Miss Polly had a Dolly (Emma Frost #2) (26 page)

Willow
Rose
is an international Best-selling author.
She writes mystery/Horror, Paranormal Romance and fantasy. Originally from
Denmark she now lives on Florida’s Space Coast with her husband and two
daughters. She is a huge fan of Stephen King, Anne Rice and Isabel Allende.
When she is not writing or reading she enjoys watching the dolphins play in the
waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

Connect
with Willow online:

http://www.willow-rose.blogspot.com/

www.facebook.com/willowredrose

https://twitter.com/madamwillowrose

The following is an e
xcerpt from Willow
Rose's international Best Selling Novel:
One, Two ... He is coming for you
(Rebekka Frank
#1)

One, Two ...
He is coming for you

Prologue

One,
two …
the song in his head wouldn’t escape. Sure,
he knew where it came from. It was that rhyme from the horror movies. The ones
with the serial killer, that Freddy Krueger guy with a burned, disfigured face,
red and dark green striped sweater, brown fedora hat, and a glove armed with
razors to kill his victims in their dreams and take their souls, which would
kill them in the real world. “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” that was the movie’s
name. Yes, he knew its origin. And he had his reasons for singing that
particular song in this exact moment. He knew why, and so would his future
victims.

He lit a cigarette and stared out the window at
a waiting bird in the bare treetop. Waiting for the sunlight to come back, just
like the rest of the kingdom of Denmark at this time of the year. Waiting for
spring with its explosion of colors, like a sea of promises of sunlight and a
warmer wind. But still the winter had to go away. And it hadn’t. The trees were
still naked, the sky gray as steel, the ground wet and cold. February always
seemed the longest month in the little country though it was the shortest in
the calendar. People talked about it every day as they showed up for work or
school.

Every freaking day since Christmas.

Now, it wouldn’t be long before the light came
back. But in reality it always took months of waiting and anticipating before
spring finally appeared.

The man staring out the window didn’t pay much
attention to the weather though. He stood with his cigarette between two
fingers. To him, the time he had been waiting ages for was finally here.

He kept humming the same song, the same line.
One, two, he is coming for you
.... The
cigarette burned a hole in the parquet floor. He picked up the remains with his
hands wearing white plastic gloves and carefully placed them in a small plastic
bag that he put in his brown briefcase. He would leave no trace of being in the
house where the body of another man was soon to be found.

He closed the briefcase and went into the hall,
where he sat in a leather chair by the door to the main entrance.

Waiting for his victim to come home.

He glanced at himself in the mirror by the
entrance door. He could see from where he was sitting how nicely he had dressed
for the occasion.

He was outfitted in a blue blazer with the
famous Trolle coat of arms on the chest, little yellow emblem with a red
headless lion—the traditional blazer for a student of Herlufsholm
boarding school. The school was located by the Susaa River in Naestved, about
80 kilometers south of Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. As the oldest
boarding school in Denmark, the school took pride in an array of unique
traditions. Some of them the world outside never would want to know about.

The blazer was now too small, so he couldn’t
close it, but otherwise he was looking almost like he had been back in 1986. He
was, after all, still a fairly handsome man. And unlike the majority of the
guys from back then, he had kept most of his hair.

His victim had done well for himself, he
noticed. No surprise in that though, with parents who were multibillionaires.
The old villa by the sea of Smaalandsfarvandet in the southern part of Zeeland
was big and admirable. It could easily fit a couple of families. It was typical
of his victim to have a place like this just as his holiday residence.

When he heard the Jaguar on the gravel outside,
he took the glove out of the briefcase and put it on his right hand. He
stretched his fingers and the metal claws followed.

He listened for voices but didn’t hear any to
his satisfaction.

His victim was alone.

Chapter 1

“We’re
going
to be too late. Do you want me to be fired on my
first day”? I yelled for the third time while gazing up the stairs for my
six-year-old daughter, Julie.

“Go easy on her, Rebekka. It’s her first day
too,” argued my father.

He stood in the doorway to the living room of my
childhood home, leaning on his cane. I smiled to myself. How I had missed him
all these years living in the other part of the country. Now he had gotten old,
and I felt like I had missed out on so much and that he had missed out on so
much of our lives too. It was fifteen years since I left the town to study
journalism. I had only been back a few times since and then, of course, when
Mom died five years ago. Why didn’t I visit him more often, especially after he
was alone? Instead I had left it to my sister to take care of him. She lived in
Naestved about fifteen minutes away.

Well there was no point in wondering now.

“You can’t change the past,” my dad would say.
And did say when I called him crying my heart out and asking him if Julie and I
could come and stay with him for a while.

I sighed and wished I could change the past and
change everything about my past. Except for one thing. One delightful little blond
thing.

“I’m ready, Mom.”

Her.

Julie is the love of my life. Everything I‘ve
done has been for her and her future. I sacrificed everything to give her a
better life. But that meant I had to leave it all behind—her dad, our
friends and neighbors, and my career with a huge salary. All for her.

“I’m ready.” She ran down the stairs looking
like an angel with her beautiful blond hair braided in the back.

“Yes, you are,” I nodded and looked into her
bright blue eyes. “Do you have everything ready for school”?

She sighed with annoyance and walked past me.

“Are you coming or not?” She asked when she
reached the door.

I picked up my bag from the floor, kissed my dad
on the cheek, and followed my daughter who waited impatiently.

“After you my dear,” I said as we left the
house.

I found a job at a local newspaper in
Karrebaeksminde. It wasn’t much of a promotion since I used to work for one of
the biggest newspapers in the country.
Jyllandsposten
was located in Aarhus, the second biggest town in Denmark. That was where we
used to live.

When I had a family.

I used to be their star reporter, one of those
who always gets the cover stories. Moving back to my childhood town was not an
easy choice, since I knew I had to give up my position as a well-known
reporter. But it had to be done. I had to get away.

Now, after dropping off my daughter at her new
school and smoking two cigarettes in anxiety for my daughter’s first day, I
found myself at my new workplace.

“You must be Rebekka Franck. Welcome to our
editorial room,” said a sweet elderly lady sitting at one of the two desks
piled high with stacks of paper. I looked around the room and saw no one else.
The room was a mess, and so was she. Her long red hair went in all directions.
She had tried to tame it with a butterfly hair clip, but it didn’t seem to do
the job. She got up and waddled her chubby body in a flowered yellow dress over
to greet me.

“I’m Sara,” she said. “I’m in charge of all the
personal pages. You know, the obituaries and such. People come to me if they
need to put in an announcement for a reception or a 50-year anniversary
celebration. Stuff like that. That’s what I do.”

I nodded and looked confused at all the old
newspapers in stacks on the floor.

“You probably would like to see your desk.”

I nodded again and smiled kindly. “Yes, please.”

“It’s right over there.” Sara pointed at the
other desk in the room. Then she looked back at me, smiling widely. “It’s just
going to be the two of us.”

I smiled back, a little scared of the huge
possibility of going insane in the near future. I knew it was a small newspaper
that covered all of Zeeland, and that this would only be the department taking
care of the local news from Karrebaeksminde. But still … two people. Could that
be all?

“Do you want to see the rest of your new
workplace?” Sara asked and I nodded.

She took a couple of steps to the right and
opened a door. “In here we have a small kitchen with a coffeemaker and the
bathroom.”

“Let me guess. That’s it?” I tried not to sound
too sarcastic. This was really a step down for me, to put it mildly.

Sara sat down and put on a set of headphones. I
moved a stack of newspapers and found my chair underneath. I opened my laptop
and up came a picture of Julie, me, and her dad on our trip to Sharm el-Sheikh
in Egypt. We all wore goggles and big smiles. Quickly I closed the lid of the
laptop and closed my eyes.

Damn him, I thought. Damn that stupid moron.

I got up from the desk and went into the break
room to grab a cup of coffee. I opened the window and lit a cigarette. For
several minutes I stared down at the street. A few people rushed by. Otherwise
it was a sleepy town compared to where I used to live. I thought about my
husband and returning to Aarhus, but that was simply not an option for me. I
had to make it here.

I drank the rest of the coffee and killed my
cigarette on the bottom of the mug. Then I closed the window and stepped back
into the editorial room.

I need to clean this place up
,
I thought but then regretted the idea. It was simply too much work for one person
for now. Maybe another day. Maybe I could persuade Sara to help me. I looked at
her with the gigantic headphones on her ears. It made her face look even
fatter. It was too bad that she was so overweight. She actually had a pretty
face and attractive brown eyes. She looked at me and took off the headphones.

“What are you listening to?” I asked and
expected that it was a radio station or a CD of her favorite music. But it
wasn’t.

“It’s a police scanner,” she said.

I looked at her surprised. “You have a police
scanner?”

She nodded.

“I thought police everywhere in the country had
shifted from traditional radio-scanners to using a digital system.”

“Maybe in your big city, but down here we still
use the old-fashioned ones.”

“What do you use it for?”

“It is the best way to keep track of what is
happening in this town. I get my best stories to tell my neighbors from this
little fellow,” she said while she leaned over gave the radio a friendly tap.
“We originally got this baby for journalistic purposes, in order to be there
when a story breaks, like a bank has been robbed or something like that. But
the past five or six years nothing much has happened in our town, so it hasn’t
brought any stories to the newspaper. But I sure have a lot of fun listening to
it.”

She leaned over her desk with excitement in her
brown eyes.

“Like the time when the mayor’s wife got caught
drunk in her car. That was great. Or when the police were called out to a
domestic dispute between the pastor and his wife. As it turned out she had been
cheating on him. Now that was awesome.”

I stared at the woman in front of me and didn’t
know exactly what to say. Instead I just smiled and started walking back to my
desk, when she stopped me.

“Ah, yes I forgot. We are not all alone. We do
have a photographer working here too. He only comes in when there’s a job for
him to do. His name is Sune Johansen. He looks a little weird, but you’ll learn
to love him. He’s from a big city too.”

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