Alice & Henry: A Novel

"I found Henry." At first I didn't think she heard, because she continued speaking right on over the top of me like a cheery pink steamroller smashing my words to a flat, vaporous gray line. "Huh?" I caught her darting glance from the corner of my eye as she turned onto Wyatt Avenue. Almost there, the timing was perfect. "That's the good news. The bad news is that he's my new history teacher and the dumbass is like eleven years older than me, maybe twelve, I don't know. Do you suppose he'll go to jail?" Mom's mouth popped open in a round, little 'o'. "Alice!" Blackmail, coercion, and forty long years have separated Alice from Henry. As he lay dying in a nursing home in the year 2033, a deathbed messenger, a fetch, calls to her and she reluctantly goes to him during the final minutes of his life. Alice's reluctance is justified; this wasn't the first the end had come for one of them. Their souls and their fates had been entwined since the beginning of time--life after life and death after death. Three of Alice's previous lifetimes had ended in violence or suicide because of him: burned at the stake for witchcraft in the 15th century, hung for the same crime as a Puritan in the 17th century, and overdosed in the 1920s Chicago jazz scene. But only Alice can remember these lives; Henry must relearn the hard lessons of the past. In 1980 there is a chance to get it right... but it won't be easy. Alice is a freshman in high school and Henry turns up as her history teacher--fresh from college and unsure how to handle his feelings for this bewitching girl whose eyes see more than he can possibly understand. In desperation, he turns to another, Sarah Thurmond--a spoiled, malicious young woman who lures Henry into a one night stand that turns into a nightmare of epic proportions. Moving between 1980 and 2033--and beyond this mortal coil--Alice & Henry is the story of two souls whose love transcends time... and whose struggles might prove eternal when a karmic debt comes due.