The story made a splash in the papers and on TV, but the small-town buzz it created was totally sympathetic to the three ladies. What purpose had been served by their public humiliation?
The phrase I heard constantly repeated was, “In the old days, this never could have happened.” They were right. In the old days, in our small town, the story would have been quietly suppressed. No harm, no foul.
In those days our town was run by an old-boy network, a loose circle of friends (lawyers, judges, doctors, cops) who golfed and hunted and partied together. Policy decisions that affected the entire county were often made by a few friends over drinks at the Yacht Club.
A conspiracy? In a way it was, but I’m not complaining. My own youthful misdeeds, from DUIs to street scuffles, were glossed over and dismissed because I came from a “good” family. If those exceptions hadn’t been made, I and many of my friends might be living very different lives now. And wearing ankle bracelets.
Still, those days weren’t all Hallmark card moments. I know mistakes were made, some of them pretty egregious, which gave rise to this story. What if the old-boy network, with the best of intentions, made a fatal mistake?
God, I love this game.
Andrew Bourelle’s fiction has been published in Hobart, Kestrel, Jabberwock Review, Prime Number Magazine, Red Rock Review, Thin Air, Weave, Whitefish Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He lives in Albuquerque with his wife, Tiffany, and son, Benjamin.
• I wrote this story several years ago, when I was a graduate student at the University of Nevada, Reno. I had been interested in writing a modern-day western for a while, and after reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, I decided to go for it. I wanted to write a fast-paced story where I could put my foot on the gas and not let up. I also tried to take common western themes and subvert them. Instead of riding off into the sunset at the end of the story, Jack is riding toward the sunrise. He has his whole life ahead of him, a life where he’ll never be able to outrun what he’s done.
I’m indebted to my former professor Christopher Coake, who gave me excellent advice for revising the story. I’m also thankful to Amy Locklin for first publishing the story in the anthology Law and Disorder.
Tomiko M. Breland is just beginning her literary career. Her short fiction has won the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Award and placed in the Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Contest. She runs a small editing, manuscript review, and graphic design business out of her home in Monterey, California, where she lives with her husband and two sons, and is completing her first novel. “Rosalee Carrasco” was her first published piece of fiction.
• According to Stephen King, original stories occur when “two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.” I think that’s the best way to describe what happened with this story. I had this idea that I wanted to write a short story that cheated — that accomplished what a novel accomplishes (telling the past, present, and future of a cast of three-dimensional characters) in a very short space. I came up with my form, and then tinkered with a number of story ideas, all terrible, for several weeks. And then I read an article about a horrific social media bullying incident — and there was my second idea.
I began with a Stephen King quote because I think that Rosalee has the bones of King’s Carrie: she is a sympathetic outcast, her “becoming a woman” is witnessed by others, and we even have the backdrop of a girls’ locker room. But what happens when that girl’s “becoming a woman” is witnessed in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? When bullying becomes viral and untraceable, public and exponential? Nothing good. My second idea — Rosalee and her tragic but not unbelievable circumstances — poured itself into my first idea with the smoothness and liquidity of juice into a glass carafe, taking shape the way you always hope your stories will when you start out. To ensure that I really, really stuck to the short story form, I challenged myself to keep each character — past and future — to just one typed page, and that resulted in a dense little story that packed some punch, and I found that I had written “something new under the sun.”
Previously a law student, theater technician, television director, and union organizer, Lee Child is now the globally best-selling author of the Jack Reacher series.
• I was asked to contribute to Belfast Noir on the basis of my father being a Belfast man, which meant I had spent time there both before and during the Troubles and was familiar with the culture that had led in that tragic direction.
Family legend has it that when my grandparents moved in the 1940s, they sold their house to a couple named Morrison, whose first child, Ivan, went on to become the musician Van Morrison. I was interested in the idea of foreign fans seeking out his birthplace, but in the end opted for an imaginary writer instead of the real-life singer. (But the story’s title, Wet with Rain, is a common line in Van Morrison’s lyrics — as well as a perpetually reliable description of Belfast’s weather.)
I was also interested in the idea that although Belfast’s rifts were relentless and implacable to the point of psychosis, there must have been participants who on occasion opted for restraint, and Wet with Rain is about one of them.
Michael Connelly is the author of twenty-seven novels and one book of nonfiction. Ten of his novels — featuring the characters LAPD detective Harry Bosch, defense attorney Mickey Haller, and journalist Jack McEvoy — have hit the number-one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. His books Blood Work and The Lincoln Lawyer were produced as films starring Clint Eastwood and Matthew McConaughey. He is executive producer of the streaming television show Bosch, based upon his long-running series of books. He lives in Florida and California.
• The task faced by Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly was figuring out how to legitimately bring together two characters who live and work on opposite coasts of the United States. Harry Bosch is an LAPD detective and Patrick Kenzie is a Boston private eye, and it would seem never the twain should meet. But it was decided by the authors that the most believable way to pull this off was to have Harry Bosch follow a lead on a cold case to Boston. And so Connelly wrote the setup. Evidence in the cold case leads to identifying a solid suspect in Boston. He gets on a plane and lands in Boston. From there he stumbles into Kenzie and the story goes from there. Since Boston is Lehane’s turf, he sort of met Bosch at the airport and took it from there.
Joseph D’Agnese is a journalist, author, and editor who has written for adults and children alike. His nonfiction has appeared in The Best American Science Writing two years in a row. His crime fiction has appeared or will appear in Shotgun Honey, Plots with Guns, Beat to a Pulp, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. One of his short stories was a finalist for the 2014 Derringer Award. He’s the author of three popular history titles, a children’s picture book on the Fibonacci sequence, and some novels. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, the author Denise Kiernan (The Girls of Atomic City).
• The seeds of my story “Harm and Hammer” were planted the day I visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, where I live, and encountered a blacksmith who entertained tourists by playing his anvil as a musical instrument. The sound of hammers on steel struck me as so beautiful, so clear, so pure, and so unlike any instrument I’ve ever heard that it lodged in my mind and never left. I’m not religious, but I am still strongly moved by hymns. Two of my favorites have always been “Amazing Grace” and “Jerusalem,” probably because the lyrics hint at their composers’ inner struggles. Years after I’d first seen that smithy’s anvil performance, I began to find the notion of combining these two disparate elements — the anvil and the hymns — in one story nearly irresistible. I just needed a protagonist. That got me thinking about the sort of person who might be drawn to obsessively play the anvil as a form of expiation. Before long I envisioned a young woman consumed with guilt, her anvil perhaps offering a somewhat healthier form of self-flagellation. Naturally, because of the way my mind works, it wasn’t enough to have one crime in the story. The deceit and violence, like the music itself, had to ripple outward.