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.