#lee and rio and the haunted doll

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

(Unverified yet) submissions for standalone fiction works :

The Scorpio Races (Maggie Stiefvater)

Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir)

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)

Graffiti Moon (Cath Crowley)

Martyr! (Kaveh Akbar)

This Is How You Lose The Time War (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone)

The Friendship Doll (Kirby Larson)

Graveyard Shift (M. L. Rio)

The Spear Cuts Through Water (Simon Jimenez)

Echo Thomas (Olde Heuvelt)

The Traveling Cat Chronicles (Hero Arikawa)

Sin Eaters Confession (Ilsa J. Bick)

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

Aces Wild: A Heist (Amanda DeWitt)

The Honeys (Ryan La Sala)

Children of Red Peak (Craig DiLouie)

Hell Is A World Without You (Jason Kirk)

Elatsoe (Darcie Little Badger)

Loveless (Alice Oseman)

Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik)

An Unkindness of Ghost s (Rivers Solomon)

El Móvil (Javier Cercas)

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

The Vanished Birds (Simon Jimenez)

The Fortunate Fall (Cameron Reed)

Synners (Pat Cadigan)

The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson)

Babel-17 (Samuel Delany)

Spiderlight (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)

Piranesi (Susanna Clarke)

The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern)

The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (V.E. Schwab)

The Princess Bride (William Goldman)

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Victor Hugo)

Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)

The Story of a Seagull and the Cat Who Taught Her to Fly (Luis Sepúlveda)

Revolution (Jennifer Donnelly)

The Adventures of Pirate Emma (Kristen Korning)

Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

The Romantic Agenda (Claire Kann)

The Witches of Moonshyne Manor (Bianca Marais)

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Victor Hugo)

The Secret History (Donna Tartt)

The Last Unicorn (Peter Beagle)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)

The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)

To Be Taught If Fortunate (Becky Chambers)

The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

Thomas the Rhymer (Ellen Kushner)

Turtles All the Way Down (John Green)

Perfect on Paper (Sophie Gonzales)

Betty (Tiffany McDaniel)

The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)

The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

Matilda (Roald Dahl)

[fragmentedshards]

Hey y’all, I need to do a life update right quick

I see a bunch of y’all enjoying my stories, and I’m absolutely overjoyed about that! Not only am I working on those updates, but I have several other stories I’m fixing up so I can post them here as well!

However, at home we’ve been having an internet problem where our connection sort of fades in and out, causing a problem for obvious reasons. Furthermore, our internet “sleeps” at night now, which cuts a huge chunk out of my available writing time.

All that to say, it’s going to be quite a long time until I can update anything or post anything new. I really appreciate your patience and support! 💖

[fragmentedshards]

Lee and Rio and the Haunted Doll

Chapter Two

-

Lee Harker stared at the bar window from inside his car, feeling unusually apprehensive. After President Jelani assigned him to be Rio’s investigation partner, Lee had reached out to Rio in an email. She had responded asking him to meet her later that day at Wanderley’s, the bar near Thredson College.

He had not been entirely honest with President Jelani; he had been in contact with Rio since her high school graduation, although he had not talked to her since long before either of them had started teaching at Thredson. While he wasn’t exactly nervous about seeing Rio again, he wasn’t sure how it was going to go. Even though their parting had been amiable enough, it was still a little awkward. Lee sighed to himself. He wasn’t even sure if Rio was already inside or not. Shaking himself, he climbed out of the car and walked into Wanderley’s.

Of course the light was dim inside. He waited for his eyes to adjust, then scanned the place for Rio. He found her sitting at the counter, flipping through papers and drinking a margarita. Before he could start walking towards her, she looked up and spotted him, waving him over. Once he reached her he ordered a beer and glanced at the papers in front of her, only to realize they were essays from her students.

“So they really asked you to be the one to help me out with these projects, huh?” Rio asked, spinning on her chair to face Lee and taking her margarita with her.

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “I’m the scientist, you’re the bookworm. That’s the balance needed for these cases, apparently.” he gestured to the folders in Rio’s large embroidered bag, which was draped over her chair. “Are any of those our first case?”

Rio’s face lit up. “I’m glad you asked!” she closed the folder of papers in front of her (“I’m so sick of reading these papers on Catullus; that man is proof that toxic masculinity has always been part of human nature”) and pulled another folder out of the bag, plopping it onto the counter and opening it to the first page. “Check this out. We’re going to investigate one of the most famous haunted dolls in the world.”

“Annabelle?”

“No,” Rio shook her head. “No, I’m pretty sure Annabelle is with Lorraine Warren. This one we have to investigate is called Letta. Take a look.”

Lee dragged the folder over to himself as the bartender brought him his beer and took Rio’s order for another margarita. He read over the information in the file before taking a huge gulp and looking up at Rio. “So, the only evil thing related to this doll is the foreboding some people feel when they’re around it, is that right?”

Rio nodded. “But he does periodically call out; that’s how he got the name of Letta, for Letta me out. He supposedly has real human hair and the likeness of a human brain -”

“Now what on earth does that mean? What does a likeness of a human brain look like inside a doll head?” Lee asked.

“Dunno,” Rio shrugged. “That’s part of the mystery and part of what we’re going to figure out.” she drank from her margarita and pointed to a section of the paper. “See what it says about how Letta was found? Kerry Walton found him under the porch of an abandoned house. I’d be interested to know how the doll got there in the first place.”

“So how do we do that?”

Rio reached into her bag and fumbled around, looking for something. “Shit,” she said after a minute. “I left it at home. You’ll have to come with me for a bit.” she tossed some money onto the counter, said “His is on me” to the bartender, and hopped off the stool while gathering up her folders in her arms. “Come on,” she waved at Lee to follow her.

~

“Jesus, Rio,” Lee muttered when he stepped through the door of her apartment. “What the hell did you do to your place? It looks like some conspiracy theorist’s hideout.”

“Shut up,” Rio balled up her sweater and threw it at Lee jokingly.

Lee wasn’t wrong. The bookshelves were crammed full of books, yet more books still lay open on every flat surface. The walls were covered with maps and pictures and pages of information, either printed out or torn from books - though if Lee knew Rio, there was no way she would have torn pages out of books, so where she got the torn pages was a mystery to him. Rio had tied strings to thumbtacks and stuck them in various places all over the pages, connecting concepts and facts, similar to a murder board. It looked exactly like a place a conspiracy theorist would live.

Rio made her way carefully to her desk and fished through a stack of papers. Finally she seemed to find what she was looking for, clambering back to Lee and handing him a printed-out email.

“If you read that, you’ll see it was from Kerry Walton, giving us permission to ask him more questions about Letta.”

Lee adjusted his glasses and peered at the paper.

Professor Bennett,

Yes, I know Letta draws much attention from all over the world. If you have some questions that have not been answered by the other interviews I have done, certainly you may meet me and ask me. I have some new developments on the doll which you may want to hear anyway.

You may as well meet me in Sydney. Let me know which hotel you choose and I’ll come to the hotel bar. I’ll even bring Letta along, if you wish. Come quickly.

Regards,

Kerry Walton

Lee folded the paper in half and handed it back to Rio. “So, when are we going?” Rio handed Lee a plane ticket before he even finished his question. “You can pay me back for that later, though you don’t need to worry about the hotel bill. The college took care of that.”

Lee took a closer look at the ticket. “Tomorrow?” he exclaimed. “God, they could at least have given me a heads up so I could organize something for my classes to do while I’m gone.”

“Just create an extra credit project for them,” Rio shrugged. “That’s what I did for my classes. I posted it on the website; the creative writing classes have to come up with an additional short story, the literature and core English classes have to write an additional literary criticism paper, you get the idea.”

“Hmm,” Lee rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess I could assign them a research project about invasive species in the Everglades.”

“Oh, right,” Rio disappeared around the wall to where Lee assumed there was a kitchen, and his guess was confirmed when he heard a Keurig up and running. She continued to talk loudly over the coffeemaker. “That was your area of expertise, wasn’t it?”

“Still is, technically, but yeah.” he replied. “How did you know that, though?”

“I still talk to Winter once a week at the very least,” Rio said over the clanking of a spoon on the inside of a mug. “Though I haven’t had the chance to tell her that you’ll be my case partner.” she poked her head around the wall. “Coffee?”

Lee shook his head. “I didn’t drink all that much.” Rio’s head disappeared and reappeared again in a moment, gripping a Hello Kitty mug in her hands. “I should probably go pack, if I have to be at the airport in the morning. I’ll pick you up from here and we can go together, does that sound good?”

Rio nodded, sipping her coffee. “That’ll be fine. I’m packed, so I’ll just double check to make sure all the papers are together and then try to sleep.”

Lee was halfway out the door of the apartment before he turned back and said half- smiling, “Hopefully that’s decaf, then,” before dodging a poorly-aimed ball of paper Rio threw at him and laughing as he exited. Not awkward at all, actually, he thought to himself. And apparently she still likes to throw things.

[fragmentedshards]

Illustrations for Lee and Rio!

It was a little harder to get a good picture made of these two, I guess because they’re supposed to be modern-day characters and not fantasy or historical ones. But here it is; Lee Harker and Catriona “Rio” Bennett!:

[fragmentedshards]

Lee and Rio and the Haunted Doll

Chapter One

-

Lee stood awkwardly in the university president’s office, trying to figure out what the hell he had done wrong. He had just been teaching his class as he always did, but the problem with that was that he tried to tie everything in his Intro to Biology class back to snakes. He studied herpetology in college, what was he supposed to do once his research lost its funding?

Maybe the class finally got sick of it and complained, he though to himself. He wasn’t normally a nervous person, but something about being summoned to President Jelani’s office threw him for a loop. Lee had only met the woman twice that he could recall. I mean... even if they complained about my snake obsession, how much trouble can I really be in just for that, right?

Just as he was thinking this, the door to the office opened and President Jelani walked in. “Sit,” she commanded, pointing at the chair facing her desk. Lee obeyed as she herself took a seat behind the desk and fixed him with a studying look. President Michelle Jelani was a short woman with corkscrew-coiled hair and bright eyeglasses who took control everywhere she went. She was one of the most impeccably professional women Lee knew, and she both inspired and terrified him (inspired because she was excellent at her job, and that reassured him that Thredson College was in good hands; terrified because at any moment she could fire his ass). “Lee Harker,” she said his name as if it was the most mundane thing in the world, flipping through pages on her desk. Lee assumed that was his file.

“Ma’am?”

“You studied herpetology at McDermott University and then went to Everglades National Park to work on solving the problem with the invasive species, is that correct?”

“Yes ma’am,” Lee nodded. “We were close to a solution, but we never got enough funding to see it through.”

“And that’s how you ended up teaching here?” President Jelani had yet to look up at him as she continued her questioning.

“That’s right. I try to teach as much as I can about reptiles in my biology classes. I understand that might get old after a while, so if I need to stop that I will -”

“As long as you’re actually teaching and all your techniques are legal, I don’t care how you do it.” she cut him off abruptly. “You also minored in history, yes?”

“I did,” Lee confirmed. “That was really just because I was interested in it. Excuse me, President Jelani, but have I done something wrong?”

“Not that I know of,” President Jelani lazily replied, finally looking up at him. “Are you familiar with another professor at Thredson College by the name of Catriona Bennett?”

Before he could stop himself, Lee exclaimed “Rio? Rio teaches here?”

President Jelani raised her eyebrows. “So you do know her. If you know her as Rio, you must go way back.”

“We went to high school together - I was a couple of years ahead of her.” Lee explained. “She was friends with Winter, my little sister. For all I know, she still is friends with her.” he leaned back in the chair, still surprised. “She’s really teaching here, huh?”

“Professor Bennett makes up one third of Thredson College’s English program. I suppose teaching here is an understatement.” President Jelani also leaned back in her chair and folded her arms, staring Lee down. “She has essentially latched herself onto the cases in the Department of Confusion. How she has time for that with all the work she does is beyond me.”

“The... what?”

“Thredson College is a small college, Professor Harker,” she didn’t miss a beat. “Small and unassuming. While that has its negative sides - such as having only three professors controlling the entire English program - it also has its advantages, one of which is that nobody is going to think of us first for anything. Tell me, Professor Harker; if you had to hide something extremely sensitive and peculiar until it was time for the right person to find it, would you place it somewhere significant but obvious or insignificant but safe?”

“Well...” Lee furrowed his brow. “Insignificant but safe, of course. Are you telling me something is hidden at Thredson College?”

“More like multiple things,” she answered. “I assume you’ve seen The X-Files?”

“Hasn’t everyone?” Lee realized as the words came out of his mouth that they were probably rude, but President Jelani just laughed.

“Probably,” she agreed. “I ask because that makes the explanation much easier: the Department of Confusion is like our X Files. We store files on all sorts of unexplained phenomena, but ours are not of such an extraterrestrial nature. It seems Professor Bennett has taken up working through the files in the Department, most likely because so many of the cases are in her wheelhouse.”

“What exactly is her wheelhouse, again?”

“Professor Bennett teaches English 1101, 1102, Intro to Creative Writing, and many other classes similar to those.” President Jelani explained further. “Her expertise lies in literature and folklore. Many of the cases in the Department of Confusion involve legends, even the supernatural.”

“Oh,” Lee stroked his beard, puzzled. “I’m sorry... but I don’t understand how all this involves me. I haven’t spoken to Rio since... well, I think since she graduated high school.”

President Jelani leaned forward and rested her elbows on her desk. “Professor Bennett has gotten the college’s approval to investigate the cases in the Department, but she has asked for a partner to help her. Thredson College believes you are the best person for the job.”

“I’m... what?” Lee drew back in his chair. “Out of everyone else on the college staff? That... that seems pretty random.”

“Between your science and history expertise and her proficiency in literature and legend, the two of you have the best chance of tackling each of these cases and wrapping them up nicely.” President Jelani clarified. “And don’t worry, everything else will be taken care of; your responsibilities here, the funding for the expedition, almost all of it. You two will have to figure air fare out yourselves.”

Lee didn’t know what else to say. Nobody refused President Michelle Jelani. Besides, what she was asking was not exactly unreasonable - astounding, yes, but not unreasonable - and he would be able to catch up with Rio, which would be... interesting.

“I... uh,” Lee awkwardly stood up, scratching his beard. “Sure, I guess. I see your point.”

“Good,” President Jelani adjusted her glasses. “Now get out of my office. I have work to do.”

[fragmentedshards]

This is the best I could do for President Michelle Jelani; I thought you all deserved an illustration for her.