L I L A C ~ M O O N
(a mystery novel)

by Shelly Frome

Description
___________________________________________
This chilling mystery unfolds in remote Connecticut
hills. A series of creepy pranks has driven
impressionable thirty-something actress, Katie,
to distraction. One rainy evening, her habitual jog
results in a near-fatal fall into a camouflaged cistern.
Drifting past consciousness, she calls for her lifelong
friend Sarah. Soon Sarah, a features reporter from
New Haven, learns of Katie’s plight, discovers her in
a near-coma, and promises to intervene; only to discover
herself nearly overwhelmed by bizarre suspects and her
own psychological turmoil. Trying to prod state troopers
into action, Sarah learns of a trio of dubious revivals:
production of Dark of the Moon, restoration of a
vineyard, and evangelical crusades. As the plot thickens,
goings-on eventually lead to murder, and Sarah
unwittingly becomes a player.

". . . memorable rich characters . . . two central figures
you really care about who induce you to keep reading till
the compelling finish . . . Lilac Moon truly captures the
whole Connecticut/Berkshire ambiance . . ."

Lilac Moon Are you ready for our first murder mystery? Well Sarah wasn't, when she discovered death under the lilac moon!

ORDER NOW

ISBN
0-9719496-5-4
Cloth Bound
Price $22.50 US


Single Orders

Volume Orders

Excerpt Below



Nanci Race, Features Editor
The Artful Mind
Great Barrington, Massachusetts
The Author

As Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts at The University of Connecticut, Shelly Frome is no stranger to the theater world. Among his publications are The Actors Studio (2001), Sun Dance for Andy Horn (a novel) 1990, and Playwriting (1990). He is author of four plays: Death in the Stacks, Last of the Good Guys, Sun Dance for Andy Horn, and Harlequin Jones, wrote thirteen articles on acting and playwriting, and composed twenty-three plays and seven dance/theatre pieces.

EXCERPT :

CHAPTER ONE
____________________________________________________

The damp May wind was weaving a tangle of black clouds when Katie first screamed. Her cry was aimed at everyone and everything including God.

Slipping onto the spanning back porch of the rambling colonial, she cheered on the rain. It was fine that there was no pink twilight. Fine and fitting. At least the sky might weep a little, as if something mattered.

She started to raise her fists, but then let them drop to her side. Like everything else about her, her fists were small and ingenuous, totally non-threatening. Still and all, it was pretty brazen of her. She’d never dared yell at God before. Maybe now, at long last, He would answer. Let her know what was on his mind.

Katie cut herself off. She was in dangerous territory here. Best to run hard, run past it. Fly so fast that she would leave this grungy existence. Dash past the torments to some other zone--way beyond the meanness and confusion. And finally get a moment’s peace.

But the fear that had no name crept in and became the old familiar quiver. Was God really still punishing her for the boating accident? But that was so many years ago. And good things had happened since. Yet here she was, up in the Litchfield Hills lured by the same play, the same part of Barbara Allen. Haunted by and drawn to the same old Scottish ballad.

“Good grief,” Katie muttered to herself. “I must be nuts . . . caught in a stupid circle with no end.”

What was it Sarah always said? ‘Get a grip, Alice. Don’t overload the circuit.’ Yes, she would do that. Take her customary nightly jog to her summer theater and rehearse the opening scene, the moment when Barbara Allen and the Witch Boy first met. Jog and rehearse. Stick to her guns, stick to the routine and let nothing stop her.

The silver disc glinted behind the clouds for one brief second, paled, glinted again and then dissolved into the gunmetal gray of the sky. Setting out into the curtain of moist, pulsing darkness, she wished she wasn’t so totally alone. She pressed on. Imperceptibly, the mist began to change to drizzle as she circled the old, weathered, red barn.

She ignored the croaks and squeals and all the sounds of spring, letting the rainwater pelt her cheeks and trickle down her face. Breaking into a lope, she continued to do her darnedest to sprint past her troubles and focus only on the task at hand. Soon smidgens of hope flickered into the corners of her mind. It would be so great to have some company--Sarah, the one person left in the world who would listen to a person even if that person was spooked and made absolutely no sense. Sarah, her old childhood chum, would have to reply to her letters, come out of the woodwork, wend her way up from the Connecticut shore and give her some overdue support. Straighten out her head so she could just live her life.

Katie picked up the pace, cutting through the dripping pods and weeds that smothered the one-time formal gardens. She telescoped her jaunt into a single record-shattering run: through the stand of vineyard stakes, past the pond, by the costume shack and the scene shop, up the wooden steps to the backstage entrance, onto the stage, into the limelight.

The squeals grew louder, more insistent, joining the mix of scudding gray sky, croaking, splattering rain and a new whisking sound darting through the laurels and sprays of lilac. She was panting now, loping harder, when the whisking sound skittered behind her and in and out of the blips of the raindrops. Traces of grapevines and wooden stakes slipped into view like a skewered trawling net. The squeals faded to a whimper.

The rain beat down harder, hissed and dribbled. The wind kicked up, sending a shiver through her ribs. If only she wasn’t so petite. If only she had enough size to stand up to things and make certain people take notice. Something long and tubular jutted out from a trellis dead ahead. She flinched, noting the glowing forked end of a divining rod pointing to a brace of sawhorses marked with red strips of cloth. To the left of the sawhorses was a dark mound. Between the mound and the sawhorses was a neat, tamped-down aisle.

Breaking into full stride, she took the aisle and dashed through. The second she hit the gap between the mound and the warning flags, she stumbled. In that same second, a hand smacked her from behind and the ground gave way. The back of her head struck first, her pelvis twisting and scraping as she spiraled down, screaming and grasping onto shards of canvas and sticks that hurled more mud and gravel on top of her, driving her lower, mixing with the well of mortar and stones that enveloped her as she slid lower still, choking her, packing her in until her fall was finally broken by a pool of stagnant water. An airless hush filled the cavity as suddenly as her fall. She waited for the bad dream to end, for the sickening filth and pain to dissolve, for the sky to clear, for a voice to tell her to wake up. She curled up, groping for her pillow, wondering why the bed was as damp as clay. Above, the rasping bite of a shovel cut into the lull and then faded into the raw blackness.

It was an imperfect murder. Katie was not dead. She was also not alive. She was somewhere between. Something or someone had pulled her out of the well. Someone or something had sucked the dirt out of her throat. No one or nothing had eased the stabbing pain at the back of her head and the throbbing that circled her waist.

There had been flashing lights, a litter, a sensation of being strapped down and covered. There had been glimmers of green and white linen and words that filtered in and out: “. . . bleeding . . . fracture . . . easy, easy . . . what do you think? . . . who knows? . . .” The words became jumbled and blended in with the drone of a motor and bumps and swerves. The drone grew louder, the bumps and pain struck at her harder and faster and a shadow figure constantly checked her eyelids and questioned her again and again. “Can you open them? . . . that’s it, that’s good . . . What happened? . . . how did you get there? . . . What hurts? . . . how much? . . . What’s your name? . . . what’s today’s date? . . . who’s the president? . . . “ Katie’s lips had moved but the sounds hadn’t come out right, not like they were supposed to. She may have answered. She didn’t know. Then there was a circus of lights and noises. Shuffling feet traipsing in and out. New words were spoken: “. . . ER . . . trauma team . . . call Doctor So-and-so . . . code three . . . cranial bleed . . . go to the O.R., evacuate the fluid . . . unless it resolves or reabsorbs . . . And the pelvis? . . . Stick to the head. Why fix an axle if the motor’s shot? . . . “ Blurs of blue linen with different voices, poked at her, touched her, taking turns, looking in her eyes, constantly working on her eyes. A lot more talk, a lot more touching. And someone always muttering about vital signs. Bad dialogue. Repetitive. Boring. Same stage business, same lines over and over. But she wasn’t on stage.

At some time the circus cut off. What took its place was unreal, perhaps in some other world, another planet. It was made of green glass. Panels of it that sometimes slid off in the distance and to her side. It certainly wasn’t earthly glass; it had no glare.

The gaggle of human sounds was replaced by beeps, whistles, bells… and an eerie hush. A few low murmurs seeped into the abyss from time to time. So did a few passing shapes and a nearby whoosh and hiss.

The closest she came to real life was a tube that seemed to have been thrust straight down her throat and had taken over her breathing. Some kind of collar clamped her neck and ropes and pulleys rose above her. Occasionally, a male or female whisper drifted down from a mile away, asking her to squeeze her hands and blink her eyes. Her arms were locked but she wasn’t sure where. Just when she thought she had located them, there was a pin prick of a needle that sent her off to a darkening limbo.

Sometimes new words invaded the darkness and hung there suspended: “. . . airway . . . I.C.U. . . . EKG . . . one blown pupil . . . inappropriate response . . .” Sometimes other words came from the darkness, moved into the lull and passed back into the pitch black: “ . . . move your feet . . . wiggle your toes . . . start an I.V. . . X-ray the skull . . . what did the CAT scan show? . . . will the cranial bleed reabsorb? . . .”

And sometimes in the muted stretch of space and time, the words became totally incomprehensible: “. . . mannitol . . . neuro-vascular . . . pneumo-fluid . . . nasal canula, stat . . . ”

There were also periods of nothingness--no darkening and no moving shadows--in which Katie sensed that she and other creatures were lined up in identical bays, preserved for another millennium when the sun would shine, skies would turn blue and she and the other former earthlings would again become animated.

And once in a great while, when the piercing pain broke through at the back of her head and her lips quivered wildly over the tracheal tube, she cried, “Why?” Now, bracing herself for another onslaught, sensing that all but a few creatures like herself remained, she half-wished and half-prayed. Her only hope lay hidden somewhere . If there was a forwarding address, and if the letters she wrote truly did arrive before whoever had tried to do her in slipped into this void to finish the job. If there was time, Sarah could be her sentry. Her champion. Maybe even erase the stain of guilt for something awful she must have done to deserve this. So she, Katie, could return to earth and keep looking for the spirit of the moment, even if it always had to be make believe . . .

Unless someone else would, or could, take up the gauntlet.

No, there was no one else. It was Sarah or nothing.



TOP