Introduction

BEING DEVELOPED AS A TV SERIES BY FOX NETWORK

“An expertly rendered mystery, complete with compelling characters, an impeccably paced plot, and surprising twists...A must-read!” --Heather Gudenkauf, bestselling author of The Overnight Guest

A scientist and reluctant psychic is brought in to find a girl who went missing long ago in the new novel by Julia Heaberlin, the bestselling author of We Are All the Same in the Dark

Vivvy Bouchet, daughter of a known psychic, was ten when she saved a boy’s life by making an impossible prediction. Now she’s an astrophysicist in Texas, devoted to science, but the boy she saved has become a cop who continues to believe she can see things no one else can. When he begs for help on the high-profile cold case of a kidnapped girl, Vivvy steps back into the ocean of voices that once nearly drowned her.

She is forced to team up with detective Jesse Sharp, a skeptic of anything but fact. When Vivvy becomes the target of a conspiracy theorist podcaster, she fights back with both her scientific mind and her inexplicable gifts, hoping to lure a kidnapper, find a child who haunts her, and lay some of her own ghosts to rest.

Sharply relevant, Julia Heaberlin's Night Will Find You explores the mysterious nature of belief--in psychic power, in science, in conspiracies, in a higher power--and the delicate dance between scientific truth and the things we can’t explain.

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Excerpt

Chapter 1

I lay my palm flat on the picture. It covers a pile of bones.

I think her name starts with A or E.

Definitely a vowel.

She is embedded in the earth like a forgotten shipwreck on the ocean floor.

The voices of two men drift under the closed door—a childhood best friend who believes I brush shoulders with ghosts, and a stranger who thinks I’m a joke. Both are cops. Both are agitated. I wish they’d burst in, get it over with, tell me to continue or not with this dead girl lying under my chewed pink fingernails.

The walls in this police interview room make me ache from the inside out. I’ve been here often enough lately that I’ve memorized every scar in this room. The ominous black marks on the walls, the handcuff scratches on the metal table, the tile floor with the big chip and brown stain.

I stare at a pale crescent line drawn between my thumb and forefinger, one of nine scars on my own body. It seems like a lot for a twenty-eight-year-old who still wouldn’t call herself brave.

My friend Mike feels differently about my fearlessness. He has enticed me to this interview room five times in the last couple of months, late at night, an open secret in the police station. I overheard my nicknames from two cops gossiping at the sink while I sat in a bathroom stall.

Mike’s Medium.

The Poltergasm.

The rumor is, after I look in my crystal ball of the dead, Mike throws me on this table and cheats on his wife.

All I’ve ever seen in a crystal ball is nothing. Mike would never cheat, not with me. He’d arrange this table the same way every time—with two chilled cans of Coke and a pile of unresolved case files—and then he’d leave.

No more than ten files, only photographs, that was our agreement. That’s all of the dead I could take in one sitting. At my request, no details of the crimes.

I’d examine each of Mike’s files carefully, sticking a Post-it on the outside after I closed it. Many times, the word I wrote was Nothing. Mike didn’t care. He said cops were thrilled with forty percent accuracy on psychic tips and that I was averaging forty-two.

Mike left an occasional surprise. A plastic bag with a little girl’s blood-stained pink bow. A man’s watch with the hands stuck at 3:46. A bone the size of a small fingernail that looked like part of a bird but was really the tiniest, most fragile bone in the human face. The lachryimal bone. Part of the tear duct. It helped the girl it belonged to to cry while she was being tied up with torn pieces of her T-shirt.

It took about three hours in this room to trigger a headache that would stab my head for days.

I’d leave things in a neat pile afterward, including the plain brown envelope with cash inside, probably from Mike’s own pocket.

The outside of the envelope was always marked VIVVY ROSE, in the same block letters written on the get-well cards Mike brought to the hospital when I was eleven. Those cards stood like protective cardboard soldiers on my windowsill: a pig tucked under a quilt, a dog with a stethoscope, an alligator with a bandaged tail.

Today, Mike has graduated me to late morning, a public and busy one. I’m getting an official introduction to this skeptical cop I’m about to meet. I’m examining the photographs of a single important case, not ten.

The crescent scar has begun to ping. My hand is still flayed out on the dead girl. Anna? Eleanor?

The edge in Mike’s voice is rising, like right before he punched a high school jock who asked if I could predict his tongue down my throat.

I don’t want to be here almost as much as I never want to let Mike down.

I flip to the photograph of the girl’s skull, held by small anonymous hands in purple gloves. It looks as polished and cleaned as a marble bust in a museum.

I ruffle the stack of photographs like cards, halting randomly on the mourners at her second and final grave, the one where she wasn’t buried by a killer like a stray dog. Pull out my phone to switch on my magnifying glass app.

Outside the door, sudden silence. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Questions from the publisher:

At first glance, "science" and "psychic" are on two very different ends of a spectrum. Do you think Vivvy successfully blends these two elements in her life?

Does one or the other hinder her ability to connect with other people? Or to do her job?

Discuss Vivvy's relationship with her mother and with her sister.

How did Vivvy and Brig end up on such different paths? How have they each processed the relationships and events in their lives?

What function does Vivvy's diary play in the plot?

Why do you think the author included insights into Vivvy's childhood?

Karissa Vacker employs a variety of different voices for the characters throughout the book. Can a narrator's performance enhance character development?

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