by Pat Dale
http://www.patdale.net/
http://www.patdalesblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.whimsicalpublications.com/
Set in the charming hospitality of northern Mississippi, CROSSED LINES is a most inhospitable story of seduction, mystery, and revenge.
Baby Jane should have been just another statistic in the annals of New Orleans history, but the infant survived abandonment. A few years later she should have been a basket case after years of sexual abuse at the hands of a foster father, but she found a way to get free of him without losing her sanity. Or did she?
A successful author who'd put her unsavory past behind her, she's stayed for years with her philandering husband ; a man who unwittingly unleashes all the disgusting memories she'd kept buried in her psyche. And now, the fool must pay the price for his infidelity; him and his sexy lover.
Excerpt: Prologue
She stayed at the downtown hotel into the weekend while a crew cleaned her mansion of all traces of the violence. Early on Monday, hours before the inquest, she went back home and pulled out the sole contents of her safe, a computer disc. Inserting the disc into her computer, she initiated the printer.
As it spit out page after page of manuscript, she dropped them into a cardboard box. After destroying the disc, she lifted the heavy box and carried it out to the trash burner behind her home, and started a fire with a ew pages, adding more as the fire grew. When the last sheet had been tossed into the flames, she stepped back and looked skyward at the column of dirty gray smoke. Waving to it, she whispered, “Goodbye, Martin, and good riddance. May your rotten soul burn in hell forever.”
Even as she waved, Jane felt a lightening in her spirit, a buoyancy that had been missing her entire life. The sense of foreboding and heaviness that had pervaded her very existence was gone. After the symbolic pile was reduced to ashes and the sky clear of smoke, she returned to the house and prepared her real manuscript for shipment. Her latest novel was complete and ready for the publisher.
“What was will be no more,” she sang to herself, recalling the little play she’d directed. “What will be, we’ll see…” In her mind, last fall was only a blink away…
