I swallowed and leaned into him. “Yeah, Dad.”
Then Lindy came in, and I helped her chop asparagus tips into precise segments, as instructed, and the three of us sat down to eat, like every night.
Lindy says it’s my choice to forgive Mom, and I guess I have. At least I’m trying to, though I don’t know if we’ll ever be perfectly comfortable with each other.
But even at the end of a mystery, everything’s not perfect, you know? The dead stay dead, no matter that the murderer’s been caught. The main character finds her answer, but maybe it’s not the right one; maybe the question she had in her head from the start was all wrong, and now she has to live with the weight of what she knows and what she’ll never know. I mean, look at Rebecca. Even though Manderley burns down, and long after the place of all her and Maximilian de Winter’s suffering has crumbled into a cold pile of ash and blackened stones on a lonely beach, it still haunts the unnamed heroine. She still dreams of it in the end of her story.
Obviously, I’m just graduating high school, so it’s not exactly the end of my story.
I freeze a smile in place, and Jessa takes the picture.
The music picks up inside, pounding out through the walls behind us. We twist around to watch our classmates drift toward the dance floor, summoned by the pied piper of a Kesha song on full volume. Levi Cantu waves at Jessa from the buffet table, sets his champale down, and pantomimes his intentions with sharp, sprinkler-armed moves.
She turns to me, her thin shoulders swaying slightly to the beat. “We can stay out here a little longer. However long you want.”
“No, let’s go in. The bugs are out anyway.”
“Yeah?”
We stand and smooth our dresses down and catch sight of our faint reflections in the glass, side by side.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
I open the door.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
REBECCA PODOS is a graduate of the writing, literature, and publishing program at Emerson College, where she won the MFA award for best thesis. Her fiction has been published in Glimmer Train, Glyph, Paper Darts, Bellows American Review, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She lives with her husband in Connecticut. The Mystery of Hollow Places is her first novel.
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BOOKS BY REBECCA PODOS
The Mystery of Hollow Places
CREDITS
COVER ART OF ICE © 2016 PLAINPICTURE/NORDIC LIFE
COVER ART OF BEACH © 2016 PLAINPICTURE/FSTOP
COVER DESIGN BY SARAH NICHOLE KAUFMAN
COPYRIGHT
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE MYSTERY OF HOLLOW PLACES. Copyright © 2016 by Rebecca Podos. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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 hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.epicreads.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Podos, Rebecca.
The mystery of hollow places / Rebecca Podos. — First edition.
pagescm
Summary: A mystery writer’s daughter sets out to find her missing father and, along the way, begins to understand the loneliness that has gripped them both since her mother abandoned them years before.
ISBN 978-0-06-237334-2 (hardback)
EPub Edition © January 2016 ISBN 9780062373366
[1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Mothers—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.1.P63My 2016 2015010331
[Fic]—dc23 CIP
AC
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15 16 17 18 19 PC/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
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