Marsh Queen

by Virginia Hartman

Genres: Family Life; Thrillers

Synopsis

For readers of Where the Crawdads Sing, this powerful debut novel, set amid the lush landscape of the Florida wetlands, delves into past crimes, old memories, and the eloquent, limitless expanse of parental love.

Loni Mae Murrow’s life as a bird artist at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC is tidy, if a trifle constrained—until she’s abruptly summoned back home to the wetlands of northern Florida, where she grew up. Her mother, critical and difficult, has grown frail and been resentfully consigned to assisted living, and her younger brother, Phil, juggling a job, a wife, and two young children, needs her help. Loni may not be her mother’s only child, but there are some things only a daughter can do.

Going through her mother’s things when she returns, Loni finds a cryptic note from a woman whose name she doesn’t recognize: “There are some things I have to tell you about Boyd’s death,” it reads. Boyd is her father, a man who drowned in a boating accident out on the marsh when Loni was twelve and Phil just a baby. The circumstances of his death, long presumed a suicide, turn out to be murkier than anyone thought.

Against her better judgment, she finds herself drawn into a dangerous quest to discover the truth about how he died, struggling all the while to reconnect with her mother through the remnants of their past and to reconcile with her brother and his pushy, provincial wife. At last moved to avenge the wrongs done to her family, Loni has to decide whether to join the violence or end it.

Release date: September 6, 2022

Publisher: Gallery Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter 1

1
If I were a different person, I could move forward and never look back, never try to fathom the forces that shaped me for the worse. But there are times when a fog rolls in, slow as dusk, beginning with a nodule of regret. I should have, why didn’t I, if only. I replay the day my father left us for good, the sun showing orange through the live oak, him pacing at the bottom of the porch steps, twelve-year-old me looking down with my baby brother, Philip, on one hip. I winced as I gently extracted a strand of my dark brown hair from his doughy little grasp.

Daddy bounced his feet on the bottom step and squinted up. “Look, darlin’. Miss Joleen next door can help your mama with the baby. So how’s about it, Loni Mae? You comin’ with me?”

My dad hadn’t gone fishing in months. But he’d grown restless, knocking into furniture and slamming the screen door. There was a thrumming in the house like the wind before a storm.

That day, my mother said, “Boyd, go on! You’re pacing the house like a caged animal.”

I’d have given almost anything to be out fishing in the swamp with him, to draw every creature I saw, to watch and listen as before. But how could I? I had to stay. Now that Philip was here, I served a purpose in my house. I held him while my mother talked on the phone, while she rested or did housework. I knew how to make him laugh those hiccupy laughs. He was my after-school activity, my weekend amusement, my part-time job. My mother no longer shook her head at my hopelessness, nor raised her eyes to heaven.

Daddy turned, and his boots crunched gravel. He retrieved his fishing pole and tackle from the garage. I put the tip of my braid in my mouth and sucked it to a fine point as he walked out to the end of the dock, his khaki vest sagging with lead weights and lures, the tackle box a drag on his left arm. He turned and looked back for a minute, tilting his head so his face caught the light. I put my hand up to wave, but a shaft of sun was in his eyes, and he didn’t see. He swiveled back toward the jon boat, stepped in, and he was gone.

He could have slept at the fishing camp, that faded two-room cabin that stuck out over a muddy bank, or he might have gone on patrol right after his swamp time. But on Monday morning, his Fish & Game uniform still hung in the closet at home, pressed and waiting.

Around three, my dad’s boss stopped over. Captain Chappelle was tall and fit in his khaki uniform, his boots clunking up the porch steps. My mother was out the door before he’d reached the top stair.

“Hello, Ruth. Just came by to see if Boyd was sick or what.”

My mother turned to me. “Go on, Loni. Get to your chores.” Two vertical lines between her eyebrows told me not to argue.

I couldn’t hear what they said, though from the kitchen I strained to make words from the low tones in the Florida room. I wiped the last dish and heard Captain Chappelle’s truck kicking up gravel in the driveway.

The weather turned cool that night, sweatshirt weather, and still Daddy didn’t return. Long after I’d gone to bed, I heard voices and went to the top of the stairs.

“I shoulda seen it, Ruth.” It was a man’s voice—Captain Chappelle. The Florida room’s square panes of glass would be black now, the marsh invisible behind them. The darkened banister glowed with the light from downstairs, and Captain Chappelle’s voice rippled with a watery sound. “Boyd hadn’t been himself lately. I just never thought he’d go and—”

“No,” my mother said.

“Had he been acting strangely around home? Depressed? Because these last few weeks—”

“No,” she said louder.

Captain Chappelle’s voice dropped to a murmur, but words floated up to me. Drowned… intentional… weighted down…

My mother kept repeating, “No.”

“We’ll fix it up, Ruth. Boating accidents happen every day.”

“Not to my Boyd.”

At the funeral home, I stepped away from the varnished wood box and listened.

Such a terrible accident.

What a shame.

It could happen to anybody, out in a boat.

You just never know when it’s your time.

So it was an accident. Those other words, floating up along the staircase, had just been a bad dream.

After the funeral, my mother and I took Philip home and we didn’t talk about Daddy. If we didn’t speak his name, maybe we could erase the knowledge that he’d never come back.