Dead Right

Hunched against the freezing January rain, Madeline Barker felt her fingernails cut into her palms. Standing with her stepbrother, stepsister and stepmother, she watched the police and several volunteers attempt to pull her father's car out of the abandoned water-filled quarry. Her head pounded from lack of sleep, and her chest was so tight she almost couldn't breathe, yet she stood perfectly still...waiting. After almost twenty years, she might finally have some answers about her father's disappearance. Toby Pontiff, Stillwater, Mississippi's, police chief, knelt at the lip of the yawning hole. "Careful, careful there, Rex," he called over the high-pitched whine of the winch attached to a massive tow truck. Joe Vincelli and his brother, Roger, Madeline's first cousins, hovered on the other side of the quarry, their faces betraying their anticipation. They spoke animatedly to each other, but Madeline couldn't hear them above the noise. She was fairly sure she didn't want to. What they had to say would only upset her. They'd long blamed her father's disappearance on certain members of her stepfamily--Irene, Clay and Grace-- who were gathered around her now. Unfortunately, the fact that the Cadillac had been found in the quarry five miles outside of town would only convince them they'd been right all along. It'd certainly prove that her father hadn't driven off into the sunset. The black seal-like heads of two divers who'd gone down a few minutes earlier popped up and, with a gasp, Madeline realized she could see the front grille of her dad's car through the murky water. With a sudden rush of tears, she instinctively moved closer to Clay, who remained as dark and silent as the surrounding rocks. The car didn't break the surface. Rex hit a button that stopped the clamoring winch, halting its progress, and the silence made Madeline's ears ring. Her stepmother, a short buxom woman with hair like Loretta Lynn's, whimpered at the sight of the barely visible car. Grace shifted to try and comfort her, but Clay didn't move. Madeline looked up at him, wondering what was going on behind his intense blue eyes. As usual, it was difficult to tell. His expression mirrored the gray, overcast sky. Maybe he wasn't thinking. Maybe, like her, he was simply surviving the cataclysm of emotions. It'll be over soon. No matter what happens, knowing is better than not knowing.She hoped... "This is making me nervous," Rex complained. Short and wiry with the tattoo of a woman partly visible at his neck, he frowned as he joined Chief Pontiff. "What if we clip the rocks? The car could get hung up." "It's not gonna get hung up," a police officer by the name of Radcliffe said. The tow-truck driver ignored the unsolicited input, keeping his focus on the man in charge. "I don't think this is gonna work," he insisted. "I say we bring a crane in here, Toby, before someone gets hurt or we ruin my truck." Toby, a slight blond man with a neatly trimmed mustache, had become Chief Pontiff six months earlier and was a friend of Madeline's. They'd grown up together; she'd been close to his future wife all through high school. He shot Madeline a sympathetic glance then, lowering his voice, he turned away from her. Still, she could make out his words. "That'll take another few days. Look at that group over there. See the woman in the middle? The one who's white as a ghost? Her mother killed herself when she was ten years old. Her father went missing when she was sixteen. And she's been standing here since dawn, getting soaked. I'm not going to send her home until I get her father's car out of this damn quarry. We need to see if his remains are inside. It's already taken me a week to arrange it." "If she's waited that long, what's another two or three days?" Rex asked. "It's another two or three days!" Toby nearly shouted. "And she's not the only one with aNovak, Brenda is the author of 'Dead Right ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780778324393 and ISBN 0778324397.