| Bed and Breakfast Murders |
The soft rose-color of the Pink Lady Slipper wild orchid was exactly the hue she had the Slipper Bed and Breakfast interior painted, though she kept
the log exterior as natural, the trim accepted and accentuated the deep dark weathered log exterior. The flower’s beauty, like that of the Pink Lady
Slipper Bed and Breakfast, was evident its ubiquitous undertow camouflaged. She couldn’t bear to change the name now. It would stand as a
reminder and a tribute to those that had died, and those that still lived. Ruby Tiffany’s suite, and her girls that haunt the halls, would remain a part of
the bed and breakfast forever. She had discovered early that that was part of the draw people loved. A chance, perhaps, to see a ghost first hand.
Ruby’s Room, roped off so no one could interfere with her life as she’d left it, proved the perfect center for the other rooms, Trudy thought as she
dusted and freshened up the room. She saw out the window that the snow that had begun to fall early last night continued this morning. She
wondered how the stagecoach run would have been affected in the old days. Surely they didn’t stop traveling because winter came, but now The
Slipper would need to switch. Things were different now. Sue-happy people forced businesses to protect themselves from real or imagined harm.
The stagecoach rides would no longer be possible until spring, as the long trek between bed and breakfasts would be too dangerous for the guests,
not to mention, for the horses, too. They wouldn’t dare go across those trails from Miner’s Bluff to Cozy Cove. Sleigh rides to Old Smokey Joe’s, with
ice skating on the lake and dinner under the stars, was booked solid until mid-March. She was glad Xavier Ward had worked out the details after
Alexandra had suggested it.
He had some good ideas, but his presence was beginning to have an unsettling affect on Trudy. She couldn’t put her finger on the cause. Perhaps
she was afraid of getting involved with a man. It had been so long since she had given any thought to anyone but Jerome. But how long can you
hang on to a memory, it doesn’t keep you warm at night. Still there was something about Xavier that didn’t set right with her. Her mind went back to
the skating parties and her chief idea person, Alexandra Eldride. Trudy thanked her lucky stars that when she was looking for a carpenter to
renovate The Slipper, Alexandra had come highly recommended. She couldn’t ask for a more creative partner than Alexandra. She seemed to know
instinctively where the next idea hid. Trudy wondered if she’d been a detective in a former life.
Then she chuckled to herself as she gathered the linen cart and cleaning supplies and put them in the dumbwaiter. She loved the feeling of Ruby
looking over her shoulder as she dusted and tidied the room. She loved the voices she could imagine she heard--or did she really hear Ruby's girls
talking and laughing sometimes, she wondered. The deep green crushed velvet of the draperies and the bed coverlet colored a picture for her that
connected Ruby and the color green. She wondered if she was Irish instead of French as her last name implied. No pictures were left behind, so her
imagination of what Ruby Tiffany really looked like would have to be good enough. She finished putting things in the dumbwaiter and patted the door
as she lowered it. That was a brilliant addition, sure saved her from lugging things up and down the stairs. Another thought crossed her mind; how
long before someone would insist she put in an elevator to accommodate the handicapped?
Back down stairs at her desk she checked the guest register. A party of six was coming in from Traverse City. Separate rooms--how many separate
rooms? She had the staff ready three, figuring three sets of two each. They planned on the sleigh ride and a three-day stay. The menu for the week
necessitated a trip to the grocery store. She sat at her desk and wrote the list. Her hip ached today, a sure sign the weather was about to change.
“Could mean anything,” she sighed. “Sure hope it holds off until the guests arrive. Can’t afford any cancellations this month,” she said.
“Hey, did you see the weather report,” Alexandra said brushing the snow from her jacket.
“No, but I felt it in my hip. What does the weather man say?”
“You know they are never right anymore but they’re predicting eighteen to twenty inches by the time this storm front moves through.”
“Oh, great. I’ve got shopping to do before our guests arrive this afternoon,” Trudy said.
“We better get to it then. We can use the Blazer in case it dumps on us before we get back.”
“Let me grab my purse. You want to give the staff the schedule? I think we should put them on either side of Ruby’s room. Have them make up those
beds and then they can leave for the day. We can handle the rest of it, can’t we?”
“Sounds like a plan, I’m on it.” Alexandra said as she disappeared toward the kitchen.
Trudy folded the grocery list and stuffed it in her pocket. While she was getting her coat from the closet she noticed their new ranch hand walking
toward the bunkhouse. His pace was more of a stormy march than a walk. His face, contorted into a furrowed knot, told her he was furious. Suppose
he and Jamison got into again. Those two were like an old married couple, or a pair of mismatched horses that were expected to be a team. They
constantly pulled sideways against the harness, making the job twice as tough as it needed to be. She had hired them together because they came
in as team, a matched set, as they said. They were the most unlikely pair, but she thought maybe it was the way they rubbed against each other that
got the work done in such a hurry. If they didn’t eventually kill each other they might mellow out, she thought.
“Ready to roll?” Alexandra said.
“Yeah. Looks like the twins are at it again. Just saw Max heading toward the bunkhouse in a fit of rage I gather from his stride and the look on his
face.”
“I swear one of these days I expect to see them, six guns strapped to their hips, facing off over by the corral,” Alexandra said.
They both laughed at the thought of an old-fashioned gun battle, not that it would be much of a stretch, from the explosive temperament of the two.
“Just had a thought, maybe we should think about staging a gun fight. Maybe even a stagecoach robbery as part of the package here,” Alexandra
said.
“With those two? I’m afraid one of them would use real bullets.”
Jamison tossed a suitcase into his old International truck.
“Going somewhere?” Trudy asked.
Jamison waved his hand toward the bunkhouse, “He’s lost his mind,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Alexandra asked.
“Weatherman says that snow storm will pass us by. No, he’s a better weatherman than the guy who gets paid to... well, it ain’t worth chewing on. I ain’
t going to round up the horses and bring them to the inner corral because we may, or may not, get an inch of snow. They’re better off heading into
the woods and foraging for a day than standing down here muddying up the corral--but no,” he said as he kicked the tires on the old truck.
“Hold everything. I think he may be right if I read the ache in my hip right,” Trudy said.
“No reason to leave,” Alexandra said.
“He is so, excuse me ma’am, but he’s so damn bullheaded, it’s his way or no way.”
“Come on, lets go talk to him. Maybe we can get you both to go out after the horses. That would seem to make quick work of it. We’ve got guests
coming in and we’ll need the horses for a sleigh ride tomorrow anyway,” she said.
~ * ~
Once Alexandra and Trudy were on their way, Trudy asked, “Do you think maybe we should let them go and find another crew? A couple of men who
can get along?”
“Hate to see that happen because all the guests have really liked them. They do get a lot accomplished when they bury the hatchet.”
“That’s true as long as they don’t wind up burying it in each other’s head. The Pink Lady Slipper doesn’t need that addition to her already sullied
reputation.”
“We haven’t had an incident since--well, not since last spring. Maybe she’s done causing the people of Orenda to raise their collective eyebrows.”
“I sure hope so,” Trudy said. “I’d hate to have the town ladies ready to burn her down again.”
“They don’t have a Faith Yachne to lead them on anymore.”
“Seems there is always one like her ready to step in though,” Trudy said.
~ * ~
The snow had accumulated by the time they had made all the purchases they needed and were headed back out to The Pink Lady Slipper. “From
the looks of this it’s a good thing they are bringing the horses in. It’s cheaper to feed them hay and oats than buy a new horse because one got lost
in a blizzard and froze to death,” Alexandra said.
They were unloading the Blazer when they heard Jamison and Max usher the four horses into the small corral by the barn. Trudy wondered a loud to
Alexandra, “Where’s the roan mare?”
Max trotted over to the two women. “Think we’ve got a problem with wolves. They dragged down the roan. Looks like it must have been early this
morning. Never finished her so we must have scared them off. The other horses scattered to the north end of the pasture.”
“I’ve never known a wolf to bring down a healthy horse. Do you suppose something else could have brought her down, or at least injured her before
they got there?” Alexandra asked.
“Do we need to hunt them down to protect our stock?” Trudy asked, her mind wrapping around the idea of a hungry wolf pack after the herd. “I have
to agree with Alexandra. I can’t imagine they’d kill livestock, especially a healthy horse. Doesn’t sound right. Unless of course they are rabid or
something else is going on.”
“Well, something sure tore her up and they were feeding when we got there. Can’t imagine, never really looked for tracks other than seeing the pack’
s tracks all around her. Something else could have brought her down I suppose.”
“You bury her?” Alexandra asked.
“No time, had to get these back before this storm swallowed us.”
Max went back to tending to the remaining horses while she and Alexandra finished hauling their purchases inside.
“I can’t imagine wolves bringing that roan down.”
“You’re right, especially with four other horses running with her. We’ll have to get the men to go back out and try to figure it out once the storm is
over,” Alexandra said. “Of course, by then all of the tracks will be obliterated. They should have looked into it instead of just assuming.”
The women busied themselves with preparing the dining room for six plus them, Stu Marks and Xavier Ward. Trudy wandered into the small room
they had set aside as an art gallery for her mother’s paintings and studied the paintings with a fresh eye. They seemed to change daily. They never
told her the same thing twice. Somehow they always seemed to present her with something she hadn’t seen before, a brushstroke that caught the
light differently would reveal a new meaning. Her mother had been a remarkable painter she decided. What talent did she have that could be
inherited from her mother? She must have gotten something by the means of genes if nothing else. The painting of her sister, ‘In the Shadows,’ their
mother had left her, hung in a far corner. It served as a dark and sinister reminder that things always aren’t the way they seem. She felt a twinge of
regret that her sister would never be a part of her life, except from behind bars for the murders she’d committed. She could understand John Wanita;
he had betrayed her and her mother. But how does one get angry or vengeful enough to murder their own mother. She shuddered at the evil that
must possess such a mind.
Alexandra had urged her to get rid of the painting. “Too many bad memories hiding in its shadows,” she’d said.
“Can’t, it’s one of mother’s paintings and it reminds me never to be gullible,” she’d said.
It did, she thought as she studied the ghost-like women’s faces behind the Indian in the picture. She was still having a hard time accepting that her
sister had been so messed up that she’d committed murder.
“What kind of evil seed grows in someone to make them do that?” she said to Alexandra as she came into the gallery.
“I don’t think anyone has an answer for that,” she said.
“You know what scares me,” Trudy said. “If she could be that evil, what is keeping me from turning into a female Jekyll and Hyde? I have the same
genes as she does.”
“I don’t think it’s the genes,” Alexandra said. “I think Linda was brainwashed by Faith Yachne’s warped mind. She was weak, that’s all.”
“It scares the crap out of me. It’s like I might be one brain synapse away from being a murderer.”
“You can’t beat yourself up for what your sister did. Even identical twins, even twins conjoined at the head, aren’t exact copies of each other.”
Alexandra said.
“I know you’re right in the daylight, but in the dark of the night I begin to wonder about sanity and the thin thread that tethers the sane to real life.”
“Come on. I thought we were going to get the Christmas decorations up today. Stu and Xavier are coming by later to put up the outside icicle lights
and the rest of the outdoor stuff as soon as they can get shed of the day job in town.”
“Guess I could use the diversion, the attitude adjustment, if you will.”
Jamison and Max came in to help them retrieve the decorations from the storage area in the basement. They were no longer at each other’s throats,
and actually seemed to be quite jovial. Trudy just shook her head. The two had been joined at the hip since birth, though not literally. No woman
ever came between them, but when they fought they could be as opposite and contrary as two bitter enemies. When she checked their references at
least that’s what the folks in town had told her when she’d said she was looking to hire a couple hands. How they’d managed forty plus years without
killing each other would never cease to amaze her. The two men set out to cut three pines to use for Christmas trees while she and Alexandra began
getting each of the guest rooms decorated. Vintage decorations for each of the bedrooms in a style suited to the décor of that particular room
thrilled Trudy as she saw the rooms come to life. It was as though Christmas peace and joy could be instilled in a house merely by placing
decorations in its midst.
She pulled some Christmas CDs from their wrappers and plugged the CD player into the speakers that threaded into every room and out to the
outdoors. She cranked the volume up and soaked in the Christmas bells that chimed throughout the house. A chill raised the hair on her arms. With
her sister and her mother gone, Christmas would not be the same. She was thankful for Alexandra and Xavier to help dull the pain of the first
Christmas without them. The music definitely put the spirit back in her decorating mood. She pulled the step ladder to the center of the dining room
and attached the gold garland above the chandelier. Alexandra brought another ladder and twisted and looped the garland to the four corners of
the large room.
It could still be Christmas, she decided.
 |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
Bed and Breakfasts Murders
ISBN 1-59088-488-4 (electronic)
ISBN 1-59088-705-0 (Print)
The bed and breakfast was a good draw. People loved the history and nostalgic beauty of The Pink Lady Slipper. Trudy Moncha was
finally able to accept the inheritance from her mother’s estate without cringing. The past year had settled all the old hurts and sorrow of her mother
and her sister’s indiscretions. The bizarre trauma of the bodies and skeletons that turned up every time she tried to begin anew with the remodeling
of the Pink Lady Slipper nearly sabotaged the whole effort. She was glad she hadn’t let it. A bed and breakfast seemed to be the perfect historical
stretch of stagecoach stop, that once was the role the Slipper played, to the new place to spend the night, but with atmosphere. With all the rooms
decorated and furnished with antiques, the charm of the Pink Lady Slipper grew.
ISBN 1-59088-488-4 (electronic)
ISBN 1-59088-705-0 (Print)
The bed and breakfast was a good draw. People loved the history and nostalgic beauty of The Pink Lady Slipper. Trudy Moncha was
finally able to accept the inheritance from her mother’s estate without cringing. The past year had settled all the old hurts and sorrow of her mother
and her sister’s indiscretions. The bizarre trauma of the bodies and skeletons that turned up every time she tried to begin anew with the remodeling
of the Pink Lady Slipper nearly sabotaged the whole effort. She was glad she hadn’t let it. A bed and breakfast seemed to be the perfect historical
stretch of stagecoach stop, that once was the role the Slipper played, to the new place to spend the night, but with atmosphere. With all the rooms
decorated and furnished with antiques, the charm of the Pink Lady Slipper grew.
| Ancient Secrets |
ISBN 978-1-59705-396-9 (print and electronic)
It looked like she had been sitting on the park bench we had bought for her birthday last summer. Perhaps the papers were on her lap. She must
have stood up and let them fall. She left them lay like wasted time, just there. No breeze to stir them, march them away, dance them off to some
happier place. Three steps, maybe four, was all she took. She lay there like those papers, just there. No breeze to stir her, or wind to pick her up
and dance her to heaven’s door. No. The sheets of paper, the years of her life lie on the ground and speak no words for us to hear on rustled
breeze. We wept, standing there connected by heart strings, pearls from her womb tarnished a bit by life, but never tarnished in her eyes. We were
like bleached out paper lying in the sun on the ground. We made no sound, nor did she or they, those papers of no importance.
Daringer J. Smith fell to his knees beside her, hoping against all hope that he had somehow fallen asleep and this was all a bad dream, a lie that
never could have happened. Why do we think that by not believing something it will automatically make it false? A heavy weight inside his chest
crushed his heart and soul. It couldn’t be. He felt a breath then, so shallow, but breath, none-the-less. “Quickly,” he said to his sisters. “Call an
ambulance, she is still alive.”
~ * ~
The ambulance arrived lights flashing, siren blaring, hurried movements that shoved him back away. “Precious Mother, live,” he prayed aloud.
Oxygen mask obscured her never faltering smile. Her hair floated in gray wisps, a halo to her near white, ashen face. Isana jumped aboard the van.
Always the first to do the action that must be done, oldest sister style. “I’ll call you later unless you drive over,” she said.
“I’ll be there,” Trudchen, the younger sister said.
“I’m on my way soon.” Daringer Smith heard his middle-child self murmur. Shock froze his leaden legs where they stood. Mothers don’t die, not
Story Lady Mothers, as though the thought would make it so. “Live Mother,” he said as they shut her in the orange and white van that smelled of
disinfectant. Had the last patient they transported died, he wondered at the smell.
“I’m driving over to the hospital; do you want to ride along?” Trudchen said somewhere outside his fog. He nodded then, but couldn’t move. She
took his arm and led him to her car.
~ * ~
The cold, bright corridors of the hospital where shoes squeaked on the too polished, disinfected floors and made you wince, shhhhh, the silence
hissed like a librarian in his mind.
“Coma,” the doctor said. The rest of his words were mumbled and obscured by grief Daringer felt he need not have just yet. “She lives.” He heard
those words both loud and clear and shook his head out of that dense and horrid fog of death and despair.
“Can we see her now?” Daringer asked. They turned to stare at him as if he hadn’t been there until now. As though the words had made him visible
where before he was an empty space.
“Of course, it would probably be good for you all. We will run tests but, I can’t give you any idea of what happened to her at this point.”
“She is stabilized though, you said?” Isana asked.
“Yes, for now. We have her on oxygen and an IV that will keep her comfortable.”
“I read somewhere that people in a coma can hear and it is the voices that eventually bring them back,” Trudchen said.
“It can’t hurt, but I don’t know if there is any fact to that tale or not,” the doctor said as he led the way to their mother’s room. “Leave a number
where we can reach one of you at the nurse’s station before you leave,” he said.
They nodded. Joined at the womb they thought each other’s thoughts, triplets as they were. They shared more than just space, they discovered
early on. Daringer saw himself the middle child in terms of birth order. Five minutes separated us, he thought. Isana always first and petite little
Trudchen always followed our lead.
~ * ~
Since he was staying at his mother’s while he visited, his sisters dropped him off on their way home. “A long day, shower, rest. We’ll call you in the
morning,” he seemed to remember they said.
His mother had asked him to come and see the beads in the unusual necklace she had acquired. She wanted him to try to tell her where they came
from. We never got to them. Where would she have them hidden? She said she would hide them because of their power. Daringer searched her
jewelry box. Unable to sleep, he searched her room and found the travel diaries lined up neatly according to the years on her shelf above her
computer, my modern story lady mother.
Daringer wondered, when he found them tucked in her lingerie drawer, what the significance was--what was it about the beads that worried her so?
The gold gilded box with a reclining angel on top held the beads. The beads seemed ordinary, if not a bit garish in their setting. Something about
them as he touched them though, struck him with unanticipated grief. When he lifted the black stone, it was as though some invisible electric
impulse traveled from his finger tips up his arm and to his heart. His heart ached with sorrow. Years worth of sadness flooded over him, washing him
in blackest despair, creating nearly unbearable heart wrenching sorrow. He dropped the black stone he held back into the red velvet lined coffin it
had come from as though it burned his fingers instead of his heart.
Dare he touch another? White--white is peace, purity--safe, he reasoned, unsure of anything at this point. Warily, he picked up the white stone
between thumb and forefinger ready to release it if he felt any ominous presence there. As he lifted it ever so cautiously, an anguished cry
accompanied by a rush of wind sent icy howls around the room. He quickly dropped the stone. If even white was not purity, was not peace, what
then of the other stones? Neither the blue, the green, the yellow stones--the rest--he dared not touch, nor the purple for surely something was in
those stones, some spell, some mystic presence powered them. His hands trembled as he replaced the lid on the box. Perhaps another time, a
braver soul could test each bead against the day. Not him, not this time, not now.
::What is in your heart emanates from each stone. Only the purest heart can hold these stones.:: The sound echoed from somewhere not audible,
and registered only in his mind it seemed. He didn’t hear a sound in his ears, of that he was very sure. With that the small box whisked out of his
hand and deposited itself back in the lingerie drawer under layers of her personal silk undergarments. Daringer stood long, looking at what had
happened and wondering if he had imagined it. Perhaps the grief he held, the fear for his mother’s life, clouded what he thought he saw, what he
thought he heard--did it really occur?
Where would she have ever come up with such trinkets? Her trips took her to worlds she knew intimately and we never knew at all. We were too
busy to be interested in what we called her eccentricities. Her travel journals on the book shelf beckoned him; at least he thought they did. What
magic force did she encounter to come away with these stones? He toyed with the idea of removing the box and putting it in his pocket to ponder
their significance later. Do I dare leave them behind and never know what became of them?
Guardedly, he slipped his hand back into the drawer, withdrew the box, and tucked it into his pocket. He felt warmth where it touched against him.
He noticed no sound, no further wind with garish cries to chill his soul or slights of hand depositing the box where it chose--merely warmth,
penetrating warmth radiating into his skin. He felt it safe to take the necklace with him then. He gathered the travel journals in his arms. Perhaps
she recorded the source of these stones; he left the room with them.
He dared to glance one time around the room. It’s emptiness without her presence was more than he could bear. He wanted to run away, to be
gone from here and not look back. If she was to be buried; there was little else he wanted of her left behind life. Let the rest of them deal with her
possessions, he had the memories and that was enough for now. The box moved slightly in his pocket. He patted it. “And you, of course,” he
murmured to the emptiness.
~ * ~
In the days that followed the house was flooded with well-wishers, condolence-spouters--as though there were already a wake. Never noticing her
before, they did now. Daringer could not sit through a torturous semi--or pre--wake. She isn’t dead yet, he wanted to shout, but held his tongue.
Instead, he walked until he couldn’t walk anymore and found himself at the outdoor market. He watched the colorful streams of marketers. He
walked hopelessly in the crowded streets. The serapes and parasols bumped and prodded him. The sights and sounds blurred past him. The
haggling drone of the venders soothed his grief more than all the well-wishers with their pasty gray faces, false, sad furrowed brows and crocodile
tears.
People squeezed, smelled, pinched, and prodded the colorful array of fresh produce. They held the bright fruit up to the sun as though they
offered it in prayer to Ra or the deity of fruit, before they dropped it into bags, boxes, and sacks or snuck them into pockets while they thought no
one watched. The market was alive and vibrant with everydayness. A wake was not awake, why call it that? It was dead and still, silent and sad,
painful and pointless. Even the spirits of the dead do not visit at the wake. There is too much sadness for them to bear. So why should we? Listen
to people’s lies. “She looks so peaceful lying there,” they say. I want to shout, “Did you ever see her sleep?”
Isana and Trudchen were already preparing her wake--when she lingers still this side of heaven’s gate.
“Prepare for the inevitable,” Isana said. Always so practical and organized with her hand out for whatever she could grab and pocket.
“Isn’t it enough,” he said. “This steady stream of condolences and well wishers hovering at the door like vultures waiting for scraps of her life to be
tossed to them to savor after her death? What if she lives?” He wanted to shout, to no one in particular, but to shut out the sound of Isana’s drone
about what we must do when.
“Out damn spot,” so like Macbeth, I want to purge that woman from my life, she who shared one third of our mother. She didn’t deserve her share,
she was like the blood-red stain that wouldn’t wipe clean.
“She looks good. Her hair is very nicely done,” they say.
He wants to shout, “Did you know the skin melts when a curling iron touches the scalp of a dead person?” He drew his attention back to the joyous
hubbub of the market square.
Green, yellow, and every shade in between, bananas hung in huge clumps hacked from the trees that very morning. “Too much,” one yelled over
the din of bartering hordes. Not to a starving child. They’d gladly pay any price, if they only had it, for the spoils that littered the ground and
beckoned the insects and rodents and robber birds. Children starve, not allowed to enter the market square. They wouldn’t let the children in to
clean up the dropped fruit. The starving hordes of brown little faces with eyes as big as moons and arms as gaunt as scarecrows standing at the
periphery of all that luscious fruit rotting in the sun... Weren’t they as good as the insects, rodents and birds? They lined the streets outside the
market begging like so many little brown beads strung on a string of starvation within inches of salvation. No one noticed, or so it seemed. Daringer
was sure God must have. Was He waiting for a tender heart to care, to step in and save these street urchins? Daringer cared and did. One large
bunch of bananas found its way to excited outstretched hands.
Why do we not see, feel or hear until it’s too late? Like the string of beads, or the sheaf of papers that was so like life--if life stops? Littering the
ground and hiding in drawers, rotting in the sun, all the sum total of a life lived while no one noticed. Daringer felt despondent, growing weary with
even the noisy bright marketplace.
~ * ~
There were things he could do while he waited for word that his mother had crossed one way to life or the other way to eternal life. He could do
some of the repair and maintenance that needed doing around her home. Before the old place could be sold, it would need to be restored, not for
a better market price but for them, the spirits. If the souls or spirits stay behind to wait, they need a good place to do that, he reasoned. Daringer
wanted to repair the railing on the seldom used back stairway.
He could incorporate the box with the necklace of strange stones; He could hide it below the spindles. Why he had the urge to bury them where
they couldn’t be found again he didn’t know. It was there though, the urge strong and insistent. These beads seemed to possess a power he wasn’t
sure he was man enough to tamper with.
When he began to remove the damaged stair railing to replace it, the stringers toppled like dominos clanking heavily to the bare wood floor. They
looked like so many dead soldiers lying exposed after the war. Bodies helter-skelter having fallen where they stood--shattered lives, beads in a box,
beads on a rosary, dots on the planet earth. What was their reason for being? Where did they go and why? Who traversed these steps? How many
hands have held this railing? Were some of them those dead soldiers, and what war were they--Civil, WWI or WWII? Or were they none of these?
Perhaps deserters, perhaps charlatans and rogues who hid beneath the cellar and let their wives be liars instead, while they fathered children who
would have been better off dead than become fodder for another war. A time when their bodies, boxed, returned fallen heroes from another time.
Where did these thoughts originate? Why are they my concern? His mind whirled with confusion. Daringer began to wonder about his sanity and if
the stones were powerful enough to cause him to become delusional. He shuddered and pulled himself back to what he was doing.
He couldn’t plant the necklace beneath the stringers on that stair knowing what he knew. That thought, too, was foreign. What was it he supposed
he knew? He did not know. Daringer kept them in his pocket, and the heat along his thigh grew. It seemed they were content to know that he would
keep them longer.
He mended the broken railing. Would that it were so easy to mend my grieving heart. She isn’t gone yet. The phrase cried in his mind and he
prayed again for life.
“When will you give me grandchildren, my son?” she’d asked.
He was too busy with his career to be tied down yet. He had said, “Soon, Mother, soon. There is plenty of time, Mom. Oh is there? Now he
wondered at his flippant attitude.
~ * ~
He decided to leave town, back to the academic life he’d chosen, because he couldn’t stay and wait and wait. “Keep me posted,” he’d said.
Trudchen and Isana said they would. He passed by the new massive shopping mall that would bring the sleepy little town out of its complacent
pleasantness and into the new century. He wanted to shout, “Don’t, Please don’t! You can never go back once you touch the future.”
Beams hung suspended high above the ground tethered to a crane with chains. Yellow and blue helmeted workers dangled feet from steel girder
roosts where they sat, jovial and animated, with coffee and lunches. Steel men they call them, they mean their occupation, but it fits the men--
nerves of steel and bodies of iron. These bronzed, sure-footed mountain goats on narrow girder pathways sit and eat while steel I-beams sit and
wait, while lunch and camaraderie are served--yellow, blue, white beads perched on steel girder threads.
~ * ~
Daringer approached the three lane bridge that spanned the river. It was as though the universe was suddenly exiting through a birth canal once
large enough, but barely so, for but one child--not a universe.
A string of garnet jewels with cubic zirconium accents lined the bridge single file in triple rows. Angry red jewels flashed impatiently on and off from
dim to bright as vehicle occupants depressed and released brake pedals.
Pouring rain splotched the windows creating mosaic, stained glass patterns on the windshield and side windows. Entombed in metal caskets, waiting
to snake through the bottleneck the tall bridge created. Short bursts from impatient horns snarled at immobile red eyes ahead.
Trapped. The radio announced traffic conditions on the bridge as stand still, jammed. Find an alternate route. The anger Daringer felt leapt to the
man that stepped out of his car and stood on the hood. Oh no! He has a gun. He’s firing. First at the traffic reporter’s helicopter. Now he sprayed
the cars around him. Screams, zinging bullets--screaming, crack, crack, crack, the Uzi spends its power. Out of shells, he pitches the weapon and
jumps from vehicle to vehicle shouting angry curses. Before anyone can think to stop him he hurdles to the pavement and races across the bridge
and down the road.
Daringer sat mesmerized not believing what his eyes were telling him. Now strings of flashing red and blue lights squeezing though no-drive lanes,
stretcher bearers-stringing life saving paramedics to the bead of lives that threaten to fade away. Blue uniforms race from car to car, the stranded
traffic is destined to be a vault for hours while the massacre is cleaned up and dispensed with like so many colored beads on an ordinary necklace.
Daringer rested his hand on his hip pocket with the box holding the necklace, the box trembled and the warmth turned hot. He got out of his car to
go see if he could help in any way. He couldn’t bear to be confined in that metal coffin with the box of beads, they frightened him and he had
forgotten about them until this.
~ * ~
Daringer was nervous, glad to be boarded on a plane. He wondered if it would hold together as it started its jolting train-like sway on the slow path
down one runway, around a corner with a bounce, groan, creak, cough and down another.
It made him feel like they should all stick their feet down through the floor boards and push. Like a top heavy blue-footed booby, it struggled to gain
speed enough. He could see the grass growing in clumps in the cracks in the runway. He could smell the pungent aroma of new mowed hay. “Shut
the window,” he wanted to shout. “Turn on the fan to help the propellers pull.” Something--anything to get safely off the ground. Away from the
dark, depression he felt here in this place that at once held her jovial story telling heart and his angst over her fate.
The plane launched itself from the runway--wings rattling--trembling against the torque--machine defying gravity. A mechanical bumble bee that
maybe, just maybe, didn’t have the right DNA to fool Mother Nature and fly after all. The beads trembled in heated agitation in his pocket. He
reached for them and held his breath as clouds strung like pearls on blue sky threads and the plane soared between them in its small single engine
way.
::It’s safe to miss her now,:: the beads seem to say in his mind. A tear that had waited so long faltered on his lower lid and then slipped down his
cheek. Only one, but it was enough, this close she would understand. “I hope it’s not good-bye,” he whispered above the clouds in the setting sun.
But, what of the beads, what mystery unsolved, what message do they hold? Where will I find that answer? The beads glowed warm again inside his
pocket to let him know they heard the questions. Or so he supposed they did.
It looked like she had been sitting on the park bench we had bought for her birthday last summer. Perhaps the papers were on her lap. She must
have stood up and let them fall. She left them lay like wasted time, just there. No breeze to stir them, march them away, dance them off to some
happier place. Three steps, maybe four, was all she took. She lay there like those papers, just there. No breeze to stir her, or wind to pick her up
and dance her to heaven’s door. No. The sheets of paper, the years of her life lie on the ground and speak no words for us to hear on rustled
breeze. We wept, standing there connected by heart strings, pearls from her womb tarnished a bit by life, but never tarnished in her eyes. We were
like bleached out paper lying in the sun on the ground. We made no sound, nor did she or they, those papers of no importance.
Daringer J. Smith fell to his knees beside her, hoping against all hope that he had somehow fallen asleep and this was all a bad dream, a lie that
never could have happened. Why do we think that by not believing something it will automatically make it false? A heavy weight inside his chest
crushed his heart and soul. It couldn’t be. He felt a breath then, so shallow, but breath, none-the-less. “Quickly,” he said to his sisters. “Call an
ambulance, she is still alive.”
~ * ~
The ambulance arrived lights flashing, siren blaring, hurried movements that shoved him back away. “Precious Mother, live,” he prayed aloud.
Oxygen mask obscured her never faltering smile. Her hair floated in gray wisps, a halo to her near white, ashen face. Isana jumped aboard the van.
Always the first to do the action that must be done, oldest sister style. “I’ll call you later unless you drive over,” she said.
“I’ll be there,” Trudchen, the younger sister said.
“I’m on my way soon.” Daringer Smith heard his middle-child self murmur. Shock froze his leaden legs where they stood. Mothers don’t die, not
Story Lady Mothers, as though the thought would make it so. “Live Mother,” he said as they shut her in the orange and white van that smelled of
disinfectant. Had the last patient they transported died, he wondered at the smell.
“I’m driving over to the hospital; do you want to ride along?” Trudchen said somewhere outside his fog. He nodded then, but couldn’t move. She
took his arm and led him to her car.
~ * ~
The cold, bright corridors of the hospital where shoes squeaked on the too polished, disinfected floors and made you wince, shhhhh, the silence
hissed like a librarian in his mind.
“Coma,” the doctor said. The rest of his words were mumbled and obscured by grief Daringer felt he need not have just yet. “She lives.” He heard
those words both loud and clear and shook his head out of that dense and horrid fog of death and despair.
“Can we see her now?” Daringer asked. They turned to stare at him as if he hadn’t been there until now. As though the words had made him visible
where before he was an empty space.
“Of course, it would probably be good for you all. We will run tests but, I can’t give you any idea of what happened to her at this point.”
“She is stabilized though, you said?” Isana asked.
“Yes, for now. We have her on oxygen and an IV that will keep her comfortable.”
“I read somewhere that people in a coma can hear and it is the voices that eventually bring them back,” Trudchen said.
“It can’t hurt, but I don’t know if there is any fact to that tale or not,” the doctor said as he led the way to their mother’s room. “Leave a number
where we can reach one of you at the nurse’s station before you leave,” he said.
They nodded. Joined at the womb they thought each other’s thoughts, triplets as they were. They shared more than just space, they discovered
early on. Daringer saw himself the middle child in terms of birth order. Five minutes separated us, he thought. Isana always first and petite little
Trudchen always followed our lead.
~ * ~
Since he was staying at his mother’s while he visited, his sisters dropped him off on their way home. “A long day, shower, rest. We’ll call you in the
morning,” he seemed to remember they said.
His mother had asked him to come and see the beads in the unusual necklace she had acquired. She wanted him to try to tell her where they came
from. We never got to them. Where would she have them hidden? She said she would hide them because of their power. Daringer searched her
jewelry box. Unable to sleep, he searched her room and found the travel diaries lined up neatly according to the years on her shelf above her
computer, my modern story lady mother.
Daringer wondered, when he found them tucked in her lingerie drawer, what the significance was--what was it about the beads that worried her so?
The gold gilded box with a reclining angel on top held the beads. The beads seemed ordinary, if not a bit garish in their setting. Something about
them as he touched them though, struck him with unanticipated grief. When he lifted the black stone, it was as though some invisible electric
impulse traveled from his finger tips up his arm and to his heart. His heart ached with sorrow. Years worth of sadness flooded over him, washing him
in blackest despair, creating nearly unbearable heart wrenching sorrow. He dropped the black stone he held back into the red velvet lined coffin it
had come from as though it burned his fingers instead of his heart.
Dare he touch another? White--white is peace, purity--safe, he reasoned, unsure of anything at this point. Warily, he picked up the white stone
between thumb and forefinger ready to release it if he felt any ominous presence there. As he lifted it ever so cautiously, an anguished cry
accompanied by a rush of wind sent icy howls around the room. He quickly dropped the stone. If even white was not purity, was not peace, what
then of the other stones? Neither the blue, the green, the yellow stones--the rest--he dared not touch, nor the purple for surely something was in
those stones, some spell, some mystic presence powered them. His hands trembled as he replaced the lid on the box. Perhaps another time, a
braver soul could test each bead against the day. Not him, not this time, not now.
::What is in your heart emanates from each stone. Only the purest heart can hold these stones.:: The sound echoed from somewhere not audible,
and registered only in his mind it seemed. He didn’t hear a sound in his ears, of that he was very sure. With that the small box whisked out of his
hand and deposited itself back in the lingerie drawer under layers of her personal silk undergarments. Daringer stood long, looking at what had
happened and wondering if he had imagined it. Perhaps the grief he held, the fear for his mother’s life, clouded what he thought he saw, what he
thought he heard--did it really occur?
Where would she have ever come up with such trinkets? Her trips took her to worlds she knew intimately and we never knew at all. We were too
busy to be interested in what we called her eccentricities. Her travel journals on the book shelf beckoned him; at least he thought they did. What
magic force did she encounter to come away with these stones? He toyed with the idea of removing the box and putting it in his pocket to ponder
their significance later. Do I dare leave them behind and never know what became of them?
Guardedly, he slipped his hand back into the drawer, withdrew the box, and tucked it into his pocket. He felt warmth where it touched against him.
He noticed no sound, no further wind with garish cries to chill his soul or slights of hand depositing the box where it chose--merely warmth,
penetrating warmth radiating into his skin. He felt it safe to take the necklace with him then. He gathered the travel journals in his arms. Perhaps
she recorded the source of these stones; he left the room with them.
He dared to glance one time around the room. It’s emptiness without her presence was more than he could bear. He wanted to run away, to be
gone from here and not look back. If she was to be buried; there was little else he wanted of her left behind life. Let the rest of them deal with her
possessions, he had the memories and that was enough for now. The box moved slightly in his pocket. He patted it. “And you, of course,” he
murmured to the emptiness.
~ * ~
In the days that followed the house was flooded with well-wishers, condolence-spouters--as though there were already a wake. Never noticing her
before, they did now. Daringer could not sit through a torturous semi--or pre--wake. She isn’t dead yet, he wanted to shout, but held his tongue.
Instead, he walked until he couldn’t walk anymore and found himself at the outdoor market. He watched the colorful streams of marketers. He
walked hopelessly in the crowded streets. The serapes and parasols bumped and prodded him. The sights and sounds blurred past him. The
haggling drone of the venders soothed his grief more than all the well-wishers with their pasty gray faces, false, sad furrowed brows and crocodile
tears.
People squeezed, smelled, pinched, and prodded the colorful array of fresh produce. They held the bright fruit up to the sun as though they
offered it in prayer to Ra or the deity of fruit, before they dropped it into bags, boxes, and sacks or snuck them into pockets while they thought no
one watched. The market was alive and vibrant with everydayness. A wake was not awake, why call it that? It was dead and still, silent and sad,
painful and pointless. Even the spirits of the dead do not visit at the wake. There is too much sadness for them to bear. So why should we? Listen
to people’s lies. “She looks so peaceful lying there,” they say. I want to shout, “Did you ever see her sleep?”
Isana and Trudchen were already preparing her wake--when she lingers still this side of heaven’s gate.
“Prepare for the inevitable,” Isana said. Always so practical and organized with her hand out for whatever she could grab and pocket.
“Isn’t it enough,” he said. “This steady stream of condolences and well wishers hovering at the door like vultures waiting for scraps of her life to be
tossed to them to savor after her death? What if she lives?” He wanted to shout, to no one in particular, but to shut out the sound of Isana’s drone
about what we must do when.
“Out damn spot,” so like Macbeth, I want to purge that woman from my life, she who shared one third of our mother. She didn’t deserve her share,
she was like the blood-red stain that wouldn’t wipe clean.
“She looks good. Her hair is very nicely done,” they say.
He wants to shout, “Did you know the skin melts when a curling iron touches the scalp of a dead person?” He drew his attention back to the joyous
hubbub of the market square.
Green, yellow, and every shade in between, bananas hung in huge clumps hacked from the trees that very morning. “Too much,” one yelled over
the din of bartering hordes. Not to a starving child. They’d gladly pay any price, if they only had it, for the spoils that littered the ground and
beckoned the insects and rodents and robber birds. Children starve, not allowed to enter the market square. They wouldn’t let the children in to
clean up the dropped fruit. The starving hordes of brown little faces with eyes as big as moons and arms as gaunt as scarecrows standing at the
periphery of all that luscious fruit rotting in the sun... Weren’t they as good as the insects, rodents and birds? They lined the streets outside the
market begging like so many little brown beads strung on a string of starvation within inches of salvation. No one noticed, or so it seemed. Daringer
was sure God must have. Was He waiting for a tender heart to care, to step in and save these street urchins? Daringer cared and did. One large
bunch of bananas found its way to excited outstretched hands.
Why do we not see, feel or hear until it’s too late? Like the string of beads, or the sheaf of papers that was so like life--if life stops? Littering the
ground and hiding in drawers, rotting in the sun, all the sum total of a life lived while no one noticed. Daringer felt despondent, growing weary with
even the noisy bright marketplace.
~ * ~
There were things he could do while he waited for word that his mother had crossed one way to life or the other way to eternal life. He could do
some of the repair and maintenance that needed doing around her home. Before the old place could be sold, it would need to be restored, not for
a better market price but for them, the spirits. If the souls or spirits stay behind to wait, they need a good place to do that, he reasoned. Daringer
wanted to repair the railing on the seldom used back stairway.
He could incorporate the box with the necklace of strange stones; He could hide it below the spindles. Why he had the urge to bury them where
they couldn’t be found again he didn’t know. It was there though, the urge strong and insistent. These beads seemed to possess a power he wasn’t
sure he was man enough to tamper with.
When he began to remove the damaged stair railing to replace it, the stringers toppled like dominos clanking heavily to the bare wood floor. They
looked like so many dead soldiers lying exposed after the war. Bodies helter-skelter having fallen where they stood--shattered lives, beads in a box,
beads on a rosary, dots on the planet earth. What was their reason for being? Where did they go and why? Who traversed these steps? How many
hands have held this railing? Were some of them those dead soldiers, and what war were they--Civil, WWI or WWII? Or were they none of these?
Perhaps deserters, perhaps charlatans and rogues who hid beneath the cellar and let their wives be liars instead, while they fathered children who
would have been better off dead than become fodder for another war. A time when their bodies, boxed, returned fallen heroes from another time.
Where did these thoughts originate? Why are they my concern? His mind whirled with confusion. Daringer began to wonder about his sanity and if
the stones were powerful enough to cause him to become delusional. He shuddered and pulled himself back to what he was doing.
He couldn’t plant the necklace beneath the stringers on that stair knowing what he knew. That thought, too, was foreign. What was it he supposed
he knew? He did not know. Daringer kept them in his pocket, and the heat along his thigh grew. It seemed they were content to know that he would
keep them longer.
He mended the broken railing. Would that it were so easy to mend my grieving heart. She isn’t gone yet. The phrase cried in his mind and he
prayed again for life.
“When will you give me grandchildren, my son?” she’d asked.
He was too busy with his career to be tied down yet. He had said, “Soon, Mother, soon. There is plenty of time, Mom. Oh is there? Now he
wondered at his flippant attitude.
~ * ~
He decided to leave town, back to the academic life he’d chosen, because he couldn’t stay and wait and wait. “Keep me posted,” he’d said.
Trudchen and Isana said they would. He passed by the new massive shopping mall that would bring the sleepy little town out of its complacent
pleasantness and into the new century. He wanted to shout, “Don’t, Please don’t! You can never go back once you touch the future.”
Beams hung suspended high above the ground tethered to a crane with chains. Yellow and blue helmeted workers dangled feet from steel girder
roosts where they sat, jovial and animated, with coffee and lunches. Steel men they call them, they mean their occupation, but it fits the men--
nerves of steel and bodies of iron. These bronzed, sure-footed mountain goats on narrow girder pathways sit and eat while steel I-beams sit and
wait, while lunch and camaraderie are served--yellow, blue, white beads perched on steel girder threads.
~ * ~
Daringer approached the three lane bridge that spanned the river. It was as though the universe was suddenly exiting through a birth canal once
large enough, but barely so, for but one child--not a universe.
A string of garnet jewels with cubic zirconium accents lined the bridge single file in triple rows. Angry red jewels flashed impatiently on and off from
dim to bright as vehicle occupants depressed and released brake pedals.
Pouring rain splotched the windows creating mosaic, stained glass patterns on the windshield and side windows. Entombed in metal caskets, waiting
to snake through the bottleneck the tall bridge created. Short bursts from impatient horns snarled at immobile red eyes ahead.
Trapped. The radio announced traffic conditions on the bridge as stand still, jammed. Find an alternate route. The anger Daringer felt leapt to the
man that stepped out of his car and stood on the hood. Oh no! He has a gun. He’s firing. First at the traffic reporter’s helicopter. Now he sprayed
the cars around him. Screams, zinging bullets--screaming, crack, crack, crack, the Uzi spends its power. Out of shells, he pitches the weapon and
jumps from vehicle to vehicle shouting angry curses. Before anyone can think to stop him he hurdles to the pavement and races across the bridge
and down the road.
Daringer sat mesmerized not believing what his eyes were telling him. Now strings of flashing red and blue lights squeezing though no-drive lanes,
stretcher bearers-stringing life saving paramedics to the bead of lives that threaten to fade away. Blue uniforms race from car to car, the stranded
traffic is destined to be a vault for hours while the massacre is cleaned up and dispensed with like so many colored beads on an ordinary necklace.
Daringer rested his hand on his hip pocket with the box holding the necklace, the box trembled and the warmth turned hot. He got out of his car to
go see if he could help in any way. He couldn’t bear to be confined in that metal coffin with the box of beads, they frightened him and he had
forgotten about them until this.
~ * ~
Daringer was nervous, glad to be boarded on a plane. He wondered if it would hold together as it started its jolting train-like sway on the slow path
down one runway, around a corner with a bounce, groan, creak, cough and down another.
It made him feel like they should all stick their feet down through the floor boards and push. Like a top heavy blue-footed booby, it struggled to gain
speed enough. He could see the grass growing in clumps in the cracks in the runway. He could smell the pungent aroma of new mowed hay. “Shut
the window,” he wanted to shout. “Turn on the fan to help the propellers pull.” Something--anything to get safely off the ground. Away from the
dark, depression he felt here in this place that at once held her jovial story telling heart and his angst over her fate.
The plane launched itself from the runway--wings rattling--trembling against the torque--machine defying gravity. A mechanical bumble bee that
maybe, just maybe, didn’t have the right DNA to fool Mother Nature and fly after all. The beads trembled in heated agitation in his pocket. He
reached for them and held his breath as clouds strung like pearls on blue sky threads and the plane soared between them in its small single engine
way.
::It’s safe to miss her now,:: the beads seem to say in his mind. A tear that had waited so long faltered on his lower lid and then slipped down his
cheek. Only one, but it was enough, this close she would understand. “I hope it’s not good-bye,” he whispered above the clouds in the setting sun.
But, what of the beads, what mystery unsolved, what message do they hold? Where will I find that answer? The beads glowed warm again inside his
pocket to let him know they heard the questions. Or so he supposed they did.