The Spirits Within

 

~ 1 ~

The awareness came slowly as Jonah Fairburn grew. 

Most of the feelings came to him in his dreams of floating souls, which he had quite regularly. For the first fourteen years of his life, he didn’t know what they meant. His parents told him that dreams were strange things.
Because they were both quite religious, they believed that dreams were God’s way of talking to us. He loved his parents and they loved him. He had no reason to doubt them, so that’s what he believed. 

His parents, Michael and Sheila Fairburn, were Catholics, so that’s what Jonah became. Every Sunday morning since he could remember, they went to mass, They all sat together and listened to the mass. But in all that time, Jonah never really heard God speaking to him. He never heard anything but the occasional cough from an old person and the priest going on in Latin. And of course, he heard the murmurs in his head. 

Jonah was a handsome boy. He was also a popular boy too, because he liked people, and he liked sports, which was most of what a small town childhood was about. He didn’t have a best friend with whom he hung out regularly. But he knew people from all over town. He rode his bike everywhere, listening to the murmurs and whenever he saw people he knew out doing something, he would stop and join them, like it was pre-planned and that he had showed up right on time. As he continued to interact with his friends, he realized that he could push the murmurs, back to a point where he could barely hear them and call them forward when he was alone.

Jonah was in his last year of grade school and would soon be going to a high school that wasn’t a Catholic school. Truth be told, he would be happy to see the last of the nuns who were his teachers. He always felt uneasy around them, because, in them, he could feel a sense of desperation. Like they became nuns because the real world was too much for them to handle and that giving their heart to Jesus, was, if nothing else, something they could deal with, even though the relationship was a one- way sort of thing. 

Then, one day, just after his fourteenth birthday, everything slowly started to change. Through the summer after he finished grade school, the voices which he had grown so used to, as a murmuring in his head, started to become clear and understandable. Half of the six voices he was able to discern spoke English. The other three  voices he heard spoke in different languages, but one spoke in what he thought might French. For the better part of the next two months, he was just content to find a quiet place and listen to the voices. He became so fascinated with the voices that he retreated from his old life and stuck pretty much to himself, as he worked to try and figure them out.

This is when he started to write. He was trying to understand what the voices in his head were all about so he wrote down everything he could remember them saying. They were all quite literate. Not insane sounding like all the ghost stories made the spirits sound. They sounded more like the grownups he knew. But different.

At the beginning of his first year of high school, Jonah started to notice something strange about the voices. When he would sit in his classes, and the teacher would explain something and then ask a specific question, the voices would all murmur and then one of them would tell him the answer. So he would raise his hand and repeat what the voice had told him. The teacher would just smile and nod. Jonah was careful not to do too much of that, for fear that his classmates might start to think he was a brownnoser. So he answered just enough questions to keep the teachers happy and his classmates from turning on him. It was a real balancing act.

The weird thing was that it didn’t matter what the subject was, one of the voices would give him an answer and almost every time it would be a correct one.

One night, after Jonah had finished his homework and there was nothing much to watch on TV. He went outside and sat down on the rear deck of his house. He was silent for a long time and so were the voices. Then Jonah said,
“Can you hear me?” 

And one by one the voices replied that they could.

“Can you see what I see?”

“Yes we can.” said the voice who was obviously speaking for all the rest.

“Who are you?”

And the voices said nothing.

“Do you know who you are?” 

And the lead voice said. “Unfortunately, no. But we know many other things.”

This is the beginning of the final phase of his relationship with the voices. The one that would last for years and take him to places he could not have imagined at the age of fourteen. It was also when he realized that
his destiny, or at least a probable future could be as some kind of writer.

Jonah breezed his way through high school starting in grade ten based on the recommendation of his grade eight teacher. The voices helped him figure out many of the complex things. In grade thirteen, his class was given the assignment to write an essay on one of the more significant events of the last five centuries.

When he got home that afternoon, he went out onto the back deck with his laptop and asked. “Anybody got some ideas about my history essay?”

There was a good deal of murmuring as the voices debated with each other. Finally, one of the English voices told him that they had decided that the French Revolution of 1789 would be the subject. Very shortly after that  French voice started talking and one of the English voices would translate. The narrative that the French voice was speaking was very emotional and almost felt personal to Jonah. The voice talked about its hatred for the king, Louis the Sixteenth and his queen, Marie Antoinette, the excesses of the French court, the total disregard the royalty had for the French people, the hunger and death and disease that riddled the country and the attack that dethroned the king and ended one of the worst periods that France had ever experienced.

The descriptions were so vivid that they lingered in Jonah’s mind long enough for him to fashion a pretty decent narrative. While he was writing it out, the thought occurred to him that he was kind of cheating. But who would he confess it to who wouldn’t think he was completely off his rocker? So he just kept writing. The hell with it, he thought. It’s mine as much as it is theirs.

~ 2 ~

And so it was all through his higher education, for which his essay on the French Revolution won him a full-ride scholarship to Glendon College in Toronto. 

Early in the summer following his high school graduation, he was invited to lunch by the Dean, who explained to him that the education he receive would be a good grounding to get into teacher’s college, or if he wanted to become a writer or communications professional of any kind it would be a good grounding.

Up to that point, Jonah had not really thought much about what he specifically wanted to do besides writing. But he was a voracious reader, and the voices in his head were always telling him weird stories, and by transcribing them he taught himself how to write quite effectively Maybe, he thought, he could parlay that into a book or movie writing career of some sort. He was already a reader, mostly of cop and detective fiction. The voices gave him a million-dollar education in that, and would suggest writers who were a bit off the beaten path, but whose work was quite brilliant all the same. Through his reading in the long summers off, he also went through a great many of the classics and learned to appreciate what real literary writing was about. But he also read all the worlds of several contemporary writers who wrote mostly about crime from either the detective, private investigator or criminal perspective.

His grade point average was just enough to get him his BA, but his literary education, thanks to the voices, was a Phd course in literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.

At Glendon College, he lived in the residence and made his spending money playing poker with all the brain-dead rich kids in the coffee room. One of the voices was obviously some sort of gambler and taught him how to bluff with the best of them. He tried smoking but didn’t like it, so he quit after just two cigarettes. He also tried weed, but that just made the voices in his head go crazy, cracking lame jokes and arguing with each other. It was very noisy. There were a lot of headaches involved as well, and he never got the true feeling of being high. He came out of Glendon four years later with a relatively useless BA in English, but with a focus that was fixed on writing.

He then headed home, but had no intention of staying there. It would be just long enough for him to get his bearings. 

Jonah’s grandfather, William Wiley, ran a mid-sized market trading firm in Buffalo across the river. Jonah had worked there in the summers, and his grandfather bought him a nice Toyota to get back and forth. During those three summers, he learned a lot about the market, talking with the traders in their lulls and from talking with his grandfather, at the lunches they had together, and when he came to visit his folks on the weekend. But as valuable as the insights were, he also learned that the price of entry into that kind of business, especially as an individual trader was extremely high. 

Toward the end of his final year at Glendon College, he found out that his grandfather had passed away. He rode the bus home for the funeral, sat around with a lot of adults, then drove his car back to Toronto the next day. 

After Jonah graduated from high school his grandfather he gifted Jonah $500,000, which his parents had put in a in a combination of high-yield savings and blue chip stocks picked by his grandfather. Over following four years, it had grown to close to $650,000. His parents didn’t tell him about this money because they felt it would tempt him to quit school before he got his degree.

The day he got back home to Fort Erie, with his two large suitcases of clothes, his parents took him out for Chinese, which was his favourite dinner, to a restaurant called Ming Teh down on the river. After they placed their order, his father slipped a bank book across the table to him. He opened it up and saw the total.

“Is this for real?” Jonah asked his dad.

“Yep.” his dad said,  “And I have to say we have known for a while now, but didn’t want to tell you about it.”

“Why not?” Jonah asked. But one of the voices in his head had already given him the answer.

All the same, Jonah was grateful. He was also excited because this would give him a good start on the idea he had in mind.

Jonah didn’t do much of anything that summer. Mostly just read a lot of detective fiction, and helped his parents move into a new house. His mom had inherited her dad’s business, and not being a numbers person at all, quickly sold it for a considerable amount, enough for them to both retire, sell their old house in the south end of the town and purchase a beautiful house along the River Road close to the Old Fort, as it was known locally, which was Fort Erie’s other attraction, along with the thoroughbred race track. 

Over the summer after his graduation, Jonah looked up a few of his old friends and found they were either married with young families or had jobs in neighbouring cities like Niagara Falls, which had several gambling casinos and hotels or St. Catharines, which was the largest city on the entire peninsula. It was then that Jonah realized that between working for his grandfather for four summers in high school then going to college in Toronto for another four years, a lot of things had changed. He had moved on and so had a lot of his old friends.

Jonah’s parents never put any real pressure on him to figure out what to do with his life. Truth was that once he started hearing the voices more clearly, he became quite remote from his mom and dad. He didn’t ignore his parents, just slowly and steadily diminished the amount of interaction he would have with them. They wrote it off to petulance, which teenagers all had in abundance. And then he won the scholarship and was gone for the better part of four years. When he was home, all he did was read. To them, he was a bit of a stranger. But he carried himself with a good deal of confidence, and they realized that he had grown into a pretty decent adult.

Then one night Jonah sat his folks down and told them that he was going to use the money he had inherited to support himself while he went through the process of becoming a writer. He had a couple of notebooks filled with story idea, some of which were based on ideas his voices had given him. Others came out of his own brain.

Jonah longed to tell his folks about what was going on in his head, but he was afraid that they would get all religious on him. Or even worse, they wouldn’t understand at all and insist that he see a psychiatrist who, in turn would have made sure he underwent some pretty serious psychotherapy, all of which he wanted to avoid like the plague. 

Having no one to hang out with and no idea exactly what he wanted to do with his life, he started going for long bike rides like he used to do when he was younger. only this time he would ride along the lake path that stretched from Fort Erie all the way to the town of Port Colburne at was the southern end of the Welland Canal which cut through the Niagara Peninsula. There was even a bike path all the way up the canal to St Catharines. But that was a hell of a ride, no matter how strong your legs were. 

Over the years since he could hear the voices, he had grown quite comfortable with them and secretly hoped that they would help him through the next phase of his life, like they did through high school and college.

A couple of times over the years, he had asked the voices who they were, and what their story was, but they had no interest in telling him any of that. Or perhaps it was that they couldn’t because they didn’t know. They were much more interested in his life, since he actually had one.

~ 3 ~

One day, a warm one in early August, Jonah sat out on his parents’ new back deck and started to do some research, to see if other people had experienced voices like he had. In his Google search, he found a website called Interior Voices, which was started by someone in England named Phillip Cromwell, who had experienced the same things as Jonah was experiencing. On the site was a chat room and as he looked through it, he saw that there were about a couple dozen people from all around the world whose experience was similar to his. 

He was a little reluctant to join the chat group, because some of the people sounded a bit loony. And the last thing he wanted to find out was that this was being caused by some sort of brain malfunction, or worse, a tumour. 

As he continued to read through the chat, he noticed that there was one person, from a small town along Lake Erie called Crystal Beach, who sounded like she really had her head on straight. Her name was Carolyn Somerville. He searched her on Google and found her website. She had a BA in English Lit from Brock University in St Catharines, graduating one year earlier than he had. 

She was currently writing a novel. Her site was basically a repository for some of the short stories she had written in advance of trying her hand at the novel. She had had her work published on a number of different sites. But her stories were all on her own site as well, so Jonah started looking through the encapsulations of them. It very much appeared that she was writing science fiction. He went back to the about page, saw her picture and read her bio. She was a beautiful-looking young lady, with long brown hair, dark eyes and beautiful lips. She had started writing in her mid-teens and was a big fan of some of the legendary Sci Fi writers like Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson and Ray Bradbury, all of whom Jonah had read as part of his search for a writing genre he would feel comfortable with. He picked one of her more recent unpublished stories titled, ‘The Visitor’, and started to read: 

“The ship was cloaked as it entered the Earth's atmosphere and touched down on the grounds of a coastal estate on northern Long Island. The voyage had taken the equivalent of three Earth years to get there. 

During the first year, the ship’s pilot had digested almost all of the available human knowledge through an earth system known as the Internet.

The second year was spent fabricating a body for himself. He had studied human physiology along with human nature, and he determined that if he made himself a Caucasian male approximately three and a half earth decades old, that would suit his purpose. 

Half of the third year was spent learning to adjust to his body, which included the consumption of liquids and solid foods, which he was able to fabricate from chemical formulae available to him on the Earth Internet.

The rest of the time was spent creating an identity and a whole family history, registering himself as a landed immigrant from a location known as Australia, giving himself a vehicle operator’s licence and credit cards, purchasing a carbon fuel-powered vehicle, and leasing a dwelling in a place called Long Island, from which he would operate his mission. He also created a bank account at a financial institution called BankAmerica and seeded it with $77,000,000 US dollars. His wardrobe was all purchased on the Earth’s Internet, and delivered to the address of his house. The car, a black Mercedes-Benz, was also delivered to that address. The keys were left with a human called a leasing agent whose name was Cindy Walker, whom he had dealt with via a text messaging as he entered the galaxy that contained the planet known as Earth.

He mused a bit at how simple a process it was to create a complete identity and insert himself into the culture of the planet. But then again this planet was considerably less evolved than his own. 

This would be his third conquest. After the second, he came to realize that this was just the way of things. Some planets were simply less evolved than others.

Once he entered the galaxy which the Earthlings called The Milky Way, he filed his report with the Ministry of Interplanetary Affairs on his home planet. When that was completed, he sat patiently for the next twenty Earth days and waited.

~ 2 ~

The name he gave himself was Ezra Birmingham. His background story was that Ezra had inherited his fortune from his father who had recently passed away. He was a shipping magnate, and owner of Birmingham Cargos, out of Brisbane Australia. An entire company history was fabricated, including taxes paid to the government of an Australian province called Queensland. The story was that Ezra had been in America for the past two years, applied for and was granted citizenship and was now, after a long period of travel, eager to spin his already considerable fortune into even more wealth. 

It was late at night when his craft touched down on the large manicured lawn of the estate he had leased in a town called Southhampton. Anyone observing this landing would have seen nothing, other than the sudden appearance of a naked human figure. 

He stepped out of the craft and sent it to the roof of the garage adjacent to the large house. He found the house keys beneath a plant pot at the corner of the large rear deck. He entered the house through a back room and walked up a few steps to the kitchen. There he saw a note from the real estate agent, Cindy Walker. She welcomed him to his new home, and had, as per his request, stocked the cupboard and refrigerator with food and various beverages. She had also taken all the packages that had been delivered and brought them upstairs to the master bedroom.

He walked around the house, taking it all in. After he had familiarized himself with it, he flipped on the TV in lower rear room and scanned the various channels. It became obvious to him rather quickly that this medium was not designed for intellectual pursuits, which in part explained the planet’s rather slow evolution. Everything he had taken in, through his three years of studying the planet, led him to believe that the human species was evolving at a snail’s pace, relative to any other planetary culture he could name.

Again, he shrugged it off. He was not here to save the planet, but simply to make certain that it was worth the effort to conquer and then recruit some earthlings to help manage affairs once the conquest was complete. He had chosen New York as his base because, from all his research, he concluded that many of the more evolved people in the country called America lived there. At least that was his hope.

He climbed the stairs to the second floor and entered a large room which he assumed was his. The bed in the room was covered with clothing all laid out neatly. He quickly dressed in a pair of khaki trousers and a black T-shirt. He then hung up and put away the rest of the clothing clearing off the bed. He briefly explored the second floor of the house and then returned to the kitchen. 

He extracted a bottle of chablis from the wine cooler, and opened it and poured some of the contents into a glass. He took his glass out to the deck and sat at the large table there. He gazed out at the ocean. He touched a small stud in his left ear lobe and a virtual screen opened up in front of him. As he spoke, in English, his words were automatically translated into an ornate series of glyphs.

“Earth Journal, entry number one. The voyage was uneventful. The landing unnoticed. The landscape of the planet is interesting. The majority of it is a liquid they refer to as water. Humans live, for the most part, in individual habitats either alone or in groups called families. The habitat I am occupying at present is much larger than it needs to be. Perhaps that has to do with the human preoccupation with wealth and power. I have no doubt I will eventually encounter many humans who feel that way. How many remains to be seen. I will be encountering my first human when the planet’s rotation reveals their sun. Her name is Cindy Walker. Her title is leasing agent. I assume she is a shrewd judge of character. So she will be the first test for this identity.”  

Ezra spent the rest of the night staring out at the ocean and listening to the waves as they made contact with the rocky shore. After an hour or so, he willed himself into a state of regeneration, only to be woken from it when the doorbell chimed the next morning.

As he read, he noticed that the voices in his head were silent. So he started reading aloud. It took him about an hour and a half to finish the entire story, which was close to forty-four thousand words and quite interesting and inventive. It didn’t feel literary, though, more like a very elaborate movie treatment would be like. He could very clearly see what was going on through her words. But there were no frills to her writing. It was very workman-like, straight-ahead storytelling.

Between the story and her picture, Jonah became quite intrigued to meet her. So he sent her an email, told her a bit about himself, alluding to their common bond, and politely requested an opportunity to meet with her.

He was quite surprised to receive a reply within half an hour. They set a date for the upcoming Sunday, and that thy could meet at the Tim Hortons in Crystal Beach, which was about half an hour from Fort Erie, along the shore of the Lake Erie

~ 4 ~

Jonah still had the Toyota Corolla and true to what his grandfather told him about how the Japanese-made cars that last three or four times longer than any American-made car you could name, it was almost ten years old and still in pretty good condition. His mom used it as a second car for shopping, since Jonah’s parents were both teachers at Fort Erie Secondary School, where his father was also the Vice-Principal and science teacher, they only really needed one car. 

He never brought the car with him when he moved to Toronto to go to school, because Toronto, was one of the worst-planned cities in North America. Rush hour was all day, every day. And besides, he was living in residence and there was a bus that ran regularly down Bayview Avenue, where he could find anything he was looking for food-wise, which was really all he cared about.

So on Sunday afternoon, he got onto the Dominion highway that basically ran parallel to the Lake Erie shore, drove out of Fort Erie, passed through the small town of Ridgeway and on towards the lake and into Crystal Beach. 

When he got to the Tim Hortons, he entered and recognized Carolyn immediately. She was at a table for two by the window. He waved and noticed she had a large coffee in front of her, so he went to the counter and got his own. Then he walked over and sat down opposite her. She smiled and they shook hands.

“Hi Carolyn. Great to meet you.” Jonah said.

Carolyn looked to be in her mid-twenties, about the same as Jonah. She was really quite attractive, even though she appeared to be wearing no makeup. She was just naturally pretty.

“So I read your story, ‘The Visitor.’” Jonah said. “It was really interesting. But I found it quite straightforward.”

“Yeah. I’m not really writing short stories for publication, although I have had a few published on online sites. They’re more like movie or TV series pilot treatments. It’s a long road. Right now, I’m just in a holding pattern, because the US studios aren’t looking at anything from Canada because of the idiot president they have. So now I’m driving down the literary road.”

“I get that.” Jonah said. I’m working my way into becoming a writer myself. I’ve been fooling around with some ideas in the cop slash detective slash mystery genre. I was also thinking about screen stories, so I learned a lot from reading yours. 

“That’s good. The key to writing stories for TV or movies is that you need strong characters and a good basic plot line. Once a production company gets hold of that, they find a screenwriter, which is an insane profession, and they work with the producer and director and fashion a script that tells your story along with whatever they can afford to add in terms of effects and locations, etc. So the treatment is a lot more barebones than real sci-fi.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” Jonah asked.

“I started writing fiction when I was twelve and I have always been curious about the process of creating a TV series or movie, so I just got on the Internet and figured it out.” 

“So now you’re writing a novel?”

‘Yeah, sort of. I’m expanding the story you read into a novel.”

How do you find the time to do all of this, if you don’t mind me asking. It sounds like this is all you’re doing.” Jonah said.

“No I don’t mind.” Carolyn said, then took a sip of her coffee. “Right now, I don’t need to have an income. My parents are really loaded. My dad’s in the stock market and my mom is a full professor of modern Literature at U of T and has published several best-selling novels, three of which have been optioned so far. If she likes my novel she’ll help me by introducing me to her agent. ”

“But you live here?”

“Yeah, over in Bay Beach, along the lake closer to the point. I live in our vacation house, which was actually the house my grandfather build for him and my grandmother. They’re both gone now. My folks know what I’m doing and have agreed to fund me until I make it in either the movies, TV or book writing. I also like living here. I’ve got a whole beach in my back yard, a pool and a lake that you can actually swim in. I go and visit them in Toronto, you know, on holidays and stuff, but that city just jangles my nerves.”

“I know what you mean. I went to Glendon, which is the liberal arts college of York University.”

“The one up Bayview Avenue.” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I considered going there.” Carolyn replied. “But, you know…the city. So I opted for Brock in St Catharines. It was an easy drive, and I’ve always been an early riser anyway. ”

She took a sip of her coffee. “So you know a lot about me. What’s your story, Mister?”

Jonah chuckled. “I grew up in Fort Erie. My parents are both high school teachers. In the summers when I was in college, I worked for my grandfather’s trading company in Buffalo, so I know a bit about the market. But you know, it’s all about the Benjamins, or so all his traders would tell me.

“Yeah, playin’ the market is not for regular people.” she said.

“Oh, I know.” Jonah said. “So I got interested in writing in high school, I have no idea what exactly I want to do just yet and my parents are cool with it.”

“So you’re a writer too.”

Jonah chuckled. “Not like you are. Not yet anyway.”

Carolyn chuckled.“And are your parents retired now?” Carolyn asked.

“Sort of. My grandfather died when I was in my last year at Glendon. He left the company to my mother. But she didn’t really have a clue about the market so she sold it. They got a shitload of money for it from some New York brokerage. Enough to more than fill their retirement funds and buy a much nicer house down on the river. They’re not really retired, they’re just kind of treading water for a while. I guess.”

“And you’ve got a BA in Lit. Same as me, which only qualifies you to either teach or write.”

“ Yeah, but that was the plan. I graduated, then came home with a couple notebooks full of ideas and I’m basically getting revved up to start writing. And while I was doing that, I started thinking about…you know.” So I looked it up on the web and that’s how I found you.”

“Yeah, let’s not talk about that here.”

Jonah looked around. There were only a few people within earshot. But he knew that they should keep it as private as possible.

“So you’ve been home for a couple months now. Have you at least focused on a direction?”

“Sort of. I’m thinking a lot about detective fiction. I have an idea that I started developing in my third year that felt pretty solid. So I’m gonna blow that out into a series treatment.”

Carolyn didn’t say anything for a while. And then she took a last sip of her coffee.

“We can go talk about this at my place. Do you like to swim?

“Yeah. I grew up swimming in the Niagara River.”

‘Good because it’s hot today. So we can have that chat then go for a swim, and maybe have a glass of wine.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Jonah said as he finished off his  coffee.

~ 5 ~

Jonah followed Carolyn to a beautiful house on a long narrow lot on Erie Road just past Bay Beach. The lot was bordered on the both sides by spruce trees, and felt quite secluded. He followed Carolyn up the long driveway. She was driving a fairly new Lexus. She parked beside the house in a carport. Jonah followed her and parked behind her.

 She showed him around the house which was fairly large and very tastefully furnished, but it definitely had that summerhouse feel to it. They walked through the house to the back deck, which opened onto a yard that was about thirty yards or so deep with a set of concrete steps down to the beach. Closer to the large rear deck of house there was a long, narrow rectangular pool, which had an automatic cover that was supported by a pillar in each corner of the pool.

They then re-entered the house and Carolyn disappeared into a laundry room beside the kitchen and came out a moment later with a large towel and a swimsuit.

“You and my dad are around the same size. You can change in there.” she said, pointing to a bathroom, off the living room,  I’ll go get my suit on and meet you out the back. You can grab a beer or a Diet Coke or whatever in the fridge on your way out.”

Jonah got changed and then walked through the house to the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator. He headed out the back door took a seat on the deck overlooking the pool. It looked to be about sixty feet long and only about fifteen feet wide. On one end was what appeared to be a control panel of some sort. He got up and went over to have a look at it. Then it hit him that this was one of those pools that created a current that you could swim against. There was also a six foot high opaque fence that ran along the far end of the pool, presumably to keep any snow from accumulating on the pool cover and break any wind blowing in off the lake during the winter months, which meant that she used the pool all year round. A little further down, there were a couple of painted wooden deck chairs and the beach, about thirty yards of it, and Lake Erie.

He walked down to the end of yard and down onto the beach. He looked up and down and saw that it was all pretty sandy all the way toward Fort Erie and the river, and about half way out the point. 

As Jonah was walking back to the deck, Carolyn came out in a floral-patterned bikini, carrying her own water bottle and towel. Jonah couldn’t help but stare and think of how an old friend of his described a girl in a bikini they saw at Crescent Beach as being built like a brick shithouse. He chuckled to himself as she sat down on one of the chairs at the table on the deck. 

“That’s a hell of a pool.” Jonah said.

“Yeah. My dad bought me the pool as a graduation gift. I love to swim and this setup allows me to do it all year round.”

“So you swim against some sort of current that comes out of one end?”

“Yeah. And you can adjust the current speed to up to six knots.”

“Wow. That’s just a little slower than current in the Niagara River.” Jonah said.

“Uh huh. And it’s a crazy good workout. About twenty minutes a day is all you need. It also has individual jets, like a whirlpool, and as you can see, the canopy comes down to help keep the water from losing too much heat so it doesn’t cost a lot to run it all year round. The barrier in behind keeps the snow from drifting onto the pool cover. And it’s pretty easy to brush the snow off it when the top is down.

“That’s quite the setup.” Jonah And this is a beautiful house. I can understand why you prefer it to the city.” 

“Yeah, definitely. We’ll swim in a while.” Carolyn said. “So…why don’t you tell me about your spirits and I’ll tell you about mine.”

“Okay” Jonah said. And he thought about it for a moment. “Mine are all men. Three of them speak English and one speaks French, which I can understand because I took French in high school and for four years at Glendon, and the other two speak a kind of broken Slavic English.” 

“That’s interesting, because all the voices I have, four of them, are all women, and they all speak English. But, you know, British English. One is very sophisticated, the other two are pretty normal and that fourth one sounds like some sort of comic book character. Have you had the voices all your life?”

“I don’t know. I became aware of them when I was about ten. Nothing distinct. Then, when I got to be about fourteen, they started to become much clearer and each voice had its own distinct attitude, personality, I guess. They’re all pretty forceful, but they don’t feel violent or angry. It’s like they know where they are and have no problem with it.”

“Wow. You’ve really been thinking about this.”

“Yeah. I, uh, wanted to be able to explain as much as I could to you. Another thing they do is try to influence me. The essay I wrote in grade thirteen, the one that got me into Glendon, it was the French voice who told me the story. And it felt very personal to him. It was all about the French Revolution. I’m pretty sure he’s really old, ‘cause that was like in 1789.

“Is there one that voice dominates the others?” Carolyn asked.

“Not really. There seems to be one who speaks for them all, but I can’t be sure. He never talks in the first person. The slavic guys don’t talk clearly at all. But other than the French voice telling me the French Revolution story, they all chatter away about the same. They never override each other. It almost feels polite or like they were raised to be respectful of other people speaking. So that’s about all I know, other than that I’ve learned to make them quiet just by asking politely. So what about you?”

Carolyn chuckled “I call mine the bitches. I have to be pretty forceful with them to get them to speak one at a time. They are not what you would call obedient voices. So I put them to sleep a lot.”

“What do you mean you put them to sleep?” Jonah asked.

“That’s just what I call it, when I basically tell them to be quiet. I’ve taught them that that means for a specific amount of time. It took a bit of arguing and a lot of firmness, but they have no sense of time, so I tell them to stay quiet until I wake them up again.”

“And they stay quiet?”

“Well for a couple of hours at least. To them, who knows, it might feel like a century.” Carolyn said. “What about your guys? Have you taught them anything?”

“No…no I haven’t…mainly because I never realized that I could.”

“Maybe you can, or maybe you can’t. From my interactions with the group on Interior Voices, it seems there’s no rhyme or reason at all. If you read enough of the posts in the chatroom, you’ll see very clearly that everyone has a different situation to deal with. A few have had psychotherapy, hoping to get rid of the voices that couldn’t be put to sleep. There are also stories of suicides because the voices drove them mad. I guess we’re in the lucky category.”

“I think you’re right. I also think that maybe it has something to do with the fact that we never, you know, rile them up. We have both accepted them and have learned to live with them. Hell, you can even control yours. I can only quiet mine down for a while.” 

“I can’t tell you,” Carolyn said, ‘How great it is to find someone in the same situation as I am. It’s a real relief to have someone to talk to about it.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m happy you agreed to meet up.”

“Okay, now so I’m gonna show you how this pool works.” 

They got up and walked over to the control panel that was covered with a hinged transparent plastic lid. She flipped it open and pressed a button and the roof slowly lifted. When it was fully raised, she set the current control to four knots and slipped into the pool. She walked to the far end in the churning water and grabbed the chrome bar that ran across the width of the pool. She let go and was immediately pushed away from the bar. Then she started to swim from about the mid-point of the pool. She stayed in pretty much the same place for the next fifteen minutes or so. Jonah sat back down on the deck chair. She was obviously, Jonah thought, a very powerful swimmer. He sat in his chair and drank some more water. One of his voices commented that the lady he was talking to was very beautiful.

“Her name is Carolyn and she has voices like you guys. And she’s gonna help me figure out how to control you guys a bit more.”

“Control us. Why would you want to control us? We’re your friends.”

“I want to control you so that I can have some time to actually think for myself, you know, like a normal human being.”

The voice laughed. “There’s no such thing, my friend. Believe us we have tried to find one…no luck. The best we could hope for, we suppose, is acceptance, which we have found with you.”

“I was wondering, why it is you guys have never told me anything about yourselves.” Jonah said. Or thought. He wasn’t sure anymore.

“What’s to tell? We lived, we died. Everything in between is indistinct.”

“So you don’t know who you are?”

“No. We don’t. All we know is you.”

“You know nothing of your lives?”

“Bits and pieces. Mostly we just know things which, we suppose, we learned while we were living. Stories, mathematics, geography. But it’s all, we assume, unrelated to who we were. We know nothing…personal.”

“Do you have a theory about that?”

“ We suppose it’s so that we can inhabit another body but not saddle that body with our memory. Not knowing what we were means that we could have been anything, good or bad.”

“That’s an interesting way to look at it.”

“It’s all we have. All we know about life is what we know about you…This girl. Does she like you?”

“I suppose. I mean, we just met, so she barely knows me.”

“We have good feeling about this girl.”

“Oddly enough, so do I.”

“Go slow with her. She is not a woman of the world.”

“How do you know that?”

“How do we know anything? We listen. She is alone. Her interior life has cut her off from the world. Like yours has.”

“I want you guys to do me a favour and just you know, leave me alone for a while. I want to find out more about her.”

“That’s the spirit. Of course.” There was a good deal of mumbling and then all he could hear was the sound of pump pushing water and the sound of Carolyn swimming.

~ 6 ~ 

Fifteen minutes later, Carolyn stopped swimming and turned off the current in the pool and switched on the whirlpool.

She motioned for Jonah to join her. He climbed down into the pool and immediately felt the surging jets. He found a place beside her and sat down on the bench where

“This is really cool.” Jonah said.

“You want to try a swim?” 

“Mmmm. I’m working my head into it.”

Carolyn chuckled. 

“I believe that if everybody had one of these pools, there would be no wars and no drug problems. It’s the best high ever.” she said.

“I can’t disagree.”

“I noticed you were having a chat. Make any progress?”

“They all think you’re quite beautiful. And so do I.”

Carolyn looked at him and smiled. “I like the way you look too, and so do all my ladies.”

As they talked, Jonah noticed that Carolyn had inched a bit closer to him.

“I smoked some weed once in college. My spirits really got crazy.” Jonah said out of the blue. “Gave me a migraine like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Yeah. When I smoked some, my girls all started singing stupid bubble gum songs from the sixties and seventies. So I don’t do anything that will alter my consciousness. Maybe a glass of wine, but that’s about it.”

They sat in the warm August day, cooler than cucumbers and talked for nearly two hours. And though she sounded bright and cheery, he could hear the loneliness in her voice.”

“So, do you have anyone in your life?” Jonah finally asked. “You know, a boyfriend of any sort?” 

“Not really. I was friends with a couple of the guys I went to high school with, but they’re married with children now.”

“Does it get lonely living all by yourself?”

“You know, I thought it would, at first, when I got back from college and started to write. But no. I don’t suppose I could ever be truly lonely, because well, I’m never really alone.”

“I get that.” Jonah said.

“I know you do. And you know what? Without travelling thousands of miles, you’re really the only one I can talk to about it who wouldn’t think I was out to lunch.”

They looked at each other with their voices silent. Then Carolyn leaned forward and kissed Jonah. And when she did, there was literally a spark between them that they both felt. It was positively electric. It was scary and beautiful and powerful all at the same time. Their voices were silent. But none of that mattered. It was monumental in its intensity.

 When Carolyn pulled back she was positively glowing and a little breathless. Jonah was dumbfounded. They stared at each other for quite some time. Then Jonah said. “I have to admit, I’ve never been there before. Not even close.”

“Me neither.” Carolyn replied and she raised her hand to caress his face. “I know we haven’t known each other all that long, but I really think you should come and live here with me. I think that we could both be very happy together. Truth be told, I’m tired of having this big house all to myself. We could write books and critique each other’s work. And we could talk to each other whenever we wanted. I think it would be wonderful if that could happen.” Carolyn said. 

This all made a lot of sense to Jonah. This girl was beautiful, smart, a great swimmer with her whole own house and four spirits not counting her own. And although she never let on, she probably was kind of lonely, and he understood what that was all about. Maybe they really needed each other. Maybe they would be stronger together. It was almost too good to be true, but at the same time it felt absolutely right.

“Are you sure about this, Carolyn? I mean, you know, dead certain sure?” Jonah asked.

She shook her head. “No, Jonah. I’m not. I’m not sure about anything right now and I get the feeling that you’re not either. So maybe we could…you know, just figure things out together. Because what I do know is that I can’t do this on my own or with anyone who wouldn’t understand. And then you showed up. We’re the same, you and I. And maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be. But we will never know unless we try. If we crash and burn, well, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.”

Jonah knew every word she was speaking was true. And that there was really no real downside to it at all. Then he got angry with himself because he was waiting for the spirits inside him to tell him he was doing the right thing.

“I have to tell you the truth. I’ve been waiting to say anything because…I think I have become a little too dependent on these guys. But you are absolutely right. If I were to say no to you, I know I would end up regretting it for the rest of my life. So, yes. I will. Because yes, I want to, and more importantly, I also think it would be good for both of us. Otherwise, I’m really afraid we could both end up insane.”

They moved together and held each other in the warm late afternoon sunlight in the cool pool water and for the first time, for both of them, they felt they were so much more than spirit carriers.

~ 7 ~

They went to a nice family restaurant in Crystal Beach  for dinner and then spent the evening watching a couple of old Humphrey Bogart movies and eating popcorn. They then spent the night together and, for the first time in a long time for both of them, they slept peacefully. 

The next day, they drove down to Fort Erie separately to meet Jonah’s folks. They were delighted that their son had met such a beautiful young lady. And surprised when Jonah announced that he would be moving to Bay Beach to live with Carolyn and get to work on his own writing career.

They only stayed for a couple of hours. And maybe it was the joy that both of them radiated, but Jonah’s parents just wished them well and reminded them that they were only a half-hour away and they could visit whenever they wanted. 

Jonah strapped, the bike rack to the back of the Toyota and fastened his bike onto it. He tossed his two suitcases in the folded down rear seat along with a box of computer stuff and bike maintenance gear and they took off. 

As they stood in the driveway watched their son and a girl he had known for all of two days, all that was on their minds was their fervent hope that he was making the right decision. 

They didn’t know about the bond that their son shared with her. And even if they knew, they would probably not understand it, or even believe it, despite the fact that they were both quite religious and the transmigration of souls was something that every religion taught to one degree or another.

On the way back they were both a little anxious as to why they had not heard from their spirits. They both knew that they were still there inside them. But their silence weighed on them. Like they need their approval

When they got to the house in Bay Beach and started to unpack. Caroline asked, “Did you hear from your spirits?”

“Not a peep.” Jonah responded. “How about you?”

Carolyn shook her head. “Do you think you might be pissed off about, you know, us?”

“Maybe they’re figuring out how to deal with this.”

“You mean like we are?” Carolyn said.

“Sort of. I mean, say you were one of them. You would feel a certain amount of, I don’t know, ownership.”

“Do you think they feel they own us? That they control us?” Carolyn asked.

“No. Do you?” Jonah asked.

Carolyn took a deep breath. Then shook her head. “I don’t really know, Jonah. I just know that you and I are what we are. I have no idea what they are, and never really have. We might just both be suffering from the same mental illness.”

“It sure doesn't feel that way.”

“I know!” Carolyn exclaimed. “Guess we’ll just have to wait them out.”

“Like we have a choice.” 

And they both laughed because it was all insane. But at least they now both had someone to be insane with.

They lugged everything into the house and agreed that Jonah could use the guest room to store his clothes. There was also a small desk in there where he could work at night if he wanted to.

About half an hour later, he was all moved in. He came down the stairs and into Carolyn’s office, where she was just puttering around on her computer.

“So what do you think about going out to dinner to celebrate. It would be like our one-day anniversary.” Jonah said.

Carolyn just smiled, then got up and kissed him. “Sounds like a plan.” she said, and kissed him again. They held each other for a while and it felt really good. It felt…complete.

~ 8 ~

Carolyn spent the better part of the next morning showing Jonah where everything was and making a shopping list. Then they headed into Ridgeway to do some food shopping. Jonah insisted on paying for the groceries, since he was not saddled with any other expenses aside from gas and insurance for his car. Carolyn didn’t tell him  it wasn’t really necessary because she sensed he wanted it to be a real partnership.

Carolyn worked from about seven in the morning until whenever she had felt she’d done enough. So she was up very early and down in her office hammering away. Jonah was still on vacation as far as his body was concerned. So he wandered down around ten that morning, poured himself a cup of coffee to wake himself up a bit, then headed out to the pool and started swimming. He couldn’t handle the current speed that Carolyn could. But he figured he would work his way up to it. As he swam, he started thinking about the kind of stuff he read in college and in the evenings on his long summer breaks. He thought about TV writing, not so much scripting, but creating original stories that could be turned into character -driven movies and or series. 

From his conversations with Carolyn about the literary market, he reckoned that TV might be an easier market to crack, since the mainstream literary market was as constipated as it ever was. He admired the fact that Carolyn was planning to take a shot at it, which she had mentioned the evening before at dinner. Jonah knew she was good enough and with her mom’s connection, he figured she stood a pretty good chance at succeeding.  

But, unlike the literary market, there were now literally dozens of cable networks that needed content. Carolyn liked sci-fi because she had always read a lot of it and watched a lot of it when she was younger. Plus the sci-fi market was considered to be a fringe market of sorts, although you could make a good living if you had an idea that Carolyn told him, had some legs, meaning that it could be rolled out into a series. That’s what she was writing at the moment, which, coincidentally, was an expanded version of the story he had read titled ‘The Visitor.’

 He thought about that and could see a lot of possible directions to take it forward. So she was following a course that was guided by the kind of books, series and movies she had been absorbing for quite a while. 

Thinking about himself, he realized that he had read and absorbed a lot of detective fiction. Cops, private investigators, even military investigators. So that was something to think about.

The other thing was that, while the government in the US was currently being headed and run by a bunch of Republican lunatics, one of the things they had done was closed off TV and movie markets to Canada. But like most of the things they were doing, there was no real way to police this, especially if you were a valued commodity in the field. So he decided that’s what he would make himself and works as hard as he could to bring it to life. 

After he had gone through all that in his head, and had swum which he reckoned was about twenty minutes. He shut off the jet and plopped down on the submerged seat in a corner of the pool. He took a few deep breaths and closed his eyes. 

For no reason that he could identify, he heard one of his voices softly speak. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Oh yeah.” Jonah said. “So what qualifies you to be giving out ideas? And where the hell have you guys been?”

“Well first of all, I have no idea why I have this thought. And secondly, we have noticed that you are now in a relationship with someone who has friends as well. So we just wanted to give you a little space. We’re not uncouth, you know.”

“Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate that.” Jonah said. 

“She’s seems like a wonderful girl and we believe you’re going to be very happy.”

“I sure hope that’s true. So tell me about your idea.”

“Okay. It’s set in Toronto.

“What do you know about Toronto?” Jonah asked.

“Quite a bit, but don’t ask me how I know it. Because we all know things that we’re not sure how we got to know.”

The voice started talking into Jonah’s brain. An hour later, the voice stopped and Jonah realized that he had been sitting in the pool all that time, transfixed.

He climbed out and dried himself off and walked back to the house. Carolyn was in the kitchen making a cup of tea for herself. He gave her a kiss.

“How’s it goin?” he asked.

“Pretty good.” she replied. “Just need a little fuel.” she said holding up the cup. “How about you?”

“I did a lot of thinking and more or less decided what I want to do.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Uh huh. It’s a detective story. I got it from one of the spirits.”

“Really, so they’re still around.”

“Yeah, they’re, at least mine are. They’re apparently  giving us a little honeymoon break.”

Carolyn chuckled. “A honeymoon break. Wow.” 

“I assume your ladies are doing the same.” 

“That’s actually a valid assumption.” Carolyn said. “So did it give you enough so you can start writing?”

“Yep. I’m just gonna have a shower, then make some toast and coffee and get cracking. I don’t know how good it will be, but what the hell.”

Carolyn kissed him on the cheek. “Doesn’t matter. The key thing is that you‘re starting. That’s really the hardest part of the whole thing. Have a good time.” And with that, she was out of the kitchen and back to her office.

~ 9 ~

Half an hour later, Jonah was sitting on the deck, with a Word file open on his laptop. He was staring at the blank page. Beside the computer was a notepad and a pen, where he would write down stuff he wanted to remember, like character names, locations and certain plot points.

So far he had all the names of the principal characters figured out. And a rough idea of how to get the story started. He knew all the nuts and bolts of it. It was really just a question of putting them all together in a way that, at the very least, made sense, and at the most, would be a worthwhile read. He had learned enough about story structure to be able to organize things properly. After that, well, who knows, he thought.

So he took a deep breath and a sip of his coffee and started to write.

~ 1 ~

Emil Haven IV sat perched on the second-floor porch railing of his flat in an area of Toronto called The Beaches. He was looking out over one of them now, called Balmy Beach. Haven hated his first name, but because there was an IV behind it, he felt a certain, family-imposed, obligation not to change it to something like Wes or Phillip. 

Haven was holding a half-consumed bottle of Grolsch beer in his hand. He was dressed in light cotton pants and a well-worn red V-neck T-shirt. He was in his mid-thirties and quite fit for a beer drinker. Mainly from running the length of the boardwalk in front of his house three or four times a week and doing more crunches than he could count every day. 

Haven was what you would call ruggedly handsome. But he had never really been conscious of it. His hair was long and wavy and well cut. His nails were manicured and he had a small tattoo around his right wrist; a snake eating its tail. At one point, it made total sense to him, but nowadays he wondered just how much of a hassle it would be to have it removed. He had a diamond stud in his left ear and a pair of reading glasses hanging around his neck. 

Haven was a mildly successful writer of detective stories, but the bulk of his income was in the form of regular cash draws from his trust fund account. He was, after all, a Haven and the Havens were Ontario royalty, with most of their money made in steel and iron ore mining in various parts of the world. But that was his grandfather’s world and fortune. His dad was simply another Toronto uber-rich guy who made money with money, and there was a lot to be made these days.

Haven could very well have chosen to just be a playboy, but for some reason that he had yet to fathom, he was cursed with a work ethic. Writing whodunits, while quite an enjoyable pastime for Haven, served the very useful purpose of keeping him away from the drudgery of the family business of making money out of money.

Haven was watching the reflection of the nearly setting sun on the water and the endless parade of people passing by on the boardwalk below; people who mostly could not afford to live where Haven was living at the moment, and maybe never would be. These citizens were lumbering along, pulling dogs on leashes, pushing strollers, or just dragging themselves through the warm early summer evening. Haven didn’t look down on them so much as he considered himself fortunate that he would never have to worry about a lot of the things they worry about. Like money or job security or drug-addicted children or the cost of a new car.

 Satisfied that the world outside no longer held any interest, he finished his beer and slid off the railing. He walked over to a table set on the porch. On it sat a large MacBook and a pile of paper in two thick folders. He took both piles of paper and dropped them on the floor beside a large wastebasket half-filled with empty bottles of Grolsch. A small desk lamp was the only light. The piles he dropped to the floor were all the changes from his 13th novel. ‘A Month Of Sundays, A Phil Rossetti Mystery,’ which was, at that very moment going to press.

He sat down and woke the Mac. He opened the hard drive, then a Pages file. At the top of the first page, he typed ‘The Virgin Detective’ A Novel by Emil Haven IV.

Haven continued to peck furiously, impervious to all distractions. He loved starting a novel. It always held so much promise for him. A tale to tell, churning and bubbling its way out of his brain. This would be his 14th novel and would remove the Unlucky 13 curse that afflicted him for more than a year and three major edits. The only thing that kept him sane was that there was a new idea in his head, rolling around like thunderclouds, and now that the dreaded 13th novel was complete, his new story, The Virgin Detective, was leaking out slowly as he typed.

~ 2 ~

TWO MONTHS EARLIER

Two men in well-tailored suits stood side by side at the arrivals gate at Kennedy Airport in South Brooklyn New York, USA. They were dark, swarthy bulldog types…serious hoodlums. One of them held a hand-written sign which read, “Mr. O’Leary.” 

Colonel Richard Kane, retired, a bearded, slightly academic-looking man walked by them, a large canvas haversack slung over his shoulder. He nodded almost imperceptibly to the two hoods and walked on. The two men fell in step behind him. As they walked the length of the airport, one of the men moved up beside Kane and mumbled something to him. Suddenly, virtually out of nowhere, two men with semi-automatic pistols materialized, focused on the threesome. The two men with Kane drew their weapons. Bursts of gunfire began and pandemonium broke out in the immediate vicinity. 

Kane dropped to the floor and rolled under a row of seats. Then, keeping low and scooting swiftly with surprising agility, he moved farther from the fray. He made it to an outside door, only to be accosted by a young hood, sporting a semi-automatic Colt 44. The kid gestured for Kane to drop his haversack. Kane did so. He bent over to lower it to the ground. For a split second, the kid dropped his guard. Kane’s left foot lashed out and connected with the side of the kid’s leg. It snapped at the knee. The kid started crumbling. As he descended, Kane caught him with a flat hand to the underside of the jaw, and followed through with easy, skillful force, puncturing his windpipe and slicing several vertebrae in his neck. The kid was dead before he hit the ground. 

Kane spotted the two soldiers dashing out of a set of doors about fifty feet down the terminal. He picked up his haversack and ran after them. They all arrived at a Cadillac limousine more or less at the same time. The back door opened and Kane dove in. The two hoods, none the worse for wear, were getting organized in seats across from him in the back of the limo. He nodded to them. One hood reached out and pulled the door closed. The car took off with a lurch. Once they were clear of the airport and heading out toward Long Island, Kane motioned to the small wet bar in between the two men.

“Mind if I pour one?”  Kane asked.

One of the hoods half nodded. Kane reached forward and fixed himself a scotch on the rocks. “Fix you lads anything while I’m at it?”

“We ain’t allowed to drink onna job. But thanks fer askin’” The hood on the left said.

Kane nodded and sat back with his drink. He twirled the ice in the glass. He took a long sip.

“Certainly was a warm welcome.” Kane said, feeling the scotch burn his throat as it went down.

“There’s a little tension in the city these days. Nothin’ we can’t handle, though.”

“So it would seem.” Kane took another sip of scotch, and several deep breaths to calm himself down. 

“You really with the IRA, like the Duke says?” The first hood asked.

“Not anymore. Got retired by a gutshot a few years back  But before that I put in seventeen years with the Ulster Provisionals. You know what that is?”

“Some badass buncha Micks, I bet.”

Kane mused over the hood’s comment. He sipped the scotch. “Aye...some badass bunch of Micks.”

The limo rolled through the Long Island countryside. Through small towns and farmland, and finally into an area of posh estates. It drove up to an odd-shaped villa of bleached concrete and pulled up in front of the house. The back door was opened by a young boy with distinctive almond-colored hair and deep blue eyes. He took Kane’s haversack and disappeared into the house. Kane stepped out of the limo and looked around. Up close the house was awesome in its beauty. The two hoods climbed out behind Kane.

“Follow the kid.” One of them said.

“When do I meet with the Duke?”

“When the Duke’s ready to meet with you.” the other one said.

Jonah stopped. He absently scratched his cheek. He scrolled back to the top of the page and realized that he was barely conscious of having written anything that was there.

But he didn’t dwell on it. Just read through it to the end of what he had done and continued, fixing typos and adjusting the logic of the words as they flowed. 

Having done that, he went to the kitchen, made himself another coffee, got himself seated again and continued.

Kane was ushered into the house. He followed the young boy to a large room at the back of the second floor. The boy opened the curtains and the sliding glass door to reveal the ocean some hundred and fifty feet across the manicured lawn. 

Kane walked over to the doorway to take in the view and when he turned around the boy was gone and his door was closed. He walked around the room, feeling the bed, checking out the appointments. He entered the adjoining bathroom and slipped out of his clothes. He turned on the shower and climbed in. 

After the shower, he took a short nap and then dressed and stared out the glass door again. A few minutes later, the young boy opened the bedroom door and looked at Kane. He followed the boy to the kitchen where a buffet was spread out. Several well-dressed hoods sat noshing away and drinking cold beers. They paid very little attention to Kane as he loaded up a plate and filled a glass from a Chianti bottle. The young boy took the Chianti bottle and motioned for Kane to follow. 

Kane entered a solarium behind the young boy. Sitting at a glass-topped table, with a small plate of vegetables and a glass of mineral water, was the Duke, Lorenzo Chiba. He was tall and thin and could have been anywhere from seventy to eighty years of age. The Duke motioned for Kane to take a seat across the table from him. When he did so, Kane saw that two men were standing in the corners of the room, concealed from anyone entering by plants and flowers. The room was warm and humid. The Duke gazed at Kane through deep, brown, knowing eyes. He then cast a glance at the young boy, who put the Chianti bottle on the table and then immediately disappeared.

“My grandnephew, Marco. We’re teaching him the family business from the ground up so to speak...to serve the men he works with so he will have respect for the service they will provide him.”

“That makes very good sense…umm.”

“Just call me Duke, Colonel Kane.”

Kane nodded and lifted his glass of Chianti. He took a sip and put the glass down. He picked up the Chianti bottle and proffered it to the Duke. The Duke raised his hand in a gesture of polite refusal.

“No, thank you. I have enjoyed my share, believe me. More than my share, my doctors tell me. Please…enjoy."

Kane took a healthy sip from the glass and started his meal.

“I’m told that you had a little trouble at the airport. Nothing too inconvenient, I hope.”

“I arrived in one piece, sir. Beyond that, it hardly matters.” 

The Duke nodded thoughtfully. “My people tell me you served your cause for seventeen years.” 

Kane nodded as he continued to eat.

“And that these past few years you have been working in the Third World.”

“Military strategist and advisor.”

“And that this has made you a very rich man?”

“Not as rich as you, sir.”

“And how do you know how rich I am?”

Kane smiled and wiped his lips with a napkin. “My clients are of two types, sir. The very rich, who want nothing more than to get richer. And military men who want to be very rich themselves. I know a very rich person when I see him.”

The Duke leaned back in his chair and chuckled. It caused him to cough slightly. This, in turn, caused the two guards to move forward. The Duke waved them off.

“I’ve heard that the Micks are excellent observers of the human condition.” 

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Kane pushed his plate away and poured another glass of chianti. 

“Let’s go for a walk, Colonel. I’ll tell you why I’ve brought you here.”

The Duke and Kane rose up out of their seats. One of the guards opened the outer door of the solarium and exited. The other stood by the door. After a few seconds, he nodded to the Duke. The Duke and Kane then left the solarium.

The two men made their way across the large and beautifully landscaped lawn to a pair of comfortable chairs overlooking the sound. The sky was starting to take on the deep orange-magenta hue of sunset. The waves broke loudly on the long stretch of shoreline in front of them. The two men sat. The Duke motioned his bodyguards back out of earshot.

“I bought this place for only one reason. I love the sound of the ocean.” 

“I live on the Celtic Sea myself. I know what you mean about the waves. They soothe the soul the way few other things can.”

“The Duke pulled a pair of Cuban cigars out of his inside jacket pocket. He handed one to Kane and lit them up.”

“Smoking is also on my doctor’s list of no-nos. But there’s only so much living a man can give up and still feel alive.”

Kane smiled and puffed on the cigar. The Duke stared out at the sea.

“I’ve talked to some people about you.” The Duke said. “But these are not people I trust a hundred percent. You might find it hard to believe, but I’ve picked up a few enemies along the way. People who would like nothing better than to lead me down the garden path.”

Kane merely chuckled and puffed on his cigar. “If you talk to anyone I’ve done business with, sir, they’ll tell you flat out, I’m only in it for the money. I’ve had a lifetime of politics and bullshit and I’m happy to be clear of it. I’m a soldier. You want a fire, I’ll light it. You want a country, a president or anyone else for that matter, deposed or the mineral rights to any tract of land anywhere, I’m your man. That’s the long and the short of it, sir.”

The Duke puffed his cigar thoughtfully. “As you’ve probably figured out, the situation for people in our business is getting very...competitive. I’ve never been good at confrontations. They’re expensive and wasteful. And besides, I’m too old to be breaking out the mattresses. So I’ve decided to move my organization to another place.”

“I see. And would it be accurate to say you’d be willing to pay me a substantial amount of money to...clear the way for your arrival?”

“You’re a very perceptive man, colonel. That’s exactly what I want.”

“I’ll need to know the downside risks.”

“Let me put it to you this way. Colonel. Is there a downside risk to shooting fish in a barrel?”

Kane merely flashed the Duke a sardonic smile. He was capable of putting two and two together.

“Then Canada will be like shooting fish in a barrel.” The Duke said.

Kane stared out at the ocean. The sky had gone to a gunmetal silver grey. The wind had picked up and was blowing straight at them. He turned to look at the Duke. 

“It sounds very much, sir, like you’re about to make me an offer I can’t refuse.”

They talked for another few minutes, then the two men got to their feet. Kane and the Duke shook hands and began to walk around the grounds. The Duke was leading the conversation, talking in a highly animated and excited way. He was a man with a plan and he was pretty sure he had found the right executioner.

Jonah stopped writing. He was quite a bit less freaked out than he was the first time he stopped. Obviously, the spirit in his head, while not dictating to him, was guiding him rather closely.

He read over everything he had written and when he finished focusing on that, he realized he was quite tired. All he wanted to do was lie down and take a nap. 

As he was pondering that, he felt two hands on his shoulders and a pair of luscious lips on his cheek.

“How’s it going?” Carolyn asked.

“It’s going fine. It’s just really exhausting.”

“Welcome to the world of fiction, sweetie.” 

Jonah chuckled. “Good day?”

“Yeah, I think so. maybe four thousand words. How about you?”

“You know I didn’t switch on the word count. So he scrolled down one of the menus and the word count came up at the bottom of the last page

“Looks like around 2800.”

“Wow. I’m impressed.”

“Yeah but it completely drained me.” Jonah said

“You’ll get over that. Hopefully sooner rather than later. 

It was around three o’clock. Carolyn said. “Why don’t we have a sandwich then go for a walk.

It was another sunny day, but the scorching heat of last three days had abated. They drove over to a place called Windmill Point, parked the car and walked down to the beach and started walking east toward the river. The walked barefoot, carrying their sandals. He already knew what Carolyn was writing so her told her all about his idea. He found that retelling the story to someone allowed him to fill in some of the blanks in his head when he was writing. 

“It’s essentially about this guy, his name’s Emil Haven the Fourth but I just call him Haven, cause he hates his first name. He lives in Toronto in a nice upper-level duplex flat in the Beached area of Toronto.” Jonah said. “He’s from a very wealthy family and was groomed to take over the family investment business. But instead he decides to start writing detective novels. And he does pretty well. Not well enough to live off, but he has a trust fund that makes up the difference

 So one day he’s down at the courthouse doing some research, watching a trial and he meets a cop who is there to testify. The cop’s name is Gino Botticelli. The two of them eventually become friends and have beers and coffees together and talk about cases. Over the years, he and the Gino guy decide to open an investigation agency, once Gino does his twenty years and is eligible for his full pension.

Haven has another friend who is a crime reporter for one of the Toronto newspapers. He came from Ireland, mostly to get away from the IRA, which he got too close to. But one day, this IRA guy shows back up in his life. He’s been hired by a New York mafia guy to start a war between the two principal crime families in Toronto.

This IRA guy ends up killing one of the wrong people when he starts the feud, and has the mafia guy who hired him on his case for that. So he decides instead to blackmail the mafia guy who hired him and use the Irish crime reporter as his bag man.

So the bag man, his name is Jim Clancy, he gets killed but the IRA guy still needs someone to complete the deal so he figures out who Haven is and gets him to do the job.

But while Haven is down in New York getting the blackmail money, he makes a deal with the New York mafia guy, who has sent someone to Toronto to kill the Irish guy.

When he gets back to Toronto, he manages to tip off the New York killer to the IRA guy, and they end up killing each other. His cop friend finds the tape recording that the Irish guy was using to blackmail the New York mafia guy and sends it to New York. So the New York mafia guy is arrested. At the end of it all, the writer, Haven, is left with a great story, and the five million in ransom money.

Six months later, his cop friend retires and they form their Investigation agency. And then, you know, they do one case a week. I’m trying to write the part I just told you about so it’s a 90-minute pilot, and the shorter stories, when they start working together solving cases, would be like 44 minutes or whatever a TV hour is these days.

“Wow.” Carolyn said.

“Now there’s a lot of nuts and bolts inside the story but that’s basically the outline.”

“That’s a pretty nifty story. It sounds a little complicated when you just reel it off like that, but I can see where you’re going quite clearly.

“Yeah, well that’s the job. Making it quite clear on paper. I feel pretty good about it so far. There’s a couple more characters to deal with, like a secretary for their agency and a computer guy to help them with cybercrimes, that sort of thing.”

“And you say that one of your spirits just gave it to you.”

“Yeah. Yesterday, when you were writing, I went for a swim and then after that, he just fed it into my brain, pretty much like I told it to you. All I have to do is flesh it out and make it all make sense, which I’m pretty sure I can do.”

Carolyn laughed. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you can too. Do you have a title yet?”

“Yeah. I call it The Virgin Detective.”

Carolyn smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “I think that’s a great title.”

They walked all the way to a place called Waverley Beach and they could see the lake start to narrow down as the water flowed into the Niagara River. There was a lot of concrete that looked like it might have been the base of a building at one time. 

“All that concrete used to be a dance hall. Behind it, across the lawn,” Carolyn said, pointing inland, was another old building. “That used to be a hotel. This was a happening place way back in the day.”Carolyn said.

“Lot of history around here.”

“Yeah. My dad told me a lot of stories that his dad told him. His dad was born in Ridgeway and actually built the house we’re in now. My grandfather, Tommy, left the house to dad, and we used it as a vacation house. Then when I got into Brock, I moved down here, because the community wasn’t a big deal traffic-wise compared to Toronto, which always made me uncomfortable.”

“So you have quite a family history around here.”

“I think a lot of folks do. I’m sure it’s the same for your family in Fort Erie. The people I know around here are all descendants of people who lived here for a couple of generations at least. This is a great part of the world to be living in. The people are more sane than crazy, the summers are only brutal for a few days here and there, the autumn is beautiful and there’s a lot of snow in the winter, but nothing we can’t handle. All the people that I see around here…they look…happy. And maybe that’s because they are living in a part of the country that gives them room to breathe.”

“I never thought about it in quite that way.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve been in the big bad city for most of the last four years.” 

They didn’t talk much on their way back. Both of them were listening to their spirits who were now back in spades.

~ 10 ~

Over the course of the next couple of months, they fell into a nice rhythm. They worked on their stories. They swam together in the pool, and Jonah got a lot better at it. They went for long walks and talked to each other about what they were writing. They read each other’s work and proofed it, so that when their stuff was ready to send out, it would feel very professional and get them to the tops of the piles quickly.

Pretty soon, it was October and the weather was cooling down. It was also getting close to Thanksgiving and they worked out a schedule that allowed them to have one dinner with Jonah’s folks and another up in Toronto with Carolyn’s.

The trip to Toronto was nerve-wracking for Jonah because he was really antsy about meeting Carolyn’s parents. Carolyn was nervous because she hated driving in the city, especially on a holiday when everybody seemed to be in a huge hurry to get somewhere. 

The spirits were quiet, because they had all been coached ahead of time, that both Carolyn and Jonah had to really be on their A game to fend off any the questions they would have to deal with.

Carolyn had finished her novel, while Jonah was about two-thirds of the way through his project, having completed the pilot story and two of the five shorter episodes. Carolyn wanted to really get her mom interested in showing it to her agent.

On the trip up to Toronto, they made up a plausible fake story about how they met. Carolyn would tell them they met at the Tim Horton’s, where Jonah, who had been on a long ride along the lake path, stopped for coffee. The place was busy so he asked Carolyn if it would be OK if he sat across from her. They started talking and found they had a lot in common. They started seeing each other after that, mostly just going out for dinner or to a movie in Welland or Niagara Falls. After a couple months, Carolyn asked Jonah to move in with her.

Carolyn believed they would buy that, as opposed to what had really happened. So when they got to Rosedale, where her parents lived, in a beautiful smaller house relative to many of the other houses around it, and close to the Castle Frank subway station, they were fully prepared and Jonah felt quite confident. 

Carolyn’s parents, Julia and David Somerville, were both good-looking people. And from the way they were dressed and the look of the interior of the house, quite well-off.

They greeted their daughter with huge hugs and then she introduced them to Jonah. 

They were not surprised by the story and the fact that they were living together. In fact, Carolyn’s dad told them he felt a lot better about that than having her live alone.

They poured out some wine, and gently peppered Jonah with questions, which he answered quite honestly because there really was only the one fabrication. After that it was all reality.

They were also quite pleased to find out that Jonah was a writer, had a fair bit of money of his own and that his parents were both high school teachers.

They also asked Jonah questions about what he was writing and what market he was aiming at. But they were clever enough people not to make it sound like the interrogation that it actually was. 

Next it was Carolyn’s turn. She told them she had finished her novel and had brought a digital copy of it for them to read.

“So how do you want to move forward, sweetie?” Her mom asked.

“Well, if you think it’s good enough to show Charles, that would be a great start.” 

Charles was Charles Ridley, who was Julia’s agent and always on the lookout for new talent. Like a few of the more enterprising literary agents, he was cultivating and growing a list of very good film and television connections, which was really a natural add-on, especially these days. Charles had negotiated options for three of Julia’s six bestselling novels, which, fortunately for her, was well before any of what she referred to as the ‘nonsense’ in America. 

It was Thanksgiving, so there was a rather large turkey in the oven. And there would be mashed potatoes and fresh cut green beans to go with them. For dessert there was a beautiful looking apple pie which Julia had purchased at the St Lawrence Market. Julia also told them that she has recently started a one-year sabbatical to write another novel, a sequel to one of her earlier books. She was very excited about that. 

Half an hour later they were sitting down to dinner. David talked about making the transition from the equities firm he had been working for to an independent investment advisor and market player.

Jonah told him about his summers working at his grandfather’s firm in Buffalo, so he knew enough about the market to realize that unless he had a good deal more capital than he currently had, he would be playing with fire.

David, just smiled and looked at Carolyn and said, “Your fella has his head screw on right, honey.”

“I know, daddy. That’s why he’s my fella.”

They talked about all kinds of things that evening and had a great time. At about nine Carolyn began to grow a bit restless, and so they said their goodbyes and headed out. 

They took the Queen E, all the way to St Catharines and then headed south on the 406 til they hit Highway 3. The further they got from Toronto the less traffic they encountered, but they were home by midnight, both full of turkey and dog tired. But they had checked another box on their rather finite list of things to deal with. 

The next day, was kind of cool and there were dark clouds over the lake that could go either way, rain or snow. 

Carolyn had no intention of doing any writing so she gave Jonah the use of her office, while she set about cleaning the house. She called it ‘domestic bliss’ which kind of made Jonah laugh. But she told him to wait until he was finished his stories. He’d probably want to detail his car and hers. Anything but more writing. 

“Fortunately, it only lasts a couple of days and then you start getting antsy again. It’s a crazy life. And, oh yeah, I’ll be running the vacuum cleaner for a while.”

Jonah just laughed. “You just do what you have to do, toots. We all have our own little peccadillos. Noise doesn’t bother me at all.”

Carolyn gave him a kiss on the cheek and a hug. “You did really well yesterday. My mom sent me an email this morning to tell me how impressed they were with my taste in men.”

“Well, I guess I passed the audition.” Jonah said.

“I guess you did.” Carolyn said and headed off to clean the house.

~ 11 ~

The spirits had been quiet for about a week, but neither Carolyn nor Jonah really noticed. He was busy finishing his treatment. She was busy cleaning the house and swimming and making dinners for both of them. 

One night, they were sitting out on the deck, with long sleeves and long pants, and Jonah asked, “Have you heard anything from your spirits lately?”

“Come to think of it, I haven’t. Have you?” Carolyn said. 

“No. I wonder what happened them?” Jonah asked.

“You think they might have left us?” 

“That’s hard to say.’ Jonah said. “I mean, all those years and then they just up and leave, without saying goodbye. And at the same time, that’s really strange. Not to mention a bit rude.”

“Yeah. You’d think that we would feel something missing.” Carolyn said. “I hope nothing’s happened to them.”

“Well, you know,” Jonah said, “It’s quite likely they have no real sense of time. Maybe when they show back up again, it will be, to them, you know, like they were only gone for a few minutes.”

They watched the clouds slowly roll by the half moon low in the sky above the lake. 

“You know.” Jonah said. “I don’t think it really matters one way or the other. I mean, this is perfect. Sitting here with you, looking at the moon. Your book’s done, my story’s done. We live in a peaceful country. We have no worries at the moment, outside of finding someone to take what we’re doing and push it out into the marketplace. And as odd as it sounds, I don’t miss them all that much. Do you?”

“No. Not really. I mean, they were with me for so long I felt like I knew them. But I also didn’t really know them, what their lives were like, or even where they were from.

“I think everything about life is complicated.’Jonah said. “But I have to admit, right now it feels a whole lot simpler.”

“Yeah. It kinda does.” Carolyn said. “By the way, I heard from my mom today. She really liked the novel. She wants me to register it with the Writer’s Guild to protect it and when I’ve done that, she’ll take it to Charles Ridley. She also asked to see your treatment. I think she’s still adjusting to her sabbatical while she thinks her book through, so this helps her fill the time.” 

“Have you read all of her books?” Jonah asked.

“No just a couple. She writes about people who are really emotionally messed up. The stories are very complex and I don’t know, maybe it’s because I haven’t gone through a ton of emotional rollercoaster riding, but I had trouble relating to them. But the people who read them do. Every one of her books has been somewhere on the New York Times bestseller list. And she has three movie options. So I guess that’s really all that matters.”

“Well, you can read my stuff tomorrow, then I’ll tighten it up, and you can send it to your mom.” 

Carolyn clutched his arm. “Who knows. Maybe we’ll get famous together.”

“Anything’s possible, my dear. Anything at all.”

“As long as we don’t have to move to Toronto, I‘ll be happy.”

“We may have to make a few more visits. You should be psyched for that.”

“Yeah. Not thrilling. But yeah.” Then Carolyn got to her feet. “You know what? I think it’s time for some Fantastic Beasts.

“ You know, I’ve never seen those movies.”

“Well, you’re in for a treat, mister. You make some popcorn and I’ll get the drinks. I have all three of them. Probably watched each one of them ten times.”

As Jonah followed her into the house, he said, “You know that kinda borders on addiction.”

“You sound like my mom.” Carolyn said, but with a hint of a laugh. Jonah slapped her gently on the butt.

Later that night, or very early the next morning, they were both awakened. They sat up in bed and stared out into the darkness. There was nothing there that they could definitely make out, but they both knew there was something going on. 

“I think they’re back.” Jonah said.

“It certainly feels that way.” Carolyn replied. “I hope they don’t start making a lot of noise and keep us up all night.” she said in a louder voice.

Then, they flopped back down on their pillows and went back to sleep. 

~ 12 ~

The next afternoon, Jonah emailed Carolyn a copy of the pilot for the series he titled ‘The Virgin Detective.’ and two shorter follow-up episodes.

Carolyn made some fresh coffee and sat down in the kitchen and read the piece through, making little notes on punctuation, typos and any details she thought might improve the narrative, in red. There were actually only a few of them. She thought that for someone’s first real time out of the gate, it was a pretty damn good story. All the stuff that sounded complex when he was trying to explain it to her verbally, all made sense as she read the words in her screen. The storyline  in the pilot was also pretty clever, in that the main character was really kind of improvising as he went along in order to save himself from being killed, and thinking like a mystery writer to do it.

All in all, she was quite impressed. And she told him so when she brought it back to him with the fixed typos she had found and a couple of smaller points of clarification she thought would be helpful.

She pulled up a chair and sat down beside him and handed him the memory key. It took all of ten minutes to go through it one more time and fix everything.

She had drafted the email to her mom with the whole series attached, who after she finished reading Jonah’s story, and gave it a glowing review. All that was left was to show Jonah how to register his work with the WGA to protect it.

When that was done, they both headed out to celebrate. They drove down to Fort Erie where they met up with Jonah’s folks at a Chinese Restaurant on Niagara Falls Boulevard called Ming Teh, Here, Jonah and Carolyn were able to fill them in on what they had been doing over the past several weeks. 

Needless to say, they were delighted that they were both so busy and had a good connection in Toronto. Their attitude toward Carolyn was much more friendly this time around because they could see just how happy their son was with everything that was going on. It was a nice dinner, and a nice drive home where they talked to each other non-stop, and held hands all the way back.

~ 13 ~

The next day, Carolyn was sitting in her office, reading through another one of her stories to determine whether she could blow it out into another novel, when her voices started speaking. But there was something a little different this time. It seemed to her there was something missing. After a few moments of listening, she asked them what happened.

“We are only three”. They said in unison. 

Well, that answers my question.” Carolyn said. “How did that come about?”

“How can we know?” they replied. Carolyn knew exactly which voice was missing.

“You’re right. How can you know?”

“We know that you have completed your story. We liked it very much. It tells of the world as it should be.” 

“Well thank you. To tell you the truth I thought you had abandoned me without saying goodbye.”

“We were distracted and needed to regroup. It was her time to go.”

“Where did she go?”

“Who can say. She is only no longer with us.”

“Do you miss her?”

“No. Why should we?”

“I thought you were all friends.”

“More like castaways in the same boat. We are each alone.”

“But you are all together. That should mean something.”

“What should that mean? We know nothing of each other. We are just here. But we are alone.”

“I guess that’s my perception. I see you as together.”

“You are entitled to your perception. Our reality is… different.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“We are in you. We are wherever you are.”

“So you know nothing of yourselves.”

“We only know that we are where you are. We know we were…like you. But we are no more.”

And then just as suddenly as they started talking to her. they stopped.

Jonah was sitting on the steps of the deck, thinking about going for a swim, when Carolyn flopped down beside him. 

“I just has a conversation with the girls. There are only three now. One is gone…the noisy one.”

“Did they explain where they’ve been?”

“I don’t think they’ve actually been anywhere. I think I am their whole universe. The same as with your guys.”

“There’s a certain logic to that. Did you feel the loss of one of them?” Jonah asked.

“I knew it somehow. But that was about it. But we talked for a while and that’s how I came to the conclusion I did.”

“So I am my whole world for my spirits too?” Jonah asked.

“Maybe. You’ll have to ask them next time they contact you.”

They sat quietly for a while. Then Carolyn said. “I wonder where she went.”

“You know, for a while now,” Jonah said, “I’ve believed that our spirits are really just pure energy, and according to somebody early in the last century, I think it was Einstein,  when they were figuring all this stuff out, he determined that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be altered to manifest in different forms.” Jonah said. “It’s a really secular thing ‘cause it bangs up against all the promises that religions make to their flocks.”

“I was never religious.” Carolyn said. “Not at all. Since I was old enough to start thinking deeply about stuff like that, I believed you could drive yourself crazy trying to figure out the universe and how all this came to be. Religion is just a simplistic explanation that most people can get their heads around. But you and I, my dear, know that there is a lot more to the universe than anything defined by science. Either that or we are both brain damaged in almost exactly the same way. And I don’t believe that for a minute. We have been shown something strange and learned to live with it. You have to be pretty damn sane to do that, don’t you think?”

Jonah didn’t say anything for a while. Then finally he looked over at her. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right. We are both brain-damaged in exactly the same way. Who’d have thought it could happen? And in the same part of the Niagara Peninsula to boot.”

She hit him harder than usual and he started to laugh. 

“I will not be ridiculed for my deep philosophical thinking.” She said with mock sternness. “Not from you. Not from anyone.” And then she hugged him and he hugged her and they both knew how crazy they were, but it didn’t matter.

~ 14 ~

Two weeks later, they were on their way to Toronto to meet with Charles Ridley at his office in a nice house on Summerhill Avenue. 

Charles was an independent agent, and very practical. He didn’t need to be part of a firm. He had done that for long enough for him to get the rhythm of the repping business and then he headed home with a digital Rolodex full of connections from all over North America, and no ‘hands off’ waiver to deal with from the agency he gave five years of his life to, mainly because he was more interested in the visual media than he was in the book business. That part of his business was just a tool for establishing credibility and getting his clients' work in front of the right executive producers and investors. In that regard, he was very well-connected and respected in the business on both sides of the border as well as Great Britain.

While Carolyn’s mom was her and Jonah’s access to Charles Ridley, it was really all about the work. And right now, as they sat down with their coffees in front of them, Charles Ridley was pretty stoked.

Charles had known Carolyn for several years. He knew a lot about her, and had read a few of her short stories and given her some very good advice on turning them into treatments. So he was delighted to tell her that he would push whatever stones up whatever hills to find a production company interested enough to make it go. Then he would find the money people who would provide the other 50% of the investment.

“OK, Carolyn.” Charles said. “This is a great story. It’s got a little bit of everything, and I can think of half a dozen people to show it too right off the top of my head, a couple of whom are in England and New Zealand, where they love this kind of stuff.”

Carolyn just smiled. “Well, that’s certainly the answer I was hoping for, Charles.”

“You go home and write some more. If you can blow this out into a series or expand it into a novel, all the better. But quality wise, you’re right in the pocket.”

Then Charles turned to look at Jonah. “Now you sir, are a bit of a mystery. I know that Carolyn’s been at this since her early teens. But you appear to have materialized out of nowhere.”

“I, umm, yeah, I guess I did. I just graduated from Glendon College in the spring. I had a lot of ideas that I kept track of and then when Carolyn and I started living together I began to get serious about it.”

Charles took a deep breath. “It’s not very often you see something this complete, right out of the gate. Usually takes a bit of cajoling and a kick or two to the backside to get where you are at the moment, which is, in my opinion, at least, fully formed. I saw this story as both a standalone feature and a series pilot, and that’s kinda rare. I also liked the two episodic stories too, they flow rather nicely from the big story.”

“I appreciate hearing that, sir. I have three more episodes drafted. I will send them along when I get them finished, which will just take a few days.” Jonah said

Charles just smiled. “This gets better and better”. Then he leaned back in his chair and pulled his desk drawer open and pulled out two sets of contracts. 

He handed one to each of them. “Look these over and if you don’t have any issues, sign them back to me and we’ll be good to go. I will go over these stories with Leon Fine, my partner and editor, and he will send you his notes. Trust me, there won’t be much, because these are both reasonably tight pieces. He looked at Carolyn, I’ve got your numbers and email addresses on the copies your mom sent me, so we can do whatever else needs to be done online. Once it gets real, you’ll probably have to meet with a producer, screenwriter and director, but that will just be a formality more than anything, although, depending on who they are, they might ask you for some insights into casting.”

They spent the next few minutes reading over the agreement documents and signing them.

“I gotta tell you, you have made my week.” Charles said. “I try to keep my eye out for new talent, but it’s kinda depressing how little people understand about the business they want to spend their lives in. Carolyn, you were lucky ‘cause you mom was in the business and you got to see how a lot of it works first hand, and I’m sure you gave Jonah here some really good advice as he was putting his series together. But a lot of people show up here and they’re dumb as rocks, their ideas are weak or, even worse, derivative, and their attitudes are off the charts arrogant.”

“Sounds like a low percentage game.” Jonah said.

“That’s one way to look at it, for sure. But having two people come in with their heads on straight and two marketable ideas, that kinda makes up for at least a couple weeks of bozos.”

Charles gathered the contracts, and smiled. “We’re done, guys. I’ll be back to you very soon, and Carolyn, tell your mom, I owe her a big dinner.”

“I will and thank you, Charles.” Carolyn said, “And I’m so glad you have decided to take us on.”

“That goes for me too, sir.” Jonah said.

“Just go home and keep writing at this level, and we’ll all make out like bandits.” Charles said. He shook hands with Jonah and gave Carolyn a big hug. “Welcome aboard, guys.”

Once they got outside they hugged each other and whooped a bit as they walked down the street to their car.

They had arranged to have lunch with Carolyn’s mom and dad and so they headed over there through Rosedale.

Carolyn’s parents were delighted for both of them. Her mom also told them that she had finally gotten started on her new book, which was going to be a sequel to one of her more successful earlier books.

Both Carolyn and Jonah looked to be floating on a cloud, and her parents were happy for them both. 

They stayed and chatted till about two thirty or so and then they took off,  looking to miss the worst part of the rush hour. The gods must have been smiling on them because when they hit the Gardiner Expressway, they were actually travelling at somewhere close to the speed limit. Once they made it past Sherway Gardens in the west end of the city, they were home free and two hours and a bit later they pulled into their driveway. 

 It was early November and though it was cool, it wasn’t all that breezy, so they drove down Erie Road into Crystal Beach and had fish and chips at the South Coast Cookhouse, which had kind of become one of their go-to restaurants in town.

They sat by the window looking out over a subdivision of cottagy-looking houses. 

“My dad told me,” Carolyn said. “There used to be a big amusement park right across the street where that subdivision is now. They had a great roller coaster, but he was too young to go on it.” This place was flooded with people all summer long. A lot of people from Buffalo had cottages here. The way he tells it, the whole town was mostly American-owned cottages, the people who owned the restaurants and stores and the people who worked for them.”

‘Funny how things change. “You hardly see any Americans these days, and I'm sure the Americans don't see, many of us either.” Jonah said.

“Yeah, going to America ain’t what it used to be. I remember going there when I was younger about ten. My mom liked to shop in Buffalo. Guess a lot of those businesses are really hurting these days.” Carolyn said.

“They brought it on themselves. More than a third of the eligible voters in the last couple elections didn’t bother voting at all. That apathy is what’s killing the country. I’ve been following it online for a while now, every since Trump got elected the first time. And he’s just ruining the country. Their foreign trade is in the toilet. Their unemployment is massive. There are probably more robots working than there are humans. But we seem to be OK. The new PM is banging on doors all over the world and working to reduce our dependence on the US for, well, just about everything.” Jonah said

“I never realized you were that into politics.” Carolyn said.

“It’s not really politics. It’s the economy. I got real interested in that when I worked over there for my grandfather.”

“Yeah, my dad had a rough go of it when it all started to get turned on its head. But he’s moved away from the US market almost altogether. He told me the next big thing to watch is Africa. They decided that they don’t want any outside interference so they’re training their own people and keeping AI from replacing anyone, which is a smart move. But the market is the market and sooner or later there will be a lot of new African companies listed.”

Their waitress brought their dinner. Jonah raised his glass. “Thank you, Carolyn. I can’t tell you how weird this all is. I expected it to be a ten-year uphill battle.”

Carolyn just smiled and kissed his glass with hers. “Oh I think it’s gonna take some time, you know. But at least we’re both in the game.”

After dinner, they drove down to Fort Erie and Jonah told his parents the news. They were absolutely delighted, but they also cautioned him to stay humble and learn as much as he could about the craft and how the market works. They were real ‘knowledge is power’ people, but it’s what one would expect from teachers, especially good ones, like they both were.

They got home just after eleven and just jumped into bed and read until they were too tired for anything but sleep.

~ 15 ~

The next day was cool. But not windy. Jonah decided to go for a ride and pick up a few things they needed along the way. Carolyn was working away on ways to roll her idea into some sort of mini series or expand it to novel length

Neither of them had heard from Charles, but really weren't expecting to for a few days at least.

Jonah got onto Erie Road and wove his way through the residential streets to Thunder Bay Road and on for a while to Colony Road, which took him down to Windmill Point. It wasn’t a long ride like his Niagara River rides, but he enjoyed it all the same. He walked his bike down to the beach and sat in the cool sand for a while looking out over the lake and the north end of Buffalo across the other side. 

It was then that he heard the voices.

“Hello, Jonah.” They said. 

But Jonah only heard three of them. “Don’t tell me. You’ve lost some your comrades.”

“Indeed.” they said. The most familiar voice spoke alone.“Guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.”

“Yeah, Carolyn lost one of her comrades too.”

“It was bound to happen sooner or later, whatever that means.”

“So there are just the three of you.”

“Yes and we all speak the same language so that’s a blessing. And we hear that you are having some success with your storytelling.”

“We live in hope. Carolyn too. We’ve both acquired an agent, as you probably know.”

“We do indeed. The city you travelled to, it was quite frightening.”

“It was Toronto.” And it was partially because of your story that we were there.”

“Glad to be of service. You’re looking out over the water, but it’s different, so you’re not at home.”

No, I went for a ride. Just waiting to hear back from the agent then I’m gonna get back to work. So are you guys planning to stick around for a while?”

“If by stick around you mean stay where we are, well, that’s the hope. But have no control over that. We’re just here today, perhaps gone tomorrow, whatever that means.”

 “I find it very odd that you know things but don’t understand them.”

“We do as well, I believe. One of us suggested they might be called platitudes. But that may have just been a wild ass guess.”

“Well, I hope you stick around. I would miss you if you weren’t there.”

They were silent after that. So he sat for a few more minutes then he rode up to Ridgeway and picked up a few things at Joe’s, which was really an independently owned supermarket that was supplied by Loblaws, the biggest grocery chain in Canada. Joe’s was always busy because it served quite a large area, which was mostly populated by retirees. The houses where they lived in Crystal Beach and Thunder Bay were smaller and beautifully equipped. Jonah knew this because one weekend he went with his folks to check out some of the model homes in the most recent subdivision. The houses were nice enough, but they reminded him of the old Pete Seeger song; ‘Little houses made of ticky tacky and they all looked just the same.’

The house where he and Carolyn lived was much older and looked nothing like those places. He got back an hour or so later and found Carolyn in the pool. He sat on the steps and watched her swim. for about fifteen minutes, and then she climbed out peeled out of her suit and wrapped a large towel around her body and a smaller one around her hair.

She came to the stairs, sat down and gave Jonah a peck on the cheek. 

“Good swim?”

“Yeah, I needed it too. It’s funny, but when you’re working on your own, you know before things happen, life feels…so light and airy. Then when you’re working on instructions like the instructions Franklin gave us, it’s a lot more like work.”

“Well, we are an adaptable species, or so I’ve heard.”

“I’m counting on that. So how was your ride?”

“Good. I rode over to Thunder Bay and sat on the sand and guess what?”

“Your boys are back.”

“Yeah, but now there are only three of them.”

“Hmmm. Do you think they’re being phased out?”

“I don’t know. And they sure as hell couldn’t tell me.”

She kissed him on the cheek, then got to her feet. “I’m gonna have a quick shower and change. Then get back to work for a while.” I took a lunch break and also got the veal cutlets ready for dinner.”

“You’re a regular Suzy homemaker.”

For that crack, he got a punch on the upper arm.

“Yes I am, and don’t you forget it.” she said.

“The reminders last for quite a while.” He shouted after her, rubbing his arm.

But she was already gone.

~ 16 ~

The next morning, they both received the notes from Charles Ridley and, as promised, there were relatively few changes suggested for both of them. So they spent the rest of the day working with each other and making suggestions. Some were taken, others not so much. But about four hours later they were done to their mutual satisfaction.

“I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna be this easy every time out of the gate.” Carolyn said.

“I suppose not. But I learned quite a bit from the little he actually noted.”

“Yeah, I did too. I think we’re in pretty good hands.” 

They made their dinner and sat in the dining room looking out at the ever earlier darkening sky. They were watching the news from Buffalo on Carolyn’s laptop. It was mostly about what asinine thing their president that day. He seemed to have an endless supply of idiocy. After a while, they got bored with it and turned it off. Around the same time, snow started to fall. It was big, fluffy flakes at first, and then it got more and more dense as the storm progressed. Jonah walked out onto the deck and stared up at the sky, which was black.

When he got back inside he said. “This feels like it might be worth snow blowing when it stops.” Jonah said. 

They consulted the Weather Network and it looked like they were in for about ten centimetres or four inches.

The pool cover was down, so there was no other reason to go outside. They had a snow removal service that would come when the snow stopped so they would only plow out the unpaved part of the long driveway. Jonah had grown up with Lake effect winters, and it didn’t really bother him. There was a good-sized snowblower and a hundred-foot power cord in the large storage area that ran down the outside wall of the car park and a couple of good shovels and push brooms to clean off the deck and pool cover.

After dinner, they put on some music and did the dishes. They had a dishwasher, but they never used it. They enjoyed the process of cleaning up together after dinner.

They decided to watch a couple more episodes of a strange series they found on Prime called Mr. Robot. It starred the American actor, Rami Malek, and they both thought that the series was an absolute work of art about computer hacking. They knew Rami Malek because he had won an Academy Award for playing the band Queen’s singer, Freddie Mercury, in the Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody. He wasn’t a lot older than they were and they both wondered if, as their careers progressed, they would ever get to meet him. Jonah thought that he would make a great lead for his Virgin Detective story. But he was pretty new at the game and his story, if it ever made it to the screen, would likely have a lot of relatively unknown people in it. But stranger things had happened. A lot of it depended on Charles.

As they watched Mr. Robot, Jonah started thinking about who exactly he would love to have in each of the parts of his story. The trouble with that was that a lot of the actors he imagined in the parts were too old. That was the result of having grown up watching a lot of movies from the forties and early fifties, which he loved for their simplicity and great character acting, and having very little interest in all but a few of the big movie franchises.

~ 17 ~

Though they had finished all their revisions in just a few hours, they decided to wait a day before sending them back to Charles. They figured that would convince him that they had really thought things through. But the simple fact was, they were both very good writers and imagineers. And, despite they were just approaching their mid twenties, they had the boundless energy of youth on their side, and, to them, the changes he had suggested were a piece of cake.

Along with the revised stories from both of them, Jonah also sent the three remaining shorter episodes shorter episodes, which he had managed to put together from his outlines in a single long day. He indicated that he had also applied several of both Leon’s and Charles’s comments, so the synergy between the stories and the pilots was, in his opinion at least, solid.

Toward the end of the small storm, the wind came up and whipped the snow on the beach up into everybody’s backyard. It blew so hard that it actually carved a fairly clear path down to the beach. So they bundled up and headed out for a walk in the windstorm. 

Growing up in southern Ontario, you never really felt pissed off or inconvenienced by snowstorms, especially a pipsqueak storm like this one, which was a relatively small bit of snow and a whole lot of really strong wind. 

They walked along the beach for a while, then when they got to an area called Bay Beach they turned off and headed to Erie Road and the Beach House Restaurant, where they split a pizza and drank some Diet Cokes. 

While they were eating, the subject of next steps came up. 

“You go first.” Carolyn said.

“Okay….well, I had this idea about a guy in Toronto… a writer. I  call him Jake. He has a TV review column that’s syndicated in a quite a few places and twice a week he has a two-hour radio program that he has to go downtown to do. 

“So one day, he’s sitting in a coffee shop before going to work and this guy comes up and sits down with him. He’s a guy Jake went to college with. They shoot the shit and catch up and then they both spot a couple of shady-looking characters looking into all the stores up the street. So the guy gives Jake a locker key to hold onto and they arrange to meet the next day. The guy splits, and Jake goes to work and doesn’t think anything of it. He would just, you know, meet up with the guy and give him back his key.” Jonas took a bite of his pizza.

“What’s in the locker?” 

“It’s a super high speed computer that runs on a chip the guy invented in the US, but he wants to sell it to a Canadian company if he can, so he’s up here from the States where he lives. But the guys following him want what he has because they’re working for someone who can develop it but doesn’t want to have share the profits with anyone.

“So the guy with the supercomputer ends up getting killed and Jake is stuck with the locker key, but he doesn’t know where the locker is. He eventually finds out, but on the advice of a friend, he hires a guy to protect him from the killers until he figure out how to unload the chip.”

 Jonah paused to take another bite of his pizza. 

“So do you have the whole thing figured out? ‘Cause it sounds pretty cool.”

“Yeah, I’ve got it mostly figured out. But, you know, because of the kind of story it is, it would probably be better if I just wrote the damn thing and let you read it. But I think it could make a pretty dandy little thriller movie.”

“Okay, I can see that.” Carolyn said

“So what about you?”

“Okay, well I didn’t mention this but Charles called me and told me he had emailed the story to several science fiction and fantasy book publishers, specifically ones who also do illustrated novels.

“Wow. Well, I can see that. Having an illustrated book would be amazing.” Jonah said.

“Uh huh and it’s also the key to getting a movie made. It’s a lot easier to budget when you had a full blown storyboard to work from, which is what the illustrated book would be.”

“I never thought of it in that way. But you’re right.”

“Like I said when we first met, the story is the thing. I won’t make as much as a printed book but it will have a much better chance at getting optioned. So Charles told me to leave it at that for now and start working on something new.” 

“Do you have any ideas yet?”

“I’ve got a few rolling around in my head. I’ll talk through it with you when I decide on which one I want to do first. But the one I’m thinkin’ about won’t be anything like The Visitor. In fact, I don’t think it will be science fiction at all.”

Jonah leaned back in his chair and said. “I have to tell you. I know we met under the strangest of circumstances. But this has worked out so much better than I could have ever imagined.”

Carolyn smiled. “That goes for me too, babe.”

They finished their pizza and bundled up for the walk back home. The wind had died down considerably and when they went out the front to check on the accumulation in the driveway, they found that the wind had literally blown all the snow into the trees.

So they went inside and back to work.

~ 18 ~

Jonah was sitting in his usual spot at the kitchen table. His coffee cup was full, and he had a couple of cookies beside it. 

Since his first story was given to him as a gift, he sat down and thought his new original idea through very carefully.

As he thought about how detailed he should make the story, he remembered something he learned in his third year, when he took a course on writing for movies and TV. 

His instructor was a veteran of years of working on US series shows and he always stressed that the original story was not a screenplay. The original story was only designed to do three things. Thing one was to give the story its basic structure. Thing two was to introduce and dimensionalize the characters mainly through their dialogue and their actions. Thing three was to make the genre of the story clear. The converse to this was to avoid indicating anything that sounded like like direction. The story, he said, was the skeleton, the locations, the scripting, cinematography, directing or choreography, as he called it and the editing were the skin, the personality and the engine that made the story go. The story was just the fuel.

Jonah considered himself fortunate that he was able to burn that into his skull. It not only made the writing a lot easier, but it also removed or at most minimized any  internal debate as to exactly how the story should be told. The closer you got to that very straightforward skeleton with your basic story the better everyone else could do their parts and create a more enhanced cohesive whole.

Jonah had the whole story in his head. He knew what he wanted to have happen and how the story should flow from beginning to end. All he really had to do was write it out using the rules that were burned in his brain with as little diversion as possible. It was frightening and exhilarating at the same time. The frightening part kept him sharp and the exhilaration gave him the energy to keep on pushing the keys and moving the story along. 

Because Jonah was a fast writer, he never thought too much about where he was in the story or if he had written enough for one day. He simply banged away and let the story roll out of his head and onto the page as close to the way he saw it as possible. He didn’t worry about typos which he considered a cheap way to buy time. He just wrote and wrote and wrote and four and a half hours later he had laid down the whole story more or less the way he wanted to. There was no crescendo in his mind at the end. There was just a huge sense of relief, knowing that regardless of sloppy grammar, missed quotation marks and typos galore, which he would fix the next day, he had pulled off his own first complete original story, and he could feel, down deep inside, that it was every bit as good as the one that was given to him by one of his spirits. There was enough similarity in terms of what happened to the main characters to tie the stories together style-wise. They were both dramas. Not overly dramatic, and more narrative in tone. The first story was set up as a pilot first and a free-standing story second. This new one was totally
self-contained. 

He leaned back in his chair and assessed how much energy he had left. He decided that there was a little so he started to read it over again and correct it.

THE LOCKER KEY

 ~1~

It was a beautiful spring day in Toronto. Early summer, cloudless sky, no wind to speak of, not too hot, not too cool. Jake Morrison was riding his bike along Dundas Street, heading for the downtown core. He was wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. He was about five-foot ten and a little overweight. But he was in good shape because the bike had always been his preferred mode of transportation in a city like Toronto, where the city planners were clueless when it came to traffic management. 

Jake was handsome or maybe slightly less, depending on the kind of hair day he was having. His hair was long and sort of wavy. His eyes were dark brown, but spent most of their time behind either shades or reading glasses. 

Jake was singing a Tom Waits song, that got stuck in his head from the night before, just loudly enough for him to hear himself in his slightly out-of-tune voice. 

Gotta get behind the mule

In the morning and plow…

He had a whistle on a leather thong around his neck and was not wearing a helmet. His riding was a little on the reckless side from the driver’s point of view, but not from Jake’s. He’d been doing this ride a long time and had it covered. Some people honked at him and he waved back. A couple of others honked more aggressively and he shot them the bird. 

Eventually, he ran the gauntlet and made it across the Don Valley and into the downtown core. He headed down River Street and across King all the way to Simcoe Street, and onto a quiet cul-de-sac. He stopped in front of a nondescript building. A couple of bike couriers sat on the steps of the building having a smoke and chatting. Jake locked his bike to the railing at the side of the steps and entered the building, stopping to have a brief word with the couriers. They shared a laugh. Jake liked couriers. He used to be one back in the day and knew what their lives were like.

He climbed the steps to the second floor of the building, which was a radio station called MOJO Radio: Talk Radio For Guys. Or so the sign above the receptionist said. Jake nodded to her and said a sweet good morning, then walked down the hall to one of the broadcast studios. He waited until the light above the door went off and entered the studio. There were a couple of guys sitting behind the microphones, packing stuff up and chatting with each other. They were Jerry and Jeff, the PM sports show guys.

“The Jakester. How you doin’ Jake?” Jerry said.

“Jerry. Jeff. How about those Raptors?”

“Jury’s still out on that.” Jeff said.

Jake pulled a small MacBook from his backpack along with a thin sheaf of hard copy. He stepped into the control room, high-fived the technician and handed him the copy. He then came back in and took a seat next to Jerry, opened his computer and messed around with it a bit.

“So how are things in Jakeland?” Jerry said. “I hear they’re talking to you about a half-hour weekend cable show.”

“Yeah, building the Couch Potato empire one brick at a time. My agent is takin’ the idea to them this week.” 

“That’s cool, Jake, good on you.” 

The producer’s voice came through a speaker: “Back in five, four, three…

“Well, that’s about it for us, sports dweebs.” Jeff said into the microphone. “Tune in tomorrow, when our guest will be the man himself, Freddie Van Vleet of the playoff bound Toronto Raptors. It’s gonna be one hell of a show, guys.  So we’ll see you then. This is The Jerry and Jeff PMS Show signing off. In the meantime, stay tuned for Jake Morrison and the soon-to-be world-famous Couch Potato Chronicles.”

Jerry and Jeff high-fived Jake and left the studio as The Couch Potato Chronicles theme music came up and a pre-recorded announcer voice. “And now, coming to you live from the MOJO studios right here in the center of the universe, it’s the Couch Potato Chronicles with your host and head spud, Jake Morrison.”

“Hey, everybody.” Jake said. “Well, it’s Tuesday May 7th, if you care about things like that. I‘m Jake Morrison. We’ll take some calls and read some emails later in the hour, but right now, I want to talk about something that’s pissing me off severely.

“I was killing time last night waiting for the Spurs/Mavericks game to come on and fumbling around with my recordings, when I noticed that I had recorded an episode of something on Showcase called Trailer Park Boys. I recalled seeing the previews for this show and making a mental note to watch it as part of my Canadian-made TV studies course. I’m glad I did and I’ll tell you why. This show brought out a level of disgust in me that I have never actually reached before, and as we all know it can be a pretty disgusting world out there, especially to a cynical spud like myself. Trailer Park Boys is one of those cruel jokes that TV plays on us every now and then…” Jake rambled on with his show kickoff monologue, guaranteed to piss off a lot of people and make for some interesting phone conversations and threatening emails later in the show. 

And so it went, for two hours, twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays.

The next morning, Jake was lying half asleep on the right-hand side of a queen-size bed. There was a lot of activity going on in the room. Stacy, Jake’s live-in girlfriend, was fully dressed and packing her suitcase. Jake rolled over and watched her. Stacy was a good-looking lady with long auburn hair and an hourglass shape that Jake had always found alluring.

“Oh oh….not again, Stace.”

“Jake, I don’t want to talk about this.” Stacy said. “I’ve said it all a couple of times. It’s my family and unlike some people I know who haven’t got two minutes to spare for theirs, it’s something I’ve got to do.”

“That’s a low blow. I’m not trying to stop you, Stacy. But this has happened before and it’s been nothing but a tempest in a teapot.”

“It’s not a tempest in a goddamn teapot Jake. It’s my mother and her heart.”  

 Jake got up. He was wearing pyjama bottoms. He walked over to the window and peered out at the street below. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I take back everything I just said. Go. Be with your mother. Get her better.”

Jake sauntered out of the room and headed downstairs. Stacy kept packing. 

A little while later, Jake helped Stacy load her bag into her car. “Look.” Stacy said, “I didn’t mean to be so harsh with you upstairs. I’m just...I don’t want to go either. But I have to Jake…it’s my family.” 

Jake gathered Stacy up in his arms. “It’s alright babe. I’ll keep a candle in the window.”

Stacy pulled back from Jake’s embrace. Tears were streaming down her face. She sniffed and tried to pull herself together. She kissed him gently on the lips. As she got into the car, Jake walked over to his front stoop, sat down and watched Stacy back down the driveway and head up the street.

Jake headed into the house and started making his coffee of coffee. He then walked into the back porch behind the kitchen, which has been converted into a comfortable office. At one end sat a large Mac computer on a desk flanked by floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books, DVDs, papers and memorabilia. At the side, along the window was a small sofa and coffee table across from an impressive entertainment centre. His MacBook sat on the coffee table in front of the couch. A small pile of DVDs were on one side of the MacBook. On the other side was a big binder. On it is a logo and the words “Jake Morrison’s Couch Potato Chronicles”

Jake sat down at the desk and flicked on the big computer. As he waited for it to warm up, he punched up the messages on his cell phone.

Jake. It’s Charlie. I’m heading out down to the network tomorrow morning. I need the proposal with me. Finish up the revisions and meet me for lunch at Rugantino’s at 1:00. If you can’t make it, just email it to me. Otherwise, I’ll see you there.

Charlie was Charlie Morton, Jake's recently acquired agent and manager.

He hit the second message.

Jake. It’s Trisha, calling for you know who, who wants the copy for this week’s Chronicles. Press time is coming up quickly. I’ll check my email every ten minutes. Bye bye.

Jake set the phone down and leaned back sighing. “No rest for the wicked.” he muttered to himself, and then grabbed his mouse and started to get busy.

The next two days were spent doing the usual stuff. The meeting with his agent, a lot of writing, a lot of viewing. Jake’s biggest challenge was staying true to his mission that he would only deal in extremes. The shows he reviewed were only really bad or really good. He figured that any asshole could spot mediocre or ordinary.

~ 2 ~

On Friday morning, Jake got downtown early and was sitting at a table by the window in the Cafe Mocha coffee shop around the corner from the studio. His MacBook was open on the table in front of him and he was reviewing his monologue. Beside the computer sat a large paper cup of coffee and a half-eaten blueberry muffin. 

Jake was dressed in a pair of jeans and an untucked white shirt. He was staring at the computer with a blank look on his face. He then made a few changes to polish up the script and took a deep breath.  He put the computer to sleep and folded it closed. He leaned back in his chair for a moment and stretched, looking out at the street. 

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a man across the street. The man was walking quickly, looking behind him. The man crossed the street, coming right toward the coffee shop. He looked vaguely familiar to Jake. As Jake studied the man, he noticed that he was distracted, and nearly got plowed by a taxi that slammed on its brakes and honked. The man quickly entered Cafe Mocha. He ordered a coffee. 

Jake stared at him for a moment and then turned his gaze back to the street. Just another asshole in the city, Jake thought. In the distance on the far side of the street, he saw two other men, both burly and serious looking, walking slowly along the street.

The first man Jake saw was waiting for his coffee, and staring out the window at the same two men. He looked over at Jake. He was wearing a grey suit that was kind of wrinkly and he was sweating profusely. He looked to be about the same age as Jake. The man got his coffee, then walked over to Jake’s table, and took the seat opposite him.

“You’re Jake Morrison.”

“Yeah…who wants to know?” 

“You don’t remember me do you, Jake?”

Jake scratches his head. Then rubs his chin. “You know, I do, but it’s pretty fuzzy.” Jake says, trying to humour the fellow.

“It was a while ago, Jake. U of T. Philosophy. Professor Higgins.”

“Jesus Christ. It’s, ummm. Marlowe…Tommy Marlowe?”

“Terry…”

“Terry, right. Man, it’s been a few years, Terry. How the hell have you been? You dropped out after first year, as I recall.”

“Yeah. Missed my calling with Liberal Arts. Switched to systems engineering and then won a postgraduate scholarship at MIT. I was doing research there until about five years ago when I went into the private sector.

“Bill Gates finally get his hooks into you?”

“Something like that. And what about you? You’re quite the local celebrity, I hear.”

“Naaa. I’m just too lazy to get a real job, so I write a TV and video review column and do a radio show.”

“Didn’t I read on your website that you’re syndicated in something like a hundred and fifty papers.”

“Don’t believe everything you read. It’s a hundred and twelve. And it pays the bills.”

Jake glanced out the window and noticed the two burly men. They were backtracking up the street, checking out one store at a time. He looked back at Marlow and saw he was studying them closely.

“Friends of yours, Terry?”

“Who?”

“The two thugs across the street.  The ones you haven’t been able to take your eyes off.”

“Oh them. Well, Jake, it’s a bit complex. Tell me something. Do you come to this place a lot?”

“Yeah, I guess. I like working here. The hustle and bustle is mentally stimulating.”

“Are you gonna be here, say tomorrow about this time?”

“I don’t know…Terry, are you in some kind of trouble?”

Marlowe didn’t reply, but reached into his pocket and pulled out a small key. He leaned forward. “Jake, I need you to do me a favour.” He slid the key across the table. “I need you to hold onto this key for me. I’ll meet you here tomorrow at this time and pick it up…I promise.” 

Jake and Marlowe looked out at the street and saw the two guys as they crossed over to the same side of the street as the coffee shop. Jake stared at Marlowe who was visibly trembling at this point.

“I guess it would be best if I didn’t ask you like...what the hell is going on?” 

“Yeah, that would be best. Look Jake, I gotta go. Can I count on you? For old time’s sake.”

Jake grabbed the key and dropped it into his breast pocket. “Sure, Terry, no problem.” 

Marlowe put the lid back on his coffee cup and got up. 

“Tomorrow, same time. I’ll buy you lunch or something. Okay Jake. I gotta go. Thanks, man.”

 Marlowe was out of his seat before Jake had a chance to reply. He was back at the counter. The counterperson pointed him in the direction of the back door and he was gone.

A few minutes later, Jake came out of the coffee shop as the two men walked by him and went inside. He unlocked his bike and took off down the street.

He only gotten this far with his fine tuning when fatigue set in. So he wisely stopped. 

The sky outside his window was darkening. There looked to be a bit more snow on the way. He closed up the file and copied it to his backup hard drive. He didn’t believe in the cloud, after some of the hacking stories that he heard at school. He then set about to make dinner.
About fifteen minutes later, Carolyn came wandering out of her office. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and he told he he had done the whole first draft of his story, and that tomorrow, he would finish tightening and correcting then it and give it to her to read, if she had the time, and that he would be happy to read anything of hers.

~ 19 ~

Over dinner, they talked about what they did during the day. Carolyn was delighted that Jonah had gotten a whole draft treatment down.

“I got another call from Charles.” Carolyn said, “He was quite honest with me, and told me that until the US president stops behaving like a moron, anything else I do in the science fiction realm was gonna be on hold unless we get really lucky. But the feelers had all been put out and even if she hit, creating and publishing an illustrated book would takes a lot of time.” 

Jonah just stared at her. Then he said. “So what does that mean for you?”

Carolyn took a deep breath. “Well, it’s the ‘wait’ part of the ‘hurry up and wait’ cliche. So…I’ve decided to write a novel that’s not science fiction. I spent the day researching possibilities and looking at the book market, and I think I have come up with an idea that might work. It’s gonna take a while because I’ve never done anything like that before. But, sometimes you just gotta say ‘What the fuck’, and push on.”

Carolyn then started to talk about the idea she had. She talked right though the meal and over some frozen yogurt for dessert. By the time she was through, she had told Jonah the whole story in a condensed form. He thought it was delightful and he was totally impressed with how she could change gears so easily.

“You should write it up as a short treatment and send it to Charles. See what he says. I think it’s really a nice idea.”

“Yeah. And Charles figures by the time I get it done, things will have changed down there. And besides, Trump only seems to be targeting Hollywood and the TV industry anyway. I don’t think he believes there even is a book publishing industry.

“Well, he’s not the sharpest pencil in the pack.”

“But yeah, I’m gonna write a two page version of what I just told you and then do some research before I start writing. I also talked about it with my mom. She liked the idea too and told me to take all the time I need, and do it right.”

“That’s good advice.’Jonah said. “But I don’t think it will be as hard as you might be thinking it would”.

The snow came back that night and part of the next day. along with some howling winds and some pretty serious drifting. But they were both too busy to really notice. It was nothing unusual for people who lived in this part of the country. They just took it in their stride, kept working and when the snow stopped and it looked like the storm had passed, they bundled up and went out to push and blow it around. Carolyn wrote a short treatment that outlined the story which she titled ‘Lilli’s Lost & Found. Her main character was a young woman named Lilli Braithwaite, and the story followed her life from the time she graduated with a degree in English Lit to her late fifties when she sat down to write her biography. The life Carolyn described was one of a hard-working professional writer. Her companion, whom she named Ethan Thomas, was a software designer and business owner. It was set at a time when a change in the American political and environmental landscape was not just necessary but actually starting to happen, and she made her character, Lilli, a real agent of change within that landscape.

Caroline told Charles that her main source of inspir- ation for this story was quite simply the world around them and it was set in a fictional era that followed the far right wing nonsense that had been so prevalent in America over the past several years there. 

Her treatment was pretty thorough, outlining the story and that found Lili at different ages from twenty-three to fifty-eight. As she wrote out the treatment she became very excited about the prospect of blowing it out into a novel, mainly because she made it a point to make everything about the story hopeful and as positive as she could.

Jonah read it over her proposal and his only comment was “That’s a hell of a story, sweetie. Very positive. Maybe just what America needs right now.”

“Yeah, I think so too.” Carolyn replied. “I just hope I can pull it off.”

Jonah smiled because he knew that once she got cranked up and into the project there would be no stopping her. He proofed the document for her, and hour later she had sent it off to Charles for his opinion.

At about ten the next morning, she got an email back from Charles. It read: ‘Full speed ahead, my dear. I know six different publishers who would love a story like this. Make it work and it will put you on the map.’

Carolyn almost cried when she read it and she screamed out for Jonah. 

He came to the door of her office and she jumped up and hugged him. “Read the note from Charles.” He walked over to her computer and read the note. He turned around and all he could think of was to say was; “Hot damn.”

~ 20 ~

Carolyn and Jonah worked differently. Carolyn had a large bulletin board and mapped out her story on file cards. Jonah was more of a stream of consciousness writer, who carried a big idea in his head and filled it in bit by bit, adhering to the things he was taught about structure and story movement as closely as possible.

Lilli had her story all carded, with each card being a chapter, in about two days. On the third morning she got up, made her coffee, went into her office and walked herself through the phases she had separated the story into. And then she took the first two cards, put them on her desk and started to write.

PREFACE

Lilli Braithwaite carried her laptop and a coffee out onto the back deck of her home in Hampton Bays, New York.

She was a beautiful-looking woman of sixty-two. Her hair was grey and she made no vain attempt to hide that from the world. She felt that she had earned every single hair. For all intents and purposes, Lilli was more or less retired from a nearly forty-year career as a professional writer, ‘more or less’ being the operative term. Because Lilli knew that writing wasn’t a job. It was an obsession, a passion and sometimes a refuge. 

The very fact that she was sitting down and opening up a new file in her laptop was ample testimony to the reality that she would never be truly retired. However, there was, for the first time in her experience, nothing that she absolutely had to write about. There was no deadline. There was no income to worry about. She and her life partner, Ethan, had more than enough money to last three or four lifetimes.

All there was, at this point, was the thing she woke up that morning wanting to do, which was to finally tell her own story. She had spent a good part of her career telling the stories of other people. And she did it very well. She also spent part of her career warning people about the danger zone the world was entering into as the environment continued to become more and more an enemy than a friend to the human race. She had even spent some time in government, helping her country do what it would to weather the storm that was coming. 

And as she sat quietly and calmly listening waves washing up on the shore just fifty yards away, she emptied out her mind of all the worries and fears she carried, and just, for the first time in close to forty years, thought about herself. She took a sip of her coffee and started to write.

 LILLI AT 23

~ 1 ~ 

Lilli Braithwaite could have been anything she wanted. She was just barely twenty-three, quite beautiful in a very earthy way, statuesque and a ball of energy. She was raised on Long Island, New York, Her father was head of the substantially-sized Braithwaite Industries, which Lilli and her twin brother, Daniel, would inherit one day. Braithwaite Industries was one of the country’s largest suppliers of automotive parts, which, of course, in America ensured that there was wealth aplenty.

Lilli breezed her way through two private schools and Vassar College in upstate New York, where she obtained a Master's degree in fine arts, with a major in American Lit. Her parents, Marcus and Fiona, had high hopes that Lilli would attend the Harvard School of Business and study Business Administration. But Lilli had no interest in the automotive business, even though she would inherit part of one of America’s larger automotive supply companies one day. She figured that she would sell her brother her half of the business when the time came for him to take it over.

After completing her degree at Vassar, Lilli decided to take a year off, to figure out what she wanted to do with her adult life, which had just begun, and moved into her family’s Manhattan apartment on Central Park West and 71st Street. From there, she hiked and biked around the city, observing things with her formidable brain and noting many in a journal she had started right after high school. 

Lilli had no idea what she wanted to do with her life at this point. The only thing she knew for sure was that she wanted to write.

 She quickly got the feel for the city’s pulse and saw the highs and the lows from the safe distance that only real wealth can provide. It was obvious to no one but Lilli that she was searching for something, but had no idea what that could actually be. 

While Lilli was what would easily be considered part of the fortunate few in America, with a $21 million trust fund which was hers to do with as she pleased, she had no intention of idling her life away in the Big Apple or anywhere else for that matter. She had watched her father build his business from an engineering practice to a large corporation, so she knew first-hand the benefits of hard work. Lilli was a writer who loved words, so she was determined to make her mark in the world of words, by hook or by crook. 

One of the things that most writers have in common is a deep curiosity about people. Lilli was no different. She quickly found several good places to observe others in their natural habitats. One of her favourite places was the lounge of the Pierre Hotel on the other side of Central Park from her apartment. Lilli would camp out at the end of the bar and record her impressions of the people she saw there. 

It was a strange mix of business people and tourists from all over the world. She saw costumes and heard languages that she had never seen or heard before. She watched deals being made and hearts being broken. She saw high-class hookers and ultra-slick hustlers from her little perch at the end of the bar. She was hit on at least a dozen times and had learned to diplomatically fend off anyone who might want to buy her a drink. 

On most nights, and because Lilli came to the bar early, the bartender, named Johnny Lee, would let her sit nursing a Long Island Iced Tea while making copious notes in her small book.

Lilli went to the Pierre once or twice a week as part of her rounds of the mid-town area where she lived. But today was a little different. Today, something happened. Today, Lilli met the man of her dreams. 

Ethan Thomas was about twenty-five, tallish and handsome, with long dark brown hair, and glasses with circular rims that made him look a lot hipper than he was. He had a slightly introverted nerd-like quality. His Ph.D. in computer science, completed at the age of twenty-one at NYIT, justified his nerdiness.

Ethan too, came to the Pierre to watch people and wind down from his job. But he had no lofty writing goals in mind. He just enjoyed all the various types of human interaction that a drink or two at the Pierre could offer. And for the past couple of weeks, he also enjoyed watching Lilli on her perch at the far end of the bar. There was something about her sitting alone, scribbling in her notebook and taking in the whole place that attracted him, brought him out of his shell, so to speak, and finally gave him the nerve to sit down beside her and offer to buy her a drink.

“I’ll have another Long Island Iced Tea.” said Lilli as if she was used to people offering to buy her a drink.

“That sounds good. I’ll have one too.” Ethan said.

Ethan summoned Johnny the bartender, and ordered the drinks. 

“I’m Ethan, Ethan Thomas, by the way.” 

“Lilli. Lilli Braithwaite, by the way.”

They shook hands in a rather businesslike manner.

“Do you live around here, Lilli Braithwaite, by the way?”

“Across the park.” 

“It’s nice over there. Do you live near the Dakota?”

“Yes, at the San Remo, pretty much right next door. Is that where you live, Ethan, the Dakota?”

“Yes, I do. ” 

“You don’t look like a student, so I assume you work somewhere.” Lilli said.

“Yep. I work in my family’s business. Software and business systems. I’m a system designer. How about you?”

Lilly thought about that for a moment. “I have a degree in literature, so I’m trying to be a writer I guess.” 

“What kind of writer are you trying to be?”

“Oh, I don’t know yet. Right now, I’m just writing a journal and trying to figure my life out. I envy you, Ethan, knowing what you want to do and doing it.”

“Well, that’s not necessarily true,” Ethan said. “I do programming because I’m good at it. Good enough to have made the family business quite successful. But as far as that being what I want to do…the jury is still out.” Ethan took a long sip of his drink and Lilli got the distinct feeling he didn’t like talking about himself. 

“What is it you want to do, Lilli Braithwaite?” Ethan asked.

Lilli thought about it some more, not so much about what she wanted, but why she should be telling someone who was a stranger her deepest thoughts and desires. She looked at Ethan, who was sipping his Long Island Iced Tea and right then she hypothesized that they could be kindred spirits. She finally said, “I honestly don’t have the slightest idea.” 

Ethan thought about that for a good moment. “You were writing in your notebook. So, from my perspective that makes you a writer already. Now it’s just a question of focus.”

Lilli laughed. “Well, I guess you’re right about that. Writing is one of the things I’ve been doing the most of, since like forever.”

“OK, so what would you like to write now that we’ve established that you are a writer?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

“I assume you don’t need a job.”

“No, I don’t. And I’m not looking for one. More like…a calling… something I can be passionate about doing.”

“Well, there you go. If I were you, I would start thinking seriously about what kind of writing that would be. Writing is a great big world.”

Lilli laughed. “I know, and I think about that all the time, Ethan. All the time.”

Lilli and Ethan finished their drinks. Ethan volunteered to walk Lilli home so they headed across the street into Central Park. They walked for quite a while chatting incessantly to each other about nothing in particular. There was still a bit of sunlight streaming through the buildings on Central Park West and they yapped non-stop in the warm late afternoon summer air. After a while, they decided to have dinner and wandered up to the Shake Shack on Columbus Avenue. Then they walked some more. For the first time since coming to the city, Lilli felt like a real New Yorker. Ethan had a ton of stories from his NYIT days. He seemed to possess total recall, which was a quality that Lilli envied.

They stood in front of Lilli’s building for quite some time, still talking about anything and everything. Ethan, who was rather timid when he first sat down beside her in the bar, seemed to not only have crawled out of his shell but happily left it behind. Lilli did notice that he never really talked about his work, which led her to believe that maybe he wasn’t all that happy doing it.

Finally, she thanked him for a great couple of hours of conversation and he thanked her for just being herself. Since it was a Friday, they agreed to meet the next day and figure out this writing thing once and for all. Lilli went to bed that night, happy and exhausted and maybe she thought, at the beginning of something wonderful.

A few hours later, Lilli was still awake, staring out the window at the stars, what few of them she could see in the middle of New York City. But she wasn’t paying attention. She was wrapped up in the cozy blanket of her thoughts. She thought about Ethan and how relaxed she felt just being with him. He was sweet and curious and interested and he had an actual job.

After she had noodled that nearly to death, she turned her thoughts to becoming a writer. She had been at it since about the age of fourteen and it had served her well. She loved writing essays and doing the research she had to do. She loved the physical act of stringing words together, how it could take you into whatever world you wanted to enter and let it show you all kinds of strange and wondrous things, all out of your head. She had reams of blank verse in her notebooks and in files on her laptop. She had story ideas for novels and movies. She even had a list of famous people for whom she would like to write a biography. But so far, none of those ideas ever materialized into something she felt she could act on. Lilli wasn’t being too hard on herself though. She’d only been at it for a few months and understood that life-changing decisions might just take a little longer than that. 

As she finally drifted off to sleep, those thoughts, those choices, those probables and possibles all floated around in her head, creating strange dreams. Lilli was very good at remembering her dreams which is why she kept a small notepad and pen beside her bed. In the morning when she woke up, she would lie very still, conjure them up, then write down the main points as little memory triggers.

The next morning, Lilli only wrote down one thing…Lilli’s Lost & Found. She lay in bed for nearly an hour staring at the words on the pad thinking about all the possibilities.

 

Carolyn stopped writing and looked at her wall clock. It read 3:35. 

“Wow.” she said to herself. She then took her cards and put them back on the corkboard, flipping them over. 

‘Only 68 more to go.’ she thought as she went back to her desk to read over and fixed what she had written. Her plan was to write two chapters a day. She was pretty sure that the further she got into the story, the easier the writing would become. 

She found very little wrong with what she had written because she had had the presence of mind to take private typing lessons in the summers while she was in college. She did make a few changes here and there but nothing substantial. She was starting to feel the story taking shape and every bone in her body felt the same. 

It was then that she heard one of the voices. “This is a very nice story you are telling here. The characters are very kind.”

“Well, thank you. That was the intention.”  

“We know.”

Carolyn saved the file to her backup drive, then got up to go and see how Jonah was doing. She hadn’t heard from him all day. When she got in the kitchen she saw a note. ‘Gone to do some shopping and pick up a couple of things at my folks’s house in Fort Erie. Back by five, 

luv Jo

~ 21 ~

The next two months were a blur, punctuated only by two Christmas dinners. One in Fort Erie and the other in Toronto.

On Christmas Morning, Jonah gave Carolyn a beautiful diamond ring which she was free to call an engagement ring. She gave him a new MacBook Pro, a separate keyboard and a high-end trackball. Because she had noticed that his MacBook was getting a little long in the tooth, and that we always looked uncomfortable writing on the laptop itself.

In For Erie, Jonah’s parents had both decided to go back to teaching, mostly because they weren’t really trip takers and, quite frankly, didn’t feel old enough to be retired. The Vice-Principal’s job was taken so his dad would just teach math and science while his mom had designed a new English course that focused more on writing for the media, television and movies, which was a qualification she had gained over the past ten months online.

His parents also drove to Toronto on Boxing Day to meet and have dinner with Carolyn’s parents. They got along famously, and were both extremely proud of their kids.

In Toronto, both Carolyn and Jonah also got to give Charles Ridley the news that they would both be finished their stories and have something for him to review by very early in the New Year. Charles and his life partner Leon Fine were family friends and at the house for the Boxing Day dinner. Leon was a book and story editor and had edited all of six novels authored by Carolyn’s mom who announced that she was about halfway through her novel and was very happy with the way things were going, as was Charles Ridley. Carolyn’s dad, smart cookie that he was, had spent the first half of the year gradually shifting his investments out of the US market, which was contracting and into the Canadian and Mexican markets, which were expanding as both countries offered the kind of reliability that the US could no longer guarantee with any certainty and would be stuck in that situation for a few years after Trump’s term in office was up.

While it was exhausting, for Carolyn and Jonah, because their lives went from very quiet to reasonably noisy literally overnight, it was also exhilarating and, in a strange way, refreshing. 

The evening was very pleasant and a much needed break for everyone, even Jonah’s parents, who decided to stay in Toronto and go see a play at the Royal Alex the next evening.

Late Boxing Bay evening on the drive home Carolyn asked Jonah if he really wanted to get married. 

Jonah chuckled. “You know, I’ve felt married for a while now.”

“So have I.” But it would be a good excuse for a party. We could do it in the summer at the beach house.”

Jonah said nothing for quite a while. Then he said. “You’re a real old fashioned girl aren't you?”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

‘So am I,  and before I agree to something like that, I’d really like to know that I could, you know, hold up my end. And the only way I’m gonna know that is to have some success with the writing I’m doing.”

Carolyn didn’t respond right away. Instead, she looked out at Toronto as it whizzed by them.

“That’s a very well-reasoned argument.” She said, finally, “Guess I’m not the only one who’s old-fashioned.

And they both laughed because they knew they were already marred in all the ways that really mattered.

~ 22 ~

The next day, they both slept in. When they got up they looked out the window and saw that the snow had started again. Big fluffy, easy to shovel or blow flakes. The air was so dense with the snowflakes they couldn’t see the lake. They could barely make out the pool in their backyard.

After they got dressed and headed downstairs. Carolyn went into the living room and turned on the TV to check the weather. 

A few minutes later, she came into the kitchen where Jonah was making the coffee. 

“Looks like were gonna get a foot and the wind is gonna pick up in a couple of hours.” she said. Jonah shut off the coffee maker and they both headed for their coats and boots and the side door.

Fifteen minutes later, they were wandering around Joe’s supermarket. An hour after that, they were home and unloading more groceries than they needed but that just meant they didn’t have to go out unless they really wanted to, which was fine with them. Carolyn had her novel to work on, which was about three-quarters done, and Jonah had his new laptop to set up and three more stories of his mini series to finalize.  

Jonah sat at the dining room table by the window and watched the relentless snow come down. It was kind of hypnotic, and reminded him of his childhood, when they would stare out the window at the thick snow that blew in from the lake. When it was over, they would get their winter clothes on and head out. They would drag their sleds and toboggans down the empty street to a park called the Sugarbowl that had the best sledding hill next to the Mather Street School on the other side of town. He remembered those days with a real fondness and thought that maybe, one of these days, when if he ever got to the point where he could write anything he wanted, he would write a story about his childhood in that small town.

While he was sitting there with his feet up on a second chair just staring out the window, Carolyn came up from behind and wrapped her arms around him.

“Whatcha doin’?” she asked,

“I was just thinkin’ about days like this when I was a kid. How we would get all bundled up after the snowfall and head to this place called the Sugar Bowl. It was one of two good sledding hills in Fort Erie. We would spend hours there, freezing our asses off riding down the hill for about, I don’t know, about ten seconds then trudging back up to do it all again until we were so cold and wet that we had to go home just to keep from getting pneumonia or something.”

He turned and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Guess it must have been a little different in Toronto.”

“Not really.” she said, sitting down at the table. “Before we moved to Rosedale, we lived in a nice house on a side street off Broadview Avenue, south of the Danforth. We were about two blocks from a park that ran almost all the way down to Gerrard Gerrard.which was close to half a mile. It had a really long hill and when it snowed, my dad would take me over there with my flying saucer and I would zoom down that hill. Scared me to death. But I did it until I was frozen solid. My dad would sit on a bench and shoot the shit with the other dads and moms. Those were good times. Then we moved to Rosedale and I outgrew it. Finished high school and decided to live here, in my grandpa’s house and go to Brock.” 

Jonah could hear a bit of sadness in her voice. ‘Nostalgia would do that to you,’ he thought, ‘Even if it wasn’t all that long ago.’

He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. 

“I guess everybody’s got a snowy day story or two.”

“I think you’re right.” Carolyn said. She got up and made herself another cup of coffee and a few seconds later had disappeared into her work room to keep slugging away on her novel.

As Jonah sat there staring at his computer screen, getting ready to edit his final episode, he heard one of his voices say: “We envy you, Jonah. Our memories are the things we miss the most.”

Jonah said nothing. There really was nothing to say after all.

~ 23 ~ 

The soft snow came. The temperature stayed cold which made it easy to get rid of. They wrote and they cooked and they fooled around before watching a movie on TV. They slept like babies. And they got up the next day and did it all again for about another few days. On New Year’s Eve, the roads were clear, so they headed out for a Thai dinner at Youngs up in Fonthill which was about a half hour drive. They got home around 9:30, watched another Fantastic Beasts movie and then switched to an American station to watch the ball fall in a very crowded Times Square in New York City. They kissed each and held each other for quite a while. They both had a good feeling about the year to come. 

Hopefully, it would be a breakout year for both of them. But that didn’t really matter. They were both writers and couldn’t really see themselves as anything else. They considered themselves lucky that they had figured it out so early in life. Because by the time they got into a position to really attack the business, they were both very well equipped and free of the kind of delusional thinking that drove a lot of would-be writers off one sort of cliff or another. They knew they were in for a lot of hard work and iron-fisted lessons. But they were both strong people and they had each other, which gave them even more fortitude.

On New Year’s Day they both called their parents and wished them all the best. They called Charles Ridley too and gave him a progress report. Charles told them not to sweat the timings. The whole industry usually spent the  the first week of January recovering from their holiday hangovers.

That afternoon, they got on their boots and coats and headed out to sweep off the deck and the pool cover and take a walk on the beach where all the other walkers had trampled down a wide path. The day was cold and sunny. Everything around them looked white and clean. The lake, which usually frozen out about a hundred feet or so was not quite there yet. But they both knew the really cold weather was on the way.

When they got back home, they made some coffee and  sat in the dining room where Jonah read his five stories to Carolyn. She had already read and proofed the pilot story so she was quite familiar with all the characters.

The stories, unlike the pilot, which had a bit more action and violence, were more cerebral, which made sense to her since the team of Haven and Botticelli were both more interested in figuring things out than smashing around and breaking in doors. Carolyn found it refreshing, especially with the violence that the streaming sites all seemed to be conditioning their viewers to. She believed that something like this would work better in more civilized countries like the British Isles and Scandinavia.

Being a planner and a plotter, she marvelled at how these stories just seemed to flow naturally out of Jonah’s head. She wondered if one day she should try and write something right out of her own head.

She liked all the stories, mainly because they weren’t overly complex and the characters were all pretty clever, confident people.

Jonah made some small corrections and fixed typos as he read the stories to Carolyn. When he was finished, they both agreed that there was a whole mini-series there. And Jonah made a note to talk to Charles about the British and Scandinavian markets, which he thought was really good advice.

~ 24 ~

Another month went by, and in that time Carolyn completed her novel, to the point where she was willing to give it to Jonah to read.

Jonah had set up a small table on which he could type or read off his screen while sitting in one of the comfortable tub chairs in the living room. 

He had finished all his episode treatments and sent them off to Charles and so the timing was good and he could really focus on reading Carolyn’s novel.

As he read through her second draft, one of the things he liked about it was that Carolyn’s no-frill writing style worked well with the story she was telling. 

As he got to the end of the story, he remembered reading something that the author, John Updike, said in an article he wrote in the New Yorker. It went something like ‘A good novel is a story that starts at one point in the main character’s life and ends further along in that life.’

Maybe Carolyn had read that same article, because when she started, the main character, Lilli was twenty-three and fresh out of college, and when she finished, she was about fifty-six. 

He also liked it that Carolyn had put a little twist in at the end. The last chapter concluded with Lili walking out onto her deck with her computer and a cup of coffee, all her obligations and achievements behind her, and beginning to write her own story.

The novel was about ninety-two thousand words, which was a little shorter than most novels. But Charles had reminded her that with all the, sadly, shrunken attention spans out there, brevity was, indeed, the soul of wit and the key to sales. Carolyn had obviously been smart enough to follow his advice. Jonah was pleasantly surprised that it told the story in a kind voice, that he believed readers would find comforting and maybe even inspirational.

After he finished reading it, he walked it over to Carolyn’s office and sat down on the chair beside her desk.

Carolyn had just finished taking down all her file cards and was putting an elastic band around them and tossing them into one of her desk drawers.

“So?”

Jonah just smiled. “It was an absolute pleasure to read all the way though.” he said. “Now I’m not in your target audience, but I thought that she turned out to be a hero. Not because of any one thing she did, but because of the way she lived her life, the people she took responsibility for, and the country she cared about, which, you know as well as I do, is pretty messed up at the moment. I think that having a reminder that there are people out there who are trying to make things better is important. I mean it’s happening here in Canada with the majority of people all pulling in the same direction behind a leader they can trust. That’s what we all need more of, and I think your character, Lilli, could represent that, especially to people in the US.”

Carolyn sat listening to the guy she loved telling her the truth about what she had done. She had no idea how to react, because like most writers, she had no idea whether this novel was good, bad or anything in between.

“So should I send it to Charles or work on it some more?”

“I don’t know what the protocol is for novels. He may very well just give it to Leon and let him help you tighten it up in places where they think it needs tightening. But my take on this was that it was pretty clean and worked very well because of its simplicity.”

Carolyn smiled. Then she leaned over and kissed Jonah.

“Thanks, babe. I’ll check it over one more time then send it to Charles. I’d send it to my mom, but she’s started writing and I don’t want her to have to stop for this.”

“I’d send it to Charles. It’s a good story, and you told it well. I like that it wasn’t all flowery and full of insights. It was a straight-ahead read. And your characters, both Lilli and Ethan are American heroes in their own ways.”

Two hours later, Carolyn sent the story called Lilli’s Lost & Found, off to Charles, who immediately replied. ‘Love the title. If the story’s even half as good, we’ll be off to the races. Talk soon, Charles.’

~ 25 ~

About a week later, Carolyn got a call from Charles’ life and business partner, Leon Fine, His biggest long term client, beside Carolyn’s mom, was Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who wrote magnificent sprawling novels that got turned into big sprawling movies.

“Lilli. Hi, this is Leon.”

“Oh, hi Leon. How are you?”

“I’m just fine and dandy. Listen, Charles gave me your novel to read because he really liked it and couldn’t believe that a twenty something science fiction writer could pull something like this off.”

“Okay. I’m not sure what that means, but I did write it. I have a witness.”

“I know, I know. He wanted me to read it over and see if it needed any help.”

“So did it? Because I’m perfectly willing to do anything that needs to be done, Leon.”

“Yeah, well that’s the thing. I went over it and except for a few missed tenses, I think it’s a nifty little piece of work and you should be really proud of it. I could see half a dozen ways to blow it out into something bigger, but that would just water it down and I have a very strict rule against doing that?”

“So are you saying it’s publishable.”

“That’s what I’m saying, Carolyn. We already have three publishing houses in the US bidding on it.”

“Holy shit!” Carolyn was flabbergasted.

Leon just chuckled. “Holy shit is right. So you need to get yourself up here and sign some papers. I’ll send you the marked-up edited version. There’s relatively little there but I’d like to go though it all with you just the same.”

“I don’t know what to say.” 

“Hey kiddo, you’re a writer. You don’t have to say anything, just get up here and let’s finalize this puppy and make some money.”

“OK Leon.”

“And bring your significant other. Charles wants to talk to him in person as well.”

“Alright. Does Monday work for you. Sometime after rush hour?

“Sure. See you then. Have a nice weekend. Go out and celebrate.”

“Thanks, Leon.”

Carolyn disconnected and walked into the living room where Jonah was lying on the sofa, reading a book on his Kindle.

She sat beside him on the large coffee table. 

“I heard you talking in there. Anything special?” He asked.

“You might say that.” Carolyn said. “It was Leon.”

“Oh yeah.”

“He’s sending me the edits to my novel and he wants to see me in Toronto on Monday. There’s a bidding war for it going on in the States.”

Jonah sat up. “Wow. That’s insane.”

“Yes it is. He wants me in Toronto to finalize the manuscript on Monday and sign the financial deal for the book. And Charles also wants to talk to you. Probably about your series.”

“Holy shit. This is really happening.”

They hugged each other. 

“It can’t be this easy.” Jonah said. “It just can’t.”

‘Well, we’ll find out on Monday.”

“I guess so.” Jonah said and flopped back onto the couch, bringing Carolyn with her.

~ 26 ~

As usual, all the snow they had gotten so far that winter hadn’t fallen into the massive population centre that ran from Hamilton to Oshawa, about twenty miles either side of Toronto. So that made their drive a little easier. But once they hit Toronto, there was nothing easy about the traffic. It was the same old mess. They got to Charles’s home office by slipping off the highway and going up the Bayview extension and through Rosedale a little ways north of where Carolyn’s parents lived. They arrived at about two in the afternoon. Charles figured they would have missed lunch so he made some sandwiches for them to eat after they talked. 

Once they were settled in Charles’s office. They started their discussion. Carolyn signed a representation document specifically for Lilli’s Lost & Found, which included a relatively small reading fee for Leon. This would be the basis for a publishing contract. The numbers would be filled in later once the bidding was done and the publisher selected. Carolyn’s signature just gave Charles permission to act in her best interest when making that specific deal, a lot of which would depend on distribution and promotion in the US only. Once that deal was made, it would give them some good leverage to make publishing deals in other interested markets. Like Canada, Great Britain, Scandinavia, Australia and a few other places. 

Caroline only had one question. 

“Will I have to go to the US? Because I really don’t trust that country right now. They’re sweeping all kinds of people off the streets there, Charles. It’s totally nuts.”

“Charles thought about it for a few seconds, then he said. “No, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to. We can do this all from here through video and audio feeds to various programs that promote books. It does mean you’ll have to make a few more trips to the city. But we’ll try and get them scheduled fairly close together. A lot is gonna depend on who we choose and the promotional tools they want to employ. But we’ll send them all a note that you won’t be coming to the US until the government changes.”

“I know this is asking a lot, Charles.” Carolyn said.

Charles and Leon both chuckled. Charles shook his head. “Sweetie, you, would not believe some of the things that writers demand. At least your demand makes sense and we can play it like they played Salinger. He wrote The Catcher In The Rye and a number of other stories. But he refused to do any live promotion. That created a sizeable mystique around him and it helped sell a lot of books. Every publisher in America is familiar with that story.”

“Okay. I just didn’t want to seem pushy.” Carolyn said.

“It’s fine.” Charles said. “It’s a great little story and it’s really relevant. I think people will glom onto this and create a ton of word of mouth. So that’s it. You go over the book with Leon and we’ll be good to go once we have gone through the offers.”

“Well, that was easy.” Carolyn said.

“It’s always easy when there’s a marketable product.” Charles said.

Leon got to his feet. “Come on sweetie, we’ll get those revisions done and I’ll send it out for proofing.” 

Carolyn got to her feet. She looked at Jonah who just smiled at her, and then she left with Leon.

“Okay.” Charles said once they had gone. “I have some really interesting news on your series project. I sent it to a New York production company that does a lot of shooting up here and really knows their way around both New York and Toronto. They have been looking for a foot in the door up here with the Canadian networks and see this a great opportunity to interact and create a joint US/Canadian co-production. The good news is that I have found them a Canadian partner, which means that all the money will be in place. They will have a Canadian/US writing team to do the scripting. But the deal I worked with them puts us in control of anything beyond that first season.

“What does that mean, Charles?” Jonah asked.

“Well it means that we own a piece of what’s gonna happen right off the bat, in addition to the price they will pay for the story, and a smaller piece of anything they decide to do after that taking the series forward, into a second season. You won’t have to do anything. But we will have a share of the revenues for as long as the series lasts, because they’re your characters. So if it’s a hit it could go five or six seasons with six to eight episodes per season. I could see the legs it would have after I read the the pilot and the first episode.”

“So what is that worth?”

“Depends on who they can sell it to. Right now they are talking to both Netflix, Prime and Disney where their connections are. The Canadians are talking to both CBC and CTV up here. CBC is a pain in the ass. CTV not so much. My guess one of the US Streamers. Either way this thing gets made. They loved the premise, but want to put a little more action in the roll out episodes.”

“Yeah, I thought about that and figured that anybody who got interested would want to add more action. But I also know that action costs money and I didn’t want to build it all in and price the series out of reach.”

“That was smart thinking. Gives them a greater sense of ownership too. Guess you must have really been paying attention in your Film and TV classes at Glendon.”

“Yes I was. We had a great instructor.”

“Johnny Milton, We know him very well.”

“It’s a small world, I guess.” Jonah said.

“Indeed. So we’re on hold for the moment, while they pitch the idea. But once it’s greenlit, I’ll have a better handle on the money.”

“Wow. You really don’t mess around.”

“Not when I have an idea that’s worth something. But I do want to say, and I’ll say it to Carolyn too. This is not beginner’s luck. You both know what you’re doing. All you have to do is keep on doing it and you’ll be well compensated and also be two less things for me to worry about. Okay?”

“Okay.” Jonah said. “And thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now go have a sandwich and wait for your honey to get done.” 

“Yes sir.” Jonah shook hands with Charles, and headed down to the kitchen.

~ 27 ~

Jonah ate a very nice ham and cheese sandwich and read his e-book for the better part of an hour. When Carolyn finally appeared, she had her coat on and and her bag slung over her shoulder.

“So how did it go?” She asked. 

Jonah got up and tucked his Kindle into his shoulder bag, and got into his coat. 

“Charles does not mess around.” Jonah said as they started to the front door and headed out of the house. “He has someone who is very interested in doing the whole series. But there’s a lot of stuff to go though before starts happening. You know, the ‘wait’ part of the ‘hurry up and wait’ thing. But look at you, all ready to go. I think that’s great.”

They got to the car. Carolyn handed him the keys. “You should drive, hun. I’m a little distracted. Let’s go see my folks and then go home, okay.”

“Are you alright?” They got in and Jonah started the car.

“Yeah. I’m good. It’s just, you know. I never thought about the part where it all gets real, and wow, it smacks you.”

Jonah chuckled. “Well, yeah. It’s a lot to take in. But, you did what you set out to do, and you’re in the game.”

“Yeah. I guess I’d better start figuring out how the game actually works.”

“You will.” Jonas said and he took her hand. “We’ll help each other.”

And off they went.

By the time they got home, which turned out to be much later than they had planned, because they spent a lot of time with Carolyn’s folks and everybody knew if you wanted to get across the city and keep your sanity, it would have to be at around eight in the evening or later.

They made good time but were both completely exhausted when they got home. It had snowed again but only a few centimetres. which they could pretty much blow away in the morning.

They slept in the next day and woke up still feeling a bit drained.

Jonah made them omelettes and toast, which they slathered with homemade jam that they got from a farmer’s market store the last time they were in St. Catharines. 

“So.” Jonah said. “Here we are on the road and gunning for the Buddha.” which was an expression he picked up listening to a power rock British band called Shreikback.

“Yeah. Here we are. I guess we’ll be going back and forth a bit once things start happening.”

“Yeah.” Jonah said. “ But I think we can do a lot of stuff online.”

“I hope so.”

“You really don’t like the city, do you.”

“I don’t hate it or anything. It’s just that I pick up on the vibe and it makes me uncomfortable.”

“I can understand that. What we have here is like living on another planet.” 

“Charles understands totally ‘cause he has a couple of other writers who feel the same way.”

“So he must be used to doing things that way.” 

“I guess.” Carolyn said.

“You sound bit down, hun.”

“Yeah, just feeling drained. It will go away. I have little bits and pieces of that feeling after I finished a story.”

“That’s understandable.” Jonah said. “I think they call it postpartum depression. Like after a woman has a baby. They’ve been lugging the baby around for nine months and now it’s not a part of them anymore. I think it works the same for the stuff you write, or anything else you put your heart and soul into building. It’ll pass.”

Carolyn smiled. “You’re really a first-class boyfriend, you know.”

“Aww shucks. You’re not so bad a girlfriend yourself. Maybe the best thing to do with your two irons in the fire is come up with a third one.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about that. But I’m a bit conflicted about whether it should be sci-fi or something else.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure that out.” Jonah said, happy that she was thinking ahead and not just stuck in the moment. “But my opinion, for what it’s worth, would be to get ready to write another book like Lilli’s Lost & Found. Because if it hits, I’ll bet you a nickel that Charles will be asking you to do that.”

They talked about ideas until they were finished their breakfast. Jonah said he was going to snow blow the driveway, and sweep the back deck and the pool cover, then put the heater on, so they could both go for a swim. The temperature outside was zero and supposed to start going up a bit, which would make the fluffy snow heavier.

So off he went and Carolyn got busy cleaning up. All the while she was thinking about what she wanted to write next.

~ 28 ~

While he was blowing and sweeping the snow, his spirits came to him.

“Sounds like you and your lady had a very successful business trip.”

“Yeah, well we’ll see about that. A lot of things have to happen before I know anything for sure. And by the way. No more ideas, please. I have to learn to do this on my own.”

“Okey dokie. But if you find yourself in the position of needing something…”

“No. Definitely not. I really appreciate what you have done for me, but I have to make the rest of it happen on by myself, I really do.”

“We understand. Summon us if you need us.”

And, with that, the voices went silent. He thought about that as he swept and slowly came to the realization that he had gained a modicum of control over the spirits inside him.

He felt a bit of relief over that. In the past months, he had been hearing from them less and less, and at this point he was starting to believe that they were not real, and that maybe he and Carolyn simply shared the same delusions. He was much happier thinking that way, as opposed to believing that they were, in any way, real. 

‘The human brain,’ he said to himself. ‘A very complex thing.’ Then he turned on the blower and got to work. 

 It was already mid-February, and he was surprised at how little snow they had gotten so far. But at the same time, it was a month and a half from April, and in this part of the country, anything could happen.

They idled away the rest of the day, with their swim, some serious fooling around, a walk for dinner over to The Beach House and a walk back under the light of the three-quarters moon. They got comfortable and started watching the second season of Yellowstone on DVD, which was a Christmas gift they had given themselves. They were both huge fans of Taylor Sheridan. Carolyn wondered what he would do if he decided to write science fiction. But that was just a thought, because she reckoned he was too down-to-earth for something like that. But, damn he was a good writer. Jonah totally agreed. 

They spent the rest of the week just goofing off, and thinking. It was colder outside but they still swam every day. They read a lot and basically just gave themselves a well-deserved break for that entire week.

On Saturday, they slept in again. They had some coffee and toast, did a few things around the house and headed off to Fort Erie for lunch with Jonah’s folks. 

They told them all about their trip to Toronto and some of the stuff that could happen as their agent moved their projects forward.

Jonah had noticed that his parents had really warmed up to Carolyn and she had warmed up to them as well.

“You know,” his dad said. “When you first told us that you had decided to live with Carolyn after knowing her for all of two whole days, we thought you were a bit off your rocker.”

Jonah smiled. “Yeah, I get that. You weren’t the only ones. But I had a good feeling about this, and it seems to be working out just fine. Maybe we’re lucky. Or maybe this was just the way things were meant to be. Either way, we’re both very happy and inching our way into being able to do what we have always wanted to do.”

What about you, Carolyn?” Jonah’s mom asked. 

“Well, I think the world works in strange and mysterious ways. Some days everything is chaos. Other days, everything lines up perfectly. When I met Jonah, I felt almost instantly that he was what was missing in my life. And I guess I must have been what he was missing in his life, too.”

“Are you going to have to move to Toronto?” his dad asked.

“No. We’re not doing that,” Carolyn said. “We made that very clear to our agent and he was fine with it. We’ll have to take a few trips there. But we would do that anyway to visit my parents. So we’ll do what we have to do for work and visit them. We can stay over there if we have to but mainly we’re working from the lake.”

Then his parents told him they’d decided to go back to work. Jonah was a bit surprised and he asked them about their decision.

“Retirement’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” Jonah’s dad said. “We had the house to fool around with, but that was all taken care of after a few months. Then we did a lot of walking along the river and a lot of reading. But truth be told, we both missed teaching. But at least we got a taste of retirement and one thing’s certain. The next time we do this we need to both have hobbies.”

They had a nice lunch, then stopped at Joe’s in Ridgeway to pick up a few things on the way home. On the way, they both started talking about what they wanted to do next. 

“I have to admit,” Carolyn said. “That after writing Lilli’s Lost & Found, I started to lose interest in science fiction. And I thought about what you said about Charles coming after me for another book in the same vein as Lilli and I think you’re right.”

“What do you mean, you know, exactly?” Jonah asked.

“Well, I don’t know exactly. I guess you could call it  character piece. Last night I had this idea, about a guy who wins a massive lottery like a Powerball, way up in the hundreds of millions, and what this guy does with it.”

“That sounds interesting. I remember reading an article about that somewhere, you know, what happens to people who win big money lotteries. Not too many happy stories. So maybe you write a happy story, somebody who dodges all the bullshit that comes at them with winning a massive lottery.” 

“You’re readin’ my mind there, mister.”

Jonah just chuckled as they pulled the parking lot of Joe’s Supermarket.

“So figure out the story. You’ve got the time, and I know you’ve got the talent.” Jonah said.

“Yeah. I do, don’t I?”

~ 29 ~

Carolyn spent the next couple of days thinking her idea through. Who would be in the story? Where would she set it? What would her character’s plan after he won the prize? What kind of person would her main character be? And half a dozen other questions that she stared at for quite a while.

As she wandered around the house doing some cleaning. She took out some pork chops for dinner. She did some more thinking. She watched some news on TV, She went for a swim and kept on thinking. She thought all day and all evening, stopping only to discuss things with Jonah, who was really careful not to point her in a specific direction. He knew what that kind of influence meant to him and certainly didn’t want to infect her with it. 

Also at dinner, they talked about their spirits, Carolyn had not heard from hers in more than a week. Jonah told her that he had chatted with his guys a few nights ago and made a deal with them that they would only come forward when he called them. He found it amazing that the tactic had actually worked. 

“I didn’t want to bother you earlier ‘cause I know you’re thinking hard about your idea.’ Jonah said but I got an email from Charles. He’s been talking to Leon about The Virgin Detective.”

“Really? So what did he have to say?” 

“He told me that with a bit of jigging around with what’s already there, this could be turned into a nifty little novel. If I’m interested he wants me to talk to Leon on Skype tomorrow.”

“So…what are you gonna do?” Carolyn asked.

“Well, I thought it over and it didn’t really seem like it would be a ton of work to convert it. So I guess I’ll talk to Leon and hear what he has to say. It’s about eighty thousand words right now, so if I fatten up everything up a bit, I could pretty easily get it up to somewhere around ninety to ninety-five thousand.”

“Sounds like Charles really likes the idea.”

“Yeah it does. You know, I thought about writing it as a novel originally and I think I still have a longer draft of the pilot episode. It’s backed up somewhere on my remote drive.”

“So we’re both in the book biz.”

Jonah chuckled. “Well not just yet. But the idea appeals to me, and it might just be good support for the video series.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what Charles was thinking too.” Carolyn said.

“So what do you think?”

“Doesn’t matter ‘cause I can tell from the way you’re talking that you’re gonna do it.”

“Am I really that transparent?” Jonah asked.

“I guess you must be.”

And they both laughed because they knew it was true.

The next morning Carolyn made some coffee and toasted a bagel and went right into her office. She was good to go. Jonah set up his Skype and took his laptop upstairs so he wouldn’t bother Caroline.

Leon called at eleven on the dot and they talked for about half an hour. Leon seemed to know the story pretty well and gave him some good suggestions about the parts he could work on to fatten up the manuscript. He also suggested changing the order of the smaller episodes stories to give the book a subtle open ending, which was always a good thing to do, especially if it took off in any way that would call for a sequel or even a series.

Leon said he would send Jonah a copy with his notes and the arrangement he suggested for the episodic stories. Jonah’s job would to make it all flow smoothly as a single narrative, as opposed to what he had now which was a series of related stories.  

At the end of the conversation, Jonah thanked Leon, who told him that he could see a possible franchise in this if they found the right publisher. He asked Jonah how he felt about that. Jonah told him that he honestly could not believe that any of this was actually happening. 

Leon chuckled because heard that a couple of times before spoken by people who were now quite well known in the book business.

“I’ll wait to see your notes and get right on it, Leon. Carolyn is starting a new novel, so I’ll have lots of time. Oh yeah, don’t mention that to Charles just yet. It’s technically none of my business at this point.”

“That’s cool. Jonah. You just stick to your knitting and we’ll all do just fine.” Leon said.

They disconnected and Jonah headed downstairs to wait for the file from Leon.

~ 30 ~

Jonah thought that Leon was a very good editor, although he didn’t have a lot of personal experience to base that on. But his notes and suggestions all made sense and would certainly make the job of expanding his treatment into some sort of novel fairly straightforward.

It took Jonah the rest of the day to read through everything and understand Leon’s strategy regarding expanding the story. There were also two pages containing some pretty good style and linkage advice. Once Jonah had taken it all in, he decided to stop for the day to think about everything. 

He went to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich. Carolyn was already there doing the same thing.

“So how was your call with Leon?” Carolyn asked.

“Very good.” Jonah replied. “He made a lot of really sharp suggestions about where I could expand it. He also gave me a bunch of style tips too. I think it’s gonna be pretty easy to pull off. Might take a few weeks but they really seem to like the idea.”

“That’s great.” Carolyn said

“What about you?”

“Well, I have most of the story figured out and carded, I figure after tomorrow I can start writing.” Carolyn said then took a bite of her sandwich.

“You know, I don’t know about you, but this all seems pretty unreal to me.” Jonah said.

“I know! It’s like I’m waiting to wake up.”

“There has to be a wall we run into at some point.”

Carolyn said nothing which she chewed her sandwich. Then she took a sip of milk and gave Jonah a peck on the cheek. “No walls allowed.” she said and headed back to her office.

Jonah knew better than to ask her what her story was about. She would tell him in her own time. Probably when she was finished.

The next morning, he deliberately got up early and  plunged in. The first thing he did was find his earlier draft because it had a different structure that he thought might work now that he was making it a novel

It wasn’t very hard to find because he only had a couple of different files with the Virgin Detective title. He opened the earlier version. He found the intro and copied it. He then opened up the Word file of the marked up treatment that Leon had sent him, pasted it on the first page of the story.

~ Prelude ~

On a warm late spring day about a year ago, Emil Haven IV sat down to write the jacket notes for his fourteenth novel. It was titled: The Virgin Detective: The Irish Connection.

Eleven months later, it had sold more than two million copies in English. It had also been translated into seven different languages, where it accounted for another two million in sales. And it was currently being bid on by three major studios and two streaming services, which would probably net him more than all his book sales combined. 

This was the first book in his Virgin Detective series. The book, and the character name, Eric Wilder were both fiction, but its success, both critically and among the detective story reading public, had propelled Haven from the ranks of the ‘just barely getting by’ to ‘getting by rather nicely ‘in the fiction writing business. 

In actuality, Haven’s book was an embellished version of reality. A reality that damn near got the author killed. But it also showed him that the business he really wanted to be in was the one wasn’t all about creating and solving fictional crimes. But solving real crimes like a real detective.

He then started to add and edit as per both his own intuitive feelings and the suggestions that Leon had made.   It was nowhere near the level of exhilaration of fashioning a story from thoughts rolling around in his head, but it was interesting nonetheless, and after a few hours of it, he was starting to get into a good rhythm. And as he moved through the piece, chapter by chapter, he started to feel he was getting the hang of it. He was teaching himself as he went and he found it interesting how many of the contractions he had made for efficiency’s sake could easily be expanded. A couple of sentences here and there, sometimes a whole new paragraph. He felt like he was blowing up a balloon. Before he knew it, it was close to six PM and Carolyn was roaming around in the kitchen. She came over and kissed him on the cheek and took his dish and glass away and put them in the dishwasher. 

A few minutes later, Jonah came to the end of a chapter and decided to stop there. He was about a third of the way  through and had added just over six thousand words to the narrative. At this rate he would be finishing in three days tops. But that didn’t strike him as realistic. He’d have to think on that a bit, before guesstimating a timeline.

He wandered over to the kitchen. Carolyn was staring into the refrigerator with a blank look on her face. Jonah gently closed the door.

“I know you got out some pork chops. But I can tell that you don't feel like going to all the trouble of cooking. So let’s go out.”

“Good. ‘Cause I don’t know how long I would have stood there starting into the fridge..”

“You look a little tired. Rough day?” Jonah asked,

Caroline took a deep breath as they both started to walk to the side door and get their coats. 

You have to make a of decisions when you’re just starting. It’s exhausting.” Carolyn said.

“Yeah, but it gets easier after that.”

“I sure hope so.”

~ 31 ~

It actually took Jonah the better part of two weeks to do what needed to be done to enlarge his treatment and make it flow. 

A lot of this had to do with the fact that he was a novice and was just figuring things out as he went along. But he had a writer’s mind and a strong enough intellect to tell him whether he was going either too far or not far enough and it was that analysis that took a lot more time than he had reckoned and involved a lot more work than he had thought it would.

But after his last read-through, which was mostly to check for typos, quotation marks in the right place, punctuation and overall feel, he came away fairly confident that he had actually pulled it off. 

One of the things he had to abandon was the discipline he was taught about writing treatments. In a novel, he was free to go into what his prof called ‘directorial detail’. It only took him a few chapters to figure that out. Once he had, he went back over what he had done to that point and basically added a good deal of what he was deliberately leaving out.

When he got to the end and was ready to send it off to Leon, he felt rather proud of himself. He also realized that after he got into the groove, he had started to enjoy this kind of writing a lot more than he thought he would.

Leon got back to him a few hours later and said that he had gone over the first couple of chapters and liked the overall feel, which caused Jonah to finally relax a bit and start to think about maybe writing a new story from scratch, just to see if he could.

He also got an email from Charles saying that the pitches had all been made and there were three offers to analyze and timings to be determined, then they would get into budgeting, scripting, locations, looking for a lead that would draw an audience, and finally, pre-pre-production.   

The best news was that, overall, the idea was well-received and, as Charles had thought in the beginning, a refreshing change from all the hollow ultra-violence and AI effect ideas that they were producing because that was pretty much all that was coming to them. It was, as Charles pointed out, a solid zig when everybody else was zagging.

In the meantime, Carolyn was locked away in her office, pounding away. She was a good three solid weeks and two hundred pages into her draft which was the equivalent of about sixty-two thousand words, and from the look of the flipped over file cards on her board, she still felt that she had a fair bit of story left to tell. 

But she could feel the weight of the non-stop routine she was on and decided that it would be time to take a day or two off. 

It was early March and for whatever miraculous reason, the typical Lake Erie-influenced winter mess had not materialized. In fact the temperature was consistently between five and ten degrees Celsius. The snow had melted away except for a long strip along the water edge of the beach and some sheltered pockets. along the breakwalls. 

It was getting close to lunch time when she emerged from her office and walked down into the family room where Jonah was reading on his computer.

“Hey big boy.” she said. “What’s goin’ goin’ goin’ on?”

“Not much, little girl.” he replied. “What’s happening with you?”

“I’m about two-thirds through and decided to take an extended coffee break.

“What a coincidence. I am getting ready to chill out myself. Leon has my novelization and wanted a week to go through it. That was up today and he sent me the final this morning. I’m just finishing it up and it feels pretty good. So, I’ll have to go to the city to sign some stuff. You should come. We could go see your folks.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll call my mom”. She walked over to the window. “I can see that winter is waning.” 

“We’ve still gotta get through most of March.”

“There’s always that.” she said flopping down on the couch beside him and leaning in so her head was on his shoulder.

“Are you happy with the edit?” Carolyn asked

“Yeah. He didn’t do a whole lot to it. But the few things he did really helped it along.”

“Leon’s the best. My mom loves him to death.”

“Well, he impressed the hell out of me.”

“I’m gonna have a swim and then maybe we can think about some dinner and head out tomorrow.”

OK. I just need another hour with this and I’ll set something up with Charles.”

She gave him a peck on the cheek and trundled off to open the pool and turn on the heat and then get her suit on. Jonah had set up a meeting with Leon and Charles for the next afternoon. An hour later, he was done and emailed the final final back to Leon. Then he got into his trunks and headed out to join Carolyn, who was just sitting  in the warm water doing absolutely nothing.

~ 32 ~

They decided on pasta and meatballs for dinner. They cooked together and listened to some Steely Dan while they were doing that. 

Neither of them were really old enough to have been around for most of the band’s run, but Carolyn’s mom and dad grew up with them and thought they were one of the very best rock/jazz fusion bands that came out of the seventies and eighties. What Carolyn and Jonah liked about them, apart from their musical genius and all the great players they had on their albums was their cryptic storytelling lyrics. This was a band that you really listened to, like you really listened to Bob Dylan and Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell. But what set Steely Dan apart was the quality of their musical sound. They worked with the best players and made serious demands from them. Carolyn, especially, did a lot of reading about them., She found the two founders, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, quite mysterious and believed they had really old souls.

As they were eating, Jonah asked Carolyn if she had heard from her ladies. Carolyn told him that she had not heard a peep. Jonah said the same and they both wondered if something was going on that they didn’t know about.

Early the next morning, before they left for Toronto, Carolyn went onto the Interior Voices website and started scrolling down the most recent comments and discovered that it wasn’t just their spirits that had gone quiet, it was just about everybody else’s as well.

So Carolyn called Phillip Cromwell.

“Phillip, hi it’s Carolyn, over in Canada.”

“Oh, hello Carolyn. I know why you’re calling.”

“Yeah. I was looking through the comments on the site.

“Something is happening. They have all gone quiet.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“Not a clue. This has never happened before. It’s very strange. But I’m looking into it and I will post whatever I find out. Tell me something … did you lose any spirits before the others went dark?”

“As a matter of fact, we did.”

“We? Who is we?”

“My better half, Jonah. He had six spirits but one day, about two months ago, three of them disappeared.”

“I’ve never heard of six spirits in one soul before.”

“Yeah, well now he’s down to three and he can’t find them either. I lost one a few months ago too, and now the other three are nowhere to be found.”

“This is all very strange.”

“I’ll say. Have you lost any?”

“Yes. All three of mine are gone.”

“Hmmm. Well we’d be very interested to know what’s going on.”

“Myself as well. Check the site regularly. I’ll see what I can find out.”

“We will. Goodbye, Phillip.”

“Bye.”

 She had put the phone on speaker, so Jonah heard the conversation.

“So it’s not just us.” Jonah said.

“Looks like it’s pretty much everyone.” Carolyn said. “But you heard him. He’ll investigate.”

“Yeah, I heard him. But how the hell do you go about investigating something like this?

“I have no idea.” Carolyn said.

“So I guess we’re just a couple of normal people.”

“The funny thing is that I don’t feel any different. Do you?” Jonah asked.

Jonah thought about it for a moment and then said. “No. But then, I never really felt anything different when they were there, you know, in my head.”

They were gathering up the stuff they wanted to take with them.

They loaded up the Beamer, which was the car they always took to Toronto. It was about 10 am which they figured would get them into the tail end of the morning rush hour.

The meeting at Charles Ridley’s only took about an hour, and really just involved some general chatting and Jonah signing a contract for the The Virgin Detective novel. Charles had informed the production companies involved what they were doing and both sides agreed that it would be some good PR, since they were about a month from finalizing with Netflix, a good six to eight months from having everything shot and and another three months from completing all the post production.

Netflix USA was their best offer, but Charles told him that the financials would be figured out as soon as the scripting was finalized, which was about a month away. But Charles had a good story to tell when he was pitching the book, so he was reasonably confident he could make a good deal for Jonah in the US.

By now, Jonah and Caroline were both becoming used to the amount of time it took to get anything done in the business they found themselves in. 

“I know that both of you are new to this world and it seems like its crawling along at a snail’s pace.” Charles said. “But there are always a lot of pieces involved, especially with series productions. This is where your patience is tested. My best advice to both of you is to head back home and keep on writing. Once there is enough stuff in the pipeline, your perceptions will alter for the better and things will start moving faster. You’ll see.”

They both just nodded. They knew Charles knew what he was talking about and they were just in kindergarten as far as understanding how things worked in both industries.

Caroline hadn’t sent anything but a one pager to Charles about what she was doing. He sent her back a thumbs up. All she told him was that she was about two-thirds done and he was happy with that. So off they went.

~ 33 ~

Caroline knew her mom’s writing routine, so they had a few hours before they would feel comfortable visiting. 

“Maybe we should pick up some dinner. Is there anything your folks like?” Jonah said.

“Believe it or not, they both love pizza, but they don’t have it very often.”

“So do they have a special pizza place?”

“Yeah, but it’s over on the west side off Eglinton Avenue. It’s called Commisso Brothers and Racco, whoever he is. It’s incredible. They have a massive bakery and make all kinds of takeout Italian food.”

“Okay. I’ll drive and you can navigate. We’ve got a couple of hours to kill, so let’s do that.”

They got to the car, which was parked down the street. Slowly but surely, they worked their way across the city. Everything looked strange and new to Jonah, because all he really knew about the city was stuff on Mount Peasant and the downtown core. He wasn’t much of an explorer when he was at Glendon. There was more than enough to do there. Mostly reading and studying and a little poker here and there.

“You know, when you’re coming in on the highway like we always do, you don’t really appreciate just how big this city is.”

“Yeah, it takes up a lot of space.” Carolyn said.

It took them the better part of an hour to get to Commisso Brothers, and when they did, Jonah was astounded at the selection of breads and rolls, and Italian main course dishes. Carolyn ordered the pizzas while Jonah wandered around and filled up a bag with rolls. He brought them to the counter and paid for everything. Carolyn had asked for the pizzas to be uncut, which evidently was not an unusual request. They were much easier to handle and warm up because of their size. They were told it would take about twenty-five minutes to make the pizzas, so they went out to the car and put the bag of rolls in the back seat. It was not all that cold, so they just leaned on the car and watched the people come and go.

“Apparently it goes on like this all day and all night. My dad says they never close.” Carolyn said. “He calls it a licence to bake money.”

 Jonah chuckled at the metaphor. 

While they were waiting, the sky clouded over and some random snowflakes started to fall. A few minutes later they heard their number called though the loudspeaker and went into to get the pizzas. They were quite large and smelled wonderful.

“I ordered two because these pizzas are great on the second day, so we’ll bring one home.” Carolyn said.

Jonah just smiled.

The drive back was a bit quicker because they were now going against the general flow of traffic. So it only took them about forty minutes to get back to Rosedale. It was also nearly dark.”

Carolyn’s parents were delighted to see them and very happy with their choice of dinner.

The pizza was larger than Jonah had ever seen before. It barely fit into their oven, but Carolyn knew her mom had an extra-large bread board that could hold the whole warmed-up pizza. But it was a two person operation getting it out of the over, and each piece was gigantic, so there would be lots of leftovers for them as well.

Carolyn’s parents were both delighted with the progress that both of them were making. After dinner, they hung around and chatted. Carolyn’s mom was about halfway through her first draft, but admitted she wasn’t thrilled with writing a sequel to any of her stories. Carolyn agreed, because while she wasn’t writing a sequel, she was working to make it a very logical second book.

They both agreed that the real joy came not from extending what you have already done, but from the creation of totally new ideas. But business was business and at a certain point, her publisher knew, or at least thought he knew, what would sell and these days, with the shrinking literacy rate of pretty much the whole human race, you kind of had to play the game, or they would just find someone who would.

They left around eight thirty and most of the rush hour traffic had died down, so they made it home by about eleven. But it had been a long day and they were both looking forward to sleeping in, and goofing off for a while. They cut up the pizza and stashed it all in the refrigerator and headed up to bed

~ 34 ~

  In the morning, Carolyn did something she had not done before. After breakfast, she handed Jonah a memory key with her latest story, which she had titled, ’Ted’s Millions.’

“I’m having a little trouble.” Carolyn said. “But I don’t want to talk to you about that until you’ve read what I’ve done so far.”

Jonah took the key and inserted it into his laptop. “Okay, I’ll read it and then we’ll talk.”

“Good.” was all Carolyn said, and she left him to read.

Ted’s Millions 

By Carolyn Somerville

~ 1 ~

His name was Ted Phillips, and he was nobody special. Just another office drone in one of the Manhattan midtown towers. An accountant by trade and a darn good one. But he was also a quiet, almost humble soul with an aversion to attention. So he just slaved away in his small office in one of New York’s largest accounting firms, faithfully doing the bidding of his masters.

Until one day, he finally, after many months of trying not to, convinced himself he’d had enough. And, as fate would have it, it was also the day that his life would change dramatically.

It was a Tuesday in November, and Ted was walking from the subway to his apartment in Brooklyn when it seized him. It boiled up like an overheated kettle in his brain. It caused him to stop and hold onto the wall of a building he was passing.  He thought he might be having a stroke, although he didn’t really know the symptoms to look for, and he was only thirty-five, which he reckoned was way too young for a stroke. 

The feeling passed almost as quickly as it arrived, and he walked on. But something had changed. Something in the way he felt inside. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. But he thought deeply, almost incessantly, all the way home, about what on earth it could be.

Ted’s firm handled some of the country’s larger corporations and a lot of smaller regional businesses as well. He sat in endless Zoom meetings with corporate minions and business owners whose job it was to reduce their company’s taxes to the smallest number possible and make sure the government wasn’t coming after them for any criminal reason.

Ted did his job diligently for about twelve years and gradually came to see it as a form of corporate dirty work. Bit by bit, day by day, over the course of close to two years, he began to hate the job and the businesses he was working for. This hate slowly festered and grew, and though Ted did not realize it right away because it happened so gradually, he was starting to become quite depressed.

Ted lived alone in a nice apartment in a nice part of Brooklyn. He dated from time to time, but preferred his own company. He had all the makings of a true sociopath, but unlike most of those afflicted in that way, he had a very logical mind. On the day he finally realized that he might be depressed, he thought a lot about how long he could go on living like that. But he was in New York, and he needed the money just to be able to afford a half-decent life for himself.

On a warm Saturday in August, two days after his weird stroke-like episode, Ted stopped at a bodega around the corner from his apartment in Brooklyn and bought some coffee cream and a small bottle of Tylenol for the mild headaches he had been experiencing for the past couple of days. And for some reason that he could not fathom, he also bought a Powerball lottery ticket. All the time, he was thinking about how he could make a break from the life he was living, spending his work days figuring out creative ways to lower the tax burden of his already wealthy clients and feeling very much like an evil enabler in that way.

Ted had never purchased a lottery ticket before. Never even really thought about it all that much. His mind was too logical and he knew the odds of winning were astronomical, to say the least. The accountant in him told him that it was an exercise in futility. But buying that ticket was, in all of his adult life, probably the most spontaneous thing he had ever done. So he decided to roll with it, just to see what would happen.

The next Saturday night, Ted sat in his apartment watching a nature show about how bats navigate in the dark. When that was over, the five-minute Powerball show came on. Ted got out his ticket and put it on the table beside his chair. He took a sip of his soda. He didn’t refer to the ticket, because he already had the numbers etched on his brain.

When the last ball fell, Ted sat in astonishment. He leaned forward and looked at the numbers on the TV screen that matched perfectly the numbers in his head. He picked up the ticket and confirmed it. The jackpot was seven hundred and ninety-two million dollars and Ted, who had never even thought about buying a lottery ticket before, had just won it. 

Ted took another sip of his soda because his mouth was suddenly dry. His accountant's brain calculated the after-tax sum, which was in the area of five hundred and fifty million, if he was smart about it, and Ted knew how to be smart about money. Quite a leap from the eighty-two thousand a year that he made at the accounting firm. 

~ 2 ~

Over the years, Ted had grown to despise the millionaires he worked for and now he was one of them. He thought hard about what he would do with that kind of money, and for the life of him, he simply couldn’t imagine what that would be. He had read stories about other Powerball winners and how all that money had severely fucked up their lives. Ted was pretty sure that wouldn’t happen to him. But then again, who could tell?

Ted shut off the TV and sat there in his comfortable chair in his nice apartment and thought about it until his brain was too tired to think anymore. He then put the ticket back in his wallet and went to bed.

The next day was Sunday. Ted went to his office with a small nylon shopping bag. He gathered up anything he felt belonged to him, which wasn’t much. Finally, he opened his computer and inserted a large-capacity memory key. Over the next half-hour, he downloaded the profile information and recent tax summaries of every client he had ever worked on over the past few years. There were exactly one hundred and five.

Finally, Ted wrote out a letter of resignation and emailed it to his boss, Everett Barton. He wouldn’t bother going into the office to resign in person because he knew that he would be automatically escorted out of the building once he announced it. It was the nature of the business. Then he pulled the corporate-issued cell phone from his pocket, set it down on his desk and left his office for the last time.

~ 3 ~

The next day, Ted ignored a call from Mr. Barton from his former office, had a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast, then took the subway down to the Powerball offices on 43rd Street to claim his prize. 

The person he talked to was a woman named Helen McQueen. She was about Ted’s age and dressed in a conservative-looking business suit. Ted had done some reading online about the lottery and knew that he had the right to refuse to be photographed or participate in any of their promotion. So he insisted on anonymity. 

Helen’s job was to talk him out of it. But Ted stood firm, explaining that he had read quite a few stories about other winners and how they were hounded by investment seekers, scammers, hustlers, friends, long-lost relatives, even strangers with sad stories. Ted wanted no part of that. After half an hour of very skillful, almost seductive pleading, Helen relented. But she told him that there would be a 48 hour waiting period to determine if there were any other winner claims.

Ted headed home and started to think through his future. He told Helen McQueen he was going to have a new phone soon and he would call her with his number.

He walked down Second Avenue to an Apple store and purchased a new iPhone, which one of the kids in the store was happy to program for him. He also bought a 15-inch iPad and a 15-inch MacBook Air, but told the Apple kid that he would set them up himself. No more PC shit for him.

Ted then headed back to Brooklyn on the subway. After he got to his neighbourhood, he went into the Italian grocery store and bought a cooked breaded veal cutlet, a crispy roll and a green salad. He then went to the wine store next door and bought a very expensive bottle of red wine. 

Sitting in his comfortable chair in his nice apartment, Ted was pretty sure that the shock of winning all that money hadn’t hit him. He thought about what would happen to him when it did. So he had another glass of wine and a third, figuring that when it hit he would probably realize he was too drunk to do anything about it, and just go to sleep. And when he woke up, he would still be rich, but he wouldn’t be fucked up about it. Because that was his biggest fear. 

While he drank, he set up all his Apple devices from the manuals that were provided. But he omitted any address, phone or email information. He also never set up the Internet on his phone. He was working to make himself as invisible as possible online. It took a couple hours and about three glasses of wine. He also uploaded all the client information he had taken from his office to his PC laptop.

When he was finished doing that, he sat down in his easy chair, reclined it back and took a nap.

When he woke up a couple of hours later, he made the sandwich and poured another glass of the rich red wine and then spent the rest of the day and most of the evening online looking at coastal properties farther south than New York City.  

As he was cruising through the listings, one house in particular caught his eye. It was a beautiful frame house on North Ocean Boulevard in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. As he kept searching, he found several other houses there that would be worth looking at. So South Carolina became his new destination.

Two days later to the hour, he received a call from Helen McQueen informing him that no one else had claimed the jackpot, therefore the entire seven hundred and ninety million was his. 

Two hours later Ted walked up to his Citibank branch in the same building as his office and asked to see one of the managers.

The person he met with was a middle-aged man named Franklin Davies. He put the cheque down in front of him and told Davies to do whatever he had to do to verify it, then deposit it in his daily interest savings account, which was currently sitting at a mere one hundred and three thousand, four hundred and fifteen dollars.

Surprisingly, Davies did not freak out over the amount. He just smiled at Ted, picked up the phone and called the number that Helen McQueen had given Ted. He had a very brief conversation with her and then put the phone down. 

“I very much doubt that you will want to keep all this money in a savings account.” Davies said.

Ted smiled. “I’m an accountant, Mr Davies, and I know I could live quite comfortably off savings account interest alone. But no, I will be moving out of New York and once I am relocated, I will start thinking about what to do with it. Forty percent of it at least will be going for taxes, so I will do my research and find some tax shelters. I’m actually quite adept at that. It was my job for twelve years.”

“Well, I will have this cheque deposited before the end of the day, and congratulations, Mr Phillips.”

“Thank you,” Ted said, “The only thing I would ask is that you increase the limit on my MasterCard to $100,000.”

“Consider it done, Mr Phillips.” Davies then handed him a card. “Once you’re ready to start doing something with your money, have whoever you deal with from wherever you end up call me. I’ll take care of everything.”

Ted thanked Franklin Davies and walked out of the bank.

Jonah read the entire 203 pages that Carolyn had done. It was a beautifully written story of an accountant in New York who hated his job and one day, for no reason that he could think of, bought a lottery ticket, and won more than seven hundred million dollars. Seeing a way out, he methodically got rid of his entire New York life and headed south to the city of Myrtle Beach South Carolina, where he slowly became friends with a few people, remade his personal image, bought a beautiful house on the beach and found an investment advisor who could help him manage his money.

But Ted was also carrying a bit of a grudge against some of the people he worked for and with the help of a serious hacker he met through his financial advisor, he sends out a computer virus to sabotage their businesses. 

Ted’s connection to one of the businesses that were attacked attracts the FBI, who by very reason of their investigation of him, derails his plans.

After that he wisely decides that he doesn’t want to spend time in prison or deal with the lawsuits that would plague him, he stops and starts to think about more constructive ways to use his money. 

This was as far as Carolyn had gotten. She had the rest of the story figured out, of course, but like most writers who often feel too close to their work to be objective about it, Carolyn started to wonder about how closely aligned the style of this story was to Lili’s Lost & Found.

After Jonah had finished reading what Carolyn had given him, he suggested they go for a walk along the beach.

The snow was completely melted now but the day was still pretty cool. The sky was cloudless and there was very little wind as they walked along.

“So you’re wondering if this story is a good fit with your first one.” Jonah said.

“Yeah. I have a nice ending figured out where Ted decides to put his money to work in the small business community and actually comes right back around to being an accountant, only for his own business.” Carolyn said.

“So I think one of the things you have to realize about yourself,” Jonah said, “Is that you have, quite honestly in my opinion, developed a unique voice. There are no hard edges in your storytelling. And I’m not just saying that because I love you or anything. I’m saying that because it’s what I felt when I read what you gave me. Honestly, if you just write it out to the end, that way you have been writing all along, and you’ll have another really nice story about people who working to do good things. Sometimes they get sidetracked or overly enthusiastic, or even vengeful, which was that corporate sabotage stuff, but that only helps them realize who they really are.” 

Carolyn said nothing as they walked along. 

“I think you intuitively know all of this. But while you’re actually doing the work, it’s just another ball that you’re juggling. You don’t really look too closely at anything other than the story. But the thing I saw in what you gave me, over and above the story, was you, hun. Right there in the pocket.”

Carolyn, clutched Jonah’s arm. “Thank you, sweetie.”

“My pleasure. Just keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be fine.”

Carolyn finished her story over the next couple of weeks and, true to form, it was another nicely told cautionary tale for the American book reader to ponder. There was no need for any sort of slam bang ending. This was a story that would succeed or fail based on its thoughtfulness and its truth-telling.

Understandably, both Leon and Charles agreed. There was no doubt that Carolyn was a unique sort of talent, with a knack for getting her message across without whacking anyone over the head. Their chosen publisher, Domino Books, a fairly new but well-connected and very aggressive company, felt the same way. Between Leon and their editor-in-chief, a lady named Vanessa Segal, who got along very well, there was relatively little for Carolyn to do. Ted’s Millions would be released eight months after Lilli’s Lost & Found. When they went to Toronto to sign the book deal Charles simply told her to take her time and start a new one in a similar vein. 

~ 35 ~

Three months later, it was early June and Carolyn was in the middle of a third novel she had titled ‘The Human League’, which was a story about two MIT computer science graduates who work together to develop an app to enable anyone using a computer to spot fake content. 

In preparation for this, she did a lot of reading about the various types of programming used to create these fakes. Her characters were both very smart people and quite concerned about the evolution of all of this fakery into crimes, especially embezzlement, which would prey on a lot of not-so-savvy people. The story had a bit of a harder edge than her previous tales, but she had talked it over with both Jonah and her mom, whose book was now with Leon for editing, and they both agreed the subject matter she chose called for a bit more of a shot upside the head. But she was now on her third book and had pretty much figured out the boundaries and the reader expectations. So she walked a fine line between making a powerful statement and staying true to the character of her previous novels.

She was about halfway though the story when she got a call from Charles, letting him know that the money from Lilli’s Lost & Found was starting to come in, and the sales figures exceeded the expectations of both Charles and the Domino people. Her sales were up in the low hundreds of thousands, which were really helped along by several book club volume purchases as well as volume purchases from major outlets like Costco and Sam’s Club. Plus a good deal of positive response and a volume purchase from Amazon as well which added e-books to her potential revenue stream. This meant she would be receiving a cheque for between forty five and fifty thousand every month until the sales began to level off. After that, he reckoned it would drop down to about half of that, and hopefully the slack would be picked up by Ted’s Millions.

Charles then asked for Jonah, but she told him that he was out doing some shopping on his bike. So told her to mention to him, that the budgeting had been done for The Virgin Detective series and he could expect a cheque for $110,000 US by the end of the week. The residuals would come later, once the series was produced and the markets for it world wide were determined. He also mentioned that  Domino also very much liked Jonah’s novelization and we’re going over it with their editor and would make them an offer soon.

He had also already found a Toronto based production company who had optioned The Locker Key and were currently scripting it and in the process of raising money for an independent TV movie, which would give them a lot of different revenue sources and streams.”

“Wow, that’s a lot, Charles.’ Carolyn said. “Why don’t I just get him to call you when he gets back. I’m sure he’d love to hear it from you and will probably have some questions.”

“You’re right. This is just a lot of good news in a single week. As you can tell, I’m a bit pumped. It’s so rare for not one but two young authors to be accepted so quickly.”

“The times, they are a changin’, according to Dylan, Charles.”

“I suppose they really are.” Charles replied. 

“I’ll get Jonah to call you as soon as he gets back.”

“Thanks, Carolyn. By the way, how’s the new story coming?”

“I’m about halfway though. Another couple of months.”

“Good, good. Well, there’s no rush, so take your time.”

“Will do Charles, and thanks for all the news. This is very exciting.”

“Yes it is.”

~ 36 ~

Jonah walked in a couple of hours later. Before he had gone shopping, he rode over to Waverley Beach to see if he could get in touch with his spirits there. But no luck. 

He also spent some time staring out at the lake and thinking about his next story.

It was going to be about sports gambling. And this time he wanted to set it in the States. All he had so far was a title that came to him in the fog between waking up and getting up in the morning. The title was ‘AKA Charlie McQueen’ and he had had the presence of mind to write it down on the pad on his night table. 

The day was warm, and he had a good feeling about everything. Apart from his own focus, he was thrilled to watch Carolyn mature into a real book writer.

A couple of hours later, he walked into the house with a small bag of groceries, which he set on the counter. Carolyn was in her office and heard him. She ran out and wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. 

“I got a call from Charles, this morning.” she said and went on to tell him all the good news that she could remember. 

Jonah then called Charles, listened carefully and then turned to Carolyn. “Wow. Looks like we’re finally on the map.” he said and hugged her again. 

“Yes sir, we certainly are.” Carolyn said.

“Charles wants to see us both on Thursday. He should have the money by then and I have to sign a deal with the production company he found that wants to do The Locker Key as an independent film, which means it can go anywhere, which also means more profitability. And on top of all that, I have an idea for a new story that I can probably get a treatment done show it to Charles when we go.”

“It’s all really starting to happen.” Carolyn said.

“I hope so, hun. I really do. We’ve been working hard, so it’s not like we don’t deserve it.”

At this point, they just stood and stared at each other for a while. They both thought about the spirits that had brought them together. And the bond between them that kept them together. They thought about how important having someone to love was in this life and that no matter what happened from this day on, they would always have each other. 

“I never told you this.” Carolyn said. “But the idea for Lilli’s Lost & Found…”

“Yeah?”

“It was a gift, you know, from the girls.”

Jonah just smiled, and now he understood just where the spirits had disappeared to.

“They did their jobs. They brought us together and they gave us both a gift to kickstart our lives together. I’m pretty sure they were done and so they just moved on.”

And Carolyn thought it was as good an explanation as any.

~ 37 ~

Over the course of the next decade, Carolyn worked her way up into the ranks of bestselling female authors, not with heavily plotted action and adventure stories or romance and heartbreak tales, but with deep, thoughtful stories of all the many different kinds of relationships that human beings have with each other. Her books were never more than eighty to ninety thousand words, but to her fan base, which was as diverse as out there, she was seen as a truth teller. She didn’t write to create spectacle. She wrote to go deep into the quiet recesses of the human spirit. And she found, much to her delight, that this was something relatively rare in the world of fiction, the bulk of which was nothing more than page turning excitement for its own sake. Carolyn wrote to satisfy needs that ran deeper than that. And for whatever reason, she did it well, and she did it for all of her working life. 

Carolyn also stayed in touch with Phillip Cromwell through the Interior Voices site. As she read through the more recent comments on the Interior Voices site she noticed that posts had changed. The people she recognized were all talking about how happy they were in their work and their lives, and the new people talked about the strangeness of having ghosts as constant companions.

For his part, Jonah, continued to mine the rich vein of original stories that could be ideal for films or series. He had long talks with both Charles and Leon, who were his guiding lights, and found that he was, with little effort, able to act quickly and decisively on their directional input, much to everyone’s delight. 

Together Jonah, Charles and Leon built a great business around supplying ideas to production companies all over North America and Great Britain. Charles was the front man who opened the doors, Jonah was the treatment writer and Leon was the main contact who would work with the scriptwriters to make sure that Jonah’s vision was realized in the script.

Within a year of their starting this relationship, the government of the US had changed and nullified just about everything that the Trump government had put into place, which opened the doors wide enough for them to stroll through and for Charles to expand his contact base exponentially into the lucrative US market.

As their reputation grew, so did the fees they could charge. At the end of three years and twenty-six projects, they were now commanding at least half a million per story and close to twice that for limited series concepts. 

The split was 50/25/25, with Jonah getting the larger share and Charles and Leon splitting the remainder. It was an excellent deal for everyone and it completely minimized Jonah’s need to go to the big city other than with Carolyn for the odd signature and to visit her parents.

+

Caroline’s mom had another big-selling novel, but decided to go back to teaching full-time for at least a couple of years while she plotted out a new writing direction for herself. 

As the Democrates took power, Carolyn’s dad started slowly shifting some of his investments back to the US. Although he had to admit that during the Trump years, Canada had grown into an industrial, avionic, and digital tech powerhouse and he knew it would take the US close to a whole generation before they gained back the trust of the better part of the world.

Carolyn and Jonah continued to live in the house in Bay Beach, and used some of their money to upgrade the heating and cooling system, build a proper garage with room for both cars and lots of equipment storage space. and build an added office for Jonah beside the deck, overlooking the beach and the pool

After five years together, and with all the expertly negotiated business deals by Charles, Jonah and Carolyn  between them accumulated enough money for them to be considered independently wealthy. They each had developed excellent reputations in their chosen areas of the writing world. They had several million in the bank and their futures both looked bright.

There was only one thing that was missing. But six weeks after they discussed it, Carolyn announced that she was pregnant.

FIN

CAROLYN’S STORIES

The Visitor

https://jimmurraysstories.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-locker-key.html

Ted’s Millions

https://jimmurraysstories.blogspot.com/2024/01/teds-millions_22.html

The Human League

https://jimmurraysstories.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-human-league.html

JONAH’S STORIES

The Virgin Detective

https://jimmurraysstories.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-virgin-detective.html

The Locker Key

https://jimmurraysstories.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-locker-key.html

AKA Charlie McQueen

https://jimmurraysstories.blogspot.com/2023/07/aka-charlie-mcqueen.html