Page 1 of Death on Riddle Road

DAY ONE

DECEMBER 27

CHAPTER ONE

My phone rang.

It took a beat to recognize the sound came from real life.

First, I needed to mentally step out of the book in my head, where a main character was arriving in the North Carolina mountains after a long autumn drive and even longer emotional turmoil.

I was not reading this book, because I was driving my own car when the real-life phone rang.Unlike the character, I was in Northern Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and heading home from the airport on a late December morning.

Neither was I listening to the book on audio.There’d been no time to start an audiobook between hanging up from an...interestingphone call with Teague O’Donnell and this call coming in.

Teague is...

And here we fall into the morass of blurry terminology for adult relationships.

My boyfriend?That’s fine for those under legal age and charming for those over retirement age.Not so much for those of us in between.

My significant other?That seemed more settled than we were, as well as smacking of corporate speak.

My honey, sweetie, babykins, boopsie-doodle, and all similar terms?I balk at calling my dog most of those, even in private.No way would I apply them to Teague, a former police detective and current sheriff’s department consultant.Though calling him boopsie-doodle in front of certain of his colleagues sure was tempting.

But temptation’s meant to be resisted, right?

Let’s say for now that Teague’s the guy I’m dating.The guy I want to keep dating.

Between the end of theinterestingcall with Teague and this incoming call — which the phone system informed me was from my friend Clara Woodrow — I’d barely had time to entertain a few thoughts about how cars and their cocoon-like atmosphere can bring out soul-searching.

Not only soul-searching for me in regards to the call with Teague, but for my lead character in the story I’m working on.

Thatwas the book in my head.Not a story I was consuming, but one I was trying to create.

The character, a woman named Mary Chase Rodgers, is arriving at her aunt’s house in Lattimore Mountain, North Carolina, after leaving her old life and old self behind in New York City.

She thinks she wants solitude, but she needs to learn—

What’s that you say?Why was I thinking about Mary Chase instead of Teague?

Sometimes it’s more comfortable to think about my fictional characters than my real life.

This time it was a toss-up.

Because the fictional characters were not responding the way I wanted.I suppose I could have — should have?— talked to my Great-Aunt Kit about that before dropping her off at the airport.After all, she is a career novelist as well as the real author of mega-bestsellerAbandon All.

Whenever I’ve mentioned that title over the past decade and a half, I’ve been conditioned to pause while people gush.Oh, I loveAbandon All...The best book I ever read...That book changed my life...I read it every year.

What no one ever says is,Your aunt wrote that book?

That’s because, with very few exceptions, no one knows that major secret.

The rest of the world was told I wrote it.

Not the me I am now — Sheila Mackey, driving home through slow-motion snowflakes in North Bend County, Kentucky — but the persona Kit created and I played for years, until I shed the name and persona the world knew asAbandon All’s author.

Truth be told, Kit nudged me — or drop-kicked me, depending on your point of view — out of the waning Manhattan literary spotlight when she decided to retire to the Outer Banks, with no more books planned for that author name, though she continues writing under other names.