The Glassheart Chronicles Read online

  The Glassheart Chronicles

  A Short Story Collection

  By

  Fisher Amelie

  J.L. Bryan

  Courtney Cole

  Wren Emerson

  Amy Jones

  Tiffany King

  Nicole Williams

  Copyright © 2011 Lakehouse Press

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this anthology are all products of the authors’ imaginations and are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of these authors or publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the authors or publisher.

  Cover art was created by Roobix, LLC.

  www.goroobix.com

  The Wonderboom

  By

  Fisher Amelie

  For Jen,

  'Cause you're flippin' amazing

  And you don't even know it!

  Bramwell, West Virginia

  Ten-thirty p.m.

  Just breathe, Sawyer. Breathe. Take your phone from your pocket. Good.

  Now, dial nine-one-one.

  I dialed the numbers and as my thumb trembled over the send button, I let out a shaky breath.

  "Nine-one-one. What's your emergency?"

  I recognized the voice. I grew up with that voice. That voice sat behind me in almost all my history classes for some reason.

  "Casey, it's Sawyer."

  "Something wrong, Sawyer?"

  "You could say that. I think I may have just found the missing head to that tourist." I also think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

  "Jeez Sawyer, you've only been back in town two weeks and you're already causing trouble?"

  "Casey, just get Danny down here," I said, impatiently.

  "Alright, where are you?" she asked.

  "I'm on County, about three miles from the center of town. Tell Danny, when I see his lights, I'll signal him."

  "Alright," she laughed, "Uh, want me to stay on the line with you until he gets there?"

  "Casey," I said through gritted teeth.

  "I was just askin'! Jeez Sawyer! Don't get your undies in a twist," she said, before pausing. "Are you sure? Because, if you're scared, I wouldn't mind..."

  "Casey!"

  "Alright, alright. He's on his way. Sit tight," she said before hanging up.

  As if I could do anything else.

  This is how the second week of my returning back to Bramwell, West Virginia ended. Just peachy, right? Sawyer Tuttle, ex-assistant district attorney for Suffolk County in Boston, Massachusetts, now unemployed finder of body parts.

  Unfortunately, my recently retired father suffered a stroke, leaving him paralyzed on the left side of his body. He's a tough old goat though and had made significant progress the first week he'd been released from the hospital, regaining much of his speech, but it was his body that wouldn't bounce back as quickly, forcing me to quit the job of a lifetime. A job I was positive I could never get back, regardless of my sterling records and alma mater, not after having only been there six months, quitting with hardly any notice anyway. Cities usually frown upon that type of behavior, despite the fact you're doing it for family.

  When Danny's flashing lights approached me from a hundred feet or so, I waved my hands over my head, alerting him to where I was. His cruiser popped and crunched the gravel as it slid to a stop on the shoulder. He stepped from his vehicle, checking behind him for oncoming traffic and affixing his hat tightly onto his head. His badge gleamed in the headlights of a passing truck as he drew near me.

  "Sawyer," he said, reaching out his hand.

  I shook it firmly and nodded. "Sheriff."

  "Hoped to see you again after all this time under better circumstances," he said, "but I suppose this'll do. Show me what you've found."

  I led him to the patch of brush where I discovered the head. Danny flashed his heavy light dragging it across the grass, giving me an extra gruesome dose of what I'd tripped over while jogging home along County.

  I saw these very same images in Boston on a daily basis as a criminal prosecutor but witnessing it in person just didn't hold the same effect. Apparently, pictures downplay the smells of their rotting subjects. I coughed into the sleeve of my t-shirt.

  "Awful, right?" Danny commented.

  "Terrible."

  Danny stood and spoke into the transmitter at his sleeve, "Casey, can you have Deputy Carson meet me at mile marker one-seventy-five? Tell him to tell the Johnsons that their weekly domestic dispute will have to wait until tomorrow as we've got bigger fish to fry. Also, wake the coroner."

  The thing buzzed with static before Casey answered, "'’Kay. Did Tuttle spill his guts all over the pavement yet or..."

  "Casey, we talked about this."

  Silence.

  "Alright, son. Tell me how you discovered the head."

  I cleared my throat. "Well, I was jogging home..."

  "And why would you jog so late at night on a dark road?"

  "I'm just used to working out late at night. In Boston, I wouldn't get back from the office until late so it was the only time I had to do it. Guess it became a pattern."

  "Alright," Danny said, jotting down information on a pad of paper. "Then what?"

  "I was jogging on the shoulder against the flow of traffic when a car approached. I forgot to wear any reflectors so I decided, to be safe, I'd jog deeper into the grass line until the car passed. That's when I tripped over something. It felt a little too soft and bulky to be a natural part of the landscape, so I passed my key flashlight over the area and the light reflected off the eyes. Freaked me out, Danny."

  "Can you think of anything else? See anything else that felt strange?"

  "Nope."

  "Okay Sawyer," he sighed. "Number still the same?"

  "Of course. Has anyone in this little town changed their number in the past thirty years?" I asked sarcastically.

  "Yes," he said, thoughtfully, "Little Katie Shannon's parents had to change their number because she was handing it out willy-nilly at a bar in Charleston and a couple of chaps wouldn't leave her be."

  Katie always was a bit of a goof.

  "I get ya. You're just doin' your job."

  He smiled. "Need a ride home son?"

  "That would be great actually, thank you."

  Finishing my jog home was out of the question. There was something about not wanting to risk tripping over a second bloody head that night that left a bad taste in my mouth, best to leave that to the next jogging sucker.

  "Alright, as soon as Carson gets here, I'll have him swing you home."

  Danny went back to his cruiser and popped open his trunk. He began digging around and instead of bothering him, I opted to watch the black International Scout that was barreling towards us at what seemed to be a hundred miles an hour. Good gracious, they've got to be going at least eighty.

  When the driver didn't seem to be slowing down, I stepped back a bit to avoid any possible gravel that could kick up from their tires and peg me in the face, because that would have been my luck. When the driver came to a screeching halt on the shoulder opposite my side of the road, I stifled the urge to cross and punch the guy out. I couldn't see very well when the driver stepped from the Scout but I recognized the clickety-clack of a woman's heels. It was the same noise I remembered the women at the court house would make when walking with purpose on the marble hallways.

  Wh
en the woman's thin black high heels emerged under the lights of Sheriff Danny's cruiser, my heart stopped dead in its tracks. My cheeks heated to an unnatural warmth as I stared at the strap around her slender ankle. The most gorgeous woman I'd ever laid eyes on became engulfed by the light from the car. I followed those black heels up long, willowy legs and met the hem of a knee-length pencil skirt.

  Now, the only reason I even knew what those were was because my ancient secretary tried to explain to me the appropriate types of skirts women should wear in the court room and that I needed to tell fellow prosecutor Mary Kingsford that she was dressing ‘inadequately'. I didn't, by the way, tell Mary Kingsford because I thought Mary's skirts added a little interest to my day.

  In my opinion, the pencil skirt is one of those elusive pieces of clothing that women believe are modest and truly, they are. But what women miss, or maybe they don't miss at all, is the fact that the pencil skirt does something to a woman's shape. Hips are curvier, calves are more pronounced, hips are better lined. There is nothing sexier to a man than a woman in a pencil skirt. Its appeal is the mystery and boy, do I love a good mystery.

  As my eyes followed the woman's shapely hips, they continued up until they met the face of a literal Botticelli painting. She was devastatingly handsome with dark brown wavy hair that fell at her elbows and eyes that pierced through me. I couldn't get the color but I was determined to remedy that very soon. She was probably five foot five and no older than twenty-one. Too young for you, old man. I eyed her carefully. She looked strangely familiar.

  At twenty-eight, there was no way such a young beauty would have anything to do with me but that didn't mean I couldn't appreciate her.

  "Thanks for calling me, Danny!" she yelled acerbically, breaking me from my thoughts.

  Danny looked up. "Oh Lord! Get out of here, girl! We haven't even started investigating yet and you can't be this close to the scene! Go on! Get! You can call me tomorrow for the details." She didn't turn around. "I'm serious as a heart attack! Get your butt back in that jeep or I'll call your mama!"

  But she just shook her head and laughed.

  "Nope," she said succinctly, before turning and stopping short two feet in front of me. "Well, well, well. What do we have here?" she asks, her eyes raking me up and down. "Let me guess, you were the one who found it?"

  "Yes, ma'am," I said, unprepared for the nervous lilt in my tone. I cleared my throat and answered more surely, dropping a pathetic octave lower than my genuine voice.

  "Yes, ma'am."

  You're an idiot, Sawyer. She made me feel like a little kid at school, answering to an intimidating school teacher which floored me because I was a criminal prosecutor for the city of Boston. I'd run across some of the most imposing people that walked this earth but I'd never had a reaction like this to anyone.

  She turned to face Danny once more, asking him a question but it was as if she spoke too slowly for me to catch on, I was so enthralled. Her hair blew in my face and my head swarmed as I breathed in her intoxicating scent.

  "What happened?" she asked, snapping her fingers in my face, searching her bag for what I assumed was a pen. She pulled one out and clicked the end, the sound reverberating in the air as if in slow motion.

  Before I could stop myself, the words came spilling out of me of their own volition. It was as if even words bent prostrate before this incredible woman and I couldn't stop until I'd told her everything, down to how many breaths I'd taken before she'd arrived, it seemed. She buried her eyes into her notebook, feverishly writing everything I was revealing to her. As I approached the end, having nothing more to say, I panicked, desperately needing to tell her more. This woman asked me for information and my body voluntarily willed itself to continue talking, to continue speaking until she commanded me to stop.

  Then, she brought her eyes to mine for the first time since she'd arrived.

  Our gazes collided in a spectacular explosion, wind lashed through my ears, tunneling out all other sound. Silence whipped around us, cocooning us together like we were the last two people on God's green earth.

  And it hit us like an atom bomb.

  My breath hitched in my throat and I felt an inexplicable need to place her hands in mine, to cull her body into mine, to press her front with mine and protect her from the world. Hers to mine.

  A sudden, frantic urge overtook me and I would have given every possession I owned, every cent in my custody to hear her whisper my name in that same instant. I expected the only relief I could possibly feel from the ache forming in my chest would be to crush my lips to that stranger's baffling mouth, a mouth whose lips grew heavy and parted in anticipation, sending a secret thrill through my skin.

  Our breaths sped beneath our chests and I heard a faint pant pass through that velvet mouth, her eyes searched my face, searched for a reason, for the something that could explain her necessity to have the same as I needed to have from her. Her unimaginable blue-grey stare made my heart beat so boldly that my body shook, afraid she'd perceive its deafening sounds. It beat this stranger's unfamiliar name with such intensity, I could do nothing more than to succumb to her unconscious summons.

  My hands slowly lifted to touch her face.

  "You've asked your questions. Now get." Danny's voice interrupted like a sonic boom, breaking us from our trance.

  I thanked God I wasn't the only one to act disoriented. We both stumbled over ourselves, examining the world around us as if we were witnessing it for the first time.

  "I've...I've got to go," she whispered to me.

  "Wait!" I say, reaching for her hand again but she shrugs from it before I can grab her. "Aren't you even curious as to who I am?"

  A faint curve met the side of her mouth and she narrowed her eyes.

  "Sawyer Tuttle, don't be ridiculous. How could I ever forget you?"

  And with that, she bolted for her Scout and sped from the scene, leaving me slack mouthed and dumbfounded as to what just happened between the two of us.

  I turned to the Sheriff, "Who was that, Danny?"

  Danny eyed me strangely, furrowing his brow. "Hit your head boy? That's my niece. That's Maddy. Didn't you recognize her?" He went back to removing plastic markers from a plastic kit. "She's a reporter now for The Bramwell Tribune, graduated last year in fact. Everyone's mighty proud of her." His chest puffed a little.

  I brought both hands to my temples, rubbing furiously. That was Madeleine Gray? Madeleine. Gray. My hands began to shake and I fisted them into my hair to steady them. Why? Why her?

  I knew, despite it being so late and my awful luck with his family, that Elliott Gray would be receiving a call from me that very night.

  "Ready?" Carson asks.

  "More than," I say.

  At home, I rummage through my old room, skirting packed boxes from my apartment back in Boston, searching for the one box that held Elliott's cell phone number, praying it was still good. The number was in an old address book, tattered and torn but priceless all the same because this book held answers. I followed the wood floor hallway and sat at my father's desk in his old office. Glancing over his shelves, I noticed dust collecting over his beloved novels. Need to ask Genie to dust these. I was stalling. My cell phone lay cold in my hand. It's just Elliott, Sawyer.