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Sometimes meeting your soulmate happens under difficult circumstances.

Briella and Marcus, both suffering, find rays of light and each other, when events go horribly wrong.

A story of how love and caring win even over loss, and start to mend even the most broken hearts.

“The Mix-up” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

The Mix-up By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Briella Wilder felt silly driving back to the Rolling Hills Pet Memorial Park with the small and tasteful gray bag strapped into the passenger seat of her six-year-old Audi. She had a slight headache from repressing tears which—she thought—was a lose-lose situation. If she cried, then she couldn’t see the road. And if she didn’t, she got the headache.

Of course, she almost always got a headache after crying, hence lose-lose.

And there really wasn’t anyone she could talk with about losing Rochester, not someone who would understand. Her more insensitive friends were impatient with her. After all, she had lost cats to old age before, and she had two perfectly lovely Siamese at home, so, really, what was the problem?

The problem was that Rochester had been beside her for the past fifteen years. He had shown up at her new apartment in her new city, when she had been shaky and terrified to live alone.

Until that summer, she never had lived alone nor had she ever moved across country before. She knew back then that she needed a new start. Her parents had divorced and started new families and she had married the wrong man in the middle of that, maybe to prove to them that marriage worked.

Instead, she had learned that marriage was hard, and she and Del did not love each other enough to weather the ups and downs. He liked to say he left first, but that wasn’t accurate. They left together, on the same day, walking down the sidewalk away from the townhouse that had felt so very sterile, the way that people walked down an aisle as they exited a church.

Reverse wedding march, she had called it, and Del had snuff-laughed, something she always liked about him.

She liked most things about him—still did—but she had never really loved him. They had remained friends, though, and he had been the first to call her when she had texted that Rochester died.

Rochester. Hard to believe he fit into the tiny cat-shaped urn Rolling Hills had given her.

Or hadn’t fit, as the embarrassed owner of Rolling Hills told her that very morning.

Because the cremains in the urn beside her did not belong to Rochester. They belonged to another cat named Rose Chester. The extremely stressed receptionist had misheard, and given Briella the pretty little gray bag without following procedure.

No doublecheck on the last name, no need to present identification. Just Briella’s signature on a fancy little document, and then the receptionist had gone into the back and returned with the gray bag, that Briella had somehow known from the beginning did not belong to Rochester.

But she had assumed she had felt that way because Rochester was gone. He had struggled so hard at the end—a bony pile of long black fur which was steadily getting coarser due to illness, pretending that everything was all right, until he couldn’t anymore.

Even then, on that last morning, he had gotten up off his special catbed (which Briella had moved to the end of the couch during those final two weeks so that he could always be with her) to greet the home-care vet who was going to put him out of his misery.

He had toppled over on his way to her, and Briella had to pick him up, cradling him as she talked to the vet. It was obvious to all three of them that Rochester had used up all of his nine lives and then some.

Briella’s two Siamese —Brooklyn and Bronx—watched from their favorite hiding place under the stairs. They were a bonded pair that had met at the animal shelter and taken to each other. They liked Rochester, but they had never loved him.

Not like she had.

She swiped at her left eye, because it was betraying her by filling with tears. Fortunately, she had turned on the wide side street that led to the memorial park.

The park was startlingly big, partly because it was almost as old as the city. The park was green, with actual rolling hills and large pine trees. There was a manmade pond in the center, with benches all around it. The benches had iron railings that were decorated with little cat and dog heads. The feet were, of course, clawed.

She had gone into the park three days after Rochester died and sat quietly, staring at the pond. That was the day Rolling Hills had called to let her know that his remains were ready. Or cremains, as they insisted on calling them.

She had gathered herself enough to go inside the little white building, when a couple stormed out, still screaming at each other. She had hoped for peace, and had instead found turmoil.

Turmoil everywhere.

And the poor receptionist tried her best that day. She had been shaking from the encounter, trying not to cry herself, and yet somehow remaining professional. She had even—with empathy—told Briella that she was ever so sorry for her loss.

Briella had believed her. But Briella had never believed that the little urn held her heart-cat. And she had told herself that the reason was because she had never received the cremains of a cat before, even though she had cremated three others.

She just couldn’t bear to part with whatever was left of Rochester. And yet, it turned out, she had.

She pulled into the narrow parking lot in front of the white building. There was another, wider lot, for people who wanted to visit their pets in the cemetery. She had seen the little headstones, some with lifelike statues of a cat or a dog or, in one case, a rabbit, but she couldn’t imagine leaving Rochester there. That felt like abandoning him.

He had hated the outdoors so very much. He never wanted to leave the warmth and safety of indoors, not after she had rescued him.

Another car, a newish dark blue sedan, sat at the other side of the narrow parking lot. For a moment, Briella stared at the vehicle, trying to see if someone was inside. As emotionally fragile as she was at the moment, she didn’t really need to see another screaming fight outside of this building.

But the car appeared empty, and it was parked far away enough that it might have belonged to a staff member.

Briella sighed, and stepped out of her car into the spring sunshine. The sun wasn’t warm, but its thin light was comforting. She wiped at her eyes again, then reached back inside the car and removed the tasteful gray bag.

The braided handle was soft between her fingers, and the bag itself was thick and pleasant to the touch. It struck her that this was not the type of place that made obvious mistakes, particularly ones that would cause the pet parents even more grief.

The owner had to have been mortified.

Briella took a deep breath, and crossed the lot. Last time she had been here, two days ago, she hadn’t noted how clean the white exterior was or the beautiful calligraphy in the same gray as the bag which suggested the rolling hills of the business’s name.

She opened the door and stepped inside, then blinked at the sudden dimness. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust.

The entry was clean and wide, with a few seats along one wall. There were pamphlets on grief and a display of urns that looked like they had been taken from a museum.

A small door opened into a hallway Briella had never ventured down. If the tiny map on the corner of the desk was accurate, they included viewing rooms and places for families to mourn, just like a human mortuary had.

A man was standing near the reception desk, blocking Briella’s view of the receptionist. The man was wearing a shirt that stretched across his broad shoulders. His dark hair rested on the back of his collar a bit unevenly, suggesting that it needed a trim. He was taller than she was and looked strong, but nothing in his posture suggested that he was angry.

Briella hung back, so that she wouldn’t call attention to herself. At first, she thought there was going to be conversation, but there wasn’t: no one sat in the reception chair.

A woman that Briella hadn’t seen before came out of the back area, and said as she did, “Mr. Chester, if you’ll just wait in the back. It’ll take a minute—”

“Mr. Chester?” Briella blurted before she could stop herself. “You’re Rose’s…”

She let the name dangle, because she wasn’t sure what to call him. Some people objected to owner. Others thought pet parent too precious by half.

The man turned. He had a strong face, with flat cheekbones and a square jaw. His skin was light brown and he had deep circles under his eyes.

He looked as sad as she felt.

“Yes?” he asked.

She held up the bag. “I think this might be yours.”

“Let me.” The receptionist hurried over and took the bag. She was an older woman, wearing tan dress pants and a blue and tan patterned blouse that would hide any stain.

Briella recognized her voice. This was the woman who had called that morning.

“Let’s get you to the back room,” she said. “I need to confirm…”

And then she shook her head, as if somehow, she was editing the experience as she was having it.

“I’m so sorry about the confusion,” she said. “We don’t run our business like this. I don’t know what happened, but I can assure you, it won’t happen again.”

“I know what happened,” Briella said. “You had a couple in here that was having a screaming fight over their pet. I got the sense they were no longer together. It felt…”

She wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence either. The word she wanted was violent and it seemed like a violation of the peace in this place.

But the other two waited, until she finished her sentence.

“It was scary,” she said, deciding not to go with violent. “I saw them on the way out.”

Mr. Chester nodded, his gaze meeting Briella’s. He seemed to understand what she was saying.

“I was here when they arrived,” he said. “They were furious with each other. Your poor receptionist wouldn’t give either of them the cremains they asked for, because apparently, there’s some kind of legal battle…?”

“Oh,” the owner said. “I know who they are. And yes, there’s a legal battle. They’re not supposed to come here in person anymore. I didn’t realize…”

She closed her eyes, catching herself. Then she shook her head again, and opened her eyes, not looking any calmer.

“But that’s not an excuse,” she said. “We try to make your experience here as smooth as possible, and we failed that. When we call you, we set your loved ones in a different area, alphabetically, and we—”

“It’s all right,” Mr. Chester said. “Really. Everyone makes mistakes.”

“Yes, but this…” The owner’s voice broke. “We’ve never had this happen before.”

“And I’m sure it won’t happen again,” Briella said. “I used to do crisis management for businesses—” and she had hated every minute of it, which was why she quit. “—and we found that when a serious mistake happened, the business put new systems in place to make sure the mistake would never happen again.”

The woman nodded, then her expression changed, becoming just a bit hooded. Her professional look, most likely.

“For what it’s worth,” Briella said, “I never even opened the bag. Everything here is exactly as you gave it to me.”

“Me too.” Mr. Chester swept his hand—also square with long fingers—toward a bag on the table. “I wasn’t…I don’t know.” He smiled, but it was an uncomfortable smile. “I didn’t…um…I don’t know if I wasn’t ready to face the loss of Rose or…it just didn’t feel like her.”

“Yes,” the woman said, and it was clear from her tone that she had launched into her canned speech. “These are just reminders of loved ones.”

She leaned forward and took the bag that Mr. Chester had brought as well.

“If you would like,” she said, “there are family rooms in the back, if you want to wait in private. I know how hard this is.”

But something in the woman’s eyes said she didn’t know, that this was still new.

“We have markers on each urn to ensure that the right one goes to the right family. I just need to check our system, which is also in the back. I’ll take you back there, if you would like.”

“I don’t mind waiting here,” Briella said. She really didn’t want to see all of the workings of a pet mortuary. This experience had been tough enough without putting images in her head that might never go away.

“I’ll stay too,” Mr. Chester said, then looked at Briella. “If you don’t mind…?”

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“It might take fifteen minutes or so,” the woman said. “You might be more comfortable.”

“Take your time,” Mr. Chester said, and somehow managed not to sound like a man who wanted to add and get it right.

The woman nodded, then disappeared through that door clutching both bags.

Briella had a hunch the woman would check and double-check and go through each system as carefully as possible, before she brought the bags back out.

Mr. Chester moved to the display of urns, hands clasped behind his back. Briella sat in the chair closest to the window. The chair was on the same wall as the door that the woman had gone through. Briella did not want to watch the door, as if she were in a hurry.

She really wasn’t. She worked at home now, in the quiet, and could adjust her day if she needed to. She had promised herself that she would take it easy after Rochester died, and not put pressure on anything.

After a moment, Mr. Chester sat in a chair across from her. The entry wasn’t that big, so they weren’t sitting far from each other.

He looked over at the reception desk, with its empty chair. “You don’t think the receptionist got fired, do you?”

“I hope not,” Briella said. “Everyone’s allowed one mistake.”

He smiled. This time the smile was soft, and suited his face. “Let’s hope this doesn’t get counted as two mistakes.”

Briella nodded. “I’m Briella,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“And yours,” he said. “I’m Marcus, by the way.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” she said, and then realized what she had said. “Despite the circumstances.”

His smile faded just a bit. “I left work to come here. No one there seemed to understand why I thought it was important to bring the bag back. They thought it could wait.”

“Yeah,” Briella said. “I kept thinking about someone else, wanting their pet, and not getting even the right…what do they call it?”

“Cremains,” he said in a tone that suggested he didn’t like the word.

“So I came right away too,” she said.

“Good thing,” he said. “Then we don’t need to make a third trip here, not that this is a bad place.”

“Exactly,” she said. “When the mobile vet told me about it, I was picturing, you know, horror movie crematoriums.”

With smoke coming out of the roof and a dirty trailer park front office, a man smoking a cigarette who took the body and tossed it on a pile.

She didn’t say any of that, but maybe she didn’t have to, because Mr. Chester—Marcus—smiled.

“Me too.” He leaned forward just a bit. “What was your cat’s name?” Then he caught himself. “Cat, right?”

“Cat,” she said. “His name was Rochester.”

“Rochester,” Marcus said. “Rose Chester.” He nodded. “I can see that.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“Why Rochester?” he asked. “The name?”

“That’s where I was living,” she said, “when he showed up. In New York, not Minnesota. All my cats have New York names now.”

“All?” Marcus asked. “You have other cats.”

“Two,” she said. “They’re bonded pair. Bronx and Brooklyn. I’m not sure they care that Rochester is gone.”

He rubbed a hand on his knees, a bit nervously. “Rose didn’t like other cats. Just me.” He shrugged. “I suspect she would consider it a betrayal if I got a cat, even though she’s gone.”

“Or maybe she would want you to be happy,” Briella sa.

“Naw,” he said. “She really wanted me to herself.” He chuckled, lost in a memory. Then he sighed. “The place is quiet without her.”

“It’s not quiet at my place,” Briella said. “Those two play a lot. But Rochester followed me everywhere. He was my shadow from the moment we met.”

“Sounds like he had a lot in common with Rose,” Marcus said.

“Was she jealous of you spending time with people?” Briella asked. She had heard about cats like that.

“She hated my last girlfriend,” Marcus said. “Turns out, Rose was right.”

Briella nodded. “Yeah, Rochester had a radar about anyone I brought home as well. I’ll miss that. The two Bs don’t have that kind of radar.”

The woman came out of the back with two bags. They were two different shades of gray. One was slightly darker than the other. She set them on the desk.

“I was as careful as I could be,” she said. “I put everything in new bags. Yours is the darker bag, Mr. Chester, but if you would like, you can go through it and make sure.”

Marcus stood, and walked over to the bags. He picked up the tag on the side. Then looked inside. “It appears to be in order,” he said.

“And Ms Wilder, if you want to look at yours,” the woman said.

Briella stood. She didn’t have to look. She knew, somehow, that bag belonged to Rochester, just as surely as she knew that the previous one hadn’t.

Still, she looked at the tag and then peered inside at the pamphlets, the framed paw print, and the tiny little urn with a cat face along the top that looked nothing at all like Rochester.

“Would it make you feel better if we checked the numbers?” she asked the woman.

“No, no,” she said. “I had my assistant help me. Not the receptionist you saw, but the one…”

She mercifully let that sentence trail off. Briella didn’t want to know what all of the jobs were in this building.

“I don’t need to double-check,” Briella said, and knew better than to ask Marcus if he did. She didn’t want to put pressure on him.

“This is Rose,” he said and hefted the little bag as if it held the weight of a gigantic personality.

“All right,” the woman said. “Again, I’m so sorry for the mixup and if you need anything from us or the next time—”

“It’s fine,” Briella said, not wanting to hear the end of that sentence either. It was probably something like the next time you need our services which was not anything she wanted to think about. Not this week. “Thank you.”

“No, thank you,” the woman said. “I appreciate the understanding.”

“I’m glad you cleared it up,” Marcus said, and then he walked to the door. He pulled it open, letting the lovely spring sunshine inside. He held the door for Briella, and she walked through, stepping into the faint scent of roses. Only then did she realize some were blooming near the door.

Marcus followed her out. He looked at the other car in the lot, so obviously his. He was about to say something, but Briella spoke first.

“I, um…this might be odd, but would you and Rose like to get some coffee?”

He glanced at the bag as if he were checking with it. “We would love to,” he said. “But I suspect Rose will remain in the car. She was never the adventurous type.”

“Neither was Rochester,” Briella said. “We passed a coffee shop about a mile from here. If you want…”

“I’d love some,” Marcus said, “if you don’t mind me boring you with Rose stories.”

“Only if I can counter by convincing you how brilliant Rochester was,” Briella said.

He smiled. She was beginning to like how easy his smile was and how often he was willing to share it.

“I would love to hear about Rochester,” he said. “I’ll follow you to the coffee shop, since I don’t remember seeing it.”

Something in that sentence let her know that he had been too upset to notice. Something else they shared.

“You just hit the main road and turn left,” she said. “I promise I won’t drive too fast.”

“All right,” he said, and headed to his car, carefully putting the bag with Rose into the front passenger side. When Briella saw him put the seatbelt over the bag, she knew that they had a lot more in common than the loss of a special pet.

She went to her car, and strapped Rochester in. Then she backed out, saw that Marcus was waiting, waved, and headed down the street.

She was most of the way to the main road when she realized that the tears no longer threatened. She had no idea what would come of coffee with Marcus, and she wasn’t sure that mattered, not in the long run.

But in the short run, it would be lovely to discuss Rochester with someone who understood the loss of a family member—and felt it, as deeply as she did, every single day.

 

For Cheepy

___________________________________________

“The Mix-up” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2025 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Canva

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

 

People often ask why Nancy and I moved to New York when we left the Appalachians. We could have settled pretty much anywhere, but we chose an area — the Hudson River Valley — that few think of as a retirement destination. The fact is, a main reason we came here was to be near my brother and sister-in-law, whom we adore.

Jim and me, birding in Arizona.

As it happens, this is my brother’s birthday week, and so I am afforded a wonderful opportunity to embarrass him.

James Coe — Jim to me; Jimmy when we were much younger — is just about my very favorite person in the world. He is older than I am. I won’t say by how much, but trust me, it’s A LOT!! When we were kids, I wanted to do everything he did, often to his dismay. He was my babysitter, my early-life mentor, occasionally my tormentor, but throughout all my years my best friend. He was the one who interested me (and our oldest brother, Bill) in birdwatching. He shaped my early musical tastes, introducing me to James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Crosby Stills and Nash, Carole King, Simon and Garfunkel, not to mention the Monkees and Young Rascals. Later, as I got older, he was my guide to jazz. He saw to it that I discovered pizza. He risked parental sanction by lighting off firecrackers for my entertainment (and the satisfaction of his own pronounced pyromaniacal tendencies).

Jim is a remarkably talented artist — you can find samples of his work, as well as his very impressive biography, here — and all kidding aside, his courage in pursuing his own unconventional artistic career emboldened me to do something similar in pursuit of my passion for writing fantasy. In a sense, I owe my career to his example. His art is all over our walls, and for all of my adult life, the best gift I could receive for any birthday has been an original James Coe painting. Over the years, he has been incredibly generous in that regard.

He is a bold and creative chef, an accomplished baker whose from-scratch bread rivals Nancy’s (and that, my friends, is saying something). He is wise and caring, a wonderful Dad to his talented, beautiful children, Jonah and Rachel, a loving spouse to his spectacularly brilliant wife, Karen, and a marvelous uncle to our girls. He is, to this day, my favorite birding companion, my constant partner in silliness, my beloved big brother.

So, please wish Jim a happy birthday, and really do check out his website. He is annoyingly talented.

Love you, Coe.

Confession time, guys. I think I might have a drinking problem.

Really? No one could have guessed that. I’m surrounded by idiots.

There’s one above you.

And one below you.

We are legion. Also, why are you all upside down?

>the provisional release date is 4th November, 2025.
Let’s go!!!

In this episode, High Wizard Elron is upset with a trio of 100-year-old ghosts for not sending an email listing their five accomplishments of the week. They've also failed to haunt certain annoying members of Congress adequately.

I've been hard at work on The Pilot for quite a while now, but "real life" has been beating me with sticks all year. The calendar keeps trying to insist that it's only the second month of the year, but I don't trust it. I've been beaten with too many sticks to fit in just two months. At least four months' worth of sticks.

Here's an example of a stick that's been beating our entire family:

My 24-year-old cousin was diagnosed a few weeks ago with what ended up being Stage 4 ovarian cancer. She's struggling to survive as we speak. I know that's a very serious shift in tone for this blog, but it is true, and things are still very difficult for her and her immediate family right now.

That alone is enough to make it a long year already.

But on a lighter note, I am making progress on writing! Book 4 of The Last Horizon proceeds on schedule, and an early draft has even gone out to some of the beta readers.

I also almost forgot to blog this month because time passes so quickly. And because I forgot this month only has 28 days. As the rhyme goes, "30 days hath September, plus the ones I don't remember. All the rest have 31, but when you know the month is done, February steals the sun. March and April steal it back, then May stabs April in the back. For August, that ungrateful hack."

-Will

There might not be a Hughday next week. We have to push through on the editing. But meanwhile we offer extra today.

Totally not my chicken. Stock Image.

Bucky clopped down the road, stamping his hooves into the old asphalt with cheerful abandon. The day was bright and lovely. A clear blue sky, flooded with crystalline sunshine and feathered with white clouds, stretched overhead. The magic hit about ten minutes before they left the castle, and Bucky’s coat glowed an ethereal white.

Hugh watched the autumn woods pass by them, awash with yellow, gold, and scarlet. Behind him, Bale rode on a chestnut Morgan mare, and behind the berserker, the delegation from Aberdine chugged along on their horses, grim-faced and looking like someone pissed in their cornflakes. Five Iron Dogs brought up the rear.

Bishop nudged his gelding and caught up, drawing even with Bucky.

Hugh waited.

Bishop cleared his throat.

“Something on your mind?”

“I know your people are good.”

“They are.”

“I mean no disrespect, but there are at least seventy mercs camped out in our field.”

“You mentioned that.”

Bishop glanced behind them.

“You’re bringing six soldiers.”

Hugh pretended to frown. “You think it’s overkill?”

“You know what I mean. They’ve got this guy, Silas. He’s as good as any of yours.”

Silas, huh? “Did Silas do that?” Hugh nodded at Bishop’s arm.

The lawman grimaced. “No. That was Falcon’s personal goons. He’s got these three guys that follow him everywhere. Not especially good, but big and happy to hurt people. You can always tell the types who are in it for a chance to dish out some pain. They get off on it.”

“Good to know.”

They rode for a bit more.

“We could turn around and get more people,” Bishop said.

“No need.”

“I don’t want any of you getting hurt for nothing.”

“Ah, that’s sweet. I didn’t know you cared.”

Bishop heaved a sigh and dropped back.

Bale chuckled softly.

“You watch yourself,” Hugh told him.

“Poor fella is worried about our safety.”

“He is the chief of police. He gets paid to worry about things like that. Besides, you heard what he said. They have Silas.”

“I heard that.” Bale’s eyes lit up. “As good as one of ours.”

“We’ll have to test that.”

The trees parted, and the road unrolled into the open, with Aberdine rising in the distance. Before the Shift, it was a typical small Southern town, with a handful of street lights and gas stations, a Wells Fargo, a firehouse, a school, and too many Dollar Generals. Now a sturdy wooden palisade, reinforced with steel beams, guarded the few blocks inside the city’s center, with scattered homesteads and farms crowding around it.

Like most modern settlements, Aberdine kept a cleared kill zone between the town and the few surrounding farms and the forest. Coller Road, on which they now rode, cut right through that cleared land, leading to the city gate. The gate was shut. Old tents were pitched on both sides of the road, some military issue, others the civilian camping type. People mulled about, dressed in random gear, unshaven, looking hungry.

Hugh scanned the camp. Sloppy. No guards or sentries posted. No signs for designated latrines, no cook tent, no mess hall. No cleared spots for drills and training.

The wind brought a whiff of shit and other human body odors.

Lovely.

The mercenaries glared at them as they rode past.

“Ooh, so much hostility,” Bale said. “I’m beginning to feel unwelcome.”

The bell on Aberdine’s fire tower pealed, ringing out three times.

Hugh looked at Bishop over his shoulder.

“I didn’t tell them to do that.”

So much for the element of surprise.

A group of men moved in front of the gates, blocking the road. The one in front was tall and beefy, with reddish hair cut regulation short, so close cropped on the temples, he looked like he had a short mohawk. Heavy jaw, almost no neck, small cold eyes. The man stared at them like a gator watching a deer sneak in for a drink in his lake.

The five mercs around him didn’t seem any friendlier. They were cleaner than the rest, better fed, better equipped, with some remnants of military bearing, but there was no doubt of it. This wasn’t an organized, disciplined unit with hierarchy and defined roles. This crew was run like a gang, with the clique at the top making all of the decisions. The best possible scenario. 

Lamar had been right once again.

They were about twenty yards away from the mohawk and his entourage. Hugh stopped. Everyone behind him halted as well.

“You must be the man in the castle,” the mohawk said.

“You must be Falcon,” Hugh said.

Around them the mercenaries drew closer.

“I am,” the leader said. “Now that we know who’s who, what are you doing in my town?”

#

Elara layered mushrooms and chopped parsnips in the bottom of the Dutch oven. She tossed a few sprigs of rosemary, fresh sage, and thyme on top of that, and reached for the garlic cloves. One, two, six, eight…

“Don’t you think that’s enough garlic?” Savanah said.

“No.”

Ten, fourteen. That should do it. She poured about a cup of white wine into the pot, picked up the chicken, and set it on top of the vegetables. She’d already seasoned it with salt, pepper, and smoked paprika.

The older witch shook her head. Her dark curly hair was wrapped into a tight bun today. She’d recently bought a new pair of glasses with bright red frames that complemented her warm brown skin, and her hair clip matched the scarlet shade exactly.

“Why do you even bother?”

Elara washed her hands and dried them on a blue kitchen towel. “He’s my husband and he asked for something delicious for dinner.”

Savannah rolled her eyes. “We have a fully staffed kitchen.”

“He didn’t ask them. He asked me.” Elara put the lid on, opened the oven, and heaved the heavy cast iron pot into it.

“You could have made something easy. Why this?”

“Because he’s French and Chicken en Cocotte is the only French main dish I know how to make.”

“What is happening to you?” Savannah demanded.

Elara leaned back. “It’s a bargain. I make this and he comes back safe.”

“Who are you bargaining with?”

Elara waved the kitchen towel around. “Fate, the Source of All Life, everything. Whoever is around.”

Savannah threw her hands up. “What about the budget projections?”

“I have them right here.” Elara pointed to a stack of paper on the table.

“In the kitchen?”

“The budget projections don’t care where I read them. I have fifty minutes until I need to take the lid off and turn the fire up. Plenty of time. Just let me get the potatoes cut up.”

Savannah gave her a resigned sigh. “I’ll brew us some tea.”

#

“It’s not your town,” Bishop said.

Falcon squinted at him. “I thought we had an understanding. Instead, you went behind my back. And this was all you could get? Seven men?”

“Hope it was worth it,” a large dark-haired man offered on Falcon’s left.

Falcon glared at him and turned back to Bishop. “You and I are going to have a long talk after I deal with this. It seems to me you still don’t understand the chain of command.”

“I’ll make this short,” Hugh said. “My wife is cooking a delicious dinner, and I don’t want to be late. Aberdine doesn’t want you here. You have an hour to clear out.”

Falcon smiled. Behind him a couple of his heavies chuckled. “Is that so?”

“It is.”

Falcon squinted at him. “The folks in town tell me you’re some kind of a big deal. Well, that doesn’t mean shit to me.”

Why was it always the hard way?

Hugh let out a bored sigh. “We can kill the lot of you, but it would take a while and I’m getting hungry. Why don’t you pick your best guy, and I’ll pick one of mine. Sound fair?”

The mercenary leader gave him a calculated look, surveyed Bale and the five Iron Dogs behind him, then glanced at the tents. Falcon was not a complete fool, or he wouldn’t be able to hold this lot together. Bishop had left to get help, and now seven soldiers rode straight into Falcon’s camp. The numbers were clearly on his side, yet this new group was unbothered and their leader was now giving him orders.

Hugh could practically feel the wheels turning in Falcon’s head. The merc leader was thinking that the magic was up, so it was likely a factor. He had to suspect that they had an ace up their sleeve, and Hugh had just handed him a chance to see what it was. In Falcon’s mind, they could see what they were up against and even if they lost, they could always swarm them after. They had ten times as many warm bodies.

“Cherry, go get Silas,” Falcon ordered.

The dark-haired man who ran his mouth earlier took off and disappeared between the tents.

A minute passed. Another.

Cherry double timed back, slightly out of breath. A blond man followed him, carrying a katana in the traditional saya scabbard. He wore a black turtleneck, loose-fitting athletic pants, and dark tennis shoes. His hair was cut short, his jaw was clean shaven. He glanced at Hugh, his expression flat, and stopped in front of Falcon.

“Here he is,” Cherry announced.

“They want to put one of theirs against one of ours,” Falcon said. “I need you to explain to them why that was a bad idea.”

Silas turned and took five steps forward. He stood about five ten, with the kind of build that came from living by the sword – lean, spare, but strong, as if he was twisted together from steel cables.

Bale got down from his horse and made a show of loosening up his shoulders and back. “So, you’re their secret weapon?”

Silas didn’t answer. His gaze was fixed on Hugh as if Bale didn’t even exist.

Bale lumbered closer and scrutinized the swordsman. “What is this shit you’re wearing? Must be very high speed.”

The look on Silas’ face turned slightly desperate.

Falcon grinned in anticipation. The man was clearly loving this.

“Get them, Silas,” Cherry called out.

Silas held still.

“Have you got anyone else?” Bale leaned to the side to look past Silas at Falcon and his mercenaries. “This one looks a bit beaten down and half starved.”

“Silas!” Falcon snapped.

Silas didn’t move. He seemed in pain.

“What are you waiting for?” Falcon snapped.

Enough was enough. It was time to put Silas out of his misery.

“I’m waiting for you to put one of your men up for the fight,” Hugh said.

“Are you stupid?” one of Falcon’s men demanded.

“My man is standing in front of you,” Falcon said.

“No,” Hugh said. “These are both my men.”

Something broke in Silas’ expression, as if a wall inside him came crashing down.

The mercenaries stared at them.

“Dog!” Hugh called out.

Silas snapped to attention. “Yes, Preceptor!”

“Kill the next man who steps forward.”

“Yes, Preceptor!”

Silas pivoted around, faced Falcon, and unsheathed his sword.

Bale draped his arm around Silas’ shoulders. “You remembered how. See, I knew it would come back to you.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Falcon roared.

Hugh put some steel into his voice. “Put a soldier up or concede.”

Falcon stared at Silas. “Have you lost your fucking mind? What do you think is going to happen to your wife after we kill these assholes? Do the fucking math –”

Bale charged forward, mace in hand, the muscles on his right arm boiling and ballooning into a massive limb. None of the mercs had time to react. The berserker swung, monstrous muscle flexing. The mace whistled through the air and smashed into Falcon’s face. The mercenary leader’s skull cracked like an egg under a hammer. Chunks of brain and bone exploded, splattering onto the other men.

Bale twisted. Flesh rippled across his frame. His voice was a low inhuman growl.

“Who else wants to threaten my sworn brother’s family?”

He pointed the mace at the largest merc. “Is it you?” The mace moved to Cherry. “You?”

They backed away from him.

On the left, one of the mercenaries in the field by the tents raised a crossbow. On the right a mage was chanting, building up power and winding it into a bow like cotton candy on a stick.

Hugh pulled the magic to him and opened his mouth. “Osanda sapawur daas kair.”

Kneel before me and be silent.

The power words tore out of him, shaping the very matrix of magic. Power pulsed from Hugh, exploding in all directions like a blast wave from a bomb.

Seventy pairs of knees hit the dirt. The entire camp knelt as one. Only Bale, Silas, and the riders stayed where they were.

The mercenaries’ faces contorted.  They were trying to rise, trying to scream, and couldn’t do either. 

Silence claimed the field. You could hear a proverbial pin drop. Above them a hawk swooped, crying out.

This was the ancient power he had inherited from the Builder of Towers. He shouldn’t have been able to use it. Roland had purged him, ripping that gift away from Hugh, and yet there it was.

He’d been practicing for the last month, and the magic was getting easier. Every time he used a power word, it hurt less. He’d timed this one for about 10 seconds, because he wanted helplessness to sink in until it birthed terror. To the mercenaries kneeling on the field, every moment would stretch into eternity. They were panicking now.  He saw it in their glassy eyes.

“One hour,” Hugh ordered. “Get your shit and be gone.”

The magic ran its course. The spell collapsed and the entire camp fell to the ground.

Bale hefted the mace onto his shoulder. “Silas, we looked for you everywhere. Look at you! You got married and none of us were invited. Introduce me to your wife, you bloody ass. I can’t wait to meet her.”

Silas turned to Hugh, his eyes still haunted and desperate.

“Preceptor, there is something wrong with my wife.”

Of course, it couldn’t be that easy. Hugh swung out of the saddle. “Lead the way.”

Elara’s Chicken en Cocotte with Roasted Young Potatoes

Modified from Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street recipe. The original is behind a paywall, but I highly recommend the subscription.

Chicken

• 1 3-4 pounds whole chicken
• 10-12 garlic cloves
• 3-4 parsnips, peeled and cut into large chunks
• 1 lb brown mushrooms, sliced into large chunks or whole if they are small
• 3 thyme sprigs
• 1 sprig sage
• 1 cup white wine (I used 2021 High Planes Rose from Lewis Wines)
• 1 small bunch of parsley
• butter, salt, pepper and smoked paprika

Roasted potatoes

• 1 5lb bag of young gold potatoes
• 1/4 cup of animal lard (if you are not BFFs with Grace Draven who sent me Wagyu beef lard, any lard will do. Duck fat would be great. You can do butter. You can also go with the olive oil for a healthier spin. But Wagyu lard was to die for.)
• A dash of Italian seasoning
• salt, pepper

You need a large Dutch over for this.

1. Heat the over to 350 degrees with the rack in the center. Season the chicken with salt, pepper, and smoked paprika.
2. Throw mushrooms and parsnips into the Dutch oven, arranging them in a single layer if possible. Scatter whole garlic cloves and sprigs of herbs on top of the vegetables.
3. Pour 1 cup wine and 1 cup water over the vegetables. Place the chicken on top of the vegetable layer and put the lid on. Bake at 350 for 50 minutes.
4. Remove the pot from the oven. Melt some butter and brush it over the chicken. I ended up using around 1/4 cup of so. Return the chicken, uncovered, to the oven and turn it up to 450. Cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes or until the temperature of the thighs or breast reaches 175. The chicken will brown and develop a nice crust.
5. Remove the pot from the oven. Using tongs, place the chicken into a deep platter or baking dish, tent with foil. (The original recipe used leeks and returned the Dutch oven to the over for another 10 minutes. I hate leeks, so my vegetables were perfectly cooked.) Discard herbs and half of the garlic. Remove vegetables to a serving platter. Mash the remaining garlic into paste in the Dutch oven.
6. Turn off the oven – super important step I sometimes forget.
7. After the chicken rested for about 10 minutes or so, remove it onto the cutting board. Pour the drippings from the platter into the Dutch oven. Set the Dutch oven on the stove and bring to boil, whisking the sauce. (Because I am a savage and I know my family’s tastes, I whisked about 1/3 packet of powdered turkey gravy into the sauce, but you can skip this step.) Cook until thickened. Mix in finely chopped parsley.
8. Carve the chicken to your preference and arrange it on the platter on top of potatoes and vegetables. Or serve everything separately. (I served separately.) Pour the sauce over the chicken – it will be divine – and definitely serve it at the table.

Potatoes

1. While the chicken is baking for that initial 50 minutes, wash the potatoes and slice them in half. Place the potatoes into a bowl, season with salt, pepper, and a dash of Italian seasoning, mix well, add you choice of melted fat or olive oil, mix again. dump the potatoes onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper for the ease of cleaning. Arrange them cut side down. You wouldn’t think they would brown with paper, but they do.
2. When you remove the chicken from the oven for the first time and turn the heat up to 450, pop the potatoes on the bottom rack. They will need roughly 40 minutes to bake, but you might want to check them at 30, depending on how small your potatoes are. The cut side should be crispy and the top side should be soft.

Grace Draven made her chicken with leeks, so if you want to ask her about it, here is her website and Facebook.

The post Oh no, not the Hughday? first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

In reply to Celia.

We give them swords and let them fight to the death?

In reply to Cindy Houghton.

I really like the body piercing aspect but would go one step further with direct implants into the skin. Wonder if that would work? Maybe allow you to keep a certain powerful sigl close to an area of the body that it needs to sit in to work correctly. Has anyone brought this up already and I’ve missed it?

Please note: This originally went live on my Patreon page on Sunday night, February 9, 2025. If you want to see most of my business posts these days, you’ll find them on Patreon. I’m only going to post a handful here.

Doing The Work Amid The Noise

There are times in life when being a writer is hard. I don’t mean real-world hard. Real-world hard is when your job is so important that one small error means someone else dies. There are a lot of real-world hard jobs in the world, and they keep the rest of us safe and alive.

As I said in a post a few weeks back, entertainment is important as well. We have an obligation to help those who are doing real-world hard jobs by giving them some kind of respite at the end of their long days.

But that means we have to do the work, and the work comes out of our brains. When we’re panicked and distracted—checking the news every fifteen minutes, looking at our social media, worrying aloud with our friends about what is going to happen next—it’s difficult, if not near impossible to concentrate on our made-up worlds.

They feel so small and unimportant.

We don’t see readers enjoying our work. We have no idea that a reader will close a book and hug it, like I did a week ago when I finished Robert Crais’s latest, The Big Empty. I know that Bob is a slow writer, and I wish he wasn’t, because I would love another of his books right now.

He lives in L.A. Not only are people there dealing with the chaos that is America right now, they’re dealing with the devastating losses of many parts of their community. I suspect he’s distracted.

I know that Connie Willis is because I’m following her Facebook page in which she aggregates all the news of the day. I have no idea how she finds the time to write fiction or if she even is. I hope she is.

I’m a former journalist. I love information, the more the better. But, after the election, I shut off all media. I canceled all of my major newspaper subscriptions, stopped watching everything but the weather on any news channel, and got a lot done. I needed to because of an ongoing business crisis.

But I also needed the rest.

And I knew if I didn’t figure out how to control the information that came to me, I would not write another sentence—at least in fiction.

Writing fiction, as unglamorous as it sounds, is my job. It’s what I do for a living. But it’s also what I would do if the world ended tomorrow (which has gotten closer, according to the Doomsday Clock run by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).

I make up stories. I always have. I write them down and have done that since I was in grade school.

Storytelling keeps me sane.

After the despair of the election (not shock, because I kept saying all summer [hell, all year] that this was possible, even if I wasn’t really listening to myself), I needed that quiet. I needed to accept that the world as I had known it for years would change dramatically.

How dramatically? I had—and have—no idea. This post is not about what’s going on out there in the real world. It’s changing too fast. I sat down at 1 p.m. on a Sunday, knowing that by the time I finish, more news will pour in.

It might be good; it might be bad; it might be hopeful; it might be devastating. It might be all those things at once.

It’s too much for the brain to cope with—and right now, it’s designed that way. Which is why I urge you to take care of yourself and your family first. Then take care of your community, whatever that might be, and then pick one or two or three issues to work on and be part of the solution for. If all of us do that, our differences will make sure that we will cover the entire spectrum of problems that are popping up like weeds.

Yes, I know. People are dying. I know. The situation is growing more dire by the day.

One step at a time. That’s all we can do. See above.

The problem is, then, how to corral the brain and give it enough space so that you can write.

That solution is different for each and every one of us. And it’s different each one of us as an individual at different points in our lives.

I can only give you examples from my own life.

Example #1: I got very sick when I was living on the Oregon Coast. I’m already allergic to half the world; there, we later discovered, I was living in mold and was allergic to that too. We moved to the dry desert here in Nevada just in time. I doubt I would have made it through the year otherwise.

But, I was and am a writer. I wrote through all of that, and even wrote a book about my methods for writing when I barely had enough strength to get out of bed. The book is called Writing With Chronic Illness.

Some of the solutions in that book might work for some of you now. Doing the writing first, being happy with what you can accomplish, accepting your limits—all of those are important.

I did them as best I could there. Here, in Las Vegas, I’m healthier, although the chronic conditions do fell me more than I would like. I can get through them easier in this dry climate, so sometimes I forget what I had learned.

Example #2: Our close friend Bill Trojan died, and Dean had to handle Bill’s horribly messy estate. At the same time, my editor at one of the traditional publishing houses had a mental meltdown and spent a half an hour on the phone, screaming at me and telling me I was the worst writer on the planet.

No one treats me like that. No one. So I immediately divorced that publisher, offering to pay back the money they had invested in me and my work so that I could get the rights to my books back.

That was at least $250,000 that I would pay—even though we were embroiled in the estate mess and Dean was not working on publishing and writing, due to that big problem.

My confidence was shaken, and we were in financial difficulties. I had to figure out how to write a funny novel that was still under contract.

I did, a page here and a page there. I remember sitting in my office and writing long paragraphs about how awful that editor was to get her out of my head so that I could actually finish a book that was under contract for someone else.

I did it, but shutting out the noise was almost impossible. It took concentration. It took will power. It took a daily reminder to myself that writing is supposed to be fun.

And you know what? Many days, it ended up being that way, just because of the determination.

Example #3: As many of you know, the last two or so years of my life have been filled with turmoil. Dean lost much of his eyesight, which meant we had to make some massive changes in our lives. Then, just as he was getting used to the changes, he fell on a 5K race and destroyed his right shoulder.

He couldn’t do much work. He was healing. I cared for him and, as I dug deeper into the business at our publishing company, I realized it was sick too.

We had to make drastic changes there, and I had to take over the company completely.

Which meant it got run the Kris way—lots of questions, lots of systems, lots of data, lots of procedures. The old staff buckled under the Kris method (which had not been in place since I got very ill in 2015), and within 2 months, they were gone…leaving problems so massive behind that those problems either had to be solved or the company had to be dissolved.

Dean and I chose solving those problems, and we had (and have) great help in doing so. These sorts of events teach you who your friends really are.

I knew, as we dug in, that I was not going to be focused on the writing. I needed to figure out how to harness that focus in a different way.

I had a novel to finish as well as short story deadlines from traditional short fiction editors. I was not going to miss those deadlines, and I needed to finish that novel.

The problem was that in this small condo, I did not have a second business office. I had to do the work on my laptop and my writing computer in my writing office.

I knew I needed help.

So I set up a challenge with other writers. I made it costly for me to lose (not just pride—which, pardon my French, fuck if I care about personal pride). I started the first challenge in December of 2023, and continued the challenges through most of 2024.

I lost a couple of times. But the challenge was the only thing that got me to the computer. Daily word count…that I had to report (and God, I hate reporting). I couldn’t fudge it for my own sake, and I didn’t.

I finished that novel, and a lot of short fiction, before September hit, and the business stuff combined with some legal matters that were all do-not-miss and I had to miss some writing days.

It irked me—and kept the writing as a focus.

Usually I don’t bring others into my writing process, but I knew I would need it in 2024. So I did it.

I still have a writing challenge going, this one for short stories, because I know that now, I need to get back to massive novel production, and I didn’t want to lose my short story focus. I have to do both (which I have done throughout my career).

It’s not as draconian as the 2024 challenge, but my life is different now. The business has settled into a pattern. We’ve moved the main offices to Nevada, which means I have a business desk. (Yay!) And we’ve gotten through some of the mess left by the old staff, and what’s left we’re slowly wrapping our arms around.

One thing I noticed, though, in all of those crises, is that the world swirled around me, with its problems and its demands. In each of them, it felt like a massive storm pounding on the outside of my house—you know the kind: the rain is horizontal, the winds are devastating, and the view outside the windows is black and gray, with almost no visibility at all.

You just have to wait out those storms and know that when they’re over, everything will be different, but some things will still stand. There will be rebuilding. There will be heartbreak. But the sun will have come out to reveal what’s left.

In the middle of it, though, you just have to survive it and keep the important things safe.

Your writing is one of those important things. It will take effort to keep it safe. Effort on your part.

And you’ll have to figure out what it will take for you to do it. My methods might not work for you. Find what works. Realize that those things might not work in a different kind of crisis.

But you can find a way to be with yourself during these tough times.

Here are a few practical things you can do in most (not all) crises:

• Protect your safe space. For me, that’s my writing space. I couldn’t do it during this last crisis, but I managed somehow. It felt uncomfortable and reminded me yet again about the importance of having a dedicated writing computer.
• Shut off the internet. Dean uses a different computer for his internet research—one that’s just a foot or two away from his writing computer. I shut off my wi-fi, so that clicking over to the internet for research takes a conscious action, and often makes me realize that I was just heading over to distract myself. (Different strokes, y’know.)
• Set a daily writing time. Make sure your family knows what it is, and that you shouldn’t be disturbed. Try to pick a time when it’s not easy to disturb you (early mornings; late evenings)

There are so many other practical things you can do, but again, they become specific to you.

One other thing—a tough thing—is that sometimes the project you were working on when the crisis hit is not the project your creative voice needs right now. You might have to switch—something shorter, something longer, something that requires less research, something that requires a different kind of concentration.

It’s up to you.

But the key here is to remember that when you write, you’re inside and safe from the storm. It will rage around you unabated while you’re working. It’ll probably (sadly) still be there when you’re done with today’s writing session.

But you got that session done. It’s a victory.

Celebrate the tiny victories. Keep writing.

And remember, in almost every difficult time, the only way out is through.

 

“Doing The Work Amid The Noise ,” copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

 

Here’s a promo video for Vesper’s Polish translation of Stinger that was posted by mroczne_strony!

https://www.robertmccammon.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/mroczne_strony_602a2ada705b4af4bbbc4044882c789e.mp4

House Andrews are deep in the editing cave for Maggie. How deep? They shared an update yesterday on Facebook:

A lot of work, but of course what we take from it is a very chalant OMG OMG OVER EIGHT HUNDRED PAGEEEEES! WE SHALL DEVOUR!

No? Just me? Hehe.

But that takes a lot of effort. I am their herald today, conveying their apologies that they will not have time for a Wednesday post.

Instead, I’d like to ask you something I’ve been curious about: what do you do in your every day life to add a bit of whimsy to it?

This was a post a while ago on TikTok and I’ve had the most lighthearted few moments reading the comments. For example, someone shared that they meow songs to their cats “so they can hear the lyrics in their own language“. Others that they “put on pyjama sets the night of fresh sheets, so they can have ‘fancy sleep’” or “when it’s time to wash the dishes, I tell them it’s bath time“.

I realised I’ve been doing this since I was a child: whenever there’s a storm out, I fling out my hands (dramatically, of course) and call out “WINDS!” and when the wind intensifies, I feel like a powerful witch. Nowadays, I also look expectantly at Mr Mod R until he acts impressed with my magical powers.

So, what are the small things you do that are perhaps silly, but bring you a bit of joy in a world where it’s increasingly hard to find some?

The post Busy, busy first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

This is the full cover dust jacket for the hardcover of Heir of Light. I would have posted it when I posted the paperback full cover, but I just received it today, so I’m posting it now. The text should be the same on the cover flap as it is on the trade paperback. And now I’m going back to the joy of copy-edit reviews for Wild Road >.<.

Pita Cardenas finds herself with the toughest case of her career. The only attorney in the small town of Rio Gordo, she decides to fight the biggest railroad company in the state to get compensation for the widow of a man who might have raced a train.

Everyone thinks the man guilty. Even Pita believes that. But the truth, once discovered, proves far more complicated that Pita could have imagined.

Another powerful and haunting mystery story by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “Discovery” was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Short Story.

“Discovery” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Discovery By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“OVER THERE.” Pita Cardenas waved a hand at the remaining empty spot on the floor of her office. The Federal Express deliveryman rested a hand on top of the stack of boxes on his handcart.

“I don’t think it’ll fit.”

It probably wouldn’t. Her office was about the size of the studio apartment she’d had when she went to law school in Albuquerque. She could have had a cubicle with more square footage if she’d taken the job that La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia offered her when she graduated from law school five years before.

But her mother had been dying, and had refused to leave Rio Gordo. So Pita had come back to the town she thought she’d escaped from, put out her shingle, and had gotten a handful of cases, enough to pay the rent on this sorry excuse for an office. If she’d wanted something bigger, she would have had to buy, and even at Rio Gordo’s depressed prices, she couldn’t afford payments on the most dilapidated building in town.

She stood up. The Fed Ex guy, who drove here every day from Lubbock, was looking at her with pity. He was trim and tanned, with a deep West Texas accent. If she had been less tired and overwhelmed, she would have flirted with him.

“Let’s put this batch in the bathroom,” she said and led the way through the rabbit path she’d made between the boxes. The Fed Ex guy followed, dragging the six boxes on his hand truck and probably chafing at the extra time she was costing him.

She opened the door. He put the boxes inside, tipped an imaginary hat to her, and left. She’d have to crawl over them to get to the toilet, but she’d manage.

Six boxes today, twenty yesterday, thirty the day before. Dwyer, Ralbotten, Seacur and Czolb was burying her in paper.

Of course, she had expected it. She was a solo practitioner in a town whose population probably didn’t equal the number of people who worked at DRS&C.

People had told her she was crazy to take this case. But she was crazy like an impoverished attorney. Every other firm in New Mexico had told her client, Nan Hughes, to settle. The problem was that Nan didn’t want to settle. Settling meant losing everything she owned.

Pita took the case and charged Nan two thousand dollars, with more due and owing when (if) the case went to trial. Pita didn’t plan on taking the case to trial. At trial, she wouldn’t just get creamed, she’d be pureed, sautéed and recycled.

But she did plan to work for that two grand. She would spend exactly one month filing motions, doing depositions, and listening to offers. She figured once she had actual numbers, she’d be able to convince Nan to take a deal.

If not, she’d resign and wish Nan luck finding a new attorney.

Her actions wouldn’t hurt Nan. Nan had a spectacular loser of a case. She was taking on the railroads and two major insurance companies. She had no idea how bad things could get.

Pita would show her. Nan wouldn’t exactly be happy with her lot—how could she be, when she’d lost her husband, her business, and her home on the same day?—but she would finally understand how impossible the winning was.

Pita was doing her a favor and making a little money besides.

And what was wrong with that?

***

At its heart, the case was simple. Ty Hughes tried to beat a train and failed. He survived long enough to leave his wife a voice mail message, which Pita had heard in all its heartbreaking slowness:

“Nan baby, I tried to beat it. I thought I could beat it.”

Then his diesel truck engine caught fire and he died, horribly alive, in the middle of the wreck.

The accident occurred on a long stretch of brown nothingness on the New Mexico side of the Texas/New Mexico border. A major highway ran a half mile parallel to the tracks. On the opposite side of the tracks stood the Hughes ranch and all its outbuildings.

Nan Hughes and the people who worked her spread watched the accident. She didn’t answer her cell because she’d left it on the kitchen counter in her panic to get down the dirt road where her husband’s cattle truck had been demolished by a fast-moving train.

And not just any train.

This train pulled dozens of oil tankers.

It was a miracle the truck engine fire hadn’t spread to the tankers and the entire region hadn’t exploded into one great fireball.

Pita had been familiar with the case long before Nan Hughes came to her. For weeks, the news carried stories about dead cattle along the highway, the devastated widow, the ruined ranch, and the angry railroad officials who had choice (and often bleeped) words about the idiots who tried to race trains.

It didn’t matter that the crossing was unmarked. Even if Ty hadn’t left that confession on Nan’s voice mail (which she had deleted but which the cell company was so thoughtfully able to retrieve), trains in this part of the country were visible for miles in either direction.

The railroads wanted the ranch, the cattle (what was left of them), the life insurance money, and millions from the ranch’s liability insurance. The liability insurance company was willing to settle for a simple million, and the other law firms had told Nan to sell the ranch, and pay the railroads from the proceeds. That way she could live on Ty’s life insurance and move away from the site of the disaster.

But Nan kept saying that Ty would haunt her if she gave in. That he had never raced a train in his life. That he knew how far away a train was by its appearance against the horizon—and that he had taught her the same trick.

When Pita gently asked why Ty had confessed to trying to beat the train, Nan had burst into tears.

“Something went wrong,” she said. “Maybe he got stuck. Maybe he hadn’t looked up. He was in shock. He was dying. He was just trying to talk to me one last time.”

Pita could hear any good lawyer tear that argument to shreds, just using Ty’s wording. If Ty wanted to talk with her, why hadn’t he told her he loved her? Why had he talked about the train?

Pita had gently asked that too. Nan had looked at her from across the desk, her wet cheeks chapped from all the tears she’d shed.

“He knew I saw what happened. He wanted me to know he never would have done that to me on purpose.”

In this context, “on purpose” had a lot of different definitions. Ty Hughes probably didn’t want his wife to see him die in a train wreck, certainly not in a train wreck he caused. But he had crossed a railroad track with a double-decker cattle truck filled carrying two hundred head. He had no acceleration, and no maneuverability.

He’d taken a gamble, and he’d lost.

At least, Nan hadn’t seen the fire in the cab. The truck had flipped over the train, landing on the highway side of the tracks, and had been impossible to see from the ranch side. Whatever Ty Hughes’s last few minutes had looked like, Nan had missed them.

She had only her imagination, her anger at the railroads, and her unshakeable faith in her dead husband.

Those were not enough to win a case of this magnitude.

If someone asked Pita what her case really was (and if this imaginary someone could get her to answer honestly), what she’d say was that she was going to try Ty Hughes before his wife, and show her how impossible a defense of the man’s actions that morning would be in court.

And Pita believed her own powers of persuasion were enough to convince her jury of one to settle.

***

But the boxes were daunting. In them were bits and pieces of information, reproduced letters and memos that probably showed some kind of railroad duplicity, however minor. A blot on an engineer’s record, for example, or an accident at that same crossing twenty years before.

If Pita had the support of a giant law firm like La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia, she might actually delve into that material. Instead, she let it stack up like unread novels in the home of an obsessive compulsive.

The only thing she did do was take out the witness list, which had come in its own envelope as part of court-ordered discovery. The list had the witnesses’ names along with their addresses, phone numbers, and the dates of their depositions. DRS&C was so thorough that each witness had a single line notation at the bottom of the cover sheet describing the reason the witness had been deposed in this case.

The list would help Pita in her quest to recreate the accident itself. She had dozens of questions. Had someone inspected the truck to see if it malfunctioned at the time of the accident? Why had Ty stayed in the truck when it was clear that it was going to catch fire? How badly had he been injured? How good was Ty’s eyesight? And how come no one helped him before the truck caught fire?

She was going to cover all her bases. All she needed was one argument strong enough to let Nan keep the house.

She was afraid she might not even find that.

DRS&C’s categories were pretty straightforward. They had categories for the ranch, the railroad, and the eyewitnesses.

A number of the witnesses belonged to separate lawsuits, started because of the fender benders on the nearby highway. About a dozen cars had damage—some while they were stopped beside the road, and others because they’d been going too fast to stop when the train accident occurred.

Pita started charting the location of the cars as she figured this category out, and realized all of them had been in the far inside lane, going east. People who had pulled over to help Ty and the railroad employees had instead been dealing with accidents involving their own cars.

A separate group of accident victims had resolved insurance claims: their vehicles had been hit or had hit a cow that had escaped from the cattle truck. One poor man had had his SUV gored by an enraged bull.

Cars heading west had had an easier time of things. None had hit each other and a few had stopped. Of those who had stopped, some were listed as 911 callers. One had grabbed a fire extinguisher and eventually tried to put out the truck cab fire. That person had prevented the fire from spreading to the tankers.

But the category that caught Pita’s attention was a simple one. Several people on the list had been marked “Witness,” with no accompanying explanation.

One had an extra long zip code, and as she entered it into her own computer data base, she realized that the last three digits weren’t part of the zip code at all.

They were a previous notation, one that hadn’t been deleted.

Originally, this witness had been in the 911 category.

She decided to start with him.

***

C.P. Williams was a Texas financier of the Houston variety, even though his offices were in Lubbock. He wore cowboy boots, but they were custom made, hand-tooled jobbies that wouldn’t last fifteen minutes on a real ranch. He had an oversized silver belt buckle and he wore a bolo tie, but his shiny suit was definitely not off the rack and neither was the silk shirt underneath it. His cufflinks matched his belt buckle and he twisted them as he led Pita into his office.

“I already gave a deposition,” he said.

“Before I was on the case,” Pita said.

His office was big, with original oil paintings of the Texas Hill Country, and a large but not particularly pretty view of downtown Lubbock.

“Can’t you just read it?” He slipped behind a custom-made desk. The chair in front was made of hand-tooled leather that made her think of his impractical boots.

She sat down. The leather pattern bit through the thin pants of her best suit.

“I have a few questions of my own.” She took out a small tape recorder. “I may have to call you in for a second deposition, but I hope not.”

Mostly because she would have to rent space as well as a court reporter in order to conduct that deposition. Right now, she simply wanted to see if any testimony was worth the extra cost.

“I don’t have that much time. I barely have enough time to see you now.” He glanced at his watch for emphasis.

She clicked on the recorder. “Then let’s do this quickly. Please state your name and occupation for the record.”

He did.

When he finished, she said, “On the morning of the accident—”

“I never saw that damn accident,” he said. “I told the other lawyers that.”

She was surprised. Why had they talked with him then? She was interviewing blind. So she went with the one fact she knew.

“You called 911. Why?”

“Because of the train,” he said.

“What about the train?”

“Damn thing was going twice as fast as it should have been.”

For the first time since she’d taken this case, she finally felt a flicker of real interest. “Trains speed?”

“Of course trains speed,” he said. “But this one wasn’t just speeding. It was going well over a hundred miles an hour.”

“You know that because…?”

“I was going 70. It passed me. I had nothing else to do, so I figured out the rate of passage. Speed limits for trains on that section of track is 65. Most weeks, the trains match me, or drop back just a bit. This one was leaving me in the dust.”

She was leaning forward. If the train was speeding—and if she could prove it—then the accident wasn’t Ty’s fault alone. He wouldn’t have been able to judge how fast the train was going. And if it was going twice as fast as usual, it would have reached him two times quicker than he expected.

“So why call 911?” she asked. “What can they do?”

“Not damn thing,” he said. “I just wanted it on record when the train derailed or blew through a crossing or hit some kid on the way to school.”

“You could have contacted the railroad or maybe the NTSB,” she said. “They could have fined the operators or pulled the engineers off the train.”

“I could have,” he said. “I didn’t want to.”

She frowned. “Why not?”

“Because I wanted the record.”

And because he repeated that sentence, she felt a slight shiver. “Have you done this before? Clocked trains going too fast, I mean.”

“Yeah.” He sounded surprised at the question. “So?”

“Do you call 911 on people speeding in cars?”

His eyes narrowed. “No.”

“So why do you call on trains?”

“I told you. The potential damage—”

“Did you contact the police after the accident, then?” she asked.

“No. It was already on record. They could find it. That attorney did.”

“I wouldn’t know how to compute how fast a train was going while I was driving,” she said. “I mean, if we were going the same speed or something close, sure. But not an extra thirty miles an hour or more. That’s quite a trick.”

“Simple math,” he said. “You had to do problems like that in school. We all did.”

“I suppose,” she said. “But it’s not something I would think to do. Why did you?”

For the first time, he looked down. He didn’t say anything.

“Do you have something against the railroad?” she asked.

His head shot up. “Now you sound like them.”

“Them?”

“Those other lawyers.”

She started to nod, but made herself stop. “What did they say?”

His lips thinned. “They said that I’m just making stuff up to get the railroad in trouble. They said that I’m pathetic. Me! I outearn half those walking suits. I make money every damn day, and I do it without investing in any land holdings or railroad companies. They have no idea who I am.”

Neither did she, really, but she thought she’d humor him.

“You’re a good citizen,” she said.

“Damn straight.”

“Trying to protect other citizens.”

“That’s right.”

“From the railroads.”

“They think they can run all over the countryside like they’re invulnerable. That train pulling oil tankers, imagine if it had derailed in that accident. You’d’ve heard the explosion in Rio Gordo.”

Probably seen it too. He had a point.

“Tell me,” she said. “Is there any way we can prove the train was going that fast?”

“The 911 call,” he said.

“Besides the 911 call,” she said.

He leaned back as he considered her question. “I’m sure a lot of people saw it. Or you could examine that truck. You know, it’s just basic physics. If you vary the speed of an incoming train in an impact with a similar truck frame, you’ll get differing results. I’m sure you can find some experts to testify.”

You could find experts to testify on anything. But she didn’t say that. She was curious about his expertise, though. He seemed to know a lot about trains.

She asked, “Wouldn’t a train derail at that speed when it hit a truck like that?”

“Actually, no. It would be less likely to derail when it was going too fast. That truck was a cattle truck, right? If the train hit the cattle car and not the cab, then the train would’ve treated that truck like tissue. Most cattle cars are made of aluminum. At over a hundred miles per hour, the train would have gone through it like paper.”

Interesting. She would check that.

“One last question, Mr. Williams. When did the railroad fire you?”

He blinked at her, stunned. She had caught him. That’s why DRS&C’s attorneys had called him pathetic. Because he had a reason for his train obsession.

A bad reason.

“That was a long time ago,” he whispered.

But she still might be able to use him if he had some kind of expertise. If his old job really did require that he clock trains by sight alone.

“What did you do for them?”

He coughed, then had the grace to finally meet her gaze. “I was a security guard at the station here in Lubbock.”

Security guard. Not an engineer, not anyone with special training. Just a guy with a phony badge and a gun.

“That’s when you learned to clock trains,” she said.

He smiled. “You have to do something to pass the time.”

She bit back her frustration. For a few minutes, he’d given her some hope. But all she had was a fired security guard with a grudge.

She wrapped up the interview as politely as she could, and headed into the bright Texas sunshine.

And allowed herself one small moment to wish that C.P. Williams had been a real witness, one that could have opened this case wide.

Then she sighed, and went back to preparing her case for her jury of one.

***

Most everyone else in the witness category on DRS&C’s list was either a rubbernecker or someone who had made a false 911 call. Pita had had no idea how many people reported a crime or an accident after seeing coverage of it on television, but she was starting to learn.

She was also learning why the police didn’t fine or arrest these people. Most of them were certifiably crazy.

Pita was beginning to think the list was worthless. Then she interviewed Earl Jessup Jr.

Jessup was a contractor who had been on his way to Lubbock to pick up a friend from the airport when he’d seen the accident. He’d pulled over, and because he was so well known in Rio Gordo, someone had remembered he was there.

When Pita arrived at his immaculate house in one of Rio Gordo’s failed housing developments, she promised herself she wouldn’t interview any more witnesses. Then Jessup pulled the door open. He smiled in recognition. So did she.

She had talked with him in the hospital cafeteria during her mother’s final surgery. He’d been there for his brother, who’d been in a particularly horrendous accident, and who had somehow managed to survive.

They hadn’t exchanged names.

He was a small man with brown hair in need of a good trim. His house smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and aftershave. The living room had been modified—lowered furniture, and wide paths cut through what had once been wall-to-wall carpet.

“Your brother moved in with you, huh?” she asked.

“He needed somebody,” Jessup said with a finality that closed the subject.

He led her into the kitchen. On the right side of the room, the cabinets had been pulled from the walls. A dishwasher peeked out of the debris. On the left were frames for lowered countertops. Only the sink, the stove and the refrigerator remained intact, like survivors in a war zone.

He pulled a chair out for her at the kitchen table. The table was shorter than regulation height. An ashtray sat near the end of the table, but no chair. That had to be where his brother usually parked.

Pita pulled out her tape recorder and a notebook. She explained again why she was there, and asked Jessup to state some information for the record. She implied, as she had with all the others, that this informal conversation was as good as being under oath.

Jessup smiled as she went through her spiel. He seemed to know that his words would have no real bearing on the case unless he was giving a formal deposition.

“I didn’t see the accident,” he said. “I got there after.”

He’d missed the fender benders and the first wave of the injured cows. He’d pulled up just as the train stopped. He’d been the one to organize the scene. He’d sent two men east and two men west to slow traffic until the sheriff arrived.

He’d made sure people in the various accidents exchanged insurance information, and he got the folks who’d suffered minor bumps and bruises to the side of the road. He directed a couple of teenagers to keep an eye on the injured animals, and make sure none of them made for the road again.

Then he’d headed down the embankment toward the overturned truck.

“It wasn’t on fire yet?”

“No,” he said. “I have no idea how it got on fire.”

She frowned. “It overturned. It was leaking diesel and the engine was on.”

“So the fancy Dallas lawyers tell me,” he said.

“You don’t believe them?”

“First thing any good driver does after an accident is shut off his engine.”

“Maybe,” she said. “If he’s not in shock. Or seriously injured. Or both.”

“Ty had enough presence of mind to make that phone call.” Everyone in Rio Gordo knew about that call. Some even cursed it, thinking Nan could own the railroads if Ty hadn’t picked up his cell. “He would’ve shut off his engine.”

Pita wasn’t so sure.

“Besides, he wasn’t in the cab.”

That caught her attention. “How do you know?”

“I saw him. He was sitting on some debris halfway up the road. That’s why I was in no great hurry to get down there. He’d gotten himself out, and there wasn’t much I could do until the ambulance arrived.”

Jessup had a construction worker’s knowledge of injuries. He knew how to treat bruises and he knew what to do for trauma. He’d talked with her about that in the cafeteria, when he’d told her how helpless he’d felt coming on his brother’s car wrapped around a utility pole. He hadn’t been able to get his brother out of the car—the ambulance crew later used the jaws of life—and he was afraid his brother would bleed out right there.

“But you went to help Ty anyway,” Pita said.

Jessup got up, walked to the stove, and lifted up the coffee pot. He’d been brewing the old-fashioned way, in a percolator, probably because he didn’t have any counter space.

“Want some?” he asked.

“Please,” she said, thinking it might get him to talk.

He pulled two mugs out of the dishwasher, then set them on top of the stove. “I thought he was going to be fine.”

“You’re not a doctor. You don’t know.” She wasn’t acting like a lawyer now. She was acting like a friend, and she knew it.

He grabbed the pot, and poured coffee into both mugs. Then he brought them to the table.

“I did know,” he said. “I knew there was trouble, and I left.”

“Sounds like you did a lot before you left,” she said, trying to move him past this. She remembered long talks about his guilt over his brother’s accident. “Organizing the people, making sure Ty was okay. Seems to me that you did more than most.”

He shook his head.

“What else could you have done?” she asked.

“I could’ve gone down there and helped him,” he said. “If nothing else, I could’ve defended him against those men with guns.”

She went cold. Men with guns. She hadn’t heard about men with guns.

“Who had guns?” she asked.

He gave her a self-deprecating smile, apparently realizing how dramatic he had sounded. “Everyone has guns. This is the Texas-New Mexico border.”

He’d said too much, and he clearly wanted to backtrack. She wouldn’t let him.

“Not everyone uses them at the scene of an accident,” she said.

“If they’d’ve been smart, they might have. That bull was mighty scary.”

“Who had guns?” she asked.

He sighed, clearly knowing she wouldn’t back down. “The engineers. They carried their rifles out of the train.”

She raised her eyebrows, not sure what to say.

He seemed to think she didn’t believe him, so he went on. “I figured they were carrying the guns to shoot any livestock that got in their way. Made me want my gun. I’d been thinking about the accident, not a bunch of injured animals that weighed eight times what I did.”

“Why did you leave?” she asked.

“It was a judgment call,” he said. “I was watching those engineers walk. With purpose.”

As she listened to Jessup recount the story, she realized the purpose had nothing to do with cattle. These men carried their rifles like they intended to use them. They weren’t looking at the carnage. After they’d finished inspecting the train for damage, they didn’t look at the train either.

Instead, they stared at Ty.

“For the entire two-mile walk?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Jessup said. “That’s when I decided not to stay. I thought Ty was going to be fine.”

He paused. She waited, knowing if she pushed him, he might not say any more.

Jessup ran a hand through his hair. “I knew that in situations like this tempers get out of hand. I couldn’t be the voice of reason. I might even get some of the blame.”

He wrapped his hands around his coffee mug. He hadn’t touched the liquid.

“Besides,” he said, “I could see Ty’s cowboys. They were riding around the train and heading toward the loose cattle near the highway. If things got ugly, they could help him. I headed back up the embankment, went to my truck, and drove on to Lubbock.”

“Then I don’t understand why this is bothering you,” she said. “You did as much as you could, and then you left it to others, the ones who needed to handle the problem.”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “I tell myself that.”

“But?”

He tilted his head, as if shaking some thoughts loose. “But a couple of things don’t make sense. Like why did Ty go back into the cab of that truck? And how come no one smelled the diesel? Wouldn’t it bother them so close to the oil tankers?”

She waited, watching him. He shrugged.

“And then there’s the nightmares.”

“Nightmares?” she asked.

“I get into my truck, and as I slam the door, I hear a gunshot. It’s half a second behind the sound of the door slamming, but it’s clear.”

“Did you really hear that?” she asked.

“I like to think if I did, I would’ve gone back. But I didn’t. I just drove away, like nothing had happened. And a friend of mine died.”

He didn’t say anything else. She took another sip of her coffee, careful not to set the mug to close to her recorder.

“No one else reported gunshots,” she said.

He nodded.

“No one else saw Ty outside that cab,” she said.

“He was in a gully. I was the only one who went down the embankment. You couldn’t see him from the road.”

“And the truck? Could you see it?”

He shook his head.

“What do you think happened?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “and it’s driving me insane.”

***

It bothered her too, but not in quite the same way.

She found Jessup in DRS&C’s list of 911 nutcases. He’d been buried among the crazies, just like important information was probably hidden in the boxes that littered her office floor.

No one else had seen the angry engineers or Ty out of the truck, but no one could quite figure out how he’d made that cell phone call either. If he’d been sitting on some debris outside the cab, that made more sense than calling from inside, while bleeding, with the engine running and diesel dripping.

But Jessup was right. It raised some disturbing questions.

They bothered her, enough so that she called Nan on her cell phone during the drive back to her office.

“Do you have a copy of the autopsy report for Ty?” Pita asked.

“There was no autopsy,” Nan said. “It’s pretty clear how he died.”

Pita sighed. “What about the truck? What happened to it?”

“Last I saw, it was in Digger’s Salvage Yard.”

So Pita pulled into the salvage yard, and parked near a dented Toyota. Digger was a good ole boy who salvaged parts, and when he couldn’t, he used a crusher to demolish the vehicles into metal for scrap.

But he still had the cab of that truck—insurance wouldn’t release it until the case was settled.

For the first time, she looked at the cab herself, but couldn’t see anything except charred metal, a steel frame, and a ruined interior. She wasn’t an expert, and she needed one.

It took only a moment to call an old friend in Albuquerque who knew a good freelance forensic examiner. The examiner wanted $500 plus expenses to travel to Rio Gordo and look at the truck.

Pita hesitated. She could’ve – and should’ve – called Nan for the expense money.

But the examiner’s presence would raise Nan’s hopes. And right now, Pita couldn’t do that. She was trusting a man she’d met late night at the hospital, a man who talked her through her mother’s last illness, a man she couldn’t quite get enough distance from to examine his veracity.

She needed more than Jessup’s nightmares and speculations. She needed something that might pass for proof.

***

“I can’t tell you when it got there,” said the examiner, Walter Shepard. He was a slender man with intense eyes. He wore a plaid shirt despite the heat and tan trousers that had pilled from too many washings.

He was sitting in Pita’s office. She had moved some boxes aside so that the path into the office was wider. She’d also found a chair that had been buried since the case began.

He pushed some photographs onto her desk. The photographs were close-ups of the truck’s cab. He’d thoughtfully drawn an arrow next to the tiny hole in the door on the driver’s side.

“It’s definitely a bullet hole. It’s too smooth to be anything else,” he said. “And there’s another in the seat. I was able to recover part of a bullet.”

He shifted the photos so that she could see a shattered metal fragment.

“The problem is I can’t tell you anything else, except that the bullet holes predate the fire. I can’t tell you how long they were there or how they got there. They could be real old. Or brand new. I can’t tell.”

“That’s all right.” A bullet hole, along with Jessup’s testimony, was enough to cast doubt on everything. She felt like she could go to DRS&C and ask for a settlement.

She wasn’t even regretting that she hadn’t worked on contingency. This case was proving easier than she had thought it would be.

“I know you asked me to look for evidence of shooting or a fight,” Shepard said, “but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I let it go at that. The anomaly here isn’t the bullets. It’s the fire itself.”

She looked up from the photos, surprised. Shepard wasn’t watching her. He was still studying the photographs. He put a finger on one of them.

“The diesel leaked. There’s runoff along the tank and a drip pattern that trails to the passenger side of the cab.”

The cab had landed on its passenger side.

“But the fire started here.” He was touching the photo of the interior of the cab. He pushed his finger against the image of the ruined seat. “See how the flames spread upwards. You can see the burn pattern. And fuel fed it. It burned around something—probably the body—so it looks to me like someone poured fuel onto the body itself and lit it on fire. I didn’t find a match, but I found the remains of a Bic lighter on the floor of the cab. It melted but it’s not burned the way everything else is. I think it was tossed in after the fire started.”

Pita was having trouble wrapping her mind around what he was saying. “You’re saying someone deliberately started the fire? So close to oil tankers?”

“I think that someone knew the truck wouldn’t explode. The fire was pretty contained.”

“Some people from the highway had a fire extinguisher in their car. It was too late to save Ty.”

“You’ll want your examiner to look at the body again,” Shepard said. “I have a hunch you’ll find that your client’s husband was dead before he burned, not after.”

“Based on this pattern.”

“A man doesn’t sit calmly and let himself burn to death,” Shepard said. “He was able to make a phone call. He was conscious. He would have tried to get out of that cab. He didn’t.”

Pita was shaking. If this was true, then this case went way beyond a simple accident. If this was true, then those engineers shot Ty and tried to cover it up.

Ballsy, considering how close to the road they had been.

But the other drivers had been preoccupied with their own accidents and the injured cows and stopping traffic. No one except Jessup had even tried to come down the embankment.

And the engineers, who drove the route a lot, would have known how hard that truck was to see from the road.

They would have figured that the burning cab would get put out once someone saw the smoke. No wonder they’d lit the body. They didn’t want to risk catching the cab on fire, and leaving the bullet-ridden corpse untouched.

“You’re sure?” Pita asked.

“Positive.” Shepard gathered the photos. “If I were you, I’d take this to the state police. You don’t have an accident here. You have cold-blooded murder.”

***

The next few weeks became a blur. DRS&C dropped the suit, becoming the friendliest big law firm that Pita had ever known. Which made her wonder when they’d realized that the engineers had committed murder.

Either way, it didn’t matter. DRS&C was willing to work with her, to do whatever it took to “make Mrs. Hughes happy.”

Nan wouldn’t be happy until her husband’s killers were brought to justice. She snapped into action the moment the state coroner confirmed Shepard’s hunches. Ty had been shot in the skull before he died, and then his body had been burned to cover up the crime.

If Nan hadn’t worked so hard and believed in her husband so much, no one would have known.

The story came out slowly. The train had been speeding when Ty crossed the tracks. Williams’ estimate of more than 100 miles per hour was probably correct—enough for the railroads to have liability right there.

But the engineers, both frightened by the accident itself and terrified for their jobs, had walked the length of the train to Ty’s overturned truck and, finding him alive and relatively unhurt, let their anger explode.

They’d threatened him with the loss of everything if he didn’t confess that he had failed to beat the train. He’d made the call to satisfy them. But it hadn’t worked. Somehow—and neither man was going to admit how (not even more than a year later at sentencing)—one of the rifles had gone off, killing him. Then they’d stuffed him in the cab—whose ignition was off—poured some diesel from the spill on him, and lit him on fire.

They watched him burn for a few minutes before going up the embankment to see if anyone had a fire extinguisher in his car. Fortunately someone did. Otherwise, they planned to have someone drive them the two miles to the engine for the train’s fire extinguishers.

The engineers were eventually convicted, Nan got to keep her ranch and her husband’s reputation, and the railroads kept trying to settle.

But Pita insisted that Nan hire an attorney who specialized in cases against big companies. Pita helped with the hire, finding someone with a great reputation who wasn’t afraid of a thousand boxes of evidence and, more importantly, would work on contingency.

“You sure you don’t want it?” Nan had asked, maybe two dozen times.

And each time, Pita had said, “Positive. The case is too big for me.”

Although it wasn’t. She could have gone to La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia as a rainmaker, someone who brought in a huge case and made millions for the company.

But she didn’t.

Because this case had taught her a few things.

She’d learned that she hated big cases with lots and lots of evidence.

She’d learned that she really didn’t care about the money. (Although the ten thousand dollar bonus that Nan had paid her—a bonus Pita hadn’t asked for—had come in very handy.)

And she learned how valuable it was to know the people of her town. If she hadn’t spent all those evenings in the cafeteria with Jessup, she wouldn’t have trusted his story, and she never would have hired the forensic examiner.

Her mom had been right, all those years ago. Rio Gordo wasn’t a bad place. Yeah, it was impoverished. Yeah, it was filled with dust, and didn’t have a good nightlife or a great university.

But it did have some pretty spectacular people.

People who congratulated Pita for the next year on her success in the Hughes case. People who now came to her to do their wills or their prenups. People who asked her advice on the smallest legal matters, and believed her when she gave them an unvarnished opinion.

Her biggest case had helped her discover her calling: She was a small town attorney—someone who cared more about the people around her than the money their cases could bring in.

She wouldn’t be rich.

But she would be happy.

And that was more than enough.

 

____________________________________________

“Discovery” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

“Discovery”

Copyright © 2017 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November, 2008.
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2017 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Brandon Alms/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Last April, after a grief-filled winter, and a previous fall that was more difficult than I could possibly describe, Nancy and I went to Italy for three weeks — a long-delayed trip that had once been intended as a celebration of our 60th birthdays, both of which were more than a year passed by then.

While in Italy, we spent four lovely days in the ridiculously picturesque city of Venice, and while there, we took a day to visit Murano, a portion of the city that is renowned for its glass factories. It is, if you are not familiar with the history of glass-making in Venice, home to the Murano Glassworks, one of the most renowned glass producers in the world. It is also a gorgeous part of the city. We had a great time there, walking around, looking in shops, getting some food, enjoying the play of color and light on the waterways and old buildings. We watched a glass-blowing exhibition at the Murano factory, and bought many gifts for friends and family back home, as well as for Nancy.

While walking around, searching for a small souvenir of my own, I stopped in at a modest shop on a square, and found, among other things, several small squares of glass in which were embedded finely-wrought images of bare trees. I was captivated and started up a halting conversation with the shop’s owner, who spoke only a bit more English than I did Italian. We managed to communicate, though, and had a very nice exchange. The works in question, it turned out, had been done by the man’s father. He shaped the trees out of strands of steel wool and then placed them in small molds which he filled with melted glass. Each image came out slightly differently. All of them were delicate and beautiful and utterly unlike anything else I had seen in Venice (or anywhere else, for that matter).

I bought the one you see in the photo here. It is small — only 2 1/2 inches by 2 inches — and it is signed — etched, actually — by the artist. I don’t recall what I paid for it. Honestly, I don’t care. I love it. The man wrapped it up in tissue paper, took my payment, and I left his shop, likely never to see him again.

I kept it wrapped up even after we returned to the States. My plan was to open it once we were in our new house, which is what I did. It now sits in my office window, catching the late afternoon sun. And it reminds me of so much. That trip to Italy, which marked the beginning of my personal recovery from the trauma of losing Alex. That day in Venice, which was gloriously fun. The conversation with the kind shopkeeper, whose love for and pride in his father was palpable throughout our exchange. More, that little glass piece is an image of winter, and it sparkles like a gem when the sun hits it. It reminds me that even after a long cold winter, a time of grief and pain, there is always new life and the joy of a new spring.

A cliché, to be sure. But as with so many clichés, it’s rooted in truth.

That little tree — the simplicity of steel wool preserved in glass — brings me joy and comfort all out of proportion to its size and cost. I think Alex would love it, too.

When we were getting ready to move, Nancy and I unloaded a lot of stuff. We talked often of the joy we derived from “lightening our lives,” culling from our belongings items we no longer needed or wanted. And I am so glad to have done that work. But I will admit that I still get great pleasure out of many of things we kept, including little tchotchkes (Yiddish for “trinkets” or “little nothings”) like this one.

Wishing you a wonderful week.

It’s Reader Question Monday. We might have to do a Reader Question Wednesday as well, as we received many questions about Amazon and digital ownership.

You mentioned in the introduction that you usually publish a scene but this time would publish a full chapter. It made me wonder if, when planning a book, you explicitly plan for two scenes to a chapter, which seems to be your usual (though not always). Is it a thought out plan or just your natural writing rhythm?

We don’t plan a book in chapters, not do we stick to any rules regarding how long the chapters are or how many scenes they have. Chapters happen because it feels right to have a natural break in the narrative. We have a rough road map of where we are going, but when it comes to actual writing, we plot in chunks.

For example, the current Hugh chunk is

Aberdine sends people -> Hugh goes to Aberdine – > confrontation with the mercenaries.

Originally, we planned on summarizing the Aberdine delegation arrival and kind of stuffing it as a mini-flashback into the scene that opened with Hugh riding toward Aberdine. There didn’t seem like there would be enough happening during that initial meeting to warrant its own scene.

However, as we started writing it and unpacking all of the emotional undercurrents, it grew into its own chapter. This is the joy of writing: the unexpected discoveries.

Why don’t you let people point out the typos?

Because the comment section degenerates into a nitpicking session and then different writing experts start fighting with each other. This is the first draft; it is fragile and unpolished, and too much criticism will kill it. You are seeing it as it is, with all of its flaws. If you want the cleaned up version, you will have to wait until release. Muhahahaha!

So Hugh 2 is being rewritten? In 2020 it was announced that the release was on hold because it was a dark story and the world was in a dark place. I thought that meant it was done. It’s been five years, so when I look around to see if I missed anything it sounds like it may be in progress?

No. Hugh was never written, but we knew what we needed to write and at that particular time, we didn’t have emotional fortitude to do it. Writing books requires a huge emotional investment, because we, as writers, live through he character emotions so we can accurately portray them on the page.

Life interferes as well. Sometimes stuff happens to knock you off your writing rails. Yesterday we didn’t get any writing done because we email the comments from the site to ourselves and Mod R for moderation, and we have to use SMTP for that, because WordPress just kind of quit sending comments to us. For no apparent reason the SMTP callback is failing.

Despite 5 hours with host support chat, it is not fixed. They tossed me back to the SMTP plugin support, which has yet to respond. I wasn’t in the mood to write witty banter after that. I was just tired and needed some tea.

Why don’t you and Gordon make more videos where you talk about writing?

This is one is a little out of the left field. I’m guessing this must’ve come about because of the keyboard typing video. Being a writer and being an influencer are two different things. Writers primarily market their books by doing yet more writing, and influencers primarily provide entertainment while also marketing a product either directly or through ads. Some people admirably combine both.

We are not that great on camera, and we are not very entertaining. We would make terrible influencers. Neither of us has those particular skills and talents. Thankfully, we are not celebrities by any measure, so that is not required of us.

Our posts are mostly about what we do: things we write, things we cook, build, crochet, and so on. It’s less about being a writer and more about the work itself or the process. We try to maintain that boundary between product and person.

Basically, you get enough of me carrying on on the blog. You don’t need us on your YouTube.

See you on Wednesday!

The post Hugh and the Distressing Lack of Videos first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Oh, hell, is it Monday again? I’ve got nothing.

Gzzznorkzzzzzzzzz

I vote we bag it for the week.

I have a tail!

Yeah, the last list from 2024. Finally. I thought maybe I would just punt this one, but I like sharing what I’ve read that I’ve liked. So I didn’t want to lose all of these to extreme busy-ness. I barely remember September, so I can’t give you lots of comments. I do know that I had almost no sleep, so any reading I got done was stolen from other projects.

I am not going to include the articles here, like I usually do. In the spirit of kicking 2024 to the curb, those are going to be sacrificed. So here are the three books that I loved in September…

September 2024

Balogh, Mary, Always Remember, Berkeley, 2024. Mary Balogh writes in series that focus on a particular family. I liked how this series started, and wrote about it in several of the Recommended Reading Lists. This book, about Ben Ellis, who has a charming daughter and is one of the more interesting characters in the series, is a personal favorite. I felt sad when I finished this one. Balogh had been promising this romance throughout the series, and it was satisfying when she finally got to it.

King, Stephen, “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” You Like It Darker, Scribner, 2024. This isn’t a short story; it’s a novella. King excels at the novella form. I read the entire short novel in one sitting, uncertain where any of it was going. There’s always an edge in King’s fiction, a feeling that one wrong move and the story will collapse. I felt that here, but the story never made the wrong move. It’s powerful and worth the price of the entire collection.

King, Stephen, “On Slide Inn Road,” You Like It Darker, Scribner, 2024. Everyone is fair game in a King story, so I try to avoid some of the ones featuring children. I got sucked into this one right off the bat, though, and read it with one eye closed and my face averted. Memorable, sadly enough.

King, Stephen, “Two Talented Bastids,” You Like It Darker, Scribner, 2024. In the hands of a lesser writer, this story would have been cliche-ridden and hard to read. Here, it’s touching and one of my favorites in the collection. I’m not going to say anything else for fear of spoiling the story for you.

King, Stephen, You Like It Darker, Scribner, 2024. I think I like Stephen King’s short stories the best of all his works, and I’m a fan. I like almost everything he does. (The Dark Tower series doesn’t work for me, and lately he’s ventured into Covid territory, which I’m not ready for, but mostly, I’ll follow him anywhere.) This entire book is wonderful. I’ve highlighted some favorite stories here, but I can recommend the entire volume as well.

Roberts, Nora, Mind Games, St. Martin’s Press, 2024. I’ve been very disappointed with Nora Robert’s standalone titles the past few years, so I bought this one with trepidation. I felt like she hadn’t been challenging herself in some of the previous books or she lost interest in them or something. They just didn’t have her usual vibrancy. This one does. It was a rich book, difficult to put down, even though I had to because of everything else going on. The perfect escape that makes me look forward to her next…just like it should.

January and February have been chaotic, frenetic, and full of chaos and confusion. And snow. Which, given where I live, is normal, if hugely inconvenient. And copy-edits, which make me pull my hair out. But: I have a full cover for the upcoming Heir of Light. And also: for reasons I’m not clear on, Mira is publishing a simultaneous hardcover release. I think it’s meant mostly for library purchase, but is being offered on Amazon and physical retailers as well. (I personally would not want a hardcover of the second book in a series when the first book didn’t have a hardcover release, but that’s the bibliophile in me.) For those who listen, I can’t quite figure out on short notice … Continue reading →

I had hoped the ‘Sigl Fashion’ option would have scored higher… I figured with the nobility and ultra wealthy type of folks, sigl jewelry would almost reach a ‘crown jewels’ sort of function. You become head of house, or the heir apparent, you get something like a signet ring, like the official ducal seal worked into the ring Paul inherits from his father as Duke Atreides in Dune. Or the signet ring Hadrian wears in the Sun Eater series, as a sign of his status and rank as a Palatine. The King still wears the three feather signet ring of Wales, like he did as Prince of Wales. The new heir or head of house would get the ring, just getting a new sigl created and mounted in the antique setting.

Also, I figured with the younger crowd and the fact some sigls need to be worn close to the skin, that sigl jewelry piercings would be more widespread than they apparently are in the series so far.