Maybe it’s the darkness of the day, the brown leaves dripping with rain, or Halloween around the corner. Whatever, it conjures stories of visitors from beyond the veil. So, I offer a short-short-short-really short story for your October enjoyment.

No one had used the back parlor of Countryman House since the official government letter arrived twelve years earlier notifying Edith Countryman of her husband’s death at Chickamauga. The letter remained on the small table before the settee, held in place by a crystal vase of long wilted daisies.

As Cora Countryman entered the room, sunlight glissaded through two six-over-six windows, their red brocade drapes tied back to save the cloth, the open sashes allowing the soft clucks of chickens to invade the still of the room. Shelves of books lined the interior wall, some behind glass. When a girl, Cora sat at the carved mahogany reading table by the windows. Her feet dangling off the chair, her tongue between her lips, she drew pictures of sailboats, strange pyramids, and darkly clothed men from stories. Of course, that was when her father lived, before his loss forced her mother to take in boarders.

Twelve years seemed ample time to mourn, especially with her mother as gone as her father, though not as dead, well, not dead at all if the rumors that Edith was gambling on the Mississippi riverboats were true. Cora leaned over, touching the letter’s brittle paper. As she did, the room shook under the thunder of hooves so real she pivoted to face them, horses leaped over a stonewall onto pikes, men shouted as others fell, screamed, lay motionless. She removed her hand from the paper, the room ceased shaking, all before her vanishing.

Cora sat on the settee, staring into the marble fireplace with its walnut mantle, her right hand spread across her chest, her breathing rapid. She lowered her hand to her side, afraid to touch the vase of dead daisies, lecturing herself on her ridiculousness.

Once convinced, she wrapped her fingers around the vase, a withered white petal fell from a long dead stem, floating to the ancient letter. Laughter erupted and swirled around the room. A young woman, a daisy chain wreathing her brow, threw her arms out, twirling until she bobbled into the arms of a dark-haired youth of near her age. They lay together in the tall grass; he brushed a single daisy petal across her lips, until the marching of heavy footfalls brought them to their elbows.

Cora admonished herself, she was a modern woman, this was fantasy, or wishfulness. She lifted the yellowed paper between two fingers, it tore along a long-rotted crease.

“He is not dead, he is not,” a man in a blood-spattered coat insisted, his hands at the wrist of the body set before him. “Take him elsewhere, he belongs with the living.”

A soldier, his blue uniform filthy, positioned the dead man’s arms on his chest and with another lifted the stretcher. The two ducked out the tent flaps into cannon smoke, bullets smacking into trees and through tenting. They dropped the stretcher and ran for cover before men in gray on wild-eyed horses breaching the position.

Cora’s father lay before her, blood coursing from his wounds. A smile eked across his handsome face, a sly one. He opened one eye.

The government letter of notification in Edith Countryman’s right hand, she sank to the settee, placing the letter on the table. When a breeze ruffled the paper’s edges, she situated a vase of daisies on it. “He is not dead, I have seen him, I have seen his smile.”

The vase and letter remained there, twelve years, her mother forbidding all to use the handsome room. Determined to end the nonsense, Cora took the cut crystal vase of dead flowers in one hand and the yellowed notification in the other to the paned-glass section of the bookcase. The moment she set the items on a shelf, it began to vibrate and the glass panes to shimmy. She slammed the rattling doors closed, and holding them tight with her left palm, she locked the haunted souls inside. The key tight in her fist, she leaned, her back against the shelves. A wind howled down the fireplace flue and across the floor, swirling ashes over and about the table.

Her eyes on the fluttering ashes, Cora took a deep, freeing breath. There were eggs to collect.

Cora’s adventures begin in Unbecoming a Lady, available at https://www.amazon.com/Unbecoming-Lady-D-Z-Church-ebook/dp/B0BTKBSP1B. A Confluence of Enemies, the second book in the Wanee Mystery series, is available January 15, 2024.

Mom once told me she had been blessed with two creative children. At the time, I took it to mean that she thought my brother and I were underemployed.

He’s a musician. I’m a writer. He was also a teacher for many years. I knew from an early age that I wanted to write. So I spent my working life in a variety of jobs, the last being an administrative position at the University of California. It was all in aid of paying the bills in order to support my avocation. I wanted the kind of job I didn’t have to take home with me.

My brother had the same desire to make music. He got his first guitar when he was a teenager. With two friends, he played rock ’n roll. They practiced in the basement after school. Was it my imagination, or did the house shake? Maybe that was the windows vibrating?

They were certainly loud. I once asked Mom if the noise bothered her. She said, “At least I know where your brother is.” True enough.

Me, I was the kid who always had her nose in a book. So, it seemed natural to write one. I wrote what I called a book in the sixth grade. It was more like a short story, a very short story. And I illustrated it, too. It was a mystery, natch.

My brother kept playing music over the years, in local bands in the town where he lived, doing gigs on weekends and teaching full-time. He has multiple guitars and takes several wherever he goes. I understand this is a condition common to guitarists.

I graduated to short stories in junior high and high school, some of them longer. I called them novels, but they weren’t. Novellas, maybe. We will draw a veil over the plot about the circus.

At some point I began writing a mystery. Through various drafts it got better, and I was sending it out to agents. Then I got the idea for the book that became my first published novel, Kindred Crimes, and everything got pushed to one side while I wrote that.

Publishing lightening struck and I won the St. Martin’s Press Private Eye Writers of America contest for best first PI novel. I was to pick up the award at Bouchercon, which was in Philadelphia that year. My parents were so proud and excited they got on a plane and flew to Philly to see me get that award.

From then on, they were my biggest promoters. Dad was a salesman. He’d carry copies of Kindred Crimes in the trunk of his car, telling everyone about his daughter the writer. And if his audience had a glimmer of interest, he’d pop open the trunk and sell them a book. Mom did her part, too, selling books to family and friends alike. She would buy them when a new book came out and give them as gifts, too.

Dad is long gone. Mom died in August, just over a month ago. Mom being Mom, she left detailed instructions about her memorial service, right down to the Bible verses and the songs. She specified that she wanted my brother to sing a song he’d written. Of course, he had a guitar with him. He didn’t think that any of his rock or blues songs would be appropriate, so he wrote a new one for Mom.

The other instruction was that I was to read something from one of my books. As I stood in front of the people at the church, I prefaced that by saying, “Well, Mom, I write crime novels.”

Then I read a few paragraphs from Bit Player. That’s the book where my private eye Jeri Howard gets involved in a decades-old Hollywood murder because she learns that her grandmother, an aspiring actress in the 1940s, was once questioned by the police. It seemed the appropriate choice, since Mom grew up selling tickets and watching every available picture at the movies theaters her family owned. In fact, that’s where she met Dad, at the ticket booth of the family movie palace during World War II.

Here’s to Mom, a love letter from one of your creative children.