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A reporter investigating strange disappearances falls in love with a mysterious woman who may be behind them—and who may not even be real.
WELCOME TO COOPERS VALLEY, MR. MORROW. GOOD LUCK MAKING SENSE OF IT.
Coopers Valley, Indiana. A peculiar town. Hard to pinpoint on a map. Inhabited by people who aren’t quite there. And carefully watched over by . . . someone.
To this fabled “Town of a Thousand Stories” comes Matt Morrow, a reporter investigating two unsolved missing persons cases. His real purpose? To restore a ruined reputation and redeem himself for a tragic mistake.
He soon finds himself in the company of beautiful Mrs. Zimmer, a police aide assigned to help his research. But even as he is powerfully drawn to this mysterious widow with the haunted eyes, he begins to suspect she’s involved in the two old cases.
As the hours pass his suspicions mount. Why won’t she give him a straight answer? What is she hiding? And how does she know so much about him and his own dark past?
As Morrow searches for answers, Dilly dodges his questions and offers instead entertaining stories about the townsfolk. Stories too fantastic to be true. Or are they?
The conflict between them mounts until they finally uncover the truth about themselves . . . and the shocking secret at the very heart of the town itself.
Coopers Valley. Where stories come alive.
Cover art by Leah Diekhoff studiophantasmic.com

Sujets

Fiction

Mystery

Detective

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Publié par	iUniverse
Date de parution	03 août 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781663254283
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

COOPERS VALLEY
Where stories come alive
Sequel to COOPERS CROSSING

Daniel Cross

COOPERS VALLEY
SEQUEL TO COOPERS CROSSING

Copyright © 2023 J. V. Shepherd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-5427-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5428-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023911885

iUniverse rev. date: 07/28/2023

To Roger and Doyn, my parents: They gave me love, a name, a home and my first typewriter.
CONTENTS
PRELUDE
HEADS OR TAILS?
951 MULBERRY STREET
SUZI
THE INITIAL TREE
NISSY, NILLY AND DALE
MY BIG TV ADVENTURE
THE CLICKY MACHINE
THE UNICORN IN THE PANTRY
THE NIGHT THE MERRY-GO-ROUND GOT LOOSE
GYPSY GIRL
THE GYPSY CARAVAN
THE CASE OF THE VANISHING MAYORS
THE LETTER
THE LITTLE ROOM
POSTLUDE
MAYOR’S FATE STILL UNKNOWN
From The Coopers Valley Daily Chapter, J uly 20, 1965
By Jay Dalton, Repo rter
“Mr. Coopers Valley” Still Missing After Five Years
Today would have been Jack Van Camp’s thirty-ninth birthday, an event traditionally celebrated as a city holiday.
This day, though, there are no fireworks, no parade, no celebration of any kind. Nor has there been one for the last five years—e ver since the popular mayor, nicknamed “Mr. Coopers Valley,” vanished without a trace March 14, 1960.
Five years on in their investigation, Coopers Valley Police Chief Tom Whitacre says the CVPD has interviewed dozens of witnesses and followed up on scores of tips. Clues, however, remain elusive.
“The case remains open,” Whitacre said. “We don’t believe that Jack Van Camp willingly left this town he loved so much. We will keep looking for him, and we will leave no stone unturned.”
Van Camp, according to town lore, arrived in 1955 with neither name nor memory. He quickly became a familiar figure around town. His knack for civic development and his uncanny knowledge of townspeople led to his election as the newly-named city’s first mayor.
In that role, Van Camp led Coopers Crossing, as it was called then, through a boom in population growth and business development, earning the town the nickname (one of several) “The Town that Jack Built.”
Van Camp was last seen on March 14, 1960. Anyone with knowledge of his whereabouts should call the Coopers Valley Police Department at ST7-9803. Ask for Mrs. Zimmer.
*
Predecessor Also Missing
In a strange coincidence, Mr. Van Camp’s civic predecessor, Leonard Hughes Ott, similarly disappeared two years before. Another popular figure among the town’s citizens, he is credited with “putting Coopers Crossing on the map,” according to Interim Mayor Bob Hollis.
Ott, a World War I veteran, retired from General Motors in Indianapolis and moved to Coopers Hollow, as the town was then called, in 1948. A bachelor like Mr. Van Camp, he bought and refurbished the town’s oldest house, the landmark Cooper House, and undertook a hobby of story-writing.
He soon established himself as a familiar figure throughout town, earning the unofficial title of “Mayor of Coopers Crossing” for his frequent walks through town, his amazing knowledge of so many of the townspeople and his lively support—both financial and civic—of the town’s astounding growth.
A beloved elder figure considered the patriarch of the town, Mr. Ott was last seen on January 3, 1958. Anyone with knowledge of his whereabouts should call the Coopers Valley Police Department at ST7-9803.
*
Townspeople: ‘Nothing Unusual Here’
W hat does the town think of all this? For the citizens of Coopers Valley, “the Mystery of the Missing Mayors” seems just two more unexplainable happenings in a town known (and nicknamed) for them—the “Town of a Thousand Stories.”
After all, Mayor Van Camp himself claimed to have arrived in town “quite out of nowhere.” And it was none other than him who once proclaimed Coopers Crossing “an out-of-the-ordinary town full of out-of-the-ordinary people.”
In the end, maybe all that can be said for certain about his fate and that of his predecessor is that it is “out of the ordinary.”
* * *
PRELUDE
I came to Coopers Valley in the fall of 1965 to solve two mysteries. Along the way I was drawn into a third. One older, deeper and much darker than either.
That mystery was a woman. She had dark hair, small hands and Gypsy eyes. It was the eyes that started it all. Everything else followed.
*
But first, a word about this most peculiar town.
Coopers Valley, Indiana, formerly Coopers Crossing and before that Coopers Hollow, has had a short but decidedly strange history.
Popping up almost overnight, then growing at an unnatural pace, the town was within a decade filled with people who had had the most extraordinary experiences . . . or so claimed.
The town’s, and townspeople’s, reputation for the bizarre, outlandish and supernatural quickly drew plenty of sightseers eager to find out for themselves if all the tales were true: Tales of people disappearing, genies popping from lamps, people swapping souls, balloons stalking people, radios broadcasting the future’s news, miniature mermaids basking in fountains and more.
As for the town’s phenomenal growth—Rumor (and tangible evidence) confirmed that people weren’t the only things appearing there, either overnight or in several cases in broad daylight. Factories cropping up over a weekend. Full-grown trees sprouting unseen in an afternoon. Roads opening where only woods stood before. Whole families materializing almost instantaneously, complete with their houses. Most curiously, all these appearances seem to have occurred without witnesses.
Beyond these anomalies was the town’s peculiar geography, often remarked by visitors and even studied by state cartographers. (Yes, there are such things.) The town appears on the map of Indiana somewhere around the south-central part of Sycamore County—around eight o’clock if the state of Indiana were a clock with Indianapolis as its center.
Efforts to map exact distances to surrounding towns, however, have proven strangely unsuccessful. Indeed, visitors returning home from Coopers Valley often remark that the distance driving to Coopers Valley does not equal the distance returning from it. Others have observed that distances to surrounding towns do not always makes sense in a geographical way.
Nonetheless, there Coopers Valley sits. It is a paradox in the form of an ordinary Hoosier farm community. An enigma situated somewhere, no one is quite sure where, among the fields, woods and dusty back roads of Indiana.
This strange town drew me, Matt Morrow, journalist, not for its geographic anomaly or its unaccountable population growth or even its residents’ supernatural tales. No, my interest was more a matter of the everyday world of facts, possibly even of crimes. What drew me was this question:
What happened to this town’s last two ma yors?
As an investigative journalist in Indianapolis, this question had caught my attention years before, when I read that two of this community’s mayors disappeared in succession without a trace, the first in early 1958, the second in spring of 1960. Both cases had both been thoroughly investigated by local and state authorities, and subsequently shelved as Unso lved.
While I have no particular interest in finding missing mayors (As far as I’m concerned, we have plenty to spare), my reporter’s news sense told me there was an untold story here: The two events surely were related. After all, while one mayor’s disappearance is a mystery, two mayors’ disappearances from the same small town are—What? A plot? A conspiracy? Something more than coincidence, anyway.
I wanted to find out more. I wanted to know what happened. And I wanted to write a sensational story revealing it all. Maybe, too, I hoped that doing so would restore my ruined reputation after all that had happened to me.
This was the mission, then, that brought me to Coopers Valley on a gloomy rain-promising November morning, and to the Coopers Valley Police Department headquarters.
And there my mission met its first obstacle.
* * *
1.
“What the hell do you want?” Police Chief Tom Whitacre snarled. This was my greeting when I stepped into his office.
He was a short man but broad, tucked into a too-tight police uniform whose shirt buttons puckered in a row up his belly like so many navels. Two close-set eyes beneath a single eyebrow darted a glance at the scar over my right temple before checking over the rest of me. His long chin jutted out like the blade of a coal shovel. I was vaguely re