Gravity Hill

Susanne Davis

Description

Jordan's town is wrecked by the deaths of 3 boys on Gravity Hill. It's tied to a mystery that has plagued the town for years. Can Jordan clear her brother's name?

Sujets

• Coming of Age
• NA
• Maine
• Fiction
• Connecticut

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781956440072
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Gravity Hill
Susanne Davis


Lake Dallas, Texas


Copyright © 2022 by Sus anne Davis
All right s reserved
Printed in the United States of America


FIR ST EDITION


Gravity Hill i s a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coi ncidental.


Requests for permission to reprint material from this work
should b e sent to:

P ermissions
Madville Publishing
P. O. Box 358
Lake Dallas, TX 75065


Author Photograph: Tara Doyle
Cover Design: Jacque line Davis


I SBN: 978-1-956440-06-5 paperback
ISBN: 978-1-956440-0 7-2 ebook
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932006


Chapter 1

Jordan Hawkins sat on a metal stool inspecting amber beer bottles as they spun by her lamp. Built out of sky blue sheets of metal and plopped in the middle of a paved lot, Glass and Company offered the highest paying factory jobs in Connecticut’s eastern corner. Twenty-four hours a day, florescent light shone over the lines and the furnace blasted dry heat over the workers, finding moisture and sucking it back up int o the air.
Jordan was looking for split necks and cherry stones, the two most common defects in the bottles. Split necks were easily detected because light shone through the crack in the lip of the glass, whereas the stubborn pebbles that resisted melting could only be found by scanning for shadows in the body of each bottle. Jordan twisted her ponytail around her hand and tugged. The pain felt good. Down the line a pair of cherry stones danced. The inspection lamp caught the imperfections each time the bottles turned, so that they looked like bugs encased in amber. She kept her eyes on the pair. Beer bottles spun by very fast, a combination of their size and shape, about sixty a minute, but Jordan liked that—she liked to feel that nothing on the line was too much for her to handle, and when they reached her, she knocked them off the conveyor belt down into a hole in the floor. Another belt would carry them back to be fired over again. “Better luck next time, losers,” she w hispered.
Jordan had barely taken off her high school graduation gown when she filed into Glass and Company’s orientation with the other new recruits weeks earlier. Mr. Tilchek, one of the shift supervisors, filled a beer bottle with water and rapped it lightly against a counter. The bottle popped wide open, revealing a pebble and he joked, “Resistance is futile.” Jordan got the joke, but grief had a way of flattening everything, especially humor. Tilchek explained that every bit of sand had to be melted to make perfect glass. “Defects weaken the bottle,” he said, pointing to the flashing light of the furnace where the bottle would be fired again, and the best Jordan could do was nod in acknowledgment. She saw not the furnace but an ambulance and lights splitting open the darkness.
That was only a month ago, but it felt like somebody else’s lifetime. Tonight, at eight p.m. just as he did every night, Mr. Tilchek tapped Jordan on the shoulder for her break. He was a short, stout man with straight brown hair that hung over his ears and hid the top of his gold-rimmed glasses. His smile hitched up on one side, apologetic and hesitant. Jordan removed her Styrofoam earplugs, and the roar of the plant filled her head.
“You want to work a double?” Tilchek shouted.
A double shift meant overtime and the third shift made the most money. She would make $25 an hour, $200 extra for the night. Her bank account had $7,000 before starting at the factory, the total accumulation of her lifetime wages. In just a month, she had added anoth er $2,000.
She plucked a split neck from the line.
Tilchek smiled. “I was going to tell you this at the end of your shift, but I might as well tell you now. I’m giving you a 3% raise, starting n ext week.”
“Gee, thanks,” she said without taking her eyes off the line. She knew that by taking the double she wouldn’t get home until after eight in the morning and that meant her father would have to do most of the morning milki ng alone.
“You have a 97%, Grade A inspection rate,” Tilchek added, pushing his glasses up on his nose. Jordan saw not her green eyes, pale skin, and blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, but rather her frown lines reflecting bac k to her.
She’d been taught to deflect compliments and she knew Tilchek’s admiration wasn’t just for her bottle inspecting. She kept her head down, glad for the baggy shirt that hid her comp act form.
Tilchek touched her arm lightly. “Hey,” he said. “I know you’ve had some bumps in the road. But you’re gonna make it.”
Jordan jerked her arm away and punched three split necks into th e gutter.
Tilchek seemed to get the message. He stepped back. “Why don’t you go take your break? And then go to Line 3 and start packing.”
Jordan slid off the stool. “Thanks again for the raise,” she said, but Tilchek had already put his earplugs in, which was a good thing because her thanks sounded am bivalent.
Workers milled about the break room, but even in the crowd, Jordan picked out Tom Hesip, Regional High’s sexy football star: doe-eyed, streaked blond hair and fat, juicy kissing lips. He sat in the corner at one of the square Formica tables, his lunch box open in front of him. Since graduation he worked full time at the glass factory and lived in a renovated mill apartment in Putnam with the high school French teacher. Jordan had flirted with Hesip once at a football game, and he’d responded by asking her to go with him to a party after the game, but she’d left the party early to get home f or chores.
The vending machine was in that corner and she was hungry, having already eaten her sandwich on the way to work. She pretended to study the bills in her wallet as she stood in front of the machine and selected a bag of peanuts. She got as far as stuffing the peanuts in her back pocket, when Hesip ca lled out.
“I’d know that ass anywhere,” he grinned. “What are you do ing here?”
“Same as you. Working,” she said flatly. She looked into his lunch box, which held two sandwiches with lettuce and tomato, a package of baby carrots and an apple. In the high school cafeteria, he’d filled his plastic tray with bags of chips and starchy entrées and carried it to Room 107 to eat lunch with Mrs. Logee, a cute pixie of a woman in her late twenties. Jordan hadn’t believed the rumors of the affair, but two weeks before the end of school Mrs. Logee was fired, and a substitute took over the French classes.
“When did you start work ing here?”
“Last month.” Jordan started to move away when Hesip slapped his head and said, “What a jerk I am. Sorry. Are you still going to college in the fall?”
Jordan shook her head. “I’m taking a y ear off.”
“It’s too bad,” Hesip said. “About your brother.” His gaze slid away. “I know how much school mean s to you.”
Some of the men sitting at the table with Hesip stopped talking and looked at her. Hesip picked up one of his sandwiches and unwrapped it. Were they waiting for her to say that she wished she were the one who had died? Because she wasn’t going to say it.
“And I’m sorry Mrs. Logee lost her job. I know how much it meant to her.”
Hesip dropped the sandwich. His face reddened. “You are such a bitch.”
Jordan whipped her gloves out of her back pocket and moved out of the break room. She didn’t want to admit how good it felt to hurt Tom Hesip. When she reached Line #3, Norma Helfin didn’t look up to see her there, although she certainly must have, but instead heaved a box onto the conveyor belt and poked Jordan in the side. Norma scowled as she adjusted the box but made no apology. Jordan didn’t expect any. Norma was a lifer and even though Jordan worked at the factory, she wasn’t a lifer, and everyone knew it. The lifers hated the college kids because they came in, made good money to pay their tuition, and then they were gone. So, the lifers did what they could during that time to make factory life miserable for them. If they could leave a line backed up with bottles, they did. If they could put the college kids working on the lines nearest the furnace, where they fainted like flies, they did. Then they belittled them for being so weak. If lifers found defects that the college kids hadn’t caught, they’d save them all until the end of the shift and then take them to the shift supervisor. But the lifers hadn’t been able to get anything on Jordan and a few showed their grudging admiration for her. She had the best eyes of the teens on her shift and her life of farm work made her tough enough so that the heat of the plant, long hours, and heavy boxes didn’t faze her. But those attributes seemed to make Norma ev en madder.
“Hey, Norma? You want to work third shift? Well, you can’t, because Mr. Tilchek asked me,” Jordan called out as she started flipping bottles in to boxes.
Norma glared at her and veered over to where Tilchek watched t he lines.
Jordan heard Norma shouting at him. Although she couldn’t hear what Norma said, she knew the general content. The rule was that the person with seniority always got the offer to work overti me first.
Tilchek hefted his pants over his belly. He wore navy blue work pants with a crease ironed down the front of the legs. He kept his thumbs inside the waistband as if he feared Norma might tear him to pieces. He spoke in a low tone to counter hers. Norma frowned over at Jordan, and then spun away toward the break room. Jordan looked at the bottles spinning down the line toward her. They were backing up so that the person at the inspection lamp, someone she didn’t know, didn’t care to kno