I'm done and here's a taste

Hey Family,


I've finished my middle grade book, Thunderbird Dreams. Yay! I'm giving it a rest before I do one last read and polish, then I'll be sending it out to agents.


Here's a taste of it. The beginning. Hope you like!


Hugs and kisses!


Traci

Not that I’m afraid or anything, ‘cause I’m not, but when a high-pitched wail rises in the chilly night, I pull the quilt up to my eyeballs and scooch closer to my sisters.

“Did you hear that?” I whisper. It sounds like a shout in the silence of our new house.

“It’s just a coyote, Crystal. Go to sleep,” Bethany mutters and rolls over, yanking the quilt out of my grip. Megan keeps on snoozing in the middle of us, hugging that dang stuffed bear of hers.

“That was no coyote,” I mutter. We’ve been in this crummy, flea-bitten, middle-of-nowhere mining town for almost a week now, I know the difference. I shiver and tug my share of the quilt back.

What I heard sounded like a ghost from one of old Jeb’s stories. The old coot loved to scare the bejeezus out of all us kids back home with his stories. But he’s far away now and that ghostly sound was nearby. 

Another caterwaul, and I sit up. Twelve year olds do not believe in ghosts. And I don’t. I can’t. Because if I did, then I’d have to worry about Mom coming back to haunt me for what I did. Or what I didn’t do.

So I don’t. And I will prove it.

I grab the old Indian pottery piece from under my pillow and slide out of bed. I can’t see much out the bedroom window—just the rocky hill dotted with sagebrush and the lopsided outhouse we share with our neighbors in shack #12—so I slip out out to the hall. The house is quiet. I guess Dad and Joe didn’t hear the ghostly sounds.

Moonlight seeps through the shutters at the front of the house. I tiptoe toward the window. A floorboard squeaks, and I freeze. Maybe the sound I’d heard was just the house talking, as Mom would put it. But no. Another wail crawls through the cracks in the walls of the rickety clapboard house.

I look back to the bedroom, to the safety of my sisters, of my bed, of covers over my head. But I don’t turn back. No. Only a lilly-liver chicken poop with no guts at all would turn back now. I forge on and throw open the shudders.

Outside is just the podunk town Dad moved us to—a whole 25 shacks, a schoolhouse, boarding house, and the company store with the boss’s old Model T Ford truck parked in front. No ghosts anywhere. I lean out further. Nope. Nothing moves or makes a sound.

I turn to go back to bed. “I told you, Jeb,” I whisper. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

A new sound makes me stop. A steady beat that matches my thumping heart. Drums? I know we moved to the wild west and all, but is someone really playing tom-toms in the middle of the night?

When I lean out the window this time, I catch a flash of white.