Secret Vias of Paradise
Palm Beach, November 1954. The Season is about to begin, and the great houses along the ocean are waking up one by one. Nora Calloway is the caretaker who opens them. She is the third generation of her family to hold the keys, and since October she has been the most unwelcome woman on the island. Her family's ledger helped her bring an old crime into the daylight, and the families who paid for her silence have not forgiven her for it.
Nora has always found her quiet in one small place, a courtyard off Via Mizner where Addison Mizner's pet monkey lies buried under a little gray stone. She has cleaned that stone for twenty-one years. Now a dog there will not stop digging at the ferns beside it, and cold air rises out of the ground. On the Ashworth lawn a rabbit runs into a tangle of bougainvillea and banyan roots and never comes out. Behind it Nora finds a rusted steel door with a new brass padlock. On the other side she hears a hum that never stops, and someone breathing.
Then a nineteen-year-old seamstress from Pleasant City disappears from a shop on Via Parigi, from a workroom bolted on the inside. The police call her a runaway. Her mother sits for hours on a bench at the station, and nobody comes to talk to her. Nora starts hearing sounds beneath her own floor at night. Her notes are copied while she sleeps, and a peppermint is left on her kitchen table.
Bishop, the one detective on the island who ever believed her, begins to look at her the way people once looked at the ones who were sent away. The old servants say the ground of Palm Beach is haunted. The cooks call the humming the island's heartbeat. For thirty years anyone who talked about voices under the ground was laughed at, and the ones who kept talking were declared unfit and shipped to the state hospital at Chattahoochee. A few of them were never sent anywhere at all.
With a borrowed lantern and a box of yellow chalk, Nora goes down. Beneath the vias she finds coral tunnels dug by hand at night while the shops were built by day, and gratings where she can hear the shoppers laughing overhead. She finds tidy bundles of clothing tied with string and tagged with hardware store price tags. Somewhere in the dark there is a room the families never speak of, and a keeper who has watched Nora all her life and always meant her to take his place.
Secret Vias of Paradise is the second novel in the Bones in the Coral series, and it stands fully on its own. It is a story about an island that chose to laugh at anyone who noticed, and the people who were right all along.
