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  HERO BLUES

  A Neighborlee, Ohio, Story

  By

  Michelle L. Levigne

  Uncial Press Aloha, Oregon

  2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events described herein are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60174-212-4

  Hero Blues

  Copyright © 2016 by Michelle L. Levigne

  Cover design

  Copyright © 2016 by Linda Palmer & Judith B. Glad

  Woman © Bigstock / Pavlo Kolotenko;

  Hair © CanStock Photo Inc / Julenockek;

  Town © Bigstock / wintercoat

  Ereader © Can Stock Photo Inc. /heikehuettenkofer

  All rights reserved. Except for use in review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five (5) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Published by Uncial Press,

  an imprint of GCT, Inc.

  Visit us at http://www.uncialpress.com

  Chapter One

  "Talk about returning to the scene of the crime." Jane paused on the sidewalk in front of a friendly-looking café called the Sipping Post, on the main street running through the shopping/business district of Neighborlee. She looked up and down the street, waiting for that sense of déjà vu, of recognition and memory that she had expected to haunt her.

  Nothing happened. No shiver. No sense of two images snapping into place, the reality versus her hazy memories.

  "The problem is that no crime occurred," she decided aloud.

  It was now one in the afternoon and she had been walking around Neighborlee since nine that morning. Besides good exercise on a gloriously bright, warm, sweet-scented summer day, nothing else had happened to her. Everyone was friendly, no one looked at her as if she had grown an extra head or gave her the feeling they considered her a threat. More important, she got no sense of danger or threat from anyone she encountered. Not in any of the stores. Not in the park, where she had taken a decadently thick, rich salted caramel and mocha frappe to sit in the gazebo and watch the children on the playground. Not even when she stopped in the local newspaper office, The Neighborlee Tattler, to pick up a copy of the twice-weekly paper and find out if there were any community activities going on.

  The Neighborlee Arms was a grand old building with a quirky history, proudly displayed in a little museum room off of the lobby on the first floor. She had spent more than two hours there last night after checking in, before she went to bed, reading placards on glass display cases or flipping through copies of old newspapers, learning about the early years of settlement. The establishment of the town and the local college, Willis-Brooks. And interestingly, a whole wall and display table had been devoted to a short stint when the building had been used as a bordello. There were no ghosts, either hesitantly or proudly admitted to. Jane was especially sensitive to claims of places being haunted.

  One man's restless spirit was another man's (or woman's) superhero.

  All Jane had picked up in her leisurely walk up and down the center of town, besides exercise and a little touch of sun color, was a healthy appetite. She had long ago worked off the luscious breakfast she had eaten in a little diner near the hotel called Hunky & Dory's, and now she needed to refuel. Several people she had asked on the street, including the young woman her age in a wheelchair, coming out of the Neighborlee Tattler office, said the Sipping Post was a good place for sandwiches and drinks. The woman in the wheelchair even recommended asking for their picnic special—sandwich, cold bottled drink, piece of fruit and a frosted brownie or cookie in a bag she could take to the park, including an extra-large napkin for sitting on the ground.

  Right now, that sounded like just what the doctor ordered. Jane asked for the special when she stepped up to the counter. The woman with a pencil tucked behind each ear, her frizzy white hair caught back in two ponytails high off the back of her head, and a Willis-Brooks College t-shirt in neon pink with neon green lettering, gave her an odd look, just for a moment. Jane glanced at the menu posted on the largest blackboard she had ever seen, filling the entire wall behind the counter and stretching up to the ceiling. Someone had written it in at least twenty different colors of chalk. They must have had to use a ladder—or else people in this town had a talent for levitation. Nowhere on the menu was the picnic special listed.

  "Umm, a girl I ran into at the newspaper office recommended it," she offered. "Wheelchair, dark hair—"

  "Ah, Lanie. Okay, makes sense." The woman nodded and grinned, looked Jane up and down once, and stepped away from the counter. "I'm guessing you're a deluxe-tuna-with-pepper-jack-cheese-on-oat-bread and a brownie kind of girl?"

  "That sounds great." Jane waited for that shiver that came over her when she ran into someone she had never met at the Hoax, Inc., office and she realized that person had a Gift of some kind, no matter how small.

  "Root beer or peach tea... Or no, chocolate milk?" The woman reached into the glass-fronted cooler and snatched up a bottle of chocolate milk before Jane could think to answer.

  "Definitely chocolate." Still, no shiver of recognition of another Gifted person.

  She had to chalk up the woman's ability to guess what she wanted to years of experience.

  "Peach, orange, or apple?" She bent down and opened up another door behind the counter. Jane couldn't see what was in it, but she guessed it was another cooler.

  "Apple. As long as it's tart and crisp. No mushy-mealy-sweet apples for me, please."

  The counter woman laughed and came up with a Granny Smith, dark green and flawless and as big as her fist. She and Jane chatted for a few moments as she put together the sandwich, about what she had seen in Neighborlee so far, and she recommended a few places Jane hadn't visited yet. She also took a few seconds to sketch the city park on the edge of town on a napkin, pointing out a few places where Jane could enjoy her lunch in peace and quiet, without the town's "hooligans" disturbing her. Then she laughed and warned her to stay away from a set of triplet boys who were her "grand-hooligans" and the ringleaders of the troublemakers.

  "You haven't been to Divine's Emporium yet, have you?" the woman said, as Jane took her paper bag full of food and headed for the door.

  "No." That shiver finally ran down Jane's back and wrapped around her lungs, tickling and tightening at the same time.

  "You might like it. Depends on what exactly brought you to Neighborlee." Her smile faded, just enough to be noticeable.

  "Memory lane, I guess." Jane shrugged. "I used to live here when I was a little girl. I was in the area and...thought I'd see if the place was like I remembered."

  "Is it?"

  "Nope." She sighed and grinned. "Better."

  "Be careful of Divine's, then. You might like it so much, you'll come back to stay."

  "I'm tempted already. Thanks much."

  She strolled down the street to the park and found one of the secluded spots the woman had told her about. It was in a little rise near one end of the park, surrounded by big old gnarled oaks, with branches so interwoven they created a canopy that cast the picnic spot into semi-gloom at nearly two in the afternoon. The picnic table was old wood, faded and weathered, and spotted with moss in places. Jane s
at on top of the table and looked down the steep slope on the far side of the clearing, where the city park gave way to parkland full of trees and meadows and an asphalt road that meandered through it. She remembered reading about the park, how much of it had been quarries early in the history of Neighborlee. Some of the quarries were filled with water and made into fishing and swimming holes. The northern part of the quarries were off-limits, filled with water and not an official part of the park system.

  Jane munched and thought and remembered, and couldn't hold back the trepidation that had been trying to creep up on her since she arrived in Neighborlee. Nothing having to do with the town, exactly. Coming here wasn't exactly forbidden. More like highly recommended to be avoided. Demetrius and Reginald, affectionately, and not-so-affectionately, referred to as "the Old Poops" by the children they had raised for the last fifty or so years, were smart enough not to forbid going to Neighborlee. They merely made it very clear that they wouldn't be responsible for whatever happened to anyone foolish enough to stick their noses where their mere presence could generate trouble.

  If the leaders and chief investigators of Hoax, Inc. so clearly preferred to avoid the unnamed, unidentified and likely unidentifiable weirdness that resided in Neighborlee, that was good enough for most of their students. After all, Hoax, Inc. was known around the world for investigating and debunking reports of weirdness and the unearthly and supernatural. Nothing frightened them because they had a gift for getting to the bottom of the causes, explaining them, and fixing whatever imbalance in the natural world created the "incident." If a charlatan was involved, they dealt with him as the situation dictated.

  Until a few months ago, Jane had been content with following her teachers' recommendation. It had never bothered her that many of the "family" of Hoax, Inc., including Demetrius and Reginald, had come from Neighborlee. She was the last child taken out of the Neighborlee Children's Home, discovered when her Ghost talent manifested, and brought away to the Sanctum, the headquarters of Hoax, Inc., to be trained in safety and secrecy. There was something unique and bizarre about Neighborlee that caused people like her to have their Gifts. Something Reginald and Demetrius believed dangerous to encounter.

  After wandering the streets of Neighborlee for half a day, Jane couldn't figure out what that "something" was. She had a talent for sensing the dangerous and the weird. She could sometimes feel when a Gift was being used. Just last summer, she had been instrumental in finding a girl in Sydney, Australia, who had started manifesting her Gift at age nine. Demetrius and Reginald had brought her along to investigate. She had been able to befriend the frightened child and convince her that her ability to find water and manipulate it like clay, make it boil or freeze, was a wonderful talent and she wasn't a freak who had to fear the Men in Black, Hydra or government-sanctioned boogeymen.

  That had been far more satisfying than the last five years combined, assigned to Fendersburg, the town the Old Poops had put under her care.

  Jane paused in the mid-crunch and had a hard time swallowing the last bite of her apple. Thinking about going back to Fendersburg had just killed her appetite. On the surface, Fendersburg looked a lot like Neighborlee: small town, business district only four blocks by five blocks, weekly newspaper, lots of Mom & Pop businesses, everybody knowing everybody else's business. Underneath... She couldn't quite put the difference into words, but she suspected Neighborlee didn't have an inbreeding problem. Here, people cared about good personal hygiene, and everybody graduated from high school and at least tried to go to college. Everyone raised at Hoax, Inc., was assigned to a town something like Fendersburg and Neighborlee with two particular duties—protect the people of the town from weirdness, and look for signs of Gifted people appearing among them, combined with high incidences of children abandoned in the middle of nowhere. After only a year at her assignment, Jane had suspected no Gifted child would ever appear, and most of her duties would fall in the category of protecting Fendersburg from itself. Now, she was positive.

  Maybe that sense of being wasted, of having a useless job—and fearing to be honest about her loathing for it—had prompted her to break training and come to Neighborlee. Other than the Sanctum and her little apartment in Fendersburg, this was the only other home she had ever had. Nine years in the Neighborlee Children's Home. She had been happy there. Loved. She had friends. What happened to those friends? Would they remember her if she looked for them? She had been a quiet child, with a talent for blending into the background and making herself unnoticed, even before she discovered her Ghost talents.

  Jane threw away the rest of her apple. She was careful to wrap up the brownie, though. Only a fool would throw away three inches by three inches of fudgy chocolaty goodness with frosting as thick as the brownie itself. She might need the comfort of that brownie after she visited Divine's Emporium.

  Oddly, she remembered how to get there. It was almost like she had built-in GPS. She remembered Divine's, a big olive and gold Victorian house on a dead-end street overlooking the slope down into the park.

  Jane dredged up memories of Divine's as she walked the few blocks over there. Outings to town were treats at the children's home. She remembered competing with the other girls to hold their housemother's hand as they walked from their cottage to the curiosity shop. Or better yet, to hold the hand of Mrs. Silvestri, the orphanage administrator, when she took children into town for shopping excursions or to play in the park or go to a play at the college.

  Funny, how easy it was to remember all those little things, when she had lived for so long believing her life hadn't really started until Reginald and Demetrius took her to the Sanctum. Neither of the Old Poops had ever admitted to any kind of memory-controlling talent, or maybe memory-wiping, but that didn't mean they didn't have it. Unless the hazing of her memories was done by someone—or something—in Neighborlee? Maybe it was the opposite—stepping over the border refreshed her memories?

  "Don't be ridiculous. Just because this place is so much like F-town, and so much not like that moronic place..." Jane sighed and quashed her grumbling thoughts. The last thing she needed was to be caught talking to herself in a town where she was essentially a stranger. Or anywhere else, quite frankly. One of the first lessons Reginald taught her was to blend in, to avoid notice, and to be a watcher, rather than the watched. Her safety and the inborn responsibilities of her Gift depended on it.

  After all, none of the dozens of Gifted trained by the Old Poops had superhero costumes or even masks to protect their identities. Very few of them were even granted a nom de guerre by the residents of the towns they observed and guarded. Unless, like her, their Gifts granted them the ability to practice their gifts openly and in secrecy at the same time.

  More memories crashed down on Jane as she turned the corner onto the street where Divine's Emporium sat near the dead end. Instead of the usual metal highway guardrail barrier, Neighborlee had a pretty wooden gate, and signs pointing to paths people could take to walk down the slope to the park below. Jane studied the building as she walked down the street, remembering bits and pieces. The multiple shelves of penny candy in old apothecary jars. The big brass cash register. The book room. The vintage clothing room, which Angela let children play in and dress up as much as they wanted. Funny, how it never occurred to Jane until now that no adult customers ever intruded on their fun, and those adults who had been inside the shop during their play never seemed upset.

  "The Wishing Ball," she whispered, and her steps slowed as she remembered the globe just about the size of a bowling ball, dark metallic rainbow swirls, sitting in a stand shaped like a coiled dragon. She had loved simply gazing into the Wishing Ball, where it sat on the counter next to the cash register. Jane had always imagined someday the soft swirling of colors in the ball would resolve into images that would answer the questions that haunted her young mind. Who her parents were, how they had lost her, how she had come to be found at a little more than a year old, sitting by the side of the road just insi
de Neighborlee's borders. Like the other children she had known in the orphanage or in school, Jane had made her share of wishes on the Wishing Ball. Many had come true, but they were easy wishes like what she wanted for Christmas, or to pass an upcoming test, or for the Neighborlee Pikes to win the next football or baseball game.

  Was the Wishing Ball there, and would Angela—if she was still there—allow her to make a wish? What would she wish for, if she could?

  "That's easy," Jane muttered as she stepped off the sidewalk onto the flagstone path and through the wrought iron gate that stood open. "To escape Fendersburg."

  She grinned at her silliness. She had to grin, otherwise she might cry. Sometimes she absolutely hated the town of lazy, entitlement-attitude mental midgets she had been assigned to guard. Honestly, how could Reginald and Demetrius think that Gifted people would be found among people who made Mayberry look sophisticated and Mensa-eligible?

  "More like Densa."

  Then she was at the steps leading up to the porch and the front door. She sighed in delight and wonder as she pushed the front door open. Bells chimed sweetly, almost like singing, and the sound faded slowly as she stepped down the short entry hallway. The sense of having walked into a familiar place wrapped around her. She smelled fruity scented candles and the dusty perfume of books and chocolate. Freestanding display shelves invited her to browse a haphazard collection of figurines and decorative boxes, candles, dishes, and numerous other bright, colorful items she ignored as she let memory guide her feet.

  Divine's didn't stock all the disgusting, trendy candy and gimmicks and do-dads that she hated seeing cluttering the counters at other stores. No novelty candy shaped like garbage or aliens or weapons. No trading cards and dispensers shaped like toilets or garbage cans or cell phones. She saw candy bars and gum, hard candy and licorice whips and funny, funky shapes she hadn't seen since childhood. Jane wandered for a few minutes, looking at all the display boxes and jars. Dolls in lacy dresses, wooden toys, puzzles made of metal and string and wood, pinwheels and bottles of bubbles, sidewalk chalk, cap guns, balloons, and other fragments of an innocent, happier time she had only glimpsed. Living in an orphanage where the boys outnumbered the girls four to one and the children outnumbered the budget had meant little to no pocket money, and few opportunities to earn an allowance for the bare essentials.