Gayle’s Tales

By Trish Hubschman

Gayle’s Tales is a collection of Tracy Gayle mystery short stories.

Everyone’s favorite couple, Tracy and Danny, are still going strong, romantically and professionally, rocking and rolling and solving crimes.

Tracy has to locate missing persons who vanished decades earlier.

She gets tangled in murder investigations she hadn’t anticipated.

She digs into a coal mining town that’s been uninhabited for 40 years and discovers secrets and skeletons.

In the end, she brings long–lost family members and friends back into each other’s arms and lives.

Through all this, she and Danny are planning their wedding extravaganza at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

Tracy narrates her own adventures in these tales, as she does in the books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trish Hubschman
• Release date: Dec 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005890278

Book preview

The Tracy Gayle Mysteries

Tidal Wave

Stiff Competition

Ratings Game

Uneasy Tides

Gayle’s Tales

Synopsis of Gayle’s Tales

Gayle’s Tales is a collection of Tracy Gayle mystery short stories.

Everyone’s favorite couple, Tracy and Danny, are still going strong, romantically and professionally, rocking and rolling and solving crimes.

Tracy has to locate missing persons who vanished decades earlier.

She gets tangled in murder investigations she hadn’t anticipated.

She digs into a coal mining town that’s been uninhabited for 40 years and discovers secrets and skeletons.

In the end, she brings long–lost family members and friends back into each other’s arms and lives.

Through all this, she and Danny are planning their wedding extravaganza at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

Tracy narrates her own adventures in these tales, as she does in the books.

Dedication

As always, to my husband, Kevin; my mom, Ginny; and my dog, Henry

Special thanks to my friend Patty Fletcher for posting some of these stories on her blog. Her website is https://pattysworlds.com

Special thanks to my friend Scott M. Stoffel for publishing my work in his e–zine. He’s S. M. Stoffel on Amazon.

Introduction

Those of you who have read my previous Tracy Gayle books already know the characters and probably love them as much as I do—except for the bad guys. For those who didn’t read the books and don’t know the characters, let me introduce them.

My hero is Danny Tide. He’s the leader of the popular rock band Tidalwave. There are five members in the band: Ricky Trapp on bass; Tony Miller on drums; Jim Crown on guitar; and the most recent addition, Mike Carson on keyboards. Danny also plays guitar and does lead vocals. His home base is Bel Air, California.

Tracy Gayle is my private eye. She has a two–bedroom ranch house on the North Shore of Long Island, New York. She runs a one–woman detective agency. The only other employee is her secretary, Lois. Tracy’s a pro at finding missing persons, dead or alive.

Her closest friend, associate, confidant, whatever you want to call him, is Doug Johnson. He’s a homicide detective with the New York Police Department. He’s divorced and has a daughter, Kim.

There are many more characters in the books and the short stories in this book, but these three are the most important ones.

How did Danny and Tracy meet?

Tidalwave was on summer tour. They put on a show at Jones Beach on Long Island. There was a break of a few days before they had to be at their next stop in Philadelphia, so they decided to enjoy the sun, surf, and sand on Long Island’s South Shore.

While Danny and his then–girlfriend, Laura Wells, were hanging out on the beach, Tidalwave’s tour bus burst into flames. Police detective Doug Johnson, who just happened to be in the area, was on the scene. Since the police couldn’t do much except ask around if anyone might have seen the arsonist, Johnson recommended his friend, private eye Tracy Gayle, to Danny, to have her go on tour with the band and do some undercover sleuthing. Danny was for the idea and hired her.

They started out as boss and employee, but their friendship grew. The chemistry between them was perfect. It happened all by itself.

They became the best of friends and more.

How and when were these two characters created?

Ironically, Danny and Tracy came about at different times and for different projects.

Danny came first. Let me explain.

In 1997, my husband took me to Radio City Music Hall in New York City to see the rock band Styx. It was their reunion concert. We had eighth–row orchestra seats. I was totally mesmerized as I watched these guys sing, play instruments, and move around on stage. It had been 14 years since they’d played together, and everything came together perfectly. Plus, I fell in love with the lead guitarist/singer, Tommy Shaw. He was a good–looking man, with muscular arms and a great voice. I asked my husband a lot of music–related questions. A story began forming in my head.

Three days later, we saw the same band perform the same show at Jones Beach on Long Island. I was itching by then to sit down and create a story. And I did. Danny Tide was born. He was a good–looking, multi–talented musician. I starred him in two novel–length romances, A Song for Love and A Song to Remember. I even wrote a song of my own for the second book.

I had just joined a writers’ group, Long Island Romance Writers. A Song for Love was the first book I presented to them. That was as far as this work of fiction went. I ended up tossing Danny and those two manuscripts in a drawer and pretty much forgetting about him for years.

Tracy Gayle came into being around 2010. I had been writing mystery short stories and enjoying it. In those stories, the cops usually did the crime solving, or a person involved in the story itself did. I wanted my own private investigator. I was a big fan of Sue Grafton’s alphabet detective series.

Then I heard a shocking but interesting story in the news. A woman and her husband were in a parking lot, and somebody shot and killed her husband right in front of her. When the police investigated, they discovered that the husband himself was a bad guy. He was suspected of embezzling two million dollars from his company with his partner. The stolen money had vanished. The partner didn’t have it and suspected that the woman’s husband had double–crossed him and pocketed the loot himself.

I couldn’t touch the murder end of the story. That was for the police. But I wanted to know what had happened to the two million bucks. Enter private eye Tracy Gayle. She’s a female Dick Tracy. She unearthed the missing money and solved a bunch of other cases.

The short stories were rolling into each other. I was having a ball.

In 2012, during a major hurricane on Long Island, Superstorm Sandy, I sat at my computer and wrote a totally different type of Tracy story. It was called none other than Hurricane. In this one, I introduced homicide detective Doug Johnson; his daughter, Kim; his ex–wife, Linda; and her partner, Janet. Still no Danny with Tracy yet.

When did I finally bring the two of them together?

In 2014, my friend Carol and I saw Styx at the Jones Beach Theater. This was in late June. A few days later, they were in Philadelphia, and that’s when the band’s tour bus burst into flames. No one was hurt, and there was no damage to the equipment. The band made a nice donation to the Philadelphia Fire Department for their speedy response.

But what had actually happened? I was curious. I decided to do some internet research into the matter, but I came up with no cause of the fire or the arsonist. So, enter Tracy Gayle, private eye, on the scene. I was going to solve this one on my own—in fiction, at least.

I was churning out Tracy and Danny stories and having so much fun. I didn’t want to reach the end of a story, then have to say goodbye to them. That’s why each story rolled into another. I fell in love with my characters. Tracy and Danny are the perfect team. The rapport between them was incredible from day one. And it was entirely natural.

I did something different with my private eye series, and I’m proud of it. This is not a groupie thing. Musicians are people, too.

Technically, the short stories here come after my fourth book, Uneasy Tides. The reason for this is that all series evolve as time passes and people get older, retire, etc. Also, characters that are in my books may appear in these short stories. One example is Danny’s second wife, talk–show hostess Blair Nelson. My third book, Ratings Game, involved Blair. Danny’s mother, Monica Tide, is in a few of the short stories. She’s a spunky 80–odd–year–old gal. She was introduced in the fourth book.

I’ll end this introduction here, saying that I hope you enjoy reading these Tracy and Danny shorts as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Is That Really Her?

Did this lady ask Ms. Jones if she was her long–lost daughter, Debbie Lynn? I asked. That seemed to be the next logical question.

Johnson and I were on the phone. He had called to fill me in on the cold missing persons case he was helping a buddy at the station on. Johnson was a homicide cop with NYPD. He was out on medical leave pending retirement. At the moment, I was sitting in a suite at the Sheridan Hotel in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

My fiancé, rock musician Danny Tide, was still asleep in the bedroom. Thinking of my beloved, I glanced over my shoulder toward the closed bedroom door. All was quiet. His band, Tidalwave, had a show that night, and the King could get a few more hours of sleep before he had to rise and begin prepping for it.

I spoke to her on the phone, and yep, I did ask her that, Johnson replied. Her response was negative. Said she didn’t know how to approach Ms. Jones. Twenty years is a long time, and a lot has happened in those two decades.

I rolled my eyes. He could say that again.

As the story went, Debbie Lynn ran away from home at sixteen. She got into drugs and prostitution. She was in and out of jail for fifteen years. Shortly before the birth of her child, she decided to turn her life around, and then she suffered a serious vision loss.

The other woman in the story, Ms. Tiffany Jones, was a New York Times bestselling author thanks to her memoir, Sad Eyes Turned Bright.

Why didn’t Mrs. Nabors look for Debbie Lynn twenty years ago? I asked.

Said she did. Police couldn’t find a trace of one sixteen–year–old runaway on the streets out of hundreds of them out there.

That made sense, but I wasn’t giving up yet. And she wants you to make the introductions after all this time? My tone was cynical.

Something like that, but only after I find out for certain if Ms. Jones is our Debbie Lynn.

Do you think she’ll tell you if she is?

We continued tossing it around for a few minutes. Then I disconnected the call and put my phone on the sofa beside me.

That’s when I heard it. I swung my head around. My tall, blond, beautiful knight in shining armor was in the bedroom doorway. I didn’t know you were standing there, Tide! I felt kind of guilty. Had I disturbed his sleep?

Danny came over and sat on the sofa beside me. He picked up my hand and brought it to his lips. You know, babe, he said in a low voice, you looked so happy just then, when you were in your Sam Spade mode. I haven’t seen you that exhilarated in a long time.

Now I really felt guilty.

The next morning, I sat in the back of a Lincoln Town Car, heading east