Tag: #Christian

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The Body in the Floor

When a skeleton is found in the remains of the burnt-out courthouse, most folks just treat it as a curiosity. Ira “Doc” Pearson knows it was murder and wonders if the murderer is still around.

Published by Outlaws Publishing and available on ebook (in many formats) and in paperback!

See all of the Ira “Doc” Pearson novels here!

The Van Bent courthouse burns down and a body is found to have been stuffed into the floorboards years before, when the building was built. Ira Pearson is determined to discover the identity of the woman, but Sheriff Wood has little interest in the matter for he has more important matters on his hands–including a numbers runner and big city tough who came to Van Bent for some reason and promptly lost a thumb in an alley fight. Could the back alley fight and the woman in the floor somehow be connected?

Sample passage

“What’s going on, Chief?”

“I just—you need to see, first.”

The chief led the way over to the smoldering remains of the courthouse and to a ladder that had been lowered into the basement. He handed Ira some big, rubber boots, saying, “Put these on. Foller me. It’s safe,” Buckler directed as he descended the ladder.

Ira hesitated, but the man seemed to be going down with no fear. And it did look like everything was safe but soaked, hence the boots, which he put on. He took a breath, then followed the man down the ladder and into the pit that had so recently been the courthouse basement. He was glad of the rubber boots if for no other reason than that they came up to his knees and the piles of muddy ash were at least that deep.

They slogged over to a space almost in the center of the building’s footprint—which seemed surprisingly small to Ira, now that the building was gone—and Buckler knelt down and pointed. “Looky here, Doc.”

Ira bent over and saw instantly what the man was pointing at. “Human hand, ain’t it?” Buckler asked.

“Sure looks like it. Right hand.”

“No chance it’s just a fake of some kind? I seen a human skeleton over to El Paso once made out of plaster. This looks real to me, but I ain’t seen all that many human bones in my day.”

Ira moved in closer and peered at the strange object before him. “My early thought is that it’s real. Is there more?”

“We stopped work when we seen this,” Buckler answered. “If there is, I reckon it extends in under that pile there,” he continued, pointing. “I didn’t want to go no further ‘til we had you here to supervise. Thought you could tell us if this person died in the fire.”

“At an early guess, I’m going to say no. As hot as that fire was, if this were a, um, ‘fresh body’, there would probably still be more signs of flesh. And the burn marks on the bones would be different if flesh were melted off or if it were just bones in the fire.”

Buckler nodded and said, “I git ya, Doc.”

“Chief, you know of any reason there would be a skeleton in the courthouse?”

“None I can think of. Nobody had one in an office or anything—that I know of.”

“And this is on top of some things,” Ira commented, mostly to himself. Realizing he had said it out loud, he explained, “Not like this courthouse was built on top of an old cemetery and this was someone buried here. This person is above the rock of the basement. Any chance this person was stored in the basement?”

“What for?” Buckler asked, almost laughing.

“Who knows? Any old rumor that there was a body in the basement, though?”

“None that I ever heard. An’ I been here since the foundation was laid on this place. Before that, even. I helped to dig the hole.”

“All right,” Ira said, standing up. He looked around, then said, “This person’s dead, so it’s not like we can hurt him—or her—in any way. Still, let’s see if we can dig him out without jostling the bones around any more than we have to.”

“Okey-dokey,” Buckler said. “We’re going to need to brace that west wall, though. It’s bucklin’ a little and liable to collapse on us if we don’t.”

Ira nodded and said, “You get some men on that. You and me, let’s get some shovels and maybe a pry bar and see if we can find out whether there’s more under here than just a hand.” As the fire chief went off to put those instructions into action, Ira looked at the hand and remembered how finding a hand like this had landed his friends the Jameses in all sorts of trouble. He hadn’t been there, but he had heard the story. He also had thought over the years that, if he had been there, he could have kept Polly from spending that year in prison that she hadn’t deserved.

Buckler was soon back and, as three men worked to shore up the west wall, he went to work with Ira at pushing the ash and dirt away from the hand.

Soon, they were seeing a wrist, and then part of a forearm. And then, it seemed as if the arm were reaching out from within a wooden frame. “A casket?” Buckler asked as he looked at the wood.

Ira took up one of the shovels and scraped some of the dirt and ash away, then said, “Look at this, Chief. This isn’t a casket. Not built like that.”

Buckler shoved some of the dirt away himself and said, “That there’s flooring.” As Ira nodded, Buckler commented in worried awe, “This body was inside a floor! Somebody hid a body in the floor.” He reached out and rubbed some ash away from the top, saying, “That’s the tile from the first floor. I’m picturing in my mind and them joists for the first floor was foot-wide beams. Two foot on center.”

“Plenty of room to hide a body,” Ira commented.

Buckler tried to made a joke as he said, “Ain’t nobody goin’ to fit me in a foot-by-two space lessen they squeeze me down a might.” He looked up suddenly and asked, “You don’t reckon it’s a child, do ya, Doc?”

“Based on the size of that hand, I’d say it’s at least someone fifteen years old, or more. Not a big person. Might be a lady.”

Buckler took off his hat, as if at a funeral, and said with reverence, “God be with us.”

Ira raised up, tapped through the mud and ash in a couple places, then said, “Looks like there’s a fair-sized portion of that floor here still intact. Relatively speaking, anyway. Let’s clear it off and get some more pry-bars over here.”

“Think the whole body’s still together?”

“I’d have to say that would be beyond belief, but finding this at all is pretty incredible. And somebody better go fetch Sheriff Wood.”

“After all this time?”

“Whether we can figure out how this person got here I have my doubts, but it’s not likely to have been for benign reasons that someone hid a body in between floorboards. I think the sheriff needs to know.”

Buckler nodded again, then detailed someone to go get the sheriff and the other two men to help them pry the boards apart. It was not easy for the floor had been well made and they were trying to not disturb the bones any more than absolutely necessary.

Sheriff Wood was with them a while later—and quite a crowd had gathered nearby though the volunteer fire department men and Wood’s deputy Chubby were keeping them back—when they finally got the right boards pried up. There were a couple of reverent exclamations, the Catholics present crossed themselves, and Ira was the first to articulate any recognizable words.

“This was a woman,” he said. Though the visage before them was mostly of bones, there was just enough muscle and tendons still clinging to the form to keep the skeleton intact.

“How old, you reckon?” Buckler asked, watching with great curiosity, but also with a clear reluctance as to touching the bones.

Ira shook his head, but leaned closer and said, “I can give a better answer with more study, but her hips make me think she was old enough to have given birth. There was no sign of arthritis in that hand we saw first.” He then pointed and said, mostly to Wood, “Look there, Sheriff. However she came to be between these boards, someone murdered her to get her here.”

Wood looked, as did the other men close by, and could see the crack in the skull Ira was pointing to. Wood, feeling the need to say something, “She was either dead when she was put in here or close to it. Nobody would have lived long after a rap like that.”

Ira nodded in agreement then said, “It’s been a long time, Sheriff. Trail’s going to be colder than a polar bear. But this fire just revealed a murder.”

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A Thousand Miles Away

Edward Garrett finds himself washed up on the shore of a foreign land, shipwrecked! As he tries to find his way home, he becomes involved with The People, a friendly—but reserved—people who live along the coast and are being harassed by brigands from the mountains known as the Brazee.

Thinking that Marcus has brought him here for just this reason, Edward agrees to lead a posse into the mountains to try and retrieve four teenage girls who were captured by the Brazee. Edward’s greatest desire is to leave, to go find his beloved Marianne and let her know he didn’t die in the great battle by the river. In the process of freeing the girls, however, he is shot and lands in a Brazee prison. There, he is forced into gladiatorial games where the only way to freedom … is death. A futuristic fantasy in the tradition of Louis L’Amour.

Order today for Kindle or Paperback

And don’t forget the two prequels to this novel: “All the Time in Our World” and “Some of the Time“!

Reading Sample

Running up the stairs of the tallest parapet of the grotesque castle that overlooked the river we in my day called the Mississippi, I was bleeding from a few minor cuts and my skin was bruised in many places, but I had never felt more alive. Nor had I felt more joyful.

Ahead of me ran Marcus, carrying his sword and with a light step as one who is running for pleasurable exercise. One might even say he carried the sword casually, though Marcus did nothing casually. All he did was carefully planned and meticulously executed. If Marcus had stopped to admire the sunset, anyone watching would have just assumed that was what he had always intended to do at that moment, for those who knew him knew that none of his steps, moves or halts were in waste.

Holding my own sword in my right hand, it’s blade still flecked with black blood for I had had no opportunity to clean it, my mind went back briefly to how we had come to be there. I say briefly for it was just a matter of steps, but the mind works in overdrive when in battle and a million thoughts may rush through a mind in their completeness in less time than it has taken me now to write this sentence.

We had crossed the great plains that I had once known as the land of Oklahoma with relative ease, though it hadn’t seemed so at the time. The logistics of moving such a great force of such disparate abilities and technologies had been one of the problems. The skirmishes we had fought against advance scouts of the Enemy had been another difficulty, though as we looked back later those battles had been like swatting mosquitoes.

As we had crossed into what had been known in my time as Arkansas and Missouri it seemed as if every valley and each forest held a new host of enemies lying in wait to ambush us. We had excellent scouts of our own, but it soon became obvious that it was not a position that promised a long lifespan. Though, as we went further, experience taught our scouts much and those who made it to the river with us were woodsmen indeed.

We came to the river fully six months after setting out on this excursion. We had been joined by additional members of the Gund Nation, as well as more Overstreets (who proved to be the best scouts for they could move through the forest more quietly than the wind itself) and even a large contingent of warriors from a people known as the T’rah’mra, who lived far to the southwest of Green River, along the sea coast. Somehow Marcus had gotten word to them and though they had set out before us it was some time before they could catch up to us. They were a people who were mighty in the skills of boat building and their service when we got to the river was immeasurable.

Still six days from the river, we had been met by a most surprising delegation. Eight men and five women—all taller than my six foot and appearing to me made of whipcord and muscle dressed in clothing that looked like something the Polynesians of my day might have enjoyed—arrived at our camp, also saying they had been summoned by Marcus. How they had received said summons none were ever clear, but Marcus greeted them warmly and assured us he had called for them. They were a people who called themselves a name which meant “Land of Wet Ground” but they were known in rumor and legend to the Gund as the Treemors.

They were somewhat darker of skin than I, but not so dark as the Cherokee or the T’rah’mra and, as I say, they were all tall. Some of them approached seven foot, though most were around six and a half. I was to find out later that they came from the deep woods that I once knew as Georgia and Northern Florida. Even with their bright clothing, they could disappear into a forest almost as well and quickly as an Overstreet.

The delegation of thirteen—a number of some significance in their reckoning—brought us the welcome news that they had a force of some hundred thousands amassed on the far side of the river, not twenty miles from the Enemy’s castle. They were the most advanced of the surface-dwelling people and maintained a primitive radio communication among their people. It was subject to disruption and had a limited range, but they assured me that they could and would work in concert with us when the time came to attack.

That time was soon. We knew the Enemy was aware of our presence and we were also certain he knew why we were coming, for he was not a being who welcomed casual visitors. While we hoped that we could maintain some element of surprise as to the “how-to’s” and “where-fore’s” of our attack, we knew that our only real hope lie in the justness of our cause. More than that, of course, was that Marcus was on our side and he had never been defeated—nor would he ever be we were sure.

I split our forces into three main divisions, though two of the divisions were—numerically—vastly superior. The smaller division—which was itself bifurcated—was our demolitions team. Half of them were to work their way to the western shore of the river and, on signal, begin to bombard the city with bombs my good friend Lomar would have relished to handle. The other half, meanwhile, had taken themselves up river approximately two hundred miles, to an ancient dam on the river that created what Marcus said was the largest inland, manmade, lake in the history of the world, larger even than the Lochs he, Marianne, Daniel and I had marveled at many years ago on our first journey. Upon reaching the dam, they would set charges and—from a safe distance—blow them and release the water of the lake.

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Book of Tales – The Last Valley – Book 3

Jerry was just a college kid trying to catch one more weekend of fun before senior year when the ash hit. His college, his home town, his family—all wiped out in the blink of an eye. With the nation teetering on the edge of ruin, he joins the military to help with the search and rescue but finds that the powers that be want to use this natural disaster as cover for an unnatural war. The last war. Winner take all that’s left.

In the satellite photos, though, he sees evidence that the lands where he grew up might still have some green grass. With no idea whether anyone still lives there, Jerry dreams of someday returning to those pastures, even if it means living there all alone.

Meanwhile, Josh, Adaline, Claire and the rest of the denizens of the last valley have built a thriving community—and even have contact with another community across the mountains. But a disease is sweeping through Overstreet, one that could wipe them all out. Twenty years before, the cure would have been easy to affect, but now, their isolation may be their doom.

They can only pray for a miracle.

Make you read how this all started in “Ashes to Ashes” and “Crazy on the Mountain“!

Order today for Kindle or paperback!

…

Sample reading

The man on the other side of Jerry from Darren—a stout, middle-aged man in a white plantation hat, shorts too short for his build and a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned so as to display his hairy chest and ample gut—suddenly said, “Bartender. That TV got any sound?”

The bartender looked like he was about to say something negative or sarcastic in reply, but his attention went to the TV, and then he was grabbing for the remote and fumbling with it as if it were hot before he got control of it. As he turned up the sound, everyone sitting at the bar turned their attention to see—not the usual sports anchors but one of the nightly anchors from the parent network that owned the sports channel. He was dressed in a suit and tie, but he looked uncomfortable and his skin tone was different (owing to not having the time to be made up) as he said, “To repeat, we have reports from people in Wyoming and Idaho that an enormous plume of ash and smoke has been seen spewing from the ground in Yellowstone National Park. According to these reports, the cloud was spotted by people more than a hundred miles outside the park and is estimated to be rising to a height of—“ He touched his ear in that way anchors do when getting important updates, then swallowed hard as he looked off-camera and asked, “How reliable is—“

The TV went to that picture channels use when having technical difficulties, then suddenly there appeared a harried-looking woman, standing at the podium of the White House. She took a deep breath, then said, “We apologize for breaking in on your expected programming, but we must insist that everyone in the western United States get inside the nearest building. Shut the doors and windows and, if you have breathing masks, please apply them.”

As the TV began to play a loop of what the woman had just said, several people were saying things like, “It’s even saying that on my phone!”

“And my watch!”

“It’s all that’s on the radio.”

Several swear words were heard as people began to ask questions.

“What happened?”

“A nuke?”

“That first guy mentioned Wyoming. Haven’t they always said there was a giant volcano under Yellowstone?”

“They’ve been saying that for two hundred years,” someone argued in response to that last question.

Suddenly, the alarms were sounding, telling everyone to get off the beach. Lifeguards were using bullhorns to tell specific people to get out of the water, and shore patrol boats were appearing as if out of nowhere and making sure everyone could make it to the sand safely. The warning sirens of the town of Galveston could be heard in the distance.

Darren wasn’t too steady (or cognizant of the danger), so Jerry helped him get to their motel, a ratty little place near the beach which suddenly looked better than it had all week as the traffic jam of people exiting in cars began to pile up. Ineffectual honking was added to the general din of the warning sirens—now aided by police and fire sirens. People could be heard shouting, and screaming, as they tried to obey the order to get off the beach. Voices shouted at the car in front of them, as if the person driving that car were just sitting still to be obstinate and not backed up behind a row of stopped cars, all waiting for a break in the traffic. The repeated warning from the White House could be heard coming from a thousand phones and car radios.

In the motel room, Jerry turned on the TV, to see the same warning being repeated on every channel. He stumbled across one network on which a person at a news desk was saying, “We have an unconfirmed report that the famed Yellowstone volcano has erupt—“ before the feed went down, to be replaced by the government loop. Darren’s brain had almost caught up to the moment, then, and he asked Jerry, “What’s goin’ on, bro?”

It momentarily crossed Jerry’s mind to make some comment about the stupidity of Darren’s recent attempts to talk like a surfer—or like he imagined surfers talked, for none of the actual ones did—but he replied, “Not sure. Sounds like a volcano, though.”

“In Houston?” Darren asked, squinting at the TV as if doing so would improve his perception.

“In Yellowstone,” Jerry replied shortly, staring at the TV himself, trying to will it to give more details.

Darren was about to make an attempt at humor along the lines of hoping Yogi Bear was OK, when the President of the United States appeared, standing at the podium that the spokeswoman had been standing at for the looped message. He had that calm, measured look he always carried, but Jerry noticed he appeared to be just a little short of breath. Like he had hastily dressed and run to this room from another part of the White House. He eschewed his famous winning smile to look reserved, paternal and constipated as he said, “My fellow Americans. Exactly seventy-eight minutes ago, there was an eruption of gas and ash from what we have known for years as the Yellowstone Dome. Eighteen minutes after that,” he paused and looked down, appearing to his constituency as a man who was grasping for his sanity in the face of bad news. After a moment, he looked back at the camera and said, “Eighteen minutes after that, the largest eruption in the recorded history of mankind began. Many of you have felt the tremors and even those of us who didn’t will, the experts tell me, soon be seeing a cloud of ash and dust from the arctic circle to the Yucatan peninsula and, perhaps, beyond. I must ask you to stay off all land-lines and hold all other forms of communication to a minimum as we dedicate all the resources of this great nation to our first responders. Stay off the roads and highways. Listen to your local authorities.”

He took another deep breath, stared downward at the podium for a moment that seemed excruciatingly long but was probably only a couple seconds, then looked back up at the camera and said, “’Choose this day whom you will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’ If you are a praying person, or even if you have never prayed in your life, Marion and I ask you to join us in supplication before the God of the Universe.”

And then most of the stations went blank and the few that remained on the air began to loop the president’s announcement. Jerry was sitting there numbly as Darren commented, “Think we can get back to college before classes start?”

“What?” Jerry had an idea that any reply was going to be wasted, but he told Darren, “I think college is over, Darren. I think everything may be over.”

“No kidding? You mean we, like, graduated?”

Jerry thought of several sarcastic replies, but finally just said, “Yeah. Just like that.”

Darren swore, but it wasn’t clear what at or to what purpose. It might have even been a word of triumph, based on the look on his face.

Jerry tried to call his parents, but no lines were available even though his phone said he was getting plenty of signal. He tried and tried again, with no success. Even tried going outside, as if that might help.

What he saw outside was the continued chaos of people trying to leave the beach, of cars jammed to a halt on the roadways, and many people just standing and watching in numb fear as an ash cloud miles high came near. It was visible first as a dark line on the horizon, but after the President’s announcement, several people had been watching for it and more than one voice had called out, “There it is!”

Then, word had spread through the crowd and even those in cars—who had so recently been honking or shouting—got out and stood, looking to the northwest as the dark line grew closer and closer. At first, it just looked like a rapidly approaching storm, but then it became clear that it was darker than most storms, and far taller, reaching hundreds or even thousands of feet into the air as it approach like a wall. Swear words were heard, as well as prayers. Some people fell on their faces, crying out prayers of repentance while others screamed or just stood numbly. Jerry even saw one woman walk to the beach, taking off her clothes as she went, and then walk calmly into the water until it was over her head. He ran close to try and find her—even enlisted a lifeguard who was still nearby and had seen the woman as well—but they never found any sign of her.

Email the author (garisonfitch@gmail.com) to find out about purchasing an autographed copy or getting the trilogy in paperback at a discount.

Be sure and read how this story started in “Ashes to Ashes” and concludes in “Book of Tales“!

Sample passage

I happened to ask, “Deanna, how long have you lived in Vail?”

“What? Oh, you might say I’ve lived there all my life.” Adaline and I looked at each other in surprise, for this was not said with the hick voice Deanna had mostly been using of late. It also made us wonder about our earlier thought that she was from Denver. She continued, in a somewhat conspiratorial tone, “My great-grandfather was the first of the family to come to Vail. The story that he told his family was that he had been a banker in Birmingham, Alabama,” the names of the city and state were said with a deep, southern accent. “But the bank had gone bust—through no fault of his own, of course, so he had headed west to seek his fortune. He said he worked several jobs in towns both big and small before landing in Vail, broke and starving, worried about his wife and kids back home for it had been some time since he had been able to send them money.

“But it was ski season and he took a job in a kitchen at one of the hotels. He worked hard and sent money back to his family and, by the end of the ski season, had worked his way up to waiter. Over the summer months, he proved himself invaluable and was made assistant manager of the restaurant, and then manager. At that point, he sent for his wife and kids and was ever so happy to see them. He got his kids—who were teenagers by then—jobs in Vail and they saved their money and, would you believe it, one day they bought the restaurant! Using all of his banking and monetary skills, he was eventually able to buy the building the restaurant was in, and his ‘empire’ was begun!”

Deanna chuckled, then said, still in the refined voice of someone who had grown up on the tonier side of life, “And thus began the Coventry empire of Vail. Pembleton is my married name, of course. I grew up attending the best schools, a member of all Vail’s best clubs, and groomed for a career in hoteliery. Yes, I know that’s not really a word, but my father always said it should be. But, I went off to college and fell in love and got married and, well, the last thing I wanted to do was to come back to Vail for anything other than a visit. Best laid plans of mice and men, right? My father had a stroke when I was just about to turn thirty, so my husband and I came back to watch over the business while he recovered. What was supposed to just be a few weeks in Vail became years, with my own children going to those same schools I did, joining the same clubs, being the same spoiled, rich brat I was. Oh how I wish we had never left Denver. My husband, Paul Pembleton, he rose to great heights in Vail, sat on all the important boards and had chairmanships in all the clubs, but I think he always resented the thought that he had only gotten there because of my family connections. It wasn’t true, of course, but it’s how men think sometimes. You know, I think he actually appreciated the ash cloud, for it allowed us all to go back to square one, with no one being anything more or less than what they could contribute.”

In a sly voice, she continued, “But speaking of square one. When my own grandmother was nearing the end of her life, I went and sat with her for many an hour, listening to her stories of growing up in Alabama, of earlier days in Vail than I had ever known. And one night, when she was strangely lucid,” a phrase that got both mine and Adaline’s attention, for we had both been thinking it in relation to Deanna, “She told me a story. According to her, my great-grandfather hadn’t been an innocent bystander in the failure of that bank, but the main instigator. His father was the actual president of the bank, you see, and my great-grandfather had been manipulating loans in some way that allowed him to pocket a sizable sum on the side. Undeclared, you might say.

“Then, one day, maybe he thought his father was about to get on to him, he withdrew an enormous sum of cash from his personal account, walked out of the bank, and no one knew where he went. Didn’t go home or anything. When my great-grandmother called her father-in-law that evening, he said they should call the police, thinking something nefarious had happened to the up-and-coming young banker. Perhaps a ransom call would come in any moment. It was then, so the story goes, that the bank president first realized what his son had been doing. He called his daughter-in-law and convinced her not to file a missing person’s report, for fear of what the publicity would do to the bank. He did agree, however, to engage the services of a private detective.”

Deanna was still speaking in a normal voice, though it became a little dreamy as she said, “I wondered if it were a private eye like in the movies: snap-brim hat, long trench coat, steel-jawed chin. Anyway, the private eye had little trouble following my great-grandfather—though ‘great’ is probably the wrong word for him,” she said with an ironic chortle. “It seems my progenitor had left a bread-crumb trail of prostitutes visited and affairs started that led all the way to Vail, where he was working as a lift attendant at the ski area while, um, serving a rich lady at night while her husband attended to his … let’s say: board functions.

“When the bank president learned of this, he brought his daughter-in-law and the kids out to Vail for a ski trip, hoping to engender one of those movie moments where the miscreant is surprised by his one true love and repents of his wicked ways. According to my grandmother, it was almost like that. Her father was happy to see his children, but not so happy to see his wife. Still, he stopped the fooling around, for a while, and took his family in. His father got him a respectable job as the manager of one of the local restaurants and my great-grandfather gave all appearances of becoming a respectable citizen again. What he was actually doing, though, was continuing his association with the rich lady. He got money out of her somehow and bought the restaurant. Set his wife up as the general manager, dumped the rich lady for a younger mistress, and made his children managers of other properties he had acquired. By the time I came along, great-grandfather was dead and his true story had been buried longer than he had.” She laughed heartily before adding, “There’s even a picture of him in the museum, all dressed up and looking distinguished, with a little plaque about how he was one of Vail’s leading citizens and top philanthropists. He even gave enough money to one of the local churches that they named the recreation building after him. Can’t you just see some youth minister telling the kids who came out to play volleyball, ‘And this building was named after a notorious sinner, who would have slept with any of your mothers who let him, in Jesus’ name, Amen!’” She cackled with laughter and then slipped back into one of her songs. Adaline and I looked at each other strangely, but continued on without a word. We did discuss later how much of the story we thought was true, but had no way to come to a conclusion. And we still thought Deanna was unhinged at best.

We made it to Vail in less than a week, which really encouraged me—and made Adaline wonder why I had thought it would take three weeks. The thing was, I hadn’t been counting on the Interstate being in such good shape, which it was. There were only a couple places where the ash had slid across it, and neither of them deep. And while Black Gore Creek ran strong in some places, it didn’t cross the highway at any point. As we pulled up in sight of Vail, I was smiling and telling Adaline how surprised everyone would be if we pulled back into town before they even came to look for our signal.

“Where are your people?” I asked Deanna, once we had her attention for she had been in the middle of a rousing rendition of either “Amazing Grace” or “I Fought the Law” (it was hard to tell).

She crawled up to crouch behind the front seat and, pointing, said, “Up yonder. You cain’t see it from here, but it’s the other side of that big white building by the ski slopes. I heared you talking about how the wind blew that gash in the ash—gash in the ash,” she repeated with a laugh, “And we had something just like that. People to the left and right was all dead, but our little gash was just fine. All things considered, I mean.”

“Think we can make it before nightfall,” I asked, for we were still a good five miles out, “Or should we make camp and get there in the morning?”

She looked up at the bright spot of the sun that almost shown through the ash and said, “Let’s see if we can push through. If we can’t, at least we can stay in one of the buildings on the edge of town. We might make’er this evenin’, though. Them’s good horses you got there.” This was a surprising statement, for she had frequently complained when we stopped to water the horses or, worse, gave them a lengthy breather and roll when we came upon that rare meadow of thick grass—or any grass. I couldn’t blame her for being anxious to get to her people, but I did get tired of her complaining—especially as we had been making such good time.

As we pulled closer to the town of Vail, some thunderheads started building to the west. “I hate to say it, Deanna, but we may need to pull up and find shelter.”

I had expected an objection, but she looked at the sky and said, “Them’s buildin’ up to be gully-washers, all right.” She pointed off to the right and said, “They’s an old mechanic’s shop up yonder. You’d be able to pull the horses into the dry.”

With impeccable timing we got the old garage doors open and the horses inside the bay just before a wall of summer rain came through. I enjoyed seeing it, though, for it made me think of the rains we used to have when I was growing up. They would come up on us all of a sudden, pelt you with raindrops the size of golf balls, then pass through as quickly as they had arrived. I could see some sunlight to the west, creating a golden line on the mountains in that direction, which made me think this would be one of those storms. It was, but by the time it had passed through it was too late to go anywhere so we set up camp in the old automotive shop. I was afraid Deanna would be upset by us stopping that close to her goal, but she just curled up on a couch in the manager’s office and went to sleep.

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Crazy on the Mountain – The Last Valley – Book 2

Josh Overstreet and his sister Claire have been carving a life out of the ash for more than half a decade, unsure whether anyone yet lives outside the small valley where they have established their town of Overstreet with two dozen others.

Then Deanna Pembleton stumbles into the valley, asking for help for herself and her friends. Claiming they have eked out a life much like that of the people of Overstreet, she begs assistance, which Josh is willing to give. She is, however, clearly unhinged on some level. Could the people she is claiming to want to help just be figments of her imagination?

Against the advice of almost everyone in Overstreet, Josh and Adaline set out to try and take food to Deanna’s people, hoping that people still exist outside “the last valley”.

They never dreamed their valley might not be there for them when they get back.

Be sure and read how this story started in “Ashes to Ashes” and concludes in “Book of Tales“!

Available now on Kindle and paperback.

…

Sample passage

I happened to ask, “Deanna, how long have you lived in Vail?”

“What? Oh, you might say I’ve lived there all my life.” Adaline and I looked at each other in surprise, for this was not said with the hick voice Deanna had mostly been using of late. It also made us wonder about our earlier thought that she was from Denver. She continued, in a somewhat conspiratorial tone, “My great-grandfather was the first of the family to come to Vail. The story that he told his family was that he had been a banker in Birmingham, Alabama,” the names of the city and state were said with a deep, southern accent. “But the bank had gone bust—through no fault of his own, of course, so he had headed west to seek his fortune. He said he worked several jobs in towns both big and small before landing in Vail, broke and starving, worried about his wife and kids back home for it had been some time since he had been able to send them money.

“But it was ski season and he took a job in a kitchen at one of the hotels. He worked hard and sent money back to his family and, by the end of the ski season, had worked his way up to waiter. Over the summer months, he proved himself invaluable and was made assistant manager of the restaurant, and then manager. At that point, he sent for his wife and kids and was ever so happy to see them. He got his kids—who were teenagers by then—jobs in Vail and they saved their money and, would you believe it, one day they bought the restaurant! Using all of his banking and monetary skills, he was eventually able to buy the building the restaurant was in, and his ‘empire’ was begun!”

Deanna chuckled, then said, still in the refined voice of someone who had grown up on the tonier side of life, “And thus began the Coventry empire of Vail. Pembleton is my married name, of course. I grew up attending the best schools, a member of all Vail’s best clubs, and groomed for a career in hoteliery. Yes, I know that’s not really a word, but my father always said it should be. But, I went off to college and fell in love and got married and, well, the last thing I wanted to do was to come back to Vail for anything other than a visit. Best laid plans of mice and men, right? My father had a stroke when I was just about to turn thirty, so my husband and I came back to watch over the business while he recovered. What was supposed to just be a few weeks in Vail became years, with my own children going to those same schools I did, joining the same clubs, being the same spoiled, rich brat I was. Oh how I wish we had never left Denver. My husband, Paul Pembleton, he rose to great heights in Vail, sat on all the important boards and had chairmanships in all the clubs, but I think he always resented the thought that he had only gotten there because of my family connections. It wasn’t true, of course, but it’s how men think sometimes. You know, I think he actually appreciated the ash cloud, for it allowed us all to go back to square one, with no one being anything more or less than what they could contribute.”

In a sly voice, she continued, “But speaking of square one. When my own grandmother was nearing the end of her life, I went and sat with her for many an hour, listening to her stories of growing up in Alabama, of earlier days in Vail than I had ever known. And one night, when she was strangely lucid,” a phrase that got both mine and Adaline’s attention, for we had both been thinking it in relation to Deanna, “She told me a story. According to her, my great-grandfather hadn’t been an innocent bystander in the failure of that bank, but the main instigator. His father was the actual president of the bank, you see, and my great-grandfather had been manipulating loans in some way that allowed him to pocket a sizable sum on the side. Undeclared, you might say.

“Then, one day, maybe he thought his father was about to get on to him, he withdrew an enormous sum of cash from his personal account, walked out of the bank, and no one knew where he went. Didn’t go home or anything. When my great-grandmother called her father-in-law that evening, he said they should call the police, thinking something nefarious had happened to the up-and-coming young banker. Perhaps a ransom call would come in any moment. It was then, so the story goes, that the bank president first realized what his son had been doing. He called his daughter-in-law and convinced her not to file a missing person’s report, for fear of what the publicity would do to the bank. He did agree, however, to engage the services of a private detective.”

Deanna was still speaking in a normal voice, though it became a little dreamy as she said, “I wondered if it were a private eye like in the movies: snap-brim hat, long trench coat, steel-jawed chin. Anyway, the private eye had little trouble following my great-grandfather—though ‘great’ is probably the wrong word for him,” she said with an ironic chortle. “It seems my progenitor had left a bread-crumb trail of prostitutes visited and affairs started that led all the way to Vail, where he was working as a lift attendant at the ski area while, um, serving a rich lady at night while her husband attended to his … let’s say: board functions.

“When the bank president learned of this, he brought his daughter-in-law and the kids out to Vail for a ski trip, hoping to engender one of those movie moments where the miscreant is surprised by his one true love and repents of his wicked ways. According to my grandmother, it was almost like that. Her father was happy to see his children, but not so happy to see his wife. Still, he stopped the fooling around, for a while, and took his family in. His father got him a respectable job as the manager of one of the local restaurants and my great-grandfather gave all appearances of becoming a respectable citizen again. What he was actually doing, though, was continuing his association with the rich lady. He got money out of her somehow and bought the restaurant. Set his wife up as the general manager, dumped the rich lady for a younger mistress, and made his children managers of other properties he had acquired. By the time I came along, great-grandfather was dead and his true story had been buried longer than he had.” She laughed heartily before adding, “There’s even a picture of him in the museum, all dressed up and looking distinguished, with a little plaque about how he was one of Vail’s leading citizens and top philanthropists. He even gave enough money to one of the local churches that they named the recreation building after him. Can’t you just see some youth minister telling the kids who came out to play volleyball, ‘And this building was named after a notorious sinner, who would have slept with any of your mothers who let him, in Jesus’ name, Amen!’” She cackled with laughter and then slipped back into one of her songs. Adaline and I looked at each other strangely, but continued on without a word. We did discuss later how much of the story we thought was true, but had no way to come to a conclusion. And we still thought Deanna was unhinged at best.

We made it to Vail in less than a week, which really encouraged me—and made Adaline wonder why I had thought it would take three weeks. The thing was, I hadn’t been counting on the Interstate being in such good shape, which it was. There were only a couple places where the ash had slid across it, and neither of them deep. And while Black Gore Creek ran strong in some places, it didn’t cross the highway at any point. As we pulled up in sight of Vail, I was smiling and telling Adaline how surprised everyone would be if we pulled back into town before they even came to look for our signal.

“Where are your people?” I asked Deanna, once we had her attention for she had been in the middle of a rousing rendition of either “Amazing Grace” or “I Fought the Law” (it was hard to tell).

She crawled up to crouch behind the front seat and, pointing, said, “Up yonder. You cain’t see it from here, but it’s the other side of that big white building by the ski slopes. I heared you talking about how the wind blew that gash in the ash—gash in the ash,” she repeated with a laugh, “And we had something just like that. People to the left and right was all dead, but our little gash was just fine. All things considered, I mean.”

“Think we can make it before nightfall,” I asked, for we were still a good five miles out, “Or should we make camp and get there in the morning?”

She looked up at the bright spot of the sun that almost shown through the ash and said, “Let’s see if we can push through. If we can’t, at least we can stay in one of the buildings on the edge of town. We might make’er this evenin’, though. Them’s good horses you got there.” This was a surprising statement, for she had frequently complained when we stopped to water the horses or, worse, gave them a lengthy breather and roll when we came upon that rare meadow of thick grass—or any grass. I couldn’t blame her for being anxious to get to her people, but I did get tired of her complaining—especially as we had been making such good time.

As we pulled closer to the town of Vail, some thunderheads started building to the west. “I hate to say it, Deanna, but we may need to pull up and find shelter.”

I had expected an objection, but she looked at the sky and said, “Them’s buildin’ up to be gully-washers, all right.” She pointed off to the right and said, “They’s an old mechanic’s shop up yonder. You’d be able to pull the horses into the dry.”

With impeccable timing we got the old garage doors open and the horses inside the bay just before a wall of summer rain came through. I enjoyed seeing it, though, for it made me think of the rains we used to have when I was growing up. They would come up on us all of a sudden, pelt you with raindrops the size of golf balls, then pass through as quickly as they had arrived. I could see some sunlight to the west, creating a golden line on the mountains in that direction, which made me think this would be one of those storms. It was, but by the time it had passed through it was too late to go anywhere so we set up camp in the old automotive shop. I was afraid Deanna would be upset by us stopping that close to her goal, but she just curled up on a couch in the manager’s office and went to sleep.

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Some of the Time

an Edward & Marianne story

Garison Fitch’s grandson, Edward Garrett, and his young wife Marianne, have been living back in the twenty-first century for four years now. Marianne has won a gold medal at the Olympics … and Edward? He’s been stuck in a dead-end job, dreaming of the days when he led armies and walked the lands of the far future with Marcus and Daniel. A parade in Marianne’s honor in their hometown is cut short by a storm-an enormous storm like only Edward and Marianne have seen before.

When it subsides, they are back in the future they once knew, even closer to the end of the world than before. But Lasten-who they knew before as an old man-is now a young man and the land of Nid is populated as it had been in his youth … and led by a madman who believes his society is dying and, so, must be put out of its misery. In the course of trying to save the future-and discover why they have been summoned out of their own time-Marianne and Edward discover a whole new culture and race of men most people believed was only a legend until the Garretts burst through with irrefutable evidence that the legends are true. The world will never be same, but can it survive the change long enough to make it to the end of time itself?

Order today for Kindle or Paperback!

And don’t forget book 1 in this series, “All the Time in Our World” and the finale, “A Thousand Miles Away“.

…

Reading Sample

They were halfway through the parade route—traveling slowly along North First and gaining a whole new understanding of why the Cowboy Band had to stretch their legs periodically—when they felt the first drop. By the time they turned north to head back up Pine, it was beginning to sprinkle.

No one seemed to mind, though, as Edward was right that it rarely ever rained that time of year and it had been a dry summer so far. If anyone had brought an umbrella they weren’t unfurling it, yet, and most of the spectators weren’t even seeking cover.

The bands were not at their best for they usually didn’t play in public this early in the season. But it had been deemed a momentous occasion that a local girl had won an Olympic gold medal and everyone—especially the downtown merchants—had thought a parade through downtown was an excellent idea. Abilene hadn’t had a bonified celebrity since Clint Longley almost a century before and it seemed like it was about time. So every church, civic organization and fraternal order had been encouraged to quickly come up with an Olympic-themed float and enter it in the parade. For such a hastily thrown together event, it had turned out quite nice.

Except for the rain, which, by North 5th, was coming down hard enough that some people were beginning to wonder if seeing an Olympian were really worth the trouble. By North 8th, the Cowboy Band was pretty much running to get to shelter and Ranger Rangerettes were just streaks of running makeup.

“This is fun,” Marianne laughed as they hunkered down in the seat and the roof of the convertible closed over them.

He smiled at his wife, so beautiful to him even with her hair plastered to her head and shoulders, and said, “This can’t be good for the meticulously redone interior on this car.”

By the time they got to the civic center, the rain was coming down in buckets and the owner of the car quickly appeared in a state of panic and mumbling something about, “Never again!”

“Do you two need a ride somewhere?” the banker asked.

Edward started to say that would be appreciated, but Marianne interrupted, “I kind of like walking in the rain myself. And our car’s just over there by Thornton’s anyway.”

Edward nodded, then added, “And I guess Joly’s supposed to be around here, too.”

“Surely he’s not going to go through with anything,” Marianne told him. “Come on. Let’s just go to the car.”

They were already so wet that walking in the rain was not uncomfortable. It was rather liberating, once one got used to it. As they stopped at the corner, Edward pulled Marianne into his arms and kissed her. He had read books about how romantic it was to make out in the rain but had never really done it. He admitted it was pleasant, but he always thought kissing Marianne was pleasant—and sometimes it had been more pleasant than this time.

Just then a gust of wind blew past them, chilling them in their wet clothes and so powerful Marianne thought it was going to knock her down—off balance and on her tip-toes as she was. They held each other tighter, waiting for the wind to die down, but it merely picked up force. Still holding tightly to Marianne, Edward reached out and grabbed the street sign nearby for support.

Then, suddenly, the wind stopped. And the rain.

And it wasn’t cloudy anymore.

As they looked around, still holding each other tightly, the same thought came to each of their minds and they spoke in chorus, “We’re not in Abilene, anymore.”

“Yes we are,” he suddenly added. He pointed out a red spire to their south and said, “There’s Lasten’s castle.”

Her hand went to her mouth as she let out a sound of exuberant excitement. Then, grabbing his hand, she set off running across the fields, saying, “Come on!”

There was a slight rise between them and the castle and when they topped it they paused to take a look at the castle. They were surprised by what they saw.

The castle itself looked virtually the same as it had the last time they had seen it, but now it was surrounded by a sizable village. At a guess, Edward thought it might contain as many as two thousand people. And the castle itself, if every room were used, could probably hold at least a couple hundred people and perhaps more.

It was a thriving town, with much hustle and bustle. And unlike the drab, dreary towns they had seen on their last visit to the area, it was bright and cheerful. Banners hung not only from the castle walls, but also from many of the buildings about the town. Even the smaller homes—huts, really—had a fresh, newly built look to them.

And there were children. Lots of children were running about and playing among the buildings and on the large greens before the castle gate.

Behind the castle the town rose to the crown of what Edward and Marianne in their time had known as McMurry Hill. Edward looked at the scene before him and commented, “I think we’ve been away more than four years.”

Marianne nodded, then began dragging him into the town, saying, “Come on! Let’s see if we can find Lasten.”

“You think he’ll still be alive?”

“The question is whether he’ll remember us. If this is after the last time we were here, then he won’t.”

“Right,” Edward nodded, understanding precisely what she meant.

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All the Time in Our World

an Edward & Marianne story

by Samuel B. White

Synopsis

Two nervous west Texas teenagers on their first date are suddenly engulfed in a horrific thunderstorm and take shelter in an old barn. When the storm subsides, the barn is gone … and so is everything else, except their bicycles. They ride their bikes on a mysteriously well-maintained road in an otherwise barren land to an ancient castle whose single resident claims to already know them. Edward and Marianne have been whisked thousands of years into the future and their only hope of returning to their own world and time is to follow a mysterious traveler named Marcus and a hulking warrior named Daniel into a battle for the soul of all mankind. Over almost a year’s time and more than a thousand miles of travel, Edward and Marianne are trained “physically and mentally” to put together and lead the army that will fight the battle for the beginning of the end of the world. As Edward is taught to be a general and a sword-fighter and Marianne learns to use a bow and lead as well, they begin to learn that their greatest asset just may be each other.

Order on Kindle or paperback.

And be sure and check out the sequels: Some of the Time and A Thousand Miles Away.

…

Reading Sample

Prologue

A wide plain baked by sunlight.

The lone figure touches a parched tongue to chapped lips and realizes the action no longer seems to have any effect.

She casts a fearful glance up at the sun. She can’t make out its orb, just a brighter spot in the already glassy sky.

It has moved some since last she looked. Still a long way from the horizon, it promises many hours of blinding light.

Still, she doesn’t look forward to night, for at night she cannot work.

She looks down at the sheaf of papers in her hand. Why is she still working on them at all? What could it possibly matter?

She has asked the question out loud many times, but not this time. She knows why she continues to work. She works because she has to. She can do nothing else.

Is it only days now? She tells herself that people have thought that before. She leafs through the pages and her hazel eye stops briefly on a name. She knows the name. She knows what’s on the paper so well that she feels as if she knows the person the name belonged to. He lived back before the world’s middle age, but she would wager that he wondered if the days were almost spent.

Was he wrong?

Her great-grandmother used to tell her that the ending wasn’t just at the end.

Chapter One

Beneath the canopy of pecan trees lay two young people, a chaste distance apart an observer might reckon them, yet closer were they in their own minds than they had ever been to another. They were in the spring of their lives, and a rare occasion it was for their spring coincided with the calendar’s.

He thought about moving closer, but wondered if he could, for he was possessed of that awkwardness that comes from not knowing where one stands in the eyes of the desired and fearful that the standing was further away than hoped. His hand moved closer to hers, but almost imperceptibly so.

She didn’t perceive it. A young woman of light brown hair which tended to grow lighter in the summer months, she possessed the body of a somewhat younger girl, though her body was starting to portend the curves which would come later. She was the younger sister of a woman who drew men’s attention and had never drawn any herself—or so she would have said—yet she was one of those women upon whom age would smile, making her more attractive as the years went by; which was a process that was moving far too slowly as far as she was concerned.

She didn’t perceive the slight motion of his hand because she was too busy thinking about him. She had known him since grammar school, had been his friend, but had only recently noticed him. As she thought of him, she thought he was a handsome young lad, or—perhaps—that he was becoming handsome. He had sandy brown hair that he wore a bit long for the day and a mostly clear complexion around an intelligent smile. Standing, he was tall and lanky, if not actually skinny, with an athlete’s ease of movement combined with the unexpected bursts of clumsiness so prevalent in men of his age.

The pecan trees provided such a canopy overhead that the sky was only visible in small patches. Mockingbirds chittered in the trees, mocking each other most likely. A frog’s call grated in the air, adding to the soft din of families on picnics, and the ever-present crickets whose noise was an underlying constant. Learned men who studied the sounds of the frog would have studiously debated whether the sound were the sound of the frog searching for a mate or flies, but the more mundane answer was probably that the frog just did not like silence. In the distance, another mockingbird spoke, perhaps mimicking the frog.

Neither frogs nor birds took any notice of the young couple who lay on the thin blanket beneath the pecan trees. Neither did the people who ate their sandwiches from plastic bags or tossed a plastic disk back and forth on the warm and windless west Texas day. Had they looked, they might have noticed that the young man was nervous. Nervous, yet underneath—or perhaps overriding—that emotion, he was ecstatic.

Near the old wooden bridge they lay, the waters of the creek already dry for the year, but the young man smiled because beside him lay the woman he had dreamed of for years.

Neither would be mistaken for movie stars. Walking together they would have drawn little to no notice for they turned heads with neither unbelievable good-looks nor eye-catching ugliness. They were the type of people who were easily overlooked by an appearance-conscious world.

This is the way it’s supposed to be, he thought. Hanging out in one of your favorite places in all the world—at least, the small part of the world he had actually seen—with a girl you were … crazy about.

He didn’t know if he were in love with her. He had been given—and occasionally listened to—all the lectures about love versus infatuation and he knew enough about love to know he didn’t know much about love. And what he knew about love and about himself was enough to know that what he felt probably wasn’t love … at least not yet. It wasn’t exactly infatuation, either, he thought. Infatuation was short-lived and he had known her way too long to be infatuated. He liked her, and she was pretty, and she seemed to like him. Enough to go out with him, anyway, which was a good sign. But was it love? Would it turn into love?

He knew better than to even ask such questions. Asking such questions always led to trouble, he knew, because girls never thought the way guys did and when girls found out a guy was thinking along those lines, they always seemed to be way ahead of him on the idea or way behind and the difference led to crashing problems. So Edward lay back and vowed not to voice what he was thinking—even if he could, which was doubtful, considering how much of it consisted of incomplete sentences.

Still, he felt like he had to say something. Like most teenage boys, he thought that to sit in silence for any great length of time was a mistake. Or maybe he had never thought about it at all. He was just going on instinct and instinct said that if you sat silent around a girl for too long, she’d eventually start thinking about other things (meaning: not him) and that couldn’t be a good thing because soon (of course) she’d be thinking about some other guy and—

“I love it here.”

“Hmm,” Marianne replied.

Marianne was thinking that this really was a beautiful place and she couldn’t believe that she had lived this close to it for so long and had never explored it before. She was also thinking that she enjoyed the company she was sharing it with and wondering if it would be a mistake to tell him so. She knew that if you told a guy you were enjoying the time spent with him, he usually made a logic leap to the idea that you were madly in love with him and, so, were either after him and were someone to be avoided or were ready to set a date.

She knew better than to dare speak what was actually on her mind. She was thinking that it wasn’t just that this was a good date, a better than most date, it was that this had so far been a great date. Not because it was exciting or thrilling or the most romantic thing she had ever heard of, but because she was getting the idea in the back of her mind that she was enjoying herself more with this guy than she had with any other guy in … forever. She was starting to see herself wanting to date this young man on a regular basis but could she tell him that now without completely ruining everything? She doubted it.

So, in spite of what initially seemed a major setback, the day had gone better than either could have predicted.

It had all started a couple weeks previous, towards the end of the school year. Edward had ridden his new twelve-speed to school even though he knew that in the minds of most of the people at O.H. Cooper High School there were only two kinds of people who rode bikes to high school: dwizzles who either weren’t old enough to drive a car or weirdoes who rode a bike for some sort of exercising fun. Exercising was highly touted at Cooper High School among the constituents, and even bicycle riding, but only as a recreational activity, never as an actual mode of transportation.

When he had left home that morning, the idea of biking all the way to school had seemed like a good one. He had been riding out in the country and getting in shape and the five or so miles to the school had not been daunting. As he had drawn closer to the sprawling campus at the end of Sayles Boulevard, though, trepidation had begun to set in. Could he get to a good place to lock his bike up without his friends seeing him? What would they say if they did see him? Many of them knew he rode his bike out in the country—but to school? What sort of humiliation might he be setting himself up for? Was it too late to ride home, hop in the car and get to first hour on time?

He figured the only way to deal with it effectively would be to just brazen his way through it. Pretend like it were something he did every day. Maybe even look disdainfully on everyone who didn’t ride their bikes to school. Yeah, that’d be the way to do it, he thought. Attitude was everything.

So he had pulled up to the bike racks and climbed off like he did it every day and reached for the lock as if that were something he did every day. He remembered all the times back at Jefferson Junior High anyone had forgotten to lock their bikes at the bike rack. Rarely were bikes stolen, but the owner generally came out of class to find his mode of transportation dangling from the branches of the nearest tree. It had never happened to him, but he had seen it more than once and had been everlastingly grateful the one time he realized he hadn’t locked up his bike that no one had caught the oversight.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone else pull up to the bike rack. His first thought was that this was good because it would make it look as if he weren’t the only person riding a bike to school that day. With a rapidity to rival the greatest minds in the world, he instantly jumped to the idea that it could be one of the dwizzles or weirdoes, in which case he didn’t want to be seen riding a bike to school like one of them. Now, the only thing for it was to just walk away and pretend he hadn’t noticed anyone else pull up and make sure that—if anyone were watching—they’d know he was walking away without being aware someone else had pulled up. It was all a part of the high school dance he stepped to every day of his life and these moves and motivations didn’t seem to him as ridiculous as they probably do to the reader.

He slung his backpack full of books he rarely opened over his shoulder and was about to step away when a voice asked, “Edward?”

He thought of a dozen people who could be calling him by name right then and none of the faces which jumped to mind were pleasant ones. Maybe nice enough people, granted, but not the kind of people he wanted to be seen walking away from a bike rack with. This was high school, after all, and in spite of what the psychologists might say, image was everything.

But there was no getting out of it now, so he stopped and casually turned his head, making sure that anyone who might be watching would know for sure that he was doing this casually. His momentary surprise at seeing he was not being addressed by either a dwizzle or a weirdo was quickly overcome by the normal teenage boy fear of being addressed by a girl.

“Hey, Marianne,” he replied, trying to sound casual but afraid his tongue was sticking to his mouth like it usually did when addressing someone—anyone—of the opposite sex. Being the girl, his tongue was only following the lead of his flash-frozen brain.

“I didn’t know you rode a bike to school,” Marianne smiled.

“This is actually the first time I’ve done it since Jefferson.”

“Ever get yours thrown into a tree?”

“No, I missed out on that.”

“At Lincoln they just stole your bike if you left it unlocked. If the police ever found it again, it always seemed to be somewhere out by Phantom.”

“Ever happen to you?”

She gave him something between a smirk and a shrug that indicated it probably had.

Edward and Marianne had gone to elementary school together for fourth and fifth grade back at good ol’ David Crockett Elementary and he had had a crush on her almost since the first day she walked into Mrs. Landers’ class. In the two years of elementary school, he had had the nerve to actually talk to her maybe three times. Then junior high had rolled around and, even though he could see her house from his, he was in the Jefferson district and she went to Lincoln. He had seen her a few times over the next three years—in the neighborhood or at a store—and they always spoke cordially, though never had much to say.

He had just about forgotten his crush on her until high school. He had had plenty of other unrequited loves during middle school, after all. Freshman year he had just seen her at a distance and that had been that, sort of. His old crush for her had been in the back of his mind, but had never really been fertilized.

But sophomore year they had both wound up in Miss Gober’s geometry class and, sitting there day after day, he had fallen for her all over again. He had finally talked to her, and—as part of a group—they had even headed over to the mall or Taco Bueno for lunch a time or two. But he had never once gotten the impression she was the least bit interested in him, so he had never asked any questions that might give him the answers he wanted and sophomore year had ended and that had been that.

Junior year had been little different. They had no classes together, but they had many friends in common and so were found in the same group now and again before school, during lunch, at pep rallies and the like. He had spoken to her a few times, though it would be hard to call any of the encounters a true conversation. For one, it was almost always amidst a group so there was no chance for truly close discussion. He had daydreamed what he might say, but had always found a reason not to say it. Someone else walked up, they were in a crowded place, the earth was orbiting the sun. There was always a reason.

They were seniors now, would be graduating from good ol’ Cooper High in a couple weeks, and here he was finally with a chance to talk to her and a five minute window in which to do it. And it had only taken him nine years. With a sense of melodrama that only a high school kid who thinks every moment in time has led up to the one in which he now occupies, it occurred to him that if he didn’t talk to her now he probably never would. She’d go off to college and he would too and they’d probably never come back to Abilene and … he had to say something.

“You bike?” was all he could come up with.

“Yeah,” she shrugged.

He thought about saying that that explained why she had such great legs, but he didn’t and realized it was probably for the best. Not only was it inaccurate (because he had thought her legs nice for as long as he had known her and that probably had nothing to do with the bike), but he also knew that lines like that only worked in old movies and only served to make the user sound like a letch in real life.

Looking for some way to continue the conversation, it suddenly occurred to him that, living two blocks away from him as she did, she had probably taken the same route he had to get to school. “Pretty long ride from our part of town, huh?”

She shrugged, “I like it, though. Gives me some time to think and plan for the day.”

“Kind of bites going home though, doesn’t it? After a long day here.”

“Not really. In a way, it provides a good wall between school and home. Once I leave here, I’ve got a good half hour to put everything about school behind me. By the time I get home, school’s another world.”

Barely hearing her as he steeled his courage, he asked, “You ever go for long rides? Like out in the country?”

“Not really. I’ve thought I’d like it, but I guess I was worried about being a girl alone and all that.”

“I hadn’t thought about that, but I can’t blame you. What about riding with someone? I mean, well, um, ah, I like to ride out to the State Park and I was, uh, wondering if you’d like to do that, too, sometime. Together, I mean.”

“You know, that might be fun,” she replied cheerily. “The State Park, isn’t that out by Buffalo Gap?”

His heart was beating so hard he figured it probably showed through his shirt and his mouth was as dry as new sandpaper. Untying his tongue, he managed to ask, “Are you free this Saturday?”

“Ah, no,” she replied. Then she quickly added, “My mom and I are going down to look at Texas A&M. We’ve had it scheduled for a couple months.”

He figured his window of opportunity had closed with a resounding thud just then, but she told him, “I could go the next Saturday.”

His heart had almost exploded (as well as his head) just then, but he managed to say something unintelligible that was roughly affirmative and they promised to get together the next week and plan out the trip.

They had peddled the twelve miles out to the State Park with the intention of taking a nice dip in the spring fed pool when they got there. They had arrived to find that the pool was not open yet because, it had been discovered, a pipe had ruptured during the winter and hadn’t been discovered until earlier in the week. Men were hard at work on the problem and a park attendant was assuring everyone who came by that the pool would be open the next week, but that didn’t suit the needs of the people who had driven all the way out to go swimming, let alone those who had bicycled out.

This had been a tremendous blow to Edward. He wasn’t a particularly good swimmer, but he had looked forward to seeing Marianne in her swimsuit. Not that that was the only reason he had asked her on a date like this, he reminded himself, but it had been a looked-for perk.

So they had peddled down to one of the tree-shaded picnic tables and eaten their lunches and tried not to let the other person notice just how close they were to exhaustion. They were both hoping and praying that the other person would not suggest turning around and riding back into town, yet. After lunch, they had spread out the sheet they had brought and—in completely chaste fashion—lay down on it to rest and talk.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as they lay there Edward began to think that he might never be able to get up again. So he sat up and pulled his knees to his chest a time or two to stretch his hamstrings. As he did so, he looked over at Marianne.

She was either asleep or had her eyes closed against the bright Texas sunlight that peeked through the pecan branches overhead. Either way, she couldn’t see him staring at her. Even then, he only took furtive glances, then quickly looked away lest she—like some forest animal—could somehow sense his staring.

He wondered what it was that he had always liked so much about her. There were prettier girls at Cooper. Heck, there had been prettier girls at Crockett. So why had he always had this crush on this particular sandy-haired young woman? Her face was pretty, but she was no model. Her figure was attractive but a little on the slight side. She had really nice legs, but she hadn’t in elementary, so that couldn’t have been it.

Maybe it was her smile. Her mouth might have been considered by some to be a little large, but she had a great smile. And she smiled a lot. Maybe that was it, he thought: maybe it was because Marianne almost always seemed happy. Even in those moments when, like most high school students, she complained about the world around her, there was an air of humor and hyperbole behind all the angst.

Suddenly proving that she was awake and had somehow noticed his stealthy glances, she asked, “What?”

“Hmm?” he asked, shaken from his reverie.

“You keep looking at me funny.” Reaching up a hand to check, she asked, “Do I have something in my hair?”

“No,” he replied, blushing.

“Then what?” she asked, sitting up, stretching her legs much as he had.

“Nothing,” he replied shortly, maybe a little too guiltily. Hoping to quickly change the subject, he asked, “You ready to head back?”

Looking at him as if still hoping to discern what had just been going through his mind, she replied with a laugh, “No. I’m wishing I had brought my mother’s cell phone so I could call her to come pick me up.”

He reached into his backpack and offered her his phone. “I always bring it,” he shrugged. “In case I get caught in a storm or have a wreck or something.”

She pushed the phone away and said, “I was joking. I have one, too. I just hate using it.”

“Really?” he asked, truly surprised. He thought he used his phone less than anyone he knew, but he still never went anywhere without it.

“My mother’s always told me that phones were a replacement for true inti—friendship. I guess her words soaked in on me.”

“Your mom sounds a lot like mine.”

She looked around and commented, “It’s so beautiful here. Like we’re in a whole ‘nother world from Abilene. Are there nature trails and stuff like that here?”

“Yeah. Some good ones.”

“Well, sometime—when I’m in shape—I want to come out here and walk around and take a dip in that pool.” She looked at him with that familiar twinkle in her eyes and said, “But today, I better head back while I can. ‘Cause if I stay here one more minute, I’m going to be here until the paramedics come for me.” She held out her hands and asked, “Help me up? ”

He bounced to his feet as if he were sitting on springs and took her hands in his. As he pulled her up, she grimaced and told him, “I feel like a little old lady.”

As he held her hands for that moment, he thought of all that he wished to tell her. How he had had a crush on her for nine years now. How he had sat out on his back porch looking across the park, just hoping she’d come out on the porch of her house so he could wave hello. How he’d sat there all the way through geometry wanting to ask her out. But all he managed was, “I’ll fold the sheet.

They loaded up their backpacks then and got on their bikes. As she groaned at the first pressure to the peddle, he asked, “You sure you don’t want to call?”

“I’m fine,” she laughed.

“That you are,” he wanted to say, but wisely didn’t.

The little hill getting out of the park was hard on their legs. Even his, for though he often rode far more than twelve miles in a day, it was usually in a straight shot and not with a long idle time in the middle. Once out of the park and onto the highway, though, they both began to feel their legs loosen a bit and the prospect of the ride back was not nearly so grim. It was a beautiful day, after all. Not as hot as usual for that time of year, a little bit of cloud cover, and every now and then a touch of a welcome breeze.

They were about halfway to Buffalo Gap when they felt the gust of wind coming up behind them. Edward turned to call back that that ought to help them get back home a little quicker … and then he saw the cloud.

It was a dark cloud. The darkest he had ever seen. It roiled and billowed like the front edge of an alien invasion from an old 2-D movie. It was filled with lightning and the air was suddenly filled with the roar of thunder and before he could tell Marianne to look out or anything (he wasn’t sure what he could have told her), the cloud had caught up with them and they were being pelted with cold, hard rain drops the size of June bugs.

In a matter of seconds, he could no longer see fifty feet ahead of him and had to look hard to make sure Marianne were still with him. He let her pull up alongside and called out over the noise, “We’ve got to find some place to pull over!”

“You lead, I’ll follow!” she shouted back.

There was a bar ditch beside the road, but he figured that would soon be running brim-full with water. So he peddled on a bit until he found a place to pull off. He saw a shelter through the rain and made for it even though at first glance it was just a darker place in the darkness. The going was tough and the road was a washboard, but he finally pulled into what appeared to be an old barn. It was empty, but the smell of manure was fresh in it, so it wasn’t completely out of use.

Marianne pulled in right behind him, soaked to the skin. Even in the midst of a near crisis, the teenage boy side of his brain remarked that he was getting to see her swimsuit after all, but he quickly swatted the thought away and set about closing the big doors.

He was trying to work up the nerve to suggest they get into the loft, where there might be dry hay, when he turned to find her already climbing the ladder. He scampered up after her and found her sitting against a post, trying to put her hair back into a pony tail. She said something to him, but he couldn’t hear her for the sound of the rain on the metal roof.

Edward came closer and asked, “What?”

“I said, ‘It’s kind of loud in here!’” she laughed.

He sat down beside her and thought about saying something about how he’d always liked the sound of rain on a metal roof but figured saying it would spoil the moment because he would probably rupture a lung getting it out loud enough. He took her hand as he leaned against the railing of the hay mow and she didn’t seem to mind so he figured he was in the midst of the best day of his life.

She leaned up against him and said, loud enough for him to hear, “My legs really didn’t need another stop. If this lets up, I may not get going again.”

He made certain the cell phone was still in the backpack and said, “We’ll call as soon as it’s quiet enough for someone to hear us.”

She laid her head against his shoulder, nodding as she did so, and he decided that this was undoubtedly the best day of his life. To have a girl—not just any girl, but Marianne—fall asleep against his shoulder while sitting in a barn on a rainy day … well, it was just something he contemplated with joy right until he fell asleep, too.

It was a pretty good day for Marianne, too. She had never had a crush on Edward, but over the years she had come to have a fondness for him that she realized she didn’t have for any other guys. Until the day he had asked her out, though, she had never really given any thought to going on a date with him. If asked to name her ten best friends at school, he might have appeared on her list, but if asked to name the ten boys she most wanted to date, he would not have appeared. And now she was thinking he might have just jumped to the top of that second list. She asked herself why. Why did she like him? Why had she never realized it before?

He was tall and a tad gangly, but sort of cute. And she had always enjoyed talking to him on the few occasions she had given it a shot. But, she told herself, she had been sucked into the culture of her time and had spent an embarrassing amount of time swooning or pretending to swoon over the same guys the other girls presumed to pursue.

Marianne and her friends had often made up lists. Sometimes lists of movies or favorite songs, but most often lists about guys. Best hair. Best face. Best derriere—though that was not the word they used. She could not remember Edward being on any of those lists even though, as she glanced at him, she realized he was fairly attractive. To her own embarrassment, she could not remember having suggested him for any of those lists. Was she really as shallow as that?

She hadn’t dated much since turning old enough for her mother to allow her out of the house without an armed guard, but when she had, she had been singularly unimpressed with most of the guys she had gone out with. They were either obsessed with themselves or sex and had quickly grown boring if not outright boorish. Yet here they were in a hayloft and rather than try something, he had held her hand. She realized it might sound silly or juvenile to some, but to her it was incredibly sweet.

So here was a nice guy, who she had somehow always known had liked her, who was rather cute, and she had also known that his character was a level or two above most other guys she knew. Why, then, had she waited until senior year to finally decide she liked him, too? And not just senior year but the last week of senior year?

After agreeing to the date, she had mentioned it to some of her friends. While not met with derision or disdain, none of her friends had been particularly impressed. But, as she had started telling them how much she was looking forward to it, she had slowly come to realize just how true that was. Without exaggeration or hyperbole, she had begun to tell her best friend, Shelinda, about Edward and had started realizing then that she liked him—liked him more than she had ever known.

It was with these thoughts that, much to her own surprise had she given it any consideration, she fell asleep.

She was asleep on him for a few minutes before he realized it.

“Edward,” he heard a nervous and scared voice saying.

“Yeah?” he asked, coming awake but not yet opening his eyes because the sun was so brilliant. The realization that the sun was so bright—when the last he remembered, he was in a darkened barn—made his eyes fly open. Marianne was standing next to him and he jumped to his feet beside her.

There was no barn. No rain. And, as far as he could tell, they weren’t anywhere near Buffalo Gap. The row of palm trees made him think they weren’t even in west Texas anymore.

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A Star Falls on Oklahoma

a Mended Lives story


Rising star Sonya Kiel suddenly drops off the grid and lands on the doorstep of her cousin Lynette, who lives in western Oklahoma. Telling herself she’s just slumming and slowing down, Sonya finds herself enjoying the bucolic lifestyle … and Lynette’s best friend, a youth minister named Andy Brockton. Her life begins to be pulled in two directions as part of her desires to return to the bright lights and the silver screen, but another (and previously unknown part) wants to leave it all and follow Andy onto the mission field. Her dilemma becomes, literally, a life and death decision for her family.

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Andy and Sonya also appear in the murder mystery “Ghosts of Families Past“, so make sure you read that one, too!

…

Reading Sample

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” he grumbled as she straightened his tie. “Tell me again how you, a girl from western Oklahoma, have a cousin from England.”

Lynette let go of Andy’s tie and said, “My father’s younger brother was a Rhodes scholar. Smartest member of the Kiel family they say—before me, of course,” she chuckled. “He went to England to attend Oxford and avoid Vietnam and became a stuffy college professor. At forty, he married one of his students and proceeded to have eight children with her before he was fifty.”

“Eight?” Andy asked, though he was afraid of getting distracted from his original objection. “So, which one of the eight are you setting me up with?”

“Number five,” Lynette chuckled. “Or, Sonya, as her family calls her.”

“And she’s how old again?”

“Nineteen. And before you can object again, it’s only a three year difference and she’s very mature for her age.”

“The age is the only thing about this whole deal I’m not objecting to,” Andy quipped as he put on his suitcoat.

“For starters—well, actually, I’m not sure where to start. I’ve only been on one blind date in my life and it was a disaster.”

“Really? When was this?”

As they walked out to her car he said, “Back when I was doing that summer internship in Houston one of the girls in the youth group invited me to go out and play miniature golf with a bunch of her friends. I didn’t realize it was a date until about thirty minutes into it and I started counting heads.”

“‘Counting heads’?”

“Yeah, I realized there was an even number of boys and girls and all but one of the girls was already holding someone’s hand.”

“Was it that bad?” Lynette chided.

“Oh yeah.”

As they got into the car it occurred to Andy that he hadn’t complimented Lynette on how she looked, and she did look nice. The thing was, he and Lynette had known each other since seventh grade and had been best friends since about tenth. They had tried dating a couple times and realized it was like going out with a sibling and had called it off by quick and mutual agreement.

Lynette was pretty, if not a knockout. She was tall and a bit on the thin side, but had a winning smile and green eyes everyone envied. She was very smart, which had intimidated some guys, and it was true that she had a low level of patience for stupidity, but she was his best friend and he wanted the best for her. He thought the guy she was dating now might be the one for her, but he knew her well enough not to hold his breath.

Andy, Lynette thought, was just the type of guy she would like to find—in someone else. He was her intellectual equal, shared many of her interests, and wasn’t too bad looking. A little short for her tastes, but that was mainly because she was taller than average. He had thick, curly black hair that he kept cut too short, and an intriguing face if not actually handsome. His skin was dark but his eyes were atypically shaped and made her think that there might have been some Polynesian blood somewhere in his ancestry. He did have some Native American blood in his veins—Choctaw, to be exact—but it was so far back that it was doubtful if it were a contributing factor to his looks.

The way the evening had gotten started was that Lynette had shown up at his place an hour before, all dressed up, and saying she needed his help. Unwary, he had of course said yes before inquiring what sort of help would be needed. Lynette had then explained that she had tickets to the Wichita Falls Philharmonic Orchestra’s season opening concert for herself and Stephan but that her cousin from England had suddenly arrived unexpectedly and Lynette couldn’t just leave her at home and three was a crowd and so on.

It should probably be explained to the reader that very few inhabitants (i.e. “one”) of Lawton, OK, thought of the opening of the Wichita Falls Philharmonic Orchestra’s season as a big deal. Lynette, though, was an aficionado of classical music, a player of the viola herself, and had not missed an opening in Wichita Falls or Oklahoma City in five years. For four of those years, Andy had accompanied Lynette to the concerts out of friendship and had come to rather appreciate classical music, even if he had yet to buy a classical CD for himself. As a result, he had not been at all upset to find this year that Lynette had talked someone else into going with her to the concert.

Now, most people in Lawton facing a similar circumstance would probably have either called off the concert trip or given the tickets to someone else. This idea had never occurred to Lynette, even after Stephan suggested it. She promptly got online and purchased two more tickets to the concert. She had quickly dressed, then gone to get Andy, knowing if she called him on the phone with the idea of a blind date he might have some way to escape the issue.

So here they were, two well-dressed people on their way to Lynette’s apartment to pick up Lynette’s date and meet

Andy’s. Of course, Lynette knew her, but Andy had never met her, as far as he knew.

“How is it,” Andy asked, as if reading the narrator’s mind, “That I have never met this cousin?”

“You have, actually.” As Lynette sped down Cache Road, she said, “She came and spent a week with me when you and I were fourteen. I remember you came over one day and we all went swimming.”

“Just the three of us or was anyone else there, too?”

“Her sisters, your brother, and the rest of the youth group,” Lynette explained.

“So eight years ago I met an eleven year old girl and you expect me to remember her?”

“No, I don’t expect you to remember her, you just asked if you had ever met her. You’ve seen pictures of her, though.”

“Really?” Seeing all the restaurants they were passing, he asked, “Do I get a supper out of this or am I buying?”

“After the concert,” Lynette answered as she turned off the main road. “We’ll just barely have time to make it there before the overture. And we can go dutch treat if you like.”

“We better,” Andy replied.

As they pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex where Lynette lived, she turned to Andy and said, “I really do appreciate you doing this. And I’ll explain it all to Carly if you like.”

“I’m not seeing Carly,” he said as they got out of the car. At Lynette’s skeptical glance, he said, “I’ve been out with her twice. I don’t know if there will be a third. And I know for a fact she’s dating other people. Which is perfectly fine with me, by the way.”

“Well, thank you, anyway.”

As they walked up the steps, he said, only half-joking, “I never asked you what she looks like.”

“You going to back out if she’s ugly?” Lynette asked, a laugh in her voice that made him curious what she was concealing.

“No. But I’ll get you back somehow.”

“Don’t worry,” Lynette said as they neared her floor. With an even stranger lilt to her voice, she added, “If she’s not the prettiest woman you have ever been out with, I’ll buy your supper tonight.”

“The world’s cheapest graduate student is offering to buy me supper?” he chided in return. “For the first time today, I’m actually anxious to see her.

Andy opened the door to Lynette’s apartment and let her in. As he followed her in, he saw Stephan sitting on the couch. Stephan looked up from a magazine and smiled. “Hey, Andy. How’s it going?”

Andy came over and shook Stephan’s hand as he sat down. “Not bad. You doing all right?”

“Can’t complain … too much,” he added with a laugh, showing perfect teeth in his dark face. Stephan was a first year assistant coach and biology teacher at Lawton High who loved his job but also found it exasperating at times. He had been introduced to Lynette by one of his fellow teachers, who had attended MacArthur High with Lynette four years before. Their personalities had seemed like oil and water initially (she very Type-A, he exactly not) but the fact that he was more than her intellectual equal—and a shared passion for volleyball—had led to, so far, multiple dates.

“I’ll go see if Sonya’s ready,” Lynette said, disappearing into the back of the apartment. It was a one bedroom affair, with the kitchen, living room and dining area all being the same, but it was a nice place and Lynette had fixed it up pretty well. Her parents still lived in town and would have loved for her to move back in, but the idea was anathema to Lynette, even though she had returned to Lawton after her undergrad work.

When Lynette was out of earshot, Andy leaned close to Stephan and asked in a whisper, “This Sonya, is she as pretty as Lynette says?”

Stephan chuckled, then noticed the look on Andy’s face and asked, “Are you kidding?”

“What do you mean?”

Stephan was about to reply when they heard the bedroom door open and Andy sat back in a more normal and casual position. He looked up (again, casually) to try to take a casual first glance of the cousin. His mouth casually hit the floor.

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The Woman Caught

a Mended Lives story

Alexander “Opie” Gates, a young man from west Texas, finds himself being greeted by a woman in a bar in New York City. At first glance, she’s kind of pretty and he likes the attention. But over the evening, he begins to think she is considerably older than she appears and worn down by life. Over the next few days, Opie finds himself drawn to this woman (who proves to be younger than he thought), but then he makes a horrible discovery about her lifestyle. Telling himself he’s emulating Jesus, he continues to be her friend. But then, two things Opie never anticipated happen almost at once: The woman comes to share his faith, and he begins to fall for her. Suddenly, he’s no longer just trying to be understanding and forgiving of a semi-nameless person. He’s trying to be forgiving of someone he wants to fall in love with but he can’t get over the idea that she’s already violated something he holds very dear.

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…
Reading Sample

Alexander “Opie” Gates sat at the dimly-lit bar of the dimly-lit dive a few blocks from Times Square reading his Bible and sipping on a Sprite. It was an attention-grabbing spectacle and he knew it. It was completely intentional.

He’d got the idea from an old roommate in college. The guy was short of stature and tended to dress like he’d just gotten off a gator-hunting swamp boat, which wasn’t as much of a stretch as one might think. He’d take his Bible—a big, leather-bound job with study notes in the margins and hundreds of handwritten notes on sticky-papers stuffed here and there from Genesis to Revelation—and he’d go to a bar, order something obviously non-alcoholic, and sit and read. He told Opie that, invariably, someone would come over and ask what he was doing, and then Allen would share the gospel with them. The long-term efficacy of such an evangelism approach Opie had always doubted, but he had admired it, nonetheless.

So, with nothing else to do on a night in Manhattan when he couldn’t sleep, he had decided to give it a try. He’d left a note for his host and, wisely or no, had slipped out into the big strange city and found his way to this bar, not so far from his friend’s apartment as the crow flew, but more than half a world from home.

With his red hair and a father who adored “The Andy Griffith Show” to be nick-named “Opie” had almost seemed pre-ordained. When he had read in a book that the kid from the TV show had actually been named after one of the star’s favorite performers, Opie Cates, the name had seemed inevitable. He knew he had been born bald as a bowling ball, so he guessed the only reason he hadn’t been named Opie officially was that they had been waiting to see what color his hair would take.

Now here he sat, clearly a tourist and clearly out of sync with the rest of the bar’s patrons. They seemed a reclusive lot—hiding back in the shadows like rats—and if they paid him any mind at all, it wasn’t for long. He’d only been in the Big Apple for a couple days, but he’d seen enough to know that there wasn’t much that would garner the attention of the locals and a tourist with a Bible barely even registered on the meter.

He’d read a good bit of the middle section of the book of Ezekiel and was thinking about heading back to Rory’s pad when a voice said from beside him, “Is that a Bible?”

He looked up in surprise, answering “Yes” before even seeing who had spoken. He was getting ready to go into his old roommate’s routine when he saw her.

She was a pretty woman, probably in her mid-twenties, just like Opie. She had dark hair and was dressed in tight jeans and a loose-fitting top that showed some cleavage. He caught a glimpse of a tattoo of a rose on her left breast and quickly looked away. Glancing back, making sure he looked only at her face, his second glance made him think she was probably a lot older than him, maybe even pushing forty. But she had expertly applied makeup which created the illusion of a much younger woman.

Suddenly, he felt very sad for her. Probably not the impression she wanted men to take away from her looks, he thought ruefully. If he knew her, he thought, he’d tell her to lose the makeup and just look her age. She might not be as striking, but he was sure she would actually be prettier. He wasn’t about to say such a thing to a complete stranger and any further thoughts were stricken from his mind by the question, “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you sitting in a dump like this and reading your Bible at,” she glanced at the clock over the bar, “Almost midnight?” She tapped a finger against his glass, watched the bubbles move, and added, “And drinking a Sprite?”

He thought back to what his roommate always said in such situations, and suddenly it seemed canned and disingenuous. So he told her the truth, “I couldn’t sleep and I figured if I did this someone would eventually ask me why and I could tell them.”

“So, go ahead and tell me.”

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So Many Books

a Mended Lives story

He had never seen so many books in one room. Stacked on rickety shelves from floor to ceiling, they overwhelmed the room, and the visitor. Chris Farmer, investigator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, suddenly felt like he knew nothing about the person he was trying to help. But he was suddenly curious. Why would someone so young-why would anyone-have so many books? Alyste Smith was a young woman who lived with an abusive step father and longed to escape. The only way she knew how was through books. So she read and read and read, hoping beyond hope that, one day, a hero like the ones in her books would walk through her door and rescue her.

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…
Reading Sample

I had never really noticed her until I saw the books. Hundreds of books (thousands, I was to learn later) adorned her small room. She had bookshelves she had brought in from somewhere at, I guess, the start of it. Between them she had built other shelves. They would have made Norm Abrams cringe, but they would have warmed the heart of any librarian.

Some shelves were built by putting a board across cinder blocks, then more cinder blocks, then another board and so on up to the ceiling. In some cases, where cinder blocks or other bricks couldn’t be found, larger books were used to hold the shelves above off the books below. Here and there an ineffectual nail had been driven into a board to secure that board to the side of another shelf or to the wall itself. The whole business showed a profound lack of engineering knowledge but would have made even Rube Goldberg envious.

How the whole mess stood and hadn’t collapsed and killed her years before I have no idea. My own experience with dismantling it all brought a few paper avalanches that threatened to take my own life, but I’ll have to get back to that later.

“You’ve read all these?” I asked in dubious wonder as I looked at the books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling, making the little eight by ten room about seven by eight and a half. If she could have figured out a way to attach a bookshelf to the back of the door, I was sure she would have.

“Uh-huh,” she nodded. Then, in the apparent need for accuracy, she amended, “Everything but these two shelves. I haven’t read them, yet. But I will.” Pulling back the covers on the bed, she revealed a weathered paperback and, picking it up, said, “And this one. I haven’t finished it, yet. I …can I take it with me?”

“Yeah,” I told her, still looking in awe at the walls-which I couldn’t see, but assumed they were back there-somewhere-behind the books.

I knew there were more important and pressing matters, but I couldn’t help stepping closer to the books for a moment. There was no discernible theme in the volumes chosen. I saw a few romance novels, of the kind I would have stereotyped a young woman in her position to read. But I saw much more. There were psychology textbooks and biographies of famous people, from Teddy Roosevelt to Tacitus, and books by Twain, L’Amour and Kafka. There was a shelf of books by CS Lewis, just above a shelf of books by Tolkien (having never read either, I had no idea of the significance of this paring). I saw books on horticulture and agriculture and books of poetry by people with names I couldn’t read, let alone pronounce.

“All of them?” I asked again, though not necessarily meaning it to be out loud.

“All of them,” she confirmed.

“Do you have a favorite?”

I happened to be looking at her at that moment and realized from the look that flew fleetingly across her face that I had asked her a question akin to asking a mother which of her children were her favorite. When her composure was regained, she replied, “Probably whichever book is in my hands at the moment you ask.”

I pointed to the book that she had picked up off the bed and asked, smiling and trying to make it sound friendly, “So right now it’s that one?”

She looked down at it, a slight grimace at the corner of her mouth, then back at me and replied, “No. Not this one. It’s not that good.”

“So why read it?”

There was just the slightest hesitation before she answered, “Because I started it.”

For the first time, I took a look at this remarkable person who had, up until that very moment, just been a part of another complicated if strangely routine and boring case.

The way he looked at the books intrigued me.

Not many people had seen my collection of books, but some had. All the others had had pretty much the same reaction, though. Wondering why I had so many books, why I wanted so many books, or complete incredulity at my claim to have read them all.

People my age were the worst. The couple times I had met people my age who claimed to be readers, when they saw all my books, they usually looked at me like they thought I was crazy. Most of them, I would find out (if given the chance, most were gone after a glimpse into my room), read more than the average teenager, but they only read one thing. All romance books, or all mystery novels or all books on a single subject. That, to me, sounded like eating the same thing meal after meal, year after year. I like pizza, but I have to eat some other things now and then, you know?

So when he looked at the books with amazement, I thought I had found a soul mate. I was so surprised later to find he wasn’t a reader. Oh, he knew how, of course. He had just never known why anyone would do it on purpose. What struck me, though, was that he didn’t dismiss my reading. And when he found out just how many books I had, he didn’t renege on his offer to carry them all out. For the first time since my mother died, someone saw my books and didn’t treat me like a freak.

On the other hand, I have never been able to understand people who don’t read, or don’t love reading. I love reading. Even when my life was going well, I loved reading.

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Joyfully Ever After

a Mended Lives novel

Sean Clarke moves to the town of his dreams, to a house he loves, to a life he’s always wanted.  There he meets and falls in love with Angie. a beautiful young woman.  Sean’s family is happy for him, but they are waiting: for that moment when Sean discovers something he doesn’t like about another perfect woman and dumps her.

A novel of self-discovery, about finding out that the things that irritate us most about the faults of other people are when they mirror our own.

Available on Kindle!

To read more about Brad, Allie and Angie, make sure you read the novel Mended Lives!  To read how Joe and Ellen met, check out Hating God – a love story!

…

Sample Passage

He let go of her to hold the picture in both hands.  He was looking at it, but he wasn’t seeing it.  He wasn’t seeing anything.  His mind was gone and it didn’t show any signs of coming back any time soon.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said, when she didn’t think he would ever speak again.  “I never meant to hide this—to hide anything—from you.  But I was so ashamed—”

“You should be!” he blurted out.

“I know, I—”

He jumped to his feet and demanded, “What else are you going to tell me, Angie?  When am I going to start meeting all these guys you slept with?  What about the millions who saw you nude?  When are more of them going to show up and start asking me if I’ve seen what they’ve seen?  When, huh?”

She stood up in front of him and tried to reach out to him.  “I wish I could take back all those pictures, Sean.  I do.  But I can’t.  What can I do?”

“You could leave.”

“Sean!”

“What do you expect me to say?  ‘Hey great!  All the men of England have already seen my fiancé naked but I haven’t!’  Just leave, please.”

He picked up the folder, stuck the picture back in it (but not before seeing that there were other similar pictures in it and actually letting one slip out unnoticed that slid under the rocking chair), and thrusting the folder at her demanded, “Take these with you.”

“Sean—”

“Please, go.”

“Can I come back?”

He took a deep breath and replied, through clinched teeth, “I’ll get back to you on that.”

“Sean—”

He stepped around her and opened the front door.  Gently but firmly, he pushed her outside and closed the door behind her.

She turned around to face the door, but heard the unmistakable sound of the deadbolt being thrown.  She thought about knocking but didn’t think it was the right time.  She sat down on the front porch steps, put her head on her knees, and started crying.

It was almost half an hour later that she got up, smoothed out her dress with her hands and, taking the folder, walked back to the café.  Inside, the cook asked if she were all right, to which she nodded but didn’t answer out loud.  She just put on her apron, then put on her customer face, and went out to deal with the public.  She was relieved that the British couple was gone.

She looked around, though, at the crowd now there and wondered if any of them had ever seen her ads for Sutley’s, or Liverpool football, or any of the other ads she had done?  What about just the magazine layouts?  She remembered when she used to pat herself on the back because she had never done full-frontal, but now it didn’t seem like such a big deal.  “Partly evil is still evil,” she muttered to herself.  Then, noticing that a customer had overheard, she smiled, said, “Excuse me,” and took his order.

After that order, though, she went back and relieved the cook.  Not only did she want to be away from the general public, working with food had long been a way to calm down and think.  She did so, now.