Storm Taken: A Supernatural Thriller

by William Michael Davidson

  Storm Taken

  William Michael Davidson

  Storm Taken

  by William Michael Davidson

  Published by Clean Reads

  www.cleanreads.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.

  STORM TAKEN

  Copyright © 2018 WILLIAM MICHAEL DAVIDSON

  ISBN 978-1-62135-776-6

  Cover Art Designed by AM DESIGNS STUDIO

  Contents

  Untitled

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  About the Author

  Clean Reads

  Much of this book is about the power of a good marriage.

  I dedicate this book to my dad, who gave an example from which to write, and who has shown me what it is to love a woman.

  “Storms make the oak grow deeper roots”

  -George Herbert

  “No monsters came out of the storm; the storm was the monster.”

  -Eddie Dees, the author

  Chapter One

  The storm took many things, but my dog was the first.

  My wife and I owned a Golden Retriever that we rescued from the pound. A decision that was, the more I look back at everything, a decision to please our younger son; he’s quite an adept beggar, and we caved in way too soon.

  I didn’t realize, of course, that the dog had actually been taken.

  And Bessie was only the beginning.

  We moved to Naples Island at the age of forty-two because life had been pretty good to us. At least until that point it had. My first three novels sold very well, all bestsellers, and they even made a movie out of the last one. We’d previously lived in Seattle. When our folks passed away and we realized that money wasn’t going to be a problem for us and we could have our druthers, we selected Naples Island. It’s a community in Belmont Shore, California, that looks like something right out of Italy, our favorite place to vacation together. Our Cape Cod-style home sat right on one of the canals. We loved to sit outside, drink wine, admire the sunset, and watch people walk dreamily along the canals. It really was, to us at least, a piece of heaven.

  The storm began on the first day of July, our first summer living there. At that point, we had no idea what we were in for. We were on the deck in the front of the house, sitting by our gas-powered fire pit and drinking Gaja Barbaresco, when we noticed the storm clouds moving in. The first flashes of lightning whitened the sky, but there was no thunder that we could hear. We laughed when we noticed the looming storm. Here we were, all giddy about living in California, and not even two months in our new home, a storm was coming our way. A storm in July? Something just seemed very un-California about it to Seattle natives like us.

  I checked the weather on my phone. Apparently monsoon moisture from the deserts had drifted farther west than usual, which was causing some showers and thunderstorms. Not a very common thing to happen near the beaches in July, but we decided to make the best of it.

  It was still mid-afternoon, and we thought we’d wait it out and drink more wine until the rain came our way. I have to admit, it was pretty amazing to watch. These dark, billowing clouds crawled across the sky, and it was almost like watching a fireworks show. The thunderclouds spewed out great bolts of lightning—electrical forked tongues licking the corners of the horizon. Some of our neighbors even came out to watch the spectacle.

  Before long, we could hear thunder following the brilliant flashes. The wind picked up, and I thought it best to pick up our plate of cheese and crackers, gather our wine glasses, and make our way inside. But my wife, Madison, laughed at my suggestion to move things indoors to escape the impending downpour.

  “Don’t be so silly,” she said. Reclining in her chair, she leisurely flipped through pages of Eating Well.

  “Do you see the clouds? They’re coming our way.”

  “Yes, I can see the clouds,” she said, “and a little thunder and lightning isn’t going to kill us. Where’s your sense of adventure? This is kind of exciting, Eddie. It’s our first storm in California. Maybe we can dance beside the canal when it gets here?. It’ll be a special moment.”

  “I think if we’re going to dance, I’d prefer to dance inside.”

  She clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Party pooper,” she whispered and tossed the magazine at me. Then she leaned back and undid the top two buttons of her blouse. “If it’s any consolation, I still think you’re the hottest bestselling author on Naples Island.”

  I thought about this statement. “Well, considering I’m the only bestselling author on Naples Island, I suppose that’s a compliment.”

  “I know what we can do instead of dance,” she said, and she pulled out the scrunchie that had kept her long locks of blonde hair in a bun. It fell about her shoulders. She threw the scrunchie at me, and I saw those big, electric-blue eyes looking at me. She peeled back the top of her blouse and baited me with a glimpse of tanned cleavage. It worked well, because I couldn’t look away. Hey, I’m a guy. “We can do something else in the rain, if you’d prefer? Something a little naughty.”

  “Babe, I think that’s something I’d prefer to do inside as well.”

  She clicked her tongue again. “It wouldn’t be the first in the rain, but it’d be the first in California rain. Remember right after we got married? In the park?”

  “Yes, I remember,” I said, and seeing that she wasn’t going to budge until the deluge was upon us, I picked up my glass of wine and made myself comfortable. “But that was a long time ago, babe. We were in our twenties.”

  “I still think you’re hot.”

  “And we were complete idiots. Anyone could have walked by at any moment.”

  “They would have been jealous,” she said very matter-of-factly. In what was clearly another attempt to bait me, she moved southward on her journey of unbuttoning her blouse and I, primitive man, watched the buttons undo themselves as if under hypnosis.

  The front door opened, and Owen, our junior in high school, walked out with a can of Coca-Cola in his hand. He’s a tall, gangly guy─several inches taller than me─and his headphones might as well have been surgically attached to him. Under his shaggy mop of black hair, maybe they really were screwed into his skull.

  I don’t know what exactly he was coming out to ask us. He opened his mouth to say something, but I assume the s
ight of his mom with her shirt unbuttoned and her boobs nearly hanging out was too much for his adolescent mind to cope with. Me drooling over her probably didn’t help. His eyes went wide, and then he shut them. His acne-pocked forehead crinkled in what appeared to be an effort to squeeze that memory out of his mind once and for all.

  “That is so gross!” he said, still looking constipated.

  He turned around and closed the door behind him.

  But we could hear him yell as he went back upstairs: “Disgusting!”

  My wife and I looked at each other and fell apart laughing.

  Chapter Two

  I’ve always considered myself one of the lucky guys, and I really mean it. I was forty-two that summer, and more had gone right in my life than had gone wrong─a lot more. I sold my first suspense novel just a few years after graduating college, married the same woman who had encouraged me to finish writing that book, had two healthy and well-adjusted children, and I had plenty of money in the bank. What more could a guy want? I used to sit on the front porch of that house on Naples Island and wonder if I should pinch myself, because so much good fortune in so short a span of time seemed almost impossible to believe.

  And most of my good fortune is because of Madison. I really do love my wife, and the older I get, the more I realize how few people can truly say that. I have three good friends from high school and college that I still keep in touch with. Two of them have been through not-very-nice divorces, custody fights, and enough drama to script daytime talk shows for the next millennium. My other buddy, Dwight, is married, but sometimes when I talk to him I get the impression he’d rather join my other friends in their return to bachelorhood. He and his wife have three boys, and if it wasn’t for them, I think he probably would have thrown in the towel a long time ago.

  I think in all our years of marriage, my wife and I haven’t even said that word: divorce. Maybe it’s because we both came from divorced families and we’ve seen the aftermath firsthand; it’s hard to drop a bomb when you’ve spent time standing amongst the civilians and debris. But more than that, I just think I chose the right person. Maybe all the books that have been written on marriage and relationships can be substituted for one simple rule: Get your head out of your butt and choose the right person. That’s the advice I’ve always given my sons.

  My wife and I are polar opposites. My friends in college used to joke with me and say that I could probably go a whole week sitting inside without talking to somebody, and there’s truth in that. I’m usually the first to want to leave a social event, most certainly the first to suggest not even going to a social event, and when I can’t get out of those situations, I probably look pretty pathetic following my wife around like a shadow. Being shorter than her probably doesn’t help. If there’s anything I like about those kinds of situations, it’s the fact that I can observe, because that’s what writers do─we observe things. Many a person that I’ve been introduced to at my wife’s social gatherings has appeared on the pages of my books. But in the end, I guess I’m just a homebody. We all have what I like to think of as a daily word quota, and I take care of mine at about five o’clock in the morning with my coffee and the blank screen in front of me. That’s my safe place. That’s when Eddie Dees has more words than he knows what to do with.

  My wife, on the other hand, can hardly go to the bathroom without giving everyone in the room a hug goodbye. She’s vivacious, loud, bubbly, exciting, childlike, and my life would be boring without her. For sure, she annoys me at times and hardly lets me get a word in edgewise on most days and maybe that’s why I chose a career as a writer. Blank pages don’t interrupt me when I’m trying to make a point. But, in all honestly, I’d probably be some crabby author locked in my office twenty-four hours a day if it weren’t for her. She gets me out into the real world and, even more importantly, she gets me out of my head.

  And she definitely makes me deal with people like Marsha Walker.

  I’m not sure how old Marsha is, but I’ve always assumed she’s closing in on her fifties. During our first couple months living on Naples Island, I never saw Marsha wearing anything other than a muumuu. It looked to me like she’d bought all of these items in some thrift store on the wrong side of the tracks. She had short but very thick brown curls which sat on top of a pudgy, doughy face. Her eyes were big brown headlights that seemed to swallow up everything in her presence. Sometimes she reminded me of an oversized, over-sugared kid, with cotton candy in one hand and a soda in the other, who had been let loose in an amusement park with hundreds of dollars in her pocket. She just had this overly-enthusiastic, overly-optimistic demeanor about her and, when I discovered how so frumpy a woman had come to reside in so elegant a neighborhood, it made sense to me. She had grown up on Naples Island and from what I heard, had never married (or had a boyfriend for that matter). She never left the house she was brought home to as an infant. When her parents passed away—only a few years before my wife and I moved there—she had inherited the home along with a trust as robust as her. She really was that kid in the amusement park.

  Just as my son, Owen, had retreated from what he thought was the most disturbing sight he had ever beheld─sexual flirtation between Mom and Dad─Marsha waddled over to our house. She was our neighbor to the right and, considering how close the houses are built on Naples Island, that distance could probably be measured in inches.

  “Oh my dear, oh my dear, oh my dear,” Marsha said. She pointed her pudgy finger toward the approaching storm clouds, and her bracelets clicked together about her wrists. She always wore brightly colored, plastic bracelets. My wife and I never quite understood it. “Do you see the storm, do you see it? A thunderstorm in July. Oh my dear, I’ve never seen something like this. It’s so rare.”

  My wife, who had quickly buttoned her shirt when she saw Marsha approaching, nodded in agreement and said, “Hi, Marsha. Yes, we were just talking about it. Our first storm in California. We’ve seen enough of them in Washington.”

  “Oh, I bet you have,” Marsha said. Then she looked at me. “Kind of like something a writer would have in a scary book or something, right, Mr. Dees?”

  “Well, perhaps. Maybe it’ll inspire me.”

  “Oh, I just think it’s so fascinating how writers can be inspired by such things,” she said. She took a deep breath and sighed. “I just think it’s so absolutely wonderful how you are able to take these things that we see around us every day and make them into stories. It’s almost magical, Mr. Dees, almost magical. I know I’ve already told you about how when I was a little girl, I dreamed of being a writer. I dug up that old story I wrote and once I’m done editing it I’ll give it to you so you can tell me what you think.”

  My wife shot me a knowing grin.

  “Yes, Marsha,” I said. “I’m very much looking forward to seeing it.”

  Marsha had already told me about the short story she wrote in college at least a dozen times and even though she kept promising she would show me her story, I doubted she ever would. I’ve learned that most people talk about writing, but very few actually sit down to do it. Occasionally, I run into a person like Marsha who, because I’ve sold a lot of copies of my novels, thinks I’m some kind of deity. I even gave up my effort to get her to call me by my first name. It was apparent that she wasn’t going to take me down from the pedestal she’d placed me on. My wife, of course, thought the whole thing was hilarious. She always thought it was hilarious when people—particularly females—went all goo-goo-eyed over me because I was a successful writer.

  “He still wipes his butt, people, he’s just a normal dude,” she’d often whisper in my ear during certain encounters. “Oh, wait a minute,” she would then tease. “I just cleaned his underwear last night. I take that back. Maybe he doesn’t wipe.”

  “Thanks a lot, babe,” was my usual response.

  “How’s your new novel coming along?” Marsha asked.

  “Doing well. Got up at my usual five o’clock and put in a few hours. Ho
ping to have it done in a few months.”

  “And what is it about? Is it the usual suspense kind of stuff? Or is it a follow-up to one of your earlier books? Like Redemption Awaits? I always thought that would have been a good one to write a sequel to.”

  “No, this is a standalone novel, and I can’t say anything about it yet. Too early. But if things go as planned, it should be out sometime next year.”

  “Well, you know me. I’ll want an autographed copy.”

  “That can be arranged,” I said, smiling. Why not? I’d autographed my other novels for her, and my wife and I had noticed, during one occasion when she invited us into her living room for some tea and cookies, those autographed books on display on the top of her living room bookshelf. She was mighty proud of them.

  Just then, Darrel and Jenna Paisley walked by. They were followed by Samantha Wheeler. Darrel and Jenna were the typical middle-aged near-retirement family you expected to find on Naples Island, and they were our neighbors two doors to the left. Some hermit by the name of Dominic, whom I had only seen once or twice, lived between us. Darrel was a twiggy, scrawny guy with thinning hair and a hook nose, while his wife, Jenna, was a bit more on the shorter, wider side of things. Nearing retirement, Darrel was a financial planner, and his wife was an art teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School. It was pretty clear that it was his income and his income alone that afforded them the ability to live on this private nook of Naples Island.