The Girl with the Stone Heart
By Scott Grand
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About this ebook
Winter has set in a small town on the California coast and a fishing vessel has been lost amongst the gray waves. Grace runs the bowling alley and ghosts through his own life. He lives in the layer of fat between the underbelly and society. He completes tasks given to him by the people who run the town and is grounded only by his aging grandmother and her weekly bingo trips.
Grace is charged with issuing payments to the fishermen’s widows. He pulls on his funeral suit and borrows his grandmother’s New Yorker. When Grace is unable to find one woman, he uncovers something that threatens the oligarchy’s reign and his way of life.
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The Girl with the Stone Heart - Scott Grand
THE GIRL WITH THE STONE HEART
Scott Grand
Copyright © 2020 by Scott Grand
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover design by Zach McCain
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Girl with the Stone Heart
About the Author
Books by the Author
Preview from this gun from Norman Court by Pablo D’Stair
Preview from Headstone’s Folly by Robert J. Randisi
Preview from The Better of the Bad by J.J. Hensley
For Marisa
I like the sound. It’s comforting somehow. The ball working its way down the lane. The clack as the pins collapse against each other.
A potbellied man gets a strike, lays them down with a singular clap. Like thunder. He does a chicken dance to celebrate.
A college couple turns in their red-and-blue clown shoes. Sizes twelve and seven. I slide their dollar fifty deposit back, hit the shoes with a slash of disinfectant spray, slide them back in their cubby.
The night goes on like that, shoes in and out, a soundtrack of strikes and spares and gutter balls and all the ooohs and ahs that go with them. At closing I flip the sign, sweep, mop in silence. The cash comes out, and I arrange them by note, rubber-band them tight, and put them in a gray little safe. The small bundles make it look big.
Upstairs, my place, I sit on a bare mattress, trade my boots for tennis shoes. The shutters are old, wooden, show me a white and cold January on the California coast. So I put on a beanie and sweats too. I used to run without music, just my footfalls and heavy breath. But my head’s too crowded for that sort of serenity anymore. There’s rap and techno in my earbuds. Something with a beat. Something to match the hate in my heart.
So I take it, put that anger into my feet and pound it into the pavement. I push white breath into the darkness and let the rhythm carry me.
Cold this winter. No snowflakes have touched the beach this season, stayed at the tree line, at the edge of city limits. But the air whispers in my ear, tells me it’s only a matter of a couple digits.
Four miles in and I’ve passed a good stretch of brown beach and gray ocean. There’s driftwood scattered along the shoreline, bleached stark and bone white from salt and sun. Looks like monster skeleton. Like some beast crawled out of the ocean, laid down on the sand to die. A sticky mist clings to me, and everything else too, and a filmy sweat works under my base layer.
Lights up ahead, on a curve where the old growth redwoods start. Alternating blue and red. Makes me want to turn around. But this eight-mile loop’s my routine, so my stride carries me toward it. The lights multiple as I near and I see a string of vehicles pulled off onto the narrow shoulder. A different logo on each one. Sherriff, police, park service, fish and game, CHP, search and rescue. And a single ambulance.
A man in a yellow slicker wades out of the ferns, holds up a palm, flashlight in the other, waves it in a way that moves me to the other side. Sharp lights reflect off the slick road sheen, lose some of their edge. The ambulance pulls away, no lights and blank faces.
A shadow crosses me, makes me turn. Blonde, kinked and curled from the rain. Her heart-shaped lips move and I unplug my earbuds. You home later?
I nod and the gathered mist falls off my beanie, hits my cheeks and splashes in my eyes.
I’ll be around later.
She nods to the lights and the redwood thicket. After a while.
Then she whips around, sends droplets flying off her windbreaker. Says DA Investigator in blocky yellow letters across the back.
I plug the buds back in, hit play, and let the sound fill my mind. But I can’t find my rhythm and my steps fall in a broken and ragged pace.
The loop takes me back to town and sidewalks and streetlights. I end at Horton’s MMA. Used to be Horton’s Boxing, two giant gloves, painted a glittering gold. Now though, it’s hidden by the new sign and a pair of black fingerless MMA gloves. It’s strange though, knowing what’s underneath. Cause when I look, all I see is the glittering gold. The rings gone, replaced by a cage. But the smell is the same, dust and sweat and hard work.
The weights are the same and I adjust the volume, get to pushing and pulling. I go until there is nothing but motion and my mind melts into a serene numbness.
Back at home, I take chilled water from the little bar fridge, tastes sweet. I shower cold, then click the dial on the boxy metal space heater and it hums to life with electric heat. The mattress is cool on my skin, and outside the mist turns to rain, pelts the roof. My eyes find a crack in the ceiling and the organic sound of the rain soothes me.
Middle of the night and my door creaks, the wet rustle of wet clothes being peeled off, and then the rush of shower water. Pale skin flashes, smooth and polished under the midnight starlight.
I’m cold,
she says.
I do my best to make it right.
Morning is hazy and foggy and the color of fresh poured concrete. The room is stuffy with burned heat and empty of the girl. An extra bottle of water has disappeared from the glass shelf in my fridge. The only sign she’d been there at all.
There’s a diner down the block, hasn’t changed the paint or the menu since I was a kid. I saddle up to a creamy scarred Formica counter edged in shiny metal, eat something called a hangover plate and drink black coffee. Small talk moves around me, last night’s game, weather, fishing, the mill. Easy things, things separate from me.
Something quiet comes through the diner, a breathy whisper of gossip. Did you hear about the Osprey? Wendell’s boat. Six men gone. Not a sign. Bless their souls. The ocean is an unforgiving mistress. Little Charlie Pofahl was only twenty-two.
Call for you hon.
Janice stretches the curly cord straight, hands me the receiver.
I hold it to my ear and wait.
Hello? Grace?
I make a sound.
You gotta get a phone. How can you not have a phone in this day and age?
I wait.
Alright. Get you big Indian ass over to the Velvet. Do it now.
Then there’s just the electric hiss.
Five blocks, hunched against the wind and drizzle, hands shoved deep into my canvas work coat. The velvet has blue awning and the drops