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Lucy Price is living the American dream. She has been married to her successful husband and businessman, Edward Price for a year and couldn’t be happier until she learns that Eddie is a dangerously ruthless man, heavily involved in illegal activities that threaten not only her marriage, but her life. Eddie abruptly disappears, but not before warning Lucy that if she wants to keep breathing she'd better keep her mouth shut. Six months later, word of her husband surfaces when she learns that he is presumed murdered in a small Texas town, apparently killed by his “wife”, Marlowe Price.
Marlowe is no stranger to trouble. An outcast in her own community for being one of those "hoodoo women," who can curse you or cast you under her beguiling spell, Marlowe is shunned at every turn. Six months ago, a whirlwind romance in Mexico led Marlowe to marry the man she thought she’d spend the rest of her life with. For Marlowe and Eddie, there is no such thing as trouble in paradise. But late one night, when Marlowe witnesses her husband putting the body of a dead man in the trunk of his car, the illusion comes crashing down around her and she knows she has to move fast before the devil comes calling once again.
Now, Lucy and Marlowe must come together to find out where and who Eddie really is, and help each other through the threat he poses. There's nothing more dangerous than a woman scorned...except for two women scorned who are willing to put their pasts behind them and band together to take one bad man down...
Excerpt from The Real
Mrs. Price by J.D. Mason, coming May 24, 2016
Copyright © 2016 by J. D. Mason.
All rights reserved.
Marlowe had been sleeping restlessly when the phone rang next
to her bed. “Hello?” she asked, half-awake.
She’d been dreaming. Goodness gracious! Marlowe’s eyes
widened as she scanned the space in her room.
“It’s me,” Shou Shou said without apology. Shou Shou was
Marlowe’s aunt. “I had an intuition,” the old woman told her.
Marlowe sat up in bed. The last time Shou Shou had had an
intuition, Marlowe’s twin sister, Marjorie, died.
“What it look like?” Marlowe asked anxiously.
“It look like you,” Shou Shou told her. “I want you to do
something for me.”
“Say it,” Marlowe responded. “You know I’ll do it.”
“I want you to read the bones, Marlowe. Don’t wait ’til
sunup. Get up and read ’em now.”
Marlowe could count on two hands how many times she’d read
the bones in her lifetime. But if Shou Shou was asking her to do this, then it
had to be important.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said
nervously. “You want me to call you back and tell you what I saw?”
“No,” she said simply. “It ain’t for me. It’s for you. Do it
now, before midnight. Don’t go back to sleep, Marlowe.”
“No, ma’am. I won’t.”
“Not ’til you read them bones. Then go back to sleep if you
can, darlin’.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Marlowe hung up, rubbed the sleep from her
eyes, and looked at the clock. “Shit.” In twenty minutes, it would be midnight.
She climbed, naked, out of bed and went to the bathroom to pee and slip into
her robe before heading out into the sunroom at the back of the house. Marlowe
kept the bones in a black velvet bag at the bottom of an old flowerpot in the
corner on the floor. Reading bones inside her house, even in the sunroom, was
something she’d never do.
Shou Shou had always told her to take them outside. “Bones
can bring good news, but they can bring bad news, too. Always read ’em outside
in case the news is bad. The last thing you want is to let that mess loose
inside your house.”
By mess, she meant foul spirits.
Marlowe knelt and spread her casting cloth out on the porch
and then opened the black pouch and poured the possum bones into her hand.
Cupping both palms around the bones, she shook them, held them as she took a
deep breath, and watched them fall. She studied the positioning of each of them
carefully as they related to each other and to themselves.
Shou Shou’s words came back to haunt her. “Sometimes you
can see the devil in the bones. He don’t look like you think he looks. But you
can tell it’s him.”
A dreadful feeling snaked up her spine. “Is that you, devil?”
she murmured, trying not to give in to the fear rising up from that casting
cloth. She had dreamed him, and the bones confirmed her fears.
Were the bones trying to warn her about Eddie? Because if
they were, then they were too late. She’d married him already. He’d been inside
her house and inside her body too many damn times, so she was tainted with him,
soiled and spoiled, and left dirty from him. She studied the bones intensely a few
minutes longer and realized that they weren’t showing her the devil who had
come; they were warning her of the one yet to come.
The thought came to her, Don’t let him in. Marlowe
shuddered.
Marlowe had learned a long time ago that discerning spirits wasn’t
always a good thing. Looking down at those bones, she had no choice but to
commit to the ugly and unwelcome truth. There was a threat in the bones,
shrouded by something or some- one so dark and dangerous that she trembled at
the thought of him. She didn’t know who he was or why he had any business with
her, but the bones didn’t lie, and Marlowe couldn’t deny their truth.
“That’s you, all right.” She swallowed fearfully.
She wanted no part of him, whoever he was, but that dream
still had her shaking. These bones—and what they’d told her— made her
physically ill. Marlowe had no idea how to make ready to face him, but there
was no doubt that he sure as hell was coming, and he was coming for her.
