Feature Follow Friday ~ September 23, 2016

Feature & Follow is a blog hop hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read. The goal of Feature & Follow is to meet new bloggers, make friends, and gain readers.

Favorite Opening Scene

What is your favorite opening scene?

I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about this before. Recently I started participating in First Chapter First Paragraph where we share the opening of a book each week, but I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about my favorite opening scene. Since I’ve never thought of this, today I am sharing the opening to my favorite book in the world. I’ve talked before about this book teaching me how to love.

People disappear all the time. Ask any policeman. Better yet, ask a journalist. Disappearances are bread-and-butter to journalists.

Young girls run away from home. Young children stray from their parents and are never seen again. Housewives reach the end of their tether and take the grocery money and a taxi to the station. International financiers change their names and vanish into the smoke of imported cigars.

Many of the lost will be found, eventually, dead or alive. Disappearances, after all, have explanations.

Usually.

Part One

Inverness, 1945

Chapter 1

A New Beginning

It wasn’t a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance. Mrs. Baird’s was like a thousand other Highland bed-and-breakfast establishments in 1945; clean and quiet, with fading floral wallpaper, gleaming floors, and a coin-operated hot-water geyser in the lavatory. Mrs. Baird herself was squat and easygoing, and made no objection to Frank lining her tiny rose-sprigged parlor with the dozens of books and papers with which he always traveled.