American Gothic (The Hawkmoon Chronicles Book 1)

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Her name is Fearless. She hears Voices.

Her home is in the worst part of Chicago’s Southside. She knows all of it... The crack houses, the shooting galleries, the places where they pimped out girls… A mother with kids running from a violent husband… A pregnant daughter living with her meth head boyfriend…Could she go there and bring her home? A family in hock to a loan shark... Could she talk to him? Maybe work something out?
An addict held her up with a broken bottle... She took him to the house and fed him. When Freddy got back a mother and two kids were asleep in their bed. The hype was sleeping in the spare room. When the addict died she and Freddy were the only people at his cremation. She was threatened. Her windows were smashed. Twice she was assaulted. It didn’t stop her. Some people thought she could afford to be brave because her husband was in Special Forces, but Freddy was deployed half the time.Fearless came out of Chicago in the winter of 1997.She might have stayed if her husband had come home but Freddy was killed in some flyblown place on the other side of the world. His body was never recovered. She asked for information, but Army policy is never to talk about special operations. All her life a voice called to her. Across time and space, it sang to her of other peoples…other times. A melancholic voice in an unknown language, heavy with grief, impregnated with a spirit of wonder.
All she knew of the place was its name; The Fair Land. One day she would go there. She heard it first in childhood, growing stronger in puberty. Receding with womanhood, and twenty years of marriage, it called once more when Freddy passed.

Fixing her old Dodge Hattie drove south into the Heartland. It was the first long journey of her life. Except for a blizzard near Springfield and getting mugged when she stopped to ask for directions, there were no incidents. She went to Texas. From Amarillo she travelled to spend Christmas with friends in Lubbock. The New Year brought her to Albuquerque . Two weeks saw her in Grissom, New Mexico. A week saw her in Jerusalem Landing.

One morning she rose from her bed to find a strange man seated at the table in her kitchen.
Fearless went to the bedroom where she kept a thirty eight under her pillow Despite his strange appearance he seemed to present no danger. She gave him coffee, which he drank with evident pleasure… They did not speak. He left soon after. It was then she noticed the book. It was large, heavy bound and traced in an exotic script…. Strange types came looking for it. They made no secret of the lengths they were prepared to go if she refused to surrender it.She was a forty year old woman living alone in a small American town. How hard could it be to get what they want?

They don’t know anything about her.