Forty four box set books.., p.139
Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10 (44), page 139
“Hello, Abigail,” he said.
“Hello.”
He climbed in the car, his energy massive and electric. Almost unbearable.
“Who are you?” I said.
He didn’t answer, looking over at me with piercing eyes. They were a deep brilliant blue. I could see them.
I pulled back out onto the deserted road.
We drove away in silence, the night coming down hard all around.
THE END
The adventure continues…
Forty-Four Book Eleven
Forty-Four Book Twelve
Forty-Four Book Thirteen
(the final chapter)
All available on Amazon.com
Books by Jools Sinclair
Forty-Four
Forty-Four Book Two
Forty-Four Book Three
Forty-Four Book Four
Forty-Four Book Five
Forty-Four Book Six
Forty-Four Book Seven
Forty-Four Book Eight
Forty-Four Book Nine
Forty-Four Book Ten
Forty-Four Book Eleven
Forty-Four Book Twelve
Forty-Four Book Thirteen
Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-5
Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10
The Road Not Taken (An Abby & Jesse Short Story)
Whiskey Rain (A Rose City Novella)
Available on Amazon.com
To hear about new books first, join the New Book from Jools Sinclair Mailing List.
About the Author
Like her main character, Jools Sinclair has a house in Bend, Oregon. She is currently on the road, working on what comes next.
Learn more about Jools Sinclair and the Forty-Four series at… JoolsSinclair.com
Praise for Forty-Four
*****
A FANTASTIC novel! 44 was just about impossible to put down once I started. From the very beginning, there was an air of mystery that kept me on the edge of my seat… I highly recommend this fantastic novel!
The Caffeinated Diva
*****
Everything from the setting, to the time frame, to the characters, was beautifully developed. This book is truly a gem and I highly recommend it. It literally took my breath away.
Avery’s Book Review
*****
Sinclair sucked me in like a vacuum cleaner sucks up dirt. She brings mystery, love, and friendship to the book and weaves a lovely tale.
Just Another Book Addict
*****
IMPRESSIVE! 44 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and will take readers by storm. With so much information in such a small book it will impress readers to the detail and depth in so few pages. The conclusion will take your breath away. Don’t miss you chance to check out this amazing story.
The Book Whisperer
*****
Fantastic, edge of your seat thriller. A MUST READ! It twists you about and as soon as you think you have it all figured out, throws you for the final loop with an ending that will break the hardest heart.
Wormhole
Forty-Four Book Eleven
Forty-Four Book Twelve
Forty-Four Book Thirteen
Also from Jools Sinclair…
Who says you can never go home again? Go back to high school with Abby and Jesse, back to a simpler time, back to where it all began... before that fateful day on that icy mountain road that would change them both forever.
It's almost Thanksgiving and the biggest game of Abby Craig's life is just days away. But before she can focus on scoring goals, she has to help Jesse solve a mystery that's been haunting the school's basketball team for the last fifty years. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Conner is proving to be a whole different kind of distraction. Will Abby be able to juggle it all or will her junior year end up being a real turkey?
This heartwarming short story is a prequel to Forty-Four, which has been downloaded by more than half a million readers. The Road Not Taken is approximately 10,000 words long.
Whiskey Rain: A Rose City Novella
To hear about new books first, join the New Book from Jools Sinclair Mailing List
Free sample of…
Whiskey Rain
A Rose City Novella
by
Jools Sinclair and Emily Jordan
The rain was coming down hard and being blown around in different directions like the world was stuck inside a carwash. It had been the wettest March in thirty years. And it didn’t look like it was going to let up anytime soon.
The woman blinked and squinted up into the deluge before dropping her head and pulling on her hood.
For a moment she thought about calling a taxi but then blew it off. It was twelve blocks. She could do twelve blocks. Even in a little rain. Okay, in a lot of rain.
She began walking toward the bridge and then remembered something. The bridge hadn’t factored in to her estimate. Twelve blocks plus the Ross Island Bridge. She had done a story on it last year. The numbers came back to her… 3700 feet long, 123 feet high.
Taxi!
The word exploded in her head like a wet firecracker. But as she reached the corner of First and Arthur she realized she was already thoroughly soaked. Soaked and committed. Somewhere along the way her pride had taken an interest and it was going to see her through this.
She did her best to avoid the puddles and the watery potholes when she got to the crosswalks. Not that it mattered. Her shoes and socks were wet and spongy.
She shivered as she passed the creepy entrance to the Arthur Street Tunnel and tried to think of other things.
She thought about a hot shower, an episode of House Hunters International—somewhere tropical—a drink, and those Trader Joe’s taquitos she had become addicted to. Maybe there was even some guacamole left. She hated when the guacamole turned brown, but on a night like this she might even go with brown guacamole.
She thought about the story she was working on. It was big news, the break she had been waiting for, a stepping stone to a better job on a major newspaper. She smiled at the possibility.
She thought about the man she had met recently. He was obviously dark and troubled, but there was something about him, something that called to her in a way no one had in a long time. Lately, she caught herself thinking about him more and more.
As she stepped onto the bridge’s narrow walkway, a gust hit her from the side, blowing off the hood and shooting water into her ear. She tilted her head and shook it several times, trying to get her hearing back.
“Damn this rain.”
At some point she began to get the feeling that someone was following her. She turned back a few times but didn’t see anyone. Still, she began to walk faster.
She was halfway across the bridge now, more than halfway home. The rain was cold but she didn’t feel it, having settled into a comfortable pace, fast enough to get her blood flowing, fast enough to get the job done.
Yeah, there was someone back there all right. She stopped and turned around again, waiting for a passing car to light up the walkway behind her. A few cars sped by but, again, she didn’t see anyone.
“Go to hell,” she said at the cold, wet night. “Whoever you are.”
She stared down at the river for a moment, black and whipped up. It was sad, she thought, that people got to the point where their lives felt so beyond repair, so beyond rescue, that they sometimes used this bridge to end it all. She looked down a moment longer. The empty darkness stared back and the rain kept on falling. She shivered again and turned back toward her route.
But when she looked out in front of her someone was in her way.
“Do you…” a snot-filled voice said.
She couldn’t make out all the words.
“I’m sorry,” she said, instantly feeling stupid and mad at herself for apologizing.
“The time,” the man repeated. “Do you have the time?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
Damn if she didn’t do it again. She started to step around him, trying to make up for the weakness of her words with a steely bridge-like determination in her body language.
“Yes, I believe you,” he said.
Believe whatever the hell you want, she thought but said nothing.
Suddenly, in a flash, he had his hands around her waist. After the initial shock she began to kick and scream. But he was too strong and there was no one else around to hear.
She felt herself spinning.
“I’m sorry,” the man said.
“Why?” she yelled. “Why are you doing this?”
“You know why.”
Her face formed a question mark.
No! her mind screamed. No, I don’t.
A second later she felt the man’s powerful arms swing her back and then up and forward. And then her world went upside down and began to fall away.
A few moments later there was a lonely and terrible splash down in the river below.
And then nothing.
Two Weeks Earlier…
I poured myself another sloppy shot of Maker’s Mark and stood in front of the window watching the rain streak the glass, wishing for things that once had been, wishing I could have found a way to hold on to them.
Ben was dead. Almost seven months now. But that didn’t stop him from coming back every single night, didn’t stop him from crawling out of his grave and into my living room.
He never said anything. He just sat there looking sad. Sometimes the drinking helped. Sometimes it made it worse.
I had gotten used to it, but on this night I didn’t feel like dealing with him. I held the glass to my cheek and stared outside, refusing to turn around. After the third drink the lights of the city lost their focus as my mind loosened from my skull. I could see his blurry reflection in the window pane.
Benjamin Mortimer was just a memory, like the scent of his aftershave that still lingered in my closet or his voice on old phone messages I refused to delete. I knew he wasn’t real. I didn’t see ghosts. It was the whiskey and the loneliness and the anger and the grief that brought him back each night.
I finally turned around.
He looked the same. Black hair, pale face, hollow and haunted eyes. I held his gaze, searching for an answer, looking for the missing piece. But as always, I came up empty.
“Why, Ben?” I whispered. “Why did you throw us away?”
He didn’t answer. He never did.
I poured another drink and watched him disappear.
And then I got to work.
For some reason my editor at the Portland Free Press wanted a story on education finance. It was the kind of thing that had always tested my sanity, sitting through a dull-as-pencil-lead budget meeting and coming away with a thick binder full of numbers and a pain behind the eyes.
I had three other stories I was working on at the moment, all of them more interesting, but I wouldn’t be able to get to them until this one was out of the way. I knew what I had to do. I just had to plow through the material and get it done.
I read through my notes and highlighted some possible quotes, then leafed through the binder, slapping Post-its on the pages that I would need to analyze better by the light of day. I made a short list of district personnel to follow up with and wrote down a few questions. Maybe I would talk to some art teachers and librarians, the ones scheduled for the slaughterhouse if the proposed budget was approved.
School cuts and lost jobs were commonplace, but I still needed to find a way to humanize the story. It wasn’t going to be anything original, but at least talking to the victims would put a face on the numbers.
An hour later I closed my laptop, stacked the binder and my notes on top of the table by the door, and set the alarm on my phone. I still had four hours before I had to get up. Maybe I could get some sleep.
Before getting to bed I wandered back over to the window. It was raining harder. Through the downpour I stared at the rusty metal table with the one matching chair on the small porch across the street. I had never seen anyone sit out there. I wondered what it said about a person with a table and one chair. Did it say they had given up any and all hope that there would ever be a need for a second chair?
Maybe I should get rid of some of my own chairs.
The dog had run up to him and he stroked its head, savoring the moment, a mix of anticipation and tightness in his chest.
Spring was on its way, but not yet. It had rained all day and now the chill of twilight closed in all around as more dark clouds rolled in from the west.
“Bailey, come back here,” the owner said. “Bad dog. I’m sorry.”
He saw her holding the leash, the leash that should have been hooked onto Bailey’s collar.
He wondered how many times a day she called to it and how often it actually listened. He knew it wasn’t the dog’s fault.
He thought about those words: I’m sorry.
How many times did people use that phrase? And how many times did they mean it? Most of the time what they really meant was that they were sorry you showed up and got in the way. They weren’t sorry for anything they had done. Not really.
But that was all right. That was about to change.
“No need to be sorry,” he said, squeezing the needle into the dog’s neck. “Good dog.”
Bailey never felt a thing, running off down the wooded path before stumbling and then slumping down to the ground next to a tree.
He smiled at the woman and reached inside his pocket, feeling the latex gloves. She was rather attractive for someone her age.
But this wasn’t about that.
I stared down at my mug of Earl Grey, the steam billowing up like a nuclear reactor, and made the call.
“Hello, this is Kate Craig,” I said.
“Kate who?”
“Craig. Kate Craig. I’m a reporter at the Portland Free Press. Is Mr. Dumars in?”
“Wait, let me see,” the woman at the other end of the line said. I waited. “No, I’m afraid he stepped out. Would you like to leave a message?”
I left my name and number and hung up.
“Nice work on that budget story, Jackson,” Dan Porter said.
The city editor at the Free Press had gotten into the habit of calling me Jackson after watching a documentary on the history of the Eagles a few months earlier.
“When they were just starting out, Jackson Browne lived in a basement below Glenn Frey,” Dan had told me one day. “Frey said that he would hear the whistle from Browne’s tea pot every morning and listen to him sing and play the piano, working on the same verse over and over and over until he felt he had it just right. And then he would have some more tea. And then he would work on the next verse twenty times. And so on.
“When I heard that story I immediately thought of you, Kate. Tea by your side, always trying to write the perfect story.”
I appreciated that he noticed how hard I worked and I didn’t mind the nickname. I was into jazz, but Jackson Browne was all right. You could be called a lot worse. What I didn’t like was the idea that I might become Dan’s go-to writer when it came to finance and budgets. That’s not why I had gotten into journalism, but this was the fourth money story I had written so far this month.
“Thanks,” I said, trying not to sound overly enthused.
“Hey, how’s that hero piece coming along, Heather?” Dan asked.
I wondered why he didn’t have a nickname for Heather Roberts. She was blond like me. He could have easily called her Blondie or Britney or Underwood. Phew. Dodged a bullet on that one. Yeah, you could be called a lot worse than Jackson.
“I should have it for you in an hour,” Heather said.
She had gotten an exclusive interview with a high school teacher who had prevented a school shooting two days earlier by wrestling the gun away from a student. According to a journal found in the gunman’s backpack, he had planned to shoot as many of his classmates as possible before taking his own life. At first the reluctant hero refused to talk to the press but Heather had gotten him to open up.
I tried not to feel jealous. At the moment the closest thing I had to something like that was an idea for a human interest story on Eric Dumars, the chief administrative officer for the city of Portland, who on his days and nights off skydived and deejayed at dance clubs around town. But he wasn’t returning my calls.
Detective Clay Moore studied the body in the back seat for another long moment.
The man’s eyes bulged hideously from his head as if they had been trying to run away. His legs were splayed apart unnaturally, as if they had been trying to run away, too. The victim’s tongue hung limply from his mouth. A dog snored in the driver’s seat.
“What’s with the dog?” Moore asked.
“Drugged,” Detective Elmer Reyes said.
Moore ran his fingers through his hair. It felt oily. His ex, back in the good days, would have bought him one of those shampoos designed for his greasy condition. But those days were long gone.
He looked over at the small group that had begun to gather behind the yellow tape. At least it was still early. In another hour this place would be a zoo.
“I’ve got our people canvasing the park,” Reyes said, pointing his chin across the street.
“Okay, but better tell them to focus on the homeless because that’s who’ll still be here,” Moore said to his partner. “According to Wick, the vic’s been dead for at least six hours. Everyone else is long gone. We need to re-canvas tonight.”
“Gotcha.”
Reyes put two fingers between his shirt collar and his thick neck and pulled down. Then he got on his radio and relayed the message regarding the homeless to the uniforms working the park.
