1

The morning her mother rose from the dead, Samantha Adams stood out in her driveway loading up her car, nothing more on her mind than heading for Atlanta to sing “Happy Seventy-Five” to her uncle George.

Her little blond shih tzu, Harpo, was on her heels, tagging back and forth from the car to the steps of Sam’s old wide-hipped house in Covington, thirty-five miles due north of New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain.

Harpo wore a worried look. To his mind, he’d been abandoned far too much recently. Why, it was only a couple of days earlier that Sam had returned from her latest trip to Manhattan, her publisher getting ready to debut her book, American Weird. And here she was headed off again. Was he going?

Sam said, “Yes, sweet pea. Yes.”

Harpo did his happy polka.

“Chill, dog,” she said. “It’s too hot for dancing.”

Come August, nowhere in the Deep South is suitable for woman or beast, but south Louisiana is particularly brutal. Walk out of the air-conditioning, it’s like hitting a wet electric blanket turned all the way to ten. Even this early in the morning, the air was steaming, filled with the perfume of swamp and rot and finny creatures. Sam found it a struggle merely breathing, much less loading a car with luggage and birthday presents. But finally she slammed down the trunk of her old silvery blue BMW. Ready to hit the road. Crank up Patsy Cline, Janis Joplin, Kenya Walker, and the air-conditioning.

Then Polly, Sam’s housekeeper, stepped out on the porch. “For you,” she said, handing over the phone.

Sam eyed Polly’s grin. Who was this?

“Sam?”

Sam froze, a tall, lean Popsicle in the heat.

It was Harry.

Harry Zack. Her erstwhile lover, a gray-eyed songwriter turned barbecue restaurateur, former bad bad Uptown boy, scion of an ancient Garden District family. Harry, at thirty-two, ten years her junior. Harry, of the broad shoulders, the slow grin, the head of dark curls much like her own.

Harry and Sam had had a parting of the ways this past spring. Sam loved Harry but couldn’t give him the commitment he was asking for. When she’d moved over from Atlanta, she’d wanted to be closer to him, but not too close, so she’d set up house in Covington rather than New Orleans, where he lived. She’d tried to explain it to him.

You see, son, she’d said, Loss was her middle name, the loss and death of loved ones major themes. Both her parents had been killed when she was eight. Her first love had abandoned her, had remembered suddenly, after he’d captured her heart, that he was marrying someone else. Her sole marriage had been a disaster, ending in divorce. Mr. Booze, now he had been a faithful lover, whose clutches she’d barely managed to escape as he dragged her toward the grave. Then there’d been Sean, the love of her life, killed by a drunk driver in San Francisco only a few years earlier. Trust me, she’d said to Harry. Death and destruction, they dog my tracks. Let’s us be close but not too close; that’s the safest thing.

That was nonsense, Harry insisted. No, said Sam. Then, his feelings hurt, Harry had let his glance fall upon a young blonde. That wasn’t what Sam had intended, not at all. After that, things had become complicated. She’d flown off to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and gotten herself involved with one Jack Graham. Whatever the hell that was about. Then, after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, she’d pulled herself out of the game altogether, told herself she ought not to play at all if she didn’t want to play for keeps. Recently Jack had called to say he was heading out to San Francisco to look up an old girlfriend. Sam, who had once lived in that fair city, gave Jack a list of great restaurants and wished him well. But she didn’t call Harry.

She’d been fine with her solitude, she’d told herself. She had her garden, her dog, her old house at the edge of a bayou. She didn’t have time for anything else, was hard at work on a second volume of American Weird, a collection of real-life tales of American strange and peculiar. She’d kept busy. She most certainly had.

Which was not to say that, every once in a while, when she was down in New Orleans, she didn’t drive by Harry’s cottage in the French Quarter, the one with the tiny square of garden bright with bougainvillea. At night, Dixieland jazz from Preservation Hall next door floated across Harry’s garden, leaving blue sharps and flats stuck to his big brass bed. Sam would sit in her idling car, thinking about sweet times and what-ifs. Eventually she’d cruise back home across the causeway, windows open, her curls blowing in the breeze, singing along with Janis’s “Mercedes Benz,” daring anyone to tell her she wasn’t happy to be free.

But right now, Sam—a tall brown-eyed woman in a red T-shirt, legs for years below white shorts, a grownup woman who was doing just fine on her own, thank you very much—was standing here on her porch frozen at the sound of her former lover’s voice.

“Wha’cha up to?” he began.

“I’m about to head out for Atlanta for a week. George’s seventy-fifth birthday is Sunday. Big shindig.” Had she kept it breezy? It was tough, with that big bass drum beating in her chest.

“Will you give the old man my best?”

“I will.”

“I miss him, you know.”

Uh-oh.

“George ever ask about me?”

“Yes. Yes, he does, Harry. You know he’s always been very fond of you.”

“And what do you tell him?”

She paused. “I tell him you’re fine.”

“How do you know that?”

Sam stared down at Harpo, who’d planted himself at her feet. He sat with his head cocked to one side, listening intently. Harry was one of Harpo’s very favorite people. But then, they’d had some awfully good times, hadn’t they, the three of them? Some great adventures. Some of her very best times, actually.

“I hear about you from time to time,” she said. “I’m always happy to know that you’re doing well.”

“Don’t suppose there’s any way you want to see that for yourself?”

“Oh, Harry,” she said.

“Yeah, well.” Sam could see his chin jutting. She’d hurt his feelings again. He said, “Just thought I’d give you a jingle. Never any harm in that, is there?”

“No, not at all. I’m always pleased to hear from you.”

“Pleased! Hell’s bells, woman. Stop talking to me like I’m the vacuum cleaner repairman.”

Sam laughed. At Harry. At herself. “I’m sorry, son.” She’d always called him that, a fond reference to the difference in their ages. “Tell me what you’re up to.”

“I thought you’d never ask. I’m about to leave on a little journey myself. Heading out this evening for a rafting trip on the Shuiluo.”

“The what?”

“River in China. It’s a tributary of the Yangtze, parallels the border of Burma and Tibet. It’s never been run before.”

See? This was exactly what she was talking about. How could a woman commit herself to a man whose idea of fun was pitting himself against a raging river in To Hell and Gone, where, if his team got into trouble, there’d be no help? He’d drown. He’d die. Sam had attended the funerals of enough people she’d loved, thank you.

“I was real flattered to be asked along,” Harry was saying. “Crackerjack bunch of river rats. One of the guys is a descendant of a scout on the Lewis and Clark expedition.”

“Can I have your record collection?” Sam asked. “You don’t make it back?”

“Now, there’s a vote of confidence.”

“Okay, okay, only the Elvis.” Two beats passed. “How long you going to be gone?”

“Run ought to take about a week. Tack on a week traveling over, another one back.” Harry’s voice had gone happy at her interest. Oh, God. What had she done? Now he was saying, “You want to have a picnic with me, Labor Day?”

Yes, she did. That sounded wonderful, in fact. But she didn’t hear herself saying that. Sam, Sam, Sam, what are you afraid of? Listen to your heart. Uh-huh. Then listen to it crack.

“Tell you what,” Harry said. “You think about it. I’ll give you a jingle when I hit town.”

Oh, God, no. Don’t let me be doing this. I can’t open that door again. I’m happy playing my own music, safe. Don’t need Harry’s blues floating over us, his long low moaning between the sheets. Uh-huh. Then how come you lay awake so many nights, aching for him?

“Sammie? What you thinking about?”

Thinking a woman ought not to be talking to a man who could read her mind that well. At least, this woman shouldn’t. This woman who, even after all the years and hard work of sobriety, would not, could not, commit wholeheartedly to love again because she couldn’t risk the pain. Who wrote for a living, but couldn’t find the words to express her fears. Who found it necessary to curl up around her soft parts like a possum.

She said, “Listen, son, I’d better get moving. I’ve got six-hundred long, hot miles to drive before I sleep. Let’s talk when we both get back, okay?”

He sighed. “Okay, but you be careful.”

“This from a man who’s putting his life in the hands of river gods who don’t even speak English?”

But it was true that Sam had a penchant for vehicular speed. Harry knew that she regularly flirted with death on the freeways and was on a first-name basis with more state troopers across Dixie than most governors. His voice was low and sweet as he said, “You take care of yourself, y’hear? And I’ll talk to you Labor Day, if not before.” Then he was gone.

Five seconds later, Polly appeared back through the screen door, a pitcher of iced coffee in her hand. “How’s he doing?”

“I hate you, Polly. You’re not to be trusted. I told you to say I was out if Harry ever called.”

“Uh-huh.” Polly started poking at a Boston fern perched on a white wicker stand.

Sam’s protest picked up heat. “I don’t want to be involved with anyone. Do you understand?”

Polly brushed away some dead ends, snapped off little wiry runners. She started whistling “Trouble in Mind” under her breath.

“That’s it. I’m out of here.” With that Sam grabbed up Harpo, the last of her things, and jumped into her car. Throwing it into reverse, she said to herself, Here I come, Slidell. I’ll be out of Louisiana in less than an hour, away from these irritating people, folks poking all the time in my business. And she would have been gone, except there was Felix, the FedEx man, in her rearview mirror, blocking her in.

Felix Dupree was a long, lean light-skinned man who played the blues when night fell. Now, tipping his navy baseball cap, he climbed out of his truck. “How y’all pretty ladies feeling today?”

“Fair-to-middling,” said Polly, her mouth tightening. Felix’s flirtatiousness always made her impatient. Polly didn’t have time for nonsense. She was busy studying photography. There were oodles of folks around here whose pictures she intended to take.

Felix said, “Here you go, Sam. Two packages today. Hope there’s something good.”

Sam reached out, took the large flat envelopes, and ran a finger beneath the flap of the first. “If I won the Publishers Clearing House,” she said to Felix, “you and me are headed for Paris.”

“Lord have mercy!” he shouted.

Polly gave him a look.

But there was no check in the first envelope, only the tentative schedule for her book tour with American Weird. The shipping label attached to the second said it had been sent by someone named J. Hilton, La Fonda Hotel, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sam tapped the envelope on her steering wheel and stared out toward the big lake. Now, who do I know in Santa Fe?

She’d been through the town once, nearly twenty years earlier. She and Jimmy, her one-and-only husband, had stopped for a night. She still had a few snapshots of the place in her head: adobe houses, a grassy plaza in the center of town, on one side of it a café where a bowl of posole had fixed her hangover right up. Other than that she remembered only margaritas and marijuana, fighting with Jimmy, making up.

Had they skipped on the hotel bill? Was this it, finally catching up with her?

Then suddenly, like a blue norther blowing across from the Texas panhandle, a shudder of premonition ran up her spine. This phenomenon had happened with some frequency back in the days when she’d been a crime reporter, had saved her life more than once. It still made her sit up.

She ripped into the FedEx package. Inside was an envelope of cream-colored vellum with her name written across it. The handwriting was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of notepaper. Sam slipped it loose and held it out from her at some distance.

Later she’d remember, it seemed as though Polly and Felix and Harpo and all the other living creatures in her yard had joined her in holding their breath.

Sam unfolded the note and read the greeting: “My dearest Sugar.”

Sam’s stomach lurched. Her face flamed. The world wobbled on its axis, then darkened and narrowed to that single sheet of paper. No one had ever called Samantha Adams Sugar except her mother.

But how could this letter be from Johanna Adams? Not this letter, handwritten in, she suddenly realized, what looked to be her mother’s careful looping script. Not this letter, dated only one day earlier.

This had to be some kind of joke, for Johanna Adams had been dead, her ashes buried in the cold, cold ground, for thirty-four years.

*

An hour later, Sam sat motionless on her front porch steps. She had read and reread the letter dozens of times, tracing her fingers across the words….

My dearest Sugar,

I must see you. Do not try to write or phone. Please come to Santa Fe, now. You will find me at the La Fonda Hotel, registered under the name J. Hilton. Please come. It’s urgent. I need your help.

Your mother,

Johanna Hewlett Adams

P.S. This is no hoax. You see above my nickname for you. The Tooth Fairy gave you exactly ninety-nine cents, all in bright new pennies, for each lost tooth. Your secret name for your teddy bear was Bogalusa. I still have the birthmark high on my right thigh that you said looked like a Santa Claus face. Please call me the moment you arrive, my daughter, my dearest Sugar.

Sam lifted her gaze to a weeping willow that grew where the bayou skirted the corner of her property. But in her mind, she was not on this porch, nor in the state of Louisiana, nor in this year of our Lord….

An early June morning, Sam was back home in Atlanta. She was eight years old, and she was perched on a chair in the breakfast room of her uncle George’s rambling old split-timber Tudor house on Fairview Road. She and George, her father’s brother, whom she adored, were enjoying scrambled eggs and bacon and a basket of biscuits that Peaches had just pulled from the oven. They were anticipating her parents’ return that very day from a grand tour of Europe with the Atlanta Art Association.

“Momma’s bringing me a green-and-white tea set from Assisi,” Sam said. “That’s what she told me when I talked to her last.”

“I’m sure she will,” said George. “And I’m sure it will be lovely. Assisi, you know, Sammie, is the hometown of Saint Francis, the saint who protects all the animals.”

“Like Frank!” Sam leaned over and petted George’s black cocker spaniel, waiting, ever-hopeful for crumbs, under the table. “Oh, I can’t wait to see them again. Momma and Daddy have been gone forever.”

“I know, sweetheart,” George said. “And you’ve had a horrible time here. All three of us beating you with a stick.” He gave her a wink.

Sam giggled. Uncle George had long been a widower, and Peaches and Horace, who’d been with him forever, had no children. The trio of doting adults treated Sam like a fairy princess, and their house was her castle. Staying with them was ever so much more fun than being at home. Not that she didn’t miss Momma and Daddy dreadfully.

“Momma says you spoil me rotten. She says that I’ll be incorrigible when they come back. Which will be in…” Sam checked her Cinderella watch with the blue grosgrain band.

Sam would always remember that moment, looking down at the watch, asking Uncle George for the millionth time, if it was eight A.M. in Atlanta and six hours later in Paris, which made it two P.M. there, and the plane had left at noon and the flight took nine hours, what time was it really when they’d arrive?

Just then the telephone rang. George, a lawyer with a houseful of phones, reached for the one at his elbow.

Sam couldn’t take her eyes off him. Her prescience had kicked in. She could smell something in the air. Something ominous. The ozone before the lightning crash.

“Good morning!” George boomed. “George Adams here.” And then someone on the other end, a secretary at the Atlanta Art Association it turned out, talked for a long time while George listened.

Just once George said, “No!” and shoved back in his chair as if a great hand had pushed him. Then he slumped and listened.

After George hung up the phone, he sat there for what seemed an eternity, sinking into himself, growing smaller and smaller, until Sam thought he would disappear. Under the table, Frank licked his master’s ankles and whined.

Then George scooped Sam up from her chair and wrapped her in a mighty hug. She could feel his chest heaving.

She didn’t say a word. She knew that there was a monster loose in her world. But if I’m very quiet, she told herself, and very still, the creature can’t find me. I’ve proved that, haven’t I, night after night, keeping at bay the horrible thing that lives beneath my bed?

But she couldn’t fool this monster.

Finally George pulled back from her, wiped his tears, and said, “Sammie, darling, I have something very, very sad to tell you. I wish I didn’t. Oh, Lord, how I wish I didn’t.”

Sam clapped her hands over her ears. If I don’t let the bad words in, she thought, they won’t be true. But eventually she had to hear George tell her of the crash of the chartered Boeing 707 upon takeoff at Orly. For years to come, she would close her eyes and see, as if she’d been there, every detail of the fiery scene. She could hear the plane exploding into the tarmac, the long silence, and then the screams. She could see the smoke, white at first, then growing blacker and blacker as the greedy flames claimed one hundred and thirty victims. The crash had been the worst disaster in American aviation history up until that time.

For months, Sam relived the crash nightly. But in her dreams there was salvation. There came a moment in her scenario when her parents would rise from the flames and stroll toward her, hand in hand, smiling. They had survived. See?

It wasn’t true, of course. Her mother and father were lost. Forever lost.

Her father, Rob Adams, the tallest, most handsome man in the world, would never again come bounding through the back door. Never sweep her up. Never toss Sam in the air as if she were a bright ball, then catch her at the very last moment. She would never again feel that thrill. He would never again hold his hands out, a surprise tucked in one. Which one, Sammie? Never snuggle her with his rough chin, his kisses tickling her neck, kisses fragrant with aftershave and smoke and whiskey.

Her daddy was gone, lost forever, as was her beautiful momma, Johanna, whose laughter was like music floating down the stairs. Johanna, who painted the walls of Sam’s room with her favorite fairy tales. Johanna, who whispered that Sam was an only child because she was so special there’d been no need for more. Johanna, who’d given Sam her brown eyes and dark curls and sun-lit complexion. Johanna, who was the center of her universe. Sam was the spit and image of Johanna, her momma, everyone said that.

Neither of them was ever coming home. Finally Sam understood what George had meant when he’d said that.

But he had said other things, too. George held her so tightly to his chest she could feel his pulse, and he promised he would love her and care for her forever. She would be safe. He knew that he and Peaches and Horace were no replacement, but their home on Fairview Road would be hers, and she would be theirs, and they would be family.

He had been as good as his word. George and Peaches and Horace had never, for one instant, forsaken her. They had nurtured her and raised her and let her go when the time came, always with love. They had stood by her through the hardest times—her first broken heart, her drinking, her divorce, the death of her lover Sean. No one had ever had better friends and parents than George and Peaches and Horace.

And now, there was no one she’d rather talk with. Sam stood up from the front steps of her house close-by the dark Louisiana bayou and stumbled inside for a phone.

*

“Hello? Hello?” George said. “Sammie, is that you? Are you all right? You are coming aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course I am,” she finally managed.

“Great. So what’s your news, darling? Are you delayed?”

“A letter came,” she announced bluntly.

When she was done reading it to him, there was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then George asked, in a voice that was suddenly old and uncertain, “What do you think, Sammie?”

Sam stepped back. What had she thought? That George was going to kiss her boo-boo and make it well? That George would have all the answers?

Well, yes, he would have, in the old days. Both he and Sam’s father had been white-shoe Atlanta lawyers, New South wheelers and dealers. There had been nothing they couldn’t fix. But that was long ago. Her daddy was long dead (Wasn’t he?), and George, old and blind, had retired from the center court of life.

“I don’t know what to think, George. I mean, what the hell kind of sick prank is this? Which weirdo on the loose?”

“Well, we know plenty of those guys, don’t we?”

That was for sure. During Sam’s long tenure as a reporter on newspapers in San Francisco and Atlanta, she had had a special interest in the big crime stories, and some of those felons had taken her interest personally. More than one had bellowed threats at her while being dragged away in cuffs. She’d received her share of threatening letters, scrawled in pencil on cheap lined paper. Then there’d come the day one Skeeter Bosarge had escaped a south Georgia jail, popped up from Sam’s back-seat, and roped her to a tree for target practice.

That kind of vengeance she understood. But this? This was much too subtle for the bad guys she knew.

“It’s sick,” said George. “And very cruel. Of course, it would be even more cruel, well, unthinkable, actually…” His voice idled to a stop; then he croaked, “…if the letter really were from Johanna.”

Sam let his words float through the air. She could almost see them. Words, she thought, are so strong; it’s a wonder that we don’t pay them more respect. Worship in the First Church of the Word. Then she said, “Do you really think that that’s a possibility, George? That Momma’s alive?”

“Well, it’s certainly never crossed my mind before. But, as a lawyer…” She could see George’s shrug as clearly as if she were standing next to him. “Like I always said, ‘Endless and unpredictable are the permutations of human behavior.’”

Indignation swamped her. “Human behavior? Jesus H. Christ, George, this is my mother, my father, your brother, we’re talking about. This is not some abstraction. Some idea. Some philosophy.”

George heard the hope, and the fear, in her voice. “The letter doesn’t say a word about Rob, does it, Sam? Not a syllable about your daddy.”

No. The letter laid claim solely to her mother’s resurrection. But it’s a joke, she told herself. Fraudulent. There are millions of people who can rattle off details of my childhood or fake my momma’s handwriting. People do that sort of thing every day.

George was silent.

Okay, maybe not millions. But scores. Plenty. Enough. Family, for instance.

“Donna or Darla?” said George. Her mother’s cousins? “Do you really think they’d remember details like Bogalusa, what the Tooth Fairy brought you, Johanna’s birthmark, even if they’d paid that much attention years ago? Sammie, Sammie, stop and think. Do you really suspect someone in the family of writing you this letter?”

No, of course not. But what if… She trolled the thought past George. “Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that this letter really is from Johanna.”

Johanna, yes, there, that was better, calling Momma by her given name. Remove the subject from the nursery, from the sticky fingers of childhood. Examine it with a cool, adult eye. That’s the way to solve the problem, yes, with your intellect. You let your emotions carry you away, cloud your judgment. Get in touch with your feelings. They had to be kidding. And wallow in all that pain?

“Okay. Suppose,” she said to George, “that Johanna’s been alive and well lo these many years. Now what would that mean? That she didn’t board the plane? That those aren’t her ashes we buried next to Daddy’s? Yes, we always knew that they might not be, not exactly them, I mean. Not precisely. What with the fire…”

Then Sam’s voice broke, her composure evaporating. She was in rough shape here. Inside her, flood waters raced over dams. She was drowning.

“Sammie, Sammie, baby,” George crooned. She could almost feel his arms around her.

She shrugged them off, for something else was rising in her now. Anger, the scalding kind, born of hurt. “If this letter is from Johanna, where has she been all this time? Why didn’t she come home? What could be so important that she’d abandon us?”

Us. You and me, George. Family. Friends. It’s too hard to say me. I can’t manage it. It hurts too much to think that Johanna, alive and well, had made the choice not to see me, her only child. Never ever again.

Until now.

George whispered. “I don’t know, dear. I truly don’t.” Then his voice quickened as he hit upon a plan. Mr. Fix-it was back in action. “Bring the letter with you to Atlanta. Bring it along with a sample of Johanna’s handwriting. You still have those boxes of old scrapbooks and Johanna’s letters, don’t you? You can take some of them along with this letter to a graphologist. Why, you could take it out to the crime lab. You still have friends there. An expert can tell you in no time at all if Johanna wrote the letter. And approximately when.”

“Yes, I could do that.”

“Ah,” said George, hearing her hesitation. “But you don’t want to. Well, I would understand if you just wanted the whole thing to go away. We get older, and certainly at my age, some things simply seem like too much effort. Passions fade. I just don’t care as much I used to…”

“No, George.” She stopped his flood of words. “The handwriting is a great idea. But I don’t think I can bear to wait around for it.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to, dear. We all know patience has never been your long suit, but…”

Then the words came flying from her mouth before she could stop them. Flying from her heart, bypassing the doors labeled Kindness Toward Others, Thoughtfulness, Tact. “George, I have to go to Santa Fe. Now.”

He chose the high road then, pretending he hadn’t understood. “Yes, certainly. You can leave from here, right after the party.”

“No, old darling. I have to leave now. As soon as I hang up, I’m heading straight for the airport.”

“But, Sammie…”

“This is rotten. I know it is. I’m hurting your feelings, and I’m so very sorry. I know your seventy-fifth is important to you. It’s important to me. And I’ll be there, I promise, as soon as I can, but…”

But what? My very skin is screaming. My skin. Me, me, me. I’m eight years old again. My mother has crashed and burned. She’s dead. That’s what you told me. That’s what the papers said. You held up the tiny caskets and showed me. That’s all that’s left, Sammie. Your momma’s ashes and your daddy’s. I didn’t want to believe you, didn’t want to believe any of it. Didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, not for years. And wonderful as you were to me, you and Peaches and Horace, you weren’t Daddy. You weren’t Momma.

Sam said, “I want to be in New Mexico before sundown. I’m sure it’s a hoax and I’ll be telling you all about it over a cup of coffee in your study tomorrow night, but I have to find that out for myself. Now.”

George said, Sure. No problem. He understood. But she knew that he didn’t. Or, rather, that understanding wasn’t enough. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help herself. I have to go. I’m already on the plane. I’m knocking at Johanna’s door. Momma? I can hear myself calling, Momma, is that you?