Excerpt #2: Out of the Darkness (from Double Play)

After finishing with the newspaper, Rob lay back in his chair and closed his eyes while Jennie thumbed through the pages. She wasn’t really reading anything, just scanning a few headlines and checking out the ads for fall clothes, but stopped abruptly when she got to page 7 and saw something odd in the lower right-hand corner of the page.

“Look at this ad, Rob,” Jennie said. “This is very strange.”

The two-column boxed advertisement included a small photo of a rocky coastline beach and the words, “Happy birthday, Anthanella. Thinking of those nights on Flintucket Sound.”

“So what’s so weird about that?” Rob asked.

“Well, two things,” Jennie said. “First, remember last year when I went to Boston for that television interview with Selina Alvarez? About our second book? That same day, the TV station was taping a panel discussion on government corruption in the Boston area and one of the panelists was David Flynn. I told you he was there that day, didn’t I? Well, he and the others were standing around awaiting their turn on set when my interview finished, and he walked over and introduced himself. He said he had read both of our books and liked them very much. He told me he was planning a book of his own and was influenced by our journalistic writing style. He also said his wife especially liked the book about the girl on the ferry because she had been a bit shy and restrained growing up, like Mellie Swinson in our book, and could identify with some of the issues the girl had faced.” 

“OK, so what’s the point?”

“The point is, he said his wife’s name was Anthanella,” Jennie said. “It’s pretty hard to forget a name like that. He said it was a family name that went back to medieval Ireland or Scotland or some such thing and that other women in her family had had that name in the past.”

“OK, so there’s another Anthanella in the world,” Rob said, “or maybe somebody knows Flynn’s wife and is wishing her a happy birthday … like maybe a relative or something.”

“Seriously, Rob, I said there were two weird things about the ad. The second one is, it talks about ‘those nights on Flintucket Sound.’”

“So?”

“So there is no such place as Flintucket Sound,” Jennie said. “It’s a fictional place in a novel by Charlotte Mains called Summers With My Lovers. I just finished reading it last week.”