Lily Pads in Water

Det. Lieutenant Frank Ryman is telling his captain, Winthrop Pemberton, about an incident with the murdered woman that involved him.  Remembering, he is angry and embarrassed.

After a few minutes had gone by and the woman’s drinks had begun to take effect, she had come over and sat close to him.  Her perfume was expensive, exciting, but he was in love with Sofia.

“How about a kiss, lover?” she had whispered, her lips parted as she ran the tip of her tongue over them.

Sofia, Frank’s wife and the woman’s friend, was desirable.  He was faithful, not too long married, but this woman was like all the women in the Bible and good novels, like Salome and Scarlett O’Hara.  He had been forty-eight then and there wasn’t much he hadn’t been exposed to, but he hadn’t sampled all that many of the world’s women or the world’s vices, or even the world’s wares, for that matter.

He had decided to play it light.  “Come on now,” he said.  “I’m the husband of your friend.”

She had laughed just a little, and she seemed hurt.

He had tried to smooth it over.  “Look, you’re the most beautiful woman I know, except Sofia, but I believe in fidelity in marriage.”

She had smiled mysteriously.  “I see,” she said softly, and got up and left the room.

Frank had tapped his foot to the jazz playing on the stereo, nervously awaiting his wife.  Even if he didn’t really want this woman, his middle-aged ego felt enriched by her aggressive hustle.  He wondered how many men she came onto in any given week.  Hell, men sure weren’t shy about propositioning women and crowding them.  Were women equal, or weren’t they?

He was staring at the richly hued Persian rug, lost in thought, when she coughed.  Looking up, he saw her standing in the arch of the living room in front of a bank of windows with the drapes open.  She was silkily alabaster white — and birth-naked.  Overwhelmed, his body liked what faced him even if  the faithful part of his mind did not.  He stood up, the difference in their heights making him feel less vulnerable.

“Cut it out now.  Be nice,” he said, like the black Dutch uncle he sure as hell didn’t feel like.

“No, you be nice,”  she cooed.   From her lips, it was a command from master to servant.  As his mouth set in a hard line,  and he silently threatened to disown the clamoring lower half of himself, she snarled, “Don’t you go high and mighty on me! Why are you being so damned mean?”

They were on even ground now.  He was going to have to cut her down.  All his instincts said she didn’t want him for erotic gain. She meant to control him.

“Well,” he drawled, “I guess you might say that the bitch you’re acting like brings out nothing but the mean old junkyard dog in me.”

It wasn’t what she expected.  She started toward hhim, undulating.  He saw that she would stop at nothing to seduce him, and although he couldn’t admit it, her single-minded assault frightened him.

“Cut it out or I’m leaving,” he said sharply.  “You think even if I wanted you, I’d let  Sofia come in and catch us here?”

Angry beyond the attempted seduction, he started to the closet to get his coat.  The cool room seemed unbearably hot through the sweat on his body.

“Go on, run!” she snarled.  “I like black men, but I want the genuine article, not a sorry mongrel half-breed like you.”

Her words were a rabbit punch to  his belly.  Maybe she’d discussed him with Sofia, and Sofia knew his pain at Jesse’s and Jenny’s blackness and his own white skin. They loved him and he loved them, but he was stubbornly acknowledged by Max, his white father, and that made it worse.

The words he prided himself on never calling women rushed to his lips, but he stifled them;  they’d never satisfy him now. He needed blood.  Fighting, blindly angry, he stopped and said to her, “If being all white makes you so fucking almighty, then why are you so goddamned miserable?”

“Voila!” Her smile, her languid stance blazed into rage.  He had started again for the closet when she picked up a vase and sent it toward the wall just past him, grazing the side of his head.

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So, the plot thickens.  I will let this segment stay up because many people don’t use the Internet on weekends.  Monday,  please read an alcoholic father’s strange reasoning behind his incest with one daughter, his gropings with another younger one,  and his link to a murdered woman.  Read, too, one detective’s pithy comment on that incest.

Wishing you a great weekend and hoping to see you Monday!  Slow down and keep cool!

Fourth Excerpt from Dying on the Edge originally appeared on Francine Craft on July 8, 2010.

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The other detectives were carefully checking three bedrooms, one master and two smaller, and three walk-in closets filled with clothes.  All three knew that a couple of outfits would equal any one of their yearly salaries.

The master bedroom was in wild disarray, with clothes pulled from hangers, but seemingly undamaged, the rose velvet bedspread crumpled on the floor and the mattress askew on the bed.  Frank knew the woman didn’t live here, but in a penthouse on Eden Avenue that  was far plusher than this apartment.

He stood surveying the room.  It was s silent here.  Something bad had happened here.  His skin prickled with dread.

Police and firemen received more and more false alarms and lunatic calls lately, burning up already tight money and resources, but this time Frank  would have donated a year of  his salary to find this call was nothing but a fool’s caper.

One more door, this one of solid oak.  Frank pushed it open and caught his breath.  The others were right behind him.  This was the aviary.  White doves frantically swept past them, shrieking.  Surprised, they shielded their eyes at first and saw it before they could wonder why the doves were so frightened. Frank switched on the light and they saw that a wide streak of blood led from the middle of the room into a huge bird cage.

The phone call had been no prank.

A woman clad in a leopard print bikini lay in  a fetal position in the huge gold-lacquered bird cage that reached nearly to the ceiling, its walk-in door open.  A dove cowered in the far corner as if afraid to move.

Frank squatted beside the woman, his breathing ragged.  Hell, hadn’t he known from the beginnning it would be her?

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Blue Ocean Shoreline

Thursday, I will bring you the fourth excerpt, a seduction scene from hell. I’ll leave on until the following Monday because so many people don’t read on weekends and this is a longer scene.   Then the last scene which is a sad one that comes on Monday about sexual abuse that  blights far too many lives, shrouding those lives in destructive secrecy.

 Will I see you again this Thursday?  Please take very good care and I certainly hope I will.

Third Excerpt from Dying on the Edge originally appeared on Francine Craft on July 6, 2010.

Cloudy Ocean Shoreline

In this, the second excerpt from Dying on the Edge, a woman is reminiscing about  visiting Port au Prince, Haiti and a noted houngan (voodoo high priest) in search of a spell, potions, or poisons to kill a woman whose husband she intends to have.  The houngan is Papa Henri Delacroix and like most other men, he is entranced by this woman.

“Welcome again,” Papa Henry had said, seemingly delighted to see her.  He was very tall, with light chocolate-hued skin and long, tangled locks of kinky gray hair.  He was wearing a robe of light gray cotton.

She got down to  business immediately.  She had soothed his masculinity, leading up slowly to her true mission in their two previous meetings, playing the adoring supplicant.  Now she told him bluntly that she wanted Kurt Wilder for her husband. 

He listened carefully before he spoke.  “So the wife does not wish to let this man go.  Perhaps she needs him more than you do, loves him more –”

“No!”  She was suurprised at her own vehemence.  “I must have him!”  Her voice trembled with emotion.

He nodded, studying her intently but giving her no answer.

Raw with need, she had begged him again and again, saying that she needed something truly powerful if it became necessary to do away with this woman.

Then he had smiled, closing his eyes as if in blessing.  She had felt happy, believing that she had finally reached him and that he favored her at last.

Finally he opened his eyes and studied her.  “You are so beautiful.  But you are also a fool.  You have lied to me, and because of your spell and the fact that you remind me someone dear, I have only seen the good in you.  This was a mistake.  I will not help you.”

She began to rise to leave, infuriated.  She had wasted too much time.  If he wouldn’t help her, there were others.  She didn’t need this excuse for a houngan.

He leaned forward, and his big, gnarled  hand covered her slender one.  “There is no victory in evil,” he said mildly.  Evil can only destroy; it is without power to create anything save chaos.”

Facing him, her face contorted with anger and frustration so that it was no longer beautiful, she flung at him, “Perhaps you are the fool, Henry Delacroix.  Surely you know that destruction is often a necessary step to creation.”

She had glanced at him triumphantly before he said sadly, “Do not do this deed you plan, even if it becomes, as you put it, necessary.  You are  not yet dead enough inside to be effectively evil.  You still feel too much.  Listen when I tell you that you will die in the flames you light for another.  At the very least, you spirit will die.”

She would listen no longer.  Opening her purse, she had pulled out a sheaf of bills to pay him, even though he had proved useless.  He refused the money and  followed her to the door, pleading, “If I am an old fool, even fools are wise on some subjects.  I beg you to listen….”

But she had rushed to the waiting jeep taxi and the grinning, sleepy-eyed driver who, at her request, had taken her to Simone.  Madame Simone Duclair was a well-known mambo, a voodoo priestess highly recommended by a Haitian acquaintance.

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The next excerpt will come on Tuesday and depict the detectives finding a woman’s body. 

All five  excerpts  skip throughout the book and will give you the flavor of the book.  Responses of most readers have been supportive and full of praise.  But Edge  is not everybody’s cup of tea.  If you don’t care for psychology, I wouldn’t advise trying to read it.  It’s subtle and not everyone likes subtlety in a story.

So come Tuesday, as they say in the U.S, south, if I live and nothing happens, I’ll bring you the third excerpt.  But it’s the  fourth and the fifth that are explosive and the fifth is sad.

Will I see you next Tuesday?  I certainly hope so.

Second Excerpt from Dying on the Edge originally appeared on Francine Craft on July 3, 2010.

Sea and Rocks

This was a downtown section of Carroll City, an east coast metropolis with a population of five hundred thousand.  She reflected that what others thought about her didn’t matter now, and she hugged herself.  She was a genuine goddess!  Too bad she couldn’t yet flaunt that to the world.

She sat on a couch facing the windows and stretched, relaxing in the too-warm room, enjoying her triumph, wriggling her scarlet-tipped toes.  She would have all that and more after she and Kurt were married.

She got up, walked over to a golden oak credenza, and slid open a door.  She took out a once-exquisite porcelain doll, now dressed in dirty knife-slashed rags.  Its gold chain bracelet with a plain gold medallion seemed incongruous but somehow suited to the ruined doll, which resembled Eden Wilder, Kurt’s wife.  The face of the doll was scratched and gouged.

Staring at her hated rival’s image for a long minute, she spat full in the porcelain face.  Holding the doll in one hand, she encircled its slender throat with the other.  She squeezed and murmured the ancient incantation Die, bitch, die!

Still standing, she pulled on black silk ballerina slippers.  Then dancing in circles, she switched on the stereo,  The sound of ritual Haitian voodoo drums filled the room with their pounding rhythn.  A growing frenzy filled Maggi as she danced to the hypnotc and sexual sound of the drums.  Panting and full of the necessary hatred boiling inside her, she flung the doll with all her might against the fieldstone wall and heard the porcelain shatter.  She danced in a straight line over to where the dolll lay broken and kicked it brutally, her toes striking the fieldstone.

When she had visited Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Simone Duclair, her mentor and friend, had taken her to hear the music.  She gave her recordings to bring back, so that she would not forget.

Tensed against the pain flashihng through her toes, she thought of how Dido had pressed her to make love.  His hunger for her never seem to lessen.  He had been angry, sullen, unlike his usual suave self.  How much longer would she have to lead him on while she learned what he knew about voodoo?  And what happened once she knew?  She shrugged.  Life was hard, and only thhose who could adjust to change would survive.

Limping to the couch, she sat down, massaging her hurting toes, then laughed abruptly, winded.  Killing, even in fantasy, was hard work.  And this had to go far beyond fantasy.

“It didn’t have to  be, Eden,” she said softly.  “You had your chance to let him go.”

Welcome to Dying on the Edge.  It’s now available on Amazon where you type in the title instead of my name.  I had forgotten authors maintain their own list of books, so it doesn’t yet come up under my name.  Price is relatively the same when ordered from Amazon or Wheatmark, because Wheatmark ships free.  Amazon is http://www.amazon.com.  Wheatmark is http://www.wheatmark,com/bookstore.

I will put on the second excerpt Saturday, giving you time to read and digest, and I’ll put on one or two excerpts after July Fourth.  As I said, Edge is written in blood – mine!  No, I have not lived all of it under any circumstances, but I have known enough of its heartbreak.

First Excerpt from Dying on the Edge originally appeared on Francine Craft on June 30, 2010.

Cascading water Over Mossy Rocks

Far and away you’ll learn more about Dying on the Edge from the back cover than from any thumbnail sketch I could give you.  What you read here really is what you get.

Maggi Frencxh is a beautiful film star whose lust for power and obsessive drive for another woman’s husband can only bring disaster!

She Was Looking for a Way Back Into His Heart!

Film star Maggi French is on top of her game, and she wants billionaire real estate mogul Kurt Wildder for herself, even though he’s married and has a child.  He owns Wilder Film Studios, and Maggi’s drive for power demands she have him as her husband.  She’ll go to any lengths to get him, including voodoo.  Maggi lives on the edge of an emotional precipice.  Will her hunger for Kurt provide the thrust that pushes her over?

Was He Looking for a Deadly way Out?

Kurt Wilder has romanced many women and his wife knows all about them.  Once he thought he’d divorce his wife and marry Maggi.  Now he’s drifting and she’s clinging.  Has he figued out a way to be free of  her forever?

I feel it’s written in blood – mine!  Text and subtext lives.  Love and hate.  Truth and lies. Faithfulness and betrayal.  They’re all here: the people you know and those you don’t want to know.

Excerpts begin tomorrow and as soon as we can, front and back book covers go up.

I hope to see you here tomorrow and take very good care of yourself!

What Dying on the Edge is About originally appeared on Francine Craft on June 29, 2010.