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Overview
“A very clever wordsmith.”
—New York Times Book Review
“When Emily Arsenault was growing up, a teacher told the fifth-grader she was very good at writing. Give that teacher an A.”
—Hartford Courant
Emily Arsenault’s compelling debut, Broken Teaglass, was resoundingly praised (“Quirky and inventive...meets all the definitions of a good read.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch). With her intelligent, complex, and ingeniously crafted sophomore offering, In Search of the Rose Notes, Arsenault validates her standing as an exhilarating new voice in contemporary fiction. A moody and engrossing mystery, In Search of the Rose Notes follows two best friends from childhood who once unsuccessfully investigated the disappearance of their teenage babysitter, and now, in their twenties, attempt once again to uncover the truth. Readers who love the literary, female focused mysteries of Laura Lippman, Tana French, and Jennifer McMahon will be thrilled to add Emily Arsenault to their must-read lists.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062092458 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 07/26/2011 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 721 KB |
About the Author
Emily Arsenault is also the author of The Evening Spider, The Broken Teaglass, In Search of the Rose Notes, Miss Me When I’m Gone, What Strange Creatures, and the young adult novel The Leaf Reader. She lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, with her husband and daughter.
Read an Excerpt
In Search of the Rose Notes
A NovelBy Emily Arsenault
William Morrow Paperbacks
Copyright © 2011 Emily ArsenaultAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780062012326
Chapter One
Fitting that Charlotte would call while I was doing nothing.When we were kids, she was always saving me from nothing.
What are you doing? Nothing. And compared to Charlotte's
house, with its big brother, its basketball hoop, its VCR, its
trampoline, and its pantry full of Oreos, my place really was
nothing. You wanna come over? Nothing but an apartment with
neatly dusted hardwood floors, a grainy television without a
cable box, a crotchety old landlady downstairs, and a single
mother who prided herself on getting five meals out of a single
chicken. Did I want to come over? Back then the answer was
always yes.
This time when Charlotte called, I was sitting at my wheel
in the garage, staring at a sketch I'd done a week earlier—of
a squat teapot with a wide, round handle. I'd nearly sat down
twice to make it, and twice I'd found myself distracted by
something more pressing—a bill I'd forgotten to pay, the lawn
I'd meant to mow.
Now I gazed at the freshly wedged lump of clay in my hands.
I hadn't much else to do but throw it down and get started.
My grades were submitted, the laundry was done, and this had
been my plan all along. Same as last year. Spend the summer
throwing like crazy so I'd have lots to sell through Christmas,
even if my teaching didn't allow me much time at the wheel
in the fall. It had worked beautifully last year. But this year I
just wasn't getting into it the way I had. Neil and I no longer
really needed my meager profits from the craft fairs and farmer's
markets—and maybe I didn't need any more compliments
from hemp-skirted ladies and their gentle, bearded husbands.
Not to mention that I was a little tired of my quaint teapots and
teacups. While I had nothing against quaintness, I wasn't sure I
wished to generate it anymore.
I considered ignoring the phone when it rang. Clearly I was
having the sort of existential moment a career in ceramics is
supposed to protect you from. If I focused, if I made myself
stay in the garage, I could work through it. If I simply ignored
everything else and got the wheel spinning, I'd probably just
forget about it.
After the third ring, I jumped up and ran for the door to the
house.
"Hello?"
"Hello? Nora?" I felt oddly relieved by the sound of her voice
even before I knew who it was. "It's Charlotte Hemsworth."
"Charlotte?" I repeated. "HEY!"
"Yeah."
"Wow. How are you?
Charlotte hesitated. "Not so bad. And you? I heard you and
your husband bought a house."
"Umm, yeah."
I looked around the living room skeptically. It had been five
months since we'd painted these crisp yellow walls. Neil had
assured me that we'd feel better about our color choice once we
filled the living room with furniture and hung some pictures on
the wall to break it up. But we'd done all that and I still wasn't
convinced.
Charlotte was silent on the other end.
"How'd you hear about the house?" I asked.
"I called your mom, and she told me. That's how I got your
number. She's easier to find than you are. Your old number
didn't work."
"My e-mail's still the same, though."
"I didn't want to e-mail you, Nora. I wanted to talk to you."
"Well, that's nice. I'm glad you—"
"Nora," she interrupted.
"Yeah?"
"They found her."
"Found . . . who?"
"Rose."
I had a flash of Rose walking into the Waverly police station,
her dark blond hair still brushing her shoulders, her
wide-necked purple sweatshirt still hanging off one shoulder,
exposing her exotically black bra strap. Smelling of the Love's
drugstore perfume that was supposed to cover up the smell of
her cigarettes. That stone-washed jean jacket tied around her
waist. Her face about fifteen years older. Or—had it been more
than fifteen years?
"Oh, my God," I whispered, my heart now racing. "Is she—"
"They found her body, I mean. Bones."
I leaned against the wall, pushing the phone so hard against
my ear that it hurt.
"Nora?" Charlotte said.
I tried to picture what Charlotte might look like at this very
moment. Sitting at her parents' old kitchen table, surrounded
by that ugly mauve wallpaper with the ribboned clusters of
white flowers. Saying my name so gently into the phone, as
if coaxing me there for another sleepover, promising no scary
movies this time. A promise she never seemed to keep.
"I'm here," I said. Sort of. "How do they know it's her?"
"Something about a bracelet, clothing fibers. . . . Listen,
I'm e-mailing you an article. I just didn't want to surprise you
with it."
Listening to Charlotte, I could almost smell her mother's
Pall Malls. That kitchen was where I was supposed to be when
we found Rose—not in this perky little bungalow where Neil
and I had accidentally painted every room one shade too bright.
I heard Charlotte take a breath.
"Where, Charlotte?"
"I'm at home," Charlotte said vaguely.
"No. Where did they find her?"
"Near the pond. Adams Pond."
"But . . . didn't they comb that area when we were kids? A
few times, even?"
"I'm not sure. But yeah. I thought so."
"Was she buried really deep? I mean, how did they know to
dig there?"
"Nobody knew anything. Some kids just . . . found her. There
was something sticking out of the ground, I guess, and . . . well,
I'm not sure. My friend Porter's done the first couple of stories
for the paper, but the police aren't giving out that many details."
"Your friend Porter?"
"From when I worked at the Voice," Charlotte said with a
sigh.
"Oh," I said.
"Of course there are all sorts of rumors. I'm not sure how
accurate it is, but one scuttlebutt is that the body was moved
there. Recently."
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor. "But that's
. . . crazy. That's impossible."
"I know."
Now that I was seated, I took a deep breath and tried to get
my head around it: Yes, this was real. I was talking to Charlotte
again. About Rose. But then, what else did we have to talk about
except Rose? We'd politely pretended otherwise for years, but
Rose was really the only thing we could still have in common.
"Are you all right, Nora?" she asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"Are you near a computer?"
"No. Why?"
"I'm sending you the article just now."
"You want me to read it right now?"
"Well . . . if you want."
Charlotte's sideways insistence was familiar and therefore
comforting.
"Give me a few minutes," I said. "I'll call you back."
I opened my laptop and found her e-mail sitting there, dated
just one minute before now. The link was to an article in the
Voice. I had no idea my old hometown paper had gone high tech.
ADAMS POND BODY LIKELY
MISSING YOUNG WOMAN
WAVERLY—The bones found last week near Adams
Pond are likely those of Waverly resident Rose Banks,
who has been missing since 1990, according to police.
"It's still quite early in the investigation, but we now
believe that this could be Rose Banks. We've already
spoken to the family, and if it is her, we hope that this
will give them some closure in what has been a painful
case," Waverly police chief Carl Fisher said during a
press conference yesterday.
The skeletal remains, along with Banks's dental
records, have been sent to a forensics lab in Hartford
for further testing, which could take several weeks.
Tolland County coroner Donald Campbell, in a preliminary
investigation, identified the skeletal remains as
belonging to a female between the ages of fifteen and
twenty, which have been decomposing for at least ten
years, Chief Fisher said.
The body was found Thursday near Adams Pond
by two boys who were fishing there. Local and state
police closed off the entire pond area to search for
additional clues.
This discovery reopens Banks's sixteen-year-old
case, the only missing-person case ever reported in
town history. Banks, age sixteen, was last seen on the
evening of November 15, 1990, walking home from a
baby-sitting job in her Fox Hill neighborhood. Police
and town residents searched for weeks but found no
clues suggesting her whereabouts.
"With the help of Detective Tracy Vaughan of the
state police cold-case unit, we're going over every
detail of the case to make sure we didn't miss anything.
We'll likely re-interview many of Miss Banks's friends
and associates, and we would be grateful to speak to
anyone else who might know something about this
case," Chief Fisher said.
So it was real. They'd found Rose. After all these years. As
I read the article again, I had a feeling that my wheel wouldn't
be spinning for another week at least. I knew I needed to see
Charlotte, and she needed to see me.
Psychic Powers:
August 1990
It was Charlotte's idea to make the Zener cards. Like all her
projects that summer, the idea came out of the Time-Life
books. We pronounced them ZEE-ner cards. Rose managed to
turn the making of the cards into a two-afternoon affair—one
for walking a mile and a half into town to Rite Aid for a pack
of three-by-five cards, the other for carefully crayoning thick
black circles, squares, crosses, stars, and (the most fun, but also
the most difficult) three-lined psychedelic squiggles. Rose
rejected our early attempts, insisting that the waves needed to be
parallel and that sloppiness might confuse the mind and skew
our results.
On the third day of the project, Rose finally shuffled the
cards and laid them out for us. She'd been designated for this
task since she was, for all intents and purposes, the grown-up.
Charlotte and I would take turns guessing the symbols on the
overturned cards and recording each other's results. On the
first try, I got ten out of twenty-five. Charlotte got four. On my
second round, I noticed Rose's face changing before some of
my guesses. Her mouth opened round before a circle; her head
bobbled lazily before the wavy lines. Once she was certain I'd
noticed it, the gestures became subtler—a slight movement of
the mouth for a circle, a twitch of the chin for the squiggles.
For stars, squares, and crosses, she offered no help, keeping her
face motionless and her eyes slanted toward the ceiling in an
exaggerated expression of disinterest.
"Wow." Rose raised her eyebrows at Charlotte when my
second and third rounds turned out an impressive thirteen and
eleven respectively.
Through Rose's facial codes, I noticed a helpful pattern—
more often than not, she put squiggly lines on the edges and
circles somewhere in the center of the five-card rows. Her hints
weren't always discernible, and sometimes Charlotte's intense
gaze made it impossible to sneak a look at her. But overall the
help made my results significantly higher than Charlotte's. As
my psychic superiority became apparent, Charlotte was clearly
perplexed. Instead of scrutinizing us, however, she simply
focused harder on her own guesses. Frowning and uncharacteristically
silent, she was determined to reverse the results. She had
apparently been certain that she'd be the psychic one. We knew
this without ever hearing her say it. Whenever a situation
allowed for someone to be the winner, or to be special, Charlotte
inevitably—and usually effortlessly—fell into the role.
Rose and I never discussed our cheating or adjusted the
methods—even when we could have, when Charlotte was in
the bathroom or fetching more graham crackers out of the
pantry. I never understood why we were doing it. It wasn't to
laugh at Charlotte or to trick her. I wouldn't even say Rose liked
me better than she liked Charlotte. She didn't have enough
interest in either of us to form a preference.
"Your psi seems stronger for round and wavy lines," Charlotte
observed after about three afternoons of repeated testing.
I bit my lip and looked at Rose for help.
"Probably she's using her right brain more," Rose said quickly.
"What does that mean?" Charlotte asked.
"I learned about it in school," Rose explained. "The left brain
is more like the science and math part. The right brain is, like,
the soft stuff. Art and poetry and stuff. I'm right-brained, I
think. My sister's left-brained. Nora's probably right-brained."
"What do you think I am?" Charlotte wanted to know.
"I'm not sure. What do you like better, math or language arts?"
"I like both."
"Well. Then you're neither-brained."
"Or both-brained," Charlotte suggested.
Rose gathered up the cards, looking bored. "Another round?"
she asked, shuffling.
"This time with Pepsi," Charlotte suggested, and then she
explained to us her latest finding in the black books. Experiments
performed by J. B. Rhine in the 1930s indicated that people's
ESP and psychokinetic abilities improved after they'd drunk
caffeinated sodas. After hearing this explanation, Rose let us
raid Charlotte's dad's impressive Pepsi supply in the pantry.
"If anyone asks, I drank most of it and you guys each just had
a glass," Rose called from the living room as Charlotte and I
chugged in the kitchen.
I thought I sensed in that statement Rose's desire to have a
little Pepsi herself. As Charlotte refilled my glass, I stepped
tentatively into the living room to ask her if she wanted any. When
I saw her slip a few cigarettes out of Charlotte's mom's coffee
table pack, I crept back into the kitchen for my second glass.
The Pepsi results were inconclusive. Charlotte's performance
improved slightly but remained just under chance. Mine stayed
the same.
"Nora's looks like a pretty pure power," Rose said. "Kind of a
steady, unshakable vision."
Charlotte sucked on a lock of her reddish hair. She looked
wounded, but just for a moment. When her eyes met mine,
she pulled the hair out of her mouth and gave me an admiring
smile.
"Yes," she said, tucking the lock behind her ear. "It looks
like it."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In Search of the Rose Notes by Emily Arsenault Copyright © 2011 by Emily Arsenault. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow Paperbacks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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