Praise for

The Boys of Sabbath Street

SHELLY REUBEN IS A MAGICAL STORYTELLER

Shelly Reuben is a magical storyteller: Her new book, The Boys of Sabbath Street, displays what magical storytelling is all about. This thriller combines the story of magician-turned-mayor Artemus Ackerman and his assistant Maggie Wakeling with Shelly's specialty as a novelist...fires—everything about fires. A series of fires on Sabbath Street in the small city of Calendar has everybody on edge, including the widow of a renowned magician. Artemus wants to turn a derelict theater on Sabbath Street into a museum featuring memorabilia from the widow's collection. Will the fires destroy the dream of Artemus? Read The Boys of Sabbath Street and discover what her readers have known for a long time: Shelly Reuben knows her fires and knows how to keep a reader enthralled. It's magic!

David M. Kinchen – Book critic for HuntingtonNews.Net

If you are interested in magic—and who isn't?—you will love this delightful story. If you are charmed by people falling in love you will love this story. And if you like a good mystery you will love this story. Maggie Wakeling has given up working in the advertising business, and has found her true calling as a PR person for the mayor of the town of Calendar. In the course of falling in love, Maggie begins to suspect that things are not exactly as they seem. Beneath the surface in Calendar, there is not just crime. There is guilt and confession—but there is also magic, heroism and ultimately rebirth. And there is a fellow named George Copeland. But maybe the biggest mystery has to do with Maggie Wakeling, and as this charming narrator's story unfolds, it may be what Maggie, who believes that prayers are never answered, learns about herself that offers the solution to the greatest mystery in The Boys of Sabbath Street.

Albert Ashforth, Author of The Rendition

The Boys of Sabbath Street is an outstanding tour de force—a fascinating three-hour read—fast-moving, funny, full of surprises, with a most satisfactory conclusion. The boys are two young heroes who notice smoke coming from an apartment building and rush in and save four inhabitants, winning both local and national acclaim. Fire Marshal George Copeland conducts a meticulous investigation of that fire and two others. Author Shelly Reuben builds a small city with buildings, parks, schools, streets, history, interesting inhabitants—a mayor who is a performing magician, and a fire chief who knits. It all makes sense. A licensed detective and fire investigator, she knows what she’s talking about and knows how to write an enjoyable mystery.

Robert Rusting, Rusting Publications

With a style of inflammatory optimism that would sooth a raving cynic, Shelly Reuben crafts a tale around her professional expertise as a Fire and Arson Investigator which is both dramatic and empathetic, topped with a little romance. After the intrepid and passionate The Man With The Glass Heart and, now, on a more realistic plane, The Boys of Sabbath Street, she explores the psychosis of pyromania. Reuben is staking out a sub-genre that no one else can touch without getting severely burnt.

Jules Brenner, Critical Mystery Tour

The Boys of Sabbath Street is a witty and thought-provoking look at what happens when crime comes to a small, close-knit community. When a frightening series of arson fires strikes the small town of Calendar, Mayor's Assistant Maggie Wakeling and Fire Marshal George Copeland are faced with finding out who has it in for Calendar. This is a story about crimes and their investigation. It is also a story about family, about love, about hope, oh, and about magic too.

Margot Kinberg, Author of the Joel Williams Mysteries

Shelly Reuben captures whimsy and blends it with a good dose of delight in The Boys of Sabbath Street. You will be smiling within the first few paragraphs and won’t be able to stop until the last page. Merriment and an intriguing adventure await within the pages of this mesmerizing story. Quirky characters, bubbly dialogue, and a titillating saga will hold you captive for a pleasurable read.

Mason Canyon, Thoughts in Progress

"What is happening on Sabbath Street?” Shelly Reuben's comforting writing makes the magic of Calendar and its inhabitants come alive, before igniting a drama of proportions the town has never seen. Reuben gracefully introduces heavy themes alongside blooming love, without dividing the reader's attention. The Boys of Sabbath Street will remind readers that new beginnings, and second chances, are possible after all.

Shira Schindel, Entrepreneur and Rights manager, Qlovi

ALSO BY SHELLY REUBEN

FICTION

Julian Solo

Origin and Cause

Spent Matches

Weeping

Tabula Rasa

The Skirt Man

The Man With The Glass Heart

NON-FICTION

Come Home. Love, Dad

SHORT STORIES

Tsk. Tsk.

A Terrible Thing to Do

Death of a Violinist

Mrs. Pomfrey’s Elderberry Wine

Hero Worship Eyes

You Again

The Human Book

My Beautiful, Beautiful Daughter

Never a Cross Word

The Boys of Sabbath Street. Copyright © 2014 by Shelly Reuben. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Published by:

Bernard Street Books

P.O. Box 232

New York, New York 11209

BSBPublishing@aol.com

1. Mystery-Fiction. 2. Crime Novel-Fiction. 3. Love Story-Fiction. 4. Magic-Fiction. 5. Arson-Fiction.

Digital edition published by Bernard Street Books in 2014

ISBN: 978-0-9884181-1-0 eBook

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013921203

The Boys of Sabbath Street / Shelly Reuben

ISBN: 978-0-9884181-2-7 Print Edition

BSBPublishing@aol.com

www.shellyreuben.com

DEDICATION

For Bob Rusting

Without whom, Maggie Wakeling (and I)

Would never have learned public relations...

And never worked for a magician!

CHAPTER 1

SINCE I AM A PROFESSIONAL SIDELINER, I usually do what I do away from the glare of the public eye. Being an essential part of this story, however, I concede the necessity to put myself up for a minimal amount of scrutiny.

Therefore, and in the spirit of not-too-full disclosure:

Name: Margaret Wakeling. But nobody calls me Margaret. It’s Maggie to the world. Maggie to you. And Maggie to me.

Age: Let’s put off discussing that for a while longer, shall we? Like forever.

Physical description: Hazel eyes; crooked mouth; short brown hair, usually wind-blown, with or without a wind; five-foot seven inches tall in bare (pedicured) feet; one hundred twenty-five pounds eleven months of the year. One thirty from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day.

Favorite feature: My hands. I have long, expensive-looking fingers. I dote on manicures.

Most profitable asset: My voice. More about that later.

With a few notable exceptions, very little about my past has any relevance to the fires in the town of Calendar. My father was a diplomat stationed in Paris. My mother was Parisian. I was born in Marseilles. We moved to Chicago when I was two years old. Therefore, I am completely bi-lingual. I sing in the rain in English; I sing in the shower in French.

That I speak fluent French is relevant.

Before coming to Calendar, I worked exclusively in advertising and public relations. When I was employed by Toomey, Wallis, Tumulty & Freer, I single-handedly developed the advertising campaign for Morning Dew, a new body lotion developed by CMC Cosmetics. This lotion was easy to promote, because it is ultra-light, ultra-absorbent, ultra-smooth, and...

What am I saying, here?

See how easy it is for me to slip back behind a product or a person or a story line to avoid talking about myself?

Maggie, behave!

Okay.

Morning Dew. My idea was to do some really sexy and provocative television ads, but at the same time to avoid alienating our less libidinous viewers. So I came up with a very sexy rose. She was thorn-less, of course. She had sumptuous curves, two extremely sensuous green leaves, and crimson petals that were silky, seductive, and soft.

To encourage the women in our audience to identify with Rose, we gave her a human face with saucy eyes, a delicate nose, pouty and pretty lips, and a sultry voice. In other words, Rose was hot. If I had not liked her so much, I would have been appalled by her lack of inhibitions.

Consider this: It is an average morning. Rose fills the leaf of her right hand with a palm-full of Morning Dew. Then slowly, smoothly, with wickedly lingering strokes, she slathers it all over the luscious curves of her sinuous body ... I mean stem.

Fun, isn’t it?

Since it was all done by animation, we in the creative department were able to indulge our beloved Rose in brazen and exhibitionistic behavior without the need of self-censorship.

We were outrageous.

For one thing, Rose was always naked.

For another, at some point during each :30 or :60 second spot, Rose’s Morning Dew theme music would become noticeably burlesque and she would segue into a shameless bump and grind.

Elliot Sperber, art director at Toomey, Wallis, Tumulty & Freer, tried to convince me that Rose was my alter ego. At the time, I had thought that Elliot was delusional. I have subsequently and profitably changed my mind.

In my original conception of her, Rose chattered away, completely self-absorbed, in both English and French. A typical Rose sentence might be:

And you see, mon ami, how I rub Morning Dew, like so, into my soft and silky skin. Je ne puis pas décrire comment douloureux exquis que la sensation est. (I cannot describe how unbearably exquisite that sensation is.)

Rose rhapsodized in English only enough to convey the few facts that we wanted viewers to remember about our product. Then she would slip in a French phrase or two to reinforce her status as a coquette.

We auditioned hundreds of actresses for Rose’s voice.

Elliot, however, had gotten stuck in the rut of my voice. To him, I was not only the first Rose, I was the only Rose.

Why is this relevant?

Because when we finally got around to shooting the Morning Dew commercial, it was I, with my perfect French accent, who did all of Rose’s voice-overs.

Il était enchanteur pour que je dépeigne une femme si délicieuse du monde. (It was enchanting for me to portray such a delightful woman of the world.)

And when the Morning Dew spots were aired on television, it was I who received all of Rose’s residuals.

What happened next?

Elliot Sperber left Toomey, Wallis, Tumulty & Freer to become Marketing Director for CMC Cosmetics, the company that had developed Morning Dew, and he took my Rose voice along with him.

Briefly...

Elliot’s replacement was a quarrelsome creature of indeterminate gender and firm convictions about my ideas. She hated all of them. She also had no sense of humor, no sense of style, no sense of honor, and chapped elbows.

Why do I mention her elbows?

No reason. I’m just getting back at the loathsome bitch.

Because of her, I quit my job at the advertising agency.

Elliot offered me a lucrative position at CMC Cosmetics. He also proposed to me, but by then I was engaged to the man I would eventually marry. So I turned down his proposal and his job, got married, and stayed on the East Coast.

This did not end my alliance with the Sperber family, because Elliot had a brother named Sandy Sperber who was president of Sandford Sperber & Associates, a small, local public relations firm. Sandy and I had always liked each other, but he had never offered me a job before because he knew that he couldn’t afford me. He still couldn’t afford me, but now I didn’t care. I was earning so much money on Rose’s voice-over residuals that I could more than make up for the downward salary dip.

Which is how I went from working in advertising to working in public relations.

Why is that relevant?

Because of magic.

Makes no sense to you, right?

Let me explain.

Most of Sandy Sperber’s accounts were manufacturers of home improvement products. This included replacement windows, insulation, aluminum siding, recessed lighting, and mailboxes that you could run over with a tractor and they wouldn’t get crushed.

If I remember correctly, one of our clients was participating in a landscapers’ convention at the time and needed to introduce a new line of lawn care products. Sandy’s suggestion was that the client should hire a magician. How does one get rid of weeds? The magician’s way would be to make them disappear in a top hat or a goldfish bowl. Our way, the right way, would be to use Weed-Out ... or whatever the product was called.

Sandy contacted a few people in the business to ask about magicians, and the overwhelming majority (two of them) recommended Artemus Ackerman, The Professor of Prestidigitation who “Will Tease, Taunt, Titillate and Delight you with his Tongue-in-Cheek and Sleight of Hand.”

Up until that point, my only experience with magic was what I had seen on television, and that had heartily under-whelmed me. I am not a fan of trick photography, but with the obtuse camera angles, diffuse lighting, and other high-tech gizmology I was seeing on my TV screen, that is exactly what I felt I was being subjected to.

Then I met Artemus Ackerman.

Then I saw close-up magic. Eyeball-to-eyeball and eyeball-to-knuckle, as it were. That was when I realized how pure, clean, and exhilarating honest-to-goodness legerdemain is when it is performed no more than a foot or two away.

Half-dollars, silk scarves, decks of cards, baby chicks ... Artemus Ackerman was able to make them all vanish right before my disbelieving eyes.

It is because of him, only and exclusively because of him—his dexterity, his enthusiasm, his professionalism, his patter, and his style—that I fell in love with magic.

I love the innocent delight of it all.

I love the look of pleasure, pride, and astonishment I see on a conjurer’s face when the elephant sitting on a platform in the middle of a stage really does disappear, as if the magician is as surprised and enthralled as the rest of us.

It is an act, of course.

But what an act!

Houdini, the greatest escape artist of them all, instructed magicians to “Say it as if you mean it, and believe it yourself. If you believe your own claim to miracle doing and are sincere in your work, you are bound to succeed.”

I have been with Artemus Ackerman almost twenty years now, so I know how he can make a quarter disappear in a glass of water, turn wet strips of colored papers into a long banner of dry silk, make an endless stream of quarters pop out of thin air, transform three pennies into one, and mysteriously insert a dollar bill inside a tangerine.

Still, I am taken in by it.

Every time.

Harlan Tarbell, the quintessential teacher of magic, wrote, “The ability to make something happen that others know cannot happen, is necessary to the successful magician.”

When I am watching Artemus perform, I know what effect he is striving to achieve and I know how he achieves it. Each and every time, though, I forget what I know and I am amazed all over again. Which illustrates another of Dr. Tarbell’s precepts: “Always remember that the first impulse of people is to believe. Doubting is secondary.”

From my early apathy about television magic to the woman I am today, I have been transformed like a coin, like a rabbit, like a dove, into Professor Ackerman’s unapologetic groupie. It started the day we booked him for that first landscapers’ convention and it has never stopped. Of course, that was the good professor’s doing, because immediately after the convention, he hired Sanford Sperber & Associates to do his public relations work.

I asked Sandy to assign me to the new account, which he did, and for the next two years, I generated all of the publicity and promotion for “Professor Artemus Ackerman’s Prestigious Presentations of Prestidigitation.” During those years, I came to know and love Artemus’ wife, Dorothy, who died seven years ago, and I developed unreasonable attachments to assorted rabbits, canaries, and doves.

And so when Artemus, at age fifty-three, decided to quit magic, return to his hometown, and run for mayor, I mourned not only the loss of a friend, some mammals, and a few birds, but also the loss of a job that I loved. I dreaded returning to the world of weed killers, replacement windows, and indestructible mailboxes.

Chin up. Shoulders back. Stiff upper lip and all that, so I did it. But I hated what I was doing, and I longed for salvation.

A little over a year after the weed killers had reclaimed me, Artemus telephoned my office.

“Listen, darling,” he said. “I need you to come back and work for me.”

Did he want me to hawk hotdogs during intermission?

Did he want me to do backward somersaults upon a stage?

No matter. I could be bought, packaged, and paid for with the wave of his magic wand.

“I’m in,” I answered instantly. “What are we doing? Do we have a new act?”

After a moment of silence, Artemus enunciated slowly, “Well ... I suppose you could call it a new act.”

He explained how he had won the election, hired his staff, and made all of his political appointments. But how, when he got up and looked at himself in the mirror that morning, he realized that he was still missing what he called “the key player in my professional life.”

“Me!” I exclaimed happily.

Artemus laughed.

“Yes. You, darling. You will be my aide de camp and my confidant. You will occupy the office next to mine, cater to my every wish and whim, keep me out of trouble, and make me look good in the press.” He paused for a moment. “That is, if I can afford you. How much is Sandy paying you, Maggie?”

I told him.

Artemus snorted. “The town of Calendar can do better than that. Of course, we can’t pay what you’re worth, but nobody could do that.”

Ah. Magicians. I love their patter.

Then he asked, “Did Jack leave you any money?”

My husband, Jack, a war correspondent, had been killed by a sniper’s bullet the year before in War Torn Wherever.

“Jack had a small life insurance policy. But—”

I explained about Morning Dew, CMC Cosmetics, and the residuals I was getting for putting words into Rose’s little vixen mouth.

Money was not my problem.

Boredom was.

I missed magic. I missed my magician.

“Enter heart and soul into the part you are playing,” Dr. Tarbell had instructed fledgling illusionists. “Your audience believes you have marvelous powers.”

I believed that Artemus Ackerman had marvelous powers. I believed that he could enter heart and soul into any part that he was playing, and that if he wanted to play the part of a politician, he could put hope into the hearts and sparkle back in the tiara of his hometown.

“As the actor upon the stage makes his character live and thrills an audience,” continued Dr. Tarbell, “so must you too make the character of the magician live and bring happiness and wonderment to others.”

My job description states that I am the mayor’s lieutenant and his confidential aide but that’s a lot of hokum, because everybody knows what I really am.

I am Artemus Ackerman’s press agent, and the city of Calendar is his show.

CHAPTER 2

NOW. A LITTLE HISTORY LESSON:

The current population of Calendar is 15,397 people; 3,530 registered dogs; 2,207 registered cats; and approximately 23 illegal ferrets.

Calendar is located on a branch of the North River called the Baby North, and it was settled in the late 1600s by the Dutch. For the first however-many-years, the settlement was called by the Indian name Lenni Lenape.

The remarkable career of Israel Shipley was to change that.

In the late Eighteenth Century, Shipley, who was born on a farm just south of town, moved into Lenni Lenape and apprenticed himself to a printer. In time, he mastered his craft, bought the print shop, and began to publish a local gazette.

Israel Shipley was a very good printer, but he had a short attention span and was quickly bored. Publishing a gazette in the manner of other newspapers did not thrill or excite him. Innovation did. It was rumored that he was the first to feature advice columnists, political cartoons, and guest editorials. He was also said to have sponsored the first poetry contest, and the first crossword puzzles, many of which Shipley wrote himself.

Yet even this was not enough to satisfy the exuberant entrepreneur, so as a sideline, he started to print calendars. Ordinary calendars, of course, would never do. Shipley calendars broke all the rules and set new standards. They commemorated specific events, such the Boston Massacre, the start of the Revolutionary War, and the Declaration of Independence. They displayed pretty etchings of flowers and landscapes. They featured bible quotations, cooking recipes, homemaker advice, medical tips, and poetry. They came bound as books, as wall hangings, in scrolls, on note pads, and even stacked as tear sheets for those who wanted to dispose, literally, of the previous day.

They became so popular so fast that within their first year of publication, Shipley calendars were being distributed everywhere that horses, carts, stagecoaches, ships, boats, barges, or wagons could travel throughout North America. As a consequence, The Shipley Printing Company grew to employ hundreds of people, attract commerce, and, literally, put Lenni Lenape on the map.

Which, by the way, Israel Shipley also printed.

Maps, that is.

This resulting boon to the economy did not go unnoticed by the city elders, who, as Israel approached his eighty-fourth birthday on April 22, 1794, decided to honor its most influential citizen by changing the name of their town from Lenni Lenape to Calendar. On that same day, they also provided more suitable designations for their streets, parks, public squares, and piers.

Lockhardt, Forsythia, and Canal Streets, became January, February, and March Streets; Copely Park became Equinox Park; the patch of land in front of City Hall became Lunar Square, a geometrically challenging concept; and each of the seven streets west of Main Street were named for a different day of the week.

City Hall looks out on Monday Street. Mayor Ackerman never goes in that front entrance, though. He always goes around the back to Tuesday Street, because it opens into the parking lot where he locks his motorcycle. Wednesday and Thursday Streets are west of Tuesday Street and run north and south on either side of the Gregorian Grammar School; Thursday and Sabbath Streets form the east and west boundaries of Equinox Park; and Sunday Street is completely residential, with no parks, hospitals, schools, or churches to mark its passage across town.

TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO, when Artemus Ackerman was performing at a small theater in Pasadena, he received the not unexpected news that his father had passed away, leaving him a tidy sum of money and a cumbersome Victorian house. Artemus’ initial strategy was to attend the funeral, finish his tour, return to Calendar, sell the house, and then take his show back on the road.

But was that really a good idea?

After decades of living out of a suitcase, Artemus found himself dealing, not only with the loss of a beloved father, but also increasingly disenchanted with fellow magicians. Some, although incapable of making a simple quarter disappear into a glass of water, had sufficiently mastered computers to transport skyscrapers from the middle of the city to remote mountain peaks; others spent hours, days, or weeks immersed in bizarre, flesh-eating fluids, confronting the prospect of either dissolving or dying; and the worst derived cynical delight from revealing the secrets of fellow magicians in sneering voices on nationwide TV.

Legerdemain had gone high-tech.

Legerdemain had become an endurance test.

Legerdemain had become an exposé.

The piece of blank paper that inexplicably turns into a dollar bill ... the card on which the audience member has written his name that emerges mysteriously from the magician’s deck of cards ... the curvaceous assistant bisected without damage to a single sequin on her outlandish gown ... all of the misdirection ... all of the intimacy of close-up and hands-on magic was being denigrated, distanced, and made obsolete.

Touch it. Feel it. Rattle it.

Are you certain that this lock is secure and that the chains around my wrist are tight?

Yank on it.

No, yank harder!

Days, weeks, months ago, the man from the audience had touched it, felt it, and yanked on it. In the enchanted darkness of a theater, he had been hoodwinked and deceived. Baffled. Befuddled. Awed.

And, of course, he had been enthusiastically and wildly entertained.

When he walked away from the theater after the curtain had gone down, there was always a smile on his face as, shaking his head, he wondered, “How did he do that?”