Indie Chicks: 25 Women 25 Personal Stories
Page 63
Agents and editors think they know what readers want. They don’t always know. Readers know what readers want, and they’re expressing their wants by buying books written by indie authors. Give yourself a hardy pat on the back if you’ve completed a manuscript, but the big applause goes to our devoted fans and readers. Without them, we would be nothing.
About the Chick
Carol Davis Luce’s first novel, Night Stalker, was also her first sale. “A dandy read,” wrote author Tony Hillerman. It went into three printings and became the flagship for the sub-genre “Woman in Jeopardy” at Kensington Publishers—strong heroines pitted against evil opponents. Reviewers have said of her villains: [Night Prey] “Luce’s portrayal of a psychopathic mountain man is chilling…” [Night Game] “The villain is evil personified.”
In addition to five published novels, Carol’s short story “Shattered Crystal” appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Magazine and Treadmill Tales (audio). E-reads Publications reprinted Night Passage in e-book format and POD. Nonfiction publications include two articles for Writer’s Digest. One article, “Writing Suspense That’ll Kill Your Readers,” was reprinted (second edition) in THE COMPLETE HANDBOOK OF NOVEL WRITING (Writer’s Digest Books)2010.
In The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing 2010, Carol Davis Luce defines tension as “the act of building or prolonging a crisis.” She goes on to give some examples and ends the chapter with this: “How you build that suspense can make the difference between your readers chucking your book for a good night’s sleep or nudging their spouse to say, ‘the suspense is killing me.’”
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Night Widow
Carol Davis Luce
An Excerpt
Chapter 1
Where Are They Now? Washed up? Hiding out? Dead?
SYBIL SQUIRE…
Not dead yet. This stunning platinum blonde will be forever ingrained in our hearts for her femme fatale role in the 1950 Oscar win, The Shady Lady. One flash of her pale blue eyes and men were putty. Seems she hasn’t been hiding all these years. She surfaced briefly this year after police and paramedics were called out to her mansion in the Hollywood Hills. A housekeeper found the Golden Age screen idol unconscious at the bottom of her staircase with a blood alcohol level above .10.
Rehab again or the old folk’s home?
— WashedUpStars.com
Piper Lundberg rushed through the ultra-modern house with the last of her personal possessions. No time for sorting and packing, it was grab and dump into whatever was handy. Almost done, she couldn’t get out fast enough. Gordon was supposed to be boarding a plane for Europe at this very moment, but knowing her soon-to-be ex-husband, she wouldn’t be surprised if he canceled his business trip to ambush her in their Santa Monica home.
Through a front window, she saw her best friend across the street stuffing shoeboxes into the back of her SUV. Lee’s Escalade was already stacked to the ceiling with Piper’s clothes, books, CDs and laptop.
Sweat beaded on her forehead and upper lip. Her heart raced. It was a race to be free. Rounding the corner with the cumbersome recycled carton, Piper slipped on the polished hardwood. The box caught the edge of the doorway between the living room and dining room, spewing its entire contents across the floor. She groaned in frustration, wiped her sweaty palms on the front of her jeans, and dropped to her knees to retrieve the dozens of old video cassettes, DVDs, and mementos. Of all her possessions, this collection meant the most. As her fingers wrapped around a cassette, a black leather dress shoe pressed down on her hand, pinning it and the cassette case to the floor.
Piper jerked her head up. Gordon looked down on her. She expected to see that sanctimonious smirk that had, over the years, come to define him. His expression was hard, stony. When she tried to free her hand, he increased the pressure. She should’ve known it wouldn’t be easy. Gordon didn’t play fair.
“In a hurry, are you?”
She yanked her hand out from under his sole.
Gordon kept his foot on the cassette. He turned his head to stare out the window at Lee who was still struggling to load the SUV.
“Brought the dyke for moral support? Or is it the muscle?”
She bit down on her lip. Gordon knew she hated it when he called Lee it. A transsexual, Lee had made the full male-to-female transition several years ago. Lee Sikes, formally Leroy, was Piper’s first husband.
“I don’t want any trouble.” Piper tried to control her anger. “I don’t want anything of yours. I just want to go.”
Gordon pinched the fabric at his knees, lifted his slacks, then squatted down and picked up the cassette case. He’d just had a haircut. She could see the red skin above his collar where the electric shears had chaffed his neckline.
On his haunches, level with her face, he pinned her with his gaze. “You’ll regret this.”
*
Piper and Lee, with the help of Belle Vogt, had unloaded her belongings from the two cars and carried everything upstairs to the Vogt’s guesthouse above the garage. Piper left Belle and Lee in the driveway talking shop and hurried upstairs. She wanted a few moments to herself in her new home. She crossed the room, dropped an armful of clothes on the pulled-down Murphy bed, and glanced around. Assured she was alone, she made a beeline to the northwest corner window.
The late afternoon sky, recently purged by the hot, dry winds of the Santa Anas, was clear of smog. A red-tailed hawk soared high above hills thick with vegetation, casting a sharp eye below to the yucca plants, greasewood and royal palms for signs of prey. The hawk continued upward, growing smaller, following the winding road to the top near Mulholland where Brando once lived. The hawk dove, disappearing into the thick brush.
The hawk held little interest for Piper. What did interest her was the Mediterranean mansion on the huge lot next door. That she would have a birds-eye view was beyond her wildest expectations. Closest to the six-foot property wall was the pool. A small rose garden in full bloom extended off a brick patio at the rear of the stately house. The house belonged to Sybil Squire.
She scanned the grounds, looking for a glimpse of the owner. Someone was in the pool. Piper leaned closer to the glass. The old woman with platinum hair executed a strong, yet graceful, backstroke across the rectangular swimming pool. Except for a pair of black swim goggles, she was as naked as a newborn.
“What’s got your attention there, Piper? As if I didn’t know.”
Piper spun around.
Belle nimbly leapt over a pile of shoeboxes blocking the entrance. With her pale complexion and dark hair cropped close to her head, her root-beer-brown eyes, innocent and childlike, dominated her China-doll face.
“Busted. I was spying on our neighbor.” Piper turned back to the window. “Did you know she swims in the nude?”
“Really? I can’t see the pool from the house.” Despite a quarter century of living in the US, Belle’s British lilt infused her words. “Is she alone?”
“In the pool? Yes.”
Belle wove her way through the boxes and bags to stand alongside Piper.
“Oh, my, not bad for an old babe, eh?” Belle peered down. “But those goggles…what is that? Sort of spoils the au natural effect, don’t you think?”
“Um. Maybe she doesn’t expect an audience?”
“Are you kidding? Everyone in these hills has a telescope, and believe me, they’re not pointed at the stars. At least not the heavenly stars.” Belle chuckled. “Bet you didn’t expect to see her so soon, now did you? Or so much of her.”
“I expected her estate to be a fortress, hidden behind towering walls and gates, like the one in her movie, Black Ribbon.”
Belle bent at the waist and picked through the carton of old video cassettes. “All of her flicks? Impressive. Some of these you can’t even get on digital download.”
“T
hey were my grandmother’s. Instead of the family flatware, I inherited her collection of Sybil’s movies. I’ve had them all converted to DVDs, but I can’t part with these original cassettes.”
“You must have every film our platinum widow made.”
“Not quite. Every one but Judgment Day.”
“That was, what, her last one?”
“Yes. It was pulled right after its release.”
“Maybe out of respect for the loss of husband number three.”
“Four. He was her fourth husband.”
Belle sorted through the cassettes. “What is it about her, Piper, that you fancy so much?”
Piper took a moment to answer. “She helped my grandmother Ruth through a very hard time.”
“Helped her how?”
“Sybil took her in after the fire. Gave her and my mother a place to stay when they had nowhere to go. Nana was a seamstress in the fifties there at RKO where Sybil worked.”
“They stayed there, next door?”
Piper nodded. “It was a long time ago. My mother was eight. All she could remember about the house was the swimming pool. Nana thought the sun rose and fell on Sybil. Said she was her savior.”
Piper looked out at the pool. It was empty. A trail of wet footprints darkened the concrete and bricks leading to the back door.
“Belle, has she been alone all these years, hiding out?”
“I wouldn’t call living in the Hollywood Hills hiding out exactly. Of course, from the main house we have a different view than from here. And see there, her house sets cockeyed on the corner, so our front entrances aren’t even on the same street.”
“You live next door to her. You must know something about her.”
“She fancies birds. Canaries. Keeps them in the sunroom, there…off the patio. Dr. J tries to imitate them. It’s not a pleasant sound.” Dr. J, short for Dr. Jekyll, was the Vogt’s twelve-year-old Goffin cockatoo.
Piper put her ear to the open window and closed her eyes. Yes, she heard them, a chorus of songbirds.
“Does she go out? Have people in?”
“I don’t know, Piper darling. She keeps to herself and even if she didn’t, I’m not one for coffee-klatches or chitchatting over the fence. Following the lives of tragic former leading ladies is not my bag.”
Belle gathered up a half dozen cassettes. “Where do you want these?”
“On the bookshelf. Where’s Lee?”
“She made her excuses and dashed.”
“Manual labor is not Lee’s bag.”
With Belle’s help, they tucked Piper’s few possessions away in record time. She had taken only personal effects and things recently purchased with her own money. Anything bought with Gordon’s money was Gordon’s. She didn’t want anything of his, only her freedom. Would he try to keep that from her as well?
The guesthouse matched the main Tudor-style house. The polished cherry wood cabinets, window casings, and hardwood floors enhanced the smooth lines of the ivory Kreiss couch and leather club chairs. Belle’s love of feathered creatures was reflected in the hanging prints of exotic birds—cockatoos mostly—and throw pillows covered in a vivid bird-and-bamboo-patterned fabric. A cherry wood screen separated the living area from the bedroom area, which was a Murphy bed on the north wall.
In less than one day, Piper felt more at home here than she’d ever felt in Gordon’s model-home-like house. For her, the comforting smell of old leather and the aged area rug overrode the aseptic odor of fresh paint, granite, and sharp angles. The guesthouse, once an office for Belle’s husband, Micki, was now Piper’s home. House-sitting while the Vogt’s were in Hong Kong gave her a three-month time cushion to get her life together.
Belle brushed her palms together and looked around the studio apartment. “There, I’ve done all I can do. The rest is up to you.”
“Belle, I can’t thank you enough.”
“Nonsense. You’re doing us a favor,“ Belle said. “We’ll see you at eight for dinner. Don’t bother to knock. The side door will be open.”
An unexpected wave of dizziness hit Piper. Belle, standing beside her, froze. Just then the floor beneath them came alive, vibrating. She knew instantly what was happening. Any resident of California would know. The metal handles on the built-in cabinets rattled, jingling like a wall of tiny bells. She grasped Belle’s hand in a death grip and stood perfectly still, afraid any movement might make it worse. There was nothing she could do to stop it. Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. The floor became solid again. The metal handles settled against the wood.
“There, there, Piper, nothing to fear. A teaser.” Belle disengaged her hand from Piper’s and rubbed her fingers. She patted Piper’s hand. “Sneaky buggers, those.”
*
At a quarter past eight, Piper walked across the concrete driveway to join the Vogts and their guests for a small informal dinner party. A late-model car with tinted windows cruised up the street and slowed as it passed the Vogt’s driveway. There were already two cars parked in the driveway and no room for a third. The car accelerated and continued up the hill.
Micki Vogt greeted her at the side door with a big hug, as though she’d come across town instead of across the driveway. Micki was a film producer. Four Academy Award nominations and an Oscar for his last picture had thrust him onto the fast track in the industry. Belle, ten years his senior, the most together person she knew, maintained their relationship like a mechanic maintains a high performance racecar. They were the perfect couple. Piper envied them their solid, twenty-year marriage, made more enviable by the fact that her own second marriage was down the toilet.
“One of your guests looks lost, or they’re searching for a parking space,” Piper said.
“No guests of ours. Everyone is here.”
Belle was telling the story of James Dean and the lovesick jumper when they entered the living room. Rumor had it that in the fifties the Vogt’s English Tudor belonged to a wealthy studio executive whose starlet wife, so distraught by the death of James Dean, dove from a letter on the Hollywood Sign, following Peg Entwistle’s lead some twenty years earlier. The rumor, though never substantiated, was a lively conversation starter at all the Vogt’s parties.
Belle stopped in midsentence. “Here’s our dear friend, Piper.”
A man Piper’s age sat on an overstuffed chair. The unattached male. A flash of eagerness sparked when their eyes met. The floating male was Eric Billing. When he shook her hand, he held on with both hands until Piper pulled it away. Piper silently groaned. She suspected Belle of attempting to matchmake, something she wasn’t buying into. Not that she didn’t like men, she did. She hoped to resume a social life someday, but not just yet.
Belle introduced her to Jane Hill and her young lover, Melody, no last name, just Melody. Jane was one of those women who went out of her way to look unattractive, relying on money and professional status to get her young, starlet partners. Her gray, frizzy hair, streaked with yellow, was pulled into a sloppy chignon at the nape of her neck. Her deep red lipstick bled into the creases in her upper lip. White pet hairs stuck to her designer pantsuit.
The first chance she got, she followed Belle into the kitchen. From the large cage in the alcove of the bay window, she heard a deep, rakish chuckle. Dr. Jekyll lifted his claw, bobbed his head, and said, “Nice rack, babe.”
Piper looked down at the low neckline of her blouse and laughed. “You made me look, you dirty bird.”
“Pretty boy,” he said.
“No, not a pretty boy. A dirty bird.”
He chuckled.
Belle laughed and handed her a tray of lobster-stuffed mushroom caps. “He’s just expressing the obvious. You look gorgeous. When I think of all those wasted years with that bloody scoundrel, I want to cry. You deserve so much better than him.”
For years, Piper assumed the Vogt’s had been the ones to distance themselves from her and Gordon. When Piper ran into Belle at an art gallery in Brentwood and told her that sh
e was leaving her husband of five years, Belle had whooped and immediately offered Piper the guesthouse. She also put her in touch with an attorney friend.
“I know you mean well,” Piper said, “but I’m not looking for a love connection. At least not until the bloody scoundrel is out of my life. I meet with the lawyer on Monday.”
“Oh lighten up. I was simply trying for more balance, boys to girls. Four women to one man is a bit much, even for Micki. Anyway, Eric’s not your type.”
She wondered what her type was. Her first husband had exchanged his jockey shorts for lace panties, and her second husband his sheep clothing for a wolf hide. The two couldn’t have been more unalike in every aspect. “Do I have a type?”
“Yes, you just haven’t found him yet.”
At the dinner table, the topic of the trembler earlier that afternoon opened the dinner conversation.
“I’m so used to the ground shaking, I merely assume I’m falling in love again,” said Jane, the producer of women’s documentaries. She slipped a hand under the glass tabletop to squeeze the bare thigh of her female companion.
“Is it earthquake season already?” Micki’s crack got the expected laughs.
Eric Billing, a director of slasher movies, asked what Piper did. She answered quickly, eager to move the topic away from earthquakes.
“Film editing. Freelance, mostly.”
“What projects have you worked on?”
His Nordic good looks reminded her of Gordon and left her cold until she noticed the tiny gap between his two front teeth. A flaw she found charming in this age of perfectly spaced, dazzling white teeth.
“Well, not much…lately. I’ve been out of the loop for awhile.” These people had been discussing current and critically acclaimed projects. Her last noteworthy endeavor had been five years ago—’a lifetime in this business.
“Like most film editors, Piper is being modest.” Micki brushed at a black eyebrow. “Having to work in the shadow of egotistical producers, such as myself, they don’t expect much recognition. Before her husband locked her away in the ivory tower, she was, and is, quite a gifted editor. She cut Cromnon’s The Last Clock, and my Devil’s Due. She can spot a dead frame—trimming time is her gift. In fact, Piper will start cutting my documentary as soon as we leave for Hong Kong.”