“A week? I can’t take a week off. We just got back from too many weeks off already, Ike.”
“Nevertheless, with the skillful connivance of Agnes, your loyal and at the moment teary-eyed administrative assistant, I have managed to have you off the books for one whole week beginning today. This afternoon, we head out to Roanoke.”
“Roanoke! You want me to spend quality romantic time celebrating this matrimonial crash and burn with a week in Roanoke? Really?”
“Not the city, Miz President, the airport. From there we shall hop our way across the country and spend a rollicking week in Sedona, Arizona.”
“What’s in Sedona, Arizona? Hell, aside from being in Arizona, where is Sedona?”
“Middle of the state, out of the worst of the heat and very pretty. We will have a week in a luxury resort, complete with a spa, mud baths, and cucumber slices on the eyes if that is your wish, crystal shops with New Age woo-woo, art galleries, good food, pink jeeps, red rocks, and energy vortexes.”
“Energy vortexes, you mean like a New Age filling station?”
“Um, yes that would pretty much cover it.”
“Right. So, what could possibly go wrong with that?”
Acknowledgment
If you are like a lot of readers, you skip the Acknowledgments in the front of books and go directly to Chapter One. I even know people who will skip Prologues as well. I don’t recommend that. Many writers put important stuff in them. You should take the time to at least skim them. Anyway, I decided to put this bit at the end of the book in hopes that you could be lured into turning one last page before snapping the cover shut, figuratively in the case of an e-reader. The folks who make the story magic happen are important and need to be acknowledged. You are the beneficiary of their efforts as much as mine.
***
There was a time, not so very long ago, when all I needed to do when it came time to thank those responsible for this wonderful literary ride would be to list, at most, a half dozen names. Poisoned Pen Press was a small outfit then. Now it boasts well over a hundred writers banging out classy mysteries and a staff that grows ever larger, as it must. So, rather than omit someone whose contribution played a vital role in this book’s production, I will thank the whole slate by Acclamation, as they say in Robert’s Rules…or somewhere.
I cannot, however just leave it at that. I have to single out at least three folks and hope the rest will forgive me. Barbara Peters brought me into this writing business because she liked a very raw and rough book titled Schwartz. Her patience and steely editing ended with the first of the “Ike books,” renamed Artscape. Now, ten years later the number of Picketsville books stands at nine. Also I need to thank Robert Rosenwald, who got flimflammed into publishing Judas and that led to the Gamaliel mysteries, which I love writing. Then a shout-out to Jessica Tribble who has been the glue, I suspect, to this enterprise and who now reaps her just desserts along with a chronic need for antacids.
Finally, to my long suffering wife, Susan, who has endured endless ramblings about the other women in my life; Ruth and Sam and Essie—all fictitious, but real to me—and Ike and Gamaliel and Loukas and Sanderson and…
Thank you, all.
Frederick Ramsay
2014
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