Shaded Light: The Case of the Tactless Trophy Wife: A Paul Manziuk and Jacquie Ryan Mystery (The Manziuk and Ryan Mysteries Book 1) (61 page)

Acknowledgements

I'd like to acknowledge the role books have played in my life. From Hans Christian Anderson’s
Fairy Tales
and
Alice In Wonderland
through
Trixie Beldon
and
Little Women
to
The Grapes of Wrath
and
Crime and Punishment
, and countless other titles, I've been entertained, challenged, and delighted through words on pages.

When I'm feeling blue, I reread the work of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen, Desmond Bagley, Dick Francis, Louis L’Amour, and other authors I love. Books are more than words on a page; they're my friends.

I also have to acknowledge my debt to a different kind of writer. Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, and other songwriters taught me at an early age the magic of how a few words could carry volumes in emotion and depth of meaning. As I write, the poetic music of Ian Tyson, Prairie Oyster, Clay Walker, Paul Brandt, or Brad Paisley drowns out the rest of the world.

And there are a few people I need to thank for their practical help and encouragement. My great-uncle Frank for introducing me to the fascinating world of books when I was seven years old and knew little beyond Dick and Jane. Drama teacher Bob Wilton for opening my eyes to creativity. Professor Barney Thordarson for keeping me awake in those 8:30 AM first-year English classes and teaching me how to organize my thoughts. Professor J. W. Grant for challenging my mind with 16th- and 17th-century literature. Margaret Epp and Maxine Hancock for letting me see that writers are “ordinary people,” too. Norman Rohrer, Leslie Keylock, Ken Peterson, and Larry Matthews for their advice and encouragement. Audrey Dorsch for maintaining a writing conference so I could meet writers and editors, learn, and later try my wings. Former policewoman Gail Hayes for her advice on Jacquie’s character. The people at
Writer’s Digest
for producing all the wonderful books I've used as resources. Crime Writers of Canada, Sisters in Crime, and Murder Must Advertise for helping me learn the ropes and find community. The many writers I now count as friends, especially those who are members of The Word Guild.

Thanks to Laurel Schunk of St Kitts Press who first published
Shaded Light
in hard cover.

Finally, I would like to thank Carole Anne Nelson, who I met at Bouchercon in Denver in 2000. I was lost in a sea of strangers, wondering what on earth I was doing there. I was sitting alone at a table near the registration area when Carole Anne arrived. She set her belongings down on a chair near me, and we ended up talking for nearly an hour. Later, she invited me to be on a panel she was moderating at Malice Domestic and treated me as if I belonged there. Carole Anne left us too soon, but I'll always remember her as a larger than life person who welcomed me into the mystery community and made me feel I belonged.

And, of course, I have to thank my family. My four sons for letting me spend hours cooped up in my room plotting and writing and rewriting. My husband for doing many of the household chores to give me time. And also for encouraging (challenging?) me to write this book in the first place. One Christmas many years ago, I threw down a library book in disgust and made the typical, “I could do better than that!”

My husband, while giving me “the look,” said, “Then why don’t you?”

So I did.

Bonus Materials

Author's Tales

Shortly after
Shaded Light
came, out, I had the opportunity to write an article about writing the book for the
Mystery Reader
.

It took a few tries to get down on paper what I wanted to say. It was almost as though I first had to get permission from Paul Manziuk and Jacqueline Ryan.…

“What exactly are you going to tell them about us?” Jacquie asks, her piercing dark eyes riveted on mine.

I shrink back a little on the loveseat where I have been eating brownies and drinking tea.

“She’ll tell them the facts,” Manziuk drawls from his recliner as he casts aside the front page of today’s newspaper and searches for the sports pages. “What else would you expect?”

I open my mouth, but Jacquie is before me. “Facts? You mean our ages and stuff like that? So I become a 28-year-old Jamaican-born female, five nine, 140 pounds, with dark brown skin and short black curly hair. And you’re a 47-year-old Caucasian male of Ukrainian ancestry, born in Canada, height six five, weight 235 pounds, dark brown hair. That might describe us for a wanted bulletin, but–”

Manziuk opens the sports pages. “I expect she’ll tell them how she first thought of us way back in 1982, but didn’t actually get us into print until 2000. And how we more or less leapt full-blown into her mind once she decided she wanted a male and female so we’d be able to talk and argue and all that.”

Jacquie’s voice is scornful. “We’ve heard that stuff hundreds of times. And how she isn’t Ukrainian or black, but she is a woman.”

Keeping his eyes on the paper, Manziuk says, “She pretty well had to be a woman or a man.”

“True. And she knows a lot of people, so she got ideas from them. And then there’s all the research she does.”

“Must be nice to devour all those books and call it research.” Manziuk is looking for something in the paper.

Jacquie crosses her arms in front of her chest. “But none of that tells beans about who we are.”

“Don’t you think she knows that?” Manziuk finds the baseball scores. He takes a sip of coffee and prepares to read them. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

Jacquie jumps up and begins pacing. I pull my feet in so she doesn’t trip over me.

“I’m not worried,” she says. “It’s just—oh, you have no idea!”

Manziuk sighs before setting down the paper and looking up at his partner. “What are you talking about now?”

“You just keep plodding away, oblivious to everything. You’ve never had to fight for anything, never had to scheme and plot and scratch to get what you wanted.”

Manziuk frowns. “I don’t see—”

“Look at you!” Her voice changes, becoming sing-songy and high-pitched. “Fresh out of high school, you decide to become a policeman. So you apply and they accept you. You breeze through the training and next thing you know you’re on the force, starting at the bottom, but ready to work your way up. Then you marry your high school sweetheart, and the two of you buy a little house and start a family. And you get promotions and your family grows, and now here you are, Detective-Inspector, happily married, with three great kids, the oldest working on a doctorate in ancient history at Oxford, no less.” She has to stop to take a breath before blurting out, “Your whole life is perfect! And you just take it for granted. It makes me so—so—”

“Angry?” Manziuk suggests.

She bares her teeth. “What really gets me is that you don’t even know how easy you’ve had it. You don’t even—”

“My life hasn’t been all that easy,” he says quietly, his deep, calm voice quenching hers like water quenches a fire. “You only know what you see; not every detail. You don’t know what it was like to grow up as the son of Ukrainian refugees. Or why I decided to become a cop in the first place. Or how Loretta and I struggled, especially when the kids were young and my hours were so long and stressful—how much she sacrificed to keep us together and to keep the kids safe and happy. You have no idea how many times I’ve wanted to quit, or how many times I’ve been tempted to go outside the lines…. There’s a lot you don’t know.”

For a moment she is subdued. But only for a moment. “Still, you have no idea how hard it is to be black. And female. Ever since I can remember, I’ve had to fight my way up every rung of the ladder. Always having to be perfect, to prove myself—”

Manziuk holds up his hand, palm forward like a traffic cop. “I know. You’ve mentioned it once or twice before. But look at you! You have a degree in criminology. You’ve paid your dues. You have a bright future in homicide. You’ve done it!”

“Yeah,” she says, an edge to her voice. “Ironic, huh? The police force gets told it has to hire more women and more minorities. And look! I’m both!” She stops pacing to stare him in the eye. “So I’m where I am both in spite of the fact that I’m a black woman and because of it. But where do you think I’d be if it wasn’t for that mandate?” She throws her hands out, palms up. “And when do you think the day will come that I no longer have to prove to you guys that I actually deserve to be here?”

Quietly, his eyes unflinching, Manziuk says, “I suppose that will be the same day you stop feeling you have to prove it to yourself.”

She takes an involuntary step backward.

I am ready to intervene, but they don’t need me.

“How dare you!” she asks. “How dare you?”

“When was the last time you did something crazy just because you wanted to?” he presses.

She continues to look him steadily in the eyes. After a long moment, she says, “I don’t remember.”

“Maybe it’s time you let yourself be a person and not only a black female cop.”

She shakes her head. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“No, and I never will. No more than you’ll know what it’s really like to be me. But I do know that all of us human beings, whatever our race or sex, need certain basic things. We all need time to relax and have fun.”

She looks at the carpet. “I’m not sure I know how.”

“You need to get a life. Get away from your family, for starters.

“What’s wrong with my family?”

“Now don’t say you’ve never complained about them!”

Jacquie smiles, but her voice, when she speaks, is tinged with sadness. “We live together because we all need each other, I guess. After my father was killed, my grandmother moved in with us. And then later, after Mom married that horrible man, my grandmother and I lived with my aunt for several years. During that time, my uncle died of cancer. Then, when Mom finally left that man, we all moved in together for—well, for healing, I guess. There’s strength in unity.”

“But surely you could get a place of your own now. Then you wouldn’t have them watching and analyzing your every move.”

Jacquie smiles again. “I’m kind of used to them.”

“But don’t you think one sight of them would scare away any man who might be interested in you?”

“It’s obvious you think so.”

He says nothing.

“The truth is, I don’t need any help scaring off men. I seem to do a great job all by myself.”

“If you could just relax a little more, let down a few barriers….”

She tosses her head back and looks at him, her lips curled. “That’s assuming I want to attract a man, which I’m not so sure I do. Look at the loser my Mom found. And you should talk to my cousin Precious about some of the jerks she’s gone out with!” She takes a deep breath. “Maybe someday I’ll meet somebody I want to get to know, but right now, I’m doing fine, thank you.” She looks at him almost tenderly. “You have no idea how lucky you are.”

He clears his throat. “Perhaps not.”

She walks to the window and looks out. “So did your baseball team win yesterday?”

“I think so.”

“Better read your paper while you have the chance. I found a textbook on the childhood personalities of serial killers that I want to skim through.”

“You’re no longer worried about that article she’s supposed to write? The one about us.”

“Huh? Oh, that.” Jacquie takes a quick, oblique glance at me. “No, I guess not. After all, her mind dreamed us up in the first place: she should know how to tell people about us.”

Manziuk crosses his ankles as he spreads the paper out on his knees. “What I thought,” he mumbles as he begins to read.

An article I wrote for
The Mystery Reader
: “The Partnership of Creator and Created”

One of the ironies of being a writer is that at some point reality becomes blurred concerning which people you know are breathing three-dimensional humans and which are two-dimensional beings existing only in your mind.

Due to my long association with them, I frequently forget that Paul Manziuk and Jacquie Ryan fit into the latter category. Although Paul and Jacquie first appeared in print in
Shaded Light
(my first mystery novel which was published by St Kitts press in 2000), they have been alive in my mind for more than 19 years—longer than my youngest son has been with me.

The day after Christmas, 1982, I was reading a mystery from the library. I tossed it on the floor and complained aloud. My lips eventually formed those oft-quoted words, “I could write a better book than this.”

My ever-helpful husband, who happened to be reading the newspaper in the same room, looked over at me and said, “So, why don't you?”

Why not, indeed? I grew up reading mysteries. The first and probably most influential were the Trixie Beldon books. As I grew older, my grandmother introduced me to Erle Stanley Gardner. I eventually found John Creasy and Agatha Christie in our library, and soon the mystery world opened up before me.