A Dark and Stormy Night: Stories of Virtue Falls Read online

  Now, please enjoy these Virtue Falls extras:

  — Alternate ending for LOVE NEVER DIES

  — Readers' Guide Questions for LOVE NEVER DIES

  — Additional scenes from VIRTUE FALLS

  — Alternate ending for OBSESSION FALLS

  — Excerpt for BECAUSE I'M WATCHING

  — Excerpt for THE WOMAN WHO COULDN'T SCREAM

  Alternate Ending for LOVE NEVER DIES

  The first extra in A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT is the additional ending I wrote for LOVE NEVER DIES, which gives Areila her happy ending. I made the tough decision to delete it because LOVE NEVER DIES focuses not on Areila's story, but the story of Frank Vincent Montgomery. Nevertheless, I thought you would enjoy reading a little more about Areila.

  "I'm so glad!" she said to the sunshine. She patted the lawn over the grave. "I love you, too. I love you both!" Standing, she brushed the grass off her soaking knees. Smiling, she picked up the urn and turned.

  One row over, Rich Sanderson, the bane of her second grade year, knelt at his father's grave. He was placing a handful of flowers by the tombstone, but he watched her quizzically; probably he thought she was nuts talking to a crematory urn and a gravestone.

  If he had only seen what she'd seen…

  She walked toward him. "I heard about your father, Rich. My condolences."

  "Thank you. There was so much sorrow in the past year that in the end his passing was a blessing." Rich stood and in a gesture like hers, he brushed the grass off his knees, then offered his hand. "You know, I saw you here, and all was gray and bleak. Then that burst of sunlight illuminated your face and for the first time since Dad's funeral, my heart was lifted."

  "Sunshine will do that for you." She recognized a sign when one was presented to her … She shook his hand, and rather than let it go, she held it. "I'll buy you a cup of coffee, and we can catch up on old times."

  He grinned and he looked like the old, mischievous second grade Rich Sanderson — except he had his front teeth. "I'd like that, and I promise not to throw dirt clods at you."

  She bumped him with her shoulder. "And I promise not to get my revenge with a spray can of hair color."

  He looked stricken. "I'd forgotten about that."

  "I'll bet you did." She bumped him again. "Come on. Race you to the coffee stand."

  They walked toward their cars.

  The sunlight followed them all the way.

  Readers' Guide Questions for LOVE NEVER DIES

  1. Frank describes his feeling the first time Areila Leon enters the park as “I felt a vibration not unlike the dramatic, opening chord on a Spanish guitar.” Have you ever felt that type of instant connection to another person?

  2. After hearing Cleardale’s backstory about his wife murdering their children because of latent mental illness, do you wonder how the homeless people in your area came to live on the street?

  3. Frank blames himself for his failure to save a woman’s life before he was killed. Have you ever felt helpless and unable to save someone from a terrible situation? What would you have done differently if given the chance?

  4. Because of his own death, Frank was unable to return to Sofia, the woman he loved, and for that he suffers eternal grief. Would you rather have a short time with the person you truly love, or a lifetime with another?

  5. When Frank tells Areila about how he was killed, she offers to help him, and he says, “You have helped. You allowed me to tell my story.” When something terrible happens to you, do you feel better if you share it with someone? Do you have a regular confidante? Can you tell us who and why?

  6. Areila seizes the opportunity to defeat the killer by using the weapon at hand — a shovel. Her quick thinking saves her own life and undoubtedly the lives of others. Yet many who face such violence are paralyzed by fear. Do you believe in the right circumstances you could also use whatever resources you have to fight for your life and the lives of others?

  7. When Areila triumphs, Frank says, “You fought like a woman. You fought like a warrior.“ Do you believe a man of the early twentieth century would ever think/speak such a sentiment? What do you think of the changes in society in the last seventy years?

  8. Kateri suffered traumatic injury during the tsunami and was on painkillers. During that time, she saw Frank’s ghost. Terrified, she ran away. Do you believe in ghosts? If not, why were you willing to suspend disbelief to read this ghost story? If so, have you ever had experience with a ghost or an otherworldly apparition? Were you afraid?

  9. Of the quilting bee, Mrs. Golobovitch says, “Kateri got the project rolling. I think she likes the conviviality of the group more than the work.” Do you feel that way about any groups you are involved with?

  10. Eugene Park, the main setting for this short story, is based on Seattle’s Denny Park, which was, in fact, originally a cemetery. Does that make you wonder about your local landscape and what it might have been in the past? Have you done research or excavation that sheds light on your surroundings?

  11. LOVE NEVER DIES tells the love story of Areila’s great grandfather and great grandmother. What stories of love or loss have been passed down in your family? Please share.

  12. Frank Vincent said, “Her fingers closed around mine, warm, vibrant, alive in a way I could never have hoped or imagined. At last, at long last, I was able to step beyond the bounds of my prison and into her arms. Love had freed me.” Do you believe that love between two partners never dies, or is that simply a romantic affectation? Do you share or have hopes of sharing such a love?

  13. Do you prefer the original conclusion or the addition to the story?

  Additional Scenes from VIRTUE FALLS

  The first book in the series, VIRTUE FALLS, went into the publisher at 146,000 words. That is a very long book; my previous titles were 70,000 to 100,000 words, and my contract stated the book should be 100,000 words.

  Perhaps you think a publisher would be thrilled to receive so many words for free, but no. Too many words is a problem when a publisher is looking at the cost of paper and shipping on a hardcover. My editor and I had to cut chapters and scenes from VIRTUE FALLS. So when you were reading and thinking, "Man, this seems brief!" … It was. Read on for the extras, but please remember — if you haven't read VIRTUE FALLS, these will include spoilers!

  Here's the backcopy:

  Twenty-three years ago, in the isolated coastal town of Virtue Falls, Washington, four year old Elizabeth Banner witnessed her mother's brutal murder. Elizabeth's father was convicted of killing Misty and sentenced to prison. Elizabeth grew from a solitary child to a beautiful woman with a cool scientific mind and an instinctive distrust of love. Now Elizabeth is back in Virtue Falls, a geologist like her father, her life guided by logic and facts. But nothing can help her through the emotional chaos that follows the return of her ex-husband, Garik Jacobsen, an FBI agent on probation and tortured by the guilt of his past deeds. Nor can it help her deal with her father, now stricken with Alzheimer's and haunted by Misty's ghost. When a massive earthquake reveals long-concealed secrets, Elizabeth soon discovers her father is innocent. Is the killer still at large, stalking ever closer to the one witness to Misty's murder? To Elizabeth herself? Elizabeth and Garik investigate, stirring old dark and deadly resentments that could provoke another bloody murder-- Elizabeth's own.

  I wanted to start the introduction to Virtue Falls like this:

  The town of Virtue Falls is known for two things: the Virtue Falls resort, an elegant, early twentieth century, four-story boutique hotel and spa perching on a rocky precipice that thrusts its way into the Pacific Ocean, and the ongoing study of Pacific Rim tectonic plates and subduction zones.

  Nobody really gives a crap about the second thing except for geologists and the occasional film crew from the Discovery Channel.

  The resort is the draw, bringing in moneyed tourists — the rooms are pricy — who eat in the Virtue Falls restaurants, shop in the art galleries, take the whale-watching
tours, and generally provide income for every Virtue Falls business either through direct contact or in a trickle-down sort of way.

  But the Banner geological study provides the town with an income during the dismal winter months when no sane tourist will set foot in Virtue Falls (although there are some insane tourists who come at Christmas because they are too cheap to pay the resort’s summer rates, God bless them every one). So the locals tolerate the constant parade of scientists and their students, and shake their heads at the geologists’ barely restrained desire to witness an earthquake and tsunami so they can measure the results…

  Twenty miles offshore and twenty-five miles underground, the fault line slips. The sea floor cracks and bounds up, creating underwater cliffs, lifting the ocean water, triggering an earthquake so powerful it strikes the coast from British Columbia to the northern reaches of San Francisco bay. Above the epicenter, a massive tsunami rises like a Poseidon’s horse and races toward shore…

  This VIRTUE FALLS chapter takes place after the earthquake and was the original introduction to Bradley and Vivian Hoff. They are in Philadelphia to promote his new coffee table book and haven't heard about the earthquake in their hometown. The chapter vividly demonstrates Bradley's artistic fame, his temperament, Vivian's place in his life and the structure of their marriage. In the interest of cutting words, it was replaced with chapter twenty-one.

  “This morning, we have with us Bradley Hoff, Nature’s Artist, the most popular artist in America today.” Jessica Fine, big-hair TV personality and all-around phony, pivoted on the beige leather couch and in that practiced professional TV personality voice, she said, “Bradley, welcome to Good Morning Philadelphia.”

  The studio was set into the corner of the lobby of one of the city’s plush hotels, close to the windows that overlooked the Schuylkill River, and constructed out of partitions, lined with monitors, carpeted with cables taped with black electrical tape.

  No matter what Bradley thought of Jessica and the venue, the show was popular and would bring people in to meet him this afternoon at Wal-Mart to buy his coffee table book, and this evening to Vivian's studio to buy his paintings, and that was all that mattered. So he said, “Thank you, Jessica, I’m always glad to be back in Philadelphia. As you know, I was born and raised here, and attended art school here and in New York City, so I feel very much at home in this great city, the founding center of American freedom.”

  He could do phony with the best of them.

  Jessica knew exactly what he was up to. She liked it, too. Made her job easier. “That’s always good to hear, Bradley. You’ve completed over two hundred watercolors and a hundred oil paintings, and it’s estimated that one in every twenty-five homes in America contains a copy of one of your works.”

  “That’s right.” He could see where she was going with this. The same way every other newsperson went. “I’m very proud of the votes of approval from my American audience and from around the world.”

  “But the critics are loud in their scorn of your popularity.”

  “Isn’t that like saying that if a lot of viewers enjoy your newscast it must be bad?” He smiled when he said it, his voice cajoling.

  But she was taken aback, unprepared for a counterattack.

  He didn’t need to glance at his wife, Vivian Moorhouse, who stood off-camera, to know he had broken the golden rule of television — never piss off the personality, because the personality always had the last word.

  But he’d been on tour for three solid weeks now. He’d crisscrossed the country, sweated in Florida, shivered in the Rockies, lost his suitcase in San Francisco and made a museum appearance in yesterday’s underwear, and he had just spent the night sitting up on a train coming in from West Virginia because that was the fastest way to get here from there. He was tired, and he was fed up. So he didn’t wait for Jessica to recover, but kept talking, saying all the things he had always wanted to say. “Who am I going to believe? The critics? Or the people who love my work so much they pay out their hard-earned cash to buy and frame my work and put it on their walls? Should I listen to the art critics who mock the happiness I give my fans, or listen to the emails and letters I get that tell me about how one of my paintings was the only thing a woman took away from her divorce, because it was the one object that gave her hope, or of a grandfather’s peaceful death, looking at my painting hung on the wall of his hospital room? I get those letters, you know, by the hundreds, and I read them all.” It wasn’t quite true, although he did dip into them when he could. He loved the worship. “They are like gifts from my dearest friends.”

  Jessica smoothly recovered. “That truly is inspiring.” She came at him from a different direction. “You’re on a national tour right now, launching a new line of framed mini-prints featuring scenes from Virtue Falls, Washington while meeting your dearest friends at your own art galleries around the country.”

  “Actually, the studios are my wife’s. Before I met her, she was already a successful art gallery owner in New Orleans.” He sent a warm smile to Vivian, knowing the cameraman would cut to her and knowing, also, that she had donned make-up for exactly that reason.

  She looked good, of course. She was a tall, slender woman who wore clothes as well as any model — in her teens, she had been a fashion model in Paris. Her long, dark hair was drawn back into a sleek knot at the back of her head. Her cheekbones would have made Picasso weep for joy. In the last few years, she had withered into that hollow-eyed, gaunt look that very thin older women developed, but she was still handsome. When the two of them were paired, him with his dark hair and arresting blue eyes, they were very photogenic, and for that, they were not strangers to the society pages. “You know, Jessica,” Bradley said, “we celebrated our twenty-first wedding anniversary this year. It’s hard to believe. I still look at Vivian and see my bride.”

  What was Jessica supposed to say? She smiled with all her capped white teeth. “That’s wonderful, and so rare these days.”

  “Yes…” He glanced at the monitor where a progression of his prints paraded in a slow segue from one to another, downy blends of velvety blue skies and brash purple seas, golden warm sands and spiky green dune grass. And there, at the top of the cliff, a lone house clutched at the warm earth, and a single window glowed red with the sunset. He laughed softly, and touched his chest. “I know I’m the artist, but when I see my work displayed like that, I’m constantly amazed at how it strikes a visceral chord in me. I guess that’s why the art works as a whole for so many people — I’m painting from a place deep within my soul, and my brush is dipped in the absolute amazement of the glories which God has created.”

  “Yet the art critic André Kennard said,” — Jessica whipped out a pink index card — “‘Bradley Hoff’s work is pretty, but the experienced and judgmental eye can clearly see an uncomfortable glimpse of a genius who has chained himself to the shackles of popular art. And for what? For money? For fame? Or to hide an inner torment that gnaws away at his sanity and puts his paintings uncomfortably off-balance?’”

  Bradley wanted to say, Really, Jessica? A pink index card? How retro of you. And, André Kennard is just pissed because I slept with him and figured out right then that I liked women better.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he impatiently flicked his bangs off his forehead. “My God. That man is the biggest whiner. I mean, truly.” He looked off camera. “Vivian, grab any one of my paintings and slap it up there.”

  Prepared for this moment, his wife had moved to the laptop and halted the slide show on seemingly one random painting.

  Bradley gestured toward the monitor where the Main Street of Virtue Falls stretched into the distance, with saturated colors and soft lines. “André Kennard liked my early stuff, the crap I drew when I was young and earnest and thought real art portrays passion and suffering. I grew out of that conceited self-delusion. I wish he’d give it a try.”

  “So you don’t have any deep inner secrets that gnaw at your so
ul?” Jessica pointed a finger at her producer, and suddenly Bradley's peaceful street was gone, and in its place on the monitor was one of his first works, of his college roommate staring in bewilderment at a Dear John note written, ironically, on a pink index card.

  Bradley flushed with rage. Where had she dug that up?

  Shit. Poor Pankaj. After graduation, he’d moved back to India, but that didn’t mean anything. The guy was a successful stockbroker; he could be in Philadelphia right now, and if he was, Bradley hoped to hell he wasn’t watching TV, because no guy liked to be viewed in extremis. “Of course I have secrets. Who doesn’t?”

  “André Kennard said” — Jessica went back to the pink index card — “‘Hoff’s early paintings so expertly portrayed humans in the puzzlement of ignorance, the despair of unending labor, the loneliness of unrequited love, and all with the intense focus of a man who reveled in each emotion he painted. Yet his current landscapes are static and echo with emptiness. Where are the people? Where is the passion?’”

  “André Kennard did actually stumble on my darkest secret.” Bradley allowed his smile to fade, and leaned forward to gaze earnestly into Jessica’s big brown eyes. “In my early work, I painted people, but I was never satisfied with the quality of my work. The depth and complexity I saw in my subjects, I could never successfully transfer onto the canvas. And I won’t allow less than the best from myself. I continued to search, to experiment, to look for the medium and the subjects that I could give my whole creative self to, and I found that in my landscapes.” He sat back again. “I’m sorry André Kennard doesn’t credit me with the sense of knowing what’s right for me and for my audience, but I think we can all agree I’m not painting for him.”