Now available in paperback and on Kindle
Genre: Literary
Fiction/Mystery
Published: September,
2012
A story of life, love, and a journey of a thousand years…
It was Monday, May 19th, 1975. I’ll never forget that day.
The Vietnam War had ended with the fall of Saigon that April, and the world was
mired in one of its worst recessions ever. Unemployment in the United States
was nearly nine percent, inflation even higher, and leadership lacking. The
Watergate scandal had cast a smear across American politics, resulting in
Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 to avoid impeachment, and his
successor’s immediately pardoning him to close the book on an unhappy chapter
in U.S. history.
It was not a good time for anyone and a particularly hard
time for the old Victorian town of Cape May. The crown jewel of the New Jersey
shore had fallen into neglect and disrepair and was dying a slow death. Once
the elegant summer home to presidents and kings, it had become the last refuge
of the deposed.
That’s where I met Tom Ryan. Tom was a king, or so he would
have you believe, but unlike Richard Nixon, when Tom was dethroned, he wasn’t
sent home with a slap on the wrist. He was sent to prison. He was a convicted
draft dodger, but one of the lucky ones released early by President Ford as
part of his mass clemency after Nixon’s pardon. The problem was, Tom had
nowhere to go when he got out, so he took the money his dad mailed to him and
spent it on a bus ticket to get as far away as possible to a place where nobody
cared who he was or what he had done, a place where nobody cared about
anything. That place was Cape May.
As hard a time as it was for everyone, it was harder for me
because that was the day I met Tom Ryan. I should have turned and walked away.
I knew it when he first looked at me, but I didn’t, not my first mistake, but
one that would make Monday, May 19th, 1975 the hardest day of my life.
This is the story of how Tom Ryan and I met and how things
never quite work out the way you think. You might find a love story in here
somewhere. You might not. You might find a message hidden in one of the nickel
pop bottles collected by the beachcombers from some of the most beautiful white
sand beaches in the world. You might even find a little mystery, but life is a
mystery, isn’t it?
