Watch for Sunny Side Up coming soon on all Amazon sites.
Sunny Side-Up will be
available for purchase at Amazon in October.
Excerpt from Sunny Side Up by Kathryn Elizabeth Jones.
The
old man wore a black suit, a starched white shirt and a black bow tie, the
standard fare for men of his age. They were both on a cruise ship, and though
she didn't really know him, they’d been speaking. At least, she'd been speaking.
The man was drunk and could hardly stand; he'd kept asking her to repeat
herself.
She'd
been speaking about her divorce and subsequent trip when his blue-gray eyes had
clouded over and he'd collapsed in a heap in front of her.
She'd
reached for him, of course. But his body had slipped through her fingers like a
fish in shallow water. He'd tried to breathe, taking in two shallow gasps. But
he was lying there now, his blistered face to the sky, his eyes staring, his
left leg bent behind him in some sort of twisted leap. He was dead, Susan was
sure of that.
“Help!” she screamed, watching the dance floor for someone,
anyone...
And then suddenly, she was there, an old woman in a gold dress, her bronzed skin
twinkling against the burnished fabric. She leaned over the
man.
“What happened?” the old woman's voice quivered. It reminded Susan of a
child’s.
As the salty air caressed Susan's cheeks, she looked out at the great blue ocean
for only a moment and thought of Henry.
“I…I don’t know, we were just talking.”
The woman in gold, her hair perfectly coiffed, reached for the man’s wrist. And
in that moment Susan saw Henry James as John Middleton, lying dead by the old
coal burning stove at the Hotel Camaro.
The woman was sobbing, leaning over the man, trying to shake him
awake.
“What did you do?” she wailed. Her eyes were a blotchy black and mascara was
running down her naked neck.
Susan looked away.
The
champagne glass near the deck’s railing had spilled. The place where it lodged
was a red and sticky, wet.
“I can’t wake him!”
The waves must have crashed against the large cruise ship, but Susan hardly
noticed; she barely saw those who had suddenly gathered around her including the
face of Charles, one of the officers on board ship. He pronounced the man
dead.
“But, how can he be…dead?” the old woman gasped, holding her chest, breathing in
the sea air in shuddering gasps.
Susan
stood next to the railing. She looked out at the sea and wasn't sure when the
old man was taken away with his sobbing wife. How had she gotten to the railing
anyway? Why was the man dead? And just as important, who had killed
him?
Bio:
Kathryn Elizabeth Jones is a lover of fiction and
nonfiction. Her Susan Cramer Mystery series stems from her love of
Nancy Drew Mysteries read as a teen and her love in later years for the
popular television program, Murder She Wrote. When not writing mysteries,
Kathryn dabbles in Christian fiction and nonfiction and helps other writers to
live their writing dreams through the establishment of Idea Creations Press. You
can contact Kathryn at: kathy@ariverofstones.com.
