Category: PART OF A SERIES
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TROUBLE IN PARADISE, CHAPTER VII, The Aftermath
THE FINAL CHAPTER OF THIS SEVEN PART STORY Fort Stockton had seen strange endings before, but the conclusion of the Melba Duncan affair managed to land somewhere between Biblical justice and a county commission meeting that ran too long. Folks who had followed the trial closely agreed on one thing: nobody would have written it…
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TROUBLE IN PARADISE, CHAPTER VI: The Twist
CHAPTER VI OF A SEVEN PART STORY Fort Stockton had a long memory and a short attention span. The first meant people remembered things they probably shouldn’t. The second meant they were usually too distracted to connect those memories until someone interesting showed up and stirred the pot. That someone, lately, was Parker McHale. Folks…
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TROUBLE IN PARADISE, CHAPTER V: Taking Sides
CHAPTER V OF A SEVEN PART STORY If Fort Stockton had a smell that week, it was diesel, damp limestone, and something faintly metallic that clung to the back of your throat and defied any attempt to cough it out. It wasn’t just the kind of smell that lingered in the air. It moved into…
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TROUBLE IN PARADISE, CHAPTER IV: Measured Justice
CHAPTER IV OF A SEVEN PART STORY His name was Daniel Mercer, though in Fort Stockton he quickly became “Danny” whether he liked it or not. He was thirty-four years old, which in West Texas is that delicate age where you are either “a promising young man” or “a boy who hasn’t learned better yet.”…
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TROUBLE IN PARADISE, CHAPTER III: The Reckoning
CHAPTER III OF A SEVEN PART STORY Folks in Fort Stockton got used to seeing Howie Hermleigh around town in a brand-new Lincoln Continental. That didn’t mean they didn’t talk about it and speculate like amateur weathermen predicting a storm blowing in over the Davis Mountains. Amateur weathermen, it should be noted, are hardly ever…
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TROUBLE IN PARADISE, CHAPTER II: The Undertaker
CHAPTER II OF A SEVEN PART STORY Folks in Fort Stockton are mostly cut from a conservative cloth. They believe in Jesus and John Wayne, generally in that order, though there are days when the order gets quietly reversed without anyone filing a complaint. They consider the right to bear arms biblical, the right to…
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TROUBLE IN PARADISE, Chapter I: The Widow
CHAPTER I OF A SEVEN PART STORY Melba Lambert was born the oldest of three girls in a white-painted frame house about four miles past what Fort Stockton at that time dared to call its city limits. The house sat low against the wind, not for comfort but for survival, the way an old dog…
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CLASS OF ‘43, CHAPTER V – Mercury Rising
THE LAST OF FIVE CHAPTERS By the late 1950s, the Cattle Baron Hotel had become Fort Stockton’s most dependable lie. It stood there with its clean brick and bright windows like it had been built for good news, like it existed for weddings and anniversaries and men in hats shaking hands with other men in…
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CLASS OF ‘43, CHAPTER IV – Victoria Vernon
CHAPTER IV OF FIVE Virginia Vernon often felt as though she were watching her life rather than living it. Not unhappily, exactly. More distantly. As if she were seated several rows back in the Bijou, the house lights dimmed, the screen glowing silver and enormous, and the woman at the center of the picture only…
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CLASS OF ’43, Chapter III: Boone Beckett
CHAPTER III OF FIVE Boone Beckett learned early that some lives arrive with instructions and some do not. His parents came to Fort Stockton when Boone was five, towing their future behind them in a rented trailer that rattled like it didn’t trust the road. His father followed oil the way other men followed weather,…