Monday December 14th
“Karen?” Jean knocked on the bedroom door. “I’ve got some dinner if you’re, you know, hungry.”
Silence
“I could just leave the plate outside the door, you know, with all the others.”
Silence.
“Karen, it’s been three days. Listen honey, I know that was the last straw in a whole barn of straw bails, but… It’s not like we’re strangers to… “
The
door cracked open. From the dark a raspy voice cleared it’s throat. “Frosted Flakes, family size, whole milk, one gallon.”
“That’s my girl.” Jean said with relief.
Not everyone had been as supportive. Bob been calling with divorce issues, Karen didn’t take those calls. Her boss had been calling with work issues. She didn’t take those calls either. She was laid-off on her third day out of work. Jean gave her the news. There was no reaction.
Even Jean, in her frustration had uttered the words “just a dog,” once through the closed door. There was no one that could understand what Jewel meant to her. No one could, except…
Karen got out of bed and went through the cardboard boxes that littered her sister’s extra room till she found her books and quickly took them out one by one. Under her high school yearbook, there it was.
FANNY ARBUCKLE
HARVEST
Book III In the Persephone Series
Persephone, of course, was the popular book series featuring the quirky kick-ass modern day ninja “Persie”. The series had four books: “Seed”, “Overworld”, “Harvest”, and “Underworld”, one for each season. Fanny Arbuckle was Karen’s favorite author of all time. Persephone was her favorite series of all time, and Harvest was her favorite book.
She thumbed through the pages to be sure. There it was. Persie’s faithful dog Homer, had been slain by her enemies during a battle. He had sacrificed himself to save her. Many of Fanny’s faithful readers had jumped ship after she killed-off such a key character. Karen herself wondered why she had done it, but read on and continued to love the series.
Persie Pruitt was not your typical heroine, she was someone that Karen could love. She kicked ass sure enough, but she was also funny, whimsical and even a bit accident prone. Anne of Green Gables meets Lara Croft. In an magazine interview Fanny had described Persie as “crimefighter by principle, homebody by choice”. She went out into the world to make things right, but preferred a cup of tea, a warm fire and a good book to any adventure. Karen understood Persie and it seemed that Fanny Arbuckle understood Karen.
Karen took the book back to bed snuggled in around the covers and started reading from the beginning. The hours and the chapters flew by.
Chapter VII
After standing the cot on it’s end Persie was able to jump up and reach the high basement cell window. A couple of attempts later and she got her hands on the bars as hauled herself up so she could see the street at ground level. She whistled softly. Homer padded out from behind a dumpster where he had been hiding.
“Good boy Homer.” The German shepherd gave her fingers a friendly lick where they grasped the bars. “They took all my hairpins Homer, can you believe it? I guess they’ve heard about me. So, like, I need some hairpins.” Persie freed one of her hands to show her faithful friend her unbound locks of hair. She made a face. “See, all messy, blech. I need my hair pins. Go get ‘em boy!”,
Homer shot off through the alley and out into the street. This was a long shot, but at the moment it was all she had. Persie jumped down and carefully returned her cot to it’s proper position in case the thugs returned. Now she had to wait and hope that Homer returned before Dr. Snow did.
Surprisingly soon after that she heard Homer sniffing at the window. She hauled herself up again to see her smiling dog with a small pile of very wet bobby pins on the window sill. “Oh good boy, good boy! How on Earth did you manage… You know what, I don’t wanna know. Sit tight, I'll be out of here in a jiffy.”
Persie dropped ninja silent to the cell floor and listened close for the guard. She could hear slow breathing with a little rasp at the end of each breath.
“Snoozeville!”
With her Sonny and Cher T-shirt, she wiped the Homer slime off the bobby pins, bend them open to the proper angle and went to work on the cell door lock. The mechanism was heavier than most of the locks she had picked, she broke three hair pins in her first efforts.
“Last one,” she whispered. Taking a single hairpin from her pocket. “Letsee, if I bend it backward instead of forward it’ll be stronger… or weaker. Oh well, here goes.”
Persie inserted the new turning pin and applied a little pressure. With her other hand she placed the tumbler pin and started pushing them up one-by-one. The first tumbler clicked and the lock rotated ever so slightly. The next two tumblers followed not too long after, but with each one cleared it took more force to rotate the lock before the last tumbler fell away. Sweat began to form on her brow and her fingers were getting a little slick themselves. She used her Left hand to wipe her brow, but she couldn’t dare allow her right hand a break without letting all the tumblers fall down. She’d have to start over if they did.
“Good evening Dr. Snow”
“Good Evening Henry. How’s our little guest?”
“Wrapped up tight like a package sir,”
“Not yet she isn’t.”
“Indeed sir.”
“Give me a minute to settle in, then bring her in here.” The Doctor pointed to sturdy chair in the center of the room.
“Yes sir.” Henry said with a wicked smile. He took a pair of handcuffs and a long rag from a drawer and headed for the basement.
Persie froze when she heard the approaching footsteps. Her heart raced.
The sleeping guard nearly fell out of his chair when Henry slapped his cap clean off his head.
“I, I’m sorry sir must have dozed off.”
“Well you just dozed yourself off a job. Get up! Let’s go.”
Persie breathed again when she heard the voices fade into the distance. There was one more tumbler to go. It was now or never. She worked her pins until she felt the lock give with a clunk. Using both pins she turned the lock the rest of the way. The latch released and the door swung open.
“Piece of cake,” she said. Her Converse high tops tiptoed down the hall barely stirring the air.
She easily picked the lock of the door leading from the basement and opened it just a crack. A security camera at the end of the hall was focused on the door. She closed the door and looked around her. A guard’s jacket and cap hung on a some hooks at the bottom of the stairs.
Persie returned to the top of the stairs and adjusted her new hat so the brim covered most of her face. She opened the door wide and walked down the hall and past the camera with the night stick swagger of an Irish beat cop. Her ninja posture returned as soon as she was clear of the camera. Though she had been blindfolded when they brought her here she remembered a long narrow hallway that led from the entrance.
And there it was, a long passageway with a single door at the end. Persie peered around the corner. The coast was clear, for the moment.
“No turning back now, might as well go for it.”
Persie floated down the passage as fast as she could with breaking into to a run. She was almost to the end when she saw a figure silhouetted in the frosted glass window of the door. There was no nowhere to go!
Jean knocked on her door before peeking in. “Your last paycheck.” she said pulling an envelope out from the other mail.
Jean made small talk in the doorway while Karen opened the envelope. She glanced at the net pay. her eyes went wide.
“Gee, this is a lot more than usual.”
“Lemme see.” Jean said. “Wow, you make this much?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Maybe it’s a mistake”. Jean scanned the pay stub. Oh. Um sweetie, did you have vacation time?”
“No, not at my level.”
“Guess again. You did according to this.” Jean pointed to a line on her stub. “You accrued 128 hours of vacation time and apparently never took any, they have to pay you for it when you leave, that's the law.”
“It must be some kind of mistake,” Karen said.
“Let them worry about that, it’s right here in black and white.”
“Wow!”
“What are you going to do with it.” Jean said handing the check back to her sister.
Karen looked at the figure again.
“I should give it to the kids.”
“Yeah, that’s mighty noble of you,” Jean said, “but the kids are about to have Christmas and Bob’s already going to spoil them with guilt gifts. You’d just be playing into that, or at least look like you are.”
“I guess.”
“You need to spend it on you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, dummy. For once in your life do something for you, the one who’s just been through hell, hello!”
“I can’t.”
“I’m making you.”
“You can’t.”
“Watch me!”
Chapter VIII
Henry whistled and twirled the handcuffs from a finger all the way down the hall. Persie’s head dangled down from where she had spider-walked up the walls to the ceiling her hands extended against the right wall and her feet against the left. Her eyes followed the henchman. She held her breath. All he had to do was look up and it would be all over.
As soon as the door closed behind him she eased her way to the floor. She breezed through the front lobby like a ghost. There was the receptionist at the desk, but to a ninja like Persie, it was hardly a challenge to sneak past the weak-minded girl whose face was deep in her phone.
Almost there! She opened the doors to freedom. The Sunlight blinded her briefly.
“Why Miss Pruitt, didn't you think that leaving without saying goodbye might hurt my feelings?” said Dr. Snow.
Persie snapped into combat stance. She instantly took in her surroundings and established several possible escape routes and half a dozen tactical scenarios. She heard the door open behind her. Henry’s oversized figure was unmistakable in her peripheral vision. She revamped her tactics and decided on an escape route that was least likely to go horribly wrong.
People are wildly unpredictable in a fight, especially since she’d never gone up against these jerks before. There are so many parameters of experience, perception and, more than anything, emotion and adrenaline. When you form a plan there’s a million ways that fate and your opponent can screw it up. One must always improvise to the music of combat and change key in half a heartbeat. There are however a short list of textbook predictabilities when face to face with a human male that wants to put you in handcuffs and God knows what then.
- The temporary paralysis of the human male when suddenly and unexpectedly faced with bare breasts.
- The less temporary paralysis when kicked solidly in the balls.
- His incorrect assumptions about the laws of Gravity.
Karen spun around to face her closest problem, Henry the Huge. She raked her T-shirt skyward taking her bra along for the ride. As it is written, Henry’s mind short circuited for half a second, never mind that he was gay. That was all the time she needed.
A kick to the balls is rarely done correctly. The finer points are usually lost to the fact that, like pizza and sex, testicle punting done poorly still works pretty well. In Persie’s situation however "pretty well" was not going to send this hulk of a man to the happy land of stars and tweeting birds for very long.
Using the foot is wrong. Though it might extend your pain-inflicting reach a few inches, it is a better strategy to get half step closer to your opponent and shut that puppy down by crunching those nuts between the hardness of your shin and his pelvic arena at a nice perpendicular angle.
Just as Henry’s mind began to detach from the breasts before him, Persie’s right leg gave a mighty Radio City Rockettes salute to his genitals and he wilted like tissue paper in a rain storm.
Dr. Snow was the next problem. He was closing in fast. The boob thing only works well at close range and it had lost its element of surprise. Still in her camp was the fact that he, like most people, operated on the assumption that gravity would confine Persie to a two dimensional fighting arena.
Silly rabbit.
Persie jumped up and used Henry’s doubled-over posture as a stepping stool. First his knee then his back. She leapt up from there and grabbed onto the light support over the door. From there she could descend on the Doctor with a kick that would leave him unconscious. then he pulled out a gun.
Time to change keys.
She quickly swung herself up like a gymnast onto a narrow ledge on the building. Dr. Snow looked up in amazement as if she had just sprouted wings. Persie edged along as fast as she could. Then she heard a bullet whiz by her just as she rounded a corner of the building.
Shit was getting way too real.
If nothing else, the fact that they were willing to kill her meant she was right about what was really going on in that warehouse. She just had to survive long enough to tell the police.
What she saw next however did not make that a likely prospect. Around the corner the ledge dead-ended leaving her nowhere to go. There was no where to climb up, and the ground had lowered further into the well of a loading dock making it too high to jump down without a break or sprain. Dr. Snow slowly moved around the corner and raised his pistol. This would be a turkey shoot and Persie was going to wind up stuffed and baked.
She held her breath. Dr. Snow's left eye closed taking aim with his right.
Homer galloped from his hiding place, jumped up onto a car then leapt towards the cold eyed Dr. Snow. The gun fired just as he was knocked to the ground. Persie heard the bullet impact just to her right...
Karen’s eyes began to well with tears. She put down the book. She had to skip ahead, she knew what happened next. It was too much, too soon. Memories of her own dog flashed in her mind. The day she came home as a puppy, her first romp in the snow, all those times when Karen had to sleep in weird positions other than kicking her dog off the bed. She buried her sobs in her pillow to keep from waking and worrying Jean.
Tuesday December 15th
Chapter XI
Persie tried to take in the whole of the land around her in deep breaths. Before her was a vast valley rimmed with snow frosted mountains and a sky so big it seemed to surround her with infinite space. The horse she was mounted on snorted her impatience in a steam cloud that made the beast seem like a dragon. Persie flicked her heels inward and the horse charged up towards the treeline. The frigid air hurt her lungs almost enough to feel alive.
Snowberry Blossom Ranch had been in her family for generations. It had nearly been lost as her father had died before Persie had been old enough to have the secret passed down to her. Persie’s skills in deciphering her great grandfather’s riddle told her of the ranch’s existence and it’s secret location. She came here whenever she needed to get away, which was as often as she could. It was the closest thing to home she knew. After the loss of Homer and the infamous Dr. Snow escaping justice, coming to Blossom Ranch was the only place the she could carry on. The horse’s hooves pounded hard kicking up snow. Persie timed her breathing with the horse’s footfall. Their minds were as one, racing up towards a ridge for no other reason than to be somewhere else, and as fast as possible.
Karen put down the book and closed her eyes. She imagined she had a place to go, a place like that. She was reminded of another part of the series when persie had to solve the riddle to find Snowberry Blossom Ranch where she would make her home and retreat in the later books.
She imagined waking up to a blanket of snow on evergreens, with majestic mountains as a backdrop and the vast sky of the West. Taking a horse and riding up to a high ridge overlooking the postcard view below. Karen took a deep breath as if she could feel the cold, the pine and the openness of the West in her lungs.
Then her eyes opened.
In the book Persie solved parts of the riddle, but she ended up finding the ranch largely by other more suspenseful and adventurous means. A corrupt sheriff, a unscrupulous landowner, the lovely ninja battling cowboy henchman, and even winding up in their clutches, but freeing herself to save the day and rightfully inherit her grandfather’s ranch.
But the riddle itself was never solved.
Truth was, the story was so riveting, most readers didn’t notice the plot hole. Karen was among those, till now.
It was as if Fanny Arbuckle had decided the riddle was not exciting enough and side-stepped it as a plot point, Why then didn’t she leave it out altogether?
“Maybe the riddle is real.”
Again through her boxes Karen dug until she found it.
OVERWORLD
Book Two
In The
Persephone Series
The well loved book nearly opened on it’s own. She turned pages until the right words jumped out at her.
Chapter XVI
Reginald Pruitt III had a rather eccentric will. Beyond the bare legal requirements it was written entirely in the form of a series of riddles. Persie’s father was granted the ownership of his father’s various properties and holdings, but access to and even knowledge of some of them was only revealed by solving the riddles. Now that Reginald Pruitt IV, Persie’s father, had passed those same riddles on to her to face. She knew which one she would work on solving first. The location of the family remote mountain retreat. Sure she had been there, but as a child in her father’s plane. Since her parents were careful not to mention specifics, her memories were of a wonderful place that could have been anywhere in a remote mountainous location. The Rockies of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, or Alberta, the Sierras of California. Even Alaska was a possibility.
No, her usual skills of deductive reasoning would not break this case, the family tradition and it’s fortune’s was carefully preserved in a vault of wit, passed down to her, as the will stated, six months after her father’s passing.
Persie read the yellowed page with a racing heart.
In the mountains crest with the purest snow
Lie canyons and meadows sweeping below
When wolves howl and troubles toll
A magic home heals heart and soul
To earn this geographic panacea
Search deep each word for an idea
With a wrong start you won’t have a chance
Take a week off, only then advance
Of forty-five you should be thinning
The forty-eighth of August a good beginning
Towards the timber’s peril up seventeen mile
Pointed towards them all the while
Pointed towards them all the while
Your feet will be wet in the creek
When you’ll hear you double speak
Move upstream from a sweet smelling tertiary
Take the sunset to a cemetery
Beyond from two canyons you must choose
Which pen did your did your old Pa use
On the porch you’ll be sure to find
The scribe of wrote these words in kind
Karen read the riddle over and over. Especially one puzzling line.
“The forty-eighth of August a good beginning “
Why was a date important and why call it the “48th of August” wasn’t that just another way of saying September--Karen did some math on her fingers--seventeenth?
And why the spaces between “a” and “good”. Probably a misprint, but her paperback was not a first edition. Surely editors would have caught it by the second go round. It seems like this line, which mentioned a “beginning”, was the key to the whole thing.
Soon, Karen’s eyelids fell. The book and her chin slowly sank to her chest.
Karen was walking in a meadow in the mist of dawn. Mountains rose in the distance. On the grass around her, lines and numbers had been painted like a football field, but no. This was a calendar. A the top of the grid she could see the world “August”.
A man walking a dog came into view. When he came closer she could see that the dog was Jewel. The man released the black lab and she bolted for Karen nearly knocking her over. Karen hugged her dog with tears in her eyes.
“I guess we found your owner,” said the man as he got closer. He was tall and handsome. He wore a suede coat and a cowboy hat.
“Oh, I’m so happy you found her, we thought she was… Where did you find her.”
“She was romping around here. This is my ranch. Yeah she was a little hungry, but happy as a clam, but happier to see you obviously.”
“All this is yours?” Karen said taking in the scenery again.
“Yeah, pretty much.” He said looking around.
“What’s with the calendar?”
“This?” he said pawing at some of the painted turf with the toe of his cowboy boot. “This isn’t a calendar.”
“Really, it looks like a calendar.”
“Look again,” he said.
Karen turned around. The days of the calendar were not all square, some of them had odd shapes. In a flash she recognized the shapes. She was standing on a map. A map of U.S. states, like days in a calendar, each one had a number, but the numbers were not in order. A forty five next to a thirty eight, next to a forty-one. The smaller numbers were toward the right side of the map but there seemed to be no pattern to it. She looked at the top of the map.
August a
“August, A,” she said to herself. The man had disappeared.
“Augusta!” she shouted herself awake.
It was a location, a city!
Wednesday December 16th
The reality that Jewel was not really alive brought back a wave of sadness. She lie back on her side and pulled the covers to her chin. She let the tears soak into her pillow, but she silently repeated the word, over and over.
“Augusta.”
Her phone rang. Bob. She pushed the ignore button.
Karen opened her computer. A Google search told her that there was an Augusta in Georgia, one in Maine, Kansas, Virginia and Wisconsin also. But none of those places sounded very mountainous, or ranch like.
Of forty-five you should be thinning
The forty-eighth of August a good beginning...
What is there forty-five of? If it were fifty, it might be states.
“Wait a minute Karen said, the riddle was written in in 1909 according to the book.”
Sure enough, in 1909 there were forty-five states. “Then why ‘forty-eighth’?”
Phone again. Bob. Ignore.
She read the whole riddle again.
...With a wrong start you won’t have a chance
Take a week off, only then advance...
“ ‘Take a week off’,” she said. “Seven days! Okay, forty-eight minus seven… forty-one.”
The forty-first state Karen saw on a Wiki page was Montana. A quick search showed that there was indeed a small town between the mountains and plains named “Augusta”.
Augusta, Montana. But was it real? The ranch? Maybe Fanny Arbuckle lived there.
Her phone rang a third time.
“Hello, Bob. What do you want?”
“Where the hell have you been? Paul’s been sent home from school. He’s been suspended.”
“What? What for?”
“ ‘Violence towards staff’, that’s what they called it.”
“Oh God, that’s the last thing I…”
“Can you get over there? I can’t get away, right now. The friggin commission is breathing down our necks and I have a shitload of accounts to go over.” Bob interrupted.
“I’m not doing too well Bob, isn’t there any way…”
“I’ll tell you what I’m doing, I’m here at the office earning his room, board and his goddamn college tuition. What have you accomplished today?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Goddamn right it’s not. Now get you ass over there.”
Karen hadn’t even opened her shade in days. Outside was still an overcast world of bare trees, brown grass and mud, but the light still hurt her eyes.
“Worst Christmas ever.” she said as she got into her car.
“Paul?”
Karen knocked on the door just above the hip hop pulsing from her son’s room. She tried the door handle. It was locked.
“Paul, what happened today? I’m not mad, I just want to hear what happened… C’mon Paul, let’s talk, let me in.”
There was no response from inside the room. She heard paper being torn.
“Paul? Is this about the divorce?
She took a breath and leaned her head against the door.
“Paul?... Is this about Jewel?”
The tearing sounds from the room stopped. The music was cut short. Footsteps came to the door. A latch clicked and the door opened part way.
He looked taller, his face was lean and serious.
“You killed her.”
The words punched Karen in the throat. The stone cold look on her son’s face was a right hook to her heart.
“Paul, I…”
“You ruined everything… I hate you… Bitch!”
Karen’s hand flew out. Before she knew what had happened, she felt the sting of her son’s cheek on her hand. She stared at it. her eyes drifted back to Paul. His eye’s were wide. He reached up and touched his reddened cheek. His eye’s grew hard again and his hand dropped to his side.
“That’s what I thought.” He said with disturbing calmness. The door slowly closed. She heard the lock latch.
“Paul?” she said softly. “Paul, I…”
The music returned, much louder this time. Her fist poised to knock but it fell. She cleared her voice to speak above the music, but she swallowed and propped herself on the door jam. Her head fell, her tears disappeared into the carpet.
“Well now you’ve done it,” Bob said from behind her. “Thanks a lot. I’m going to have that to deal with for the rest of the evening.”
“I thought that you…”
“Well, you guilted-me into coming home. Thanks for that too.”
She closed her eyes. She thought about Persie and all she had faced, all the opponents she had bested, and the challenges she had overcome.
Karen felt all her emotions, the sorrow, the hurt, the frustration, gather into a sharp point of anger. It was growing inside her, not like a bomb, but like a Samurai sword being drawn from its sheath in a lighting flash of metal.
She drew up and looked Bob in the eye. He seemed small.
“I was not the only thing wrong with our marriage, or with this family, far from it.”
Karen’s voice was stern and strong, but even and tempered. From the look on Bob’s face, he had not heard her like this before.
“You have been a shitty husband, you’re a shitty father, and you’re a laughing stock at your office. You think I don’t hear about what goes on there? I have tried for years to unhear and keep from our kids the stupid things you do, about the accounts you lose, the skirts you chase… unsuccessfully.”
The music turned down inside Paul’s room. The shadows of his feet stood close to his door.
“I have gone so easy on you in our marriage and in this divorce. And, yeah, maybe because I didn’t have the stomach for it, but also for the kids. I was trying to keep the ugliness to a minimum for their sake. I hope you’ve enjoyed your easy ride you sad pathetic little man, because it gun git bumpy now!”
Bob tried to formulate a defense. Only grunts came from his mouth before Karen cut him off time and time again.
“I not only have I not signed your one-sided divorce papers, I am going to tear-up that joke of a settlement, hire the nastiest lawyer I can find and then I’m going to let… you… have it!
“And, by the way, the car you’ve been driving, the one you put in my name for ‘insurance reasons’, I’ll be using that from now on. You can have the rusty piece of junk you gave me after you wrecked my last car.”
Gravel spit from the tires the BMW as she gunned it out of the gravel driveway. She felt better than she had felt in a long time, but she hadn’t gone far before the the events of recent began to haunt her thoughts.
She gripped the steering wheel and looked into the distance. She didn’t want to go home. She needed to think. She thought about her poor dog Jewel, she thought about her words to Bob. The slap she gave her son replayed in her head relentlessly. Eventually the lines of the highway became a gold watch swinging on a chain and the painful thoughts gradually, imperceptibly faded into the grayness of the pavement. There was only one thing left in her mind. The definitely fictional, but maybe possibly hopefully almost real Snowberry Blossom Ranch.
She galloped on a horse for mile after mile it’s mane and her own hair floating then crashing down on theirs necks again and again.
A tone of a bell rang repeatedly. Karen blinked her eyes and looked down at the dash, the yellow “low fuel” warning was glowing.
It was dark out. The gas gauge had cleared the “E” and the lowest marking on the gauge completely.
How much time had gone by? Where the hell was she? How is it, she wondered, that she could not remember the last--she looked at the clock on the dash--three and a half hours?
She was on some sort of four-lane highway. There would have to be a sign eventually, and hopefully a gas station very soon.
Ahead a large green sign came into view. Karen squinted at it waiting for it’s letters to reveal her location.
ENTERING
ASHTABULA COUNTY
CONNEAUT
CORPORATION LIMIT
Karen had only begun to contemplate those unfamiliar names when she came upon the much larger sign in white and red cantered over the expressway. She lowered her head to look up at the sign in disbelief until it passed .
WELCOME TO
OHIO
