by Ann Charles
DEADWOOD SHORTS
SEEING TROUBLE
by Ann Charles
Illustrations by C.S. Kunkle
Contents
Dear Reader
Seeing Trouble
Interview with Violet
About the Author
Contact Information
Also by Ann Charles
Nearly Departed Cover Progression
The Beginning
Cover Contender #1
Cover Contender #2
Cover Contender #3
ARC Cover
Final Cover
Other Images
Boney Wild Bill
The Hessler House
Deadwood Map
Dear Reader,
One of the things I’ve wanted to do since I wrote Nearly Departed in Deadwood, the first book in my Deadwood Mystery Series, was to write several short stories that give the backstory of the characters and/or the setting. I chose not to include these bits of backstory in the actual novels because I didn’t want to slow the pace. Also, due to the fact that we’re always in Violet’s head, some of the short stories I want to write and share would be difficult to play out on the pages of the novels.
This series of short ebooks will be released in between the regular length Deadwood novels and will offer what I hope to be fun insights to gobble up, kind of like those mini-sized candy bars and MoonPies. Rather than blather on about my random ideas, crazy antics, and diabolical plans, I present to you the first Deadwood Shorts ebook: Seeing Trouble.
Seeing Trouble offers answers to some of the questions I’ve received from fans about how Violet Parker ended up as a single mother of twins. It was originally titled Dear Diary in Deadwood and was part of a Valentine’s Day anthology with several other authors’ works. In addition to this short story, I’ve included the original character interview I did with Violet prior to writing the first book that introduced us to her wild world. I threw in a couple of Deadwood illustrations by C.S. Kunkle that were created for my original website. I have also included several images that show the progression of the cover design for Nearly Departed in Deadwood, from the first working cover I created after finishing the first draft, through several contenders drawn by C.S. Kunkle, to the final product that you see today. Finally, I added a short story called Candy Lover that I pulled from my story vault. It has nothing to do with Violet and Deadwood, but it’s a story that I felt might put a smile on your face.
I hope you enjoy this first ebook in the Deadwood Shorts series.
As Old Man Harvey would say, “Don’t squat with your spurs on.”
Ann Charles
The Beginning of the Deadwood Mystery Series
Seeing Trouble
Deadwood, South Dakota
“Hey, Mom,” said Addy, my nine-year-old daughter, as she burst through my bedroom doorway. “Elvis found this old book in the basement.”
She held out a book I hadn’t seen in over a decade—my old diary. The upper corner of the cover had been pecked, leaving it tattered.
Elvis was my daughter’s pet chicken. Long story short, she planned to save the animal kingdom one pet at a time. Elvis was just another in Addy’s long line of birds, mammals, rodents, fish, and amphibious creatures. I’d drawn a line at the garter snake. Indiana Jones wasn’t the only one with a loathing for things that go slither in the night … or day.
“It has a cool little lock on it. It must be a diary,” Addy said, holding up a paperclip. “Can I try to pop it open?”
I inspected the lock for scratches, wondering if she already had and was just covering her ass by asking. “You know how diaries work, Addy. They are for the owners’ eyes only.”
“But we don’t know whose diary this is. It could be the long-lost diary of Calamity Jane.”
Being that we lived in Deadwood, which was famous for its history of gold rushes and gunfights, my daughter tended to think that anything older than she belonged to some famous historical figure. Take the old rusted spur her twin brother Layne, my very own wanna-be archaeologist, dug up in the yard last week. She was certain it had belonged to Wild Bill Hickok.
“We do know whose diary this is, Addy. It’s mine.”
“Are you sure? It looks really old.”
Shut it, child. “Isn’t it time for you to take Elvis for a walk?”
“What did you write about in it?” she asked, ignoring my attempt at distraction.
Your father. “Just some thoughts on life and growing up.”
“You should let me read it. I might learn something of value.”
It was ironic how whenever she wanted to get her way, she reflected my words of wisdom right back at me. “I’m not falling for that, Adelynn Renee. This book is for my eyes only.”
“Come on, Mom,” she whined. “Why can’t I read it?”
“Because I don’t want you to.”
In the pages of this little book, I’d written the truth about her father, a man she had yet to meet. I didn’t feel like taking a trip down memory lane to visit him tonight with her in tow. It would only raise questions that were better left for after she graduated high school—or maybe college. That asshole of a sperm donor didn’t deserve her love and affection before she was able to fully understand what had happened a decade ago.
Addy sighed and threw herself on my bed. “I was hoping we could read it together and bond.”
Bond? I narrowed my eyes. “You need to stop watching the Hallmark Channel.” I picked up a pair of her pajamas that for some reason were on the floor of my bedroom and handed them to her. “Go brush your teeth and climb into bed.”
“Ah, Mom.”
“Go. Now.” I nudged her toward the door. “I’ll be in later to kiss you goodnight.”
She trudged out the door, her stocking feet sweeping a cluster of dust bunnies with her.
As soon as I heard the bathroom door close, I picked up the diary and popped it open with Addy’s paper clip.
Property of Violet Parker
Running my finger over my name, I chewed on my lower lip, remembering. I’d been so young, so clueless. I fanned the pages full of loopy cursive writing. Even my handwriting had been different then—flowing and pretty, not the rushed scrawls I used now.
I stopped on a page with a short, sloppy entry:
July 13th: Crappity crap! I just realized I totally missed my period. It must be the new birth control pills messing with my system. Seems like the nurse said something about this happening. Maybe I should call the doctor.
Ha! If only it had just been the pills making my period a no-show. I’d forgotten all about calling the doctor thanks to the full load of college classes I was taking, my full-time job, and, of course, my preoccupation with Addy’s father. His blonde hair, golden brown eyes, and hard body had melted my underwear along with my resistance every time he came around to charm me into bed. I’d had a thing for sexy brainiacs back then, especially a science major who talked like Captain James Tiberius Kirk during sex. Don’t … stop …Violet.
I flipped a couple of pages, grimacing at the big, bold strokes I’d used on one of them.
July 29th: I’m going to kill her!!! How could she? She knows how much I like him. I hate her. I fucking hate her. I CAN’T BELIEVE SHE SLEPT WITH HIM!!!!
Ah, yes. My little sister, a.k.a. Psycho Susan. I should have known that she was going to be a permanent burr in my ass back when she was four and she cut the hair off all of my Barbie dolls because I’d told her she couldn’t play with them while I was at school. Since birth, she’d lived by the motto: What was hers was hers, and what was mine was hers to destroy.
The night I came home early from work and walked in on her naked and gasping in my bed underneath Addy’s father was the night I had shut th
em both out of my life. I still felt a slight kick in my solar plexus whenever the image of them together popped into my head. Her game had sunk to a new level. It was no longer about whom Daddy loved more.
Shaking my head, I flipped forward a few more pages. The writing was short and sweet and slightly smudged.
August 24th: I’m ten weeks pregnant. Shit!
I shook my head, remembering the choking fear squeezing my esophagus when I’d stared at the ultrasound image on the monitor. A baby. Oh, my God, a baby.
My sister had still been hot and heavy with Addy’s father at the time. We’d become our own soap opera: The Young and the Pregnant. There had been so much drama in the air that summer, especially the night Addy’s dad had come to my door and declared his love for me. When I asked why he was having sex with my sister, he claimed it was only because he couldn’t have me.
I tried to break his nose with the door when I slammed it, but he’d been too quick for me.
For the next few weeks, I’d chewed my knuckles about whether to tell him or not about the baby. Maybe he really did love me. Maybe, somehow, we could carve a happy family life out of this mess. Maybe I was delusional from pregnancy hormones.
In the end, Natalie, my best friend, had talked me into giving him a chance to be a father.
I turned the pages until I found the entry about me coming clean with him. Two pages later, I had written down his response.
September 12th: Psycho Susan called me this morning crying hysterically. When she finally calmed down enough to make sense, two words rang clear. “He’s gone.” So much for having a loving, responsible father for my child. If I ever see the dickhead again, I’m going to tear his nuts off and turn him into a eunuch.
After our little chat about me bearing his child, the jerk never did contact me to tell me I was going to have to fly solo. Apparently, being a genius didn’t guarantee he was smart.
A bunch of self-pity filled the next chunk of pages. Then I came across an entry I remembered all too well.
October 5th: TWINS! I’m having twins. Oh! My! God! I’m so screwed. The nurse gave me some information on adoption today after I mentioned that the father had run for the hills, abandoning me to raise two babies on my own. The flyer says that they screen the potential parents, including an FBI background check. I don’t know what to do.
I scanned through the next bunch of pages, chuckling at my attempts to return to the dating circuit with a very obvious bump sticking out the front of me. It had been Natalie’s idea for me to get out, meet some new men, sniff out a potential father. The only thing I smelled in the dates was a lot of cologne and freakiness.
First, there was the fellow classmate who’d been shocked to learn I was pregnant—he’d just thought I was chubby because I ate like a 300-pound construction worker.
I still wince about the insurance salesman, who after learning why my belly stuck out so far had wanted to cover my baby bump with olive oil and rub his stubble-covered cheeks all over it. Before I shut my apartment door in his face for good, he tried to sell me whole life insurance.
Next came the serious college professor who looked like Magnum P.I. He turned out to be hiding his true age behind dyed hair, a glued-on moustache, and a fake tan. His gray chest hair gave him away, and his desperate fantasy to “bonk” a young female student went unfulfilled by me. My bonking days were long over.
Then there was the angry dentist, the possessed baker, and the narcissistic toy airplane maker. My life had turned into a disturbing nursery rhyme.
Around that time, I finally gave up on men and focused on my new job—Administrative Assistant at a local engineering firm. I decided to keep the babies, much to my family’s relief. Well, except for Psycho Susan, who suddenly found the spotlight shining on me and didn’t like it that I had toys she couldn’t take and mess up—they were attached by umbilical cords.
December 23rd: Got fired today, one week before my probationary period was up. When I asked the HR rep what I did wrong, I was informed that my sister was caught making a pass at my boss when she came to visit me yesterday (I’d been at the doctor’s for my monthly checkup and Susan knew it). “What kind of pass?” I’d asked, explaining that my sister was a perpetual flirt. The kind involving her sitting on his lap in a dress sans her underwear. That was probably an accident, I explained straight-faced. Susan sometimes forgot she wasn’t wearing underwear—she never has worn them, claiming an allergy to elastic. The HR rep went on to explain that my boss accidentally had his pants down, too. Yikes! Needless to say, after being told that sisters are usually cut from the same cloth and reminded that I was an unwed mother with no baby-father in sight, I was given a week’s severance and asked to pack my things and join my boss at the unemployment office. Susan was at my parents’ place when I pulled in the drive. Had I been able to catch her, I might have given her a fat lip. Stupid waddle. She swears he came on to her first, and I think Mom even believes her. Criminy. Who is going to hire an almost 28-week-pregnant mother-to-be? I can’t even reach past my belly to the glasses in the kitchen cupboard anymore.
It turned out that the only place that would hire a 28-week-pregnant woman was a 24-hour gas and carryout store. I’d worked there for a full month before my father pulled me aside and begged me to have mercy on him and quit. The stress caused by thinking of his pregnant daughter all alone in a gas station every night had his blood pressure red-lining. I told him that I had to pay rent. He asked me to consider relocating to his basement. He and my mom had talked and agreed they would support me for the first six months of the kids’ lives, and then help with babysitting as I got rolling again. My eyes grew misty even now thinking about that conversation with him.
Teary-eyed, I’d told him I’d think about it, which I did three nights later after a red-eyed freak came into the gas station and asked if I needed a foot rub. When I turned him down, he asked if I’d rather practice making another baby. I quit the next morning. My brother moved me back home the following weekend before heading off to the Gobi desert—his next photojournalist gig.
I’d written a lot in my diary during my unemployment. I scanned through lines filled with deep thoughts about the kids, my life, and my aching feet and back. I also plotted revenge schemes, like making a voodoo doll that looked like the sperm donor and backing over it with my car or shaving Susan’s head while she slept.
Susan and I had managed to be civil during family dinners, but I stayed in my basement hideout whenever she came to visit the folks. Mom knew better than to ask me to be the bigger person. I was bigger. I was huge, in fact. But there was no way I could get past the crap Susan had pulled.
As Valentine’s Day neared, the thoughts in my diary grew darker, full of worries and anxieties over the two little watermelons that would soon need to be pushed out through a rather small opening in my body. I remember wondering what man would ever want me and my deflated body after the babies had come. Short of rubbing bacon all over my pulse points and wearing barbecued pork-rib earrings, I figured I’d be spending the rest of my life sans men.
February 9th: Cool! I found this small box waiting for me at the table this morning with a card that had my name and a smiley face on it. Inside of the box was a necklace with a daisy pendant. The petals are made of little diamonds and the yellow center is a piece of amber or a yellow sapphire. It looks vintage. I’ll have to show it to Aunt Zoe; she’s going to love it. She digs this kind of jewelry. Oh, and it came with a matching ring—bonus! Mom and Dad are the best parents ever!
It turned out they were as surprised as I was by the necklace and ring. I asked all around, but the gift giver remained anonymous, everyone in denial. That should have been my first clue. I blame the pregnancy hormones for my stupidity.
I turned the page, knowing what came next, but caught up in the past anyway.
February 14th: Guess where I spent the night, diary? In jail. Happy Valentine’s Day to me. That’s right, eight months pregnant, and there I sat in a damned jail ce
ll. Granted it was only for a half hour before Mom bailed me out, but still—jail. Why, you ask, my dear diary? Because of my PSYCHO SISTER! What started out with me getting pulled over in my parents’ pickup for a taillight being out, turned into the truck being listed as stolen, which then became a VIN record check showing over a thousand dollars-worth of unpaid parking tickets and fines. To top it off, while I sat at the police station trying to convince them that I had nothing to do with any of this, one of the officers noticed my pretty new necklace and ring and showed me a photo of the very same pieces—reported stolen. Strike three. I went to jail. A half hour later, my mother dragged my sister into the station. She confessed to having reported my parents’ truck stolen seven months ago while she was borrowing it for a few weeks. One of her druggy ex-boyfriends had taken off with the truck for days and racked up all kinds of tickets on it. As for the jewelry, they were hand-me-down gifts from her as a way of apologizing for making me lose my job. She’d scored them from another loser boyfriend who’d ripped off a jewelry store weeks ago and bought her affection with them and other sparkly gifts.
That had been the last entry I’d made in the diary before I had my twins, the last entry period. That night, I’d gotten into a huge fight with Susan. I told her to never come near me again, and then I spilled the beans about something that still makes shame warm my cheeks.
With my stress level through the roof, I’d gone into labor—a month early. Hours later, the doctor pulled Addy out first and then Layne minutes later. I could still hear their teeny, tiny screeches.
Actually, I could hear them now as they fought with each other from opposite sides of the bathroom door.
“Addy!” I yelled loud enough for the tourists down on Deadwood’s historic Main Street to hear me. “Let him in to brush his teeth, dang it!”
I looked back at the diary, touching the picture I’d glued onto the page of both of them snuggled together in the little plastic heating bed. I flipped the page and straightened the wrinkled corner of a picture of Natalie—who’d held my hand through it all—snuggling both babies at once, her face split in a huge grin. The next page had a shot of Aunt Zoe leaning over me while I held my babies. She’d stayed with me in the room until I was cleared to go home and promised me that she’d always have room in Deadwood for all of us if we ever wanted to stay with her.