Wednesday Words: Still, an excerpt from Small Town Escape

 On Wednesdays, I post an excerpt from one of my books that uses the previous day's word from the New York Times game, Wordle. Yesterday's Wordle was STILL.

This is an excerpt from my latest release, Small Town Escape. This book is a mash-up between the TV show Shitt's Creek and Nicholas Spark's novel, Safe Haven. Wildly different inspirations, but who can say what sparks an idea? Not me, and I'm the one who captured it.

When I spotted Kelvin Duran running, I took off after him.

Donna Darlington toddled ahead of me, her rolling pin raised in the air. "I've got you now, you little bugger!" Donna, who had the build of a bowling ball, stopped to catch her breath on the corner of Olympic and Pine. Doubling over, she put her hands on her knees and wheezed.

I patted her on the back when I passed. "Don't worry. I'll catch him."

Jim Henry, in his battered Chevy, braked at the intersection, missing me by a hair. He waved. "Go get 'im, Sheriff!"

I was a police officer, not a sheriff, but Henry knew that, so I didn't stop to correct him.

Kelvin dove into Cascadia Hardware.

I pounded after him.

Stan Jorgenson behind the counter didn’t look up from his Country Gardens magazine, but his lips twitched, and he pointed a long finger toward the lumber aisle without saying a word.

I caught a flash of Kelvin's red sneakers rounding a stack of two-by-fours and sprinted after him. "Those don't belong to you, Kelvin!"

A door banged, telling me my prey was now in the alley. Swearing, I tore through the back room, vaulted over a stack of bagged potting soil, and burst through the door. Outside, I looked in both directions and caught my breath. The crisp late-autumn air filled my lungs.

Grime and soot stained the buildings on either side, and the occasional dumpster overflowed with garbage, filling the air with the stench of rotting food. Puddles of murky water and discarded cigarette butts littered the ground. Colorful murals and graffiti adorned the walls. Small doorways and staircases leading to the buildings’ upper floors hid in the shadows. Kelvin could have disappeared into any of them.

Where was he? If he was hiding in the trash bins, was that punishment enough?

I went left, heading for Pine. When I reached the sidewalk, I was rewarded by another Kelvin sighting. I sprinted after him through Legionnaire's Park, hurdling benches, avoiding a poodle on a leash, and past the gazebo.

Kelvin flashed a terrified glance over his shoulder and threw the bag of doughnuts at my head. I almost caught it, but slipped and went down on one knee, breaking my fall with outstretched hands. Doughnuts showered around me. A dog snuffled my hair.

" ¡Maldito sea!"

I looked up to find the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen staring at me with large amber eyes. She wore a pair of jeans and a white button-up shirt that accentuated her tanned skin. A strawberry-shaped birthmark sat just below her jawline. She tugged her dog, some sort of terrier mix, away from the doughnuts.

“Lo siento.” She fished a poop bag out of her backpack and tossed it to me. Her gaze sent me an apology.

I inspected the bottom of my boot and tried to scrub it clean with the bag. When I looked up, the woman, the dog, and Kelvin had all disappeared.

A cluster of crows swooped in to take care of the doughnuts.

I headed back to the police station, angry at myself and Kelvin in equal measure, curious about the girl, and hungry for doughnuts.

I double-checked the bottom of my shoe before entering the station. A bell jangled when I pushed open the door. Inside, the office looked exactly the same as it had when I had first come here as a junior explorer. A few desks and chairs, a filing cabinet filled the room, and a map of the town hung on the wall.

Hudson MacPherson, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a weathered face, sat at his desk, reviewing a report. He had been the sheriff of Cascadia for over twenty years, and he knew the town and its people better than anyone. Even me, and, other than my years at college and the police academy, I had lived here for most of my twenty-four years.

Taylor sat at her desk across the room, typing on a keyboard. She was about ten years my senior. Her short blonde hair matched her no-nonsense attitude. She had been with the department for five years, but because she lived in nearby Rose Arbor, she complained most Cascadians still treated her as an outsider.

The phone on MacPherson's desk rang, and he answered it with a gruff "Sheriff's office, MacPherson speaking."

I only half-listened to the conversation, my attention drifting when it became clear he was talking to someone about having the furnace repaired. What I hadn’t realized when joining the force three months ago was that police work was twenty percent helping people and eighty percent paperwork.

When Mac hung up the phone, Taylor approached him with her report. He glanced over it and nodded his approval before handing it back to her. "Looks good," he said.

She smiled, lapping up the compliment.

Mac glanced over at me, his gaze lingering on the grass stains on the knees of my pants, making me grateful he couldn't see the bottoms of my shoes.

When I’d left the farm, I had hoped to spend less time wallowing in muck. I rubbed my shoe on the mat under my desk. I didn’t regret opting to be a cop rather than staying and working for the family business, but sometimes I thought about joining a larger force, where chasing Kelvin Duran wasn’t a regular occurrence.

The sheriff pinned me with a don't argue with me look. "I need you to go out to the Dollhouse. Phyllis claims there's been another theft."

Taylor smirked and ducked her head to hide her smile.

I fiddled with my pencil and tapped the pile of papers on my desk. They weren’t interesting, of course, but they seemed like a better use of my time than visiting Phyllis’s creepy doll collection. "That's her third call this week."

"It's a wonder she can even tell any of them are missing," I groused, reaching for my keys. “There are so many.”

Mac grinned. “I hear there’s a new doll out there. One you might be interested in.”

“Unlikely,” I muttered.

MacPherson’s and Taylor's laughter followed me out the door.

I passed Kelvin slinking over the railroad tracks on my way out of town.

I stopped at an intersection and waited for him to disappear into the trees bordering the Evergreen Estates—a mobile home community filled with mostly senior citizens and retired loggers. An uncomfortable thought crossed my mind. What if Kelvin had been hungry?

I shook the worry away. The school provided free breakfasts and lunches—not that Kelvin was a model student. Still, my new concern stuck with me like an itch begging for a scratch all the way to the Dollhouse Inn.