On Fridays I’m going to share a chapter a week from one of my books. The first book is Souls Lost. If you wish to purchase it to read faster, you can find it at your favorite retailer. Find chapter 1 here.
Zoe Mason-Hyer Parker watched the dark blue sedan that belonged to the chief of police cruising down the street. Taran Rees was driving quickly, probably over the speed limit, but he didn’t have his lights or siren on. An advantage of being in Corbin Meadow instead of in Portland, where he’d have to have used the flashers to go that fast down a through street.
Zoe watched as he passed the school and turned the corner on Cedar. She didn’t know where he went after that. She told herself she didn’t care, but she was getting one of her feelings, like she always got back in Corbin Meadow, which was why she’d fled as far as she could to get away from them. Not that she was like one of those women in urban fantasy books who ran away from power. She didn’t have power. She had feelings that never made any sense.
Why couldn’t she get a power that let her have revenge on her enemies, which would make the whole divorce thing as easy as casting off the name Parker would be when it went through? She’d at least like to know things, important things that maybe people didn’t want her to know.
Instead she got feelings. This one felt like she was standing under a deep dark shadow and something very, very bad had happened. The fact that the chief of police was riding around in his car, going faster than the posted speed—at least to Zoe’s untrained eye—could mean that a major crime had been committed. It might also mean he was taking a statement on a lost dog.
Deep down, she knew the police chief wasn’t on a call about a lost dog. It was something else. That feeling. Someone was dead. Zoe was as certain of that as she was that she was standing in her childhood home which hadn’t changed much except it wasn’t quite as tidy as it had been when her momma was there to supervise the housekeeper. It still smelled of lemon cleansers, though that had gone out of style long ago, and she suspected that the scent remained from when her momma polished the wood on the coffee table that now bore more than its fair share of nicks and scratches.
The grandfather clock ticked, loud in the otherwise silent house. Zoe turned from the front window, sighing, wondering what had possessed her to come back home. She’d felt such a pull to be there, but now that she was, she was wishing she was somewhere else.
Something bad had happened.
Zoe crossed the hardwood, scuffed from decades of her parents walking across it and a decade and a half of her running, hopping, skipping, and even dancing on it. She walked out of the front room to the kitchen and family room area. Everything was so cut up in the house, not like the modern homes. The appliances were still black, not yet into the modern stainless steel era, although her momma hadn’t liked stainless as it picked up too many fingerprints.
Her father didn’t care so long as things worked. Zoe curled up on the sofa that had been old when she’d been a child, a nondescript brown that would probably be the same color after ten years in the dump. There was a flat screen television, too large for the room, angled towards the sofa, but Zoe didn’t turn it on. The glass slider looked out at a covered patio, a child curled in the arms of its parent house the way the bedrooms stuck out further back on one side and the kitchen poked out on the other. Zoe didn’t even turn to look outside though the sun was still shining.
Her stomach was tied in knots that would impress even a fisherman—not that she knew any fishermen. Zoe tried to get a handle on the bad feeling, as a therapist had once suggested to her. The feeling was everywhere in her body, from the tips of her toes to the top of her head and in every cell in between.
It wasn’t as if she knew anyone living down the way Taran Rees had driven, not well, not any longer. Zoe breathed in, hoping to move the feeling out of her body, but like the air on a summer day, it sat there, refusing any and all attempts at creating a breeze. Like the summer air, it was waiting.
Zoe’s phone rang. She looked at the number, but it had no name attached to it. She considered ignoring it, but maybe talking would help.
“This is Zoe,” she said, trying to sound cheerful, wondering if there was any chance she’d succeeded, though perhaps the person on the other end was just there to persuade her that her computer had sent out a message that someone was trying to hack it and she could hang up.
“Zoe?” The slight Appalachian drawl that always reminded Zoe just a little of Dolly Parton gave away the speaker. Donna Winston, Zoe’s best friend through grade school, who remained a good friend even through high school, though Zoe’s need for higher education and wanderlust had meant they weren’t as close as they had been when they were children.
“Donna?” Why exactly hadn’t her name come up on the caller ID? Donna and Zoe had talked several times since she’d been home, had, in fact, talked even before she’d come. Donna had been the one to talk Zoe into coming out for a visit, to see how it felt as an adult, which is what Zoe liked to think she was doing.
“I’m at Momma and Daddy’s,” Donna said in response to Zoe’s unspoken question. While Donna had once lived two houses down—the reason for the start of the girl’s friendship—three years or so ago her parents had decided the house was too much upkeep and “downsized” to one of the new condominiums that had been built on the edge of Corbin Meadow.
If Zoe remembered correctly, the zoning for the condos to go through had been her momma’s idea, a plan for how the community could grow. That had been her fondest wish, to see the place grow rather than being a town so small and so far off the beaten path that no one except the residents ever seemed to find it.
“What’s up?” Zoe asked. Donna hadn’t just called from her mom’s phone instead of her cell because she was bored. Her momma was probably there listening.
“Momma got a call from Mary Jo,” Donna said, almost whispering. “Mary Jo found Elaine Wilcox dead in her backyard.”
Zoe tried to talk but only a squeak came out, her mouth too dry to force words out. The dread she’d been feeling was about Elaine. It had always been like that in Corbin Meadow. The feelings that something was wrong, and periodically that something was right, and then the call or the announcement of what had happened and the confirmation from her gut that this was what she had known.
Not enough to be worthwhile. Just enough to unsettle.
And it only happened in Corbin Meadow. Because even if no one else admitted it, Zoe knew that Corbin Meadow wasn’t normal, hadn’t ever been normal, nor would it ever be normal. But like her feelings, she just couldn’t pinpoint why.
Chapter 4 will be coming next Friday. Don’t want to wait? Find the book here.
