The Girl in the Mist (Misted Pines 1)

En route, this information was relayed to Harry Moran and Bohannan.

It was then, Bohannan knew who had me.

And why.

Onward from that:

Within days of the media sharing the role Ray played in the deaths of Alice Pulaski, Malorie Graham and the shooting of David Ashbrook, and with this sharing photos of Ray, Ray started receiving a trickle of fan mail.

Within weeks, it was an avalanche.

Within the month, The Joy of Joy was burned to the ground. No one was harmed in the fire.

Two days after that, Harry Moran found the arsonists and arrested them.

Also within the month, Shelly George took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills.

Within a day of learning this, Ray was under twenty-four-hour guard because he’d gone apeshit crazy.

Two days later, Bobby Graham had been found in his car in the garage in the home he was renting outside Seattle, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.

Not long after that, it was learned that he’d left his somewhat vast holdings to his still-wife Lana.

The day after that, a young man came forward to the police in Berkeley, California and informed them he’d been hired to play a prank on a girl in a dormitory on the campus. He admitted to getting paid five hundred dollars to do it. He also admitted to having sexual relations with Ray Andrews. That young man bore more than passing resemblance to Tony Romano.

A week and a half after that, Harry Moran arrested Leland Dern for multiple felonious abuses during his tenure as sheriff, including not following through with investigations of reports of two of his deputies’ consistent sexual coercion of female suspects in custody and misappropriation of department funds. Not long after that, on the evidence presented, a grand jury indicted him.

That same day, Gary Spoonacher resigned as county commissioner.

A day later, Kenneth Warner announced his planned retirement from the town council upon the beginning of the next term.

Three days later, the woman who provided an alibi for Tony Romano in the death of Malorie Graham was arrested in a prostitution sting in Portland, Oregon. She was extradited to Misted Pines and charged with providing a false statement to the police in a murder investigation. She has since recanted her alibi.

The next week, the Misted Pines Town Council invited Paddy Tremayne to their next meeting to accept an honor for the role he played in capturing Ray Andrews and saving my life.

The next day, Paddy Tremayne, a recluse who lived in a cabin in the hills above the lake directly opposite from the Bohannan compound, a man who came to town only once a month to get supplies, called Polly Pickler to ask her to communicate his response. And that response was, “Tell them to go stuff it.”

The council accepted this because it was expected, considering it came from Paddy Tremayne, but also because they had no other choice. However, they didn’t know Paddy came around the lake to eat dinners Bohannan or I cooked for him regularly.

Three months after that, The Joy of Joy celebrated their grand re-opening.

Within the year, regardless that the author had not had the cooperation of any of the players, including Ray Andrews, who was reportedly furious that his and Tony’s families were badgered for information, the first book about Ray Andrews and Tony Romano was published.

It was titled Real Men.

It was a bestseller.

And word was, they were making it into a movie.

Epilogue

The End

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

The End.

I typed those two words, stared at them and smiled to myself.

Finally, the next Jack Mullally was ready (after a reread) to submit to my publisher.

I was so far past deadline, the one for next year’s Priscilla Lange romance was only three months away.

But…so be it.

I had a life to live.

And I was going to live it.

No more detailed planning every task and every second. I could be organized, but I didn’t have the time to be obsessed with it.

I had three beautiful daughters, even if one wasn’t strictly mine, two handsome sons, even though they also weren’t mine, and a fabulous man, who was definitely mine.

I had a job I loved.

I had a beautiful home with a beautiful view, and a future that was blindingly bright.

And I’d also had an experience that I decided, firmly, I’d use to remind me, instead of life being a day-to-day battle, it was a gift.

You could struggle through it.

Or you could rise each day and make the most of it.

I chose the latter.

I hit save, closed the chapter, went back to the directory, opened the Prologue (and the next five chapters besides) to start reading so I could make my last-minute tweaks, when I heard it.

Concrete Blonde’s “Joey.”

“Oh boy,” I said to my computer, sat back in my chair, my right fingers, like they did often, moving to tinker with the bracelet on my left wrist, and I looked out the windows in my fabulous new office to the mist on the lake.