Patti O'Donoghue
Cecilia Anne “Celia” Stanhope and co-conspirator Regina “Goldie” O’Brien are at it again! They’re back in Sandy Run, North Carolina, and Celia learns that her dead parents left a trust fund of more than one hundred thousand dollars—a detail that her guardian, the Air Force Captain Anita Carter, failed to mention.
Trouble is Celia is eighteen years old and supposed to wait until she’s twenty-one to get the money! Does she want to wait? Will her aunt terminate the trust early? You guessed it, no.
Celia cooks up a plan to get her aunt to release the trust funds. But where to go? The girls spin the globe and settle on a tiny dot in the western Pacific Ocean, Guam, USA, as the place. Now the girls have the place and soon Celia will have the money.
Mix in discovery, treasure and tales of shipwreck--and Celia's belief that treasure is sitting in the sand and waiting for them to find it--and you'll see how very misplaced these two southern girls can get!
Patti O'Donoghue launched her first book, The Stanhope Trilogy, Book One, Celia, in spring 2006. She continues the adventures of Celia and Goldie in Where America’s Day Begins.
Ms. O’Donoghue holds an advanced SCUBA rating which she received at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. Her diving experiences include sites in the tropical waters of Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Rota, and Ponape and the islands of Palau.
She has explored wrecks of ships and aircraft of World War Two that can still be found in the waters off these western Pacific Islands. Fact and fiction of numerous wrecks have fed her imagination to create the Trilogy stories.
Ms. O’Donoghue has served as Director of Public Information at Mount Olive College, Mount Olive, NC and as President of the Mount Olive Area Chamber of Commerce. Her writing and photography have appeared in magazines and newspapers.
Her husband's 33-year Air Force career took the family to Germany, Turkey, Guam and bases in the United States. Patti and Greg O’Donoghue are the parents of five children and the servants of one cat, Miss Kitty.
Goldie spent the layover talking to some GI’s. One of them walked over. He was tall with dark hair and an earring on one ear. Celia wondered if the earring was an okay thing in the military. It didn’t used to be. She decided not to ask.
“Cee,” Goldie said, “This is Tom. He says he has a car we can use when we get to the island.”
“It’s a little old,” Tom informed them. “I left it at the airport so I’d have transportation when I got back, but my girlfriend decided to pick me up.
“It’d be a favor to me if you two take it off my hands. I’ll let you have it one day free. It’s a bomb, but she runs good. Ten dollars a day after that.”
“Okay, Cee?” Goldie asked.
“Fine with me. We’ll need transportation, anyway.” Their flight was called. Tom smiled and boarded the plane with the other GIs.
“What’s a bomb?” Celia asked.
“We’ll soon find out,” Goldie said.
“Something called a bomb sounds dangerous,” Celia insisted.
But once on the plane, she got comfortable and fell asleep. And sometime during the flight, just like when Cinderella’s ball gown turned back to rags and her royal coach turned into a pumpkin and the coachmen back into mice, Friday magically turned into Sunday...
They arrived at the Guam airport and saw Tom holding hands with a petite blond at the baggage area.
“That girl couldn’t get any closer to Tom if she was a tick,” Goldie whispered.
“You’re right about that,” Celia whispered back. “I guess we get to use the car for sure.”
“Welcome to Guam,” he said, “where America’s day begins.”
“What does that mean?” Goldie asked, as she grabbed for one of her suitcases...
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