9780553587623: Summer's Child
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553587625 ISBN 13: 9780553587623
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Luanne Rice is the author of twenty-one novels, including Sandcastles, Summer of Roses, Summer’s Child, Silver Bells, Beach Girls, and Dance With Me. She lives in New York City and Old Lyme, Connecticut.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

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.

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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...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553587625
ISBN 13 
9780553587623
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
432
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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