The Season of Lillian Dawes

Chapter One

There is in most lives, a defining moment, a point dividing time into before and after -- an accident or love affair, a journey or perhaps a death. For Spencer, all four, like the points on a compass, combined in the shape of Lillian Dawes. And because it is not possible to witness a tragedy without carrying away some of its stain, she became my watershed as well.

I was seventeen when the Renwick School for boys decided, despite my family's long affiliation with the school, to discharge me midterm. My father had died the year before, and out of deference to his name, and perhaps also his bequest, they had kept me on through a number of earlier infractions. However, when I was caught smoking a cigar in the chapel after curfew, it was plain I had exhausted the sympathy due my orphaned state. The masters were so eager to return me to what remained of my family that rather than wait for my aunt Grace to retrieve me at the end of the weekend, they sent me to New York, to my brother Spencer, which amounted to divine intervention in my ... read full excerpt from Season of Lillian Dawes, The ebook