Shop Talk by Carolyn Haines Read Free Book Online Page B

roommate or pets to intrude.”
    Red flushed up from Jazz’s throat into her cheeks. “LoveHaven Trailer Park isn’t the atmosphere for literary pursuits.”
    “Don’t worry, you’ll get published. You’ll
own
the biggest condo on the coast, or one on all three coasts.” Dallas pointed her breadstick at Jazz. “The idea of a sequel to the sequel of
Valley of the Dolls
with the stoned female protagonist witnessing the murder of a federal judge and his wife is an excellent plot. The fact that only Brook’s sixteen-year-old black lover believes her is perfect. I mean it has social significance, and it portrays a black man in a positive role. Someone is going to snap it up if you just get over the writer’s block and
write!”
    Jazz lowered her glass to the white table cloth now covered in breadstick crumbs. “Thanks, Dallas.”
    “You’ll do it,” Coco added. Her gaze was on Dallas’ breadstick stub, but her hands were on the table, curled like a sleeping infant’s.
    “That leaves one option.” Mona looked around the group. “We don’t have enough money to rent a place so we’ll have to find a new member, someone with a place where we can meet. Any disagreement?”
    The silence around the table was heavy, but no one disagreed.

Chapter Five
    All around Driskell the vivid images whizzed and whirled in a soundless kaleidoscope of color. He sighed in satisfaction. The mercury vapor glow of Pass Road was broken only by the head and tail lights of traffic, and the erratic beam of a lightshow being put on by one of the casinos over on the beach. Driskell’s complete attention was focused on the computer screen in front of him as he dialed into America On Line’s local access number and waded through the series of annoying questions and quasi-promotions that were hurdles on the road to the Internet.
    The modem in his lap-top was slow, and Driskell listened to the Gregorian chants coming from his portable boom box. It was his favorite music. Deep, somber, comforting. The chants reminded him of the high ceilings in his grandmother’s old house.
    In the big old house, light fixtures hung by two feet of decorative chain. Above the light was a space of perpetual gloom, a darkness that could harbor anything.
    The house had once been owned by an elderly rich woman. She had died there, in the bedroom on the southwest corner, when the skirt of her nightgown brushed into a low fire burning in the bedroom hearth. She’d run out into the yard, a human torch.
    It was common Cranberry knowledge that her spirit stalked the large, dark rooms, spying and waiting for a chance to rout the interlopers who dared to inhabit her home.
    As a young boy, Driskell had lain on his back every night, afraid to sleep on his stomach–afraid to sleep at all—for fear an arm would dangle off the bed and something under the dust ruffle of the big four-poster would grasp his wrist in a firm, bony grip.
    He’d developed dark circles under his eyes and an unhealthy pallor from chronic fatigue. Weariness had led to physical lethargy and a quiet studiousness that made him the butt of jokes in school. Yet while his schoolmates shunned him, his grandmother doted on him, bringing him candy and books and the fresh, tart cranberries that he loved to hold in his lips and savor. The cranberries had permanently stained his lips and made him a laughingstock, but it didn’t matter that he had no friends. His grandmother loved having him all to herself, to sit beside her as she hemmed a dress or listened to the radio.
    He had no strong recollections of his mother, who was gone a lot, or his father, who was drunk a lot. His memories were ruled by his grandmother, a big dumpling of a woman with massive breasts that always smelled of apples and cinnamon. She had been an expert seamstress with more customers than she could serve. The women she sewed for were heavy. Women too large to find stylish clothes in neighborhood department stores and too sensitive to go