K L Kemp

 

Light At The River's Edge

The cruelest of lies are often told in silence. - Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Young Katie Whitaker is a master at keeping things hidden in darkness until her entire life is shrouded in turmoil—and leads her to the brink of suicide. Traveling away from her home in the Mid-West to the Fuller Ranch in the scenic Smith River Valley of Montana, she struggles to find a bit of peace and hope, and the strength and courage to overcome the torments that plague her. But Katie’s secrets grow restless and more ominous until they collide, threatening her soul and her very existence.  Now Katie must find a reason and the fortitude to keep living.

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CHAPTER ONE

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     Katie Whitaker would be shamed and embarrassed if anyone called her a liar, yet that was exactly what she was, having learned the art of deception from those closest to her. She didn’t know if her journey of lies began in her mother’s apartment over Duffy’s Speed Queen Public Laundromat or in the series of foster homes or in the corner of her grandmother’s bedroom where she slept for so many years. The end of her journey to the truth lurched forward the spring her brother died.

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     In 1963 while Americans mourned the passing of Patsy Cline, while they flocked to theaters to see Hitchcock’s new movie The Birds or stayed home to watch a new TV show called General Hospital, and while they complained that gasoline was now an outrageous thirty-two cents a gallon, Katie did nothing more than finish her junior year of high school, watching the spring rains turn the town of Teetersburg into a sea of mud.

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     She wanted that spring to be different from most days of her existence. Except for the late December night her mother died in a fire, after which Katie and her older brother, Ryan, went to live with their grandmother Bernice, always called Gram, her life slipped into an interminable numbness and grew unbearably dull.

In the cramped, wood-shingled bungalow at 823 Rose Avenue, in the company of Gram, Katie waited day by day and hour by hour to grow up and to distance herself from the discontent of her life. She grew weary of waiting and became convinced her condition would never change, so she plotted to do the only thing within her power to alter her life.

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     She set a course to kill herself.

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Light At The River's Edge is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Xlibris Publishing, in hardback, paperback, and e-reader formats.

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