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Life Sentences
Laura Lippman
A writer discovers the truth about her past in this haunting and multi-layered thriller from the multi-award-winning New York Times bestseller.What if you found out that the central story of your life was a lie?A successful writer returns to her hometown of Baltimore on the hunt for new material and stumbles into the middle of a mystery which takes her back to her schooldays.Former classmate Callie Jenkins hit the headlines when she was jailed for 7 years having refused to give up the whereabouts of her missing child. But why did she remain silent? And whatever happened to the little boy?Cassandra thinks she can find out. But in the course of her investigation she finds out that her own history might be far from the truth…
LAURA LIPPMAN
Life Sentences
Copyright (#ulink_3fa575d5-552c-5d7b-8f84-7c6c593b5770)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
AVON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the USA by HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, NY, 2009
Copyright © Laura Lippman 2009
Laura Lippman asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
Source ISBN: 9781847560933
Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007328970
Version: 2018-06-13
In loving memory of James Crumley, 1939–2008.
Take my word. It was fun.
I detest the man who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks for another.
—THE ILIAD
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ub7b1a119-53ec-5eb8-b305-a213a6ea4f7d)
Copyright (#u5b5bfe4b-f814-590d-ba8e-15c71ca77df1)
Dedication (#u3e09d2c4-aa4e-53ef-a71a-15f5963f1195)
Epigraph (#u835b1beb-74c2-53f8-9947-db0dc7dde972)
Chapter One (#ulink_f98e164a-e2bc-5cd3-bebd-894bfb706e0b)
Part 1-Bridgeville: February 20–23
Chapter Two (#ulink_31c6e402-c8b2-549f-9262-8864b8d18c47)
Chapter Three (#ulink_ea21c20b-37ab-5368-bc48-d7bb108dfa92)
Chapter Four (#ulink_307c46d2-921a-52b1-9342-ec9987e0cb73)
Part 2-Banrock Station: February 25–28
Chapter Five (#ulink_7cf53a99-d159-5201-b99b-7381bea0b84d)
Chapter Six (#ulink_9c7af0aa-8dfc-54f5-a814-8498f584f4d1)
Chapter Seven (#ulink_bd5e0f99-f1da-5689-a6f4-a2f875b37275)
Part 3-Glass Houses: March 1–2
Chapter Eight (#ulink_dac78847-9c92-5f05-a4c3-3f7468223584)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 4-The Brier Patch: March 3–5
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 5-Collectors: March 11–12
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 6-Low Countries: March 14–21
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 7-How To Cook Everything: March 24–27
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 8-Natural Selection: March 28–29
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 9-And Agamemnon Dead: March 29–31
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 10-Happy Wanderers: September 5–6
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Excerpt from The Innocents (#litres_trial_promo)
Autumn 1977–Spring 1978 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright (#ulink_46e36d29-e0f2-53df-ba93-f26bc4247019)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#u947e72b4-c54f-5078-842e-a5bac4575c69)
‘Well,’ the bookstore manager said, ‘it is Valentine’s Day.’
It’s not that bad, Cassandra wanted to say in her own defense. But she never wanted to sound peevish or disappointed. She must smile, be gracious and self-deprecating. She would emphasize how wonderfully intimate the audience was, providing her with an opportunity to talk, have a real exchange, not merely prate about herself. Besides, it wasn’t tragic, drawing thirty people on a February night in the suburbs of San Francisco. On Valentine’s Day. Most of the writers she knew would kill for thirty people under these circumstances, under any circumstances.
And there was no gain in reminding the bookseller—Beth, Betsy, Bitsy, oh dear, the name had vanished, her memory was increasingly buggy—that Cassandra had drawn almost two hundred people to this same store on this precise date four years earlier. Because that might imply she thought someone was to blame for tonight’s turnout, and Cassandra Fallows didn’t believe in blame. She was famous for it. Or had been.
She also was famous for rallying, and she did just that as she took five minutes to freshen up in the manager’s office, brushing her hair and reapplying lipstick. Her hair, her worst feature as a child, was now her best, sleek and silver, but her lips seemed thinner. She adjusted her earrings, smoothed her skirt, reminding herself of her general good fortune. She had a job she loved; she was healthy. Lucky, I am lucky. She could quit now, never write a word again, and live quite comfortably. Her first two books were annuities, more reliable than any investment.
Her third book—ah, well, that was the unloved, misshapen child she was here to exalt.
At the lectern, she launched into a talk that was already honed and automatic ten days into the tour. There was a pediatric hospital across the road from where I grew up. The audience was mostly female, over forty. She used to get more men, but then her memoirs, especially the second one, had included unsparing detail about her promiscuity, a healthy appetite that had briefly gotten out of control in her early forties. It was a long-term-care facility, where children with extremely challenging diagnoses were treated for months, for years in some cases. Was that true? She hadn’t done that much research about Kernan. The hospital had been skittish, dubious that a writer known for memoir was capable of creating fiction. Cassandra had decided to go whole hog, abandon herself to the libertine ways of a novelist. Forgo the fact-checking, the weeks in libraries, the conversations with family and friends, trying to make her memories gibe with hard, cold certainty. For the first time in her life—despite what her second husband had claimed—she made stuff up out of whole cloth. The book is an homage to The Secret Garden—in case the title doesn’t make that clear enough—and it’s set in the 1980s because that was a time when finding biological parents was still formidably difficult, almost taboo, a notion that began to lose favor in the 1990s and is increasingly out of fashion as biological parents gain more rights. It had never occurred to Cassandra that the world at large, much like the hospital, would be reluctant to accept her in this new role. The story is wholly fictional, although it’s set in a real place.
She read her favorite passage. People laughed in some odd spots.
Question time. Cassandra never minded the predictability of the Q-and-A sessions, never resented being asked the same thing over and over. It didn’t even bother her when people spoke of her father and mother and stepmother and ex-husbands as if they were characters in a novel, fictional constructs they were free to judge and psychoanalyze. But it disturbed her now when audience members wanted to pin down the ‘real’ people in her third book. Was she Hannah, the watchful child who unwittingly sets a tragedy in motion? Or was she the boy in the body cast, Woodrow? Were the parents modeled on her own? They seemed so different, based on the historical record she had created. Was there a fire? An accident in the abandoned swimming pool that the family could never afford to repair?
‘Did your father really drive a retired Marathon cab, painted purple?’ asked one of the few men in the audience, who looked to be at least sixty. Retired, killing time at his wife’s side. ‘I ask only because my father had an old DeSoto and…’
Of course, she thought, even as she smiled and nodded. You care about the details that you can relate back to yourself. I’ve told my story, committed over a quarter of a million words to paper so far. It’s your turn. Again, she was not irked. Her audience’s need to share was to be expected. If a writer was fortunate enough to excite people’s imaginations, this was part of the bargain, especially for the memoir writer she had been and apparently would continue to be in the public’s mind, at least for now. She had told her story, and that was the cue for them to tell theirs. Given what confession had done for her soul, how could she deny it to anyone else?
‘Time for one last question,’ the store manager said, and pointed to a woman in the back. She wore a red raincoat, shiny with moisture, and a shapeless khaki hat that tied under her chin with a leather cord.
‘Why do you get to write the story?’
Cassandra was at a loss for words.
‘I’m not sure I understand,’ she began. ‘You mean, how do I write a novel about people who aren’t me? Or are you asking how one gets published?’
‘No, with the other books. Did you get permission to write them?’
‘Permission to write about my own life?’
‘But it’s not just your life. It’s your parents, your stepmother, friends. Did you let them read it first?’
‘No. They knew what I was doing, though. And I fact-checked as much as I could, admitted the fallibility of my memory throughout. In fact that’s a recurring theme in my work.’
