Dreams of Falling Read online

  ALSO BY KAREN WHITE

  The Color of Light

  Learning to Breathe

  Pieces of the Heart

  The Memory of Water

  The Lost Hours

  On Folly Beach

  Falling Home

  The Beach Trees

  Sea Change

  After the Rain

  The Time Between

  A Long Time Gone

  The Sound of Glass

  The Forgotten Room

  (cowritten with Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig)

  Flight Patterns

  Spinning the Moon

  The Night the Lights Went Out

  THE TRADD STREET SERIES

  The House on Tradd Street

  The Girl on Legare Street

  The Strangers on Montagu Street

  Return to Tradd Street

  The Guests on South Battery

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2018 by Harley House Books, LLC

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  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: White, Karen (Karen S.), author.

  Title: Dreams of falling / Karen White.

  Description: First Edition. | New York: Berkley, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017057855 | ISBN 9780451488411 (hardback) | ISBN 9780451488428 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION/Contemporary Women. | FICTION/Family Life. | FICTION/Mystery & Detective/Women Sleuths. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.H5776 D74 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057855

  First Edition: June 2018

  Jacket photos: hand and ribbon © twomeows/Getty Images; woman © Elisabeth Ansley/Trevillion Images

  Jacket design by Rita Frangie

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

  Version_1

  To Claire

  acknowledgments

  Thanks to my amazing team at Penguin Random House in editorial, marketing, publicity, sales, and art. I just write the books, and you all make the magic happen by ensuring they wind up in the hands of my readers. A thousand thanks for your support and friendship over the past eleven years.

  No acknowledgments would be complete without a shout-out to my first readers, partners in crime, and BFFs, Susan Crandall and Wendy Wax. Thanks for being kind enough to tell me what I’m doing right—and what I’m not!

  And, of course, thanks to my readers who faithfully buy each book. Your enthusiasm and kind words really do make all the agony of each deadline worthwhile. You truly are the best part of this writing gig—right up there with my two favorite words: The End.

  Thanks to the lovely town and residents of Georgetown, South Carolina, for your Southern hospitality and kindness during my visits. You made the research part of this book nothing but fun. Thanks also to former resident Marilyn Barnhill, who was a treasure trove of information about Georgetown in the fifties. I wish I could have seen it then!

  Last, thanks to the unsung heroes who fight for the preservation of old buildings, who understand that our collective history is inexorably tied to these witnesses of time and that once they are gone, they are gone forever.

  contents

  Also by Karen White

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  chapter twenty-four

  chapter twenty-five

  chapter twenty-six

  chapter twenty-seven

  chapter twenty-eight

  chapter twenty-nine

  chapter thirty

  chapter thirty-one

  chapter thirty-two

  chapter thirty-three

  chapter thirty-four

  chapter thirty-five

  chapter thirty-six

  chapter thirty-seven

  chapter thirty-eight

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  Caol Ait: Thin Places. Gaelic for where this world and the next are said to be too close. According to legend, heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in thin places, that distance is even less. Carrowmore, in County Sligo, Ireland, is one of many such thin places found throughout the world, a place where time stands still and the secular world brushes against the sacred.

  one

  Ivy

  2010

  GEORGETOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

  I think I am dead. Yet I smell the blooming evening primrose and hear the throaty chirps and creaky rattles of the purple martins flitting home across the marsh. I see their sleek iridescent bodies gliding against the bloodred sunset sky, through the blackened Corinthian columns and crumbling chimneys of Carrowmore. The house is named after a legendary thin place, far away in Ireland. I can hear Ceecee’s voice again in my head, telling me what the name means, and why I should stay away. But as with most things Ceecee has ever told me, I didn’t listen.

  Carrowmore and I are both in ruins now, with wrinkles in our plaster and faults in our foundations. It’s oddly fitting that I should die in this house. I almost died here once before, when I was a little girl. I wonder if the house has been waiting for its second chance.

  The thrum of Ellis’s 1966 Mustang rumbles in the distance. If I could move, I’d run out the front door and down the walk before he can honk the horn and irritate Daddy. There are no things Daddy dislikes more than Ellis’s long hair and that car.

  But I can’t move. All I remember is stepping on a soft spot in the old wooden floor, then hearing the splintering of ancient rotten wood. Now I’m lying here, broken in so many pieces.

  My brain reminds me that Ellis has been gone forty years. His precious car sold before he shipped out to Fort Gordon in 1
969. Still, the acrid scent of exhaust wafts over me, and I wonder with an odd hopefulness whether it’s Ellis, coming for me after all this time.

  There’s something soft and silky crumpled in my fist. My fingers must have held tight when I first felt the ancient floor give way beneath my feet.

  A hair ribbon. I’d pulled it from Larkin’s dresser drawer. My sweet baby girl. The daughter who’d always desperately wanted to be just like me. Almost as desperately as I wanted her to be different. I wanted her to be happy. Not that Larkin is a girl anymore. She’s too old for ribbons, but I kept everything in her room just the same as she left it, hoping one day she’d come home for good. Decide it was time to forgive all of us. To forgive herself.

  I remember now using a black marker to write down the length of the ribbon, the letters bold and big, shouting my anger with silent strokes. But that’s the only clear memory I have. I can’t feel that anger anymore. Nor remember the reason for it. I must have driven here, but I don’t remember. Just my writing on that ribbon, and then here, falling. My brain is playing tricks on me, recalling things from long ago with the clarity of hindsight, yet leaving what happened only thirty minutes ago in a dark closet behind a locked door.

  Bright pops of air explode inside my skull. Streaks of light like shooting stars flit past my line of vision. I think they’re the purple martins of my past, constant as the moon and stars in my memories. And then the pain comes, white-hot and precise, settling at the base of my head, then traveling upward, a large hand slowly constricting my brain.

  Then darkness covers me like a mask and everything fades away. Except for the engine fumes of an old car, and the raucous chirp of a thousand martins coming home to roost.

  two

  Larkin

  2010

  The introductory notes to an old song distracted me for a moment, causing me to glance up from my computer and look around with an oddly satisfying appreciation. I loved my desk. Not because it was beautiful or rare—it was neither—but because of its simple functionality.

  It was no different from the metal desks of the other copywriters at Wax & Crandall, the ad agency where I’d worked for the past five years, except mine was devoid of all personal effects. No frames, no kitschy knickknacks or rubber-band balls. Nothing tacked up on the walls of my cubicle, either, or mementos of my four years spent at Fordham earning my undergraduate degree. My one concession to my past was a gold chain with three charms on it that I never removed but kept tucked inside my neckline.

  I loved that nobody asked me why I seemed to have no past. This was New York, after all, where people seemed to care only about where you were going, not where you’d been. They just assumed that I had no husband or significant other, no children or siblings. Which was correct. The people I worked with knew I was from somewhere down south only because every once in a while a long consonant or dropped syllable found its way into my sentences. I never mentioned that I was born and raised in Georgetown, South Carolina, or that if I closed my eyes long enough, I could still smell the salt marshes and the rivers that surrounded my hometown. My coworkers probably believed that I hated my home and that was why I left. And in that assumption they’d be wrong.

  There are reasons other than hating a place that make a person leave.

  “Knock, knock.”

  I turned to see Josephine—not “Jo” or “Josie,” but “Josephine”—standing at the entrance to my cubicle. The lack of a door meant people had to improvise when they wanted to enter. She was one of our account executives, a nice enough person if she liked you but someone to avoid if she didn’t.

  “Are you busy?” she asked.

  My fingers were at that moment poised above my keyboard, which made her question unnecessary, but Josephine wasn’t the type to notice such things. She was one of those women who commanded attention because of the way she looked—petite, with sun-streaked brown hair, and perpetually tanned—so it had become customary for her to get what she wanted with just a smile.

  I was streaming Pandora on my computer, and the song playing would distract me until I could name it. It was an old habit I’d never been able to break. “‘Dream On.’” Aerosmith. I smiled to myself.

  “Excuse me?” Josephine said, and I realized I’d spoken aloud.

  I thought back to her question. “Actually . . . ,” I said, but as I began, the vague feeling of disquiet that had been hovering over me since I’d awakened exploded into foreboding.

  Ceecee would have said it was just somebody walking over my grave, but I knew it was the dream I’d remembered from the night before. A dream of falling, my arms and legs flailing, waiting to hit an invisible bottom.

  Ignoring my body language, Josephine stepped closer. “Because I wanted to ask you about a dream I had last night. I was running, but it felt as if my feet were stuck in glue.”

  I let my wrists rest on the edge of my desk but didn’t swivel my chair, hoping she’d take the hint. “You can Google it, you know. You can find out a lot about dreams on the Internet. It’s handy that way.” I kept my hands poised near the keyboard.

  “Yes, I know, but I just thought it would be quicker if I asked you. Since you’re the expert.” She beamed a smile at me.

  With a sigh, I turned around to face her. I wasn’t an expert—only well-read on the subject after years spent trying to analyze my mother’s dreams in an attempt to understand her better. As my delusional childhood self, I’d thought knowing what was in my mother’s head would help me unlock the reasons for the sadness and restlessness behind her eyes. I’d hoped she would be so grateful, she’d include me in her various quests for peace and beauty. I’d failed, but in the process, I’d discovered an avid interest in these windows into our subconscious. It gave me something to talk about at the rare parties I attended, a parlor trick I could pull out when conversation faltered.

  “There are probably a million interpretations, but I think it might mean that some ambition in your life, like your career or love life, isn’t progressing as you’d like it to be, and you feel as if something is holding you back.”

  Josephine blinked at me for several seconds, and I wasn’t sure whether she either didn’t understand or was in complete denial that anything could ever hold her back. “Thanks,” Josephine said, smiling brightly again, any self-doubt quickly erased. “You going with the group from sales to the Hamptons for the weekend?”

  I shook my head, eager to get back to work. I was at the gym every afternoon at five thirty, meaning I had to leave at five. Though it kept me in shape, the habit didn’t allow for much after-hours socializing. Not that I didn’t like my coworkers—I did. They were a fun, creative, and young group, including a smattering of millennials who didn’t act too much like millennials. I just found that I preferred socializing with them in an office setting, making it easier to escape back to my desk if any question went beyond which apartment I lived in and whether I preferred the subway or cabbing it.

  “No,” I said. “I think I’ll stay in the city.” It never ceased to amaze me that people who complained about the crowded city always seemed to gravitate toward the same beaches at the same time with the same people from whom they were trying to escape. “The water will be ice-cold, anyway. It’s still only April.”

  Josephine scrunched up her nose, and I noticed how nothing else wrinkled. She said she used Botox only as a preventative measure, but from what I could tell, she was well on her way to looking like one of the gargoyle women I saw shopping in the high-end stores on Fifth Avenue. As Ceecee would say, it just wasn’t natural.

  “Not any colder than usual,” Josephine insisted. “Come on. It’ll be fun. We’ve got a huge house in Montauk. There’re two queen beds in my room, if you don’t mind sharing with me. You could analyze everyone’s dreams.”

  I was tempted. I’d never been part of a group or hung out with girls who rented houses together and took trips on the weeke
nds. For a brief time in elementary school, I’d had a cluster of friends my age, but by the time we reached middle school, they’d formed their own smaller groups, none of which included me. I’d always had Mabry and her twin brother, Bennett, though. Our mothers were best friends, and we’d been bathed in the same bathtub when we were babies. That right there made us best friends, regardless of whether we ever acknowledged it. At least until our senior year in high school, when we’d stopped being friends at all.

  The memory made it easier for me to shake my head. “Thanks for the invite, but I’ll stay home. I might rearrange my furniture. I’ve been thinking about it.”

  Josephine gave me an odd look. “Sure. Oh, well, maybe it’s for the best. I don’t want to be the one standing next to you wearing a bikini—that’s for sure.”

  “For the record, I don’t own a bikini.” I was more a T-shirt-and-boy-shorts type girl. “But thanks for asking. Maybe next time, okay?”

  My cell phone buzzed where it lay faceup on my desk. I didn’t have a picture or a name stored in the directory, but I didn’t need to. It was the first cell phone number I’d ever memorized. When I didn’t move to pick it up, Josephine pointed to it with her chin. “Aren’t you going to get that?”

  It was oddly telling that she didn’t excuse herself to give me privacy. I reached over and silenced it. “No. I’ll call him back later.”

  “Him?” she asked suggestively.

  “My father.” I never took his calls, no matter how many times he tried. When I’d first come to New York, the calls were more frequent, but over the past year or so, they’d tapered down to about one per week—sprinkled across different days and times, as if he was trying to catch me off guard. He wasn’t giving up. And neither was I. I’d inherited the Lanier bullheadedness from him, after all.

  “So, you have a father.” Josephine looked at me expectantly.

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  The phone started buzzing again. I was about to toss it in my drawer when I noticed it was a different number, another number that I knew and received calls from frequently, but never when I was at work. It was Ceecee, the woman who’d raised my mother, who was pretty much my grandmother in standing. She was too in awe of my working in New York City to ever want to interrupt me during office hours. Unless there was a good reason.