Death changes people. God knows, my death changed me.
My name was Cleo Sherwood. After death I became a Lady in the lake—a corpse pulled out of a fountain after several months underwater.
And no one cared about me until you came—until you gave me this stupid nickname and started knocking on doors, pestering people, and getting into places where you weren’t welcome. It was expected that everyone would spit on me, except my family. The colorful one—who went on a date with the wrong man, and after that no one ever saw her.
But then you got involved and turned my ending into your beginning.
Why did you need that, Madelyn Schwartz? Why couldn’t you keep living in a beautiful house, have a perfectly tolerable marriage? Why couldn’t you leave me at the bottom of the fountain? There I was safely hidden.
And everyone was safe while I was there…
***A novel where the plot is much more important than the crime on which it’s based, and the crime is much more important than its solution.
Soon there will be a screen adaptation with “Oscar” holders Natalie Portman and Lupita Nyong’o.