Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I tend to write a lot of mystery novellas. They’re too long for traditional publishers, which makes them perfect for WMG. We can put the novellas in book form.

Over the last year, a number of you have asked how to get my Derringer-award winning novella, “Catherine The Great,” and while you can get it in last year’s Holiday Spectacular compilation, that’s only available in ebook. Many of you want paper…and I get it. I do too.

So, we decided to put it into paper. And by the time we got to that project, I had also written three other mystery/crime novellas. One is a thriller (Kizzie) and two are more straightforward mysteries. We put all four in a Kickstarter that launches today.

Here’s the video for the Kickstarter. Over the next week, I’ll also share the book trailers with you for the novellas. However, if you’d like to see them now, head to the Kickstarter. They’re all on it, along with a lot of other goodies.

As you can tell, this is one of my favorite things to write. I hope you end up getting the books.

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/4-Mystery-Novellas-Low-Res.mp4

George has lived a full life as a decorated WWII veteran, high-end attorney, family man.  But the incident that haunts him only took five minutes—five minutes when he shared a Coke with a woman on her way to California, a woman who would die hours later. Murdered. Maybe even by George.

Winner of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s Readers’ Choice Award.

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

 

Details By Kristine Kathryn Rusch 

No more alcohol, no more steak. In the end, it’s the little things that go, and you miss them like you miss a lover at odd times, at comfort times, at times when you need something small that means a whole lot more.

I’ve been thinking about the little things a lot since my granddaughter drove me to the glass-and-chrome hospital they built on the south side of town. Maybe it was the look the doctor gave me, the one that meant you should’ve listened to me, George. Maybe it was the sight of Flaherty’s, all made over into a diner.

Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m seventy-seven years old and not getting any younger. Every second becomes a detail then. An important one, and I can hear the details ticking away quicker than I would like.

It gets a man to thinking, all those details. I mentioned it to Sarah on the way back, and she said, in that dry way of hers, “Maybe you should write some of those details down.”

So I am.

* * *

I know Sarah wanted me to start with what she considers the beginning: my courting—and winning—of her grandmother. Then she’d want me to cover the early marriage, and of course the politics, all the way to the White House years.

But Flaherty’s got me thinking—details again—and Flaherty’s got me remembering.

They don’t make gas stations like that no more. You know the kind: the round-headed pumps, the Coke machine outside—the kind that dispenses bottles and has a bottle opener built in—and the concrete floor covered with gum and cigarette butts and oil so old it looks like it come out of the ground.

But Flaherty’s hasn’t been a gas station for a long time. For years it was closed up, the pumps gone, plywood over the windows. Then just last summer some kids from Vegas came in, bought the land, filled the pits, and made the place into a diner. For old folks like me, it looks strange—kinda like people being invited to eat in a service station—but everyone else thinks it looks authentic.

It isn’t.

The authentic Flaherty’s exists only in my mind now, and it won’t leave me alone. It never has. And so I’m starting with my most important memory of Flaherty’s—maybe my most important memory period—not because it’s the prettiest or even the best, but because it’s the one my brain sticks on, the one I see when I close my eyes at night and when I wake bleary eyed in the morning. It’s the one I mull over on sunny mornings, or catch myself daydreaming about as I take those walks the doctor has talked me into.

You’d think instead I’d focus on the look in Sally Anne’s eyes the first time I kissed her, or the way that pimply faced German boy moaned when he sank to his knees with my knife in his belly outside of Argentan.

But I don’t.

Instead, I think about Flaherty’s in the summer of 1946, and me fresh home from the war.

* * *

I got home from the war later than most.

Part of that was because of my age, and part of it was that I’d signed up for a second tour of duty, World War II being that kinda war, the kind where a man was expected to fight until the death, not like that police action in Korea, that strange mire we called Vietnam, or that video war them little boys fought in the Gulf.

I came back to McCardle in my uniform. I’d left a scrawny teenager, allowed to sign up because old Doc Elliot wanted to go himself and didn’t want to deny anyone anything, and I’d come back a twenty-five year old who’d killed his share of men, had his share of drunken nights, and slept with women who didn’t even know his name let alone speak his language. I’d seen Europe, even if much of it’d been bombed, and I knew how its food tasted, its people smelled, and its women smiled.

I was somebody different and I wanted the whole world to know.

The whole world, in those days, was McCardle, Nevada. My grandfather’d come west for the Comstock Load, but made his money selling dry goods, and when the Load petered, came to McCardle. He survived the resulting depression, and when the boom hit again around the turn of the century, he doubled his money. My father got into government early on, using the family fortune to control the town, and expected me to do the same.

When I came home, I wasn’t about to spend my whole life in Nevada. I had the GI Bill and a promise of a future, a future I planned on taking.

I had the summer free, and then in September, I’d be allowed to go East. I’d got accepted to Harvard, but I’d met some of those boys, and decided a pricey snobby school like that wasn’t a place for me. Instead, I went to Boston College because I’d heard of it and because it wasn’t as snobby and because it was far away.

It turned out to be an okay choice, but not the one I’d dreamed of. Nothing ever quite turns out like you dream.

I should’ve known that the day I drove into McCardle in ’46, but I didn’t. For years, I’d imagined myself coming back all spit-polished and shiny, the conquering hero. Instead I was covered in the dust that rolled into the windows of my ancient Ford truck, and the sweat that made my uniform cling to my skinny shoulders. The distance from Reno to McCardle seemed twice as long as it should have, and when I hit Clark County, I realized those short European distances had worked their way into my soul.

Back then, Clark County was so different as to be another country. Gambling had been legal since I was a boy, but it hadn’t become the business it is now. Bugsy Siegel’s dream in the desert, the Flamingo, wouldn’t be completed for another year, and while Vegas was going through a population boom the likes of which Nevadans hadn’t seen since the turn of the century, it wasn’t nowhere near Nevada’s biggest city.

McCardle got its share of soldiers and drifters and cons looking for a great break. Since gambling was in the hands of local and regional folks, its effects were different around the state. McCardle’s powers that be, including my father, took one look at Siegel and his ilk and knew them for what they were. Those boys couldn’t buy land, they couldn’t even get no one to talk to them, and they moved on to Vegas, which was farther from California, but much more willing to be bought. Years later, my father would brag that he stared down gangsters, but the truth of it was that the gangsters were looking for a quick buck and they knew that they’d be fighting unfriendlies in McCardle for generations when Vegas would have them for a song.

Nope. We had our casino, but our biggest business was divorces. For a short period after the war, McCardle was the divorce capitol of the US of A.

You sure could recognize the divorce folks. They’d come into town in their fancy cars, wearing too many or too few clothes, and then they’d go to McCardle’s only hotel, built by my grandfather’s dry goods money long about 1902, and they’d cart in enough luggage to last most people a year. Then they’d visit the casino, look for the local watering holes, and attempt to chat up a local or two for the requisite two weeks, and then they’d drive off, marriage irretrievably broken. Some would go back to Reno where they’d sign a new marriage license. Others would go about their business, never to be thought of again.

In those days, Flaherty’s was on the northern-eastern side of town, just at the edge of the buildings where the highway started its long trek toward forever. Now, Flaherty’s is dead center. But in those days, it was the first sign you were coming into civilization, that and the way the city spread before you like a vision. You had about five minutes of steady driving after you left Flaherty’s before you hit the main part of McCardle, and I decided, on that hot afternoon, that five minutes was five too many.

I pulled into Flaherty’s and used one thin dime to buy myself an ice-cold Coca-Cola.

I remember it as if it happened an hour ago: getting out of that Ford, my uniform sticking to my legs, the sweat pouring down my chest and back, the grit of sand in my eyes. I walked past several cars to get to the concrete slab they’d built Flaherty’s on. A bell ting-tinged near me as someone’s tank got filled, and in the cool darkness of the station proper, a little bell pinged before the cash register popped open. Flaherty himself stood behind the register in those days, although like as not by ’46, you’d find him drunk.

The place smelled of gasoline and motor oil. A greasy Philco perched on a metal filing cabinet near the cash register, and it was broadcasting teen idol Frankie Sinatra live, a pack of screaming girls ruining the song. In the bay, a green car was half disassembled, the legs of some poor kid sticking out from under its side as he worked underneath. Another mechanic, a guy named Jed, a tough who’d been a few years behind me in school, leaned into the hood. I remembered Jed real well. Rumor had it he’d knifed an Indian near a roadside stand. I’d stopped him from hitting one of the girls in my class when she’d laughed at him for asking her on a date. After that, Jed and I avoided each other when we could and were coldly polite when we couldn’t.

The Coke bottle—one of the small ones that they don’t make any more—popped out of the machine. I grabbed its cold wet sides, and used the built-in bottle opener to pop the lid. Brown fizz streamed out the top, and I bent to catch as much of it as I could without getting it on my uniform.

The Coke was ice-cold and delicious, even if I was drinking foam. In those days, Coke was sweet and lemony and just about the best non-alcoholic drink money could buy. I finished the bottle in several long gulps, then dug in my pocket for another dime. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was or how tired; being this close to home brought out every little ache, even the ones I had no idea that I had. I stuck the dime in the machine, and took my second bottle, this time waiting until the contents settled before opening it.

“Hey, soldier. Mind if I have a sip?”

The voice was sultry and sexy and very female. I jumped just a little at the sound. I hadn’t seen anyone besides Flaherty and the grease monkeys inside, even though I had known, on some level, that other folks were around me. I kept a two-fingered grip on the chilly bottle as I looked up.

A woman was leaning against the building. She wore a checked blouse tied beneath her breasts, tight pants that gathered around her calves, and Keds. She finished off an unfiltered cigarette and flicked it with her thumb and forefinger into the sand on the building’s far side. Her hair was a brownish red, her skin so dark it made me wonder if she were a devotee of that crazy new fad that had women lying in the sun all hours trying to get tan. Her eyes were coal-black but her features were delicate, almost as if someone had taken the image from a Dresden doll and changed its coloring to something else entirely.

“Well?” she said. “I’m outta dimes.”

I opened the bottle and handed it to her. She put its mouth between those lips and sucked. I felt a shiver run down my back. For a moment, it felt as if I hadn’t left Italy.

Then she pulled the bottle down, handed it back to me, and wiped the condensation on her thighs. “Thanks,” she said. “I was getting thirsty.”

“That your car in there?” I managed.

She nodded. “It made lots of pretty blue smoke and a helluva groan when I tried to start it up. And here I thought it only needed gas.”

Her laugh was deep and self-deprecating, but beneath it I thought I heard fear.

“How long they been working on it?”

“Most of the day,” she said. “God knows how much it’s going to cost.”

“Have you asked?”

“Sure.” She held out her hand, and I gave the bottle back to her, even though I hadn’t yet taken a drink. “They don’t know either.”

She tipped the bottle back and took another swig. I watched her drink and so did most of the men in the place. Jed was leaning on the car, his face half hidden in the shadows. I could sense rather than see his expression. It was that same flatness I’d seen just before he lit into the girl outside school. I didn’t know if I was causing the look just by being there, or if he’d already made a pass at this woman, and failed.

“You’re not from McCardle,” I said.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and gave the bottle back to me. “Does it show?” she asked, grinning.

The grin transformed all her strange features, making her into one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. I took a sip from the bottle simply to buy myself some time, and tasted her on the glass rim. Suddenly it seemed as if the heat of the day had grown more intense. I drank more than I intended, and pulled the bottle away only when my body threatened to burp the liquid back up.

“You just visiting?” I asked which was the only way I could get the answer I really wanted. She wasn’t wearing a ring; I suspected she was here for a quickie divorce.

“Taking in the sights, starting with Flaherty’s here,” she said. “Anything else I shouldn’t miss?”

I almost answered her seriously before I caught that grin again. “There’s not much to the place,” I said.

“Except a soldier boy, going home,” she said.

“Does it show?” I asked and we both laughed. Then I finished the second bottle, put it in the wooden crate with the first, and flipped her a dime.

“The next one’s on me,” I said, as I made my way back to the Ford.

“You’re the first hospitable person I’ve met here,” she said and I should’ve heard it then, that plea, that subtle request for help.

Instead, I smiled. “I’m sure you’ll meet others,” I said and left.

* * *

Kinda strange I can remember it detail for detail, word for word. If I close my eyes and concentrate, the taste of her mingled with Coke comes back as if I had just experienced it; the way her laugh rasped and the sultry warmth of her voice are just outside my earshot.

Only now the memory has layers: the way I felt it, the way I remembered it at various times in my life, and the understanding I have now.

None of it changes anything.

It can’t.

No matter what, she’s still dead.

* * *

I was asleep when Sheriff Conner showed up at the door at ten a.m. two mornings later. I was usually up with the dawn, but after two nights in my childhood bed, I’d finally found a way to be comfortable. Seems the bed was child-sized, and I had grown several inches in my four years away. The bed was a sign to me that I didn’t have long in my parents’ home, and I knew it. I didn’t belong here anyway. I was an adult full grown, a man who’d spent his time away from home. Trying to fit in around these people was like trying to sleep in my old bed: every time I moved I realized I had grown beyond them.

When Sheriff Conner arrived, my mother woke me with a sharp shake of the shoulder. She frowned at me, as if I had embarrassed her, and then she vanished from my room. I pulled on a pair of khakis that were wrinkled from my overnight case, and combed my hair with my fingers. I grabbed a shirt as I wandered barefoot into the living room.

Sheriff Conner was a big man with skin that turned beet-red in the Nevada sun. His blond hair was cropped so short that the top of his head sunburned. He hadn’t changed since I was a boy. He was still too large for his uniform, and his watch dug red lines into the flesh of his wrist. I always wondered how he could be comfortable in those tight clothes in that heat, but, except for the dots of perspiration around his face, he never seemed to notice.

“You grew some,” he said as the screen door slammed behind my mother.

“Yep,” I said.

“Your folks say you saw action.”

“A bit.”

He grunted and his bright blue eyes skittered away from mine. In that moment, I realized he had been too young for World War I, and too old for this war, and he was one of those men who wanted to serve, no matter what the cause. I wasn’t that kind of man, only I learned it later when I contemplated Korea and the mess we were making there.

“I guess you just got to town,” he said.

“Two days ago.”

“And when you drove in, you stopped at Flaherty’s first, but didn’t get no gas.” His tone had gotten sharper. He was easing into the questions he felt he needed to ask me.

“I was thirsty. It’s a long drive across that desert.”

He smiled then, revealing a missing tooth on his upper left side. “You bought a soda.”

“Two,” I said.

“And shared one.”

So that was it. Something to do with the girl. I stiffened, waiting. Sometimes girls who came onto a man like that didn’t like the rejection. I hadn’t gone looking for her over to the hotel. Maybe she had taken offense and told a lie or two about me. Or maybe her soon-to-be ex-husband had finally arrived and had taken an instant dislike to me. Maybe Sheriff Conner had come to warn me about that.

“You make it your policy to share your drinks with a nigra?”

“Excuse me?” I asked. I could lie now and say I was shocked at his word choice, but this was 1946, long before political correctness came into vogue, almost a decade before the official start of the Civil Rights movement, although the seeds of it were in the air.

No. I wasn’t shocked because of his language. I was shocked at myself. I was shocked that I had shared a drink with a black woman—although in those days, I probably would have called her colored not to give too much offense.

“A whole buncha people saw you talk to her, share a Coke with her, and buy her another one. A few said it looked like there was an attraction. Couple others coulda sworn you was flirting.”

I had been flirting. I hadn’t seen her as black—and yes, back then, it would have made a difference to me. I’ve learned a lot about racial tolerance since, and a lot more about intolerance. I wasn’t an offensive racist in those days, just a passive one. A man who kept to his own side of the street and didn’t mingle, just as he was supposed to do.

I would never have flirted if I had known. No matter how beautiful she was. But that hair, those features all belied what I had been taught. I had thought the darkness of her skin due to tanning not to heredity.

I had seen what I had wanted to see.

Sheriff Conner was watching me think. God knows what kind of expressions had crossed my face, but whatever they were, they weren’t good.

“Well?” he asked.

“Is it against the law now to buy a woman a drink on a hot summer day?” I asked.

“Might be,” he said, “if that woman shows up dead the next day.”

“Dead?” I whispered.

He nodded.

“I never saw her before,” I said.

“So you usually just go up and share a drink with a nigra woman you never met.”

“I didn’t know she was colored,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows at me.

“She was in the shade,” I said and realized how weak that sounded.

The Sheriff laughed. “And all pussy’s the same in the dark, ain’t it?” he said, and slapped my leg. I’d heard worse, much worse, in the army but it didn’t shock me like he just had. I’d never heard Sheriff Conner be crude, although my father always said he was. Apparently the Sheriff was only crude to adults. To children he was the model of decorum.

I wasn’t a child any longer.

“How’d she die?” I asked.

“Blow to the head.”

“At the station?”

“In the desert. Her pants was gone, and that scrap of fabric that passed for a blouse was underneath her.”

The desert. Someone had to take her there. I felt myself go cold.

“I didn’t know her,” I said, and if she had been a white woman, he might have believed me. But in McCardle, in those years and before, a man like me didn’t flirt with—hell, a man like me didn’t talk to—a woman like her.

“Then what was she doing here?” he asked.

“Getting a divorce?”

“Girls like her don’t get a divorce.”

That rankled me, even then. “So what do they do?”

He didn’t answer. “She wasn’t here for no divorce.”

“Have you investigated it?”

“Hell, no. Can’t even find her purse.”‘

“Well, did you trace the license on the car?”

He frowned at me then. “What car?”

“The ones the guys were fixing, the green car. They had it nearly taken apart.”

“And it was hers?”

“That’s what she said.” At least, that was what I thought she said. I suddenly couldn’t remember her exact words, although they would come to me later.

The whole scene would come to me later, like it was something I made up, like a dream that was only half there upon waking and then came, full-blown and unbidden, into the mind.

That your car? I said to her, and she didn’t answer, at least not directly. She didn’t say yes or no.

“Did you check with the boys at the station?” I asked.

“They didn’t say nothing about a car.”

“Did you ask Jed?”

The sheriff frowned at me. I’d forgotten until then that he and Jed were drinking buddies. “Yeah, of course I did.”

“Well, I can’t be the only one to remember it,” I said. “They had it torn apart.”

“Izzat so?” he asked, stroking his chin. “You think that’s important?”

“If it tells you who she is, it is,” I said, a bit stunned at his denseness.

“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t seem to be thinking of that. He seemed focused on something else altogether. The look that crossed his face was half sad, half worried. Then he heaved himself out of the chair, and left without even a good-bye.

I sat on the sofa, wondering what, exactly, that all meant. I was still shaken by my own blindness, and by the Sheriff’s willingness to accuse me of a crime that seemed impossible to me.

It seemed impossible that a woman that vibrant could be dead.

It seemed impossible that a woman that vibrant had been black.

It seemed impossible, but there it was. It startled me.

I was more shocked at her color than at her death.

And that was the hell of it.

* * *

I tried not to think of it.

I’d learned how to do that during the war—it’s what helped me survive Normandy—and it had been effective during my tour.

But it stopped working about a week later when her family showed up.

They came for the body, and they seemed a lot more out of place than she had. Her father was a big man, the kind most folks in McCardle would have crossed the street to avoid or would have bullied out of fear. Her mother was delicate, with the same Dresden features as her daughter but on much darker skin. The auburn hair didn’t seem to come from either of them.

And with them was her husband. He wore a uniform, like I did, and his eyes were red as if he’d been crying for a long, long time. I saw them come out of the mortuary, the parents with their arms around each other, the husband walking alone.

The husband threw me, and made me even more uncomfortable than I had already been.

I thought she had flirted with me.

I usually didn’t mistake those things.

But, it seemed, I made a whole lot of mistakes in that short half hour I had known her.

They drove out that night with her body in the back of their truck. I knew that because my conscience forced me over to the hotel to talk to them, to ask them about the green car, and to tell them I was sorry.

When I got there, I learned that the only hotel in McCardle—my family’s hotel—didn’t take their kind. Maybe that, more than an assumption, explained the Sheriff’s remark: Girls like her didn’t get a divorce.

Maybe they didn’t, at least not in McCardle, because the town made sure they couldn’t, unless they had some place to stay.

And there weren’t blacks in McCardle then. The blacks didn’t start arriving for another year.

* * *

The next day, I moved, over my mother’s protests, into my own apartment. It was a single room with a hot plate and a small icebox over the town’s only restaurant. I shared a bathroom with three other tenants, and counted myself fortunate to have two windows. The place came furnished, and the Murphy bed was long enough for me, although even with fans I had trouble sleeping. The building kept the heat of the day, and not even the temperature drop after sunset could ease it. On those unbearable summer nights, I lay in tangled sheets, the smell of greasy hamburgers and chicken-fried steak carried on the breeze. I counted it better than being at home.

Especially after the nightmares started.

Strangely they weren’t about her. Nor were they about the war. I didn’t have nightmares about that war for twenty years, not until I started seeing images from Vietnam on television. Then a different set of nightmares came, and I went to the VA where I was diagnosed with a delayed stress reaction and given a whole passel of drugs that I eventually pitched.

No. Those early nightmares were about him. Her husband. The man with the olive green uniform and the red eyes. I knew guys like him. They walked with their backs straight, their faces impassive. They didn’t move unless they had to, and they never talked back, and if they showed emotion, it was because they thought guys like me weren’t looking.

He hadn’t cared about hiding any more. His emotion had been too deep.

And once Sheriff Conner figured out I had nothing to do with it, he’d declared the case closed. Over dinner the night before I left, my father speculated that Conner’d just shown up to show my father who was boss. Mother’d ventured that Conner hoped I was guilty, so it’d bring down the whole power structure of the town.

Instead, I think, it just brought Conner down. He was out of office by the following year, and the year after that he was dead, a victim of a slow-speed single vehicle drunken car crash in the days before seat belts.

I think no one would have known what happened if it hadn’t been for those nightmares. I’d dream in that dry, dry heat of him just standing there, looking at me, eyes red, face impassive. Her body was in the green car beside us, and he would stare at me, as if I knew something, as if I were keeping something from him.

But how could I have known anything? I’d shared a Coke with her and gone on.

I hadn’t even bothered to learn her name.

* * *

In the sixties they called what I was feeling white liberal guilt. Not that I had done anything wrong, mind you, but if I had known what she was—who she was—I would have acted differently. I knew it, and it bothered me.

It almost bothered me more than the fact she was dead.

Although that bothered me too. That, and the dreams. And the green car.

I went to Flaherty’s soon after the dreams started and filled up my tank. I got myself another Coke and I stared at the spot where I had seen her. The shadows were dark there, but not that dark. The air was cool but not that cool, and only someone who was waiting for a car would choose to wait in that spot, on that day, with a real town nearby. She must have been real thirsty to ask me for a drink.

Real thirsty and real scared.

And maybe she took one look at my uniform, and thought I’d be able to help her.

She even tried to ask.

You’re the first hospitable person I’ve met here, she’d said.

I’m sure you’ll meet others.

What she must have thought of that sentence.

How wrong I’d been.

I took my Coke and walked around the place, seeing lots of cars half finished, and even more car parts, but nothing of that particular shade of green.

Her family had taken her home in a truck.

The car was missing.

And as I leaned on the back of that brick building, the bottle cold in my hand, I wondered. Had the mechanics started working on the car because they too hadn’t realized who she was? Had she gotten all the way to Nevada traveling white highways and hiding her darker-than-expected skin under a trail of moxie?

I went into the mechanic’s bay, and Jed was there, putting oil into a 1937 Ford truck that had seen better days. A younger man stood beside him, and I wagered from the cut of his pants and the constant movement of his feet, that he’d been the guy under the car that day.

I leaned against the wall, sipping my Coke, and watched them.

They got quiet when they saw me. I grinned at them. I wasn’t wearing my uniform that day, just a pair of grimy dungarees and a t-shirt. Even so, I was hot and miserable, and probably looked it.

I tilted my bottle toward them in a kinda salute. The younger man, the one I didn’t recognize, nodded back.

“You seen that girl the other day?” I asked. I might have said more. I try not to remember. I can’t believe the language we used then: Japs and niggers and wops; the way we got gypped or jewed down; laughing at the pansies and whistling at the dames. And we didn’t think nothing of it, at least I didn’t. Each word had to be unlearned, just as—I guess—it had to be learned.

Jed put a hand on his friend’s arm, a small subtle movement I almost didn’t see. “Why’re you askin’?” And I could feel it, that old antipathy between us. Every word we’d ever exchanged, every look we had was buried in those words.

He wouldn’t talk to me, not really. He wouldn’t tell me what I needed to know. But his friend might. I had to play that at least.

“I was wondering if she’s living around here.” I said with an intentional leer.

“You don’t know?” the younger asked.

My heart triple-hammered. I knew then that the sheriff hadn’t told anyone he’d come after me. “Know what?”

“They found her in the desert with her face bashed in.”

“Jesus,” I said softly, then whistled for good measure. “What happened?”

“Dunno,” Jed said, his hand squeezing the other boy’s arm. Jed saw my gaze drop to his fingers, and then go back to his face. He grinned, like we were sharing a secret. And I didn’t like what I was thinking.

It seemed simple. Too simple. Impossibly simple. A man couldn’t just sense that another man had done something wrong. He needed proof.

“Too damn bad,” I said, taking another swig of my Coke. “I woulda liked a piece of that.”

“You and half the town,” the younger one said, and laughed nervously.

Jed didn’t laugh with him, but stared at me with narrowed green eyes. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear of it,” he said. “The whole town’s been talking.”

I shrugged. “Maybe I wasn’t listening.” I set the Coke down beside the radio and scanned the bay. “What’re they gonna do with that car of hers? Sell it?”

“Ain’t no one found it,” the younger boy said.

“She drove it outta here?” I asked. “She said it seemed hopeless.”

Finally Jed grinned. He actually looked merry, as if we were talking about the weather instead of a murder. “Women always say that.”

I didn’t smile back. “What was wrong with it?”

“You name it,” the younger one said. “She’d driven that thing to death.”

I knew one more question would be too many, but I couldn’t stop myself. “She say why?”

“You gotta reason for all this interest, George?” Jed asked. “You can’t get nothing from her now.”

“Guess not,” I said. “Just seems curious somehow. Woman comes here, to this town, and ends up dead.”

“Don’t seem curious to me,” Jed said. “She didn’t belong here.”

I stared at him a moment. “People don’t belong a lotta places but that don’t mean they need to die.”

He shrugged and turned away, ending the conversation. I picked up my Coke bottle. It had gotten warm already. I took another sip, letting the sweet lemony taste and the carbonation make up for the lack of coolness.

Then I went outside.

What did I want with all this? To get rid of some guilt? To make the dreams go away?

I didn’t know, and it angered me.

“Hey.” It was the younger one. He’d come out into the sun, ostensibly to smoke. He lit up a Chesterfield and offered me one. I took it to be companionable, and we lit off the same match.

Jed peeked out of the bay and watched for a moment, then disappeared, apparently satisfied that nothing was going to be said, probably thinking he had the kid under his thumb. Only Jed was wrong.

The younger one spoke softly, so softly I had to strain to hear, and I was standing next to him. “She said she was driving from Mississippi to California to join her husband. Said he’d got back from Europe and got a job in some plant in Los Angeles. Said they’d make good money there, but they didn’t have it now, and could we do as little as possible on the car, so that it’d be cheap.”

“Did you?” I asked. And when he looked confused, I added for clarification, “Keep it cheap?”

He took a long drag off the cigarette, and let the smoke out his nose. “We didn’t finish,” he said.

I felt that triple-hammer again. A little bit of adrenaline, something to let me know that I was going somewhere. “So where’s the car?”

“We left it in the bay. Next morning, we come back and it’s gone. Jed, there, he cusses her out, says all them people are like that, you can’t trust ’em for nothing, and that was that. Till the sheriff showed up, saying she was dead.”

The car I saw couldn’t have been driven, and the woman I saw couldn’t have fixed it. She would not have stopped here if she could.

“You left the car in pieces?” I asked. “And it was gone the next day? Someone drove it out of here?”

He shrugged. “Guess they finished it.”

“That would’ve taken some know-how, wouldn’t it?”

“Some,” he said. He flicked his cigarette butt onto the sandy gravel. I glanced up. Jed was staring us from the bay. I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise.

I took another drag off my cigarette and watched a heat shimmer work its way down the highway. The boy started walking away from me.

“Where was she?” I asked. “When you left? Where was she?”

And I think he knew then that my interest wasn’t really casual. Up until that point, he could have pretended it was. But at that moment, he knew.

“I dunno,” he said, and his voice was flat.

“Sure you do,” I said. I spoke softly so Jed couldn’t overhear me.

The man looked at my face. His had turned bright red, and beads of sweat I hadn’t noticed earlier were dotting his skin. “I—left her outside. Near the Coke machine.”

With a car that didn’t run, and no place to take her in for the night.

“Did you offer to give her a lift somewhere?”

He shook his head.

“Was the station still open when you left?”

“For another hour,” he said.

“Did you tell the sheriff this?”

He shook his head again.

“Why not?”

He glanced at Jed, who had crossed his arms and was leaning against the bay doors. “I didn’t think it was none of his business,” the boy whispered.

“You didn’t think, or Jed there, he didn’t think.”

“Neither of us,” the boy said. “Jed told her she could sleep in there by the car. But it woulda been an oven, even during the night. I think she knew that.”

“Is that where she slept?”

“I dunno.” This time the boy did not meet my gaze. Sweat ran off his forehead, onto his chin, and dripped on his shirt. He didn’t know, and he was sorry.

And so was I.

If I was going to pursue this logically, then I had to think logically. And it seemed to me that whoever killed the girl had known about the car. I couldn’t believe she would have talked to anyone else—I suspected she only spoke to me because I was in uniform. And if I made that assumption, then the only other people who would have known about her, about the car, about the entire business were the people who worked the station.

“Who was working that night?” I asked.

“Mr. Flaherty,” he said.

Mr. Flaherty. Mac Flaherty, whom I’d known since I was a boy. He was a hard decent man who expected work out of his employees, payment from his customers, and good money for a job well done. I’d seen Mac Flaherty in his station, at church, and at school getting his son, and I couldn’t believe he had killed someone.

But then, I had. I had killed a lot of boys overseas, and I would have killed more if Hitler hadn’t proved he was a coward and did the world a favor by dying by his own hand.

And the Mac Flaherty who ran the station now wasn’t the same man as the one I’d known. I’d learned that much in my few short days in McCardle.

A shiver ran down my back. Then I headed inside, looking for Mac Flaherty, and finding him.

* * *

Mac Flaherty was drunk. Not falling down, noticeable drunk, but his daily drunk, the kind that made a man a bit blurry around the edges, kept him from feeling the pain of day-to-day living, and kept him working a job he no longer liked.

Once Flaherty’d loved his work. It had been obvious in the booming way he’d greet new customers, in the smile he wore every day whether going or coming from work.

But then he left for the war, like I did, only he came back in ’43 minus three fingers on his left hand to find his wife shacking up with the local undertaker, and a half-sibling for his son baking in the oven. The wife, not him, took advantage of the McCardle’s divorce laws, and Flaherty was never the same. She and the undertaker left that week, and apparently, Flaherty never saw his kid again.

I went inside the service station’s main area, and the smell of beer mixed with the stench of gasoline. Flaherty was clutching a can, staring at me.

“You harassing the kid?” he asked.

“No,” I said, even though I felt that wasn’t entirely true. “I was just curious about the woman who died.”

“She something to you?” Flaherty asked.

“Only met her the once,” I said.

“Then what’s the interest?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and we both seemed surprised by my honesty. “Your boy says he left her sitting outside. That true?”

Flaherty shrugged. “I never saw her. Not when I locked up.”

“What about her car?”

“Her car,” he repeated dully. “Her car. I had it towed.”

“At night?”

“That morning,” he said. “When it became clear she skipped out on me.”

“Towed where?” I asked.

“My place,” he said. “For parts.”

And those parts had probably already been taken, along with anything incriminating. I didn’t say that aloud, though.

“You have any idea who killed her?” I asked.

“What do you care?” he asked, gaze suddenly back on me, and sharper than I would have expected.

I thought of Jed then, Jed as I’d seen him that day, staring at me, that flat look on his face. “If Jed killed her—”

“I didn’t see Jed touch nobody,” Flaherty said. “And I wouldn’t say if I did.”

I froze. “Why not?”

Flaherty frowned, his eyes small and bloodshot. “He’s the best mechanic I got.”

“But if he killed someone—”

“He didn’t kill no one.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“What happened, happened,” Flaherty said. “Let’s not go wrecking more lives.” Then he grabbed the bottle of beer he’d been nursing, and took a sip, his crippled hand looking unbalanced in the grimy afternoon light.

* * *

By the time I got back with the sheriff, Jed was gone. Not that it mattered. The case went down on the books as unsolved. What else could it have been with the other kid denying he’d even talked to me, and Mac Flaherty swearing that the girl’d been fine when he drove by at midnight, fine and unwilling to leave her post near the Coke machine. He’d winked at the sheriff when he’d told that story, and the sheriff seemed to accept it all.

I went to Jed’s apartment, and found the door open, all his clothes missing, and a neighbor who said that Jed had run in, not even bothering to change, and packed a bag, took some money from a jam jar he’d had under his bed, and disappeared down the highway, never to be seen again.

He’d been driving one of Flaherty’s rebuilds.

When I found out, I told the sheriff, and the sheriff’d been unimpressed. “Man can leave town if’n he wants,” the sheriff said. “Don’t mean he killed nobody.”

No, I suppose it didn’t. But it seemed like a huge coincidence to me, the girl getting beaten to death, Jed watching us talk, and then, when he knew I’d left for the law, disappearing like he did.

It was just the sheriff saw no percentage in pursing the case. It’d been interesting when he could come after me because of my family, because of the power we had, but it soon lost its appeal when the girl’s family took her away. Took her away, and pointed the finger at a good local boy, a mechanic who could down some beers and tell great jokes, who’d gone off to serve his country same as the rest of us. Jed had had worth to the sheriff; the girl had had none.

* * *

I don’t know why he killed her. We’ll never know now. Jed disappeared but good, and wasn’t heard from until five years ago, when what was left of his family got an obituary mailed to them from somewhere in Canada. He’d died not saying a word—

* * *

Sorry. Got interrupted there. Was going to come back to it this afternoon, but things changed this morning.

About nine a.m., I walked into my front room, buttoning one of my best shirts in preparation for yet another meeting with that pretty doctor down at the glass-and-chrome White Elephant, when I saw Sarah sitting in my best chair, feet on the footstool my granny hand-stitched, and all forty hand-written pages of this memory in her hands. She was reading raptly which I found flattering for the half second it took to realize what she was doing. I didn’t want any one to read this stuff until I was dead, and here was my granddaughter staring at the pages as if they were something outta Stephen King.

She looked up at me, her heart-shaped face so like Sally Anne’s at that age that it made my breath catch, and said, “So you think you’re some bad guy for failing this woman.”

I shook my head, but the movement didn’t stop her.

“You,” she says, “who’ve done more for people—black, white or purple—than anyone else in this town. You, who went and opened that civil rights law practice back east, who fought every racist law and every racist politician you could find. For godssake, Gramps, you marched with Dr. King, and you were a presidential advisor on Civil Rights. You’re the kinda man who shows the rest of us how to live our lives, and you’re feeling like this? You’re being silly.”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

“Damn straight,” she said, and I winced, as I always do, at the sailor language she uses. “You shouldn’t be mulling over this any more. You did what you could, and more, it seems, than anyone else.”

“And even that wasn’t enough.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “that happens, Gramps. You know that. Hell, you taught it to me.”

Seems I did. But that wasn’t the point either, and I didn’t know how to tell her. So I didn’t. I took the papers from her, put them back on my desk where they belonged, and let her drive me to the doctor so that they both could feel useful.

And all the way there and all the way back, I thought about how to make my point so that girls like her would understand. You see, the world is so different now, and yet it’s still the same. Just the faces change, and a few of the rules.

These days, Jed would’ve been arrested, or the sheriff would’ve been bounced out of office, or the press’d make some huge scandal over the whole thing.

But it wouldn’t be that simple, because pretty women don’t approach strange men any more, especially if the strange men are in uniform, and pretty women certainly don’t wait alone in gas stations while their cars are being repaired.

But they’re still dying, because they’re women or because they’re black or because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there’s so damn many of them we just shrug and move on, shaking our heads as we go.

But that isn’t my point. My point is this:

I wouldn’t have marched with Dr. King if it weren’t for that poor girl, and I wouldn’t have made it my life’s work to stamp out all the things that cause the condition I found myself in that hot afternoon, the condition that would have led me to ignore a girl if I’d noticed the true color of her skin.

Because I think I know why she died that day. I think she died because she’d flirted with me.

And that just wasn’t done between girls like her and men like me.

Jed wouldn’t have taken her to the desert if she were white. He would’ve thought she had family, she had someone who missed her. He might have roughed her up for talking to me. He might have had a few words with me.

But he didn’t. I did something unspeakable to people of our generation, and he saw a way to get back at me. If I’d talked to her, then I’d want to do what was probably done to her before she died. And if she’d fought, then I’d have bashed her. That’s what the sheriff was thinking. That’s what Jed wanted him to think.

And all because of who she was, and who I was, and who Jed was.

The sad irony is that if I’d kept my place, she’d be alive, and because I didn’t, she was dead. That had bothered me then, and bothers me now. Seems a man—any man—should be able to talk to whomever he wants. But what bothered me worse was the fact that when I learned, on the same morning, that she was black and that she was dead, it bothered me more that she was black and that I had talked to her.

It just wasn’t done.

And I was more worried about my own blindness than I was about one woman’s life.

Since that day, hers is the face I see every morning when I wake up, and every night when I doze. And, if God gave me the chance to relive any day in my life, it’d be that one, not, strangely, the day I enlisted or the day I deliberately misunderstood that German kid asking for clemency, but the day I inadvertently led a pretty girl to her death.

White liberal guilt maybe.

Or maybe it was the last straw, somehow.

Or maybe it was the fact that I had so much trouble learning her name.

Learning her name was harder than learning the identity of the man who killed her. It took me three more weeks and a bribe to the twelve-year-old son of the owner of the funeral home.

Not that her name really mattered. To me or to anyone else.

But it mattered to her, and to that man in uniform with the red, red eyes. Because it was the only bit of her that couldn’t be sold for parts. The only bit she could call completely hers.

Lucille Johnson.

Not quite as exotic as I would have thought, or as fitting to a woman as beautiful as she was. But it was hers. And in the end, it was all she had.

It was a detail.

An important detail.

And one I’ll never forget.

 

___________________________________________

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

Details

Copyright © 2018 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1998
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2018 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Amuzica/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.

You’ve probably noticed that we really upped our design game at WMG Publishing in the past year. Some of that is due to the new designers we’ve brought on board, but some of it is because Stephanie Writt has a lot of design experience using modern tools like Canva.

In combination with Dean, whose done more book covers than anyone I know, they’re working together to come up with really pretty books.

Every Friday, they do a seminar together called Writer Direct, which helps writers go directly to the readers, through indie publishing and marketing. (It’s open to anyone for a monthly fee.) For the past six months, the writers who attend have asked Dean and Steph to do a workshop on covers.

Once they started brainstorming, they realized they could do workshops on covers and interiors and Kickstarter.

These courses are designed to take a writer who has never designed anything and have them making gorgeous books by the end of the class. I’m their guinea pig. (Dyslexic girl. If they can get me to do it, anyone can do it.)

The nice thing about these, though, is that there are design tricks in the new programs that long-time designers don’t know. So there’s an entire section for people who have been making covers and designing books for years.

The classes won’t start for a few weeks, but we’re offering an early bird sale on these, which is buy two and get the third free. (In other words, save $500.) Or just buy one and save $100 off the price. Find out more information here.

When you follow that link, you’ll see another class from me. I’m doing short classes on techniques that I can teach quickly. After finishing the difficult senses—smell and taste (which I taught together)—those who came to the webinar asked for similar classes on the remaining three senses.

So, I’m going from hardest to easiest. The next one is on touch. It starts right after I finish the in-person Gothic workshop next week.

Finally, Dean and I are finishing up the next installment in The Kris & Dean Show Goes To the Movies. We’re doing Ocean’s 11 (the 2001 version). I’m the one who picked that because I’ve been meaning to examine that film very closely.

Turns out it’s even more useful than I thought it would be. This class will teach you all about how to feed information to a reader so that they don’t notice the important stuff until you want them to. It’ll also show you how to establish characters quickly, and how to handle an extremely complicated storyline with verve and clarity.

We’re having a great time doing this one, and it’ll go live next week.

So take a look and see if there’s a class for you.

Like to read? Like to knit? Like socks? Like fantasy?

Then this is the Kickstarter project for you.

Here, in a nutshell, is what it is:

Socks & Sorcery will have four themed collector’s boxes, each delivered three times over the course of a year. Every box contains:

•  A Surprise fantasy novel in the format of your choice (ebook, paperback or audiobook)
•  100g skein of exclusively dyed fingering weight yarn inspired by something from the book
• A 20g contrasting mini skein perfect for crafting heels and toes
• Delightful surprises to enhance your reading and crafting journey. 

Mix and match any of the four themes—Dragons, Familiars, Witches and Vampires, or Faeries—or get them all for a box delivered each month for a year!

There are lots of great writers contributing books to this project including T. Thorn Coyle, Anthea Sharp, Leslie Claire Walker, and Thomas K. Carpenter. The first book in my Fey series, Sacrifice, is also a part of the project.

This project is a lot of fun, and I’m pleased to take part in it. I hope you join us!

I do most of my business writing on Patreon these days, but roughly once per month, I’ll put a post for free on this website. This post initially went live on my Patreon page on March 30, 2025.  If you go to Patreon, you’ll find other posts like this one.

Putting Yourself Out There

I’m gearing back up to return to the university in the fall. After a heck of a couple of years, I’m resuming my very slow attempt to get a few extra college degrees. Mostly, it’s an excuse to listen to people much younger than myself learn cool stuff, and an excuse to listen to people somewhat younger than myself share their expertise.

I get inspired by all of that.

I’m searching class schedules and realizing that my Spanish has gotten rusty again, so there is probably a summertime online refresher in the complicated tenses on the horizon. Even though, really, using the proper tense is not my problem so much as finding the correct vocabulary word. As in any word that might suit in that circumstance. The vocabulary was the first thing to flee my brain in the hiatus.

The thing that fascinates me the most, though, is watching the theater kids, particularly those who are (at 18, 19, or 20) convinced they’re going to be Actors! (and yes, the exclamation point is there for a reason). Most won’t be, not because they’re not good enough, but because they don’t listen well and they already think they’re God’s gift to the profession.

Mostly, I watch the ones who are insecurely secure in their dreams. These kids know exactly what they want in their lives, but they’re not sure they’re good enough to get there, so they work extra hard to figure out where they should be.

Sometimes it is not where they expect to be. In the theater department in particular, they have to take courses in all aspects of theater, and they sometimes learn that they love a part of theater that they hadn’t expected to like at all.

Surprisingly enough to my younger self, the one who didn’t have the courage to follow her musical abilities into a music degree or to even walk into the theater department at the University of Wisconsin, there are a lot of introverts in theater. Some of those introverts are writers, yes, but many go onstage and perform. Most, in fact, because they like being someone else in front of a group. It’s safer for them.

I get safe. It makes sense. I also get the fear of doing something revealing in front of a crowd. Mostly, that fear is gone for me now. Years of public speaking and talking on panels at sf conventions eased my mind.

Still, I was pretty shocked when I learned that a lot of actors and musicians suffer severe stage fright—people you’ve all heard of. If they have to go onstage, they sit in the dressing room and shake, or, in some cases, puke, because they’re so scared.

Had I known that…well, I doubt I would have done it, because puking is not something I voluntarily do, even for art…but it certainly would have eased my mind about what for me is relatively minor stage fright (in comparison to what these folks have).

Really, though, it’s what they are willing to do for their dreams and their art. They put themselves out there. More importantly, they figure out how to put themselves out there.

Every year, I have a conversation with at least one of my writing students who is terrified for some reason I never probe of putting their work in front of an audience. It always boils down to the fact that they’re afraid of being seen.

Sidebar from a nearly 65-year-old person who has worked in the arts her entire life: You are never seen. Not in your entirety. You may reveal all of your secrets and no one will care. Or they’ll comment on the portrayal of something minor, like the cat, and kvetch about that. It’s disappointing…and freeing.

 

However, the fear of being seen is a real and crippling fear, stopping a lot of prose writers and poets from following their dreams. Writers, unlike actors and musicians, can hide from the world. You can use a pen name, set up a legal entity that doesn’t use your real name (in an obvious manner), and never let your picture out into the world.

You can hide and publish your work. That’s the great thing about being a writer.

Usually when a writer figures out their own personal workaround, they put their work on the market, whatever it means for them.

I had one of those discussions this past week with a couple of different writers, some in person, one online, and when I photo-bombed the Writers’ Block webinar on Wednesday.

After that moment on the webinar, I spent a few hours thinking about how universal that fear is among writers. I’ve been in this business almost fifty years now, and I’ve seen it every year.

Then Dean and I watched a little bit of The Voice. We often watch something to rest our poor brains, usually at dinner. We’ve moved away from news (since there’s no way that will relax anyone), and gone to documentaries and The Voice.

We usually watch a segment or two and then go back to whatever we were doing. It will take us days to watch an entire 2-hour episode.

So that Wednesday night, we watched two members of Michael Bublé’s team duet on a song he wrote, called “Home.” Most of you know it as a super hit for Blake Shelton, but Bublé wrote the song and released it first.

Before the battle, Bublé talked a bit about writing the song. I can’t find the clip for that (mostly because I’m lazy, but also because it’s not that relevant), but I did find the one that caught my attention.

It got me thinking, and I went up to my office and made a list.

Most people who work in the arts realize that their work has to be put out into the world.

• People who write music must perform that music to sell that song/sonata/whatever. They may be terrible singers. They might be shy as hell. But they need to make, at minimum, a demo tape.

Often they perform their own work, in some kind of concert, and it is that work that ends up catapulting them into whatever level of fame they will reach.

And then, partly because of the vagaries of the (exceedingly complex) music copyright laws, they may hear someone else cover their song. They might be like John Legend, who has said on The Voice that he cannot listen to a cover of one of his songs fairly. Or they might be like Bublé who not only assigned the song, but was honored by the way the singers performed it.

• People who write plays write them with production in mind. What is the point of writing a play if it’s just going to languish on your desk? The problem, though, with writing a play is that when it is performed, there will be an area that the performers cannot do or cannot say.

In early drafts of a play, the playwright will have to be nearby to do some kind of work to smooth out that section. Sometimes it’s because the star is a doofus and can’t say a word with more than two syllables, but mostly it’s because that section of the show, when performed in previews, did not work. Neil Simon deals with this a lot in his autobiography Rewrites.

• People who write screenplays know that they’re writing something that will be performed as well. I had a very famous writer friend who wrote the wordiest damn screenplays ever and had, in his contract, a clause that said not a word could be touched.

After his early years in Hollywood (when he didn’t have enough clout to have that stupid contract), he rarely sold a screenplay and when he did, it was a charity sale from a friend who would buy the screenplay so that the writer could retain his Writers Guild membership. (And then the charity friend would do a shooting script.)

• Artists know that their paintings or photographs will be displayed or used on covers or put on t-shirts and prints and everything else.

Even the lowest of the low, graffiti “artists,” the ones who deface buildings, understand that their art needs to be seen. (I’m grumpy about graffiti these days since Vegas has a lot of wall murals all over the city—and the freakin’ graffiti “artists” will deface them. Grrr. I hate people who deface other people’s art.)

• Even young poets these days understand that they might have to get up in front of a crowd at a poetry slam and declaim their poem.
• And let’s not talk about comedians, who are also writers, who get in front of a crowd, and risk bombing night after night after night. Dean and I saw one of George Carlin’s shows in his last years, and Carlin was testing material so new that he was holding paper torn from a notepad.

Some of it was funny. Much of it was not.

Fiction writers—people who write novels and short stories—are the only artists I know who expect someone else to publish their work. Fiction writers, particularly those who are traditionally published, believe that all they have to do is write it, and everyone will flock to their feet.

That’s an ingrained attitude, and a hard one to fight. Heck, a lot of these writers are worried when they decide to give a copy of their manuscript to an editor at a book publishing house or (worse) an agent.

Writers do not expect to have their work in the public view, and often fear it.

I’m not sure why this is. I think it’s just part of the culture.

There are movies that show writers at work, and someone else dragging that “brilliant” manuscript off the writer’s desk. Or the writer “gets discovered” in an English class (never happened when I was in school). Or someone else mailed off their manuscript.

That myth goes hand in hand with the idea that writing should be hard and writers should suffer while doing it. That myth also goes with the idea that anything written fast is terrible and anything labored over is brilliant. And that myth goes with the idea that being prolific is a sin. (Tell that to Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare.)

Indie writers have a similar problem, but it’s couched in other terms. I don’t want to learn how to publish. That’s going to be hard. It’ll take too much money or I can’t do covers or…or…

Okay, I want to reply, whatever roadblocks you want to set up for your work, go ahead.

But real artists—be they musicians or painters or (yes) writers—need to have their work seen. They need to figure out how to get on that stage despite their stage fright and put their art in front of an audience.

Otherwise the art will be destroyed when they die, tossed out with the trash or deleted off their computers.

Oh…and let’s talk “covers” for a minute. Blake Shelton’s version of “Home” is very different from Bublé’s version, which is different from the duet that aired on The Voice this past week.

If you’re lucky as a writer, and if you put yourself out there, at some point, someone will want to do make another piece of art using yours as inspiration. Maybe a movie, maybe a TV show, maybe a dramatic reading or an audio book.

That’s a “cover” for lack of a better term. (It really is a derivative work, and it does fall in a different place in the copyright law, but go with me on this for a minute.) Instead of being all protective and saying that you must control all things, say yes…if the contract terms are good.

That’s all.

A singer doesn’t have to get permission to cover a song. I can sing “Home” badly in front of an audience if I want to, but if I get paid for it, I need to let the songwriter know that I’m going to be covering the song. The songwriter cannot say no.

It gets complicated after that. (Okay, it’s already complicated.) But implied in all of this is that the music needs to get in front of an audience. The play will be performed. The screenplay will become the basis for a movie. The painting will hang on a gallery wall.

What makes writer-artists any different? Why should we fight so hard to create something and then be afraid to put it in front of an audience. Particularly since we’ll never see that audience. We don’t have to hear from them either, if we keep our email private and don’t go on social media and don’t read reviews.

What makes fiction writers so dang delicate? Every artist has fears. All of us do. If we want to make a living at our art, we learn to overcome the fear.

It may take a dozen workarounds. It might mean the writing equivalent of puking in the bathroom before stepping on the stage. But if you value your own work and your own dreams, you learn how to get past whatever is stopping you.

Just like other performers do.

“Putting Yourself Out There,” copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Picture of Gavin is there because, despite appearances, he’s terrified of putting himself out there.

 

After receiving a great shock, Grace, a CPA who always lived a cautious life, decides to sell her business and move west, not realizing that the man who bought her business deceived her. Her departure looks like guilt, and suddenly Grace, who only wants peace and quiet, finds herself with a price on her head.

Included in the World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, “Cowboy Grace,” also received an Edgar Award nomination for Best Short Story of the year.

“Cowboy Grace“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

Cowboy Grace By Kristine Kathryn Rusch 

“Every woman tolerates misogyny,” Alex said. She slid her empty beer glass across the bar, and tucked a strand of her auburn hair behind her ear. “How much depends on how old she is. The older she is the less she notices it. The more she expects it.”

“Bullshit.” Carole took a drag on her Virginia Slim, crossed her legs, and adjusted her skirt. “I don’t tolerate misogyny.”

“Maybe we should define the word,” Grace said, moving to the other side of Carole. She wished her friend would realize how much the smoking irritated her. In fact, the entire night was beginning to irritate her. They were all avoiding the topic du jour: the tiny wound on Grace’s left breast, stitches gone now, but the skin still raw and sore.

“Mis-ah-jenny.” Carole said, as if Grace were stupid. “Hatred of women.”

“From the Greek,” Alex said. “Misos or hatred and gyne or women.”

“Not,” Carole said, waving her cigarette as if it were a baton, “misogamy, which is also from the Greek. Hatred of marriage. Hmm. Two male misos wrapped in one.”

The bartender, a diminutive woman dressed wearing a red and white cowgirl outfit, complete with fringe and gold buttons, snickered. She set down a napkin in front of Alex and gave her another beer.

“Compliments,” she said, “of the men at the booth near the phone.”

Alex looked. She always looked. She was tall, busty, and leggy, with a crooked nose thanks to an errant pitch Grace had thrown in the 9th grade, a long chin and eyes the color of wine. Men couldn’t get enough of her. When Alex rebuffed them, they slept with Carole and then talked to Grace.

The men in the booth near the phone looked like corporate types on a junket. Matching gray suits, different ties—all in a complimentary shade of pink, red, or cranberry—matching haircuts (long on top, styled on the sides), and differing goofy grins.

“This is a girl bar,” Alex said, shoving the glass back at the bartender. “We come here to diss men, not to meet them.”

“Good call,” Carole said, exhaling smoke into Grace’s face. Grace agreed, not with the smoke or the rejection, but because she wanted time with her friends. Without male intervention of any kind.

“Maybe we should take a table,” Grace said.

“Maybe.” Carole crossed her legs again. Her mini was leather, which meant that night she felt like being on display. “Or maybe we should send drinks to the cutest men we see.”

They scanned the bar. Happy Hour at the Oh Kaye Corral didn’t change much from Friday to Friday. A jukebox in the corner, playing Patty Loveless. Cocktail waitresses in short skirts and ankle boots with big heels. Tin stars and Wild West art on the walls, unstained wood and checkered tablecloths adding to the effect. One day, when Grace had Alex’s courage and Carole’s gravely voice, she wanted to walk in, belly up to the bar, slap her hand on its polished surface, and order whiskey straight up. She wanted someone to challenge her. She wanted to pull her six-gun and have a stare-down, then and there. Cowboy Grace, fastest gun in the West. Or at least in Racine on a rainy Friday night.

“I don’t see cute,” Alex said. “I see married, married, divorced, desperate, single, single, never-been-laid, and married.”

Grace watched her make her assessment. Alex’s expression never changed. Carole was looking at the men, apparently seeing whether or not she agreed.

Typically, she didn’t.

“I dunno,” she said, pulling on her cigarette. “Never-Been-Laid’s kinda cute.”

“So try him,” Alex said. “But you’ll have your own faithful puppy dog by this time next week, and a proposal of marriage within the month.”

Carole grinned and slid off the stool. “Proposal of marriage in two weeks,” she said. “I’m that good.”

She stubbed out her cigarette, grabbed the tiny leather purse that matched the skirt, adjusted her silk blouse and sashayed her way toward a table in the middle.

Grace finally saw Never-Been-Laid. He had soft brown eyes, and hair that needed trimming. He wore a shirt that accented his narrow shoulders, and he had a laptop open on the round table. He was alone. He had his feet tucked under the chair, crossed at the ankles. He wore dirty tennis shoes with his Gap khakis.

“Cute?” Grace said.

“Shhh,” Alex said. “It’s a door into the mind of Carole.”

“One that should remain closed.” Grace moved to Carole’s stool. It was still warm. Grace shoved Carole’s drink out of her way, grabbed her glass of wine, and coughed. The air still smelled of cigarette smoke.

Carole was leaning over the extra chair, giving Never-Been-Laid a view of her cleavage, and the guys at the booth by the phone a nice look at her ass, which they seemed to appreciate.

“Where the hell did that misogyny comment come from?” Grace asked.

Alex looked at her. “You want to get a booth?”

“Sure. Think Carole can find us?”

“I think Carole’s going to be deflowering a computer geek and not caring what we’re doing.” Alex grabbed her drink, stood, and walked to a booth on the other side of the Corral. Dirty glasses from the last occupants were piled in the center, and the red-and-white checked vinyl tablecloth was sticky.

They moved the glasses on the edge of the table and didn’t touch the dollar tip, which had been pressed into a puddle of beer.

Grace set her wine down and slid onto her side. Alex did the same on the other side. Somehow they managed not to touch the tabletop at all.

“You remember my boss?” Alex asked as she adjusted the tiny fake gas lamp that hung on the wall beside the booth.

“Beanie Boy?”

She grinned. “Yeah.”

“Never met him.”

“Aren’t you lucky.”

Grace already knew that. She’d heard stories about Beanie Boy for the last year. They had started shortly after he was hired. Alex went to the company Halloween party and was startled to find her boss dressed as one of the Lollipop Kids from the Wizard of Oz, complete with striped shirt, oversized lollipop and propeller beanie.

“Now what did he do?” Grace asked.

“Called me honey.”

“Yeah?” Grace asked.

“And sweetie, and doll-face, and sugar.”

“Hasn’t he been doing that for the last year?”

Alex glared at Grace. “It’s getting worse.”

“What’s he doing, patting you on the butt?”

“If he did, I’d get him for harassment, and he knows it.”

She had lowered her voice. Grace could barely hear her over Shania Twain.

“This morning one of our clients came in praising the last report. I wrote it.”

“Didn’t Beanie Boy give you credit?”

“Of course he did. He said, ‘Our little Miss Rogers wrote it. Isn’t she a doll?’”

Grace clutched her drink tighter. This didn’t matter to her. Her biopsy was benign. She had called Alex and Carole and told them. They’d suggested coming here. So why weren’t they offering a toast to her life? Why weren’t they celebrating, really celebrating, instead of rerunning the same old conversation in the same old bar in the same old way? “What did the client do?”

“He agreed, of course.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Is that it? Didn’t you speak up?”

“How could I? He was praising me, for godssake.”

Grace sighed and sipped her beer. Shania Twain’s comment was that didn’t impress her much. It didn’t impress Grace much either, but she knew better than to say anything to Alex.

Grace looked toward the middle of the restaurant. Carole was standing behind Never-Been-Laid, her breasts pressed against his back, her ass on view to the world, her head over his shoulder peering at his computer screen.

Alex didn’t follow her gaze like Grace had hoped. “If I were ten years younger, I’d tell Beanie Boy to shove it.”

“If you were ten years younger, you wouldn’t have a mortgage and a Mazda.”

“Dignity shouldn’t be cheaper than a paycheck,” she said.

“So confront him.”

“He doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. He treats all the women like that.”

Grace sighed. They’d walked this road before. Job after job, boyfriend after boyfriend. Alex, for all her looks, was like Joe McCarthy protecting the world from the Red Menace: she saw anti-female everywhere, and most of it, she was convinced, was directed at her.

“You don’t seem very sympathetic,” Alex said.

She wasn’t. She never had been. And with all she had been through in the last month, alone because her two best friends couldn’t bear to talk about the Big C, the lock that was usually on Grace’s mouth wasn’t working.

“I’m not sympathetic,” Grace said. “I’m beginning to think you’re a victim in search of a victimizer.”

“That’s not fair, Grace,” Alex said. “We tolerate this stuff because we were raised in an anti-woman society. It’s gotten better, but it’s not perfect. You tell those Xers stuff like this and they shake their heads. Or the new ones. What’re they calling themselves now? Generation Y? They were raised on Title IX. Hell, they pull off their shirts after winning soccer games. Imagine us doing that.”

“My cousin got arrested in 1977 in Milwaukee on the day Elvis Presley died for playing volleyball,” Grace said. Carole was actually rubbing herself on Never-Been-Laid. His face was the color of the red checks in the tablecloth.

“What?”

Grace turned to Alex. “My cousin. You know, Barbie? She got arrested playing volleyball.”

“They didn’t let girls play volleyball in Milwaukee?”

“It was 90 degrees, and she was playing with a group of guys. They pulled off their shirts because they were hot and sweating, so she did the same. She got arrested for indecent exposure.”

“God,” Alex said. “Did she go to jail?”

“Didn’t even get her day in court.”

“Everyone gets a day in court.”

Grace shook her head. “The judge took one look at Barbie, who was really butch in those days, and said, ‘I’m sick of you girls coming in here and arguing that you should have equal treatment for things that are clearly unequal. I do not establish Public Decency laws. You may show a bit of breast if you’re feeding a child, otherwise you are in violation of—some damn code.’ Barbie used to quote the thing chapter and verse.”

“Then what?” Alex asked.

“Then she got married, had a kid, and started wearing nail polish. She said it wasn’t as much fun to show her breasts legally.”

“See?” Alex said. “Misogyny.”

Grace shrugged. “Society, Alex. Get used to it.”

“That’s the point of your story? We’ve been oppressed for a thousand years and you say, ‘Get used to it’?”

“I say Brandi Chastain pulls off her shirt in front of millions—”

“Showing a sports bra.”

“—and she doesn’t get arrested. I say women head companies all the time. I say things are better now than they were when I was growing up, and I say the only ones who oppress us are ourselves.”

“I say you’re drunk.”

Grace pointed at Carole, who was wet-kissing Never-Been-Laid, her arms wrapped around his neck and her legs wrapped around his waist. “She’s drunk. I’m just speaking out.”

“You never speak out.”

Grace sighed. No one had picked up the glasses and she was tired of looking at that poor drowning dollar bill. There wasn’t going to be any celebration. Everything was the same as it always was—at least to Alex and Carole. But Grace wanted something different.

She got up, threw a five next to the dollar, and picked up her purse.

“Tell me if Carole gets laid,” Grace said, and left.

Outside Grace stopped and took a deep breath of the humid, exhaust-filled air. She could hear the clang of glasses even in the parking lot and the rhythm of Mary Chapin Carpenter praising passionate kisses. Grace had had only one glass of wine and a lousy time, and she wondered why people said old friends were the best friends. They were supposed to raise toasts to her future, now restored. She’d even said the “b” word and Alex hadn’t noticed. It was as if the cancer scare had happened to someone they didn’t even know.

Grace was going to be forty years old in three weeks. Her two best friends were probably planning a version of the same party they had held for her when she turned thirty. A male stripper whose sweaty body repulsed her more than aroused her, too many black balloons, and aging jokes that hadn’t been original the first time around.

Forty years old, an accountant with her own firm, no close family, no boyfriend, and a resident of the same town her whole life. The only time she left was to visit cousins out east, and for what? Obligation?

There was no joy left, if there’d ever been any joy at all.

She got into her sensible Ford Taurus, bought at a used car lot for well under Blue Book, and drove west.

***

It wasn’t until she reached Janesville that she started to call herself crazy, and it wasn’t until she drove into Dubuque that she realized how little tied her to her hometown.

An apartment without even a cat to cozy up to, a business no more successful than a dozen others, and people who still saw her as a teenager wearing granny glasses, braces and hair too long for her face. Grace, who was always there. Grace the steady, Grace the smart. Grace, who helped her friends out of their financial binds, who gave them a shoulder to cry on, and a degree of comfort because their lives weren’t as empty as her own.

When she had told Alex and Carole that her mammogram had come back suspicious, they had looked away. When she told them that she had found a lump, they had looked frightened.

I can’t imagine life without you, Gracie, Carole had whispered.

Imagine it now, Grace thought.

The dawn was breaking when she reached Cedar Rapids, and she wasn’t really tired. But she was practical, had always been practical, and habits of a lifetime didn’t change just because she had run away from home at the age of 39.

She got a hotel room and slept for eight hours, got up, had dinner in a nice steak place, went back to the room and slept some more. When she woke up Sunday morning to bells from the Presbyterian Church across the street, she lay on her back and listened for a good minute before she realized they were playing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” And she smiled then, because Jesus had been a better friend to her in recent years than Alex and Carole ever had.

At least Jesus didn’t tell her his problems when she was praying about hers. If Jesus was self-absorbed he wasn’t obvious about it. And he didn’t seem to care that she hadn’t been inside a church since August of 1978.

The room was chintz, the wallpaper and the bedspread matched, and the painting on the wall was chosen for its color not for its technique. Grace sat up and wondered what she was doing here, and thought about going home.

To nothing.

So she got in her car and followed the Interstate, through Des Moines, and Lincoln and Cheyenne, places she had only read about, places she had never seen. How could a woman live for forty years and not see the country of her birth? How could a woman do nothing except what she was supposed to from the day she was born until the day she died?

In Salt Lake City, she stared at the Mormon Tabernacle, all white against an azure sky. She sat in her car and watched a groundskeeper maintain the flowers, and remembered how it felt to take her doctor’s call.

A lot of women have irregular mammograms, particularly at your age. The breast tissue is thicker, and often we get clouds.

Clouds.

There were fluffy clouds in the dry desert sky, but they were white and benign. Just like her lump had turned out to be. But for a hellish month, she had thought about that lump, feeling it when she woke out of a sound sleep, wondering if it presaged the beginning of the end. She had never felt her mortality like this before, not even when her mother, the only parent she had known, had died. Not even when she realized there was no one remaining of the generation that had once stood between her and death.

No one talked about these things. No one let her talk about them either. Not just Alex and Carole, but Michael, her second-in-command at work, or even her doctor, who kept assuring her that she was young and the odds were in her favor.

Young didn’t matter if the cancer had spread through the lymph nodes. When she went in for the lumpectomy almost two weeks ago now, she had felt a curious kind of relief, as if the doctor had removed a tick that had burrowed under her skin. When he had called with the news that the lump was benign, she had thanked him calmly and continued with her day, filing corporate tax returns for a consulting firm.

No one had known the way she felt. Not relieved. No. It was more like she had received a reprieve.

The clouds above the Tabernacle helped calm her. She plugged in her cell phone for the first time in days and listened to the voice mail messages, most of them from Michael, growing increasingly worried about where she was.

Have you forgotten the meeting with Boyd’s? he’d asked on Monday.

Do you want me to file Charlie’s extension? he’d demanded on Tuesday.

Where the hell are you? he cried on Wednesday and she knew, then, that it was okay to call him, that not even the business could bring her home.

Amazing how her training had prepared her for moments like these and she hadn’t even known it. She had savings, lots of them, because she hadn’t bought a house even though it had been prudent to do so. She had been waiting, apparently, for Mr. Right, or the family her mother had always wanted for her, the family that would never come. Her money was invested properly, and she could live off the interest if she so chose. She had just never chosen to before.

And if she didn’t want to be found, she didn’t have to be. She knew how to have the interest paid through offshore accounts so that no one could track it. She even knew a quick and almost legal way to change her name. Traceable, but she hadn’t committed a crime. She didn’t need to hide well, just well enough that a casual search wouldn’t produce her.

Not that anyone would start a casual search. Once she sold the business, Michael would forget her and Alex and Carole, even though they would gossip about her at Oh Kaye’s every Friday night for the rest of their lives, wouldn’t summon the energy to search.

She could almost hear them now: She met some guy, Carole would say. And he killed her, Alex would add, and then they would argue until last call, unless Carole found some man to entertain her, and Alex someone else to complain to. They would miss Grace only when they screwed up, when they needed a shoulder, when they couldn’t stand being on their own. And even then, they probably wouldn’t realize what it was they had lost.

***

Because it amused her, she had driven north to Boise, land of the white collar, to make her cell call to Michael. Her offer to him was simple: cash her out of the business and call it his own. She named a price, he dickered half-heartedly, she refused to negotiate. Within two days, he had wired the money to a blind money market account that she had often stored cash in for the firm.

She let the money sit there while she decided what to do with it. Then she went to Reno to change her name.

Reno had been a surprise. A beautiful city set between mountains like none she had ever seen. The air was dry, the downtown tacky, the people friendly. There were bookstores and slot machines and good restaurants. There were cheap houses and all-night casinos and lots of strange places. There was even history, of the Wild West kind.

For the first time in her life, Grace fell in love.

And to celebrate the occasion, she snuck into a quickie wedding chapel, found the marriage licenses, took one, copied down the name of the chapel, its permit number, and all the other pertinent information, and then returned to her car. There she checked the boxes, saying she had seen the driver’s licenses and birth certificates of the people involved, including a fictitious man named Nathan Reinhart, and viola! she was married. She had a new name, a document the credit card companies would accept, and a new beginning all at the same time.

***

Using some of her personal savings, she bought a house with lots of windows and a view of the Sierras. In the mornings, light bathed her kitchen, and in the evenings, it caressed her living room. She had never seen light like this—clean and pure and crisp. She was beginning to understand why artists moved west to paint, why people used to exclaim about the way light changed everything.

The lack of humidity, of dense air pollution, made the air clearer. The elevation brought her closer to the sun.

She felt as if she were seeing everything for the very first time.

And hearing it, too. The house was silent, much more silent than an apartment, and the silence soothed her. She could listen to her television without worrying about the people in the apartment below, or play her stereo full blast without concern about a visit from the super.

There was a freedom to having her own space that she hadn’t realized before, a freedom to living the way she wanted to live, without the rules of the past or the expectations she had grown up with.

And among those expectations was the idea that she had to be the strong one, the good one, the one on whose shoulder everyone else cried. She had no friends here, no one who needed her shoulder, and she had no one who expected her to be good.

Only herself.

Of course, in some things she was good. Habits of a lifetime died hard. She began researching the best way to invest Michael’s lump sum payment—and while she researched, she left the money alone. She kept her house clean and her lawn, such as it was in this high desert, immaculate. She got a new car and made sure it was spotless.

No one would find fault with her appearances, inside or out.

Not that she had anyone who was looking. She didn’t have a boyfriend or a job or a hobby. She didn’t have anything except herself.

***

She found herself drawn to the casinos, with their clinking slot machines, musical come-ons, and bright lights. No matter how high tech the places had become, no matter how clean, how “family-oriented,” they still had a shady feel.

Or perhaps that was her upbringing, in a state where gambling had been illegal until she was 25, a state where her father used to play a friendly game of poker—even with his friends—with the curtains drawn.

Sin—no matter how sanitized—still had appeal in the brand-new century.

Of course, she was too sensible to gamble away her savings. The slots lost their appeal quickly, and when she sat down at the blackjack tables, she couldn’t get past the feeling that she was frittering her money away for nothing.

But she liked the way the cards fell and how people concentrated—as if their very lives depended on this place—and she was good with numbers. One of the pit bosses mentioned that they were always short of poker dealers, so she took a class offered by one of the casinos. Within two months, she was snapping cards, raking pots, and wearing a uniform that made her feel like Carole on a bad night.

It only took a few weeks for her bosses to realize that Grace was a natural poker dealer. They gave her the busy shifts—Thursday through Sunday nights—and she spent her evenings playing the game of cowboys, fancy men, and whores. Finally, there was a bit of an Old West feel to her life, a bit of excitement, a sense of purpose.

When she got off at midnight, she would be too keyed up to go home. She started bringing a change of clothes to work and, after her shift, she would go to the casino next door. It had a great bar upstairs—filled with brass, Victorian furnishings, and a real hardwood floor. She could get a sandwich and a beer. Finally, she felt like she was becoming the woman she wanted to be.

One night, a year after she had run away from home, a man sidled up next to her. He had long blond hair that curled against his shoulders. His face was tanned and lined, a bit too thin. He looked road-hardened—like a man who’d been outside too much, seen too much, worked in the sun too much. His hands were long, slender, and callused. He wore no rings, and his shirt cuffs were frayed at the edges.

He sat beside her in companionable silence for nearly an hour, while they both stared at CNN on the big screen over the bar, and then he said, “Just once I’d like to go someplace authentic.”

His voice was cigarette growly, even though he didn’t smoke, and he had a Southern accent that was soft as butter. She guessed Louisiana, but it might have been Tennessee or even Northern Florida. She wasn’t good at distinguishing Southern accents yet. She figured she would after another year or so of dealing cards.

“You should go up to Virginia City. There’s a bar or two that looks real enough.”

He snorted through his nose. “Tourist trap.”

She shrugged. She’d thought it interesting—an entire historic city, preserved just like it had been when Mark Twain lived there. “Seems to me if you weren’t a tourist there wouldn’t be any other reason to go.”

He shrugged and picked up a toothpick, rolling it in his fingers. She smiled to herself. A former smoker then, and a fidgeter.

“Reno’s better than Vegas, at least,” he said. “Casinos aren’t family friendly yet.”

“Except Circus Circus.”

“Always been that way. But the rest. You get a sense that maybe it ain’t all legal here.”

She looked at him sideways. He was at least her age, his blue eyes sharp in his leathery face. “You like things that aren’t legal?”

“Gambling’s not something that should be made pretty, you know? It’s about money, and money can either make you or destroy you.”

She felt herself smile, remember what it was like to paw through receipts and tax returns, to make neat rows of figures about other people’s money. “What’s the saying?” she asked. “Money is like sex—”

“It doesn’t matter unless you don’t have any.” To her surprise, he laughed. The sound was rich and warm, not at all like she had expected. The smile transformed his face into something almost handsome.

He tapped the toothpick on the polished bar, and asked, “You think that’s true?”

She shrugged. “I suppose. Everyone’s idea of what’s enough differs, though.”

“What’s yours?” He turned toward her, smile gone now, eyes even sharper than they had been a moment ago. She suddenly felt as if she were on trial.

“My idea of what’s enough?” she asked.

He nodded.

“I suppose enough that I can live off the interest in the manner in which I’ve become accustomed. What’s yours?”

A shadow crossed his eyes and he looked away from her. “Long as I’ve got a roof over my head, clothes on my back, and food in my mouth, I figure I’m rich enough.”

“Sounds distinctly unAmerican to me,” she said.

He looked at her sideways again. “I guess it does, don’t it? Women figure a man should have some sort of ambition.”

“Do you?”

“Have ambition?” He bent the toothpick between his fore- and middle fingers. “Of course I do. It just ain’t tied in with money, is all.”

“I thought money and ambition went together.”

“In most men’s minds.”

“But not yours?”

The toothpick broke. “Not any more,” he said.

***

Three nights later, he sat down at her table. He was wearing a denim shirt with silver snaps and jeans so faded that they looked as if they might shred around him. That, his hair, and his lean look reminded Grace of a movie gunslinger, the kind that cleaned a town up because it had to be done.

“Guess you don’t make enough to live off the interest,” he said to her as he sat down.

She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe I like people.”

“Maybe you like games.”

She smiled and dealt the cards. The table was full. She was dealing 3-6 Texas Hold ‘Em and most of the players were locals. It was Monday night and they all looked pleased to have an unfamiliar face at the table.

If she had known him better she might have tipped him off. Instead she wanted to see how long his money would last.

He bought in for $100, although she had seen at least five hundred in his wallet. He took the chips, and studied them for a moment.

He had three tells. He fidgeted with his chips when his cards were mediocre and he was thinking of bluffing. He bit his lower lip when he had nothing, and his eyes went dead flat when he had a winning hand.

He lost the first hundred in forty-five minutes, bought back in for another hundred and managed to hold onto it until her shift ended shortly after midnight. He sat through dealer changes and the floating fortunes of his cards. When she returned from her last break, she found herself wondering if his tells were subconscious after all. They seemed deliberately calculated to let the professional poker players around him think that he was a rookie.

She said nothing. She couldn’t, really—at least not overtly. The casino got a rake and they didn’t allow her to do anything except deal the game. She had no stake in it anyway. She hadn’t lied to him that first night. She loved watching people, the way they played their hands, the way the money flowed.

It was like being an accountant, only in real time. She got to see the furrowed brows as the decisions were made, hear the curses as someone pushed back a chair and tossed in that last hand of cards, watch the desperation that often led to the exact wrong play. Only as a poker dealer, she wasn’t required to clean up the mess. She didn’t have to offer advice or refuse it; she didn’t have to worry about tax consequences, about sitting across from someone else’s auditor, justifying choices she had no part in making.

When she got off, she changed into her tightest jeans and a summer sweater and went to her favorite bar.

Casino bars were always busy after midnight, even on a Monday. The crowd wasn’t there to have a good time but to wind down from one—or to prepare itself for another. She sat at the bar, as she had since she started this routine, and she’d been about to leave when he sat next to her.

“Lose your stake?” she asked.

“I’m up $400.”

She looked at him sideways. He didn’t seem pleased with the way the night had gone—not the way a casual player would have been. Her gut instinct was right. He was someone who was used to gambling—and winning.

“Buy you another?” he asked.

She shook her head. “One’s enough.”

He smiled. It made him look less fierce and gave him a rugged sort of appeal. “Everything in moderation?”

“Not always,” she said. “At least, not any more.”

***

Somehow they ended up in bed—her bed—and he was better than she imagined his kind of man could be. He had knowledgeable fingers and endless patience. He didn’t seem to mind the scar on her breast. Instead he lingered over it, focusing on it as if it were an erogenous zone. His pleasure at the result enhanced hers and when she finally fell asleep, somewhere around dawn, she was more sated than she had ever been.

She awoke to the smell of frying bacon and fresh coffee. Her eyes were filled with sand, but her body had a healthy lethargy.

At least, she thought, he hadn’t left before she awoke.

At least he hadn’t stolen everything in sight.

She still didn’t know his name, and wasn’t sure she cared. She slipped on a robe and combed her hair with her fingers and walked into her kitchen—the kitchen no one had cooked in but her.

He had on his denims and his hair was tied back with a leather thong. He had found not only her cast iron skillet but the grease cover that she always used when making bacon. A bowl of scrambled eggs steamed on the counter, and a plate of heavily buttered toast sat beside it.

“Sit down, darlin’,” he said. “Let me bring it all to you.”

She flushed. That was what it felt like he had done the night before, but she said nothing. Her juice glasses were out, and so was her everyday ware, and yet somehow the table looked like it had been set for a Gourmet photo spread.

“I certainly didn’t expect this,” she said.

“It’s the least I can do.” He put the eggs and toast on the table, then poured her a cup of coffee. Cream and sugar were already out, and in their special containers.

She was slightly uncomfortable that he had figured out her kitchen that quickly and well.

He put the bacon on a paper-towel covered plate, then set that on the table. She hadn’t moved, so he beckoned with his hand.

“Go ahead,” he said. “It’s getting cold.”

He sat across from her and helped himself to bacon while she served herself eggs. They were fluffy and light, just like they would have been in a restaurant. She had no idea how he got that consistency. Her home-scrambled eggs were always runny and undercooked.

The morning light bathed the table, giving everything a bright glow. His hair seemed even blonder in the sunlight and his skin darker. He had laugh lines around his mouth, and a bit of blond stubble on his chin.

She watched him eat, those nimble fingers scooping up the remaining egg with a slice of toast, and found herself remembering how those fingers had felt on her skin.

Then she felt his gaze on her, and looked up. His eyes were dead flat for just an instant, and she felt herself grow cold.

“Awful nice house,” he said slowly, “for a woman who makes a living dealing cards.”

Her first reaction was defense—she wanted to tell him she had other income, and what did he care about a woman who dealt cards, anyway?—but instead, she smiled. “Thank you.”

He measured her, as if he expected a different response, then he said, “You’re awfully calm considering that you don’t even know my name. You don’t strike me as the kind of woman who does this often.”

His words startled her, but she made sure that the surprise didn’t show. She had learned a lot about her own tells while dealing poker, and the experience was coming in handy now.

“You flatter yourself,” she said softly.

“Well,” he said, reaching into his back pocket, “if there’s one thing my job’s taught me, it’s that people hide information they don’t want anyone else to know.”

He pulled out his wallet, opened it, and with two fingers removed a business card. He dropped it on the table.

She didn’t want to pick the card up. She knew things had already changed between them in a way she didn’t entirely understand, but she had a sense from the fleeting expression she had seen on his face that once she picked up the card she could never go back.

She set down her coffee cup and used two fingers to slide the card toward her. It identified him as Travis Delamore, a skip tracer and bail bondsman. Below his name was a phone number with a 414 exchange.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin and the surrounding areas. Precisely the place someone from Racine might call if they wanted to hire a professional.

She slipped the card into the pocket of her robe. “Is sleeping around part of your job?”

“Is embezzling part of yours?” All the warmth had left his face. His expression was unreadable except for the flatness in his eyes. What did he think he knew?

She made herself smile. “Mr. Delamore, if I stole a dime from the casino, I’d be instantly fired. There are cameras everywhere.”

“I mean your former job, Ms. Mackie. A lot of money is missing from your office.”

“I don’t have an office.” His use of her former name made her hands clammy. What had Michael done?

“Do you deny that you’re Grace Mackie?”

“I don’t acknowledge or deny anything. When did this become an inquisition, Mr. Delamore? I thought men liked their sex uncomplicated. You seem to be a unique member of your species.”

This time he smiled. “Of course we like our sex uncomplicated. That’s why we’re having this discussion this morning.”

“If we’d had it last night, there wouldn’t be a this morning.”

“That’s my point.” He downed the last of his orange juice. “And thank you for the acknowledgement, Ms. Mackie.”

“It wasn’t an acknowledgement,” she said. “I don’t like to sleep with men who think me guilty of something.”

“Embezzlement,” he said gently, using the same tone he had used in bed. This time, it made her bristle.

“I haven’t stolen anything.”

“New house, new name, new town, mysterious disappearance.”

The chill she had felt earlier grew. She stood and wrapped her robe tightly around her waist. “I don’t know what you think you know, Mr. Delamore, but I believe it’s time for you to leave.”

He didn’t move. “We’re not done.”

“Oh, yes, we are.”

“It would be a lot easier if you told me where the money was, Grace.”

“Do you always get paid for sex, Mr. Delamore?” she asked.

He studied her for a moment. “Don’t play games with me, honey.”

“Why not?” she asked. “You seem to enjoy them.”

He shoved his plate away as if it had offended him. Apparently this morning wasn’t going the way he wanted it to either. “I’m just telling you what I know.”

“And I’m just asking you to leave. It was fun, Travis. But it certainly wasn’t worth this.”

He stood and slipped his wallet back into his pocket. “You’ll hear from me again.”

“This isn’t high school,” she said, following him to the door. “I won’t be offended if you fail to call.”

“No,” he said as he stepped into the dry desert air. “You probably won’t be offended. But you will be curious. This is just the beginning, Grace.”

“One person’s beginning is another person’s ending,” she said as she closed and locked the door behind him.

***

The worst thing she could do, she knew, was panic. So she made herself clean up the kitchen as if she didn’t have a care in the world, and she left the curtains open so that he could see if he wanted to. Then she went to the shower, making it a long and hot. She tried to scrub all the traces of him off of her.

For the first time in her life, she felt cheap.

Embezzlement. Something had happened, something Michael was blaming on her. It would be easy enough, she supposed. She had disappeared. That looked suspicious enough. The new name, the new car, the new town, all of that added to the suspicion.

What had Michael done? And why?

She got out of the shower and toweled herself off. She was tempted to call Michael, but she certainly couldn’t do it from the house. If she used her cell, the call would be traceable too. And if she went to a pay phone, she would attract even more suspicion. She had to consider that Travis Delamore was following her, spying on her.

In fact, she had to consider that he had been doing that for some time.

She went over all of their conversation, looking for clues, mistakes she might have made. She had told him very little, but he had asked a lot. Strangely—or perhaps not so strangely any more—all of their conversations had been about money.

Carole would have been proud of her. Grace had finally let her libido get the better of her. Alex would have been disgusted, reminding her that men couldn’t be trusted.

What could he do to her besides cast suspicion? He was right. Without the money, he had nothing. And she had a job, no criminal record, and no suspicious investments.

But if he continued to follow her, she could go after him. The bartender had seen them leave her favorite bar together. She had an innocent face, she’d been living here for a year, got promoted, was well liked by her employer. Delamore had obviously flirted with her while he played poker the night before, and the casino had cameras.

They probably had records of all the times he had watched her before she noticed him.

It wouldn’t take much to make a stalking charge. That would get her an injunction in the least, and it might scare him off.

Then she could find out why he was so sure he had something on her. Then she could find out what it was Michael had done.

***

The newly remodeled ladies room on the third floor of the casino had twenty stalls and a lounge complete with smoking room. It had once been a small restroom, but the reconstruction had taken out the nearby men’s room and replaced it with more stalls. The row of pay phones in the middle stayed, as a convenience to the customers.

Delamore wouldn’t know that she called from those pay phones. No one would know.

She started using the third floor ladies room on her break and more than once had picked up the receiver on the third phone and dialed most of her old office number. She’d always stop before she hit the last digit, though. Her intuition told her that calling Michael would be wrong.

What if Delamore had a trace on Michael’s line? What if the police did?

A week after her encounter with Delamore, a week in which she used the third floor ladies room more times than she could count, she suddenly realized what was wrong. Delamore didn’t have anything on her except suspicion. He had clearly found her—that hadn’t been hard, since she really hadn’t been hiding from anyone—and he had probably checked her bank records for the money he assumed she had embezzled from her former clients. But the money she had gotten from the sale of the business was still in that hidden numbered account—and would stay there.

Her native caution had served her well once again.

She had nothing to hide. It didn’t matter what some good-looking skip trace thought. Her life in Racine was in the past. A part of her past that she couldn’t avoid, any more than she could avoid the scar on her breast—the scar that Delamore had clearly used to identify her, the bastard. But past was past, and until it hurt her present, she wasn’t going to worry about it.

So she stopped making pilgrimages to the third floor women’s room, and gradually, her worries over Delamore faded. She didn’t see him for a week, and she assumed—wrongly—that it was all over.

***

He sat next to her at the bar as if he had been doing it every day for years. He ordered a whiskey neat, and another “for the lady,” just like men in her fantasies used to do. When he looked at her and smiled, she realized that the look didn’t reach his eyes.

Maybe it never had.

“Miss me, darlin’?” he asked.

She picked up her purse, took out a five to cover her drink, and started to leave. He grabbed her wrist. His fingers were warm and dry, their touch no longer gentle. A shiver started in her back, but she willed the feeling away.

“Let go of me,” she said.

“Now, Gracie, I think you should listen to what I have to say.”

“Let go of me,” she said in that same measured tone, “or I will scream so loud that everyone in the place will hear.”

“Screams don’t frighten me, doll.”

“Maybe the police do. Believe me, hon, I will press charges.”

His smile was slow and wide, but that flat look was in his eyes again, the one that told her he had all the cards. “I’m sure they’ll be impressed,” he said, reaching into his breast pocket with his free hand. “But I do believe a warrant trumps a tight grip on the arm.”

He set a piece of paper down on the bar itself. The bartender, wiping away the remains of another customer’s mess, glanced her way as if he were keeping an eye on her.

She didn’t touch the paper, but she didn’t shake Delamore’s hand off her arm, either. She wasn’t quite sure what to do.

He picked up the paper, shook it open, and she saw the strange bold-faced print of a legal document, her former name in the middle. “Tell you what, Gracie. How about we finish the talk we started the other morning in one of those dark, quiet booths over there?”

She was still staring at the paper, trying to comprehend it. It looked official enough. But then, she’d never seen a warrant for anyone’s arrest before. She had only heard of them.

She had never imagined she’d see her own name on one.

She let Delamore lead her to a booth at the far end of the bar. He slid across the plastic, trying to pull her in beside him, but this time, she shook him off. She sat across from him, perched on the seat with her feet in the aisle, purse clutched on her lap. Flee position, Alex used to call it. You Might Be a Loser and I Reserve the Right to Find Someone Else, was Carole’s name for it.

“If I bring you back to Wisconsin,” he said, “I get a few thousand bucks. What it don’t say on my card is that I’m a bounty hunter.”

“What an exciting life you must lead,” Grace said dryly.

He smiled. The look chilled her. She was beginning to wonder how she had ever found him attractive. “It’s got its perks.”

It was at that moment she decided she hated him. He would forever refer to her as a perk of the job, not as someone who had given herself to him freely, someone who had enjoyed the moment as much as he had.

All that gentleness in his fingers, all those murmured endearments. Lies.

She hated lies.

“But,” he was saying, “I see a way to make a little more money here. I don’t think you’re a real threat to society. And you’re a lot of fun, more fun than I would’ve expected, given how you lived before you moved here.”

The bartender came over, his bar towel over his arm. “Want anything?”

He was speaking to her. He hadn’t even looked at Delamore. The bartender was making sure she was all right.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “Can you check back in five minutes?”

“Sure thing.” This time he did look at Delamore, who grinned at him. The bartender shot him a warning glare.

“Wow,” Delamore said as the bartender moved out of earshot. “You have a defender.”

“You keep getting off track,” Grace said.

Delamore shrugged. “I like talking to you.”

“Well, I find talking with you rather dull.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t think so a few days ago.”

“As I recall,” she said, “we didn’t do a lot talking.”

His smile softened. “That’s my memory too.”

She clutched her purse tighter. It always looked so glamorous in the movies, finding the right person, having a night of great sex. And even if he rode off into the sunset never to be seen again, everything still had a glow of perfection to it.

Not the bits of sleaze, the hardness in his expression, the sense that what he wanted from her was something she couldn’t give.

“You know, the papers said that Michael Holden went into your old office, and put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Then the police, after finding the body, discovered that most of the money your clients had entrusted to your firm had disappeared.”

She couldn’t suppress the small whimper of shock that rose in her throat.

Delamore noted it and his eyes brightened. “Now, you tell me what happened.”

She had no idea. She had none at all. But she couldn’t tell Delamore that. She didn’t even know if the story was true.

It sounded true. But Delamore had lied before. For all she knew he was some kind of con man, out to get her because he smelled money.

He was watching her, his eyes glittering. She could barely control her expression. She needed to get away.

She stood, still clutching her purse like a schoolgirl.

“Planning to leave? I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” His voice had turned cold. A shiver ran down her spine, but she didn’t move, just stared down at him unable to turn away.

“One call,” he said softly, “and you’ll get picked up by the Nevada police. You should sit down and hear what I have to say.”

Her hands were shaking. She sat, feeling trapped. He had finally hooked her, even though she hadn’t said a word.

He leaned forward. “Now listen to me, darling. I know you got the money. I been working this one a long time, and I dug up the records. Michael closed all those accounts right after you disappeared. That’s not a coincidence.”

Her mouth was dry. She wanted to swallow, but couldn’t.

“‘Member our talk about money? One of those first nights, here in this bar?”

She was staring at him, her eyes wide and dry as if she’d been driving and staring at the road for hours. It felt like she had forgotten to blink.

“I told you I don’t need much, and that’s true. But I’m getting tired of dragging people back to their parole officers or for their court date, or finding husbands who’d skipped out on their families and then getting paid five grand or two grand. Then people question your expenses, like you don’t got a right to spend a night in a motel or eat three squares. Or they demand to know why you took so danged long to find someone who’d been hiding so good no cop could find them.”

His voice was so soft she had to strain to hear it. In spite of herself, she leaned forward.

“I’m forty-five years old, doll,” he said. “And I’m getting tired. You got one pretty little scar. Did you notice all the ones I got? On the job. Yours is the first case in a while where I didn’t get a beating.” Then he grinned. “At least, not a painful one.”

She flushed, and her fingers tightened on the purse. Her hands were beginning to hurt. Part of her, a part she’d never heard from before, wanted to take that purse and club him in the face. But she didn’t move. If she moved, she would lose any control she had.

“So,” he said, “here’s the deal. I like you. I didn’t expect to, but I do. You’re a pretty little thing, and smart as a whip, and this is probably going to be the only crime you’ll ever commit, because you’re one of those girls who just knows better, aren’t you?”

She held her head rigidly, careful so that he wouldn’t take the most subtle movement for a nod.

“And I think you got a damn fine deal here. The house is nice—lots of light—and the town obviously suits you. I met those friends of yours, the ball-buster and the one who thinks she’s God’s Gift to Men, and I gotta say it’s clear why you left.”

Her nails dug into the leather. Pain shot through the tender skin at the top of her fingers.

“I really don’t wanna ruin your life. It’s time I make a change in mine. You give me fifty grand, and I’ll bury everything I found about you.”

“Fifty thousand dollars?” Her voice was raspy with tension. “For the first payment?”

His eyes sparkled. “One-time deal.”

She snorted. She knew better. Blackmailers never worked like that.

“And maybe I’ll stick around. Get to know you a little better. I could fall in love with that house myself.”

“Could you?” she asked, amazed at the dry tone she’d managed to maintain.

“Sure.” He grinned. That had been the look that had made her go weak less than a week ago. Now it sent a chill through her. “You and me, we had something.”

“Yeah,” she said. “A one-night stand.”

He laughed. “It could be more than that, darlin’. It took you long enough, but you might’ve just found Mr. Right.”

“Seems to me you were the one who was searching.” She stood. He didn’t protest, and she was glad. She had to leave. If she stayed any longer, she’d say something she would regret.

She tucked her purse under her arm. “I assume the drink’s on you,” she said, and then she walked away.

He didn’t follow her—at least not right away. And she drove in circles before going home, watching for his car behind hers, thinking about everything he had said. Thinking about her break, her freedom, the things she had done to create a new life.

The things that now made her look guilty of a crime she hadn’t committed.

***

She didn’t sleep, of course. She couldn’t. Her mind was too full—and her bed was no longer a private place. He’d been there, and some of him remained, a shadow, a laugh. After an hour of tossing and turning, she moved to the guest room and sat on the edge of the brand new unused mattress, clutching a blanket and thinking.

It was time to find out what had happened. Delamore knew who she was. She couldn’t pretend any more. But he wasn’t ready to turn her in. That gave her a little time.

She took a shower, made herself a pot of coffee, and a sandwich which she ate slowly. Then she went to her office, sat down in front of her computer and hesitated. The moment she logged on was the moment that all her movements could be traced. The moment she couldn’t turn back from.

But she could testify to the conversation she’d had with Delamore, and the bartender would back her up. She wouldn’t be able to hide her own identity should the police come for her, and so there was no reason to lie. She would simply say that she was concerned about her former business partner. She wanted to know if any of what Delamore told her was true.

It wouldn’t seem like a confession to anyone but him.

She logged on, and used a search engine to find the news.

It didn’t take her long. Amazing how many newspapers were online. Michael’s death created quite a scandal in Racine, and the pictures of her office—the bloody mess still visible inside—were enough to make the ham on rye that she’d had a few moments ago turn in her stomach.

Michael. He’d been a good accountant. Thorough, exacting. Nervous. Always so nervous, afraid of making any kind of mistake.

Embezzlement? Why would he do that?

But that was what the papers had said. She dug farther, found the follow-up pieces. He’d raised cash, using clients’ accounts, to bilk the company of a small fortune.

And Delamore was right. The dates matched up. Michael had stolen from her own clients to pay her for her own business. He had bought the business with stolen money.

She bowed her head, listening to the computer hum, counting her own breaths. She had never once questioned where he had gotten the money. She had figured he’d gotten a loan, had thought that maybe he’d finally learned the value of savings.

Michael. The man who took an advance on his paycheck once every six months. Michael, who had once told her he was too scared to invest on his own.

I wouldn’t trust my own judgment, he had said.

Oh, the poor man. He had been right.

The trail did lead to her. The only reason Delamore couldn’t point at her exactly was because she had stashed the cash in a blind account. And she hadn’t touched it.

Not yet.

She’d been living entirely off her own savings, letting the money from the sale of her business draw interest. The nest egg for the future she hadn’t planned yet.

Delamore wanted fifty thousand dollars from her. To give that to him, she’d have to tap the nest egg.

How many times would he make her tap it again? And again? Until it was gone, of course. Into his pocket. And then he’d turn her in.

She wiped her hand on her jeans. It was a nervous movement, meant to calm herself down. She had to think.

If the cops could trace her, they would have. They either didn’t have enough on her or hadn’t made the leap that Delamore had. And then she had confirmed his leap with the conversation tonight.

She got up and walked away from the computer. She wouldn’t let him intrude. He had already taken over her bedroom. She needed to have a space here, in her office, without him.

There was no mention of her in the papers, nothing that suggested she was involved. The police would have contacted the Reno police if they had known where she was. Even if they had hired Delamore to track her, they might still not have been informed about her whereabouts. Delamore wanted money more than he wanted to inform the authorities about where she was.

Grace sat down in the chair near the window. The shade was drawn, but the spot was soothing nonetheless.

The police weren’t her problem. Delamore was.

She already knew that he wouldn’t be satisfied with one payment. She had to find a way to get rid of him.

She bowed her head. Even though she had done nothing criminal she was thinking like one. How did a woman get rid of a man she didn’t want? She could get a court order, she supposed, forcing him to stay away from her. She could refuse to pay him and let the cards fall where they might. Years of legal hassle, maybe even an arrest. She would certainly lose her job. No casino would hire her, and she couldn’t fall back on her CPA skills, not after being arrested for embezzlement.

Ignoring him wasn’t an option either.

Then, there was the act of desperation. She could kill him. Somehow. She had always thought that murderers weren’t methodical enough. Take an intelligent person, have her kill someone in a thoughtful way, and she would be able to get away with the crime.

Everywhere but in her own mind. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how much he threatened her, she couldn’t kill Delamore.

There had to be another option. She had to do something. She just wasn’t sure what it was.

She went back to the computer and looked at the last article she had downloaded. Michael had stolen from people she had known for years. People who had trusted her, believed in her and her word. People who had thought she had integrity.

She frowned. What must they think of her now? That she was an embezzler too? After all those years of work, did she want that behind her name?

Then again, why should she care about people she would never see again?

But she would see them every time she closed her eyes. Elderly Mrs. Vezzetti and her poodle, trusting Grace to handle her account because her husband, God rest his soul, had convinced her that numbers were too much for her pretty little head. Mr. Heitzkey who couldn’t balance a checkbook if his life depended on it. Ms. Andersen, who had taken Grace’s advice on ways to legally hide money from the IRS—and who had seemed so excited when it worked.

Grace sighed.

There was only one way to make this right. Only one way to clear her conscience and to clear Delamore out of her life.

She had to turn herself in.

***

She did some more surfing as she ate breakfast and found discount tickets to Chicago. She had to buy them round-trip from Chicago to Reno (God bless the casinos for their cheap airfare deals) and fly only the Reno to Chicago leg. Later she would buy another set, and not use part of it. Both of those tickets were cheaper than buying a single round-trip ticket out of Reno to Racine.

Grace made the reservation, hoping that Delamore wasn’t tracking round trips that started somewhere else, and then she went to work. She claimed a family emergency, got a leave of absence, and hoped it would be enough.

She liked the world she built here. She didn’t want to lose it because she hadn’t been watching her back.

Twenty-four hours later, she and the car she rented in O’Hare were in Racine. The town hadn’t changed. More churches than she saw out west, a few timid billboards for Native American Casinos, a factory outlet mall, and bars everywhere. The streets were grimy with the last of the sand laid down during the winter snow and ice. The trees were just beginning to bud, and the flowers were poking through the rich black dirt.

It felt as if she had gone back in time.

She wondered if she should call Alex and Carole, and then decided against it. What would she say to them, anyway? Instead, she checked into a hotel, unpacked, ate a mediocre room service meal, and slept as if she were dead.

Maybe in this city, she was.

***

The district attorney’s office was smaller than Grace’s bathroom. There were four chairs, not enough for her, her lawyer, the three assistant district attorneys and the DA himself. She and her lawyer were allowed to sit, but the assistant DAs hovered around the bookshelves and desk like children who were waiting for their father to finish business. The DA himself sat behind a massive oak desk that dwarfed the tiny room.

Grace’s lawyer, Maxine Jones, was from Milwaukee. Grace had done her research before she arrived and found the best defense attorney in Wisconsin. Grace knew that Maxine’s services would cost her a lot—but Grace was gambling that she wouldn’t need Maxine for more than a few days.

Maxine was a tall, robust woman who favored bright colors. In contrast she wore debutante jewelry—a simple gold chain, tiny diamond earrings—that accented her toffee-colored skin. The entire look made her seem both flamboyant and powerful, combinations that Grace was certain helped Maxine in court.

“My client,” Maxine was saying, “came here on her own. You’ll have to remember that, Mr. Lindstrom.”

Harold Lindstrom, the district attorney, was in his fifties, with thinning gray hair and a runner’s thinness. His gaze held no compassion as it fell on Grace.

“Only because a bounty hunter hired by the police department found her,” Lindstrom said.

“Yes,” Maxine said. “We’ll concede that the bounty hunter was the one who informed her of the charges. But that’s all. This man hounded her, harassed her, and tried to extort money out of her, money she did not have.”

“Then she should have gone to the Reno police,” Lindstrom said.

An assistant DA crossed her arms as if this discussion was making her uncomfortable. It was making Grace uncomfortable. Never before had she been discussed as if she weren’t there.

“It was easier to come here,” Maxine said. “My client has a hunch, which if it’s true, will negate the charges you have against her and against Michael Holden.”

“Mr. Holden embezzled from his clients with the assistance of Ms. Reinhart.”

“No. Mr. Holden followed standard procedure for the accounting firm.”

“Embezzlement is standard procedure?” Lindstrom was looking directly at Grace.

Maxine put her manicured hand on Grace’s knee, a reminder to remain quiet.

“No. But Mr. Holden, for reasons we don’t know, decided to end his life, and since he now worked alone, no one knew where he was keeping the clients’ funds. My client,” Maxine added, as if she expected Grace to speak, “would like you to drop all charges against her and to charge Mr. Delamore with extortion. In exchange, she will testify against him, and she will also show you where the money is.”

“Where she hid it, huh?” Lindstrom said. “No deal.”

Maxine leaned forward. “You don’t have a crime here. If you don’t bargain with us, I’ll go straight to the press, and you’ll look like a fool. It seems to me that there’s an election coming up.”

Lindstrom’s eyes narrowed. Grace held her breath. Maxine stared at him as if they were all playing a game of chicken. Maybe they were.

“Here’s the deal,” he said, “if her information checks out, then we’ll drop the charges. We can’t file against Delamore because the alleged crimes were committed in Nevada.”

Maxine’s hand left Grace’s knee. Maxine templed her fingers and rested their painted tips against her chin. “Then, Harold, we’ll simply have to file a suit against the city and the county for siccing him on my client. A multi-million dollar suit. We’ll win, too. Because she came forward the moment she learned of a problem. She hasn’t been in touch with anyone from here. Her family is dead, and her friends were never close. She had no way of knowing what was happening a thousand miles away until a man you people sent started harassing her.”

“You said he’s been harassing you for a month,” Lindstrom said to Grace. “Why didn’t you come forward before now?”

Grace looked at Maxine who nodded.

“Because,” Grace said, “he didn’t show me any proof of his claims until the night before I flew out. You can ask the bartender at the Silver Dollar. He saw the entire thing.”

Lindstrom frowned at Maxine. “We want names and dates.”

“You’ll get them,” Maxine said.

Lindstrom sighed. “All right. Let’s hear it.”

Grace’s heart was pounding. Here was her moment. She suddenly found herself hoping they would all believe her. She had never lied with so much at stake before.

“Go ahead, Grace,” Maxine said softly.

Grace nodded. “We had run into some trouble with our escrow service. Minor stuff, mostly rudeness on the part of the company. It was all irritating Michael. Many things were irritating him at that time, but we weren’t close, so I didn’t attribute it to anything except work.”

The entire room had become quiet. She felt slightly lightheaded. She was forgetting to breathe. She forced herself to take a deep breath before continuing.

“In the week that I was leaving, Michael asked me how he could go about transferring everything from one escrow company to another. It required a lot of paperwork, and he didn’t trust the company we were with. I thought he should have let them and the new company handle it, but he didn’t want to.”

She squeezed her hands together, reminded herself not to embellish too much. A simple lie was always best.

“We had accounts we had initially set up for clients in discreet banks. I told Michael to go to one of those banks, place the money in accounts there, and then when the new escrow accounts were established, to transfer the money to them. I warned him not to take longer than a day in the intermediate account.”

“We have no record of such an account,” the third district attorney said.

Grace nodded. “That’s what I figured when I heard that he was being charged with embezzlement. I can give you the names of all the banks and the numbers of the accounts we were assigned. If the money’s in one of them, then my name is clear.”

“Depending on when the deposit was made,” Lindstrom said. “And if the money’s all there.”

Grace’s lightheadedness was growing. She hadn’t realized how much effort bluffing took. But she did know she was covered on those details at least.

“You may go through my client’s financial records,” Maxine said. “All of her money is accounted for.”

“Why wouldn’t he have transferred the money to the new escrow accounts quickly, like you told him to?” Lindstrom asked.

“I don’t know,” Grace said.

“Depression is a confusing thing, Harold,” Maxine said. “If he’s like other people who’ve gotten very depressed, I’m sure things slipped. I’m sure this wasn’t the only thing he failed to do. And you can bet I’d argue that in court.”

“Why did you leave Racine so suddenly?” Lindstrom asked. “Your friends say you just vanished one night.”

Grace let out a small breath. On this one she could be completely honest. “I had a scare. I thought I had breast cancer. The lumpectomy results came in the day I left. You can check with my doctor. I was planning to go after that—maybe a month or more—but I felt so free, that I just couldn’t go back to my work. Something like that changes you, Mr. Lindstrom.”

He grunted as if he didn’t believe her. For the first time in the entire discussion, she felt herself get angry. She clenched her fingers so hard that her nails dug into her palms. She wouldn’t say any more, just like Maxine had told her to.

“The banks?” Lindstrom asked.

Grace slipped a small leather-bound ledger toward him. She had spent a lot of time drawing that up by hand in different pens. She hoped it would be enough.

“The accounts are identified by numbers only. That’s one of the reasons we liked the banks. If he started a new account, I won’t know its number.”

“If they’re in the U.S., then we can get a court order to open them,” Lindstrom said.

“Check these numbers first. Most of the accounts were inactive.” She had to clutch her fingers together to keep them from trembling.

“All right,” Lindstrom said and stood. Maxine and Grace stood as well. “If we discover that you’re wrong—about anything—we’ll arrest you, Ms. Reinhart. Do you understand?”

Grace nodded.

Maxine smiled. “We’re sure you’ll see it our way, Harold. But remember your promise. Get that creep away from Grace.”

“Right now, your client’s the one we’re concerned with, Maxine.” Lindstrom’s cold gaze met Grace’s. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch.”

***

Grace thought the eight o’clock knock on her hotel room door was room service. She’d ordered another meal from them, unable to face old haunts and old friends. Until she had come back, she had never even been in a hotel in Racine, so she felt as if she weren’t anywhere near her old home. Now if she could only get the different local channels on the television set, her own delusion would be complete.

She undid the locks, opened the door, and stepped away so that the waiter could bring his cart/table inside.

Instead, Delamore pulled the door back. She was so surprised to see him that she didn’t try to close him out. She scuttled away from him toward the nightstand, and fumbled behind her back for the phone.

His cheeks were red, and his eyes sparkling with fury. His anger was so palpable, she could feel it across the room.

“What kind of game are you playing?” he snapped, slamming the door closed.

She got the phone off the hook without turning around. “No game.”

“It is a game. You got away from me, and then you come here, telling them that I’ve been threatening you.”

“You have been threatening me.” Her fingers found the bottom button on the phone—which she hoped was “0.” If the hotel operator heard this, she’d have to call security.

“Of course I’d been threatening you! It’s my job. You didn’t want to come back here and I needed to drag you back. Any criminal would see that as a threat.”

“Here’s what you don’t understand,” Grace said as calmly as she could. “I’m not a criminal.”

“Bullshit.” Delamore took a step toward her. She backed up farther and the end table hit her thighs. Behind her she thought she heard a tinny voice ask a muted question. The operator, she hoped.

Grace held up a hand. “Come any closer and I’ll scream.”

“I haven’t done anything to you. I’ve been trying to catch you.”

She frowned. What was he talking about? And then she knew. The police had put a wire on him. The conversation was being taped. And they—he—was hoping that she’d incriminate herself.

“You’re threatening me now,” she said. “I haven’t done anything. I talked to the DA today. I explained my situation and what I think Michael did. He’s checking my story now.”

“Your lies.”

“No,” Grace said. “You’re the one who’s lying, and I have no idea why.”

“You bitch.” He lowered his voice the angrier he got. Somehow she found that even more threatening.

“Stay away from me.”

“Stop the act, Grace,” he said. “It’s just you and me. And we both know you’re not afraid of anything.”

Then the door burst open and two hotel security guards came in. Delamore turned and as he did, Grace said, “Oh, thank God. This man came into my room and he’s threatening me.”

The guards grabbed him. Delamore struggled, but the guards held him tightly. He glared at her. “You’re lying again, Grace.”

“No,” she said and stepped away from the phone. He glanced down at the receiver, on its side on the table, and cursed. Even if he hadn’t been wired, she had a witness.

The guards dragged him and Grace sank onto the bed, placing her head in her hands. She waited until the shaking stopped before she called Maxine.

***

Grace had been right. Delamore had been wearing a wire, and her ability to stay cool while he attacked had preserved her story. That incident, plus the fact that the DA’s office had found the money exactly where she had said it would be, in the exact amount that they had been looking for, went a long way toward preserving her credibility. When detectives interviewed Michael’s friends one final time, they all agreed he was agitated and depressed, but he would tell no one why. Without the embezzlement explanation, it simply sounded as if he were a miserable man driven to the brink by personal problems.

She had won, at least on that score. Her old clients would get their money back, and they would be off her conscience. And nothing, not even Delamore, would take their place.

Delamore was under arrest, charged with extortion, harassment, and attempting to tamper with a witness. Apparently, he’d faced similar complaints before, but they had never stuck. This time, it looked as if they would.

Grace would have to return to Racine to testify against him. But not for several months. And maybe, Maxine said, not even then. The hope was that Delamore would plea and save everyone the expense of a trial.

So, on her last night in Racine, perhaps forever, Grace got enough courage to call Alex and Carole. She didn’t reach either of them; instead she had to leave a message on their voice mail, asking them to meet her at Oh Kaye’s one final time.

Grace got there first. The place hadn’t changed at all. There was still a jukebox in the corner and cocktail waitresses in short skirts and ankle boots with big heels. Tin stars and Wild West art on the walls, unstained wood and checkered tablecloths adding to the effect. High bar stools and a lot of lonely people.

Grace ignored them. She sashayed to the bar, slapped her hand on it, and ordered whiskey neat. A group of suits at a nearby table ogled her and she turned away.

She was there to diss men not to meet them.

Carole arrived first, black miniskirt, tight crop top, and cigarette in hand. She looked no different. She hugged Grace so hard that Grace thought her ribs would crack.

“Alex had me convinced you were dead.”

Grace shook her head. “I was just sleeping around.”

Carole grinned. “Fun, huh?”

Grace thought. The night had been fun. The aftermath hadn’t been. But her life was certainly more exciting. She didn’t know if the tradeoff was worth it.

Alex arrived a moment later. Her auburn hair had grown, and she was wearing boots beneath a long dress. The boots made her look even taller.

She didn’t hug Grace.

“What the hell’s the idea?” Alex snapped. “You vanished—kapoof! What kind of friend does that?”

In the past, Grace would have stammered something, then told Alex she was exactly right and Grace was wrong. This time, Grace set her whiskey down.

“I told you about my lumpectomy,” Grace said. “You didn’t care. I was scared. I told you that, and you didn’t care. When I found out I didn’t have cancer, I called you to celebrate, and you didn’t care. Seems to me you vanished first.”

Alex’s cheeks were red. Carole stubbed her cigarette in an ashtray on the bar’s wooden rail.

“Not fair,” Alex said.

“That’s what I thought,” Grace said.

Carole looked from one to the other. Finally, she said, very softly, “I really missed you, Gracie.”

“I thought some misogynistic asshole picked you up and killed you,” Alex said.

“Could have happened,” Grace said. “Maybe it nearly did.”

“Here?” Carole asked. “At Oh Kaye’s?”

Grace shook her head. “It’s a long story. Are you both finally ready to listen to me?”

Carole tugged her miniskirt as if she could make it longer. “I want to hear it.”

Alex picked up Grace’s whiskey and tossed it back. Then she wiped off her mouth. “What did I tell you, Grace? Women always tolerate misogyny. You should have fought him off.”

“I did,” Grace said.

Alex’s eyes widened. Carole laughed. “Our Gracie has grown up.”

“No,” Grace said. “I’ve always been grown-up. You’re just noticing now.”

“There’s a story here,” Alex said, slipping her arm through Grace’s, “and I think I need to hear it.”

“Me, too.” Carole put her arm around Grace’s shoulder. “Tell us about your adventures. I promise we’ll listen.”

Grace sighed. She’d love to tell them everything, but if she did, she’d screw up the case against Delamore. “Naw,” Grace said. “Let’s just have some drinks and talk about girl things.”

“You gotta promise to tell us,” Alex said.

“Okay,” Grace said. “I promise. Now how about some whiskey?”

“Beer,” Alex said.

“You see that cute guy over there?” Carole asked, pointing at the suits.

Grace grinned. Already, her adventure was forgotten. Nothing changed here at Oh Kaye’s. Nothing except Cowboy Grace, who’d finally bellied up to the bar.

 

___________________________________________

“Cowboy Grace“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Cowboy Grace

Copyright © 2016 Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in The Silver Gryphon, edited by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern.
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Imageegami/Dreamstime

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

I read a lot in January and liked a lot of it as well. Some truly marvelous books (which is not what I could say for February & March. More on that in those lists). I also finished my reading for the in-person space opera workshop I was conducting in the middle of the month. Honestly, I didn’t like much of what I read in the brand-new anthologies I found. The stories had no depth or no ending or both. So I don’t have a lot to recommend from those books. Usually I can at least recommend the introductions, but one stunningly left out all the great female space opera writers of the 1990s and barely mentioned the ones in the 2000s. I realize that bias happens, but that one stung on a bunch of levels. (I guess I expect it from old timers, most of whom are not with us anymore, but not folks who were active in those time periods.)

I haven’t yet finished reading  The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, because I needed to take a break. The book has a slant that is very white-male oriented. It’s also filled with some challenging pieces that aren’t holding up to the 26 years since the book was printed. (I swear, New Journalism is soooo self-involved.) But some of it is good and interesting and I’ll come back to it when the mood suits me. I doubt I’ll ever recommend the book, but watch: there will be a time when I recommend more essays from it.

I read one of the best novels I’ve seen in years and some great articles. So January was quite a success…which is why this list is so late. It took a while to chronicle my reading.

 

January 2025

Anders, Charlie Jane, “A Temporary Embarrassment in Space Time,” New Adventures in Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Tachyon, 2024. I absolutely love this story. It’s everything a certain kind of space opera should be—fun, preposterous, believable, tense, and adventurous. All wrapped into a neat and well-written package. A wonderful gem of a story.

Crais, Robert, The Big Empty, Putnam, 2024. The best book I’ve read all year, maybe in the past few years. I love Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. Pike doesn’t show up until halfway through this book because Bob is so dang good at point of view and the way a story should flow. I don’t have a lot of time for leisure reading, and right now, my lack of time is significantly worse. So I did the readerly thing. I stayed up past my bedtime, and Dean literally had to pull the book from my hands. I still read it in two days. Fantastic. And no, I’m not going to tell you much more than “fantastic” because, as with all of Bob’s books, to say more is to ruin a surprise. (I might have already said too much, in fact.)

Deaver, Jeffery, and Maldonado, Isabella, Fatal Intrusion, Thomas & Mercer, 2024. Yep, I have an Amazon link only for this book, because I just discovered something very unpleasant. This book (and a bunch of Deaver novellas) are only available in ebook on Amazon. Sorry about that! I read the book in paper, which is how I prefer to read, so I had no idea that this had happened until the moment I was putting the book on the list. Sigh. It makes me, as a reader, more than mildly pissed off.

The book is good enough. It’s not as good as most Deaver books, but it’s better than a lot of thrillers. I’ll read the next book in the series, and if I like it, I’ll pick up one of Maldonado’s books. Collaborations are a difficult animal. They can be something better than both writers, especially if the book is something they wouldn’t have written without the collaborator. I suppose Deaver could argue that he wouldn’t have had a character like Carmen Sanchez, but except for a few chapters that I suspect were all Maldonado, she felt very generic. So I don’t think this collaboration enhanced the two writers’ work (I’m saying this without having read hers). But this is a good way to while away a few hours.

Fekadu, Mesfin, “The Loophole That Landed Muni Long a Grammy Nom,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 20, 2024. The online version of this article has the title “Muni Long Explains How She Made It,” and I think that is a better title for the content here. Muni Long has been around for awhile, and she has followed her own path. There are some great quotes in here, but the best was her response to how she got paid for her streaming content:

Sometimes you look at your quarterly statement and you’re like, “Oh wow, $1,000 for 500 million streams. Great. That’s awesome.” The sheer volume that I have to write in order to make an income that makes sense [is insane]. What saved me is that I have quality and quantity, whereas some of these people, all they have is one or two records.

Quantity and quality. She’s right. We’re doing the same. Take a look at this one, even if you’re new to Muni Long.

Harris, Robert,, Vintage Books, 2016. I really like Robert Harris’s writing, although his topics don’t always interest me. I picked up Conclave after seeing a review of the film. A lot of my favorite actors are in it, and since I like Harris, I thought I should give the book an eyeball before watching the film. Glad I did. There’s a nice moment toward the end of the book, something completely unexpected and yet set up. It worked for me, and might not have worked in the film (which I have not yet seen). Of course, that had me looking through more Robert Harris for the books I’ve missed. I mostly didn’t order the ones on the topics that I don’t care about, but I did preorder the next. I love his courage as a writer. He’s always doing something interesting. This is a novella, filled with his great characters and marvelous writing. Oh, and for the interested: I am not Catholic, although I was in and out of Catholic churches as a kid because so many of my friends were Catholic. So I have a passing familiarity with some of the rituals, but no great interest in the church or its habits. I still found this fascinating.

Heinz, W.C., “Brownsville Bum,” The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam with Glenn Stout, HarperCollins, 1999. I had never heard of W.C. Heinz before reading this book. Yet many of the other writers in the front half of the book (at least) mentioned him as the best of the best. Well, this is my favorite piece in the book so far. It’s a 1951 piece about someone named Bummy Davis who was a fighter back in the day when fighters could kill each other in the ring. This one reads like a short story—the life and death of kinda thing. The writing itself is sharp and crisp, the events breathtaking. The murder, at the end, shocking because it happened in a bar, not in the ring. If you find the book, read this one first.

Rose, Lacey, “Selena Gomez is Waiting For Your Call,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 20, 2024. Last fall and early this year, there were a lot of interviews with Selena Gomez as the Oscar and Grammy hype heated up. She has a good team. But she’s also a great interview because, as young as she is, she’s had an amazing career. She knows who she is, and she’s blunt about it. I can’t encapsulate this long piece in any coherent way, except to say all writers (and Selena fans) should read it.

Royko, Mike, “‘A Very Solid Book,'” The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam with Glenn Stout, HarperCollins, 1999. A lot of the work in this book is dated. So dated, in fact, that I had to look up some of the rivalries just to see what was going on. But this piece by Mike Royko from 1987 is familiar. I was 27 at the time, and aware of the Mets/Cubs rivalry.

Some idiot at some NY publishing house asked Royko to review a book about the Mets. And oh, did he. This piece is not dated, once you knew about the rivalry, and it is one one of my favorites. I just read it again, out loud this time to Dean. It’s a very short piece that is, ostensibly, a review of a book by Mets first baseman (at the time) Keith Hernandez. And Smith was a Cubbies fan through and through. The book is solid, you see, because it can survive being thrown against a wall…

Really worth reading

Score, Lucy, Things We Never Got Over, Bloom Books, 2022. Okay, this is annoying. As I set up this post, I discovered that Lucy Score’s ebooks are exclusive to Amazon. Same thing as the Deaver/Maldonado above. Grrrr. You can get the paperbooks anywhere you want, but to get the ebook, you have to go to Amazon. You can’t even go to her own website/store to get the book. Sorry about that. Get the paper. She has some lovely deluxe editions.

However, I did find the book on Amazon. I had just finished something else (what I can’t remember) and the algorithm suggested this book. I did what I often do and read the first chapter. And wowza is it good. Seriously, this first chapter is worth reading even if you don’t pick up the book. The chapter is a masterclass of information flow. The chapter title is Worst. Day. Ever. The first paragraph is a perfect hook:

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I walked into Café Rev, but it sure as hell wasn’t a picture of myself behind the register under the cheery headline “Do Not Serve.” A yellow frowny face magnet held the photo in place.

Each paragraph builds on that. With each page, the situation gets worse and worse and worse. You—well, I—had to go to the next chapter immediately. The book ends up being a tiny bit long, and for a moment verges on “if you two only talk to each other, this would end” but by then I didn’t care. The book is fun, the writing is great, and the characters are a hoot. So pick this one up…or at the very least (writers) read that first paragaph.

Smith, Red, “Next To Godliness,” The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam with Glenn Stout, HarperCollins, 1999. My father, who was born in 1914, used to talk about the great sports writers and announcers from his life. He also talked about great players, so many of their names are familiar to me. Others, not quite as much. But Red Smith was quite familiar. His name was in the air all the time in our family, and also in the various writing classes I had. Red Smith was one of those writers even non-sports fans enjoyed.

Back when my father imprinted on baseball, there was radio, but it was local only. So games played outside of the area weren’t aired. The readers had to rely on the print media.

“Next To Godliness” describes an entire game in maybe 1,000 words. It also describes the reaction to that game from Smith himself. It’s lovely and well done. There’s a reason this man’s work was remembered—at least for another 50 years.

Smith, Thomas, “Dua Lipa Talks 2024,” Billboard, December 14. 2024. I love Dua Lipa’s stuff. I run to it. I also enjoy how she’s running her career, in the same way that I admire the way Taylor Swift is. These women are taking charge in a way that most musicians do not. So read this. She’s interesting and what she’s doing with her business is also great.

Verhoeven, Beatrice, “John M. Chu,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 13, 2024. Fascinating interview with John M. Chu, released just before Wicked came out. (If you haven’t seen Wicked, oh, you must! It’s marvelous.) Lots of great material here, mostly about being courageous. Lots of behind the scenes on his various movies as well. In The Heights, Crazy Rich Asians, and more. Read this one.

Weir, Keziah, “Give And Let Give,” Vanity Fair, October, 2024. I’ve been thinking about this interview ever since I read it, particularly as one particularly nutty billionaire chainsaws his way through American government, another sends his fiance into space, and the rest don’t seem to give a rat’s banana about actual human beings.

Melinda French Gates, former wife of Bill Gates, is also worth billions, and she’s giving it away, systematically, to charity after charity. She says it’s not easy, because she had to have the right organization in place to help funnel the money, and then she has to figure out where she can do the most good. Note the difference: Do The Most Good. Yeah, she’s not the only ex-wife of a billionaire doing this.

It’s fascinating to me that the wealthy women understand their social responsibility and the bulk of the men…do not.

 

 

A desert lake. A severed arm. A thousand questions.

Las Vegas summer sun bakes Metro Detective Sofia Herrara as she carefully steps her way to solving this murder mystery, while protecting herself, her partner and the department.

From water wars to the mob, good guys to bad, she’ll follow the clues to answer these pressing questions:

Whose arm? Who died? And—most importantly—why?

“Body Parts & Bathtub Rings“ is available for one week on this site. It’s available in Crimes Against Nature, edited by Robert Lopresti. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

Body Parts & Bathtub Rings By Kristine Kathryn Rusch 

The skin on the hand remained intact, although it was pale and bloated. Black hairs curved out of the base of the fingers and along the wrist. The body was missing, but the wedding ring studded with three visible diamonds wasn’t. The diamonds sparkled.  This hand hadn’t been in the water long, which was both good and bad.

Las Vegas Metro Detective Sofia Herrara pulled gloves onto her own hands, the heat of the day making the task harder than it should have been. Her own hands were slightly swollen and just a little bit damp. Sweat trickled down her back despite the loose weave long-sleeve shirt she wore. Her dark khakis were probably sweat stained as well behind the knee. Part of the problem was her heavy boots, which required thick socks just to keep the blisters away. Her feet were hot, she was hot, and it would only get worse.

She was crouched in the midday sunlight at the edge of Lake Mead. Her wide-brimmed hat cast shade over the rocks of what had once been the lakebed. The water pushed against larger rocks about a foot away.

The water glistened as if the sunlight made it happy. Sunlight in July did not make Sofia happy. She had given her standard issue water bottle to her partner, Zach Gelb, to hold while she examined the crime scene. If, indeed, this could be called a crime scene. The crime had clearly happened elsewhere.

Zach had taken a few steps away from the scene to talk on his cell. He had his back to her, but he was standing still, not pacing, trying to act like this was a crime scene as well.

The sun was so high that Zach didn’t leave much of a shadow. There was, essentially, no escaping the sun out here at this time of day, which was usually when the lake was the emptiest—at least of locals. Tourists, on the other hand, had no idea what they were facing when they encountered the desert sun, the water, and the increased elevation.

The third person in their group knew that better than she did. The park ranger who had called the hand in, Roberto Bonetti —Call me Berto— had been out here for most of the morning as he waited beside the hand to preserve the scene.

He wore the National Park Ranger’s standard summer uniform, a tan shirt with tan slacks and boots as heavy as hers. His hat wasn’t thin and floppy like hers and would have made her head sweat.

Maybe he was used to this heat, although she had no idea how anyone could be. He did have two water bottles attached to his utility belt, along with some hydration packs and a small emergency kit. She hadn’t asked him how many times he had found dehydrated tourists suffering from heat stroke, but she suspected it was quite a lot.

The three of them were now waiting for the Clark County Coroner’s Office to send someone here. Technically, the ranger should have contacted them immediately, but this wasn’t Berto’s first rodeo. He could see that the hand was suspicious. Or rather, what was visible of the arm was suspicious.

The wrist was intact, but the forearm wasn’t. And it hadn’t been cleanly cut. It had been ripped through. The bone, which was what she had to go on, was jagged.

Which made it suspicious, and because it was, Berto knew that a detective would be needed. So he had called Metro first, and then called the coroner.

Sofia was grateful for that because the faster they all moved on this the better. The last thing she wanted was for the media to get wind of a severed hand discovered at Lake Mead.

As Lake Mead’s water levels had dropped due to the drought conditions of the past twenty-plus years, more and more bodies—or parts of bodies—got discovered. The national press corps went nuts a few years back when a body in a barrel turned up. That body was at least forty years old and most likely the remains of someone who had run afoul with the Las Vegas mob.

Since then, every single grisly discovery on the shores or sticking out of the water got the press’s attention. It would only be a matter of time before someone heard of this one.

Thank heavens, though, this hand had been discovered by a ranger and not a tourist. At least Sofia wasn’t dealing with social media postings and the hasty arrival of the local news channels. She’d faced that last fall when a skull was discovered by a couple hiking the lake bed. Turned out that skull belonged to a local man who had drowned while jet skiing in the 1990s, but it took a while for the DNA testing to come back, which meant she had to endure weeks of speculation and interviews about contract killings and the violence that was part of Las Vegas’s past.

She always tried to steer the discussion away from that and toward the changes in Lake Mead. The lake she remembered from her childhood was gone; what she saw was a tiny expanse of water revealing more and more of its lakebed.

A white “bathtub ring” encircled everything, marking where the waterline had been when she was a little girl. Even back then, though, Lake Mead was considered the deadliest national park in the United States. There had been more deaths at Lake Mead in the past two decades than at any other national park. She had actually looked that statistic up because she’d gotten so many questions about the deaths and discovered that Lake Michigan was the deadliest lake, but it wasn’t a national park site.

And when the deaths were put into a context, such as the number of deaths versus the number of visitors, the deaths were a tiny tiny tiny percentage. Last fall, she’d had all of those numbers at her fingertips, because she was so annoyed by the discussions of the mob and the murders and the deaths. She’d actually snapped at one reporter: How come you care so much about these so-called mob murders and not the bathtub ring around the lake? That’ll lead to hundreds if not thousands of deaths in the Las Vegas Valley if the drought continues…

She got pulled off of media duty after that, and no one sent her to Lake Mead again. Until now.

Although, to be fair, she wasn’t even sure this was a homicide. Not yet. For all she knew, the arm could have been severed in a boating accident. If someone got too close to a boat propeller or maybe got their arm entangled in an anchor chain, the force might sever the arm.

She was going to have to find out if local hospitals had treated someone with this kind of severed limb. If the arm’s owner had assistance from someone who knew what they were doing, the owner might’ve made it to a hospital before bleeding out.

Might was the operative word, though. The chances of surviving a severing like this would take skill and luck. There were ambulances parked in strategic areas around the lake, but a bleed-out like this one would need attention immediately. Just getting from one part of the lake to another might take five minutes, and then there’d be a hike to the water itself.

She didn’t really expect to find the owner of the arm alive, but she couldn’t rule it out.

She felt a half second of irritation. The coroner should have been here by now, considering the fact that Berto had called them right after her. But she knew it could sometimes take a while for the coroner to free up enough staff for an investigation. The last time Sofia had responded to a case out here—a case of simple murder, it turned out, one fueled by beer and fisticuffs—it had taken the coroner’s office nearly ninety minutes to arrive.

She braced her gloved hands on her knees and stood up. Her calves ached from the crouch. She used to be able to hold that position for an hour or more. Now, fifteen minutes nearly wrecked her.

Berto was standing near the shore—if one could call it that. He was staring at the other side of the water, where a couple of people—teens maybe?—were playing on the large rocks near the waterline.

“Berto,” she said.

He turned. His face was ruddy, his skin leathery from too much time in the sun. He had old eyes, which relieved her. She hated dealing with people who had not been on the job long.

He walked over, glancing at Zach, who was still on the phone. That did not bode well for the coroner’s arrival.

“I need to ask a few baseline questions,” she said, removing her small notebook from her pants pocket. The leatherette cover was damp. She clicked the pen attached to the notebook with a small plastic cord. Usually, Zach gave her crap about that.

He looked over, waved his phone at her as if to say, I can’t come yet, and grimaced in annoyance. She gave him a tiny nod. They’d worked together for years, so she didn’t have to tell him to get to her side as soon as he could.

Berto waited patiently.

“Tell me again how you found this hand.” She asked the question a second time for two reasons. The first was simple; she hadn’t had her notebook out when she originally spoke to him, although she suspected Zach was recording the encounter.

The other reason was she wanted to make sure that Berto gave her the same story, with few embellishments.

“I was walking my beat.” He had already warned her he used a lot of police shorthand because he found it more convenient. He had worked as a police officer back in the Midwest, so he knew procedure—and apparently liked the lingo. “I saw something white and flat on the rocks there. It looked organic, but I couldn’t be sure. And I didn’t smell it. Normally when you see something that white, the smell of decay hits you first.”

She waited, pen poised. He hadn’t given her this much detail before, but it was consistent with what he had already told her.

“I walked down to it, saw that it was a human hand, and called it in.” He nodded toward that hand. “You know the rest.”

She didn’t, though. He had spoken to dispatch, then to Zach, and then to her when she had arrived. The story probably seemed like old hat to Berto already.

She needed to move him off of that, distract him a bit. “When was the last time you were in this part of the park?”

He blinked, tilted his head just a little, clearly considering the question.

“Had to be a week ago,” he said. “We try to see everything, keep track of it all, but we’re dealing with a million and a half acres. We can’t monitor all the changes, especially not with visitors.”

“How early in the morning do you walk this?” she asked. Because it had to be morning; every local knew that this time of day could prove deadly quickly.

“In the open like this?” he asked. “As early as I can. Usually sunrise.”

“You called us at nine,” she said. It had taken her a while to arrive—first because of the drive and then the walk to this part of the park. She had given Berto permission to leave the area, but he hadn’t. He had been in this sun for hours now.

He didn’t even look wilted. She was becoming a puddle.

“I did,” he said. “I was just finishing up the rounds. I was planning to go to the station for a while, maybe have some ice coffee, maybe something to eat before I handled whatever crises arose for the day.”

“Ice coffee,” she muttered.

“It’s not as good as it sounds,” he said. “We just pour brew coffee over ice. Nothing fancy.”

“I’ll take not fancy at the moment.” She smiled at him. Then she let her smile fade. “You haven’t found other body parts, have you?”

“No,” he said. “Not recently, and not, y’know, something like this one that hadn’t been in the water long.”

She nodded. She had had Zach dig into recent findings at Lake Mead while they drove here. There had been a lot of body parts—apparently, the lake released its bodies in chunks—but nothing in the past few months. So, this confirmed what Berto was saying.

Now she got to the question she wanted to ask.

“The hand’s a yard or more from the water line,” she said. “How do you think it got here?”

He glanced at the water, the reflection of its surface lightening his skin just a little. Then he shrugged.

“It could’ve washed up in a boat wake,” he said. “Lots of speed boats create their own waves. Or it could’ve been a bird.”

“A bird?”

“They find all sorts of things. Then, if something startles the bird, it’ll drop whatever it’s carrying. I’m surprised there haven’t been any birds around this. But, I guess, there’s no soft tissue—eyeballs, whatnot. That’s less interesting to them.”

If he was trying to gross her out, he had failed. She’d probably seen everything he had and more. She had no idea where he had worked with the police in the Midwest. That covered a lot of ground, from small towns to cities like Chicago or Detroit.

“I was thinking the hand looked pretty fresh,” she said. “You think maybe someone dropped it here so that we could find it?”

“No.” His response was swift. “If they wanted someone to discover the hand, they would have gone to, say, Echo Bay. It’s the boat launch with the fewest restrictions right now, so too many people frequent it.”

“You think someone would know that?” she asked.

“Detective,” he said, with just a tiny hint of contempt, “if you came up here for something other than bodies, you’d know it too. We deal with a lot of complaints about the declining water level and the restrictions on people’s boats. We encourage everyone to come, but we really can’t accommodate them anymore.”

By the end of that little speech, the contempt had vanished. Maybe she had misread it. Maybe she was hearing frustration or anger.

“Talk to me about emergencies,” she said. “What happens with the serious ones?”

“Well,” he said, “we can’t help with most of those. The drownings are usually over before we’re notified. And if someone tries to kill themselves, we find out when the family realizes they’re missing. Usually we don’t learn someone’s a danger to themselves until deep into the investigation.”

“What about something like this? Something that involves a serious wound or a broken limb or a heart attack?”

Berto tipped the brim of his hat back just a bit. “If they call us, we can dispatch one of the ambulances. If the ambulance heads to Boulder City, it might be a while before another arrives to replace it.”

“Does that happen a lot?” she asked.

“Mostly in the spring,” he said. “It’s our busiest time. I’ve been lobbying for more medical services. But you know the whole drill about funding.”

“I do.” She looked down at that hand. “An ambulance couldn’t come down the path we walked.”

“No,” he said. “But a stretcher could. We’ve done it countless times.”

She crouched again, and tried to peer under the hand. If an ambulance had responded to something near here, the EMTs would have put the hand on the stretcher to cart it back. Once at the ambulance, they would have put the hand on ice.

Not to reattach the limb, should they locate the owner, but to take DNA and fingerprints off it, if possible.

Zach half-walked half-slid his way toward them. He was wearing dress shoes instead of his normal boots. He had initially thought he was going to be in court this morning. Considering the sweat stains on his white shirt and the fact that he was using his hat as a fan, he probably would have preferred testifying to this.

“Coroner’s assistant got lost,” he said. “I had to talk them through the directions. They should be here at any moment.”

“Good,” Sofia said, “because I was just beginning to wonder if we could find something to shade this hand from the sun.”

Something that wouldn’t contaminate it further.

A clatter sounded behind them. Sofia turned. A coroner she didn’t recognize was coming down the path sideways to accommodate the slight decline. Behind him was another person, wearing light clothing and a hat with a brim so low that Sofia couldn’t really see who that was either.

Both were carrying equipment. The person in the back had a white-and-blue cooler that was reflecting sunlight.

Zach went up to greet them. He had been talking to them on the phone, so he would handle it from here.

Sofia looked at Berto. “You feel like sharing some of that delicious ice coffee?”

He smiled at her, surest proof that he had seen everything. No newbie smiled like that over body parts.

“I’d be happy to,” he said, “if only to see what a glutton for punishment you really are.”

***

The ice coffee left her a little too jazzed, but it was not the highlight of the ranger station. The highlight was the aloe cream that she apparently needed despite her sunscreen and warm-weather gear. She had been in that sun too long.

All she ended up with, though, was a slight headache that lunch would cure. Zach didn’t stay long with the coroners and met her at their car.

He was already inside, AC running, when she approached. When he saw her, he scooted to the passenger side, and grabbed his laptop.

“We have an I.D.,” he said.

She handed him aloe. He lathered his skin while she backed the car out of the lot.

“Fingerprints?” she asked.

“Yeah, they were able to get some.” He grimaced. He hated watching the techniques that the coroner’s office used. If Zach could avoid working with the bodies, he would. “His name is Elias Venegas. He was reported missing three days ago by his wife.”

She pulled out of the lot and headed back toward Boulder City, taking her time because she knew that some drivers—usually tourists—were all over these roads.

“Why was he fingerprinted?” She pulled off her hat and tossed it in the back seat, then set the AC on frigid. The aloe had helped, but she was definitely burned. The touch of the sun through the window was irritating.

“He was bonded and certified. He went through all kinds of vetting.” Zach stared at his computer screen. “He was a well-known landscape artist who specialized in creating desert gardens.”

She glanced at Zach sideways. He was frowning. She was frowning.

“So, you’re thinking, accident?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Zach said. “It’s weird. The wife reported him missing when he didn’t come home from work a few days ago.”

“Where’s work?” she asked.

“His offices are in downtown Summerlin.” He tapped the laptop. “Looking at the missing persons filings now. The intake officer said the wife was adamant that her husband wouldn’t disappear on her.”

A four-by-four passed her on a narrow corner, a boat attached to the back swinging into her lane. She barely had room to get out of the way and stay on the road.

“Jeez,” Zach said, sounding panicked. But Sofia’s heart rate hadn’t even gone up, which was why she was driving, and he was not.

“The report?” she asked.

“The intake officer was pretty diligent, even though he didn’t believe the wife,” Zach said.

Years ago, Sofia had worked Mis-Pers. Nearly everyone claimed that the person wouldn’t disappear without telling anyone, and usually they were wrong.

But to go from Summerlin to Lake Mead was a deliberate trip.

“Was he entertaining clients?” she asked.

“No,” Zach said. “He’d gone to visit a client.”

“Who?” she asked.

“The wife didn’t know but said the client was a really important one.” Zach scrolled along the laptop’s pad. “No one asked or explained what ‘important’ meant.”

So now the question became, should they call the wife and tell her about the body part just to get answers? Or did they leave that part out of this?

Sofia wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet about the hand.

“Contact his office, find out where he went,” she said. “And check the hospitals, see if this Venegas guy is in any of them.”

“The report says the wife already did,” Zach said.

He hadn’t worked Mis-Per, so he didn’t know that sometimes people called in a missing person’s report after killing someone, just to cover their butts.

“Start with Boulder City,” she said, “and then go to Kingman, Laughlin, Bullhead City. Places the wife wouldn’t have thought to check, if she had no idea he was at Lake Mead.”

“Hospitals first?” Zach asked. He sounded irritated, but he didn’t say anything. After all, she couldn’t check any of this, since she was driving.

“Yeah,” she said.

He tapped on the keyboard of his laptop, then picked up his cell with a sigh.

She dodged another four-by-four with a boat behind it, shaking her head as she did so. Who came out here in this heat? It had to be tourists.

An ancient RV weaved across the road before her, and she leaned on the horn, hoping to get their attention. She did. They snapped to their lane.

But as they went past, she frowned at it.

Trucks, RVs, boats. Lots of equipment, lots of empty spaces. No one thought twice about all of those vehicles heading to the lake. No wonder so many bodies turned up.

It wouldn’t be hard to transport them from somewhere else.

She didn’t say anything about that, though, because Zach was deep in his conversation with the hospital in Boulder City. He wasn’t having any luck.

She doubted he would.

Something about Venegas’s job and the fact that he worked in Summerlin made her think he was dead before he got to the lake.

But she would wait on what the coroner had to say. Sometimes cases surprised you. She hoped this wouldn’t be one of those.

***

They stopped at a local fast-food chicken place in Boulder City. She promised Zach a milkshake. He’d contacted all the hospitals in the area, and none had any record of an Elias Venegas, nor did they have a record of a John Doe who had come in missing a hand.

As she and Zach headed inside, they saw a sprinkler head near the edge of the door, leaking water all over the parking lot. She sighed and signaled Zach to get lunch while she asked for the manager.

When an older woman with a manager’s tag stuck her head out of the back area, Sofia said, “You know you have a leaking sprinkler, right?”

“Yeah,” the woman said. “People’ve been telling us.”

Which meant it had been going on for a while. “You realize you can be fined for excess use, right?”

“I won’t be fined,” the woman said, and walked away.

Sofia sighed again, knowing she couldn’t let that go. Too many people failed to report. She went back outside, took a picture, and sent it to the Southern Nevada Water Authority. They would know what to do.

Then she joined Zach at the table. He’d already picked up the food.

“This guy, he’s a big deal,” Zach said in between bites of a chicken tender. “The mucky-mucks in town, they all hire him to transform their lawns into a desert oasis.”

He had to be half-quoting some promotional something or other. Sofia took her orange tray and pulled it toward her, grabbing a fry as she did so.

“His fees are astonishing,” Zach said. “I mean, hell, I’d just lay ratty Astroturf instead of pay for this.”

“Or pull up the grass yourself,” she said.

“Yeah,” Zach said with a grin. “Desert landscaping done easy.”

Nevada had passed a law as the drought crushed everything, forcing residents to get rid of what the state termed “decorative grass” by the end of 2026. Some people were doing that already. Others were pressing for a variance.

She tried not to follow any of that because it irritated her too much. What was wrong with people? They lived in a desert, and water had been scarce from the start. In the 1990s, predictions were that Las Vegas wouldn’t make it another ten years because of a lack of water, so the city embarked on a recycling program.

Now, all water used indoors was recycled. The problem was things like that broken sprinkler. Outdoor water was one-time use only, although there were measures trying to reform that as well.

“Lemme see what he charges,” she said.

Zach spun the laptop around. Venegas’s website was beautiful, high-end, and filled with lovely pictures of various landscapes. He hadn’t called himself a landscape artist. Architectural Digest had.

This guy was one of the top landscape designers in the country. A guy like that didn’t go on a jaunt to Lake Mead in the middle of the week.

“Find out if anyone is actually in the office,” Sofia said.

She had a feeling, but it wasn’t something she could articulate. Not yet.

Zach looked at her measuringly. He had worked with her long enough to know that she wasn’t going to share her thinking yet. He respected the hunches, but he always wanted to know how she got there, which led to irritated discussions, which neither of them needed right then.

He spun the laptop back toward himself, glanced at the number, and dialed with his thumb. Then he grabbed the milkshake and stood up, heading toward the car.

He had finished eating, and she had just started. She finished in a hurry, headed outside, and slipped into the car’s air conditioning, which was fighting a losing battle with the heat. Records every day this July, and it looked like today would be no different.

“We’re in luck,” Zach said. “One of the associates is waiting for us.”

“Did you tell them why we’re coming?” Sofia asked as she put on her seat belt.

“Didn’t have to,” Zach said. “When she found out who I was, she said, ‘I hope to hell this is good news about Elias.’”

“Did you tell her the bad news?” Sofia asked.

“I didn’t,” Zach said, “because we still don’t know. I mean, maybe…”

Sofia gave him a knowing nod. They did know; they just couldn’t prove anything. And an excess of caution was always the best.

“I just told her we were investigating the missing person report,” he said.

“Was she surprised?” Sofia asked.

“Are rich people ever surprised that someone is doing something for them that doesn’t happen for anyone else?” he asked.

“She’s probably not rich,” Sofia said. “She works for someone.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said, “but given how much money that place brings in, she’s richer than we are.”

They were going to have to drive to downtown Summerlin, and the easiest way was to take the Beltway, which would give Sofia exactly no time to go home and clean up. Ah, well. The extra aloe had helped, as had the chocolate shake.

She drove while Zach continued to tap on his laptop, occasionally naming the very famous clients who had hired Venegas. Apparently, the pictures of their properties were gorgeous, if Zach’s enthusiasm was any indication.

She was going to have him look deep into the business’s financials when a call came into her cell. It was the coroner. She put it on speaker.

“Please tell me you found the rest of his body in your cooler,” Sofia said.

“Nope,” the coroner said. “I suspect it’s still in Lake Mead.”

“Really?” Sofia asked. “We’ve been calling hospitals to see if he’s alive.”

“The arm was severed post-mortem,” the coroner said, “and I think severed is the wrong word. I think the chain that was wrapped around it somehow twisted and snapped the bone.”

“Chain?” Sofia asked. Zach was leaning forward, frowning at the car’s speakers as if they were the coroner herself.

“Yeah,” the coroner said. “We found bits of it in the skin and the bone itself.”

“This wasn’t, say, a boating accident? Something got caught in, maybe, a propeller?”

“Well, maybe, in one sense,” the coroner said. “A propeller might’ve snagged that chain and put enough force on it to make it snap the arm.”

“And send it to the shore?” Zach asked.

“Flying to the shore, maybe,” the coroner said. “The hand was dropped from above. There were rocks in the skin, and they came from directly underneath the hand. So it landed with some force.”

“Not deliberately dropped, then,” Sofia said. She wasn’t sure if that was a question or not.

“Well, not unless it was deliberately dropped from some kind of height,” the coroner said. “And given that there was no hills in that part of the beach…”

“Yeah, okay,” Sofia said.

“I’ll have more for you as we investigate, but I thought you’d want to know that this person was dead when he went into the water. Someone wrapped him in chains and probably attached him to something they thought would sink. It probably didn’t go as deep as they wanted.”

“Or they put him somewhere a bit too shallow,” Zach said.

“Maybe,” the coroner said. “But people usually underestimate how much weight it takes to hold a gaseous bloating body underwater. Bodies like that want to float.”

Zach winced. Apparently, he could picture that. If Sofia let herself, she could smell it, which wasn’t something she really wanted to do—not even in her imagination.

“I’ll have more for you later,” the coroner said, “but I figured you would want to know that this guy was already a corpse when he was tossed into Lake Mead.”

“Thanks,” Sofia said, but the coroner had already hung up.

“So,” Zach said, “a murder then.”

“Most likely,” Sofia said.

Whether they could prove it or not would be something else entirely.

***

The offices of Venegas Landscape Artistry and Design were in one of the newer buildings in Downtown Summerlin, near the Las Vegas Ballpark. The entire development was snooty, catering to people with more money than Sofia would ever earn in her lifetime.

The building had opaque glass walls that reflected the mountains. The site looked lovely, except from the parking lot. There, it felt like she had entered a sterile office park that could be in any city.

Inside, the walls belied that impression. The doors opened onto an expensive blue and gray lined carpet. The walls were covered with murals—if one could call a black-and-white gigantic flower a mural.

The offices took up the entire seventh floor. As she and Zach emerged from the elevator, the first thing she noticed was that the art had changed. The walls were covered with photographs of the desert or desert plants. Brown and gray rocks, with a bit of green or gray or the ever-blooming flowers, something she actually loved about this city.

Those images soothed her, which was probably what they were supposed to do. There was another set of smoked glass doors, and as she was about to go through, the doors opened.

A lanky woman with skin so leathery that it looked like it had been glued to her bones came out, right hand extended.

“Officers,” she said in one of those sickly sweet voices that people used when they were uncomfortable.

“Detectives,” Sofia said, pausing between that word and the rest, “Herrera and Gelb.” She deliberately did not give the woman any clue as to who was who.

Since neither of them took her hand, the woman let it drop.

“I’m Louisa Langford,” she said, pushing the smokey door open. “We spoke on the phone.”

She said that to Zach.

“We’ve been worried sick about Elias. He missed several important meetings, and his wife has no idea where he is. I take it you do?”

She led them to a conference room, talking the entire way. The conference room was a glass box. The view was visible from the hallway, but so were the people inside.

Sofia went in and stood near the windows. The heat of the day radiated through the glass, leaving the front of her warm and her back cold in the air conditioning.

“We don’t know where he is,” Zach said, not exactly lying. Sofia could see him reflected in the glass, his body larger than the towers dotting the Strip. “When did you last see him?”

“Three days ago,” Langford said. “He was going to see one of our clients. He was really nervous.”

That caught Sofia’s attention. She turned, so she could see Langford’s face. “Why would a man with his credentials be nervous?”

Langford took a deep breath and looked over her shoulder. Then she made sure her back was to the hallway.

“Look, this client is…” She paused. “I’m not supposed to discuss him or the work, but well, Elias is missing, and I’m scared.”

“Why?” Sofia asked.

Langford gripped the back of a chair. “You know we have a lot of foreign money, billionaires, in Summerlin, right?”

Sofia blinked, trying to follow. “You’re saying your client is a foreign billionaire?”

“I’m not saying that,” Langford said. “I don’t give out client names.”

She let that hang for a moment, but neither Sofia nor Zach jumped on it. They would figure this out, with a warrant if they had to. First they needed to let Langford talk.

“We often don’t meet the actual clients,” she said after a moment, “but instead, we meet the people running their estates. Those people are…protective…of their positions. Apparently, the estate manager, in this instance, was…difficult at best. Elias wouldn’t let any of us near him.”

“Difficult why?” Sofia asked.

“Elias used the word thugs to describe the security. He was worried for anyone on our team to go up there and work. The security is armed and…his word…volatile.” Langford’s fingers dug into the back of the chair.

Interesting, Sofia thought but didn’t say. “So what did they want Elias for?”

“Apparently, someone wanted to change the estate’s landscaping to desert landscaping.” Langford raised her eyebrows. “You’re aware of the Named and Shamed List?”

“Yes,” Zach said without looking directly at Sofia. He knew she didn’t always follow the news. But she was aware of the Named and Shamed List, mostly because it frustrated her. Every year, the Las Vegas Valley Water District released the names of the top 100 residences that used too much water.

The problem was that all of them belonged to the rich, who could afford the exorbitant fines that came with excessive water usage. Sofia was of the opinion that anyone who overused their allotment—in some cases by millions of gallons per year—should have their water shut off until there were changes.

But she wasn’t in charge of that.

“Many of our clients come from the list,” Langford was saying to Zach. “But they’re usually locals who made good and want to change their behavior and cut their water footprint.”

Zach nodded.

“Someone in our current client’s compound wanted to change the behavior there or at least change the unfavorable reporting. Elias was going to essentially say he couldn’t do what they were asking, and they needed to hire someone else.” Her hands ran along the top of the chair as if trying to rub it clean.

“What were they asking?” Zach asked.

“If we could set up a system that made it look like they were using less water without changing the landscaping at all.” Langford frowned. “Of course we can’t, not legally. We’d have to shuffle the water meters and change the way that things are recorded…I’m sure someone could do it, but we certainly can’t.”

Sofia could hear the frustration in her voice.

“So, you fire the client,” Sofia said. “People do that all the time.”

Langford straightened her back. “We do that all the time as well. But this client…” She looked away as if conjuring a memory. “Elias told them he wasn’t interested in working with them. I guess it got heated. When he came back, he was really upset because we’re all about conservation here.”

“Okay…” Zach said, trying to keep his voice level as if he didn’t understand where this was going.

Langford looked at him, her gaze sharp. “Elias was afraid…well, we were afraid…that the water waste would continue. Millions of gallons wasted and untraceable. It’s just…wrong.”

Sofia didn’t see how any of that was worth killing over, though. That thought must have shown on her face because Langford squared her shoulders.

“I know most people think this is silly, but it’s not. Water waste here in the valley is a matter of life and death for all of us. For the city too.” Langford had made a fist with her right hand, and pounded it slightly on the back of the chair. “I know it’s not an immediate problem. People don’t think about the future—”

“What happened?” Sofia asked. She didn’t need the lecture. She did worry about the future, but right now, she needed to focus on the present. On this case. “He was angry. He must have done something.”

Langford nodded, just once. “Something he’d never done before,” she said. “He reported them to the Water Authority so that they could be on the lookout for any kind of tricks. And he was talking to some people with law enforcement ties—lawyers, in particular—to find out if doing such a thing would be fraud on a large scale.”

“Large scale?” Zach asked.

“A felony, to make them stop,” Langford said.

That would make no difference to a foreign national, but it might to the estate manager, if they were local.

“I’m confused,” Sofia said. “If they’re not a client, why did Elias return to the estate after reporting them?”

“They’re still on our books as a client,” Langford said. “Elias was going to give them a list of landscapers to replace him. Only he didn’t make a list. He was going to tell them off. I told him not to.”

She gave them an odd look.

“I was scared for him. I really was. These people aren’t people you cross or confront. They play by different rules.”

“Because they’re armed?” Sofia asked.

“No.” That single word had frustration in it. “Lots of our clients have armed security these days. But these guys—they seem violent.”

“You’ve met them?” Zach asked.

“No,” she said. “Violent was Elias’s word. And I was scared. But he went anyway.”

“And no one has seen him since?” Sofia asked.

“That’s right,” Langford said. “No one has seen him since.”

***

The nice thing about Summerlin was that it was a brand-new planned development. Started in the 1990s, most of the Vegas Valley’s wealthy migrated up there for enhanced security and privacy. The communities were gated, even though the homes were on multiacre estates.

Enhanced security meant cameras. It meant monitors. It meant doorbell cameras and prying eyes, even though the locals wanted privacy. They got it behind their own gates but on the way to and from the gate? They had no privacy at all.

So that was why it wasn’t hard for Sofia and Zach to trace what happened to Elias Venegas. As they drove away from his business, Zach looked up the foreign nationals on the Named and Shamed List. Most had been on the list for decades because no one had been able to shut them down. But the newcomer to the list was a Chinese billionaire who owned casinos in Macao and who had some ownership in one of the casinos on the Strip.

The billionaire had never been to Las Vegas, apparently preferring to park his money here without bothering to visit it in person. But there had been dozens of reports of late-night parties on the estate, lots of random weapons fired, and some generally out-of-control behavior that made the wealthy neighbors nervous.

A new estate manager was hired, and promises were made to the gated community’s board that the estate would clean up its act. Apparently, someone thought that included cleaning up the landscaping.

It took more than a week of careful investigation and several warrants to get information from nearby security cameras. Sofia also got permission to dredge Lake Mead near where the hand had been found.

Sure enough, Venegas’s body wasn’t that far out, in waters deep enough to boat but too shallow to really hide a corpse effectively.

The story, as it came out, was sad and simple. Venegas had gone alone, gotten into a loud verbal disagreement with the estate manager. The fight brought in security, who saw Venegas as a threat, and shot him.

Then the guards were informed as to who he was and what they had done. That night they placed him into a van and drove it to Lake Mead. It showed up on several traffic cams along the way.

The big mistake they made, though, was driving his car along with it. That car was in the lake as well, only it hadn’t been found yet.

Sofia had everything wrapped up within the month. So many employees of the estate saw what happened or were involved, and did not want to get charged with aiding and abetting. That made them talk.

The Chinese billionaire did not help them. He fired the estate manager and put the entire place on the market.

And all of this happened before the media got wind of any of it, which relieved her. It put her in charge of the way that the story got covered.

No one mentioned the severed hand in Lake Mead. That would come out in trial.

Instead, she managed to get a friendly journalist to report on the center of the story—or at least, what she believed to be the center of the story:

Elias Venegas was a passionate defender of the future. He had just run into someone so stuck in the past that they had been willing to commit fraud to make their bad habits invisible to the community writ large.

The story had that focus for two whole days before the preliminary hearings. And then the arm and the body in Lake Mead and the stories about the lake of death began.

Two days were more than she would have gotten otherwise. Normally, she didn’t care about coverage, but in the Lake Mead cases, she did.

She wanted people to understand that bathtub ring. She wanted them to know that the drought situation had long since become serious.

The death of Elias Venegas wasn’t the first death connected to the changes in the climate, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

But it had been dramatic enough to catch the world’s attention—if only for a few hours.

And sometimes, that was all it took.

 

___________________________________________

“Body Parts & Bathtub Rings“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Body Parts & Bathtub Rings

Copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing

First appeared in Crimes Against Nature, edited by Robert Lopresti, Down & Out Books, 2024

Cover and Layout copyright © 2025 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Canva

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

People often misquote Benjamin Franklin on the only certainties in life—death and taxes. But Patrick wonders about the truth in that.

Once, young and foundering, he embarked on a quest to challenge life’s inevitabilities.

Now, older and jaded, he comes face to face with his past, forcing him to question everything he believes.

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

 

Death And Taxes By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Sixteen years and a half continent away from the great American Midwest, Patrick saw Keri. She was running out of the market across the street from his favorite coastal café, a bottle of wine in her hand.

At first he thought it couldn’t be her. Her long brown hair caught the sun, reflecting it in golden highlights. She was slender, and the blue sundress she wore hung off her as if she hadn’t grown into it yet.

Perpetually twenty. That was what he thought as he sipped his mocha and returned to the Wall Street Journal. Keri would always be twenty and coltish, not quite grown into her body.

He smiled at himself, at his romantic nature. Proof, perhaps, that he had loved her because he saw her in every gangly twenty-year-old with the promise of great beauty.

Then a car horn made him look up. The woman was standing in the middle of the street, staring at him, cars stopped all around her. The bottle of wine had shattered at her feet.

His gaze met hers.

She hadn’t changed.

And there was a look of abject horror on her face.

***

Sixteen years and half a continent away, he’d been twenty-five, callous and certain of his own future. The son of a prominent lawyer, he’d become a lawyer too—not with the thought of practicing law, but with the thought of creating it. He studied politics like it was a religion, and decided that he had to be in the seat of government. So, with his newly minted certificate from the bar, he headed downstate thinking the capitol would welcome him.

Instead, he learned that any state capitol had its share of locally grown lawyers. With his pedigree, the partners at the large local firms said, he could get a job anywhere. The following question—why here?—had an underlying meaning: what’s wrong with you? How come you haven’t gone to your father’s firm?

He couldn’t very well say he had come because he thought getting into politics would be easier here. It wasn’t. He didn’t know anyone, and the art of politics was the managing of connections.

Eventually, he got a job as a junior staff lawyer at the Fair Housing Coalition, a job he saw as beneath him both financially and politically. Yes, yes, he believed everyone should have a home and everyone should be treated fairly, but most of the people he saw were too dumb to realize that a lease agreement was a legal document and that their behavior had put them in trouble with their landlord and the local laws.

He could have, he later supposed, joined the interoffice coalition that was working to change some of the more egregious landlord-tenant laws, but his heart wasn’t in it. Instead, he gravitated to the local university, spending his time in the student union, drinking with people who reminded him of his friends back home, talking philosophy and planning to change the world, one little decision at a time.

That was how he learned about the Professors Simmons and their interdisciplinary study—financed by any number of government agencies and private corporations—and extended, theoretically, over decades.

The study only made it through the first five months of its existence.

It caused two deaths, and derailed any hopes he had of politics—at least out front. Only fast-talking and the excellent attorneys of his father’s firm had saved Patrick from being disbarred.

By then, he didn’t care. He’d already met and lost Keri.

And had his belief in everything shattered.

***

He grabbed his mocha as he headed out of the café. Interesting, he would later think, that he’d left his PDA and his newspaper, but took his beverage.

It was a clear sign that he wasn’t thinking, just reacting, running through the closely set tables to the double-doors, pushing them open and hurrying into the street.

A VW Bug swerved past him, and the driver shouted an obscenity. A sedan, following, leaned on its horn.

But he didn’t move. He stared at the broken bottle, the red wine running like blood down the empty sidewalk.

Keri was gone—as if she had never been.

***

The Professors Simmons were not related. There were four of them, all in different disciplines. They met at a large university faculty gathering where everyone had been asked to clump alphabetically. Their common last names, their common ages, and their uncommon interests held them together a lot longer than the meeting had.

Professor Abigail Simmons taught philosophy. She had two seminars in which she tortured undergraduates, forcing them to challenge the realities in the world around them. She also taught three graduate seminars to the same twenty grad students, the courageous few who thought majoring in philosophy was a good idea, no matter how badly it ruined them for the job market. She had grown frightened for her own job, discovering that publishing occasional articles in philosophical and religious journals wasn’t enough to impress her dean. Apparently, she had to do some sort of breakthrough research to justify her salary. But, she would argue, breakthrough research and philosophy were by definition incompatible, something her dean believed she—of all people—could overcome.

Professor Roderick Simmons taught political science. He was the rightwing guru of the poli-sci department, the man that local media always called to give a reliable—and seemingly balanced—view of local elections. Roderick Simmons specialized in political systems and, in addition to his well-received books, he spent a lot of time away from campus, consulting with various groups, many of them tied to the Republican Party. He was tenured and secure, which made him perfect for this joint project.

Professor Marilyn Simmons was a biologist. Her teaching work involved occasional lectures to overcrowded 101 classes (with the day-to-day work done by teaching assistants) and supervising the research of sleep-deprived graduate students. Her seat at the university had funding from outside grants; she was a star professor who felt her own area of expertise had grown a bit stale. She was looking for a new challenge, one that would improve her prestige even more, and this, she felt, was it.

Professor Nash Simmons was the youngest and the most professionally insecure of the group. Even his specialty reflected his insecurities: His professorial bio said that he focused on Cognitive Analysis and Behavioral Theories—a lot of words, he liked to joke, that meant he had no idea what he was doing. He did whatever it was that he did from the Behavioral Science Department, where he taught upper-level psychology classes and graduate seminars in the brain. He supervised almost no graduate students and his thesis, a trailblazing work on cognitive theory that had been published to great acclaim, was now several years old. He had to produce something new, and in the way of all who were acclaimed when they were too young, he felt that something new had to be trailblazing as well.

Patrick had no idea how the multidisciplinary study went from cocktail party talk to grant-writing to grant-winning, but by the time he had encountered Simmons-N, as Nash Simmons had been designated by those involved in the work, the study was looking for willing bodies. That Patrick wasn’t a student and had an understanding of the body politic made him an unusual choice.

That he was willing to step into the real world in the name of science made him even more unusual.

But it was his willingness to apply experimental techniques to that real world that made him the most desirable candidate the Professors Simmons had found.

***

Patrick walked into the market. It smelled of garlic and fish overlaid with the faint scent of roses from a display near the door. The place was dark compared to the street and cramped, which instantly made him uncomfortable. He preferred the large chain grocery store at the end of town, where the lights were bright and the products were displayed according to dictates of some corporate official in another state.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw six different aisles heading toward the seafood department along the back wall. The seventh aisle, which started behind the cashier, carried wines, beer, and hard liquor. Cigarettes were stacked high, where no one could get them without help from the staff.

He waited in line, noting that everyone ahead of him had fresh produce and canned products with the words “healthy” or “organic” or “natural” on the label. He shuddered, hating the pretension, remembering when he used to do the same thing just to fit in with his university friends.

When he made it to the front of the line, he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his badge. Most people in this small town knew their sheriff, but he was cautious for the handful that didn’t.

“The woman who just left,” he said. “The one with the wine. Can I see the copy you made of her license?”

The clerk flushed and for a moment, he thought the gambit wouldn’t work. Keri still looked twenty; she should have been carded. Oregon law stated that anyone who looked thirty-five or younger had to show identification to buy liquor.

But the clerk nodded and called for a manager, who took Patrick to the back office where he could look at the fuzzy identification that had been scanned into the computer system.

Kerissa Simon, the ID said, the last name dangerously close to Simmons—so close that it made his head hurt.

“Any idea where she’s staying?” he asked, knowing the store didn’t need a record of that, but often took it to avoid problems later on.

He got the name of a roadside motel, cheap but comfortable, and somehow it didn’t surprise him, just like her appearance in his refuge hadn’t surprised him.

Although it should have.

***

The meeting room was an old lecture hall in one of the campus’s earliest buildings. The building was now used primarily for offices, but this room had clearly been too big to give to just any professor.

Radiators ran along the walls beneath the single-paned windows, and despite the constant heat blowing into the room, there was still a draft. Patrick sat near the door in a wooden desk chair that was at least eighty years older than he was. Some of the names carved into the desk’s surface had been there so long that their edges had worn smooth.

He traced them, feeling out of place among the students, knowing he looked out of place in the suit his father had purchased for him before his first moot court appearance. Patrick had taken off the tie and stuffed it into his briefcase, but the fact that he had a briefcase instead of a backpack and a suit coat instead of a sweater already showed that he wasn’t One of Them.

A few stared, and a couple kept glancing at him like they expected him to get up front and talk about the various studies.

He’d had some preliminary meetings with the Professors Simmons and the assisting graduate students; he assumed these other participants had as well. Now, though, they were getting together for their first official meeting. They would have four such meetings before splitting into various subsets, four meetings in which the Professors Simmons would lay out the purpose of the studies as best they could, without tainting the results.

The professors stood in the hallway, heads bent, conferring, while a graduate student with a clipboard checked off the names of each attendee. Finally, a young woman, snowflakes melting on her hair and collar, stopped near the graduate student, gesturing an apology as she gave her name. Then she slipped inside the room, and took the only remaining chair, right next to Patrick.

“The snowstorm they predicted came, huh?” he asked.

She leaned away from him and finger-combed the moisture from her brown hair. Then she peeled off her coat, meticulously hanging it on the back of her seat.

“The roads are a mess,” she said. “I had to park six blocks away.”

He was in one of the private lots, courtesy of the Fair Housing Council. He hadn’t really noticed the snow until he started climbing hill. Then he worried about the swiftness of the storm, knowing that the sidewalks could get buried during the few short hours of the meeting.

“I’m Patrick,” he said as she sat down across from him.

“Keri.” She stuck her mohair scarf inside her coat sleeve, then smiled at him. “You need the money too?”

No, he wanted to say but didn’t, I just need the company. He knew this study paid the highest of any conducted on campus, and he thought he knew why. The interdisciplinary approach allowed for even more grant money than usual, and the professors decided to use that money to pay the subjects extra, so that they’d stick around for the duration rather than leave when the semester ended.

“Money’s always nice,” he said, which was as much of a dodge as he wanted to give her. He wasn’t sure why he felt this odd need for honesty. She was a bit thin for his tastes—all elbows and knees and sharp angles. She was also at least five years younger than he was, an undergraduate when he’d been out of school for a year now.

She smiled at him, then pulled an older laptop from her backpack. The laptop barely fit on the desk. Several other participants had laptops or AlphaSmarts or PDAs with keyboards.

He hadn’t even thought of taking notes, which suddenly showed him how far he had come from the student mentality. He leaned to the right, opened his briefcase, and pulled out both a legal pad and his BlackBerry, not sure which would work best in this situation.

Then the door opened one more time, and the Professors Simmons came in. Their appearance was as varied as their disciplines. Simmons-A was short and dumpy, her curly hair a mixture of gray and grayer. Simmons-R wore a suit as expensive as Patrick’s. His black hair had a precision cut, and his hands looked manicured. Simmons-M was slender and wore her long red hair in some sort of upswept do that looked like it took time and three other people to create. Simmons-N had the prerequisite professorial ponytail and wispy goatee. His glasses fell to the edge of his nose, making him seem even more absent-minded than he probably was.

Patrick’s stomach turned. Studies, waivers, payment by the hour, altering his behavior because he had agreed to do so, not because he wanted to do so.

Was he that lonely? Was he that lost?

He glanced around the room, at the stressed, pimply faces around him, and realized he probably was.

***

The motel had been built in the late 1950s, when this coastal community had been known as the Disneyland of the Pacific Northwest. Once there’d been a theme park (although in those days, they’d called it something else) on the outskirts of town. Only a few remnants remained—a red-and-white store downtown that made its own candy; a go-cart park across from a restaurant once known as (and still referred to by locals as) the Pixie Kitchen; and a five-story resort hotel built in the Cape Cod-style where presidents had stayed but which had become, in the intervening years, an old-folks home.

This motel, unoriginally called the Beach-Goer, still advertised that it had television and clean, comfortable rooms. It stood on a bluff overlooking the ocean, prime real estate that the elderly owners refused to sell to all sorts of development firms.

The main entrance was off a narrow drive that barely fit today’s SUVs; he had no idea how the large automobiles of forty years ago had negotiated the same road.

He drove a truck/van combination with an engine modified for high speeds. The county owned the vehicle, and if he ever lost a local election, he would have to give the thing back. Sometimes he thought he might miss it—in the back was all sorts of life-saving equipment mixed with weaponry—but mostly he saw it as a burden of his job, one of many he hadn’t understood when he learned that his checkered past mattered less to the people here than it probably should have.

He parked just outside the entrance, making sure that the official decals were facing away from the street, so as not to interfere with any walk-in business. Then he went inside.

The desk clerk was a local gal who played bingo at the casino every Wednesday night. He didn’t know her name, but they’d seen each other around. It was hard to miss the other locals in a town of 7,000.

She smiled at him with recognition. He didn’t have to flash his badge. He just asked for Keri Simons’ room, and the clerk gave him a room key.

He weighed it in his hand as he walked along the concrete sidewalk. The key was a kind of power: if she wasn’t there, he could wait inside her room, surprise her, let her know who was really in charge.

That he even had the thought surprised and appalled him at the same time. He had never thought of control in connection to Keri before.

But the study itself, the reason they met, was all about control.

And hubris.

And the belief that somehow, humankind had the power to alter its own destiny.

***

“For thousands of years, mankind has felt it has a destiny.” Simmons-A stood in front of the long wooden desk beneath the chalkboard. She had taken a piece of chalk before beginning her welcoming remarks, almost as if the chalk provided a kind of comfort. All during her talk, she kept the piece in her palm, alternately rolling it and clenching her fingers around it.

Patrick found himself watching the chalk instead of her face, partly because she reminded him of every professor he’d ever disliked, and he wasn’t exactly sure why.

“Not just a species destiny,” Simmons-A was saying, “but individual destinies as well. We can turn to almost any early document based on the oral tradition and find evidence. Genesis tells us that God created Man in His own image, and just that sentence alone implies that God had a purpose for Man, a purpose that Woman screwed up, of course.”

The group laughed, but it sounded dutiful. Patrick made himself smile, even though he hadn’t felt like it, but Keri crossed her arms.

“Mythology gives us story after story of people confronting their destinies, from the Christ story to the Greek story of Oedipus.”

Patrick shifted in his chair. He didn’t need the history lesson if that was what it could be called. He just wanted to get on with the actual business of the study, whatever it would be.

“Fighting destiny is one of the greatest themes mankind has.” Simmons-A tossed the chalk into the air and caught it. “Look at Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. Look at our own fiction from popular tales of Harry Potter to Star Wars. Even romance fiction flirts with destiny. Romance hints that every person on earth has a soulmate—someone they’re destined to be with. If we take the time to find that person—or if we recognize that person (apparently some of us do not)—then, the theory goes, we shall live happily ever after.”

Keri bit her lower lip. Patrick didn’t know when he started looking at her instead of Simmons-A.

“From time immemorial,” Simmons-A said, “mankind has tried to fight its destiny, whatever that destiny might be. Few are with that proverbial silver spoon in their mouths. Even fewer accept that spoon with grace. If you do not believe me, look at the remaining royal families of the world. Such tales we hear of debauchery and rebellion.”

A few people smiled, but most stirred, just like Patrick had.

“What has this to do with us?” Simmons-A asked. “Simple.”

She then gave a capsule summary of the faculty meeting, the conversation the Professors Simmons had in lieu of listening to faculty debate.

“The only thing that the four of us could agree on that evening,” she said with a smile that transformed her face from sour and discouraged to slightly pretty, “was that Benjamin Franklin was right: in this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

“And being born,” someone said from the front row.

She looked at him in surprise. He had broken her rhythm. Simmons-M, the biologist, came forward at that moment, rescuing her colleague.

“We can’t change that,” she said. “We’ve all been born and we’ve survived. So once we’re here, all we can be certain of are death and taxes.”

She had a powerful voice with a touch of music to it. She also had a great deal of charisma, and Patrick found himself wishing that she had been in charge of the opening speech instead of Simmons-A.

But Simmons-M knew her place, at least in this beginning. She made a little bow to Simmons-A and returned to the cluster of Simmonses near the blackboard.

“Precisely,” Simmons-A said, attempting to recover. “Death and taxes. We argued about that flip remark for weeks. And somehow, we went from a philosophical discussion of certainties and uncertainties in this world to what we’re calling a multidisciplinary study. According to our grants, we’re attempting to see if humankind can change its known destiny. But between us—”

And she grinned again, looking over her shoulder at her colleagues like a schoolgirl. Only Simmons-N smiled back.

“—we decided to have a race. We have four things to prove: That we do indeed have destinies. That we can change them. That human-made systems—in this case, taxes—can be changed. That biological systems—in this case, death—can be changed.”

Then she stepped back with a little nod, and Simmons-R came forward. Patrick slouched. He’d never realized until this moment how much Simmons-R reminded him of his father.

“You’d think,” Simmons-R boomed and half the room sat up as if they’d dozed and been rudely awakened, “that human systems would be the easiest to change. But I have my doubts. In a cursory search of governmental systems throughout human history, I cannot readily find an example of a society without taxation. Once again, let me turn to the Bible. The Egyptians…”

And as he discussed the levies that the Egyptians placed on their subjects, the taxes that built the Roman roads, the demands the medieval Japanese put on families, he made an eloquent, if familiar, point.

Patrick assumed the point probably wasn’t as familiar to the undergraduates—few people in the room besides the Professors Simmons were as overeducated as he was. He glanced at Keri. This time her gaze caught his, and she smiled.

He felt twelve again, and actually had to resist the urge to write a note on his legal pad and pass it to her. So far, she hadn’t typed anything into her laptop, and he’d only written down “Death and Taxes” as if it were the topic sentence of an essay exam.

In fact, he never wrote anything else down that night. The remainder of the evening was a jumble of lecture—Simmons-M discussing the necessity of death, not just on an individual scale, but on a worldwide one (species death; death of ecosystems; the eventual death of the planet itself), and the arrogance of humankind to think it can alter death, even on a small scale; and Simmons-N referring to behavioral studies that suggest humankind’s perceptions of the world have led humans to misunderstand it—and an increasingly shared but silent intimacy with Keri, who seemed to find the whole thing as pretentious and amusing as Patrick did.

“One of the things that we’re going to examine,” Simmons-N said in his nasal voice, “is whether time actually exists or is just a matter of perception. Because if it is a matter of perception, then nothing around us is real—or everything is real, from the primordial soup that the Earth was once to this moment to the heat death of the universe, all happening at once.”

Simmons-A smiled through that entire speech, as if she agreed. Indeed, it seemed to Patrick that she would have been better off saying it than the cognitive and behavioral scientist.

Patrick said that later to Keri, at an all-night coffee shop just off the main drag. They’d ducked inside on their way back to their cars—or, more accurately, on the way back to hers; he’d passed his blocks before, but hadn’t told her, enjoying her company enough to hazard the ice pellets and heavy wind that the storm had become.

They found a booth in a warm corner away from the door, where they spent the next few hours laughing about the pretension, about the silly race between the disciplines (which implied, Patrick said, that they would all succeed in areas of study where no one had succeeded before), about the ironic coincidence that led the Professors Simmons to each other in the first place.

Sometime during the evening, Keri postulated that the winner of the entire thing might end up being the philosopher, who had somehow gotten a group of diverse people together to re-examine their beliefs in a way that seemed as irrational as the most screwball religious cult.

Patrick had laughed at that remark. And it was his own laughter that he thought of most often when he thought of Keri. Not of those nights at his apartment, not of the horrible last day. Just the laughter.

And the professors’ fight against a complacency that he didn’t then understand.

He understood it now, even felt it on days when the sunlight hit the ocean, and his small town was bathed in a clear, almost unworldly light. He would tell himself, as he looked at that beauty, that he had done the best with what he had.

But there was always an itchy restlessness underneath—a what-if chorus that continued to sing: What if he had gone to his father’s law firm first? What if he hadn’t been interested in politics? What if he had never met Keri?

What if, what if, what if.

He played the scenarios in his mind as if he were screenwriter finishing a script for a time-travel movie.

What if…

He didn’t know. He would never know.

He only knew that if the ancient Greeks had written his life story, the what-ifs didn’t matter. Destiny was destiny. The Greeks always showed that no matter what changes mere mortals tried to make, destiny would win out.

Somehow, the Greek version seemed to tell him, he would meet Keri anyway, she would die, and everyone would be sued. Careers would end. Lives would be ruined. Simmons-N would commit suicide all over again.

And Patrick would end up here, carrying a little sheriff’s badge in an unimportant town on the Oregon Coast, living alone, and wishing none of it had ever happened.

***

He paused before knocking on the door to her room. Only now, with a key in hand, and the memories fresh, did he realize how silly he was being.

Keri Andreeson was dead. He’d seen her corpse. They all had. They had clustered around it in the biology lab, her mouth slack, her tongue protruding ever so slightly, her eyes bulging, and her skin an unnatural clay color, and they had stared.

No one had said a word. He wasn’t sure, even then, if anyone completely understood how much her death would change everything.

He wasn’t sure he understood even now.

He swallowed against a dry throat. Was standing here a sign of a growing insanity? The fact that he was willing to believe that some girl—coincidentally named Keri (spelling the same)—whose driver’s license claimed she was twenty-two and from Illinois (Keri had been from North Dakota, complete with a melodic Fargo accent)—the fact that he was willing to believe she was the same person as the girl whose body he’d seen, the fact that he was willing to believe she was alive, and looked the same, and was terrified of him—showed just how far he had fallen intellectually, how little he believed in realities any more, how much he hoped for miracles.

Which made him no better than the people who had placed their faith into those studies.

Or put their faith in anything, for that matter. For what was faith, but a belief in the impossible? An irrational belief in something unbelievable.

He clutched the key in his fist, tempted to open the door and scare the girl, whoever she was. Who would she report her fear to? The sheriff?

He felt a bitter smile cross his lips. Then he turned away.

Better to leave the past in the past. Better to leave destiny or fate or the lack thereof to the philosophers and the professors and the dreamers.

Better to return to the realities of traffic accidents and one murder a year and a lonely house on a cliff-face overlooking the ocean, a house with a television as large as his bookshelves, a place where he went when he couldn’t stand reality any more.

He had just stepped into the parking lot when he heard a lock turn and a door open behind him.

And before he had time to think—or maybe he lied about that: maybe he did have time to think and he chose this—he turned, and stared Keri Simons—Keri Andreeson—in the face.

***

They’d become lovers even though the Professors Simmons had cautioned against fraternizing. That alone might have skewed the study—or one of the studies—had any of them been completed. But the thing had barely gotten off the ground when it all ended. Patrick had just received his working orders from Simmons-R the week before, working orders that included an overall personal plan which extended for five years.

The breadth of the study surprised him, even then.

Patrick was to ally himself with a local political group—any political group would do, so long as it worked on the grassroots level—and slowly ease them to a new vision: that taxation was a scourge, that government needed fiscal responsibility, and that required budget-tightening, reduced spending, and no new taxes. Over time, the no-new-taxes pledge would become a no-tax pledge, depending on how high up the political ladder he could climb, how much power he could attain, and how many followers he could convert to his—actually, Simmons-R’s—way of thinking.

Patrick, in his naïveté, had thought it possible. Much as he believed politics was the art of compromise, he also knew it lived in the realm of argument. A charismatic man with the right argument could change the playing field—make compromise happen on the one-yard line instead of the fifty-yard line, and yet convince everyone that they had attained a middle ground.

He’d actually see in happen, years later. The political center moved farther and farther right as he moved farther and farther west. When he finally stopped long enough to look at what America had become while he’d tried to outrun his past, he found himself wondering if some of Simmons-R’s other subjects hadn’t continued with the experiment, working their way up the political ranks until they reached the national level, influencing everyone from senators to the president himself.

Then Patrick would shake that feeling off—surely he would recognize someone from the bad old days, right?—and he would remind himself that taxes still existed, that the United States went through cycles of heavy taxation followed by cycles of light taxation, but never, in its two-hundred-plus year history had the United States ever gone without taxing someone for something.

He found that vaguely reassuring, just like he found the obituary columns reassuring. People continued dying. Humankind kept fulfilling their destinies, one grave at a time.

***

She was twenty. That was the first thought which reached his brain as he stared at her, framed in that cheap wooden doorway, sunlight peaking over the building’s eaves and the shush-shush of the ocean beyond.

In no way could this woman be in her mid-thirties, stretched by time and loss and years on the run.

She put both hands on the doorframe as if bracing herself or blocking his entrance or simply holding herself up. She was as thin as ever, coltish, all angles and lines, a girl who had not yet fulfilled her physical potential, whatever that might be.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a voice he wasn’t sure he remembered.

He flushed. She had seen him pause in front of her door, maybe even seen his hand raise slightly, his fist clench the key. She’d certainly seen his indecision, and, ultimately, his retreat.

“You bought a bottle of wine today,” he said, finally choosing an official approach.

“Is that illegal?” She tilted her head slightly as if she were interested in the answer. The movement was familiar. Keri used to do it when she was flirting.

His heart literally contracted. He’d only felt that squeezed sensation once before, when he saw her on the cot in the lab, her arm dangling to one side, the IV still taped into it but listing, as if it had died with her.

It took a physical effort to bring himself to the present.

“No,” he said. “Buying wine isn’t illegal. Neither is dropping it. But you could have picked up the glass.”

“Is this town so poor that it sends someone out to get its littering fees?” Then he heard it: the Scandinavian music behind the Fargo accent. The accent existed in the up-and-down cadence of the words as much as the long-vowel pronunciation.

She had cured the long vowels, but not the melodious intent behind them.

“I’m not here to collect any fees,” he said, “even though I am the county sheriff.”

“I would have thought that a man who read the Wall Street Journal had higher ambitions.”

She had seen him then, drinking his mocha and reading his paper, taking his afternoon break and pretending he was someone else.

If she had seen him, then that look of horror had been real.

And if that look of horror had been real, did that mean she had recognized him?

And if she had recognized him, did that mean she was Keri Andreeson masquerading as Keri Simons?

“I did have higher ambitions once.” He felt odd discussing them with a woman he thought dead in the parking lot of a cheap motel. “I left the café to talk with you, but you’d already vanished.”

“Vanished.” She smiled. That smile belonged to a woman, not a girl. It was learned. It held a wisp of sadness as well as a touch of irony. And through it all, her eyes hadn’t changed. “Leaving broken glass behind.”

He should have brought a bottle of wine. He saw that now. It would have eased the moment, given it some symmetry. But he wasn’t that kind of thinker.

Or maybe he was—a man who knew better than to tempt fate.

“We got it cleaned up,” he said as if he had something to do with it.

She nodded. She didn’t ask who he was. She just studied him in the odd light filtering over the building.

Finally, he had to become the supplicant, even though he didn’t want to. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

She shrugged a single shoulder, her hands remaining in place. “This is fine.”

It wasn’t fine. Even though the motel was sheltered by the trees, there were other doors, other windows, other rooms where people might be. They might listen. The desk clerk might be listening, and later she’d mention the odd conversation to her friend in the bingo hall, telling them how strange the sheriff seemed on that sun-dappled afternoon.

“It’s not very private,” he said.

“I don’t see other cars,” she said, as if she’d expected his objection.

He sighed, and walked back toward her. She locked her arms, and he had the sense she had done that instead of flinching. Why would she be afraid of him? If they hadn’t met, then it was something about her. If they had, then she was afraid he’d recognize her. He’d know that she hadn’t died, that people had gone to jail for no reason.

But she had died. He had touched her waxy skin. He had cried for her.

He’d loved her.

He hadn’t thought of any way to approach this conversation, and now he felt tongue-tied. Did he ask her if she’d known a Keri Andreeson? Wouldn’t someone who had changed her name deny it? Or should he ask if she had gone to the university? Or simply ask what brought her here, to the literal end of the earth?

Finally, he settled on: “Have we met before?”

Her mouth opened as if she planned to answer him, then closed as if she thought better of it. “You mean besides now.”

He nodded, not willing to play any more word games.

“Outside the market, you looked at me like I frightened you,” he said, then wished he hadn’t.

“That’s why you ran outside?” she asked, her voice rising. “That’s why you tracked me down?”

“I was already thinking you looked familiar,” he said, letting the implication hang that yes, he had sought her out because he wanted to find out what terrified her.

“A lot of people say that.” She gave another one-shoulder shrug. “I have one of those faces.”

But not one of those bodies. Not in combination. But he didn’t dare say anything like that lest she think it improper. Not that she would have any recourse here, in this small town, where he normally was the recourse.

“Still,” he said. “Something you saw frightened you.”

She studied him for a moment. “I don’t think we have met,” she said, answering the earlier question. “You seem like a man a woman would remember.”

He felt his breath catch. The other Keri had described him that way. When he had asked her why she had gone with him that first night, she had said she would have regretted not going. He had asked why. She had smiled. Because, she said, you’re the kind of man a woman would remember.

The echo bothered him. Everything about this meeting bothered him.

“You came to see me because you thought I was frightened,” she said.

“I came because I wanted to find out if you’re the woman I remembered,” he said, noting the echo in his own language.

“Am I?” she asked.

He swallowed, his throat still dry. The movement was painful.

“No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t think you are.”

***

She died testing the equipment. That was the official story. She was lying on the cot, taking a bit of fluid in the IV, seeing if the heart monitors worked, when somehow, she went into cardiac arrest.

Experiments on human beings, whether in government funded labs or university trials, were forbidden in the United States. Tests could be performed—trial runs of pharmaceuticals, for example, or psychological batteries—all with waivers, properly signed, and the risks carefully laid out.

For the death study, administered by Simmons-M with help from Simmons-N, the risks hadn’t been properly laid out. The implication—never proven—was that the participants would be brought to the brink of death and brought back. At the brink, they would attempt to prolong life, through perception changes or medications or some other procedure.

But unlike the tax part of the study, none of this was written down. It didn’t dare be.

Although the grant for this part of the study had been explicit enough to bring the two Professors Simmons to criminal court, and drag the university into a system-wide scandal. Simmons-R got brought in when it became clear he had lobbied the institution that issued the grant money, but Simmons-A remained untouched.

Simmons-A had only her grant proposal to delineate her involvement, and her participants were going to examine the philosophical underpinnings of both death and taxes, with a touch of psychological attribution.

She claimed betrayal by the other Simmonses, and that was how she parlayed her involvement into bestselling nonfiction books, while the other professors spent years in court.

Arguing over Keri’s death. Accident? Possibly. The administering nurse was really a nursing grad student, not through her pharmacological classes. Perhaps she had put a sedative into the IV in error—or grabbed the wrong IV in error. But there was too much verbal testimony otherwise.

Too many indicators that the Simmons Three, as the press had started to call them, had become arrogant enough to believe they could conquer death. Simmons-N’s suicide, shortly after he had been let out of jail on bond, led to jokes in the local media—that the Simmonses were again trying to prove they could conquer the state, if not death itself.

There was no sympathy.

Not even from Patrick.

He had stayed for the trials, even though his father told him not to. He had stayed, even though he (and the other tax participants) were classified as non-involved.

No one discovered his relationship with Keri, and he didn’t confess it.

He watched as Simmons-M’s brilliant career dissolved, as Simmons-R went from being an authority to being a blowhard, as the two of them sat across from a jury and waited for judgment.

What’s your destiny now? The reporters would ask as the two of them and their lawyers hurried out of the courtroom every night.

Their destiny, it turned out, was a plea bargain. Negligent Homicide for Simmons-M. Conspiracy for Simmons-R. A few years time in a minimum-security prison, followed by community service.

None of this brought Keri back.

Simmons-A didn’t even attend the trials. When Patrick went to see her, after the trial, she grew rude and frightened when he said he wanted to discuss the study. But he didn’t leave.

Did you really want to change destinies? He asked.

I told them it couldn’t be done, she said. It’s the one thing philosophers agree on. That in life, some things cannot be changed.

He almost fell for it. Then he realized that she was wrong. The Hindu system was based on knowledge—reincarnation as learning, improving, changing, growing—and, by implication, changing destiny. Not accepting it as the Christians taught. Not bowing to its inevitability, like the Greeks.

But he didn’t challenge her. He no longer had the energy.

He couldn’t change his destiny. But he could change his life.

So he headed west.

***

Where, he thought as he got into his truck, he had become a man who drowned in taxes. They created his job, provided his ride, paid his salary. In an odd, and completely unplanned way, taxes were his destiny.

Just as death would be someday.

He started to pull away, and then he stopped.

None of that explained Keri, her look of fright, her resemblance to the other Keri, the one he thought he had loved.

He couldn’t leave. Not yet.

He rested his head on the steering wheel and sighed. Then he got out of the truck one final time.

He rehearsed what he was going to say as he crossed the parking lot.

Do you believe in destiny? He’d ask. Do you believe in soulmates? In love that doesn’t die?

He didn’t know what he’d do if she said yes.

But he was willing to find out.

 

___________________________________________

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

Death and Taxes

Copyright © 2017 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Fate Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Daniel M. Hoyt, Daw Books, 2007
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2017 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Jun He/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.

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

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

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

 

Sob Sisters By Kris Nelscott

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

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

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

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

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

And of the police.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s going on here?” I asked.

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

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

“Good,” he said. “Come on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When should I start photographing?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is this?” I asked.

“Her life’s work,” he said.

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

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

“Not even close,” I said.

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

“The philanthropist?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He closed his eyes slightly and nodded.

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I know, but—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why am I here?” I asked.

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

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

He nodded. “So is the pressure.”

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

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

“I will,” I said.

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

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

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

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

My breath caught as I finally understood.

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

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

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

“You’ll be back for me?” I asked.

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

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

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

So no one else knew I was here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I started with the files.

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

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

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

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

I took the ledger and placed it on my coat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was intrigued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I couldn’t be certain unless I explored.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I felt chilled. “Meaning?”

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

“Who made this decision?” I asked.

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

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

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

“This is her life’s work,” I said.

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

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

“I doubt that’ll be possible.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which, I guess, we were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Consider yourself on notice,” Louise said.

I nodded. Something else to take care of.

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

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

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

“Okay,” she said. “I won’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Me either,” Midge said.

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

Midge looked alarmed. But I grinned back.

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

“Sure,” she said, frowning at us.

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

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

“What’s this?” she asked.

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

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

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

“What?” I asked.

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

“Sure,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is this?” she asked me.

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

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

I nodded. “But I trust you.”

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

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

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

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

She snorted. “Maybe on Mars.”

I sighed.

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

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

“Did I miss something?” Louise asked.

“Not really,” Susan said.

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

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

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

I looked at her.

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

Susan sighed. “Worse nightmares.”

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

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

“Do you read shorthand?” I asked.

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

“You mean besides Val?” Susan asked.

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

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

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

“Good,” Susan said. “She can do it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If Louise agrees,” I said.

Susan smiled. “She will,” she said.

***

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

“We found something,” she said quietly.

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

Then I followed Susan upstairs.

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

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

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

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

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

“I can’t tell you,” I said.

“You need to tell us,” Louise said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But she had had a secret life.

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

Women who wrote tears.

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

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

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

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

Susan was tapping her thumbnail against her teeth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I glanced at her. Her eyes were red.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A group of perverts,” Louise said.

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

“What kind of perverts?” I asked.

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

Her words were clipped, bitter, angry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I empathized.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded. “Just taking a break.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” he said.

“Go to that door.”

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

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

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

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

“C’mon in,” I said, standing back.

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

“Yes,” I said.

“I expected—”

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wow,” I said. “You got one?”

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

“And then you became a cop,” I said.

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

“And she got angry at you.”

“Said I was wasting my talents.”

“Are you?”

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

I smiled. “Touché.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What made you get me?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

His voice broke on the last word.

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded.

“No,” he said. “But you do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I doubt it,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Names?”

I nodded.

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

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

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

So I did.

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

Louise was still there, looking ragged.

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

I nodded.

“Your cop friend?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We don’t know that,” I said.

“If she did, she got out of it.”

I nodded slightly, a small concession.

“How could she get caught this time?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know,” I said softly.

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

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

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

“Val,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“But I can’t let it drop,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Which meant I was too.

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

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

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

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

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

In the middle of the night. With police escort.

If you could call Kaplan a police escort.

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

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

Then the story broke open again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had pretended I hadn’t seen her.

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

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

After a long moment, she nodded.

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

“The charities? Of course,” Helene said.

“The writing,” I said.

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

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

“Who hurt her so badly?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

“Their disgrace?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Sob sisters.

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

The things some of us did for revenge.

 

___________________________________________

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

Sob Sisters

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

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form

 

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

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

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

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

 

Advisors at Naptime By Kristine Kathryn Rusch 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You said—”

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

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

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

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

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

Only she never saw him again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Mommy lied—and Carol hated liars.

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

She wanted to be let out of this room.

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

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

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

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

She wanted a nap.

She pounded again, and Mommy opened the door.

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

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

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

“Honey—”

“I wanna go home.”

“Tonight, honey.”

“Now,” Carol said.

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

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

“You’re not supposed to like him.”

“He’s s’posed to play with me.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” Mommy asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carol frowned. That didn’t sound right.

“What’s I-R-A-Q?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Now,” Carol said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that say?”

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

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

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

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

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

Mommy just squeezed her tighter.

“We gots to go!” Carol shouted.

Mommy nodded.

The guards kept their guns on them.

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

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

“Huh?” the first guard asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“I wanna go,” Carol whispered.

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

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

“I wanna go home,” she said again.

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

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

Carol reached for it, but Mommy grabbed her hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wanna nap,” Carol told Ms. Hanaday.

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

Ms. Hanaday was frowning at her.

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

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

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

Carol shivered again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right.” He crouched.

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

“You look pretty smart,” he said.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“Are you smart?” he asked.

“Of course I am, dummy,” Carol said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr.—Lord—Sir,” Mommy said. “She’s—”

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

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

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

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

“Can I have that cookie?” Carol asked.

Everybody looked at her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get it ready,” he said.

“But the five-year-old—”

“Isn’t average,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ms. Hanaday shook her head.

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

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

The guards had lowered their weapons.

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

Carol tried not to giggle.

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

“Sure,” Mommy said.

“Pretend stuff,” Ms. Hanaday said.

“Yeah,” Mommy said.

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

“I know,” Mommy said.

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

“Okay,” Mommy said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where’re we going?” Carol asked.

“Far away,” Mommy said.

“Can we get my blankie?”

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

“What’s far away?” Carol asked.

“Good guys,” Mommy said.

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

Mommy’d been watching Carol play too many games.

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

“Mommy?”

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

“Am I average?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

___________________________________________

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

Advisors at Naptime

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

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

 

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

Glocalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question: Why those territories? And the answer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the first article notes:

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

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

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

Because that’s all we can do.

 

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

That’s right! 38 ebooks, all fantasy by amazing authors, available in a bundle of bundles for $30.

Writers like Thomas K. Carpenter, Anthea Sharp, and Ann Gimpel have put entire series in this bundle. Other writers have given you three books or more as a taste of what they can do, writers like Lisa Silverthorne and T. Thorn Coyle. You’ll find marvelous books by Brigid Collins, DeAnna Knippling, and Robert Jeschonek. I curated this bundle and included four books in my Faerie Justice series. Dean included all four of his Bryant Street collections.

These are amazing, high quality fantasy novels that’ll keep you reading long into the spring.

But this opportunity disappears on Thursday evening Pacific time, so hurry over to Storybundle to get yours. And maybe toss in a bit of money to support our charity, World Central Kitchen, and feed a few people while you feed your soul.

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https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Storybundle-Fantasy-Bundle.mp4

 

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

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

Winner of the Asimov’s Readers Choice Award.

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

 

The Nameless Dead By Kristine Kathryn Rusch 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” he said. “Where’s the baby?”

“With his dad,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I want to go back,” I said.

“We’re not going back,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Meaning what?” I asked.

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

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

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

I crossed my arms. “You lie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Austin was certainly better off without me.

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

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

I can barely be responsible for me.

But that’s another story.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I don’t.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sit,” I said.

She hesitated, apparently not used to being ordered about.

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

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

I waited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean, categories of unsolved?”

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

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

Whatever I had expected, it wasn’t that.

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

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

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

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

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

“Meaning what?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Two hundred,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I barked out a laugh. It was the opposite.

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

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

“No,” I said. “I don’t really care.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her eyes narrowed. She was still taking my measure.

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

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

Something I didn’t know, then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When do you retire?” I asked.

“In five years,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.” I wasn’t being cruel. I needed an order that I could understand, not some vague emotional reaction that she was having. “Oldest to newest. I will report to you as each case closes or at the end of every month if I can’t find anything.”

“What if I don’t want to work that way?” she asked.

I opened my hands just a little. “You’re free to find someone else.”

There was no one else. I was the only person that I knew of who did this kind of work—in this city, anyway. En route to the so-called Gateway of the Future, maybe there were other people like me, but I doubted it.

I would have heard, or tripped over their work. Because, as far as I was concerned, their work was always in the past.

She sighed softly. Then she nodded.

“You’re going to be a contractor with the city,” she said. “That means there will be a lot of documentation up front. I’ll do as much of it as I can and give you the rest to fill out.”

“I’ve worked for the city before,” I said. “I’m on file.”

She looked surprised. “I thought you were a lone wolf.”

“A handful of people used city funds to make sure that new hires were who they said they were. Those investigations couldn’t go through the usual channels.” Because they had been politically sensitive. One of them had even involved the mayor.

Lin-Wonle frowned.

“Put my name into your system,” I said. “My personal name, not the business name. You’ll find all you need. Then give me the first five names.”

“How about ten, and you can move on if you—”

“Five,” I said. “I have rules. You’ll need to follow them, or I’ll cancel our agreement.”

City work tended to creep into other things until it took over your life. That had happened to me once.

It was never happening again.

“You drive a hard bargain,” she said.

I almost said, Especially when I don’t want to do the work. But that statement wasn’t really true. I was curious. Lin-Wonle seemed competent enough to do everything on her own.

Cases that stymied her would challenge me.

I hadn’t lied to her about that.

I hadn’t lied to her about anything.

And that in itself was unusual.

***

The work wasn’t as hard as Astra Lin-Wonle made it sound. The first five cases took me less than a week. The second five only a few days. I wasn’t really investigating so much as organizing information, discovering identities, tracing journeys, things I normally did.

All ten of the cases had been execs who had come here on similar transports to the one that had brought me. Once I had a real name, I was to turn that over to Lin-Wonle, which I did.

She seemed happy enough.

We worked that way for six months before I hit my first wall. One of the cases she sent me involved a body found outside a dive bar near the port, a dive bar that no longer existed.

The body was male and badly beaten. He had no identifying marks that Lin-Wonle could find, and nothing in the area around him gave any clue as to his identity.

He had been dumped.

Lin-Wonle did give me his DNA, though. She had processed it through her usual databases and had come up dry.

I had several other databases that she couldn’t use. The city had deals to share information with other governments all over the planet, but couldn’t afford deals with various sector governments. I didn’t have to participate in that kind of cross-agency cooperation. I was a single operator who was trying to help people.

When I approached agencies that way, most of them allowed me access or gave me assistance that they wouldn’t give Lin-Wonle, not without some interagency b.s.

Then there were the databases that I had found over the years, the ones that had been abandoned as their organizations failed or moved to a new system or simply disappeared. I was working from the present to the past as measured by one long trip of an executive space cruiser. I had a lot of touchpoints because over the years, I had had a lot of clients.

The DNA was a great starting point, but it required a methodical search, one that took more time than the kinds of searches I was usually doing for Lin-Wonle. I had to peer into distant family connections, trying to find something that this body had in common somewhere within range of this particular space port.

I was making an assumption: I assumed he had arrived through the port. I had to, at least at first, because my databases all focused on the past.

I figured if his trip was supposed to originate here, then he’d be a local and Lin-Wonle would have information on him, somewhere. But she didn’t either.

Just the body, dumped, behind a no-longer existent dive bar.

I remembered the bar. I went there shortly after I arrived. It was a filthy cubby in a row of even dirtier storefronts, the kind that people expected near the port. Most of the goods sold there had been familiar ones to the folks who just got off the ships, items that couldn’t be found as easily away from the port.

Of course, anyone who went into one of those places paid a premium for whatever it was that their heart desired.

Me, I desired whiskey, which was available elsewhere in the city. I just didn’t know it yet.

When I squeezed myself inside, saw the sad customers sitting at the five round tables, and the even sadder customers sitting at the bar itself, I almost stopped and left.

But I didn’t. I went to the bar, startled to discover a human behind it, a hard-faced woman with even harder eyes.

I ordered a whiskey and she said, “We don’t got that here.”

I knew she was lying. The guy next to me had a glassful and wasn’t really nursing it.

I eyed it, then looked at her and she shook her head just a little.

“Look, honey. I’ve seen you around just enough to know you’re living nearby. So lemme give you a tip.” She leaned in front of the bottles of booze on the wall, either to block them or so that I could see them. I wasn’t sure which. “What we got here—what anyone has down at the docks—you can’t afford. You want to drink yourself into oblivion, drink downtown or in the comfort of your own home. Here, you get all the crazies who just got off the boat and you get to pay extra to watch them tear up the place. A lot extra.”

I didn’t move. I wanted a drink badly enough that I was going to ignore her. And she knew it.

So she waved a hand at me. “Get outta here. Because I ain’t serving you.”

And the drunk guy next to me slurred, “And I ain’t sharing.”

I’d never been denied service in any kind of bar before. It felt odd. It caught my attention the way that not much else had. Maybe because it didn’t feel personal. Or maybe because a woman I hadn’t known had shown me a kindness.

A lot of people had shown me a kindness since I left the family, kindnesses I didn’t deserve.

She was busy with another customer—talking and pretending to laugh—by the time I finally managed to move. I left that bar, and thought about that incident every single time I passed it over the years, until the bar vanished entirely, to be replaced by some automated hair-cutting service.

I wondered where she had gone, I wondered where the new drinkers went to drown their sorrows, and I wondered how the hell I had gone from craving whiskey late at night to not having a drink in more than thirty years.

The bar was a turning point. Not of the and I will never drink again kind, but of the finally noticing that other people still existed kind.

Somehow, I went from there to here, investigating part of a death that occurred behind that bar long before it closed. A death that, truth be told, could have been just as empty and meaningless as my own would have been.

I wondered if the bar was a clue. I wondered if the neighborhood was a clue.

I wondered if the cops had even bothered to look at all of the clues.

I didn’t really want to do the local investigatory work, not yet anyway, so I put it off. I didn’t have to finish this job to get the next five. Lin-Wonle wanted the work finished before she quit, so she continued to hand me cases whether I’d helped her with the others or not.

I kept investigating Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy, as I had privately taken to calling him, as I fulfilled my contract with the other new cases.

Just because Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy ended up at the port didn’t mean that he had come through on any ship, and certainly didn’t mean that he had come via one of the longer distance ships.

But I was making that assumption. I figured Lin-Wonle had looked at the local angle. (If not, she should have.) I had one investigatory problem that I didn’t confess to her.

My databases all came from worlds that fed the executive tract here, not from other worlds that ships still traveled to. Some of those worlds sent people back here on various ships after they had worked through their contracts.

By then, those people understood time dilation, and they knew they would lose years again. But they usually didn’t care.

I didn’t have information from those places. I didn’t have databases to tap or agreements with the current governments of those places. Nor had I ever investigated their historical databases.

I didn’t want to make an agreement with those governments and/or the corporations that sent their executives into a bright, unknown future. Communication over long distances was a pain in the butt, and, quite frankly, the coroner’s office wasn’t paying me enough to volunteer to have my butt pained.

After six months, I set Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy aside, figuring I’d come back to that investigation.

And then I tripped on another of the files that Lin-Wonle had given me. It came—as they all did—complete with holographic images of the deceased.

I had looked at the first three images, back when she started giving me the cases, and I had decided that holographic life-sized images of corpses did not belong anywhere in my office.

I had switched off the automation in the files that Lin-Wonle had given me, so bruised and bloodied dead people weren’t prone across my workspace. But I discovered that I needed to see their faces.

And just as with Lin-Wonle, the nameless ones—the ones it seemed like I couldn’t solve—bothered me.

The second one wasn’t a guy. It was a woman, older like me. No real identifying marks.

Like me.

The image had risen from the file—her lined face, her cloudy sunken eyes, and her body, from the armpits upward. She was naked, of course, because the image I saw had been developed just before the autopsy.

Lin-Wonle had edited those images, because they were part of her reports. The images were actually vids that showed the entire autopsy, from the external examination of the corpse to the internal, should it be necessary.

She had accidentally left one of those once, and I managed to shut it down before it got too gruesome. The things she did for her job made me appreciate mine all the more.

I dug into the file she sent me about this woman. It said precisely nothing. One of the attending officers thought maybe the dead woman worked at the same dive bar as Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy, confirming what I knew about the place. It actually had human employees.

But I also knew that she had not been the woman I had seen.

Most of the bars in this city didn’t have human employees. Just robots and automated serving procedures. It kept the pour counts accurate in the mixed drinks, but did add a certain blandness to the alcoholic offerings all over the city.

Before I dug into her file, I looked up the bar.

It was called, unoriginally, The Watering Hole. There were places in every single city all over the sector with a similar name, although if I were naming businesses—particularly dive bars—I would never voluntarily use the word “hole” in conjunction with them.

Or maybe that was a marketing tool. Because dive bars really weren’t for the casual drinker. They were for the down-on-their-luck sad sacks who wanted a safe place to drink, no questions asked.

I paused in my reminiscences, thinking about the handful of places I’d visited as I fled my family so very long ago.

Twice I had gotten off the ship and twice I had reboarded it. I took one look around whatever port city we had landed in and I figured I didn’t want to stay there.

I hadn’t wanted to stay here either, but I had because that was the trip I had paid for, not because I liked the location.

But I vividly recalled two other Watering Holes at both ports. Same kind of place—narrow slice of real estate with only one obvious door. In one case, the door had been so grimy, I hadn’t wanted to touch it. In the other, I had paused, remembering that I didn’t have a lot of money and the booze was free on the ship.

In fact, it was the familiarity of the look and name of the Watering Hole that had brought me to it here, all those years ago.

I sat back down, shoved both files aside with the swipe of a hand, and started digging.

There were a lot of businesses—and I mean a lot—that operated on all the executive cruiser stops along the way. I had never given those businesses a lot of thought, but I did now.

Because something was itching at me.

I’d never dug into the companies before. I hadn’t even investigated the personnel files, because my clients were known. They wanted to know about their families, and their families clearly didn’t work on these ships.

I almost asked Lin-Wonle about the companies, and then decided not to. I had no idea how much money these companies brought into the city, but I would have wagered it was a fair amount.

Maybe that was why she had come to me. Maybe the nameless dead weren’t as nameless as they appeared. Maybe she needed someone outside her system to investigate the other dead.

But if that was the case, wouldn’t she have put more of those cases into my pile? So far, I’d only had two that were even remotely difficult.

I did not know, and didn’t want to guess. Her motives mattered less to me than the work itself.

I actually did like challenges. And I had found one here.

***

Forty-seven starship corporations carried passengers across the sector, along the route that I had happened into one drunk night. Forty-seven starship corporations, none of which shared the same corporate DNA.

I checked.

The company that had ferried me from one life to another had no complaints lodged against it, except for the obvious fold-ins. Those were usually easily dismissed because the company had been folded into other suits, usually against some bigger corporation. That corporation was the one that the person who had lost their entire life in exchange for a crapload of money often got sued for misrepresenting the work.

I examined a few of the lawsuits. The corporations always had the proper documentation. The starship company’s part in the case always got tossed out. Several judges—different ones in different jurisdictions—all informed the poor, hapless executive that courts did not have to protect someone against signing a bad contract unless the contract was egregious, which this wasn’t.

There was plenty of evidence that these executive schlubs were supposed to get educated about their journeys long before travel commenced.

Most of them simply chose not to take advantage of the opportunities.

I lost several days to deep-diving into about thirty of the forty-seven corporations. Those were easy to investigate. Corporate documents all properly filed. Information at the ready. Lawsuits mostly won, and those that weren’t required them to pay another crapload of money.

After every single crapload, those thirty companies would alter their practices, their contracts, and their behaviors to make sure that whoever climbed onto one of the ships did so fully educated—or at least, had every opportunity to become fully educated.

The remaining seventeen? That was where it all got interesting.

Seven of them were as old as time itself—or so it seemed. They were the granddaddies of all the corporations, and many of their practices were grandfathered in.

I had to investigate them because some of the oldest cases that Lin-Wonle had given me had involved those seven corporations.

They were either out of business now or sold and absorbed by one of the legit corporations that were easy to investigate.

The remaining ten presented me with a small mountain of issues.  I found more corporate name changes than someone escaping a criminal past. Each corporation took me down more dead ends than I expected. They seemed to be hiding something, but what I couldn’t tell.

I got very wrapped up in the overall investigation of the corporations. I like research. I like information. I like finding things out.

It frustrates me when information gets hidden from me, as someone was doing here. So I searched even more, taking the time out to investigate each group of names Lin-Wonle sent me.

Truth be told, I was hoping I’d find another difficult-to-identify nameless. Because I figured if I had three points of a triangle, I would have enough information to make a difference. That wasn’t exactly true, but it felt true.

I figured it might open a few more doors, at any rate.

Instead, I spent weeks on the corporations, until I realized that one of them ran more than star cruisers. One of them rented out properties in the ports of various cities, ports where the star cruisers stopped.

Several of those rental sites rented to Watering Holes in the various cities. Not here any longer, though. Not for years.

I felt like I was onto something now. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was searching.

I stopped everything else I was doing and dug into the history of the Watering Hole here.

Not that there was much. Twenty years ago, the city changed its policy regarding businesses around the port.

The city decided to take over the entire area. Instead of buying out the businesses at the going rates, the city used some of its eminent domain laws to offer a token fee and take over the entire area.

Except for the block with the Watering Hole.

There, the city simply reclaimed all of the businesses and replaced them with tiny automated shops like the hairstyling salon.

And for the life of me, I couldn’t find out why.

***

Lin-Wonle never sent me the latest files. She always insisted on dropping them off. Sometimes she told me her history with the deceased, not that I cared, and sometimes she stepped in as if she was checking on my progress, as if she was my boss.

I never answered her questions on those occasions. I was always too annoyed to say much more than hello or thanks.

But the drop-off after I had used all of my tricks to find out what was going on with that block, I invited her into my office.

She came wearing a gray version of the cape and slacks that she had worn at that very first meeting more than a year before.

I waved a hand at one of my chairs, sat down in the other, and said without any kind of greeting to soften my words, “I need you to look through city records for me. I can’t access the information that I need.”

She looked surprised. Of the sixty-plus names she had sent me so far, I’d only delayed on two. She had told me the month before that she was pleased with my work.

She had even implied that some names would be impossible to find.

I knew she was heading toward her retirement, and from her perspective, getting answers on most of these cases was better than no answers at all.

But that wasn’t my perspective at all.

“What do you need?” she asked in a tone I’d never heard from her before. It was carefully neutral.

“The Watering Hole,” I said. “Two of the bodies you sent me were found behind it.”

“Yes, one of the portside bars that the city closed down years ago. That area was a lot scarier thirty years ago. If anyone went down there, they had a good chance of being mugged or beaten or worse.” She folded her hands over her lap. “I don’t remember this particular bar. It wasn’t even the worst offender. That was—”

“I don’t care,” I said. I hated chatty people. I thought she had known that. “I’m interested in this bar and the block it was on. The city reclaimed that block but didn’t pay the corporation for taking the property. The city just took it, and I want to know why.”

“I’ll look it up for you to be sure,” she said, “but if I remember correctly, the city seized a lot of businesses known for illicit activity.”

“What kind of illicit activity?” I asked.

“The kind you would expect near the port,” she said. “Mostly selling banned and illegal substances.”

“Mostly,” I said. “What else?”

“That I don’t recall,” she said. “I do remember the Clean Up The Port campaign went on for nearly a decade.”

Then she squinted at me.

“I thought you were in business at that point,” she said. “Surely, you remember this.”

“I usually don’t care what happens in the city,” I said.

“But you do now,” she said.

“You want all the names or not?” I asked, maybe a little more sharply than I should have.

“I do,” she said, sounding surprised. “This will get them for me?”

How the hell should I know? I almost said, but I had enough common sense not to alienate her too badly.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m wondering why the information wasn’t easily available in the first place.”

The smile she gave me was condescending. It made me regret refraining from snapping at her a moment ago.

“We’re a port city, Gateway to the Future, as they like to call us. The port shuttles people off-planet on business, yes, but many just come here to visit our attractions, see the various resorts and natural wonders. That’s a good 75% of our income.” She added that in her didactic tone as if I should’ve known all of that as well.

I’d seen the ads, of course, and wondered what kind of idiot came to a place just to see something that could be easily recreated with a full virtual experience. Hell, some of those experiences came with sense impressions—water droplets pelting the viewer (or seeming to) while they were looking at a waterfall.

Something in my look must have caught her because she gave me one of those derisive smiles.

“Oh,” she said. “Such things are beneath you.”

“You’re telling me that the city believes if someone found out that the port was a hotbed of criminal activity, they wouldn’t come here?” I asked, trying to keep the incredulousness from my tone. “Even though that’s been how port cities have operated since time immemorial?”

She shrugged. “I don’t run the city government. I just work for it.”

“So the information was buried, lost, hidden,” I said. “Pretty well, too.”

Although I probably could have found it if I had been willing to break into the city’s systems. I had figured talking to Lin-Wonle was easier.

I was beginning to regret that decision.

“Do you still want the specific information?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

***

She brought me the information a week later on a small protected network device. Apparently she wasn’t supposed to share any of this stuff, not that it mattered.

What she had were city records of the decision to buy out the area, along with the properties to be confiscated because the illegal activities there rose above the 50% level, whatever that meant.

The city was good at hiding its sins, and I didn’t care enough to ferret them out.

Instead, I pursued another path.

I looked at arrest records going back half a century. At first, I didn’t find a lot. Exactly what Lin-Wonle had told me. Illegal substances, history of muggings, beatings, and the occasional homicide—with an easily identified victim.

Then, from a handful of records, forty years old, I found a criminal code listing that had no corresponding description to the current criminal code.

Just a series of numbers and letters that looked like they referred to some law or another, but nothing I could find.

And the hell of it was, a lot of them came from the block around the Watering Hole. A handful originated at The Watering Hole itself.

Finally, something I could easily research. Laws that were on the books but either got scrubbed or changed never really went away.

I had to dig to find the code, but I did.

And it made my non-existent heart hurt.

***

Two cases hogged all of the attention. These cases occurred nearly 100 years ago when the Gateway to the Future sounded more like the Gateway to Hell. The city was smaller then, the port even more dangerous than it was now.

Andries Schweinzinger, scion of the Schweinzinger clan, one of the city’s founding families, was found staggering down the street near the Watering Hole. He was naked, his hands bound behind his back, his hair nearly gone, his tongue black.

He was shouting that he’d been a victim and some local bypasser, someone who didn’t stick around, used one of the kiosks (now gone) to contact the police. They arrived surprisingly quickly and one of them was conscientious enough to film the entire encounter, maybe because she recognized Schweinzinger.

He was clearly on something. Eyes crazed, drool on the side of his mouth. He kept repeating that he’d been kidnapped and they were going to sell him to the highest bidder.

Because he was rich, he got some special treatment and some vilification in the local media. The media thought, like the police, that he was hallucinating. The substance he had taken should have rendered him unconscious, but one of the doctors who treated him claimed that Schweinzinger had built up a tolerance to the drug over the past year or two. Apparently, it was highly available at the time and was being used by the inevitable partiers.

Schweinzinger found himself the butt of jokes, but he hired a good attorney who was fighting the case everywhere, from the legal side to the publicity nightmare.

It looked like Schweinzinger had made up the accusation until a woman screamed her way out of the Watering Hole, naked, terrible bruises on her wrists where—she said—she managed to collapse her hands enough to get them out of restraints.

She was at the opposite end of the social strata from Schweinzinger, and her name would never have appeared anywhere if it wasn’t for the bizarre history she shared with him.

Lilly Wright was young and pretty and exceptionally smart. Graduated at the top of her class three days before and had spent the post-graduation ceremony partying. Her friends claimed she left them somewhere near the ports, but no one thought much about it.

Until she screamed as she fled the Watering Hole, claiming they were going to sell her to the highest bidder.

The city had no trouble finding people to blame. The names meant nothing to me, and I really didn’t care about them at all. The charging documents didn’t use the codes that I had found, and I wanted to know why these cases appeared when I dug for the numbers.

It took time, but I found my answer.

The cases changed the laws here. Turned out that there was a kidnapping ring working the docks. They’d take a young, bright, competent person, drug them, and sell their “contract” to someone on one of the many ships going through, taking the victim to places far from here, places from which—someone ominously said—there was no way to return.

When I saw that, I sat down. Hard. I’d been pacing my office, listening, looking, reading, and watching until that point. But places from which there was no return. That was anywhere in this sector, provided the ship traveled far enough fast enough.

Hell, my business was based on people being unable to return. The fact that I could answer their questions simply meant that the answers they sought were some part of some historical record somewhere. That was it.

I never vouched for accuracy. I just did what I could, and usually people left thinking they knew what was what.

The kidnapping laws had to change to accommodate the nightmares taking place at the port. Because if the kidnappings had been successful, there would have been nothing to charge. Schweinzinger and Wright would have been off-planet, and nothing could have brought them back.

No one would have known what had happened to them.

So the law changed to incorporate attempted kidnapping with some involuntary servitude laws to ratchet up the crimes from serious to so damn serious that whoever tried it would get life in prison, which was, for here, ironically, off-planet, just not far enough away to cause any time ripples.

Schweinzinger became the poster child for the law, but Wright was the one who wrestled it into being. It became her life’s work, making sure that no one was ever trafficked out of this city again.

She managed to clean up the port more or less, except for one aspect.

A lot of people arrived here, fully dressed and not drugged in any way, but impoverished and terrified, claiming they had been kidnapped at the beginning of their journey, lightyears and decades from where they had started.

They’d been drinking or partying or in the wrong bar at the wrong time, and somehow, they woke up on a ship days later when they were too far out to return home.

The city found enough evidence of a crime to use that code to charge ship owners and ship workers with enhanced kidnapping. But the kidnapping ring was larger than ships and ship workers. They all claimed they were doing it at the behest of one faraway corporation or another.

But there was a major legal issue.

The actual kidnappings occurred off-world, decades ago in real time. The original kidnappers might even have been dead since most of them never traveled on the ships. Those folks just got paid by the able bodies they’d provided to the underhanded shipping companies who brought workers to far-flung places.

Turned out that some of the faraway corporations believed it was easier to buy people than it was to pay lifetime contracts. The difference in upfront money was staggering. People could be sold illegally much more cheaply than entire families could be bought off.

The legal issues got more complicated the deeper I looked. There were the jurisdictional suits, the claims that the law sought to regulate behavior that the city had no right to regulate. They could prevent suspected criminal enterprises from using the port, but they couldn’t legislate behavior on other planets, behavior that had often happened before any of the attorneys, juries, or judges had been born.

The law was quietly abandoned. The city used the old kidnapping statutes on the books to handle cases like Schweinzinger’s—of which there were fewer and fewer as the area around the port got cleaned up. As for people who claimed they’d been kidnapped elsewhere and brought here, there were informal inquiries, halfway houses, places they could go, often getting protected refugee status if they wanted to go that route.

Most, though, just abandoned ship here and fled. The people running the ships never did pursue them, or rather, never pursued them once they got here.

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, feeling pieces fall into place. I finally understood why some of the people who came to me seemed so very desperate to find out about their families.

Those people hadn’t stupidly signed some contract without reading it. They’d been taken, brought here, and knew they couldn’t go back.

They had not only come to me for answers, they had probably come to me for comfort as well.

Whoops.

But this was something Lin-Wonle should have known. Except that the codes had vanished from the record.

Unless Lin-Wonle had been a student of history, she wouldn’t have known about the law. It was quietly buried as a mistake.

If I was a different kind of person, I would have figured out why the law had been abandoned and information about it buried rather than some activists retooling it so that it would work better.

Very few people alive were old enough to know about this law. Very few.

But it caught me. I shut down all of my systems, stood, and went to the private part of my office.

I was shaking.

I trusted my memory. I had evidence of my own choice. I remembered how I felt around Austin and Tom. I remember how hard that ship employee had worked to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake.

But…

That moment at the Watering Hole bothered me. Both moments, at both Watering Holes, the other far from here.

The drinks are cheaper on the ship.

I had been easy—at least at that first port stop. It hadn’t taken much to force me to return to the ship.

But what about others? People who really wanted to escape? How had they been treated?

I would never know, but I could guess.

I let out a small breath of air and realized that I felt something. I felt something strongly enough that it actually filtered through every protection I had set up within myself.

I was furious.

I knew how hard the damn trip was for someone like me, someone who had no regrets.

I couldn’t quite imagine how hard it would be for someone who hadn’t wanted to come in the first place.

No wonder Lin-Wonle had seen so many suicides. No wonder people’s behaviors made no sense.

Particularly since most of them had no recourse.

I didn’t know, and I didn’t check, but I would wager that there was no real way to sue those shipping companies either for intentional harm. Since the crews rotated out, they could profess ignorance of what happened, and probably had.

I paced for a few minutes, wishing the unaccustomed emotion would go away.

It was staying. It made me want to punch something.

It made me want to go to the port and yell at someone.

It made me want to find a local bar and have a drink to calm down all the messy feelings.

I stopped.

I had been looking in the wrong databases.

I had been looking at people who had voluntarily taken ships away from their cushy homes.

I’d been looking at port records.

I needed to search missing person databases. Not here, but at the various points of origin.

I needed to find out who, if anyone, had disappeared from their homes.

***

Missing person databases are messy things. Most places keep them up for a few years, but if the missing person had been gone for a decade or more, the record got lost in the chum that was all crime for a location. Sure, they remained in the missing person database or whatever some place called that database, but no one looked, no one cared, no one really figured out what was going on.

It took me weeks to find the proper databases. I had to trace most of the ships, where they originated and where they were heading. The oldest records were extremely old, and in systems even my high-end research center couldn’t easily access.

It took me weeks to get more than 1,000 new databases into my system. By then, Lin-Wonle had given me more bodies. I solved those, but I did something I hadn’t thought of before.

I cross-referenced them.

Then I wished I hadn’t.

I cross-referenced most of the cases she had given me, and found a good half of them included people on the missing persons database.

But then, to give myself a foundation, I looked myself up.

And found that Tom had reported me missing as well.

What was worse was that he was one of those sad sacks who checked every few months to see if someone—anyone—was still following up on the case.

When I saw that, I actually left my office. I walked down two miles to the entertainment district and stopped just outside it.

I had been heading to get drunk.

There were two filthy benches near one of the venues. Bright lights flashed, the cobblestone sidewalk was littered with empties, some of them old enough to be encrusted in dirt.

No one cleaned up down here. The air even smelled foul—rotted food, sour beer, and a miasma of rancid smells that I couldn’t quite identify.

I still sat down.

I had to. My legs wouldn’t hold me.

The stupid son of a bitch had never remarried. He had raised our child, but he had never remarried.

Instead, he had tried to get the local authorities to search for me for years.

That stupid son of a bitch had actually loved me. Just like he said he had.

The problem was me. The problem had always been me. The problem would forever be me.

My lack of feeling, my unwillingness to learn how to be inside a family. My unwillingness to do the difficult things.

A drink would help. A drink at that very moment would put the feelings back where they belonged.

The messy anger. The even messier regret.

And the sorrow. Oh, dear god. There was sorrow underneath it all.

A sorrow I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying for most of my adult life.

***

I have no idea how long I ended up sitting there. I eventually stood up. I did not go into the entertainment district.

I did not buy a drink, then or ever.

I returned to the life I had built. The life I had chosen one drunken night so long ago. The life I said I preferred.

Two days later, when I felt as much like my old self as I probably ever would, I contacted Lin-Wonle. I invited her to my office.

When she came, I explained what I found.

The color drained from her skin, leaving it an ash-gray. She closed her eyes, bowed her head, and didn’t move for the longest moment.

Then she squared her shoulders, sat up, and thanked me.

“We’re done now,” she said.

“But,” I said, “you said you had two hundred cases. We’re not there yet.”

“I know.” Her mouth moved in an attempt to smile. “Thank you. Thank you for answering my questions. I’ll put in for payment for the full two hundred cases.”

“I told you,” I said tightly, “it’s not about the money. It’s never been about the money.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s the challenge. And you rose to it.”

She left without saying good-bye. I received the overpayment a day later. I contacted the office to ask for a proper payment, one for the work I’d actually done, and I was told that she had retired, more abruptly than planned.

The acting coroner asked me if there was anything she could do for me. I said no, and severed the contact.

Then I sat for a long time in my single little office.

I could start a campaign. I could be the one to figure out who was coming in on these ships, who didn’t want to be on them, and who needed help adjusting. I could start some kind of program or reinstate one. I could see if I could get the city to designate them as something—not a refugee, but some category like that, so that they could get assistance.

But what good would it do? They’d had everything of value stolen from them. Their families, their futures, the world they had known. Nothing could repay that. Nothing could really help them.

Either they survived it, or they didn’t.

I survived it.

But I’m not sure my husband did. And I’m not going to look, not again. Looking back is what causes all the pain.

So I’m going to stay in the now. The ever-present now. That’s all we have, when it comes down to it. The moments. Passing, fleeting, wrapping in memories if we choose, or lost in what might happen, again if we choose.

Or we can stay here, doing what we do. Thinking only of the way the universe is, not the way it can be.

Changing things is for dreamers, and I most definitely am not one.

I used to like to think I was kidnapped. I don’t like to think that any longer.

Being kidnapped is worse. Much worse.

I chose to be here.

And I would choose it again, even knowing what I know.

No matter how much it breaks my non-existent heart.

 

___________________________________________

“The Nameless Dead” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

The Nameless Dead

Copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2025 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Canva

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

 

I’ll tell you how in the second workshop in the Quick & Dirty Craft Series.

There are some simple things every writer can do to make their endings stronger, and I’ll explain that in this short class.

Find out more here or watch the video below.

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/QD-ENDINGS-INTRO-ORIGINAL-VIDEO.mp4

 

Buster’s final wish—a Viking funeral. Although Winston, a small magician with a small talent, wants to give his familiar his ideal funeral, Winston finds it hard to imagine how to burn a boat at sea. Still, a Viking funeral seems a small price to pay for years of companionship. 

But the funeral might cost Winston more than he realizes. He must break all kinds of laws—magical and otherwise—to give his beloved cat the proper goodbye.

“Familiar Territory” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

Familiar Territory A Winston and Ruby Story By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Every morning they went clamming. Winston would carry the pail, and Buster would trail behind, stopping to sniff dead fish and complaining when his delicate paws sank in wet sand. Sometimes people would coo over him—they seemed drawn to a cat on the beach—but usually they would watch from a distance.

Winston knew the town thought him strange. They called him that crazy guy with the cat, and most never visited his shop. Only tourists came in, and they usually bought the mass-produced items, not his specialty items. Those he sold to select customers who never returned, although they recommended the store to their friends. He did a steady mail order business, shipping weekly all over the United States, Canada, and Europe.

He didn’t care about the money. It was merely a way to maintain his warm and cozy home, built on a cliff overlooking the sea. He had worn a path from the back door to the beach near the small town of Seavy Village, and he and Buster tramped down the path daily at first light, crabbing if the tides allowed, and playing in the sand until nine a.m. Then Winston returned home, showered, and drove to his shop on a decrepit section of Highway 101. Buster complained about the drive, but flirted with the customers shamelessly while Winston studied his books behind the counter.

It was a small life, as magic ones went, but it was his, his and Buster’s. They had shared it since Winston fled San Francisco twenty years before and arrived in Seavy Village to find the cliff house for sale, and a rain-soaked kitten who spoke perfect English huddled beside its front door.

Only this morning, Buster didn’t wake up. He remained curled at the foot of the bed, eyes half open, skin already cool. They had known the end was coming—few cats made it to twenty and remained as healthy as Buster—but they hadn’t thought it so soon. Kind of Buster to wait until Monday, the only day the shop was closed.

Winston put his hand on Buster’s still black-and-white side, and wished that instead of all his tiny powers, he had a single large one: the power over death.

But he didn’t, and he never would. He sighed once, cradled his best and only friend for a long time, and then padded into his workshop to build a ship.

***

Buster had requested a Viking funeral.

The cat, being 90% feline and only 10% familiar, didn’t care about state regulations regarding the ocean. He didn’t care that it was against the law to throw anything into the waves. He didn’t care that Oregon hated people tossing the ashes of loved ones onto the sea, and would probably charge Winston with a felony for tossing a dead body in.

You can cover it, boss, Buster had said. Use a small spell, a shield or something, to make sure nobody sees you.

I thought cats hate the water, Winston replied, a tad grumpily.

You observe, but you don’t see, Buster said. Cats love the water. They just hate to get wet.

You’ll get wet with a Viking funeral.

Naaaw, Buster said. I’ll be ashes by the time I hit the water.

Why do you want a Viking funeral? Winston asked.

Buster had looked at him from his perch on top of an end table. The look implied that Winston knew nothing about cats. Blaze of glory, my friend, Buster had said. Blaze of glory.

 ***

What Winston knew about Viking funerals came from his English lit class in high school over three decades before; half a dozen old movies; and a program he had fallen asleep to on the History Channel. Some of the Arthurian myths had Merlin give Arthur a Viking death: the proud king, wrapped in his fur robes, heading out to sea in his burning boat. Winston had made the mistake of telling Buster that story one rainy afternoon when they should have been mixing a love potion for a woman in Puget Sound.

Buster had adored the idea.

Winston didn’t like the parallels. Buster was supposed to be his familiar, not his king, and while Winston had clear talents, he was no Merlin. No wizard had been that great in over a thousand years.

But in the time they had been together, Winston had only denied Buster one thing—(Neutered, boss. Neutered. You know what that sounds like? Sounds like nullified. How would you like it if I neutered you?)—and he had done that for Buster’s safety, and for the sanity of all the female cats in Seavy Village. Buster had mellowed as he got older, when he saw the effects sex had had on the wild toms. The fights they get into, Buster had said, and all over a woman who’ll slap ‘em when she’s done. Somewhere around the age of ten, Buster realized that his sex drive would have shortened his life, and while he never admitted that Winston had made the right decision, he had stopped focusing on it.

Buster loved his life near the sea, with the storms and the fish and the adoration of the tourists who filled Winston’s shop in the summer.

Buster loved all twenty years of it, and who was Winston to deny him his final request?

***

The ship, when finished, was two yards long, and two feet high at its lowest point. A dragon’s head with oddly feline features rose from the front to guide the ship on her way. Winston had made little holes throughout which he would stuff with gas-soaked rags when the time came. He’d also lined the hollowed-out center with newspaper and kindling. Over that, he had built a box long enough and wide enough to hold Buster. He placed Buster’s favorite pillow in the front of the box, and around it he put all of Buster’s toys.

It had taken him twenty-four hours of concentrated work to finish. Twenty-four hours in a cold house, his fingers raw from strain. He had let the fire die and had turned down the heat so that Buster’s body wouldn’t decay quite as rapidly. Still, twenty-four hours wasn’t enough to do this kind of work unassisted. He had to use four craft spells, one no-doze spell, and contact the restless souls of three ship-builders to help in the process.

He was so tired his body hummed.

But it was finished, and it was as perfect as he could make it. Now all he had to do was rig the hand-sewn sail, wait till the tide was going out, and find a friendly current.

***

The morning dawned clear and cold with no real wind. A few fluffy white clouds dotted the sky. From his window, he saw the tell-tale green-gold line of a riptide, and he knew this would be his best chance to send Buster out to sea. Winston placed his friend in the ship, stretched his limbs (thankful that rigor had eased) and set his head gently on his pillow. Then Winston stuffed a bag full of rags and tied it to his belt. He carried the ship outside.

The chill was brisk, waking him from the exhaustion that clouded his eyes. He needed enough strength to finish this, and the chill gave him some. He balanced the ship under one arm, making certain the weight was right, and picked up the half full gasoline can. And with his burden, he walked down the path to the beach.

His hair rippled in the ever-present breeze, but it wasn’t great enough to be considered a wind. The beach was a winter beach, strewn with rocks, the sand hard-packed and firm. He stood for a moment on his favorite spot, a flat black lava rock that stood a bit back from the surf. Then he climbed beside it, set the boat and gas can down, and gazed at Buster.

Buster’s sleek dark fur shone in the sunlight. He was a beautiful cat. It seemed odd for his features to be so still; even in sleep he had moved—a whisker twitch here, a kneading paw there. Winston touched him, ever so lightly, and felt the lifelessness, the lack of breath, the lack of vitalness.

“I miss you already, buddy,” he whispered.

Then he sighed, and prepared to work.

The beach was empty. Even so, he took Buster’s advice and made a shield spell, placing it around him, the ship, and the stretch of beach and water extending to the riptide line. He removed the rag bag from his belt, opened the gasoline can, and carefully soaked each rag in gasoline. After a rag was soaked, he shoved it into the holes he had prepared. When he finished, he capped the gasoline, and carried the ship to sea.

Even with the sail and the riptide, there was no way the ship would go into the ocean alone. It would get caught in the tide, and hug the shore. Buster had wanted what they both had imagined to be a Viking funeral; it meant disappearing on the horizon in a burning ship. Despite his exhaustion, Winston had one more thing to do.

He waded into the surf, wincing as the cold water made goose pimples run up and down his skin. Then he set the ship on the water’s surface, and blew lightly, mouthing a wind spell as he did so. The sail filled up, and the ship moved forward, slicing the waves like a ship of old.

Buster would have been proud.

Winston waited until the ship reached the riptide line, then he snapped his fingers, reciting a simple fire spell. Sparks touched the soaked rags, and the ship ignited. It continued to sail forward, dragon’s head proudly leading the way as it headed to the horizon. Plumes of smoke rose from it, and the flames licked the sky.

A blaze of glory.

He wished he had been able to do it at twilight, as the sun was setting. Such a magnificent sight it would have been then, but he couldn’t, since his powers often waned at dusk.

Still, Buster would have enjoyed it. The burning ship sailing toward eternity.

Winston stood in the surf, the water numbing his feet and ankles, and watched as the flames consumed the dragon’s head. The air smelled of smoke and sea salt.

Was this what Merlin smelled that twilight so long ago? Or had he turned his back on the burning ship, walked across the land, and gone back to his life?

The ship broke apart in a spray of sparks. Pieces burned on the water’s surface, then sank, slowly, the dragon’s head disappearing last.

For a moment, the black smoke mingled with the white clouds, and formed a black and white cat running toward the horizon.

Then the smoke dissipated, and Buster was gone.

***

Winston cleaned up his mess, broke his shield spell, and carried the gas can back up the path. He showered, ate a small breakfast, and napped until he had to leave to open his shop.

By the time he got up, clouds were rolling in. The horizon looked blurred. Rain wouldn’t be far behind.

He drove his ancient Gremlin the two miles down Highway 101. The rusted and battered car seemed like an affectation without Buster inside, paws on the dash, tail wagging as he watched the passing traffic. Winston had always worried that Buster would die in a slow-speed collision, something that could have been prevented if the cat had but listened and sat under the dash.

But, as Buster had always said, he was 90% feline and 10% familiar. He followed rules only when he made them.

Winston parked behind the shop and reached for the passenger side before he could stop himself. He drew back, and left the car empty-handed.

The shop was cold and damp. It smelled of incense and cat food. He turned on the lights, lit the candles, and sat behind the large counter, wondering who would flirt with the customers now. He couldn’t. He had never been as social as Buster. Or as friendly.

What was a wizard without a familiar? His mouth went dry. He had gone without a familiar in the early years, as he apprenticed, and then went out on his own. He had claimed to his master, a disaffected beatnik, that he didn’t like animals. His master had shrugged.

You will, he had said.

His master’s familiar was a five-year-old sow that he had special permission to keep inside the city limits. She had been the opposite of Buster: grumpy, anti-social, and nasty. Winston had vowed then not to take on another soul.

And then had gone out on his own. After two months, his potions spoiled, his bottled spells rotted, and a young woman who had special-ordered an aphrodisiac had nearly died. Fortunately she hadn’t yet shared it with her boyfriend and he had gotten her to the emergency room. The cops had thought it a drug overdose, and had thought Winston the supplier. He had left San Francisco in a dead run, stopping only when he saw Seavy Village and its gothic landscape.

Two days later, he had the house and Buster.

And he never made a mistake again.

He put his head in his hands. The nap hadn’t helped. He felt lethargic. The bell tinkled, indicating the arrival of a customer, but he didn’t have enough energy to look, to see who it was.

“Excuse me,” a woman’s voice said.

He looked up. His next door neighbor, the owner of an antique store, hovered inside his doorway. She was a pear-shaped woman whose pink polyester pants and white shirts only emphasized the flaws in her figure. She always went out of her way to be kind to him, and he was kind in return, but they’d never had more than a passing familiarity with each other.

“I—I —.” She waved a hand at the door. “I was wondering. The magic and all. Did you see the burning ship this morning? It’s all over town. People are calling it a ghost ship.”

A shiver ran through him. He stood, then gripped the countertop, and nearly sat again. Were they coming for him so soon? Did the spells curdle without a familiar?

“Did you see it?” he asked.

She nodded. “I— ah—we —”

And then he realized that half a dozen people crowded outside his shop door.

“We thought maybe you had an explanation.”

“Did you call the Coast Guard?”

“They had no record of a vessel. They scanned the waters and found nothing. No one radioed a distress call. They thought we were making it up.”

He tried not to swallow hard. He was trembling. The whole city saw you blaze, Buster, he thought.

“Did you see it?” she asked again.

He nodded.

“Was it a ghost ship?”

How to formulate an answer that was honest and yet maintained the mystery? “I don’t count something as a ghost unless it appears in the same location more than once,” he said.

“If it wasn’t a ghost, what was it?” she asked. “It didn’t seem quite real somehow.”

“It was real enough,” he said. “There was a cat in the smoke.”

“Yes!” she said. “A black-and-white one. He looked quite satisfied with himself.”

Winston smiled. “He did, didn’t he?”

She smiled in return, and then her smile faded. “What do we do if we see it again?”

Ah, the real purpose for her visit. Not just comfort, but comfort magic. “It depends,” he said. His trembling had stopped. Somehow it relieved him that someone else had seen Buster’s farewell.

“Depends?”

“On whether or not you want to exorcise the ghost or use it to promote Seavy Village.”

“Promotion.” She rubbed a hand on her chin. “Hmm. A ghost ship. It looked rather Viking-like to me, but they didn’t come up this far, did they?”

“I honestly don’t know,” he said.

“And it was burning. I wonder if any ships went down that way in the harbor. Do you know?”

He shook his head.

She glanced around his shop, her gaze taking in the crystals and the globes, the incense burners and the bottles of potion lining the walls. “I tell you what,” she said. “If I discover anything, I’ll let you know. It’d be quite a boon to your business.”

He hadn’t thought of that. “Thanks,” he said, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice.

“Don’t mention it,” she said. “I’ll be back when I know something.”

And then she let herself out. She explained things to her friends out front, her hands moving expansively. Rain interrupted her small speech, and the crowd dispersed.

***

The day turned out to be one of the busiest he’d ever had. Fifteen phone orders for potions, twenty-five mail orders for specialty items, and six customers, all of whom bought. The last told him that a store like his needed a cat, and he had said softly, I know.

By the time he left, the rain had turned into a squall. One of those coastal storms that Buster had so loved. Winston was glad he hadn’t waited for twilight. The storm was too severe. He never would have gotten the ship afire.

The Gremlin coughed its way home. He would have to think of getting another car. Too bad the car companies no longer used magic items in their names. But he had kept the Gremlin far too long. Her usefulness had passed.

He put her in the driveway, and sighed. The day had been so busy that he hadn’t had a chance to mix the new potions, let alone put up the “closed” sign for a few hours while he visited the local pound. He doubted any of the cats there would talk to him, but he had to see. He couldn’t believe that Buster would leave without planning for a successor. Buster had always been too meticulous to leave any detail untended.

Winston grabbed his umbrella, opened the car door, then opened the umbrella outside, stepping into a puddle as he got out. He cursed softly—his feet had gotten wet enough this day—and then he ran the few yards to the back porch.

In his haste to get inside, he almost missed it. The tiny black cat, fur spiked by rain and wind, huddled against the wood pile. For a moment, he thought it was Buster. Not the old Buster, but the baby Buster come back. And then he realized that this kitten was all black. It had no white at all.

He crouched, letting the umbrella protect them both, and held out his hand. The kitten came forward and sniffed his fingers. Then it looked around. When it saw he was alone, it said, “You could at least offer a girl some fish.”

Her voice was sultry and not childlike at all. Buster had also come kitten-sized, but with his voice and personality full grown.

“I have some inside,” Winston said. He opened the door, and the kitten trotted in as if she owned the place. She went to the cool fireplace and shook the water off her fur. Winston closed the umbrella outside, and then put it in its holder. He went immediately to the refrigerator. He had some salmon he had planned to make for dinner the night Buster had died.

He took the salmon out and picked some pieces off it, putting them on a small plate. As he worked, he glanced at the fireplace. The kitten was cleaning herself, making her black coat lie flat.

Then, because he couldn’t remain silent, he asked, “Did Buster send you?”

“What do you think we got a referral service?” she asked.

Her gruffness shocked him. He wasn’t ready for gruffness yet. He wasn’t ready for a new personality, a new life.

A small body wrapped itself around his leg, and a purr so strong it vibrated his skin echoed up to him.

“You just want the fish,” he said.

“You bet,” she said.

He set the plate down and she ate quickly, without Buster’s innate grace. She had been hungry for some time.

When she finished, she sat back on her haunches and glared at him.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Ruby,” she said.

“Ruby, I don’t know if I’m ready for another familiar.”

“You can’t go without, big boy. We keep your spells fresh, and your mind from wandering.”

“It took me years to find Buster,” Winston said.

“He knew,” she said. “And he figured you could last maybe a day alone.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know him.”

“I never said anything like that.” She stood, arched, and yawned. “We all know each other. Becoming a familiar doesn’t come from your magic practices. It comes from ours. Buster had a feeling you and I’d work out. And if this fish is any indication, he was right.” She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “But don’t get any ideas about burning me at sea.”

“I think we have a few years before we need to discuss your funeral.”

“Good.” She sauntered toward the fireplace. “Now, how about a real fire so a girl can nap?”

He snapped his fingers and a fire appeared in the grate.

“Real,” she growled.

“As you wish, your highness,” he said, hurrying toward the pile of logs beside the fireplace. She had already curled up on the rug. She was different, and, for all her big talk, she was tiny. She would never replace Buster. No one could. But she’d make the world a little less lonely.

“Do you like clams?” he asked.

“Only in the mornings,” she replied.

“I go clamming with the morning tides. Should be just after dawn tomorrow.”

“I’ll make sure you’re up,” she said sleepily. Then she opened one yellow eye. “Finished that fire yet?”

“I will,” he said, feeling lighter than he had all day. He built her a tiny blaze. One to keep her toasty and safe, and to let her know she was welcome in his small life. His small, magic life.

 

___________________________________________

“Familiar Territory” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Familiar Territory
Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in first published in Wizard Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Daw, November, 1997
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Corey A. Ford/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

 

Here’s something really fun…at least for me. I’ve been doing a lot of teaching lately, working with student manuscripts. And it doesn’t seem to matter how experienced the writers are, some of them are having trouble putting in all five senses. In particular, the senses of smell and taste.

I have a quick and easy solution to that, as I explain in the video below.

I have a lot of quick solutions to long-term craft problems that writers struggle with. I’m doing to do an entire series of these workshops. Here’s a bit more on the series itself.

I hope you’ll join me with this workshop. You can sign up for the first one right here.

So many of you backed our latest Kickstarter, which was for my first three fantasy novels. We did a full rebrand, and are introducing the books to a new audience. Your help with the Kickstarter made that easy.

Thank you!!!!

Now you can return to your regularly scheduled Saturday evening…

Caitlin Carter seeks purpose. She needs to, or so her counselors at the VA keep telling her. Find a reason to live. Forget the past.

The past haunts her, especially because she lives in her old hometown. The place where the trouble started.

Until she finds exploring her past might help her find a future…just not the way she expects.

A powerful story about veterans and the traumas they continue to face even at home.

“Rehab” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

Rehab By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Not quite homeless. That’s how she described herself to herself. Not quite homeless but not quite home, either.

Caitlin Carter started her walk back from her appointment at the VA. The stately old building had been at the edge of mansion row for more than forty years, as the neighborhood slowly slipped into decline.

She barely saw it any more. She grew up only a few blocks away, and the mansions had never really been at their peak—not in her lifetime.

She wore two stocking caps over her skull, one pulled down almost to her eyebrows, and two pairs of gloves over her hands, which she still stuck in her pockets. One of the many gifts of her desert tours was a broken internal thermometer—light cold seemed too cold, harsh cold seemed warm, deadly cold felt welcoming—and she made sure she dressed like the sensible Midwestern girl she had been, back before she decided to chuck it all for the sake of some excitement or (oh, hell, let’s be honest) to tell her law-and-order father to go fuck himself.

So many issues, so little time. At least that was what she joked with the shrink the last time she heard, “I’m afraid our time is up.” Yeah, she always just got started, and then the time was up, and she was sent into the cold, literally, at least this winter.

No matter what she did, she couldn’t get her parents out of her mind. She’d moved back in with them six months ago—not in her old bedroom because that belonged to some other girl. A girl who graduated high school, smiled wide, dressed in pink, and had totally dorky boyfriends. A girl with trophies on her shelf from volleyball tournaments, certificates from math contests framed over her bed, and one rather nasty juvie file in a shadow box below a shattered mirror.

Yeah, that girl had issues.

The woman has more.

She lived in the grandmother apartment over her parents’ garage. One bedroom, half kitchen, tiny bathroom, ugly living area. The smell of exhaust filled the place every time her father moved the car.

She found the smell of exhaust comforting.

She needed comforting, because the apartment wasn’t. Her parents weren’t either. Her mother couldn’t meet her eyes, even now, and her father, for all his talk of wasted potential, still mentioned that one night, the joyride, the anger, the accident, leading to what would’ve been a couple of felonies had she been one week older, or had Michael actually died of his injuries.

Caitlin had told her father she hadn’t known Michael had put a gun in her glove box and carried a knife inside his boot. She claimed she hadn’t known about the weapons till she and Michael had ripped off the liquor store that failed to serve them, and sped off, crashing through the windows of a car dealership not half a block away.

Not the worst thing that happened to her, by far.

The thing her father blamed, though. Technically, he hadn’t paid off the judge, but she knew there was a tit-for-tat, probably dealing with secrets. Her father loved secrets, knew where the bodies were buried, liked to haul out the skeletons when he needed them.

And he’d needed them that night, when he traded her years in a juvie facility and/or some prison somewhere for mandatory military service. Sounded like punishment to her at the time.

Life-saving, turned out.

She carefully picked her way across the ice-covered street, to the unshoveled sidewalks of mansion row. Her breath fanned out around her like exhaust from the engines of a dozen jeeps.

It had taken nearly a year to work her way up the VA’s waiting list. Counselors—especially those dealing with the psychological problems—were in high demand.

Her problems had started long before she joined up, got exacerbated by her tours. If it weren’t for the nightmares—the screaming, pound-her-fist-through-the-wall nightmares—she probably wouldn’t have signed up for counseling in the first place.

Thrown out of three separate apartments at the far end of town. License restricted for driving drunk, which limited her choices—especially here, where the phrase “bus service” was an oxymoron and public transportation meant taking a tourist trolley that circled the downtown.

She had to move close to the VA because if she missed one appointment, just one, she got knocked down to the bottom of the waiting list again, and much as she hated the shrink talk and the sharing and the crappy way she felt when the sessions were over, she hated not having someone to talk to—really talk to—worse.

So she walked, every day, even when it was ten below, like today. No matter what her mother said, Caitlin didn’t wear a ski mask over her face—that would bring back flashbacks to high school and the rebellion and the power-high she got from pulling cash from some stupid clerk’s till. (Okay, so she had known about the gun, but she’d only told the shrink that last week. It’d been her gun (which she stole from another kid’s locker), and Michael had been too injured to ever contradict her—at least when it counted, during the so-called court case, the judgment that sent her on the path that led to this icy sidewalk, this everyday walk.)

She tucked her chin inside the parka, letting the fake fur caress her face. Whenever she felt the fake fur, she knew she was okay—not too cold—because if she were too cold, she’d feel nothing at all.

Time to walk back to the undecorated apartment and wait until she had to show up for one of her three five-hour shifts at the nearby coffee shop, the only place that would hire vets and let them be around people. Didn’t matter that most of the customers were also vets. Didn’t matter that she rarely said more than “That’ll be $2.50” and “Here’s your change, sir.” At least she got out of the house.

Or so she said to herself.

She saved the mansion for the way back. She loved the mansion. She had loved it since she was a child.

She used to walk down this stately old boulevard near her parents’ house, and imagine living in the mansions. Back then, they were apartments, mostly, although some were still single-family dwellings. All had fallen on hard times, or so everyone thought.

But even harder times had been on the horizon.

Now most of the mansions were boarded up, with plywood over the windows and doors. Her favorite was on the corner of two boulevards, and it seemed to take up half the block. When she was a kid, an old lady lived there, alone. Sometimes Caitlin saw the old lady, tottering her way to the really fancy car that she left parked in the driveway.

But mostly, Caitlin wondered how one person could live in such a large place. It had three stories, plus an attic and a basement and the biggest garage Caitlin had ever seen.

She used to hoist herself up on top of the stone fence and peer into the yard, imagining what it would be like to own the house. Then the old lady called the cops on her, and Caitlin never climbed the fence again.

She had forgotten about the place until she lost her last apartment, and walked to her parents’ house when the VA admitted it couldn’t help her if she didn’t help herself. They said she needed meaning in her life. She needed purpose. They meant she had to get treatment for her anxiety and PTSD and all-around out-of-control behavior.

But she took it as the one final wake-up call.

Because as she walked those four blocks to her parents’ house to beg for a place to stay, she kept looking at the ruined homes on the dying boulevard and thinking how easy it would be to slip inside one, and squat for a few days, a few months, and no one would ever be the wiser.

That was her backup plan if her parents officially threw her out. When she arrived at her parents’ to beg for her old room back, her mother had made that thin-lipped disapproving grimace that always made Caitlin’s stomach queasy, but her father had just stared at her. He’d had something in his gaze she’d never seen before.

“Yeah,” he’d said. “We’ll fix up the apartment over the garage.”

She could have taken that badly—that they didn’t want her inside their house. But Caitlin had a sense that her father understood what it took for her to ask, and, even weirder, had understood what she needed. What she needed was a place of her own where no one would bother her, and yet, a place where someone kept an eye out for her.

She offered to pay rent, and he told her to bank the money instead. And somehow, that conversation had left her more shaken than any conversation she’d ever had with him—including the angry ones over her terrible behavior in her seventeenth year.

That walk, though—that walk through the mansions, in the long-dead, formerly rich area of town—that walk was the moment when she labeled herself almost-homeless, when she knew she had only a hairsbreadth between being someone with a glimmer of a future and being someone who only had a past.

Every day since, she’d used the mansion as a measuring stick: Was she better? Had she moved forward?

And every day, she had no answer at all.

She stood outside on this cold, cold afternoon and stared at the mansion, with its wrap-around porch, columns, and gabled attic. When she first came on these regular walks, she wondered what the neighbors thought of her staring at the place, and then she realized there were no neighbors.

The neighborhood was as empty as some of the bombed-out places she had patrolled in Fallujah. Someone had lived here once, but no one did now.

No one cared.

The storm the night before had dumped nearly two feet of snow on the neighborhood. No one had shoveled sidewalks, because no one cared. A plow had gone through and tossed even more snow on the sidewalk. There was no real path, only an icy trail of footprints that she had made at the beginning of the winter.

She frowned at the mansion. If she stared at it, and let her eyes blur, it looked no different than it had when the old lady had lived there.

But if Caitlin really looked at it, she realized the house was falling apart, like every other place on this block.

And the snow the night before would only make things worse.

She slipped through the broken gate. No one had shoveled the mansion’s sidewalk either. The only way she had known there was a sidewalk was from memory, the way the brick walk went from the stone fence to the matching stone steps that eased the journey up the small knoll the mansion rested on.

Her boots crunched on the snow’s hard surface, breaking through to a layer of ice beneath. The door ahead looked dark and foreboding, and, unlike the rest of the building’s façade, had no snow plastered against it.

If she were in an old movie, her breath might have come shallowly and she might’ve felt some trepidation. But she knew, she knew, no snipers sat in the windows, no family waited with guns in hand, no insurgent had planted a bomb beneath the stairs.

Maybe she would have worried about such things six months before, but she’d had six months to wrap her brain around the reality of now, not the memory of then, and no matter how bad it might get inside a mansion in her hometown, it would be nothing compared with what she’d seen.

What she’d done.

That last thought made her heart flutter just a bit. She took a deep breath of air so cold that it burned going into her lungs.

She made herself focus on her destination, and as she did so, she realized that the door was partially open. Snow had piled against it, making sure it would never close.

Open all winter, the mansion’s decay would accelerate. No one would come here and check—not the city historical division which was trying to sell the place, not the police, not the imaginary neighbors. No one would notice this; no one would understand it.

No one except her.

She continued forward, up another, smaller flight of stairs, and then crossed the pristine layer of snow to the house itself.

She had never stepped on the porch, not in years of dreaming about it. Up close, the porch looked dangerous. In the places where the snow did not blanket the surface, she saw rotted wood and broken beams.

The mansion’s stone exterior needed some kind of grout or something—whatever they put between the stones—and the door wasn’t open, so much as it wasn’t really intact.

Ah hell, she might as well be honest with herself: The door was shattered, and the snow that accumulated near the opening was as deep as the snow around the building.

Even though she had stared at the thing for months, she hadn’t realized that it had been snowing inside since winter began.

She put her hand on one of the stone columns that made the mansion look so stately.

She pushed past the broken door, stepped over the biggest mound of snow, and felt her heart sink as she saw how deep the snow had piled inside.

The house was as cold inside as it was out, but the air didn’t have the fresh crispness of the outdoors. It smelled faintly sour, and she knew, if the inside were any warmer, that sour smell would grow into something overpowering.

Still, she felt almost like a child as she stepped inside the foyer. To her right was the receiving room. It still had its dark wood wainscoting, but someone had painted the area between the end of the wainscoting and the crown molding a bright pink. She winced when she saw it, and when she saw the cracked and ruined fireplace (as if someone had gone after it with a bat), and the toppled radiator.

Each room she walked through had damage—a rotted floor, dented plaster and lathe, missing light fixtures. The kitchen had no appliances. It looked like they—and the sink—had been ripped from the wall. A large stain near the water pipe where the sink had been made her think that water had flowed steadily since the sink was gone—until a deep freeze froze the pipes.

She didn’t want to think about that damage—or any of the damage she couldn’t really see.

Still, here and there, she saw traces of love. This house had been grand once, and then when it was no longer grand, someone had still cared for it enough to keep its character.

The damage didn’t look fresh, but it didn’t look decades old either. The house had good bones beneath all the garbage and the destruction.

She ventured to the back staircase. Part of it threaded down into a basement, and she just couldn’t bring herself to go there, not on the coldest day of the year so far. But upstairs—she had always wanted to see upstairs.

The staircase twisted upward, working its way around two corners. It opened in a narrow hallway, and she realized with a bit of a shock that this house actually had a servant’s wing. Two small bedrooms separated by the tiniest jack-and-jill bathroom she’d ever seen convinced her of that. The bathroom was 1950s vintage, and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in at least forty years.

The door to the hallway was closed. She pushed it open, the squeal echoing in the emptiness. Her heart started pounding now.

She recognized the feeling. A sense that she didn’t belong, combined with experience from a dozen (maybe a hundred) entries into seemingly empty buildings, only to have someone jump out at her, or a hand clutch her arm, holding her back just in time to save her from danger.

She was slipping, slipping into memory. She recognized the feeling, and she caught herself. She didn’t dare leave this place—this frigid and empty house, a building she had always wanted to visit.

It wasn’t dangerous here.

It was just broken.

Rather like her.

Amazing how broken could seem dangerous when viewed in the wrong light.

She took a deep breath and made herself walk forward. Two medium-sized bedrooms. A remodeled bathroom with a claw foot tub and a glassed-in shower added at least thirty years before.

The stained glass window over the toilet made her realize that nothing had been broken or stolen up here. Apparently the thieves from downstairs hadn’t ventured up this high.

She let out a small sigh, then continued on, to what had to be the master suite. Rays of thin winter light penetrated the hallway. The sour stench seemed stronger here, probably because this level was just a tiny bit warmer.

She stepped into the bedroom—and stopped.

A camp stove, blankets, a sleeping bag, some books, all scattered near the fireplace. Half burned wood rested against the fireplace’s brick wall.

And next to it all, a person wrapped in blankets.

Or what was left of a person.

She had seen enough death to know that death had come and gone from this room at least a week ago, maybe more.

She swallowed hard, looked at the little camping area, saw that whoever this had been had managed to clear the fireplace, but either the flue was closed or there was a block in the chimney, because soot covered too much of the area around the body.

A pitcher, with ice along the rim, sat beside the fireplace. Her heart twisted.

He—and it had been a he—had put out the fire rather than burn the house down. Respect, to the bitter end.

She crouched before him, saw the dog tags first, maybe because she had looked for the dog tags first. His face was too ruined for her to tell what he looked like, but if he tried to live here and he was a vet, she had a hunch she had seen him before.

He had stolen her idea of living in one of the mansions so that he could be close to the VA, only he hadn’t thought it through. Sleeping in one of these old places was fine in summer and maybe okay in early fall, but on days like this, the house needed more than a single fireplace, and if that wasn’t working, well…

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

She rocked back on her heels and stood.

She wasn’t feeling cold any more, but it wasn’t her broken thermostat. She’d learned how to cope with death. Four tours, and death no longer bothered her.

The means of death, that sometimes did. The roadside bomb (God, the truck flew. She should have warned them. Should. Have…), the single shot from a great distance (Look at the sniper nest. Been up there days. She should have scoped the area. Should. Have…), the child with the knife (Big enough to be a young adult. She should have thought that through. Should. Have…)

She wiped a gloved hand over her face, felt the fabric against her skin. No frostbite, not yet. But soon if she wasn’t careful.

She had to call this in to someone. And what would she say?

The truth. She’d learned that too, over there.

The truth was the only defense and the only explanation. No matter how ugly things got.

She stood, her knees cracking.

He—whoever he was—had tried to make a home here, and no one had even known he was around. The neighborhood was empty because everyone thought it dangerous. Her parents had warned her not to walk through it, as if they had no idea what she had seen in her short life. And then she realized/remembered/understood. They did have no idea.

No one had any idea.

Except the folks at the VA. Who told her that she had to give herself a chance. To step forward, do the right thing. And they had said earlier this afternoon, the right thing was to take care of herself.

Right now, though, in this moment, the right thing was to let someone know about him.

To bring him home—since he hadn’t been halfway homeless. He’d been all the way homeless.

She was nearly down the stairs before she remembered where she was, and when she was. She had a phone in her pocket. She didn’t have to keep radio silence.

She gave herself a rueful smile, tapped 911, and reported the body. Then she sat on the stairs and waited.

***

Three people in the ambulance, two cops in the squad, no sirens. They photographed the scene, removed the body, asked if she knew who he was.

She had to say no, but she asked them to keep her informed.

“If he doesn’t have people,” she said. “I’ll pay for him, make sure he’s buried with honors. Tell whoever needs to know.”

She didn’t have a business card, so she made sure the cops took her information, and one of the ambulance drivers did too.

Only as an afterthought did one of the cops ask her why she had been here.

She was about to launch into the open-door explanation, the curious-about-this-place-since-childhood story, when the words caught in her throat.

“Just a feeling,” she said. “I just had a feeling.”

She wasn’t sure that was right, but she wasn’t sure it was wrong either. She had had a feeling.

If she’d had a premonition, she would’ve liked to think that she would have arrived before he froze to death.

But she had proven to herself time and time again in the desert that she had no premonitions, that she never saw the future, that she barely saw the warning signs.

And this was a big warning sign. Alone, in the dark, freezing, with enough respect not to light a fire for fear of destroying part of an already-hurting 110-year-old house.

Respect and loneliness. A man with a past and no future.

A man no one remembered or knew.

A man no one had even seen.

The cops left last, apparently not caring that she was inside a house she didn’t own.

No one cared about this place.

Except her.

She loved it. The man who died had cared about it too—enough to gamble his life on saving it.

She turned around, looked at the gloom, the dust motes floating in the twilight air.

She had no idea what a house like this needed. She didn’t know how to repair plaster or how to fix the missing stones out front. She’d never pounded a board into a porch or painted a wall above beautiful wood.

But she had shoveled snow for her entire life. She could start there.

And she had savings too. A lot of it, thanks to her father and his no-rent policy.

No one liked this neighborhood. It wasn’t dying. It had died a long time ago, and no one had cared.

But this house was still alive, barely clinging to life. With no future, only a past.

Unless someone helped it.

She was shaking—not from cold, but from excitement.

She needed a shovel. She needed some plywood. She needed to go to the city and make some promises that she intended to keep.

She would learn how to fix the house, no matter how long it took. She would promise to live here afterward—like that little old lady from her childhood.

Caitlin would learn how a single person could survive in a house this big.

After she glued it back together.

Repairing the damage and becoming presentable, slowly, by focusing on each tiny section.

Like the snow in the foyer. The chill in the air.

A little love and elbow grease might not make the house a showplace again, but they would ease the house back to life.

Ease her back to life.

One missing piece at a time.

 

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“Rehab” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Rehab

Copyright © 2020 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2020 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © sorokopud/Depositphotos

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.