Shadow Creek - Softcover

Fielding, Joy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385677383 ISBN 13: 9780385677387

Publisher: Anchor Canada, 2019

Synopsis

From New York Times bestselling author Joy Fielding--a chilling psychological thriller that explores the depths of psychopathic behaviour and the lengths to which a mother will go to protect her daughter.
     When an innocent group of campers ventures to the Adirondacks for a trip, they are followed by a murderous pair. . . . A group of unlikely travelling companions--a woman, her two oddball friends, her teenage daughter, and her soon-to-be-ex-husband's new fiancee--find themselves on a camping trip at the same time that a pair of teenage killers is terrorizing the area.
     Shadow Creek is a chilling thriller that explores the depths of psychopathic behaviour and the lengths to which a mother will go to protect her daughter.

About this title

About the Author:

JOY FIELDING is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Charley's Web, Heartstopper, Mad River Road, See Jane Run, and other acclaimed novels. She divides her time between Toronto and Palm Beach, Florida. Visit her website at www.JoyFielding.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

ONE

BRIANNE,” VALERIE CALLED FROM the foot of the stairs, “how are you doing up there?”

No answer.

“Brianne,” she called a second time. “It’s almost eleven o’clock. Your father will be here any minute.”

Still no answer. Not that Val was surprised. Her daughter rarely answered until at least her third try.

“Brianne,” she dutifully obliged, “how are you coming along with the packing?”

The sound of a door opening, agitated footsteps in the upstairs hallway, a blur of shoulder-length brown hair and long, lean legs, the shock of a lacy black thong and matching push-up bra alternating with layers of bare skin, the sight of a pair of balled fists resting with familiar impatience on slender hips. “I’d be coming along fine if you’d stop interrupting me.” Brianne’s voice tumbled down the green-carpeted steps, almost knocking Valerie over with the force of their casual disdain.

“You’re not even dressed,” Valerie sputtered. “Your father . . .”

“. . . will be late,” her daughter said with the kind of rude certainty that only sixteen-year-old girls seemed to possess. “He’s always late.”

“It’s a long drive,” Valerie argued. “He said he wanted to get there before dinner.”

But Brianne had already disappeared from the top of the stairs. Seconds later, Valerie heard her daughter’s bedroom door slam shut. “She’s not even dressed,” she whispered to the eggshell-colored walls. Which meant she probably hadn’t started packing, either. “Great. That’s great.” Which meant she’d have to entertain her soon-to-be ex-husband and his new fiancée until their daughter was ready. Which just might work to her advantage, she thought, since lately Evan had been hinting that things weren’t going all that well with darling Jennifer, and that he might have made the biggest mistake of his life in letting Valerie go.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d made that particular mistake, Val thought, walking to the front door of her modern glass and brick Park Slope home and opening it, looking up and down the fashionable Brooklyn street for signs of Evan’s approaching car. He’d left her once before, running off with one of her bridesmaids just days before their wedding. Six weeks later he was back, full of abject apologies, and begging her to give him another chance. The girl meant nothing to him, he’d sworn up and down. It was just a case of raw nerves and cold feet. “I’ll never be that stupid again,” he’d said.

Except, of course, he was.

“You’re all the woman I’ll ever need,” he’d told her.

Except, of course, she wasn’t.

In their eighteen years together, Val suspected at least a dozen affairs. She’d turned a blind eye to all of them, somehow managing to convince herself that he was telling the truth whenever he called to say he’d be working late, or that an urgent meeting had forced him to cancel their scheduled lunch. She’d even insisted it was no big deal to concerned friends when they told her they’d seen Evan at a popular Manhattan restaurant, nuzzling the neck of a young brunette. You know Evan, she’d say with a confident laugh. He’s just a big flirt. It doesn’t mean anything.

She’d said it so many times, she’d almost come to believe it.

Almost.

And then she’d come home one afternoon, tired and depressed after a day of dealing with her mother, who stubbornly continued to resist dealing with her drinking problem, to find Evan in bed with the young woman he’d recently hired to design a new ad campaign for his string of trendy boutique hotels, the girl’s toned and shapely legs lifted high into the air above his broad shoulders, both of them totally oblivious to everything but their own impressive gymnastics, and her blind eye was forced wide open once and for all.

Even then, it had been his choice to leave.

I should hate him, Val thought.

And yet, the awful, unforgivable truth was that she didn’t hate him. The awful, even more unforgivable truth was that she still loved him, that she was still praying he’d come to his senses, as he had after running off only days before their wedding, and come back to her.

What’s wrong with me?

It’s my own damn fault, she’d chastised herself now. I knew what he was like when I married him. I knew from the first minute I laid eyes on him in the lobby of that small chalet in Switzerland, tanned and fit and holding court in front of a roaring fire, surrounded by adoring ski bunnies, that he was trouble. Exactly the kind of man she’d spent her entire twenty-one years up to that point trying to avoid, a man of grand gestures and small cruelties, as charming as he was unsubtle. She knew the type well, having been raised by just such a man.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she’d told her friends, the same words her mother had said to her.

Well, maybe it didn’t mean anything to men like her father, men like Evan, Val understood, but it meant the world to the women who loved them.

And, ultimately, where did all that fortitude and forbearance leave them?

It left them nowhere.

They got dumped anyway.

Her friends had breathed a collective sigh of relief at Evan’s departure. “He’s a moron,” her closest friend, Melissa, had pronounced. “He doesn’t deserve you,” their mutual friend, James, had agreed. “Believe me, you’re better off.”

Her mother had been too drunk to say anything.

Val could still picture the stricken look on her mother’s face after her father had announced he was leaving her for one of his much younger conquests. “It doesn’t mean anything. He’ll be back,” her mother had assured Valerie and her younger sister, Allison. But he never did come back, eventually marrying again and fathering two more children, both girls, daughters to replace the ones he’d so easily abandoned. Meanwhile Val’s mother had gradually morphed from a bright, engaging woman into a joyless and bitter old crone whose main source of comfort was a bottle. Is that what Val wanted for Brianne?

“Brianne, do you need some help?” Val called out now, shutting the front door on the oppressive July heat and returning to the foot of the stairs.

Evan was giving her pretty much everything she asked for in the divorce—the house, the white Lexus SUV, substantial alimony, more than generous child support. Within days of moving out of their large home in Brooklyn, he’d settled into Jennifer’s small condo in Manhattan, seemingly none the worse for wear.

I should hate him, Val thought again.

Except that you don’t stop loving someone you’ve loved almost half your life just because they treat you badly, she’d discovered, regardless of whether or not you should. Still, it wasn’t fair that a woman celebrating her fortieth birthday would be pining over a man who’d openly betrayed her, as if she were a lovesick teenager crying for the one who got away.

Although he wasn’t just any man. He was her husband of almost two decades, her husband for another month at least, until their divorce was final, despite the fact he was already engaged to somebody else. He was the love of her life, a man she’d traversed the globe with repeatedly, helicopter skiing with him in the Swiss Alps, white-water rafting with him in Colorado, trekking with him to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. “The only woman who can keep up with me,” he’d said . . . how many times?

“The only woman I’ve ever really loved.”

It had been while they were hiking in the Adirondacks that she had suddenly dropped to her knees and surprised them both by proposing. “What the hell,” he’d proclaimed with a laugh. “It’ll be an adventure.”

An adventure it had certainly been, Val thought now, trying—and failing—not to succumb to nostalgia. Those first few years before Brianne was born had been such a heady rush that it had been relatively easy to overlook Evan’s wandering eye, to tell herself that she was imagining things, and when that proved impossible, to hold herself at least partly responsible for his actions, to urge herself to try harder, be more desirable, more available, more . . . all the things she obviously wasn’t, all the while reminding herself that nothing mattered except that she was the one he really loved, and that no matter how far or how often he strayed, he would always come back to her.

Evan wasn’t her father.

She wasn’t her mother.

Yet Val had been devastated to realize that she’d fallen into the same trap as her mother after all, which made her all the more determined to react differently, to not give up, and to fight for her man with every ounce of her being. She hadn’t even allowed her pregnancy to slow her down, indulging Evan’s combined love of travel and danger by continuing to chase him down the steepest slopes and up the highest peaks. She’d missed her daughter’s first birthday so that she could accompany him to the Himalayas, justifying the trip by rationalizing that her husband came first, that a year-old child couldn’t differentiate one day from the next, and that they’d celebrate Brianne’s birthday when they got home. She even wrote an article about their trip that was subsequently published in the travel section of the New York Times.

It was the beginning of an unexpected, and unexpectedly successful, career, a career that came to an abrupt and equally unexpected halt the day Val returned home early from a trying day of dealing with her m...

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor Canada
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0385677383
• ISBN 13: 9780385677387
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400