Kristine Kathryn Rusch

February, 1964: Two men die in a squalid alley in a bad neighborhood. New York Homicide Detective Seamus O’Reilly receives the shock of his life when he looks at the men’s identification: J. Edgar Hoover, the famous, tyrannical director of the FBI, and his number one assistant, Clyde Tolson.

O’Reilly teams up with FBI agent Frank Bryce to solve the high-level assassination before the murders unleash even greater consequences.

Two different best of the year collections, including the prestigious Best American Mystery Stories, chose “G-Men” as one of the best stories of the year. Nominated for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History.

“G-Men” is free on this website for one week only. You can get your own copy here or at any online retailer. If you like this story, you might enjoy the novel version, The Enemy Within. And if you’re a fan of alternate history, then pick up the current Storybundle called “Escape From 2026.”  It includes two of my novels as well as a number of other tremendous alternate history and time travel tales.

G-Men Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“There’s something addicting about a secret.”  —J. Edgar Hoover

 

The squalid little alley smelled of piss.  Detective Seamus O’Reilly tugged his overcoat closed and wished he’d worn boots.  He could feel the chill of his metal flashlight through the worn glove on his right hand.

Two beat cops stood in front of the bodies, and the coroner crouched over them.  His assistant was already setting up the gurneys, body bags draped over his arm. The coroner’s van had blocked the alley’s entrance, only a few yards away.

O’Reilly’s partner, Joseph McKinnon, followed him.  McKinnon had trained his own flashlight on the fire escapes above, unintentionally alerting any residents to the police presence.

But they probably already knew.  Shootings in this part of the city were common.  The neighborhood teetered between swank and corrupt.  Far enough from Central Park for degenerates and muggers to use the alleys as corridors, and, conversely, close enough for new money to want to live with a peak of the city’s most famous expanse of green.

The coroner, Thomas Brunner, had set up two expensive, battery-operated lights on garbage can lids placed on top of the dirty ice, one at the top of the bodies, the other near the feet.  O’Reilly crouched so he wouldn’t create any more shadows.

“What’ve we got?” he asked.

“Dunno yet.”  Brunner was using his gloved hands to part the hair on the back of the nearest corpse’s skull.   “It could be one of those nights.”

O’Reilly had worked with Brunner for eighteen years now, since they both got back from the war, and he hated it when Brunner said it could be one of those nights.  That meant the corpses would stack up, which was usually a summer thing, but almost never happened in the middle of winter.

“Why?” O’Reilly asked.  “What else we got?”

“Some colored limo driver shot two blocks from here.” Brunner was still parting the hair.  It took O’Reilly a minute to realize it was matted with blood.   “And two white guys pulled out of their cars and shot about four blocks from that.”

O’Reilly felt a shiver run through him that had nothing to do with the cold.  “You think the shootings are related?”

“Dunno,” Brunner said. “But I think it’s odd, don’t you? Five dead in the space of an hour, all in a six-block radius.”

O’Reilly closed his eyes for a moment.  Two white guys pulled out of their cars, one Negro driver of a limo, and now two white guys in an alley.  Maybe they were related, maybe they weren’t.

He opened his eyes, then wished he hadn’t.  Brunner had his finger inside a bullet hole, a quick way to judge caliber.

“Same type of bullet,” Brunner said.

“You handled the other shootings?”

“I was on scene with the driver when some fag called this one in.”

O’Reilly looked at Brunner.  Eighteen years, and he still wasn’t used to the man’s casual bigotry.

“How did you know the guy was queer?” O’Reilly asked.  “You talk to him?”

“Didn’t have to.”  Brunner nodded toward the building in front of them.  “Weekly party for degenerates in the penthouse apartment every Thursday night.  Thought you knew.”

O’Reilly looked up.  Now  he understood why McKinnon had been shining his flashlight at the upper story windows.  McKinnon had worked vice before he got promoted to homicide.

“Why would I know?” O’Reilly said.

McKinnon was the one who answered.  “Because of the standing orders.”

“I’m not playing twenty questions,” O’Reilly said.  “I don’t know about a party in this building and I don’t know about standing orders.”

“The standing orders are,” McKinnon said as if he were an elementary school teacher, “not to bust it, no matter what kind of lead you got.  You see someone go in, you forget about it.  You see someone come out, you avert your eyes.  You complain, you get moved to a different shift, maybe a different precinct.”

“Jesus.” O’Reilly was too far below to see if there was any movement against the glass in the penthouse suite.  But whoever lived there—whoever partied there—had learned to shut off the lights before the cops arrived.

“Shot in the back of the head,” Brunner said before O’Reilly could process all of the information.  “That’s just damn strange.”

O’Reilly looked at the corpses—really looked at them—for the first time.  Two men, both rather heavy set. Their faces were gone, probably splattered all over the walls.  Gloved hands, nice shoes, one of them wearing a white scarf that caught the light.

Brunner had to search for the wound in the back of the head, which made that the entry point. The exit wounds had destroyed the faces.

O’Reilly looked behind him.  No door on that building, but there was one on the building where the party was held.  If they’d been exiting the building and were surprised by a queer basher or a mugger, they’d’ve been shot in the front, not the back.

“How many times were they shot?” O’Reilly asked.

“Looks like just the once.  Large caliber, close range.  I’d say it was a purposeful headshot, designed to do maximum damage.” Brunner felt the back of the closest corpse.  “There doesn’t seem to be anything on the torso.”

“They still got their wallets?” McKinnon asked.

“Haven’t checked yet.”  Brunner reached into the back pants pocket of the corpse he’d been searching and clearly found  nothing.  So he grabbed the front of the overcoat and reached inside.

He removed a long thin wallet—old fashioned, the kind made for the larger bills of forty years before.  Hand-tailored, beautifully made.

These men weren’t hurting for money.

Brunner handed the wallet to O’Reilly, who opened it.  And stopped when he saw the badge inside.  His mouth went dry.

“We got a feebee,” he said, his voice sounding strangled.

“What?” McKinnon asked.

“FBI,” Brunner said dryly.  McKinnon had only moved to homicide the year before.  Vice rarely had to deal with FBI.  Homicide did only on sensational cases.  O’Reilly could count on one hand the number of times he’d spoken to agents in the New York bureau.

“Not just any feebee either,” O’Reilly said.  “The Associate Director.  Clyde A. Tolson.”

McKinnon whistled.   “Who’s the other guy?”

This time, O’Reilly did the search.  The other corpse, the heavier of the two, also smelled faintly of perfume.  This man had kept his wallet in the inner pocket of his suit coat, just like his companion had.

O’Reilly opened the wallet.  Another badge, just like he expected. But he didn’t expect the bulldog face glaring at him from the wallet’s interior.

Nor had he expected the name.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said.

“What’ve we got?” McKinnon asked.

O’Reilly handed him the wallet, opened to the slim paper identification.

“The Director of the FBI,” he said, his voice shaking.    “Public Hero Number One.  J. Edgar Hoover.”

***

Francis Xavier Bryce—Frank to his friends, what few of them he still had left—had just dropped off to sleep when the phone rang.   He cursed, caught himself, apologized to Mary, and then remembered she wasn’t there.

The phone rang again and he fumbled for the light, knocking over the highball glass he’d used to mix his mom’s recipe for sleepless nights, hot milk, butter and honey.  It turned out that, at the tender age of 36, hot milk and butter laced with honey wasn’t a recipe for sleep; it was a recipe for heartburn.

And for a smelly carpet if he didn’t clean the mess up.

He found the phone before he found the light.

“What?” he snapped.

“You live near Central Park, right?” A voice he didn’t recognize, but one that was clearly official, asked the question without a hello or an introduction.

“More or less.”  Bryce rarely talked about his apartment.  His parents had left it to him and, as his wife was fond of sniping, it was too fancy for a junior G-Man.

The voice rattled off an address.  “How far is that from you?”

“About five minutes.”  If he didn’t clean up the mess on the floor.  If he spent thirty seconds pulling on the clothes he’d piled onto the chair beside the bed.

“Get there.  Now.  We got a situation.”

“What about my partner?” Bryce’s partner lived in Queens.

“You’ll have back-up.  You just have to get to the scene.  The moment you get there, you shut it down.”

“Um.”  Bryce hated sounding uncertain, but he had no choice.  “First, sir, I need to know who I’m talking to. Then I need to know what I’ll find.”

“You’ll find a double homicide.  And you’re talking to Eugene Hart, the Special Agent in Charge.  I shouldn’t have to identify myself to you.”

Now that he had, Bryce recognized Hart’s voice.  “Sorry, sir.  It’s just procedure.”

“Fuck procedure.  Take over that scene.  Now.”

“Yes, sir,” Bryce said, but he was talking into an empty phone line.  He hung up, hands shaking, wishing he had some BromoSeltzer.

He’d just come off a long, messy investigation of another agent.  Walter Cain had been about to get married when he remembered he had to inform the Bureau of that fact and, as per regulation, get his bride vetted before walking down the aisle.

Bryce had been the one to investigate the future Mrs. Cain, and had been the one to find out about her rather seamy past—two Vice convictions under a different name, and one hospitalization after a rather messy backstreet abortion.  Turned out Cain knew about his future wife’s past, but the Bureau hadn’t liked it.

And two nights ago, Bryce had to be the one to tell Cain that he couldn’t marry his now-reformed, somewhat religious, beloved.  The soon-to-be Mrs. Cain had taken the news hard.  She had gone to Bellevue this afternoon after slashing her wrists.

And Bryce had been the one to tell Cain what his former fiancé had done. Just a few hours ago.

Sometimes Bryce hated this job.

Despite his orders, he went into the bathroom, soaked one of Mary’s precious company towels in water, and dropped the thing on the spilled milk.  Then he pulled on his clothes, and finger-combed his hair.

He was a mess—certainly not the perfect representative of the Bureau.  His white shirt was stained with marina from that night’s take-out, and his tie wouldn’t keep a crisp knot.  The crease had long since left his trousers and his shoes hadn’t been shined in weeks.  Still, he grabbed his black overcoat, hoping it would hide everything.

He let himself out of the apartment before he remembered the required and much hated hat, went back inside, grabbed the hat as well as his gun and his identification.  Jesus, he was tired.  He hadn’t slept since Mary walked out.  Mary, who had been vetted by the FBI and who had passed with flying colors.   Mary, who had turned out to be more of a liability than any former hooker ever could have been.

And now, because of her, he was heading toward something big, and he was one-tenth as sharp as usual.

All he could hope for was that the SAC had overreacted.  And he had a hunch—a two in the morning, get-your-ass-over-there-now hunch—that the SAC hadn’t overreacted at all.

***

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sat in his favorite chair near the fire in his library.  The house was quiet even though his wife and eight children were asleep upstairs.  Outside, the rolling landscape was covered in a light dusting of snow—rare for McLean, Virginia even at this time of year.

He held a book in his left hand, his finger marking the spot.  The Greeks had comforted him in the few months since Jack died, but lately Kennedy had discovered Camus.

He had been about to copy a passage into his notebook when the phone rang.  At first he sighed, feeling all of the exhaustion that had weighed on him since the assassination.  He didn’t want to answer the phone.  He didn’t want to be bothered—not now, not ever again.

But this was the direct line from the White House and if he didn’t answer it, someone else in the house would.

He set the Camus book face down on his chair and crossed to the desk before the third ring.  He answered with a curt, “Yes?”

“Attorney General Kennedy, sir?”  The voice on the other end sounded urgent.  The voice sounded familiar to him even though he couldn’t place it.

“Yes?”

“This is Special Agent John Haskell.  You asked me to contact you, sir, if I heard anything important about Director Hoover, no matter what the time.”

Kennedy leaned against the desk.  He had made that request back when his brother had been president, back when Kennedy had been the first attorney general since the 1920s who actually demanded accountability from Hoover.

Since Lyndon Johnson had taken over the presidency, accountability had gone by the wayside. These days Hoover rarely returned Kennedy’s phone calls.

“Yes, I did tell you that,” Kennedy said, resisting the urge to add, but I don’t care about that old man any longer.

“Sir, there are rumors—credible ones—that Director Hoover has died in New York.”

Kennedy froze.  For a moment, he flashed back to that unseasonably warm afternoon when he’d sat just outside with the federal attorney for New York City, Robert Morganthau and the chief of Morganthau’s criminal division, Silvio Mollo, talking about prosecuting various organized crime figures.

Kennedy could still remember the glint of the sunlight on the swimming pool, the taste of the tuna fish sandwich Ethel had brought him, the way the men—despite their topic—had seemed lighthearted.

Then the phone rang, and J. Edgar Hoover was on the line.  Kennedy almost didn’t take the call, but he did and Hoover’s cold voice said, I have news for you. The President’s been shot.

Kennedy had always disliked Hoover, but since that day, that awful day in the bright sunshine, he hated that fat bastard.  Not once—not in that call, not in the subsequent calls—did Hoover express condolences or show a shred of human concern.

“Credible rumors?” Kennedy repeated, knowing he probably sounded as cold as Hoover had three months ago, and not caring.  He’d chosen Haskell as his liaison precisely because the man didn’t like Hoover either.  Kennedy had needed someone inside Hoover’s hierarchy, unbeknownst to Hoover, which was difficult since Hoover kept his hand in everything.  Haskell was one of the few who fit the bill.

“Yes, sir, quite credible.”

“Then why haven’t I received official contact?”

“I’m not even sure the President knows, sir.”

Kennedy leaned against the desk. “Why not, if the rumors are credible?”

“Um, because, sir, um, it seems Associate Director Tolson was also shot, and um, they were, um, in a rather suspect area.”

Kennedy closed his eyes.  All of Washington knew that Tolson was the closest thing Hoover had to a wife.  The two old men had been life-long companions. Even though they didn’t live together, they had every meal together.  Tolson had been Hoover’s hatchet man until the last year or so, when Tolson’s health hadn’t permitted it.

Then a word Haskell used sank in.   “You said shot.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is Tolson dead too then?”

“And three other people in the neighborhood,” Haskell said.

“My God.”  Kennedy ran a hand over his face.  “But they think this is personal?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Because of the location of the shooting?”

“Yes, sir.  It seems there was an exclusive gathering in a nearby building.  You know the type, sir.”

Kennedy didn’t know the type—at least not through personal experience. But he’d heard of places like that, where the rich, famous and deviant could spend time with each other, and do whatever it was they liked to do in something approaching privacy.

“So,” he said, “the bureau’s trying to figure out how to cover this up.”

“Or at least contain it, sir.”

Without Hoover or Tolson.  No one in the bureau was gong to know what to do.

Kennedy’s hand started to shake.  “What about the files?”

“Files, sir?”

“Hoover’s confidential files.  Has anyone secured them?”

“Not yet, sir.  But I’m sure someone has called Miss Gandy.”

Helen Gandy was Hoover’s long-time secretary. She had been his right hand as long as Tolson had operated that hatchet.

“So procedure’s being followed,” Kennedy said, then frowned.  If procedure were being followed, shouldn’t the acting head of the bureau be calling him?

“No, sir.  But the Director put some private instructions in place should he be killed or incapacitated. Private emergency instructions. And those involve letting Miss Gandy know before anyone else.”

Even me, Kennedy thought.  Hoover’s nominal boss. “She’s not there yet, right?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know where those files are?” Kennedy asked, trying not to let desperation into his voice.

“I’ve made it my business to know, sir.”  There was a pause and then Haskell lowered his voice.  “They’re in Miss Gandy’s office, sir.”

Not Hoover’s like everyone thought.  For the first time in months, Kennedy felt a glimmer of hope. “Secure those files.”

“Sir?”

“Do whatever it takes.  I want them out of there, and I want someone to secure Hoover’s house too.  I’m acting on the orders of the President.  If anyone tells you that they are doing the same, they’re mistaken.  The President made his wishes clear on this point.  He often said if anything happens to that old queer—”  And here Kennedy deliberately used LBJ’s favorite phrase for Hoover “—then we need those files before they can get into the wrong hands.”

“I’m on it, sir.”

“I can’t stress to you the importance of this,” Kennedy said.   In fact, he couldn’t talk about the importance at all. Those files could ruin his brother’s legacy.  The secrets in there could bring down Kennedy too, and his entire family.

“And if the rumors about the Director’s death are wrong, sir?”

Kennedy felt a shiver of fear.  “Are they?”

“I seriously doubt it.”

“Then let me worry about that.”

And about what LBJ would do when he found out.  Because the president upon whose orders Kennedy acted wasn’t the current one.  Kennedy was following the orders of the only man he believed should be president at the moment.

His brother, Jack.

***

The scene wasn’t hard to find; a coroner’s van blocked the  entrance to the alley.  Bryce walked quickly, already cold, his heartburn worse than it had been when he had gone to bed.

The neighborhood was in transition.  An urban renewal project had knocked down some wonderful turn of the century buildings that had become eyesores. But so far, the buildings that had replaced them were the worst kind of modern—all planes and angles and white with few windows.

In the buildings closest to the park, the lights worked and the streets looked safe.  But here, on a side street not far from the construction, the city’s shady side showed.  The dirty snow was piled against the curb, the streets were dark, and nothing seemed inhabited except that alley with the coroner’s van blocking the entrance.

The coroner’s van and at least one unmarked car.  No press, which surprised him.  He shoved his gloved hands in the pockets of his overcoat even though it was against FBI dress code, and slipped between the van and the wall of a grimy brick building.

The alley smelled of old urine and fresh blood.  Two beat cops blocked his way until he showed identification.  Then, like people usually did, they parted as if he could burn them.

The bodies had fallen side by side in the center of the alley. They looked posed, with their arms up, their legs in classic P position—one leg bent, the other straight.  They looked like they could fit perfectly on the dead body diagrams the FBI used to put out in the 1930s.  He wondered if they had fallen like this or if this had been the result of the coroner’s tampering.

The coroner had messed with other parts of the crime scene—if, indeed, he had been the one who put the garbage can lids on the ice and set battery-powered lamps on them.  The warmth of the lamps was melting the ice and sending runnels of water into a nearby grate.

“I hope to hell someone thought to photograph the scene before you melted it,” he said.

The coroner and the two cops who had been crouching beside the bodies stood up guiltily.  The coroner looked at the garbage can lids and closed his eyes.  Then he took a deep breath, opened them, and snapped his fingers at the assistant who was waiting beside a gurney.

“Camera,” he said.

“That’s Crime Scene’s—.” the assistant began, then saw everyone looking at him.  He glanced at the van.  “Never mind.”

He walked behind the bodies, further disturbing the scene.  Bryce’s mouth thinned in irritation.  The cops who stood were in plain clothes.

“Detectives,” Bryce said, holding his identification, “Special Agent Frank Bryce of the FBI.  I’ve been told to secure this scene.  More of my people will be here shortly.”

He hoped that last was true.  He had no idea who was coming or when they would arrive.

“Good,” said the younger detective, a tall man with broad shoulders and an all-American jaw.  “The sooner we get out of here the better.”

Bryce had never gotten that reaction from a detective before.  Usually the detectives were territorial, always reminding him that this was New York City and that the scene belonged to them.

The other detective, older, face grizzled by time and work, held out his gloved hand.  “Forgive my partner’s rudeness.  I’m Seamus O’Reilly.  He’s Joseph McAllister and we’ll help you in any way we can.”

“I appreciate it,” Bryce said, taking O’Reilly’s hand and shaking it.  “I guess the first thing you can do is tell me what we’ve got.”

“A hell of a mess, that’s for sure,” said McAllister.  “You’ll understand when….”

His voice trailed off as his partner took out two long, old-fashioned wallets and handed them to Bryce.

Bryce took them, feeling confused.  Then he opened the first, saw the familiar badge, and felt his breath catch.  Two FBI agents, in this alley?  Shot side-by-side?  He looked up, saw the darkened windows.

There used to be rumors about this neighborhood.  Some exclusive private sex parties used to be held here, and his old partner had always wanted to visit one just to see if it was a hotbed of Communists like some of the agents had claimed.  Bryce had begged off.  He was an investigator, not a voyeur.

The two detectives were staring at him, as if they expected more from him.  He still had the wallet open in his hand.  If the dead men were New York agents, he would know them.  He hated solving the deaths of people he knew.

But he steeled himself, looked at the identification, and felt the blood leave his face.  His skin grew cold and for a moment he felt lightheaded.

“No,” he said.

The detectives still stared at him.

He swallowed.  “Have you done a visual i.d.?”

Hoover was recognizable.  His picture was on everything. Sometimes Bryce thought Hoover was more famous than the president—any president.  He’d certainly been in power longer.

“Faces are gone,” O’Reilly said.

“Exit wounds,” the coroner added from beside the bodies.  His assistant had returned and was taking pictures, the flash showing just how much melt had happened since the coroner arrived.

“Shot in the back of the head?” Bryce blinked.  He was tired and his brain was working slowly, but something about the shots didn’t match with the body positions.

“If they came out that door,” O’Reilly said as he indicated a dark metal door almost hidden in the side of the brick building, “then the shooters had to be waiting beside it.”

“Your crime scene people haven’t arrived yet, I take it?” Bryce asked.

“No,” the coroner said.  “They think it’s a fag kill. They’ll get here when they get here.”

Bryce clenched his left fist and had to remind himself to let the fingers loose.

O’Reilly saw the reaction. “Sorry about that,” he said, shooting a glare at the coroner.  “I’m sure the director was here on business.”

Funny business.  But Bryce didn’t say that.  The rumors about Hoover had been around since Bryce joined the FBI just after the war.  Hoover quashed them, like he quashed any criticism, but it seemed like the criticism got made, no matter what.

Bryce opened the other wallet, but he already had a guess as to who was beside Hoover, and his guess turned out to be right.

“You want to tell me why your crime scene people believe this is a homosexual killing?” Bryce asked, trying not to let what Mary called his FBI tone into his voice.  If Hoover was still alive and this was some kind of plant, Hoover would want to crush the source of this assumption.  Bryce would make sure that the source was worth pursuing before going any farther.

“Neighborhood, mostly,” McAllister said.  “There’re a couple of bars, mostly high-end.  You have to know someone to get in.  Then there’s the party, held every week upstairs. Some of the most important men in the city show up at it, or so they used to say in Vice when they told us to stay away.”

Bryce nodded, letting it go at that.

“We need your crime scene people here ASAP, and a lot more cops so that we can protect what’s left of this scene, in case this men turn out to be who their identification says they are.  You search the bodies to see if this was the only identification on them?”

O’Reilly started.  He clearly hadn’t thought of that.  Probably had been too shocked by the first wallets that he found.

The younger detective had already gone back to the bodies.  The coroner put out a hand, and did the searching himself.

“You think this was a plant?” O’Reilly asked.

“I don’t know what to think,” Bryce said.  “I’m not here to think.  I’m here to make sure everything goes smoothly.”

And to  make sure the case goes to the FBI.  Those words hung unspoken between the two of them.  Not that O’Reilly objected, and now Bryce could understand why.  This case would be a political nightmare, and no good detective wanted to be in the middle of it.

“How come there’s no press?” Bryce asked O’Reilly.  “You manage to get rid of them somehow?”

“Fag kill,” the coroner said.

Bryce was getting tired of those words.  His fist had clenched again, and he had to work at unclenching it.

“Ignore him,” O’Reilly said softly.  “He’s an asshole and the best coroner in the city.”

“I heard that,” the coroner said affably.  “There’s no other identification on either of them.”

O’Reilly’s shoulders slumped, as if he’d been hoping for a different outcome.  Bryce should have been hoping as well, but he hadn’t been.  He had known that Hoover was in town.  The entire New York bureau knew, since Hoover always took it over when he arrived—breezing in, giving instructions, making sure everything was just the way he wanted it.

 “Before this gets too complicated,” O’Reilly said, “you want to see the other bodies?”

“Other bodies?” Bryce felt numb.  He could use some caffeine now, but Hoover had ordered agents not to drink coffee on the job.  Getting coffee now felt almost disrespectful.

“We got three more.” O’Reilly took a deep breath.   “And just before you arrived, I got word that they’re agents too.”

***

Special Agent John Haskell had just installed six of his best agents outside the Director’s suite of offices when a small woman showed up, key clutched in her gloved right hand.  Helen Gandy, the Director’s secretary, looked up at Haskell with the coldest stare he’d ever seen outside of the Director’s.

“May I go into my office, Agent Haskell?” Her voice was just as cold.  She didn’t look upset, and if he hadn’t known that she never stayed past five unless directed by Hoover himself, Haskell would have thought she was coming back from a prolonged work break.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” he said.  “No one is allowed inside.  President’s orders.”

“Really?” God, that voice was chilling.  He remembered the first time he’d heard it, when he’d been brought to this suite of offices as a brand-new agent, after getting his “Meet the Boss” training before his introduction to the Director.  She’d frightened him more than Hoover had.

“Yes, Ma’am. The President says no one can enter.”

“Surely he didn’t mean me.”

Surely he did.  But Haskell bit the comment back.  “I’m sorry, Ma’am.”

“I have a few personal items that I’d like to get, if you don’t mind.  And the Director instructed me that in the case of…” and for the first time she paused.  Her voice didn’t break nor did she clear her throat.  But she seemed to need a moment to gather herself.  “In case of emergency, I was to remove some of his personal items as well.”

“If you could tell me what they are, Ma’am, I’ll get them.”

Her eyes narrowed.  “The Director doesn’t like others to touch his possessions.”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” he said gently.  “But I don’t think that matters any longer.”

Any other woman would have broken down.  After all, she had worked for the old man for forty-five years, side-by-side, every day.  Never marrying, not because they had a relationship—Helen Gandy, more than anyone, probably knew the truth behind the Director’s relationship with the Associate Director—but because for Helen Gandy, just like for the Director himself, the FBI was her entire life.

“It matters,” she said.  “Now if you’ll excuse me…”

She tried to wriggle past him.  She was wiry and stronger than he expected.  He had to put out an arm to block her.

“Ma’am,” he said in the gentlest tone he could summon, “the President’s orders supercede the Director’s.”

How often had he wanted to say that over the years?  How often had he wanted to remind everyone in the Bureau that the President led the Free World, not J. Edgar Hoover.

“In this instance,” she snapped, “they do not.”

“Ma’am, I’d hate to have some agents restrain you.”  Although he wasn’t sure about that.  She had never been nice to him or to anyone he knew.  She’d always been sharp or rude.  “You’re distraught.”

“I am not.”  She clipped each word.

“You are because I say you are, Ma’am.”

She raised her chin.  For a moment, he thought she hadn’t understood. But she finally did.

The balance of power had shifted.  At the moment, it was on his side.

“Do I have to call the president then to get my personal effects?” she asked.

But they both knew she wasn’t talking about her personal things.  And the President was smart enough to know that as well.  As hungry to get those files as the Attorney General had  seemed despite his Eastern reserve, the President would be utterly ravenous.  He wouldn’t let some old skirt, as he’d been known to call Miss Gandy, get in his way.

“Go ahead,” Haskell said.  “Feel free to use the phone in the office across the hall.”

She glared at him, then turned on one foot and marched down the corridor. But she didn’t head toward a phone—at least not one he could see.

He wondered who she would call.  The President wouldn’t listen. The Attorney General had issued the order in the president’s name.  Maybe she would contact one of Hoover’s Assistant Directors, the four or five men that Hoover had in his pocket.

Haskell had been waiting for them.  But word still hadn’t spread through the Bureau. The only reason he knew was because he’d received a call from the SAC of the New York office.  New York hated the Director, mostly because the old man went there so often and harassed them.

Someone had probably figured out that there was a crisis from the moment that Haskell had brought his people in to secure the Director’s suite.  But no one would know that the Director was dead until Miss Gandy made the calls or until someone in the Bureau started along the chain of command—the one designated in the book Hoover had written all those years ago.

Haskell crossed his arms. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t let the A.G. know how he felt about the Director.  Sometimes he wished he were still a humble assistant, the man who had joined the FBI because he wanted to be a top cop like his hero J. Edgar Hoover.

A man who, it turned out, never made a real arrest or fired a gun or even understood investigation.

There was a lot to admire about the Director—no matter what you said, he’d built a hell of an agency almost from scratch—but he wasn’t the man his press made him out to be.

And that was the source of Haskell’s disillusionment.  He’d wanted to be a top cop.  Instead, he snooped into homes and businesses and sometimes even investigated fairly blameless people, looking for a mistake in their past.

Since he’d been transferred to FBIHQ, he hadn’t done any real investigating at all.  His arrests had slowed, his cases dwindled.

And he’d found himself investigating his boss, trying to find out where the legend ended and the man began.  Once he realized that the old man was just a bureaucrat who had learned where all the bodies were buried and used that to make everyone bow to his bidding, Haskell was ripe for the undercover work the A.G. had asked him to do.

Only now he wasn’t undercover any more.  Now he was standing in the open before the Director’s cache of secrets, on the President’s orders, hoping that no one would call his bluff.

***

As O’Reilly led him to the limousine, Bryce surreptitiously checked his watch.  He’d already been on scene for half an hour, and no back-up had arrived.  If he was supposed to secure everything and chase off the NYPD, he’d need some manpower.

But for now, he wanted to see the extent of the problem.  The night had gotten colder, and this street was even darker than the street he’d walked down.  All of the streetlights were out.  The only light came from some porch bulbs above a few entrances.  He could barely make out the limousine at the end of the block, and then only because he could see the shadowy forms of the two beat cops standing at the scene, their squad cars parking the limo in.

As he got closer, he recognized the shape of the limo.  It was thicker than most limos and rode lower to the ground because it was encased in an extra frame, making it bulletproof.  Supposedly, the glass would all be bulletproof as well.

“You said the driver was shot inside the limo?” Bryce asked.

“That’s what they told me,” O’Reilly said.  “I wasn’t called to this scene.  We were brought in because of the two men in the alley.  Even then we were called late.”

Bryce nodded.  He remembered the coroner’s bigotry.  “Is that standard procedure for cases involving minorities?”

O’Reilly gave him a sideways glance.  Bryce couldn’t read O’Reilly’s expression in the dark.

“We’re overtaxed,” O’Reilly said after a moment.  “Some cases don’t get the kind of treatment they deserve.”

“Limo drivers,” Bryce said.

“If he’d been killed in the parking garage under the Plaza maybe,” O’Reilly said.  “But not because of who he was.  But because of where he was.”

Bryce nodded.  He knew how the world worked.  He didn’t like it.  He spoke up against it too many times, which was why he was on shaky ground at the Bureau.

Then his already upset stomach clenched.  Maybe he wasn’t going to get back-up.  Maybe they’d put him on his own here to claim he’d botched the investigation, so that they would be able to cover it up.

He couldn’t concentrate on that now.  What he had to do was take good notes, make the best case he could, and keep a copy of every damn thing—maybe in more than one place.

“You were called in because of the possibility that the men in the alley could be important,” Bryce said.

“That’s my guess,” O’Reilly said.

“What about the others down the block?  Has anyone taken those cases?”

“Probably not,” O’Reilly said.  “Those bars, you know. It’s department policy.  The coroner checks bodies in the suspect area, and decides, based on…um…evidence of…um…

activity…whether or not to bring in detectives.”

Bryce frowned.  He almost asked what the coroner was checking for when he figured out that it was evidence on the body itself, evidence not of the crime, but of certain kinds of sex acts.  If that evidence was present, apparently no one thought it worthwhile to investigate the crime.

“You’d think the city would revise that,” Bryce said.  “A lot of people live dual lives—productive and interesting people.”

“Yeah,” O’Reilly said.  “You’d think. Especially after tonight.”

Bryce grinned.  He was liking this grizzled cop more and more.

O’Reilly spoke to the beat cops, then motioned Bryce to the limo.  As Bryce approached, O’Reilly trained his flashlight on the driver’s side.

The window wasn’t broken like Bryce had expected.  It had been rolled down.

“You got here one James Crawford,” said one of the beat cops.  “He got identification says he’s a feebee, but I ain’t never heard of no colored feebee.”

“There’s only four,” Bryce said dryly.  And they all worked for Hoover as his personal housekeepers or drivers.  “Can I see that identification?”

The beat cop handed him a wallet that matched the ones on Tolson and Hoover.  Inside was a badge and identification for James Crawford as well as family photographs.  Neither Tolson nor Hoover had had any photographs in their wallets.

Bryce motioned O’Reilly to move a little closer to the body.  The head was tilted toward the window.  The right side of the skull was gone, the hair glistening with drying blood.  With one gloved finger, Bryce pushed the head upright.  A single entrance wound above the left ear had caused the damage.

“Brunner says the shots are the same caliber,” O’Reilly said.

It took Bryce a moment to realize that Brunner was the coroner.

Bryce carefully searched Crawford but didn’t find the man’s weapon.  Nor could he found a holster or any way to carry a weapon.

“It looks like he wasn’t carrying a weapon,” Bryce said.

“Neither were the two in the alley,” O’Reilly said, and Bryce appreciated his caution in not identifying the other two corpses.  “You’d think they would have been.”

Bryce shook his head.  “They were known for not carrying weapons.  But you’d think their driver would have one.”

“Maybe they had protection,” O’Reilly said.

And Bryce’s mouth went dry.  Of course they did.  The office always joked about who would get HooverWatch on each trip.  He’d had to do it a few times.

Agents on HooverWatch followed strict rules, like everything else with Hoover.  Remain close enough to see the men entering and exiting an area, stop any suspicious characters, and yet somehow remain inconspicuous.

“You said there were two others shot?”

“Yeah.  A block or so from here.” O’Reilly waved a hand vaguely down the street.

“Pulled out of one car or two?”

“Not my case,” O’Reilly said.

“Two,” said the beat cop.  “Black sedans.  Could barely see them on this cruddy street.”

HooverWatch.  Bryce swallowed hard, that bile back.  Of course.  He probably knew the men who were shot.

“Let’s look,” he said.  “You two, make sure the coroner’s man photographs this scene before he leaves.”

“Yessir,” said the second beat cop.  He hadn’t spoken before.

“And don’t let anyone near this scene unless I give the o.k.,” Bryce said.

“How come this guy’s in charge?” the talkative beat cop asked O’Reilly.

O’Reilly grinned.  “Because he’s a feebee.”

“I’m sorry,” the beat cop said automatically turning to Bryce.  “I didn’t know, sir.”

Feebee was an insult—or at least some in the Bureau thought so.  Bryce didn’t mind it.  Any more than he minded when some rookie said “Sack” when he meant “Ess-Ay-Cee.”  Shorthand worked, sometimes better than people wanted it to.

“Point me in the right direction,” he said to the talkative cop.

The cop nodded south.  “One block down, sir.  You can’t miss it.  We got guys on those scenes too, but we weren’t so sure it was important.  You know.  We coulda missed stuff.”

In other words, they hadn’t buttoned up the scene immediately.  They’d waited for the coroner to make his verdict, and he probably hadn’t, not with the three new corpses nearby.

Bryce took one last look at James Crawford.  The man had rolled down his window, despite the cold, and in a bad section of town.

He leaned forward.  Underneath the faint scent of cordite and mingled with the thicker smell of blood was the smell of a cigar.

He took the flashlight from O’Reilly and trained it on the dirty snow against the curb.  It had been trampled by everyone coming to this crime scene.

He crouched, and poked just a little, finding three fairly fresh cigarette butts.

As he stood, he said to the beat cops, “When the scene of the crime guys get here, make sure they take everything from the curb.”

O’Reilly was watching him.  The beat cops were frowning, but they nodded.

Bryce handed O’Reilly back his flashlight and headed down the street.

“You think he was smoking and tossing the butts out the window?” O’Reilly asked.

“Either that,” Bryce said, “or he rolled his window down to talk to someone.  And if someone was pointing a gun at him, he wouldn’t have done it.  This vehicle was armored.  He had a better chance starting it up and driving away than he did cooperating.”

“If he wasn’t smoking,” O’Reilly said, “he knew his killer.”

“Yeah,” Bryce said.  And he was pretty sure that was going to make his job a whole hell of a lot harder.

***

Kennedy took the elevator up to the fifth floor of the Justice Department.  He probably should have stayed home, but he simply couldn’t.  He needed to get into those files and he needed to do so before anyone else.

As he strode into the corridor he shared with the Director of the FBI, he saw Helen Gandy hurry in the other direction.  She looked like she had just come from the beauty salon.  He had never seen her look anything less than completely put together but he was surprised by  her perfect appearance on this night, after the news that her long-time boss was dead.

Kennedy tugged at the overcoat he’d put on over his favorite sweater.  He hadn’t taken the time to change or even comb his hair.  He probably looked as tousled as he had in the days after Jack died.

Although, for the first time in three months, he felt like he had a purpose.  He didn’t know how long this feeling would last, or how long he wanted it to.  But this death had given him an odd kind of hope that control was coming back into his world.

Haskell stood in front of the Director’s office suite, arms crossed.  The Director’s suite was just down the corridor from the Attorney General’s offices.  It felt odd to go toward Hoover’s domain instead of his own.

Haskell looked relieved when he saw Kennedy.

“Was that the dragon lady I just saw?” Kennedy asked.

“She wanted to get some personal effects from her office,” Haskell said.

“Did you let her?”

“You said the orders were to secure it, so I have.”

“Excellent.”  Kennedy glanced in both directions and saw no one.  “Make sure your staff continues to protect the doors.  I’m going inside.”

“Sir?” Haskell raised his eyebrows.

“This may not be the right place,” Kennedy said.  “I’m worried that he moved everything to his house.”

The lie came easily.  Kennedy would have heard if Hoover had moved files to his own home.  But Haskell didn’t know that.

Haskell moved away from the door.  It was unlocked.  Two more agents stood inside, guarding the interior doors.

“Give me a minute, please, gentlemen,” Kennedy said.

The men nodded and went outside.

Kennedy stopped and took a deep breath.  He had been in Miss Gandy’s office countless times, but he had never really looked at it.  He’d always been staring at the door to Hoover’s inner sanctum, waiting for it to open and the old man to come out.

That office was interesting.  In the antechamber, Hoover had memorabilia and photographs from his major cases.  He even had the plaster-of-paris death mask of John Dellinger on display. It was a ghastly thing, which made Kennedy think of the way that English kings used to keep severed heads on the entrance to London Bridge to warn traitors of their potential fate.

But this office had always looked like a waiting room to him. Nothing very special. The woman behind the desk was the focal point.  Jack had been the one who nicknamed her the dragon lady and had even called her that to her face once, only with his trademark grin, so infectious that she hadn’t made a sound or a grimace in protest.

Of course, she hadn’t smiled back either.

Her desk was clear except for a blotter, a telephone, and a jar of pens.  A typewriter sat on a credenza with paper stacked beside it.

But it wasn’t the desk that interested him the most.  It was the floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets and storage bins.  He walked to them.  Instead of the typical system—marked by letters of the alphabet—this one had numbers that were clearly part of a code.

He pulled open the nearest drawer, and found row after row of accordion files, each with its own number, and manila folders with the first number set followed by another.  He cursed softly under his breath.

Of course the old dog wouldn’t file his confidentials by name.  He’d use a secret code. The old man liked nothing more than his secrets.

Still, Kennedy opened half a dozen drawers just to see if the system continued throughout.  And it wasn’t until he got to a bin near the corner of the desk that he found a file labeled “Obscene.”

His hand shook as he pulled it out.  Jack, for all his brilliance, had been sexually insatiable.  Back when their brother Joe was still alive and no one ever thought Jack would be running for president, Jack had had an affair with a Danish émigré named Inga Arvad.  Inga Binga, as Jack used to call her, was married to a man with ties to Hitler.  She’d even met and liked Der Fuhrer, and had said so in print.

She’d been the target of FBI surveillance as a possible spy, and during that surveillance who should turn up in her bed but a young naval lieutentant whose father had once been Ambassador to England.  The Ambassador, as he preferred to be called even by his sons, found out about the affair, told Jack in no uncertain terms to end it, and then to make sure he did by getting him assigned to a PT boat in the Pacific, as far from Inga Binga as possible.

Kennedy had always suspected that Hoover had leaked the information to the Ambassador, but he hadn’t known for certain until Jack became President  when Hoover told them.  Hoover had been surveilling all of the Kennedy children at the Ambassador’s request. He’d given Kennedy a list of scandalous items as a sample, and hoped that would control the president and his brother.

It might have controlled Jack, but Hoover hadn’t known Kennedy very well.  Kennedy had told Hoover that if any of this information made it into the press, then other things would appear in print as well, things like the strange FBI budget items for payments covering Hoover’s visits to the track or the fact that Hoover made some interesting friends, mobster friends, when he was vacationing in Palm Beach.

It wasn’t quite a Mexican stand-off—Jack was really afraid of the old man—but it gave Kennedy more power than any Attorney General had had over Hoover since the beginnings of the Roosevelt administration.

But now Kennedy needed those files, and he had a hunch Hoover would label them obscene.

Kennedy opened the file, and was shocked to see Richard Nixon’s name on the sheets inside.  Kennedy thumbed through quickly, not caring what dirt they’d found on that loser.  Nixon couldn’t win an election after his defeat in 1960.  He’d even told the press after he lost a California race that they wouldn’t have him to kick around any more.

Yet Hoover had kept the files, just to be safe.

That old bastard really and truly had known where all the bodies were buried. And it wouldn’t be easy to find them.

Kennedy took a deep breath.  He stood, shoved his hands in his pockets, and surveyed the walls of files.  It would take days to search each folder.  He didn’t have days.  He probably didn’t have hours.

But he was Hoover’s immediate supervisor, whether the old man had recognized it or not.  Hoover answered to him.  Which meant that the files belonged to the Justice Department, of which the FBI was only one small part.

He glanced at his watch.  No one pounded on the door.  He probably had until dawn before someone tried to stop him.  If he was really lucky, no one would think of the files until mid-morning.

He went to the door and beckoned Haskell inside.

“We’re taking the files to my office,” he said.

“All of them, sir?”

“All of them.  These first, then whatever is in Hoover’s office, and then any other confidential files you can find.”

Haskell looked up the wall as if he couldn’t believe the command.  “That’ll take some time, sir.”

“Not if you get a lot of people to help.”

“Sir, I thought you wanted to keep this secret.”

He did.  But it wouldn’t remain secret for long.  So he had to control when the information got out—just like he had to control the information itself.

“Get this done as quickly as possible,” he said.

Haskell nodded and turned the doorknob, but Kennedy stopped him before he went out.

“These are filed by code,” he said.  “Do you know where the key is?”

“I was told that Miss Gandy had the keys to everything from codes to offices,” Haskell said.

Kennedy felt a shiver run through him.  Knowing Hoover, he would have made sure he had the key to the Attorney General’s office as well.

“Do you have any idea where she might have kept the code keys?” Kennedy asked.

“No,” Haskell said.  “I wasn’t part of the need-to-know group.  I already knew too much.”

Kennedy nodded.  He appreciated how much Haskell knew.  It had gotten him this far.

“On your way out,” Kennedy said, “call building maintenance and have them change all the locks in my office.”

“Yes, sir.”  Haskell kept his hand on the doorknob.  “Are you sure you want to do this, sir?  Couldn’t you just change the locks here?  Wouldn’t that secure everything for the President?”

“Everyone in Washington wants these files,” Kennedy said.  “They’re going to come to this office suite. They won’t think of mine.”

“Until they heard that you moved everything.”

Kennedy nodded.  “And then they’ll know how futile their quest really is.”

***

The final crime scene was a mess.  The bodies were already gone—probably inside the coroner’s van that blocked the alley a few blocks back.  It had taken Bryce nearly a half an hour to find someone who knew what the scene had looked like when the police had first arrived.

That someone was Officer Ralph Voight.  He was tall and trim, with a pristine uniform despite the fact that he’d been on duty all night.

O’Reilly was the one who convinced him to talk with Bryce.  Voight was the first to show the traditional animosity between the NYPD and the FBI, but that was because Voight didn’t know who had died only a few blocks away.

Bryce had Voight walk him through the crime scene.  The buildings on this street were boarded up, and the lights burned out.  Broken glass littered the sidewalk—and it hadn’t come from this particular crime.  Rusted beer cans, half buried in the ice piles, cluttered each stoop like passed-out drunks.

“Okay,” Voight said, using his flashlight as a pointer, “we come up on these two cars first.”

The two sedans were parked against the curb, one behind the other.  The sedans were too nice for the neighborhood—new, black, without a dent.  Bryce recognized them as FBI issue—he had access to a sedan like that himself when he needed it.

He patted his pocket, was disgusted to realize he’d left his notebook at the apartment, and turned to O’Reilly.  “You got paper?  I need those plates.”

O’Reilly nodded.  He pulled out a notebook and wrote down the plate numbers.

“They just looked wrong,” Voight was saying.  “So we stopped, figuring maybe someone needed assistance.”

He pointed the flashlight across the street.  The squad had stopped directly across from the two cars.

“That’s when we seen the first body.”

He walked them to the middle of the street.  This part of the city hadn’t been plowed regularly and a layer of ice had built over the pavement.  A large pool of blood had melted through that ice, leaving its edges reddish black and revealing the pavement below.

“The guy was face down, hands out like he’d tried to catch himself.”

“Face gone?” Bryce asked, thinking maybe it was a head shot like the others.

“No.  Turns out he was shot in the back.”

Bryce glanced at O’Reilly, whose lips had thinned.  This one was different. Because it was the first?  Or because it was unrelated?

“We pull our weapons, scan to see if we see anyone else, which we don’t.  The door’s open on the first sedan, but we didn’t see anyone in the dome light.  And we didn’t see anyone obvious on the street, but it’s really dark here and the flashlights don’t reach far.”  Voight turned his light toward the block with the parked limousine, but neither the car nor the sidewalk was visible from this distance.

“So we go to the cars, careful now, and find the other body right there.”

He flashed his light on the curb beside the door to the first sedan.

“This one’s on his back and the door is open.  We figure he was getting out when he got plugged.  Then the other guy—maybe he was outside his car trying to help this guy with I don’t know what, some car trouble or something, then his buddy gets hit, so he runs for cover across the street and gets nailed.  End of story.”

“Did you check to see if the cars start?” O’Reilly asked.  Bryce nodded that was going to be his next question as well.

“I’m not supposed to touch the scene, sir,” Voight said with some resentment.  “We secured the area, figured everything was okay, then called it in.”

“Did you hear the other shots?”

“No,” Voight said.  “I know we got three more up there, and you’d think I’d’ve heard the shooting if something happened, but  I didn’t.  And as you can tell, it’s damn quiet around here at night.”

Bryce could tell.  He didn’t like the silence in the middle of the city.  Neighborhoods that got quiet like this so close to dawn were usually among the worst.  The early morning maintenance workers, and the delivery drivers stayed away whenever they could.

He peered in the sedan, then pulled the door open.  The interior light went on, and there was blood all over the front seat and steering wheel.  There were styrofoam coffee cups on both sides of the little rise between the seats.  And the keys were in the ignition.  Like all Bureau issue, the car was an automatic.

Carefully, so that he wouldn’t disturb anything important in the scene, he turned the key.  The sedan purred to life, sounding well-tuned just like it was supposed to.

“Check to see if there are other problems,” Bryce said to O’Reilly.  “A flat maybe.”

Although Bryce knew there wouldn’t be one.  He shut off the ignition.

“You didn’t see the interior light when you pulled up?” he asked Voight.

“Yeah, but it was dim,” Voight said.  “That’s why I figured there was car problems.  I figured they left the lights on so they could see.”

Bryce nodded.  He understood the assumption.  He backed out of the sedan, then walked around it, shining his own flashlight at the hole in the ice, and then back at the first sedan.

Directly across.

He walked to the second sedan.  Its interior was clean—no styrofoam cups, no wadded up food containers, no notebooks.  Not even some tools hastily pulled to help the other drivers in need.

He let out a small sigh.  He finally figured out what was bothering him.

“You find weapons on the two men?” he asked Voight.

“Yes, sir.”

“Holstered?”

“The guy by the car.  The other one had his in his right hand.  We figured we just happened on the scene or someone would have taken the weapon.”

Or not.  People tended to hide for a while after shots were fired, particularly if they had nothing to do with the shootings but might get blamed anyway.

Bryce tried to open the passenger door on the second sedan, but it was locked.  He walked around to the driver’s door.  Locked as well.

“No one looked inside this car?”

“No, sir.  We figured crime scene would do it.”

“But they haven’t been here yet?” Bryce asked.

“It’s the neighborhood, sir.  Right there—” Voight aimed his flashlight at stairs heading down to a lower level “—is one of those men-only clubs, you know?  The kind that you go to when you’re…you know…looking for other men.”

Bryce felt a flash of irritation.  He’d been running into this all night.  “Okay.  What I’m hearing in a sideways way from every representative of the NYPD on this scene is that crimes in this neighborhood don’t get investigated.”

Voight sputtered.  “They get investigated—”

“They get investigated,” O’Reilly said, “enough to tell the families they probably want to back off.  You heard Brunner.  That’s what most in the department call it.  The rest of us, we call them lifestyle kills.  And we get in trouble if we waste too many resources on them.”

“Lovely,” Bryce said dryly.  His philosophy, which had gotten him in trouble with the Bureau more than once, was that all crimes deserved investigation, no matter how distasteful you found the victims.  Which was why he kept getting moved, from communists to reviewing wire-taps to digging dirt on other agents.

And that was probably why he was here.  He was expendable.

“Did you find car keys on either of the victims?” Bryce asked.

“No, sir,” Voight said.  “And I helped the coroner when he first arrived.”

“Then start looking.  See if they got dropped in the struggle.”

Although Bryce doubted they had.

“I got something to jimmy the lock in my car,” O’Reilly said.

Bryce nodded.  Then he stood back, surveying the whole thing.  He didn’t like how he was thinking.  It was making his heartburn grow worse.

But it was the only thing that made sense.

Agents worked HooverWatch in pairs.  There were two dead agents and two cars.  If the second sedan was back-up, there should have been four agents and two cars.

But it didn’t look that way.  It looked like someone had pulled up behind the HooverWatch vehicle, and got out, carefully locking the door.

Then he went to the door of the HooverWatch car.  The driver had got out to talk to him, and the new guy shot him.

At that point, the second HooverWatch agent was an easy target.  He scrambled out of the car, grabbed his own weapon, and headed across the street—maybe shooting as he went.  The shooter got him, and then casually walked up the street to the limo, which he had to know was there even though he couldn’t see it.

As he approached the limo, the limo driver lowered his window.  He would have recognized the approaching man, and thought he was going to report on the danger.

Instead, the man shot him, then went to lie in wait for Hoover and Tolson.

Bryce shivered.  It would have happened very fast, and long before the beat cops showed up.

The guy in the street had time to bleed out.  The limo driver couldn’t warn his boss.  And the beat cops hadn’t heard the shots in the alley, which they would have on such a quiet night.

O’Reilly brought the jimmy, shoved it into the space between the window and the lock, and flipped the lock up with a single movement.  Then he opened the door.

No keys in the ignition.

Bryce flipped open the glovebox.  Nothing inside but the vehicle registration.  Which, as he expected, identified it as an FBI vehicle.

The shooter had planned to come back.  He’d planned to drive away in this car.  But he got delayed.  And by the time he got here, the two beat cops were on scene.  He couldn’t get his car.

He had to improvise.  So he probably walked away or took the subway, hoping the cops would think the extra car belonged to one of the victims.

And that was his mistake.

“How come you guys were here in the middle of the night?” Bryce asked Voight.

Voight swallowed.  It was the first sign of nervousness he’d shown. “This is part of our beat.”

“But?” Bryce asked.

Voight looked away.  “We’re supposed to go up Central Park West.”

“And you don’t.”

“Yeah, we do.  Just not every time.”

“Because?”

“Because I figure, you know, when the bars let out, we could, you know, let our presence be known.”

“Prevent a lifestyle kill.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you care about this because…?”

“Everyone should,” Voight snapped.  “Serve and protect, right, sir?”

Voight was touchy.  He thought Bryce was accusing him of protecting the lifestyle because he lived it.

“Does your partner like this drive?” Bryce asked.

“He complains, sir, but he lets me do it.”

“Have you stopped any crimes?”

“Broken up a few fights,” Voight said.

“But not something like this.”

“No, sir.”

“You don’t patrol every night, do you, Voight?”

“No, sir.  We get different regions different nights.”

“Do you think our killer would have thought that this street was unprotected?”

“It usually is, sir.”

O’Reilly was frowning, but not at Voight.  At Bryce.  “You think this was planned?” O’Reilly asked.

Bryce didn’t answer.  This was a Bureau matter, and he wasn’t sure how the Bureau would handle it.

But he did think the killing was planned. And he had a hunch it would be easy to solve because of the abandoned sedan.

And that abandoned sedan bothered him more than he wanted to admit.  Because the presence of that sedan meant only one thing:  that the person who had shot all five FBI agents was—almost without a doubt—an FBI agent himself.

***

Kennedy looked at the bins and the filing cabinets stacked around his office and allowed himself one moment to feel overwhelmed.  People ribbed him about the office; he had taken the reception area and made it his, rather than use the standard size office in the back.

As a result, his office was as long as a football field, with stunning windows along the walls.  The watercolors painted by his children had been covered by the cabinets.  His furniture was pushed aside to make room for the bins, and for the first time, this space felt small.

He put his hands on his hips and wondered how to begin.

Since six agents began moving the filing cabinets across the corridor more than an hour ago, Kennedy had received five phone calls from LBJ’s chief of staff.  Kennedy hadn’t taken one of them.  The last had been a direct order to come to the Oval Office.

Kennedy ignored it.

He also ignored the ringing telephone—the White House line—and the messages his own assistant (called in after a short night’s sleep) had been bringing to him.

Helen Gandy stood in the corridor, arms crossed, her purse hanging off  her wrist, and watching with deep disapproval.  Haskell was trying to find out if there were remaining files and where they were.  But Kennedy had found the one thing he was looking for: the key.

It was in a large, innocuous index file box inside the lowest drawer of Helen Gandy’s desk.  Kennedy had brought it into his office and was thumbing through it, hoping to understand it before he got interrupted again.

A man from building maintenance had changed the lock on the door leading into the interior offices, and was working on the main doors now that the files were all inside.  Kennedy figured he’d have his own office secure by seven a.m.

Then he heard a rustling in the hallway, a lot of startled, “Mr. President, sir!” followed by official, “Make way for the President,” and instinctively he turned toward the door.  The maintenance man was leaning out of it, the door knob loose in his hand.

“Where the fuck is that bastard?” Lyndon Baines Johnson’s voice echoed from the corridor.  “Doesn’t anyone in this building have balls enough to tell him that he works for me?”

Even though the question was rhetorical, someone tried to answer.  Kennedy heard something about “your orders, sir.”

“Horseshit!”  Then LBJ stood in the doorway.  Two secret service agents flanked him.  He motioned with one hand at the maintenance man.  “I suggest you get out.”

The man didn’t have to be told twice.  He scurried away, still carrying the doorknob.  LBJ came inside alone, pushed the door closed, then grimaced as it popped back open.  He grabbed a chair and set it in front of the door, then glared at Kennedy.

The glare was effective in that hang-dog face, despite LBJ’s attire.  He wore a plaid silk pajama top stuffed into a pair of suitpants, finished with dress shoes and no socks.  His hair—what remained of it—hadn’t been Brilcremed down like usual, and stood up on the sides and the back.

“I get a phone call from some weasel underling of that Old Cocksucker, informing me that he’s dead, and you’re stealing from his tomb.  I try to contact you, find out that you are indeed removing files from the Director’s office, and that you won’t take my calls.  Now, I should’ve sent one of my boys over here, but I figured they’re still walking on tip-toe around you because you’re in fucking mourning, and this don’t require tip-toe.  Especially since you got to be wondering about now what the hell you did to deserve all of this.”

“Deserve what?” Kennedy had expected LBJ’s anger, but he hadn’t expected it so soon.  He also hadn’t expected it here, in his office, instead of in the Oval Office a day or so later.

“Well, there’s only two things that tie J. Edgar and your brother.  The first is that someone was gunning for them and succeeded.  The second is that they went after the mob on your bidding.  There’s a lot of shit running around here that says your brother’s shooting was a mob hit, and I know personally that J. Edgar was doing his best to make it seem like that Oswald character acted alone.  But now Edgar is dead and Jack is dead and the only tie they have is the way they kow-towed to your stupid prosecution of the men that got your brother elected.”

Kennedy felt lightheaded.  He hadn’t even thought that the deaths of his brother and J. Edgar were connected.  But LBJ had a point.  Maybe there was a conspiracy to kill government officials. Maybe the mob was showing its power.  He’d had warning.

Hell, he’d had suspicions.  He hadn’t let himself look at any of the evidence in his brother’s assassination, not after he secured the body and prevented a disastrous autopsy in Texas.  If those doctors at Parkland had done their job, they would’ve seen just how advanced Jack’s Addison’s disease was.  The best kept secret of the Kennedy Administration—an administration full of secrets—was how close Jack was to incapacitation and death.

Kennedy clutched the file box.  But LBJ knew that.  He knew a lot of the secrets—had even promised to keep a few of them.  And he wanted the files as badly as Kennedy did.

There had to be a lot in here on LBJ too.  Not just the women, which was something he had in common with Jack, but other things, from his days in Congress.

“From what I heard,” Kennedy said, making certain his voice was calm even though he wasn’t, “all they know is someone shot Hoover.  Did you get more details than that?  Something that mentions organized crime in particular?”

“I’m sure it’ll come out,” LBJ said.

“You’re sure that saying such things would upset me,” Kennedy said.  “You’re after the files.”

“Damn straight,” LBJ said.  “I’m the head of this government.  Those files are mine.”

“You’re the head of this government for another year.  Next January, someone’ll take the oath of office and it might not be you.  Do you really want to claim these in the name of the presidency?  Because you might be handing them over to Goldwater come January.”

LBJ blanched.

Someone knocked on the door, and startled both men.  Kennedy frowned.  He couldn’t think of anyone who would have enough nerve to interrupt him when he was getting shouted at by LBJ.  But someone had.

LBJ pulled the door open.  Helen Gandy stood there.

“You boys can be heard in the hallway,” she said, sweeping in as if the leader of the free world wasn’t holding the door for her.  “And it’s embarrassing.  It was precisely this kind of thing the Director hoped to avoid.”

Then she nodded at LBJ.  Kennedy watched her.  The dragon lady.  Jack, as usual, had been right with his jibes.  Only the dragon lady would walk in here as if she were the most important person in the room.

“Mr. President,” she said, “these files are the Director’s personal business.  He wanted me to take care of them, and get them out of the office, where they do not belong.”

“Personal files, Miss Gandy?” LBJ asked.  “These are his secret files.”

“If they were secret, Mr. President, then you wouldn’t be here.  Mr. Hoover kept his secrets.”

Mr. Hoover used his secrets, Kennedy thought, but didn’t say.

“These are just his confidential files,” Miss Gandy was saying.  “Let me take care of them and they won’t be here to tempt anyone.  That’s what the Director wanted.”

“These are government property,” LBJ said with a sly look at Kennedy.  For the first time, Kennedy realized his Goldwater argument had gotten through.  “They belong  here.  I do thank you for your time and concern, though, ma’am.”

Then he gave her a courtly little bow, put his hand on the small of her back, and propelled her out of the room.

Despite himself Kennedy was impressed.  He’d never seen anyone handle the dragon lady that efficiently before.

LBJ grabbed one of the cabinets and slid it in front of the door he had just closed.  Kennedy had forgotten how strong the man was.  He had invited Kennedy down to his Texas ranch before the election, trying to find out what Kennedy was made of, and instead, Kennedy had realized just what LBJ was made of—strength, not bluster, brains and brawn.

He’d do well to remember that.

“All right,” LBJ said as he turned around.  “Here’s what I’m gonna offer.  You can have your family’s files.  You can watch while we search for them and you can have everything.  Just give me the rest.”

Kennedy raised his eyebrows.  He hadn’t felt this alive since November.  “No.”

“I can fire your ass in five minutes, put someone else in this fancy office, and then you can’t do a goddamn thing,” LBJ said. “I’m being kind.”

“There’s historical precedent for a cabinet member barricading himself in his office after he got fired,” Kennedy said.  “Seems to me it happened to a previous president named Johnson.  While I’m barricaded in, I’ll just go through the files and find out everything I need to know.”

LBJ crossed his arms.

It was a stand-off and neither of them had a good play.  They only had a guess as to what was in those files—not just theirs but all of the others as well.  They did know that whatever was in those files had given Hoover enough power to last in the office for more than forty years.

The files had brought down presidents.  They could bring down congressmen, supreme court justices, and maybe even the current president.  In that way, Helen Gandy was right.

The best solution was to destroy everything.

Only Kennedy wouldn’t.  Just like he knew LBJ wouldn’t.  There was too much history here, too much knowledge.

And too much power.

“These are our files,” Kennedy said after a moment, although the word “our” galled him, “yours and mine.  Right now we’re control them.”

LBJ nodded, almost imperceptivity.  “What do you want?”

What did he want? To be left alone? To have his family left alone?  At midnight, he might have said that.  But now, his old self was reasserting itself.  He felt like the man who had gone after the corrupt leaders of the Teamsters, not the man who had accidentally gotten his brother murdered.

Besides, there might be things in that file that could head off other problems in the future.  Other murders.  Other manipulations.

He needed a bullet-proof position. LBJ was right:  the Attorney General could be fired.  But there was one position, constitutionally, that the president couldn’t touch.

“I want to be your Vice President,” Kennedy said.  “And in 1972, when you can’t run again, I want your endorsement.  I want you to back me for the nomination.”

LBJ swallowed hard.  Color suffused his face and for a moment, Kennedy thought he was going to shout again.

But he didn’t.

Instead he said, “And what happens if we don’t win?”

“We move these to a location of our choosing.  And we do it with trusted associates.  We get this stuff out of here.”

LBJ glanced at the door.  He was clearly thinking of what Helen Gandy had said, how it was better to be rid of all of this than it was to have it corrupting the office, endangering everyone.

But if LBJ and Kennedy controlled the entire cache, they also controlled their own files.  LBJ could destroy his and Kennedy could preserve his family’s legacy.

If it weren’t for the fact that LBJ hated him almost as much as Kennedy hated LBJ, the decision would be easy.

“You’d trust me to a gentleman’s agreement?” LBJ asked, not disguising the sarcasm in his tone.  He knew Kennedy thought he was too uncouth to ever be considered a gentlemen.

“You know where your interests lie.  Just like I do,” Kennedy said.  “If we don’t let Miss Gandy have the files, then this is the only choice.”

LBJ sighed.  “I hoped to be rid of the Kennedys by inauguration day.”

“And what if I planned to run against you?” Kennedy asked, even though he knew he wouldn’t.  Already the party stalwarts had been approaching him about a 1964 presidential bid, and he had put them off.  He had been too shaky, too emotionally fragile.

He didn’t feel fragile now.

LBJ didn’t answer that question.  Instead, he said, “You can be an incautious asshole.  Why should I trust you?”

“Because I saved Jack’s ass more times than you can count,” Kennedy said.  “I’m saving yours too.”

“How do you figure?” LBJ asked.

“Your fear of those files brought you to me, Mr. President.” Kennedy put an emphasis on the title, which he usually avoided using around LBJ.  “If I barricade myself in here, I’ll have the keys to the kingdom and no qualms about letting the information free when I go free.  If you work with me, your secrets remain just secrets.”

“You’re a son of bitch, you know that?” LBJ asked.

Kennedy nodded.  “The hell of it is you are too or you wouldn’t’ve brought up Jack’s death before we knew what really happened to Hoover.  So let’s control the presidency for the next sixteen years.  By then the information in these files will probably be worthless.”

LBJ stared at him.  It took Kennedy a minute to realize that although he’d won the argument, he wouldn’t get an agreement from LBJ, not if Kennedy didn’t make the first move.

Kennedy held out his hand.  “Deal?”

LBJ stared at Kennedy’s extended hand for a long moment before taking it in his own big clammy one.

“You goddamn son of a bitch,” LBJ said.  “You’ve got a deal.”

***

It took Bryce only one phone call.  The guy who ran the motorpool told him who checked out the sedan without asking why Bryce want to know.  And Bryce, as he leaned in the cold telephone booth half a block from the first crime scene, instantly understood what had happened and why.

The agent who checked out the sedan was Walter Cain.  He should’ve been on extended leave.  Bryce had recommended it after he had told Cain that his ex-fiancé had tried to commit suicide. On getting the news, Cain had just had that look, that blank, my-life-is-over look.

And it had scared Bryce.  Scared him enough that he asked Cain be put on indefinite leave.  How long ago had that been?  Less than twelve hours.

More than enough time to get rid of the morals police—the one man who made all the rules at the FBI. The man who had no morals himself.

1. Edgar Hoover.

Bryce had spent the past week studying Cain’s file.  Cain had had HooverWatch off and on throughout the past year. Cain knew the procedure, and he knew how to thwart it.

He’d killed five agents.

Because no one would listen to Bryce about that vacant look in Cain’s eye.

Bryce let himself out of the phone booth.  He walked back to the coroner’s van.  If he didn’t have back up by now, he’d call for some all over again.  They couldn’t leave him hanging on this.  They had to let him know, if nothing else, what to do with the Director’s body.

But he needn’t’ve worried.  When he got back to the alley, he saw five more sedans, all FBI issue.  And as he stepped into the alley proper, the first person he saw was his boss, crouching over Hoover’s corpse.

“I thought I told you to secure the scene,” said the SAC for the District of New York, Eugene Hart.  “In fact, I ordered you to do it.”

“The scene extends over six blocks.  I’m just one guy,” Bryce said.

Hart walked over to him.  He looked tired.

“I need to speak to you,” Bryce said.  He walked Hart back to the two sedans, explained what he’d learned, and watched Hart’s face.

The man flinched, then, to Bryce’s surprise, put his hand on Bryce’s shoulder.  “It’s good work.”

Bryce didn’t thank him.  He was worried that Hart hadn’t asked any questions.  “I’d heard Cain bitch more than once about Hoover setting the moral values for the office.  And with what happened this week—”

“I know.” Hart squeezed his shoulder.  “We’ll take care of it.”

Bryce turned so quickly that he made Hart lose his grip.  “You’re going to cover it up.”

Hart closed his eyes.

“You weren’t hanging me out to dry.  You were trying to figure out how to handle this.  Son of bitch. And you’re going to let Cain walk.”

“He won’t walk,” Hart said.  “He’ll just…be guilty of something else.”

“You can’t cover this up.  It’s too important.  So soon after President Kennedy—”

“That’s precisely why we’re going to handle it,” Hart said.  “We don’t want a panic.”

“And you don’t want anyone to know where Hoover and Tolson were found.  What’re you going to say? That they died of natural causes in their beds?  Their separate beds?”

“It’s not your concern,” Hart said.  “You’ve done well for us.  You’ll be rewarded.”

“If I keep my mouth shut.”

Hart sighed.  He didn’t seem to have the energy to glare.  “I don’t honestly care.  I’m glad to have the old man gone.  But I’m not in charge of this.  We’ve got orders now, and everything’ll get taken care of at a much higher level than either you or me.

You should be grateful for that.”

Bryce supposed he should be.  It took the political pressure off him.  It also took the personal pressure off.

But he couldn’t help feeling if someone had listened to him before, if someone had paid attention, then none of this would have happened.

No one cared that an FBI agent was going to marry a former prostitute.  If the Bureau knew—and it did, then not even the KGB could use that as blackmail.

It was all about appearances.  It would always be about appearances.  Hoover had designed a damn booklet about appearances, and it hadn’t stopped him from getting shot in a back alley after a party he would never admit attending.

Hoover had been so worried about people using secrets against each other, he hadn’t even realized how his own secrets could be used against him.

Bryce looked at Hart. They were both tired.  It had been a long night.  And it would be an even longer few weeks for Hart.  Bryce would get some don’t-tell promotion and he’d stay there for as long as he had to.  He had to make sure that Cain got prosecuted for something, that he paid for five deaths.

Then Bryce would resign.

He didn’t need the Bureau, any more than he had needed Mary, his own pre-approved wife.  Maybe he’d talk to O’Reilly, see if he could put in a good word with the NYPD.  At least the NYPD occasionally investigated cases.

If they happened in the right neighborhood.

To the right people.

Bryce shoved his hands in his pockets and walked back to his apartment.  Hart didn’t try to stop him.  They both knew Bryce’s work on this case was done.  He wouldn’t even have to write a report.

In fact, he didn’t dare write a report, didn’t dare put any of this on paper where someone else might discover it.  The wrong someone.  Someone who didn’t care about handling and the proper information.

Someone who would use that information to his own benefit.

Like the Director had.

For more than forty-five years.

Bryce shook the thought off.  It wasn’t his concern.  He no longer had concerns.  Except getting a good night’s sleep.

And somehow he knew that he wouldn’t get one of those for a long, long time.

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Cover and Layout copyright © WMG Publishing Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © grand failure | Depositphotos

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of !ction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are !ctional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. No AI was used in the creation of this book. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative arti!cial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Strangers don’t walk into D’s bar very often. But one night, a stranger shows up. Something about him seems familiar. Reminds her of her past. And just might threaten her future.

“The Trendy Bar Side of Life” is available on this website for one week only. If you want your own copy, head to WMG Books, or pick it up from any of your favorite retailers.

The Trendy Bar Side of Life Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

I tend bar, not in one of those upscale things that serve weird drinks with funny names, where everyone comes after work for a nanosecond while the bar’s the hot spot and then move on when someplace else becomes trendy.

Nope. I tend bar in one of the old dives that still exist in neighborhoods, the kind that no sane person would enter without an invitation, and that invitation only comes from the universe. You know, you lose your job, your wife walks out, your friends tell you to stop whining, so you pass the dive bar you’d never think of entering when you’re on the trendy bar side of life.

You walk in, see the decrepit unshaven guy sitting at the edge of the bar, a woman nursing a piss-colored beer at a table that hasn’t balanced since 1970, and one of those lighted bubbling beer signs for a brand that got discontinued when you were a kid. You doubt the bar’s been cleaned since then, either, although none of the surfaces you touch are sticky or dirty or dust-covered. The place is just so old that the dirt and the now-banned cigarette smoke are embedded into the walls.

I’ve worked in that kind of bar since the night Ronald Reagan got re-elected, the night I decided to chuck it all and walk into one of those bars myself. Only I walked in, wearing a suit with a lace collar, bow-tie untied, and heels so high they looked like fuck-me-shoes instead of what they really were, which was the required business attire of the day.

Yeah, I’m a woman. Yeah, you’re excused if you have no idea. Most people don’t know until I open my mouth, and some aren’t sure even then. They see the shaved head, the muscular fat, the T-shirt with ripped sleeves, and the bicep tattoos and think “man.” They ignore the studs outlining the rim of my ears, the delicate chain around my neck that ends in a tear-drop diamond, and the breasts which, granted, are a bit underwhelming, even with the extra fifty pounds I’ve gained since that horrid night.

This isn’t my bar, even though folks think it’s my bar. They never see Bancroft, the owner, who, let’s be honest, hasn’t crossed the threshold since his first AA meeting in 1991. He calls me on the landline when he’s coming by (he doesn’t have a cell), stops his Hog in the alley near the garbage cans so he can’t smell the piss and stale beer from the back door, and makes me hand him the books (on paper), the cash, and the hard drive backup which, in theory, he takes to the accountant, because Lord knows, a man who doesn’t like cell phones doesn’t like computers either.

Bancroft tells me I can do what I want with the place. I can redecorate. I can expand to the empty storefront next door (which he also owns). I can start making trendy drinks.

He doesn’t care, so long as the bar makes money.

I’m afraid if I alter a damn thing, the money will vanish, and if the money vanishes, then I actually have to confront a few things, like why I work in a dive bar in a redneck neighborhood, why I have the same conversations that I’ve had weekly for thirty years with the same people, and why even I’ve started to look at strangers with suspicion because, y’know, they don’t belong in this bar.

Which is how I look at the new guy when he staggers in. Maybe twenty-five, pretty in a sexually ambiguous kinda way, collar open, shirt askew, tie completely gone. He’s walking like something hurts, like a woman does when the high heels she’s worn all day hurt not just her feet, but her back as well. Only he’s not wearing high heels. His dress shoes are stained on top, but the sides shine.

He gingerly climbs onto a bar stool in the very center of the horseshoe bar and if I weren’t paying attention to him, I’d assume he was being prissy—worrying that the seat wasn’t clean enough for the black silk pants that matched the shiny black silk suit coat.

I slap a bar napkin in front of him, and he jumps. Then he looks at my hand, resting on that bar napkin, as if he’s never seen a hand before.

I frown. And, for once, I modulate my tone so I don’t sound actively hostile.

“You want something?”

He raises his head, but his eyes don’t meet mine. “I don’t know. Jesus. A drink.”

Normally, I’d say, You are in a bar, buddy, but I don’t. Instead, I look closer at him. His hair’s spikey, and I don’t think that’s style. Either a bruise is forming along his chin or something has smudged there.

“Ah…beer,” he says, then shakes his head. “Um, no. Whiskey. Brandy. Something that burns.”

“Beer, whiskey or brandy,” I say. “Which do you want?”

“Jack,” he says. “Just give me some Jack.”

I pour him a Jack Daniels, and set the glass in front of him. He’s already torn up the bar napkin. There’s dirt under his fingernails.

His manicured fingernails.

He leans over the drink like he doesn’t recognize it. I get another glass, and fill it with ice water, and set that in front of him, on a coaster this time, with a bar napkin beside it.

He doesn’t even look up. I’m not sure he notices.

My own mouth is dry. I look around the bar, to see who’s here. The same crowd is here day to day, so sometimes I don’t really notice who’s in the bar and who’s not. And I haven’t noticed until now.

Ma Kettle sits in her favorite booth, her gray wig askew, and her sweatshirt food-stained. Her real name is Cora Kattleman, but I think I’m the only one who knows that, and only because she opened her tab with a credit card fifteen years ago. Everyone calls her Ma Kettle at her insistence, and most folks don’t even know the reference, a clichéd but popular hillbilly movie character from the 1940s and 50s.

But then, no one thinks about the nicknames. Most of us in this place have one, and we use it instead of our real names. It’s easier that way.

Ma Kettle comes in at noon, every day, and sits in her booth. I set the first vodka tonic in front of her, and maybe by the fifth, she’ll say hello. She doesn’t talk much, mostly watches the TV, which I have on mute, and stares at nothing.

She hasn’t seen the guy.

And no one else is here, although Rick Winters should come in at any moment. His shift ends at 3:30, and he usually rolls in here by 3:35.

Just me, Ma Kettle, and the new guy, who hovers over his drink like he’s about to puke.

The sleeve of his suit is split at the shoulder, and the silk in the back looks smudged, like silk does when it has encountered liquid it doesn’t like.

I’m shaking, just a little. I’ve been there. I’ve literally been there, right here, at this bar, in ripped clothes, aching all over, staring at a drink I don’t want, but not sure what else I can do.

Turning point: Last night of my professional life. Last night of my all-important career. Last night of ain’t-she-cute.

That’s how I know he wasn’t in a fight. Oh, he might’ve fought. But one of those knock-em-down, drag-em-out fights? Naw. Right now, everything’s scraped and raw and coming in images. He’s not thinking clear, and I don’t blame him.

I also don’t lean toward him to talk.

Bancroft leaned in that night, thirty-two years ago, and probably scared a decade off of me. I still have nightmares about that moment, and jump whenever Bancroft leans toward me. Not his fault, but he got roped into those images, those memories.

So this afternoon, I slide the ice water toward the new guy and say, “Did you know him?”

The new guy’s hand shakes as he grabs the whiskey glass. His knuckles are scraped and his thumb is swollen and it hangs funny. It might be broken.

“Whatever you think you know,” he starts in a tone that puts me, a bartender, back into my lower-class place, “it’s wrong.”

His voice wobbles on the word “wrong,” and he swallows hard.

Naw. I’m not wrong. He wants me to be wrong. He doesn’t want me to see him at all, and I see too clearly.

Like Bancroft had with me. I’d said to Bancroft, Piss off, asshole. Let me drink in peace.

And he’d said, I don’t think you’re going to find peace tonight.

I don’t know what to say now. I know what not to say. So I go for short and succinct, flat tone, as if I don’t care. And I do care, even though I don’t want to.

“You want that thumb to keep working, you’ll need to see a doctor,” I say. I don’t say anything about his private parts, which’ve got to be just as bruised. Maybe more bruised. Maybe more than bruised.

I don’t want to scare him away.

Now his eyes meet mine. They’re brown, two shades darker than his skin. They’re also watery, and his lower lip is trembling.

“No,” he says in a tone that adds, Back off.

I shrug, grab the bar rag and toss it over my shoulder. It smells of the vinegar solution we use to wipe down the back area. I walk away, keeping my eye on the guy in the gigantic mirror behind the expensive alcohol.

He starts to pick up the whiskey, grimaces, and keeps the glass on the bar. That thumb is the size of a dying balloon. With his other hand, he grabs the ice water. The glass shakes as he raises it to his lips. Some of the water drips onto his expensive suit.

The door bangs open. The new guy jumps and spills more water. Rick Winters stomps in and slams the door behind himself. That takes some doing, because I got the door on one of those slow swings, just so no one can slam it.

Rick looks older than he should—balding, a growing beer belly, and a whole lotta attitude. He’s staving off burnout by spending the afternoons here, but he doesn’t have much longer. Every day for the last six months, he’s come in mad.

I open a Heineken and set it at his usual spot on the bar, on the left side of the horseshoe, back to the door. He looks at the new guy.

“What’s the story?” Rick asks, with an edge.

I shrug. I don’t ask for stories. Rick should know that. It’s one reason he comes here. The relief bartender, who usually works weekend days, came in for me one afternoon, asked Rick what had him so pissed off, and got to hear the entire story about a five-car pile-up on the Expressway, which started with the sentence, Fucking drunk drivers, and ended with, and of course, the asshole drunk walked away.

Rick might be a drunk himself, but the minute his fingertips touch a green longneck, he doesn’t go near a vehicle. He says 90 percent of the shit he deals with as an EMT occurs because someone who had too much to drink gets behind a wheel or punches the wife or plays with a gun. Rick says he needs to haul his ass to AA, but he’s not ready.

He’ll be ready when he quits the job. He’s not suited. It’s not the drunks he objects to. It’s all the blood.

Rick’s fingers haven’t touched the bottle. He’s still looking at the new guy. “Pretty messed up.”

“Yeah,” I say, not willing to add that I’d mentioned a doctor already.

“It’s probably none of our damn business,” Rick says.

“It usually isn’t,” I say, and wipe off an imaginary spot on the bar near that Heineken. Ma Kettle pounds her glass on the table—a sign that I haven’t been doing my job: I usually anticipate her drinking needs—and then there’s a large clatter and bang behind me.

I whirl in time to see the new guy’s head slide off the bar. He’d knocked over his water and his whiskey when he passed out. He would’ve fallen all the way to the floor, but somehow Rick levitates from his place at the end of the bar and runs to the new guy’s side, catching him before he bangs his head again on the nearby stool.

“Shit,” Rick mutters. “Shit.”

At first, I think he’s commenting on working after hours, at dealing with some drunk. We’d done it a hundred times, dragging some idiot to a chair where we throw water in his face, pick his pocket for his wallet and address, and call him a ride home.

Then I realize that Rick isn’t looking at the guy or where he’s dragging the guy to. He’s looking at the bar stool.

He picks up the guy as if he weighs nothing, and swings him toward the door. Liquid drips—I’m thinking whiskey, when my brain registers the viscosity.

Blood.

The guy surfaces, looks up, sees Rick holding him, and screams. I’ve never heard a sound like that, raw and pain-filled, and completely anguished.

“Call Mercy General,” Rick says. “Tell them I’m bringing in a guy. I’ll radio.”

The guy claws at him, moaning now, kicking, trying to get free.

“You got your rig?” I ask. I’ve only seen it once, that ambulance he drives like it’s a tank.

“No, not that it matters. I got a radio in my truck.” Then Rick backs him out the door, and the guy screams again.

The sound fades as the door bangs closed.

“Jesus,” Ma Kettle says. “High drama.”

Then she holds up her glass.

I pour her another vodka tonic, just because it’s easier than fighting with her. I carry the vodka tonic around the bar, and head toward her, careful to step over the blood trail.

In one move, I take the old glass and set the new one down on the wet bar napkin. It’s a sign of how distraught I am that I haven’t brought a new napkin. Automatic movements and all that.

I turn, look at my bar from the customer’s point of view. A thin line of blood drips off the new guy’s stool. How had I missed that?

I look at the door, see only a blood trail leading out. Either he hadn’t been bleeding that bad when he came in, or the blood disappears in the general ambience of the place.

Here’s what I can do: I can call the cops, let them treat this place like part of a crime scene, not that it is a crime scene. It’s a crime scene aftermath. Technicalities and all that. I can leave it or I can clean up.

The cops’ll come here anyway. Mercy General will have to run a rape kit. Rick’ll insist on it, and because he’s there, he’ll file, as an EMT on the scene. Whether or not the new guy presses charges, well, that’s up to him.

Considering how he was sitting for so long in so much pain, considering how he didn’t want a doctor in the first place, considering that suit, that condescending tone, he’s not going to want cops involved. Hell, women don’t want cops involved, and it’s quote-unquote normal for a woman to get raped.

Guys, well, they’ve got even more stigma to overcome. Not just with the cops, but in their own head.

I go to the back, grab the fluids bucket, the oldest mop, and some bleach. At least three times a month, I clean blood off my floor. I’m damn good at it, after thirty years.

I can make anything disappear.

Except the memory of what came before.

That memory never leaves.

***

“He won!”

Confetti, balloons, hotel grand ballroom doing double-duty—half a party for the Reagan-Bush Re-election Campaign, the other half for Senator Dwight Corbin. Red, white, blue, the posters with their exclamation points and patriotic lettering lining the walls, including the stupid one, the one that always stopped me short—Ronald Wilson Reagan painted to look decades younger despite the wrinkles on his face, almost Norman Rockwell, an American flag behind him, an unrecognizable George H.W. Bush looking off to the side, and the slogan “Bringing American Back!” which always, always made me ask, “Bringing America back to what?”

If I’d been working national campaign instead of state campaign, I’d’ve advised against the slogan. I mean, after all, hadn’t Ronald Reagan been president for four years already? Bringing America back from the brink? Because we felt like we were on the brink: I just didn’t trust Mondale to do anything except flap his gums.

I was a great operator back then, a better operator for Reagan than Senator Corbin, although Corbin’s campaign shared me once everyone figured out just how well I could handle the press. Didn’t need a lot of press for the re-election campaign—they’d send their flunkies in when the President came to town, which ended up being all of three times. Needed lots of press for Corbin because he was young, because he was new, and because he was dumb as rocks.

I wasn’t really grooming him for a national senate seat or even governor once he finished with his state term. I was grooming me for the day when women in politics became more than a curiosity or a curious screw-up, like Mondale’s Veep Ferraro, whose husband cocked everything up, the way husbands always do.

So, celebrating, drinking, confetti in my hair—hell, confetti everywhere, including my hoo-ha when it was all said and done. I still don’t see confetti as anything but evil, even now.

The rest of the memory gets lost in campaign Sousa marches and cheers of “he won!” and laughter, lots of laughter. The laughter bleeds into everything, like clown laughter in a bad horror film, and then the lights get dim, and there’s a bed involved, one of those pasty hotel beds in one of those gold upscale rooms, and I’m holding champagne, and then I’m not, and I stand in the bathroom, aching everywhere, pulling confetti out of my hair and wondering if my lips look bruised.

I paste myself back together, adjust the suit coat, leave the stupid bow-tie undone (who thought of bow-ties for women, anyway?), finger comb my blond curls, wash off my face and ignore my shaking hands.

Then I walk out the door, go back before it closes, grab my purse, leave again, and look at the elevator, think: maybe he’s in the elevator. Think: maybe people’ll wonder why I’m in the elevator. Think: they’ll want me back in the ballroom. Think: screw the ballroom, and walk to the stairs, conscious that I’m limping a little.

I blame the shoes. Even in my memory, I blame the shoes—too high, too pointed, too tottery. But really, that year, I lived in extra-high-heels, showing off my calves, my thighs, my ass, because you could go miles with the male operatives if you distracted them with some cleavage and a hint of sex.

That’s what I was thinking as I walked down the steps. My fault. Cleavage, hint of sex, only a matter of time. Reached the lobby, didn’t go out that way, went down one more flight to the parking garage, only it wasn’t a parking garage, it was the basement, a nearly empty function space that I hadn’t seen, and a door marked exit that I walked through to an alley that meandered like I was, until I found our street, this bar, one drink, and Bancroft saying I don’t think you’re going to find peace tonight.

But I did. Peace and oblivion, not in bottles, like Bancroft those first six years. But in the work. The mindless work. I cleaned up after him, tended bar when he couldn’t, slept in the back room because, hand-to-God, I didn’t want to walk outside again, and I didn’t, not that I noticed anyway, until someone (Bancroft?) told me the hotel’d gone bankrupt and the building was empty, and it was the last bastion of the Great Downtown, and it was finally, finally going away.

Thought of torching it myself. Instead, meandered up that alley, stared at the broken windows, the steel door, the now-faded glory, thought: Serves you right, you bitch, and wasn’t sure if I was talking to the hotel, or to me, or to the world in general.

Then turned around and headed back to the bar, but first, stopped in the barbershop half a block away, and when they wouldn’t shave my head, grabbed the electric razor and started it myself. Lots of screaming, lots of Don’t do it, honey, and I was wondering where the hell they were years before, when someone should’ve screamed (me, maybe?) and someone should’ve said Don’t do it, honey (me again?) and someone should’ve yanked his hand away, like they yanked the razor out of mine. But Gus, the barber, finished the shave, told me to go buy a wig, said, At least you got one of them perfect skulls, and I looked in the mirror, liked what I saw, none of that you’re-too-cute-to-work-in-politics-sweetheart, not any more. Looked more like a Star Trek alien than the girl next door.

Took another year to get the tattoos. By then, the extra fifty I carried took away the cute as effectively as the hair. Stopped watching the news, stopped voting, stopped thinking about politics at all. Mostly listened to my drunks repeat the same stories over and over, finding comfort in their miserable little lives, happy that those lives weren’t mine, happy that I had a place and some usefulness and that sense I belonged, even if daylight had become foreign and the stench of stale beer normal.

I’da kept going too, if the blood didn’t remind me, if the blood didn’t—

***

Ah hell, it wasn’t the blood. It was the look on the new guy’s face, that shell-shocked, not-me-look I’d seen in the mirror too many times, the dirt (blood) under the fingernails, the way he jumped when my hand got too close.

His wallet sits on the bar, drenched in whiskey, and I pick it up, wrap it in a towel, and put it in the safe. And I think about it, through the long normal night, like the wallet’s a talisman, thinking, thinking as Ma Kettle expounds drunkenly on her latest theory about toll ways and city streets, as Screwy Marcus and The Donster argue about next year’s playoffs, and as five guys, fresh from their weekly basketball game, stop in on their way home.

Rick never comes back though, and I wonder if tonight’s the night he finally gets clean. Then I wonder if the new guy died, and Rick couldn’t deal. And then I wonder why I should care about either of them.

But the wallet…it calls me and calls me and calls me, and I know I can’t keep it forever. I wait until closing, when The Donster does his chivalric thing and offers (like he does every night) to walk Ma Kettle home, and she refuses, and he does it anyway, and they pretend like it’s something new.

I lock the door, open the safe, and pull out the wallet.

It’s calf leather, black, and stained now, not just from the whiskey, but probably from blood. That doesn’t gross me out. After tending bar for thirty-some years, nothing grosses me out, although behaviors often disgust me.

I take the wallet to the office, which has better lighting, and turn on the overhead, along with the gooseneck lamp that probably curved over the desk since the bar’s founding. I set the wallet on a wad of paper towels, even though I know I’m going to clean up the desk anyway. Bleach is a marvelous thing.

I flip the wallet open, see gold cards, platinum cards, and at least five hundred dollars cash. Tucked in both sides of the cash flap are business cards, two wads of them, one white and one a light blue. I pull out the business cards first, expecting to see that he had organized a pile of them.

Instead, I see two different cards for the same man: A.D. “Andy” Santiago. One card, the blue one, with somewhat archaic type, lists his job as “consultant,” along with an email address and a phone number.

The white card has a red-white-and-blue logo on the front. The logo’s for the Jeff Davis For Senate campaign, and I damn near drop the card. I don’t like coincidence. Politics and rape and this bar. Thirty years apart, but still.

I glance at the driver’s license. Yep. A.D. Santiago is the owner of the wallet, the guy who stumbled into my bar, the man who looked like I had all those years ago.

Only we got him to the hospital. Bancroft never took me.

I make myself cling tighter to the white card, bending it slightly, and I focus on it. I focus on the now. In the lower left, the card reads Andy Santiago, Media Relations, along with a different phone number and a different email address from the other card.

This one’s newer, but I would have known that just from the campaign itself. Jeff Davis is in a dead heat with some other candidate whose name I can’t recall. The only reason I know Davis’s name is because of the billboards plastered on the Expressway, accusing him of living up to his namesake Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy.

Want to go back to 1861? the billboards ask. They have a Confederate flag as a backdrop. Vote Jeff Davis For Senate.

Every once in a while, my old calling catches me, and I have thoughts I can’t bury. Like who the hell thought that was a good campaign slogan? It doesn’t even name the candidate running opposite Jeff Davis, although, in fairness, who would want her name on a billboard like that?

I shake myself from the reverie, know I mentally walked that way because of the shock of seeing that poor A.D. “Andy” Santiago is a political operative just like I was.

And then he ended up here.

I slip both cards into my back pocket, clench my fist to stop my hand from shaking, and dig through the wallet a little more. The address on Santiago’s driver’s license is eight blocks from here, on a street that was gentrified ten years ago.

The money’s coming back to the neighborhood, as I mentioned to Bancroft a while ago. At some point, we’re going to have to upscale the bar or sell it. He doesn’t want to sell it: Bancroft doesn’t like change. But that was when he gave me permission to remodel the place.

Bancroft isn’t the only one who doesn’t like change.

And I force my mind back to the wallet. I recognize the way my thoughts wander when there’s something in front of me that brings up my past. Only now, I want to face it, and I’m finding that as hard as running away from it.

I write the address down, then fold the wallet back up and carry it, wrapped in paper towels back to the bar. I pull out a plastic sandwich bag from the stack I use for leftover garnish, and slip the wallet inside.

Then I sigh. Crunch time.

I can keep it here until someone comes for it. I can take it to the police. Or I can take it to the hospital.

I glance at the ancient clock emblazoned with the Christmas Budweiser Clydesdales in the snow. It’s quarter past eleven. We don’t stay open past midnight on weeknights: there’s no point.

It’s past visiting hours at the hospital, not that I want to look in on this guy. But it’s still early enough that someone on the staff with half a brain would be there, who would be able to trace the John Doe that Rick Winters brought in.

If Santiago registered as a John Doe. He seemed pretty out of it when Rick carried him out of here, but Santiago had been conscious. He might’ve used his name.

I slip the wallet in its baggy in the canvas tote I call a purse, grab my leather jacket, toss them both over a chair, and go through my lockup routine. I have to follow the same routine, day in and day out, or I forget something.

When you do the same thing for decades, you zone out as you do it, and I’m no exception. Books balanced. Pour count entered. Cash in the safe in my office, receipts printed and tallied. Computers shut down. Lights dimmed. Bar gleaming.

Purse and jacket over my arm, check to see if the front door’s locked. Yep. Make sure the window bars are secure. Yep. Head to the back, set the alarm, let myself out, and lock up.

Alley smells of vomit again, with a bit of piss mixed in. Supposed to rain tonight, so the smell should be gone by morning. I step gingerly past any puddles, note that the garbage is particularly rancid as well, happy that the pickup arrives before I do tomorrow.

I slip my purse over my shoulder, my jacket over the entire thing, keys in hand, heart pounding like it always does—as if I expect some sex-crazed asshole to jump me in the 20 feet between the bar’s back door and the parking lot. Me, round and muscled. Me, who took so many self-defense courses that I can lay out a 250-pound drunk with a well-placed shove to the chest. Me, who hasn’t had anyone look at her sideways in maybe fifteen years.

But every night, sure as I lock up, I also talk myself down from the panic, remind myself just how safe I am, remind myself that the asshole who changed the course of my life wasn’t some random sex-crazed idiot with a hard-on, he was one of the best known politicians in the state, and goddamn if I shouldn’t’ve enjoyed his attentions because, after all, he spent some of his precious time with me.

That’s why I’m shaking. He’s still well known. Hell, he’s better known. And he’s not just in the legislature. He’s running it.

And he’s hoping to fill it with men like Jeff Davis, hoping to bring the world back to 1861. Just because I think the slogan’s bad politics for the opposition doesn’t mean I think the slogan’s wrong.

My vehicle’s the last one in the parking lot, just as it always is. Usually, I look at my black F-150 and smile, thinking Built Ford Tough because damned if I don’t need a vehicle that’s tough and protective, since I’m still on my own.

But this night, I scan the perimeter, like I always do, then I unlock the truck and get inside, locking back up immediately. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel unsafe. I feel jangly, a little outside my own body, as if I’m not in complete control.

Maybe the fact that I’m not in complete control is how I ended up at Jeff Davis’s campaign headquarters. I realized I was driving there halfway down a side street I don’t normally drive on.

Campaign headquarters are never on the beaten path. They’re not places voters go to. Campaign headquarters are places to keep voters out of.

I expected this one to have one light burning and a few die-hard true believers, all under the age of twenty-five, to be shuffling papers and manning the phones. Shows how 1980s my campaign memories are, because when I pull up, the entire place is lit up. Yellow light, not pasty fluorescents, illuminates everything behind the glass windows, initially designed for a long-dead retail establishment.

Inside, people talk, exchange papers, lots of papers, and stare at computer screens, which adds even more ambient light. And yes, everyone seems to be under twenty-five—and well-dressed. No hoodies and ripped jeans, no T-shirts and old jeans, no jeans at all. Open-collar dress shirts, suit coats on the backs of chairs, matching pants which fit well—and everyone thin, or at least, thinner than the average American.

Enthusiastic, well-dressed, thin—jeez, it looks more like a movie set than an actual campaign headquarters.

I can’t help myself. I pull the truck over, park behind a Prius and feel tempted to go all Monster Truck on its ass. I ignore the thought and what it means (okay, yeah, I’m pissed, but I’m generally pissed, so what’s it matter?), grab my giant purse and let myself out.

I can’t do innocent anymore, although I’m tempted. I almost revert to Girl Operator, the one who died, along with her blond curls and her innocence.

Instead, I square my shoulders and take a deep breath. No Girl Operator. Instead, Bad-Ass Bartender. Or, maybe, Concerned Friend.

As I walk down the sidewalk, I try on Concerned Friend for good measure. Won’t work. Everyone in the headquarters knows Andy Santiago, and I don’t. Can’t do Bad-Ass Bartender either. Don’t have my bar, blocking me from the fighting customers. Don’t have my baseball bat for minor scuffles. Don’t have my gun for major ones.

Just me, short, squat, bald and tattooed. Big, and muscled, and unexpectedly female.

That should surprise the little shits working to take us back to 1861.

I pull open the campaign office door and, of all things, a bell jingles above me. Conversation ceases. Everyone looks up, a sea of white surprised faces. I remember this now from my years in campaign headquarters:

Alert! Stranger in our midst! Reporter? Spy? Civilian? Volunteer?

Only it’s nearly midnight. Who the hell comes into a campaign headquarters at midnight?

I let the door bang behind me. No one approaches me, although someone should. There should be some flunky in charge, even this late at night.

Computers hum in the silence. No one moves, as if I’ve caught them selling drugs or laundering money. I’m not real fond of standing here, either.

So I meet their gazes, slowly, one at a time, acknowledging them. An I-see-you action that I learned in self-defense class. It works with drunks who’re acting up all the way across the room.

Once I’ve met everyone’s gaze, I say, “I was told I could find Andy Santiago here.”

In the back of the room, two women glance at each other. Another woman stands up. As she draws closer, I see that she’s a little older than the others.

“What do you want with Andy?” she asks.

“It’s personal,” I say.

“Uh-huh,” she says in a tone that says I-don’t-believe-you.

“He’s not at his place,” I say, “and he’s not answering his cell. So, a friend said to try here.”

Those women glance at each other again. Someone titters in the back.

“You think this is funny?” I ask in my driest voice. “I’m looking for someone. I was told you people could help. Can you?”

The woman glares in the direction of the titter. Then she looks back at me. Her makeup has faded on the right side of her face, as if she’s been resting her hand there, and the makeup came off.

“Can’t help,” she says. “He’s not part of this campaign any longer.”

“Really?” I ask. “Since when? Because he was still handing out your business cards a few days ago.”

Her too-red lips thin. “We parted ways this afternoon.”

He showed up in my bar this afternoon.

“Over what?” I ask.

“That’s personal,” she says.

“Huh,” I say. “Because he worked for you. So that should be business.”

One of the young men in front of me leans back in his chair. His mouth twists sideways. I think maybe he’s trying to smile derisively. It’s not working.

“We don’t have any room for Log Cabin Republicans,” he says.

“Jordy,” the woman cautions.

He glares at her. “It’s true. That’s what Jeff—”

“We parted ways,” the woman says. “It turns out that Andy’s agenda was different from ours.”

I smile, and I know my smile works. “Log Cabin Republicans,” I say. “Is he a card-carrying member of that particular organization, or are you rocket scientists labeling him that because you just figured out that he’s gay?”

“He’s not gay,” one of the women from the back says.

“Stop,” the woman in charge says. “This is no one’s business but ours.”

The woman in the back stands up. “Andy’s not gay—”

“Yeah, right,” says the guy in front of me.

“But he believes in equality for everyone. He’s been pushing—”

“An agenda that’s not consistent with the Davis campaign,” the woman in charge says over her. “So we told him to take his services elsewhere.”

The woman in the back is looking at me. She’s maybe 21, with long blond hair, and the kind of cute that’ll get her dismissed in politics.

I should know.

“Two weeks before the election?” I ask. “That’s bit odd, isn’t it?”

“You’re a reporter, aren’t you?” the woman in charge asks.

“Actually, no,” I say. “I used to do your job, though, a long time ago in a land faraway.”

She looks me up and down, making it clear without saying a word that a woman like me could never have run a position of authority in a campaign. Funny, I used to get dismissed because I was little and cute. And now that I’m neither, I get dismissed for being the kind of person who’s too militant to ever be taken seriously.

“Well,” she says, “be that as it may, Andy’s not here, he’s not going to be here, he’s not ever coming back, and we have no idea how to reach him. So you have no reason to stay here.”

“And no reason to vote for Jeff Davis either, apparently, considering how nice and cooperative his staff is.”

“It’s midnight,” she says. “What did you expect?”

“It’s midnight,” I say, “and someone’s concerned about Andy. I would have expected some compassion, and maybe a little help.”

No one responds. I look at each of their faces again, as if I’m memorizing them. A number of the staff won’t look at me this time. The young woman in the back, the only one who spoke to me, glances at the woman in charge.

She doesn’t say anything. She’s still glaring at me.

I want to say Thanks for nothing, but that sounds childish, even in my head. So I just turn around and leave. I hear someone lock the door behind me.

I know if I turn around, I’ll see a few faces pressed against the glass, watching me go.

Strangely, that sense I had, that jittery not-quite-in-control sense is gone. And so is the underlying panic that I usually feel in a strange neighborhood. You’d think it would be worse here, but it’s not.

I get in the truck and sigh. I glance at the clock on the dash. Maybe I can get the wallet to someone who knows Andy Santiago at the hospital desk, but I think that’s a true maybe. The other maybe is whether or not I should go home—

A knock on the driver’s side window startles me. I swallow a scream, then curse myself. I still haven’t learned how to scream for help. Eight self-defense classes, and screaming still doesn’t come naturally to me.

I turn, and see the face of that young woman, the one who spoke out of turn, looking up at me. She had to reach up to hit the window with the knuckles of her right hand.

She’s not wearing a coat. Her arms are wrapped around her torso and she’s shifting from foot to foot as if she’s cold.

I lower the window, and don’t say anything.

“Why do you need to find Andy?” she asks.

“He left his wallet at my place,” I say, which is trueish, “and he’s not answering his phone,” which is probably true as well.

“Oh,” she says. “I thought maybe….”

I wait.

Her face scrunches up and she takes a deep breath. “He’s okay then?”

“I can’t reach him,” I say, as if that’s an answer. “That’s unusual for a man like him.”

She sighs a little. Bites her upper lip, glances over her shoulder.

“They walked him out,” she says. “Jordy and three other guys. And it didn’t look friendly.”

I don’t interrupt.

“I’m worried about him,” she says and her voice breaks. She seems to be telling the truth. She looks over her shoulder again. Then she adds, “I left my stuff in there. I—they’ll—would you walk me back?”

Is she kidding me? After she just told me that four men marched Santiago out of the building, and he ended up raped and beaten? Do they think I’m that dumb? Or do they think she’s so appealing that she’s going to be bait I would fall for?

I have no idea where that thought came from, but as soon as it crossed my mind, it made me angry.

“No,” I say.

Her lower lip trembles. She frowns prettily, and I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Bad-Ass Bartender doesn’t really exist outside of the bar, apparently.

“Tell you what,” I say. “I’ll back up, park in front of your headquarters, and watch as you go in. If anything goes wrong—”

“Forget it,” she says, voice plumy with tears. “I can handle it myself.”

She stomps away, then pauses just for a moment as if marshaling courage. It’s that little movement that catches me. I wheel the truck around and park across the street.

She sees me, then turns her head away.

She goes inside the headquarters. Everyone watches her, like they watched me. No one says anything.

They watch her walk to the back, grab her purse, a laptop bag, and a coat, and then the woman stops her near the door.

The girl isn’t bait. She’s genuinely scared. And I treated her badly.

I look around the neighborhood, then get out of the truck. I shove the keys in my pocket, and walk to the door, keeping my eye on the girl and the woman. They’re arguing.

I pull the door open—apparently she left it unlocked—and say, “You fired her for talking to me?”

They all look at me now.

The girl’s face is pale. “I quit, actually.”

She can’t lie to save herself. That’s so different from me at that age. I was the queen of liars. That’s how I got and kept my job.

“And I’m leaving,” the girl says, pulling the laptop bag away from the other woman.

“The laptop is ours,” the woman says.

“The laptop is mine,” the girl says. “My personal laptop. I never ever used yours. I don’t like linked networks.”

“It has our work product on it,” the woman says.

I know where this conversation is going, and I don’t like it.

“So hire a lawyer,” I say to the woman. Then I extend my arm to the girl. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”

Her look is both startled and grateful.

The Jordy kid stands up. He’s taller than me, younger than me, dumber than me. Even though he’s not drunk, I probably have fifty IQ points and a whole lotta living on him. And I can put him down with a shove to the chest.

Only he doesn’t know that.

“She’s not leaving,” he says.

“What’re you going to do?” I ask. “Hold her hostage?”

I waggle my fingers at the girl, and she runs toward me. I hold the door open, watching everyone, Jordy, the woman, the other workers still at their seats.

The other girl in the back, the one who had exchanged glances with the one heading to my truck, she’s gone too. I hope she went out a back exit, and isn’t just in the ladies room.

But she’s not my problem. I’m neither cop nor superhero.

“You people are something else,” I say, then follow the girl outside.

She’s standing on the sidewalk, shivering.

“Do you have a car?” I ask, thinking maybe the Prius is hers.

She shakes her head. “I took the bus.”

Worse than a Prius, then. A True Believer, who can’t afford a vehicle. True Believers go all Ninja Avenger when they lose their cherry and discover their candidate is an ass and a cad. (They’re all asses and cads, at minimum. Often they’re crooks and egomaniacs too.)

If she has writing skills, she’s going to blog.

If she doesn’t, she’s going to cause other troubles, and the problem is that the woman inside that campaign headquarters knows it.

“I’ll drop you,” I say to the girl.

She glances at me, then at the people inside. I can almost read her thoughts. She’s having two of them. The first: They’re going to think that I’m connected to this woman. And the other comes from a much younger, much more vulnerable place: I’m not supposed to get in a car with strangers.

The girl takes a deep breath, then nods. We cross the street to my truck, and using the remote access, I unlock the door. I’m getting into a car with a stranger, too, something I haven’t done in more than thirty years.

Not that my problems have ever come from strangers.

“I’m D,” I say after we’re both inside the truck. I don’t explain that “D” is short for “Blondie,” which was what the patrons used to call me before I got rid of the hair. Then they called me “Baldie,” and all I could hear over the noise of the jukebox was the hard “d,” so I took on the name.

“Laney,” she says, her voice still shaking. She’s glancing out the window as if she expects Jordy and his friends to follow us.

I start the truck and put it in gear in one swift movement. “I take it you like Andy.”

“He’s a lot of fun,” she says, “and he’s really smart, and he was right.”

A girl with a crush, it sounds like.

I check the mirrors, and the door to the campaign headquarters. The remaining staff is arguing. I don’t see the other girl.

I pull out and start down the road. “How do you know Andy’s not gay?”

“I just do,” she says. “I mean, he doesn’t seem like it, and he wouldn’t be, and he’s really nice.”

I suppress a sigh, wondering how anyone can be as naïve as she is and still function. I remind myself, as I often do at the bar, that it’s not my job to educate people. At the bar, it’s my job to help them forget their idiocies for a while.

Right now, I don’t really have a job, except maybe to get this girl home.

“Where do you live?” I ask.

“They’re not going to come for me, are they?” she asks.

I don’t ask “who.” I know who she means. “You got a roommate?”

She shakes her head.

“Deadbolts?”

She nods.

“Just don’t answer your door tonight,” I say, knowing it’s not a lot of comfort. But I’m not going to be responsible for this kid. “Call the cops if someone’s persistent.”

She makes a little involuntary sound of panic. I ignore it.

“Address?” I ask again.

She tells me. She lives all the way across town, near the university. Of course.

I wheel the truck in that direction, and wonder what I’m going to do with the information that the girl has given me. Call the cops? Tell Rick? Tell the hospital?

It’s really none of my business.

And I’m not the type who makes it my business. I tend bar, for godssake. Nothing is my business.

“Where were you when he left his wallet?” she asks.

I glance at her. I had said he left it at my place. Either she forgot that, or she’s trying to figure out why Santiago would be with a woman like me.

We’re nowhere near the headquarters now, and something about being alone in the cab of this truck with this girl makes me decide on honesty.

“He came into my bar,” I say, my voice flat.

“Bar?” She frowns at me. “I thought—he says—he doesn’t drink.”

Maybe like Bancroft doesn’t drink. Because no non-drinker would order Jack. Although I had pushed him into it. And he hadn’t known what would hurt him.

Maybe someone he knew ordered Jack, and he parroted the order.

“He did,” I say. “And then he passed out—”

“He drank that much?” she asks.

I wheel onto the Expressway. Not a lot of traffic this late at night, but the billboard is lit up from below. Want to go back to 1861?

“No,” I say, answering both questions. “He passed out from blood loss.”

“He got beat up in your bar?”

“He got beaten up and raped before he got to my bar.”

I let the words hang.

She’s shaking her head. “No. You can’t rape a…” and then she pauses and her breath catches. “No,” she says again, only this time, the tone is different. This no is a disbelieving no. She saw something, realized something, knew something.

“Where is he?” she asks.

“Mercy General,” I say. “We took him there.”

“If you know where he is, why did you come to campaign headquarters?” There’s anger in her voice now, as if it’s all my fault.

Why did I go to the headquarters? It was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I hadn’t meant to, but I’m not sure I should say that to this girl.

“I thought maybe I’d find some of his friends there,” I lie. “I thought maybe I’d find someone who cared.”

She nods, and goes silent. The Expressway seems alien at this time of night, with the halogen streetlights leaving uneven pools of light across the smooth pavement. We’d gone several miles. We were due for another Want to go back to 1861? billboard real soon now.

“I care.” She says it so softly that I almost didn’t hear her over the hum of the tires. “Can we go see him?”

“It’s the middle of the night,” I say. “Do you know his family?”

She shakes her head. “Who do you think did this?”

“Who do you think did it?” I ask with more charge than I expect.

She turns away, thinking I can’t see her. But I can see her reflection in the passenger side window. Her mouth has thinned, her eyes are narrow, and at first, I think she’s angry. Then I realize she’s holding back tears.

“If I go to the police,” she whispers, “I’m done.”

“You already quit,” I say, recognizing the irony as the words come out of my mouth. I’m pushing her to take action in a situation where I never would.

“No,” she says. “I’m done working in politics.”

“Maybe,” I say. But politics are different now than they were in my day. No one would believe a girl with a complaint thirty years ago, even if she had been bruised and battered and bleeding for days.

Now, people would believe a girl, a sincere girl of the proper background, who saw something, knew something, accused something. And if she stood up, then maybe—

I smile at myself, mentally pat myself on the back and think, Hello, Girl Operator. I thought I’d trained her out of me, but she reappears like the undead, filled with naiveté, optimism and hope.

“You want to keep working in politics more than you want to help a friend?” I ask.

“He’s not a friend,” she says too fast. “He’s….”

He was the hope of a friend. A boyfriend. Someone kind to her.

We’ve reached her neighborhood. I take the first exit off the Expressway. Students sit outside well-lit bars, one hour before last call. My bar hasn’t been open to last call since Barak Obama got re-elected, when the rednecks and the bigots were too scared and angry to go home.

I wonder what made Laney want to return to 1861. She fits into my bar—Bancroft’s bar—better than I do, and she doesn’t even know it.

I wind through a couple of side streets and find the rundown apartment complex where she lives.

She looks at me for a moment, as if she wants to say something. Then she opens the passenger side door.

“Thanks for the lift,” she says, as if we’re old friends.

She gets out, slams the door, and half-runs, half-walks to the building. She doesn’t look both ways to see if anyone is lurking in the shadows. She doesn’t look back either.

I watch her fumble with her keys, open the main door, and head inside.

I don’t know why I expect her to do the right thing, when the only person in this entire situation who has done the right thing wasn’t me. It was Rick. And he did it without hesitation.

I sigh, pull away from the curb, and drive away.

Eventually, I head home, because I can’t think of anywhere else to go.

***

Home isn’t much. It’s a condo only because I bought the entire building a few years ago, when I realized it was better to control who I had as neighbors than it was to suffer through another loud drunken party two floors below me.

I have the entire top floor, which sounds more impressive than it is. Living room with a view of the street, good-size kitchen with a view of nothing, a dining room that serves as a storehouse for mail that I forget to sort, and a large bedroom complete with TV and reading chair, and two windows, both locked and shaded. I installed air conditioning and a good heating system, and if you came inside with me (which you never would) you’d think that the windows hadn’t been opened since the last century, and you’d be right.

Fresh air is for suckers, baby. And people who trust other people.

My kitchen table is always spotless. I hang my purse over one of the chairs, open the fridge, and take out the sub I bought that morning. I usually have something ready when I get home so I don’t have to think about food.

I unwrap the sub. The bread’s soggy from the oil and vinegar dressing I splurged on, but I don’t care. I eat a few bites, listen to the green pepper crunch, let the pepperoni bite my tongue, and start shaking again.

It’s hard to eat. My throat has closed up like it did in those first weeks after I met Bancroft. I trained myself to eat after that—too well, some would say—and I force myself to take a few more bites now.

No regression, no regrets. Just move forward.

Only that’s not really working for me right now. I know something. Laney knows something. And neither of us have taken any steps forward.

I cut the rest of the sub in half, and put the good half in the fridge for tomorrow—if I can eat tomorrow. I make myself finish the other half, chase it with some cold water, and head to the bedroom.

The queen-sized bed doesn’t even look inviting. The entire room seems like a foreign place. I go to my living room, don’t turn on any lights, and sit on the couch, surveying the neighborhood.

Or so I tell myself. Part of me knows I’m reverting to the scared woman I’d been thirty years ago.

And part of me doesn’t care.

***

I wake up with my head jammed against the arm and back of the sofa, a crick in my neck so profound that I moan as I move. The light falling into the room is unfamiliar, and I have awakened much earlier than usual.

I get up, and as I make some much-needed coffee, I look at the clock on the microwave. It’s 7:30 a.m.

Even though I don’t have to be at the bar until eleven, I know I can’t go back to sleep. My dreams were filled with confetti and laughter and cries of He won! I’m not going back there just to get a few more hours rest.

I shower, dress, manage to shove some Raisin Bran into my mouth, and chase the meal with coffee. Then, without really thinking about it, I let myself out of the condo.

Mercy General is fifteen minutes away on back roads in rush hour traffic. I get there just as visiting hours open.

I’m not sure if I want to see Andy Santiago. My stomach is as twisted as my neck was this morning, the coffee mixing badly with the cereal. I ask for Santiago’s room, and receive the number with no fuss.

Apparently, he was able to tell them who he was.

Hospitals have the same smell—the sour scent of sickness overlaid by disinfectant and cafeteria gravy, with a hint of very bad coffee. I take the elevator to the fourteenth floor, wondering what, exactly, I’m about.

But I don’t turn around.

His room is halfway down the hall from the elevator. I pass rooms with moaning patients, beeping equipment, and loud televisions. The room number is displayed prominently on the blond wood.

Santiago’s door stands open. I slip inside, surprised to see that the room is private. It has a bathroom near the door, and a bed in the center. Windows cover the outside wall, letting in sunlight.

Andy Santiago looks nothing like the man who came into my bar. His face is gray with pain and that bruise on his chin is five times the size it was yesterday afternoon. He’s smaller than I thought, and he wears a hospital gown instead of an expensive suit.

“Mr. Santiago?” I sit on the edge of the chair next to his bed. I don’t want to tower over him. In my experience, looming is as threatening as leaning in.

He opens one eye and slowly moves his head in my direction.

“You,” he says, his voice raspy with disuse.

I nod. I reach into my purse and remove the plastic bag with his wallet.

“I found your wallet.” I set it on the nightstand, near the TV remote. That’s when I realize the television is off.

“Thank you,” he mouths and closes his eyes again.

I wait a minute, just to see if he’ll talk to me. I start to get up, feeling very awkward.

You’d think I would know how to talk to someone in a situation like this. You’d think I would know what’s right and what’s wrong, how to pressure, how to comfort.

But I don’t. I don’t know any of it.

I don’t even say, I’m sorry for what happened to you, because even though the words aren’t empty, they sound empty.

I walk out of the room, feeling like I should have done more, but not sure what more actually is. I can’t tell him to go to the police; I never did. And I can’t offer him the comfort of some support group, because I never found them comforting.

I’m most of the way to my truck when I realize that all the things I would offer a friend, all the common-sense things people do for each other in times of crisis, all the ways our society says we should take care of crime and each other, I have done none of them for myself. Ever.

Coffee-flavored acid rises in my gorge and I swallow, hard. I lean on the truck for a moment.

Then I climb inside, and drive to work, two hours early and thirty years too late.

***

I clean the front top to bottom in those two hours, and I keep cleaning through the slow arrival of the lunch drinkers. Ma Kettle finds her booth around one, and I give her the usual vodka tonic. A twenty-something couple walks in about one-thirty, looks around, and then gives me a sheepish look before leaving again.

I’m amazed they got inside at all.

I’m clock-watching, waiting for Rick. I’m not sure what I want to talk to him about; I just want to talk.

Then, at three-thirty-five, he arrives, like he always has. Only he doesn’t bang the door closed and he doesn’t seem quite as angry.

He also doesn’t sit at his usual spot at the bar.

He glances at everything, as if memorizing it. I’ve seen this from regulars before. They’re saying goodbye.

I head over, but I don’t grab the Heineken. I won’t, unless he asks.

“Hey,” I say. “I took that guy his wallet.”

Rick nods. “He’s pretty messed up.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“They used something—bottle, bat, I don’t know,” he says. “I didn’t ask. But he was hemorrhaging. If we hadn’t brought him in, he would’ve died.”

Jesus. In my bar. Right in front of me.

“If you hadn’t brought him in,” I say.

“What?” Rick asks.

“You did it, not me,” I say. “If I had been here by myself—”

“You’d’ve called 911,” Rick says. He looks longingly at the bar stool. I can feel him wavering. “Those bastards. He wouldn’t tell me who did it.”

“Guys he worked with,” I say.

“He told you?” Rick asks.

I shake my head. I don’t want to tell him about the campaign office—it’s too close, too personal, but…

Rick’s staring at me. “What, D?”

“Debra,” I say, surprising myself. “I’m Debra.”

And then I burst into tears.

***

Oh, I’d love to tell you everything’s hunky dory now, and my life is perfect, and that big-name politician isn’t sitting like a slug at the statehouse. He is, and my life is still my life, and nothing’s hunky dory.

But Rick knew the detective handling Santiago’s case, and Rick made me tell the detective about the campaign headquarters and the Log Cabin Republican comments and the sheer hostility.

They found Laney, and it turns out she was scared not just because she figured out what happened. Right after I had said Santiago was raped, just as she was going to tell me with all her naïve passion that raping a man wasn’t possible, a memory hit her, and made the sentence die in her throat.

She had seen the bloody dowel Jordy and his friends used, part of a broken towel-rack someone placed near the back to take out with the recycling. She’d seen it, and better yet, she helped the police find it.

Those four guys who used it to teach Andy Santiago a lesson are going to learn some lessons themselves.

If this were one of those happy feel-good alls-well-that-ends-well kinda stories, I’d tell you that Santiago and I have become friends or that we bonded at our support group. I’d tell you this incident derailed the Jeff Davis campaign.

But none of that happened.

I’m still here, still tending bar, still wondering what to do with my afternoons.

Something’s different, though. I’m trying to figure out how to update the bar, so that we’re not the neighborhood eyesore as the gentrification continues. I’ve decided that I like what we are—that wayside, that haven, for the folks whose lives are in the crapper.

There’re plenty of trendy bars. I don’t like them much.

I prefer places where strangers wander in rarely, and when they do, they tend to stick around until they cross back over to the trendy bar side of life.

I imagine that’s where Rick is. Or he’s in that same place Bancroft is, the one that knows about the reality of dive bars and the camaraderie of people hanging at the end of their ropes.

About a week ago, Santiago came back, he says, because he owes me. But I keep saying he owes Rick. Santiago doesn’t owe me anything.

But Santiago does know that I used to do his job, back in the day, the job he doesn’t do any more either, and he knows I once sat on the same bar stool with the same disillusionment.

I don’t know if that means anything to him. I’m not sure it means much to me.

I do know that, for the time being, he’s finding comfort here.

And who can argue with that?

The Trendy Bar Side of Life

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and layout copyright © 2020 by WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © aragami12345/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.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

As a woman in the Middle Ages, Maude knows her place. But her husband’s early death means she must fulfill his duties until their son comes of age.

When a woman appears on her doorstep bloodied and broken, Maude must decide how far she will go to protect her son’s estate. Will she follow the cultural rules, or will she find a strength she didn’t know she possessed?

“Improvements” is free on this website for one week only. If you would like an ebook copy of the story, you can get it at WMG Books or on any other ebook retail site. Enjoy!

 

Improvements Kristine Kathryn Rusch

When the strange woman appeared, Maude was in the buttery, speaking with the clerk of the kitchen about his latest round of purchases. He went to market too often, she thought, and was too extravagant for the types of meals he produced. She would, if he did not modify his expenditures, have to fire him.

He would be the first servant she fired since her husband died.

The very idea filled her with dread. She had run the household since her marriage ten years before, but her husband had handled the money, the hiring and firing of servants, and the overall management of the large estate.

Now she managed it, in trust for their only child, a son who was still in swaddling. Still, some duties made her hands shake.

The clerk of the kitchen was a large florid man whom her husband had hired shortly before the baby was born. She had had misgivings about him then, but had been too tired to speak of them. Then her husband became ill, the baby had been born, and her husband had died, all within half a year’s time. She felt as if she woke up only recently to find herself in a life that only resembled the one she had once had.

The buttery was a small room off the kitchen. Beer and candles sat on the shelves. The stairs from the beer cellar descended down one side, and the main door of the buttery opened into the hall. She had sent the yeoman of the buttery—he was such a gossip—into the garden for a brief rest. Not that he needed one. His services were rarely used this early in the day.

The clerk of the kitchen was explaining, in his condescending voice, how some foods tasted poorly without the proper ingredients. She had her hands folded inside her sleeves, her wimple pinching her chin. She had been listening to him for too long, but she didn’t know how to make him stop.

And that was when they heard the screams, coming from the kitchen.

The clerk looked at her as if he had never heard such sounds before. She pushed past him into the Hall, through the Court, and into the kitchen.

It stank of grease and smoke and roasting meat. Even though no one was yet cooking the evening meal, the smell from last night’s lingered.

The kitchen staff was huddled near the outside door. One of the kitchen maids had her hands over her mouth. She was doubled over away from the door, as if she had seen something horrible.

Maude hurried past the worktable to the door itself. The servants parted as they saw her, all but the chief cook who blocked her way with his large body.

“Milady,” he said. “This is not for a lady to see.”

“Move aside,” she said.

He stared at her a moment, his blue eyes red-streaked from smoke, his lips thin and pursed as if he had tasted something bad. Then he stepped away from the door.

A woman lay on the flagstones leading into the garden. Her ragged clothes were blood-covered as was her face and hair. When she saw Maude, she raised a thin hand as if beseeching her.

“We shall take care of this, Milady,” the chief cook said. “It is nothing that should bother you.”

But they hadn’t taken care of it so far, had they? Besides, how could she leave a creature in such obvious distress?

“It is simply a beggar woman,” the chief cook said. “We see many of them at the kitchen. She was probably beset by thieves—“

“A beggar woman, beset by thieves? That does not seem likely.” Maude stepped outside. She knew why the staff was protecting her. The woman wore garments that Maude recognized from the town’s stew.

“She is a harlot, Milady,” the chief cook hissed. “Please. It is not right for you—“

“Enough!” Maude said. She crossed the flagstones and crouched beside the woman.

The woman smelled of sweat and fear. She was so thin that all the bones in her hand were visible. Her face was swollen and bruised, her teeth blackened and nearly gone. Yet Maude was certain the woman was younger than she.

Her surcoat had once been a rough wool, but time and use had worn it to nothing. There were several tears in it, recent tears, that rendered it nearly useless. She wore nothing underneath, and Maude could see scars beside the fresh bruises.

“Milady,” the woman murmured.

Maude put a hand on the woman’s forehead. No fever. She could not see where the blood came from. “Who did this to you?”

The woman touched her bloody garment. “Not mine.” She spoke so softly that Maude could barely hear her. “Anne’s.”

Maude felt a shiver run through her. “Where is Anne?”

The woman looked toward the forest beyond, and the road that led back into town. “I could not help her any longer…”

It was then that Maude looked at the woman’s feet. She wore no hose and no shoes. Her right leg, Maude suddenly realized, was twisted in an unnatural way.

“Help me get her inside,” Maude said to the chief cook.

“No, Mistress,” the woman said, but Maude ignored her.

The chief cook crossed his arms. “Milady, she is—“

“One of God’s children,” Maude said. “We shall take care of her.”

The chief cook sent out scullions and the indoor grooms. Apparently the cook was too good to help a woman in need.

The men slipped their arms beneath the woman and she moaned. Maude wondered how many other bones had been broken.

“Place her in the servants quarters and send for the wet nurse,” Maude said. Her wet nurse knew potions and herbs and healings. She had cursed the doctors when she saw what they had done to Maude’s husband, saying that if Maude had brought her in sooner, she could have saved him.

Considering that she saved the steward, who later fell to the same disease, Maude believed her.

The quarters where she had them take the woman were for the greater servants. They had rooms of their own, with cots stuffed with straw, instead of mattresses on the floor. This room had been empty since her husband died. She had lost a few servants and hadn’t had the energy to replace them.

The men laid the woman on the bed. She was paler than she had been before, and her eyes were glassy with pain.

“What are you called?” Maude asked.

“Mistress, your man, he is right about what I am.”

“Do not argue,” Maude said. “You are here now. What are you called?”

“Joan.”

“Joan,” Maude said. “Who did this?”

Joan closed her eyes. At that moment, the wet nurse appeared. She held a towel as if she had just left the young lord, and her surcoat was not properly fastened.

When she saw the woman on the bed, her gaze met Maude’s. “Milady, you know—“

“I know,” Maude said. “See what you can do. She’s been badly beaten and her arm is broken.”

The wet nurse nodded. She came inside, put a hand on Joan’s forehead, and then began to examine her. Maude stood.

The men were still crowded inside the room. It was as if they saw Joan as a curiosity and nothing more.

“Come,” Maude said. “We shall find this Anne.”

***

Halfway to town, they found what remained of Anne. She lay in a crumpled heap beside the road, her limbs bent at unnatural angles. Her face was bloodied, as if her nose had been broken, but that was not where all of the blood came from.

She had knife wounds on her hands and arms, and another through her belly. The dry road contained a black trail, as if she had lost blood the entire way.

Joan had carried her on a broken leg, until she could come no farther.

Maude turned to the head groom who had accompanied her. She took one of Anne’s cold, damaged hands, and held it out to him.

“What do you think of this?” she asked.

He shrugged. He could barely look at her. “This is not your concern, Milady.”

“Of course it is,” she snapped, startled at the tone that came out of her mouth. Had she ever spoken to anyone so harshly? “This is my land.”

He looked at her then, and it seemed as though there was pity in his eyes. It made her bristle.

“What becomes of these women,” he said, “is their choice.”

“I doubt anyone would choose to die like this,” Maude said. She ran her fingers over the deep wounds. The skin had parted so far that she could see muscle. “I believe she was trying to defend herself.”

“Be that as it may, Milady,” the groom said. “She knew what such a life would bring.”

Did she? Did anyone? Maude remembered the day after her marriage, as she rode in her husband’s carriage to her new home, the estate she now ran. Had she known that day how many miscarriages she would have? How the first babe born to them would die three days later in pain so bad that his little wails broke her heart? Had she known then that she would love her surviving son so much that it hurt?

Of course not. And the greatest surprise of all had been how badly she missed her husband, now that he was gone.

“You know something of these women then?” she asked her groom.

He flushed. “Only what I have overheard in taverns, Milady.”

She narrowed her eyes, not believing him. “They are from the stew, are they not?”

He nodded.

“Is such treatment common there?”

His flush grew deeper. “Milady, I am not—“

“I am a woman married and widowed,” she said. “I am not unfamiliar with such things.”

“There are perversions, Milady, that I cannot speak of to a gentleborn lady.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Perversions that would result in this?”

He looked away from her. His skin was the color of dark wine. “There are men who enjoy inflicting pain.”

She shuddered once, and decided that perhaps he was right; she was not ready to hear such things. Still, a woman had died on her land and another had come to her for help.

“What do you think they were doing here?” she asked. “Where do you think they were going?”

He shook his head. He knew, as well as she, that no one would have taken the women in.

The hand did not feel human. It was too cold, the flesh hard.

“We shall give her a Christian burial,” Maude said.

“Milady! She deserves no such treatment.”

“Did you know her then?” Maude asked.

He shook his head.

“Then you do not know who and what she was. Like me, you can only guess. And I choose to guess that she was a Godly woman. You shall send some men to bring her back to the house. We shall place her in the chapel, find her suitable clothes before the priest arrives, and have him say a few words over her.”

“He will not like this, Milady.”

“He will not know,” she said.

“How will he not learn of it?” the groom asked. “So many have seen her, so many already know.”

She raised her head, anger making her feel stronger than she had for almost a year. “If anyone speaks of this,” she said firmly, “he will be fired.”

The groom’s eyes widened. She had never been this cold before.

He nodded once. “As you wish,” he said.

***

Because of her duties to young Henry, the wet nurse enlisted the aid of two kitchen maids and a chambermaid, all of whom, the wet nurse said, also had knowledge of healing.

Maude was amazed that she knew so little of her staff. They bowed to her when she came into the room. It now smelled of wine and camphor. While Maude was gone, Joan’s sore feet had been cleaned and bound with cloth, her bruises rubbed with hot stones, and her broken leg set and splinted.

But she was awake, her eyes dark against her pale face.

“Leave us for a moment,” Maude said to the servants.

They bowed again, and slipped through the door. Maude took Joan’s hand. It was fragile as a bird’s wing, but at least it felt alive, warm and callused, the bones delicate against her palm.

“Anne is dead,” Maude said.

Joan closed her eyes for a moment, and nodded. It was as if Maude’s words made the death real.

“I am giving her a Christian funeral,” Maude said. “She is in the chapel. If you are well enough, you may attend.”

Joan bit her lower lip. “You do not want me there.”

“Of course I do,” she said.

“’Tis not a place for me.” Joan bowed her head.

“Our Lord did not think so,” Maude said. “Mary Magdalene was of your profession, yet she was at his side.”

Joan squeezed Maude’s hand. “You are a good woman. I did not mean to burden you.”

“It is no burden.” Maude put her other hand on top of Joan’s. “Who did this to you?”

“Milady, it is not for you to hear.”

“I am so tired of everyone telling me what I may and may not hear,” Maude said. “I have lived more than a score of years, and I know of the stew and the men who frequent it. Now, stop protecting my dainty ears and tell me who did this to you.”

“A man,” Joan whispered. “I do not know his name.”

“Is he the same one who killed Anne?”

A tear eased out of Joan’s right eye. “No.”

“Yet you left together.”

“She would not have been hurt if not for me.”

“Tell me,” Maude said, and so Joan did.

***

The story came out in fits and whispers, sometimes lost beneath the choking sound of Joan’s heavily drawn breath. A man—a customer—had ill used her, and Anne, seeing how badly Joan was hurt, went to William, the stewholder, asking him to send for a doctor. He refused, and demanded that Joan, who was popular, finish her night’s work.

Anne returned to Joan’s room, and bundled her up, taking bread from the kitchen, and rolled it and some clothing in two blankets. Anne had heard of nunneries that took in Daughters of Eve—the Order of Saint Mary Magdalene—and they would travel until they found such a place.

Anne was helping Joan out of the stew when William found them. He accused Anne of stealing and he drew a knife. He cut her and that brought him to a frenzy. He attacked her like a madman, and did not stop. Joan could not help her.

Blood spattered her face, and then his, and that seemed awaken him from his fit. He left them in the road outside the stew, left them, Joan believed, to die.

She managed to lift Anne over her shoulder, holding her in place with her good hand. Somehow she managed to make it to the middle of the forest before she fell, unable to go on. There she realized that Anne’s eyes were open and unseeing, that Anne was not drawing a breath.

She remembered no more.

“I do not even think I saw your manor,” she said. “I was just walking because I did not know what else to do.”

***

Maude did not know what to do either. She sat in her private chamber, head bowed. But she did not ask for God’s aid. Somehow she felt that God’s presence was in none of this.

The stewholder, she knew, had rights over his women. He could prevent them from leaving. He could punish them for an obvious theft. But Maude did not believe the theft of bread and blankets was sin enough for this. She did not believe that women, who sought to better themselves, deserved to die by the side of the road, to be left there like discarded clothes.

It took her an hour to come to her decision.

And then she sent for her steward.

***

He was a man of some years, thin after his illness, his hair gone except for graying tufts at the sides. Her husband had trusted him implicitly and Maude had trusted him as well. His advice had been sound, his care for the estate excellent.

He seemed uncomfortable to be in her private rooms. He waited, with the door open, for her instruction.

“Have the sheriff arrest the stewholder,” she said. “His name is William.”

“Milady,” the steward said. “Since your husband’s death, we have had no magistrate.”

She nodded. “I will sit in judgment,” she said.

He stared at her for a long moment, as if she were not someone he recognized.

“What would be the charge, then?” the steward asked.

“Murder,” she said.

***

She held the hearing the next day. She sat in her hall as the sheriff brought in William the Stewholder. He was a portly man whose scarlet tunic was made of an expensive serge and whose shoes were lined with fur.

He looked as if he could afford the loss of a blanket or two.

His hands were shackled, but his feet were not.

When he saw her, his face flushed the color of his tunic. “I’ll not sit before a woman!” he cried.

“You have no choice,” she said in her new voice, the voice that had been born of this experience. “I am the trustee of my husband’s lands, and until my son comes of age, I am the one who runs them.”

“That means she’s the magistrate,” the sheriff said, shaking William.

“Did you,” she asked, “stab a woman named Anne?”

“She stole from me.”

“Enough to warrant two dozen wounds?” Maude asked.

“The price of theft is death!” he shouted, spittle coming from his mouth. Apparently he felt that she would only understand him if he yelled.

“I determine the price of theft on these lands,” Maude said, amazed she could sound so calm. “Those women were injured. They wanted medical care.”

“Only one was injured,” he said.

“Yet you wanted her to work.”

He shrugged. “She done it before.”

Maude stared at him for a long moment. He stared back, unrepentant.

“I sentence you,” she said, “to a pilgrimage. You shall visit holy sites until you learn the meaning of humility.”

“How shall that be judged?” the sheriff asked.

“I believe it will take many years. Perhaps,” she said, “your pilgrimage shall be eternal. I shall think on it, and come to that decision by the morrow, when you shall be shipped out.”

“You cannot do this,” he said.

“We’ve already established that I can.”

“Those whores you’re so worried about will have no one to manage them.”

She felt cold. She hadn’t thought of that. She looked at the sheriff. “You shall bring them here. They shall learn useful work.”

“Milady, they may leave but that will not stop someone else from opening a stew,” the sheriff said.

“I am aware of that,” she said. “But at least it will not be William here.” She waved in dismissal. “Take him away.”

***

That evening, she sat alone in the chapel as the priest sent Anne’s soul on its way. Joan had been too ill to come. It would take many weeks for Joan to heal.

By then, Maude hoped the men she had sent to find the nearest Order of Saint Mary Magdalene would have returned with good news.

For it did not matter how a woman was born, as a daughter of Eve, or a daughter of Mary, she deserved to live a life free of brutality and pain.

Maude lived such a life, but she had not known it until now. And it had taken a sight that most would have shielded her from to teach her that she had strengths she had never expected.

She would hold these lands in trust for her son. And when he came of age, she would give them to him gladly, better than they had been when she came to them.

Better, because she had made them so.

 

 

Improvements

Copyright ©  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright © WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Alvaro Ennes/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.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to head over to Storybundle to pick up a copy, along with ebooks by Jamie Ferguson, T. Thorn Coyle, Dean Wesley Smith, Robert Jeschonek and others. 

Everything in this bundle is exclusive to the Storybundle, including my book. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. The Storybundle ends in two days, so you might want to get yours now. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites. The new edition will release on in July.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post is from February of 2025, and is in the second section of  the book. 

DOING THE WORK AMID THE NOISE

From 2025

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

As I said in Chapter 11, entertainment is important as well. We have an obligation to help those who are doing real-world hard jobs by giving them some kind of respite at the end of their long days.

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

They feel so small and unimportant.

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

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

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

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

But I also needed the rest.

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

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

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

Storytelling keeps me sane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can only give you examples from my own life.

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

But, I was and am a writer. I wrote through all of that, and even wrote a book about my methods for writing when I barely had enough strength to get out of bed. The book is called Writing With Chronic Illness, which will appear in a revised edition in mid-2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I knew I needed help.

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

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

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

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

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

I continued the writing challenges into early 2025, because I knew that I needed to get back to massive novel production, and I didn’t want to lose my short story focus. I have to do both (which I have done throughout my career).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s up to you.

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

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

Celebrate the tiny victories. Keep writing.

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

“Doing The Work Amid The Noise” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

In a rundown bar on a space station at the end of the universe, a customer asks for passage to Dunyon. But the bartender has never heard of Dunyon.

But more and more people arrive, all wanting to go to Dunyon—creating a huge crisis for that little bar, the space station, and maybe the universe.

“Dunyon” is free on this site for one week only. If you’d like your own copy, you can get it at your favorite retailer or pick up a copy from WMG Books by clicking here.

Dunyon Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

It started in the far reaches of the sector—ships firing on each other, some destroyed. Keeping track became hard—communications turned sporadic, and who really followed which government was in charge of what anyway?

Rumors started, rumors impossible to confirm as communications throughout the system grew intermittent. Entire ships, destroyed. Cities, gone. A planet, blown up.

But most people saw no evidence of any of it. One would think, if a planet had been destroyed, there would be some kind of repercussion, but most people knew of none. Most people saw nothing.

Until one day the ships appeared overhead.

Most people barely had time to gather the family and the money, barely had time to get away, to find refugee ships.

But “refugee ships” make it sound organized, like an effort conducted by some charity organization or a benevolent and surviving government.

The ships weren’t organized or tied to each other or even very similar. Some were old-fashioned generation ships. Some were commandeered space yachts. Some were stolen trading vessels.

They made it only so far. Some refugees died in the blackness of space, the ships powerless, spinning slowly, the only thing surviving an emergency signal that would go forever unheeded.

Other refugees made it to the outer reaches of the sector. To supply stations and military outposts.

And the rest—well, the rest ended up here.

The new arrivals always ask me where here is, and I tell them one of three things, depending on my mood.

I say, I used to know but I don’t any more.

Or, It’s the end of the line.

Or, Here? This isn’t a place. It’s an emotion.

But too many asked me what that emotion was.

Desperation, I’d say. Desperation, pure and simple.

 

***

In truth, “here” was once an outpost, so far on the edge of the sector that we weren’t even sure which government claimed us. Mostly we claimed ourselves. Eventually, we became a destination space station, a haven for the rich. We built fantasy resorts spiraling off the main part of the station—all virtual reality and holographic technology like nothing else in the sector.

If you wanted to be pampered, you came here. If you wanted to redefine yourself, you came here. If you wanted to hide from the public, you came here.

It would cost you more money that most people ever saw, but you came here.

I came here without money twenty years ago. Most women, when they arrived, either dripped money or had unvarnished beauty. I had neither.

I was a former soldier looking for a respite, scarred inside and out. I started as a bartender, and built a reputation as the person who solved everyone else’s problems quickly, silently, and efficiently.

I did nothing but work and save and meddle (unemotionally) in other people’s lives. So as the station expanded, built its first exclusive wing, I had enough money to build my own bar with my own apartment attached.

I could run things the way that I wanted to, keep the hours that I wanted, let in the clients I wanted.

By being exclusive, I became popular.

And rich.

Nowadays, the bar is still exclusive. We are the only place that still charges a cover. We have entertainment in the back room—usually a band, sometimes a comedian, once in a while an acting troupe—all of them famous, all of them refugees. I pay well. People want to run their show in my place because they like my place.

I have human employees not because I can afford them (of course I can) but because I’m trying to create jobs so that fewer people remain stuck in the refugee areas, the places we called the pens. So far, I’ve created twenty-five jobs, and I’m thinking of expanding.

I’ve already expanded more than I initially planned. In addition to my entertainment room, I have a high stakes poker room. No one gets in without a fifty thousand minimum. I raised the stakes when I learned the truly desperate were taking the last of their savings and trying to double their money on my tables.

I didn’t want to get rich by making desperate people poor.

In the main room, we serve dinner at eight sharp. When the five courses are over, we clear the tables and serve drinks until four a.m.

At four, I shut down everything except the high stakes poker (some games can go on for days) and wander the halls, looking at the decay. The hotels that once catered to the dilettante are now filled to capacity with the rich and desperate. The restaurants serve food to the people who pay up front. But their doors are all closed when I wander. I see the signs for specials or warning the people from the pens to stay out. Sometimes I see evidence of a scuffle—broken chairs, smashed tables, a hastily made “closed for the week” sign.

The only places still open when I close the bar are the information kiosks. They have no employees, so people can use them at any time. Even at four in the morning, I will pass lines in front of the kiosks, lines that extend through dozens of corridors.

Information. That’s where the premium is. People want to know if their home is still there, if members of their family are still alive, when (if ever) they can return. Most never let go of the past, unable to accept they’re in a new future, one they don’t recognize.

I barely recognize it, and I have little to hang onto. But I see patterns. For example, you can always tell which part of the sector is closed or ruined or under attack because the information stops flowing from there. What replaces information is rumor.

Rumor. This place thrives on rumor. You can hear it as you walk through the corridors, going from the old resort section (now part of the pens) to the condo wing to my little neighborhood of exclusivity. You hear it in the lowered voices, see it in the furtive looks. You know that someone is lying to someone else, maybe not intentionally, but always harmfully.

For the rumors are almost always harmful. They give hope where there is none.

And I think that’s the most destructive of all.

***

Last month, I finally became a victim of rumors. The whispers, the looks, all came toward me, and I had no idea what was causing them.

My bartender brought me the first hint. He used the silent call built into the back bar to bring me down from my office on the second floor.

The bar in the main room is spectacular. I designed it for looks as well as ease for the bartender. I insist on a human bartender, not some robotic mixer or automated machine. There’s an art to mixing cocktails—the right amount of this touched with a splash of that—which machines can never get right.

The bar circles around a blue screen that shows flat images of anywhere in the sector. Usually I set the imagery, and I try to keep current: any place that’s considered safe shows up on the image screen, and any place that might have exploded out of existence gets removed from the rotation.

In front of the imagery stand bottles of real alcohol, most of them imported. The bulk of my real alcohol is stored in a safe room off-premise. Only I know where that safe room is because now, much of the real alcohol is more valuable than jewelry or credits or any other commodity except food. Some of those liquors aren’t ever going to be made any more, and the fifteen bottles in my storeroom are the fifteen last known bottles in the sector, maybe even the universe.

I price accordingly.

Between the bar and the back bar is a floor so springy that you can stand on it all day and your legs don’t ache. Customers sit on high stools that gradually tilt if the bartender decides the customer is sucking too much air. Obnoxious people leave quickly. Pleasant ones stay so long, they often fall asleep with their heads on my well-polished bar.

The bartender, Jack Kunitz, had moved to the very edge of the bar when he saw me. He was a burly man with a history as checkered as mine. He dreamed of opening his own bar one day—or he used to, before all of this.

He was polishing glasses with a special bar rag, even though we had a machine for that.

“See that woman?” he asked softly, nodding at the other side of the bar.

I could barely see her. The bar was shaped like a giant C, and she was in the middle of the opposite curve. Slender, older, rich. Rich was easy to tell because her clothes fit, she looked well nourished, and she still wore expensive rings on her long, thin fingers.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“She wants to know how much passage is,” he said.

“Passage?” I asked. “To where?”

“Dunyon,” he said.

“Dunyon?” I repeated. I had never heard of it. I thought I had heard of every damn place. “Where the hell is that?”

He shrugged. “I asked her. She said it was somewhere far from here. Somewhere safe.”

“Why is she asking us for passage?” I asked.

“Dunno,” he said. “I asked her. She said I should know. So I called you.”

Sometimes I had special information. Or a ticket someone lost at a high stakes game for an expensive berth on a ship leaving from here, usually somewhere far away. Maybe not somewhere safer, but somewhere different.

After you’ve been here for a while, after you’ve finally accepted that your home is gone, you have no family left, and nothing is ever going to be as it was, you go somewhere else, figuring you’ll start new, figuring you have at least a fighting chance of rebuilding some kind of life.

At least, that’s what these people tell me when they spend thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—for the chance to get the hell out of here.

“I don’t know a thing about Dunyon,” I said. “Apologize and tell her to check her source.”

He did, and she left, and I gave it no more thought until the next night when three more people—obviously wealthy people—offered a small fortune to buy their way to Dunyon. And the following night, six offered. By the next night, twenty-five.

The amount of money was staggering. The number of people willing to pay it was growing by the hour.

I needed to find out what Dunyon was, and I needed to find out fast.

***

Believe it or not, bartenders—bar owners—don’t always have the latest information. I don’t believe rumor and innuendo, and while I have a few trusted sources, I only trust them on matters pertaining to the station and my operator’s license. Anything else is suspect.

So at times like this, I have to use an information kiosk like everyone else. Before everything went to hell, I could access information from my apartment. But that avenue got shut off as the pens grew larger and larger. First people hacked into our personal systems, and then the information got corrupted. That made the kiosks the only safe place for news.

The kiosks were tapped into the station’s space monitoring system. Information from ships approaching and leaving, from other systems, and from various networks filtered through the monitoring system. If its information was wrong, the station would soon cease to exist.

The kiosks were designed so that no one could tap into that system, and anyone who tried to modify the kiosks’ security was arrested and often never heard from again.

I paid one of the cocktail waitresses to stand in line for me. Poor thing, she waited for eight hours before she contacted me. She was three people from the kiosk door. I still didn’t hurry down. Three people, at a minimum, would take twenty minutes to finish their business.

I made it to the kiosk in fifteen. Still two people away. The waitress looked exhausted.

“Next time,” she said. “Get someone else to stand for you. I’d rather be moving than standing still.”

I nodded, thanked her, and waited another fifteen minutes before getting into the kiosk myself.

The kiosks were ten feet tall and seven feet wide. They were oblong, with doors on two sides. The person accessing information went in one door while the person who had just finished with the kiosk went out the other.

As the doors slid, the kiosk wiped its memory, so that the newcomer would face a blank screen.

At least, that was the theory. More than once, I’d seen what the person before me had been searching for. Mostly, those searches didn’t concern me—a name I had never heard before, a place I was only vaguely conscious of—but the searches almost always ended with a red no-longer-viable notice.

My searches were few and far between. Mostly they pertained to specialized booze or a particular type of glassware. This was the first search I would ever make for a place.

The kiosk doors slid closed simultaneously and the side lighting came on, faint but illuminating. The flat screen in front of me had its own backlight. If I wanted a holographic avatar that would talk me through various programs, I had to turn around and deal with the other screen.

I interacted with people more than enough. I didn’t need a fake person to walk me through programming.

So I asked the screen in front of me about Dunyon and got this response back:

Which Dunyon?

Which Dunyon indeed? I had no idea. But I couldn’t tell an information kiosk that.

“Dunyon,” I repeated. “The one that’s far from here. And safe.”

You are the six hundredth person to enquire about that Dunyon on this station in the past week, the system informed me. I have no Dunyon that fits such parameters.

“How about a place called Dunyon within travel distance from this station?” I asked.

I have no Dunyon that fits those parameters either, the system informed me. You are asking questions in the same pattern as four-hundred-and-eighty other inquirers. Would you like the remaining questions and answers?

I didn’t like being told I was unoriginal, but I did appreciate the shortened workload. I told the system yes, and let it inform me that there was no place called Dunyon in the known universe, that there was no place with alternate spellings or pronunciations of Dunyon in the known universe, and no place called Dunyon on any shipping lanes.

“No place nicknamed Dunyon?” I asked.

No, the system told me, and then informed me that I was starting down a line of questioning that 365 people had followed. I got their results as well.

So far as we could tell—all of us who inquired on this system—Dunyon did not exist.

Then I remembered the system’s initial response to my very first question.

“When I inquired about Dunyon,” I said, “you asked me to clarify. You said, which Dunyon? Which implies that there are several Dunyons. What are they?”

Dunyon, the system responded. An ancient family of hereditary rulers on Uteelly. The family was assassinated several thousand years ago. Uteelly was destroyed in the latest wars, along with all cities and landmarks named after the family Dunyon.

I wondered if that was the source of my rumor and was about to ask when the system continued.

Dunyon, it said. A mythological city in the Koppae Sector. A place that may or may not have existed. Thought to be the perfect city. The hereditary family Dunyon of Uteelly claimed to be the only survivors of Dunyon, although this is unproven. There is no evidence that this Dunyon ever existed.

But it sounded like my Dunyon, the place far from here, the place that was safe. In these troubled times, “safe” was better than perfect or idyllically beautiful.

I frowned. There was a long silence, and I realized that the system had finished its recitation.

“When did you get your first query about Dunyon?” I asked.

Seven days ago.

“Did that query fit into any of the patterns of inquiry you mentioned before?”

No.

“What did that questioner want to know?” I asked.

Personal inquiries are protected information, the system said, rather primly it seemed to me.

“Did I ask any of the same questions as the original inquirer?” I asked.

No, the system said.

I felt frustrated. I couldn’t find out where this information had originated, but it had clearly originated here on this station one week before.

“Did I receive any of the same answers as the other questioner?” I asked.

No, the system said.

I thought for a moment. Then I tried one last question. “Has anyone thought they’ve found the lost city of Dunyon?”

Time parameters?

Time parameters? It took me a moment to understand that. “When did that Dunyon disappear?”

Sixteen centuries ago.

“Has anyone thought they’ve found the lost city of Dunyon in the past three hundred years?”

I chose the number 300 randomly. I could have chosen 500 or even the full sixteen hundred. But I wanted some inkling of what was happening recently.

Seventy-five explorers believed they found Dunyon. But they could not find it a second time.

I recognized this myth. It had existed throughout human history. The vanishing city. The perfect city that you could only visit once.

“Has anyone found the lost city of Dunyon in the past fifty years?”

Lucas Ennelly found the lost city of Dunyon fifteen years ago.

“Where is Lucas Ennelly now?” I asked.

I got the red screen. Lucas Ennelly was no longer viable. Even though I expected something like that, I still felt discouraged. I could understand why most people fled the kiosk upon getting such news.

“When did Lucas Ennelly die?” I asked.

Eight days ago, the system told me.

My stomach clenched. I was on to something.

“Where?” I asked, even though I had a hunch I knew.

In a bar on this station, the system told me.

“Which bar?” I asked. I knew what the system would tell me. I really didn’t have to wait for the words, although I did.

My bar. Lucas Ennelly died in my bar, eight days ago.

The day before the woman arrived, asking about Dunyon.

***

People die in my bar all the time. That’s part of the new reality. No one has the money to do simple things, like eat properly or see doctors when they get ill. The pens are breeding grounds for all kinds of viruses, and no one is allowed to leave if they’re sick.

But that doesn’t always stop people. Nor do they benefit from the constant stress and worry. Heart attacks, once thought to be eradicated, are common now, along with strokes. Experts are saying that it is the stress which kills, but I think it’s a broken heart.

Lucas Ennelly passed out at the bar, not far from where that woman sat. By the time we realized he wasn’t a passed-out drunk, it was too late. He had stopped breathing an hour before.

I’m not held liable for such things, just like I’m not held liable for the attacks and the attempted murders that go on just outside. People have become hostile. They drink too much and get too angry.

I’m always happy when they pass out. I prefer to let them rest there, since God knows, they probably don’t get rest anywhere else.

Jake contacted authorities when we realized Ennelly was dead. One of the station’s six coroners eventually removed the body, and—I’m sorry to say—that was the last thought we had given him, if we had given him one before that.

I was giving him a lot of thought now. I had the system tell me all it could about Lucas Ennelly. Turned out he was taking funds from people—the money the woman had quoted to us—for safe passage to Dunyon. He had already made a down payment on a retrofitted generation ship. He was going to take everyone to a place he had only seen once.

And they were willing to believe him. I left the kiosk, and reported his scheme to the authorities. If things went well, they might find some of Ennelly’s funds and return them to the poor unsuspecting souls who had invested so much for escape to a mythical realm.

If things went the way they normally did, some low-grade bureaucrat would find the money, pocket it, and claim that Ennelly had spent it all.

I couldn’t worry about it.

I had to figure out how to keep Ennelly’s clients from coming to my bar.

I walked back. I didn’t usually have time off during the day and it was an odd treat to see people in the corridors, to see the full restaurants, and the back-and-forth of commerce, even if it was conducted furtively and with great desperation.

By the time I got back to my exclusive neighborhood, I was relieved. I was tired of the crowds, the grasping, the clawing, the questioning looks from faces shoved against mine. I had gotten used to the late night silence as well as the order I kept inside my own bar.

I preferred it.

I wasn’t going to get it, however.

Because as I got close, I heard shouting. Then I saw dozens and dozens of people, pressing against the bar’s entrance. A mob, screaming, pulling, punching. The windows looking into the corridor were already broken and people were pouring inside.

I had never seen such chaos at my place—or even in this neighborhood. I grabbed one man and pulled him back.

“What’s going on?”

“Free tickets to Dunyon to the first five hundred people!” he yelled back, then pulled away from me.

I stood there, breathless, as more and more people hurried toward my bar. None were well dressed. They all smelled like sweat and unwashed clothes.

People from the pens, running toward free tickets.

I scrambled away, heading to the side of the bar. The employee entrance was hidden. Only an employee’s DNA made it visible, and no one else’s. I made sure I wasn’t followed before I touched the wall, which opened for me, and let me slide inside.

Inside wasn’t much better. People crowded the main room. The images behind the bar were shut off, and it took me a moment to realize why. Someone had broken the screen. Bright light shone from it onto the floor above.

Jake was standing behind the bar, protecting the expensive liquors with some kind of unauthorized weapon. The cocktail waitress who had helped me was keeping people back with the broken edge of a bottle.

I didn’t see any other employees, but I glanced up. The doors to the back rooms were closed and locked. Someone had the presence of mind to seal off the entertainment area and the high stakes poker room.

The noise was deafening. I pressed the emergency call button beside the employee entrance and got a green light, which meant help was on the way.

Although I wasn’t sure what the authorities could do, except stun the rioters and maybe hurt regular patrons inside my bar.

I pushed my way to the bar proper, then climbed on top of it. I waved my hands, but nothing happened.

So I shouted, “I’m the owner of this bar!”

The people in front of me stopped yelling and pushing.

I shouted the same thing again, and again, until the entire room was quiet.

Now I had to tell them something. I could have said the authorities were coming and they would all be arrested, but that probably wouldn’t counteract the concept of a free ticket.

I had to be creative.

I had to let them think they were getting what they wanted.

“Thank you all for coming,” I said, hoping I sounded sincere. “It’s been a great promotion. Lucas Ennelly gave us tickets to Dunyon and I’m proud to tell you that we have just given the last one away. Congratulations to all the winners!”

I clapped my hands, as if I were congratulating someone. Jack watched me for a minute as if I had lost my mind, then he started clapping too. The cocktail waitress slapped one hand against the neck of the broken bottle.

A few confused people up front peered at me, but people behind them started to clap. And so did everyone else.

They were so used to losing, so used to being the ones who did not get the special treatment, that they weren’t angry when they realized the tickets they had come for were gone. They accepted the loss as one more in a series of losses. They pretended joy for my so-called winners, and then they slowly, calmly, filed out.

No one remained except Jake, the cocktail waitress, and one of our regulars, who had clung to his seat at the bar through it all.

“What the hell was that?” Jake asked.

“I know how the rumor started,” I said, and told him about Lucas Ennelly. “He really was selling tickets to Dunyon from this bar for a lot of money.”

“A scam,” the waitress said.

“Most likely,” I said. Then I shrugged. “But people who claimed they found the lost city of Dunyon always tried to go back. I think he was using these poor people to fund his trip.”

“I don’t get it,” Jake said. He set his weapon in a drawer behind the bar that I had forgotten about. “Why come in greater numbers after he died?”

“Two reasons I think,” I said. “First, people had bought tickets here. And second, deaths don’t get publicized on the station. No one knew he was dead.”

“So they thought he was holding out on them,” the cocktail waitress said.

I nodded. “Which only made them more desperate.”

I didn’t have to explain the rest to them. Because they live here and they know: Desperation leads to rumors and rumors become wild stories, and wild stories ignite belief. People are taking action on the smallest things, the most unlikely things, because they need something—anything—to cling to.

I’ve seen it countless times.

I just hadn’t experienced it myself.

Until then.

The authorities arrived too late to do anything. We were already sweeping up the mess, replacing the broken tables with others from our back rooms, and scrambling to find more chairs.

I didn’t even file a complaint because who was there to complain against? God? The universe? The random unfairness of the conflicts we all found ourselves in?

So I had some damage and I lost some money. I consider myself one of the lucky ones.

 I have a place. I am here on purpose, not because I have nowhere else to go.

Unlike most of the people outside my doors, I am not desperate.

Not yet.

Although I feel the press of humanity with the arrival of each new ship filled with refugees, as the pens grow bigger and the crowds more unruly.

At some point, there won’t be incidents any more, sparked by rumors, fed by hopelessness.

At some point, it really will be us against them.

And we will lose.

Because there are too many of them, desperate and terrified. And there are too few of us, pretending that civilization will go on.

Even when there is no real civilization left.

Dunyon

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Starblue/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of !ction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are !ctional, 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.

Any use of this publication to train generative arti!cial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

My class ended on Wednesday with a surprise A+ on a quiz I hadn’t studied for. That was lovely. A bunch of other things happened these past few weeks, all good, which I really can’t share except to say that they were marvelous. And Dean Wesley Smith and I celebrated our 40th anniversary on Monday. I’m astonished at that. It seems like I just met him a year or so ago. Amazing how time flies…

Anyway, with school ending and a bunch of other things closing down, it feels like summer has started. The end of the school year has always felt like a beginning to me anyway, as the daughter of a professor. I love school (which is why I take the occasional class at UNLV) and I love having school end.

Oh! And basketball season has started just this weekend, even though my Aces allowed themselves to suffer a tragic defeat yesterday.

My summer includes a lot of book design, some learning on a video program, and several writing-adjacent projects. I looked at that, then looked at myself, and realized, Uh,oh. Distract-o Girl will not get much writing done unless she plans really well.

I have learned over the last few years that without firm deadlines from the outside, I need something to get me in the chair first thing. Challenges work, especially when I have a lot of other distractions. (In the past three years, they were mostly bad distractions; now they’re mostly good ones.)

So, I’m in need of a challenge. When I’m in need of an exterior challenge, I set one up. I talked to Dean about it, and it seems that he needs one too. Plus we need to focus on the writing first again, which means we need to do some motivational things. When we get like this, we want to share.

Rather than have me explain it all, I’m going to copy Dean’s blog from Thursday night. (Note that the “I” in the italicized section below is actually Dean.)

Kris and I have challenges available that anyone can sign into, and we have done some focused seminars over the last year or so. They were great fun and the challenges are open to anyone at any time, to start at any time.

The Super Great Challenges run for an entire year from the moment you start. And making it work not only gets you a bunch of stuff written and published, but a subscription award to Teachable.

So I got a couple questions on what people got at the end of this challenge (that Kris has proposed)? Answer… a lot of stuff written through the summer. But the seminar part of this is the key. Taking the seminars in the past, you got knowledge, no award. This is a challenge mixed with a seminar.

So for 14 weeks you get two motivation videos from me and Kris every week. 28 motivation videos over the summer and then also three webinars focusing on motivation. That is the award for joining into this challenge and focusing on your own writing.

This idea came about because Kris was looking for something to help her stay focused on her writing this summer. Really, really focused. And a couple years ago, some challenges she had offered had really helped her. But this summer she tells me she is working on a really difficult project and wants to stay ultra-focused for three months.

Okay? She is normally frighteningly focused, so this could get interesting…

So we got talking about offering a challenge through this time of great forgetting, but then decided that we could also add a couple of motivation videos every week. We would plan them together, I would record them. Videos to help anyone signed up keep writing and publishing through this time of great forgetting.

And then we will add in a monthly webinar, three of them during the time of the challenge, making it into a strange form of seminar.

Start May 18th and end August 16th.

This is not a challenge against Kris.

You are only challenging yourself, and getting weekly motivation videos and a monthly webinar. At the start you will tell us how many FICTION words you plan to write per week and then report in every Monday. We suggest you keep the amount low because if you miss a week, if you want to continue with the videos and webinars, you have to buy back in for half price. Or just let the time of great forgetting win.

Your report does not have to be about your week, just the number of fiction words you wrote and maybe how far above your challenge number you were.

And Kris will tell you her goal and every week Kris will talk about her progress and how she is doing to those in the seminar. (That alone will be a major learning experience.)

So you get to challenge yourself, get weekly motivation videos, monthly webinar, and watch how Kris is doing up close every week. Three months of progress for yourself and staying focused through the time of great forgetting. All wins and great fun!!

SUMMARY OF THE BASICS

1… Three months long, starting May 18th, ending August 16th.

2… You must send us before we start the amount of fiction words you want to write EVERY week during those three months. (Keep the total low, but not under 250 words per day, 1,750 words per week is minimum.) Goal starts over every week, not cumulative.

3… Original Fiction Only… No nonfiction or rewrites. ANY GENRE IS FINE.

4… LIMITED to 25 writers.

5… $300 price but $250 early bird sign-up until May 10th late. (THAT IS THIS COMING SUNDAY!!)

6… If you miss on a week, you can jump back in for $150.00

7… No subscriptions or credits on this because for this to work you must have skin in the game (Write me if you want me to explain why that works.)

8… To sign up, send the $250 fee to PayPal to the email address dean@wmgpublishingstore.com

I will get you on the list. Again limited to the first 25 writers signing up. Webinars will be recorded in case you can’t make it on a month.

This is going to be great fun and even though I am focused on the publishing side totally, I might jump into this as well, start ramping back up my writing, and report my progress to everyone.

Questions, write me at Dean (dot) WMG workshops @ gmail 

Now…Kris again. I hope you all join me on this—or at least a few of you will. We would like the videos and the webinar to keep us motivated as well.

Let’s have a productive summer…together.

This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to head over to Storybundle  to pick up a copy, along with ebooks by Darcy Pattison, Douglas Smith, Ron Collins, Tracy Cooper-Posey and others.

Everything in this Storybundle is exclusive, including The Write Attitude. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. The bundle will end in 9 days, so hurry on over. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites starting next month. The new edition will release in July.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post appeared on my Patreon page in November of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

SOUNDING LIKE YOURSELF

From 2025

In a Billboard article about Addison Rae, I came across a useful Miles Davis quote. (Billboard, August 13, 2025.) She cited the quote this way:

Sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.

Wow. That hit home. But before I used it to base a blog post on, I looked it up. I was worried that it really wasn’t a Miles Davis quote or that it was a misquote (although it didn’t sound like one). What I found was that there are two versions of this quote, which leads me to believe that the jazz great remarked on this a lot.

The other version of the quote says:

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

And I think I like that one better, although both quotes are useful. For those of you who don’t know who Miles Davis was, he was one of the most influential musicians of the mid-twentieth century. He is definitely one of the most influential jazz musicians of all time.

If you are not familiar with him or his work, start at his website, milesdavis.com, and scan outward. You are probably familiar with a lot of his music, particularly if you’re a jazz fan.

The reason I like both quotes is that they have at least two different meanings, three if you think of them from the point of view of a prose writer.

The first quote: It takes a long time to sound like yourself.

That’s all about voice. Yes, Miles Davis, Addison Rae, and vocal coach Eric Vetro (who first showed Rae the quote) were talking about a musical voice—about sounding like no one else by channeling your own inner vision.

Which is what the best writers do. (That’s why the worst copy editors aren’t the ones who introduce mistakes; they’re the ones who put some writer’s manuscript into “perfect” grammar, ruining their voice.) If you listen to Stephen King reading his own work, his inflections and pauses are not surprising because he knows how to write them into the prose. (His accent or the tone of his voice might surprise you, but nothing more than that.)

Stephen King, former English teacher, found his own voice as a young boy and then learned how to transmit that voice, via the tool of a manuscript, into the brain of a reader. What he does is an extremely difficult skill, and one I aspire to. That’s why I typed Mick Herron’s work into my computer a while back (see the previous chapter), so that I could learn how someone else did things.

The more tools you have in the toolbox, the better writer you will be.

If you don’t read much fiction or you don’t read much fiction anymore, as so many writers say, then you’ve stopped accumulating tools. As long as I breathe, I will be reading. And the fascinating part to me is that I see writers do things that I thought were impossible or things I’ve never thought of. Or, Mick Herron’s case, he does things that someone, somewhere, decades ago, had warned me away from. (The opening to each Slough House book is an astonishing exercise in setting the stage as well as the characters and the themes of each book.)

Here’s the tough part. Once you sound like yourself, your writing will seem bland to you. Because you live with that voice in your head each and every day.

So that’s the voice part.

That’s the first part of sounding like yourself.

The second part is this: You must defend your voice, your “sound.” Sure, it might be “wrong” to use a dozen semi-colons in a single paragraph, but Herron does it to such great effect (sometimes in a single sentence) that the reader doesn’t notice them.

I didn’t realize the man uses a million semi-colons until I typed in his work. I’m semi-colon lite, dash heavy, which, I thought, made me a much more breathless writer than he is, but his work continually proves me wrong.

I’m sure some silly copy editor somewhere tried, once upon a time, to edit out all of his semi-colons and to make his honkin’ long single-sentence paragraphs into many sentences, and from what I can tell, the man slapped them down.

There’s another component to voice, though, and it has nothing to do with words and grammar and punctuation. It’s subject matter. It’s characterization. It’s something I discussed after the Herron piece. It’s the ability to “go there,” wherever there is. (See chapter 10.) To write the stuff that frightens us, that makes us original, that might get us in trouble with the readers or in some cases, the government.

It’s the stuff that doesn’t fall into genre lines.

I was having a discussion a few weeks back with someone I was considering working with on a future project. That person insisted we use trope charts, like so many writers have started to do in Kickstarters.

Tropes are well and good, if used sparingly. As a romance reader, I want to see—either from the sales copy or from a trope listing—that the book in my hand uses the enemies-to-lovers trope or is a small-town romance. I want to avoid a guardian-ward historical trope because…yucky!

So a one-line description or acknowledgement of the trope is a good thing, especially in books where the ending is prescribed, like a romance (happily ever after) or a cozy mystery (amateur solves a stakes-free murder).

But other than that—a tropes chart? You might as well put two gigantic signs on your work. The first sign says, Read something else because this book is on rails. The second sign says, This book is mediocre. There are no surprises here. There’s a third sign, but only if someone dares to crack open a book based on a tropes chart. And that sign says This writer has no idea what tropes are. The ones listed here are not in the book.

Whoops.

Writers who sound like themselves can’t write books that can be boiled down into a tropes chart. Sure, the overall trope might work because that might form the heart of the book. (I’m thinking of enemies to lovers here in a romance trope.) But going beyond that would harm the reading experience if the writer is writing from their heart.

That’s why writers who are really good at sounding like themselves often have trouble selling their fiction to set markets, particularly traditional markets. Those markets want something they can sell, and a book that’s on rails is easier to market to a consumer than a book that is, at its core, like nothing a reader has ever seen before.

That’s why this quote comes from Miles Davis. His website has this sentence on the home page:

Miles Davis made music that grew from an uncanny talent to hear the future and a headstrong desire to play it.

Note the phrases here. “Uncanny talent.” In other words, he did things no one else dared. “Hear the future.” I might disagree with that one on some level, because on that level, Davis invented the future that his website claimed he heard. And, the most important phrase, “a headstrong desire to play it.”

Later this little biographical snippet points out that Davis never stopped fighting for his art. That’s my memory of him. He wasn’t as respected in his lifetime as he became later, even though no one dared argue with the impact he was having. I worked in listener-sponsored radio in Wisconsin and was immersed in jazz. We could play all kinds of jazz for our listeners and they supported the programming with their dollars.

The other local jazz station was much more conservative. They played traditional melodic jazz, things we call standards now, and would go to modern jazz after 10 p.m. when most Midwesterners went to bed. Even then, you wouldn’t find a lot of Miles Davis on that station. The powers that be loathed his work.

I think that’s the other side of this. You have to become good enough to force people to have opinions about your work. “Having opinions” means they’ll love it or they’ll hate it. What is most important, though, is that they won’t forget it.

These mediocre, “properly written” works? The ones with the voice edited out of them, with the vision troped to death? Those will be forgotten the moment that the reader closes the book.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to be accused of being mediocre. Love or hate my work, that’s up to the reader. But finding it dull or predictable…well, then, I’ve done something wrong.

The second quote from Miles Davis is my favorite. I think it might more accurately reflect what he’s getting at, especially if you’re familiar with his music.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Yeah, I know. He’s talking about playing music, often onstage. He was the master of improvisation, but even in the improvisation, the listener knew they were listening to Miles Davis. His perspective was that original.

But what I love here is the word “play.” I love watching jazz musicians in particular improvise. Somewhere in the middle of what they’re doing, they’ll grin at each other. They’re having fun. They’re creating something new, something unexpected, and it gives them joy.

This type of musicianship is why I don’t miss a Keith Urban residency when he’s in Las Vegas. He performs intensely and playfully, goofing around much more than other residency performers I’ve seen. I wasn’t a big fan (or much of a fan at all) when I first saw him perform, and now I go to watch the playful musicianship.

Writers need to play as well. We need to experiment. We need to risk failure. We need to jangle some chords, try a different instrument, and go far, far, far off the beaten path.

That means we’ll miss sometimes, but it also means that when we hit, the work will be powerful.

When I talk about play, I’m not saying that writers should only write something light and “fun.” Instead, I’m talking about experimentation, about risking everything, about free-floating ideas from our own subconscious even if those ideas make us feel uncomfortable.

We should also go for different formats and different genres, different lengths and different ideas than we’ve explored before. We might not be onstage riffing with our friends, but we should write in that same spirit of improvisational play.

We need to be uniquely ourselves as writers. And as Miles Davis said (and yes, he wrote his own stuff), it takes a long time to achieve that.

But finding yourself as a writer? That’s worth the time spent.

“Sounding Like Yourself” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with short video. Sometimes I add audio, but every now and then I do something that’s imagery and text. I’ve done that here, with the video I did for Dean Wesley Smith’s current Kickstarter campaign.  There was simply too much information to cram into a talky video, so I didn’t. I let images do the work.

If you like what you see here, head over to the campaign. You’ll find it here.

You know what? Even if you don’t like the video, head over to the campaign. There’s lots to love in it.

Enjoy!

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Five-Science-Fiction-Collections-high-quality.mp4

Santa Cruz right after the 1989 earthquake. Broken concrete, broken dreams. One woman uses time slips to escape that moment only to find herself in a tangle of family. She needs a solution that will survive…long after she does.

“Perennials” is free on this website for one week only. You can get your own copy in ebook on every e-retailer or go to WMGbooks.com.

 

Perennials Kristine Kathryn Rusch

1989

IN REAL TIME the destruction looks different. I stand at the edge of the Pacific Garden Mall and see flat concrete, large holes surrounded by wire fences, a few shored-up buildings, and innumerable parking lots.

Last summer, eucalyptus trees covered the mall. Buildings—a few that had survived the ’06 quake—lined the streets. Street musicians hung out on corners; bicyclists and pedestrians filled the sidewalks. The place had the kind of life that too few cities experience.

I had always loved that life. To me, it was the heart of Santa Cruz.

I don’t like real time. As I stand here, hands in the pockets of my windbreaker, staring at the remains of the destruction, I see the city as a newcomer would see it: a broken, deserted downtown, like so many other downtowns in so many other places. Newcomers would think that Santa Cruz has charm anyway. The Boardwalk, with its famous roller coaster and sea view, still stands. Shops dominate the pier. Funky older houses line tree-covered, winding streets. There are only a few of us who know, a few of us who remember, and we will never forget.

When I was a little girl, my grandmother’s house smelled of peppermint. I loved the kitchen. Light streamed in from two windows and the screen door. Grandma’s collection of saltshakers lined one window like a curtain. On the counter, chocolate cake with marshmallow frosting cooled. The cookie jar waited on top of the refrigerator for that special moment during the day when Grandma would reward us for being ourselves.

In her bedroom the portraits hung: Grandma’s mother in 1886, at twenty-six a foreboding woman with dark eyes; Grandma’s entire family around 1910, arranged from tallest to shortest, Great-aunt Ruth (always the gregarious one) with a bow the size of a Stetson hat tied in her hair; Grandma, Grandpa, my father, and Aunt Mary in her forties—Grandma looking the same, shoulders back, gaze straightforward and proud; Grandpa smiling, his hair nearly gone, hand holding his only daughter’s; Aunt Mary looking young and happy; and my father, wearing black-rimmed glasses, his body still young-man trim, and his hairline receding like his father’s, with an impish grin that I had seen only when he played cards. I used to lie on Grandma’s bed and stare at the pictures as I tried to conjure the family ghosts. No haunting ever came—no shaking chains, no eerie voices. But some of the pictures seemed alive. On those nights when I slept on the cot at the foot of Grandma’s bed, I would wake to whisperings that I attributed to my great-grandmother and my grandfather, both of whom died shortly before I was born. The whisperings were always too faint to hear, but I felt the love in them, just as I felt the love in my grandmother’s gaze.

***

I take my car from the mall to the Boardwalk. The drive is familiar, except for the cracked windows, the fallen signs. The road itself has lost its smoothness, and the car rocks in the ruts. I keep the radio off, listening instead to the whoosh of other cars as they pass, the honking horns, the occasional shouts of pedestrians as they walk down the twisting streets.

The morning looks no different than any other, even though it should. I know that if I turn down the right street, I’ll find my tiny one-room apartment, filled with books and newspapers, an overlarge stereo, and a sofa bed; a place that’s less of a haven than somewhere to sleep. I clerk at the local grocery store and put most of my money into a savings account that I never touch. My grandmother and I share a social life with each other—made up of each other—which she said is normal for a woman of ninety-five, but not for a woman of thirty. She would tell me I need to live in my present and work for my future, and I would always laugh and tell her life is easier in the past.

The Boardwalk looms, a barrier against the sea. The view is both dated and modern: the old wooden roller coaster dominates the skyline, making the newer flume ride and the Giant Dipper seem cheap and brassy. I park my car in the empty parking lot and walk to the gate. Someone has locked it and placed a CLOSED sign against the metal bars. Through the doors past the concession stands and shored-up rides, the ocean whispers against the beach. The air smells of sea salt and fresh wind instead of cotton candy and corn dogs. My hands sink deeper into my pockets, and the nylon strains against my knuckles.

On hot summer days, the parking lot was full, and cars circled the street like hungry cats. I walk back to my car, alone in a place that I never believed could be lonely. I pull the car door open and stand for a moment before crawling inside. Across the street a cyclone fence surrounds an empty field. Scraggles of winter grass cover the choppy earth. Something sat there, something I should remember. My mind yields up no images, no pictures of the spot, though I had once gone by it daily. I get into the car, close the door, and huddle against the steering wheel. One tiny fragment gone—dispersed by the sands of time.

***

On the day my Aunt Esther died, I arrived home from school to find my mother scrubbing the kitchen floor. Dirt streaked her face, except for the places where hours-dried tears had cleaned the skin. I touched her shoulder, and she shook me away.

“Get off my floor.” Her voice was harsh and raw. I had never heard its peculiar edge before.

I stood for a moment, wanting to ask details—the school counselor had told me only that my aunt, my mother’s favorite sister, was dead—wanting to hold my mother, to comfort her, to share the pain. Instead, I walked across the clean linoleum into the living room and sat on a transplanted kitchen chair in the growing twilight until my father came home.

He made us dinner on the well-scrubbed stove, and then he put my mother to bed. I huddled under one of my grandmother’s afghans on the couch and listened to my father’s voice drone as he made the arrangements by phone. When he finally came into the living room, looking smaller than I had ever seen him, his balding head shining in the lamplight, I asked, “What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to remember her,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”

***

The empty field mocks me. I can see nothing but the diamond wires of the cyclone fence, the clumps of dirt, the shades of ancient footprints. If I go back six months, I will see it. I will know.

I reach for a time slip, feel its power hum against my fingertips, but as I try to grasp the rim, the slip scuttles away, and I remain in real time, clutching the steering wheel of a twenty-year-old car, a car I’ve owned for only half a day.

Somewhere I will find a place that hasn’t changed, a place where the past, present, and future have fused, a place that is safe.

I turn the key in the ignition, and the car hums into life. As I pull out of the parking lot, a dozen other cars appear from nowhere. Perhaps we all are searching for the same thing.

***

Four days after my aunt’s funeral, I found my first time slip. I lay on my bed in the upstairs of the creaky old Victorian house my mother had just cleaned top to bottom. I was almost asleep, when a light-filled slit like that of a half-opened door appeared in the air before me. I had seen those slits before, several dozen times in my young life. When I was four, the night my sister (who was my mother surrogate) married, hundreds of light slits appeared in my room. I cowered against the wall and screamed for help. No help came. My parents, too drunk from the wedding, slept through all my cries. Finally the lights faded, and I thought the lights were dream visions that passed into my waking hours.

That night, though, I knew I wasn’t asleep. Another slit appeared, and another, until they surrounded me, and their light felt like a hug. No one had hugged me since my aunt died. No one had said more than three sentences to me in all that time—except my grandmother, who tried to comfort me by phone from her home six hundred miles away.

I reached out, perhaps to hug back, perhaps just to touch, when I felt something hum against my fingertips. I stuck my hand inside the nearest light, and felt a solid edge. I grabbed the edge, pulled a little—

And found myself in my Aunt Esther’s dining room. The room smelled of cigarettes, roast beef, and fresh bread. Bottles of alcohol covered the bureau, and half a dozen people sat around the table. The chandelier sent a crystal light across the room. It took a moment to recognize the man at the head of the table as my uncle. He was too slim, his hair too dark. My parents sat on one side, my mother’s hair long and black and coiled around her scalp, my father looking like the picture in Grandma’s bedroom. Aunt Esther came out of the kitchen, carrying one of her good serving bowls filled with broccoli in cheese sauce. She was beautiful: her face unlined, her eyes wide and dark. Her hair, cut in its usual marcel, didn’t seem dated, but looked appropriate somehow. She set the bowl down, and the woman across the table—not my mother, but someone else I vaguely recognized—stubbed out a cigarette. My uncle carved the roast beef, while my father picked up the bowl filled with mashed potatoes and plopped a spoonful on his plate. My mother took the bowl from him and looked at Aunt Esther.

I walked to the table and took a little piece of meat. It was good and hot. I hadn’t had Esther’s cooking since my uncle died.

“All this food,” Mother said. “We should say grace.”

“Father would have said grace.” Aunt Esther’s voice was smoother, less rough than I remembered it, as if the years of cigarettes and alcohol hadn’t touched it yet. “But I figure we earned it—why should we eat it after it gets cold?”

“Esther.” My uncle placed a slab of roast beef on his own plate. He didn’t look up, but I could hear the caution in his tone. I touched his shoulder, hoping he would pull his chair back, but he didn’t notice me.

Esther took a sip from the drink beside her ashtray. “I don’t have to do everything my father taught me. He’s been dead for twenty years. And if he were here, he wouldn’t be thankful for the food. He would yell at me for all the paint I wear, the booze I drink, and the things I say.”

“You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” my mother said softly.

“See what I mean?” Esther said. “She was only four when he died, and she can mimic his voice perfectly. Some people always haunt you.”

The scene faded. I reached for my uncle, but found myself grabbing my own bedspread, the smell of roast beef and cigarettes still lingering in my nostrils. I hugged my pillow and waited until dawn for the lights to return. They didn’t, and I fell into an uneasy sleep.

***

I have driven along the ocean for over an hour. Finally I pull into an empty turnout at the edge of a cliff and get out of my car. The wind is cold here, the ocean rough and gray. Waves break against the rocks below me. Off in the distance, heavy, dark clouds threaten a major winter storm.

The ocean is here, ever present, ever changing, never reassuring. I reach for a time slip, and can’t even find one, shivering as a chill runs up my back. Used to be I could slip anywhere, anytime. I would close my eyes and reach until I felt the hum. Then I would grab a corner and pull myself into another world.

My grandmother would say it was as if I had disappeared from my eyes. She never knew where I went, and I would never know where I was going, only that I would find somewhere better than I was. She hated it when I was gone. But the time slips never lasted long. I would get a brief glimpse and then come back to the present. I saw bits of my parents’ lives, bits of wars, bits of places I would never see again. When I went through high school, the lights faded, but the hums remained. I learned to control the slips, to go anywhere I wanted. And often I would end up in Santa Cruz, on the Boardwalk or in the mall, places where time had a special essence, an added dimension of warmth.

Sea droplets splash my face. I draw my windbreaker closer. This is a place I would have visited in a slip, but it feels wrong in real time. Less powerful, less potent. If I were able to slip now, I would return to my grandmother’s house, steal a fingerful of marshmallow frosting, and lie on her bed, staring at the photos. I would listen to the whispers, the haunting, and if I heard my grandmother’s step, slow and sure across her linoleum, I would run to the kitchen, hug her, and never let her go.

Some of the water drops running down my face are warm. I wipe my cheeks, irritated at the moisture, and turn my back on the sea. It is not home, it is not safe, and it has no warmth.

***

Last week the phone woke me out of a sound sleep. Grandma was in the emergency room, bleeding from countless ulcers in her ninety-five-year-old stomach. She was screaming for me, they said. Even if she hadn’t been, I still would have rushed to the hospital.

The hospital had a Sunday-morning quiet. The walls were painted forest green, and the plush carpet absorbed all sound. I hurried to the emergency wing, and they ushered me to a back room. My grandmother lay on a bed, held down by a doctor and three nurses. Her gray hair was matted around her face; her watery blue eyes were wide with fright. When she saw me, she murmured, “Thank God. Thank God.”

“You’re her granddaughter?” the doctor asked. He was my age, but his frustration made him seem younger. “We need to put some tubes down her to pump the blood from her stomach. But she won’t let us.”

The tubes went through the nostrils. I remembered my mother hooked up like that in the years before the alcohol finally killed her.

Grandma grabbed my hand. She squeezed so tight that I knew I would bruise. “They’re hurting me,” she said.

“They have to hurt you to help you,” I said.

“Will you stay while we try again?” the doctor asked. “Maybe she’ll be calmer around you.”

I nodded. They brought the tubes to her nose, and Grandma screamed and thrashed. I put my hands on her shoulders, held her head in place, and she stopped moving. All the while they worked, she watched me, staring into my eyes as if my presence gave her strength. Finally everything was in place, the suction began working, and the tubes turned black with her blood.

The doctor thanked me and took the nurses outside. Grandma closed her eyes and sighed once. I reached for a time slip, a short moment somewhere better, when her grip tightened on my hand.

“Stay.” Her voice was wispy, a little girl’s.

“I’m right here,” I said.

“No.” She shook her head once. I brushed the hair from her forehead. “Stay in your eyes. You aren’t living when you’re running away.”

I pulled over a chair and sat down, never letting go of her hand. For that entire week, I stayed. But she didn’t.

This morning she left.

***

I’m back on the mall, staring at the empty spots, the holes, the missing pieces. I can’t slip away anymore, can’t run to some better spot in someone else’s life. In my week’s stay, the ability to slip left me. I ramble through this broken place, where pieces of the past have shattered like concrete against the force of the earth, and I know that parts have already left my memory—perhaps to form other time slips that other children can run away to.

I guess, Grandma would say, it is time to start living in the present and planning for the future.

I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

Beside me on the cyclone fence, a work permit flutters in the breeze. Across the street, enterprising merchants have set up large tents filled with heat and light and merchandise. I walk over there, away from the demolished Cooper House, the shored-up western facades, the buildings of handmade brick that had survived the ’06 quake and had died in this one. A little bit of history passed on. A life spanning nearly a century, punctuated by two quakes and, in the end, some lingering pain.

A woman sells plants outside the nearest tent. She sits next to the tent wall, clutching a steaming paper cup, and watches me. I glance at the plants, little shoots in green plastic pots, and I know that she is here, hoping that people will plant for spring.

“I want some flowers.” My voice cracks as if I never use it. “Perennials.”

She shows me more shoots in more green plastic pots. I buy six that bloom in different light and temperature. Flowers for my grandmother’s grave, always and forever. Always changing, always there. One small way—my only way—to control a bit of time…

And to keep it warm.

 

Copyright Information

Perennials

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © by WMG Publishing Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © blinkblink/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.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

I had a good reading month. Lots of fun things, although a couple of the novels read slowly. (Meaning I had to savor every word. Oh, woe is me!) I did finish a crappy mystery anthology. It was the one I was reading at UNLV during lunch, although a number of students ended up co-opting my lunch as the semester progressed. Lots of good discussions, very little reading. Not that it mattered. When I did get a chance to read, I was disappointed, so I’m not recommending that here.

Got introduced to some marvelous playwrights and some fascinating theater history as well. Also had to wrestle with more bad writer behavior from some of them. I’m going to include two, one amazing woman and a man with a difficult history. 

Fewer articles than usual. Maybe I just wasn’t in an article-recommending mood.

So here’s April’s reading. It’s quite a cornucopia.

 

April, 2026

Canfield, David, “Love The Sinner,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 11, 2026. This is an interview with Ryan Coogler, written before the Oscar ceremony. It’s worthwhile to see how one of the most creative artists in film approaches story, imposter syndrome, and business negotiations. He got an amazing deal from Warner Bros. last year. About it, The Hollywood Reporter says:

Driven by both the movie’s themes (Sinners) and the evolution of his own career, Coogler negotiated to have Warner Bros. return the rights to him 25 years after release — an uncommon, if hardly unprecedented, arrangement that nonetheless sparked endless debate about its merits both for him, despite his strong track record, and for an embattled Warner Bros.

And yet, he pulled it off. Ask and see what will happen. That’s the art of negotiation. Now, read the article.

Carter, Ally, Only The Good Spy Young, Little, Brown and Company, 2010. I continue to work my way through Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series, which takes place at a boarding house for spies. Things are getting real by this, Book 4. I found it a bit distressing, because no one trusted a character that had been set up as a good person earlier in the series. I truly did not know if the earlier impressions were correct. (Not giving spoilers here.) So the book is effective, and even though I read these late in the day, hoping not to stay up late, I ended up staying up late to finish. It’s a good series, but start with the first book.

Carter, Stephen L., The Emperor of Ocean Park, Vintage Contemporaries, 2002. I’ve been planning to read this novel for nearly 25 years. But the cover put me off—or something did. I’ve read other books of Carter’s and liked them. Then I picked up a later work, and saw a mention that it was tied to this one, and thought, “Okay, time to read this book first.”

I’m glad I did. It was a deliberately slow read. (John Grisham’s blurb calls it a legal thriller. Um, no. It’s a legal meanderer.) Mostly it’s a family saga, beautifully written, with characters so vivid they leap off the page. My favorite is our protagonist, Talbot Garland’s son, Bentley, who is only three. I’m guessing that Carter’s son was three at the time the book got written, because this three-year-old sings off the page–all the good and bad things about three-year-olds are here, delightfully so. The love that Talbot has for his son is the best thing about the book, which also shows that no matter how much you love your children, the way you live your life can have an unforeseen impact on them. Bentley makes it to the end, but that charming three-year-old eventually turns four in a different circumstance.

Circling around all of this is the ghost of Talbot’s father, a judge who was nominated to serve on (it seems) Reagan’s Supreme Court, until a scandal that happened in the middle of his hearings brought him down. Rather like Robert Bork, only if Bork had been Black, adding an entire racial component. The judge dies under what some believe to be mysterious circumstances and there’s quite a bit of drama around fake FBI agents and detectives and a university that seems…well…familiar.

The only problem I had with this book is that it felt normal. At the time it was published, it must have been shocking. A corrupt judge that close to the court? Murder? People being uncivil in government, lying about who they are? The book almost seems prescient.

I really, really enjoyed the time I spent with the book and miss visiting it now that I finished.

Grynbaum, Michael M., Empire of the Elite, Simon & Schuster, 2025. Well, I have two ugly covers on this list, and this is, by far, the ugliest. However, the book is fascinating. Empire of the Elite is the history of Condé Nast, from its start 100 years ago or so to now. If you’re a writer who has been at this for more than two decades, back when the New Yorker and Vanity Fair were actually important magazines, you might want to read this. Not just for the dishy (but sourced) gossip, but for the reason that you—a member of the Great Unwashed who did not hang out in rarified circles—could never succeed over the transom. Just the amount of money spent to maintain the illusion of taste and power is breathtaking, even in 2026 terms.

Dunno about the rest of you, but I’m thrilled that we do not live in this curated world any longer. Still, the book itself is quite the publishing education.

Johnson, Georgia Douglas, A Sunday Morning in The South, University of Illinois Press, 2024. Play written in 1924/25. Sadly, while I had heard of a number of writers from the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, I had never heard of Georgia Douglas Johnson. She was exceedingly influential, holding salons and working with younger writers. This play, which is one of her anti-lynching plays, is a gut-punching read. I’d love to see it performed. The book, which is not where I read the play (we got an excerpt from a different book), contains two states—a Black church version and a white church version. I do hope you read this, and when you do, realize that it was a contemporary play, not a historical one. She was dealing with a very real issue 100 years ago, and doing so powerfully.

The play is set in a family kitchen near a church. The music filters in as the grandmother cooks breakfast and talks with her grandchildren. The action is startling and much-too-true. The play’s characters are rich and her writing is amazing, so that you can visualize the show easily while reading the script.

Odets, Clifford, Waiting for Lefty, 1935. I couldn’t find an ebook version, so I linked to a Grove/Atlantic version from 1994. Another political play. Like A Sunday Morning in the South, this feels too on point for where we are in 2026. (Sigh) This is a play of a union meeting—written before Waiting for Godot. Lefty is a union leader who might authorize a strike vote against a taxi-cab company. While everyone waits, they talk about the reasons they need to be paid more.

The structure of the play caught me. Little vignettes in the middle have just as much power as the play overall. I’m still thinking about the format.

Odets himself is a controversial figure. He, along with Elia Kazan, named names in the 1950s blacklist era. There were reasons they did so in the way that they did, but it didn’t play well with the blacklisted authors. (Or others, for that matter.) As we were studying this, I kept thinking, Why do I know his name? so I looked him up after class and realized why I did. It’s fascinating to have the hindsight on a lot of these writers. We also dealt with Bertold Brecht this month, and wowza, was he a piece of work. Still thinking on all of this…

Schmitt, Preston, “How To Win A Nobel Prize,” specifically “Mr. & Mrs. Lederberg,” On Wisconsin, Winter, 2025. When the idiots in the Trump administration started cutting funding for universities (and continue to cut funding for science. Bastards.), most universities have found ways to fight back.The University of Wisconsin is using its alumni magazine to point out how significant the research is, was, and can be. On the was side of the equation is this article, about all the Nobels the university has won. Normally, I wouldn’t point this out, but there is a very sad middle to the entire thing. The only woman on the list, Esther Lederberg, did not win a Nobel. Her husband did in 1958 for work they did together. In fact, she’s the one who made the breakthrough discovery, not him. Take a look at this, please, and do what you can to make sure that things like this never happen again.

Score, Lucy, Mistakes Were Made, Bloom Books, 2026. I forgot that, when I preordered this, I ordered the Amazon special edition, planning to get the regular paperback later. I ended up with, bar none, one of the ugliest books I’ve ever seen. Click over and take a look. Whoever designed it apparently loved yellow. The book screams at you from across the room. I also forgot, until just now, that Lucy Score is an Amazon-exclusive ebook writer, and was picked up by Bloom Books for her paperbacks only. So I’m linking to Amazon so that you can get the ebook. Frustrating as hell.

The book arrived this month, just as I was thinking I needed something light. This is light and funny. Score can write situations that are completely unbelievable, but work. And her dialogue sparkles. There was one too many iterations of will-they-won’t-they, but I was committed. This, in theory, is about an agent who moves to a small town to deal with her one and only client. Yeah, that happens. So suspend your disbelief.

Some good stuff here about living with ADHD, about forgiveness, and about the way lives can be destroyed in a single moment. So behind the humor is some good, if tough, stuff.

 

Whenever things get rough, Roxanne escapes to other worlds. She possesses a talent that no one else believes exists. Except her granddaughter Marissa, who exhibits the same talent.

Roxanne wants to train Marissa to live with her talent, but the rest of the family wants to stop her. They fear Marissa will end up like Roxanne: difficult, unreachable, distant. Worse, they fear Marissa will not survive Roxanne’s training—or her love.

“Worlds Enough…And Time” is free on this site for one week only. If you just want a copy of this story, download it on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

Worlds Enough…And Time Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“Watch,” Marissa says.

She brings her small hand to her temple, then extends her arm. She tilts her head sideways, black curls falling against her neck, and stares at something I can’t see. Finally she twists her fingers ever so slightly, and a window opens in the sky.

It’s a tiny window, the size of a hand mirror, and it looks like a photograph floating on the summer breeze. The window blots out part of a birch tree, but not the lake beyond.

A floating miracle, adrift in a sea of air.

I crouch to Marissa height, barely over three feet, and stare into the window. All I can see are waves, like heat waves that appear on a highway on a sunny day.

Marissa giggles, clenches her fist, and the window disappears. All that remains are the birch trees, the dandelion fluff decorating the air, and the chill breeze off the lake.

The emptiness startles me.

My heart is pounding and my own fingers clench. I want to grab her, shake her, demand that she do it again.

Instead, I close my eyes, trying to control my own trembling. Marissa laughs, the sound farther away. She’s probably running off, but I don’t care.

Her father will find her. Bastard. He said nothing of this. He should have known how interested I’d be.

A son owes his mother. He always owes his mother.

And he should never forget that.

***

I was Marissa’s age when I first had the feeling, the sensation of worlds dividing, multiplying, changing around me. I had snuck into the attic. The air smelled of dust and mildew, the floor simple pine boards, the boxes slowly rotting in the summer damp.

My mother’s wedding dress hung in a metal wardrobe, the latch rusted open. I pulled the door, saw the white dress yellowing with age and inattention, the black cocktail gown beside it, and a blue silk evening gown with a plunging neckline and room for a bustle.

Only I didn’t know what a bustle was or a cocktail dress or an evening gown. I brushed against the blue silk, part of it trailing to the dirty metal floor of the wardrobe, and saw the dress as it had once been: hanging off a voluptuous woman, accenting her narrow waist, her high breasts, and adding to her already ample behind. The diamonds around her neck winked in the gaslight, and she smiled, her skin unlined and pale against the blackness of her hair. In the background, music played—a waltz—and couples twirled on a polished dance floor, none of the women as beautiful as the one before me, the one in the dress, the one who made the dress live.

She turned, saw me, eyes widening, and shrieked that my filthy hand was ruining her dress. Her skin, warm and soft, brushed mine, and dislodged my fingers.

Then she faded as if she had never been.

The dress hung in the wardrobe, forgotten against the black and the rusting wall.

My hand had fallen to my side, the skin still tingling from her touch.

I told my mother and she had laughed. “Miracles in the attic,” she said with enough contempt that even I, child that I was, realized she thought I made the entire thing up.

***

Darren slams open my kitchen door. He drags Marissa by the hand, pulls her inside, and takes her upstairs. I sip my coffee, warming my hands against the mug, and lean against the kitchen counter.

Outside, the breeze has become a gale. The birch trees sway and bend as if they are dancing to a music only they can hear. The sky has grown dark with an oncoming storm.

“Jesus, Mom,” Darren says from behind me. “She fell into the lake. She could’ve drowned.”

“She can swim.” I don’t turn around. I know Marissa can swim because I’m the one who took her to swimming lessons before she could walk. She would giggle and paddle toward me, dipping her head in the water like a baby seal.

“And if she’d been knocked unconscious? What then?”

Then she would have drowned. But I don’t say that.

“You were supposed to be watching her.” He steps into my line of sight, his face mottled with anger just like his father’s used to do.

“I did watch her.” My voice is amazingly level, considering how odd I feel. “I watched her create a hole in the sky.”

***

At four, you’re too young for theories. You simply know that things are not exactly what they seem.

I could never get the lady with the dress to come back. I visited the attic day after day, touched dress after dress and saw nothing except dust motes and the occasional moth.

But the air was alive up there, and I had a sensation that if I touched the right thing at the right moment, I could see worlds I hadn’t even imagined. Not just visages of the past, but possibilities of the future, permutations of the present, times that exist outside of ours.

In some of those places, my mother believed me, nurtured my talent, told me of hers. In most of those places, I believed the world was a much better, much friendlier place.

***

Darren takes Marissa home. The supervised visit is over. I am told I should not see her again.

I am left in my small house eighty miles from nowhere, one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes only yards from my front door. Nowadays, motorboats and airplanes break the stillness with startling regularity, but when I moved here more than thirty years ago, silence was the norm.

I needed silence to concentrate, the glitter of the sun on the lake water to focus, the sparkle of deep winter snow to catch and hold my eye.

Sometimes I could slip—find an already existing window and start to step through it, like I first did in my mother’s attic—but I could never create my own.

I learned that in 1970 when Darren’s father left me.

***

By then, the theory I couldn’t form at four had become a full-blown dissertation, complete with footnotes and bibliography. I saw each conversation as my orals—a chance to convince the people around me that we were in one timeline out of millions, each linked by events, separated by choices in response to those events, and tied to each other by a single touchable moment.

My theory had pieces of Alice’s Adventures through the Looking Glass mixed with some C.S. Lewis and twisted by a touch of Ray Bradbury.

Years later, I would add more pages—chaos theory, string theory, the theory of everything—as well as musings on time by scientists from Dirac to Einstein.

But those scientific principles were in the future. In 1970, I was exploring inner space, trying to expand my mind, thinking the adventure came from within, not from without. My guru was Timothy Leary, my expansion of choice LSD, my trips cosmic, significant, and oh so wrong.

It was a sign of the time that Darrell—Darren’s father—who couldn’t take my constant drug use, my discussions of the limitlessness of the universe, my willingness to sit at the feet of anyone who believed in the existence of alternate worlds left me alone, pregnant, and broke—and no one blamed him for what happened next.

They blamed me.

***

The shrink has her own theory. She still tells me about it, even though I heard it in court when Darren got the judgment against me, forbidding me to see my own granddaughter for more than two hours, and never ever unsupervised.

The shrink thinks I make up alternate worlds because I do not like this one.

No matter how many books I bring her, no matter how much my aunt testifies to the Talents within our family, the shrink persists in her belief.

“Roxanne,” she says to me when I complain about Darren’s hasty departure, “you have to face what you do. You cannot constantly escape to other worlds.”

What the shrink does not understand is that I did not escape that afternoon by the lake. I wanted to, but I couldn’t reach the window. I couldn’t even see what was inside.

I was there the entire time.

I was there, just like I was supposed to be.

***

There will be a new hearing. Some legal assistant arrives at my house with court papers. My son has decided to exclude me from my granddaughter’s life forever.

I hesitate before I call my attorney. I cannot sound hysterical. I cannot let him know what I will lose.

I walk through my small house, touch the antiques that have once opened the past for me and do no longer. The desk I found at a flea market outside of Boston, which took me to a dark gray afternoon with a filthy harbor out the window, and a man writing a letter with a quill pen. The letter began Dearest, She has learned of us. I must end—

Then he saw me, started, and the pen scrawled awkwardly along the page. He shouted, pushed, and I fell backwards, out of wonderland, and back to the flea market where a dozen people stared at me as if I had lost my mind.

By then, I knew: Only two trips are allowed through a window into another time—a trip there and a trip back. After that, the window closes.

Still, I buy the objects that open worlds for me: the desk; a book of poems written in Latin (once held by a sobbing priest who screamed when he saw me); a glass serving bowl that in a not-too-distant past had held salad and matching glass tongs (lost to time). The woman who had been mixing the salad in the bowl had seen me and smiled, thinking I was one of her guests, until she saw my attire—blue jeans, a Cal Tech sweatshirt, bare feet. Then she frowned and spoke to me in a language I did not understand. Someone nearby grabbed my arm and shoved me backwards—and that window closed, like all the others before them.

I can find windows—existing windows—but I cannot create them.

Not like Marissa.

Marissa, who holds universes in one tiny little hand.

***

Perhaps doctors are right. Perhaps newborns should not ingest mind-altering chemicals in their mother’s milk.

Over the phone, my mother called Darren’s screams colic, but when those screams didn’t end, the neighbors called the police. They took him away from me, claiming he was malnourished, claiming he was addicted, claiming he would be brain-damaged forever.

He programs computers now, graduated from the top of his class at Harvard, lives a mundane life with a wife who refuses to meet me and the most beautiful child in the world.

The doctors were wrong: he is not damaged. At least not visibly. But he has a paranoia I recognize from my hippie days, a tendency to believe the worst of everyone around him, a rebellion against authority that must have come through the milk as well.

That the authority he rebels against is me is something I have trouble dealing with. I freely admit that, even though the shrink believes I do not—I cannot—understand.

***

I remember the first time we met. He was eighteen. He had used his powerful mind to track me down.

I believe he remembered me from those first few months—inside that complex mind of his were images of me—and I had a hunch that he too had peered into alternate worlds and saw how happy we would have been if only I had done things right.

We had eight years. I was clean and pretending to be unimaginative. My visits to antique stores were infrequent and I tried to stay away from estate sales, garage sales, and public auctions so that I couldn’t touch the past.

I tried very hard to be normal, to hide my secret life.

We would talk about everything from politics to aliens, from the things we could touch to the things we could only imagine, to the importance of belief and the willingness all humans have to understand something beyond themselves.

We would talk, then.

And he would listen.

***

Finally, I call the lawyer.

He is my age, expensive, and world-weary, with a high tolerance for alternate lifestyles, even though he hasn’t lived one himself in nearly thirty-five years.

He takes my call: he has gotten the papers. He expected to hear from me.

I am slightly annoyed that he did not call first.

I sit on my screened-in porch and stare at the lake as we speak. Sunlight glitters on the water, making diamonds, making tiny untouchable windows that might—if we’re lucky—open alternate worlds.

Sometimes I am distracted, but my lawyer is used to that.

Today it seems to irritate him.

“I asked, Roxanne, if you were supposed to be keeping an eye on her,” he snaps, his voice metallic through the phone.

“The visits are supervised. I’m never the only one watching her.” I rock back in my chair, looking at the lake from a different angle.

The prisms of light flicker, but do not move.

“Don’t you remember the fight we had to get Marissa out to the lake house in the first place?” he asks. “Don’t you remember the discussion with the judge, your promise—in writing, Roxanne—that you would never take your eyes off her?”

“I blinked,” I say. A blink of an eye: the lid closes, then opens. It takes only a moment, or perhaps an entire night. The amount of time passing depends on your definition of time. If a moment is a blink of an eye, and a blink is the closing of the lids, followed by the opening of the lids, then I looked away for only a moment.

“It says here you left her.” I can hear papers rattling through the earpiece. “It says you went inside and made coffee.”

“Darren was already going to her. I knew she’d be fine.” Then I whisper: “She swims, you know.”

“I know.” He sounds so exasperated.

The swim classes convinced the first judge that I cared. I was the one who drove Marissa there, the one who held her in the water, the one who listened to her coach, swam with her, helped her learn to use those tiny limbs.

I was the only one thinking ahead—knowing, fearing, if she fell through a window into another world there was no guarantee she would land on ground. She might find herself a pond or a pool or a too-full tub. She might need to know how to hold her breath before she moved backwards, into the world she had just left.

Of course, I never explained it quite that way. Lawyers, judges, logical minds—they never entirely understand. So I said simply, convincingly, apparently, that swimming is a survival skill as important as walking and it’s always better for children to learn early, particularly if they’re going to be around lakes.

Back then, that had been a point for me.

“But that’s not the point now,” my lawyer says. “The point is that you should have gone after her. You should have saved her, not Darren. He sees it as one more sign of your growing irresponsibility.”

“I’m not irresponsible,” I say.

“Your granddaughter nearly drowns and you make coffee?”

“She didn’t nearly drown.” I have to struggle to keep my voice level. “She can swim.”

“I’m going to be honest with you, Roxanne,” he says to me, and I hate the tone. It is the same tone Darren uses with me now — an I-will-speak-slowly-because-you-will-never-understand tone. “You’ve blown this. Even if we do go back to court, the best you can hope for is supervised visits in a neutral place—like Social Services. You’ll never get to see her at your house, and certainly not at Darren’s. Maybe it’s best if you let Marissa go. Your record with children is poor. Wait until she’s an adult, like you did with Darren. Wait until the two of you can talk.”

I did not wait until Darren was an adult. He was taken from me, and no one would tell me where he went. He found me.

And for a brief time, I was his alternate world.

“No,” I say. “I have to see her.”

“Why, Roxanne?” he asks. “And don’t give me the grandmother-granddaughter crap. I don’t buy it. Other people aren’t real to you.”

“There are things in life that only I can teach her, only I can show her.”

“Yeah,” my lawyer says. “Which is precisely what your son is afraid of.”

***

He was too old when he came to me, my son, my Darren. His mind had already formed around precepts someone else had taught him—that solid objects existed only in one space-time, that this world was the only one (except for Heaven and Hell—which Darren himself called mythical concepts—he had taken his disbelief one step further than even the world around him had taught him).

Although I tried to tell him about our family’s talents—my aunt’s ability to know what had happened in someone else’s past, my mother’s sudden inklings of what was to come, my own ability to reach into already existing windows—he did not believe me. He laughed, calling our talents superstitious nonsense which could be explained logically, he was sure.

Later, he called my beliefs fantasies, and even later, drug-induced hallucinations.

By then, he had married.

By then, his mind had been poisoned, by his wife.

***

After that day near the lake, I have thought a lot about Marissa and how she fits into this world. She is one of the window-creators. If she touches an object, she doesn’t find the window, as I do. She makes it.

Like the woman in the dress (a great-grandmother, I later learned), like the man at the desk, like the priest with his poetry, my granddaughter has the ability to open moments in time.

I suspect she also has the ability to close them.

I have searched for this my entire life—something I cannot explain to my lawyer, who sees my actions as negligence—and something my shrink willfully misunderstands. My granddaughter is special, but only people who understand her special ability will help her develop it.

She needs me, even more than I need her.

***

It takes planning, of course. And silence. I speak to no one, confide in no one, write to no one.

I act alone.

I let my lawyer pursue our defense in court, even though his heart is not in it. Neither is mine. Supervised visits in Social Services will do neither me nor Marissa any good.

I let my shrink enroll me in more rehabilitation programs, even though I am still clean, and have been for nearly twelve years now.

Of course, I do not tell her that I plan to be gone before the first program starts.

Darren’s house is in a modern neighborhood with large lots and houses that the media calls McMansions. His is a 6,000-square-foot monstrosity with an indoor and an outdoor pool, a four-car garage, a guesthouse, and a state-of-the-art security system.

The system funnels into the guesthouse and the garage as well as the house.

People forget that I was once a beloved member of the family—or at least a tolerated one. I have keys. I have codes.

I can—and have—slipped in and out unnoticed.

Marissa’s bedroom is in the south wing, on the second floor. She has a suite with a playroom, a bedroom, and a second bedroom for guests or the nanny that Darren keeps threatening to hire. The south wing has a door at its far end that leads into the apartment above the garage.

It is so simple to enter the garage by the side door, shut off the alarm before it even blares, climb the stairs to the apartment, and then cross into the house. So simple that I worry I will get caught whenever I do it.

This night it is even simpler. I wait until everyone is asleep. I have a flashlight that I only use in the non-windowed parts of the hallway, but I really don’t need it.

I know this place as well as I know my own—the worlds we travel between, the lives that get lived within these little boxes, in these quiet walls.

Marissa’s suite is filled with nightlights. I close and lock the main door, then slip into her bedroom. She is asleep on her side, her hands tucked under her head as if she were praying. Her curls float behind her.

My hand hovers near her temple, wishing I could pull the window from it with a touch of my fingers. But I dare not try.

Instead, I cradle her against me, coax her awake. She blinks sleepily at me and smiles—to his credit, Darren has never said anything negative about me to her—and settles into the crook of my arm.

“Remember?” I whisper. “Remember showing me how you can make pictures in the sky?”

She nods.

“Can you do it now?” I ask.

She nods again.

“Watch,” she whispers.

She brings her small hand to her temple, then extends her arm. She tilts her head sideways, black curls falling against her neck, and stares at something I can’t see. Finally she twists her fingers ever so slightly, and a window opens right in front of us, a window filled with light.

I look through it, but cannot see clearly, just like before.

I reach out my hand, but Marissa shakes her head. “Papa says not to touch.”

Damn him. Darren knows—and believes—his daughter, but denies the talent to me.

Damn him.

Still, I smile at her. “Grownups can touch,” I say.

I touch the edge and the window widens. I still cannot see through the light.

Marissa puts her thumb in her mouth, a little girl now, in a world she does not understand.

I would comfort her, but I do not. She needs to remember this. She needs to remember it like I remember the attic, as the defining moment, the beginning of her understanding of the nature of the universe.

She will explore, on her own, her abilities, if she only remembers how I behave.

I am nervous, but I can’t let her see that.

My heart pounds. I ease my body away from hers, then kiss her forehead. She looks at me with wide, frightened eyes.

I place both hands into the light. It is warm there, and I catch the scent of daffodils.

“Remember,” I say, and tumble through.

She reaches out a hand to stop me—and instead, closes the window.

Just as I expected.

***

A blink of an eye—

—and suddenly, I am sitting beside a row of daffodils, planted against a headstone. The cemetery is carefully mowed, the trees are large—birches—and beyond, you can catch a glimpse of one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes.

Sunlight glimmers off the water, creating prisms of light, little windows into yet even more worlds.

I am not willing to travel beyond this spot. I am comfortable here. It is quiet, and I always do best in the quiet.

The air is alive, filled with visages of the past, possibilities of the future, and permutations of the present.

I know this world is a much better, much friendlier place.

 

Worlds Enough…And Time

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Svetap/Dreamstime, Naphotos/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.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to head over to Storybundle to pick up a copy, along with ebooks by Robert T. Jeschonek, Andrea Pearson, J. Daniel Sawyer, Dean Wesley Smith, and ten more great writers. Everyone’s book is an exclusive. That’s right. Everything in the bundle is exclusive to the bundle, including my book.

The book is exclusive to the Storybundle—meaning that at the moment, you can’t get it anywhere else. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites in a few weeks. The new edition will release on July 14.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post, which first appeared on this site in slightly different form, is from January of 2015, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

Churning It Out

Toward the end of a pretty good Entertainment Weekly article about the romance side of the publishing industry, this sentence appears:

[Bella Andre]’s a naturally fast writer—on average she churns out four to six books a year—and she released the first one in June 2011.

Before we get to the reason I’m telling you about that sentence, let me say one thing that might or might not be related: There’s a slight snobby tone to EW’s romance article. What’s that all about? The magazine’s called Entertainment Weekly. It’s not The New York Times Book Review. EW sings the praises of The Walking Dead and video games, and everything in between, for heaven’s sake, but somehow romance fiction doesn’t meet the high standards of entertainment?

Sorry. I had to get that off my chest.

As I said, the article, “A Billion-Dollar Affair,” by Karen Valby, appeared in the October 24, 2014 issue, and did cover the romance industry (of the time) pretty well. (And is still available online.)

So why am I objecting to that single sentence?

I’m not, really. It’s a common sentence from any media that covers books. And I’m not even objecting to the entire sentence. Bella Andre does write fast by most writers’ standards, and she does so comfortably.

What I’m objecting to is the phrase “churned out.”

It’s become a cliché. Any writer who writes fast “churns out” material. Or she “cranks out” or “pounds out” whatever it is that she writes. Because clearly, no writer who writes fast can think about what she writes.

There are other implications in that phrase. The material “churned out” isn’t very good. Anything “churned out” is an exact copy of what has come before. It has no real value, primarily because of the speed with which the writer “churns out” the material.

In the olden days of traditional publishing, those of us who “churned out” a lot of books did so under a lot of pen names. Here’s how it worked in my case: Kristine Kathryn Rusch might, at best, put out two books per year; Kris Nelscott one every two years; and Kristine Grayson one every six months.

Most reviewers never noticed all the short stories or blog posts or nonfiction. Only a handful of people (including my agents back when I was stupid enough to hire them) knew that I wrote under other pen names as well.

While reading a midlist thriller novel in bed one night several years ago, I laughed so hard that I woke Dean up. What made me laugh? The author’s bio, which stated that the byline of the novel I was reading was a pen name for a “well-known #1 New York Times bestselling author.” Ballsy and hysterical. That writer wrote so many books that his publisher refused to publish them all under the author’s bestselling name.

Or maybe the publisher never got a chance. Because I later discovered who the author in question was (and that’s why I’m not naming the book here), and discovered that the author had nearly a dozen pen names, and kept them all quiet—except for that coy little bio for at least one of them.

In the opening to Bag of Bones (first published in 1998), Stephen King writes that his main character, a bestselling novelist, kept one novel in the drawer for every novel he published, since his publisher was demanding that he publish no more than one book per year.

Think about this, people: How many other industries that have mega-selling products demand that the producer of popular, high-quality material slow down? What happened to providing the consumers with what they wanted?

When Nora Roberts started out, she was fortunate to begin with Harlequin, which could publish as many books as she produced. She stayed with Harlequin even after she moved to a bigger publisher (Bantam) for a once-per-year hardcover, which then became a once-per-year hardcover and twice-a-year mass market paper, and then became twice-a-year hardcovers and three-times-a-year mass market paper, and finally, she had a big fight with Harlequin, and started up the J.D. Robb pen name (twice per year) and her publisher (by then, Putnam) threw in the towel. The publisher finally agreed that Nora could put out a lot of books. But the publisher’s other writers couldn’t.

Nora Roberts’ speed didn’t matter to that publisher because the publisher had no expectation of quality based on the genre. As we all know, and Entertainment Weekly’s snobby tone confirms, romance is trash anyway. No one expects quality fiction from writers who crank out cookie-cutter books for women.

You think I’m kidding, right? I’m not. I’m old enough to have read the trade journals as romance got its start as a genre, as the Romance Writers of America (founded in 1980) fought for recognition from publishers, as romance readers slowly realized that they were marketing force that had a lot of clout.

Romance has a lot of respect now compared to the 1980s—and still writers see phrases like “churned out” and that slightly school-boyish tone that every Literary Critic uses when discussing romance.

It’s about love and mushy stuff. It can’t be good. It might include kissing and touching and actual irony-free emotion. Anyone can churn out that crap if they put their minds to it. But most people are sensible enough to want respectability instead of…whatever it is that these romance people have.

Oh, yeah. Money.

And readers.

Who actually like the books.

I have taken exception to that snobbish attitude for my entire career. I’ve written essay after essay about it in all kinds of journals and magazines. I’ve written some business blogs on it too.

Back when I was writing those essays, the attitude was merely annoying. Savvy writers could get past it with the judicious use of pen names, and make not just a living, but a substantial living. As in earning mid-six figures or more, simply by hiding the fact that the fast writers wrote more than one book per year.

That snobbish attitude has always been harmful to writers who wanted to make a living. But in my mind, that snobbery always went hand-in-hand with a desire to be recognized over a desire to have a full-time writing career. The writers who wanted to make a living figured out how to handle the respectability argument while “churning out” a lot of books. The writers who wanted respectability and labored over each word never left their day jobs.

Now, however, that snobbish attitude has become actively harmful to writers. Most of the ways that books sell to readers have broken down. The traditional publishing systems have lost their impact. The old-fashioned way that publishers advertised books—that one-size-fits-all method—no longer works. Bookstores don’t window titles much anymore, if a reader can find a brick-and-mortar bookstore that sells new titles within driving distance of home.

Because books are available all the time rather than for only a few months, readers pay less attention to release dates than ever before. Readers have always read a book when they felt like it, and not a moment sooner. But in the past, readers had to buy the book when they saw it, because they might never find a copy again.

So, even if readers didn’t read the book for a year or more, readers still had to buy it in that limited time window.

Not any longer. Readers can make a note of the title, realize it’s been published, and buy it days or hours or minutes before reading it. That really changes the way that the publishing industry markets books—or it should.

It hasn’t yet, entirely, anyway. But the industry is starting to get a clue.

Event books, the ones that publishers convinced the media to promote, are no longer events. The numbers to become a bestseller are much, much lower than they were in 2007.

Lists matter, but less and less as readers discover their books in other ways.

And one of the major ways that readers discover a book? E-mail alerts or notifications that scroll across the reader’s favorite online retailing site—alerts and notifications tailored to that reader.

No longer do we all get notification of the top five books on The New York Times bestseller list. Now, we get science fiction (if that’s what we read) or romance or mystery. We get notifications about our favorite author’s latest book, not the latest release from some author whose work we would never, ever, ever read.

The notifications come from bots designed by the retailers. What provokes those bots to let a reader know about an author? Publication of her latest work. The bots always send readers a note that an author they have bought before (through that retailer) has released a new book.

The reader might not buy that book immediately, but the book might go on a wish list. It might be put in reserve until the reader has the cash to order or the time to read.

Another change in the way people buy books also has to do with unlimited availability. All readers indulged in binge reading of a new-to-them author, but in the past, that binge reading was combined with treasure hunting.

Whenever I discovered a new writer whose work I liked, I’d read what was easily available, then I’d go to the library to see what it had. Libraries never had the complete oeuvre because, like bookstores, they have limited shelf space. So I’d dig through every used bookstore in every town I visited until I got each and every book by that author.

Or as close to each and every book as I could get.

Other readers did the same.

Now, readers can order every book that a favorite author has written, whether that author has written five books or hundreds. That fear writers have, the fear that readers won’t respect the work if it doesn’t take years to complete, is silly when looked at from a reader’s perspective.

Readers want to escape from their lives for a few hours. They might want to read a beautiful well-written slow-moving literary novel or they might want to read a fast-paced hard-to-believe thriller. But readers want the book when they’re ready to relax. If they liked that book, they want another by the same author. The author becomes a known quantity, and the reader wants more.

Binge-reading has become an all-consuming activity, just like binge-watching. And the best way to get noticed as a writer is to publish enough to enable your readers to binge for a weekend.

But the idea of writing a lot is the opposite of the way that most writers are trained. Writers are told to slow down, think about every word, consider every sentence. Writers are taught to forget story because story is something that hack writers do.

Hack writers can “churn” out words because words are unimportant to them.

Real writers write so slowly that they might only compose a paragraph per day.

Real writers who have day jobs and who still believe myths spouted in the 19th century.

Real 19th-century writers who are still read today, like Charles Dickens or Louisa May Alcott, got paid by the word, so they wrote a lot of words, for a lot of publications. These writers wrote fast long hand, and they “churned out” a lot of stories we no longer read.

But they also “churned out” stories that all of us still read.

That little phrase, “churned out,” holds so much disrespect. Deadly disrespect, because writers who hear that phrase—and use it themselves—won’t be able to survive in this new world.

The 21st century is not leisurely, although we have more leisure time than ever. Can you remember the name of the “important” literary novel of five years ago? Ten? Without looking it up? I didn’t think so.

Yet, I can still name the important literary novels of forty years ago, because they got all the press, and I do mean allthe press.

It’s impossible to get all of the press now. The best way to get attention is to give your readers what they want. If they like your work, they want more of it.

If they want more of it, the only person who can give them more is you.

And the only way to do that is to write a lot, whatever that means for you.

One sure way to teach yourself to write at a comfortable pace is to clean up your language. Watch every word. Make sure you’re using the right phrase—when you’re talking about writing.

Clean “churned out” from your vocabulary. Don’t say you “cranked out” a novel. Don’t apologize for writing fast. Don’t tell anyone how long it took to finish a novel.

Write and release.

The only people who judge fiction writers for how fast they write are people for whom reading isn’t something they do for enjoyment but for prestige. They want to impress others with their literary acumen.

I don’t know about you, but I want readers who get lost in the story, not readers who have already determined that I’m a hack because I don’t write at the proper speed or in the proper genre or with the proper attention to language.

Enjoy your writing. Take as much—or as little—time as you like to compose your stories.

Because how you created the story doesn’t matter. How much readers enjoy the story does. Readers don’t care if it took you one week to write that story or fifteen years. All readers want is escape.

And it’s your job to provide it.

“Churning It Out” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Albert’s mother championed Earth Day and its environmental causes. The cause became her first priority, almost an obsession. And Albert’s obsession? His mother. In her honor, he will Save The Earth…maybe not in the way she expected.

“Earth Day” is free on this site for one week only. If you just want a copy of this story, download it on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

Earth Day Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Excerpt:

…personal documents identify him as Albert Suttles, but in his statement, he repeatedly referred to himself as Raymond Bilojek…

My mom had an obsession with Senator Gaylord Nelson. Nobody remembers him any more, except in dusty old history books, not that there are dusty old history books any more. Everything’s online now. Even our confessionals.

Here’s mine.

Let me start again.

Mom had an obsession with Senator Gaylord Nelson. Not a stalkerish obsession, but one of those I-think-this-man-is-the-greatest obsessions. She used him as an example all the time, particularly in the dysfunctional early decades of this century.

There are no more men like Senator Gaylord Nelson, she said to me on her deathbed—not that I was with her at her deathbed. I was a full professor by then, supervising more research than I truly had time for, living in Berkeley, and enjoying it. Especially the weather. California weather, for a good Wisconsin boy, is like an early glimpse of heaven.

Not to mention that I spent my formal education in cold places. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yale, MIT. If it weren’t for my second post-doc at Cal-Tech, I would’ve thought that you had to nurture scientists in the cold in order for them to flower.

But I promised myself no jokes in this manifesto. Not that people get my jokes anyway. I’m too quiet. I think of the joke, turn it over in my mind, then inject it too late into the conversation. People have looked at me funny my entire life.

I long ago gave up trying to impress the unwashed with my conversational skills, even though I admire folks who have them. Earliest influences for me include comedians, especially the really brainy ones—George Carlin, Dennis Miller, Lewis Black—the ones who can quip their way out of anything. Or I thought they could, until I saw Carlin in his dotage, just out of rehab, working off a paper script, telling the audience honestly that he was testing material for an HBO special.

You remember HBO, right? That’s where I first saw the “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television” speech. I must’ve been ten, maybe, one of those years when we could afford premium cable. 1977? Something like that. We were pretty itinerant, and I didn’t see much television at all, especially premium television as it was called then. So I remembered seeing Carlin on HBO.

But his other routines? I didn’t see those until later. And his influential “bad case of fleas” routine? I didn’t see that one until maybe mid-2007, on the Internet. Ironic, right?

Anyway, Mom. Senator Gaylord Nelson. She met him, you know. One of those Earth Day rallies back in the day. Said I met him too, back when Earth Day was a movement, and she was part of it. Not that she ever left the movement.

The movement defined our lives. She’d say, we moved for the environment.

Not for the weather, like normal people. But for the environment. Someone needed a volunteer to coordinate rallies? Mom was there. Someone needed a volunteer to post flyers? Mom was there. We lived off the kindness of strangers, she’d say, and it took me years to understand that she was quoting a Tennessee Williams play.

The kindness of strangers got me into a science-only high school. We need scientists, too, the man who fronted everything said. He was one of those truly rich bastards, the kind who gave his money to all sorts of causes. But his favorite was Mom’s favorite: the environment.

Everything from the Sierra Club to some wacky fringe organization (Save The Cockroaches!), this guy gave it money. And he funded Mom for years, which is something I don’t want to think about even now. Because I don’t know why Mom in particular, even though I have a hunch.

It does go back to Mom, you know. I’m smart enough to know that. The therapist I hired at my first tenured position told me I was “unhealthily obsessed” with her, and we had to break the obsession. That therapist couldn’t divorce me from Mom entirely. I recognize that too. Because without Mom, I wouldn’t be a tenured professor with a large research staff and grants for fifteen different projects, including the private one you’re seeing today.

Or will see today.

But I digress.

My digressions are why I’m not doing this as a video. Or a holographic video. Some kind of statement broadcast on every single remaining broadcast channel.

The Internet.

No one’ll see this until after.

But then, no one will see it after either.

Heh. Just realized.

This is all for me.

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Excerpt:

…his research assistants, graduate students, and post-doctoral candidates weren’t hard to find. All wore Earth Day T-shirts, modeled on the first Earth Day poster from 1970. Separate interviews attached. Each mentions Suttles/Bilojek’s insistence on the Earth Day experiment, which most participated in for a grade or because they were terrified of losing their research posting…

My influences:

1. Comedians (see above).
2. Space photos, particularly that one from the late 1960s—you know, the beautiful blue-and-green globe? That was Mom’s favorite too. But for different reasons. Me, I like the vivid colors, the rocks against the blackness, the vibrant life that we don’t recognize as life—you know, the sun big and deep like an ocean, with storms and spots and—I could go on forever. But we don’t have forever. ?
3. Great scientists from the past. The unassuming guys, at least in the beginning. Archimedes in the bathtub. Galileo dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa. Einstein contemplating the universe from the silence of the patent office.

They didn’t have grants and grad students, publish-or-perish mandates, the necessity of finding the smallest niche in the large world of science just to get someone to fund a project. They didn’t have to write grandiose papers before their discoveries. Sometimes they didn’t even write grandiose papers after their discoveries.

So of course, in this modern era, I decided not to write a grandiose paper either. I got dozens and dozens of smaller grants, on smaller topics, and isn’t it ironic that if you Google (Google. Heh. Created outside the system.) my professional name, you’ll see article after article, interview after interview, with me, whom they call the Scientist of Small Things.

Apparently I did find notice. Someone—maybe a scientifically minded clerk, handling grant applications for the U.S. government—noticed my name originating most of them.

No one put together all the topics, though.

No one except me.

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Excerpt:

…appended to this file a report from several different departments in Homeland Security, as well as reports from similar bureaus in Germany, Russia, China, South Africa…

Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day and, some say, the founder of the modern environmental movement, was a saint. George Carlin, comedian, the enemy.

At least according to Mom. On her deathbed. Or what I call her deathbed—that dreadful nursing home bed she didn’t leave for the last few years of her life. I saw her a year before she died—2007—and after that I discovered why Carlin was the enemy.

In that wonderful, eye-opening routine, he said he hated Earth Day. He said, and I quote: “Environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat.”

Ah, it rang true. It rang so true.

That’s when I realized all my degrees, all those little environmental things I was doing weren’t for the planet. They were for the environmentalists. Like Mom.

And then, in that same routine, Carlin said, he said, the planet will be here after we’re long gone. And he added the inspiration: “The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.”

That was my Eureka moment.

I know how to get rid of fleas.

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Excerpt:

…when the FBI received a notice from the Patent Office, delineating several patents that returned to the same man, known as the Scientist of Small Things. The small things, when combined in the proper order, could be seen as a potential terrorist threat. The patent office employee [name redacted] did not contact the FBI immediately. After some thought, however, she determined she could not remain silent….

It took very little tweaking to move from “Save The Earth For Environmentalists” to “Save The Earth.”

Because to save the earth for environmentalists, you have to know what will kill the little buggers. Instead of getting rid of those factors, you add to them. You tweak them.

You make them stronger.

I figured out the balance. Tweak this and touch that and you make the planet shake off the fleas a little faster. It is a multidisciplinary approach. To understand how water reaches entire populations, one must know the engineering of water treatment plants as well as urban planning. One must also learn the details of water processing in each community.

Tiny things, small things, all reported back to the one man who can understand it all.

Amassing small bits of data into one large experiment. Only large minds can understand this.

And there are very few large minds around any more.

Almost none.

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Excerpt:

… the case built slowly. The initial investigator retired, and Agent William Franks took over. Franks had received a Masters in Biology from Harvard before joining the Bureau. He did not like the coincidences either, and talked off the record to two of Suttles/Bilojek’s graduate students. That raised enough suspicions to bring in additional field agents….

My pet graduate students run all of my projects. I have developed a multidisciplinary department, highly regarded, since most of my students go on to so-called great things in the so-called real world.

My current graduate students and post-docs are doing a one-day experiment for me, or so they think. They are not large minds. They are useful small minds. In the years I have planned this, it has always helped to have useful small minds.

It has also helped that in 2007 my mission changed from Save The World For Environmentalists to Save The World. Because of Mom, because of my initial environmentalist approach, I know how to talk to small minds, to make them believe I am on their side.

And I am. Truly I am. I do want to save the world.

In fact, my pet scientists and I are doing exactly that today.

My pet scientists have tweaked the ground water, and the air filtration systems. They’ve added toxins to all the poisons we already touch, from oil to Styrofoam. They’re adding viruses to enclosed spaces, like airplanes and ships. They’re even coating restaurant surfaces.

I don’t care how we get the fleas off the planet. I just care that we do.

And now we will.

As the first Earth Day T-shirt says, “We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us.”

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Homeland Security, FBI Division

Arresting Officer William Franks

Excerpt from Franks’ verbal message, attached to the huge packets of reports submitted to the U.S. Justice Department:

…gotta say, Dave, it’s a good thing guys like this are rocket scientists. If they understood people, they wouldn’t confess before the crime. Whenever I feel down about humanity, I gotta remember that good citizens saw this manifesto and reported it. Dunno if we got everyone, but I hope we did. If nothing else, the outbreaks will be isolated now. This guy had a good plan. He almost killed millions.

Creepy bastard. When I locked him up, he smiled at me like we were old friends. Then his grin widened to crazy. You know. You’ve seen it on the face of so many of these bastards.

Usually you can dismiss them. But I’m having trouble shaking this one. Because of what he said to me I started to walk away.

He said, “So, flea, how does it feel to save the world?”

 

Earth Day

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright © by WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Matthew Trommer/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.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to head over to Storybundle to pick up a copy, along with ebooks by T. Thorn Coyle, Ron Collins, Darcy Pattison, Anthea Sharp, and ten more great writers. Everyone’s book is an exclusive. That’s right. Everything in the bundle is exclusive to the bundle, including my book.

So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites starting at the end of May. The new edition will release on July 14.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post appeared on my Patreon page in October of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

 

GETTING LOST IN THE WORDS

From 2025

This past week, I finished the largest Fey book I’ve written to date. It is the fifth book in my side series on the Qavnerian Protectorate…and it ended up at 240,000 words long. I trimmed about 50,000 words out of it, and wrote the scenes that I missed. (Mostly the validation, because I always skip the validation in my first pass.) I figured the book was long because of how I wrote it. I dabbled at it during the two years of crisis that we endured at the business. For a while, I gave the book up entirely because I simply couldn’t concentrate on a story that big. That was when I wrote some of the novellas that came out this year, as well as a novel that will appear in late 2026.

My mind was trending long, I think, because I didn’t want to keep coming up with new things. I didn’t have the brain space for that.

I also found that I couldn’t make any decisions while still in the thrall of that huge, gigantic, super-sized novel. I wasn’t in the position to decide what I would do next. I’m going to figure that out in the next few days.

But some of the small things I meant to do included typing in about 6,000 words that Mick Herron wrote in the middle of his Slow Horses novel Bad Actors. He wrote a scene filled with mayhem that stretched over a couple of square miles of London and had at least four main viewpoint characters. (If you want to know what scene, it’s the one that more or less culminates with the iron and the bus, as well as a brick to the head.)

When I first read the thing, two years ago now, I became aware at the very end of the section that I not only had a feeling of mayhem, but that I had understood each part of the action. When a writer uses a technique that isn’t in my writing toolbox, I figure out how that technique works. Sometimes I can eyeball it, but occasionally, I type it into my own computer using my word program and my set-up, so I can see how it all works on the page.

It took two days’ writing sessions to do the typing, partly because I stopped to give my wrists a break and also because I would look up any words I didn’t know. As a reader, I skipped over the British slang that I was unfamiliar with, choosing to get it out through context, but as a writer, I wanted to know what he was doing.

So louring, cack-handed, and a whole bunch of other words entered my consciousness and, in the case of louring, changed my perspective on a moment in the scene that I was typing in.

Usually, when I type in another writer’s work, it’s a serious struggle. I want to add commas or punctuation or paragraphs or different words. Aside from the British slang, I did not feel the need to add or change words, but I did realize that he uses punctuation very differently than I do. There are a lot more colons in his work than there are in mine, and not as many commas. The only quibble I had, in fact, was that he wouldn’t use a comma in something like “For a moment he was thinking of his wife…” I would add a comma after “moment.” And he wouldn’t use an ellipsis plus a period for the end of a sentence. I don’t know if that was deliberate, a British punctuation thing, or personal preference. It caught me every time.

But the one thing I did note was this: I have been deep in the words in my own writing. Because life has thrown me a lot of lemons in the past year, I would catch them and consider them before making the lemonade. In other words, my critical voice was and is on very high right now.

Sometimes as I worked on the biggest Fey novel to ever come out of my computer, I would stop and stare at the words and think them very plain. That’s not a normal thought for me—or it wasn’t before this past year or two.

As I typed in Herron’s section, I noted that I reached the “words are plain” stage somewhere around 3,000 words in. His words were plain and sometimes repetitive. There were copy editing issues as well, one or two misspellings (not British spellings, but actual misspellings) and a few missing hyphens that my eye caught while I was working out his technique.

I had to pause and consider that moment, though. By putting his words into my format, I hit the same “these words are plain” place I hit in my own writing. Which meant that critical voice was not doing its job and looking at the technique. It was critiquing the words used instead of the effect those words had on the reader.

Copy editors make this error a lot. I train copy editors and have done so for decades now. The traditional publisher for my Grayson books in the 1990s used my books to test copy editors. If I got a heavy hand, the copy editor didn’t get hired. My Grayson books, like Herron’s Slough House series, are voice heavy. If the copy editor missed that, and put the book into proper English with traditional punctuation, they had no right to be called a copy editor at all.

The copy editor’s job is to find actual mistakes (misspellings, inadvertently repeated details, misnaming characters) rather than “clean up” some established writer’s punctuation. And copy editors who are harsher on new writers will often strip those writers of the very things that make their voice strong.

I can’t imagine the discussion Soho Crime had early on with Herron’s copy editors. He breaks every single rule of grammar and punctuation on purpose and does it to make a point in the story.

For example, I noted in his latest book, Clown Town, that in another mayhem scene, one character’s point-of-view section was usually one paragraph long and just a single sentence. I slowly realized that single sentence extended over many sections and many pages. Every time we were in that character’s point of view, there was a lot of punctuation, and not a bit of it was an actual period.

The period arrived at the end of the character’s point-of-view section in that mayhem scene…and I realized (because of how I read) that the character was dead. Herron played with that idea (are they really dead?) for the next twenty pages, and most readers would have missed the period at the end of the character’s section. But I didn’t. (I had the same problem in the book Silence of the Lambs when Thomas Harris has Hannibal Lector escape a well-guarded facility. Harris used an odd phrase, a strange verb, and a long sentence in the middle of a gigantic paragraph. The odd phrase from such a careful writer caught me up short. So I went backwards, looking to see if I’d missed anything else.

And yep, I had. I knew exactly how Lector escaped pages before Harris wanted me to. Most readers didn’t catch it until Harris did a big reveal. And then they would go back and see the odd phrase. I saw it going in.

Those things that excellent writers do out of their subconscious as they’re in the moment are things that a copy editor would “fix.” I can imagine that a novice (to Herron’s work) copy editor adding periods throughout those character sections—and ruining them.

The best copy editors read the book they’re editing for enjoyment first, so that they will see the author’s intent long before they start “fixing mistakes.” Most modern copy editors don’t do that at all, which is why you’ll hear Dean tell you that you don’t need a copy editor. He’s right: better to let some mistakes through than muck up the voice.

I hire and fire a lot of copy editors even now because I have a tendency in my fiction writing to repeat myself. Some of that comes because I write out of order. So I might actually introduce a character for the first time when I write chapter 45, but chapter 45 might have been the very first chapter I ever wrote. Then, later, I might write chapter 7, where the character appears for the reader for the first time and I’ll write the same description (often in the same language without checking back) again. And maybe I’ll worry that I hadn’t described the character when I get to chapter 15, and I’ll write the same description again.

I need someone to find that stuff. What’s amazing to me is that the words-only, rules-only copy editors never find the repeated information. Or the silly stuff, like a character putting on a hat in chapter 27 and then putting on a different hat six pages later without taking off the first hat.

That’s what’s valuable about copy editors. Not fixing the grammar, but fixing the goofy stuff. On the latest book which will appear in 2026, the other book I wrote during the crisis, I changed the name of one of the main characters but never did a search and replace. So occasionally, his name goes back and forth with one letter different. The very good copy editor that I have caught that. None of my first readers did—and neither did I.

In storytelling, the words are tools. Punctuation is also a tool. Paragraphing is a tool.

The rules are there for beginners. Storytellers need to have a huge toolbox, and they need to learn how to use those tools. Most writers get by with a hammer, some nails and a few screwdrivers. The best writers have finesse tools (to extend the metaphor) like a cape chisel, saw set pliers, and an egg beater drill just in case the story needs them.

And I can guarantee you that if the story does need them, the copy editor will probably not understand why they’re there—unless the copy editor is someone who actually reads and understands the story before looking at the words.

As for the rest of us—we storytellers—we need to stay out of the words and not worry about them. So what if they’re “plain”? So what if you’ve written a passive sentence? So what if they seem to lie flat on the page?

If you’re thinking those things, you’re not in the story at all. You’re in copyedit or critic mode.

Stop it.

Remember that you’re a storyteller. Not a writer. And don’t worry about the little fiddly bits. If you misspell them and the story’s compelling, your reader won’t even notice.

Just like reader me didn’t notice all the words I didn’t know in Herron’s work. I was so caught up in that mayhem scene that I went right over those unfamiliar words, and ended up thinking that the sequence was brilliant.

Because it is.

“Getting Lost in The Words” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

D Street—the closest thing Hope’s Pass has to a red light district. Three whorehouses and a few independents to service the miners who survived the mines outside of town.

When someone murders a prostitute, Will, the mayor, must fill in for the drunken sheriff and investigate. Only the crime has deep roots—roots that will touch Will’s entire family and make him question everything he has ever known.

“Death on D Street” is free on this site for one week only. If you like this crime story, you might like my other crime stories. A Kickstarter for my latest crime novel, Candid Shots of the 1970s, will run until Thursday, April 16. There you can get the new novel as well as Consecrated Ground, a novel that hasn’t seen print in 15 years, and a brand-new collection of short crime stories (although this one is not included). Click here to look at the Kickstarter.

If you just want a copy of this story, download it on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

 

Death on D Street Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Ginny had just blown out the lamp and snuggled against me, her slender arm across my chest. The house still held too much of the day’s warmth for us to be cuddled so close together, but I didn’t move her. I liked the touch of her skin against mine, even when we were both too tired to do anything about it.

The baby was quiet for the first time in two days. She was teething and not happy about it. Ginny’d been rubbing my brandy against the baby’s gums and it didn’t seem to be doing anything except wasting good liquor. Still, Ginny swore that was a teething trick and I figured she’d know. She had gotten Sam through it, and on her own. By comparison, this couldn’t be as bad.

We should have expected the knock on the door—or something to break the quiet, but the knock surprised both of us. The baby wailed. Ginny must have already been asleep because she rolled over fast and reached for the gun she kept in the top dresser drawer.

I caught her arm and soothed her awake. I’d seen this reaction before and knew its source. A woman traveling alone across country had to be adept at protecting herself and her child. Nothing I could do convinced her she was safe. I’d stopped trying a year before.

I jerked on my pants as the knock came again. The baby’s wail grew into a scream. I grabbed a shirt and said, “See to the kids.” Then I headed down the stairs.

The knocking started a third time. I yanked the door open. Travis stood outside. He’d set his lantern on the porch. The yellow light illuminated his mud-stained pants and scuffed boots. The stench of cigars and cheap booze wafted inside.

“Sorry to wake ya,” he said, “but Doc sent me. We got a holy hell of a mess on D Street.”

D Street was the closest thing we had to a red light district. Three whorehouses and a few independents all lined up in a row. When I was sheriff, I restricted the hookers to that area. I’d learned that getting rid of them was impossible, not to mention unpopular. When men got time away from the mines, they wanted some affection, even if they had to pay for it.

“Where’s Sheriff Muller?” I asked.

“Couldn’t roust him.”

“Drunk again?” I glanced up the stairs. The baby was still crying. The floorboards creaked as Ginny walked with her, trying to quiet her.

“Smelled like it,” Travis said.

“What kind of mess?”

“Somebody killed Jeanne.”

I stepped onto the porch and pulled the door closed. “While she was servicing him?”

“Jesus, Will, how’m I supposed to know?”

I shook my head and strode down the street. The dust was caked thanks to the summer heat, the wagon ruts treacherous in the darkness. The air was cool now, almost cold—one of the benefits of being in the mountains—but by dawn the heat would be creeping back, oppressive and overwhelming.

D Street was three blocks over and two down. I walked along Main Street. Most of the saloons were still open. Music filtered out of O’Hallerans—someone was banging on the town’s only piano. A few drunks were collapsed on the wooden sidewalk, leaning against the building, and I knew who they were.

I’d lived in Hope’s Pass since it was founded, eight years before. I’d stumbled through here, looking to make my own fortune mining for silver. I lasted a month underground in the dark, candle burning away the oxygen, cave-ins a constant threat. Even though the pay was pretty good, I realized there were other ways to make money.

The town needed a sheriff and I volunteered, setting my own pay so high that no one in their right mind would meet it. But in those early days of what would become known as the Comstock Lode, no one was in their right mind.

They paid me more than I was worth for six years. Then Ginny came to town with little Sam and enough money to set up a dressmaking business. Four months later, we were married and I had resigned as sheriff. I felt it wasn’t right to be dragged out of bed at all hours to calm down drunken miners or settle disputes over one of the town’s whores. I ran for mayor and won; then I appointed Johann Muller as the new sheriff, which was, I think, the worst decision I’d ever made.

D Street was down two blocks from Main, at the very edge of the mountainside. The ground was treacherous here—subject to floods in heavy rains. The buildings here had washed away more than once. There were other problems as well. Mine shafts had been dug underneath this entire area of Hope’s Pass, and more than one man had fallen through the street to the emptiness below. One of my campaign pledges had been to shore up the South Town area, but no one was really pushing me to fulfill that promise.

Lights were on in all the houses, and laughter filtered down from one of the porches. The men here weren’t drunk—or at least weren’t obviously so. A lot of them stood outside, smoking and talking as they waited in line. It must have been payday for one of the mines. I’d gotten so caught up in my daughter’s teething drama I hadn’t been paying attention.

I walked to the very last house. The street trailed off into nothing here, just scraggly grass and dust. Light poured out of this house as well, but the door was shut tight. As I approached, I saw a man knock and get sent away.

I didn’t bother to knock. I tried the knob but it didn’t turn. I glanced over my shoulder. Travis hadn’t followed me. Apparently his only task had been to fetch me. That completed, he was able to go back to one of the saloons and see if he could finish the task of getting drunk.

So I rapped on the big picture window, closed despite the coolness of the evening, and shouted, “It’s the mayor!”

The door opened just a crack.

“Doc sent for me,” I said.

The door opened the rest of the way. I didn’t recognize the girl behind it. She was blonde and buxom, wearing a cheap satin wrap that tied at her waist and left nothing to the imagination. I didn’t recognize her, but that wasn’t a surprise. Girls came and went at these places so fast that sometimes I was surprised anyone knew who they were.

Her face was ashen and she didn’t even bother to greet me. She just stepped aside, waited until I crossed the threshold, then pulled the door closed.

Six girls were in the parlor. A few were wearing dresses. The rest had on stained wraps just like the girl who had opened the door. Lucinda Beale, who’d opened this house six years before, sat on the edge of a chaise lounge.

She waved a hand toward a door. “In there.”

The room smelled of sweat and perfume. One of the girls sat on the ornate staircase leading to the second floor. She held her face in her hands, her legs slightly spread, revealing everything.

I walked through the women. They all moved away from me, something I’d never experienced in a whorehouse before.

The door led to the back parlor. It was usually reserved for the girls and “family,” anyone involved with the house. I’d been there half a dozen times before, mostly for a drink after getting rid of unruly customers. I hadn’t been inside since I married Ginny.

I swung the door open and stepped inside the room. It was hot and had the copper odor of blood.

“Watch where you step.” Doc Clifton leaned against the wall, arms crossed. His open medical bag sat on the ornate red sofa. His face was puffy from lack of sleep. He’d been up the night before helping one of Rena’s girls down the way through a particularly difficult birth.

I gave him a sideways look. Doc nodded toward the floor.

Jeanne lay there, legs splayed, wrapper open. Her torso was undamaged. The only visible wound was around her neck. It had been cut so deeply that her head had nearly been severed. Her hands, flung back beside her face, were cut as well.

I crouched beside her body. Her eyes were open. Her expression was one of great fear. I’d seen that expression on her face before. Her ebony skin brought a certain kind of clientele to Lucinda’s—one with exotic tastes. But some of the customers objected to Jeanne’s presence. Most of the fights I’d stopped in his last year as sheriff had started over Jeanne.

“Someone got her this time, huh?” I asked.

“It’s not that simple.” Doc pushed himself off the wall. He pointed to her hands. A single matching slit ran across both palms.

“So he surprised her, cut her throat, and she grabbed at the knife at the last minute.”

Doc nodded. “But he killed her in here.”

I rocked on his toes and looked around. Blood spattered the rug and a nearby table. It had clearly spurted. “He spun her.”

“Yep.”

I sighed. Murder in a small town was always difficult. I hated the cases when they involved someone important. Investigating one with a prostitute—and one who wasn’t even white—would be even harder.

“We knew it was only a matter of time, Doc,” I said. “If someone didn’t get her here, they would have got her when Lucinda sent her to service the boys in Shantytown.” I’d escorted her back a number of times and that was when I’d seen the fear on her face. The men usually ignored her, but the town’s women—even my usually tolerant wife—gave her looks filled with hate.

Doc’s eyes narrowed. “You gonna let this slide, then, Will?”

Of course I was. Solving murders wasn’t my responsibility any more. “That’s for Sheriff Muller to decide.”

“Sheriff Muller’s a drunk and you know it. You gave him the job so someone would take the midnight calls and you could continue overseeing everything else.”

I stiffened. “The girls get hurt. Sometimes they die. It’s not a safe or particularly joyful profession. If anyone knows that, it’s you, Doc. How many times do you get sent to D Street to tend to someone who’d had it too rough or was dying in childbirth and didn’t know who the father was?”

“So we let this go.”

I looked at Jeanne. She’d been pretty in a quiet sort of way. And she had been soft-spoken, almost shy. The prettiness was gone now, leached out of her with the blood. “It might be better to forget about it.”

“Will you say that when this same maniac slits some other girl’s throat? Or what if he attacks a real citizen, someone you care about? What then?”

There was an edge to Doc’s words that I had never heard before. “You got a personal stake in this, Doc?”

His gaze slipped away from mine. “I don’t ever want to see a mess like this again.”

“Chances are it was a drifter.”

“Who got invited into the back parlor?”

“All right. Maybe it was someone who knew her. Maybe even a relative. Lord knows Lucinda wouldn’t want a colored man in her waiting room.”

Doc looked at me. His gaze was clear and direct. “Is this about Jeanne’s profession, Will? Or her color?”

My cheeks heated up. “I’m just trying to take care of this with a minimum of fuss.”

“Fuss? We got a dead woman lying at our feet. Someone damn near sliced her head off and you’re worried about fuss?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my job to keep things calm in Hope’s Pass.”

Doc’s cheeks were an ugly red. “You ignore this, Will, and I’ll kick up a fuss like you never seen before.”

I turned to him, careful to keep my feet away from the blood smeared on the floor. “What was Jeanne to you, Doc?”

“A person,” he snapped, and walked out of the room.

***

I’d never been shamed into an investigation before, and truth be told, it didn’t make me enthusiastic about it. Still, I’d prove to Doc that I could solve this—or at least make sure whoever’d done this was long gone.

First, I gave the scene one more once-over. A silver tray lay near the kitchen door. Two glasses lay on the rug. One still had a bit of whisky inside. The smell of blood overpowered the smell of alcohol, which was why I hadn’t noticed it when I’d first come in.

The couch’s cushions were untouched, except for Doc’s bag, which he had left behind. I peered in it and saw nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, except for the body and the blood, the room was neat. Lucinda always had a penchant for clean.

There were no footprints in the blood on the floor, no handprints on the wall. Whoever had done this had been careful. There was also no break in the spatter, so he hadn’t gone at her from the front.

Already I could hazard a guess on how the attack happened. He’d been sent to the back parlor and waited there, standing near the empty fireplace as Jeanne came out of the kitchen, carrying a silver tray. She’d clearly expected to entertain him, but whether that entertainment would lead to a trip upstairs, I couldn’t yet tell. She’d planned on drinking with him, though, and she hadn’t even gotten to the place where she could set the drinks down.

He grabbed her from behind, slit her throat quickly and viciously. She’d realized what was going on—she probably had a hell of a self-preservation instinct—and grabbed at the knife as he pulled it along her throat. But she hadn’t had a chance to scream—he’d been too fast for her—and the method he chose wouldn’t have allowed it.

Her life sprayed out of her fast, but she’d still struggled, forcing him to spin around because he was having trouble holding her. But she’d stopped pretty quick, going limp in his arms. Then he dropped her and ran out the kitchen—arms and hands bloody, but otherwise unscathed.

Knife wasn’t there. Nothing else was there, except a downed silver tray and the body of a woman Doc felt important enough to take time from my family.

I pushed open the kitchen door, and went inside. The kitchen was clean and everything was in its place. No dirt on the sideboards, tin canisters lined up against the walls. No fire burned in the stove, even though this room was hotter than the parlor. The only thing out of order was the whiskey decanter on the long kitchen table—and the bloody handprint on the back door.

***

I decided to talk to the girls individually. Most of them couldn’t tell me anything—they’d been upstairs with a client. Only Lucinda and Elly had seen anything at all.

Elly’d been between customers when the front door opened. A blond man, his hair falling ragged over his collar, came inside. Despite the day’s heat, he’d had on a gray coat. It was worn, almost a part of him. His hands were tucked in the pockets, pulling it down, messing up its shape.

At first she thought him old because he was so thin and he walked with a limp. Then she looked at his face and realized he couldn’t be thirty yet. He spoke with a Southern accent and his eyes were haunted. She figured him to be a Reb who’d been wandering since the war ended. She didn’t remember seeing him before.

She’d sidled up to him, put a hand on his chest, and thrust herself against him. “I’m just what you need,” she’d said.

“Maybe so, darlin’,” he’d said gently, “but you ain’t what I want.”

She’d backed away from him then, and Lucinda’d come forward. Elly went to the kitchen where Jeanne was cleaning the sideboards. She hadn’t had a customer all night and she was restless, feeling trapped in the house, unable to go outside.

They talked for a while, about nothing, Elly said, and then Elly rolled herself a cigarette and took it out back so Lucinda wouldn’t catch her.

Not that Lucinda was trying. She was talking to the stranger, finding out exactly what it was he wanted.

He’d heard, he said, she had a colored girl in the house. Then he’d lowered his voice so soft she had to strain to hear. “Growin’ up the way I did, I got me a special hankerin for colored girls.”

“We do have a girl,” Lucinda said. “Her name’s Jeanne. I’m sure she’d be happy to see you.”

He glanced at the front door then, and she could sense how nervous he was. “I’d like to talk first, but if my friends find me with her…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. Lucinda had heard that request dozens of times.

“Why don’t you go to the back parlor?” Lucinda said, pointing the way. “I’ll have her join you in just a few minutes.”

He’d smiled then. She’d thought it a particularly gentle smile, grateful really, and she’d smiled back. She hadn’t thought anything of it, not even when she’d heard the tray and the thud. Jeanne knew the rules—clients should be taken upstairs once the transaction was to begin—but sometimes men were too eager. That was a rule Lucinda was always willing to bend, as long as the man paid in full.

It was when the hour was up and then some that Lucinda got impatient. She’d expected her southern drifter to leave long before that. So she’d pushed open the door to the back parlor, and she’d seen Jeanne and she’d hoped that somehow the girl had lived through it, which was why she’d sent for Doc at the same time she’d sent for the sheriff.

Which was why she was willing to talk to me.

“This sort of thing got me closed down in St Louis,” she said. “I been real careful about it in Hope’s Pass. I run a safe house and my girls get treated good. You catch this man, Will, and you make everyone know that what he did had nothing to do with me.”

“You should check your clientele for weapons, Cinda,” I said.

“I do. They have to leave their guns at the door.” Then her eyes brightened and she held up one chubby finger. “Just a moment.”

She walked toward the door, moved a picture and opened a wall safe. From inside, she pulled out a small pistol.

“I suppose all your clients know that’s there,” I said.

Lucinda nodded. “That’s where we keep the guns. The real safe is somewhere else.”

She studied the pistol for a moment, then came toward me. “I got this off him before he went into the back parlor. Obviously, he didn’t come back for it, although he should have.”

“Should have?” I stood.

“I’ve never handled a gun quite like this one before.” She extended the gun to me, and I froze.

It was a Remington-Elliot single shot Derringer, .41 rimfire caliber, with walnut grips and blue plating.

“You sure that was his?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.” She frowned at it. “Pretty little thing, isn’t it?”

It was. It was so small that it fit in the palm of her hand. I took the gun from her and examined the barrel. Etched into the plating were the initials V.L., exactly as I expected.

“What’s there?” Lucinda asked.

“Hmm?” I looked at her. She was frowning at me. “Oh, nothing. Mind if I keep this?”

“I surely don’t want it.” She put her hands on her wide hips. “But it is a special gun. He might come back for it.”

“He might at that. Where’s Travis?” Travis worked as her security on busy nights.

“Probably drinking. He hasn’t come back since he fetched you.”

I checked the gun’s chamber. It wasn’t loaded. I slipped the gun in my pocket. “You get your own gun out, stay awake a while. I’ll make sure Sheriff Muller comes to keep an eye on this place, and I’ll find Travis for you.”

Lucinda smiled at me. “You always take good care of us, Will.”

In the past, I would have leaned over and kissed her cheek. But I didn’t dare get more perfume on me than had already leached into my clothes from this place. “You can tell Doc that it’s all right to come downstairs again.”

Lucinda’s smile turned sly. “I’m sure he’ll come down when he’s ready.”

“When he does,” I said, “make sure he does something with Jeanne. Remind him that’s his responsibility, not mine.”

Her smile faded. “Of all my girls to end up like that, I’d’ve never imagined Jeanne.”

“Why not?” I asked.

Lucinda’s gaze met mine. “She never was one who liked it rough.”

***

I found Travis and sent him back to Lucinda’s, not that he would do much good considering the condition he was in. Then I slapped Muller awake and sent him as well. He, at least, was a little more sober than Travis, only because he’d had time to sleep it off.

All the while, I fingered the gun in my pocket, the cold metal sending shivers through me. It took all my strength to find the men, to get them back to Lucinda’s, before heading home.

The sun was rising as I walked up Main. My house was dark, curtains closed, and the door locked. I opened the front door as quietly as I could and stepped inside. The early morning brightness hadn’t reached the interior of the house. Everything was in shadow. But the baby wasn’t crying.

I made my way up the stairs. When I reached the bedroom door, I stared at my wife, asleep in our bed. She lay on her left side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, her chest rising and falling with her even breathing. Even asleep she looked tired.

I walked toward her, never taking my gaze off her. She didn’t stir. I crouched beside her and opened the top drawer of the dresser, and suddenly she was awake, reaching for the gun, the one I was covering with my right hand.

“Will?” she asked, as she blinked herself fully awake. “Everything all right?”

“I don’t know.” My voice sounded odd to my own ears, flat and emotionless. I pulled her gun out of the drawer and rested it on my left palm. The blue plating was nicked, the walnut grip scratched. But even from my angle, I could see the engraved initials.

V.L.

“Will?”

From my pocket, I pulled out the other gun and let it rest on my right palm. “Look what I found tonight.”

All the color left her face. Her brown eyes were wide, and I could see her tamping down panic. “Where?”

“In a whorehouse safe.”

“That what they called you out for? A gun?”

I had heard that kind of question before, and it made me sad. It was a stalling-for-time question, one that let the asker think about her story rather than try to obtain an answer.

“No,” I said, not willing to tell her what had happened. “Tell me about your gun, Ginny.”

“It’s just a gun, Will.” Another stall.

“Then there’s nothing to stop you from telling me about it.”

Her gaze hadn’t left my face, but I could see that took some effort. She was at a disadvantage. I was good at reading people, but I was best at reading her.

“I got it in a pawn shop in Kansas City, before I took the wagon train out here. I figured Sam and I needed protection.”

“From a single shot revolver?”

She shrugged. “It was all I could afford.”

She was lying. God help me, I could tell she was lying. The slight twitch of her upper lip, the sweat forming at the hairline. Something about this was scaring her and she didn’t want to tell me what.

“I thought the V.L. stood for Virginia Lysander,” I said. “In fact, you told me that once.”

“It’s my gun,” she said. “It can stand for anything I want. I don’t know what it stood for before.”

“It was just a bit of luck that you found a gun with your initials on it?”

“That’s why I picked it out,” she said.

“I thought you said it was all you could afford.”

A spot of color formed in each cheek. She knew I’d caught her. “That too.”

“Ginny,” I said, almost pleading with her. “This is serious.”

She pushed her lips together. She wasn’t going to say any more.

“The man who owned this gun murdered Jeanne.”

She blinked at me. “Jeanne?”

“She was a whore on D Street.”

Ginny frowned as if she were trying to place the name. It was a small town and she had lived here nearly as long as Jeanne. I knew they had to know of each other. “You mean that coal-black girl who worked Shantytown?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you said you got the gun from a safe.”

“It’s a long story, Ginny. I just want to know how you fit in.”

She flung back the covers and got out of bed. She was moving with great purpose. “Where’s the man now?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I have to find out. I thought maybe you could help me.”

“How can I help you?” She grabbed her dress off the chair that she had lain it on the night before.

“Tell me what the connection is between the guns.”

She pulled the dress over her head, then keeping it bunched around her shoulders, stepped out of her nightdress. I couldn’t see her face when she said, “How should I know?”

“The matching gun, Ginny.”

“I told you. I bought it at a pawn shop.” She slipped her head through the dress. Her hair was mussed. “You believe me, don’t you?”

I stared at her, this woman I thought I knew well. I didn’t believe her, and I didn’t like the way I had started thinking. The way she woke up on edge, the fact that she always kept the gun near her, the difficulty she’d had initially trusting me or any man.

“Where’d you get the gun, Ginny?”

She blinked, looked away, then shook her head. “Don’t ask me any more. You’re not going to like what I have to say.”

“What I like and don’t like doesn’t matter, Ginny. Where’d you get the gun.”

She leaned against the wall, her head narrowly missing the crucifix she had put up there when we got married. “From a dead man.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise me. “Who?”

She swallowed, closed her eyes, and bowed her head. “Sam’s father.”

***

He’d been a decorated officer in the Confederate Army. He’d returned to Atlanta on a short leave around Christmas, 1862. That was when he’d forcibly raped Ginny and left her pregnant with Sam. Sam was born in August 1863 and she found she didn’t care how he was conceived. He was her boy. She made up a husband, a father for Sam—Russ Lysander, tragically killed at Gettysburg, the man she’d always told me about—and prepared to leave Atlanta as soon as she was healthy enough.

It took her some time to regain her strength after the birth. By November of 1863, she was ready to leave. But as she was figuring out how best to travel with an infant, she ran into Sam’s father again.

He had returned to Atlanta on Jefferson Davis’s business. Somehow—Ginny wasn’t real clear about this—Sam’s father managed to overpower her and take her to his home where he tried to rape her again. Only this time, she managed to get his gun.

She shot him, point-blank range, through the heart. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Then, she said, her voice oddly emotionless, she robbed him—took his gold wedding band, the diamond earrings he’d given his wife, some pieces of silver—spoons, a small box, and napkin rings. She also took the Confederate bank notes from his pocket, and the gold coins he’d stashed in his safe, and she used all of that to make her way west.

As she told me all of this, she met my gaze. It was as if she didn’t care what I thought—she would always be proud of what she had done.

“Who’s the man with the second gun?” I asked.

“His son.”

I waited for her to tell me his name.

Her lips thinned. “Beau Lewis.”

We stared at each other for a long moment. I could see the fear and hesitation behind her bravado. She wanted me to reassure her that I still loved her, even though she had killed someone, even though she’d been defiled. Neither of those things mattered to me.

What mattered was that she hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me either of them until now.

“May I have my gun?” she asked.

“You don’t need it,” I said.

“And if he somehow finds out I’m in town?”

“You’re not using the same name, are you?” That question was as much for me as it was for her.

She shook her head once.

“Then you’ll be all right.”

“I don’t like to be without it, Will.” A plaintive note to her voice, just the hint of begging.

I handed her the gun. “Stay inside. I’ll be back soon.”

“How’re you going to find him?” she asked.

“If what you say is true, then this gun means something to him. He’ll come back for it.” I slipped the extra gun in my pocket. “And I’ll be waiting for him.”

***

Whorehouses were quiet places in the daytime. The girls usually slept long past noon, and no clients appeared before dark. Things began to become active in the afternoons at a well-run place like Lucinda’s—people ate, cleaned, shopped, did all they needed to do.

I figured Lewis knew this, and would be back. I had only a few hours in which to catch him.

By the time I arrived back at Lucinda’s, Travis had fallen asleep in the chair by the door. Muller for once was awake and alert, but hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary.

I relieved him, locked and jammed the back door, ordered Lucinda to keep the girls upstairs, and then I unlocked the front door. I positioned myself between the front door and the safe, my Colt resting on my leg with my hand covering it.

Sure enough, long about 9 a.m., I heard rustling outside. My grip tightened on the Colt, and I fished in my pocket for the Derringer. The door opened, and a man sidled inside.

He was gaunt and blond, his hair ragged, his face careworn. He wore a threadbare gray coat, his hands in its pockets, ruining its shape.

“Come back for this?” I asked, holding up the Derringer.

He froze, one hand on the jamb of the open door. Sunlight framed him, making him look as if he were outlined in light. “I left in a hurry last night.”

He had a soft Southern accent, not as coarse as I had imagined from Elly’s description. He sounded educated.

“I bet you did. A man usually doesn’t stick around when he murders someone in cold blood.”

To my surprise, he didn’t even try to bolt. “You the sheriff?”

“I’m the mayor.”

“Then you should know why I did what I did. That nigra girl, she murdered my daddy.”

“Did she now?”

“Yes, sir. After the Devil Lincoln issued his illegal declaration freeing all the slaves in a country he no longer ruled, she let herself into the house, took one of my daddy’s guns from his matched set, and shot him with it. Then she told all her people to run away. Thank the good Lord some of them stayed to tell me about it when I came home more’n a year ago.”

I felt cold. “You’re sure this was Jeanne?”

“Her name wasn’t Jeanne. It was Jubilee. She took my dead momma’s name when she pawned my family’s silver in St. Louis and signed onto the wagon train. That’s how I tracked her here.”

“Your momma’s name?” I had to brace my arm so that the hand holding the Colt didn’t shake.

“Virginia Lysander.”

I felt as if I were encased in a shell.

“I take it,” I said flatly, “you never met the woman who murdered your father.”

“Oh, I seen her,” he said. “She was ours, after all.”

“But you don’t remember her,” I said, “and you didn’t ask for her by name when you came here.”

“What is this?” He stepped further inside. “Why should I ask for her by name? She’d already changed it twice. I just asked where the town’s nigra women were. I was told there was only one.”

“And?” My throat was dry.

“She recognized me same time as I recognized her.” He held out his hands. “I was telling you this because I thought you was a reasonable man. I wasn’t willing to take her back to Georgia for trial. Laws’ve changed, and I didn’t want to travel with a darkie, not in today’s world. Surely, you can see that.”

“I can.”

“So you can give me my daddy’s gun, I’ll leave your fair city, and we’ll pretend this conversation never happened.”

I stood. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Whyever not?”

“You just reminded me,” I said as I approached him. “Laws have changed.”

“It’s Biblical. An eye for an eye. Justice has been done.”

“No, it hasn’t,” I said, fishing for my handcuffs. “Murder’s a hanging offense in Hope’s Pass.”

“She was a nigra, a murderess, and a whore. Ain’t no one gonna miss her.”

“I can think of at least two people who will,” I said as I cuffed his hands behind his back.

I led him into the sunshine. As we stepped onto D Street, I wasn’t surprised to see Ginny, standing alone in the dust, her Derringer out and pointed at Lewis.

“Go home, honey,” I said, feeling more weary than I’d ever felt in my life, hoping that Lewis wouldn’t realize the mistake he’d made.

But his face flushed an angry red. “Ruby,” he said in soft recognition. “Son of a bitch. You and Jubilee done this together.”

“Step aside, Will,” she said to me. “I don’t want my shot to go wild and hit you.”

“Ginny, honey, this isn’t right.”

Lewis gave me an odd sideways look.

“It’s right that he killed Jube?” she asked.

“He’s going to hang for that.”

“He’s gonna ruin our lives, Will.”

“What the hell’s she talking about?” Lewis asked me. “You got something with this woman?”

“She’s my wife,” I said softly.

“Tarnation, man, don’t you know what she’s done? She’s been passin’. She was one of our house niggers from the time she was old enough to carry.”

“Shut up!” Ginny waved the gun at him.

“She’s been lying to you,” he said in that sly voice. “All these years, making you think she’s something she’s not.”

“Move aside, Will,” she said again.

“She used you to make her greater than she was. And now you know what she is. A killer, an animal, no better than a snake.”

That frozen feeling was still with me. All of this felt like it was happening to someone else.

“Will.” Ginny sounded panicked. “I don’t care what you think of me. But what about Sam? The baby?”

Sam, with his gray, trusting eyes, and my daughter, whose black hair had more curl than I’d ever seen in a baby. Curly black hair and skin so white it made mine seem dark.

I reached into my pocket for the handcuff key. My hand was shaking. I wasn’t thinking. I was just acting.

I unlocked his cuffs and walked away, leaving her with her single-shot pistol alone with him and his knife.

***

She had left the children by themselves. The baby was crying in her crib, drool coming from her sore gums. Her diaper was wet. I changed it by rote, then cradled her against me and looked into her black, black eyes.

I could see it now, of course, now that I was looking. The curl of her hair, the darkness of her eyes, the twist of her features in a way that I had once thought particularly Ginny. Amazing that I’d missed it before.

Sam was tugging on me, his face splotchy. He’d been crying too, although, at three, he was too big a man to admit it. I crouched down and hugged him to me, and willed the numb feeling to go away.

I was afraid of what I’d find underneath it. Loathing for Ginny, for me. I’d always despised men who used their slave women, like my father had used his. I’d walked away from that life ten years before, wanting no part of it, content to sit out the war in the West and watch the casualties roll by.

I didn’t figure I’d have some of its victims in my own house.

Sam was a bright little boy, full of pluck and energy. He didn’t deserve half a life. And neither did the baby, her whole future ahead of her.

Maybe, on some level, I could understand what Ginny had done. And why she had to lie to me.

I could understand it, but I wasn’t sure I could ever forgive her.

***

She came home about a half hour later, her eyes haunted. The blood that spattered the bottom of her skirt told me she’d had to use Lewis’s knife to finish the job—her shot had only wounded him.

The baby was quiet. Sam was watching us from the doorway.

I led her into our bedroom, careful not to touch her, and closed the door.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“I left him on the street.” Her voice was low. “Someone’ll find him.”

“And come get me.”

She nodded. “But if you don’t make something of it, no one else will.”

She was right. No one would care, and everyone would have their own version of what happened. Some might even credit me.

In an odd way, they would be right. Because I wasn’t going to speak up. As Lewis had said, justice had been done.

“You want to tell me the truth now?” I asked. “I deserve to know.”

Ginny looked away, her expression sad. Then she closed her eyes, and took us both back to the past.

***

When she was sixteen, Lewis’s father visited her for the first time. When she was seventeen, she had his child. She had another child the next year, and the next, and when it became clear that she preferred motherhood to her duties, the children were sold as part of a package to a nearby plantation and she never saw them again.

She was pregnant with Sam when word of the Emancipation Proclamation hit. She stole the derringer, and waited, shooting Lewis’s father as he pressed down on her in the dark.

Jeanne heard the shot, and was the one who thought of taking the money, the silver, the rings. Together the women left, making their way north, helping each other survive.

Sam was born in New York, the first free child in Ginny’s family. It was there she realized that unless she was seen with Jeanne, everyone thought she and Sam were white.

She sold one of the spoons and left in the middle of the night for St. Louis, not telling Jeanne where she was going. She invented Russ Lysander and his untimely death, and received treatment beyond her dreams.

Everything went well, until Jeanne turned up in Hope’s Pass. She’d followed Ginny across country. Jeanne earned part of her living at Lucinda’s and supplemented it by blackmailing my wife.

Which was why every time I saw them near each other, they looked at each other with such hate.

***

Ginny’s voice had trailed to nearly nothing. Her gaze met mine, and I saw the pleading. But Lewis’s voice echoed in my mind.

She’d murdered two men. And she’d lied to me.

There was a knock on the door. I jumped, even though I’d expected it. In the next room, the baby started to wail.

“What do we do now?” Ginny asked.

“Will!” Travis yelled from the street. “Doc says we got another situation.”

The baby’s cries had grown piercing. Sam tapped on our door. “Mommy?” he said.

Ginny’s gaze met mine and held it. I always prided myself on doing the right and honorable thing.

Only this time, I had no idea what the right and honorable thing was.

“Will!” Travis yelled.

I could see fear in her face, fear greater than any I’d seen before. I sighed.

“Change your clothes,” I said, “and feed the children. I have no idea when I’ll be back.”

I pulled open the bedroom door. Sam launched himself at my leg, and held it so tight that he nearly cut off circulation. He would grow up slender like his uncle. He’d have the same gray eyes, the same deep voice.

I slipped my hand on his head, feeling his thin straight hair.

Ginny was watching us, her hands clasped together.

“And make sure you’re here when I get home,” I said. “I want to have dinner with my family tonight.”

Her breath caught. I could see her fighting to stay calm. “What happens next, Will?” she asked, her voice soft. “To us?”

I stroked Sam’s hair. We had only one choice. “We put the past behind us, Ginny, like all people who come West.”

Her smile was thin, but there was hope in her eyes. Maybe there was hope in mine as well.

“Will!” Travis yelled from below.

I nodded at her, kissed our son as I extracted him from my leg, and went downstairs to clean up Ginny’s mess.

Death on D Street

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and layout copyright ©  WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Philcold/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.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Consecrated-Ground-Book-Trailer-Small-.mp4

Here’s the book trailer, specifically designed to feature the Kickstarter, for my noir novel, Consecrated Ground. This is the novel that I mentioned on Tuesday, the one that the original editor slapped an offensive title on (which stuck for nearly two decades). I’m using the original title.

This novel is historical through and through, although, like its compatriot in the Kickstarter, the novel straddles two different timelines. Memory and crime feature in both novels.

There’s also a short story collection in the Kickstarter, and it has some previously unpublished stories. Readers who are in my newsletter told me they wanted to see more short story collections, so I’m working diligently to give them what they asked for.

I hope the trailer interests you enough to send you to the Kickstarter. Consecrated Ground won’t be available anywhere but the Kickstarter for several months. So if you want to get a copy early, head on over now.

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Candid-Shots-Kickstarter-low-quality.mp4

We’re running a Kickstarter as of about five minutes ago. It features a brand-new crime novel that I hesitate to call historical, because part of the book is set now. I’m proud of that book, Candid Shots of the 1970s, but it also surprised me. I thought it was going to be a short story, but the characters took off with it, and told me a story that I did not expect. Yep, that’s how I spent my December holidays, listening to characters tell me about an afternoon on a Minnesota lake that turned into a massively traumatic experience by evening.

The second novel appeared under a different title. It was published in the 1990s, reprinted in the early part of this century, and got great reviews. The first editor also gave it an offensive title that I will not use here, even to tell you which novel it is. This one is a true historical, with a crime in the center. And it’s noir, so expect dark. We’re reissuing it with the original title, Consecrated Ground.

The final book in the Kickstarter is a collection of short stories, two of which are brand-new. There are some award nominees in the collection as well. I think you’ll all have a lot of fun with this one.

In addition, there’s a mix of workshops and other mystery short fiction collections. So you can find all sorts of reading.

The video above is for the Kickstarter itself, and gives you a good sampling of what’s in it.

Head on over. The Kickstarter will run until Thursday, April 16, but the sooner we hit our goal, the sooner we start on the stretch goals. Then you’ll get even more reading—and, if we get to the upper level of the Kickstarter, an online workshop that I put together last year. Here’s the link!

After a vicious attack, Louisa wants her life back. She takes the first step in her new home, filled with art and mementos, high in the hills, on a beautiful dark night. A night that will take an ugly turn. A night no one ever anticipated.

“Hot Water” is free on this site for one week only. If you like this crime story, you might like my other crime stories. A Kickstarter for my latest crime novel, Candid Shots of the 1970s, will run from Tuesday, April 7, until Thursday, April 16. There you can get the new novel as well as Consecrated Ground, a novel that hasn’t seen print in 15 years, and a brand-new collection of short crime stories (although this one is not included). Click here to look at the Kickstarter.

If you just want a copy of this story, download it on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

Hot Water Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“You sure, honey?” Steve asked, hand on the brass doorknob. The foyer was dark and a bit too warm, carrying the day’s heat. “The Sandersons invited you too.”

Louisa brushed his curling hair out of his collar and straightened his suit jacket. “It’s okay,” she said, trying to keep the impatience from her voice. Steve wanted to include her, but this time she didn’t want to be included. She had been waiting for this night. “I’ve had a long week. I just want to be alone and relax.”

“All right.” He kissed her, almost missing her mouth, and pulled her close for a brief moment. “I’ll be back around midnight.”

She put her hand on top of his and pulled the oak door open. “No hurry. I’ll probably be asleep when you get here.”

He kissed her again, on the forehead this time, and walked out. She followed him onto the porch. Twilight had just settled in the valley, giving the trees a gray, shadowy edge. A cool breeze made the branches rustle. The frogs had started their evening chorus from the pond halfway down the driveway, and from overhead, a bird gave a good-bye chirp.

“Wish I were staying here with you,” Steve said. “It’s a great night.”

She smiled, but said nothing. She had been waiting for this evening alone for almost two weeks. She wanted nothing to spoil it. Steve squeezed her shoulder, then hurried down the wood stairs to the flagged path. They had only been in the house a few months, and it still needed work, but Louisa loved it.  If she strained, she could hear cars passing on the road over a mile away, but that was the only sound of civilization — except at midnight, when the distant whistle from the mill announced the arrival of third shift.

Steve hurried down the walk and opened the door on their car, a champagne-colored Porsche covered with dust from the gravel drive. He had been threatening to pave the driveway and to buy a truck, claiming that the Porsche was too expensive to suffer the nicks of tiny rocks churning beneath the wheels.

Someday he would decide the car was too expensive to drive.

The car roared to a start and made its way around the curving slope of the drive, through the trees. Louisa leaned against the wobbly wood railing and watched as the headlights grew smaller along the mile-long gravel drive.

No lights shone in the valley. The house just down the hill had been abandoned years ago. The three neighboring houses — the ones she could see sprawled on their individual twenty acres — had the clean look of a place with owners out of town. On Labor Day weekend, she could count on everyone being away.

She sighed and stretched, feeling the knots in her back pop. She couldn’t get more alone than this.

Still, she needed darkness. She slipped back inside and pulled the heavy door closed behind her. Then she shut off the porch light and the light illuminating the huge foyer.

Her hands were shaking.

The only way to conquer fear is to face it.  Her therapist’s voice echoed in her head. Roger wanted her to do this. He wanted her to take charge of her life. Now that you know why the fear exists, you can control it. It doesn’t have to control you.

Right.

She glanced at the stairs. Up there was her office, the safest place in the house. She could go there and grab a book, climb into the easy chair and while the hours away.

Or she could stay down here and face herself.

She walked to the kitchen, avoiding the bathroom and its mirror. The kitchen light was still on, illuminating the hand carved cookie jar she and Steve had bought on their honeymoon. Dishes dried in the rack, the long knife Steve had used to carve the beef resting on its side next to the plates.

Everything looked normal here. Everything was normal, except her. At least Steve had patience. He loved her. He had known even before they married that she would never take off her clothes for him, that she couldn’t stand to be naked in front of anyone. They made love in the dark with her nightgown pushed around her waist, his gentle fingers stroking her breasts through the fabric.

He loved her, but she could see in his eyes that sometimes he wanted more. Just once he wanted to see her, all of her, at the same time.

She flicked off the light switch over the phone. The fluorescent held their light for a moment, then went dark.  She walked into the breakfast nook and stared through the glass paned doors at the hot tub.

Even with the lights off, she could see it clearly, a big ungainly structure sitting in the middle of her backyard. A deck Steve had built circled it, with a rack to one side for their towels. He liked sitting nude in the water. He said it was one of the most sensual experiences in the world.

Her heart pounded in her throat. She hadn’t been this nervous since the first time she made a sales presentation nearly six years before. Roger had helped her overcome stage fright. Now he was helping her with this.

You need to face your fear, he said, each week. Next week, she wanted to go into his office and tell him she had.

She stepped back from the door and pulled her t-shirt off over her head. Her hair got caught in the neck, and for one suffocating moment, she couldn’t get free. She struggled, then pulled, willing to rip the shirt to free herself from the fabric. Finally, she was out, and she flung the shirt away from her.

It fluttered like a bird mid-flight, and landed gently on the sofa. Her body shook. She hadn’t been that trapped since (he grabbed her and threw her against the sand, the hot granules digging into her bare back. He wrapped his towel around her face and arms, pinning her in place—) No. She wouldn’t remember that. He had no place in this house. His memory, and the memory of his touch, were the things she was trying to get rid of.

She took a deep breath and made herself calm down. Then she slipped out of her shorts and panties, leaving them in a pool on the floor. She wrapped a towel around her waist, stepped into her thongs, and opened the back door.

Cool air caressed her skin, raising goose bumps. She loved the mountains. No matter how hot it was in the day, the nights were always comfortable, the breeze always fresh. She closed the door behind her and stood on the wooden back porch, letting the night woo her with its promise of secrecy.

She didn’t feel naked yet. The towel was enough protection. An owl hooted nearby, adding its voice to that of the frogs. At the base of the driveway, a car swooshed past, its sound little more than a reminder that other people lived in the world. The trees rustled around her as the wind caught the leaves.

Natural sounds. Safe sounds.

She took a deep breath and walked down the creaky wood stairs to the stone pathway Steve had built. The stones tilted to the left, down the hill, and she had to hold her arms out to maintain her balance.  The towel shifted precariously against her skin. She grabbed the top with one hand and nearly fell. Only Steve seemed able to walk across the stones without stumbling. She walked the rest of the way on the grass.

The tub made a low humming sound, so faint she only heard it when she was up close. Sometimes it clicked off, and she was left with complete silence.

Dew had formed on the tub’s plastic cover, leaving little trickles in the dust. The edge was cool to her fingers. She grabbed a side and pushed it back, not willing to take the entire cover off. She had tried to put the cover back on by herself once, and pulled a muscle in her back.

Steam rose off the surface of the water, and the biting scent of chlorine filled the air. Her heartbeat speeded up and her breath came in shallow gasps. Almost there. Almost.

The wooden stairs leading up to the deck were sturdier than the steps on the porch. Steve had built the deck out of cedar and the faint woodsy scent mingling with the chlorine made her think of him. She clung to that thought like the railing, maintaining her balance, giving her strength.

When she reached the top of the deck, she stopped, hands clutching the towel to her breasts.

The mountains across the valley were inky shadows against the dark horizon. No cars passed. Even the white glare from the mill was missing — it had shut down for the holiday. Occasional bursts of steam obscured her view like tiny clouds. Crickets had joined the frogs, and the breeze had an extra bite away from the house.

Alone. She was alone.

Carefully, she undid the knot holding the towel in place. The air kissed the sweat between her breasts and her body went rigid.

(He had smiled at first, friendly as she was, another nudist on a nude beach. The alcove didn’t seem private. Over the rocks, she could see her friends playing volleyball. But her screams mingled with the cry of seagulls, masked by their laughter, and no one found her until hours later, huddled in a small sunburned ball, nearly dehydrated from the sun.)

She had been wrong to go for heat. Heat would bring the memory back. Heat would make things worse.

Excuses. The memory was back, and would haunt her each time her skin was bare. Every morning before she got in the shower, she saw his face. She didn’t want to see his face any more.

Face it. Face your fear. Once you face it, no one will ever be able to hurt you again.

She hung the towel on the railing and immediately sat down at the edge of the tub, her feet in the water. The warmth made her toes ache, but she ignored it and slide inside, feeling covered by water, not quite as visible as she had been a moment before.

She didn’t move for a long time. Then she tilted her face toward the sky. She was doing it. She was sitting alone, under the stars, naked. Absolutely naked.

Free.

A tiny feeling of elation pushed aside her fear, and she breathed into it. Free.  She smiled and then stood. The chill tickled her heat-covered skin: she had never felt so sensual, so alive before. She ran her hands along her wet skin. He had had no right to touch her that way. Touch felt good.

It felt good.

And she was free.

***

She didn’t know how long she stood there, letting the breeze caress her in places her husband had never seen. The moon had moved across the sky, and wispy clouds appeared to the west.

Steve would be home sometime soon. And she would be waiting for him. Completely, gloriously nude.

She slipped back into the water and let its warmth relax her. Roger had been right. It had been so easy, but it had taken so long to get the courage. Even then, she knew. One false statement on Steve’s part, one wrong move, and she would have to do it all over again.

Unless she prepared herself. Unless she sat in the darkness and thought all the problems through. He would be startled, surprised to find her in the tub. He might comment on that. He might say her name softly, in a voice filled with awe. He might ask if she was okay.

A twig snapped. She stiffened, heart pounding. The sound had come from the front of the house. She swallowed, and listened closely. A faint rustle. Soft movements in the bramble.

Deer.

A week after they had bought the house, the tub was finally clean enough and warm enough to use. Steve took off his suit, looking glorious in the moonlight. She wore hers as she slipped into the water. They had held hands under water and stared at the stars for what seemed like hours before they heard something behind them.

She had tried to sit up, but Steve had held her still. “Deer,” he whispered. He put a finger to his mouth and turned carefully, without disturbing the water. Then he touched her shoulder and pointed. A doe stood just behind them, upwind, ears twitching. Finally she ignored them and began eating from the apple tree at the edge of the yard.

Deer.

Louisa made herself take a deep breath. Of course she was on edge. She would be until she got used to being without clothes again. Once she could be naked with strangers — at a nude beach, up in the hot springs, at hot tub parties when she worked in California — then it had all disappeared in the space of an afternoon, while she screamed, with hot granules of sand digging into her back.

She was safe now.

It was over.

She was free.

She leaned back in the water and rested her head on the tub’s plastic side. By the time Steve got home, her body would be shriveled and wrinkled. She smiled. Then he couldn’t judge it. Then he couldn’t decide that the woman he had married had one of the uglier bodies on the planet.

A light went on in the house.

Louisa sat up, water sloshing around her. Steve wasn’t home. She would have heard the car. She would have seenthe car, coming up the drive. No timers on the lights, because they felt no need for them. No one could see the house from the road. Sometimes they even went away and left the house unlocked.

Someone was inside.

A stranger was inside her house.

A man crossed the foyer. He was bigger than Steve and muscular. His shoulders, in shadow, looked like they could carry the world without dropping it. Another, smaller man followed him.

A light went on in the living room.

What were they doing? Waiting for her? No. The house was dark. They thought no one was home. They were looking for something. But they hadn’t brought a car, probably so that they wouldn’t caught on that circular driveway.  No car. She would have heard it. Something they could carry. Not the Dali in the living room nor the Degas in the den.

(Although they could cut the paintings out of the frame and roll them. Carrying tubes would be easy, even in the dark.)

The safe held extra money and her jewels, mostly her costume jewels. The real ones were in a safety deposit box in a bank downtown.

Except for the emerald. The antique emerald her grandmother had given her. The one the photographer for Smithsonian had photographed for the article they were doing on family heirlooms. The one that had been reproduced in papers all over the state.

It certainly wasn’t the most valuable jewel they had, but it was the most famous.

They must have been planning this for a long time. She thought she had heard a car earlier, down by the abandoned house. Steve had said she imagined it.

Steve was wrong.

Her heart pounded in her throat. They were in the living room. They didn’t know she was there. If she eased the lid back over the tub and crouched under it, she would have enough air to last for several hours.

But that might make too much noise. She was probably better if she didn’t move at all.

(Then they would find her and pull her out and hold her on the cedar boards, the wood digging into her naked back—)

No. She had to get away now. But her clothes were inside and Steve had the car.

Steve. What happened if he came home while they were in the living room. It would take them time. The safe was behind the heavy oak bookcases. They had to take the books off the cases, move the cases and figure out the combination.

(Mixed birthdays — her month, Steve’s day, the combination of their years: 6-10-56. Impossible to guess unless they knew. Unless they had a stethoscope like in the movies, a man who ran an emery board against his fingertips so that they would be sensitive—)

She was panicking, thinking nonsense instead of finding a way to save herself. The Holts lived half a mile down the drive. They rarely locked their house. She could go inside, use their phone, have the police catch the men in the act.

And she would be safe.

They didn’t know she was here. They wouldn’t know she had escaped.

Deep breath. Deep breath. Move quietly. Do not stir the water.

She moved her hand underneath the water, and braced herself against the seat.  A shadow fell across the living room window, but no one else moved in the foyer.  She brought her other hand out and grabbed the lid.

Water dripped, sending echoey pings through the yard.

Her heart rate increased, but she didn’t move. They couldn’t hear the pings. She couldn’t hear anyone in the hot tub unless the windows were open, and she kept them all closed.

She stood. The cold breeze raised goose bumps on her body —

And she froze. She couldn’t get out. They would see her. They would see all of her and —

She had to. She had to. It was the only way to save herself.

Maybe she could crawl back in. It wouldn’t take too much effort to pull the lid down and she would have enough air for hours. She would be safe there, and no one would see her. No one would notice that she was nude…

Another shadow moved across the living room window. She sank back into the hot water. In a minute, they would turn on the outside light, and see her. She wasn’t safe. Not here. Not now.

Face your fear, Roger had said.

If only he had known.

Her body was shaking so badly she was making little ripples in the water.  Out. She would only be naked for an instant. Long enough for her to grab her towel, wrap it around herself and get off the deck.

But to get to the driveway from here, she had to either go down a path beneath the living room or walk through six feet of brush. Snapping twigs and crackling branches. They would hear. They would find her.

She had to try.

She eased herself out of the water again, eyes closed, imagining Roger’s face, hearing his voice with its calm confidence. Face your fear, Louisa. That’s the only way it will disappear.

Her torso was out, breasts exposed to the night air. The breeze kissed the water droplets. Her shaking had grown.

Face your fear.

She braced her hands on the side of the tub, and pulled herself up until her buttocks rested on the lukewarm plastic. Then she slid back, feet still in the water, until the plastic turned to wood. The cedar of the deck. She reached over, grabbed the towel, and wrapped it around herself.

Then she opened her eyes.

A man stood in the kitchen, staring out the double paned doors. Staring at her.

She held back a scream, finally understanding how the doe had felt when she approached the apple tree. The man picked up a knife, and set it down, then opened the cupboards.

He hadn’t seen her.

He couldn’t see her. The kitchen light was on. He couldn’t see what was going on in the yard. In the darkness.

She pulled her legs out of the water, careful not to make a sound. With her right hand, she tied the towel in place. With her left, she grabbed her thongs and slid them on her wet feet. She glanced at the house and the path. Lights from the kitchen and the living room illuminated it. If someone looked out, he would see her, crouching by. Besides, going that way was the opposite direction. She had to go down. Away.

She climbed off the deck and paused for a moment, wondering if she should put the lid on. Too much time. And too much risk of noise. She had to get away. She had to disappear before they realized that under the towel she was —

She wouldn’t think about it.

The dry grass crunched beneath her feet. Each step sounded like a peal of thunder. She went around the large oak tree, using it for support as she slipped into the bushes.

Her towel caught on a thorn, nearly pulling it loose. She yanked, and the bush shook. She waited. Nothing changed inside the house.

She took a few more steps down. She could see the gravel, glinting in the moonlight. Up the driveway stood the carport with nothing in it. They had parked somewhere else. They had planned this.

They thought she was gone, with Steve, until midnight.

She let go of the oak tree and grabbed a blackberry bush, wincing as thorns bit into her palm. A few more feet and she would make it. A few more feet and she would run for her life.

A twig snapped beneath her thongs.

“Jesus!” a voice boomed from the house. “What was that?”

Another voice responded, and then the voices grew silent again. She huddled, knees against her chest. No doors opened. No one came down.

She was okay. As long as she didn’t step on anything else.

She made herself count to one hundred before moving again. She stayed low, letting the blackberry bushes protect her. Nothing snapped beneath her feet. She crossed the expanse of grass until she reached the gravel —

— which shuffled like an explosion against the silence of the night.

Another light went on in the house. She swallowed heavily. They would find her. They would find her and hold her —

She kicked off the thongs and ran down the side of the road, on the unmowed grass. Rocks pierced her bare feet, but she willed it not to hurt. It wasn’t going to hurt. It couldn’t hurt.

The back door opened.

” —told you I heard something.”

And the porch light went on.

“Good God. There’s someone here.”

“No. There’s no car —”

“Lid’s up. The damn tub’s steaming. And there’s footprints.”

She reached the fork in the driveway. Her bare foot landed on gravel and slid out from under her. She fell, gravel moving her forward. A grunt escaped her, and pain ran up her left side. Rocks had imbedded themselves in her legs and buttocks —

(like grains of sand)

— but she made herself stand up and keep running.

“Down there!”

The men crashed through the brambles. She ran downhill, gaining speed with each movement. One wrong step and she would fall on her face. Gravel flew behind her and her feet felt like lacerated sores.

“I’ll get the car. You see if you can spot him.”

Not the car. If they had the car, they would find her. But she had reached the bottom of the hill and the clearing. She only had a few more yards before she reached her neighbor’s house.

“Leave the damn car. It’s too far away. There’s nowhere he can go.”

Other footsteps followed her.  She rounded the corner, and vaulted the gate, losing her towel. She stopped, reached for it, but couldn’t grab it. The tall man was crashing down the road, looking even bigger in the moonlight. He saw her.

It was the towel or escape.

A whimper left her throat. She needed that towel, needed the cover, needed —

— the phone. The police. Help of some sort.

She took a deep breath and left the towel where it fell, ran up the dirt walk and onto the porch.

Please let the door be open. Please.

She grabbed the knob and yanked. The door opened, and she nearly stumbled backwards. She went inside and pulled it closed, locking it behind her.

The phone was on the kitchen counter. She had used it once before hers was installed. She grabbed it, thumbed the buttons, counted, and found 911.

It rang once.

“Nine-one-one, may I help you?”

“Yes. Men have broken into my house. They’ve chased me down to the neighbor’s. They’re coming up the walk now. I need someone out here as fast as possible.”

The doorknob rattled. She stepped back, fear making her entire body cold.

” —located at 6611 Aker Road?”

Her neighbor’s address. “Yes. He’s at the door. Can someone hurry?”

“There’s a car in your area.”

A face pressed against the glass of the sliding patio doors. Shit. She hadn’t checked the locks on any of the other doors. Even if the door was locked, all he had to do was break the glass.

“Please hurry,” she said. “Please.”

“Someone will be there as fast as possible, miss. In the meantime, stay on the line —”

She set the phone down and groped behind her. Damn. She should have paid more attention when she was down here. Knives on the sideboard? No. But she needed something. Anything.

She reached up and her hand brushed something metal above the stove. Skillets. Cast iron. Heavy. She pulled the biggest one down as he yanked the patio door open.

He held up her towel. “Forget something?”

She froze, seeing not him, but the man who had grabbed her on the beach. A big man, bigger than this one, smiling. She couldn’t see his face now, in the dark.  But he was probably smiling too.

Her breath was coming heavy, her chest heaving. She had to move. Had to. He had already seen her naked. He had already done the worst he could do. Help was on the way. All she had to do was hold him off until it arrived.

A tinny voice echoed from the phone. He came closer, shaking the towel. “Thought you were smart, didn’t you? Thought we would never find you. Wet feet leave footprints, miss.”

Her arms ached from holding the skillet. She backed up until the wood counter dug into her back. She was breathing through her mouth, the air whistling between her teeth.

“Scared, huh? You got nothing to be scared about. Not yet. Not till my partner gets here.”

He hadn’t seen the phone then. In this dark corner of the kitchen, he probably could barely see her at all. He came forward, waving the towel like a bull fighter waved a flag.

“Hope you’re pretty. I like pretty women.”

Pretty. He had said that before. On the beach. She could smell him, the sweaty oniony scent of an overweight man. He would touch her and this time, sand wouldn’t dig into her back. The counter would.

And she was naked, just like she had been the first time.

“Got you trapped,” he said. He reached out and she swung the skillet at him, catching him full on the side of the head. The metal rang. He grunted and fell against the counter. The towel landed on her feet, the soft weave tickling the skin. She kicked it aside. He moaned again, and reached for the counter to pull himself up. She brought the skillet down, harder this time, and he collapsed against the floor.

A voice was yelling, outside. A man’s voice. She held the skillet against her shoulder like a bat, and stalked to the door. The other man stood in the driveway, his body silhouetted in the moonlight. He glanced in all directions, unable to see her or his friend. He was shouting his companion’s name — a word she couldn’t quite catch.

And then she heard sirens.

He wouldn’t find her if she kept quiet. But she had to protect herself. She had to make sure the other one wouldn’t wake up. She walked back in the kitchen. He hadn’t moved. He huddled in a near-fetal position, one arm trapped under his head. She crouched over him, skillet poised, like a child about to smash a bug.

The tinny voice still spoke from the phone. Even though she couldn’t hear the words, the sound comforted her. Someone was there. Someone was listening. The sirens grew louder.  Flashing red and blue lights illuminated the kitchen. Something dark streaked the side of the counter. The man’s hair had matted against his skull. His breath was raspy, difficult, as if his nose were plugged.

The door behind her opened and a light came on. She stood and whirled at the same time, skillet clutched tightly in both hands.

A policeman stood there, hands out. “It’s okay, ma’am. I’m here to help.”

She didn’t move. He came across the carpet slowly, facing her as he walked. He knelt beside the man and touched his matted hair. His fingers came away bloody. Two other policemen came in the doorway.

“He’s breathing,” the first policeman said. “But we’ll need some help.”

One of the others went back out the door. The first policeman stood. “We caught the other man on the road. You’re safe now. That was some pretty quick thinking.”

Her arms trembled under the skillet’s weight. She didn’t want to let it go. It was her protection. He came closer, reaching for her.

“It’s okay. You’re safe now.”

“Your husband’s outside,” said the other policeman. “We met him as we were turning into the driveway. He wants to see you.”

Steve? She felt as if she were surfacing from a very deep sleep. Everything had to be okay if Steve was there. She loosened her grip on the skillet, and the policeman took it away from her as if he was afraid she would use it.

“Come on,” he said gently. “You’re safe with us. Do you have anything…?”

For a moment, she didn’t know what he meant. Then she glanced back at the man on the floor. His left hand lay flat on the towel. She shook her head.

He nodded to the other policeman who went into the bedroom. He returned carrying a pink chenille bedspread. With one hand, he extended it. She took it, and wrapped it around herself, wondering at the need for it. Would it embarrass them if she went outside naked?

“You hurt?” the first policeman asked.

She shook her head.

“Your husband’s outside,” the second one repeated.

They wanted her out of the house. Away from the man. That was good. She didn’t want to be near him anymore. She had shown him. She had finally shown him that he couldn’t hurt her, that he had no more power over her.

The night air was colder than she remembered. Five squad cars had squeezed into the small lawn, one parked on the baby pool near the swing set. Uniformed men huddled outside, talking. Steve stood with them until he saw her.

“Jesus, honey.”

He came over and put his arms around her. She realized for the first time that she was trembling. He caressed her face, then stopped when he touched the bedspread. It had slipped so that it clung to her like a cape.

“You’re not wearing anything. Did he—?”

His voice broke. She knew what he saw. More months of therapy. More months of darkness, of hesitant touch.

“No,” she said.

He took his hands off her as if he had been burned. She stepped back into his arms, and leaned her head on his strong shoulder. “I mean,” she said, “that he didn’t touch me. He didn’t touch me at all.”

His body felt good against her bare skin, the rough cloth of his suit giving her comfort she didn’t know she needed. The bedspread fell, and as he reached for it, she stopped him. He finished the hug, clutching her tight, and then bent down.

“You need this,” he said and wrapped the spread around her.

She didn’t need it. Not like he thought. Not ever again. Roger had been right. She had faced the fear and conquered it.

And no one would ever be able to hurt her again.

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © KrisCole/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.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

Technically, the first thing I finished reading was Anton Chekov’s The Seagull for my theatre history class. I’d read both the play and the short story the first time I was in college 100,000 years ago, and didn’t like them then. I decided to give the dang thing a chance again. Still didn’t like it, but I understand it now. Also, the prof mentioned in passing that we should read the play with Hamlet in mind. I did, and wow, that helps. It also explains why I don’t like The Seagull (besides, you know, the symbolism, the suicide, the unlikeable characters). Hamlet is my least favorite Shakespeare play. Reading a later play based on Hamlet does not make me like that story any better. (Sigh.) So yes, I’m not recommending it…

I am still reading a very long, very dense novel that I’m loving, but it blocked my easy reads of lighter fare for most of the month. I read a few other things that aren’t worth recommending and are, in fact, quite forgettable. 

So…here’s what I liked in March.

 

March, 2026

Abramovich, Seth, “The History of Mel Brooks, Part One,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 29, 2026. Full disclosure: I’m not the biggest Mel Brooks fan. His humor is too broad for me. Dean has tried to make me like Blazing Saddles as long as we’ve been together, and I just don’t. I saw it when it was released, I saw it with him when we were first together, and then later, he made me watch it again. The famous fart scene? Not funny to me. This is not my kind of humor. However, I do like some of his films. Young Frankenstein is a personal favorite as is Silent Movie (which no one ever mentions), particularly the scene with Marcel Marceau. I saw The Producers on Broadway because I adore Nathan Lane. We saw the show the very first week, scoring tickets through magic. And while I found it funny, I found it funny the way I usually find Mel Brooks’ material funny: I understood the joke and wished it would make me laugh.

That said, I admire the crap out of Mel Brooks. He’s 99 now, still creating, and still moving forward. This interview is all about risk and reward, about taking chances and about staying true to your vision. The introduction says this of Brooks’ work:

Across nearly a century, Brooks has repeatedly tested the limits of taste, commerce, politics and patience. He has offended studio executives, television censors, foreign governments and polite society at large, often all at once. He also has reshaped the grammar of American comedy, leaving behind a body of work that includes The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, History of the World, Part 1, High Anxiety and Spaceballs. Several of those films were dismissed or misunderstood on arrival, only to be adored later. Others were instant detonations. All of them bear the same unmistakable fingerprint: an artist who believes that nothing is sacred except the laugh itself.

 Read this interview. It’s amazingly wonderful.

Armstrong, Kelley, Watcher in the Woods, Minotaur Books, 2019. This is the fourth Rockton novel and it does not stand alone. It starts shortly after the previous book ends. If I could have read something this dark before bed, I would have finished this book in one of those all-night marathon sessions. As it was, I read it when I could, and finished quickly. The unique setting and strong characters make both for good thrillers and fascinating reading. Start with City of the Lost and have fun.

Carter, Ally, Cross My Heart And Hope To Spy, Little, Brown, 2016 edition of a 2007 book. I love the Gallagher Girl Books. Set in a secret school for girls who are going to grow up to be spies, these books are delightfully adventurous. This time, Carter adds some rather mysterious teenage boys to the mix and a few teachers who might or might not be what they seem. This is my bedtime reading. It doesn’t usually keep me up (although the ending of this one did), but it is memorable and the characters are grand. (Btw, Books2Read malfunctions more than not for me, so you might have to find the book on your own.)

Carter, Ally, Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover, Little, Brown & Company, 2016 edition of a 2009 book. I blew through this book even though it’s my nighttime, don’t-stay-up-late read. Instead of one chapter, I probably read three or four per night, and then hurried through the ending because I just had to know. Carter introduces a Big Bad in this book that will factor into future books. (I know this because I’m deep in the next one.) I love the relationships the girls have with each other, and this school sounds like a great deal of fun. Books2Read malfunctioned again for me, so I don’t know if it’s the book or if it’s Books2Read (which seems to have gone downhill), but I was only able to get two links for you. If you prefer to shop elsewhere, you’ll have to look up the book on your own. Believe me, it’s worth the time.

Neville, Stuart, “Juror 8,” Ink and Daggers, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Titan, 2023. I’m still working my way through this volume. It’s heavily noir, which I like mostly, but occasionally the stories have left me cold. Which is why I love this Stuart Neville piece. Yes, noir. Yes, dark. But the voice is marvelous and the characters so dang real. I have several Stuart Neville books on my TBR shelf and I avoid them because he is so dark. But maybe now I’m feeling up to them…

Pirandello, Luigi, Six Characters in Search of an Author, multiple publishers, first published in 1921. Well, I’m remarkably consistent. I loathed The Seagull when I read it as a twenty-year old, and I loved Six Characters back then. I love it now. It was a fun read for my theatre history class. The other students were baffled as hell by it, but I love metafiction and this is one of the first well known pieces of metafiction. It was fascinating to learn that Pirandello was friends with Mussolini. (It was also fascinating to hear the prof, who is as liberal as they come, try to justify that friendship.) The discussion was glossed over in class, but it got me thinking about the age-old argument—do you judge the author by what they do or what they’ve written. I know with Rowling, I will not support anything of hers, because she’s doing active ongoing harm at the moment. Reading an old Pirandello play, aware of all the things Mussolini would do after the two men got to know each other…well, I just want to avert my eyes. In other words, I have no justification for recommending a play from someone who was a fascist, and yet, here I am, doing it.

When a journalist on assignment visits a convention held by a fringe group who believes that teleportation has changed them—he wonders how he will manage to complete his assignment. But the more he talks to the TVSo?s, the more he becomes convinced they might not be crazy—they might just be right. 

Finalist for the Best Fiction Maggie Award given by the Western Publications Association.

“Going Native” is free on this site for one week only. You can download your own copy of the story on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

Going Native Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

“God, could you find a duller way to travel?” asks my leggy companion, the luscious Ruth. She has this weekend off, and she insisted on coming with me on my assignment. It’ll be fun, she said, and then followed that up with, how can I know what you’re doing unless I come along with you on occasion? I listened to the logic of that, and now I find myself trapped in a 5-foot-by-six-foot moving room with a woman who finds train travel passé.

Me, I’m afraid that the Amtrak trip up the mountain will be the best part of this assignment. I work for eight online editors, and all of them called me last week to ask for an article on the annual TVS convention. Such a uniformity of requests has only happened once before in my career, and that was when a woman that I sat beside in grade school, tormented in middle school, and dated in high school was inaugurated as president of the United States. Suddenly my memoirs had value.

Somehow, I doubt that this essay has the same sort of import.

I also had my doubts about bringing Ruth to kooksville and now, when we’re still two hours away from our destination, I know I’ve made the Wrong Decision. She is lying on the bottom berth, her bare feet against the dirty plastic wall, her skirt pooled around her waist, and she is not thinking of sex.

Neither am I.

“I mean, we’ve been on this train for hours. How did people travel like this?”

They made love, they ate, they read books. But I do not tell Ruth that. She would see it as a slap, an insult to her great intelligence. In real life, Ruth is a receptionist for a lawyer, but she prefers to call herself a paralegal. She uses legalese, mispronouncing most of it, and pretends that she knows as much as someone who has a law degree.

I’ve never told her about mine. But then, why should I? It would ruin the sleazy nature of the relationship, the fact that I’m dating her for her deliciously man-made breasts and she’s dating me because I know the secrets of the universe.

She believes that’s because I’m a journalist. The old-fashioned print kind, even though what we print is done online. I’m paid by the download, which is why I’m on this train trip instead of, say, investigating the latest bombing in downtown Seattle. No matter how idealistic you start, you soon learn that it’s paranoia that sells.

Which is why we’re on a train instead of teleporting. There are no teleportation stations in this part of the Cascades. Rumor has it that the first teleportation technician who ventured into this part of Oregon was shot. Whether he lived or died depends on which rumor you believe.

Ruth knew we were heading into no man’s land when she decided to come with me, but the closer we get the less I believe she actually understood it. I think she thought we’d look at the crazy yokels and then go home.

I think I thought she could handle anything.

Check that. I think I knew, deep down, she was contemplating Marriage, and I wanted to convince her that breaking up was her idea. But that’s hindsight. Going in, I was simply concerned about the lack of sex.

“Once,” I say, gazing out the window at the snow beside the tracks, “this was the fastest way to travel in the whole world.”

“Yeah.” She flops an arm over her eyes, missing the deer that stand by a group of trees, staring at us. A 19th century vision in the 21st. “Sad, isn’t it?”

I’m not sure. I’m enough of a romantic to enjoy the view. I’m enough of a romantic to wish that she’d enjoy it with me.

***

The assignment, if you look at it historically (which is one of the few things that I’ve retained from law school, a sense of historical perspective), is a perennial: Go look at the fringe and report back to the masses. Around the turn of the last century, that meant going to carnivals and fairs to examine the bearded women, the two-headed chickens, and the stillborn fetuses that looked like fish. In my grandfather’s day, a reporter on this beat might go to see the mysterious Area 51, thought to be a repository for Unidentified Flying Objects (things so familiar they were known by their acronym UFO) and for the little green men who flew them. Me, I get assigned the annual meeting of the Teleportation Victims Society whose own acronym is TVS, but who is known in newsrooms nationwide as TVSo?. I should’ve known I was in trouble when I tried to explain this little joke to Ruth and she’d stared at me blankly, not even threatening to smile.

The TVSo?s meet every year in Harbor, Oregon, which used to be a 1990s survivalist camp between Bend and Klamath Falls. The area’s only attraction, or so I could glean before I arrived, is that it has no teleportation station, and none is planned. If someone wants to travel in that part of the Cascade Range, they either have to go to Bend, fifty miles to the north, or Klamath Falls, over 60 miles to the south. Then they have to take whatever ground transportation is available, provided, of course, they can get it. Amtrak still serves this part of the country, partly because the sparse population can’t justify the teleportation system, and partly because the tracks have existed for nearly two hundred years. It’s the only form of public transportation between those two stations, and mostly it’s used by the low-income folks who can’t afford the cost of speedier travel.

I insisted on taking the train all the way from Seattle, over Ruth’s protests, because I wanted my experience at the annual meeting to reflect the experience of all the other TVSo?s. I had secretly hoped I’d meet a few of them on this ride, but Ruth has kept me chained to the room, demanding room service, and not paying for it in the way that I had hoped.

Still I manage to sneak to the club car once, and there I see exactly what I expect, a group of tired, smelly people, most of whom are too drunk to look at the magnificent scenery whizzing past. I realize that, in my new khakis and bomber jacket, I am overdressed and as conspicuous as a rich man in Olympia. No one will talk to me. They barely manage to look at me.

And, for the first time, I worry about how I’ll pull this assignment off.

***

I should say at this stage of article research, I always worry about how I’ll pull the assignment off. Even though what I write is dictated into my wrist-top, edited on a larger screen at home, and e-mailed directly to my editor, what I do is really not much different from the work, say, Mark Twain did almost two hundred years ago. He ventured out into places unknown and reported back.

Ernest Hemingway did that, so did Ernie Pyle, and Peter Arnett. The great journalists thrived in times of war. When there is no war—or no war America is interested in—we are stuck with perennials. And no journalist ever became famous by risking his life at a TVSo? convention.

I simply want to go in, find a few things that are amusing, see if I can discover the secret behind the victimology, and return to home base with all parts intact. I know that, by Sunday evening, I will have a story. I’m just not sure if it’s the kind of story Hemingway would have dispatched from Spain.

In fact, I know it’s not the moment the train pulls into Harbor, Oregon.

***

When Ruthie and I get off the train at the small white station nestled against a snow-covered ridge, we are greeted like visiting royalty. I made no secret of my job as a journalist, but it’s really Ruthie they want to see. It seems, on the e-slip she sent with her fee, that she listed her employment as she always does.

A paralegal and a journalist. We are a dream couple for the TVSo?s.

I am not the only journalist in this place. Every major television reporter, radio commentator, vid producer, and holotechnician is here to record the loonies in action. I am one of the few print people, and the only one with enough awards to make me semi-famous. Every TVSo? wants to tell me his story, to introduce me to little Jonnie or Suzy or Uncle Billy, and to show me what makes them different.

When I get off the train, I realize I am not ready for this. The grasping hands, the slightly desperate gaze. I insist on going to the hotel before meeting people, and Ruth gives me her I-can’t-believe-you’re-doing-this look. That’s when I realize she’s not upset about the location or the people. She’s upset that I want to leave them. She not only relishes the attention, she believes she can give these people advice. She doesn’t realize how dangerous the situation can be. She’s with the only people in the world who might take her seriously. I grip her arm and follow our host to the Compound, our hotel.

The Compound was the former survivalist’s camp, and looks it. The outbuildings are made of wood hammered together by people who clearly didn’t know what they were doing. The main building, where the restaurant and gift shop reside, was once a ranch-style house, built in the mid-twentieth century, complete with front-facing garage. The building had been added onto, once during its survivalist camp days—that was evident by the concrete bunker in the back—and once by the hotel, the brass and wood façade that tried to make everything upscale.

Our room isn’t really a room. It was cabin Number 8. A plaque on the door tells us that it had once been used by the house’s original owners as a storage shed, and was remodeled into a cabin when the camp started in the early 1980s. The plaque tells us proudly that eight people lived in this space; I’m wondering how Ruth and I will manage for a weekend.

The room is square, with an area carved out for a bathroom with an ancient shower and plastic tub. The sink has motion detectors instead of computer controls, and the toilet actually has a handle for flushing. Ruth is charmed, but I wonder if that will last into the middle of the night, when one of us stumbles in there and initiates the gurgle and grunt of the ancient plumbing.

We unpack, and then Ruth wants to reenter the fray. I’m more interested in checking out the dining facilities. The reconstituted chicken I had on the train didn’t last me long.

Outside, we see several blue-and-white signs, pointing to various cabins. Most signs are hand-lettered and made specifically for the conference: Registration is to our left; Legal advice is to our right; and Testimonials is straight ahead. Other signs show us the way to improve our Education, covering everything from Technological Secrets to the History of Transportation. Many of these, I know, are ongoing programs, and I will check them out through the weekend. It’s the guest speakers I am most interested in, and those are going to be the hardest events to see.

***

In the registration line I learn that the TVSo?s aren’t all low-income poorly educated folks like the research had led me to expect. The man in front of me is a doctor from Philadelphia who has documentation on “differences” and was willing to call it up on his wrist-top right there in the frigid Oregon mud. The slender, pretty woman behind me is a reasonably well known vid personality whose career went into a decline, she says, after she teleported 65 times in one month. I talk to both of them at some length. Ruth has left me alone in line while she went on to the lodge for drinks.

She has been gone a long time.

I draw the same sort of crowd I drew at the train station. I am uncomfortable, used to being the observer, not the observed. Everyone wants to tell me a story; everyone wants me to know how teleportation changes people, how it creates differences where there were none before.

Some of the stories are just silly, like the vid personality’s. She claims she lost a little bit of charisma each time she teleported from one place to another. Some are strange, like the woman who has me examine holograms of her now-estranged husband, a man whose eye color changed in the space of one afternoon from green to brown.

The rest are merely sad. Many are from people who claim that their spouses are no longer the same people they married, and they blame use of public teleportation. Others show evidence of medical conditions they claim were caused by teleporting, and still some have tales of close loved ones who died soon after traveling in a teleportation device.

I have read the literature; I am familiar with all variations on these stories and more. I even know their origins.

I ask the eye color woman why she believes her husband’s eyes were the only thing to change.

“I didn’t say they were the only thing, now did I?” she says angrily.

I turn away, afraid to follow up.

***

The first big breakthrough in teleportation occurred in the late 1990s when a team of Austrian scientists successfully completed a transfer on the sub-atomic level. The physics of the breakthrough was too complex to explain to the layman in the popular newspapers of the day, so many journalists attempted (unsuccessfully) to put the discovery in layman’s terms.

I have tried to hunt down the origin of the example used for the laymen and have been, to date, unsuccessful. I suspect either one of the scientists got exasperated with the journalists’ stupid questions and used the example to explain, poorly, what was going on, or a journalist attempted to translate what he thought he understood into language that he thought other people could understand.

Their experiment, said the news organizations of the day, was as if the scientists had taken a red ball in one room, made it disappear, and then reappear in another room—although what was teleported was not the ball itself, but the quality of redness which was then transferred onto another ball.

It is not what we experience. We experience the teleportation first imagined in pulp fiction stories of over a hundred years ago. Our bodies literally disassemble in one location, are transferred to another location, and are then reassembled. There are documented cases of malfunctions, most dating from the early days of the technology and almost all of them having to do with apes who arrived dead. These deaths were not pretty or simple: they had to do with parts being reassembled in the wrong order, rather like taking a puzzle apart, then trying to put it together by placing all the corners in the middle. Those details were resolved long before any human being stepped onto a teleportation pad. The things we must worry about are simpler: power failures and computer malfunctions, both of which can lose us mid-transfer. This problem is the greatest in Third World countries, in devices built out of scrap metal, most likely, by the operator’s Uncle Ralph. Teleportation is not sanctioned to those countries, or is done purely at the user’s own risk. Here and in “approved” countries, every device is scrutinized, overhauled, and replaced more often than anything else in our technologically advanced society.

This is what the literature tells me. It is what exists in all published reports, the meetings before Congress, and in several teleportation companies’ legal databases. I know there can be problems—we all do. The problems are called “acceptable risk,” something we all assume when we step on a teleportation pad, or even when we walk out our front door. What varies from person to person is how acceptable some risks are.

It is the idea that we can be disassembled and reassembled that unnerves people the most. A large number of people (actual estimates vary, depending on the reporting agency) refuse to use teleportation, allowing other forms of mass transit to remain in business. Most of these people are not TVSo?s. They simply don’t like the idea of being taken apart and put back together without it being necessary, and are not willing to sacrifice their original unity for the sake of instantaneous travel.

Others cannot imagine traveling any other way. Frequent teleporters receive a discount on each trip. “Frequent” is defined in the industry as anyone making more than ten trips per day. I have only hit the ten trip in one day milestone once, and it left me feeling disoriented and unnerved—not, I hasten to add, because I was disassembled so many times, but because, after five different teleportation stations, I lost track of my surroundings. Later I learned that frequent travelers set their wrist-top to remind them of their location and their purpose for being there upon arrival.

I have read all the literature, examined all the records, and while I still feel a twinge of nerves when I step on the platform, I prefer the instantaneous shift, the delight at having been in Manhattan one moment and Rome the next. It is not different, my grandmother once told me, than that frisson of fear she used to feel whenever an airplane’s wheels left the ground or whenever a train went over a particularly high and narrow bridge.

It is human nature to worry about the accidental, the unexpected, the unknown. It is also human nature to magnify those things into problems so strange as to be somehow plausible.

***

The TVSo?s have three banquets at their weekend meeting, and I have bought tickets to all three. Ruth did not want to eat at the banquets. In fact, she soon made it clear that she did not want to spend time with me. She says my attitude is too cynical, my remarks too cutting. She is already right. I am already thinking in the tone I’ve decided to take for this article, a tone that my brain established while part of it tried to concentrate on the seriousness of the vid personality’s loss of charisma.

The first banquet is on Friday night, and there I am happily surprised. The food is excellent. It is free-range chicken, brought in from a nearby ranch, local vegetables grown and stored here, marinated in local wine, mixed with spices grown in the chef’s own herb garden.

Nothing was shipped in: no risk of teleportation tainting the food. And somehow it does seem fresher. Or perhaps the chef, a world-renowned man who refused to allow me to use his name in this article, has simply lived up to his spectacular reputation.

The speaker that night is a transportation historian who is, believe it or not, duller than he sounds. He reads his speech off the TelePrompTer modification in his contact lenses, probably much as he does in class, which forces him to stare straight ahead. That, combined with his monotone, makes him seem as if he’s teleported one too many times.

The diners at my table, which is toward the back, immediately deduce the problem and begin whispering, as I imagine his students often do. We introduce ourselves and tell each other why we’re here.

The woman to my immediate left looks like a Hollywood grandmother, which is to say that she’s round, gray-haired and jolly. She confides that she went to see her grandchildren on her only teleportation trip, and instead of arriving in Pittsburgh as planned, she arrived in Philadelphia. The teleportation operators claim she simply told them she was going to Philly, but she claims that they punched in the wrong destination. I take mental notes, knowing that what is at stake here is more than a simple trip. She lives on a fixed income and she scrimped to afford the teleport. She could not afford to then go from Philly to Pittsburgh and back home. She missed a trip, and probably several meals, for that one abortive visit.

This is a problem I can get behind. It is not magic woo-woo incantations in which she claims that she suddenly ballooned in size because her protons expanded or that she got skin cancer that should have belonged to someone else. This is the kind of operator error we all worry about. I have had nightmares about getting on a teleporter in Portland and ending up in Beijing.

The woman next to her confides that there is a lawyer in the legal section who is trying to get enough contacts to initiate a class action suit for just that sort of problem. The grandmother thanks her, and then asks her, whispering politely of course, why she’s here. The woman, who is in her mid-forties, has the prettiest lavender hair I’ve ever seen. She flushes a nice shade of pink that somehow complements the lavender and admits that she would rather not say.

I am beginning to think I’ve hit a lucky table. Imagine someone who has come to a TVSo? convention who is unwilling to admit why she has come. It is almost antithetical to the purpose of the conference.

I make a mental note to pull her aside later, then ask the man to my right why he has come. “Reporter,” he says tersely, not whispering. “Just like you.”

He gets shushed by the people at the table behind him, who, believe it or not, are engrossed in the teacher’s speech. At that point, I surface briefly, realize the man has droned on for thirty minutes and hasn’t yet reached the invention of the automobile. I signal a waiter for more coffee.

The woman to the reporter’s right bursts into tears when asked why she’s here, and we get shushed again. I actually don’t mind because I get an odd sense that the tears are fake. Still, we dutifully lean forward after she dries her eyes with her linen napkin.

“My baby,” she whispers, and stifles a sob. The entire table behind us glares at us with angry eyes. We glare back, then lean as close as we can.

“My baby,” she says again, “was a boy when he went into the device.”

Suddenly I don’t want to hear any more, and neither, it seems, does anyone else. The reporter hands her another napkin, and makes sympathetic noises, but as quickly as he politely can, he rises and makes his way to the men’s room.

Ten minutes later, when he has not returned and the speaker is rhapsodizing about the uses of airplanes in World War I, I excuse myself. The corridor outside is empty, but I find a new convention going on at the bar.

“I don’t know why they invite him back,” says one woman to a gale of laughter. It seems that this is the fifth year the historian has spoken on Friday night, and this year he is actually more interesting than he has ever been.

One of the conference organizers overhears, and says rather stiffly, “We invite him so that you all have an historical overview of the problems we face.”

“Oh,” the laughing woman says, “but don’t you think that teleportation is a little different than, say, a Model T?”

“No,” the organizer says, and I realize that this is one of those dangerous people to whom the phrase “sense of humor” has no meaning at all, “it is all a manifestation of our need to make the world smaller. Once everyone thought that instantaneous travel would solve all our ills. They didn’t realize that it would cause more problems than it started.”

“Do you believe,” one woman asks, “that everyone who has been in a teleportation device is still human?”

Not even the conference organizer answers that question. It is too touchy. Most of the people here are here because they have been in a teleportation device. If the woman’s right, that would mean none of us are human. I don’t believe that. I believe we’re very human, although the more I see, the more I wonder what side of humanity we actually belong to.

***

The next morning, I wander over to Legal, and listen to lawyers pontificate on ways to collect damages from teleportation companies. I hear the familiar litany of successful lawsuits—there aren’t many, and most are nuisance cases much like the grandmother’s of the night before—but the audience is attentive and asks polite questions.

In the afternoon, I poke my head into Education, and see the historian. I don’t run from there, although I’m tempted. I walk slowly, pretending I had ventured into that area by mistake.

Ruth is nowhere to be seen. She did show up in our room the night before, but long after I was asleep, and I thought I smelled brandy, but by that point I didn’t really care. I wonder idly who she has found to entertain herself with and how she can use him to further her career. The thought, though accurate, is uncharitable, and I then wonder when I stopped thinking with fondness of Ruth’s tendency’s to exaggerate and began to be annoyed by them. Probably around the point when her manufactured breasts became her most fascinating feature.

That night’s speaker is an expert in teleportation technology and I am assured by almost everyone who’s been here before that he makes the historian look glib. I am sorry to give up the free-range chicken, but I cannot bear another two hours trapped in those uncomfortable wooden banquet chairs.

I go into the restaurant, where I’ve had two delicious breakfasts, and cast about for a table. It seems to have a lot of patrons, considering there is a banquet going on in the next room.

Ruth is at a table near the window. Even though it is dark, I can make out the ghostly shape of the nearby mountain, snow-covered and shiny. She waves me over.

She is sitting with the lawyers. They have asked that no other tables be filled around them, and so far the restaurant is able to comply. Ruth, it seems, has been spending her time with the entire legal wing of this conference and learning “a whole heckuva lot.”

I sit down, and listen for a while. This seems like an informal version of the panel I had attended in the morning. I order a steak, and do not ask if it was shipped in or slaughtered locally, for which I am razzed, and then one of the attorneys, an overweight vegetarian who consumes way too much wine during the evening, informs me of the many ways that beef could kill me. Since I have heard this lecture before, I add a few insights of my own, all the while chomping heartily on my dinner.

Finally they ask me why I’m here, and I tell them that I’m a paid observer of human nature.

“He’s journalist,” Ruth says, breaking my cover.

They eye me as if I’m the slimy species and I explain that I’m a practitioner of New Journalism almost a century after New Journalism was introduced. It is my way of gaining legitimacy among the illegitimate: pretend to a literary value that I don’t really have.

The New Journalism comment seems to have silenced them, so to break the ice—and to make my dinner worthwhile—I ask them what they really think about teleportation technology.

“It makes lawyers rich!” one of them said and the others laugh. But I press them, and finally a dark-suited man next to Ruth says, “I used to laugh at these folks and then questions started coming up, questions I couldn’t get an answer to.”

One of the female attorneys nods, and still another, the overweight vegetarian, says, “Yeah, like why is there a ban on kids under the age of three taking teleportation?”

“It’s not a firm ban,” a New York lawyer says. “You can get around it with a doctor’s permission.”

“Yeah,” the vegetarian says. “Why a doctor? And what does he give permission for?”

“I’ve never seen any instances of babies traveling. They don’t allow it, with or without the doctor,” the woman says.

“But I met a woman who says her baby—” I start and they all shake their heads sadly, silencing me.

“She’s here every year,” the vegetarian says. “I checked the story out. She doesn’t have a kid. I don’t even think she’s female.”

They chuckle again, and the joviality is back. No matter how I push them, I can’t learn what the other questions are. The vegetarian promises to tell me if I come to the bar later. I do, and he’s passed out in a pile of corn chips. I vow to try and find him the following day.

***

The next morning, as the speakers are setting up, I go to the Technological Secrets area. It’s in a wide auditorium with holographic capabilities. My mind boggles just at the thought of seeing strange machinery in life-size and 3D.

It takes me a moment to find a speaker who’ll talk to me, who doesn’t try to get me to wait until his presentation. I tell him about the lawyers’ collective unease about the baby ban.

“You ask the teleportation stations they’ll tell you it’s because babies are too fragile for most kinds of travel. Like they’ll ban an infant from a jet.” The guy I’m talking to is six feet tall and has a honking nasal voice. I’m glad I elected not to stay for his presentation, even though he seems nice enough. “But it’s really because of the stress to the body.”

“I thought there is no stress.”

He looks at me as if I’m the dumbest thing he’s seen at this conference, and given what I’ve seen, I’m almost insulted. He holds up a glass of water. “You can’t teleport crystal either,” he says. “Sometimes it shatters. And it shouldn’t. I mean, they perfected this at the subatomic level, or so they say.”

“You don’t think they did?”

“Between you, me, and the wall,” he says, “I know they perfected it. The problem is that they don’t use the right equipment to teleport people. It’s like building a house. We can build a damn fine house with everything correct. But we hire contractors who want to make as much money as possible, and they do it—have done it—since time immemorial by using inferior parts and charging the same as they would for good parts. I try to tell the lawyers that, but it’s not glamorous, and it’s damned hard to prove. They tell me they’ll help me when I can show damage caused by inferior parts. I can show damage. I just can’t make a credible link.”

Later that day, I check his statements with a few other technology wonks. They agree that the problem with public teleportation is that it’s public. The system used by the President and other heads of state is state-of-the-art, so protected that nothing can go wrong. The system used by the rest of us, well, these guys would have us all believe it’s held together by spit and glue and pieces manufactured just after the turn of the century.

It makes me think of all those bans on teleportation travel to third-world countries. If our technology is bad, what is the technology like that was hammered together by someone’s Uncle Ralph? The very idea raises images of those poor puzzle box monkeys with the corners where their middle should be.

Of course when I get back home, and call the various teleportation manufacturers, they all give me the company line and swear teleportation is the safest form of transportation since walking. Even that can go wrong, I say. Think of potholes. Think of missteps, twisted ankles and tripping over small children. But the manufacturers don’t find me funny. When I get belligerent, forgetting, for a moment that this is supposed to be a puff piece and not investigative reporting, they transfer me to their legal departments who remind me of libel laws and how careful I need to be in questioning their companies.

***

The free-range chicken is gone by the third banquet, but the speaker is delightful. He’s a comedian just starting out, and he proves to me that the TVSo?s have a sense of humor, since most of his jokes are aimed at them, and they laugh uproariously. I don’t. I feel vaguely embarrassed, mostly because I know I would have laughed if I’d been watching this guy in any other setting but this one.

As I head out, I look for Ruth. She’s still surrounded by her lawyers, and when she sees me, she waves me over. She puts a hand on the overweight vegetarian’s arm and informs me that he has hired her as a paralegal. I pull her aside, remind her that jobs aren’t always that easy to come by and that she’d better check his credentials. She frowns at me, asks me if I think she’s dumb or something—a question which I decline to answer—and then stalks off. I gather, from that whole exchange, that she’s not taking the train home, and I turn out to be right. My wish has been granted. She has forgotten thoughts of Marriage and believes that our break-up is her idea. I find that I regret the whole plan, not because I wanted to marry her, but because I had hoped that I would at least get to try all parts of train travel, from meal to sleep to sex. We had neglected sex on the way there, and I was hoping for a bit on the way home.

Instead, I spend the next week finding a way to ship her clothes cheaply without using teleportation technology, since the vegetarian likes to keep his office “pure.”

I am beginning to understand the sentiment. My moment of hesitation as I step on the teleportation platform in Bend—I see no point in train travel all the way to Seattle if I’m not going to be able to have nookie in transit—lasts nearly three minutes, and customers behind me get angry. But I keep thinking of those banned babies, and Uncle Ralph, and inferior-grade equipment, and the way that the sheet rock in my condo flakes like someone’s untended dandruff, and I find myself more and more reluctant to travel in that instantaneous sort of way. After all, why am I in such a hurry? I’m a journalist, for godssake, a man who makes his living off observing, and observation is something that can’t be rushed. I am proud of my observation skills, and proud of my capability for contemplation that makes them possible.

But what I’ve been observing since I got back is my own reflection in the mirror. There’s a line down one side of my face, an instant wrinkle that really doesn’t look like a laugh line or something that would naturally occur as I age. It looks more like a fold, or a crease, something incorrectly ironed in, as if a section of me were miscut and hemmed wrong.

I never noticed the wrinkle before getting on that teleportation station in Bend. I have been obsessed with it since. And I think, I really think, that my obsession is a product of the TVSo? convention, but not for the reason that you’d think. It’s not that I suddenly believe the teleporter has given me a new wrinkle. It’s just that I find the idea of a wrinkle induced from the outside better than the idea that I’m growing older. It’s easier to believe in the fiction. It’s nicer.

It takes the responsibility for that particular line off me.

Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. Because I do need to teleport on occasion for my job. Journalists observe, yes. But they must observe in the right places. And when my editor tells me to get to London yesterday, I do the next best thing. I get there two minutes from now, new wrinkles be damned.

But I find that I do examine mirrors more, and I wonder, when I think something particularly cruel, like most of my thoughts about Ruth lately, if I’ve become less than human. Is humanity something we can lose, little bit by little bit, like the vid personality and her charisma? And if so, how can we tell it’s gone? Is it replaced by paranoia, by worry, in equal degrees? And am I, in worrying about this, showing signs of latent TVSo?ism?

I don’t know. But I do suspect that my recent desire to take the train to the far reaches of the United States has less to do with my unfulfilled sexual fantasy than it does with my desire to avoid a technology that I may have learned to fear. Then I remind myself of the history of this form of paranoia; I know that being a reporter from the fringe requires an ability to cross over into that land and appear to be a native. I’m simply afraid I’ve taken it too far. Going native requires residency in kooksville, and while it only takes an instant to reach that particular destination, it takes years and expensive psychotherapy to get out.

***

When I turned in this essay, I thought of asking for a bonus, a sort of combat pay to compensate for the wrinkle, for the increased harassment as I take an extra minute of other people’s time while I hesitate before stepping on a teleportation platform.

But my editor vid-conferenced with me this morning, wanting to discuss what he calls “proper compensation.” My article, he says—(this thing you are currently reading, without this coda)—has given him an idea. Teleportation has overtaken other forms of transportation so much that his younger readers have probably never flown in a plane or driven a car. He wants me to do these things, and report back about my experiences, as if I have gone to yet another frontier, even if it is a part of the past.

He asks what I want to do first, and then reminds me this will be on the magazine’s expense.

“A ticket on the Orient Express,” I say.

“Ah,” he says. “You’ll title it ‘Strangers on a Train?’”

I’m thinking not of Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock, but of luscious, willing blonds with breasts the size of helium balloons and the ca-thunk, ca-thunk of the wheels on a track suggesting a rhythm that no teleportation device can hope to match.

“I hope so,” I say, and realize this is the kind of fringe I like. “I certainly hope so.”

Going Native

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and layout copyright © by WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Embe2006/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.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.