Reviews
"LaPierre hits the bulls-eye, presenting even the most minor characters with equal parts compassion and judgment against a gorgeous backdrop, and topping the whole show off with a surprise ending."
—Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2001
"Acting in tandem and separately, Verity and Patience pursue paper trails and more tangible ones along California's 'Lost Coast.' Along with the misfits, iconoclasts and dropouts that inhabit this intriguing stretch of land the reader meets a heartbreaker of a young girl and unexpected heroes... Janet LaPierre's consistently excellent series—in depth characterization, a California setting as vivid and unique as any, and well plotted, engrossing stories built around an admirable heroine—merits recommendation from librarians, booksellers and reviewers."
—Bookbrowser
"LaPierre does an excellent job portraying the relationship between mother and daughter and in describing the beautiful scenery that is the backdrop for this story. And, your heart breaks for the sweet, brave, young Sylvie."
—Suite101.com
"In Keepers Janet LaPierre has created a compelling puzzle with a startling ending. The settings are so real and sensual that you can smell the redwoods, and the dinner cooking; taste the first sip of wine; feel the first hot drop of blood on your skin. Her full and fair treatment of all the characters adds a richness and subtlety to the story. Keepers is a rare treat."
—Susan Dunlap, author of Cop Out and No Immunity
"Janet LaPierre has done it again, with a believable plot that immediately grabs and carries you right into her coastal California setting. One of the best things about LaPierre's books is the sense that her people care about each other and about things that matter. Keeperskept me going until two o'clock in the morning."
—Sue Henry, Agatha award winner and author of Dead North
Excerpt
"Ms. Smith?"
She'd seen his shadow as he approached, and was facing the door, telephone at her ear, as he appeared in the doorway. Tall and sturdy, was her first thought as she set the receiver back on the machine. "Mr. Simonov? Come in, please," she said, tucking her sheet of notes into the open folder she then set aside.
Not really tall, she decided as she stood to greet him; five-ten, perhaps. His hair was somewhere between dark blond and light brown, in the currently popular shaved-near-the-skull cut; his round face was weary or worried or both, flesh puffy under blue eyes. In plaid flannel shirt, baggy corduroy trousers, and battered hiking boots, he looked like a mildly depressed version of the community college biology teacher he'd claimed to be.
He tossed a look over his shoulder as he stepped in, then closed the door—not an unusual action in someone with investigative business. Patience gestured to the chair across from her, and he sat down.
"Ms. Smith," he said, leaning forward, "like I told you when we spoke yesterday, I'm eager to find my daughter. I hope you can help me."
Patience clasped her hands on the blotter before her. "Perhaps I can. But the first thing I should tell you is that the police are much better equipped to look for missing persons than any private investigator."
He sat back in his chair—slouched, really. "I know. But they wouldn't be interested in me, because I've got no legal connection to the daughter—well, daughter and former wife—I'm looking for."
Patience simply raised her eyebrows, and he spread his hands. "Lily, my wife, left me for another man five years ago, when our daughter Sylvie was not quite two. Lily said she was going to divorce me and marry Dev, Devlin Costello, and she did, as soon as possible."
He sighed and squared his shoulders. "I knew they wouldn't stay in Susanville, where Lily and I were living; she hated the place. In fact, I was pretty sure they'd be moving around a lot, the way Dev always did. There wasn't any way I could continue to be a real father, and Lily wasn't asking for support, so I relinquished all claims. Lily has full custody."
"Did her new husband adopt Sylvie?"
"I doubt it," he said with a shrug. "Even at two she was a skinny, scowling, demanding little kid, and I think he'd have happily left her with me. But Lily was totally in thrall to Sylvie, and Dev wanted Lily."
Lily, whom the man across the desk had apparently given up without a qualm. "Mr. Simonov, five years is a long time in a child's life. Why are you looking for Sylvie now?"
He blinked hard, as if her blunt question had startled him. He blinked again, sniffed and pulled a handkerchief from a pocket to touch it to his eyes. "Sorry. I'm allergic to a lot of spring pollens."
She waited, and he shifted position in the chair, crossing his legs. "Could I give you some background, please?"
Patience was a sucker for a story. Sometimes she counted this a failing, sometimes she thought it was the quality that had made her an investigator in the first place: what happened? She moved her yellow notepad into place on the blotter, picked up a pencil, and said, "Of course."
"The three of us—Dev Costello, Lily Medina, and I—all grew up in Red Bluff."
Patience nodded. A town with a population in the ten-to-fifteen thousand range, Red Bluff was located north of and well inland from Port Silva, on Interstate Highway Five. Beyond that, Patience knew only that it lay along the Sacramento River and was hell-hot in summer, which was the only time of year she'd been there.
"Dev and I were buddies from kindergarten—Dev-and-Dave, like one word. Lily was younger by almost four years; a neighborhood couple, the Mangrums, took her in as a foster child when she was ten, and we were her, oh, friends and big brothers for a long time. Then we went away to college, me to Humboldt State and Dev to UCLA. And Lily grew up."
"And married you?" asked Patience when it seemed he wouldn't go on.
"Yeah. I finished school and came home to ask her. Dev had dropped out in the middle of his sophomore year and just kind of gone off to see the world, I guess. He liked doing things his own way and school always either irritated or bored him. Anyway, it was a fairly bad time for Lily, so she married me."
And later married Dev. Lily sounded like a woman who had trouble making up her mind. But she must have been fairly young the first time around, if she was four years younger than this—what, thirtyish?—fellow.
"How long were you married?"
"Almost five years. Lily worked while I finished my masters. Then I landed a teaching job at this community college over in the eastern part of the state, in Lassen County, and Lily got pregnant. I was working hard trying to establish myself, and she was staying home with the baby, maybe a little depressed and bored, when Dev showed up, the way he did every now and then." He made a palms-up, what-can-you-do? gesture. "See, when we were kids, except that I was the better student, Dev was always the leader. He was good-looking, he had energy, ideas—charm, I guess. People always took to him right away. Lily probably wouldn't have married me in the first place if Dev had been around then."
Patience thought David Simonov seemed surprisingly unabashed by this admission of his own second-class status. "Mr. Simonov, what I still don't understand is why you are looking, now, for your daughter—and for Lily as well, I believe you said?"
He blew out a long breath and slumped lower in his chair. "Lily kept in touch, sort of. She'd send me a card from Phoenix, months later maybe a card from San Diego. Now and then a picture of Sylvie; Sylvie is turning out to look just like her."
Another huge sigh, and a harried look. "Last Christmas I got a card from her, as usual, but the note on it said Dev was making her crazy and she was thinking about leaving him."
"From where?"
"Uh, I think they were in San Francisco by then. Look, Lily was always like that, very dramatic and everything life-or-death; I didn't pay a lot of attention. Anyway, it—the note—said she'd call me, but she didn't. Then in early March I got this birthday card; she always remembered my birthday. Inside with the card was a letter that said she was taking Sylvie and running away from Dev. She might come to see me, but she'd have to be careful so he couldn't follow her. Mostly she was writing to say that if anything happened to her, she wanted me to be responsible for Sylvie."
"She didn't arrive?"
"Not while I was there; I was off on trips with the biology students for a week here, a week there. I mean, I had my own life to live, after all," he said in defensive tones. "And like I said, Lily always over-dramatized everything; I think regular daily life was sometimes just too ordinary for her.
"Anyway," he went on with a shrug, "she obviously had taken off, because Dev turned up at my place two or three weeks later. He'd expected her to come back to him in a few days, like she'd apparently done before, and when she didn't, he figured I might have taken her in. She didn't have anyone else to go to, after all. So we cried on each others' shoulders and drank a lot of Scotch and said a lot of dumb things about women, and then he went home."
"Has he seen her, since then?"
Simonov shook his head. "He hadn't, up to a couple of weeks ago. But I haven't been able to get hold of him recently. I called this pub in San Francisco that he'd been managing, and they said he didn't work there anymore."
"Mr. Simonov, this is all..." Too distant, too far-fetched, too not quite believable, she was going to say, but he interrupted.
"Here are pictures," he said, and reached across the desk to lay two photos before her. In one, two skinny young men, one fair-haired and the other carroty, stood like sentinels on either side of a slim girl with long black hair and a narrow, intense face. The second was a head shot of the same young woman, three-quarter face: hollow cheeks, heavy dark brows over deep-set dark eyes, sharply cut nose with the hint of an arch. The only softness in that face was in the full, drooping mouth.
"See?" he said in a near-whisper. "Lily has always had this... compelling, I guess is the word...quality. Something that made anybody, any guy at least, believe she had wonderful secrets to tell just to you, if you could only find the right way to ask her. Men can't leave her alone." He sighed, looked at the photo still in his hand as if surprised to find it there, and then set it in front of Patience. "This came with the birthday card. That's Sylvie with her."
In this picture Lily stood beside a child whose head reached almost to her shoulder. Looking at the straight, dark hair and long limbs. Patience caught her breath audibly, and Simonov straightened and said, "What?"
"Oh. Sorry," she said quickly. "A young girl with a superficial resemblance to your daughter, with this kind of long dark hair, was killed near here recently—hit by a car that didn't stop." This child, this Sylvie, was not really like the dead Melody Harker except in being thin and dark. This was indeed Lily's daughter, with features that echoed her mother's; but while the woman's face now seemed spiritless, Sylvie's was full of light and energy.
"I saw that little girl's picture in the paper," he said with a grimace. "It's what gave me an extra push. I thought, something like that could happen to my daughter, and I'd never know it. So I came here to the north coast, the place Lily loves most of all. Her foster father had lived in Port Silva as a kid, and I think the only pleasant memories she had of her childhood were the camping and fishing trips she took with him in Mendocino and Humboldt Counties. If Lily was looking for safe haven for herself and Sylvie, I know this is where she'd head."
He leaned forward, intent as a bird dog on point. "But it turns out nobody will talk to me; I'm a man and a stranger and they see domestic violence or something and won't get involved. I was trying to think what to do, and then by accident, or luck, I came across your Yellow Pages ad. 'Patience Smith, Investigations. Licensed. Experienced. Quiet.' It sounded, you sounded, just perfect." He sighed, and sank back into his chair. "And now that I've met you, I see how right I was."
"Mr. Simonov..."
"Another thing is, I have a job I like, and I hope to be head of the department next year. Even though the regular school year has ended, I shouldn't be here now; I'm supposed to be making some ecological surveys of wildlife refuges up in Modoc County."
"Mr..."
"Besides that. I'm planning to get married again soon, really looking forward to making a home and having a family and all that. But there's this old responsibility I've basically dodged for five years and now I need to take care of it."
"Have you considered the possibility that Lily is back with her husband and they've simply moved on?" asked Patience.
"I—don't think that's likely. From what she said in her letters, I got the feeling that her trouble with Dev was about Sylvie. I mean, she may still love Dev, but she's always been completely out of her mind over her kid."
Patience came to stiff-backed attention. "Mr. Simonov, if you believe Lily's second husband has been abusing your daughter, you must go to the police with your suspicions and her letters."
"Look, she didn't accuse Dev of anything specific, and he's not the kind of guy to hurt a kid. What he told me was, she was spoiling Sylvie rotten, turning her into an aggressive brat. No control, no discipline, and if he tried to set any rules, Lily would go wild." He paused for breath, tears brightening his eyes once again. "Ms. Smith, Lily is basically an unstable woman. She had a rotten childhood and a pretty weird adolescence, and she has never, ever lived on her own. Whatever the truth is, she and that little girl should not be out there at the mercy of who knows what. They need help."
Patience Mackellar, you're out of your mind. This is a messy circumstance and anyway beyond your resources. Patience reached out to push the photos back to their owner, but her hand disobeyed her and picked up the picture of the child. "Mr. Simonov, are you intending to seek custody of your daughter?" She lifted her gaze from the dark, intense face to the mild countenance across her desk.
"Oh no, ma'am! My fiancee, well..." He tipped his head and gave her a rueful grin. "She's a kind woman, but she wants to have a family of her own instead of walking into what they call a 'blended' one. Not that I—we—won't help the two of them financially, if it's needed. No, I just need to know that they're okay. What it is, I'm a selfish guy trying to get this niggling little worry cleared up so I can get on with my life."
Niggling little worry? Patience looked from the child's face to that of the father, her own eyes chilly. He caught the glance and smoothed all humor from his countenance. "Please. Help us."
She picked up her pencil and pulled the yellow pad closer. "I'll need some specifics. And an advance payment."
© Janet LaPierre.