One Night Gone Read online

  It was the perfect place to disappear...

  One sultry summer, Maureen Haddaway arrives in the wealthy town of Opal Beach to start her life anew—to achieve her destiny. There, she finds herself lured by the promise of friendship, love, starry skies and wild parties. But Maureen’s new life just might be too good to be true, and before the summer is up, she vanishes.

  Decades later, when Allison Simpson is offered the opportunity to house-sit in Opal Beach during the off-season, it seems like the perfect chance to begin fresh after a messy divorce. But when she becomes drawn in to the mysterious disappearance of a girl thirty years before, Allison realizes the gorgeous homes of Opal Beach hide dark secrets. And the truth of that long-ago summer is not even the most shocking part of all...

  Advance Praise for One Night Gone

  “One Night Gone’s strength lies in its all-pervading sense of precariousness: everything is fragile, unstable and under threat, from Maureen’s prized freedom and Allison’s hard-won recovery to the intricate framework of relationships and hierarchies that underpins life in the small seaside town. It makes for a subtly but relentlessly unsettling book.”

  —TANA FRENCH, author of The Witch Elm

  “A heart-wrenching and suspenseful novel of betrayal and revenge. A stunning debut!”

  —CAROL GOODMAN, Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning author of The Night Visitors

  “Allison is a recently fired television meteorologist who becomes entangled in an affluent beach town’s missing-girl cold case. Featuring a brilliantly executed dual timeline with two unforgettable narrators, Tara Laskowski’s One Night Gone is a timely and timeless mystery, one that will keep you obsessively reading well past your bedtime.”

  —PAUL TREMBLAY, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts

  “Absolutely gripping. This multi-layered and gorgeously structured tale of betrayal, murder, and redemption will haunt you long after the book is over. The talented Tara Laskowski, with her confident hand, beautifully drawn characters and unique style, is sure to be a major voice in crime fiction.”

  —HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN, bestselling and award-winning author of Trust Me

  “There is so much to love in Tara Laskowski’s One Night Gone that I don’t even know where to start. At its core, it’s a mystery, and a perfectly paced, well-plotted one at that. But it’s also a beautifully lyrical coming-of-age story that depicts the socioeconomic divide of small beach town life, with all the 1980s flavor to go with it. Laskowski is a truly gifted storyteller with that ‘X-factor’ you look for—but rarely find—in a debut author. Spectacular.”

  —JENNIFER HILLIER, author of Jar of Hearts

  “With evocative prose, One Night Gone feels like a journey through a sinister hall of mirrors, bringing to life the off-season menace of a beachfront refuge for the wealthy, still haunted by the disappearance of a teenaged girl thirty years ago.”

  —HALLIE EPHRON, New York Times bestselling author of Careful What You Wish For

  Tara Laskowski is the Agatha Award–winning author of two short story collections, Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons and Bystanders, which was named a Best Book of 2017 by The Guardian. She is the editor of the online flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly and is a member of Sisters in Crime. A graduate of Susquehanna University and George Mason University, Tara grew up in Pennsylvania and lives in Virginia. One Night Gone is her first novel. Find her on Twitter, @TaraLWrites.

  TaraLaskowski.com

  One Night Gone

  A NOVEL

  Tara Laskowski

  For Mom

  Contents

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  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

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  READER'S GUIDE

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  The little mermaid kissed his hand, and felt as if her heart were already broken. His wedding morning would bring death to her, and she would change into the foam of the sea.

  —“The Little Mermaid,” Hans Christian Andersen

  PROLOGUE

  Opal Beach

  Summer 1986

  The girl tried not to look up into the hazy summer night, the seagulls circling overhead like giant paper airplanes. They made her dizzy. She focused on the horizon, the dark ocean churning, its vastness broken up by milky froths.

  Thomas, the guy from the party, was pressed up against her, his thighs tight against hers. She could feel the heat in her cheeks, but at least it was cooler here at the end of the pier, away from the lights and sounds, from the constant pop pop pop bling bling of the arcade games and the deafening roar of the Zipper, a ride she’d thrown up on last year and then sworn her friends to secrecy.

  Thomas dipped her back over the railing—not too far, but enough that she felt the danger, felt that if he just shifted his large hand an inch or so off her back she’d fall, tumble like a tragic mistake. He laughed, pulling her back, his dewy breath catching in her hair.

  “Stop it,” she said, batting at him, though she wasn’t sure she meant it.

  She liked him. She liked the way he made her feel—important. Funny. Sexy. At the party, he’d said he was from the cornfields of Indiana, a state—she would never tell him—that she wouldn’t be able to point out on a map. He was tall like a cornstalk, she thought, and let that bubble up into a giggle on her lips as he swayed into her again and kissed it away.

  Their friends were on the other side of the pier, drinking beer they’d poured into empty soda cans, chattering away and tossing a Frisbee. The guys flicked the disk so fast and low that she was afraid it was going to soar over the edge of the pier.

  It was as if they were all in a delicious dream that might never end, a pause on life, a stop-freeze on a late-summer moment where everything still felt good. Right. Forever.

  And this guy. This cornstalk Thomas, with white-blond hair curled by the salty air. His arms long and warm and his breath in her hair and his tongue filling her mouth and oh. She was drunk, that was for sure. That had been their mission, all of her friends. One week before college. Get wasted. Let your hair down. Wasn’t that what everyone came here for?

  She closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, a fluttering on the nearby post caught
her attention. It was a piece of paper, tattered, clinging by one small piece of remaining tape. The wind slammed it back flat across the post, and she saw a girl’s face, black-and-white, the word Missing scrawled across the top.

  “Thomas,” she said low, trying to push him off her. “Thomas. Look.”

  She couldn’t quite make out the girl’s name, printed in small type below her photo, but the girl’s face—well, her eyes stared right at her, it seemed. Smiling shyly. A yearbook photo, perhaps. Remember me always forever.

  The paper fluttered again, a pathetic flag rippling, weak.

  “Someone’s missing,” she said. She tore her gaze away as Thomas untangled himself from her neck. He was smiling at her, his teeth so white. She pointed to the poster and he reached out and steadied it for her. Now she could read it. The girl had gone missing the summer before. How long had this paper been hanging here? She straightened her thin bra strap. She could be any of us. She could be me.

  “No reward, though,” he said, tapping the poster with a thick finger. Behind them, one of the guys hooted, and a peal of laughter echoed in the night. Thomas crinkled his nose. “How do they expect anyone to care without a reward?”

  The girl’s eyes widened. Surely he was joking, this guy who just earlier, at a crowded party, had shamefacedly admitted he didn’t know how to swim. Who had seemed so crushed she was leaving in only a few days to go home.

  “Oh, come on,” he whispered, burying his face in her neck. “No time for being sad. Not now.”

  “Maybe she was already found,” she said, more to herself than him.

  Thomas muttered what sounded like a yes in her ear. His fingers snaked into her shorts and she wondered how far they would go tonight. And where.

  Another gust of wind, and the missing poster freed itself from the post, whipped around the pier for an instant and butterflied into the darkness. The girl watched as it flitted to the ocean, wavered on the choppy surface. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the paper had disappeared.

  1

  ALLISON

  September 2015

  You’ll feel like a new woman.

  That’s what Annie said. The perfect opportunity to reinvent myself.

  Annie was raving excitedly, brushing her hair away from her face as we sat outside on the patio of Chez Monsieur, a name that sounded way fancier than the actual restaurant. Perhaps that was why I was skeptical of her enthusiasm—I was uncomfortable, distracted by the sucking sound that came each time I pulled my forearms off the sticky plastic tablecloth. And that loaded term: new woman. Was Annie suggesting that I was damaged?

  Perhaps I was skeptical of everything. Nothing worked out to be perfect. There was no perfect, no happy-ever-after. No happy ever, it seemed.

  Still, my younger sister was almost the only thing I had left, so I nodded, sipping my water from a filmy glass with only a few chips of ice still withstanding the late-summer Philadelphia sun.

  “The off-season at the beach,” she said wistfully, staring off into our very un-beach-like surroundings as a taxi driver honked his horn and tossed a select finger at another driver trying to back into a space on the narrow street. “It’s a great opportunity to relax, recoup—recover.” She smiled reassuringly. “And the house—oh, Allison. It’s divine. You won’t even believe it.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes at my sister’s undying optimism. “And I’m sure these heavenly people are just going to hand me over the keys, right? Without even checking up on my...background?” I asked.

  A large cumulus cloud whipped over the sun, dimming the patio and turning the strong wind cold. An omen, my mom would say, but I quickly dismissed it.

  “No, no, no.” Annie leaned forward, and I caught my reflection in her large lenses—a hunched-over, thin waif of a person with hair too long for forty. Ever since I’d gone off-air I’d let it grow past my shoulders, though vainly I still dyed it every five weeks. I could never stand the gray roots.

  I sat up straighter, adjusted my chair. Annie was still going. “Like I said, my friend Sharon knows the couple really well. And the town—she grew up right near there. I can vouch for you, no problem. They want someone they can trust—not just someone off the street. Oh, Ally. It’s so perfect for you. A chance to get away from...from all this.”

  I thought about making a snide comment along the lines of, you mean get me out of your apartment, but that would’ve made her feel self-conscious about Mike, and I didn’t want her to feel guilty for having a stable relationship. So instead I said, “Do you think I could really ever get away from any of it?” Because, contrary to what Annie believed, despite the protests she was now making at my negativity, I didn’t need to become a new woman—I needed to get back to the old me. The me I was before. Before it all crashed.

  Yet in spite of my sarcasm and doubt, already, already the idea was beginning to appeal. An oceanfront home, rent-free for the winter. The couple had just bought the place last year, but the wife’s job was unexpectedly calling her abroad and they didn’t want the house to be vacant for that many months. But they also didn’t want to bother with the mess of renting the place out—distrustful of random strangers trooping in and out of their home week after week. All those horror stories you heard about people renting their homes through Airbnb on the internet—

  “Do they use Google?” I asked, half joking.

  Annie just shook her head at me. “Allison, please don’t.”

  “YouTube? I’m just being practical.”

  “You just need to see this house,” she said, ignoring my comment.

  My sister had a talent for ignoring subjects she didn’t want to discuss. It came as part of her nurse package—cute kitten-adorned scrubs, a cheery sing-song voice and a no-nonsense attitude for dealing with grumbly, pessimistic patients. The best medicine is a positive attitude, she always said, and I mostly admired it, though sometimes I wanted to do what one of her patients once did—dump a filled bedpan on her. She put up with a lot, but she always did it with a smile.

  “Four bedrooms, a back deck, a sunroom overlooking the ocean. You could use the time to relax. Or you know, figure out your next steps. The beach is a great place to study weather, right?” Annie snaked her hand across the table to squeeze mine, but I picked up my water glass and watched her pull her hand back. “Besides, you’re doing much better.”

  “Well, according to everyone else, that bar is pretty low, isn’t it?”

  Annie ignored that, too. She knew where this conversation was headed. It was a relief, really. I didn’t want to talk about Duke anymore either—the same ground over and over again.

  “Just think about it, okay? We’ll take a look tonight—they’ve got pictures. We have to act fast, though, because someone’s going to snatch this up, I just know it. It’s like a dream come true.”

  * * *

  It turned out that Annie wasn’t exaggerating. Divine was a good word for Patty and John Worthington’s beach house. Cozy, but also lavish. The place looked like it had morphed out of an issue of Architectural Digest. Wooden siding on the outside, cute A-frames. On the inside, an open living room with a ceiling that stretched to the top floor. A sunroom off the back with views of the ocean and a second-floor back deck with sun chairs.

  “Built in 1986,” the online ad read. The house had an opulent charm, and I immediately fell in love. It was exactly what I needed. A chance to get away. A place of beauty to run to.

  “See? I told you.” Annie squeezed my arm, shaking me until I broke into a grin. She squealed like she used to when we were kids and pressed snails or earthworms we’d found near the neighbor’s pond into each other’s palms. Or later, as teenagers, when we’d slip into each other’s beds after a night out and whisper secrets about the guys we’d met, the way their clove cigarettes had smelled, sweet and smoky, the way their hands had nestled onto the smalls of our backs. Annie
would giggle, her face pressed into her pillow, then sit up, hair streaming around her, eyes gleaming in the moonlight with all the possibility. We’d always been each other’s ears, there to absorb both the delights and the horrors. So when Duke betrayed me, Annie was the one to help me pick up the pieces.

  Annie kissed the top of my head and jumped up from the couch. “I’m going to call Sharon.”

  I sat back and closed my sister’s laptop, staring up at the ceiling of her little apartment in Manayunk. My home for the last nine months.

  This was not where I was supposed to be. This was not in any of the New Year’s resolutions I’d sketched out each year in my leather-bound planners. I was supposed to be in Annapolis, living in a large, single-family home not far from the water, giving the morning weather report on WDLT Annapolis with a beaming smile and a jaunty flair, married to Dennis “Duke” Shetland. I was supposed to be finding tile to remodel our kitchen, planning a trip to Greece, fighting with my mother about not having kids. In other words, turning forty with a husband, house, job and friends—like everyone else I knew.

  Instead I had regular appointments with a divorce attorney, sleeping pills, antidepressants, jaw pain and a tiny bedroom my little sister let me crash in while I sorted out my life. Instead, for the first time in my adult life, my compass was twirling around and around, unable to find direction.

  Maybe the house was the solution. A chance to prove I was just fine, to show everyone—including myself—that I was no longer the Allison-puddle-toxic-hot-mess that I had been for the past year. In a new space, I could get perspective. Annie’s apartment had its charm—with her stacks of dog-eared paperback books, colorful afghans over every chair, cross-stitch framed inspirational quotes posted slightly askew in the halls (You can’t see the sunshine with your eyes closed!)—but it was nowhere close to the breathing room I’d have in a three-story house right on the coast.