Excerpt from the Book

Chapter 1

Everything Interrupted

“Is Roswell sick?” Jim Turner mumbled, with his mouth full of cream cheese and bagel. A black and tan German Shepherd flashed past him and pushed its way outside through the half-open sliding door.

“I don’t know what’s up with him,” Jim’s eleven-year-old daughter Ling-Ling replied. She rubbed her black pixie cut into place and yawned. “I didn’t feed him anything weird yesterday, but he has been whimpering all night.”

“You don’t know what’s going on in his pea-brain? This is a first,” Jim said.

The Turners adopted Ling-Ling from China when she was a young toddler. Since Ling-Ling didn’t have any friends in the U.S.A. upon her arrival, the Turners bought her one. Roswell was her official ‘welcome to America’ gift. A tight bond developed between Ling-Ling and Roswell, from the moment she tried to wind up his tail, to see if she could make him ‘go’. Ling-Ling always knew exactly what Roswell was thinking or feeling. However, this morning something was different.

“I’m stumped, dad.” Ling-Ling glanced out the door and squinted hard. She could barely make out Roswell’s outline on the lawn, shadowy in the morning moonlight. “He’s just sitting out there. If he had an upset tummy, he would be circling around in the bushes by the barn,” she said.

“Ah, he’ll get over whatever is bothering him. If not, I’ll take him over to Doc Duncan later tonight,” Jim said, wiping a smear of cream cheese from the corner of his lower lip with his shirtsleeve.

Ling-Ling stepped outside, her ankle-bootie slippers crunching through frozen blades of grass. “Roswell! Come here, boy,” she called. “Come.”

Even though it was March, spring had yet to arrive in Briarwood Cove, Connecticut. The Turner house loomed halfway complete on the best shore of vast Lake Tahaso. Although Jim was a real estate contractor and builder, the Turner house was perpetually under construction. Ling- Ling and her little brother, Tanner, still slept in the basement. Jim promised he would finish the main-level bedroom wing … someday. Ling-Ling glanced at the tarp-wrapped wood frame that would one day be her room. A piece of the black fabric flapped against a two-by-four in a whistling gust of pre-dawn wind.

Roswell stood, with fur bristling and snarled. “A tarp?” Ling-Ling grumbled to herself and tightened the tie of her quilted Oriental robe. “You’re a silly boy. You woke me up at 5 am to growl at a tarp?”

Ling-Ling hastened toward Roswell and grabbed his red leather collar. She could feel the growl growing in the soft fur under his neck. He turned toward her, dog tags jingling, and she looked deep into his brown eyes. Her own senses heightened, and goose bumps covered her arms. Ling-Ling felt that feeling she knew all too well. Roswell was trying to tell her something - something was out there, something alive. “I know, boy,” she whispered. “It’s no tarp. There is some sort of animal out here. I can feel it watching us.”

Ling-Ling stood in place, her eyes darting over the Turner property in search of a hidden intruder. “I don’t see anything with my eyes,” her soft words drifted down to Roswell. “Now let me try my mind,” she said, closing her eyes. Through fluttering eyelids, Ling-Ling scanned the backyard again. This time her vision was clear and her range of view wider. Like the wind itself, the eyesight of her mind twisted and blew over the Turner property, swirling through every dark nook and shadow. “Ah!” she smiled and opened her eyes. “It’s a coyote, Roswell. He’s behind the barn. You go inside, boy.” Obedient Roswell turned away and trotted back to the house.

OWWWWWWWOOOO! A close, pitiful wail rose from behind the small red barn. From within the structure, Ling-Ling could hear the muffled whinny of her horse, Xeno, safely tucked away in his stall. A holly bush on the left side of the barn rustled, and a shadow of four legs and fur emerged from the waxen leaves.

“Why are you here?” Ling-Ling asked, drawn to the mottled creature. Roswell wasn’t the only animal Ling- Ling had a bond with. Sometimes she could sense things instinctively about all sorts of animals. With closed eyes, the coyote lifted its snout toward Ling-Ling and howled again.

OWWWWWWWOOOO! “AHHHHH!” Jim’s thunderous shout overpowered the coyote’s guttural wail. “Get away you! Go on!” Jim reached for a small piece of scrap lumber by the door and hurled it at the coyote. With back hunched and tail between legs, the rangy creature slunk off into the woods.

“That was unnecessary.” Ling-Ling crossed her arms and huffed past Jim into the house. “He was only trying to tell me something,” she said. “Now I’ll never know what it was.”