Fish Food no comments
The view from the Outerbridge Crossing, the bridge that takes travelers over the Arthur Kill from Perth Amboy, New Jersey to Staten Island, New York, gives some sense of what the town of Charleston was like at several times in its history. You can pick out Greek Revival mansions built by early 19th century oyster captains and the rotting hulks of early 20th century ships abandoned in the Kill. The burnt clay of this area helped define Manhattan’s terra cotta skyline in the early 20th century.
On a hilltop stands the Stick-Style mansion of Balthazar Kreischer, whose yellow bricks paved some of New York’s streets in the late 19th century and covered many of its row house blocks. Kreischer built a thriving company town he called Kreischerville. The town had a waterfront, and marshland on the other side. The other two borders were deep woods. Despite the factory, the town’s aspect was, and in some areas, still is, decidedly rural.
By the 1920s, Kreischerville was already calling itself Charleston and the factory that Kreischer built was on its way out of business. The little factory town was slowly relaxing back into its pre-industrial countryside. It was a slow kind of place. The kind of place where a nursing mother sitting on her porch would notice a stranger passing by, simply because he was a stranger.
But this stranger was acting, well, strange.
The Haunted Penthouse no comments
Edna Crawford Champion’s wealthy husband, Albert, invented the spark plug. Champion was a Frenchman with a French wife in Detroit, when he met young Edna while on a business trip to New York. She was there from St. Louis looking for a rich husband and she found Albert. He paid his wife a million dollars to divorce him, married Edna, and took her to live in Detroit.
The blonde and beautiful Edna did not take to the Motor City. World War I was over, the 1920s on the horizon, and Edna married Albert’s money to have fun. Well, good, New York here we come! Albert adored Edna and indulged her in anything she wanted, almost. He would buy her jewels, furs, and dresses. He would live in New York. He just wouldn’t give her any money of her own. And he was extremely jealous of any interest she showed in men nearer her age.
It was on a trip to join Albert, who was in Paris on business, that Edna met Charles Brazelle. Albert wasn’t able to meet his wife at the railroad station and sent an old friend named Barney Oldfield, an automobile racer, to pick up Edna. Barney had with him a younger friend—handsome, suave, Sorbonne-educated, half American and half French—Charlie Brazelle, who had a definite way with women.
Charlie and Edna began a hot love affair that very day. They met secretly at first, but once Albert Champion found them out, they started going out together in public. They were together at the Crillon Bar one day when Albert barged in, demanding that Edna either come home and be a good wife, or he would cut her off without a cent. Brazelle beat Albert to a pulp there in the Crillon. Poor old Albert was found dead in his hotel room a few hours later.
The No-Truck Truck Stop no comments
“I’ll wait 20 minutes and that’s it,” Ruby said to herself, checking her watch.
“That’s it,” she said louder without realizing it.
“What?” the waitress asked a bit snappish.
“Coffee, please.”
Ruby watched the girl walk up the aisle between the long lunch counter and the booths lining the windowed wall. A real Jersey Girl, big hair and all, long fingernails painted blue, with little somethings in spots near the tips. Ruby had read about Jersey Girls and listened to Bruce Springsteen sing about them. Who knew? If her father had stayed with her mother, she might have been a Jersey Girl herself.
Ruby loved the father she did have, the man who married her mother after she was born; this had nothing to do with him. Her caring stepfather would always be part of who Ruby was; she wanted now to know the part she never knew. She needed to know it. The need had grown inside her until she was heavy with it.
So here she was at a truck stop on a highway in Neptune, New Jersey.
Kris Nelscott: Thin Walls no comments
Falling in love with Smokey Dalton just may be the easiest fall you’ve ever taken. He’s handsome, he’s built, he’s smart, passionate, sensitive, and tough. His love interest is Laura Hathaway. She’s all those things; she’s just white and rich. But Smokey’s primary love, the one that comes ahead of everything else in his trouble-strewn life, is for ten-year-old Jimmy Bailey. Smokey is saving himself as he attempts to save Jimmy. At Jimmy’s age, Smokey’s parents were both lynched and he was spirited away from Atlanta for his own protection. Through Jimmy, the adult Smokey is able to confront his own buried (and crippling) feelings of fear, loss, guilt, and anger. Jimmy makes Smokey whole as a man.
In the first installment in this most compelling series, A Dangerous Road, Jimmy witnesses the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis and the killer is not James Earl Ray. Jimmy, abandoned by his prostitute mother and then by his teenaged brother, finds a willing protector and father figure in Smokey Dalton, the college-educated Korean War veteran who works as an unlicensed PI. Smokey takes charge of Jimmy, abandons his home and business in Memphis, to save the child from certain death by the conspirators in Dr. King’s murder. But, oh my, where to go? Well, Laura Hathaway happens to live up there in Chicago. But events rearing up out of Laura’s family past put formidable obstacles in the way of any reunion of lovers.
And, of course, it is 1968, a year of assassinations and politics. Chicago is very, very crowded, what with secret service, FBI, anti-war activists, hippies, Yippies, and other outside agitators assembled for the Democratic National Convention. Mayor Daley’s police batons are in full swing. Smokey and Jimmy are living underground with a family in a black neighborhood in Smoke Filled Rooms, Smokey has taken the name Bill Grimshaw and is working as a hotel security guard. Smokey hears he is being shadowed in the neighborhood. Black boys start turning up dead. Smokey realizes he has to get Jimmy to a safe place. Until now, Smokey’s pride has kept him away from the wealthy Laura in her lake-view penthouse. For Jimmy’s sake he swallows it, and enlists her help in protecting his son. It is an old and dangerous enemy who threatens Smokey and all he loves. It takes all the strength Smokey can muster to defeat him. Defeat him he does in a fashion that allows our hero to show of what true grit is made.