Maternal instinct, p.1
Maternal Instinct, page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by Becky Masterman
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Becky Masterman
About the Author
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Also by Becky Masterman
The Brigid Quinn series
RACE AGAINST THE DYING
FEAR THE DARKNESS
A TWIST OF THE KNIFE
WE WERE KILLERS ONCE
MATERNAL INSTINCT
Becky Masterman
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2023
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
This eBook edition first published in 2023 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © Becky Masterman, 2023
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Becky Masterman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-1195-8 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-1196-5 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This eBook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland
Praise for Becky Masterman
“Chilling, smart … and what a voice”
Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl, on Rage Against the Dying
“Fans of Lisa Gardner and Tess Gerritsen will love this book”
Booklist on Rage Against the Dying
“Masterman keeps the tension high throughout this page-turner”
Publishers Weekly on We Were Killers Once
“Nerve-wracking … The plot never loses its drive and the characters are truly intriguing”
Booklist on We Were Killers Once
“Chilling, twist-filled”
Publishers Weekly on A Twist of the Knife
“Will compel both new readers and old fans to cheer Brigid on … Certain to fuel the growing readership for this original series”
Library Journal on A Twist of the Knife
“Gripping … Tough, cunning Brigid Quinn will certainly appeal to thriller readers who favor a female perspective, but her unwavering determination to fight for even the ugliest forms of justice will also draw in fans of Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane”
Booklist on Fear the Darkness
“[Readers] are in for a ride as thrilling as they can find outside the pages of Jeffery Deaver … A scorching, humane first novel”
Kirkus Reviews on Rage Against the Dying
“Masterman lives up to her name in this masterly combination of compelling character and plot to keep the pages turning. And readers of a certain age will love her middle-aged protagonist”
Library Journal Starred Review of Rage Against the Dying
“One of the most memorable FBI agents since Clarice Starling”
Publishers Weekly Starred Review of Rage Against the Dying
“Pulse-quickening … scorching … invigorating”
The New York Times on Rage Against the Dying
About the author
Becky Masterman has worked as an actor, playwright, and an editor for a forensic science and law enforcement press. Her debut thriller was a finalist for the Edgar and the Anthony Awards for Best First Novel and for the CWA Gold Dagger, and her books have been translated into 20 languages. As well as four books featuring retired FBI agent Brigid Quinn, she is the author of standalone thriller Maternal Instinct. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband.
beckymasterman.com
For my Froot
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I must acknowledge the Grain River Asian Bistro where I often got take-out during the pandemic lockdown. From them I got a fortune cookie message that said, ‘Good news will come from far, far away.’ Not long after, Rachel Slatter from Severn House contacted me to ask if I were writing. Considering there’s an eight-hour time difference between Tucson, Arizona, and London, that counts as far away. I sent her the manuscript for this book and am so glad I did. I’m thankful, Rachel, to you and Tina Pietron, Penelope Isaac, Martin Brown, and other so far un-met folks who I’m sure will be equally as professional and kind.
Thank you to my critique group, my husband Fred, Anne Siren, who also provided the title, Jody Wilson, and Shannon Baker, a terrific crime dramedy author who manages to squeeze more feeling out of eating a cinnamon bun than I do from ten fight scenes.
Kimberly Witherspoon at Inkwell Literary Agency and Helen Heller at Helen Heller Agency both offered valuable advice on the early draft that pushed the story to the next level. Helen’s remark, ‘The villain set my teeth on edge’ was particularly memorable.
Thank you to all the readers who generously took the time to write and ask when my next book was coming. Here it is.
As any author will tell you, all the fiction, all the characters, come from my own warped imagination. But the relationship between mother and daughter, that’s true and makes me grateful to Rebecca. Between family and friends, and the perfect writing conditions that Fred provides at Masterman Monastery, it’s a worthwhile life.
ONE
To fine effect, her blue dress had splashed to the floor with the nudge of a single shoulder strap, its faux crystals sparkling like a lake at sunrise. Now the aluminum table against her bare back was ice. Goosebumps weren’t sexy, but there were things she couldn’t control. For example, goosebumps. Maybe he would mistake it for arousal.
While he undressed more slowly, watching her as he removed his moderately expensive watch and placed it on the small portable stand nearby, she listened to the tapping of her nails on the metal table. Then, thinking that would telegraph the impatience she felt, she ran her fingers along the narrow channels on either side of it. They probably had a specific name, these channels. Everything had a name in every language. T hat was where the blood and other fluids ran, she figured. What other fluids had been here last, and when was that? She shivered, not altogether because of the cold. Oh well, she’d probably never worked under conditions more sanitary than this.
She giggled in her nose, that little kgch that’s nowhere near erotic.
‘What is funny?’ he asked. He had taken off his shoes, placed them precisely next to each other, and tucked a sock in each one. When he stood and turned to her, his look was doubtful.
‘Are you sure of privacy?’ she asked, forcing her voice into a lower register, wanting to distract him from guessing what she thought of this silliness.
‘I locked the door from the inside,’ he said. ‘There’s only one entrance.’
‘You’ve done this before.’
‘Never.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘But I’ve always wanted to,’ he said. He paused, the tie he had just removed dangling in his hand. ‘Do you have fantasies?’
No. ‘But of course!’
‘Tell me.’
‘I have a fantasy of meeting a handsome stranger on the steps leading to the Sacré-Coeur and letting him control my fantasy.’
He shrugged, perhaps disappointed by her lack of imagination, and changed the subject. ‘You have such a funny accent.’
They liked it when you gave them a little something personal, like people in restaurants who want to show they consider the waiter an equal. It didn’t need to be true. ‘Texas. I was born in Dallas.’
That was enough. He took off his suit jacket and trousers and turned to hang them on a clothing rack she hadn’t noticed when she first entered the room. There were much more interesting things to look at. The silver doors to the refrigerated compartments, for example. She counted nine, three across, three down. How many of them contained bodies? she wondered. Also bare countertops and closed cupboards and drawers that probably contained all kinds of tools you saw on television shows. Scalpels, and frightful clamping things that went unnamed. Everything properly in its place, like his suit. A fastidious man. A cold man. He was unnamed, too, for a while, until she found his name. Once she knew what he did for a living, that was easy to do.
She had met him in Montmartre where she had gone to think. By the time he approached her she had convinced herself that thinking was overrated. But now she was thinking again in that way she could never stop. She was thinking about all the terrible things around her, named and unnamed.
He unbuttoned and hung his dress shirt and that was that. Finally. As he approached the table, she ran her fingertips across those places where the scalpel might cut, her imagination wildly drawing an incision from just below her breasts to her groin. She glanced at him, knowing that, rather than her thinking about her organs being lifted from her body, weighed, and recorded, he thought she was about to touch herself. Being able to read a person’s thoughts made for successful business, and sometimes for survival.
And she thought about what she might do next, to what interesting things this adventure might lead. She needed to feel bad in some new way. The old ways had once seemed cool, but now they were just dull.
Ah, there he went. Lord, the French were easy.
TWO
A few decades later, on a different continent …
Althea Deming sagged on the threshold, Robert’s ashes in one hand and a bag of cat in the other. Feeling dizzy from the shock for which no one had prepared her, she leaned against the open door, afraid of what she could see and terrified of what she couldn’t.
What she could see was gray, black, with sharp edges everywhere.
In this, her former home, she had spent a good part of her life caring for her husband and raising his children. Now, if she hadn’t known they were bringing her here, she wouldn’t have recognized the place.
Renovations, they called it. Deletion, she called it.
Her mouth fell open as her head dipped, in an involuntary mix of grief and anger. She was glad the others were behind her so she could hide these feelings. These feelings were unworthy of her, she told herself. After all, her story wasn’t sensational, unlike the old gothic romances she adored. This was just, as the modern self-help books would point out, a life change or learning experience. Something that happened daily around the world if one had family, if one wasn’t alone.
Then why did she feel as if her tears were building into an explosion?
And why hadn’t anyone thought enough of her to predict this fall-out?
This is what they should call a nuclear family.
Althea pushed through the door and stood for a moment in the once-familiar foyer to get back her balance and her self-respect. She clutched them tightly, Dead Robert and a live cat. They represented the only two things she could still control.
She looked at the walls where the elegant fleur-de-lis paper had been stripped away, replaced by pale gray paint, and she mourned Robert as if he had died seconds ago. She wouldn’t cry, though. There are some griefs too monumental for tears, some trials that crying would only diminish. Her grief was between her and God alone, and it was a grand thing. She lifted her chin and took a deep breath, and forced herself to catalog the other changes to her home.
The robin’s-egg-blue carpeting had been torn up in favor of fake wood flooring. Against the wall to her right, replacing the French provincial side table, loomed a black credenza that repurposed the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A statue of the elephant-faced Indian god Ganesha at one end competed theologically with a menorah at the other. They reminded her of a Pier One going-out-of-business sale.
With a deep breath, she almost believed she had gained control until she saw in the far corner of the living room the Christmas tree. They had put it up themselves without her. The lights were white, not the multi-colored ones that always made this room so warm and cozy. And the decorations were all large silver and gray balls. Could one actually find gray Christmas decorations? Grace probably couldn’t find any in black, or she would have used those too.
‘Mmmm,’ she said.
The tree was in the wrong place. It was supposed to go in front of the big bay window at the front of the house so people passing by could see it at night.
‘Mmmm.’
The tree was fake. She and Robert had had a live tree every single Christmas of their life together; even his last, when he spent every moment in the hospital bed in the downstairs bedroom and never saw it.
The tree had been put up too soon. She and Robert had always waited until Christmas Eve, honoring the season of Advent by not celebrating the Nativity until the Nativity, when as the final touch, the Baby Jesus would be added to the manger with appropriate solemnity.
Finally, missing from the tree were all the ornaments Hal and Joan had made in their childhood, those lackluster attempts made of dull felt spotted with sequins and glue stains that she had nonetheless so loyally preserved and trotted out every year.
And where were all the ornaments she had gathered from all the countries she and Robert had visited. Althea felt bad.
‘So! How do you like it, Momya?’ Hal said in that high-pitched volume that implies anyone near seventy can’t hear normal conversation.
As if she were too stupid to understand what was happening.
‘Mmmm,’ Althea said. They had let her come in alone so they wouldn’t have to deal with her original shock. Then Grace sent Hal in because she was less likely to be angry at him. Althea knew she couldn’t tell them she was on to them. They would call her a b-i-t-c-h. A grumpy, old, narrow-minded, out-of-touch woman. They would say she was set in her ways.
This was her first warning of what life here would be like, and her first self-instruction: Don’t let them know what you’re thinking. It’s your best defense.
‘I think it’s absolutely delicious,’ Althea said, wrenching her eyes away from the tree, wondering if the whole house was as devoid of color. ‘So much … class. So … understated. Gray Christmas decorations. And look, some of them are square instead of round. Who’d have thought?’
Grace had come up behind Hal. ‘We updated things just a little,’ she said. Althea noted the subtext under her daughter-in-law’s words, partly apologetic, partly relieved that Althea seemed to be accepting how Grace had usurped her home.
Grace went on. ‘You must be dying to see your suite. Would you like to see your suite?’ Repeating the word ‘suite’, as if it would take twice for her to understand. Or convincing her that a ‘suite’ was a very good thing, indeed. The best thing in the world.
