Breakthrough (Annie Hansen Mysteries Book 4)

Book Summary

"Breakthrough" follows the lives of Annie Hansen, Mark Snow, and their daughter Skye in Edmonton. Skye's world is turned upside down when she's accused of her former boss's murder, prompting her parents to intervene. This gripping tale unravels a web of secrets and motives, with love at its core, as the Snow family seeks truth and freedom in the face of adversity.

Excerpt from Breakthrough (Annie Hansen Mysteries Book 4)

My name is Skye Snow – a beautiful name, say my friends. I’m the daughter of Annie Hansen-Snow and her husband, Mark. My hair is white-blonde and curled like egg noodles around a square jaw, green/hazel eyes like my mother, and rugged face very like my father.

Born twenty-one years ago on the Ides of March, I inhabit this tall, athletic body that Annie and Mark named Skye Christine. They tell me I entered the world backward as a breech birth. I have been backward ever since. I would rather believe my life is a dream or hallucination than reality. They tell me it’s mental illness, like my mother’s. Or I think it might be an alien intervention. Fortunately – or unfortunately – I have been unable to produce any concrete evidence of extraterrestrial or interdimensional interference in my life, despite the story that follows and my unusual beliefs. My psychologist, Dr. Kettner, tells me that the following tale of alien abduction is a hallucination and delusion of a schizophrenic breakdown that happened to me this summer. Judge for yourself. My mother, Annie, has struggled with mental illness most of her life. Recently, she tells me they found me huddled in an alley screaming of aliens. I’ll tell you what I remember, although some of it is blurred.

I am my mother’s daughter. My childhood years were influenced by tales of strange encounters and a theory that today’s abductee phenomena are the result of gods visiting us from another dimension. Little grey gods with huge black eyes and slits for mouths. Terrible beings with soft hands and treaties from governments allowing them to harvest us. Having seen them, I believe. We ourselves may be hybrids left here on Earth by extraterrestrials and monitored. I don’t know. It’s either that or government interference. My theory is not only plausible but probable, in my opinion. Many disagree. But I’ve had more than one encounter. I’ll tell you what happened to me in June.

The encounters don’t always happen when I’m alone. Sometimes other people are involved. My mother, Annie, was with me the first time it happened. All too vividly I remember. It was a bizarre occurrence but at the same time beautiful.

At the beginning of my memories of childhood, in my white wooden crib with the pink decals, I remember that Annie and Mark were in the next room while I lay with a nightlight on after being lulled to rest. My mother called, “Go to sleep, dear” as I cried out. The grey figure with the huge black eyes peered over the side of my crib, grasping the bars with skeletal grey fingers. My mother opened the door and the figure disappeared. I believe she caught a glimpse of a cold pale mist that lingered, but to this day we do not discuss it. Judge for yourselves, dear reader, as I unfold the unique circumstances of the life of Annie Hansen’s progeny since that time. My mother insists it was shadows and a dream. My mother and I have disagreed almost from birth about the most important events in my life. She has disappointed me.

***

Graduating from high school at age seventeen, I enrolled at MacEwan University for three years in a graphic design course. Socially, a few friends remain in my life from that school, also, from my work at the small design studio as an apprentice graphic designer. I do have friends although diagnosed for many years on the autism spectrum or ADHD. Maybe I’m schizophrenic as some say, like my mother, or have alien implants in my body that affect my behavior. These implanted objects I think are in communication with somebody or something. I reached out to the population of the world through social media to wonder, “If the presence of extraterrestrials on Earth were made known, what would be your reaction? If a large number of people have been taken, why are only a small percentage open about it? In the generations to come, will this phenomenon continue?” I got no proper answer to my inquiries. I continued. “When will we have full disclosure?” Yet I wonder whether this alien intervention truly exists despite my vivid memories of it. My memory may be defective, like my mother’s.

My mother, Annie, sees visions and hears voices of a terrible world to come. Her hallucinations also hint at a wonderful and beautiful world, shared by other civilizations over a continuum of universes and a thrumming on the strings of multiple dimensions. Quantum physics concurs with us. I have more advanced knowledge than the environment would allow for this tall, awkward twenty-one-year-old girl with a father on the normal spectrum and a mother like Annie Hansen-Snow.

My story unfolds with a mystery that Annie was able to solve, and her husband and my father, Mark Snow, as partners in love and crime-solving, as the parents of an only child conceived on their first day in their newly purchased home in Westmount nine months before my birth in March.

Annie breathes softly, Mark beside her, tucking stray bits of short grey hair behind her ears. Their legs intertwine on the big blue velvet bed and their bodies breathe into one another’s chests. Annie’s hands caress Mark’s back. She sighs and pushes away.

“What’s wrong?” He is perplexed. His stomach is soft over valentine boxer shorts. Annie, sleeker now than when young, swings her legs across his shins and straightens in bed. The blue coverlet slides to the floor.

His wife wrinkles her pretty forehead. “What do you think?”

It’s their daughter again, of course. “Skye. What’s she up to now?” Mark’s still muscular chest, less firm now and covered with white wiry curls, heaves with exasperation. Always the girl, the thought of her interrupting their lovemaking, interrupting their times together that should now be theirs – Skye Christine Snow, the progeny of his loins, an accident of fate during their first frenetic night in this vintage old house.

Yet so like his beloved Annie.

A tall, thin whip of a girl, twenty-one now – how did that happen to them, the years rocketing through the space/time of their lives, the time after a bump in their universe spawned a child: midwives, nurses, preschool, a wonderful first grade teacher, and middle school (ahh, the boys there!); leaving home at seventeen (so sad yet so right, just like mom); a steamy first night in their new home produced all this, forever and forever, an unexpected – yet delightful – gift from a goddess yet unnamed. They should have called her Diana, mistress of the moon. Mistress of the hunt. Virgin girl amongst the maidens. Mark sighs as Annie slides her long toes into fuzzy knitted slippers and stands naked at the open window, looking out at the riot of blooms in the back garden where once their first dog frolicked, now gone.

Big green trucks grunt and roar in the alley, devouring garbage in their steely jaws. Annie hears a singular note soaring high, pretty, scattering idle blossoms of song in its wake. A homeless woman hunches over a black shiny trashcan, looking for cigarette butts or maybe bottles or cans. The beautiful flutelike notes continue. Annie cracks open the window another few inches, her frizzy hair translucent in the early morning light as Mark watches from the bed. Middle age has not shrunken her tall frame. Her hazel eyes, now green as glass, dart to the yellow bird half hidden in the crab apple tree. A Baltimore Oriole, rare this far north and west. Annie’s lips, pink and rounded, curve upward toward ruddy cheeks. She turns her head toward her husband reclining on the white sheets. She sees her image as he sees her, reflected in his eyes blue as the morning sky, his blond grey-streaked hair receding over a wide tanned forehead. I was plain before I met him, she thinks. I was a misfit and a wannabe cop, a juvenile criminal arrested for shoplifting and working out a community service with Lorne O’Halloran in a dirty private eye’s office in a small island town. I was dowdy and unloved except by my Sudanese friends Pepsi and Samir, now long gone to Vancouver and bright futures. “You lifted me up,” she murmurs and Mark, on the bed, raises a blond eyebrow and smiles.

“What’s that about our daughter?” he asks. “Did you get one of her infrequent calls? Is she okay? Still working at the small design studio and still happy there?”

Annie sighs. “Maybe to all three questions. And no, I called her.”

“Should we send more money?”

“I don’t think she wants our money. It’s too little and too late.”

Mark snorts. “Too little? We did what we could. We have two City of Edmonton incomes. That’s enough to see our little girl through college.”

“MacEwan is a university now. And she did well enough on her own, with a grant and student loans. Our help came from guilt, let’s admit it, Mark.”

“She left us at seventeen. Maybe for the best for her to get on her feet and figure out what she wants to do with life besides listen to us. Still – yes, guilt.” He heaves his torso up onto a tanned hand, his bent elbow sinking into the mattress. “Where did we go wrong, Cupcake?”

Annie turns away from the open window, her naked figure streaked with sunlight. The flutelike beautiful song continues, matched by another from a raspberry bush on the other side of the garden, which wasn’t so lush when they first moved into the house and their young golden retriever dug up anything they tried to plant. Instead, now they haul humus and tend flowers, after fifteen years still missing their dog and almost resenting the clipped neat hedges and flat lawns. Puppies followed, none so destructive yet as loveable as Chuckles. Annie smiles at the memory. Mark, noticing the smile, thinks it’s for him.

***

Miles and lovely birdsongs away, their daughter Skye awakens to another dreary and perhaps frightening morning. She has to dress quietly while Bridgette sleeps after her nightshift at the bakery. Skye skips breakfast most mornings. She snatches a jar of instant oatmeal from the cupboard to eat later, has to trot along the cobblestones past the school and the delinquent boys, say good morning to Mr. Lee, then perhaps skirt the familiar black cat by the riotous poppies, and the figure in the deserted warehouse, the deformed crimson eyed street person, more sinister than the boys she has to pass every morning. Mr. Shepherd at the small design studio seems benign in comparison. She will sit straight and tall in her cubicle at nine o’clock, breathing deeply, the gauntlet run and conquered once more.