The Lost Years Read online

  “Credit Clark for her intuitive grasp of the anxieties of everyday life that can spiral into full-blown terror.”—The New York Times

  In The Lost Years, Mary Higgins Clark, America’s Queen of Suspense, has written her most astonishing novel to date. At its center is a discovery that, if authenticated, may be the most revered document in human history—“the holiest of the holy”—and certainly the most coveted and valuable object in the world.

  Biblical scholar Jonathan Lyons believes he has found the rarest of parchments—a letter that may have been written by Jesus Christ. Stolen from the Vatican Library in the 1500s, the letter was assumed to be lost forever.

  Now, under the promise of secrecy, Jonathan is able to confirm his findings with several other experts. But he also confides in a family friend his suspicion that someone he once trusted wants to sell the parchment and cash in.

  Within days Jonathan is found shot to death in his study. At the same time, his wife, Kathleen, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, is found hiding in the study closet, incoherent and clutching the murder weapon. Even in her dementia, Kathleen has known that her husband was carrying on a long-term affair.

  Did Kathleen kill her husband in a jealous rage, as the police contend? Or is his death tied to the larger question: Who has possession of the priceless parchment that has now gone missing?

  It is up to their daughter, twenty-eight-year-old Mariah, to clear her mother of murder charges and unravel the real mystery behind her father’s death.

  Mary Higgins Clark’s The Lost Years is at once a breathless murder mystery and a hunt for what may be the most precious religious and archaeological treasure of all time.

  MARY HIGGINS CLARK, #1 New York Times bestselling author, has written thirty-one suspense novels; three collections of short stories; a historical novel, Mount Vernon Love Story; two children’s books including her latest, The Magical Christmas Horse; and a memoir, Kitchen Privileges. She is the coauthor with Carol Higgins Clark of five holiday suspense novels. Her books are international bestsellers, with more than 100 million copies sold in the United States alone.

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  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY BERNARD VIDAL FOR SIMON & SCHUSTER

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  BY MARY HIGGINS CLARK

  The Magical Christmas Horse (Illustrated by Wendell Minor)

  I’ll Walk Alone

  The Shadow of Your Smile

  Just Take My Heart

  Where Are You Now?

  Ghost Ship (Illustrated by Wendell Minor)

  I Heard That Song Before

  Two Little Girls in Blue

  No Place Like Home

  Nighttime Is My Time

  The Second Time Around

  Kitchen Privileges

  Mount Vernon Love Story

  Silent Night / All Through the Night

  Daddy’s Little Girl

  On the Street Where You Live

  Before I Say Good-bye

  We’ll Meet Again

  All Through the Night

  You Belong to Me

  Pretend You Don’t See Her

  My Gal Sunday

  Moonlight Becomes You

  Silent Night

  Let Me Call You Sweetheart

  The Lottery Winner

  Remember Me

  I’ll Be Seeing You

  All Around the Town

  Loves Music, Loves to Dance

  The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories

  While My Pretty One Sleeps

  Weep No More, My Lady

  Stillwatch

  A Cry in the Night

  The Cradle Will Fall

  A Stranger Is Watching

  Where Are the Children?

  BY MARY HIGGINS CLARK AND CAROL HIGGINS CLARK

  Dashing Through the Snow

  Santa Cruise

  The Christmas Thief

  He Sees You When You’re Sleeping

  Deck the Halls

  MARY

  HIGGINS

  CLARK

  Simon & Schuster

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  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Mary Higgins Clark

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2012

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  Designed by Jill Putorti

  ISBN 978-1-4516-6886-5

  ISBN 978-1-4516-8893-3 (ebook)

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  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapte
r 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Epilogue

  Read About the Inspiration Behind Other Classic Novels by Mary Higgins Clark

  Acknowledgments

  To say writing a book is a long journey is entirely true. To say that it would be a two-thousand-year trip is quite different. When Michael Korda, my editor, suggested that it would be interesting to have a biblical background to this story and that it should be about a letter written by Christ, I shook my head.

  But the possibility kept nagging, and the words “suppose” and “what if?” kept jumping into my mind. I started writing and four months later realized I didn’t like the way I was telling the tale.

  No matter how experienced you are as a writer, it doesn’t mean that the story always unfolds the way you had envisioned. I tossed those pages and began again.

  My joyous thanks to Michael, my editor, mentor, and dear friend for all these years. We’ve already booked our celebration lunch. During it, I know what will happen. Over a glass of wine, his eyes will become speculative and he will say, “I was thinking…” Meaning here we go again.

  My in-house editor, Kathy Sagan, is great. I knew she was busy with her own long list of authors, but having worked with her on our mystery magazine, I knew just how valuable she is and requested her. This is our second novel together. Thank you, Kathy.

  Thanks to the team inside Simon & Schuster who turn a manuscript into a book: Production Manager John Wahler, Associate Director of Copyediting Gypsy da Silva, Designer Jill Putorti, and Art Director Jackie Seow for her wonderful cover design.

  My home team of rooters, Nadine Petry, Agnes Newton, and Irene Clark are always there. Cheers and thanks.

  Love abiding to John Conheeney, spouse extraordinaire. Can’t believe we just celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary. It does truly seem like yesterday. Here’s to all our tomorrows sharing love and laughter with our children and grandchildren and friends.

  To all of you my readers, I do hope you enjoy this new tale. As I’ve quoted before from that wonderful ancient parchment, “The book is finished. Let the writer rejoice!”

  Cheers and Blessings,

  Mary Higgins Clark

  In memory of my dear brother-in-law and friend,

  Kenneth John Clark

  Beloved husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather

  And

  “The Unc”

  To his devoted nieces and nephews

  We loved you deeply

  Rest in Peace

  Prologue

  1474 A.D.

  In the hushed quiet as late shadows fell over the walls of the eternal city of Rome, an elderly monk, his shoulders bent, made his silent and unobtrusive way into the Biblioteca Secreta, one of the four rooms that comprised the Vatican Library. The Library contained a total of 2,527 manuscripts written in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Some were available under strict supervision to be read by outsiders. Others were not.

  The most controversial of the manuscripts was the one known as both the Joseph of Arimathea parchment and the Vatican letter. Carried by Peter the Apostle to Rome, it was believed by many to be the only letter ever written by the Christ.

  It was a simple letter thanking Joseph for the kindness he had extended from the time Joseph had first heard Him preaching at the Temple in Jerusalem when He was only twelve years old. Joseph had believed He was the long-awaited Messiah.

  When King Herod’s son had discovered that this profoundly wise and learned child had been born in Bethlehem, he’d ordered the young Christ’s assassination. Hearing this, Joseph had rushed to Nazareth and received permission from the boy’s parents to take Him to Egypt so that He could be safe and could study at the temple of Leontopolis near the Nile Valley.

  The next eighteen years of the life of Jesus Christ are lost to history. Nearing the end of His ministry, foreseeing that the last kindness Joseph would offer Him would be his own tomb for Him to rest in, Christ had written a letter expressing gratitude to His faithful friend.

  Over the centuries some of the Popes had believed that it was genuine. Others had not. The Vatican librarian had learned that the current Pope, Sixtus IV, was contemplating having it destroyed.

  The assistant librarian had been awaiting the arrival of the monk in the Biblioteca Secreta. His eyes deeply troubled, he handed him the parchment. “I do this under the direction of His Eminence Cardinal del Portego,” he said. “The sacred parchment must not be destroyed. Hide it well in the monastery and do not let anyone know of its contents.”

  The monk took the parchment, reverently kissed it, and then enfolded it in the protection of the sleeves of his flowing robe.

  The letter to Joseph of Arimathea did not appear again until over five hundred years later when this story begins.

  1

  Today is the day of my father’s funeral. He was murdered.

  That was the first thought twenty-eight-year-old Mariah Lyons had as she awoke from a fitful sleep in the home where she had been raised in Mahwah, a town bordering the Ramapo Mountains in northern New Jersey. Brushing back the tears that were welling in her eyes, she sat up slowly, slid her feet onto the floor, and looked around her room.

  When she was sixteen, she had been allowed to redecorate it as a birthday present and had chosen to have the walls painted red. For the coverlet and pillows and valances she had decided on a cheery red-and-white flowered pattern. The big, comfortable chair in the corner was where she always did her homework, instead of at the desk. Her eyes fell upon the shelf that her father had built over the dresser to hold her trophies from her high school soccer and basketball championship teams. He was so proud of me, she thought sadly. He wanted to redecorate again when I finished college, but I never wanted it changed. I don’t care if it still has the look of a teenager’s room.

  She tried to remind herself that until now she had been one of those fortunate people whose only experience with death in the family had been when she was fifteen and her eighty-six-year-old grandmother had passed away in her sleep. I really loved Gran, but I was so grateful that she had been spared a lot of indignity, she thought. Her strength was failing and she hated to be dependent on anyone.

  Mariah stood up, reached for the robe at the foot of the bed, and slipped into it, tying the sash around her slender waist. But this is different, she thought. My father did not die a natural death. He was shot while he was reading at his desk in his study downstairs. Her mouth went dry as she asked herself again the same questions she had been asking over and over. Was Mom in the room when it happened? Or did she come in after she heard the sound of the shot? And is there any chance that Mom was the one who did it? Please, God, don’t let it turn out to be that way.

  She walked over to the vanity and looked into the mirror. I look so pale, she thought as she brushed back her shoulder-length black hair. Her eyes were swollen from all the tears of the last few days. An incongruous thought went through her mind: I’m glad I have Daddy’s dark blue eyes. I’m glad I’m tall like him. It sure helped when I was playing basketball.

  “I can’t believe he is gone,” she whispered, recalling his seventieth birthday party only three weeks earlier. The events of the past four days replayed in her mind. On Monday evening she had stayed at her office to work out an investment plan for a new client. When she got home to her Greenwich Village apartment at eight o’clock, she had made her usual evening call to her father. Daddy sounded very down, she remembered. He told me that Mom had had a terrible day, that it was clear the Alzheimer’s was getting worse. Something made me phone back at ten thirty. I was worried about both of them.

  When Daddy didn’t answer, I knew that something was wrong. Mariah thought back to that seemingly endless
drive from Greenwich Village as she had rushed to New Jersey that night. I called them again and again on the way over, she thought. She remembered how she had turned into the driveway at eleven twenty, fumbling for her house key in the dark as she ran from the car. All the downstairs lights were still on in the house, and once she was inside, she went straight to the study.

  The horror of what she had found replayed in her mind as it had been doing incessantly. Her father was slumped across his desk, his head and shoulders bloodied. Her mother, soaked in blood, was cowering in the closet near the desk, clutching her father’s pistol.

  Mom saw me and started moaning, “So much noise… so much blood… ”

  I was frantic, Mariah remembered. When I called 911, all I could scream was “My father is dead! My father has been shot!”