirt. Her voice squeaked. “Oh, Mama.” Katherine burrowed into Jeanie’s chest and curled into a ball in her lap.
Jeanie wiped Katherine’s mouth with the edge of her skirt, streaking mud across her cheek. She used her thumb to clean away the muck. Her daughter in need was all that kept Jeanie from rolling into a ball herself.
“My, my. We’ll be fine,” Jeanie said. And as her heart fell back into its normal rhythms heavy exhaustion braced her. “We’ll enjoy the sunshine all the more if we’ve had a few shadows first. Right? That’s right.” Jeanie knew those words sounded ridiculous in light of all they’d been through, but still they dribbled out of her mouth, as though simply discussing a broken bit of Limoges.
Katherine nodded into her mother’s chest. Jeanie shuddered, a leaden tumor of dread swelled in her gut. She wouldn’t let it settle there.
“Shush, shush, little one,” Jeanie kissed her cheeks. If Katherine and she lived through that they could live through anything. The pond event, as it came to be in Jeanie’s mind, was evidence they’d paid a price and would be free to accept all the treasures the prairie offered from that point forward.
“Are you crying Mama?”
Jeanie forced a smile then looked into Katherine’s upturned face.
“We’re not crying people.” Her fingers quivered as she tucked the stiff chestnut tendrils into Katherine’s bonnet. “Besides there’s nothing to cry about.”
Katherine gripped her mother tighter.
“I knew you’d save us, Mama. Even in Des Moines, I knew that no matter what, you could save us.”
Jeanie hugged Katherine close hiding the splintered confidence she knew must be creased into her face. What did Katherine know? She couldn’t know the details of their disgrace. She must have simply picked up on the weightiness of their leaving the family home for this-this nothingness.
Jeanie squeezed her eyes shut, trying to find the strength inside her. She would not fake her self-assurance. She believed that kind of thing lived inside a person’s skin, never really leaving, even if it did weaken from time to time. Yes, Jeanie told herself, she was the same person she had been three weeks before. Losing everything she owned didn’t mean she had to lose herself.
***
Jeanie stood at the edge of the pond and inventoried her most recent losses: impractical shoes she shouldn’t have been wearing anyway; silver chatelaine that held her pen, paper, and watch; pride. Well, no, she was determined to salvage her self-respect. She clutched her waist with both hands, considering their options, then pulled Katherine to her feet.
“This standing pond water will poison us. We’ll continue to the well.”
Katherine patted her mother’s back then bent over to pluck some prairie grass from the ground.
The wooly sunrays seemed to lower onto their heads rather than move further away, settling into the west. Their dresses dried crisp-the pond-water debris acted as a starch-while the skirts underneath remained moist and mealy.
Jeanie wiggled her toes. They burned inside the holey stockings.
“Our new home will have a spring house, right Mama? Icy, fresh spring water?”
“I’m afraid, no, little lamb.”
“Oh gaaaa-loshes,” Katherine said.
Jeanie slung her arm around Katherine. “Let me think for a moment, Darling.”
The endless land looked the same though not familiar, appearing perfectly flat, though housing hidden rises in land and gaping holes that were obvious only after it was too late. All Jeanie could remember was running straight to the spot that ended up being a pond. Her heart thudded hard again reminding her she had no control of her existence.
A sob rumbled inside Jeanie, wracking her body, forcing an obnoxious, weak moan to ooze from her clenched lips. Toughen up. She pushed her shoulders down as her throat swelled around another rising sob.
Katherine pushed a piece of grass upward, offering it to Jeanie to chew on.
“You said you came around a bend, Mama.”
Jeanie closed her fingers over the blade of grass and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“We’ll curve back around to get to the point where we can head straight back toward the wagon. Then we’ll know where the well is from there.”
They held hands, traipsed around the edge of the pond and rose up a gentle hill. From there, they could see a tree. Just one. Tall, yet knobby, as though surrendering to death a bit. But, even in its contorted form, Jeanie could see its vibrant green foliage and white blooms.
Katherine pointed.
“I forgot the world had trees.”
“Yes.”
“I’m thirsty Mama.”
“Don’t feel out of spirits. We’ll find the well. Better to ignore the thirst until then.” Jeanie wished she could take her own advice but she’d felt parched since she first perched atop the wagon seat three days before.
Katherine squeezed Jeanie’s hand three times saying “I love you” with the gesture. Jeanie squeezed back to say the same then looked away from the tree into nothingness.
They hugged the edge of the pond, following the bends back to the spot where Jeanie’s foot caught the cusp of the pond, tearing out some earth. Facing directly east, they headed back to where Jeanie thought the wagon sat.
“Get on my shoulders,” Jeanie said.
They faced each other with Jeanie’s wrists crossed, hands joined. Jeanie bent her knees and exploded upward swinging Katherine around her back. Katherine wiggled into a comfortable place on Jeanie’s shoulders and fastened her ankles around Jeanie’s chest.
“You all right, Mama?”
“My yes, Sweet Pea. All is well.” She was going to make all of that true. “Peel your eyes for the wagon.” Jeanie plodded, feeling Katherine’s weight quickly, thinking of the baby inside.
“Yes, Mama.” Katherine hummed a tune.
“Concentrate on the looking,” Jeanie said.
“The humming helps me look.”
“Well, then,” Jeanie said through heavy breaths. “Keep those eyes wide as a prairie night.”
“Wide as a what?” Katherine said.
“A prairie night,” Jeanie said. Katherine’s legs stiffened and she pulled hard around Jeanie’s neck.
Jeanie halted, absorbing Katherine’s tension.
“What’s wrong? What do you see?” Jeanie looked upward at Katherine’s face above her. She squeezed Katherine’s thigh to get her attention. Were they about to step into a snake pit, be trampled by a herd of cows?
“What is it?”
“A man,” Katherine said.
“Who?” Ridiculous question in light of them not knowing a soul in Dakota.
Katherine’s legs kicked-she gripped Jeanie’s bonnet making its ties nearly choke her.
Jeanie’s heart began its clunking patterns again.
“Where?”
Katherine didn’t respond so Jeanie swung her from her shoulders and tucked her behind her skirts. Jeanie glanced about the ground for something sharp or big. There was nothing that could be used as a weapon against a small rodent let alone a man.
Katherine clenched Jeanie so tight that the two nearly flew off their feet. Steadied, Jeanie couldn’t see anyone coming toward them. Her bare feet pulsed with pain making her feel more vulnerable. Katherine must be hallucinating, the thirst taking its toll on her.
Jeanie spun in place, craning for the sight of a man, the sound of feet, but a windblast made anything that might emit noise, soundless.
For a moment Jeanie was tempted to burrow into the grasses, hide there, play dead, anything to avoid the man, if there was a man. A new burst of sweat gathered at her hairline and dripped down the sides of her face. Katherine’s fingers delved into the loosened stays of Jeanie’s corset.
“Who’s there?” Jeanie yelled into the wind. She shuddered. She could feel someone watching them. She whirled again, Katherine whipped around with her.
“Who’s there?” Jeanie shouted. This time her words tore through the air, the winds momentarily still.
“It’s Howard Templeton! Jeanie Arthur? That you?” A full, gruff voice came from behind. Jeanie and Katherine twisted around a final time. Jeanie’s body relaxed. If he knew her name it must be a good sign. She tensed again, maybe not. Maybe he tortured Frank and the boys and…she wouldn’t think about it. This Templeton sported a pristine black hat. His ropy limbs were strong though not bulky, not threatening in any setting other than that of the naked prairie.
Jeanie shaded her eyes and looked into his six feet two inches, meeting his gaze. A crooked grin pulled his mouth a centimeter away from being a smirk.
“Mrs. Arthur, I presume? There. That’s more proper, isn’t it? Don’t be nervous.”
“It was the wind,” Jeanie said. You scared me blind, she wanted to say, but wouldn’t. “I couldn’t pinpoint…well, no matter.” She wasn’t accustomed to making her own introductions. It felt rude to say, who are you? So, she said nothing.
Templeton removed his hat and bent at the waist, lifting his eyes. Was he flirting with this dramatic bow? She grabbed for absent pearls then smoothed the front of her dress before pulling Katherine into her side.
He straightened, replaced his hat.
“I met your husband, Frank, on his way to stake a claim.”
Jeanie flinched. Where was Frank?
Templeton jammed one of his mitts toward Jeanie, offering a handshake. She stepped backward while still offering her hand in return.
He clasped her hand inside both of his. They were remarkably soft for a man ferreting out a home on the prairie. He held the handclasp and their gaze. Jeanie looked away glimpsing their joined hands. She cleared her throat and wormed her hand out of his.
She wished there had been a manual pertaining to the etiquette of meeting on the prairie. Etiquette should have traveled anywhere one went, but she could feel, standing there embarrassed in so many ways, how unreliable everything she had learned about life would be in that setting. Jeanie ran the freed hand over her bonnet, straightening it then smoothing the front of her pond-mucked skirt.
Templeton shifted his weight, and drew Jeanie’s attention back.
“I advised your Frank to jump a claim. To take up in the Henderson’s place. That family never proved up and rather than you starting from scratch, I figured you might as well start from something. Besides, I miss having a direct neighbor. Darlington Township might have well over a hundred homesteads settled, but it’s really the few closest to you, the ones you form cooperatives with, that matter.”
Jeanie swallowed hard. She eyed his canteen and had to hold her hand back to keep from rudely snatching it right off his body.
“Well, I’m not keen on jumping a claim, Mr. Templeton. I’ll have to consult my own inclination before we put pen to paper on that.”
She bit the inside of her mouth, regretting she’d lost her manners, her mind.
“I’m sorry. My manners. It’s a pleasure to meet you. This is my daughter Katherine.”
Katherine smiled. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Templeton shook her hand then folded his arms across his chest.
“You, Katherine, are the picture of your father. Prettier though, of course, with your mother’s darker coloring, I see.”
Katherine reddened, peered upward from under her bonnet then darted away, leaping and spinning.
“Stay close!” Jeanie said.
“So what bit you with good old prairie fever?” Templeton asked.
Jeanie looked around as though something drew her attention. She hadn’t considered what her response to that query would be. Her heart burst at the chest wall. Templeton’s quiet patience, his steadfast gaze heightened Jeanie’s discomfort.
“Circumstances.”
“I know all about circumstances,” Howard said.
“I don’t mean to be ill-mannered, but…” Jeanie eyed the canteen Templeton had slung across his body.
He rubbed his chin then slid the strap over his head.
“Frank sent me with some water, figured you’d need it, that I’d be the best person to find you.”
“Water, thank you, my yes.” Jeanie licked her lips.
He handed it to Jeanie. Her hands shook, nearly dropping it as she unclasped the catch. She would give her daughter the first drink.
“Katherine! Water!”
Katherine skipped toward them. She took the canteen, shoulders hunched, eyes wide as they had been on Christmas morning.
“Watch, don’t dribble.” Jeanie held her hands up under the canteen. She forced her gaze away, knowing she must look crazed, staring at Katherine’s throat swallowing, barely able to wait her turn.
Katherine stopped drinking and sighed, eyes closed, content. She held the canteen to her mother.
Jeanie threw her head back, water drenching her insides. The liquid engorged every cell of her shriveled body. She took it from her lips and offered it back to Katherine.
“You finish up,” Jeanie said, cupping Katherine’s chin, lifting it to get a good look into her now glistening eyes.
“There’s got to be plenty back at the wagon now, right, Mr. Templeton?” Jeanie said.
He didn’t reply. He squatted down, squinting at Jeanie’s bare feet.
“You’re not going another inch with naked feet and phalanges. What a great word, I haven’t had use for since, well, never mind that,” Templeton said.
Katherine’s eyes widened.
“I’ll thank you to find your manners, Mr. Templeton,” Jeanie said stepping back.
“Don’t be harebrained, Mrs. Arthur. Allow me to wrap your feet so they’re protected should you step on a rattler, or into a gopher hole. I’ll be as doctorly as possible.” Templeton stood and unbuttoned his shirt.
Jeanie waved her hands back and forth. “No, now, no, now please don’t do…” But before she could arrange her words to match her thoughts, Templeton ripped his shirt into strips and helped Jeanie to the ground. He turned her left foot back and forth. Jeanie’s eyes flew wide open, her mouth gaping.
Katherine sighed with her entire body.
“Sure am glad we stumbled upon Mr. Templeton. My mama wasn’t trying to be disagreeable. She’s just proper is all.”
“Katherine Margaret Arthur.” Jeanie snatched for her daughter’s arm, but she leapt away, humming, cart-wheeling. Jeanie’s face flamed.
Templeton’s deep laugh shook his whole body. He began to wrap her foot. “These feet look to have been damaged by more than a simple run across the land.”
Jeanie bit the inside of her cheek. She wouldn’t confide her utter stupidity to a stranger.
“Let me guess,” Templeton said. “I’d say you had a little trouble parting with your city shoes? Perhaps? The way your feet are lacerated below the ankles, as though stiff shoes meant for decoration more than work had their way with you?”
“Stay close Katherine!” Jeanie shouted to avoid admitting that in fact, she’d kept three pairs of delicate, pretty shoes and only traded one for a pair of black clodhoppers. The clodhoppers that bounced out of the back of the wagon just beyond their stop in Yankton.
Jeanie flinched as Templeton bandaged the other foot.
“Did I hurt you?”
Jeanie covered her mouth then recovered her poise.
“No. Let’s finish this production and get moving.” It was then Jeanie realized she was shoeless-and not temporarily speaking. She wouldn’t be able to sausage her swollen feet into the pretty shoes and she had nothing utilitarian in reserve. Frank was a miracle worker with wood, but wooden shoes? That wasn’t an option.
Templeton whistled.
“Nice you have such a grand family to cheer you while you make your home on the prairie. Times like this I wish I had the same. No wife, no children to speak of.”
“You’re unmarried?” Jeanie smoldered at the thought that not only a strange man handled her feet, her naked toes, but one who was batching-it! A scandal in the eyes of many. Thankfully, there were no prying eyes to add this outrage to her hobbled reputation.
Templeton snickered repeatedly as he moved with a doctor’s detachment. The feel of hands so gently, though firmly, caring for her, nearly put Jeanie in a trance. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done such a thing for her.
“There. Good as new. Until we get you to the wagon, anyway. I assume you have another pair of boots there.”
“Well, I uh, I…” She told herself to find her composure, that she was one step away from a reputation as an adventuress or an imbecile if she didn’t put forth the picture of a respectable woman.
“Had a shoe mishap?”
“It could be characterized that way.” Jeanie wanted to die. How stupid could she have been?
She turned one foot back and forth and then the other before having no choice but to look at Templeton and thank him for his assistance. Blood seeped through bandages and she nodded knowing he had been right. She’d have been wrought with infection and open to the bone if he hadn’t wrapped her.
“Thank you Mr. Templeton. I thank you sincerely.” Jeanie put her hand over her heart.
He pulled Jeanie to her feet.
“My pleasure.” Templeton gave another shallow bow then tied an extra shred of his white shirt to a small cobwebby bush to use as a landmark, to show Jeanie and Katherine how the prairie land could work against even the most knowledgeable pioneer.
Jeanie knew she’d been careless that day, but she certainly didn’t need white ties all over the prairie to keep her from getting lost again. She’d be more vigilant next time.
Move on, Jeanie. No time for moping. Jeanie drew back and lifted her skirts. She stepped onto the fresh bandages then snapped her foot back in pain. She held her breath and pressed forward ignoring the pain.
“It’s this way,” Templeton said. “You’re turned around.”
Jeanie halted. Her face warmed further than the heat and anxiety had already flushed it.
“I suppose I’ve made some dire errors today, Mr. Templeton.”
“I suppose we all do at first, Mrs. Arthur.”
Jeanie puckered her lips in front of unspoken embarrassment. When was the last time she’d faced a string of endless failures? Never. She wondered if that could be possible, or if she was just making such a fact up in her mind.
“This way, my sweet!” Jeanie pushed her shoulders back, tugged her skirts against her legs and took off in the correct direction, Katherine beside her with Templeton just behind, gently guiding them back to Jeanie’s family, back to the life she didn’t think she could actually live with, but would not survive without.
Chapter 3
1905
Des Moines, Iowa
In the three days since Yale had stumbled drunk into Katherine and Aleksey’s home, the couple had made the decision that their Edwardian home, even with four children, allowed more than enough space to care for both the cancer-stricken Jeanie and Yale, who was slow. There wasn’t much to do in the way of transporting her sister and mother’s belongings into Katherine’s home for other than two trunks and some hanging clothes; they did not own a single item that needed to be moved.
It wasn’t Katherine’s decision to have them come. She resisted with all her might but Aleksey, had for the first time in their marriage, asserted the type of overbearing male dominance so many men reveled in regularly. He told Katherine she had no choice but to let Jeanie and Yale live with them. It was Katherine’s duty to nurse her mother back to life or onward to death and it was her job to comfort and house her struggling sister.
Katherine stood in their doorway and watched Aleksey help Jeanie, one awkward step after another, up the front steps and across the porch. Katherine may not have remembered any warmth toward her mother, any sweet, shared moments or precious mother/ daughter secrets, but she felt them from time to time, inside her skin, down in her soul, coursing through her body. Below the surface of her conscious mind was the memory of a woman she once adored. Normally when that flash of love for her mother shot through Katherine, she pushed it away, and let the resentment, the gritty hate that seemed to be layered like bricks, weigh on the goodness, squashing it out.
But now, with her mother being ushered into her home for Katherine to tend until she took her final breath, she let the shot of warm feelings sit a bit; saturate her mind, hoping the sensation would allow her to cope.
As Aleksey and Jeanie entered the front room, Katherine watched Jeanie’s gaze fall over the carved-legged mohair davenport, velvet chair, and an oil painting done by Katherine herself. The thick Oriental rug drew Jeanie’s attention, then when Katherine pushed the button, the diamond-like chandelier jumped to life, drawing Jeanie’s gaze before she settled it back on Katherine’s painting, one she’d done when they lived on the prairie.
Jeanie’s once graceful posture was hunched over an ugly black cane as her hand opened and closed around the handle as though the action soothed her. Jeanie’s brown hair, pulled tight into a bun, was thin, sprouting out of the severe style. The frail woman straightened, stared at the painting then brushed the front of her dress before falling hunched over her cane again.
Katherine told herself to find the love she wanted to feel. She took Jeanie’s elbow and helped her to the couch, hoping it didn’t smell like the old hound that often curled on one corner.
Aleksey kissed Jeanie’s cheek and took her cane, supporting that side as they shuffled to the davenport. Acid rose up inside Katherine and blossomed into full envy at the warmth Aleksey showed Jeanie-the fact that he could touch her without looking as though his skin would combust on contact, as Katherine felt hers would.
Katherine gritted her teeth as she and Aleksey turned Jeanie and settled her onto the davenport. She sighed and squinted at Aleksey. She loved him more than anyone except their own children, but this may be too much.
“I’ll get that sweet tea you made, Katherine.” Aleksey headed toward the hall.
Katherine couldn’t have guessed exactly what her mother was thinking, but the puckered lips and narrowed brows didn’t look positive.
“Well,” Jeanie said. “You’re a little late with your spring cleaning, but the place is respectable all the same. I can see you purchase things that last.” Jeanie smoothed her dress over her knees then smiled at Katherine.
“I know you mean that as a joke, Mother, but I don’t appreciate it.”
Jeanie scowled and Katherine flinched, waiting for hard words in return. Her mother opened her mouth and closed it then stared toward the painting with reed straight posture.
The pounding of the ice pick as Aleksey split the ice into cold slivers mimicked Katherine’s heartbeat. She took a deep breath. How could a person feel so uncomfortable with the very person who gave her life? She prayed for Aleksey to speed it up in the kitchen as time moved like a fly in honey for the two in the front parlor.
With a startling jerk, Jeanie grasped Katherine’s hand. She jumped in her seat, so surprised that her mother actually touched her. She stared at their hands then at her mother’s profile. Jeanie gazed at the moody landscape Katherine had created on that awful day so long ago.
“You were such a beautiful artist,” Jeanie said. “I remember when you did that one.”
Prickly heat leapt between their hands, making Katherine sweat with anxiety. Jeanie caught her confused expression then squeezed her daughter’s hand three distinct times. I love you. Each unspoken word was hidden in the three contractions of Jeanie’s grip. Katherine nearly choked on swelling anger as she fought the burst of tears that threatened to fall.
With her free hand, Jeanie brushed some hair back from Katherine’s face. Katherine, still as marble, wanting her mother to stop touching her, cleared her throat, feeling like she might pass out.
“Oh, I know,” Jeanie said. “So very serious you are. I was once that way…I…well. I’m sorry, Katherine. I shouldn’t have…I should have told you everything years ago, but…” Jeanie’s gaze went back to the painting. “I want to explain.”
Katherine nodded once but angled her shoulders away, trying to put as much space between them as possible. Katherine couldn’t go down that old prairie path again. It was too late for explanations. She would have sprinted out the door, but her legs were numb. The only energy in her body seemed to exist inside the space between her and her mother’s intertwined fingers. Hurry Aleksey. Katherine closed her eyes. Aleksey returned with a tray and tea, ice cubes clinking in the tall glasses.
He set the tray on the table in front of the women. Katherine silently begged him to notice her blood had rushed to her feet, that he should hoist her over his shoulder and take her away from this woman who, in merely touching Katherine, made her unable to render useful thought, to move, to live.
Trust Aleksey, Katherine told herself. She told herself to hope, to believe that something would be gained from this operation- from what Katherine saw as self-inflicted torture.
But, with Aleksey standing there, handing out tea, acting as though it were perfectly normal that Jeanie was there, with Yale asleep upstairs, Katherine decided she might never speak to Aleksey again.
Chapter 4
1887
Dakota Territory
Jeanie, Katherine, and Templeton crested a hill and stopped. Jeanie was eager to get to their wagon but relieved to give her smarting feet a break. She lifted one foot then the other, grimacing, as Templeton discussed their trek up to that point. He motioned back in the direction they had come, where he had tied a piece of his shirt to a bush, saying that even though the path to the crest upon which they stood had risen slightly and slowly, that Jeanie should always be aware of how deceptive the prairie land could be.
She turned in place, taking it in, seeing that on that sloping land the world seemed to open up but also it hid things. The fat, blue sky stretched in every direction without a landmark to mar a bit of it. Like the tie on that bush. It was gone, as though it never existed. Jeanie shook her head. So, it wasn’t just that she and Katherine had been irresponsible in getting lost earlier, it was tricky land.
Templeton walked Jeanie and Katherine twenty yards further over the slope. And as though a magician had lifted a curtain, there appeared, one hundred and fifty yards east, a small frame home and the Arthur’s wagon sitting near a crooked barn. Even from that distance, Jeanie could make out Frank, their eleven-year-old son James, and Katherine’s twin brother Tommy fiddling with the wagon wheel.
The three of them walked east as though searching for something lost in the grass. Frank swaggered; his wiry body bore his unconscious confidence. But, he tapped the side of his leg-the one outward sign that something was bothering him. His movements were like a set of fingerprints. Jeanie could pick him out of a thousand other men if they were all in shadow, she was sure.
Katherine tore away from Jeanie and Templeton, galloping, twirling around to wave at Jeanie before breaking into full sprint to greet her father and brothers. Tommy glanced up at his approaching sister then carried on with his play-walking a few yards before throwing himself to the ground, shot, by some evil intruder.
And her James. Jeanie’s first born. He lagged behind, but leapt into the air as Katherine raced by him and slapped his backside, making her fall into giggles that carried over the land. James had perfected a subtle, bellow of brooding, never quick to laugh or lash out. Each of them unique though together they formed a mass of love and pride, each one inhabiting a chamber of Jeanie’s heart. If one were to disappear it would surely kill her instantly.
Templeton pointed west, past Jeanie’s nose.
“If Katherine fell into the pond I think you’re describing, you must have seen that tree.”
Jeanie nodded toward the crooked one she’d seen earlier.
“That’s the bee tree. It’s actually part of the Henderson’s, no, your homestead, now. You can’t see the tree from everywhere, but it’s an anchor of sorts. Then there’s another anchor just over there, at the far end of the Hunt’s property, a cluster of six or seven trees.”
Jeanie rose to her toes to look.
“Your bee tree and the Hunt’s cluster are the most obvious landmarks between the five closest homesteads in Darlington Township. Gifts, sprouting from the land to guide and direct us.”
Hoots of joy from Frank and the children startled Jeanie. She looked back at the family. They ran into the sun, past the sinking yolk, their bodies exploded blaze yellow, each outlined in black to mark where one golden body ended and another began.
Jeanie looked at Templeton and realized for the first time since he’d disrobed to wrap her feet that he was not properly dressed, that it would be shameful to someone with a suspicious mind.
“Uh, well…Mr. Templeton, I’ll be…” Jeanie had no words. She shook her head, ignored the scorching pain in her feet and limped toward the wagon. “I’m going now, Mr. Templeton. My family awaits!” Jeanie’s words had barely sailed out on prairie winds before she decided to ignore her screaming feet and whipped her body into a full-out run.
***
Jeanie tore across the land. Her children caught sight of her and sprinted toward her. When they reached each other, they collapsed in a massive hug. Jeanie pulled each of their faces to hers, kissing their dirty cheeks, eyes, hands, clutching them, kneading their arms, making sure each was actually alive.
“No more of that wandering,” Jeanie’s mouth was taut, her gasping breaths making her words choppy. “We have to stick together…we have to…”
Tommy yanked on Jeanie’s sleeve.
“Can we have lamb chops tonight? And pancakes for breakfast. With Vermont maple syrup, like we love?”
Jeanie squinted down at him.
“Now, Tommy, my, my, we discussed this matter repeatedly. You’re a ten-year-old young man, capable of grasping…” Jeanie turned to be sure Templeton was out of earshot, “…our circumstances.”
“Ahhhh, but…”
Jeanie knelt in front of him. Anger sprouted from the fatigue and thirst that lingered, but she wouldn’t raise her voice. “Now Thomas Hart Arthur. We will have syrup yet again and I’m sure lamb will grace our table before long, but I am ordering you not to whine. We are in these dire straits for now, but only now. And I want this to be our last conversation on the matter.”
She squeezed Tommy’s arms and looked into James’ and Katherine’s faces to be sure they understood as well.
“This station, our current position, these circumstances are not who we are-they are simply where we are right now.”
She gave Tommy’s arms one final squeeze then rose, determined that the conversation, the self-pity, and whining was at its end for no one wanted to mope and wail and bleat more than she. But, no one knew better than she that such acts would get them nowhere.
Frank came up behind Jeanie.
“All’s all right, right?” he said.
Jeanie felt the joy at reconnecting with her children diminished by the arrival of Frank. Realizing, admitting that, even in her own mind, shamed her. She had been angry he had taken so long to get water, that he put them in the position of nearly drowning. But, beyond the relief that she needed him to survive, she felt jarred by the notion that the love and romance she once held for him, seemed fully dissolved.
Frank pulled Jeanie into his chest. She went stiff in his arms, unable to soften into his embrace. The scent of sweat, and homemade soap filled her nose. The familiarity was comforting and that reassured her in the face of her general distaste for him. Maybe they could recapture the love that had once beguiled them both.
She remembered the water.
“Frank, my Lord, the water.” She spoke into his shoulder, weakened with the thought of what had nearly happened. “Where did you go? Katherine. I lost her and we fell into a pond, we nearly died. When I stop and think-” Jeanie felt the calmness she’d forced upon herself disappear now that she was safe.
Frank gripped Jeanie’s shoulders and shook her as he looked directly into her face.
“You look fine to me, Jeanie Arthur. Just peachy.”
The fear Jeanie had felt and ignored earlier finally settled in heavy, making her legs buckle. Frank caught her and she began to hyperventilate. Her shoulders heaved while she looked around to be sure the children weren’t watching them.
“I’m scared. I don’t like the feeling. I’ve never felt this before, this-”
“Doesn’t matter, we’re fine, ignore it.” Frank pulled her into his body and hugged her so hard that her breath had no choice but to slow. She realized she didn’t want his reassurance. He was the one who left them in the position to be in danger.
Jeanie sniffled then pushed away. Templeton approached from the west. Jeanie’s feet stung with every heartbeat that rushed her blood past the lesions. And, there was shirtless Templeton. Frank’s face creased with what Jeanie knew must be confusion.
Jeanie lifted the hem of her skirts.
“My shoes. Mr. Templeton, he used his shirt…such a gentleman, this Templeton. We’ll have to go back to Yankton, to get some suitable footwear.” She turned back to Frank.
Frank glanced at Jeanie’s feet then waved her off, walking away, leaving her with Templeton.
“You’ll make do. You’re the ‘Quintessential Housewife’ after all.”
Jeanie’s mouth gaped.
“You’re what?” Templeton said.
Frank turned back, hands spread to the sky like a preacher. “She’s the real ‘Quintessential Housewife’, Templeton, the author? Didn’t she tell you?” Frank dropped his hands and continued to walk away.
“Well, I’ll be. Really?” Templeton cocked his head at Jeanie, rubbing his chin while the creases in at the corners of his eyes winked. “The Moore sisters will be crazed when they hear that. They’re always hovering over your articles, making me bring copies back from Yankton every time I go. Oh, they’ll eat this up.”
“It’s nothing.” Jeanie stared at the ground then at her feet. She despised Frank’s actions. That with his unconcern for her feet he demonstrated that he was as miserable as her husband as she was his wife. The difference being that she never embarrassed him in front of others. She took their vows to heart, even if the very uttering of them twelve years before had created the very noose that now sat poised around her neck.
Jeanie straightened. She wouldn’t share an intimate moment of shocked reality with another man.
Templeton looked from Jeanie’s feet to Frank who was headed toward the wagon. She shifted her weight. He was enough a gentlemen not to make eye contact or to comment on what he’d seen. Frank had never been a simple man to understand and he was even more complicated to explain to others.
“What exactly is the Quintessential Housewife? I’ve never read anything, I’m sorry to say, just brought the articles for the ladies over yonder,” Templeton said.
Jeanie bit the inside of her cheek. Frank’s mocking tone didn’t get past Templeton.
“It’s well, a series of books and home-keeping columns I wrote in Des Moines. I was…well, no matter. I’m done with that now.”
She covered her mouth and fought back the embarrassment she felt even though Templeton had no idea the depth of it. Damn Frank for bringing that up. She did not want to explore their past.
“Frank!” Templeton shouted over the wind. “It’ll be dark soon. You’ll all have to stay for dinner and sleep. I caught three jackrabbits just this morning.”
Frank trudged back toward them.
Templeton stretched and yawned.
“Why don’t Frank, the boys and I head to the well and you ladies strike up a meal? Everything you might need is in the house, in plain site.”
“Well, no-”
“She’d be obliged to cook up some dinner.” Frank talked over Jeanie. “There’s not a homemaker alive who can stand in her kitchen. And she’s got the books to prove it.” Frank stalked away.
“My feet…Frank?” Jeanie said.
Templeton started to walk away with Frank then turned back, pulling Frank’s arm as he did.
“Your wife’s feet, Frank…” Frank pulled his arm out of Templeton’s grasp and lumbered on.
“Uh, well, Jeanie, Mrs. Arthur, I mean…” Templeton tossed his head in the direction of the slender, whitewashed house. “You don’t have shoes? Mrs. Henderson-from the homestead you’re jumping-she left a pair behind. At least I think they’re hers. Check under my bedstead…they’re somewhere in there.”
Templeton lifted his hand to Frank as if to call him back, but Frank was shrinking in the distance, not listening or caring that Jeanie had bleeding feet and no shoes.
“Oh, and Mrs. Arthur,” Templeton said for the first time not making eye contact.
“I’m much obliged to sample your cooking as Frank said I’d be in for dandy-good eatings. That’s a real treat, that is. I appreciate it.” And he followed Frank’s path to the well.
Jeanie’s lips quivered. She couldn’t swallow. How could she confess to Templeton that yes, she could run a home, but that home was typically outfitted with a staff of six and a kitchen the size of his entire house?
It wasn’t until right that moment that she realized she should admit that same fact to Frank. But, Frank’s mocking tone returned to Jeanie’s thoughts and it was instantly clear. Frank was well aware of her limitations and it looked as though he would enjoy seeing her run into them as they tried to make a home on the empty prairie land.
Well, she would show him. If he was so willing to enjoy her humiliation, she wouldn’t allow him the opportunity. Jeanie scrunched her face. “Dandy eatings. I’ll show you both dandy-good eatings. If it’s the last thing I do.”
***
Hands on hips, Jeanie climbed the two steps leading to Templeton’s worn porch. She kicked a stone across the boards, into a hole at the far end, and then bounced a little, testing its strength. Not too bad. If the Henderson homestead-the claim the Arthurs were jumping-was like this, Jeanie could make it livable. She imagined her family resting in the shade of the porch roof, rocking in chairs, the children playing jacks and checkers on the wood floor. Yes, this just might work for Jeanie.
Templeton’s house was one floor, about 14×20. He’d built it sideways so the length of it promised more than it delivered in size, but the faded indigo door burst against the white wash and green grasses with the same awe that a human being floating among the clouds would inspire.
Jeanie threw open the door, ready to tackle dinner in clean quarters as opposed to the outdoors as she’d cooked in the last few nights. Sunlight flooded through the doorway and lit up the dusty space. Jeanie stepped inside, her bare feet lifting dirt, leaving prints as she circled the room. Did Templeton ever clean?
A bedstead stood in the far corner, a cook-stove in the fireplace and a squatty square table served as a spot to take his meals. Three stacks of books stood near the bed and one towered under the only rectangle window. Jeanie couldn’t help but smile at what took up most of the space. In the middle of the rat-trap stood a grand piano.
She plunked a few keys then swiped her finger along the top of it, revealing a path of glossy black paint under the blanket of dust. The sound made her throw her head back with ironic laughter. This beautiful, enormous thing, here amidst dirty nothingness.
Her feet burned. The shoes. She got on all fours in front of Templeton’s bedstead and began pulling things out. Mismatched men’s shoes, hats, billiard balls, sheet music, a tin cup, and a Spode platter, crusted with either burnt beans or rancid meat. She finally dislodged a pair of boots from under the far corner of the bedstead. The shoes were a size too big, but given the state of her feet, she thought that might be better.
Clodhoppers. Ugly, wicked-looking things. Heavy scars creased the leather and curled the toes upward, telling Jeanie stories she didn’t want to hear. And though she didn’t know the details of the events, the shoes proclaimed that the woman who’d owned them before lived hard.
She slipped the shoes over her reddened feet and said a prayer to a God she wasn’t sure she knew, that her feet wouldn’t grow infected. She stood up and lifted her skirt, turning her foot side to side before letting her skirts drop over the ghastly sight. She begged herself not to allow self-pity a home inside her heart. If she went there, there’d be no way to get back. Yet, the dismay at her station. It was there.
Katherine came into the house with a bucket of water, forcing Jeanie away from the enticing self-pity.
“Don’t touch a thing, Katherine,” Jeanie said. They had work to do, cleaning things up before they set to the real work.
“It doesn’t seem as though there’s anything to make dirty or break, Mama.”
“This place is filthy. Poor Templeton is batching-it. We can’t expect a man to do everything around the house. He’s got crops to sow and bring in.”
“Hmm,” Katherine said.
“This is a prime example of why a woman’s place in the world is firmly…” Jeanie took the bucket from Katherine and shrugged, unable to finish the nonsense she once so happily dispensed to anyone who would listen.
“Well, we women,” Katherine said, standing rod straight, imitating her mother’s stance and pursed lips, “are having a day of it. This home expressing exactly why women are obliged to tend the homes of men.” Katherine swooped her hand outward as though putting the house on display. “There are no more pressing circumstances for a woman in the home, than in an uncivilized place like this,” Katherine said.
Jeanie playfully pulled a section of Katherine’s hair making them both giggle.
Jeanie would have told Katherine she rethought her position on women’s rights, but one-she wasn’t sure she had, and two-she didn’t have time to discuss such things anymore.
“We better get to dinner,” Jeanie said.
They scoured the house for food and cooking tools.
Not that there was much space to search. Templeton’s home consisted of one large room. Off to the left, in the back, there was an alcove. Jeanie, limping again, went to it and peered inside the space.
“Well, sweet heaven and hell,” Jeanie said.
Templeton’s urine sat in a ceramic chamber pot, nearly filling it up. She sandwiched the sides of the pot between her palms, picked it up, trying not to wrap her fingers around the rim, while trying not to slosh any liquid from the vessel.
“Mercy heavens, damn and hell.” Jeanie whispered the curses.
Katherine’s head whipped toward Jeanie.
“You didn’t hear that, Sweet Pea,” Jeanie said. Once they’d scrubbed down the cook-stove and washed their hands as best they could, trying to limit the wasted water, they worked fast, though not prettily. Out behind the house, they set up for preparing dinner-something Jeanie had never done herself. Not like this.
Jeanie wanted to cry at what she was doing.
“We’re not crying people. There’s no room for self-pity. We’re not crying people.” Jeanie repeated the mantra to herself as she clenched her jaw and used a dull knife to skin the jackrabbits. The ripping sound as she separated the rabbit’s coat from his muscle and fat made her skin prickly, chilling her. The sweet and sour odor of blood filled her nose and seemed to settle in her mouth as though she were eating the creature raw.
Jeanie’s eyes watered and she gagged, turning to throw up her empty stomach.
“I can do this, Mama,” Katherine rubbed her mother’s back and took the knife from Jeanie’s hand. Jeanie straightened.
“Nonsense, my Sweet Pea. No.” Jeanie took the knife back. She held her breath and started to skin the second animal. Gagging again, she finally let Katherine finish the dirty work while she chopped the carrots and onions she’d found in a storage space above the bedstead.
Jeanie wanted to make Katherine stop, tell her that she just needed to settle her stomach, that she was pregnant and that must be getting the best of her. But she hadn’t told Frank of the baby yet, and though Jeanie couldn’t admit she was only partly capable of taking a meal from beginning to end, that splattering blood from one end of the back of the house to the other was something she’d never done, Katherine already knew it and Jeanie was sure she’d keep her secret. They were mother and daughter after all and Jeanie had never felt so fortunate to be able to say that.
Jeanie concocted a stew that only partly thickened. Nothing was available to make biscuits or cakes, so Jeanie hoped the company itself would do. It certainly wasn’t a dandy-good supper. That much Jeanie knew.
She and Katherine spread some raggedy linens, loosely described as such, on the floor and used the small table to set the stew to be served to everyone. Jeanie sent Katherine out to gather everyone into the house.
Frank appeared in the doorway first.
“Here. Water. Templeton’s working with the boys. Apparently he’s a whiz with the weather indications and even had a post with the Army until three years ago. James has taken an interest in predicting the weather.”
“Predicting the weather?”
“I know,” Frank said. “What good is something like that? Doesn’t matter much what the weather might or might not be in the future, just what it is at the time you’re wondering. I mean since there’s no way to know what’s going to happen.”
He tapped his leg, causing Jeanie to worry, knowing he was insecure about something-perhaps it was that James was taking an interest in another man’s hobby-no matter what made him feel insecure it never lead to anything good for Jeanie. But, it was only their recent losses that made it such a problem that he may be an unstable man.
“What Frank?” She threw her hands up to the sky. “What in damn hell is the matter?”
Frank bit down so hard Jeanie could feel it in her bones across the room. She dropped her hands as though burdened with sacks of rocks.
“Nothing, Jeanie. Nothing you could help me with.” And he left the room, shouting to the others that dinner was ready.
***
The meal was a disaster. The man Jeanie was beginning to think of as “sweet Templeton,” had gobbled up three steaming bowls of the disastrous, somehow bitter, stew while her own family barely managed one slurp. The children and Frank were still operating with visions of one-inch steak, buttery biscuits, thick mashed potatoes, sweet peas, and towering chocolate cake in their minds and on their taste buds, and not yet hungry enough to eat rancid stew.
She knew Templeton was only being kind as he sopped up every last drop with his finger at the end, saying “dandy-good eats” every three minutes, acting as though it tasted scrumptious not just edible. Not that it was any of that.
All night Templeton passed back and forth by the bedstead where he allowed the Arthurs to sleep that night. He groaned as his bowels emptied repeatedly, slopping into one bowl and then another he’d dug out of God knew where. The children gagged at the sound and odor and Jeanie spent the night kicking the children under the covers so they wouldn’t humiliate a man for emptying his body of the poison their mother had fed him.
Waking the next morning, Jeanie was relieved to see Templeton had cleared the pots and acted as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred during the night.
She couldn’t look him in the eye, even as he searched out her gaze, and even went so far as to reassure her that she would make a fine prairie wife.
“You’re clearly too smart to be anything but a blazing success,” Templeton had said tipping his hat to her. Jeanie hadn’t known how to respond, so she just let the heavy failure she’d felt turn steely, inside her, inspiring her to be a better person, wife than she’d clearly been when she’d had a army of servants and cooks to assist her in being the Quintessential Housewife as she’d come to be known in Des Moines.
The Arthurs left Templeton’s home about nine a.m. Frank seemed back in good spirits. In the wagon, he was taken by his peppy, happy personality. He rambled like a train roaring down the track, ticking off the list of things they needed to do in order to claim the Henderson’s homestead as theirs. Two trips to Yankton. One to file papers, one to pick up the wood he’d agreed to work into furniture for some men they’d met when they stopped over there.
“You all right?” Frank put his hand on her back as she curved forward, head on knees. Gripped by cramps so tight, Jeanie would have sworn she was in labor or miscarrying, she couldn’t even speak. She nodded into her lap then sat back up hoping that stretching her body would release the tension inside her womb. She’d desperately wanted more children, but considering the extensive work ahead of them, perhaps if nature stole her baby as it had the others since Tommy and Katherine were born, they’d be better off.
“You eat some rabbit stew for breakfast?” Frank chuckled. “Man that Templeton’s not too bright, is he? Slurping down that stew as though the old cooks in Des Moines had actually done the work. It must feel good, though, to finally put all that advice you’ve doled out over the years to use, right?”
Jeanie couldn’t respond as she bent into the pain tearing at her insides.
“I’m joshing; just poking fun…you know after all, we need to laugh a little, right?”
Jeanie groaned, trying to keep it quiet so the kids in the back wouldn’t hear. She forced herself to straighten reducing some of the pain.
Frank clicked his tongue and slowed the horses. She stared into the great land, which looked much the same as Templeton’s had, except over the night, tinges of brown had taken the tips of
KND Freebies: Spruce up your resume with PRO RESUMES MADE EASY, featured in today’s Free Kindle Nation Shorts excerpt
Did you know that 95% of job applicants never even land an interview?
In Pro Resumes Made Easy, expert resume writing veteran Andrea Drew takes job seekers on an easy-to-follow, step-by-step process designed to help them turn their resumes into
job interview magnets.
Pro Resumes Made Easy (The Made Easy Series)
by Andrea Drew
95% of people fail miserably in their search for a simple job interview – 95%!! That’s in spite of the fact that they put in the effort to create a good resume, they buy the appropriate clothing to make a great first impression, and they take the time to learn the effective job interview techniques for success.
But instead of an invitation to a job interview, they get the cookie cutter, “Thanks but no thanks” letter, notifying them of job application failure. In other words, they don’t even make it to the job interview stage! Sound familiar?
If that’s been your experience so far, listen up: chances are it’s not your fault. Chances are it’s not your lack of experience or qualifications that’s letting you down. It’s something as simple as your resume. In fact, I’m almost certain it’s your resume that’s not cutting the mustard for you.
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- How to get more job interviews without spending a fortune on professional resume writers (page 6)
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- The biggest resume blunders and how to avoid them (page 69)
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an excerpt from
Pro Resumes Made Easy
by Andrea Drew
CHAPTER 1
some basics
What is the purpose of a resume? If you ask most people, they will tell you it is “to get a job interview.” Yes, that’s right it is designed to get you a job interview. But a resume is also designed to sell you, or generate enough interest in you to make the reader make contact and schedule a meeting time. Your resume has had enough impact, that out of the hundreds of resumes a recruiter receives in their email inbox daily, yours has stood out.
If you’ve heard the saying that recruiter’s look at most resumes for between 5 and 20 seconds, it’s true. Add to that equation the fact that resumes are now received via email inbox, and you need to consider the fact that this means that the top third of your first page will be the first thing the recruiter sees when they click open the attachment.
I’ll be running you through the step by step process I use when writing a resume.
My resumes are written in a way that they;
-
Catch the recruiters eye immediately
-
Give them a reason to keep on reading
-
Stand out by writing them in a way that only 5% of all job applicants use effectively; and
-
Works with scanning software sometimes used by recruiters
-
Makes the reader want to meet with you!
CHAPTER 2
the first part of the resume writing process – planning
I’m sure most of you have lots and lots of questions including what headings to use, how long should it be, and do I include an objective and similar questions.
In my 11 years of writing resumes professionally, I’ve lost count of the number of questions that I have been asked about resumes.
Honestly, I think the best way to do this is for me to go through my resume writing process step by step, and then, when we’re done, I’ll include a list of possible questions and answers that may be still unanswered at the end of this book, OK? How does that sound? Good. OK, here we go.
The first thing to understand is that you don’t need to include the word resume or curriculum vitae (CV) as a title within the document. What you are really telling the recruiter in doing so is that you really do think they are thick as two short planks, and that they are so dumb they don’t even realise that this is your resume. No, don’t go there. By the same token, you don’t need headings or identifications such as name, address, telephone. It is obvious what they are! Surely people aren’t that dumb? (Hold your tongue!)
Most resumes I see (and I have seen thousands) fall into the “shopping list” resume category. That is, they are a hastily written document scribbled down, and it is just a list of boring, general descriptions which mean little. The problem with this type of document is that it only describes the sort of duties that anyone in that position could do. There is nothing in there that markets you as a unique individual with value to bring to the potential employer.
Usually, when a client purchases a resume writing package online, they also upload their current CV to me. At this point I acknowledge receipt of their payment and documents, and ask them to complete my in-house questionnaire.
Why do I do this?
Well most resumes are what I have rather cheekily termed “shopping list” resumes. That is, a quickly scribbled dry boring very general list of functions and responsibilities.
This does nothing to market the candidate, and actually really only talks about the types of functions anyone within that position could perform. A resume needs to talk about why you are different. What challenges or problems did you face, no matter how small? What did you do to solve these problems? And (hopefully) what was the fantastic result?
It is this information that I am really looking for when sending the questionnaire to a client. I also send them a video to guide them as to the “resume gold” that I am digging for.
Once I receive this, I get to work. I’m going to show you my process from start to finish, using the case study of “Angela” but firstly the planning stage. I usually write an action plan as this makes it easier to write the resume. It doesn’t need to have all the boxes and look beautiful so long as you have the information there to work with.
Here is a sample:
So you can see there I have the person’s name – their position title, the position they are aiming for or targeting and their personal traits. Similarly I list the number of years’ experience they have, as well as their “hard skills.” These are their skills that I will be using to formulate a list of keywords within the resume, more on that to come. Hard skills list should only include those skills and ability that can be backed up by evidence. General skills are something most job seekers use a lot of; I see lots of words such as “team player” and “excellent organisational and prioritisation abilities” and most readers will scan over these if they look general without hard evidence.
What the job seeker doesn’t realise is that almost every other job seeker out there has done the same. Of course they don’t realise this, as they don’t get to see lots of CVs as I do (and lots of recruiters do) and so these statements lose impact. Statements such as “Contract Negotiation” and “Process re-engineering” or “Profit Maximisation” where this is backed up with evidence is much more powerful and makes the reader sit up and take notice, even if just for the fact that they very rarely see a resume of this kind.
Keywords are something that are not only used to attract the readers’ attention, particularly in a situation where a recruiter is scanning through hundreds of resumes; they are also occasionally picked up by computer scanning software. Not all recruitment companies use this software, but those that do are able to search across their entire database of say 20,000 resumes through scanning for several keywords which may be for example, FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) or Contract Negotiations. So including “hard skills” here within the keywords section serves a dual purpose in that these words listed on the first page could more than likely assist you in gaining an interview, months after registering with a recruitment company. A position comes along, they interviewed you six months ago for a different position, and they registered your CV on their database and do a search and bang, up comes your resume in their search results months later!
Getting back to the action plan and resume writing, the second page of the action plan is where I plan the “meat” of the resume or achievements.
I use a tried and true method of CAR or Challenge, Action, Results. Here what I am doing is splitting up achievements into chunks to make sense of these prior to writing the resume. You will see here that these make up the bulk of the job seekers “story” and really demonstrate their skills:
Here you can see the challenge, action result planning in action. As the above text is a little small, I thought I’d include a few of them here:
Challenge
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Lack of shared purpose amongst staff, four departments all working hard but efforts disjointed and haphazard
Action
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Strategic Planning Review – several meetings took place, review distributed to staff. Met with resistance due to perceived increase in workload, involved staff to gain 90% commitment – arranged meetings so staff could “vent” – facilitated sessions to demonstrate how sharing of information needed to be reciprocal (i.e. other depts., customer) – arranging training sessions in customer service and dealing with difficult people for managers and supervisors
Result
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Two supervisors struggling with change resigned, Staff turnover reduced from 30% to 5%, Profit increased by 3% as well as adding 4 additional resources across the contract, Finance and Facilities depts. Held their own strategic planning sessions using my principles to ensure uniform message, resulting in late invoicing and debtor’s payments reduced from 60% to 5%
As you can see this is my rough “internal” text. From here it is a matter of tight phrasing, trying to get the salient points across to the reader without being too drawn out and long winded.
In this case the CAR approach became these two bullet points one after the other:
-
Instigated and rolled out a series of strategic planning review meetings with outcomes distributed to staff. Allowed staff to communicate frustrations and concerns whilst simultaneously facilitating training sessions in customer service, and dealing with difficult people. Staff turnover reduced dramatically from 30% to 5% with a marked upsurge in morale and a more cohesive unit.
-
Increased profit by 3% whilst adding five additional resources across the contract through formulation and rollout of strategic planning, staff training, facilitating staff meetings and demonstrating how improvements could be made
Here’s another example of how a rough CAR planning point became a selling point within the resume:
Challenge:
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Tenders for project work not being effectively managed with customer complaining – complaints were justified
Action:
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Arranged for myself and two others within Facilities department to be trained in defence’s procurement guidelines, then implemented these into all project processes including Identifying exact scope of work, using correct forms and processes throughout tender process
Result:
-
Additional $3 million of work managed from writing scope of work through tender process and to financial completion for year 2007/2008 – on time and on budget. By 2008/2009 this was done without my input
Which when rewritten became the following:
-
Recognised poor management of tenders for project work resulting in disgruntled client. Arranged two staff and myself to be trained in formal Defence procurement guidelines, implementing these into all project processes. Subsequently managed an additional $3 million in project work (estimated $7m in 2010/2011 financial year) throughout the entire tender process, enabling staff in following years to manage this process with minimal input
chapter 3
Writing the resume
So now we have done our planning, we can get to writing. Remembering our earlier example, Angela is a graduate nurse, passionate about midwifery. She is trying to gain entry into this program. But her existing resume is just likes so many others I see, boring, ho hum, plain and in my opinion pretty useless (sorry Angela but I am sure you would agree with me )
Right, well here is a snippet of the first section of the first page of her resume as it was:
So what’s wrong with that? You might be thinking. Well, here’s what’s wrong with it. Firstly, why does it need a heading or title of “Curriculum Vitae?” Shouldn’t it be obvious to the reader what this is, after all they’ve already received an email in response to a job ad (most of the time) so the recruiter should know that you aren’t sending them the latest cricket scores.
Unless, you really are desperately trying to tell the recruiter that you think they are stupid. No? I didn’t think so.
The second thing is that this heading doesn’t really stand out to me. Keep in mind that I was a recruiter in a previous life. Picture this. Your manager has put you in charge of the advertising and screening process for 30 positions. Each position receives between 100 and 1000 applications including cover letters and resumes. So you really do only give each application about 5 to 30 seconds, meaning that the resume has to stand out immediately.
Combine this information with the fact that over the last thirteen years I have looked at thousands of resumes, and I can assure you that most resumes look exactly like the “before” resume listed here. Bland, boring, non-descript. When I write the resumes, I try to incorporate in the very top section of the document:
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Contact details of the candidate:
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A quick idea for the recruiter as to what sort of candidate they are dealing with e.g. Results focussed Accountant seeking auditors role (or similar)
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6-8 bullet points of “hard” skills
You can see below how I rewrote the very beginning of this clients resume:
A couple of things to remember:
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Only list “hard” skills. You may notice above I have listed these, which I discovered via Angela’s questionnaire. Don’t, don’t please don’t include wishy washy statements and “soft” skills such as “effective team skills” “outstanding communication” “ability to prioritise and manage time” I see these sorts of general meaningless statements all the time. Trust me, 99% of all resumes I see make these sorts of claims which, without evidence mean nothing! Every man and his dog will claim they have these skills.
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Don’t go overboard with fancy graphics, fonts or layout. I say stick to black and white, with a regular font or typeface such as Arial or similar. Yes, use bullets and bold or underline for emphasis, but don’t go overboard. If you are using these for emphasis, they are no longer emphasised if the entire page is bold, or 75% or 50% of it is. Get the idea? Use bolding or underlining or italics sparingly and only where definitely needed. Also if you use bullets ensure these are uniform throughout the document and well formatted
-
Start bullet points or achievements using the CAR approach with a verb or strong action word e.g. revamped or collated or redesigned. Refer to the end of this eBook for a list of power words for use in your new resume.
From here you need to continue writing the resume, as outlined in the previous chapter, and using the CAR approach. Once your resume is completed, including an education and references section, have someone that you trust look over the resume to hopefully give an objective opinion. (Including me – refer to bonus section!)
Hint: Don’t be tempted to use the same action word over and over in your resume. For example:
-
Improved sales performance by 30% through implementing new sales force training program
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Improved customer relations through individualised follow up
To help you I’ve included a “power words” section at the end of this book to use when writing your bullet points/achievements.
CHAPTER 4
Professional history/employment narrative
This is where you get into the “meat” of the resume and which is the recruiter’s main focus. What is your experience, working background or as I sometimes call it “Career Snapshot”
Keep in mind here, that less is more. Truly. This is a marketing document designed to generate enough interest that the reader really wants to meet with you to find out more about you and what you are capable of.
That doesn’t mean that you list out every single function of your job as well as outstanding achievements.
This is what Angela did within her resume. Let me ask you a question. Would you find reading through that text interesting? Does it grab your interest? No? Well then how can you expect a recruiter to see anything other than “boring” written all over it?
How should this be written? Well personally I believe that accountabilities or functions can be discussed at interview if necessary. Duties and responsibilities are the sort of thing that anyone in that job could do.
What is going to sell or market you and your skills effectively? How do you demonstrate proof of your skills or evidence that you can do what you say you can? How can you position yourself as unique or the best person for the job? The CAR formula or;
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Challenge or problem
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Action – what did you do to solve it?
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Result – what was (hopefully) the result of your actions and overcoming the problem?
The trick here is to tell your “story” to the employer. In this way, not only do you provide evidence to the reader of your skills, but you set yourself apart from the pack. To demonstrate this a little better, I’ve included some statements where I managed to reword the job seekers information into something eye catching:
Before:
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Departments I manage are Emergency Services, Administration and Finance (includes IT), Facilities Management, and Commercial Operations
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My focus since moving from the Operations Manager to the Executive Business Manager’s role has been to streamline processes and procedures with the aim of providing a more effective and consistent service to our contracted customer (Department of Defence) and to other stakeholders such as xxxxxx residents, xxxxxxx Test Facility Customers, and tourists and other visitors to the community. This has been achieved while still maintaining a healthy bottom line for the Company
Positive outcomes achieved to date include the development of a strategic plan for departments which has resulted in significant improvement in the timely processing of the finance functions; including a customer satisfaction survey process; development of an HR plan to improve our ability to retain and attract key staff , including a review of remuneration and benefits; development, in conjunction with the Facilities Management team, of a strategic plan for the management of contracted activities for the next 5 years; improved commercial opportunities for additional business; development and implementation of an improved, effective Helpdesk service, and the timely management of Project plans to meet key objectives of BAE Systems and the customer.
BORING!! Would you read through all of that if you had 99 other documents to read through?
And after:
xxxxxxxxxxx, State 03/2006−present
Executive Business Manager
Upon commencement, the challenges appeared daunting. Long standing customer difficulties combined with a four departmental team suffering lack of vision and failing to meet Key Performance Indicators prompted the need to develop a strategic plan and address customer shortfalls whilst improving profit, cash flow and staff morale and decreasing staff turnover.
Identified challenges including dissatisfied customers, backlogs in accounts payable and receivable, frequent staff turnover, and lack of shared vision.
-
Instigated and rolled out a series of strategic planning review meetings with outcomes distributed to staff. Allowed staff to communicate frustrations and concerns whilst simultaneously facilitating training sessions in customer service, and dealing with difficult people. Staff turnover reduced dramatically from 30% to 5% with a marked upsurge in morale and a more cohesive unit.
-
Increased profit by 3% whilst adding five additional resources across the contract through formulation and rollout of strategic planning, staff training, facilitating staff meetings and demonstrating how improvements could be made
Are you getting the idea? It’s a matter of quantifying your achievements and giving context or “the story” based on the CAR approach. Employers are interested in results. Funnily enough, very few candidates manage to include these in their resume, less than 1% of all job seekers manage to do this. Simply including these results is enough to make you stand out from the pack. You may see above that I am telling the job seekers individual story. I state the problem or challenges, what was actually done to overcome these challenges, and the measurable, quantifiable result. Once you start talking about results or how you can add value, employers are all ears.
Another tip: always start each bullet point with a strong action word or verb. And don’t use the same verb or action word over and over. Use the power words section at the end of this document liberally!
chapter 5
Where to focus
I’m sure many of you are interested in where I put my focus within a resume? Well, it goes a little like this:
70% of the focus should be on the first page
20% of the focus on the second page
10% on the rest
Why?
The first page is what recruiters will look at primarily. They will make a snap, ten second decision on whether to continue reading. So this is the point of impact. They are also primarily interested in what the job seeker is doing now, and how they can add value. Give this information to them quickly and effectively with impressive wording and layout and you will have their interest.
I am going to include a sample here of a successful resume, so I can show you what I mean by where I place the focus.
Keep in mind that the samples I am showing you here have:
a. Won the job seekers lots of interviews; and
b. In many cases gained the job seeker their pick of job offers. One of these clients was offered more than one position from which to take their pick! Nice position to be in don’t you think?
John Citizen
Details removed for confidentiality reasons
Email: sample@sample.com Home: (00) 9999 9999
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X Director/ Satellite Analyst/X Engineer |
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Persistent trouble shooter, renowned for remaining calm under pressure. Specialist in crisis management, delivering simple solutions to complex problems. Excels at mentoring controllers and understanding complex needs and requirements. Employs a vast knowledge of design, development, integration and operations support of X/L-band payloads |
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Career Highlights
Sample Employer – Melbourne, Victoria 1998 – 2010
This x communications company employs 200 staff worldwide, and 18 within the Melbourne office. This position reported to the Vice President Operations and supervised six staff. Initial employment in 1998 was as Quality Officer, whereupon I was promoted to Payload Engineer in 2000 and Mission Director in 2010
Mission Director (2004 – 2010)
Highlights include:
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Participated in conversion of all Payload procedures from an Astrium control system to an ISI (EPOCH) control system. This involved conversion, testing the completed procedure via a Dynamic satellite simulator and ultimately comparing bit patterns from the original procedure to the newly converted procedure using ‘Wireshark.’ During this process determined some procedures were not being converted correctly so wrote software to correct the conversion process using Visual Basic (VB)
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Analysed and identified failure on board Asiastar satellite resulting in switch off of an active unit and powering on of a redundant unit. After bringing the beam back online, edited all procedures that referenced the failed unit, and rewrote sections to reference the new unit
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Improved payload recovery procedure from 8 hours to 2 hours by rewriting and streamlining procedures, removing redundant steps and speeding up various parts of the procedure
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Repositioned the North East beam resulting in better coverage over China
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Promoted to Mission Director from previous position as Payload Engineer
“Over the years, I always talked up the Melbourne mission, GCN and PFLS crew to the WS and FVI people here at HQ. You made things go really smoothly, even in the face of MCC trouble. I could always count on you for mastering any issues pertaining to channel activity on Asiastar. Also your creation and management of the PHP ‘Satellite Anomaly DB’ is really an excellent piece of software and has worked well from day one for us here in Washington.”
Name Removed, Colleague,(Mission Director) Washington HQ, Sample Employer
Responsibilities included:
-
Trained Payload engineer as well as 5 satellite Controllers
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Directed the satellite engineering team on payload reconfigurations and anomalies
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Managed daily operations of mission engineering and broadcast operations
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Maintained regular contact with ground stations in China Melbourne and Singapore as well as regular teleconferences with Washington head office
Sample Employer – Melbourne Vic
Payload Engineer (2000 – 2004)
Highlights included:
-
Proposed and created a web site accessible by both Asian and African sites, in order to share satellite anomaly data, improving failure recovery time. Used MySQL, PhP and HTML to create the application, which is still in use today
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Wrote software application which automatically converted trend data into graphs using Visual Basic Application (VBA) and Visual Basic (VB). This saved large amounts of time as previous system meant manual retrieval of data and manual creation of graphs in Excel. As a result of this successful application was asked to extend its capability to graphing more complex plots
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Promoted to Payload Engineer from Quality Officer position
Responsibilities included:
-
Supported Mission Director in monitoring and controlling channel programming, routine maintenance on feeder link station and day to day running of the mission segment
Sample Employer – Melbourne Vic
Quality Officer (1998 – 2000)
Highlights included:
-
Resolved complaint of staff bullying and conflict. Initial complaint of racial abuse resulted in senior management proposing dismissal of two controllers. Negotiated with management to investigate the matter further, eventually determining that two staff members were targeting all controllers, rather than the behavior being personally or racially motivated. Counselling of two staff members ensured staff retention and dramatically improved morale.
Responsibilities included:
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Ensured on-site configuration changes and anomaly management were implemented in line with xxxxx quality requirements
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Performed operational impact assessment of procedures and indicated improvements where appropriate
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Implemented quality audits
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Executed operation qualification on Asia star satellite including procedures prior to launch
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Monitored all procedures and satellite tests, reporting anomalies, requesting changes and confirming all activities relating to operational qualification
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Coordinated with ground stations globally to line up carriers, and configure resources on board to broadcast their programs to one of three downlink areas in Asia
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Member of the Asia star launch and early orbit phase team (LEOP)
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Supervised controllers and coordinated all Controller related issues
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Facilitated smooth functioning of Regional Operations Centre during nominal operations
Sample Space Agency – Darmstadt, German 1995 – 1998
Analyst
Highlights included:
-
Created web page in order to disseminate monthly performance reports to all European space agency sites, subsequent to Operations Manager request to disseminate monthly reports in an effective manner. This page is still in use at http://ersmonrp.esoc.esa.de/start.htm
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Acted as Ranging Officer for ESR1, and Quality Officer for ERS2 including monitoring data collection from a remote sensing station in Sweden, as well as ensuring the satellite was delivered to the owner in orbit, and functioning as expected
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Involved in all three satellite launches both in Europe and Australia. ERS1 and 2 (scientific satellites) and Asia star (communications satellite) including launch and early orbit phase.
Responsibilities included:
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Supported European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS) ERS-1 and ERS-2 nominal and anomaly operations
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Managed both ground and space segment operations
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Assessed overall platform and payload health
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Trained new Controllers and assisted Spacecraft engineers with trouble shooting and report generation
Education
Bachelor of Information Technology (Networking) Monash University completion 2010
(final semester)
Professional Development
Introduction to 3D Studio Max (Graphical Design software) RMIT Melbourne 2002
Platform, Payload and Associated group equipment Alcatel, Astrium and Xxxxx France 1998
User level Introduction to UNIX ESOC Darmstadt (Germany) 1997
Certificate in Spacecraft operations ESOC Darmstadt (Germany) 1994
Technology
Programming PhP, Java, JavaScript, HTML, VB, VBA, SQL
Operating Systems Windows, Linux, Unix Applications MS Office, 3D studio max, Flash, Dreamweaver
References
References removed for confidentiality reasons
This was only one sample, but I am hoping it is enough to give you an idea of what I am aiming for.
Do you notice how the bulk of the focus was on the first page, as well as the way the achievements were worded?
Recruiters really are interested in current positions first, keywords (in this case such as Satellite engineer, X/L band payloads). The focus when I write this resumes is firstly the current position, less so the one prior to that, and even less the one before that.
You may also notice that the word “I” isn’t used in my resumes. That’s because the resume is a marketing document. It should be written in the third person, and using the word “I” makes it first person.
From there I get into headings such as Education, Professional Memberships, Technology/IT skills (if applicable) Licenses and References. There are other possible headings, but we will get into those later in the book and in my “Q and A” section where I take up the most commonly asked questions over the last twelve years or so.
A couple of points I wanted to make about these last few sections though.
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Only include education that is relevant to your career path or the position being applied for. Case in point. I once saw a resume received from a candidate seeking work within a large hospital as a Ward Clerk. She had in her education section information regarding her responsible service of alcohol certificate and her accreditation as TAB corp gambling processor. Hardly the sort of qualifications being sought by a hospital whose job it is to take care of patients often whom have been injured as a result of alcohol! Yes this may take you some time to amend for each resume, but it is worth it definitely, as to do otherwise is to give the recruiter the impression that you are adopting a “one size fits all” approach and are not checking your resume before sending it off to each application
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Don’t include professional memberships if you have not been a member for years. Stating that you were a member of the Law Society five years ago is not going to add value to your resume, as well as considering the fact that in all honesty memberships are not exactly a focal point of the resume (they are usually listed on the second or third page). Yes, definitely in the eyes of some recruiters memberships do carry weight, particularly when specified within their job advertisement or position description, but definitely not when the membership is lapsed.
I get asked whether it is better to list references individually or simply “Available on request.” The answer is that this depends upon your individual situation, but most Australian employers according to survey, do prefer telephone referees listed within the resume. Refer also to the references chapter later on in the book.
… Continued…
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(The Made Easy Series)
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Dr. Jerry Pollock pokes away at our human brain and Divine soul intelligence by not so subtly attempting to empower us to accept the author’s inevitable conclusions that God is the Master Scientist and we, the human race, are God’s experiment. Within the pages of Little Book of God, God’s untold story emerges. God is the big bang. God is the universe. God is space itself and is the unseen energy field that brings life to elementary particles which in turn bring life to all evolutionary species. God is the Chi, the life force of all existence.
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an excerpt from
Little Book of God
by Jerry Pollock
1
Prologue
Each time it’s been the same. I’m certain that I’m going to die and then it’s an unexpected surprise when I don’t. It was only years later that I understood that it was God Who had intervened in my life in those close-to-death experiences and saved me.
Once I should have been dead from swallowing two hundred pills and I survived. Marcia was having lunch forty-five minutes away with our daughter Erin and after they had just ordered, she stood up from the table and said, “We have to go. Something is wrong with dad.” The firefighters came and the doctors at the hospital pumped my stomach and told Marcia that it would be forty-eight to seventy-two hours to know whether I would live or succumb.
Another time my mother tried to kill me in an abortion attempt in her womb and I felt God’s Energy protecting me from being swallowed up like my twin. In the birth canal I felt her crushing my head, neck, and shoulders, trying to hold me back in a desperate attempt to prevent me from being born.
A third time I fell asleep at the wheel while returning in the wee hours of the morning from a date in college. I awoke to find myself ready to crash into a cement wall which was immediately in front of me. My car at the very last moment impossibly swerved and should have flipped over. Yet it stopped half way on its side and righted itself. I do recall how I was shaking but I don’t remember acting solely on my own to avoid the wall.
I would like to believe that God has kept me alive for a purpose. Perhaps my purpose has been to remain here on earth so that I could write God’s untold story and share it with you.
My first real connection with God came in 1982, forty years after my birth while I was living alone, separated from my wife in a summer cottage on Long Island. I twice heard God’s Voice. Up until then I was not aware of God’s presence. His Voice came to me once more at the end of 1998 together with other miraculous experiences, all of which propelled me to begin my spiritual journey.
The road has been bumpy and often I have wondered where the road was going or whether I was worthy enough to be traveling on it. After fifteen years of climbing uphill, I realize that the road I chose is the only one that would lead me to my spiritual destiny—understanding God’s Essence. Often on my journey there seemed to be no end in sight; yet once I started my spiritual climb, there was a force inside me that would not allow me to turn back.
The way life turned out for me with the loss of my soul mate, Marcia, the road has had me as its solitary traveler. I have given up much in my devotion to God. Some of my family members have not understood my spiritual journey and it has interfered with our love.
I would not recommend traveling on my road to anyone else; yet I must continue my journey because I believe with all my heart that Heaven has led me in its direction.
I caution you to be aware that the more you pursue God, the more demanding God is of you, especially if you wish to stand on the highest rungs of His spiritual ladder. Marcia believed “God Is,” and she didn’t need to know anything more about God. I accept what Marcia said as truth but for whatever reason, call it my destiny as I refer to it, I just can’t let go and get off my road.
Traveling the road has forever changed me. Initially my spiritual writings were for myself. Then gradually they became for the sake of Heaven. Now with the writing of this small book, my reason seems to be to share with you the reader or listener what I feel I know about God based upon my life experiences and my background as a scientific researcher.
God certainly doesn’t need me to write a book about Him. He will tell you Himself in His own time. If God does take to the public stage of life once again, as He did back in biblical times, then I am quite happy to throw this book into the fire when He sets the record straight. I will only praise and thank God that this lonely road will come to a dead end and I can finally rest.
The book is not meant to offend you or change your personal beliefs about God. It is meant simply to offer new ways of looking further inside of the little that we do know about Him. What I have written may be totally wrong but after fifteen years of thinking about Him, my gleanings are the only sensible way for me to understand the Essence of God. My insights may not turn out to be adequate explanations for you and that’s perfectly fine by me. God gave all of us Free Will to decide for ourselves on all matters, including belief or disbelief in Him.
I consider God to be not only the Master Creator but also the Master Scientist. His scientific mastery of the world is only possible because God is in His Essence composed of special electromagnetic, all powerful Energy. Before writing this book I placed the word, “God,” into the Google Search Engines, because I was curious to know how many websites around the world would come up on my computer screen. There were 1,680,000,000 which was higher than any famous person, living or dead.
The strange thing is that no one has ever seen God, one reason being that God is not human. If He has been masquerading as one of us here on earth, we haven’t been privy to meeting Him. Someone, somewhere, at sometime has seen everyone else on the planet that we would consider famous.
Back in biblical times thirty-three hundred years ago when God was on the public stage, and not hither and there behind the scenes as He is today, we heard stories of God talking with Moses and the 600,000 plus ancient Israelites at the time of the giving of the Ten Commandments. In the Bible, God even talks to animals like the Serpent in the Garden of Eden or the sperm whale that temporarily swallowed up the prophet Jonah.
Mentally ill or normal, there are those of us who will claim to have heard the Voice of God or have spoken with Him. Can any of us including myself prove that they indeed did? My answer is NO, since God has not verified the conversation.
Furthermore, who’s to say that the voice people claimed they were hearing was actually God’s, rather than some evil impersonator who had the power to “get into their thoughts” and even carry on full conversations with them? God did create evil in this world and evil continues to amass its own power by corrupting willing souls.
Is it not odd that in modern times there are no known voice recordings available of God’s Voice? Nor are there any visual documented sightings of His presence, except in biblical times where these sightings were not noted for posterity. Today because of the cameras on cell phones, no malicious or miraculous event is sacred from scrutiny. The only visible undocumented evidence of God was back in biblical times when God appeared as a pillar of fire or a pillar of cloud.
God Himself tells us in the Bible, “No one can see My ‘face,’ lest they die.” How can God have a “face,” if He’s not human? As we shall learn in this book, God has limitless Energy which can be shaped into a human face, a human being, the neck of the giraffe, or a beautiful rainbow. Note that the Bible cites passages describing angels who can turn themselves into humans. Angels are a special form of God’s Energy.
My search for God through science makes me sound like an atheist. I assure you that I’m not. I’m a mediocre, flawed man, a good but not outstanding scientist, who has an unshakable love of, belief in, and trust in God, and a burning desire to understand Him. What I describe to you in the pages to follow are my insights on what I have discovered on my spiritual quest to understand God and to give back to Him for the blessings of Divine miracles that He has bestowed upon me.
Over the years I have progressed spiritually by following God’s Ten Commandments and becoming righteous in His “eyes” , gradually improving my character to correct the wrongs that I caused. As best I can I have tried balancing my ego with my desire to be connected to Heaven, as God becomes more and more the central focus of my being. I have experienced much in my life of 72 years. In the writing of this book, I’d like, as I stated, to bring you a fresh original look at Who God is, How He has accomplished what He has, and What He has planned for us in the future.
If I’m going to tell you some of God’s untold story, I need to go beyond what we already know about Him and show you His Essence — what makes God “tick” so to speak. Sadly, it is only with the passing of my eternal soul mate in March of 2011 that has made it possible to share my knowledge with you. It was after Marcia’s death that I entered the world of the soul and the field of energy.
God is a mix of various forms of Energy which is the foundation stone of our planet, our universe, and of us. If you look carefully and long enough into the foundation stone, you will begin to see that God is allowing us a transparent glimpse into His Being.
After all is said and done and you separate my words from me the writer, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether my story of God makes sense to you. Please do not get offended if it doesn’t. Only God and no one else can confirm or disprove whether my words are the written truth. I leave that for God to decide and act upon.
I don’t think God shall abandon me, leave me “hanging in the breeze” so to speak. I foresee God taking the public stage of humanity and correcting any conceptual and factual errors that I have unintentionally committed. I welcome Him to prove me wrong, by speaking aloud to everyone around the world in their respective native languages, simultaneously. My faith in God sets the bar very high for Him as He does for me, and I know with certainty that He shall not disappoint me. The Bible asserts that God in Messianic times shall create miracles, incredible even to Him, and that we shall know Him as the waters of the sea. His faithful have always awaited His coming.
My journey has led me to conclude that God purposely preplanned our world, whereby our curiosity of Him is continually piqued by His keeping the knowledge of His Being a mystery to us. I believe it was a selfless desire on God’s part not to tell us of His plan in order to allow human beings the thrill of making new discoveries about ourselves, our earthly planet, and our universe without the need to include Him in our explanations.
God fashioned events so that we would draw conclusions of new found knowledge based upon the laws of nature and science without the need to acknowledge Him for His contributions to our world.
Only an omnipotent Supreme Being with a limitless organizing intelligence could preplan, and then create our complex entire world.
2
God Preplanned
Our World
The main reasons that we humans continually come up with such diversified theories that allude to but never pinpoint God as the First Cause are three-fold: (i) God gave us the Free Will to do so. We choose to believe or disbelieve whatever we wish at any moment in time, (ii) God gave us a preplanned ever changing dynamic world so that we could have jobs, lead interesting lives, and pontificate on Him, even if we remain stubbornly, diehard non-believers until our dying breath, and (iii) He gave us a logical, rational human brain which seemingly is an advantage for our curiosity and intellect, but in reality has turned out to be a detriment to our faith and understanding of God and the world He created around and for us.
God has a “brain” but it is nothing like a human brain. His “brain” is made up of His enormously powerful, electromagnetic Energy particles, which endow Him with infinite knowledge, wisdom, and wondrous miraculous capabilities beyond anything we could ever imagine. We with our human brains are limited in comparison as a speck of dust is to all the sand grains of the earth or a single star is to all the uncountable stars in the galaxies of the universe. God is at least trillions or more likely quadrillions of times more powerful and more intellectual than any human being.
Some fourteen billion years ago at the time prior to the Big Bang, God used His awesome powers to preplan every detail of the universe. He never told us that He had done this in advance, so that with each passing year of our planet and our evolution we could make advancements and new discoveries with our free will and our human brains. To us, the automobile, the airplane, and the computer became “new,” but to God everything we have ever learned in human history about ourselves and the world around us is “old.”
We could be talking about how to use the mechanical forces described in our physics textbooks to properly hammer a nail into a piece of wood or we could be investigating the complex workings of human brain memory. The subject doesn’t really matter. God knew all the details of everything and anything to come into our world before He initiated the Big Bang.
Since the Big Bang, fourteen billion years have passed that have led to the sophisticated advancements in technology and the human psyche. Our discoveries have permitted us to know the details of our universe, given us a deeper understanding of the human mind, and even provided recent surprising knowledge about our souls and the soul world in Heaven. However we know very little about God our Creator. What do we really understand about God’s Essence, His central core?
It’s almost as if God completed an impossible billion piece jigsaw puzzle, broke it up, and then randomly handed the individual pieces to the human race to put the puzzle back together again. This extraordinary puzzle of incomprehensible difficulty represents the totality of life itself since the beginning of time which commenced when God initiated the Big Bang.
Think of it as if you wanted to barely scratch the surface of all existing world knowledge so that you could permanently acquire a teeny bit of God’s wisdom. An analogy might be that you have a photographic memory that remembers what you’ve read in the millions of published books that line library shelves. Even a person with an off the chart, immeasurable, human brain intelligence quotient couldn’t come close to amassing the magnitude and scope of the knowledge and information of which we are speaking.
We need to start at the beginning, before time existed, if we wish to commence our journey of understanding God. I would recommend that skeptical scientists tune in because if everything has been planned by God in advance, then these scientists in their quest for new scientific knowledge actually wind up at God’s doorstep and Science becomes the search for God. God is the Master Scientist, and humans and all that encompasses our world are the Experiment.
If you are feeling like a guinea pig right now, you needn’t, as God’s reasons have nothing to do with receiving credit for His creation and have everything to do with benefitting us. He has kept silent all these years since biblical times though He keeps a close watch on what’s going on in our societies without being the puppeteer pulling our strings. He allows us the Free Will He granted us to make our own choices and He leads us in the direction we wish to go.
To understand God’s purpose in creating us and our physical world, we first have to understand Him.
3
God’s Beginnings
The physicists and mathematicians cannot tell us what happened moments before the Big Bang. Some of our most brilliant among them claim that we don’t need to invoke God, while others like Albert Einstein were wise enough to realize that science could not explain everything and that God was responsible for planning or at least guiding our universe.
I have another suggestion which goes beyond Einstein’s beliefs of God acting in a supervisory role with regard to the universe. God alone was the universe before the Big Bang, and He existed then in the form of Light and Dark Energy particles which occupied the entire space of the universe approximately fourteen billion years ago.
The Book of Genesis in the Bible suggests that on the First Day of the Seven Days of the Creation of the universe, only Light was visible and then at some point, God separated the light and the darkness. My personal interpretation of this biblical event is that this original Light was God’s Light Energy which represented only a small fraction of God’s total Energy. The Light was of such brilliance and intensity that it uncharacteristically had the power to function like a reverse Black Hole such that the original Light Energy contained within it all of God’s Dark Energy prior to the Big Bang. The separation referred to in the Bible on the First Day is the explosion that took place during the Big Bang, giving rise to a new appearance to God’s universe whereby His Energy could now be seen in its entirety as an enlarged separated mixture of both His Light and Dark Energy particles.
God called the Light Energy “day” and His Dark Energy, “night.” However, this was only to distinguish Light Energy separated from Dark Energy and not what we think of today in actual time of the day and the night where daylight hours and night time hours are separated. The night and day time dependency came only on the Fourth Day of Creation as told in the Bible. God added the sun to dominate the Light Energy and create the daylight hours and the moon to dominate the Dark Energy to create light within the darkness of night time hours. God does not talk about the stars but He may have included them in His biblical description when He referred to the sun as the great luminary and the moon and stars as the lesser luminary.
The term “day” is still in use today, as God gave us structure and order in our seven day week. Even when God rested on the Seventh Day, this became our weekend. The Seven Days of Creation actually represent the time since the Big Bang, so that the time difference between the First and Fourth Days could represent millions to billions of years.
We know from the physicists that our present universe is made up of 70 percent dark energy, 20 percent dark matter, and less than 5 percent of light energy. What I am suggesting is that all of this Energy is God and that God is space and God is the universe. What the brilliant Albert Einstein and others have suggested is true. Our universe is continuously expanding and the expansion is accelerated by the dark energy of the universe.
Einstein further hypothesized that “old space” and “new space” are never “nothing” because it’s a natural principle in physics that space is always occupied by energy. Einstein was searching for a cosmological constant but he eventually abandoned his search when He could not find it. I believe this brilliant man was looking for the “God Constant,” which neither mathematics nor physics can delineate. Because the universe is expanding with God, the energy of the universe, God’s Energy, is infinite. Scientists cannot calculate infinity.
Prior to the Big Bang, God’s Light Energy was therefore not the sun but some form of special Supernal Light. The Bible does describe the possibility of such a Light returning on Judgment Day at the End of Days where there will be a different type of day because the world will be lit up by this original Supernal Light and not the light of the sun.
I believe that an incredible miracle will take place on Judgment Day where a typical eclipse of the sun will occur, and yet there will still be daylight provided by God’s original Supernal Light. The Bible not only speaks about God performing miracles incredible even to Him, but also talks about God putting signs in the sky in the beginning of the Messianic Age at the End of Days. One of the signs is the eclipse of the sun and another is the moon turning blood red.
Scientists have difficulty obtaining an accurate numerical value for the diameter of the universe, especially with the rapid acceleration of the expansion of space. Figures in the trillions have been proposed. Since the time of the Big Bang, estimates have placed the increase in expansion in the order of at least one-thousand fold. Since all space is energy and God is both space and the universe, then God’s Energy is increasing geometrically. It is not the dark energy of the universe that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, it is God since currently the major component of God’s Energy is the Dark Energy.
We know from the biblical story of the Exodus of the Israelite slaves from Egypt, that God sent the Pharaoh and the Egyptian people ten plagues. Especially important for our discussion was the plague of darkness where the normal daylight hours were turned into darkness for at least forty-eight hours. Day no longer existed in Egypt, and day was replaced with darkness in the absence of the moon and the stars. In this part of the world located near the Equator, it is impossible for only the darkness of night to exist. Night must follow day and day must follow night.
In the pages to follow, we shall see how God is the Master Creator. There is no doubt in my mind because of my spiritual beliefs that God’s omnipotence can cause the light to become dark and the dark to become light. God has at His disposal a vast amount of His Dark Energy that He can convert into Light Energy. The reverse is also possible and the intro-conversion in either direction seems to happen instantaneously.
It seems that it would be easy for God to eliminate Earth by changing our Light Energy into Dark Energy or to take away the light of day during the Egyptian plague of darkness. In one respect, you might look upon God’s Dark Energy as a reserve He can tap into any time. He needs more Light Energy for the Soul Energies of an ever increasing world population. Everything alive has Energy including humans who must possess a Divine soul made up of Energy in order to begin and maintain life.
Is it a coincidence that in 2012, physicists at the CERN laboratories have confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson Particle originally proposed by Higgs and five other scientists in 1964? Without the unseen Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson Particle, elementary particles would not acquire mass and our universe and our bodies would be one random blob. The Higgs Boson particle has been jokingly referred to as the “God Particle” but the joke is really on the scientists because the invisible Higgs energy field in space and God’s Energy Field are one and the same.
I think we need to delve further into to discovering the power of God. Does God provide certainty to the uncertainty of His universe?
4
God and Science
Albert Einstein believed all his life that God would not roll the dice, so that there could be no room for uncertainty with regard to our universe. Along came Werner Heisenberg in 1925 and proposed that at the subatomic level, which is not directly observable and where you are trying to understand elementary particles like electrons, there was uncertainty. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was a bold suggestion that initiated the field of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Theory.
If there is uncertainty, then one must conclude that physics is no longer an exact science as previously thought in earlier days by the brilliant physicist Isaac Newton. There is therefore no future predictability about our universe and we could be here today and gone tomorrow.
What neither of these highly intelligent Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicists Einstein and Heisenberg knew, was that God Himself, whose organizing intelligence is trillions to quadrillions of times more advanced than any human, is the unified theory of the universe that Einstein so desperately sought to find, even on his deathbed. God has preplanned our universe, because He is our universe and although both Einstein and Heisenberg thought that they were freshly exploring “new” startling theories, these groundbreaking revelations were in fact “old” for God. God was the original inventor before even He decided to come into existence approximately fourteen billion years ago. Prior to God, there was no time-dependent existence. There was only God and His timeless solitary “existence.”
Einstein and Heisenberg were unaware that God had purposely set up the universe so that these scientists would believe that they were discovering new concepts of physics and mathematics. Einstein though believed that God created and was in charge of the universe without realizing that God was the universe.
Science thus unknowingly became the search for God. Why would God go to all this trouble? He would do it of course to allow the thrill of humans making new discoveries akin to a baby continuously praised by his mother and father for discovering the private world within his or her environmental domain.
Einstein never accepted Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle as a fundamental physical law because he felt that a valid theory should encompass both what you observe and what you don’t observe. An electron inside an atom cannot be seen argued Einstein, but that doesn’t mean that electrons don’t have defined orbits within the atom. He added that just because he wasn’t always observing the moon, he would like to believe that the moon was still there.
Einstein proposed that it was only a matter of time when he could prove that God doesn’t roll the dice. God would never base His creation of the universe on uncertainty. Once all the details were scientifically discovered in the future about electrons inside atoms, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principe or his Principle of Indeterminacy would become invalid, and we would believe, as Isaac Newton believed, that the universe was truly set in motion by God in a specific determinable way.
Heisenberg’s physics reality on the other hand was predicated upon only what he could observe and what he could measure. Heisenberg from his experimental analysis came to the conclusion that you simultaneously could not determine the position of the electron versus the momentum (mass of particle times velocity of the particle) or direction of an electron at the same time. The more precisely the position of an elementary particle is determined, the less precisely the determination of the momentum in this instant, and vice versa. Heisenberg’s conclusion was that you could never with great certainty measure more than one property of a particle such as an electron, and that elementary particles thus exist only in states of probability mathematical distributions rather than as can be described definitively with certainty.
Quantum mechanics further states that this blurring of the magnitudes, such as position and speed or direction and other descriptive magnitudes such as energy and time are an intrinsic inherent property in the nature of the particles themselves. What inherent in nature means is that based upon the Uncertainty Principle, particles cannot have arbitrarily precise position and velocity regardless of whether the scientist observes them or not.
The particles have essentially been “born” this way with uncertainty. Since elementary particles are present throughout the universe and we need them for life on our planet and within ourselves, we are in uncharted waters in predicting the future of planet earth.
Instead of electrons moving in defined orbits in atoms, the physicist Erwin Schrodinger proposed that the electrons were continuously vibrating energetically to create waves while moving around the atom. Heisenberg and Niels Bohr talked about electrons as quantum particles instead of waves and explained their Uncertainty Principle theory through Matrix Mechanics mathematics where discontinuities and quantum jumps would be responsible for the observed position and movement of electrons.
Schrodinger in 1926 proved that particles and waves are equivalent descriptions. Electrons in our bodies can exist both as particles and waves but we can only determine one or the other of these characteristics at any one time. It depends upon what the observer scientist chooses to measure in a given experiment. Waves and particles are thus complimentary and separate but both are essential to describe quantum events. Einstein on his deathbed muttered, “What are these quanta?” Einstein wanted to present us with proof of a unified theory of the universe to accommodate his own Relativity Theories and Heisenberg’s and other’s Quantum Theory.
I believe God created the moon sometime after the Big Bang with His Light Energy particles. You can observe the moon but no one with the exception of possibly the Jewish Biblical Patriarch, Jacob, has ever partially seen God. Does that mean that God does not exist? Is God like the electron that you can’t see inside our atoms and molecules?
In biblical times, we have indicated earlier that there have been humans like Moses and Abraham who have communicated audibly with God. For just about all of us, however, we will never hear or see God. Our belief has to be based upon faith, at least until Messianic times when we shall know God as the waters of the sea. On the premise that God pre-planned our world billions of years ago at the time of the Big Bang and is the Master Scientist, why would God purposely create all this controversy in the physics of the universe?
I believe that once God decided to create a world of human beings and plant and animal species, He decided to create one that was dynamically interesting. He gave us free will to choose good or evil, a Divine soul, soul energy, past lives, intelligence, wisdom, doubt, fantasy, imagination, emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, happiness and sadness, unique speech and voice patterns, and the ability to think and ponder. He instilled in us a sense of curiosity of past, present, and future, direction to choose our vocations, our sense of discovery not only in science but in so many fields such as philosophy, psychology, medicine, architecture, engineering, politics, the economy and on and on.
In terms of Einstein and Heisenberg, the controversy that God provided is still continuing after eighty-eight years. Look at all the jobs that God has provided in physics and in every field. Would we have universities and schools if God didn’t preplan our world? Similar to this lengthy controversy in the physics of the universe, what about the ongoing separate factions that believe and have believed for hundreds of years in either Evolution or Creation. Our churches have a cause they can fight for and God foresaw His creation of religion as well to create both diversity and differing societies. It’s no accident that we have a continuing battle with those who are pro choice and those who are pro life. God gave us that as well to provide us with more challenges and more jobs, where people could play useful roles in society.
If we knew that God has known all along where we would be at different times in our history, then whatever certainty and uncertainty God purposely placed into the universe would be combined together as “God’s Certainty Plan.” We would have to have wound up where we are at this moment in time in our history, because God determined that it would be this way without us knowing it.
Were the births of Einstein and Heisenberg accidental or did God plan them crossing paths in life by endowing them with special souls? Did Einstein get a piece of his hero Isaac Newton’s soul, and did Heisenberg get a piece of Galileo’s soul that influenced both of them in their out of the box forward thinking? It would be nice to believe that even though God is not yet interacting with us, He does likely make things happen behind the scenes at critical times in our history. Hitler’s biggest mistake was advancing toward Russia. Did God influence Hitler’s decision?
At this writing we don’t know if Einstein is right about needing for Heisenberg’s theory to account for the unobserved, and we don’t know enough about electron pathways just like we know so very little about the human brain. I am a fan of Einstein, so I tend to believe that he is right. I also believe in Heisenberg. If God’s unified theory accommodates both Einstein and Heisenberg, then an electron can exist both as a particle and a wave but it can also exist in a defined orbit. Too often in life we are on either one side or the other of a pendulum swinging from side to side. Often however there is a choice right in the middle of the pendulum where both arguments are embraced.
I think we need to delve further into to discovering the power of God. How can God have existed back at the time of the Big Bang and still be here fourteen billion years later?
… Continued…
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Book 2 in the series!
Give Me Love (Give Me # 1)
by Kate McCarthy
Evie Jamieson, a former wild child, is not only a headstrong, smart-mouthed trouble magnet, she is also a lead singer with a plan. That plan involves uprooting her band, including her two best friends guitarist Henry and band manager Mac, to Sydney to kick off their dreams of hitting the big time.
Jared Valentine is the older brother of Evie’s best friend Mac and also the man determined to make Evie his. They strike up a long distance friendship which suits Evie because she’s determined to avoid the distraction of love, not only because it doesn’t fit in with her plan, but because twice in the past it has left her for dead. Moving to Sydney, however, has put her directly in Jared’s path and he has decided it’s the perfect opportunity to make his play.
Unfortunately Jared, co-owner in a business that ‘consults’ in dangerous hostage and kidnapping situations, makes an enemy who’s determined to enact revenge. When his enemy puts Evie in his sights, Jared not only has a fight on his hands to make her his own, but also to keep her alive.
Is accepting the love he’s so desperate to give worth the risk to both her heart, and her life?
Please Note: Kate McCarthy is an Australian author and Australian English, spelling and slang have been used in this book.
Praise for Give Me Love:
“I love a book that can make me laugh and cry all at the same time…”
“This book is the total package! The more I read, the more I fell in love with the characters…What a great debut by Kate McCarthy!”
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an excerpt from
Give Me Love
by Kate McCarthy
Chapter One
Performing the transformation into Rockstar Goddess was quite a feat. I’d be up for Heavyweight Champion in the Makeup Application Olympics if I managed to open my eyes under the weight of all the layers. The only other alternative was to look washed out under the bright lights of the stage, so I persisted with my efforts. Many nights performing on stage should have meant I’d perfected the process, but being a natural girl at heart, I still struggled to get it right.
The granite of the bathroom vanity was cool on my near naked form as I finished lining glue on the furry black eyelash, leaning close to the mirror to tack it on as quickly as possible. Time was escaping me, and Mac, my fierce and predictable best friend and roommate, would be busting down the door with impatience soon. I didn’t mind too much because I needed her to kick my ass into gear on a regular basis.
“Hurry up, asshead!” I heard her shout from outside the closed bathroom door. It was accompanied by a few loud thumps for emphasis causing me to jump in fright and attach the lash to my eyebrow by mistake. It wasn’t exactly the look I was aiming for.
“Macklewaine,” I complained loudly.
Mac took it as an invitation to enter because the door burst open hard enough for the knob to whack the back wall with a loud thud, making a dent in the perfectly painted plaster.
“Oh shit!” Apparently, Mac wasn’t anticipating an unlocked door.
I folded my arms and flared my nostrils but she just let out a snort of laughter at my expense.
At twenty-four, Mackenzie Valentine was the same age as me but far more beautiful than any one person needed to be. She was tough and direct, leaving me to believe that when God was handing out the looks, she not only jumped the queue, she muscled her way to the front in order to take more than her fair share. She was golden all over, from the shimmery blonde strands of hair to her luminous skin, down to the golden sparkle of polish on her toes. Her eyes were like green emeralds, and not a single blemish marred her perfect complexion. Love her or hate her, there was no in between for a person like Mac. In her defence, she had three older brothers, hence fierce determination wasn’t just a way of life, it was a matter of survival learned from the tender years of childhood.
When it came to appearances, the only thing Mac and I shared was height and shoe size, but considering the footwear collection she housed in her wardrobe, this made me a very lucky girl indeed. My hair was dark brown to her blonde, with highlights of caramel littering the strands from the sun. It hung down my back, almost to my waist, in waves of imperfect wildness. My skin was not golden but olive with a hint of rose, and my eyes were a dark chocolate brown. I wouldn’t ever call myself beautiful, constantly lamenting my nose was a little too wide and my lips not full enough, however, Mac always told me I had an inner radiance that drew people in, and with such a look of “smouldering sex appeal,” she felt prim and proper in comparison. I guess I could deal with that.
“What the hell happened to your face?” Mac said after she finished laughing at me.
I put my hands on my hips and glowered at her but the whole furry eyebrow look was ruining my attempts to look fierce. “You. You happened to my face. Everything was going fine until you busted in here like a fucking SWAT team.”
It wasn’t really going fine, but she didn’t need to know I was struggling or her impatience would reach even greater heights.
I turned back to the mirror and peeled the furry caterpillar off the neatly pencilled arch of my eyebrow. The eyelash was ruined now. Gluey dried clumps coated the surface. I leaned forward and began picking the glue remnants out of my brow. Dastardly stuff.
“You’re bathroom hogging again,” she complained, and I didn’t deny the obvious. It was taking me at least a year to achieve Rockstar Goddess status, but defeat and I were not friends.
Mac put the toilet seat down, sat on the lid, and began buffing the already perfect nails on her left hand while I picked at the glue. I watched her warily through the mirror as I began to re-apply a new set of eyelashes. Something was churning through her brain. I could feel the waves of it powering towards me like a tsunami. I waited for her to get to the point since she wasn’t known for taking winding side trips through the willows.
I raised a brow as I turned to look at her properly. “Can I help you?” I prodded, just wanting to get whatever it was over with already.
At my question, she tried to feign nonchalance, but she could never manage to get the expression right. Her eyes went a little too wide, and her shrug a little too exaggerated.
“I just got off the phone with Jared.”
Hearing his name made my heart pitter patter, and then plonk somewhere down in the vicinity of my toes. That explained Mac’s willow trip. Being direct on the subject of Jared hadn’t gotten Mac anywhere in the past. In fact, coming at me sideways on the subject of Jared hadn’t gotten her anywhere either. It was a no-win conversation as far as I was concerned.
I turned back to the mirror, finished tacking on the eyelash with smug triumph, and stepped back, doing some rapid blinks to make sure I hadn’t glued my eyes together.
Don’t laugh. I’d done it before. Granted, the emergency glue I pilfered from the shit draw in the kitchen probably wasn’t a good idea.
“Oh?” I replied back with an offhanded casualness that belied the churning of my insides.
Jared is Mac’s older brother by three years. Out of her three brothers, Jared is the one she is closest to, and of the three, he is the only one I look at and feel like time has stopped.
“He said he’s coming tonight to watch the band.”
I was about to burst out with “That’s not fair!” but wisely held my tongue. Tonight was an important night for us and required focus, not distraction, and Jared would be a distraction. Of that I was sure.
It was my band’s debut in Sydney tonight at the White Demon Warehouse, an uber cool venue to hear up and coming indie rock bands. This meant my stomach was already on the verge of dancing the twist and the slight tremor in my hands was making this eyelash attachment a nightmare.
I sucked in a few deep breaths. I could do this. I could.
I am a cool cucumber.
No, fuck that. I am Snoop Dogg. You can get no cooler than that.
Satisfied that one eye had achieved full Rockstar Goddess status, I leant forward to begin layering liner on the second eye. All the while, I could feel Mac’s eyeballs burning into my back, assessing my reaction to her words.
“Is that so?” I murmured, doing my best not to react.
She stopped filing her nails to gift me with a smirk, making it apparent that my lack of reaction was answer enough. Damn! I wasn’t good at game playing, and she knew me too well.
“Yes that’s so,” she replied.
I didn’t have the time or the inclination for a man in my life for important reasons. The first of which was that I had a career in the music industry as a lead singer in a band that was going places. Music wasn’t just my therapy, it was my life, and as long as I had that, I had everything I needed.
My band had been a family for six years; the four boys were like my brothers. We took it seriously, working long days—and even harder nights—and weekends, playing, creating, and evolving into what I chose to believe was a musical fucking force of nature that would eventually take over, if not the world, at least Australia to start. If we worked hard enough, it would mean months of travel—nationally and internationally—hours, days, and months of recording time, and if successful enough, we’d generate acres of fans and album sales. All of that so we could keep feeding our souls by doing what we loved most in the world.
“That’s nice,” I offered.
Besides music being my world, my heart had already been broken twice in the past, and I had no intention of revisiting that pain. Once by my ex Wild Renny and subsequently by my ex Asshole Kellar. Deciding that the third time was apparently the charm, I changed mid-stride and began dating dorks like they were my new religion. As long as they didn’t fit what seemed to be my type—tall, hot bad boy with the consistent ability to put my life in danger—I was safe. No broken heart there. I had needed to change my ways before I started university because my life was spiralling out of control based on my lack of ability to make good decisions.
I met Jared for the first time during my first year at university when he came to check on his little sister, my very new roommate and soon to be bff. After that, avoiding him became my new mission in life because by appearance alone, he seemed to fit my type. All I had to do was ensure that wherever Jared was, I wasn’t. Not an easy feat considering he was Mac’s brother and co-owned a business with my older brother Coby, but the fact that he lived in Sydney while I lived in Melbourne kept him at arm’s length.
The trouble now was the whole distance thing no longer existed since we moved to Sydney a week ago which placed me directly in Jared’s determined path.
I risked another glance at Mac through the mirror. She appeared distracted from her current topic choice and was now eyeballing my underwear with a narrowed gaze. It was a vintage blue and black lacy affair with a demi cup bra and little black bows and satin gathering that was both pretty and sexy and so expensive my purse gave out a feeble bleat of protest when exposed to the price tag. I’d only ventured to the shops to pick up milk and bread, but unfortunately that was when all sense went out the window.
“New underwear?”
I nodded because “This old thing?” never worked. She knew more about the contents of my wardrobe then I did. “I bought it yesterday.”
“Um, sorry? I thought I just heard you say you bought it yesterday.”
I cringed at the unhappy tone of her voice. What meditation was for some, shopping was for Mac. She didn’t mind doing it alone, but for some reason, if I shopped without her, I might as well just take myself directly to hell and save the time of waiting around for her to do it.
“We only moved to Sydney a week ago and you’ve gone shopping without me,” she hissed.
When I started putting the eyeliner on in a panic so I could make a quick escape, Henry, my other best friend and roommate, banged hard on the bathroom door to hurry me along.
I jumped again at the noise, eyeliner running wildly up my eyelid, and I wanted to scream in frustration. I’d never achieve Rockstar Goddess at this rate.
“Effing hell, Henrietta,” I screeched and tore open the door. “Can a girl not work her freaking Rockstar Goddess magic in peace?”
“Holy shit, Sandwich,” he muttered.
Sandwich was their nickname for me because of my surname Jamieson. Jam. Jam Sandwich. Now it was just Sandwich. It wasn’t really the best nickname, but you just had to roll with what you got because if you kicked up a fuss, you’d likely end up with something worse.
I pursed my lips as his eyes did a full body scan before finally resting on the eyeballs that were glaring back at him.
“Finished?” I asked tersely.
Henry had long since declared Mac and I as asexual beings, so I took his body scan as the insult it intended to be.
“Tonight’s theme is Tartmonkey?” he asked.
Did he think I was planning to hit the stage in underwear alone? Before I could open my mouth, Mac beat me to it, snorting from her seated position on the toilet.
“That’s rich coming from your manwhore status, isn’t it, Hussy?”
He burst out laughing. “What the hell happened to your face, Evie?”
I raced back to the mirror to see a mad streak of liner, not unlike another furry black caterpillar, trailing up my eyelid and over my brow.
Was the universe trying to tell me something about my eyebrows? I raised them experimentally and turned my head left to right.
“Fucksicles, the pair of you. I have to start over now.” I grabbed for a makeup wipe.
“What’s with you, Mactard?” Henry asked.
I gave Henry a warning look as I threw the wipe in the bin. It conveyed the message that Mac was on the warpath, and that it was too late for me, but save yourself.
Mac stood up to inspect her perfect make-up job for any flaws as she replied, “I’m stressed and need an outlet. I need shopping, I need chocolate, and I need alcohol. Any order will do.”
Mac is like Ellen Ripley of Alien, capable, fierce, and downright scary, but being our band manager, not even those attributes could shield her from the stress levels the job entailed. She had me to deal with, didn’t she? And if I wasn’t bad enough, there was Henry and Snap, Crackle, and Pop, our other band members, otherwise known as Frog, Cooper, and Jake: the Rice Bubble trio.
Mac became our band manager when we finished uni, having long since given up her lifelong dream to kick ass on the police force like her dad, Steve, and eldest brother Mitch. I think it was all fun in theory—hot bad guys, guns, shoot outs, hot bad guys—but she eventually realised that the whole premise of having to be an upstanding citizen put a crapshoot on that idea.
“Start with alcohol,” Henry ordered.
“There’s bubbles in the fridge. Get me some too, please,” I added.
“Me too,” said Henry.
Mac smoothed her already perfectly smooth golden blonde waves and vacated the bathroom, making sure to inform Henry that Jared was coming tonight before she left because Henry and Mac rode the same wavelength on that particular topic.
Who did the two think they were? The love fairies? I gave a snort as I re-pencilled my brow. The Laurel and Hardy duo was more their speed.
Henry smirked and got out his phone to start texting whoever. “Looks like your avoidance plan hit a snafu.”
“Snafu?” I snorted. “That’s something my Great Aunt Dottie would say.”
“You don’t have a Great Aunt Dottie.”
“If I did, she would say that.”
I finished adding the second set of eyelashes to my eye and blinked rapidly as Henry read a reply to his text with a faint smile.
Henry was the lead guitarist in our band and the ultimate pretty boy. A real live Paul Walker with his white blond hair and blue eyes, and left girls a bit tongue tied. Not me though. I’d known him since the age of five when he was a dirty little snot nosed grub. I got into a fight with Johnny in the schoolyard. I called Johnny a bumface (he’d looked up my skirt), and a shouting (him), name calling (me), hair pulling (him and me) match began. Our interaction had drawn quite the crowd by the time I got in his face and smashed my knee into his boy bits. Everyone laughed, as little kids do, in the face of seeing a bully go down, especially at the hands of a girl.
More yelling (me again) ensued and at that, Johnny’s friend came over and pushed me into the dirt. I heard a boy yell out and looked up from the pile of rubble to see a little blond boy leap onto the back of Johnny’s friend and pull him into a headlock. I got up and dusted off my hands, ready to jump into the fray, when our teacher Mr. Paul came racing over to pull everyone apart.
We bonded after the mayhem, and afternoons found us trading the guitar we’d bought together with saved pocket money back and forth, or driving our matchbox cars through little dirt tracks we had painstakingly dug out in the backyard. Mum hadn’t been impressed about that because we’d turfed up a fair whack of lawn, and after the Big Wet (it had bucketed down rain for two weeks straight) it left quite the mud pit in the backyard. A few of our precious little cars, including my prized black Trans Am, got buried.
“Earth to JimmyJam,” Mac sing-songed, waving a glass of bubbles under my nose.
I snatched the glass out of her hand with a thanks and took a sip, followed it with a loud delighted sigh, and finished with a lip smack.
“Big crowd expected tonight, Macface?” I asked.
Henry looked up expectantly from his text fest.
We’d played quite a few large crowds at venues and festivals throughout Melbourne, but The White Demon Warehouse was our biggest break yet and was well known as the launchpad for two bands now headed into the stratosphere of Planet Success. We had high hopes.
“Packed house, bitches.”
I grinned at Henry. Henry grinned at me. Mac grinned at both of us.
“Just add a scout to that mix and I’ll give you a big pash,” I said to Mac, pouting my lips in a come hither if you dare expression.
“Christ, don’t say that. You’ll ruin my lippie. I spent like ten minutes on it.”
I looked at Mac’s lips. They looked like she’d spent ten minutes on them.
“Do mine,” I ordered.
I guzzled the rest of my bubbles while she scrabbled around in the vanity drawer, producing a lip liner, a tube of lip plumper, base lipstick, top lipstick, and a sparkly pink gloss.
Henry, absorbing the seriousness of what we were about to embark on, rolled his eyes. “Aren’t we like in a hurry?”
The front door slammed and the Rice Bubbles could be heard banging around in the kitchen, pillaging our fridge and pantry.
“Christ, Henry!” Mac waved the lip liner around in a panic. I moved my head back, fearing another furry eyebrow fiasco, this time in Perverted Pink. “Go hide my chocolate stash will you? If those troublemakers so much as breath on it, I’ll have them eating through straws.”
Henry left with an eye roll, drinking his bubbles and texting madly as he went.
Mac turned to me with an evil grin that evoked feelings of great fear.
“Now, back to Jared,” she began.
“Mac,” I warned sternly with a finger point. “Don’t even go there.”
Mac, having heard my warnings before, rolled her eyes.
What was this? The Eye Rolling Convention?
She grabbed my finger and shoved it away. “Bet your sweet ass I am going there. I’m tired of your silly geek parade, Sandwich. You might have no trouble lying to yourself, but I’m not lying to you when I tell you that you’re being a giant, fat, retarded idiot.”
Mac had obviously decided the indirect route was for the weak.
“Just give it to me straight, Mac, okay? Because I’d hate for you to waste time taking tact pills in the morning.”
“Better than the stupid pills you seem to have been overdosing on the last God knows how many years. Come on, Evie, I know you think the dorks you’ve been dating are safe, and I won’t deny that they are because I’ve seen you more involved in watching paint peel from the walls, but it’s no way to live. I don’t care about Hairy Parry’s time space continuum theory or Beetle Bob’s thesis on the evolution of insects and its problems for Darwinism.”
Frankly, I didn’t care either, but it was hardly the heady stuff that would lead your heart down the garden path either, was it?
“Hairy Parry was cute.”
“Was he? How were you able to tell under all that hair?”
I chuckled, disrupting Mac’s efforts at layering liner along the edges of my lips.
Hairy Parry had a calm, quiet demeanour and also a beard and a long wavy mane that rivalled my own. I think dating a man with so much hair was more a novelty than anything else, but we did enjoy each others company. I was loud and he was quiet, and we somehow managed to find a middle ground that worked for the both of us.
Mac smoothed on the base lipstick.
“Rub your lips together, Sandwich,” she ordered.
I rubbed my lips and offered a pout as she inspected and then continued with the top coat.
“Beetle Bob was really sweet.”
“Beetle Bob lavished more attention on Draco than on you!”
This was true. Draco was one of Beetle Bob’s pet bearded dragons, a very social little Australian lizard that would bob his head and swish his tail whenever I visited. Surprisingly, Beetle Bob’s little creatures were entertaining and somehow soothing, but they did require constant care, so many nights would find us cozied up on the couch watching television while they overran the house.
“I miss Draco,” I muttered. “Maybe I should get my own little lizard friend.”
Mac snorted. “You don’t have the time involved in caring for one of those freaky little critters and don’t change the subject.”
With a “Voila,” Mac finished slicking gloss on my lips and shoved me out the door and towards my walk-in wardrobe before I could even pout in the mirror to inspect the results.
Hands on her hips, she stared at the contents. “What are you wearing?”
“Well I thought I would—”
“No, you thought wrong.”
Of course I did, considering her control issues filtered down into telling me what I should and shouldn’t wear.
I pursed my glossy Perverted Pink lips, and let her have her way, flopping down on the bed as she made her way into the wardrobe.
Henry wandered in, phone at the ready. “Top up?” he asked, indicating towards the empty champagne glass I still clutched in my hands.
“No,” Mac shouted from somewhere within the dark confines. “She’ll ruin her lips.”
True. Perverted Pink Perfection was not created in mere moments.
Henry shrugged and walked back out.
“I think that you should ask Jared out,” Mac shouted.
“Are you high? Because I’m pretty sure I heard you telling me I should ask Jared out.”
“Here!” A pair of Sass and Bide croc-print skinny jeans slapped me in the face.
I winced. Those were going to be hot, as in sweaty. I stood up and began the struggle of wedging my legs into the tight material.
“No, I am not high. Okay, don’t. He’ll ask you. I’m sure of it. Now that we’re living in Sydney, there’ll be no more avoiding him.”
That was what I was worried about, especially after the incident at the Zen bar two weeks ago in Melbourne that simply confirmed my lack of control around the man.
I lay on the bed, sucked in my stomach with everything I had, and zipped up the jeans. As I rolled off the bed and onto my knees, a manoeuvre performed because simply sitting up in said jeans was unachievable, a silver and Lucite studded baby doll top slapped me up the side of my head.
Mac emerged from the wardrobe as I struggled to my feet.
“What are you doing?” she asked in disbelief, as though flopping around on the floor like a trout was something I was doing for fun. “We need to get going.”
I glared. “I’m trying to get dressed, asshead.”
I smoothed the long curls of hair that ran down my back, an attempt at fixing the mess created from clothing whiplash, and flung the babydoll top over my new lacy creation. As I moved to examine my appearance in the full length mirror behind the wardrobe door, Mac came to stand behind me.
“Just say yes.”
I heard a quaver in her voice and had no doubt she believed with all her heart that Jared and I were meant to be. I couldn’t help but feel partial responsibility for that particular belief.
I met her eyes. “No.”
“Sandwich,” she growled. “I want you happy. I want Jared happy. The two of you together would equal giant rainbows of happiness.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at her earnest, yet idiotic expression which changed to hopeful when I didn’t reply.
Mac nodded her head approvingly and pointed at me. “Shoes.”
At that, she spun on her heel and vacated the room.
I clambered for a pair of black stilettos from the chaos that was now my wardrobe and gave up breathing as I bent over to slip them on. These shoes were the David Copperfield of the stiletto world. They might have looked like skyscraping gems of leather strappage, but in reality it would likely take threats of scissors and at least half an hour to get them off later tonight.
I stood up with a gasp, my face red from the exertion of performing magical deeds.
“Hurry up, asshead!” Mac shouted up the stairs.
I rolled my eyes, because this was the Eyerolling Convention after all, grabbed my bag, and headed down the stairs to the car where everyone was waiting.
Chapter Two
“Up and in the shower, Sandwich!”
Mac’s voice sounded far away because I was happily burrowed deep beneath the fluffy white mounds of my bed, busy reflecting on last night’s success.
The White Demon Warehouse had been filled to capacity just like Mac assured us it would be. The venue was more than worthy of launching our band, Jamieson, into success. Only a repeat booking would provide the concrete evidence, so we’d remain on tenterhooks until Mac had spoken to their manager Marcus and received some feedback.
The White Demon was located in the heart of the city, just a drunken stumble to Central Station, and displayed a retro red brick façade, white panelled windows, and high lofty ceilings for acoustical brilliance. Several bars dotted the interior, allowing enough alcoholic lubrication to launch a rocket, and burly bouncers swarmed the four entry points, ensuring drunken degenerates were given the boot.
I felt hands make contact and give a tickle to the body protected by the thick white covers. I chuckled and burrowed in further.
“She’s awake.” I heard Henry’s muffled voice.
The covers were whipped off, and I shrieked at the sudden bright rays of light, squinting at Mac and Henry as they piled on my bed.
I squeezed out a squeal as I yawned and stretched aching muscles, exhausted after last night’s efforts. It felt far too early to be doing something as energetic as getting in the shower like Mac suggested.
“What’s going on?” I muttered tiredly.
“Mum and Dad are having a barbecue lunch today. Spur of the moment. They were disappointed they missed seeing you last night, so they want us there.”
I was disappointed I’d missed seeing Steve and Jenna too. Mac’s parents were like my surrogate mum and dad since my own were no longer around. My dad—a very loose term—Ray, was big on sailing, and when I was five, he’d gotten on his boat one day and never returned. It would be nice to believe that the choice of leaving us was out of his hands, even if that meant he’d died, but there’d been a couple of random sightings of him by family friends, so the truth was that he just didn’t want us anymore. Sometimes, I think it must have broken my mum’s heart more knowing that rather than if he’d died. For me it doesn’t hurt, not in a devastating break your heart kind of way, because I didn’t know him. There was just an empty space where a dad was supposed to be. Random snippets sometimes flitted through my mind of him on the boat as the harsh sun beat down, laughing, directing my older brother Coby on hoisting sails, urging me out of the way, but they were blurry, and sometimes I wondered if they really happened.
My mum, Nance, wasn’t around much. She worked long hours in an investment banking firm. That had never been an issue for me because when she was home and with you, she was with you. Her focus didn’t waver, and Coby and I knew, without her needing to say, that we were the most important part of her life. The hard work was done for us, a single mother trying to do it all for her kids.
She died the day of my sixteenth birthday. She’d left at four in the morning just so she could get through her work to leave early and help set up for my party. I was bitterly disappointed when she hadn’t arrived and set about doing it all myself. I left school early that Friday to be there and angrily strung up balloons, thinking that I’d never asked for much, just Mum’s time, and on the day of my sixteenth birthday party of all days, work had come first. Only an hour after the party was under way, Coby found me in the kitchen chatting to my friend Cam. His pale, anxious face and the fact that he’d snatched my wrist, dragging me upstairs to my room without a word, was cause for alarm. When he delivered the news that Mum had died in a car accident, I didn’t cry or turn hysterical. Adrenaline kicked in and I nodded quietly and returned to the party, realising Coby had told Henry first because guests were already disappearing en masse towards the door. I calmly accepted hugs and tears from closer friends, and when the door closed behind the last guest, Coby and Henry looked on, their eyebrows drawn together in similar expressions of worry as I set about pulling down balloons, binning rubbish that littered the house, and packing food away in the fridge. I still looked back on my response that day and marvelled at how I managed to just pack it away and pull myself together. Apparently, I was good in a crisis.
Later that night, Coby and Henry urged me into the shower, thinking that maybe the shock of the water might alleviate some of the adrenaline and let the emotion through. The fact that I sat on the floor of the shower for over an hour as the water beat down on my curled sobbing form told me their idea had been a good one. Unfortunately, I’d packed it away again the next day, and that was when my life had started to spiral out of control. Turning to both men and alcohol wasn’t the ideal way to heal the horrible sensation of abandonment, but it certainly helped me forget, and for brief moments I felt wanted. Thankfully, Coby forgave me for those years even though I’d put him through hell. At seven years my senior, and in the middle of finals, I figured being saddled with a sixteen year old female was probably already hell in itself.
“Earth to space cadet,” Mac sing-songed, snapping her fingers in my face and I blinked away the memories.
“They’re putting on a barbecue just for us?”
Mac’s parents lived in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, still in the same house Mac grew up in until she moved to Melbourne on scholarship and found us. They’d been excited about coming to our first Sydney show last night, but we hadn’t finished playing until well after midnight. Being in their early fifties, they weren’t the die-hard mosh pit types, well not anymore, and they left at a sensible hour.
“Yep,” she replied.
“That’s really nice, but um, why does that mean we need to be up at the hour of…whatever hour it is?”
Henry and Mac shared a meaningful smirk.
“Because Mac wants to head over there early to help Jenna set up,” Henry offered as he stole the pillow out from under my head and propped it behind his back.
“Hey!” I made a grab for the pillow. “Does she want me there to help too or do you need a lift?”
Mac didn’t own a car and neither did Henry. They hadn’t needed one in Melbourne. Most places had been within walking distance, and I had my Toyota Hilux and the Rice Bubbles had their van, so they borrowed either when needed.
“No…no, but maybe you can make your slice?” Henry suggested, pressing his back hard into the pillow as I tried to pry it away from him.
My lemon coconut slice was popular on the Melbourne uni circuit because it had the perfect ratio of biscuit base to lemon icing and had a tart chewy crunch that almost made your toes curl.
“Sure,” I said on a yawn, stretching again, and when Henry shifted, I snatched my pillow back in triumph. Fluffing it and then tucking it back under my head I asked Mac, “But how are you getting there then?”
Henry and Mac once again looked at each other with raised eyebrows, and before I could make threats of violence to find out what they were up to, a voice called out from the stairway and my question was answered.
I jabbed an angry finger at both Mac and Henry as they crowded my bed. “You sneaky interfering fuckers,” I hissed. “You both need to worry about your own damn love lives and stop interfering in my own.”
Shit.
“In here, Jared,” Mac shouted.
Double shit.
I’d successfully managed to evade Jared last night, but it wasn’t through any magical tricks from my bag of, well, magical tricks. After the show, my band mates had left the dressing room for the bar, the roar of the DJ thumping through the air as they’d made their exit. I’d stayed behind, mostly because I was still in the throes of avoiding Jared and somewhat because my makeup had sweated off under the blinding bright lights of the stage and needed a serious overhaul. Then Mac had busted through the door, in the way only Mac could, and delivered the news that Jared and Coby had been called out for work and exited the warehouse half an hour ago. I squashed the feelings of disappointment like a pesky bug and summoned up a smile of delight to put Mac off the scent. Jared was likely off to shoot at a few criminals before blowing up a small building or two.
Jared earned his living dealing in mayhem and chaotic violence, just like my brother Coby. They both co-owned Jamieson and Valentine Consulting here in Sydney, along with Mac’s other brother Travis. Coby fitted in well with the Valentine brothers, having met Jared when he’d visited Mac in Melbourne one weekend a few months after she’d moved. Happy I was settled and doing well at uni, and seemingly done with my years of spiralling out of control, Coby moved to Sydney and their consulting business was born. To be honest, none of us were sure what the consulting part meant; the term was conveniently vague in my opinion, but I knew they had contracts from various government agencies and mostly dealt in hostage negotiations, kidnapping, and ransom.
After being in business for five years, their operation expanded and they now had a huge team in place as well as gaining another co-owner, Casey. I knew they’d been shot at on more than one occasion. Travis was actually hit once in the shoulder. Jared was knifed two different times, and Casey rolled his car during a full-on, hair raising, police flashing, siren screaming car chase down Motorway 5 in Sydney’s south-west. It seemed they had their fingers in every dangerous pie across the city of Sydney and would soon be running out of hands. Once, while I was busy trying to recuperate from a hangover on the couch of my Melbourne apartment, I saw Coby on the news running full pelt down a back alley, shouting and gun in hand, before it cut to the news reporter on the street. My heart almost closed up shop and moved to another city. I told Coby he had to remove consulting from their sign and change their name to Jamieson & Valentine: Badass Brigade.
Henry laughed and Mac smirked as I tried to smooth the birds nest that was my hair and hurriedly wiped under my eyes to make sure no smudged mascara residue lingered there.
Why hadn’t I jumped in the shower like Mac told me to? I was now desperately lamenting my laziness. The first time I’d met Jared I’d fared no better.
It was the first time Jared had visited Melbourne and became friends with my brother. Henry and I hadn’t known Mac before uni; she answered our online ad to share a three-bedroomed apartment with the two of us. Jared had stopped in for a weekend visit from Sydney to see with his own eyes that Mac was happily settled and not getting into any trouble. He didn’t actually say that last part, but it was definitely implied. The fact that we were uni students in a band meant that troubles did abound on a regular basis, however, we weren’t housing any plans on announcing said troubles to an overprotective older brother. We had a party apartment. It was within walking distance to the uni bar and featured lots of timber flooring that forgave rivers of vodka spillage and unfortunate barfing with reckless regularity.
His arrival was unannounced, so when the knock came at the door, I was prone on the couch, Mac was on the floor, and Henry was somewhere in between both. The three of us were hungover, motionless, and watching a music video marathon with all the enthusiasm of a goldfish on Christmas day.
A quick and silent rock, paper, scissors ensued, and the loser, which was always me, staggered off with a numb backside to open the door.
My pickled brain and my unfortunate choice of hangover wear (comfy cotton shorts with a hole in the ass, ratty faded to grey Rolling Stones singlet top, hair half dried and frizzed in a ball on top of my head) left me speechless and feeling the immediate burn of embarrassment when I’d flung the door open.
Jared stood there in all his delicious glory, and that, for me, was when time had stopped. The man was absolutely exceptional and not just because of how he looked because I’d already seen photos, and it was evident he shared the same genes as Mac. His eyes were the same shade of emerald, and his skin just as golden, but where Mac was all blonde, his hair was light brown, the ends only slightly blond from the sun. It was obvious he needed a haircut. Most of the photos I saw featured him with shorter hair. I liked the length, how it hung in his eyes and made me want to brush it across his forehead, my fingers itching to feel the silky strands that caressed the back of his neck.
His clothes were nothing special, an old vintage t-shirt and soft worn jeans, but he wore them well. The shirt stretched across a broad chest and revealed the tanned muscles of his biceps. The jeans rode low upon lean hips, leading down the long length of leg to a pair of motorcycle boots that had seen better days.
He didn’t appear heavily tattooed, but when he lifted his right arm to scratch at the back of his neck, the underside of his bicep revealed an inky swirl of words you just knew meant something important. I was dying to know what it said, what it meant to him.
It all made up a tantalising package of man, but it was his eyes and his demeanour that spoke to me of something special. His posture exuded a strong, capable determinedness, serious and unwavering, but his eyes radiated laughter and passion, and when they locked on mine, my mouth went dry and my heart quickened to a beat of epic proportions.
Then those eyes did a full body scan of the wonderment that was me in hangover mode, and I watched the corners of his lips curl up in a lazy grin so hot it was a wonder I wasn’t already a pile of ash on the floor.
I sucked in a deep breath, letting it out in a whoosh when he opened his mouth to talk and his deep voice rumbled across my skin like rich honey.
“You must be Evie.”
I shivered, nodding mutely because upon hearing that voice, I decided I’d be whoever he wanted me to be as long he kept talking.
“Can I come in?” he asked, green eyes watching me intently.
When his voice set off more shivers, I once again nodded dumbly, deciding he could move in if that was what he wanted.
“I’m Mac’s brother Jared,” he offered, even though I’d already known, and he moved through the doorway. For the third and final time, I nodded because I decided he could be whoever he wanted to be as long as he was standing in my apartment.
“Jared,” Mac squealed and leaped into his arms when I’d guided him into the lounge room like a dumb mute.
Mac’s squeal was a like a sucker punch. It pulled me out of a time warp that had me sucked in so hard I’d forgotten who I was, leaving me filled me with horror. No man had ever left me at such a loss the way he had done in just a matter of moments. I promptly vacated the room, got dressed, and did what any self-respecting girl would do when faced with such a predicament.
I went shopping.
One pair of shoes, two sets of silk and lace underwear, a dress, and two new kitchen implements later, I descended on Hairy Parry’s apartment for the weekend. A good dose of dork was exactly what I needed to break Jared’s spell.
The next morning I’d woken up all tangled in Hairy Parry’s hair to a text message from Mac.
M: Did you have to disappear yesterday?
E: Yes. Yes, I did 😛
I rolled over to my stomach in the darkened room so I wouldn’t disturb Parry with my messaging.
M: Why?
I sighed as I thought about my response and decided to just come out with it. God knew she’d get it out of me eventually anyway.
E: Your brother is hot.
M: Your point is?
E: Hello? Did you not see me yesterday? <– social retard alert.
M: You like him???!!!
This time my sigh accompanied a cringe of embarrassment.
E: Like is a strong word, Mactard.
M: We’re going out for lunch. If you don’t come with us, I’ll tell Jared you like him and give him your number.
I couldn’t help but feel I was somehow revisiting my high school years and resisted the urge to message Mac and tell her to suck it. Instead, I got up, showered, and left Parry a note telling him not to leave town because I had plans that involved him and bed for later that evening. I ignored the loud voice telling me to call Mac’s bluff. So what if she gave him my number? Were the tickets on myself that big that I thought he would use it anyway? I saw him for all of ten minutes!
I messaged Coby, inviting him to lunch too. If Mac was going to have her brother there, then by God, so was I. With Coby there I was sure I’d be less likely to make an idiot of myself around Jared. Besides, it was entirely possible my initial reaction to him was simply my brain cells not firing at full speed due to the hangover I’d been suffering.
The four of us met at a café and sat in the sun at a pretty, outdoor table. After finishing lunch, I realised my mistake in not trusting my initial instincts. Jared hadn’t looked any less hot, and I hadn’t acted any less stupid. Thankfully, most of the conversation was carried by Jared and Coby, making my lack of speech less noticeable. Whenever I looked anywhere other than my plate, it was in Jared’s direction, and every time, his eyes would meet mine with an expression I wasn’t able to decipher.
Eventually, I was able to relax a little and join in the conversation. At one point, I even had Jared laughing with a story about Cooper’s latest stage diving attempt when we played at a small, local festival three weeks ago. It had left Cooper with a twisted ankle and a bunch of female groupies dragging him to safety as he gave us the thumbs up.
As the afternoon wore on, I let my guard down. I decided I could happily sit there for hours and listen to Jared talk. When I was able to forget myself, I could respond freely or talk and laugh loudly with Mac in our usual banter. Then I would find his eyes on me again and clam up until he directed his focus away, speaking to Coby and laughing.
It got to the point where I was gazing freely at Jared, and he must have felt it because he offered me a wink while he kept talking with Coby. By then I knew it was time to go. I stood on shaky legs and informed the table I was going out and that I’d see them tomorrow.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jared frown. Coby shook his head at Mac, mouthing “Hairy Parry?”
Feeling annoyed, which I attributed mostly to the fact that I wanted Jared and wasn’t allowing myself the chance, I snapped out, “Yes, Coby. I have a hot date with Hairy Parry.”
Mac snorted as though the idea of hot and Hairy Parry together in one sentence was outrageous.
I glared at Mac, and Coby stood up, kissing me on the cheek and telling me to be safe. I offered a smile and a quick hand wave to Jared, not quite meeting his eyes, and left.
I’d only gotten a few steps when I heard, “Wait up, Evie.”
I turned, seeing Jared jogging to catch up to me, and my heart skipped a beat. Okay, it skipped a couple. I raised my eyebrows in question.
“I was wondering if I could get your number?”
My first reaction was that I was going to murder Mac, weigh her body down, and throw her over a bridge. Well maybe that might be a bit much, but at the least there would be pain. Did she put him up to this?
I folded my arms. “Did Mac put you up to this?”
He gave a slight head shake, appearing confused. “Ah, no? Actually, I was going to say I have a friend who lives here in Melbourne. His little sister is getting into singing, and I thought maybe if I passed on your info, you could be like a mentor or something. It’s just a thought,” he added.
Deflated and embarrassed, I made a show of digging around in my bag for a pen to cover the flush. Of course Mac had been all talk, and of course Jared wasn’t interested. I wanted him to want me as much as I wanted him, even if I wasn’t willing to act on it. How stupid was that?
“You can just tell me you know. I can type it in,” he said.
I peered up from the depths of my bag, flush returning as he stood there holding his phone with amusement crinkling his eyes.
“Right.” I wiped my sweaty hands down my shirt in the pretence of smoothing wrinkles as I gave him my number.
He typed it in, then casually tucked his phone into his back pocket. “Thanks. So uh, Hairy Parry, huh? He’s your boyfriend?”
I nodded, avoiding his gaze because it was giving me shivers.
He stepped closer, tipping his finger under my chin until I met his eyes. The light touch and the heat from his body left me feeling breathless, but it was nothing compared to the burning heat in his eyes. “Hope he knows he’s a lucky guy. Well, enjoy your hot date, Evie.”
“Um, thanks,” I replied, wondering if he’d now ruined Hairy Parry for me, and quite possibly any other man.
Jared turned and headed back to the table, and unwilling to return my gaze to Mac and Coby for their reaction to that little whatever it was, I left for Hairy Parry’s.
That evening found me wearing my slinkiest, shortest black dress and highest heels and dragging Parry out to Verve with some casual friends. The plan was to drink and dance the night away in my best effort to remove Jared’s image from my head. The barely there underwear I’d worn worked well in capturing Parry’s attention, but later that night, naked in bed after sex, I’d felt like an absolute shit girlfriend for wishing it was Jared’s tongue that was tasting my skin and his mouth that was doing wicked things to my body.
I woke again the next day, closer to lunch time than morning, to another message as Parry lay snoring at my side. This time though, it wasn’t from Mac.
Leaving for Sydney this morning, Evie. Just wanted to say bye and thanks for letting me stay at your apartment. Jared.
I swallowed the lump in my throat at the thought of Jared leaving and typed a casual response.
E: Have a safe flight home!
A safe flight home? Like he had any control over the aircraft? What an idiot.
J: Thanks. How did your hot date go?
What was I supposed to say to that? Shitty, because I wished it was you I was on the hot date with?
E: Great! We went drinking and dancing at Verve with some friends.
J: So can I assume that Hairy Parry’s name is because he’s hairy?
E: You can. Hair almost as long as mine.
J: So you like guys with long hair? Should I grow mine?
What did that mean? He wants me to like him? He likes me? My pulse raced, making me feel worse because I was lying in bed naked with one man while I was burning up inside for another.
I ignored the question, not sure how to respond, and instead changed the subject.
E: Hey, I didn’t ask you what your friend’s sister’s name was?
Jared replied to my question, and we messaged each other on and off for the rest of the day. I enjoyed the banter. He was witty and smart, and considering he lived such a long distance away, surely chatting to him this way was safe enough.
Then the next day he asked me about a band he was seeing that afternoon with friends and if I’d heard of them. I hadn’t but I looked them up, and their songs were fantastic. I commended him on his taste in music, and the rest of that day found us messaging each other on and off, and then the next day, and the next, until it seemed we struck up some kind of texting friendship where the two of us couldn’t seem to go a day without texting the other.
Like when I found a particularly expensive, but necessary pair of shoes. I’d snap a photo and message it.
E: Should I buy these?
J: Only if you promise to send a pic of you wearing them.
I would get a message late at night.
J: Drowning in paperwork. Do you know first aid?
E: Mouth to mouth is my speciality, but alas, you will be blue by the time I arrive. Call the medics.
When I’d broken up with Hairy Parry six months later, I found myself forlorn but naturally not heartbroken.
J: Do you need me to break his face?
E: I would, but you would be hard pressed to find it under all that hair.
J: lol
E: Don’t you have any girls I can break a face for?
If that wasn’t fishing then I wasn’t Rex Hunt.
J: I don’t do relationships.
E: Why not?
J: That is a story for another day.
Six months later, I met Robert the insect fiend who we’d promptly nicknamed Beetle Bob. Mac and Henry had chortled with glee when they found out our first date was to the Melbourne Museum to view the Bugs Alive! exhibition.
Later that night, Jared’s message arrived.
J: How was your first date at the museum?
E: Beetle Bob was very attentive & I got to see a feeding demonstration. Very cool.
J: Cool, huh? What was your favourite bug?
E: Praying mantis, I think. Those things were pretty cute.
J: Don’t they bite the head off the male after sex?
E: Oh gross. They do?
J: lol. Didn’t you learn anything at the exhibition?
E: I guess not!
Four weeks later, I actually received an invitation inside the inner sanctum that was Beetle Bob’s house and promptly met Draco. Draco liked a good piece of mango and hung out on my arm while I made him watch So You Think You Can Dance. He really seemed to like it. I snapped a photo of Draco head-bobbing and texted it to Jared.
E: Isn’t he cute?
J: Is that Beetle Bob? If so, he’s much better looking than Hairy Parry.
I laughed like a loon while Beetle Bob gave me the freaky eye, and Draco just kept on head-bobbing on my arm.
Then six months later, Jared got knifed in the side by a drugged up lunatic who thought waving it about inside a store and locking up customers seemed like a good way to earn money.
Panicked and scared, it almost got me on a plane to Sydney.
E: Are you okay?
J: Just a scratch. I had worse at ten years old when I jumped off the roof of our house.
E: What trying to be Superman?
J: Wolverine. His thing is an accelerated healing process. Sadly mine took a metal pin and eight weeks in plaster.
Four months later, our Melbourne festival appearance hit YouTube and received a really decent viewing. That night found us at the local university watering hole dancing and singing and liberating the bar of all alcohol. Unfortunately, Beetle Bob, as usual, decided to leave early to tend the insects in his care, and while the thought was admirable, for a brief moment, I was tired of coming second best to a bunch of creepy-crawlies. Thus began a knock down drag out shouting match that levelled the entire building to silence.
I left in a drunken snit and promptly messaged Jared when I got home.
E: Beetle Bob has been effectively crushed. I will miss Draco.
J: Plenty more dorks in the sea.
Two weeks later, Beetle Bob came by, Draco in tow because he knew I’d do anything for the little lizard dude, apologised, and told me he would be a better boyfriend.
I immediately felt bad because it wasn’t like we were in love, and I was being a bit of a selfish mole, but Beetle Bob was otherwise a good person, so I took him back. I snapped a photo of me holding Draco and messaged it to Jared.
E: Beetle Bob is back on.
J: You just want him for his big lizard.
E: Guilty 😀
It was six weeks later when I saw Coby on the news as he rushed some random dilapidated brown weatherboard house.
E: What the hell are you up to?
J: You know I can’t discuss details. We are all good.
Two weeks later he messaged a photo of what was left of Casey’s car after his high speed chase.
J: Walked away, the lucky bastard.
E: He must be the real Wolverine. Lucky you weren’t in the car. You would have been in traction for months.
J: Har har.
A few inane messages.
J: What are you doing?
E: Face mask. Can’t talk.
J: In that case, a string walks into a bar several times and asks for a drink. Each time, he is turned down by the bartender. Finally, the string asks a stranger to tie him in a knot and frazzle the ends a little. The string walks back into the bar and the bartender asks him, “Hey aren’t you the same string I just turned down?” The string replies, “I’m a frayed knot.”
I snorted water out my nose, and my mask promptly cracked into a thousand pieces at his lame, dorky joke.
Six weeks later, I met Herringbone, Beetle Bob’s new baby python. His greeting was simply a pair of beady black eyeballs peeking out from the inside of my running shoe. I snapped a photo and messaged Jared.
E: So I thought I’d go for a light jog this morning.
J: Nice snake shoes. Bet that made you run fast.
E: Like you wouldn’t believe.
Two months later.
J: Finally, a weekend off. Thought I’d come visit.
I panicked.
A long distance friendship was all good and well from the safety of another state, but we all knew how well I managed in Jared’s real life presence.
E: This weekend? What a shame. Beetle Bob and I will be away visiting his sister and brother-in-law in Canberra.
We weren’t, but Beetle Bob had been making noises about it, so no time like the present. I messaged Beetle Bob, and in a matter of moments, our weekend was arranged.
Two months later, we arrived at the conclusion our musical career would take off better in Sydney and made the decision to move.
J: Mac tells me you’re moving to Sydney.
E: Yes, our band is going to be the next big thing.
J: Does this mean we get to hang out?
E: You should be so lucky.
Three months later found us all set to move. Over the internet, we picked out a newly renovated duplex based in Coogee, a pretty beachside suburb just out of the city and a short walk to the beach. It had three bedrooms on one side and three on the other with a joint basement that housed a shared laundry and tons of space for musical equipment. It was perfect for the six of us. Coby did the inspection and when he gave us the nod telling us it wasn’t really a fallen down ramshackle in a desperate state of disrepair, he arranged the rental for us. That simply left us with four weeks to pack up our lives in Melbourne and make the move.
Two weeks later, Beetle Bob and I decided to part ways. Long distance visiting was simply not feasible when it came to the care of his creatures.
J: So you and Beetle Bob, huh?
E: Draco and Herringbone will fill the empty void that I leave behind.
One week later, Jared and Travis arrived for an overnight stay to help move some of the heavier furniture. The plan was for us to follow in a few days with the rest of our possessions and the band equipment.
Unfortunately, on the afternoon of Jared’s arrival, I’d received some snide comments from Beetle Bob’s friends at the local store, and feeling angry and a little let down, I met up with Henry at the Zen bar, our new local watering hole since graduating uni.
It was later that night, after five Metropolitans, that Mac arrived at the bar, Jared and Travis in tow. Metros were like Cosmos but better because they were made with black-currant vodka. I had been busy happily bashing Beetle Bob’s friends to Henry to make myself feel better. Henry, who was trying his best to offer support but not used to Metros, was having trouble keeping his seat.
My first thought when I saw Jared venture into the bar alongside Mac and Travis, was thank God I finally looked decent. My long waves of hair were curled into lush waves that very morning. My skin was tinted rose from the summer sunshine. No longer donning ratty pyjamas or the last minute wrinkled outfit worn to lunch, I was dressed in tailored grey shorts with pink pinstripes, a loosely fitted cream blouse, and strappy lemon coloured wedges. It was the perfect ensemble: casual, chic, and pretty.
My second thought was that he hadn’t changed one bit since I saw him last. His effect on me was as st