Evening in the Yellow Wood Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Reviews

  Dedication

  Chapter

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Pandamoon Publishing

  Book Club Questions

  Evening in the

  Yellow Wood

  By

  Laura Kemp

  © 2018 by Laura Kemp

  This book is a work of creative fiction that uses actual publicly known events, situations, and locations as background for the storyline with fictional embellishments as creative license allows. Although the publisher has made every effort to ensure the grammatical integrity of this book was correct at press time, the publisher does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. At Pandamoon, we take great pride in producing quality works that accurately reflect the voice of the author. All the words are the author’s alone.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pandamoon Publishing. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  www.pandamoonpublishing.com

  Jacket design and illustrations © Pandamoon Publishing

  Art Direction by Don Kramer: Pandamoon Publishing

  Editing by Zara Kramer, Rachel Schoenbauer, Heather Stewart, and Forrest Driskel, Pandamoon Publishing

  Pandamoon Publishing and the portrayal of a panda and a moon are registered trademarks of Pandamoon Publishing.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC

  Edition: 1, version 1.00

  Reviews

  Book Riot — Laura Kemp’s debut novel ‘Evening in the Yellow Wood’ is what happens when a mystery sticks comedy in its hair like flowers, frolics through a field of romance and then goes tumbling headlong down a magical hole.

  Alexia Gordon, Lefty Award-winning, Agatha Award-nominated author of The Gethsemane Brown Mysteries — Laura Kemp blends folklore, the supernatural, romance, and mystery in this complex tale of a missing father, family secrets, and a killer who transforms tortured dreams into waking nightmares. The small-town setting in the backwoods of Michigan adds to the eerie suspense and throat-tightening tension of Evening in the Yellow Wood, the story of a woman’s search for the father who abandoned her—and the truth for which he sacrificed everything to protect her.

  Penni Jones, Author of On the Bricks and Kricket — Laura Kemp’s debut novel ‘Evening in the Yellow Wood’ is an engaging and eclectic story of family bonds that surpass physical presence and friendships that survive hardships, all set against the rich backdrop of rural Michigan. It’s abundant in both beauty and suspense, and I can’t wait to see what Kemp delivers next.

  Steph Post, Author of A Tree Born Crooked, Lightwood, and Miraculum — ‘Evening in the Yellow Wood’ has it all – fast pacing, deep mystery and a surprising paranormal twist, all delivered with literary finesse. A compelling story with something for everyone.

  Lynda Curnyn, Author of Killer Summer and Confessions of an Ex-Girlfriend — Who do you trust in a world where nothing is what it seems, and the past is not only alive - but deadly? Laura Kemp’s haunting debut novel explores how the ties that make us who we are can also be the bonds that break us.

  Dedication

  For Mom, who wrote down my stories when I was too little to do it myself, and Dad, who tied inner tubes together and swam with me to the middle of Klinger Lake

  Evening in the

  Yellow Wood

  Prologue

  It was Tuesday afternoon, the sun hot on my pink shoulders as I sat dangling my feet in the shallow end of the community pool. My friend Sherry was by my side when I saw Mom, her face pinched in the unforgiving light.

  “We need to go,” Mom said as she reached down to pull at my elbow. Instead, she came away with the strap of my blue bathing suit. I muttered under my breath, reached up to swat at her hand in pubescent embarrassment. Suppose it slipped off and revealed what God had barely given me? What would Jake Jones, my current crush who was doing backflips off the diving board, think?

  I didn’t move.

  “Justine!” Mom hissed, and my friend made a face, rolled her eyes, and got slowly to her feet while slinging her towel over her shoulder.

  “What’s the rush?” I asked, annoyed, thinking I would make her pay later for being so pushy by refusing to do homework or take out the trash. Stink up the place.

  “You’ll see,” she snapped, and something inside of me took notice.

  I shut my mouth before I made things worse and grabbed my flowered terrycloth towel, keeping three paces behind as we walked towards our brown Pontiac.

  I got in the back seat and slammed the door. The radio was bleating white noise as my friend gave me “The Look” that said I’d better call later with the scoop as we pulled up outside her split-level house.

  I tried to smile, to apologize, but Sherry understood. Mom was a dork, but my friends put up with it because we had a ping-pong table in our basement and my Dad was cooler.

  Hip.

  Zen.

  As his only child, I felt the same.

  I looked at Mom, wondering why a man who had tied inner tubes together with fishing line and swam with me to the middle of Tamarack Lake had married someone so uptight—realizing moments later I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t seen something in her that I didn’t.

  “Bye,” Sherry called over her shoulder. And then the exaggerated wink. “Call ya later.”

  I knew she would, and that Mom would want to know what we talked about and that Dad would sit eating his chili supper and wonder about other things, sometimes so far away I couldn’t touch him even though we sat side by side.

  We pulled into our own driveway five minutes later. I sat in the backseat, sullen and staring outside at the dappled sunlight on our cracked cement until Mom finally turned to me.

  “It’s your Dad.”

  So now he belonged to me?

  “What about him?” I shrugged.

  “He’s not here.”

  “I know that,” I answered in a surly tone. Dad always took off for the woods when we went to the pool, said he couldn’t stand the crowds or the smell of chlorine.

  “I mean he’s gone.” She paused. “Really gone.”

  My eyes darted toward the garage. The door was up. Dad’s spot was empty.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “That’s just it.” Mom put a hand to her face, touched her index finger to the bridge of her nose and I hated that she left me hanging.

  “Mom,” I asked, wanting her to answer quickly so I would know how to feel. “Where’s Dad?”

  “I have no idea, Justine.”

  I tried to make sense of what she’d said even as my breath hitched in my chest. I
thought back to the last time I’d seen him: that morning before he left for his shift at the paper mill. He had bent down, ruffled the top of my head, and kissed me on the cheek.

  Be good, Muffet. Give your Mom a break.

  “He probably had to work overtime or something and forgot to tell you.”

  She shook her head and the barest of smiles touched her lips, the one I hated because it usually meant I was wrong.

  “I went out to run some errands while you were at the pool and when I came home,” she touched her nose again, her brown hair falling over her face in a way that made her look like a nun in prayer. “I found this.”

  I saw something in her clenched fist, something she was handing over the back seat, a piece of crumpled notebook paper that had been folded neatly into quarters, her name printed in the block letters I recognized.

  With shaking hands, I took it, the smell of chlorine suddenly suffocating me.

  I looked at Mom again.

  “Read it,” she said.

  I did. The first line made it clear he loved us very much and always would. The second had me tearing at the car door, racing up the driveway, and into the house we’d shared for almost twelve years.

  I can’t tell you why I had to leave or if I’ll ever be able to come back.

  I made it to the front door, yanked it open, and fumbled with the hook and eye latch on our screen.

  The painting in the studio just sold. Put the money toward Justine’s college.

  “Dad!”

  It would be better if you don’t try to find me.

  I ran upstairs to his bedroom and threw open the closet door. Some clothes and an overnight bag he used when he went fishing were missing.

  I ran down the hall to my own room—a pink and purple confection I’d just started decorating in my own style, one of Dad’s forest landscapes above the bed. Had he left something for me? A note explaining what he really meant to say? A place we could meet up and ditch Mom, live the free and easy life we’d always wanted?

  A package tied carefully with silver ribbon that just matched my bedspread was sitting in plain sight. A card was taped to the center.

  Muffet.

  I tore the card open so quickly I cut my finger.

  An orange kitten with a party hat adorned the front, a ball of pink twine between his paws.

  Hope your Birthday is PUUURFECT.

  I clenched my teeth so hard my jaw hurt. My birthday was a month away and I sure as hell didn’t care about a stupid kitten. And damn if my birthday this year would be anything close to PUUUURFECT!

  I went to my knees, my own hair falling against my hot cheeks and sticking there. The next minute I was ripping up the card and the awful orange kitten with the party hat. I sat in the middle of the confetti pieces for a long time, sobbing, my face pressed against my bedspread.

  Dad was gone.

  The Zen vanished.

  The magic over.

  Chapter One

  Webber wasn’t a town that liked to surprise people. Situated about thirty miles south of Kalamazoo in the flatlands of southern Michigan, it was homespun, mellow, and meandering. People who lived there knew what to expect and whom to expect it from.

  I was no different. I’d grown up in Webber, gone to school there and learned how to tee pee houses after Friday night football games within its parameters. After graduation I’d done what all the cool kids did: got the hell out and headed for college.

  After four years at Western Michigan University, I surprised everyone, including myself, by moving back home and settling into a one-bedroom apartment in the bustling downtown district, a two-block radius that included the Dime a Dozen Diner and Pawsitive Pals Pet Salon.

  It was a safe choice—a lame choice, I had to admit—and one that left me wondering if the quiet certainty of the town was why I decided to take a job at the local newspaper when Chicago was only three hours away.

  And so I settled in, spent my free time writing poems and hanging out with the few high school friends who remained, dating some of the local guys I hadn’t glanced at before, thinking that if I stayed long enough Dad would find his way back home and I would stumble upon him floating across Tamarack Lake in his silver canoe, his hair catching fire in the sun as it always had.

  Whatever the reason I had decided to come home and live a mundane life, everything changed the minute I walked into work one morning and saw the latest edition of the Webber Sentinel.

  News from the north seldom made a splash down here, but the record snowfall that buried the small village of Lantern Creek did.

  The name stuck in my mind and wormed around for a bit. Aside from its poetic beauty, I was certain I’d heard Mom and Dad arguing about it one night when I stood peering around the door jam, daring them to see me and take notice and tell me to get back to my room. Why they cared about a place I’d never heard of was of no interest to me at the time, but my juvenile mind figured it was because he wanted to go fishing and she wanted him to stay home.

  Like always.

  So I asked to go along, but Dad had refused. Fishing was his time to be alone and contemplate whatever artists who were forced to work in paper mills thought about.

  I wouldn’t understand, he said. And he was right.

  Yes, the name Lantern Creek struck a chord that morning at the office of the Webber Sentinel and so I paused, quickly scanning the article and the picture that accompanied it. It featured four men with a shovel standing beside a massive snowdrift in front of a hardware store. Measuring by the handle, it appeared that about a foot and a half of snow had fallen.

  Record spring snowfall buries small Michigan town.

  Then I saw it.

  Inside the store, half hidden by the glare from the windowpane stood a man peering out—a man with shoulder-length blond hair—a man I hadn’t seen since he told me to give Mom a break ten years before.

  I felt the walls of the office go soft and rubbery.

  Ten years had passed since that day at the community pool—but in some ways, it felt much longer. I remembered that first birthday without Dad and how I had refused to open the gift he’d left for me, wanting to hurt him somehow, knowing he would have no idea if I’d opened it and so I shoved it back in the far corner of my closet.

  I remembered my first boyfriend later that same year, my first heartbreak—remembered wishing for a bit of Dad’s common sense in the discombobulated world I shared with Mom.

  I remembered ten years of whispers and stares, of piteous looks from my teachers when some activity involving a father was mentioned. It wasn’t as if I was the only kid who didn’t have a dad in the picture, I was just the only one who didn’t know what had happened to him, and the mystery hung over my head like a giant Bermuda Triangle, drawing attention to The Great Question of “Where did Robert Cook run off to?” It seemed “The Question” was on the windward side of every encounter, along with “Did Brenda drive him to it? Was there another woman? Was he involved with the Mob? The CIA? Aliens?”

  I’d heard it all—and grown up fast because of it.

  And now I stood looking at a picture of him where no trace had existed before. Ten years seemed to fold like an accordion around my shoulders, the smell of chlorine coming to me as it had that day at the community pool.

  I stood up quickly, stepped back from the paper, and tried to steady my breath. Momentary light-headedness was followed closely by anger, then sadness until I found myself tearing through the article again, looking for a quote or a caption or anything that would tell me who had taken the picture.

  The photo was not credited.

  I spun on my heel and almost ran into our receptionist.

  “Sorry,” I managed, a loopy smile on my face. “This article”—I hit it a couple of times with my index finger for emphasis—“is really great.”

  She nodded, looked at me like I had a lobster hanging from my earlobe, and scurried back to her desk. Scanning the office, I saw my editor and quickly made my way towards h
er.

  She was a short woman, pleasant and plump, with a homey style and penchant for dressing in appliqued sweatshirts that made me feel comfortable. She always took a personal interest in her staff, which had never bothered me before but seemed tedious now as I endured several questions regarding the health of my cat.

  “You know Joey,” I shrugged. “He’s up to eight and a half lives now.”

  She laughed in the knowing way Cat People do, then asked me what I needed.

  “Who took the picture of that blizzard up north?”

  She seemed to sense my uneasiness. “It was sent from Alpena. Didn’t Allan caption it?”

  I tried very hard not to hit her over the head with the rolled-up newspaper I held in my hand.

  “He didn’t. When did the snow come through?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, confused by my sudden interest in an obscure story about an even more obscure town. “Maybe you should read the article.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I agreed, loopy smile in place. “Will do.”

  I went back to my desk, unfolded the paper as though it were one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and discovered the record snowfall had taken place two weeks before on the fifth of May.

  Five minutes later, I had the Lantern Creek Hardware Store on the telephone.

  The young girl who answered was unable to tell me who had taken the picture or if a man named Robert Cook had been in that day or if he even lived in the area. After a garbled conversation with a co-worker, she handed the phone over to an older man who identified himself as the owner. He told me that he knew of some Cooks over in the Onaway area, but they didn’t come into the store very often.

  “They got a big Walmart goin’ in over there. No need to darken our doorstep.”

  “Ah,” I commiserated, not wanting to get involved in northern hardware store politics. “I see. Thank you for your time.”