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Sample Chapters
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The house crouched,
brooding and silent, like a giant beast of stone and mortar.
Waiting for her—expecting her to come.
“Aren’t you at least
going to the door with me?
” Jowanna McFarland turned to the
strange old man who brought her out to the desert and now
hurried back toward his truck.
“No ma’am. Got to
get back.”
His large Adam’s apple bobbed in his skinny neck,
a sheen of sweat beaded his weathered face.
Where is my father?
Why didn’t he meet me?
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Panic rising at her
uneasy thoughts, she picked up one of her suitcases and
reached for the other.
It was so hard to believe she stood
at the foot of Superstition Mountains in Arizona.
She sensed
that nothing much had changed in this desert land from the
beginning to this year of 1948.
The letter clenched in her
hand was hard to read through the tears she fought back, but
she’d memorized it.
The long white envelope was addressed to
Jason McFarland, her brother, dead for the past ten years.
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Jowanna knew the
contents of the letter by heart.
The signature was her
father’s, who had abandoned his family eighteen years ago.
It wasn’t only the bare words that had dragged her out of
her comfortable niche and brought her to this strange
destination.
And it wasn’t only to confront him with their
pain his leaving had caused the family, nor was it the
mention in his letter of a gold mine he’d been searching for
and finally found.
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Kate Macklin stared at the grotesque body of
a woman in the water. She is down there.
The voice whispered
into her ear, stiffening hairs on the back of her neck. No!
She put her hands over her ears, as if she heard the words
out loud.
She slammed the lid on the laptop computer,
knowing it wouldn’t help.
That was where the picture had
come from.
Out of the window of the Amtrak car, Kate
glanced down into a deep gorge alongside the train tracks.
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The river crashed over the rocks, exploding in spumes of
white, high into the air.
The Colorado countryside in the
fall appeared brilliantly clear and sharp.
A sudden stab of
unreality pierced Kate, and she closed her eyes.
In the past, she had seldom ventured out of
her house.
Now, here she was, Katharine Macklin, speeding
through another state, toward a destination she hadn’t yet
determined and enjoying moment.
Until now.
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Without warning, Kate’s fingers grew cold on
the edge of the laptop and a sinking feeling settled in the
pit of her stomach.
Her skin was as clammy and damp as if
the spume sprayed over her from the water below.
Slowly,
cautiously, she opened the computer, expecting—hoping to see
the familiar spreadsheet with figures from one of her
bookkeeping jobs.
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“Oh no! My purse fell overboard!”
Strangers
ran to the side of the ferry and watched the brown, leather bag bob backward through the
wake.
The reality of her entire existence floated
away, destined to eventually sink in the depths of the dark water somewhere between
mainland Australia and Tasmania.
She felt in the pocket of her jeans the thin fold of
bills and a few coins. She wasn’t entirely broke—a tiny consolation.
Tears of angry frustration blurred her vision. |
When she blinked and looked again, the bag was gone.
“Are you all right, Miss?”
An elderly couple
leaned close, as if to shield her from the loss of her handbag.
Flynn Stevens tried to tidy her flyaway hair,
which had come undone from the ribbon at the nape of her neck.
“No, I’m not. I’ve just
lost my money, traveler’s checks and passport.”
What would she do? Nothing this bad had
ever happened to her before.
“I still have my backpack, though.”
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She pointed to the sturdy bag leaning against the railing.
The couple clucked like a pair of chickens
looking for a nugget of corn.
“I realize I shouldn’t have kept everything
valuable in one place. I’m usually more organized.” She took a deep breath, wanting to be
alone with her misery.
“You poor dear.” The woman touched her arm in sympathy.
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Where was David? Had the ocean swept in over the ship deck and washed him
overboard?
Jenny’s heart raced as she peered out the porthole.
The last time she’d seen
her brother, he was racing across the deck of the ship, helping the crew.
What did he know
about walking on water-soaked decks with the ship half-tilting on its side?
The steamer tossed like a chip of wood in the ocean.
The sea sprayed high
over the bow, turning the lines on the deck to shards of ice. |
To Jennifer Kileen, the loud
booming noises and sharp cracks sounded like the death throes of some giant sea monster.
She shivered and tried to rub away the goose bumps creeping along the top of her arms.
Nothing made of mere boards and iron could hope to withstand a storm like this.
She was too close to the end of their long journey to die in the cold
water, without the comforting feel of Ohio earth beneath her feet.
Jeremy would never know
what happened to them, or that they had come to the Northland looking for him. |
She wiped a
clear spot to look out the fogged window.
A handful of women huddled, whispering together in a corner of the salon.
They had come up from the dining area below the deck at the first sign of the storm.
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As the pilot began the descent, Danielle Beaumont closed her eyes, thinking
of the crumpled letters on her desk, the delicate, spidery writing.
Maybe she should have
brought them with her instead of leaving them at home.
What if her grandmother was senile
and denied sending her the one way plane ticket and begging her to come with such urgency?
The Gulf of Fortuna lay below, a brilliant
turquoise, calmly translucent all the way to the bottom.
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Boats of all sizes and shapes
cluttered the seaport as far as she could see along the shoreline.
Oh, Lordy, what was she
doing here?
“Pardoneme. Is this your first visit to LaCieba?”
A woman in the next seat
tried a halting English.
They hadn’t spoken since the passenger boarded at the last stop.
Danielle assumed she didn’t speak English and the woman probably was put
off by the irritation in Danielle’s expression.
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She was ashamed of herself for feeling so anxious.
Howard and her grandmother weren’t worth it. She was finished with letting
people manipulate her.
“Yes, I’ve never been out of the United States before.
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Marisa should have found her circumstances terrifying, but now anger
blinded her.
The stolen money, the promised inheritance, her father’s constant doubts
as to her ability to do something on her own—none of these should have compelled her to
come here.
Impatiently, she tapped her boot on the macadam of the Brazilian airport.
Why was it so difficult to hire a private plane to take her into the
jungle of Mato Grosso?
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Here she was in Brasilia, the Capitol city, and she might as well have been invisible.
She spoke to one pilot after another; polished, wearing suits and ties, they looked like businessmen from any American city.
Most spoke varying degrees of English but could have spoken Portuguese for all that it mattered.
They looked her over with admiring stares, taking inexcusable liberties with their dark liquid eyes, and then promptly turned away when she asked them about Mato Grosso.
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What was her stubbornness costing this time? Coming here, so far from her comfortable niche, wasn’t the first time she had burned her bridges.
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Chapter.
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The girl saw no familiar trees, no tall peaks of
snow-covered mountains, only flat whiteness surrounding
them. Someone shrieked and the sound carried back to her.
She turned to watch in stunned fascination as the last boat
gave a mighty lurch against a pounding wave and rolled in
slow grace so that only the bottom bobbed on the surface.
The second boat did the same, causing a neck-snapping jolt
transmitting to the two remaining vessels.
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They tipped
sideways for a long, terrifying moment before they bounced
back into place.
Fear had not touched her yet. Her father, the leader of the
group, would make it all right. He always had.
Ragged chunks of ice struck the sides of the wide skin boats
and the wind howled and danced over the water.
Women and children huddled together, their mouths open in
unspoken cries of fright.
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The men stoutly braced themselves
against the movement of the heaving sea. Tawny skin
stretched over their facial bones in expressions of grim
resignation.
The men knew Ugruk’s power.
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“He comes! The giant sun-touched bear walked through our camp last night leaving his signs behind!”
Quaanta, a man who seldom showed his feelings, bent his head to peer into the tent at the two women and the girl sitting astonished before him.
“It is an omen. Surely it foretells the end of our hunger.” Grandmother was the first to recover from the shock of seeing her daughter’s mate in such a state of excitement.
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Tiana, a child of nine summers shook her head.To slay a grizzly was forbidden under any circumstances, even if the tribe starved to death.
Her father knew that.
Quaanta withdrew his head and shoulders from the tent flap.
“The shaman has called a meeting in the
kaslim, the big tent.”
The women and the girl sat in silence after Quaanta left. Finally they started dressing in their outer furs, with no words coming forth, so great were their apprehensions.
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Outside, the bite of the northern wind sweeping down from the nearby mountains chilled Tiana to the bone in spite of her jacket made of badger skins and the wolverine cover for her head.
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Scrambling over
garbage cans, Alexander McBee climbed up on the dividing
fence, and dropped, bent over, breathing hard.
McBee’s heart
pounded. He felt the exertion in every muscle of his body.
“Barely forty and you’re unfit as hell,” he muttered
when his breath caught up with him again.
He didn’t think
of himself as lazy. He just didn’t believe in sweat.
His
first case in a month and already screwing up, but what the
hey ... he was trying, wasn’t he?
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“Hey,
jerk! You tailing me?” The hoarse whisper sounded
alarmingly close to his ear.
McBee
pivoted, ready to get in a few licks until he recognized the
voice of the sleazy bookie he had followed for days. So much
for undercover.
“Yeah,
I’m following you.”
It
was hard slowing his gasps to somewhere near normal, noting
the other fellow was not even breathing hard.
“What
the hell for?” Blackjack snarled.
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“I paid you a deposit
and you screwed up the big bucks. You were supposed to watch
Marie, not me, you jerk!”
Private
eye work could get complicated. When had he decided to
switch from shadowing Marie to watching her husband?
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Chapter.
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Katharine Macklin stared at the
computer screen in disbelief.
Little dolls stood in a parade
in front of her, wrapped in see-through plastic.
She rubbed
her knuckles in her eye sockets, trying to clear her vision
and bring back the bookkeeping program.
One...two...buckle my shoe.
The snippet of
nursery rhyme came clear, over and over in high pitched,
whispery little voices.
Kate’s throat tightened and the
muscles around her heart constricted when she realized they
weren’t dolls—but little girls.
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Why were they singing to
her? An ominous dread settled around her shoulders.
It was
the psychic thing coming back to haunt her.
It had helped to
find her daughter when she needed it two years ago, but why
was it here now?
The familiar chills ran from the back of
her neck down her spine and something told her she would
have to call the police again.
“We’re facing a brick wall,
Slater.”
Captain Murphy glared at the man in front of
him as if he’d grown two heads.
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“What do you mean you
won’t come back to Homicide?”
The big man shrugged, towering over Murphy,
causing him to move back a step. “I told you. I’m never
doing homicide again.”
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Chapter.
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