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'The Ghosts of Red Savannah'. Forthcoming in 2012. Modern Paranormal Romance.
Twenty years ago Buck Muldoon left home under a cloud of seduction and failed teenage romance. Now the sudden death of his father forces Buck to return to Red Savannah, his plantation home in Charleston, SC, for the first time since. Not only will Buck have to face the girl whose heart he broke as an eighteen year-old, he also will have to face up to whatever feelings he has left for the girl who seduced him into it.
But these are not the only 'ghosts' haunting Buck upon his return. He starts seeing the ghosts of a long-dead Revolutionary War commander and a slave girl, both of whom appear to have a message for Buck...
Twenty years ago Buck Muldoon left home under a cloud of seduction and failed teenage romance. Now the sudden death of his father forces Buck to return to Red Savannah, his plantation home in Charleston, SC, for the first time since. Not only will Buck have to face the girl whose heart he broke as an eighteen year-old, he also will have to face up to whatever feelings he has left for the girl who seduced him into it.
But these are not the only 'ghosts' haunting Buck upon his return. He starts seeing the ghosts of a long-dead Revolutionary War commander and a slave girl, both of whom appear to have a message for Buck...
Excerpt From The Forthcoming Novel 'The Ghosts of Red Savannah'.
CHAPTER ONE
The direction of my life changed forever the night Casey Duquesne seduced me.
It happened on one of those long, humid nights during the usual temper-tester of a Charleston summer. Casey was the daughter of my family’s housekeeper. A heady mix of melting love and wild sensuality way beyond her seventeen years, with an aura of near-divinity and rampant wickedness about her, angel and devil all wrapped up in one beautiful blonde and blue-eyed package.
I left my home, left Charleston and South Carolina, not long after that stormy summer night and the stormier encounter Casey and I had. I’ve never returned. Not for Christmases, not for birthdays, not for anything. Too many bad memories. Too many good ones, too, and all of those contributing in some way to what made the bad stuff happen.
Fast forward some twenty years and a lot of water passed under many bridges. I have never been able to forget Casey Duquesne, however. She became a sweet, agonizing dream, both yearned-for and reviled by me. I had moved from South Carolina to San Francisco, where I made a good living as a freelance commercial artist, and where I had friends, and girlfriends. None of the relationships I had with these women led anything permanent. I liked to tell myself I wasn’t looking for the whole married-with-kids ball of wax. Somewhere in back of my
mind, I think was always aware of something being missing though. That I might be doing more yearning than reviling when it came to Casey and that was interfering in my ability to have a relationship with anyone.
Then came the telephone call would turn my life upside-down all over again. My mother called to tell me that my father was dead.
“ What happened?” I asked, thinking accident.
“ Heart attack,” my mother told me. Well, that wasn’t an accident. In the silence followed volumes of her disapproval and distaste screamed. “ He had the attack in bed. Not his own bed,” she added finally.
I almost asked “ Whose bed?” but stopped myself. It was irrelevant. I’ve known all my life that my father was a philanderer. I did not need to know which of his many mistresses had the dubious honor of being under him when his ticker - and his pecker - finally gave out.
“ You’ll be coming home for the funeral, of course,” Mother stated.
It would be unthinkable to her that I should not attend. She may never have complained about my missing Christmases and birthdays and the like, but to stay away from a family funeral, well, that would be the absolute height of social faux pas.
“ Yes, Mother, I’ll be there,” I told her.
I didn’t need to ask whether she had already informed my five siblings of our father’s demise. Of course she had. I was usually last on her to-do list. I am a never-ending well of disappointment and disgrace to my mother. I take heart, however, from knowing most of her children have been a disappointment to her in some way although I may be the only one is also a disgrace to her. Only Robert, my eldest brother, has ever managed to please her.
“ And Buckley, it might be best if you were to come unaccompanied. It is a family thing after all.”
I felt the cold tightening around my eyes of my anger rising. My mother has never been comfortable ( her word, not mine ) with the fact I have dated African American women. Hence her 'disgrace' in me. Oh, she dresses it up in various excuses…It’s just my generation, we didn’t mix the races…I can’t help being a product of my time…but bottom line, Hannah Elizabeth Archer Muldoon is a racist. She sincerely wishes that segregation had never ended, that people such as Dr King and Rosa Parks could have refrained from going around putting ideas into the
heads of ordinary black folks. Again, I take heart from knowing she is also horrified that my youngest brother Ethan dates other men.
As it happened my last girlfriend was white and we’d broken up last week, but I still chafed at my mother’s presumption.
There have been Muldoons and Archers ( Archer being my mother’s name before she married Dad ) at the heart of Charleston society since ever there was a Charleston society. They epitomize old Old Charleston, all gloriously fading wealth and perennial concern with social status. Whilst my mother embraces fully this snobbery, it left my father rebelled against it by taking on mistresses whom his snobbish contemporaries thought were ‘beneath’ him. No pun intended. Thankfully myself and my siblings, with the exception of Robert, take after our father as far as giving a fart in a whirlwind about society.
“ I’ll see you tomorrow, Mother,” I said and hung up the phone. I paused a moment, just staring into middle distance and thinking about going home, not having many good thoughts about it, and then I lifted the phone again and dialed the airport. I managed to book a cancellation seat on a direct flight to Charleston departing at ten o’clock next morning. That done, I called Rachel.
Rachel is two years older than me and lives with her husband and two children in Savannah, Georgia. She keeps in regular touch with home and so I learned more from her about our father’s sudden demise. At the time of the fatal cardiac episode he was indeed with his latest mistress who was, Rachel reported, an employee of his stable. Our father owned a stable in Camden where he produced
champion race horses.
“ So he was doing the stable girl,” I said.
“ I think she might have been the trainer,” Rachel corrected me.
“ Oh. Well, that makes it alright then.”
“ Are you disapproving of Dad?” Rachel asked, sounding surprised.
“ No.” Truth was I hardly cared who my father had been sleeping with. We all had grown up knowing he was unfaithful in his marriage, and knowing also that our mother tolerated these extra-marital meanderings so long as he was discreet about them, and continued to bring in the kind of income could keep her in the state of luxuriously functioning alcoholism to which she’d become accustomed.
“ I wonder who Dad has left the stables to?” Rachel mused.
“ Probably to you.” I figured Rachel was always good with horses, with animals in general, so it stood to reason that our father would leave his precious stables to the only one of the family knew the first thing about horses. Rachel was good with children, too, and old people. Okay, Rachel is good with everyone. She’s a people person.
The Muldoon fortune was founded in cotton. It expanded via various import and export ventures, and diversified by way of vine-growing, with a little detour into horse breeding. I have always been bored by business. Which isn’t to say I know nothing about it. In fact I know a good deal about business. It bores me because I know about it. There is very little mystique about making money, and certainly nothing creative about it. Give me someone who can pen a great masterpiece of fiction, or a painter who can bring a landscape to life on canvas, and I will worship at their feet. But a businessman is just a money-making machine in a nice suit and two hundred dollar shoes.
Rachel had not yet heard from Sean. She and Sean are twins. They look alike enough to be masculine and feminine versions of the same person, but in personality they are poles apart. Miriam, Rachel informed me, was still trying to pin down Sean’s last-known location. Miriam always was good at keeping track of things. Wandering siblings, absent pets, our mother’s daily intake of alcohol.
“ When do you get into Charleston?” Rachel asked.
“ Around midday,” I replied.
“ Don’t bother to hire a car. I’ll come pick you up from the airport.”
“ Only if it isn’t any trouble?”
“ Are you kidding?” Rachel gave a brittle laugh. “ I’ve only been here since this morning and already I want to set fire to someone. I need a break, Buck.”
“ I’ll see you at the airport then,” I said.
The direction of my life changed forever the night Casey Duquesne seduced me.
It happened on one of those long, humid nights during the usual temper-tester of a Charleston summer. Casey was the daughter of my family’s housekeeper. A heady mix of melting love and wild sensuality way beyond her seventeen years, with an aura of near-divinity and rampant wickedness about her, angel and devil all wrapped up in one beautiful blonde and blue-eyed package.
I left my home, left Charleston and South Carolina, not long after that stormy summer night and the stormier encounter Casey and I had. I’ve never returned. Not for Christmases, not for birthdays, not for anything. Too many bad memories. Too many good ones, too, and all of those contributing in some way to what made the bad stuff happen.
Fast forward some twenty years and a lot of water passed under many bridges. I have never been able to forget Casey Duquesne, however. She became a sweet, agonizing dream, both yearned-for and reviled by me. I had moved from South Carolina to San Francisco, where I made a good living as a freelance commercial artist, and where I had friends, and girlfriends. None of the relationships I had with these women led anything permanent. I liked to tell myself I wasn’t looking for the whole married-with-kids ball of wax. Somewhere in back of my
mind, I think was always aware of something being missing though. That I might be doing more yearning than reviling when it came to Casey and that was interfering in my ability to have a relationship with anyone.
Then came the telephone call would turn my life upside-down all over again. My mother called to tell me that my father was dead.
“ What happened?” I asked, thinking accident.
“ Heart attack,” my mother told me. Well, that wasn’t an accident. In the silence followed volumes of her disapproval and distaste screamed. “ He had the attack in bed. Not his own bed,” she added finally.
I almost asked “ Whose bed?” but stopped myself. It was irrelevant. I’ve known all my life that my father was a philanderer. I did not need to know which of his many mistresses had the dubious honor of being under him when his ticker - and his pecker - finally gave out.
“ You’ll be coming home for the funeral, of course,” Mother stated.
It would be unthinkable to her that I should not attend. She may never have complained about my missing Christmases and birthdays and the like, but to stay away from a family funeral, well, that would be the absolute height of social faux pas.
“ Yes, Mother, I’ll be there,” I told her.
I didn’t need to ask whether she had already informed my five siblings of our father’s demise. Of course she had. I was usually last on her to-do list. I am a never-ending well of disappointment and disgrace to my mother. I take heart, however, from knowing most of her children have been a disappointment to her in some way although I may be the only one is also a disgrace to her. Only Robert, my eldest brother, has ever managed to please her.
“ And Buckley, it might be best if you were to come unaccompanied. It is a family thing after all.”
I felt the cold tightening around my eyes of my anger rising. My mother has never been comfortable ( her word, not mine ) with the fact I have dated African American women. Hence her 'disgrace' in me. Oh, she dresses it up in various excuses…It’s just my generation, we didn’t mix the races…I can’t help being a product of my time…but bottom line, Hannah Elizabeth Archer Muldoon is a racist. She sincerely wishes that segregation had never ended, that people such as Dr King and Rosa Parks could have refrained from going around putting ideas into the
heads of ordinary black folks. Again, I take heart from knowing she is also horrified that my youngest brother Ethan dates other men.
As it happened my last girlfriend was white and we’d broken up last week, but I still chafed at my mother’s presumption.
There have been Muldoons and Archers ( Archer being my mother’s name before she married Dad ) at the heart of Charleston society since ever there was a Charleston society. They epitomize old Old Charleston, all gloriously fading wealth and perennial concern with social status. Whilst my mother embraces fully this snobbery, it left my father rebelled against it by taking on mistresses whom his snobbish contemporaries thought were ‘beneath’ him. No pun intended. Thankfully myself and my siblings, with the exception of Robert, take after our father as far as giving a fart in a whirlwind about society.
“ I’ll see you tomorrow, Mother,” I said and hung up the phone. I paused a moment, just staring into middle distance and thinking about going home, not having many good thoughts about it, and then I lifted the phone again and dialed the airport. I managed to book a cancellation seat on a direct flight to Charleston departing at ten o’clock next morning. That done, I called Rachel.
Rachel is two years older than me and lives with her husband and two children in Savannah, Georgia. She keeps in regular touch with home and so I learned more from her about our father’s sudden demise. At the time of the fatal cardiac episode he was indeed with his latest mistress who was, Rachel reported, an employee of his stable. Our father owned a stable in Camden where he produced
champion race horses.
“ So he was doing the stable girl,” I said.
“ I think she might have been the trainer,” Rachel corrected me.
“ Oh. Well, that makes it alright then.”
“ Are you disapproving of Dad?” Rachel asked, sounding surprised.
“ No.” Truth was I hardly cared who my father had been sleeping with. We all had grown up knowing he was unfaithful in his marriage, and knowing also that our mother tolerated these extra-marital meanderings so long as he was discreet about them, and continued to bring in the kind of income could keep her in the state of luxuriously functioning alcoholism to which she’d become accustomed.
“ I wonder who Dad has left the stables to?” Rachel mused.
“ Probably to you.” I figured Rachel was always good with horses, with animals in general, so it stood to reason that our father would leave his precious stables to the only one of the family knew the first thing about horses. Rachel was good with children, too, and old people. Okay, Rachel is good with everyone. She’s a people person.
The Muldoon fortune was founded in cotton. It expanded via various import and export ventures, and diversified by way of vine-growing, with a little detour into horse breeding. I have always been bored by business. Which isn’t to say I know nothing about it. In fact I know a good deal about business. It bores me because I know about it. There is very little mystique about making money, and certainly nothing creative about it. Give me someone who can pen a great masterpiece of fiction, or a painter who can bring a landscape to life on canvas, and I will worship at their feet. But a businessman is just a money-making machine in a nice suit and two hundred dollar shoes.
Rachel had not yet heard from Sean. She and Sean are twins. They look alike enough to be masculine and feminine versions of the same person, but in personality they are poles apart. Miriam, Rachel informed me, was still trying to pin down Sean’s last-known location. Miriam always was good at keeping track of things. Wandering siblings, absent pets, our mother’s daily intake of alcohol.
“ When do you get into Charleston?” Rachel asked.
“ Around midday,” I replied.
“ Don’t bother to hire a car. I’ll come pick you up from the airport.”
“ Only if it isn’t any trouble?”
“ Are you kidding?” Rachel gave a brittle laugh. “ I’ve only been here since this morning and already I want to set fire to someone. I need a break, Buck.”
“ I’ll see you at the airport then,” I said.
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