Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Madison, Wisconsin, 1972—When Detective Hank Kaplan calls Valentina Wilson to a crime scene, she wonders why. She soon finds more questions than answers in a secret room belonging to a wealthy female philanthropist, whose brutal murder the police hastily cover up. Val’s search for the truth will take her from the rape hotline she runs to the shocking realization that the woman’s murder anchors a long line of horrific events stretching back decades.

Chosen as one of the best mystery short stories of the year by the readers of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, “Sob Sisters” continues the powerful story of Valentina Wilson, a character who first appeared in Nelscott’s award-winning Smokey Dalton series.

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

 

Sob Sisters By Kris Nelscott

TECHNICALLY, I WASN’T supposed to be at the crime scene. I wasn’t supposed to be at any crime scene. I’m not a cop; I’m not even a private detective. I’m just a woman who runs a rape hotline in a town that doesn’t think it needs one, even though it is 1972.

Still, what woman says no when she gets a phone call from the Madison Police Department, asking for her presence at the site of a murder?

A sensible one, that’s what my volunteers would have said. But I have never been sensible.

Besides, the call came from Detective Hank Kaplan who, a few months ago, had learned the hard way to take me seriously. Unlike a lot of cops who would’ve gotten angry when a woman out-thought him, Kaplan responded with respect. He’s one of the new breed of men who doesn’t mind strong women, even if he still has a derogatory tone when he uses the phrase “women’s libbers.”

The house was an old Victorian on a large parcel of land overlooking Lake Mendota. Someone had neatly shoveled the walk down to the bare concrete, and had closed the shutters on the sides of the wrap-around porch, leaving only the area up front to take the brunt of the winter storms.

And of the police.

Squads and a panel van with the official MPD logo on the side parked along the curb. I counted at least four officers milling about the open door while I could see a couple more moving near the large picture window.

I parked my ten-year-old Ford Falcon on the opposite side of the street and steeled myself. I was an anomaly no matter how you looked at it: I was tiny, female and black in lily-white Madison, Wisconsin. Most locals would’ve thought I was trying to rob the place rather than show up at the invitation of the lead detective.

I grabbed the hotline’s new Polaroid camera. Then I got out of the car, locked it, and walked as calmly as I could across the street. I wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves, so I stuck my hands in the pocket of my new winter coat. At least the coat looked respectable. My torn jeans, sneakers, and short-cropped Afro were too hippy for authorities in this town.

As I approached, a young officer on the porch turned toward me, then leaned toward an older officer, said something, and rolled his eyes. At that moment, Kaplan rounded the side of the house and caught my gaze.

He hurried down the sidewalk toward me. He was wearing a blue police coat over his black trousers and galoshes over his dress shoes. Unlike the street cops on the porch, he didn’t wear a cap, leaving his black hair to the vicissitudes of the wind. He was an uncommonly handsome man, with more than a passing resemblance to the Marlboro Man from the cigarette ads. I found his good looks annoying.

“Miss Wilson,” he said loud enough for the others to hear, “come with me.”

He sounded official. The cops outside started in surprise, then gave me a once-over.

A shiver ran down my back. I hated the scrutiny, even though I knew he had done it on purpose, so no one would second-guess my presence here.

“This way,” he said, and put a hand on my back to help me up the curb.

I couldn’t help it; I stiffened. He let his hand drop.

“Sorry,” he said. He knew I had been brutalized by a cop in Chicago. While that experience had made me stronger, I still had a rape survivor’s aversion to touch.

“What’s going on here?” I asked.

“I’ll show you,” Kaplan said. “But we’re going in the back. Did you bring your camera?”

I held up the case. I had wrapped the strap around my right hand.

“Good,” he said. “Come on.”

He walked quickly on the narrow shoveled sidewalk leading around the building. I had to hurry to keep up with him.

“So,” I said, as soon as we were clear of the other cops, “you guys don’t have your own cameras?”

“We do,” he said. “You’ll just want a record of this.”

Now I was really intrigued. A record of something that he was willing to share; a record of something that they didn’t want to record themselves? Maybe he had finally decided that I should photograph a rape victim immediately after the crime had occurred.

Although Kaplan didn’t handle the rape cases. He was homicide.

The narrow sidewalk led to another small porch. Kaplan pulled on the screen door, and held it for me. Then he shoved the heavy interior door open.

A musty smell rose from there, tinged with the scent of fall apples. I had expected a crime-scene smell—blood and feces and other unpleasantness, not the somewhat homey smell.

To my right, half a dozen coats hung on the wall, with a variety of galoshes, boots, and old shoes on a plastic mat. This was clearly the entrance that the homeowner used the most.

“When should I start photographing?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you when,” Kaplan said, and led me up the stairs.

We stepped into a kitchen that smelled faintly of baked bread. I frowned as Kaplan led me through swinging doors into the dining area. A picture window overlooked the lake. The view, so beautiful that it caught my attention, distracted me from the coroner’s staff, who clustered in the archway between the dining room and living room.

Kaplan touched my arm, looking wary as he did so. I glanced down, saw an elderly woman sprawled on the shag carpet, arms above her head, face turned away as if her own death embarrassed her. This area did smell of blood and death. The stench got stronger the closer I got.

I couldn’t see her face. One hand was clenched in a fist, the other open. Her legs were open too, and looked like they had been pried that way. A pair of glasses had been knocked next to the console television, and a pot filled with artificial fall flowers had tumbled near the door.

The coroner had pulled up the woman’s shirt slightly to get liver temperature. The frown on his face seemed at once appropriate and extreme for the work he was doing.

I moved a step closer. He looked up, eyes fierce. His mouth opened slightly, and I thought he was going to yell at me. Instead, he turned that look on Kaplan.

“Who the hell is that? Control your crime scene, man. Get the civilians out of here.”

“Sorry,” Kaplan said, sounding contrite. “I turned in the wrong direction.”

He touched my arm to move me away from the crowd. I realized that he had play-acted to convince the coroner and the other police officers that my appearance in that room had been an accident.

But it hadn’t been. Kaplan had wanted me to see the body.

“This way,” he said in that formal voice, as if he thought someone was still listening.

He led me back into the kitchen, then opened a door into a large pantry. Canned goods lined the walls. A single 40-watt bulb illuminated the entire space.

My stomach clenched. I had no idea what he was doing, and I wasn’t the most flexible person around cops.

He pulled the pantry door closed, then moved past me and pushed on the far wall. It opened into a book-lined room with no windows at all. Mahogany shelves lined the walls. The room was wide, with several chairs for reading and a heavy library table in the middle, stacked with volumes. Those volumes were half open, or marked with pieces of paper.

Beyond that was another open door. Kaplan led me through it.

We stepped into one of the prettiest—and most hidden—offices I had ever seen. The walls were covered with expensive wood paneling. A gigantic partners desk sat in the middle of the room. The flooring matched the paneling—no shag carpet here. Instead, the desk stood on an expensive Turkish carpet, of a type I had only seen in magazines. The room smelled of old paper, books, and Emerude. I couldn’t hear the officers in the other part of the house. In fact, the only sound in this room was my breathing, and Kaplan’s clothes rustling as he moved.

An IBM Selectric sat on the credenza beside the desk. Behind it stood a graveyard of old typewriters, from an ancient Royal to one of the very first electrics. Above them, files in neat rows, with dividers. The desk itself had several open files on top, and a full coffee cup to one side. I wanted to touch it, to see if it was still warm.

“This is what you wanted to show me?” I asked.

“I think you’ll find some interesting things here,” he said, nodding toward the floor. Against the built-in bookshelves in a back corner, someone had placed dozens, maybe hundreds of picture frames.

I crouched. Someone had framed newspaper and magazine articles, all of them from different eras and with different bylines.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Her life’s work,” he said.

“Her,” I repeated. “I’m not even sure whose house this is.”

He looked at me in surprise. “I thought you knew everything about this town.”

“Not even close,” I said.

He sighed softly. “This house belongs to Dolly Langham.”

“The philanthropist?” I asked.

He gave me a tight smile. “See? You do know her.”

“I don’t,” I said. “Some of my volunteers kept trying to contact her for help with fundraising for the hotline, but she never returned our calls or our letters.”

A frown creased his forehead. “That’s odd. She was always doing for women.”

I frowned too. “I take it she’s the woman in the living room?”

“That’s the back parlor,” he said, as if he knew this house intimately. Maybe he did.

“All right,” I said slowly, not sure of his non-response. “The back parlor then. That’s her?”

He closed his eyes slightly and nodded.

“You’ve caught this case?” I asked. “It’s yours entirely?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he didn’t sound happy about it. “This is a big deal. Miss Langham is one of the richest people in the city, if not the richest. Her family goes back to the city’s founding, and she’s related to mayors, governors, and heads of the university. She’s important, Miss Wilson.”

“I’m getting that,” I said. “Why am I here?”

“Because,” he said, “cases like this, they’re always about something.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“No,” he said. “You don’t know. There’s the official story. And then there’s the real story.”

I froze. Cops rarely spoke to civilians like this. I had learned that from my ex-husband, who had been a Chicago cop and who had died, in part, because of what had happened to me.

“You think the real story is going to get covered up,” I said.

“No,” Kaplan said. “I don’t think it. I know it.”

I glanced around the room. “The real story is here?”

He shrugged. “That I don’t know. I haven’t investigated yet.”

He was being deliberately elliptical, and I was no good with elliptical. I preferred blunt. Elliptical always got me in trouble.

“Why am I here?” I asked.

“I need a fresh pair of eyes,” he said.

“But the investigation is just starting,” I said.

He nodded. “So is the pressure.”

I let out a small breath of air. So, he had a script already, and he didn’t like it. “You want me to photograph things in here?”

“As much as you can,” he said. “Keep those pictures safe for me.”

“I will,” I said.

“And Miss Wilson, you know since you were once a cop’s wife, how things occasionally go missing from a crime scene?”

“Oh, I do,” I said. “You want to prevent that here.”

He shook his head, and gave me a look he hadn’t shown me since the first time I met him. The look accused me of being naïve.

“You know, Miss Wilson, I find it strange that you don’t carry a purse. Most women carry bags so big they can fit entire reams of paper inside them.”

My breath caught as I finally understood.

“I prefer pockets,” I said, and stuck my hands inside the deep pockets of my coat.

“You are quite the character, Miss Wilson,” he said approvingly. “I think you might have a couple of uninterrupted hours in here, if I keep the doors closed. Is that all right with you?”

Inside a room with no windows, only one door, a phalanx of cops outside, and a dead body a few yards away. Sure, that was Just Fine.

“You’ll be back for me?” I asked.

“Most assuredly,” he said, and put his hand on the door.

“One last thing, Detective,” I said. “Who found this room?”

A shadow passed over his face, so quickly that I almost missed it. “I did. No one else.”

So no one else knew I was here.

“All right,” I said. “See you in two hours.”

He nodded once, then let himself out, pulling the door closed behind him.

I felt claustrophobic. This room felt still, tense, almost as if it were waiting for something. Maybe that was the effect of the murdered woman in the back parlor. Maybe I was more tense than I thought.

That would be odd, though. I had training to keep me calm. I went to medical school until I couldn’t find a place to intern (honey, we don’t want you to take a position away from a real doctor), and then I went to the University of Chicago Law School. I got used to cadavers in medical school, and extreme pressure in law school, and somewhere along the way, I had accepted death as a part of life.

I let out a small sigh, squared my shoulders, and pulled off my coat. I opened it, so that the inner pockets were easily accessible, and draped it on one of the straight-backed chairs near the door. Then I grabbed the Polaroid and put it around my neck.

I didn’t know where to start because I didn’t know what I was looking for. But Kaplan had asked me here for a reason. He wanted me to find things, and to remove some of them, which meant that I shouldn’t start with the books or even the framed articles.

I started with the files.

I walked behind the desk. The perfume smell was strong here. Dolly Langham had clearly spent a lot of time at this desk. The papers on top were notes in shorthand, which I had never bothered to learn. I was certain one of my volunteers at the hotline knew it, however. I stacked those papers together and put them in a “Possible” pile. I figured I’d see what I found, and then stash what I could just before Kaplan came back for me.

I opened the drawers next. The top held the usual assortment of pens and paperclips, and stray keys. The drawer to my right had a large leather-bound ledger in it.

The ledger’s entries started in 1970, and covered most of the past two years. The most recent entry was from last week. There were names on the side, followed by a number (usually large) and a running total along the edge. That much I could follow. It was the last set of numbers, one column done in red ink and the other in blue, that I couldn’t understand.

Kaplan had to know this was here. He had to have looked through the desk; any good investigator would have.

I took the ledger and placed it on my coat.

Then I went back and searched for more ledgers. I figured if she had one for the 1970s, she had to have some from before that. I didn’t find any in the drawer—although I found a leather-bound journal, also written in shorthand, with the year 1972 emblazoned on the front.

I set that on the desktop along with the notes, and continued my search.

The desk, organized as it was, didn’t yield much, so I turned to the files behind me. They were in date order. The tab that stuck out had that date and a last name. I opened the oldest file, and inside found more handwritten notes, and a yellowed newspaper clipping. The byline—Agnes Olden—matched the name on the outside of the file.

Someone had scrawled 1925 on the clipping, which came from a newspaper I’d never heard of called The Chicago Telegram. The headline was Accuser Speaks!

Dressed in an expensive skirt and a shirtwaist blouse with mullion sleeves, Dorthea Lute looks like a woman of impeccable reputation instead of the fallen woman all assume her to be. For our interview, she sat primly on the edge of her chair, feet crossed demurely at the ankles, hands clasped in her lap, head down. She spoke softly, and when she described the circumstances of her accusation, she did not scream or shout or cry, but told the tale with a calm tone that belied its horror.

I scanned as quickly as I could, trying to get the gist of the piece. Apparently this Dorthea Lute accused one of Chicago’s most prominent citizens of “taking her forcibly and against her will” in the “quiet of his own home.” Friends and family said that she was bruised, and “indeed, witnesses saw her wearing her arm in a sling. She had two black eyes, and a purplish bruise that ran from her temple to her chin.”

I closed my eyes for a brief moment. This was an account of a rape, and the interview was conducted with the “accuser,” who—of course—had been accused herself of using her body and her “wiles” to “improve her standing in the world.” When that didn’t work, she accused this prominent businessman of “the most vile of crimes.”

I thumbed through the file and found no more clippings, just more notes. Then I grabbed the next file. It had the same byline, and featured an interview with the family of a young girl who died brutally at the hands of her boyfriend. File after file, interview after interview, all written in that now-dated manner.

I replaced those files and grabbed another from the next row. This came from the Des Moines Voice, another paper I had never heard of, and came from 1933. The content of the file was similar to the others, with the shorthand notes, the scrawls, but the byline was different. This one belonged to Ada Cornell. Cornell had the same kind of interest in crimes against women.

Only these files also contained carbons of the original news piece.

I was intrigued.

The next shelf down had stories from the 1940s, and many of them came from different communities. The bylines all differed but the files remained the same.

So I took the last file off the last shelf. It came from nearly twenty years before—1955 to be exact. I had expected it to be a 1972 file, considering there were notes on the desk. So either the files from 1955 onward were missing, or she hadn’t done anything for years and got back into the work.

I couldn’t believe that she had given up until recently, not with the typewriter graveyard behind me. I looked around the room for another place that held files. Then I walked to the center of the room, put my hands behind my back, and frowned at everything.

This was a room within a room within a room, so secret that it was in the very center of the house, hidden behind what most people would consider the pantry. Dolly Langham wrote under false names, so she hadn’t wanted anyone to know she was doing this work.

I frowned, then glanced at the panels. In the old mystery novels, paneling—especially from fifty years ago—hid secret passageways. This room itself was a secret, so I doubted I’d find a passageway. But I might find a hidden compartment.

I surveyed the area, looking for scuff marks, fingerprints, something that jutted out, but I saw nothing obvious. Then I looked at the paneling itself. It had a pattern along the right and left side, but the wall with the files and the typewriter graveyard was configured differently, as if that entire area was built especially for Langham. Wall panels weren’t mass produced forty years ago; they were crafted by someone, who—if the inside room had been built in the Depression—wouldn’t have questioned the design.

A decorative frame had been built around the shelves in the center. Then the waist-high shelf that housed the typewriter graveyard jutted out an extra foot, and so did the area below it.

I went behind the desk, crouched and felt along the edges. I found a small ridge that my fingertips just fit inside. They brushed against a tiny knob. I pressed it, and half of the lower cabinet swung open, silently. A tiny light clicked on, revealing more files.

The shelves ran across the length of the cabinet, and the files continued to the floor.

I left that open, then touched the frames on the right side of the entire unit, looking for a similar ridge. I found it, and that long door swung open, revealing a closet. Inside, wigs, make-up, clothing, and the faint scent of mothballs. I peered into the darkness beyond and realized I had been wrong: there was a hidden passageway behind the clothes.

I pushed the clothes aside, and coughed as dust rose. Cobwebs hung from the opening beyond. I stepped inside anyway and peered. It didn’t appear to be a passageway after all, but more of an extension of this room, like a gigantic walk-in closet.

But I couldn’t be certain unless I explored.

It was clear that Langham hadn’t used this closet in a long time. If I could assume that whatever happened to her in that living room happened because of something she had hidden, then I might be safe in assuming the “something” was a recent occurrence, not one housed in mothballs and cobwebs.

I knew I was making a hasty judgment, but that was all Kaplan had left me time for. Besides, I didn’t have a flashlight. I would have to haul whatever I found into the main room—or trust that there was an electrical switch somewhere back there that I could find easily.

I closed that panel door, and opened the one on the other side just in case it was something different. As I thought, it was the other end of this “closet,” with more wigs, and clothing, including a few very old furs. The musty smell made my eyes water.

I pulled out my Polaroid and took pictures of that back area. I also took pictures of the files. Then I took a few pictures of an open file on the desk.

And by then I was out of film. The Polaroids dried on the desktop as I closed the doors. Then I sat on the Turkish carpet, and looked through the files in the hidden case. The writing style that Langham cultivated had lost popularity, and so had the long yellow journalism stories. They vanished after the war. But she seemed to adapt. There were articles here from The Milwaukee Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Des Moines Register, and more. Many of the longer articles appeared in Saturday Review, Ladies Home Journal, and surprisingly, that new magazine for women, Ms.

The bottom shelf was empty except for two large manuscripts, in their entirety. As I was about to pull one out, I heard a sound from the outer room.

I cursed, then carefully closed the cupboard door. My heart was pounding. I had a hunch the person out there was Kaplan, but if it wasn’t, I didn’t want the other investigators to know about this—and neither did he.

Then I grabbed my pile from the desktop, hurried it over to that chair, and covered the entire pile with my coat. If I left with everything I’d hidden, I’d look like I gained fifty pounds, but that couldn’t be helped.

The door opened just as my coat settled on top of everything.

Fortunately, the person at the door was Kaplan, and he was alone.

He closed the door, then leaned on it. “You find anything?”

“You know I did,” I said. “How come she kept all this secret?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just looked at it today.”

“But it’s clearly relevant to your case. You’re going to need it.”

He gave me a bitter half-smile. “In a perfect world.”

I felt chilled. “Meaning?”

“Apparently, she interrupted burglars,” he said with such sarcasm that I didn’t have to ask him if he believed it. He clearly did not.

“Who made this decision?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said tiredly. “It’s coming from the chief. We’re to wrap up the investigation in a hurry.”

“What about this?” I waved my hands at the files in the back. “Who gets this?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said. “Dolly was the last of the Langhams. We haven’t even looked for a will or contacted her attorney. I have no idea who inherits. I suspect it’s a bunch of charities.”

“This is her life’s work,” I said.

That bitter smile creased his face again. “Apparently, she had a lot of different life’s work. Folks around here would say her life’s work was her philanthropy, spending Papa’s money.”

I thought of the ledgers. “I wasn’t able to go through anything. I just located things. I’d like to come back—”

“I doubt that’ll be possible.”

“But you have no idea how much is here, what she has. I certainly don’t. I can’t even decipher most of it. I don’t read shorthand.”

“Ah,” he said, “the benefits of a law school education.”

I understood what he meant. If I had been a typically educated woman, I would have known shorthand. But I never was typical.

“I have some volunteers who can read it. Give us a few days in here—”

“I can’t, Miss Wilson,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here now. In fact, I came to get you out. The mayor is on his way, and I’m sure the television cameras will follow. I don’t want anyone to know you were even on the premises.”

“Great,” I said. “There’s more than I can carry.”

He unzipped that heavy police department jacket of his. “Give me some of it,” he said. “Quickly.”

I picked up my coat, and handed him the ledgers. I kept the two journals and all of the recent shorthand notes, shoving them inside my coat. We zipped up together, like co-conspirators.

Which, I guess, we were.

“Let’s go,” he said. He waited for me near the door, and as we stepped out, he turned off the lights. The room disappeared into a blackness so profound it made my skin crawl.

The library was empty. Still, I hurried through it, not wanting to stop this time. I waited at that door for Kaplan.

I clutched my hands around my middle like a pregnant woman. The edges of the journals dug into my stomach, and I wanted to adjust them, but I couldn’t.

We went through the same routine—I stepped into the pantry, he shut off the lights, then closed the door. Once it was shut, he moved a few boxes in front of it.

I could hear voices not too far away. Kaplan paused at the pantry door, peering through it. Then he beckoned me, and we scurried across the kitchen. The voices were coming from the dining room beyond.

Kaplan led the way down the stairs and out the side door. He looked along the sidewalk, nodded when he wanted me to follow, and walked faster than I liked on the ice-covered concrete.

My papers and journals were slipping. I shifted my hands slightly, praying that nothing fell as I hurried after Kaplan.

He reached my car before I did, tried the door, and cursed loud enough for me to hear. He didn’t like that I had locked it. I wasn’t sure how I was going to unlock it without dropping anything. I pulled the keys out of my pocket, adjusted my papers again, and leaned a little on the cold metal to unlock my door.

I pulled it open. Kaplan reached around and unlocked the back door. He looked both ways, bent over, and opened his jacket. The ledgers fell out along the seat. Then he slammed the door closed and shoved his hands in his pockets.

I just got in the driver’s side, figuring it was easier than getting rid of my stuff.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said before I could ask any more questions. Then he slammed the driver’s door closed.

He had returned to the other side of the street before I could get the keys in the ignition. My breath fogged up the window, but I just used my fist to make a hole.

I didn’t have to be told to get the hell out of there. I pulled out just as a group of large black cars came around the corner behind me.

I followed the narrow street out of the neighborhood, then pulled over until the windshield cleared. While the defrost was doing its job, I reached around to the back seat. I locked the door, and grabbed a blanket I kept on the floor for emergencies. I used it to cover the ledgers that Kaplan had spilled.

If we had dropped anything outside the car, I hoped Kaplan had found it.

Because I wasn’t going anywhere near that place again.

***

I got back to the hotline in record time. The hotline was a few miles away, deeper in the city itself. We weren’t far off State Street, which connected the University of Wisconsin with the Capitol. This neighborhood used to be a nice enclave for the medium rich, leaving the very rich to Langham’s neighborhood. Now, the old Victorians here had been torn down or divided into apartments, usually crammed with students.

The church where we housed the hotline had been abandoned two decades before. I lived in the rectory and used the church proper for the hotline, and sometimes to house women in need.

On this day, I pulled into the rectory side of the parking lot. I didn’t want the volunteers to see what I had.

It took me two trips to bring in all of the material. I piled the stuff on my coffee table, then closed and locked my door. I pulled the curtains too, something I rarely did in the middle of a Midwestern winter.

I took off my coat, put some innocuous papers over the things on my coffee table, and picked up one sheet of the paper covered in shorthand. Then I headed into the hotline proper.

The passageway between the rectory and the church had no heat, and was cold this time of year. I opened the unlocked door into the church, and inhaled the scent of sawed wood.

My volunteers, as inept as they were, loved doing the repair work.

I went down the stairs into the basement and found five women in t-shirts and ragged jeans, discussing the finer points of electricity.

“Val would never say she’d hire an electrician,” Louise said. She was a tall, middle-aged blond and one of my best volunteers.

“And yet I will,” I said as I went by. Several women looked up in surprise. Apparently they hadn’t heard me come in. “We’re not going to remodel this place just to burn it down. If we’re at the electricity stage, let me know and I’ll hire someone.”

“Consider yourself on notice,” Louise said.

I nodded. Something else to take care of.

I went all the way back to the main office, where we had our phones. We’d initially had only one line for the hotline and one private line. But our hotline had expanded after some recent publicity, and now, we had three separate desks with phones on them. The calls rolled over to a different line if one was in use. It was an expensive system, but well worth it.

The afternoon’s volunteers were an undergrad named Midge who had just started a few weeks ago, and one of my old hands—Susan Dunlap, who worked for the phone company.

“Don’t tell me you’re here on your day off,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “I won’t.”

She was writing in the logbook. We kept a record of each call that came in, the time, date, and what was said. The volunteer signed in at the beginning of her shift, and then, if there were no calls, she read what had been written between her shifts. We sometimes got repeat callers, women who tested us before they confided in us, and the volunteers had to be prepared for that.

Susan was a middle-aged redhead who had never really lost her baby weight, even though her kids were in high school now. Like Louise, Susan was one of my most reliable volunteers, a main supporter, almost from the beginning.

Midge was studying at the other desk. She had the secondary phone, not that it mattered. Right now, the phones were silent.

I hovered until Susan finished writing. Then I asked, “Do you know shorthand?”

“Doesn’t every woman?” she asked so blandly that at first, I thought she was serious. Then I realized she was making a political statement.

I smiled. “If so, then I’m decidedly not female.”

“Me either,” Midge said.

Susan grinned. “I’m older. Back when I was a girl, they forced us to learn shorthand while they suffocated us in girdles.”

Midge looked alarmed. But I grinned back.

“Come with me,” I said to Susan. “Midge, can you watch the phones?”

“Sure,” she said, frowning at us.

Susan and I went into the kitchen. It was a marvel, built to serve dozens at church suppers. And unlike the rest of the church, this kitchen had been in good condition when I bought the place. Apparently it was one of the few places that the previous tenants had kept up.

Susan sat at the large table we had in the center of the room. I handed her the sheet of paper.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“I don’t honestly know,” I said. “Tell me if you can read it.”

I poured us some coffee from the pot we kept on the stove.

“It’s an idiosyncratic form of shorthand, and it uses some symbols that are pretty old,” Susan said. “But I think I can read it. Something about a—this can’t be right.”

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Can you get me a legal pad?”

“Sure,” I said.

I went out to the front office, and grabbed a legal pad from the stack I kept in one of the desks. I brought it and a pad back to Susan. She translated the shorthand into English, pausing over a couple of words, shaking her head the entire time.

“This can’t be right,” she said again.

She didn’t say that as if something in the text bothered her, but as if something in her translation did.

“Show me,” I said as I sat beside her.

“Okay.” She tapped her pen against the legal sheet. “It starts in the middle of a sentence. Usually when someone takes shorthand, she skips the articles—‘a’ ‘the’—and that’s happening here.”

She slid the paper to me. Her handwriting was clear.

…tortured family relationships. Rumors he had fathered his stepdaughter’s bastard child. Z denies. Paternity test would prove nothing since Z & stepdaughter share blood type. Other accusations…

“What is this?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I have reams of this stuff. Can you translate it for me?”

“I’m not sure I want to,” she said. “I’m not the only one who knows shorthand here.”

I nodded. “But I trust you.”

“You trust the others,” she said, still looking at that paper.

At that moment, Louise came into the kitchen. She was covered in grayish dust. When she wiped a hand over her forehead, she only managed to smear everything.

“You realize, Val, that there are no female electricians, right? Who the hell are we going to hire?”

“There’s got to be a female electrician somewhere,” I said.

She snorted. “Maybe on Mars.”

I sighed.

“You’re going to have to break the no-men rule,” she said.

“And here we have that trust thing again,” Susan said.

“Did I miss something?” Louise asked.

“Not really,” Susan said.

Louise went to the fridge and removed two Cokes and a Hires root beer. She set the bottles on the counter, then fumbled for the bottle opener.

“I’m interrupting something, aren’t I?” Louise asked.

“Just Val trying to rope me into a job I don’t want,” Susan said. “It’ll probably give me nightmares.”

I looked at her.

“You mean answering the phone doesn’t?” Louise asked.

Susan sighed. “Worse nightmares.”

“Ah hell,” Louise said. “Nothing can get worse than mine. I’ll do it.”

I glanced at her. She’d been around almost as long as Susan. Louise was my unofficial foreman on the remodeling.

“Do you read shorthand?” I asked.

“Is there a woman alive today who doesn’t?” she asked, and she was serious.

“You mean besides Val?” Susan asked.

“Oh, gee, sorry,” Louise said. “Yes, I read shorthand.”

“You’d have to keep all of this confidential,” I said.

“Not a problem,” Louise said, and I believed her. She had kept everything confidential so far.

“Good,” Susan said. “She can do it.”

I shook my head. “I have a lot of material. I need both of you to work on it.”

“Mysterious Val,” Louise said. “Let me take the drinks to my crew and I’ll be back.”

She slipped out of the kitchen, clutching the bottles between the fingers of her right hand.

“You’ll have to work in my place,” I said to Susan.

“Oh, God, Val, that’ll drive you nuts,” Susan said. “I’d offer to take this home, but I don’t want my kids near it.”

“I don’t blame you.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that there was a chance that what was on these papers had gotten Langham killed. “That’s why I want you here.”

Susan frowned, thinking. “Then what about the vestry? It has a desk and good lighting. And no windows, so no one would know we were there. Besides, none of the girls go upstairs.”

“If you’re comfortable working up there,” I said.

She smiled. “I love that room. It’s as close to a secret hideaway as we have in this place.”

She was right. And I thought it appropriate for them to examine materials from Langham’s secret room in our most secret room.

“If Louise agrees,” I said.

Susan smiled. “She will,” she said.

***

They worked throughout the afternoon. I didn’t interrupt them. Instead, I sent the workers home, and stepped in for Susan at the phones. The evening shift arrived with pizza. I was about to go upstairs with some pieces for Susan and Louise when Susan surprised me in the kitchen.

“We found something,” she said quietly.

I knew that Kaplan would be in touch, so I told the two volunteers that if someone came or called for me, I was in the vestry. They seemed surprised. I wasn’t even sure these two new girls knew where the vestry was.

Then I followed Susan upstairs.

The smell of sawed wood was strong here as well. I was in the process of remodeling the former offices and choir room into a women-only gym. At the moment, I still taught my self-defense classes at Union South and my friend Nick’s gym, but I wanted a room of my own, as Virginia Wolff said.

The vestry was to the left of the construction zone, past the still closed-off sanctuary. Paneling hid the door on this side, apparently to prevent parishioners from walking in on the minister as he prepared.

Right now, though, the door was half open revealing a well-lit little room. It wasn’t as big or as fancy as Langham’s hidden office, but it was beautiful, with lovely paneling that I planned to save, and a ceiling that went almost two stories up, ending in a point that mimicked the church’s closed-off spire.

Louise had lit some homemade scented candles, so the little room smelled like vanilla. The desk was covered with hand-written legal papers. The garbage cans were overflowing with wadded up sheets. The nearby table had all of the journals opened to various pages. A blank legal pad sat on one of the reading chairs I had placed toward the back.

“Where did you get this stuff?” Louise asked.

“I can’t tell you,” I said.

“You need to tell us,” Louise said.

My heart sank. After that step-, only-, half-daughter thing, I braced for the worst. “How bad is it?”

Susan went over to the table. She touched an open journal.

“This,” she said, then touched another, “this,” and another, “this,” and yet another, “and this, all tell the same story. Different days, different years.”

“And the handwriting is a little looser in all of them,” Louise said, as if that would mean something to me.

“What story?” I said, knowing they wanted me to ask.

“You’d recognize it if you could read it,” Louise said. “It’s the sob sister.”

***

We’d been calling her the sob sister from the beginning of the hotline. She had called every Saturday night like clockwork, rarely missing, usually around eleven.

She always told the same story—a brutal, violent rape that nearly killed her, left her ruined and heartbroken, and made it impossible for her to have children. She would sob her story out. The first few times I took the call, her words were almost incomprehensible.

I tried to get her to come in, to talk to someone, to report the incident. I told her I would go with her, and she would always quietly, gently, hang up.

Other volunteers had a similar experience, and finally we stopped telling her to report the incident. We just listened. Every Saturday night. Sometimes there were more details. Sometimes there were fewer. She always sobbed. If we tried to console her, she would hang up.

I’m not sure exactly when we figured out she was drunk—maybe about the point someone gave her the nickname, about the point when we realized we were helpless in the face of her never-ending grief.

The sob sister taught me that not all victims could be healed, and that for some, grief and loss and terror became an everlasting abyss, one they would never come back from.

I had assumed the sob sister was some broken-down drunk who lived in a trailer, or as a modern-day Miss Haversham in a ramshackle house at the edge of town.

I never thought the sob sister was someone as powerful and competent as Dolly Langham.

“You’re sure?” I asked, sounding a bit breathless.

“Positive,” Susan said. She picked up one of the journals. “This is from 1954.”

Then she read the account out loud. It wasn’t word-for-word what I had heard on the phone—after all, Langham had written this in shorthand, with missing articles and poor transitions—but it was close enough to make the hair rise on the back of my neck.

“And this one,” Susan said, “is the day after Pearl Harbor. She speculates on who might enlist, and then—suddenly, as if she can’t control it—that damn story again.”

I held up a hand. I had to think this through. It violated a lot of my assumptions about everything, about the sob sister, about the nature of victimhood, about Dolly Langham.

Who, come to think of it, was a single unmarried woman who lived alone in the family manse after her father died, who had no family, and who seemingly had only her charities to keep her warm.

But she had had a secret life.

As a sob sister. Not the sobbing woman who called my hotline, but as a front-page girl, one of those women writers of the press, the kind who specialized in an emotional sort of journalism nearly forgotten and completely discredited. Nellie Bly, who got herself tossed into an insane asylum so she could write passionately about the awful conditions; Ida Tarbell, whose work on Standard Oil nearly got discredited because of her gender; or even the great Ida B. Wells, whose anti-lynching campaign almost got her killed, all got dismissed as sob sisters.

Women who wrote tears.

Dolly Langham wrote tears. Accuser Speaks! It was a piece of sympathy, not a piece of hack journalism. So were other stories, all under the guise of a straight news story, told in a way that would appeal to the woman of the house, the emotional one, the one who actually might change the mind of her man.

“Do you guys remember who gave the sob sister her nickname?” I asked.

“It was before my time. You guys had already labeled her before I got here,” Louise said. “So, you know who she is now. You want to share?”

“I can’t yet.” I said, even though I wanted to.

Susan was tapping her thumbnail against her teeth.

“June seems like so long ago,” she said after a moment. She was frowning. “Maybe Helene nicknamed her. Or Mabel.”

Our oldest volunteers. I adored Mabel. She had campaigned for women’s rights in the teens, and had done her best to change the world then. That she was helping us now seemed a miracle to me.

Helene, on the other hand, drove me nuts. She was conservative, religious, yet determined to make this hotline work. I still struggled to get along with her, but as time progressed, I had learned to appreciate her.

“I think it was Helene,” Susan said. “I have this vivid memory of her passing the call to me one Saturday night just as the phone rang. She said she couldn’t help the sob sister any. Some others were there and the name stuck.”

She couldn’t help the sob sister. Because they knew each other?

“Are there names in any of these accounts?” I asked. “Does she give us a clue as to who this guy is who hurt her so badly?”

“It wasn’t one guy,” Louise said softly.

I glanced at her. Her eyes were red.

“It was a gang,” she said. “A few of the early accounts were really graphic.”

Susan nodded. “And there are no names, at least not that we’ve found.”

“What about in the other papers I gave you?” I asked. “Are there any names in those?”

“Initials,” Louise said. “And I have to tell you, this stuff is gruesome.”

“Yeah,” Susan said. “What was this woman into?”

I shook my head again. “I’ll tell you when I can. The most recent papers, what are they about?”

Susan bowed her head. “You don’t want to know.”

But Louise squared her shoulders. “It’s another group.”

“A group of what?” I asked, feeling cold.

“A group of perverts,” Louise said.

Susan had put a hand over her mouth. Her head was still bowed.

“What kind of perverts?” I asked.

“The kind who like little boys,” Louise said. “They take them from the home, to work. And the boys work, all right.”

Her words were clipped, bitter, angry.

“The home?” I asked, my mind a bit frozen. I’d become so used to dealing with women that the phrase “little boys” threw me off. “Their homes?”

“The boys’ home near Janesville,” Susan said, sounding ill. “My church gives that place money.”

“Please tell me she uses names,” I said.

Louise shook her head. “Initials, though. That and the home might be enough information to figure it out.”

If we were cops. If someone was going to investigate this. I didn’t know if Kaplan could do it. Groups, gangs, rings of organized anything were often the hardest thing to defeat.

“Did they know she was investigating them?” I asked.

“Someone—a E.N.—thought she was asking a lot of questions. She was scared,” Susan said. Then she added, “I got that from the journal, not from her notes.”

“Can you give me what you translated?” I asked. “Not the journals, but the notes themselves?”

“I wish we had one of those expensive copiers,” Louise said. “I really don’t want to write this stuff out again.”

I empathized.

“Just set the papers in a pile right here.” I moved a metal outbox onto the table. “I’ll pick them up if I need them. Don’t copy right now. Keep translating, if you can. If you can’t, I understand. But I sure would like names.”

Susan picked up her pen. Then her gaze met mine. “How do people stay sane in the face of all this crap?”

I thought of the cops I’d known, good and bad, as well as the people I knew who were trying to make things right in the world.

“I’m not sure they stay sane,” I said. “Hell, I’m not even sure they were ever sane.”

I wasn’t sure I was either. But I didn’t say that. I figured both women knew that already.

***

I was halfway down the stairs when I met one of the volunteers coming up. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her nose was red.

“Call for you,” she said in a thick voice.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded. “Just taking a break.”

She was trying for jaunty, but she failed miserably. A lot of the volunteers took breaks after a particularly tough phone call. Often those breaks took place in the ladies room, and involved lots of Kleenex.

I hurried down the stairs to my desk. Kaplan was on the line.

“I’m coming over there,” he said. “But I figured, given the nature of your business, that you’d want me to let you know first.”

I did appreciate it, but knew better than to thank him. In the past when I noticed him being sensitive, he got offended.

“Do you know where the old rectory used to be?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Go to that door.”

I hung up and hurried back through the walkway into my tiny living room. I had just switched on the lights when I heard a car pull up. I didn’t look through the curtains. I waited, tense, listening to the car engine shut off, the door slam, and footsteps on the gravel. I anticipated the knock on the door, but it still made me jump.

“It’s me.” Kaplan’s voice. I appreciated that he didn’t identify himself. He probably had no idea that I was alone.

I checked the peephole, then unlocked all of the dead bolts. I pulled the door open.

Kaplan was still wearing his heavy police jacket, and his galoshes. His black pants were stained with snow and salt along the hems.

“C’mon in,” I said, standing back.

He nodded, stamped his feet, and entered. He stopped as I closed the door, a look of surprise on his face. “This is your place?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I expected—”

“The hotline, I know,” I said. “We don’t let strangers in there.”

“I remember,” he said grimly. He took off his jacket, put his gloves in the pocket, then ran a hand through his hair. He slipped out of the galoshes as well.

He was wearing a rumpled suit coat under the jacket. “You see the 10 o’clock news?”

“No.”

“Open and shut. Burglars surprised her, knowing what was in the house. Now we’re having an all-out manhunt which will, of course, fail.”

I opened my hand and gestured toward the sofa. His gaze passed over the materials that I had left on the table. “Coffee?” I asked. “Water? Soda?”

“Coffee,” he said. “Black. Thank you.”

I went into the kitchen and started the percolator. Then I hovered in the archway between the kitchen and the living room.

“How do you know it wasn’t burglars?” I asked.

“You mean besides the fact nothing was stolen? Oh, that’s right. I forgot. She surprised those burglars, so they viciously attacked her. The odd thing was there was more than one of them, and still they didn’t have time to take her purse or the diamond earrings she wore or the gold bracelet around her wrist.” He leaned his head back. “There’s so much not right here, and I can’t tell anyone.”

Except me. The tension had left me, and I actually felt flattered, although I knew better than to say so.

“You knew her, didn’t you?” I asked quietly.

He raised his head, and looked at me. “She called me her disappointment.”

I raised my eyebrows. At that moment, I heard the percolator and silently cursed it. “Coffee’s done.”

I filled two large mugs, grabbed the plate of five raisin cookies that I had stolen from the volunteers two days ago, and put it all on a tray that had come with the kitchen. I brought the tray into the living room and put it on the end table near him.

I sat across from him on the matching chair that faced the window. “You were a disappointment?”

“Yeah.” He grabbed two cookies, but he didn’t eat them. “Among the other things she did, Dolly Langham gave out two full-ride scholarships every year to the University of Wisconsin. She gave them to the best students from Madison area high schools, no matter the gender.”

“Wow,” I said. “You got one?”

He nodded. “Four years at our greatest state institution.”

“And then you became a cop,” I said.

He shrugged one shoulder. “Like father, like son.”

“And she got angry at you.”

“Said I was wasting my talents.”

“Are you?”

His gaze met mine. “Are you wasting yours?”

I smiled. “Touché.”

We both picked up our coffee mugs. He didn’t add anything, so I said, “You never lost touch with her.”

“I checked up on her,” he said. “She wasn’t young and she lived alone.”

“I’ll bet she appreciated that.” I blew on my coffee, wishing I hadn’t tinged that sentence with sarcasm.

“You got it. She hated it. Not that it made any difference. She still died horribly. Worse that I would have expected.” He sighed. His sadness and regret were palpable.

Yet the thought of him just discovering that hidden room today didn’t ring true. He had known all along that it was there.

“So she took you into her private office before,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’d seen her go in it once, but I’d never gone in myself. I just thought she had some paperwork stored in the back of the pantry, until today.”

“What made you get me?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I guess I always figured you and her as kindred spirits.”

I started. Had he known what she was doing? “Why?”

“The stubborn independent streak, maybe,” he said. “The willingness to go against female norms. The way that you both believe men are unnecessary.”

“I never said that.” I sounded defensive. I liked men. Or, at least, I used to.

“She never said it either. It was just the attitude—don’t help me, don’t do for me, there’s nothing you can do that I can’t do.” He shook his head. “She was a cussed old broad.”

His voice broke on the last word.

He loved her. He really should not have been in charge of this investigation, and yet he was. I doubted he would have been able to relinquish it to anyone.

And yet, because he loved her, he couldn’t go along with the fake investigation. He had to know why, and it might cost him his career.

I almost said something to him, warned him, but it wasn’t my place. It angered me when he told me what to do; I was certain my warning him would make him just as angry as it would have made me.

So I decided to approach the entire idea sideways. “Do you know what she was working on?”

He took a deep breath, ran a hand over his face, and sighed, clearly gathering himself. “You mean besides the charities.”

I nodded.

“No,” he said. “But you do.”

I got up and took the Polaroids out of my pile. Then I held them before showing them to him. Showing them to anyone almost felt like a betrayal of her trust—this woman I hadn’t known, and hadn’t met, who was, as Kaplan had so astutely seen, a kindred spirit.

I even knew why she had avoided the hotline. She didn’t want—she couldn’t, really—draw attention to her secret life. Besides, she had called us before we approached her. She was afraid we would figure out who she was.

“Here’s the problem,” I said before I put the Polaroids in front of him. “She’d been doing a mountain of investigative work, and she’d done it for decades—longer than you and I have been alive. Any one thing from her past could have killed her.”

I carefully laid each Polaroid in front of him, explaining them all, the secret closet, the hidden shelves, the pen names, the meticulous notes that we hadn’t even really begun to explore.

“Jesus,” he said when I was finished, and the word was a half-prayer, half-reaction. “Jesus.”

I hadn’t even told him what she had been working on. I only touched the old cases, because I wasn’t familiar with most of them, not yet.

“Why would she do this?” He picked up one of the pictures, the one that showed the wig, the different clothing. “Her father was still alive through much of this. He never knew?”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Kaplan said more to himself than to me. He looked up, his gaze open and vulnerable. “It doesn’t—”

Then his mouth dropped open. He closed it, and shook his head slowly.

“I should listen to myself,” he said. “I said she was like you. She was, wasn’t she? She had the same background and there was no way in hell she was ever going to be someone’s victim.”

“Not the same background,” I said softly. “It’s never the same.”

“You know what I mean,” he said with more heat than I expected. He thought I was belittling his realization. “You know what happened. Is it important? Did it get her killed?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure when it happened. In the teens, I think. I can’t tell you much more. She used to call here, so it falls in my confidentiality rules.”

“Which won’t hold up in court,” he said fiercely.

“I know,” I said. “I’d give you names and dates if I had them. She’s gone, after all, and I’d love to find out who killed her. But she never gave names, and she didn’t give a lot of details that would ever help us find who hurt her.”

Damaged her, damn near destroyed her. “Hurt” was such a minor word in the context of what happened to Dolly Langham and the power of her reaction to it.

“Names?”

I nodded.

His eyes narrowed. “So give me what you do have. The recent stuff. Logically, that would be what got her killed. If nothing else, it’ll give me a place to start.”

I was shaking my head before he even finished speaking. “You’re not going to like it.”

“I don’t like any of this,” he said. “Just tell me.”

So I did.

Somewhere in the middle of the discussion, partly because I couldn’t stand his expression, and partly because I didn’t want to answer questions I knew nothing about, I went up to the vestry for the translated papers.

Louise was still there, looking ragged.

“A man called you earlier,” she said, as if I had done something wrong.

I nodded.

“Your cop friend?”

I picked up the papers from the out basket. “Thank you,” I said.

Then I went down the stairs again. My cop friend. Were we friends? I wasn’t sure.

I let myself back into the rectory. It smelled of toast, bacon, and coffee. Kaplan wasn’t sitting on my couch any longer. He was in my kitchen, scrambling eggs in my best cast iron pan.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I haven’t eaten anything except cookies all day.”

“I don’t mind when someone else cooks.” I looked at the clock on the stove—it was the middle of the night. I should have sent Louise home.

Kaplan divided the eggs between two plates, then added bacon and toast. He handed me a plate which I gladly took. I was hungry, and that surprised me.

I set the papers on the table as I sat down.

He sat across from me, but didn’t read. Not yet.

“She did this for almost fifty years,” he said, “and never got caught before.”

“We don’t know that,” I said.

“If she did, she got out of it.”

I nodded slightly, a small concession.

“How could she get caught this time?”

“Maybe the disguise didn’t work for an elderly woman,” I said. “Or maybe someone recognized her voice. We probably won’t know.”

He had already cleaned his plate. I had barely touched mine.

He picked up the papers, then went into the living room to read them. I finished eating and cleaned up the kitchen.

It felt both strange and natural to have a man in my house again. To have a cop in my house. A benevolent cop. I need to stop thinking of every cop like the man who hurt me and remember how much my husband Truman had cared about the people around him. Truman was like most of the cops I had known. I needed to keep that in mind.

When I finished the dishes, I went into the living room. Kaplan had rolled up the legal sheets and was holding them in his left hand. His right elbow was braced on the arm of the couch, and he was lost in thought.

“What am I going to do?” he asked as I sat down across from him. “I’m a detective in a small city. I have orders from the chief of police to close this quickly. I don’t think he’s involved, but I’ll wager whoever is has money and clout and the ability to close the cases that he believes need closing.”

“I know,” I said softly.

“Sometimes,” he said, not looking at me, “you learn to close your eyes. But this….”

He let the words trail off. Then he raised his head. His eyes were red-rimmed.

“They killed her. They killed her to keep her quiet, and she worked her whole life to make sure the full story got told on cases like this. They silenced her, and she didn’t believe in silence. Hell, Miss Wilson, she’s going to haunt me if I let them get away with it. Even if she’s not a real ghost, she’ll haunt me. Just her memory will haunt me.”

“Val,” I said.

He blinked, and focused on me for the first time.

“Call me Val,” I said. I didn’t need to explain why.

“Val,” he said softly. Then he sighed. “I won’t have a career if I go after this. I might not live through the week.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. I’d seen worse over the years.

“But I can’t let it drop,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “You might not have to.”

His breath caught—just a moment of hope, a small one, and then I watched that hope dissipate. “It won’t work. Anything I do—”

“I’ve had a few hours longer to think about this than you have,” I said. “And there’s something pretty glaring in the evidence that Miss Langham gathered.”

“Glaring. Something that’ll convince the chief?” he asked. Then before I could get a word in edgewise, he added, “Even if the evidence is rock-solid, I can’t do anything. Hell, for all I know, there are judges involved and city officials and—”

“Hank,” I said quietly. “This gang, this ring, they operate across state lines.”

His mouth opened slightly. Then he rubbed a hand over his chin.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, you’re right. Hell, I won’t have to even tie this to Dolly’s murder. I just have to quietly hand it to the right person.” Then he smiled. “And I just happen to know some good men who work for the FBI.”

***

I wish I could say it was easy. I wish I could say it all got resolved in the next few days. But I can’t, because it didn’t. It took nearly a year on the orphanage case, and most of the time, Kaplan was out of the loop.

Which meant I was too.

And that made me uncomfortable. I didn’t trust the FBI on the best of days. But I had to continually remind myself that this wasn’t my case or really, my business. Although if they didn’t stop it, I promised myself I would find a way.

Eventually, the Feds arrested a lot of people and more quietly resigned, and the regional papers had a lot of articles that were vague and unsatisfying, because someone deemed the details too graphic for publication.

Langham’s case got closed quickly. Kaplan and I decided that it was better to assume her death was caused by the most recent case, and to get the ringleaders for that. However, I know that Kaplan is still quietly investigating. He’ll never be satisfied until he knows what really happened.

But for now, the official story stands: Langham’s death inside her own home was caused by burglars she interrupted. What got taken? No one knows exactly, but it turned out that the house had two secret rooms that probably dated from Prohibition—or so the papers speculated, without proof, of course. The rooms had books and desks, but there were empty cupboards, except for clothing that apparently belonged to Langham’s father’s various mistresses.

Whatever had been in the drawers of the desk and the cabinet behind one of the desks, well, the burglars had clearly made off with all of that.

In the middle of the night. With police escort.

If you could call Kaplan a police escort.

That part wasn’t in the papers, of course. And the neighbors never seemed to notice the two police officers—one tiny and dark, and the other who looked like he was from central casting. They arrived at one a.m. on two consecutive nights, parked in the driveway, and carried boxes of documents out to a squad car.

No one questioned it, no one remembered it, and no one even knew about those rooms for nearly two months after the investigation closed, when the heirs—the administrators of seven local charities—got their first tours of the place they now held in trust.

Then the story broke open again.

By then, no one even mentioned the cops dealing with that late-night crime scene. No one mentioned the boxes.

Boxes that moved from one secret room to another—although my room wasn’t exactly secret: just forgotten. It was the closet off what had been the choir room. There were even a few musty robes balled up in the corner. I didn’t move them. I just locked the closet door, then locked the choir room door, and wondered what I would do with my treasure, what I would do with another woman’s life work.

Kaplan asked me not to worry about it, not yet.

I didn’t worry about it, but I decided it was time to join the female half of the human race. I signed up for a shorthand course at Madison Area Technical College, starting in January.

And that would have been the end of it, except for one rather strange conversation, late on a Saturday night, two weeks after Langham’s death.

I found myself alone with Helene, our second-oldest volunteer, the one who irritated me, the one who had given Dolly Langham her nickname.

That night, Helene wore a blue dress over a girdle that had to hurt like hell, her perfect stockings attached at the thigh with clips that she would have been appalled to know I had seen as she sat down. She had played the organ at Langham’s funeral, and stood graveside like a supplicant.

I had pretended I hadn’t seen her.

But that night, in the silence of the phone room, about eleven p.m. when Langham’s drunken calls usually came in, I said, “You knew who it was from that first call, didn’t you?”

I watched Helene weigh her response. An old secret versus a new one, the sadness at the loss of a friend, the weight we both felt in the silence.

After a long moment, she nodded.

“You knew what she had been doing all these years too, didn’t you?” I asked.

“The charities? Of course,” Helene said.

“The writing,” I said.

Helene peered at me. Then sighed. “I thought she had quit decades ago. I would have told her to quit if I had known.”

So Helene suspected the truth: that Langham’s death was caused by her work, not by burglars.

“Who hurt her so badly?” I asked.

Helene shook her head. “Does it matter? They’re all dead now.”

The words were so flat, so cold. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said. “A couple of them committed suicide. After their disgrace.”

I frowned. She shrugged, then slid the log book of all the calls toward her, to do her night’s reading.

“Their disgrace?” I asked.

“Different for all of them, of course,” she said as if she were discussing the weather. “You know how it is. They come to Madison for graduate school or to work in government, and then they go home to Chicago or Des Moines. And then the press finds some story—true or not—and hounds them. Just hounds them.”

She smiled just a little, her hand toying with the edge of the log.

“Those tearful interviews with the female accusers. Readers used to love those.”

Then she stood up, nodded at me, and asked me if I wanted coffee. As if we were in the basement of a still functioning church. As if we weren’t discussing the unsolved murder of a woman who had been Helene’s friend for decades.

A shiver ran through me, and I looked at my half-finished room, that still smelled of sawed wood.

Sob sisters.

The things we did to live with our pasts. The things we did to cope with the violence.

The things some of us did for revenge.

 

___________________________________________

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

Sob Sisters

Copyright © 2021 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November, 2013
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2021 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Curaphotography/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

 

I know, I know. It’s April Fool’s Day. And Dean Wesley Smith decided to launch a Kickstarter anyway. It’s for his Poker Boy series, which is one of my favorites. If you back it, you’ll get four Poker Boy ebooks and whatever stretch goals we hit. And writers, there’s some really great rewards here. So take a look.

And if you’re uncertain, at least watch the video I did. Enjoy! (Oh, and head to the Kickstarter here.)

Carol wants a nap. Carol needs a nap. And no one will let her have one because she’s important. She’s important because the grown-ups believe she’s an average five-year-old. Average five-year-olds have uses for bad guys who want to conquer the world. Only no one realizes that Carol isn’t average. Carol’s smart. And tired. And will do anything to get her nap.

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

 

Advisors at Naptime By Kristine Kathryn Rusch 

It was time for Carol’s nap. They always forgot her nap. Mommy says every kid needs a nap. Carol used to hate naps, but now she’s tired. All she wanted was her blankie, her cuddly dog, and her squishy pillow.

And Mommy. They never let Mommy into the playroom with her.

They said Mommy sat outside, but once they left the door unlocked and Carol got out. She was in a cold hallway that looked like a giant tube or something. No chairs, icky white lights, and a hard gray floor.

No Mommy, no guards, no one to hear if she cried.

She stamped her foot and screamed. Everybody came running. Mommy said they were watching a TV screen with Carol on it in that room up there—and then she pointed at this tiny window, way up at the end of the hall—and Carol got mad.

“You lied,” she said, pointing her finger at Mommy in that way Mommy said was rude and mean. “You promised. You’d be right here. You said!”

Mommy got all flustered. Her cheeks got kinda pink when she was flustered and she messed with her hair, twirling it like she yelled at Carol for doing.

“I meant,” Mommy said in that voice she gets when she’s upset, “I’d be able to see you all the time.”

“You said—”

“I know what I said, honey.” Mommy looked at one of the guards—they’re these big guys with square faces and these weird helmets you could see through. They also had big guns on their sides, latched down so nobody can grab them away—and then she looked back at Carol. “I meant I’d be able to see you. I’m sorry I said it wrong.”

Carol wiped at her face. It was wet. She was crying and she didn’t know it. She hated that. She hated this place. It wasn’t fun like Mommy said it would be. It was a stinky place filled with grown-ups who didn’t get it.

Mommy said she’d be playing games all day, and she did, kinda, but by herself. She sat in front of this computer and punched numbers.

Once this scary guy came in. He wore bright reds, and he kinda looked like a clown. He bent down like grown-ups do, and talked to her like she was really stupid.

He said, “Carol, my dear, I’m so glad you’re going to help me with my little project. We’ll have fun.”

Only she never saw him again.

Which was good, because she didn’t like him. He was fake cheery. She hated fake cheery. If he was gonna be icky, he should just be icky instead of pretending to be all happy and stuff. But she didn’t tell him that. She didn’t tell him a lot of stuff because she didn’t like him. And she never saw him again. Just his mittens.

Mommy said every important person had mittens. Everybody who worked for him could be called a mitten, which meant Carol was one, even though she didn’t look like a mitten. She finally figured it was some kinda code word—everybody here liked code words—for workers.

She thought it was a stupid one—Mommy would say, be careful of Lord Kafir and his mittens—and Carol would have to try not to laugh. How can people be afraid of big fake-cheery guys with mittens? ’Specially when they had big red shoes and shiny red pants like those clowns at that circus Uncle Reeve took her to.

Carol had a lot of uncles. Mommy used to bring them over a lot. Then she met Lord Kafir, and the uncles didn’t come to the house no more. Lord Kafir promised Mommy a lot of money if Carol would play games at the Castle with him.

Mommy asked if this was a Neverland Ranch kinda thing and Lord Kafir’s mittens—the ones who’d come to the house—looked surprised. Those mittens didn’t wear helmets. They wore suits like real grown-ups and they had sunglasses and guns that Carol had seen on TV.

They wouldn’t let her touch the guns (she hated it when grown-ups wouldn’t let her touch stuff) but they promised she’d be playing with “weapons” all the time.

Mommy had to explain that weapons were like guns and stuff, only cooler.

So here’s what Carol thought then: she thought she’d be going to a real castle, like that one they show on the Disney Channel—maybe a blue one, maybe a pink one, with Tinkerbell flying around it, and lots of sparkly lights. She thought she’d get to wear a pretty dress like Cinderella, and dance with giant mice who were really nice, or meet a handsome beast like Belle did.

All the girls who go to castles get to wear pretty dresses with sparkly shoes, and they got to grow their hair really long (Mommy keeps Carol’s hair short because “it’s easier”) and got to dance what Mommy called a walls, and they lived happily ever after.

But that’s not what happened. The Castle wasn’t a castle. It’s this big building all gray and dark that’s built into a mountain. The door let you in and said stuff like checking, checking, all clear before you got to go through another door.

Then there was the mittens. The ones outside the mountain door wore suits and sunglasses. The ones inside actually had the helmets and weird-looking guns and big boots. They scared Mommy—the mittens did, not the boots—and she almost left there. But the assistant, Miss Hanaday, joined them and talked to Mommy and reminded her about all the money she’d get for just three months of Carol’s time (Carol didn’t like that), and Mommy grabbed Carol’s hand really tight and led her right into the castle/hall/mountain like it was okay.

Carol dug her feet in. She was wearing her prettiest shoes—all black and shiny (but no heels. Mommy says little girls can’t wear heels)—and they scraped on that gray floor, leaving black marks. Mommy yelled at her, and Carol hunched even harder, because the place smelled bad, like doctors or that school she went to for three days, and Mommy said the smell was just air-conditioning, but they had air-conditioning at home and it didn’t smell like this. At home, it smelled like the Jones’s dog when he got wet. Here it smelled cold and metal and—wrong.

Carol hated it, but Mommy didn’t care. She said, “Just three months,” then took Carol to this room with all the stuff where she was supposed to play with Lord Kafir, and that’s when Mommy said she’d be right outside.

So Mommy lied—and Carol hated liars.

And now all she wanted was a nap, and nobody was listening because Mommy was a liar and nobody was in that room. Carol was gonna scream and pound things if they didn’t let her nap really soon. She wanted her blankie. She wanted her bed.

She wanted to be let out of this room.

She didn’t care how many cookies they gave her for getting stuff right. She hated it here.

“Hate it,” she said, pounding on the keyboard of the computer they had in here. “Hate it, hate it, hate it.”

Each time she said “hate,” her fist hit the keyboard. It jumped and made a squoogy sound. She kinda liked that sound. It was better than the stupid baby music they played in here or the dumb TV shows that she’d never seen before.

She wanted her movies. She wanted her big screen. She wanted her blankie and her bed.

She wanted a nap.

She pounded again, and Mommy opened the door.

“Honey, you’re supposed to be looking at the pretty pictures.”

She was leaning in and her cheeks was pink. If her hands wasn’t grabbing the door, they’d be twirling her hair, and she might even be chewing on it.

“I don’t like the pictures,” Carol said.

“Honey—”

“I wanna go home.”

“Tonight, honey.”

“Now,” Carol said.

“Honey, we’re here to work for Lord Kafir.”

“Don’t like him.” Carol crossed her arms.

“You’re not supposed to like him.”

“He’s s’posed to play with me.”

“No, honey, you’re supposed to play with his toys.”

“A computer’s not a toy.” Carol was just repeating what Mommy had told her over and over.

“No, dear, but the programs are. You’re supposed to look at them and—”

“The bad guy always wins,” Carol said. She hated it here. She wanted to see Simba or Belle or her friends on the TV. Or maybe go back to that kindergarten that Mommy hated because they said Carol was average. She didn’t know what average was ’cept Mommy didn’t like it. Mommy made it sound bad.

Until that day when she was looking at the want ads like she did (Honey, don’t mess with the paper. Mommy needs to read the want ads) and then she looked up at Carol with that goofy frowny look and whispered, “Average five-year-old…”

“What?” Mommy asked.

“In the games,” Carol said. “The bad guy always wins.”

Mommy slid into the room and closed the door. “The bad guy’s supposed to win, honey.”

“No, he’s not!” Carol shouted. “He gets blowed up or his parrot leaves him or the other lions eat him or he gets runned over by a big truck or his spaceship crashes. The good guys win.”

Mommy shushed her and made up-and-down quiet motions with her hands. “Lord Kafir’s a good guy.”

“I’m not talkin ’bout him!” Carol was still shouting. Shouting felt good when you couldn’t have a nap. “On the computer. The bad guys always win. It’s a stupid game. I hate that game.”

“Maybe you could do the numbers for a while, then, honey.’

“The numbers, you hit the right button and they make stupid words. Nobody thinks I know letters but I do.” Carol learned her ABCs a long time ago. “What’s D-E-A-T-H-R-A-Y?”

“Candy,” Mommy said. Her voice sounded funny.

Carol frowned. That didn’t sound right.

“What’s I-R-A-Q?”

Mommy grabbed her hair and twirled it. “Chocolate.”

“What’s W-H-I-T-E-H-O-U-S-E?” Carol asked.

“That’s in there?” Mommy’s face got all red.

“What’s W-O-R-L-D-D-O-M-I-N-A-T-I-O-N?” Carol asked.

“D…D…O…” Mommy was frowning now too. “Oh. Oh!”

“See?” Carol said. “Stupid words. I hate stupid words and dumb numbers. And games where the bad guy wins. I want to go home, Mommy.”

“Um, sure,” Mommy said. She looked at the door, then at Carol. “Later. We’ll go later.”

“Now,” Carol said.

Mommy shook her head. “Carol, honey, you know we can’t leave until five.”

“I wanna nap!” Carol shouted, then felt her own cheeks get hot. She never asked for a nap before. “And a cookie. And my cuddly dog and my pillow. I wanna go away. I hate it here, Mommy. I hate it.”

“We have to keep coming, honey. We promised.”

“No.” Carol said and swung her chair around so she was looking at the computer.

It was blinking bright red. It never did that before.

“Mommy, look.” Carol pointed at the big red word.

Mommy looked behind her like she thought somebody might come in the room. “Honey, I’m not supposed to see this—”

“What’s that say?”

Mommy looked. Then Mommy grabbed Carol real tight, and ran for the door. She got it open, but all those mittens with guns and helmets was outside, with guns pointed.

Mommy stopped. “Please let us go. Please.”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” the man with the biggest gun said. “You have to wait for Ms. Hanaday.”

“We can’t wait for Ms. Hanaday,” Mommy said. “My daughter punched the computer. Now it’s counting down to a self-destruct.”

Carol squirmed. She watched Star Trek. She knew what a self-destruct was. “We gots to go,” she whispered.

Mommy just squeezed her tighter.

“We gots to go!” Carol shouted.

Mommy nodded.

The guards kept their guns on them.

“A self-destruct?” one of them whispered.

Another guard elbowed him. “She’s the average five-year-old. She finds the holes before we implement the program.”

“Huh?” the first guard asked.

“Y’know, how they always say that the plan’s so bad an average five-year-old could figure out how to get around it? She’s the average—”

“Enough!” Mommy said. “I don’t care if it is fake. I’m not going to take that risk.”

Carol squirmed. She wanted to kick, but Mommy hated it when she kicked. Sometimes Carol got in trouble for kicking Mommy. Not always. Sometimes Mommy forgot to yell at her. But right now, Mommy was stressed. She’d yell.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the first guard said. “We can’t let you go until Ms. Hanaday gets here.”

“And she is!” a lady’s voice said from far away. Carol peered around Mommy, and sure enough, there was that Ms. Hanaday, in her high heels and her black suit and wearing her glasses halfway down her nose even though she wasn’t as old as Mommy was.

“I wanna go,” Carol whispered.

“I know, honey,” Mommy said, but she wasn’t listening. She was just talking like she did when Carol was bugging her. But she did set Carol down, only she kept a hold of Carol’s hand so Carol couldn’t run away.

Ms. Hanaday was holding a bag. Her heels made clicky noises on the hard gray floor. It was colder out here than it was in that room. Carol shivered. She wanted a jacket. She wanted her blankie. She wanted a nap.

“I wanna go home,” she said again.

One of the guards looked at her real nice-like. He was somebody’s daddy, she just knew it. Maybe if she acted just a little cuter…

“What have we got here?” Ms. Hanaday said as she got close. She reached into the bag, and crouched at the same time. She whipped out a giant chocolate chip cookie, the kind Mommy said had to last at least three meals.

Carol reached for it, but Mommy grabbed her hand.

“We would like to leave now,” Mommy said.

“May I remind you, Ms. Rogers, that you signed a three-month contract? It’s only been three weeks.”

“Still. My daughter isn’t happy, and I’m not real comfortable here. No child should have to work all day.”

“It’s not designed as work, ma’am. It’s play.”

“Is not,” Carol muttered, wanting that cookie. She stared at it. Maybe if she stared hard enough, it would float over to her. She seen that in movies too.

“Did you hear her?” Mommy asked. “She doesn’t think it’s play.”

“Wanna nap,” Carol told Ms. Hanaday.

Really want that cookie, but Mommy still had a hold of her hand. Too tight. Mommy’s hand was cold and kinda sweaty.

Ms. Hanaday was frowning at her.

“I don’t like it here,” Carol said louder this time, in case Ms. Hanady didn’t hear so good. “Wanna go.”

“The day’s not over yet,” Ms. Hanaday said.

“Delores!” Lord Kafir shouted from down the hall. Carol knew it was him because he had the funny accent Mommy called Brid Ish. Some people from England had it. Most of them got to be bad guys in movies.

Carol shivered again.

Ms. Hanaday stood up. Lord Kafir was hurrying down the hall. His shoes didn’t make that clicky sound. They were kinda quiet, maybe because they weren’t official grown-up shoes.

“Is it true?” he asked Ms. Hanaday like there wasn’t Mommy and Carol and all those guys with the big guns. “Did she break the code?”

“I’m afraid so,” Ms. Hanaday said. She was holding the cookie so hard part of it broke. She had to move really fast to catch it before it fell to the ground.

Now the cookie was Carol-size. Carol looked at Mommy, but Mommy wasn’t looking at her.

“This is the five-year-old, right?” Lord Kafir pushed past Ms. Hanaday, knocking the cookie again. She had to grab real fast and still parts of it fell on the floor. Wasted. Carol wanted to get them, but Mommy wouldn’t let her go.

“Yes, sir. This is Carol. You’ve met her.”

“That’s right.” He crouched.

Carol made a face at him. She hated people who forgot her.

“You look pretty smart,” he said.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“Are you smart?” he asked.

“Of course I am, dummy,” Carol said.

“Carol!” Mommy breathed. “We don’t talk to grown-ups like that.”

He wasn’t a grown-up. He was a mean man in bright red clothes. He was glaring at her like she’d done something wrong.

“I think you’re pretty smart,” he said like that was bad.

“Her teachers said she was average,” Mommy said.

“We tested her IQ three times. She always came out in the normal range.” Ms. Hanaday sounded kinda scared.

“You know that children often give unreliable IQ tests.” Lord Kafir pushed up and looked at the other grown-ups. “I don’t think she’s average.”

“Mr.—Lord—Sir,” Mommy said. “She’s—”

“The other five-year-olds couldn’t beat that self-destruct,” he said.

“They barely got a chance, sir.” Ms. Hanaday was dripping cookie crumbs. “She got it earlier than the others—”

“Because she solved the earlier puzzles sooner. She’s good at code words and passwords and secret plans. She shouldn’t be this good if she’s average.”

“She watches a lot of television,” Mommy said.

“Can I have that cookie?” Carol asked.

Everybody looked at her.

“Please?” she asked in her best company voice.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mommy said, but Ms. Hanaday handed her all the parts of the cookie.

Carol chomped. The cookie wasn’t as good as it looked. Maybe because it got all sweaty and gooey in Ms. Hanaday’s hand.

“I swear, sir,” Ms. Hanaday said. “She’s average.”

“I’m tired of five-year-olds,” he said. “It’s time to implement the plan.”

“Sir! We can’t do that! It’s not ready!” Ms. Hanaday said.

“Get it ready,” he said.

“But the five-year-old—”

“Isn’t average,” he said.

Ms. Hanaday looked at Mommy like Mommy had gone into the living room without permission. It was like that code grown-ups had. Lord Kafir understood, even if Carol didn’t.

“Have you seen anything?” Lord Kafir asked Mommy.

“No,” Mommy said. She was lying. Carol looked at her in shock. Mommy was a horrible liar. She lied all the time. Carol just didn’t know it before.

“She saw the red lights,” Carol said. She didn’t want Mommy to get in trouble with Lord Kafir. “It scared her.”

“Red scares a lot of people,” he said, smoothing his ugly clothes. Was that why he wore them? To scare people?

The guards looked at each other, like they didn’t like any of this.

Ms. Hanaday shook her head.

“Pay the lady her three weeks and get them out of here,” Lord Kafir said to her. “And wash your hands. You’re a mess.”

“Yes, sir,” Ms. Hanaday said, but Lord Kafir was already hurrying down the hall.

The guards had lowered their weapons.

Ms. Hanaday ran a hand through her hair, making a streak of chocolate on the side of her face. It looked a little like poo.

Carol tried not to giggle.

“You know that this is all just war games,” Ms. Hanaday said.

“Sure,” Mommy said.

“Pretend stuff,” Ms. Hanaday said.

“Yeah,” Mommy said.

“None of it means anything,” Ms. Hanaday said.

“I know,” Mommy said.

“I’ll get your check,” Ms. Hanaday said, “and meet you at the door.”

“Okay,” Mommy said.

Ms. Hanaday hurried off after Lord Kafir. The guards just stared after her.

“I don’t like this,” one said to the other.

Mommy picked Carol up like she was a baby. “We’re going, honey.”

Carol swallowed the last of the cookie. Cookies were yucky without milk. “Okay,” she said.

Mommy hurried down the hall, a different way than everybody else went. It only took a few minutes to get to the door.

Ms. Hanaday was already there, holding a long piece of paper. It had to be a check. Mommy snatched it, then said thanks in a kinda rude voice, and then hurried out the door.

Nobody stopped them. In the movies, somebody would’ve stopped them. ’Specially the way Mommy was breathing, like she was all scared and stuff.

Carol wasn’t scared. Carol was glad to be outside where the sun was bright and the air smelled really good. She stretched. She wanted down. She wanted to run, but Mommy held tight all the way to the car.

They backed up and headed out of the parking lot, driving really, really fast.

“If you want a nap,” Mommy said, “close your eyes.”

“Where’re we going?” Carol asked.

“Far away,” Mommy said.

“Can we get my blankie?”

“Maybe,” Mommy said. That meant no. Carol sighed. She hated no. But not as much as she hated that place.

“What’s far away?” Carol asked.

“Good guys,” Mommy said.

Carol smiled. This was how it was supposed to go. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. But she couldn’t sleep. Mommy was driving really bad. Fast like in the movies. Tires squealing. Going around corners on two wheels, stuff like that.

Mommy’d been watching Carol play too many games.

Carol opened her eyes. They were on a road outta town. Carol’d never been outta town before. This was kinda cool.

“Mommy?”

“Hmm?” Mommy said in that don’t-bother-me voice.

“Am I average?”

“I hope so, honey,” Mommy said. “In fact, I’m praying that you are.”

“Because average kids beat the game?” Carol asked.

“And that means it’s easy,” Mommy said.

It didn’t seem easy. It was just dumb. But Carol didn’t say that. She closed her eyes again. She didn’t care about numbers and weird letters and computers. Or bad guys like Lord Kafir. They could be scary, but they always lost in the end.

At least she got part of what she wanted. She got a cookie. She got outta there.

And now—finally—she was gonna take a nap.

 

___________________________________________

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

Advisors at Naptime

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in If I Were An Evil Overlord, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis, Daw Books, March 2007
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Lane Erickson/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.

 

I do most of my business writing on Patreon these days, but roughly once per month, I’ll put a post for free on this website. This post initially went live on my Patreon page on December 22, 2024.  If you go to Patreon, you’ll find other posts like this one.

Glocalization

In the past year, I have started to read Billboard regularly. The music industry is always ten years ahead of traditional publishing, and the music industry has already figured out how to handle the small mountain of data that each song, each stream, produces.

The fantasy-novel-sized Grammy Preview issue that came out in October took a while to get through, but it had a lot of gems. Some pertain only to my business, so I’m sharing those with the staff. There were also some lovely nuggets that I’ve posted either here (or will post here) as well as in my November Recommended Reading List.

But one article on business really caught my attention. Headlined “U.S. Artists Are Dominating The Global Charts,” the article explored the way that music crosses international boundaries.

The premise here was that in 2022, 85% of the hits on the Bilboard Global chart came from outside of the U.S. In 2023, 92% of the hits on that same chart were not from the U.S.

But in 2024, over 60% of the hits on the global chart came from the U.S. All fascinating, all important for the music industry.

It’s a change that the U.S. welcomes, of course. It’s also what’s new is old. Early in my childhood, the bulk of the music in the U.S. came from England. (British Invasion, anyone?) And then, throughout the seventies—with the exception of Abba and Olivia Newton John—most of the music worldwide came from the U.S.

That changed with the advent of streaming. Then the cost of making and marketing music plummeted. As Will Page, former chief economist for Spotify told Billboard last year, “When the cost structure changes, local [music] bounces back.”

Page should know. He and Chris Dalla Riva, a musical artist and senior product manager at the streaming service Audiomark wrote a paper on this topic in 2023.

They examined the top ten songs in four countries—France, Poland, the Netherlands, and Germany. In 2012, local artists accounted for less than 20% of the song market in those countries. Ten years later, that number had flipped considerably, with the rise the biggest in Poland, where fully 70% of the top ten songs were local.

Here’s the part that caught me…and got me thinking about publishing.

The authors call this shift “glocalization.” This all points to a growing marketplace where the power has been devolved from global record labels and streaming platforms to their local offices and from linear broadcast models to new models of streaming which empower consumers with choice.

There are still the big performers, of course. They tend to get enough press so that people will hear of their songs and sample. But, as the article points out, if Polish rap is big in Poland along with, say Sabrina Carpenter, there’s a slimmer chance that Polish rap is big in France, but Sabrina Carpenter might be.

Replace all these names with Nora Roberts and Stephen King. They have built-in audiences worldwide who are looking for their next book. But those audiences might want something that has a lot more local flavor for the rest of the big sales.

Not to mention the language barrier. That’s not as big a deal in music. People have grown up listening to music in other languages. Heck, opera would not exist without afficionados being willing to listen to gorgeous, sweeping melodies in a language they do not understand.

But reading books in another language requires you to understand that language. Translation programs only go so far. They usually lack the finesse of a translator. The good translators add their own artistry to the work. (The bad ones are…well…bad.)

It’s easier to translate nonfiction, particularly if it’s utilitarian (as in how-to books). But utilitarian books usually don’t rise to the top of the charts. Nonfiction is often stubbornly local. I do care about the political situation in France, but not enough to pick up a translated book about it or to attempt to read (or listen to) an AI translation of it.

My reading time is limited, and I’d rather use it on things that really interest me.

Fortunately for most of us, though, English is the most widely spread language in the world. In 2024, 1.52 billion people worldwide spoke English in 186 countries. Only 25% of those people are native speakers. Everyone else learned it as a second (or third or fourth) language.

And…over fifty percent of websites worldwide use English for their content.

Our books in English can and do sell outside of the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.

Which brings us to the other part of this article that really caught my attention—marketing. U.S. music labels now run global campaigns for some of their product or, as the article says, are…

…even starting promotion abroad, in territories where marketing is cheaper and fandom can be more of a social activity, before [the companies] begin a push stateside.

There was even more strategy on this buried in an article from the November 16th issue. In a piece about the co-founders of Broke Records, there was this little gem about marketing to Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The question: Why those territories? And the answer:

Cheaper cost and these markets start a lot of trends on the internet.

The founders go on to explain that there’s a tipping point where influencers will jump on board to promote because they see the song getting bigger in other markets.

All of this caught my attention because it feels so familiar. In the 1990s, before the U.S. book distribution system collapsed, book marketing was aggressively local. Some writers sold well in certain regions of the country or in certain large marketplaces such as, say, Detroit or Los Angeles.

If those books sold a lot more than usual or if they started dominating the conversation more and more, then the publishers would push harder in other regions.

The publishers soon learned that some books did not cross over, not matter how much money was put behind them. Others took off quickly. It was predictable on some level—local authors tended to sell best in their local regions—but not predictable in others. Why did gentle contemporary fantasy sell well in the American South, but not in big Eastern cities?  No one cared enough to put in the legwork to get the data, in those days before computers.

Now, that information might be available with the right kind of market research.

While we would all like our books to sell equally well in every single country, that’s not going to happen. (Remember that there are 186 countries where English is spoken. There are nine where English is not spoken much at all.)

The key here isn’t to become a dominant worldwide bestseller, but to use the data available to us to see where we’re doing well. If we can target those areas where our work is already selling, then we might be able to leverage that and increase the sales.

The increased sales will lead to all kinds of other opportunities, from licensing games and other products (even local films) including—you guessed it—some kinds of translations.

I love this term “glocalization” because it breaks down the gigantic world into bite-sized pieces. With the way that data works these days, we can actually view these pieces without doing a lot of guessing about them. You’ll know if your books are selling well in Australia, but not doing well at all in Austria. Or vice versa.

And if you have limited marketing dollars, like all of us do, you’ll target places where your name is already familiar…unless you want to grow your work in a part of the world that is similar (you hope) to another place where you are doing well.

Also, a lot of online distributors have targeted ad-sharing and/or marketing opportunities. You might want to take part in a bundle of ads that focus on the Sydney area and not do a similarly priced promotion in London.

It’s your choice, which is, in my opinion, fun.

If you do this right, you can also adopt the right mindset. Instead of saying, Yeah, I’m a bestseller in Italy but nowhere else as if that’s a problem, understand that being a bestseller anywhere is great and work to grow your audience in that country—as well as worldwide.

Yes, we’d all like to be the biggest bestsellers in the biggest markets in the world, but that’s not really happening with any writers any more. Glocalization has hit us all. A book might take off, but a writer rarely does these days.

Things are changing, and in a way that we can all understand.

Realize, like the U.S. music labels have after their banner international year of 2024, that the success is due to a confluence of events, not to their increased marketing.

As the first article notes:

Executives contend the uptick is partly due to random chance. A surfeit of American heavy hitters including Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Ye, Ariana Grande, Future, Taylor Swift and Post Malone have dropped albums this year. At the same time international powerhouses…have been quiet.

Random chance. That’s all we have. So write your work, market it everywhere, and then look at the data on occasion, particularly when you have marketing money. Give your marketing strategy some thought.

Just accept where you’re at and figure out how to move forward—without taking too much time away from the writing.

Because that’s all we can do.

 

“Glocalization,” copyright © 2024/2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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Hard choices in a place where space travel can accidentally steal your entire life away…

An investigator can look backwards to discover secrets lost to time. But one investigator discovers secrets lost in her own past, dangerous secrets that give names to the dead strewn across the universe.

Winner of the Asimov’s Readers Choice Award.

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

 

The Nameless Dead By Kristine Kathryn Rusch 

I like to think I was kidnapped. I like to think that some thugs grabbed me, and tossed me into their ship, and I ended up here six months later, through no fault of my own.

I like to think that, but the records show something else entirely, and my memory always, always gives the records an assist.

That night, thirty-five years ago, I’d had enough. If we’re being 100% honest here, I wasn’t really cut out for marriage or motherhood. I was twenty-five and figured I could handle all of the emotional fallout, but of course, I couldn’t.

I get that night in snatches: the stench of sour milk and poopy diapers, the sound of voices screeching at each other over the wail of an unhappy baby, the scratch in my throat because this was the fifth night in a row of that kind of yelling—and worse, Austin, clutched in his father’s arms, waving his little fists.

I blamed Austin that night: I said, “Well, he wants me to go bye-bye, so I think I will.”

And my husband Tom, all sympathy and warmth, said, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

The door didn’t hit me. Nothing did, even though I was sore and tired and angrier than I should have been. I picked up a bottle of what I then thought was good beer, and carried it, wondering if I should drink it since I was breast-feeding and then deciding, ah fuck it, and downing it like I was dying of thirst.

The beer glugged, and the bottle emptied, and I bought another, and another, and another as I staggered across what we called the Holy Trinity—a series of blocks that contained nothing but bars, usually catering to spacers, not people like me.

By the time I ended up in the last one, wearing a smelly sweater that someone had given me to hide stains from my leaking breasts, I was ready to give up.

Deep down, I knew Tom was right: I sucked as a parent. I didn’t want to feed the kid on the kid’s schedule. I didn’t want to pump my breasts. I didn’t want to spend half my life tied to those two people, even if one of them was too small to talk and needed me more than I needed him.

If I left, I rationalized drunkenly, then they would have a better life. If I left, Tom could remarry and Austin would reach his potential and I—I would be free.

Maybe I actually had that conversation out loud. Maybe I just thought it.

Next thing I knew, I was at the space rings, staring at what wasn’t quite a luxury cruiser. It was one of those ships that took executives to their postings so far away they could never return.

I ended up in a small antechamber in the docking rings with a man who wrinkled his nose as he talked. At the time, I thought he was fussy. Looking back, I realized that he thought something smelled bad—and that something was me.

He warned me, and warned me again, and then warned me a third time.

“You do this,” he said, “and you won’t see anyone you ever love again.”

“You assume I love someone,” I muttered drunkenly.

He looked pointedly at my leaking breasts, and said, “Someone clearly loved you.”

“You’re confusing love and sex,” I answered and thought I was witty.

“Yeah,” he said. “Where’s the baby?”

“With his dad,” I said.

“You mind if I check that?” the man said.

I waved one hand at him. “Be my guest.”

So he vanished. For how long, I don’t know. But he came back armed with vids and tablets and more information than I wanted. And then he said, “You got an hour to consider this. Maybe by then, you’ll be sober enough to change your mind.”

I got a little more sober in that hour. I’d like to say I didn’t understand what I learned from those tablets and vids, but maybe I had even understood it more than I let on.

I wasn’t making an accidental mistake, no matter what I used to tell folks years later when I was drunk and alone and confessed that I had once been a parent.

Now, I’m never drunk, although I’m still alone, and I really don’t think that anything I did in those few months after Austin’s birth counted as parenting, not even the haphazard breastfeeding which I mostly did on a dare.

After that hour, I hadn’t changed my mind. I cashed out the money in our savings to buy a berth on a lower level that turned out to be barely bigger than the width of a single bed. I was allowed to leave the berth, thank heavens, because the journey lasted six months. Six months in that tiny space would have made me crazier than I already was.

The food was included in the price, but little else, and because I hadn’t planned, I had to pay for new clothes and some expert to help my body past its hormone overload.

Three months in, I woke up and realized that I wasn’t cut out to be a spacer, and I really didn’t want to be somewhere new, and so I got some initiative and found the man who’d tried to talk me out of the trip.

Turns out, that was his job, to make sure everyone who got on the transport knew it was a one-way trip.

I, of course, didn’t believe him. I rarely believed anyone in those days, and when they challenged me, I doubled down on whatever fool thing I had in my head.

“I want to go back,” I said.

“We’re not going back,” he said.

“So drop me somewhere,” I said. “Someone can take me back.”

“You saw the vids,” he said. “You signed waivers. You said you understood time dilation.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It works the same going back, right?”

He stared at me like I was the dumbest person he’d ever seen.

“Time never goes backwards,” he said. “No matter how much we want it to.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Meaning that if we drop you ‘somewhere’ and you magically find enough money to fund your return trip, you will arrive fifty years after you left, give or take.”

“That’s not possible,” I said, my heart sinking. “I’ve got a baby back there.”

“Not anymore you don’t.” He punched a button on a nearby console and doublechecked it. “Your baby is at least twenty years old right now. I suspect he’s probably pissed at the mother who abandoned him, and he doesn’t want to see you.”

I crossed my arms. “You lie.”

He shook his head. “I don’t get paid enough to lie. You go back immediately after we arrive at our destination, and your kid might very well be dead. He’ll be pushing 100 at least, and he certainly won’t forgive you for missing his entire existence.”

Talking to that man was the first time my memory wouldn’t let me off the hook. Even though I’d been drunk when I boarded the executive travel vessel, I had heard all the talk about time dilation and loss and not being able to return to the place you’d left, not really.

I’d thought that was a good thing, at least that night, with my sore and leaking breasts, my scratchy throat, and Tom’s vicious but true words about what an awful person I was still stuck in my ear.

Then, somehow, I’d twisted the memory as I tossed and turned in that single bed, thinking that time dilation somehow worked in reverse—you got farther away and lost time and regained it when you returned.

I knew better. I wasn’t really a scientific illiterate. I was just really good at dismissal and denial, two reasons why I’d had a baby in the first place.

And here’s the sad part—at least to me—the part I usually don’t confess to anyone: I don’t miss the baby. I don’t miss the idea of the baby either. When I think about the sleepless nights, the way his baby nails scratched at my hand whenever he grabbed my finger, the way his sleepy eyes made me want to shake him awake, I knew we were not meant for each other.

Maybe Tom wasn’t the best parent. Maybe Austin would’ve been better off with some adoptive parents or with his paternal grandparents, or maybe just with someone else.

But Austin was certainly better off without me.

That thought, which I’ve had repeatedly over the years, is not a justification for what I’ve done. Just the plain cold truth about who I am.

I’m better off alone. I’m better without being responsible for anyone.

I can barely be responsible for me.

But that’s another story.

***

It is not without some small irony that I’m the go-to woman for all things time dilation. I hadn’t planned it. But I may be emotionally cold, but I’m intellectually hot. If there’s research to be done or information to be gathered or thinking about things that have nothing to do with my emotions, I’m the person for the job.

And here, on the very first large port where the executive “shuttles” stop, my services are in great demand.

First, let me explain the situation here. This is a large port city, the Gateway to the Future, as some wag named it.

The city itself spreads over half a continent, and the space ports are built above the city proper. So, when you’re on the ground and look up, what you see is the scaffolding that holds all those docking ports in place.

No one docks in orbit here. They all come down, and then the executives who don’t have a transfer to some other part of this sector stay for a few days or a month, or sometimes even a year just to get their footing.

They can’t go back any more than I can, but a few of them routinely sue, claiming they haven’t understood their contract.

Most of their contracts are the same. It doesn’t matter what industry they’re involved in. The contracts give them a hefty upfront fee if they choose to take it. The ones who usually sue take the hefty upfront fee and give it to their families.

Why execs? I have no idea. I’d think skilled people who can grow plants and lovely food in a hydroponics garden or folks who make life nicer and prettier would be better. Those skill sets are always in vogue.

But execs? All they have is the ability to manage other people in a controlled environment. And maybe a willingness to work hard on things that no one really cares about. Weirdly enough, that’s a particular skill set too, and it doesn’t matter what kind of job they’re supposed to do. These execs will do it with competence, even if they hate it.

They’re about as alien to me as human beings can get. So I don’t even try to understand them. I particularly don’t understand why they take these crappy deals, but they do.

They sign the contracts and board the executive cruisers, thinking they’re going to go off and work for maybe five years max—which is what their contract says—and then they’ll come home to the same family they left, albeit five years older.

These execs don’t understand time dilation or maybe hadn’t realized that it would have an impact on them. Most of these prizewinners never read the contract at all. They just looked at that hefty upfront fee, figured it would set their family for life, and took the deal.

Then they went very far away. The farther reaches of the sector had a lot of resources and a lot of tech, but not enough human beings to manage it all. Managers are, by nature, cautious types, and they don’t want adventure. So they had to be paid a lot to go far away because recruiting through the ranks when there are very few ranks really doesn’t work.

By the time these execs found me, they would be all but broken, devastated by a decision they’d made for financial reasons without really understanding the emotional underpinnings.

They didn’t even have the same excuse I had: they weren’t drunk when they made the decision. Most of them had weeks—sometimes months—to consider what they were about to do.

I have no idea how these people still missed the time dilation part or misunderstood it or didn’t think it would be a factor for them.

Many told the same lie I considered telling: that they’d been taken against their will. Being a victim was apparently better than being a stupid greedy idiot.

Some of the folks here think it’s an anti-science thread that’s been part of our culture from the get-go. Others think that it’s a failure of education—most of these execs aren’t the brightest lasers in the toolbox. Most of the folks here agree with me though: this was all about greed and money and execs thinking they’d be set for life, not realizing that their family would be set for life, but these poor losers would have to work for the better part of theirs just to repay that upfront fee.

Still, they managed to reach deep into their pockets and find enough resources to pay me—and my services don’t come cheap.

I also take payment upfront, no refunds. Most people don’t like what they hear when I’m done, and a few stiffed me early on. That’s when I inaugurated the no-refund policy and that’s when I tried to warn off potential clients.

Because all I do is gather information for them, but it really isn’t information they can use. They can’t change what they find out, they can’t help, and they can’t do much more than muddle.

In that opening meeting, before I take their money, I warn them that they’re not going to like what they learn. But they make the same mistake they made getting to this place: they think they know better than the person with the experience, the person giving them the advice.

This is where it helps to be emotionally cold. Because I really don’t care if the information hurts them. I really don’t care if they tear up or get angry at me—unless they try to trash my place. I don’t even care if they sue me, because they always lose.

The only time I ever lie to them is when they ask me if I’ve ever researched someone from my past.

“Yeah,” I say, with an air of sadness. That way, they think we’re kindred spirits. That way, I have the credibility to convince a few of them to turn away.

I suppose it’s not a complete lie. The reason I know how to research what happens to relatively anonymous families on a completely different planet so far from here that time bends is because I started to research my own family.

Got far enough to realize that Tom raised Austin and never remarried. Didn’t look any further, though. Didn’t bother with the things I’d do later, like arrest reports and rehab files. Didn’t look at school records or bank accounts. Didn’t examine the genealogy and figure out if I had any grandchildren or great-grandchildren or if the line died out with the kid who waved bye-bye that fateful night.

My rationale? If I did know, it would make no difference in my life. And since it would make no difference, why expend the energy in the search?

I am an enclosed being of one, a person who is completely different than the messy and sloppy drunk who started on this journey.

I really don’t like her, and I don’t like to think about her.

So I don’t.

***

The second big change in my life came when Astra Lin-Wonle paid for an hour of my time to explain the death situation.

I hadn’t known who she was when she sent me the hefty upfront fee. Just another name—and, I assumed—just another executive. I didn’t research her—she hadn’t paid enough yet—and I forgot about her.

She just became a name on my automated calendar, a name that got attached to a person the moment she arrived at my door.

She was small and dark-haired, with black eyes and high cheekbones, and a nose that didn’t fit her face. Her chin was narrow and made her look slightly feral, accenting the intelligence that I would later learn was as formidable as mine.

She wore a black cape over black slacks. The entire outfit looked dramatic and yet professional. Her small feet were encased in small black shoes that seemed impractical for life in this city. Every part of her clothing glistened and shined and seemed like she hadn’t just put it on, she had also dusted it with something to make it seem like it was newer than new.

The automated door to my office let her in at the appropriate time, about fifteen minutes before the appointment. She waited in the tiny antechamber, which allowed me to do a full body scan for weapons and a current background check to make sure there were no outstanding warrants or other criminal details in her history.

When the check came back, listing her as the head coroner for the entire city, I froze, all kinds of possibilities running through my mind. I had no idea why she wanted to hire me, but she’d been in that job for nearly twenty-five years, so she wasn’t one of those bamboozled execs. Maybe one of them did something bad, and they had my information on them.

Her position made it impossible to turn her away. If I did, I’d be ruminating over what she wanted for months, maybe years, afterward. Yes, sometimes I could be obsessive. That was also part of my makeup.

Since she was an official, though, and I was leery of officials (mostly because of some of my drunken adventures), I gave my office a quick once over. It was clean enough. Two chairs, about four feet apart. Mine had wide arms so that I could activate all kinds of recording and emergency backup systems with the touch of a finger.

The systems were a bit old-fashioned, mostly because I wasn’t born here. I could’ve had implants put in that would have attached me to all kinds of systems, but when the implants were offered, I was still drinking and thought maybe the government wanted to control me.

Now, I know the government is too busy to control anyone, and I vaguely regret the decision. Not enough to get the implants, mind you, but enough to consider it from time to time.

I unlocked the door between the antechamber and my office without getting out of my chair. The door swung open, and she entered in a wave of perfume that seemed to cover something sharper, another earthier scent.

She looked at me oddly, maybe expecting some kind of nicety. I don’t traffic in niceties. I waved a hand at the chair.

“Sit,” I said.

She hesitated, apparently not used to being ordered about.

I didn’t move. Nor did I speak again. Either she would sit or she would ask a question. I hoped for sitting, because the questioners were always trouble.

Finally, she squared her shoulders and eased into the chair.

I waited.

When she realized I wasn’t going to speak, she said, “I understand you can dig through a massive amount of information in a very short time.”

Whatever I had expected her to say, it wasn’t that.

I didn’t nod or encourage her, though. I continued to wait.

“I have a project—if you can call it that—which needs someone like you. The city will pay you at your going rates, which,” she said, as if she couldn’t trust me (and maybe she couldn’t), “I have already investigated.”

“I don’t work for governments,” I said.

“Well, this really isn’t a government job so much as a government favor,” she said.

Despite myself, I was interested. “I’m willing to listen,” I said.

She looked at me oddly, but I wasn’t about to agree to listen, only to find out that there was some kind of confidential nightmare thing I had agreed to just by opening my ears.

“Okay.” She sighed. “Forgive me if I tell you something you already know.”

I nodded just once, hoping that encouraged her to continue.

“We have a lot of transients in this city, and they are unusual.” It felt like she was beginning a settled speech.

That I did know, clearly. I built my business on them.

“A number of people manage to forge their identity before they get on the shuttles that bring them here.” She watched me, maybe thinking I would be surprised.

I wasn’t surprised. I knew that almost as well as I knew my own name. A few of those unfortunates had come to me, trying to figure out a way to recapture the life they had abandoned. They couldn’t, of course. And I really had no inclination to help them.

“A lot of them die here,” she said, her gaze on mine.

I started. That I did not expect, although it made sense.

“Suicide?” I asked because that makes sense to me, too. The despair I’ve seen in my work has often been deep and dark.

I’ve often suggested that those who go to an even darker place after hearing news of their family get some kind of professional help. I mean, after all, they can afford me, so they should be able to afford a therapist, counsellor, religious leader, or someone who can assist them in figuring out how to deal with the situation they find themselves in.

I might be emotionally cold, but I know that having a lot of clients die on my watch is bad for business. Besides, people need help. I got some, finally, when I realized that drinking yourself to death wasn’t as much fun as it was cracked up to be.

“Some commit suicide, yes,” she said, “but most of the suicides identify themselves for us. It’s part of putting their affairs in order.”

That made sense to me. I met a lot of those people. Finding out what happened to their family was part of putting their affairs in order as well.

She seemed frustrated that I wasn’t asking follow-up questions. Apparently, she was usually as tight-lipped as I was.

She folded her hands on her lap. Her hands were not manicured, which made sense now. She was one of the few people in this city who actually used those hands for some kind of labor. Hers involved bodies and chemicals and investigations. Even if she used some kind of device to peek under the skin, she still had to handle that skin. Move it, change it, shove it into some kind of bag. The city didn’t let robots do that—some bad public thing happened a while ago that made people believe they were not respected after death—and the city made the wrong kind of change: the kind that made work harder for the actual humans without really solving the problem.

“We need your help with some categories of unsolved,” Lin-Wonle said primly.

Maybe she was being deliberately vague. Maybe she was trying to force me to ask questions. If that was the case, then it was working.

“What do you mean, categories of unsolved?”

She inclined her head a little, as if she didn’t want to elucidate. But I waited again, and this time it took her only a fraction of a second to say,

“Some deaths,” she said. “They’re haunting.”

Whatever I had expected, it wasn’t that.

“I’m retiring soon,” she said. “And, I would like…”

She gave me an odd smile, one that was uncomfortable and didn’t quite reach her eyes. It made her feral little face softer and sadder, if that was possible.

“I would like,” she said a bit more firmly, “to know who they were and why this happened to them.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” I said. I wasn’t complaining. But if she was trying to resolve an entire career in a few months, and she had hundreds of names for me, what she was asking wasn’t possible—no matter how much she paid me.

“It might be,” she said. “But you wouldn’t do all of it.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“We don’t have the resources to research the names,” she said.

“Don’t have the resources?” I asked. “And yet you’re going to pay me?”

“I’m not referring to financial resources,” she said. “I’m talking about systemic resources. We’d have to set up a system to do the work that you already do. We don’t have the resources for that.”

That made sense to me. It took me a long time to figure out how to find information across years and distance.

“Once you find out the person’s real name,” she said, “we might be able to take the investigation from there. If it’s worthwhile.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you have me research the name, doesn’t that automatically make it worthwhile? After all, you will have invested my time and your money into this.”

She gave me a small smile. I couldn’t tell if it was condescending or not. “I’ve already invested time into these people. There’s something about each one of them that has caught me, held me. I want to find out who they are.”

I stared at her, the lines in her face that time and stress had created, the dark wedge of exhaustion under her eyes that looked permanent, the way she held herself as if her shoulders were so tense that they hadn’t relaxed in more than a decade.

I usually did not understand my clients. I never figured out why anyone who abandoned friends and family wanted to find out what had happened to them, across time and distance, impossible to resolve.

There was no logic in it, and the emotion often felt false. They couldn’t have cared, could they? Hadn’t they felt the relief that I had when I realized I never had to look in Tom’s face again or feel that thread of revulsion at Austin’s grasping hands against my skin?

If they cared, they wouldn’t have left. That was the logic. The human logic, the one that the man on the ship had tried to appeal to when he looked at drunk me and told me that I was about to make a decision I couldn’t take back.

I lacked that small human element. I never really cared about anyone except maybe myself, and even that was in doubt. After all, I hadn’t treated myself well.

Some would argue that I still wasn’t treating myself well. I had a small apartment, an interesting job, but I stayed away from people, I did not do much beyond the basic self care. I knew no one would care if I disappeared again. I wasn’t even sure I cared. I certainly didn’t care about my future past that day, that night, and maybe the following week.

But this woman, this Astra Lin-Wonle, she cared. The deaths, the bodies she had found, the bodies she couldn’t identify, they haunted her. Haunted was a word that interested me. It suggested so much more than a need-to-know.

This was an obsession to know, and I almost asked her why she had elevated these people, this group of nameless dead, into something that caught her attention and wouldn’t let her go.

But I didn’t ask. Instead, I said, “How many are there?”

“Two hundred,” she said.

The number startled me. For some reason, I expected it to be smaller. Yet she had said categories. As if people could be placed into neat groups, groups that she expected to file away in neat spaces.

These people, this group of nameless dead, had not fit at all.

“I have had hundreds,” she said. “Hundreds of false names, people who aren’t who they say they are. But they are usually easy to resolve. They make mistakes. They booked passage with their real name, or they kept their real identification from wherever they arrived from. Or a holo of family, with time, date, and location built in.”

I’d seen all of those things when I researched for clients. Sometimes they would come into this office and sit down and slide an artifact at me.

This is all I have left of that life, they would say, as if the item—the holo, the identification, a ring, a necklace, a bit of fabric—was the most precious thing in the universe.

Now, after hearing her, the number—the two hundred—surprised me in a different way. It was larger than expected. If she had categories of dead, and most came with false names but real artifacts, then she should only have a tiny few who had nothing at all.

“These ‘categories,’” I said. “They arrived with nothing then?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “Some had artifacts, but not their artifacts. Others had names, and the names were a tangled maze of connections that, at the root, had nothing to do with the person at all. And some had nothing. No clothes, no identification, no identifying marks, and nothing that made them recognizable to anyone.”

She shook her head, the lines around her eyes growing deeper.

“You’d think,” she said, “that someone would have seen them. Someone would have wondered about them. Someone would have cared.”

“People don’t care,” I blurted, and she looked at me, seeing me for the first time.

Her head tilted. “Is this why you do the job? Because you care?”

I barked out a laugh. It was the opposite.

I did this job because I didn’t care. Because it didn’t break my heart to see another woman sob when she realized her abandoned children had suffered after her disappearance. It didn’t break my heart to watch a man look at the holo of his so-called beloved marrying another person.

I had begun to suspect there was no heart to break.

“No,” I said. “I don’t really care.”

“Except for the money,” she said, nodding.

That probably made sense to her, considering the question I had asked. I just didn’t like doing work for no pay. Money was how I kept score, nothing more.

Score for what—in what game—I wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. The money mattered only as a number, not as something avaricious. If I had found a way to keep score with shoes, I would have used shoes.

“Not the money,” I said. For some reason, I felt the need to correct the record with her.

But I did not know how to explain more. How do you tell someone who cares too much that you care too little? I wasn’t sure she could even understand.

“The knowledge, then,” she said, trying to categorize me.

“The challenge,” I said, giving her a category. It wasn’t the correct category, but it would do for now.

She grunted, the kind of response people gave when they had no idea what someone else was talking about, but they had to make some kind of noise in acknowledgement. The sideways glance she gave me was measuring as if she couldn’t quite figure me out.

“You said someone would have cared,” I said. “Someone should have remembered them. And that is probably true. But not necessarily here. A person can stay anonymous forever here.”

Her eyes narrowed. She was still taking my measure.

“These cases of yours,” I said, “they’re all suicides?”

“Very few,” she said. “And even those I’m not certain of. They seem like suicides. Suicides make sense, until you understand that suicides follow a pattern. Unless they accidentally overdose or do something that kills them suddenly, suicides prepare. Many of them even practice.”

Something I didn’t know, then.

“Very few of these people prepared and almost none of them practiced.” She ran a hand along the seam of her black slacks, smoothing them out, even though they didn’t need it. Precision and just a bit of nerves.

These cases meant even more to her than she was saying.

“What if I’m not able to help you?” I asked.

“You’ll get paid,” she said. “We don’t pay by the job. We’ll pay by the time you invest. We’ll buy a set number of hours each week. We will, of course, want to see evidence that you worked those hours.”

“I work for myself for a reason,” I said. “It is so no one keeps track of me or my time.”

“Then how would you like us to pay you?” she asked. “There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to find out anything that can help us.”

“I don’t give that kind of guarantee anyway,” I said. “You’ll pay me like any other client. I will try until I find something or until you decide you’ve invested enough money. As my contact information says, I want a retainer upfront per case, and then I will work on that case until I see it through.”

“We have two hundred,” she said. “You can’t do them all at once.”

That was true. I couldn’t. If I did, the government would be my only client.

“When do you retire?” I asked.

“In five years,” she said.

She was a planner, a woman who knew what she wanted and knew it took time to get whatever it was. For her, five years was “soon.”

“Give me five per month,” I said. “Oldest cases first, since those are the ones that might take more time than the others.”

“All right,” she said. “What if you can do more per month?”

“Then I’ll take work from my other clients.” I didn’t quite smile at her, but I tried to soften my words. “I’m not going to work solely for you.”

She let out a shaky breath. That was the second sign I’d seen of nerves, the first being that movement along the seam of her perfectly creased pants.

“I can’t give you the ones that frustrate me the most?” she asked.

“No.” I wasn’t being cruel. I needed an order that I could understand, not some vague emotional reaction that she was having. “Oldest to newest. I will report to you as each case closes or at the end of every month if I can’t find anything.”

“What if I don’t want to work that way?” she asked.

I opened my hands just a little. “You’re free to find someone else.”

There was no one else. I was the only person that I knew of who did this kind of work—in this city, anyway. En route to the so-called Gateway of the Future, maybe there were other people like me, but I doubted it.

I would have heard, or tripped over their work. Because, as far as I was concerned, their work was always in the past.

She sighed softly. Then she nodded.

“You’re going to be a contractor with the city,” she said. “That means there will be a lot of documentation up front. I’ll do as much of it as I can and give you the rest to fill out.”

“I’ve worked for the city before,” I said. “I’m on file.”

She looked surprised. “I thought you were a lone wolf.”

“A handful of people used city funds to make sure that new hires were who they said they were. Those investigations couldn’t go through the usual channels.” Because they had been politically sensitive. One of them had even involved the mayor.

Lin-Wonle frowned.

“Put my name into your system,” I said. “My personal name, not the business name. You’ll find all you need. Then give me the first five names.”

“How about ten, and you can move on if you—”

“Five,” I said. “I have rules. You’ll need to follow them, or I’ll cancel our agreement.”

City work tended to creep into other things until it took over your life. That had happened to me once.

It was never happening again.

“You drive a hard bargain,” she said.

I almost said, Especially when I don’t want to do the work. But that statement wasn’t really true. I was curious. Lin-Wonle seemed competent enough to do everything on her own.

Cases that stymied her would challenge me.

I hadn’t lied to her about that.

I hadn’t lied to her about anything.

And that in itself was unusual.

***

The work wasn’t as hard as Astra Lin-Wonle made it sound. The first five cases took me less than a week. The second five only a few days. I wasn’t really investigating so much as organizing information, discovering identities, tracing journeys, things I normally did.

All ten of the cases had been execs who had come here on similar transports to the one that had brought me. Once I had a real name, I was to turn that over to Lin-Wonle, which I did.

She seemed happy enough.

We worked that way for six months before I hit my first wall. One of the cases she sent me involved a body found outside a dive bar near the port, a dive bar that no longer existed.

The body was male and badly beaten. He had no identifying marks that Lin-Wonle could find, and nothing in the area around him gave any clue as to his identity.

He had been dumped.

Lin-Wonle did give me his DNA, though. She had processed it through her usual databases and had come up dry.

I had several other databases that she couldn’t use. The city had deals to share information with other governments all over the planet, but couldn’t afford deals with various sector governments. I didn’t have to participate in that kind of cross-agency cooperation. I was a single operator who was trying to help people.

When I approached agencies that way, most of them allowed me access or gave me assistance that they wouldn’t give Lin-Wonle, not without some interagency b.s.

Then there were the databases that I had found over the years, the ones that had been abandoned as their organizations failed or moved to a new system or simply disappeared. I was working from the present to the past as measured by one long trip of an executive space cruiser. I had a lot of touchpoints because over the years, I had had a lot of clients.

The DNA was a great starting point, but it required a methodical search, one that took more time than the kinds of searches I was usually doing for Lin-Wonle. I had to peer into distant family connections, trying to find something that this body had in common somewhere within range of this particular space port.

I was making an assumption: I assumed he had arrived through the port. I had to, at least at first, because my databases all focused on the past.

I figured if his trip was supposed to originate here, then he’d be a local and Lin-Wonle would have information on him, somewhere. But she didn’t either.

Just the body, dumped, behind a no-longer existent dive bar.

I remembered the bar. I went there shortly after I arrived. It was a filthy cubby in a row of even dirtier storefronts, the kind that people expected near the port. Most of the goods sold there had been familiar ones to the folks who just got off the ships, items that couldn’t be found as easily away from the port.

Of course, anyone who went into one of those places paid a premium for whatever it was that their heart desired.

Me, I desired whiskey, which was available elsewhere in the city. I just didn’t know it yet.

When I squeezed myself inside, saw the sad customers sitting at the five round tables, and the even sadder customers sitting at the bar itself, I almost stopped and left.

But I didn’t. I went to the bar, startled to discover a human behind it, a hard-faced woman with even harder eyes.

I ordered a whiskey and she said, “We don’t got that here.”

I knew she was lying. The guy next to me had a glassful and wasn’t really nursing it.

I eyed it, then looked at her and she shook her head just a little.

“Look, honey. I’ve seen you around just enough to know you’re living nearby. So lemme give you a tip.” She leaned in front of the bottles of booze on the wall, either to block them or so that I could see them. I wasn’t sure which. “What we got here—what anyone has down at the docks—you can’t afford. You want to drink yourself into oblivion, drink downtown or in the comfort of your own home. Here, you get all the crazies who just got off the boat and you get to pay extra to watch them tear up the place. A lot extra.”

I didn’t move. I wanted a drink badly enough that I was going to ignore her. And she knew it.

So she waved a hand at me. “Get outta here. Because I ain’t serving you.”

And the drunk guy next to me slurred, “And I ain’t sharing.”

I’d never been denied service in any kind of bar before. It felt odd. It caught my attention the way that not much else had. Maybe because it didn’t feel personal. Or maybe because a woman I hadn’t known had shown me a kindness.

A lot of people had shown me a kindness since I left the family, kindnesses I didn’t deserve.

She was busy with another customer—talking and pretending to laugh—by the time I finally managed to move. I left that bar, and thought about that incident every single time I passed it over the years, until the bar vanished entirely, to be replaced by some automated hair-cutting service.

I wondered where she had gone, I wondered where the new drinkers went to drown their sorrows, and I wondered how the hell I had gone from craving whiskey late at night to not having a drink in more than thirty years.

The bar was a turning point. Not of the and I will never drink again kind, but of the finally noticing that other people still existed kind.

Somehow, I went from there to here, investigating part of a death that occurred behind that bar long before it closed. A death that, truth be told, could have been just as empty and meaningless as my own would have been.

I wondered if the bar was a clue. I wondered if the neighborhood was a clue.

I wondered if the cops had even bothered to look at all of the clues.

I didn’t really want to do the local investigatory work, not yet anyway, so I put it off. I didn’t have to finish this job to get the next five. Lin-Wonle wanted the work finished before she quit, so she continued to hand me cases whether I’d helped her with the others or not.

I kept investigating Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy, as I had privately taken to calling him, as I fulfilled my contract with the other new cases.

Just because Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy ended up at the port didn’t mean that he had come through on any ship, and certainly didn’t mean that he had come via one of the longer distance ships.

But I was making that assumption. I figured Lin-Wonle had looked at the local angle. (If not, she should have.) I had one investigatory problem that I didn’t confess to her.

My databases all came from worlds that fed the executive tract here, not from other worlds that ships still traveled to. Some of those worlds sent people back here on various ships after they had worked through their contracts.

By then, those people understood time dilation, and they knew they would lose years again. But they usually didn’t care.

I didn’t have information from those places. I didn’t have databases to tap or agreements with the current governments of those places. Nor had I ever investigated their historical databases.

I didn’t want to make an agreement with those governments and/or the corporations that sent their executives into a bright, unknown future. Communication over long distances was a pain in the butt, and, quite frankly, the coroner’s office wasn’t paying me enough to volunteer to have my butt pained.

After six months, I set Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy aside, figuring I’d come back to that investigation.

And then I tripped on another of the files that Lin-Wonle had given me. It came—as they all did—complete with holographic images of the deceased.

I had looked at the first three images, back when she started giving me the cases, and I had decided that holographic life-sized images of corpses did not belong anywhere in my office.

I had switched off the automation in the files that Lin-Wonle had given me, so bruised and bloodied dead people weren’t prone across my workspace. But I discovered that I needed to see their faces.

And just as with Lin-Wonle, the nameless ones—the ones it seemed like I couldn’t solve—bothered me.

The second one wasn’t a guy. It was a woman, older like me. No real identifying marks.

Like me.

The image had risen from the file—her lined face, her cloudy sunken eyes, and her body, from the armpits upward. She was naked, of course, because the image I saw had been developed just before the autopsy.

Lin-Wonle had edited those images, because they were part of her reports. The images were actually vids that showed the entire autopsy, from the external examination of the corpse to the internal, should it be necessary.

She had accidentally left one of those once, and I managed to shut it down before it got too gruesome. The things she did for her job made me appreciate mine all the more.

I dug into the file she sent me about this woman. It said precisely nothing. One of the attending officers thought maybe the dead woman worked at the same dive bar as Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy, confirming what I knew about the place. It actually had human employees.

But I also knew that she had not been the woman I had seen.

Most of the bars in this city didn’t have human employees. Just robots and automated serving procedures. It kept the pour counts accurate in the mixed drinks, but did add a certain blandness to the alcoholic offerings all over the city.

Before I dug into her file, I looked up the bar.

It was called, unoriginally, The Watering Hole. There were places in every single city all over the sector with a similar name, although if I were naming businesses—particularly dive bars—I would never voluntarily use the word “hole” in conjunction with them.

Or maybe that was a marketing tool. Because dive bars really weren’t for the casual drinker. They were for the down-on-their-luck sad sacks who wanted a safe place to drink, no questions asked.

I paused in my reminiscences, thinking about the handful of places I’d visited as I fled my family so very long ago.

Twice I had gotten off the ship and twice I had reboarded it. I took one look around whatever port city we had landed in and I figured I didn’t want to stay there.

I hadn’t wanted to stay here either, but I had because that was the trip I had paid for, not because I liked the location.

But I vividly recalled two other Watering Holes at both ports. Same kind of place—narrow slice of real estate with only one obvious door. In one case, the door had been so grimy, I hadn’t wanted to touch it. In the other, I had paused, remembering that I didn’t have a lot of money and the booze was free on the ship.

In fact, it was the familiarity of the look and name of the Watering Hole that had brought me to it here, all those years ago.

I sat back down, shoved both files aside with the swipe of a hand, and started digging.

There were a lot of businesses—and I mean a lot—that operated on all the executive cruiser stops along the way. I had never given those businesses a lot of thought, but I did now.

Because something was itching at me.

I’d never dug into the companies before. I hadn’t even investigated the personnel files, because my clients were known. They wanted to know about their families, and their families clearly didn’t work on these ships.

I almost asked Lin-Wonle about the companies, and then decided not to. I had no idea how much money these companies brought into the city, but I would have wagered it was a fair amount.

Maybe that was why she had come to me. Maybe the nameless dead weren’t as nameless as they appeared. Maybe she needed someone outside her system to investigate the other dead.

But if that was the case, wouldn’t she have put more of those cases into my pile? So far, I’d only had two that were even remotely difficult.

I did not know, and didn’t want to guess. Her motives mattered less to me than the work itself.

I actually did like challenges. And I had found one here.

***

Forty-seven starship corporations carried passengers across the sector, along the route that I had happened into one drunk night. Forty-seven starship corporations, none of which shared the same corporate DNA.

I checked.

The company that had ferried me from one life to another had no complaints lodged against it, except for the obvious fold-ins. Those were usually easily dismissed because the company had been folded into other suits, usually against some bigger corporation. That corporation was the one that the person who had lost their entire life in exchange for a crapload of money often got sued for misrepresenting the work.

I examined a few of the lawsuits. The corporations always had the proper documentation. The starship company’s part in the case always got tossed out. Several judges—different ones in different jurisdictions—all informed the poor, hapless executive that courts did not have to protect someone against signing a bad contract unless the contract was egregious, which this wasn’t.

There was plenty of evidence that these executive schlubs were supposed to get educated about their journeys long before travel commenced.

Most of them simply chose not to take advantage of the opportunities.

I lost several days to deep-diving into about thirty of the forty-seven corporations. Those were easy to investigate. Corporate documents all properly filed. Information at the ready. Lawsuits mostly won, and those that weren’t required them to pay another crapload of money.

After every single crapload, those thirty companies would alter their practices, their contracts, and their behaviors to make sure that whoever climbed onto one of the ships did so fully educated—or at least, had every opportunity to become fully educated.

The remaining seventeen? That was where it all got interesting.

Seven of them were as old as time itself—or so it seemed. They were the granddaddies of all the corporations, and many of their practices were grandfathered in.

I had to investigate them because some of the oldest cases that Lin-Wonle had given me had involved those seven corporations.

They were either out of business now or sold and absorbed by one of the legit corporations that were easy to investigate.

The remaining ten presented me with a small mountain of issues.  I found more corporate name changes than someone escaping a criminal past. Each corporation took me down more dead ends than I expected. They seemed to be hiding something, but what I couldn’t tell.

I got very wrapped up in the overall investigation of the corporations. I like research. I like information. I like finding things out.

It frustrates me when information gets hidden from me, as someone was doing here. So I searched even more, taking the time out to investigate each group of names Lin-Wonle sent me.

Truth be told, I was hoping I’d find another difficult-to-identify nameless. Because I figured if I had three points of a triangle, I would have enough information to make a difference. That wasn’t exactly true, but it felt true.

I figured it might open a few more doors, at any rate.

Instead, I spent weeks on the corporations, until I realized that one of them ran more than star cruisers. One of them rented out properties in the ports of various cities, ports where the star cruisers stopped.

Several of those rental sites rented to Watering Holes in the various cities. Not here any longer, though. Not for years.

I felt like I was onto something now. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was searching.

I stopped everything else I was doing and dug into the history of the Watering Hole here.

Not that there was much. Twenty years ago, the city changed its policy regarding businesses around the port.

The city decided to take over the entire area. Instead of buying out the businesses at the going rates, the city used some of its eminent domain laws to offer a token fee and take over the entire area.

Except for the block with the Watering Hole.

There, the city simply reclaimed all of the businesses and replaced them with tiny automated shops like the hairstyling salon.

And for the life of me, I couldn’t find out why.

***

Lin-Wonle never sent me the latest files. She always insisted on dropping them off. Sometimes she told me her history with the deceased, not that I cared, and sometimes she stepped in as if she was checking on my progress, as if she was my boss.

I never answered her questions on those occasions. I was always too annoyed to say much more than hello or thanks.

But the drop-off after I had used all of my tricks to find out what was going on with that block, I invited her into my office.

She came wearing a gray version of the cape and slacks that she had worn at that very first meeting more than a year before.

I waved a hand at one of my chairs, sat down in the other, and said without any kind of greeting to soften my words, “I need you to look through city records for me. I can’t access the information that I need.”

She looked surprised. Of the sixty-plus names she had sent me so far, I’d only delayed on two. She had told me the month before that she was pleased with my work.

She had even implied that some names would be impossible to find.

I knew she was heading toward her retirement, and from her perspective, getting answers on most of these cases was better than no answers at all.

But that wasn’t my perspective at all.

“What do you need?” she asked in a tone I’d never heard from her before. It was carefully neutral.

“The Watering Hole,” I said. “Two of the bodies you sent me were found behind it.”

“Yes, one of the portside bars that the city closed down years ago. That area was a lot scarier thirty years ago. If anyone went down there, they had a good chance of being mugged or beaten or worse.” She folded her hands over her lap. “I don’t remember this particular bar. It wasn’t even the worst offender. That was—”

“I don’t care,” I said. I hated chatty people. I thought she had known that. “I’m interested in this bar and the block it was on. The city reclaimed that block but didn’t pay the corporation for taking the property. The city just took it, and I want to know why.”

“I’ll look it up for you to be sure,” she said, “but if I remember correctly, the city seized a lot of businesses known for illicit activity.”

“What kind of illicit activity?” I asked.

“The kind you would expect near the port,” she said. “Mostly selling banned and illegal substances.”

“Mostly,” I said. “What else?”

“That I don’t recall,” she said. “I do remember the Clean Up The Port campaign went on for nearly a decade.”

Then she squinted at me.

“I thought you were in business at that point,” she said. “Surely, you remember this.”

“I usually don’t care what happens in the city,” I said.

“But you do now,” she said.

“You want all the names or not?” I asked, maybe a little more sharply than I should have.

“I do,” she said, sounding surprised. “This will get them for me?”

How the hell should I know? I almost said, but I had enough common sense not to alienate her too badly.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m wondering why the information wasn’t easily available in the first place.”

The smile she gave me was condescending. It made me regret refraining from snapping at her a moment ago.

“We’re a port city, Gateway to the Future, as they like to call us. The port shuttles people off-planet on business, yes, but many just come here to visit our attractions, see the various resorts and natural wonders. That’s a good 75% of our income.” She added that in her didactic tone as if I should’ve known all of that as well.

I’d seen the ads, of course, and wondered what kind of idiot came to a place just to see something that could be easily recreated with a full virtual experience. Hell, some of those experiences came with sense impressions—water droplets pelting the viewer (or seeming to) while they were looking at a waterfall.

Something in my look must have caught her because she gave me one of those derisive smiles.

“Oh,” she said. “Such things are beneath you.”

“You’re telling me that the city believes if someone found out that the port was a hotbed of criminal activity, they wouldn’t come here?” I asked, trying to keep the incredulousness from my tone. “Even though that’s been how port cities have operated since time immemorial?”

She shrugged. “I don’t run the city government. I just work for it.”

“So the information was buried, lost, hidden,” I said. “Pretty well, too.”

Although I probably could have found it if I had been willing to break into the city’s systems. I had figured talking to Lin-Wonle was easier.

I was beginning to regret that decision.

“Do you still want the specific information?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

***

She brought me the information a week later on a small protected network device. Apparently she wasn’t supposed to share any of this stuff, not that it mattered.

What she had were city records of the decision to buy out the area, along with the properties to be confiscated because the illegal activities there rose above the 50% level, whatever that meant.

The city was good at hiding its sins, and I didn’t care enough to ferret them out.

Instead, I pursued another path.

I looked at arrest records going back half a century. At first, I didn’t find a lot. Exactly what Lin-Wonle had told me. Illegal substances, history of muggings, beatings, and the occasional homicide—with an easily identified victim.

Then, from a handful of records, forty years old, I found a criminal code listing that had no corresponding description to the current criminal code.

Just a series of numbers and letters that looked like they referred to some law or another, but nothing I could find.

And the hell of it was, a lot of them came from the block around the Watering Hole. A handful originated at The Watering Hole itself.

Finally, something I could easily research. Laws that were on the books but either got scrubbed or changed never really went away.

I had to dig to find the code, but I did.

And it made my non-existent heart hurt.

***

Two cases hogged all of the attention. These cases occurred nearly 100 years ago when the Gateway to the Future sounded more like the Gateway to Hell. The city was smaller then, the port even more dangerous than it was now.

Andries Schweinzinger, scion of the Schweinzinger clan, one of the city’s founding families, was found staggering down the street near the Watering Hole. He was naked, his hands bound behind his back, his hair nearly gone, his tongue black.

He was shouting that he’d been a victim and some local bypasser, someone who didn’t stick around, used one of the kiosks (now gone) to contact the police. They arrived surprisingly quickly and one of them was conscientious enough to film the entire encounter, maybe because she recognized Schweinzinger.

He was clearly on something. Eyes crazed, drool on the side of his mouth. He kept repeating that he’d been kidnapped and they were going to sell him to the highest bidder.

Because he was rich, he got some special treatment and some vilification in the local media. The media thought, like the police, that he was hallucinating. The substance he had taken should have rendered him unconscious, but one of the doctors who treated him claimed that Schweinzinger had built up a tolerance to the drug over the past year or two. Apparently, it was highly available at the time and was being used by the inevitable partiers.

Schweinzinger found himself the butt of jokes, but he hired a good attorney who was fighting the case everywhere, from the legal side to the publicity nightmare.

It looked like Schweinzinger had made up the accusation until a woman screamed her way out of the Watering Hole, naked, terrible bruises on her wrists where—she said—she managed to collapse her hands enough to get them out of restraints.

She was at the opposite end of the social strata from Schweinzinger, and her name would never have appeared anywhere if it wasn’t for the bizarre history she shared with him.

Lilly Wright was young and pretty and exceptionally smart. Graduated at the top of her class three days before and had spent the post-graduation ceremony partying. Her friends claimed she left them somewhere near the ports, but no one thought much about it.

Until she screamed as she fled the Watering Hole, claiming they were going to sell her to the highest bidder.

The city had no trouble finding people to blame. The names meant nothing to me, and I really didn’t care about them at all. The charging documents didn’t use the codes that I had found, and I wanted to know why these cases appeared when I dug for the numbers.

It took time, but I found my answer.

The cases changed the laws here. Turned out that there was a kidnapping ring working the docks. They’d take a young, bright, competent person, drug them, and sell their “contract” to someone on one of the many ships going through, taking the victim to places far from here, places from which—someone ominously said—there was no way to return.

When I saw that, I sat down. Hard. I’d been pacing my office, listening, looking, reading, and watching until that point. But places from which there was no return. That was anywhere in this sector, provided the ship traveled far enough fast enough.

Hell, my business was based on people being unable to return. The fact that I could answer their questions simply meant that the answers they sought were some part of some historical record somewhere. That was it.

I never vouched for accuracy. I just did what I could, and usually people left thinking they knew what was what.

The kidnapping laws had to change to accommodate the nightmares taking place at the port. Because if the kidnappings had been successful, there would have been nothing to charge. Schweinzinger and Wright would have been off-planet, and nothing could have brought them back.

No one would have known what had happened to them.

So the law changed to incorporate attempted kidnapping with some involuntary servitude laws to ratchet up the crimes from serious to so damn serious that whoever tried it would get life in prison, which was, for here, ironically, off-planet, just not far enough away to cause any time ripples.

Schweinzinger became the poster child for the law, but Wright was the one who wrestled it into being. It became her life’s work, making sure that no one was ever trafficked out of this city again.

She managed to clean up the port more or less, except for one aspect.

A lot of people arrived here, fully dressed and not drugged in any way, but impoverished and terrified, claiming they had been kidnapped at the beginning of their journey, lightyears and decades from where they had started.

They’d been drinking or partying or in the wrong bar at the wrong time, and somehow, they woke up on a ship days later when they were too far out to return home.

The city found enough evidence of a crime to use that code to charge ship owners and ship workers with enhanced kidnapping. But the kidnapping ring was larger than ships and ship workers. They all claimed they were doing it at the behest of one faraway corporation or another.

But there was a major legal issue.

The actual kidnappings occurred off-world, decades ago in real time. The original kidnappers might even have been dead since most of them never traveled on the ships. Those folks just got paid by the able bodies they’d provided to the underhanded shipping companies who brought workers to far-flung places.

Turned out that some of the faraway corporations believed it was easier to buy people than it was to pay lifetime contracts. The difference in upfront money was staggering. People could be sold illegally much more cheaply than entire families could be bought off.

The legal issues got more complicated the deeper I looked. There were the jurisdictional suits, the claims that the law sought to regulate behavior that the city had no right to regulate. They could prevent suspected criminal enterprises from using the port, but they couldn’t legislate behavior on other planets, behavior that had often happened before any of the attorneys, juries, or judges had been born.

The law was quietly abandoned. The city used the old kidnapping statutes on the books to handle cases like Schweinzinger’s—of which there were fewer and fewer as the area around the port got cleaned up. As for people who claimed they’d been kidnapped elsewhere and brought here, there were informal inquiries, halfway houses, places they could go, often getting protected refugee status if they wanted to go that route.

Most, though, just abandoned ship here and fled. The people running the ships never did pursue them, or rather, never pursued them once they got here.

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, feeling pieces fall into place. I finally understood why some of the people who came to me seemed so very desperate to find out about their families.

Those people hadn’t stupidly signed some contract without reading it. They’d been taken, brought here, and knew they couldn’t go back.

They had not only come to me for answers, they had probably come to me for comfort as well.

Whoops.

But this was something Lin-Wonle should have known. Except that the codes had vanished from the record.

Unless Lin-Wonle had been a student of history, she wouldn’t have known about the law. It was quietly buried as a mistake.

If I was a different kind of person, I would have figured out why the law had been abandoned and information about it buried rather than some activists retooling it so that it would work better.

Very few people alive were old enough to know about this law. Very few.

But it caught me. I shut down all of my systems, stood, and went to the private part of my office.

I was shaking.

I trusted my memory. I had evidence of my own choice. I remembered how I felt around Austin and Tom. I remember how hard that ship employee had worked to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake.

But…

That moment at the Watering Hole bothered me. Both moments, at both Watering Holes, the other far from here.

The drinks are cheaper on the ship.

I had been easy—at least at that first port stop. It hadn’t taken much to force me to return to the ship.

But what about others? People who really wanted to escape? How had they been treated?

I would never know, but I could guess.

I let out a small breath of air and realized that I felt something. I felt something strongly enough that it actually filtered through every protection I had set up within myself.

I was furious.

I knew how hard the damn trip was for someone like me, someone who had no regrets.

I couldn’t quite imagine how hard it would be for someone who hadn’t wanted to come in the first place.

No wonder Lin-Wonle had seen so many suicides. No wonder people’s behaviors made no sense.

Particularly since most of them had no recourse.

I didn’t know, and I didn’t check, but I would wager that there was no real way to sue those shipping companies either for intentional harm. Since the crews rotated out, they could profess ignorance of what happened, and probably had.

I paced for a few minutes, wishing the unaccustomed emotion would go away.

It was staying. It made me want to punch something.

It made me want to go to the port and yell at someone.

It made me want to find a local bar and have a drink to calm down all the messy feelings.

I stopped.

I had been looking in the wrong databases.

I had been looking at people who had voluntarily taken ships away from their cushy homes.

I’d been looking at port records.

I needed to search missing person databases. Not here, but at the various points of origin.

I needed to find out who, if anyone, had disappeared from their homes.

***

Missing person databases are messy things. Most places keep them up for a few years, but if the missing person had been gone for a decade or more, the record got lost in the chum that was all crime for a location. Sure, they remained in the missing person database or whatever some place called that database, but no one looked, no one cared, no one really figured out what was going on.

It took me weeks to find the proper databases. I had to trace most of the ships, where they originated and where they were heading. The oldest records were extremely old, and in systems even my high-end research center couldn’t easily access.

It took me weeks to get more than 1,000 new databases into my system. By then, Lin-Wonle had given me more bodies. I solved those, but I did something I hadn’t thought of before.

I cross-referenced them.

Then I wished I hadn’t.

I cross-referenced most of the cases she had given me, and found a good half of them included people on the missing persons database.

But then, to give myself a foundation, I looked myself up.

And found that Tom had reported me missing as well.

What was worse was that he was one of those sad sacks who checked every few months to see if someone—anyone—was still following up on the case.

When I saw that, I actually left my office. I walked down two miles to the entertainment district and stopped just outside it.

I had been heading to get drunk.

There were two filthy benches near one of the venues. Bright lights flashed, the cobblestone sidewalk was littered with empties, some of them old enough to be encrusted in dirt.

No one cleaned up down here. The air even smelled foul—rotted food, sour beer, and a miasma of rancid smells that I couldn’t quite identify.

I still sat down.

I had to. My legs wouldn’t hold me.

The stupid son of a bitch had never remarried. He had raised our child, but he had never remarried.

Instead, he had tried to get the local authorities to search for me for years.

That stupid son of a bitch had actually loved me. Just like he said he had.

The problem was me. The problem had always been me. The problem would forever be me.

My lack of feeling, my unwillingness to learn how to be inside a family. My unwillingness to do the difficult things.

A drink would help. A drink at that very moment would put the feelings back where they belonged.

The messy anger. The even messier regret.

And the sorrow. Oh, dear god. There was sorrow underneath it all.

A sorrow I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying for most of my adult life.

***

I have no idea how long I ended up sitting there. I eventually stood up. I did not go into the entertainment district.

I did not buy a drink, then or ever.

I returned to the life I had built. The life I had chosen one drunken night so long ago. The life I said I preferred.

Two days later, when I felt as much like my old self as I probably ever would, I contacted Lin-Wonle. I invited her to my office.

When she came, I explained what I found.

The color drained from her skin, leaving it an ash-gray. She closed her eyes, bowed her head, and didn’t move for the longest moment.

Then she squared her shoulders, sat up, and thanked me.

“We’re done now,” she said.

“But,” I said, “you said you had two hundred cases. We’re not there yet.”

“I know.” Her mouth moved in an attempt to smile. “Thank you. Thank you for answering my questions. I’ll put in for payment for the full two hundred cases.”

“I told you,” I said tightly, “it’s not about the money. It’s never been about the money.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s the challenge. And you rose to it.”

She left without saying good-bye. I received the overpayment a day later. I contacted the office to ask for a proper payment, one for the work I’d actually done, and I was told that she had retired, more abruptly than planned.

The acting coroner asked me if there was anything she could do for me. I said no, and severed the contact.

Then I sat for a long time in my single little office.

I could start a campaign. I could be the one to figure out who was coming in on these ships, who didn’t want to be on them, and who needed help adjusting. I could start some kind of program or reinstate one. I could see if I could get the city to designate them as something—not a refugee, but some category like that, so that they could get assistance.

But what good would it do? They’d had everything of value stolen from them. Their families, their futures, the world they had known. Nothing could repay that. Nothing could really help them.

Either they survived it, or they didn’t.

I survived it.

But I’m not sure my husband did. And I’m not going to look, not again. Looking back is what causes all the pain.

So I’m going to stay in the now. The ever-present now. That’s all we have, when it comes down to it. The moments. Passing, fleeting, wrapping in memories if we choose, or lost in what might happen, again if we choose.

Or we can stay here, doing what we do. Thinking only of the way the universe is, not the way it can be.

Changing things is for dreamers, and I most definitely am not one.

I used to like to think I was kidnapped. I don’t like to think that any longer.

Being kidnapped is worse. Much worse.

I chose to be here.

And I would choose it again, even knowing what I know.

No matter how much it breaks my non-existent heart.

 

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

The Nameless Dead

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.

 

I’ll tell you how in the second workshop in the Quick & Dirty Craft Series.

There are some simple things every writer can do to make their endings stronger, and I’ll explain that in this short class.

Find out more here or watch the video below.

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/QD-ENDINGS-INTRO-ORIGINAL-VIDEO.mp4

 

Buster’s final wish—a Viking funeral. Although Winston, a small magician with a small talent, wants to give his familiar his ideal funeral, Winston finds it hard to imagine how to burn a boat at sea. Still, a Viking funeral seems a small price to pay for years of companionship. 

But the funeral might cost Winston more than he realizes. He must break all kinds of laws—magical and otherwise—to give his beloved cat the proper goodbye.

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

 

Familiar Territory A Winston and Ruby Story By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Every morning they went clamming. Winston would carry the pail, and Buster would trail behind, stopping to sniff dead fish and complaining when his delicate paws sank in wet sand. Sometimes people would coo over him—they seemed drawn to a cat on the beach—but usually they would watch from a distance.

Winston knew the town thought him strange. They called him that crazy guy with the cat, and most never visited his shop. Only tourists came in, and they usually bought the mass-produced items, not his specialty items. Those he sold to select customers who never returned, although they recommended the store to their friends. He did a steady mail order business, shipping weekly all over the United States, Canada, and Europe.

He didn’t care about the money. It was merely a way to maintain his warm and cozy home, built on a cliff overlooking the sea. He had worn a path from the back door to the beach near the small town of Seavy Village, and he and Buster tramped down the path daily at first light, crabbing if the tides allowed, and playing in the sand until nine a.m. Then Winston returned home, showered, and drove to his shop on a decrepit section of Highway 101. Buster complained about the drive, but flirted with the customers shamelessly while Winston studied his books behind the counter.

It was a small life, as magic ones went, but it was his, his and Buster’s. They had shared it since Winston fled San Francisco twenty years before and arrived in Seavy Village to find the cliff house for sale, and a rain-soaked kitten who spoke perfect English huddled beside its front door.

Only this morning, Buster didn’t wake up. He remained curled at the foot of the bed, eyes half open, skin already cool. They had known the end was coming—few cats made it to twenty and remained as healthy as Buster—but they hadn’t thought it so soon. Kind of Buster to wait until Monday, the only day the shop was closed.

Winston put his hand on Buster’s still black-and-white side, and wished that instead of all his tiny powers, he had a single large one: the power over death.

But he didn’t, and he never would. He sighed once, cradled his best and only friend for a long time, and then padded into his workshop to build a ship.

***

Buster had requested a Viking funeral.

The cat, being 90% feline and only 10% familiar, didn’t care about state regulations regarding the ocean. He didn’t care that it was against the law to throw anything into the waves. He didn’t care that Oregon hated people tossing the ashes of loved ones onto the sea, and would probably charge Winston with a felony for tossing a dead body in.

You can cover it, boss, Buster had said. Use a small spell, a shield or something, to make sure nobody sees you.

I thought cats hate the water, Winston replied, a tad grumpily.

You observe, but you don’t see, Buster said. Cats love the water. They just hate to get wet.

You’ll get wet with a Viking funeral.

Naaaw, Buster said. I’ll be ashes by the time I hit the water.

Why do you want a Viking funeral? Winston asked.

Buster had looked at him from his perch on top of an end table. The look implied that Winston knew nothing about cats. Blaze of glory, my friend, Buster had said. Blaze of glory.

 ***

What Winston knew about Viking funerals came from his English lit class in high school over three decades before; half a dozen old movies; and a program he had fallen asleep to on the History Channel. Some of the Arthurian myths had Merlin give Arthur a Viking death: the proud king, wrapped in his fur robes, heading out to sea in his burning boat. Winston had made the mistake of telling Buster that story one rainy afternoon when they should have been mixing a love potion for a woman in Puget Sound.

Buster had adored the idea.

Winston didn’t like the parallels. Buster was supposed to be his familiar, not his king, and while Winston had clear talents, he was no Merlin. No wizard had been that great in over a thousand years.

But in the time they had been together, Winston had only denied Buster one thing—(Neutered, boss. Neutered. You know what that sounds like? Sounds like nullified. How would you like it if I neutered you?)—and he had done that for Buster’s safety, and for the sanity of all the female cats in Seavy Village. Buster had mellowed as he got older, when he saw the effects sex had had on the wild toms. The fights they get into, Buster had said, and all over a woman who’ll slap ‘em when she’s done. Somewhere around the age of ten, Buster realized that his sex drive would have shortened his life, and while he never admitted that Winston had made the right decision, he had stopped focusing on it.

Buster loved his life near the sea, with the storms and the fish and the adoration of the tourists who filled Winston’s shop in the summer.

Buster loved all twenty years of it, and who was Winston to deny him his final request?

***

The ship, when finished, was two yards long, and two feet high at its lowest point. A dragon’s head with oddly feline features rose from the front to guide the ship on her way. Winston had made little holes throughout which he would stuff with gas-soaked rags when the time came. He’d also lined the hollowed-out center with newspaper and kindling. Over that, he had built a box long enough and wide enough to hold Buster. He placed Buster’s favorite pillow in the front of the box, and around it he put all of Buster’s toys.

It had taken him twenty-four hours of concentrated work to finish. Twenty-four hours in a cold house, his fingers raw from strain. He had let the fire die and had turned down the heat so that Buster’s body wouldn’t decay quite as rapidly. Still, twenty-four hours wasn’t enough to do this kind of work unassisted. He had to use four craft spells, one no-doze spell, and contact the restless souls of three ship-builders to help in the process.

He was so tired his body hummed.

But it was finished, and it was as perfect as he could make it. Now all he had to do was rig the hand-sewn sail, wait till the tide was going out, and find a friendly current.

***

The morning dawned clear and cold with no real wind. A few fluffy white clouds dotted the sky. From his window, he saw the tell-tale green-gold line of a riptide, and he knew this would be his best chance to send Buster out to sea. Winston placed his friend in the ship, stretched his limbs (thankful that rigor had eased) and set his head gently on his pillow. Then Winston stuffed a bag full of rags and tied it to his belt. He carried the ship outside.

The chill was brisk, waking him from the exhaustion that clouded his eyes. He needed enough strength to finish this, and the chill gave him some. He balanced the ship under one arm, making certain the weight was right, and picked up the half full gasoline can. And with his burden, he walked down the path to the beach.

His hair rippled in the ever-present breeze, but it wasn’t great enough to be considered a wind. The beach was a winter beach, strewn with rocks, the sand hard-packed and firm. He stood for a moment on his favorite spot, a flat black lava rock that stood a bit back from the surf. Then he climbed beside it, set the boat and gas can down, and gazed at Buster.

Buster’s sleek dark fur shone in the sunlight. He was a beautiful cat. It seemed odd for his features to be so still; even in sleep he had moved—a whisker twitch here, a kneading paw there. Winston touched him, ever so lightly, and felt the lifelessness, the lack of breath, the lack of vitalness.

“I miss you already, buddy,” he whispered.

Then he sighed, and prepared to work.

The beach was empty. Even so, he took Buster’s advice and made a shield spell, placing it around him, the ship, and the stretch of beach and water extending to the riptide line. He removed the rag bag from his belt, opened the gasoline can, and carefully soaked each rag in gasoline. After a rag was soaked, he shoved it into the holes he had prepared. When he finished, he capped the gasoline, and carried the ship to sea.

Even with the sail and the riptide, there was no way the ship would go into the ocean alone. It would get caught in the tide, and hug the shore. Buster had wanted what they both had imagined to be a Viking funeral; it meant disappearing on the horizon in a burning ship. Despite his exhaustion, Winston had one more thing to do.

He waded into the surf, wincing as the cold water made goose pimples run up and down his skin. Then he set the ship on the water’s surface, and blew lightly, mouthing a wind spell as he did so. The sail filled up, and the ship moved forward, slicing the waves like a ship of old.

Buster would have been proud.

Winston waited until the ship reached the riptide line, then he snapped his fingers, reciting a simple fire spell. Sparks touched the soaked rags, and the ship ignited. It continued to sail forward, dragon’s head proudly leading the way as it headed to the horizon. Plumes of smoke rose from it, and the flames licked the sky.

A blaze of glory.

He wished he had been able to do it at twilight, as the sun was setting. Such a magnificent sight it would have been then, but he couldn’t, since his powers often waned at dusk.

Still, Buster would have enjoyed it. The burning ship sailing toward eternity.

Winston stood in the surf, the water numbing his feet and ankles, and watched as the flames consumed the dragon’s head. The air smelled of smoke and sea salt.

Was this what Merlin smelled that twilight so long ago? Or had he turned his back on the burning ship, walked across the land, and gone back to his life?

The ship broke apart in a spray of sparks. Pieces burned on the water’s surface, then sank, slowly, the dragon’s head disappearing last.

For a moment, the black smoke mingled with the white clouds, and formed a black and white cat running toward the horizon.

Then the smoke dissipated, and Buster was gone.

***

Winston cleaned up his mess, broke his shield spell, and carried the gas can back up the path. He showered, ate a small breakfast, and napped until he had to leave to open his shop.

By the time he got up, clouds were rolling in. The horizon looked blurred. Rain wouldn’t be far behind.

He drove his ancient Gremlin the two miles down Highway 101. The rusted and battered car seemed like an affectation without Buster inside, paws on the dash, tail wagging as he watched the passing traffic. Winston had always worried that Buster would die in a slow-speed collision, something that could have been prevented if the cat had but listened and sat under the dash.

But, as Buster had always said, he was 90% feline and 10% familiar. He followed rules only when he made them.

Winston parked behind the shop and reached for the passenger side before he could stop himself. He drew back, and left the car empty-handed.

The shop was cold and damp. It smelled of incense and cat food. He turned on the lights, lit the candles, and sat behind the large counter, wondering who would flirt with the customers now. He couldn’t. He had never been as social as Buster. Or as friendly.

What was a wizard without a familiar? His mouth went dry. He had gone without a familiar in the early years, as he apprenticed, and then went out on his own. He had claimed to his master, a disaffected beatnik, that he didn’t like animals. His master had shrugged.

You will, he had said.

His master’s familiar was a five-year-old sow that he had special permission to keep inside the city limits. She had been the opposite of Buster: grumpy, anti-social, and nasty. Winston had vowed then not to take on another soul.

And then had gone out on his own. After two months, his potions spoiled, his bottled spells rotted, and a young woman who had special-ordered an aphrodisiac had nearly died. Fortunately she hadn’t yet shared it with her boyfriend and he had gotten her to the emergency room. The cops had thought it a drug overdose, and had thought Winston the supplier. He had left San Francisco in a dead run, stopping only when he saw Seavy Village and its gothic landscape.

Two days later, he had the house and Buster.

And he never made a mistake again.

He put his head in his hands. The nap hadn’t helped. He felt lethargic. The bell tinkled, indicating the arrival of a customer, but he didn’t have enough energy to look, to see who it was.

“Excuse me,” a woman’s voice said.

He looked up. His next door neighbor, the owner of an antique store, hovered inside his doorway. She was a pear-shaped woman whose pink polyester pants and white shirts only emphasized the flaws in her figure. She always went out of her way to be kind to him, and he was kind in return, but they’d never had more than a passing familiarity with each other.

“I—I —.” She waved a hand at the door. “I was wondering. The magic and all. Did you see the burning ship this morning? It’s all over town. People are calling it a ghost ship.”

A shiver ran through him. He stood, then gripped the countertop, and nearly sat again. Were they coming for him so soon? Did the spells curdle without a familiar?

“Did you see it?” he asked.

She nodded. “I— ah—we —”

And then he realized that half a dozen people crowded outside his shop door.

“We thought maybe you had an explanation.”

“Did you call the Coast Guard?”

“They had no record of a vessel. They scanned the waters and found nothing. No one radioed a distress call. They thought we were making it up.”

He tried not to swallow hard. He was trembling. The whole city saw you blaze, Buster, he thought.

“Did you see it?” she asked again.

He nodded.

“Was it a ghost ship?”

How to formulate an answer that was honest and yet maintained the mystery? “I don’t count something as a ghost unless it appears in the same location more than once,” he said.

“If it wasn’t a ghost, what was it?” she asked. “It didn’t seem quite real somehow.”

“It was real enough,” he said. “There was a cat in the smoke.”

“Yes!” she said. “A black-and-white one. He looked quite satisfied with himself.”

Winston smiled. “He did, didn’t he?”

She smiled in return, and then her smile faded. “What do we do if we see it again?”

Ah, the real purpose for her visit. Not just comfort, but comfort magic. “It depends,” he said. His trembling had stopped. Somehow it relieved him that someone else had seen Buster’s farewell.

“Depends?”

“On whether or not you want to exorcise the ghost or use it to promote Seavy Village.”

“Promotion.” She rubbed a hand on her chin. “Hmm. A ghost ship. It looked rather Viking-like to me, but they didn’t come up this far, did they?”

“I honestly don’t know,” he said.

“And it was burning. I wonder if any ships went down that way in the harbor. Do you know?”

He shook his head.

She glanced around his shop, her gaze taking in the crystals and the globes, the incense burners and the bottles of potion lining the walls. “I tell you what,” she said. “If I discover anything, I’ll let you know. It’d be quite a boon to your business.”

He hadn’t thought of that. “Thanks,” he said, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice.

“Don’t mention it,” she said. “I’ll be back when I know something.”

And then she let herself out. She explained things to her friends out front, her hands moving expansively. Rain interrupted her small speech, and the crowd dispersed.

***

The day turned out to be one of the busiest he’d ever had. Fifteen phone orders for potions, twenty-five mail orders for specialty items, and six customers, all of whom bought. The last told him that a store like his needed a cat, and he had said softly, I know.

By the time he left, the rain had turned into a squall. One of those coastal storms that Buster had so loved. Winston was glad he hadn’t waited for twilight. The storm was too severe. He never would have gotten the ship afire.

The Gremlin coughed its way home. He would have to think of getting another car. Too bad the car companies no longer used magic items in their names. But he had kept the Gremlin far too long. Her usefulness had passed.

He put her in the driveway, and sighed. The day had been so busy that he hadn’t had a chance to mix the new potions, let alone put up the “closed” sign for a few hours while he visited the local pound. He doubted any of the cats there would talk to him, but he had to see. He couldn’t believe that Buster would leave without planning for a successor. Buster had always been too meticulous to leave any detail untended.

Winston grabbed his umbrella, opened the car door, then opened the umbrella outside, stepping into a puddle as he got out. He cursed softly—his feet had gotten wet enough this day—and then he ran the few yards to the back porch.

In his haste to get inside, he almost missed it. The tiny black cat, fur spiked by rain and wind, huddled against the wood pile. For a moment, he thought it was Buster. Not the old Buster, but the baby Buster come back. And then he realized that this kitten was all black. It had no white at all.

He crouched, letting the umbrella protect them both, and held out his hand. The kitten came forward and sniffed his fingers. Then it looked around. When it saw he was alone, it said, “You could at least offer a girl some fish.”

Her voice was sultry and not childlike at all. Buster had also come kitten-sized, but with his voice and personality full grown.

“I have some inside,” Winston said. He opened the door, and the kitten trotted in as if she owned the place. She went to the cool fireplace and shook the water off her fur. Winston closed the umbrella outside, and then put it in its holder. He went immediately to the refrigerator. He had some salmon he had planned to make for dinner the night Buster had died.

He took the salmon out and picked some pieces off it, putting them on a small plate. As he worked, he glanced at the fireplace. The kitten was cleaning herself, making her black coat lie flat.

Then, because he couldn’t remain silent, he asked, “Did Buster send you?”

“What do you think we got a referral service?” she asked.

Her gruffness shocked him. He wasn’t ready for gruffness yet. He wasn’t ready for a new personality, a new life.

A small body wrapped itself around his leg, and a purr so strong it vibrated his skin echoed up to him.

“You just want the fish,” he said.

“You bet,” she said.

He set the plate down and she ate quickly, without Buster’s innate grace. She had been hungry for some time.

When she finished, she sat back on her haunches and glared at him.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Ruby,” she said.

“Ruby, I don’t know if I’m ready for another familiar.”

“You can’t go without, big boy. We keep your spells fresh, and your mind from wandering.”

“It took me years to find Buster,” Winston said.

“He knew,” she said. “And he figured you could last maybe a day alone.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know him.”

“I never said anything like that.” She stood, arched, and yawned. “We all know each other. Becoming a familiar doesn’t come from your magic practices. It comes from ours. Buster had a feeling you and I’d work out. And if this fish is any indication, he was right.” She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “But don’t get any ideas about burning me at sea.”

“I think we have a few years before we need to discuss your funeral.”

“Good.” She sauntered toward the fireplace. “Now, how about a real fire so a girl can nap?”

He snapped his fingers and a fire appeared in the grate.

“Real,” she growled.

“As you wish, your highness,” he said, hurrying toward the pile of logs beside the fireplace. She had already curled up on the rug. She was different, and, for all her big talk, she was tiny. She would never replace Buster. No one could. But she’d make the world a little less lonely.

“Do you like clams?” he asked.

“Only in the mornings,” she replied.

“I go clamming with the morning tides. Should be just after dawn tomorrow.”

“I’ll make sure you’re up,” she said sleepily. Then she opened one yellow eye. “Finished that fire yet?”

“I will,” he said, feeling lighter than he had all day. He built her a tiny blaze. One to keep her toasty and safe, and to let her know she was welcome in his small life. His small, magic life.

 

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

Familiar Territory
Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in first published in Wizard Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Daw, November, 1997
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Corey A. Ford/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.

 

Here’s something really fun…at least for me. I’ve been doing a lot of teaching lately, working with student manuscripts. And it doesn’t seem to matter how experienced the writers are, some of them are having trouble putting in all five senses. In particular, the senses of smell and taste.

I have a quick and easy solution to that, as I explain in the video below.

I have a lot of quick solutions to long-term craft problems that writers struggle with. I’m doing to do an entire series of these workshops. Here’s a bit more on the series itself.

I hope you’ll join me with this workshop. You can sign up for the first one right here.

So many of you backed our latest Kickstarter, which was for my first three fantasy novels. We did a full rebrand, and are introducing the books to a new audience. Your help with the Kickstarter made that easy.

Thank you!!!!

Now you can return to your regularly scheduled Saturday evening…

Caitlin Carter seeks purpose. She needs to, or so her counselors at the VA keep telling her. Find a reason to live. Forget the past.

The past haunts her, especially because she lives in her old hometown. The place where the trouble started.

Until she finds exploring her past might help her find a future…just not the way she expects.

A powerful story about veterans and the traumas they continue to face even at home.

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

 

Rehab By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Not quite homeless. That’s how she described herself to herself. Not quite homeless but not quite home, either.

Caitlin Carter started her walk back from her appointment at the VA. The stately old building had been at the edge of mansion row for more than forty years, as the neighborhood slowly slipped into decline.

She barely saw it any more. She grew up only a few blocks away, and the mansions had never really been at their peak—not in her lifetime.

She wore two stocking caps over her skull, one pulled down almost to her eyebrows, and two pairs of gloves over her hands, which she still stuck in her pockets. One of the many gifts of her desert tours was a broken internal thermometer—light cold seemed too cold, harsh cold seemed warm, deadly cold felt welcoming—and she made sure she dressed like the sensible Midwestern girl she had been, back before she decided to chuck it all for the sake of some excitement or (oh, hell, let’s be honest) to tell her law-and-order father to go fuck himself.

So many issues, so little time. At least that was what she joked with the shrink the last time she heard, “I’m afraid our time is up.” Yeah, she always just got started, and then the time was up, and she was sent into the cold, literally, at least this winter.

No matter what she did, she couldn’t get her parents out of her mind. She’d moved back in with them six months ago—not in her old bedroom because that belonged to some other girl. A girl who graduated high school, smiled wide, dressed in pink, and had totally dorky boyfriends. A girl with trophies on her shelf from volleyball tournaments, certificates from math contests framed over her bed, and one rather nasty juvie file in a shadow box below a shattered mirror.

Yeah, that girl had issues.

The woman has more.

She lived in the grandmother apartment over her parents’ garage. One bedroom, half kitchen, tiny bathroom, ugly living area. The smell of exhaust filled the place every time her father moved the car.

She found the smell of exhaust comforting.

She needed comforting, because the apartment wasn’t. Her parents weren’t either. Her mother couldn’t meet her eyes, even now, and her father, for all his talk of wasted potential, still mentioned that one night, the joyride, the anger, the accident, leading to what would’ve been a couple of felonies had she been one week older, or had Michael actually died of his injuries.

Caitlin had told her father she hadn’t known Michael had put a gun in her glove box and carried a knife inside his boot. She claimed she hadn’t known about the weapons till she and Michael had ripped off the liquor store that failed to serve them, and sped off, crashing through the windows of a car dealership not half a block away.

Not the worst thing that happened to her, by far.

The thing her father blamed, though. Technically, he hadn’t paid off the judge, but she knew there was a tit-for-tat, probably dealing with secrets. Her father loved secrets, knew where the bodies were buried, liked to haul out the skeletons when he needed them.

And he’d needed them that night, when he traded her years in a juvie facility and/or some prison somewhere for mandatory military service. Sounded like punishment to her at the time.

Life-saving, turned out.

She carefully picked her way across the ice-covered street, to the unshoveled sidewalks of mansion row. Her breath fanned out around her like exhaust from the engines of a dozen jeeps.

It had taken nearly a year to work her way up the VA’s waiting list. Counselors—especially those dealing with the psychological problems—were in high demand.

Her problems had started long before she joined up, got exacerbated by her tours. If it weren’t for the nightmares—the screaming, pound-her-fist-through-the-wall nightmares—she probably wouldn’t have signed up for counseling in the first place.

Thrown out of three separate apartments at the far end of town. License restricted for driving drunk, which limited her choices—especially here, where the phrase “bus service” was an oxymoron and public transportation meant taking a tourist trolley that circled the downtown.

She had to move close to the VA because if she missed one appointment, just one, she got knocked down to the bottom of the waiting list again, and much as she hated the shrink talk and the sharing and the crappy way she felt when the sessions were over, she hated not having someone to talk to—really talk to—worse.

So she walked, every day, even when it was ten below, like today. No matter what her mother said, Caitlin didn’t wear a ski mask over her face—that would bring back flashbacks to high school and the rebellion and the power-high she got from pulling cash from some stupid clerk’s till. (Okay, so she had known about the gun, but she’d only told the shrink that last week. It’d been her gun (which she stole from another kid’s locker), and Michael had been too injured to ever contradict her—at least when it counted, during the so-called court case, the judgment that sent her on the path that led to this icy sidewalk, this everyday walk.)

She tucked her chin inside the parka, letting the fake fur caress her face. Whenever she felt the fake fur, she knew she was okay—not too cold—because if she were too cold, she’d feel nothing at all.

Time to walk back to the undecorated apartment and wait until she had to show up for one of her three five-hour shifts at the nearby coffee shop, the only place that would hire vets and let them be around people. Didn’t matter that most of the customers were also vets. Didn’t matter that she rarely said more than “That’ll be $2.50” and “Here’s your change, sir.” At least she got out of the house.

Or so she said to herself.

She saved the mansion for the way back. She loved the mansion. She had loved it since she was a child.

She used to walk down this stately old boulevard near her parents’ house, and imagine living in the mansions. Back then, they were apartments, mostly, although some were still single-family dwellings. All had fallen on hard times, or so everyone thought.

But even harder times had been on the horizon.

Now most of the mansions were boarded up, with plywood over the windows and doors. Her favorite was on the corner of two boulevards, and it seemed to take up half the block. When she was a kid, an old lady lived there, alone. Sometimes Caitlin saw the old lady, tottering her way to the really fancy car that she left parked in the driveway.

But mostly, Caitlin wondered how one person could live in such a large place. It had three stories, plus an attic and a basement and the biggest garage Caitlin had ever seen.

She used to hoist herself up on top of the stone fence and peer into the yard, imagining what it would be like to own the house. Then the old lady called the cops on her, and Caitlin never climbed the fence again.

She had forgotten about the place until she lost her last apartment, and walked to her parents’ house when the VA admitted it couldn’t help her if she didn’t help herself. They said she needed meaning in her life. She needed purpose. They meant she had to get treatment for her anxiety and PTSD and all-around out-of-control behavior.

But she took it as the one final wake-up call.

Because as she walked those four blocks to her parents’ house to beg for a place to stay, she kept looking at the ruined homes on the dying boulevard and thinking how easy it would be to slip inside one, and squat for a few days, a few months, and no one would ever be the wiser.

That was her backup plan if her parents officially threw her out. When she arrived at her parents’ to beg for her old room back, her mother had made that thin-lipped disapproving grimace that always made Caitlin’s stomach queasy, but her father had just stared at her. He’d had something in his gaze she’d never seen before.

“Yeah,” he’d said. “We’ll fix up the apartment over the garage.”

She could have taken that badly—that they didn’t want her inside their house. But Caitlin had a sense that her father understood what it took for her to ask, and, even weirder, had understood what she needed. What she needed was a place of her own where no one would bother her, and yet, a place where someone kept an eye out for her.

She offered to pay rent, and he told her to bank the money instead. And somehow, that conversation had left her more shaken than any conversation she’d ever had with him—including the angry ones over her terrible behavior in her seventeenth year.

That walk, though—that walk through the mansions, in the long-dead, formerly rich area of town—that walk was the moment when she labeled herself almost-homeless, when she knew she had only a hairsbreadth between being someone with a glimmer of a future and being someone who only had a past.

Every day since, she’d used the mansion as a measuring stick: Was she better? Had she moved forward?

And every day, she had no answer at all.

She stood outside on this cold, cold afternoon and stared at the mansion, with its wrap-around porch, columns, and gabled attic. When she first came on these regular walks, she wondered what the neighbors thought of her staring at the place, and then she realized there were no neighbors.

The neighborhood was as empty as some of the bombed-out places she had patrolled in Fallujah. Someone had lived here once, but no one did now.

No one cared.

The storm the night before had dumped nearly two feet of snow on the neighborhood. No one had shoveled sidewalks, because no one cared. A plow had gone through and tossed even more snow on the sidewalk. There was no real path, only an icy trail of footprints that she had made at the beginning of the winter.

She frowned at the mansion. If she stared at it, and let her eyes blur, it looked no different than it had when the old lady had lived there.

But if Caitlin really looked at it, she realized the house was falling apart, like every other place on this block.

And the snow the night before would only make things worse.

She slipped through the broken gate. No one had shoveled the mansion’s sidewalk either. The only way she had known there was a sidewalk was from memory, the way the brick walk went from the stone fence to the matching stone steps that eased the journey up the small knoll the mansion rested on.

Her boots crunched on the snow’s hard surface, breaking through to a layer of ice beneath. The door ahead looked dark and foreboding, and, unlike the rest of the building’s façade, had no snow plastered against it.

If she were in an old movie, her breath might have come shallowly and she might’ve felt some trepidation. But she knew, she knew, no snipers sat in the windows, no family waited with guns in hand, no insurgent had planted a bomb beneath the stairs.

Maybe she would have worried about such things six months before, but she’d had six months to wrap her brain around the reality of now, not the memory of then, and no matter how bad it might get inside a mansion in her hometown, it would be nothing compared with what she’d seen.

What she’d done.

That last thought made her heart flutter just a bit. She took a deep breath of air so cold that it burned going into her lungs.

She made herself focus on her destination, and as she did so, she realized that the door was partially open. Snow had piled against it, making sure it would never close.

Open all winter, the mansion’s decay would accelerate. No one would come here and check—not the city historical division which was trying to sell the place, not the police, not the imaginary neighbors. No one would notice this; no one would understand it.

No one except her.

She continued forward, up another, smaller flight of stairs, and then crossed the pristine layer of snow to the house itself.

She had never stepped on the porch, not in years of dreaming about it. Up close, the porch looked dangerous. In the places where the snow did not blanket the surface, she saw rotted wood and broken beams.

The mansion’s stone exterior needed some kind of grout or something—whatever they put between the stones—and the door wasn’t open, so much as it wasn’t really intact.

Ah hell, she might as well be honest with herself: The door was shattered, and the snow that accumulated near the opening was as deep as the snow around the building.

Even though she had stared at the thing for months, she hadn’t realized that it had been snowing inside since winter began.

She put her hand on one of the stone columns that made the mansion look so stately.

She pushed past the broken door, stepped over the biggest mound of snow, and felt her heart sink as she saw how deep the snow had piled inside.

The house was as cold inside as it was out, but the air didn’t have the fresh crispness of the outdoors. It smelled faintly sour, and she knew, if the inside were any warmer, that sour smell would grow into something overpowering.

Still, she felt almost like a child as she stepped inside the foyer. To her right was the receiving room. It still had its dark wood wainscoting, but someone had painted the area between the end of the wainscoting and the crown molding a bright pink. She winced when she saw it, and when she saw the cracked and ruined fireplace (as if someone had gone after it with a bat), and the toppled radiator.

Each room she walked through had damage—a rotted floor, dented plaster and lathe, missing light fixtures. The kitchen had no appliances. It looked like they—and the sink—had been ripped from the wall. A large stain near the water pipe where the sink had been made her think that water had flowed steadily since the sink was gone—until a deep freeze froze the pipes.

She didn’t want to think about that damage—or any of the damage she couldn’t really see.

Still, here and there, she saw traces of love. This house had been grand once, and then when it was no longer grand, someone had still cared for it enough to keep its character.

The damage didn’t look fresh, but it didn’t look decades old either. The house had good bones beneath all the garbage and the destruction.

She ventured to the back staircase. Part of it threaded down into a basement, and she just couldn’t bring herself to go there, not on the coldest day of the year so far. But upstairs—she had always wanted to see upstairs.

The staircase twisted upward, working its way around two corners. It opened in a narrow hallway, and she realized with a bit of a shock that this house actually had a servant’s wing. Two small bedrooms separated by the tiniest jack-and-jill bathroom she’d ever seen convinced her of that. The bathroom was 1950s vintage, and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in at least forty years.

The door to the hallway was closed. She pushed it open, the squeal echoing in the emptiness. Her heart started pounding now.

She recognized the feeling. A sense that she didn’t belong, combined with experience from a dozen (maybe a hundred) entries into seemingly empty buildings, only to have someone jump out at her, or a hand clutch her arm, holding her back just in time to save her from danger.

She was slipping, slipping into memory. She recognized the feeling, and she caught herself. She didn’t dare leave this place—this frigid and empty house, a building she had always wanted to visit.

It wasn’t dangerous here.

It was just broken.

Rather like her.

Amazing how broken could seem dangerous when viewed in the wrong light.

She took a deep breath and made herself walk forward. Two medium-sized bedrooms. A remodeled bathroom with a claw foot tub and a glassed-in shower added at least thirty years before.

The stained glass window over the toilet made her realize that nothing had been broken or stolen up here. Apparently the thieves from downstairs hadn’t ventured up this high.

She let out a small sigh, then continued on, to what had to be the master suite. Rays of thin winter light penetrated the hallway. The sour stench seemed stronger here, probably because this level was just a tiny bit warmer.

She stepped into the bedroom—and stopped.

A camp stove, blankets, a sleeping bag, some books, all scattered near the fireplace. Half burned wood rested against the fireplace’s brick wall.

And next to it all, a person wrapped in blankets.

Or what was left of a person.

She had seen enough death to know that death had come and gone from this room at least a week ago, maybe more.

She swallowed hard, looked at the little camping area, saw that whoever this had been had managed to clear the fireplace, but either the flue was closed or there was a block in the chimney, because soot covered too much of the area around the body.

A pitcher, with ice along the rim, sat beside the fireplace. Her heart twisted.

He—and it had been a he—had put out the fire rather than burn the house down. Respect, to the bitter end.

She crouched before him, saw the dog tags first, maybe because she had looked for the dog tags first. His face was too ruined for her to tell what he looked like, but if he tried to live here and he was a vet, she had a hunch she had seen him before.

He had stolen her idea of living in one of the mansions so that he could be close to the VA, only he hadn’t thought it through. Sleeping in one of these old places was fine in summer and maybe okay in early fall, but on days like this, the house needed more than a single fireplace, and if that wasn’t working, well…

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

She rocked back on her heels and stood.

She wasn’t feeling cold any more, but it wasn’t her broken thermostat. She’d learned how to cope with death. Four tours, and death no longer bothered her.

The means of death, that sometimes did. The roadside bomb (God, the truck flew. She should have warned them. Should. Have…), the single shot from a great distance (Look at the sniper nest. Been up there days. She should have scoped the area. Should. Have…), the child with the knife (Big enough to be a young adult. She should have thought that through. Should. Have…)

She wiped a gloved hand over her face, felt the fabric against her skin. No frostbite, not yet. But soon if she wasn’t careful.

She had to call this in to someone. And what would she say?

The truth. She’d learned that too, over there.

The truth was the only defense and the only explanation. No matter how ugly things got.

She stood, her knees cracking.

He—whoever he was—had tried to make a home here, and no one had even known he was around. The neighborhood was empty because everyone thought it dangerous. Her parents had warned her not to walk through it, as if they had no idea what she had seen in her short life. And then she realized/remembered/understood. They did have no idea.

No one had any idea.

Except the folks at the VA. Who told her that she had to give herself a chance. To step forward, do the right thing. And they had said earlier this afternoon, the right thing was to take care of herself.

Right now, though, in this moment, the right thing was to let someone know about him.

To bring him home—since he hadn’t been halfway homeless. He’d been all the way homeless.

She was nearly down the stairs before she remembered where she was, and when she was. She had a phone in her pocket. She didn’t have to keep radio silence.

She gave herself a rueful smile, tapped 911, and reported the body. Then she sat on the stairs and waited.

***

Three people in the ambulance, two cops in the squad, no sirens. They photographed the scene, removed the body, asked if she knew who he was.

She had to say no, but she asked them to keep her informed.

“If he doesn’t have people,” she said. “I’ll pay for him, make sure he’s buried with honors. Tell whoever needs to know.”

She didn’t have a business card, so she made sure the cops took her information, and one of the ambulance drivers did too.

Only as an afterthought did one of the cops ask her why she had been here.

She was about to launch into the open-door explanation, the curious-about-this-place-since-childhood story, when the words caught in her throat.

“Just a feeling,” she said. “I just had a feeling.”

She wasn’t sure that was right, but she wasn’t sure it was wrong either. She had had a feeling.

If she’d had a premonition, she would’ve liked to think that she would have arrived before he froze to death.

But she had proven to herself time and time again in the desert that she had no premonitions, that she never saw the future, that she barely saw the warning signs.

And this was a big warning sign. Alone, in the dark, freezing, with enough respect not to light a fire for fear of destroying part of an already-hurting 110-year-old house.

Respect and loneliness. A man with a past and no future.

A man no one remembered or knew.

A man no one had even seen.

The cops left last, apparently not caring that she was inside a house she didn’t own.

No one cared about this place.

Except her.

She loved it. The man who died had cared about it too—enough to gamble his life on saving it.

She turned around, looked at the gloom, the dust motes floating in the twilight air.

She had no idea what a house like this needed. She didn’t know how to repair plaster or how to fix the missing stones out front. She’d never pounded a board into a porch or painted a wall above beautiful wood.

But she had shoveled snow for her entire life. She could start there.

And she had savings too. A lot of it, thanks to her father and his no-rent policy.

No one liked this neighborhood. It wasn’t dying. It had died a long time ago, and no one had cared.

But this house was still alive, barely clinging to life. With no future, only a past.

Unless someone helped it.

She was shaking—not from cold, but from excitement.

She needed a shovel. She needed some plywood. She needed to go to the city and make some promises that she intended to keep.

She would learn how to fix the house, no matter how long it took. She would promise to live here afterward—like that little old lady from her childhood.

Caitlin would learn how a single person could survive in a house this big.

After she glued it back together.

Repairing the damage and becoming presentable, slowly, by focusing on each tiny section.

Like the snow in the foyer. The chill in the air.

A little love and elbow grease might not make the house a showplace again, but they would ease the house back to life.

Ease her back to life.

One missing piece at a time.

 

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

Rehab

Copyright © 2020 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2020 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © sorokopud/Depositphotos

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.

 

The White Mists of Power, Heart Readers, and Traitors made my reputation as a fantasy writer. Published worldwide to great acclaim, the books have been in print for years. But they haven’t been revamped since 2012. The interiors were old and tired, and the covers of the 2012 versions have not held up.

So we’re reissuing the books with a brand-new design. And, as we’ve been doing, we’re starting the relaunch with a Kickstarter. This Kickstarter contains more rewards than we usually have, because the original mass market books are part of the Kickstarter, signed by me.

As well as the very first edition of The White Mists of Power.

If you back the Kickstarter, you will get the brand-new ebook editions. You can get the newly redesigned hardcover or trade papers and…or…you can get the original older versions.

We have a lot of other fun items in this Kickstarter, so head on over and take a look.

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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.

Mary Beth Wilkins knows she made a mistake the moment she sees her beloved library burn.

She also knows what she must do next to protect herself and her secret. And although she failed to save this library, she has a more important purpose to fulfill—a magical purpose.

If she acts fast.

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

 

The Midbury Lake Incident By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

Mary Beth Wilkins had the most perfect library, until one day, in the middle of June, the library burned down.

She arrived at the two-hundred-year-old structure to find the roof collapsed, the walls blackened, and the books…well, let’s just say the books were gone, floating away in the clouds of smoke that darkened the early morning sky.

No one had called her, even though she had always thought of the Midbury Lake Public Library as her library. She was the only librarian, and even though she didn’t own the building—the Town of Midbury Lake did—she treated it like her own, defended it like a precious child, and managed to find funding, even in the dark years of dwindling government support.

She sat in her ancient Subaru, too shocked to move, not just because the firefighters were still poking out of the smoking building as if they were posing for the cover of next year’s Fire Fighters Calendar, but because of all of the emotions that rose within her.

Grief wasn’t one of them. Grief would come, she knew. Grief always came, whether you wanted it or not. She had learned that in her previous life—a much more adventurous life, a life lived, her mother would say (and why, why was she thinking of her mother? Mary Beth had banned thoughts of her mother for nearly ten years). No one could avoid grief, but grief came in its own sweet time.

No, the dominant emotion she was feeling was fury. Fury that no one had called her. Fury that the library—her sanctuary—was gone. Fury that her day—her life—had been utterly destroyed.

She gripped the leather cover she had placed on the Subaru’s steering wheel, so that her hands would never touch metal or hard plastic, and she made herself take a deep breath.

Her routines were shattered. Every morning she arrived before six, made coffee, put out the fresh-baked donuts whose tantalizing aroma was, even now, wafting out of the back seat.

Her assistant, Lynda Sue, would arrive shortly, and then Mary Beth would have to comfort her, since Lynda Sue was prone to dramatics—she had been a theatah majah once, you knoow, deah—and then it would become all about Lynda Sue and the Patrons and the Library and the Funding, and oh, dear, Mary Beth would find herself in the middle of a mainstream maelstrom.

Too many emotions, including her own.

She had made a serious mistake, because her morning routine hadn’t been in her control. That meditative hour, before anyone arrived, would happen at the library, in what everyone called the Great Room, which was—had been—a wall of windows overlooking Midbury Lake and the hills beyond.

Midbury Lake changed with the seasons and sometimes, Mary Beth thought, with her moods. This morning, the lake itself seemed to be ablaze, the reds and oranges reflecting on the rippling water.

Then she realized that the colors were coming from the sunrise, not from the fire at the library, and she bowed her head.

When she opened the car door, a new phase of her life would begin, and she would have to make choices.

It had been so nice not to make choices any more.

It had been wonderful to be Mary Beth Wilkins, small town librarian.

She would miss Mary Beth.

She could never rebuild Mary Beth.

She would have to become someone new, and becoming someone new always took way too much work.

***

She drove back to her apartment, and parked near the secluded wooded area near the two-story block-long building. She often parked there—at least she had kept up that old habit—and knew all the ways to the building’s back entrance that couldn’t be seen from the street.

Then she glanced over the back seat of the car. The donuts. That little incompetent clerk at the local donut shop probably wouldn’t remember her, and as usual, Mary Beth had paid cash. She hoped if anyone saw her, they would think they’d seen her earlier than they had or maybe they would confuse the days.

She hoped. Because she had stopped thinking defensively three years ago. Somehow, she had thought Midbury Lake was too remote, too obscure, too off-the-beaten path for anyone to find her.

Better yet, she had thought no one remembered her. She had done everything she could to scour herself from the records, and she hadn’t used magic in what seemed like forever, so she wouldn’t leave a trail.

The donut aroma was too much for her, or maybe she had just become one of those middle-aged women who ate whenever they were stressed. She didn’t care. She reached into the back seat, nudged up the top of the donut box, and took a donut, covering her fingers with granules of sugar.

She couldn’t fix the library, not without someone noticing.

She bit into the donut, savoring the mix of sugar and grease and soft, perfect cake. She would miss these donuts. They were special.

At least she had already picked a new name. She needed to adopt it. Not Mary Beth Wilkins any longer. Now, Victoria Dowspot. Her identification for the new identity was in the apartment. She should have been carrying it. Yet another mistake.

She also should have been practicing the name in her own mind. She hadn’t done that either. Victoria. Victoria Marie Dowspot.

Another librarian. The kind of single middle-aged woman no one noticed, even, apparently, when her library burned.

She swallowed the fury. That was Mary Beth’s fury, not Victoria’s. She needed to keep that in mind.

Victoria finished the donut, wiped the sugar off her mouth, then sighed. The donuts, comfortable in their box, were just one symbol of all she had to do, how lax she had become.

She stepped out of the Subaru, then pulled out the donut box, and put it in the trunk. No one would accidentally see them there. And there was nothing else in the car that would directly tie it to her, at least from the perspective of someone who didn’t know her.

She had learned, three identities ago, to be as cautious about strange little details as possible. Too bad she had gotten so relaxed here in Midbury Lake. She had already made half a dozen mistakes.

She hoped they weren’t fatal.

She snuck up the back stairs, stepping around the creaks and groans, and quietly turned the key in her apartment door’s deadbolt. She pushed the door open and slipped inside. Magoo greeted her, concern on his feline face. He was a big orange male, battered when she found him, or, rather, when he found her.

He had lived through two different identity changes, the only consistent part of her life. She always thanked the universe that librarians and cats went together like hands and gloves. No one thought anything of a librarian who had cat.

Victoria was just glad she hadn’t brought him to the library of late. That had actually been his idea. He hadn’t liked one of the new patrons, a middle-aged man with an overloaded face—big forehead, small piggy eyes, heavy cheekbones.

She hadn’t like him either, but unlike Magoo, she couldn’t bail on her job.

Until today, that is. And she would bail because they would think her dead in that fire.

She just had to do a few things first.

She had a go-bag in the van she kept in the apartment’s parking area. She paid for the extra space, telling the management the van belonged to her cousin, whom she’d pretended to be more than once. She would use that disguise again today, after she grabbed some food and water for Magoo. Everything else would stay here.

She wouldn’t mind leaving this apartment. It was dark, especially in the winter, but it was heavily soundproofed and, unlike the library, made of stone.

Magoo looked at her, his tail drooping. He knew. He hated what was going to come next, but at least he didn’t run away from her.

She scooped him under one arm and put him in the special cat carrier she had made. It was solid on the inside, but on the outside, it looked like a canvas carryall. And she had spelled it so no one could see a cat inside.

Magoo made one soft sound of protest, but he went in willingly enough. She put one bag of his dry food in her real carryall, along with two extra cans of his wet food. Then she grabbed two of his toys, the ones he played with the most, and packed them as well.

Her eyes filled with tears as she looked at the remaining cat toys, scattered on the hard wood floor. The toys were battered and well loved, and she had to leave them behind.

Funny, how the emotion rose over Magoo’s things, and not her own. She had worked on staying unattached for so long that she didn’t mind leaving her possessions behind. She minded leaving his.

She stood. She had hoped she could stay in Midbury Lake. After so many years, she had thought she could. But she should have known that disaster would follow her.

It always did.

She made herself take a deep breath, then ran a hand over her forehead. She went into the bedroom, smoothed the coverlet on the bed because she didn’t want anyone to think she was a slob, not that it mattered. It wasn’t her after all; it was Mary Beth.

Then she peered out the bedroom window, with its view of the parking lot. She couldn’t see the Subaru, but the van looked just fine.

No one else stood in the lot either. So, it was now or never.

She clenched a fist and focused her ears on the Subaru. Then she slid her right fingernails along her thumb, mimicking the slow opening of a trunk lid. She heard it unlock, and squeal open.

For the first time, she was happy she had never used rust remover. Sometimes it was the little things that allowed success.

Always, it was the little things.

Then she scooped her left hand downward. She could feel the donut box, even though it was far away. She levitated it, seeing it in her mind’s eye, and waited until it was over the trees before igniting it. Then she sent it to the library, as fast as the breeze could take it.

If anyone saw the burning box, they’d think it sparks or debris from the library fire, or a figment of their imaginations.

The box arrived, and she lowered it into one of the still burning sections, careful to keep it away from firefighters.

Then she closed the trunk lid, and leaned on the windowsill.

Her heart was pounding as if she had run five miles. She had trouble catching her breath. Sweat dripped from her forehead.

She was out of practice on everything, and that wasn’t good. She really had become complacent.

And she still had some magic to go before she could quit.

She wiped off her forehead with the back of her hand, then crouched beside the bed. She removed a locked box with her many identities and two dental models of her mouth.

Her hand was shaking as she removed one of the dental models. This was the tricky spell, and she was tired from the easy one. She had to make real human teeth out of one of the models. Then she had to send it to the library, and lower it into one of the still burning sections. If there were still-burning sections.

She had been moving awfully slowly.

She grabbed the glass of water beside her bed. The glass was smudged. Magoo had probably stuck his little face in it, just so he could touch the water with his tongue.

Even so, she needed the refreshment, so she drank. The water was warm and stale, and she thought she could taste cat saliva. Probably her overactive imagination.

She drank the entire glass, then set it down, and squared her shoulders. She held the dental model, squinched her eyes closed, and imagined it as bone, yellowed with age and tarnished with plaque.

She opened her eyes. She was now holding a mandible instead of a model. It actually looked like someone had ripped teeth from her mouth.

She shuddered just a little, opened the window six inches and stuck her hand—and the teeth—outside. Then she sent them to the burning library.

Her mind’s eye showed her that one section still burned. She lowered the teeth there, snapped the mandible in half, and let it fall. It didn’t matter if it hit someone. They wouldn’t know what it was. They would think it was just debris.

She shut off her mind’s eye for the second time, leaned back, and felt her legs wobble.

If only she could sit for twenty minutes. But she couldn’t. She had to get out of here before someone remembered her, before someone decided to check up on her.

That fury rose a third time—no one was thinking of her at all—and then she remembered that it played to her advantage.

She wiped a shaking hand over her forehead, and turned around.

That hideous man with the overloaded face was standing in the doorway, holding Magoo with one hand. If anything, the man looked even more menacing than he had in the library.

And Magoo seemed remarkably calm. He hated being held without having someone support his back feet.

And he hated this man.

She held her position, as if she were frozen in fear. Her heart was pounding too hard. She hated it when someone snuck up on her, but that was her fault. She hadn’t retuned her ears.

Even when she was trying not to be careless, she was being very careless indeed.

“Making your escape?” the man asked. “You’re a little slow this time, Darcy, aren’t you? Complacent. It trips up escapees every single time.”

Her heart pounded harder. He used her real name. She stared at Magoo, whose ears were flat.

Then she made herself swallow against a dry throat.

“Put him down,” she said, careful not to use Magoo’s name. She didn’t even have to work at making her voice quaver. “He didn’t do anything.”

“True enough,” the man said. “He isn’t even a real familiar. And even though he’s lived in close proximity to you for—what? a year?—your magic hasn’t rubbed off on him.”

The caveman’s numbers were wrong. She wasn’t sure if that was deliberate. She wasn’t sure if he had said that to get her to correct him. She wasn’t going to correct him.

Because Magoo was a familiar, but she had cloaked him long ago. And he had clearly practiced his itty bitty magic more than she had. He had made a doppelganger, and that doppelganger was at least a year old. How often had Magoo used that doppelganger with her, so that he could do whatever it was he did when he didn’t want her to catch him? Enough so that this doppelganger had some heft and a tiny bit of catlike life.

Good for Magoo, sending the doppelganger out when he heard the caveman come through the door.

Or was the creature that the man held actually Magoo?

Her heart rate spiked.

She was going to have to use her mind’s eye to check, which meant magic, which meant even more doors opening, more people coming for her. Those tears pricked her eyes again.

“What do you want?” she asked the man, even though she knew.

“We need you back in Alexandria,” he said.

How many times had she heard that answer in her nightmares? And for how many years? Ever since she had inherited the library. The real library and all of its knowledge, once thought lost.

Her stomach twisted. “And if I don’t go?”

He raised Magoo—or the Magoo doppelganger—and shook him slightly. The cat made a mew of protest. Unless the man had magicked Magoo, that really was the doppelganger. The actual Magoo would’ve bitten the man’s fingers off.

“Do you really want to test it?” the man asked.

She clenched her fists. No, she didn’t want to test it. And no, she didn’t want to deal with the man either, because that would mean fire, and if she somehow set this place on fire, and the library was already burning, then that would draw attention to Mary Beth Wilkins, and Darcy (no, Victoria. She had to think of herself as Victoria) didn’t want any attention ever falling on Mary Beth.

“What do you get paid if you bring me to Alexandria?” she asked, not willing to say, Bring me back, because that would imply that she had left, and in actuality, she had never been to Alexandria. The library had. The library was born there, and parts of the library died there. Her ancestors managed to save some of it—much of it—during the four different times it burned.

But they had learned to never, ever put the books back on the shelves, because doing so brought out men like this one. And sometimes started fires.

She took a deep silent breath, then flashed her mind’s eye for a half second, looking past the man, seeing what his powers were, and seeing if that creature he held was the real Magoo.

The man had less power than he thought he did, and the creature wasn’t Magoo. Magoo was crouching motionlessly in his carryall.

She retracted her mind’s eye, but the man had noticed.

So she stood taller, and let her power thread up. Without planning it, she extended one hand and sent a ball of flame to the man so quickly that he didn’t have time to scream before it engulfed him.

His mouth opened, then his face melted as his entire body incinerated.

She stopped the fire before it destroyed him completely. The stench of burning meat and grease filled the air.

Magoo sneezed.

The man’s body had toppled to the hardwood floor, and the flames had left a serious scorch mark. She walked over to the body, and poked it with her foot.

She had needed a body. Actually having one would be so much better than those stupid teeth had been.

She bent over him, and separated the top of the skull from the jawbone. She left the top of the skull to float just above the body. Then she removed some small bones from the feet and the hands, not enough to show that the hands were bigger than hers, but enough to show that the hands were human. She took a small portion of a rib as well.

She compiled them into a little ball, covered them with a cloak, and sent them, still steaming, through the still-open window. She monitored them as she sent them to the library, and let them tumble into the section where she had sent the teeth.

Then she uncloaked them. Their steam mixed with the smoke of the still-smoldering section.

She shut off her mind’s eye and took a shuddering breath, then wished she hadn’t. It tasted foul, like rotting meat. She licked her lips.

Her neighbors would notice that odor.

She used the last of her energy to cremate the remains into little bits of nothing, careful to contain the fire. Then she put it all out, staggered into her kitchen, and took out a broom and dustpan. She swept up the ash, and dumped it into the toilet in small sections, flushing several times so that it wouldn’t clog up the system.

By the time she was done, she was woozy with exhaustion. She hadn’t used that much magical power in years and years. And using it had opened the door to more interlopers like the man who had just died.

She ran a hand through her hair and looked in the mirror. Shadows under her eyes, and a face smudged with ash. She washed off her skin, then staggered into the kitchen and drank an ancient bottle of Ice Blue Gatorade. It helped, a little.

In the living room, Magoo mewed. It was probably a get-me-out-of-here mew, but she took it as a move-your-ass mew. Because she had to.

She really had been careless. Not just here, but at the Midbury Lake Public Library.

That fire. It had to be her fault. Not because she set it, but because she hadn’t monitored the books. With all the interest in the history of the ancient world these days, particularly the history of religion as it pertained to modern times, someone had probably ordered a book through interlibrary loan that she hadn’t seen.

A paper book, one that shouldn’t be on the shelf of a library where she worked. A paper book about paganism or magic spells or showing ancient scrolls. The kind of book that had actually been in the Library of Alexandria in its heyday or in the Serapeum just before it was destroyed.

The kind of book stored inside her memory, in a locked area, where she couldn’t touch it. Like the women before her, all of them, from the same family. She likened that locked area to a computer chip. It contained knowledge and power, but only tapped that knowledge and power when something demanded them.

She had put herself in a position where nothing would tap the knowledge, or she thought she had. But she hadn’t done enough. She should have kept an active inventory on the books that her family guarded. She hadn’t, and it had caused this.

Because, whenever one of the old books hit a shelf, or a facsimile of one of the old books hit a shelf near a library repositorian (like her), the ancient spells revived, the ones that had actually destroyed the library. If the books from the Library of Alexandria reappeared on shelves, those shelves were supposed to burn.

Her family, one of the 16 ancient families that guarded the library’s knowledge, had never been able to counter those spells. Her grandmother had died trying, so her mother simply avoided libraries, bookstores, and any other place where books gathered.

Darcy had embraced libraries, but she had been cautious.

Not cautious enough though, since that horrid man had found her. And she had destroyed her favorite little library by not monitoring what crossed its shelves.

She went back into the living room. The carryall was inching its way across the floor. Apparently Magoo had had enough.

She crouched beside him and put her hand on his back through the soft side of the carryall.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We still have to go.”

Before someone caught her again. Before someone took her back to Alexandria. Before someone tried to take that chip of library knowledge out of her brain, and destroy it entirely. Or, worse in her opinion, tried to revive it all at once, and use it for the wrong purpose—whatever that purpose might be.

She put on the wig and hoodie that marked her as Mary Beth’s cousin, then grabbed both carryalls and walked to the door. The apartment still smelled faintly of greasy meat, and there was a lingering bit of smoke.

That was on her. It was always on her.

The magic inside her wasn’t her own. It wasn’t even the library’s. It was an ancient evil spell, designed to destroy the very things she loved.

Books.

Maybe the next time she stopped somewhere, she wouldn’t become a librarian. Maybe she would run a movie theater or open a donut shop. Or maybe she would spend her days in genteel poverty, sitting in a coffee shop and watching the world go by.

She had a lot of time to think about it, and a long way to drive. Where to, she didn’t know. She would wait until she deemed herself as far from this place as possible, in a location that seemed as far from Alexandria as possible.

Then she let herself out and walked down the stairs, quietly, so as not to disturb the neighbors, who were already gathering around the front of the building. She could hear the conversation: they thought the stench was coming from the burning library.

Let them.

People always misunderstood why libraries burned. They blamed old paper or faulty wiring. They never blamed the ignorant, who deemed some knowledge worthy and some too frightening to know.

She wished she could defend that knowledge, but all she could do was protect it, and hold it, until someone else came up with a solution. And when the time came, she would pass that little kernel on to some other member of her family, who would adopt the burden and treasure it.

Like she had adopted Magoo.

“Come on, kiddo,” she said to him as they headed to the van. “Adventures await.”

And she hoped those adventures would be of the gentle, placid kind. Like summer mornings staring at a still Midbury Lake.

One could always hope. Because hope was what kept the bits of the library alive. Hope that one day the spells would lift, one day the library would be reunited, and one day the books would return to the shelves.

And she would never ever have to grieve again.

 

____________________________________________

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

The Midbury Lake Incident

Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Dimdimich/Dreamstime
Uncollected Anthology logo art © Tanya Borozenets/Dreamstime
Uncollected Anthology logo design © Stephanie Writt

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.

 

…to get my upcoming class, “Craft in the 21st Century,” for the early bird price. Right now, it’s $200. After it goes live tomorrow, it’ll be $250. Hurry on over  if you want to refresh your writing for the 2020s. Click here to get more information and order the class.

We’re also offering some coaching on publishing your work.

We’ve been conducting a writer’s block course, and in the webinar, we learned that one thing which actually blocks writers in 2025 is the learning curve for indie publishing. People get stuck at various different places, so we can’t just do a simple do-this, do-that course anymore. (It was possible ten years ago; isn’t possible now)

So Dean wants to help as many folks as he can. But he can only do it one at a time. Therefore, for 3 months, he’ll help a few people get started from wherever they’re stalled. Then, if that works, he’ll do it again for a different group.

If you’re interested, check out this post: https://deanwesleysmith.com/coaching-getting-your-stuff-out/

I am teaching a new lecture-only class called “Craft in the 21st Century.” I’ve been doing a lot of work with professional writers this past six months, and I’ve noticed some new problems that I hadn’t seen before. Plus, I’m encountering a few things in my own writing that didn’t exist before either.

Life changes. The act of reading changes. The act of writing changes. People’s tastes change. All of this is normal, but sometimes hard to keep track of. So, I’m going to talk about it in this class.

This is a craft class. Like the in-person craft classes that I teach, there will be no discussion of politics or religion. We won’t discuss current events. We will be talking about trends and changes in the world, often dictated by technological change.

So, join me for this. The class will start on Monday. The price is $200 right now, but it will go up to $250 on Monday when the first video goes live. Sign up here.

You want to hear more about the class? Take a look at this video.

 

The reason I’m wearing the dorky Back To The Future shirt is because I recorded that video on the same day as Dean and I recorded “The Kris & Dean Show Does Back To The Future.” We go through the movie bit by bit to show how to develop characters and how to plant information so that readers/viewers don’t really notice it. The entire show went live last night.

Here’s a taste of how goofy the two of us get when we’re together:

You can sign up for that here. And if you missed “The Kris & Dean Show Does Die Hard,” you can find that here. In that one, we have a lot to say about plotting and keeping up a thriller pace.

And yes, there will be more.

Why is this all happening now? Well, because we moved our WMG offices to Las Vegas. We can record these ease.

So take a look. I hope you have fun with them!

Oh, and the picture of Angel Kitty? That was just to get your attention. ?

Paige Racette envisioned the perfect man over and over in her romance novels.

But when Josiah Wells starts using those novels as a blueprint for the way to romance her, she finds the attention creepy, not attractive.

When Wells escalates, adding violence to his role-playing, Paige realizes she must escape the perfect man. But she might find help from someone unexpected—someone a little more flawed, a little less perfect. 

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

 

The Perfect Man By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Paige Racette stared at herself in the full-length mirror, hands on hips. Golden cap of blond hair expertly curled, narrow chin, high cheekbones, china blue eyes, and a little too much of a figure—thanks to the fact she spent most of her day on her butt and sometimes (usually!) forgetting to exercise. The black cocktail dress with its swirling party skirt hid most of the excess, and the glittering beads around the collar brought attention to her face, always and forever her best asset.

Even with the extra pounds, she was not blind date material. Never had been. Until she quit her day job at the television station, she’d had to turn men away. Ironic that once she became a best-selling romance writer, she couldn’t get a date to save her life. Part of the problem was that after she quit, she moved to San Francisco where she’d always wanted to live. She bought a Queen Anne in an old, exclusive neighborhood, set up her office in the bay windows of the second floor, and decided she was in heaven.

Little did she realize that working at home would isolate her, and being in a new city would isolate her more. It had taken her a year to make friends—mostly women, whom she met at the gym not too far from her home.

She saw interesting men, but didn’t speak to them. She was still a small town girl at heart, one who was afraid of the kind of men who lurked in the big city, who believed that the only way to meet the right man was after getting to know him through mutual interests—or mutual friends.

In fact, she wouldn’t have agreed to this blind date if a friend hadn’t convinced her. Sally Myer was her racquetball partner and general confidant who seemed to know everyone in this city. She’d finally tired of Paige’s complaining and set her up.

Paige slid on her high heels. Who’d ever thought she’d get this desperate? And then she sighed. She wasn’t desperate. She was lonely.

And surely, there was no shame in that.

***

Sally had picked the time and location, and had told Paige to dress up. Sally wasn’t going to introduce them. She felt that would be tacky and make the first meeting uncomfortable. She asked Paige for a photograph to give to the blind date—one Josiah Wells—and then told Paige that he would find her.

The location was an upscale restaurant near the Opera House. It was The Place To Go at the moment—famous chef, famous food, and one of those bars that looked like it had come out of a movie set—large and open where Anyone Who Was Someone could see and be seen.

Paige arrived five minutes early, habitually prompt even when she didn’t want to be. She adjusted the white pashmina shawl she’d wrapped around her bare shoulders and scanned the bar before she went in.

It was all black and chrome, with black tinted mirrors and huge black vases filled with calla lilies separating the booths. The bar itself was black marble and behind it, bottles of liquor pressed against an untinted mirror, making the place look even bigger than it was.

She had only been here once before, with her Hollywood agent and a movie producer who was interested in her second novel. He didn’t buy it—the rights went to another studio for high six figures—but he had bought her some of her most memorable meals in the City by the Bay.

She sat at the bar and ordered a Chardonnay which she didn’t plan on touching—she wanted to keep her wits about her this night. Even with Sally’s recommendation, Paige didn’t trust a man she had never met before. She’d heard too many bad stories.

Of course, all the ones she’d written were about people who saw each other across a crowded room and knew at once that they were soul mates. She had never experienced love at first sight (and sometimes she joked to her editor that it was lust at first sight) but she was still hopeful enough to believe in it.

She took the cool glass of Chardonnay that the bartender handed her and swiveled slightly in her chair so that she would be in profile, not looking anxious, but visible enough to be recognizable. And as she did, she saw a man enter the bar.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a perfectly tailored black suit that shimmered like silk. He wore a white scarf around his neck—which on him looked like the perfect fashion accent—and a red rose in his lapel. His dark hair was expertly styled away from his chiseled features, and she felt her breath catch.

Lust at first sight. It was all she could do to keep from grinning at herself.

He appeared to be looking for someone. Finally, his gaze settled on her, and he smiled.

Something about that smile didn’t quite fit on his face. It was too personal. And then she shook the feeling away. She didn’t want to be on a blind date—that was all. She had been fantasizing, the way she did when she was thinking of her books, and she was simply caught off guard. No man was as perfect as her heroes. No man could be, not and still be human.

Although this man looked perfect. His rugged features were exactly like ones she had described in her novels.

He crossed the room, the smile remaining, hand extended. “Paige Racette? I’m Josiah Wells.”

His voice was high and a bit nasal. She took his hand, and found the palm warm and moist.

“Nice to meet you,” she said, removing her hand as quickly as possible.

He wore tinted blue contacts, and the swirling lenses made his eyes seem shiny, a little too intense. In fact, everything about him was a little too intense. He leaned too close, and he seemed too eager. Perhaps he was just as nervous as she was.

“I have reservations here if you don’t mind,” he said.

“No, that’s fine.”

He extended his arm—the perfect gentleman—and she took the elbow in her hand, trying to remember the last time a man had done that for her. Her father maybe, when they went to the father-daughter dinner at her church back when she was in high school. And not one man since.

Although all the men in her books did it. When she wrote about it, the gesture seemed to have an old-fashioned elegance. In real life, it made her feel awkward.

He led her through the bar, placing one hand possessively over hers. This exact scene had happened in her first novel, Beneath a Lover’s Moon. Fabian Garret and Skye Michaels had met, exchanged a few words, and were suddenly walking together like lovers. And Skye had thrilled to Fabian’s touch.

Paige wished Josiah Wells’s fingers weren’t so clammy.

He led them to the maître d’, gave his name, and let the maître d’ lead them to a table near the back. See and Be Seen. Apparently they weren’t important enough.

“I asked for a little privacy,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I hope you don’t mind.”

She didn’t. She had never liked the display aspect of this restaurant anyway.

The table was in a secluded corner. Two candles burned on silver candlesticks and the table was strewn with miniature carnations. A magnum of champagne cooled in a silver bucket, and she didn’t have to look at the label to know that it was Dom Perignon.

The hair on the back of her neck rose. This was just like another scene in Beneath a Lover’s Moon.

Josiah smiled down at her and she made herself smile at him. Maybe he thought her books were a blueprint to romancing her. She would have said so not five minutes before.

He pulled out her chair, and she sat, letting her shawl drape around her. As Josiah sat across from her, the maître d’ handed her the leather bound menu and she was startled to realize it had no prices on it. A lady’s menu. She hadn’t seen one of those in years. The last time she had eaten here had been lunch, not dinner, and she had remembered the prices on the menu from that meal. They had nearly made her choke on her water.

A waiter poured the champagne and left discretely, just like the maître d’ did. Josiah was watching her, his gaze intense.

She knew she had to say something. She was going to say how nice this was but she couldn’t get the lie through her lips. Instead she said as warmly as she could, “You’ve read my books.”

If anything, his gaze brightened. “I adore your books.”

She made herself smile. She had been hoping he would say no, that Sally had been helping him all along. Instead, the look in his eyes made her want to push her chair even farther from the table. She had seen that look a hundred times at book signings: the too-eager fan who would easily monopolize all of her time at the expense of everyone else in line; the person who believed that his connection with the author—someone he hadn’t met—was so personal that she felt the connection too.

“I didn’t realize that Sally told you I wrote.”

“She didn’t have to. When I found out that she knew you, I asked her for an introduction.”

An introduction at a party would have done nicely, where Paige could smile at him, listen for a polite moment, and then ease away. But Sally hadn’t known Paige that long, and didn’t understand the difficulties a writer sometimes faced. Writers rarely got recognized in person—it wasn’t their faces that were famous after all but their names—but when it happened, it could become as unpleasant as it was for athletes or movie stars.

“She didn’t tell me you were familiar with my work,” Paige said, ducking her head behind the menu.

“I asked her not to. I wanted this to be a surprise.” He was leaning forward, his manicured hand outstretched.

She looked at his fingers, curled against the linen tablecloth, carefully avoiding the miniature carnations, and wondered if his skin was still clammy.

“Since you know what I do,” she continued in that too-polite voice she couldn’t seem to shake, “why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

“Oh,” he said, “there isn’t much to tell.”

And then he proceeded to describe his work with a software company. She only half listened, staring at the menu, wondering if there was an easy—and polite—way to leave this meal, knowing there was not. She would make the best of it, and call Sally the next morning, warning her not to do this ever again.

“Your books,” he was saying, “made me realize that women looked at men the way that men looked at women. I started to exercise and dress appropriately and I…”

She looked over the menu at him, noting the suit again. It must have been silk, and he wore it the way her heroes wore theirs. Right down to the scarf, and the rose in the lapel. The red rose, a symbol of true love from her third novel, Without Your Love.

That shiver ran through her again.

This time he noticed. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she lied. “I’m just fine.”

***

Somehow she made it through the meal, feeling her skin crawl as he used phrases from her books, imitated the gestures of her heroes, and presumed an intimacy with her that he didn’t have. She tried to keep the conversation light and impersonal, but it was a battle that she really didn’t win.

Just before the dessert course, she excused herself and went to the ladies room. After she came out, she asked the maître d’ to call her a cab, and then to signal her when it arrived. He smiled knowingly. Apparently he had seen dates end like this all too often.

She took her leave from Josiah just after they finished their coffees, thanking him profusely for a memorable evening. And then she escaped into the night, thankful that she had been careful when making plans. He didn’t have her phone number and address. As she slipped into the cracked backseat of the cab, she promised herself that on the next blind date—if there was another blind date—she would make it drinks only. Not dinner. Never again.

***

The next day, she and Sally met for lattes at an overpriced touristy café on the Wharf. It was their usual spot—a place where they could watch crowds and not be overheard when they decided to gossip.

“How did you meet him?” Paige asked as she adjusted her wrought iron café chair.

“Fundraisers, mostly,” Sally said. She was a petite redhead with freckles that she didn’t try to hide. From a distance, they made her look as if she were still in her twenties. “He was pretty active in local politics for a while.”

“Was?”

She shrugged. “I guess he got too busy. I ran into him in Tower Records a few weeks ago, and we got to talking. That’s what made me think of you.”

“What did?”

Sally smiled. “He was holding one of your books, and I thought, he’s wealthy. You’re wealthy. He was complaining about how isolating his work was and so were you.”

“Isolating? He works for a software company.”

“Worked,” Sally said. “He’s a consultant now, and only when he needs to be. I think he just manages his investments, mostly.”

Paige frowned. Had she heard him wrong then? She wasn’t paying much attention, not after she had seen the carnations and champagne.

Sally was watching her closely. “I take it things didn’t go well.”

“He’s just not my type.”

“Rich? Good-looking? Good God, girl, what is your type?”

Paige smiled. “He’s a fan.”

“So? Wouldn’t that be more appealing?”

Maybe it should have been. Maybe she had over-reacted. She had psyched herself out a number of time about the strange men in the big city. Maybe her overactive imagination—the one that created all the stories that had made her wealthy—had finally betrayed her.

“No,” Paige said. “Actually, it’s less appealing. I sort of feel like he has photos of me naked and has studied them up close.”

“I didn’t think books were that personal. I mean, you write romance. That’s fantasy, right? Make-believe?”

Paige’s smile was thin. It was make-believe. But make-believe on any level had a bit of truth to it, even when little children were creating scenarios with Barbie dolls.

“I just don’t think we were compatible,” Paige said. “I’m sorry.”

Sally shrugged again. “No skin off my nose. You’re the one who doesn’t get out much. Have you ever thought of going to those singles dinners? They’re supposed to be a pretty good place to meet people…”

Paige let the advice slip off her, knowing that she probably wouldn’t discuss her love life—or lack of it—with Sally again. Paige had been right in the first place: she simply didn’t have the right attitude to be a good blind date. There was probably nothing wrong with Josiah Wells. He had certainly gone to a lot of trouble to make sure she had a good time, and she had snuck off as soon as she could.

And if she couldn’t be satisfied with a good-looking wealthy man who was trying to please her, then she wouldn’t be satisfied with any other blind date either. She had to go back to that which she knew worked. She had to go about her life normally, and hope that someday, an interesting guy would cross her path.

“…even go to AA to find dates. I mean, that’s a little crass, don’t you think?”

Paige looked at Sally, and realized she hadn’t heard most of Sally’s monologue. “You know what? Let’s forget about men. It’s a brand-new century and I have a great life. Why do we both seem to think that a man will somehow improve that?”

Sally studied her for a moment. “You know what I think? I think you’ve spent so much time making up the perfect man that no flesh-and-blood guy will measure up.”

And then she changed the subject, just like Paige had asked.

***

As Paige drove home, she found herself wondering if Sally was right. After all, Paige hadn’t dated anyone since she quit her job. And that was when she really spent most of her time immersed in imaginary romance. Her conscious brain knew that the men she made up were too perfect to be real. But did her subconscious? Was that what was preventing her from talking to men she’d seen at the opera or the theater? Was all this big city fear she’d been thinking about simply a way of preventing herself from remembering that men were as human—and as imperfect—as she was?

She almost had herself convinced as she parked her new VW Bug on the hill in front of her house. She set the emergency brake and then got out, grabbing her purse as she did.

She had a lot of work to do, and she had wasted most of the day obsessing about her unsatisfying blind date. It was time to return to work—a romantic suspense novel set on a cruise ship. She had done a mountain of research for the book—including two cruises—one to Hawaii in the winter, and another to Alaska in the summer. The Alaska trip was the one she had decided to use, and she had spent part of the spring in Juneau.

By the time she had reached the front porch, she was already thinking of the next scene she had to write. It was a description of Juneau, a city that was perfect for her purposes because there was only two ways out of it: by air or by sea. The roads ended just outside of town. The mountains hemmed everything in, trapping people, good and bad, hero and villain, within their steep walls.

She was so lost in her imagination that she nearly tripped over the basket sitting on her porch.

She bent down to look at it. Wrapped in colored cellophane, it was nearly as large as she was, and was filled with flowers, chocolates, wine and two crystal wine goblets. In the very center was a photo in a heart-shaped gold frame. She peered at it through the wrapping and then recoiled.

It was a picture of her and Josiah at dinner the night before, looking, from the outside, like a very happy couple.

Obviously he had hired someone to take the picture. Someone who had watched them the entire evening, and waited for the right moment to snap the shot. That was unsettling. And so was the fact that Josiah had found her house. She was unlisted in the phonebook, and on public records, she used her first name—Giacinta—with no middle initial. And although her last name was unusual, there were at least five other Racettes listed. Had Josiah sent a basket to every one of them, hoping that he’d find the right one and she’d call him?

Or had he had her followed?

The thought made her look over her shoulder. Maybe there was someone on the street now, watching her, wondering how she would react to this gift.

She didn’t want to bring it inside, but she felt like she had no choice. She suddenly felt quite exposed on the porch.

She picked up the basket by its beribboned handle and unlocked her door. Then she stepped inside, closed the door as her security firm had instructed her, and punched in her code. Her hands were shaking.

On impulse, she reset the perimeter alarm. She hadn’t done that since she moved in, had thought it a silly precaution.

It didn’t seem that silly any more.

She set the basket on the deacons bench she had near the front door. Then she fumbled through the ribbon to find the card which she knew had to be there.

Her name was on the envelope in calligraphed script, but the message inside was typed on the delivery service’s card.

 

Two hearts, perfectly meshed.

Two lives, perfectly twined.

Is it luck that we have found each other?

Or does Fate divine a way for perfect matches to meet?

 

Those were her words. The stilted words of Quinn Ralston, the hero of her sixth novel, a man who finally learned to free the poetry locked in his soul.

“God,” she whispered, so creeped out that her hands felt dirty just from touching the card. She picked up the basket and carried it to the back of the house, setting it in the entryway where she kept her bundled newspapers.

She supposed most women would keep the chocolates, flowers, and wine even if they didn’t like the man who sent them. But she wasn’t most women. And the photograph bothered her more than she could say.

She locked the interior door, then went to the kitchen and scrubbed her hands until they were raw.

***

Somehow she managed to escape to the Juneau of her imagination, working furiously in her upstairs office, getting nearly fifteen pages done before dinner. Uncharacteristically, she closed the drapes, hiding the city view she had paid so much for. She didn’t want anyone looking in.

She was cooking herself a taco salad out of Bite-sized Tostitos and bagged shredded lettuce when the phone rang, startling her. She went to answer it, and then some instinct convinced her not to. Instead, she went to her answering machine and turned up the sound.

“Paige? If you’re there, please pick up. It’s Josiah.” He paused and she held her breath. She hadn’t given him this number. And Sally had said that morning that she hadn’t given Paige’s unlisted number to anyone. “Well, um, you’re probably working and can’t hear this.”

A shiver ran through her. He knew she was home, then? Or was he guessing.

“I just wanted to find out of you got my present. I have tickets to tomorrow night’s presentation of La Bohème. I know how much you love opera and this one in particular. They’re box seats. Hard to get. And perfect, just like you. Call me back.” He rattled off his phone number and then hung up.

She stared at the machine, with its blinking red light. She hadn’t discussed the opera with him. She hadn’t discussed the opera with Sally either, after she found out that Sally hated “all that screeching.” Sally wouldn’t know La Bohème from Don Giovanni, and she certainly wouldn’t remember either well enough to mention to someone else.

Well, maybe Paige’s problem was that she had been polite to him the night before. Maybe she should have left. She’d had this problem in the past—mostly in college. She’d always tried to be polite to men who were interested in her, even if she wasn’t interested in return. But sometimes, politeness merely encouraged them. Sometimes she had to be harsh just to send them away.

Harsh or polite, she really didn’t want to talk to Josiah ever again. She would ignore the call, and hope that he would forget her. Most men understood a lack of response. They knew it for the brush-off it was.

If he managed to run into her, she would just apologize and give him the You’re Very Nice I’m Sure You’ll Meet Someone Special Someday speech. That one worked every time.

Somehow, having a plan calmed her. She finished cooking the beef for her taco salad and took it to the butcher block table in the center of her kitchen. There she opened the latest copy of Publisher’s Weekly and read it while she ate.

***

During the next week, she got fifteen bouquets of flowers, each one an arrangement described in her books. Her plan wasn’t working. She hadn’t run into Josiah, but she didn’t answer his phone calls. He didn’t seem to understand the brush off. He would call two or three times a day to leave messages on her machine, and once an hour, he would call and hang up. Sometimes she found herself standing over the Caller ID box, fists clenched.

All of this made work impossible. When the phone rang, she listened for his voice. When it wasn’t him, she scrambled to pick up, her concentration broken.

In addition to the bouquets, he had taken to sending her cards and writing her long e-mails, sometimes mimicking the language of the men in her novels.

Finally, she called Sally and explained what was going on.

“I’m sorry,” Sally said. “I had no idea he was like this.”

Paige sighed heavily. She was beginning to feel trapped in the house. “You started this. What do you recommend?”

“I don’t know,” Sally said. “I’d offer to call him, but I don’t think he’ll listen to me. This sounds sick.”

“Yeah,” Paige said. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Maybe you should go to the police.”

Paige felt cold. The police. If she went to them, it would be an acknowledgement that this had become serious.

“Maybe,” she said, but she hoped she wouldn’t have to.

***

Looking back on it, she realized she might have continued enduring if it weren’t for the incident at the grocery store. She had been leaving the house, always wondering if someone was watching her, and then deciding that she was being just a bit too paranoid. But the fact that Josiah showed up in the grocery store a few moments after she arrived, pushing no grocery cart and dressed exactly like Maximilian D. Lake from Love at 37,000 Feet was no coincidence.

He wore a new brown leather bomber jacket, aviation sunglasses, khakis and a white scarf. When he saw her in the produce aisle, he whipped the sunglasses off with an affected air.

“Paige, darling! I’ve been worried about you.” His eyes were even more intense that she remembered, and this time they were green, just like Maximilian Lake’s.

“Josiah,” she said, amazed at how calm she sounded. Her heart was pounding and her stomach was churning. He had her trapped—her cart was between the tomato and asparagus aisles. Behind her, the water jets, set to mist the produce every five minutes, kicked on.

“You have no idea how concerned I’ve been,” he said, taking a step closer. She backed toward the onions. “When a person lives alone, works alone, and doesn’t answer her phone, well, anything could be wrong.”

Was that a threat? She couldn’t tell. She made herself smile at him. “There’s no need to worry about me. There are people checking on me all the time.”

“Really?” He raised a single eyebrow, something she’d often described in her novels, but never actually seen in person. He probably knew that no one came to her house without an invitation. He seemed to know everything else.

She gripped the handle on her shopping cart firmly. “I’m glad I ran into you. I’ve been wanting to tell you something.”

His face lit up, a look that would have been attractive if it weren’t so needy. “You have?”

She nodded. Now was the time, her best and only chance. She pushed the cart forward just a little, so that he had to move aside. He seemed to think she was doing it to get closer to him. She was doing it so that she’d be able to get away.

“I really appreciate all the trouble you went to for dinner,” she said. “It was one of the most memorable—”

“Our entire life could be like that,” he said quickly. “An adventure every day, just like your books.”

She had to concentrate to keep that smile on her face. “Writers write about adventure, Josiah, because we really don’t want to go out and experience it ourselves.”

He laughed. It sounded forced. “I’m sure Papa Hemingway is spinning in his grave. You are such a kidder, Paige.”

“I’m not kidding,” she said. “You’re a very nice man, Josiah, but—”

“A nice man?” He took a step toward her, his face suddenly red. “A nice man? The only men who get described that way in your books are the losers, the ones the heroine wants to let down easy.”

She let the words hang between them for a moment. And then she said, “I’m sorry.”

He stared at her as if she had hit him. She pushed the cart passed him, resisting the impulse to run. She was rounding the corner into the meat aisle when she heard him say, “You bitch!”

Her hands started trembling then, and she couldn’t read her list. But she had to. He wouldn’t run her out of here. Then he’d realize just how scared she was.

He was coming up behind her. “You can’t do this, Paige. You know how good we are together. You know.”

She turned around, leaned against her cart and prayed silently for strength. “Josiah, we had one date, and it wasn’t very good. Now please, leave me alone.”

A store employee was watching from the corner of the aisle. The butcher had looked up through the window in the back.

Josiah grabbed her wrist so hard that she could feel his fingers digging into her skin. “I’ll make you remember. I’ll make you—”

“Are you all right, miss?” The store employee had stepped to her side.

“No,” she said. “He’s hurting me.”

“This is none of your business,” Josiah said. “She’s my girlfriend.”

“I don’t know him,” Paige said.

The employee had taken Josiah’s arm. Other employees were coming from various parts of the store. He must have given them a signal. Some of the customers were gathering too.

“Sir, we’re going to have to ask you to leave,” the employee said.

“You have no right.”

“We have every right, sir,” the employee said. “Now let the lady go.”

Josiah stared at him for a moment, then at the other customers. Store security had joined them.

“Paige,” Josiah said, “tell them how much you love me. Tell them that we were meant to be together.”

“I don’t know you,” she said, and this time her words seemed to get through. He let go of her arm and allowed the employee to pull him away.

She collapsed against her cart in relief, and the store manager, a middle-aged man with a nice face, asked her if she needed to sit down. She nodded. He led her to the back of the store, past the cans that were being recycled and the gray refrigeration units to a tiny office filled with red signs about customer service.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Why?” The manager pulled over a metal folding chair and helped her into it. Then he sat behind the desk. “It seemed like he was harassing you. Who is he?”

“I don’t really know.” She was still shaking. “A friend set us up on a blind date, and he hasn’t left me alone since.”

“Some friend,” the manager said. His phone beeped, and he answered it. He spoke for a moment, his words soft. She didn’t listen. She was staring at her wrist. Josiah’s fingers had left marks.

Then the manager hung up. “He’s gone. Our man took his license number and he’s been forbidden to come into the store again. That’s all we can do.”

“Thank you,” she said.

The manager frowned. He was looking at her bruised wrist as well. “You know guys like him don’t back down.”

“I’m beginning to realize that,” she said.

***

And that was how she found herself parking her grocery-stuffed car in front of the local precinct. It was a gray cinderblock building built in the late 1960s with reinforced windows and a steel door. Somehow it did not inspire confidence.

She went inside anyway. The front hallway was narrow, and obviously redesigned. A steel door stood to her right and to her left was a window made of bullet-proof glass. Behind it sat a man in a police uniform.

She stepped up to the window. He finished typing something into a computer before speaking to her. “What?”

“I’d like to file a complaint.”

“I’ll buzz you in. Take the second door to your right. Someone there’ll help you.”

“Thanks,” she said, but her voice was lost in the electronic buzz that filled the narrow hallway. She opened the door and found herself in the original corridor, filled with blond wood and doors with windows. Very sixties, very unsafe. She shook her head slightly, opened the second door, and stepped inside.

She entered a large room filled with desks. It smelled of burned coffee and mold. Most of the desks were empty, although on most of them, the desk lamps were on, revealing piles of papers and files. Black phones as old as the building sat on each desk, and she was startled to see that typewriters outnumbered computers.

There were only a handful of people in the room, most of them bent over their files, looking frustrated. A man with salt and pepper hair was carrying a cup of coffee back to his desk. He didn’t look like any sort of police detective she’d imagined. He was squarely built and seemed rather ordinary.

When he saw her, he said, “Help you?”

“I want to file a complaint.”

“Come with me.” His deep voice was cracked and hoarse, as if he had been shouting all day.

He led her to a small desk in the center of the room. Most of the desks were pushed together facing each other, but this one stood alone. And it had a computer, screen showing the SFPD logo.

“I’m Detective Conover. How can I help you, Miss…?”

“Paige Racette.” Her voice sounded small in the large room.

He kicked a scarred wooden chair toward her. “What’s your complaint?”

She sat down slowly, her heart pounding. “I’m being harassed.”

“Harassed?”

“Stalked.”

He looked at her straight on, then, and she thought she saw a world-weariness in his brown eyes. His entire face was rumpled, like a coat that had been balled up and left in the bottom of a closet. It wasn’t a handsome face by any definition, but it had a comfortable quality, a trustworthy quality, that was built into the lines.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

So she did. She started with the blind date, talked about how strange Josiah was, and how he wouldn’t leave her alone.

“And he was taking things out of my novels like I would appreciate it. It really upset me.”

“Novels?” It was the first time Conover had interrupted her.

She nodded. “I write romances.”

“And are you published?”

The question startled her. Usually when she mentioned her name people recognized it. They always recognized it after she said she wrote romances.

“Yes,” she said.

“So you were hoisted on your own petard, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

“You write about your sexual fantasies for a living, and then complain when someone is trying to take you up on it.” He said that so deadpan, so seriously, that for a moment, she couldn’t breathe.

“It’s not like that,” she said.

“Oh? It’s advertising, lady.”

She was shaking again. She had known this was a bad idea. Why would she expect sympathy from the police? “So since Donald Westlake writes about thieves, he shouldn’t complain if he gets robbed? Or Stephen King shouldn’t be upset if someone breaks his ankle with a sledgehammer?”

“Touchy,” the detective said, but she noticed a twinkle in his eye that hadn’t been there before.

She actually counted to ten, silently, before responding. She hadn’t done that since she was a little girl. Then she said, as calmly as she could, “You baited me on purpose.”

He grinned—and it smoothed out the care lines in his face, enhancing the twinkle in his eye and, for a moment, making him breathlessly attractive.

“There are a lot of celebrities in this town, Ms. Racette. It’s hard for the lesser ones to get noticed. Sometimes they’ll stage some sort of crime for publicity’s sake. And really, what would be better than a romance writer being romanced by a fan who was using the structure of her books to do it?”

She wasn’t sure what she objected to the most, being called a minor celebrity, being branded as a publicity hound, or finding this outrageous man attractive, even for a moment.

“I don’t like attention,” she said slowly. “If I liked attention, I would have chosen a different career. I hate book signings and television interviews, and I certainly don’t want a word of this mess breathed to the press.”

“So far so good,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he believed her, still. But she was amusing him. And that really pissed her off.

She held up her wrist. “He did this.”

The smile left Conover’s face. He took her hand gently in his own and extended it, examining the bruises as if they were clues. “When?”

“About an hour ago. At San Francisco Produce.” She flushed saying the name of the grocery store. It was upscale and trendy, precisely the place a “celebrity” would shop.

But Conover didn’t seem to notice. “You didn’t tell me about the attack.”

“I was getting to it when you interrupted me,” she said. “I’ve been getting calls from him—a dozen or more a day. Flowers, presents, letters and e-mails. I’m unlisted and I never gave him my phone number or my address. I have a private e-mail address, not the one my publisher hands out, and that’s the one he’s using. And then he followed me to the grocery store and got angry when the store security asked him to leave.”

Conover eased her hand onto his desk, then leaned back in his chair. His touch had been gentle, and she missed it.

“You had a date with him—”

“A blind date. We met at the restaurant, and a friend handled the details. And no, she didn’t give him the information either.”

“—so,” Conover said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “I assume you know his name.”

“Josiah Wells.”

Conover wrote it down. Then he sighed. It looked like he was gathering himself. “You have a stalker, Ms. Racette.”

“I know.”

“And while stalking is illegal under California law, the law is damned inadequate. I’ll get the video camera tape from the store, and if it backs you up, I’ll arrest Wells. You’ll be willing to press charges?”

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s a start.” Conover’s world-weary eyes met hers. “but I have to be honest. Usually these guys get out on bail. You’ll need a lawyer to get an injunction against him, and your guy will probably ignore it. Even if he gets sent up for a few years, he’ll come back and haunt you. They always do.”

Her shaking started again. “So what can I do?”

“Your job isn’t tied to the community. You can move.”

Move? She felt cold. “I have a house.” A life. This was her dream city. “I don’t want to move.”

“No one does, but it’s usually the only thing that works.”

“I don’t want to run away,” she said. “If I do that, then he’ll be controlling my life. I’d be giving in. I’d be a victim.”

Conover stared at her for a long moment. “Tell you what. I’ll build the strongest case I can. That might give you a few years. By then, you might be willing to go somewhere new.”

She nodded, stood. “I’ll bring everything in tomorrow.”

“I’d like to pick it up, if you don’t mind. See where he left it, whether he’s got a hidey hole near the house. How about I come to you in a couple of hours?”

“Okay,” she said.

“You got a peephole?”

“Yeah.”

“Use it. I’ll knock.”

She nodded. Then felt her shoulders relax slightly, more than they had for two weeks. Finally, she had an ally. It meant more to her than she had realized it would. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “Let’s wait until this is all over.”

All over. She tried to concentrate on the words and not the tone. Because Detective Conover really didn’t sound all that optimistic.

***

The biggest bouquet waited for her on the front porch. She could see it from the street, and any hope that the meeting with Conover aroused disappeared. She knew without getting out of the car what the bouquet would be: calla lilies, tiger lilies and Easter lilies, mixed with greens and lilies of the valley. It was a bouquet Marybeth Campbell was designing the day she met Robert Newman in All My Kisses, a bouquet he said was both romantic and sad. (Not to mention expensive: the flowers weren’t in season at the same time.)

She left the bouquet on the porch without reading the card. Conover would be there soon and he could take the whole mess away. She certainly didn’t want to look at it.

After all this, she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to see flowers again.

When she got inside, she found twenty-three messages on her machine, all from Josiah, all apologies, although they got angrier and angrier as she didn’t answer. He must have thought she had come straight home. What a surprise he would have when he realized that she had gone to the police.

She rubbed her wrist, noting the soreness and cursing him under her breath. In addition to the bruises, her wrist was slightly swollen and she wondered if he hadn’t managed to sprain it. Just her luck. He would damage her arm, which she needed to write. She got an ice pack out of the freezer and applied it, sitting at the kitchen table and staring at nothing.

Move. Give up, give in, all because she was feeling lonely and wanted to go on a date. All because she wanted a little flattery, a nice evening, to meet someone safe who could be—if nothing else—a friend.

How big a mistake had that been?

Big enough, she was beginning to realize, to cost her everything she held dear.

***

That night, after dinner, she baked herself a chocolate cake and covered it with marshmallow frosting. It was her grandmother’s recipe—comfort food that Paige normally never allowed herself. This time, though, she would eat the whole thing and not worry about calories or how bad it looked. Who would know?

She made some coffee and was sitting down to a large piece, when someone knocked on her door.

She got up and walked to the door, feeling oddly vulnerable. If it was Josiah, he would only be a piece of wood away from her. That was too close. It was all too close now.

She peered through the peephole, just like she promised Conover she would, and she let out a small sigh of relief. He was shifting from foot to foot, looking down at the bouquet she had forgotten she had left there.

She deactivated the security system, then unlocked the three deadbolts and the chain lock she had installed since this nightmare began. Conover shoved the bouquet forward with his foot.

“Looks like your friend left another calling card.”

“He’s not my friend,” she said softly, peering over Conover’s shoulder. “And he left more than that.”

Conover’s glance was worried. What did he imagine?

“Phone calls,” she said. “Almost two dozen. I haven’t checked my e-mail.”

“This guy’s farther along than I thought.” Conover pushed the bouquet all the way inside with his foot, then closed the door, and locked it. As he did, she reset the perimeter alarm.

Conover slipped on a pair of gloves and picked up the bouquet.

“You could have done that outside,” she said.

“Didn’t want to give him the satisfaction,” Conover said. “He has to know we don’t respect what he’s doing. Where can I look at this?”

“Kitchen,” she said, pointing the way.

He started toward it, then stopped, sniffing. “What smells so good?”

“Chocolate cake. You want some?”

“I thought you wrote.”

“Doesn’t stop me from baking on occasion.”

He glanced at her, his dark eyes quizzical. “This hardly seems the time to be baking.”

She shrugged. “I could drink instead.”

To her surprise, he laughed. “Yes, I guess you could.”

He carried the bouquet into the kitchen and set it on a chair. Then he dug through the flowers to find the card.

It was a different picture of their date. The photograph looked professional, almost artistic, done in black and white, using the light from the candles to illuminate her face. At first glance, she seemed entranced with Josiah. But when she looked closely, she could see the discomfort on her face.

“You didn’t like him much,” Conover said.

“He was creepy from the start, but in subtle hard-to-explain ways.”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“I was raised to be polite. I had no idea he was crazy.”

Conover grunted at that. He opened the card. The handwriting inside was the same as all the others.

 

My future and your future are the same. You are my heart and soul. Without you, I am nothing.

—Josiah

 

She closed her eyes, felt that fluttery fear rise in her again. “There’ll be a ring somewhere in that bouquet.”

“How do you know?” Conover asked.

She opened her eyes. “Go look at the last page of All My Kisses. Robert sends a forgive-me bouquet and in it, he puts a diamond engagement ring.”

“This bouquet?”

“No. Josiah already used that one. I guess he thought this one is more spectacular.”

Conover dug, and then whistled. There, among the stems, was a black velvet ring box. He opened it. A large diamond glittered against a circle of sapphires in a white gold setting.

“Jesus,” he said. “I could retire on this thing.”

“I always thought that was a gaudy ring,” Paige said, her voice shaking. “But it fit the characters.”

“Not to your taste?”

“No.” She sighed and sank back into her chair. “Just because I write about it doesn’t mean I want it to happen to me.”

“I think you made that clear in the precinct today.” He put the ring box back where he found it, returned the card to its envelope and set the flowers on the floor. “Mind if I have some of that cake?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She got up and cut him a piece of cake, then poured some coffee.

When she turned around, he was grinning.

“What did I do?” she asked.

“You weren’t kidding about polite,” he said. “I didn’t come here for a tea party, and you could have said no.”

She froze in place. “Was this another of your tests? To see if I was really that polite?”

“I wish I were that smart.” He took the plate from her hand. “I was getting knocked out by the smell. My mother used to make this cake. It always was my favorite.”

“With marshmallow frosting?”

“And that spritz of melted chocolate on top, just like you have here.” He set the plate down and took the coffee from her hand. “Although in those days, I would have preferred a large glass of milk.”

“I have some—”

“Sit.” If anything, his grin had gotten bigger. “Forgive me for being so blunt, but what the hell did you need with a blind date?”

There was admiration in his eyes—real admiration, not the sick kind she’d seen from Josiah. She used her fork to cut a bite of cake. “I was lonely. I don’t get out much, and I thought, what could it hurt?”

He shook his head. That weary look had returned to his face. She liked its rumpled quality, the way that he seemed to be able to take the weight of the world onto himself and still stand up. “What a way to get disillusioned.”

“Because I’m a romance writer?”

“Because you’re a person.”

They ate the cake in silence after that, then he gripped his coffee mug and leaned back in the chair.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’d forgotten that little taste of childhood.”

“There’s more.”

“Maybe later.” And there was no smile on his face any more, no enjoyment. “I have to tell you a few things.”

She pushed her own plate away.

“I looked up Josiah Wells. He’s got a sheet.”

She grabbed her own coffee cup. It was warm and comforting. “Let me guess. The political conferences he stopped going to.”

Conover frowned at her. “What conferences?”

“Here in San Francisco. He was active in local politics. That’s how my friend Sally met him.”

“And he stopped?”

“Rather suddenly. I thought, after all this started, that maybe—”

“I’ll check into it,” Conover said with a determination she hadn’t heard from him before. “His sheet’s from San Diego.”

“I thought he was from here.”

Conover shook his head. “He’s not a dot-com millionaire. He made his money on a software system back in the early nineties, before everyone was into this business. Sold his interest for 30 million dollars and some stock, which has since risen in value. About ten times what it was.”

Her mouth had gone dry. Josiah Wells had lied to both her and Sally. “Somehow I suspect this is important.”

“Yeah.” Conover took a sip of coffee. “He stalked a woman in San Diego.”

“Oh, God.” The news gave her a little too much relief. She had been feeling alone. But she didn’t want anyone else to be experiencing the same thing she was.

“He killed her.”

“What?” Paige froze.

“When she resisted him, he shot her and killed her.” Conover’s soft gaze was on her now, measuring. All her relief had vanished. She was suddenly more terrified than she had ever been.

“You know it was him?”

“I read the file. They faxed it to me this afternoon. All of it. They had him one hundred percent. DNA matches, semen matches—”

She winced, knowing what that meant.

“—the fibers from his home on her clothing, and a list of stalking complaints and injunctions that went on for pages.”

The cake sat like a lump in her stomach. “Then why isn’t he in prison?”

“Money,” Conover said. “His attorneys so out-classed the DA’s office that by the end of the trial, they could have convinced the jury that the judge had done it.”

“Oh, my god,” Paige said.

“The same things that happened to you happened to her,” Conover said. “Only with her those things took about two years. With you it’s taking two weeks.”

“Because he feels like he knows me from my books?”

Conover shook his head. “She was a TV business reporter who had done an interview with him. He would have felt like he knew her too.”

“What then?” Somehow having the answer to all of that would make her feel better—or maybe she was just lying to herself.

“These guys are like alcoholics. If you take a guy through AA, and keep him sober for a year, then give him a drink, he won’t rebuild his drinking career from scratch. He’ll start at precisely the point he left off.”

She had to swallow hard to keep the cake down. “You think she wasn’t the only one.”

“Yeah. I suspect if we look hard enough, we’ll find a trail of women, each representing a point in the escalation of his sickness.”

“You can arrest him, right?”

“Yes.” Conover spoke softly. “But only on what he’s done. Not on what he might do. And I don’t think we’ll be any more successful at holding him than the San Diego DA.”

Paige ran her hand over the butcher block table. “I have to leave, don’t I?”

“Yeah.” Conover’s voice got even softer. He put a hand on hers. She looked at him. It wasn’t world-weariness in his eyes. It was sadness. Sadness from all the things he’d seen, all the things he couldn’t change.

“I’m from a small town,” she said. “I don’t want to bring him there.”

“Is there anywhere else you can go? Somewhere he wouldn’t think of?”

“New York,” she said. “I have friends I can stay with for a few weeks.”

“This’ll take longer than a few weeks. You might not be able to come back.”

“I know. But that’ll give me time to find a place to live.” Her voice broke on that last. This had been her dream city, her dream home. How quickly that vanished.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Me, too.”

***

He decided to stay without her asking him. He said he wanted to sift through the evidence, listen to the phone messages, and read the e-mail. She printed off all of it while she bought plane tickets on-line. Then she e-mailed her agent and told her that she was coming to the City.

Already she was talking like the New Yorker she was going to be.

Her flight left at 8 a.m. She spent half the night packing and unpacking, uncertain about what she would need, what she should leave behind. The only thing she was certain about was that she would need her laptop, and she spent an hour loading her files onto it. She was writing down the names of some moving and packing services when Conover stopped her.

“We leave everything as is,” he said. “We don’t want him to get too suspicious too soon.”

“Why don’t you arrest him now?” she asked. “Don’t you have enough?”

Something flashed across his face, so quickly she almost didn’t catch it.

“What?” she asked. “What is it?”

He closed his eyes. If anything, that made his face look even more rumpled. “I issued a warrant for his arrest before I came here. We haven’t found him yet.”

“Oh, God.” Paige slipped into her favorite chair. One of many things she would have to leave behind, one of many things she might never see again because of Josiah Wells.

“We have people watching his house, watching yours, and a few other places he’s known to hang out,” Conover said. “We’ll get him soon enough.”

She nodded, trying to look reassured, even though she wasn’t.

***

About 3 a.m., Conover looked at her suitcases sitting in the middle of the dining room floor. “I’ll have to ship those to you. No sense tipping him off if he’s watching this place.”

“I thought you said—”

“I did. But we need to be careful. One duffel. The rest can wait.”

“My laptop,” she said. “I need that too.”

He sighed. “All right. The laptop and the biggest purse you have. Nothing more.”

A few hours earlier, she might have argued with him. But a few hours earlier, she hadn’t yet gone numb.

“I need some sleep,” she said.

“I’ll wake you,” he said, “when it’s time to go.”

***

He drove her to the airport in his car. It was an old bathtub Porsche—with the early seventies bucket seats that were nearly impossible to get into.

“She’s not pretty any more,” he said as he tucked Paige’s laptop behind the seat, “but she can move.”

They left at 5, not so much as to miss traffic, but hoping that Wells wouldn’t be paying attention at that hour. Conover also kept checking his rearview mirror, and a few times he executed some odd maneuvers.

“We being followed?” she asked finally.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I’m being cautious.”

His words hung between them. She watched the scenery go by, houses after houses after houses filled with people who went about their ordinary lives, not worrying about stalkers or death or losing everything.

“This isn’t normal for you, is it?” she asked after a moment.

“Being cautious?” he said. “Of course it is.”

“No.” Paige spoke softly. “Taking care of someone like this.”

He seemed even more intent on the road than he had been. “All cases are different.”

“Really?”

He turned to her, opened his mouth, and then closed it again, sighing. “Josiah Wells is a predator.”

“I know,” she said.

“We have to do what we can to catch him.” His tone was odd. She frowned. Was that an apology for something she didn’t understand? Or an explanation for his attentiveness?

Maybe it was both.

He turned onto the road leading to San Francisco International Airport. The traffic seemed even thicker here, through all the construction and the dust. It seemed like they were constantly remodeling the place. Somehow he made it through the confusing signs to Short Term Parking. He found a space, parked, and then grabbed her laptop from the back.

“You’re coming in?” she asked.

“I want to see you get on that plane.” He seemed oddly determined.

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course I do,” he said and got out of the car.

San Francisco International Airport was an old airport, built right on the bay. The airport had been trying to modernize for years. The new parts were grafted on like artificial limbs.

Paige took a deep breath, grabbed her stuffed oversized purse, and let Conover lead her inside. She supposed they looked like any couple as they went through the automatic doors, stopping to examine the signs above them pointing to the proper airline. Conover was watching the other passengers. Paige was checking out the lines.

She had bought herself a first class ticket—spending more money than she had spent for her very first car. But she was leaving everything behind. The last thing she wanted was to be crammed into couch next to a howling baby and an underpaid, stressed businessman.

She hurried to the first class line, relieved that it was short. Conover stayed beside her, frowning as he watched the people flow past. He seemed both disappointed and alert. He was expecting something. But what?

Paige stepped to the ticket counter, gave her name, showed her identification, answered the silly security questions, and got her E-ticket with the gate number written on the front.

“You’ve got an hour and a half,” Conover said as she left the ticket counter. “Let’s get breakfast.”

His hand rested possessively on her elbow, and he pulled her close as he spoke. She glanced at him, but he still wasn’t watching her.

“I have to make a stop first,” she said.

He nodded.

They walked past the arrival and departure monitors, past the newspaper vending machines and toward the nearest restrooms. This part of the San Francisco airport still had a seventies security design. Instead of a bank of x-ray machines and metal detectors blocking entry into the main part of the terminal, there was nothing. The security measures were in front of each gate: you couldn’t enter without going past a security checkpoint. So different from New York, where you couldn’t even walk into some areas without a ticket. Conover would have no trouble remaining beside her until it was time for her to take off.

She went into the ladies room, leaving Conover near the departure monitors outside. The line was long—several flights had just arrived—but Paige didn’t mind. This was the first time she had a moment to herself since Conover had arrived the night before.

It seemed like weeks ago.

She was going to be sorry to say good-bye to him at the gate. In that short period of time, she had come to rely on him more than she wanted to admit. He made her feel safe for the first time since she had met Josiah Wells.

As she exited the ladies room, a hand grabbed her arm and pulled her sideways. She felt something poke against her back.

“Think you could leave me?”

Wells. She shook her arm, trying to get away, but he clamped harder.

“Scream,” he said, “and I will hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt me,” she said. “You can’t have weapons in an airport.”

“You can bring a gun into an airport,” he said softly, right in her ear. “You just can’t take it through security.”

She felt cold then. He was as crazy as Conover said, then. And as dangerous.

“Josiah.” She spoke loudly, hoping that Conover could hear her. She didn’t see him anywhere. “I’m going to New York on business. When I come back, we can start planning the wedding.”

Wells was silent for a moment. He didn’t move at all. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel his body go rigid. “You’re playing with me.”

“No,” she said, letting her voice work for her, hoping it sounded convincing. She kept scanning the crowd, but Conover was gone. “I got your ring last night. I decided I needed to settle a few things in New York before I told you I’d say yes.”

Wells put his chin on her shoulder. His breath blew against her hair. “You’re not wearing the ring.”

“It didn’t fit.” she said. “But I have it with me. I was going to have it sized in New York.”

“Let me see it,” he said.

“You’ll have to let me dig into my purse.”

She wasn’t sure he’d believe her. Then, after a moment, he let her go. She brought up her purse, pretended to rummage through it, and took a step toward the ladies room door, praying her plan would work.

He was frowning. He looked like any other businessman in the airport, his suit neat and well-tailored, his trench coat long and expensive, marred only by the way he held his hand in the pocket.

She waited just a split second, until there were a lot of people around from another arriving plane, and then she screamed, “He’s got a gun!” and ran toward the ladies room.

Only she didn’t make it. She was tackled from behind, and went sprawling across the faded carpet. A gunshot echoed around her, and people started screaming, running. The body on top of hers prevented her from moving, and for a moment, she thought whoever had hit her had been shot.

Then she felt arms around her, dragging her toward the departure monitors.

“You little fool,” Conover said in her ear. “I had this under control.”

He pushed her against the base of the monitor, then turned around. Half the people around Wells had remained, and two of them had him in their grasp, while another was handcuffing him. Plainclothes airport police officers. More airport police were hurrying to the spot from the front door.

Passengers were still screaming and running out of the airport. Airline personnel were crouched behind their desks. Paige looked to see whether anyone was shot, but she didn’t see anyone lying injured anywhere.

Her breathing was shallow, and she suddenly realized how terrified she had been. “What do you mean, under control? This doesn’t look under control to me.”

Security had Wells against the wall and were searching him for more weapons. One of the uniformed airport police had pulled Wells’ head back and was yelling at him. Some of the passengers, realizing the threat was over, were drifting back toward the action.

Conover kept one hand on her, holding her in place. With the other, he pulled out his cell phone. He hit the speed-dial and put the small phone against his ear.

“Wait a minute!” Paige said.

He turned away slightly, as if he didn’t want to speak to her. Then he said into the phone, “Frank, do me a favor. Call the news media—everyone you can think of. Tell them something just happened at the airport…. No. I’m not going through official channels. That’s why I called you. Keep my name out of it and get them here.”

He hung up and glanced at Paige. She had never felt so many emotions in her life. Anger, adrenaline, confusion. Then she saw security lead Wells away.

Conover took her arm and helped her up. “What’s going on?” she asked again.

“Outside,” he said, and pushed her through the crowd. After a moment, she remembered to check for her laptop. He had it, and somehow she had retained her purse. They reached the front sidewalk only to find it a confusion of milling people—some still terrified from the shots, others just arriving and trying to drop off their luggage. Cabs honked and nearly missed each other. Buses were backing up as the crowd spilled into the street.

“Oh, this is so much better,” she said.

He moved her down the sidewalk toward another terminal. The crowd thinned here.

“What the hell was that?” she asked. “Where were you? How did he get past you?”

“He didn’t get past me,” Conover said softly.

She felt the blood leave her face. “You set me up? I was bait?”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

“Oh, really? He was supposed to drag me onto the nearest flight? Or shoot me?”

“I didn’t know he had a gun,” Conover said. “He was ballsier than I expected. And he wouldn’t have taken you from San Francisco.”

“You know this how? Because you’re psychic?”

“No, he wanted to control you. He couldn’t control you on a plane. I had security waiting outside. A few plainclothes had been around us since we arrived. He was supposed to grab you, but you weren’t supposed to try to get away.”

“Nice if you would have told me that.”

He shook his head slightly. “Most people wouldn’t have fought him. Most people would have cooperated.”

“Most people would have appreciated an explanation!” Her voice rose and a few stray passengers looked her direction. She made herself take a deep breath before she went on. “You knew he was going to be here. You knew it and didn’t tell me.”

“I guessed,” he said.

“What did you do, tip him off?”

“No,” Conover said softly. “You did.”

“I did? I didn’t talk to him.”

“You booked your e-ticket on-line.” His face was close to hers, his voice as soft as possible in all the noise. “He’d hacked into your system weeks ago. That’s how he found your address and your phone number. Your public e-mail comes into the same computer as all your other e-mail. He’s been following your every move ever since.”

“Software genius,” she muttered, shaking her head. She should have seen that.

Conover nodded. Across the way, reporters started converging on the building, cameras hefted on shoulders, running toward the doors. Conover shielded her, but she knew they would want to talk to her.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” she asked again.

“I thought you’d be too obvious then, and he wouldn’t try for you. I didn’t expect you to be so cool under pressure. Telling him about the ring, pretending you were interested, was smart.”

One of the reporters was working the crowd. People were turning toward the camera.

“Where were you?” she asked. “I looked for you.”

“I was behind you all the time.”

“So if he took me outside…?”

“I would have followed.”

“I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me not to get the ticket on line?”

“The ticket was a gift,” Conover said. “I didn’t realize you were going to do it that way. You told me when you finished. His file from the previous case mentioned how he had used the internet to spy on his first victim. He was obviously doing that with you.”

“But the airport, how did they know?”

“I called ahead, said that I was coming in, expecting a difficult passenger. I faxed his photo from your place while you were asleep. I asked them to wait until I got him outside, unless he did something threatening.”

She frowned. More reporters were approaching. These looked like print media. No cameras, but lots of determination. “You could have waited and caught him at home.”

“I could have,” Conover said. “But this is better.”

She turned to him, remembering the feel of the gun against her back, the screaming passengers, the explosive sound when the gun went off. “Someone could have been killed.”

“I didn’t expect a gun,” Conover said. “And I didn’t think he’d be rash enough to use it in an airport.”

“But he did,” she said.

“And it’s going to help us.” Conover watched another set of reporters run into the building. “First, his assault on you in an airport makes it a federal case. The gun adds to the case, and all the witnesses make it even better. Then there is the fact that airports are filled with security cameras. There’s bound to be tape on this.”

She frowned, trying to take herself out of this, trying to listen like a writer instead of a potential victim.

“And then,” Conover said, “he attacked you. You’re nationally known. It’ll be big news. Our DA might have lost a stalking case against Wells, but the feds aren’t going to let a guy who went nuts in an airport walk, no matter how much money he has.”

“You set him up,” she said. “If this had failed—”

“At the very least, I would have been fired,” Conover said. “But it wouldn’t have failed. I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you. I didn’t let anything happen to you.”

“But you took such a risk.” She raised her head toward his. “Why?”

He put a finger under her chin, and for a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her.

“Because you didn’t want to leave San Francisco,” he said softly.

“I get to stay home?” she asked.

He smiled, and let his finger drop. “Yeah.”

He stared at her uncertainly, as if he were afraid she was going to yell at him again. But she felt a relief so powerful that it completely overwhelmed her.

She threw her arms around him. For a moment, he didn’t move. Then, slowly, his arms wrapped around her and pulled her close.

“I don’t even know your first name,” she whispered.

“Pete,” he said, burying his face in her hair.

“Pete.” She tested it. “It suits you.”

“I’d ask if I could call you,” he said, “but I’m not real good on dates.”

That pulled a reluctant laugh from her. “Obviously I’m not either. But I make a mean chocolate cake.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Let’s go finish it.”

“Don’t we have to talk to the press?”

“For a moment.” He pulled back just enough to smile at her. “And then I get to take you home.”

“Where I get to stay.” She couldn’t convey how much this meant to her. “Thank you.”

He nodded. “My pleasure.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder, feeling his strength, feeling the comfort. It didn’t matter how he looked or whether he knew La Bohème from Don Giovanni. All that mattered was how he made her feel.

Safe. Appreciated. And maybe even loved.

 

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The Perfect Man

Copyright © 2017 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Murder Most Romantic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Denise Little, Cumberland House Press, 2001
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2017 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © George Mayer/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.