Brooks Mencher

The Sea Silk Shawl Brooks Mencher

Nearly twenty years ago, a drug drop gone wrong claimed the lives of the Point Dolores lighthouse keeper, his eight-year-old daughter Anastasia, and a much-loved local sheriff's deputy. The triple murder still haunts the isolated Northern California town, and the arrival of Ruth M, the FBI textile forensics consultant known within the department as the Yarn Woman, threatens to dredge up the past. On the first night that Ruth spends at the lighthouse, which is now a visitor lodge, she wakes to find a young girl at her bedside. The seed of a deep friendship is planted, but when Ruth attends a local knitting club meeting that night, she learns who the strange child really is. Or was. Ana's body was never found, and the girl's true fate remains a mystery, like the drug-related shootout itself. Ruth unearths the strange history of Point Dolores - the wreck of an opium clipper a century and a half ago, and the impossible presence in the waters off Point Dolores of "sea silk." Incredibly rare and valuable, the golden-colored fiber comes only from the byssus of the large Mediterranean mussel, Pinna nobilis. This golden thread was woven by the ancient Chinese into what they called "cloth from West of the Sea," and was sought by Jason and his Argonauts in the form of the golden fleece. It was coveted my Arabian princes a thousand years ago. In both myth and modern times, though, it maintains an uncanny relationship to those who have died - and the troubled spirits who wander the earth in the gray world between life and death.