Tag: #futuristic

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Noiné’s Eyes – Martyr’s Fire – Book 3 available now!

Order your Kindle copy today! Click here. For the paperback, click here!

AD 5252 and all of the western world is at war.
Led by King Vykyant, a coalition of more than a dozen nations has come together to fight an evil on a far-off continent. “We will fight it there to protect our families here.”
But the families at home are not free of danger, for the fight is being waged there, too.
Thousands of soldiers marching, fighting and dying in a foreign land. People at home getting spotty information at best.
A world at war, as told through the eyes of the people on every front line.

Now available for Kindle & paperback. (Due to the length of this novel, it will not be available in hardback.)

Sample Reading

Three thousand years before, the continent had been a land with everything: verdant forests, wide rivers, harsh deserts. There had been cities and towns and beaches and places where men and women went for leisure and many places where they worked. It had been a land of mystery, and legends, and ghosts.

There had been people of education and what was called sophistication, often living just feet from those who didn’t receive those accolades. There had been people in the finest clothes, often living not so far away from people who had the barest rags, then a little further away were people who didn’t know what clothes were for and—had they known—couldn’t have imagined wearing them. Technology had existed side-by-side with stone tools.

When the first of great wars had come, the majority of the continent had remained relatively unscathed. Relative being a relative term, for there had been fights and squabbles, but almost none of the large-scale harm that had affected every other continent on the planet. Some of the survivors from other continents moved to that continent thinking it would always be that way.

When the wars returned—though in the myopic view of the future’s rear view, all the wars were one—the continent was mostly spared, though circumstances made it isolated.

The continent was still rich in many ways, but especially in tyrants and graft. Its resources were plundered and sold, leaving the majority of its population in even more poverty and want than they had been before—and they had been among the planet’s poorest back then. Its great forests were plundered not just for the wood, but for the precious metals that lay beneath, a process that had begun before the wars, then accelerated after even though the booty was just being sold to fellow residents of the continent.

But then came more wars that finally poisoned the rest of the planet. That southern continent was more protected than all the others, or so it seemed at first. Very few military strikes landed there. It was not attacked with the poisons that were levied against practically everywhere else and atmospheric conditions swirled them away. The last of the people who could escape from the other continents came to the southern continent.

They brought their wealth with them—some of which had come originally from that continent, ironically. The richest brought their own security forces with them, setting up little fiefdoms, assuming that to do so was their right even as they ran those who had been on the land for time out of mind off of it. Those so displaced headed to the already crowded cities, making life even harder—or deeper into the jungle.

And then the winds shifted. Not the political winds, but the actual winds, and the poisons everyone thought they had escaped came to the southern continent.

Millions were wiped out in just months’ time.

As in the rest of the world, those who survived, survived in pockets. Perhaps more people survived on the southern continent than on others. Some estimated that while elsewhere in the world ninety percent of the population was wiped out by the wars and their poisons, on the southern continent it was “only” eighty percent. Those who survived quickly stopped burying their dead and just threw them into the rivers or natural ravines. This exacerbated the poison, and the stench.

Technology was lost.

Commerce between the pockets was impossible.

Mankind was reduced to its most primitive state as every waking hour was spent scrabbling for food and shelter. And on that continent, in its pockets, there were more people fighting for the few resources the poisons hadn’t killed. The men and women of those lands became more vicious than in the rest of the world because they had to if they wanted to survive.

A millennium later, as the poisons dissipated and people all over the world began to venture bravely beyond the piece of ground they had known for a thousand years, there was some conflict of course, as is the nature of man. In some places there was cooperation, though, as the people met others who had goods or services they didn’t have themselves. In some cases across the globe rival pockets still spoke a semblance of the same language, but in some they were so divided they couldn’t even sign to one another. There was fighting at times, too.

The southern continent knew nothing of cooperation. For a thousand years and more, all anyone had known was a mad struggle for life amidst death and when they encountered someone they didn’t know, the first thought on every mind was challenge, and murder. Pockets of stronger people conquered pockets of weaker people, though there were no pockets of weak people. The strongest took over, killing or enslaving the weaker until only the very strongest ruled. Tin-pot dictators were overrun by tyrants, and tyrants were squashed by despots. When finally a potentate arose for a time who was over the whole continent, it was with an army of people who were only biologically men, for in reality they were animals.

Like with animals, as the leader began to show weakness, he was slaughtered by a younger, stronger, lieutenant who would then rule until the same fate befell him. And so it went. For two thousand years the plants grew back, deformed and twisted from the lingering effects of the wars, but not so deformed and twisted as the men and women who occupied the lands.

Their languages were guttural and rarely written down. Their thoughts were of conquest and survival and not worth being written. Every thought was toward evil and their own advancement.

It was only natural that the puppet who was the latest to rise to “command” of the whole continent could be easily persuaded to look beyond the continent, to the lands to the north, where it was said there were good lands and weak people who would fall easily before his blade.

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Ashes to Ashes – The Last Valley – Book 1

Ash.

Siblings Josh and Claire were out with a detail of locals trying to replant the Selkirk area following the previous summer’s fire when the ash hit. They had seen a lot of ash, but not like this. This was a wall two miles high that swept through and buried everything. Everything.

Some said it had to be the result of a volcanic eruption. As far as anyone can tell, the two-score people who have made their way to the valley are the last people left alive in the world. Everyone is trying to survive, but Josh is determined to thrive.

With Claire by his side, he begins to rally the people to not just claim a life in the ash, but to build a new community. With death all around them, and continuing to come their way, Josh begins to wonder if he can keep everyone going long enough to build something new. Even if he can keep their hopes up, how long can they push back against the ash?

From the ash arises a new town, a new way of life, and hope.

Be sure to read the rest of the story in “Crazy on the Mountain” and “Book of Tales“!

Available now for Kindle and paperback.

…

Sample passage

You can only live in panic so long. Eventually, you have a nervous breakdown or you wear out. Claire and I just wore out. It had been about six o’clock in the evening when the wall of ash descended on us and minute after minute, then hour after hour, of sitting in a darkened pick-up truck, clinging to your sibling for dear life, while outside the wind moans and nothing is visible takes its toll. Throw in that we were already tired from an afternoon of work and, somewhere in there, we fell asleep. Or my brain shut off, which was a lot like sleep.

I remember having the momentary thought that I probably wouldn’t wake up. I pictured the ash covering the truck until every crack was full and the air was used up. I fell asleep picturing our parents crying one day as they got word from the Forestry Service or someone like that, saying that a pick-up with the remains of their two youngest was found buried under a mountain of ash. I look back now and am a little surprised that I fell asleep under those conditions, but at the time there just wasn’t anything else to do.

“Josh,” a voice whispered in my ear. I hoped it was my mother, waking me up in my own bed, the events of the day before just a dream.

“Josh,” repeated Claire, a little more loudly. “I can see.”

“Hmm?” I asked, trying to wake up and realizing just how uncomfortable sleeping upright in a pick-up truck can be. I finally got my eyes to open and realized Claire was right: we could see, if dimly.

The wind was still blowing a hefty breeze, but the cloud of ash had dispersed enough that we could actually see a little of what was outside. It was a weird light, though, and it took me a few more moments before I realized that what I could see was because the moon had broken through a gap in the clouds—whether clouds of water vapor or of ash I couldn’t tell at that moment in time.

As my brain came into focus with my eyes, I realized that part of why we could see—even by the light of a not-full moon—was because the moonlight was reflecting off the light-gray coat of ash that covered everything. It wasn’t quite like moonlight on snow, but it was a little brighter than if it had just been shining on the dirt. “Wonder what time it is?” I mumbled.

“Middle of the night, looks like,” Claire responded. “We must have slept several hours.”

“I’m just glad to wake up,” I told her. She cast me a strange look, but didn’t ask me to explain.

“Think we can drive home now?”

“Maybe. I can see the road, anyway. Wonder if we ought to check and see if everyone made it to safety, though?”

Claire looked like she was about to say something in response to that, then pursed her lips and nodded, saying, “You’re right.” She pulled a flashlight out of the glove box and checked to make sure it worked. She started to reach for the door, then gave me an ironic smile as she gestured with the flashlight, “Why didn’t we remember this earlier?”

“Just geniuses, I guess,” I replied with a shrug.

The wind was blowing, yet not really high like it had been when I had gone after the bottled water. Still, as soon as we were outside and next to each other, Claire took my hand as she swept the area with the flashlight in her other hand. If memory served, the last time she had held my hand for anything other than a family prayer was when we were both pre-school age and Mom had made us hold hands while we crossed the street. It was a strange sensation and not particularly comforting to me, but maybe it was to her. Just as I thought that, she gave my hand a reassuring squeeze, then let go.

The ash beneath our feet stirred up with each step, making us cough even though the makeshift bandanas were still in place, and then making us go slower so as not to stir so much up. It wasn’t deep—perhaps no more than a half-inch to an inch in most places—but it was pervasive. The wind kept ash in the air, but another glance up at the moon showed me that we were in a sort of trough where “new ash” (like new snow) didn’t seem to be falling. The ash in the air seemed to have just been stirred up from the ground or been blown off the ridge that hung above us to the west. To the north and south, on either side of the gash in the sky, it looked like the ash still roiled.

We walked nervously over to where the flashlight showed us a lump under the ash. Claire held back a step but curiosity forced me to close the distance and kneel down, even though the shape beneath the ash was pretty clear. I reached out gingerly and brushed the ash away, hoping I would startle whoever it was awake.

The body was cold beneath the ash.

“Can you tell who it is?” Claire asked, coming a half-step closer.

“Annie Meyers,” I replied, then wishing I had a way to cover her face back up with a blanket, or the ash. A muffled sob escaped Claire’s lips.

“If we had … “ Claire mumbled.

“Yeah. If we had known, and if we could have found her, and if we could have brought her into the truck—“

“You don’t care that she’s—she’s dead?”

“Of course I care. And I will spend the rest of my life telling myself I should have seen her and picked her up but I’ll also spend my life knowing there’s nothing I can do to change the past.”

“Why are you so cold?”

I stood up and responded angrily, “Cold? Claire, look around you. There are at least three other lumps in the ash about the same size as this one was. I’m not cold, I’m … I’m scared to death!” I was a little surprised at my ability to say it out loud, but once having said it, I knew it was true.

She came over and, putting an arm around me, offered, “Maybe someone else made it to a vehicle.” I nodded and we began to gently step towards the nearest vehicle, an old van owned by Mister Glass.

I pounded on the side of the van and was both startled and relieved to hear a response. The side door of the van slid open and Mister Glass stuck his ash-covered and bespectacled face out into the wind. “Josh? And Claire. How have you survived this long?”

“We were in our truck,” I replied. Claire shined the light into van as I asked, “Did anyone else make it through with you?”

“There are five of us,” Mister Glass replied, stepping outside and looking up in apparent surprise at the moon. “I think the others are asleep, but I haven’t slept a wink. Anyone else make it?”

“We don’t know, yet. We know that, um, Mrs. Meyers didn’t.”

Mister Glass swore lowly, then said, “I got a couple lights. Let’s see if we can find anyone else.”

Howard Glass was a semi-retired electrician from Kansas who had come to the mountains with his wife a decade before. She had died of cancer a couple years after they arrived. He always talked about going back to Kansas, but he also talked about how much he loved the mountains. When he lost his house to one of the fires, we all figured that would be his signal to head back to the flatlands. Instead, he had lived in a trailer while rebuilding and spent many weekends helping with one of the valley’s replanting projects. He still spoke fondly of Kansas, but never mentioned going back there anymore.

Mister Glass picked up one flashlight from the floor of the van, gave his other to Aunt Jenny, and then we began to walk to the other vehicles that had been parked along the road. We spread out a little, but stayed within sight of each other’s lights. Personally, I kept a hand on Claire’s shoulder, telling myself it was for her comfort and safety but knowing it was mostly for my own peace of mind.

The other lumps were just that: lumps, which was an extreme relief. It seemed that everyone from our work party except Annie Meyers had made it into a vehicle. While some people were still having trouble breathing, they were all still alive. As word went around, people began to point fingers in regards to Annie Meyers. Why hadn’t anyone helped her to a car? Why hadn’t anyone looked for her?

“Wait,” Claire interrupted. “How did Annie get here?” Several people grumbled in reply, but Claire stood firm and asked, “All of the rest of us scrambled for the vehicle we came in, right? Who did Annie ride with to get here?”

At varying speeds, we all came to the idea that Claire’s question was a good one. We didn’t immediately have an answer until someone declared, “The Roxons!” As several people, me included, said something interrogative as to what the speaker meant, he (Freddy Wilson) said, “The Roxons were working with us earlier today. Were they still here when the storm hit or had they already left?”

Everyone spoke but no one could remember when the Roxon brothers left, whether Annie might have come with them, or whether she was friendly enough to have ridden with them in the first place. A couple people said they thought they had heard a car moving along the dirt road in the early moments of the storm, but they weren’t for certain and other people were sure they hadn’t heard a vehicle. Someone said, loudly, that it would be just like the Roxon brothers to run off and leave poor Annie to die as they took care of their own skin. Others argued that the Roxons wouldn’t have done that. I stayed silent, remembering how my own moment of selfish panic had only been thwarted by the happy accident of my sister beating me to the truck. I said a prayer of thanks in my mind that I had found her, for if I hadn’t, she might have suffered Annie Meyers’ fate.

Someone said something about how it must be one whale of a forest fire, to be interrupted by Danica Frowley, who said in a tone that brooked no argument, “This is volcanic” as she rubbed (apparently) ash between her fingers.

Someone objected, “We don’t have volcanoes around here!”

Danica happened to be looking at me as she said, “I didn’t say it was around here. It could have come from a hundred miles away, or a thousand. But no forest fire is going to produce this amount of ash—look at the places we’ve been working these last couple years. Somewhere, maybe Capulin down in New Mexico or Krakatoa in Hawaii or one of the Alaskan volcanoes or—somewhere, a volcano blew.”

“This came from the west,” Mister Glass pointed out. “Does that mean it was Alaska?”

“There are volcanoes all along the Pacific rim,” Danica told him. Danica Frowley was a banker from nearby Fairplay who loved to hike in the woods. In her mid-thirties and fairly attractive with her flawless dark skin and lithe frame, I had heard more than one person wonder why she had never married. I had gotten to know her a little on these weekend work parties, but not well enough to have any sort of answer for that question. I had a guess that she was married to her work, but that might have just been nothing more than a guess. “And just because we saw the ash coming from the west doesn’t mean the volcano is in that direction. Did you see how high that wall of ash was? I think it came from the west, too, but at that altitude, the winds can blow differently than—“ She shook her head and said, “That’s neither here nor there. I can’t tell you where the volcano is, but I can tell you this much ash has to be volcanic.”

Since she seemed to know what she was talking about, and as none of us had any better ideas (and agreed with her assessment that this level of ash was beyond any of the fires we had seen in past years), we all turned to her as our authority. “How bad?” Claire asked, receiving nods of agreement from many of us.

Danica thought a moment, then replied, “Depends on where this happened. If we’re right and this came from the west—probably from the Pacific Rim—if it can blow up there and hit us with ash here … then I would think we’ve got to be talking a death toll in the millions.” As we all mouthed the words—twenty-plus of us standing around her—Danica continued, “Seattle, San Francisco, if they were closer to the blast they might be leveled now. And if this set off the San Andreas … “

Aunt Jenny looked at her watch and said, “We felt that first quake at about five-fifty, our time. It was probably, what? Better part of an hour before the wall of ash hit. Then, it was almost five hours before the ash let up enough for us to get out of the vehicles. Does that tell us anything?”

Danica answered, “I have a cousin who’s a geologist. It might mean something to him. I have no idea how far or fast a wall of ash like that could travel. And if there’s a weak spot in the earth’s crust, that might not be the only volcano—others could open up or it might just be the one. Either way, I don’t think this is a good thing.”

“Well,” I said, speaking for the first time in a while and finding the nerve to do so I knew not where, “It seems to me that the thing for us to do now is try to get back to town or to our homes. See if there’s power there and if anyone’s hurt.”

Several people agreed, but someone asked, “What about Annie? Do we just leave her here?”

“Somebody help me get her into the back of my truck. I can take her at least as far as Como.”

“And then what?” Claire objected. “Put her in the barn until someone claims her?”

“It’s either that or leave her out here,” I replied. Did I mention that, as brother and sister, we were often very skilled at pushing each other’s buttons? In the past, we had just been better at keeping it off public display. Of course, we had never had one of these discussions over a dead body before, either.

Claire, in an overly-logical voice I had come to hate over the years, said, “We can either take her into town and bury her or fire up the front end loader over there and bury her now. Either way, the salient point is that she’s dead.” That last word was said with pointed irony that deserves its own special typeface.

“We’ll take her in the truck,” I pronounced somewhat imperiously. “She was Catholic. We can take her to the Catholic Church in Como. Probably people gathering there right now, trying to figure out what to do next.”

Claire clearly wanted to object, but she didn’t interfere when a couple ladies wrapped Annie Meyers in an old blanket and then myself and Freddy loaded her into the back of the pick-up truck. It suddenly registered on me that I was going to be driving around with a dead body in the back of the truck and I wasn’t crazy about the idea but I wasn’t going to tell my sister that. What I said to her was, “Come on. Sooner we can get to the church, the sooner we can get her out of the truck.”

Claire said nothing in response, but got into the cab and slammed the door.

I was relieved when the engine fired up, though I had no reason to think it wouldn’t. I turned on the headlights, but that actually reduced the visibility due to the ash still in the air. I turned off the headlights and switched on the fog lamps and that helped some. I looked in my rearview and saw several other vehicles turning on their lights. I was glad I had parked with the truck pointing down canyon as I watched people behind me do three point turns on the narrow dirt road.

“Why aren’t we moving?” Claire asked, none too happily.

“Just making sure everyone can get their wheels going,” I replied as I slipped our truck into drive.

As we moved out slowly, Claire surprised me by saying, “I’m sorry I argued back there, Josh. I just—I just—I don’t know. I just get a feeling way down in my stomach that Annie’s not the only one who died here this evening and, well, maybe if I can deny she did, maybe no one else did, either.”

“Yeah. I understand.” I looked over at my sister in the glow of the dash-lights before us and headlights behind us and asked, “You think Miss Frowley’s right? Millions dead?”

“Dear God, I hope not,” my sister replied quietly.

At the mouth of the valley, where it opened out onto the larger South Park Valley near the site of what had been the town of Peabody back in the gold rush days, there was less ash. As if the valley we had been in were a large pipe that had blown the ash away from its entrance. But then, as we passed onto the grounds where once had stood the other mining town of Hamilton, the ash started getting thicker. By the edge of Como—itself once a prominent mining town but by this time a burg with an official population of less than fifty people—the ash was six inches deep and, like snow, drifted higher in some places. I was only going about five miles an hour—at the beginning due to visibility but then because the traction was so miserable. I had driven that old truck in snow storms and on ice, but driving on that ash was the least in control I had ever felt in a vehicle. Only a mile down the road and I could already feel the ache in my shoulders from the tense way in which I gripped the wheel.

And then someone started honking their horn and flashing their lights behind us. I came to a stop, panicking for a moment as it seemed like we were just going to keep sliding indefinitely, and then got out. Mister Glass had been right behind me in that old conversion van of his and he was getting out as well. We had started out from the Selkirk with six vehicles in our caravan and now there were only five. “What happened to Miss Frowley and her bunch?” I asked, as if Mister Glass could somehow know more than I did under the circumstance. Rather than snap back pithily, he just shrugged and we started working our way down the line.

At the last car, driven by Freddy, we were told, “I just looked up and Miss Frowley wasn’t behind me. I didn’t see her go off the side or anything.” Freddy was getting out of the car as he said this and began walking back down along the road.

Mister Glass had had the presence of mind to grab one of his flashlights and began to sweep the road and the ditches to either side. We had only gone a couple hundred yards when we found Miss Frowley and the three people with her gathered around her car, the hood up. As we came up closer she said, “I tried honking, but I wasn’t sure if anyone had heard me.”

“What happened?” Freddy asked her.

“Just died on me. I can’t get it started back up.”

Freddy motioned for her to get into the car, then said, “Try again.”

The car made a chugging noise, but wouldn’t engage. Freddy opened up the air intake, took out the filter, and looked at it in the light of Glass’s flashlight. “Full of ash,” Freddy commented, banging the filter against the engine block. Putting it back in place, he motioned for Danica to start the car again. She did, and it came on, but still sounded sluggish.

“This is going to be a problem,” Freddy commented sardonically, to be punctuated by the sound of one of the cars ahead of us honking wildly. As we three set out at a run, Miss Frowley’s passengers jumped in her car and followed us.

The third car in the caravan had been driven by Wlllard Guthrie, who was now standing beside his car and peering under the hood. “Just died. Acts like it’s not getting gas.”

“It’s not getting air,” Freddy told him, and us. “And who knows? The gas line may be clogging up, too.” He looked around and said, “There’s a good chance none of us are going to make it very far this night.”

“Well, let’s go while we can,” Mister Glass said, then we could hear his van dying from where we were. At that moment, Danica pulled up even with the convoy only to have her car die again.

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TimeKeeperS-Restoration

Marianne Whitcomb is happily married to a doctor. She has two sons. The traumas of her past travels through time are mostly behind her.

But then, she makes eye contact with a stranger in the grocery store and he quickly looks away. Where does she know him from? Does she know him? Is it from this time, or another?

The mystery man slips from her mind when she is contacted by Kellie, the biological sister of the other Marianne–the one with almost-identical DNA who now lives several thousand years in the future. Kellie needs a kidney. Marianne remembers her own sister Kellie and finds herself so desperate to have her back that she’ll even take a replica.

And in another millennia, the last dying remnants of the Winauwan empire are planning a stroke that will wipe out not just Edward and Marianne, but all of civilization. They intend to rise from the ashes and the blood and rule. Only one young mother stands in their way.

This is the 3rd book in the series and it’s now available now for Kindle and paperback!

Book 3 in the TimeKeeperS series!!

Book 1: TimeKeeperS, Book 2: TimeKeeperS – Rectification, Book 3: TimeKeeperS – Restoration

…

Sample reading

Marianne fed a twenty-dollar bill into the register and then waited for her change. She smiled to herself, thinking the machine was probably confused about being fed actual cash.

As she waited, she looked up, absently scanning the people around her. It was a habit long-engrained in her from her work as an investigator—and from even before that, in her “other life”—and rarely brought any results. Oh, she usually spotted friends quicker than they spotted her, but other than that one time a couple years before when she had spotted her client’s wayward husband picking up a pizza, her scans were benign.

This day, though, she caught a man’s eyes at—she believed—the exact moment he had spotted her. She didn’t recognize him at first, but the way he furtively looked away got her attention. It wasn’t just the look of a married man who has been caught ogling a woman. Marianne was no longer an ingénue, and her body showed the effects of two children, but she was still thought attractive—especially by men of that age. Men in their fifties or sixties who told themselves they passed for forty-five or thought a woman in her late thirties would be attracted to a man of their … experience? Maturity?

This man, though, upon seeing Marianne had quickly looked away, and his skin tone had changed, growing darker. As Marianne took her change without even looking at the register, she cast another glance at the man. Mid-sixties, she guessed, with a fringe of dark hair and a few long strands combed over a suntanned pate. A little overweight but not obese. He was wearing casual clothes and his tan covered his arms but there was a hint of a white line right below his shirt—which was just a simple T advertising a local body shop. She told herself immediately that he did not work at the body shop but probably did work outside. Gardner? No, his head would have been either covered with skin cancer or he would be wearing a cap. They made the highway crew wear long-sleeve shirts anymore, so not that job. Maybe, she reasoned, he worked inside but spent his off hours on the golf course. She thought that a more reasonable explanation than boating or fishing, for those guys tended to burn, not tan.

She casually walked out of the store, noticing from the corner of her eye that he made sure not to look directly at her. It was then she realized there was a heavy reflection in one of the windows to the left of the door and he was looking at her that way. When he realized she had noticed him, he quickly turned away. As she watched him walk, she noticed he never moved his left arm, as if it were just limp. She didn’t want to stare too hard, though, so it could have just been a false impression.

“He’s someone who knows a little something about stealth,” Marianne commented to herself lowly. Ex-military? she wondered. A spy? If so, she thought it had been a long time for him as a pro wouldn’t have been spotted at all with that reflection.

The next question in her mind was to wonder if he were always furtive and just the act of making eye contact with anyone had spooked him, or had he been spooked by Marianne? If so, why? A past case? Marianne had a good memory for faces—and usually names—and the man didn’t mean anything to her right away. As she got in her car, she watched him through the mirror and saw him go out to a plain, blue car, probably ten years old, and drive away. She thought about following him, but knew she had no good reason to. She also knew that one of the hardest things for most people to disguise was their walk and she was certain she had never seen this man’s walk before.

So what had spooked him? She knew that the simplest explanation was that, for just a split second, she had reminded him of someone else. Marianne was of average height and build for her age, and while she wore her hair longer than most women of her years, she had been mistaken for other people before. It was part of why she had been such a good investigator: she almost never stood out from the crowd. Knowing that was the most likely explanation didn’t stop her from thinking, though, because the second-most-likely scenario was that she had crossed his path at some point in the past as an investigator. Perhaps he had been one of the clandestine lovers of someone Marianne had been investigating for a divorce case. Maybe he had been on the periphery of a bank investigation and never caught, but should have been.

Something, after all, had spooked him, for it occurred to Marianne as she drove away that his walk had been too casual, the walk of someone who doesn’t want to look nervous while also checking their surroundings with a keen eye. Yet, she didn’t recognize that walk.

She puzzled about the matter all the way home, then got out of the car anxious to see her husband and children. She would have been happy to see them, anyway, but she knew herself and her propensity to dwell on minutia. It was what made her a good investigator, but it was also something of a curse at times. Thus she was hoping that a romp in the yard with the kids would take her mind off of what was probably just an odd moment. Even if the man recognized Marianne from something in the past, it would probably never come up again.

She was momentarily chagrined, then, to find the house empty. She was just about to grumble when she saw the note on the counter. It was from her husband and said the family was at the neighborhood park. Marianne had intended to start supper as soon as she got home, but decided she would rather go be with her family. Not just because it would be fun, but because it would be distracting (she hoped).

Putting the recently-purchased cheese and sour cream in the fridge, she locked the door and set off down the street.

The park was just a couple blocks away and she quickly found her family there. Her two boys waved but took little more notice than that for they were quite busy on the jungle gym, fighting bad guys or slaying dragons or whatever it was they were doing. Her husband, Caleb, gladly came over and gave her a hug and a kiss. “Hope you didn’t mind,” he said as they held hands. “I just didn’t want to be cooped up in the backyard.”

“Don’t mind at all. You realize this means I’m probably not going to fix enchiladas for supper so, if you want some, we’re going to have to go eat at Jose’s,” she replied, quickly adding, “Hint, hint.”

“Sounds good to me,” he told her. As they sat down on a nearby bench, Caleb told her, “I had the weirdest dream last night.”

“You?” she laughed, elbowing him in the ribs. “You never have a dream!”

“That’s part of what makes it so weird. The thing is, I usually just don’t remember dreams. I wake up knowing I just had one, but two seconds after waking I couldn’t tell you what it was about. Anyway, I remember this one—or part of it. I just remember that I was at the hospital and I was walking past the lobby and glanced in at the waiting patients—always curious if any of them are mine, you know? Anyway, out of the corner of my eye I see this … shadow. Like someone peeking at me from around a corner, but I looked and couldn’t see anyone. Just the normal hospital people, anyway.

“It kept happening, though. I’m sure I woke up more than once and then I’d go back to sleep and it would happen again.”

“Did you ever see who it was?” Before he could answer, she posited, “Maybe Batman? Sounds like something he’d do.”

Caleb smiled in response, then said, “I don’t think so. Right before I woke up this morning, I finally got a glimpse of the person. And here’s the really weird part—well, all of it’s weird. Anyway, it wasn’t like he was stalking me or anything. When I finally saw him, it was like we had just been going down opposite hallways but would never cross open spaces at the right time. But then we did, and I got a good look at him.”

“Anyone you know?”

He shook his head as he said, “I don’t think so. I mean, he wasn’t real distinctive. I mean that in two ways. It was a dream, and even when I do dream I rarely see things clearly. It’s like everything’s out of focus. But also, he wasn’t a distinctive person. Just an average-looking person.”

“Okay, now you’re in my wheelhouse,” she laughed. Pretending to hold a notebook and pencil, she queried, “How tall was he? What color hair? Did he walk with a limp?”

Caleb laughed along with her, but then actually searched his memory and said, “He didn’t have hair, I remember that. I mean, he had some along the sides but he was balding. Average build, maybe a little on the heavy side. I think he was older than us. Probably late fifties, maybe early sixties. Dark complex—no, I remember thinking he was just tan, like someone out in the sun a lot.”

“Um,” she asked, trying to keep the surprise out of her voice, “How do you know that?”

“It’s weird that I would notice this, especially in a dream, but I remember seeing that he had a farmer’s tan. He was wearing short sleeves, but there was a white band on his upper arm like he’d been outside a lot but usually wore his sleeves just a little—Honey, are you all right?”

She shook her head as if she’d just come up out of water and said, “What? Yeah. Just fine. This is … this is really strange.”

“What?” he asked, knowing her well enough to know that she meant more than just the fact that he had actually remembered a dream.

“I think I saw that guy today.”

“What guy?”

“The guy from your dream.”

“Oh, come on,” he retorted with a laugh.

“No, I mean it,” she said, then described the encounter at the grocery store.

Caleb finally told her, “Sure, they sound similar, but we both described a man that could be a quarter of the men in this town. Neither one of us got a good look at any distinguishing features, no tattoos or anything.”

“I know,” Marianne said with a nod. She watched their boys play for a bit, then said, “Something about that encounter—and it wasn’t even really an encounter, just a glance. Something about it is just sticking in my mind. More than it should by any logical reasoning.”

Caleb put his arm around his wife’s shoulder and said, “He probably did know you from a case. You’re probably right that he was on the periphery in some way and he’s lived in fear ever since of being roped in. And I know your mind, Honey: you don’t remember him now but sometime tonight, you’re probably going to wake up and remember that you did see him in relation to some client you worked for ten years ago.”

“Yeah, I know,” she agreed with a shrug.

“You’re leaving out another possibility.”

“What?”

He smiled as he squeezed slightly with the arm that was around her, “You always talk like you’re this Plain Jane, but I happen to still be convinced that you’re the prettiest woman in town. It’s very possible you just happened to look up and catch a married man who thought he’d been caught admiring your legs.”

“I doubt that,” she replied with a shrug, though she took his hand.

Caleb decided not to press the point, partly from exasperation at having pressed it so many times before. He truly did think his wife was beautiful, and thought she was more beautiful after almost ten years of marriage than she had been when he first met her. For some reason, though, she had always been convinced that she was no better than average and could blend into anonymity at any time. It frustrated him so that he sometimes had to remind himself not to speak harshly to her about it. He was a doctor, and though he had never studied psychology, he was convinced there was an underlying cause that he had never been able to diagnose. Something from her childhood, perhaps, but something.

As he sat there looking at her profile as she watched their boys, he was reminded all over again just how pretty he found her to be. The long hair, the smile some might have said was a little wide but he had never thought so, the green eyes. And her figure … he smiled to himself because if he started thinking too much about her figure he was going to have to figure out some way to keep the boys occupied while he swept her off to the bedroom.

“Now what are you smiling about?” she asked suspiciously, though with a twinkle in her eye.

Trying to be as innocent as he could, he shrugged and replied, “Oh, just looking at you.”

“I guess that’s better than having you look at me and laugh,” she commented sardonically, though the twinkle was still there.