A Chambered Nautilus

By Anne L. Watson

Nita walked away from her family when she was seventeen years old, determined to never look back. But forty years later, when her mother died and her father descended into Alzheimer's, Nita returned to New Orleans to care for him in his final months.
 
Now her father has passed on, leaving Nita her childhood home as an inheritance. But she soon finds she isn't the only resident. The house is occupied by ghosts of her past, playing out scenes of the life she fled.
 
What are they trying to tell her? Will they ever leave her in peace? And are they really spirits, or only visions, emerging from sealed-off depths of memory as from the shell of a chambered nautilus?
 
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
 
Anne L. Watson, a retired historic preservation architecture consultant, is the author of several novels, plus books on such diverse subjects as soapmaking and baking with cookie molds. A former resident of New Orleans -- the setting of "A Chambered Nautilus" -- she currently lives in Friday Harbor, Washington, in the San Juan Islands, with her husband and fellow author, Aaron Shepard, and their cat, Skeeter.
 
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
 
SAMPLE
  
I kept coming back to one set of photos of Manda, Lou, and me on Christmas morning. Sitting near the tree, opening our presents. Our smiles and shining eyes were captured forever. But Dad was gone, and the love that inspired those photos had died long before he did. How had he turned into a man who threw Christmas in the dump, every last elf and star, every last shred of tinsel?
 
I pushed the box of photos aside.
 
With two more empty boxes, I sorted for any records that had to do with Dad’s last business venture, the successful one. After I’d left home, he’d invented several toys that caught on and made enormous amounts of money. Manda had told me about it at the time, but I’d dismissed it as ironic: How could a man who disliked children have invented amazing toys?
 
Now I remembered he had made that rocking horse. And bunny shadows on the wall, and a herd of charming animals he sculpted for us out of multicolored telephone wire. I remembered more and more. He hadn’t started as a man who disliked children.
 
And Mom. When had she changed from the cake baker, the most beautiful woman in the world, to the one who screamed that she wished we didn’t exist?
 
I remembered what the ghosts had shown me, and more. The miscarriage. The finally fulfilled longing for a son, followed by gut-level battles about what a son should be. Years of failure and scarcity, dinners of scraps, our filthy house, neighbors who shunned us. Anger feeding accusation in a vicious circle.
 
Beyond that, the truth was as tantalizing as a mirage. Why did their marriage go bad? Which of them had started it? Trying to figure that one out was like watching a tennis match. She did this because he said that, because she said that, because he did this . . . back and forth, back and forth . . .
 
I grinned suddenly, remembering Lou’s description of tennis—“the kind of thing a cat would watch.”
 
It was unsolvable. Whatever had gone wrong between Mom and Dad had gone disastrously wrong. War had been declared, and as in all wars, there was “collateral damage.” Which was military-speak for what happens to innocent bystanders. Like kids.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shepard & Piper
• Release date: Aug 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781620350324