Krishna
This is my first book by the author, and I am glad I picked it up. A very satisfying story with a lot of twists and turns in the story that go naturally with the story itself. A very entertaining read.
The story starts with a lady driving back to her parent’s house after a long time, seeing how the city has changed. In an unguarded moment, when she was distracted, the car she was driving runs over an oil patch on the road and nudges a much bigger SUV during the slide. The other car, driven by a young girl, falls off the embankment. The lady does not stop and drives on, with the intent of circling around and stopping her car on a side road and come back to investigate but her car is damaged and a police officer stops her – he had seen the accident and now she looks like a hit and run driver to him. Compounding the issue, she finds that her ID is not in her purse and also that she does not own a cell phone.
Yes, the story takes off right from the beginning – and stalls thereafter. She is in deep trouble as the police seem to think hers is a hit and run case. Kevin Infante is assigned to the case from the police side. Kay Sullivan is a young doctor in the hospital taking care of the injuries of the girl who caused the accident.
You are mildly interested, and as the story moves on, you realize that this girl has multiple facets – she seems to have secrets within secrets and identity within identity. The accident, after all, turns out to be minor, but has this girl scared that she is in big trouble.
Now the girl admits that she is Heather Bethany, one of the two sisters who disappeared many years ago. The other sister, Sunny was found murdered at that time. It comes as a shock to the police detective Infante, who goes to interview her.
The story unfolds in flashback. The story of the two sisters in a normal family is the starting point. When the elder sister goes to the mall, the father forces her to take the younger one against her will. And in the mall, she palms Heather off with five bucks to go spend it in the mall elsewhere. (That five dollars was stolen from Heather herself!)
She has no purse or papers but the car is registered to a Penelope Jackson. So, that is who the police assume she is. They are highly suspicious of the girl, even though she seems to know a lot about Heather and Sunny – much of it can be deduced from published reports.
The story moves forward and backwards in time, and is put together in a seamless and non confusing way so you do not have any suspicions about which is past and which is present.
In the past, Miriam was married to ‘colourless’ Dave but was having an affair with the unpredictable office colleague Jeff. Jeff’s brusque approach to sex was a novelty to her. We learn how the strands come together. Dave and Miriam are parents of the two girls and Miriam and Dave divorce a year after the disappearance of the girls. Miriam first moves to Texas and then Mexico. Dave is warned of his wife’s infidelity by an elegant woman, whom Dave thinks of as Jeff’s wife.
In the present, Infante is really puzzled by the turn of events – a simple accident morphs into the girl being one of the two sisters who vanished in a sensational unsolved case. He doubts that the girl is telling the truth anyway but collects all evidence from the old files of the case.
The story proceeds and you learn of the father of the girls, Dave, being in a bar on that fateful day, having learnt of his wife’s infidelity. The mother Miriam, though she said that she was going to work, went to meet the neighbour Jeff for a roll in the hay. They both are wracked by guilt. Miriam comes clean about her affair and where she was with the police, earning their grudging respect.
Dave has also learnt of the Buddhist Five Fold Path – even before the tragedy and meditates using Agnihotri mantra (ghee and fire and the full paraphernalia with the syntactically accurate Prajapataye Swaha in Sanskrit and (maybe because I cannot vouch for it) ‘Prajapataye Idam Na Mama’ as the mantras.
It is interesting to see the marriage slowly break (and that is before she left for Texas and later to Mexico as we have already been told). The emotional turmoil of each of the parents is well told.
In the present, the police come up with dead ends everywhere. The original detective Willoughby, still broods about the case, and when Infante learns that he still has the file (illegally) goes to meet him to get the file back. Willoughby wants to come see the woman (from behind the one way mirror) and Kevin Infante is glad to have another pair of eyes
The girl – Penelope/ Heather – accuses a cop called Stan Dunham was the one who murdered Sunny and raped her daily. Kevin finds that Stan is now fully senile, in a nursing home, with just weeks to live due to Stage III cancer. He does not even know what is going on around him, let alone remember anything from the past to be of help to the police. His son, Tony, was killed in combat in Vietnam. Heather also claims that she was given an identity called Ruth Leibig. A lot of things make no sense to the police. If she was in captivity, how was she allowed to go to school? And also, upon investigation they find that Ruth was a real student in the city she mentioned, but the years of graduation do not match.
In the meanwhile, Penelope / Ruth is surprised to hear that Miriam is alive – not only alive but also coming to see her. She manages to con Ruth, the social worker – into giving her a room in her place (against strict rules) and snoops into Ruth’s computer to see what she had searched about herself!
When she sneaks out just before Mariam is due to arrive – from Kay’s house – she is hemmed in by Nancy and Kevin and is brought back.
The real bombshell of an ending – and definitely I am not going to give any hint here – comes thereafter.
Amazing story, well put together. Explains every puzzling piece and little hints are there everywhere once you finish reading you remember the little pieces of straw strewn all over the plot. Brilliantly done.
A very satisfying mystery – though the ending seems a bit pat.
Definitely worth a read.
7/10
== Krishna