The Whistling Shadow

Gail Kiskadden drove through the night to Columbus, Georgia, afraid to find the girl she sought, afraid of not finding her. Eight weeks had passed since Gail's only son Johnny had been killed in a car accident. In those eight weeks she had tried to suspend herself from reality. But the fragile protection of that withdrawal had been shattered when Gail learned that somewhere there was a girl with whom Johnny had been joined in a secret marriage. The girl's name was Sherry Lee and Gail Kiskadden was speeding to the site of her last address.
It was in a desolate house that Gail found Sherry Lee--a small girl with a nimbus of champagne-colored hair which she brushed incessantly, a girl with a furtiveness about the eyes and a weak hunger about the mouth, a girl who was reluctant to discuss Johnny.

In the weeks that followed, Sherry Lee taught Gail that she had only begun to know the meaning of grief and fear. A whistling shadow, a dilapidated doll, a remembered dread of an old lover--these tokens of Sherry Lee's sordid past followed them to Minneapolis and made a horror of the home that had always been Gail's haven. As the menacing shadow loomed larger, the very walls of Gail's house seemed to shrink and dissolve to the fragile transparency of a glass bubble. Far from being in a state of suspended animation, Gail discovered that she was at the very center of a vortex of violence and impending disaster.


Genre: Literary Fiction