Deidre Cross

By Vicki Lee Zell

Deidre Cross discovers life outside her home is the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, where uncertainty sometimes leads to suffering. Deidre discovers the truth when secrets kept hidden from her are exposed over the internet. Her father, William, imposes his religous beliefs in order to bring Deidre into the light, out of the dark shadowy world because Robert Farnsworth has stolen Deidre's heart. William believes this young man has soiled Deidre's soul, and it isn't until Deidre discovers the many hidden secrets of her family that these secrets finally set her free. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: vlzbooks
• Release date: May 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201096298

Vicki Lee Zell

Hello Reader, and welcome to my page. I don't know about you, but I love a good mystery. A well told story should take us on a journey packed with excitement page after page and not weigh us down. I like books that dive into the storyline. I want to know what's coming, what's next, not every color of every character's whatever. I try leaving as much as I can to the reader's imagination. Like when you talk to someone on the telephone who you've never met. Their voice alone gets you wondering all about the person. Their hair color, eye color, facial expressions, the way walk. If everytime you talked to someone over the phone and they described themselves to you, you'd never get to the good stuff. That's kind of how my stories go. I am telling you a story to keep you in the dark until the very end, and then surprising you with a WTF kind of attitude. I want to shock you, hold you close, wrap your imagaination to get you to have an imagination. 

Book preview

Every home has its secrets

Unseasonably warm temperatures spread throughout the five surrounding boroughs of Davidson County that year. The year that strange, unfamiliar cold led me to a cold, dark, secret.

It wasn't the cold that woke me, but the annoying chiming of that Grandfather clock in the downstairs hallway at the stroke of midnight which sat me straight in my bed.

Oh, how I hated that monstrosity.

I say this because we didn't need a grand clock. Bessie objected but William insisted, and it was out of character for Bessie because Bessie rarely objected. Bessie was usually off in some corner. What Bessie wanted was unnecessary according to William.

My mother Bessie says when my father William makes up his mind there is no bargaining chip to be had. I try to ignore my parents' arguments whenever possible. Even when Bessie gives me that look how she wants my opinion. Or, as William says, my unwanted opinion.

My room was bitter cold, freezing that night. Times before, when I sensed the cold, I would wake thinking I was dreaming because my room was an average temperature. Only, that night, my room was cold as a meat locker. I could see my actual breath.

Earlier that evening, the three of us sat in the living room. Bessie sat in her cloth-covered yellow rocker while William sat in his high-back brown leather. I lay stretched out on the sofa. I and Bessie watched Little House while William buried himself in the Dorchester Gazette, the local newspaper distributed throughout the five surrounding boroughs.

The temperature in the room had shifted from a muggy warm eighty degrees to what felt like zero degrees.

Why is it so cold in here?! I said, a bit alarmed, and William muttered a questionable agreement behind his damned newspaper, and so I said, again. Why is it so cold in here?

Bessie mumbled a clueless contribution. What's that...sweetheart?

I was about to say the room was cold when I realized the temperature had returned to a tepid degree. Bessie averted her eyes from the TV. She directed her attention to William.

William, is something wrong with the furnace? 

I looked at Bessie wondering about her state of mind because she was way off the mark. It was ten p.m., on the third of July. The temperature outdoors was a balmy degree. Bessie should have asked why the air conditioner wasn’t working. Only, we had no air conditioner because William finds necessary comforts unnecessary. According to William, electronic devices are the devil’s instruments, and the world outside, the Shadowy World, William calls it, is dark and corrupted.

I never understood why my father brought home that RCA vintage television. I suppose because William believes what he believes until it comes to giving in to that forbidden fruit, which in the case of the RCA, that forbidden fruit was to keep Bessie entertained regardless of the conjecture whether it be the devil's handiwork.

Well-Will, did you hear me? Quoted Bessie when she wanted William’s undivided attention.

Of course, William heard her. How could he not, sitting but two feet away? William just simply refused to lower that damned newspaper.

Well-Will? Bessie demanded.

What is it...Bessie?! 

My father called my mother Bessie whenever he wanted my mother to harken any complaint. When he called her Bess, she would head up the stairs to their bedroom. Now please, don't misunderstand. I loved my parents. They are both gone now. Both dead and buried. In either heaven or hell, or they are simply nowhere. No one truly can say after the breath leaves the body where the soul goes, no matter what anyone professes. The most renowned psychics don’t know this. If there even are genuine psychics and not just those who are exceptional at fooling foolish believers.

I thought I knew my parents but discovered I didn't know them at all. I had heard bits-n-pieces of recalled memories, so I blamed my grandparents for my parents’ oddities even though I never knew my grandparents. They died before I was born, or I was too young to remember them. I can recall my Grandmother Dorothy if I fix my memory and concentrate. Mother called her Dot. Father called her Dottie. I picture Dot's prying eyes and dull facial expression as if carved from stone when she hovered over the top of my crib, looking down at me.

I was five when Bessie told me Dot went to heaven. I asked if Dot went there to drive the angels around the clouds because I remember Dot driving mother and me to market. Mother laughed when I said this and told strangers what I had said. They laughed with crinkled noses and pressed smiles behind clenched teeth that frightened me and made me cry, so Mother scooped me in her arms, and everyone laughed louder. Those gaping holes in their faces scared me, so I buried my face in my mother's neck to keep from seeing those gaping holes, but I could not stamp out the gnashing of their teeth.

To this day, I recall that point of passage in Psalms thirty-five sixteen from the Good Book, like godless jesters at a feast, they gnashed at me with their teeth.

While keeping his eyes glued to his damned newspaper, Well-Will told Bessie she needs to stop being so dimwitted because we don't run the furnace in the summer, and this harkened Bessie to that corner where she often would relay when she didn't care to elaborate further.

I announced I was going upstairs to my room because I don't like hearing them argue. Later that night, I awoke to the cold in my room and searched the dark. I sensed a presence in my room. Moonlight slipped from behind a cluster of clouds and filled my room with a spookily glow, and in the far-right corner, there loomed a ghostly shadow. Fumbling for the lamp, I nearly knocked it off my nightstand when I flipped the switch. Whatever I saw, vanished. The apparition frightened me, and I snatched my bedcovers and pulled the covers over the top of my head. William's footsteps sounded in the hall, and I worried William heard the commotion. I was sure that my father could see the lamp's visible glow under the door jamb but was too afraid to turn out the light for fear the shadow would return.

William passed my room and descended the stairwell, so I lowered the bedcovers and sat up in bed until my eyelids grew heavy. Unknowingly, I dozed off because the morning sun streamed through my window when I woke to hear Bessie calling me to come downstairs. I heard the Grandfather clock in the downstairs hallway announce it was half-past something. It was Saturday. This meant I didn't have to jump out of bed for school, so I stayed tucked under my bedcovers until I heard Bessie holler up the stairs.

Deidre Cross, your pancakes are getting cold.

Coming, Mother.

I didn’t want to get out of bed and was not hungry for breakfast, and most certainly did not want any of my mother's pancakes. But if Bessie prepared breakfast, so be it. William says I should be grateful Bessie goes out of her way to cook me a meal. I was grateful. Just not hungry. I ate the breakfast, knowing I could never argue against it. After two pancakes, two sausages, a glass of orange juice, and a glass of milk, I went back to my room, stuffed to the gills, and dressed for the day. There was no mention of the cold the night before. Nothing was discussed at the table because William says quiet obedience is for the Lord's sake.

At seven a.m. every Monday through Friday, William heads to work while I head to school. This leaves Bessie eight to ten hours to herself. How Bessie filled those hours those days, I assumed all mothers serve daily household chores then watch soap operas in the afternoons.

Mother never that I remember missed a beat. Every day after school, I would find her standing over a hot stove. We ate at precisely six every night, seven days a week. Five of those seven days, one-half hour after William arrives from working as a Sales Rep for a company dealing with, of all things, air conditioners. Bessie says if William does not see the need, no reasoning will persuade William.

While I am in the air conditioning school, William works in an air-conditioned office, and Bessie’s home with only the opened windows to beat the summer heat. Some days, though rare and few are those days, a gentle breeze blows throughout the house. William must have realized how exhausting it was for Bessie to stand over that stove because he placed a fan on the refrigerator. Still, the fan merely swirled the sweltering heat from the oven, giving no one any comfort.

I turned the pivotal age in a young girl's life that year and that year I met Robbie Farnsworth. It was that year that I rebelled.

CHAPTER 2

William drove Mother to Harrisons Grocery on Saturdays. I tagged along because I was not allowed to stay at home alone. William never went inside the store but waited in the car while Mother did the shopping and while I thumbed through all the magazines. William would not allow magazines in the house. He said they were empty trash, so my mother, in a pretense, looked the other way, keeping our little secret.

My favorite of all the magazines was Sweet Sixteen. There were articles of girls my age dressed in the latest fashions. I would imagine myself dressing in these clothes that I could never dress in, but I still think about it because no one can help thinking what they think. William could not control this one thing though he believed he did; Mother said to let him believe what he will.

At school, I sat with two girls who had introduced themselves to me one day at lunch. But unfortunately, I could never invite either of them to my house because William does not allow those from the shadowy world into our world.

These girls often talked about their parents, which made my parents seem alien. Some of what they said made me blush. William's disapproval of these girls spending eternity in hellfire made me wonder what William believes isn't true.

So, this was my life, and I suppose you could say I was programmed, but aren't we all at some level?

William told me I was on the road to following in Bessie's footsteps, but I found this hard to believe knowing my mother. But, then again, what do we know about anyone, including our parents?

Candice