October is my favorite month of the year, with its cooler temperatures and leaf color. And football, soccer, and field hockey games. We live in an area with three Division One colleges! We decided to take a trip to the North Carolina mountains near Boone for a weekend in mid-October to get our leaf-peeping in. Nothing much had been happening in Durham, still warm and green, and I was yearning for leaf color. We missed the peak color by a week but came home having seen some lovely oranges, yellows and some reds at the lower altitudes. Two weeks later – wow! Everything here just popped. The best color in years. Maybe because of the long, long, and very hot summer? Here’s a sampling. But of course with the warm days, we still have flowers on our patio, including one stubborn sunflower! This is a camellia tree – they usually bloom in November. We had two huge trees filled with blossoms at our old house. Hope you got to enjoy some fall color, too! 0 0

I’m in the process of editing my sixth book in my Rhe Brewster Mystery series. My critique group is gnawing on it, and I have an interested beta reader slipping me comments. The title is Death in a Stone Well.  Since the torching of their house in the last book, Death at the Asylum, Rhe and Sam Brewster have purchased an old Victorian wreck that sits on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Naturally there is a stone well in the back yard.  FYI, this is not the cover picture, but just an image to get you interested – hopefully. The first floor renovations are done and they are moved in, including son Jack and a new addition to the family, their two-year-old daughter, Marlee. And of course, Tux, the cat, who somehow survived the burning house. The old house has secrets, and Rhe is convinced there is a ghost. Honestly, how can you not have a resident ghost in such an old house? Rhe and Sam are up to their usual, sniffing out and solving crimes. Rhe goes to investigate why loads of sand are being carried off from the Pequod beach, and together she and Sam get involved with a concrete mixer, faulty construction, and rat bites. Oh, and the hospital has thieves stealing old X-rays. Interested? Stay tuned for an excerpt next month. 2 0

This is the second in the Shallow Draw series of Western romances by the author Mae Claire, who is one of my favorite writers. I eagerly devoured her Hode’s Hill and Point Pleasant series, which are supernatural thrillers, and was anxious to see how she transitioned to a romance set in the 1860s. I was not disappointed. This book tells the story of a thirty-three year old widow named Leah Holt, and a handsome twenty-five year old man, Shey Lafferty, the rakish son of the wealthy local rancher. Leah has come to the town of Shallow Draw to live with her sister and her sister’s husband, who run a hotel, after taking the position of the local school’s new teacher. Shea is well-known for his amorous high-jinx with local women, and Leah meets him by literally falling down a hill into his lap during one of his assignations. The immediate attraction turns out to be quite mutual.  Shey’s father is also in a May-December marriage, where he is much older than his second wife, and he despairs of Shey ever settling down. A chance encounter by Leah with two drifters, who threaten to rape her, brings Shey back into her life to save her. One of the drifters, Monk Sunday, is not in Shallow Draw by chance, having mysterious ties to Shey’s new stepmother and her young son. The author teases the reader with the twists and turns she’s created to illustrate just how. This is an old-fashioned story of good vs really, really awful evil, revenge, mis-matched love, and excitement on the high plains, including brawls, threats, and shooting. The author writes with her usual compelling style – I inhaled the book in one day! Her attention to detail – the colorful scenery, the pace and business of ranch life, the smells, even the feel of the air and the weather – draw the reader right into the story. Best of all are her characters. Both Leah and Shey are drawn with loving strokes, and the families of each are distinctive in their personalities. I especially enjoyed the machinations of Leah’s sister, trying hard to match Leah with the town’s two most eligible bachelors, neither of which Leah, nor I, found at all attractive. Monk Sunday is a truly nefarious character, associated with equally odious side-kicks, and the reader will be longing for his elimination as much as Shey and his father. I leave the reader to discover how the Lafferty Ranch became named the Diamond Jack and how Shey relates to Monk Sunday. I very much enjoyed this read and look forward to reading the first book in this series, as well as the next. Highly recommended! About the author (from Amazon): A member of the International Thriller Writers, Mae Clair is also a founding member and contributor to the award-winning writing blog, Story Empire. She has achieved bestseller status on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with several of her novels chosen as book club selections. Mae writes primarily in the mystery/suspense genre, flavoring her plots with elements of urban legend and folklore. Married to her high school sweetheart, she lives in Pennsylvania and is passionate about cryptozoology, old photographs, a good Maine lobster tail, and cats. Discover more about Mae on her website and blog at MaeClair.net 0 0

Everyone probably has a childhood memory of a friend—or an enemy – that remains with them despite the passage of time. For me, that person was Ann. Ann was what my mother called a wild child and for some reason, she hated me. I only discovered why decades later. Although we both belonged to the Eel River Beach Club and took swimming and diving classes together, we didn’t spend time together outside of school until junior high, when we played sports. Her closest friends were her sisters and friends that lived in an area known as Chiltonville, several miles from where I lived. In junior high, Ann went out of her way to be nasty to me, forcefully bumping into me whenever we met and making snide remarks. “Little Miss Smarty Pants. You think you’re better than me.” The usual kid stuff, to which I never responded because I wasn’t a fighter. But I did wonder why she hated me. Ann loved to challenge authority. One day in middle school, she mashed herself inside her full length locker and had a friend shut the door. The bell rang, and we all went inside our home room – without Ann, of course. The teacher took attendance and noted the absent Ann.             “Ann. Where is Ann?”             “Outside in the hall,” several of us replied.  The teacher went out of the room, ostensibly to look for Ann in the corridor, then came back in, saying, “No she’s not.”             “She’s in her locker.”             Another visit to the hall. “No, she’s not.”             “She’s IN her locker.”             We heard the locker door open, and then, “GO DRECTLY TO THE PRINCIPALS OFFICE.”   That is the Ann I remember.  Ann was especially mean to me on the school bus. She and a cadre of other kids from Chiltonville were the first to be picked up by the bus in the morning. I was one of the last pick-ups and drop-offs on that route. Ann made a habit of moving her friends around in the bus so she could sit next to me on the way home. This allowed her to kick me in the legs and elbow me in the side at will. I took it, and eventually, not getting a response, she would stop. Still, I had bruises and my fuse got shorter. Frenchy Roubidoux drove the Chiltonville bus for all my years in junior and senior high, a man who always wore a newsboy cap and who came up to my shoulder on a good day. He’d fought in World War II – or at least that was the student rumor. Frenchy always had a smile and greeted us by name, and I knew he knew what Ann was doing but figured we would work it out. One day, on the way home, my fuse lit. When Ann kicked me, I hauled off and kicked and pushed her so hard she fell on the floor. Frenchy stopped the bus and walked back to where Ann laid sprawled in the aisle.               “She kicked me!” Anne whined, bringing up some real tears and looking a little surprised.             “And well-deserved,” replied Frenchie. “Do you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing to her?” He pulled her up and marched her to the front of the bus. “Get off. You can walk home.” The bus riders gave an audible gasp, since we were more than two miles from her house. I remember looking back and seeing her standing forlornly by the side of the road. Silence reigned in the bus for the rest of route. We’d never seen Frenchy lose his temper. I quietly thanked him when I got off. Ann never hit or kicked me again, and we played amicably as teammates on the high school field hockey and basketball teams. We even occasionally exchanged words. I found that I admired her wildness, her athletic ability, and I loved listening to her adventures, things I would never, or could never, dare do. I remember being at a slumber party with her and some other friends during our junior year. Sometime after midnight, she exited via a second story window, climbing down an outside trellis, in order to spend the night with her boyfriend. She climbed back in around seven AM. No one said a word. Soon after, her parents sent her away to a boarding school, but apparently she was just as willful there, because she was back for her senior year. My mother told me many years later that Ann had stolen some money when she was at our house for a day when we were both very young, something I didn’t remember at all. Ann’s mother made her come back and apologize, and Mom said that might have been why she hated me. That and the fact her mother held me up as an example of the girl she wanted Ann to be – polite with good grades and little trouble. In other words, a nerd. Too bad for Ann, because I was actually far from perfect. In retrospect, I don’t blame Ann for feeling the way she did, but I sure wish I’d known at the time. Maybe we could have been friends instead of frenemies. Anne developed cancer in her forties, and, after what my classmates said was a brave fight, died. On a whim, I went to see her mother when I was in Plymouth for my fiftieth high school reunion. We had a nice chat about Ann and I asked where she was buried. He mother gestured to the barn where they kept their horses. I drove down and found a stone bench with her name on it. I sat on the bench for a moment, thinking about our troubled relationship, and realized why I had fashioned the main character in my mystery books after her, the feisty, challenging frenemy of my childhood. 0 0

My Mom used to write things down as she remembered them, and this is something I recently found among my papers. The original Memère (according to Mom) was her grandmother, my great-grandmother.) Mom’s mother, my grandmother, became Memère in turn for me and my brother, and now I am Memère (Maymay) to my grandchildren. That name has quite the history! So my great-grandmother wanted some good photos taken of her and Pepère, her husband. He agreed as long as he could have one special one taken just of him. His special photo of him is of a man with his back turned to the camera! The original Memère and Pepère had several children, among them my grandfather (called Peno) and his brother Leon, along with three daughters, Cora, Josephine and Olive. The daughters were of the opinion, probably gotten from their mother that their father was a bum, because he liked his bucket of ‘suds,’ as they called it, when he came home from work. The original Pepère was a wood carver, and he did altars, statues, and communion railings. As such he had to travel and was often away from home for a month, taking two or more days to get home, walking and hitching rides on wagons. For this reason, the whole family (except Pepère) was against liquor – until a time when Pepère was very old, when Leon decided to do what other French Canadian families always did on New Year’s Day: serve alcoholic drinks to visitors. He had Peno buy one bottle each of rye, gin and rum for the celebration. My Mom and her dad, Peno, went to visit the family after Mass on the first of January that year. Others had visited before so Leon apologized because all he had left was half a quart of gin. He fixed them drinks, a water glass half full of gin with a little water and ice cubes. It was so powerful that Peno poured his onto Olive’s plants and Mom poured hers down the bathroom sink. Mom and Peno laughed all the way home because Cora and Josephine had greeted visitors in their pocking chairs and had something to drink with every visitor, mixing very strong drinks that Leon made, willy-nilly. We watched while they rocked their chairs back and forth across the floor. Mom and Peno did not visit them the next day for obvious reasons! I don’t remember Great Aunts Cora, Olive or Josephine very well, but I do remember Great Uncle Leon. He used to come to my grandparents’ house once a week to play pinochle with his brother. He and Peno played in the back room of the house, where I slept when I was there, and I remember them laughing and jabbering away in their French Canadian patois and having a grand old time. 0 0