The
Girl In The Seaside Hotel
Literary
Fiction, Mystery
Published:
February 2019
Surf
And Sand: The Girl In The Seaside Hotel is the story of a young girl and her
family living in Hermosa Beach during the late 1950s, the so-called
"Gidget Era" of surfing. A
formerly grand old hotel becomes the setting for the girl's growing obsession with
solving the mysterious disappearance of another girl 21 years earlier in the
hotel's basement swimming pool. After a
friend goes missing too, the detective from the original case, now nearing
retirement, is called in to help solve the two cases, which may or may not be
connected.
Excerpt
…There
had been a large crowd in the ballroom that Saturday night, as a well-known
jazz orchestra had been playing. As many
as 300 people. None of the girl’s
friends reported any suspicious incidents or encounters before the girl went
missing. Irene Young did not have a
steady boyfriend or local family, and lived with another young woman in
Hollywood, a woman who hadn’t been at the hotel or ballroom that evening.
Irene’s
friends had tried to report her missing much earlier that morning, just after
2AM, with a mildly frantic phone call, but the police had just assumed she’d
just probably gone home in a taxi-cab or with a friend or someone else she’d
met there at the hotel. And besides she
hadn’t been missing the required 72 hours for a formal report. Still, a police officer was eventually sent
over just after daybreak, really just to placate her friends. It was all more
or less routine until the shoes and necklace were found. Then detectives had arrived to ask questions.
There
were no obvious signs that any physical violence had occurred down in the pool
area, but it couldn’t be ruled out either.
Eventually every room in the hotel had been searched for any sign of
violence or evidence that Irene Young had been there. Nothing was found to indicate she had. She had simply vanished.
But
one of the newspaper stories that Nell found had included a few of the
witness’s first names and last name initial.
These were the names of Irene’s companions that had been interviewed by
the police. There was a Joey F, a Clark S., and a Lois J. And one of those names was a Virginia W. That’s just like mother’s maiden name, she
thought. Worsham! Nell had never heard of a Joey F., but there
was Uncle Clark and Aunt Lois. How could
this be? It couldn’t be coincidence,
could it? Sherlock Homes didn’t believe
in coincidence. Nell didn’t know what to
think. Or what to do.
About
the Author
W.B.
Edwards is a retired telephone employee, who took two years of college as an
English major at Rio Hondo in Whittier, California, from 1966 to 1968. Edwards is a Vietnam era Navy veteran, a
motorcycle enthusiast, surfer, taiji practitioner, and dreamer. He is an Indie author with two novels
completed, and working on a third.
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1 comments:
thanks for hosting
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