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DYING BREATH by Wendy Corsi Staub
On Sale: May 1st
Paperback
416 pages
ISBN-10: 1420101315
ISBN-13: 9781420101317
It's summer on the Jersey Shore. Children play on the beach. Husbands are off working in the city. And the surf echoes in the night. Here in this perfect place, a serial killer has no worries in the world --- except choosing the next victim.
Cam Hastings has come to Long Beach Island with her teenage daughter and the hope that maybe she can save her failed marriage. Cam has never stopped loving her husband Mike, nor has she been able to outrun her flaws and demons --- a vanished mother, a lost sister, and the ugly visions she has of missing children. Now, Cam is about to step over the edge. For once, she will act on one of her visions --- and then face the consequences. For a killer has just struck again. And for Cam, and the people she loves most, fear has come home for good.
Wendy Corsi Staub is the author of ten novels of suspense, including the New York Times bestsellers DON'T SCREAM, MOST LIKELY TO DIE, THE FINAL VICTIM, and SHE LOVES ME NOT. She is currently working on her next suspense novel. She lives with her husband and two children outside New York City. Readers can visit her website at www.wendycorsistaub.com.
DYING BREATH by Wendy Corsi Staub is here just in time for the 2008 beach season. Having said that, it should come with a warning label, or a reminder every 10 pages or so, to turn over to avoid sunburn. This riveting novel is arguably the best to date from her extensive bibliography.
The Jersey shores are synonymous with summer for millions of people on the East Coast, and Staub’s choice of Long Beach Island (LBI) as the primary setting for the book is perfect as domestic difficulties intersect with a series of horrific child disappearances. Cam Hastings is at the turbulent heart of DYING BREATH. Hastings is the daughter of a once-legendary rock band drummer and a mother who abruptly left the family when Hastings was a child. Now the mother of a teenage daughter named Tess, Hastings is having her own difficulties.
In addition to dealing with her daughter’s cusp of adolescent rites of passage, Hastings and her husband have abruptly separated for a number of vague reasons, not the least of which is her tendency to emotionally withdraw and abuse alcohol. At the heart of her problems, however, are the visions of missing children that have plagued her for the balance of her life. Hastings has kept notebooks full of her handwritten descriptions, even as she simultaneously attempted to drown the visions in alcohol. At the same time, she has kept these visions secret from all, even her husband, as she fears they are indicative of some sort of mental illness.
Hastings has almost succeeded in burying her apparent hallucinations when a number of occurrences take place that abruptly bring them back to the forefront of her attention. She discovers that she’s pregnant, the result of an auld lang syne with her husband shortly before their separation. She stops drinking to protect her unborn child, a commendable action that unfortunately brings her visions of children in danger back to the forefront. Trying to keep her pregnancy a secret from both her daughter and estranged husband, yet wishing at least to maintain the appearance of normalcy for Tess, Hastings and her daughter take their usual family summer vacation to their cottage in Beach Haven on LBI --- though this one is sans husband --- and attempt to go through the motions.
But this summer is going to be markedly different. Hastings quickly makes the acquaintance of other single mothers and manages, against the odds, to maintain sobriety. Her visions of children in dire straits, however, become even more vivid, even as they begin going missing from the LBI area. The disappearances result in local law enforcement bringing Lucinda Sloan to Beach Haven. Sloan is an investigator who has shown an uncanny (read psychic) ability to solve missing children cases. When Hastings, tormented by her visions, finally contacts the police, she and Sloan are quick to recognize their common and shared ability, which is less a blessing and more of a curse. When the visions of both women indicate that it is Tess who will be in danger, their unofficial collaboration takes a new turn, one that plays out to a climax that is as absorbing as it is frightening.
Once you pick up DYING BREATH, don’t even think about doing anything else other than reading. Staub keeps Hastings’s domestic difficulties interesting but they are not overwhelming, and the shadowy presence of the child abductor lurks within the pages even as metaphoric sharks haunt the waters of LBI just below the ocean’s surface. And even if you guess the identity of the monster who prowls the Jersey shores --- and why --- you’ll still read the last 100 pages peering through your fingers. It’s that intense. Oh, and don’t think that Staub is done with Hastings. A preview of DYING LIGHT, a sequel scheduled for release in 2009, is included at the end of this addicting work. Jump on this series now, and plan your summer early.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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Prologue
New York City
January
It always begins with the dizziness.
In her office high above East Forty-Sixth Street, Camden Hastings is editing yet another inane fashion article, "Not Your Grandmother's Belts and Brooches," when the words begin to swim on the page.
Lightheaded, she looks up warily. The desk lamp is glaring; the small room distorted and tilting at an impossible angle.
Oh, no.
She braces herself.
Here it comes.
It's been awhile --- a month, maybe more --- since the last episode.
Sometimes after that much time has passed, she actually allows herself to relax a little. She'll lower her guard, wanting to believe she's free and clear; that she'll never have to deal with the unsettling visions again.
But they always come back.
Cam's fingers involuntarily release her pencil. It rolls off the desk onto the floor. Ignoring it, she rolls her chair back slightly, just enough to rest her elbows on her lap and lower her face into her hands to stop the spinning sensation.
She can hear her heart beating, hear her own rhythmic respiration...then someone else's.
Inhale...
Exhale...
Inhale...
Cam's head is filled with the sound of erratic, shallow breathing, in some kind of bizarre syncopation with her own.
"Please, you have to let me go."
The thin, uneven pitch of the voice is typical of male adolescence, but she can't see the speaker yet. Can't see anything at all; her eyes are tightly closed against her palms and her mental screen remains dark.
"Why are you doing this? Who are you?" she hears the boy ask brokenly.
He's so afraid, she senses, so terribly afraid, it's all he can do to just stay conscious, keep breathing...
Inhale...
Exhale...
Cam's own lungs seem to constrict with the effort.
But that's crazy. You can breathe. You know he's only in your head, like the others.
All of them --- all the characters she alone can see and hear --- are figments of an exceptionally vivid imagination Cam's English teachers liked to call "a gift," back when she was in school.
Ha. A gift?
Hardly.
But then, her teachers didn't know about the strange visions she's endured for as long as she can remember. If they knew, they might have understood that a vivid imagination can be --- more than anything else --- a curse.
They'd have suggested a shrink for her, instead of creative writing courses. Because that's what you do when you hallucinate on a regular basis, right? You see a psychiatrist.
That's what her sister Ava did at college, well over twenty years ago.
But no one in Cam's world ever realized that she had stumbled across the truth about beautiful, brunette Ava. About her mental illness. For all she knows, Pop never even knew about Ava's troubles in the first place.
In any case, no one in her life has ever suspected that Cam is aware she might have more in common with her older sister than an uncanny physical resemblance. She might also have the genetic potential to go stark raving mad, just as Ava so obviously did over twenty years ago.
Why else would a person --- perched twelve stories in the air --- take a head-first dive to the ground?
You don't kill yourself just because your mother abandoned you when you were a teenager, or because your college course load is overwhelming... do you?
Okay, some people might. But Cam found her sister's diary years ago. She's suspected, ever since, what was going on with her. She's come to believe the voices in Ava's head told her to jump.
Funny, though --- the voices in Cam's aren't anything like that.
For one thing, they're invariably laced with fear. Terror, even. They never speak directly to Cam; they're always addressing someone else, some shadowy person who intends to hurt them.
And most of the time, those voices belong to mere children.
Cam knows that because she can usually conjure their faces if she focuses hard enough.
Funny...even though she's the one who dreams up these tortured characters in the first place, she can never quite anticipate what they're going to look like, or whether she'll even get to see them at all.
For instance, this boy today, the frightened boy with the cracking voice, sounds like he's going to be small, and pale.
But when he begins to take shape in Cam's mind's eye, he's older than she expected. Dark-skinned, too --- Hispanic, maybe, or Native American. He has a mop of curly dark hair and big brown eyes.
He's huddled in a confined space --- she can see carpet, and metal, and a small recessed light, as if...
Yes, it's a car trunk. It's open. Broad daylight. Dappled, fluid shade spills in, as if trees are gently stirring overhead.
Then a human shadow looms over the boy; someone is standing there, looking down at him.
Cam's heart races, her throat gags on the boy's panic.
Calm down, she tells herself --- and him. Even though he's not real. Even though he exists only in her head.
Is he wearing some sort of uniform? Boy Scouts, maybe? Khaki shirt, badges and pins. A kerchief is tied around his neck. On his sleeve, a couple of sewn-on numbers, but Cam can't make them out.
Which doesn't make sense because she's the one who made him up --- so she should know which numbers he's wearing, shouldn't she? She should know his name, and his age, and, dammit, she should be able to make him stop sounding so helpless.
But no. He's crying now. Crying and cowering in the car trunk, his elbows bent on either side of his face, his hands clutching the back of his head.
Cam can't bear to see him like that, can't bear to listen to the unnatural, keening sound.
Stop, she commands her over-imaginative, gifted brain, lifting her head and shaking it back and forth. Stop doing this to me.
Mercifully, the boy's voice gradually grows fainter. The image begins to fade.
Cam breathes deeply to calm herself.
There. That's better.
She sits up in her chair.
Sips some tepid tea from the mug on her desk.
Slowly, her breathing returns to normal.
That was a bad one.
They usually are. Bad like a nightmare that grips you when you're having it...
And end when you wake up.
But lately, the hallucinations stay with her. She doesn't forget them the way you would a nightmare. They seem more real than ever before. Why?
Who knows? It's hard enough for Cam to believe she's capable of creating such emotional drama out of thin air --- let alone comprehend how and why she does it.
Lord knows she's got enough to worry about without her mind being cluttered by imaginary people in trouble.
Her promotion from Associate Editor to Editor is on hold until the next fiscal year begins. Mike's been laid off for almost a month. They're running out of money.
That's real stress.
That's what she should be worrying about.
Not daydreaming, or hallucinating, or whatever one would call the unsettling visions that pop up in her head.
Maybe I should go see someone about them, she thinks --- same as always, whenever she comes out of one of these episodes.
Then --- no. No way, she tells herself --- same, too, as always.
She can't go see a shrink. They can't afford it, and anyway, what would Mike do if he realized he were married to a crazy person?
Probably the same thing Pop did, all those years ago:
Make himself scarce.
I can't lose Mike. I need him. I love him.
She can barely remember her parents' married era. Not that Ike and Brenda Neary had ever divorced --- though they often spoke the word.
Spoke? Ha. Screamed it.
Back then, they still lived in Camden, a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia and Mom's hometown, for which she named her second daughter. Obsessed with glamorous old Hollywood and lingering girlhood dreams of becoming an actress, Brenda had named her firstborn after her favorite movie star, Ava Gardner.
The irony: the real Ava Gardner lived a long, gilded life. A different brand of irony: once thriving Camden, New Jersey has steadily deteriorated into poverty, urban blight and staggering crime rates, notoriously dubbed the "most dangerous city in America."
Cam dimly recalls her mother's face, her voice, her tears. Not much more than that, though. On rare occasions her father was around, there were arguments and accusations --- usually ending with her mother hysterical and Pop slamming the door behind him as he left.
Then came the day that her mother was the one who left --- for good. Cam was three years old; Ava a college freshman at NYU. When Ava arrived at their small Camden apartment, summoned in the crisis, she gently told her little sister that they'd never see their mother again.
Pop protested.
But as it turned out, Ava was right.
"Don't worry, baby girl," Pop reassured Cam that night, holding her close as she sobbed. "I'll take care of you. Lean on me. You can trust me."
"But you always have to leave."
"Not anymore. I never will. Never again. I promise. Not unless I take you with me."
That was what he did.
And she leaned on him. Trusted him.
Yet in all those years the two of them spent together on the road, or down the shore, or in between gigs --- somehow, she never found the nerve to tell Pop about the visions.
Nor can she bring herself to tell her husband.
Or, God forbid, her friends or coworkers.
Cam wonders sometimes if she might have eventually confided in her big sister. But she never had the chance.
Ava's "tragic accident," as everyone chose to call it --- her "falling" to her death at NYU's Bobst Library--happened less than a year after Mom left.
As for Cam, she has no choice but to deal, silently and alone, with her hallucinations whenever they strike, reassuring herself that she has no reason to fear something that only exists in her imagination.
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