Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4

 

I slumped in my chair, feeling like someone had pulled a plug and I was deflating like a punctured waterbed. "How long have they been missing?"

"I'm sorry."

"How long?"

"What's up?" Pete demanded, joining us. He saw Felicity two seconds after he stumbled in, dressed in threadbare boxers with purple hearts on them. He shrieked and dashed into the laundry room, just off the kitchen, and emerged a few seconds later with a bath towel wrapped around his hips. To add insult to injury, Felicity was too busy watching me to notice Pete's condition.

"How long have my parents been missing?" I demanded again, choking on the words.

"Two weeks," he admitted on a sigh.

"And you've been looking for them all this time?"

"If Mum and Pop didn't want anybody to find them for some reason, nobody could find them," Harry growled. He glared at me when I signaled him for silence, then sank into the nearest available chair. Fortunately, it didn't have any of Felicity's loot on the seat.

"When I have more information, I'll contact you," Hayward said. "Don't stir up any more trouble than there already is by calling here or the hotel they were last at. Understand?"

"Oh, I understand far more than you might imagine."

"Lanie… I'm sorry. They're my friends." Another sigh. "I didn't even know the military was trying to ride on the coattails of their research until after they were reported as missing."

"If that's a ploy to try to find out what we know—"

"Your parents are my friends. Trust me, all right?" He waited, while I tried to find words, and swallow down the sharp-edged block that filled my throat. "Lanie?"

"We don't really have any choice, do we?"

"I'll contact you as soon as I can." Then he hung up before I could respond.

Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4

 

"Hi, Colonel." My voice shook for half a second. Hearing from the military, even if that particular officer was a good friend of my folks, could not be a good thing. "What's up?"

"You're getting a registered letter today. I thought I'd prepare you. As a friend. Unofficially."

"Officially," I said, forcing ice into my voice, "my folks aren't working with the military this time."

"Things don't always work out the way we want them to."

"What does the government want with my folks' investigation of electromagnetic fluctuations around the Bermuda Triangle?"

"We won't know until we figure out what we saw."

"Meaning what?"

"Exactly that. No one is sure what happened. All I can tell you is that your folks…vanished. They're officially listed as missing, reason unknown."

"What were they doing?"

"No one knows yet. There's nothing to analyze."

"What do you mean, nothing?" My voice got loud enough to trigger a thud from down the hall. About five seconds later, Harry stumbled into the kitchen, holding up his sweatpants with the broken drawstring and trying to pull a Willis-Brooks College T-shirt down into place. He must have remembered that Felicity had threatened to invade, first thing this morning.

"They weren't measuring anything. No equipment. Nothing indicated in the notebooks we found in their room at the hotel." The frustration in Hayward's voice cut through the churning in my head and gut. "Those on-site are trying to blame the stormy seas and freak weather patterns. Considering your parents weren't anywhere near the water, that doesn't do us much good."

"No signs of a struggle? No explosion? What were they working on?"

"As far as I knew, they hadn't started working yet."

Video: Sneak Peek at the next book in the Visitors' Guide to Neighborlee, Ohio.

 

NIGHT OF THE LIVING PROOF

Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 5.

Check back later in May for the quiz to earn points toward free books.

Listen to chapter 1 on Ye Olde Dragon's Library storytelling podcast starting May 1, then answer the quiz questions.

Come on, it'll be fun!

Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4

 

The three of us were grateful that we hadn’t been discovered and snatched away, because Neighborlee needed us. We were also kind of ticked that more Lost Kids hadn’t been left to help carry the burden. That was part of why we were looking for others like us.

About the time I broke my back, we decided it was time to expand our search beyond the borders of our town. Were there other towns in the U.S. and scattered throughout the world where other abandoned children showed up and did the Superboy routine? Who made those other potential semi-pseudo-superhero kids vanish?

Not to start sounding like a sulky little brat who didn't get chosen for the school play, but how come they didn't take us?

True, Kurt's gift for mechanical wizardry wasn't splashy, and Felicity's talents with dogs, changing her appearance, and killing electronics were easily hidden with believable explanations. I had always been careful to do my flying/gliding where most people wouldn't see me. But if someone had the power and connections to snatch other kids away, how come they'd never noticed us?

Maybe we felt more than a little left out.

"Who knows?" I said to Felicity, who was rearranging her loot. About then I thought I heard movement coming from my brothers' rooms, and took a look down the hall. No signs of life yet. Well, it was only 9:30, and we had been up late with pizza, and it wasn't like anyone had homework to worry about until Sunday night.

Correction: I had homework. My first Talk to Terry column.

Lord, now would be a good time for the Rapture. Please? I'd settle for an alien invasion.

Remembering the roller coaster of good and bad news from the day before, I brought Felicity up-to-date while we dove into examining the rest of her loot. I got as far as describing the first request for lovelorn advice, when the landline phone rang. I headed for the shelves holding the phone and answering machine. Naturally, the outgoing message played before I got to it.

"Lanie, this is Col. Hayward." It was a gravely male voice. "Please pick up the phone. This isn't something I want to leave on an answering machine."

I yanked with brainpower when I was still two feet away from the phone, and nearly clocked myself across the cheekbone with the receiver before I could grab the handle.

Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4

 "Have you heard from Kurt?" she asked, when the present ended up on the table, designating it as a keeper.

"Nope. Nothing either way."

"Did you think he'd have some success this time?" Her face seemed to melt into that somber, little-girl-worried expression that I had always hated.

Kurt was out of town, following yet another lead on Lost Kids who had left Neighborlee while they were still minors. Lost Kids were the abandoned children who appeared on the outskirts of town, usually toddler age, no language skills, no identification, and despite the best searching methods available, no one ever claimed them and they never appeared in missing persons reports. At least, no one claimed them until strange things happened around Neighborlee Children’s Home, and then suddenly people swooped in with paperwork proving they were long-lost relatives. And those Lost Kids vanished. As far as we knew, Felicity, Kurt and I were the only ones with unusual talents who'd stayed in Neighborlee. Sure, lots of Lost Kids had stayed in town, made lives for themselves, and became upstanding and sometimes integral parts of the community. The ones who didn’t show any unusual abilities, or who weren’t in the vicinity when odd things happened.

That was the pattern we assembled since we decided to investigate why we were the way we were, and why or how we had ended up at Neighborlee Children's Home. Once we had those answers, or at least hints at those answers, maybe we could get closer to solving the really big question: where were we from and why weren’t we there anymore?

There were a lot of whispered stories and fragments of rumors to investigate. We had discovered an interesting and pretty consistently frustrating tendency for memories to be hazy when it came to the Lost Kids who vanished. Always around adolescence. According to the comic books and science fiction encyclopedias, and all the books of supernatural phenomena that my parents regularly debunked, psychic and superhuman powers usually manifested in adolescence. Mixed in with the stories of the just plain weird, amusing, or frightening things that happened in Neighborlee, there were true stories of children discovering their abilities.

Mysterious people in dark cars were usually seen loitering in the vicinity of Neighborlee Children’s Home just before the Lost Kids vanished. Those people knew enough to watch the children’s home for odd talents to show up in the Lost Kids. They knew how to make official records vanish, so those of us trying to pick up the trail years later came up against dead ends. So far, anyway. We knew as much about these mysterious people and the vanished Lost Kids as we knew about the enemy forces who tried to break through to Earth from other dimensions of reality. Neighborlee served as a patch on a weak spot in the fabric of the cosmos, or a lock on the gate. Lost Kids, whether we had semi-pseudo-superhero powers or not, often ended up as guardians, holding the door closed, slapping reinforcements on the weak spot. 

Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4

 

Back when I was a kid, I hadn't realized that I broke just as easily as any ordinary mortal.

"Hey, you can still fly, with Kurt's help. Thank goodness he's the Handyman." She slipped the lid on the box with Mum's sarong and tossed it to me.

I caught it with brainpower and tossed it down the hall and around the corner to my office. I couldn't see where it landed, but since I didn't hear a crash, chances were good it hadn't knocked over any stacks of papers or CDs or books.

"One down, a dozen to go," I muttered, and mentally marked present number one off my list.

"Speaking of Kurt…" She flipped an ominously plain brown plastic bag upside down, emptying a half-dozen sorting-and-storage boxes onto the floor. "What do you think? He can adjust the sizes of the compartments."

"Just right."

The perfect gifts for Kurt had always been mechanical, in one form or another. I admired the sorting boxes she had chosen, in varying depths and widths, and promised to help her wrap the presents.

Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4

 Saturday morning, Felicity came over to show me all the loot she had dragged home from shopping. When she was in super-shopper mode (not one of her superpowers, no matter how amazingly fast she moved) she was definitely a Felicity, rather than what we sometimes called her: Zap. Thinking of her as Zap, unable to control her powers, helped me ignore the fact she was gorgeous and looked like she was in terminal ditz mode, with those big, Bambi-wide eyes, coffee-and-cream skin, and all that curly hair. Currently she had it tinted amber, but it could be jet black tomorrow and platinum blond the day after, without her resorting to a bottle of dye.

I groaned, but didn't even think of complaining, when she spilled all her shopping bags on the kitchen table. And into the TV room. Mi casa es su casa.

I had to bite my tongue while she enthused about all the bargains and treasures, and contradicted herself every three or four sentences about who would get what gift. There were an even dozen presents in the pile of loot she had bought for me, to give to people. Gotta love having a shopaholic at my beck and call. Especially when I hated shopping. And not just because I loathed going into crowded malls when I couldn't see over people to navigate. The malls generally struck me as a ski slope obstacle course. The problem was that the poles moved without warning, and they had a tendency to scream when I hit them.

"How about this for your mom?" Felicity held up a neon green-and-purple sarong with matching foam-rubber sandals. "They're still in Bermuda, aren't they?"

"Probably." I caught myself twitching, trying to reach back and scratch that tender spot between my shoulder blades that always seemed hyper-sensitive when there was something wrong with the person I had just been thinking about.

Uh oh.

"What's wrong?" She paused in folding the sarong to put back into the gift box. Felicity might have looked like Lobotomy Barbie, but she regularly out-thought the Prime Time TV detectives and would have been a millionaire if she ever auditioned for Jeopardy.

"They missed their last two check-in calls." I shrugged. "You know how Mum and Pop are when they're tracking down the strange and unique. They forget there are people back home who want to make sure they're still alive. But it's not like we're little kids, left home with the babysitter."

"They never left you home with a babysitter when they went hunting down the inexplicable. Remember those pictures, jumping over Stonehenge? You always had the best family vacations." She giggled. "You could make a mint getting impossible photos, getting past all those no-fly zone restrictions."

"Could have. Past tense." I grinned, remembering all the stunts I had pulled as a kid, thoughtless tricks that even Superboy wouldn't have thought of. I had done them just because I knew I could, or wanted to find out if I could.

Living Proof QUIZ Time! Earn points for free books!

 How do you play?

ü Listen to Chapter 1 of LIVING PROOF either on the Ye Olde Dragon’s Library storytelling podcast page on YeOldeDragonBooks.com, or on your favorite podcast app.

ü Answer the questions.

ü Send the answers to 2OldeDragons@gmail.com

Points add up to get a free ebook or audiobook or print book in the Neighborlee series.

All month, the featured book is at a discounted price, if you need to fill in the holes in your collection. I mean, there are 13 books altogether. If you have all 13 already, THANK YOU!! But chances are good you don’t have all of them.

Yet.

This is your chance to get more and catch up on the weirdness that is Neighborlee, Ohio.

  1) What was the weather like on Senior Prank Night?

2) What was stolen?

3) Where did Lanie, Kurt and Felicity go to look for those stolen items?

4) What was the name of the boy Lanie rescued?

5) What does "semi-natural four-wheel drive” mean in snark-speak?

6)  What job did Lanie give up, and what job did she take full-time?

7) What is the name of Lanie’s basketball team?

8) Who is Lanie’s new boss?

9) What was missing when Lanie got to the comedy club that night?

10) What line did Lanie quote from The Muppet Movie?

Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4

 

For someone to be skulking around outside anyone's house was odd enough to be creepy. A lot of the older generation still didn't bother to lock their doors. If someone came to visit, they would have left a note, or walked next door to ask Makenzie on the left or Joe on the right to tell us they had stopped by. Skulking and setting off Felicity's dogs added up to something that just didn't belong in our town.

Maybe it was someone from out of town?

I almost didn't hear Pete bark "amen," but survival instincts overrode my temporary paranoia. I snagged three slices of pizza before I got my eyes open.

Odd thing: I didn’t think about that flash of impressions, the sparks in the air and tingle in my fingers and seeing Sylvia and the dirty oil slick in the air, until I was nearly asleep. It was like something had been blocking my memories until I started sliding down into sleep.

I didn’t have a chance to think too long about it, but the impressions affected my dreams. At least, when I woke up the next morning, I hoped they were just ordinary dreams, trying to interpret the stress of the day before. My other option was that my dreams were warning me of something about to happen. I did not want that. My life was already stressful enough. Christmas shopping season had officially started, and I hated shopping.

The PIGGIES Are Coming!!! Fairytale Anthology #5: TROUBLE COMES IN THREES

 

Coming May 1

Fairytale Anthology #5

TROUBLE COMES IN THREES

They say "three's the charm," but is that true?

When it comes to three pigs, of all different kinds, who can be sure?

Inside these pages lurk evil pigs, silly pigs, brave pigs, musical pigs, magical pigs, lazy pigs, diligent pigs, arrogant pigs, manic pigs, and pigs fleeing a future as bacon.

Oh, and then there are the houses of straw, sticks and bricks, and multiple interpretations thereof.

And don't forget the wolves. Evil wolves, professorial wolves, vengeful wolves, defender wolves, and wolves just trying to help their friends out of a sticky, piggy mess.

If the story of the three pigs isn't your favorite fairytale … it might just be by the time you finish reading.

Come inside and see pigs through our authors' eyes. You'll never look at pigs and straw and sticks and bricks and bacon the same way again…

NEWS NEWS NEWS NEWS NEWS

You can get TROUBLE COMES IN THREES in ebook EARLY -- and Save $$$.

Go to YeOldeDragonBooks.com and click on the storefront NOW, and download the ebook to read before everybody else!

Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4

 

"Hey, Gordon. Who reported us?" I tipped back, pivoted to face him, and balanced on my back wheels for a few seconds.

"Mr. Poldruhy." He stepped over to the railing at the bottom of the ramp and leaned on it. The two-inch pipe groaned in protest.

"He's three blocks over. Man, those dogs have lungs."

"Joyce says she saw somebody creeping around the fence just before the dogs woke up. All this snow reflection, even with the lights out, it's hard to find a dark spot." He hooked his thumb over his shoulder at my neighbor across the street and one door down.

I would have to wheel over to Joyce's place tomorrow with a plate of cookies and thank her. Problem was, I hadn't even started my holiday baking. The combination of my folks being in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle and missing their last two check-in phone calls took a lot of the steam out of me.

Harry came outside and retrieved the big spotlight from under the passenger seat of the Jeep. Pop had insisted that I needed to have one, just in case I had car trouble in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. What was I going to do? Turn it into a klieg light and wave it at the sky until the Mounties showed up? Well, Pop would have been laughing now, as Harry helped Gordon look around the perimeter of the fence for footprints.

Problem was, between the melting and freezing of old snow and the blowing of new snow for the last three hours, it was hard to tell what footprints all over the yard were new and what were old, what belonged there and what didn't, and what had been covered up already. Gordon loved to play with his CSI toys, but he didn't even make a half-hearted offer to take footprint casts and try to match the soles with famous brands in the national registry. I knew that had to depress him, so I made sure he took two pieces of pizza when he left. From the boys' meat-lovers box, of course.

"So, who was poking around, do you think?" Pete said, when we finally settled down in the kitchen. He flipped the lid open on the top pizza box and didn't go through his routine of inhaling loudly and smacking his lips. The boy was distracted, for sure.

"If the security cameras Kurt installed in the fence posts were working…" I shook my head. Felicity felt bad enough about breaking Kurt's newest toys. I didn't want to rub it in, even though she wasn't even in the house.

"Whoever it is will come back, eventually." Harry opened his mouth and turned the pizza around so he could devour it crust first. The glitter in his big, dark eyes challenged me.

"Pete, say the blessing this time?"

He hadn't even gotten his pizza onto his plate, let alone lifted it to his mouth. He groaned, let his two slices drop, and licked sauce off his fingers before folding his hands together to pray.

I barely listened to him recite the standard lines he had been using since he was seven. My mind switched back and forth between the rotten turn my day had taken, and the mystery that greeted us when we got home. Sure, we had some weird characters in Neighborlee, but on the whole even the weirdos were friendly, and mostly harmless. Other than the Grandstones, and some of the wackos who ignored the subliminal “go away, we don’t like you” vibe the town gave off.

Save $$ on this month's featured book!

 

This month's featured book in the Visitor's Guide to Neighborlee is ON SALE all month on the YeOldeDragonBooks.com website.

Go over to the storefront and save $$ on the print, ebook or audiobook version.

And remember to check back on April 10 for the quiz, to earn points toward free Neighborlee books. All you have to do is listen to Chapter 1 of LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished) either on the Ye Olde Dragon's Library podcast page on the YeOldeDragonBooks.com website, or on your favorite podcasting app, then answer the questions, and presto! Points toward free books.

Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4

 

Felicity's dogs were going nuts, or rather, more nuts than usual, when we pulled into the driveway an hour later. (For those joining the confession late in the game, Felicity lived in my three-car garage, which had been turned into an apartment, and had a bunch of dogs. We're talking rescued strays. Big, drooly, smelly mutts. Felicity was a dog person, part of her semi-pseudo-superhero talent, along with uncontrollable EM bursts.) Between the usual letdown after a performance high and the knots of hunger in my stomach from the smell of that heavenly pizza, I wasn't in the sweetest mood. The big fence around my property kept the dogs relatively contained, but it didn't keep them quiet. When they were noisy, it meant someone had tried to break into my property.

Too bad security was often noisy. No lights were coming on in the houses around us, up and down the street. Translation: those dogs had been yammering and throwing themselves at the fence long enough for everyone to go back to whatever they had been doing before the alarm went off. Which meant, oh joy, the cops would show up any time now.

"Save a slice for Gordon," I warned Pete.

He slid out of the back seat and headed for the ramp to the kitchen door, holding the pizza boxes with all the care such treasure deserved. It was more important to get the food inside and keep it hot in this weather, than it was to get me and my wheelchair inside, after all.

The dog clamor meant Felicity hadn't come home yet. Big surprise. As soon as Harry swung my wheelchair out of the back of the Jeep and unfolded it, they shut up. For all their noise and smell, those dogs were smart. They knew I was the boss. It was my house, and they knew who was the alpha when Felicity wasn't there. Too bad my brothers hadn't learned that lesson yet.

I got to the top of the ramp and paused to use the towel hanging by the door to wipe the ice-melt grit off my wheels before going inside. The big black-and-white truck belonging to Neighborlee PD pulled up before I could go in. The dogs yapped once, then slunk around the side of the house to their kennels. They understood what police were for.

"Hey, Lanie." Gordon unfolded himself from the cab. There was a reason why the PD kept the truck they'd confiscated from some idiots who thought they'd set up a meth lab on the outskirts of Neighborlee. Gordon didn't fit into regular issue vehicles. In fact, he made this heavy-duty machine look a little delicate when he stood beside it. And over it. One of these days, I knew I had to ask him who made his uniforms. Had to be special order.

Firsty Freebie Day!

 

The April Freebie Firsty is JAX. A short story from the AFV Defender series, taking place after HERE THERE WERE DRAGONS.

 Only a Talent can establish communication with the Castitaran dragons, known as numenjax. But when the communication short-circuits Confri and knocks her out cold, she thinks her part in the project is over. Until the numenjax come up with a much more creative plan!

 Use these links to claim your free short story – only good through Wednesday, April 2:

 Ebook: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/wojxtz6lc0

Audiobook:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/rr5gf10iuv