SNEAK PREVIEW! Chapter One

The Maj Jong Murders
A Mary Frances Cohen Mystery
By Donald Owen Cohen


The ancient woman looked like a question mark.  Her southward posture brought her head halfway down to the ground.  Her piercing vision narrowed by macular degeneration had declined, but she was still able to detect a straight pin on the floor, even in shrouded light.  Left with 2/3 of her original hearing, Mary Frances Cohen's audio recognition was low, but she made up for it by forcing her friends, relatives and every one she'd meet in the grocery store and other stops along the way to repeat what they'd said.

"What's that?" she'd say sweetly in a gravelly voice rendered almost unintelligible after a bout with laryngitis in her youth.

On this late August afternoon, Mary Frances' discussion with her neighbor, Carmillia, a stocky little Haitian woman who resembled an ebony hued fire hydrant, centered on the weather:

"It's gebbun kinahot," Mary Frances said.

"What?" said Carmillia.

The conversation bounced back and forth for about ten minutes, until Mary Frances had discovered that Carmillia's son was in jail on a DUI bust, her sister had to return to Haiti to get some money from her ex-husband, and that the entire building was being overrun by termites.  Such was the way that the affable 89-year old Jewish woman with the Catholic names gathered a wealth of information, some profound and some less than trivial, but all of it important to Mary Frances Cohen.

Widowed at age 64, Mary Frances never put much gusto into the dating scene.

"All those little mumzers want to do is grab my tits," she said after an encounter with a pudgy fellow formerly from New Jersey who'd lived in Mary Frances' condo complex for nearly 15 years.  Sy Horowitz had been her final date, and the brief encounter with the breast-grabbing nebbish ended when Mary Frances laughed at little Sy's attempt to invade the land of milk and honey.

Yet, the Charleston, West Virginia-born retiree was rarely bored.  She had a weekly mah jong game that rotated among the homes of the four participants.  Plus, computer solitaire, looking after her three kids, two of whom were card-holding AARP members and the youngest, a 54-year old drifter whose main purpose in life had never been known.  To say that Mary Frances Cohen was happy in her dotage would be inaccurate.  For the active-minded woman was often mired in mild depression when her brain wasn't engaged.  Little did she know what excitement lie ahead.