Vicki Lane - The Day of Small Things: A Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF VICKI LANE

IN A DARK SEASON

A Romantic Times Best Mystery and Suspense Novels of 2008 Pick

Anthony Nominee for Best Paperback Original

The precise details and many mysteries are all skillfully drawn together at the end, and the main characters are clearly developed, complicated people who have lives outside the mystery. Elizabeth Goodweather is a perfect protagonist who shows that there can be intelligence and romance after 50.

Romantic Times

Vicki Lane is a born storyteller in the finest tradition of Sharyn McCrumb. Lanes best yet, In a Dark Season , is a haunting, lyrical tale of the Appalachians, as heartbreaking as it is magical. Brooding, suspenseful, and superbly written, Lanes Marshall County mysteries rank among the best regional fiction anywhere today.

J ULIA S PENCER -F LEMING

Suspenseful, atmospheric, and beautifully written.

S ARAH G RAVES

Lane craftily deepens the swiftly moving plot with liberal sprinklings of Carolina folklore.

Publishers Weekly

OLD WOUNDS

Lane is very adept at creating complex, multi-faceted stories that move effortlessly from one time period to another and characters with incredible depth. She is also a master of using sensory details to make locale come alive. Old Wounds exemplifies these talents. Readers weary of reading too many mysteries featuring frothy amateur sleuths wont find a better antidote than Old Wounds!

Mystery News

Vicki Lane is quite simply the best storyteller there is. Her books, like her Appalachian home, have everything: mystery, suspense, beauty, heart, and soul.

J OHN R AMSEY M ILLER

A story so exquisitely written and perfectly paced, you will not want to put this book down. Old Wounds is a powerful and very personal mystery for the thoughtful Elizabeth Goodweather to solve.

J ACKIE L YNN

ARTS BLOOD

Lanes sharp eye for detail gets put to good use in this second installment of her Appalachian series. The widow Good weather is a wonderful character: plucky, hip and wise. The dialogue sparkles with authenticity, and Lane generates suspense without sacrificing the charm and mystique of her mountain community.

Publishers Weekly

Lane mixes the gentle craft of old-time quilting with the violence of a slaughtered innocent.

Greensboro News & Record

Lane is a master at creating authentic details while building suspense.

Asheville Citizen-Times

SIGNS IN THE BLOOD

Vicki Lane shows us an exotic and colorful picture of Appalachia from an outsiders perspectivethrough a glass darkly. It is a well-crafted, suspenseful tale of the bygone era before Florida came to the mountains.

S HARYN M C C RUMB

Signs in the Blood turns the beauty of the Appalachian hills and a widows herb and flower farm into the backdrop for modern menace. This clash of the traditional and the modern makes for an all-nighter of satisfying suspense.

Mystery Lovers Bookshop News

For readers familiar with the sound and feel of mountain life, this book rings with a resonance that is true to the life it describes. For everyone else, this book opens a peephole into a world both hauntingly strange and achingly beautiful. Regional mystery lovers, take note. A new heroine has come to town and her arrival is a time for rejoicing.

Rapid River Magazine

Also by Vicki Lane

In a Dark Season

Old Wounds

Arts Blood

Signs in the Blood

The Day of Small Things is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

A Dell Mass Market Original

Copyright 2010 by Vicki Lane

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Dell, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D ELL is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33971-7

www.bantamdell.com

v3.1

To Kate Miciak,
who wanted to let me spread my wings
and, so doing, let Birdie spread hers.

And, as always, to John.

Acknowledgments

First of all I must thank Karol Kavaya and Madelon Heatherington, members of my former critique group, who wouldnt let me kill off Miss Birdie back in the first book. Who knew how many readers (including my editor) would love this woman so much?

For all whove asked, Miss Birdie is not based on anyone Ive ever known but is a composite, enhanced with a very generous dose of my own imagination. In this connection, I have to note, with sorrow, the passing of two of my friends and neighbors: Mearl Davis and Grace Henderson, two strong mountain women and great ladies who shared some DNA with Miss Birdie.

Thanks go also to Kathy Hendricks, who told me a story of a mother and a daughter that gave me an idea. Judith Arnn-Knight pointed me to useful websites. Nancy Meadows loaned me the diaries of her aunts Inez and Odessa, and their names as well; Tammy Powell shared some old-time names and ways. Thanks to Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolinas poet laureate, whose work is a continuing inspiration; to Mary Pat Franklin, who answered questions; and to Calvin Edney, who told me about the hatpin lady. (Sadly, there really was one.)

Thanks to Ann Collette, my wonderful agent, who always cheers me up when I begin to have doubts about my alleged career; to Deb Dwyer, the sharp-eyed copy editor who catches my mistakes and leaves lovely comments in the margins of the manuscript; and to Randall Klein, who has dealt kindly with my unusual additions to this book.

And to all the readers who send me supportive e-mails, and especially to the readers of my newsletter and (almost) daily blog, who have lived and suffered through the long, long birthing of this book: You all have kept me going through some dark moments. I hope you enjoy Miss Birdies story.

(And now, on to the next book and the resolution of that cliff-hanger.)

Contents

PART I

Least

Dark Holler, 19221938

Chapter 1

A Birth

Dark Holler, 1922

O n the evening of the third day of labor, the womans screams filled the little cabin, escaping through the open door to tangle themselves in the dark hemlocks that mourned and drooped above the house. The weary midwife, returning from a visit to the privy, winced as a series of desperate shrieks tore through the still air of the lonely mountain clearing.

Pausing to readjust her loose dress and collect her strength for the battle ahead, she glanced up at the brooding trees and shook her head. Seems like all them cries and moans is going straight up into them old low-hanging boughsjust roosting there like so many crows. And the pain and grief, itll linger on and on till every wind that stirsll be like to bring it backmiseries circling round the house again, beating at the air with their ugly black wings.