From the Valley of the Missing

A moon-pale infant drifts aboard a mahogany yacht on the Hudson’s obsidian current, a foundling christened Everett by the golden Brincombe clan whose veranda gazes across the river at Governor Vandecarm’s pillared fortress. Years earlier, twin stars of that mansion—Floyd Jr. and Fledra—were snuffed out like candles by Lon Cronk, a convict forged in the governor’s own judicial kiln. Reared in a tar-paper shack, the twins forget their birth-names; they answer to Flea and Flukey, scrawny revenants of a genteel world that has erased them. One bruised dawn they bolt through cockleburs and ironweed until Tarrytown’s gaslamps halo the Shellington house, where Anne—part Madonna, part archivist of lost causes—ushers them into damask refuge. But Cronk, stitched from grit and grievance, stalks their newfound Eden, marshaling the grown Everett—now a restless heir—into a slow-motion siege of forged papers, midnight whispers, and courthouse legerdemain. River mist, daguerreotype locket, and a single blood-stained baby blanket become the fragile triad that must decide whether identity is heirloom or invention.