Chapter One

Death in the Passage

The narrow alleyway walls muffled the gunshot as uptown Charlotte slept. It was one thirty in the morning on Tuesday, April 1.

The phone call didn’t last long.

“It’s me,” the caller said. “I need your help.”

“I’m listening.”

“I have a body.”

“Whose?”

“Chance Landry.”

“Where are you?”

“Lincoln Street. Inside the Rivafinoli Passage in South End. Next to the Queen Charlotte mural.”

“Anyone with you?”

The caller explained who else was still there.

“You leave. Tell them to stay with the body and wait for my call. I need to think.”

Three minutes later, the call was made to the only living person remaining in the passage who could help.

“I am going to text you an address.” Next, they explained what to do with Landry’s body when they got to the address.

“Are you kidding? He’s already dead.”

But the person giving instructions had no sense of humor. “Just do it.”

A text message followed with the address.

The person who received the message knew how to follow directions and did as they were told.

Chapter Two

Vengeance is Sweet

The 11:15 p.m. email on Craig Travail’s phone read: Your friends are about to suffer financial ruin, untold heartbreak, and trials and tribulations. You have only yourself to blame.

What?

Travail read the email again, slower this time. He read it twice more. There was no author name. Just an unknown vengeanceissweet email address.

Travail exhaled. His email checking practice was a bad habit, a routine held over from his career when clients expected their lawyers to be available 24/7.

Nothing good ever came of his itch to scratch his email in-box for late-night messages, like now, when it would be twice as difficult to sleep after watching the late night local news—with its smorgasbord of crimes, collisions, and natural disasters—and reading this email.

One news story was about elder fraud, a reminder of how susceptible retirees are to financial fraud schemes. Was that what was coming for his friends at the Independence Retirement Community, which everyone called the Indie? Were the residents about to suffer financial ruin because of risky investments? If so, he’d be angry at the perpetrators for their heartless guile and frustrated with his friends for being so gullible.

The television show made the point, though, and he agreed, that adults spend most of their lives collecting assets to make retirement possible and the rest of their days worried if their accumulated treasure will last as long as they do, leading some retirees to make risky and uninformed choices with their nest eggs. Was that what his friends had done? Made bad choices with their money? Is that what the emailer taunted him about?

Travail’s instinct was to fire off a harsh response to the email with some choice lawyer-like words and warnings, but he ignored the bait—he suspected they wouldn’t respond anyway—and he punched the remote control instead.

The television screen faded to black, and his den fell silent, save for Blue’s rhythmic snores and his jerking legs. Travail’s black and tan coonhound must be dreaming, chasing ducks along the lake behind Travail’s cottage, as he was apt to do in real life, and as usual, failing to catch the waterfowl before they darted back into the water. Travail leaned over his club chair’s arm and let his free hand graze on Blue’s back until his pet stopped running in his sleep.

Maybe the email was a prank. Maybe, like him, a friend had become bored with life at the Indie. And yet, the email bothered him.

Whose lives—which friends’ lives—were about to be shattered? And how? And for that matter, why? And what did he have to do with it?

Since moving a year earlier into the Independence Retirement Community, Travail had made two best friends, Harriet Keaton and Yeager Alexander, and several other good friends. He’d met many other retirees, some whose company he tolerated and some whose company he could do without. Either way, he didn’t want to see anyone hurt. He certainly didn’t want his close friends to suffer, and he didn’t want to be the person responsible for their pain.

The flame on the candle he’d lit this morning was down to the base of the wick. He turned away from it, detesting the severe loneliness of March 31.

There was no logic for feeling so alone—what with all the crimes, court cases, and historic mysteries Harriet, Yeager, and he navigated since he arrived at the Indie and the time they spent together—but it was hard to control his feelings, especially the feeling of being by himself. A Jewish resident told him about the tradition of lighting a candle on the anniversary of a loved one’s death. It felt loving to strike the match in Rachael’s honor, but as day became night, Travail’s mood shifted. It had been three years to the day.

The flickering light had a strobe-like effect on the things that reminded him of Rachael: her furniture, her quilts, her artwork, her pictures. Travail missed Rachael’s kindness, her playfulness, her creativity, and the rituals they shared. The flicker made the past too present, making him long for another night and morning and day together. She was here, there, and everywhere, but nowhere at all.

Assertive is what he’d needed to be in the moment that changed everything. He and Rachael were in the mountains at a high-elevation rental for a getaway when a freak storm rolled in and dumped six inches of snow on the ground. Rachael decided to drive to the local general store to stock the pantry for their cozy weekend together. He had a work call and offered to go with her after he finished.

“It’s just snow,” she’d said.

“Okay, but be careful,” he’d responded.

“Always, dear.” Then she kissed him on the mouth, patted his bottom, and walked out of his life forever.

The news came in a phone call from the local police. First came the shock, then the grief, and then the Monday-morning quarterbacking. He should have insisted Rachael let him drive her. He should have done more to protect her. If he had, maybe she would still be here. Maybe the out-of-control delivery truck that hit the black ice would have killed him instead of her, or maybe Travail could have prevented the accident.

Spring in North Carolina was supposed to be about new beginnings, not endings, with the dogwoods and azaleas in bloom, but his eyes grew wet from the memories, and he felt a sudden heaviness in his body.

He looked at the email again and became resolute. For sure, he would not make the same mistake twice with the people he cared about. He would protect them.

But who was behind the email?

Whoever wanted sweet vengeance against his friends wanted vengeance against him too, because their pain would be his pain. The question for his lawyer brain—used to solving riddles for years—was: who despised them and him that much?

Like an unexpected electric shock, the answer startled him. This email was exactly the kind of plot his nemesis, Robert Elkin, would conjure. If Elkin hurt Harriet, Yeager, and his other close friends, he hurt Travail worse.

But wasn’t Elkin no longer a threat? They’d exposed his concealment of the truth about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, avoided death at the hands of his father, pushed him out of his Big Law leadership position, and seen to it that the state bar took his law license. Elkin no longer had big-time lawyer power. The only thing he had was anger, resentment, and a low-paying job as a paralegal with a former client, though Travail didn’t know the client’s name or their business. It was a sharp drop from the level of influence that had made the man dangerous, and yet, there was reason to be cautious. Elkin was cunning and would hold a grudge till death do they part.

Travail leaned his head back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling, and pondered the text again: financial ruin, untold heartbreak, and trials and tribulations.

Harriet was too smart to get caught up in a financial scam. Not so with Yeager. He was impulsive, likely to jump at the chance to possess something shiny because it might become shinier.

Travail pulled an olive-colored sweatshirt over his t-shirt, woke Blue, and took him into the backyard to do his business under the stars. While he waited, Travail glanced across Lost Cove Lake to Harriet’s cottage. He inhaled the fresh night air, and he marveled at the main building’s reflection on the lake’s surface. Harriet’s lights were out. She, an early riser, must be asleep.

Seeing Harriet’s peaceful cottage raised a question he’d been pondering. Should he ask her on a date? Carrie Roberts, the Indie Gossip Queen, thought so and often shared her opinion.

Most days, it seemed like the right decision not to ask Harriet—or anyone else, for that matter—on a date. Three years wasn’t that long, really, since Rachael died. And yet, here he was, caught in a web he’d spun for himself, trapped somewhere between what he no longer had and the companionship he wanted but resisted. Harriet was his friend. Should he keep it that way?

Harriet would most likely turn him down anyway. He was a project, and he knew it, starting with the lesson she’d had to teach him last year that retirement living is not life’s dead end but a fresh path forward. And now, with him being a sixty-six-year-old widower afraid to address his feelings, she’d be quick to beg off.

Blue finished up, and the two headed inside. His watch told him it was a new day. He blew out the dwindling flame on the candle and headed to his bedroom, where Blue was already curled up on the end of Travail’s queen-size bed. Wearing only striped boxers and a white cotton t-shirt, Travail pulled the covers up to his chin. With a good night’s sleep, he’d be fresh in the morning to put his effort into stopping Elkin. He still had his law license, after all, and as Yeager would tell him from time to time, “You ain’t dead yet.”

He closed his eyes and imagined tying a dry fly rig with two nymphs on a dropper line, the key to catching river trout on and below the surface at the same time. This falling-asleep system was better than counting backward from three hundred by threes. It worked its charm in less than five minutes.

Travail didn’t know when he dozed off that the murder train had left the station. He didn’t know when he began to snore that someone had already set the trap for his friends. And he didn’t know when he fell into a deep sleep that when the sun came up, he would ponder, and not for the first time, how he could have been so wrong to believe retirement living would ever be boring or lonely.

***

Excerpt from Deadly Gold Rush by Landis Wade. Copyright 2026 by Landis Wade. Reproduced with permission from Landis Wade. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Place the blame where it should go: on chocolate. The good stuff. The variety that melts way too fast as you swirl it over your tongue and let it cuddle the inside of your mouth, knowing the sensation is fleeting, which makes it more delicious. Yeah, that’s the kind I’m talking about.

I opened the front door of my Vegas condo and instantly tried to slam it. Except, the man I faced handed me a golden, foil-wrapped box with the unmistakable Godiva logo.

He placed it in the palm of his right hand and extended his arm. Then he stepped back. With elegance and skill, he had baited the hook, and I was snagged. Just like that.

I’m fast and grab the box before he could pull away. Or maybe that was his plan all along. If it hadn’t been for the lure of delectable dark chocolate, I would have stayed happily ignorant about sex slaves, black-market babies, cheating preachers, and an assortment of lowlifes that suddenly intruded on my cluttered, frazzled life.

If only I’d slammed the door, I would never have been rejected, arrested, and nearly exterminated.

Wait, did you just say, “Back the truck up”? Sorry, writing a memoir is new to me, and I just got overly excited to tell you everything. Instead, I’m taking some deep yoga-style breaths and will give you the whole story, nothing but the truth, just like it happened.

You see, at the stroke of another scorching Las Vegas summer midnight, I found myself feeling the still sizzling breeze swirling around my sleep shorts and tank top—front door open, air conditioning spewing out into the neighborhood. I stood and sniffed the corners of the box, knowing full well the pleasures that were inside. Why was this guy on my doorstep? It was wrong. It was a moment, much later, I wanted to stop time—like you can while watching Netflix. Instead, I ripped open the box, placed a scrumptious piece of heaven-on-earth into my mouth and eyed up and down what the devil had dumped on my doorstep.

Medical studies have proven it’s a bad idea to let a woman with PMS eat a pound of Godiva at one time, or so some new report said. Trust me, however. It’s an even worse idea to try to take chocolate away from a woman, PMS or not.

Fortunately, this guy certainly knew women. So he waited. I gobbled three more. In a row. Then handed him back the two-thirds empty box. I’m not greedy, see?

Forget whatever you’re thinking. This man was not a hunka, hunka burning love, but seemed to be my pudgy grandfather. Or a doppelgänger dressed collar to cuffs in glitter galore, gold, and some gosh-awful alligator-esque cowboy boots. In blood red.

He squinted in the light of the front steps of my townhouse/condo combo, and his chin dragged low. He grumbled, muttered, and withdrew his left hand from behind his back, producing yet another box with the chocolatier’s signature wrapping. I told you he was good. I salivated, snatched it, and stepped out of the way. I’m not addicted to the stuff; I just like it a lot, a whole lot.

Okay, that gives you the abbreviated version of why, five minutes later, my disgruntled relative was huddled on the beige sofa in the sterile Las Vegas condo that came with my current job. It does not explain why I was stomping up and down in front of him, but I’ll get to that. You see, I’m usually the one who solves problems; that’s my field, being I’m a minister and all.

You heard it right. I might not look like any preacher you’ve ever met, being that I’m rounded in all the right places, and I prefer a flashier wardrobe than you may have seen on church ladies. Like it or not, that’s me, Pastor Jane Angieski. I’m ordained and licensed, overly educated and fully confused a good portion of the time. I’ve been told, by the governing board of my denomination, that I should be more professional. It’s taken a long time and therapy, but I like me as I am.

You’re not the first, you know, to wonder how a flashy gal like me got into the ministry business. Most folks do not come straight out and ask because they’re dumbfounded to find out I know the Good News backward, forward, and well done in the middle. My response when they sputter a question or raise both eyebrows to the ceiling? “You see. They have quotas. Recall affirmative action? The denomination needed more females who had curves and padding in their ranks. There were plenty of string bean ones.”

Honestly? Hold on to something sturdy:

When I returned to college to finish my master’s, I was working part-time in retail at Victoria’s Secret, then at a mortuary where I applied makeup to the dearly departed. I also gave out contraceptives and condoms at a free clinic in Watts, and did some hard time asking, “Do you want fries with that?” Along the way, I made enough to avoid incurring huge debt. Psychology was to be my field. I am outrageously curious about people. We humans are so weird, and I love it.

One steamy Los Angeles day, I attended a program on campus because the AC in my apartment was broken. I also knew that with luck there’d be cake and coffee. The program, as I found out, was to recruit grad students into the ministry. It was probably the sugar talking, but I signed on the dotted line and started that summer attending seminary. Graduated with honors, accepted an assistant minister gig straight out of the seminary doors and got kicked out because I volunteered to help the cops in tracking down hoods in the hood where I was the pastor in this ghetto church.

The church council didn’t mind that I nabbed the bad guys looking like a lady of the evening who could do it all night. What they didn’t like was that I appeared on the front of the L. A. Times in a hot pink leather miniskirt, strappy sandals that wound up to my knees and a blouse leaving little to the imagination of Great Aunt Tillie, or anyone else. The news story hit the floor running, and little old me was seen and talked about on PBS News Hour, CNN, Fox News, and then YouTube, and then it went viral. As if no one had seen a minister before. Go figure.

People magazine beseeched and besought me for an interview, full four pages of me, but better judgment kicked in. I turned it down after a call from a member of my denomination’s district council put the brakes on that one. Besides I don’t always want to stay and play second fiddle in the church hierarchy. I do have some pride and ambition. I’d like to be known someday as an important voice in ministry, not one of those television evangelists with flapping eyelashes and hair like dear old Marge Simpson. No offense, Marge. It’s not a good look for either of us.

The metaphorical knuckle-wrapping, to me, was worth it. It resulted in the dealing, drugging, and pimping partners in crime who went off to a helping place in another area of California, clogging an overstuffed prison system even more. Not my problem there. I got a letter of commendation from LA’s mayor and my backside booted to Vegas. I wasn’t exactly demoted, but I was no longer a full pastor. These days, if I should burp without saying, “pardonnez-moi,” the council hears about it. In detail. Hence, the youth minister I’m filling in for left exact instructions on the requirements of my professional demeanor so that I wouldn’t lead any teens down a slope where a flashing sign reads: Beware: She’s Crazy and Dangerous.

Back to the man of the midnight hour littering my living room. His grumbling continued. Like waiting out a storm, I sat down next to the huddled mass of manhood whose name isn’t Woe Is Me, but Henry J. Angieski, Ph.D.—my grandfather who just happens to have an alternative personality, one of a classic rocker with the 70s band Slam Dunk. You may have heard of him when he was called Hank A. Yes, that’s Gramps. Although you wouldn’t recognize him. I didn’t.

Gramps is a “let’s get coffee” kind, friends with Sir Paul, Bruce, Mick and a lot more you can name, if you like the older stuff. In all of my thirty-five years, I’d never known him to be defeated, never seen him without a sly smile and a plan to take on the world.

Quick familial footnote: He and Gram couldn’t have children, and they knew it before they married. Gramps told me like this: “Uncle Sam really needed me and thought a tropical Asian trip might help me understand humanity better.”

Translation? It was 1965. He’d dropped out of grad school to find his musical mojo. He was drafted, surprise, surprise, and sent directly to Vietnam where horrible things were happening, like an unpopular and soul-crushing war. Did you wonder how I got into this mix?

Gramps said, “I found the son of my heart there, honey. The kid was always hanging around the barracks. He had red hair like your gorgeous gram and the most intense almond-shaped eyes I’d ever seen. He picked up English like it was nothing, and one day when I handed him a guitar, he started to play chords. He was six or seven, but he didn’t know his birthday and had forgotten his father’s name, if he’d ever known it. Mom died in childbirth, and the bio family shunned him. The other guys in my unit adopted him like a mascot.

“I was finishing my deployment when I got word that I’d been accepted into the music program at the University of Southern California. Your Uncle Sam thought I deserved to return to California because, with this chunk of shrapnel in my knee, I was pretty useless as a foot soldier, and I told everyone the kid was mine.”

That country was in shambles, already invaded by the French, English, and Russians before the US stepped into the mess. So Gramps returned to Gram with a ready-made son whom they adored.

Fast forward ten years. Gram died after a painful battle with cancer, and a couple of months later I came into the world. My father somehow neglected to tell Gramps there was a teenager in his life who was about to birth their baby, and it was a surprise all around when she showed up one day with me in a pink blanket.

Parenthood didn’t rock the Richter scale of life for this young couple. Gramps, once more, manned up, and he became the saving grace for me. The story goes that the twosome, my bio parents, piled their macrobiotic rice, pine nut smoothies, ceremonial drums, unfiltered carrot juice, and love beads inside a rusting, hand-painted purple VW bus, dotted with yellow daisies, and went in search of their bliss. I believe they were about ten years past the real hippies, but that didn’t seem to deter them. The last I heard, when I was sixteen, was that they were in Sedona, selling therapy rocks to tourists. I was happy for them; I had the best grandfather, the coolest Gramps in my school. However, getting a rock in the mail for one’s birthday stunk.

Enough about me. At least for a few minutes—unless it has to do with the reason I wrote this memoir, which is to explain why I ended up a viral sensation on YouTube. Again. Although the in-between stuff scared me silly.

Gramps interrupted my gallop down Memory Lane with a grunt that sounded suspiciously like he was swearing, which I knew he didn’t. Or the normal-ish grandfather I previously claimed didn’t swear.

“Call me Onesimus,” he growled.

“What-a-muss?”

“Get a clue, you’re a preacher. You know this stuff. Always spouting it off as you do all that Bible-belting.” Then he grumbled about how his granddaughter could easily become a pompous prig.

“I’ve never belted a Bible in my life, I’ll thank you.” And I wondered in a tiny spot in my heart if I should look up the definition of prig before I felt insulted.

“Don’t give me that look, girl. I’m immune. Been looking at myself too long for one of your freeze-frame frowns to frazzle me and make me spill my guts.”

“Are you talking Old Testament or New?”

“Look it up, Pastor.”

He never calls me, Pastor. Never before had he even raised his voice to me. “Who are you and what did you do with my grandfather?” I demanded. My now mostly-retired from sex, gals, and rock and roll, and teaching at the university, grandfather lived in the beachy town of Carlsbad, California. “It’s midnight, and my real grandfather is safety tucked in bed right now, not in Vegas, baby.”

We stared at each other, then a flickering two-watt bulb flipped on. “Are you talking about Onesimus, as in the slave the Apostle Paul wrote about?”

“Bing-a-ding ding, girl. Listen, Janey, I’m having a crisis, one that, well, is personal, as private as it can get for a man.”

From the dancing rhinestones embedded on his denim shirt, past the belt buckle the size of Rhode Island, and the boots which had three-inch heels, the man was either auditioning for a low-budget movie or had lost his marbles. My real grandfather was a rock star, wore a lot of black, dragged a guitar everywhere and didn’t dress like a cowboy. He was dependable, had style, sure, and a heart for the next gal and guy. Always.

Okay, there were some ladies of a certain age, groupies if I’m honest, who would have had their way with him, but Gramps was incredibly discreet about that stuff. Then again, I never had a conversation about the birds and the bees with him.

“Oh, personal and private,” I muttered, regretting my decision to have that second Lean Cuisine Mexican Medley. I did not ever, ever, want to discuss my grandfather’s sexual inadequacies or his performance issues, and the souring sensation in my stomach agreed. Big time.

Instead, I blurted, “Men your age are well past that. For Pete’s sake, don’t tell me you’re in Vegas to marry an 18-year-old, half-naked dancer who wears pink feathers that glow in the dark with matching pasties that barely cover her nipples. And that she’s just misunderstood and currently employed at a local strip joint because she’s putting herself through med school.”

He just took off a boot. There was no denial.

“She’s not some chorus babe, Jane. She has to be at least 18 or 19, however. Guess she could be 16 with a fake ID. I never asked.”

***

Excerpt from Jane Won’t Quit by Eva Shaw. Copyright 2026 by Eva Shaw. Reproduced with permission from Eva Shaw. All rights reserved.