Key of Valor

Chapter One

ZOE McCourt was sixteen when she met the boy who would change her life. She'd grown up in the mountains of West Virginia, the oldest of four. By the time she was twelve, her father had already run off with the wife of another man.

Even then, Zoe hadn't considered it any great loss. Her daddy was a short-tempered, moody man who preferred drinking beer with the boys or banging his neighbor's wife rather than seeing to his own.

Still, it was hard, since most weeks he had at least brought home a paycheck.

Her mother was a thin, nervous woman who smoked too much and compensated for her husband's desertion by replacing him, with some regularity, with boyfriends cut from the same cloth as Bobby Lee McCourt. They made her happy in the short term, angry and sad in the long, but she'd never been able to do without a man for more than a month straight in any case.

Crystal McCourt had raised her brood in a double-wide, slotted into a lot in the Hillside Trailer Park. After her husband ran off, Crystal got shit-faced drunk and, leaving Zoe in charge, hopped in her thirdhand Camaro to head out in pursuit of, in her words, "the cheating son of a bitch and his godforsaken whore."

She'd been gone for three days. She hadn't found Bobby, but she came back sober. The chase had cost her some of her self-respect, and her job at Debbie's House of Beauty.

Debbie's House might have been more of a hut, but it cut deep to lose the regular pay.

The experience toughened Crystal considerably. She sat her children down and told them things were going to be rocky and things were going to be hard, but they'd find a way.

She nailed up her beautician's license in the trailer's kitchen and opened her own house of beauty.