Fiction: The Weapon

“Your mother’s funeral,” Aunt Margaret repeated as they sat down. She spoke, as she always did, so Eric and everyone else at the table could hear her.

It was a gorgeous late spring day and the women of the First Baptist Church had set up the funeral dinner outside rather than in the church basement. Only the mildest of breezes blew and it was scented with lilac.

Eric said nothing. He had learned long ago to keep his responses to Aunt Margaret short and polite, whatever else he might want to say.

“Where on earth were you, Eric?” Aunt Margaret demanded from across the table. “What did you think could possibly be more important than being on time to your dear mother’s funeral?”

Continue reading “Fiction: The Weapon”

Fiction: The House of the Secret Revealed

“Welcome, Seeker. Welcome to The House of the Secret Revealed. I am Garvey, the Keeper of the Inner Door.”

There were three doors in the small room where they stood. There was the door through which the Seeker had come and that would not open from this side. There was an exit that led away from the waiting pilgrims … and there was the Inner Door. It was richly jeweled with gilt inlays; the oversized handle was bronze and clearly bore, in silver, the shape of a sleeping dog.

Continue reading “Fiction: The House of the Secret Revealed”

Fiction: The Orient Club

There were seven public rooms in the museum, and Jalene Naysure had seen them all a thousand times. She had gotten friendly with the curator, Aileen Royer, and had been in the private office many times.

That left one room Jalene had never seen, the one that was off limits to everyone but the curator. It was an oddly placed addition to the house and was accessible only from the outside. Someone unfamiliar with the floor plan wouldn’t have known of the room just from walking around inside. It was behind a bare wall decorated only with a little molding and two brass candle sconces.

“I’ve never been in there,” said Arnold Pinkhause, a retired volunteer fire chief and one of the volunteer docents. “Cora says it’s just storage.”

“Oh, odds and ends,” Cora Belling, chief volunteer docent, told Jalene. “Junk, really, but junk no one’s made the decision to get rid of over the past fifty years. I’ve never been in there myself, but there’s nothing worth looking at in there.”
Continue reading “Fiction: The Orient Club”