Heartstrings in B-Flat Minor

by Scott Johnson

  Heartstrings

  in

  B-flat Minor

  SCOTT JOHNSON

  HEARTSTRINGS IN B-FLAT MINOR

  Copyright © 2017 Scott Johnson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  iUniverse

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  Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-5320-2484-9 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5320-2486-3 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5320-2485-6 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017910498

  iUniverse rev. date: 07/17/2017

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Makeup Is Us

  Chapter 2 Uncle Austin

  Chapter 3 No Rest For The Weary

  Chapter 4 Look Out Below!

  Chapter 5 American Cuisine

  Chapter 6 Ktc

  Chapter 7 Ja Dreamin’, Mon

  Chapter 8 Roe Yourself Gently

  Chapter 9 Aloha, Mom

  Chapter 10 Mexican Standoff

  Chapter 11 Reality, The Present Tense

  Chapter 12 Istanbul …

  Chapter 13 … Or Bust

  JJ,

  to this day, I turn around looking, and you’re not there

  Prologue

  You think you know someone. It could be a sibling you’ve known since birth—yours or theirs—or the BFF would-be sibling you never had or anybody else. Take your pick; it really doesn’t matter. Then think again.

  Remember that a lost soul, deep down, retains the essence you thought you knew. So either love the person back from the ledge or protect yourself in a deadly clinch. Neither way comes easy.

  Know that cautionary tales spring from life. Listen. Learn.

  Chapter 1

  MAKEUP IS US

  An overwhelming presence of snow puts a hard edge to the Windy City where a lone CTA bus crawls south with caution on Sheridan past Belmont’s dead traffic lights malfunctioning in the cold. Otherwise desolate, this major thoroughfare is devoid of morning rush hour traffic. Eerily, it’s as though half the city’s residents have called in sick to work—or at least half of those lucky enough to have jobs from which to be absent. Visible through the frost-encrusted windows of the southbound bus are the faint silhouettes of four passengers inside. One of them is a stylish black man in his midforties, Sterling Jackson, though for introductory purposes he prefers Dr. Sterling Jackson.

  Sterling’s fine suit and topcoat attest to the apparent heights he’s reached from humble Cabrini-Green origins. Sometimes he still rides the bus since he has never mentally recovered from a childhood car accident and doesn’t drive. Bound for Lincoln Park, Sterling is making his first foray from his spacious Lake Shore Drive condo since the blizzard hit. Tropical images of where he’d rather be are tempered by his having to wear insulated gloves inside the bus, thanks to a broken heater. Stuck here with numb toes, he is unimpressed that this ghost town of a city, the city that allegedly works, seems unable to do better than just cope with its present situation.

  Shut down, he thinks. How like my own circumstances. Financial woes, as with the city, have Sterling edgy. The fact is, since adolescence, he often has worried about where his next buck will come from. Earning a living seemed like an insurmountable task. It still often does, notwithstanding all his apparent success. Expenses rise; clients come and go; prospecting never ends. How to start and restart, where and when? “Same old,” he mutters, reflecting on the constant need for money.

  Despite his well-hidden self-doubt, Sterling has managed over the years to earn a pretty healthy, if occasionally streaky, living, all on the edge of the law. When he has prospered, it mostly has been thanks to the kindness of ladies who became lovers and then investors of a sort, though not always in that order. No matter how brilliant or esteemed these ladies may have been in their daily walks of life, all have been plain suckers in Sterling’s conniving eyes. He figures the need to find enough such suckers matches the monetary production pressures put upon any number of legitimate businesspeople.

  Another day, turn another dollar, he mentally coaches himself, not forgetting for a second that he’s down to one main meal ticket. And that one’s getting shaky. Keeping those dollars trickling in is the goal behind Sterling’s bus ride through an arctic twilight zone. He closes his eyes, shutting out from sight the surrounding snowpack. However, two annoying cell phone conversations from behind require that he bring on a full meditative state to block them from his consciousness. Through his self-hypnosis, even the mammoth vehicle’s metallic grunts and frozen groans soon fade away.

  Flashes of Jamaica cross his mind, taking him back willfully to where and when he first learned self-hypnosis. It was there and then he’d also learned stealthy techniques for hypnotizing others. The memories warm him against the layers of cold inside the unheated bus. “Those were the days,” he recalls, smiling wanly behind closed eyes.

  Farther down Sheridan, past Diversey in a tiny Lincoln Park condo with a bedroom view of the lake, a weary traveler has just returned home. Sheryl Taylor battles jet lag, unsuccessfully attempting sleep. A product of Chicago’s white-bread North Shore, she moved to the city after college and has never looked back. City life has been more in keeping with her globe-trotting career and a need to be handy to either airport. A head-turning blonde, fortyish being the new thirty, Sheryl is only hours removed from having touched down at O’Hare—thankfully so, after having safely shepherded her tour group out of Tahrir Square’s protest pandemonium.

  “I’m a hero!” she laughs aloud to herself, yawning as daylight fights the blinds.

  She feels a state of semisleep possibly coming on, and this experienced traveler believes the mind never really sleeps anyway, so at times like this, a person should make sure to rest the body. Meditatively secure now that she is back in her own familiar bed, Sheryl finds her restless mind returning to Frankfurt, where she connected to her homebound flight two days ago after a hair-raising flight out of Cairo.

  Frankfurt, a bustling minimetropolis, is a major hub for European travelers that long has been the scene of carefree tours for Sheryl. It also was where as a young student at Goethe University she cut her teeth on travel and adventure. She had only one compressed summer semester there, but she fondly recalls diving headlong into life beyond the Midwest, deftly handling long days including studies in a language other than English.

  In Frankfurt, she also discovered firsthand the thrill of mingling with foreign men so different from any she’d ever known, men far removed from her undeniably sheltered world. The mere sight of some of these young men, many of them dark-skinned students from favored backgrounds around the globe, like hers, flushed her fair face and fluttered her heart. “Those were the d
ays,” she recalls, wanly smiling, eyes closed.

  Her innermost thoughts center on dearest Ilkin Kahn, of Istanbul. “If only we could have …” She fantasizes about overcoming the obstacle of being worlds apart. Abruptly flipping the off switch on Ilkin, Sheryl turns her concerns to the actual man in her life, hoping he’s as anxious to see her as she is to see him. After wondering whether he’s gotten her texts since she touched down at O’Hare, she briefly worries he might be in trouble, or in a hospital. But she quickly ditches such concerns given that she’s been home only a matter of hours; there’s no need to be so anxious over their reunion, even if absence may have made her heart grow fonder. “Quit acting like a schoolgirl,” she lazily reminds herself, happy just to be alive. “Get some sleep. He’ll pop up.”

  Nights in lockdown at the Egyptian hotel remain fresh in her head, easily pushing thoughts of any man to the periphery. There were enough close calls in Cairo to last anyone’s lifetime. There were highs and lows and moods and fears beyond imagination, yet it wasn’t even her first wild experience in Cairo. She is determined it will be her last. No more Egypt! And there might be some others added to that list too.

  Maybe survival comes with a warning. It’s gotten too crazy everywhere to remain active in the international field, she decides. Perhaps it’s time to step behind the scenes, take up that desk the boss has offered. She can do local tours on the side—live at a slower pace and not out of a suitcase, at least for a while. “I have to sort all this out,” she pledges. She also desperately needs to turn around shaky personal finances that didn’t autocorrect while she was in Egypt. Rolling over to count sheep, she mutters, “I can never get ahead.”

  Outside, blocks away on the incoming bus, Sterling remains transfixed on his bouncing seat. Mentally, he’s way beyond Jamaica by now, having drifted back to even earlier times right here in Chicagoland—which, despite current evidence to the contrary, does have its share of warm sunny days. He’s basking in such days now, north-suburban days, when he and the target of today’s unannounced visit-to-come first met. Life was so much easier then, he tells himself. Anyone would agree.

  Today’s target is Sheryl. Despite Sterling’s need to spin her more yarns about continued court delays in lawsuits against his beleaguered but promising company, in which she has money, he can’t help but admire how she must have trooped through this most harrowing expedition of her touring career. She’s been all over the news the last few hours, with testimonials pouring in from tourists she helped survive and escape Cairo. I’ll play it worshipful, he decides, strategizing.

  For her part, Sheryl, were she not counting sheep, also easily could be reliving those long-ago early days with Sterling. Occasionally, during bouts of insomnia, her thoughts do slip way back to those very days. Such thoughts always trigger others, including musings over all the what-could-have-beens and sighs over the ones that got away during all these years tied up with, and invested in, Sterling. Other memories too painful to entertain right now fight for attention, but she staves off tears and pushes them aside. “It has to work in the end, Lord, but soon,” she prays randomly but fervently.

  Counting sheep isn’t working, as expected. Insomnia takes hold, and her thoughts drift to how she and Sterling met. “My God, Y2K seems like a lifetime ago.” Back then, having just done her junior collegiate year abroad, Sheryl had a lifetime of hope ahead of her.

  Looking for a little pocket money and a chance to flesh out her résumé, Sheryl has taken a summer job at a packaging plant not far from her suburban home. A pampered North Shore girl, she finds the factory’s whir of machinery quaint. Overwhelmingly naive she is, especially for someone who already has traveled widely.

  Makeup Is Us has an employee roster top-heavy with females, especially during peak production in the summer season, with inventories to build for the approaching holidays. Hence, every summer, the cosmetics company’s plant teems with young coeds working through school breaks. A few lucky college guys who have stumbled upon the idea also work there, surrounded by young women.

  One rainy day after work, Sheryl makes for the company’s parking lot under cover of an umbrella. Crossing the street near a bus stop, she spots one of those lucky college guys just missing a bus. At this point to her, he’s just a familiar face around the plant. He ducks into the bus stop shelter, becoming its sole occupant. Sheryl reaches the bus stop and leans inside. “Need a ride?”

  “Hey,” he responds, seemingly caught off guard. “That’s tempting, but I can’t impose. Thanks for the offer, though. Very cool.”

  “What’s your hang-up with my offer?”

  “It’d be a long ride. I couldn’t put you out like that.”

  “You’ve already said that. Try something new. I’ll give you one last chance.” She smiles. “Want a ride?”

  He looks for a bus coming in the rain and sees none. “Guess I’d be a fool to turn down that offer.”

  Lightning cracks nearby, and thunder rumbles in the distance. The rain picks up its intensity. Sheryl grabs the young man by the forearm and pulls him under her umbrella. “Let’s get to the car! This umbrella has a steel shaft!”

  They run to the lot, splashing all the way to Sheryl’s vintage Renault Dauphine. She opens the front passenger door for her coworker, shielding him with the umbrella as he gets inside. By the time she’s dashed around to the driver’s door, he’s figured out how to unlock the foreign contraption. She jumps into the tiny interior as another bolt of lightning strikes.

  “Holy moly,” she yells, “that was too close for comfort!”

  He laughs. “Yeah, but where’d you come up with this car?”

  “You like it? Let’s just say I’m grateful for the transportation—and that it’s a long story.” She starts the balky engine. It sounds like an eggbeater. “Which way?” she asks.

  “Take a left out of the lot.”

  She throws the stick into first and heads for the street entrance. The eggbeater revs as she sloppily shifts into second to pull out into traffic. Then it really winds up as she times her shift into third to just get them through an intersection on the yellow. At forty-five miles per hour, the engine sounds pushed to its limits.

  “What about hitting fourth gear, girl?”

  “It only has three—this is as good as it gets!”

  “You’re kidding. They allow this on the roads?”

  “No restrictions,” she intones with a chuckle.

  They putter along through a railroad underpass with water splashing as high as the roof. A bus passing in the opposite direction throws up a wall of water for them to pierce. Water forces its way past Sheryl’s vent window, which she cracked open earlier to help the defroster clear the interior’s humidity. Everything is wet, including them.

  “Man,” says her passenger, showing genuine signs of nervousness. “I might’ve been wiser to wait for the damn bus.”

  “What’re you so nervous about?”

  He hesitates before answering. “I was in a bad wreck as a kid. My parents were killed. The other driver too. And it was all Dad’s fault. I watched as the whole thing developed. So I’m not only a bad passenger, but I have no desire to ever drive, either.”

  Sheryl takes her eyes off the road, locking them for a moment with her passenger’s. “I’m so sorry,” she says with empathy that makes him flush. “You poor thing.”

  “Hey, I’m not complaining,” he says. “Just is what it is.”

  Sheryl refocuses on traffic and the treacherous conditions.

  “But thanks,” he adds.

  She senses his embarrassment and keeps looking down the road. “Well, anyway … I can understand how my driving might make you nervous. Sometimes it makes me nervous. From now on, I’ll be keeping my hands at ten and two and my eyes dead-ahead where they belong.”

  “Sounds good by me.”

  It dawns on her that they still don’t know
each other’s names. “So I’m Sheryl. Sheryl Taylor.”

  “Sterling, Sterling Jackson. Where do you call home?”

  “Hubbard Woods. I’m back with my folks for the summer.”

  “Oh, I see—Hubbard Woods. How nice for y’all. I suppose you went to New Trier.”

  “Good guess, but wrong—try Shoreline Country Day School.”

  “Of course,” he chuckles. “I should’ve known.”

  “It’s not so hoity-toity as you’d think.”

  “Sure … right.”

  “Well,” she laughs in acquiescence, “at least in our minds it wasn’t, sort of—but of course, we all were rebels in our own minds, like kids anywhere. What did we know?”

  “Makes sense,” he agrees.

  “Where’d you graduate?”

  “Ever hear of Cermak High?”

  “Sounds kind of vaguely familiar, I think.”

  “Let’s just say it’s no country day school. They sometimes serve bullets with lunch.”

  “How educational for you, I’m sure,” she deadpans, not knowing what else to say. The Edens Expressway entrance ramp looms ahead.

  “Do you take this thing on expressways?” he asks.

  “It’ll take us wherever we need to go,” she assures him.

  “Then let’s go for it, I guess,” he says not so assuredly.

  Sheryl floors it as they head down the ramp toward already-building rush-hour traffic. The little engine winds up, and sweat beads up on Sterling’s forehead as they watch for an opening into the highway’s flow. A spot magically does materialize between two semitrailer trucks. She guides the Renault into the leading semi’s slipstream, essentially drafting behind it. Sterling’s white-knuckle posture betrays his apparent fear, and he exhales in relief.