Morgan James - Promise McNeal 01 - Quiet the Dead Read Online Free PDF

pervasive sense of restlessness I’d developed, telling me I needed to make a change in my life. Did I really think a different place would give me a different life? As a counselor, I should have known better. And what was so bad about my old life, anyway? I had my modest debt free townhouse, good friends who made me laugh, and lots of choices for shopping and eating out. Maybe I should have stayed where people and things were familiar, kept my small counseling practice going and waited for the feelings to pass. That’s what I always tell clients-feelings are usually transitory. Like the weather: just hang on, they change.
    The infamous Committee—members being: the Should, Second-Guess, and What-if girls—convened in my head, chiming in with the flip side. On the other hand, the committee pointed out, the North Carolina Mountains are breathtakingly beautiful. They had called my name for several years as I came weekend after weekend to drive the winding back roads. My house, backed up against Fire Mountain and nesting on five acres of green rolling pasture, overlooking laurel banked Fells Creek, was perfect. The mountains to my back and rushing water in my front yard, who could ask for anything more? And, I needed a new focus for my life. I wasn’t exactly burned out as a counselor, but let’s just say I was singed around the edges.
    So, if I loved my house and the mountains, the Committee wanted to know what was the problem? Why did I continue to worry that moving was a mistake? Thinking maybe a month long Caribbean vacation may have been a better choice. For one thing, being cut off from my deep Atlanta roots was more painful than I envisioned; and the debt for the house and store was even more painful. I needed income from Granny’s to help float my mid-life adventure, and the store was not paying the bills, unless I was willing to pick up where the Goddard twins left off, which I was not. It wasn’t hard to conclude, given the available choices; Garland Wang was my best bet to make the mortgage this month.
    All right , I told myself, with a conviction only financial insecurity can produce. The fog is lifting and WSB radio says Georgia 400 is clear southbound, all the way to Roswell. I’ll give the mountains six more months and see how I feel. The worst that can happen is I’ll sell the property and tuck tail back to Atlanta.

“Harpy: …Depicted as a bird of prey with a woman’s face.…”
The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition
    3.
     
    Negotiating the bumper-to-bumper traffic along Georgia 400, I exited right onto Holcomb Bridge Road. Fortunately, Garland’s office, elegantly ensconced in a quasi-Williamsburg styled brick building, popular when the small city of Roswell exploded into yet another extension of Atlanta proper, was only a mile further, because the traffic moved like meandering cattle in the Texas heat. Why would I even think of believing the radio report of Georgia 400 being clear to Roswell? It is never clear. Never! Finally, I pulled my Subaru into the parking lot and gathered my worn leather briefcase containing pad, pen, and other assorted necessaries and prepared to assume the persona of “expert from afar” for hire.
    Stepping off the elevator onto the eighth floor where Wang and Wang occupied the penthouse, I had a long-range view through a wall of windows of the highway along Georgia 400 to the east, Holcomb Bridge Road to the north, and historic old Roswell village to the south. I remembered from earlier visits that Garland, being “king” of the penthouse, looked out on a red brick structure squatting on the bank of the Chattahoochee River known as the Roswell Mill, once infamous for producing the gray woolen “rebel” cloth suiting southern soldiers during the Civil War. With his pugnacious enthusiasm, Sherman destroyed the mill during his Atlanta campaign and shipped the workers, all women and female children, north of the Ohio River, ostensibly to a better life