The Hunt

Chapter One – The Invitation

1.

  Through the half-moon window Libby stared at the thin pink-yellow line appearing on the horizon, a new day was here.  She sat at a dark mahogany desk and on the desktop were three items: a piece of paper, a medicine bottle and a glass of water.  She looked down and slowly moved her hand that gripped a pen to the bottom of the page as she readied to sign her name to her last will and testament.  She paused, again, and glanced out the window.  The sky was brighter, pastel colored orange and gold blended with the pink and yellow as the sun slowly rose.  She could see the town now spreading before her eyes. 

  Candlelight is a small Missouri town south of Columbia and, as the old saying goes, if you closed your eyes you could miss it.  It had a gas station and Mini-Mart combo, an elementary school and a high school but its big claim to fame is the Candlelight Candle Factory located the her right, just out of view.  Main street has its City Hall, barber shop, grocery store and hardware store lined up next to each other.  Libby still lived in the Davis family home, a two story house across the street from the elementary school where she has been the school’s secretary for the last twenty-five years.  Tears are filling her eyes.  She blinked and a single one fell down her left cheek.

  She was told she had breast cancer.  Her mother died of that horrid disease.  Libby remembered how the treatments had drained her mom and the hope her father and she had when she recovered.  Then the cancer returned with a vengeance a few years later and she died.  Her Mom was sixty-five years old.  Libby just turned fifty and now she has breast cancer, too.  A month ago she felt something funny in her left breast and she went immediately to her doctor.  Following a mammogram, she was sent to a specialist in Columbia who tested and announced that she did have cancer.  He prescribed the course of action and she went home and cried.  She decided to keep it a secret, but she didn’t want to go through all of what her mother did, alone.  She thought she would rather die so she sat at her mahogany desk finishing her last will and testament, planning to take all those pills and go to sleep forever.

  Libby’s gaze out of her window led her from her school to the ice cream parlor, the Milkshake Straw, located catty-corner from her home and she smiled.  It was the place to go after school when she was so much younger.  Her friends, the gang of six, would go there from fourth grade to high school graduation, almost every day, for a chocolate shake in the far corner booth.  She giggled through the tears as she remembered them, her gang, and she could see their faces.  She still hears from each of them somewhat regularly, a couple more than others.  All of them escaped Candlelight except for her.  None of them left Missouri.  Three of the six were married and had kids, and two were divorced like her.  One of the divorced friends had one child, and the other, like her, had none.  One worked as a newspaper editor in Columbia, one was a teacher in St. Louis, another worked in manufacturing somewhere in Jefferson City, one was a legal aide in Branson, and the other one was a stay at home parent in Wentzville.  She smiled again as she thought of them.  Suddenly a thought entered her head, a shimmering thought of hope. Maybe, just maybe. 

  She opened the right hand drawer of the desk and pulled out her laptop, opened it typed in Sami O’Neil.