Jane loses everything when her teenage daughter is killed in a senseless accident. Jane is devastated, but sometime later, she makes one tiny stab at a new life: she moves from San Francisco to the tiny seaside town of Half Moon Bay. She is inconsolable, and yet, as the months go by, she is able to cobble together some version of a job, of friends, of the possibility of peace.
And then, children begin to disappear. And soon, Jane sees her own pain reflected in all the parents in the town. She wonders if she will be able to live through the aching loss, the fear all around her. But as the disappearances continue, she begins to see that what her neighbors are wondering is if it is Jane herself who has unleashed the horror of loss.
Half Moon Bay is a chilling story about a mother haunted by her past. As Stewart O’Nan said about Turn of Mind—this novel “blindfolds the reader and spins her around.”
My review of this story will follow soon....
EXTRACT
A police car,
she can see as it comes into focus. Its lights flashing. White with black
geometric markings. And another. And another. A dark figure approaches, grows
darker and more substantial as it gets closer.
May I help you,
ma’am? When did she turn from a miss into a ma’am? The shift has
been imperceptible. Yet it has happened. Maiden, mother, crone. She is no
longer either of the first two, so that leaves the final stage. At thirty-nine,
her red hair glints gray in direct light.
What’s going on?
Jane asks. Even her voice is muffled by the fog.
The figure comes
closer. It is wearing a hat, a uniform with a badge on it. It is male, as she should
have known from the voice. But somehow that surprises her. What did she expect?
Something not quite of this earth. A hobgoblin. Bugbear. But this man seems
solid, human. A policeman. The bearer of bad news.
It’s a search
party. You live near here?
A silly
question. No one lives near Mavericks. To reach it, you have to wind your way
through the acres of rusting warehouses and grounded boats Jane has just
navigated.
Over there. Jane motions
with her head in the general direction of her cottage.
You know the
McCreadys, then?
Just the name, Jane says. She
tries to conjure up faces, fails.
They live up on
the hill. He points into the darkness.
Oh. That explains
it. Hill people. They’re different. In another life, Jane would have been one
of them. They live in the new houses clinging precipitously to the steep hill
above Princeton-by-the-Sea. The ornate ones painted to look like Victorians
from the last century.
With balconies
no one stepped onto, lounge chairs no one sat in. Hill people were the
prosperous professionals: the doctors and lawyers and engineers who commuted
every day over the hill to Silicon Valley. Another world from here, the San
Mateo coast. Although it’s a small community, Jane isn’t on speaking terms with
any of the people who live up the hill. Most of them belong to a different
species altogether, with their business suits and BMWs that roar off at 7:00
a.m. to make it over Route 92 to Sunnyvale or Milpitas by the start of the
workday. Programmers and project managers. Financial analysts, accountants. Men
and women who spend more time on the road than at home. People capable of
organizing their thoughts into logical code, Gantt charts of responsibility,
and numbers that add up. Ambiguity banished from their lives during the day.
Then back here, to the rolling sea and amorphous fog. A strange existence. It
takes a certain kind of person to juggle the contrasts. Jane knows she sounds
scornful, but really she is envious. They have found balance.
What about the
McCreadys?
Their little girl, Heidi. She’s wandered away.
Jane considers. Why
are you looking here? she asks. It seems an implausible place and time.
This was her
favorite spot. She’d been here with her parents this afternoon. The little girl
lost her magic pebble. They thought she might have come back to look for it.
Jane considers.
Magic pebbles. It hurts to remember. Magic string, magic pencils, even magic
bugs. Jane had fixed up a cardboard box to contain the spiders and the
roly-polies Angela captured from under the porch, but they all skittered away
through the cracks. Jane’s heart breaking to see Angela’s tears of irrevocable
loss. A child’s grief, never to be trivialized.
How old was she?
Jane asks.
Five.
Angela didn’t
speak until she was five. Jane and Rick had taught her sign language and
communicated with their hands. Eat. More? All gone. Then, suddenly, out
came everything in full sentences. Angela had kept it all inside until she
burst. She learned that from Jane.
A long way to
walk for a five-year-old, Jane says.
A missing girl.
Police. This will end badly. Such things always end badly.
