Chapter 1 : Part 3

Passing Through Paradise
by Susan Wiggs

(Page 3 of 3)

The big house had been in her father's family for generations, built more than a century ago as a summer retreat. Ever since, the old place had sat abandoned and neglected, like a bleached skull at the edge of nowhere. Although the house wasn't insulated for winter visitors, Sandra had no choice but to live here now.

At least she had a roof over her head. But her husband was dead and no matter what the truth was, everyone blamed her. She held secrets in her heart that she would take to the grave.

Staring out the rain-lashed window again, she tried not to feel the cold drilling into her bones. The storm had pummeled the dead tangles of brier in the field beside her house. On the beach, the wrack line lay thick with whatever flotsam the waves had driven home. A delicate rime of frost silvered everything - the dunes, the rocks, the windows of the house she couldn't afford to heat.

Heat. This was getting ridiculous.

She put on a heavy plaid coat, stuffed her feet into gumboots and headed outside. The rain had slacked off, but the wind blew sharply across the property. As she crossed the driveway toward the garage and shed, a flutter of paper at the side of the road caught her eye.

When the rumors had started, she used to find the occasional roll of toilet paper hurled from a car, draping the overgrown hedge by her mailbox. She ought to be used to the humiliation by now, but she wasn't.

Hers was a typical rural mailbox, poking out from a hedge of wild roses - nothing special, not even marked with a name. Just the house number.

The small metal box lay torn to bits in the ditch beside the road. The crooked red signal flag lay in the middle of the pavement, pointing south. The galvanized steel housing had been reduced to twisted wreckage - a plane crash in miniature.

"My God," Sandra said through chattering teeth. "Now what?"

Firecrackers; probably some local kid's cherry bomb or M-80. Why hadn't she heard them? Maybe last night's storm had drowned out the noise, or perhaps she'd mistaken the sound for a car backfiring.

Driven by the bitter wind, the mail rolled and tumbled along the ditch and roadside. She recognized the cover of a lingerie catalog she never ordered from, a sheaf of oil-change coupons she would forget to use until they expired, and the daily credit card solicitation. Even when the whole world was against you, the credit card companies still wanted you to shop.

Kicking the debris around with the toe of her boot, she recognized a telltale scrap of pale blue and picked it up. The paper was the color of a check from her literary agency. Sure enough, there had been a check in the box.

When Victor was alive, her modest earnings had been a rather gratifying bonus. Now that he was gone, the money meant survival.

She suspected the vandals didn't give a rat's ass about her survival. People still thought she was the Black Widow.

Sandra crushed the paper in her hand. Enough. She'd had enough. Something cracked inside her and slowly broke apart like an iceberg shoving up against a rock.

Enough.

At the lean-to by the garage, she glared at the stack of fat, seasoned logs. Flinging the torn check aside, she grabbed the maul from its hook, used her foot to roll a log onto the colorless grass and set it upright. She brought the blade of the maul down squarely into the heart of the log, splitting it apart. The pith of the wood was pale, slightly moist, fragrant with a clean scent. Setting up each broken half, she split them one after another, a little surprised by her deadly accuracy with the maul. Finally she picked up each split quarter and tossed it into the rusty wheelbarrow to take back to the house.

She moved on to the next log, and then the next, whaling away with a sense of purpose as hot and clean as new fire. She had no notion of time passing, though the stack of quartered firewood in the wheelbarrow grew steadily. She was like a machine, pulling out a log, splitting it, splitting it again until sweat mingled with the tears pouring down her face.

Copyright © 2002 by Susan Wiggs

About the Author

Susan Wiggs is the author of the bestselling historical romance novels The Mistress, The Hostage, and The Horsemaster's Daughter. She won the Romantic Times career achievement award and the Romance Writers of America's RITA Award for best historical romance. A dramatic departure from her critically acclaimed and highly popular previous novels, THE YOU I NEVER KNEW is her first full-length work of contemporary fiction. A Harvard graduate and former schoolteacher, she lives on an island in Puget Sound with her husband and daughter.