Go Get Outbound

DSM contributor Charlie Geer wrote OUTBOUND a couple of years back and for a moment all seemed right with the world: the novel earned positive reviews, Geer was a man-about-town, and, most important, his reputation as an exciting new author was confirmed.

Described as “wickedly funny” by the Charleston Post and Courier, OUTBOUND won the 2006 Independent Publishers Award for Best Regional Fiction, Southeast.

Then the publishing house folded and suddenly the future of his book, after much momentum-building and praise-garnering, was uncertain.

It’s an unfortunate scenario that, unfortunately, happens all too often.

Rather than throwing up his hands, though, Geer thought about that old lemon analogy and took his manuscript to a POD publisher, had a fresh new cover designed, formatted the text for Kindle and whammo, OUTBOUND was brought back to life.

OUTBOUND is now available (in digital or paperback).

You should order a copy today. Or, for the impecunious historians among us, I’ve two copies that I am willing to donate to the cause. All you have to do to win a copy of the book is correctly identify this historical figure (hint: his name is mentioned somewhere in this post).

Update: Our winners have been notified. Thanks for playing!

Email editor@darkskymagazine.com with the correct answer. First two people to do so win.

To whet your appetite, here’s the novel’s synopsis, backcover blurbs, and first chapter:

The old port city has welcomed its share of visitors over the years, but when a bureaucratic snafu brings the Bravado Arts Festival, the Tri-County Mini-Storage Convention, and the Hunters-for-Jesus Jamboree to town all at once, the load is just too much, and for the second time in as many centuries, Charleston secedes — this time, literally. Following the course of the wayward island and the oddball hodgepodge of natives, tourists, and carpetbaggers stuck on board, Outbound is both a hilarious send-up of entrenched society and a deft satire of contemporary American politics. Forget red states and blue states: with rednecks, bluebloods, and redneck bluebloods scrambling for the helm, a rowdy reckoning is in store.

“Charlie Geer is the Vonnegut of the South.” — Charleston Magazine

“Outbound is deep fun-making.” — Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood

“A deliciously satiric vision of the city’s foibles and outrageous characters.” — Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else on Earth

Chapter I

WHEN FROM THE SHEER WEIGHT of humanity and its assorted accoutrements the Charleston Peninsula broke off from mainland South Carolina and began floating out to sea, among the last to notice were those persons trapped on board the unlikely vessel. The rest of the state, which had always considered the old town a harbor of loose values and oddball politics, was happy enough to be rid of it. The rest of the nation, which knew the city primarily through weather reports and travel magazines, would find other, less mobile destinations to visit.

On board, the first individual to take note was eighty-eight-year-old Lawson Waldrup, a chronic porch-sitter who, when he saw Fort Sumter sliding past the Battery, retrieved his .45 and casually opened fire on the old Yankee fort. He had dreamed of just such a close-range opportunity for years; from the former distance he had once cloaked a similar assault under the boom of the city’s 4th of July fireworks display. But it was not the 4th of July — it was the 25th of May, and certain neighbors naturally expressed concern. They expressed their concern not to Mr. Waldrup but to the local authorities, who in turn expressed concern to Lawson’s daughter. Elizabeth Hathaway, who did not care for the neighbors or the local authorities, was short with the two investigating officers. They were not impressed by her arguments — that the man was elderly and therefore experienced occasional difficulties with time, place and propriety; that even had he intended to hit something, he was far too feeble to succeed; and that furthermore perhaps the two gentlemen had something better to do on another side of town. Though the officers might have liked to haul the two of them off to jail, they instead summoned them to appear in Livability Court. The mayor would want it that way.

Elizabeth scowled at the summons. She had already been to Livability Court twice, the first time for having a creaky gate and the second, for hanging her linens on the line to dry. She would not go again.

“Now, you listen — ” she said.

But the officers were already leaving. “Have you considered a home, ma’am?” the shorter one asked from the sidewalk. “For your father?”

“My father has a home,” said Elizabeth, and she started to shut the door.

Started, because she thought she’d seen, just out the corner of her eye, a range marker slipping past the Battery. Which was, in fact, what she had seen.

Well, that’s just lovely, she thought. On top of everything else, we’re floating out to sea. Just lovely.

Elizabeth had not had a very pleasant week, it was true. She had received three unexpected guests in as many days, and while she liked to think of herself as a hospitable and accommodating woman, she wasn’t, especially when caught off guard. The first guest, Mr. T. Moffett from Connecticut, had arrived without actually showing up. A month earlier Mr. Moffett had purchased the house beside Elizabeth’s from the Daniels for an ungodly sum and commenced doing what people like him seemed to do best, which was to have the home flayed and gutted without mercy, its insides torn apart, ripped out, and hauled away. Elizabeth spent the better part of a day watching the proceedings from her kitchen window. The old house trembling and groaning while the men worked, plaster dust billowing out the windows like smoke—it was as though the structure were being sacked from the inside by a ruthless invading army. She was certain the Daniels would not have stood for it, nor the Conrads before them, nor the McCraes before the Conrads. But of course the Daniels had taken the ungodly sum and moved to Sullivan’s Island, the Conrads were piddling the end of their lives away at distant Morningside Manor, and the McCraes, being long dead, could say very little at all. In recent years Elizabeth had lost well near all her allies in the neighborhood to beaches, retirement homes and cemeteries. She’d had no one to turn to last year, when the dignified antebellum mansion to the east of her became the Bay House Bed and Breakfast, and she had no one to turn to now. Elizabeth might have approached absent T. Moffett herself, but as of yet the man had not made an appearance, only expressed, through the actions of his hired hands, his utter dislike for Charleston interiors. Elizabeth thought it horribly arrogant of him to remain in Connecticut while he so blatantly broke the rules of someone else’s neighborhood. Of course, Mr. Moffett had little choice in the matter now. The current seagoing state of affairs made him a unique breed of absentee owner, the likes of which Elizabeth had never confronted — or not confronted — before. There was no telling how long he would be away. That is, how long Charleston would be away.

Her second guest had arrived the day after absent T. Moffett’s demolition crew, shortly before the mysterious floating off of the peninsula. He arrived midmorning, while Elizabeth was observing the progress of the destruction next door from a wingback chair beside the bay window. The crew had attached a large cylindrical chute to the second story of the house, and Elizabeth watched as the dangling apparatus spewed loads of plaster and glass into the dumpster below, the debris rushing forth in sudden, violent heaves. When her doorbell rang, the chime seemed as sudden, as violent. It startled her as a thunderclap might. With the better part of her friends and relations long since moved away, the instrument had fallen out of use.

There was no need for Elizabeth to answer the door. She had not even stood up when she heard it swing open. Then the call, all too familiar: “Oh, Maaah-meee!”

Her son, Parker. Whom she loved as a mother should, but whom she frequently wondered about. This Mommy thing, for starters. Grown men did not call their mothers Mommy. Parker was thirty-eight years old. Elizabeth herself was approaching seventy. She was nobody’s “Mommy.”

“Parker?” she said.

“Don’t get up, sweetie,” Parker said. From behind he kissed her on the neck, then swung an armful of gladiolas in front of her.

“Oh,” Elizabeth said with as much enthusiasm as she could gather. “Lovely. They’re lovely, dear.”

Parker stepped away to set the flowers in a vase on the sideboard, and Elizabeth turned to have a look at him. Wearing a white linen suit, a yellow silk ascot with green polka dots, and a white boater with a blue-and-red-striped band, he was as much a fop as ever. With a new touch, even: from one of the blazer pockets dripped the gold chain of a pocket watch. Elizabeth had hoped her son might have at least taken a new hairstyle, but he hadn’t. Still it was cropped at the base of the neck, still it swung about ridiculously when he moved. He might have been Prince Valiant from the funny papers, or Little Lord Fauntleroy. Or simply a jackass. Elizabeth was mildly relieved to see that Parker had at least foregone the kilt this time around. His most recent visit, two months previous, had been made for the Scottish Heritage Games, and had found him trotting about in plaid skirts like a man who had been waiting all his life to. She simply could not imagine what kind of people her son was running with down in Savannah. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“Heavens,” Parker said, returning to his mother’s side. “What are they doing over there?”

“What they usually do.”

“Ah. A little interior desecrating, mm?”

“Something like that.”

Parker chuckled mischievously. “It looks—obscene. That—thing—hanging down like a—oh my. Spilling that—oh my.”

Missing her son’s point entirely, Elizabeth said, “I do take offense to it.”

“I should say so,” Parker said.

“I just don’t know what these people want.”

“Sexy,” Parker said. “That’s what they want.”

Embarrassed, Elizabeth glanced back at her son. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

“People want sexy interiors,” said Parker. “Sexy black bathrooms. Sleek sexy kitchens.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Elizabeth sighed. She had done her best to dismiss desire and all its complications years ago, even before Parker’s father had passed—early, of drink. Such frank discussion of the matter—especially from Parker, a man who had once proposed a return to the powdered wig—unsettled her. It was uncalled for.

“Have you found anything worthwhile among the wreckage, Mommy?” Parker said, referring to his mother’s habit of picking through the junk piles of others for items she herself might yet find a use for.

“I haven’t looked.”

“Why not?”

“Principle.”

“How adorable,” Parker said. He turned and left for the front hall, where he had, Elizabeth noticed, deposited two hang-up bags and a suitcase.

“Well, Mommy,” Parker said from the hall. “I’ll be staying in Liza’s old room?”

“Staying?”

“Oh, yes,” Parker said as he started up the steps, hang-ups and duffle in tow. “The town is absolutely booked. Some genius has scheduled the Sportsman’s Jamboree for the same week as the Bravado Festival. This week. There’s not a room to be had, Mommy. Not in this town.”

Bravado. Of course. The annual arts festival, which her son patronized religiously. She had once patronized the festival herself — monetarily, even. But that was years ago, at a time when she had believed in the city, and the city in her. In those days she and others of her station had seen the festival as a kind of counterbalance to the Bubba culture that they believed posed a threat to the genteel character of the town. An annual festival of opera, ballet, and chamber music, Bravado was an opportunity to put the city on the cultural map. Unfortunately, the culture Bravado had lately come to engender — nudist ballets, extraterrestrial operas, and bizarre puppet shows — led Elizabeth and others like her to reevaluate their former mistrust of Bubba. She had withdrawn her support several years ago and would have been just as happy if the town were removed from all maps entirely. This was not to be. By the time the early patrons backed off, the town had filled up with people of such extraordinary means and such extraordinary enthusiasm for all things festively cultural that Bravado had become not only a fixture but an institution, an annual gathering of kooky artists and their brazen jet-set patrons. And as for Parker, Elizabeth believed he saw the festival as little more than an excuse to get tremendously intoxicated and parade about in ridiculous clothing.

“Pawpaw looks good,” Parker announced as he descended the steps. “Still on the porch, I see.”

“He does favor the porch.”

Parker paused to examine himself in the mirror above the sideboard. “I think he favors the Tri-Delts who bounce past the porch,” he said.

“He’s eighty-eight years old, son.”

“He’s still a man, Mommy.”

“I suppose.”

In front of the mirror Parker fiddled with the presentation of his ascot. A ludicrous affair, Elizabeth thought.

“At any rate, the festival opening is this afternoon,” he said. “The unveiling of Abel Horfner’s site-specific piece in Calhoun Square. Quite monumental, Mommy. He hasn’t shown in six years. I’ve heard Carolina Gabrél is going to be there. From the Times.”

Carolina Gabrél. Elizabeth had heard Parker mention the woman before, had even held out hope that Carolina Gabrél might represent some kind of conventional love interest for the boy. In the past, word of Parker’s successes with Savannah’s society girls had tickled her, but in recent years she’d begun to wonder if his many exploits didn’t betray some kind of pathology. Perhaps he wasn’t really in the market for a woman at all. So yes, there might yet be redemption in this Carolina Gabrél. But what was this business about the times?

“What times?” she said.

“THE Times, Mommy. THE Times.”

“I see,” said Elizabeth.

Before turning to the door, Parker approached his mother and kissed her lightly on the back of the neck.

“Ciao, sweets,” he said. “Don’t wait up, okay?” And then as suddenly as he had appeared he was gone.

No sooner had her son shut the door than Elizabeth moved to the kitchen to collect the makings of a strong drink. It was not yet noon, but the circumstances of the morning, she decided, were unusual. Anyway, it was noon somewhere, and that would have to do.

She did not drink often. Having seen liquor kill one man and all but ruin half a dozen others, she tended to abstain. But there were certain occasions when she indulged, and when she did, she poured the drink the deceased man and the all-but-ruined men had poured, the drink that had been poured in the house for more than a hundred years: two jiggers of bourbon splashed with water and three cubes of ice. Once she had mixed the beverage she sat down at the kitchen table. Already the events of the day had exhausted her.

Elizabeth drank with a slow, measured rhythm, allowing the delicate bite of each swallow to pass before drawing another. Firmed up by the whiskey, she resisted the temptation to return to the window and eye the goings-on next door. She simply would not be bothered by the offenses of absent T. Moffett, not during so rare an indulgence. Mr. Moffett would not be allowed to trespass on her spirits, which were rising nicely with each sip. To punctuate her resolve, she stood and drew the shades over the three bay windows when she had finished the drink. Each catch locked with a satisfying snap, and she thought she might fix another glass to commemorate the small victory.

That’s when her third unexpected guest had shown up.

The knock was soft but insistent. When Elizabeth first heard it, she thought it was a rat probing a floorboard. That would not have been unusual. The house was over one hundred years old. Elizabeth took her yardstick from beside the refrigerator and moved carefully to the front hall to investigate. Normally a slap on the floor with the stick would shut the little devils up.

She was doing just this, slapping the hall floor with the yardstick, when the knock sounded again. Closer, now, she recognized the sound — someone at the door, humbly but resolutely demanding attention. There was only one man she knew who demanded attention in such a way. There was only one man who knocked like that.

Bubby McGaw. Her son-in-law.

A realtor from the upstate who years ago had infected Elizabeth’s daughter with an off-brand religion and then, somehow, persuaded her to marry him.

“A glorious good morning to you, Mrs. Hathaway,” he said when she cracked the door. He was smiling at her. As inane as the smile was, it had always made Elizabeth nervous. It never went away, for one thing, and for another it pressed at two twitchy blue eyes that she had always thought were too small for the face to begin with. And too close together.

“Oh — well, hello,” Elizabeth said. She glanced about for her daughter, who might yet be returned to some semblance of reality, if only given the chance. But she didn’t see Liza anywhere, just a small, lonely-looking pile of luggage. Sorry she had answered the knock at all, she held the door to a crack.

“Not gonna wop me with that thing, are you?” Bubby said, and he winked twice at her.

Appraising herself, Elizabeth saw that she was holding the yardstick just off the shoulder, like a baseball bat. “No,” she said. “I hadn’t planned to.” Still, she didn’t exactly shift her stance.

“Well, I thank you, Mrs. Hathaway,” Bubby said. “I really do.” He slid a package of Big Red from his shirt pocket and offered a stick to her. “Chewing gum?”

“No, thank you,” Elizabeth said. She didn’t chew gum, and she didn’t trust people who did. Especially people like Bubby McGaw, who chewed with an open mouth, slowly and stupidly, like a cow working cud.

Bubby slid a stick into his mouth, then shook his head. The smile relaxed slightly. “Boy, do I have a favor to ask of you, Mrs. Hathaway. Boy.”

“Oh?”

“Yes ma’am. Boy. Seems they’ve really filled the town up this week. I mean, really filled it up. With all kinds.”

“So I hear.” Elizabeth did not like where this was going. Not at all.

“Yes ma’am. I’m here representing the Fellowship, see, and they goofed up. They put me—”

“The Fellowship?” Elizabeth interrupted.

“Right. The Fellowship of Evangelical Sportsmen, Mrs. Hathaway. Hunters for Jesus. Hunters of Jesus, some call us.”

“I see,” Elizabeth said. Then, unable to resist: “And what will you do when you catch Him?”

Bubby quit chewing for a moment, cocked his head like a puzzled puppy. “Ma’am?” he said.

“Nothing.”

Bubby chewed again. “Right. So they put me in a room with an opera singer, Mrs. Hathaway. Big gal. They goofed up, see. Between the Jamboree and this art thing. They goofed up.”

“Yes.”

“It’s two beds. I said I would share. I told them I’m a Christian man and a quiet man and I wouldn’t get in anybody’s way. But that big gal wouldn’t have it, see. Said she’d go back to Paris France Europe before she’d share a room with me. What about that?”

Elizabeth could see the opera singer’s point, but she didn’t say so.

“I told them. I said, I’ve got family here. Good people. I told them about you. I said some of us know how to treat people, and my mother-in-law, Mrs. Hathaway, is one of them.”

“Well.”

“So I was wondering. You know. Maybe I could stay for a few days. I would surely appreciate it, Mrs. Hathaway. You’ve got that old Southern hospitality. I always said so. I tell everybody.”

Elizabeth had seen this coming. Throughout the entire conversation she’d been considering ways she might get out of it. In the end there was only the truth: she was all booked up. If he stayed, he would have to share Liza’s old room with Parker. She knew there was a possibility that this course might work: Parker and Bubby had differences with each other. Serious differences.

It almost did work. When she told Bubby of the cohabitation option, he quit chewing entirely. His smile collapsed and his face tightened. “Oh,” he said. “Parker?”

“I can’t turn family away,” Elizabeth said. “You know.”

“Oh, I know,” Bubby said. “I know.” He looked off and chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Well, I—hm. Hmm. Old Parker. How is old Parker?”

“Same as ever,” Elizabeth said.

“Well. I — well, we’ll just have to work it out, Mrs. Hathaway. We’ll just have to work it out.”

Not what Elizabeth wanted to hear. “Oh? Oh, but — ” she started, but it was too late now. Bubby McGaw had retrieved his luggage and now stood at the door waiting for her to let him in. Not nearly as skilled with a yardstick as she might have liked to be, she had little choice but to do so. She watched him deposit the bags in the corner of the hall, and thought thirstily about a second drink. After that, perhaps a third.
Bubby McGaw turned and checked himself in the hall mirror, smoothing his hair and working his tie into place. “I sure thank you, Mrs. Hathaway. I sure do. We’ll work it out. With the Lord’s help, we’ll work it out.”

“Are you off?” Elizabeth asked hopefully.

“Oh, yes ma’am. They’re having a pig pick down at Calhoun Square, Mrs. Hathaway. For the kick-off celebration. I’m opening it all with a blessing.”

“Oh, really. This afternoon?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Calhoun Square?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Well. That should be interesting.” Quite, she thought.

“I won’t stay too long. Some of those sportsmen do get rowdy, if you know what I mean. They aren’t all the most religious of people.”

“No.”

Bubby turned for the door. “With a little help from providence, Hunters for Jesus will be able to change all that,” he said.

“Well, good luck,” Elizabeth said, opening the door. “And good luck finding Him, too.”

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh. Well, I thank you again, Mrs. Hathaway,” Bubby McGaw said as he left across the porch. “May God bless you.”

And may he damn you to hell, Elizabeth thought. She couldn’t help it. For all Bubby’s smiling, all his “yes ma’am” and “Mrs. Hathaway,” he brought out the very worst in her. Always she had believed that his relationship with her daughter had been founded unfairly, forged as it was just after the death of Liza’s father, a time when anyone would be vulnerable, when even the most properly raised child might act carelessly. Surely her daughter would come around, eventually. It wasn’t that Bubby McGaw didn’t treat Liza well. Real estate was treating everyone well these days. It was his off-brand religion. Like so many others from that part of the state, he had taken religion too far. He had taken it to television, for one thing. To churches the size of coliseums. He had taken it to the theme park.

Herself, she’d been born right the first time.

Thoroughly flustered, Elizabeth returned to the kitchen for a second drink. It was after noon, now—the sun past the yardarm, her mother used to say—and nobody’s business anyway. She had been through a month’s worth of strain in a morning, and she deserved the drink if anyone did.

The second drink was not nearly as satisfying as the first. It only made Elizabeth more irritable and ultimately led her to return to the bay windows and release the blinds. Still the waste from the inside of the home of absent T. Moffett exploded out the chute. Elizabeth received each blast as a personal insult, an assault on her own home, which, if it was in fair need of a paint job, was in no need of family history. What was more, 2 Bay Street had never needed a sexy kitchen or a sexy bathroom. It had never belonged to strangers, and if she could help it, it never would.

As she often did during moments of conviction, Elizabeth retrieved the brief history of her home from the lower right sideboard drawer. The one-page synopsis had been written by a representative of the Preservation Association years ago, when Elizabeth, not yet thoroughly disgusted with the tourist trade, had put her home on the annual tour. She could recite the account by heart, but always it comforted and strengthened her to see it written, to hold it in her hand.

The clapboard Queen-Anne cottage was commissioned by the present owner’s great-grandfather, decorated Civil War veteran Colonel Thomas Parker, in the early 1880s. The yard served by generational turns as a chicken pen, a flower garden, and a playground for children and dogs. The wrap-around porches have hosted more than a century’s worth of courtships, cocktail parties, and musings. In the narrow garden to the left of the house lies the old stone cistern into which young Thomas Parker, Jr. fell and drowned. Although the structure has long been sealed shut, notice that the present owner has encircled the cistern with a bed of irises, both in memory of the drowned ancestor and in tribute to the peculiar history his misfortune set into motion. His sole male heir deceased, Colonel Parker willed the house to his three daughters, Lea, Julia and Mary. When Mary married a banker in Savannah, she ceded her share to Lea and Julia, the former a portraitist, the latter a concert pianist. (The den, which was used as a painting studio by Lea Parker, might now be considered a gallery for the same, dressed as it is with the deceased artist’s miniatures, still-lifes and seascapes. The aging baby grand in the living room belonged to Julia and is said to have been “imported” from New York.) Having never married, the two sisters shared the house until their deaths—of the same illness, tuberculosis, on the same afternoon. With the loyalty of a bygone era, they had bequeathed the home to their sister Mary’s first-born son, who promptly moved his law practice and his young family into the house. Here he brought up his only child, present owner Elizabeth Hathaway, and here, in time, Mrs. Hathaway brought up two of her own.

Elizabeth might have liked to wave the document in absent T. Moffett’s face, but for the time being that was physically impossible. Too, the strength of her position was tempered somewhat by the ramifications of the last sentence. She had brought the two children up, yes, but she would hardly admit to it anymore. One had married a Bible thumper and the other had not married at all, for reasons she would rather not understand. What did Parker know about sexy kitchens? She hadn’t taught him about sexy kitchens. Colonel Thomas Parker certainly would not have gone for sexy kitchens. If there were individuals like absent T. Moffett in the world, individuals who were so common as to require sexy kitchens, she was not one of them.

Anxious to confirm the conviction, she returned to her own unsexy kitchen. A simple, practical affair that had in the home’s earliest days served as a hallway to the cook’s quarters, the room contained little more than the components necessary for the preparation, storage, and serving of food. The table was modest, the cabinets unassuming. Her appliances were not terribly sleek, but they functioned well enough. A Valentine’s card was posted on the icebox, but the card was months old and, having been sent by her daughter, suggested nothing inappropriate. No, there was nothing at all sexy about her kitchen. Everything in it worked. Elizabeth found the judgment profoundly satisfying, and felt she deserved another drink for having reached it.

On her way to the icebox Elizabeth turned on the small transistor radio she kept on the kitchen windowsill. The selection in play was Strauss’s Blue Danube, a favorite of hers. She raised the volume, warmed to the remembrance of a debutante ball long past, the night she had first danced with handsome Wallace Hathaway. An exquisite dancer, he had introduced her to dips and turns that were not taught in dancing school. Later, in the lush quiet of St. Philip’s cemetery, he had introduced her to other things. Elizabeth laughed lightly in spite of herself. On her way to the counter she managed a left box turn — however tenuous, however shuffling. One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three. She poured the whiskey, then dropped away with a closed change, two, three. A forward hesitation to the sink, two, three. She added water and dropped away, two, three. Another cube of ice would be right nice, two, three. She dipped her hand in the ice bowl and turned again, two, three.

It would not be the last dance of the day, nor the last drink. Elizabeth would spend the better part of the afternoon indulging in both. The dances changed with the musical selections of the radio host — a fox trot, another waltz, a lindy — but the drink remained the same, through the end of one bottle and into another. It was a rare binge, to be sure — but justified, she thought. For as long as she could think, anyway. After her third drink, she was done justifying; after her fourth, she was done thinking.

By the time her father made his attempt to recommence the Civil War, she herself might have believed it was 1861, or at least the 4th of July. Perhaps the sharp blasts were simply her father’s way of calling for his lunch, which in the rapturous dance of memory and woozy wash of booze she had forgotten to prepare. She didn’t get very far preparing it then, either, not before the doorbell rang –again. And then the police officers and then, as the police officers were leaving, the realization that whether anybody knew it or not, whether anybody cared or not, they were all floating out to sea. Meaning, among other things, that her sudden unexpected guests might be here a while. Even worse, that her chance to confront absent T. Moffett would grow more remote by the minute. With the floating off of the peninsula, the man’s absentee status had been all but sealed. His indecency sanctioned, it seemed, by the heavens.

It was not a pleasant turn of events, not in the least, and if Elizabeth could find a single man to blame for all of it, she would hunt him down and do so. Viciously.