The Other Side of Everything

by Lauren Doyle Owens

Genres: Literary Fiction; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Laura Lippman meets Megan Abbott in this suspenseful literary debut about three generations of neighbors whose lives intersect in the aftermath of a crime.

Bernard White is a curmudgeonly widower who has lived in Seven Springs, Florida for decades and has kept to himself since his wife passed. When his neighbor is murdered, he emerges from his solitude to reconnect with his fellow octogenarians. These connections become a literal lifeline as a second, and then a third, elderly woman is murdered, and "the originals," as they call themselves, realize that they are being targeted.

Amy Unger is an artist and cancer survivor whose emotional recovery has not been as successful as her physical one. After the woman next door is murdered, she begins to paint imagined scenes from the murder in an effort to cope with her own loss. But when her paintings prove to be too realistic, her neighbors grow suspicious, and she soon finds herself in the crosshairs of the police.

And then there's Maddie Lowe, a teenage waitress whose mother recently abandoned the family. As Maddie struggles to keep her family together and maintain the appearance of normal teenage life, she finds herself drawn to the man the police say is the killer.

As they navigate their increasingly dangerous and tumultuous worlds, Bernard, Amy, and Maddie begin to uncover the connections between them, and the past and present, in a novel that ultimately proves the power of tragedy to spark renewal.

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 272

Sample

The Other Side of Everything

ADEL

HER SHOES HAD COME OFF during the struggle. One lay next to her head, near its crown, where her hair had become matted with blood the color and texture of crushed cherries. The other was gone. A clock ticked out the time in rhythmic staccatos, filling the house with bored urgency. In the kitchen, an egg timer went off, calling for her with its certain and persistent buzz.

She was not a young woman. The skin on her face was loose, the folds around her eye deep. Her eye itself was brown and open and staring, it seemed, at the hemline of her living room curtains. The other eye had taken the blow that killed her, and was no longer intact. Its vitreous humor oozed onto the floor, pooling with blood and broken tissue; the eye itself—the yellowed sclera, detached retina, puffy iris, and perfect lens—was now lodged in the cavity behind her nose.

The house was not particularly bright. The curtains were drawn and the furniture dark, the appliances brown. Pictures in equally dark frames lined the walls and covered tabletops and shelves. Her favorite, the one from her wedding, had overturned during the struggle and fallen to the floor. So her husband, handsome in his military blues, had not seen her get struck with the heavy cast iron kettle he’d given her for their sixth wedding anniversary. But the others could see her just fine. Her sisters and brothers, children and grandchildren, parents and friends, could all see her now—her mouth agape, her blood staining the cold terrazzo floor.

An hour after the egg timer began to buzz, the oven started to smoke. Smoke streamed from the oven and drifted from room to room, touring the three-bedroom ranch the way a guest might. The smoke found the house’s corners, its closets, its secret places, but did not trigger any of its five smoke detectors, which watched the smoke without warning of its arrival. When the house was nearly black with it, smoke exited slowly through the cracked mechanics of the house’s old, jalousie-style windows. It poured from the house in thin, steady streams, appearing to lift it from its foundation, as if on strings.

Then, it began to rain.

The rain was soft at first—tapping politely on the flat white roofs; dribbling down blades of grass; collecting in droplets on large, saucer-like leaves. Then, the rain began to drive, battering the large, bushy fronds of cabbage palms, disturbing delicate bougainvillea blossoms, and hammering the ground, causing mud to rise among perfect blades of St. Augustine grass, creating puddles where the driveways met the streets of Seven Springs, Florida. A ribbon of lightning split the sky, its thunderous sound causing the geckos, anoles, and skinks, which had been jumping to and fro in the soft rain, to scurry beneath shrubbery, into drain spouts, under doorways, and into houses.

The rain grew harder, denser, louder. It pounded against windows, drummed against streets, flooded garages. Curtains of it rained down on the golf courses, swimming pools, and highways in and around Seven Springs, causing whiteout conditions and minor traffic accidents. Another thread of lightning shocked the dark gray sky, causing a boom so loud it rattled the windows of houses and tripped the alarm sensors on a half dozen parked cars. Still, smoke poured through the broken seals of the little yellow house where the old woman had lived and died, darker now.

Several blocks away, a man stood in his backyard with a shovel, sweating, though the rain had made it cool. He began to dig a hole.