For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

The cramped space was now a storage room, with overflowing cardboard boxes, crates, and trunks littering nearly all available floor space. A brief investigation had confirmed the missing books of her youth were not included within these assortments of unwanted kitchen appliances, children’s toys, and threadbare clothing. It had never felt like her bedroom without the books, but it had never really felt like it with them, either. Likewise, she’d never been able to convince herself this house was home. Decades later, she was still unconvinced.

You didn’t forget a thirty-year-old dream, but you learnt to live with it. Besides, reality has a habit of stealing your attention from the artefacts of sleep, particularly when there’s an earthquake outside your bedroom window.

It started as a distant growl, but soon grew to seismic rumbling. Quentin’s bike? No, too…vast. Broken springs creaked as she rose from the bed and padded across bare floorboards to the window.

The earthquake was a convoy of articulated lorries, struggling along the winding track that led past the Wakefield house. Renata made out the company name plastered across the side of the leading eighteen-wheeler:

Rye Productions

Obviously a man of his word, Quentin appeared to be kick-starting the project he’d promised the people of Millbury Peak. Although now a stranger to the town, Renata still knew the uproar this invasion would cause.

Suddenly, an explosion of light.

She cursed her cranial pains before realising, agony as they were, they’d never thrown her across a room or caused windows to smash.

She gasped with pain at the broken glass pressing into her hands as she sat up. The room was surprisingly silent, apart from the high-pitched buzzing; she swatted at the moth in her ear, until it dawned on her moths don’t buzz. Her overdriven eardrums calmed, the chaotic sounds outside replacing the ringing in her head. She struggled to her feet and peered out the broken window, heart racing.

It was a warzone. Flames billowed from the back of the largest articulated lorry at the tail end of the convoy, the drivers and passengers of the remaining vehicles running to aid the two men trapped in its cabin. Renata stood frozen as the panic unfolded, until a second explosion from the same truck forced her back, screaming. She whipped her head round as banging came from downstairs. She threw on her mother’s dressing gown and raced for the front door.

‘Ren…I mean, Miss Wakefield,’ Quentin stammered, standing in the doorway, ‘I…I don’t…those guys, they’re still in the truck. The thing…it just—’

‘Mr Rye, I know. I saw everything. What on earth’s happening?’

Quentin glanced over his shoulder. ‘I got no idea. I was up front riding with one of the sound guys, then I heard the explosion at the back of the convoy. It’s Dwayne and Rich, Ren. They’re stuck in the cabin.’ He placed a foot in the threshold. ‘Please, we gotta help them. Your phone…the emergency services, we have to—’

‘Mr Rye…’

‘Call me Quentin, please.’

A small fire extinguisher sprayed into the inferno, its effect akin to the throwing of a glass of water into a volcano. Howling came from the trapped men inside the cabin as members of the production team tugged on the unmoving doors.

Renata took a breath.

‘Come inside, Quentin.’

‘If ever a sign were needed,’ Thomas choked from his wheelchair at the top of the stairs, ‘let this be it.’ A droll of biblical mutterings followed, eventually fading down the corridor back to the master bedroom. The grey, immobile hound by the fireplace remained as uninterested as a rug.

Renata handed Quentin a mug of cocoa. ‘Sorry about my father,’ she said.

‘After all I’ve put his family through? Come on, he could throw me his best right hook and I’d only thank him.’ He smiled and crossed his legs. Mickey Mouse socks peeked out from beneath his brown corduroys. ‘Luckily for me he doesn’t look like he has much of a right hook on him.’

Renata flinched.

Quentin, recrossing his legs, lowered his voice. ‘Seems all I’ve done recently is bring pain to you folks.’

‘None of this is your fault.’

More sirens screamed down the country tracks. The cause of the explosion was yet to be identified, but what had been established was that the hoses were only angering the flames further. All efforts seemed to do nothing but goad the fire.

‘I can’t believe this,’ said Quentin, jiggling his foot. ‘First Sylvia, now this. I mean, thank God they managed to get those guys out, but they’re gonna be messed up.’ The mug trembled in his hand. ‘They were right, I shouldn’t have come here. I did this, Ren.’

She took his cocoa and set it on the table.

People. She was surprised to find she seemed to have a fairly good idea how to act around them. What to say, where to look, how to react; there was nothing natural about it, but really it was nothing more than going through the motions, like writing a character, so long as she could keep a lid on her anxiety. As a teenager she’d thought she hated people, then it dawned on her that she just didn’t care for them. Most of all, it was their mindless clamouring for individuality, like children fighting for a place in the spotlight, a feral pack she had no interest in joining.

And yet, inadvertently, she’d claimed a small portion of that spotlight for herself. She’d been an author – a professional author. It should have felt good put like that but, despite her passion, it had really been no more than a means to an end, the end in question being the means to live alone on an empty rock surrounded by crashing waves.

And now a simple letter from a simple detective in a simple town regarding a not-so-simple murder had pulled her off that rock and onto