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    She's Got Her Own, an entertainment
    She's Got Her Own, an entertainment
    She's Got Her Own, an entertainment
    Ebook329 pages5 hours

    She's Got Her Own, an entertainment

    By Angus Brownfield

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    About this ebook

    She’s Got Her Own is about self-discovery, about Lizzie Mae Brown, a woman obsessed with finding the True Mother and True Father of her dreams. In her search she encounters lawyers and bikers, avarice and selflessness, and links that click into place after years of incubating. There’s crime, low and high, suspense and a little love, romantic and carnal.
    Lizzie doesn’t know Mama Eunice and Daddy Dale Brown kidnapped her, but from an early age she’s sure she’s not their child. They’ve not only conflicting temperaments, they have no roots of their own, living dog-paddle lives in quiet, humid Hephzibah, Georgia. —Until word comes of a sharp operator searching for a girl who fits Lizzie’s description, when they decamp for California.
    Lizzie’s allies: best friend Bess Slokum; lover Zack Zacchlin, an Air Marshal; talented attorney, Julian Magnin, her boss. She’s stalked by Maurice (Mondo) Astrue. Mondo’s as obsessed with finding her (and the fortune he believes awaits her as heir to a very rich lady) as she is of finding her real parents.
    Mondo’s aided by Jude Gaut, Daddy Dale’s distant cousin and a hapless biker, and by Janet Gonsalvez, a motorcycle mama with more balls than conviction. They put Mondo onto Miami attorney Florin Farnsworth, companion to the late playgirl, Angel Ducane, and guardian of the fortune she left for her kidnapped daughter, who turns out to be... Lizzie.
    At the climax, like a perfect storm, the sharp operator and his mark confront each other in a showdown that ends one life and settles the future for the other.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAngus Brownfield
    Release dateMay 20, 2011
    ISBN9781458016485
    She's Got Her Own, an entertainment
    Author

    Angus Brownfield

    Write what you know. I know me and I'm talking to you, reader, in the first person, not the anonymous third person, because when I write I write about me and the world that thrives around me. I wrote decent poetry in college, I couldn’t get the hang of short stories. I finished my first novel so many years ago writers were still sending their works to publishers instead of agents. My first novel was rejected by everyone I sent it to. The most useful rejection, by a Miss Kelly at Little, Brown, said something like this: “You write beautifully, but you don’t know how to tell a story.” Since then I've concentrated on learning to tell a good story. The writing isn’t quite so beautiful but it will do. Life intervened. Like the typical Berkeley graduate, I went through five careers and three marriages. Since the last I've been writing like there’s no tomorrow. I have turned out twelve novels, a smattering of short stories and a little poetry. My latest novel is the third in a series about a man who is not my alter ego, he’s pure fiction, but everyone he interacts with, including the women, are me. My title for this trilogy is The Libertine. Writers who have influenced me include Thomas Mann, Elmore Leonard, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and Willa Cather. I don’t write like any of them, but I wish I did. I'm currently gearing up to pay attention to marketing. Archery isn’t complete if there’s no target. I've neglected readers because I've been compulsive about putting words down on paper. Today the balance shifts.

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      She's Got Her Own, an entertainment - Angus Brownfield

      SHE’S GOT HER OWN

      An entertainment

      by Angus Brownfield

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      ***

      Published by

      Angus Brownfield on Smashwords

      Copyright © 2011 and 2016 by Angus Brownfield

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this eBook.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of any products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please download an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this Ebook and did not download it, or it was not downloaded for your use only, then you should return to the eBook retailer from whom it was acquired and download your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

      She’s Got Her Own

      For Christy Brownfield

      Them that's got shall get

      Them that's not shall lose

      So the Bible said and it still is news

      Mama may have, Papa may have

      But God bless the child that's got his own

      Billie Holiday

      Part I: Being there

      Sis

      One two three. Sis boom bah. Elbow to the throat, thumb to the eye, knee to the groin. Only her attacker isn’t in front of Lizzie Mae Brown, where she can apply her self-defense lessons, he’s ‘out there,’ attached to her by the Neither Heat nor Gloom of Night US Postal Service and, latterly, Ma Bell. He’s nameless: only the last contact, the phone call, gives her any idea of who he is: sadistic, crude, probably from around her former hometown of Hephzibah, Georgia, the telltale Georgia accent attenuated but still there. Meaning to do her harm, if only to frighten her.

      She’s the one who’s on the receiving end of the one two three, anonymous mailings, one an article about a woman dead as long as Lizzie’s been alive—Angel DuCane—and one about the dead woman’s like-named offspring . . . Lizbeth Mae Brown. And then, just a moment ago, the phone call, just when she’s settled into a hot bath with a libation and a library book, hoping to evict the two missives from her mind.

      A little more than a month after Lizzie turned twenty-five, the mailman delivered a manila envelope containing nothing but an article cut from a tabloid, commemorating the death of a notorious playgirl and gold digger, Angel DuCane. Above the headline Angel looks out from a captioned photo, doing her best to channel another suicide blonde of more lasting fame. At the end of the article are two short paragraphs about the disappearance of Angel’s infant daughter, Lizbeth Mae, dubbed ‘Li’l Angel’ in the press. The sender highlighted these paragraphs and penned beneath, Happy Birthday, Li’l Angel.

      Two Lizzie Mae Browns in the world: what’s the chance? The name of Angel DuCane’s baby has to be a fluke. Though Lizzie’s been wondering who her True Parents are since she was ten, there’s no way she is that woman’s daughter. That woman was notorious for taking off her clothes in front of the camera, for marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather, to glom onto his money. Notorious for dying at the most inopportune time in her baby’s life, leaving uncertainty about who her father really was.

      Lizzie is certain the folks who raised her, Mama Eunice and Daddy Dale Brown, aren’t her real parents, but she’s pretty sure their surname is genuinely Brown. And she’s pretty sure Lizzie Mae Brown fits what they’d pick as a baby girl’s name, a hick name, chosen by hicks. Maybe they even read about Angel DuCane’s daughter and borrowed the name, thinking it was smart.

      *****

      At age ten it all became clear to her, though the notion must have been simmering since Lizzie started classes at Willis Foreman Elementary School (in the first grade, the Browns claiming she was too smart for kindergarten) where it dawned on her how odd her family life was. No brothers or sisters, no cousins, no aunts and uncles, no grandparents. Everyone at school had cousins. Shoot, it seemed every Vietnamese kid in school was cousin to all the others. But she wasn’t used to forming thoughts for herself, not yet, though Mrs. Benson, her first grade teacher, said it wasn’t a bad thing to have an original thought once in a while. Mama Eunice and Daddy Dale, on the other hand, weren’t keen on original thoughts.

      And at first she didn’t think to ask them about family. Kinfolk would surely show up any day now. An aunt—and a husband, aunts and uncles came in pairs—would show up, on a muggy afternoon next summer, thunder off in the pine breaks, rain coming down real steady, and they’d run from their car to the front door with a raincoat over their heads or maybe newspapers, greeted with Well look who’s here.

      Only none came. And the only cousin to appear was a cousin because that’s what Mama Eunice and Daddy Dale called him, Cousin Jude, though she wasn’t about to recognize him as blood kin. He had run over her dog, Sam, pulling into the driveway pell-mell one day—or at least that’s what Mama Eunice told her. Said he had buried Sam out back, beyond the turn-around Daddy Dale had fashioned with a borrowed Bobcat. And too, when she couldn’t get to sleep at nap time one day last summer, she responded to some strange mewlings and peeked through the keyhole to Mama Eunice’s sewing room that had the spare bed, and watched Cousin Jude doing something alarming to Eunice. Yuk!

      So, finally, aged ten, she got tired of waiting for an aunt or an uncle to show up, and started asking questions. They’re all scattered acrost the country, Lizzie mine. You got plenty of cousins, they just aren’t from around here. Yet Eunice couldn’t rattle off names and locations, she shooed Lizzie out the door whilst the sun shone. These answers didn’t satisfy, oh no. They stirred Lizzie up, and when the stirring subsided it came to her: she was living a lie. She’d watched an old movie on television, where Susan Hayward said it first, but it fit. Lizzie said aloud, trying to sound like Susan Hayward, I am living a lie.

      That was when she vowed to find her True Mother and True Father.

      *****

      Oak Road is straight as a Stone Age arrow from the Pleasant Hill Bay Area Rapid Transit station to downtown Walnut Creek. There’s hardly three feet difference in elevation along its path. Apartments and condos flank this arterial, some new since BART went into operation, some old and not as fancy. Walking along Oak Road to one of the older apartment complexes is a tall woman, a youthful woman with a long stride. She’s pretty. Her long, straight hair is somewhere between chestnut and cinnamon with lots of body. In repose her face is serious, almost severe, but as she walks along she thinks a pleasant thought and her face falls easily into a smile. She hasn’t a clue that her life is about to take its next abrupt turn.

      She shares the apartment with Bess Slokum, her friend since fourth grade. From Willis Foreman Elementary School they moved on to Spirit Creek Middle School. Two more devoted friends their classmates never knew. Cliques formed and broke apart and new ones congealed, but no one ever got between Lizzie Brown and Bess Slokum—they better not.

      Unlocking the apartment door, she calls out, You home, Bess? Their apartment used to be part of a high rent complex, but it’s been humbled by lots of newer places out Geary Road and Ignacio Valley Boulevard that have more amenities. It’s snow white and ash gray, it’s efficient, it’s pretty cheap for being in Walnut Creek and so close to a BART station.

      Bess comes out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her torso, another in hand, drying her hair. Anything good in the mail? Entering the living room she sees her roommate kick off her pumps and plop onto the Salvation Army couch.

      Lizzie is still looking at the outside of the envelope.

      Aren’t you going to open it?

      See where it’s from? asks Lizzie.

      Bess takes the envelope in hand. There’s no return address.

      There’s a Hephzibah postmark, though.

      Who’s left in Hephzibah but my mother would send you anything? asks Bess.

      There’s that Cousin Jude guy, but I'm pretty sure he doesn’t know where we live.

      Well open it, girl. Lord’s sake: maybe it’s a birthday present.

      (A bit of vicarious wishful thinking; it’s late March and Lizzie’s birthday was January twenty-four. Bess’s is coming up, though.)

      Lizzie goes in the kitchen and comes back with a paring knife. She slits the end of the envelope above the brass clasp, flexes the edges, blows in the envelope to widen it, and pulls out the contents.

      The photo catches her eye, the lip-licking grin and exaggerated curves of a woman she knows only as a one-time vamp of brief fame, dead, now, as long as Lizzie’s been alive. This vamp, Angel DuCane, was a genuine stripper who made it into the age of topless-bottomless clubs via the cover of Penthouse and eventually one of its centerfolds. The article recounts Angel DuCane’s rise to fame, her marriage to Mr. James Tyler Brown, who left her tons of money, her premature death (linked, the article hints, to excessive drug use) and the cult that’s grown up around her.

      Towards the end of the article the anonymous sender has highlighted a paragraph about the disappearance of Angel DuCane’s daughter, Li’l Angel, Brown, a mere six months old when her mother died, the object of a fierce legal battle, not for custody but merely to be named the father of this miniature heiress, who on her birth certificate was named Lizbeth Mae Brown: out of Rosa Mae Bonner (Angel DuCane’s real name) by Florin Farnsworth, though the child’s last name is that of James Tyler Brown, big in precious metals and oil drilling equipment.

      (Farnsworth, some assert, put his name on the certificate while Angel was busy posing for paparazzi from her maternity ward bed.)

      The article goes on to state that before the men besides Mr. Brown claiming to be Lizbeth’s father could produce evidence of paternity (DNA matching still a gleam in some biologist’s eye in 1982) the baby was snatched from the protective custody of the dead woman’s lawyer—the same Florin Farnsworth—and disappeared for good.

      You know, says Lizzie, whose only evidence of emotion on reading this colorful tale is a slight tremor in her hands, there’s a new way to lift fingerprints using X-rays. Supposed to be good for getting prints off paper. She knows this because she’s a part-time student in criminal justice administration and criminology.

      But, replies Bess, you have to have someplace to match the prints. You gonna bring the FBI in on this?

      On some wacko’s idea of a joke? Heck no.

      If I were you I’d be royally pissed at whoever sent this shit to you. It’s no sane person’s idea of a joke.

      Now don’t you jump to judgment. Don’t you think I look like her? Lizzie asks, striking the deceased’s classic over-the-shoulder glamour pose.

      Go on.

      Sure. Notice the hairline, the cheekbones? I could be her sister.

      Bee ess you could. She looks slutty as hell.

      Don’t talk that way about my mama, girl, Lizzie says, resurrecting her Georgia accent.

      Buffing her hair one last time, Bess goes back to her bedroom and closes the door. She’s a security guard at Diablo Valley Mall. She comes out in her summer uniform, white slacks and a white, short-sleeved polo shirt. At work she will add a utility belt with a can of pepper spray and a walkie-talkie suspended from it. She has pinned on her shirt the gold badge which she calls her badge of authority, allowing her to go up to rowdy mall rats and talk them out of rowdy behaviors.

      "Remember, darlin’, it ain’t behavior, it’s behaviors with an ess," Bess said while training for the job.

      She sees her roommate pacing the living room, article in hand. What?

      Lizzie turns, frown lines centered above her nose. It’s not the cockeyed coincidence, that baby’s name and mine, it’s that someone wanted to rub my nose in it. Who’d do such a thing?

      When I get off work tonight, if you’re still up, we’ll talk. But I wouldn’t get your knickers in a bunch about it. It’s some jerk—

      —Who knows where I live. Who knows I had a birthday recently. Who’s jumped on the fact that me and the baby of this Angel DuCane woman happen to have the same name.

      Bess has moved back to the bathroom and is blow-drying her hair. She gestures with a hairbrush to indicate she can’t hear.

      Lizzie lifts her skirt and sheds her pantyhose, then goes in the kitchen—almost a kitchenette: not much larger than the galley on a forty foot sloop—and pours a glass of milk.

      The hair dryer stops. The door to the bathroom closes, there’s a flush. When Bess emerges Lizzie says, I’m making fried chicken and garlic mashed potatoes for dinner. Shall I make enough for you?

      You always do.

      It’s ten to four, time for Bess to leave for work. She’s half a head shorter than her roommate and, by comparison, plain in appearance: brunette, average size everywhere, a woman a male contemporary wouldn’t look at twice, although she has eyes as beautiful as Lizzie’s and looks streamlined in her Speedo. The two women hug.

      Could be a lead, Lizzie. I don’t know what you’d find online, but you might want to do an Internet search.

      Find out about this Angel DuCane.

      Or check out jerks in Hephzibah.

      Nab some shoplifters, hear?

      Bess is out the door. Lizzie hops over the back of the couch and plops down, to study the sender’s handwriting, as if some inspiration will come of it. Her frown fluctuates between anger and confusion. This sensational article is a reminder of a long-held conviction but not the kind she wants. This isn’t the True Mother of her dreams; this is a woman she doesn’t want to be associated with. A confirmation sent to her by someone who knows more about her than she cares for anyone but a friend to know.

      What good can come of this?

      Boom

      You get a jolt like that, you expect a second helping, the proverbial other shoe that’s bound to drop. And it does.

      The second prong of this three-pronged assault on Lizzie’s peace of mind has two components, a thumb to the eye and thwack with a wet noodle. Part one: another plain brown envelope with no return address. Part two: a pale lavender envelope with flowers decorating the corners, stationery she instantly recognizes as Mama Eunice’s. They arrive in the mail the same day, though the postmarks are dated a day apart. One was mailed or sorted in Hephzibah, the other North Augusta—a crow’s flight of twenty miles away.

      She opens this plain brown envelope with her thumb. It yields an article clipped from a newspaper, the masthead and date missing. The yellowed paper and faded ink tell her the article is from some time ago. It’s about the kidnapping of Angel DuCane’s daughter, Li’l Angel, from the home of Angel’s lawyer, Florin Farnsworth.

      On seeing the name she sits, feeling the way she does after a second espresso.

      She calls out, Bess? You home?

      No answer.

      Bess! She sits for a moment, then gets up, losing her balance and reaching for the back of the couch to steady herself as she enters the kitchen and opens the fridge to find orange juice. After a glass of juice she goes into her room and sits at the computer. As she waits for it to boot up, she reads the article.

      *****

      LI’L ANGEL TAKEN

      Deceased Beauty’s Baby Stolen

      Lizbeth Mae Brown, dubbed Li’l Angel by the press, has apparently been kidnapped and her whereabouts at this time are unknown.

      A couple posing as relatives of the late oil drilling equipment tycoon, James Tyler Brown, overpowered the nanny caring for the daughter of the late Angel DuCane (Angela) Brown at her lawyer’s Key Biscayne villa and fled by taxi with the baby.

      Florin Farnsworth, Ms. DuCane’s lawyer and companion in her last months, was named the child’s temporary guardian shortly after the celebrity’s death a month ago.

      The incident, which authorities are calling a kidnapping, took place before noon today, while Farnsworth was in a hearing in the 11th Judicial Circuit concerning the paternity of the child, who was born seven months ago.

      Farnsworth now claims paternity, though earlier he had stated that the child was conceived by artificial insemination, from cryogenically preserved sperm donated by Ms. Brown’s late husband. To cloud the paternity issue further, Farnsworth is named as father on the birth certificate, a copy of which the News obtained from the Miami-Dade County registrar of vital statistics.

      No other staff were present at the villa, which is gated, when the kidnapping took place. The couple gained entry to the house, bringing presents and visiting with the baby for about fifteen minutes, then called a taxi to take them back to their hotel. While they waited, the woman, described as matronly but stylishly dressed, chatted with the nanny, Maxine Sheridan, and before the taxi arrived, Ms. Sheridan alleges, the man placed a cloth saturated with something that smelled like ether over her face and forcibly restrained her until she passed out.

      Ms. Sheridan remembers nothing until Mr. Farnsworth returned from court and found her lying on the couch in the drawing room. She is vague about the details of where the couple said they were from, although she believes they had Southern accents.

      (An anesthesiologist at Paramount Medical Center said the short-term memory loss and other symptoms exhibited by Ms. Sheridan suggest the use of chloroform. The physician, who spoke on background, said that the dose needed to render an adult woman unconscious was far more than the few drops typically used in cinematic depictions of chloroform anesthesia.

      (Chloroform in such doses is dangerous, the doctor stated. When widely used in surgery, it was known to sometimes cause cardiac arrhythmias in patients, he added.)

      Police detective Jack Alvarez said that a check of cab companies operating in Key Biscayne turned up a trip logged from Farnsworth’s address to the Royal Atlantic Hotel, but no such persons were said to be registered there. No one at the hotel remembers a couple fitting the kidnappers’ descriptions carrying a baby in the lobby or other public rooms.

      A Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesperson said that a request has been made to the FBI field office in North Miami Beach to participate in the search for the baby on the basis of her being a kidnap victim.

      Special Agent in Charge Stanley Heguy has asked that anyone with information regarding the whereabouts of the infant contact the FBI’s North Miami Beach office at (305) 555-1155. Persons with information may also contact the Florida Department of Law Enforcement at (305) 555-FDLE (3353).

      According to an AP wire service release, Mr. Farnsworth said there would be a substantial reward for information leading to the baby’s safe return.

      *****

      This time there’s no penned message, nothing giving away anything about the sender. Still, Lizzie, feeling as if she’s been chloroformed herself, sits staring at the computer wallpaper as she ponders the article. Turning to the keyboard at last, she clicks the Internet search icon and waits for the connection.

      The note in the lavender envelope holds no threat. The hand, pure Palmer Method, is definitely Eunice’s, the message the kind of mealy-mouthed admission she might expect. Except that, this missive with no return address comes from the same neck of the woods as the other two, the sleazoid article and the newspaper clipping. There’s a connection, there has to be. The Hephzibah Browns perfidy has taken on a fuller meaning.

      *****

      The first prong gave her pause, the second is about to interrupt what she’d seen as a logical progression, lining up her ducks and then going forth to find her True Parents. At one time the way had seemed simple and clear. Lizzie would become a private detective, Bess would become a police officer, then they would track down her True Parents. Now she wasn’t so sure there might have been a better way. Here came two messages from the Universe, one confirming what she’d known in her bones since ten—no way Dale and Eunice were her folks—the other trying to tell her she was the offspring of a notorious gold digger and playgirl.

      Angel DuCane really was her mother while Mama Eunice had always claimed to be but definitely wasn’t. Lizzie didn’t know the first, even after two not so subtle hints from the Universe, and was no more certain of the second, after Mama Eunice’s confession, than she had been at age ten. It was with a Gila monster’s tenacity that she had clung to her private reality, that she must find her real parents before she could picture her own future. It takes grit for a child to do that; she’s paying for the grit in living a life that is ever provisional.

      If you’d seen her walking into the Walnut Creek apartment she shared with Bess Slokum, the day she got the first inkling of her real origins, you’d have to have been a Charlie Chan or Hercule Poirot to spot the resemblance to Angel DuCane. Not the height, she’s taller. Given a slight flush after the brisk walk from the BART station, she is still of higher color. Her hair color isn’t too different from Angel’s original light auburn, but Lizzie’s had never seen a bottle of bleach, while no one had seen her mother as anything but a suicide blonde from her sixteenth birthday to her premature death.

      Still, there is a resemblance. If you’d watched her sort mail in the apartment’s foyer, you’d notice Lizzie’s hands are small for her height and weight, but always look capable and shapely—a gene donated by Angel DuCane. She has a habit of chewing on her lower lip when concentrating, once an Angel DuCane trait as well. In repose her face is more serious than her mother’s but, when she smiles, the transition from repose to sparkle reminds you of Angel in one of her famous underwear ads, knowing and innocent at once.

      Lizzie is fighting the idea suggested by the two missives. She reads them over again and again, hoping for some insight, some memory or merely a dollop more wisdom, to contradict what they are telling her.

      And the whiny letter from Eunice, which she merely scans, does nothing but make her angry. Some anonymous bastard is toying with her, suggesting paternity a thousand miles from the image of the True Mother she carries in her heart. Eunice is admitting that she had lied her whole lifetime, to what possible end? Could she be in cahoots with the person sending these clippings?

      Bess sees her roomie’s jaw muscles working, knows she’s grinding her teeth, knows her pal well enough to know she’s getting madder than hell. Hey, Sis, how about a run?

      Bah!

      She’d been out for a run with her roommate on a unseasonably hot April afternoon. Normally she won’t run in the heat, and Bess wouldn’t have encouraged her to, except she needed an outlet for what was going on inside her. She needed the run to work off rising anger.

      Lizzie and Bess got back from their run when it was time for Bess to go to work at the Mall. She took a quick shower, ran a comb through the naturally wavy hair Lizzie envied every day, and took off in a rush to keep from being late. Her last words were, Don’t let the bastards wear you down, girl, you’re gonna find your real parents.

      Alone and still grim despite the run, Lizzie drew a bath. As the water ran she filled a lowball glass with ice, gin and lemon peel and grabbed the novel on her night stand. She also set the cordless phone on the toilet seat cover, hoping for a call from her boyfriend, Zack. She stripped down and eased herself into the water—slowly; it was almost scalding. When she’d squirmed herself into a comfortable position she reached over her right shoulder to pick up the gin, taking a first taste: piney, lemony, icy. She turned the other way and took up the novel, about a thirtyish man, a whisker shy of grand larcenist and male chauvinist pig, snookering a global oil cartel. She set the gin next to the phone and found her place, a hot scene in which the semi-larcenist-pig was getting The Treatment from a casual acquaintance while talking crude oil futures over a satellite phone.

      She took a second, more generous taste of gin and read for not more than a minute, beginning to let go of her chagrin as the protagonist’s phone call wound down and The Treatment got serious . . . when her own phone rang. Caller ID displayed RESTRICTED, not Zack, but then Zack, being an air marshal, didn’t always use either of his cell phones. So she said hello in a tone of voice meant to convey mild impatience at the interval since his last call.

      A man said, in an accent not quite suggestive of Hephzibah, "I know where you live, missy. You stay right there and I’ll come over and take your breath away. Then I’ll really take your breath away—y’understand me?"

      She’s dumbstruck for the three seconds it takes for adrenalin to kick in. She says, voice wavering between anger and fear, "No, you stay right where you are, buster. I’m gonna come over and cut your guts out and strangle you with them," slamming the phone down before the creep can reply.

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