Home Fires
Page 31
“Miss Rice writes as naturally as she breathes.” —Brendan Gill
“Luanne Rice proves herself a nimble virtuoso.” —Washington Post Book World
“Rice has an elegant style, a sharp eye, and a real warmth. In her hands families, and their values … seem worth cherishing.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Rice’s great strength is in creating realistic characters readers care about.” —Denver Post
“Luanne Rice touches the deepest, most tender corners of the heart.” —Tami Hoag, author of Dust to Dust
“Pure gold.” —Library Journal
COMING THIS SUMMER
Celebrate the Season with
Two Unforgettable New Novels from
New York Times Bestselling Author
Luanne Rice
Beginning with
SUMMER’S CHILD
On sale everywhere in paperback May 31st
She looked like everyone’s favorite sister, best friend, and girl next door all rolled into one. The excitement in her blue eyes, the enormous smile, the way she positively shimmered with life, radiated goodness. The fact that she was pregnant when she disappeared gave the story a terrible jolt of shock… . On the first night of summer, adorable five-foot-nothing, pregnant-as-could-be Mara Jameson went out to water the garden. She was never seen again …
Read on for a Special Advance Preview of Summer’s Child
SUMMER’S CHILD
On Sale May 31, 2005
Being retired had its pluses. For one thing, it was good to be ruled by the tide tables instead of department shifts and schedules. Patrick Murphy kept the small Hartford Courant tide card tacked up by the chart table, but he barely needed it anymore. He swore his body was in synch with the ebb and flow of Silver Bay—he’d be pulled out of bed at the craziest hours, in the middle of the night, at slack tides, prime times to fish the reefs and shoals around the Stone Mill Power Plant.
Stripers up and down the Connecticut Shoreline didn’t stand a chance. They hadn’t for the two years, seven months, three weeks, and fourteen days since Patrick had retired at the age of forty-three. This was the life. This was really the life, he told himself. He had lost the house, but he had the boat, the truck. This was what people worked their whole lives for: to retire to the beach and fish the days away.
He thought of Sandra, what she was missing. They had had a list of dreams they would share after he left the Connecticut State Police: walk the beaches, try every new restaurant in the area, go to the movies, hit the casinos, take the boat out to Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard. They were still young—they could have a blast.
A blast, he thought. Now—instead of the fun he had thought they would have together—“blast” made him think of the divorce, with its many shocks and devastations, the terrible ways both lawyers had found to make a shambles of the couple they had once been.
Fishing helped. So did the Yankees—they had snapped their losing streak and just kept on winning. Many the night Patrick combined the two—casting and drifting, listening to John Sterling and Charlie Steiner call the game, cheering for the Yanks to win another as he trolled for stripers, as his boat slipped east on the current.
Other things pulled him out of his bunk, too. Dreams with dark tentacles; bad men still on the run after Patrick’s best waking efforts to catch them; a lost girl; shocks and attacks and bone-rattling fears that gave new meaning to Things That Go Bump in the Night. Patrick would wake up with a pounding heart, thinking of how terrified she must have been.
Whether she was murdered, dead and buried all these years, or whether something had happened to drive her from her house, her grandmother’s rose garden, to someplace so far away she had never been seen again, her fear must have been terrible.
That’s the thing he could never get out of his mind.
What fears had Mara Jameson felt? Even now, his imagination grabbed hold of that question and went wild. The case was nine years old, right at the top of his unsolved pile. The paperwork had been his albatross, his constant companion. The case was the rock to Patrick’s Sisyphus, and he had never—not even after it promised to ruin his marriage, not even after it made good on that promise, not even now, after retirement—never stopped pushing it up the hill.
Mara’s picture. It sat on his desk. He used to keep it right beside his bed—to remind him of what he had to do when he got up. Look for the sweet girl with the heartbreak smile and the laughing eyes. Now he didn’t really need the picture. Her face was ingrained into his soul. He knew her expressions by heart—the way other men knew their wives, girlfriends, lovers …
She’d be with him forever, he thought, climbing out of bed at five-thirty a.m. He had only the vaguest idea of what his dream had been—something about the blood spatter on her kitchen floor, the spidery neon-blue patterns caught by the luminal, trickles and drops … spelling, in Patrick’s dream, the killer’s name. But it was in Latin, and Patrick couldn’t understand, and besides, who could prove she’d been killed when her body had never been found?
He rubbed his eyes, started the coffee, then pulled on shorts and a sweatshirt. The morning air felt chilly; a front had passed through last night, violent thunderstorms shaking the rafters, making Flora hide under the bed. The black lab rubbed up against him now, friendly bright eyes flashing, knowing a boat ride was in their future.
Heading up on deck, he breathed in the salt air. The morning star blazed in the western sky. The just-about-rising sun painted the dark eastern horizon with an orange glow. His thirty-two-foot fishing boat, the Probable Cause, rocked in the current. After the divorce, he’d moved on board. Sandra had kept the house on Mill Lane. It had all worked out fine, except now the boatyard was going to be turned into condos. Pretty soon all of New England would be one big townhouse village, complete with dockominiums … and Patrick would have to shove off and find a new port.
Hearing footsteps on the gravel, he peered into the boatyard. A shadow was coming across the sandy parking lot; Flora growled. Patrick petted her head, then went down below to get two mugs of coffee. By the time he was back on deck, he saw Flora wagging her tail, eyes on the man standing on the dock. Angelo Nazarena.
“Don’t tell me,” Patrick said. “You smelled the coffee.”
“Nah,” Angelo said. “I got up early and saw the paper; I figured you needed company so you wouldn’t get drunk or do something really stupid. Longest day of the year’s tomorrow, and the articles are starting already …” He held the Hartford Courant in one hand, but accepted the heavy blue mug in the other as he stepped aboard.
“I don’t drink any more,” Patrick said. He wanted to read the story but didn’t—at the same time. “Besides, I’m not speaking to you. You’re selling my dock.”
“Making millions in the bargain,” Angelo chuckled. “When my grandfather bought this land, it was considered crap. The wrong side of the railroad bridge, next to a swamp, stinking like clam flats. But he was smart enough to know waterfront is solid gold, and I’m cashing in. Good coffee.”
Patrick didn’t reply. He was staring at Mara’s picture on the front page. It had been taken in her grandmother’s rose garden—ten miles from here, at her pretty silver-shingled cottage at Hubbard’s Point. The camera had caught the light in her eyes—the thrill, the joy, that secret she always seemed to be holding back. Patrick had the feeling he so often had—that if he leaned close enough, she’d whisper to him, tell him what he so desperately wanted to know …
“These papers really get a lot of mileage out of nothing,” Angelo said, shaking his head. “The poor girl’s been gone nine years now. She’s fish food, we all know that.”
“Your Sicilian lineage is showing.”
“She’s gone, Patrick. She’s dead,” Angelo said, sharply now. He and Patrick had gone to school together, been altar boys at St. Agnes’s together, been best man at each other’s weddings. He and Patsy had introduced him to Sandra. Patrick’s dream came back, the luminescent blood, electric b
lue, spelling out the killer’s name …
“The husband did it—right?”
“I thought so, for a long time,” Patrick said.
“What was his name, though … he had a different last name from Mara …”
“His name is Edward Hunter. Mara had her own career. She kept her own name when she married him.”
And now Patrick saw Edward Hunter’s handsome charm-boy face, his false desperate smile—as wide and bright as Mara’s, but without one ounce of her heart, soul, depth, integrity, authenticity, spark… . As a state cop, Patrick had encountered smiles like Edward Hunter’s thousands of times. The smiles of men pulled over for speeding on their way home from places they shouldn’t have been, the smiles of men at the other end of a domestic violence call—smiling men trying to convince the world they were better than the circumstances made them seem and reminding Patrick that “smile” was really just “slime” spelled sideways.
“Everyone thought so—not just you. But the bastard didn’t leave a body behind. So you can’t try him, and it’s time for you …”
“We could have tried to pull a Richard Crafts,” Patrick said, naming Connecticut’s infamous killer convicted of murdering his wife, whose body was never found, on the basis of a few fragments of hair and bone found in a rented wood chipper, “but we didn’t even have enough for that. I couldn’t even find enough evidence for that …”
“Like I was saying, it’s time you moved on.”
“Okay, thanks,” Patrick said, his expression saying why didn’t I think of that?, his Irish rising as he faced his friend Angelo—who had brought over the morning paper with Mara’s face on the front page, who was about to sell his boat slip right out from under him. Flora had gone for a run around the still-deserted parking lot, and now she leapt back aboard the boat.
“What I mean is …” Angelo said, trying to find the words to fill the hole he’d opened up.
“What you mean is, it’s time I got a life, I know,” Patrick said, giving his old friend an old-friends’ glance. You know the kind, the look that tells them they know you better than anyone, that you take their point, that they were right all along, when what you really want is to just shut them up and get them off your case.
“Yeah. To be honest, that’s what I mean,” Angelo said, chuckling with relief even as Patrick was folding up the newspaper and tossing it through the hatch—purportedly for disposal but actually to save forever.
As he saved all of Mara’s pictures.
Because, he thought as he started up the engine and Angelo cast off the lines, as they headed out to the fishing grounds, it was one of the ways he had found to keep her alive. That, and one other way …
Everyone assumed that Mara Jameson and her unborn baby had died all those nine years ago, and they still did. Patrick thought back to his Catholic childhood, that phrase in the Creed: We believe … in all that is seen and unseen. It was pretty much impossible to have faith in what you couldn’t see. And the world hadn’t seen Mara in over nine years.
Backing out of the slip, hitting the bow thrusters, he eased into the channel. The boat chuffed through the deepening water as gray herons watched silently from shadows along the green marshy shore. The rising sun shone through scrub oaks and white pines. Bursts of gold glittered on the water ahead.
The dead never stayed hidden. The earth gave them up, one way or another. Patrick knew they were relentless, in their need to be found. The Tibetan Book of the Dead described the hungry ghosts, tormented by unbearable heat, thirst, hunger, weariness, and fear. Their realm seemed familiar to Patrick; having spent his career investigating homicides, he believed that the dead had their own emotions, that they haunted the living until they were found.
And Mara had never been found.
After all the work he had done on her case, Patrick believed he would know—deep inside his own body, if she were dead. He felt Mara Jameson in his mind, his skin, his heart. He carried her with him every day, and he knew he’d never be able to put her down until he knew for sure what had happened to her. Where she was …
The birds were working up ahead, marking a school of blues just before the red nun buoy. Angelo got the rods ready. Flora stood beside Patrick’s side; her body pressed against his leg as he hit the throttle and sped toward the fish and tried in vain to escape the thoughts that haunted him wherever he went.
Now available in trade paperback
wherever books are sold
Stone Heart
by
Luanne Rice
New York Times Bestselling Author of
DANCE WITH ME
A long-awaited opportunity for readers to discover Luanne Rice’s acclaimed early novel—one of this cherished storyteller’s most powerful and complex portraits of the fragile bonds of family and home.
“A highly suspenseful, multilayered novel about the complex subtleties that lie beneath the surface of a family.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Deserves a place among the best fiction of its kind, alongside Judith Guest’s Ordinary People and Sue Miller’s The Good Mother.”—Eileen Goudge
“Powerful…electrifying…The contrast between romance and reality is what gives this novel its wonderful, terrifying, always compelling tension.” —Kirkus Reviews
“The sense of foreboding is almost overpowering.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
AND LOOK FOR
SUMMER
OF ROSES
On sale in hardcover June 21st
New York Times bestselling author Luanne Rice continues the story begun in Summer’s Child in an unforgettable novel destined to take its place as one of her most beloved works.
HOME FIRES
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published August 1995
Bantam mass market edition / August 1996
Bantam mass market reissue / May 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1995 by Luanne Rice
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-23911
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90112-2
v3.0