Wordcount Wednesday Thursday

(It's at 20K now, but the widgets won't cooperate.)

This week I've had a lot of fun skunking my characters, dousing them in tomatoes and then not giving them the dessert they wanted. In return (they must be very forgiving characters!) the real mystery of the matter is finally appearing. If I mean to tie it up in 17 days, some action had best come soon!

It must have been a bad night in the kitchen, was all that I could figure, and continued in preparing my little snack only a little more disturbed than before. Suddenly, as I was spooning a glowing amber gem of apricot jam out of its ribbed glass jar, a horrible little chill went up and down my spine. I froze on my stool with the spoon at half mast, holding my breath and listening.

Funny how these little spooks can come upon us in the dark of the night, when we are all alone with no one within distance to say "hello, did you hear that?" and then laugh together when it turns out to be the cat. Funny how they make our hearts pound and our lives go still for just a moment, while an unexplained cart goes rumbling down our road. Surely you have had such things happen to you? I guess that I was lucky that there *was* indeed someone there to laugh with, though I hd not known it a moment before.

As I sat there, poised and listening, I suddenly thought of my father back in Oak Grove and how very very much I could have liked to been there just at that moment. Then the hair on the back of my neck rose straight up and I'm sure my eyes were as big as saucers as I heard the back kitchen door squeaking open. In fact, I caught my own reflection in the copper bottomed pots above my head and the sight of myself looking so silly shook me out of it and into the role of watching a figure slip into the room behind me.

- randomly chosen excerpt