Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4
"Have you heardfrom Kurt?" she asked, when the present ended up on the table, designatingit as a keeper.
"Nope. Nothingeither way."
"Did you thinkhe'd have some success this time?" Her face seemed to melt into thatsomber, little-girl-worried expression that I had always hated.
Kurt was out of town,following yet another lead on Lost Kids who had left Neighborlee while theywere still minors. Lost Kids were the abandoned children who appeared on theoutskirts of town, usually toddler age, no language skills, no identification, anddespite the best searching methods available, no one ever claimed them and theynever appeared in missing persons reports. At least, no one claimed them untilstrange things happened around Neighborlee Children’s Home, and then suddenlypeople swooped in with paperwork proving they were long-lost relatives. Andthose Lost Kids vanished. As far as we knew, Felicity, Kurt and I were the onlyones with unusual talents who'd stayed in Neighborlee. Sure, lots of Lost Kidshad stayed in town, made lives for themselves, and became upstanding andsometimes integral parts of the community. The ones who didn’t show any unusualabilities, or who weren’t in the vicinity when odd things happened.
That was the patternwe assembled since we decided to investigate why we were the way we were, andwhy or how we had ended up at Neighborlee Children's Home. Once we had thoseanswers, or at least hints at those answers, maybe we could get closer tosolving the really big question: where were we from and why weren’t we thereanymore?
There were a lot ofwhispered stories and fragments of rumors to investigate. We had discovered aninteresting and pretty consistently frustrating tendency for memories to behazy when it came to the Lost Kids who vanished. Always around adolescence. Accordingto the comic books and science fiction encyclopedias, and all the books ofsupernatural phenomena that my parents regularly debunked, psychic andsuperhuman powers usually manifested in adolescence. Mixed in with the storiesof the just plain weird, amusing, or frightening things that happened inNeighborlee, there were true stories of children discovering their abilities.
Mysterious people in dark cars were usually seenloitering in the vicinity of Neighborlee Children’s Home just before the LostKids vanished. Those people knew enough to watch the children’s home for oddtalents to show up in the Lost Kids. They knew how to make official recordsvanish, so those of us trying to pick up the trail years later came up againstdead ends. So far, anyway. We knew as much about these mysterious people andthe vanished Lost Kids as we knew about the enemy forces who tried to break throughto Earth from other dimensions of reality. Neighborlee served as a patch on aweak spot in the fabric of the cosmos, or a lock on the gate. Lost Kids,whether we had semi-pseudo-superhero powers or not, often ended up asguardians, holding the door closed, slapping reinforcements on the weak spot.
