Light of Day

by Saul, Jamie M.

• ISBN13: 9780060747534
• ISBN10: 0060747536
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Light of Day is a powerful and illuminating novel about love, loss, and the unforeseeable darkness that lurks around the corners of everyday life. Respected professor Jack Owens brought his son, Danny, to Gilbert, Indiana, to escape a betrayal too painful to endure anywhere but in this quiet Midwestern college town. After ten years, Jack believed they were safe. But on a seemingly ordinary day, the world Jack thought he knew and the future he anticipated abruptly comes apart at the seams, leaving him haunted by the questions why and what next. Redemption, however, could come with the arrival of an unexpected friend whose prescient understanding slowly helps Jack cope with the unacceptable. But with healing comes clarity -- and secrets best left unrevealed by the stark, glaring light of day.

Excerpts

Light of Day
A Novel

Chapter One

The road into Gilbert, Indiana, is U.S. 40. It's the old highway that cuts east and west through town, a few blocks north of Main Street. Nobody drives it much these days, nobody who isn't from Gilbert or nearby. Nobody who's in a hurry, and most people driving through Gilbert are in a hurry, tearing across the interstate on their way to somewhere else.

They built the interstate, and the mall that's just off the exit, aboutthirty years ago. The smaller stores in town would have gone out ofbusiness, the larger ones would have followed the money, and downtownwould have been a ghost town if not for a few far-thinking peopleon the city council who came up with the plan to save downtown byturning it into an outdoor shopping mall. Now there are parking lots onthe side streets and clean, expansive sidewalks with shade trees andbenches so people can sit and talk; so they can spend their time strollingdown the street, looking in store windows, shopping and browsing, insteadof looking for places to park their cars.

And of course, the college helps keep the town alive. The studentsand teachers shop in all the stores, eat at the little restaurants, at Paul'sjust off Main Street, where they serve the tenderloin sandwiches deepfriedon a soft bun with bread-and-butter pickles, or the meat loaf andmashed potatoes with gravy that they make at the coffee shop inside theGilbert Hotel, which isn't a hotel anymore but an office building. Not that Gilbert was ever known for its cuisine or convenient downtownshopping. It's the air that everyone notices, or did until the winds ofchange blew through town and the EPA helped clean things up.

But no matter which way the wind blows, the air is always tingedwith sulfur, one of the by-products of coal, the leitmotif of industrializedIndiana. If not for coal, Gilbert would be just like all the otherpostindustrial towns--they strip-mine coal out on the east side. It's thecoal-burning power plants that keep the lights throughout the stateglowing in the night. Most of that coal comes from Gilbert. But it's thesulfur that does the trick.

In sunlight it turns the air sepia, like an old daguerreotype photographor a silent movie. The rose tint and warm brown hues look so softand welcoming, you'd like to crawl in, pull them over your head andhide from the coming millennium. You might even think the past isn'tsuch a bad place to step back into. Then you see the old-timers, wholook like they've stepped right out of that past, hobbling down MainStreet wrinkled and weathered like old leather, emphysemic and brokendown, like hard times, gnarled and grizzled. It makes you think yourtimes aren't so bad after all.

Highway 40 crosses Highway 41--another old road which heads allthe way from Chicago to Miami, Florida--over by Third Street, thenruns past the railroad tracks by the Wabash River and across the namelessbridge that shakes and sways, like the hammock you hook to a coupleof trees at the end of May and don't take down until the leaves startto turn in late September. But if you're not in too much of a hurry, whenyou get to where the highways intersect and you look south you'll seethe ruins rising like an apparition.

The ruins stand in grand decay on the rise of a slow hill above themuddy banks of the Wabash in Fairmont Memorial Park. It's just afaçade, a replica of the Parthenon never fully realized. It was going to bethe new post office back in 1936, when the WPA workers came to town.They went to work on the college first, built the Fine Arts building andlaid down those beautiful brick sidewalks, and gaslights, and the grassyquadrangle, designed by some long-forgotten architect in love with eighteenth-century England. Then they moved their gear to the riverand started working on the ruins and the park where it stands.

Sixty years later and all the bricks are pockmarked and broken. Thecorroded Doric columns strain to support the majestic entrance. The foursplendid windows are sealed with cinder blocks, braced against the dampriver air. A bas-relief of the American eagle--about to take wing acrosseternal America--stares stoically past the broken patio and rotting cementsteps. Anachronistic and decrepit, the ruins are a monument to apast that was, if not efficient, certainly ambitious.

People from town, students from the college, come out to the parkto sit in the shade of the sycamores, and on the steps of the ruins; lie inthe grass by the river with their girlfriends; lean against the solid wallsand think the private thoughts people think when their lives are fallingapart or coming together. When they need to resolve their worries, orpiece together their plans. It's the quiet place they come to when theywant to spend time doing nothing, or nothing more exciting thanwatching the river flow, thinking about their good luck or recent misfortune.When they need to feel the comfort of the past. Or when there'sno place left to go. This is where they found the body.

Light of Day
A Novel. Copyright © by Jamie Saul. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

---

Excerpted from Light of Day by Jamie M. Saul
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.