Fiction Friday: Sneak peak at Death By Ice Cream

Well, the poll has made a fairly strong showing for Death By Ice Cream for the title of my new mystery.  I have to say, I'm still waffling a little.  I really do like The Corpse in the Cooler.  And really the voting is pretty evenly split.  I  may let my Mom decide.

Either way, it's time to reward those who've been helping me decide, or fail to decide, with a sneak preview of the first few pages of the book, as they currently stand.  There are still two or three more steps to go through before this is ready for release (another overall edit to check the changes I made, a read-aloud to find things that just don't sound right, and a final proof reading at the least).  But this is far enough along to share.  So, in place of Flash Fiction Friday, I offer. . .

Sneak Preview Friday!  (Bet you thought I'd go for the alliteration and make it Sneak Preview Saturday.  Ha!  Fooled you!)

DEATH BY ICE CREAM

Chapter One: Everybody Wanted Her Gone

“Curse it, Kitty, do something about that woman!”

To emphasize my point, I pounded my fist on the battered and scarred table between us, banging hard enough to make Maddy’s cell phone jump.  Kitty Padgett flinched, her chair scraping as she tried to shift a bit farther from me.  My hand stung from the blow.  Instead of apologizing, though I felt bad for startling her, I glared at our PTA President and waited. 

“But—” Kitty waved her hands vaguely.  Kitty was my best friend, but I couldn’t deny that sometimes she was way more mouse than cat.  Her lack of spine increased my irritation, so I pushed on.

“If she quits the Yearbook, fine, we’ll manage.  I’ll do it myself it I have to.”  Everyone gasped, shocked by what I had just said.  But it was too late to take it back.  Desperate cases call for desperate measures. 

A chance gripe session among friends had morphed into an emergency meeting of the Orcaville High School PTA.  We four—me and Kitty, Maddy and Carlos—had gravitated to the teachers’ room to plot damage control, and now I’d put my foot in it.  I took a deep breath and stuck to my guns.  I didn’t like to back down, even from myself.  “Letitia LeMoine is boorish, overbearing, and opinionated, and she’s alienating everyone in the PTA.  Heck, everyone on this Island!”

“She sure is.”  That was Carlos Hernandez, our Secretary.  We all looked at him and he shrugged.  “She tells me I am not smart enough to run the Spring Faire.  And that my English is not good enough to be Secretary.”  Carlos spoke with a slight accent, but his English was better than that of most people who post opinions on the Internet.  “I do not need that crap.”

Carlos’s complaint unleashed the feelings Madeleine Takahira had been keeping politely bottled up.  Before Kitty could offer Carlos reassurances that his English was quite good enough for us, Maddy was airing her own gripes.

“She thinks I’m no good!  She says my books are a total mess.”

Kitty and I exchanged glances.  We’d known Letitia LeMoine’s opinion about Maddy’s bookkeeping, but hadn’t known she’d insulted Maddy to her face.  Matters had gotten even worse than I’d thought.  It didn’t matter that Letitia was right about Maddy’s skills as Treasurer.  If anything needed saying, it was Kitty, not Letitia who should have brought it up.  Kitty hadn’t, because Maddy knew she had a problem.  What on earth was LeMoine trying to do, anyway?

“She said she didn’t know anyone could be so incompetent!”  Maddy sniffed and swallowed hard.  I hoped she could keep her tears under control.  Sloppy emotions make me cranky.  “I can’t help it if I have trouble with numbers,” Maddy nearly wailed.  But she didn’t cry.

I took a deep breath, tapped into some store of patience I didn’t know I had, and reached out a hand.  “Okay, Maddy. I’ll help you straighten out the books.  I just wish you’d come to me sooner.”  She pulled out a tissue and blew her nose.  For just a moment, I wondered if she was bothered by more than accusations of incompetence.  I dismissed the idea as soon as I’d thought it.  Mrs. Loudmouth’s bullying was justification enough for tears, at least for someone as sensitive as Maddy Takahira. 

“We were just fine until That Woman came along.”  Maddy’s thoughts echoed my own.

“Yeah,” Carlos agreed. 

“Like I said, Kitty,” I began.

Kitty Padgett sighed.  She knew we were right.  She just hates conflict even more than I hate tears.  “Okay, okay.  You guys are right.  But I hate to do it.”  She eyed me.  As her VP, I’m supposed to do whatever needs doing.  “Can’t you talk to her, JJ?”

“Do you really think that’s a good plan?”

“No.”  She sighed again.  Kitty’d known me for seven years, ever since I came to Pismawallops Island.  She knew tact wasn’t one of my strengths.  She might even have wondered if it was in my vocabulary.  “Okay, I’ll talk to her.  She really does need to back off and let other people work in their own way.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” I encouraged.  “You’re the President.  We do not need someone who makes everyone else want to leave.”

I must’ve been a little firmer in tone than I’d realized, because Annette Waverly, the principal, stuck her blonde head in the door just then, an unseemly wrinkle of concern creasing her carefully made-up face.

“Is everything quite alright?  I thought I heard someone, ah, yelling?”

Nobody was yelling.  Just being . . . emphatic. 

“Everything’s fine,” Kitty assured her before I could say anything to further upset the principal’s equanimity.

“Okay, then.”  Annette’s face reorganized itself into something like a smile.  “I’ll leave you to it, then.”  She withdrew, closing the door gently, in exaggerated contrast to my banging and raised voice.

“Should I have told her about Ms. L?” Kitty wanted to know.

We all shrugged.  Ms. Waverly was new that year and still, in April, something of an unknown quantity.  Nor was the Vice Principal, Elvis Fingal, likely to be much use.  If he were, it would be a first.

“I think it would not be helpful,” said Carlos.  As the school custodian, he was in the best position to know how the principal would react.  “It would just upset her.  You talk to Mrs. L., Kitty, and it will be okay.  You are good with people, you know.”

Kitty sighed, unconvinced by the compliment.  “If only she’d at least learn to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’  But there you are.  If she did, she’d be someone different, wouldn’t she?”  Kitty got to her feet.  “The Orcaville PTA is not going to kowtow to Letitia LeMoine, even if she is from the City, and we’re just Islanders.”  Out here in Puget Sound, Seattle was the Big City, even for those of us up closer to Bellingham.

From what I’d heard, Ms. L. probably was a bit more local than she let on, but I wasn’t going to bring that up just now.  It was enough that Kitty was ready to stand up and put the woman in her place before she could make a complete mess of our PTA.  I just hoped she wouldn’t get all huffy and quit the Yearbook, because I really, really did not want that job.

###

Sneak Peek: Return to Skunk Corners

Instead of Flash Fiction, today I'm giving a sneak peek at the opening of the new Ninja Librarian book, due out August 15: Return to Skunk Corners.

 

First, though the cover isn't finished so I can't do a reveal, I just want to say it will feature this guy:













And, so do some of the stories.  After all, this is Skunk Corners, right there next to Skunk Springs on Skunk Mountain.

So the story opens:

-->

 Skunk corners with no librarian

It didn’t come as any surprise.  When we sent the toughs from Endoline packing without any help from the Skunk Corners librarian, I knew what we’d proven.  I’d known the Ninja Librarian long enough to guess what came next.

Still, it had been a nasty shock when I woke that morning to find an envelope on my kitchen table.  Only one person could’ve snuck in and left it without me waking.  With a sinking feeling, I slit the envelope with my hunting knife, feeling the big brass key inside.  Along with the key to the library was a single line penned on a bit of stationery in the Ninja Librarian’s fussy, old-fashioned handwriting:

It’s yours now, Alice.

Mine?  I knew even less about running a library than I did about running a school.  Which, despite several years in charge of the Skunk Corners school, wasn’t much.  Anyway, I couldn’t run a library and a school, could I?  I raced to the library, meaning to stop him if I had to sit on him, but he was gone.

Just like that, I’d lost my best friend, my teacher, and my mentor, and gained another unwanted responsibility.  If Ninja Tom wanted me to grow up, he’d opted for the sink-or-swim approach.

I was giving some serious thought to sinking.

It wasn’t just me.  In the following weeks my students grew mopey, the mayor nervous, and Tess and her girls cranky.  Maybe not as cranky as me, but they’d lost a friend, too.  Like me, they didn’t have many they could spare.

In short, our town had lost its heart, just when we’d started to learn we had one.

“This is silly,” Tess tried to convince us both.  We were having drinks in her place—Two-Timin’ Tess’s Tavern—shortly before closing a couple weeks after he left.  We sipped our tea from shot glasses.  “It’s not like Tom was one of us,” she argued.  “We got on before he came.  We’ll get on without him.”

“I know,” I said.  “He was just an outsider who came and tried to tell us how to run things.”  It was a good effort, but it didn’t work.  “I was an outsider myself not so long ago. Tess.  What makes me any different from him?”  Tess shrugged.  She didn’t have any answers.

Ninja Tom had come and shown our whole town how to grow up, and that was worth a whole lot more than being born here.  Everything was different because of him, and what I was afraid of—what we all feared—was that without him we couldn’t keep it up.

“I don’t want Skunk Corners to go back to being the sort of town that drives off librarians and raises children who can’t read.  Won’t read, which you gotta admit is worse.”

“I know,” Tess said. 

“That’s why I’ve got so gloomy and cantankerous.”

I suppose I should introduce myself.  Around Skunk Corners I’m known as Big Al, though Tom called me by my given name almost from the first.  That’s one thing Tom hadn’t finished before he left.  I might’ve let him call me Alice—he once kicked me into the street on my hindquarters for backtalk, so I didn’t argue—but he couldn’t make me like the name.  And I didn’t let anyone else use it.  Now that he was gone, no one called me Alice, not even Tess, who dared most things.

Tom hadn’t managed to turn Big Al into a girl.  It should have made me happy.

Later that night, though my heart wasn’t in it, I practiced the drills Tom had taught me. That was another thing he hadn’t finished.  I was no Ninja fighter yet, though I was better set to defend myself than I’d been a year before.  I could maybe handle the sort of trouble-maker we got here well enough.  I’d already kicked one low-down side-winder out of town.  But I’d be no match for someone really mean.

And I didn’t know how to defend Skunk Corners from itself.  Fewer people came to the library now, and I didn’t seem to have Tom’s ability to captivate the children at story time.  Oh, I knew the tricks he’d used in the beginning.  But he hadn’t needed those tricks for long.  His voice could hold them once they’d been quiet long enough to hear it.  Mine held no magic at all.

So I was expecting the worst when disaster hit our town, though what I expected was nothing like what happened.




Notice: This blog is posting itself in my absence.  If you comment, I WILL respond. . . but not for a few weeks.  This does not mean I no longer love you.  It just means I've gone hiking.

R: Return to Skunk Corners

 

Most folks manage a cover reveal, but I'm still struggling with that.  But I wanted to throw out a teaser as we get closer to release for the Ninja Librarian sequel, Return to Skunk Corners.  So here's an excerpt from the first chapter.

It didn’t come as any surprise.  When we sent the toughs from Endoline packing without any help from the Skunk Corners librarian, I knew what we’d proven.  I’d known the Ninja Librarian long enough to guess what came next.

Still, it had been a nasty shock when I woke that morning to find an envelope on my kitchen table.  Only one person could’ve snuck in and left it without me waking.  With a sinking feeling, I slit the envelope with my hunting knife, feeling the big brass key inside.  Along with the key to the library was a single line penned on a bit of stationery in the Ninja Librarian’s fussy, old-fashioned handwriting:

It’s yours now, Alice.

Mine?  I knew even less about running a library than I did about running a school.  Which, despite several years in charge of the Skunk Corners school, wasn’t much.  Anyway, I couldn’t run a library and a school, could I?  I raced to the library, meaning to stop him if I had to sit on him, but he was gone.

Just like that, I’d lost my best friend, my teacher, and my mentor, and gained another unwanted responsibility.  If Ninja Tom wanted me to grow up, he’d opted for the sink-or-swim approach.
I was giving some serious thought to sinking.

So begins the second saga of Skunk Corners, and though things start off a bit gloomy, they look up soon.  Here's a selection from later in the book, when Big Al encounters the most feared beast on the mountain:

I was walking home in the evening coolness, well satisfied with my mission, when I encountered the one thing that scares me.

No, not a bear nor yet a courting fellow—I can cope with those.  This, my nose told me, was much more unnerving.

A skunk.

I froze in my tracks, my eyes swiveling like they were on lantern-poles, trying to spot the critter without making any move that might startle it.

The little black-and-white animal stepped onto the trail right in front of me, and I turned to stone.  I put all my efforts into offering neither threat nor surprise to the thing.  I scarce breathed while the critter looked me over and began to saunter up the trail away from me.  It was while I considered my options—following a skunk didn’t have much appeal, but I needed to get home—that I realized I hadn’t seen our town’s namesake for a long time.

Maybe not since the Ninja Librarian had so expertly ejected one from the library, his first morning in town.

Now, I like animals, and teach my students respect for all the critters, but I can’t say I’d been pining after the skunks.  And I wasn’t any too happy now to realize I’d have to follow one up the trail, or else take to the woods and beat through the brush in the near-dark.

I decided maybe I’d just set a while on a handy tree trunk and think, while Mr. Skunk, or Mrs. Skunk—I didn’t know and didn’t care to get close enough to ask—went wherever he, or she, was going.



If any of you would like to read more, contact me to see about being a Beta reader, as I move into the final editing stages.