Excerpt for NOWHERE TO RUN

The phone message. . . Liv threw off the covers, shivering a little. She climbed out of bed and padded to the kitchen, a journey that took about ten steps across the tired carpeting of her one-bedroom apartment. Lawyers had found her home phone number and left her the message. That had been the trigger for last night’s nightmare. She’d tried to ignore the blinking light the night before when she’d tossed her keys on the counter. She’d asked herself for about the billionth time why she kept the phone and voicemail at all. Most of the time she liked the idea of being off the grid completely, which was exactly why she didn’t carry a cell phone. If that made her a Luddite, then so be it. She was a little frightened of technology anyway. She didn’t want to be on someone else’s radar. It didn’t feel safe. Dr. Yancy had told her she was hiding from something, and she supposed it was true but she didn’t care. Still, Crenshaw and Crenshaw had found her phone number, so she’d called back and the lawyer – Tom Crenshaw – had asked her for her home address. He’d said he wanted to send her something – a package -- but he’d been cagey as hell about what that package contained. Only when they’d gone back and forth a few times and he’d finally convinced himself that yes, she was definitely the Olivia Margaux Dugan that he was searching for, did he come through and say that his firm had a package for her – from her mother. Her mother? After that Liv had simply dropped the phone receiver, stumbled into bed and fallen into a coma-like sleep that she’d just woken up from. It had to be a mistake. Her mother was dead. Had been since Liv’s sixth birthday. The package could not be from her mother. Now she gazed at the phone receiver. It still dangled along the side of the cabinet, tethered to the base unit by a long cord, hanging in a way that made her stomach wrench. She could still see her mother’s softly swaying body hanging from the kitchen rafters and her protruding tongue; the image hadn’t faded with time. Sucking in several deep breaths, she squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them again, picked up the receiver and placed it back in its cradle. But she kept her palm resting lightly upon it and tried to contain her galloping heart. There was a bogeyman out there. Maybe more than one. Better to be safe than sorry. She did, however, have voicemail and that nagging blinking red light on the base unit meant she had another call. Crenshaw had undoubtedly phoned back. Screwing up her courage, she pushed the answering machine’s button and heard the lawyer’s voice through the speaker: Ms. Dugan, this is Tom Crenshaw again, of Crenshaw and Crenshaw, Attorneys-at-Law. Please call us back so we can send you the package from Deborah Dugan addressed to her daughter, Olivia Margaux Dugan. Per our earlier conversation, this package was left in our care to be sent to you on your twenty-fifth birthday. As that date has passed, we need to make certain you receive this package soon. A pause. As if he wanted to say a lot more, then simply, Thank you, and a return phone number and the law firm’s hours. Feeling disembodied, Liv slowly picked up the receiver again. She watched as the fingers of her other hand stabbed out the number Tom Crenshaw had left for her. Staring at the cracks in the kitchen wall, she looked back to a past she would like to forget as she waited to hear the message her mother had left her nearly twenty years earlier.