Excerpt: Mechanical Menagerie

All things considered, she had a pretty normal life going. It just so happened that it took her almost a decade to get it and herself together. Next week was going to be hard, as it always was. Nearly ten years ago, Devina came home to carnage brought on by alcohol and Daddy’s “little spoon of sugar.” The result had been a bloody mess that had once been her Mother, and a frantic run to her neighbor’s house, then a night spent in a hotel half a mile from the police station with her best friend, Coleen, and Coleen’s mother. The police never told her what had really happened, but the newspapers did. Martin Stevenson had gone on a whiskey binge, topped himself off with a liberal helping of cocaine, and brutally murdered Erika, his wife of 17 years. It was already being called the most grisly murder in Forester County in the last 100 years, and it wasn’t much help that the papers didn’t publish her name. Everyone in the sleepy town knew who her daddy was, and now they all pitied her – a fact that she had hated then, and hated now.