Oct 4 NaNo Prep

Oct 4 Plot Beginning

His given name is Longfellow, as in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Family and friends call him Nick or Nicky, his middle name being Mikolaj, Polish for Nicholas. And, since high school, he has looked like Nicky Dark, a hardboiled detective who solved crimes with the use of supernatural friends. Or at least that’s what he’s written, for English and friends.

She had been taken from him four years earlier, the victim of a drunk driver who fled and with the help of his sheriff brother escaped prosecution, at least for a month. He found her killer, with the help of family members in law enforcement and retired investigators from her law firm. It took them just a month all while the Albany County sheriff’s department never looked.

The published author – pen names used were Michaux Nichols and Nick Andrews – wanted to return to his life after the murdering coward was brought to justice, but he knew he couldn’t. Sitting in front of computer monitors and creating software at the Naval Atomic Research facility would be boring and frankly, a waste of his talents. It was on a beautiful yet cool early spring morning in 1990 that he gave his two weeks, something that his immediate supervisor and the Naval personnel believed would have come much earlier.

He sat in the brownstone’s library, the third-floor room just off the master bedroom and read from the file, a report the investigators from Oldham and Newbury, his Vanessa’s old law firm had sent him. They wanted a fresh pair of eyes on it, to give them a new perspective on the story their client had told.

Longfellow had read it the night before and turned in with the feeling that something was not right. He felt like she was holding back.

“Perhaps she is,” the Bride’s spirit whispered. The Bride, the first ghost who announced their presence to him once he was out of the hospital and visiting his great-aunt, Cecile Sobolewski.

“I think so, but what is she hiding?” he asked to no one since the spirit of the murdered woman doesn’t show herself frequently. “I need to get the investigators press her a little more.”

“Have that pretty female one do the talking,” she suggested. “Maybe have her come by the home office.”

Longfellow’s live skin did not lend itself to show blushing, but he could tell that he was.