Sample Sunday: Excerpt: LAUNDRY AFTER MIDNIGHT by Nina Wachsman

Please welcome Nina Wachsman to the blog today with an excerpt from her short story in the new anthology, Justice For All: Murder New York Style 5.

 LAUNDRY AFTER MIDNIGHT 

No one believes anyone in New York, especially not a 12-year old boy. Heck, I wouldn’t have believed me either, but like many things in this city, the unbelievable turns out to be true.

“I’m going down to get the laundry,” I announced to my parents, who didn’t look up at me even though it was one in the morning. Hand on the brass doorknob, I was about to open the front door, when I heard a noise in the hall. My view was limited through the peephole, blocked by the back of a guy in a blue sweater. When he jerked sideways, I could see the lady across the hall swinging her small purse at him by its chain handle. He raised an arm to block her attack. Thunk! A sickening sound, but I couldn’t see where it came from because the blue sweater was blocking my view again. Bang! The slam of the stairwell door was so loud I jumped away from the peephole.

I blinked a few times with my hand still frozen on the doorknob. Then I placed my eye on the peephole again, expecting to see only an empty hall and closed doors. But there she was—the lady across the hall, facing me, her back against her door, slowly slinking down to the floor, her knees crumpling and her blond hair leaving a trail as it stuck to the doorpost. Not good.

“Mom, Dad!” I burst into the dining room banging the table so the laptops under their fingers bounced.

“Did you get the laundry, Neal?” my mother said automatically, not looking up.

 “Come quickly. The neighbor’s hurt. She’s lying in the hall.”

“What our neighbor does is none of our business,” Dad muttered, his eyes on his screen.

“This is no joke,” I pulled out my phone. “I’m calling 9-1-1.”

They both looked up. “What’s got into you?” Dad said.

I pointed a shaky finger to the hall, holding my phone, ready to dial. Chairs scraped back simultaneously, and they brushed by me as they hurried into the hall. I followed.

“Oh. My. God.” My mother said, putting a hand over her mouth. Dad didn’t move, just stared.

The lady from across the hall sat just as I saw her in the peep hole. Up close, her eyes were open, staring at nothing, the dark pupils large and stark against the light blue of her irises. Strands of blond hair were stuck to a large streak of blood that ran down the doorpost. Her coat was open, and something sparkly glinted from underneath.

“I’m calling 9-1-1,” Mom said, her fingers tapping her phone.  “They should be here shortly. Let’s get Neil out of there. This is not a sight for a twelve-year old.”

“Neil, back to the apartment,” Dad said, turning towards me. “I’ll handle the police when they come.”

I was not moving. A real murder, and in my apartment building!

  

Nina Wachsman ©2021

Nina Wachsman is the author of The Gallery of Beauties, a novel of historical suspense, to be published by Level Best Books in 2022. Inspired by family history, it is the story of a courtesan and a rabbi's daughter in seventeenth-century Venice, the city's Golden Age, and is the first of a series. Nina has been a children's book illustrator, art director, and advertising executive. She raised her three children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a prewar apartment where she currently lives with her husband.

Sample Sunday: Excerpt: The Thanksgiving Ragamuffin by Kathleen Marple Kalb

“The Thanksgiving Ragamuffin” starts with the 19^th century tradition of New York City children begging for treats on Thanksgiving morning. The first children to knock at opera star Ella Shane and her cousin Tommy Hurley’s Washington Square home are schoolkids playing poor. Then comes the second group:

 

“Anything for Thanksgiving?”

These voices were a bit rougher, and so were the kids. Newsboys, unless I missed my guess. Their faces were thinner, and the grime was real. And the worn clothes weren’t hand-me-downs roughed up for the occasion. They were all they had.

Some newsboys came from poor families, “doing their part in the house,” the way I’d once done with piecework, and Tommy had with odd jobs in the old neighborhood. Others had no one. The boys all knew the stories, but they’d never tell them to us. Over time and hot cocoa in the Holy Innocents rectory, Father Michael would find out and help where he could.

I didn’t feel the least bit guilty sending these fellows on their way with two pieces of penuche each instead of one. Honestly, I’d have given them the whole batch if they could have carried it.

“Did you recognize any of them?” I asked Tommy as I closed the door.

He shrugged. “I’ve seen a couple of them around Holy Innocents. The little one, with the dark hair and eyes, he’s new.”

Tommy’s gaze lingered on my face. He knew what I was thinking. The world saw opera diva Ella Shane, internationally acclaimed, or at least paid in several different currencies, for my performances in “trouser roles,” heroic men’s parts played by women. But inside was Ellen O’Shaughnessy, Irish-Jewish orphan made good, with more than a few scars from my childhood. Tommy knew better than most; we’d been looking out for each other since my mother died and his family took me in. Just eight, sad and scared, I’d attached myself to twelve-year-old Toms, even helping him fight the bullies who called him a “sissy.”

“I’m fine, Toms.” I took the basket from him and put it back on the small table by the door. “C’mon. Mrs. G left us some penuche.”

“That’s an excellent idea, Heller.” He rarely called me by anything but the nickname I’d earned during our street-fighting years, before he grew half a foot and became the star of his boxing gym, and I found my mentor and voice teacher Madame Lentini.

We had just turned for the stairs when the shouting came from the street.

“He’s dead! He’s dead and that rotten little newsboy killed him!”

“Let go of me, lady! I didn’t do anything!”

Tommy and I stepped outside to see the small dark-haired boy struggling with a sturdy woman, apparently next to the body of the victim. From across the street on a cloudy morning, though, the remains looked like nothing but an indistinct rounded shape lying near the entrance to Washington Square Park.

“I didn’t hurt anyone! Let me go!”

The child let out a shockingly loud howl, his face contorted with fear.

Even the officious, overdressed woman who’d accosted him looked stunned, dropping his collar and backing off in confusion.

I didn’t think about it. I just walked over to the little fellow and put a hand on his shoulder. He looked up at me with tear-filled, bottomless dark eyes.

“Come here, sweetheart. You’re safe now.” I pulled him to me, and he burrowed into my arms as my friends’ children sometimes will. As I rubbed his back, I noticed that his clothes, while grubby, were of good quality and relatively new. Maybe one of the luckier ones. “Call Father Michael, Toms.”

“And Cousin Andrew the detective, too, I think,” Tommy added. Andrew Riley is actually Father Michael’s cousin, not ours, but everyone calls him that, and there was no doubt that we – and that poor boy – would need a friendly police detective.  

“The Thanksgiving Ragamuffin” is just one of the many stories by the members of the NY/TriState Chapter of Sisters in Crime in the new anthology JUSTICE FOR ALL: MURDER NEW YORK STYLE 5, edited by D.M. Barr and Joseph R.G. DeMarco.

 

 Kathleen Marple Kalb ©2021

Kathleen Marple Kalb is the author of the Ella Shane historical mystery series for Kensington Books, and as Nikki Knight, the author of LIVE, LOCAL, AND DEAD, coming February 8, 2022 from Crooked Lane.  She’s a weekend radio anchor in New York City and a weekday mom in suburban Connecticut.

Short Story News: Kathleen Marple Kalb

The Thanksgiving Ragamuffin (mystery)

Kathleen Marple Kalb

On Thanksgiving Day, 1899, opera star Ella Shane and her cousin Tommy Hurley help a poor newsboy who is wrongly accused of a crime because of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic prejudice, and end up solving a second case as well.

The theme of this year’s NY/TriState Sisters in Crime anthology is social justice. In the Ella Shane books, nativist, religious, and class prejudice are key issues, so when I found out about the tradition of New York City’s “Thanksgiving Ragamuffins” begging for treats on the holiday, it was the perfect start for a short story.

 

  

Kathleen Marple Kalb also contributed this recent post about writing short stories during the pandemic.

Short Story News: D.M. Barr

 

A Trial for the Books (crime/satire)

D.M. Barr

 

Amid its bustling, diverse fabric, injustice is unfortunately as much a part of the New York City landscape as Times Square, the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty. Such inequities are spotlighted in, Justice for All: Murder New York Style 5, collection of sixteen short and thought-provoking stories penned by some of the Sisters in Crime New York/Tri-State chapter’s most prolific authors. The crime committed may involve homophobia, xenophobia, child abandonment, sexual abuse, white privilege, ageism, or literary snobbery. Regardless, these tales are designed to both enlighten and delight readers of suspense who seek out a bit of fairness and integrity in the city that may never sleep but does often rectify its wrongs.

 

I wrote the story after a blog tour host gave me a low rating because I had profanity in a book I never marketed as a clean read.