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Caroline Masters
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Caroline Masters Mass market paperbound - 2000

by Richard North Patterson


From the publisher

Richard North Patterson studied fiction writing with Jesse Hill Ford at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has written eleven novels, including the international bestsellers Dark Lady, Eyes of a Child, Degree of Guilt, Silent Witness, No Safe Place, and the upcoming Protect and Defend. Patterson lives with his wife, Laurie, and their family in San Francisco and on Martha's Vineyard.

First line

Two days after the murder, listening to Brett Allen's tale of innocence and confusion, the lawyer wavered between disbelief and wonder at its richness, so vivid that she could almost picture it as truth.

Details

  • Title Caroline Masters
  • Author Richard North Patterson
  • Binding Mass Market Paperbound
  • Edition REPRINT
  • Pages 512
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Ballantine Books, Westminster, Maryland, U.S.A.
  • Date November 28, 2000
  • ISBN 9780345444929 / 0345444922
  • Weight 0.54 lbs (0.24 kg)
  • Dimensions 7.08 x 4.22 x 1.15 in (17.98 x 10.72 x 2.92 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Mystery fiction, Legal stories
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 00109894
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

Excerpt

ONE

Two days after the murder, listening to Brett Allen's tale of
innocence and confusion, the lawyer wavered between disbelief and wonder
at its richness, so vivid that she could almost picture it as truth.
The lawyer looked at Brett in silence, taking in the oval face, the
delicate cleft chin, the curly ungroomed hair, the small breasts and
almost too slim body of a late bloomer who, at first glance, looked
younger than twenty-two. But what struck her was the bright greenness of
the eyes, a gaze so intuitive and direct that it unnerved her.

As Brett described it, the night had been crisp, windless. Moonlight
refracted on the still, obsidian waters of the lake and traced the pines
and birches and elms surrounding it.

The only sound Brett heard was the rise and fall of James's breathing.
They were naked. Brett straddled him, as she had when making love. The
cool night chilled her nipples, dried the wetness on her skin. As she
shivered, James, flaccid and unconscious, slid from inside her.
She felt a spurt of anger. And then the nausea returned, mingling the
acrid taste of marijuana with the torpor of too much wine. All at once,
the night burst into shards-images without connection, freeze-frames of
color amidst a black jumble she could not remember.

That explained how she had acted with the police, she told her lawyer-pot
and wine, shock and paranoia. Dope was really James's thing. As Brett said
this, her lawyer saw a sheen of tears, as if the young woman had
remembered some fond detail. For days after, as the lawyer grew to believe
that Brett Allen was a murderer, the moment haunted her.

Before the dope, Brett told her, her memory was sound.

James had called her parents' home, where she was staying for the summer.
They had talked a little; then, fearing that her mother might listen in,
Brett had suggested that they go to the lake, take some cheese and wine.
She had a favorite place, and they would be alone.

Whatever James had to say, she sensed, should not be heard by others.
Brett made her excuses. She saw the tight look in her mother's thin face,
the cool gray eyes filling with things
she did not say. For a moment, Brett was torn between pity and the desire
to confront her, and then she decided that this was pointless. She left
the house, its dark mass looming behind her.

She drove to the college for James. In the car, he was quiet, intent. His
face was a study in black and white-pale skin, dark ringlets of hair,
shadows on his sculpted face. One of his acting teachers, with mingled
derision and admiration, had once called him "Young Lord Byron." The
teacher, Brett pointedly recalled, was a woman.

They drove winding roads, wooded and silent, saw occasional headlights
cutting the silver darkness, then the steady glow of a lone car behind
them, traveling neither slower nor faster. Abruptly, they turned down a
dirt road, hacked so narrow between looming pines that it was pitch black.
The car lights behind them passed the trailhead, and vanished.
Hitting the brights, Brett slowed to a crawl, following the headlights as
they carved a path between the rough-barked trunks of trees.

Then the path ended.

Brett stopped there. Silent, she opened the trunk of her battered black
Jeep, took out the gym bag with the wine and cheese, then tucked a rough
woolen blanket under her arm. James followed her into the trees.

*    *    *

Suddenly, there was no sky.

They edged through trunks and branches down a gradually sloping hill, feet
sliding on the hardened ground, the result of two dry weeks after a rainy
spring. A branch lashed at her face; in the darkness, Brett felt
diminished, like some primitive amidst the mysteries of nature.

"Where are we going?" James murmured behind her. "To play Dungeons and
Dragons?"

Why was it, Brett wondered, that people whisper in the darkness? She did
not answer.

And then they reached the clearing.

A glade of grass, opening to a moonlit lake. She stopped there, looking
out.

Behind her, James was quiet again.
"This is yours?" he said at last.
Can you leave this? she felt him ask. But she answered only the question
he spoke aloud.

"Yes," she said simply. "It's mine. If I still want it."

She did not mean the lake. It was a mile across and nearly that wide; on
the far shore were a few fishing camps and summer houses, unseen in the
darkness. But since her birth her family had held the parcel where they
stood for Brett. It was a fact as certain as her grandfather's love.
Brett gazed out at the water, postponing by her stillness the moment when
they would begin to talk.

She could sense, rather than see, the platform where she had first learned
to dive. Yet she could have swum there as surely as in daylight. Just as
she could remember standing on the rocky inlet between the glade and the
water, holding aloft the rainbow trout, speckled in the sunlight, so that
her grandfather could see it.

Turning to James, Brett put down the gym bag and held out the wool blanket
so that he could help her spread it on the glade. Laying it down, she
could feel the dampness of the grass.

They settled onto the blanket, Brett sitting cross-legged, James lying on
his side, head propped on one hand. Woods surrounded them on three sides;
in front of them was the smooth black sheen of water. Far across the lake,
Brett heard the faint cry of a heron. They were utterly alone.

"What is it?" she asked him.

James brushed the hair back from his forehead. Brett knew this as a
temporizing gesture, a sign of hesitancy.

"I want us to go to California," he said at length.

Her voice was level. "I know that."

"I mean soon."

It was hard to read his face. But beneath the casual pose, so
characteristic of James, Brett felt his anxiety.

"Why soon?"

He was quiet for a time. But in their year together, Brett had learned the
uses of silence. She waited.

"That dope I sold," James said finally. "I never paid for it."

Brett despised James's business. They had fought about it for two months:
James was adamant that this was the way for him-left without money or
family to speak of-to pay his way through what he had sardonically labeled
the "poison ivy league." It was, he promised, temporary.

"Never paid for it . . . ," Brett repeated in a flat voice. "I didn't know
your friends gave credit."

"I need the money. We need the money. To leave here." James's voice rose.

"Sure as hell your family won't give you any. Not for that."

"Why should they?"

"No reason to." His tone softened. "It's just that I had to do
something-start a life."

He was trying to make her complicit, Brett knew. "Without asking me?" she
shot back. "You're supposed to do what you want, and I'm just supposed to
react to it?"

James sat up now, facing her. "I owe a little over thirty-five hundred."
He leaned forward in entreaty. "I made almost forty-three selling the
stuff. Enough to drive to the Coast and still have first and last months'
rent."

Media reviews

"Compelling . . . Very possibly Patterson's best."
--USA Today

"DAZZLING . . . THE PAGES ALMOST SEEM TO TURN THEMSELVES. . . . The plot culminates in a classic courtroom confrontation."
--San Francisco Chronicle

About the author

Richard North Patterson studied fiction writing with Jesse Hill Ford at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has written eleven novels, including the international bestsellers Dark Lady, Eyes of a Child, Degree of Guilt, Silent Witness, No Safe Place, and the upcoming Protect and Defend. Patterson lives with his wife, Laurie, and their family in San Francisco and on Martha's Vineyard.
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Caroline Masters

Caroline Masters

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Caroline Masters

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