Page 1 of Night Falls on Predicament Avenue
1
EFFIEJAMES
May 1901
Shepherd, Iowa
ITWASTERRIBLE, truly, that moment when you stared at a behemoth in the dark and knew you’d beheld a monster.
Effie hadn’t an ounce of resistance left within her. Terror had evolved into a ghastly stillness. The kind that choked her, like bony fingers wrapped around her throat, squeezing with a methodical joy as it watched the life drain from her eyes.
“Effie.”
It was an awful feeling when you realized the dirt mounded beside the cavern in the ground was meant to cover you after you were dead, like a cold blanket.
“Effie.”
There would be nothing left to fellowship with but the creatures that burrowed through the ground and eventually through her remains. A terrible—
“Effie!”
Effie James jerked from her thoughts, her shoulder bumping into the tree against which she huddled in the darkness. The whites of her sister’s eyes were bright in the moonlight. The house rose ahead of them, silhouetted in the midnight moon’s stare.
“What’swrongwith you?” Polly persisted. Her form was more petite than Effie’s, and it was swallowed by the man’s shirt she had buttoned to the collar and stuffed into the trousers they’d stolen from their brother’s dresser drawer.
Effie shook her head to clear away her wandering thoughts. Unwieldy and disobedient thoughts that rambled and raced into blocks of words and images that weren’t happening anywhere else but in her own mind.
It didn’t help that only a few yards from the house’s back porch rose gravestones that inspired a myriad of imaginative musings, lonely sentinels of memories. It was an ancient graveyard, the oldest stone dating back to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
“Effie!”
The skin on her arm was pinched—quite persistently. She startled again and stared through the night at Polly.
Her sister released a sigh of loving annoyance and shook her head. “Effie James, you’re doing it again. Where did you go this time?”
“I’ve been here all along.” Effie tilted her chin up a bit.
“Mm-hmm.” The disbelief in Polly’s response was evident. But there was humor in her voice when she added, “Do try to stay attentive.”
Effie sucked in a stabilizing breath. “I’m always attentive.”
“Of course you are.”
An affirming pat over the pinched skin ended the small tiff, and the James sisters stared ahead into the night. Graveyard on one side, two-story house on the other, with a backyard between them boasting a gazebo roof with a pulley and a bucket.
The sisters knew this because they’d passed 322 Predicament Avenue countless times. Everyone in Shepherd had. It was, after all, the strangest and most mysterious place in the entire small Iowa town. A place of transients that came and went. Or died. People in Shepherd weren’t certain what happened to the people who stayed in the house at 322 Predicament Avenue, just that they would come and then would disappear.
Occasionally, dirt in the cemetery seemed to have been trifled with, giving way to rumors that perhaps the unknown occupants of 322 Predicament Avenue arrived but never really left. They’d just moved to a different permanent location on the property.
Effie and Polly weren’t the first ones to sneak onto 322 Predicament Avenue in the dead of night. It was a rite of passage for many young people. Except Effie and Polly weresupposedto be obedient, proper daughters of Carlton James, the town’s bank president. The James children—specifically the daughters—didn’t do daring and dreadful things.
Until tonight.
At twenty, Effie should have been the voice of reason for her sister, who was two years her junior. But trying to cage Polly was like trying to keep dandelion fluff from blowing in the breeze. Polly was a free spirit, and while Effie was the cautious, bookish one, her fierce sense of loyalty meant she would follow precocious Polly anywhere—even to Predicament Avenue at midnight.
“Now,” Polly whispered in Effie’s ear, “tradition states we must plant both feet on the back porch and kiss the iron door knocker’s lion head before we leave.”
Effie stared at her sister. This wasn’t the first time she had heard the rules of the Shepherd miscreant tradition. She’d just never fathomed she’d be partaking in it—especially at her age. But what Polly wanted ... well, she couldn’t say no.
