ISBN: 9781335180926
Publication Date: 5/18/2021
Publisher: HQN Books
Kathleen is eighty years old. After she has a run-in with an intruder, her daughter wants her to move into a residential home. But she’s not having any of it. What she craves—what she needs—is adventure.
Liza is drowning in the daily stress of family life. The last thing she needs is her mother jetting off on a wild holiday, making Liza long for a solo summer of her own.
Martha is having a quarter-life crisis. Unemployed, unloved and uninspired, she just can’t get her life together. But she knows something has to change.
When Martha sees Kathleen’s advertisement for a driver and companion to share an epic road trip across America with, she decides this job might be the answer to her prayers. She's not the world's best driver, but anything has to be better than living with her parents. And traveling with a stranger? No problem. Anyway, how much trouble can one eighty-year-old woman be?
As these women embark on the journey of a lifetime, they all discover it's never too late to start over…
1
Kathleen
It was the cup of milk that saved her. That and the salty
bacon she’d fried for her supper many hours earlier, which had left her mouth
dry.
If she hadn’t been thirsty—if she’d still been upstairs,
sleeping on the ridiculously expensive mattress that had been her eightieth
birthday gift to herself—she wouldn’t have been alerted to danger.
As it was, she’d been standing in front of the fridge, the
milk carton in one hand and the cup in the other, when she’d heard a loud
thump. The noise was out of place here in the leafy darkness of the English
countryside, where the only sounds should have been the hoot of an owl and the
occasional bleat of a sheep.
She put the glass down and turned her head, trying to locate
the sound. The back door. Had she forgotten to lock it again?
The moon sent a ghostly gleam across the kitchen and she was
grateful she hadn’t felt the need to turn the light on. That gave her some
advantage, surely?
She put the milk back and closed the fridge door quietly,
sure now that she was not alone in the house.
Moments earlier she’d been asleep. Not deeply asleep—that
rarely happened these days—but drifting along on a tide of dreams. If someone
had told her younger self that she’d still be dreaming and enjoying her
adventures when she was eighty she would have been less afraid of aging. And it
was impossible to forget that she was aging.
People said she was wonderful for her age, but most of the
time she didn’t feel wonderful. The answers to her beloved crosswords floated
just out of range. Names and faces refused to align at the right moment. She
struggled to remember what she’d done the day before, although if she took
herself back twenty years or more her mind was clear. And then there were the
physical changes—her eyesight and hearing were still good, thankfully, but her
joints hurt and her bones ached. Bending to feed the cat was a challenge.
Climbing the stairs required more effort than she would have liked and was
always undertaken with one hand on the rail just in case.
She’d never been the sort to live in a just in case sort
of way.
Her daughter, Liza, wanted her to wear an alarm. One of
those medical alert systems, with a button you could press in an emergency, but
Kathleen refused. In her youth she’d traveled the world, before it was remotely
fashionable to do so. She’d sacrificed safety for adventure without a second
thought. Most days now she felt like a different person.
Losing friends didn’t help. One by one they fell by the
wayside, taking with them shared memories of the past. A small part of her
vanished with each loss. It had taken decades for her to understand that
loneliness wasn’t a lack of people in your life, but a lack of people who knew
and understood you.
She fought fiercely to retain some version of her old
self—which was why she’d resisted Liza’s pleas that she remove the rug from the
living room floor, stop using a step ladder to retrieve books from the highest
shelves and leave a light on at night. Each compromise was another layer shaved
from her independence, and losing her independence was her biggest fear.
Kathleen had always been the rebel in the family, and she
was still the rebel—although she wasn’t sure that rebels were supposed to have
shaking hands and a pounding heart.
She heard the sound of heavy footsteps. Someone was
searching the house. For what, exactly? What treasures did they hope to find?
And why weren’t they trying to at least disguise their presence?
Having resolutely ignored all suggestions that she might be
vulnerable, she was now forced to acknowledge the possibility. Perhaps she
shouldn’t have been so stubborn. How long would it have taken from pressing the
alert button to the cavalry arriving?
In reality, the cavalry was Finn Cool, who lived three
fields away. Finn was a musician, and he’d bought the property precisely
because there were no immediate neighbors. His antics caused mutterings in the
village. He had rowdy parties late into the night, attended by glamorous people
from London who terrorized the locals by driving their flashy sports cars too
fast down the narrow lanes. Someone had started a petition in the post office
to ban the parties. There had been talk of drugs, and half-naked women, and it
had all sounded like so much fun that Kathleen had been tempted to invite
herself over. Rather that than a dull women’s group, where you were expected to
bake and knit and swap recipes for banana bread.
Finn would be of no use to her in this moment of crisis. In
all probability he’d either be in his studio, wearing headphones, or he’d be
drunk. Either way, he wasn’t going to hear a cry for help.
Calling the police would mean walking through the kitchen
and across the hall to the living room, where the phone was kept and she didn’t
want to reveal her presence. Her family had bought her a mobile phone, but it
was still in its box, unused. Her adventurous spirit didn’t extend to
technology. She didn’t like the idea of a nameless faceless person tracking her
every move.
There was another thump, louder this time, and Kathleen
pressed her hand to her chest. She could feel the rapid pounding of her heart.
At least it was still working. She should probably be grateful for that.
When she’d complained about wanting a little more adventure,
this wasn’t what she’d had in mind. What could she do? She had no button to
press, no phone with which to call for help, so she was going to have to handle
this herself.
She could already hear Liza’s voice in her head: Mum, I
warned you!
If she survived, she’d never hear the last of it.
Fear was replaced by anger. Because of this intruder she’d
be branded Old and Vulnerable and forced to spend the rest of her days in a
single room with minders who would cut up her food, speak in overly loud voices
and help her to the bathroom. Life as she knew it would be over.
That was not going to happen.
She’d rather die at the hands of an intruder. At least her
obituary would be interesting.
Better still, she would stay alive and prove herself capable
of independent living.
She glanced quickly around the kitchen for a suitable weapon
and spied the heavy black skillet she’d used to fry the bacon earlier.
She lifted it silently, gripping the handle tightly as she
walked to the door that led from the kitchen to the hall. The tiles were cool
under her feet—which, fortunately, were bare. No sound. Nothing to give her
away. She had the advantage.
She could do this. Hadn’t she once fought off a
mugger in the backstreets of Paris? True, she’d been a great deal younger then,
but this time she had the advantage of surprise.
How many of them were there?
More than one would give her trouble.
Was it a professional job? Surely no professional would be
this loud and clumsy. If it was kids hoping to steal her TV, they were in for a
disappointment. Her grandchildren had been trying to persuade her to buy a
“smart” TV, but why would she need such a thing? She was perfectly happy with
the IQ of her current machine, thank you very much. Technology already made her
feel foolish most of the time. She didn’t need it to be any smarter than it
already was.
Perhaps they wouldn’t come into the kitchen. She could stay
hidden away until they’d taken what they wanted and left.
They’d never know she was here.
They’d—
A floorboard squeaked close by. There wasn’t a crack or a
creak in this house that she didn’t know. Someone was right outside the door.
Her knees turned liquid.
Oh Kathleen, Kathleen.
She closed both hands tightly round the handle of the
skillet.
Why hadn’t she gone to self-defense classes instead of
senior yoga? What use was the downward dog when what you needed was a guard
dog?
A shadow moved into the room, and without allowing herself
to think about what she was about to do she lifted the skillet and brought it
down hard, the force of the blow driven by the weight of the object as much as
her own strength. There was a thud and a vibration as it connected with his
head.
“I’m so sorry—I mean—” Why was she apologizing? Ridiculous!
The man threw up an arm as he fell, a reflex action, and the
movement sent the skillet back into Kathleen’s own head. Pain almost blinded
her and she prepared herself to end her days right here, thus giving her
daughter the opportunity to be right, when there was a loud thump and the man
crumpled to the floor. There was a crack as his head hit the tiles.
Kathleen froze. Was that it, or was he suddenly going to
spring to his feet and murder her?
No. Against all odds, she was still standing while her
prowler lay inert at her feet. The smell of alcohol rose, and Kathleen wrinkled
her nose.
Drunk.
Her heart was racing so fast she was worried that any moment
now it might trip over itself and give up.
She held tightly to the skillet.
Did he have an accomplice?
She held her breath, braced for someone else to come racing
through the door to investigate the noise, but there was only silence.
Gingerly she stepped toward the door and poked her head into
the hall. It was empty.
It seemed the man had been alone.
Finally she risked a look at him.
He was lying still at her feet, big, bulky and dressed all
in black. The mud on the edges of his trousers suggested he’d come across the
fields at the back of the house. She couldn’t make out his features because
he’d landed face-first, but blood oozed from a wound on his head and darkened
her kitchen floor.
Feeling a little dizzy, Kathleen pressed her hand to her
throbbing head.
What now? Was one supposed to administer first aid when one
was the cause of the injury? Was that helpful or hypocritical? Or was he past
first aid and every other type of aid?
She nudged his body with her bare foot, but there was no
movement.
Had she killed him?
The enormity of it shook her.
If he was dead, then she was a murderer.
When Liza had expressed a desire to see her mother safely
housed somewhere she could easily visit, presumably she hadn’t been thinking of
prison.
Who was he? Did he have family? What had been his intention
when he’d forcibly entered her home? Kathleen put the skillet down and forced
her shaky limbs to carry her to the living room. Something tickled her cheek.
Blood. Hers.
She picked up the phone and for the first time in her life
dialed the emergency services.
Underneath the panic and the shock there was something that
felt a lot like pride. It was a relief to discover she wasn’t as weak and
defenseless as everyone seemed to think.
When a woman answered, Kathleen spoke clearly and without
hesitation.
“There’s a body in my kitchen,” she said. “I assume you’ll
want to come and remove it.”
Excerpted from The Summer Seekers by Sarah Morgan.
Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Morgan. Published by HQN Books.
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Twitter: @SarahMorgan_
Facebook: @AuthorSarahMorgan
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