The shade is pulled, but the morning light cascades into an empty room. No wrapping paper from yesterday’s gifts. No ponies cast about on the floor. Her stuffed animals are piled up on her bed, as if wondering, too, what happened.
My gaze falls on a teddy bear. Black, with a white star on its chest, the fur not yet rubbed off, the eye still intact.
Gomer.
My knees buckle and I crawl to the bed, yank it from the pile. Press it to my face.
No. No…no…
I’m shaking now, the world coming at me in splinters.
The wound.
The missing swing set.
My empty bed.
Eve on the porch with Silas.
And, on my daughter’s shelf, a picture of my mother and father, grinning in a cruise line photo frame. They look happy, not a hint of my mother’s stroke in her eyes, her smile.
She’s dead, and you can’t bring her back.
No.
I close my eyes and cling to the only fragment of all of this that makes any sense.
The only thing that offers the slimmest filament of hope.
Oh, God, please.
Let the watch work.
The epic series continues with Rembrandt Stone in two months. Turn the page to check out a sneak peek of book two. Join us in April for the next installment.
Chapter 1 - Sneak Peak
Just try and outrun your demons, I dare you.
I sit in my daughter’s upstairs bedroom, in my half-remodeled craftsman, the morning bright against the window, holding a black teddy bear in my shaking hands. Gomer, a throwaway gift to my then four-year-old daughter, almost an afterthought I picked up from a drugstore as I raced home from work on a long-ago birthday.
A white star is embedded in the toy’s fur, and this version of Gomer still has both eyes. They stare at me, black, glassy.
Shocked.
It’s all wrong.
Please, God, let me wake up.
It’s a fear that stalks every man, at least the ones like me, middle aged, married, a father of one, trying to frame his life into something that resembles success. A fear that, despite his heroic attempts, and as much as he tries to live in the light, his mistakes will find him.
And the price of those mistakes will cost him everything.
The voice that confirms it is seven years old, a deafening memory deep inside my head. “But daddy, you’re a detective. You know how to find things.”
Overnight my life has imploded.
My house is now a war zone, the product of fury and panic, the drawers opened, dumped out, my office bearing the wreckage of my disbelief. I spent the past hour digging through my belongings—our belongings—to find anything that might give me answers.