MADDEN MANOR
Following the untimely death of his parents, Daniel, a teenage outcast, reluctantly moves into his uncle’s home in the country where he’s left feeling even more friendless and isolated.
He discovers a lonely girl is haunting the old mansion when he sees her standing at the outside entrance to the cellar. Her name is Lizze, she tells him, and this is where she stood the night she was murdered in 1897 on her seventeenth birthday. Daniel’s great grandfather shot her because he had reason to believe his wife was about to find out he’d been having an affair with her servant. Lizze’s body was hidden in the cellar and then forgotten.
Daniel and Lizze become fast friends. By year’s end they are deeply in love. When he turns eighteen, his uncle orders him to go out and seek his own fortune. Torn between two worlds, a foiled robbery attempt changes Daniel’s life forever.
Excerpt
The paramedics had taken his parents to the morgue long before he stepped off the high school bus. Severe weather warning sirens echoed hollowly as they wound down. The rain had stopped but a new round of lightning raised fears of another bad storm on the horizon. Daniel walked close to the remains of his home, the roof and walls scattered about like a high-speed fan had hit a house of cards. A fierce and devastating EF-5 tornado had made a direct hit on the low-income neighborhood and completely flattened it.
He stopped and looked around, his vision blurred by heavy tears. On the ground a couple of feet beyond where the front door once stood was his father’s favorite baseball cap. He picked it up. Swallowed the lump in his throat. Unzipped his backpack, and put the cap inside.
The sounds of pain and misery were all around him.
