CHAPTER 16: A TROJAN HORSE

Around two o’clock in the afternoon that following day, at a little place called the Creekside Bed & Breakfast, a wonderfully friendly – and admittedly cute – elderly couple named Sylvia and Frank Parkinson came into the lobby to cash in on their reservation.

The high school teenager who welcomed them – a sophomore named Harper Norris, whose parents owned and operated the place – bounced up from a homework assignment she had been attacking online when they came in.

The Creekside Bed & Breakfast was a large Victorian home nestled on a small spot near the old train bridge and right on the water. Originally built as the mayor’s home in the late 1800’s, it had long since been remodeled into an old-style B&B with a little café out back and walking paths through the manicured gardens and up to the bridge itself, which now doubled as a walking trail up into the hills that surrounded the town.