Page 1

DAY 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... interesting phone 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 the interesting call 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.

That was 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-bestseller Abandon 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 love Abandon 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 as Abandon 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.

I’m entirely grateful for that drop-kick.

I enjoy my life here.

I’ve treasured that no one knew Sheila Mackey — fur mom of rescue collie Gracie, dog park regular, North Bend County resident, and sometimes sleuth — was also the person presented to the world as Abandon All ’s author.

But, soon, Teague will know.

That’s why I’d called him — to commit myself to telling him.

Later.

Though not much later.

Unlike my fictional character Mary Chase Rodgers, I wasn’t avoiding dealing with something. Wasn’t masking my reaction to meeting North Carolina store owner and community leader Whit Kendall with internal and external misdirection.

Oh, no, not me. I was facing it head-on.

Or would be.

Soon.

Real soon.

Before this year ended in five days.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about my just-finished call with Teague was that when I’d said we had to talk — a phrase renowned as a harbinger of bad news — he readily agreed.

He didn’t push me to tell him right then — perhaps recognizing in that detective brain of his that behind the wheel and over the phone were not the way for me to share anything substantive.

Still, it was a little odd...

No, I would not obsess about possibilities.

I had secrets I’d been keeping from him and after much urging from Kit, I intended to spill them. Plain and simple.

The first step had been placing the we-need-to-talk call to him.

Done.

The second step would be to have the talk.

My stomach gripped and twisted.

So, yeah, I switched my thoughts to the characters and their woes.

And then this phone call came in.

I welcomed it, especially since it was from Clara, my fellow dog park denizen and sometimes sleuth, as well as my best friend in Kentucky and beyond.

I answered with, “Clara, you couldn’t have heard from Ned already. I barely hung up with Teague and he was going to call Ned about all of us spending New Year’s Eve together, so—”

“ Sheila — we have to help her.”

“Her who? Help how?” I asked semi-incoherently.

“Mamie.”

The name clarified nothing for me, which I brilliantly conveyed by asking, “Who?”

“You know, Mamie from the flower shop by the yoga studio,” she said impatiently.

We attended classes together at the Beguiling Way Yoga Studio, though the holidays wiped that out for this week.

A tiny flower shop next to it was run by a man and his granddaughter, whose name.

.. possibly was Mamie. I based that possibility on what Clara said, not on my memory.

“And now her boyfriend’s father has been murdered. ”

Other people might have responded to the word murdered , but we’d seen a few of those lately.

I said, “Her boyfriend—?”

“Yes, yes, Robbie. The boy we met when we were looking into that murder outside the studio. Remember?”

Nope.

I did remember the murder. But the girl? Not really. Didn’t remember the boyfriend, either. However, I’m not devoid of stock phrases to fill in such gaps. “That’s terrible, but—”

“We have to help her.”

Perhaps self-centered, but my first thought was that my upcoming talk with Teague would not benefit from Clara and me being involved in investigating a murder.

As a recent hire as an investigatory consultant for the North Bend County Sheriff’s Department, he had.

.. reservations about my involvement in such matters and some of his colleagues had more than reservations.

Not to mention Clara and I had very recently concluded such an inquiry.

“We hardly know the girl. I doubt she’d recognize us in the street or vice versa. We—”

“She stopped me in Shep’s Market in tears and begged — begged — us to help.”

So much for not recognizing us — at least the Clara half of us.

“If her boyfriend’s father was murdered, the sheriff’s department will investigate and—” Ah! But only if the crime was in Teague’s jurisdiction. If it wasn’t, no conflict existed. “Where did this happen? I haven’t heard anything about a murder in town.”

Not that I had Clara’s connections in our town of Haines Tavern, Kentucky, but the word murder did catch my attention in local reporting or overheard conversations. And I’d heard none.

On the other hand, I had been preoccupied with getting Kit to the airport at the end of her holiday visit, then my we-have-to-talk conversation with Teague.

“He was murdered here. But the rest of it’s complicated.

Derrick Dorrio — that’s who was murdered — was.

.. Well, neither his son — that’s Mamie’s boyfriend, Robbie — nor Robbie’s mother trusts the sheriff’s department.

There’s history there. The boy is devastated, and so, of course, is she — his mother.

And Mamie, too. A whole family. Devastated . ”

If Clara did charity appeals, all wallets and purses would be emptied within the sound of her voice. But I dare anyone to diagram some of her sentences.

More prosaically, she added, “Besides, I promised we would help.”

Memories started to surface and I grabbed onto one that benefited my cause of avoiding conflict with Teague at this delicate moment in our relationship.

“But the grandfather — Mamie’s grandfather, who owns the flower shop — is really protective. That’s why she didn’t tell us—”

“His name’s Alan. But that’s all in the past.”

“Still, he won’t like her getting us involved, all the questions we’d have to ask her, ask everybody.”

“He’d probably prefer she wasn’t affected by another murder, but she says she followed our advice and now her grandfather approves of Robbie, so surely he wouldn’t stand in the way of her helping us help her help Robbie.”

After a pause to untangle the helps , I protested, “Clara, I still think—”

“Did you know she volunteers at the animal shelter? She’s one of the people who exercises the dogs.”

That was playing dirty.

Clara and I take our respective dogs — LuLu and Gracie — to the park most days. We both have soft spots for the four-legged. Especially rescues.

“But—”

My momentary weakness was all she needed.

“I knew you’d agree. I’ll be right over to your house — oh, did Kit get off okay?”

“Yes. But—”

“Great. I need to put away my groceries from Shep’s, then I’ll be right there.”