July Opening Lines

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ScaryShoe

Edith:  If ya want somebody to do something, tell ’em not to do it. I told her running alone on the rail trail was too dangerous. My plan worked, and now I’m blissfully alone.

Julie: There were runner’s stretches, then there were stretchy runners. She was the latter, and never met a wall she didn’t like. Until Tuesday. Did that look like a cliff to you?

Liz: I might not have noticed the shoe if I hadn’t dropped my phone during my walk. But when I bent over to pick it up, there it was. I thought at first it was a kid playing hide and seek, but boy was I wrong…

Sherry: I really wish I wouldn’t have pulled on that shoe when I found it.

Barb: “Go get it, girl! Go get it.” But Trixie shook me off, growling and baring her tiny teeth, so I dove through the hedge to retrieve her favorite ball. When I broke through the undergrowth on the other side, I saw something so strange and magical, so astonishing and terrifying, it changed my life forever..

Jessie: Patrice had always wondered how Melody had dazzled the judges, year after year at the annual Little Watford garden competition. Now that she knew her rival’s secret she could check two items from the top of her to-do list: win the Silver Spade trophy and rid her household of her layabout brother-in-law.

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Published by Edith Maxwell

Agatha Award -winning author Edith Maxwell writes the historical Quaker Midwife Mysteries (Beyond the Page) and short crime fiction. As Maddie Day she writes the Dot and Amelia Mysteries, the Country Store Mysteries series, the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries, and the Cece Barton Mysteries (all from Kensington Publishing). She lives north of Boston in an antique house with her beau and cat Martin, where she writes, gardens, cooks, and wastes time on Facebook.

42 Thoughts

  1. If I’d told her once, I’d told her a hundred times,”Don’t borrow my stuff without asking.” She’d done it again. My brand new Nikes were gone. I should have guessed when she told me she’d met a cute guy. That they were going to run together in the morning.Well, she wasn’t going to get awqy with it this time. I laced up my old Sketchers and headed for the trail. I planned to catch up with the little sneak and yank my good shoes off her thieving damned feet. It didn’t turn out exactly that way.

  2. Near the church, hidden in a gap in the stone wall, lay a treasure more perishable than gold but as important to Edith’s future wellbeing as any other nest egg.

  4. As I looked closer at the shoe, I froze and stared at it saying over and over to myself ” Please don’t let this be an episode of Law & Order!”

  5. The stake out location was practically perfect. Burrowing under the English ivy, I could just lie there with my binoculars and observe the scene, completely unnoticed.

  6. In New England there are stone walls that have not moved in hundreds of years. The stones fit together in a way that is imperfectly permanent and impenetrable. That’s how it was for us girls who met in our forties.

  7. Her name was Ivy and she was trouble. Everyone knew it and tried to avoid her but sometimes a man would get too close. Then he’d be sorry. Her name was Ivy, poison ivy.

  9. Like all rock walls on the Granby estate, this one incorporated the traditional components: quarried granite, discrete mortar, and the occasional body part.

  10. At first, I thought I was looking at wall; and then I realized I was lying down and there was a sneaker not far from me.

  13. “I think the sculptor is trying to make a statement about the natural versus the man made, the futility of running against time, our inevitable end. Though I do wonder about the use of the odor, don’t you?”
    Her sister sighed. “Gawd, I wish you’d never gone to art school. Call 911. That’s the smell of death.”

  14. I was dying to pull the shoe out of the wall to see if I could find any clues as to why it was left there. But what if it contained a spiders’ nest, a snakes’ lair, a centipede sanctuary, or worst of all, a foot? I think I will let it remain a quirky piece of the environment — at least until tomorrow.

  15. As I stopped to tie my shoe, I saw the jagged edge of a scrap of grey paper caught between the rocks.

  16. I’d run this path a million times. But that evening, when I found the one running shoe, I felt a little creeped out. I should have listened because what I found just around the next bend would start me on a wild ride.

  17. I thought, some yard ornaments are more appropriate than others. Little did I know…

  18. I was fascinated by the fact that the stone and shoe seemed to be the same size. This turned out to be the least interesting thing on my walk that day.

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