As her groceries were scanned, Mrs. Jones looked intently at the young woman scanning them. Madison, her name tag read.
I don’t recognize her by name, but I could swear that I know this girl from somewhere,
she thought. While primarily focusing on doing her job, the nineteen year-old checkout girl could sense a familiarity with this woman as well, but couldn’t place it either. Being a bit shy, she was reluctant to bring it up.

Laura still couldn’t believe that it was real. She stepped out to the balcony of the private beach house where she was spending her honeymoon. She had awakened before her husband and went outside to get some sun in a black one-piece bathing suit with a book in one hand and a bottle of suntan lotion in the other. She stretched out comfortably on the chair and rubbed the lotion on her neck, shoulders, arms and legs before returning to her favorite pastime, immersing herself in a book.

“How much farther is it?” Sabrina asked as she lagged her best friend, Shelby, following her on a hike into the woods. Shelby had been excited to show her an unusual rock formation that she had seen the last time she went hiking in these woods. Sabrina didn’t share her friend’s enthusiasm for the outdoors, but humored her friend anyway. They had been friends for nearly all of their twenty-eight years, so she was used to putting up with things like this for Shelby occasion

Karissa stood in front of her bathroom mirror brushing her shoulder-length wavy light brown hair. The forty-four year-old was excited to finally meet Todd, the man she had been chatting with online and on the phone for the last couple weeks. She set her hairbrush down and started touching up her makeup when she heard the doorbell ring.


“Chloe, can you answer the door?” she called out to her twenty year-old daughter who was watching a show on Net

“I know it’s a business trip, but we don’t fly back until Monday, so be sure to have a good time this weekend,” forty-five year-old entrepreneur Gwen said to the younger women standing on both sides of her as they waited with bags in hand for a driver to pick them up from the airport.


“Sure thing, boss!” Ariel, her twenty-two year-old secretary said with a smile.


“Absolutely! I

The day the four women had been waiting had finally arrived. This weekend was the planned getaway that they had all been anticipating for weeks. At the house of Lynn, the older of one of the two pairs of sisters who made up the group, her best friend Stephanie had arrived and they were chatting and discussing their plans for a great long holiday weekend. Soon, Stephanie’s younger sister Tina arrived, and then they all waited impatiently for Lynn’s younger sister Valerie, who was runn

Todd sat alone at the end of the bar, drinking slowly from a bottle of beer while occasionally glancing around and taking a look at the other patrons. Every time he glanced in the direction of one particular woman, she seemed to quickly avert her eyes. She appeared to be in her mid-to-late twenties, had shoulder-length blond hair and, from the quick looks he got at them, he guessed blue eyes. He knew that he had seen her in a couple other places recently, but even beyond that, he felt like he re

After a couple hours of searching in the darkness, the small goblin scout party finally spotted a feast that seemed to make all the effort worth it. “Over here,” the leader of the group called out in a quiet voice to the others as he slid into some bushes to hide. “Look there!” he continued pointing in front of them.


The others looked and spotted a group of three young women sitting in folding chairs around a campfire roasting some ma