LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      TUCKER LANG wasn’t the sort of guy good girls cared to be seen with. Not if they valued their reputations. Good girls went out with clean-cut, law-abiding guys, the ones who stayed in school and went to church and had plans for the future.

      Being with Tucker Lang was another matter, however—as long as no one found out—and by the time he left Harmony at the age of twenty-one, not many girls remained who hadn’t joined him for a walk on the wild side. Tucker was trouble, all right, and nothing was more alluring than trouble.

      Tucker even looked like trouble, from his long black hair to his scuffed biker’s boots, which he wore both winter and summer and even to the beach. He also favored shark-tooth jewelry, black leather jackets, and sleeveless T-shirts, to display his sinewy musculature.

      The vehicles he drove, both of which he’d rebuilt himself, looked like trouble, too. The first was a big, loud Harley-Davidson; the other, a Trans-Am with flames painted on the sides. Auto repair was, in fact, his trade while he lived on Harmony, one he’d stumbled into simply because it happened to be the family business. His great-uncle Walter, who’d brought him to the island from the Bronx when he was thirteen, operated the island’s only garage, Lang’s Auto Repair.

      To the distress of Walter and his wife, Winnie, trouble ran deeper than just appearances with Tuck, right from the get-go. He set off stink bombs in school, encouraged his classmates to smoke and swear, and pilfered candy and magazines anywhere he found them for sale.

      Another reason the Langs turned gray so fast, beyond the fact that they were both sixty when they took Tucker in, was that he seemed perpetually involved in dangerous activities, usually on a dare. One day, for instance, he dived off Little Harbor Bridge—nothing unusual for island kids, except that in Tucker’s case his hands were tied behind his back. He once camped out all night in Morgan’s Hollow, where if the ghosts didn’t get you, the deer ticks would. But the incident that made Tuck an irrevocable Harmony legend was his getting struck by lightning, a gigantic bolt that passed right through him, yet left him totally unharmed.

      Tucker was combative, too, a trait that became more prominent as he grew older and began hanging out in bars. He wasn’t the largest or strongest guy on the island, but he was arguably the toughest, and he never backed down from a fight.

      In addition to all this, Tucker drank hard, swam nude, danced dirty and spent more than his fair share of nights in jail paying for his sins, the sum of which, alas, only added to his appeal and, in turn, the sullying of even more female reputations.

      Not mine, though, thought Cathryn McGrath a bit smugly as she drove across Harmony on a slushy, colorless Valentine’s Day. She was on her way to attend the afternoon visitation at D’Autell’s Funeral Home where Walter Lang was laid out. Cathryn’s virtue had remained intact—although, to be honest, Tucker had never tested it.

      For

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