Flight Patterns Read online

  New American Library Titles

  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 Tradd Street Series

  The House on Tradd Street

  The Girl on Legare Street

  The Strangers on Montagu Street

  Return to Tradd Street

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Published by New American Library,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of New American Library.

  Copyright © Harley House Books, LLC, 2016

  Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Random House LLC, 2016

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  New American Library and the New American Library colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information about Penguin Random House, visit penguin.com.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Names: White, Karen (Karen S.), author. Title: Flight patterns/Karen White. Description: New York City: New American Library, [2016] Identifiers: LCCN 2015047815 (print) | LCCN 2016001086 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451470911 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698165861 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Families—Fiction. | Homecoming—Fiction. | Self-realization in women—Fiction. | Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION/Family Life. | FICTION/Contemporary Women. Classification: LCC PS3623.H5776 F58 2016 (print) | LCC PS3623.H5776 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047815

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  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 my mother, Catherine Ann Sconiers,

  who instilled in me a love of fine china.

  acknowledgments

  One of the best things about writing a novel, besides sharing my stories with readers, is the lovely people I meet along the way who are so incredibly generous with their time and knowledge. I learned so much while writing Flight Patterns, and I’d like to thank those who helped me with everything I didn’t know, and who made the learning a real joy for me.

  Thank you to the lovely people of Apalachicola for your warm kindness and generosity in sharing your love for your beautiful hometown—especially Caty Greene at the Apalachicola Municipal Library and Susan Clementson, both of whom allowed me to borrow their names for the book. Thanks, too, to Kathie Bennett of the Magic Time Literary Agency, who introduced me to both of these fabulous women.

  Thanks also to beekeeper James Rish for teaching me everything I needed to know about harvesting tupelo honey in the Florida swamps, and to Florence Love for your patience with all my endless questions and for allowing me to invade your backyard for several hours while you showed me your bees and how it all works. I appreciate your lending me your name and your dangling bee earrings for the beekeeper character in the book.

  Since I don’t speak French, I owe a great deal of gratitude to the French-speaking friends who agreed to translate for me—Luke McCracken, Alicia Kelly, and Nicky and Mathieu Limousi. Any mistakes are completely my own.

  And, of course, a huge thanks to my amazing team at NAL/Berkley and Writer’s House for the incredible support you give to me and my books.

  Last, but by no means least, thanks to my sister-in-law and “research buddy,” Claire White Kobylt, who tagged along with me on my first visit to Apalachicola and happily jotted down notes as we drove through the tree-shaded streets studying the architecture and learning the history of this incredible town. And to my first readers, talented writers, and BFFs, Wendy Wax and Susan Crandall, for reining me in and keeping me far from the ledge.

  contents

  New American Library titles by Karen White

  title page

  copyright

  dedication

  acknowledgments

  prologue

  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

  chapter 29

  chapter 30

  chapter 31

  chapter 32

  chapter 33

  chapter 34

  chapter 35

  chapter 36

  chapter 37

  chapter 38

  chapter 39

  chapter 40

  chapter 41

  epilogue

  readers guide

  about the author

  prologue

  “The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.”

  Henry David Thoreau

  —NED BLOODWORTH’S BEEKEEPER’S JOURNAL

  SEPTEMBER 1943

  PROVENCE, FRANCE

  Dead bees fell from the bruised dusk sky, their papery bodies somersaulting in the air, ricocheting like spent shells off the azure-painted roof of the hive. Giles straightened, breathing in the heavy scents of lavender and honey, of summer grasses and his own sweat. And something else, too. Something chemical and out of place in his fields of purple and gold. Something that made sense out of the bees lying like carrion for the swarming swallows above.

  “Ah! Vous dirais-je, maman,” sang his three-year-old daughter with her clear, perfect voice from her perch on an upturned bucket, unaware of the sky or the bees or the tremor of fear that shook the breath from his lungs.

  “Colette, calme-toi,” he said, putting his finger to his lips.

  The little girl stopped singing and stared up at her father with a question in her dark eyes. He had never asked her to stop before.

  Keeping his finger to his lips, Giles closed his eyes, listening. A low hum escaped from inside the hive, quieter now, a volume dial turned low on a radio. A sign to any beekeeper that something was wrong. The queen had died, perhaps. Or any of the dreaded parasites—mites or beetles, even—had invaded the hive, taking over an entire popul
ation and killing them.

  Or the entire colony had become aware, even before Giles, that the one thing he’d hoped and prayed would never happen was now waiting with open arms on his doorstep. And the bees had chosen a sudden death instead of a long, lingering passing.

  He strained to listen, wanting to hear beyond the sound of the bees and the circling birds and his own breathing. There. There it was. The gurgle and thrum of multiple engines. Not cars. Trucks. Large trucks to transport as many people as possible, a slow convoy climbing its way through the small farms and vibrant fields of Provence.

  It was inevitable, he supposed. As soon as the Germans had invaded the free zone in southern France the previous November, there was nobody to protect them. Not even a puppet government. His chest expanded and contracted as a cloud of dust and cut hay churned up by the trucks’ tires drifted over the winding dirt road in the far distance like poison descending on the valley.

  He thought of the family now huddled in his barn, in the small room he’d created beneath the hidden trapdoor covered with bales of hay. A mother and father and three small children, the woman’s belly swollen with a fourth. He hadn’t even asked their names. These families came and went so frequently that he’d stopped asking. It was easier that way, later. When he’d learn that some hadn’t made it over the mountains to safety it was better that he hadn’t known their names.

  Giles cursed under his breath. Three days before, when the cobbler had sent his new assistant, he’d known. He’d seen the way the young man’s eyes had darted about the barn, taking in the tidy table and bench pushed against the wall. The way the cobwebs had been swept out of the corners of the rafters. The neatly stacked tools, carefully placed. All signs of a woman’s touch, yet Giles’s wife had been dead for three years. Yes, Giles had known even then. And the bees had known, too.

  Half an hour. That’s all he had before the trucks reached his farm, saw the brightly painted beehives and the stone house where his family had lived for almost two hundred years in the shadow of the château. Before they reached the barn and started moving the hay. His nostrils flared as the exhaust fumes overtook the sweet scents of his beloved fields, and he turned abruptly to Colette.

  “C’est le temps.” He picked her up, her warm breath on his neck, and began to run.

  She started to cry before they’d even reached the barn, her sobs already hiccups by the time the family had crawled from their hiding place and begun their escape across the lavender fields, their shadows chasing them through the rows of purple.

  In the kitchen at the back of the farmhouse he removed the small leather suitcase that had been Colette’s mother’s, packed the same day he’d decided he could no longer be a bystander. Carefully he took the teapot from the hutch, where it had been nestled between its matching cups and plates, the feel of the china fragile beneath his rough hands, as he remembered his dead wife and how she’d loved beautiful things, how she’d loved to set the table and eat from the delicate plates. The china set had been a wedding gift from the château to his grandparents, a thank-you for his family’s years of service.

  He wrapped it in a small towel and tucked it carefully amid Colette’s clothing inside the case, then lifted the little girl into his arms again, pressing his forehead to hers. “It will be all right, ma petite chérie. Madame Bosco has promised to look after you until I return.” He lifted the suitcase and began walking swiftly from the house toward the neighboring farm. The Boscos were a large Italian-French family with seven children of their own and had not asked him why he might need to leave his daughter for an unspecified amount of time. It was better they did not know.

  “Non, Papa.” Colette’s bottom lip quivered, but he dared not slow or look behind him.

  He pressed her blond head against his chest as he walked faster, seeing the lights of the stone farmhouse, white sheets flapping on the clothesline like a warning. The door opened before he reached it. Madame Bosco’s large, round form filled the doorway, the light illuminating her. A young girl, dark haired like her mother but slender as a reed, peered out from behind madame.

  “Go back inside,” the woman said to the girl. “Keep your brothers and sisters away from the door.” She waited until her daughter had left, the girl stealing a glance over her shoulder only once. Madame Bosco turned back to Giles. “It is time?” she asked, her voice low.

  Giles nodded, holding Colette even tighter, knowing what a terrible thing he was asking the child to do. And how this very scene must be playing out again and again all over the burning fields of Europe. A chorus of children’s cries and parents’ despair that fell on parched earth and thick air that smelled of burning things. The wailing might be heard, but no one was listening.

  He touched his lips to Colette’s sweat-soaked forehead and tearstained cheek, breathing in the scent of her one last time. “You are my heart, ma chérie,” he said, holding her small fist tightly in his own larger one, replaying something they did every night. “And only you can set it free.” He opened his hand and wiggled his fingers like petals on a sunflower. Even in her misery, the little girl remembered her part and opened her own hand, the small fingers slow and heavy.

  “Remember this,” Giles whispered in her ear, the folds and curves as delicate as a flower. “Remember you are my heart.”

  Before he could change his mind, he handed Colette to the welcoming arms of Madame Bosco. There were tears in her eyes as she held the sobbing child. “We will keep her safe until you return. We have already instructed the children.”

  Giles nodded, remembering her mother, as he stroked Colette’s blond curls. He slid a postcard from his pocket and handed it to madame, his thumb obscuring the foreign stamps. The edges were torn and frayed from having been held and read so many times, the image of the beach with impossibly white sand engraved in his memory. “If something happens, let my friend know. His name and address are on here. If I can’t find you, I will go to him.” He paused for a moment. “Keep it hidden. It will be safer for you that way. No questions.”

  Madame Bosco nodded and he felt the trembling in her hand as she took the postcard. “I will pray that I will put this back in your hands along with Colette when this is all over.”

  He gave her a solemn stare. “I hope God listens to your prayers. He hasn’t listened to mine in a very long time.” Lifting the suitcase, he set it inside the kitchen door. “Be careful with this. I have wrapped something precious inside, something of her home and family. Please keep them both safe.”

  One last time Giles pressed his lips against Colette’s soft curls. “Au revoir, ma chérie. I will come back for you; I promise. However long it takes.”

  The little girl looked up at him with her mother’s eyes, large and dark. She reached for him. “Ne va pas, Papa! Don’t leave me!” She struggled to release herself from the woman’s grasp, her legs kicking frantically.

  “Be safe,” madame said, her own eyes damp. “Until we meet again.”

  He touched her arm and pressed it, grief like cement filling his throat. With one last glance back, he turned in the opposite direction from his farm and began to run. He heard his daughter sobbing as the sky cast out the light, and imagined he could hear the sound of dead bees hitting the parched earth, lamenting the passing of all that was good.

  chapter 1

  “The bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and he leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as he found them.”

  St. Francis de Sales

  —NED BLOODWORTH’S BEEKEEPER’S JOURNAL

  Georgia

  APRIL 2015

  NEW ORLEANS

  Memories are thieves. They slip up behind you when you least expect it, their cold hands pressed against your face, suffocating. They blow icy-cold air even on the hottest days, and pinch you awake in the middle of the night. My grandfather had once told me that memories we
re like a faucet you could turn on or off at will, and that after I got to be as old as he was, I’d have figured out how it works. Maybe I just wasn’t old enough, because my memories always had a way of getting stuck in the “on” position, flooding my mind with images and snatches of conversations I’d rather not relive.

  Perhaps that explained my obsession with old things, with antique clocks, armoires, and shoes. My fascination with ancient books filled with brittle paper, with mismatched china pieces, and with old-fashioned keys and their corresponding locks. It was as if these relics had been left for me to claim as my own, to make up a past devoid of my own memories.

  Old china was my favorite. It allowed me to live vicariously through somebody else’s imagined life, to participate in family meals and celebrations, to pretend to be a part of a bride’s place-setting selection. Experiences from somebody else’s life, but definitely not my own. Despite, or probably because of, my family’s well-grounded belief that I was born to founder, I’d discovered a vocation I not only loved but was actually good at. I was an expert in most things antique, a sought-after consultant, and proof that it’s possible to become someone different from the person you once were. The person everybody expected you to still be. If only I could have figured out how to turn off the memories, I might have been able to sink comfortably into the new life I’d created from old china and discarded furniture.

  I dipped a cotton swab into the cleaning solution and dabbed at the intricate scrollwork of the padlock on my desk. The silver shield-shaped lock with grained bar-and-diamond-embellished trim had been found in a box of old horse tackle in a barn in New Hampshire at an estate sale. Mr. Mandeville, my boss, and owner of the Big Easy Auction Gallery, had grudgingly let me go. I had a good eye and an even better instinct about these things, and after eight years of my working for Mr. Mandeville, he’d finally started to agree. I would study the history of a property and its owner when an estate sale was announced so that I could look at pictures of boxes stacked in an old barn or pushed against the walls of a humid attic and know what treasures I’d find.