A Whole New Life - Hardcover
One August evening in a southern Arizona town a sheriff's deputy comes to Jackson Williams's door to tell him that his wife has died in a car crash. The deputy questions him while the police search his house and confiscate his computer. His amazement turns to disbelief when they arrest him. Williams suddenly has a whole new life, all right, but not the one he sometimes dreamt of when he admitted to himself that his marriage was a mistake. Now he is a man lost, in prison, awaiting trial for his wife's murder.
He is not without friends, however. Ruth Norton, his next-door neighbor, convinces a locally famous lawyer to take on his case.
Mara, Jackson's grown daughter from a previous marriage, happens upon the crisis unknowingly when she arrives in town to seek out the father she never knew as she was growing up.
Finally, there is Tyler, Ruth's eleven-year-old son. The others aren't aware of what he can contribute to finding the real killer---but is the murderer?
Although Thornton introduces a new group of characters to her readers, they live in the same mountains and desert in which we met and loved the Victim's Advocate, Chloe Newcombe. Readers will be cheering for all these new friends as they do their best to clear Jackson's name---often at peril to themselves.
He is not without friends, however. Ruth Norton, his next-door neighbor, convinces a locally famous lawyer to take on his case.
Mara, Jackson's grown daughter from a previous marriage, happens upon the crisis unknowingly when she arrives in town to seek out the father she never knew as she was growing up.
Finally, there is Tyler, Ruth's eleven-year-old son. The others aren't aware of what he can contribute to finding the real killer---but is the murderer?
Although Thornton introduces a new group of characters to her readers, they live in the same mountains and desert in which we met and loved the Victim's Advocate, Chloe Newcombe. Readers will be cheering for all these new friends as they do their best to clear Jackson's name---often at peril to themselves.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Betsy Thornton works for the Cochise County Attorney's Victim Witness Program as a victim compensation advocate and a victim advocate. She lives in Bisbee, Arizona.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter One Jackson Williams was sure right away that he knew how his wife had died. It was her tires. She never had them rotated. She never even looked at them. And just a week before her death he'd said to her, "Jenny, you need to do something about your front tires. The treads are pretty worn." But she hadn't. She'd driven over the Mule Mountain Pass on bare tires, in the rain, lost traction, swerved, gone over the edge, and crashed and died.
Now they were going to do an autopsy. Because he hadn't been able to get a straight answer from the medical examiner's office about when her body would be released, Ruth Norton, Jackson's neighbor and a good friend, had suggested a nondenominational memorial service, over in Dudley, followed by a reception at Ruth's house. Then there could be a quiet burial later when Jenny's body was released.
He'd gotten through the memorial service on automatic pilot, but after half an hour at the reception he'd felt he couldn't go on. So he'd slipped away, gone out back and up the rise where the mountain began at the end of Ruth's yard to a big rock, partially screened by a mesquite bush. There he sat now, polishing his wire-rimmed glasses and thinking about that autopsy.
It seemed so extreme. Couldn't they tell how Jenny had died without cutting her up? It seemed especially hard that it was her body they were cutting up; she had tended it so carefully, worked so hard at keeping it fit. And didn't they take out the organs when they did an autopsy? Took them out and weighed them: Jenny's liver, her pancreas, her kidneys, her little heart. Jackson swallowed, swallowed again. Something was caught in his throat, wouldn't go down.
He put the glasses back on, and Ruth's backyard below came into focus. The guests were milling around down there--some of his colleagues from the college, including Sid Hamblin, that envious ass, braying as usual; the Kleins, who were elderly neighbors; Jenny's friends from various exercise classes; her best friend, Anita, who had pointedly ignored him. There was Ruth, talking to Grace Dixon, Jenny's mom, under the apricot tree. Amazingly, he hadn't seen Grace in three years. Jenny had driven over to Green Valley, a retirement community near Tucson, to see her a couple of times a month, but she never took him along.
Ruth had looked nice at the memorial, elegant even, in some long dark gauzy dress that set off her reddish-brown curly hair with the streak of white that went back from her forehead. She never got dressed up except to substitute teach, and afterward she always changed into sweats and some old T-shirt the minute she got home.
His mind drifted. All those arguments he'd had with Jenny--arguments about what food to eat, how to decorate the house, arguments about what she called his lack of ambition, arguments about the time he spent away from home as well as about the times he was home but not doing what she wanted. He wished he'd kissed her, just once even, during those arguments, instead of always trying to have the last word.
An ant tickled across his hand and he shook it off. He'd kissed her when they took him to identify her body. Leaned down and kissed her forehead. Too late. It was like kissing some smooth, cool object, not like kissing a living person at all.
The voices grew louder from below. He heard laughter. Someone had brought wine. Maybe it would turn into an Irish wake. His own name drifted up, once, twice. Were they looking for him? He couldn't deal with them now. He shifted back on the rock, farther behind the mesquite bush. Coward. Then he heard a rustling behind him and turned his head, and there was Tyler, Ruth's eleven-year-old.
Tyler was okay. Tyler wasn't like the people below, Tyler was real. "Hey, sport," Jackson said.
"Hey." Tyler hunkered down beside him, stiff in dress khaki pants that were too big. He was a skinny kid still, though if he was anything like his two older brothers he would fill out in a couple of years. "What are you doing up here?"
"Best seat in the house." That sounded too flip. He cleared his throat. "Well . . . actually, it's hard for me to talk to people right now."
The skin at the corner of one of Tyler's eyes twitched, then twitched again. "Yeah," he said in a hushed voice. "And they're laughing."
"People laugh for all kinds of reasons," said Jackson. "Like when they're nervous, for instance, or tired or angry or sometimes to keep from crying."
Tyler's eye twitched some more while he considered this. "I guess so," he said finally.
"What's this thing going on, by your eye?" asked Jackson.
Tyler shrugged. "Don't know." He looked a little peaked; the freckles on his nose stood out. "It's like there's a little bug under there that keeps jumping."
Tyler adored his two older brothers, Dan and Scott. Jackson tried to remember, how long had Dan been gone now? Over three years, he thought, but Scott had left only six weeks ago to spend time with his father before he went to college at U.C.L.A. Tyler must be lonely.
"When all this is over," said Jackson, "we'll play basketball again. A lot. I'm getting out of shape."
"Cool," said Tyler.
This reception will never be over, thought Ruth Norton, coming out of her house with a glass of water for Jenny's mom, Grace Dixon. Never, never. Sid Hamblin, one of Jackson's colleagues from the college, was sitting on the outside stoop, blocking her way.
"Excuse me," she said.
"Sorry!" Sid jumped up, a big man in his forties with a black beard, wearing a black Hawaiian shirt printed with tiny green palm trees, his idea, apparently, of what one wore to a memorial service. He bowed and made a sweeping arc with his arm. "Madame," he said.
She inched past him, trying not to make physical contact--he radiated a kind of jocularly aggressive sexuality that both annoyed her and made her nervous--went across the yard to Jenny's mom, handed her the water, then sat down beside her.
I am in purgatory, thought Ruth, sitting under the apricot tree with Mrs. Dixon. Someone had to look after her because Jackson was hopeless at that kind of thing and, in fact, had disappeared. Mrs. Dixon, an elderly widowed lady in poor health, had been driven here from Green Valley by a man who'd introduced himself as Henry, a gentleman friend. Jovial and outgoing, Henry was working the room, or rather, the yard.
Ruth wished she could go inside and take off her bra.
Mrs. Dixon sighed.
Ruth patted Mrs. Dixon's hand. "How are you doing? Okay?"
Behind pale blue tinted glasses, Mrs. Dixon looked at her without recognition. A white-haired old woman with some of Jenny's prettiness but faded, she was dressed in a black pantsuit with a silver and turquoise indian necklace. Her hands rested on a silver-headed wooden cane.
"It seems to me," said Mrs. Dixon, "they could have had better flowers for Jenny at the memorial than those weeds."
"Wildflowers," said Ruth gently. "Asters. Jenny loved to run. She would have seen them by the side of the road. They were kind of to evoke her memory."
And kind of to evoke Ruth's memory of her oldest son, Dan, moved out now for three years. Of her three children, Dan had always gotten along best with Jenny. He was a runner as well, and the two of them used to go for morning and evening runs together down the road to the highway and back, Jenny's hair pulled back in a ponytail, swinging, Dan loping along, almost a foot taller. Jenny had been different back then, giggly and fun--looser. The asters were to remind Ruth of that Jenny.
Ruth would have liked to explain, but none of this would mean anything to Mrs. Dixon.
Jenny's mom turned her head away from Ruth and stared at the long table where refreshments had been laid out. Flies buzzed around the plates of half-eaten food. Through Mrs. Dixon's eyes, Ruth saw what a bad job she'd done with it--wasteful, ordering platters of cold cuts from the Safeway even though so many people had brought casseroles, and not a salad in sight.
Mrs. Dixon sniffed and turned back toward Ruth to reach down for her purse. With a shock of guilt, Ruth saw she had tears in her eyes. For heaven's sake, how could she sit there feeling trapped, she, Ruth, of all people, with three boys who were all alive, all healthy? Mrs. Dixon had lost a child. No, two. She remembered that now--Jenny's brother was dead as well. All Grace Dixon's fretfulness and complaints were just to cover her pain. How could there be anything worse in this world than to lose a child? How could she bear it?
Where was Tyler?
She realized she hadn't seen him in a while. As Mrs. Dixon blew her nose, Ruth glanced around the yard, looked up the rise behind--and then she saw him, crouched by a big rock, talking to Jackson. She couldn't see all of Jackson, he was trying to hide behind some mesquite, but she recognized his pant leg. Tyler was safe. Thank goodness. Tyler and Jackson, both safe. She didn't begrudge them their escape, but she wished she could be up there with them. She turned back to Jenny's mom.
...
It was two days after the memorial service. Eyes on the ground, under the load of his backpack, Tyler trudged down the road from the highway where the school bus had dropped him off, past the house being built by the man from Phoenix. The cement mixer was grinding away. Sometimes he would stop and watch, but today he didn't feel like it. He hated where he lived, out in the middle of nowhere at the edge of a mountain; just his house and two others. Not one single kid lived there but him.
Bees swarmed busily around the purple asters by the side of the road. What if they were killer bees? Killer bees were all over the state of Arizona. He heard it on the news every night. They...
Now they were going to do an autopsy. Because he hadn't been able to get a straight answer from the medical examiner's office about when her body would be released, Ruth Norton, Jackson's neighbor and a good friend, had suggested a nondenominational memorial service, over in Dudley, followed by a reception at Ruth's house. Then there could be a quiet burial later when Jenny's body was released.
He'd gotten through the memorial service on automatic pilot, but after half an hour at the reception he'd felt he couldn't go on. So he'd slipped away, gone out back and up the rise where the mountain began at the end of Ruth's yard to a big rock, partially screened by a mesquite bush. There he sat now, polishing his wire-rimmed glasses and thinking about that autopsy.
It seemed so extreme. Couldn't they tell how Jenny had died without cutting her up? It seemed especially hard that it was her body they were cutting up; she had tended it so carefully, worked so hard at keeping it fit. And didn't they take out the organs when they did an autopsy? Took them out and weighed them: Jenny's liver, her pancreas, her kidneys, her little heart. Jackson swallowed, swallowed again. Something was caught in his throat, wouldn't go down.
He put the glasses back on, and Ruth's backyard below came into focus. The guests were milling around down there--some of his colleagues from the college, including Sid Hamblin, that envious ass, braying as usual; the Kleins, who were elderly neighbors; Jenny's friends from various exercise classes; her best friend, Anita, who had pointedly ignored him. There was Ruth, talking to Grace Dixon, Jenny's mom, under the apricot tree. Amazingly, he hadn't seen Grace in three years. Jenny had driven over to Green Valley, a retirement community near Tucson, to see her a couple of times a month, but she never took him along.
Ruth had looked nice at the memorial, elegant even, in some long dark gauzy dress that set off her reddish-brown curly hair with the streak of white that went back from her forehead. She never got dressed up except to substitute teach, and afterward she always changed into sweats and some old T-shirt the minute she got home.
His mind drifted. All those arguments he'd had with Jenny--arguments about what food to eat, how to decorate the house, arguments about what she called his lack of ambition, arguments about the time he spent away from home as well as about the times he was home but not doing what she wanted. He wished he'd kissed her, just once even, during those arguments, instead of always trying to have the last word.
An ant tickled across his hand and he shook it off. He'd kissed her when they took him to identify her body. Leaned down and kissed her forehead. Too late. It was like kissing some smooth, cool object, not like kissing a living person at all.
The voices grew louder from below. He heard laughter. Someone had brought wine. Maybe it would turn into an Irish wake. His own name drifted up, once, twice. Were they looking for him? He couldn't deal with them now. He shifted back on the rock, farther behind the mesquite bush. Coward. Then he heard a rustling behind him and turned his head, and there was Tyler, Ruth's eleven-year-old.
Tyler was okay. Tyler wasn't like the people below, Tyler was real. "Hey, sport," Jackson said.
"Hey." Tyler hunkered down beside him, stiff in dress khaki pants that were too big. He was a skinny kid still, though if he was anything like his two older brothers he would fill out in a couple of years. "What are you doing up here?"
"Best seat in the house." That sounded too flip. He cleared his throat. "Well . . . actually, it's hard for me to talk to people right now."
The skin at the corner of one of Tyler's eyes twitched, then twitched again. "Yeah," he said in a hushed voice. "And they're laughing."
"People laugh for all kinds of reasons," said Jackson. "Like when they're nervous, for instance, or tired or angry or sometimes to keep from crying."
Tyler's eye twitched some more while he considered this. "I guess so," he said finally.
"What's this thing going on, by your eye?" asked Jackson.
Tyler shrugged. "Don't know." He looked a little peaked; the freckles on his nose stood out. "It's like there's a little bug under there that keeps jumping."
Tyler adored his two older brothers, Dan and Scott. Jackson tried to remember, how long had Dan been gone now? Over three years, he thought, but Scott had left only six weeks ago to spend time with his father before he went to college at U.C.L.A. Tyler must be lonely.
"When all this is over," said Jackson, "we'll play basketball again. A lot. I'm getting out of shape."
"Cool," said Tyler.
This reception will never be over, thought Ruth Norton, coming out of her house with a glass of water for Jenny's mom, Grace Dixon. Never, never. Sid Hamblin, one of Jackson's colleagues from the college, was sitting on the outside stoop, blocking her way.
"Excuse me," she said.
"Sorry!" Sid jumped up, a big man in his forties with a black beard, wearing a black Hawaiian shirt printed with tiny green palm trees, his idea, apparently, of what one wore to a memorial service. He bowed and made a sweeping arc with his arm. "Madame," he said.
She inched past him, trying not to make physical contact--he radiated a kind of jocularly aggressive sexuality that both annoyed her and made her nervous--went across the yard to Jenny's mom, handed her the water, then sat down beside her.
I am in purgatory, thought Ruth, sitting under the apricot tree with Mrs. Dixon. Someone had to look after her because Jackson was hopeless at that kind of thing and, in fact, had disappeared. Mrs. Dixon, an elderly widowed lady in poor health, had been driven here from Green Valley by a man who'd introduced himself as Henry, a gentleman friend. Jovial and outgoing, Henry was working the room, or rather, the yard.
Ruth wished she could go inside and take off her bra.
Mrs. Dixon sighed.
Ruth patted Mrs. Dixon's hand. "How are you doing? Okay?"
Behind pale blue tinted glasses, Mrs. Dixon looked at her without recognition. A white-haired old woman with some of Jenny's prettiness but faded, she was dressed in a black pantsuit with a silver and turquoise indian necklace. Her hands rested on a silver-headed wooden cane.
"It seems to me," said Mrs. Dixon, "they could have had better flowers for Jenny at the memorial than those weeds."
"Wildflowers," said Ruth gently. "Asters. Jenny loved to run. She would have seen them by the side of the road. They were kind of to evoke her memory."
And kind of to evoke Ruth's memory of her oldest son, Dan, moved out now for three years. Of her three children, Dan had always gotten along best with Jenny. He was a runner as well, and the two of them used to go for morning and evening runs together down the road to the highway and back, Jenny's hair pulled back in a ponytail, swinging, Dan loping along, almost a foot taller. Jenny had been different back then, giggly and fun--looser. The asters were to remind Ruth of that Jenny.
Ruth would have liked to explain, but none of this would mean anything to Mrs. Dixon.
Jenny's mom turned her head away from Ruth and stared at the long table where refreshments had been laid out. Flies buzzed around the plates of half-eaten food. Through Mrs. Dixon's eyes, Ruth saw what a bad job she'd done with it--wasteful, ordering platters of cold cuts from the Safeway even though so many people had brought casseroles, and not a salad in sight.
Mrs. Dixon sniffed and turned back toward Ruth to reach down for her purse. With a shock of guilt, Ruth saw she had tears in her eyes. For heaven's sake, how could she sit there feeling trapped, she, Ruth, of all people, with three boys who were all alive, all healthy? Mrs. Dixon had lost a child. No, two. She remembered that now--Jenny's brother was dead as well. All Grace Dixon's fretfulness and complaints were just to cover her pain. How could there be anything worse in this world than to lose a child? How could she bear it?
Where was Tyler?
She realized she hadn't seen him in a while. As Mrs. Dixon blew her nose, Ruth glanced around the yard, looked up the rise behind--and then she saw him, crouched by a big rock, talking to Jackson. She couldn't see all of Jackson, he was trying to hide behind some mesquite, but she recognized his pant leg. Tyler was safe. Thank goodness. Tyler and Jackson, both safe. She didn't begrudge them their escape, but she wished she could be up there with them. She turned back to Jenny's mom.
...
It was two days after the memorial service. Eyes on the ground, under the load of his backpack, Tyler trudged down the road from the highway where the school bus had dropped him off, past the house being built by the man from Phoenix. The cement mixer was grinding away. Sometimes he would stop and watch, but today he didn't feel like it. He hated where he lived, out in the middle of nowhere at the edge of a mountain; just his house and two others. Not one single kid lived there but him.
Bees swarmed busily around the purple asters by the side of the road. What if they were killer bees? Killer bees were all over the state of Arizona. He heard it on the news every night. They...
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- PublisherMinotaur Books
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 0312357591
- ISBN 13 9780312357597
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages288
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