Question: What's the payoff for a writer in spending three or four hours a day Tweeting and Friending and being LinkedIn, then hastening to blog and guest-blog and attend Literary Salons and Poetry Slams and smiling at strangers when you just want to get back to your girlhood treehouse and imitate Daphne duMaurier?
Answer: Hunh? You mean in addition to talking to nice people?
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Installment Three of Dead on Dutcher's Mountain:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0066U7J3Y its ASIN: B0066U7J3Y
Two
Early sunset colored the granite walls of the Smith River gorge and reflected pink and gold onto the river foam. The air smelled of wet leaves and wood smoke, chilly through the dashboard vents. Brian Webster teased his sister Hillary as she drove his SUV toward the party for the Dutcher’s Mine reopening. His daughter, Karen, seven, blonde and participatory, rode in back.
“...bother me at all that my little sister is driving,” Brian was claiming, “I have my seat belt...” He gripped the dash in mock panic as they took another curve. Grinning, Hillary swung a little extra on the wheel. “Eek!” Karen shrieked. Hillary smiled into the rear-view mirror and swung again.
“Mon dieu, mon cher,” Brian began, still bantering, “un morseau de...Jesus Christ!”
A low-slung silver car, in passing, almost disappeared beneath them to avoid an oncoming coupe. Horns blared, tires smoked. Hillary cringed, swore; tapped the brake and teased the steering wheel as they skidded broadside toward the guard rail. They left pavement; they skidded. Then the tires took hold and the car stopped. Hillary was almost aware of resignation--that her body took such extravagant care of her, that she was alive.
The silver car, safely ahead of them, fishtailed onto the pavement and took its driver into the next curve before it halted. One gull-wing door opened and the big driver emerged. Hillary threw a rueful smile to her ashen-faced brother and opened her window.
“I owe you something,” the man called across the gap. He was blond and looked very tall, maybe in contrast to his low car.
“You sure do!” Hillary called back. “Let me drive that thing!”
“If fate permits!” The other driver waved, nodded; he left. The fit of man to reptilian machine, style to style, looked deliberate.
Karen stood up to watch him disappear. “Is that a car?”
“Yes, that’s a car,” Brian said, “and it almost pushed us right into the gorge.” He released his grip on the dash. He could have spat into the river.
“You underestimate my driving, moan chair,” Hillary said absently, and rummaged into her journalist’s camera bag for an M&M. She was short, dark and thin; her cropped hair curled naturally over her temples and the nape of her neck. With extra pounds, her eyes would have made her beautiful. She no longer cared. She drawled, “My driving’s awesome; been driving Jeeps in Yucatan, and I’m alive to tell the tale.”
“Alive and with an accent,” Brian claimed. “Those Mayans affected your pronunciation.”
“Deed not.”
“Deed too, but eet’s fading.”
She was surprised; “Did you see my broadcasts?”
“Sure!” Karen supplied. “We saw you with those soldiers. You were talking to some guy in a ski mask.”
“PBS,” Brian said smugly. Hillary paused with her hand in the bag, her eyes focused inward on another, more rewarding life. Brian went on, “Half the county watched you every night. And everyone claimed to know you since you were a kid. Writing this story for Brad is going to get you a lot of local points.”
Hillary shrugged. “His society editor is sick.”
“So you said.”
She sought the memory of the supple little car. “Wasn’t that a beautiful machine?”
Karen understood the reference first. “What kind of car is it?” she asked. “Why is it so low? How did a guy that tall fit inside?”
Brian cupped one large hand on Karen’s head and pushed her back onto her seat. “It looked like an Accordo,” he said. “They’re built extra low so they can turn corners like that without tipping over.”
“Why?”
“So they can turn corners like that without tipping over.”
“It looks like an attack frog.”
“The driver’s feet stick out almost straight ahead.”
His voice was a croon. The tone never failed to raise Hillary’s gorge; she blamed her impatience on her slow, uncertain recovery from dengue fever.
Brian was very different to his sister, a smooth-looking man from his slicked-back hair to the elegant fit of his jacket. The jacket, however, concealed an early paunch, and his spreading flabbiness irked her too. She studied him. Sweet face; lower lip a bit full, a little pouty, but kind. Still hurting over Gail; another sticking point. He had to get over his wife’s disappearance; six months was too long to pretend she would, or more probably could, come back.
She checked her watch. Another forty-five minutes’ drive to the mine. That silver car could make it there in half the time. She imagined it at the Oregon border, floating the curves, sailing down the grade of the Siskiyous toward the Illinois River Valley; effortless, easy, fast.
Away.
“I love you, Brian,” she said, and was surprised at how profoundly she felt it.
Brian’s eyes turned, his head followed. “What brings that?” Then he hugged her, hard, his face against her neck and leaving the damp of perspiration or of unshed tears. She restarted the car and entered the highway, looking for the Slant Bridge turnoff. Slant Bridge; landmark names were coming back.
Karen asked, “Was that Sheriff Earl’s car back there at Gasquet?” and pointed so that Hillary could see in the rear-view mirror.
“Yes, Hon,” Brian said.
“I hope he comes to the party.”
A glimpse of a back, someone obviously lecturing a trio of men lounging on their motorcycles. “He looked pretty busy,” Hillary said. She left the highway at the bridge, crossed the river and turned abruptly left onto a road scratched into a cliff. She changed focus. “So we’ll be in the trees all weekend. That’ll feel good.”
Earl’s hair was the color of purest taffy.
“Mais oui.”
Like Karen’s.
more next time...
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