Read an Excerpt
From Chapter One
Theresa Susan Hannah Harris had never expected to be so utterly, completely alone. She had never been this alone in her life, so frightened and full of dread and yet desperately wanting to know the answers to questions that kept bubbling to the surface of her mind. Good or bad, she had to know why; she had to have some closure to the agony of not knowing where the man she loved had gone. The explanations that Susan—her family called her Susie—formulated about the mystery she endured were terrifying and grotesque. When she fell asleep, her dreams were worse.
Susan Harris was living in a mansion grander than anything she had ever dreamed of, a sprawling pink two-story estate with 6,200 square feet of luxury detail: six bedroom suites, six and a half baths, a game room, a fitness gym, a sauna, and a hot tub. When she and her new husband first saw the house at 3158 Blackhawk Meadow Drive, in Danville, California, both of them viewed it as the home they would live in for all the years ahead. Although Susan demurred at the price tag of almost a million and a half, Jerry Harris just grinned. He had always given her anything she wanted, usually before she even mentioned a wish aloud. The irony was that all she really wanted was Jerry himself. Meeting him, falling in love, and finally marrying him had been a modern-day fairy tale. Too good to be true.
Too good to last? Susan Harris wondered.
Alone at night in the mansion on Blackhawk Meadow Drive, she was afraid. There were no drapes or blinds over the dozens of windows. Some had a view of the treetops below, and others focused up at the sunburned hill that rose beyond their backyard. They had moved in only three weeks before; she had thought they had plenty of time to decorate and buy window coverings. Now she felt as if there were eyes out in the night watching her. The high ceilings and the massive rooms made her feel lost, and her footsteps on the marble and granite floors of the hallways echoed eerily.
The kind of love that Susan and Jerry Lee Harris felt for each other transcended the ordinary. They fell in love quickly and they loved each other more as the years passed. Theirs was the kind of relationship that ballads were written about.
It would be no exaggeration to say they would have died for each other.
Susan and Jerry Lee Harris had so much in common, and, at the same time, so little. They had both grown up in working-class families, each had four siblings, and they were both born in Medford, Oregon. Indeed, they were born in the same hospital—Sacred Heart. His birthday was June 1 and hers was June 2. But Jerry was eighteen years older than Susan. He was a shining star, brash and confident and exciting, while she was a quiet, almost shy, planner who spoke softly and went about her life and education in a traditional way.
Susan was beautiful and slender, with a sweet face and long blond hair. Jerry was handsome, despite his three-times-broken nose, although Susan couldn't really see what he looked like when she met him. She laughed when she recalled her first sight of him. "He had a bushy beard, and there was no way of telling what he looked like underneath it."
There is no question that from the moment Jerry Harris first saw Susan Hannah, he never thought of another woman. He was a man inordinately gifted with intuition about most people, and he saw something in Susan that both startled and thrilled him. She embodied, perhaps, the one thing he had never been able to find in his world: romantic love that would last for a lifetime. He had married three times and seen each marriage fall apart, but he recognized something in Susan, something that made him know they would be together until the day he died.
Copyright © 1998 by Ann Rule
