LITMIR.BIZ

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have intercepted the call, and pretended it was Yolanda. If he hadn’t been so intent on taking the time to insult the old bag at the restaurant he might have even made it back in time to catch it before Elley did. Earlier, if he hadn’t been so involved in making his notes and drinking his beers, he might have given some thought to dinner ahead of time. If he had only given Dani his cell number, this would not have happened at all.

      If, if, if, if, if, if.

      Well, he would talk to Elley. He’d have to. The noose he had managed to tie around his neck could not be totally undone, but maybe it was possible to slacken it up a little, just enough to breathe.

      He got up and went to the fridge and pulled out the one remaining Sam Adams from the six-pack. Fucking bitch! he thought furiously, walking back to the table, no longer certain at whom he was directing his rage.

      CHAPTER SIX

      God, what an idiot she had been for not simply hanging up when Jack didn’t answer himself. His wife had not said anything overtly accusatory to her, but the frost level in her voice fully communicated that she did not believe for a nanosecond Dani was innocently helping Jack out with a work project. While there was no denying that his wife would be justified in feeling so had she known that Dani had climaxed more times with Jack in one day than she had with Perry in the last six months of their marriage, Dani had said nothing to indicate what they had done.

      Had Jack confessed? Dani doubted it. Had he done so, his wife would have gotten screaming hysterics from his wife instead of icy condescension. From now on she would avoid calling him at home.

      What she had intended to tell Jack, had she gotten him on the phone, was information she had gleaned from spending the day in Glenowen, which proved to be a charming, historic village whose local industries were arts, crafts and antiques. In the course of rambling through the town’s century-old-or-better business district she had stopped into a tiny bookshop which featured locally written and published works. One of them was a book of ghost stories from the Central Coast area. The back cover had promised more in the way of local folklore than things bumping in the night, but Dani bought a copy anyway and took it back to the motel, where she started to read it while sipping a mimosa in the Pines bar.

      Even though Dani had not been looking for anything in particular, she quickly found something pertinent: a section on Wood City. It failed to provide any sources for the information, which meant it was probably a combination of old folk tales with a few newspaper articles thrown in for the illusion of veracity, but actually having visited Wood City, accepting the conclusions made by the author of the book did not take a great stretch.

      Cursed Ghost Town in the Pines

      Deep in the forest at the base of the Santa Lucia Mountain Range in between Glenowen and San Simeon lies the deserted ghost town of Wood City. It was originally designed and built in the 1930s by industrialist Henry J. Breen as the place where the workers of his intended lumber mill, which was to be located nearby, would live. Newspapers of the time proclaimed that Wood City would be an idyllic village, but old timers who remember the town say it looked more like a work camp. Some claimed it was the concept of a company store taken to the extremes: an entire company village.

      But that isn’t reason the Depression-era town has spawned a legend all its own. Even before it opened for business, Wood City was said to be cursed. Many thought it was because Breen himself collapsed and died right in the center of town just before it was completed, and that his spirit remained to haunt the place. More rational people of course simply claim that Breen’s sudden death, combined with his unwise business decision to build the town before the mill that would support its residents, doomed the entire venture. Some have even said that the town was destined to fail from the very start, since Breen seems to have chosen the location for his mill more from a standpoint of nettling his neighbor, rival tycoon William Randolph Hearst, whom Breen hated, rather than the belief that the forests of the Central Coast were prime for such a venture. Ego wars among the rich are not recent inventions.

      None of that, however, can explain the reports of disappearances amongst the citizens of Wood City. Entire families were said to have simply vanished. Many have argued that these disappearances were for perfectly sound reasons. There was, after all, little reason for anyone to stay in the town once it became clear that the lumber mill would never actually be constructed. But because of its strange history, over the years the story of Wood City has taken on a legendary aspect, similar to the mysteries of the disappearances of the Virginia colonists from Roanoke Island or the abandoned “ghost ship” the Mary Celeste.

      Whatever the truth of the situation, within a few years of Breen’s death Wood City was nothing more than a memory. Ruins of the old town still exist, and over the decades there have been many reports from hikers and travelers through the area of having been overcome by strange, foreboding feelings.

      That last part had caused Dani to shiver. Even now she could feel the uninviting aura of the place, the sense of grimness that permeated it like an old, bad memory, which could not be explained simply by way of its desolate location. It was something else, an aura that hung over the site like a cloud. And it had clung to her.

      She had felt that sense of abandon, the sudden conviction that nothing else mattered except satisfying her basest urges, right before she had jumped on Jack Hayden in his truck and rode him like a mechanical bull. It was still lingering within her when they continued to make love at the motel. It did not abate until hours later, after she had actually considered picking up another man in the bar and taking him back to her room. When the feeling had finally gone away, she had reacted not so much with a feeling of guilt, but of shock. It was not like her to be a sexual predator, or even sexually aggressive, and hard as she had tried, Dani could not explain away the feeling of being driven by some outside force to act in a way that was not natural for her as either the acknowledgement of her newfound unmarried freedom or as some kind of oncoming middle-aged itch (and actuarial statistics aside, she did not think of herself as entering middle-age). It was literally like she had just awakened from a dark dream, one that was pleasurable, certainly, but one that was also disturbing.

      The Devil made me do it. That used to be the catch phrase from some old television comedian. Then the Devil went away again, leaving her with a swirling storm of contradictory emotions: a strange kind of shame for pouncing on a man she had only just met, offset by the desire to see him again, mingled with worry over having complicated his marriage and home life.

      But there in Jack Hayden’s pickup truck in the woods, she at once knew what it felt like to want to be a bad girl, the kind of girl so bad that at the moment of orgasm she had a sudden, horrible urge to take her two thumbs and push them as far as she could into Jack’s eyes, shove them inward until her fingernails went up into his brain.

      And some small part of her enjoyed the feeling.

      Dani Lindstrom shuddered. She desperately wanted to talk to Jack. She desperately wanted to learn if had felt the same sort of dark shadow steal into his soul up there at Wood City.

      Or was she having some kind of breakdown?

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      “You told him what?” Jack Hayden shouted, sitting in Marcus Broarty’s office. Ordinarily he would not have taken such a liberty as screaming in his boss’s face. But after a largely sleepless night resulting from Elley’s having literally locked him out of the bedroom, followed by her leaving early this morning without so much as a word, just a good deal of slamming and thumping, he was not in a good state of mind.

      “Jack, I just relayed what you told me,” Broarty responded, looking like a finalist in the Mr. Guileless competition.

      “What I told you, Marc, was the place was a near total loss!”

      “You used the word ‘encouraging,’ and I’m quoting you, Jack.”

      “Maybe I did, Marc, but I used a lot of other words around it, and they add up to the fact that there’s nothing there. Didn’t you even look at those pictures I emailed you?”

      “What pictures?”

      “Don’t tell me you didn’t get the pictures.”

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