Time Piece

By P. V. LeForge and Anne Petty

One rain-lashing night, Melanie Truslow's father--a former French officer in Vietnam--fell off the McClenny Pier near his North Florida home and was drowned. Now his large house, and its ghosts, are hers. As she begins to settle into her new surroundings, she tries to understand the accident of his death and to reconstruct the life of the man who had left her mother before Melanie was born. Her only clues lie within the house's filthy basement--a room with blacked-out windows, chicken bones and cigarette butts strewn on the floor, and stacks of homemade pornographic videos narrated by a scarred and cynical French journalist.

This is the third and final book in the loosely related North Florida Trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Bay Books
• Release date: Jun 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310844409

P. V. LeForge

P. V. LeForge lives on a horse farm in north Florida with his wife Sara Warner, who is a dressage rider and trainer. Their stable includes Fabayoso, who was Southeastern Regional Stallion Champion, and his colt Freester, who was Reserve Champion USDF Horse of the Year in 2011.LeForge is also an e-book formatter who can be found on Mark's List. He enjoys formatting Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Drama.LeForge's other books of poetry and fiction can be obtained in ebook and paperback at most on-line book outlets. In addition to writing and doing farm chores, he enjoys songwriting and target archery.

Book preview

Time Piece

(Book 3 of the North Florida Trilogy)

By P. V. LeForge and Anne Petty

Copyright © 2014 P. V. LeForge and Anne Petty

Cover design by Black Bay Books

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

There is no note on any instrument that has not been played before. That said, Time Piece is sheer fiction. Any resemblance of names, places, characters, and incidents to actual persons, places, and events results from the relationship which the world must always bear to works of this kind.

Black Bay Books

Books for people who like to think about what they read.

By P. V. LeForge and Anne Petty

The North Florida Trilogy

Hell and High Water (2011)

Museum Piece (2013)

Time Piece (2014)

Chapter 1

Melanie’s Diary, September 1, 1988

There are ghosts in this house, I think.

Wandering through these still-unfamiliar rooms, I catch the fluttering shadows of bats in the rafters, hear the slinky scratching of rats in the wainscoting, and feel the patterns of wear on the carpets made by generations of footsteps.

It’s alive somehow, this sprawling wooden haunt, and each room has a separate personality. I’ve started to give them names. There’s Queen’s Way, a roomy bedroom with Victorian-style curtains billowy with dust and a double bed still sturdy and comfortable under a four-poster canopy.

Next to that is a room I call Paris. It is tastefully packed with French Empire furniture from the time of Napoleon. Frank—my father—had proudly showed me the room with its green ormolu sofa, mahogany roll-top desk, and other lacquered and gilded antiques he had purchased over the years. He told me he would sometimes shut himself up in the room for hours just to remember his birthplace, his French heritage.

The Planning Room has a ton of war memorabilia, model planes, and old papers, most of them in French.

There’s also the Room of Reflection, with its oval waterbed surrounded by mirrors and facing a giant TV screen. It is so plush and spacious and unlike anything I have slept in before that I have decided to make it my own bedroom, at least for a while.

And then there’s The Crypt.

I don’t know why I call it The Crypt, since someone has obviously been living in it recently. It may once have been a maid’s room or a pantry, set off as it is from the kitchen down a short flight of steps. But someone has sprayed the walls with black paint, removed whatever furniture was there before, and replaced it with a thin futon and frayed yellow blanket. A number of cardboard boxes are stacked neatly along one wall. I do not know what is in them yet, nor who they belong to, but labels stuck haphazardly across their faces proclaim that they were shipped from Hong Kong. The shipping labels themselves, written in a firm hand, are addressed to my father, François Thibedeau, at this address, yet he doesn’t seem to have opened them: they are all sealed tightly with clear packing tape. There is no return address on the labels, only the name of a business: Le Temps de rever, s.a. Dreamtime Inc. There is no clue as to what the boxes contain and I haven’t wanted to be in the room long enough to open them.

The only window of The Crypt looks out at ground level because of the room’s cellarlike location, but it, too, is painted over in black. The bulb in the ceiling is red and casts only dim illumination into the gloomy and frightening hole. Chicken bones are strewn into corners and, next to the futon, unfiltered cigarettes have been crushed out on the hardwood floor. On the rumpled blanket a filthy magazine lies open to the world.

In the far corner of the room is another door. When I opened it and peeked in I was hit with a foul smell that brought back a memory from over twenty years before. I was at a playground in a strange part of Boston where my mother had left me while visiting an old friend. At one point during the day I sought out a bathroom in a disused pavilion, only to find a dark room with a cracked toilet and filth, bugs, and tissue paper strewn about the floor. Both the sink and toilet were brown and crusty. As a girl I fled from that stinky room, and I confess that I also fled from my own downstairs bathroom in revulsion nearly two weeks ago and haven’t had the gumption to venture there again. Nor have I been in The Crypt since. What I did do was call in a locksmith and had her change every lock in the house. It’s my house now, I inherited it fair and square and won’t have a neo-Nazi or punk rocker or whoever encroach on it—even if I have to install an alarm system and vicious Dobermans to protect it. And me.

My father lived here for thirty years. In many ways he still lives here. But I can’t believe The Crypt is his doing. Did he rent it out to someone? Did vagrants find their way in somehow? The problem is, I find it hard to believe that it’s anyone’s doing.

There’s one thing for sure; The Crypt has to go. It smells like death and I’ve had too much of that already.

Chapter 2

Melanie’s alarm clock—the one forcing her awake at this inhuman predawn hour—was actually an hourglass set over a finely tuned calibrating mechanism. The weight of the sand falling through its aperture triggered the device, which responded by clicking on a radio tuned to the morning news broadcast. The announcer, much too loudly, was talking about how a young boy, twelve, had contracted the AIDS virus from unsterilized tattoo needles.

Melanie groaned. When did twelve year olds start getting tattoos? She reached out and turned off the radio, then groped her way into the bathroom to shower. At least it was Friday; tomorrow she could sleep late and relax.

Or maybe not. Although her father had maintained most of the large house in a kind of muted elegance, the bathroom that led off from her bedroom needed some extensive remodeling. It was a roomy bathroom, with a tub, shower, and vanity, but it needed a more modern toilet, new lighting for the vanity, and new wallpaper more suited to her taste. As she stepped into the shower, she felt a fine spray of mist where the shower head was not sealed properly. That would have to be replaced, too.

As few minutes later Melanie turned off the shower and stepped out onto the mat. She toweled off quickly and blow-dried her hair, the new Electra-Pro 2000 looking out of place in the 70-year-old room. So did she, for that matter. She combed out her hair into a long shining blond mass, then pulled it together in the back and clipped on a barrette, making the hair fan out evenly below.

Back in her bedroom she selected an appropriate teacherly outfit and put it on in front of the full-length mirrors that lined almost every square inch of wall. They’d take some getting used to, those mirrors. But Melanie had always enjoyed dressing properly and well and the mirrors made this easier. She was still in only the second week of her new job and wanted to make a good impression on the students and teachers. After checking her outfit for rumples and stains, she quickly made the bed, put on her Movado museum watch, and left the house, locking the door securely behind her.

Her father had left her a fairly new Cadillac Seville, appropriate for a businessman perhaps, but too ostentatious by half for an elementary school media specialist. It was only a short distance to the school and she preferred to leave the car at home. Walking in the fresh morning air affected her much like a cup of coffee did other people. It was invigorating and helped work out the knots from playing too much tennis the day before. But she also liked walking by the harbor with its boats bobbing against the docks and bustling fisherfolk—many of them Vietnamese refugees—sorting their catches and gathering their nets into secret folds. Their industriousness was catching.

Just around the corner stood the school where she worked—her third job in three years, not a very impressive employment record. It was her third city in three years, for that matter, but maybe—

Excuse me. A hand on her shoulder jerked Melanie out of her thoughts. She turned quickly to see an attractive young Asian woman dressed, she noticed with chagrin, more smartly than herself.

The woman backed off a bit. I’m sorry. Her voice was respectful but not timid. I did not mean to startle you.

No, it’s okay. I just didn’t see you come up.

The woman pointed behind her and smiled widely, showing perfect teeth. My house is there, on that block. I just came out. You work at the school, yes?

Yes; how do you know?

I do, too. I saw you there yesterday. Can we walk together?

Sure.

Melanie headed toward the school, the shorter woman having to walk faster to keep up.

You are Mrs. Truslow, I think? said her companion.

Ms, she said.

The woman bowed slightly and raised one hand. Of course, she replied. We still have twenty minutes before the bell. If you want to come with me to the teacher’s lounge I can acquaint you with myself more properly.

All right.

In front of them, the school loomed huge and gray—a monument of unpainted concrete and fieldstone. Celestine Fahey Elementary School was named after the first woman in Ft. Walton Beach to attain principalship, back in the late fifties. That seemed odd now, when almost half the principals in Okaloosa County were women, but thirty years was a long time.

The Asian woman opened the front door for Melanie, then stepped in behind her.

Melanie had been lucky that Fahey had a job opening before any of the other schools in the area because of the short distance from her house. Still, it was a one-building stone monstrosity looking more like a primitive Spanish fort than a center of learning, musty smelling with thick wooden doors and dust etched into the very walls. As they walked down the hallway, their footsteps sounded hollow and forbidding. A simple squeal of laughter from one of the earlybirds resounded in the hallway like a banshee in a cave.

It was very similar to the primary school Melanie had attended in Boston—a stone-buttressed girls’ school where the cold seeped into your bones—and, like that school, the main office was located just inside the entrance to the building. The two women passed its windowless door and continued down to the end of the hall. They turned left and came to a section of the building Melanie had only seen once, an older and grungier section Her companion opened the last door in the corridor. She waited until Melanie went inside before she followed.

The teacher’s lounge was simply a classroom without desks. A row of armchairs was placed on one side, coffee and snack machines on the other. Three round tables made a halfhearted and asymmetrical attempt to fill in the space between. A woman slouched over her coffee cup at one of the tables while, by the window, two men sat reading newspapers. Melanie’s companion headed straight for the coffee machine. Only when she had a paper cup full of black java and a lit cigarette between her lips, did she turn back to Melanie. My name is Jen Nga, she said casually, sitting down and dragging a loaded ashtray to her side of the table.

Like the tennis player? Melanie asked automatically. Hu Na? She sat down at the nearest table.

I don’t know her, said Jen."

She’s one of the first Chinese to play on the women’s tour, explained Melanie.

I am Vietnamese.

Oh, right. The N-g-a spelling. Is that a common name in Vietnam? I know someone else named Nga.

Your lawyer, yes.

Right. My lawyer. But how—

Before she could finish the question, Jen Nga continued, He is my husband.

Oho. Now it began to sink in.

He has told me a little about you and your inheritance.

I’m sorry if I sound suspicious, Melanie said. It’s just that things have been happening a bit fast for me ever since I decided to move here.

Things?

My father died and my mother had a stroke all in the same week. Plus I got this new job and inherited a huge house that I’m not sure I belong in at all.

Jen considered her, her thoughts hidden, then said, Is there a problem with the will? she asked.

Melanie laughed. No, I don’t mean it isn’t mine by rights, I just think that it and I have different vibes.

Vibes?

Melanie thought for a few seconds. Okay, it’s like . . . think of all the kids who’ve attended this school and imagine that each one left some piece of their souls here. Picture them rocketing around the halls right now, asking questions, squalling, pulling each other’s pigtails. If we were just a bit more perceptive than we are, we could see them. Jen Nga gave her a curious look, but didn’t interrupt. I feel the same about my house. There are ghosts wandering about there and I’m not sure I want to meet them.

Did your father live alone: she asked

As far as I know.

It would be his ghost, then.

Melanie nodded. His especially.

You were close? Jen asked.

Not really. My mother and father divorced just before I was born. I never met the man until I was in college. Over the last few years I’ve made a few trips over here to visit him, but I can’t really say I knew him well. I wanted to, though. I liked him. It’s funny; I was planning to move here anyway to get to get closer him. I’d already been hired to work here when he died. Melanie bit her lip, her mind’s eye re-reading the newspaper headline for the hundredth time:

Prominent Businessman Drowns

Off McClenny Pier

It was an unfortunate accident, said Jen Nga.

Yes, replied Melanie. But why would he have been fishing at night? And in a rainstorm?

Stranger things happen.

I guess. Melanie noticed that several other teachers had come into the lounge. Some were staring at her.

Jen Nga blew smoke toward the ceiling and changed the subject. And how is your mother?

Umm. Not good. She has a kind of virus…a brain fever that wiped out most of her short-term memory. I had to bring her here from Boston and put her in a nursing home. Your husband helped me get her power of attorney, so now I handling her affairs as well as my own. Melanie eyed Jen’s half-smoked cigarette with longing. But she had not smoked since moving to Ft. Walton and gulped down the urge to bum.

Let me know if I can help.

Thanks, I will. And thanks for stopping me. You’re about the first person I’ve felt like talking to since I moved here.

School just started and you’re new. We will all need your help for our classes before too many more days have gone by. Jen tapped ash into the ashtray. What made you decide to become a media specialist?

I don’t know. I was married at the time. Maybe I felt that if I trusted my husband to bring home the bacon we’d be eating rinds. Jen snickered, but her face smoothed over immediately. FSU has one of the only graduate library school programs in the Southeast and I heard that librarians could get good-paying jobs. And it’s true.

That was not your original field, then?

No. I got my BA in French and Philosophy.

A double major?

Both of them pretty useless, Melanie demurred.

Having a talent in a subject like philosophy gives you knowledge you can use everyday.

Not everybody agrees. Melanie’s ex-husband, in fact, had never seen any use to it.

I think that most people from the East would, Jen responded. But I’m interested; do you actually sit home at night and read books on philosophy?

Melanie laughed. Some people read fat romances, I read Kant and Heidegger.

Jen Nga nodded approvingly. "Et votre francais? Vous avez tout oublie?"

"Je pense que j’arrive encore a me debrouiller."

You and I will get along well, then, said Jen, smiling.

I forgot that Vietnamese people spoke French, said Melanie.

Not all of us. In fact, once the French left our country in the middle fifties most people started learning English instead. I learned it from my mother.

Me, too. Her family used to have a house in Paris and I spent a lot of time there when I was growing up. Is your mother here in this country?

Yes. So is my father. We all got out together a few months before the fall of Saigon. I was only ten years old.

You must have been terrified. Melanie looked at Jen with new respect. And what about your husband’s parents? Did they come over with him as well?

Bao never knew who his father was and his mother died in Saigon during the war.

I guess a lot of civilians got killed in bombing raids and things like that, said Melanie. She didn’t want to pry, but she’d never met anyone who’d been directly harmed by the war—it was a lump of morbid curiosity she couldn’t suppress.

It is said that she was tortured to death by the police, said Jen Nga quietly.

I— Melanie didn’t know what to say. The sudden clanging of the bell saved her from having to try. I’d better get over to the media center, she said. Thanks for the talk.

See you soon, said Jen Nga.

Melanie wound her way through the corridors and around clusters of noisy and scrambling children who were disappearing like billiard balls through open doors on both sides of the hall. She unlocked the door to the Media Center and went inside.

The room was not huge but its space was used efficiently. Bookcases or magazine racks lined each wall, leaving space for only two doorways—the one through which Melanie had entered and one to her right which led to her office and a storage room. A desk stood outside the door to her office and to its right was a glass case containing everything Melanie could find on reptiles of the Southeast. She contemplated it fondly—her first display of the school year. Four library tables were crowded together in the center of the room. Surrounding them was a ring of desks, each equipped with a computer console and keyboard. A similar computer stood on Melanie’s desk, but hers had a printer as well.

Melanie locked her purse in her desk drawer and sat down. This was the end of her second week at Fahey, and each day had been a challenge. For one thing, she had never worked with elementary school students before. Their needs were much different from the college students and professional researchers she dealt with when she had worked in a university library. Her last job—in a small public library in Panama City—had been mostly to maintain a reserve list and to call patrons when the latest best seller by Stephen King or Danielle Steele was returned to the library. During her tenure there of less than a year, she had never seen a book by Joseph Conrad, James Fenimore Cooper, or even Dylan Thomas go out the door. And forget about even finding any French philosophy, even by someone as popular as Jean Paul Sartre.

But all thoughts of existentialism vanished when the first few students began filing into the room. Her workday had begun.

The kids kept her busy all day, not only checking books in and out, but giving students short tutorials on how to use the computers. She had to remind herself over and over that her job title had changed from librarian to media specialist. Computers were becoming the new media and the clunky-looking machines were decidedly not her forte. She had worked with a few computer databases in the university library but tracking books had been done by keypunch operators on IBM cards, which were then batched and their information printed out on newspaper-sized printouts that generally weighed more than a small typewriter. Now, everything was being stored on small magnetic disks. Technology had advanced so quickly that Melanie was simply no longer up to speed. The fact that the public library in Panama City used no computers at all had pulled her even further below the curve.

To make up for this, she had studied and she had practiced. She now knew enough to help most elementary school students create document files or log in to video games, but there was still so much more to learn. Students dropped in with no regularity—some at lunch, some were sent by teachers to spend their Study Hall hours, and some just hung out after their last class waiting for their rides home. Still, at the end of the day, she felt bedraggled and frazzled.

When the last student had finally drifted out, she breathed a sigh of relief and set to work tidying up. There were a dozen or so books left on the desks and tables by students and she gathered them up and studied them. Noticing what the kids read was a good way to find out what their interests were. There was a book on fish, a Horn Magazine, a couple of Babysitter Club novels, and an open issue of Sports Illustrated, which must have been brought in by one of the kids and left there—the school didn’t subscribe to it. She glanced through it, looking for tennis news, but much of the issue seemed to be concerned with swimwear. Splashy, neon-colored pages of bodies assaulted her eyes. She was shocked; Adam and Eve in fig leaves were dressed warmly by comparison. She closed it and looked at the cover for the first time. Annual Swimsuit Issue. Where did eleven-year-olds get such things? She heard footsteps in the hall and hastily crammed the magazine into her desk drawer.

She slammed the drawer, barely missing her fingers, and looked up in time to witness the entrance of one of the strangest women she had ever seen. The first impression Melanie had of the woman was that she was all ears and flowers. Indeed, the woman’s ample dress was cut from purple and green orchid-print cloth and nearly reached the floor in a froth of pleats. In addition, she wore a hat bedecked with real flowers—not matching the ones on her dress—and so large that only the woman’s enormous ears prevented it from slipping down and covering her eyes.

Whatcha hidin, Sweetie? The voice Melanie heard sounded like it had passed through the speakers of a boom box rather than someone’s throat. "A few titillatin pages of a computer manual? Ha ha! Or maybe the latest nasty new shipment of floppy disks, hey?"

Something like that… Melanie began, but the woman cut her off with the wave of a hand that had rings on every thick finger.

Hell, the woman sniffed, her voice suddenly more normal, "looked like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue to me."

A student left it on one of the desks, countered Melanie. She had no idea what to make of the woman, but wasn’t about to let the creature’s overbearing manner and bizarre appearance fluster her.

Ha ha! You’re lucky it wasn’t worse, the woman answered, looking around the room