An excerpt from The Cemetery Club:
Sleep vanished as a sound penetrated my consciousness. I sat bolt upright. What had awakened me? My bedroom curtain moved as a breeze blew through. Had the wind knocked something off my dresser?
Throwing back the sheets, I padded to the window. The full moon lit the front yard, making it almost as bright as day and throwing long shadows of trees and bushes across the grass. An owl disengaged itself from the moon-silvered oak and flew silently away. Owls are night birds and sometimes they fly into yards, so there was nothing unusual about seeing it. Maybe it hooted and that was the sound that woke me. Something, however, felt wrong. Could this be the same owl I heard before our near break-in? Had it adopted Mom and me and taken upon itself the job of guarding us?
As I gazed at the shadows in the yard, one of them moved. This shadow was large and upright. A man stepped out from behind the oak. As if I were watching an old, silent movie, a smaller figure appeared, walking toward the man, her housecoat flapping. Mom! That was my mother, alone and unprotected in the middle of the night, closing in on a stalker who had trespassed into the yard.
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