Ah guys, this is pathetically short. Still, there is light at the end of the tunnel because Spring Break is here!!! Look forward to a lot of writing coming!
CHAPTER VIII
HIS WORLD
Summary: For the Love of Elaine, set in the 1930s, recounts the investigation of young and sweet Elaine Whitney’s murder, focusing on the contrast of love with lust and the effects of guilt. The main characters include Gifford Boswell, the elderly Chadwick estate butler and guardian of Elaine; Ian Donald, the estate’s young gardener and close friend/lover to Elaine; Richard Farrell, the Chadwick’s newly hired personal detective; and Vera Sloan, the bitter, tough-as-nails, platinum blonde with an unconquerable ambition to escape her life as the estate’s cook. In the last installment, Ian recalls the a conversation with Elaine in which she confesses her worse fear in the form of an unrelenting suitor with red-blotched hands.
Tring, tring! The telephone jived on its stand. Boswell jolted from his reverie. Bills and the Chadwick Estate record were sprawled on his desk in the small, dim office. Ever the efficient butler, for the past week he had listlessly completed his duties creating a much-resented gap in the running of the household.
Tring, tring! Again, the telephone rang.
Dreading that the call might force him to emerge from his cave, Boswell hesitated before picking it up.
“Gifford Boswell, butler of the Chadwick Estate,” he answered.
“Boswell,” Ian’s voice sounded over the line in an urgent tone, “I need your help, sir.”
Gifford’s jaw clenched.
“Boswell, I may know who killed…her,” his anger boiled through the speaker. “Come to the jailhouse at two o’clock.”
The butler heard the click of the receiver on the other end and he slowly hung the telephone back on its box.
He wished the world had stopped the day he found Elaine gone. His world had.
On that day, Boswell had woken up at the same time habit had commanded for fifty years—six fifteen in the morning, sharp. He stirred in his room and meandered into the kitchen. Elaine who usually prepared toast and coffee for breakfast, was nowhere to be seen. Boswell thought it odd yet decided he could toast his own slice of bread. Six forty, the butler brought out the large tattered family Bible. Still no Elaine.
His fears for her health from the previous night revived, Boswell shuffled over to her room and knocked on the closed door. No answer. He knocked again and called out softly. No answer. His heart had missed a step. Boswell peeked into the room, but he did not spy her on the bed. As he opened the door wide, dead air seeped past him and he saw her.
How quickly can someone’s world shatter? Like a glass globe suspended in mid air by a silk thread, only a snip of the dullest scissors can send one’s life crashing down.
Harvest of Stars 