Novels by Armstrong

Five years later the dead walked into the Hale Meridian ballroom, and for a few seconds nobody noticed, because she waited until the speech was nearly done."Damian Hale, put down the glass."The quartet stopped in the middle of a bar, same as before. On the stage, beneath a banner that said Fifteen Years of Hale Meridian, In Memory of Those We Lost, Damian stood with champagne halfway to his mouth. He was thinner, grey at the temples, with the face of a man who had learned to look at a river without flinching.He turned toward the doors, and the glass slipped out of his hand and broke on the stage.A woman stood in the doorway in a charcoal suit, hair cut sharp at the jaw, heels planted as if the floor were hers. A tall boy of ten stood on her left, straight-backed, with a careful look and Damian's stubborn eyebrows. On her right a little girl in a navy coat held a paper doll wearing a tiny crown."Iris?" It was a breath, not a word.The room came apart. Chairs scraped, a woman screa

Iris watched her own funeral from the back seat of a rented sedan, through a black veil, with the window down two inches.Two white coffins on the cathedral steps, one full-sized and one so small she had to look at the flowers instead. The same four hundred people from the ballroom filled the square, and half of them were holding up their phones."Eleanor ordered every lily in the city," Vance murmured from the driver's seat. "Forty thousand dollars' worth.""She always liked an audience.""You can still change your mind. Say the word and I'll walk you down those steps myself.""No."At the front of the crowd Damian stood alone, in the black suit he had worn for his father's funeral, and it already hung off him. At his wrists, small and blue, were the cufflinks she had bought him in March. Of course he was wearing them. He had put them on this morning to bury her. Eleanor reached up to straighten his tie and he caught her wrist without looking at her."People are watching, Damian." Sh

"By sunrise Iris Hale will be dead."She said it standing at the window of Aldous's office with her back to the glass, and Aldous dropped his pen. Vance, who had been staring at the empty inhaler, looked up as if she had thrown something at him."Iris, you've been awake for twenty hours.""That's why I can see it." She kept her voice low, for the door. "Eleanor filed before he collapsed, so the judge is already hers. Somebody emptied his inhaler, so he isn't safe in any building they pay for. If I'm alive they take him. If I'm dead there's nobody to file against.""And Theo?" Aldous said."Theo too."Nobody breathed."Not really," Iris said. "On paper. In the river, in front of the people who matter. You told me my father's trust can't be touched until I'm thirty-five, Mr. Vance. It never said I had to be seen."Vance said nothing for a long time. Then he took a folded map from the briefcase and put a finger on a bridge. "Kessler Crossing. Sixty feet of water, and it runs fast enough

Eleanor took the phone out of Iris's hand and threw it at the corridor wall.It broke in three pieces, and the screen went on cracking after it landed, a small ticking sound. A nurse passing with a tray looked at the three of them and sensibly kept walking."You will not run to some lawyer," Eleanor said, brushing a splinter from her sleeve. "You are a guest in this family, Iris. Guests don't threaten the host.""Six years and I'm still a guest." Iris crouched, picked the SIM card out of the wreckage and shut her fist on it. "Good. Guests can leave.""With what? The house is mine, the cards are mine, this wing is paid for by the foundation I chair." Eleanor smiled with half her mouth. "I froze your accounts while you were still on that ballroom floor."Iris turned to her husband. Damian was leaning on the wall with his arms folded, looking at the pieces of the phone and nowhere else."You knew.""Mother handles the family money.""Theo's medicine comes out of those accounts.""Then yo

"Damian Hale, your son is dying, so put down the glass."The quartet played on for two more bars because nobody had told them to stop, and then the cello gave up and four hundred heads turned toward the doors. A woman in a wet dress stood there with a five-year-old hanging over her shoulder, one of his shoes missing, a paper crown sliding down over his ear.Up on the stage Damian lowered his champagne and smiled the way he smiled for photographers, as if she were something the planners had arranged. Vivienne Ashgrove stood at his elbow in silver, her fingers resting on his sleeve. Iris looked at those fingers, and then she started walking.Nobody stopped her. The carpet was so thick she couldn't hear her own steps, only Theo's breathing against her neck, a thin high whistle like a kettle in another room. She had been listening to it since six o'clock."He can't get air," she said at the foot of the stage. "I called you five times."Damian covered the microphone with his palm and bent