Water Never Came - A Small-Town Suspense Novella About the Secret That Held for Twelve Years

Twelve years, the county called the house vacant.Ivy Callahan is about to find out nobody ever checked.Ivy doesn't do towns twice. Ten years surveying floodplains across four states have taught her exactly one rule: measure the house, file the number, and be gone before anyone asks her to care what happens to it. Hollow Bend was supposed to be one more stop on a list - a routine survey ahead of a compulsory buyout, nothing she hasn't done a hundred times before. Then she opens a cellar that's supposedly been sealed for over a decade, and the numbers stop being routine. A permit filed weeks after the county swore the house was empty. A water heater three years old in a home nobody's lived in for twelve. Every professional instinct Ivy has tells her to write it up, hand it to the sheriff, and drive to the next county on her list - the way she's done at the end of every job for ten years.For the first time in her career, she can't make herself do it.The closer Ivy gets to the truth, the more the town closes around her. Files go missing from a locked room. A woman who asks one careful question too many doesn't live long enough to ask a second. And the one person in Hollow Bend who has never once raised his voice, never once given anyone a reason to doubt him, keeps turning up exactly where he shouldn't be. Ivy has three days before a public vote makes twelve years of lies permanent - and she's starting to understand that the flood this whole town was warned about was never the thing that was going to kill them.How do you protect yourself from a killer who has spent twelve years teaching an entire town to trust him?