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Have fun! Now, here's chapter 1:

Charlie Ann Huckabee Ragsdale was coming home to Willoughby.

Well, forget the Ragsdale, she thought. She had only used the name for a little over a year, and good riddance to it! And to him.

Now, she began to look for familiar landmarks as she neared the outskirts of her old hometown. The Frazier house should soon be coming up on the right. Fraziers’ Folly everyone called it because of its purple stucco turrets and those outlandish cement horses that guarded the gate.

Charlie Ann slowed. It should be right here where the road forked into town. She drew in her breath. Fraziers’ Folly was gone, replaced by a strip mall called Shopsense, and across the road where her Sunday school class always came to picnic in the meadow and wade in the creek was a huge sign announcing a new subdivision, Heavenly Heights.

What heights? Charlie Ann wondered since there wasn’t a hill in sight. And what happened to those giant oaks that shaded the creek bank? The landscape was scraped of anything green leaving only red clay crisscrossed by rows of pavement. How heavenly was that?

Charlie Ann bit her lip. Maybe she was making the wrong decision coming back here after having been away over 10 years, but Aunt Shug had sounded almost forlorn when they spoke on the phone a few weeks ago, and it wasn’t like her at all. Widowed early in her marriage, she had always been spunky and independent. Now in her mid-60s, her aunt ran a successful bed and breakfast in her pink Victorian cottage near the center of town – or had until she broke her arm.

Charlie Ann tut-tutted at the thought of it. A woman her aunt’s age had no business trying to skateboard with the neighborhood boys! Well, she shouldn’t be surprised. Wasn’t Aunt Shug the one who taught her to swim in Big Bend Creek, to bait her hook and fish where the water was deep under the bridge? And it had been her aunt who helped her build that great tree house with the swinging ladder. Naturally, no boys were allowed.

Soon she would be crossing the bridge to Big Bend Creek. Charlie Ann smiled. If her aunt felt up to it, maybe the two of them could try their hands at fishing again…

But what was this? Her smile vanished at the sight of the "NO FISHING" sign and the litter that spoiled the sandy banks. Who would want to fish here?

Charlie Ann had cried for days when at 15 she left Willoughby with her parents to live in another state. Her dad had accepted a more lucrative position in a larger town and they moved to a bigger house, but Willoughby had always seemed like home to her.

Perhaps it would cheer up her aunt if she brought some of her favorite candy. Aunt Shug loved chocolate drops and she remembered that Red Whitfield and his wife Evie sold them in their store on the edge of town. Charlie Ann was feeling proud of herself when she found a parking place near the familiar old building. It would be good to see the Whitfields again.

The door slammed behind her before Charlie Ann realized she was standing in a roadhouse.

“What can I get for you?” The man with a scar on his cheek and tattoos covering his arms wiped down the bar with a dirty rag and frowned at her. You could count his teeth on one hand.

“Uh- the Whitfields…this used to be the Need to Feed Grocery. What happened to Red and Evie?”

The bartender shook his head. “Red and Evie who?”

Charlie Ann hurried out the door ignoring catcalls from the leering men who clustered on the porch, and whose cumulative IQ was probably less than 50. Was Thomas Wolfe right when he said you can’t go home again, she thought, quickly leaving the roadhouse behind her. It was almost enough to make her turn around and go back the way she had come.

But there was nothing for her there anymore. Besides, Aunt Shug needed her, and right now she needed Aunt Shug. What did Thomas Wolfe know anyway?