Talking “Back to Basics"

Welcome to the intro video and an excerpt from the eighteenth post of my weekly serial, “Sketches from the Café Confictura.” If you’d like to share a comment, please use the comment option at the end of this excerpt. To follow the mystery of Applewood, and get recipes from Mrs. Creaverton, writing advice from Roscoe Belesprit, and fashion tips from the Fastionista, please visit www.ClarissaJeanne.com for new posts every Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. EST.

This was what Roscoe lamented, as Clarke and Schmetly argued. For most of tonight’s meeting, the group had discussed Schmetly’s latest story, and it was rife with the same mistakes as always. Clarke had chosen one such mistake to grab hold of, and he wasn’t about to let go.

Schmetly yelled at him, “Look, ‘I’ is always more proper. I wrote a scene with two high-society types. They’re gonna say, ‘He gave the champagne to Miss Whitaker and I.’”

“Wrong, doofus,” said Clarke.

“You’re a doofus!”

Roscoe laid his head down and mumbled, “Stein had Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Benchley had Parker and Woollcott. But let history show: never was the level of discourse heightened so as when the likes of Clarke and Schmetly traded barbs.”

Clarke turned to Roscoe. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know what the hell you just said, but I get that you want us to calm down.” To Schmetly, he said, “When a pronoun follows a preposition, like ‘to,’ odds are it’s supposed to be an object pronoun: ‘me,’ ‘her,’ ‘him,’ ‘us.’”

Everyone looked at Clarke in shock.

“What?” he said. “I know things.”

Portia said, “Of course you do. It’s just after taxing yourself with ‘doofus’ we figured your brain was done for the night.”

Clarke made a face at her. “Ha-ha-ha.” He turned to Roscoe. “I’m right here, right?”

“He is indeed, Mr. Schmetly,” said Roscoe. Over Clarke’s gloating and Schmetly’s pouting, Roscoe continued: “Let’s see. Many years ago, my daughter’s language arts teacher gave her a trick to use when determining pronouns. I think she still uses it. ‘He gave the champagne to Miss Whitaker and I.’ If you take Miss Whitaker out of the sentence, you wouldn’t say, ‘‘He gave the champagne to I,’ would you? Of course not. He gave it to ‘me.’ Just as he would to ‘her,’ not ‘she.’”

“Oh,” said Schmetly, drawing out the word as understanding seeped in. “That’s a good trick.”

Roscoe picked up a pen and tapped it against the table in a frustrated, nervous tick. “This is what I mean,” he said. “I’ve tried repeating lessons on creative writing 101. I’ve had you read good literature. But some of these fundamentals are still clouded over in your minds.”

A woman had come up to the entrance of the Riverview Room, and she grabbed everyone’s attention when she said, “You always did have a tendency to skip over the basics, Roscoe.” Her lips turned up into a knowing smile.

Finally, Clarke and Schmetly, it seemed, had something to agree on. Clarke whistled low. Schmetly whispered, “I’m in love.” The woman was striking: late fifties, tall with an athletic build, dark brown skin, and streaks of gray in her shoulder-length hair.

Clarke said, “Who is that?”

“Kate Brooks,” Roscoe replied, and he returned her smile. “My ex-wife.”

  

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Talking “Wrapping Up the Nom"

Welcome to the intro video and an excerpt from the seventeenth post of my weekly serial, “Sketches from the Café Confictura.” If you’d like to share a comment, please use the comment option at the end of this excerpt. To follow the mystery of Applewood, and get recipes from Mrs. Creaverton, writing advice from Roscoe Belesprit, and fashion tips from the Fastionista, please visit www.ClarissaJeanne.com for new posts every Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. EST.

“What has you so enamored of him?” I asked. Mrs. C usually doesn’t get swept up in politics.

She sat on the couch’s arm. She fit there nicely, actually, now that she’s down about twenty-five pounds since she started eating so much healthier in January. She said, “Well, I share his values. I think he’d make a good mayor. Same goes for the guy he’s running against in the primaries. But, with Masterson, I feel a kinship. When I saw Mr. Creaverton just after he passed, I told some people about the encounter and I was ostracized for a time. You know how people were in this town before the ghosts really started kicking up a storm after 11/5. A full-spectre paranormal encounter was sacrosanct. Half the people I told were jealous of me, half thought I was making it up for attention. Masterson went through a similar experience. He still gets flack, since he’s the first major candidate around here to admit he had the same kind of encounter. He’s up against that kind of malarkey and he still puts himself in the public eye, striving to make his dreams come true. I’m pretty inspired by that. I really wish, just for now, I lived in Speroton so I could vote for him.” She grinned. “But at least letting him campaign here might help secure him the nomination.”

“Why Confictura?” said Roscoe, his voice a touch gruff. Everyone knows Roscoe’s in love with Mrs. Creaverton; everyone, that is, except Mrs. Creaverton. Whenever she inadvertently reminds him that the ghost of Mr. Creaverton is still hanging around, he gets a little prickly.

“His advisor guy on the phone said Masterson loves the café’s story,” said Mrs. C. “That we were lucky to be a rock in the midst of the quake, business hasn’t suffered, people love coming here. He sort of holds us up as an ideal. And I guess he’s heard about the changes I’ve made in my own diet and with some of the café’s recipes.” She started to get flushed as the phone rang again.

Her flush quickly drained. “Oh, really?” she said. She tried to keep her voice light, but the look on her face was one of disgust. “I see. There’s not, by any chance, anyone else who could maybe do it instead? No, no, that’s fine. I was just wondering. I’ll be looking forward to it.”

We got the skinny when she hung up, and said flatly, “One of their campaign people, who lives in Applewood, can meet me here tomorrow to go over the schedule, figure out where in the café he’ll be set up, things like that. And that person is none other than Ms. Nessie Fyne.”

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Talking “The Long and the Shorts of It"

Welcome to the intro video and an excerpt from the sixteenth post of my weekly serial, “Sketches from the Café Confictura.” If you’d like to share a comment, please use the comment option at the end of this excerpt. To follow the mystery of Applewood, and get recipes from Mrs. Creaverton, writing advice from Roscoe Belesprit, and fashion tips from the Fastionista, please visit www.ClarissaJeanne.com for new posts every Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. EST.

Violet had rung up her last order for a while. Graham was flirting with her and she was, in her cool way, flirting back, just as any couple six weeks into their new relationship should do. He told her he was going to head out and he’d see her later, and that it was going to be such a boring day without her, and so began a back-and-forth about who was going to miss whom more. Mrs. C told them it was unhygienic to slobber so close to the food.

Then, Amy walked in.

A tempestuous gust pushed in with her, smacking the overhead bell. After unusual heat lasting for several weeks in February, we’re back to cooler temps, although it’s still more like October than March. The last couple days have been gloomy with occasional bouts of rain, and today’s no exception. I feel I should be going home, lighting a jack-o-lantern, and putting on a scary movie to watch while awaiting trick-or-treaters.

Every day that Amy comes in, Violet and I ask her if she’s found anything at the library on old Applewood, something that might reference the tunnels we found deep under the town. Since that’s where we saw the hooded man, and the hooded man is related somehow to the quake and the mental fog, we thought there might be some clue about those tunnels that would start to solve this whole conundrum. And, every day, Amy says the same thing she said this morning:

“Nope. Haven’t found a thing yet.”

Only, this time, she said it a little too emphatically, a little too quickly. She ducked her head down, her corkscrew curls bouncing around her round face. Amy’s a stout woman, and shorter even than me or Violet, and her face is naturally a touch ruddy. Just now, it looked like she’d drunk a bottle of Tabasco.

Violet poured Amy’s coffee into a takeout cup, and lidded it, all the while trading suspicious glances with me and Graham. Violet came around the counter, cup in hand, and put an arm around Amy.

“Uh,” said Amy, digging into her purse, “hang on, lemme pay you.”

“It is on the house, oui?” said Violet. She handed Amy the cup, and started walking with her back through the café.

I came up on Amy’s other side, and mirrored Violet. Graham followed us.

Amy looked up at us. “Where are we going? I’ve got to get back. Radinka is the only other librarian on shift, and you don’t want to keep the boss waiting--”

Near the far corner of the Woodwork Room, Violet nodded to me. We ran Amy into the pocket room, a little closet-like cubby, one of which is off of each main room. Graham ran in with us; he locked the door behind him, and Violet and I each locked the other two doors that lead to adjoining pocket rooms.

“You know something about the tunnels,” said Violet. “Tell us or we don’t go outside this room.”

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Talking “The Professionals"

Welcome to the intro video and an excerpt from the fifteenth post of my weekly serial, “Sketches from the Café Confictura.” If you’d like to share a comment, please use the comment option at the end of this excerpt. To follow the mystery of Applewood, and get recipes from Mrs. Creaverton, writing advice from Roscoe Belesprit, and fashion tips from the Fastionista, please visit www.ClarissaJeanne.com for new posts every Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. EST.

Just as Wilhelmina left, Roscoe came running up to the remaining three of us. “Don’t go,” he said. “I need your help.”

Our fashion maven, Violet, nodded and said, “Oui, I am glad you recognize this. Okay, first, this shirt is all wrong for you and anyone who is not living in 1991, so you must burn it.”

I said to her, “I don’t think that’s the kind of help he meant.”

“Well, it should be,” she snapped.

Roscoe explained, “I’m coming in and out of this fog and, as you know, when it hits full-on I seem to lose any filter of propriety and just say whatever’s on my mind. Dean Krakas will be here soon, and I can’t offend him. So, will you all please stay close and interfere if it looks like I’m about to make a fool of myself?”

A few weeks ago, Roscoe was offered to return to his old professorship at Fairburne College, for the express purpose of serving on a special endowment board attached to one specific donation. It seems one of the stipulations of this anonymous donation is that certain professors, including Roscoe, have to be on this board to decide what to do with the money; if even one doesn’t agree to serve, the donation gets retracted. Another professor, Andy Wicks, has been circling lately, trying to get Roscoe to commit.

Of course, if Roscoe does go back, we lose him, and the salon loses him. Though, maybe if he’s away from Applewood for a while, the mental fog will leave him alone. The dean of humanities was coming tonight to get Roscoe’s decision, finally.

Mrs. C said to Roscoe, “So, if you don’t want to offend the dean, I guess that means it’s because you’re going to be working with him soon. You’ve made up your mind to leave Applewood, and go back to Fairburne, then.” She looked crestfallen, in part, I’d imagine, because she and Roscoe had just made up after a weeks-long fight.

A man’s voice cut straight through Confictura all the way from the front door. “What a great little town,” he said. “Such a quiet little burg. I love towns like this.” His words were underscored by squeaking sneakers; and a moment later the man came into the Riverview Room. The hook-nosed Professor Wicks was at his shoulder, but that was the only thing that told us this man was Dean Krakas.

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Talking “Peace of Pizza"

Welcome to the intro video and an excerpt from the fourteenth post of my weekly serial, “Sketches from the Café Confictura.” If you’d like to share a comment, please use the comment option at the end of this excerpt. To follow the mystery of Applewood, and get recipes from Mrs. Creaverton, writing advice from Roscoe Belesprit, and fashion tips from the Fastionista, please visit www.ClarissaJeanne.com for new posts every Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. EST.

Of course, not long after Wilhelmina, Violet, and I resurfaced from our adventure underground on Friday night, rumors started rolling about the hooded man haunting the secret tunnels beneath the town. Okay, maybe that was our fault a little bit. We’d hardly kept our voices down talking about it back at the café. And then there were the fliers. Wilhelmina had sketched out a wanted poster with “Have you seen this man?” in bold lettering at the top, copied it, and we all three handed them out over the weekend and yesterday. So, you know, maybe that had something to do with the spike in gossip.

Mark Raynid, the “entertainment” columnist for the Applewood Timber--who is actually little more than a town crier of hearsay, a scribe of scuttlebutt--Mark devoted a special edition of his column last night to “hooded man sightings.” Which is strange considering that before the three of us saw this guy skulking through the underground tunnels, no one had ever mentioned him. Well, either Mr. Moleman felt the need for a weekend out on the town, perhaps a few drinks at the Sloshed Guzzler, maybe get his hood cleaned at the Fluf-N-Fold; or the town’s imagination was starting to run wild. Whatever the explanation, Mark’s column was hardly hurting for material.

And people were starting to get nervous.

I attribute, then, Confictura’s unusually busy past few days to this growing cloud of apprehension. The prospect of a strange tall man running around with an electrified lightning rod is a little less disturbing when you’re surrounded by people. Add to that Confictura’s perpetually warm lighting, buzz of espresso machines, and smell of apple tarts, and you’ve got an almost holiday atmosphere of friends and family wrapped around you. Who can be scared in that?

Violet and I took it as a hopeful sign when one of the people seeking refuge here was none other than our Roscoe Belesprit. Since he and Mrs. Creaverton have been at war, we’ve hardly seen him around, except for Wednesday night meetings of his “How to Write a Novel in 30 Years” literary salon. On Sunday afternoon, though, he poked his head in the door, ordered an almond milk latte and two of Mrs. C’s new vegan cupcakes, and read in a corner of the Book Room. Neither of them started arguing with the other. This was a huge step. So Violet, perhaps emboldened by our recent adventure underground, decided to push them another step forward.

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