He walked past the lat machine to the open doorway and scanned the empty hallway beyond. Muffled sounds, like distorted voices, emanated from the
end of the corridor. He inched along the wall, pausing at each step, until he recognized the noise as a television blaring in the distant room. His shoulder
brushed a framed poem on the wall. It jarred loose and leapt for the solid oak floor, but his skillful fingers darted out and intercepted the unintended
alarm before it could signal his approach. He examined the cross-stitched writing, To my Beloved Wife, Crystal, and grinned. He placed the frame on the
floor against the wall and continued his journey quietly, deliberately, toward his objective ten feet away. Finally, he peered cautiously through the crack
provided by the partially opened door, but quickly pulled back when he saw a shapely female tying the reflective laces on a pair of pink tennis shoes. He
watched her pull long, silky, blonde hair back into a ponytail, then start a series of stretching exercises while she paid partial attention to the local news
report on the wide screen television.
The mysterious disappearance of twenty-one-year-old Amber Campbell from the Brandon College campus four months ago still baffles the Piedmont
County Sheriff’s Department. Yesterday, I interviewed Sheriff Lundgren regarding leads as to the whereabouts of Ms. Campbell.
“Sheriff, is there anything you can share about this case with our viewers?”
“Nothing substantive. We’ve investigated dozens of phone calls and potential sightings, but they all resulted in dead ends.”
“Can you speculate on the cause of her disappearance or give us some idea as to what might have happened?”
“Nothing solid. It’s possible Ms. Campbell was suffering from some emotional stress, perhaps the tension of her heavy course load, a fight with her
boyfriend – who knows. We’ve seen it before where a young girl runs offs and reappears months later in some other state.”
“Is that what you think happened: that she ran away?”
“We just don’t know at this time.”
“No leads, only dead ends; just more sad words for the waiting parents of a beautiful young girl with a promising future. This is Jamie Davis for
channel 12.”
His eyes locked on the swaying motion of her rear taunting him to reach out and stroke those feminine curves. Then something penetrated his nose.
Even from this distance, he sensed a sweet fragrance; a faint blend of tangerine and lime: her shampoo.
The lure of her tiny waist and firm buttocks contorting with each bending motion worked their magic. He could no longer deny his thoughts. She would
resist at first, wrestle against his superior strength. Finally she would accept his offering and they would merge as one. The vision of her smooth,
shaved legs entangled around his waist flooded his brain along with the sensation of her muscles tightening while she squeezed and surged in rhythm
with each thrust, further, deeper.
He wanted her. No, he needed her. Beneath him. He needed to take her completely and resolve the urge racing through his loins. The buzzing in his ears
and the blood throbbing in his temples drummed out all reason. Without a sound, he edged forward. As she started to turn, he reached out and locked
her tightly around the waist from behind, his massive arms gripping like a vise. She gasped and tried to escape, but it was useless. His warm hand slid
down inside the elastic band of her jogging shorts, and the sensation of her cool, smooth flesh drove more blood straight into his groin.
Kurt rocked restlessly in the white wicker chair on the bottom deck of his two-story cedar cabin. Its location at the entry to Cattail Cove off the mouth
of Gills Creek afforded an expansive view of the lake. At the edge of his vision, he caught movement to the right toward the main channel. A pair of
mated mallards led their brood of five, fuzzy little brown ducklings in a tight formation into the cove except for one straggler two feet back. Must be the
weakling. There’s always one.
The plop of a lure being coaxed across the shallow end of the cove to his left diverted his attention. He watched a crimson bass boat with metallic stripes
along the side ease just outside the bedding area of spawning largemouth bass. The fisherman tried to agitate the male bass from their beds, but they
weren’t taking the bait.
Splash!
Kurt turned back toward the line of ducks, but where there were five before, now only four waddled along. The weak, trailing newborn was gone. The
parents of the little critter had just paid a terrible toll for swimming in a lake occupied by large predator fish like muskies and stripers. While they would
never know the truth about what had happened to diminish their family, Kurt knew. In the shadows beneath the ripples of small paddling feet, a massive
beast with serrated teeth waited for an opportunity to strike. The innocence of the unsuspecting morsel was irrelevant; the loss to the parents of no
consequence. The answers they would never find meant nothing to the soulless devil. Only hunger and greed mattered. There was no guilt, no remorse
for its actions; it was driven by pure, self-centered instinct.
Kurt rubbed the tip of his thumb and forefinger slowly, deliberately, as he considered the irony of what he had just witnessed. On the surface, Spenser
Lake conveyed a portrait of natural beauty, but the peaceful surroundings were deceptive. The struggle for life and death played out each and every day,
yet the lake residents chose to ignore the brutal elements that existed in the serene vistas just outside their picture windows. He compared this scene to
the sad reality of the inept society in which he lived – an existence where people were unable to protect their own and where evil lurked in the shadows,
at the edges, waiting for a chance to consume the unsuspecting.
He actually shivered at the image of the parents of the young girl missing from Brandon College and the sleepless nights they would share, filled not with
answers, but with tears. They, too, would never know the truth about their offspring – the beautiful young girl full of life with a future unlimited by its
potential. Were her last moments too horrifying to consider? Her parents must feel helpless to reach out, pull her back, and save her from things that
consumed without a conscience or a soul.
Kurt returned to the confused pair of mallards as they searched back and forth for the duckling they would never find. He combed his fingers through
his thick black hair, then stopped and studied the hands on the dial of his gold-toned watch again. “Shit.” The rhythm of his thumb and forefinger
increased, the pressure of skin-on-skin contact made a shallow popping noise. “Damn it, Crystal. Where the hell are you?”
He reached for his cell phone on the narrow plastic table at his side and pressed a speed dial button. After the sixth ring, a canned message began. In an
aggravated tone, Kurt demanded into the mouthpiece, “Answer your phone, Crystal! Stop playing around.”
When the call back recording came on, he slammed the phone shut and smashed the mayfly resting on the small drink tray with his fist. The impact sent
his half-full beer bottle into the air. The amber container made a somersault before bouncing on the wooden floor. The contents sprayed across the
freshly stained deck, forming a trail of cream-colored foamy liquid oozing from the mouth. Kurt sat transfixed, like a statue, ignoring his surroundings.
The bottle rolled over the edge of the porch, gyrated down the steep hill and plopped into the lake. It bobbed up and down, resisting the inevitable, until it
released a gurgling sound as it disappeared beneath the dark waters of Gills Creek.
Kurt stuffed the phone in his pocket, leaped up, and raced for his truck. He was angry that she had ignored him and gone ahead by herself after she’d
promised never to do so again. But worse, he was frightened – afraid of the possibilities, what might have happened to the only woman he loved, and
had loved, for the past seventeen years. While he searched along Shady Hollow Road, images flashed in his mind of someone, something, harming his
wife.
His search became more frantic as he neared the end of her jogging route. She wouldn’t have gone off the road. Not even Crystal would be that crazy
after the neighbor’s dog was found mauled just days earlier, possibly by a cougar that had strayed down from Alders Mountain. She must have turned
right on Ridge Lane. She would be there, she had to be, and when he found her he would read her the riot act.
“Crystal, I’m going to literally kick your pretty little ass this time.”
But the words were a gruff façade hiding his real emotions; the apprehension that his worst fears were about to come true.
The damselflies were out early this morning. Half a dozen darted randomly back and forth just above the back end of Cattail Cove. One dove toward a
swarm of waterdogs suspended by surface tension above the lake, interrupting the ballet of water insects dancing erratically along the surface. The
reflection of the diving, four-winged marauder trying to single out one small bug among hundreds scattered the swarm in all directions. This time they all
escaped to hunker down amidst the swamp grass until it was safe to venture out and begin their ballet again.
Danielle smiled slightly. She was the intruder on nature’s deadly game, not the other way around. She shook her head, clearing out the cobwebs, as she
took one final hamstring stretch with the help of the porch railing and then set out on her morning ritual – a jog along the scenic path following the lake.
It didn’t take long for her feet to find their rhythm. Danielle adjusted the ear buds of her iPod briefly, humming subconsciously to the Toby Keith tune
playing, I Ain’t As Good As I Once Was. She followed the inlets and outlets of the lake, glancing every now and then at the profusion of houses – all
graced with expansive porches facing the water and most of them ostentatiously large. She never could figure out why folks were so eager to build the
biggest structures possible; all those empty rooms left unoccupied most of the year when the summer vacationers returned home to the city, all that
unused solitary space that had to be cleaned.
Before she realized it, she was flush with the back porch of her best friend’s house. Marina was sitting in a silvered wooden deck chair; a cup of coffee
in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She spotted Danielle and waved through her last puff of smoke while she took a sip from her favorite, old,
cracked mug.
Danielle ran in place for a few steps before accessing the porch via a set of stairs ascending from the lake pathway up to the porch. Danielle drew a
chair up next to Marina and plopped down, wiping a hand across her dewy forehead and pulling the buds off her ears.
“Coffee’s right there on the table, hon, help yourself. You know the routine.”Danielle pulled the thermal container closer and poured some of the
steaming coffee into an empty mug identical to the one cuddled in Marina’s hands. It was thick and off-white, devoid of decoration, but sporting an
intricate network of stained micro cracks distributed across the surface. The hairline cracks in the porcelain glaze conveyed a pattern similar to the
wrinkles and crevices in Marina’s face, the effect of years of chain smoking. Even with all its cracks and stains, its worn and imperfect exterior, the old
cup was still strong and dependable– much like Marina herself.
Marina’s eyebrows rose over the rim of her mug. She put down her cup and emitted a low whistle. “Do you see what I see? Hubba, hubba.”
Danielle’s eyes followed her friend’s gaze towards the lake. A male swimmer was coming up out of the water to sit on the edge of Marina’s boat dock
just a few yards down from the porch. The man flicked water from his longish, dark hair and droplets sprayed out into the morning air, briefly sparkling
against the rising sun before falling back into the lake. His arms were braced straight against the pier and Danielle could see the clearly defined muscles,
long and firm. His back and shoulders were incredibly broad and narrowed down to a flab-less waist which disappeared into a pair of swim trunks not
much bigger than the tiny pieces of Lycra worn by professional divers.
At this angle, the swimmer’s strong profile was canted out from the creek toward the main lake, but what Danielle could see was rather alluring and
strangely familiar. It was him. The man she had seen around town, up at Ruth’s place, but usually planted in the lounge chair on his deck staring off in
the distance and searching for something that wasn’t there. The features of this man she had seen through her binoculars from her own porch countless
times in the past year revealed strength and a spirit of confidence, yet there was sorrow reflected in his dark eyes. Danielle had to admit that Marina had
assessed correctly. He was one hell of a specimen.
end of the corridor. He inched along the wall, pausing at each step, until he recognized the noise as a television blaring in the distant room. His shoulder
brushed a framed poem on the wall. It jarred loose and leapt for the solid oak floor, but his skillful fingers darted out and intercepted the unintended
alarm before it could signal his approach. He examined the cross-stitched writing, To my Beloved Wife, Crystal, and grinned. He placed the frame on the
floor against the wall and continued his journey quietly, deliberately, toward his objective ten feet away. Finally, he peered cautiously through the crack
provided by the partially opened door, but quickly pulled back when he saw a shapely female tying the reflective laces on a pair of pink tennis shoes. He
watched her pull long, silky, blonde hair back into a ponytail, then start a series of stretching exercises while she paid partial attention to the local news
report on the wide screen television.
The mysterious disappearance of twenty-one-year-old Amber Campbell from the Brandon College campus four months ago still baffles the Piedmont
County Sheriff’s Department. Yesterday, I interviewed Sheriff Lundgren regarding leads as to the whereabouts of Ms. Campbell.
“Sheriff, is there anything you can share about this case with our viewers?”
“Nothing substantive. We’ve investigated dozens of phone calls and potential sightings, but they all resulted in dead ends.”
“Can you speculate on the cause of her disappearance or give us some idea as to what might have happened?”
“Nothing solid. It’s possible Ms. Campbell was suffering from some emotional stress, perhaps the tension of her heavy course load, a fight with her
boyfriend – who knows. We’ve seen it before where a young girl runs offs and reappears months later in some other state.”
“Is that what you think happened: that she ran away?”
“We just don’t know at this time.”
“No leads, only dead ends; just more sad words for the waiting parents of a beautiful young girl with a promising future. This is Jamie Davis for
channel 12.”
His eyes locked on the swaying motion of her rear taunting him to reach out and stroke those feminine curves. Then something penetrated his nose.
Even from this distance, he sensed a sweet fragrance; a faint blend of tangerine and lime: her shampoo.
The lure of her tiny waist and firm buttocks contorting with each bending motion worked their magic. He could no longer deny his thoughts. She would
resist at first, wrestle against his superior strength. Finally she would accept his offering and they would merge as one. The vision of her smooth,
shaved legs entangled around his waist flooded his brain along with the sensation of her muscles tightening while she squeezed and surged in rhythm
with each thrust, further, deeper.
He wanted her. No, he needed her. Beneath him. He needed to take her completely and resolve the urge racing through his loins. The buzzing in his ears
and the blood throbbing in his temples drummed out all reason. Without a sound, he edged forward. As she started to turn, he reached out and locked
her tightly around the waist from behind, his massive arms gripping like a vise. She gasped and tried to escape, but it was useless. His warm hand slid
down inside the elastic band of her jogging shorts, and the sensation of her cool, smooth flesh drove more blood straight into his groin.
Kurt rocked restlessly in the white wicker chair on the bottom deck of his two-story cedar cabin. Its location at the entry to Cattail Cove off the mouth
of Gills Creek afforded an expansive view of the lake. At the edge of his vision, he caught movement to the right toward the main channel. A pair of
mated mallards led their brood of five, fuzzy little brown ducklings in a tight formation into the cove except for one straggler two feet back. Must be the
weakling. There’s always one.
The plop of a lure being coaxed across the shallow end of the cove to his left diverted his attention. He watched a crimson bass boat with metallic stripes
along the side ease just outside the bedding area of spawning largemouth bass. The fisherman tried to agitate the male bass from their beds, but they
weren’t taking the bait.
Splash!
Kurt turned back toward the line of ducks, but where there were five before, now only four waddled along. The weak, trailing newborn was gone. The
parents of the little critter had just paid a terrible toll for swimming in a lake occupied by large predator fish like muskies and stripers. While they would
never know the truth about what had happened to diminish their family, Kurt knew. In the shadows beneath the ripples of small paddling feet, a massive
beast with serrated teeth waited for an opportunity to strike. The innocence of the unsuspecting morsel was irrelevant; the loss to the parents of no
consequence. The answers they would never find meant nothing to the soulless devil. Only hunger and greed mattered. There was no guilt, no remorse
for its actions; it was driven by pure, self-centered instinct.
Kurt rubbed the tip of his thumb and forefinger slowly, deliberately, as he considered the irony of what he had just witnessed. On the surface, Spenser
Lake conveyed a portrait of natural beauty, but the peaceful surroundings were deceptive. The struggle for life and death played out each and every day,
yet the lake residents chose to ignore the brutal elements that existed in the serene vistas just outside their picture windows. He compared this scene to
the sad reality of the inept society in which he lived – an existence where people were unable to protect their own and where evil lurked in the shadows,
at the edges, waiting for a chance to consume the unsuspecting.
He actually shivered at the image of the parents of the young girl missing from Brandon College and the sleepless nights they would share, filled not with
answers, but with tears. They, too, would never know the truth about their offspring – the beautiful young girl full of life with a future unlimited by its
potential. Were her last moments too horrifying to consider? Her parents must feel helpless to reach out, pull her back, and save her from things that
consumed without a conscience or a soul.
Kurt returned to the confused pair of mallards as they searched back and forth for the duckling they would never find. He combed his fingers through
his thick black hair, then stopped and studied the hands on the dial of his gold-toned watch again. “Shit.” The rhythm of his thumb and forefinger
increased, the pressure of skin-on-skin contact made a shallow popping noise. “Damn it, Crystal. Where the hell are you?”
He reached for his cell phone on the narrow plastic table at his side and pressed a speed dial button. After the sixth ring, a canned message began. In an
aggravated tone, Kurt demanded into the mouthpiece, “Answer your phone, Crystal! Stop playing around.”
When the call back recording came on, he slammed the phone shut and smashed the mayfly resting on the small drink tray with his fist. The impact sent
his half-full beer bottle into the air. The amber container made a somersault before bouncing on the wooden floor. The contents sprayed across the
freshly stained deck, forming a trail of cream-colored foamy liquid oozing from the mouth. Kurt sat transfixed, like a statue, ignoring his surroundings.
The bottle rolled over the edge of the porch, gyrated down the steep hill and plopped into the lake. It bobbed up and down, resisting the inevitable, until it
released a gurgling sound as it disappeared beneath the dark waters of Gills Creek.
Kurt stuffed the phone in his pocket, leaped up, and raced for his truck. He was angry that she had ignored him and gone ahead by herself after she’d
promised never to do so again. But worse, he was frightened – afraid of the possibilities, what might have happened to the only woman he loved, and
had loved, for the past seventeen years. While he searched along Shady Hollow Road, images flashed in his mind of someone, something, harming his
wife.
His search became more frantic as he neared the end of her jogging route. She wouldn’t have gone off the road. Not even Crystal would be that crazy
after the neighbor’s dog was found mauled just days earlier, possibly by a cougar that had strayed down from Alders Mountain. She must have turned
right on Ridge Lane. She would be there, she had to be, and when he found her he would read her the riot act.
“Crystal, I’m going to literally kick your pretty little ass this time.”
But the words were a gruff façade hiding his real emotions; the apprehension that his worst fears were about to come true.
The damselflies were out early this morning. Half a dozen darted randomly back and forth just above the back end of Cattail Cove. One dove toward a
swarm of waterdogs suspended by surface tension above the lake, interrupting the ballet of water insects dancing erratically along the surface. The
reflection of the diving, four-winged marauder trying to single out one small bug among hundreds scattered the swarm in all directions. This time they all
escaped to hunker down amidst the swamp grass until it was safe to venture out and begin their ballet again.
Danielle smiled slightly. She was the intruder on nature’s deadly game, not the other way around. She shook her head, clearing out the cobwebs, as she
took one final hamstring stretch with the help of the porch railing and then set out on her morning ritual – a jog along the scenic path following the lake.
It didn’t take long for her feet to find their rhythm. Danielle adjusted the ear buds of her iPod briefly, humming subconsciously to the Toby Keith tune
playing, I Ain’t As Good As I Once Was. She followed the inlets and outlets of the lake, glancing every now and then at the profusion of houses – all
graced with expansive porches facing the water and most of them ostentatiously large. She never could figure out why folks were so eager to build the
biggest structures possible; all those empty rooms left unoccupied most of the year when the summer vacationers returned home to the city, all that
unused solitary space that had to be cleaned.
Before she realized it, she was flush with the back porch of her best friend’s house. Marina was sitting in a silvered wooden deck chair; a cup of coffee
in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She spotted Danielle and waved through her last puff of smoke while she took a sip from her favorite, old,
cracked mug.
Danielle ran in place for a few steps before accessing the porch via a set of stairs ascending from the lake pathway up to the porch. Danielle drew a
chair up next to Marina and plopped down, wiping a hand across her dewy forehead and pulling the buds off her ears.
“Coffee’s right there on the table, hon, help yourself. You know the routine.”Danielle pulled the thermal container closer and poured some of the
steaming coffee into an empty mug identical to the one cuddled in Marina’s hands. It was thick and off-white, devoid of decoration, but sporting an
intricate network of stained micro cracks distributed across the surface. The hairline cracks in the porcelain glaze conveyed a pattern similar to the
wrinkles and crevices in Marina’s face, the effect of years of chain smoking. Even with all its cracks and stains, its worn and imperfect exterior, the old
cup was still strong and dependable– much like Marina herself.
Marina’s eyebrows rose over the rim of her mug. She put down her cup and emitted a low whistle. “Do you see what I see? Hubba, hubba.”
Danielle’s eyes followed her friend’s gaze towards the lake. A male swimmer was coming up out of the water to sit on the edge of Marina’s boat dock
just a few yards down from the porch. The man flicked water from his longish, dark hair and droplets sprayed out into the morning air, briefly sparkling
against the rising sun before falling back into the lake. His arms were braced straight against the pier and Danielle could see the clearly defined muscles,
long and firm. His back and shoulders were incredibly broad and narrowed down to a flab-less waist which disappeared into a pair of swim trunks not
much bigger than the tiny pieces of Lycra worn by professional divers.
At this angle, the swimmer’s strong profile was canted out from the creek toward the main lake, but what Danielle could see was rather alluring and
strangely familiar. It was him. The man she had seen around town, up at Ruth’s place, but usually planted in the lounge chair on his deck staring off in
the distance and searching for something that wasn’t there. The features of this man she had seen through her binoculars from her own porch countless
times in the past year revealed strength and a spirit of confidence, yet there was sorrow reflected in his dark eyes. Danielle had to admit that Marina had
assessed correctly. He was one hell of a specimen.
Copyright 2010 by Michael W. Davis
Excerpt 2
Excerpt 1
Excerpt 3
| Sometimes truth cuts deeper than a lie |
| There’s something suspicious going on at Spenser Lake. People are disappearing and their bodies are never found. The fear and uncertainty of who will be next is affecting every resident of the tranquil community, but especially Kurt Hawkins. Two years after his wife goes missing, there are no clues, only the nightmares of what happened in her last moments. The constant guilt that somehow he was responsible precludes any thought of a normal life until he meets Danielle Gillette, a reclusive author with a rather large skeleton in her own closet. When the secret is finally revealed, they both discover that sometimes the truth cuts deeper than a lie. |
| "a story full of hidden nuances, twists and turns that keep you going “OH MY GOD!” . . I was glued to the pages and tried to figure out the mystery of Spenser Lake when the authors would flip the script and twist it so you are scrambling to see what and where the story will take you. With some wonderful multi-dimensional characters, mystery and some sexual tension sprinkled within the pages, the authors deftly weave a spell around the readers’ as they try to navigate the VEIL OF DECEPTION that covers Spenser Lake and its residents., Run, don’t walk, to pick up the latest book from these talented authors and be prepared to get lost in the mystery of Spenser Lake.", 4.5/5 stars |
| "The tension escalates until ... WOW! And, no, I can't tell you what happens. You'll have to read that for yourself...Veil of Deception is a story of redemption and a testament of the never-ending struggle of good and evil." |
| "Veil of Deception made me feel as though I were a part of this close knit community. I was the neighbor that got to peek into the lives of my neighbors sight unseen. I got to call them a best friend, a sister, or a brother. I felt their joys, pain, and anguish." |
Blurb
Stories to touch the heart and mind
Michael W. Davis
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2008 Author
of the year
of the year
2009 Author
of the year
of the year