Where Is Ed Hubble ???

Where  Is  Ed  Hubble  ???

 

     Ed Hubble was always a secretive person around here, where he lived for the past twenty years selling quart jars of Lisa’s super-delicious corn chowder.  Lisa and a few of her close friends and relatives did the cooking and canning in her old farmhouse’s large kitchen from which Ed and his helpers toted the jars into the large adjacent room at the back of the house where they were sold to Lisa’s many customers who came from miles around.

     This suddenly ended after exactly twenty years when Lisa died (as she foreknew she would!), and the store was closed, and Ed immediately vacated his rented house and prepared to leave on the express train to his brother Nathan’s house several hundred miles north of here.

     I was Ed’s chief helper and the one in charge of the store whenever Ed was not present.  Ed appreciated my help which he expressed by leaving me a generous retirement fund.  And I was the only one he told of his future plans and to whom he bade goodbye.

     Therefore I was the one whom his brother called that evening to deliver the shocking news that Ed had not arrived on the train!  When he choked up and could not continue talking he handed the phone to his daughter Laura, whom I told that I was with Ed when he bought his train ticket, after which we took a brief stroll and had a brief chat in the park adjacent to the train station.  I said goodbye to him at about 3 PM, which gave him plenty of time to catch the train, which was scheduled to arrive at 4 PM.

     I then revealed to her what Ed had revealed to me in our chat, namely that he devoted all his free time here to writing fantasy novels, to be published under a pseudonym.  He had just completed his twentieth novel – he wrote one novel for each of the twenty years he had been here.  And he had chosen to do this here in our community because of its great folklore, much of which he used in his writing.  Lisa’s foreknowledge of her own death (which some of her ancestors also had) is but one such example of the folklore of our community, which Ed regards as “a magical place”.  Laura knew about this because it was to her that he sent his manuscripts, who then had them edited and published.  She thinks his books might be relevant to his disappearance, which is similar to an event in his last book.  Maybe he is trying to repeat in his life something he put into that story!!

     In our conversation Laura and I sought for answers as to why Ed was not on the train, and we quickly ruled out deception (Ed was not lying about his intentions of being on that train) and we do not believe anyone either murdered or abducted him

 

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    While Laura and I were having our conversation she was walking to another room in her house; and when she got to that room she heard her cell phone ringing.  She interrupted our conversation to pick up her cell phone and was overjoyed when she heard Ed’s voice on it!  Ed had called to apologize for having missed the train, which he had to do in order to do a favor for someone here.  He then caught the 6 PM train, which will arrive at the station up there at 9 PM.  Whew!!  What a relief!

     After Laura ended  her phone chat with Ed, she got back onto her landline phone and we resumed our conversation.  She then told me a secret of some super great news she learned about today.  She has a big surprise for Ed.  About a year after his 20^th  book is published, the publisher is going to come out with a special 20^th anniversary edition which will include all 20 of his books arranged into five tetralogies.  Wow!  And I heard about it even before Ed did!!

 

Forrest W. Schultz

Grantville, Georgia (another “magical place”)

May 28, 2015

 

 

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