Sleep Stalker (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 1) by Joy Elbel Read Free Book Online

was he talking about?  And new perfume?  It felt like he was making things up just so he could have an excuse to argue with me.  He couldn’t possibly believe that I was cheating on him, could he?  The whole situation was so insanely confusing. 
         I needed to take my mind off of Zach before I went completely crazy trying to figure him out.  Writing.  Writing was a great escape from reality.  I propped myself up with every pillow I could find and opened my laptop.  I clicked through my Word files until I found the one I wanted. 
         SOS.  Those three letters stood for Shades of Summer.  That was the title of the book I’d been working on for quite some time.  It was the story of how I came to Charlotte’s Grove and my first encounter with a ghost.  Originally, I only meant for it to be something I wrote for personal enjoyment.  But now that I was comfortable with my own weirdness, I was eager to share it with the world.  Yes.  Writing was how I was going to keep my mind occupied tonight and every night until Zach started acting like a proper human being again.
         Not even twenty minutes later, I realized how dreadfully bad my plan was.  Shades of Summer was about one other thing—Zach, how I met him and how quickly I fell in love with him.  I couldn’t write about the first days of our romance when I was so utterly irritated with him.  Frustrated, I dug into the potato chips and tried to think of another way to pass the time.  Halfway through the bag, I had my answer—online research.  It was time for me to find out everything I could about my mom.
         Sometimes talking to Dad about her was weird.  He didn’t visit the grave she shared with my sister Miranda because he said graves only contained bodies not the actual souls of the dead.  But I think that was only part of it.  I had a theory that he hadn’t totally absolved himself of his guilt over their deaths. 
         I was no stranger to guilt but the lack of information I was getting from him was infinitely maddening.  I was full of questions that he couldn’t answer and he didn’t seem bothered by the fact that he knew so little about her.  Eventually, I stopped broaching the subject with him but my curiosity was far from satisfied.  So shortly before leaving Charlotte’s Grove, I rooted through his filing cabinet until I found their marriage certificate.  Armed with her full name and birthdate, I would find those answers for myself.
         Camille Ayita Rogers, birthday May 23, 1967.  Her middle name intrigued me—I’d never even heard of it before.  So the first thing I did was look for a website that gave the meanings and origins of names.  Ayita was a Native American name of Cherokee origin meaning “first dancer”.  Interesting.  Was it merely a coincidence considering the fact that my mom was a dancer?  Or did I come from a long line of dancers?  If so, this apple definitely fell closer to her father’s side of the family tree.  And so I also began to wonder, was I part Cherokee?  I got my curls and pale complexion from my dad but mom and I both had black hair and when I saw her at the prom; I noticed that her skin was a beautiful shade of tan.
         According to what little I already knew, Mom’s parents disowned her after she got pregnant with me.  Dad said it was because they didn’t want her to give up her career.  If I found them now, would they want to talk to me?  Had enough time passed for them to forget their anger toward her and her decisions?   Why do people have to be so complicated?  Of course that thought made me chuckle out loud at the irony.  I myself ranked near the top of the complicatedness scale.  There was only one person who I felt currently outranked me.  Zach.  But I wasn’t going to think about him now.
         I found very little information regarding my mother online.  She died before the internet was widely available so all I found