Nine Wells
A Quiet Southwestern Ghost Story

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
In June of nineteen fifty-two, the driest summer anyone in the high desert of New Mexico can remember, Louisa Brennock steps down from a dusty truck at a ranch she has never seen. Her husband died in April. He left her a failing herd, a bank note due in the fall, and nine hand-dug wells. Seven are dry.

On her first night she hears a child counting in the dark. Then a woman singing. Then a man giving careful directions to a place that is not there. Every well, it seems, keeps the voice of someone who once drank from it, and nobody in the valley will say so out loud. Her husband never spoke of it. The neighbors bring hay and beans and watch her too closely. The young hired man will not go near the north well. And a courteous surveyor from the state offers her a fair price for every acre and every drop of water she owns, an offer that expires in September.

As Louisa follows the voices from well to well, she begins to piece together the lives of the people who dug them, and a wrong done long ago over land and water, a wrong the ranch itself was built on. The truth will cost her everything the sale would save. What she owes cannot be balanced like a ledger. It can only be acknowledged, and someone has to go first.

Tender, eerie and unhurried, with a hopeful ending, this is a ghost story without gore or shocks: ledgers and neighbors, old promises, and the hard, ordinary work of making water run again.

A quiet Southwestern ghost story of drought, debt and nine wells.