Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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.

 

____________________________________________

“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

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.

Please note: This originally went live on my Patreon page on Sunday night, January 26, 2025. Since then, even more crap has happened in the world and people are freaking out. (Freaking out, btw, does not help. Calm, deliberate, and calculated action helps, along with…well, read the post.) 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.

How Entertainment Fits Into Our Lives

I spent the day of 9/11 with the television pegged on CNN, while I talked on the phone and handled e-mail. At the time, Dean and I were traditionally published and a good 80% of our income came from New York City.

We had friends there, friend-family there, and so much business there. I spoke to people, searching for them, figuring out if they were okay or not (and, physically, they were). I informed my agent’s assistant that she was in an evacuation zone, and she needed to leave now, something her boss (who was in Connecticut) apparently hadn’t been willing to do. No one knew what the toxic smoke emanating from the buildings was going to do, so they were evacuating the entire area. I reminded her that she could work from home, because she was afraid she would lose her job if she left.

She got out and she got safe.

Dean, always the most level head in any emergency, grabbed every single extra book we had, along with the books and advanced reading copies that we had stacked up to trade in at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon. At the time, we lived in Lincoln City, on the coast.

Dean packed the car and took off for Portland, over two hours away. Neither of us liked that he was going, but we felt he had to. At that moment, we had no idea if the attack was localized to the East Coast or if other major cities were going to get hit. We had no idea what would happen to the economy, especially if the attacks continued, and we had no idea if Dean would be safe as he headed to downtown Portland.

What he knew, and what I quickly realized, was that our entire income stream was about to dry up. We had some money in the bank, but not enough to get us through six months to a year (worst case).

Those ARCs and first editions that he brought to Powell’s were catnip for collectors and he got thousands of dollars for them.

The next morning, Powell’s shut down all book buying. Dean’s Hail Mary journey was prescient and would have been impossible if he had waited even 24 hours.

That money got us to January, which was when the first payments started trickling back out of New York City. He was smart, but he did have to spend the day listening to the chaos coming out of New York and D.C. We had cell phones, but most of us used landlines. Still, I kept him updated on what I knew, and after I reached everyone I could, I spent the day locked in horror, alone with the TV and all of those awful images—some of which no major network has replayed.

By the time he got home, we had to shut it all off. We couldn’t handle the stress anymore. We knew that the future was uncertain—bleak, difficult and frightening. For those of you who were children then or those of you who weren’t even born, this is what it felt like: We had no idea if those planes were the first volley in a war. We were catapulted from a familiar world with familiar patterns into one filled with chaos, uncertainty, death, and violence.

I do not remember what we had for dinner that night. Nor do I remember what we talked about if anything. I do remember that every single cable channel—even the ones that should have been showing classic movies—would break in with updates. Not that the movies were any comfort. Every one that had been scheduled was set in the before times, and some even had images of the World Trade Center—the still-standing World Trade Center, before the big disaster.

So there was no television option. But we had a streaming satellite radio subscription. I turned on one of the stations that just played music—no talk at all—and I think I left it on for days.

I had a book due in two weeks, which was almost laughable. That was the project I was working on. But I couldn’t focus on it. I did not return to my writing desk for ten days. By then, I knew that the book deadline was going to be extended (my editor was not in New York at that time; she had been in France), and I had time.

I wrote a short story called “June Sixteenth at Anna’s,” which was about 9/11 in a sideways way, but more than that, it was about worlds lost, moments that are forever gone, and are mostly impossible to recover. When it was published in Asimov’s in 2003, 9/11 was still close. The story finished third in the Reader’s Choice Awards and was chosen for a year’s best volume.

But I didn’t write the story for readers.

I wrote it for me. I had to clear my palate of the horrors I’d seen. I also had to work through that jolt of fear that happens to all of us when our life’s path suddenly takes a terrible turn.

After I wrote the story, I was able to return to the novel. I guess I had officially gone back to work.

But quieting my mind was harder. When there are blanket emergencies—things that happen on a national or worldwide scale—it’s hard to escape them. And sometimes, you shouldn’t escape them.

This past year, we had to deal with a lot of crap in a business we built lovingly for our own work. The betrayal and breach of trust that we suffered also had economic and practical ramifications, and we had to handle those quickly and with great attention.

I didn’t sleep much during that period (or after Dean shattered his shoulder or much with another emergency the year before that), and I didn’t have a lot of leisure. An hour of television at night, the occasional Aces basketball game, and then (stunningly to me) football in the fall provided a bit of distraction.

Mostly, though, I couldn’t afford to be completely distracted. I was in the middle of an emergency and I had to concentrate. When I was able to find a distractable moment, I needed to choose my reading wisely. I had to avoid the new or the challenging. I read a lot of mediocre romance and some rather terribly done mysteries, while waiting for my favorite authors to release new books. And even then, I would balk at some of the topics they had chosen and set the books aside for later.

I’m just getting to later now.

But this was an emergency that I was literally in the middle of. If I didn’t act correctly, make the right choices, and handle the problems in the right way, my business might crumble. Dean was right beside me as were Chris York and Stephanie Writt. I have no idea how we got through June, July, and August, but we did, and the business is better for it.

Friends of mine are going through something similar right now. I am writing this on Sunday night, as the City of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas are finally, finally getting rain after months of drought.

The fires that sprang up during the Santa Anna winds of January made many of my friends flee their homes. I followed on Facebook with some, because I’m not on Twitter. Others I communicated with by phone, and still others I couldn’t locate at all because they had a limited social media presence…and I didn’t feel comfortable calling them in the middle of an emergency. Let me rephrase: a fleeing for your life emergency. I contact friends during emergencies all the time, but if I know they’re in the middle of the crazy shit, I wait a day or so to see if they need something.

Most of my friends who are going through this aren’t hurting for money. They fled to hotels, and one friend noted on Facebook that he had paid for two weeks, just in case.

Not hurting for money makes one aspect of the crisis easier. It means that you have the ability to pay for two weeks in a hotel—any hotel. Sleeping in your car isn’t necessary. Trying to get to family or friends who can put you up (if they’re willing) isn’t necessary either. You can buy clothes and toothpaste, buy a carrier for your dog, and get food.

But it doesn’t help the emotional part. And that second weekend in January, when everything was burning, reminded me of the other disasters I’ve seen or been through: the TV coverage was relentless and it was almost everywhere.

People who had evacuated couldn’t find anything to rest their brains, if they wanted to, although it’s easier now with streaming. If they escaped with their laptops or their iPads or their phones, they could watch something.

At that point in a crisis, you need something mindless.

Eventually, though, you have to dig out. You have to repair the damage. You have to see the lay of the land.

For many, the presidential election has also precipitated a crisis. A lot of people unplugged and disappeared after the election, unable to face what was ahead. The rest of us soldiered on, although we’re handling the firehose of change differently than we did in 2017.

I know some of you are happy with the election. Please don’t tell me, because what’s bothering me the most right now is the blatant bigotry against anyone who isn’t cis, white, and male. If you can tolerate that, you’re free to leave without comment, because if you do comment about this particular point, I will block you.

I’m on social media and yes, in a bit of a left-wing bubble. And I’m seeing a lot of people call anything that is entertainment “bread and circuses.”

They’re wrong.

Entertainment is how we survive.

Yes, we all need to pay attention. We need to fight for our little corner of the universe, whatever that means. (You can see which corner of the universe I’m focusing on from my note about bigotry above.)

But we can’t be on alert twenty-four hours per day for the next few years. Or even for the next few months.

That way lies complete disaster. People can and do collapse from exhaustion in crisis situations (however they define that), and then they’re of no help at all. (Sometimes, as I mentioned above, you have no choice; you must run full speed ahead. But at a certain point, you have to stop running and start building.)

A surprising part of that exhaustion isn’t from lack of sleep; it’s from lack of rest.

The brain is an amazing thing. It can marshal defenses, activate the sympathetic nervous system, and get us through whatever we’re facing. But it’s taxing on the body, and not something we can sustain for years.

I wanted to dig a little into the science for you, but I’m not an expert. Instead, I found something from the Association of Critical Care Nurses. This blog post by Sarah Lorenzini explains the science of crisis response. She’s writing for critical care nurses, but the article applies to all of us.

She writes:

Maintaining your well-being is essential for mastering the SNS response. Practice self-care to mitigate stress and enhance resilience. Engage in activities that promote physical and mental well-being, such as exercise, mindfulness, hobbies and spending time with loved ones. Being tired or hypoglycemic exacerbates negative symptoms associated with the stress response. By nurturing yourself and prioritizing adequate rest, hydration and nutrition, you can maintain composure and sustain your ability to provide compassionate care in demanding situations.

Let me reiterate something buried in the middle of this post, for the “bread and circuses” crowd. She writes, Engage in activities that promote physical and mental well-being, such as exercise, mindfulness, hobbies and spending time with loved ones.

Hobbies. Reading, watching movies and TV, going to sporting events…are hobbies. And hobbies are essential for survival in tough times.

Understanding the science is important—at least to me—and I learned long ago about the importance of shutting off the mind and going “somewhere else” for a little while. Sometimes movies and TV do that, sometimes sports does, but nothing is better than a book or a short story.

(During the worst of our crises last summer, I could only focus on short stories. But they were a lovely distraction.)

I learned this during 9/11. I couldn’t read mystery novels or even romances because at that moment, I was so shaken I wasn’t sure if I believed in happily ever after.

I ended up reading made-up world fantasy novels. They are the actual definition of “somewhere else.” Not somewhere familiar either. Somewhere I’d never thought of.

Science fiction is the same, but at the time I couldn’t find anything long and immersive. I ended up reading a fantasy series that I had on my TBR pile.

It was that series that reminded me of the importance of escape.

Fiction is survival for people in difficult situations. Fiction is necessary.

And we can’t dictate what kind of fiction other people need.

When I was a child living in an abusive household, I consumed as much fiction as possible. Sometimes I needed the escape of a made-up world, but I also read a lot of scary books—many of the Gothic novels because I knew they had a happy ending. And those books reinforced that no matter how dark the world got, people could survive.

Interestingly enough, to me the reader at least, the people who survived were always the ones who took action. Yes, that’s a tenet of fiction. After all, who wants to read about a whining protagonist who does nothing and needs to be rescued at the end?

But it’s also consistent with our biology.

The critical care nurse writes this:

I understand the surge of hormones in response to an emergency and how paralyzing it can feel. However, I have learned to channel my SNS (sympathetic nervous system) to help optimize my performance as a nurse. Instead of perceiving the physical manifestations of stress as hindrances, I reframe them as signs that my body is preparing me for peak performance. I embrace the increased heart rate, rapid breathing and heightened senses as indicators that I am ready to act and make a difference.

Our job, as writers, is to give the people responding to a crisis—any crisis—that escape which will give them the right kind of rest. It might enable them to get an extra hour of sleep at night. It might help them relax just enough to calm down and then move forward.

What we do is extremely valuable.

We should not dismiss it as “bread and circuses,” something to be avoided in a crisis.

We should embrace it as the necessity that it is.

That’ll enable us to continue to write and it’ll allow us to make time for our own rest through whatever crises we experience in our lives.

Storytellers are essential.

So tell your stories, no matter what is going on in the world.

And read the kinds of stories you love, without guilt or judgement.

It’s a great way to take care of yourself and the world around you. Because we all need that little moment of rest.

“How Entertainment Fits Into Our Lives ,” copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Addendum added on February 1:

I’m currently reading the issue of The Hollywood Reporter that came out during the fires. It had this tidbit: Apparently LA Residents (even those who had been evacuated) flocked to the movies in the non-fire zones. People needed an escape.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/wildfires-movie-theaters-1236111782/

As one woman said, “What else are we going to do? I wanted to get away from it all.”

Just more evidence that entertainment is important, even in the tough times.

 

 

Just a quick little post to let you all know that Dean’s Kickstarter for his marvelous Marble Grant stories has just gone live. There’s a lot of goodies here in addition to the books. You’ll find discounted workshops and a lot of short stories.

Take a look at the video I finished over the weekend, and see if Marble Grant is right for you.

Head to the Kickstarter by clicking here.

When Ry gave her the magic gun, she thought it the most romantic gift she’d ever received. But after his death she had to put the gun in her past or risk losing her future.

Until the day she can no longer keep the gun at bay. It demands answers. Answers only she can find. Answers that involve a ceremony she never fully understood. Until now.

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

  

Handfast By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The most romantic gift anyone ever gave me? A gun.

Valentine’s Day, ten years ago. Ryder. God, what a sweet man. Six-three, all tattooed muscle, black hair shorn off that year to accent his dark, dark skin.

We were on the roof of his place, trying to keep candles lit in the cold breeze blowing across the Hudson, eating take-out sushi with custom-made chopsticks clutched in our frozen fingers, sitting on lawn chairs wedged into the ice-covered snow.

Ry gave up on the candles midway through, decided to go to his apartment to get a lantern—he said—and did come back with one. Battery operated, large, already on. And in his other hand, a Tiffany’s blue box big enough for a cake, tied with the ubiquitous white ribbon.

Despite the box, he couldn’t afford Tiffany’s. Not even something small, and certainly not something that large. Even if we could have afforded Tiffany’s, we wouldn’t have bought anything there.

We were militantly anti-ostentation back then. It went well with our lack of funds. But we believed it, acted on it, maybe even looked the other way when someone in a silk suit and shiny leather shoes ventured into the wrong alley, stepping in only when that rich bastard looked to be in trouble for his life—never stepping in to save his wallet.

I opened the box with trembling fingers, stuck the ribbon in my pocket and stared at a small lockbox that looked old and well used.

Ry nodded. He wanted me to open it.

So I did.

And saw the gun.

It wasn’t any old gun.

It was custom-made, silver, and, I later learned, it glowed slightly when its owner touched it. It also designed its own bullets—silver for werewolves, holy-water-laced for vampires, and laser-lighty (filled with fire) for the unknown magical.

I long suspected—and never tested—that the miracle weapon could transform its bullets into whatever the owner imagined.

We handfasted me to the weapon. He claimed he had another one, but I never saw it.

Handfasting required the candlewax (he was planning ahead), a bit of mercury, a touch of burnt almond. And some other magical oil-based concoctions I’m not going to describe, just in case.

And yeah, handfasting—pagan term for wedding. But it also meant a bargain struck by joining hands. I thought then that applying hand to hand-grip was the same thing.

I had no idea where Ry had gotten the weapon or how he learned to control it. I didn’t understand why he gave it to me.

I’d love to believe what he told me that night: He gave me the gun because he loved me.

But that couldn’t have been entirely true, because who gave a gun out of love?

When I pushed the next day, asking the right way—what made you think of me when you saw this?—he said I was so much more talented than he was, I deserved the weapon, and the weapon deserved me. And then, the day after that, he admitted he had one too, and we’d go practice with them, just him and me, Upstate, the next time we had the dough.

There was no next time. There wasn’t even a day after that. Not for Ry.

Someone caught him in our alley, shredded him, took the tattoos as souvenirs. I found him, still alive, barely. But not alive enough to tell me what happened. Or alive enough to let me know he heard me when, stupid me, I told him I loved him for the first and only time.

***

Fast-forward a decade to the winter that never died. Press coverage that year pegged it as the coldest in two decades, blaming arctic air that should’ve lived in Canada but, like any other snowbird, decided to move south.

I had my own place by then, two buildings over, tall enough to get the occasional sunset glinting off the nearby roofs. I liked that: the dying sunlight reached the kitchen of my glorious apartment, just about the time (in the winter at least) I was having whatever it was I scrounged for breakfast.

My apartment: three rooms, hard-fought. Actually purchased when the building went condo just before the damn housing crisis. Now I was—as the pundits so euphemistically call it—underwater, and for once, I gave a damn.

Then I’d come to my place, warded and spelled, with the most comfortable furniture I could find (mostly discards on garbage day, dragged up the elevator, refurbished and softened), and reveled in having a safe harbor, somewhere no one else ever breached. Not anyone, including the post-Ry lovers, the so-called friends, the clients and the hangers-on.

Just me and the silence I’d created, a place to refurbish myself after each day’s hard knocks and scrapes.

Somehow I stopped being militantly anti-ostentation. I was still anti-ostentation—no one would mistake the interior of this place for anything fancy—but I’d grown up enough to have financial entanglements and to adopt some of the trappings of a good citizen.

Protective coloration, really.

I’d needed it.

Back in the day, me and Ry were a team, and he was the stronger. We’d partner up, go after the shadows, fight till dawn, screw till noon, sleep a little, and start over.

Then he died, and I went full-moon batshit crazy searching for his killers, never sleeping, the edges of the world growing jagged and dark, finding clues where none existed, missing clues that’d probably been there, going, going, going until I ended up face-down in an abandoned subway tunnel and no memory of how I got there.

I had to choose, with my face pressed against the oil and the decades-old piss, whether I’d keep going or whether I’d just let it all end.

And weirdly, it was Ry who saved me. Ry, with his crooked half-smile and his embrace of anything dangerous. Ry, who had a tattoo on his left bicep of a bright yellow smiley face holding a sword in one little gloved hand and a dripping scalp in the other, with the word Onward in gothic letters underneath.

That tattoo always made me grin, especially when he flexed it, making the sword move up and down as if the smiley face were marching at a parade.

I saw that tattoo as clearly as if it were in front of me and, instead of regretting the method of its theft, I let out a tiny laugh. That moved the dusty dirt in front of me, and almost made me gag on the stench. Which, for some reason, I also found funny.

I was exhausted and spent, and in some ways, ruined. Completely different than I had been before.

I sat up, then stood up, and staggered my way out of the tunnel, heading back into my life. Which I rebuilt—alone—bit by bit. In the places that had never functioned alone, I built—I trained, I learned, I became.

I stayed in the City. Because the City had taken Ry from me. I couldn’t get him back: Magic didn’t work that way—at least not any kind of magic I chose to participate in. But I could find the missing pieces.

I could find whoever or whatever had killed him.

I could have answers—

Or so I thought. At first. Before I realized that a girl’s gotta eat. A girl’s gotta live. A girl’s gotta move forward.

So I did.

***

And then the winter of our discontent. Valentine’s Day wasn’t a bright spot for anyone. Yet another storm had arrived the day before, canceling flights, snarling traffic, and delaying the all-important flower deliveries to shops that relied on them. By the time the actual holiday rolled around, the City was enveloped in sleet on top of two feet of snow.

I rented an office near the alley where Ry got attacked. The office wasn’t much—third-floor walk-up with a frosted door, frosted windows, and a radiator that clanged to its own tune but at least kept the place warm. I had an actual desk which I got from an office five doors down—a blond wood monstrosity that smelled like old cigarettes, giving the office a slightly musty air, something I actually liked. In keeping with the thirties motif, I kept an open bottle of Scotch in the bottom drawer, although I rarely touched liquor. Any more.

I cribbed an old leather sofa from that same abandoned office, and found two matching desk chairs in the garbage behind my apartment building. The only money I actually spent on furnishing the place was for my chair, which was the most high-tech thing I owned. It had more levers and dials and options than the first (and last) car I ever drove.

The office had no computer or phone or anything remotely resembling office equipment. I don’t write reports. I collect funds up front, and don’t give paper receipts. If I need more money from my clients, I ask them for more. If they refuse to pay, I refuse to work.

I’m not one of those private detectives who works pro bono because the case interests them. I work because I need the money—and if I didn’t work, I’d go back down that crazy subway tunnel, and the overwhelming stench of decades-old piss.

It’s not even fair to call me a private detective. I use the title sometimes because it’s easier than explaining what I do. What Ry and I used to do. What I never stopped doing, after he was gone.

I shove the magic back where it belongs.

Sounds easy, but it’s not. And there are only a few of us that can do it.

By now it should be clear: I wasn’t sitting alone in my office on Valentine’s Day because of the snow. I hated Valentine’s Day with a bloody passion. I tried not to. It wasn’t the fake holiday’s fault I was always so miserable at this time of year.

I usually tried to tell myself that Valentine’s Day had peaked for me that night on the roof, with the lantern and the Tiffany box. And sometimes that worked.

But not on the tenth anniversary. Not as I slogged my way through the snow and sleet, watching inane couples in their finery get out of cabs or stumble out of the subway, pretending the day (night) was perfect after all. Maybe it was the combination—wind, snow, Valentine’s—that caught me.

Or maybe I was finally feeling my age for the first time.

Whatever it was, it convinced me to haul out that open bottle of Scotch the moment I collapsed into my high-tech desk chair. I had had the same open bottle of Scotch for months now, ever since a baby demon with a heart of gold (long story) had slept in my office for two weeks and nursed on the bottle like it was demon-mama’s teat. No way was I ever drinking from that bottle again. So I got a new one—after I found baby demon’s distraught mama and finally reunited the two of them.

Me, an open bottle of Scotch, sleet tapping the frosted glass like werewolf claws. I thought I had the night all planned—when the gun appeared out of nowhere.

The gun. You know, the one from the Tiffany’s box.

Or so I thought at first.

Well, not entirely true, because you don’t think about where a gun came from when it appears right in front of you, business end pointed at your face, trembling as if held by an unsteady hand.

And nothing else.

I set the bottle of Scotch down, then made myself calmly and deliberately screw the cap back on. I would have put the bottle back in the bottom drawer, but the gun’s trembling got worse, and I really didn’t want to get shot just because I was being a neat freak.

I wondered what kind of bullets were in that thing—silver, holy-water-dipped, flaming hot. Damn near any of them would kill me, since I’m just good old-fashioned flesh and blood. I stared at the wobbling muzzle of that gun, then realized I had some control.

We’d been handfasted after all. The weapon belonged to me and I to it, which was probably why it couldn’t go through with the shooting.

I held up my right hand and said in my deepest, most powerful voice, Come to me.

The weapon’s trembling increased, but it didn’t move. My heart moved enough for both of us, trying to pound its way out of my chest.

I tried the command again, and again, the damn gun just shook more.

So, figuring the rule of three, I tried one final time. Join your handfast partner.

The gun stopped trembling. And then it whirled as if pursued, and floated away from me. I sat for a moment, stupidly, then realized that the damn gun didn’t belong to me. It was a different weapon than the one locked in the lockbox I kept in the Tiffany’s box.

I got up and stumbled after the gun. It floated down the hallway, then down the stairs, always staying at chest-height, just as if someone were holding it.

It reached the lobby, bumped out the door (I have no idea how it got open), and into the sleet. I followed, coatless, instantly chilled, and nearly slammed into a couple wearing less clothes than I was, giggling their drunk way out of a nearby bar. They didn’t seem to see the gun, but I couldn’t take my gaze off it.

Because it went into the alley, where Ry died. And then it started banging against the brick wall behind a Dumpster, as if it were trying to get into something.

I wished for gloves. And boots. And a coat. I was sliding on ice, and still the alley had the stench of weeks-old garbage. It didn’t matter how cold or wet something got, the smells remained.

I tried not to look at the back corner, where Ry bled out. It was covered in a snow pile six feet high anyway. The gun kept banging and scraping, and I finally decided to violate one of the major rules of automated magic.

I got between the gun and the wall. The gun kept hitting the same brick, scraping it white. I grabbed the damn thing, surprised that my fingers fit where the mortar should have been.

So I pulled.

The brick slid out easily, and I slid backwards, nearly falling. I caught myself on the edge of the ice-cold Dumpster.

The gun turned itself sideways, shoving its grip into the open hole. It had stopped trembling.

It balanced on the edge of the brick below for just a moment, then toppled downward.

I jumped back, afraid it would go off by accident.

But it didn’t.

It rested on top of the ice as if all the magic had leached out of it. Its color was different too. No longer silver, but a muddy brown instead. I tilted my head, blinked hard, my face wet with sleet.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, smearing the cold rather than getting rid of it.

The gun still looked odd. I figured it actually looked odd—it wasn’t my magical sight that had changed; the gun was different.

So I crouched. And looked closer.

And gasped.

Something had wrapped itself around the grip. Brown and mottled. It took a moment for my eyes to make sense of what I saw.

The word Onward in Gothic script.

Bile rose in my throat.

I nudged the gun with my foot, then managed to flip the weapon over. The image on this side was a distorted yellow, desiccated and faded.

I swallowed hard, my stomach churning.

Then I stood and made a small flare out of my right fingertip. I used the flare to illuminate the hole in the bricks.

Saw shreds, images. Messed on the top like someone had rifled a drawer, and laid flat below, like carefully folded linen napkins waiting for a fancy dinner.

I lost my not-fancy dinner. And breakfast. And every meal for the past week.

Some investigator.

I’d searched for those patches of skin from the very beginning—all six of Ry’s tattoos—knowing his magic lurked in them.

Only, as I braced one hand on the wall, and used the other hand to wipe my mouth, I realized that there were a lot more than six scraps of skin in that wall.

A lot more.

I allowed myself to get sick one final time before hauling out my phone, and calling the only detective at the NYPD who would ever listen to me.

Ryder’s older brother.

Dane.

***

He showed up ten minutes later, wearing a dress coat over an ill-fitting suit, and a this-better-be-worthwhile attitude. He wore his hair regulation cut, and he didn’t have the muscles or the tattoos. Still, there was enough of a family resemblance to give me a start every time I saw him walk toward me. Same height, same build, same general energy.

“Three-hundred dollars up front for dinner,” he said. “Includes five courses and champagne. We’d just finished appetizers.”

“Special girl?” I asked.

“I’m hoping,” he said. “We’ll see if she’s still there when I get back.”

She might be waiting a long time, I thought but didn’t say. I just showed him the open hole in the brick.

“What?” he asked impatiently.

“Just look,” I said, my voice raspy, throat sore, my breath so foul I tried not to face him.

He grabbed his phone and used it like a flashlight, then backed away when he realized what he was looking at.

“What the hell?” he asked.

He peered into that obscene storage space, then looked at me, his handsome face half in shadow.

“How did you find this?” he asked, as if I had created the horror all on my own.

I poked the toe of my battered Nike against the gun.

He turned the phone’s light toward it, saw the desiccated but still visible smiley face, and swallowed hard, then shook his head.

“You’re out here without a coat or hat or mittens, and you’re telling me you just stumbled on this gun?”

He didn’t mention his brother’s skin, wrapped around it, or the fact that there was more shredded skin in that opening.

“No, I’m not saying that.”

Now that he mentioned how I was dressed, I realized just how cold I was. My teeth started chattering. I shoved my hands in the pocket of my jeans, not that it did much good.

“I asked you how you found this?” Dane snapped.

“And I showed you,” I said.

“It means nothing.” His voice went up, echoing between the buildings.

“Only because there are some things you refuse to let me tell you,” I said, matching his tone.

He stared at me, breathing hard. I tried to stay calm, but it was difficult, considering how bad I was shivering.

“Magic?” he asked with a sneer he once reserved for Ry, but had transferred to me since Ry’s death.

I nodded.

Dane rolled his eyes and shook his head. “You think this crap has been here all along?”

I shrugged one shoulder.

“You want to tell me, without talking about magic, how you came down here?”

I sighed. I could have said no, I supposed, but I didn’t. “I followed the gun.”

“And whoever was holding it,” he said.

“I didn’t see who was holding it,” I said.

“Convenient,” he said, “since it looks like Ry’s gun.”

It is Ry’s gun, I wanted to say, but knew better. Because then Dane would ask me how I knew that, and I would point to the layer of skin wrapped around the grip.

“Ry told me he had one,” I said. “I never saw it. How do you know it’s his?”

Besides the skin, I mean, I added mentally. Of course, Dane didn’t hear that.

“Pretty unusual thing, huh?” Dane said. “Ry called it magic. Me, I think it’s some kind of toy, since it supposedly invents its own bullets.”

I ignored that jibe. “He ever use it in front of you?”

“No, he wanted to take me to the range to practice with it, but he….” Dane let out a sigh. “He died before we could go.”

“Who ended up with the gun?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Dane said. “I never saw it again.”

“So you remember it after ten years?” Lying on the ice, with Ry’s skin wrapped around it, the gun didn’t look that distinctive, at least not to me.

“I’d tell you I recognized it by that lovely silver barrel,” Dane said, “but I didn’t even notice that part at first.”

I waited. I was going to make him say it, the bastard.

“I don’t think we’re going to have to test the DNA on that skin,” Dane said quietly.

I nodded.

“But we might have to on the rest of this stuff in here.” Dane peered at that hole. “Why would the gun turn up now?”

It had been exactly ten years since I got my gun. But I had no idea if Dane knew I had one too, and I wasn’t about to tell him.

“The anniversary’s coming up,” I said.

“Yeah, like I can forget that,” Dane said dryly. He sighed again. “I’m going to call this in. You need to go inside before you freeze solid.”

“What about the gun?” I asked. “Do you think it should go into evidence?”

He looked at me. He knew what I was thinking. Hell, all of New York would have known what I was thinking. The city had seen a lot of news lately about weapons stolen out of the NYPD’s evidence storage.

“You want to pick it up?” he asked.

Of course I didn’t. Neither did he. But he had opened the door, and he was the magic-denier, not me. I reached around him, and with shaking fingers, sorted through the Dumpster until I found a box that wasn’t too junked up. It was a shoebox with some stains along the bottom, but it didn’t smell that bad, so I grabbed it.

I was going to scoop up the gun with the box lid, but I stopped halfway. I didn’t want to mess up that grip. (That tattoo.) So I glanced at Dane. He was watching me closely.

I slid the lid underneath the box, then held the box in my left hand. I turned my right palm upward. Then I concentrated on the gun and hooked it mentally to my right hand. Slowly I raised my hand, and the gun rose too.

Once the gun was a foot off the ground, I crouched, slid the box underneath it, and turned my palm down. The gun bounced into the box, and I slapped the lid on it.

Dane watched me, face gray in the half light. His gaze met mine, but he didn’t say anything. I knew, if asked, he would say only that I slid the box under the gun and scooped it up.

I offered him the box.

He shook his head. “You keep it.”

“There could be evidence here,” I said, taunting him.

He shook his head. “We’ll have more than enough. Now, go inside.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I scurried to my building, feeling as if I would never get warm again.

***

So Ry had handfasted to the gun, just like I had.

I carried it up the stairs to my office, noting that the box did have an odor, but I wasn’t sure if the odor came from the Dumpster or that tattooed slice of skin. I didn’t want to think about that either.

Instead, I locked the entire box inside my office safe. Then I went to the ladies room down the hall ostensibly to run warm water on my hands but, in reality, to get whatever was on that box off my skin.

I shivered and shivered, even after I warmed up. The shivering didn’t just come from the cold.

After I’d cleaned up, I grabbed my heavy down coat, my unattractive knit cap, and my gloves. I slipped everything on, locked the office, and headed home.

I needed to know if my own gun was still there.

When I reached the street, the cold returned with a vengeance. It was as if I hadn’t gone inside to get warm at all.

A crime scene unit had the alley blocked off. Dane appeared to have left, and some unis guarded it all. They stared at me as if I were the bad guy. I pivoted, went the other way, and headed to my place.

At least the sleet had stopped, but the sidewalk was slippery. The restaurants along the way—this place was so gentrified now—were filled with well-dressed couples pretending to be happy. And maybe they were over their—what had Dane said? $300 meals? I preferred the take-out sushi eaten with custom-made chopsticks on a roof so cold it made this evening seem like the Bahamas in summer.

I still missed Ry, the bastard. I liked to think I had moved on, but I hadn’t. Not inside. Not where it counted.

I took an elevator to my apartment, and let myself in. The apartment was warm, homey, perfect, just like it had been since I bought it. I closed the door and locked it, then checked the wards just in case.

They were fine.

I peeled off my gloves and tossed them on an occasional table. Then I went into my bedroom and opened the closet.

There, on the top shelf, was the Tiffany’s box. I pulled it down, and gingerly untied the ribbon. I tugged the lid off and looked inside. The lockbox was still there. I opened it too, and stared at the gun, gleaming in the light.

It looked no different than it had every other time I had looked at it. It was a shame I had never used it, a shame that it hid here in the dark, as if it were at fault for Ry’s death.

I ran my fingers across its cool surface. It glowed faintly, in recognition. I wished I knew how to use it. I wished Ry had told me where he had gotten it, why he had chosen a Tiffany’s box to keep it in, what it all meant.

I closed the lockbox, then closed the Tiffany’s box, and retied the ribbon, like I’d done dozens of times over the years. I put the gun on the top shelf of my closet, then closed that door. If only it were that easy to put the gun out of my mind as well.

Something had caused the second gun to come to me. Something had powered it. Something—or someone.

I wouldn’t know what until I knew more about the guns themselves.

I grabbed my cell to call Dane. Then decided I wasn’t going to speak to him on the phone.

I would go to him, wherever that was.

I took my gloves off the occasional table and let myself out of the apartment, using the edges of my magic to track Dane.

It wasn’t hard.

He was at the precinct, at his desk—which, I was certain—was not where he wanted to be.

***

The limestone façade of the three-story precinct building looked dirty against the sleet-shiny snow. Ry used to call it the Home of the Enemy, but he didn’t really mean it. He was always mad at Dane for refusing to acknowledge the magic or the work Ry and I were doing.

The rivalry between them didn’t mask the love they had for each other, though, and I knew Dane had been as torn up over Ry’s death as I was.

I let myself inside, the smell of fear and sweat enveloping me. I took the steps up to the detective unit, and slipped inside.

Nighttime made little difference. There were always detectives poring over files, tapping on ancient computers, or talking tiredly into the phones.

Dane was sitting at his desk toward the back, hands pressed against his cheeks, staring down at some paperwork in front of him. His suit coat was hanging over the back of his chair, and his long dress coat was hanging on a peg on the wall.

I walked over to him and hovered, waiting for him to acknowledge me.

“At least fifteen different skin types,” he said. “And they’re just estimating. Who does that?”

He sounded tired. I guess the possibly special woman hadn’t waited for him after all.

“Not who,” I said. “What does that?”

“Yeah, some kinda animal,” he said more to himself than to me. Because we both knew that he was deliberately misunderstanding me.

It was a good question, though. Demons shredded skin, but they used the unbelievable pain from the process to increase their own power. There were lots of creatures from all sides of the magical divide that consumed skin, mostly as food, and a handful that took the magic from tattoos.

But nothing native to New York. Because all of the native creatures destroyed the skin when they did what they did.

I knew of nothing that took tattoos like trophies.

“Was everything—” I couldn’t bring myself to say skin fragments. “—tattooed?”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Mean something to you?”

I shook my head, but he wasn’t looking up. Maybe he took my silence as an acknowledgement.

“Do you know where Ry got the gun?” I asked.

Dane finally raised his head. He seemed to have aged years in the past few hours. He seemed surprised by the question.

“There were two,” he said. “They belonged to my parents. I figured he had given one to you.”

My cheeks heated. I had never told Dane about the gun. I hadn’t told anyone.

Dane was frowning. “He was going to—you know—ask you to marry him. He was all goofy about it. He even found a Tiffany’s box, because engagement rings come in Tiffany boxes. He thought you’d get it.”

I thought we didn’t believe in marriage. I thought marriage was so…middle class, so ostentatious.

I had missed the point.

Why me? I had asked Ry.

Because I love you, he had said, so sure, so certain.

And then, at my confusion, he had shrugged, said he was cold, and we’d better hurry. Still, we handfasted me to the gun. My gun. And his matched.

Like wedding rings.

Son of a bitch.

“Did your parents have wedding rings?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Dane said, “but my folks were pretty traditional. They wanted the guns to go to me and Ry, like we were supposed to split up the rings.”

Dane leaned back, closed his eyes for a minute, shook his head, then added, “I was the only sane one. The only one who didn’t see little sparklies in the universe or dark things crawling out of corners. My folks were so disappointed…”

Then he rocked forward and opened his eyes.

“I thought you knew,” he said again, but I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the guns or his parents or all of it.

I shrugged, pretending at a nonchalance I didn’t feel. “What were the guns for?”

“Monster hunting,” he said sarcastically.

I nodded, not going there.

“Thanks,” I said, and threaded my way through the desks.

“Hey,” he said. “You need help?”

Not your kind of help, I nearly said. Instead, I shook my head. “You guys are doing it all.”

And as I walked out, I realized that was true. After I had come to my senses, I left the investigation in the hands of the police.

Even when I had known that whatever killed Ry hadn’t been human—at least, by my definition. Maybe by Dane’s.

But not by mine.

***

The guns had history, and I needed to find it. I could look in moldy books or try to find something accurate online. Or I could ask the guns themselves.

I didn’t want to ask the one with Ry’s tattoo wrapped around its grip. I wasn’t sure who or what would answer me.

And I didn’t want to find out.

So I walked back to my apartment, and got my gun down a second time.

Everyone describes silver as cold, but it’s not. Especially when it’s been indoors, and the endless winter continued outside. The gun was warm against my hand, the silver never needing polish.

I wrapped my hand around it, saw—

Ry, grinning as he watched me open the box…

I made that image disappear, saw—

Something huge and scaly, looming over a pair of sleeping boys, then a bright white light zinging out of the muzzle, and the huge, scaly thing exploding into a thousand little pieces…

I shook my head, smiled a little, saw —

Hands with two matching rings, clasped, each around the grip of a different gun. “With my heart, I hold you,” a male voice so like Ry’s said. “With my soul, I touch you…”

It was a handfasting ceremony, only of a kind I’d never heard of. With the guns in the middle.

Marriage, the old-fashioned way.

I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. Then frowned, thought of an experiment, and decided to try it.

I set the gun on top of the box.

Then I went into my kitchen, and thought, Join your handfast partner at the gun itself.

After five minutes, it wobbled its way toward me, muzzle pointed at my heart, trembling like Ry’s gun had.

Find your box, I thought, and the gun wobbled its way out the door. I followed it, as it returned to the very place it had started.

I picked the box up and wrapped my arms around it.

Anniversaries had power.

I had thought the gun came to me at the anniversary of Ry’s death.

The gun had come to me at the anniversary of our love—the marriage he had tried to give me, ten long years ago.

***

With my gun in my shoulder holster, I went back to the office.

I doubted I would ever get warm, even though I was wearing my coat, thick gloves, and my hat. I was cradled in the heart of a long, cold winter, and I might as well embrace it.

Ry’s gun was inside the safe, the remains of my favorite tattoo still attached to the grip.

First, I put my gun on the desk. Then, gingerly, I picked up Ry’s.

He laughed.

I took my hand off the grip, shaking.

Then touched it again.

I don’t care how dark things get, he said. We’ll always have each other.

As if he hadn’t left. As if he were still here.

I set the guns beside each other, and they started to glow. If they were real guns—real as in the way Dane defined guns—I would be fleeing now, expecting some kind of weird explosion.

But I was curiously unafraid.

The guns glowed and locked to each other. The tattoo grew into an entire man.

Ryder.

See-through, but there.

“I missed you,” he said.

I didn’t care if he was real or not. “I missed you too.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d understand,” he said. “We never finished the ceremony.”

“I know,” I said.

He nodded, reached toward me, his hand going through my face. I felt nothing, not even a rush of wind.

And oh, how I wanted to.

“What happened?” I asked, because I had to, because I had a sense time was short.

“Demons,” he said, and his image flickered.

He glanced at the guns. The glow was fading.

“No,” I said.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too,” I said. “Stay.”

“I wish.” His voice was faint. “Balance the scales…”

And then he was gone.

Again.

The son of a bitch.

***

I felt it—the batshit crazy. It was coming back, or maybe it had never left. I could go after everything, clean up everything, fight everything—and be consumed.

Or I could stand up.

Fight.

Figure it out.

The guns didn’t glow any more. The tattoo was gone.

I touched Ry’s gun. It was cool. So was mine.

Balance the scales.

Demons—and skin.

I let out a breath, grabbed both guns, and headed to the alley below.

***

No crime scene tape. No footprints in the snow. No tire marks where the crime scene unit had parked their van.

The brick was back in place.

I walked to it, touched it, felt edges, still there. The hiding place, still there.

Son of a bitch.

“Finally,” he said, his voice echoing between the buildings.

I turned. He looked bigger, eyes glowing ever so slightly red, Ry’s face covering his imperfectly, five tattoos glowing on his scaly skin.

Saw—in my mind’s eye—two boys, sleeping, a demon hovering over them, exploding in the dark, and scales raining down—on the oldest boy, the one closest to the door.

“Your parents took your magic away from you,” I said.

“They thought they could,” Dane said, his voice deeper, more echoey. “They took the wrong magic.”

They took the good magic, leaving the scales.

Balance them, Ry had told me.

“You killed him,” I said.

Dane didn’t answer me, but the tattoos glowed. The death hadn’t been intentional. I knew that, or Dane wouldn’t have crumbled like he had. They had had a fight—over the guns?

“What do the guns have to do with it?” I asked.

“One of them is mine,” he said.

“Why didn’t you take Ry’s after he died?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find it. But you found it. Thank you,” he said. “Now, give it to me.”

I had no other weapons. I hadn’t expected to fight demons tonight. I wasn’t really in the fighting and slaying business any more. Just the investigating, resolving business.

I pulled Ry’s gun out of my pocket. My hand trembled as I gave the gun to Dane.

He took it, looking surprised at the ease.

“I never realized you were this logical,” he said.

“You never knew me,” I said. Which was fair: I never knew him either.

And I had dismissed Ry. Ry, who had called Dane “The Enemy” right from the start.

Dane grinned. “I like you, you know.”

I nodded, as if I cared. He looked down at the gun, and weighed it in his hand, as if it were something precious.

Which it was.

Join your handfast partner, I whispered.

The gun in Dane’s hand trembled. He held it tightly. The tattoos on him—Ry’s remaining tattoos—glowed.

Then peeled off, one by one, each fastening itself around the gun.

For a moment, there were two men before me, one thinner, less substantial, the other glowing red, the gun between them.

My gun had found my hand as well—and I didn’t remember grabbing it. Then I realized it had heard the same command, thought the command was its.

I knew what kind of bullets demons took, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to shoot Dane—not with Ry fighting him for the gun.

They struggled, the ice melting beneath their feet, the heat of Dane’s evil warming the entire alley. The gun remained between them and then—

Something popped as if a bubble had burst.

Ry staggered backwards, substantial, bleeding (bleeding!!!), and falling, holding his gun.

Dane, dripping scales, reached for the gun and without thinking, I imagined white light—bullets—heading toward him.

They did, shooting out of my gun and hitting his torso.

I reached down, grabbed Ry, pulled him backwards with me, away from the white-and-red glowing demon-man in the center of that alley. We made it behind a stupid snowplow-created pile of snow when Dane exploded, bits raining everywhere.

Except on us.

Balance the scales.

Not just the scales of justice. The scales of a demon, returning where they belonged.

I wrapped my arms around a bleeding, warm, living man.

“Ry,” I said.

“Took you long enough,” he muttered.

“You didn’t explain—”

“No excuses,” he said, and then he passed out.

***

I had no story for the ambulance attendants. I had no story for the cops. I pled ignorance, lost memory, frostbite…I don’t know. Those lies are gone, along with any trace of Dane.

Ry thinks Dane died that night ten years ago, and somehow his demon self managed to get to Ry, so that Ry’s power would keep them alive.

But I think—the magic suggests it—that Dane died a lot longer ago than that. Maybe the night of the demon attack, the ones the gun stopped.

Because demons can create hallucinations, images, visions, like the crime scene. How easy for one boy to die and feed a dying demon, keeping it alive, just barely, waiting for the right opportunity to grow into something stronger.

From the moment I met him, Ry said he distrusted Dane. I thought that strange for brothers. But it wasn’t. It was the man reacting to something he barely remembered from his own childhood.

Ry doesn’t agree.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because we’ve done purges. We’ve saged the entire alley. We’ve warded it and cleansed it. We invited old friends to do the same.

Dane’s gone.

And Ry’s here.

And it’s no hallucination or vision.

The most romantic gift anyone’s ever given me was a gun. And a handfast.

And a future.

Together.

At last.

 

____________________________________________

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

Handfast

Copyright © 2021 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Streets of Shadows, edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon, Alliteration Ink, September 2014
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2021 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Fixzma/Dreamstime, 88and84/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.

December allowed me to have some extra brain time. Some of the crisis events of the previous six months had passed or been dealt with or are (even now) being dealt with. We’ve reestablished a rhythm in life, so I was able to read more in the midst of the usual holiday craziness.

I read holiday anthologies only in the holiday season, so sometimes it takes me years to finish one. There are two here that took years to finish, but I found stories I liked in both of them. And then there is the Library of America Christmas stories collection. I didn’t get far into it, but I will be reading it for several more years. It’s a slow read, because the stories are chronological and I can already see that I disagree with some of Connie Willis’s choices. (Prerogative for the heavy reader.) She leans more into sf/f than I would and of course, completely ignores romance. And also, much of the mystery oeuvre. Still, worth looking at, I suspect. I’ll know more in a few years.

Of course, I read a lot more than that as well. My schedule slowly freed up (as much as my schedule can) and I had some time for reading, leisure and otherwise. Here’s what I liked from the leisure.

December 2024

 

Brown, Leah Marie, “Finding Colin,” Winter Wishes, Zebra Books, 2017. This novella comes from a book with no attributed editor, something that always annoys the heck out of me. No matter. The stories were good enough, but “Finding Colin” was charming. It has a great voice, a great sense of humor, and a story problem that made me vaguely uncomfortable (and I think the author intended that). A hardcore fan spends her vacation dollars to track down the man of her dreams, an actor named Colin. She finds out where he’s filming his latest movie and…well, the story goes from there. And it didn’t go the way I feared it would. It’s a lot of fun, and well worth reading.

Dunne, Griffin, The Friday Afternoon Club, Penguin Press, 2024. I feel an affinity for Griffin Dunne. I was going to write that I have no idea why, but that’s really not true. Dunne is a survivor. His family was famously dysfunctional. His beloved sister was murdered. He dropped out of school (understandably, as he recites the incident), and yet has managed to have a major career in the arts. Given his history, he shouldn’t have survived, and yet he has.

His father, Dominick Dunne, came to my attention after he had lost his daughter and became a crusader for justice. He continually wrote about the way the courts and the justice system failed victims’ families. His aunt by marriage, Joan Didion, has been one of my favorite writers for my entire life. (That’s her on the left, arms around her daughter.)

So I wanted to read this book to read about the family, which I knew was interesting, but also to read about Griffin Dunne, whose work I’ve admired since he was the only memorable part of An American Werewolf in London. The book is well written (not surprisingly) although it clearly retools the stories that Dunne has probably been dining out on for years. Still, there were some surprises, particularly from his good friend Carrie Fisher, and some truly sad and heartfelt moments. The book ends with the birth of Dunne’s daughter, and it should end there. But that leaves another twenty years or more of his life to discuss at some point.

Even if you have no idea who any of these people are, you might want to read this. It really is a testament to survival and stubbornness and lots of other fascinating things.

Lipshutz, Jason, “In Control,” Billboard Magazine, November 16, 2024. This is a fascinating—to me, at least—article about a badly managed company (Warner Music Group) that turned itself around with new management. Considering that’s what’s happening with our WMG Publishing right now, this was an exceedingly timely and hopeful article. Dunno if you all will find it as interesting. Hope you do.

Meier, Leslie, “Candy Canes of Christmas Past,” Candy Cane Murder, Kensington, 2007. I have no idea when I first started this book, but I note that I recommended Laura Levine’s story in 2020. Which means I haven’t picked it up since then. So…four years later…I was in the mood for cozies again at holiday time, I guess.

Leslie Meier’s story features her regular heroine, Lucy Stone, in a story that takes place in two time periods—when she is a grandmother and her kids and grandkids come to visit, and when she’s a young mother, dealing with a new home and a toddler, while pregnant in a new town. The house is a fixer-upper and it’s falling apart around her, yet she makes time to solve an old crime involving glass candy canes. The 1980 details are marvelous, the discomfort of advanced pregnancy plain, and the stress on young parents also vivid. The mystery is meh, but I always find that with cozies. The read, though, was great.

Mitchell, Gail, “Quincy Delight Jones,” Billboard Magazine, November 16, 2024. It’s hard to believe that Quincy Jones is gone. He was perhaps the influence on all music in the last 60 years or more. If you don’t believe me, read this piece, and think about the choices Quincy made, the talent and creativity he brought to everything he did. Then maybe watch “We Are The World: The Greatest Night In Pop,” a documentary about something that just seems impossible now. It was impossible then too, but Quincy helped pull it off. If you’ve never thought about Quincy Jones, well, you’re in for a treat.

Oppenheimer, Mark, “The Gonzo Life and Tragic Death of ‘Heff'” The Hollywood Reporter, October 23, 2024. I found this to be an utterly fascinating character study of a…well, I don’t want to say tragic figure, but someone whose life didn’t turn out the way anyone thought it would. John Connery Heffernan III was one of the people behind the movie Snakes on a Plane. That ended up being his biggest success. Then after a few years of being somewhat famous, he disappeared from his friends’ lives. That led Oppenheimer to track him down only to learn that Heff was dead. So, Oppenheimer wanted to know what happened. This story is as strange as the movie.

Provost, Megan, “Teaching Possibility,” On Wisconsin, Fall, 2024. Apparently, the University of Wisconsin selects a book for every student at this incredibly large campus to read each year in the Go Big Read (for Go Big Red, a school saying) every year. This year’s book was by Rebekah Taussig, whose book is part of Carolyn Mueller’s class in disability and identity. The interview is with Mueller, but I also suggest you pick up the book…after you’ve read the interview, of course.

Walker, Joseph S., “Crime Scene,”  The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023, edited by Amor Towles, The Mysterious Press, 2023. I think this is the only story that made it into both Best-of collections for 2023, and it deserves to be there. The crime scene in question is the scene of President Kennedy’s assassination. The story is smart and twisty, and like my notes on most smart and twisty stories, I can’t tell you much more than that without ruining it. Just pick it up and enjoy.

Willis, Connie, “Introduction,” American Christmas Stories: The Library of America Collection, Library of America, 2021. Connie’s introduction on the history of Christmas storytelling in America is fascinating. I knew much of it, and feel like she missed a few things (L.Frank Baum, for example), but overall, this is really worth the read. Well researched and well considered.

Crime reporter Atkins discovered Scrawny Pete at the scene of a murder-suicide. The hard-bitten reporter took to the cat, and the cat took to him.

Together they travel through the city on the police beat—until the day they come across another crime, one that Scrawny Pete understands.

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

 

Scrawny Pete By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

He found Scrawny Pete, flea-bitten, hair coming out in patches, and eyes like a baby’s, in a fifth floor walk-up, crouched beside two dead bodies. The cat wouldn’t come to anyone but him, and in a moment of weakness, he took the damn thing. The vet’d cleaned him up, put antibiotics on the scabs, gave Atkins some salve and some special food and sent him on his way.

A cat owner.

And not just any cat. Scrawny Pete was on his way to becoming a legend.

The dead bodies had been part of a domestic. Typical, in its way. Murder-suicide. Always seemed that the man shot the woman and ate the gun. Fifteen years on the crime beat for whichever daily tabloid paid him enough to write his five hundred words of wisdom showed him that there was nothing in the human existence that someone didn’t try to solve with a gun. In the mouth, out of the mouth, in the heart, in the stomach, it didn’t matter. In America, someone whipped out a gun and entire lives ended. A flash, an instant, leaving more heartbreak than any newspaper could cover.

As if it wanted to. Whoever said, “All happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways,” had been more right than Atkins wanted to imagine.

The problem with Scrawny Pete, as Atkins soon learned, was that the damn cat was terrified of being alone. Surprisingly, loud noises didn’t bother him, and neither did the smell of blood, but his own company in the quiet of Atkins’s apartment drove the cat absolutely crazy. Atkins tried leaving the television on, and bringing home a kitten, but Scrawny Pete was intelligent enough to know that a TV wasn’t company, and he didn’t tolerate any furry companions in his fancy abode.

Somehow the damn cat talked Atkins into taking him everywhere. Atkins started wearing a great coat with a large pocket that Scrawny Pete—who was smaller than most six-month-old kittens—took to riding in. Atkins found that Pete could be smuggled anywhere, restaurants, hotels, even doctor’s offices. And once he started writing about Pete in his column, well, he didn’t have to smuggle the cat anywhere any more.

It was June 21st, one year to the day after he’d gotten Scrawny Pete, that he found himself taking an old Otis to the top floor of a scrungy apartment building on the lower East Side. The cops were already on the scene. Some rookie was standing outside the main door, arms crossed, unwilling to let in any comers even with press badges until he saw Scrawny Pete. Atkins mumbled as the Otis’s doors slid open on the fourteenth floor that if he’d known a cat was worth more than a press badge he’d’ve gotten the cat years ago.

Scrawny Pete had no answer. If anything, the cat seemed tenser than usual.

Pete was always unnaturally tense. Atkins attributed it to the poor critter’s upbringing by such obviously happy folk. He could only imagine how awful it had been. The walk-up hadn’t had any cat food. The only sign that a cat had even lived there were the claw marks on the living room sofa. Obviously the happy couple had let Scrawny Pete fend for his dinner in the hall with the other stray cats, and had let him the bulk of his life outside—which had probably been good for Scrawny Pete or he might have been the first to taste the gun, long before hubby decided the family needed a vacation in Never-Never-Land.

But in this hallway, which smelled of grease and garlic and Asian cooking, overlaid with filth and a bit of despair, Pete’s naturally tense body became a hard little wire. Atkins put a hand on Pete’s back, like he used to do when they first started traveling together, before he realized that nothing—not honking horns, not screaming people, not the breeze from a passing train—could spook Pete enough to make him leave the pocket. Pete’s security was Atkins, and that cat wasn’t ever going to let go.

Apartment 14A had a crooked metal sign and an open presswood door, the outside of which had once seen the backside of someone’s foot. The breaks in the wood weren’t new and they weren’t clean, and all they left was a thin layer of really cheap oak covering between the inhabitants—or former inhabitants as the case might be—and the rest of the world.

Atkins pushed his way inside, felt Pete turn into a statue against his side and start making little huffing noises. Two detectives stood inside, both in plainclothes, cheap off-the-rack suits that had seen better days. The ME stood over the bodies with the department’s camera, preserving the scene for posterity, although it was obvious what had happened.

Husband shot the wife before eating the gun. The air still had an acrid whiff from the double discharge. Atkins was surprised he could smell it over the stench of blood and voided bowels.

The detectives recognized him, showed him where to stand so that he wouldn’t violate the scene. Pete was still huffing, his fur rising on his back. Strange behavior. Stranger way still to spend their one-year anniversary.

Atkins stared at the couple. Young, by the looks of their hands. Poor, by the looks of the apartment. But not that poor, by the looks of their stuff. In fact, a bit upscale for a neighborhood like this.

“Slumming, Atkins?” one of the detectives asked.

“Heard the call,” he said, hand still on Pete. “What is it about this day, hm? It’s not Christmas. Not nothing at all. What makes people go off on this day?”

“What?” the detective said. “There been other calls today?”

Atkins shook his head. “A year ago today, I got Pete at a place just like this one. In fact…” His voice trailed off. He shuddered, something he hadn’t done at a crime scene in more than a decade.

“What?” the detective asked, but Atkins ignored him. Instead he crouched, put his hands up to his face as if he were forming a camera, and looked through the frame.

“Do bodies always fall like that in a murder-suicide?” he asked.

“Like what?” the detective asked.

“Side by side, twinned up like they’re in bed next to each other, only they’re on the floor.”

“Naw.” The answer came from the ME. He’d taken the last shot. “Usually, they are in bed. It’s only a few who do it in the middle of the living room. I think they had some kind of argument, he grabs the gun, waves it in her face, she thinks he ain’t gonna do nothing, maybe even dares him, he shoots, realizes what he’s done, then shoots himself.”

Sounded plausible.

Pete was making little sounds of distress. Atkins put his hand back in his pocket. Pete was shivering. In the whole past year, in all the strange situations, he’d never once felt Pete shiver. Not even in the middle of winter.

“Never figured you for one of them animal lovers who took his friggin pet everywhere,” the other detective said.

Atkins shrugged, pretended an indifference he didn’t really feel. “It gets readers.”

“Sure does,” the first detective said. “The wife reads your column now like you’re writing the adventures of Scrawny Pete. You should mention him every day.”

“Yeah,” Atkins said. “He sure has a place in a story like this one.”

“I don’t see no story here,” the ME said. “Sad to tell, but who really cares when some guy takes out himself and his wife. ‘Cept the friends and family, of course.”

Atkins looked at him. The ME was a skinny redhead with premature aging lines from frowning instead of too much sunlight. “No kids?” he asked.

“Not a one.”

“How common is that?”

The ME shrugged. “I’m not a walking book of statistics.”

“I mean, isn’t it usually long-marrieds, or newly separateds, or bad divorces who resort to this?”

“Can’t say.” The ME looked over his shoulder. But one of the detectives frowned.

“Where you going with this, Atkins?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “Just seems strange to me. The couple that I got Pete from, they were in this position, no kids, dead in the living room in a fifth floor walk-up not a lotta different from this.”

“The world’s weird, Atkins,” one of the detectives said. “Who’d’ve figured? It’s like you and that crazy cat.”

“Yeah,” Atkins said softly, not taking his hand off Pete. “Who’d’ve figured.”

***

It didn’t stop him from checking anyway. Superstition was sometimes a reporter’s best friend. He and Pete spent the afternoon digging through records, and what he found chilled him. The past five years, there’d been a murder-suicide on the same date. Same day, same pose, different precincts. No one recognized the scene. And because it was looked like a murder/suicide, no one did more than a cursory investigation. Did he shoot her? Yeah. Did he shoot himself? Yeah. End of story.

But not really.

Atkins called the detective in charge of the latest one, told him what he’d learned, and didn’t explain how he got his hunch, except to say that he remembered the anniversary of getting Pete.

Pete was still freaked. Atkins had learned, in the year he’d had Pete, that cats had memories, emotional memories, like people. The apartment drove him crazy; whenever one of the neighbors got to shouting, Pete dove under the couch. He sat in the corner like a terrified rabbit when Atkins wasn’t home, not moving at all, defecating and urinating in the spot where Atkins left him in the morning. He’d done that for a week before Atkins, who knew that Pete understood a litter box, tried taking Pete to work.

The rest, of course, was history.

The detective didn’t call back for two days. By then, Atkins was three columns away from the scene. He remembered it, of course. That night, Pete had slept like a baby in his arms, something he wouldn’t admit to anyone, barely admitted to himself, and the cat seemed spookier than usual. But life marched on and Atkins with it, turning in his five hundred words, crime beat, the most popular column in the city with or without mention of Scrawny Pete.

“Atkins,” the detective said.

“Yeah?”

“You got a story here. Want it? We wouldn’ta got it without you.”

Reporters lived for calls like that. Atkins was no different, even after fifteen years. He went to the precinct, which was gray and dirty and smelled like ancient coffee, just like every other precinct in the city, and listened as the detective explained, in excruciating detail, how they went over the crime scene, how they found things that didn’t exactly fit: a shoe mark in blood that didn’t belong to any of the cops; a handprint on the coffee table; fibers in the wounds that had nothing to do with either deceased.

The detective didn’t apologize. He knew that Atkins was a pro, Atkins understood how overworked they all were, how they liked to close cases, especially easy ones, like a murder/suicide, how hard sometimes serial killings were to see.

Luckily, or so the detective said, this one was easily solved. A neighbor—one Tobias Craig—heard the fighting, complained, complained again, finally decided to take matters into his own hands. Apparently he snapped every June 21st. Left a visible trail once they knew what to look for. Every apartment super with the June 21 murders remembered the guy complaining about the noise.

The cops had interviewed him at every scene and he’d always been the one who said the expected litany: It don’t surprise me, officers. They were fighting all the time.

Atkins knew better than to ask for a why, but he got it anyway: Apparently Craig’s name was all over the system, not as a criminal, but as a victim. Parents dead of a murder/suicide—a confirmed one—that happened in front of the children on June 21st, 1979. He’d been six at the time.

Atkins found the clippings, saw the blood-spattered children being led out of the apartment. In his imagination watched them watching their father pull out the gun like the ME had said, pull the trigger, kill his wife, then in sudden remorse, kill himself. He’d forgotten the children, sleeping in the next room, the children who’d crawled out of their shared bed to see what the noise was just in time to watch him eat his gun.

Scrawny Pete’d seen it of course. That explained the terrors, the fears of being left alone with neighbors who shouted and screamed. Was he their cat, the dead couple’s? Or had he originally been a stray who’d taken food from Craig? No telling, and certainly Pete wouldn’t say. Not in any way Atkins wanted to see anyway.

So he wrote the column, asked if it could go on more than 500 measly words, and because he rarely asked, and because his longer columns usually got national attention, sometimes awards, his editor said sure. Atkins wrote the story, mentioning Pete’s reaction to the smells, the repeated scene. Mentioning, only mentioning. And then he’d gone on to reflect on the way the system failed the victims and the way it created more victims and was it guns or the human race’s innate violence that caused a man to shoot his wife and then himself, to start a ball rolling that would leave five couples dead after some kind of terror at the hands of a crazy man who’d once been a blood-spattered six-year-old kid.

People didn’t remember the analysis or the arguments or the excellent prose, some of the best of his career. Nope. They remembered the bizarre nature of the story, and they remembered Pete. And over the years, it became the crime that Pete solved, and Scrawny Pete became a legend.

Atkins didn’t mind. Cats could become legends. Reporters shouldn’t. Reporters schlepped from scene to scene, observing, recording, trying to make sense out of one corner of the world. Sometimes he managed it, sometimes he didn’t. But he was the best at it, for a few years at least.

The years he had Scrawny Pete in his pocket.

 

____________________________________________

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

Scrawny Pete

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published as an Amazon Short, June 2005
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Jeffery Koh/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.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s alternate history stories have won or been nominated for every award in the sf field. “The Arrival of Truth” shows why. In pre-Civil War Virginia, some slaves tell a story about Sojourner and the Truth. One young girl, forced to give up her own children and nurse a white baby, wonders what the Truth will mean. Will it set her free? Or will it force her to make terrible choices of her own?

In “The Arrival of Truth,” Kristine Kathryn Rusch casts light on the powerful struggle between right and wrong, slavery and freedom.

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

 

The Arrival of Truth by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I first heard the story the morning they took my third child. My body, half-hidden in the feather bed, ached from the effort of birthing a baby I would never raise. My breasts dribbled milk that would soon feed a white child. The Missus and Old Sal, the midwife, took my new baby out of the room so I couldn’t hear it cry. I reached for it—all small, bloody, and wrinkled—but wasn’t strong enough to get out of bed. As the door closed, I turned by face against the Missus’ feather pillow and wished I had died.

A breeze rustled the gingham curtains on the open window. Voices echoed in the yard, and from Big Jim’s yelp, I knew I had had a son. The voices hushed for a moment, then Big Jim cried, “No! No! That’s my boy! You can’t take him away! That’s my boy!” and I tried to sink deeper in the soft bed, softer than I was used to, the bed the Missus used when a girl gave birth to a baby she could sell and make more money for the House. Big Jim’s shout got cut off mid-word as a whip snapped and cracked through the air. Big Jim would get another scar because of my baby, and the child wasn’t even his.

The door creaked open, and Nesta stood there, eyes sad as eyes could be. She snuck inside and let the door close quietly. She was big and soft, and I wanted to bury my face against her chest and cry until no more tears would come, but when her hand caressed my forehead, I couldn’t look at her.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “All that learning didn’t save you. It don’t save none of us, long as we look different from them.”

She took a cornhusk doll, painted black, with frizzed yarn hair and a sackcloth dress, and tucked it in my arms. “Sojourner’s coming,” Nesta said. “And when she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.”

Then she slipped out the door, quietly as she came. I buried my face in the doll’s rough skin and I wished, Lord how I wished, it could move and cry and pat its little fist against my cheek.

***

Some days I can still remember the feeling of being a child, the closest to white I’ll ever get.

The old Missus, she had ideas that her son, Master Tom, said was dangerous and harmful to his way of life. But when he was a boy and had no say in the house, the old Missus would teach some of us. She taught us how to read and spell and how to talk proper. She read to us from the Bible and said we needed to know God’s Word so we could get into heaven. She made us promise we would never tell nobody what she done because she would have to stop and some of us could get killed because of her mistakes. So we practiced reading in private, hiding the books when the old Master or Jake the overseer or any guests came to the House. The old Missus talked to use like we were the same as the white folks she spent the rest of her time with. And she loved us, each and every one. No babies got sold when she ran the House, and she promised that when she died, we would all go free.

But she died one sunny afternoon when her horse stumbled and threw her. The old Master said her will was written by a crazy woman who didn’t understand money, and he wouldn’t abide by her wishes. So none of us got our papers, and none of us were set free. The old Master brought us—the ones she educated—into the House and made us “the best House niggers” in the state of Carolina. We were never allowed to leave, never able to talk with the field hands or any of the others, as if he was afraid our knowledge would spread like pox through a room full of children.

***

Three days later, when I could stand alone, the Missus let me return to my cabin behind the House. I took the doll with me, clutching it like the child it had replaced. The Missus had promised me to the Wildersons down the road, and I was to pack my things and get before nightfall.

Big Jim wasn’t inside, but we had already said our goodbyes before he took the livery out that morning. He said he’d keep my side of the bed warm, but we both knew I wouldn’t be back until the Wilderson baby was weaned. A lot could change in that kind of time. People could get sold, people could get killed, people could disappear in the middle of the night. I only promised that I would love him as long as I lived.

The cabin was neat except for a pile of bloody rags that sat by the door. Jim had probably used them to stop the bleeding on his arm where the whip had wrapped around his skin while he was trying to save my baby boy. The cabin wasn’t much—a straw bed, a few chairs, and a table—but it was the place where we could speak our minds. After the old Master died, and Master Tom married, places like that had become harder and harder to find.

I put my other dress and my doll in a scarf and packed it in a wicker basket. Then I went out front to catch the delivery wagon as it made its way into town.

I sat on the back, and got off on the road outside the Wilderson place. The Wildersons had a bigger plantation than we did, and more babies this year than we did. But Missus Wilderson wouldn’t tolerate a field hand nursing her babies, and she wanted someone “almost human”—like me. After I’d been there a while she told me I didn’t talk like a nigger and if she closed her eyes she could pretend I was a person, someone worth talking to. She expected me to be flattered, and even though I thanked her in a quiet voice, I could see she was surprised by my tone.

Big arching trees hung over the Wildersons’ lane. After the wagon dropped me off, I walked, exhaustion making my limbs shake. I had to stop once, and lean against a wide tree trunk to catch my breath. My mother used to go back to the fields the same day she had a baby, and my pa used to say that was what faded her away. Dizziness swept through me, just as it must have through her the day she collapsed on the field—the day after my baby brother was born—and the overseer beat her to death with his whip. The old Missus had fired him, and the old Master had jailed him for destroying property. But that never did bring my mama back.

“Hey, girl, they’s expecting you up to the house.”

The voice came from a big man standing just inside the trees. His skin was dark as tree bark and his muscles bulged out of his ripped and torn shirt. His eyes shone with intelligence and when he spoke, he smiled.

“How much farther is it?” My voice sounded breathless.

“Half mile maybe,” he said.

I nodded, the thought of the extra distance defeating me. Maybe I could go a few more yards, but not a half mile. My body hadn’t recovered enough.

He peered at me through the trees, then crossed the road and stopped beside me. He was a big man, bigger than Big Jim. “You don’t look so good.”

I nodded again, afraid to say anything.

“How long since you had that baby?”

“Three days.” The words were no more than a whisper.

“And they sent you to walk? Here, honey, lean on me. I got strength enough for both of us.”

He touched me and I jerked back.

“It’s like that, is it?” He spoke softly, almost to himself. “Okay. I ain’t gonna hurt you, honey. Just let me put my arm around you, and then you can lean against me. Okay?”

I swallowed, not wanting him to touch me, but knowing I wouldn’t make it to the great house any other way. He slid his arm around my back, his skin hot against mine. He smelled of soap and honest sweat, and his touch was gentle.

“Come on,” he said, and together we walked down the center of the road leading to the great house. The trees towered over us, and an occasional bird chirped. The Wilderson plantation was quiet. No one shouted over the breeze. No overseer’s whip echoed in the distance. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought no one lived at the end of the road.

A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead, and the man tightened his grip. By the time we had reached the house, he was almost carrying me while keeping me upright.

“Lord a mercy, girl, where you been? The mistress is swearing and that baby’s crying like it won’t never shut up.” A woman stood on the porch, hair tied back in a scarf, sun reflecting off her dark face. She had her arms crossed on her hips and her skirts swished as she walked. She was in charge of the house. No one had to tell me that.

“She’s three days from the baby,” the man said, “and they left her down the road. She can barely walk and I think she’s bleeding.”

“Don’t know how to take care of their people over there,” the woman muttered as she walked down the stairs. She leaned over me and took me from the man. She was almost as strong as he was. Her hand brushed my breast as she reached around. “Lord, you’re full up too. We’ll get you to a bed, put that baby against you. He’ll ease that pain in your chest some.”

I looked at her sharply. Maybe she was referring to my swollen breasts. But I didn’t think so. I wondered how many babies had been taken away from her.

The man hadn’t let go of me. The woman looked at him. “I got her, Sam,” she said. She pulled me close, but he still didn’t let go. “Let her go, Sam. You ain’t allowed in the house.”

Sam released me. I stumbled against the woman, then she supported me.

“It’s a crime,” he said, “the way they treat people. When Sojourner comes—”

“Shush,” the woman said. “We don’t have talk like that at my house.”

“This ain’t your house.” But he said no more. He tipped a make-believe hat at me. “When you’re feeling better, you come sit with Sam. We’ll have ourselves a talk.”

I nodded, and the movement made me dizzy. When we reached the porch, the front door opened, and Missus Wilderson stood there, face blotchy and red. “They said you’d be here this morning. A sugar teat isn’t doing my Charles any good.”

Behind her, I could hear a baby wail. The sound made the pain in my chest grow stronger.

“She’s sick,” the woman holding me said.

“Something she’ll pass to the baby?”

“Her babe was born a few days ago. She ain’t recovered yet.”

Missus Wilderson humphed and moved away from the door. “As long as she can feed my boy, I don’t care what you do with her, Darcy.”

Darcy didn’t reply. She helped me in the front door. The house was cooler than the outdoors, and the hallway was lighter and airier than the one I was used to. She led me past the kitchen to a small room furnished with a cross and some figures made out of straw. I set my basket down, and she eased me onto a chair. The dizziness swept across me as she opened my bodice and handed me a wet rag. I ran it across my chest and my face. The cool cloth sent a shiver through me.

Then Darcy was beside me again, the squalling baby in her hands. I reached for him before I knew what I was doing. I didn’t want to feed another woman’s child. I wanted to feed my own. But if I closed my eyes, I didn’t see this little boy’s pale skin. All I felt was his soft baby fat. He smelled of newborn, and he clamped onto my breast with a greediness that hurt.

I rocked him, not opening my eyes, not wanting to see him, and I crooned a lullaby that Big Jim used to sing to our boys before they got taken away. But I couldn’t pretend. I knew that someday this boy in my arms would grab a woman with skin darker than his, beat her senseless, knock her to the ground, and stick himself inside her. I knew he would hire an overseer who used a whip instead of kindness. I knew that no matter whose breast he nursed on, he would never see people with dark skin as human beings.

***

After a week of Darcy’s food and care, I could walk on my own. The dizziness left me and the ache in my bones left with it. I missed the ache—it was my last attachment to my child. The bleeding stopped after about a day, and we didn’t discuss it or what it might mean about my chances for having future children. Little Charles was growing fat, and he reached for me instead of his mother, much to her dismay.

I had no place in the household, except as a milk store for Charles. I had to stay near the house, so that I could feed him when he was hungry, but other than that, I could do anything I wanted.

It took me another week to find Sam. His words had bothered me because they echoed Nesta’s. When Sojourner comes . . . When she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.

Twilight had fallen across the fields, making shadows long and dark. Charles was already asleep. I walked toward the field-hand cabins—no restrictions on me here. Apparently Master Tom hadn’t told the Wildersons that I could infect their darkies with all kinds of evil knowledge.

Children scrabbled in the hard dirt, and adults sat on porches and talked. Sam sat outside his cabin, whittling, and listening to the conversation around him.

“Okay if I join you?” I asked.

He indicated a space on the wood stairs leading up to the door. I gathered my skirts under me and sat.

“I didn’t spect to see you again,” he said. “You one of them precious house girls your master always bragging up.”

A shiver ran down my back and it was still light enough for Sam to catch it. “He don’t treat his people right, do he?”

I bit my lip and looked across at the children. They were yelling and carrying on, playing a game I didn’t understand.

“And he didn’t want no baby around to remind him of that, did he?”

I started to stand up. Sam reached over and grabbed my arm. I pulled away from him.

“He hurt you right bad.”

His words brought back that night: the smell of liquor on Master Tom’s breath, the weight of his body on mine, the bruises I couldn’t hide from Big Jim. He had wanted to kill Master Tom that night. I had stopped him.

Sam was watching me with the same intensity he had that day in the lane. “And you ain’t never gonna let a man touch you again, are you?”

“Lordy, girl, you a bunch of sticks and bones, and that baby broke some things when it busted out of ya. I had me a woman once. Don’t need another.” He waved a hand. “Sit. Tell me why you come searching me out.”

I sat back down and laced my hands in my lap. My fingers were cold, despite the heat of the night. “When I came here, you spoke of something. You said, ‘When Sojourner comes.’ What did you mean by that?”

He let out air slowly, then glanced around to see if anyone was looking. Twilight had given way to darkness. The children were inside. Candles flickered through the open windows, and five cabins down an old man smoked a pipe on his porch.

“You ain’t never heard of Sojourner?”

“Once I did. Nesta, the cook up to the Great House told me when they took my baby away. She said when Sojourner gets here, white folks are going to learn the truth.”

“The Truth, girl.” He put an emphasis on truth so strong that I could hear the capital letter. “You was born into this life. I can tell from that fancy speech of yourn. Was your mama born into this life?”

I nodded. My family had come to the colony with the Master’s family. The old Missus said we had a good and strong heritage.

“And you been a house woman your whole life?”

Again, I nodded.

“They raised you like family till the young master decided that the people can’t be family.”

“This isn’t about me,” I said. “I want to know about Sojourner.”

“Girl, what I’m saying is you’d know if you was raised in the fields.” He leaned back in his chair. The chair creaked. The muscles rippled through his dark skin. “When I was a boy, they’d sing a song when the overseer was gone. They’d sing about the promised land and how the savior would come to the land and take us all to a better place. You ain’t never heard them stories?”

I shook my head. My mama was happy that the old Missus took me into the schoolroom. When Mama put me down at night, she would say, “You almost white, honey. Someday, you go free and you will live without no whip and no dogs.”

“You do remember when that boy up to Virginia led a bunch of the people and killed the white folks?”

I didn’t remember it because it happened the year of my birth. I had heard of it, though. Master Tom would talk to the overseer about it. The way they had to keep us separate so that we would never think of a rebellion. “I know of it,” I said.

Sam stared straight ahead. Nothing moved in the darkness. “I was ten. The overseers came down and locked us all in our cabins. They took the men away and the women were left alone with the children for days. They was afraid the rebellion would spread down here and all the white folks would die. Anyone caught singing about the promised land got whipped. And anyone who talked about a savior got beat within an inch of his life.”

“I don’t remember that,” I said, and felt inadequate because of it. I was glad the darkness hid my face. My mama talked about the bad times, but I never associated it with the rebellion. It hadn’t mattered to me. It had happened before I was born.

“That didn’t stop the stories. They just got whispered in bits and pieces, back and forth. We spected things to get worse. And we spected our savior to come. But no one ever did.” Lights came on in the kitchen in the back of the house. I strained to hear the baby’s cry, but the yard was quiet.

“Then a few years ago, a runaway come through the barn. He was torn and bloodied and tired, but he told a story, Lord, we wanted to hear. He said Sojourner came to his plantation and taught white folks Truth. And all the people went free.”

I sat up straighter. “What happened?”

“He was too addled to tell us. We passed him along, and another came, just as bloodied, saying the same thing. Only he said Sojourner led them into battle, like the white folks’ Bible talked about, and all the people went free.”

“How come we haven’t heard about it?”

Sam shook his head. “These battles are quiet ones. Ain’t nobody getting caught, and ain’t nobody gonna tell.”

“Sounds like tales to me,” I said. I stood up and brushed off my skirt. “White folks won’t let niggers free, not without a fight. And if niggers put up a fight, then white folks kill them, and kill other niggers until the fight has gone out of us.”

Sam was silent for a long moment. I thought, with my simple argument, I had knocked a hole in his belief, and I felt oddly disappointed. The story of Sojourner had an appeal to it that I wanted to feel. I didn’t want to destroy his belief so easily.

“You call the people ‘niggers,’” he said. “Just like the white folk. We all know we different. But we ain’t niggers or pickaninnies or any of them pet terms they use. We’s people just like they is. And we shouldn’t make ourselves sound any other way.”

He got up and walked around me. The steps sagged under his weight. He went into his cabin without saying good night.

My cheeks were hot. I hadn’t meant to offend him, by insulting his beliefs or by using a word that I had heard since I was a child. I stood on his porch for a long time, thinking about the difference a word made. I had never thought of myself as a person. To me, people were always white.

The light in the kitchen grew, and a bad feeling ran through me. I lifted my skirt and crossed the now-empty yard. I was too awake to sleep, but something called me indoors.

I mounted the back porch steps and let myself in the back door. A hand slapped me across the mouth, and I stumbled backwards, holding up my arm to protect myself. Missus Wilderson stood there, her long hair flowing down her back, her nightgown askew. “You were brought here to feed my baby, not to go whoring.”

I wiped my palm against my mouth, felt if come away bloody. “I wasn’t—”

“Sam is a big man and probably just what you girls want, but I won’t have my baby’s milk tainted, you hear me? You stay in the house at night. You stay here where the baby can have you if he needs you.”

I nodded, knowing that she would never listen to my denials. She turned, grabbed her lamp, and walked back through the darkened hallway, looking like Lady Macbeth from the Shakespeare stories the old Missus used to scare us with.

Darcy stepped out of the corner where she had been standing. She dipped a rag in the water basin and wiped my mouth. “She knows you wasn’t doing nothing with Sam ‘cept talking. She watched almost from the start. She just don’t like him none. She’d have sold him long ago, but the Master says he’s a good one in the fields, and won’t let him go.”

My lower lip hurt. I could feel it swelling. “Why did she hit me?”

“She’s got a sense about her. When you showed up at the door, she said the final time was here, and there wasn’t nothing she could do.”

“Final time?”

“Lord, honey, white folks is as superstitious as we are. They got their strange beliefs too. I think all the white folks know they’re sitting on a powder keg, and they just waiting for it to explode underneath them.”

I took the cloth from Darcy’s hand and wiped my own mouth. I had never thought of rebellion before. No one talked about it at home, at least no one had talked about it with me. If Sojourner had come there, would they have killed me with the white folks? Because I had lessons and could read and talk like a white person, did that mean my skin had lightened? It didn’t stop Master Tom from beating me senseless and planting a baby in me. Or did he only do that to some women? Those who could pass for his own kind?

“They’ll kill us,” I said.

“Ah, honey.” Darcy brushed a strand of hair from my forehead. “At least we’ll die free.”

***

I didn’t leave the house for weeks. Little Charles grew heavier and more demanding. Missus Wilderson ignored me. Darcy made sure I was fed and had someone to talk with, and Sam waved whenever he saw me on the porch. I didn’t wave back.

The humid spring turned into a hot summer. The aches left my body and Charles crawled into my heart. Sometimes, as I put him down to sleep, I called him mine. And in so many ways he was. He reached for me and cooed when he saw me. When he had angry fits, only I could stop them. He tolerated his mother, cried at his father, but loved me.

I found no solace in that.

Mid-July I was sitting in the porch swing, rocking Charles and humming him a lullaby. He didn’t want to sleep. He reached for the butterfly circling around us, played with the buttons on my dress. His eyes would droop and then open again, as if he didn’t want to miss anything. I told him now was the time for sleeping. When he grew up, sleeping would be something he would have no time for at all.

A noise stirred Charles out of his playfulness. He turned his head toward the road, and so did I. A horse’s hooves pounded against the dirt. An angry or panicked horse, one that had ridden at top speed all day. Darcy came onto the porch followed by the Master and Missus. Sam appeared from around back, and even though the Missus tried to send him away, he stayed.

The rider came around from under the canopy of trees. He leaned over his horse, mud-splattered and exhausted. His hair, plastered to the side of his head, was straight, and his skin under the dirt was white. His clothes had once been nice, but they were torn and showed signs of wear.

“Get them out of here,” he said, waving a hand at Sam, Darcy, and me.

“How can we help you?” the Missus’ tone was cold. She didn’t take orders from anyone, especially from someone she didn’t know.

“I came to warn you,” he said. “But I won’t do it with them here.”

The Master nodded at Sam, Darcy, and me, but we didn’t move. “Come inside,” he said. “We’ll find you something to drink and maybe a bite to eat. Give Sam your horse, and he’ll take care of it.”

The man clutched the reins tighter. “Just show me where,” he said, “and I’ll rub down the horse myself.”

“Sam,” the Master said, then caught the look on the man’s face. Pure fear. I recognized it because I had seen it on so many dark faces all my life. “Never mind. I’ll take him to the stables. I don’t want you people here when I get back.”

Charles was wide awake now, and leaning forward. The excitement entranced him. The Missus took him from me. “He’s not going to sleep now,” she said. But for the first time, her words held no blame. The situation had her as spooked as it had the rest of us.

Darcy took my arm and led me down the stairs. We followed Sam into the back. The Master and the stranger were on their way to the stable, the horse limping behind them.

“Something had happened,” Darcy said.

“He’s scared of us,” I said.

“They all scared of us.” Sam reached in his pocket, took out a handkerchief, and rubbed the sweat off his face. “That’s why they treat us the way they do.”

“He’s scared worse,” Darcy said. “You seen him.”

“Yeah.” Sam tucked the handkerchief in his pocket. “That’s why I want to hear what he says. He ain’t going to tell it all to the Missus. He saying something right now.”

The groom came out of the stable, along with two stableboys, looking as confused as we felt. Sam signaled us to stay where we were, and he hurried along the path, then went around behind the stable. Darcy shook her head.

“Boy gonna get himself a whipping if he not careful,” she said.

I stood as quietly as I could. I didn’t like the feeling that surrounded me. The stranger’s presence had added a tension to the place, a tension that made all the other tensions visible.

The groom went to his cabin, and the stableboys sat outside, staring at the stable as if they could learn the secrets. Darcy said no more to me. After a few minutes, she touched my elbow. The Missus had come onto the back porch and was staring at the stable. She no longer held Charles. A slight frown creased her face. She too knew she wasn’t going to get the whole story.

And if she stood there long enough, she would see Sam.

I wiped my damp palms on my skirt and headed up the stairs. “Did you get Charles to sleep, ma’am?”

She looked at me as if I were intruding. “He’s down. I don’t think he’s sleeping though.”

“Long as he’s quiet,” I said. “I think it’ll be a minute before the men come back. Let me help you get out some lemonade, in case they want something cold.”

Her glance was measuring. I brought my head down. My heart pounded. It seemed important to me that she didn’t see Sam.

“I’ll be gone before they get back. I promise.”

She sighed then, and lifted her skirts. I followed her into the big cool kitchen. Her cousin had sent a shipment of lemons from Florida the week before, and although much of the fruit was bruised, some of it was good enough to use. We had had all of the lemonade that morning, and so I stood side by side with Missus Wilderson, squeezing lemons and listening for any sign of the men.

We had filled two pitchers by the time we heard footsteps on the stairs. I grabbed a towel and wiped off my hands, then disappeared out the front way, as the men came in the back.

“—didn’t see me leave,” the stranger was saying. “That’s how they’re getting away with this. No one is left.”

I couldn’t hear the Master’s response. I went out the front door and circled around the house to find Sam and Darcy standing in the yard.

“There you are,” Sam said. “Come to my cabin. We’re far enough away there.”

I glanced up to see if the Missus was watching, but she was nowhere in sight. Darcy and I followed Sam down the path to the one-room shack he called home.

The inside was neat and well kept. The straw mattress had a wooden frame beneath it, and the wooden furniture lining the walls was strong and well made. Not hand-me-downs issued by the family. Sam had made his own home.

I took a cane-backed chair in the corner, and Darcy sat beside me. Sam sat on the edge of the bed, where he could see through the windows and keep an eye on the door.

“It’s happening,” he said to Darcy. “Right now.”

“That’s just talk,” she said.

“Not no more. He’s been riding up from the south, warning every Great House he sees. He ain’t gonna stop until he hits every plantation between here and the capital.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“He said the people were talking among themselves for days, then this stranger shows up, and suddenly the people don’t take orders no more. Then, in the middle of the night, they come into the house just like they did in Virginia all them years ago, with pitchforks and knives and butcher the family. He’d been staying with one of the daughters—snuck in so’s nobody would see, and he got out before the mess got too bad. He grabbed a horse and started to ride, to warn white folks it was coming.”

“Now they’ve probably lynched all the people who done the killing,” Darcy said, “and the rest of us will get punished.”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “Or maybe he’s just the first wave in a battle we ain’t begun to fight.”

“Or maybe he’s crazy,” I said, “and none of this is true.”

“Don’t think so,” Sam said. “He looks like a man who knows.”

We were quiet after that. The small cabin grew oppressive. I went out onto the stairs and heard Charles wailing. He was hungry. The Missus came on the back porch, looking for me. When she saw where I was standing, her mouth set in a thin line.

“I guess you can come back in now,” she said. “Charles needs you.”

I nodded and crossed the yard. Missus Wilderson went back inside. As I climbed the stairs and stood on the porch, I heard voices coming from the kitchen.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” the Master said. “We give them a good home.”

“A good home isn’t all they want.”

I pushed open the door. Missus Wilderson stood near it, biting her nails. Charles was in a basket on the table, face red and streaked with tears. I went to him and picked him up, not happy that she had let him cry without comforting him.

“I’ll take him outside,” I said.

She shook her head. “They’re almost done. I don’t want Charles outside.”

I sighed and sat in a kitchen chair. I unbuttoned my blouse and put Charles to my chest. He clasped with his mouth and both hands. He hadn’t been hungry, he had been starving.

Missus Wilderson watched for a minute, then went into the other room. Her look had left me cold. I had seen her use it with me before. Almost a jealousy, and half an envy, as if she wanted Charles at her breast instead of mine. But it was a sign of good breeding and wealth when a woman didn’t have to feed her own children. Besides it would destroy her figure and give her marks.

I didn’t mind the marks. I just wished they had come from my own child instead.

“I take good care of the people who work for me,” the Master said. They must have been in the dining room. Only in the kitchen could we hear the dining room so well.

“They don’t work for you,” the stranger said. “You own them. I think that’s what they object to.”

“And I feed them, and house them, and clothe them. They’re little more than savages. Only a few can be trained to do anything beyond the most menial task. I take care of them and they’re grateful to me.”

I brushed the thin hair on little Charles’ scalp. Feeding his baby was a menial task? I could read and write and it was against the law for me to have those skills. I could speak better than Missus Wilderson and I was still owned by someone. I was as smart as they were, and still all of my children had been taken away from me. Maybe Sam was right. Maybe I had let their thinking invade my own.

“Grateful,” I whispered to Charles. “We’re not grateful. We’re scared.”

He closed his eyes and continued sucking. I cradled him to me. I didn’t want a revolution in which all the white folks would die. I loved some of them. I loved the little ones, like Charles, before they had time to turn into someone like Master Tom back at the plantation I was born at.

“I thank you for the warning,” Master Wilderson said. “I will heed it as best I can.”

“Protect your family,” the stranger said. “Get rid of as many of those slaves as you can.”

The voices receded from the dining room. Soon I couldn’t hear them at all. I was tense, waiting for Missus Wilderson to come back. She didn’t. Charles fell asleep, letting my nipple slip out of his mouth. I held him and rocked him just a little, clutching him to me.

After a few minutes, I heard a horse on the lane. The stranger was gone.

I took Charles to his daybed in the front parlor. The Master and Missus were standing on the porch looking at the dust cloud in the lane.

“. . . give this kind of thing credence,” he was saying. “It might give them ideas.”

“But don’t we have to protect ourselves?” she asked.

“This family has been on this piece of land for over a hundred years. If slaves were going to rebel, they would have done it long ago, when things were much more isolated. I think he got caught in an unusual incident, and it has spooked him so badly that he is afraid of any nigger he sees.”

Missus Wilderson shrugged and moved away from her husband. She didn’t believe him, but she had no choice except to abide by what he wanted. We weren’t so different, she and I. She had a nice house and a legitimate place in society, but her husband still owned her. She couldn’t do what she wanted to do.

She couldn’t even nurse her child herself.

I made myself stop watching the interchange and took Charles to his bed. He didn’t wake up as I put him down. I covered him with a light sheet and kissed his forehead. He stirred, but his eyes remained closed.

“He’s a beautiful baby.” Missus Wilderson stood behind me. I made myself turn slowly, even though my heart was pounding a drumbeat against my chest. “Even though sometimes I think he’s more yours than mine. Do you love my child?”

We had never had a moment like this before. She wasn’t speaking to me out of anger or even fear. She was actually curious about how I felt. I was the one who felt the fear. I didn’t know what she wanted of me.

I decided to tell her the truth.

“They took my baby away from me the day he was born,” I said. “Once he left my body, I never got to see him or touch him again. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I pretend Charles is that baby. But he isn’t. He’s yours. He looks like you and he loves you and I could never ever do to another woman what’s been done to me.”

The words rushed out of me before I could stop them. She put a hand to her chest as if she were trying to guard her heart. “I never sold anyone’s babies,” she said. “I’m not like your owners.”

“I’m not blaming you. I just wanted to reassure you that I would never hurt or steal your child.”

She nodded, brushed her hair out of her face, and walked out of the room. I leaned against the daybed. My hands were shaking. I had never spoken that frankly with a white person before, not even with the old Missus.

I wondered if anything would change because of it.

***

The tensions remained after the stranger appeared. My Master and the Wildersons had a long conversation and other gentlemen from the area appeared to discuss the situation. From the bits and snatches I gathered, they decided to tighten security around their homes, to punish “uppity niggers,” and to make sure if more than three of us gathered it got broken up.

Missus Wilderson didn’t speak to me again, and I cared for Charles in almost complete silence. Sometimes I exchanged words with Darcy and sometimes I spoke to Sam, but mostly I kept to myself.

Early August brought with it hot nights and sweltering days. Just into the month, I carried a sheet to the back porch swing, hoping to catch a little midnight breeze. I lay across the wooden slats. Even though they were uncomfortable, they were better than the sweaty stickiness of my straw bed. Down by the cabins, I could hear restlessness and children crying as people moved about.

The moon was full, and cast a thin daylight across the path. The dogs started barking out near the road, then just as quickly stopped. The voices from the cabins stopped too. I sat up. It felt as if the entire yard was waiting.

People came out of their cabins and stood on the stairs as if they felt the same thing I did. In the Great House, no one got up except Darcy, who let herself out of the kitchen and stood by the door. She didn’t seem to see me.

We were all looking in the direction of the dogs. Then I heard a gasp. I looked toward the sound. Sam was standing in his door, facing the opposite direction from everyone else. I followed his gaze and gasped myself.

A woman stood at the edge of the path. She was tall and angular, her hair cropped short. “Let’s gather at the edge of the field,” she said.

Sam went and got the others. Darcy and I walked toward the nearest field following the woman. As we got closer, we realized that she was old. Her skin was leathery and tough and her hair had turned white. Neither of us had even seen her before.

She stood on a wooden box that Darcy brought over and watched as the people gathered around her. Mothers held their children close, and the men stood forward, eager for a fight.

“My name’s Sojourner,” she said, her voice just loud enough for all of us to hear. “And I come to give you a message. The white folks ain’t gonna give us freedom. It costs them too much. We got to take freedom. There’s more of us than there is of them. It’s time to make life ours not theirs.”

She looked at her hands for a moment, then faced us again. In the moonlight, her face looked as if it had absorbed the night. “I’m going from place to place telling people it’s time to be free. I want to see all my people stand on their own in my lifetime, and my lifetime is going away quick.”

“You telling us to fight?” Sam asked.

“I’m telling you to take control of your lives however you want to do it. And I want women to take control two places, with the white folks and with your men. We’re all equal in God’s eyes.”

Simple words. As I repeat them back, they have lost the magic they held that night. She spoke with the power of a vision, and we listened as though the words of God himself came from her lips. She stepped down off the platform, and people tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t talk. “I got too many places to stop,” she said.

And she walked away.

The others stayed behind and talked, but I followed her to the road. She walked with her back straight, her head up, even though her movements were slow and tired. So the stranger had been right. Someone was leading my people home. A woman, with a single message, seeking to overthrow an unjust system that had existed for generations.

Shouts and cries echoed behind me. I turned back to see people hacking at their own cabins and setting fire to the Great House. Through the smoke, I thought I saw the Missus’ face. Do you love my child? she asked.

He was the only baby I got, and now they were setting his house on fire because he was born in the wrong place to the wrong family. Wasn’t that as bad as what they had done to us all these years? Or did we follow their Bible: an eye for an eye, a whip scar for a whip scar, a murder for a murder, and a baby for a baby?

A giddiness took me. I ran toward the house. I wanted to be free like the rest of them. I wanted to have my own babies and my own life. I wanted a house with more than one room and Big Jim beside me for all the rest of my days. I wanted to live like free people lived, making my own choices.

But I didn’t want to do it at the expense of Charles and his mama.

Smoke was already inches thick as I burst through the front door. In the back, I heard glass smashing and people laughing. My eyes started to water. I charged up the stairs. Charles was crying, gasping wails that made my heart ache. I ran into his room and gathered him in my arms as the Missus came in.

“You’re stealing my baby.”

“I’m saving him.” I wrapped him in his blankets and hid his face against my arms. “You got to get out now. They’re going to kill you.”

“I can’t let you take my baby,” she said.

“Then come with me. Get out now.”

“Laurel?” The Master’s voice echoed from the other room. For a moment, he sounded like Master Tom, and I wanted to go in and use a knife, hacking him to death. Beneath my surface lurked a sea of hatred.

“It’s like the man said,” she shouted. “They’ve gone crazy.”

He came into the nursery, with a shotgun leveled at me. “Put the baby down,” he said.

“You’re not going to shoot me while I’m holding Charles,” I said. “And you need me. I’m the only one who can get him away from here. You have to convince the people downstairs that you never meant them any harm. And I don’t think you can do it.”

He didn’t move the gun, but I knew he wouldn’t shoot. I turned and ran from the house, Charles pressed against me. The smoke had grown so thick that my breath caught in my lungs. Charles was gasping against me. The fire was eating the entire first floor. We ran past its heat and into the cooler night. I drank the fresh air like cold water. Charles coughed and spit up on me.

Sam was off to one side, leading them all on, and Darcy leaned against a tree, tears glinting off her cheeks. I ran down the road with half a dozen people I had never seen, not caring where I was going, careful to keep Charles’ face hidden.

We ran for what seemed like miles until we found an abandoned barn. I crawled inside, followed by a few others. Charles was crying softly, in fear, and I bared my breast for him. He took the milk, but his eyes remained open. He knew something was wrong.

Outside, we could hear the sounds of destruction. A woman I had never seen before made a place beside me in the straw. “She never said kill ’em,” the woman said. “She just said to take what’s ours. We could have slipped away in the night and nobody would have known.”

I didn’t say anything. I watched Charles eat, and then I soothed him until he slept. The woman beside me slept and I watched the light change through the crack under the door.

I hadn’t been thinking when I took Charles. I needed to go home, to Big Jim. When we took our freedom, we would search for our own children, our own past. But I knew, from the sounds all around me, that people had already scattered all over the countryside, and Big Jim was probably running, just like me.

We had said our goodbyes, just like we had done with our children. And even though I wasn’t ever going to stop looking for them, I doubted I would ever find them.

My arms were growing tired from holding Charles. I wrapped him in his blanket and put him in a nest of straw. Then I went to the door and peeked out. Smoke rose over the trees like a threatening cloud.

When she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.

What truth? I wondered. That we hated them for holding us in place? That we hated the way they ripped up our lives and treated us like cattle? That we were human too? That was truth? That was something white folks had never been able to see? It seemed so simple. They had to have been blind to miss it.

Cries and yells echoed around me, and my body ached to join them. Smash a wall with an axe, destroy a man for taking a child. An eye for an eye.

A baby for a baby.

I looked back at Charles, sleeping peacefully. Within my reach, I had the best revenge of all.

***

I didn’t take it. At least, not in the obvious way.

After the fires, we followed the old Underground Railroad line and eventually ended up west, where the land goes on for miles and people are as scarce as coyotes. The trip wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t as rough as it could’ve been either. Charles and I survived.

Which was more than Big Jim did. I went back to my old home the morning after Sojourner appeared, and found his grave outside the house where I had been born. They’d buried him two weeks after I’d left. Master Tom had killed him for some infraction no one remembered. The Great House was torched, and the Master’s family dead, just like the Wildersons, who had been too stupid to listen to me. I left with Sam and Darcy and the rest from the Wilderson house, and they were the ones who got me and Charles safe.

Now we live in a house with five rooms in a community made up of our people. I wasn’t the only one who grabbed a white child, and by an unspoken pact, we never told them a word about their origins. Charles believes I’m his real mama and Sam his real papa. And he thinks that skin color changes like eye color. Some babies are born dark and others born light. I’m not going to tell him otherwise. I don’t ever want him to see me as anything less than I am, nor do I want our roles to get reversed, and for him to become the slave to my master.

We never learned what happened to Sojourner. We just know that most of the eastern and southern sides of the country disappeared in flames. All people may be equal in God’s eyes, but every once in a while only wrath will make us equal on earth.

And I still dream about that moment in the barn, when I looked at Charles and saw only his white skin. Not his baby fat, not his beloved blue eyes, not the little hands that trusted me. Only a white boy who would grow into a white man, and white men had hurt me and left me to die. When I took him in my arms, the anger filled me—

And then I remembered why I ran into that house for him. Why I had risked a freedom I had always desired for one baby boy.

I had lied to Missus Wilderson.

He was a substitute, yes, for the children I would never ever see.

But that never stopped me from loving him.

 

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The Arrival of Truth

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Alternate Warriors, edited by Mike Resnick, TOR Books, September 1993
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Zacarias Pereira Da Mata/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.