Outskirts Press, INC.

Romance a Murder Victim After the Murder

Life can sometimes alter course in a finger snap. One second existence seems normal, the next, an out-of-step leap beyond the imagination. A night bar-hopping during Spring break on the California coast shifts from the typical to peculiar and strange in scant moments. As if out of thin air, she abruptly was sitting close, leaning inward at the little table, her face directly at him. Large, brown eyes intimate and captivating, demanding full attention. The bar’s loud, swirling noise of music and muffled chatter seemed to have quickly vanished into shadow. Easily, he closed off everything with total focus only on those liquid-brown eyes. In minutes, he fell completely head-over-heels in love, gobsmacked like a virgin little boy. However, in just a brief, single tick when he’d once glanced away, she vanished. So astonishingly quick the episode, he never got a name or a telephone number. And other people had seen her in the bar, so she was real. Or was she? Such is the beginning. In an ensuing couple of days, he tumbles like Alice down the rabbit hole. He’s no virgin little boy, but middle-aged and fighting the loose tendrils of a mid-life crisis—divorce, children (for instance, he occasionally smokes pot with his 15-year-old daughter), intense guilt about everything, and booze, all combined for close-call disaster. Yet petty compared to the wondrously-haunting hallucinations he encounters created off that one night with the young woman. An illusory mystery revealing a murder, though, in an abnormal sequence.