Janice Johnson - Bringing Maddie Home

There’s always one case…

The moment police captain Colin McAllister sees her on TV he knows. She may call herself Nell Smith, but she is Maddie Dubeau—the girl who went missing from Angel Butte, Oregon, years ago. She’s haunted Colin, and now the adult version of her is so captivating, he can’t stay away. He wants to help her recover her memories—even solve her case—without crossing a professional line.

But distance becomes impossible when the threats against her escalate. It’s clear someone is determined that Nell never remembers what happened to Maddie. Colin must keep her safe so that he can finally bring her home…to his home.

She wasn’t safe

Somebody had recognized her. If this Captain McAllister was determined enough, he could find a way, legally or not, to get her fingerprints. The life Nell had built so carefully could collapse, like a house carried down the crumbling bluff by a mud slide.

A terrible sound escaped her, a shuddering cry.

I have to run. I can’t be here when he comes looking for me again. I can’t.

She sank down, right there inside the door, her back to it, and let her purse and the books fall. Her breathing was loud in the silent apartment.

What if he meant it? What if she could trust him?

What if she couldn’t?

Nell drew her knees up, hugged herself tight and rocked.

The most insistent voice in her head was the one that whispered, Am I Maddie?

Things are not as they seem in Angel Butte, Oregon. Read on to find out how Colin McAllister can help Nell unravel the mystery of who she is in this first book of a captivating new series from reader favorite Janice Kay Johnson!

Dear Reader,

Why do some places feel like home and others never do? I lived in central Oregon for only three years when I was a child, but writing this trilogy, The Mysteries of Angel Butte, felt like a homecoming to me. I’ve only been back to Bend, where my family lived, a few times as an adult, but the first thing I always notice is the smell. I think it might be the ponderosa and lodgepole pines, maybe the volcanic soil, but that part of Oregon smells different to me than anywhere I’ve ever been. I can roll down the car window and feel amazing, just breathing it in.

My memories of those years are vivid, too. My dad was a college professor who worked as a naturalist during summers. He set up the first interpretive center at Lava Butte, a volcanic cinder cone not far from Bend. Like Maddie, the heroine in this first book, I’d often go to work with him during the summer. I was happy feeding the chipmunks that lived in the crater and looked pretty darn healthy considering all the stuff tourists fed them! My father was a runner; we lived only a few blocks away from Pilot Butte, the smaller cinder cone that is right in the middle of Bend (needless to say, the model for Angel Butte in my stories), and Dad ran to the top nearly every day. Quite often, I’m not that interested in the setting for my books, but this was different from the very beginning. The town may be fictional, but I was writing about home, in a very real sense.

Of course, to my recollection no skeletons were recovered from beneath the cinders at either Lava Butte or Pilot Butte while we lived there, but think what a great place to hide a body that would be! Both the first two books in this trilogy have characters haunted by their memories of growing up in this town. Tapping into those memories turned out to be easier than I could have imagined, even though they were far darker than mine. I’d say enjoy your visit to Angel Butte—but really I’d like to keep you awake tonight, wondering if you dare go home….

Best,

Janice Kay Johnson

PS—I enjoy hearing from readers! Visit me on Facebook or write me c/o Harlequin, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, ON M3B 3K9, Canada.

Bringing Maddie Home

Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author of more than seventy books for children and adults, Janice Kay Johnson is especially well-known for her Mills & Boon Superromance novels about love and family—about the way generations connect and the power our earliest experiences have on us throughout life. Her 2007 novel Snowbound won a RITA® Award from Romance Writers of America for Best Contemporary Series Romance. A former librarian, Janice raised two daughters in a small rural town north of Seattle, Washington. She loves to read and is an active volunteer and board member for Purrfect Pals, a no-kill cat shelter.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Excerpt

PROLOGUE

SHE AWAKENED TO darkness, pain and nausea. Had she fallen? Somehow she knew she wasn’t in bed. She reached out blindly to explore and found an unyielding surface close above her. Movement and a rumbling vibration made her body sway from side to side. She flailed all around her, finding the walls of a box. Terror swelled in her, more powerful than the nausea.

I’m in a coffin. They’re burying me alive.

Before she could scream and hammer on the lid, consciousness slipped away.

The next time she surfaced, it was to the taste of bile in her mouth and the awareness that her stomach was heaving. Too late to get up and run for the bathroom. All she could do was fling herself onto her side before throwing up. Her head hurt so bad. She banged into something as she rolled. And it was dark. So dark. The surface she lay on was hard. Not bed.

Consciousness came and went a couple more times, her awareness fleeting, her thoughts chaotic. Once she surfaced to an awful smell, then to the realization that her cheek was resting in something sticky. Her own vomit. With a cry she hurled herself back and whacked something behind her.

Panic rose in her chest. Why can’t I see?

In her peripheral vision, there was a flash of red. She tried to turn her head to see what it was and flinched. Only one eye would open. She groped for her face and found her eyelid crusted shut. With something. The smell was bad, but it didn’t matter, not when she hurt so much. She closed her other eye and gave up.

Finally she awakened and remembered the other times. Not a coffin. Her questing fingers found cold metal, with strange dips and curves and even a few holes. She succeeded in rolling all the way over and almost passed out again. Her head wanted to explode. Blood, she thought. It was blood crusting her eye. I hit my head.

She’d become used to the vibration and the sounds that might have been occasional gusts of wind. Not wind, she finally recognized: cars passing on a highway. Her mind fumbled for understanding. She was in a car. Locked in the trunk of a car that was moving. Bewildered, she turned the notion over and over. Not knowing why this was so wrong, but also confused about where she should be. She couldn’t think. It was because of the headache.

Suddenly she slid sideways and barely managed to get an arm up to keep her head from hitting the side wall. She was being pitched backward despite herself. Oh, gross, into the vomit. The car was braking, that was it. Fear rose like the contents of her stomach had earlier, clogging her throat. Once the car stopped, she wouldn’t be safe at all.

But it had stopped. The engine turned off. She heard a door open, then slam. She squeezed her eyes shut. If she pretended she was still unconscious...

Footsteps came close and she flinched, but then they began to diminish. The driver must be walking away. She strained until she didn’t hear the footsteps at all, until the silence was absolute.