Lance smiled and looked out of the driver’s window at the shorn field beside the SUV. Mary had objected over and over again when he’d first brought the paint and stuffed animals home from the store, which were definitely girlish in nature. He told her he’d repaint and return the animals if he was wrong, but he just had a hunch. She had rolled her eyes at him and left him to the plastering of bunnies and pink ducks on the walls of the room they had designated as “baby’s space” in the quaint house they’d purchased only months before.
He had withheld the image in his mind from her, unlike what had transferred between Anthony’s ghost and himself when the specter had touched him the second time in the room while he’d pretended to be bolted to the chair. Anthony had shown him exactly what he’d done to his wife the night he’d caught them trying to escape. It had flashed in fast-forward through Lance’s brain, and he’d screamed internally as he watched the river flow around the car’s windows as it sunk beneath the surface, his mother’s unconscious face vanishing below the ebb of water.
But the memory that drove him to buy the female articles for the room he wasn’t ready to share yet, although it still danced across the field of his mind daily, his vision of the little girl in a pink sundress he had seen staring out of the window of the car, her dark hair matching Mary’s almost exactly. And he bet if she had turned to look at him, her eyes would have been green.
He smiled again and saw Mary examining his face, looking for an answer. No, he wasn’t ready to tell her what their daughter would look like yet. For right now, he’d keep it to himself.
“How far are you from being done?” Mary asked as he pulled the Land Rover onto the paved road and began to accelerate from the field behind them, a house he refused to look at dotting the background.
“Maybe another week,” he said, raising his eyebrows and smiling with one side of his mouth.
“I’m so sorry you had to start the book over from scratch.”
“It’s okay. This version is even better than the first one I wrote, as it should be.”
The car was silent for a while, with only the humming of the tires beneath them and the whistle of the air outside.
“Is it a good ending?” she asked, reaching out to hold his hand again.
He squeezed her fingers in his palm where he could still feel her warmth, and nodded. “Better than I ever imagined.”
THE END
Author’s Note
First off, thanks so much for reading Lineage. It’s readers like you who make independent writers like myself yearn to create more. Also, I’d like to take a moment to tell a little about Lineage’s background and how it came to be.
Lineage came to me in bits and pieces after I’d published Midnight Paths in October of 2011. As I said in the foreword, I’ve always been in love with ghost stories. The best I’ve ever read is The Shining, hands down. No other book has literally jolted me from the story with what was on the pages. A well-written ghost story has always been the pinnacle of scary for me, so I decided that I would write something contemporary with enough twists to keep people guessing. Several of the scenes within the story came from experiences in my everyday life, like the part where Lance is looking at his phone in the middle of the night and then sees the face of a ghost looking at him. I was looking at my phone one night, and when I shut it off, I was blind from the light of the screen. I thought, What if there is a face, inches away, looking at me right now? Scared the hell of out of me, and I logged it for the story.
Lineage was a labor of love over a six-month period, and as I wrote it I surprised myself with where the story actually went. Most times the story takes on a life of its own, but this time it was alive without my realizing it!
In any event, I hope that you enjoyed the dark journey, and as always, any feedback and reviews on Amazon are greatly appreciated! If you would like to keep up with me and my upcoming projects, please find my author page on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/JoeHart/345933805484346 or follow me on Twitter- @AuthorJoeHart.
Once again, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for spending your hard-earned dollars and time on something I created. There is no better feeling a writer can have than knowing a complete stranger enjoys their work.