They Did It with Love (Thorndike Press Large Print Core Series) - Hardcover

Morgenroth, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1410406695 ISBN 13: 9781410406699

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 2008

Synopsis

Morgenroth, Kate

About this title

About the Author:

Kate Morgenroth is the author of the bestselling Plume book, They Did It With Love, two thrillers, Kill me First and Saved, and three YA novels, Jude, Framed, and Echo. She lives in New York City.

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

Praise for Kate Morgenroth’s novels

“Mesmerizing. I am as delighted by Kate Morgenroth’s nerve as much as by her skill.”

—Toni Morrison

“I read Kill Me First in one sitting. Kate Morgenroth has created an exciting and formidable character in Sarah Shepherd.”

—Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Compulsively readable...”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Nearly impossible to put down.”

—Time Out New York

“Riveting...Morgenroth writes with quick, razor strokes.”

—New York Post

“Intensely absorbing...”

—Publishers Weekly

“One knockout story...Morgenroth succeeds not only in creating something different but in doing it well.”

—St. Petersburg Times

“An appealing heroine supported by savvy plotting. Morgenroth’s second outing: [Kill Me First, 1999] proves again that she knows how to weave a spell.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A must read for those who like their women tough but vulnerable.”

—USA Today

KATE MORGENROTH is the author of Kill Me First and Saved and the YA novels Echo and the Edgar-nominated Jude. Visit her website at www.katemorgenroth.com.

THEY DID IT with Love

A Novel

Kate Morgenroth

A PLUME BOOK

“To have trusted someone! To have believed...and it was lies—all lies.”

—Agatha Christie, They Do It with Mirrors

Cast of Characters

NEW YORK

Prologue

PART I GREENWICH

1. Priscilla & Gordon

2. Susan & Harry

3. Ashley & Stewart

4. Julia & Alex

5. The Mystery Readers

6. Sofie & Dean

February

7. Priscilla & Susan

8. Julia & Alex

March

9. Sofie

10. Sofie & Susan

11 The Mystery Readers

May

12. Sofie & Dean

FOUR MONTHS LATER:October

13. Priscilla & Susan

14. Priscilla

15. Priscilla

16. Sofie

17. Sofie & Dean

PART II

18. Sofie & Priscilla

19. Detective Peters

20. Detective Ackerman

21. Alex

22. Priscilla & Gordon

23. Ashley & Stewart

24. Sofie & Dean

25. Susan & Harry

26. Priscilla & the Detectives

27. Susan & the Detectives

28. Ashley & the Detectives

29. Sofie & the Detectives

30. Priscilla

31. The Detectives

32. Priscilla & Susan

33. Alex

34. Alex

35. Sofie & Priscilla

36. Alex at Priscilla’s House

37. Alex at Susan’s House

38. Alex at Ashley’s House

39. Alex at Sofie’s House

40. Sofie & Dean

41. Susan & Harry

42. Priscilla & Sofie

43. Dean & the Detectives

44. Stewart & the Detectives

45. Gordon & the Detectives

46. Sofie & the Detectives

47. Alex

48 Alex & Sofie

49 Dean & Priscilla

50. Susan & Detective Ackerman

51. The Mystery Readers

52. Sofie & Alex

53. Alex

54. Sofie & Alex

55. Priscilla & Dean

56. Sofie & Alex

57. The Detectives

58. Sofie & Dean

59. Sofie & the Detectives

60. Sofie & Alex

61. Sofie & Alex

62. Priscilla & Gordon

63. Sofie

64Sofie & Dean

65. Sofie & Dean

66. Sofie

67 Sofie & Dean

68. Sofie & Dean

69. Sofie & Alex

70. Alex

71 Detective Ackerman

72. Sofie & Detective Ackerman

73. Priscilla

74. Priscilla & Dean

75. Priscilla & Gordon

76. Priscilla & Susan

PART III NEW YORK

77. Sofie

78. Susan & Detective Ackerman

79. Sofie & Alex

80. Sofie & Alex

81. Sofie & Alex

Cast of Characters

The Couples

Sofie and Dean

Priscilla and Gordon

Susan and Harry

Ashley and Stewart

Julia and Alex

The Detectives

Detective Peters: Detective from the Greenwich
Police Department

Detective Ackerman: Detective from the DA’s office

THEY DID IT with Love

 

It was autumn. Early morning. The air was sharp, and the sky was a deep October blue. The cars on the narrow suburban street whizzed by, churning up little whirlpools of leaves—but none of the people in the cars noticed the body hanging among the trees.

The feet were suspended in midair not far from the ground, and they looked like they had maroon stockings on—the deep purple color due to the blood pooling in the lowest parts of the body. The long, blond hair hung in a curtain around the lolled head. A light wind ruffled the hem of the nightgown and shivered the leaves in the trees, but the body hung motionless.

A dozen cars drove by without noticing anything. It might have been hours before the body was discovered—if it weren’t for Sofie.

Afterward Sofie’s life would never be the same, but a year earlier she hadn’t even known the woman. For her it had all started with another death.

NEW YORK

December

Prologue

The phone call came early Friday December 14 at seven fifteen a.m., ensuring that Sofie would remember that particular morning forever. That’s what happened with death. It took otherwise small, unmemorable moments and fossilized them. This would be the second time she had experienced the phenomenon. It had happened once before when she was three years old and had wandered into her mother’s bedroom because, though she’d waited forever, her mother hadn’t come to get her up. Even twenty-five years later Sofie still remembered those moments as clearly as if someone had taken a photograph. The open windows. The rumpled sheets. The slowly revolving ceiling fan. Then the sharp smell of urine. And the feeling...as if all the joy had been sucked out of her heart like water rushing down the drain when her mother pulled the plug in the bath.

Now it would be these moments—before the phone call—that would be preserved in her memory. She was sitting in the window seat, her mug of tea balanced precariously on the sill. The heat from the tea had made a small hazy patch of fog on the window pane just above the lip of the cup. The newspaper—opened to the second to last page of the Arts and Leisure section and folded to frame the crossword puzzle—lay on the cushion beside her, and her cat, Agatha, was curled in her lap, a small spot of warmth.

Outside the window a few snowflakes drifted through the air. Across Fifth Avenue the trees of Central Park were a tangle of dark gray branches against a pale gray sky. In a few minutes the sun would rise, and the first rays would hit the facades of the buildings across the park, turning all the windows into mirrors of light.

But at seven fifteen on December 14 the sun wasn’t up; there was only the flat emptiness of the sky and the aimlessness of the tiny flakes of snow. And her mood matched the day. That morning she felt...suspended. Poised on the edge of something. (Though later she wasn’t sure if this was true or if it was something she had retroactively inserted into her memory. Does the calm before the storm seem calm at the time? Or does it only seem calm in retrospect, knowing what is to follow?)

At that moment, sitting in the window seat, looking out over the dreary view, Sofie realized that the feeling of discomfort wasn’t purely internal; the tip of her nose was almost completely numb. She had been waiting for the heat to come up, but her husband, Dean, must have put the heat on manual override (he slept better when it was cold) and forgotten to switch it back. Cupping her palms around the mug, she lifted it to her face and exhaled, letting her own breath send a little cloud of steam billowing up. It warmed her nose, but only for a moment. As the steam ebbed away, the cold crept right back in, so she gently dislodged Agatha from her lap and stood, making her way through the dining room, then the living room into the foyer and over to the master climate control for the apartment.

As she was adjusting the heat up from an arctic fifty degrees she saw Dean’s gym bag tucked underneath the hall table. He must have forgotten it in his rush out the door earlier that morning. She sighed in exasperation. He always came home cranky when he didn’t work out. Now she had to decide if it was worth the bother to take his bag over to him at the office or risk his mood later. Maybe she would take it over to him. She nudged the bag out from under the table with her foot so she would see it when she went out, then turned to go back to finish the crossword puzzle.

The call came precisely as she was passing the phone extension in the living room, as if her presence had somehow summoned it into action. The abrupt jangle also echoed from the extensions in the bedroom and kitchen, and the hand that held the mug jerked, sending a little tidal wave of hot tea spilling over the side of the cup and onto her knuckles. It left a red mark where it splashed onto her skin.

She set the tea down and reached out to pick up the receiver. But her hand hovered in the air as if to delay the moment of knowing—though the truth was, she knew already. She knew it wasn’t Dean calling about his forgotten gym bag. She knew it wasn’t a solicitation offering her an opportunity to get the New York Times delivered right to her door. She knew it wasn’t the bookstore checking on her availability. She’d been expecting this call for weeks now.

She picked up the receiver.

 

Sofie went from the hustle of Manhattan on a Friday morning through the smooth automatic doors and into the stillness of the hospital lobby. She’d gone through those doors dozens of times over the last three years, but every time she was struck by the contrast—from the careless rush of the city into the hushed calm of the hospital, from the world of the living to the world of the dying. Every time she passed through those doors, she thought about how the two worlds felt so far apart and yet only the space of a breath actually separated them. For her mother, only the time it took to swallow a handful of pills. For her father, only the time it took to get the results of a biopsy.

She crossed to the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. They grouped patients with the same type of cancer together. The section for pancreatic cancer was small and grim. As she exited into the familiar hallway, she wondered how many times had she been there in the last few years? Ten? Fifteen? More? How many times had the doctors told her that it looked as though her father wouldn’t make it out of the hospital again? But somehow (by pure willpower he claimed) he’d always fought his way back. So when he’d been admitted again yesterday she came to visit, listened to the doctors say the same thing they always said, then went home when visiting hours ended. The only difference was that this time the doctors had been right.

When she reached her father’s room she found the door open. The sun was streaming in through the windows, and the vase of orange tulips that she’d brought was still perched on the sill, but all the curtains around the bed that her father usually kept closed were now drawn back, and the bed was stripped down to the plastic mattress pad. A nurse was bent over the bed removing the pad, and she must have sensed Sofie’s presence at the door because she looked up.

“I’m so sorry,” the nurse said. “He’s not here anymore.”

“Where did they take him?” Sofie asked. She was amazed that her voice came out so calm. So even.

“They took him to the lower level,” the nurse told her. “Do you want to view the body?”

Sofie nodded.

“Just take the elevator down to the basement.”

So Sofie retraced her steps back down the hallway and waited patiently for the elevator. When the doors slid open and she got in, she saw the button next to the one for the lobby labeled “B.” If she’d ever noticed it before, she would have assumed that it was a dark, musty basement filled with buckets and mops and supplies. She pressed it and the elevator took her down. Down past lobby level. Down below ground level. Why had she never thought about the fact that a hospital needed somewhere to store their failures?

When she exited, she found not the concrete walls and the buckets and mops she’d imagined, but a carpeted reception area. And there weren’t silent men in blue coveralls, but a very pretty, very young girl sitting behind a desk. The girl didn’t look old enough to be out of high school, and it seemed incongruous to have someone so young manning the reception desk for the hospital morgue. But maybe, Sofie thought, only someone young would be willing to work down there. For the young, death was something that happened to other people.

Sofie gave the receptionist her father’s name, and the girl checked the computer. She picked up the phone, but before dialing she said, “It will be just a few minutes,” and motioned for Sofie to take a seat. Five minutes later an orderly appeared. He was dressed in green scrubs with a plastic identity card clipped to his pocket. Sofie noticed his name was James...the same as her father’s.

“If you’ll come with me,” the orderly said. So she followed James down the corridor. Just past the reception area the carpet ended and the floor was a slick, hard linoleum. As Sofie walked, the sound of her footsteps seemed embarrassingly loud, and it felt like it took forever to get down the hall. They took a right, and the orderly stopped in front of a closed door.

“Do you want me to go in with you?” he asked politely.

“No, thank you.”

She waited while he turned and retreated down the hallway. Only when he had disappeared back around the corner did Sofie open the door. As she slipped inside and cl...

About this edition

• Publisher: Thorndike Pr
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1410406695
• ISBN 13: 9781410406699
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 515