Little Comfort Read online

  LITTLE COMFORT

  EDWIN HILL

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  APRIL

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Edwin Hill

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2018932852

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-1590-6

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: September 2018

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1591-3

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-1591-8

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: September 2018

  To Betty and Jack, always and forever

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Anyone who’s written a novel, especially a first novel, knows that a lot of people need to give you a chance for the work to see the light of day. There have been so many people who have taken a chance on me throughout my life, too many to mention in this space, but here are a few.

  To Rhonda Bollinger, Ellen Gandt, and Jonelle Calon, for seeing something special in a habitual wanderer and leading me toward a career that changed my life. To Carolyn Merrill for teaching me how to be make tough decisions. To Joan Feinberg and Denise Wydra for showing me that the quality and attention to detail trump all else. And to Simon Allen, Susan Winslow, Ken Michaels, and John Sargent for taking me places I never, ever imagined I could go.

  To all my advance readers who took a chance on a very unfinished work and saved me from myself: Kate Flora, Philomena Feighan, Mary Finch, Mike Harvkey, Martha Koster, Patricia Mulcahy, Stephen Parolini (The Novel Doctor), Anne Shaughnessy, and Ellen Thibault.

  To Katherine Bates and her trusty assistant NBS for their expertise in social media. To the real Sam Blaine (and her partners-in-crime, Nancy and Kate), may you spend every day chasing rabbits. And to Thomas Bollinger, for his unparalleled skills with the camera.

  To my parents, who took a chance on me starting on day one and never let up, and to Christine and Chester, who continue to cheer me on. To all the Rowells and the Hills, to the Starr family for welcoming me into the fold, and to Edith Ann, who continues to like my first drafts enough to eat them.

  Little Comfort may never have been noticed had my fantastic agent Robert Guinsler not taken a chance on me when I struck up a conversation with him at the Muse and the Marketplace conference in Boston. Robert stuck with me long enough to find editor extraordinaire John Scognamiglio and the team at Kensington: Steve Zacharius, Lynn Cully, Vida Engstrand, Lou Malcangi, Tracy Marx, Robin Cook, and everyone else behind the scenes, and I couldn’t ask for a better publishing team.

  To my partner Michael, who took a big chance many years ago, and who never once scoffed when I told him I wanted to be a writer, and then shut myself away nearly every weekend for three straight years while I tried to prove it. He read through drivel, corrected hundreds of typos, and helped me focus on making this story the best it could be.

  And finally to you, readers, who took a chance on a first time author. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Thank you.

  Be in touch at edwin-hill.com.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  All Hester Thursby wanted was a single day to herself, and today was going to be that day—even if it killed her. She left the baby monitor on the nightstand next to her snoring non-husband, Morgan, and slipped out of the house with Waffles on the leash. Okay, maybe she glanced into Kate’s bedroom to be sure her three-year-old niece was still alive; maybe she crept up to the queen-size bed where the tiny girl slept within a protective barricade of stuffed animals. And maybe Hester felt a wave of relief when Kate rubbed her nose with a fist and rolled over. Kate had been staying with them since September, and no matter how much Hester wanted to keep the kid from cramping her style, she still hadn’t adjusted to worrying about another human being all day and every day. “We’re making this up as we go along, kid,” she whispered, kissing Kate’s forehead.

  Outside was quiet and dark in the way only a frigid morning in December could be. Today was Morgan’s day to watch Kate—the first free time Hester had had in nearly three months. She took the dog straight to Block 11 in Somerville’s Union Square, where she ordered the biggest cup of coffee available and a scone to split with the basset hound. She added cream and seven sugars to the coffee. At the park, she let Waffles off the leash to have at it with the other dogs and then planned her day. Maybe she’d hit the Brattle Theater for that George Romero series, or wander the streets of Cambridge, or drink till she was drunk. Maybe she’d do all three.

  “You’re off somewhere.”

  Hester glanced up at Prachi—O’Keefe the greyhound’s “mom”—who loomed over her (though even some ten-year-olds loomed over Hester). As always, Prachi, who was a partner in a corporate law firm, looked relaxed, with her cocoa-colored skin and the well-rested eyes of the child free.

  “Just daydreaming,” Hester said.

  “We missed you last night,” Prachi said.

  Prachi and her partner, Jane, threw an early-winter party each year, one where guests spilled into every room and the air smelled of curry instead of cloves. It was an event Hester looked forward to, but the party hadn’t started till eight, which had meant nine, well after Kate’s bedtime.

  “Finding a babysitter on a Friday in December is next to impossible,” Hester said. “Who knew?”

  “Darling, you can still hit the town,” Prachi said. “It’s not like you died. We all love Kate.”

  “I’m learning how to do this as I go along. Turns out there’s no manual on raising someone else’s kid.”

  “Any word from Daphne?”

  “Nada,” Hester said.

  Daphne was Kate’s mother and Morgan’s twin sister. She was also Hester’s best friend. Hester had known her since college, long before Daphne had introduced her to Morgan. Three months earlier, in September, Daphne had skipped town while Hester and Morgan had been out to dinner with Prachi and Jane. The four of them had come home, drunk and ready for a nightcap, only to find Kate asleep with a note beside her. On it, Daphne had written in block letters: Back in an hour. Tops.

  They hadn’t heard from her since.

  Hester wasn’t surprised—Daphne had a history of disappearing for long stretches and then showing up unannounced as though she’d gone to the gym for an hour—but Hester still worried about her friend, and the kid thing upped the stakes, to say th
e least. She didn’t have kids of her own, and that was by choice.

  She called to Waffles. As usual, the basset had found something far too fragrant to bother coming. “I should see what she got into,” she said to Prachi. “I’ll catch you tomorrow.”

  At the house, Hester heard Kate say, “No,” her not-so-new favorite word, and she opened the door in time to see a plastic bowl of Cheerios skid across the kitchen floor. Morgan was on the phone, his red morning hair still sticking straight up. He was handsome in a kind way, with freckles that merged into each other and green eyes that matched his sister’s. He went to the gym, but without conviction. He mouthed “please” as he handed over a piping-hot bowl of oatmeal. Ever since Kate had moved into the house, Morgan had proven himself to be hapless at childcare. He gave Kate orange soda for breakfast and let her run wild in the park while he yammered on his cell phone. And whenever Hester tried to bring up Daphne, to talk about what was happening to them, he acted like leaving a three-year-old alone in an apartment while you skip town was normal behavior for a parent. But then Morgan and Daphne always watched out for each other, no matter what the behavior. They were twins in every way.

  Hester let the leash drop so that Waffles could do the majority of the cereal cleanup, and then lifted Kate from her high chair while the kid shouted, “Kate hate Cheerios!” even though some days she ate only Cheerios. Hester chased her through the living room, around the dining table, into Morgan’s office, up the stairs, through each of their bedrooms, and down the stairs, till she finally caught Kate, lifted her up, tickled her, strapped her into the chair, and poured another bowl of cereal, which Kate ate like she hadn’t been fed in a week.

  “Never,” Hester said, as she mussed Kate’s curly hair. “I will never understand the logic of being three years old. Not in one million years.”

  “Not in one million years,” Kate aped.

  Morgan hung up the phone. “That was the emergency animal hospital in Porter Square.”

  Though Morgan had his own veterinary practice, once Kate had moved in with them—and her preschool bills had begun showing up—he’d started taking spare shifts whenever he could.

  “They need someone last-minute.”

  Hester smiled at Kate and then waved Morgan to the other side of the apartment. “Are you shitting me?” she whispered.

  Morgan smiled in a way that usually got him what he wanted, but all Hester could see was a spot of fury that had taken the place of the day on her own.

  “Sorry, Mrs.,” he said

  A part of her understood, the part that knew they needed the money. But most of her wanted to scream. Plus, she hated it when he called her “Mrs.” “You owe me,” she said. “Big time.”

  Morgan kissed her cheek, put his coat on, and whistled for Waffles to come with him. Soon Hester heard him back his truck out of the driveway. “You’re stuck with me today, kid,” she said, though now Kate was only interested in her stuffed monkey, Monkey, dancing the toy across her lap and saying, “Monkey One Hundred Forty Silly Pants eating bananas,” which sounded like “Mokah anhendrd farty sesty pints tang banants.” Hester couldn’t believe she understood anything the kid said. It was a secret language that only she, Kate, and Monkey spoke. In truth, Hester couldn’t believe any of this was happening. But it was.

  She sat at the counter and tapped a finger on the granite. The long, unstructured day stretched in front of her. One of the mothers at day care had asked to schedule a playdate only yesterday, and Hester had answered evasively, still unable to commit, still wondering whether Daphne would stroll through the door at any moment expecting things to go back to normal. What was normal, anyway? She pulled up the Brattle Theater schedule on her phone and wondered momentarily if Kate could sit through Night of the Living Dead without getting too scared.

  She really was a shit parent.

  Her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number with a New Hampshire area code but picked up anyway.

  “I heard that you find people,” a woman said. “That you’re discreet.”

  Hester ran a little side business finding random strangers, a business she’d begun more than fifteen years earlier when she’d been working toward a master’s in library science. At the time, the library provided access to information unavailable to the average person, and Hester had managed to reunite all different types, from long-lost prom dates to birth parents with their children. Eventually the Web gave most people the tools they needed to find their own missing connections, and she’d assumed the business would go the way of the corner video store. It turned out, though, that there were always people who chose to live quiet lives off the grid, to keep to themselves, and to stay away from technology.

  She dumped her uneaten oatmeal into the garbage disposal. “I can be discreet,” she said. Whenever she got one of these queries, she listened to the tenor of the voice on the other end of the phone. It was surprising how many people could give off crazy in a few disembodied sentences.

  “I’m in the city today,” the woman said. “Can we meet?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lila Blaine.”

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “My brother Sam. He’s been missing for twelve years.”

  *

  “Pink poodle!” Kate said.

  She and Hester were on the bus headed from Union Square toward Cambridge talking about what Santa might bring for the holiday. They’d already gone skating in the morning, and to the Boston Aquarium that afternoon, where Hester had made the rookie parenting mistake of telling Kate that sharks ate people. Kate had pressed her hand to the glass as a shark swam by and then pulled it away with a shriek. “Shark eat people!” she’d said.

  “Don’t tell your uncle Morgan,” Hester had said. “You’ll get me in trouble.”

  Now they were on their way to Harvard Square to meet Lila Blaine.

  “Do you mean a poodle with pink clothes or a poodle with pink fur?” Hester asked. Kate kicked the seat in front of her and said, “PINK FUR” in two piercingly short notes.

  “Inside voice,” Hester said.

  Had those words really come from her own mouth? The things she said these days in the name of friendship! She’d met Daphne nearly two decades earlier at Wellesley, where Daphne had taught self-defense for Women’s Safety Week. On the first day of the course, right in front of a dozen other women, Daphne pinned Hester to the ground with her knee, shouting, “Size doesn’t matter. Fight!”

  Daphne was a solid field hockey player, much bigger and stronger than Hester, but Hester kicked anyway. She squirmed. She twisted. Or at least she tried to. She heard one of the women in the course giggle while most of them cheered her on.

  “Survive!” Daphne shouted. “Use your strengths. Be smart. The only thing you think about is how to stay alive.”

  And Hester relaxed. She grew even smaller than she already was. She pulled into herself. She felt the pressure from Daphne’s knee release the slightest bit. She twisted away. Her elbow shot from her side. She felt a crack and a crunch and then a thick warmth, and Daphne stumbled back with her hands covering her face as blood streamed from her broken nose.

  “I’m so sorry,” Hester said.

  “Sorry?” Daphne said. “Fuck sorry. That’s how you stay alive.”

  Daphne was used to fighting. For anything and everything. She and Morgan came from a family of ten children. They’d grown up in South Boston, where, by all accounts, nearly everything but other bodies had been scarce. They’d watched out for each other, though, in ways that Hester, who’d spent a lifetime watching out for herself, couldn’t comprehend, and they’d both succeeded by their own wits, Daphne getting into Wellesley on a field hockey scholarship and Morgan going to UMass. By the time Hester met her in college, Daphne had morphed into a leather chick who quoted Adrienne Rich and called NPR too conservative. On most Saturday nights, she roped Hester into riding the Fuck Truck to MIT frat parties and then disappeared into the upstairs bedrooms.
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  After graduation, Daphne and Hester rented an apartment in Alston. That’s when Hester met Morgan. Like Hester, Morgan loved his sister more than anyone, and ignored that she moved rapidly from one job to the next, always leaving on explosively bad terms. They both made excuses for Daphne’s dangerous boyfriends, and when her experiments with drugs veered away from dabbling. But then Kate came along, and everything changed. And things kept changing—the dynamic in their relationships, their priorities, Hester’s own outlook—and she suspected that those changes, and all the tensions that came with them, had only just begun.

  *

  The bus pulled into Harvard Square. Hester worked as a librarian at Harvard’s Widener Library, though she’d taken a leave of absence in September when Kate had come to live with them. She’d be back at work come spring semester, and a part of her couldn’t wait for that routine, but for now she took Kate’s hand as they hurried through the cold, across Winthrop Square to Grendel’s Den, a bohemian pub located a few blocks from the bus stop. She grabbed a table with a clear view of the doorway, pulling out a coloring book, a My Little Pony, and a box of crayons.

  “Aunt Hester is meeting a friend in a few minutes,” she said to Kate. “Do you think you can be quiet while we talk?”

  “Kate quiet!” Kate said in a voice that was anything but.

  A very young and very tattooed waitress stopped by. “Sam Adams,” Hester said as she unzipped Kate’s coat.

  “ID?” the waitress asked.

  Hester slid her license across the table.

  “Is this for real? You look about twelve.”