The Longings of Wayward Girls A Novel [Paperback]

The dark side of a seemingly perfect Connecticut suburb comes to light when one woman’s long-buried secrets refuse to stay in the past, in this engrossing debut novel of psychological suspense.

It’s an idyllic New England summer, and Sadie is a precocious only child on the edge of adolescence. It seems like July and August will pass lazily by, just as they have every year before. But one day, Sadie and her best friend play a seemingly harmless prank on a neighborhood girl. Soon after, that same little girl disappears from a backyard barbecue—and she is never seen again. Twenty years pass, and Sadie is still living in the same quiet suburb. She’s married to a good man, has two beautiful children, and seems to have put her past behind her. But when a boy from her old neighborhood returns to town, the nightmares of that summer will begin to resurface, and its unsolved mysteries will finally become clear.The Longings of Wayward Girls

May 5, 1979

SADIE WASN’T A BAD GIRL. When she was little she played church, flattening soft bread into disks, singing the hymns from stolen paper missals: Our Fathers chained in prisons dark, were still in heart and conscience free, how sweet would be their children’s fate, if they like them, could die for Thee. She set up carnivals and lemonade stands, collected pennies for UNICEF on Halloween. She bought a tree to be planted in her name in a forest purged by fire. She included everyone in her neighborhood games, even the irritating younger siblings, even the girl, Sally Frobel, who was clearly a boy, and the boy, Larry Schuster, who was clearly schizophrenic. They were cast in roles like the frog in her production of The Frog Prince or the dead boy in her Haunted Woods. She understood, perfectly, what was expected of her—and still, when it came to Francie Bingham,lF