Melissa Hudson was playing on the yellow slide while her mommy watched. Melissa climbed to the upper level and went into the slide. But, Janet Hudson never saw her daughter come out at the bottom of the slide! Janet and her husband searched everywhere. --in the play area, in the restaurant, in the rest rooms, even outside. Four year old Melissa had vanished. The following morning another child disappeared, --others the next afternoon. In just four days, fourteen children had gone missing from the city's fast food play areas. In his thirty years on the force, Police Detective Wilkins had never seen a stranger case. Where had these children gone? How was Wilkins going to find them? And who was this mystery playmate they called Mikey?
About the Author: I can't say that I always wanted to be a writer. It was more of an occasional thing for me. It was interspersed with a lot of other dreams & goals. Some of those I realized, some partially, & some not at all. But my occasional writing impulse finally caught up with me. I'm glad it did. What I mostly did and have always done, probably to a fault, was write stories in my head. They were published continuously and constantly; all to an audience of one -namely me. That likely qualifies as totally weird, but there you have it. I regard my fantasy, -Walter Mitty life, as preparation. Once in a while these fantasies came along in a sort of encapsulated summary form and I rushed to write them down before they evaporated & were gone forever. The thing that pushed me over the edge & into what seems like the writing abyss was the National Novel Writing Month. I finally realized that I could actually finish a story, --finish a novel. Now it seems so much easier. I sit down for one, or two, or three hours a day and soon I have something novel sized. What a feeling. Well, I suppose the above isn't a real biography. So here's a real one, assuming, of course, that there will be one or two, who actually want to know. OK, for that interested subset, here are a few details. First, my birth. I was born March, 1935. My mother had been raised as the only girl in the family with seven brothers. When she found out she had given birth to a son and not the daughter she was hoping for, I was told she burst into tears. In the months before my birth, she had amassed a collection of frilly baby clothing, all for the girl she was expecting. There was no budget for a replacement infant wardrobe. So, I wore that frilly, pink clothing until I outgrew them. My mother's wish for a girl baby had little effect on my macho self-image in later life. My macho father saw to that. I went through the usual sequence of schooling and into a sequence of college majors. Among my several majors, I tried Forestry, Psychology (Because it looked like fun), and back to mathematics because that was what I was good at. Then finally, Physics, because it could get me a job. And Physics did get me a job as an aerospace engineer. I did that for more than forty years. Much of my life has been guided by happenstance. But, now I am a novelist. Whoop de doo!