Wandering the Echo City

One-- What The Wind Said

Durga felt her coming on the wind, and if asked to prove her assertion she would smile thinly, mysterious as a smoke-sun horizon, and tell you nothing. She scrambled up the narrow path through laurel thicket and witchgrass, the summer's growth particularly snarling that year, with constant throes of rain and hot sun. She moved swiftly, her dirty skirts snagging often, and if you weren't looking directly in her face, you would think her a young woman the way she moved, yet she was well past seventy. Catching her grim, unbreathing face, the hard lines stacked around her eyes like a relief map of the mountainous land she came from, only then would you notice her age. No one would listen to her warnings; the town hadn't trusted her 'visions' in twenty suns. With her people you could be right 99,999 times out of a hundred thousand, but that one you got wrong would be held against you. Old Pastor Snod and his black-caped brethren didn't help much either.

When she climbed to the crest of the spur ridge, she noticed the wind had switched direction-- she could smell the pine coming up from the cove. Honeysuckle and something sour on top of that too. She had a little shack a little further up

The Quickening

Everything-- our lives, our place in the universe-- hinges on a belief. A belief that we are truly here; that substance equals, well, reality.

Such was the case with poor Janice Weathmeyer, a young pretty woman, twenty-six years old, with wavy locks of brunette hair and large moist-brown eyes, pregnant with her first born child. All was well through the first 6 months, but then a striking abberration appeared in the 7th month. In fact she had to be revived after fainting in the ultrasound room upon getting word of this chilling development. The child was gone. Not dead, not awaiting some sad and tight-lipped stillbirth. But genuinely gone. As in: the womb was empty, sans child.

Her obstetrician, Deborah Mintgale, was more than astonished, to say the least. For the fact was, this was no routine pseudocyesis, no, no where near. There seemed to be no evidence of vaginal dilation, or other tell-tale signs, which would signal the woman had given birth to a stillborn in her home and was now only lying about her condition. She had painstakingly recorded the development, via ultrasonography, since Mrs. Weathmeyer came to her one bright afternoon with that smile and hopefulness of a woman who'd just had a positive result on a pregnancy test. All in all the fetus had appeared healthy for the first 6 months. Had her body somehow consumed it as a foodsource? She'd never heard of anything remotely like this. The girl would become world famous for this case, but she was also certain that this would be no consolation to her.

When Janice was released from the hospital, with a month's supply of tranquilizers and no real explanation for why her child was no more, she went home with her husband of only a year and a half and sat mostly in silence by her apartment window. She had picked this particular apartment at Havelock Acres partly, among other things, for its view facing Flagg Mountain, a rather flat forested mesa typical of this part of world. But now the view had an opposite effect on her; it made her feel closed in. Whereas before she had felt as if the window opened out onto a beautiful invigorating vista, now it only re-emphasized her feeling of being trapped. Her husband Jeff brought her cups of green tea and tried to rub her back, but Janice was, he found, quite cruelly unreceptive to any of his soothing advances or remarks.

Eventually, after days of this, and her intense bouts of crying, (which made the silence afterwards even more potent and chilling, and caused their small housedog, Flip, to hide underneath the bed)-- after trying as hard as he could to help his wife through this awful experience, Jeff finally gave up and returned to his job as manager for a Hardware Store. It was one of those medium-sized chains still clinging to life, but year by year, more choked to submission and death by the larger chains. Within two weeks of losing his son, Jeff Weathmeyer was drinking again, harder than ever, and staying out late many nights a week at various Chattanooga bars, soaking in the smokescent (to cover the sweet and sour scent of the string of anonymous hotties gladly accepting all the free shots and pints Jeff Weathmeyer was worth).

But there were moments, in a drunken stupor, he'd shuffle to the bathroom, noticing his wife missing from their bed, and he'd think-- good god, i'll kill my liver before I go mad!-- he heard the coos and occassional cries of an infant, somewhere deep within the apartment. There but not really there. Deeply embedded in another dimension that coincided somehow with their quiet suburban apartment. He would just ignore it and shuffle back to bed, and sink back into that shallow and dream-laden sleep of the alcoholic and the spirit-shattered. Life went on and the cries faded, stopped.

The Quickening

Two months later, late in October-- near the time of her once expected due date-- Janice began to experience a new anxiety. One not of piercing, body-shaking loss but of secretive, growing presence. And it wasn't just her. She noticed a difference in Flip as well. The dog was constantly shaking, terrified, and it was no longer because of her moods. By now Janice had ended most of the worst of her crying jags, and her melancholy had become lighter, more transparent, more like a film over her vision that had the possibility of being wiped away.

For the first month, she had become a bit of a local and internet sensation. Researchers in parapsychology as well as traditional medical researchers were constantly emailling her, wanting her to come to their laboratories (on their expense) to be studied. Thankfully her cell number was private, or she was sure she would have had to change her number. Honestly, she just wanted to move on; and even though she was perplexed herself and knew at some point in her life she'd want an explanation, right now she just wanted to get on with life, try to dust off the cobwebs of her marriage, and possibly, yes, quite possibly, even try to have another child.

But with the coming of the first cold front of the season, Janice began to sense it. It..? At first she thought she had simply caught a stomach bug. She was finally getting her appetite back, and had recently gained 5 pounds. Then one night, alone in the house yet again, a sharp pang-- was that a kick?-- hit her gut. Then several more. She was certain, she felt movement there. She noticed that Flip would not join her on the couch in front of the tv, as usual, to curl up next her feet, or in her lap. And when she tried to pick Flip up, he would growl. She'd drop the dog and he would tear off to hide under some piece of furniture where he whimpered and shuddered for hours.

When the pressure and pain got worse she went to see Doctor Mintgale, deciding as well not to mention any of this to Jeff. The doctor shifted some of her appointments so that she could see Janice. The case still loomed heavy in her mind, like some doomed zeppelin, but she had a practice to run so, she too, got on with life.

"Hello, Janice, good to see you," the doctor said, a strained smile on her face. She noticed Janice was wearing a maternity blouse. Uh, oh, I knew it, poor girl has gone bonkers from grief. Her husband was a psychiatrist, so she could possibly keep the case of Janice Weathmeyer in the family.

"I think," Janice hesitated, "Oh god, you're gonna think Im crazy. I think Im still pregnant." Before she could stop herself, she was crying.

Some tests were run and sure enough, Janice's womb was devoid of fetus. Doctor Mintgale tried to console the girl, and suggested it was time for her to see that dreaded someone. But Janice became enraged, was intractably tied to the idea that her womb was not barren. As she left the office, her eyes wild and bloodshot, she said, "It's his ghost then. My son's ghost is in me." This would prove to be the last time she ever saw Janice Weathmeyer.

****

Jeff Weathmeyer was downing his fourth jagermeister shot, and washing out its licoricey venom with a Michelob Lite, when he got a text message on his phone from his wife. All it said was, "Plz Come Home."

"Hey, is that your wife!" the twenty-threeish brunette with a rose tattoo on her left partially exposed breast said. She was so drunk she blurted out, "wife" and was heard above the blaring jukebox now playing, "Werewolves of London." They must play this song 10 times a day. It was a poolhall, after all, and what was a poolhall without the well-played cd soundtrack to "The Color of Money."

The girl was leaning into him, her tobacco breath heavy between them, trying to read his text message. He couldnt decide just then if he would rather reach out and plop the rest of that tattooed dirigible from its haltered moorings or throw a lit butt deep into her cleavage. He chuckled morosely. "Babe, this is private." He was going to follow her to her apartment, which she shared with a stripper who was currently hard at work, and see what happened from there. But his wife never texted him anymore. This was odd. Odd indeed.

"Gotta go." She clinged onto him as he tried to get up and leave. He untangled himself from her as if from a desperate monkey. "Hey Dorene, something's up. Ill catch you later."

The girl slumped back in her seat, and wrenched her lips subtly,"Whatever, John. Thanks for the drinks."

The bartender sighed and smirked; he knew he was in for another long and predictable night.

My Son, My Love, Wherever Did You Go?

On his way home from Delk Monty's Billiards, he tried to call his wife, but recieved no answer. The streets glowed with rain-reflected streetlamps, green to orange. He zoomed through the mostly empty streets, vaguely aware-- as his usual drunk brain was accustomed-- that any quiet, poorly lit lot might harbor a cruiser car, with only it's hushed-orange idle lights on. If he was pulled over, maybe the cop would know of him and his story, and cut him a break.

But he didnt get pulled over, and made it home alright. Havelock Acres was washed in a sick scattered yellow light, surrounded by deep furrows of black. Nothing scared him these days, but he used to experience a brief shudder sometimes coming home late. Because beyond this complex, nestled at the foot of Flagg Mountain, were steep, undeveloped woods all the way to the top. And out there, who knows what lurked.

His apartment was on the third floor and when he got out of his car, he thought he saw the face and upper body of Janice but in a blink nothing remained but the dark shut curtains. No lights were on in the apartment. Had she been she holding something?

When he entered the apartment-- blackness and seething silence like an electric force-- he smelled the stench of rot, rot and blood, with an undernote of milk. Urine-colored light filtered in through the window. He saw her sitting in the dark, on the rocking chair that was her mother's, and her mother's before her. She was rocking slightly. Only slightly.

"Janice, you okay?" He reached for the light switch. Nothing happened. Up down up... same result.

"What happened to the lights? Is the power out? Janice?" She was definitely holding something, perhaps a doll wrapped in a baby's blanket. His son's baby blanket, blue of course, never to be used, or so he thought. --Way to go, asshole, Jeff thought, you've neglected your wife in her time of need, and now she's lost her mind. He then realized it was late in October. He would have been due. --Oh god.. His son would have been born right about now.

His eyes having adjusted to the darkened room, he could just make out Janice's face and saw that she was naked from the neck to her waist, her breasts ballooning, as if.. --Oh God... she had just recently begun to lactate. Just then she raised the bundle to her chest, and he thought he heard a suckling sound. "He's hungry, Jeffrey. Our son is hungry. Would you like to meet him?" The words came as if from deep space, from everywhere around him rather than the mouth of his wife. His heart was racing now, he could feel it stutter in his throat. "What..." but that was all he could say.

He could definitely hear the suckling sound now. It was a beastly thirst, not human. The smell was of corpses soaked in curdled milk.

"He wants to meet you, Jeffrey. Come hold your son, honey." She rose and was gliding toward him, her arms extended and offering the bundle to him. He could see its eyes. His son's eyes, lambent butterscotch yellow. They were not human eyes.

He turned and sprinted to the front door. As he was turning the knob he felt it. Something heavy landed on his back, attacking, gnawing at his neck. The pain hit him like a board to the head. In between eager gristle-chewing sounds, a maniacal shrieking filled his ears. He fell to his knees, trying to clutch at and remove that feasting, frenzied parasite set upon him by his demented wife. --See, he loves you...

That was when he felt it, that final thing, like a gooey, spongey rope, around his neck. It tightened, and all went yellow to black; the insubstantial, the negation, became real.

http://cinescare.com/index.php?page=stories&family=essays&category=Horror_and_Motherhood&display=231

Crime Blog

Ideas: home invasions.
some other topic ideas: unsolved serial killer cases(most notably LISK, Connecticut River Valley Killer, Zodiac, others), wrongful convictions and the general unwillingness of prosecutors/investigators to realize their mistakes and myopia.

The Wall Before Me

I used to write. But now the wall stops me. The wanting hasn't been snuffed out yet, so there is still that daily anxiety of not writing. I've never finished anything of consequence. Probably never will. I've let my internet and drinking addictions rule and ruin me. The feeling of 'it's too late now' is a never ending hail storm in my brain. All the projects I'll never do, all the subjects I'll never learn, all the people I'll never love... just crushing. Maybe it's more like brushing up against the Cosmic Microwave Background than any actual wall. I feel all the way out at the end and out of time. Buzzing against an impassable Nothingness. The hum and electric field of dying. 

I used to write....

new work excerpt

BALLAD OF HARRY CRUGGS

The waiting began. The ticking internal clock. The merry celebration of seconds.  All wet, flushed and clicking of windshield wipers, vetting out the stream of night. Purple mesh of street lights, like the city was drunk, only you were. And not for the first time either. Oh, Harry Cruggs had his moments. His friends and family (decidedly different class of folk) called him Harr.

Out here he prowled like a crippled night cat encapsulated by steel, glass and rubber, his back brace holding him up, his morphine patch pushing him through fog banks of pain. Not sure what he was looking for. Yet again.

Always the same really. His father Earl Cruggs was a fishing lure craftsman, content to just while away at his craft, selling his wares out of a small low-rent shop in Sweetville, Tennessee. But when he married Gladys, who had better business sense, they managed to build up into a small southern empire, a chain of stores called—Southern Sports Emporium. Then later, just known as Southern Emporium.  But Earl had the ‘thick blood’ bestowed upon him by his mother, Harr’s grandmother, and died of a stroke at forty-nine. Harr had passed that age by a few, but he hadn’t avoided the family’s curse of ‘thick blood’. Stroke and heart attack by forty-five, partial paralysis and bouts of acute agoraphobia. Up until recently he had managed several of his father’s chain of sporting goods stores, but the market was tight and in gobble phase so he sold his majority share for a nice nest egg cushion, and retired to pursue a life of leisure, such as it was with his disabilities.

Tonight he was working on his suppression of fear. A skill he felt most useful. What did Jan Von Don say? “Fast is good, but deceptive is better.” Rectangles of buildings bulked in the distance, all directions, shadows washed away ever second. Stacks of light mounting even further out, sleepy downtown, then dead mountains with sporadic flashing light beyond that, the occasional headlight switchbacking up or down. But his vision focused on the sidewalk splashed with pallid light. Waiting for a figure, a player, some actor, to emerge…

The Sunset Crow

i.
For as long as Mary could remember her father had an obsessive interest in sunsets. Her earliest memory was of cresting a western-facing ridge to watch the sun sink, fat and bloody, behind the mountains on the other side of the valley. She was four years old. She still had the photograph of that sunset. It was the sunset with which she and her father compared all others. Her bones ached, spine tingled whenever she looked at this photograph-- long after she grew bored of the whole sunset affair.

When Mary was six or seven she asked, "Why do we watch sunsets Daddy?" Her father's eyes went opaque, consciousness scattering like fossils of light to the edges of his inner world. Minutes passed, and the little girl had assumed her father didn't know the answer, but then as they came upon a rocky promontory on their hike, the sun exploding violets and robin reds behind horizon clouds, he said, "When I was a boy a crow visited me in my mother's garden. I was picking blackberries for one of your grandmother's famous pies. But this was no ordinary crow. It perched there on Simious, the Scarecrow, on its straw-filled burlap arm and then spoke to me. I was twelve. This crow said, 'The night is your mistress. You will try to fight your desires, your dark inheritance, and follow the sun in vain hope of a neverending day. But you will fail. Mother night will have you then. All that is yours will go to our mother's eye.' These words of course confused me. And I eventually forgot all about them. But then when I was a young man of twenty-one, the crow returned. My mother was buried by then, her plot on a small hill facing west. On her deathbed, your grandmother said to me, 'My grave must face west, toward the setting sun. I cannot hold back what may happen to you and your line if you do not honor my simple and humble request.' And so of course I honored this. But three years after she was buried, while I visited her gravesite, the crow found me there. It said, 'I was born from your mother's vileness as were you. We are brothers. This woman below is not your mother. You must have only sons; if you have a daughter she must die by your hand.' Then the crow flew off and I never saw it again. Then you came along and I felt nothing but rapturous sunsets, neverending dusk thoughts, and vowed to never honor the horrible crow's murderous decree. You and I are against the crow forever, locked in an eternity of sunsets." Her father never again told her this story.

ii.
Mary felt the presence of the crow long before it ever made a physical visit. Whether in dreams, or some hypnotized state of reverie that came after watching a sunset with her father, as was their custom. At twelve, beyond menarche, she became bored with the sunset watching routine, and even spiteful toward both her father and the sun, growing pale of skin and distant of emotion. But she still kept the rite alive, as she had no intention of upsetting her father, or destroying his sense of accomplishment and pride. This father had raised her all alone; she never knew her mother. All father would say about her was, she was a wicked woman, nameless, whom he had never known to be pregnant but came to him a year after her birth, and left the daughter for him to assume sole parenthood. She had no name for the child, and so he called her Mary.

She walked the night streets after her father went to bed. The moon became her secret love. The sun brought to the world light, density and green life, but this moon gave these shadowscapes mystery, formlessness and danger, muted everything green to smoke and black etchings on an dim orange sky. Somehow it opened the veins of all that was living and spilled out blackest blood, hardening like shellac on death trees. She could move about these demiurgic scenes and not be noticed by anyone. Only the raccoons and cats and possums paid her any mind. Anonymous red-eyed night, colors that mocked the sun.

When she was fourteen she slipped into a house through an open basement window, and creeped about the place for hours, eating food from their kitchen, watching the children sleep, looking at the family's many photo albums, masturbating on their sofa. The small housedog at first was scared and hid behind a laundry basket, but eventually it became comfortable enough with her to sniff at her hand, and allow Mary to scratch it behind the ears. Inside this house-- which she visited in the dead of night many times-- there was a ceramic crow on the mantle, gleaming black eyes her. On her last night inside she took it for her own.

When she was sixteen the crow came to her one night while she idled in a pale yellow-lit school playground. The crow landed on the raised seat of a see-saw. At first startled, then an overwhelming calm bathed her. She expected it to speak, like it did for her father, but it never did. She knew already what it had to say. She'd known for a long time now.

iii.
The sunset was amazing. It was her eighteenth birthday. And reluctantly she had agreed to spend it with her father, deep in the mountains, rather than with her friends drinking and partying all night. She would be leaving soon for college, what was one more sunset to humor the old man. But she was dead-set on this being the last, even if she had to be blunt and cruel with her father.

But she had to admit, after all these years of sunsets piling up on sunsets, a massive bloated corpsepile of suns, this one was extraordinary. Special. Fire reds bled into clouds streaked with surprising crow black feathers. There was something terrifying there along with its beauty. A truly unforgettable last sunset to be shared between daughter and father.

"You grow tired of these outings, Mary, my daughter." It was not a question; most certainly a statement. She remained quiet, entranced by the horizon's performance. For it surely was a performance, murder as art, a mutilation of the sun by the sharpened black steel of clouds, crow-devised. It made her quiver all over, but especially deep within her womanhood. As if she had swallowed the sun there.

She placed her hand on her father's face and stroked it gently, like never before, like the woman of the night who was her mother.

iv.
Joseph was deeply shamed by what he allowed to happen on his daughter's eighteenth birthday. But he kept his shame to himself. Three other times that last summer his strangely smirking and alluring daughter came to him, and three times he acquiesced. Gave in to her black electric touches. The words they exchanged during these dark couplings were few and far between.

"You've seen the crow then?"

"No daddy. I am the crow." But she giggled to show she was just joking.

In August Mary left to attend college. But he had not seen her for a week. She spent that last week with friends in a remote cabin high in the mountains. Communing with the crows, bathing naked under the moonlight. He should have listened to that crow so many years ago, and killed his daughter, the very day that magdelene brought her to his doorstep. The woman's words came back to haunt him: "This is your contract. This is your spawn and seal."

In September, after weeks of following a flock of crows through cove-haunts, endless undulations of tree-teethed ridges, he found their roost and poisoned hundreds of birds. Then there in the forest, naked, covered in filth, he ate a hundred dead and dying crows and fell dead himself into an anonymous puddle of pine dreck and limestone slurry.

v.
Mary went out for a late night stroll, well beyond her dorm at Black Mountain College, past the campus and into the small town of Black Mountain itself, a hamlet nestled high in the mountains. It was chill, foggy and blacker than any night she'd ever seen in her life. The few streetlamps gave light only for a few steps before she was plunged back into blackness, moonless and ripe with an unsavory secret. She had never before been afraid on any night time outing, but this night fear came to her in compounding waves.

Night was no longer night, but a chasm calling to her. On the edge of town she came to the Museum of Stained Glass, but the doors were locked. Looking behind her she saw nothing of the town anymore, but only ripplings of black on black, as if the town was a miasma of crows. She felt her only refuge was to break into the Museum. She found a large rock and hammered at the padlock and chain on the huge oaken double doors of the stone building.

On about the tenth try the rusty old padlock finally gave way and she threw away the heavy chain with a ringing thud. Behind her a cacophony of crows pressed like a gravitational field, like an overprotective father against a cruel unfeeling world. She was certain then it would consume her, shred her to bits.

She slammed the double doors shut and slid the iron rod brace across the width of the doors. Perhaps only a false comfort, but for now she felt safe. Inside, it was not dark. Votive candles in chandeliers hanging low lit the hallway all the way through to the main exhibit, a massive thirty foot high stained glass window. It took her a moment, breathless, heart thumping like a frenzied meth murderer in her chest, for her brain to stitch together the pattern of a crow, in brilliant varied shades of black and smoke-gray glass. It looked to her as if the massive bird was quaking into life..

Then an explosion of glass rained thousands of crows upon her, slashing her each time in their finite death dives. Glass crows slashing at her cheeks and eyes, sliced off one ear, stuck dagger beaks deep into her breasts. Then by bastard physics one flew up her skirt and lodged deep within her dripping dark blossom. Her mind went pure static then, pleasure and pain turned up to their highest human levels. She fell unconscious there inside the Museum of Stained Glass, amid the shattered pieces of a lost work of art.

Outside, our Mary of the Moon-- Mother of Crows-- slipped out of the clouds like a strutting streetwalker and a solitary crow nibbled at the earth, yanked out a ripe juicy worm and ate it whole.

excerpt from prologue to mystery novel:

The intruder was in the foyer but could see the babysitter sitting on the sofa with her back to him. Most of the lights were out, save the dull one in the kitchen over the sink. Her face was glued to some movie on the tv. The child must be upstairs asleep by now. But he was prepared for anything. In his gloved left hand was a large kitchen knife he had grabbed on his way in from the laundry room. His spun the handle in his grip a few times to try to calm himself down. Getting in had been a cinch. It was a small miracle considering he didn't really have a plan for breaking in, although he had scoped the house for a few weeks. No dogs, poor street lighting and every Friday night the couple left the house with a dumpy looking babysitter, though she did have huge tits.

The latch on a side window had been unlocked, so all he had to do was pull out the screen, and pull himself through. “Easy peasy", he whispered to himself. Once inside the dark laundry room, smelling vaguely of fabric softener and cat pee, he was immediately worried that the babysitter could hear his labored breathing, and then his own heart beating, but he soon realized this fear was ridiculous. He had finally done it. He’d broken into a home with the occupants still inside. Up till now every house he’d been inside without permission had been empty. But the kick had worn off on that fairly quickly. He never stole anything, he just snooped around, enjoyed the time inside as long as he dared (longer and longer each time), and then slunk home to his parent’s house, either walking along the train tracks or on his bike if the trek was longer. This was his birthday present to himself tonight though. He had just turned seventeen. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy... here we go.

Earlier that evening Cindy Ballard arrived at the Lawrence’s to watch their daughter while they went on a date. The Lawrence’s had been married for ten years but they still ogled over each other and went on regular ‘date nights’ once a week, giggling and grabbing ass like stupid college sweethearts, playing bogus courting games. Cindy was a little embarrassed by these people but they payed well and the child, Mildred, was a quiet kid and gave her no trouble. And who was she to judge? Her parents had fought constantly, and got divorced when she was ten. Her mother was a miserable bitch and her father dead from liver disease. The Lawrence's were alright people, better than most. She could kick back on their leather sofa, drink a beer or two and watch cable tv. Listen to their vinyl collection. Sometimes she’d leave MTV on in the background and spend the whole evening chatting with her friend Sarah on the Lawrence’s fancy cordless phone. But tonight, after Mildred went to sleep, she wanted to try on some of Stephanie’s night gowns. She’d done it once before babysitting for another woman, but she hadn’t dared it again. She was both exhilarated and ashamed from doing it the first time. But several months had past, and nothing ever came of it, so the desire had crept back in. She’d decided to do it again. She was twenty-two and ‘a raving pervert’, she told her friend Sarah, the only other living soul who knew about her funny little kink. Sarah had said only, 'Well, I don’t see the harm. Just ask me though if you want to try on anything of mine.” And they both had laughed at that.

Just before leaving, Stephanie reached into her purse and snatch a fifty dollar bill and handed it to Cindy. “We’ll be a bit late tonight.. hope that’s okay. Here’s a little extra.” Cindy was stunned, but snatched the fifty like a little kid snatching a lollipop. “Not a problem, Mrs. Lawrence, and, thanks!” Stephanie patted her on the shoulder, smiled in a weird way, looked her up and down and turned toward the front door. Her husband was standing there in a faux-gallant pose, holding the door open for his lady. “After you, my dear.” Stephanie,eyes sparkling with goofy wit, looked over at Cindy and said, "Manners will get you everywhere." Cindy cringed a little inside, but remembered that lurid smile from Stephanie and felt a warmth grow in her crotch. Cindy had fantasized about being seduced by both Lawrences but nothing up to this point had ever given her reason to think anything was truly possible beyond that. Then she thought again about the woman’s lingerie collection, which she had noticed before was quite extensive. Tonight maybe she’d search a bit more and see what other secrets turned up. "