Tuesday Tales: From the Word SCARED and a Brand New Story!

Welcome to this week’s Tuesday Tales. The last Tuesday in October brings with it lots of excitement as well as a touch of sadness. While the kids get ready for Trick or Treat, I’m digging out my warm clothing since there’s more than a nip of frost in the air. The temperature is 28F, -2C sounds so much colder, and the high today with be 54F, or 12C. Not exactly warm weather, but the sun is going to show its face, and that will defintely help.

This week, Tuesday Tales are written to the word prompt SCARED. Those of you who have enjoyed Listen to the Stones and want to read the entire book–and it’s a long one, the longest I’ve written to date–keep an eye fixed here on my blog for its release date, either by the end of this week or early next week.

My new work in progress is a romance-suspense/mystery. Since I love working with supernatural elements, there’s a touch of the paranormal in it–you can’t have a sunken ship and treasure without the possibility of a ghost or two, right? But ghosts come in all shapes and sizes. This will also be my NaNoWriMo book for 2024. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Although the writing doesn’t start officially until Friday, I jotted down a scene from the introduction for your readin pleasure. The book is titled, A Case of Mistaken Identity, set in Canada, is the first book in my new Evie Chambers Mystery Series. If you like Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, this new series will be right up your alley. Enjoy.

Since Pete’s death five years ago, there had been good days and bad days, but today would go down as the worst one of them all.

How could this possibly have happened? I’d been so careful, so cautious, doing everything I could to keep my online accounts secure, and yet here it was. My identity had been stolen, and to make matters worse, whoever had done so had died.

This particular twist hadn’t occurred in any of the cases of identity theft that I’d investigated to date, so while I knew how to reestablish my credit, I had no idea how to resurrect myself from an early grave. Whether I cared to admit it or not, I was scared that getting out of this mess would be a lot harder than anything I’d had to do before. Proving I was alive couldn’t be that hard—I was breathing and had a pulse, my doctor could swear to that—but getting the government to acknowledge it was another matter entirely.

I looked at the bank clerk as if she’d grown a second head. It was true that she was new at her job—the badge inscribed Carla, trainee, said it all—but I was standing right in front of her, and unless she was blind…

“As I said that account has been suspended due to the death of the account holder. Until you can bring in a death certificate and a copy of the will, stating that you have inherited the money in the account, it can’t be accessed.”

She smiled and spoke with a finality that told me that as far as she was concerned, the matter was closed. Closed my eye!

Swallowing my strained-to-the-absolute-limit temper, I inhaled deeply.

“There’s been a mistake. This isn’t in the least bit funny. Do I look dead to you, Carla?”

Her head snapped around again as if she were surprised that I still stood there. Had she expected me to vanish in a puff of smoke?

She rolled her eyes as so many of her generation did when confronted with an older person who didn’t seem to get it. I was in my mid-thirties, not my late eighties for heaven’s sake, far from my dotage, even if my hair had turned white prematurely, a genetic condition I’d inherited from my mother’s side of the family. Good old family genes. You couldn’t pick your family anymore than you could pick your DNA.

Don’t forget to check out the other Tuesday Tales.