Chapter One

It was late October, and Boone was standing at a blackjack table in Vegas when he first heard the cries of the Sorrowful Angel of Bogey Holler. The mournful cross between a dying whippoorwill and a faraway freight train was like the touch of a chilly finger on his heart. Boone shook it off, tossed back his shot of bourbon, and breathed in the snap and tang of deep autumn in the Kentucky backwoods.

The girl curled in the crook of his arm looked up at him, the light from the crystal chandeliers glinting off her frosted-purple eye shadow. “You all right, baby?”

Boone shrugged. “Bad memories.”

The girl, whose name Boone had already forgotten, smiled at him in the way women sometimes do. “I bet I can fix that.”

“Yeah?” He pulled her closer. “I’ll take that wager.”

But on New Year’s Eve, as he battled his way up a windblown sidewalk in downtown Chicago, Boone heard the Angel’s cries again. Along with the heartbroken wailing and the raw, wet scent of winter in the Appalachian Mountains came the distinct image of a face he hadn’t seen in a dozen years—one with gold-tipped lashes surrounding bluebonnet eyes, and a smile as honest as the day was long.

Delia Concannon. Lord, but she looks even better than she did at seventeen.

He told himself he didn’t believe in visitations from angels, sorrowful or otherwise. Then he climbed into his pickup truck and drove.

A while later—seventeen weeks, two days and four hours, not that Boone was keeping count—the Angel caught up to him in Lexington, where he’d holed up in a motel near the airport. This time, he didn’t bother to tell himself any lies as he pointed his truck toward Harlan.

Now he was driving too fast down an unlit dirt road, radio locked on a bluegrass station and a woman’s name caught in the back of his throat. Through the open window he inhaled the scent of wild honeysuckle that meant spring was kindling in the Cumberland Mountains. He crossed the Harlan County line four hours ahead of the sunrise.

Boone Butler was home.

 

 

Delia sat straight up in bed and clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. All around her, the shadowy room echoed with the sound of another woman’s fading sobs. The clock on the nightstand read quarter past three.

She slipped from under the sheets, crossed to the window, and looked down on the road that ran by her house at the mouth of Bogey Holler. Through the darkness she spied a pair of taillights on the gate of a pickup truck. It was too dim to make out the color of the vehicle. After a few seconds, the truck pulled onto the road and took off, the taillights growing smaller until they finally winked out. Delia stood watch a while longer before she took herself back to bed.

Just another nightmare. Doesn’t mean a thing.

She lay there, unsettled and sleepless, and with every beat of her heart she heard a name that hadn’t crossed her lips in years.

You’re an idiot. Boone Butler never loved you, and he’s never coming back. Go to sleep.

But when her alarm went off at a quarter to five, Delia was already on the other side of Harlan County, standing behind the counter of the little diner she’d owned for going on three years now. Here there was no ghostly weeping—only the bright, buzzing glow of fluorescent lights and the scent of coffee so mighty and all-consuming that it seemed to be another permanent fixture of the place, like the faded pink Formica or Delia’s best friend and second-best waitress, Pea Hawkins.

Upon entering the establishment, Pea squinted up at Delia through her round, frameless glasses and said, “Girl, you look like seven kinds of hell. Ain’t you been sleepin’?”

Delia slapped a plate of ham and red-eye gravy on the counter in front of her friend and shrugged. “Bad dreams. They’ll pass.”

“The Angel again?” The sharp note in Pea’s voice cut through Delia’s muzzy head like a hot knife through day-old grits, making her flinch. “That’s the third time since Christmas. You ought to go see my granny for a charm.”

“Maybe I will.” Delia was glad to have the conversation cut short by the arrival of Kathleen, her very best waitress, followed by the day’s first customers.

The diner stayed busy through the morning hours and well past lunchtime—and why wouldn’t it, offering huckleberry pie with vanilla ice cream for two dollars a serving, not to mention coffee at fifty cents a cup plus free refills? Pea said she should charge double, at least, but Delia couldn’t bring herself to gouge her friends and neighbors, especially since hard times had come once more to Harlan.

To hear the old folks tell it, they’d never left.

It was in the middle of the afternoon lull when Delia heard the Angel’s cries again. She was peeling fruit for a cobbler, and the sound startled her, making her run the tip of the paring knife into the base of her thumb.

Boone Butler, Boone Butler, Boone Butler…

The name echoed in her head, a drumbeat beneath the Angel’s sobs. Together they drowned out the slurp and gurgle of the percolator.

Swearing a purple streak under her breath, Delia reached across her workspace for something to staunch the flow of blood. As she did, Kathleen’s tobacco-and-whiskey-roughened voice drifted into the kitchen via the pass-through window.

“I heard one of the Butler boys is back in Harlan,” she told a customer at the counter.

Delia froze where she stood, a clean white towel clutched in one hand and blood dripping from the fingertips of the other.

“What did you say?”

~~~

Long and Short Reviews calls Ain’t No Sunshine a “Best Book”:

“Do yourself a favor. Grab this book. Or better yet, let it grab you….  Ain’t No Sunshine is a multi-dimensional tapestry woven of the Concannon and Bulter families’ past, Delia and Boone’s personal pasts and their present. The mystery, setting, characters and plot vie for main billing. Selah March excels in each area and the reader reaps the benefit. The title is an ear-worm and the story sticks in your head the same way. Ain’t No Sunshine reminded me of good bread pudding—moist, dense, chock full of both nuts and sweet surprises—rich in country flavor and extremely satisfying.” ~Water Lily at Long and Short Reviews

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Buy it here.