A Stone Barn is book one in the Travelers Trilogy. Years ago, Lynne lost her family in a horrible car crash. Now a successful business woman, she is about to lose her sanity because she has buried her grief too deeply. Jared has lost his daughter and his wife to disease and suicide. He has dealt with the grief and moves to America in order to start his life anew, only to discover secrets that could ruin the lives of new friends. Join us on this journey across time and continents, a journey of pain, healing and discovery. With the help of family, friends and a feisty Guardian Angel anyone can learn to live again. Look for book two, Red Dirt, to come out in 2011.
A Stone Barn
By Nancy LynnAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Nancy Lynn
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4520-8342-1 Chapter One
Her whole life had been the ideal, old-fashioned All-American life. A big brother, a little brother, Dad worked to support the family and Mom stayed home to keep them all in line. They all went to church every Sunday and attended vacation bible school in the summer.
She did well in high school and was accepted to every college to which she applied. She was a fairly good-looking, reasonably intelligent woman and falling madly in love with the man of her dreams during college hadn't been too hard.
She never had any burning desire to be anything in particular. Her college degree was Environmental Management, but she never had any real plans for what to do with her life. She got married, she worked at the local Parks and Recreation Office, but she never felt fulfilled.
Then she had kids. BOOM! She found her niche. Raising three children and keeping house for her breadwinner suited her just fine. B.C. (Before Children), she tried the workplace and discovered she hated working for other people. So running a family – being her own boss – worked out just fine. Once the kids were school age, she volunteered at the schools and in the community when she wanted to, said no when she didn't.
She and her husband loved doing things with the kids – museums, hiking, art shows, fishing. But they also loved doing things without the kids. Museums, hiking, art shows, fishing. Or just plain nothing. One thing that always made them crazy were people who felt that every hour of every day had to be totally structured. People who were so involved in everything that you needed to make an appointment just to see if they wanted to go to the local sports bar for a few drinks. People who were constantly driving their kids to some kind of sporting event or music lesson or dance class, then hurrying themselves off to aerobics classes and PTA meetings. People whose day was so structured that they couldn't live without a Dayrunner and a Palm Pilot.
Sitting and doing nothing every once in a while was kind of fun. Once a week they had a family night – they ordered pizza and watched TV or a movie together, sometimes played a board game. It gave the brain a chance to rest and gave people a chance to get to know the person sitting on the couch with them. And the kids seemed to actually enjoy not always being off to some activity. Not to be constantly occupied, entertained, told what to do and how to do it. Sure, they were involved in some activities, but not every minute of every day. They enjoyed having to use their own imaginations and occupy their own time. The house had been full of the products of those imaginings: homemade clay pots, popsicle stick structures, paper mache animals. Kid artwork was proudly displayed alongside art gallery pieces.
For nearly twenty years, her life and all its joys had sailed smoothly along.
Until one day a drunken truck driver altered the course of her life forever. Robert, age 42; Shanna, age 15; Phillip, age12; and Andrew, age 10, ceased to exist. And Lynne, age 40, was forced to learn to live life all over again.
She lost her All-American status.
Chapter Two
Rising out of the now tepid bath water, Lynne cursed the inability of the water molecule to remain hot once heated. Then she saw her toes.
"Harry, you'd think with as many therapeutic bubble baths as I've been taking lately, my toes would have built up a tolerance to prunyness!"
Harry, being the sedate, middle-aged gentleman that he was, stuck his elegant tail up in the air and strolled out of the room. He couldn't be bothered with the babblings of a bothersome human. He had been lying on Lynne's bath towel, so when she picked it up and started drying off, she found herself covered with his long black and white hairs.
"HARRY!"
Harry pulled that most infamous of cat tricks and disappeared into thin air.
Once she succeeded in rinsing the cat hairs off her body, she grabbed a clean towel, checking it first for unwanted fibers. While drying herself, she gazed around her bathroom. Her very elegant bathroom. Lots of mirrored surfaces, shiny brass fixtures and black and white marble flooring were not her idea of homey.
Why did I ever let that interior decorator have her own way, she thought.
When Lynne received her first big management promotion, she'd rewarded herself for a job well done by turning a high-priced interior decorator loose on the three-story brownstone in which she now lived. The woman's claim to fame was that she didn't need her customers to tell her exactly what they wanted. She said that she could tell exactly what your tastes were and what you wanted just by having lunch with you a couple of times.
So the lady claimed. And lunch was always on the customer. Lynne realized that during those lunches, she had never mentioned her previous life. The decorator only saw the 40ish professional woman who had hired her. An upwardly mobile, mid-level management workaholic whose day was so structured that she couldn't live without a state of the art Blackberry.
No wonder this place looks nothing like the house Robert and I were raising our children in.
What the Brownstone became was very elegant, very shiny, and very expensive. The brass-fixture-lots-of-mirror-marble-floor look prevailed throughout the house. The furniture was mostly pale shades of blues and greens with metallic accents in upholstery that did not invite one to sit down. It was also very hard to keep clean. It kept Tatiana, her three-day-a-week housekeeper, busy keeping all that expensive shine shiny. And her only roommate was Harry.
One of those shiny mirrors was now reflecting back a woman on whom life had been a bit rough. Permanent frown lines between her eyebrows made strangers think she never smiled. People who claimed to know her thought she never truly smiled. What most people didn't know was that those lines appeared the moment she opened her front door to a state trooper eight years ago. So, now they were permanent. So, there you have it.
Beneath, she found blue eyes with long, dark lashes she could still be proud of. The beginnings of crows feet but, what the hell, she was 48! Around her mouth were laugh lines that were acquired while she had been living her all-American life. That pleased her. Something left over. Besides family photos, there wasn't much she had kept.
In a fit of depression two months after her family was killed, she had called an auctioneer and told him to sell everything in the house he could. Then she packed up her clothes, her favorite pieces of jewelry, all the photos and left for a month. When she came back, the house was empty except for the kitchen appliances and a few pieces of kid art on the refrigerator: flowers made of hand prints and a self portrait in charcoal that Shanna had done in art class that year. She would regret that forever. She sold the house and left.
The rest of her reflection revealed a body in fairly good shape. She had never been slender, always curvy. So, the outside looked to be in pretty good shape for now. That meant she could concentrate on getting the inside straightened out. Mainly the part between her ears, and the cold lump that was her heart.
Slipping into her favorite red cotton gauze caftan and grabbing what was left of her wine, Lynne was unable to close off all the memories that came flooding through the proverbial gates. That was the thing about memories. Once they...
