… and a little preview!

Hey, everyone! I hope you’re keeping cool and getting some happy times in your summer!

I’ve got some good news, I think. Last week, I finished a manuscript—the first novel I’ve finished in a whole year. I’m starting to actually believe my violent bout with writer’s block is finally over, and I think I won by submission, lol.

This will be the third book in the Signal Bend Heritage series, and this one feels like it’s where the part of the narrative that will be the series-long arc begins to step forward.

It’s still in its rough draft stage, and nobody’s yet read it but me, so I’m not ready to announce an actual release yet, or share the title, or anything too official, but I do feel like I can share the prologue, because it refers to something that happens in Book Two, Snake.

So that’s what I’m going to do for today’s post: share the prologue in its entirety. I’m not going to restrict this content to subscribers—I’m planning to only restrict content that will only appear on the blog. Works in progress and other content related to things I plan to formally publish will be available to read for anyone who comes to the blog.

Be on the lookout for additional details and release information in the (hopefully quite near) future. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll get those details in your inbox. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can do so right here:

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Without further ado, I present to you the (rough draft of the) prologue of the next Signal Bend Heritage book:

PROLOGUE
Summer

Singing along with Dolly Parton about her coat of many colors, Abigail Freeman turned her old truck onto the road that would bring her home. On the bench seat beside her sat Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, her collie-mix mutts, who were excellent herders and very good boys. They started fidgeting on the seat as she made the turn; they were just as glad to be home as she was.

They’d been away near a week, she and the dogs and the goats, and she always fretted about the chickens she left behind. She didn’t let them run loose when she wasn’t home, they stayed buttoned-up safely in the predator-proof yard attached to the coop, and they had food and water in big automatic feeders, so she didn’t worry about their safety. But they preferred to have run of the big yard during the day, and they got kitchen scraps when she was home, so she worried they were lonely.

Her goats were her main income, and they had a varied portfolio. She made soaps and lotions from their milk, she sold or bartered with about half the kids each breeding season, and she hired them out as a brush herd. Brushers were natural lawnmowers hired by communities, businesses, and, sometimes, individuals with too much property to maintain on their own. The goats came in and spent their days eating up the overgrowth in vacant lots, side yards, and other places ‘weeds’ grew lush.

A weed was nothing more than a plant growing where it was supposed to grow; so far as Abigail was concerned, a weed wasn’t a thing at all. But most people thought the plants that were supposed to grow were whatever they wanted to grow, with no care about what the land wanted, so she hired out her goats to eat themselves happy for cash.

Cleaning out other people’s brush was the thing best keeping the lights on, so she needed to get the goats out where they made their best money. But she hated to be away from home. Not just for the chickens’ sake but for her own.

Abigail was a solitary soul. She enjoyed people, she thought humanity was fairly miraculous in all its variety and complexity, but she liked her own company best.

She’d known from an early age that she wasn’t like most people; Granny Kate always said Freeman women were witchy women. Abigail had never known another Freeman woman, so she couldn’t corroborate, but she’d learned everything Granny had cared to teach her, so she supposed if Granny had been witchy, she was as well.

She preferred to think of it as traditional, however—she had an affinity for traditional ways of being and doing, a deep-seated awe for the natural world, and not much patience for all the complicated technological frippery of modern times. If knowing which herbs would help a cough just as well as, if not wholly better than, some fake-cherry slop from the pharmacy made her ‘witchy,’ so be it.

Just before she reached her gate, Bogie, the older and wiser of her boys, stopped his ‘Yay we’re home’ dance and went on alert, his ears high and his nose quivering. Picking up Boge’s cue, Mitch went still as well, and added a low rumble, like a whispered growl.

Abigail hit the brakes and slowed gently to a stop on the road a few feet from her gate. Her boys were good protectors; they clearly sensed trouble, and she didn’t presume to have better senses for trouble than guardian dogs.

“What’s wrong, boys?” she asked, peering through the windshield and side window, trying to see anything out of sorts. But this was hill country, and her house was behind the knoll that made up her front yard. All she could see was her roof and chimney, and the big copper weather vane of the old lady’s shoe, from the nursery rhyme, that she’d made some twenty years earlier. The copper had aged into a beautiful patina.

“Bogie?” she said, and the dog swung his head quickly to her, huffed softly, and returned his attention to the gate, which was open, as usual. Nobody dangerous or crooked bothered coming all the way up here, where there weren’t many people and none who had much worth stealing.

There was Gary Prentiss, she supposed, a troubled and troublesome neighbor, but nobody much minded his transgressions overall. He was probably the poorest among the generally poor folk who lived on this lonely old road in the hills. Abigail, like most of the others up here, would have given him most of what he snuck in and stole, but Gary had a stubborn kind of pride about it, so they looked the other way except when he got too greedy and took enough to hurt.

It was possible he’d come up to her place, saw the trailer gone and knew she was away with the goats, and dug around for something he needed.

The dogs knew Gary and Leigh Prentiss, though. They wouldn’t alert like this if he were around.

“Okay, babies. Okay.” She reached behind her and grabbed the butt of the rifle she kept on a rack against the rear window. For a country person, she had an unusual distaste for firearms, but as a country person, she knew their value, and she knew how to use them. Granny had taught her that, too.

Bogie whined at the sight of the rifle in her hands, then returned to his duties as sentinel.

She checked the rack and laid the rifle across her lap, then eased her truck into as slow and quiet a roll as she could manage in a seventy-five-year-old manual transmission Ford pickup pulling a sixteen-foot livestock trailer. “Let’s see what we see.”

~oOo~

Abigail stood in her back yard. She could do nothing but stand there with her hands over her mouth, and she had no idea how long she’d been doing it. The rifle lay atop the picnic table; any need for it had lapsed well before she’d reached her gate.

In every direction she looked, she found destruction. Most of her chickens were dead, their bodies crushed into the earth by the tires of at least two vehicles. Feathers lay everywhere; each breeze cast them about like bloodied confetti. Buster, her young cockerel, just coming into his manhood, lay dead beside the strawberry tower, his head cruelly twisted.

Her babies had been safe in their coop, specially designed to keep them comfortable and secure while she was away. But whoever had done all this had torn a wall of the coop straight off, apparently by driving through a corner of the coop yard. Then they’d chased down her babies. Her mind kept trying to play the scene through, the chickens scurrying in confusion and terror, the metal monsters roaring after and over them.

Tire tracks made looping trails everywhere. Trucks had driven over her chickens, through her gardens, and mowed down dozens of her gizmos and gewgaws, her whirligigs and windchimes. Some of those had been made by ancestors long dead before she’d ever existed.

And the goat barn? A truck-size hole front and back; somebody had driven right through, and now each breeze made what was left of that building rattle dangerously.

As a finishing touch: scrawled across the side of her house, in which she’d been raised, in which Granny Kate had been born, raised, and died, in bright orange spray paint, the words FAT FREAK. Dried rivulets streaked down from the angry letters like tangerine tears.

That paint seemed to be the only attack on the house. The three exterior doors were secure, all the windows intact. Her plants on the porch looked fine, and she could see her houseplants hanging and resting just where they should be in the kitchen windows. Nobody had broken in and ransacked the house, apparently.

And nothing seemed to be missing out here. Destroyed, yes. Murdered, yes. But not stolen.

This had been done for no other reason than to hurt her.

Who would do such a terrible thing? Who would kill harmless, helpless animals for nothing more than malicious sport? She knew people found her strange, but was she hated? What had she done to anyone to make them hate her like this?

Still in the trailer, the goats bleated their irritation at being closed up. Bogie and Mitch trotted around the yard, their ears high and their noses down, their hackles raised, seeking the culprits, tracking down any further hint of danger. All Abigail could do was stand in the midst of it all and gape behind her hands.

Why? Why?

For no other reason than to hurt her.

Her eyes fell again on Buster’s poor body. Her little buddy. She’d hand-raised him when Sonny, her previous rooster, had decided that the flock wasn’t big enough for another male, not even a baby, and begun to attack both Buster and Ethel, his mother. Usually she bartered her cockerel hatchlings with neighbors for other things she needed, but she’d kept Buster because Sonny had been fourteen years old, which was basically a centenarian for chickens. But he’d still been ornery enough to want to kill his replacement. So Abigail had scooped up the cockerel and left Ethel his five sisters.

Sonny had died of old age and orneriness while Buster was still hopping around inside the house like a feathery, two-footed puppy. And Abigail had never loved a chicken the way she loved her Buster.

She staggered to his poor broken body and dropped to the ground to scoop him into her arms. As his neck drooped dully over her wrist, the horror fully hit her. She buried her face in his feathers and sobbed.

~oOo~

The goats wouldn’t let her wallow more than a few minutes, but by the time their bleating grew insistent and Abigail finally lay Buster back on the grass, Bogie and Mitch had completed their inspection of the property and taken up their role as family. They lay each on a side of her, their heads in her lap. When she stood, so did they.

The goat barn was destroyed, and the fence of the attached yard as well. She’d have to put the goats in the day pasture. That meant a long night for the dogs, and for herself; the woods held foxes, coyotes, feral hogs, even the occasional black bear. Animals weren’t safe at night in an open pasture, especially not youngsters.

She stared at the horizon, where the sun had begun to droop toward dusk. The sky was clear, nearly cloudless. Closing her eyes, she took a long, deep inhale through her nose, absorbing all the scents of the afternoon. No hint of rain, at least. But blood and torn earth and fear. So much fear in the air.

There was no way she could put all this to rights alone. But who could she ask for help? Without knowing who’d done this or why, was there anyone she could trust? The notion of unknowingly asking for help from those who’d caused this harm made a clump of hot coals ignite in her belly.

One of the goats kicked the side of the trailer. That would be Satyr, twenty-three years old and king of the herd.

Well. There was nothing to it but to do it. Was she going to stand here like a garden gnome for the rest of her life? Of course not.

Dark would fall soon. There wasn’t much more she could do tonight except get the goats offloaded and prepare for a long vigil. She’d have plenty of time to figure out who she could trust and what help she needed.

Wiping the last of her tears away, she bent to collect Buster’s body, but paused before she got her hands down. No. She didn’t know who might help her, but she wanted it known, what had been done here. Buster was no longer on this plane, nor were the girls they’d killed. She could leave their physical remains where they were without further harm.

She stood tall again. “Okay, boys. Let’s get the goats. We got a long night ahead of us.”

Walking to the trailer, she saw the insult scrawled like graffiti on the side of her family home, on the violet paint she’d so happily chosen a few years back. FAT FREAK.

Well, yes. Her shape had always been round and soft, certainly not like a model or starlet. She’d been called fat often enough in her life not to be surprised that many considered her so. And yes, she’d been called ‘freak,’ too, often enough. It was the word closest to hand for most, to describe how they felt when they saw someone who didn’t live the way they thought people ought. Abigail thought people ought live the way they wanted, so long as they didn’t smear their wants all over other people’s needs.

So yes. She supposed she was a fat freak. And that made those ugly orange letters not an insult at all. Just an observation. The most offensive thing about that scrawl was its ugliness—on her wall and in their hearts.

Ugliness, she could do something about.

~oOo~

The night was long but uneventful. By sunrise Abigail was weary, but she’d thought things through. Terrible as it all was, none of the property damage meant all that much. She could replant her gardens. She could repair or remake her generations-deep collection of yard decorations. The chickens were the truly heartbreaking part of it. Everything else was just stuff.

Well, not all of it was just stuff. She had to get the coop repaired and the goat barn rebuilt, and those tasks were far beyond her capacity to handle alone. And not much within her ability to pay for the work to be done. She was going to need some neighborly help—as long as neighbors hadn’t done this in the first place.

She knew where to go for help: the Night Horde MC. It shouldn’t have taken her so long to figure that out, but she’d never had to ask for such help before. The Horde had not been much a part of her life. Though she considered herself, and was considered to be, a Signal Bend resident, she lived well outside the town limits, and she didn’t go into town with much regularity.

Most things she needed she either grew or made herself, or she bartered with neighbors. Once a month she made a big run for staples and other things she either couldn’t make herself or didn’t have time for and to deliver jams and pies, or soaps, cremes, and lotions, to various individuals and to shops where she sold on consignment. Otherwise, she went down when there was a seasonal festival, where she ran a booth and sold her wares direct.

There wasn’t too much about Signal Bend in her daily life, so it took her a while to imagine asking the Horde for help. But she knew she could have full faith that they’d been no part of this mess. Even if they’d had some kind of quarrel with her, this was not their style at all.

So she’d call the Horde and ask for help.

©2025 Susan Fanetti