The Mystical Land of Myrrh by Maryann Shank

Author:Maryann Shank [Shank, Maryann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Romance, Lgbt, Lesbian
ISBN: 9781733581905
Google: WD_XwQEACAAJ
Publisher: Dippity Press
Published: 2019-06-14T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 11

The Never Ending Tale – Part 2

Drat it! Hog Face, she with the scrunched up nose and wicked put downs, was going to corner me again. There was no escaping.

Hog Face was just leaving the home of Conn and Sallie Price, the USAID couple, as I arrived, and we met on the porch.

“Oh, Moriah,” Hog Face oozed. “I am so so sorry. Did she die instantly, or later?” There was no sympathy in her voice, only a background sing-song of “Yadda Yadda Yadda – I know a juicy rumor!”

“Neither,” I corrected her. “She didn’t die at all.” Truthfully, I wasn’t sure if that was true, for none of us had heard from Susie.

“But she was stabbed, wasn’t she?” Hog Face insisted. “In her own bed even! By a Somali man!” Her voice turned very conspiratorial, saying “You remember what I told you about being too friendly with Somali men, don’t you, dear?”

Hog Face’s cloying voice slithered up and down my spine. I was so angry with her. How did she even hear this rumor? I had only just heard it myself, and the attack had happened about three months earlier. And it was the Peace Corps! Drat it, I should know about it before Hog Face got her claws into the rumor.

“She wasn’t too friendly with anyone,” I nearly shouted. “It was a stranger who climbed over her fence and broke into her house.” I lied – I didn’t know that to be true at all.

Sallie, bless her heart, saw how distressed I was when I appeared on her doorstep, promptly ushering me into her house, and nearly slamming the door on Hog Face’s nose. “We’ll talk another time,” Sallie told Hog Face.

Sallie was a softly padded, grandmotherly type, with shoulders as broad as the prairie she was raised on. Conn and Sallie would be leaving in a few weeks. Conn’s tour for USAID was coming to an end, and a retirement house was waiting for them in Paradise, California. As Sallie and I sat on her sofa, I buried my face on one of those broad shoulders and cried. Just cried. I didn’t know why I was so upset. I barely knew Susie, the Peace Corps volunteer who was stabbed. She was nice enough, I guess, but we never connected. She was from Indiana and wore the grand smile of a happy country farm girl. She once said that her whole town came out to the Greyhound bus depot to see her off when she left for the Peace Corps, they were so proud of her.

Susie was stationed in a small village south of Mogadishu. Susie and Julia got together from time to time, but even Julia hadn’t heard about the incident until the day after it happened, and she heard about it from the Somali teachers at her school – the bush telegraph had shouted the news in record time. The Peace Corps had dispatched a private plane to pick up Susie during the night, and Susie

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