Guest Author
June 2001
author of Stream of Death
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Author bio:
This month's featured book giveaway:
Mystery writer, playwright, and part-time actor Bill Stackhouse has a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering from General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan, and a Masters Degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
At Ford Motor Company and later, as Director of Quality Assurance & Training at a large automotive parts supplier, Bill became involved in the development of instructional manuals and training films. In the throws of a mid-life crisis, he decided to pursue the most enjoyable aspect of his job on a full-time basis—writing.
Bill's scriptwriting credits include training films and promotional videos for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to name a few. He has also written numerous radio and TV commercials.
Branching out from technical writing into the arts, four of Bill's seven stage plays (The Best Laid Plans, The Early Bird, To Serve and Protect, and A Tradition of Service) have won contests—a local, a statewide, a regional, and a national.
In addition to playwriting, Bill has directed many productions for various community theatres. For a very brief time, he even had a theatre company of his own.
After filling his gas tank at a truck stop on I-65, Bill entered the station and slipped on the wet floor. While in a dazed state, he thought he heard the ghost of John Barrymore say, "If you offer it, they will come." Thinking that the late, great actor was referring to theatre, Bill promptly formed Road Show with the Vagabond Players and set out to tour six mid-size cities in Northern Alabama and Southern Tennessee.
After an initial 5-play season, meager attendance, and a debt of many, many dollars, RSVP folded. Only then did Bill realize that the voice he had heard was not that of John Barrymore's ghost, but of Bubba Barrymore, the fry-cook at the truck stop. Bubba, of course, had not been talking about theatre, but about tractor pulls and monster truck rallies.
Bill and his very patient wife Arlene live in North Alabama where he works as a scriptwriter for a multimedia production firm and continues to write mystery novels and stage plays.
Only rarely does he wake up anymore in the middle of the night, haunted by the sound of one hand clapping.
Excerpt from Stream of Death: An Ed McAvoy Mystery:
Introducing Catskill Sleuth Ed McAvoy
Even with a left leg shattered by a drug dealer's bullet and a medical retirement from the Detroit Police Force, former homicide captain Ed McAvoy feels he’s too young to be put out to pasture. True, he thinks, being Police Chief of Peekamoose Heights, a quiet, sleepy little village in New York’s Catskills, will be a far cry from what he has been used to, but it still will be police work―his first love. Besides, McAvoy reasons, the chief's job will also afford him the opportunity to pursue his second love―trout fishing. With the slower pace in the Catskills, being Chief of Police in Peekamoose Heights will be sort of like running a country club, or so he thinks. After all, how much crime can there be? Some occasional petty theft, maybe a little vandalism, perhaps a few drunk-and-disorderly incidents? And every so often, he figures, someone might die―but, then, it probably will be an old person whose time has just run out, or a victim of an unfortunate accident.
McAvoy soon discovers that his skills as a homicide detective will not atrophy from lack of use in Peekamoose Heights. Murder, as it turns out, is an equal-opportunity crime that not only resides in large bustling cities like Detroit, but in sleepy little Catskill villages like Peekamoose Heights as well.
In Stream of Death, the first book in the Ed McAvoy Mystery Series, the famed Isabela Pendant disappears amid a hail of machine-pistol bullets during the closing days of WWII in Sicily. When it temporarily resurfaces in Detroit after fifty-some years, six people are murdered. Now, four years later, a dog has dug it up in the woods near McAvoy’s peaceful Catskill village of Peekamoose Heights.
For a free autographed copy of Stream of Death: Go to Bill Stackhouse's website (http://www.billstackhouse.com) and download the first three chapters of Stream of Death.
After you've read them, go back to the website and sign his guest book, but instead of including your phone number in the appropriate box, record the answer to the following question:
Who is the editor/publisher of the Ashokan Register?
From all the correct answers received during the month of June, Bill will randomly select one to receive an autographed copy of Stream of Death (DON'T FORGET TO INCLUDE YOUR ADDRESS IN THE GUESTBOOK).
For everyone else who participates, each quarter they'll receive a recipe from one of the restaurants featured in his books. This quarter's receipe is for Beer & Cheese Soup from Porky Jarvis at The Plough & Whistle Pub in Peekamoose Heights. Next quarter's is for Osso Buco from Carmine Bellafiore, the head chef at Garibaldi House.
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First, a few notes on some of the characters who will be mentioned in this scene.
Ed McAvoy is the Chief of Police of the village.
John Desmond is the rector of the local Episcopal Church. He’s also a CPA with an office in the village.
Sergeant Martin Bassett is a Deputy Sheriff for Ulster County, New York.
Dr. Ben Krider runs a local clinic called The Poplars.
McAvoy, Fr. Desmond, Sergeant Bassett, and Dr. Krider play darts every Thursday night at The Plough & Whistle Pub.
The pub is owned by Porky Jarvis and his sister Stevie Henderson. Stevie is McAvoy’s girlfriend.
There is also a character in this scene named Cynthia DuMont, who is sort of a flake, a flirt, and for those of you sisters with even an ounce of feminism in your blood, someone whom you won’t particularly care for.
However, I think, Theresa Hitchcock you will care for.
Theresa is an Episcopal Priest who has come to the village to substitute for John Desmond while he’s away. In this scene, she has just finished with evening vespers and has driven over to The Plough & Whistle.
* * *
Originally, Theresa had wandered in and sat herself down at a small table for two against the back wall. She felt pretty good about her first service at St. Mary’s. John’s note had said to expect only the regular quintet so she had been surprised to see thirty-eight parishioners in the pews when she intoned the opening greeting.
Must be the curiosity factor at work, she thought. But even so, it pleased her.
Seeing Theresa by herself, Ben Krider came over and collected her, informing the lady priest that part of her official duties as John Desmond’s replacement included taking his spot in the Thursday-night dart tournament. She graciously accepted, thinking about how difficult it would be to leave this village when John returned. It differed so much from downtown Manhattan. The people here were so very friendly.
Had she known the doctor better, she would have realized that friendliness comprised only half of his motive for insisting that she join the group. Although Martin Bassett usually ended up losing the dart tournament, it was not an absolute certainty. Sometimes the blind-squirrel theory came into play. The ever-frugal Ben figured that the more people in the game, the less his own chances became of coming in last.
Martin, ever the male chauvinist, unilaterally decided that the girls shouldn’t be required to throw darts, since it obviously wouldn’t be a fair contest and that only the men should take the line and compete for the entire tab. Cynthia, who thoroughly enjoyed being pampered and treated like a princess, oohed and cooed over this noble gesture.
Theresa, silently fuming over the patronizing use of the word "girls," simply walked over to the wall and removed the clutch of missiles from the dart board. After setting all but three of them on the table, she moved behind the hockey line and flicked the first dart into the triple-eighteen. With no more than a second or two between throws to take aim, her next two darts scored a triple-twenty and a single twenty-five that was only a gnat’s whisker out of the bull’s-eye.
She turned to Martin, folded her hands just below her chin, batted her eyelashes and asked in a pitiful little voice, "Mr. big, strong deputy man, would you please add those up for me? You know how awful we girls are at mathematics."
Martin stood staring at the dart board with his mouth agape. He didn’t just see three individual darts that totaled up to one-hundred-and-thirty-nine points. He saw his worst nightmare about to come true. It was bad enough getting beat almost every week by John, Ben, and McAvoy, but to get beat by a girl? So strong were his feelings of dread that he even imagined feeling a twinge in his groin as his testicles shrunk down in size by half.
Martin’s premonition had come true. They had played five matches. McAvoy and Ben had each won two apiece and Theresa had won one. Worse than that, Martin had not even won one leg of any of the matches and now sat there holding the tab in his hand, going through the calculations in his mind.
He couldn’t believe the amount entered below the total line. Usually, the four regulars just had two pitchers of beer. This tab included dinner for five, drinks before and after, and four pitchers. He was going to have to schedule himself for a lot of road-patrol overtime to make this up.
"Add it up any way you like, Martin, but it still comes out that high," Stevie said, patiently standing beside his chair with her tray extended, waiting for the deputy to haul out his wallet.
Over behind the bar, Porky loudly cleared his throat. When Martin turned and looked at the barkeeper’s round, innocent cherub face, Porky cracked his knuckles and asked, "Might tonight just be the night, do you suppose, hmm?"
Martin glanced again at the total of the tab, added Stevie’s fifteen percent, then doubled that amount. He tried swallowing the lump in his throat but it wouldn’t go down so he took a swig of beer and looked again at the dart board. He hadn’t thrown badly tonight. Everyone else had just been on their game.
Maybe tonight is the night, he thought. "Usual rules?" he asked, warming to the challenge.
"Usual rules," Porky confirmed, removing a tungsten/nickel tournament-quality dart from a black leather case and attaching a chromolux flight to it.
"You’ll enjoy this," McAvoy whispered across the table to Theresa and Cynthia. Then he stood, crossed to the wall and turned the dart board around so that the concentric circles, numbered one through ten from the outside in, faced the room.
Whenever Porky found himself in a particularly playful mood, he would offer someone the opportunity to throw darts with him—the stakes being double or nothing on that person’s tab. The rules of the game varied, depending on the quality of the opponent. For Martin Bassett, Porky would throw only one dart to Martin’s two; however, if Porky’s dart hit the bull’s-eye, he would be declared the winner, regardless of Martin’s total score. It was a sucker bet. After thirty years of pub-crawling in England and daily practice on the board in The Plough & Whistle, Porky could hit the bull’s-eye nineteen out of twenty times.
After his first humiliating encounter with the double-or-nothing bet on a snowy December night, Martin had whined until Porky agreed to a further modification of the rules. The normal throwing line, or hockey line as it was called, was at a distance of seven feet, nine-and-a-half inches from the wall. In an extremely weak and generous moment, Porky had agreed that he would throw from a line twelve feet from the target. At that distance, Porky’s accuracy slipped to a mere fourteen out of twenty.
As Martin and Porky finished shaking hands before taking up positions behind their respective throwing lines, Cynthia made a grand production of coming over and kissing each one of Martin’s darts for luck. Then she planted a final kiss full on the deputy’s lips.
"And, what about me?" Porky asked, as if his heart were broken. "Am I to be reduced to having only my little sister give me a good luck kiss?"
Theresa, stood and walked over to the portly bartender, made a small sign of the cross over his dart, looked at Cynthia then back at Porky, shrugged her shoulders and smiled. "We each do what we do best," she said, then returned to her seat.
Whether or not the power of the blessing overshadowed the power of the kiss would be discussed for months to come, but this night turned out to be one of the fourteen in twenty. Martin, who’s pitiful score of fifteen would have won if Porky had not hit the bull’s-eye, dug into his wallet and laid the required number of bills on Stevie’s tray. Everyone thanked Martin for his hospitality, then they all, except Martin, walked out to the street together—Ben for his short drive to The Poplars, Theresa for her even-shorter drive back to the rectory, and McAvoy to take Cynthia over to her home on the slopes of Big Indian Mountain.
Stream of Death: an Ed McAvoy Mystery
By Bill Stackhouse
From Poisoned Pen Press - ISBN: 1-890208-56-6
Copyright © 2001 Bill Stackhouse
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