Prologue
What has gone on before …..
USE OF THE local news station and incoming phone calls leads Detective Jonathan Miller to the residence of the homicide victim. As Miller and Officer Ted Branson are about to leave, he notices a pair of round, gold-rimmed glasses on the floor, just at the foot of the orange chair. The rose-tinted lenses seem a little odd for a man. Maybe they belong to someone who visited. Miller reaches for the glasses.
“What does the world look like through rose-colored lenses, Mr. Edwards?” He places the glasses on his face. “Whoooooaaa!
What was that?” He snatches the glasses from his face, startling Branson and Tom Bradley, the landlord. When he slowly puts the glasses back on, the room changes before his eyes. Images of Daniel Edwards move about in front of him. He quickly takes them off again and hands them to Branson.
“Here, look in these! What do you see?”
“They’re in need of a good cleaning, Sir.” Branson takes them. off and rubs them clean with his shirt tail.
The rose-tinted informant is key to Miller solving this case. They show him the last person to possibly see Edwards alive, but now he has to find her. He calls in the sketch artist.
When he arrives, Miller describes the young woman, giving as much detail as he can remember from the glasses. The artist captures everything from the sparkle in her eyes to the warmth in her smile.
“How’s this?” The artist turns the sketch pad around to Miller.
She seems to leap from the page into Miller’s head.
“It’s very, very good.”
“She’s pretty. Who is she?”
“I don’t know. I’m hoping your sketch will help me figure that out.”
“How did you get this much detail?”
It’s almost like a memory, just not my memory. “That’s a long story for another time. Thanks for your help.”
He turns to his computer and types in French café and gets a short list of restaurants in the downtown area. But his search for the young woman takes him unknowingly to the home of her identical twin Cora and her Aunt Elyse.
Twenty years ago, with the help of her sister Elyse, Ilysa James gave birth to twin girls, one of which hovered above the very edge of death’s door.
Elyse, using her connections with the Dark Arts, revived the baby, kept it as her own and never revealed its existence to Ilysa.
Edwards was hired to find Ilysa and her child. He tracked her from Atlanta to Louisiana, all the while draining the funds from his employer. However, what Edwards found, he believed, was worth much more than his original deal.
Lies and secrets have their ways of revealing themselves, and as Daniel Edwards followed one twin, he eventually bumped into the other and noting the small differences in them realized there were two.
But he wasn’t the only one to uncover the secret. Ilysa’s daughter, Callie bumped into Elyse who accidentally called her by the wrong name and once Callie knew, Ilysa knew too.
With the help of some of the residents of Hammond, Ilysa is no longer hunted by Edwards and ultimately gets revenge on her sister.
