The Day That Dusty Died

By: Lee Martin

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Synopsis

"Debra, I've got to ask youRhonda's

been telling me the most awful things about

your dadthey're not true, are they?"

I sat up. In a loud, harsh voice I scarcely

recognized as my own, I told my mother,

"Let the past be the past."

After she left, silently, I sat up for a long

time thinking

Fort Worth Police Detective Deb Ralston

ought to know that she can't follow her own

advice to leave well enough alone. For

example, there's Dusty Miller: a popular,

pretty, straight "A" student who leaps off

her fourteenth-story balcony just before

Deb barrels onto the scene. Too late. It's

out of her hands, everyone tells her, but the

question of why Dusty did it keeps nagging

at Deb.

That's not all, of course. Partially laid up

after foot surgery, Deb grudgingly agrees

to work in the Sex Crimes Unit, where she'll

be the only woman and maybe the only one

competent enough to get to the bottom of

tricky cases like the Super Glue rapist and

the overfriendly Mr. Washington.

Deb finds the work disturbing, especially

since she can't seem to stop thinking about

her own dreadful childhood. Life at home

isn't easy either, what with the reappearance of her desperately ill younger sister

Rhonda after a ten-year absence, her mother's insistence that Deb needs her over bearing brand of help, and her husband's

tendency to keep his thoughts to himself.

And the dreams, of poison-spitting snakes

and tidal waves, peppered with Dusty and

Rhonda and the girl whose mother killed her,

that appear whenever she closes her eyes