by john | May 22, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction
This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE.
15
Tommy Braxton waved at us from the bar when we walked into The Garden Cafe. I was a bit underdressed for the clientele Tommy wanted to attract, but about right for the clientele he actually had, so I didn’t mind sitting down in the closest thing that part of Union County had to a fancy steakhouse. Sheriff Dunleavy even pulled my chair out for me like a real gentleman and everything.
Leslie, Tommy’s youngest daughter, came over as soon as we were settled, and handed us menus. There were about three other tables occupied, two of them with elderly couples having dinner so they could drive home before it got full-on dark, and one a family with a young child sitting in a booster seat and trying in vain to have a decent dinner out with a toddler. I figured it was their first child and they just didn’t know any better. In a couple years, they’d be fine, but right now everything the poor little boy did was either a crisis or the greatest thing in the world.
I have always loved children, it’s why I spent so many years teaching Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. When I was a child myself, I wanted to grow up, get married, and have a house just bursting at the seams with young’s.
But as I grew older, I realized that my particular gifts make it hard to keep a relationship, thanks to odd hours that ghosts decide to visit me, and the general creepiness that most people see in somebody who actually converses with dead people, instead of just talking at them like most folks do. Add to that the unfortunate tendency of lingering ghosts to be nosy as hell, and I was not what most people would consider a “catch.” So children weren’t really in the cards for me. But I have been blessed with hundreds of boys and girls who love their “Miss Lila Grace,” and most of the time that’s been enough for me.
“Never wanted any, or never had the chance?” Willis asked.
My head whipped back around to look at him, and he just gave me a wistful smile. “Same here,” he said. “I always wanted them, but my ex-wife didn’t, and now it just seems a little late in the game.”
“I reckon that is one of the hazards of having dinner with a detective, ain’t it?” I asked. “He’s liable to know more than you want to let on.”
“Could be, except I’m not a detective anymore. I reckon I’m as close as what we’ve got for this mess, but if I’d wanted to keep dealing with murderers, I would have stayed in Milwaukee.”
“Is that where you’re from, Sheriff?”
“Willis,” he corrected.
“I’m sorry. Is that where you’re from, Willis?”
He gave me one of those little half-smiles again, the kind he had started doing when he knew I was being a smart-aleck but didn’t want to call me out on it. I kinda liked it. “That’s not where I’m from, originally, but I lived and worked there for thirty years, so I reckon it’s kinda where I’m from now.”
“Where are you from, originally?” I asked.
“Carrboro,” he said. “Just outside Chapel Hill.”
“I know it,” I said. “I knew a girl from there when I was in school. We went to Winthrop together.”
“I didn’t know you went to college,” he said.
“I did. I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English literature and proceeded to do nothing with it for most of my adult life,” I said.
“Never wrote the Great American Novel,” he asked, that teasing smile back for a second.
“No, I never wanted to be a writer. I thought I would teach, but that didn’t work out for me.” That brought back some unpleasant memories, and I guess they showed on my face, because Dunleavy wasted no time in poking that sore spot.
“What happened?” He asked. I looked up at him, and he shrugged. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. I just thought it might be better dinner conversation than dead girls in cars in lakes.”
Of course the second he says the words “dead girls,” Tommy’s girl walks up with her little notepad out to take our food orders. The poor child looked so scandalized I couldn’t decided whether to laugh or cry, so I decided to fake a coughing fit and run to the bathroom, leaving Willis on his own to dig his way out of that one. It served him right, sticking his nose into everybody’s business. I washed my hands, splashed a little cold water on my face, and freshened up my lipstick before I walked back to the table, mostly composed.
“I hope you like escargot,” Willis said as I sat back down. “Because I ordered you an anchovy appetizer with an escargot main course. It’s the least I could do to thank you for leaving me in that mess.”
“I love snails,” I said, hoping desperately that he was teasing, but completely unwilling to ask him if he was.
“Just like I love explaining to high school girls that I am not a serial killer while their father has his hand on a sawed-off shotgun under the bar,” he said.
“I believe you were telling me about growing up in Carrboro,” I said, changing the subject.
“I wasn’t, but I will. I grew up there, and went to Chapel Hill. I studied Political Science, and was looking at law school when I decided to become a cop instead.”
“What brought on that change?” I asked.
“A kid I grew up with got shot in the head trying to buy coke from the wrong guy in the wrong part of town. The Durham police didn’t have a lot of time to look into the case of another dead black kid that summer, so I decided I’d become a cop to try and keep that from happening to anybody else.”
“That’s admirable,” I said. He looked up at me to see if I was picking at him again, but his shoulders relaxed when he saw I was sincere. I was, too. A life of putting yourself in harm’s way for the benefit of others is nothing to sneer at.
“Well, when I applied, I couldn’t get a job at any of the departments near home, and my dad had a sister who lived in Milwaukee. So I went to live with Aunt Gina for a while, got a job as a beat cop in the city, and worked my way up. Put in my thirty, got my city pension, and decided to come back home where I wouldn’t ever have to shovel snow again.”
“And where there’s a lot less chance of somebody shooting at you,” I added.
“That was a part of the thinking, yes. I’m not as fast as I used to be, so I wanted to go somewhere that the pace was a little slower, and a little safer. A man gets past fifty, he starts to think he probably wants to see sixty or seventy. A big city police department is no easy place to get old.”
“A woman does the same thing, Sheriff,” I said.
“You’ve heard,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Lila Grace, you play the old woman card pretty well, but if you’re a day over forty-five, I’ll eat my hat.”
I blushed a little. It had been a long time since a man commented positively on the way I looked, especially given my typical style of dress, and I had to admit, it felt good. I tried not to show it, though, as I grinned across the table at Willis. “Do you want some Texas Pete, or A-1 sauce, Sheriff? Because I’m fifty-years old, and proud of every one of them.”
“Well, I reckon there is something to be said for clean living after all, because you sure don’t look it,” he said.
“Thank you, Willis. You haven’t done too badly yourself, for an old coot.” We both grinned a little bit. “So how did you end up all the way down here? Were you reading obituaries nationwide looking for dead Sheriffs and police chiefs?”
He looked a little abashed, but chuckled as he said, “Well, almost. I set up a Google search for municipal job listings for a sheriff or chief of police position in a town of less than fifty thousand. This one popped up, and the county council was pretty happy to have somebody with my experience apply. Nothing against Sheriff Johnny, but the impression I got was that he wasn’t the most up-to-date in his techniques.”
I almost spit sweet tea across the table at him laughing. “You could say that. Johnny kept a baseball bat autographed by Buford T. Pusser hanging on the wall of his office. That was his hero, and his favorite movie was Chiefs. A fine piece of literature, I will agree, but not exactly what I’d call the forefront of police methodology.”
“What happened to him?” Willis asked. “I get that it wasn’t anything in the line of duty, but nobody seems willing to discuss it. Was he out with the wrong woman, or something?”
I laughed again. If he kept this up, the poor man was going to think I thought he was a moron. “No, nothing like that. I reckon it would be a little embarrassing, because he was caught with his pants down, after a fashion. Johnny was a fisherman, and he liked his liquor, like most fishermen do. Hell, most people around here like a drink or two. Well, Johnny was out in his little bass boat just tooling along Broad River, and he had him a jar, like he would most Sunday mornings. Johnny wasn’t much of a church-goer, you know. He said he felt like if God needed him, he’d know where to find him. Well, I reckon God needed him, because that Sunday morning, he found him, and he took him, right there in his boat.”
“What’s embarrassing about that? The fact that he was drinking? I can’t imagine anybody would care about that,” he said.
“Well,” I hesitated before going on, then I figured he was going to hear it eventually, might as well be over a good meal. “It wasn’t so much the drinking, or the fishing, as it was the fact of exactly how he went, that might be considered less than dignified.”
Willis made on of those “go on” motions with his hand, and took a sip of tea with his other. I waited for him to swallow before I went on, not relishing the idea of getting a faceful of the sweet beverage.
“He fell out of the boat taking a leak, hit his head on a rock, and drowned.” I said it all in a rush, so as to get it out all at once, like ripping off a bandage.
Willis did what just about everybody that hears the story of poor Sheriff Johnny’s demise does. He stared at me for a second, then his shoulders shook, kinda like a convulsion, then he couldn’t hold it back anymore and the laughter just blew right out of him like a cannonball. He laughed for about a solid minute before he wiped his eyes with his napkin and got himself under control.
“That has got to be the craziest death story for a cop I have ever heard, and like I said, I been at this for better than thirty years. I’ve heard more than one story about somebody getting caught with his pants down, but there’s usually a jealous husband, or wife, involved in those. This has got to be the first time I’ve ever heard of death by pissing. Damn, no wonder the poor man can’t move on. He’s got a lot to atone for before he feels like his legacy is secure again.”
I gave a little chuckle of my own. “Oh, that ain’t why Johnny’s sticking around.”
“So why is he still here? Waiting on somebody to catch the catfish that ate his nuts?”
“Don’t be crude,” I said. He held up both hands in apology, and I gave him a little grin to let him know that if it was crude, it was at least a little funny, too. “No, he’s just here until he decides if you’re a good enough replacement. If not, he’ll be here ’til somebody better comes along.”
Willis leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Huh,” he said, a thoughtful look crossing his face. “He really loved this town, didn’t he?”
“The Thomases have been in Union County since they came over from England. His people have been here for hundreds of years. There’s a whole row of the cemetery with nothing but his kin. So yeah, he loved this place and its people. Still does, as a matter of fact.”
He leaned forward, fixing me with those blue, blue eyes. “You do too, don’t you?”
I thought for a second before I answered. “I do. It don’t matter if not all of them love me. It don’t matter if some of them think the things I can do make me a bad person, or mean I’m in league with some dark power. For every one of them, there’s somebody like Gene over at Sharky’s. Somebody I can help when nobody else can.”
“Somebody like Jenny Miller,” Willis said, his voice soft.
“Somebody just like Jenny Miller,” I agreed.
“You know we’ll find him, right Lila Grace?”
“The killer?” I asked. “Yeah, I know. We’ll find him, and we’ll make sure he pays for what he did to those poor girls.”
“Yes we will. But right now, I think we have something more important to focus our attention on.” He sat up a little straighter and motioned Tommy’s little girl over to the table. He smiled at the child when she arrived, and gave me a wink.
“And just what could that be, Sheriff?” I was starting to enjoy this side of Sheriff Willis Dunleavy. He was a sharp man, one that could be deep in conversation one second, and light-hearted and teasing the next. The man had layers. I liked that.
“Dessert, Lila Grace. We need to decide if we want to try the apple cobbler or the pecan pie.”
“Well, I do have you at an unfair advantage here, Sheriff,” I replied, smiling at the waitress. “Because I happen to know that this girl’s Granny Hope made a fresh peach cobbler just this afternoon, because I saw her this morning on the way to Farmer Black’s peach shed, and there ain’t nothing better this side of the county that Theresa Hope’s peach cobbler. So why don’t you get us a couple plates of that, darling, and you won’t even have to bother telling us about it?”
The girl grinned and turned around with a little flounce. “Yes ma’am, and I’ll be sure to tell Granny what you said about her cobbler. She’ll really appreciate it.”
I leaned forward when the girl was out of earshot. “That child’s grandmother thinks I had sexual congress with the devil himself to learn how to talk to dead people. Poor girl is going to be praying until daylight if she mentions my name in her presence. The old biddy can make a cobbler like nobody’s business, though.”
by john | May 19, 2017 | Book Spotlight, Evolution, Writing
I know, I missed a week or two. Sorry. I had conventions, then I had to get over conventions, then life…but anyway, there are a bunch of great Evolution posts coming in the next few weeks, featuring books by amazing writers, including this one, by Lauren Harris. I’ve read Unleash, and this is a helluva kickoff to a new Urban Fantasy series. You should definitely check it out!
If you know me, you know that nine times out of ten, I will gravitate toward characters with swords rather than guns, so UNLEASH was a fat raccoon in the kitchen cupboard–wholly unexpected.
It came at me while I was on my third version of my first novel. Frustrated by an inability to get it past the Revise & Resubmit stage with agents, I shelled out for a novel revision class. While I followed a writing prompt, the first seeds of UNLEASH took root.
I probably wouldn’t have written the book if not for the confluence of several events on October 31st, 2010.
I had come back from Japan mere weeks before and was depressed, isolated, and stuck in rural NC.
- I needed distance from my first book
- I was eager to implement the outlining tools I’d gathered while revising my first book.
- I wanted to prove to myself I could finish a second book.
- NaNoWriMo LITERALLY started the next day.
The moment I realized I needed to write another book, the scene from that exercise sprang to mind. I scrounged up some note cards and hammered out a rough outline of a book I was then calling HELLHOUND.
Okay, so, my outline was almost worthless. I had 24 hours to plot, worldbuild, and develop characters. You know this first draft was a dump. I mean, I ditched a second POV within a few chapters, requiring some structural gymnastics I was not yet skilled enough to accomplish.
Lots of stuff didn’t survive that first draft. There were demons, Celtic ancestor flashbacks, and the bad-guy was immortal. Helena was a fake college student and there was some weird, second-dimension demon gate stuff that I don’t really understand now. All these things were better left on the book-journey’s roadside, though I will forever regret losing the scene where Helena–a shapeshifter–gets arrested while trying to sneak back into her window. Naked.
…which is how I learned that women can’t get charged with indecent exposure in the state of North Carolina. My Sheriff’s Deputy brother sometimes worries about the questions I ask him.
I started writing this book in November of 2010 and finished it that February. That original novel went through an arduous attempt to change it from third to first person before I realized it was the novel equivalent of the money-sink renovation. It was cheaper to just bulldoze the lot and build from all new materials.
After multiple drafts of my first book, I was loathe to get dragged back into the rewrite spiral. So I shoved the manuscript in a drawer, where the ideas fermented and matured while I improved my craft and published novellas and short stories. Finally, I outlined and drafted a book that–though it kept the same main characters and basic plot trajectory–bore absolutely no resemblance to the story I had in 2011.
That book is UNLEASH. Sign up for my mailing list get an exclusive excerpt and a reminder when the book hits the shelves.
Already think you want it? (You do.) It’s available right now, so go grab it!
(Link: www.laurenbharris.com/unleash )
by john | May 16, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
Last time around, we talked about the two types of email list subscribers – incentivized subscribers and organic subscribers. Organic subscribers are the ones that come to you naturally, they are interested in you or your work, and they seek you out and sign up of their own free will. These are the unicorns of email list subscribers – they’re lovely, they’re beautiful, and may very well be mythical.
Nah, not really. But while they are the best type of subscriber, they are also the toughest to acquire, and the ones that require the most effort to cultivate. They are the folks that sign up from convention appearances, from links in the back of your books (you do have a link to your newsletter signup page in the back of your ebooks, don’t you?), or just from finding you on Facebook or the interwebs.
The other flavor of subscriber is much more prevalent, and they are the ones who subscribe because you give them something for signing up. I call these incentivized subscribers, and while it may seem at first blush that I value them less than organic subscribers, that’s not true at all. They just require different care and feeding.
Organic subscribers are easy to keep, but much harder to get in the first place. Incentivized subscribers are easier to get in the door, but much harder to keep once you have them. Both type of subscriber can turn into true fans over time, you just need to know what kind of cultivation you’ll have to do for each one.
There are good and bad ways to incentivize people signing up for your newsletter, and multiple methods of each. My favorite method of getting people to sign up for a newsletter is to give them a free ebook. I offer a free Quincy Harker short story, High Fashion Hell, to new subscribers. If you aren’t already on my email list, you can click here to join and get your free ebook. This story is available for sale, and it’s also available in an anthology, but there have been hundreds of copies of it claimed by people signing up for my email list since I started giving it away. So there is still some incentive to sign up, even with a story that is available elsewhere.
The way this works is – people see the link, click the link, and they are taken to a signup form on Mailchimp. Once they fill out the signup form, and confirm their email address, they receive another email that directs them to a page on BookFunnel. Book funnel hosts the ebook file and sends it to people in whatever format they request, for Kindle, Nook, iPad, whatever. You don’t have to put anything else in place. Mailchimp costs a monthly fee based on the number of email addresses on your list, and Bookfunnel charges based on the number of downloads per month.
I pay $25/ month for MailChimp and $10/month for BookFunnel. I also pay $20/month for Instafreebie, another service I use to send out ARCs and rewards. I’ll talk more about IF in a later post. With Hootsuite, another service I’ll talk about later, I spend about $60/month in automation and services to help with my marketing. As my lists and reach grows, so will that number. Nothing in life is free, and if it is, it’s probably worth what you pay for it. Hell, I even have a blurb at the end of this post asking for money, so this advice isn’t even really free. (BTW, if you think this advice is valuable and want me to continue making posts like this, feel free to join my Patreon.)
So how do you boost your numbers quickly? Well, there are a couple of ways. First, you can do newsletter swaps with writers that have more subscribers than you. Or even writers with the same number of subscribers as you, because they’re almost certainly different subscribers. Here’s how that works – A few months ago, Eric Asher set up a six-author mailing list swap. Each author sent out a newsletter to their list with everybody else’s book cover in it, and built a link in the cover to that author’s signup page. So all the people on Eric’s list who clicked on the High Fashion Hell cover got the chance to sign up for my email list. All the people who clicked on Eric’s cover in my newsletter got the chance to sign up for his list (and get some awesome free books. Go to his website. Sign up for the list. Tell him I said Hi).
I gained several hundred new subscribers, because they wanted free ebooks. A lot of them stuck around, because they were already pre-sorted as people who wanted to read the kind of stuff I write, because Eric and I write in similar genres. Those are incentivized subscribers, but they’re vetted leads, and much more likely to become “sticky” than a blind signup in my next example.
That’s a good way to incentivize signups – you aren’t spending much cash, and the thing you’re giving away is something that people who want to buy your books will want, but the general populace will have little interest in. Someone who doesn’t read will have no interest in signing up for my email list to get a free ebook. But they might want a free iPad!
Yeah, big-ticket giveaways aren’t worth a shit. They just aren’t. There is some value to giving away something like a Kindle Paperwhite, but a Kindle Fire or an iPad has just as much value to a non-reader as it does to a reader, and even with a PaperWhite, there’s no guarantee that the winner will read in your genre. If you write paranormal romance, you aren’t going to get a whole lot of value if a Chris Kennedy fan wins a Kindle from you. But if you like Military Sci-Fi, check Chris out. He’s good people.
The stickiness of a subscriber who joins up for a big-ticket giveaway like that is much, much lower than someone who signs up to get a free ebook. When I’ve done big massive email list building promotions, I see a lot of quick signups, then a lot of quick unsubscribes as soon as they get the first newsletter. And that costs money, not just in the cost of the item given away, but also in the escalation of your mailing list numbers, which costs more for MailChimp. So be careful about participating in those kind of campaigns. I just don’t think they’re worth it.
So what should you do if you’re just starting out trying to build an email list?
- Set up a MailChimp Account. This will manage the list so yo don’t have to fuck around in Excel or Access or something else awful. If you don’t like MailChimp, find another email list service. But use something of that ilk.
- Set up Automation so that you as soon as someone signs up for your list, they get a welcome email from you. This is where you can set up your giveaway as well.
- Set up a BookFunnel with a free ebook to lure subscribers in. It can’t be anything that’s available in Kindle Unlimited, but it also doesn’t have to be a novel. I feel like too many writers give away the farm to get email subscribers. If you’ve only got two novels published, don’t give one of them away for an email address. Write a prequel novella, or even short story, and use that as bait.
- Put a widget on your website with a link to drive signups. The book cover with a “Sign up for my Email List” tag is all you need.
- Create a Call to Action button on your Facebook Author page that is a signup button for your email list.
- Automate your Twitter and Facebook (or other social media outlets) to send out one message every day reminding people that they can get free shit by signing up for your email list. Every. Single. Day. Yes, even you, with one book out. Don’t do it every hour, but do it every day. Less than 20% of your FB contacts see the things you post, so you have to post frequently to get them out there. I don’t care if you think it’s annoying, shut up and do it. I’ll teach you how to Hootsuite later.
- Find some other authors who have shitty newsletter numbers and do a swap with them. Find other writers in your genre and do a newsletter swap with them. See if your publisher will send out a newsletter with your book cover linking to a newsletter signup page.
- Find authors who like you that have much bigger lists who will let you ride their coattails a little and do a newsletter swap with you. Don’t use this willy-nilly, and don’t email me. If everybody that reads this emails me, I’ll be overwhelmed. I might even get ten emails, given the traffic I get here. 🙂
- Communicate with your list regularly. At least once a month. Don’t consider it spam. Don’t consider it bothering people. Your readers, as much as you love them, aren’t your besties. They are your customers, and your job is to make sure they know about everything you have out there that they can buy. So go get their money!
That’s a pretty good primer on building an email list. I hope it’s been helpful. If you think I missed something, hit me up in comments. If you think I’m an idiot, then you probably shouldn’t have read this far and should go do something more fulfilling. 🙂 If you think I’m brilliant, buy all my shit. Or click the link for my Patreon.
by john | May 15, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction
This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE.
14
Sheriff Dunleavy’s car was one of about half a dozen parked in front of Sharky’s when I pulled up. I parked at the end of a row to make sure I wouldn’t have any trouble getting out, since I didn’t plan on staying long. Jenny cocked her head at me when I turned off the truck and opened the door.
“I thought you said you were hungry.”
“I am hungry,” I replied.
“Well, Sharky’s don’t serve food,” the girl said.
“How would you know? You ain’t never going to get old enough to go into a beer joint.”
“You act like anybody’s checked an ID in Sharky’s in, like, ever. All you need to get beer in there is have a single hair on your chin or on your—“
“Young lady!”
“I was gonna say legs, but that works too.” She gave me a saucy grin. “Now why are you really going in there?”
“Like I said, I think the good sheriff owes me an apology and a steak dinner for being rude to me earlier, and I plan to collect both of those things.” I closed the truck door with a hollow metal thunk and walked across the gravel parking lot to Sharky’s door. I looked down at what I was wearing and grimaced a little. I was in my normal weekday attire of a patterned shirt and blue jeans, with a pair of flat white tennis shoes. I didn’t look bad, but it wasn’t any real surprise from my wardrobe that I hadn’t had very many dates this century. Well, I wasn’t there to use my feminine wiles on the Sheriff, even if he was a handsome, strapping man with a conspicuous lack of a wedding ring.
Every head in the dim room turned to me when I pushed open the door. Sharky did a double-take, then jerked his head over to the right to where the sheriff sat in a booth with his back to the wall. It wasn’t like I couldn’t see him. Sharky’s place wasn’t very big, and there weren’t but about eight booths and four tables in the place. Somehow I would have been able to figure out where Dunleavy was sitting among the ten people that were scattered through the room.
Even so, I walked in that direction without bothering to pretend I was here to see anybody else. Hell, the only person besides Gene that I knew well enough to speak to in a beer joint was Edith Hardcastle, and she and I weren’t on the best speaking terms after she made disparaging remarks about my cherry cobbler three years ago at the Homecoming lunch after church. That biddy had the audacity to say I used a store-bought crust! I learned how to make that crust from my Gran in 1975, and have been rolling it by hand ever since I was tall enough to see over the counter. So I gave Edith a frosty nod as I walked over to see the sheriff.
“Bring me a bourbon, Sharky,” I said as I walked pas the bar. “And not any of that Ancient Age shit, either. If you’re out of Knob Creek, just bring me Turkey.”
I slid into the booth across from Dunleavy and gave him a smile. “Good evening, Sheriff. How are you doing?”
He just sat there, watching me with a baleful eye. “What do you want, Lila Grace?”
“Why do I need to want anything, Sheriff? Can’t I just come by and have a drink with a friend? Thank you, Gene. What do I owe you?” I said, taking my glass.
“Lila Grace, you know I ain’t gonna take your money,” Sharky said.
“I know, Gene, but it’s polite to offer, and I hold out hope that one day you’ll forget and let me start buying my drinks again.”
“Not gonna happen, ma’am. But thank you.” Gene turned and walked back to the bar, leaving me alone with the sheriff again.
“What did you do to him?”
“I think you mean ‘for,’” I corrected.
“Excuse me?”
“I think you mean, ‘what did I do for him,’ Sheriff. His mama passed, and she couldn’t move on because she didn’t leave a will, and there was some dispute between Gene and his brother Robert about what to do with her property. I called the three of them together and relayed his mama’s wishes to them, and they got over their differences and did what she told them to do. Gene credits me with saving his relationship with his brother, which was rapidly deteriorating on account off the money involved.”
“So you drink for free?”
“That was my fee, Sheriff,” I explained. “I don’t often charge people for what I do. I barter a great deal, and sometimes people do give me money, but usually I do what I do for one of two reasons. Either I have an overwhelming sense of justice and cannot let a wrong stand if I have the opportunity to make it right…”
“Or?”
“Or I have got some damn fool ghost hanging around at all hours irritating the ever-loving pee out of me to make things right with their loved ones.”
“Which one is this?” He asked, sipping on his drink. It looked like a Jack & ginger from what I could see, and to smell his breath, it wasn’t the first sample he’d taken of Lynchburg’s finest since he’d got off work.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Which is this, Lila Grace? Are you poking around in Jenny Miller’s death because you can’t stand to see justice ignored, or because that poor dead girl won’t leave you alone?”
“I’m going to ignore that question, Sheriff, and move on to the reason I am here. I—“
“Don’t,” he said. He didn’t move, just sat there, his elbows on the table and his eyes trained on the glass in front of him.
I took a closer look at the sheriff. He had aged since this morning. A fine brown-and-grey stubble poked out across his face. His shirt wasn’t creased, and there was a little gravy spot on his tie. All n all, it looked like he slept in his clothes, or didn’t sleep at all. I figured one of those was true. Sheriff Johnny spent more than one night laying stretched out in one of the two cells in back, trying to catch a few winks in the middle of a tough case. Looked like Sheriff Dunleavy was doing the same thing.
I thought for a moment before I spoke. “Don’t what, Sheriff? Don’t ignore the question that you only asked because you want me to feel as miserable as you do right now? Don’t come back here and try to help you because I have contributions to your case that nobody else has? Or just don’t act like I give a damn what happens to my town? What do you not want me to do, Sheriff? So I can be sure of exactly what I am telling you to kiss my ass over.”
His head snapped up and his brow furrowed, making a razor-sharp vertical line in the center of his brow. “Woman, I swear to—“
His mouth snapped shut and his eyes went wide as my palm cracked across his face like a rifle shot. “If I wanted to be spoken to like that, I could have married one of this rednecks around here. If you have something to say to me, you can call me Lila Grace, or you can call me Ms. Carter. But if you call me ‘woman’ like it’s an insult again, you can be damn sure there’ll be a matching handprint on the other side of your face.”
Dunleavy leaned forward, one elbow on the table, his eyes blazing. He stuck one finger out at me and started wagging it as he talked. “I should have you arrested for—“
“You want to keep that finger, you best put it away,” I said, my voice cold.
He stared at me long enough for it to be downright uncomfortable until he either decided we were both out of line, I was right, or that he wouldn’t likely be walking out of that bar full of hillbillies if he laid hands on the woman that taught most of them in Vacation Bible School when they were young’uns. He put his finger down and leaned back against the cracked and split red naugahyde of the booth.
“Lila Grace, I am starting to wonder if I was brought to this town as penance for something I did in a past life, because I cannot for the life of me think of anything I did to deserve you in my life.”
“Sheriff, I assure you, there is nothing that you could do to deserve me,” I smiled as I said it, and he just shook his head.
A rueful chuckle escaped his lips and he picked up the glass of brown liquid on the table in front of him and knocked it back. He waved at Sharky for another, then gaped at me when I shook my head. “What’s wrong, Lila Grace, you don’t approve of me getting drunk? I assure you I do not intend to drive home intoxicated.”
“Sheriff, as pleased as I am to hear that you do not intend to wrap your patrol car around a white oak tree between here and your house tonight, and as little as I would generally object to you crawling inside a bourbon bottle on your personal time, I am afraid that you have other obligations this evening. Obligations that require you to maintain at least a modicum of sobriety.”
He raised an eyebrow at me, then held up a twenty to Gene. The bartender nodded, and came over with the check. “That’ll be fifteen, Sheriff.”
“Keep the change, Sharky,” Dunleavy said. Gene smiled and nodded, then took away our glasses and headed back to the bar.
“What, pray tell, are these obligations, Ms. Carter?”
“You are taking me to dinner,” I said. The butterflies in my stomach were migrating north, south, and sideways all at the same time, despite my internal protestations that this was not a date, that I had no interest in this man outside the professional, and that all I wanted out of him was a free meal and an apology.
“I am?” Dunleavy asked with a slight smile. “Why exactly am I going to do that? And did you have a place in mind, or do I at least get some input?”
“You are taking me to dinner to apologize for your atrocious behavior this afternoon. You are paying for dinner and dessert to apologize for your behavior this evening, and no, you do not have any choice in where we go to eat. There are only five restaurants in this part of the county, as I’m sure you know, and only one of them can prepare a steak with any semblance of skill. So you are taking me to The Garden Cafe.”
“I’ve heard the spaghetti at the Pizza Empire is real good,” he countered.
“You are not apologizing to me at any place with checkered vinyl tablecloths. I will settle for nothing less than white linen. Or at least someplace with cloth napkins. Our choices are limited, after all.”
“Well, if that is what I must do, then that is what I must do,” he said, sliding out of the booth and standing up. He wobbled a little, not too bad, but just a little. “Why don’t you drive?” He said, putting a hand on the back of the booth seat. “I can pick up my car later.”
“Good choice, Sheriff. I would hate to have to report you to the authorities,” I stood up and preceded him toward the door. Every eye in the place was on us as we walked out, the crazy ghost lady and the new sheriff. This would be all over the grapevine, living and dead varieties, within the hour.
“Y’all come back soon,” Gene called as I opened the door. I threw a hand up over my shoulder in farewell and stepped out into the sunset.
by john | May 11, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Promos/Giveaways, Serialized Fiction, Writing
Hey y’all, just a quick note to let you see the awesome cover that Natania Barron has made for Amazing Grace! I’m still not sure if this will release under my name or a pseudonym, but either way, we can fix that pretty easily if I decide the change the name. But here’s the cover Natania did up for me. Let me know what you think!
