Mystery
Date Published: 4/27/2021
Publisher: Level Best Books (S&S)
COLDWATER REVENGE is the story of two brothers involved with the same woman, and the ensuing crisis when one brother begins to suspect the other of helping her cover up a murder.
Excerpt:
Billy Pearce was still
alive, though neither he nor his killer knew it. The plunge into the icy
darkness of Coldwater Lake brought Billy back to consciousness, but not
awareness. His body filled the narrow sleeping bag. Cement blocks at his feet
ensured that it found bottom and stayed there. Where his face filled the
opening at the top of the bag, strobes of sparkling moonlight made prisms of
the bubbles that could well be his last mortal breath. But Billy didn’t think
about that. His mind was somewhere else. This had happened to him before, a
long time ago, and his mind went back there now.
When Billy was thirteen,
he’d decided to break into a golf course clubhouse on the far side of Wilson
Cove to steal liquor that he’d heard had been left in the basement storeroom
over the winter. Temperatures had been unseasonably warm for most of the month.
But Billy had decided to chance the walk across the late winter ice, rather
than risk being spotted along the
lake road at an hour when boys his age were presumed
to be in school.
The frozen ice crackled and
popped beneath his feet like a bowl of breakfast cereal. Billy imagined the
party he would have with the liquor he was going to steal. And while he busied
himself with a short mental list of who he could invite that would not rat him
out, the snap, crackle pop went WHOOSH! and he plunged like a
clown through a trap door into the freezing lake. In an instant, his heavy
winter jacket sponged its weight in brain-numbing ice water, boots filled like
pails and the whole soggy weight of it dragged him rapidly toward bottom.
But Billy didn’t panic. His
egghead family may have thought him deficient because of his constant troubles
in school and his indifference to books, but Billy was brighter than they knew,
and a childhood of disapproval had made him stoic and unflappable.
As his body drifted toward
bottom, Billy methodically removed everything that was weighing him down:
jacket, boots, shirt and trousers—everything but underwear. That done, he
looked for the halo of light that would mark the spot where his fall had
punched a temporary hole in the rotting ice. When he found it, and before his
breath could give out or his mind succumb
to the numbing cold, Billy had kicked and clawed his
slim, nearly naked body through the hole and onto the ice.
Now, on a starless October
night a dozen years later, his mind went back to that time where his body knew
what to do and his brain was confident that everything would be all right if he
just didn’t panic. Inside the sleeping bag, his hands methodically removed a
coat that was not really there, kicked off a pair of heavy boots that were not
there either and lastly slipped-off the
trousers that were. Then, as his face turned to find
the wall of white where memory told him a patch of brighter white would guide
him to a hole he must find and climb through if he were to survive, he abruptly
ceased to remember, or to think at all. Because this time, Billy Pearce was
dead.
About the Author
James A. Ross has at various times been a Peace Corps Volunteer, a CBS News Producer in the Congo, a Congressional Staffer and a Wall Street Lawyer. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary publications and his short story, Aux Secours, was recently nominated for a Pushcart prize.
Contact Links
Purchase Link
a Rafflecopter giveaway
No comments:
Post a Comment