Goodbye Lucifer, Page 2

  * * *

  Asleep in another room, Melanie Meljac stirred as the sound of her son’s yell slipped into her subconscious—and dreamed of her children playing in the backyard; Jillian teasing her little brother, pretending to eat a bug and little David yelling, “Jilly, you’re gross.”

  TWO

  DAWN FLOWED GENTLY down the sides of the valley and into the small town of Brandell. The mountains nestling the little town between them hid the sudden harshness of sunrise and the morning sky shone in full light, the night mists having retreated into the forested slopes by the time the sun peeked over the high ridges.

  As she did every morning during the quiet time between soft light and full sun, Melanie Meljac sat with coffee cup in hand on the veranda of the big stone house on the oak-shaded corner where sedate little Meljac Lane crossed equally sedate Stillman Road.

  From her veranda Melanie could look across Stillman Road to where Meljac Lane became Brandell Boulevard; an impressive name for the narrow two-lane street on one side of which stood Brandell’s single block of what was optimistically referred to as downtown.

  Of the seven businesses fronting the Boulevard only two attracted enough patrons to keep the little business district from extinction: Walkers Drug Store, with soda fountain and prescription counter, and the old Brandell Movie Theater—their closest competition being fifteen miles of winding mountain road away.