Light from a Distant Star Read online

  ALSO BY MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

  The Last Secret

  The Lost Mother

  A Hole in the Universe

  Fiona Range

  Songs in Ordinary Time

  A Dangerous Woman

  Vanished

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Mary McGarry Morris

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Selected material has been reprinted from Get Tough! by Major W. E. Fairbairn, with permission from Paladin Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morris, Mary McGarry.

  Light from a distant star : a novel / Mary McGarry Morris.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Child witnesses—Fiction. 2. Murder—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.O874454L54 2011

  813′.54—dc22 2010039186

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45187-3

  Title page photograph by Bernard Jaubert/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Monica Gurevich/Julie Metz Design

  Jacket photograph by Lia G/Arcangel Images

  v3.1

  Dedicated to

  Zachary M. Starkweather

  Harrison D. Starkweather

  Frank E. Starkweather

  Michael D. Starkweather

  Joseph M. Danisch

  Margaret L. Danisch

  John T. Danisch

  William J. Pannos

  Kristen P. Copell

  Alexander W. Pannos

  Timothy V. Morris

  Katherine A. Morris

  Mary Joan Lonergan

  Jane M. Lonergan

  with love.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  And you still think so? Even after all this time?

  Absolutely.

  How can you be so sure?

  YOU KNOW HOW YOU JUST KNOW ABOUT A PERSON SOMETIMES? He doesn’t even have to look you in the eye or say a word, and you know. Now, exactly what it is you know might not be clear, but you still know. You just do.

  That’s the way it always was. Even as a kid. It wasn’t any kind of higher power or sixth sense, just her own God-given bullshit detector. What surprised Nellie most was how few people had one. Or if they did, how few bothered to use it—or trust it.

  Like the first time she met Max Devaney in her grandfather’s junkyard, though it wasn’t until all the trouble that she even knew his last name. She and her brother, Henry, were bringing Charlie his supper that day. Charlie Campbell was their grandfather, but they always called him Charlie, along with everyone else in town. In fact, his was a household name in Springvale then. Once something broke down or was of little use anymore, you’d say, “It’s Charlie’s now.”

  Charlie’s house had always reminded Nellie of a choked weed, struggling its way up through the junkyard’s rusted mountains of scrap metal. Close by was the tar paper–sided barn where his flinty transactions took place, the few there were anymore. The junkyard was right in the middle of town and so it was considered a blight, especially by newer stores in the area. But with Charlie’s own rumors of a big national chain looking at his three prime acres, no one dared push the old man too hard. Walmart, he’d tell people, angling for a groundswell of interest—from someone, anyone, Nellie’s mother said. Yes, sir, it was the only company he’d deal with, he liked to brag, basking in his own self-empowerment. Of the fancied negotiations, one newspaper article quoted him as saying, “A few more details, and they can do whatever the (…) they want, put up a (…) ferris wheel for all the (…) I care.” The selectmen immediately appointed an advisory committee to study the impact of Walmarts that may have opened in other downtown business districts. Most of the junkyard was hidden by a sagging wooden fence, its rotted posts braced by random boards. An eyesore, but it did keep out intruders, real and imagined. Charlie thought everyone wanted to steal his stuff.

  Nellie and her brother found Charlie in the barn that day, in the dim horse stall he called his office. Because of his personality and full thatch of wavy white hair, he had always seemed big to her—and scary. But her gangly six-inch spurt in the last few months had left her nearly as tall. Height, and stronger lenses in her glasses to keep her eye from turning, had given her new perspective on just about everything. Especially Charlie. What seemed a permanent sunburn was, she realized, a web of tiny broken veins in his nose and cheeks, and shining in the corner of his mouth was a thin trickle of spit. For the briefest fraction of a millisecond she felt bad for him.

  “Here you go, Charlie.” She held out the warm, foil-wrapped plate.

  “Pot roast,” Henry said, surprising her. They’d been working on that. Speaking right up and not waiting to be spoken to. As long as she was going to be saddled with him for the entire summer she didn’t want to be constantly speaking for him or repeating the little he did mumble. In some ways it was like being a translator, though Henry was very intelligent, one of those little boys adults take to right away, all cowlicks and dimpled cheeks. It’s just that then he was the shyest kid, always staring down at the ground when people were around, or when he had to make eye contact, blinking so rapidly they’d look away. She’d made up her mind. This was the summer to toughen Henry up. He had the brains, all he needed was confidence, and she’d recently found the perfect book in her father’s study. Actually called Get Tough!, it had been written in World War II by Major W. E. Fairbairn to teach hand-to-hand combat to British Commandos and the U.S. Armed Forces. Every day she and her brother practiced new holds and “the various ways of securing a prisoner.” So far, he had only thrown her once. He’d been getting tired of always being pinned, headlocked, and hip thrown, so to keep him interested, she’d let him take her down in a stranglehold that left marks on her neck for days and got them both in trouble. Now they practiced when no one else was home.

  Distracted, Charlie kept peering out into the yard. He gestured for her to put the plate somewhere. She set it on top of one of the junked radiators lining the stall. A shadow darkened the bright doorway.

  “Well, what d’ya know,” Charlie said. “I figured that was it.”

  The entering man was broad backed and unshaven. There were deep pocks on his forehead and nose. His dark hair was wild and bushy. A black dog trotted alongside. The man didn’t look at Nellie and her brother, but the dog did. His stare was yellow. His thick tail wagge
d, but hesitantly.

  “Took longer’n I thought,” the man said. “But it’s done.”

  “Hour’n a half?”

  The man shrugged. “Pay what you think, I don’t care.”

  Bad move, she knew, seeing Charlie’s grin. This sucker didn’t know what he was up against. Last time here, out by the barn door, she’d found a half-buried quarter that Charlie made her hand over. He insisted it was his—he remembered dropping it in that exact spot. Probably why he had them call him Charlie; that way, he could treat them like everyone else.

  Henry raised his shaky hand for the dog to sniff. They’d been working on that, too, biding your time, letting the animal know you weren’t a threat. The dog gave an eager yip and Henry lurched back.

  “Boone,” the man’s deep voice warned. “Down.”

  Down the dog dropped.

  “Scared of his own shadow but pretty damn smart, I’ll give him that,” Charlie said. She thought he meant the dog until he introduced them as his daughter’s kids, no names given.

  The man nodded without meeting their gaze.

  “How do you do, sir? My name’s Nellie. Nellie Peck.” She reached to shake hands.

  He stiffened back. “Pleased to meet you,” he said with a curt nod as if in pained acknowledgment of her far better manners.

  “And this is Henry. My brother. And he’s actually very brave.” She shot a look at her grandfather, who just chuckled in that way he had, under his breath to show he was right and could say more but chose not to.

  “That’s good.” Turning his attention to Charlie, the man said he’d piled the copper piping behind the barn, but the door wouldn’t open. The padlock was rusted.

  Charlie reached under the desk and gave him a spray can, WD-40, his answer to all life’s problems, according to her mother. “Give it a soak and try later. And here.” He handed over the dinner they’d brought. “Pot roast. Hot off the range.”

  His nose to the rim of the foil, the man actually sniffed the plate. She and Henry exchanged looks. Only animals sniffed their food, they’d been taught.

  “Go ahead. Go on up before it gets cold,” Charlie said.

  SHE COULDN’T WAIT to tell her mother that Charlie had given her delicious dinner away to some guy in the barn. And that he’d scurried up into the loft with it.

  “Oh yeah. Max,” her mother said. “So he’s still there, huh? Well, that’s good.”

  “Sandy, who’s Max?” her father called over the running water as he washed the last pan. Sharing chores had begun when her mother started working. She cooked and he kept the kitchen clean. He also did laundry and scrubbed the toilets, sinks, tubs, and floors in both bathrooms—small price to pay, she’d say with that edge in her voice. And her father was never a man to argue. With anyone.

  “Some guy Charlie hired.” She was still at the table with her coffee and the newspaper. “Creepy, if you ask me, but Charlie says he’s a hard worker. He’s up in the hay loft, that little room.”

  “That’s good.” Her father was rinsing the sink with the sprayer, which they weren’t supposed to use. But leaky hoses mattered little. His were larger concerns: peace, kindness, truth, and in their brief time on this planet, the importance of leaving a mark, their imprint, making some difference to benefit those yet to come. “It’s about time Charlie let up a little.”

  Her mother glanced over the paper. Didn’t say anything. Just sighed. Henry was eating his pudding and didn’t catch it, but Nellie did. In her mother’s opinion her husband had let up long ago, if he’d ever really cared much in the first place. About business, that is, and making money.

  Benjamin Peck was a fine man. Polite. Thoughtful. Well raised and probably the handsomest man in Springvale. For almost a hundred years Peck Hardware on Main Street had provided most of the community’s workaday needs: nuts, bolts, gadgets, hinges, keys, and every manner of tool, paint supplies, ladders, even wallpaper, though most of the rolls Benjamin had stamped SECONDS, they were so old, and long after they were fashionable, glossy decals to decorate your walls, furniture, and cabinets. Peck’s sold bird feeders and pails, lightbulbs and shovels, lawnmowers and rakes. Window shades were his specialty. MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE said the black-and-white tin sign over the shade-cutting machine, both sign and machine older than Benjamin, who took great pride in his shade-cutting skill, though not much else when it came to the cluttered store. For an impractical man caught in the most practical of lives, the past was sustenance enough.

  Benjamin’s true calling was the history he was writing of Middleton County, most especially, the town of Springvale. His small office at the back of the store was filled with old books, some stacked higher than Nellie was tall, which at that point in her thirteen years was way taller than she wanted, though she took care to always stand straight, shoulders back, head high like her father. For Nellie it was important to never show blood or weakness. For her father it was an inborn, natural stature, as erect of torso and limb as he was of character.

  It was generally agreed that no matter how bad things got, Benjamin Peck was a decent man. A dreamer, certainly, and careless maybe when it came to the business, by that point in time on its last wobbly legs. In just a five-mile drive, three ways out of town in a triangle of Peck financial doom, there was a Sears; a Target; then two years ago, the orange-and-brown death knell, a Home Depot, where you could buy everything from a hot dog and orchid plant to a utility shed complete with shutters and window boxes, as well as crystal chandeliers and French doors, even a refrigerator if you wanted. Just cart it away.

  Four generations of Pecks had served the hardware store, which was her father’s problem. It had never really seemed like his business as much as the place he was still minding, all these years later, for his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. From time to time people did come in and buy things, “pity purchases,” her father’s sister called them. Aunt Betsy had never wanted anything to do with the store. Even the shade business had fallen off. Maybe nobody could cut them like Benjamin, but when everyone else had gone to vinyl, all he stocked were more expensive paper shades in ivory and dark green, and of the latter only two had sold in the last five years.

  But the solitude was fruitful. Without distractions he could continue his research and write for hours. An old cowbell would clang on the opening front door, and there was an etched silver school bell on the counter for customers to tap if he’d missed the first bell. Most people just went looking for him. Some helped themselves and left money on the counter. Some probably helped themselves and just left.

  The history was almost finished. Only a few more chapters to go, he assured her mother. He’d finally made it to the war years, he declared one night at dinner, soon after she’d started working at the hair salon.

  “Which war?” she asked.

  “World War One.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It’s fascinating,” he said, waving his fork, striking key notes with a conductor’s blinkered intensity. “I mean, even then, that something so very distant could have such an impact on this little part of the universe. Amazing, when you think of it, when you consider it in that light. How connected, how vital a part we are of one another, from then till now, down through the ages. And how brief it all is. I mean, here we all sit, thinking we’re so important that every mistake, every disappointment is a disaster. Cataclysmic. When all we are, all we really are, is a mote, an infinitesimal speck, a pinprick in time.”

  Even Nellie could see the parallax effect: her mother thinking, perhaps for the first time realizing as she did indeed consider it in that very light, just how small, how isolatingly local and therefore remote, was the pinpoint myopia of her husband’s life’s work. But he was a brilliant man—everyone knew that—she surely must have reminded herself as she so often did her children, and far more educated than she was, which by Benjamin’s own mother’s admission had been the family’s first mistake, sending him off to a fancy college, and then the second, when he g
raduated, insisting he come back home and take over the business when his father died, which had only made him a prime target for Sandy Campbell and her illegitimate baby.

  Chapter 2

  THEY LIVED ON OAK STREET. THE OLD PECK HOUSE WAS BIG and kind of ramshackle compared to their neighbors’, but the inside was comfortable, even pretty thanks to her mother, who did all the painting and papering herself, and a lot of the repairs. She had sewn most of the curtains, duvet covers, and tablecloths. By Memorial Day weekend her flowers would be planted, the shrubs fertilized, and the shade-patchy lawn limed. There were nine rooms not counting the part of the attic that had been done over for Nellie’s sister’s sixteenth birthday.

  Ruth always got special treatment. Because she’s the oldest, they’d say, but Nellie knew it was more than that. You see, Ruth was a “love child,” born when her mother was a senior in high school. Her birth father’s last name was Brigham, but she had always gone by Peck, until that particular summer.

  For reasons Nellie could not fathom, Ruth had become obsessed with, in her words, “finding my real father,” a lousy thing to say considering Benjamin had raised her almost from infancy. Danny Brigham lived in Australia, and up to that point in time, had never laid eyes on Ruth. His offspring. Little more than his seed, the way Nellie figured it.

  His family had moved from Springvale halfway through his junior year and Sandy’s pregnancy. She had been older and a year ahead in school, a fact that Nellie found the most disturbing of all. Unnatural. Danny Brigham hadn’t wanted to leave, Sandy had always been careful to tell Ruth. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, only that being so young he had no choice, his plight another of the bittersweet fairy tales that governed Ruth’s life. In the only picture she had of him, he was seventeen years old in a Hawaiian shirt, with a big honking nose, long wavy hair, and a goofy smile. Nothing like distinguished Benjamin with his dark eyes and jet-black hair just starting to gray at the temples.

  In the back of the house there was a three-room apartment that people always seemed to be moving into then out of when the young wife got pregnant or the grouchy old lady’s tumble in the tub landed her in assisted living. So far, their best tenant had been Lazlo Larouche. Lazlo was an artist, though he supported himself by waiting on tables at the Mountain House, the most expensive restaurant for miles around. Lazlo’s paintings were of prancing moonlit horses and mist-covered lakes and vague spectral images fleeing in billowy capes. He and Benjamin took to one another quickly and on Lazlo’s rare evenings off would sit on the front porch sipping wine and talking. Each man was a good listener, particularly Lazlo, who avoided personal questions and was ever eager to steer the conversation back to Benjamin and his work, the history of Springvale. It was with Sandy, though, that Lazlo was more himself; they shared confidences and easy, sometimes helpless laughter together.