Coldwater Revenge, James Ross [books for 9th graders txt] 📗

Street.” The priest’s gaze pinned his former altar boy to the pillows. “But if you have the courage and stubbornness to keep looking, you could do worse than to start right here in Coldwater.”

Tom’s eyes found the window and the speck of Pocket Island in the distance. Courage and stubbornness. Fortis et Obstinatus. It might as well be the Morgan coat of arms.

“Something tells me you have something specific in mind,” Tom said.

“I do.”

“Go on. I can’t get away.” Might as well be in that rowboat of yours.

“I’m thinking of building a school out on Pocket Island,” said Gauss. “Something along the lines of the old Greek academies…

Tom lay back, closed his eyes and listened to Gauss expound his vision. At first, he couldn’t help thinking: do you have any idea of how much something like that would cost? The federal and state bureaucracies that would live in your pockets? The sheer regulatory and financial complexity of getting something like that off the ground? But as Gauss expounded, Tom felt his heart warmed by the beauty of the idea, even as he mentally tallied the enormous hurdles. He opened his eyes to see the priest watching.

“I see two roles that need filling right away,” Gauss concluded.

Tom laughed. “I’ll bite. What?”

“Prayer and Finance. Pick whichever one you think you’re better at.”

Before Tom could answer, another voice interrupted from the doorway. “Sorry,” said Joe. “He wouldn’t wait.”

Luke ran to the bed and climbed in next to Tom.

“We were out with your newspaper pal, Jack Thompson, trying to catch Moby Dick.”

Tom smiled. “Season’s over, Sheriff.”

“Yeah, well, I had to get gabby here out of the house. He’s been a bear since his fishing buddy’s been out of action. Driving his mom and grandma n-adic-uts.”

“Jack Thompson endorses my idea, by the way,” Gauss added. “He says that if I can get you involved in one project, he knows a dozen more waiting for someone like you to take them on.”

“What project?” asked Joe.

Tom sighed. “Something about building a school on Pocket Island.”

Joe looked sharply at Gauss, who smiled blandly in return. “It would be great to have you stay, Tommy.”

Tom turned to Luke and poked him with a bandaged elbow. “So what do you think, buddy? If Uncle Tom helps Father Gauss build a school on Pocket Island, would you go?”

“There’d be no girls,” Gauss apologized. “Just boys, boats and fish, I’m afraid.”

Wide eyes above a gap-toothed grin moved up and to the right. “Y-adic-es!”

Excerpt from COLDWATER CONFESSION

(Book 2 of the Coldwater Mystery Series, due out April2022)“There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead.When she was good, she was very, very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid.”Children’s nursery rhyme.

Lightning blasted the top of a tall royal palm and dropped it through the windshield of the parked rental car. Cacophonies of thunder and colliding debris overwhelmed all other sound and thought. Andrew Ryan watched the swirling carnage from the window of the vacation cottage, heard his wife scream and did nothing.

“Aaaann—Drew!”

Peevish bleats, pitched to dramatize minor annoyance, no longer penetrated the young man’s consciousness, but the timbre of genuine terror is self-authenticating and his wife’s cries eventually broke through. The swollen bathroom door yielded to his shoulder. A screaming woman careened through the opening. Behind her, a pale reptilian tail slithered through a gap where the bathtub and wall did not quite meet. Waves of adrenaline surged through Andrew’s already overloaded system.

“I’m out of here,” his wife shouted. But when she spotted the severed tree rising through their car’s windshield, she froze. “ANN - DREW!”

“It’s okay,” he whispered.

“There’s a HURRICANE out there! We have to get out.”

“We’re not going anywhere until this is over.”

“But there’s a SNAKE in here! I saw it.”

“And stuff flying through the air out there at a hundred miles an hour.”

“I CA….CAN’T STA… AY HERE!”

Andrew pressed the phone to his ear, tilted his head and then tossed the mute piece of plastic to the chair. “It’s dead,” he said. His wife wilted to the floor, wrapped her arms around her knees and began to rock back and forth, moaning softly. The sound that seeped out of her then was more ominous to Andrew than anything howling outside or coiled in a corner of the bathroom. It started as a low-pitched wail, like a Muslim call to prayer. Only it wasn’t spiritual.

“Eye-eeeee. MMmmmmm.”

“Karen?” he demanded. “Did you take your medicine?”

“Eye-eeeee. MMmmmmm.”

“Karen? Did you take your Thorazine?”

“Eye-eeeee.”

Andrew lifted his moaning wife and laid her on the couch and then began to search her suitcase. “Where did you put your pills, Karen?”

“Eye-eeeee. MMmmmmm.”

“Karen, don’t do this.”

“Eye-eeeee.”

“Did you pack them?” His wife’s eyes were unblinking…scared and defiant at the same time.

“I don’t like the way they make me feel,” she whispered.

Her husband’s oath was a weary amalgam of despair, resignation and foreboding. “Then knock yourself out before this gets ugly. There’re some sleeping pills in my bag.”

“Will you stay with me?”

“Of course.”

***

Andrew Ryan lay in bed, listening to the sounds of lethal nature and mulling an ordinary marriage turned by slow degree to tragedy. Or maybe it wasn’t so slow, but he was just slow to notice. A file of overlooked clues lay open against the back of his eyelids:

Late for their first date, the tanned coed in a white halter-top boasted of getting caught in a speeding trap on her way there, peeling-out and losing the startled cop in a chase through the residential hills. Aroused by the exotic combination of recklessness and sexuality, Andrew Ryan assumed that she was making it up. She wasn’t.

Later came the serial drama of post-graduation employment disasters, masked for a time by the carnal pleasures of twenty-something life in the big city. Months between jobs lengthened into seasons. The fade from lioness to recluse accelerated.

The year the popular magazines were touting biological clocks on their final countdown ticking, Karen announced that it was time for her to have children. She could