Two Nights - Hardcover
#1 New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs steps beyond her classic Temperance Brennan series in a new standalone thriller—featuring a smart, tough, talented heroine whose thirst for justice stems from her own dark past.
Meet Sunday Night, a woman with physical and psychological scars, and a killer instinct....
Sunnie has spent years running from her past, burying secrets and building a life in which she needs no one and feels nothing.
But a girl has gone missing, lost in the chaos of a bomb explosion, and the family needs Sunnie’s help.
Is the girl dead? Did someone take her? If she is out there, why doesn’t she want to be found?
It’s time for Sunnie to face her own demons—because they just might lead her to the truth about what really happened all those years ago.
Meet Sunday Night, a woman with physical and psychological scars, and a killer instinct....
Sunnie has spent years running from her past, burying secrets and building a life in which she needs no one and feels nothing.
But a girl has gone missing, lost in the chaos of a bomb explosion, and the family needs Sunnie’s help.
Is the girl dead? Did someone take her? If she is out there, why doesn’t she want to be found?
It’s time for Sunnie to face her own demons—because they just might lead her to the truth about what really happened all those years ago.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Kathy Reichs’s first novel Déjà Dead was a #1 New York Times bestseller and won the 1997 Ellis Award for Best First Novel. A Conspiracy of Bones is Kathy’s nineteenth entry in her series featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. Kathy was also a producer of the hit Fox TV series, Bones, which is based on her work and her novels. Dr. Reichs is one of very few forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. She served on the Board of Directors and as Vice President of both the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, and as a member of the National Police Services Advisory Council in Canada. She divides her time between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Montreal, Québec.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Two Nights
CHAPTER 1
My right-hand neighbor thinks I’m crazy, so she brings me cheese.
I heard the one-two crunch of her boots on the path. A pause, then the oyster shells crunched again.
I lifted a corner of the towel covering my kitchen window. She was already five yards off, a shadow-laced smudge among the live oaks.
Six years, and I still didn’t know her name. Didn’t want to. Had no desire to exchange recipes or comments on the tides.
I cracked the door, snagged the plastic-wrapped package, and shoved it into the fridge.
Truth is, I don’t mind the cheese. What I hate are the sharp little eyes plumbing my soul. That and the pity.
And the goats. When the wind is right, the bleating bullies into my dreams and I’m back in Helmand with the blood and the dust.
Or maybe I’m reading the old gal wrong. Maybe the cheese is a bribe so I don’t murder Billie or Nanny.
My left-hand neighbor hanged himself from the end of his pier. His dog curled up and died by his head. Double suicide. Maggot jamboree by the time the bodies were found.
Arthur was a wood-carver, Prince a collie. I prefer their silent company. Fits my two-pronged plan for life. Need no one. Feel nothing.
I ran six miles and put in time with my free weights. A beer and a sandwich for lunch, then I spent the afternoon shooting Cheerwine cans off a dune at Gray Bay. The beach was deserted and not far away. Nothing is.
Goat Island is a skinny strip of sand just a monkey’s spit wide, uninhabited until Henry and Blanche Holloway rowed over to escape the stresses of 1930s Charleston. Legend has it they spent decades in a hole covered with driftwood and palm fronds.
Now that sounds warp-speed psycho to me.
But Henry and Blanche had one thing right. For solitude, Goat Island is the cat’s meow. Even today there’s no ferry, no paved road, ergo no cars or trucks. No access except by private boat. Outsiders rarely find reason to come.
The few scrappy residents live in cottages cobbled together from wreckage ignored or tossed ashore by Hurricane Hugo. My porch roof is the ass end of a disemboweled rowboat. Goat Lady’s shed started life as Arthur’s latrine.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t live hole-in-the-ground au naturel batty. I’ve got electricity, a septic tank. All the advantages.
The downside to Goat is the spring mosquitoes, some large enough to carry off St. Bernards. By six the bloodsuckers were organizing into squadrons, preparing to strike. Over and out for moi.
I was home rubbing aloe on bites when the bell above the stove jangled its jerry-rigged warning.
The moths did their frenzied dance in my chest.
I dug the shotgun from my duffel, thumbed shells into the chamber, and crept to a window. The sun was low, flaming the waterway orange and making me squint.
Far below, a figure crouched on my dock, securing lines. Both human and boat were featureless black cutouts against the tangerine glow.
My grip tightened on the stock, ready to pump.
The figure straightened and headed my way. Male. Barrel-chested. Not big, but muscular in a scrawny-arms-and-legs way.
I recognized the confident drill-sergeant stride. The contour of the ragged Tilley hat. Not vintage, just old.
Shit!
I snapped into action. Ammo out and into the duffel, guns into the closet. Liquor bottles, glasses, and dirty dishes under the sink. Yesterday’s clothes and flip-flops heave-ho into the bedroom.
His knock was hard enough to rattle the screen in its jamb. One last look around, then I hurried to undo the inner door locks. Two, then the deadbolt.
He stood with hands on hips, looking left toward the marsh. His eyes were blue, his face weathered as the month of March.
“What’s wrong?” Mouth dry. No one ever came uninvited. No one ever came.
“Something’s gotta be wrong for me to drop by?” Gravelly. Gruff.
“Of course not.” Plastic smile molding my face. “You usually give a heads-up.”
“How? Send a pigeon?”
I said nothing.
“You gonna leave me out here till I need a transfusion?”
I lifted the hook and stepped back. Beau entered, gaze skimming. A cop gaze. One spin around the cottage, then it settled on me, running the same critique I resent in my neighbor.
The scar burned an itchy path below my right eye.
“I didn’t recognize the boat.” Concentrating on normal.
“Getting the gel coat repaired. But what? You were maybe expecting Bowie?”
“He died.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Gonna offer a man a beer?”
I got two Palmetto Ambers from the fridge and we moved to the living room, a small hexagon accessed through a wood-trimmed arch. Ceiling fan, sofa, two threadbare chairs, three beat-to-hell tables. No need for décor. Only Beau and one other were allowed in my home.
Beau dropped onto the sofa, sloughed off the hat, and took a long pull of his beer. His hair was gray and buzzed to the scalp. Had been since I’d known him. Probably since his mama first shaved it with clippers at a kitchen chair.
I sat opposite, knees jutting, feet under my bum. The five-window view wrapped us like an IMAX featuring the Atlantic seaboard.
A picture formed in my head. Beau with a younger man’s face. Hiding his frustration, his pride. Not pleading, but close. Asking a fellow cop to give his foster kid yet another break. Red-blue pulsing his badge and the honky-tonk shack at his back.
Beau raised his right ankle to his left knee. Cleared his throat. Levered the foot up and down several times.
“Had an interesting call today.” Eyes on a Top-Sider as old as the hat. “Lady name of Opaline Drucker.”
That triggered a ping in some remote brain chip.
“Who is she?”
“I’ll leave the telling of that for after.”
“After what?”
“Hearing me out.” Tone a million miles from drop-by casual. “Mrs. Drucker has a problem. I think you can help her.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
Beau took another swig, then set the bottle on the floor. Uncrossing his legs, he leaned forward and looked me full in the eye. “You’re in a bad place, Sunnie.”
“I’m happy as a clam out here.” Arms uplifted to emphasize the level of my joy.
“We both know that’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, I get it. You overreacted, you killed the bastard.”
“PSO ruled it a justified shoot.” Curt. The incident was the final straw for the Professional Standards Office, Charleston PD’s version of internal affairs. The end of my career in law enforcement. And ancient history.
“Damn straight it was.” Beau flicked dirt from jeans too faded to qualify as blue. Maybe a bug. “The scumbag nearly took out your eye.”
“No way I’d ride a desk.” Cheeks burning.
“Hell no. I’d have quit, too.”
“You here to remind me what a loser I am? First the Corps, then the job? News flash. I already know.” Meaner than I intended. Or not.
“Knock it off.”
“Get to the point.”
“It’s been six years.”
“Ah. You’ve come to enforce some kind of self-pity statute.” Arm-wrapping my chest and tucking my hands into my pits. “Oh, wait. You’re off the force, too.”
Beau breathed deeply. Exhaled through his nose. Chose his words.
“You can’t hide on this island, talking to no one, doing God knows what to yourself.”
“Yes. I can.”
“You’ve withdrawn from the whole goddamned human race.”
“I have a bestie that lives in my bedside table. Want to meet him?”
“See. There you go. The least little pressure and out come the jokes.”
“I have you.”
“I’m about all you have.”
“And you think I’m nuts.” God knows I did.
“Of course you’re not nuts.” Frustrated, trying for patient. “But you can’t just sit out here doing nothing.”
“I run, I shoot, I fish, I read.” Gut rolled tight as an armadillo under threat.
“It’s not normal.”
“I’ve tried normal. Too many rules. Too much constraint.” Too much rage? I’m a big girl. I can own it now.
“Why are you so goddamned stubborn?”
“It’s a gift.”
I detest explaining myself. To Beau. To the therapists with their gentle eyes and nonprobing questions that probe. To anyone. I changed the subject.
“What’s this got to do with Orphaline Drucker?”
“Opaline. I think helping her could benefit you.”
“Wow. I’m your new project.”
Beau ignored that. “Drucker’s granddaughter’s been missing for over a year.”
“Kids run off. They’re famous for it.” I knocked back some beer.
“She was only fifteen.” A beat, then, “Opaline thinks she’s been grabbed by a cult.”
Unbidden, another cerebral barrage. I sent the images to the place where I keep them all buried.
A full minute. Then I said, “Let me get this straight. I’m to be this kid’s savior because I need saving?”
“Something like that.”
Beau’s eyes were now blue-laser-focused on mine. I stared back, every neuron in my brain ordering retreat.
Still, I bit. “Where’s she being held?”
“No one knows.”
Silence on our side of the window screens. On the other, animated gull conversation about crabs or fish. Maybe trash.
“I don’t know shit about finding MPs,” I said.
“You were SERE.” Beau used the military acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.
“That’s different.” It was. But I got his point.
“And how was it you were chosen to teach those courses?”
“Lottery?”
“Right. And the other intel ‘duties’ we don’t talk about?” Air-hooking quotes around the purposely vague noun.
I took another swallow.
The curtains lifted on a breeze smelling of salt and pluff mud.
The room crept a few nanometers from orange toward amber.
Other memories bubbled up. Uneaten bologna sandwiches, blown-off guitar lessons, a lipstick-ravaged wall, once painted pink to please a teenage girl.
Beau tried hard the three short years that he had me. Never got a thank-you from his surly, copper-haired ward.
“Talk about the kid.” I broke the silence.
“Better you get the facts direct from Opaline.”
“A face-to-face meet?” Blood pulsing in the little shallow beside my collarbone.
“You can use my car.”
Taking my silence as consent, Beau pushed to his feet and handed me a blue-lined page ripped from a spiral notebook. Eyes pointed elsewhere, I flipped it onto the table beside me.
When Beau was gone, I tossed the paper into the wastebasket by my bathroom sink. An icy shower, then I armed the security system, checked for creatures outside my windows, and hit the rack.
Sleep was evasive, which is normal for me. But this was different. I’ve spent so long trying not to think about the past, about those two nights, that my insomniac mind tends to focus on the present. Buy butter. Clean the guns. Change the porch bulb.
That night I was visited by a million ghosts.
Experts say it’s healing to contemplate loss. To talk about it. Bullshit. Revisiting the past makes me nauseous and costs me rest.
After hours of futile twisting in sweat-damp sheets, I got up, padded to the bathroom, and dug Beau’s paper from among the jumble of tissues, Q-tips, and wadded-up hair. A glance at the scrawled address, then I crumpled and returned the page to the discards of my daily toilette.
The living room was dancing with shadows and still as a tomb. I settled on the couch and lowered my lids. Like five black eyes, the hexagon windows watched me force my mind blank.|Two Nights
CHAPTER 2
Opaline Drucker’s home occupied one side of a small spur shooting east from Legare Street. The stolid two-story brick Georgian faced off across the cobbles with the only other occupant of Poesie Court, another stolid two-story brick Georgian. Both addresses were South of Broad, a location befitting Opaline’s social status. Which I’d discovered via a quick Internet search.
Neither house gave a rat’s ass about curb appeal. Two windows up, two down, each with shutters to the sides and a flower box below. Both ran narrow and deep, away from the street, and both had double-decker terraces spanning one side. Though mirror-image walls hid what lay behind, I knew each upper terrace overlooked a garden.
I parked and got out of Beau’s Audi. At the thunk of the door, a squirrel hotfooted up the trunk of a magnolia. A tail-twitching pause, then it shot to the ground, cut right, and disappeared into a bed of peonies the size of Rhode Island.
The day was humid and far too warm for April. The air smelled of sun on moss-covered earth and stone. Of grass cut by workers speaking languages other than English.
Somewhere out of sight, a sprinkler spit out a rhythmic tic-tic-tic. A church bell rang. No other sound broke the stillness. Poesie Court dozed as though traffic and tourists hadn’t yet been invented.
But it went beyond quiet. The little enclave felt like a time warp. Like a place whose inhabitants had for centuries shunned the scrutiny of strangers.
A quick scan of number five, then I headed up the flagstones toward number seven. I could picture the grande dame’s interior, all wainscoting and cornices and carved balustrades. Not my style. But what the hell. I never hold a good balustrade against anyone.
A thumb to the bell triggered a trill worthy of a Vatican chapel. I wondered about the nature of the minion who would answer the door.
The woman who greeted me was black and probably in her sixties. She wore a short-sleeved gray dress with white collar and apron, all starched stiffer than a British upper lip. I gave her my name. She listened, expressionless, eyes never meeting mine.
“Mrs. Drucker is expecting you. Please follow me.”
I did. Across gleaming marble, beneath a convoluted crystal chandelier, past an elaborately designed staircase swirling with great drama toward a second story. Beyond the foyer, we continued down a wood-paneled hall to a set of glass doors at the back of the house.
“Please wait here.” The maid disappeared to announce my presence.
I looked around. More polished marble underfoot. More twisting crystal overhead. Through a partially open door to my right I could see a sliver of grand piano, above it the top half of an oil portrait, a man posing with one hand on his chest. Not a smiley guy.
I checked my image in a full-length mirror to my left. Jeans slim enough to fit my ass with legs long enough to reach my feet. With my height and lack of poundage, finding pants that fit takes serious searching. Not that I care much. White blouse roomy enough to hide the bulge at the small of my back. Hair doing unruly.
I was adjusting my ponytail clip when the maid returned and held the door wide with one fleshy arm. I followed her through to the outside.
A woman sat on a dark wicker sofa at the far end of the terrace, hair a wavery white beacon in shadows cast by flora hanging above her and potted palms flanking her sides. Despite the sticky weather, a patchwork quilt covered the woman’s lap and legs. A small dog, maybe a Pomeranian, slept curled on the quilt. The woman was stroking its back.
The maid crossed to the woman and said, “She here, ma’am.”
CHAPTER 1
My right-hand neighbor thinks I’m crazy, so she brings me cheese.
I heard the one-two crunch of her boots on the path. A pause, then the oyster shells crunched again.
I lifted a corner of the towel covering my kitchen window. She was already five yards off, a shadow-laced smudge among the live oaks.
Six years, and I still didn’t know her name. Didn’t want to. Had no desire to exchange recipes or comments on the tides.
I cracked the door, snagged the plastic-wrapped package, and shoved it into the fridge.
Truth is, I don’t mind the cheese. What I hate are the sharp little eyes plumbing my soul. That and the pity.
And the goats. When the wind is right, the bleating bullies into my dreams and I’m back in Helmand with the blood and the dust.
Or maybe I’m reading the old gal wrong. Maybe the cheese is a bribe so I don’t murder Billie or Nanny.
My left-hand neighbor hanged himself from the end of his pier. His dog curled up and died by his head. Double suicide. Maggot jamboree by the time the bodies were found.
Arthur was a wood-carver, Prince a collie. I prefer their silent company. Fits my two-pronged plan for life. Need no one. Feel nothing.
I ran six miles and put in time with my free weights. A beer and a sandwich for lunch, then I spent the afternoon shooting Cheerwine cans off a dune at Gray Bay. The beach was deserted and not far away. Nothing is.
Goat Island is a skinny strip of sand just a monkey’s spit wide, uninhabited until Henry and Blanche Holloway rowed over to escape the stresses of 1930s Charleston. Legend has it they spent decades in a hole covered with driftwood and palm fronds.
Now that sounds warp-speed psycho to me.
But Henry and Blanche had one thing right. For solitude, Goat Island is the cat’s meow. Even today there’s no ferry, no paved road, ergo no cars or trucks. No access except by private boat. Outsiders rarely find reason to come.
The few scrappy residents live in cottages cobbled together from wreckage ignored or tossed ashore by Hurricane Hugo. My porch roof is the ass end of a disemboweled rowboat. Goat Lady’s shed started life as Arthur’s latrine.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t live hole-in-the-ground au naturel batty. I’ve got electricity, a septic tank. All the advantages.
The downside to Goat is the spring mosquitoes, some large enough to carry off St. Bernards. By six the bloodsuckers were organizing into squadrons, preparing to strike. Over and out for moi.
I was home rubbing aloe on bites when the bell above the stove jangled its jerry-rigged warning.
The moths did their frenzied dance in my chest.
I dug the shotgun from my duffel, thumbed shells into the chamber, and crept to a window. The sun was low, flaming the waterway orange and making me squint.
Far below, a figure crouched on my dock, securing lines. Both human and boat were featureless black cutouts against the tangerine glow.
My grip tightened on the stock, ready to pump.
The figure straightened and headed my way. Male. Barrel-chested. Not big, but muscular in a scrawny-arms-and-legs way.
I recognized the confident drill-sergeant stride. The contour of the ragged Tilley hat. Not vintage, just old.
Shit!
I snapped into action. Ammo out and into the duffel, guns into the closet. Liquor bottles, glasses, and dirty dishes under the sink. Yesterday’s clothes and flip-flops heave-ho into the bedroom.
His knock was hard enough to rattle the screen in its jamb. One last look around, then I hurried to undo the inner door locks. Two, then the deadbolt.
He stood with hands on hips, looking left toward the marsh. His eyes were blue, his face weathered as the month of March.
“What’s wrong?” Mouth dry. No one ever came uninvited. No one ever came.
“Something’s gotta be wrong for me to drop by?” Gravelly. Gruff.
“Of course not.” Plastic smile molding my face. “You usually give a heads-up.”
“How? Send a pigeon?”
I said nothing.
“You gonna leave me out here till I need a transfusion?”
I lifted the hook and stepped back. Beau entered, gaze skimming. A cop gaze. One spin around the cottage, then it settled on me, running the same critique I resent in my neighbor.
The scar burned an itchy path below my right eye.
“I didn’t recognize the boat.” Concentrating on normal.
“Getting the gel coat repaired. But what? You were maybe expecting Bowie?”
“He died.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Gonna offer a man a beer?”
I got two Palmetto Ambers from the fridge and we moved to the living room, a small hexagon accessed through a wood-trimmed arch. Ceiling fan, sofa, two threadbare chairs, three beat-to-hell tables. No need for décor. Only Beau and one other were allowed in my home.
Beau dropped onto the sofa, sloughed off the hat, and took a long pull of his beer. His hair was gray and buzzed to the scalp. Had been since I’d known him. Probably since his mama first shaved it with clippers at a kitchen chair.
I sat opposite, knees jutting, feet under my bum. The five-window view wrapped us like an IMAX featuring the Atlantic seaboard.
A picture formed in my head. Beau with a younger man’s face. Hiding his frustration, his pride. Not pleading, but close. Asking a fellow cop to give his foster kid yet another break. Red-blue pulsing his badge and the honky-tonk shack at his back.
Beau raised his right ankle to his left knee. Cleared his throat. Levered the foot up and down several times.
“Had an interesting call today.” Eyes on a Top-Sider as old as the hat. “Lady name of Opaline Drucker.”
That triggered a ping in some remote brain chip.
“Who is she?”
“I’ll leave the telling of that for after.”
“After what?”
“Hearing me out.” Tone a million miles from drop-by casual. “Mrs. Drucker has a problem. I think you can help her.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
Beau took another swig, then set the bottle on the floor. Uncrossing his legs, he leaned forward and looked me full in the eye. “You’re in a bad place, Sunnie.”
“I’m happy as a clam out here.” Arms uplifted to emphasize the level of my joy.
“We both know that’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, I get it. You overreacted, you killed the bastard.”
“PSO ruled it a justified shoot.” Curt. The incident was the final straw for the Professional Standards Office, Charleston PD’s version of internal affairs. The end of my career in law enforcement. And ancient history.
“Damn straight it was.” Beau flicked dirt from jeans too faded to qualify as blue. Maybe a bug. “The scumbag nearly took out your eye.”
“No way I’d ride a desk.” Cheeks burning.
“Hell no. I’d have quit, too.”
“You here to remind me what a loser I am? First the Corps, then the job? News flash. I already know.” Meaner than I intended. Or not.
“Knock it off.”
“Get to the point.”
“It’s been six years.”
“Ah. You’ve come to enforce some kind of self-pity statute.” Arm-wrapping my chest and tucking my hands into my pits. “Oh, wait. You’re off the force, too.”
Beau breathed deeply. Exhaled through his nose. Chose his words.
“You can’t hide on this island, talking to no one, doing God knows what to yourself.”
“Yes. I can.”
“You’ve withdrawn from the whole goddamned human race.”
“I have a bestie that lives in my bedside table. Want to meet him?”
“See. There you go. The least little pressure and out come the jokes.”
“I have you.”
“I’m about all you have.”
“And you think I’m nuts.” God knows I did.
“Of course you’re not nuts.” Frustrated, trying for patient. “But you can’t just sit out here doing nothing.”
“I run, I shoot, I fish, I read.” Gut rolled tight as an armadillo under threat.
“It’s not normal.”
“I’ve tried normal. Too many rules. Too much constraint.” Too much rage? I’m a big girl. I can own it now.
“Why are you so goddamned stubborn?”
“It’s a gift.”
I detest explaining myself. To Beau. To the therapists with their gentle eyes and nonprobing questions that probe. To anyone. I changed the subject.
“What’s this got to do with Orphaline Drucker?”
“Opaline. I think helping her could benefit you.”
“Wow. I’m your new project.”
Beau ignored that. “Drucker’s granddaughter’s been missing for over a year.”
“Kids run off. They’re famous for it.” I knocked back some beer.
“She was only fifteen.” A beat, then, “Opaline thinks she’s been grabbed by a cult.”
Unbidden, another cerebral barrage. I sent the images to the place where I keep them all buried.
A full minute. Then I said, “Let me get this straight. I’m to be this kid’s savior because I need saving?”
“Something like that.”
Beau’s eyes were now blue-laser-focused on mine. I stared back, every neuron in my brain ordering retreat.
Still, I bit. “Where’s she being held?”
“No one knows.”
Silence on our side of the window screens. On the other, animated gull conversation about crabs or fish. Maybe trash.
“I don’t know shit about finding MPs,” I said.
“You were SERE.” Beau used the military acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.
“That’s different.” It was. But I got his point.
“And how was it you were chosen to teach those courses?”
“Lottery?”
“Right. And the other intel ‘duties’ we don’t talk about?” Air-hooking quotes around the purposely vague noun.
I took another swallow.
The curtains lifted on a breeze smelling of salt and pluff mud.
The room crept a few nanometers from orange toward amber.
Other memories bubbled up. Uneaten bologna sandwiches, blown-off guitar lessons, a lipstick-ravaged wall, once painted pink to please a teenage girl.
Beau tried hard the three short years that he had me. Never got a thank-you from his surly, copper-haired ward.
“Talk about the kid.” I broke the silence.
“Better you get the facts direct from Opaline.”
“A face-to-face meet?” Blood pulsing in the little shallow beside my collarbone.
“You can use my car.”
Taking my silence as consent, Beau pushed to his feet and handed me a blue-lined page ripped from a spiral notebook. Eyes pointed elsewhere, I flipped it onto the table beside me.
When Beau was gone, I tossed the paper into the wastebasket by my bathroom sink. An icy shower, then I armed the security system, checked for creatures outside my windows, and hit the rack.
Sleep was evasive, which is normal for me. But this was different. I’ve spent so long trying not to think about the past, about those two nights, that my insomniac mind tends to focus on the present. Buy butter. Clean the guns. Change the porch bulb.
That night I was visited by a million ghosts.
Experts say it’s healing to contemplate loss. To talk about it. Bullshit. Revisiting the past makes me nauseous and costs me rest.
After hours of futile twisting in sweat-damp sheets, I got up, padded to the bathroom, and dug Beau’s paper from among the jumble of tissues, Q-tips, and wadded-up hair. A glance at the scrawled address, then I crumpled and returned the page to the discards of my daily toilette.
The living room was dancing with shadows and still as a tomb. I settled on the couch and lowered my lids. Like five black eyes, the hexagon windows watched me force my mind blank.|Two Nights
CHAPTER 2
Opaline Drucker’s home occupied one side of a small spur shooting east from Legare Street. The stolid two-story brick Georgian faced off across the cobbles with the only other occupant of Poesie Court, another stolid two-story brick Georgian. Both addresses were South of Broad, a location befitting Opaline’s social status. Which I’d discovered via a quick Internet search.
Neither house gave a rat’s ass about curb appeal. Two windows up, two down, each with shutters to the sides and a flower box below. Both ran narrow and deep, away from the street, and both had double-decker terraces spanning one side. Though mirror-image walls hid what lay behind, I knew each upper terrace overlooked a garden.
I parked and got out of Beau’s Audi. At the thunk of the door, a squirrel hotfooted up the trunk of a magnolia. A tail-twitching pause, then it shot to the ground, cut right, and disappeared into a bed of peonies the size of Rhode Island.
The day was humid and far too warm for April. The air smelled of sun on moss-covered earth and stone. Of grass cut by workers speaking languages other than English.
Somewhere out of sight, a sprinkler spit out a rhythmic tic-tic-tic. A church bell rang. No other sound broke the stillness. Poesie Court dozed as though traffic and tourists hadn’t yet been invented.
But it went beyond quiet. The little enclave felt like a time warp. Like a place whose inhabitants had for centuries shunned the scrutiny of strangers.
A quick scan of number five, then I headed up the flagstones toward number seven. I could picture the grande dame’s interior, all wainscoting and cornices and carved balustrades. Not my style. But what the hell. I never hold a good balustrade against anyone.
A thumb to the bell triggered a trill worthy of a Vatican chapel. I wondered about the nature of the minion who would answer the door.
The woman who greeted me was black and probably in her sixties. She wore a short-sleeved gray dress with white collar and apron, all starched stiffer than a British upper lip. I gave her my name. She listened, expressionless, eyes never meeting mine.
“Mrs. Drucker is expecting you. Please follow me.”
I did. Across gleaming marble, beneath a convoluted crystal chandelier, past an elaborately designed staircase swirling with great drama toward a second story. Beyond the foyer, we continued down a wood-paneled hall to a set of glass doors at the back of the house.
“Please wait here.” The maid disappeared to announce my presence.
I looked around. More polished marble underfoot. More twisting crystal overhead. Through a partially open door to my right I could see a sliver of grand piano, above it the top half of an oil portrait, a man posing with one hand on his chest. Not a smiley guy.
I checked my image in a full-length mirror to my left. Jeans slim enough to fit my ass with legs long enough to reach my feet. With my height and lack of poundage, finding pants that fit takes serious searching. Not that I care much. White blouse roomy enough to hide the bulge at the small of my back. Hair doing unruly.
I was adjusting my ponytail clip when the maid returned and held the door wide with one fleshy arm. I followed her through to the outside.
A woman sat on a dark wicker sofa at the far end of the terrace, hair a wavery white beacon in shadows cast by flora hanging above her and potted palms flanking her sides. Despite the sticky weather, a patchwork quilt covered the woman’s lap and legs. A small dog, maybe a Pomeranian, slept curled on the quilt. The woman was stroking its back.
The maid crossed to the woman and said, “She here, ma’am.”
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- PublisherSimon & Schuster Canada
- Publication date2017
- ISBN 10 1476726450
- ISBN 13 9781476726458
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages322
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