Stone Heart - Softcover

Rice, Luanne

 
9780553587821: Stone Heart
Softcover
ISBN 10: 055358782X ISBN 13: 9780553587821
Verlag: Bantam Dell Pub Group, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

When Maria Dark returns to Connecticut after years of traveling as an archaeologist, she learns that her sister's once-idyllic marriage is now permeated with a dangerously perverse obsession, in a powerful novel of family bonds and home. Reprint. 45,000 first printing.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Maria Dark flew north, from one America to the other, with a bag of treasures between her feet. The man beside her spoke Spanish into a cassette recorder. He seemed hardly to notice the lightning at their wings. The plane lurched, then continued to glide; orange strobes reflected on the clouds that surrounded them. A flight attendant cruised the aisle, checking seatbelts.

"What time will we land?" Maria asked her.

"We're in a holding pattern over Philadelphia," the woman said. "This storm is turning to snow in New York."

"You mean we might land here?" Maria asked.

"We might."

Lightning split the sky, and for one instant Maria wished to be on the ground anywhere: Philadelphia, Miami, Machu Picchu. Then she thought of Sophie and Nell, waiting at JFK, ready to drive her home to Hatuquitit; almost absently Maria reached into her bag for a talisman to guide the plane safely north. Her hand closed around the gold goddess she planned to give Sophie. She felt like the mysterious stranger going home, bringing storms with her.

"Pretty," said the man beside her, admiring the small statue. "Is it Incan?"

"No, she's Chav’n," Maria said. During their excavation at Chav’n de Huentar, she and Aldo had found several statues like her, and Maria, thinking of a present for Sophie, had commissioned a local goldsmith to copy one.

"That belongs in the national museum," the man said reproachfully.

"She's a replica. A present for my sister," Maria said. Aldo had taught her that foreign archaeologists were always suspected of trying to remove antiquities.

"That's too good for a present," the man said. He flinched at a crack of thunder, then resumed recording.

Maria figured he thought she'd robbed a grave. She'd have to tell Sophie about it; it would add to Sophie's pleasure in the goddess. Sophie would want details: the fact that the man wore thick glasses and had hairy nostrils, the fact that he began every other recorded sentence with "And furthermore." From his litany, Maria pegged him as a low-level lawyer for the local government.

Sophie and Nell would be at the airport by now. Just before leaving the mountain, Maria had called Sophie; the connection had been terrible, full of static, but Maria thought Sophie had said she and Nell would come alone. Like the old days, Maria thought. Before Maria married Aldo, before Sophie married Gordon and had Simon and Flo, before Nell married Peter and became their sister-in-law and Andy's mother instead of just their best friend.

The plane had been veering right, circling for forty minutes, but suddenly Maria sensed it change course. Heading for home, she thought she could smell north. She opened the hand clutching the statue for one quick look. The goddess was fine and slender, nearly as beautiful as Sophie.

For one moment Maria wondered whether Hallie would meet her at the airport. Of course she would not. Sophie had a ringleader's knack for setting a scene, assembling a party. Sophie would know that their mother had no place at this homecoming. Hallie wouldn't think it seemly to stage a big welcome for a daughter who had left her husband to his glamorous dig, to Chav’n mysteries, to the thin mountain air, who had left him to all those things forever--and for what?

To return to a place where she hadn't lived for seventeen years, where her mother's house sat on a hill overlooking meadows bordered by Bell Stream on the east and the Hatuquitit Correctional Institute for Women on the west. To return to a town settled by Puritans who had called the Native Americans "fiends of hell."

To find work in a place where archaeologists taught at colleges or lectured at local Native American museums instead of making discoveries destined for display in the Smithsonian or the British Museum.
Hallie would never understand why her only child to escape the ordinary would want to return to it.

Or so Maria thought as the plane from Peru rode the storm's front edge northeast and became the last flight to land before JFK closed down.


Sophie and Nell stood amid the crowd, whistling and waving so that Maria would see them. Sophie's whistle, incredibly piercing, was unmistakable and took Maria straight back to when the three of them would roam the Hatuquitit hills pretending to be Indian scouts. Now their thick New England clothes--red and blue down jackets, corduroy pants, Nell's sailcloth purse--looked startlingly bright in the fluorescent light.

"Anyone escaped lately?" Maria called across the crowd. To children growing up next to a women's prison, that question had been as natural to them as "How are you?" or "Do you like the weather?"

"Not this week," Sophie called back.

Suddenly the three of them were holding each other in a tight circle. Maria had to drop her bags to hug them properly. Then Sophie and Nell dropped theirs--their six legs formed a cage around the bags, protecting them from the thieves they imagined swarming around the arrivals area.

"Are you okay? Did you have a good flight?" Nell asked.

"It was bumpy," Maria said.

"But are you okay?" Sophie asked, her question meaning something different from Nell's. Maria took a second before looking straight at Sophie. Sophie, like all the Darks, had black hair, fair, unfreckled skin, and blue eyes that hid nothing. Right now they were full of grief for Maria's marriage. Their depth of sadness distracted Maria from her first shocking thought: that Sophie had gained a dangerous amount of weight.

"I wanted to leave," Maria said. "It was my idea."

Sophie nodded as if she knew better. Maria, three years older, had felt like Sophie's mother when they were children. But somewhere in mid-adolescence the roles had shifted and Sophie had taken charge.

"Let's get on the road," Nell said. "We want to beat the storm. . . ."

"How is everyone?" Maria asked on the way to the car. They shouldered into the driving snow. Her bags had been evenly divided among the three of them; she carried the heaviest two herself--a big metal one full of photographic equipment and a canvas one full of presents. The icy February wind stung her face and reminded her of nights on the mountain, at the dig site near Chav’n de Hu‡ntar.

"Peter wanted to come," Nell said. "I made him stay at home with Andy. They're having dinner with your mother tonight. Someone has to keep her at bay--otherwise she'd freeze her ass off waiting for you at the end of the driveway."

"The driveway of her mind," Maria said, and Sophie snorted. Their mother would wait in the driveway for no one; she had perfected utter devotion to her family without ever showing any overt signs of affection. Somehow, Nell refused to see this.

"Here we are," Nell said, stopping at a red Jeep four rows into the short-term parking lot.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" Sophie asked Maria while Nell checked all her pockets for the car keys. Ice crystals frosted Sophie's black lashes. She smiled expectantly.

"What?" Maria asked.

"To ask about Gordon and the children. They're fine."

"That's great. I'm sure they are," Maria said. She wondered why Sophie wanted to make her feel guilty for not asking, but Sophie continued to smile. If her face was plump, it was as radiant as ever.

"I'm just so proud," Sophie said. "I'm an idiot on the subject. Gordon's planning to put a gazebo near the brook. He knows I've always wanted one. . ....

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Bantam Dell Pub Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
055358782X
ISBN 13 
9780553587821
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
338
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780804108591: Stone Heart

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0804108595 ISBN 13:  9780804108591
Verlag: Ivy Books, 1992
Softcover