The Death of Us
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Synopsis
From the award-winning author of Death at Greenway and The Lucky One comes a chilling suspense novel in which the discovery of a submerged car in a murky pond reveals betrayals and family secrets that will tear a small town apart.
One rainy night fifteen years ago, a knock at the door changed Liss Kehoe’s life forever.
On that night, Ashley Hay stood on Liss’s front porch and handed over her brand-new baby Callan.
She was never seen or heard from again.
Since then, Liss has raised Callan as her own, and loves him as fiercely as any mother would. But in the back of her mind, she’s always wondered whether Ashley is still out there somewhere—and feared what might happen if she comes back.
When Ashley does reappear, it’s not in the way Liss expected. After all these years, Ashley’s car has been found… in the quarry pond on Kehoe property. But the discovery of the car dredges up more questions than answers. What really happened on the night of Ashley’s disappearance? Was it a tragic accident, or something far more sinister? Someone in town knows the truth, and they’ll go to great lengths to keep it quiet.
As tensions rise in the small community, Liss must fight to protect her family and keep her own secrets hidden—or risk losing everything she loves.
Release date: October 3, 2023
Publisher: HarperCollins
Print pages: 384
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The Death of Us
Lori Rader-Day
Here’s the thing not everyone understands about crime in a small town: When it goes down big for the first time in a generation—when some farmer gets out his buck-hunting rifle, say, and turns it on his wife—everybody’s asking the same questions: How could it happen? Here, in this quiet town? Their worldview just got yanked to a new angle. They’re shocked and outraged, but more than that, they’re scared. They didn’t see it coming. They couldn’t have guessed.
That free-floating unease is good for gossips and business at the diner in town, with everyone stretching out their coffee breaks to chatter and theorize, but it’s not good for anyone’s sleep.
Not mine. They’re down my throat before the blood is dry looking for someone to blame. If they can assign the act to an out-of-towner, a vagrant, even someone from town they never quite took to, the unthinkable can be filed away in its proper drawer. Forgotten.
Then they can get on with things. Bring in the casseroles, send the flowers. Put on a clean shirt and do a pass by the coffin. They can frown their most solemn and serious and think how hot the church is.
We know how to play tragedy.
But uncertainty is another thing. If we don’t know who to blame, who to hate and fear, whose company not to keep anymore, that pulls at the threads in the fabric of the community. Pulls strands from the tablecloths under our dinner plates, from our pillowcases, right under our heads.
Now we’re all looking askance at people we thought we knew. If I can’t one hundred percent believe it wasn’t you, what’s that say about our supposed friendship? And if we can’t trust our neighbors, we don’t seek them out, invite them over, keep up with their news, help them out of a jam.
What happens next is an erosion: of fellow feeling, of kindness and attention, and then, finally, of order. That’s when someone spots the crack in what’s allowed, what a man can get away with.
He can get away with a lot.
He sees his opportunity, grabs what he wants. Grabs all he can take.
Sure. A man just like me.
Lissette Kehoe’s phone gave a loud space-ray zap of a noise, the sound she’d assigned to texts from her son. Her hand shot out to quiet it.
Through the open door of the office at her shoulder, her boss’s chair squeaked. Liss quickly closed the window on her computer screen.
“Is that the kid already?” Vera Chan called out from her desk.
Already? When it was nearly six anyway, and almost everyone else in the building—certainly all the support staff in the school’s main office—had gone home at the final bell?
Vera was her friend by now, but someone Liss had to read to forecast the kind of day she might have. The weather, as she had come to think of it.
And just as with storm clouds, she couldn’t take what came personally. They’d been slammed with student crisis after student crisis since the semester began. Liss only had to schedule them. Vera and Spence, the counselors, did the delicate work of defusing.
But now that the actual weather was turning, days shortening, moods turning sour, they’d hit the skids. Homecoming this week, with all its forced hoopla and dashed expectations, and then midterm exams would claim their victims. The juniors, or their parents, would soon realize the future needed to be planned for, and the seniors applying early decision to their top colleges would haunt the office for reassurances. The next school break hovered out on the horizon like a mirage.
It all made for good reading in the notes Vera and Spence kept in the student database. Of course, Liss wasn’t supposed to be reading those notes. But how could she prioritize the students appropriately if she didn’t know what they were dealing with?
Instead of snooping in the databases, she should have been getting ahead on her own work. Catching up, really. But she couldn’t very well make career fair calls after business hours.
Even as busy as things were, though, she still wouldn’t be at her desk this late if not for Callan’s football practice. She wasn’t Vera. She had a life.
“Last whistle from Coach ten minutes early?” Liss said. “Unheard of.”
She reached for her phone. Mom, the text said, don’t freak out
When had that ever worked, on any mom, ever? Practice would run late or he’d forgotten something at his dad’s apartment or he needed to build a model of a DNA double helix for biology class, due tomorrow. When Callan was younger, she’d had a total lock on his schedule and assignments. Now he was fifteen. At this age, there was far less need for emergency poster board, but her son was a different kind of challenge. She had to read the weather forecast at home, too.
Mom, Callan had taken the time to type.
Her son’s messages to her were usually bare minimum, a handful of characters
and shapes she had to parse like messages from behind enemy lines, with the detail she needed buried below code and evasion.
Are you OK? she typed. The phone made a little whoosh as the message went on its way.
Where are you? she typed.
The dots that showed Callan was working on a response danced and paused, danced and paused.
Here came the excuse, the apology instead of having asked for permission, the scurry of excuses. Guess who he’d learned that from?
The dots stopped.
Vera appeared at her doorway. “Everything OK, I hope?”
“He’s texting me, so he has most if not all of his fingers,” Liss said. “But he says, and I quote, don’t freak out.”
“Great opening gambit,” Vera said. “Sure to inspire confidence.”
A new text popped up.
Tanner had a wreck
“Oh no,” Liss murmured. “Tanner Larkin had an accident,” she said to Vera.
“Is he OK? That fancy car . . .” Vera said. They couldn’t say anything aloud about a student’s parents, but a look passed between them.
“This is exactly why Callan’s not allowed to ride with just anybody,” Liss said.
“Our anyone at all,” Vera said.
“His dad,” Liss said.
“You don’t let Callan ride with anyone else because you’re a control freak,” Vera said. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“But,” Vera said, “why would you freak out about Tanner having an accident?”
Because—
“Oh, God.” Liss thumbed Callan’s image—video call, she had to see his face—“No, no, pick up, pick up.” A thousand eventualities rushed through her mind, a thousand things she couldn’t live with.
Callan appeared on her screen. He looked annoyed. “I said not to—”
“Are you hurt?” Liss said.
“No!” Annoyed was better than injured.
Vera shook her head and went back to her office.
“Is anyone hurt?” Liss said.
A foreign expression rippled across Callan’s features. Then it was gone again, and he was so like Link that her breath caught.
Liss always felt a wave of petty relief when Callan reminded her of Link, leaving less room for Ashley Hay to sneak in. Ashley, the incubator who’d birthed and then deserted Callan, who had given up any right to appear on Callan’s face or in their lives.
Ashley’s rightful place was in a dusty frame on a shelf in Callan’s room, half hidden behind Star Wars figures and a model car he’d built with his Papa Key, Link’s dad, when he was eight. Consigned to the relics.
But sometimes, especially since Link had moved out in the spring, Liss caught the ghost of Ashley, still in their lives. When Liss didn’t feel she had a handle on who Callan was, who he might turn out to be. When he had some peevish look to him she didn’t recognize, some chippy attitude she couldn’t
believe he’d come to so quickly. Liss would think, icily, before she could stop herself: There she is.
Liss had even caught herself talking to Ashley in her head or under her breath, as though they’d argued and, in the moment, she hadn’t been quick enough with the right comeback. Oh, yeah, Ashley? Some moment with Callan gone wrong: How would you have handled it, then, Ashley?
Ashley’s absence always seemed to have the last word.
“Is anyone hurt?” Liss said again.
“I was trying—” Callan said.
“Why were you in Tanner’s car? You know how I feel about that.”
There’d been an accident a few years ago, a car crammed with students from Parkins West, heading into town after dismissal. Every school had a story like it, probably. Liss had attended each funeral, surrounded by young people, teachers, bereft families. Four broken mothers, four holes in the ground. She still woke from nightmares, the image of one of those open graves rushing away from her.
Liss didn’t need Vera’s fancy college degrees to work out the psychology there, the dreams, the driving. Some part of Liss worried, more than most mothers had to, that she could reach for Callan and he would be gone.
“Tell me you were wearing your seat belt, at least?” Liss said.
Callan huffed impatiently. “Mom, I’m trying to tell you something. There’s a car. It must have taken the curve too fast, too. Just like you say—”
“Wait, wait,” she said. “Our curve?”
Callan’s image fumbled away, the sound scratchy as he held the phone to his jacket. He was speaking to someone else.
“Callan? Callan.”
Vera was in her door again. “Is he all right?”
Liss hadn’t found the edges of this story. A car, an accident, no one hurt—oh, God thank you he wasn’t hurt—but another car was involved now, and near their house, more than eight miles away from the school when he should have been at practice.
The call with Callan cut out.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Liss said as she reached for her purse and hit redial. “I need to go. I’ll text you.”
She didn’t wait to see what Vera would say. Liss’s footsteps were loud in the empty hall. Callan’s phone rang and rang as she passed under the faded red homecoming banner and through the front doors. Outside, it was overcast, already dusk. The wind sliced at her blouse. She’d forgotten her coat, hadn’t locked down her computer. She’d have to listen to another lecture from Vera about protecting student privacy.
At the far edge of the parking lot, a pack of cross-country runners passed in and
out of her vision.
Callan answered at last, exasperation on his face clear but the audio between them crackling. “Sorry—”
“Stand out of the wind so I can hear you,” Liss said. “And start from the beginning. Why aren’t you at practice?”
“Brennan got crunched on a tackle,” Callan said. Someone was laughing on his end, voices in the background. Callan glanced away. “Coach said he had to go to the hospital for X-rays. Practice got canceled.”
“And how did you end up out at the curve exactly?” she said.
“I said already,” Callan said. On her screen, he hesitated, tilted his head. “He missed the curve.”
“I meant—”
One of the boys behind Callan spoke up. “I think he found it, you mean!”
“Who’s with you? Tanner and who else?”
“Garza and Ward,” he said.
The last name thing, every year the posturing from the field and locker room radiated out to hallways and classrooms.
“I don’t understand why you’re on our road, though,” she said. But she did, to a point. An emergency for the Brennans had wedged open Callan’s schedule and given him a window of freedom. An empty house and an unguarded pantry.
He ignored that entirely. “We missed the curve and hit the mound and when we got to the top—”
“Callan.” Liss gripped her steering wheel. Here was the part she wasn’t supposed to freak out about. “Are you kidding me?”
“I know, I know, but I wasn’t alone.”
A Tanner-sized loophole.
The mound was what they called the highest point at the rim of the pond on their property. It wasn’t stable. Or it might not be, she couldn’t be sure. The low hills between their place and the rise to Link’s parents’ hilltop house had long ago been hollowed out by a limestone mine, leaving a deep scar to fill with groundwater and rain and a scattering of ten-ton boulders along the edge, like dice thrown by the gods.
Near their house, the road used by trucks to haul rock out of the pit created a patch of shallow water where cattails grew and blue herons waited for fish that would not come. Deer came to drink. But the quarry was a rumored fifty feet to the bed, the drop to the unappealing black-green water sheer, swift. Anyone risking a swim could strike jutting rock on the dive down and, if they survived that, had a tricky climb back to safe ground.
They didn’t get too many trespassers or daredevils. Most people in the county would go a long way to avoid a run-in with Link’s dad, the former town marshal.
Keeping Callan away from the quarry was another story. A lifelong project. “We’re going to talk about this,” Liss said.
“All right,” he said miserably. “But if we hadn’t climbed up there, we wouldn’t have seen the car.”
She’d lost track of the other car. “Was the accident Tanner’s fault?” she said.
“No.” Of this he sounded very sure. “Mom, the other car is in the water.”
A pair of headlights ahead were too bright. Liss glanced away, toward the phone screen and Callan, his hair, too long, blowing across his eyes. “Do you mean in the quarry? The pond? Did you call nine-one-one?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I think the other car’s been there for a while.”
Liss concentrated on her knuckles to keep from flying into pieces.
“You can barely see it,” he said. “Garza says there’s no way—”
“What color is it?” Liss said. “Can you see the color of the car?”
“Uh, not really. White, maybe?”
It couldn’t be. She reached for the phone and shut off the camera.
“Mom? Are you still there?”
Her stomach hurt, suddenly and violently. She pulled over, untangled herself from her seat belt, and scrambled out of the car to retch into the grass. Gravel cut into her knees.
“Mom?” Callan’s voice was otherworldly, wafting from the open door onto the wind.
What had she done?
Liss stood with shaking legs, wiped her mouth. She had come to a stop a few miles from home, in front of the long drive up to a neighbor’s place. A light went on in the house, and then the porch. It was too far to call out, to say everything was fine.
Everything was not fine.
“Mom?”
Liss turned back to the car and sank into the driver’s seat. “I’m here.” Her voice was hoarse, her throat sore. She should be able to think of something to say. What would she say to a student waiting in tears to see Vera or Spence, bringing them one of the insurmountable problems of youth?
All she could think was: Ashley Hay. There she is.
After Liss hung up with Callan, she drove on, the silence now hollow and profound.
The first time she’d laid eyes on Ashley Hay, they were babies themselves, not quite Callan’s age. She showed up a new girl mid-year, dressed strangely, like she’d borrowed clothes from her grandpa’s closet. Thrift, she would call it when the other kids tried to take her down for it, but Liss caught a whiff of the Goodwill bin, the charity shop.
Ashley had clocked her, too.
They might have been friends. But Liss didn’t have the social capital to spare. She was the sort of girl who got by on so-so grades and so-so looks. Who survived in a more literal way on free school lunch and busybody church ladies. She relied on her wits and a few friends, whose mothers sometimes clucked their tongues but sent her home with extra. Her father gone, her mother home only between boyfriends, Liss was a girl whose life seemed determined by other people, their absences, their collapses.
Look, she’d wanted to say to Ashley, I’m barely hanging on as it is.
She didn’t have to say a word. They skirted each other, like the ends of two magnets, repelling one another. Liss knew now they would have shown up in the same breath at meetings between school nurses and counselors, on the same lists considered by ladies’ societies at Christmas.
Later, Liss didn’t have to try so hard to avoid Ashley; the path was well worn, and Liss’s social capital had risen sky high. Link Kehoe had looked her way.
In fact, she and Ashley had managed to stay clear of each other until their lives collided, spectacularly.
And now—
Liss drove on, scrounging in her purse for a tissue and a breath mint. Long before the turn onto the quarry road, she could see the curve choked with vehicles. Town patrol cars, a fire engine. But no ambulance. No lights whirling. No emergencies. She’d arrived at the punctuation, as the story ended. At a funeral, and their quarry a yawning grave.
Liss pulled to the side of the road at the edge of the snarl and hurried along on foot, her eyes scraping the scene for Callan.
“Oh, God.”
Tanner’s car sat against the base of the mound, only a few yards from the drop into the quarry.
Stable or not, the mound had caught them. Saved them.
Liss could imagine the fall anyway, the car careening over the edge, the boys dropped into the water and fighting out of seat belts, to open doors against impossible water pressure as the car sank to the quarry floor.
But there the boys were, milling among the boulders and kicking at the dirt, their oversized kit bags at their feet. One of the boys, Jamie, had climbed atop a stone and sat cross-legged, a small Buddha, with his chin tucked into the neck of his dark jacket against the wind. Callan looked up and came out to meet her.
Her legs shook.
“I’m sorry,” he was saying as the distance closed between them. His jogger pants were scratched at the knees and smeared with mud.
She only wanted to get her hands on him. She grasped him into her and made an inventory. He was fine, arms and legs, neck intact. “You’re sure you’re OK?”
“You think it’s her,” he said.
She held him tighter.
Over Callan’s shoulder, a familiar figure leaned into the open door of Tanner’s car. Mercer Alarie, in his town marshal uniform, had removed his hat and was studying something inside the car. As she watched, he folded his long legs into the sportscar’s driver’s seat with some difficulty and sat among the controls.
Was she relieved or—some other feeling, to know he was here?
“It can’t be her, can it?” Callan said. “How can it be?”
“I don’t know,” Liss said.
Traffic roared along the state road two miles in the distance, but theirs was a quiet patch of country, broken only by the occasional car racing in too fast.
Was that the story? An accident, and everything since just noise? Just pointless and impotent rage directed wherever it could find purchase?
She could barely keep still.
“Jeez, Mom.” Callan extracted himself from her. “Are you cold?”
“A little.”
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “About—everything.”
“You’re safe,” she said. “That’s all I care about.”
“He wants to talk to you,” Callan said.
He would be Mercer. Callan had not known what to call him, had tried never to reference him directly at all.
Liss didn’t look over. “Why don’t you go up to the house? Take your friends, open up some snacks.”
The other boys watched them, glum expressions. They’d gone out for a joy ride, kids, and now they were witnesses to something terrible. “I don’t think,” Callan said. “If it’s—if it’s—”
“Let’s not assume until we know, OK?”
“Gram always said she must have got away but I don’t think she did,” Callan said.
Got away. Dammit, Patty.
She reached for Callan’s shoulder and turned him toward the road and the fields beyond so that anything she said would drift away. Voices carried out here. She also wanted to hold him close for another minute. As long as he would let her. “People will talk,” she said finally. “When they don’t know anything.”
“We should call Dad,” Callan said. He tugged away from her. “Shouldn’t we? She was his . . . his, um.”
Maybe she had protected him too well. “He’ll be upset,” she said. “But you understand, don’t you? Who she is? To you?”
He shuffled a shoe against the grass. “I don’t want to call her . . . you know. That.”
Liss brushed the hair from his eyes. Link’s eyes, thank God. “It might not have anything to do with her, OK?”
“It might, though.” He turned back toward his friends and she followed.
It might. It would. Ashley Hay, getting the last word.
Callan slipped back to his friends. Liss veered toward where Mercer now stood at the quarry’s edge. He peered out over the expanse, his dispatch radio to his mouth and a lit-up phone in his palm. His dark hair was clipped a little more closely than the last time she’d seen him, a little too short. He had a sunburn across his nose and forehead, and she couldn’t help wondering if he’d had a fun weekend, who might have been with him.
When his radio conversation was over, he held it in his hand, weighing it against the phone. To keep from looking at her, she thought, like one of the kids at school thumbing the toggle on their backpack.
“Lissette,” he said, when the silence had stretched between them too long.
Over at the foot of the hill, Callan was keeping watch on her and Mercer with feigned casualness, his hands shoved into his front pockets.
“Do the boys need to stay?” she said.
“Let me get one of my guys to take some info and we can get them away from here,” Mercer said. “They’ve been on their phones so I expect the other parents will be coming out. If they can get through to your house.”
“They’ll find a way through,” she murmured.
“I’ll need to talk to you about this,” he said. “And Link. It was just the two of you living here then?”
Liss went still. “It’s her? You know it’s her?”
Mercer looked at her, finally. He had blue eyes, a shade people noticed from a distance and were made uncomfortable by up close. That’s how it had gone for her, anyway.
“I won’t know for a while,” he said. “We’ll need confirmation on the vehicle, first step. The license plate isn’t readable. I’m hoping for a vehicle ID once the divers get here.”
Divers. “Your new guy won’t go down for the VIN?” she said. “Pull the car up himself, chain between his teeth?”
The corner of Mercer’s lips twitched. “He would if I let him,” he said, and turned. As if on cue, the newest of his recruits leapt forward to be of service. “Bowman,” Mercer said. “Get the kids’ names, parents’ phone numbers, all that. I don’t want them out here when the hook arrives.”
The deputy hurried off. Liss went to follow, but Mercer reached for her, then dropped back. “Just the basics for the paperwork, OK? We don’t think kids who were barely born had anything to do with Ashley Hay skidding into your quarry. If it’s her.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“What do you think happened?” he said.
Ashley had shown up at their door that night, her cheap clothes clinging over baby fat, her canvas shoes squishing as she shifted Callan’s carrier from one hand to the other. Well, she’d said, in that sneer she always seemed to have for Liss. Is Daddy home? she’d said, like it was some joke.
Liss had had years to work up theories but here was evidence to refute most of them. All but the most damaging.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“It was dark when she stopped by, wasn’t it?” he said. “And raining?”
Liss shivered, nodded. If Ashley had never made it off this road—
She had a lot to answer for.
“OK.” Mercer’s eyes drifted back to the water. “OK.”
Liss’s eyes felt gritty. “Cars are always taking the curve at speed,” she said. She sounded defensive. “Just like Tanner did.”
“Is it possible, though?” Mercer said. “That this car has been here all these years
and you’ve never noticed?”
“It’s not like you haven’t spent some nights up at this house, yourself,” Liss said before she could think better of it.
One of the volunteer firefighters standing nearby in his cartoonish bucket pants coughed to cover a snort of laughter.
Mercer shot him a look and pulled her away. “Look, I’m not making judgments here. I’m just . . . considering scenarios that explain this situation.” He had a crescent crease between his eyes, a scar that deepened with worry. Liss remembered lying next to him and reaching to press at it. So serious, she’d say, to make him smile.
“Is it possible,” Mercer said, “that no one ever looked down at the right angle, from the right outlook? He’s got a good eye, your kid. I can barely make the car out myself.”
“His grandpa passed down a love of cars,” Liss said.
“Sure, you cut teeth on the steering wheel of a Chevy Bel-Air . . .” Mercer shifted uncomfortably. “Look, it could be unrelated. Someone dropped this car in there a long time ago, stolen car, insurance fraud. Getting rid of a junker, to avoid paying Pete Norville to tow it to the scrap yard. Maybe it predates the water. Maybe it was at the bottom of the quarry when it closed and the water filled in around it.”
“But you don’t think that,” Liss said.
“A vehicle left behind by the quarry would be rusted to Swiss cheese by now,” he said. “This one still has some structural integrity left to it. But that means we can get it out of there, see what’s what.”
Her stomach gave a lurch. She risked a glance toward the black water.
“How long have you lived in the house?” he said.
“Fifteen years,” she said. “And Key and Patty were here probably twenty before that.” She turned her shoulder by instinct, as though to include her in-laws’ house in the conversation. From this angle, the house at the top of the hill was only a glow through the trees. Patty would be wondering about the commotion on the road. ...
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