Reef Road

by Deborah Goodrich Royce

Genres: Literary Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Thrillers

Synopsis

When a severed hand washes ashore in the wealthy enclave of Palm Beach, Florida, the lives of two women—a lonely writer obsessed with the unsolved murder of her mother’s best friend and a panicked wife whose husband has disappeared with their children—collide as the world shutters in the pandemic lockdown of 2020.

A young woman’s life seems perfect until her family goes missing. A writer lives alone with her dog and collects arcane murder statistics. What each of them stands to lose as they sneak around the do-not-enter tape blocking Reef Road beach is exposed by the steady tightening of the cincture encircling them.

In a nod to the true crime that inspired it, Deborah Goodrich Royce’s Reef Road probes unhealed generational scars in a wrenching and original work of fiction. It is both stunning and sexy and, like a bystander surprised by a curtain left open, you won’t be able to look away.

Release date: January 10, 2023

Publisher: Post Hill Press

Print pages: 272

Sample

1

A WRITER’S THOUGHTS

When I look at photographs of Noelle, I try to gauge her expression for signs of what was to come. There are two pictures of her in newspapers, though neither is dated. In one, her hair is parted slightly off center and piled atop her head in a fräulein-style braid. I can’t tell if one or two braids were plaited to wrap across the crown of her head, but the effect suggests a little German girl in the years before the war.

Noelle’s chin in this particular image is dipped down, her eyes look up to the camera, and her smile is slight, lips barely parted. Because the photos I am studying are taken from old newspapers from the weeks and months—even years—after it happened, the pictures are grainy and pixelated.

The upward regard of her gaze allows the whites of her eyes to show underneath the irises, thus lending her an expression that the Japanese—or maybe it is only the macrobiotic practitioners—would call sanpaku. George Ohsawa, founder of the macrobiotic movement in postwar Japan, identified this characteristic—the whites of the eyes being visible either above or below the irises from the position of a straightforward look—as a sign of extreme ill health or imbalance, which he attributed to the worsening diets of his countrymen through the influence of Western culture. This trait, he believed, was an indicator of those marked for death and has been noted by other macrobiotics (I know this because I used to be one) in the gazes of a gamut of doomed historical figures ranging from Rasputin to Marilyn Monroe to Charles Manson. All of them, we can safely agree, qualified as marked for death, although death, in Manson’s case, did not happen to be his own.

Ironically, in the photo of Noelle in question, she is looking up at the camera—not straight ahead of her—so she cannot really be called sanpaku at all. Though marked for death she was.

In the other photograph that was used by the papers, Noelle is also looking upward, but not in the direction of the camera. She casts her eyes up and to the side—as if to the corner of the room—to an object she sees that is invisible to the rest of us. An angel, I hope. Something good and hopeful and reassuring that her last moments on earth—as horrific as they would be—offered reprieve. Noelle’s smile is bigger in this picture—I think I even see dimples in her cheeks—but she is still not fully open to us. She holds something in reserve.

This image of Noelle, however, reveals the girl my mother remembered. She—my mother—did not recognize her childhood friend in the braided girl who resembled a little Greta or Heidi, but she looked at this image and said this was the Noelle she knew. The girl with whom she rode the streetcar, went to school, walked to Frick Park, and, of course, played. They were children, after all. They had been friends since kindergarten.

At the time it happened, the girls had just graduated, my mother said, from playing with dolls to playing records. I like to think of them dancing, but my mother never mentioned it. And I never thought to ask her. Noelle’s record player, in fact, featured prominently in newspaper coverage of the events of that night. It was found on a chair next to the table in the kitchen, where Noelle was baking a cake to surprise her parents. Or preparing to bake a cake. It is hard to make out exactly where she was in the process, though the cake was noted to have been chocolate.

Noelle had retrieved the record player, the newspapers said (calling it a Victrola), from the basement where it had recently been stored. A dispute arose in the papers as to who exactly had fetched the Victrola. Was it Noelle who had lugged it into the kitchen? Or did the killer have a familiarity with the house and know where the family kept this item? Did he go down to the basement after stabbing Noelle thirty-six times, leaving her on the floor near the telephone table in the dining room where she had obviously—and unsuccessfully—fled? Was it he who retrieved the record player from its storage place where Noelle’s father said he had so recently put it, and set it up in the kitchen? Her father at one point advanced this theory—that the murderer had moved the Victrola—though I am not quite sure what purpose this action would have served him. Noelle’s killer, I mean.

But blood had been found on the basement stairs.

The two undated photos of Noelle must have been taken not long before her death. She was twelve years old when she was killed, and these images show a girl who is roughly that age. Spending time with these pictures, I am reminded of the words of Nancy Mitford describing a photograph of the fictitious Radlett family in her novel, The Pursuit of Love:

There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment—click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from the happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

The photos of Noelle are indisputably sad, seen through the corrective lens of hindsight. She is alone in them. She is not grouped with her family: her mother, her father, her older brother Matthew. Nor is she pictured with her friends: my mother, Jane Stores, or the others. There is one photo of her girlfriends that I can find, though my mother is strangely missing. She is not among the pallbearers, girls in their serviceable winter coats clustered around the casket, but is somewhere else in the church on the day of Noelle’s funeral. Noelle is there, though, in that photo, invisible in her white, wooden coffin.

Life, for Noelle, did not go on. The camera clicked but her life soon ended. The days, the years, the decades did not take her further and further from the happiness and promise of youth. Her promise ended on Friday, December 10, 1948, in the kitchen of her family’s modest house in its row of modest houses in the Homewood-Brushton district of Pittsburgh, where she and my mother grew up, for a time, as friends.