Fiction Friday: A House of Secrets

Everybody's got a creepy house in their neighborhood.

I try to take my dog for a walk every day. Okay, so who am I kidding? She's lucky if I get her out several times a week. But when I do manage to strap on her leash and let her haul me around the neighborhood, there's one house a few blocks away that always makes me wonder what's going on behind those drawn blinds. You know the type. The long grass. The yellowed newspapers collecting like piles of bones. The creepy Christmas wreath that never gets taken down. And worse…the eyes I sometimes see peeking out between the slats in the blinds. Halloween is just around the corner and my imagination naturally goes to the dark places whenever I stroll past this house.

And I wrote about just such a house in my story A House of Secrets. Here's a description of that one:

At the front of the lot, half-burned timbers reached into the night sky, dark on dark, like blackened bones trying to escape from a grave. Beyond the remnants of the gatehouse stood the ruins of a once-grand home, bricks holding in secrets like a jealous lover, guarding rumors of foul play. 

Yeah, I probably wouldn't want to live next door to a place like that. But at this time of year, when the wind rattles the windowpanes and candles flicker on my coffee table, it's the perfect time to curl up with an eerie story. If you like to do the same, I recommend you snatch up a copy of the Of Rags and Riches Romance Collection and ready my tale, A House of Secrets. Here's a blurb:

Ladies Aide Chairman, Amanda Carston, resolves to clean up St. Paul’s ramshackle housing, determining to demolish the worst of the worst: a “haunted” house, but when she enlists the aide of her fiance, attorney Joseph Blake, they uncover secrets neither expects—which may mean the end of their relationship…or their lives.

Of course the house isn't really haunted, but you'll have to read the story to discover what it is that makes everyone think so.