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On Sale: May 31, 2005
Paperback
432 pages
ISBN: 0553587625
THERE'S A PLACE IN OUR HEARTS RESERVED FOR MIRACLES…
From Luanne Rice, the celebrated author of Beach Girls and many other New York Times bestsellers, comes this powerful novel of a mystery, a love affair, and a bond that cannot be broken set in a seaside town where miracles are made...
On the first day of summer, Mara Jameson went out to water her garden-and was never seen again. Years after her disappearance, no one could forget the expectant mother whose glowing smile had captured the heart of everyone who'd known her: Maeve Jameson, still mourning the loss of a granddaughter she had struggled to protect…Patrick Murphy, a dogged police detective obsessed with a vanished woman…and Lily Malone, drawn to the rugged beauty of the Nova Scotia coast and its promise of a new life.
Here Lily hopes to raise her nine-year-old daughter, Rose, far from the pain and loss of the past. Here she will meet a gifted scientist, Liam Neill, whose life is on a similar trajectory from heartbreak to hope. And before the season is over, Lily will find the magic that exists in people we love the best…the everyday miracles that can make the extraordinary happen anywhere.
Nine years ago, Lily Malone arrived in Cape Hawk, Nova Scotia. Pregnant, alone and on the run, she walked out on her family in New England and changed her name to protect herself and her unborn child from an abusive husband.
Lily has created a new life for herself and her daughter, Rose, becoming a part of the community and taking solace in the remote beauty of Cape Hawk. Her main focus is protecting Rose --- from their shadowed past and from the child's heart condition that requires constant vigilance. But for those she left behind, her disappearance has left unanswered questions and a trail of sorrow in its wake.
Lily runs a needlepoint store in Cape Hawk, sharing space in a building with reclusive bachelor Dr. Liam Neill. As a boy, Liam lost his left arm in a shark attack that also claimed his younger brother's life. A member of the town's illustrious seafaring family, he's now an oceanographer who specializes in studying sharks and whales. Liam has been a source of comfort for the fiercely independent Lily since she arrived in town, and there's more to their relationship than either is willing to acknowledge.
When Marisa Taylor arrives in Cape Hawk with her daughter, Jessica, Lily recognizes in her the same hunted look that she once had. Marisa, too, is escaping a violent husband, and her story touches a chord with Lily. When Rose's health takes a turn for the worst, Marisa and Jessica are just two of the people who come to Lily and Rose's aid. And, as he has for the last decade, it's Liam who helps Lily and Rose through the darkest times.
Lily's past finally catches up to her when Patrick Murphy, a retired police detective, tracks her down in Cape Hawk. She's forced to acknowledge that the only way she'll ever have a secure future with Liam and Rose is to confront what --- and who --- she left behind all those years ago. The same is true for Marisa, who with Patrick's help discovers she shares an eerie coincidence with Lily.
In SUMMER'S CHILD, Luanne Rice spins a tale about friendship, family, and the forces that tie people together. Part suspense and part romance, she enlivens the story with engaging characters, a seaside setting, and a touch of storytelling magic that's as transcendent as the summer days in which the novel takes place.
Although there is some resolution in the storyline, the cliffhanger of an ending leads into Rice's next book. One can only hope that SUMMER OF ROSES (on sale June 21st) is as satisfying a read as this one.
--- Reviewed by Shannon McKenna
In this essay Luanne Rice talks about her novel SUMMER'S CHILD, reveals her inspiration for this saga of Hubbard's Point, explores the various images and themes that weave through her words, and muses on the depth of her love for the characters she has created.
"I never wanted to stop reading about these characters." That is one of the most wonderful compliments a writer can receive. But in the case of the characters who populate my two novels this summer, I can say that I never wanted to stop writing about them. So I didn't! This year, for the first time ever, I've written linked novels --- SUMMER'S CHILD and SUMMER OF ROSES.
They started last summer when I went to Canada to see whales. I had heard about a place, east of Quebec on the St. Lawrence River, where plankton is so abundant, whales travel miles from the sea to feed there. The bay is remote and romantic, surrounded by rocky cliffs and towering pines. While I was there, I saw shooting stars one night, and the northern lights another. I watched beluga whales, so white and mysterious, surfacing and sounding in the dark, still water.
There were also fin, humpback, and minke whales. Watching them was like trying to catch sight of a meteor. A spout-fine white vapor, there and gone. A dorsal ridge, black and glossy, arches and disappears into the vast blue. It takes hope and vigilance to watch whales; if you look away for a second you might miss them, and even if you see one, you might not be really, completely sure that you saw what you think you saw.
I started thinking about mysteries just beneath the surface, how hard it is to see certain truths no matter how long you stare. I imagined a character --- a wonderful, loving woman, devoted to her family, in love with her life --- but faced with a deep, searing betrayal.
I loved my trip to Canada, and knew that I had found my setting for SUMMER'S CHILD. The novel begins on the longest day of the year, with a shocking event that is all the harder to accept because it happens to such a nice family in such a normal neighborhood. A sparkling-eyed, happy, smiling, beloved young woman, eight months pregnant, walks into her grandmother's rose garden, and from that moment on seems to fall off the face of the earth.
Like many of my novels, SUMMER'S CHILD begins in Hubbard's Point --- an enchanted, close-knit, beachfront community in shoreline Connecticut. The woman's family and friends begin to search for her, and hold a candlelight vigil. Her grandmother raised her, loves her like a daughter, and refuses to give up hope.
But when she doesn't return, how do people go on? How is it possible to maintain faith, while having the courage to look at the truth of what really happened in her seemingly perfect home? Patrick Murphy is the relentless detective who sacrifices quite a lot of his own life, following down every lead.
The novel moves from Connecticut to Canada, to a magical bay filled with whales, reflecting starlight, embraced by pine-studded rock promontories. Nestled in the cove is the town of Cape Hawk. There's a mysterious oceanographer, a family-run inn, a band of story-telling women friends, and a girl with a broken heart.
SUMMER'S CHILD explores the dream of romance. Some relationships look so wonderful from the outside, we wish ours could be like that. The couple might seem so close and devoted --- the way they talk and laugh, the parties they give, the beauty of their house and garden. But who really knows what goes on behind their closed doors except the people themselves?
What happens when the reality is darker? When the wife needs to protect a terrible secret? It can take all her courage just to see the truth in her very own life. Feelings shift and facts slip, and trying to know what's real can be a little like hoping for a fleeting glimpse of the sleek back of a diving whale. There are ways of treating a person that are so subtle yet insidious, they chip away at her bit by bit, until she doesn't even recognize herself.
SUMMER'S CHILD is about love, heartache, family, white whales, best friends, deep longing, sharks, being afraid, learning how to be brave, and the most unexpected dreams coming true. It's about trying again, and finding love where you least expect it; about great women friends, old and new; about a man and woman who fall in love after being friends forever.
Along the way, while writing it, I fell in love myself --- with the characters. (I know, I wrote them, but to me they're just like family.) In fact, I loved them so much, I wrote another novel about them. That's SUMMER OF ROSES, coming very soon...but that's another story...
Luanne Rice is the author of nineteen novels, most recently SILVER BELLS, BEACH GIRLS, DANCE WITH ME, THE PERFECT SUMMER, THE SECRET HOUR, TRUE BLUE, SAFE HARBOR, SUMMER LIGHT, and FIREFLY BEACH. She lives in New York City and Old Lyme, Connecticut.
Chapter 1
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 sync 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 blood spatter on the kitchen floor, the spidery neon-blue patterns revealed by the blood-detecting luminol, trickles and drops . . . spelling, in Patrick's dream, the killer's name. But it was in Latin, and Patrick couldn't understand; 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 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 eastern sky, where the just-about-rising sun painted the dark 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 patted 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 anymore," Patrick said. He wanted to read the story but didn't--at the same time. "As you well know. 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.
"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 stockbroker's quick, sharp 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--the kind of 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 . . .
The whole world 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'd 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.
And he knew that when he got back, he'd be ready to write her this year's letter.
Ah, it was about to start again. As it did every year at this time. Just as the last traces of New England's long chill were gone from the air, just as the birds had returned north from their winter's journeys, just as the roses were coming into bloom and the gardens were awash with color, just as summer solstice was upon them, with its gift of the longest day . . . the time had come around again.
Maeve Jameson stood in her garden, pruning. She wore a wide straw hat, white linen shirt, and hot-pink garden gloves. In spite of all the cover-ups, she also wore sunscreen. They hadn't known about sun damage when she was a girl--they had all thought the sun was the great healing force--the more of it the better.
But she'd had a small skin cancer removed from her cheek last year, and was determined to do her best to keep it from happening again, to stay as healthy as she could, to stay alive until she knew the entire truth.
She had always been fastidious about putting lotion on her granddaughter. Mara had had such fair skin--so typically Irish, pale and freckled. Her parents--Mara's, that is--had been killed in a freak ferry accident on a trip to Mara's mother's hometown in the west of Ireland.
Maeve had taken over raising their daughter, their only child; every time she'd ever looked at Mara, she'd seen her son, Billy, and she'd loved her so much, more than the stars in the sky, more than anything--because she was a direct link to her darling boy, and she'd dutifully put sunscreen all over her freckled skin before letting her go down to the beach.
"You have the soul of your father in your blue eyes," Maeve would say, spreading the lotion.
"And my mother?"
"Yes, Anna too," Maeve would say, because she had loved her Irish daughter-in-law almost as if she'd been her own child. But the truth was, Mara had been all-Billy to Maeve. Maeve couldn't help herself.
So now she just stood in her garden, clipping the dead heads from the rosebushes. She tried to concentrate on finding the three-leaf sets, but she was distracted by the two news people standing out by the road. They had their cameras out, clicking away. Tomorrow--the anniversary of Mara's disappearance--the headlines would no doubt read, "Grandmother Still Waiting after All These Years" or "Roses for Mara's Remembrance" or some other malarkey.
The local news people had always made a cartoon of the situation--tried to boil everything down into an easily palatable story for their readers to understand. When no one knew the whole truth--except Mara. Edward had played his part in the terrible drama, and Maeve knew some segments, but only Mara knew it all.
Only Mara had endured it.
The state police detective had learned some of it. Patrick Murphy, another Hibernian, although not in the tradition of Irish cops that Maeve remembered from growing up in the South End of Hartford.
Those fellows had been tough, all steel, no nonsense, and they'd seen the world in black and white. Everything was one way or another. Not Patrick.
Excerpted from SUMMER'S CHILD by Luanne Rice Copyright © 2005 by Luanne Rice. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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