A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, Band 2) - Hardcover

Perry, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802123295 ISBN 13: 9780802123299

Verlag: MYSTERIOUS PR, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

After two decades protecting innocent victims on the run, and a year after getting shot on a job that took a dangerous turn for the worse, Jane McKinnon, née Whitefield, has settled into the quiet life of a suburban housewife in Amherst, New York—or so she thinks.

One morning as she comes back from a long run, Jane is met by an unusual sight: all eight clan mothers, the female leaders of the Seneca clans, parked in her driveway in two black cars. A childhood friend of Jane’s from the reservation, Jimmy, is wanted by the police for the murder of a local white man. But instead of turning himself in, he's fled, and no one knows where he is hiding out. At the clan mothers’ request, Jane retraces a walking trip she and Jimmy took together when they were fourteen in hopes that he has gone the same way again. But it soon becomes clear that the police aren’t the only ones after him. As the chase intensifies, the number of people caught up in this twisted plot multiplies, and Jane is the only one who can protect those endangered by it. A String of Beads is an addictive, fast-paced thriller about how abandoning the past can sometimes be the hardest thing to do, even when your life—and the life of those you love—depends on it.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Thomas Perry is the bestselling author of over twenty novels including The Butcher’s Boy, which won an Edgar Award. Metzger’s Dog was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Vanishing Act was named by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association as one of their 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Twentieth Century. He lives in Southern California.

Thomas Perry is the bestselling author of over twenty novels including The Butcher's Boy, which won an Edgar Award. Metzger's Dog was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Vanishing Act was named by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association as one of their 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Twentieth Century. He lives in Southern California.

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A String Of Beads

A Jane Whitefield Novel

By Thomas Perry

Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Copyright © 2015 Thomas Perry
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2329-9

CHAPTER 1

Nick Bauermeister sat in the stained, threadbare armchair in the front room. Chelsea's mother had dragged the chair out to the curb because it wasn't brand-new, but he had taken it home because it was much better than any other place he had to sit, and he couldn't do much better than free. He aimed the remote control at the television set, and saw that Chelsea had left it on the channel where they always showed girls buying wedding dresses.

For a girl who hardly ever wanted anything to do with a guy anymore, she sure was interested in stuff about weddings and honeymoons or some woman getting to pick one from a bunch of bachelors. He had to click the channel button several times to get to the basketball game. He adjusted the sound, but kept his thumb on the little Mute button.

Nick was mostly pretending to watch the game. What he was really watching was Chelsea. Usually he liked watching Chelsea because she was the perfect embodiment of what a girl was supposed to look like. Even now, as she walked around in the kitchen picking up plates from the table and taking them to the sink, he couldn't help thinking about how incredible she was. She seemed unaware of the way she looked — couldn't see the way her shorts neatly hugged her thin waist and, in the back, defined her ass nearly as well as if she were naked. Her blouse had worked another button open since they'd finished dinner and she'd begun scrubbing dishes. The femaleness of her body was a force of nature too strong for her clothes.

But tonight he wasn't watching her in a friendly way. He was just watching. Nick was pretty sure that Chelsea had been cheating on him. He had no idea who the guy was, because anybody would sleep with her if she wanted him to. That information might not be available until he caught her at it.

He had noticed that she had begun sitting far away from him in the evenings lately, rapidly texting back and forth with somebody. "Who's that?" he had asked. She would answer, "My mom." Her mother was a woman who would never have had the patience to sit around sending texts. She liked to talk, and when she called she always used the chance to tell everybody what she thought of everything they were doing or weren't doing. You couldn't do that with a text message. And sometimes Chelsea would just pull a name out of the air. The last two times he'd asked her she had said she was texting Carrie or Chloe. Both of them worked as waitresses in the evening, and probably would have been fired for standing around texting their friends.

The only times he'd actually seen her talking on the phone lately was when he walked in unexpectedly and she was lying on the couch talking on her cell phone, laughing and playing with her long, blond hair. As soon as she saw him her voice would go flat. "Got to go," and she'd stand up, put her phone in her pants pocket, and get moving. She'd do something to distract him, to force him to think about something besides her phone call. She'd offer him a beer, go to the kitchen to get it, and come back already talking about something that was wrong with the car or the sink. Two days ago he had gone into her computer and noticed that she had erased about a month of e- mails.

Everything had changed on the night when he had been in the fight with the big Indian in Akron. She had been quiet for a couple of days after that, and pretended to be busy all the time — busier than anyone could possibly be. Then, when she would come home, she would always be too tired. She didn't show any signs of caring how bad he had been hurt in the fight, in spite of the fact that he had been unconscious and woke up with a broken nose and four cracked ribs.

The fight might have been his own fault, like she'd said, but losing so badly hadn't been his fault. He'd been drunk, and the Indian wasn't drunk at all. How was that a fair fight? Ever since then, Chelsea had been cold and distant, so cold that he was sure she was getting ready to leave him. But in order to do that, she would need two things — a place to live, and a new guy. Women were like frogs, jumping from one lily pad to another. Before Chelsea jumped, she would have to be sure the next lily pad was going to be there. She was nearly ready. He could feel it.

He kept his face turned toward the television set, but his eyes moved with her. Wherever she stepped, he watched. At some point there would be that peculiar twinkly sound her phone made when she got a text message, and he would be up in a second like a big cat, snatch it out of her hand, and read it. If he heard instead the buzz it made for a ring, he'd take it and say, "Who's calling?" If the man hung up instead of answering, he'd find out his name from her. Once he'd caught her like that, she couldn't deny it. If he had to, he'd beat the name out of her.

She walked across the front room without even glancing in his direction. He muted the TV so he could hear her. He heard her go down the hall, and then heard a door close quietly.

He turned the television up again to cover his movements, and stood to follow her down the hall. He would fling open the door and grab the phone. All he had to do was keep the sound of his steps quieter than the television set. He began to walk very slowly. One step seemed quiet enough, so he began the next.

The metal-jacketed 180 grain bullet that was already spinning through the night air at 2,800 feet per second smashed through the glass of the front window, pounded into the back of his skull, and burst out the front, taking with it bits of bone, blood, brain, and thirty-four years of accumulated jealousy, disappointment, and anger. Nick was dead before his knees released their tension and his body toppled to the floor.

Chelsea ran out of the hallway yelling, "Nick! What the heck are you —" before she saw his body and the window pane behind him. She cut off her mother's phone call, dropped to her belly, and dialed 911.

CHAPTER 2

Jane McKinnon jogged along the shoulder of the road toward home. Every morning after her husband, Carey, went off to the hospital to prep for surgery at six, she did tai chi and then went out to run. Sometimes she drove from the big old stone house in Amherst to the Niagara River near the house where she'd grown up, and then ran the three miles along the river to the South Grand Island Bridge and back. That was the run she had always made as a teenager — three miles each way with the wide blue-gray river beside her flowing steadily northward toward the Falls. Sometimes she would drive over the bridge to Grand Island and run along West River Road, looking across the west branch of the river at Navy Island and Canada. Sometimes she ran on one of the college campuses, or in Delaware Park in Buffalo.

Today she ran along the roads near the house she shared with her husband. The house had been here for a long time, the original structure a building made of fieldstones mortared over logs a foot and a half thick around 1760. Carey's ancestors had done some farming and some trading with her Seneca ancestors who made up most of the population at the time. For the past few generations the McKinnons had been doctors.

When she was a child there had still been thousands of acres of farmland along here, mostly lying fallow and waiting for the developers. Now the developers had been at work for many years, and she ran past deep green golf courses and huge, low houses set far back from the highway and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MYSTERIOUS PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0802123295
• ISBN 13: 9780802123299
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar