Chapter One On a foggy August morning, Tessa Harlow had finally tired of her long wallow on the Santa Cruz beaches. Leaving her father's tidy little bungalow as she did every morning, she carried her breakfast down to the surf: a mango fresh from the local grocer, a hunk of sourdough bread, and a hefty cup of tea she bought from the stand on the corner. Settling on the sand, she skimmed the thick outer skin from the mango and bit into the buttery flesh, mopping the juice from her chin with a bandana. The tea was hot and milky, sweet with real sugar, and the bread--while not quite as tangy as San Francisco sourdough--complemented the mango perfectly. A woman walked purposefully along the water's edge, her calves showing ropy muscle. Gulls wheeled overhead. For the first time in months, Tessa wished for her camera. She would shoot the isolated piles of homeless men sleeping on the buffalo grass, and the boats bobbing in the distance, and maybe even the stack of mango skins on the sand. It was time to get back to her life. She walked to the edge of the waves, dipped her right hand in the water, and washed her face and the fingers sticking out of the turquoise cast on her left arm. Letting her skin dry in the air, she sat back down with her cell phone and a sheaf of papers she'd printed out yesterday at the Internet café near her father's house. Luddite that he was, he didn't have a computer of his own, and Tessa had lost hers in a river three months ago. Three months. The weeks had gone by in a wash of aqua and pale gray, deep-blue afternoons that she spent reading whatever she found at the laundromat or the local youth hostel--battered thrillers, dog-eared romances, ancient sagas. Whatever. Three months. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. In Tessa's case, the nail was a spider that had crawled into her bed in the Rocky Mountains and bitten the sole of her left foot. Not such a big thing, ordinarily. It wouldn't have been this time, if she had paid attention to it right away. Or if the rain had not been quite so persistent, so unexpected. Or if the deluge had not softened the earth so completely that a tree fell sideways, taking the trail and her entire tour group down the mountain. Or if the river had not been quite so high. Or if . . . Oh, so many details. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost, and Tessa washed up on the beach here in her father's land. Lately it had begun to creep into her mind that she couldn't exactly live this way. Her wounds, if not healed, were at least pretty well scabbed over. Mostly she could sleep again. Mostly she'd stopped having panic attacks and flashbacks. She had not purchased a new camera, but she would. Much as Sam, her surfer father, would love to have Tessa join him in his aimless drift, sooner or later she needed to explore the memories that had surfaced when she nearly drowned in Montana. Yesterday she'd spent a couple of hours online exploring the town she wanted to visit and had assembled a pitch for her boss. Flipping open her cell phone, she dialed his number. "Hey, Mick," she said when he answered. "It's Tessa. How are you?" "Well, hello to you, gorgeous," her boss said. "It's so good to hear from you. How are you?" "Definitely getting there." She traced a long mark on her foot. "They gave me a new cast last week, this one only up to the elbow, and my foot should be a hundred percent before too much longer." "I'm glad. How long do you wear this cast?" "Only another four weeks or so." "That's terrific. Is it tacky to ask when you might be coming back to work?" "I'm not up to a tour yet." Maybe she Excerpted from The Secret of Everything: A Novel by Barbara O'Neal All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
