Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

everything.
    “Did you hear me?”
    She slowly turned.
    “Are you speaking to me?”
    “No, I’m talking to the man in the moon”
    She stared. Her heart bounced. Thump. Thump. Thump.
    “Get over here”
    She stepped back toward the matron.
    “You forgot your purse”
    Her hands were sweating now, so much so, she thought the vinyl zippered purse would slip from her fingers. She reached for it and acknowledged the gesture with a quick smile.
    “Oh, thanks”
    Like others who had been around the matron, she faked a smile.
    The woman smiled, hers strangely genuine. “No problem. And you have a nice day.”
    With that, the strawberry blonde hurried to the lockers. Soon she’d be home, and in time destiny would come to pass.

BOOK I
    The Eye of the Storm

Chapter One
    Monday, 5:35, Cherrystone, Washington
    Emily Kenyon was thrashed and she looked it. She pulled herself from her gold Honda Accord, picked up her purse, and walked toward the front door. She turned to view the end of Orchard Avenue. The neighborhood of vintage homes was safe. Unscathed. Not a single fish-scale shingle from the threestory painted lady across the street had been harmed. Not so much as a splinter. Emily could even hear kids playing a couple of doors down. Everything was as it had been. The only hint that the world had turned over was the slight scent of acrid smoke that wafted through the air. It was faint, but enough of a reminder that across town homes and cars had burned.
    It had been two days since the tornado pounced on a section of Briar Falls Estates two miles away. It came almost without warning and left a jagged swathe of destruction that stole the hard work of homeowners and gardeners in ten minutes’ time. Roofs had been peeled off. Play sets and bi cycles hurled into trees. There was no making sense of whose house had been spared and whose hadn’t. Destruction reigned on the west side of Hawes Avenue, while the east side remained pristine. Across the street from a home that had been nearly ripped in two, a birdbath stood without a drop spilled over its chipped stone rim.
    No one died. It was true that an elderly lady who had holed up in her bathroom was in bad shape and had been hospitalized. Emily expected that the woman, in her eighties, would survive despite her trauma. The lady was a retired junior high social studies teacher with a classroom assignment that indicated she was tougher than most. After all, if she could endure teenagers of the 1960s, she’d survive the tornado, too.
    Emily stepped into the foyer. As she set down her purse on an antique walnut console table, its contents shifted. Her detective’s badge holder slipped out along with a pink lipstick she wished she’d used up and could toss. But she was thrifty and, despite the fact that it didn’t really work with her dark brown hair and eyes, she’d wear it until it was gone. She scooted the badge and lipstick tube back inside the pouch and called out for her daughter.
    “Jenna? I’m home”
    The scent of cinnamon toast and an empty glass of milk on the counter indicated Jenna was somewhere in the house. Emily didn’t wait for a response.
    “I’m going to take a shower. Then let’s go out and get something to eat”
    “Okay, Mom,” a voice finally came from down the hall. “I’m on the phone. I’ll talk to you when you’re out. I’m hungry. Take a fast shower!”
    Emily smiled. Jenna was seventeen, but still very much her little girl. It was just the two of them now. David had left for Seattle and become a somewhat shadowy figure since the divorce was final. There had been a few dates with new men even a kind of serious affair with a local lawyer. Cary McConnell was too possessive and controlling and Emily had enough of that with her first and only-marriage. Cary still called but she avoided him whenever she could. That wasn’t easy. Cherrystone, Washington, was a town of less than 15,000 people. She was in the courthouse two or three times a week. So was he.
    Emily snake-hipped out of her black skirt, unbuttoned her blouse, and let it fall to the floor. She was slender, blessed with long legs and a figure that looked more twenty than forty, which she was approaching on her next birthday. She twisted the shower knob with the red H all the way to the left. The C was moved a quarter turn. The old pipes clanked and steam swirled. Emily liked hot water.
    “Pietro’s?” she called out before stepping inside the whiteand-black tiled