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    A Knight in the Ville: The December Dark
    A Knight in the Ville: The December Dark
    A Knight in the Ville: The December Dark
    Ebook62 pages48 minutes

    A Knight in the Ville: The December Dark

    By Steven E. Winters

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    About this ebook

    There is a time in winter when the sun stands still in the sky. When this solstice arrives, so does the Dark. It feeds upon the ambitions, greed, corruption, and fears of the citizens in each town it visits. When a tall and mysterious stranger arrives in tiny Sistersville, WV, on a cold December night, Sergeant Curtis Knight is faced with the toughest case of his career. A waitress dies, a small crippled boy vanishes from his home, and a blizzard descends upon the Ville. As Sergeant Knight pieces together the clues, the Dark begins to feed.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse
    Release dateNov 12, 2013
    ISBN9781491833070
    A Knight in the Ville: The December Dark
    Author

    Steven E. Winters

    Born and raised in Tyler County, West Virginia, Steven E. Winters was fascinated with the folklore and legends of the Ohio Valley region. With those legends in mind, he wrote A Knight in the Ville, a five-book series based in and around Tyler County. Mixing historical facts with fictional characters, he focused on making his stories short and easy to read. Encouraged by the success of that series, he is now releasing his first short-story collection. Winters served as a law enforcement officer in West Virginia and North Carolina for twenty-three years before retiring in 2003. He now works as a private contractor for a large utility company, which gives him more time to focus on his writing. He currently resides near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina.

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      Book preview

      A Knight in the Ville - Steven E. Winters

      Chapter One

      J ohnny Flannigan was born a sickly child, and over the years, he was constantly in and out of the hospital with various ailments. Too frail to continue his studies at Sistersville Elementary, he was now homeschooled by his devoted mother, Angela. Johnny’s father, a hard-drinking former football star at Tyler Consolidated High School, had moved out just a few months prior to Johnny’s tenth birthday. He had been frustrated by his son’s weakness and his wife’s inability to conceive another child.

      Despite his physical condition, Johnny was a very intelligent young boy. He had amazed his teachers with his ability to memorize volumes

      of textbooks, and had maintained straight A s

      until his health failed to the point where he was confined to his bed. Johnny’s mother knew he had a gift, and she provided him with all the books and supplies required for a fifth grader. A few times a week, several of the teachers from the school would drop by on their own time to assist Angela with her lesson plans.

      But times were becoming harder for Angela. At twenty-nine, she was still a young and attractive woman, but the stress of her son’s illness and her husband’s desertion were taking their toll. She was a country girl, raised on a farm in Wick, WV. She knew how to take care of herself, but now she was forced to quit her job to take care of her son full-time. The child support from her husband, who was a coal miner, was adequate; but as the bills began to pile higher and higher, she was forced to seek public assistance. The social services people were great. They provided Angela and Johnny with rent-free housing on Florence Street in Happy Hollow and assigned a part-time certified nursing aide to sit with Johnny three days a week so Angela could do her household chores and shop for medication and food. They also gave Johnny a laptop so he could connect with his classmates and interact socially. He could also access his school’s web site and communicate with his teachers.

      Angela sat at the kitchen table and sipped her coffee. She looked out the window at the hillside and instantly became depressed. She hated the winter. The trees were bare, and all of the color that autumn had painted on them was now gone. A quick glance at the calendar on the wall beside the fridge only compounded her mood. It was December. Christmas was right around the corner. She remembered her childhood, when Christmas had been such a joyful time for her. She recalled going to church with her parents on Christmas Eve and the first time she got to participate in the Christmas play. Families would mill about outside after the service, and there were smiles everywhere. Sometimes they would go to a party at the farm of one of her parents’ friends and she would be treated to hot apple cider and popcorn. Christmas morning was always a joy—not because of the few toys she got, but because of the togetherness the season brought to her family. Those were simpler times. Now Christmas was a commercialized industry driven by the Big Box stores. Angela sighed and took a slow sip from her cup. She imagined it was hot apple cider instead of coffee and closed her eyes as the memories flooded back.

      A sharp rap on the kitchen door startled her. It was Marcie Johnson, the certified nursing aide who came three days a week to spend a few hours with Johnny. Angela rose and let her in, quickly closing the door against the biting wind.

      Brrr! I think the temperature has dropped a few degrees, Marcie!

      I know, right? I heard on the radio that it’s gonna drop to 20 tonight.

      Angela stood at the door for a moment and peered out. Her gaze wandered upward to the hollow. The area was called Happy Hollow because of the houses of ill repute that sprang up there in the early

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