Lucky You—You’ve Found a Sneak Peek!

Fault Lines—Chapter One

Jacob Barlowe first noticed the door sticking the day Julia disappeared. He had thought to fix it – it was a simple repair that would have taken less than an hour—but after Julia vanished, the door became the least of his worries and he put it from his mind as one does with any number of daily nuisances. Eventually, he stopped remembering there had ever been a time when the door didn’t stick. In his mind, it had always been that way. And there was no one left to remind him otherwise, the last of his guests having exited the home more than eight years earlier.   

In any case, it was easy enough to resolve by pulling down on the handle while shoving against the door with his shoulder. He had performed the task so many times that he no longer noticed it. It required no thought at all. Freed from thinking about the action, he let his mind wander to other, more pressing, matters: the groceries he needed to buy, the bills he needed to pay.  

Lost as he often was in thought, his surroundings, like the door, would disappear, becoming nothing more than backdrops to his musings. Which is why he failed to notice the patch of water that had slipped under the eaves and frozen, failed to account for the lack of traction when he shoved his shoulder against the door, failed to brace for the fall that sent him headfirst off the porch, snapping his neck upon impact.  

And because it was winter and the sun set early, and it was cold—and who goes outside for a walk around the neighborhood in this weather after all?—there was no one around to notice his body where it fell in his front yard which, in any case, was elevated off the road and difficult to see from the sidewalk below. So Jacob— or Jacob’s body, to be more precise—lay there in the yard alone and unnoticed, heavy white flakes settling on top of him through the night so that, by morning, it appeared no more sinister than a snow-covered hedge. And because no one bothered to visit Jacob anymore, and he was no longer welcome to visit others, there was no one to notice either his absence or his body until the snow began to melt a full four days later. 

Discovering Jacob’s Body Was Easy—Discovering the Secrets He Buried Will Prove Much Harder

Nineteen-year-old Nate Watanabe last saw his grandfather, Jacob Barlowe, eight years ago, the night his grandfather killed his grandmother in a drunken rage. His memories of the night are as fragmented as his family which fell apart in the wake of his grandmother’s death. But when his grandfather dies alone and unnoticed outside his Seattle home, Nate returns with his mother, Vicky, to prepare the house for sale. The pair is shocked to discover the house in disarray: Jacob died a hoarder.  

Seeing dollar signs in the delays, Vicky decides to call a junk hauler in to clean out the house. She is adamant that they not miss the spring market. Realizing the home and its contents may hold the answers to questions long burning in his mind, Nate, however, has other ideas. He convinces his mother to let him sort through the chaos, promising to finish the work before his classes resume for the spring. Now, he has only a handful of weeks to clean out the house in the hope ofdiscovering the truth about what really happened that night, a truth that has been hiding far longer than any of them realize. 

Fault Lines is my current Work-in-Progress (WIP) and is my first foray into novel-writing.

Chapter 1 introduces Jacob Barlowe, the patriarch of the Barlowe family. Poor Jacob doesn’t survive long—in the world of the story, he exists almost exclusively in the past. But his undying presence seeps into every page, propelling those he left behind along a journey of discovery they may wish they never began.