Fatality Read online

  “Weren’t you furious with Mom?”

  “Sure. But I let go of it.”

  I didn’t let myself be furious, either, she thought I’ve inherited traits from Dad even without genes. “What about him?” she said.

  “Since I love you, Rose,” he said, “how furious can I be about him?”

  “We haven’t used his name.”

  “Let’s not. For years I had this nightmare that he’d return and claim you and somehow, in the viciousness of courts and lawyers, I’d lose my precious daughter to some stranger. But you’re too old for that now. I can stop worrying.”

  It had never crossed Rose’s mind that her father was the one worrying. She leaned on him. After a while, she realized that he was leaning on her, too.

  “Tell me if you want to meet him, honey.”

  “Eeeeeeeeeuuuh!” shrieked Rose. “No!”

  They laughed. “Another nightmare set to rest,” said her father.

  Any minute Mom would arrive. There was still so much to say. “You and Mom never talked about it?” she asked.

  “Not once. She doesn’t know that I know.” He swished her ponytail again. “I guess you inherit your skill at silence from me.”

  We are alike. I am his. Instead of sorrow, Rose began to feel joy. “Why didn’t Mom guess that I myself was the secret I stayed silent for?”

  “I suspect your mother has more or less forgotten. She’s quick to forgive herself, you know,” he said wryly. “When I think of you coming to terms with that all by yourself! Oh, Rose! I’m so sorry.”

  “You know what, Dad?” And the truth of what she was about to say astonished even Rose. “It wasn’t that big of a deal. Life swept on. In fact, I forgot, too. I guess I’m just as much Mom’s daughter as I am yours. Then when the police had the diary and I remembered what I’d written, I fell apart. I couldn’t let anybody read it. I had to take action.” They were laughing helplessly. “Pretty dumb action,” she admitted.

  “I’m almost proud of you now, stealing that police car.”

  “I still have forty-four hours of community service left.”

  “My daughter, the delinquent,” he said. “We’ll need Mom’s advice on the next step. Whether we go back to the judge or what. Are you pretty angry with your mother, Rose? You don’t act like it.”

  “You know what, Daddy? I never really got mad. I managed to be mad at Aunt Sheila instead.”

  “I never liked Sheila anyway,” said her father. “I was grateful she stuck to her own coast. Rose, when your mother gets here, she’ll take her cues from you. She always does. If you’re cool about it, she’ll forgive herself by dinnertime.”

  “I wonder what we’re having,” said Rose. “I skipped breakfast because it’s been that kind of week and I skipped lunch because of driving away with Verne. I’m starving, Dad. I’m still thinking about the French toast I didn’t have on Sunday.”

  Her father laughed. “I guess we’re going to be okay,” he said. “Because when the biggest problem is what to have for dinner, life is pretty good.”

  Life is pretty good, thought Rose Lymond. I’m alive. I’m a goddess at school. Tabor likes me enough to go berserk on the phone when I’m riding around with a killer. Alan likes me enough to run after me when I’m in danger. Chrissie’s still my true friend. Anjelica—well, who knows what that was about?

  The important thing is, my father is my father.

  He always was.

  He always will be.

  A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney

  Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller The Face on the Milk Carton. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

  Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life.

  Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

  Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book, Safe as the Grave, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.

  Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.

  Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (1989–1992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, Cooney published the award-winning The Face on the Milk Carton, about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in Whatever Happened to Janie? (1993), The Voice on the Radio (1996), and What Janie Found (2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book, Janie Face to Face, will be released in 2013.

  Cooney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the Mayflower.

  The house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where Cooney grew up. She recalls: “In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody’s cellar, going around and around the furnace!”

  Cooney at age three.

  Cooney, age ten, reading in bed—one of her favorite activities then and now.

  Ten-year-old Cooney won a local library’s summer reading contest in 1957 by compiling book reviews. In her collection, she wrote reviews of Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison and Jean Craighead George’s Vison, the Mink. “What a treat when I met Jean George at a convention,” she recalls.

  Cooney’s report card from sixth grade in 1959. “Mr. Albert and I are still friends over fifty years later,” she says.

  Cooney in middle school: “I went through some lumpy stages!”

  In 1964, Cooney received the Flora Mai Holly Memorial Award for Excellence in the Study of American Literature from the National League of American Pen Women. “I always meant to write to them, and tell them that I kept going!” Cooney says. “I love the phrase ‘pen woman.’ I’m proud to be one.”

  Cooney at age nineteen, just after graduating from high school. (Photo courtesy of Warren Kay Vantine Studio of Boston.)

  Cooney with Ann Reit, her book editor at Scholastic. Many of the books Cooney wrote with Reit were by assignment. “Ann decided what books she wanted (for example, ‘entry-level horror, no bloodshed, three-book series,’ which became Fog, Snow, and Fire) and I wrote them. I loved writing by assignment; it was such a challenge and delight to create a book when I had never given the subject a single thought.”

  Cooney with her late a
gent Marilyn Marlow, who worked with her on all of the titles that are now available as ebooks from Open Road.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  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, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 2001 by Caroline B. Cooney

  cover design by Kathleen Lynch

  978-1-4532-6429-4

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY CAROLINE B. COONEY

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Contents

  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

  A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney

  Copyright