by Jean Andrews
White Horse Point
Synopsis
Best-selling mystery writer Taylor James has struggled to complete a novel ever since divorcing her husband. When her publicist insists she take time away at a remote cabin to “finish the damn book,” Taylor reluctantly agrees.
Amid the crystal-clear lakes and towering pines of the north woods, Taylor encounters a mysterious woman. Small and beautiful, Levade keeps to herself, but at night she rides a white horse bareback into the lake, as if looking for something. Taylor is captivated, but Levade pushes her away. There’s a secret she can’t share involving a murderer who walks among them and who promised to kill anyone or anything Levade loves.
But White Horse Point is haunted by another pair of lovers, long deceased, who have a personal connection to the two women, and are determined to bring them together.
What Reviewers Say About Andrews & Austin’s Work
Combust the Sun
“In a succinct film-style narrative, with scenes that move, a character-driven plot, and crisp dialogue worthy of a screenplay, Andrews & Austin have successfully crafted an engaging Hollywood mystery.”—Midwest Book Review
Summer Winds
“Andrews & Austin never, never disappoint their fans. Their wit and intelligence sing from the pages.”—Just About Write
Uncross My Heart
“The one-liners come fast and furiously, but it’s the relationship between two bright, intelligent women that resonates long after the last page has been turned.”—Ellen Hart, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of the Jane Lawless Mystery series.
“Andrews & Austin weave religion and romance together in a story that tackles a serious issue with bracing humor, and that balances provocative thought with sensual entertainment.”—Richard Labonte, Q-Syndicate
Mistress of the Runes
“With its humorous depiction of glamorous careers and corporate shenanigans, in Mistress of the Runes, Andrews & Austin once again offer readers sheer entertainment. They manage to playfully sustain a teasing erotic tension from beginning to end, but the heart of the book is its dollop of Sarah-Dreher-style mysticism. It is also somewhat reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: ‘Warrior queen, working on love and fear while wearing different costumes…fear gets love out of balance, doesn’t it?’”—Lee Lynch, author of Sweet Creek
“On the surface, this novel is about finding one’s way back from repeated failed romances, but Brice Chandler’s struggles encompass so much more. This sometimes serious, sometimes funny and always touching story can teach us all a lesson about living our dreams and following fate, whether we believe in it or not.”—Story Circle Book Reviews
“Andrews and Austin have backgrounds in the entertainment and news industries, and I enjoyed the insight into worlds far removed from my own. Their combined knowledge and talent are demonstrated in the composition of Mistress of the Runes. This book does not move quickly or rashly, but with a combination of dry humor, believable dialogue (both internal and spoken), and a touch of the paranormal, Brice Chandler’s story will stay with the reader.”—Midwest Book Review
Stellium in Scorpio
“Appealing lead characters that possess wit and intelligence drive this novel. Richfield and Rivers make a wonderful couple who experience the various ups and downs of life with a sense of humor, affection, patience…and an astrology chart.”—L-word.com Literature
“Appealing lead characters that possess wit and intelligence drive this novel. The dialogue is smart, humorous, and realistically expressed.”—Just About Write
Venus Besieged
“Venus Besieged skillfully weaves the beliefs of Native Americans with astrology, creating an exciting read.”—Just About Write
White Horse Point
Brought to you by
eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com
eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.
White Horse Point
© 2020 By Andrews & Austin. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-63555-696-4
This Electronic Original Is Published By
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, NY 12185
First Edition: April 2020
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editor: Shelley Thrasher
Production Design: Susan Ramundo
Cover Design By Tammy Seidick
eBook Design By Toni Whitaker
By the Authors
Combust The Sun
Stellium In Scorpio
Mistress of the Runes
Venus Besieged
Uncross My Heart
Summer Winds
White Horse Point
Acknowledgments
Our heartfelt thanks to Radclyffe and BSB for supporting our work, and to our wonderful editor, Dr. Shelley Thrasher, for her input and guidance. Thank you to Connie Ward, our friend who has played many roles at BSB over the years. We appreciate the hard work of the BSB team, led by Sandy Lowe. Special thanks to Laurie Hedlund of Hedlund Dressage for equine technical assistance. And we thank all of our readers who for a decade have encouraged us to once again write lesbian fiction.
Dedication
To Rachel Maddow for her intelligence, tenacity, and bravery in covering the important news when no one else is paying attention.
Chapter One
“I feel like I’m just waiting. Waiting to live, waiting to die, waiting for the other shoe to drop, trying to figure out what to do while I wait, and wondering if whatever I’m waiting for will even be worth it.” I ran my hand through my hair and leaned back in the cushy club chair at the Algonquin, famous for its literary history and the lights in the Blue Bar, where after two martinis, you couldn’t tell your agent from an alien.
I crossed my leg, revealing an Italian-weave loafer, and slid my fingers nervously down the pleat of my Armani slacks. The matching tan vest seemed tight, so I opened the bottom button, then loosened my tie, and finally stopped fidgeting. I’d made a fashion effort only because Ramona, one of New York’s more fabled publicists, liked her lunch guests to be “well put together.”
“When I write…” I said.
“Used to write.” Ramona corrected me and nonchalantly scanned the room for people she might know.
“Unkind,” I said evenly.
“You have mid-life angst.” She delivered her Holiday Inn diagnosis with only minor compassion, while making a failed attempt at surreptitiously checking her watch. “You’re just in one of your dark periods.”
Ramona was a true New Yorker—perfectly coiffed silver hair, seventy but sexy, black suit, gym-trim body, big diamonds, and short attention span.
“Stop being depressed,” she said.
“How can I not be depressed? Everyone in New York wears black. I feel like I’m in Game of Thrones.”
Ramona texted while absently addressing me and never making eye contact. “Taylor, I want you to take the rest of the summer and go up North to the lake.”
“The mosquitos are large enough to be wall art,” I said, as Ramona dipped into her tiny purse with two fingers. “Why do you bother with a four-inch purse? Don’t you have a pocket?”
“This purse cost a thousand dollars per square inch, and every woman in here appreciates that fact but you.” She extracted an old, rust-colored skeleton key and slid it across the cocktail table’s high-gloss surface.
I pushed it back and flung the back of my hand to my forehead, imitating someone about to be exiled. “Nooo. Anything but the key!”
Ramona pushed the key forward again. “Your aunt Alice knew what she was doing when she built that cabin, and even more when she sold it to me. Take the key and think about it. Better yet, just go to the cabin, breathe, and finish the damned book!”
I hugged her, thanked her for the lunch, tucked the key into my vest pocket, and left the Algonquin, melding into the flood of people hurrying along West Forty-fourth. I could send the key back to her with a nice note. I didn’t have to travel to hell and gone to write.
Two blocks farther, I stopped at Kaddish’s Deli to pick something up for dinner, where I stood in line waiting to order alongside a throng of irritable people crowding the meat case. The muscular man behind the counter in a sweat-stained T-shirt shouted in a Bronx accent, “In line over there!” He caught sight of me. “Hey, honey, what?”
“I’ll have the chicken salad sandwich.” As he scooped it up, two flies landed on the open tray of chicken salad. “Never mind. Keep the insect sandwich. I’ll have the mac and cheese.”
“Listen at you! Keep the insect sandwich! That’s free protein!” He was still joking with me as I grabbed the mac and cheese, plus a green salad, in a plastic box and paid the cashier. “Her Royal Highness don’t want flies on her chicken salad. She’s got no idea what’s in the mac and cheese!” He was right about that.
A block away, I tried to hail a cab as three of them zipped past me, their lights off, indicating they had a passenger or perhaps were just ignoring me. Looking back toward Forty-second, I saw two other people trying to flag a cab head of me. All of us, two feet off the sidewalk waving our arms frantically like human windmills.
If I weren’t insane, I would go crazy, I thought, and ducked into the subway, no longer trusting Uber drivers not to kill me. And to think some people were willing to text Turo and hook up with a total stranger and rent their personal car. And what if when they picked up the car, the guy killed them, or had a stash of drugs hidden inside the door, and the cops pulled them over, or the guy was a gang leader and a rival gang had been waiting for his car—the one they just rented—to drive by, and boom, they were dead! I’m good at thinking things through to their morbid conclusion, which is probably why I write…used to write…mysteries.
The hot, sweaty, body-odor-cum-food stench of summer underground told me I’d made a bad decision. Turo no longer sounded terrible.
Twenty feet to my right, a man oddly dressed for the intense heat of summer, in sweats and a hoodie, stood beside a woman wearing a fast-food uniform and a scarf tied under her chin. Suddenly he shouted something and pushed her in front of the oncoming train.
My heart slapped against my chest, and my knees momentarily collapsed. Two burly, middle-aged men shouted at him and instantly set chase, as the crowd screamed.
A skinny black man, in dirty jeans and torn tennis shoes, leapt over the side of the cement platform, his dreadlocks swinging around his head like ropes at a rodeo, and yanked the woman off the rails literally seconds before the train blew by. The crowd-squeals increased two octaves.
Several people helped pull her back up to safety. She was battered from the fall, with a gash on her forehead where blood streamed down onto her face and dripped onto her burger uniform. A man ripped off his shirt and tied it like a tourniquet around her head, and the bleeding slowed, and we could see she hadn’t lost her arms or legs or her life. Then other men in the crowd hoisted her rescuer back up, as everyone cheered and clapped for the man who looked like he had nothing to lose if the train had killed him too.
“You’re a hero!” someone shouted, and several people reached out to touch him, the way gamblers do when someone wins and they want the good fortune to rub off on them.
“Thanks, man,” he said with a half-smile and wandered off.
Transit security raced down the platform, and a medic came forward out of the crowd and knelt beside the injured woman. The two burly men had the pusher pinned to the ground when police arrived and cuffed him. The rest of us squawked our disbelief at one another like terrified geese.
“I can’t fucking believe that!” I shouted into the air, and people echoed me.
“Fucking crazy bastard!”
“Holy shit!”
There was nothing more for any of us to do but continue to quiver and move on. I tried to climb back up the subway stairs to get some air, my legs as useless as broken bow strings. I could hear the authorities in the background questioning the poor woman, and her weak, trembling reply. “I don’t know. I was just waiting for the train.”
* * *
I forced my shaky legs to propel me down the sidewalk to a brick high-rise on Sixty-eighth Street. I took the elevator, still clutching my deli dinner, and got off on the eleventh floor, then realized the door to my apartment was unlocked. The super was inside trying to get my air-conditioning to work.
“I was just in the subway, and a guy pushed a woman in front of the train!” I squeaked, grateful to have someone to tell.
“No kidding?” He grabbed the back of his pants and gave them a hoist, relocating the tool belt on his tall, lanky frame. Then he glanced over his shoulder at me for a second before tinkering with the AC again. “People are nuts!” He ran his large hand through his dark, curly hair.
That was the extent of it—so much drama in the city that nothing, not even my first-hand account of a woman being pushed in front of a subway train, could rise above the level of “people are nuts.”
I stashed my salad in the fridge, alongside the mac and cheese, and waited for the super to generate cool air.
“Can’t fix it,” he finally announced. “You’ll have to wait till Thursday, when the AC people can get to it.”
“It’s almost August. I’ve suffered long enough! I could die of heat stroke by Thursday. You’ve got to fix it.”
“Would if I could.” I glowered at him, and he shrugged. “Hey, what do you want from me?”
“Who are you, Adam Lambert?” I asked as the door clicked shut behind him.
I looked around the apartment at the tall bookshelves that required a ladder for dusting, the tiny kitchen with its old-fashioned fridge, the windows in need of washing that ran the length of the living room, where the old radiator provided heat in winter. Ironically the only thing missing was cool air in summer, and it was fucking summer!
I’d chosen not to sink my divorce funds into a more expensive apartment, so I’d settled for kitschy. And as I thought about that, I was suddenly angry and not even sure what I was angry about. I paused to look up at the ceiling at whatever guides or gods were assigned to me and said irritably, “Something has to change!”
I yanked a green canvas duffel bag from under my wrought-iron bed. A wrought-iron bed just screamed that I was having sex with no one, because a metal headboard was simply asking for a concussion. I started packing—designer jeans, boots, tennis shoes, political-statement sweatshirts, low-rise underwear, socks, shorts, T-shirt, sweats, and a nightshirt.
Finished, I rang Ramona. “I’m going. You’ll see me back here in the fall when my ass is so frozen, they’ll have to ship me home in an ice chest.”
Ramona seemed genuinely happy. “Good! Are you flying?”
“I hate to fly! Watch Nightly News. Everyone dies. The ventilation has Legionnaires’ disease, the kid next to you gives you measles, and then you crash on the Max 8.”
“So you’re flying.” Ramona spoke in a flat, disinterested tone that ignored my commentary and indicated she had something more critical going on.
“I’m wearing red so they’ll spot me in the wreckage and rescue me first.”
Ramona focused in. “Taylor, from angst comes
great writing. But when you reach black-hole depression, no one wants to read what you have to say. You need a little joy in your life. Fly out to Minnesota tomorrow. I’ll call Marney and tell her you’re coming, and to get things ready for you.”
“How do you have an intimate relationship with a neighbor a thousand miles away when I don’t even know who lives next door to me?” I asked her, while holding my phone to my ear with my shoulder and evaluating whether I should pack one nice sweater and a pair of slacks.
“I’m a publicist. We’re intimate with everyone,” Ramona said. “Get a hot-stone massage and a facial before you go. You’re a great-looking woman, but who would know.”
“Thanks. I’m sure the bears will appreciate me arriving all tenderized.”
“With your height, those shoulders, and that short platinum hair, it takes a very confident man to approach you, Cersei,” she teased, picking up on my Game of Thrones reference and labeling me the difficult queen. “Fluff it up a little! And for God’s sake, lose the tie. You might meet someone. Imagine that! It’s been years since Ben, and you were at least writing during all that drama.”
“Maybe I’ll meet a homicidal lumberjack who tries to chop me up for cord wood, and you can be happy again. Can I get internet up there?”
“It’s not the moon, Taylor. Yes, DSL. But if phone lines are down, then internet is down.”
“I love it when you talk tech.” I teased her. “I’ll call when I get there.”