Into the Night

Guest Spot: Barbara Scott’s CAST A PALE SHADOW

Esther Mitchell — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:42:39 +0000

Please join me in welcoming talented psychological suspense author Barbara Scott back for another week of wonderful entertainment! This week, I asked Barbara to provide us with another of her wonderful excerpts, and she provided an excerpt from CAST A PALE SHADOW! Read away, and enjoy! - Esther Mitchell

From Barbara Scott:

CAST A PALE SHADOW was too long. Faced with having to make cuts to meet the publisher’s guidelines my editor, the talented Gail Delaney, author of the Phoenix Rebellion series, advised me to consider cutting sections in secondary character’s points of view. This helped focus the story on the hero and heroine. Here’s a scene that was lost as a result. It gives some insight into the character of Bob and Edie Kirk, the heroine’s parents. Think of it as getting the DVD release with extras.

On the cutting room floor:

Bob Kirk had not gone to work that afternoon. He had a good excuse, better than most he used, but of course, his secretary was not given the whole truth. She would cover for him. She had enough practice, and he always made it worth her while. He had spent the bulk of the day on his favorite stool at the Riverview Tavern. The bar was named for its street and not its scenic aspect. The river to be viewed was more than a mile to the east and obstructed from view by the trucking companies and warehouses that cluttered most of the north St. Louis riverfront. In any case, the regular customers of the establishment would have been unable to see anything beyond the frosted, nicotine-stained front window with its blinking neon Budweiser, Coors, and Miller signs and had little interest in viewing any liquid but what filled their glasses, which Danny, the barkeep, kept flowing as freely as Old Man River.

Sending Trissa flowers was very far from Bob’s mind at the moment. A thought so sweet would have been cauterized by the acid memory of how his own daughter, the vicious little bitch, had destroyed, perhaps for good, one of his only assets in this life, his face. Every time he looked in the mirrored backbar he felt like shit. It took two stiff drinks to give him the courage to look up again, and when he did, another round would start. Only the shadowy dimness of the bar and Danny’s penchant for taping hand-lettered notices to the mirror gave him any respite. If he angled his head in a certain way, the worst of his damage was hidden between the Jim Beam bottles and the yellowed card that read “Only your wife will keep a tab on you!”

He was well on his way to flushing out the incriminating details of last night.. Gin had a way of absolving one’s guilt. He had already half-convinced himself that the lie he had tried out on Edie was indeed the truth.

“My God, Bob, what happened to you?” he remembered her screaming when he’d opened the front door to let her in from her mercy mission to her sister. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, look at your face!”

“Get in and shut the door first,” he’d growled in response. “I don’t want the whole neighborhood knowing our business. If you had been here where you belong taking care of your own family instead of your pain-in-the-ass sister’s, none of this would have happened.”

It had not been easy on him to spend half the night at Barnes, made to wait like some common street drunk. So what if Barnes was supposed to be one of the best hospitals in the whole damn country. Everyone knew if you wanted to be treated right, you went to a Catholic hospital; you went to St. Andrew’s. But how could he have gone there and taken the chance of being recognized in his sorry state?

“Ellen’s sick, Bob, you know she’s sick. I had to go,” Edie had mewled in that whiney voice that drove him up the wall even when he didn’t have a hangover and sixteen stitches in his cheek and jaw. “Did you get into a fight? Did somebody try to rob you?”

“Your daughter did this to me!”

“What? Trissa? What are you talking about? Where is she? Trissa, get down here this instant!” she immediately hollered up the stairs. It had pleased him to see her righteous indignation on his behalf. It had encouraged him in his cover-up.

“She’s not here. She ran out. She cut me with a knife like some two bit whore from down on Cherokee Street, then she ran.” He made sure he was under the full glare of the kitchen light before he turned his wounded cheek fully toward her, the better that she should see and appreciate what mutilation the child of her womb had achieved.

Edie pulled back in dismay. “I— I can’t believe this! Did you slap her again? Lord, I knew this would happen some day the way you treat one another.”

It was just like her to think him to blame. They’d gang up on him if he’d let them, these women that he fed and clothed and sheltered. “You’re damn right, I hit her. I caught her sneaking in here when I heard you tell her to stay home and study.”

“She went out? Where?”

“How the hell do I know where? But on her back most likely.”

“What?”

“Lying and smart-mouthing me when I confronted her about it, too, like she always does. You know her lip. You heard her threaten me with the police the other day. As if the police had any right sticking their nose into a father’s business!”

Edie had had to sit by that time, her head in her hands on the kitchen table. “I don’t understand it. I’ve never seen her with anybody. There’s never anybody coming around, calling. When I was her age, there were always boys around, nice boys, meeting the folks, sitting on the porch. But not Trissa.”

“You think that kind of boy’s going to come up to the front porch when she keeps them entertained in some back seat? But I’m sure they’re all Johnny-on-the-spot the way she flaunts herself.”

“Trissa? But–”

“But, but nothing.” He could tell she had her Mother Hen feathers up. “You see, this is what she counts on, you siding against me. This is why something like this can happen,” he jabbed at his laceration to make his point, “And she thinks she can get away with it.”

“Please, Bob, tell me exactly what happened. Trissa? I just can’t–”

“I’ve been telling you. She came home, I asked her where she’d been catting around at all hours, and she flew at me like some wild creature, accusing me of vile, unnatural things such as I never thought to hear from a daughter to her father. God knows who puts such thoughts in her head, locking herself in the closet half her life like she has, like she’s got something to hide, like I ain’t changed her dirty diapers, or spanked her little ass when she needed it.”

It had almost sounded like the truth to him. Hell, it could have been the truth. What did he know? He’d been drunk enough to have forgotten. But surely he hadn’t been drunk enough to do what he half-remembered wanting to do.

“Bob, Bobby, my God, did you touch her? Did you–? Like–? Not like Rita?”

“God! Jesus Christ! God damn it, yes, I touched her,” he’d crashed his fist down on the table, sending his coffee cup flying, its dregs splattering the front of them both. “You want me to show you how I touched her? Come here, I’ll show you!” Before she could cringe away, he’d snatched her up by the collar and drew his hand back to smack her doubting face but he decided it wasn’t worth it, and he’d walked out and left her there.

“Bobby. Bobby, I’m sorry. Don’t go, please. Bobby!” he’d heard her calling after him as he slammed out of the house. To hell with her. To hell with them both. He had other places to go, other women who would more than welcome him. Or would they? He caught another glimpse of himself in the mirror and winced.

Danny, astute bartender that he was, saw his distress and was ready with the shaker to refill his glass. Putting lie to his bedraggled sign that warned “The only thing on this house is the roof” which clung by one corner below the neon Anheuser-Busch eagle, Danny pushed aside the crumpled bill Bob tried to place on the bar.

“For medicinal purposes,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Bobbo, it’ll probably heal up into a decent and distinguished scar. Knowing you, you’ll wrench the heart out of some poor gal, telling your stories about how you got it.”

And Danny, who didn’t know the real story any more than Bob would after enough gin had sluiced it out of his system, was probably right.

Flash Friday: “Instinct”

Esther Mitchell — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:27:05 +0000

It was a ten-minute drive from her home in Kensington to the NNMC, and Jaye prayed no cops were out tonight as she sped toward the hospital. The nagging sense that Trevor was alone and in need of help was her only companion as she raced to the facility. She was on autopilot, with little awareness of her actions as she showed her ID to the guard at the NNMC’s gate, parked and locked her car, and headed toward the inpatient wards. She was just at the door into the building when something in her peripheral vision stopped her in her tracks. She turned, her eyes scanning the bushes beside the building and her brow furrowed. What was out there?

She shrugged when she saw nothing, but her skin prickled with awareness she didn’t want to acknowledge as she turned toward the door again. A whimper, followed by a moan, sent a chill through her that wracked Jaye to the core. It sounded like an animal, and a man, in pain. She spun around, and her eyes searched the bushes again, until she saw one move.

Heart in her throat, praying that she was about to find a wounded dog, Jaye eased toward the bush. Whatever she found there, she already knew she wasn’t ready for it.

A warning growl faded into a whimper of pain and fear as her hand touched the bush, and she eased it aside, expecting an injured animal. A dismayed gasp left her at what she found, instead.

Trevor lay in a tight huddle between the bush and the wall. The moonlight touched his dark, bare skin, and he shivered from the bitter winter cold.

“Trevor!” Immediately, she yanked off her warm trench coat, aware it still wouldn’t be enough if he’d been out here long. She glanced up as the hospital door opened and an orderly stepped outside.

“Hey!”

He turned toward her, and Jaye barked out a single order. “Get some blankets, stat!”

She returned her attention to her patient. There were no outward signs of trauma, which did nothing to explain why he was out here in the freezing cold and as bare as the day he was born.

“Trevor?” She laid a cautious hand on his shoulder, and felt the shudder that lunged through him. “Trevor, can you hear me?”

His only response was a low whine, and Jaye reassessed the situation with a muttered oath. It was worse than first appearances. Last time she found Trevor huddled in fright, he’d come around quickly, and he was still fully clothed. But he was weak then, and they only just made it back to his room from the medical storage down the hall, taht time. Clearly, his situation was deteriorating. She didn’t want to know how, why, or where he lost his clothes, and his animal instincts were sharper now than his human ones. There was no way she could count on his help getting him back to his room, and she certainly couldn’t do it herself.

Resolutely, she reached over and pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her coat draped over Trevor’s broad shoulders. He growled and yanked away, but she had her phone in hand, already. Biting her lip, she punched the speed dial for Inpatient’s trauma unit.

“Naval Medical Inpatient trauma ward. Chief Petty Officer James speaking.”

“Chief, this is Dr. Michaels. I found our missing patient. I need a gurney, and a couple of orderlies.”

Lydia was a professional; Jaye had to give her that. Though the other woman didn’t deal with psychiatric patients very often, she kept her curiosity to herself, and her focus on the patient’s care. “I’ll call down and have ER get one out to you, ASAP, Ma’am. Where are you?”

“Right outside the lower entrance to building ten.” Jaye clicked off the phone as the orderly she summoned earlier arrived, his arms loaded with blankets.

“Thanks.” She took them and turned to Trevor. He still looked oblivious to her presence, or his own humanity, and only stirred enough to voice a warning growl as she replaced her coat with the warmer blankets.

“Ma’am… Is he all right?” The orderly’s worried voice reached her.

“He will be,” she murmured, keeping her voice low and soothing as she stroked Trevor’s head gently. She kept her eyes on him, aware that taking her gaze off this wild animal would be a mistake. She only prayed her words were the truth as she again whispered, “He will be.”

My Life: Becoming Esther Mitchell

Esther Mitchell — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:28:10 +0000

I know, the title of this sounds odd, as I kick off a new blog segment on Wednesdays called “My Life.” Since I write under my own name, the logical person might say “but you became Esther Mitchell when you were born!” Yes, and no.

Yes, that’s been my name since birth. In my younger years, it was a name I had a love-hate relationship with. Mostly, I loved to hate it. Not many 4-5 year olds like it when they hear “oh, that was my grandmother’s name!” It seemed hopelessly old-fashioned to me, at the time, and I wondered why I couldn’t be a Christine or a Heather, or even a Jessica. Something that could be shortened to a nickname, maybe, or that screamed “young and energetic” instead of “geriatric.” :)

The truth wouldn’t come out for another few years. My name wasn’t a deliberate choice on my parents’ part (whom, until then, I blamed for choosing to do such a terrible thing to me) - it was a random fluke of Fate… Or was it?

Esther is an Old Testament name in the Christian Bible, a prominent figure in Jewish history, and so much more than either of those. Esther is the Hebrew form of the Babylonian Ishtar. It also equates to the Tower in the Tarot. It’s a name surrounded by mystery, power, love and chaos. Small wonder, then, that my life would find such a balance of these things.

I believe it is because of my early unhappiness with my name (which I have since learned to be appropriate and meaningful) that I discovered the art of name divinations - that is, exploring the reasons behind why people were given the names they have. I’ve also learned to appreciate the whimsical nature of the Cosmos, that names just seem to make sense for people, in most cases.

I know there’s someone out there right now who might think I’m crazy for this. The truth, however, is that despite its rather fortune-tellerish description, name divination is actually more mathematical than mysterious. Like its cousin, Numerology, name divination relies on mathematical equations in order to reach logical equations that relate to personality traits established in ancient times. It is an art has remained viable for thousands of years, and like many ancient sciences, I think it’s one that we, as a society, are too quick to pass off.