Introduction

When a severed hand washes ashore in the wealthy enclave of Palm Beach, Florida, the lives of two women—a lonely writer obsessed with the unsolved murder of her mother’s best friend and a panicked wife whose husband has disappeared with their children—collide as the world shutters in the pandemic lockdown of 2020.

“Reef Road is magnificent. It feels utterly real, a novel of deeply personal context. It swerves between truth and lies—the lies that lead to an even deeper—and more devastating—truth. Though pure fiction, it reads as compellingly as a mixture of memoir and exposé. It has left me shaken to the core. Deborah Goodrich Royce writes with brilliant understanding of the mystery and occasional grace of trauma.” 

—Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author

A young woman’s life seems perfect until her family goes missing. A writer lives alone with her dog and collects arcane murder statistics. What each of them stands to lose as they sneak around the do-not-enter tape blocking Reef Road beach is exposed by the steady tightening of the cincture encircling them.

In a nod to the true crime that inspired it, Deborah Goodrich Royce’s Reef Road probes unhealed generational scars in a wrenching and original work of fiction. It is both stunning and sexy and, like a bystander surprised by a curtain left open, you won’t be able to look away.

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Excerpt

Prologue

The Wife

May 9, 2020

Saturday

Two teenage boys burst onto the beach, skirting the do not enter tape through the sea grape bushes, surfboards tight under their arms. The sun beat straight down on them, casting no shadows, as if they weren’t even there. Despite the closure of the beaches, despite their mother’s reminders to do their schoolwork while she went to the store, they could not help themselves.

They were pretty sure the cops who patrolled occasionally would not see them either, because they never did. The police were only looking for cars illegally parked at the side of North Ocean Boulevard. This stretch of beach was grassy and hilly and the water was impossible to see from the road. The fact that the boys were breaking all rules—their parents’ and the town’s—made their outing all the more irresistible.

The wind was high, the waves were breaking perfectly, and this was Reef Road, famous to surfers around the world. At least, that’s what the boys had been told. They had been surfing here for years now, practically since they could walk. Once, they’d gone up to Montauk where the waves, admittedly, were great. But this was their beach and they felt protective of it.

They lifted their boards and walked as fast as they could over the frying pan of sand. In their hurry, they did not notice at first the shrieking circle of seagulls down near the edge of the surf. As they got closer, they became aware of dozens of gulls hopping and skittering to and from something that had captured their attention.

Rand, the younger boy—the one whose Palm Beach Day Academy friends called California for his blond curls and speech pattern, peppered with rads and bitchins—saw it first.

“Bro.” He stopped moving, ignoring the burning sand on the soft tissue of his arches. “What the fuck is that?”

“What?” asked Colson—his actual brother and not a metaphorical bro—continuing his beeline for the water.

“Dude,” Rand said. “Stop!”

“Man, you’re such a wuss.” Colson paused briefly. “Never seen a dead rat before?”

“That’s not a rat, you douchebag!”

Colson ignored him and kept walking.

“Please look?”

When his brother sounded like the little kid he used to be, Colson stopped. There was a plaintive note that made him drop his board and approach the seagulls, waving his hands to disperse them.

The seagulls did not like it one bit. Whatever they had gotten hold of, they wanted to keep.

“Beat it!” Colson yelled, kicking sand at them. He watched as one gull almost took off, nearly lifting into the air with the object secured in his beak. But it proved to be too heavy for him and he dropped it.

Both Rand and Colson lunged forward. It was hard to tell who identified it first. Rand’s tanned face paled and he turned his head to vomit, avoiding the item on the sand. Colson did not throw up, although he confessed to his brother that he could have.

“Fuck,” Colson said, “it’s a hand.”

“Yeah,” Rand agreed, wiping his mouth. “Look,” he said, squinting at the body part—the human body part—resting in the sand on their beach. “It’s got a ring.”

Colson leaned over to peer as closely as he could without touching it. “What the fuck are we supposed to do with this?”

“I dunno, Cole. Call the police?”

“Dude, what do we say? We’re not supposed to be here, but we are and we found a hand? A fucking hand?”

Rand was silent. Both boys stood motionless and stared at it. It was a man’s hand, judging from the general shape of it, the short nails, the hair on the knuckles, which looked abnormally black against the blanched quality of the bloated flesh. The end of it, the part that should have been attached to somebody’s arm, was roughly severed, like it had been torn off. The ring was a plain gold band.

The seagulls took the boys’ stillness for permission and began their recapture maneuvers.

“Arrrggh!” screamed Colson, waving his arms and running a few short steps in all directions to ward off the scavengers.

“You think it’s fake?” Rand asked. “I mean, like Halloween?”

“That’s really dumb, bro.”

Rand paused to pull his hair out of his mouth from the gusting wind. “You think it’s real?”

“The seagulls do,” said Colson.

“Yeah.”

“We can’t just leave it. I mean, it’s probably evidence.”

“Well, we can’t bring it home,” said Rand. “What’re we gonna say to Mom?”

This question lightened the mood. Colson started one of his routines that always made his brother laugh: “Yo, Mama,” he began, “what’s for dinner? We’ve been out hunting and gathering.”

“Can we give you a hand with dinner?” Rand chimed in, one-upping his brother.

The boys cracked up with a forced gaiety neither felt.

“Anyway,” Rand said, “I’m not touching it.”

“Little One,” Colson called him by this diminutive more often than Rand cared for. “You’re younger, you’ve gotta do it.”

“Do not. It probably has coronavirus and fell off someone.”

“It was a shark, dummkopf. He took a taste of this guy and hurled him up.”

“You’re probably right,” Rand said.

“Go find an old plastic bag. They haven’t cleaned the beach lately. There has to be one blowing around here somewhere.”

“You do it.”

“Someone needs to stay and watch the hand,” Colson said and started to laugh again. “Just go.”

Rand glared at his older brother then headed off to follow his orders. What else could he do? What else could they do? They couldn’t very well leave a human hand on Reef Road beach for the seagulls to eat. It wasn’t right. Anyway, it didn’t take long for him to find one of those long, blue plastic bags that newspapers came in. He picked it up and checked it for holes. He didn’t want hand guts dripping all over him.

“Here,” he said to Colson when he got back. “I got the bag so you put the hand in it.”

“Fine,” Colson said. “Baby.”

Colson slipped his own hand into the bag and prepared to pick up the appendage in the same way he would pick up poop from their golden retriever. He grabbed the hand through the thin layer of plastic and shuddered at the rubbery-ness of its texture. It gave him the weird sensation that he was actually shaking another human being’s hand. Something they hadn’t done since COVID.

The good news was it didn’t really smell too bad, just kind of fishy.

“C’mon,” he said to Rand. “Let’s go.”

Each boy tucked his board under his arm, cast a wistful glance at the sea, and turned to walk back across the sandy expanse, one of them carrying the day’s discovery.

They passed by a woman sitting on the sand, a woman they had not seen before. A woman they did not see, even now. A nondescript woman, dressed in khakis, an oversized shirt, one of those sunblock hats for old people. The kind of woman no man ever sees, especially younger ones.

When questioned later, each boy stated with absolute certainty that no one else was on the beach that day. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Written by the author:

1. Reef Road is inspired by a true crime that affected the author’s family. Writers like Dominick Dunne and Michelle McNamara are examples of writers who examined the profound effect a single act of violence can have on those who are not the victim. Are you familiar with this syndrome and have you ever personally felt the tentacles of someone else’s injury alter the way you live or the choices you make?

2. The writer’s mother is forever changed by the murder of her best friend in 1948. But it was not until 1980 that the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Experiences such as war, sexual assault, and childhood abuse, seem to enter us at a cellular level and stay there. Are you able to discuss any experiences you have had, or that you are familiar with, that have affected you or someone you love?

3. The writer is damaged by her damaged mother. Linda and her husband, Miguel, are burdened with family scars as well. In 1966, Canadian psychiatrist Vivian M. Rakoff and her colleagues recorded high rates of psychological distress among children of Holocaust survivors, and the concept of generational trauma was first recognized. Are there patterns in your family that you can link to long-ago traumas of an earlier generation? Have you done any specific work to release their hold on you?

4. There is much debate among novelists about whether or not to write about the Covid-19 pandemic. Some feel it is too soon to “go there” and are confining their novels to before or after this global experience. Royce chose to capture the eerie “twilight zone” feeling of desertion and claustrophobic heat of the Florida lockdown in 2020, finding it conducive to the true crime and noirish ambience of Reef Road. Do you agree that the pandemic lockdown mimicked a wartime siege and lent constraints that served the thriller?

5. Are you a true crime afficionado? What do you think it is about delving into horrific acts that really took place that makes us feel a sense of satisfaction or relief? And is that sense of relief possible if the crime has remained unsolved?

6. Reef Road fictionalizes an unsolved murder that took place in Pittsburgh in 1948. The author did not wish to comment on the real crime or its possible perpetrator. And she felt that fiction was a cleaner vehicle to explore overarching truths of human nature, minus the encumbrances of factual details. Have you considered this concept—telling truth through fiction—and do you agree with it?

7. Linda Alonso is a complicated woman, driven by strong passions. She changes sexual partners freely and uses people to get what she wants. Her storyline is the noir element of Reef Road. She does, however, deeply love her children, Diego (Gogo) and Esperanza (Espie). Is her love for her children enough to redeem her in your eyes?

8. The writer remains nameless until a pivotal moment when her name is revealed along with a central point of the plot. This is a moment when the separate storylines are joined and the reader understands what unites them. Were you surprised by these revelations and did you find them satisfying?

9. The writer’s sections are written in first person and resemble journal entries. Linda Alonso’s sections are written as a book-within-a-book. We hear Linda’s “voice” in third person but she remains unreliable. And the prologue of the book plays out as a bird’s-eye-view of the two teenage surfers and their gruesome discovery on Reef Road Beach, watched by the writer at a distance. Do you enjoy a changing perspective such as these in Reef Road? If you were to write a book (or have already?), what is your chosen voice?

10. Near the end of the book, the writer quotes the bible and the Greeks and Shakespeare to talk about the sins of the fathers raining down upon the heads of the sons. Surely we live in a time when we are equipped to do the work to shake off the demons of the past, don’t we? Or do we?

11. The writer leaves Linda’s children alone when she finds them in Mexico. Emma Straub writes in This Time Tomorrow, “Happy endings were too much for some people, false and cheap, but hope—hope was honest. Hope was good.” So—while Reef Road doesn’t end in a “happily,” did you feel hope for Linda’s children at the end?

Added by Pauline

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