When Mitch Pembroke and his bodyguard, Kit Moran, agree to
help their housekeeper find her daughter, they get more than they bargained
for. Miss Egan is not the only resident of her Maine logging town to have gone
missing in recent weeks and her terrified neighbors are desperate for answers.
Are the disappearances really tied up in an old Native American legend or is
there a more sinister solution? Time is running out. Can Mitch and Kit find
Miss Egan before they too end up victims of the Deceiver?
About the Author:
Gilbert M. Stack has been creating stories almost since he
began speaking and publishing fiction and non-fiction since 2006. A
professional historian, Gilbert delights in bringing the past to life in his
fiction, depicting characters who are both true to their time and empathetic
with modern sensibilities. His work has appeared in several issues of Alfred
Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and is also offered at Red Rose Publishing. He
lives in New Jersey with his wonderful wife, Michelle, and their beloved son,
Michael.
Excerpt:
It was 11:00 p.m. and Sheriff McCauley was waiting for them
behind his desk. The lines in his face and the shadows beneath his eyes spoke
of exhaustion and of a deep and abiding concern. A pallet in the corner
suggested that the sheriff would be sleeping in the jail house tonight, and
possibly had already done so the night before. He stood up and offered each man
his hand. “Did Mrs. Egan get settled in all right?”
“She’s talking
with Mrs. Baxter now,” Mitch answered.
The sheriff
sighed, returning to his seat. “I guess that’s what I expected. Still it’s a
shame to burden that poor woman with more concerns when we still really don’t
know what happened.”
Mitch placed a
chair in front of the sheriff’s desk and sat in it. Kit came over to stand
behind him. He was purposeful, not nonchalant; protective in his movements. The
sheriff noticed all of this, then clearly considered how to begin saying what
he wanted them to know.
“As I already
said, I still don’t know what happened, but there are a few facts in the case.
Not cold facts, not hard, but they’re most of what I have to work with.”
Mitch waited
expectantly. Kit offered no expression at all. The dichotomy of attitude was
already beginning to work on the sheriff—the one man clearly desiring
information, the other just as clearly intending to see that he received it. A
lesser man might have grown nervous or angry. Sheriff McCauley merely began to
share that which he had already intended to give.
“Last Sunday,
that’s April 11, Miss Egan fixed a picnic lunch and went off by herself into
Shadow Valley. She had done this a couple of times before, despite suggestions that
it wasn’t a good idea. Miss Egan said she liked to get away to work on her
lesson plan for the coming week. My deputy went looking and couldn’t find her,
but no one was really concerned until she failed to show up at the boarding
house for dinner. Mrs. Baxter alerted me, and I organized a search. We scoured
Shadow Valley for three days with no sign of Miss Egan.”
Mitch continued
to wait expectantly, politely refraining from asking if the sheriff had
questioned Deputy Howland. You didn’t have to be a local to see that Howland
was infatuated with Emily Egan. And it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to wonder if
infatuation—especially if it was unrequited—could have led to something less
innocent.
The sheriff
changed course. “Well that’s the crux of it as far as Miss Egan is concerned,
but it’s only a small part of the larger picture. You see, we’ve had a number
of other disappearances in Shadow Valley which look much the same. Well,” he
amended, “a number of recent disappearances. People have been disappearing in
the valley for the better part of two centuries. It just hasn’t happened quite
so regularly before.”
The sheriff
swallowed a sort of half laugh, as if what he was about to say embarrassed him,
but he was going to say it anyway. “The Abernackie, the local Indian tribe,
have known about the place for centuries. They won’t go there. The whole valley
is taboo. But white folk have always been too smart to listen to Indians. So we
hunt there, and now we log there, or at least we do in the half of the valley
that doesn’t belong to the reservation. And the Indians they just turn around
and shake their heads, especially when someone disappears.”
“Just how many
disappearances are we talking about, Sheriff?” Mitch asked. He had the uneasy
feeling that he knew where this conversation was going. Not specifically, of
course, but there was an aura of strangeness settling about the office, and
Mitch didn’t like the way it felt.
“Six really,” the
sheriff answered. “Miss Egan, and five others, all in the past seven months.
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