Dodging and Burning
A lurid crime scene photo of a beautiful murdered woman has arrived on mystery writer Bunny Prescott's doorstep with no return address--and it's not the first time she's seen it. Believing that her estranged childhood friend, Ceola Bliss, may have sent it to her, Bunny writes to her, wanting to make amends: "I remember the moment well ... your dark eyes burning and blood on your lips. You said, 'Bunny, you're a murderer. To this day, I believe it. I do.'"
The horrifying yet seductive photo was taken fifty-five years ago by a young gay man, Jay Greenwood, to whom both Bunny and Ceola had intimate ties and who first showed them the image in 1945 weeks before the end of the war. The reemergence of this photo sets both women on a journey into the past, compelling each to tell her version of what happened that summer.
At the center of the story is Jay, an amateur war photographer, wounded on the front in Belgium and home again in the little town of Royal Oak, VA, trying to mend his body and spirit. He tells Bunny and Ceola that he stumbled on a woman's corpse while exploring the woods and in a frantic gesture took pictures of the evidence. However, when he leads them to the crime scene, the body is gone. Soon, they discover that a local woman, Lily Vellum, is missing and may be the woman in the photo.
Dodging and Burning is the story of Bunny and Ceola's desire to understand the young man they both loved--a soldier ravaged by war and rejected by his home, an artist who only found solace through the lens of a camera.
photo credit: Nic Persinger, model: Julianna Corby
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(updated: August 8, 2010)
The Whitest of Dreams
Told in two time periods, The Whitest of Dreams is about a wealthy young woman's evolution into a visionary artist. On a spring night in 1923, Margaret Vanderstel vandalizes her own bedroom with an ax, and her uncle, Henry, who became her guardian after her parents died in a train accident, sends her to a private mental institution for a rest cure. At the hospital, she becomes romantically involved with a young psychologist, Avery Matthews, who finds himself drawn to her and the mystery behind her poignant yet violent outburst. As his patient, she begins to explore her emotional puzzle through art, which compels her to create haunting, life-size, humanoid sculptures.
The novel shifts between 1923 to 1995, using Margaret's journals and Avery's notes as textual bridges over time. In 1995, Colby, a young art dealer, returns to his home town, Royal Oak, Virginia, where as a boy, he encountered one of her sculptures. So potent was his impression of the figure that he wants to bring it and any others like it into the art world, taking advantage of outsider art's growing popularity. In his search for the sculptures, he meets Alice, Margaret's granddaughter, who still lives in the Vanderstel home. Love sparks between them, fueled by Colby's desire to know more about Margaret's past, which then becomes a quest to discover Alice's true parentage, particularly the identity of her grandfather, who might be the young psychologist or even the cold, possessive, lovelorn Uncle. However, the answer is more complex and surprising than either character at first imagined.
As a warning, the following section of the synopsis gives away important plot points: During Margaret's time at the hospital, she develops a close friendship with a beautiful and manipulative woman named Clea, who seems to have all the boldness, self-possession, and sexual energy Margaret desires for herself, but can't actualize. Clea has a dark secret. As a result of postpartum depression, she poisoned her husband and attempted to poison her newborn baby. In the final chapters of the novel, she and Margaret escape the hospital. While fleeing, she tells Margaret the truth about her past. When the women try to steal money from Margaret's home in order to leave town to find the orphaned daughter, Clea is shot dead by Margaret's Uncle.
In present day, Alice and Colby dig deeper until they meet characters from the past, most notably Amy Matthews, wife of the psychologist who treated Margaret. She gives them the last correspondence Margaret sent to Avery a year after Clea's death. In the letter, she admits to how she and her Uncle colluded in twisting their grief over her parents' deaths into a self-destructive fantasy, which in turn, led to her breakdown and violent reaction. The letter also reveals that, although Margaret raised Alice as her grandchild and Alice's mother as her child, Alice's mother was Clea's child. Clea was Alice's actual grandmother and the poisoned husband was her grandfather. Margaret found Clea's child and kept her as her own, finding peace by becoming what she lost years ago--a parent.
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An exploration of male bravado and the power of hazing, inspired by a horrible incident that occurred at my alma mater, in which fraternity brothers beat a goose to death with a golf club.
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