Don Okolo

Twelve Million Nights: a Junne Phunkhauser Mystery Don Okolo

After an evening of hurried passion, twenty-year old Junne Stapleton was told that the man she was married to was also her father. Five minutes later, she shot William Stapleton dead. Junne packed up and left Louisiana for the small town of Dublin City, Georgia. That was in 1934.

In Dublin City, she met and married a traveling salesman, Blake Phunkhauser. That marriage too, died a sudden death. In two years, she would marry and kill three more men. Her fifth husband, Mr. Cole barely walked away with his life. For more than sixty years, her house on Tobacco Road held a horrible secret. That is...until just recently.

In 2006, the house finally had a buyer: Hal and Karen Wixon... Dublin City's richest black people. They bought the property no one wanted, and then hired Hazel Huckleberry as the live-in maid.

On their first night together, Hazel can't wait to tell the Wixons that the house they had spent so much money buying isn't really their own: "Even after it becomes yours, this house will still belong to Junne Phunkhauser. It is a haunted house," she tells them.

The dead don't eat, and they don't talk either. But they can finally reveal the secrets the house on Tobacco Road harbors through their hand-picked storyteller, Hazel Huckleberry. As dinner progresses, the Wixons suspect that Hazel knows much more about Junne Phunkhauser than she is willing to divulge. Hal and Karen wonder if they will walk out of their new home alive.