Private Investigations
Page 1
Copyright
Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
Copyright © 2020 by Victoria Zackheim
Cover design by Ann Kirchner
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Zackheim, Victoria, editor.
Title: Private investigations : mystery writers on the secrets, riddles, and wonders in their lives / edited by Victoria Zackheim.
Description: First edition. | New York : Seal Press, 2020. | Summary: “In Private Investigations, twenty fan-favorite mystery writers share their first-person stories of grappling with mysteries they’ve personally encountered, at home and in the world. Caroline Leavitt regales us with a medical mystery, a time when she lost her voice and doctors couldn’t find a cure; Martin Limon travels back to his military stint in Korea to grapple with the chaos of war; Anne Perry ponders the magical powers of stories conjured from writers’ imaginations, and more”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019032305 | ISBN 9781580059213 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781580059220 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. | Novelists, English—20th century—Biography. | Detective and mystery stories, American—Authorship. | Detective and mystery stories, English—Authorship.
Classification: LCC PS379 .P75 2020 | DDC 813/.087208—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032305
ISBNs: 978-1-58005-921-3 (hardcover); 978-1-58005-922-0 (ebook)
E3-20200316-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
VICTORIA ZACKHEIM
INTRODUCTION: SOLVING THE MYSTERY
HALLIE EPHRON
GHOSTED
JEFFERY DEAVER
PLOT TWISTS: THIS WRITER’S LIFE
SULARI GENTILL
AN EXTRA CHILD
CARA BLACK
FIELD NOTES À LA MAIGRET FROM PARIS
CONNIE MAY FOWLER
LYDIA AND JACK
MARTIN LIMÓN
THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM (AND OTHER MILITARY MYSTERIES)
WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER
THE CLAY THAT WE SHAPE
AUSMA ZEHANAT KHAN
ORIGINS AND DESTINATIONS
KRISTEN LEPIONKA
A TRICK OF THE LIGHT
LYNN CAHOON
THE MYSTERY OF DECEPTION
RHYS BOWEN
THE LONG SHADOW OF WAR
RACHEL HOWZELL HALL
I DON’T KNOW THIS WORD
STEPH CHA
THE BEAMS KEEP FALLING
JACQUELINE WINSPEAR
WRITING ABOUT WAR
TASHA ALEXANDER
CAN WE LIVE WITHOUT MYSTERY?
CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS
GODFATHERS, NANCY DREW, AND CATS
CAROLINE LEAVITT
THE MYSTERY OF MY LOST VOICE
CHARLES TODD
REMEMBERING THE PAST
ROBERT DUGONI
NUNS, MAGIC, AND STEVEN KING
ANNE PERRY
I WANT TO BE A MAGICIAN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCOVER MORE
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Loving thanks to CeCe Sloan
for your unceasing encouragement
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
INTRODUCTION
Solving the Mystery
– Victoria Zackheim –
WHEN IT WAS SUGGESTED THAT I CONSIDER A COLLECTION of essays written by mystery writers revealing the mysteries of their lives, I couldn’t help but think of my own. Were the life-changing mysteries that had shaped my life shared by the twenty gifted writers in this collection? I quickly discovered that all of us view mystery in very different and personal ways.
The mysteries we discover in the course of everyday living are real, imagined, dreamed, even hoped for, feared, and anticipated. A mystery can present itself as an enigma, a solution, a challenge, a surprise. A thing of despair—or something magical. Falling in love—or out of love. Gaining stature and reputation or losing respect. Being innocent—and then not. Marriage and divorce, illness and death, the rise and fall of friendships. The expected and the serendipitous. Situations that hurt us and thrill us.
In these stories, you are invited into the private lives of gifted writers, most of them on New York Times and international bestseller lists. You may be a fan, or you may be reading their work for the first time. Their stories, all true, cover the breadth of life experiences, from introspective to mystical, from laugh-out-loud funny to noir. Mysteries, when presented from our very personal perspectives—and all of these certainly are—come in all forms.
So what are the secrets, riddles, and wonders of our lives? Do we focus on our joy or grief, highs or lows, something meticulously defined or so amorphous as to seem impossible to fathom? Whatever form these mysteries take, all of us have had our lives shaped by them. They affect who we are and how we live, love, think… behave. We can celebrate those riddles, wonders, and secrets, or we can fear them. Perhaps it’s because everything we touch, everything that touches us, has the potential to be a mystery. I felt this when I held my children for the first time. And when I accompanied my daughter to a medical examination and heard the twin heartbeats of my first grandchildren, causing my knees to buckle so that I had to grip the bed rail to stop myself from falling. And when I look into the faces of my son’s children and imagine their futures, their dreams.
There are so many mysteries around us. I remember with unusual clarity that moment in 1977 when I saw my father only minutes after his death. He was ten years younger than I am today. Gone too soon, yet his body seemed so peaceful, finally pain-free. I muttered, “This is not my father,” which caused a bit of alarm for my mother and the nurse. I tried to explain that I was looking at the shell that had housed his beautiful spirit but that his curiosity about the world around him and his quick sense of humor felt very much alive. This was my first close experience with death, and it left me confused, mystified. If a mystery is an enigma that we must unravel, then I was confronting a mystery.
That same sense returned while I was sitting at my mother’s bedside. When she took her last breath, I knew that she was finally at peace. Nearly ninety, she had become increasingly angry that her last years
were so difficult. An artist who could no longer paint, a political activist whose voice had been stilled, she felt locked within the walls of her home. Again, I struggled with the Why? of it. My complicated, brilliant mother. Who she was will aways remain a mystery in my life.
Mysteries are found in the stories of our lives, some of them challenging believability. Hallie Ephron visits a spiritualist in the hope of understanding her friend’s claims to have spoken with her murdered brother, while Sulari Gentill discovers an uncle whose existence was kept a secret… until she stumbles upon a family photograph.
We are confronted with mysteries when health is in question. I don’t exercise nearly enough, and one of my mysteries is how and why I remain upright and relatively healthy! Rachel Howzell Hall was living her life balancing writing, family, and career until a new word joined her lexicon: cancer. Caroline Leavitt lost her voice, found no answers from medical specialists, and set out to solve this mystery on her own.
Many authors pull from their very personal experiences when mapping out the plots of their novels. Connie May Fowler recalls her abuse at the hands of her mother, the social pressures she felt as a childless woman, and a recent illness that was frightening yet reminded her of the kindness of strangers. William Kent Krueger shares how his childhood was defined by the mysteries of his mother’s mental illness—the same woman who became the protagonist of one of his novels.
Life teaches us such varied lessons, some of which are cloaked in mystery, such as our quest for truth and how we respond to love and loss. As different as the stories in this collection are, you will discover similarities of the human spirit. For example, similar themes draw us into the varied and always difficult elements of war: survival, challenge, hardship, discovery. How are we affected by war? Do we honor those who fought to defend our rights? Our liberties? Martin Limón reveals the challenges of a young American soldier dropped into the foreign and sometimes mysterious culture of Korea.
There are mysteries that we discover as we write or as we adjust to a new place in the world. Ausma Zehanat Khan, an international human rights attorney, explores the mystery of her own origins, while Cara Black’s Paris is so much a part of her being that Inspector Maigret seems to be evident everywhere she goes.
As you read these stories—I resist calling them essays, although that is what they are, because that label suggests something impersonal, perhaps even cold, whereas these narratives are rich with warmth and intimacy, sharing and trust—you will hear each author’s voice, share each story, and in many ways feel as if that author is seated beside you and speaking directly to you.
What are your personal mysteries? What have you seen, survived, and experienced that has made you who you are today? When you read the stories, you might find yourself nodding, smiling, perhaps discovering tears in your eyes, certainly identifying with so much that the twenty authors share with you. It is my hope that you find elements of yourself and your life in some of these stories and that what you find, what you discover, leads you to a greater understanding of who you are and how important you are—an essential thread in this mysterious tapestry we call life.
GHOSTED
– Hallie Ephron –
IT WAS DUSK TWENTY YEARS AGO, AND I WAS DRIVING THE I-93 North through Boston and beyond, looking for the exit marked MYSTIC AVENUE. This seemed prophetic since I was on my way to a meeting of spiritualists. No, I’m not into parapsychology or the occult, and up to that point in my life I’d been secure in the belief that there is no afterlife. You live, you die; end of story. If something in my house goes bump in the night, I set mousetraps. But my struggle to understand what was happening to my friend Laura (not her real name) had drawn me to Medford to mingle with a group who claimed to be able to talk to ghosts.
If it had been anyone but Laura, I’d have written her off as a nutcase. A single mom and successful real estate agent, she was smart, grounded, endowed with a wonderfully wry sense of humor and a healthy distrust of artifice and flimflam. We’d been friends since high school, and I’d never known her to be the slightest bit unhinged. At least not until her brother Josh was murdered.
Laura and Josh had been business partners. They worked together so closely that Laura often felt as if she could communicate telepathically with him across the glass partition that separated their desks. The client who shot Josh arrived at their office first thing that morning, gunning for Laura. He was convinced that she’d cheated him. But Laura got to work late, and by the time she arrived the building was surrounded by police cruisers, its entrance was blocked by crime-scene tape, and an ambulance with its rear doors flung open was backed up to the front door.
Laura was wracked with grief and guilt. Josh had been her best friend as well as her younger brother. The killer had been her client, not Josh’s. She tortured herself with what might have happened if she’d gotten to work on time. Maybe she could have placated the killer. Talked him down. At the very least, she would have been the victim, and Josh would still be alive.
Josh’s killer escaped, and in the weeks after the murder, Laura grew more and more terrified to leave her house. She felt safe in her car, a big old Cadillac she’d inherited from her mother. It had power windows, power door locks, and a car phone. But simple acts like walking out her front door to pick up the newspaper or crossing a parking lot from her car to a supermarket entrance triggered panic attacks. Even at home, where at least she felt safe, she was in constant, unbearable pain. “Like when you hurt yourself,” she told me, “and the hurt is so bad that you have to cry. It’s as if [the killer] blew a hole in my body, too, a gaping wound that everything I see, everything I do, causes it to ache. Only sleep numbs the pain.”
Laura became a virtual recluse, barely able to get to her appointments with her therapist, who diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed medication for anxiety and depression.
My understanding of what happened next comes from long conversations that Laura and I shared over the months that followed. She’d talk. I’d listen and record her words, transcribing them later and sending her a copy with the idea that her experiences might become the basis for a book we’d write together about what it’s like to lose a loved one to homicide.
Here’s how Laura described Josh’s first visit:
Early one morning, I’m lying in bed, fully awake. I’m looking out the window when something makes me look up at the ceiling. Josh is here, floating right above me. I feel as if my body isn’t mine. For a while I just stare up at him, cemented in place, the whole of my being focused on his presence an arm’s length away.
I can’t communicate with him at first. He isn’t talking to me. He’s just here. I want so badly to communicate with him, but it’s hard. In my mind I keep saying, “Tell me how to do this.” No response. I beg for a sign that he can hear me. For what seems like a very long time I lie immobilized, looking at him. Finally I hear “Laura, you always knew what was on my mind. Just do it!” And all of a sudden the floodgates open. I can hear him, and I can talk to him.
What he says is very simple. He says that I can trust Uncle Albert. He also tells me that my Aunt Irene is with him. Aunt Irene has been dead for about five years. All I can do is nod to let him know I hear and understand. It feels as if he’s draining me, drawing off my will and strength.
Then, before I know it, he’s gone. It’s a cool morning, and I’m under the blankets, sweating. All the energy has been sucked out of me to make room for accepting Josh. When I get out of bed my legs are trembling. The physical sensation lasts most of the morning.
I know this sounds like a scene out of a movie or TV show—Truly Madly Deeply, Sleepless in Seattle, Ghost, Sherlock, or The Kominsky Method, to name a few. But to Laura, this was real. Josh visited her many more times. Often when she was in her bedroom. Sometimes in her car. Once while she was walking on a beach. The “visitations,” as she called them, were tiring but never as intense and draining as the first time. Soon she was looking forward to them. On
ly her therapist knew.
A turning point came on a Sunday morning about six months after the murder.
I am reading the Sunday New York Times in my living room. All of a sudden Josh is here with me. Aunt Irene is with him. I try to stand, a skeptic, outside of myself. Wondering. Doubting. Are they really here? Or is this my imagination?
Laura talked to them for a long time. At one point Josh suggested that she write down the things he was telling her. She was afraid to leave the room, afraid that they’d vanish while she was off fetching something to write on. But she went to her office, and when she came back with a yellow legal pad, Aunt Irene and Josh were still there.
A short time later, as Laura was writing what Josh was telling her, she realized that her fifteen-year-old son, Brian, was standing in the doorway. She had no idea how long he’d been there and what he’d heard. He asked her what was going on.
I ask him if he sees anything in the living room out of the ordinary. He looks around and obviously sees nothing. I decide to tell him. I say that Uncle Josh is sitting in the red chair. Aunt Irene is in the rocker. He stares at me for a moment, then sits down next to me on the couch. He stays there for another fifteen or twenty minutes. I’m interpreting Josh and Aunt Irene to Brian because Brian can’t see or hear them.
By the time Josh and Aunt Irene left, floating out the living room window, Laura had been with them for nearly an hour. It was only then that Laura registered the fear and confusion in Brian’s eyes. He’d lost his favorite uncle, the man who had filled the hole left in his life after Laura split up with his father, and now it must have seemed as if his mother were losing her mind.
Listening to Laura, I was shaken, too. Nothing in my own experience prepared me to make sense of hers. She was talking to a ghost yet describing the conversations so matter-of-factly that she might have been talking about conversations with the mailman.