Some yesterdays can kill your tomorrow....

She's a millennial, living a quiet, unassuming life in small town, Idaho. As far as the government knows, she owns nothing. The house is not hers. It belongs to the government. The name on her driver's license barely registers when a customer calls her. And why should it? It's not hers either. Most days she feels dead—inside and out.

Then a new neighbor moves into the house next door. He seems normal, ordinary, if a bit reclusive. She decides to be neighborly and invites him over. And suddenly, she's staring at her living room wall, freshly ripped with bullets. And just like that, the past she thought dead-and-buried, comes looking for her. It reaches after her with claws that mean to rip and shred, whatever life she'd managed to patch together.

To run means to be hunted again. To stay...is not an option.

One of my professors believed that a journalist should wait ten long seconds past his or her greatest fear before succumbing to it and fleeing the scene. I started to count. On the count of eight, I caught a new sound that I was not prepared for—whispers, tearful panting and then the sound of choking.

Bree-Ann Carver works in a satellite office, in Idaho. Her job as an intern for the New York Times is to write a blog about fictional murders. But her very first subscriber criticizes her efforts and then aggressively moves to take over her blog via his unsolicited input into her work. She knows he wants her to use his murder scenarios, but these sound like real-case murders that the police closed as accidents. If she posts even one of these dangerous scenarios, she is exposing herself to not only the real killer's wrath, but the police who closed the case as accidental death. Each time she refuses, her cyber bully sends her a chilling one liner: There will be...]]> Mon, 18 Apr 2016 12:55:59 +0300 https://graycity.net/edita-a-petrick/610621-last_child.html https://graycity.net/edita-a-petrick/610621-last_child.html

When hiding in plain sight is no longer possible....

Kate McFarland was born into a crumbling regime of Soviet Russia. She didn't have much as a child, but she had two parents who cared and protected her, and that was enough. Then Fate raked its rusty nail across a blackboard and her mother became a widow. For what seemed like eternity, life looked bleak. But then her mother met a man who was not only decent and kind but rich. It's how Kate finished growing up in the US. It's how her grassroots name became Kate and since her stepfather adopted her, she wanted to show respect by taking his last name.

She was not only allowed but encouraged to make her own decisions; even if one of those meant that at age twenty-five, Kate McFarland emerged from Quantico as Agent McFarland. She had two half-brothers, a half-sister she adored and her mother was happy. But her colleagues whispered behind her back that doors opened for her because she was...]]> Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:56:01 +0300 https://graycity.net/edita-a-petrick/197697-the_path_of_silence.html https://graycity.net/edita-a-petrick/197697-the_path_of_silence.html
]]> Tue, 15 Nov 2016 14:14:18 +0200