Tag: Fantasy

Yes, rewrite #4.

And no, I still don’t want to talk about it.

Except to offer what’s happening is probably going to end up in An Experiment in Writing about getting the voice correct (which I’ve done before in experiments 15–18), so perhaps not so much about getting the voice correct as letting the characters do the work.

Yeah, that’s it. Let the characters do the work. Or Arguing With Your Characters. Or Arguable Characters.

Whatever I decide to call it, it’ll be up sometime this month.

Vincent Quarrals watched Monique Modine exit Martin’s store from deep in the shadows of the Kristoffersen’s barn. Stacey Knox headed south a few minutes earlier.

He considered walking over when he saw Knox pull in, decided no. She seemed okay enough. He read up on her at the state capital using what little Monique knew as a starting point, and felt there was more, something beyond her litigation histories, but had no idea what.

She bought the Campbell’s farm. He never noticed her in town before. What, did she come into town on a lark, saw a broken down farm badly in need of repair with a for-sale sign on it, and decided hot damn, that’s for me? One of the top lawyers in New York City decides to go country?

Bullshit. Only a flake would do that and she didn’t seem the flake type.

Did she even know the Campbell farm’s history?

Sad place if ever there was one.

The Stocktons owned the farm since dirt was young. A Stockton niece, Maddy, married big, strapping Al Campbell, whom she met while she nursed and he MPed in Korea. They moved back to his hometown, Manchester, NH, and he joined the police force there.

The Campbells had two children, twins, Al Junior and Blanche, and the whole family’d come out for two weeks each year when Al Senior took his vacation. Once school started, Al Junior and Blanche came out for entire summers and loved it.

That’s when tragedy struck. The first of many. ‘Nam claimed whole lines of the Stockton family, accident and disease claimed most of the other. The Stockton’s entered their golden years with only Al Junior and Blanche to help them, and even then only in the summers.

Tragedy struck again. One hot August night Maddy called long distance. Al Senior’d been shot. He wasn’t expected to last the week. Al Junior and Blanche had to come home immediately.

But they hesitated, said they didn’t want to go home. It wasn’t until the Stocktons threw them out that they got on a bus.

And when Blanche got off the bus, Maddy Campbell saw why she didn’t want to come home.

Vince had no idea who got Blanche pregnant. He wasn’t even sure if it was somebody in Acra or somebody back home. She didn’t come here that way, but Vince was young at the time and probably wouldn’t have noticed if she was.

Maddy took a second-shift job in one of the mills to keep the family going.

Five months later Blanche delivered a still-born babe and never told her mother who the father was.

End of her sophomore year she started to swell again, and Maddy Campbell wants to know what she did to raise such a harlot. People she’d known for years stopped talking to her, Al Junior and Blanche stopped going to high school games and gatherings. One night Al Junior steals a car, and he and Blanche are apprehended coming out of a New York City abortion clinic.

Then one night Maddy Campbell comes home early, walks into her house, and starts screaming. She gets her husband’s revolver and starts shooting up the house. She almost hits Blanche, wings Al Junior, and turns the last shell on herself.

Mrs. Stockton got a call, got on a bus, and did what had to be done. Stayed with them until they graduated – Vince couldn’t imagine what those last years of high school must’ve been like for them – got the house in order, put it on the market, and had Mr. Stockton come out with the pickup to bring them home.

The Stocktons were never the same after that. Mrs Stockton turned bitter and snappy, and Mr. Stockton looked like he was hoping for the grave, which he was granted just a few months later.

Al and Blanche bought the farm with their inheritance. Turned out Al had quite the head for business. He stayed for two years, grew the farm, hired two hands, left Blanche to care for Mrs. Stockton and went off to U of Wisconsin Racine on a scholarship. Got his MBA in Finance in three with honors, came back, converted one of the backrooms into an office, and put a sign out front, Brunswick Investments.

He’d go up to RPI, SUNY-Albany, down to Marist, listen to students give their dissertations, and always picked which dissertations could turn into profitable businesses. He mortgaged the farm, financed winners, used that to buy back the farm, finance more winners, and bought up more and more land surrounding his farm.

Things went well until Mrs. Stockton wandered off one day and where to nobody knew. No body, no clothes, it was like she left the planet.

It only got worse when kids went out drinking in the Campbell’s woods and said they could hear some old woman calling them.

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

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

Enjoy.

Monique headed to Albany and passed a tall, skinny kid not dressed for the weather walking about a mile north of town and checked her rearviews. “That’s the kid Martin has working for him.” She pulled over and lowered the passenger window when he caught up. “You’re John, right? I met you in Martin’s store a few days ago, didn’t I?”

He stood by the door.

“I can’t hear you if you’re talking and I can’t see your head if you’re nodding. You John, yes or no?”

He bent over to reveal a bad haircut and a few bristles of ginger mustache. “Yes, Ma’am.”

“Where you heading?”

“Albany.”

“Walking?”

“You offering a ride?”

“Aren’t you cold dressed like that?”

He shrugged.

“Get in. Just Albany in general or a particular place?”

“You know the Radio Shack downtown?”

“How you getting back?”

He shrugged again.

“I’ve got business’ll take me an hour. That enough time for you to get whatever you’re doing done?”

“You offering a ride back?”

“Be where I drop you off in an hour and I’ll give you a ride back.”

An hour plus a little she saw him shivering outside the Radio Shack holding a big paper bag like it contained gold.

She nodded at the bag as he got in. “You can put that in the backseat. Or is it lost treasure and you don’t want anybody else touching it?”

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

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

Enjoy.

Martin caught the soft drink cooler’s light blink twice then go out. Sheriff Quarrals, at the Pavoni and reading the instructions for a coffee, also caught it. “How much you pay for that new unit and the light goes out every few weeks?”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve got some spare bulbs up in the apartment. Mind watching the store for five or so minutes?”

Quarrals went back to the instruction manual and waved him on.

Upstairs in his bedroom, Martin instituted Croyden’s Cone of Silence and lifted a phone handset from a drawer.

Tony Morelli’s low tenor came on the line. “Long time no talk, Larry. How is life in small town America?”

Martin chuckled. “Parochial, Tony. How’s east coast America?”

“What’s interesting about Stacey Allen Knox?”

“I got bored, Tony. Don’t know if our Unsub’s dead, gone to ground, done a runner, … Nothing new for the last month and I do random lookups on whatever’s in the news to keep my hand in, that’s all. You keeping tabs on me, Tony?”

“Did you see she just got back from Rio?”

“Rio interests you?”

“Rio interests a cross-department team with East Coast Operations being one of the departments in the cross. Nobody would’ve cared except she’s a named attorney who routinely works with internationals, not all of whom play nice with their US partners, so she was added to our persons-of-interest list.” Director of East Coast Operations Anthony Morelli paused. “We had eyes on her. She walked out of her hotel in the center of town, took a left, stopped in front of an alley between two skyscrapers, and disappeared.”

“One of our people lost her?”

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

Minor changes to some of the other preceding files. Nothing worth mentioning.

Yet.

Rhonda Gilbert lost her Company tail in a fifteenth-floor custodian’s closet at Trump Tower. The custodian’s closet contained one of her many New York City caches, one of hundreds across the globe. Wherever she posted, she used a mathematical formula based on the host city’s name to determine which buildings to use, which floors to use, and what to cache there. LiquidKey – a sweet little Special Services gadget – provided access to any mechanical lock. A Special Services app provided access to electronic locks.

Each cache contained a complete makeover. In this case, the athletically thin, black suited, middle-aged woman with thick, hip length blonde hair went in and an older, matronly woman with thick glasses, a slight lisp, ruddy complexion, and dark, Mediterranean features came out, each makeover took less then sixty seconds thanks to a special Quick-Change class her Russian handlers arranged for her when she first approached them.

Rhonda enjoyed playing both sides. She enjoyed having her own island which nobody knew about. She enjoyed the Russians paying her while they figured out how they could resurrect their empire, what shape it would take and who would run it. She enjoyed going to them, not waiting for them to come to her, with bona fides of a high-level US intelligence/security weapons research group they knew nothing about.

“Don’t beat yourselves up too much. Most of the people who should know about it don’t know about it.”

Irregular meetings were set up at various hotels – dives to five-star – at odd intervals and wherever her missions took her.

Lots of the stuff she told her handlers returned a nod, a “good job,” a “just continue what you’re doing.”

But everything changed when she mentioned Shaman to them, the US’ latest and greatest attempt to determine if ESP and now labeled PSI abilities existed, and if so, how to screen for them, how to foster them, how to develop them for strategic and tactical purposes.

One or two or her handlers completely lost their composure when she first mentioned it. Many sat forward. Most reached across the table for the files like greedy children seeing handfuls of candy for the taking. A few knocked phones off their cradles to make sure they got their candy first.

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

Yes, rewrite #3.

I don’t want to talk about it.

Vincent Quarrals watched Monique Modine exit Martin’s store from deep in the shadows of the Kristoffersen’s barn. Stacey Knox headed south a few minutes earlier.

He considered walking over when he saw her pull in, decided no. She seemed okay enough. He did a cursory read of her background at the state capital using what little Monique knew as a starting point, and something about Knox told him to go deep, go further, do some more reading beyond her litigation histories.

She bought the Campbell’s farm. He never noticed her in town before. What, did she come into town on a lark, saw a broken down farm badly in need of repair with a for-sale sign on it, and decided hot damn, that’s for me? One of the top lawyers in New York City decides to go country?

Bullshit. Only a flake would do that and she didn’t seem the flake type.

Did she even know the Campbell farm’s history?

Sad place if ever there was one.

The Campbells owned the farm since dirt was young. Al Senior, Al and Blanche’s father, never came back from Korea. MIA or POW or KIA nobody knew, and Mrs. Campbell did what she could to hold things together. They dirt-farmed their small patch but that gave them enough for themselves and a little more. Kind-hearted neighbors, most of them farmers themselves, bought what little overflow she had. She’d drop off baskets of produce and they’d return the baskets, often with new or at least not too worn clothes for her and the kids.

They raised chickens and pigs. Mrs. Campbell planned on selling off the livestock and Al had none of it. “We have two good breeder sows and all our hens are good layers. I can learn how to slaughter and get things to market. We do this right and we can grow the farm, Ma.”

Ballsy for a twelve-year old kid, but nobody knew what a head for business Al had. By the time he graduated high school he was one hell of a butcher. He handled chickens and pigs with razor sharp knifes and never pricked a finger or thumb. Neighbors brought their livestock to him for slaughter. He smiled and only took some good cuts for payment.

Al was fourteen, Blanche twelve, and the widow Campbell gets a suitor. Within a year Mrs. Campbell is Mrs. Stockton and Gus Stockton, a woodsman out of the Canadian Maritimes she meets when a hen-party went to a movie in Albany, is chocolates and flowers and smiles and works the land, helps Al with the livestock and getting it to market, Blanche with her schoolwork, and doubles over laughing when Al and Blanche imitate his eh? accent.

Then one day Gus walks the property and discovers some good timber ready to harvest, complete with a warm little knoll in the center. He talks it over with everybody, leases two good Suffolks and begins harvesting.

Those Suffolk were skittish at first, didn’t like going to that part of the woods, but Gus was good and talked them through, made sure he kept them away until he had the trees ready for hauling.

Then something strange happened. Vince’s mother said “Glory train passed through him.”

Whatever it was, Gus Stockton changed. Oh, he’s still chocolates and flowers and helpful and handy when people are watching, but it turns into fists and belt and a water pipe when people aren’t.

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters