Daughter of Aaron: Part One Fear

by Joel Vernon Smith

When Eddie Sand was given a medical discharge from the Army, he spent the next sixteen years in a Detroit suburb.  By 1984, when he had just turned thirty-nine, Eddie was fully aware that the demons from Vietnam wouldn’t depart from him.

One night in October, a flamboyant man steps into Eddie’s life.  Leonard Parks is wealthy, he says, because of his inborn writing talents.  He asks Eddie to accompany him to a special project in Grand Traverse County, Michigan, promising him a huge paycheck.

The older citizens in Grand Traverse County are in continual disagreement:  some say that Elsie DuJack died in a drowning accident during the summer of 1911 when she was only seven years old.  Others say that the parents kept their feeble-minded daughter hidden until 1967.   A third group argues that a thoroughly haunted and lonely Elsie is still alive at age eighty in 1984, though she had always been incredibly elusive.