An unsolved murder, bracketed by grief and abuse. Can there be justice, and what will it look like?
Forty years ago, a farmer was murdered near an abandoned village the locals call Grabtown. Police never found his killer.
When twin sisters Cassie and Ana return to their rural childhood home in Winslow, Connecticut, to grieve their mother's death and settle her affairs, they discover something unexpected among her belongings: the draft of a murder mystery, written by their mother's longtime girlfriend, AJ. The manuscript begins with the Grabtown killing—and features their mother as a key character.
Cassie, a frustrated writer estranged from her family and stuck in an isolating marriage, sees opportunities for her next writing project. Ana, fearful of what they might learn, wants to destroy it. As Cassie digs deeper, uncovering a disturbing trail of abuse that winds back through their family and town, she questions the truth of AJ's story. Is it fiction—or a confession?
When Cassie's mercurial husband tells her to stop digging and a retired detective appears to ask new questions about the old murder, she realizes someone believes the old story is true. And they'll do anything to keep their secrets.
An unsolved murder, bracketed by grief and abuse. Can there be justice, and what will it look like?
Forty years ago, a farmer was murdered near an abandoned village the locals call Grabtown. Police never found his killer.
When twin sisters Cassie and Ana return to their rural childhood home in Winslow, Connecticut, to grieve their mother's death and settle her affairs, they discover something unexpected among her belongings: the draft of a murder mystery, written by their mother's longtime girlfriend, AJ. The manuscript begins with the Grabtown killing—and features their mother as a key character.
Cassie, a frustrated writer estranged from her family and stuck in an isolating marriage, sees opportunities for her next writing project. Ana, fearful of what they might learn, wants to destroy it. As Cassie digs deeper, uncovering a disturbing trail of abuse that winds back through their family and town, she questions the truth of AJ's story. Is it fiction—or a confession?
When Cassie's mercurial husband tells her to stop digging and a retired detective appears to ask new questions about the old murder, she realizes someone believes the old story is true. And they'll do anything to keep their secrets.
Prologue
Metal presses in from three sides, cold and unforgiving. The fourth side is wood, rough-cut planks that give you splinters if you bump against them. Twelve-year-old Elena sits with her bottom on hard smooth steel and her back against a corrugated metal wall. She shifts a little in the dark, trying to get comfortable. Sharp ridges dig into her shoulder blades through the thin t-shirt, now damp with sweat and fear.
The container smelled at first of oil and jet fuel, with an underlying earthiness of leather and wood. But after two days in the cramped space, it mostly smells like them—three small unwashed bodies, plus the acrid stench from the bucket they cannot empty.
Quatro dias, she thinks. Four days, or has it been five?
She switches on their only working flashlight and sweeps its beam across what she’s come to think of as their prison cell. The wooden crate still dominates everything, squatting in the center of the shipping container like a sleeping giant. The crate’s bulk stretches nearly to the ceiling, almost to the side walls.
Elena and her sisters are living in the small space between the crate and the container’s rear doors, eight feet by perhaps five feet. Elena can touch both the crate and a door if she stands and stretches her arms out. She does this often, to reassure herself that the walls aren’t closing in.
At first, she was terrified the crate would shift position on the smooth floor. Slide back on takeoff, perhaps, crushing them against the container’s doors.Now she knows it’s securely bolted to the floor, so the precious cargo in the crate—whatever it is—isn’t damaged.
She should switch off the flashlight and save the batteries. Instead, she stares again at the crate’s shipping labels, studying the details she missed in their first excited hours aboard the plane. Yellow and white papers in a plastic sleeve, sealed with clear tape and stapled to the wood. Many words are printed in English, which she recognizes but cannot yet read, and in some other language that uses unfamiliar characters.
Ten-year-old Carmen presses closer to her big sister. Her whisper is hoarse from tears. “Elena, ¿cuando vamos a llegar all�” When are we going to get there?
Elena can feel how thin her sister has become. They are rationing the granola bars, but Carmen barely eats anymore. After four days in the desert and however long they’ve been in this box, she’s barely able to hold her head up.
“Pronto, mija,” Elena murmurs, but the words taste like a lie. She’s been saying “soon” for several days now.
Yesterday, Sofia, the youngest, stopped talking entirely. She sits now with her knees pulled to her chest, her mostly empty backpack clutched against her stomach. In the flashlight beam her eyes are wide and glassy, staring at nothing. Carmen offers her eight-year-old sister a drink of water from their last jug, but Sofia only twists her head away.
The container’s air vents are Elena’s new obsession. Four of them, high on the walls near the ceiling. They let in a little stale air but almost no light.
“I need to use the bucket,” Sofia whispers, the first words she’s spoken since yesterday.
Elena helps her sister to the corner where they’ve placed the white plastic bucket, now nearly full and reeking. The smell makes her gag, but she holds the flashlight steady while Sofia uses the bucket, then wipes herself with a small scrap of newspaper from a thin pile on the floor.
As Sofia returns to sit beside Carmen, the flashlight stutters and Elena switches it off. In the darkness, every sound is amplified: the scratch of fabric against metal, the rustle of their few remaining granola bar wrappers, the quiet slosh of water as they pass around the jug.
Their container shudders. Elena feels the plane tilt and hears the whine of machinery. Pressure in her ears tells her they’re descending, about to land—but this time, her heart doesn’t jump with excitement. They’ve been through this before. The landing, then the rumble of cranes, the lifting and swaying, the voices outside giving commands in languages she doesn’t understand.
“They’re moving us again,” she tells her sisters. Her voice is flat, defeated.
Through the ventilation holes, she can hear men shouting, but not in Spanish or English. The words rise and fall in a fast, clipped rhythm, nothing like the warm vowels of home. The container lurches, and all three girls brace themselves against the wall. No one whimpers this time.
“Where are we going?” There’s no hope in Carmen’s voice, it’s just a rote question.
“America.” Elena says automatically, but the words feel hollow. “We’re going to live with TĂa Rosa.”
She knows it’s not true. Mamá had assured them the trip would take no more than a day, but they’ve been traveling too long. The man who helped them climb into in the container several days ago had spoken Spanish, yes, but with an accent she didn’t recognize and a smile she didn’t like.
The container settles with a thud and Elena hears the rumble of engines starting up. Different engines, this time. Bigger, louder, with a deeper vibration that makes her teeth ache. The sound grows more insistent. They press their hands to their ears.
“Escuchar,” Elena says, but her voice cracks. “Un otro avión.” Another plane. The third one, by her count. How many flights does it take to get to Galveston, Texas?
They brace themselves against the acceleration and Elena’s stomach lurches.
The engine noise settles into a steady drone. Though she knows Sofia probably won’t eat, Elena distributes their remaining granola bars, two each. She no longer tells her sisters stories about hamburgers and pizza, or schools with smiling teachers and rooms with windows.
In the darkness, with only the drift of stale air through the ventilation holes and the steady drone of engines to keep them company, Elena holds her sisters close and tries not to think about the symbols on the crate or the strange languages she’s heard.
Their cramped container is taking them toward something far worse than uncertainty. It’s carrying them toward a truth her two sisters aren’t old enough to understand, to a place where no one good or kind will welcome three girls who are supposed to be in Galveston.
Elena begins to cry.
***
Cassie rubs her scalp with both hands until she feels her hair bristle like burnt-black grass. When she was a kid, that gesture would have drawn an eyeroll from her twin sister Ana and an exasperated headshake from their mother. But Cassandra Masterson and Anastasia Prescott are nearly forty, and their mother died four days ago.
Two hours after Marla Bousquet’s funeral, Cassie sprawls on the green plaid sofa in the rambling Connecticut farmhouse she grew up in. Nursing a cooling mug of coffee and more grief than she’s prepared to deal with, she’s waiting for Ana to return from delivering a carload of flowers to a local nursing home.
So many flowers. They’d filled the small Con-gregational meeting house with a thick humid fragrance. Lilies, carnations, gladioli, roses, chrysanthemums. And a handful of black-eyed Susans, looking like a child had plucked them from a roadside ditch. An odd choice for a funeral, Cassie thinks. Someone else must have known how much their mother loved black-eyed Susans.
An empty fist of sadness spreads through Cassie’s ribcage. She flops back into the threadbare cushions, resigning herself to tears, but her eyes remain dry. Nothing comes—no tears, no clarity, no escape. She picks at a tuft of white cat hair in a sofa seam, imagining it’s Izzie’s. Though the long-haired calico has been gone for decades.
Cassie had thought the funeral would wrap her in a tidy closure, handing her peace like a keepsake. But all she’s accomplished is to wash off her makeup, swap her gray pantsuit for shorts and a T-shirt, and power up the living room’s tower fan against the sultry heat of summer. Her mother’s frugality had rejected the installation of central AC; only a single window unit had been reserved for the sickroom, previously used as the dining room.
Her hip vibrates. Startled, she props herself up on an elbow and fumbles her phone from a rear pocket.
Marsh’s voice crackles through static, warm and familiar. “Hey, beautiful. I’m about to head out to LAX. How’s it going? God, I miss you already.”
The small hairs on her forearms lift—not from fear, but from the old pull of his voice. It’s disorienting, hearing her husband’s California charm in this house. In their eighteen years together, he’s visited exactly once. Which was the last time she was here, too, more than a decade ago.
Why is he calling? He’s promised her one uninterrupted week in Connecticut to help Ana clear out their mother’s house. Mend a few fences, maybe make peace with her sister. Cassie’s already feeling unmoored. She isn’t ready for his voice wrapping her in its smooth, no-worries velvet.
She stands and pads barefoot to the front window, searching for signal. Cell reception is laughably bad here in this dead-end corner of an old Connecticut mill town, where narrow gravel roads snake between rocky hills and mosquito-infested swamps.
The smell of her mother’s old house—musty linens, disinfectant—clings to everything, following her to the window. She wrinkles her nose. “Okay, I guess. I just got back from the funeral.”
“Oh, babe.” His voice drops to that tender register she remembers from their early days. “I’m such an ass. I should’ve asked about that first. How are you holding up?”
She rubs tired eyes, surprised by the genuine concern. This is the Marsh who used to bring her soup when she was sick, who’d massage her feet after long days at her computer. “It was a funeral. The usual.” If she tries to explain the sadness, he’ll worry and tell her to cut the visit short.
“I wish I knew what that meant.” He lets out a self-deprecating laugh. “I’m terrible at this stuff, aren’t I? Death, grief—I never know the right thing to say. I’m sort of glad I missed it, but know I should’ve come with you. Been there for you.”
The vulnerability in his admission catches her off guard. “It’s okay. I know Hong Kong’s important.”
“Not more important than you.” There’s that little-boy earnestness that used to make her melt. “I keep thinking about you in that house, with all the memories. And Ana giving you grief.” He pauses. “I’m worried about you, babe. You get so lost in your own head sometimes.”
She’s too tired to argue. And it doesn’t matter what she says, Marsh will hear what he wants to hear. Right now, his concern feels genuine, though he’s preoccupied with overseeing the delivery of a one-of-a-kind Lamborghini Miura, one of only twelve ever made, to a demanding Chinese billionaire. An oligarch, he’d said with mocking, theatrical disgust, mimicking the man’s accent until she’d laughed despite herself. The buyer is insisting that the owner of Masterson’s Exotic Motors be present at the Hong Kong airport to supervise the uncrating of his precious car.
She checks her watch. His flight from LAX is scheduled to leave in a few hours.
“It’s only six days,” he’s saying, and she can picture him smoothing his sculpted beard with a thumb and index finger, the way he does when he’s nervous. “The container was off-loaded yesterday. So I check it for damage, get the car through customs, schmooze the buyer for a few hours on Saturday—you know how these guys love the dog-and-pony show—talk with a couple other clients on Sunday, and head back that night.” He pauses. “Actually, I could try to get home a day early. Maybe switch my flight and catch a Saturday night red-eye, go straight through to Boston or Hartford and join you there for a few days. What do you think?”
Through the dusty window, Cassie glimpses a basket of red geraniums hanging from the roof-edge above the front porch. Her mother’s most cherished plants, four large pots evenly spaced beneath the roof overhang where they catch the rays of the afternoon sun. Mindful of the heat at this time of year, her mother always gave the flowers a thorough soaking each morning. Cassie wonders who’s watering the geraniums now.
“Babe? You still there?”
“Sorry, I’m here. Just…taking it all in.” She catches up to what he said. “No, you shouldn’t change flights. I’m fine.”
His voice softens again. “I can only imagine. That house holds a lot of history for you.”
Beside the porch steps, two dogwood trees flank the gravel path running from the house to the unpaved driveway. Near the end of the driveway, there’s a woodlot where a farmer collects sap from a grove of sugar maples each spring. It’s late August now, but thin blue plastic tubing still hangs in haphazard coils from the massive maple trees lining the dirt road.
She shifts her eyes back to the porch’s white railing, with its peeling paint and coating of gray-brown road dust. One picket is cracked and two are missing. Everywhere I look, something is broken.
“Cassie?” Marsh’s voice pulls her back. “I was asking about Ana. How’s she treating you? Playing the grieving daughter who was always the favorite?”
There it is again, the familiar jealousy disguised as protection.
“She’s fine. We’re fine.”
“I just don’t want her laying some guilt trip on you, okay? Making you feel bad because you weren’t there as much as she was.” His voice gets that reasonable quality that always makes her doubt herself. “If she really cared, she would’ve invited you to visit more often instead of hoarding your mother to herself.”
“Marsh—”
“Are you sleeping okay? You have your Xanax, right?” The concern is back, genuine but tinged with something else. Control, maybe. Or the need to fix things he doesn’t understand.
“We’ve been over this. I’m okay.”
“I know, I know. It’s just—” He laughs with that charming, self-aware chuckle. “I can’t help myself. I see you hurting and I want to swoop in and make it better. Very caveman of me, I know.”
Despite everything, she almost smiles. This is the Marsh who won her over—the successful businessman who could poke fun at his own intensity. Who made her feel precious and protected.
“Do you think you’ll have time to write? What are you working on?”
“Jeez, no. I haven’t even had time to think.” She’d told Marsh a few extra days here in her childhood home, with no WiFi and few other distractions, would give her a chance to concentrate on writing a new story. The truth is, she hasn’t even unpacked her laptop. And her creativity evaporated months ago.
“That’s okay, babe. Sometimes you just need to let the well refill, you know?” His voice is gentle, understanding. Then it hardens slightly. “Just remember how much we’ve invested in giving your mom the best care possible. Extra homecare nurses, specialists, that adjustable bed we rented for her—Ana seems to think we’re made of money.”
“I know. We’ve been over it before.” The sharpness in her voice surprises them both.
She bites her lip at the overstep. Now she’s crossed some invisible line. Hearing his quick intake of breath, she braces for the shift. Marsh can be so mercurial, it’s hard to keep up.
“Dammit, Cass, I can barely hear you. You’re breaking up.” His voice has changed, the warmth gone tepid. “Find a better goddamn signal or call me back on the landline. But not now—make it four o’clock, after I get to the airport.”
He pauses. When he speaks again, his tone has shifted into something even more commanding. “Did you hear me? Say it back, so I know you got it.”
Her familiar rush of submission fights with something more resistant. “Four o’clock, your time. Yes, okay, that’s seven my time.”
The line crackles again and she thinks they’ve lost the connection, but no, he’s still there.
“Just be careful, Cass.” His voice has gone softer again, almost pleading. “I know I sound paranoid, but that place—it’s not good for you. All those old ghosts, your sister stirring up ancient history. Don’t talk to anyone you don’t have to, okay? Get through the week and come home to me.”
There’s something almost vulnerable in the way he says it, like he’s genuinely afraid of losing her.
“Or you could come home early,” he says hopefully. “Maybe switch to an earlier flight—Sunday or Monday instead of Tuesday?”
“Not a chance, Marsh. Sunday’s the estate sale. Ana needs me for that. And I’m thinking of staying on a few days longer, maybe.”
And just like that, the steel is back in his voice. “That’s a hard no, Cassandra.” He’s the businessman who doesn’t take no for an answer. “You have commitments here. To me. To us.”
The line goes dead, leaving her staring at the phone. Did the call get dropped, or did he hang up? She should have managed a “miss you” or “love you,” but the moment passed too quickly, shifting from tender to tense like it often does with her unpredictable husband.
She exhales sharply and turns away from the window. That’s the thing about Marsh—he can make her feel like the most beloved woman in the world one moment and like a small, disobedient child the next. Nearly two decades together, and she still can’t predict which version of him will show up.
It’s time to begin what she’s agreed to do, help her sister clear their mother’s very cluttered house.
Downstairs: dust-caked rugs, the sagging sofa, stacks of National Geographics, cheap tote bags hanging on cup hooks by the door—all destined for the landfill. Upstairs: clothes, photos, costume jewelry, scarred furniture, closets full of who knows what.
Ana will save only a handful of photos for herself and ask the estate-sale people to clear out the rest. Cassie briefly considers shipping the mahogany guest-room chest back to Palos Verdes, but then imagines Marsh’s scowl. Her eyes fall on her mother’s ancient black rotary phone, perched on the little telephone desk in the front entry—maybe she’ll keep that as a stage prop for the gritty, darkly humorous, mid-century play she’s planning to write. Someday.
She paces the living room, dropping books and knick-knacks at random, until she stops at a shelf lined with photos. Mom and Dad, impossibly young on their wedding day in 1981. Then the twins at two: Cassie is scowling, shrinking away from the camera, while angelic Ana beams.
Even then, I wanted to be anywhere but wherever I was.
She begins assessing the rest of the room, creating a mental checklist. Donate this, recyle that, discard everything else. Discard, discard, discard.
The front door swings open with a sudden burst of sunlight and hot air. Cassie jumps slightly, tripping over a braided rug. A quick pang of guilt pokes her gut. She’d wanted her sister to find her hard at work, perhaps taking down curtains or sorting clothes—anything but drifting aimlessly or crying into the sofa cushions, which she’s already done plenty of.
Ana drops her navy cloche and purse on the sofa. Smudged mascara rims her green-brown eyes and her cheeks shine with dried tears. “Oh my god Cassie, the crowd. I didn’t know half those people, but they all knew Mom.”
Cassie shrugs. “You live and work seventy years in one town, you get a long funeral line.” That sounds sharp so she tries again. “Mom knew a lot of people. Helped a lot of people.”
“Yeah. People seem to remember their physical therapist even when they forget their doctor’s name.” Leaning against the back of the sofa, Ana toes off her kitten-heels and plucks the navy linen skirt away from her thighs. “What was I thinking? Pantyhose, in this heat. Ugh.” She kneels in front of the tower fan. The air tousles her shoulder-length hair, pale cornsilk threaded with gray. “This heat, and no AC. Who’s gonna buy this place?”
“Someone with lots of money, who falls in love with an old farmhouse in a backwater town. They’ll gut it, probably, and put in mini-splits.” Though Cassie hasn’t been home for years, the thought of someone else living here hits with a quick pang of sadness that she tries to mask. “It was good to see Jonathan and Julie today, even for a few minutes. Did Jules get away okay?”
Ana stands, turning her back toward the inadequate fan and lifting her skirt to let the air travel up her legs. “Jonathan hustled her out early, while we were still in the receiving line. He’s taking her for lunch so they can have some daddy-daughter time before she flies back to Chicago. Her flight’s at three-thirty.” She retrieves her phone from her purse, taps and scrolls quickly. “And I got a text from Scott in Edinburgh. He sends his condolences, says he’s sorry he couldn’t be here to say goodbye to Gramma. All’s well, he’s loving the city, et cetera.”
Cassie feels a tug of what-if wistfulness. She’s never wanted children and hasn’t paid much attention to her only niece and nephew—but still. “You’ve launched them well, you and Jonathan.”
Ana frowns a little, but her voice remains neutral. “They’re good kids. We had a lot of help from Mom. And Jonathan’s parents, of course.”
She doesn’t say, “And you’ve helped too, Cassie,” because it wouldn’t be true. Cassie hasn’t been any more present in her niece and nephew’s lives than she was in her mother’s, these past twenty years. Does she even know what they’re studying? Architecture and engineering. Maybe.
Ana’s saying, “It hasn’t hit me yet, losing Mom only a few days after the kids left for school. I’ve been living with her, I watched her fade away, and still somehow I didn’t expect her to ever really die. It’s the finality of it, isn’t it? I turn to say something and she’s gone. I keep expecting her to come out of the kitchen or walk in from the garden. Next week, I’ll step back into life in West Hartford. The law office, the atheneum, the country clubs. And what’s the point? It’ll be like moving into a strange new existence. Everything will be the same and also never the same. There’s this huge hole.” Ana shivers a little. Like she’s trying to shake off dust, or mortality.
Cassie’s detached herself and has no comfort to offer. She watches as her twin pushes back a lock of hair and feels a twinge of envy. No color tints, fasting, or skinny shots for Ana—she’s apparently never been at war with her comfortably padded mom-body. With a twinge of guilty satisfaction, Cassie notes the sweat stains beneath her sister’s armpits, a rare blemish in Ana’s usual composure. Anastasia, the first-born twin. The ever-capable, unshakably competent big sister.
Ana says, “Sorry it took me so long to drop off the flowers. There were so many, I had to make two trips.”
“Were they happy to get them?”
“They seemed to be. Oh, I nearly forgot.” Ana walks out to the front porch and returns with a cluster of black-eyed Susans jammed into a brown stoneware pitcher. “I felt a little embarrassed, giving these away to a nursing home. They’re so pitiful-looking. Do you know who brought them? Here.” She thrusts the pitcher at Cassie. “They can go on the kitchen table, I guess. Or I’ll dump them in the woods if you think they’re too ratty.”
Cassie surprises herself by saying, “They’re fine. I like them.” She carries the pitcher into the kitchen and sets it in the center of the wide oak table, then pokes at the stems to see if she can make them stand a little straighter. In the jungle of green leaves her fingers touch a small card, limp with moisture. She wipes it off on the seat of her shorts and reads it.
Marla, you’ve done well. Godspeed. Carl
It’s a strange thing to write on a funeral bouquet. Did their mother have a boyfriend that no one knew about? Cassie feels the ghost of a smile touch her face. She tucks the card into her back pocket and returns to the living room.
Ana’s still on the subject of funerals and flowers. “A strange custom, isn’t it? Donating all those strong-smelling lilies and gardenias to old people who’re going to have their own funerals soon. I hate the scent of gardenias, don’t you? They always smell dirty, sort of musty. I can’t see why—” She stops abruptly, her shoulders sagging. “I’m babbling. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Cassie hesitates, then moves close and stretches a little to wrap her taller twin in a stiff hug. For a moment, they stand uncomfortably. Then Ana steps away.
Cassie offers, “At least they get to enjoy Mom’s flowers, right? They won’t see their own.”
“I guess,” Ana says uncertainly. “Okay, I’ve got to get out of these things. Back in a sec.” She picks up her shoes and hat and disappears up the stairs.
When she returns, dressed in khaki shorts and an oversized pink tee knotted at the waist, Cassie’s begun piling stacks of magazines and paperbacks into two boxes labeled RECYCLING. She holds up a thin yellow booklet, no bigger than a thin paperback novel. “Ana, look. A phone book from the year we were born.” It’s titled 1985 – Winslow, East Winslow, Coulterville, Graves Parish. “The current one’s over there beneath the phone, so why’d Mom save this one?”
“She saved everything from that year, newspapers to napkins. The bigger question is, why is there a new phone book? I can’t believe someone’s still printing them.”
“Because people here still have landlines, I guess.” Cassie retrieves the current directory from beneath the phone’s permanently tangled spiral cord.
“Cassie, please. Just keep the latest one and toss the old one. We don’t have time to examine everything page by page.” Ana wraps a scrunchy around her hair and pulls it up into a high pony. Selecting an empty carton, she heads back upstairs. “I’m going to start on the shelves in my old room. Maybe you can put together more of those banker boxes?” She points her eyes and chin at a stack of flat-packed cardboard.
“Okay.” But when Ana’s disappeared, Cassie takes the two phone books to the kitchen table. She sinks into a chair and sets them side by side.
The newer one is only slightly thicker than the one from 1985. Winslow and surrounding villages certainly haven’t expanded much in four decades. The directories have nearly identical covers, featuring photos of black-and-white cows grazing in a dandelion-filled field. In the background there’s a broad oak tree and a classic New England gambrel-roofed barn, looking old and worn but still showing traces of red paint. While the cows on the two covers appear different, the tree, field, and barn look the same.
She picks up the older one. In 1985, Winslow was a town of eight thousand people. The flanking villages, Coulterville on the west and East Winslow, bordering Rhode Island on the east, were barely half the size of Winslow proper. Many people use these villages as bedroom communities, driving an hour or more each way to lucrative jobs in Hartford, Providence, or Worcester.
Graves Parish, however, hasn’t been a real town for nearly a century. In 1985 it was nothing than an artifact on the northeast edge of Winslow, a smudge on a byroads-and-bygones map; now it must be nothing more than a few stone foundations on a weedy path, eroded by storms and overtaken by the forest.
In the nineteen-eighties and earlier, your phone directory was your lifeline. It was how people found you before Google and PeopleSearch. Such a quaint concept, Cassie thinks. Everyone was so trusting back then, allowing—expecting—the phone company to publish your name, address, and phone number in a free book, delivered once a year to your home or business for all the world to read.
Not now. You might as well invite all the scammers, phishers, and doxers right into your living room and hand over your life’s savings. But many people living here still have landlines, because cell coverage is so spotty. So yes, their phone numbers still get published in the little free directory, which is also chock-full of local advertising and large-print information about fire and police and social services.
In Marla Bousquet’s house, the phone directories also served as message boards. The front and back covers are filled with random notes in a broad, loopy handwriting, their mother’s way of taking notes and starting a shopping list. Her unique cursive fills every available space, front and back, squeezed along the edges and scrawled inside the white patches of clouds and cows. Inside, notes run along the margins of many pages. They’re spontaneous life notes of a quiet, considerate woman who preferred to scribble in her phone book rather than ask someone to wait while she searched for a notepad.
Planting an elbow on the kitchen table, Cassie leans her chin on one hand as she runs a finger over words on the cover of the older directory, deciphering broccoli bread peppercorns Kleenex white vinegar cider vinegar. White vinegar for cleaning, cider vinegar for pickling, because cider vinegar has the milder flavor.
She finds 6/7 Monday – Marge, The Talisman, overdue? which meant her mom might have been in trouble with the head librarian at the Winslow Public library. Her mother wasn’t a fan of Stephen King or Peter Straub—the British cozies were more her style—so maybe it was Keith, their dad, who’d borrowed that year’s best-selling fantasy-horror novel.
Cassie puzzles over two other notes, faded with time: AJ loafers and a cryptic reminder to Call C. Androski, with a local number written large on a cow’s pale flank. She knows who AJ is, their mother’s closest girlfriend from way back in sixth grade. But she draws a blank on C. Androski. She checks the white pages, but there’s no one by that name.
Another note, written in bright purple on a fluffy white cloud, looks more recent. Baby aspirin—ask Gorham. Dr. Gorham, she knows, is the cardiologist who’d set up her mother’s heart bypass operation after she’d had her first stroke.
Cassie feels the heaviness swell again in her chest. Isn’t she done with weeping? How on earth will she survive the week if something so insignificant as an old phone book sets her off?
She rubs her face with a rough hand and tosses the 1985 directory in a recycling box. Done and dusted, just a relic from the past.
But curiosity prickles so she retrieves it and begins to thumb through the inside pages again, looking for familiar names and addresses. She finds teachers, shop owners, neighbors, Ana’s basketball coach.
Her sister’s steps sound on the staircase and there’s the muted clatter of a box being set on the floor. “Cassie,” Ana calls, “come give me a hand with these collectibles. We need to figure out if there’s anything worth adding to the estate sale, or if it’s all going to charity.”
Ana pokes her head into the kitchen doorway and frowns at the sight of Cassie, still sitting at the table.
Cassie holds up the older phone book. “Ana, did you see all of Mom’s old notes on here?”
“Yeah, she did that to every phone book we ever had.” The frown deepens. “Come on, Cass, we need to get rid of this stuff.”
“Graves Parish is still labeled as a town, see?”
Ana sighs and gives in, propping a hip against the doorway trim and crossing her arms.
“Though it’s been abandoned for years,” Cassie continues. “Do you remember that Halloween when we were eleven, when Dad took us for a walk up there, through the woods to the lost village? At night, with flashlights. There was nothing there but old cellar holes and fireplaces, and it was really spooky. Remember how mad Mom got when she found out? She said Graves Parish used to be called Grabtown. A place where bad things happened to naughty kids, especially girls. We had nightmares for a week.”
Ana tightens her shoulders in a small shiver and straightens up from the door frame. “Wow, you’re going way back. Dad said there used to be a big barn up there, where all the kids went when he was young. But it burned down, I think, before we were even born.” She glances at her watch and pushes herself away from the wall. “Come on, Cassie. Put that down. I can’t do all this by myself.”
Having read and reviewed Sarah P. Blanchard’s Drawn from Life, I was delighted to discover Grabtown. I knew it would be a special treat.
Blanchard’s Grabtown Prologue left me mildly confused until well into the story. If the author intended to hook the reader and keep them wondering, she did that brilliantly. From the mysterious Prologue, the author transports the reader to the family home of adult twins, where, while grieving the death of their mother, they navigate the painful task of sorting their mother’s belongings and preparing for an estate sale. Then Cassie discovers a manuscript: a novel written, it appears, by her mother’s best friend and edited by her mother. Only half of it is missing. And why does her husband react so strangely when she tells him about it? What does he know?
Sarah Blanchard is a masterful storyteller. She brings her characters to life. She brings scenes to life with vivid descriptions and innovative metaphors, and similes. She transports readers into the minds of her characters, compelling us to read their thoughts and feel their deepest emotions. She doesn’t just tell a story. She puts us in it, so that we live it right alongside her characters.
Grabtown uses the frame narrative format, though rather than simply inserting one narrative into another, Blanchard blends the two, moving from one to the other seamlessly and with all the skill you expect from such a talented author. As Cassie and her twin sister steadily uncover shocking truths about the woman who raised them, Blanchard keeps the reader on the edge of their chair, eager to learn the awful truth, yet afraid of the consequences of discovery. At the end, you find yourself releasing a breath you didn’t realize you’d been holding for hours, as you kept turning the pages of a gripping story that simply would not let you pause.
Grabtown tackles a sensitive subject, but Sarah Blanchard’s tactful approach exposes a sad reality with understanding and compassion. She has researched well, not just to understand the criminal mind and investigative procedures, but also to convey the psychological impact on victims. Grabtown is psychological suspense at its very best. It’s a must-read for everyone who appreciates truly great writing.