I’m tired, boss…tired of bein’ on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. The Green Mile

It was a dark and stormy night, a cliché Hayden Winters dearly loved. These broody, moody nights of lightning and thunder and violent wind fueled his imagination like no other. A man intent on committing murder….

The storm had moved in around midnight, interrupting his original plans to sleep. He could never sleep on a night like this. Didn’t want to, especially here in a house filled with memories and secrets.

Everyone, he believed, has a secret, and the south was filled with them. That’s why he’d come.

Hayden had a secret, too, a psychological canker worm. One that was eating a raw, black hole in his soul. Not that he’d ever let anyone see inside to know that much about him. To the world, Hayden Winters was a winner, a success, a man who brushed problems away with a charming smile. He was a man invited to the best parties he seldom attended and who gave rare, but coveted interviews. A man with a charmed life.

But on these dark, moody, broody nights the demons danced around the edges of his fertile mind. He wondered at his sanity, and knew it was only by a merciful God that he was strong of constitution and could keep the demons in their rightful place. Most of the time.

So he killed people. Dozens of them. Books littered with bodies fed some perverse need in the populace and kept his bank account fat and happy.

In the elegant rented bedroom-the Mulberry Room-lit only by the glow of his laptop, Hayden rose, went to the windows to watch and listen as rain lashed the sides of Peach Orchard Inn with its silver-on-black fingers clawing to get in.

The view outside was far different than it had been upon his arrival earlier today. An Australian shepherd, graying around the edges, had drowsed on the long and glorious antebellum veranda. Hayden had immediately envisioned himself at the wicker furniture, feet up on the railing with a glass of Julia Presley’s almost-famous peach tea and his imagination in flight.

The two-story columned mansion had shone in the sun, glowing in its whiteness with dark trimmed shutters, flowers spilling everywhere and thick vines twining like great green arms around the oak trees. He’d driven down the winding lane of massive magnolias right into an antebellum past, far from the distractions and manic pace of the modern world.

Peach Orchard Inn, a simple name for a magnificent house, restored he would bet, to better than its former glory. His assistant, who knew him better than most, though not well, had discovered the inn while on vacation and suggested he write the next bestseller here. Exhausted by the city bustle and another romance gone sour, he’d jumped at the idea. His ex should have taken him at his word. He’d told her from the beginning that he was neither husband nor father material. The reasons for this aversion he’d kept to himself, more for her protection than his. She didn’t know that, though, and had been hurt.

He hated hurting people. Other than in his books. And the latest episode drove him deeper into himself. A man like him ought not to need other people.

He could work here, rest here, research small town secrets for the next thriller. There were plenty of interesting places to commit murder.

Across the road, a single light glowed like a beacon in the storm. The source was the abandoned, dilapidated grist mill that had once been part of this farm. He knew this because he was ferociously curious and knowing was his business. Abandoned buildings provided perfect places to get away with murder. He’d be suitably inspired here among the hills and hollows of southern Tennessee.

A blue-fire javelin of lightning, fierce as a bolt straight from the hand of Zeus slit the night like a fiery blade. Gorgeous stuff.

Hayden stretched, rolled his neck, considered a walk in the violence.

He’d be up most of the night during a wild thunderstorm of this magnitude. He could feel the yet unformed story brewing in his blood, a bubbling cauldron of energy and creativity.

Coffee, and plenty of it, was a must. He wasn’t a Red Bull kind of guy. Something about it seemed addictive to him and if there was anything he feared greater than losing his only useful resource-his fertile mind-it was addiction. Addictions came, he knew, in many forms.

Leaving the laptop curser to blink a blind eye, he let himself out of the luxurious Mulberry Room and made his way down shadowy stairs carpeted in blood red, his hand on the smooth wooden banister, taking care on the creaky third step he’d noticed earlier. No self-respecting author of murder and mayhem missed a creaky step.

Lightning illuminated the curved staircase and thunder rumbled like a thousand kettle drums. The house stood steady, quiet even, as if it had weathered too much to be bothered by a thunderstorm. There were stories here. He could feel them.