Playing Dead
Authors: Julia Heaberlin
PLAYING DEAD
“I loved
Playing Dead
from cover to cover—it pulled me in and wouldn’t let me go until I finished in the wee morning hours. Best fiction I’ve read in a very, very long time.”
—T
AYLOR
S
TEVENS
,
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Innocent
“A compelling family mystery that kept me turning the pages. Highly recommended.”
—M
ARGARET
M
ARON
,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Three-Day Town
“Absolutely gripping! Julia Heaberlin’s
Playing Dead
whirls the reader from the open spaces of rural Texas to the crowded Chicago streets, as the stakes grow ever higher and the truth ever more elusive. I couldn’t put down this compelling novel of a life turned inside out in a world where no one is what they seem. More, please!”
—V
ICKI
L
ANE
, author of
Under the Skin
“Once I began reading
Playing Dead
, I couldn’t put it down. Heaberlin’s voice is pitch-perfect, and her story of one woman’s fierce struggle to reconcile her past with her present is gripping and powerful. An outstanding debut.”
—C
ARLA
B
UCKLEY
, author of
Invisible
“Julia Heaberlin’s
Playing Dead
is a wonderfully suspenseful debut. Heroine Tommie McCloud is scrappy and sassy, with a heart as big as her home state of Texas.”
—H
EATHER
G
UDENKAUF
,
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Weight of Silence
“I loved it, and had to put everything aside so that I could finish it. What a great, fast-paced action thriller, and, even better, written from a woman’s point of view. I was transported to Texas and Tommie’s world of cowgirl boots and junk food, and didn’t really want to come back. The uncovering of hidden family secrets and mysteriously disappearing girls is skillfully handled, and kept me guessing and rooting for Tommie all the way through.”
—J
ULIA
C
ROUCH
, author of
Cuckoo
“A terrific debut … Like the chicken fried steak that its characters love,
Playing Dead
combines Texas and noir in unexpectedly wonderful ways, with a refreshingly real heroine and a plot that moves and twists with the unpredictability of a rodeo bull.”
—S
USANNA
K
EARSLEY
, author of
The Rose Garden
Playing Dead
is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events; to real people, living or dead; or to real locales are intended only to give the fiction a setting in historical reality. Other names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Books eBook Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Julia Heaberlin
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
B
ALLANTINE
and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heaberlin, Julia.
Playing dead: a novel of suspense / Julia Heaberlin.
p. cm.
“A Ballantine Books trade paperback original”—T.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52702-8
1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.E224P58 2012
813′.6—dc23 2011035915
Cover photograph: © Kent Mathews/Stone/Getty Images
v3.1
CHAPTER 1
D
espite its name, Ponder, Texas, pop. 1,101, isn’t a very good place to think. Four months out of the year, it’s too damn hot to think.
It
is
a good place to get lost. That’s what my mother did thirty-two years ago. The fact that she successfully hid this from almost everyone who loved her makes her a pretty good liar. I’m not sure what it says about me.
When I was a little girl, my grandmother would tell my fortune to keep me still. I vividly remember one August day when the red line on the back porch thermometer crept up to 108. Sweat dribbled down the backs of my knees, a thin cotton sundress pressed wet against my back. My legs swung back and forth under the kitchen table, too short to reach the floor. Granny snapped beans in a soothing rhythm. I stared at a tall glass pitcher of iced tea that floated with mint leaves and quarter moons of lemon, wishing I could jump in. Granny promised a storm coming from Oklahoma would cool things off by dinner. The fan kept blowing the cards off the table and I kept slapping them down, giggling.
The fortune is long forgotten, but I can still hear the anguished joy of my mother playing a Bach concerto in the background.
Two years later, on the worst day of my life, what I remember most is being cold. Granny and I stood in a darkened funeral parlor, the window air conditioner blowing up goose bumps on my arms. Cracks of September sunlight tried to push in around the shades. It was at least ninety degrees outside, but I wanted my winter coat. I wanted to lie down and never wake up. Granny gripped my hand tighter, as if she could hear my thoughts. Merle Haggard blared from a passing pickup truck and faded away. I could hear my mother crying from another room.
That’s how I remember Mama—present but absent.
I’m not like that. People know when I’m around.
I’ve been told that I have a strange name for a girl, that I’m nosy, that I’m too delicate to carry a gun. The first two are true.
I’ve been told that it’s weird to love both Johnny Cash and Vivaldi, that I’m way too white for a Texan and too skinny for a fast-food junkie, that my hair is long and straight enough to hang a cat, that I look more like a New York City ballet dancer than a former champion roper. (In Texas,
New York City
is never a complimentary adjective.)
I’ve been told that my sister, Sadie, and I shouldn’t have beaten up Jimmy Walker in fifth grade because he is still whining about it to a therapist.
I’ve been told that growing up in Ponder must have been an idyllic childhood, picket fence and all. I tell those people I’m more familiar with barbed wire and have the scars on my belly to prove it.
I learned early that nothing is what it seems. The nice butcher at the Piggly Wiggly who saved bones for our dogs beat his wife. The homecoming queen’s little sister was really the daughter she had in seventh grade. That’s the way life was.
In a place like Ponder, everyone knew your secrets. At least, that’s what I thought before. I never pictured my mother, the legendary
pianist of the First Baptist Church of Ponder, as a woman with something to hide. I never dreamed that opening a stranger’s letter would be pulling a loose thread that would unravel everything. That, one day, I’d scrutinize every memory for the truth.
The letter is five days old and I have read it forty-two times. It is pink and smells like the perfume of a woman I don’t know. It arrived on a Wednesday, right to Daddy’s office, sandwiched between a plea from Doctors Without Borders and a brochure on a new exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum.
Daddy’s secretary, Melva, a former teacher and widow on the upside of her sixties, picked the envelope out of the stack as something I needed to see. Personal, she said. Not spit out by a computer. A sympathy card, perhaps, because that was one of the few things people still felt obligated to write by hand.
When I opened it and read the careful feminine scrawl, I felt the earth shift. The tremor started low, in my toes, and worked its way up, although I can’t say why the letter had such an instant effect on me.
The odds were that the woman who wrote this was a scam artist. Or simply had the wrong girl. The wrong Tommie McCloud, spelled with an
ie
.
Each of the forty-two times I read the letter, I wanted to hop in my pickup and go home to Mama, even though Mama isn’t there and home is now an empty ranch house with faded flowered sheets covering the furniture like an indoor meadow.