Making a Change for the Stranger: Deb Powers, Otherworldly PI: Case #1: Deb Powers: Otherworldly PI, #1

For Jason

Who knows the unusual perspective of being

an insider/outsider as well as I do.

Making a Change for the Stranger

Deb Powers, Otherworldly PI: Case #1

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

Making a Change for the Stranger

Most days, Deb Powers loved everything about her new life back home.

She’d set up shop in the cozy walk-out basement in her Great Auntie Zelda’s house, giving her a lovely view of the sleepy little town of Estonoa, Virginia, where she and her twin sister Katie spent the first year or so of their lives.

Or at least that’s what their parents and truly intimidating swarm of aunts, uncles, and various flavors of cousins had always told them. An embarrassing array of photographs and grainy old VHS videos seemed to back up that claim, though neither Deb nor Katie remembered any of it.

But they did remember coming back to visit the lush mountains and creeks, the secretive valleys and hollers. For holidays or vacations, and for joyful birthdays or heartbreaking funerals.

The place their parents always seemed to miss and long for from the far less wild surroundings of Deb’s Cincinnati childhood. The strange northern land her family escaped to, following the irresistible song of more jobs and better opportunities, at least back in those days.

Now Deb couldn’t deny an immediate sense of peace, of belonging, every time she looked out across the hilly streets full of low brick buildings and a few white wooden houses. The endless variety of spring green decorating the ring of mountains sheltering Estonoa kept her staring out the basement’s row of windows when she really should be working.

She pretended to herself that the next important thing to concentrate on might be...more storage space for her office. She’d brought several sensible black bookshelves with her, and they looked wonderful packed full of books and knickknacks, set against walls she’d painted a rich cinnamon brown.

Much like her private investigator job back in her adopted-in-adulthood home of Atlanta, Deb didn’t expect many walk-in clients in her new career as a computer and technology consultant. But she’d brought in a comfortably overstuffed blue sofa for one wall, and two decidedly less comfortable repurposed dining room chairs.

After all, a woman who’d made damn sure she could be her own boss and work from home since she graduated from college wasn’t exactly