Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 15 – Children of the Corn

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 15 – Children of the Corn

 
Al Campbell sat upright and in a lawn lounge chair beside a phone booth on the northwest corner of a middle-of-nowhere intersection in Nebraska. His eyes went from his Rolex to the setting sun and back, as if checking his watch and the sun were in agreement. Corn stretched skyward in all directions, and the stalks rustled and chittered in the gentle breeze like disobedient children told to stand quietly until called. The western road shimmered in the last of the day’s heat, and Al sometimes cocked an ear in that direction, a cat outside a mouse hole, and squinted into the fading daylight, waiting. Behind him and facing away from the setting sun, Blanche cut up vegetables in their Winnebago.

He checked his watch and called into the RV. “Are you sure about this, Blanche. This is Friday night. You’re sure he comes by here every Friday night?”

Blanche glanced at the digital clock on the stove and sliced her right index finger. “Damn.”

“Damn we have the wrong day? Damn we got here too late? Damn what?”

“Cut my finger. Did you make the payment?”

Al stood, walked to the center of the intersection, checked the roads in all four directions, shook his head and sat back down. “Yes, I made the payment. You read the information correctly?”

“Have I made a mistake before?”

A state cruiser crested a rise on the western road.

“My apologies, dear sister. Here he comes. You ready?”

The trooper pulled up behind the RV and turned its lights on. The officer, a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and a singer’s baritone voice, slid his baton into his utility belt as he exited his cruiser and walked over. “You folks okay? Breakdown or something?”

Blanche stood behind the RV’s screen door and held up her hand. “Cut my finger slicing vegetables but it’s nothing.”

The officer glanced at Blanche’s knife. She held it in a towel and blood dripped from her other hand onto the towel. “A smaller blade might make be easier to handle, Ma’am.”

Al stood up, smiled, and hooked a thumb towards the booth. “Called back home. We call from wherever we are every Friday night at seven. They must be out at a game or shopping. We’re waiting for them to call back. Is there a problem, officer?”

“Just saw you folks here, thought you might need some help. If everything’s okay, I’ll be on my way.”

Al cocked his head. “Forgive me for asking, officer, but that’s not a Nebraska accent I hear. You a transplant?”

The officer smiled. “Good ears. I’m what Stephen Vincent Benét called a New Hampshire Man. Thought I’d lost that Yankee drawl. Guess not, huh?”

The phone rang in the booth. The officer and Al stared at each other. The officer nodded towards the ringing phone. “You going to get that?”

Blanche opened the door and came down the steps. “I’ll get it.”

The officer kept his eyes on Al.

Blanche thrust her knife upwards into the officer’s back between his third and fourth ribs. She twisted the blade as it entered his heart. He fell lifeless, the knife still in his back.

“Are you sure he was one of them, Sister?”

She entered the Winnebago and came out a moment later with a green covered yearbook in her hands and a bandaid on he finger. The cover read “Little Green Class of ’73”. She flipped pages, stopped, tapped the bandaged finger on a picture, and handed him the yearbook.

Al looked at the picture. He kneeled beside the fallen officer and rolled the corpse onto its back. “Yeah, and wow, you’re good. Nobody can trace this back to us?”

“They’d have to dig through lots of public records, same as I do, and I only do one lookup in one place at a time. The money went to a General Delivery in Lincoln and came to a General Delivery in Grand Island, and everything done through library computers, blind Prodigy accounts, and those computerized phonebooks on CDs you got.” She went back into the Winnebago with the yearbook and reappeared at the door a moment later. “Dinner’ll be ready in an hour. I’m making your favorite, chicken pot pie, nice and creamy with lots of vegetables.

He smiled. “You’re too good to me, Sis.”

“We should be gone before then.”

Al glanced at the blood pooling around the dead state patrolman’s body, at the way the setting sun gave it a polished bronze color, and nodded. “Yeah, seal it up.”

Blanche secured the RV’s door. Al got in the driver’s seat. Out of habit, he turned on his directional and checked his mirror before pulling out into the road.


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Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 14 – Voices in the Sky

Well…here we are…in June…of 2025.

I’ve decided not to bore you with more rewrites of previous chapters. They happened, just not going to share them.

I can be merciful that way…

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 14 – Voices in the Sky

 
John knocked on Monique’s door Friday at 5PM. Behind him a red wheelbarrow held several bags looking for a dump to die gracefully in. He brought the bags in and set them down in her office.

“Martin says you got his rocket machine espresso maker to work without reading the instructions. Any truth to that?”
“You want a cappuccino?”

She pointed at circuit boards and wires he pulled from the bags. “That going to break my computer?”

“Want me to make you a better one?”

“Is that stuff legal?”

He shrugged. Two hours later there were two boxes with lots of blinking lights and lots of wires going from her phone outlet to her computer to her office phone. He gave her a set of earphones with a mike that should’ve had NASA stamped on them and pushed a button on the nearer box. “You can send and receive calls on your computer now. It’ll pop up a little window with the name and phone number of whoever’s calling you. You can make a phone book by pressing CTRL-K. And it’ll record messages people leave – even conversations you have.” He chuckled.

“Can you do that for my mobile, too?”

It took him another hour to slave her computer to her mobile.

“Any of this legal?”

He shrugged.

“Am I going to lose my real estate license because of this?”

He shook his head. “You going to tell anybody?”

“What do I owe you?”

He shrugged. “Thanks for the ride.”

He headed for her door. “You had dinner yet?”

He didn’t turn around. “No.”

“Your aunts know you do this kind of stuff?”

“I doubt it. You going to report me?”

“Hell no. I’ve got things I need. What’re you doing this weekend?”

“Making a TV.”

“With the reception we have in Acra?”

“Not that kind of TV. Mr. Martin watches overseas soccer games. I’ll bet he can get lots of other stuff. I want to watch what he watches. You going to tell him?”

She put her hands on her hips and prepared to deliver some sassy, come-hither charm and checked herself.

Poor kid’ll either have a heart attack or squirt in his jeans. Go for direct instead. “You going to let me know what he watches? Maybe it’ll be something I’d like. Maybe you can tape it for me. Fair enough?”


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Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 13 – Digging In the Dirt

Oh, how exciting! Another brand new never-before-seen chapter!

Enjoy.

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 13 – Digging in the Dirt

Stacey, khaki shorts, rainbow colored t-shirt, straw farmer’s hat, gardening gloves, and work boots, kneeled in some freshly turned earth at the end of her garden. Some garden stakes, seed packets, twine, a hand shovel and rake, and Frank Sinatra formed a half circle on her right, and her eyes went back and forth among them as she decided what to do next.

“Tell me I’m not Mr. Douglas, this isn’t Green Acres, and Larry Martin isn’t Mr. Haney, Frank. Please tell me that?”

Frank, stretched out in the sun, opened an eye, winked at her, and purred.

Something crawled up her bare knees and she absently swatted it.

The crawling sensation remained.

Not so much something crawling as something feeling. A sense of long antennae touching, tasting, testing.

She stood up abruptly.

Frank rolled on his back and waited to be scratched.

Stacey looked back where her knees met the earth.

Tiny green shoots waved back and forth, something she planted unnaturally animated.

She kneeled again, this time making sure her knees weren’t crushing the shoots.

Their movement changed. They reached for her, seeked her.

She watched them find her knees and gently brush against them while she scratched Frank’s belly.

The feeling wasn’t new.

She’d had similar experiences as a kid in the woods behind her parents house.

Pleasant and inviting, she took a glove off and touched one of the roving shoots with her fingertip.

The shoot gently twined around her. It felt like a kiss.

Someone whispered, “Ascolta.”

She looked around.

Nothing. No one.

Her knees itched. She stared at them. The soft green shoots had penetrated her flesh.

She watched their tendrils wriggle just under the surface of her skin, could feel them reach and burrow inside her thighs.

Ascolta.”

She snapped her head, stood quickly, and backed away.

The kitchen’s screen door clicked shut. Tom ran up to her. “You okay, Sis?”

Frank got up, arched his back, poofed his tail, hissed, and stood in front of Stacey facing Tom.

Tom stopped mid-stride. “What did I do?”

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An Experiment in Writing – Part 32: Let the Characters Do the Work

Consider this experiment the end of an arc beginning with An Experiment in Writing – Part 30: What Happens Next? and continuing with An Experiment in Writing – Part 31: Who Haven’t I Written About Lately? (see how I numbered them sequentially? That’s a clue so I can remember them).

“Let the characters do the work” means (to me) the characters often know better what’s suppose to happen in a story than the author does. This isn’t a Plotter v Pantser (is it “s” or “z” in “Pantzser”?) thing, and in this experiment I even name it as a tool to use with bitch chapters, those chapters which you know what’s going on and it’s not coming out as it should.

Yep, still writing this because the technique helped with with Fains I, specifically Chapter 4 – What We Do in the Shadows (which has had four major rewrites so far).

 
Think I’m onto something? Take a class with me, schedule a critique of your work, or buy me a coffee.
Think I’m an idiot? Let me know in a comment.
Either way, we’ll both learn something.

Get copies of my books because it’s a nice thing to do, you care, you can follow along, and I need the money.

All Experiments

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 12 – Strange Tales of Foreign Lands

Oh, how exciting! A brand new never-before-seen chapter!

Enjoy.

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 12 – Strange Tales of Foreign Lands

Tom stood in his room in his sister’s farmhouse. The drive from Naval Station New York to Acra gave him much to think about and none of it made any sense. Stacey even admitted none of it made any sense. She told him every inch of her legal training and years on the Bar told her to get herself checked into a psychiatric hospital.

“Just so I’ll know, Sis, what’s stopped you?”

She didn’t answer and started in on her story. He listened and started a regimental inspection checklist in his head..

She’s disillusioned with the clients Osborne, Nash, and Vogel are getting – check.

Hank Ingram pulls her aside one day and confides he’s had moments in his fifty-five year history with the firm, too – check.

He tells her to take a sabbatical, go on vacation, go on a cruise, he even says, “May Jesus forgive me, go fall in love for a weekend,” and that was one of the few times he ever mentioned his faith in the office, so Stacey knew he was concerned – okay, and check.

She went on a sabbatical – check.

To Rio.

“Rio? You’ve never shown any interest in anything south of Trenton before. What prompted Rio?”

“You going to let me tell my story?”

He shrugged and rubbed Frank Sinatra’s ears. They left I-278 long behind and were on a straight shot up 87 towards Albany.

She has no idea why Rio, and she’s doing the tourist thing, and there’s a little hidey-hole stall like a newspaper dealer’s in the middle of town between two skyscrapers that’d do The City proud, and there’s this little old brown-skinned, wizened-face woman with this beautiful long black hair with flares of gray in a thick braid all the way down her back wearing a black bowler hat and a verdant billowy blouse and skirt that feels like a deep Amazonian forest –

Tom mentally threw the checklist out the window. “Verdant? Verdant? I never heard you use that word before. You take vocabulary classes or something?”

“Can I finish?”

“And feels like the Amazon? Not reminds you of or makes you think of?”

Stacey ignored her brother and continued. “Over all this she’s wearing the most beautifully multi-colored coat, like Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors. It looks like a patchwork but it’s not, more like a Pollack painting than anything else, and she’s sitting in the stall behind a table smoking a pipe.”

“The table’s smoking a pipe?”

Stacey rolled her eyes. “People are walking past like she’s not even there. There’s a sign arcing above her written in lush rainbow colors: Profesora Anna. She smiles at me and waves me over. I feel sad for her because everybody’s ignoring her.”

Tom gently scratched under Frank Sinatra’s chin. “And she pulls out a deck of cards and starts a Three-Card-Monty hustle on you, right?”

“Shh! There’s a chair on the other side of the table from her. I sit and she pulls out this ancient looking pack of the most bizarre looking cards each with six sides and all sorts of pictures. I thought it’s some kind of jigsaw puzzle but each hexagonal piece has stars and moons and planets and animals and all sorts of other symbols.”

“Russian Tarot. I’ve seen a set before. They’re passed down through families, though. I don’t know if you can buy them anymore. Was she selling them?”

“No, she hands me the cards face down and tells me to pick as many cards as I’d like from anywhere in the pack, so I took a couple here and a couple there and three or four from the middle and two or three from near the end.

Tom kept his eyes on Frank Sinatra. “She spoke English?”

“No, not a word.”

“When did you learn Brazilian Portuguese?”

Stacey looked out her window. “I didn’t.”

Tom rubbed Frank’s ears. “But you understood her?”

Stacey turned back to face traffic. “I notice you’ve lost that “let’s tease the kid sister” tone in your voice, big brother.” She reached over and tugged on Tom’s seatbelt.

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure you’re buckled in. You think what I’m telling you has holes in it so far?”

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