by Ginny Aiken
Dad and Bella, long-time good friends, turned to each other and sought to comfort when comfort wasn’t easy to find.
Sin left a pall on all of us. Evil always does.
Three long hours later, Lila and her Smurfs took off. I breathed a sigh of relief. Dutch reached out across the sofa cushion between us and squeezed my hand.
“Long, horrible day,” he said.
“Amen.”
“It’s over now.”
“Only in some ways. In others... well, it’ll never be over for Lori and Ron.”
He gave me a long, sustained look. “Will it ever be over for you?”
I shook my head. I didn’t speak; I couldn’t. Something deep inside me urged me to tell him why, to tell him what had happened to me five years ago. I knew I would. I just didn’t know if I could do it right then. I hesitated, and the moment was lost.
His cell phone rang.
I grinned. He’d programmed it with a most appropriate song. The notes to “If I Had a Hammer” chimed out.
He frowned—sort of—over his smile. “This is Merrill.”
He listened for a few moments, nodded.
His grin grew.
His green eyes sparkled.
“It just so happens,” he finally said, mischief all over his handsome face, “that she’s right here. I’m fine with the offer, but you’d better talk to her.”
Intrigued, I took his phone. “Yes?”
“Haley?” Tedd asked. “How come you’re with Dutch—again? Is there something going on between you two?”
“Yep!” When she gasped, I went on. “We’re in the creep-catching business, didn’t you know?”
Silence. “You got Marshall?”
“And his wife and mother-in-law. I’ll tell you all about it at Mickey Dee’s tomorrow for dinner, okay?”
A reluctant “Okay” was her response, followed by, “Are you out of the designer business, then?”
“Of course not! Why would you ask that?”
“Well, because my office is looking pretty sad, and I want you and Dutch to do something about it for me.”
“You want to hire us to remodel your office?”
“That’s what I said. He agreed.”
I looked at the smirking contractor at my side. “Shrink lady, you’re on!”
She chuckled.
Then I frowned. “Just make sure you’re on the up-and-up, Dr. Rodriguez. You know our track record so far. It seems that everywhere Farrell and Merrill go, dead bodies show up too. Promise me it won’t happen again.”
Dutch’s laughter almost drowned out Tedd’s sputters.
Almost. But not quite.
I began to pray.
Note to the Reader
Very often, when writing fiction, a nugget of information sends an author on the flight of fancy that in time becomes a book. That’s what happened when I learned of the antique bottles discovered by divers in Puget Sound off the shores of Edmonds, Washington. Now, while that discovery is real, I took literary license with it and spun this book from there. Obviously, Wilmont exists only in my imagination and on these pages. So, too, do the bottles I describe and Stingray’s dive shop. The characters are all fictitious—well, maybe all but one. I’m sure everyone knows the real Midas. He’s the quintessential golden retriever, and I know few people who haven’t met one of those lovely, loveable creatures. One of them owns me.
Ginny Aiken, a former newspaper reporter, lives in Pennsylvania with her engineer husband and their three younger sons—the oldest is married and has flown the coop. Born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in Valencia and Caracas, Venezuela, she discovered books at an early age. She wrote her first novel at age fifteen while she trained with the Ballets de Caracas, later to be known as the Venezuelan National Ballet. She burned that tome when she turned a “mature” sixteen. An eclectic list of jobs, including stints as reporter, paralegal, choreographer, language teacher, retail salesperson, wife, mother of four boys, and herder of their numerous and assorted friends, brought her back to books in search of her sanity. She is now the author of twenty-one published works, but she hasn’t caught up with that elusive sanity yet.
Other books by Ginny Aiken
Silver Hills Trilogy
Light of My Heart
Song of My Soul
Spring of My Love
Deadly Décor Mysteries
Design on a Crime