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January 15, 2008

Blacksmith's Girl: Chapter Twenty-Six

In the instant before the phone beside his bed rang and jangled his nerves Robby had a vision of a figure all in white floating at first over his head, then suddenly becoming a coiled arm ready to strike.  Robby grabbed at the figure, punched at it, but found nothing but air and nothingness in his gripped fingers.  His eyes were wide and he searched the darkness in the room for the figure.  He didn’t have a moment to reflect on his apparent insanity and baseless fear before the phone rang in the dark.

He gave it three rings, just enough to suggest that he wasn’t awake but abruptly roused from his sleep.

“Yeah.”

Silence at first.  Then a voice cracking.  A hush.  Then a deep shudder of breath.

It was her.

(Continue reading Chapter Twenty-Six of Blacksmith's Girl.)

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January 11, 2008

Blacksmith's Girl: Chapter Twenty-Five

Gail Heinrich was pretty damn short.  Pretty.  Damn.  Short.  Came up about half-way on old Robby.  Up just past his hip after she kicked off her heels, bent to scoop them up, and follow along the footpath with Robby outside the big house and heading around back to the water and the footbridge to the guest house.  Going bare foot.  Ever since you were a kid, going bare foot out the door.  It’s a south thing.  She was pure south, packed into four feet and eleven inches.  Cute, too.  The pitch of her voice was higher than she was.

“Can I confide in you?” she asked.  Yewwww.

Okay, Robby said back.

Heinrich waited a tick, then she said it, plain as can be.

“I’m not a fan.”

(Continue reading Chapter Twenty-Five of Blacksmith's Girl.)

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December 13, 2007

Blacksmith's Girl: Chapter Twenty-Four

The man was gone.  What could you say?  Could you say he was going to be missed?  Somebody out there would miss him for sure.  Christi for one, the way she behaved at the memorial service, mascara running and rolling down her tanned cheeks like she had black spores growing out of her eyes.  She made quite an attractive and distinctive presence among the other mourners, few that there were for such a well-known man in the area, there at the starter’s station of the golf course.  It was a more dignified small crowd, Christi excepted, with a wife who didn’t moan a word, barely looked away from the small plaque that was set in stone near the first tee.  A place of honor for the man who dreamed up and built this course.  For the golfers to reflect upon as they placed their bets before their rounds.

Odd place for a funeral.  But what are you going to do?  Good a place as any the immediate family figured.

Where you going to have a funeral if you don’t have a body to bury?

(Continue Chapter Twenty-Four of Blacksmith's Girl and catch up with previous episodes.)

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December 05, 2007

Blacksmith's Girl: Chapter Twenty-Three

Blacksmiths_girlRobby Cochran is a notorious ex-big league pitcher who returns home to his roots in coastal South Carolina to escape the aftermath of a manslaughter charge and a messy divorce. With his future uncertain, and with no place else to go, Robby goes back home to recapture his past.

But the past is a place Robby should’ve stayed away from…

Previous episodes:

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He hadn’t realized that sleep had come. He hadn’t fought sleep, but he was content there to stay in his waking dreams and to guard over her. He had some fear, admittedly, that a face would appear at the window, or a ghostly figure at the foot of the bed. But there was little chance of that. If Carrington would awaken, he wouldn’t come looking around. He’d slink off to bed, or seek out Christi for immediate solace.

The scream woke him.

(Continue reading Chapter Twenty-Three of the serial Blacksmith's Girl.)

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