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Seadrift: Bunny Elder Series
Seadrift: Bunny Elder Series
Seadrift: Bunny Elder Series
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Seadrift: Bunny Elder Series

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Life's been rough for middle-aged Bunny Elder since her husband's murder. Where better to try to begin a new life than a small tourist town on the beautiful Oregon Coast? 
This former pastor's wife steps into uncharted waters attempting to become a freelance writer. She hopes the sun, sand and sea will inspire and heal.
New career, new friends, and a possible new romance make life by the seaside seem idyllic until an innocent walk on the beach leads to a world of International criminals and the horrific reality of human trafficking.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherJ.B. Hawker
Release dateOct 28, 2013
ISBN9781438220529
Seadrift: Bunny Elder Series
Author

J.B. Hawker

Raised in the northern end of the Sacramento Valley in California, J.B.Hawker's early life was framed by mountain ranges. While her physical vistas were bounded on almost every side, her imagination was free to soar without limits. "I've made up stories my whole life," said Hawker when interviewed. "While other children might need a flashlight to read under the covers after bedtime, I simply made up my own stories, many of which lasted multiple nights, having intricate details and characters drawn both from my life and my imagination." After twenty years serving small churches from Alaska to South Dakota as a pastor's wife, she returned to her California roots to start over in mid-life as a single business woman and author. J.B. has published many articles on faith and ministry as well as programming materials for women's ministry. "Hollow" the first book in the Bunny Elder series and winner of the BRAG Medallion Award, was her first published fiction. J.B. has three grown sons. Her oldest, the father of her three beautiful granddaughters, lives in northern Italy, the setting of the second book in the series, "Vain Pursuits", featuring the on-going adventures of Bunny and Max. "Seadrift" takes Bunny to the Oregon coast where their story continues. "...and Something Blue" concludes this series with Bunny and her new husband sailing off to Australia and, as usual, drifting into a series of inadvertent adventures.  

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    Book preview

    Seadrift - J.B. Hawker

    Prologue

    Waves explode furiously against the shore, clawing at the sand as they are dragged back into the roiling sea.

    Shells, sea creatures and refuse swept up from the ocean floor dash helplessly against rocky outcroppings before being sucked back into the maelstrom.

    Lightning sparks the crests of the waves as the tempest moves on, reluctantly releasing its hold, and the frenzied surf’s passion wanes.

    Ripples slide back down the beach, lacking the strength to carry their burden of flotsam with them.

    Moonlight reveals kelp, broken planks and detritus littering the shore and befouling the tide pools.

    A tangle of seaweed and debris bobs gently in the foam.

    Small ivory fingers curl up from the tangle, as though still seeking the comforting clasp of a guiding hand.

    Chapter One

    God called the dry ground land, and the gathered waters he called seas. And God saw that it was good. - Genesis 1:10

    Her bare feet buried up to the ankles in warm dry sand, Bunny Elder stretched both arms overhead and leaned back onto a plaid stadium blanket, reveling in the delightful weather after three days of wind and rain.

    Warm, sunny days are rare on the Oregon coast, even in late May. Bunny had moved to Bannoch-by-the-Sea only a few months before, but she already knew enough to take advantage of these precious golden days when they arrived.

    Waking that morning in her rented cabin to bright sunshine and blue sky, Bunny quickly revised her schedule.  Right after breakfast she packed a lunch, grabbed sand gear and her laptop and headed for the beach.

    It was a struggle trying to make her latest writing assignment interesting while still sticking to the manufacturer’s specifications. Bunny had discovered that, although her heart was in fiction writing, these non-fiction articles and even technical manuals were going to be her bread and butter as a free-lance writer, at least for now.

    Rationalizing that a change of scenery might be inspirational had helped to muffle her guilt at playing hooky instead of sitting down at her desk from nine o’clock until noon, as was her usual regimen.

    So far, she had not even opened her computer.

    Bunny’s attention had been diverted by the scene playing out a few hundred yards down the beach from where she sat.

    A knot of people gathered by a rocky outcropping near the tideline and both a sheriff’s office vehicle and an ambulance had driven onto the hardpacked sand.

    She supposed there must have been a drowning.

    It was unfortunate, but even with all the signs posted along this beach warning about sneaker waves tourists and other daredevils continued to ignore them. From time to time, someone would inevitably be knocked off their feet and pulled under.

    People miscalculated the power of the ocean at their own peril.

    Bunny prayed for the rescue workers, the unknown victim, and then, since there was nothing else she could offer, casually watched the action unfolding.

    Above the beach on the shoulder of the highway two men were also observing the activities. Bunny supposed they were passersby curious about the emergency vehicles and commotion until she noticed they were using binoculars to survey the scene more closely.

    Curiosity is one thing, but that’s just voyeurism, she murmured disapprovingly.

    Deciding not to be a party to that sort of intrusiveness into what might well be a tragedy, Bunny gathered up her things and slogged up the beach away from the activity. 

    When she had settled her blanket in the shelter of a grass-tufted dune, she decided to stretch her legs a bit more before finally tackling her current uninspiring writing assignment.

    The thought of stretching her legs made Bunny smile. At just over five feet tall, longer legs would be a welcome improvement.

    The sea breeze blew her gray-blond hair into her eyes when she rounded a clump of boulders and she almost blundered into a knot of seaweed and driftwood.

    What appeared to be the corner of a box was poking through some netting entangled with kelp. She nudged it out onto the sand with a piece of driftwood to avoid any surprises from hidden crabs or other sea creatures.

    After rolling the box over and determining that it was free from tiny life forms, she picked it up and brushed off the sand and bits of seaweed.

    What she’d found was a reddish-brown wooden chest about the size of a large shoebox. She immediately began to think of it as a sea chest and to invent stories about the swashbuckling sea captain who might have lost it long ago in faraway waters.

    Holding it in her hands ignited just the sort of creative spark she had been looking for.

    Bunny took the box back to her blanket, gathered up her things and headed to her car. She wanted to get home where she could start writing without distractions before the muse deserted her.

    The patrol car was still on the beach and had been joined by another, although the ambulance was gone. The two rubberneckers were still there, their spyglasses now trained in Bunny’s direction.

    It made her uncomfortable to see them focus their interest on her, but she supposed the men had gotten bored with the lack of activity on the shore and were drawn to any sort of movement.

    She was unused to attracting the attentions of strange men.

    Like many women, Bunny had been bestowed with a cloak of invisibility on her fiftieth birthday. With it she had gained the power to become a part of the scenery, like a movie extra in a cast of thousands. 

    It was no wonder many women adopted extreme or eccentric styles as they aged.  The poor dears were simply trying to get noticed and to have their existence affirmed in any way possible.

    Bunny rather enjoyed the anonymity most of the time.  She certainly didn’t like being the object of these inquisitive strangers’ regard, just now.

    She packed her things into the car’s trunk and drove home, dismissing the nosy men from her mind as she conjured up a rollicking romance full of pirates and mysterious treasure chests.

    When she got home she was eager to begin writing, so she parked in the driveway to take her things from the car. She shook out her sandy blanket and stashed it, along with the sea chest, in the empty washing machine in the garage before toting her laptop and supplies into the cabin.

    She wouldn’t bring the sea chest into the house until she had a chance to clean it up.

    Bunny had created an entire outline plus the biographies of three main characters for her romance novel and then used her momentum to carry on through several pages of the more prosaic instruction manual before she noticed she was hungry and stopped to eat.

    She took the lunch she had packed that morning out to the picnic table behind the cabin where she could enjoy the warm sunshine on her back and hear the breeze rattling the branches of the trees.

    Bunny loved the smell of sun-warmed pine and fir needles. She thought they smelled like fresh-baked soda crackers. That fragrance always reminded her of the rare summer camping trips of her youth.

    A sweet little pine squirrel chirped at her as she set out her food, then clambered farther up the tree where it sat watching her with its orange-colored chest contrasted against the dark greens of the pines.

    She bit eagerly into her crunchy sandwich of tuna, black olives and chopped dill pickle tucked into a whole wheat pita pocket ruffled with a crisp kale leaf. As she enjoyed her lunch Bunny reflected on the past few months and the remarkable change that had taken place in her life.

    Not long ago she was facing a dreary future as companion to her older sister, Linda ... two lonely widows marking time together dwelling on memories of the past and awaiting the blessed release of death.

    While she was pretty sure she still had the option of going to live with her first husband, Max...the man she thought she still loved...the prospect had been tarnished by some unpleasant revelations about their past relationship.

    Even so, Bunny had been sorely tempted to give in to Max’s urgings and join him in Houston, especially when he told her he had joined a church there and was seeking a closer walk with God.

    It had been a conflict of beliefs that caused the failure of their brief reconciliation following the death of her second husband, Eustace, but it would have been so easy to slip into a life with Max, if only he had not forced her to take a good hard look at herself when their paths crossed unexpectedly in Italy.

    They were accidentally caught up in a desperate situation which inspired Max, uncharacteristically, to talk about his feelings. His disclosures forced Bunny to see herself in a harsher and less flattering light than she was used to.

    She was compelled to face the fact she’d lived most of her life without real goals, filtering everything through her own fantasies and reacting only as necessary to whatever bits of reality intruded into her world. She had been trying to please others, but without sensitivity to their needs, or to her own.

    Bunny had become a detached observer of her own life. She’d spent so much time inside her own head she’d lost touch with her heart.

    Now, she wanted to learn who she was with her eyes wide open and only herself and God to please.

    She had been a pastor’s wife for many years before her second husband’s death and she had molded her life to the role without a second’s hesitation. She never even tried to tailor the part she played to fit her own personality.

    Eustace’s murder left her adrift with no income and no identity.

    In the few years since, she had been peeling back the people-pleasing layers in an attempt to find the real Bunny. She feared joining Max now would derail her journey of self-discovery.

    He was not happy when she told him of her plan to move to Oregon to try to make a living as a writer. Max mocked her need to find herself like some acolyte of Betty Freidan and Gloria Steinem of the 1960’s. He accused her of trying to live a latter-day sequel to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

    Bunny tried to make him understand her desire to get to know herself didn’t mean she wanted to break off their relationship. She was hoping they would be able to come back together eventually as whole individuals and have a richer, more honest life together, if only he was willing to give her a chance.

    The last time they spoke Bunny invited Max to come for a visit. He was not very gracious in his refusal to come to the cold and damp Oregon coast. She knew Max preferred warmer climates, but she still felt that this was an excuse rather than a reason.

    It was disappointing, but she remained resolute in her decision to get to know who she was when she wasn’t being a distorted mirror of someone else’s desires and expectations. If it meant Max was out of her life again, so be it.

    Bunny noticed the lengthening shadows and stopped woolgathering.

    There were errands to run before dinner and choir practice at her new church that evening.

    She scattered her sandwich crumbs for the birds and squirrels then went inside to clean up and grab her shopping list.

    When she stepped out the front door she was surprised her car was not in the driveway where she thought she left it. Had she parked in the garage, after all? Surely, she wasn’t becoming that forgetful.

    Opening the garage door relieved her fears of early-onset dementia, but failed to answer the more compelling question: where was her car? It couldn’t have just disappeared.

    She was faced with the unhappy explanation that while she was working inside, or lounging in the backyard, someone had quietly made off with it.

    It wasn’t a fancy new car, just an eight-year-old Chevy Malibu with 60,000 miles on it, bought used in Idaho before she moved to Oregon. She hadn’t left the keys in the ignition, either, so why would anyone steal it? Especially here, on such a lightly traveled mountain road. 

    This is unbelievable! It can’t be happening.

    Bunny struggled to come to grips with the sense of violation and loss.

    Emotions washed over her in waves, reflected in her rapidly changing complexion: ashen with shock, flushed fuchsia with anger, paling to the rose of loss, followed by gray-tinged fear and a sense of defeat.

    She took a deep breath to calm herself. With shaky fingers, she pulled her new cell phone from her purse to call the sheriff’s office and report the theft.

    Bunny had been reluctant to join the cell phone generation, but was forced to see the need for one after a few misadventures when being unable to use a cell phone had been a real handicap.

    She was still unfamiliar with all this smartphone’s options and had a sneaking suspicion the gadget’s IQ was several points higher than her own.

    Nearly half an hour passed before a sheriff’s deputy arrived in response to her call.

    Bunny made her report without receiving much encouragement about the chances of ever seeing her car again.

    After the deputy left she went back into the house and brewed a pot of lemon-ginger tea. The routine task and soothing aroma helped to calm her nerves while she made plans for dealing with the sudden lack of transportation.

    She had pulled insurance papers out of her file box and was filling out an online form when her phone trilled.

    Hello? Yes, that’s me. Oh my! Well, that’s wonderful! Thank you so much. I’ll be down to pick it up right away.

    Amazingly, her car had already been found. It had been abandoned alongside Highway 101 and it hadn’t even been stripped, according to the woman who called. The sheriff’s office had towed it to the auto shop in town and Bunny would be able to pick it up after dropping in at the Sheriff’s substation to sign some papers.

    She supposed some ne’er-do-well must have taken her car for a joy ride and then miraculously had an attack of conscience. Or maybe he decided it wasn’t flashy enough for his tastes.

    Whatever the thief’s motives, Bunny was elated. What a blessing!   She wouldn’t waste a bit of energy being angry or trying to have the culprit caught and punished.

    If she hurried, she could walk the mile and a half into town in time to get her car and still make it to choir practice as planned. She grabbed a light jacket, put her wallet and keys into a pocket and started out, softly singing a prayer of thanksgiving as she walked along the winding country lane down toward the highway into town.

    Chapter Two

    It is not the sound of victory, it is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear. – Exodus 32:18

    With a grateful sigh Bunny sank down onto a folding chair in the choir’s soprano section. It felt good to get off her feet. The emotional turmoil of discovering the theft, plus that long walk into town to retrieve her vehicle, had worn her out. She only had time to grab an apple and a low-fat cheese stick before dashing out again for choir practice.

    It was important to Bunny not to miss a weekly practice session, since she was so new to this fellowship and was still getting acquainted with her church family.

    In her years as a pastor’s wife it had been so easy to merge into the life of each new church. Everyone knew who she was and she knew her place almost from the first Sunday. Each new congregation provided a readymade group of neighbors.

    A pastor’s family enjoys, in varying proportions in each church, a combination of loving support and critical meddlesomeness.

    In some denominations, the pastor’s wife is actually referred to as the First Lady. The many churches Pastor Elder served did not hold their minister’s family in quite such high esteem, although they usually had demanding expectations of their pastoral family and were always more than willing to give frank opinions and pass judgment on every aspect of the Elders’ life.

    Close friendships can be difficult to cultivate in such an atmosphere and are even harder to maintain, but at least a pastor’s family members are never strangers in a new town for long.

    While Eustace was alive Bunny had been spared the discomfort of being an outsider in church. Unfortunately, she was never able to become a true member of those fellowships, either. 

    After being widowed, Bunny had gone to live in Idaho where she attended her sister’s church. She was welcomed warmly as Linda’s sister, but had not made any strong connections of her own.

    This small community church in Bannoch was her chance to make genuine friendships, with no restrictions or ulterior agendas in sight.

    After trying out a few of the half-dozen churches in the little town, Bunny had settled at Bannoch Community Fellowship, a charming little white chapel set back from Highway 101, with its steeple rising above the fir trees and lovely azalea and fern beds surrounding the patch of green lawn between the church and the parking lot.

    She fell in love with the friendly people and folksy worship style, with its blend of contemporary and traditional music. The pastor was unpretentious and preached intelligently from the Bible. She was impressed when she learned that the congregation was active in both foreign missions and local service.

    The sanctuary felt like home right away and when she discovered this was one of the few remaining churches with a regular choir, Bunny had been hooked.

    The singers were all taking their seats as the director handed out the night’s rehearsal pieces.

    Bunny forgot her tired feet and the misadventures of the day and let the music carry her as she joined her voice with the others in praise of God.

    Good night, Shirley! See you Sunday, Bunny called across the parking lot to one of her new friends.

    Shirley Griffiths was one of the first to welcome Bunny to BCF and to invite her to join the choir. She even gave Bunny a ride to her first rehearsal, so she wouldn’t arrive alone.

    A simple gesture like that can make a world of difference to a newcomer and it helped ease Bunny’s entrance into the church.

    Shirley, a few years older than Bunny, and her husband, Jack, were longtime members of the congregation. Bunny hoped they were going to become her good friends.

    Shirley’s elderly mother, Sharon, had advanced Alzheimer’s and was rarely responsive, but Shirley and Jack kept her in their home and included her in everything.  Sharon loved to sing above all things and, even though she seldom spoke, she remembered every song she had ever heard and still had a lovely voice. 

    Shirley frequently brought her mother to choir practices where she would sit in the back pew singing softly along with the music. Remembering the happy look on her face during that night’s rehearsal made Bunny smile.

    Rosamund Davidson strode up purposefully just then, forestalling Bunny as she was getting into her car.

    Mrs. Elder! Just the person I want to talk to, Rosamund announced loudly. You can bring four dozen cookies for this Sunday’s coffee time after church, can’t you?  Of course, you can! You look like you must be a wonderful baker. Good bakers always love to eat. I understand you work at home, so you must have plenty of time on your hands.

    Well, I suppose I could..., Bunny responded tentatively to this onslaught.

    Wonderful! I think brownies and Tollhouse cookies would be the best. You can choose between them, or just bring some of each. Snickerdoodles would be alright, too, I suppose. Some people seem to like them. So many of our young women have jobs these days, those of us fortunate enough to stay at home must take up the slack when it comes to the cookie rotation.

    With a sharp nod, she turned on her heel and marched quickly away, leaving Bunny feeling bushwhacked. Rosamund, the pastor’s unmarried sister, seemed like a parody of a pastor’s wife, on steroids.

    Scott Davidson, the pastor, was a tall, rangy man with sandy hair and a gentle, unassuming manner. He impressed Bunny with his Biblical scholarship, innate kindness and wry humor. His sister, however, didn’t seem to have any sense of humor, at all. Bunny looked forward to getting better acquainted with the pastor, but felt she already knew Rosamund quite well enough.

    As she drove home Bunny chastised herself silently for being so critical. She had been on the receiving end of that sort of judgment often enough to know better.

    She put her now precious car safely into the garage and went into the cabin. She had forgotten to leave a light on in her rush to get to choir on time and stumbled over something as she crossed the living room.

    Turning on a lamp to see what it was, she was aghast to find the room in a shambles with books, plants and pillows on the floor and the seat cushions pulled off the sofa and chairs.

    Walking quickly into the kitchen she was greeted by an even bigger mess. Drawers were upturned and the cupboards had been opened and ransacked.

    When she saw the back door was open with its frame broken it finally dawned on her that she might not be alone in the house.

    Bunny grabbed her phone, ran out to the driveway and called 9-1-1 to report the break-in. She stood anxiously in the darkness by the roadside to await the patrol car. She wanted to get into her own car and leave, but her keys were inside the house...and who knew where the burglar might be right now? He might even be hiding in the garage.

    The marine layer was rolling in and Bunny shivered with both chill and fear. Straining her eyes to see anyone who might be lurking among the trees and shrubs surrounding the cabin was only making it worse, as each branch and

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