Just Holler Bloody Murder
Callahan Banks returns to her beloved Timicau Island near Charleston, South Carolina, to settle her mother’s estate. Her grief is compounded by Pepper Dade’s plans to develop the island and destroy the only home she’s ever known. When the body of a bikini-clad blonde washes up on the beach, Callahan is pulled into a web of intrigue that has her questioning all she thought she knew about her own life. Struggling to resist her attraction to Pepper, Callahan suspects he may be involved in the death of the blonde. She ignores her misgivings until nine-year old freckle-faced Harry Applegate, her sidekick, disappears. Now Callahan must muster all her skills as a naturalist and tracker to find the little boy before it’s too late.
Perils of a Pregnant Sleuth
Harry Applegate, her nine-year-old triplet sidekick, and his family have just moved to the island. He and his brothers “borrowed” their father’s metal detector to search for buried treasure. Instead, they have found a dead man wrapped in barbed wire on the edge of a tidal creek. It looks like he was still alive when he was left there half-buried in the tidal creek. So he’d drowned by inches on the incoming tide.
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Someone is stalking Callahan, too, and Pepper’s newly divorced ex-girlfriend, Teelia Moultrie, has moved herself and her troubled teenage son to this private barrier island off the coast of Charleston. So, the weekly Woman’s Roundtable, expanded by five quirky new residents, already has plenty to gossip about, and then a second body is discovered on the island.
This time, they know the victim. He’s Chalmers Redpath, the creepy, reclusive doctor who’s been restoring a cottage on the island’s isolated north end. Now, little Harry is missing, and Callahan—ever the biology professor—must leave her stilt house on the swamp and focus all her knowledge and tracking skills to rescue this darling little boy.
At least for the moment, persistent Pepper Dade and his marriage offer can be put on the back burner. But he’s not a patient man, and Teelia Moultrie, of course, has her own plans for Callahan’s fiancé.
Excerpts from Perils of a Pregnant Sleuth
Prologue
Waves, cold black waves, and churning sand from the shores of Velvet Creek have nearly buried the body of the brown-skinned man whose face is frozen in a Munch’s Scream of death. Only his long black hair, swirling like seaweed in the roiling water when it disappears under an angry froth of incoming tide, can be seen. The heavy barbed wire, which encased his body when he was buried alive low on the bank of this remote tidal creek, has so far kept him from bobbing to the surface, but it has been only four tidal cycles.
A bigger, more powerful, incoming wave surges against the narrow end of the creek, rides higher up its banks, then crashes with a furious roar against Lake Timicau’s eroding earthen dam.
At least displaced sand has softened the initial horror of the man’s expression, completely filling the open-mouth and mortising closed deep barbed wire gashes across his naked back and shoulders. He did all he could do to free himself from those torturous barbs when he was alive, but it wasn’t enough. Immobilized, screaming himself voiceless over pounding waves against the dam, he drowned here by inches as the rising tide filled Velvet Creek.
End of Chapter One
This morning’s distraction, watching the old bull gator eating the cormorant, has been a welcome relief because Callahan’s so conflicted about whether to marry her baby’s father. Now though, as anxiety creeps back, her stomach growls, and her belly pitches and cramps.
Even thinking about being tied to a man makes me want to bolt and hide.
She’s so absorbed in her ruminations that it takes her a minute to realize someone else is in her house. There’s a thud on the steps and then another before Harry Applegate appears. Nine years old, a triplet, and a new island resident, he’s her favorite budding scientist. But he looks atypically worried as he charges across the deck towards her, his cheeks huff-and-puff red, the bill of his wet purple baseball hat off-center, and his husky voice breathless from climbing two flights of stairs.
“Callahan, whew! Am I glad to see you!” His round brown eyes widen. “Quick, can you come right now?” He speaks in something pretty close to a yell. “We’ve got a problem, and I can’t find Daddy anywhere.” Tom and Dick and me—” he removes the wet hat and bellows—“we were looking for buried treasure with this metal detector we sort of borrowed from Dad. Thing is, we think we’ve found a dead guy instead.”
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“Act as if nothing has changed,” advises the Dean of Women. “Carry on as normal for the good of the school.” But there are those in the student body who doubt that BJ died from a bee sting. How are they to carry on? Her best friend, Nella Fortune, and her boyfriend, Rob, have private and personal reasons to question the story, but there is no one to go to and nothing to be done. Both will sleepwalk through the rest of their senior years, consumed with what they know and what they cannot tell. But the clock is ticking. How long can such a secret be kept?
In A Horse Brought Us Here, Dershie masterfully weaves the tapestry of small-town fiction into a tense, disturbing story. She invites readers to travel back to a time when life looked simple but often was not. With every turn of the page, she evokes our nostalgia for a time in the West when some of life’s mysteries may have been best kept buried.