The Night the Lights Went Out

  ALSO BY KAREN WHITE

  The Color of Light

  Learning to Breathe

  Pieces of the Heart

  The Memory of Water

  The Lost Hours

  On Folly Beach

  Falling Home

  The Beach Trees

  Sea Change

  After the Rain

  The Time Between

  A Long Time Gone

  The Sound of Glass

  The Forgotten Room

  (cowritten with Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig)

  Flight Patterns

  Spinning the Moon

  The Tradd Street Series

  The House on Tradd Street

  The Girl on Legare Street

  The Strangers on Montagu Street

  Return to Tradd Street

  The Guests on South Battery

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Harley House Books, LLC

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: White, Karen (Karen S.), author.

  Title: The night the lights went out / Karen White.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016053299 (print) | LCCN 2017001224 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451488381 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451488398 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Divorced women—Fiction.

  | Suburban life—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION/Contemporary Women. | FICTION/Family Life. | FICTION/Suspense.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.H5776 N54 2017 (print) | LCC PS3623.H5776 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053299

  First Edition: April 2017

  Jacket photos: woman by Johner Images / Getty Images; background by Karen White

  Jacket design by Rita Frangie

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To Connor, Georgia born and raised

  Contents

  Also by Karen White

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Having lived in the real “Sweet Apple,” Georgia, for more than twenty-four years, I have far too many people to thank here for inspiring this book. Just know that I appreciate your friendship, and love living here alongside all of you in this beautiful Atlanta suburb.

  There are a few people, however, who helped me considerably with my research. Thank you to Joe, Sam, and George Ivey of Little River Farms for sharing their gift of time to tell me the wonderful stories of their family who have called Georgia home for generations, and who remembered what our corner of the world was like before subdivisions.

  Thanks to FAO Tim Farnell of the City of Milton Fire Department for his insight into what happens in emergencies (and who has convinced me that I will need to put a fire in my next book to use all his research tips). And a huge thanks to Detective Scott Harrell of the City of Milton Police Department, whose patience in answering all my questions about police procedures was not only deeply appreciated but immeasurably helpful in the writing of this book.

  Last but not least, a huge thanks to the usual suspects: my long-suffering husband, Tim White, who has forgotten what it’s like to eat a home-cooked meal unless he’s at someone else’s house, and to Susan Crandall and Wendy Wax, talented authors who have gifted me with their friendship and critical eyes for longer than we would care to admit.

  THE PLAYING FIELDS BLOG

  Observations of Suburban Life from Sweet Apple, Georgia

  Written by: Your Neighbor

  Installment #1: A Plague of Bulldozers and White Escalades

  A woman at my hair salon today asked me where I’d learned to put on makeup. I considered this a compliment, having always taken good care of my skin for the sole purpose of making it a smooth palette on which to put makeup. I could tell she was a transplant to our north Atlanta suburb of Sweet Apple by her accent. And by her question. Every true Southern mama teaches her daughter about makeup. I think in some parts of the Deep South (like the Mississippi Delta), girls are born with makeup brushes clutched in their tiny hands. This might be hearsay, but have you ever noticed how many Miss Americas are from Mississippi?

  She asked me to say a few words for her, like “honey” and “fiddledeedee” and “damn,” to hear my accent, and then actually asked if I’d ever heard of the hanging of an innocent man around these parts. I had the sudden and horrible thought that those who aren’t from around here might think that Gone with the Wind or that song about the night the lights went out in Georgia were true compasses showing what they might discover here in Sweet Apple.

  That’s when I decided I needed to write a blog, a sort of tutorial or map for the newcomers here. A way for them to educate themselves on the ways of the South and its natives before they do something heinous like wear white pants after Labor Day or show up at a funeral without a chafing dish full of Southern comfort food.

  Just like all polite Southern conversations, this one, I thought, should start with the weather. For those newcomers who haven’t yet experienced what we locals refer to as the furnace, the heat of a Georgia summer arrives suddenly. The cicadas begin their whirring song in the trees as a sort of advance warning, and by the time the tree frogs begin burping in unison, summer is here.

  But if you live in one of our new neighborhoods, you won’t be able to hear the cicadas or the frogs because of the incessant thumping of your n
eighbors’ HVAC systems, rumbling all day long like an endless shouting match.

  I’d like to suggest turning off the air-conditioning in the evenings when it’s cooler, to hear yourselves think for a change. Hear the voices of your neighbors, even. It’s easy to think we all live in our own air-conditioned bubbles, but we don’t. We have to share our breathing space with our neighbors. And don’t forget we’re all supposed to love our neighbors no matter how difficult they sometimes make it. Like when they vote to bulldoze another farm, or park in the fire lane at Kroger, or tailgate me in their white Escalade (sometimes it’s a Mercedes or BMW SUV and even the occasional Honda—but it’s always white) even when I’m going the speed limit. Being late for a chemical peel does not give you the right to tailgate, no matter how uneven your skin tone. It’s not very neighborly.

  Yes, we’re supposed to love our neighbors. Yet I still can’t shake my daydreams where I come up with a thousand different ways in which I can make some of them disappear. Permanently. Thank heavens they’re just daydreams.

  One

  MERILEE

  Sweet Apple, Georgia

  2016

  If there was one thing that Merilee Talbot Dunlap had learned in eleven years of marriage, it was the simple fact that you could live with a person for a long time and never really know him. That it was easy to accept the mask he wore as the real thing, happy in your oblivion, until one day the mask slipped. Or, as in Merilee’s case, when it fell off completely and you were forced to face your own complicity in the masquerade.

  No, she knew she hadn’t made Michael have an affair with their daughter’s third-grade math teacher. But she had allowed herself never to question any discrepancies in her marriage, content in her role as suburban wife and mother, until the props and scenery were pulled away and she was asked to exit stage right.

  “Mommy?”

  Merilee turned toward her ten-year-old daughter, Lily, blond and fine boned like her father but with a perpetually worried expression that was all her mother’s. It seemed Lily already had a permanent furrow between her brows from the worry she’d been born with. The last months since the divorce and the stress from the upcoming move hadn’t helped.

  “Yes?”

  “What if I don’t meet any friends in my new school? And what if I don’t have anybody to sit with at lunchtime? And I’m thinking I shouldn’t be in the accelerated English class, because what if I’m not smart enough?”

  Merilee carefully snapped down the lid of the plastic container she’d been filling with her collection of old maps. She’d been collecting them since she was a little girl, when she’d been in an antiquarian bookstore with her grandfather and he’d shown her an ink-drawn map. It had sketches of horses and cows and fences, and a cozy log cabin with smoke curling from its lone chimney.

  “That’s where you live,” he’d said, pointing to the cabin.

  It looked nothing like the white-columned brick house in Sandersville, Georgia, she’d lived in all her life and she had told him so, only to be made to understand that the cabin and everything around it had been plowed under to make room for her house and their neighbors’ houses in the twenties, when he and Grandma weren’t even born yet.

  For a long time it had given her nightmares, thinking she could hear the cries of the people from the cabin, not completely sure they’d been removed before the demolition. It scared her to think of how temporary things could be, how your life, your house, your family, could be erased like a sand castle at the beach. And when her little brother had died, she’d known for sure.

  Her grandfather had bought her the map, unaware he was fostering what would become a lifelong obsession. Merilee wasn’t sure whether her love for old maps was because they reminded her of the grandfather she’d loved more than her own parents or because she’d needed proof that things changed. That no matter how good or bad things were, they were never permanent.

  Merilee knelt down in front of Lily, silently cursing her ex-husband one more time. As if making her feel extraneous and unwanted weren’t bad enough, his inability to keep his pants zipped and his eyes from wandering had added an extra layer of vulnerability to their daughter.

  Gently holding her bony shoulders, she looked into Lily’s pale blue eyes. “You’ve never had problems making friends. You’re a nice person, Lily, and that’s why other girls like to include you. Remember that, okay? It’s who you are, and if you stick with that, you’ll be fine. And Windwood Academy is much smaller than your old school, which is a nice thing when you’re the new kid. You’ll know everybody in all of your classes pretty quickly.”

  “And if they don’t like me?”

  A little bit of the old spark lit her eyes, making Merilee inwardly sigh with relief. “I’m going to make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

  Lily laughed her sweet laugh, a sound that evoked champagne bubbles popping, almost eradicating the guilt Merilee felt over having left The Godfather in the DVD player one night. It had been right after she’d learned of Michael’s affair, when she’d felt the need to watch violent movies with lots of blood and bad language after the kids had been tucked into bed. Lily had flipped it on the next day thinking it was The Princess Bride, and in the five minutes it had taken for Merilee to realize what was happening, Lily had been exposed to more violence than she had seen in her entire ten years. After much apologizing and lectures about the difference between movies and real life, it had become a secret joke between them. For weeks Merilee had watched her daughter for any signs that she might need counseling, glad for once that her daughter had always had the maturity of a forty-year-old rather than that of the young girl she was.

  Merilee stood, her right knee popping, yet another reminder of why her husband had wanted to trade her in for a younger model. “As for the accelerated English class, they put you in there for a reason. You’ll do great. And if you find you don’t like it, we’ll move you—just give it a try. That’s all I ask, all right?”

  Lily’s small chest rose and fell with an exaggerated sigh. “All right. Should I tell Colin to finish packing his suitcase?”

  “I asked him to do that three hours ago. Where is he?”

  Lily twisted her mouth, unsure of her role. She wasn’t a tattletale, but she also liked to keep to a schedule. “He found a hole in the backyard and has been sitting in front of it waiting to see what might crawl out.”

  Merilee swallowed a groan of frustration. Her eight-year-old son had always moved to his own clock, content to study his world at its own pace. Merilee found it endearing and frustrating at the same time, especially on school mornings when Colin wanted to study how long it took for toothpaste to fall from the tube without his having to squeeze it.

  “Would you please run out and remind him that I told Mrs. Prescott we’d meet her at three o’clock and it’s almost two thirty? She’s ninety-three and I really don’t want to keep her waiting in this heat.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Lily ran from the room, blond hair flying, calling her brother’s name with the harsh, authoritative tone Merilee recognized as her own. She bit her lip to prevent herself from calling out to remind Lily that Colin already had a mother.

  She picked up the stack of plastic containers and moved to the garage, empty now except for the used Honda Odyssey minivan she’d bought with her own money. She’d let Michael keep the Mercedes SUV and his Audi, wanting the excision of him from her life to be a clean cut, even if it meant not having heated seats or a state-of-the-art stereo system. It was the principle of the matter. And at the moment, the only thing she had in abundance were principles.

  Through the open rear door, Merilee spotted the jewelry roll she’d tucked into a back corner of the minivan. It was her brother’s Lego figures. She’d taken them from his room without asking, knowing her mother would never have let her have anything that had belonged to David. Deanne had wanted to claim the grief as her own, dismissing an
yone else’s as not big enough to count. So Merilee had taken them and wrapped them in her Barbie jewelry roll and kept them hidden, taking them out only on the anniversary of David’s death, as if somehow that might bring a part of him back. It had been a while since she’d done that, but still she kept them, hidden in her sock drawer as if afraid her mother might find them and ask for them back. As if David were still the precocious boy of seven instead of the twenty-nine-year-old young man he should be.

  After tucking the last of the smaller boxes and their suitcases into the back of the Odyssey, Merilee made one final pass through the rooms of the now-empty home she’d lived in for less than two years. The rental house was already furnished, so it had almost been a relief to let Michael have all the furniture they’d accumulated over the past eleven years, and she’d felt a pang of regret only when their four-poster bed had been hauled into the moving van. It had been the bed where both of their children had been conceived. She imagined that if she ever had to see Tammy Garvey again, after the woman had been sleeping on that bed with Merilee’s husband for a while, she’d mention that to her.

  Having gone back inside, she listened to her footsteps echo against the bare walls as she moved from room to room. The house had never really felt like home to her, just as none of their previous four houses had. Michael thought they needed to upgrade every couple of years to keep up with his job success. They had moved into a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood each time, staying within the same school district to make it easier on the kids. And easier for Michael’s affair, Merilee had realized much later.

  Merilee thought she should be thankful for the frequent moves, knowing that leaving a beloved home would be almost as painful as leaving an eleven-year marriage. Or burying a favorite dog. Instead, this parting was as easy as pulling off a Band-Aid—it would sting a little but be forgotten as soon as they’d unpacked the first box in the new house.

  The kids strapped themselves into the backseat of the minivan as Merilee headed down the driveway one last time and drove down the street without looking back. No neighbors came out to wave good-bye. She didn’t know them well, having always worked and not had the time to build relationships in each of the neighborhoods they’d lived in, and hadn’t expected any more fanfare when they left than when they’d arrived.