by Ninie Hammon
I came into the parlor and Dusty was standing in front of the fireplace looking up at the huge painting that stretches the length of the nine-foot mantel and all the way to the crown molding beneath the 12-foot ceiling. He was staring at it as he has done every time he’s been here, which has been just about every day since Bobo lost her best butcher knife to the evidence room at the county sheriff’s office.
It’s Windy, of course, the day we rode our bikes no hands. To my knowledge—and I’ve looked—there exists no picture of Windy. So there’s no way to be sure. But I don’t think I glamorized her; I just painted what I remember. And the result is the portrait of a breathtakingly beautiful child with a haunting face filled with laughter and the joy of the moment, and with so much pain in her dark eyes it breaks your heart. The painting is called simply Laughs in the Wind.
“Jack Bartley called me today,” I said, “and he is—his words, now—’absolutely delighted’ with the Filbert proofs I sent him.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“Excuse me, did you say, ‘that’s wonderful,’ or ‘my dog just got run over by a truck,’ because it was hard to tell from my end?”
Dusty smiled at what he has come to call my Bobo Humor.
“Well it is wonderful, but I wonder what it means.” He was looking at me with those green eyes again. “Does it mean you’re on track with your book career again?”
“And you’ll be moving back to England soon? That the rest of the question?”
“Yeah, that’s the rest of the question.”
Bobo wandered in to offer dessert. It wasn’t lemon meringue pie. It was banana cream, and I knew there hadn’t been a single banana in that kitchen so I couldn’t imagine what she concocted it with. We both passed and she wandered back out to the kitchen in a pout to eat it by herself.
“Jack didn’t just say he was delighted with my paintings, by the way,” I said casually. “He was also—how did he put it?—’quite taken’ with the novel manuscript I sent him.”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh, yes I did!” I couldn’t read Dusty yet like he could read me, but I was pretty sure he was pleased. “Are you mad at me?”
“Well, jew got some s’plainin’ to do, Annie girl,” he said, in a really bad Ricky Ricardo accent. But then he went back to a previous point. “I thought you said you’d decided to do something radical. And that would be … ?”
“Promise not to laugh?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“You weren’t in scouts. I remember. You were too short.”
“You going to tell short jokes or explain your radical idea?”
“Well … I have a teaching certificate, remember? Elementary education.”
“And I have a seminary degree. Are we about to start dueling diplomas?”
“Nobody likes a smart ass. You know that, don’t you. I was just thinking I might apply for a teaching job in Goshen for the fall. I was an abysmal failure at it the first time because I’d never been a child. I think I might like to take another crack at it.”
The warmth of Dusty’s smile could have melted a whole sack of M&Ms.
“You think you could teach a bunch of little kids?” Bobo, on her little mouse feet had succeeded yet again in sneaking up on me. I didn’t mind it like I used to, though. If she hadn’t sneaked up on Jericho in the kitchen that night, I wouldn’t be here for her to startle.
Before I could respond, she crossed her arms over her flat chest. “Well, attention K-Mart shoppers! Little Annie Mitchell is a’gearin’ up to mold the future leaders of Goshen, Texas.”
“You don’t think I can handle it?”
The two of us had planted our feet and lifted our chins just the same, squared off like two banty roosters. I think Bobo noticed it, because she smiled a funny little smile and backed down.
“I ‘spect you could do it with one eye tied behind your back, Missy,” she said.
When Bobo turned to go, Dusty reached out and took my hand.
She called over her shoulder as she hobbled back toward the kitchen. “‘Course it don’t make me no never-mind one way or the other. I’m going home the end of the week.”
THE END
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Ninie Hammon
Author Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about BLACK SUNSHINE
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After two decades of shame that drove him into a whiskey bottle and left him a homeless, under-a-bridge drunk, Will Gribbins has come home to face his past.
He and his best friend were the only two survivors of the 1980 explosion that killed 27 Eastern Kentucky miners in the Harlan #7 Coal Mine and shattered countless other lives in the close-knit little community of Aintree Hollow. But the two young men escaped the mine that day with more than just their lives. Each carried the burden of a terrible secret about another tragedy that occurred in the mine after the explosion, a secret that destroys the next two decades of Will’s life.
He returns to the hollow for the first time in 20 years for the memorial service on the anniversary of the disaster, but Will doesn’t know his arrival has set in motion a chain of events that will threaten the lives of another crew of miners digging coal in a mile-deep hole under Black Mountain.
As he reconnects with Aintree Hollow, with Granny Sparrow, whose grief has imprisoned her, JoJo, who carries a terrible secret of her own and Jamey, a mentally handicapped boy who carves magical coal statutes, Will doesn’t see the mounting danger. Or that the boy holds the key to it all.
When the fate of innocent miners is again placed in Will’s hands, can he summon the courage he lacked two decades ago? Is he man enough to save them, even if it means he must do the one thing he fears most?
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Author Ninie Hammon
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On a warm May Friday in 1963, a mammoth tornado hurls across the empty plains toward the little town of Graham, Oklahoma. The writhing column of destruction a mile wide and eight miles high is not just on a collision course with the town, but with the lives of four of its residents; each of whom has already planned their own personal rendezvous with death that day.
Jonas Cunningham has reached the end of his rope, now he lives only to free his precious Maggie from the fog of Alzheimer’s. His 16-year-old granddaughter, Joy, is desperate, too. She’s pregnant. And scared. And sees only one way out. Joy’s father, Reverend Mac MacIntosh has lost his wife and his faith and on Friday plans to “kill” his ministry.
But as Mac meets daily with a strange, mystical death row inmate during the final five days of her life, everything begins to change. Set to be executed at five o’clock that Friday, Princess knows things she can’t possibly know about Mac’s life and sees things she can’t possibly see. And she is determined to carry to her grave an incredible secret about the little sister she confessed to beheading 14 years ago.
When the monster twister bears down on them, all four of the people who’d penciled in “death” on their calendars for that day in May actually do make eye contact with dying. But they don’t come to the cross
roads of life and death by the path they’d planned and they don’t leave with the result they expected. And they don’t all survive.
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Author Ninie Hammon
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Somebody shot Jim Bingham, shot him dead on the street in front of his own newspaper office, and now his heartbroken daughter must abandon the world of academic journalism for the real world of running the newspaper he left behind.
But Sarabeth Bingham soon discovers that marijuana-growing has corrupted the idyllic little central Kentucky community where she grew up. The sheriff can’t get a marijuana conviction because the county’s jury pool is tainted. Her cousin grows weed and has lost his wife and daughter to the world of drugs. After three children find dope money in an abandoned building and the dopers kidnap them to get it back, Sarabeth heeds the words on the plaque that has always hung above her father’s desk: “Don’t mess with a man who buys ink by the barrel!”
In the next issue of the newspaper, Sarabeth declares war on dope in a blazing front-page editorial! Now, the growers have to shut Sarabeth up. And dopers fight dirty.
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Author Ninie Hammon
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THE LAST SAFE PLACE.
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In the deepest, darkest midnight of her soul, Gabriella writes a horror story about demons, and then one of them crawls up out of the pages and confronts her face to face. A deranged, fanatical fan who believes he is The Beast of Babylon from her novel turns up at a book signing and then comes after her to claim her as his bride. And to sacrifice her son, Ty, as an blood offering to their unholy union.
Gabriella, Ty and Ty’s grandfather, Theo, the crusty old stand-up comic called Slap Yo Mama Carmichael, run for their lives, back to the only place in Gabriella’s life where she ever felt safe. But once there, she discovers that facing the demons from her past may be harder and more dangerous than facing the one who hunts her.
As Ty and Theo battle their own, personal monsters, Gabriella begins to fall for a man who carries a guilt she can’t even begin to imagine.
The predator who stalks Gabriella and her family tracks them down and corners his prey as a full moon rides high in the night sky and lightning explodes on the mountaintop. Then all their lives and demons collide in a final, apocalyptic celebration of one man’s madness. Gabriella’s only hope lies in the unexplainable power of 2,000-year-old tree. Is it strong enough to save them? Can a single, perfect bristlecone pine somehow determine the fate of them all?
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Sudan 2000.
Hiding in the chaos of a civil war, the Arab government of the largest nation in Africa has practiced a ruthless program of systematic genocide and more than two million southern Sudanese tribal people have been massacred. But American human rights journalist Ron Wolfson isn’t in Sudan to cover the war. He’s risking his life there to chase a different story—reports of a massive government-assisted slave trade.
When Arab Murahaleen guerrillas attack a small village and kidnap a little girl named Akin to sell on the slave market in the North, her father, Idris, goes after her and Ron joins the simple villager in his desperate effort to rescue his child. While Ron’s brother, a U.S. congressman, battles indifference to force international political pressure on the Sudanese government, Ron finds the story he’s been looking for and suffers the brutal retaliation of a slave trader.
On the eve of the sanctions vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, the lives of Ron and Idris hang by a thread, their fate in the hands of a bloodthirsty mercenary and an orphan boy. But even if they survive, is it already too late to save little Akin from the brutal horror her master has panned for her?
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WHEN BUTTERFLIES CRY.
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On August 11, 1969, two anguished voices on opposite sides of the planet cry out in terror at the exact same instant and their desperate pleas release a strange power. That power will change the destiny of a West Virginia family in a strip mined hollow that lies in the shadow of a 300-million-gallon coal slag lake—held in place by a makeshift dam high on the mountainside.
Grayson Addington
…returns from Vietnam to his wife, Piper, and 2-year-old daughter a broken man, ravaged by post traumatic stress syndrome, a chaplain who left his faith in the jungle mud with his massacred unit.
Grayson Addington
…returns from Vietnam to his wife, Piper, and 2-year-old daughter a broken man, ravaged by post traumatic stress syndrome, a chaplain who left his faith in the jungle mud with his massacred unit.
Piper Addington
… doesn’t know her husband anymore. In his absence, she turned to his brother Carter for support. Now, she must choose between them.
Carter Addington
…is in love with Piper and intends to have her by framing the shell-shocked returning soldier for a heinous crime he didn’t commit.
Maggie
…is a mystery. A strange, battered child with amnesia, she shows up on Piper’s porch and instantly bonds to Sadie, a cripplingly shy toddler. When Maggie runs away and takes Sadie with her, the warring brothers must team up to search for them, unaware that Piper’s raging older brother is also in the woods—with a deer rifle, intent on shooting Carter and Grayson on sight.
But something more than chance has brought the child called Maggie to this wounded family. And nothing less than destiny will be fulfilled by her incredible sacrifice…
… on the foggy morning when the makeshift dam on the mountain above them explodes.
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The Memory Closet Dedication
This book is dedicated to a little girl with haunting eyes who vanished from her home in Ft. Knox, Kentucky and was never seen again. And to another little girl who saw it all, and who went to the police when she grew up with the shocking story of what really happened to her little sister.
Ninie Hammon
Ninie Hammon spent 25 years as a professional journalist, worked her way up from a reporter to a publisher who started her own newspaper. But that was before she tried her hand at fiction and discovered making up the facts was waaay more fun than reporting them. She became a novelist then and she has never looked back.
Her first book, a biography published by Penguin Putnam’s Berkeley imprint, was followed by seven novels published by Bay Forest books. Each of her novels is a fast-paced, riveting tale of ordinary people who are forced by circumstances to fight for their lives, gloriously complex characters who grab the reader by the lapels and drag him into the story to live it with them.
Ninie grew up in Muleshoe, Texas, and says she now lives “somewher
e in the sky over Greenland.” She and her husband, Tom, travel back and forth between their home in Louisville, KY and one in the village of Great Linford in Buckinghamshire north of London where Tom directs Young Life in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scandinavia. The couple has six children and eight grandchildren.
Ninie would love to connect with you on her website, niniehammon.com. You can also find there links to other social media where she can chat with you.
THE MEMORY CLOSET
Copyright © 2010 Ninie Hammon
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