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  Praise for

  Home Before Dark

  “Wiggs’s strongest and most vivid writing, a novel that bites into such loaded issues as adoption, estranged sisters, difficult teens…family secrets.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Wiggs tackles some very difficult family issues in this tightly woven tale. Cleverly uncovering secrets at the perfect pace, she draws you into the tale with each passing page, allowing her characters’ emotions and motivations to flow out of the book and into your heart.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Susan Wiggs tackles contemporary issues in the crucible of family with gutsy poignancy and adroit touches of whimsy that make for an irresistible read.”

  —BookPage

  “…filled with hope and promise and the redeeming power of the human heart.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Susan Wiggs writes with bright assurance, humor and compassion about sisters, children and the sweet and heartbreaking trials of life—about how much better it is to go through them together.”

  —Luanne Rice

  Praise for the author and her works

  “Susan Wiggs paints the details of human relationships with the finesse of a master.”

  —Jodi Picoult

  “A lovely, moving novel with an engaging heroine. Bestselling author Wiggs’s talent is reflected in her thoroughly believable characters as well as the way she recognizes the importance of family by blood or other ties. Readers who like Nora Roberts and Susan Elizabeth Phillips will enjoy [this].”

  —Library Journal, starred review on Just Breathe

  “With the ease of a master, Wiggs introduces complicated, flesh-and-blood characters into her idyllic but identifiable small-town setting, sets in motion a refreshingly honest romance, resolves old issues and even finds room for a little mystery.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review on The Winter Lodge

  “Wiggs is one of our best observers of stories of the heart. Maybe that is because she knows how to capture emotion on virtually every page of every book.”

  —Salem Statesman-Journal

  “A wonderfully written, beautiful love story with a few sharp edges and a bunch of marvelously imperfect characters… It’s sure to leave an indelible impression on even the most jaded reader.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Dockside

  “A bold, humorous and poignant romance that fulfills every woman’s dreams.”

  —Christina Dodd on Enchanted Afternoon

  “The story’s theme—the all-encompassing power of love—is timeless, and it is this theme, along with the author’s polished prose and well-rounded characters, that makes Wiggs’s story so satisfying.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review on A Summer Affair

  “A classic beauty and the beast love story that will stay in your heart long after you’ve turned the last page. The Lightkeeper is a poignant, beautiful romance.”

  —Kristin Hannah

  “Wiggs explores many aspects of grief, from guilt to anger to regret, imbuing her book with the classic would’ve/could’ve/should’ve emotions, and presenting realistic and sympathetic characters…. Another excellent title to her already-outstanding body of work.”

  —Booklist, starred review on Table for Five

  “Wiggs doesn’t flinch from detailing the difficult emotions of her characters, yet she never allows things to get maudlin. Keep tissues handy, but be equally ready to smile at the many touches of sweet, subtle humor.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Susan Wiggs is a rare talent! Boisterous, passionate, exciting! The characters leap off the page and into your heart!”

  —Literary Times

  “A human and multi-layered story exploring duty to both country and family.”

  —Nora Roberts on The Ocean Between Us

  Also by SUSAN WIGGS

  Contemporary

  HOME BEFORE DARK

  THE OCEAN BETWEEN US

  SUMMER BY THE SEA

  TABLE FOR FIVE

  LAKESIDE COTTAGE

  JUST BREATHE

  THE GOODBYE QUILT

  The Lakeshore Chronicles

  SUMMER AT WILLOW LAKE

  THE WINTER LODGE

  DOCKSIDE

  SNOWFALL AT WILLOW LAKE

  FIRESIDE

  LAKESHORE CHRISTMAS

  THE SUMMER HIDEAWAY

  MARRYING DAISY BELLAMY

  Historical

  THE LIGHTKEEPER

  THE DRIFTER

  The Tudor Rose Trilogy

  AT THE KING’S COMMAND

  THE MAIDEN’S HAND

  AT THE QUEEN’S SUMMONS

  Chicago Fire Trilogy

  THE HOSTAGE

  THE MISTRESS

  THE FIREBRAND

  Calhoun Chronicles

  THE CHARM SCHOOL

  THE HORSEMASTER’S DAUGHTER

  HALFWAY TO HEAVEN

  ENCHANTED AFTERNOON

  A SUMMER AFFAIR

  SUSAN WIGGS

  Home Before Dark

  Dedicated with all my love to Lori Ann Cross.

  Even if you weren’t my sister,

  you’d still be my best friend.

  Contents

  Part 1 Before

  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

  Part 2 After

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  READER'S GUIDE

  Part 1

  Before

  “Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and love to chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

  —Socrates (399 B.C.)

  CHAPTER 1

  That spike of panic a woman feels when the thought first hits her—I’m pregnant—is like no other. Sixteen years after that moment, its echo haunted Jessie Ryder as she drove through the Texas heat, having traveled halfway around the world to see the daughter she’d never met.

  She could still remember the terror and wonder of knowing an invisible cluster of cells had changed her life forever, in ways she could not imagine. Sixteen years and uncounted miles separated her from that day, but the distance was closing fast.

  Simon had tried to stop her—It’s madness, Jess, you can’t just go dashing off to Texas—but Simon was wrong. And this wasn’t the craziest thing she’d ever done, not by a long shot.

  For the hundredth time since flinging her belongings into a bag in an Auckland hotel room, Jessie wondered what else she could have done. There was no script for this, no instruction manual for putting the broken pieces of a life back together.

  There was only the homing instinct, the tendency o
f the wounded animal to seek safe haven. And then there was the unbearable urge, long buried but never quite forgotten, to see the child she had given away at birth to the only person on the planet she trusted—Luz, her sister.

  The front tire rippled over a line of yellow discs marking the center of the highway. Jessie’s driving days were numbered, but a stubborn streak of independence, combined with a sense of desperation, made her defiant. She slowed, checked the rearview mirror—still getting used to driving American cars, on the right side of the road—and pulled off. She was lost again.

  The glint of the sun over the jagged silhouette of the hills blinded her briefly, and she flipped down the visor. Grabbing the map, she studied the route highlighted by the counter clerk at Alamo Rent-a-Car. Southwest along the interstate to exit 135-A, State Highway 290 to Farm-to-Market Route 1486, following the little red thread of road to a place few folks had heard of and even fewer were inclined to visit.

  Jessie had followed the directions. Or had she? It was hard to tell, and it had been so long since she’d traveled these forgotten country roads. As she traced a finger over the route, a movement on the road caught her eye. An armadillo.

  She usually only encountered them as roadkill, as though they’d been born that way, with their little dinosaur feet pointed skyward. And yet here was one, waddling across her path like something out of a Steinbeck novel. An omen? A harbinger of doom? Or just another Texas speed bump? She watched the creature wander to the other side of the road and disappear into the low thicket of chaparral.

  An oncoming car crested the steep hill ahead of her. She squinted at the approaching vehicle. A pickup truck, of course. What else did you find out here? As it slowed and then stopped on the opposite shoulder, she felt a slick thrill of danger. She was completely alone, lost in the middle of Texas, miles from civilization.

  The window rolled down. Shading her eyes against the glare, she could make out only the outline of the driver—big shoulders, baseball cap—and, incongruously, a child’s safety seat on the passenger side. A fishing rod lay across the gun rack.

  “Everything all right, ma’am?” he asked. She couldn’t get a good look at his face with the sun in her eyes, but that Texas drawl somehow put her at ease, evoking faint memories of lazy days and slow, neighborly smiles.

  “I’m headed for Edenville,” she said. “But I think I’m lost.”

  “You’re almost there,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction he’d come from. “This is the right road. You just haven’t gone far enough.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem, ma’am. You take care now.” The pickup truck moved off, backfiring as it headed in the opposite direction.

  You take care now. The friendly throwaway admonition lingered as she pulled back onto the road. She fiddled with the radio, finding mostly news and tears-in-my-beer country music. At last she discovered a decent rock station out of Austin and listened to ZZ Top, turned up loud. She hoped the music might drown out her thoughts and maybe even her fears.

  Austin’s bedroom communities, with names like Saddle-brook Acres and Rockhurst Estates, were miles behind her, giving way to places with folksier appellations like Two-Dog Ranch. She passed a Texaco station with a hand-lettered sign: We Sell Gas To Anyone In A Glass Container.

  Deep in the hill country, late afternoon settled in. The dark pockets of shadows hidden within the striated sandstone hills were not to be trusted. The waddling armadillo had reminded her that, at any moment, a jackrabbit or mule deer could leap out onto the road. She would hate to hit an animal. She didn’t even want to hit a dead one, she realized, swerving to avoid a battered carcass that had not yet been desiccated into a grotesque kite of flattened skin.

  The trip felt much longer than she remembered. Of course, years back, she couldn’t wait to leave; now she couldn’t wait to get home. Soon she saw it, the weatherbeaten Welcome To Edenville sign with its faded illustration of a peach orchard. Smaller signs sprouted in the field at its feet: The Halfway Baptist Church. Home of the Fighting Serpents. Lions Club meets on the third Saturday each month.

  The tree-shaded town had the eerie familiarity of a half-remembered dream. Hunched-together storefronts lined the main square, which was organized around a blocky, century-old courthouse. Adam’s Ribs B-B-Q and Eve’s Garden Shoppe still stood side by side across from Roscoe’s Hay and Feed and an exhausted Schott’s discount outlet. Despite the addition of the Celestial Cyber Café, the place retained its midcentury, slow moving character, a town content to lag behind while time sped past like traffic on the interstate bypass.

  Right out of high school, Jessie had left for college. She’d loved Austin’s urban bustle and suburban sprawl, its population of politicians, intellectuals, Goths, Mexicans, criminals and rednecks. Now she was back in the small town filled with everything she’d left behind, whether she liked it or not.

  Despite the passage of time, she knew her way now. Five more miles along a narrow lane, past the preternaturally green Woodcreek golf course and driving range, and then a right turn onto the lake road.

  She rolled down all four windows of the car and took a deep breath. She could smell the lake before she saw it—mesquite and cedar and the cleansing scent of air blown across fresh water. One of the few cold, spring-fed lakes in Texas, Eagle Lake was bluer than autumn twilight.

  Areas of rounded rock, with hawthorn shrubs blooming in the cracks, plunged down to touch the water. The lake itself was a vast mirror with a forest fringe of the most extraordinary trees in the state. They called them the lost maples of Eagle Lake because everyone knew this particular type of tree didn’t rightly belong in Texas. Maples grew in the long, frozen sleep of winter found only in the woods up north, not the unpredictable fits and starts of brutal cold and blistering heat of the Texas hill country. And yet here they thrived, nonnatives huddled together beside a picture-book lake.

  Legends about the maples abounded. Indian lore held that they were the souls of long-dead ancestors from the North. Others claimed a settler had planted them for his Yankee bride to remind her of the New England autumns she missed so desperately. But all anybody really knew was that the trees were transplanted strangers that didn’t belong, yet managed to flourish here anyway, bursting into hectic color after a scorching summer had sucked the pigment from everything else.

  Each autumn, the maples blazed brighter than any forest fire, in colors so intense they made your eyes smart: magenta, gold, deep orange, ocher, burnt umber. For two weeks every fall, the Farm-to-Market Road was clogged with tourists who drove out to Lakeside County Park to take pictures of their kids skipping stones on the leaf-strewn water or climbing high in those God-painted branches.

  As Jessie drew nearer to her destination, she tried to remember when the foliage reached its peak. Early November, she recalled. Homecoming season.

  CHAPTER 2

  The road surface changed to a jolting bed of caliche and crushed rock. Jessie clutched the steering wheel hard and concentrated. She had talked the Alamo guy into renting her the Ford Fiesta based on an International Driver’s License. She’d convinced herself that, once she cleared the bustle and sprawl of Austin’s tangled highways and headed out on the open country roads, she was a danger only to herself and the occasional hapless armadillo. A reckless impulse had compelled her to make this trip, and driving a car was one of many independent options she was about to give up. But not yet. Besides, she was almost there. A flurry of nerves stirred in her gut. She had come to fill a need as deep as Eagle Lake, yet she was terrified of reopening wounds she had inflicted long ago.

  She counted the hills to the old place on the lake: one, two and three gentle rises on a slow-motion roller coaster. At the turnoff, she flexed her hands on the steering wheel, drew a nervous breath redolent of hill country dust and slowly moved forward, entering the property through the gate beside a huge, cloven monolith of sandstone. Affixed to it was an old wrought-iron sign: Broken Rock. As the story went, her grandad h
ad built the place before there was a road leading to it, and he always told folks to turn at the broken rock. The name stuck and was now used to designate the old place on the lake.

  The property had been handed down to Jessie’s father, a remote and polite gentleman who had signed it over to her mother in the divorce settlement nearly three decades earlier. Glenny Ryder had kept only a few things from that first marriage. Her name—it was already engraved on a number of golf trophies—the lake property and her two daughters.

  Jessie’s childhood was like a colorful dream, filled with glaring sunlight, emerald fairways and long swift trips on the open highway, the world speeding by through the distorted rectangle of a car window. The soundtrack of that childhood consisted of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Cat Stevens and James Taylor, crooning from the car radio between ads for Noxema and charcoal-filter Tarrytons.

  After their daddy left, Jessie got the back seat of the 1964 Rambler all to herself, so she couldn’t say she was all that sorry to see him go. Luz had cried and cried, but Jessie didn’t remember crying. She just remembered the endless road.

  Their lives were defined by their mother’s tour schedule. When they stayed in a motel, there was always a king and a cot. Glenny took the cot and put Luz and Jessie in the bed. To this day, sleeping with Luz, knowing she was there in the bed next to her, was one of Jessie’s most vivid memories.

  After the divorce, Glenny had treated the lake house and outbuildings like a way station while she chased prizes that never lasted or brought her what she sought. Too many years and three husbands later, she had won only a handful of major titles. But she always did just well enough to stay on the tour, just well enough to pay her expenses, just well enough to keep her gone.