Pyres: A Mystery - Hardcover

Nikitas, Derek

 
9780312363970: Pyres: A Mystery
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312363974 ISBN 13: 9780312363970
Verlag: Minotaur Books,US, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

In PYRES, 15 year old Lucia Moberg lifts a CD out of a store in a shopping mall—and when she and her dad get into their car, there is a tap at the window.  The next second her father's brains are on the dashboard.  So begins the story of the ruin of her mother, whose home life is shrouded in darkness, a mysterious and menacing motorcycle gang, the real-to-life female cop out to crack the case, who is facing her own family's collapse, and the struggle for Lucia to piece together some semblance of a normal teenage life.  The writing is hard and crisp, and wholly multi-dimensional, while the story moves along at a nail-biting pace with twists, turns, literary allusions, and the engaging plight of several fascinating, memorable, and fully rounded characters.   

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Excerpt

Once upon a time is hell. Lucia would learn to wish that her life could unfold more than just once upon a time. Maybe then the story of her family might improve each time it was told. Maybe then she could cut away the dark spots, just like her dad used to do when he read her those Swedish fairy tales, hunched on a kid-sized stool near her bed. He often tilted his fables away from the brutal bits, bypassed whatever would cause nightmares. Only the bright stuff, kiddo.

“You missed the part where the goblin stole the baby,” Luc would say. She’d be tucked under her comforter in her Care Bears p.j.s, six years old, wearing mittens and her Yankees cap just for the heck of it. Downstairs Mom watched Dynasty and pretended she was studying for a bio test. Back then Mom had only two semesters left to snag that college diploma that she’d been postponing for the sake of mothering her only daughter.

“I forgot the goblin part, that is true,” Dad said. He scratched his blond moustache and flashed a smirk that meant some slips happened on purpose. The sky blue binding on the book he held was thick as a dictionary. On the cover was a painting of a bearded gnome—tomte, in Swedish—no bigger than a cat and saddled to a deer’s antlers. The tomte gripped those antlers with two thick mittens, throwing out his stubby legs. He wore a pointed felt cap and a leather tote strapped from his shoulder to his opposite hip. In the background the fir trees held aloft snow tufts on their upturned branches. Tomten are the creatures that deliver your Jul Mas presents if you’ve been a good girl.

And Dad showed her the pictures inside the book: a tomte crouched on a pillow and whispering into a sleeping child’s ear, the child’s loose hair twined around his legs and his little yarn-laced boots. That picture was for the story about a princess who finds a tomte caught in a rabbit trap in her garden. Afterward she keeps him in a burlap sack tied to her bedpost, and he doesn’t mind the tight quarters. There’s an evil queen with precious gems lodged in her eye sockets, a talking bear, an ice fairy who tells the future while a cold blue heart beats inside her chest. Even years later Luc remembered those stories.

Her father was Swedish, born and raised near Stockholm. Before Luc was born, even before Dad met Mom, he moved from Sweden to New York to go to school for his literature doctorate, and he’d only been back to Scandinavia a few times for research and visits with his distant half siblings from his father’s first marriage. Dad’s own parents died long ago. Luc had never visited Sweden herself, so she didn’t know any better than what Dad would have her believe, though he always promised they’d go in the summer of ’97 when she graduated from high school.

But for now Luc was fifteen and scrawny, five feet tall in her purple Doc Martens. Scraping her boot soles over sidewalks and down school hallways, clomping like a puppy on its adult feet. Luc’s moon face teetered on her thin stalk of a neck, and her big wet eyes always looked shocked though they hardly ever were. Black-dyed hair, black pleated skirt, black fingernails. Black that stained bathroom towels and armrests and pillow cushions and incited Mom’s hollered threats.

Blair Crowley-Moberg was her mother’s name. Mom was only thirty-five, ten years younger than her professor husband. Sure she was still attractive, but she was frumpy more often than not with her wood brown hair and her orthopedic sneakers. Last time Luc saw her mother looking halfway glam was when Mom went as Madonna to the English faculty Halloween party, with the blond wig and the cone bra. “I feel totally retarded,” Mom had kept saying until she drank enough amaretto sours to cheer herself up. Luc went as Gregor the human dung beetle from Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” even though she’d never read it. At the party Mom snuck Luc enough sips of amaretto to give Luc blurred sight even with her glasses on.

But that was more than a month ago, long before the bucktoothed jack-o’-lanterns rotted greenish on the front porch until Dad finally threw them out. Thanksgiving ’93 had passed with a roasted chicken because nobody in the family liked turkey, and then it was back to school. Now it was the first Saturday in a December that had started warmer and wetter than usual, but with the same perpetual upstate winter gray. Nine days until Luc’s sixteenth birthday, until she could test for her driver’s permit.

And if she’d had that permit just nine days earlier—

Look: if only decisions weren’t just once upon a time, then with a second chance Luc never would’ve begged her parents—Mom first—to drive her from where they lived in the Village of Hammersport to the Ontario Ridge Mall twenty minutes east toward Rochester. But there’s no pulling back from that decision. Time rushed Luc only forward. Living backward, fixing what’s already been broken—it’s like crawling back into the womb: it’s impossible.

How it happened was Luc found her mother in the backyard raking up the dead leaves they’d neglected until now, piling them beside the vinyl pool that had been covered since September. Mom wore sweatpants and an insulated flannel shirt, her shoulders getting damp from a falling drizzle. Her hair was beaded with moisture and her lips shuddered from the chill.

“I can’t take you right now. I have to finish this,” Mom said.

Luc squinted at the dark churning clouds. “It’s raining.”

“That’s why I need to finish.”

“Well—later?” Raindrops piddled against Luc’s glasses.

“I doubt it,” Mom said, like such decisions were out of her grasp. “What do you need to go to the mall for anyways?”

Luc shrugged and laced her fingers together over the top of her head. She stood near the walkout basement door and the concrete steps leading up to the driveway. The Mobergs’ patch of village property was landscaped lower than the yards around it, surrounded on three sides by stone walls like an excavation site. Back there everything loomed above the yard—their house with its finished basement and ground floor and attic, the trees shivering off the last of their dead leaves, Dad’s boat draped with a tarp for winter, the neighbors’ driveways. Next door, right that moment, Quinn Cutler was up there working in his mother’s garage. Luc couldn’t see him but she heard his tools clank and crank against his motorcycle as he tightened it up like a huge metal fist.

“Is there another rake?” Luc said. “I could help?”

“That’s a first,” said Mom. She hunched down and ripped away the wet leaves clogging the rake. For months Mom had been blurting smug quips like the two of them were still tangled in some argument that Luc had forgotten about. “Anyway, you don’t need to be spending any more money. You still owe me for those towels you ruined.”

“I was just asking,” Luc said.

And then, five feet above them, just at the crest of their stone wall, Quinn Cutler appeared on his mother’s driveway in jeans and an Overkill concert T-shirt, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. His denim knees were stained with smudges of dark oil. He was part Native American—with tanned skin and sharp cheekbones, silky brown hair parted down the center that draped past his shoulders....

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Verlag
Minotaur Books,US
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312363974
ISBN 13 
9780312363970
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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