Jules, the Truth Finder

By Cindy Marabito

Jules, the Truth Finder - (Book One in Series) Jules Laverne Johnson is the daughter of the town whore. Scratching out a life as a Beaumont, Texas waitress, she meets the man of anyone's dreams, Texas Government college professor, Sam Henry. He could have had any girl in town, but he fell for Jules. What starts as a heated love affair with a backdrop of the 70's and disco comes to an end as Sam leaves town.

Decades later, Jules starts having nightmares about the man she couldn't get out of her head. When she finds out Sam has died a mysterious death, she sets out to get some answers. Outside Waco, she picks up a clairvoyant stray dog, Nellie.
Jules, the Truth Finder is a paranormal erotic twin flames romance novel where the afterlife comes crashing into real life. Jules must fight off the demons from her own past as well as the evil beings who robbed Sam of his brilliant life.

Jules is a force to be reckoned with from Texas to Arizona, California and the beyond. Hop on for the ride with a woman who won't take no for an answer. A novel of love and obsession and a titillating, sensuous road story you won't be able to put down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jun 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798837688812

Book preview

Sam

"Will they take it from the river?

After I’ve jumped right in and drowned.

Will they find it on the battlefield?

On the spot I stood my ground?"

Carry My Body Down

Nick 13

That’s right. I went ahead and did it. I started up the car and put my foot down on the accelerator and headed out. Destination somewhere, right? I did the same thing I’d done all those years ago when I’d left Beaumont for Austin. Nothing was going to stop me no matter what. I was headstrong back then and still am. I’d been young and naive enough to do things like get into a car and hit the pedal for parts unknown without a plan. It was during the ‘70s when the whole world was like a diamond quarry full of shiny jewels waiting to be discovered. All I’d had was a suitcase and my old VW. I just went. People did that back then. Packed up and headed out for an exotic adventure. Everything that happened to me after that, Sam had always been there on my horizon, watching me, waiting for me out there in the distance. Somewhere.

I always believed I’d wind up with him at the end of it all—something innate and a part of me, like the freckles across my nose or my long black hair. I had this recurring dream. In it, I was standing on a tarmac with an airplane behind me getting ready for take-off, the propellers just a whirling. The air was blowing my hair and I was wearing a silky dress, Qiana nylon with a wide-brimmed hat looking all Lauren Huttony. I’m not a hat person, but I’m wearing this same one in every dream and I dreamed it a lot. I’m waiting for Sam to meet me at the airstrip, me in my big hat. I was finally ready to go with him, finally good enough for him. Never in a million years did I suspect he’d die. That had been a huge jolt. To die and leave me hanging. I felt wronged and I was upset at him for it.

I was way too old to be doing something this crazy. Decades later. So much had happened, but I stepped on the gas and put Austin behind me. I had two choices. Leave and go find some answers or never sleep straight through the night again. I’d been having nightmares. The kind where you sit straight up and can’t get back to sleep no matter what. I’d wake up crying and try to remember the dream, visions of Sam lingering like shards of glass.

The last dream almost stopped my heart. We were lying in bed like we used to do, both of us pretend sleeping. In a sudden move, his hands clawed into my arms. It hurt like hell and I tried to raise up, but my body wouldn’t move. I could feel him spooned up against my backside, but his flesh turned bone cold. I tried to call out his name, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate. I wanted to turn around and see his face, but couldn’t move. He began to make a noise that sounded like a wounded animal in the woods. I knew he was in danger, and I wanted to help him like he always did for me. All I could see was black night everywhere, like a darkness of nothing. I could hear him calling for help but it was far away.

It took forever to wake up. I was covered in sweat. The dream was over and gone, but left me feeling a deep sense of longing and sadness. I tried to go about my business, but the nightmare kept grabbing at me. I couldn’t shake the thought that something was wrong and it had to do with me and Sam.

I’m a writer. Nothing very earth-shattering. I just throw sap at the White Goddess in my own meager way. I author a dog blog that people appear to like. It got picked up by Purina, so I have a steady income, and it beats waiting tables, that’s for sure. I’ll write something special about a dog sitting in a shelter still wearing a pink harness and add a catchy title like, Dog on Death Row in Pink Collar. The responses always surprise me. Sometimes, the story goes viral, like the Walmart cashier who was fired for refusing to put a stray chihuahua outside in the rain. That piece got over a million hits. Or the story about Nina, a young white pit bull abandoned miles from nowhere in the middle of a forest. I get paid by the download.

It was last month when I was putting the final touches on an article about a Fort Worth cattle dog minutes from being euthanized. A slideshow of visuals burst through my head all at once, like Mansfield Dam had collapsed and flooded Lake Travis. Funny how your mind works. I couldn’t recall the dreams no matter how hard I tried, like trying to train a tomcat. I stared at the Facebook posting about the cattle dog as an avalanche of fragments began to surface at once.

If you’re going to work as a freelancer and make a living, you learn to corral your thoughts as best you can. I use a digital recorder to document ideas that flow through the river basin of my head. Like the James McMurtry song says, best to let the thoughts move through when they come busting like a hurricane wind. Or, a stampede. The old memories flowed through at once like a Viewmaster on acid. Kodachrome color-drenched frames of Sam and me on the beach in Galveston drinking Lambrusco and Seven-Up with ice cubes and limes. Seemed like we never got loaded. Maybe I was drunk on love. Or could it have been that big ocean sun? Still slides of Sam driving us to Houston in the Winnebago.

It had been his idea and he’d rented the thing on his own. He took everybody from Mo’s to see Steve Martin in Houston. We smoked a ton of pot and laughed all the way from Beaumont. I never liked pot that much, but I’d go along in a crowd. I didn’t feel paranoid, just good all over. Sam made me feel safe. It was a perfect day that day. It was probably the best time of my life. Sam made a ritual out of everything, from a concert to a day at the beach, a movie or what we were going to eat for breakfast. Everything was a big deal to Sam, as serious as a marriage proposal. I remember as clear as yesterday Sam sitting at the end of Mo’s bar, his dark-blond hair caught by the last bit of golden-hour sun.

You might want to know what he looked like. His hair was a kind of sandy brown with highlights from the beach. He had hazel eyes in the classic sense, neither amber nor green, but somewhere in between. I can’t compare his looks to anybody famous, but if you held a gun to my head, I’d go with Christian Bale. Not that Sam looked anything like Christian Bale. He didn’t. But the roles he chooses remind me of Sam. Like American Hustle. Sam was a heady cocktail of law and order and bad boy all rolled up into a beautiful man. He had a strong masculine vibe that had come pouring all over me. It would change my life forever.

Sam looked like himself. He wasn’t my type if you called my type a type. He was tall. I can still stretch out my arms after all these years and rest them where his shoulders were. His hair was cut kind of short for the day’s fashion, and he had a mustache. I kind of wondered about the mustache since he had such a beautiful face. He had the kind of skin you’d kill for. I wanted to touch it everywhere. He had a big Kennedy smile with perfect white teeth. When he’d laugh, and he laughed often, you wanted to know the joke, to be in on it. That’s what I remember, him sitting at the little bar at Mo’s on his corner barstool smiling his smile. He could make something funny out of anything. He was good-looking in the kind of way Southern women like. The girls who hadn’t yet married, their biological clocks tick-tocking to the sound of clanging wedding bells. I’d hear them talking over their glasses of dry white wine about men they wanted, men like Sam. Accomplished, but also sensuous.

Hot and sexy was a rare commodity in Beaumont, so a guy like Sam really stood out. He had a good job as a college professor of a Texas government class. You have to be smart as a whip to teach people this state’s mess of a constitution and he was good at it. He’d let you know loud and clear just how fouled up Texas lawmaking was. He was the kind of man who becomes more and more the more you get to know him. And then, before you knew it, you couldn’t live without him. Looking back on those nights at Mo’s, I try to remember the first time I saw him. To be honest, I can’t recall and I’ve tried hard. The period before I knew Sam runs together like an impressionist painting, the colors transient, somewhat like the people from my past and memories they left behind.

He taught at Lamar University when it was a state technology school, before it became a bonafide university. He talked about the goings-on in Texas government and other current events at happy hour when the sun took forever to go down. I would listen as he carried on with Mo’s regulars, the weird albino guy, Lars, and his buddy, Nance. Nance wore a butch-waxed flattop and horn rims. Even country and western stars were growing sideburns and starting to experiment with drugs, so anybody with a crew cut was a dead giveaway right-winger. Sam would get into these verbal knockdowns with Lars and Nance. He loved to poke fun at their theories and then blow them up. They’d get their backs all up when Sam would take off on Anita Bryant. When he didn’t have a comeback, Nance would turn purple and tell him Miss America was off-limits. Sam would tell him runners-up don’t qualify. He made arguing erotic.

George was another customer who sided with Sam’s politics. Sam was helping him pass the LSAT for the third time so he could get into law school. George’s big plan was to practice mental health law, whatever that was. Texas has a ton of law schools, ergo a lot of lawyers, and you needed a strategy, he claimed. When George began growing a mustache, everybody knew it was to be like Sam. We all wanted to be like him.

Mo’s was a little jazz club in my hometown, Beaumont. I’d begun working there after finally leaving my husband, Orril. Orril Fletcher was a redheaded Yankee guy from New York, but that’s another story. I’ve always managed to get myself into a scene, if there was one, and Beaumont’s scene was Mo’s, a cool place in an uncool town. They had a big grand piano and live music every night. It was air-conditioned cold year-round to counter the hot, sticky climate. Mo’s was refreshing, like a midnight oasis. Good homemade Italian family recipes like hand-thrown antipasto pizza. Red and white checkered tablecloths just like in the movies, and Chianti bottles top-stopped with dripping candles. We wore long black skirts and silky white peasant blouses. The tips were good and you didn’t have to work that hard. My hair and the long dress made the people feel like they were vacationing on the Mediterranean. It was all about the facade, and Mo’s made you feel far away from Beaumont.

People came there to dream. Most every night, the pianist would play jazz or popular radio music, what they call soft rock now. Dan Fogelberg and Fleetwood Mac songs. It wasn’t unusual for a tipsy patron to take the microphone and serenade the clientele. What was wonderful about Mo’s was the glow. Everything there seemed to be lit by candle flames. In a town like Beaumont, that glow was special. I’d been ostracized my whole life and treated like I was less than nothing. Working at Mo’s made me feel special. At Mo’s, I didn’t feel like the daughter of the town whore.

It didn’t happen overnight. Sam and I would cut up while I was waiting for drink orders on the restaurant side of the bar. I didn’t think he paid that much attention to me since I wasn’t in his league, but we’d laugh and talk. There was always something going on in the local news to make fun of. Even though Sam was educated, and me, not so much, I felt like his counterpart. There was a sense I knew him from somewhere else and we had a connection. A strong one. Something inside me had awakened like a flower.

One evening, Sam and I were chit-chatting and I got this wild hair. I came right out and asked, Hey, why don’t you ask Lana out? Lana was Mo’s new bartender. I thought they’d make a cute couple and said so. It made sense to me that good-looking people should be with one another. I’d never done anything like that before; It wasn’t my personality. But the thoughts tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop. His response almost knocked me over. Out of nowhere, he said, I believe I’m more interested in going out with you. My entire body filled with arousal and desire. He wanted me. So how about it? How about you and I go out? I heard the piano player start singing Dr. John’s Such a Night. Maybe it was the song or maybe I’d had too much wine and I let myself believe that somebody like him could want somebody like me.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. See, I believe Sam was murdered.

This Sweet Old World

That first night, Sam waited around until my shift was over to drive me home. I’d parked in cars with guys before. I’d been married and divorced, but none of it was ever like this. Sitting in front of my mother’s house with Sam, I could hear Paris carrying on all the way from her apartment at the end of the driveway. She was playing the Eagles over and over on her tinny old record player.

Paris pictured herself as the girl in all the Eagles’ songs and Lyin’ Eyes was her favorite. She knew every word by heart and would sing along out loud. You could hear her going on about the big lonely house and telling the husband she had to go out for the evening. But, instead of sounding sad like the Eagles, we heard her laughing out loud with her man company for the night. It sounded hard, like prison women in the movies. Her carrying on repulsed me in a way it hadn’t before. Sam was too much of a gentleman to say anything and my face burned to listen as she went on.

I almost couldn’t believe I was sitting there with Sam. We had rolled the windows down and you could hear the crickets chirping a night concert. The minute Sam had cocked his head in my direction, I’d run after him like a hungry puppy dog. He talked to me like I was a real person, an equal. Nobody had ever treated me like that. He made me feel at ease to be my authentic self and didn’t appear to have any judgments about me. He seemed to think what I had to say was interesting.

Having an actual conversation in his car was special. He told me about himself. Where he was from—Arlington, near Fort Worth. How he’d served in the army after high school, but had tricked the chain of command into letting him be an actor. I knew he was smart. That was during the draft lottery when guys would drop acid to fool recruitment officers. Nobody wanted to get shipped off to Vietnam and Sam’s plan worked like a charm. He spent his entire tour of duty performing onstage without ever setting foot outside the United States. He would always laugh and said the joke was on them, since he was a shitty actor.

He told me he hated his father. You don’t have to be best friends with people just because you’re related to them, he said. He was talking about his own family, but I knew he meant me and Paris.

Sam and I had an intense connection right from the get-go. Unusual people and their strange habits. We were instant soulmates and liked the same things—unusual people and their strange habits, and the beach, although he’d seen a lot more coastline than I had. I’d only been to Galveston, but I’d gone there a lot. All the little towns on the way from High Island to Bolivar and Gilchrist. Crystal Beach. The gulf shore was my second skin. Something about growing up with the sea spray hitting your face like it’s a part of you. The warm brown saltwater feels like blood running through your veins. I’m going to take you to the ocean, he told me. I want to see you in the water. Pretty and swimming. I liked the way he said things. How he talked to me.

I didn’t think I had much to offer to the conversation. I tried not to say much about Paris, although, he wasn’t any dummy and already knew she was a prostitute. Everybody did. She’d come into Mo’s with some of her finer clientele she’d be trying to impress. I hated it when she did that. Mo’s was special to me. When I was working at Mo’s, I could pretend I wasn’t me. Paris ruined that. I had a good imagination, but not that good, and Paris was hard to ignore.

Do you ever think about going to college? he said.

I laughed out loud. College? Nobody had ever asked me that before. I didn’t know how to respond.

He was being serious. Yeah. College.

Ordinarily, I’d joke around to disguise my real feelings, but I knew better this time. It would disrespect Sam. He was earnest and really cared. A little voice inside told me to not make light of his feelings.

I don’t know. I never really thought about it.

You’re a smart girl, Jules. He reached over for a length of my hair and traced his fingers through the strands like it was silk. I could feel it deep inside where my soul was. And, pretty, Jules. You are so pretty. He had a very slight lisp in his speech that you had to listen hard to catch. It made what he said more alluring, the way he would draw out each syllable and caress his words. Everything about him charmed me and most especially, the whisper in his words. I knew I was no angel, but he made me feel like something precious. And he had respect for me.

I looked at him and if I had to pick the moment, it was then that I fell in love with Sam Henry. His eyes, which were the color of the sea, and his beautiful face. I even liked his mustache and I’m not usually fond of them. It wasn’t one of those Tom Selleck gimmicky ones, either, like a lot of guys wore. On Sam, it fit. He knew what worked for him. He was comfortable as himself and that feeling translated over to you. I felt good all over when I was with him, like he knew all the answers. He was self-assured. Sitting there so close to him, I felt confident, and that would be my mistake.

He wanted to kiss me right then and I wanted him to kiss me. He kept his hand on the steering wheel with his eyes looking right into mine. When I leaned closer, he clutched handfuls of my hair and pulled me next to him. I went right in with my mouth wide open. I could feel his body, hard and warm, the soft cloth of his